History of German Literature Georg Lukacs 1947
It is easy to understand that the end of the revolutionary wave also meant the end of Expressionism. Here is the third parallel to the literary movement of naturalism. A turning away from socialism and – this is crucial – with it a turning away from oppositional activity, from revolutionary criticism, sets in. The Expressionist playwright Paul Kornfeld, in the earlier period one of the loudest voices in the dispute, now writes: “No more of war and revolution and world salvation! Let’s be humble and turn to other, smaller things ... look at a person, a soul, a fool, let’s play a little, look a little and, if we can, laugh or smile a little!” Or Walter Hasenclever, the author of the play The Son and the manifesto The Political Poet, turns into a follower of Swedenborg and brings apparitions onto the stage.
It is remarkable (and this limits the parallel again) that the period of security ended in 1918. We have seen what the human content of this apolitical and anti-political Wilhelminian idyll was. However, after the acute revolution subsided, it never returned, even in this highly problematic form.
The reaction rearmed faster, more energetically and more purposefully than the progressive literature. Some of this development even happened spontaneously; relieved by the inadvertent help of a group of left-wing writers resulting from a lack of understanding of specifically German problems.
The war novels that emerged in the mid-1920s were written to a considerable extent by left-wing authors with the intention of working against any coming war. In their overall effect, however, these books were ideologically more helpful than detrimental to the preparation for a new war. Again, the fateful abstractness of German literature plays a decisive role. Perhaps it is not necessary to emphasize that this abstractness in the basic question in no way excludes the concreteness and liveliness of the individual scenes, sometimes of the entire foreground action, indeed actually presupposes this, since in the long run only well-formed works can have a deeper effect.
Abstract in this sense is when the war descends like a senseless fate, when, no matter how powerful the depiction, only the horrors of war are portrayed. (As is also the case in the best of such novels, those of Renn and Remarque.) And when moral virtues (comradeship, solidarity) are shown as a human compensation for this senselessness, this horror of war, that life at the front brings with it, then in something that, measured against the egoism of peaceful everyday life, can even have a psychologically attractive effect on the image designed to deter war.
It is precisely here that the literary representatives of the reaction come into play. Ernst Juenger, who may figure as a representative of this trend, often surpasses many left-wing opponents of the war in describing the horror of the battle of materials. But since he portrays people who bravely defy this horror and triumph inwardly over all atrocities through personal courage and iron self-control, through him and similar writers a literature emerges in which the coming war appears as heroically attractive, elevating human value, testing morality, and proving love for one’s country polemically opposed to the peacetime in the Weimar democracy. The experience of the front described in this way is intended as the spiritual basis for the coming renewal of Germany.
The attack of reaction, however, is presented in a much broader line. The experience of the front of the reactionary war literature first gives the general moral basis for the reactionary attack on the pacifist Weimar democracy, for the reactionary turning of Germany upside down Exploited by fascist propaganda, there is also a literature that glorifies imperialist expansion itself as the alleged fulfillment of the deepest needs and desires of the German people: a literature that consciously works demagogically to present the new attempt at German world conquest as a path to renewal, to internal regeneration, and It is sufficient to refer to Hans Grimm’s Volk ohne Raum, a novel which, although artistically it does not rise too high above Heimatkunst, not by chance and not without reason was proclaimed by Rosenberg as the classic work of Hitlerism. The so-called historical novels, such as those by Hans Friedrich Blunck, complement this line by projecting the longing for living space into the past and attempting to illustrate the struggle for this as an essential content of German history.
What human and social forces is progressive literature mobilizing to protect peace and freedom against the growing onslaught of reactionary chauvinism? We have no reason here to speak at length of abstract pacifism; in the post-war period it received scarcely a reasonably effective poetic embodiment. In defending democracy against approaching tyranny, a large proportion of progressive writers are hampered above all by the economic and ideological disappointment brought about by Weimar democracy. In terms of literature, too, a republic without republicans emerged here. As it was, it could not arouse much enthusiasm, and the German people, deeply shaken by war and defeat, also hungered spiritually for content that could have given their lives new meaning. Weimar did not bring this renewal. One soon felt that fundamentally not all that much had changed.
