The conflict between Ernst Bloch and Georg Lukács over expressionism in 1938 forms one of the most revealing episodes in modern German letters. Its resonance is in part due to the criss-crossing of intellectual evolution and political destiny between its two protagonists. The main outlines of the career of Lukács are now well-known in the Anglo-Saxon world; those of his intimate friend and exact contemporary Bloch less so. Born in Ludwigshafen in the Rhineland in 1885, the son of a railway official, Bloch was educated in Bavaria at Wurzburg and Munich. He soon displayed polymathic gifts, studying philosophy, physics and music. He first met Lukács when in his early twenties, at a soirée of Georg Simmel’s in Berlin, and later during a visit to Budapest. However, it was in the period of their common residence in Heidelberg, from 1912 to 1914, that the two men were drawn together into an intense philosophical partnership. Paradoxically, in view of their later development, it was Bloch who essentially influenced Lukács towards serious study of Hegel, while it was Lukács who directed Bloch towards Christian mysticism, especially the work of Kierkegaard and Dostoievsky.1 Russia on the eve of the revolution held a magnetic interest for the two men, together with others in Max Weber’s circle at Heidelberg at the time. The onset of the First World War marked their first divergence: Lukács answered the call-up in Hungary, to the incomprehension of Bloch whose much more radical rejection of the war took him to Switzerland and a form of revolutionary defeatism. However, even four years later, Lukács was still suggesting to Bloch that they collaborate together on an Aesthetic, with Bloch contributing to it on music. Bloch’s first major work, Der Geist der Utopie (1918), a wild synthesis of religio-apocalyptic and proto-socialist ideas, contained ardent tributes to his friend.
After the war, Lukács joined the Hungarian Communist Party, fought for the Commune, and then worked in exile as a party organizer and Marxist theorist within the Third International throughout the twenties. Bloch, by contrast, did not join the KPD in Germany, remaining a heterodox sympathizer rather than enlisted militant – herald of a revolutionary romanticism that he was never to disavow. Bloch, too, was much closer to experimental and esoteric literary circles in Weimar Germany.2 The philosophical trajectory of the two men now increasingly separated, as Lukács exalted the realism of the later Hegel and Bloch defended the irrationalist reaction of Schopenhauer to it. The Nazi seizure of power drove them from Germany. Bloch went to Prague, Lukács to Moscow. Their responses to the victory of fascism soon proved to be sharply contrasted in emphasis. Bloch’s book Erbschaft dieser Zeit, published in exile in 1934, took the form of a kaleidoscopic set of aphoristic reflections and evocations from the quotidian and cultural life of Germany in the twenties. It sought to understand the elements of genuine protest – however irrational their guise – in the revolt of the German petty-bourgeoisie that had been captured by fascism. To extricate these and to win the pauperized petty-bourgeois masses over to the working-class was, he argued, as important a task for the revolution in Germany as the conquest of the peasantry had been in Russia. Lukács, on the other hand, had from 1931 onwards – at a time of extreme Third Period sectarianism in the Comintern – been developing literary positions that anticipated the cultural policies of the Popular Front period. Their main watchwords were to be: reverence for the classical heritage of the Enlightenment, rejection of any irrationalist contaminations of it, assimilation of modernist trends in literature to irrationalism, identification of irrationalism with fascism. After the installation of the Nazi dictatorship, Lukács’s first major essay was a scathing requisitory of Expressionism as a phenomenon within German culture, published in the journal Internationale Literatur in January 1934.
In it, he argued that Wilhelmine Germany, increasingly a society of parasitic rentiers, had been dominated by philosophies (Neo-Kantianism, Machism, Vitalism) that conjured away the connections between ideology and economics or politics, preventing any perception or critique of imperialist society as a whole. Expressionism had been a literary reflection of that obfuscation. Its ‘creative method’ was a search for essences pursued through stylization and abstraction. While the Expressionists professed to attain the kernel of reality, they merely gave vent to their own passions, in a subjectivism that verged on the solipsistic, since words were used not referentially but only ‘expressively’. Politically, the Expressionists had opposed the War; while in other respects their confusions were a kind of cultural analogue of the political ideology of the Independent Socialists (USPD). The Expressionists voiced a general hostility to the bourgeois, but they were unable to locate bourgeois vices in any particular class. Thus they could discern capitalist symptoms in workers, and could postulate an ‘eternal’ conflict, beyond mere class struggle, between bourgeois and non-bourgeois. The latter were seen as an elite that should rule the nation, an illusion that eventually led to fascism.
