In 1930, Die Linkskurve, the journal of the Proletarian Revolutionary Writers League (Bund proletarisch-revolutionärer Schriftsteller, or BPRS), published a series of articles by Karl A. Wittfogel entitled ‘On the Question of a Marxist Aesthetic’ (‘Zur Frage einer marxistischen Ästhetik’). Although it came at the end of the decade examined here, I refer to it at this point to establish retrospectively, as it were, some of the issues raised at the beginning of the decade. Central to Wittfogel’s elaboration is a critique of a recently published edition of Franz Mehring’s writings on culture. Long active in the cultural politics of the Social Democratic Party (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands, or SPD) from the late nineteenth century, Mehring established the policy that the culture of the revolutionary period of the bourgeoisie, the so-called heritage or Erbe, was the paradigm for working-class reference and emulation, and rejected contemporary manifestations of modernist innovation from naturalism onwards as marking the decline of that class, its pessimistic capitulation to the challenges of the historically evolving. A founder member of the German Communist Party (Kommunistiche Partei Deutschlands, or KPD), Mehring died shortly after its foundation, but his cultural influence would be dominant in the pages of the KPD paper, Die Rote Fahne, through Gertrud Alexander, its cultural editor until her departure for Moscow in 1925, who was a staunch defender of the Erbe and intransigent critic of leftist innovation – a position shared with Lenin, among others. By the late 1920s, the KPD was taking a more organizational role in cultural politics: writers’ and artists’ groups were formed, particularly the BPRS and the Association of German Revolutionary Artists (Assoziation revolutionärer bildender Künstler Deutschlands, or ARBKD, known as ASSO). It was at this point that Wittfogel began his series, with a modified critique of Mehring’s position. Mehring’s Kantian origins, he wrote, would have to be subjected to Hegelian dialectical discipline in order to move forward towards a Marxist aesthetic. I shall return later to this series but would like to point to two related aspects of these discussions: first, the high level of abstraction at which the articulation of the aesthetic is conducted; and second, the general absence of reference to concrete practices – significantly it is only in a footnote that such reference occurs: ‘also the performances of a good agitprop troop are art’.1 In a critical response to Wittfogel, also published in Die Linkskurve, Lu Märten, one of the major art-historically informed critics of the period and responsive to innovation in practice, countered: ‘It appears to me that the requirement is for a practical aesthetic … which would disclose that many bourgeois [art] forms simply cannot be adapted for revolutionary objectives.’2 The struggle for a practice-based theory or a theoretically informed practice characterizes cultural production on the left throughout the decade of the 1920s. This essay traces various stages of those struggles and Märten’s role in them.

Practice and Theory 1919–20

These struggles arose soon after the November Revolution of 1918, involving Dadaist practitioners and the Die Rote Fahne critic. The first instance is known as ‘The Art Scoundrel’ (Der Kunstlump) debate, involving John Heartfield and George Grosz as authors of an article of that name attacking the bourgeois heritage published in Der Gegner, a journal sympathetic to Dadaist activity. In her reply in Die Rote Fahne, Alexander accused them of cultural vandalism with regard to the classical tradition, which she considered the site of learning for the proletariat. Her reaction is not surprising, since she was described as a ‘student’ of Mehring’s.3 Alexander’s response to the Dada Fair (Dada Messe) of June 1920, again in Die Rote Fahne, provided the next opportunity for the defence of the Erbe, the revolutionary bourgeois heritage. Yet Märten published a more insightful and nuanced criticism of the Fair a month later, also in Die Rote Fahne. Both reviews will be considered further below.

Given the reception of the avant-gardist Dada work, it is not difficult to understand the concern that Wieland Herzfelde, Heartfield’s brother and with Grosz a member of the KPD, had with the status of criticism on the left. In 1921 he wrote a pamphlet, issued by his own publishing house, the Malik Verlag, entitled ‘Society, Artist, Communism’ (‘Gesellschaft, Künstler, Kommunismus’). It dealt with the relationship between the artist and bourgeois society, the artist’s pathway to communism and subsequent role in bourgeois society, and the artist in the communist state. Herzfelde proposed that the artist bear the responsibility of transforming communism from a statist principle (Staatsprinzip) into one of active consciousness (Prinzip des lebendigen Bewusstseins).4 More immediately, he touched on the difficulty presented to the artist who takes the side of the proletariat, ‘often subject to the shameful ignorance of revolutionary Marxist comrades with regard to contemporary art’.5 Herzfelde, of course, was not unaware of the problems arising from the tumultuous political and social conditions of postwar and post-revolutionary Germany: he was himself rescued from the infamous Moabit prison through the intervention of diplomat and Dada-circle acquaintance Count Harry Kessler. The transition period or Übergangszeit to a proletarian art may be a long time: ‘During this period (years? decades?) many artists originally working for the bourgeoisie will have to be engaged on working for communist objectives.’6 How, then, would the developments already occurring in contemporary art overlap with the political project of the committed artist and produce this transition to a proletarian art?

