Marxism and Art in the Era of Stalin and Hitler: A Comparison of Brecht and Lukacs

Abstract

ion which favored Nazi ability to hide the real world. What was needed, instead of talk about defending culture, was a literature of plainspeaking realism. This Brecht attempted to present in works such as Schweik in the Second World War, whose idiotic little hero subverts, out of practical opportunism, the poses of those in power. If culture is to be defended, Brecht argued further, it needs to be seen in relation to the entire productive activity of the masses.126 experience of Nazism heightened Brecht's desire for a realist literature which would reveal a material reality hidden by official culture. In this art no period or literary style had a monopoly. Explicitly countering Lukics, Brecht defended modernist experiment where it had exposed a reality opaque to everyday experience, and cited Nazi manipulation of language and visual image as the real formalism. His suspicion of the aesthetics of catharsis had been accentuated by an observation of Nazi theatricality, the deliberate Wagnerian construction of an illusionary reality with which spectators would passionately identify.127 His sharp rejection of a vicariously fulfilling emotionality and insistence upon critical observation and intelligence, moreover, was closely connected with an awareness of the manipulated psycho-drama of Nazi political culture.128 To paraphrase Walter Benjamin, Brecht's politicizing of art intended to challenge the aestheticized politics of the Nazis.129 Like LukAcs after 1928 and official Communist policy after 1934, he too favored a popular front against Nazism. Whereas the former sought upper middle class liberal allies with the working classes, thus accentuating the classical patrician strand of the literary heritage, Brecht implicitly worked for a united front of workers, the lower middle classes, peasants, and the alienated intelligentsia against the economic and political elites, either old or new. His hope for a popular front of SPD and KPD against the Nazis, which Stalin had effectively opposed in the critical years 1930-33, had been for a common effort of rank and file workers more than for alliances of parliamentarians, trade union bureaucrats and communist officials.3 126. Ibid., p. 249. 127. Brecht, GW, 18, p. 132; Schriften zum Theater, 5 (Frankfurt am Main, 1963-64), pp. 92-94. For an excellent discussion and illustration of this aspect of Nazi culture see Siegfried Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film (Princeton, 1960), pp. 300-303, where the Nazi film Triumph des Willens is analyzed. 128. Ewen, pp. 217-218. 129. formulation is used in Walter Benjamin's The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, p. 242. 130. Fritz Sternberg, Der Dichter und die Ratio, pp. 26-27. This content downloaded from 157.55.39.157 on Tue, 17 May 2016 05:47:22 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms MARXISM AND AR T IN THE ERA OF STALIN AND HITLER 41 Progress as Faith or as Project In their responses to Stalinism and Nazism, Brecht and Luk ics revealed strikingly different views of the modem historical process. Laboring under the strain of his own extremely pessimistic view of western society and culture before and during World War I, LukAcs moved in the 1920s and f930s toward its compensatory, opposite pole--a sanitized view of history as inevitable stages of progress. His portrayal of Nazism as barbaric and decadent denuded contemporary history of its real contradictions and terrors and set heroic Soviet in a single contrasting positive light. latter would bypass the decay and sickness of advanced capitalist society and continue the progressive culture of an earlier bourgeois humanism. In a manner very similar to Stalinist polemics, LukAcs' positivistic and deterministic view of history allowed him to view modern western art (such as expressionism), as objectively reactionary. For one who had contrived to believe in a closed historical process of progressive stages known in advance, western modernist pessimism was to be repressed in favor of the implicitly progressive perspectives found in a Balzac or Goethe, or the enthusiastic certainty of victory which the critic found in Gorkij31 What Lukacs demanded of literature, in effect, and what Kafka, Joyce and Toller did not provide, was a continuous reassurance that this road to progress was inevitably proceeding in spite of capitalist decay, world war and fascism (and often in spite of the author's own political sympathies). His adoption of an Hegelian teleology of history's cunning and imminent rationality as well as his passive aesthetics of reflection are to be seen in this light: if art helps to convince one, through a positive resolution of contradictions, of inexorable progress toward human fulfillment, then there remains little urgency to intervene actively for its