After the end of the Second World War, the German emigration gradually reassembled in Central Europe. Benjamin was dead, a victim of fascism. Bloch and Brecht, after some hesitation, chose to go back to Leipzig and Berlin in East Germany. Adorno, also after some delay, returned to Frankfurt in West Germany. Lukács moved immediately back to Budapest. With the onset of the Cold War, Europe divided into two mobilized camps. In Hungary, Lukács’s writings – for all their ostensible compliance with Stalinist etiquette – were soon (1949) violently assailed for ‘revisionism’, and his books ceased to appear. In East Germany, Bloch was published and honoured, while Brecht was granted every material privilege for the creation of his own theatre. Although their freedom of expression was circumscribed, neither was felt to represent a threat in the same way as Lukács. In West Germany, Horkheimer recreated the Frankfurt Institute of Social Research with the benevolent approval of the Adenauer regime. Adorno became its deputy director.
The end of Stalin’s rule in 1953 unleashed a general political crisis in Eastern Europe. The first country to experience its impact was the DDR. In July 1953, there was a workers’ rising, with a wave of strikes and street clashes against the apparatus of East German state – suppressed with the aid of Soviet troops. Brecht, bewildered and unnerved, reacted to this revolt of the masses with a mixture of truculent bluff and sentimental pathos in his private diaries.1 He was to play no role in the process of destalinization, dying shortly after the 20th Party Congress of the CPSU in 1956. Lukács, on the other hand, took an active part in cultural and political debates in Eastern Europe during the Thaw. Lecturing widely in Berlin, Warsaw, Budapest and Vienna in 1955, he restated his central aesthetic ideas, until recently harried and censored, and aggressively counter-attacked the Zhdanovite canon of ‘revolutionary romanticism’. The written result of this activity was a book, The Meaning of Contemporary Realism, completed shortly after the 20th Party Congress. When the Hungarian Revolt erupted in October 1956, Lukács – while lucidly assessing the probable chances of success of an essentially spontaneous social explosion – did not hesitate to cast his lot with the cause of the insurgent workers and students. Participating in the Nagy government, in which he presciently warned against withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact, he was seized by Russian troops during the Soviet intervention, and confined in Rumania. Released in March 1957, he completed his preface to the book he had been writing, and sent it abroad. The Meaning of Contemporary Realism was published in West Germany in 1958. When it appeared, Hungary was held fast in the grip of repression, and Lukács was silenced in his own country, subject to attacks of increasing vehemence.2 It was this book that Adorno was to review, in the major essay on Lukács printed below.
Adorno had become, in the same year, Director of the Institute of Social Research in Frankfurt. No two situations could have been more contrasted. Adorno, at the summit of his career, was free to write wherever he chose in the Federal Republic. In the event, his essay was published in Die Monat, a journal created by the US Army in West Germany and financed by the Central Intelligence Agency. Adorno’s strictures on Lukács’s mental ‘chains’ thus had their own irony: when he was writing, it was Lukács who was literally resisting police culture, while Adorno was unwittingly yielding to it. These circumstances should be remembered when reading Adorno’s appraisal of Lukács; they are not an insulation against it. The substance of the critical positions represented by the two antagonists remains to be assessed today in its own right.
