THE ARTIST AS CITIZEN: ON GEORG LUKACS’ VIEW OF

THOMAS MANN
BY JOHN NEUBAUER
THEmotto of the late Georg Lukics’ A’sthetik,l ‘Sie wissen es nicht, aber sie
tun es’, a quotation from Marx, bears strange resemblance to the thesis of
T. S. Eliot’s Tradition and the Individual Talent. Both suggest that artists may
not be aware of what they artistically do, that they represent a medium
through which transindividual forces become manifest. Of course here the
analogy ends: Eliot’s ‘tradition’ is in no way comparable to the social,
economic, and historical forces which, according to Lukics, are shaping art.
Still, Lukics’ motto ambiguously incorporates idealistic, as well as material-
istic, strains, and one notes with curiosity that the very man who wrote a
virulent indictment of irrationalism and its rise in Germany: should regard
the distinction between artistic intuition and cognitive thinking as the inner-
most principle of aesthetics.
Separating the artistic from the empirical self, Lukks can shield from
dogmatist Marxist criticism those great novelistic achievements of the nine-
teenth century which were written by authors that adhered to reactionary
political views. In the works of Walter Scott-as well as Balzac, Tolstoy,
and others- the artist speaks the truth malgre‘ h i : ‘Scott ranks among those
great writers whose depth is manifest mainly in their work, a depth which
they often do not understand themselvcs, because it has sprung from a truly
realistic mastery of their material in conflict with their personal views and
prej~dices.’~
I
This gencral view informs Lukics’ approach to Thomas Mann. He recog-
nizes the strong conservative note in the politics of the young Thomas Mann,
but claims that the outstanding artistic works of that period-Buddenbrooks,
Tonio Krcger, or Death in Venice-represent a more progressive, and there-
fore more accurate, view of the world than the non-fictional utterances of
these years. Thus Luklcs points out that the fleeting reference to Schopcn-
hauer in Buddenbrooks is not an homage to his phil~sophy,~ but a critical
description of it, and he claims that Death id Vetzice is an ‘anticipatory
criticism’ of Mann’s own subsequent war writings (53). In terms of this
distinction between political views and underlying deeper aesthetic beliefs
Lukics’ ‘In Search of Bourgcois Man’ sets out ‘to intcrpret Mann the thinker
and political man starting from his writing and not, as is customary, the
other way round’ (18).
In LukLcs’ view, the trajectory of Mann’s development is the inversion
of Goethc’s path. As Goethe aged he became gradually more isolated and
alienated from the historical and social milieu around him, while Mann
 T H E ARTIST A S C I T I Z E N : O N L U K ~ C S ’V I E W O F M A N N 203

moved in the opposite direction. The central experience of his maturity

was the crisis in the world which led to a personal crisis and an eventual
break with his own youthful outlook. ‘His old age was taken up with a
ceaseless publicist struggle against fascism’ (49). In the end, ‘Mann’s develop-
ment leads beyond democracy to an acknowledgement of the inevitability
of socialism’ (57).5
I1
I do not wish to raise here the scnsitive and complex question about
Mann’s commitment to socialism, partly because I believe it eludes categori-
cal answers. In the absence of documentation it is difficult to know on which
pronouncements Lukics bases his assertion that Mann came to believe in the
inevitability of socialism,6 though in general terms Lukics’ thesis about
Mann’s gradual move to the left seems unassailable. Yet according to Lukics’
own artistic credo we still have to ask what this shift in public attitudes and
political sympathies meant for thc fictional works. Does it mean, as Lukics
implies, that the dissociation of political and artistic sensibilities during
Mann’s early career gradually disappeared towards the end of his life? More
concretely, do the last works, especially Doktor Fuustus, give expression to a
belief in the inevitability of socialism?
In marked contrast to his unequivocal assertions about Mann’s political
convictions, Lukics is quite hesitant and ambiguous when it conies to a
demonstration that these attitudes arc cmbodied in Doktor Faustus. One gets
the distinct impression that Lukics’ gcntlc criticism of Mann for not pro-
viding a fictional perspective 011 socialism-as well as his half-hearted
attempts to show that such a perspective is nevertheless implied-is merely
a gesture to preempt more doctrinaire Marxist criticism. Lukics admits that
Mann’s socialist perspective is ‘abstract’, that it says ‘little or nothing about
the nature of socialism’ and ‘leaves undiscusscd the problems of transition
from present-day society to a future one’ (105).But this criticism is countered
by Lukics himself with a threefold defense which is based on (I) the unique
aspects of German history (2)’the natureof Mann’s artistic talent, and (3) the
authority and example of Shakespeare.
German history is characterized by a traditional cleavage between the
public and the private realms. As Lukics puts it, the social, historical, and
economic forces gradually disappear in the ‘power-protected inwardness’
(62)7of German intellectual and artistic history, and the works of the nine-
teenth-century German artists reflect merely the ‘small world’, the anxiety
and uncertainty of individual minds and lives. Instead of the panoramic
canvases of a Tolstoy or a Balzac, German readers were nurtured on the
claustrophobic world of a Wilhelm Raabe. This tradition is evident in
Mann’s Doktor Fuustus, where the new Faust ‘is a Faust of the study’ (61).
Lukics admits that Doktor Faitstus is dominated by a ‘Raabe-like’ atmosphere
204 THE A R T I S T A S C I T I Z E N : O N L U K h C S ’ V I E W OF M A N N
~

