Georg Lukács and the World Literature of Socialist Realism: A Case Study of Cold War Cultural Conflict

Abstract

Georg Lukács and the World Literature of Socialist Realism:A Case Study of Cold War Cultural Conflict Nicole G. Burgoyne (bio) In this study of Georg Lukács (1885–1971), I will explore how Lukács was an agent of World Literature in the sense that his literary criticism informed political policy concerning the formation of an international canon of Socialist Realist literature. As the German-speaking community of Communists and Communist ideas became ever more fractured after World War Two and divided across the Iron Curtain, Lukács's writing was alternately published and promoted in either the East or the West Bloc according to the conceptions of world literature operative in each. Lukács is representative of the trans-national ties that persisted from an earlier imperial era, but also essential to understanding the struggle to claim the legacy of Marxism amidst the cultural conflicts of the Cold War. This article focuses on Lukács's German-language publications and their reception in East and West Germany in order to show that Lukács mediated not only literary publications written in several languages, but also the cultural and political contexts of the two Blocs. As examples of Lukács's Socialist Realist mode of reading, I have chosen two extremes, that is, authors at the periphery of what was generally deemed to be acceptable Socialist Realism. Within the context of the East Bloc's rejection of literary Modernism and insistence on the tenets of Socialist Realism, Lukács's continued engagement throughout the entirety of his career with Thomas Mann requires explication. Similarly, his outspoken support of [End Page 305] the writings of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn has been largely overlooked. These two authors are extremely different in their subject matter and social criticism and the fact that Lukács wrote approvingly of both shows the breadth of his conception of Socialist Realism in ways that were not acceptable to other prominent cultural critics within the East Bloc. By explicating Lukács's engagement with these authors I demonstrate that this key figure in defining the canon of Socialism Realism delineated a World Literature that included Thomas Mann and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, authors most frequently and reasonably claimed by the West Bloc. As I will demonstrate, Lukács argued for these authors' place in his canon of World Literature. Lukács is the philosopher and literary theorist most often ascribed the role of establishing the criteria of Socialist Realist literature in the German Democratic Republic (GDR or East Germany). As Wolfgang Emmerich writes in his touchstone literary history of the GDR, Lukács held a monopoly in terms of defining the literary theory of Socialist Realism until 1956 (12).1 Lukacs's literary criticism created a set of prescriptive criteria according to which books that were officially published within the borders of the country were evaluated even after 1956. In East Germany an interlocking system of government offices and state-owned publishing houses enacted censorship through a licensing process that developed after the Soviet military authority ceded control when it officially withdrew after the Second World War. The GDR's censorship process entailed demanding changes of works in progress, refusing to print manuscripts outright (and sometimes suggesting they be destroyed), as well as confiscating published material that had not been approved by political authorities.2 Additionally, the national university system educated and credentialed all those who aspired to join the intellectual labor force that managed East Germany's cultural sphere, and here too the tenets of Socialist Realism were required doctrine and Lukács's ideas grounded this doctrine even after his name was no longer cited.3 In many ways then, Lukács might appear to embody the official criteria that constrained East German literature. Such a view of Georg Lukács's literary critical oeuvre suffers from a failure to contextualize it historically. Most importantly, Lukács's numerous outright reversals of opinion have been dismissed as political opportunism.4 Criticism of Lukács's support of Stalinism is well-founded, as is the understanding that Lukács often served as a mouthpiece of the Soviet [End Page 306] Communist Party. Beyond elaborating on the Party's official...