It is striking that the entire Weimar period produced only one important work in which the question of democracy was raised as a question of worldview: Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain. The shock of the end of the war resulted in a complete change in Thomas Mann’s political worldview, which is reflected above all in this novel, the essential content of which is the struggle of democratic and fascist ideology for the soul of a morally decent average German.
Here, for the first time after a long hiatus in German literature, democratic ideology appears in a combative role and not merely as the object of malicious and biased criticism. In Thomas Mann’s novel the battle remains undecided; that is why it could of course have had a strong forward-looking effect, because the draw in the duel of world-views contains an important and fruitful criticism of democracy; wherever the representative of democratic ideology stops short with the conventional version of his political world-view, ie roughly on the level of reality in Weimar, he is always defeated by the social demagogy of his opponent.
Of course there are plenty of ironic reservations in Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain. The book is far too reserved in its statements to have an immediate impact in such agitated times. This circumstance is further enhanced by the form of the novel, something very important for German literature in its quiet way: namely a dissolving self-criticism of the social space and timelessness of German literature of the imperialist period. Here the action is consciously transferred to an artificially isolated milieu. The people are indeed determined by their social psychology, but stand outside of their normal social ties. This creates an ironic symbol of social portrayal in German imperialism. But since it is at the same time a concrete and obvious portrayed milieu, the world of a Swiss sanatorium, the foreground directs the reader and sometimes also the author of the fine hidden main question.
The pressure of reaction increased from year to year. And the supporters of Weimar, instead of looking for a strengthening in the radical democratization of Germany and thereby getting the people excited about the republic and interested in it, managed step by step to retreat from the reaction into a “statesmanlike” position and thereby alienated Weimar from the people more and more reinforced.
The official, dominant tendencies of the New Objectivity, which replaced the dying Expressionism as a direction, are determined in terms of content and style by such a depressive atmosphere. Tiredness and disbelief, renunciation of effectiveness in a soulless and meaningless world are presented through irony as intellectual superiority. These basic features of the new objectivity are embodied in Erich Kaestner’s Fabian. One sees here that the spiritual and ideological barriers of naturalism remain unconquered. The ironic author’s comments cannot compensate for the lack of an objective world horizon. Starting from these foundations, the New Objectivity could bring essential values neither to German literature nor to the German people.
Nevertheless, it would be a gross exaggeration if we considered this direction to be ineffective; it had a decisive stylistic influence on the entire pre-fascist struggle between progress and reaction. For that great crisis in the Weimar system that preceded Hitler’s seizure of power was also a literary arms race between the two camps. In the literature of the left (both bourgeois and proletarian) an ideological defensive movement arose against the approaching reaction, for the creation of a free Germany. It is understandable that the young literature of the German working class, Bredel, Marchwitza, Weinert, Wolf and others, builds on the given. Its initial production is largely determined by the reporting style of the New Objectivity, albeit without the self-dissolving irony that is fashionable here. As much as this literature has gained ideologically and morally as a result, it is also artistically less appealing, drier. The greater liveliness of Adam Scharrer’s stories is based on that he stylistically follows older naturalistic traditions.
The ascetic dryness in the artistic is not presented in a balanced way in the revolutionary German reporting literature by the force of the facts, by the weight of the truth of the content, mainly because the orientation of the proletarian writers to the imminent overthrow of capitalist society by a socialist revolution does not allow them to clearly identify the most essential concrete problems in German working-class life either. Although this literature brings some new themes to German literature, the level of presentation does not suffice to make a strong and direct impression on broad circles, even among the working class. Another obstacle is that, contrary to the formal style of reporting, the content of most of these books is set in a world not as it really is, but as the authors think it should be. The wishes and hopes of the writers are projected into reality and the proportions of forces in the German class struggle and in the struggles of the working class are reflected in the literary reports in a distorted manner.