which is characterized ‘by the absence of any attempt, even a fruitless one,
at a breakthrough to life’ (61), and yet he simultaneously attempts to show
that Maim consistently departs from this small world to reveal the undcr-
lying encompassing one. Thus, as Lukics sees it, the multiple levels of time
in Doktor Fuiistirs emphasize the truth that though Adrian Lcverkiihn has
no external ties with the political currents of his day, his art and life is an
objective reflection of the historical situation. Hence Mann’s concern with
time is not identical with what Lukics unkindly characterizes as the ‘empty,
artificial, hothouse’ experiments of the modernists (78).
Lukics’ second argument, that Mann’s art is completely lacking in utopian
elements, is equally important. Modern German history is characterized by
the absence of serious revolutionary situations created by great middle-class
intellectual ferments : Lukics believes that the actual revolutionary struggle
of workers in Germany falls beyond the horizon of the bourgeoisie. Since
Thomas Mann could portray only the world of his experience, which was
limited to the middle-class, he could express only the loiieliness of iniddle-
class characters. The ‘abstract perspective’ in Mann’s works is then due both
to the perspectivelessness of his class and thc nature of his artistic talent.
The final argument establishes an analogy between the ending of Doktor
Fmrrttrs and the closing scenes of Shakespeare’s dramas. Shakespeare por-
trayed individual tragedies in worlds ‘out ofjoint’, without fully illuminating
the better worlds that emerge at the end of his plays. In Hamlet or King Leur
‘the light of a new world gleams in the tragic darkness at the end’, but we
have no right to demand of Shakespeare ‘to provide an accurate social
description of this new world’ (96). Lukics sees a similar light in the closing
words of Adrian Leverkiihn :
. . . statt klus zu sorgen, was vonnoten auf Erden, damit cs dort besser werde,
und bcsonncn dam zu tun, daB unter den Menschen solche Ordnung sich
herstelle, die dem schonen Werk wieder Lebensgrund und ein redlich Hinein-
passen bereiten, Iaufi wohl der Mensch hinter die Schul und bricht aus in
hollische Trunkenheit: so gibt er sein See1 daran und kommt auf dcn Schind-
wasma
According to Lukics these words ‘give clear expression to what is new: the
transformation of the real, the economic and cocial, basis of life as the first
step towards healing of mind and culture, thought and art. Thomas Mann’s
tragic hero has here found the way which leads to Marx’ (97).