The theoretical premisses of The Meaning of Contemporary Realism were essentially those which Lukács had defended from the late 1920s onwards. The distinctive emphases of the book were, however, shaped by the period in which it was written – between Stalin’s death and the Twentieth Congress of the CPSU – and by the political perspectives then forming in the Eastern bloc. Lukács’s allegiance to the policy of ‘peaceful coexistence’, with its reliance on ‘progressive’ currents in bourgeois politics and culture, and to a partial and rightist critique of Stalinism,3 were registered in his literary criticism in the form of a twofold critical intervention, against the reactionary tendency that he believed to dominate the literature of the West, and the ‘voluntarist’ excesses that he discerned in that of the East. He opened with a stinging polemic against the major literary representatives of European modernism. These authors, he maintained, were united in their affiliation to a philosophical ‘ontologism’ whose aesthetic effects were subjectivism and formalism, with a corresponding attenuation of historical reality – into ‘background’, as with Musil, if not virtual nothingness, as in the work of Samuel Beckett. Indeed the finest – because most lucid and critical – theorist of modernism, Walter Benjamin, had obliquely predicted an immolation of art in consequence of its cancellation of history.4 However, decadence was not the inescapable lot of the mid-century Western artist. Against the irrational stylisms and allegories of the tradition epitomized in Kafka stood another tradition, only superficially less ‘modern’, whose exemplar was Thomas Mann. The works of this alternative tradition represented, in effect, a renewal of the classical realist novel of the previous century, in a form appropriate to the epoch of socialist revolution; and the ‘perspective’ that guided this paradoxical achievement – the successful practice of a classical bourgeois form in the period of capitalist decline – was the admission of a ‘reasonable question’: the ‘non-rejection’ of socialism as an historic possibility. Lukács insisted that this ‘critical realism’ was the sole means to artistic excellence in the contemporary West. In his own way, Brecht had rallied to it in his later plays, for all his professions to the contrary, to become ‘the greatest realistic playwright of the age.’5 Lukács was also concerned to defend the titles of realism in the post-capitalist societies of the East. In contrast with its ‘classical’ and ‘critical’ siblings, ‘socialist realism’ was grounded in a ‘concrete socialist perspective’ and written ‘from the inside’, socially and ideologically. But for that reason, its development as a literary mode would inevitably be shaped by the ideological and material stresses of the period of transition. Thus, the main emphasis of Lukács’s argument fell on the two deformations to which ‘socialist realism’ had shown itself prone: on the one hand, a ‘naturalist’ transcription of the actual state of society; on the other, a compensatory ‘romanticism’, aggravated by political errors, that occluded the real contradictions of socialist development. For the duration of the transitional period, Lukács concluded, ‘critical realism’ would remain a legitimate and valuable element in the culture of the workers’ states.
It is necessary to recall the dual character of Lukács’s intervention now, if only to draw attention to the political character of Adorno’s assessment of it. His opening thrust – against the apologetic strain in the book – is not easily countered. Its tone and manner, by turns hectoring and affable, bespeak the same bureaucratic presumption that Brecht had protested at, years before. He was also quite right to insist on the social-darwinist affinities and philistine, conformist undertones of Lukács’s notion of ‘decadence’, and to put the eminently historical question: where was the implied alternative – healthy, vigorous and normal – to be found in the present? On the other hand, Adorno’s recourse to tendentious terms such as ‘the people’s community’ (Volksgemeinschafi) for the Eastern countries, in a text published in the West at the height of the Cold War, displayed a seemingly calculated neglect of fundamental political discriminations, which can only have appeared to endorse the liberal ideology of ‘totalitarianism’ so prevalent at the time. His evident distaste for Lukács’s aesthetic positions may help to explain this procedure, but it cannot fully excuse it.
Adorno’s principle aesthetic charge was that Lukács variously misapprehended, underestimated or ignored the constitutive formality of the work of art. His obdurate defence of ‘reflection’ – theory and of realism – the ‘imitation of empirical reality’ – led him to read the ‘images’ of modernism as grossly distorted transcripts, unconscionable travesties of objective reality. At the same time, Lukács denied the ‘autonomous’ historical development of aesthetic technique and misconceived its role in artistic production. Thus, he was blind both to the unrealistic elements in his own chosen masters – Balzac, for example – and to the real nature of the ‘images’ or ‘essences’ that modernism distils from experience. For Adorno, the production of the work of art entails the appropriation of the objective world by the subject, in accordance with the ‘laws’ of aesthetic form. The ‘image’ so produced then stands in contradiction to the real, and as a critique of it – ‘art is the negative knowledge of the actual world.’ The outstanding merit of the works of Beckett, Kafka and Schönberg, in Adorno’s view, was precisely their intransigent refusal of any form of reconciliation. As he wrote on another occasion, ‘a successful work … is not one which resolves objective contradictions in a spurious harmony, but one which expresses the idea of harmony negatively by embodying the contradictions, pure and uncompromised, in its innermost structure.’6
Adorno was right to point to the epistemological aporia of realist aesthetic theory, to reaffirm the relative autonomy of the literary ‘series’ and to stress the productive function of literary form. These issues are central to any examination of Lukács’s aesthetics, and were raised with special force by The Meaning of Contemporary Realism. It is all the more unfortunate, therefore, that these themes were not developed much beyond the point of emphasis or assertion. The fundamental categories of Adorno’s aesthetics remain opaque: ‘autonomous art’, the ‘laws’ and ‘logic’ of artistic form, ‘essences’ that are not congeneric with the essences of philosophical idealism – none of these crucial terms is assigned a clearly delimited meaning. Dialectical tropes and epigrams that do not so much explain modernist art as re-create its moods and tempers served here for the kind of conceptual clarity that Lukács, for all his errors and evasions, rightly took to be the task of theoretical exposition. In the same way, while he can pass devastating judgment on the incompetence of Lukács’s readings of individual texts (the lyric by Benn, or Mann’s Magic Mountain), Adorno’s own counter-arguments are scarcely more specific in their use of textual illustration. To dwell on these shared deficiencies of theory and concrete analysis is, in the first place, to be reminded of the need for equity in assessing this exchange between Lukács and Adorno. It is possible, however, that they are in fact the echoing symptoms of a fundamental theoretical community, in which both men participate equally.