It was these antithetical interventions by Bloch and Lukács, immediately after the victory of Nazism, that form the background to the exchange below. In 1935 the Comintern switched to the Popular Front strategy. In July, the International Writers Congress for the Defence of Culture in Paris approved a decision to create a German literary journal in exile, as a forum for anti-fascist writers and critics. The three formal editors were intended to reflect a representative spectrum of opinion: Bertolt Brecht, a Marxist without official party affiliation, Willi Bredel of the KPD, and Leon Feuchtwanger, a bourgeois admirer of the USSR. The journal was published from Moscow and since none of these writers was on the spot for long, their contribution and influence varied notably. Feuchtwanger showed the greatest enthusiasm, while Brecht remained luke-warm, confining his own contributions largely to poems and extracts from his plays. After staying in Moscow for six months, Bredel left for the Spanish Civil War. Effective control was thus exercised by Fritz Erpenbeck, a journalist and actor who had been active in Piscator’s theatre. His views tallied in all essentials with those of Lukács.
Once controversial, Lukács’s views had meanwhile been steadily gaining in influence and in 1937, some two years after the Seventh World Congress of the Comintern, a coordinated assault on German Expressionism was launched in Das Wort. The signal for it was given by Alfred Kurella – a disciple of Lukács who was later to rise to prominence in the DDR – with a violent attack on the heritage of Expressionism, manifestly inspired by Lukács’s long essay three years before. Kurella’s article provoked a flood of replies, only some of which could be published. Among those to appear were contributions by former Expressionists like Wangenheim, Leschnitzer and most importantly, Herwarth Walden – who, as the editor of Der Sturm (1910–32) had played a key role in publicizing the works of the Expressionists, as well as those of foreign schools like Cubism. Other essays were written by associates of Brecht like Johannes Eisler, and a number of other defenders of modernism, including Bela Balazs. The most trenchant rejoinder, however, came from Bloch. Dismissing Kurella, he now directly engaged with Lukács as the source of the current polemics against Expressionism. It was his essay which brought Lukács himself into the fray, with a lengthy reply.
Why did Expressionism excite so intense a debate in the German emigration? Expressionism as a movement had flourished from about 1906 to the early twenties. It had been composed of a series of small groups complexly inter-related and extending over the visual arts, music and literature. Die Brücke and Der Blaue Reiter were essentially pre-war phenomena, though of a number of their artists survived into the thirties. Most of the leading poets, however, had died during or even before the war (Heym, Stadler, Trakl, Stramm), or had turned away from Expressionism (Werfel, Benn, Döblin). Its last major achievements were the retrospective anthology of poems, Menschheitsdämmerung (1920) and the plays of Toller and Kaiser. If the normal definitions are slightly extended, Expressionism may lay claim to Karl Kraus’s The Last Days of Mankind and the early works of Bertolt Brecht. A number of factors determined the demise of the movement. Among them was the War, which the Expressionists had at first prophesied and then opposed, and whose end rendered them superfluous. A profound disillusionment followed when their League of Nations dream of a new mankind was exploded. Expressionism was also upstaged by more ‘radical’ movements like Dada and Surrealism, while in Germany the anti-revolutionary mood and cynical ‘realism’ of Neo-Objectivity (Neue Sachlichkeit) made their idealism look naively theatrical. Finally, the Nazi take-over drove the survivors into silence, exile or imprisonment. Yet, although it had petered out in such failure, Expressionism had memorably and indisputably represented the first German version of modern art. The arguments between Bloch and Lukács and their respective allies over its fate were thus essentially a contest over the historical meaning of modernism in general. Bloch’s plea for Expressionism started with an effective counter-attack against Lukács’s remoteness from the actual productions of the movement, especially in the field of painting, where the most durable achievements of Expressionism (Marc had long been admired by Bloch)3 and the most persistent weakness of Lukácsian aesthetics coincided. Bloch went on to reaffirm the legitimacy of Expressionism, ideologically as a protest against the imperialist war and artistically as a response to the crises of a transitional epoch, when the cultural universe of the bourgeoisie was disintegrating, while that of the revolutionary proletariat was still inchoate. Finally, Bloch sought to acquit Expressionism of the recurrent charges of elitism and cultural nihilism, by stressing its latent humanism and the interest shown by its exponents in popular, traditional forms of art and decoration. Lukács remained unmoved. In answer to Bloch’s reflections on the fragmentary character of contemporary social experience, he insisted that capitalism formed a unitary whole, and most visibly at precisely those moments of crisis that prompted Bloch to speak of fragmentation. The characteristic subjectivism of Expressionist art was a denial of this cardinal truth and a repudiation of the objective of all valid art, the faithful reflection of the real. Furthermore, he argued, ‘popularity’ in art implied much more than the idiosyncratic enthusiasms of the Expressionists. Authentically popular art was distinguished by its affirmation of the most progressive experience of the nation, and by its close ties with realism, an aesthetic form that was truly accessible to ‘the people’.
