Georg Lukács. The Struggle of Humanism and Barbarism. 1943

Chapter 5. Poetry in Exile

Germany, which was previously quite rightly called the country of thinkers and poets, has turned into a country of robbery and murder, devastation and violence. Previously, she prided herself on the abundance of distinctive, multifaceted individuals in her art and science; now it is a country of general barracks depersonalization, the abode of caricature people. In modern Germany, immorality and barbarity have been turned into the duty of a soldier, and during the time of the fascist “total” war, the “total” mobilization of the entire people, all Germans became soldiers. It is enough to read the notorious order of Reichenau and follow its terrifyingly conscientious fulfillment by the German army to see what the practice of this immorality and barbarity is. How can poetry arise and flourish in such a country? It is clear that poetry had to be driven out of such a Germany – and it is not hard to see why. The suppression of all freedom of opinion is an essential part of fascist politics. After all, fascist domination in Germany began with the “unification” of ideology.

However, these important and obvious facts do not fully explain all the spiritual humiliation of modern Germany. History knows many forms of oppression of peoples. But many times, in the midst of the most terrible oppression, opposition statements have broken through – of course, “underground,” hidden. A truly irreconcilable, courageous opposition has always been able to convey the necessary content to the reader between the lines.

Of course, there are people in modern Germany who are dissatisfied with the fascist government. Reading individual literary works, pondering the declarations of the fascist rulers about the tasks of literature and the omissions of writers, one can quite clearly see the traces of this discontent. Goebbels repeatedly rebuked German writers for deviating from contemporary subjects. Last year, for example, in Germany, the issues of the historical novel were intensively discussed, and fears were expressed about whether the historical theme is not an escape from modernity.

Indeed, when you read German novels, the action of which takes place in the present, one is struck by the persistence with which writers living in Germany keep silent about the political and social situation in the country. They deliberately neither directly nor indirectly touch upon the problems and situations associated with fascism. This oversight sometimes goes so far that a kind of “timeless” literature arises; in books that clearly speak of modernity, the place and time where the action takes place is not visible, the political and social environment in which certain events of private life are played out is not visible.

But this oversight is purely negative. It usually does not have the character of a deliberately polemical silence, although in the private appearance of such books one cannot see a mere chance or purely individual characteristics of individual writers. Such literary works are, at best, timid shots in the air. In the literature of modern Germany – even in the “underground” form – there is no real protest against the fascist regime. This cannot be explained only by fear of reprisals, censorship, etc. There can be only one explanation: wide circles of Germans are infected with fascist ideology.

Of course, in most cases we are not talking about the official fascist ideology proclaimed by Hitler, Rosenberg, Goebbels and Co. All the more or less independently thinking people silently reject it, often even despise it. But fascist ideology did not arise out of nothing. It has a long history in Germany, it was preceded by a long preparatory period, during which many works were written that had a profound influence on the spiritual life of Germany. They created an atmosphere in which reason and moral sense were dulled. This slowly spreading poison became not only the direct spiritual source of the official fascist ideology (after all, Rosenberg and Goebbels are only eclectic collectors, plagiarists, propagandists and demagogic simplifiers of previous reactionary ideologies); it penetrated deeply into the thoughts and feelings of the German intelligentsia and made them morally and spiritually defenseless against fascist propaganda. Hence the ideological weakness of even those writers in Germany dissatisfied with fascism. Therefore, even their creativity, far from life, in itself in no way forbidden in terms of subject matter, does not rise to the height of true works of art, real poetry. Modern German literature bears the imprint of a general, deeply rooted spiritual and moral poisoning.

Henrik Ibsen once formulated his own problems in the following quatrain:

To live is – to war with trolls
in the holds of the heart and mind
To write is to sit in judgement
on oneself. [1]

In this beautiful and deep formulation, both parts are important for poetry: both the fight against dark forces and the judgment of the poet’s personality.

Even the smartest compromise is pointless in the ideological struggle: Ibsen showed this in the image of Peer Gynt. An attempt to evade clear decisions and conclusions turns his hero from a purposeful and socially full-fledged person into a half-human, into a troll, into a spineless creature, which, as shown in one beautiful scene of the drama, like an onion, consists of easily detachable shells, but does not have a solid core.

Even before Hitler, such spinelessness embraced a significant part of the German intelligentsia as a result of its Peer-Gyntian compromise with reactionary forces, with an increasingly widespread reactionary ideology. Therefore, even subjectively honest, desperate and looking for ways, people were at the mercy of demagoguery, deception, wearing the guise of a myth. They lack ideological stamina precisely because they abandoned or shied away from fighting the dark forces too early. Therefore, they cannot, either as people or as writers, create judgment on themselves in their works.