In 1962, two years after the critique of Lukács, a German translation of Sartre’s What is Literature? appeared. Adorno took the occasion to write an extended essay on ‘Commitment’. Published in Die Neue Rundschau, the essay was essentially focussed on the work of Brecht, after some acute introductory remarks on Sartre. The two essays, on Lukács and on Brecht, are in an obvious sense complementary. The first was designed to combat the politically and aesthetically illegitimate prescriptions of Lukács’s literary criticism, the second to resist a parallel intrusion into the practice of literature itself; in both cases, the ‘autonomous’ productions of modernism are affirmed as a politically valid alternative. The logical and empirical stresses of the first are still more clearly marked in the second, as the critique of Sartre makes plain. Adorno’s strictures on Sartre’s ‘literature of ideas’ have an undeniable force, but their validity is ultimately conditional on the quid pro quo which, elsewhere in the essay, he himself imposes on the Brechtian theatre. It is true that a professedly revolutionary art must, in elementary consistency, submit itself at some point to the criterion of political correctness. But the same must then be true of any professedly Marxist criticism. Adorno’s dismissal of Sartre’s literary attempt to incite individual subjects to free and active choice was based on the premiss that late capitalism had devised an all-inclusive ‘administered universe’, a political order purged of contradiction and therefore of the objective possibility of choice. Today, respecting Adorno’s own injunction, few will fail to judge that the political assumptions of ‘Critical Theory’ have weathered rather less well than those of Sartre’s ‘libertarian existentialism’. It should be added here that the notion of a residual transcendental subject was structurally essential to Adorno’s thought, furnishing the only point of leverage in a putatively totalitarian social order (and founding the possibility of a thought that could indict it as such).7 No assessment of his aesthetics can overlook this semi-miraculous persistence of the subject in a conceptual schema that posits its complete reification. Sartre’s belief in the efficacy of individual engagement seems much less questionable than a theory in which the production of ‘autonomous’ works of art is little less than magical.
Adorno’s criticisms of Brecht are obviously subject to the same general caveat. But here, interestingly enough, his political idiom becomes more nuanced and concrete, in keeping perhaps with the avowedly Marxist purposes of the art now under discussion, and his aesthetic judgments are often very penetrating. Much of what Adorno has to say about Brecht’s plays is incontrovertible. The ‘trivialization’ of fascism effected by Arturo Ui, the wilfully crude ‘analyses’ of plays like Saint Joan and Mother Courage, the constant recourse to archaism of different kinds – these are so many instances of a definite populist strain in Brecht’s work. The Threepenny Novel, which Adorno does not mention here, is very striking in this respect. Confined mainly to the sphere of circulation and set in a lumpen, semi-criminal milieu, the narrative is actually an exposé of capitalist relations of corruption. No one factor can adequately account for this aesthetic displacement towards populism. A theoretical slippage into a kind of left-utilitarianism is a familiar failing of Brecht’s writings. His political weaknesses also took their toll – The Measures Taken, criticized here by Adorno, is a notorious case in point.8 Further, unresolved difficulties of a specifically aesthetic character may have been partly responsible for some of the contradictions of the Brechtian theatre.