Two critics mentioned above, Alexander and Märten, had crucial roles to play in the development of critical and theoretical positions, so some background details are necessary before going on to consider their contributions. In their Linksradikalismus und Literatur, Walter Fähnders and Martin Rector assess their contribution thus:

Both critics were members of the SPD before the foundation of the KPD, which they joined, and both contributed to left-of-centre women’s journals in the pre-war period, including Die Gleichheit, edited by Clara Zetkin, who later assisted Märten in her publishing attempts. Differences in educational background and experience may be seen to account for the different cultural positions they adopted after the November revolution. Alexander attended university at Jena, then art school in Eisenach, followed by study at the Royal Academy of Arts in Berlin, where she also taught drawing. Mehring’s advocacy of the Erbe was likely to be sympathetically received, and one is not surprised to find hostility to radical innovation in the arts in her reviews for Die Rote Fahne, for which she was appointed cultural editor. Märten’s career was more varied: her formal education was severely constrained by illness and downward mobility, but contact with two very different cultural circles was to shape her experience and politics. The first was a turn-of-the-century Berlin ‘Bohemia’ in which she was encouraged to engage in creative writing, producing a number of novels and a staged play. The second was the applied arts movement (Kunstgewerbebewegung) and founder members Friedrich Naumann and Theodor Heuss, from which her interest in the shaping role of the technical in the development of form would evolve. There is almost no material on either critic in English; only a little more in German.8

In 1906, Märten submitted the article ‘Kunst, Klasse und Sozialismus’ to the SPD journal Neue Zeit, but it was rejected by Karl Kautsky, on behalf of the board, ‘because in its present form it is too difficult to understand […] for most of our readers’. She also submitted an essay on Vincent van Gogh, which was rejected by Mehring.9 In 1914, her Die wirtschaftliche Lage der Künstler (The Economic Situation of Artists) was published and cited in parliament during the discussion on the funding of the Reichswirtschaftsverband bildender Künstler.10 What these and other publications in the pre-war period demonstrate was Märten’s concern with the artist in society and her interest in formal innovation, which placed her at odds with the Mehring-led SPD position vis-à-vis the tradition and the evolving.

The Dada Fair of June 1920 was the initial occasion for the exchange of fundamentally irreconcilable positions on what art should be and do in a post-revolutionary context. Herzfelde wrote the introduction for the catalogue: ‘We only need to take the scissors and cut out those things from the reproductions of paintings and photograph them for our own use […] we can take objects themselves.’ The Dada programme is informed by ‘a duty to make current events in time and place the context of their images, sourced in the illustrated newspaper and lead stories in the press’.11 This was no mere anarchy let loose upon the world but productive of ‘an intense awareness of the structure and functions of the very diverse social elements, with true insight into the real conditions rising from the forces of production, all to be understood from the position of communism’, as he would write in his 1921 pamphlet ‘Society, Artist, Communism’.12 As mentioned above, Alexander had already had, in the Kunstlump controversy, a critical engagement with Grosz and Heartfield: the emblematic photograph of them holding a large placard announcing ‘Art is dead. Long live the machine art of Tatlin’ was confirmation of her earlier negative response. For Alexander, the exhibition was a ‘collection of perversities’ reeking of bourgeois decadence. She took particular exception to the daubing of unacceptable language on reproductions of Leonardo’s Mona Lisa and Botticelli’s Flora, displayed as examples of bourgeois art that must be trampled down – echoes of the Kunstlump controversy. Nor does she find significance in the new materials. She recognizes the intention of the assemblages ‘Prussian Archangel’ (ceiling mounted, a papier mâché pig’s head, topped by an officer’s cap and set in an officer’s uniform) and ‘Electro-mechanical Tatlin Sculpture’ (a tailor’s dummy with military medals and a lightbulb for a head), but suggests that they are out place. Their site is instead that of the ‘anti-militarism Panopticum, where nobody would take exception to them’. Alexander takes it upon herself to warn the workers against such bourgeois decadence masquerading as Dada insolence (Frechheit): ‘Die Arbeiter sind gewarnt’.13

Alexander characterizes the work one-dimensionally as ‘Ulk’ (joke) and takes exception to the Berliner Post critic for invoking Rabelais in this context. Märten, on the other hand, places the work within the more multi-dimensional historical category of satire in her review ‘History, Satire, Dada and other things’ (‘Geschichte, Satyre, Dada und Weiteres’), also published in Die Rote Fahne.14 What she characterizes as a ‘a dialectic of satire’ is at play in Dada’s engagement with bourgeois culture and capitalism. ‘Dada is a manifestation of its time’, she writes, ‘no mere invention’:

