History of German Literature Georg Lukacs 1947
The content of this book is not new. Its two parts (Progress and Reaction in German Literature and German Literature in the Age of Imperialism) appeared as separate volumes years ago and as such have been published in several editions. If they now reach the public as a unified work, as a short history of modern German literature, then it is a question of something more than a mere book-technical combination. Above all, they were originally designed to be uniform. When they came into being, in the winter of 1944/45 in Moscow, and were printed as a series of articles in the Internationale Literatur – Deutsche Blatter, their common intention was to provide a unified overview of German literature, however sketchy it might be, to provide enlightenment to this day. And the editions in other languages (Hungarian and French) actually corresponded to the original intention of the author. It was mainly technical reasons that determined the previous separate edition of the two parts that belonged together, illuminating and supplementing each other. The new edition, then, means a return to the original intentions of the author.
Even today, however, this intention has an extraordinary topicality that goes far beyond the merely literary or literary-historical. It is a matter of correctly assessing the ways of the German past; this evaluation naturally exerts a guiding influence on taking the right path in the future. Of course, this is only a partial contribution to this large complex of problems. This itself could only be solved by the Marxist-Leninist revision of the whole of German history. The history of literature is only a part, an important part of the whole, but only a part. And this book describes and dissects only one stage of this partial development.
It is, however, an important part. Lenin rightly remarked that the establishment of national unity in Germany was the central question of his democratic revolution. Medieval history, culminating in the great crisis of the Peasant Wars, in the period of consequences that unfolded in the Thirty Years’ War, shows why, in contrast to England, France or Russia, this question is at the center of modern German development. The Great French Revolution – and its ideological preparation, the Enlightenment, – the wars of liberation, the July Revolution in 1848, the founding of the Bismarckian empire, the first imperialist world war and the Hitler era are the nodes of this development. They show without exception that and how and why the German people have always given a wrong, undemocratic, and unfree answer to the historically necessary question. But they also show that such an answer can solve the question only for a short period of time. The undemocratic, reactionary solution, both in its Bismarckian and in its Hitlerian form, proves to be a structure that cannot hold its own historically, whose very own inner dialectic produces suicidal behavior both in foreign and domestic politics.
The investigation of this question today does not arise merely from a purely historical interest in an adequate knowledge of the past. Rather, this historical question is the fateful question of the German people of the present. Because the collapse of the Hitler regime forces this people to ask this question again, and it must be clear to every impartial, thoughtful person: the solution that Adenauer, his conductors and his entourage are striving for will inevitably lead to a new imperialist war, to a new collapse of Germany; this “solution” is therefore synonymous with a perpetuation of the unsolved problem, with the prevention of the constitution of the German people into a unified nation. Luckily, there are counter-tendencies that solve the question in a really democratic, really progressive sustainable way, and therefore in a completely different ideal and material foundation than the Left of 1848, than the oppositions to Bismarck, Wilhelm II and Hitler.
The studies brought together here get their unity from the thought that they look at the main lines of literature in the last two hundred years from the perspective of these problems, their reflection in the written works, in the statements of the written works. The battle of progress and reaction is not just the title of a part. It is also the guiding principle of the whole. And only this basic idea makes it justified to publish this short sketch as a single book, which represents an attempt to outline the main lines in the development of literature over the last two hundred years.
Of course, within this uniform framework, the old dichotomy remains as a structure. The author thinks that it follows from the material itself that German literature before and after the founding of the Reich should be presented in different ways. The very fact that from 1870 until Bismarck’s fall, until the repeal of the Anti-Socialist Laws, there was a vacuum lasting almost two decades in the creation of really productive new publications is proof that it is not a question of a subjectively sophisticated periodization, but of the practical matter itself. That in these decades aging writers like Keller, Meyer, Raabe continued their production, that the great exception, Fontane, reached maturity precisely at this time, does little to change the fact of the vacuum. The decisive writers of the coming period do not appear until after 1889, in increasingly dense ranks. It follows that these decades appear twice in our account: once as the conclusion of the first stage of development, as the burial of old Germany, and then as the period of time in which the older generation of the imperialist period took form.
This natural periodization means that the first part is more historical than the second. It is a closed period that means an important legacy for us, both in the sense of fruitful, critical appropriation and in the sense of definitively overcoming harmful traditions. The second period, on the other hand, is still the prehistory of our present, which has a partially living effect. Despite the massive turning point that the Second World War and its end mean, it is by no means over. The fight for or against the tendencies that appear here must be much sharper, precisely because the problems are so close to the present day. Of course, here, too, a historical perspective, a historical overview, is sought; but it necessarily has a different tone, a different color than the story of the development from Lessing to Keller.
The two parts have gained some popularity as separate booklets. The author hopes that their combination will make them even more understandable and instructive for the reader.
Budapest, September 1952