Hunter Bivens. Epic and Exile: Novels of the German Popular Front, 1933-1945. FlashPoints Series. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2015. 344 pp. $45.00, paper, ISBN 978-0-8101-3148-4.

Reviewed by Axel Fair-Schulz

Published on H-Socialisms (September, 2017)

Commissioned by Gary Roth (Rutgers University - Newark)

With his Epic and Exile: Novels of the German than Bertolt Brecht. Readers of Epic and Exile are Popular Front, 1933-1945, Hunter Bivens gives us most likely to be familiar with Brecht and his a thought-provoking and engaging book that will well-known play Mother Courage and Her Chil‐ be of particular use for advanced graduate stu‐ dren (1941). Next in line of familiarity might be dents and experts in the intersecting felds of Ger‐ Seghers and her The Seventh Cross (1942), ar‐ man studies and socialist history. The book is the‐ guably one of her most famous novels. It was oretically dense and full of detailed analyses, even turned into a successful Hollywood movie in which makes it a stimulating and challenging 1944, starring Spencer Tracy. While The Seventh read. Cross and Mother Courage have long been avail‐ As the subtitle suggests, Bivens focuses on able in English, Claudius’s Green Olives and Bare German novels produced during the Popular Mountains (1944) and Marchwitza’s The Kumiaks Front period between 1933 and 1945. He explicitly (1934) are not available in English and may be ob‐ states that he does not ofer any kind of literary, scure even to many connoisseurs of German liter‐ cultural, or intellectual history of the period. In‐ ature. While Bivens provides some background stead, he examines three novels and one play that on the authors and their works, more systematic were produced between 1933 and 1945. According summaries of the plots, especially of Green Olives to Bivens, what ties these four literary artifacts to‐ and The Kumiaks, would have further enhanced gether is that they were written by authors com‐ the readability of this intriguing study. The same mitted to the Communist Party of Germany (KPD). beneft would apply to the inclusion of brief bio‐ Each had been forced into exile by the Nazi graphical sketches and overviews of the authors’ regime and typifed Popular Front aesthetics, al‐ literary oeuvres. These plot summaries, as well as though each author typifed these aesthetics in the biographical sketches, might have been espe‐ their own particular way. In addition, all four cially useful at the beginning of each chapter, fo‐ writers were to survive exile and war and, even‐ cusing on one of the three novels and the stage tually, become infuential cultural fgures in the play. This would have provided greater orienta‐ German Democratic Republic (GDR). tion and context, especially given that Bivens dis‐ cusses and analyzes specifc episodes and charac‐ The three novelists discussed are Anna ters from those literary and theatrical works. Seghers, Eduard Claudius, and Hans Marchwitza, while the author of the stage play is none other H-Net Reviews

