History of German Literature Georg Lukacs 1947
Hitlerite fascism swept across German culture like a devastating thunderstorm. What was destroyed in the process, how far Germany was thrown back in its intellectual development by Hitler, can only be fully appreciated when, after the inevitable collapse of the Nazi regime, the mental, spiritual, moral and cultural reconstruction of Germany begins. Alexander Herzen aptly said of the consequences of the suppression of the Decembrist uprising of 1825 that by pulling out of circulation the works of the Decembrists, the intellectual level of Tsarist Russia was bound to drop significantly. Now, even with an energy and systematic approach unparalleled of world history, fascism has still not managed to completely pull out of circulation the progressive forces of intellectual Germany. It is the relatively most innocent part of this destruction of German culture that the vast majority of its spiritual leaders, beginning with Thomas Mann and Albert Einstein, had to leave their homeland. They developed further abroad and thus raised the progressive traditions of pre-fascist Germany to a higher level. However, they were taken out of circulation for the people of Germany, and that says a lot.
The fighters for a better Germany who remained in the country were silenced much more radically. Right from the start they disappeared into the concentration camps, into the Gestapo cellars, where many of them were brutally murdered. A large number of the bravest underground champions against Hitlerian obscurantism ended up on the scaffold or the gallows. How many met their end in extermination camps such as Majdanek near Lublin and Auschwitz can still be seen today.
But the writers who remained at large also lost their freedom of literary expression. It would be wrong to equate the suppression of the word in Hitlerian Germany with any other reactionary despotism of the past. These always had gaps and cracks that the freedom-loving opposition could and did exploit for themselves. (Think of Heine’s successful struggles against the censorship of the Holy Alliance.) Hitler’s Gleichschaltung is the most complete suppression of all expression of opinion to date. It worked almost as flawlessly as the poison gas chambers in Majdanek. The Hitler regime subjected every written or spoken literary word to its control. The hunger whip of total annihilation of their material existence hung over all those who did not obediently submit to the commands of Goebbels’ propaganda. It made it impossible for any criticism to become public and also attempted to conceal all approaches against the Hitler regime in allusions, allegories, etc. even just to provoke it, to nip it in the bud.
Under the tried and tested Bismarckian system, the stick of Gleichschaltung was supplemented by the carrot of corruption. German fascism had an extremely small number of adherents among the distinguished German writers. Its henchmen, mediocre, often below mediocre, Blunck, Johst, etc., were placed at the forefront of literature and glorified with a colossal display of publicity as the leaders of the supposed new upsurge in German literature.
More dangerous for literature was the fact that many writers, who were not untalented but weak in character, succumbed to the systematic attempts at corruption by Hitlerism, such as Hans Carossa and others.
In spite of such “successes” it must be stated that the apparatus of Gleichschaltung functioned only approximately as well as Hitler’s direct murder institutions. The Gleichschaltung did not bear the fruits that Hitler and Goebbels expected from it. One can terrorize and corrupt literature to the point of silence and internal ruin, but one cannot even stamp an effective propaganda literature with dictatorial orders out of the ground. Official fascist criticism also always complained that writers were evading the essential tasks of the day, that they were taking refuge in a topic unrelated to these questions, in other words that literature was not so readily obedient to Goebbels’ propaganda commands, as desired by the fascist rulers.
Such an evasion, such an escape, was the natural way for honest writers to preserve their human dignity, their literary integrity, and their talents. Escape into history was naturally particularly popular. Of course, Hitlerism also falsified history “racially” and everywhere interpreted and lied into German history as a forerunner of the “National Socialist revolution,” the new imperialist aggressorism. And it also found henchmen who carried out this official line in the field of historical themes (Blunck, for example). For the real writers, on the other hand, history meant a thicket in which they could find cover from the sleuths of the Gleichschaltung. Goebbels’ propaganda therefore sharply reprimanded this flight into history.
