In:Landscapes of Realism: Rethinking literary realism in comparative perspectives
Edited by Dirk Göttsche, Rosa Mucignat and Robert Weninger
[Comparative History of Literatures in European Languages XXXII] 2021
► pp. 65–79
The contest of realism
German Marxist “realism debates” from the 1930s to the 1950s
Published online: 21 April 2021
https://doi.org/10.1075/chlel.xxxii.02wen
https://doi.org/10.1075/chlel.xxxii.02wen
Abstract
The community of German-language Marxist intellectuals living in exile in the 1930s was riven by the
so-called “Expressionism Debate,” often also referred to as “Realism Debate.” In essays published in the Moscow-based exile
journal Das Wort in 1937 and 1938, the initial contributors to the debate castigated expressionism, a
quintessentially German variant of avantgarde experimentalism, for facilitating Nazism’s rise to power due to its bourgeois
aestheticist atavism; later contributors, some of whom had themselves begun their literary careers as expressionists, defended
expressionism, arguing that avantgarde experimentation is not inherently reactionary, nor must it be considered antithetical to a
Marxist aesthetics. This exploratory essay tracks the debate from its inception in Das Wort through its
late-1930s extensions, specifically the Seghers-Lukács-correspondence and Bertolt Brecht’s numerous essay fragments directed
against Georg Lukács (fragments published only after Brecht’s death in 1956), to the 1950/1960s Lukács-Adorno debate (inasmuch as
it can be called a debate), recapitulating the “Expressionism Debate’s” relevance for the discussion of realism, Marxism and
literary experimentalism.
Article outline
- 1.The opening volleys
- 2.Responding to Lukács: Seghers’s and Brecht’s ripostes
- 3.Adorno takes over
- 4.No end in sight
Notes Works cited
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