Bivens divides his book into six chapters, an First All-Union Soviet Writers’ Congress. Bivens introduction, and an epilogue. In addition, there uses the insights of Detlev Peukert, Walter Ben‐ are endnotes and a name and subject index. A jamin, Siegfried Krakauer, Georg Simmel, and bibliography might have proven useful. At the many others to carve out the features of the de‐ very beginning of the book, one fnds the custom‐ bates regarding the KPD’s evolving relationship ary acknowledgments, including a special thanks with modern mass culture, during the eras of to the late Simone Barck and Ursula Third Period sectarianism and the Popular Front Heukenkamp, who supported Bivens’s project ear‐ later on. ly on. Both were prominent literary scholars in Engaging with particular refections on how the GDR and were fortunate to be able to continue the crisis of meaning in capitalist society relates their careers after German reunifcation in 1990, to the crisis of the bourgeois subject and indeed while many other East Germans were pushed out the crisis of the novel as a form of literary repre‐ of academia. Bivens situates his work within a sentation, Bivens examines Benjamin’s “Experi‐ broad scholarly literature, including the work of ence and Poetry” (1905) and “The Storyteller” such East German experts as Jürgen Kuczynski, (1955), and puts them into dialogue with Lukács’s Silvia Schlenstedt, Sigrid Bock, and Werner Mit‐ Theory of the Novel (1920). Pointing to the grow‐ tenzwei. He uses some of their publications from ing disconnect between individual experiences both before and after the dissolution of the East and socioeconomic as well as cultural forces, German state and its academic institutions. This is Bivens observes: “as many critics of the Weimar refreshing, as most contemporary scholars simply period insisted, the bourgeois subject was no ignore the output of their East German colleagues. longer adequate as a means of framing this con‐ It often seems that having been educated in the tradiction, and the novel as a bourgeois epic former GDR automatically disqualifes someone’s seemed equally unsuited to mapping even the eforts, without warranting further scrutiny. Of limited terrain of individual experience itself” (p. course, concerns about the formulaic ofcial 33). “Marxism-Leninism” that dominated much of East While Lukács defended the usefulness of the German scholarship are legitimate, but they novel as a literary device for modernity, in which should be an impetus to look more deeply into the all unity of experience and social reality are shat‐ specifc scholarly output of relevant East German tered, Bivens cites the famous Communist re‐ experts, rather than legitimizing wholesale and porter Egon Erwin Kisch as typical of those who undiferentiated dismissal. sought an alternative in a matter-of-fact reportage Chapter 1, titled “Epic Forms and Crisis of the style. Kisch, known as the rasende Reporter, was Novel,” probes into the nexus between aesthetic notorious for perfecting this literary style in his and political debates between the late 1920s and columns. In addition to Kisch, Bivens also uses the early years of the German anti-Fascist emigra‐ Walter Ruttmann’s famous 1927 silent flm, tion in the 1930s. The major markers of this tra‐ Berlin: Symphony of a Metropolis, Alfred Döblin’s jectory were the establishment of the Association Berlin Alexanderplatz, and Brecht’s methodology of Proletarian-Revolutionary Writers (Bund Prole‐ of “Epic Theater” in order to illustrate the crisis of tarisch-Revolutionärer Schriftsteller or BPRS) in traditional literary and aesthetic modes of expres‐ October 1928, the arrival of Georg Lukács in sion and the quest for a new approach, based on a Berlin, the Kharkov Conference of the Interna‐ more detached, “objective,” and documentary tional Union of Revolutionary Writers (IURW) in style. Lukács, of course, famously identifed the 1931, and the ofcial proclamation of socialist re‐ novel, as it had evolved in the nineteenth century, alism as the new aesthetic discourse by the 1934

2 H-Net Reviews as the best vehicle to capture the “transcendental sen im Bund proletarisch-revolutionärer Schrift‐ homelessness” of the modern experience.[1] steller [1971]). Bivens highlights the importance of the BPRS Quoting the infuential Communist writer and in this search for a new modernist narrative tech‐ fellow BPRS member F. C. Weiskopf, who in a 1930 nique. Having developed out of the Communist radio broadcast with Kurt Hirschfeld discussed International’s IURW, the BPRS was designed to the proletarian novel, Bivens summarizes three provide an organizational network for Commu‐ major themes that came out of this conversation. nist aesthetic discussions and works, as well as for Firstly, to the members and sympathizers of the disseminating Soviet literary and aesthetic de‐ BPRS, the “traditional novel was already a genre bates among German audiences. In addition, in dissolution, at best providing a forum for the Bivens points out, the BPRS merged two otherwise public decomposition of bourgeois ideology and separate currents within Communist literary cir‐ for the ventilation of social frustrations that could cles in post-World War I Germany. On the one fnd no political expression.” Second, in contrast, hand, there was the realm of working-class the‐ the proletarian novel, expressing a far more docu‐ ater groups and the so-called workers’ correspon‐ mentary style, focuses the “collective and collec‐ dence movement, composed of blue-collar work‐ tive feelings.” Hence, the social dimension over‐ er-writers, such as Willi Bredel and Marchwitza. rides the individual realm. Finally, Weiskopf sug‐ The Communist daily press searched actively for gested that the proletarian novel must “widen the new talent among genuine working-class activists realm of language” in order to “include the lan‐ and tried to encourage and help them develop guage of the political movement, trade union, fac‐ into mature and skillful authors. On the other tory culture and working-class speech in general” hand, there was the realm of the left-bourgeois lit‐ (p. 41). In similar fashion, Becher, another BPRS erary intellectuals, like Seghers and Johannes R. member—like Weiskopf originally from an upper- Becher, who had been radicalized by the growing middle-class background defned proletarian-rev‐ crisis of capitalism and the Weimar system. olutionary literature as challenging the aesthetic What connected both groups, Bivens argues, and ideological norms of the dominant classes, is their political commitment to the KPD as the and as reframing social reality from the vantage only political force capable of overcoming a point of the proletariat. This entails a critique of predatory capitalism and building a socialist/com‐ left-liberal writers and intellectuals, such as Hein‐ munist alternative, and their rejection of the tra‐ rich Mann and Döblin, as well as the sensibility of ditional aesthetic norms, as hopelessly antiquated Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity). While the and inadequate in representing the experiences members and sympathizers of the BPRS wel‐ of their time. Bivens draws on Helga Gallas, argu‐ comed the overall anti-capitalist politics of left-lib‐ ing that both the worker-writers and the radical‐ erals and the penchant for objectivity and re‐ ized middle-class intellectuals who met at the portage on the part of Neue Sachlichkeit adher‐ BPRS sought to replace traditional literary genres. ents, they ultimately argued that art and litera‐ Repelled by conventional aesthetic devices, such ture could be neither neutral nor disinterested. as the psychologizing of confict and the individu‐ Another member of the BPRS, the writer and al protagonist, they looked for new approaches physician Friedrich Wolf, pointed out, in his 1928 that refected socioeconomic and class-based col‐ Manifesto Art Is a Weapon, that art and literature lective experiences (see especially Gallas’s classic must not only be rooted in working-class life and study, Marxistische Literaturtheorie: Kontrover‐ struggle but also be part of those struggles, be available to the masses, and be consciously politi‐ cal. For the producers of proletarian novels, writ‐