Hans Leip’s novel The Shell Horn, for example, shows the positive and negative sides of such a flight into history on a not inconsiderable literary level. It is a Low German family history from the time before and during the Reformation. Leip shows himself to be quite free from the fascist falsification of history. He even has an idea of the connection between the great art, the high ideology of this time and the democratic currents that exploded in the Peasant War. But in his case, the really historical recedes almost completely behind the predominantly atmospheric portrayal of the milieu, which is often a really well-turned out psychological presentation of purely private destinies. Thus his book has something timeless in the typical new German sense, despite all the authenticity of the color of the time. The central weakness of his work lies in the intellectual naturalism that emerges here. Destinies that could objectively only be understood from the historical situation blur in a chiaroscuro because the currents of the time are only present for the author to the extent that the characters are able to absorb them. In this way, only a readable, but no significant historical novel could emerge.
However, this weakness, which we have encountered everywhere since naturalism, takes on an interesting, symptomatic accent under fascism. It remains a weakness, but it is precisely this that gives real writers, who do not want to capitulate to the Hitler ideology but are too weak to really resist it, the opportunity to remain writers through saving mimicry without becoming fascist prostitutes and at the same time not being subjected to persecution. The fact that an ideological, artistic weakness could become a protective color for literature shows the will to resist on the part of some writers, but at the same time the defenselessness of this resistance. In spite of all critical assessment of this style and way of thinking, it is to be hoped that the number of German writers who have saved themselves in this way for a better future is considerable.
The example of Ernst Wiechert shows how deep the weakness of such a spiritual naturalism in German literature is. Wiechert, in the question of professed Christianity, appeared manly and courageous and was even in a concentration camp for a while. Also concealed as a writer he much less than most of his comrades in the same fate that he does not agree with the fascist ideology. In his novel The Majorin Wiechert polemicizes against the fascist legend with good literary means, as if the front experience of the First World War laid the basis for a new one. On the contrary, he portrays beautifully and convincingly how this experience of the front brings about a moral decomposition. As successful as individual moral-psychological parts of his book, which according to modern German custom is also kept timeless, he is just as little able, even in the moral field, to lead polemics, albeit hidden. The social-poetic effect of his self-denying pietism is far too weak; his voice echoes weakly in the hurricane of barbarism.
The literary fate of Hans Fallada was even more unfortunate. In the pre-Hitler era, he was one of the greatest hopes of German literature, especially through his novel Kleiner Mann, was nun?. It would be more than unfair to accuse Fallada of having capitulated to Hitlerism. But his quantitatively very extensive production during the Hitler era did not meet any of the expectations he aroused beforehand, not only because he wrote some very bad books, but also because there, where he apparently had all his strength together (Wolf among wolves), shows a tendency to evade the ultimate consequences, which was previously alien to him, and sometimes even a tendency to trivialize serious problems. (Most clearly in Little Man, Big Man, Everything Wrong.) This is not entirely at the expense of political pressure, considerations of censorship, etc. Wolf Among Wolves is set in times of inflation, and the fascist rulers would have raised no objection against criticism of the Weimar period, no matter how harsh it might have been. On the contrary, it seems that Fallada, under the heavy pressure of the fascist atmosphere, lost that inner security of feeling which he initially had in his social criticism, albeit without clarified and consolidated views. This is also indicated by an occasional flight into the unusual (Old heart goes on a journey), which, as we can see in the poetically much more important and morally stronger Raabe, in Germany is always a symptom of ideological defenselessness against the overpowering, unfavorable and inwardly rejected currents of the times.
When Abbe Sieyes was asked after the terror of the Great French Revolution what he had been doing during this period, he is said to have replied: J’ai vecu (I lived). To be able to live through Hitler’s Germany, that is no small matter, for writers who have preserved their intellectual, moral and literary integrity can still play a great and fruitful role in the rebirth of a free Germany. But it is very small if we examine what the German literature did (or did not do) in the fight against reactionary poisoning, against the adventurous destruction of the German people.