This idea of judgment must be understood very broadly and deeply in order to come to the sources of true poetry. More than a hundred years ago, Goethe and Hegel in poetic and philosophical form in Faust and in the Phenomenology of Spirit showed how closely human personality and genus are connected. Goethe and Hegel, realizing the age-old practice of poetry, showed that in the microcosm of individual fate, if correctly understood, the macrocosm of the historical fate of a people is contained in a symbolically brief form. This inseparable unity of the life of the individual and the clan, the fate of the individual and the fate of the people is the stoker of true poetry.

And therefore, love for the truth, in the highest sense of the word, for the truthful disclosure of the most important issues of life, expressed in the relation between the individual and society, the individual and the nation, is a necessary subjective prerequisite, the basis of true poetry.

Write the truth” – this was the meaning of the lessons taught by Gorky to Soviet writers. And it is on this principle that Soviet literature is based.

Write lies” – this is Goebbels’, Hitler’s and Rosenberg’s order to the German writers. If Hitler’s book Mein Kampf is preserved in any form as a document of our era, it will be only as a shameless call to the most systematic lies and deceit that literature has ever known. As long as this “spirit” dominates German life, there can be no poetry, no literature, no thought in Germany. Granted, we saw that not all writers living in Germany are supporters of Hitler, but the fascist terror broke their backs: the poison of reactionary propaganda penetrated into their ideology, into their feelings and their minds. Therefore poetry was expelled from Germany.

Let’s take a very illustrative example. Before Hitler’s seizure of power, one of the promising writers of the younger generation was Hans Fallada. In the most successful parts of his novel Little Man, What Now? there was valid poetry of truth. During Hitler’s times, he wrote some completely bad works. In some of those books, where he obviously gathered all his strength (for example The Wolf Among Wolves), in some details the still old poetic power of understanding reality is visible. But due to the author’s desire to smooth out the contradictions in the topic, these books are spoiled by an unpleasant, sometimes corny, sometimes foolishly comic, childish play on serious conflicts, the unctuousness of a deceitful idyll.

This is, of course, not only due to censorship: the first of these novels takes place during an inflationary period, and the Hitlerite authorities would not have objected to a sharper criticism of the Weimar times. But if Fallada now showed at least only the same spontaneous, but subjectively sincere anti-capitalism, thanks to which his first books were imbued with truthfulness, his novel would become unacceptable for Nazi Germany. Fascism demagogically used the contradictions between wealth and poverty, the despair of the poor caused by the hopelessness of their situation. But the fascist government demands a literature that would nevertheless convince the poor that they are brothers of the rich, that the contradictions between them will be destroyed by National Socialism, that the poor man, as such, takes his place, and if he is honest and modest, then he is better than a rich man. Inwardly yielding to this false propaganda, Fallada expels true poetry from his works and, with all his talent for good detail, is generally degraded to the level of entertaining fiction, having abandoned the social and national vocation of poetry.

The fascist distortion of truth – both about the present and the past – steadily leads to the destruction of poetry. For a truly poetic and truly historical understanding of life correspond and ultimately coincide with each other. True poetry is always individual, both in design and in form, but it always simultaneously reflects some moment, a stage of national destiny. Such a task can be accomplished only with a real, incorruptible love for the truth, with a real respect for reason, with a deep hatred of the dark forces that threaten humanity. If all this is not there, the writer is able to create either only something finely individual, or an abstraction, a common place that does not say anything. There is no need to prove at length that the fascist myth is the most empty, saying nothing, the most deceitful commonplace ever in human history. Literature that aims to gloss over real life conflicts, that at best timidly and cowardly passes by these conflicts and ignores the problems of people’s fate, cannot contain poetry or poetic truth.

True poetry is an instrument of self-study, self-criticism of the people; it raises the people to a self-consciousness based on truth. Fascism destroys these spiritual and mental, moral and historical foundations of poetry (as it, in parallel, destroys science). Poetry was expelled from Germany along with a love of light and truth, conscience and honor.

This expulsion was also the physical expulsion of writers who did not capitulate to fascist barbarism. Such a great people as the Germans still produced in our days poets who follow the great traditions of the glorious past, protecting the conscience and self-consciousness of the people and striving to develop them. But precisely because they fought against dark forces, when these forces were just beginning to stupefy the morality and thinking of the Germans and had not yet turned into the dominant political factors, because they did not kneel before fascism when it came to power, but deepened and intensified the struggle against it (deepened, since many trends in German historical development were fully revealed only after the seizure of power by Hitler), because they saw with horror and told the world which way their people went, all these poets and their poetry were expelled from modern Germany.