What it attempts to do satirically through its distinctive means curiously enough lands it up at the same time in non-dadaist territory. The fact is that there is no longer a medium, let alone an art, necessary to present the satire or the caricature, no intellectual instance required to transcribe this material into the dialectic of satire. Instead, these times and this society, the material substance of capitalism overall – is in and of itself satire. All that is required is a simple reproduction of present circumstances in an age of world war and counter-revolution.15

Should Dada intend to fully make clear the cultural logic of capital, ‘the ambition for art must be abandoned’, a situation Märten perceives as a dilemma for Dada, for in abandoning art, the critical bridge to capitalism and its art would also be abandoned. Dada, ‘seriously revolutionary’, would have to negotiate this dilemma in order to become an enemy of the bourgeoisie and not a reflection of its culture.16 Märten’s thinking here would appear to be an early articulation, not fully realized, of the later more mature dialectic of ‘art and anti-art’ proposed by another Berlin Dadaist, Hans Richter, in his 1973 book Dada: Art and Anti-Art.17 Dada is not dismissed but is seen more as an indicative transitional phase, a phase in which a more honest art than that of the bourgeoisie will emerge, one initially possibly ‘even technically impoverished’.18 In correspondence with the Czech leftist artist Karl Teige in 1924, she wrote: ‘I took Dada completely seriously, if not all its individual members.’19

A similar range of actors and issues are to be found in the setting up of the Proletarisches Theater in 1920. It was established by Erwin Piscator, another member of the Berlin Dada group; and two members, Grosz and Heartfield, would contribute visual material to its performances. In a sense it could be seen as positively applied Dada technique from the Dada Fair earlier that year. Piscator’s statement of aims makes the relationship clear: ‘It was not a question of a theatre that would provide the proletariat with art, but of conscious propaganda, nor of a theatre for the proletariat but of a Proletarian Theatre.’ Moreover, ‘[we] banned the word art radically from our programme, our “plays” were appeals and were intended to have an effect on current events, to be a form of political activity.’ The theatre opened on 14 October, and Alexander’s review of the first night appeared in Die Rote Fahne three days later. There were three short plays on the bill, including ‘Russlands Tag’, for which Heartfield provided the set design.20 The presence of Herzfelde’s wife at the box office selling copies of the Dada-inclined journal Der Gegner, which, as a special issue, contained the Proletarisches Theater programme, written by Piscator, triggered much the same response from Alexander as did the Dada Fair: ‘With that my expectation evaporated. Proletarian Theatre! Bourgeois literati connected with Dada swarmed around the entrance door.’21 She concedes that the intention may have been to put communist and proletarian ideas on the stage, but that in itself is not sufficient. Her inherited aesthetic (Mehring’s Erbe) requires a traditional approach. What she saw was ‘not art but propaganda … Theatre is a space pledged to artistic achievement…. Art is a hallowed affair whose concept should not be surrendered to the most vulgar, botched piece of propaganda carried out on a stage by way of a coloured poster style.’22 She is concerned about the workers ‘not yet ready for independent judgement’, and suggests productions of revolutionary bourgeois drama – Schiller’s ‘Die Räuber’ is mentioned as providing ‘the powerful art which frees the spirit and liberates’.23

Märten’s essay ‘On the Necessity for a Proletarian Theatre and the Proletarian Theatre’ (‘Über proletarisches Theaterbedürfnis und proletarisches Theater’) was published in the Berlin journal Die Arbeit in 1921. Her interest is precisely in the transitional phase between one historical form of theatre and its successor: in her opinion, ‘the revolutionary question is whether the existence of a particular art – here the theatre – is at all necessary and self-evident for future culture’.24 She supported ‘the productivity of factographic theatre work’.25 Contrary to Alexander, she understood the operation of the Proletarisches Theater as addressing the workers more effectively than political propaganda did. ‘The question of material resources arises here’, Märten wrote, ‘and if the agitational effectiveness of proletarian theatre becomes so circumscribed, then the parties and groups should sustain it.’26 Piscator’s production of ‘Russlands Tag’ involved the range of material Märten would espouse in her various writings. The text was not scripted but assembled from a collage of newspaper reports, a Dada practice; it also used film and projection of text. She had addressed a related issue in an article published in Herzfelde’s Der Gegner, in 1921, ‘The Revolutionary Press and the Feuilleton’ (‘Die revolutionäre Presse und das Feuilleton’). She is concerned with how art is presented in the feuilleton: ‘Here and there the worker is presented with a discussion of the good and bad in art, the content of which he is incapable of understanding, a situation he must accept because he has not been furnished with the instrument of criticism, only with the criticism itself’.27 The feuilleton must become an organizing function of the (KPD) party: the specialist and technical virtuosity of journalism and ‘Feuilletonismus’ that the bourgeois press-machine (Press-Mechanismus) has developed must be ‘revolutionised from the ground up’: ‘If Kapital had to be retrieved from newspaper articles, and Marx’s Nachlass stems from there’, she wrote, ‘then every newspaper or journal would be undying.’28 In the introduction to her major work Historical Materialism with Regard to the Substance and Transformation of the Arts (Historisch-Materialistisches über Wesen und Veränderung der Künste), she writes that this ‘short article’ is ‘a foreword to the work on matters of art that is postulated therein … an orientation for shared thinking and cooperation, because every listener and questioner is here a co-worker’.29 In both articles, Märten is setting the agenda for ideas that will later, in a more articulated form, contribute greatly to the development of a Marxist aesthetic: the factographic ‘operierende Künstler’ and the concept of ‘Umfunktionierung’ in the early 1930s.30