I11
Lukics’ reading of Leverkuhn’s testament is open to serious questions.
For the way to Marx can be indicated in the archaic language of Luther
only if ‘progression’ is also ‘regression’,if the new is ironically old and tainted
with barbarism, if the call of Marx recalls the voice of Ignatius of Loyola
 T H E A R T I S T A S C I T I Z E N : O N L U K ~ C S ’V I E W O F M A N N 20s

(as, indeed, the two voices are fused in Naphta of the Magic Mountain, a
figure that was partly modelled after L u k i ~ s )The
. ~ failure to appreciate the
uniaue lineuistic
0
ambiance of Adrian’s testament can onlv be described as a
I

cridcal short-circuit due to ideological bias. While Luklcs is generally not

insensitive to aesthetic criteria, in this case the crucial misinterpretation is a
logical result of his intent to prove that the socialist perspective is embodied,
however faintly, in Doktor Futlstirs. The failure of the clinching argument is,
in fact, foreshadowed in the passages leading up to it.
Take for instance Luklcs’ argument that Thomas Mann provides an
objective perspective on Leverkuhn by introducing the narrator Zeitblom.
Of course Luklcs is not so naive as to claim that Zeitblom’s own perspective
is more objective than Leverkuhn’s. He admits that ‘Serenus, much more
than his friend . . . is a Raabe figure’ (84). Though Zeitblom has more than
average intelligence, he has no Archimedean reference point from which
he could resist the rise of the Nazis. Because of his defencelessness he cannot
serve as objective reference point himself. But, as Lukics sees it, not so much
Zeitblom’s analysis and narration, ‘as Zeitblom’s actual life’ brings out the
inner tie between Adrian and his age (84).
By ‘life’ Lukics presumably mcans the historical and political events that
take place during the writing of Zeitblom’s account-for Zeitblom’s own
life is quite uneventful. But, as all isolated historical facts, these events in
history are of little significance without an interpretive framework. As
Luklcs well recognizes, Zeitblom cannot provide us with such an inter-
pretation, least of all with an objective one. And yet, Lukics would like to
say that somehow the small world of Leverkuhn is placed into the context
of the big one through the narrator, though the narrator himself is more
confined to his study than the subject of his narration. It is difficult to see
how. The relations and associations that Zeitblom makes-whether they
concern his own pious humanistic tradition or the relationship between
Adrian’s aestheticism and the rising social barbarism-are in no way binding
or ‘objective’: they represent merely another point of view within the fabric
of the novel.
Luklcs disregards the artistic context of Doktor Faustus by sharpening the
novelistic themes into ideological concepts. In the final analysis this amounts
to nothing less than a negation of the critical principle which Luklcs places
at the head of his Asthetik-a principle which he finds valid for the young
Thomas Mann. Luklcs perceives the incongruity of political expression and
artistic sensibility in the early years of Mann’s career (where art appears
more ‘progressive’ than the voice of the citizen), while he denies that a
similar but inverted cleavage exists also in Mann’s final years. Lukics believes
that Doktor Faustus expresses a political and historical view that coincides
with certain public utterances of the old Mann.
206 THE A R T I S T A S C I T I Z E N : O N L U K ~ C S ’V I E W O F M A N N

Yet, I would like to argue, the motto of Lukics’ Asthetik holds better than
Lukics himself would care to admit : the shifts in Mann’s political convictions
and affiliations stand in contrast to the consistent political ambiguity of his
fiction. As Thomas Mann clearly recognized, the conservative stance became
a political impossibility in post-World War I Germany; but, as Leverkuhn’s
music and Doktor Fuusttrs itself testify, it persisted as an aesthetic possibility
within his novels to the end of his life.
Whatever one’s feelings about the moral and political ambivalence of
Mann’s fiction, whatever troubled conscience i la Tonio Kroger he himself
might have had about the ethical neutrality of his art (and the sheer volume
of his speeches and essays is a proof of his uneasiness), he was more at home
and infinitely more effective in the aesthetic confrontation of ideas than in
their unequivocal affirmation. While one admires the courage and sincerity
of Mann’s political stand, one cannot but sense in it a certain sanctimonious
stiffness which he himself so frequently parodied in his fiction. The split
between the aesthetic and the ethical stance was surely as irksome and
burdensome to Thomas Mann as a citizen, as it was fruitful for his artistic
creations. To put it in different terms, the alleged socialist perspective might
have been a political hope for a world where the public and the private,
the artistic and the moral dimensions werc no longer separated; but the
problematic notion of a ‘breakthrough’ in Doktor Futrsttrs shows that within
the context of his fiction Mann well realized the dangers of such a reintegra-
tion. To return the artist into the fold of the community was, after all, an
aim common to Stalin’s Russia and Hider’s Germany.lo Hence one may
argue that the ‘abstractness’ of Mann’s perspective on socialism was by no
means due to lack of experience and knowledge, but to a reluctance to give
direct artistic embodiment to political commitments.

