Copyright by Josch Lampe 2021 The Dissertation Committee for Josch Lampe Certifies that this is the approved version of the following Dissertation: The Marxisms of West Germany's "1968": Remaking a Public Critique through Literary Magazines Committee: Katherine Arens, Supervisor Pascale R. Bos Kirkland A. Fulk Sabine Hake Jan Uelzmann The Marxisms of West Germany's "1968": Remaking a Public Critique through Literary Magazines by Josch Lampe Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin May 2021 Acknowledgements First of all, I would like to thank my supervisor and committee, without whom this dissertation would not have been possible. The University of Texas at Austin and its Department of Germanic Studies have been crucial for this research project in both intellectual and financial ways. Research grants for the summers of 2018 and 2019 from the Department and a University Graduate Continuing Fellowship from the Graduate School for the academic year 2019–20 made it possible for me to devote my energies to my project and to complete it despite the disruptions of 2020. I would also like to thank the American Friends of Marbach, who granted me a dissertation fellowship to conduct research at the German Literature Archive in Marbach, Germany, in the summer of 2018. Vast parts of this dissertation are based on data that I was able to access thanks to the archivists, researchers, and staff in Marbach, especially Jan Bürger, Christoph Hilse, Gerhild Kölling, Petra Weiß, and Robert Zwarg. Special thanks also to Hans Christoph Buch, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, the heirs to the Karl Markus Michel estate, and everyone at Rowohlt Verlag and Suhrkamp Verlag for granting me access to their archives at Marbach and permission to reproduce excerpts in my text. iv Abstract The Marxisms of West Germany's "1968": Remaking a Public Critique through Literary Magazines Josch Lampe, Ph.D. The University of Texas at Austin, 2021 Supervisor: Katherine Arens My dissertation focuses on two of West Germany's preeminent literary magazines—Kursbuch (founded in 1965) and Literaturmagazin (founded in 1973)—and the ways in which they sought to shape and redefine a literary public sphere as a site of intellectual, cultural, and political critique during the long '68, as well as their role in the reevaluation and dissemination of different, global Marxisms. It combines archival research on the editorial correspondence and conceptualization of these respective magazines with a detailed analysis of their content in order to better understand the intellectual event "1968" and its immediate aftermath as part of a larger contested history of publishing practices in West Germany after 1945. My work outlines how these two publications not only trafficked in different Marxisms at different times and to different ends, but also took part in the (re)constitution of an engaged literary public sphere through the creation, design, and circulation of competing conceptions of literary magazines. More critically, I argue that Kursbuch and Literaturmagazin suggest clear evidence of a continuation of Marxist debates from earlier eras about the links of aesthetic judgment and political action (such as the so-called v Realism-Modernism Debate), indicating that "1968" is a mere interim stage in an unfinished debate on Marxist aesthetics. My project therefore recoups a set of West German and international voices that have been too often overlooked as viable experiments in Western Marxisms within an international framework, not just as part of West Germany's nation-(re)building and World War II recovery. In other words, these magazines brought to public discussion a broader spectrum of leftist thought. I illustrate how the journals' editorial staffs were assessing West Germany by addressing its weaknesses through the lenses of an inherently international, multilayered, and often incoherent set of Marxist agendas in the making. vi Table of Contents Introduction: Setting the Argument .....................................................................................1 Chapter 1: FRG Contexts for Two Literary Magazines .....................................................24 Historicizing Postwar Germany: Why the Nation Took a Left Turn .......................25 Enzensberger's Path to Kursbuch ..............................................................................34 Historicizing the Rebellion's Aftermath and Literaturmagazin ................................40 Buch's Path to Literaturmagazin ..............................................................................49 Some Concluding Remarks ......................................................................................61 Chapter 2: Kursbuch and Literaturmagazin at Their Origins ............................................63 Definition(s) of Literary Magazines: Periodicals and the Public Sphere .................64 Functions of a Literary Magazine .............................................................................68 Kursbuch Emerges ....................................................................................................75 Literaturmagazin Emerges .......................................................................................84 Some Concluding Remarks ......................................................................................94 Chapter 3: The Politics of Culture in a Broken Political Culture ....................................100 Abstract Materiality or Material Abstraction? The Revealing Zeitgeist of Theory 105 Back to the Future: The Activists' Legacies of Marxist Aesthetics ........................110 Origins of the Realism-Modernism Debate ............................................................117 Western Marxism: New Aesthetics for New Politics ..............................................121 From Lukácsian Realism to the Death of Literature? .............................................125 Brecht's Flexible Realism .......................................................................................133 From Utopian Socialism to Seeds of Imagination ..................................................140 Some Concluding Remarks: Aesthetic Failures of the '68 Marxists ......................151 vii Chapter 4: Remaking a Public Critique, Part I: Social Functions and Limits of Literature and Marxist Literary Criticism ..................................................................159 The Aesthetics of Staging History: From Dossiers to Brecht in Kursbuch ............163 The History of Political Aesthetics in Literaturmagazin ........................................171 Inventing New Political Aesthetics .........................................................................180 The Aesthetics of Revolution, or Revolution through Aesthetics? ........................191 Some Conclusions: The New Marxist Aesthetics? .................................................211 Chapter 5: Remaking a Public Critique, Part II: Engaged Intellectuals in a Bourgeois Public Sphere .............................................................................................................215 Bourgeois and Proletarian Public Sphere: Beyond the Frankfurt School ...............220 Kursbuch's Bourgeois Class Struggle .....................................................................226 Literaturmagazin: Do Not Reinvent Marxism; Understand It! ..............................254 Intellectuals or Workers? Yes, please! ...................................................................266 Conclusion: The Multidimensional Simultaneity of "1968" ...........................................270 Limits on and Future Prospects for the Present Study ............................................280 Some Final Remarks ...............................................................................................286 Bibliography ....................................................................................................................289 viii Introduction: Setting the Argument 1960s journals such as New Left Review (founded 1960), New York Review of Books (1963), Nouvel Observateur (1964), or Kurbuch (1965) actively contributed to the "documentary turn" on a literary "market for Marx" (Niese 2017, 25). This documentary turn equates commitment and literary realism with political engagement (Roberts 1989, xv). It aims to be a "discovery process" of the "the new and the hitherto unreported, unrepresented, and unseen," and understands itself as a "conquest of reality and a weapon in cognitive struggle" (Jameson 2012, 476). This politicized paradigm shift, however, did not come out of nowhere. During the 1960s, certain changed social and political circumstances led to a corresponding adaptation of reading practices and, consequently, to a changed status of Marxism (Sepp 2019, 232). In search of a Western-oriented postwar identity, West Germany's (FRG) political administration of the 1950s was linked to Chancellor Konrad Adenauer's (1876–1967) Restaurationspolitik [politics of postwar restoration], military rearmament, demarcation 1 of the FRG against the Eastern bloc states, and anti-communist policies.1 In the 1960s, Adenauer's conservative course developed into a new centrism, following numerous controversial events: the Marxist Left of the SDS (Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund [Socialist Student Association of Germany]) was