The two examples of theoretical differences between Alexander and Märten set out above concerned concrete examples of cultural practices aligning themselves with the left – the Dada Fair and the Proletarisches Theater. Their next engagement would be on more abstract ground, that of the concept of historical materialism and its role in elucidating cultural practices. The issues were raised across five articles, two in the Internationale Jugend Bibliothek and three in Die Rote Fahne. Märten initiated the discussion in the Internationale Jugend Bibliothek with her ‘Historical Materialism with Regard to the Substance and Transformation of the Arts: A Pragmatic Introduction’ (‘Historisch-Materialistiches über Wesen und Veränderung der Künste. Eine pragmatische Einleitung’). As much of this material is raised and discussed in Alexander’s responses and Märten’s reply to her, my focus here will be on those three articles. The exchanges centred on the relationship of art to traditional handicraft (Handwerk), the machine and Marx’s theory of labour (Märten); and on the ideological and spiritual in the conditioning of artistic form (Alexander). Although a charge of technical determinism would hang over Märten’s position, that does not seem to be supported here, as she explicitly defines materialism ‘not only according to technical features, but also according to the natural, the organism of the natural human being’.31

Alexander’s response is the best starting point for the rehearsal of the issues. This appeared in both Internationale Jugend Bibliothek and Die Rote Fahne, entitled ‘Historischer Materialismus und Kunstkritik’. She argues for a traditional concept of artistic production that accommodates the requirement of the historical-materialist method: ‘through the artistic means fashioned by the genius of its creator [a work of art] grips and excites our soul’. Such ‘psychic experience’ of art is also historically materially conditioned because man is a social being.32 She refers to Märten’s question whether ‘new duties for the arts could be determined as a result of historical-materialist investigations’, but rejects it on the grounds that ‘the historical-materialist method must be dialectical and not used mechanically or from an external point of view’, accusing her of ‘failing to see the intuitive apprehension of relationships to penetrate through to the dialectic mediations of phenomena’.33 These criticisms are preliminary to a long passage on the Gothic cathedral. For Alexander, the cathedral incarnates an ideological programme, that of the Catholic Church, and is essentially an art work; for Märten it is primarily the result of technical advance, partly influenced as she was by Gottfried Semper, the nineteenth-century architect, and his concept of the Zweckbau determined by material, function and technique. For Alexander, this ‘would be to mechanise and flatten out historical materialism’.34 She does, however, concede that Märten may in general be advocating an acceptable pathway to the future: ‘If one from now on wishes to undertake in principle the issue of “proletarian art” as an art of the future, Lu Märten may be quite right if she means that a new art is realistically conceivable through a more intimate relationship with the social labour process, through the realisation of the material culture of mankind.’ But Alexander cannot see the determining features in the ‘technical possibilities’.35 Her own pathway to the future is, again, traditional: it involves the ‘complete penetration of everyday life and its material culture with higher value objects … a general raising in the education of the spirit … the growth of a new ethos … The feeling of association of all in communism by way of a shared purpose in work and life is a prerequisite for the development of the arts.’36 Mistaking Märten’s position for being only deterministically informed, she refers to an earlier piece by Märten, ‘Maschine und Diktatur’ of 1919. Märten was working at ROSTA, the Soviet telegraphic service in Berlin, when news of artistic innovations began to trickle through from Russia. That article brought a number of developing issues together: her own interest in Handwerk and the Kunstgewerbebewegung (applied arts movement), new Russian work, the ‘social dictatorship’ in cultural production and ‘the overcoming of the machine by the machine’.37 Alexander claims that they both share the same ground, the recognition of the need to guard against ‘the flattening or narrowing of the historical materialist horizon through the reduction of a phenomenon to one cause instead of pursuing the dialectic of all factors, material as well as spiritual’.38