3 H-Net Reviews ing is not only an aesthetic act but also an immi‐ of the Stalinization of the USSR, and the rise of nently social and political one. fascism. Marchwitza’s novel thus has its place Chapter 2 analyzes Marchwitza’s The Kumi‐ alongside the work of Wilhelm Reich, particularly aks. Given how little-known Marchwitza and his The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1933) and Ernst oeuvre are in the English-speaking world (or in Bloch’s 1935 Heritage of These Times as an at‐ contemporary Germany, for that matter), a more tempt to understand recent German history in systematic introduction of Marchwitza and his terms of the mutual determination of social and novel at the beginning of the chapter might have psychological structures” (p. 54). Connecting made this otherwise very insightful segment more Marchwitza with Reich and Bloch, in terms of accessible to nonspecialists. The Kumiaks was subject matter, is legitimate but should perhaps originally conceptualized as a two-volume project be nuanced by some additional observation re‐ and came out as a published novel in 1934. An garding the diferences in the aesthetic and ana‐ earlier draft was already completed in March lytical qualities between those authors. March‐ 1933 but had to be substantially reworked. Like witza, while being showered with ofcial literary many other members of the KPD, the author be‐ honors by the East German state after the end of lieved that the Nazi regime would be overthrown Nazism and World War II, did not have much of a quickly by a working-class uprising in Germany. literary reputation outside East Germany. Even When it became clear that this uprising would not the main newspaper of the Polish Communist Par‐ take place, Marchwitza addressed this absence of ty, Trybuna Ludu, opined in its review of the Pol‐ a Communist revolution by literary means. The ish translation of the sequel to The Kumiaks that Kumiaks explores this conundrum through the this book was far too boring for anybody to read lens of a family history that chronicles the daily in its entirety and that its intellectual content was lives of working-class people, especially miners truly embarrassing. Marchwitza never made a se‐ plagued by economic hardship and unemploy‐ cret of his difculties with issues of grammar, syn‐ ment, some of whom were eventually ensnared tax, and style. The notoriously polemic literary by Nazi agitation. Bivens notes that Marchwitza critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki may have overstated sought to showcase the “structures of feeling” of things when he argued in his essay on March‐ the German workers’ movement in light of the witza that the author of The Kumiaks continued 1933 catastrophe, “highlighting the ‘mistakes, fail‐ to wrestle with the most elementary rules of writ‐ ings, and illusionary expectations’” (p. 53). ing into old age and kept producing books, sup‐ ported by a range of secretaries and editors, “that While The Kumiaks focuses on the years be‐ nobody wanted to read and nobody wanted to re‐ tween 1918 and 1923, Marchwitza wrote two sub‐ view.”[2] sequent volumes (The Homecoming of the Kumi‐ aks [1952] and The Kumiaks and Their Children The frst volume of The Kumiaks is arguably [1959]). Yet Bivens’s overall emphasis on the Popu‐ among Marchwitza’s strongest works, but he is lar Front period precludes those two sequels from clearly not on the same analytical level as Bloch his analysis. Bivens justifes starting his four-case or Reich. Nor is he on the same level as Brecht or study of Popular Front aesthetics with March‐ Seghers. All four, of course, had the advantage of witza’s The Kumiaks by putting author and novel a middle- to upper-middle-class upbringing, with into a grand historical and philosophical context. the commensurate educational and cultural op‐ The Kumiaks focuses “on the crisis year of 1923, portunities attached, while Marchwitza came which marked the turning point of the post-World from a working-class family. He worked as a coal War I revolutionary tide in Europe, the beginning miner, with little formal schooling. Yet, despite Marchwitza’s indefatigable eforts to overcome

