New Left Review I/84, March-April 1974

New Left Review

Introduction to Brecht on Lukács

The general literary canons of Georg Lukács are by now relatively wellknown in the English-speaking world. Translations of his most important theoretical essays of the thirties have still, however, to be published. It was during this decade that Lukács, having abandoned political responsibilities in the Hungarian Communist Party, turned to aesthetic writings and gradually acquired a commanding position as a critic within the ranks of the German literary left. His debut in this role occurred in the Third Period phase of the Comintern, as a contributor to Linkskurve, the organ of the Bund Proletarisch-Revolutionärer Schrift-steller (bprs) or Association of Proletarian Revolutionary Writers, created by the kpd in late 1928. Lukács first distinguished himself in Linkskurve by mordant attacks on novels by Willi Bredel, a workerwriter who had been a turner in the engineering industry, and Ernst Ottwalt, a close associate and collaborator of Brecht, for what he alleged was the substitution of journalistic ‘reportage’ for classical ‘creation of characters’ in their fiction. [1] See ‘Willi Bredels Romane’ in Linkskurve, November 1931, and ‘Reportage oder Gestaltung? Kritische Bemerkungen anlässlich eines Romans von Ottwalt’ in Linkskurve, July–August 1932, followed by a reply by Ottwalt and a concluding rejoinder by Lukács in subsequent issues. Ottwalt co-scripted the film Kuhle Wampe with Brecht in the same year. Brecht himself, together with the Soviet writer Tretyakov, was expressly linked to the negative trend exemplified by these writers, and his conception of an objectivist ‘antiaristotelian’ theatre repudiated. After the Nazi seizure of power in Germany, and the switch of the Third International to Popular Front policies against fascism, Lukács’s literary views became increasingly influential in the official organs of the German Communist emigration, where they could be used as an aesthetic counterpoint to political attacks on ‘leftism’ within the intelligentsia and the workers’ movement. [2] Since the Second World War, it has often been alleged that Lukács’s critical views can be seen essentially as a cultural justification or derivative of the Popular Front. While there is no doubt that they were to be politically instrumentalized as such, it is emphatically not the case that they represented an ex post facto adaptation of his convictions on Lukács’s part. On the contrary, having abandoned political for literary work in 1929 precisely because of his opposition to the sectarian policies of the Third Period, he anticipated Popular Front orientations in his new field by at least three years. This was paradoxically possible at the height of the kpd’s rabid campaigns against ‘social-fascism’, because of the protection in 1931–2 of Heinz Neumann and Willi Munzenberg, who sought to use the cultural apparatus of the party more flexibly than its mainline political strategy warranted, and covered Lukács’s literary flanks in Linkskurve. (For the complex history of this conjuncture in the bprs, see Helga Gallas, Marxistische Literatur-theorie, Neuwied/Berlin 1971, esp. pp. 60, 68–9, 200). After the Naziseizure of power, Lukács’s attack on expressionism still predated the adoption of the Popular Front turn by some months. The advent of the new policy in mid-1934, which finally synchronized Lukács’s evolution with that of the Comintern, at most affected the tactical trimmings of his pronouncements. The substance of his aesthetic positions had been arrived at by an original and independent route much earlier. In exile, Lukács’s next target was the legacy of expressionism in German literature, which he vigorously belaboured in the journal Internationale Literatur in January 1934, in an essay entitled ‘Grosse und Verfall des Expressionismus’. Brecht, like many other German writers of his generation, had of course started his career as a para-expressionist himself, in his plays of the early twenties. Lukács had thus assailed, in reverse order, both the two main phases of his own artistic development. Two years later, Lukács published his richest and most seminal essay of this period, Erzählen oder Beschreiben?. In this text, he set out the main categories and principles of the doctrine of literary realism that he was to maintain for the rest of his life: the reiterated antithesis between naturalism and realism, the notion of the typical character as a nexus of the social and individual, the rejection of both external reportage and internal psychologism, the distinction between passive description and active narrative, the extolment of Balzac and Tolstoy as classical models for the contemporary novel. Those modern artists who ignored or contravened these regulative norms of literary creation were insistently pilloried for ‘formalism’ by Lukács.

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