Märten’s response, ‘Kunst und historischer Materialismus’, appeared in Die Rote Fahne. Not unexpectedly she is critical of Alexander’s conception of the operation of the historical-materialist method. Its objective is not that of ‘intuitive recognition’, the ‘ideological ideal’, but the demonstration by way of deduction and exactness of what the facts are. This operation threatens such ideological concerns as ‘soul’ or ‘art’, as their foundation is laid bare. Whoever reaches for historical materialism as if for a simple tool (Handwerkzeug) and delves no deeper than ideas like ‘religious need’, ‘victorious church’, ‘the spirit of revolution’, ‘artistic essence’, ‘relinquishes the right to judge the outcome of the method’.39 Nor can the invocation of the economic sphere be used as a shortcut. Whoever thinks that ‘handicraft (Handwerk) has never had anything to do with art has not grasped the ABCs of empirical research’.40 The concept of labour stands at the beginning of all historical phenomena. Alexander had quoted Marx to the effect that each age fashions its necessary forms of expression with the requisite means to achieve its goals. Märten now invokes his chapter on Handwerk in Das Kapital, claiming that Alexander seems to be unaware of it: the ‘brilliant passage in this investigation where Marx states that the machine has freed labour from its content is either not known or is not understood by our comrade’. With Marx’s example, the historical materialist must grasp the subject while letting go of preconceptions.41 The Gothic ‘spirit’ must give way to the historical stage of labour and technique. As arts editor of Die Rote Fahne, Alexander had the last word. She characterized Märten’s prioritizing of technique as vulgar Marxism, a misunderstanding of what Marx meant by the relations of production. Rejecting Märten’s attention to the specifics of labour as too literal, Alexander wrote that labour must be considered more broadly: ‘Labour does not only stand at the beginning of all historical phenomena but is the condition for all human existence and consequently the foundation for the relations of production.’42

As with their stances on Dada and the Proletarisches Theater, we find here also, within the official organs of the left, the KPD paper Die Rote Fahne and the Internationale Jugend Bibliothek, two very different concepts on the demands of historical materialism in its investigation of culture. For Alexander it is a method for a more extensive elaboration of the art of the past; Märten instead wants to excavate that past through a concept of labour based on Marx in order to establish forms of art responsive to technological change in the present.

The pre-publication phase of this book had many moments indicative of cultural activity on the left. Märten, as noted above, worked in Berlin for ROSTA between 1917 and 1919, tasked with cataloguing extracts from the international press and forwarding them to Russia. She came into contact with politicians and journalists who had worked for the revolution, and about this time occasional references to Proletkult and new cultural organizations are found in her work: references to the alliance between workers and artists on the basis of the ‘social dictatorship’, with artists becoming organizing engineers in production.43 It was from this contact with Russian sources that the idea for her book arose, initially through a member of the Soviet Trade Mission. In November 1921, the commission for its composition was agreed by the scientific-technical section of the Counsel for Political Economy and ratified by the External Purchasing Commission for the Commissariat for Popular Education. There was a suggestion that Anatoly Lunacharsky, Director of the Commissariat for Enlightment, might oversee its translation. Unfortunately for Märten, negotiations finally fell through in 1922 due to limitations set on Russian funds in Germany. The book was published by a German publisher, Seehof, whose Taifun-Verlag published a wide range of Soviet Russian material in German translation.44 Such contacts would undoubtedly have provided Märten with privileged access to current practical and theoretical concerns in the Soviet Union, informing and supplementing her own pre-war engagement with related issues.

Märten described her project thus: ‘In the present work the attempt has been made to set out for the first time the forms of appearance of the so-called arts and to make clear and transparent the motivating forces of the spiritual and artistic production from the standpoint of historical materialism.’45 The book contains eight chapters, covering music, architecture, sculpture, painting and literature, all subject to the overarching method quoted above. The salient theoretical concerns are discussed below. Two major strands constitute the core of her theorizing: fundamentally, the role of technique; the critique of the Erbe and her related sympathy for formal innovation and experimentation, as reflected in her articles on Dada and the Proletarisches Theater. All are interrelated. Later in the 1920s, she would extend more fully her interest in technique and innovation in a series of articles on radio and film. Writing on this aspect of Märten’s work, Erhard H. Schütz claims that ‘it contains the central ideas – pleasure, experiment, science – of discussion on film of the following years, as they were particularly marked by Brecht, Benjamin and Kracauer’.46

Aside from her critique of Alexander’s position, Märten was also unconvinced by arguments for a proletarian art as such: ‘When, as happens today, proletarian art is discussed and debated, the concept of art is accepted without further ado as an eternally determined complex of forms. That is neither revolutionary nor scientific historical materialism: a concept of art in its socioeconomic dimension must be investigated.’47 Like Piscator, she opposed the fetishization of a proletarian drama, and sought a more dynamic conceptualization of the post-revolution transitional phase, the Übergangszeit: ‘All transitional phenomena which can be thus named are means of struggle, which will eventually be able to choose other, more effective forms.’ Later in the same passage she wrote: ‘it is ridiculous to want to reroute proletarian consciousness through bourgeois forms of artistic consciousness, to expect images and theatre performances which should completely reflect the content and form of the new social vitality, as yet latent and unconscious’. The ‘new forms’, she continues, ‘are therefore to be discovered, exploited and, for the first time, to be developed … [They are] no longer to be identified with the requirement “art” but rather with actual life.’48