A path to renewal must therefore be sought above all in the work of those writers who went abroad to protest against Hitler’s dictatorship and from there led the fight against fascist barbarism. Here the possibility is given to turn back from the crisis with its deepest humiliation of the German people through poetic uncovering of its essence, its history, its causes, its roots in the historically formed German national character. The previous remarks show that we do not mean a renewed literary revolution when we demand that writers make a fundamental change in their previous world view and turn away not only from Nazi ideology as such, but also from any reactionary point of view.
The first reaction of anti-fascist literature to Hitler’s rise to power was, understandably, to expose to the whole civilized world those atrocities committed by victorious fascism. The so-called concentration camp literature was created. It truthfully presents facts from fascist hell, unmasking the mass cruelty with which Hitler’s “peaceful” seizure of power was actually carried out. It also had a deservedly large impact on public opinion in the progressive world. But this literature is essentially journalistic: well summarized and grouped reports on facts. Neither the bestiality of the executioners nor the passive heroism of their victims are elucidated poetically, are made clear in writing from the social and human sources of the evil and good in the German national character that have become evident here.
Much weaker, much further removed from the truth of the facts, let alone from the deeper truth of Germany’s new historical situation, is the majority of the writings that charge head-on against fascism and attempt to expose fascist rule as a general German phenomenon. However, there are quite extraordinary objective difficulties here. The writers have been living outside of Germany for years. What they know about what is happening in Germany is sparse and was found out through mediation. Another major obstacle is that many people’s clear view of fascist reality is often obscured by idealistic images of what is happening in their homeland. Above all, the prejudice has a harmful effect here, as if fascism had only caught hold of a small clique and ruled over a people, the majority of which was opposed to the tyrants and accompanied the fighters against the Hitler dictatorship with warm sympathy and longing waiting for the day when it could throw off the fascist yoke. This prejudice, by no means limited to literature, has been devastatingly refuted by the experiences of this war. The artistically harmful effect of wishful thinking is further increased by a fundamentally wrong, abstract conception of historical optimism. Any militant literature must unshakably believe in the ultimate victory of its cause if it wants to be artistically effective. In this sense, all genuine combat literature is necessarily optimistic. If, however, the unshakable belief in the inevitability of ultimate victory leads to the need to demonstrate the necessary triumph of good over evil, of progress over reaction, at each stage, this leads to a complete distortion of the internal and external proportions of forces a falsification of reality and thus a destruction of the militant awakening effect. The revolutionary writers of older times knew how to strike a poetic balance between the inevitability of final victory and the necessary (individual) defeats in individual battles. The strongest combat drama of anti-feudalism, anti-absolutism in Germany, Kabale und Liebe ends with the defeat and death of both heroes. And the great Russian democratic critic Dobrolyubov calls the desperate suicide of the heroine of Ostrovsky’s drama The Thunderstorm “a ray of light in the kingdom of darkness”.
Therefore it is no coincidence that the victims of fascism are shaped much more effectively than the active fighters, especially when it comes to children and adolescents who are incapable of fighting fascism. (For example Bernhard Oppenheim by Feuchtwanger.) Some excellent scenes and sketches by Bertolt Brecht, Fear and Misery of the Third Reich, in which the moral decomposition of German everyday life by fascism is grippingly described, have a certain connection to this group.
In the poetic shaping of German society under fascism, the seizure of power by the Nazis and their rule, it has a very damaging effect that the writers incorrectly see the proportion of forces in Germany, the depth of the poisoning of the people by Hitlerism and do not understand how this often not understood general phenomenon came about at all. Even before fascism came to power, Feuchtwanger happily exposed in his Success the hollowness and comedicism of Hitler and his propaganda, the criminal nature of his practice. But even here, where only the beginnings, the period up to the Munich Putsch of 1923, are presented, Hitler’s effect on even a small part of the Munich population remains incomprehensible. This is felt even more strongly in the satirical-historical novel The False Nero. He gives an apt satirical description of Hitler and those around him, correctly depicts his dependence on the wire-pulling money magnates, but the causes of the mass movement that the Hitler figure (the false Nero) aroused are not made comprehensible.