IV
Ich sagte, gut werde es erst stehen um Deutschland, und dieses werde sich
selbst gefunden haben, wenn Karl Marx den Friedrich Holderlin gelesen
haben werde-, eine Uegegnung, die ubrigens im Begriffe sei, sich zu voll-
ziehen. Ich vergaI3, hinzuzufugen, daB cine cinseitige Kenntnisnahme un-
fruchtbar bleiben miiBte.”
Lukics was fond of quoting this self-quotation by Mann (43 and 96) and he
believed that Adrian s last words, which describe ‘the transformation of the
real, the economic and social, basis of life as the first step towards the healing
of mind and culture, thought and art’ (97), delineate just such a road to
Marx. But, quite apart from Adrian’s language, one might object to Lukics’
interpretation on the grounds that Adrian nowhere regards the socio-
economic factors as the ‘real basis’ of life.’2 To misconstrue his words to
 T H E A R T I S T A S C I T I Z E N : O N L U K ~ C S ’V I E W O F M A N N 207

mean that the minds will be healed once the bellies are filled (to put it bluntly)
is both a misunderstanding of what was wrong with the Nazis, who did
fill the bellies, and a misinterpretation of Mann that is comparable to Marx’s
turning Hegel ‘upside down’.
Though Mann’s recipe to cure the ills of Germany included the reading
of Marx, there is little evidence that he himself did so, and, if, the impact
was negligible: both in the fictional and non-fictional writings of Mann
history remains primarily the history of pure- and not of class-consciousness.
The ‘real basis’ of life, inasmuch as it lies beyond individual minds, is the
Zeitgeist and tradition-not the modes of production. From the Budden-
brooks-whose destiny is at least as much a function of their self-conscious-
ness as it is dependent on social and economic factors-down to Felix Krull,
whose mind is in total control of his body, Thomas Mann’s characters are
shaped by genetic, constitutional, and mental forces rather than by the socio-
economic environment. At times-as in the case of the ‘flatland’ home of
Hanno Buddenbrook and Hans Castorp-the world contributes nothing to
their ‘Bildung’, at times-as with Felix Krull and Joseph-merely what they
internally anticipated, and sometimes-as with Castorp on the Magic
Mountain and Leverkuhn-a worn-out intellectual and artistic tradition. In
the portrayal of his characters Thomas Mann remains clearly in the idealist-
romantic tradition of German letters, with hardly a trace of dialectical
materialism or any other philosophy that sees man primarily as a product
of his socio-economic environment. This remains true even if one recognizes
that Mann replaced the metaphysics of the romantics with a vaguely defined
humanism, and repeatedly repudiated the idealist-romantic heritage under
the pressure of political developments during his lifetime.13
This is the point where, in spite of Lukics’ failure to fully appreciate
Mann’s art, the critic and the artist meet: in their ill-concealed admiration
for the idealist-romantic tradition. Though it was Lukics’ lifelong ambition
to replace Hegelian aesthetics with a philosophy in the Marxist-Leninist
tradition, time and again he was justly attacked from the radical left for
attributing to individual consciousness and the ‘superstructure’ a much too
important role in history. Lukics would no doubt protest, but there are
reasons to agree with Georg Lichtheim that ‘the centrality of art in the
work of Georg Lukics testifies to a commitment which places him within
the tradition of German idealism’.l4
Indeed, the tension between aesthetic sensibility and political action was
all too evident not only in Lukics’ preoccupation with Mann (always a
suspect infatuation in the eyes of doctrinaire Marxists), but, alas, even more
dramatically, in Lukics’ rather unglorious efforts to accommodate himself
to the political systems that harboured him. In the end, Lukics, no less than
Mann, will prove to be inadequate to those radical minds on the left who
20% T H E A R T I S T A S C I T I Z E N : O N L U K ~ C S ’V I E W OF M A N N

demand that the notion of aesthetic integrity be surrendered, that aesthetic

contemplation yield to political action, that the individualism of the ‘small
world’ disappear in the ‘revolt of the masses’.