Her most contentious claims were those made around the role of technique. As noted above, she had been involved with the Werkbund circle (Naumann and Heuss) in the pre-war period and had written on craft, the machine and the division of labour, and how these changes had impacted on the arts. She had come to see the activity of labour as the originary moment and had turned to Marx’s theory of labour as the explanatory model, one over which she had differed with Alexander. There was an unfulfilled plan to write ‘a “heroic epic” titled Die Arbeit, which would set out the entire development of human labour up to the self-conscious proletariat’.49

For our purposes here, a long passage on Suprematism and Tatlin should suffice for the exposition of these ideas in their relationship to form. The Russian artists, she claimed, ‘had not contributed new words to the vocabulary of art but had created a new language itself’ in which ‘new problems demanded richer technical means for their resolution. Finally, the necessity to produce “pictures”, “artworks” that only amuse the layman or at best repulse him, is being reconsidered critically’. In this new language, ‘every material is suitable … and its new grammar and aesthetic demand manual technical training and a closer bond with its powerful ally, the machine’. In Suprematism she sees ‘a revolutionary destructive force’ that is ‘the first intimation of future synthesis’.50

This new language is not art but the media, languages and materials of new forms. Form in this production process displaces art: ‘No spiritual process needs to be embodied where everything in real life represents itself as it has really happened.’ Here Märten makes a radical claim: ‘It cannot be called classless “art”.… It can only be called “classless forms”.’ The result will be ‘a perfect artistic culture, namely the type of forms appropriate to purpose, object and material; yet, perhaps, without “arts”’.51

In her ‘Kunst und Proletariat’ of 1925, Märten presents a precise account of what has been described above, where she posits the technique/form position against that of ideology/content: ‘Material form is ignored; instead these expectations [for proletarian art] are automatically related to content, the idea, the tendency of the proletarian world-view. It is proposed that what is now known as “laboratory art”, so designated by Trotsky and others, be rejected.’52 ‘All of socialism’s spiritual insights’, she claims, ‘were in step with the facts of material production. Equally so with art attention must be paid to technical material conditions.’53 The ‘klassenlose Formen’ discovered through ‘Laboratoriumskunst’ would reconstruct the ‘Alltag’, the everyday, in order to enrich it (‘um es reicher zu machen’).54

‘Formalist barbarism’?

In the fifth part of his essay ‘On the Question of a Marxist Aesthetic’, Wittfogel accused Märten of ‘failing to proceed in a materialist or dialectical manner’, of ‘formalist barbarism’.55 It seems to be a question of the correct theory as ‘Lu Märten often discovers the real material relation but not as a result of her theory, but despite it.’56 Märten’s counterattack is set on two fronts: her interventionist intention and her questioning of Wittfogel’s exposition of a relevant aesthetic strategy. ‘Do we want to create, even with deficient means, a class-based art, or should we wait until a fully realised socialist society drops from the sky?’ she asks. Opting for the former requires ‘not the standards of traditional aesthetics’ but ‘a practical aesthetic’.57 She is not impressed with Wittfogel’s claim that his series has been a first step towards a Marxist aesthetic, built as it is on quotations from Hegel.58 Wittfogel replied by accusing her of being an ultra-leftist Trotskyist, arguing from a Trotsky-informed nihilistic view of art and of neglecting proletarian art – this, we should recall, was the period of the Stalinization of the KPD.59 He did, however, offer her a welcome if she forsook her earlier position and joined the Linkskurve programme. The invitation was not taken up.

