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Popular Front Fiction 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 offer 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). benefit 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 typified Popular Front aesthetics, al‐ literary oeuvres. These plot summaries, as well as though each author typified 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 influential 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 specific 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 reflections on how the GDR and were fortunate to be able to continue the crisis of meaning in capitalist society relates their careers after German reunification 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 disqualifies someone’s seemed equally unsuited to mapping even the efforts, without warranting further scrutiny. Of limited terrain of individual experience itself” (p. course, concerns about the formulaic official 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‐ specific 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 undifferentiated 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 identified the 1931, and the official 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 influential 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 find 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 defined 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).
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