NOTES
Lukics, asthefik (vols. I I and 12 in Werke) (Neuwied: Luchterhand, 1963).
Die Zerstorutig der Vertiirtff(vol. 9 in Werke) (Neuwied: Luchterhand, 1962).
3 Lukics, T h e Historical h’ouel, trans. Hannah and Stanley Mitchell (Boston: Beacon Press, 1963). p. 31,
+ Lukbcs, Essays on Thotnas Manrr, trans. Stanley Mitchell (New York: Grosset, INS), p. 17. This

volume contains Lukbcs’ three most important essays on Mann: ‘In Search of Bourgeois Man’ (1948).
‘The Tragedy of Modem Art’ (1948), and ‘The Playful Style’ (1955). All further references to this book
will be made in the body of my text.
5 In ‘The Playful Style’ Lukics establishes several criteria by which Mann surpasses Joyce and the
‘Modernists’ and comes to the conclusion that ‘the modernists write with no sort of perspective on the
future of mankind. Thomas Mann has a perspective: that socialism is unavoidable if (which he does not
believe) the human race is not to be swallowed up in barbarism’ (105).
6 Mann’s explicit commitments to socialism stem almost exclusively from the time of the Weimar
Republic and the iinniediately following years. Inasmuch as they represent adherence to any political
line, they are closest to social democracy. But these public statements-which include ‘Bekenntnis Zuni
Sozialisnius’ [Gcsatnmelte Werke (GW), Frankfurt: Fischer, 1960, XII, 678-841 and ‘Kultur und Sozial-
ismus’ (GW XJI, 6 3 ~ 4 9 ) a r eactually formulated in very broad terms, identifying socialism with
humanism and democracy.
7 The phrase ‘power-protected inwardness’ (machtgeschutze Innerlichkeit) appears in Mann’s ‘Leiden
und GroBe Richard Wagners’ (1933): G W IX, 419. Lukics adopted the phrase and used it throughout
his writings on Mann.
G W VI, 662.
9 SeeMann’slettertoMaxRychner of24December, 1947. PrintedinNerceRundschau,74(1963), p. 233.
10 The ambiguous meaning of a ‘breakthrough‘ in Doktor Fairstus apparently eluded Lukbcs. He writes
that Leverkuhn is characterized ‘by the absence of any attempt, even a fruitless one, at a breakthrough
to life’ (61)-and mentions as an example the Marie Godeau episode only.
11 First said, without the final sentence, in ‘Goethe und Tolstoi’ (1921): G W IX, 170; fully stated in
‘Kultur und Sozialismus’ (1928): G W XII, 649.
12 In a similar way, Adrian’s last words do not assert that the ‘real basis’ of life is to be ‘transformed’.
13 Mann contended that the anti-idealism of Ma=, Nietzsche, Ibsen and others was rooted in a doep
understanding of and sympathy with idealism (GW XII, 697). As much of Mann’s criticism, this seems
to be based largely on self-observation.
1‘ Georg Lichtheim, Georg Lukdcs (New York: Viking, 1970). p. 140.

ART AS NECESSITY: LOTHAR SCHREYER’S CONCEPT

OF ART IN DER STURM

BY M. S . JONES

IN contrast with the two other major pcriodicals of the movement, Die
Aktion and Die Weissen Bliitter, Herwartli Walden’s Der Sturrn enshrines the
ideal of art in German Expressionism. Within Der Sturrn, the ideal finds its
most extreme expression in the theory of Lothar Schreyer. Although em-
phatically anti-rational, his concept of art is developed through complex
argument based on three wide-ranging principles fundamental to human
existence. Man is in a state of ‘Leiden’, and his only escape is through ‘Liebe’