Dimensions of Engagement: Politics and Aesthetics in Heinrich Böll's Early Fiction

Abstract

The due proportion of political engagement and aesthetic autonomy has been a hotly contested issue in German literature since the end of World War II. At its most conspicuous the dispute was carried out in the form of Literaturstreite, extensive public debates among authors, critics, and scholars, which included, for example, the struggle over aesthetic autonomy vs. Socialist Realism during the formalism debate in 1949 and 1950, the conflict over aestheticism vs. engagement in the Zurcher Literaturstreit in 1966 and 1967, the 1968 debates on the death of literature, and the inter-German Literaturstreit following Christa Wolf's Was bleibt in 1990.1 Literaturstreite have served as a workable forum to periodically re-negotiate the spectrum of possible positions on the relationship between the political substance of literature on the one hand, and its aesthetic value on the other. More importantly, their regular recurrence in the public arena, rather than only in the limited realm of literature or the academy, underscores how charged the issue has been-no matter how disparate the opinions in various instances of Literaturstreite, none of these debates would have occurred without a general consensus that the status of the political in literature was a matter of crucial importance. The fundamental question at the root of the dispute has been, and remains, how much political engagement aesthetic distinction can bear. Or asked in reverse, to what extent autonomous art2 can be political. Although this was not a new question in the post-World War II era, it gained heightened significance in the immediate postwar years. At a time when German identity was at stake along with peace and stability in the region, many writers reflected on the possibilities for literature to contribute to the constitution of a new Germany. As Ralf Schnell suggested, it is therefore impossible to understand the development of contemporary German literature without an acute conception of its formative stage in the mid to late 1940s. Developments during the formative years of postwar German literature foreshadowed fairly accurately the concurrent power and impotence of literature in the German public arena (Schnell 71-72), as well as the ongoing debate on the role literature could play in the realm of politics. For example, the 1947 pan-German Schriftstellerkongress assembled writers across the spectrum of postwar literary production-avantgardists, realists, exiles, inner emigres, conservatives, communists, luminaries, and neophytes-because they believed that a single-language culture could help surmount the political divisiveness of the time. Writers who attended the Schriftstellerkongress were deeply invested in the idea that literature could and should have an impact on the socio-political sea change that was taking place. Yet at the same time it was precisely the profound disagreement over how literature could aid the construction of a unified and peaceful Germany that led to the ultimate failure of the Schriftstellerkongress project (Schnell 74-75). One strand of writing that emerged in this precarious and complex postwar climate is particularly noteworthy for embracing socio-political and ethical concerns while preserving the aesthetic integrity of the literary word. In effect, it conjoined political engagement and autonomous aesthetics. The reliance on a distinctly literary idiom prevented a mimetic reproduction of reality along with its discursive rules. By suspending the rules of non-literary discourse, such writing expanded the possibilities of unconventional political thought. Moreover, it opened new modes of relating to the realm of the political, thereby enabling a unique form of criticism. In a recent study on literatur als Widerstand Bertram Salzmann demonstrated that authors as diverse as Use Aichinger, Ingeborg Bachmann, Max Frisch, Wolfgang Hilbig, Giinter Kunert, Siegfried Lenz, Peter Weiss, and Christa Wolf concurred in their commitment to a form of nonconformist literature whose critical potential rested first and foremost in its aesthetic form (331, 335). …