And the German people, intoxicated by demagoguery, driven by the scourges of terror, with barbarously perverted instincts, wandered towards death.

Long before Hitler came to power, warning voices were heard every now and then. Here are just a few significant examples.

Heinrich Mann’s novel The Loyal Subject prophetically shows those traits of the German petty bourgeoisie that later led them to fascism. He depicts the decay of all moral instincts, which inside the country manifested itself in a lack of freedom, lack of democracy, the disappearance of civic feeling, and outside it was expressed in the form of boastful, chauvinistic, ruthless greed. Creepy before those in power, rude and shameless tyrant in relation to inferiors, a disgusting mixture of narrow-mindedness, lack of culture, petty cunning, and when it is safe, shameless cruelty – such is the “hero” of Heinrich Mann, illuminated by inexorable satire. In anticipation of the future development in his image, those elements of political and moral degradation of Germany were generalized, which later, developing, supplied fascism with human material.

Thomas Mann’s novel The Magic Mountain is a large modern epic-philosophical poem about the struggle between light and darkness, health and disease, life and death. Since the writer wants to depict this struggle in its ideologically pure, most abstract form, he chooses to a certain extent an abstract environment in which all the phenomena of the capitalist world appear in all their essence, not obscured by the petty events of bourgeois everyday life. This environment is the “Magic Mountain” – a fashionable tuberculosis sanatorium in Switzerland. People from all strata of bourgeois society meet here; all of them are in a state of forced inaction, artificial isolation from everyday worries. Thus, their social position does not essentially change, according to circumstances they give the opportunity to the individual, the best of them to ponder over the meaning and direction of their life. On this Wednesday, Thomas Mann introduces his hero – a decent, honest German youth from a wealthy family. Here, in contact with other patients, he gets acquainted with the spiritual trends of his time. The path of his inner development is the content of the novel. Thomas Mann shows what an almost magical attractive effect had the conditions of Germany at that time on the morally sensitive bourgeois: sickness, darkness, death. Dissatisfaction with one’s own, purely personal life, an existence aimed only at achieving material goals, a moral disgust for the rough, barbaric sides of this life and at the same time the inability to understand that they are generated by the lack of social freedom in Germany, made these people defenseless against dark forces.

These people are ready to accept fascist “socialism,” which is nothing more than a demagogic disguise of universal enslavement.

Thomas Mann understood even earlier this defenselessness of the German bourgeoisie in the face of the dark forces of reaction and showed it with tragic irony in his short stories.

A few years before Hitler’s seizure of power, Thomas Mann returns to this theme again and perfectly embodies it in the story Mario and the Magician. Let us point out here one particularly characteristic point. The story – set in modern Italy – introduces a charlatan hypnotist. During the session, he makes the audience dance beyond self-control. One “gentleman from Rome” resists him. The author fully sympathizes with this courageous and humane attempt to resist mass hypnosis. But at the same time, he prophetically sees that this resistance is doomed to failure in advance, since it is purely negative, meaningless and purposeless. The “gentleman from Rome” opposes hypnosis only to the abstract and empty: “I don’t want,” but such emptiness in no case can mobilize his strength. And he ultimately submits to hypnosis.

Outwardly, Thomas Mann’s story is completely apolitical. But it reflects the most important psychological reasons due to which broad strata of generally cultured and subjectively honest intelligentsia succumbed without resistance to demagogy, which is below their spiritual and moral level.

The theme of Farewell by Johannes Becher is the inner struggle against dark forces. Drawing on the bitter experience of Hitler’s rule, Becher explores the limits of the German intelligentsia’s ability to resist. Although the action of this novel, like the action of The Magic Mountain, is played out before the first world imperialist war, it is inspired by the modern anti-fascist struggle. It describes the young generation of the bourgeois intelligentsia on the eve of the First World War – those who became young men by the beginning of the war. Becher shows the life of the son of a Munich prosecutor from childhood to adolescence, upbringing, and family in pre-war Germany. all the horrors of oppression of instincts and perversion of morality both in the bourgeois family and at school, where the best aspirations of young men were suppressed by the methods of “carrot and stick,” where they were confused, spoiled, taught to be deceitful, hypocritical and rude, and where their life developed in such a way that they had no idea about the possibility of anything better. But at the same time – and this is something new that appeared in the anti-fascist militant literature after the seizure of power by Hitler – they also become acquainted with those liberating social ideas that can show a person the way from the deepest mud of moral decline to truly human life.

