New German Adventures in Realism and Modernism

Abstract

Some books appear written to throw up in the air the cards of knowledge, as they are currently stacked, in order to let them fall again in a new ordering, sometimes one that bears the marks of present interests. This may be the meaning of the prefix ‘post’. It is not that, in the process of an analysis becoming ‘post’, the former modes of conception are made redundant. Rather, those modes are rearranged, defamiliarised, and amongst them new accents become audible. This is what Devin Fore's book seems to do, mobilising a Brechtian approach to raking over the past. It tracks the very well ploughed ground of the 1920s and 1930s, of European cultural practice and theorisation, especially in its German and Soviet varieties, of the avant-garde, of the relation between politics and aesthetics, at just that moment when the non-objective vogue in art gave way to the apparent return of figuration and, specifically, the human figure. Modernism is followed by Realism or, more specifically, a return to Realism, as some read it at the time, such as Lukács, in relation to work by Bertolt Brecht in the 1930s, delighted that the fragmentary, self-reflexive nightmare of Modernism appeared over, exhausted, a shore too far from concrete political concerns, which now pressed in. Fore explores and undermines the assertion that the return to the human form is a return to humanist concerns, to the rational, acting individual. Fore does not deny the return to some sort of figuration, in his case studies, which include Carl Einstein, John Heartfield, Lázló Moholy-Nagy, the industrial novelists Franz Jung and Erik Reger, Ernst Jünger, Brecht and Sergei Eisenstein, but he skews its meaning such that it comes to signify the opposite of what might be assumed by this. The re-emergence of Realism in the interwar years is no peddling back to fully rounded nineteenth-century forms of human life existing in a three-dimensional world, a recomposition of totality after the wholeness was shattered in the First World War. It is instead Realism embedded in Modernist abstraction, in self-aware criticism of all that Realism had come to represent. It is Realism played out and cancelled. When Brecht absorbs the banalities of everyday conversation into the scenes of his Fear and Misery in the Third Reich, it is not in order to emulate more accurately the real-life, urgent horrors of the epoch, but rather to expose and alienate all articulation as a performance, to render social reality – as much as art – as the lie it pretends not to be. And more than this, this subtle rethreading of Realism and Modernism is prophetic, an inauguration of a mode yet to come. It is the post before the post. The Realism they outline is hollow, empty, faux, flat – though nonetheless significant for that. It is the Realism of mimicry, which is itself a pre-aping of the Postmodern pastiche yet to emerge.