Even by far the best novel about fascist Germany, The Seventh Cross by Anna Seghers, suffers from such weaknesses. Anna Seghers has achieved extraordinary things in terms of the vividness of the individual situations and the inner truth of the people portrayed in both camps. And yet she often does not go beyond the description of sensual or psychological states of affairs, in which, of course, their unusual energy of visualization is vividly shown. poetically, however, veiled in high quality.
A true literary instinct leads to a wave of historical novels even before Hitler came to power. The instinct is correct, for the history of Germany, of the German people, of the development of the German human being in the living conditions that he himself created but then became fateful for him and his struggle with these conditions, is undoubtedly a shock that needs to be dealt with correctly, and should lead to the disclosure of why the fascist poisoning of the German people was able to happen. But the limit of abstraction in German literature is even more apparent here. Most of those historical novels are closely related to important ideological issues of the fascist complex. If the struggle between reason and unreason, between light and darkness, appears embodied in different historical forms, then the German present is rightly meant and affected in history, through the mediation of history, although only abstractly. This abstraction is immediately expressed in the subject matter, which is decisive for historical poetry. There are very few anti-fascist historical novels that seek their material in German history, and this at a time when Goebhels’ propaganda factory is having historians and writers falsify all of German history for the purposes of fascism. Admittedly, German history is poor in revolutionary, even decidedly progressive, events. But the anti-fascist writers of Cervantes and Flavius Josephus, Columbus and Servet stand in such a broad and poetically unmediable connection with the destiny of the German people that even the most cleverly conceived, most effectively grouped historical representation must ignore the concrete truth of the present epoch.
Heinrich Mann’s Henri Quatre has nothing in common with this random topic. It is a lively and effective contrast to the concrete historical German misery and therefore to its devilish culmination in fascist rule. The lively contrast between free France and enslaved Germany is an old and good German literary-revolutionary tradition from the time before 1848. This has its concrete historical reasons in the history of both peoples, because, as Friedrich Engels once showed, Germany failed for centuries at the same political tasks that France was able to solve progressively. There is a real historical reason that results from concrete German history and makes it possible for Heinrich Mann to contrast the political-moral principles of fascism with a positive, shining counter-figure, the figure of a real leader for the liberation of the people. (In the German literature before the war, the figure of Garibaldi in Ricarda Huch occupies a similar place.)
Thomas Mann also portrays a leading and positive figure from German history in his Goethe novel Lotte in Weimar. The falsification work on German history and the distortion of Goethe to a leader of the anti-social and bourgeois anti-political, indeed later to the leader of a mystified reaction, had began decades before fascism. So Thomas Mann moves on a ground on which an ideological struggle between progress and regression is carried out. By Thomas Mann (we repeat: without historical and psychological stylization) shows Goethe as a shining figure of the forward development of mankind, he lays the foundation for the originally German forces to release freedom and progress.
Fontane once said that the genuine historical novel must lie within the horizon of experience of the oldest living generation. Without discussing the general claim to truth of this statement, it must be stated that what the historical novel proper did not achieve is repeated in individual descriptions of the period of the First World War and its socio-psychological prehistory, namely: how the fascist man grew out of the German conditions, why the best representatives of progress and humanism were defenseless against its advance. This second element is what is new about such a topic. For Heinrich Mann’s Loyal Subject and Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice can already be regarded as great forerunners of that tendency which signaled the danger of a barbaric underworld within modern German civilization as its necessary complementary product.
The concrete uncovering of the ideological and moral defenselessness of the best Germans against authoritarian and tyrannical hypnosis also has a poetic prelude in Thomas Mann before Hitler seized power. When in the novella Mario and the Magician the gentleman from Rome does not want to submit to the suggestion, he nevertheless succumbs to it after a short resistance, Thomas Mann reveals sensitively and perceptively where the psychological and moral reasons for this defeat are to be found. The gentleman from Rome does not want to, but is only able to counter the positive will of the magician with a mere no, and Thomas Mann shows that pure negation, pure defensiveness, even in defense, has no real power of resistance, that the power of darkness embodied in deeds and of evil must be countered by a force of good that is positive in terms of content if there is to be a prospect of success.