The series of novels by Arnold Zweig The Great War of the White Men depicts the difficulties experienced by an entire generation when trying to understand the events of the first world imperialist war. And with this Zweig gives a historical continuation of the novels we have considered. Before us passes a whole line of young people, raised by Wilhelm’s Germany, caught up by a wave of military enthusiasm, at the front or in the rear on their own fate, who have experienced that the war, as Clausewitz says, is a continuation of politics by other means. They find in the army all the negative aspects of Wilhelm’s Germany: lack of freedom, irresponsibility, servility with the higher and rudeness with the lower, venality, shameless abuse of the privileges of the nobility and the big bourgeoisie, etc., and all this in a concentrated, especially disgusting, repulsive form. Thus, each of them in his own way curbs his former enthusiasm and disappointment grows. It is in this disappointment that the ideological brakes on human development created by bourgeois society are especially clearly visible. Disappointment appears quickly, but a positive way out is hard to find. Many die in different ways – from suicide to moral decay – and only a few, after long wanderings, find the way to freedom, to the struggle for the emancipation of the German people.

And here we are already seeing something new that has appeared in anti-fascist literature since the time of Hitler’s coming to power. It is only necessary to compare The Case of Sergeant Grischa (1928) with Education Before Verdun (1935). The political change affected Zweig in the sense of strengthening and radicalizing his democratic convictions. In artistic terms, this was expressed in much sharper criticism and self-criticism in relation to the type of person related to himself. Drawing the best representatives of the German intelligentsia of the 20th century, he reveals their stunning political and social ignorance and naivety (for all their high general culture), their inclination, without ironing, to approve of the “facts” of political and social life (that is, the actions and atrocities of the rulers), even justify them with pseudo-profound, moral and metaphysical theories.

Considering the books of Becher and Zweig from the point of view of the political and ideological development of the anti-fascist struggle, the historical depiction of the prehistory of the deepest humiliation of Germany, one can see in both broad and specific variations the witty motive of the “gentleman from Rome” from the story of Thomas Mann. Both writers specifically talked about how powerless is a purely negative protest, in which an effective, workable positive ideal is not opposed to evil. The resistance to reactionary militarism in the heroes of Becher and Zweig is rich in nuances, saturated with valuable spiritual and moral content. Due to the fact that it does not bear a clear political, social, democratic and socialist imprint, it, like an unfounded “I don’t want it” from the “gentleman from Rome,” most often turns into an empty, powerless denial.

We have given here only a few particularly typical works. It is not our task to enumerate the most valuable works of anti-fascist literature, or an aesthetic assessment of the books mentioned here. The point is in the historical and social assessment of important literary phenomena, in the characterization of the lines of ideological development of protest against Hitler’s barbarism on the part of the best Germans, in whom the conscience of the German people is still alive.

In literary works written after the seizure of power by Hitler, even if they are thematically related to the previous period, two important new features appear. First, and we have already pointed out to this, resistance to evil and darkness is characterized in them not only from a human, but also from a political and social point of view. And due to the fact that this resistance, which seemed meaningful in terms of abstract ideas, in practice revealed its inconsistency, in this literature there is a serious and deep criticism of the pre-fascist struggle against reaction, harsh self-criticism of the best part of the anti-fascist intelligentsia, historical criticism of the development of Germany.

Secondly, the search for a way out is beginning to be concretized. Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain could still be written in terms of pure ideology; the struggle between light and darkness, between progress and reaction, could be played out there in the empyrean of abstract ideas. With this method, Thomas Mann managed to achieve the exceptional power of his work, deeply thought out justice in the depiction and assessment of the struggling ideological tendencies personified in the images of Naphtha and Settembrini.

Thomas Mann shows, on the one hand, the spiritual and moral temptation that lies in the demagogic-reactionary, degenerated, Romantic anti-capitalism, which in some ways correctly criticizes modern social life. This explains how and why even mentally and morally high-standing people could have been infected with this ideology.

On the other hand, this description is supplemented by the same subtle and fair disclosure of modern bourgeois-democratic ideology, explaining why it does not have the strength to captivate the best people of the era as revolutionary democracy did in its time.

In the novels of the post-Hitler period, we see other sides of democratic and social resistance, we see an honest but futile search, a groping for the right way out in conditions that are not very favorable for the development of a truly democratic ideology. Therefore, the positive that Becher and Zweig portray here is of great poetic and historical value. Especially because they, again historically and poetically correctly, show how slowly and contradictorily, moving forward and again retreating, the striving for freedom penetrated into the best part of the German intelligentsia.

This militant justice is the poetry of historical truth. Outstanding works of modern German progressive literature provide a broad and correct criticism of the prehistory of the modern German tragedy, they show why the once cultured people are now heading into the abyss with a distorted face and eyes staring in madness.