Nevertheless, Adorno was wrong to suggest that these contradictions were inherent in Brecht’s artistic project. The film Kuhle Wampe, made by Slatan Dudow, Ernst Ottwald and himself in 1931, demonstrates that they were not – a demonstration corroborated a contrario by the misrepresentations to which Adorno was drawn in making a general case against him. His remarks on Saint Joan confine themselves to a ‘content analysis’ as brusque as any to be found in Lukács’s writings. He does not consider the play in relation to Brecht’s ‘epic’ dramaturgy – with which he was well acquainted – or pay any attention, even in his own terms, to its unusual formal characteristics. The Good Woman of Szechuan is mentioned only as ‘a variation … in reverse’ on Saint Joan; and yet here is a work that ‘jolts signification’ in the approved Adornian manner. The action of the play effects a gradual subversion of moralism, showing how the ‘good’ Shen Te can only remain so with the aid of her ‘evil’ alter ego, Shiu Ta. No resolution of this contradiction is enacted, or prescribed by the play, which thus ends in crisis, posing a question that it does not answer. It was disingenuous, therefore, to assimilate Brecht’s theatrical practice to ‘didacticism’ tout court. His constant effort (it is another question how far or how consistently he succeeded) was not to dispense truths to a passive audience, in the manner of a George Bernard Shaw, but to provide structured possibilities for reflection on the nature of capitalist (and socialist) relations and the place of the spectator within them.
Neither Lukács nor Adorno was able to respond with much enthusiasm to Brecht, essentially because the relationship between politics and aesthetics as he conceived it was quite distinct from the conception held in common by them. All three were agreed that art could and should be a means of understanding historical reality. But Lukács and Adorno went on to accredit an intrinsic cognitive capacity to art – more precisely, to specific forms of art. In so doing, they were led to elaborate Marxist versions of pre-existing ideologies of art. For Lukács, as for Aristotle and the subsequent tradition of realist aesthetic thought, art was properly ‘the imitation of an action’; ‘action’ was to be interpreted in the light of historical materialism, but ‘imitation’ remained the unchallengeable purpose of all valid art. Adorno’s essays were not so much a Marxist defence of modernism as the expression of a distinctively modernist Marxism: his positions were, mutatis mutandis, those of modernist ideology itself. The complementary oversights of the two critics were conditioned by their underlying aesthetic-ideological commitments. Lukács inveighed against the irrationalist element in modernism, but was wholly insensitive to its positive disruptive moment; Adorno was justly contemptuous of the ‘optimism’ prescribed by Soviet orthodoxy, but was unable or unwilling to acknowledge the equally reactionary ‘pessimism’ of Western liberal orthodoxy. Sardonically noting that a ‘journalistically minded Westerner’ could praise The Caucasian Chalk Circle as a ‘hymn to motherhood’, he forgot that the same stereotypical figures are never done extolling Kafka as the analyst of ‘totalitarianism’ and Beckett as the only undeluded poet of ‘the human condition’.
Brecht’s choices were the product of a different conception of the role of politics in aesthetics. ‘Realism’, as he defined it, was a political and ideological end whose formal means were variable, according to the dictates of time and place. His use of the term ‘realism’ no more signified an aesthetic allegiance to Balzac than his ‘alienation effects’ bespoke the activities of a ‘modernist’. The techniques of classical narrative, popular song and expressionist theatre were among the elements of an artistic instrumentarium, to be drawn upon in whatever combinations the given circumstances seemed to suggest. The result was an aesthetic which, in conception at least, was much more alive to the shifting valencies of form than either Lukács’s studies of the traditional literary past or Adorno’s claims for the high avant-garde. Adorno was undoubtedly right to emphasize the problems of Brecht’s political theatre. His critique of Brecht cannot be dismissed by any socialist: it remains of greater intellectual power than any of the numerous conventional homages to him. But to question, as he did, the very possibility of a successful political art was to confine Marxist aesthetics to more or less contemplative assessments of the available forms of bourgeois art. The respective limits of the two men are suggested by their final discomfiture at the publics for which they wrote. Brecht’s disorientation before the revolt of a proletariat that belied (realized) his politics was to have its precise counterpart, fifteen years later, in Adorno’s disarray at the rebellion of an intelligentsia that confounded (appropriated) his philosophy, in the great student demonstrations of the sixties. The quest for a revolutionary art has revived in the West with a new intensity since then.