4 H-Net Reviews his educational disadvantages and his dogged de‐ equal to Zola and Hauptmann, not only in subject termination to make himself into a writer, he nev‐ matter and methodology but also in literary-aes‐ er possessed the natural talent of a Bredel, who— thetic terms, one might wish for greater clarity just like Marchwitza—came from a blue-collar here. East Germany’s ofcial literary establish‐ background and yet produced works of higher lit‐ ment bombastically claimed that Marchwitza erary quality and on similar themes that March‐ stood on the tradition of the most innovative and witza explored, such as the attempt to capture an expressive German writers, including Jacob von entire epoch by literary means in hybrid novel Grimmelshausen, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, form, drawing on the earlier format of the prole‐ and Gottfried Keller, but “continuing their tradi‐ tarian autobiography and the epic concentration tion on a higher, socialist foundation.”[3] Such and social mediations of the historical novel, as overblown praise could only distract from March‐ Lukács called for. Bivens astutely notes that The witza’s actual and very real contributions. Kumiaks refects the “aesthetic and historical de‐ Bivens draws skillfully on the East German bates of the German anti-Fascist emigration with‐ literary scholar Dieter Schlenstedt’s insight that, in its narrative structures,” and indeed the collec‐ much like Mother Courage in Brecht’s play, Peter tive search of German Communists after 1933 to Kumiak is “not an example of a hero that learns account for the triumph of Nazism (p. 53). His but rather a hero from whose depiction one can case for The Kumiaks as an ideologically layered learn” (p. 56). What Marchwitza wants his readers and unexpectedly ambivalent book (given March‐ to develop is in efect a Brechtian critical distance, witza’s Stalinist leanings) is convincing. The Kumi‐ not an empathetic identifcation with the protago‐ ak family members are exploited workers but are nists of his Kumiak family. They have not learned, not socialist heroes of any sort. In fact, the overall just as millions of Germans from similar back‐ absence of positive Communist characters, as well grounds had not learned, and thus made the Nazi as the KPD as an institution, in the novel is inter‐ victory possible in 1933. esting. The family never develops any form of Among the most engaging parts of this chap‐ proletarian class consciousness, remaining politi‐ ter (and by extension of the chapters on The Sev‐ cally naïve and tragic fgures who ultimately fall enth Cross, Green Olives and Bare Mountains, and victim to Nazi rhetoric. Marchwitza highlights the especially Mother Courage and Her Children) is socioeconomic conditions the family is forced to Bivens’s use of Bloch’s concept of Ungleichzeit‐ live under as “dull, stupefying,” and deadening to igkeit, which he translates as non-synchronism, as body and soul (p. 56). Bivens draws similarities in well as the uneven political and economic devel‐ the depiction of this kind of pre-proletarian and opment that made it possible for modern and pre‐ subaltern “plebeian” milieu between March‐ modern ideologies and modes of production to co‐ witza’s The Kumiaks and Emile Zola’s Germinal exist in an uneasy and indeed volatile mix. To (1885) and Gerhard Hauptmann’s The Weavers Bivens, Bloch’s notion of Ungleichzeitigkeit pro‐ (1892). vided a compelling explanatory frame for the Ku‐ Bivens might blur the qualitative literary dis‐ miak family, and for millions of people like them, tinctions between Marchwitza, on the one side, who could not really develop any kind of revolu‐ and Hauptmann and Zola, on the other, a little too tionary class consciousness. They were still par‐ much by stating that The Kumiaks showcased the tially stuck in a premodern peasant world, despite mundane aspects of everyday proletarian life “in having left their peasant home in Silesia, where a manner equal to ... The Weavers ... or the earli‐ Peter Kumiak was an agricultural day laborer, er-mentioned Germinal” (p. 56). While it is doubt‐ having moved to the coal felds of the Ruhr Valley. ful that Bivens would consider Marchwitza truly