Only the poetry of historical truth (and this is the difference between true poetry and narrowly topical literature, the difference between a real, deep ideological struggle against reaction from vulgar anti-fascism) shows that fascism is not an accident, not an accidental misfortune that somehow befell the German people, but certainly also not a fatal inevitability from which there was no escape. Fascism is the result of decades of struggle between historical, political, spiritual and moral tendencies; it is an outbreak of disease as a result of a long and slowly preparing ideological poisoning of the German people, which they resisted for a long time, but too slowly and weakly. By painting this process of degeneration, German writers are committing an act of judgment not only over themselves, but also over their people. Therefore, real anti-fascism in the broad and deep sense is a fight against dark forces; therefore, its poetry is the history of the national destiny, the destiny of the German people.

It has already been noted that the description of historical events occupies an extremely large place in German anti-fascist literature. It follows from what has been said that this is not an accident or weakness, not a deviation from the problems of our time or even today, but, on the contrary, the struggle against reactionary forces on a broad front, their ideological persecution even in the most distant corners.

Therefore, it is by no means accidental that both of the most outstanding historical novels of anti-fascist literature are truly militant books, in a deep and real sense an ideological weapon against fascism.

Henry IV by Heinrich Mann is thematically detached from the German past. In reality, this book portrays events that are a striking, historically correct political contrast to the development of Germany. Friedrich Engels wrote at one time that the development of France from the Middle Ages to modern times is the exact opposite of the development of Germany. Indeed, a decisive struggle for the creation of a modern bourgeois society and its state was brought to an end there, while here, due to the backwardness and belatedness of historical development, “German squalor” (deutsche Misere) arose – in essence, it has not yet been overcome. Historically illuminating an important period in the emergence of the French nation, Heinrich Mann thereby politically illuminates the future path of his homeland, the path it must take, to return to the environment of free cultured peoples. This political and social contrast, tactfully unspoken in the novel, serves as the basis for the creation of a positive hero: a friend of Montaigne, the first political leader of the modern era, a fighter against medieval darkness and barbarism.

Lotta in Weimar by Thomas Mann is a topical German book in a more direct sense. Politically and socially, “German squalor” may have reached its climax in the days when classical poetry and philosophy flourished in Germany. But ideologically reflecting the preparation and consequences of the Great French Revolution and, first of all, the revolution itself, a spiritual upsurge arose in Germany, which overcame this squalor – of course, only partially, only in the sphere of ideology, and not in practical life – and for half a century turned Germany into the spiritual center of European humanism.

Therefore, the image of Goethe is a necessary and natural contrast to the contemporary spiritual and moral humiliation of Germany. This is the image of a genius person who, with iron energy and at the same time subtle tact, overcame the dark forces. Of course, he couldn’t just drive them out. But he knew how to find and make all the elements of a person’s spiritual life shine with a bright light, in which there was at least something valuable. Goethe’s “reconciliation with reality” is the deepest realism, the understanding that the historical process is many-sided and broader than the desires of the wisest man, and at the same time it is hatred for everything petty and low, for the threatening danger of darkness, which daily and hourly can rise from the “German squalor” and halt progress.

Goethe in Thomas Mann also sometimes succumbs to the influence of “German squalor.” Thomas Mann does not write legends, but draws from the facts of reality the poetry of historical truth. A simple description of Goethe’s life and thinking is a harsh and just trial of modern Germany. These are the scales on which the history and modernity of Germany are weighed, found to be incomplete and therefore discarded.

Unsurprisingly, all this literature has been expelled from modern Germany. From the fascist burning of books in 1933 to the brutal destruction of Yasnaya Polyana, there is a direct and inevitable path.

In a beautiful biblical legend, Abraham asks Jehovah to forgive the sinners of Sodom and Gomorrah if there are at least two righteous people there, even if there is at least one. However, the real story is not a religious legend; it is, as Schiller says, the world’s judgment seat and, moreover, stern and implacable, without condescension.

Only the complete destruction of Hitlerism will open the way for Germany to the future. The German people still need bloody lessons in order to awaken from the political and social madness that grips them, from social, spiritual and moral obscuration.

When the dark years of Hitlerism are a thing of the past, when the process of awakening, healing, and mastering themselves begins for the German people, they will find for themselves a starting point in poetry expelled from Germany in hard times.


Notes

1.This is the most standardized English translation of Ibsen’s lines which Lukacs in Russian gives as Жизнь - это сердца и ума / Борьба упорная с тьмою, / А творчество - строгий акт суда, / Свершаемый над собою.