Ever since Baumgarten and Wincke1mann, Germany has been the classical land of aesthetic thought in Europe. In the 20th century, Marxism itself has repeated the rule. No other country has produced a tradition of major aesthetic debate to compare with that which unfolded in German culture from the thirties to the fifties.The key texts of these great Marxist controversies over literature and art are now, for the first timeanywhere outside Germany, assembled in a coherent order. They do not form a conventional collection of separate documents but a continuous debate between their dramatis personae. In exile before the war, Bloch and Lukacs polemicized against each other over the nature of expressionism. Brecht attacked Lukacs for literary formalism. Benjamin disputed over classical and modem works of art with Brecht. Adorno criticized Benjamin's hermeneutics, and challenged Brecht's poetics and Lukacs's politics. The multilateral exchanges which resulted have a variety and eloquence without rivaL Fredric Jame�n, Professor of French at Yale University and author of Marxism and Form and The Prison House of Language, sums up their paradoxical lessons for art and criticism today, in an essay of theoretical conclusion. Aesthetics and Politics will provide a pole of reference and a source of illumination to students of literature throughout the English-speaking world. v Ernst Bloch Aesthetics and Po Ii tics Georg Lukacs Bertolt Brecht Walter Benjamin Theodor Adorno Afterword by Fredric Jameson / Verso Translation Editor: Ronald Taylor Contents Presentation I 9 Ernst Bloch Discussing Expressionism 16 Georg L uk:ics Realism in the Balance 28 Presentation II 60 Ernst Bloch 'Discussing Expressionism', first published in Das Wl)rt 1938, then in Erbschaft dieser Zeit, Frankfurt 1962, ©Suhrkamp Verlag; Georg Lukacs, 'Realism in Bertolt Brecht Against Georg Lukacs the Balance', firstpublished in Das Wort 1938, then in Probleme des Realismus, Neuwied 68 1971, ©Artisjus; Bertolt Brecht, texts of 'Against Georg Lukacs', first published in Walter Benjamin Conversations with Brecht 86 Schriften zur Kunst und Literatur, Frankfurt 1967, ©Stefan Brecht, 1967. All rights reserved through Suhrkamp Verlag; Walter Benjamin 'Conversations with Brecht', first published in Versuche fiber Brecht, Frankfurt 1966, ©Suhrkamp Verlag - this translation first published in Walter Benjamin, Understanding Brecht, London 1973, © NLB; Theodor Adorno,'Letters to Walter Benjamin', published in Uber Walter Benjamin, Presentation III 100 Frankfurt 1970, ©Suhrkamp Verlag, and Walter Benjamin 'Reply', published in Briefe II, Frankfurt 1966, ©Suhrkamp - these translations first published in New Left Review, September-October 1973, ©New Left Review; Theodor Adorno, 'Reconciliation Theodor Adorno Letters to Walter Benjamin 110 under Duress' and 'Engagement', published in Noten zur Literatur II and III, Frankfurt Walter Benjamin Reply 1961 and 1965, © Suhrkamp Verlag; Fredric Jameson, 'Reflections in Conclusion', 134/ ©NLB 1977. Presentation IV 142 Aesthetics and Politics, first published 1977 Theodor Adorno Reconciliation under Duress ((,)NLB 1977 151 Theodor Adorno Commitment 177 Verso edition first published 1980 Verso Editions, 7 Carlisle Street, London W.l. Fredric Jameson Reflections in Conclusion Printed and bound in Great Britain by 196 Whitstable Litho Ltd, Whitstable ISBN 86091 722 3 (paper) ISBN 902308 38 6 (cloth) Index 214 Publisher's Note The texts assembled inthis volume have been selected for the coherence of their inter-relationships. Brief presentations are designed to provide the Anglo-Saxon reader with biographical and cultural background to the successive exchanges contained in them. They were prepared by Rodney Livingstone, Perry Anderson and Francis Mulhern. The trans­ lators of the texts - Anya Bostock, Stuart Hood, Rodney Livingstone, Francis McDonagh and Harry Zohn - are credited at the end of them: Ronald Taylor edited the translations for the volume. Fredric Jameson's essay forms a contemporary conclusion. NLB 7 Presentation I The conflict between Ernst Bloch and GeorgLukacs 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 Lukacs 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, physicsand music. He first met Lukacs when in his early twenties, at a soiree 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 