It is not so easy with the other radical left-wing writers. They have a deep and justifiable dissatisfaction with contemporary literature, especially with the novel as the genre that has dominated bourgeois literature for centuries. Alfred Doeblin sharply opposes the current conventions of storytelling, which depict a purely fictitious, inwardly moving world that is of no interest to anyone. He calls for a return from the novel to the epic: to the representation of what is essential to human beings. But his criticism, which is often correct, ignores the central weakness of German novels (and of all German literature), the lack of an organic connection between social and individual components in the portrayal of people and the way they act, their abstract timelessness. One form was confronted with another, without seriously examining the basis of the wrong form, the question of social content. And in fact, Doblin’s great novel from the working world, Berlin Alexanderplatz, reflects reality only in individual private moral psychological observations. And here, too, he never really comes close to the burning issues of the era and of the day. With completely new means of surrealism, an old, almost banal result emerges: how a worker who has been released from prison is finally led back to the path of individual legal decency through various hard blows of fate. The problem of the paths and goals of literature is raised more fundamentally and thoroughly by the circle of the poet and playwright Bertolt Brecht. His attack is directed much more centrally against art as a whole. Such attacks undoubtedly have a high degree of justification in bourgeois society given the deep social problems of their literature; just think of Tolstoy’s critique of art. Brecht, too, proceeds from the human unworthiness of the usual art establishment. He writes of the opera’s impact: “Storming out of the underground station, eager to become wax in the hands of the magicians, grown-ups, hardened and implacable men rush to the box office. With the hat in the cloakroom, they behave their usual way, their attitude in life, leaving the cloakroom they take their places with the attitude of kings. Should we blame them for this? It was not necessary to prefer the royal attitude to that of a cheese merchant in order to find this ridiculous. The attitude of these people in the opera is unworthy of them. Is it possible for us to change them?”
Brecht calls the magical effect, which is ironically described here, culinary, harshly and roughly, using this term from the art of cooking to defame every enjoyment of art, every re-experience of an artistically designed human world. In pointing out the undignified discrepancy between the life of modern man and the effects of current modern art, he comes, in the intended tendency, into a certain parallel with what is justifiable in Tolstoy’s art criticism. The difference again highlights the typically German literary situation, which even a writer as perspicacious and talented as Brecht could not escape. For Tolstoy criticizes the content of modern literature, its people and conflicts; the form only insofar as its modern manifestations isolate art from popular life. Brecht, too, starts from the vacuum of social space that surrounds the art of his present, he too wants to break through the barriers between art and social life in order to make literature part of social pedagogy again. But this justified criticism transitions all too quickly, all too directly, into that of the formal mode of representation. Brecht believes that a radically new art needs completely different means of expression in order to abolish the unworthiness and social harmfulness of the culinary in art (especially in the dramatic). In order to give it back its necessary social function, Brecht’s critique also ignores the social content and turns the desired social renewal of literature into an experiment in form, albeit an interesting and ingenious one.
As the crisis approached to decide whether Germany would succumb to the barbarism of fascism or be able to lead a healthy and free national existence, abstract theories of the final crisis of bourgeois society and those wrongly associated with that crisis became more common: a final crisis of the existing literary forms. The universality of this question is shown by the fact that such views also include the extreme representatives of the right-wing currents and even more the writers who waver between right and left. It is clear that the criticism of bourgeois society here, if subjectively honest in some individual cases, is often objectively influenced by the social demagogy of fascism. The presence of such tendencies in extreme right-wing circles is, after all, a symptom both of the depth of the crisis and of the fact that writers are making their political content not understood.
Again, one example will suffice. Ernst Juenger writes: “The much lamented decline of literature means nothing other than that an outdated literary question has lost its rank. There is no doubt that a course book is more important today than the final unraveling of the unique experience through the bourgeois novel.” And in Juenger, too, his rejection of art is only a consequence of his rejection of bourgeois society, which of course starts from completely wrong assumptions. He contrasts the future form of the worker with that of bourgeois society and demands that the worker “do not stand in relation to this society in terms of opposition, but rather in terms of being different”. We have cited these views only as symptoms of a crisis, because it is in the nature of reactionary literature that such tendencies can only acquire an outsider significance in it, just as with Juenger this whole “radical criticism of society” only leads to the affirmation of Rosenberg’s ideal of “heroic realism”.