Few will dissent from Bloch’s comments on his adversary’s critical methods. Lukács’s normal procedure was to construct an ideal type of what he took to be the ideological substrate of the works in question; these were then judged collectively, in the light of his own politico-ideological positions. The results of this were often grave conflations and reductions, and sometimes, when he did venture to analyse individual works, sheer blindness – as Adorno, unconstrained by feelings of friendship as Bloch may well have been, later showed. This difference of procedure was not simply technical. For Lukács, literary history composed an ordered and univocal past whose meaning and value were fixed by the wider history that determined it; the tradition handed down to the present by the ‘progressive’ epochs of the past was a set of compelling norms, a mortmain that literary legatees must honour on pain of disinheritance. For Bloch, on the other hand, this history was the Erbe, a reservoir in which nothing was ever simply or definitively ‘past’, less a system of precepts than a sum of possibilities. Thus, no work was simply replaceable by another, by virtue of its ideological exchange-value, or wholly to be discounted because of its divergence from this or that aesthetic canon. The appropriate focus of a criticism so motivated was the individual art-work, the notorious blind spot of Lukácsian criticism. At the same time, however, it should be said that Lukács’s procedure was also part of the greater coherence and ambition of his work, which produced, as no other contemporaneous oeuvre did, the elements of a systematic history of prose narrative and a sustained account of the relations between ideology and literary form – his Historical Novel, written around the same time as the rejoinder to Bloch, is perhaps the strongest example.
The pivotal issue of the exchange – the relationship between Expressionist art and social reality – is not easily arbitrated. Bloch’s defence of Expressionism avoided direct confrontation with the aesthetic premisses of Lukács’s attack. Circumventing his opponent’s assumption that the proper function of art was to portray objective reality, in organic and concrete works from which all heterogeneous material, and especially conceptual statement, was excluded, Bloch chose instead to insist on the historical authenticity of the experience that underlay Expressionism. It was thus left open to Lukács simply to remind him that the subjective impression of fragmentation was theoretically groundless, and to conclude that Expressionism, as an art that typically misrepresented the real nature of the social whole, was invalid. The effect of Bloch’s démarche was to distract Lukács’s attention, and his own, from one of the most crucial issues in the exchange between them. Driven by the ‘impressionistic’ character of Bloch’s defence to emphasize the unity of the social whole, Lukács failed to register its essential point: that this unity was irreducibly contradictory. In this way, an opportunity to debate the problems of the artistic presentation of contradiction – the absent context of Bloch’s remarks on montage, and a stubborn crux in Lukács’s realist aesthetics – was missed.
The explicit politico-cultural context of the exchange was the Popular Front. It may be said, indeed, that it represented one of the high points of popular-frontist cultural debate in that period. But it should also be noted that both essays are weakest at precisely that point. If Lukács was right to point out that Bloch’s catalogue of Expressionism’s popular interests and debts was quite arbitrary, and that modernism in general was objectively elitist and thus estranged from ‘the people’ in every practical sense, it seems no less clear that his own invocations of national popular traditions, especially those of Germany, were at best strained and at worst vapid. The problems of defining a ‘popular’ literary practice were not necessarily entirely intractable, as the example of Brecht was to show. However, final judgment of the rival theses of Bloch and Lukács in the matter should probably be referred to a wider enquiry into the cultural and political limits of popular frontism itself.4 In that perspective, the roles of the two men in the period would probably be revealed in yet another light. For, despite the lamentable conclusion of Lukács’s essay – so far below the level of his main argument, and so symptomatic of the administrative tone of official culture within the Comintern during the Popular Front – it would be a mistake to assume that Bloch was freer than Lukács from the worst deformation of the time. In fact, it was Bloch in Czechoslovakia who volunteered fulsome affidavits for the Moscow trials, complete with the official tales of Nazi-Japanese plots in the Bolshevik Party, at the very same time that he was resisting the campaign against Expressionism;5 while Lukács in the USSR, undeceived, avoided the subject wherever he could – compromising himself far less seriously. The real history of the epoch affords no comfort to facile retrospective alignments, in either aesthetics or politics.