By the date of publication of Märten’s major work, the context for politics on the left had changed. ‘The March Days’ of 1923 saw the defeat of the last insurrectionary attempt, and 1924 brought the Americanization of the economy and the attempted stabilization of capital. An indication of how Märten’s work would be received can be seen in a report of an address she gave to Künstlerhilfe members in Die Rote Fahne in February 1925 (Künstlerhilfe was one branch of Münzenberg’s empire of assistance to KPD causes). The report was written by Alfred Kemeny (under the pseudonym Durus), who replaced Alexander after her move to Moscow. Kemeny would be an important figure in promoting ASSO founded in 1928. Märten spoke on the machine and ‘classless forms’; Kemeny reports on opposition to her ideas. For him, bourgeois art will automatically wither. At present, ‘[t]he most pressing and important objective of art is as the most effective form of revolutionary agitation and propaganda in class struggle.’60 A rather different issue, not in relation to Märten’s work specifically, was raised by Grosz on his return from Moscow in 1924, where he had participated in a large exhibition of German art. Because of the great imbalance in technological advance between Germany and Russia, he declared that productivist-style art did not register as an objective for German artists.61 In 1929 Märten was invited to lecture at both the Marxistische-Arbeiter-Schule (MASCH) in Berlin and at the Bauhaus in Dessau. At MASCH she taught a series on philosophical and historical materialism. Her Bauhaus lecture, also published in their journal, was entitled ‘historischer materialismus und neue gestaltung’, a subject that supported the policy of the Marxist director, Hannes Meyer. Ignored by the ‘Stalinizing’ KPD, her ideas found interest in less orthodox leftist circles, ideas that attempted, on a materialist basis, to indicate a practice and aesthetic at odds with the espousal of the art of the revolutionary bourgeois period (the Erbe) and philosophical aesthetics by Mehring and Wittfogel. But, importantly, some of her ideas on practice would find resonance in the work of Heartfield and Brecht, with their applied materialist aesthetics.

1 My references here are to the 1973 reprint of this series: Karl August Wittfogel, Zur Frage einer marxistischen Äesthetik: Abhandlung (Kölnkalkverlag: Cologne, 1973), here p. 28, n. 6.

2 Wittfogel, Zur Frage, op. cit., p. 42.

3 The Heartfield/Grosz article was triggered by an episode in the immediate post-revolution period when workers and soldiers exchanged fire in the vicinity of the Zwinger Museum in Dresden, as a result of which a Rubens painting was slightly damaged. What angered Heartfield and Grosz was Oskar Kokoschka’s response to the combatants to vacate the scene of culture and remove themselves to the heath where no such damage could be done. The original documents are reprinted in Walter Fähnders and Martin Rector (eds.), Literatur im Klassenkampf: Zur proletarisch-revolutionären Literaturtheorie 1919–1923 (Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag: Frankfurt am Main, 1974), pp. 47–60.

4 Ibid., p. 160.

5 Ibid., p. 143.

6 Ibid., p. 142.

7 Walter Fähnders and Martin Rector, Linksradikalismus und Literatur: Untersuchungen zur Geschichte der sozialistischen Literatur in der Weimarer Republik (Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag: Reinbek, 1980), p. 129. Richard H. Schütz’s periodization is also arresting: he writes about ‘Lu Märten’s contribution to the discussion on the theory of form, which lasted almost twenty years, from the “old” social democratic to the “Stalinisation” of the KPD.’ Schütz, ‘Zur Kontinuität des Geschichtsoptimismus in der materialistichen Literaturtheorie’, alternative: Zeitschrift für Literatur und Diskussion, no. 89 (1973), p. 71.

8 Barbara McCloskey gives a brief but significant account of their controversy over the Dada Fair in George Grosz and the Communist Party: Art and Radicalism in Crisis, 1918 to 1936 (Princeton University Press: Princeton, 1997). The only major study of Märten to date is Chryssoula Kambas, Die Werkstatt als Utopia: Lu Märtens literarische Arbeit und Formästhetik seit 1900 (Max Niemeyer Verlag: Tübingen, 1988). The then West German journal alternative: Zeitschrift für Literatur und Diskussion reprinted some of the original exchanges between Alexander and Märten in issue no. 89 (1973). Before the dissolution of the GDR, there was a move towards rehabilitation of Märten, for which Rainhard Mai was responsible. See Mai, ‘Theorie der “Formen” oder Theorie der “Kunste”? Lu Märtens Versuch eine marxistiche äesthetische Theorie in Deutschland, Anfang der zwanziger Jahre zu konzipieren’, in Kunst im Klassenkampf: Arbeitstagung zur proletarisch revolutionären Kunst (Verband Bildener Künstler der DDR: Berlin, 1979), pp. 84–92; and Rainhard Mai (ed.), Lu Märten: Formen für den Alltag. Schriften, Aufsätze, Vorträge (VEB Verlag der Kunst: Dresden, 1982).

9 See Kambas, Die Werkstatt als Utopie, p. 82. But Mehring was enthusiastic about her play ‘Bergarbeiter’ (‘Miners’), which was staged in Stuttgart in 1909. He reviewed it in Die neue Zeit: ‘A stirring and impressive episode from the life of miners, in which a successful balance between psychological insight and dramatic strength is maintained’. Reprinted in alternative: Zeitschrift für Literatur und Diskussion, no. 89 (1973), p. 100.

10 Kambas, Die Werkstatt als Utopie, op. cit., p. 118.

11 Uwe Schneede (ed.), Die Zwanziger Jahre: Manifeste und Dokumente Deutscher Künstler (DuMont: Cologne, 1979), pp. 31–4.