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Bivens observes correctly: “These declining rem‐ did have an efect on the thought processes of in‐ nants of anachronistic but incomplete historical tellectuals, artists, and writers, even inside the stages project the motives, desires, and needs of KPD, and he thus cannot be written out of any dis‐ the past into the present, where they stand in con‐ course of the time. Because Bivens focuses on the tradiction to the logic of capital but not in produc‐ Popular Front aesthetic within the orbit of the tive contradiction that might lead to revolution” KPD in exile, his book should also have acknowl‐ (p. 60). edged the existence of non-Stalinist and anti-Stal‐ Already in his introduction, Bivens articulates inist currents within the German Communist re‐ how a variety of thinkers, foremost Karl Marx and sistance to Adolf Hitler. He is keenly aware of how Heinrich Heine, have contributed to an under‐ Stalinization destroyed the revolutionary hopes of standing of a “subaltern plebeian habitus, born of 1917: “defeated in the USSR no less than in Ger‐ social immiseration and military drill,” as some‐ many, Italy, Austria, and Spain, the working-class thing that must “not to be understood in regard to organizations that entered into the Popular Front Germany’s backwardness but rather in regard to may have generated a great deal of enthusiasm Germany’s embodiment of the combined and un‐ but were no longer in the position to stage social even development of capitalist modernity” (p. 20). revolutions” (p. 231). Dating the beginnings of Using the insights and analytical contributions of Stalinism to as early as 1923 echoes Trotsky’s Marx, Heine, and Bloch regarding how these iconic study of Stalinism in The Worker’s State, three novels and the play refect the Popular Thermidor, and Bonapartism (1935). A similar Front aesthetic, as well as the German Communist case, regarding the relevance of Trotsky, could be exile experience, was a very fruitful choice on the made vis-à-vis Bivens’s use of Alain Badiou in the part of Bivens. Yet it is peculiar that one particu‐ opening paragraph of the introduction to Epic and lar thinker who, perhaps more than anybody else, Exile. Quoting Badiou, he looks at Nazi and Stalin‐ is associated with the concept of “combined and ist terror crashing the hopes of revolution every‐ uneven development” is strangely absent from where: “in this short century, the 1930s is the the entire book. That person is, of course, Leon switching between the epic and the tragic, the mo‐ Trotsky. Bivens does, however, draw on some ment where the Soviet century becomes indistin‐ scholars who have identifed with the Trotskyist guishable from the totalitarian century as the tradition in one way or another, such as Pierre emancipatory claims of the revolution fnd them‐ Broué and Michael Löwy. selves at an impasse” (p. 3). Epic and Exile would have benefted from Theodor Bergmann and Mario Kessler’s essay, Bivens integrating insights from one of Löwy’s “The Resistance of Small Socialist Groups against classic books, incidentally titled The Politics of Fascism,” examines several of those anti-Stalinist Combined and Uneven Development (1981). In this Communist groups and small parties, like the book, Löwy traces the development of this con‐ KPD-Opposition of Heinrich Brandler and August ceptual approach from Marx on, highlighting the Thalheimer, Left Opposition, International Social‐ central contributions of Trotsky. In addition, Trot‐ ist Fighters’ League, New Beginning, and the So‐ sky provided what is arguably one of the earliest cialist Workers’ Party, among others.[4] In addi‐ and most coherent Marxist analyses of fascism, as tion, there is Marcel Bois’s comprehensive study well as critiques of the Third Period sectarianism of the entire left-wing opposition within the KPD, of the Stalinist parties. Given how much the Stal‐ aptly titled Kommunisten gegen Hitler und Stalin inist bureaucracies vilifed Trotsky and his vari‐ (2014) (Communists against Hitler and Stalin). ous followers, his presence (or enforced absence) These works should at least have been cited in a bibliography. Finally, there are some very minor

6 H-Net Reviews errors of spelling. For example, on page 62, it should read vogelfrei as opposed to Vögelfrei, and on page 280, Olaf Baale’s book title Abbau Ost: Lü‐ gen, Vorurteile und sozialistische Schulden has a typo. But all in all, Bivens’s Epic and Exile is a sig‐ nifcant contribution to the felds of German stud‐ ies, exile literature, and socialist history. While not recommended as an introductory text, as pre‐ viously noted, this book will engage more ad‐ vanced graduate students and experts in those felds. Notes [1]. Georg Lukács, The Theory of the Novel (1920; repr, Boston, MA: MIT Press, 1974), 41. [2]. Marcel Reich-Ranicki, “Die Legende vom Dichter Marchwitza,” Die Zeit (October 30, 1964). [3]. Ibid. [4]. Theodor Bergmann and Mario Kessler, “The Resistance of Small Socialist Groups against Fascism,” in On Anti-Semitism and Socialism: Se‐ lected Essays, ed. Mario Kessler (Berlin: Trafo Ver‐ lag, 2005), 117-134.

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Citation: Axel Fair-Schulz. Review of Bivens, Hunter. Epic and Exile: Novels of the German Popular Front, 1933-1945. H-Socialisms, H-Net Reviews. September, 2017.

URL: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=45815

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