philoso­ phical partnership. Paradoxically, in view of their later development, it was Bloch who essentially influenced Lukacs towards serious study of Hegel, while it was Lukacs who directed Bloch towards Christian mysticism, especially the work of Kierkegaard and Dostoievsky.l 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: Lukacs answered the call-up in Hungary, to the incomprehension of Blochwhose much more radical rejection of the war took him to Switzerland and a fonn of revolutionary defeatism. However, even four years later, Lukacs 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 eeist der Utopie (1918), a wild synthesis of religio-apocalyptic and proto­ socialist ideas, contained ardent tributes to his friend. 1 See Michael Lowy, Paris 1977, pp. 292-300, for Bloch'sPour early Une relationship Sociologic with des Inte//ectuelsLukacs. Rivolutionnaires, 9 Ii 10 Presentation I 11 '\) After the war, Lukacs joined the Hungarian Communist Party, fought of that obfuscation. Its 'creative method' was a search for essences for the Commune, and then worked in exile as a party organizer and pursued through stylization and abstraction. While the Expressionists Marxist theorist within the Third International throughout the twenties. professed to attain the kernel of reality, they merely gave vent to their Bloch, by contrast, did not join the KPD in Germany, remaining a own passions, in a subjectivism that verged on the solipsistic, since words heterodox sympathizer rather than enlisted militant - herald of a revo­ were used not referentially but only 'expressively'. Politically, the lutionary romanticism that he was never to disavow. Bloch, too, was Expressionists had opposed the War; while in other respects their con­ much closer to experimental and esoteric literary circles in Weimar fusions were a kind of cultural analogue of the political ideology of the Germany.' The philosophicaltrajectory of the two men now increasingly Independent Socialists (USPD). The Expressionists voiced a general separated, as Lukacs exalted the realism of the later Hegel and Bloch hostility to the bourgeois, but they were unable to locate bourgeois vices defended the irrationalist reaction of Schopenhauer to it. The Nazi in any particular class. Thus they could discern capitalist symptoms in seizure of power drove them from Germany. Bloch went to Prague, workers, and could postulate an 'eternal' conflict, beyond mere class Lukacs to Moscow. Their responses to the victory of fascism soon proved struggle, between bourgeois and non-bourgeois. The latter were seen to be sharply contrasted in emphasis. Bloch's book Erbschaft dieserlZeit, as an elite that should rule the nation, an illusion that eventually led to published in exile in 1934, took the fonn of a kaleidoscopic set of apho­ fascism. ristic reflections and evocations from the quotidian and cultural life of It was these antithetical interventions by Bloch and Lukacs, imme­ Germany in the twenties. It sought to understand the elements of genuine }' diately after the victory of Nazism, that form the background to the protest - however irrational their guise - in the revolt of the German exchange below. In 1935 the Comintern switched to the Popular Front petty-bourgeoisie that had been captured by fascism. To extricate these strategy. In July, the International Writers Congress for the Defence of and to win the pauperized petty-bourgeois masses over to the working­ Culture in Paris approved a decision to create a German literary journal class was, he argued, as important a task for the revolution in Germany in exile, as a forum for anti-fascist writers and critics. The three formal as the conquest of the peasantry had been in Russia. Lukacs, on the other editors were intended to reflect a representative spectrum of opinion: hand, had from 1931 onwards - at a time of extreme Third Period Bertolt Brecht, a Marxist without official party affiliation, Willi Bredel sectarianism in the Comintern- been developing literary positions that of the KPD, and Leon Feuchtwanger, a bourgeois admirer of the USSR. anticipated the cultural policies of the Popular Front period. Theirmain The journal was published from Moscow and sinoe none of these writers watchwords were to be: reverence for the classical heritage of the was on the spot for long, their contribution and