12 Fähnders und Rector (eds.), Literatur im Klassenkampf, op. cit., p. 152.

13 Ibid., pp. 100–2.

14 Märten was acquainted with a number of Berlin Dadaists: she published in Wieland Herzfelde’s Der Gegner, and Hannah Höch and Raoul Hausmann were among her circle of friends. See Kambas, Die Werkstatt als Utopie, op. cit., p. 137.

15 Reprinted in the catalogue Revolution und Realismus: Revolutionäre Kunst in Deutschland 1917 bis 1933, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, 1978, pp. 85–6. The reference to counter-revolution was the Kapp Putsch of March 1920.

16 Ibid., p. 86.

17 Adorno would articulate it more fully: ‘Just as all art is secularised transcendence, so all art participates in the dialectic of enlightenment. Art has faced the challenge of this dialectic by developing the aesthetic concept of anti-art. From now on, no art will be conceivable without the moment of anti-art. This means no less than that art has to go beyond its own concept in order to remain faithful to itself.’ Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. C. Lenhardt (Routledge & Kegan Paul: London and New York, 1986), p. 42–3.

18 Revolution und Realismus, op. cit., p. 86.

19 Kambas, Die Werkstatt als Utopie, op. cit., p. 203.

20 Details of these productions are to be found in Erwin Piscator, The Political Theatre, trans. Hugh Rorrison (Eyre Methuen: London, 1980), pp. 44–5. One of the plays, ‘Der Krüppel’ (The Cripple), was by K. A. Wittfogel, writing under the pseudonym Julius Haidvogel.

21 Fähnders und Rector (eds.), Literatur im Klassenkampf, op. cit., p. 209.

22 Ibid., p. 208.

23 Ibid., p. 210.

24 Kambas, Die Werkstatt als Utopie, op. cit., p. 143.

25 Ibid.

26 Ibid.

27 Reprinted in alternative: Zeitschrift für Literatur und Diskussion, p. 102.

28 Kambas, Die Werkstatt als Utopie, op. cit., p. 133.

29 Ibid.

30 When Brecht and Benjamin were discussing setting up the journal Krise und Kritik, her name was brought up: ‘Benjamin thought a “debate” was necessary on “what has until now been brought from the materialist side about literary criticism (Franz Mehring, Merten etc)”.’ Erdmut Wizisla, Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht: The Story of a Friendship, trans. Christine Shuttleworth (Libris: London, 2009), p. 79. Wizisla accepts Chryssoula Kambas’s argument that ‘the name, written from dictation, must conceal Lu Märten, based on the reception of Märten during the 1920s’. Wittfogel was also on the list.

31 Kambas, Die Werkstatt als Utopie, op. cit., p. 147.

32 Die Rote Fahne, 20 May 1921, reprinted in alternative: Zeitschrift für Literatur und Diskussion, pp. 63–4.

33 Ibid., pp. 64–5.

34 Ibid., p. 66.

35 Ibid., p. 70.

36 Ibid.

37 Kambas, Die Werkstatt als Utopie, op. cit., p. 127.

38 Reprinted in alternative. Zeitschrift für Literatur und Diskussion, p. 70.

39 Ibid., p. 60.

40 Ibid., p. 61.

41 Ibid.

42 Kambas, Die Werkstatt als Utopie, op. cit., p. 149.

43 Ibid., p. 127.

44 Ibid., pp. 176–8. More unfortunately, he went bankrupt and had to offload stock to other outlets.

45 Ibid., p. 154.

46 alternative: Zeitschrift für Literatur und Diskussion, p. 96.

47 Reprinted in ibid., p. 83.

48 Ibid., p. 86.

49 Kambas, Die Werkstatt als Utopie, op. cit., p. 157. As a self-supporting intellectual typical of the Weimar period, she worked on international labour archives in Berlin.

50 Ibid., p. 173.

51 Ibid.

52 Die Aktion, reprinted in alternative: Zeitschrift für Literatur und Diskussion, p. 54. She had reviewed Trotsky’s Literature and Revolution the previous year and found his distillation of the cultural through historical materialism less than clear.

53 Ibid., p. 55.

54 The question has been raised as to whether Märten may have got to know of Boris Arvatov’s work in the Soviet Union: apparently it was only published in German translation a year later, in 1926.

55 Wittfogel, Zur Frage, op. cit., p. 34.

56 Ibid., p. 39.

57 Ibid., p. 43.

58 Ibid.

59 Ibid., p. 50.

60 Kambas, Die Werkstatt als Utopie, op. cit., p. 180.

61 This is stated in a co-authored pamphlet with Wieland Herzfelde, Die Kunst ist in Gefahr (Art is in Danger), in which Dada is strenuously defended and the false objectivism of Neue Sachlichkeit strongly attacked.