The motif of German defenselessness is treated in great detail in Arnold Zweig’s war novels from the first imperialist war. The cycle began even before fascism, but it was only after living through the bitter experiences of Hitler’s rule that Arnold Zweig’s view of society became fully insightful and mature. Education before Verdun and Inauguration of a King show this gallery of the ideologically defenseless Germans incomparably clearer and critically more profound than the earlier novels. Also, Zweig is not satisfied with this rich depiction of a central German problem of fate. With deep socio-psychological insight, he also describes the type of honest and passionate German intellectual who, despite all his cleverness, honesty and education, is so apolitical that he could become just as much a fascist as an anti-fascist based on his own psychological and moral prerequisites. He also shows how, under the conditions of Prussian militarism, ordinary petty bourgeois were bred into disgusting sadistic criminals.
Johannes R. Becher’s Germany poetry, parallel to Thomas Mann’s Goethe novel, expresses for the first time in the newest German literature the close connection between the best German culture and the ideas of progress. From German history, from the best German psyche, it mobilizes those forces that are suitable for achieving an inner victory over fascist poisoning: love for Germany, feeling for the homeland, for the happiness of all people in it. Hatred and contempt for fascism are given concrete and German expression here. Becher’s novel Abschied depicts the development of young people in Germany in the period before the first imperialist world war, but already from the perspective of the experiences of the fascist period. The underworld of the period of security forms the center of a violent ideological struggle with the existing mental counter-forces. Becher shows how the psychological germs of fascist inhumanity are socially cultivated in the German people of the Wilhelminian period, like an inner struggle, which of course can only be successful if it grasps the whole ideology of man from politics to morals and .aesthetics, if it has positive, democratic and at the same time German goals, must be kindled against these forces of darkness.
The works of Oskar Maria Graf and Adam Scharrer also belong to this group of portrayers of the inner history of Hitlerism.
The experiences, happenings and insights that were unleashed by Hitler’s war of aggression and its failure shatter all prejudices and illusions that were cherished in the anti-fascist camp about Germany. A hard relearning must take place in progressive German literature. Of course, under the conditions of the immediate decisive struggle, this re-learning is expressed more in the form of journalism than poetry. A real overview of how the experiences of the Hitler war and the ideological and moral collapse of the Hitler system had a concrete effect on German literature cannot yet be given. On the one hand, this literature is still in its infancy, on the other hand, under the conditions of the war, we are only familiar with a small part of it. From the works that have become known to us, Becher’s Germany poetry deserves special mention.
The liberation of Germany is getting closer and closer. The task of the inner rebirth of the German people is becoming more and more urgent a requirement of the day for all honest German patriots. German literature has an enormous task to fulfill in this work of awakening: to bring the German people back from their deepest political, moral and ideological decline to civilized, human life. This self-inflicted fall of the German people can only be made up for by the most inexorable means of self-knowledge, the most relentless self-criticism. Here German literature has a great mission in which, if it succeeds in reviving its people, it can itself be revived to its former glory. As an experience of his own poetic task, Becher expressed this general mission of German literature:
Grosses, Grosses war mir aufgetragen:
Meines Irrtums Reste zu zerschlagen
Und mich ueber mich kuehn zu erheben,
Ein gewandelt Bild euch vorzuleben.
Grosses, Grosses war mir aufgetragen:
Meines Volkes Feinde anzuklagen
Und in meinen Taten und Gedichten
Sie zu richten, ewig zu vernichten.
Grosses, Grosses war mir aufgetragen:
Auszuschauen nach den kuenftigen Tagen,
Noch verborgen in den Wolkenhuellen –
Und des Volkes Willen zu erfuellen.
(Great, great things were assigned to me:
To smash the remnants of my error
And rise above myself boldly
A changed image to set an example for you.
Great, great things were assigned to me:
to accuse my people’s enemies
And in my deeds and poems
to judge them, to destroy them forever.
Great, great things were assigned to me:
to look forward to the days to come,
Still hidden in the clouds –
And to fulfill the will of the people.)