Benjamin and Lukács.

Historical Notes on the Relationship between Their Political and

Aesthetic Theories
Author(s): Bernd Witte
Source: New German Critique , Spring, 1975, No. 5 (Spring, 1975), pp. 3-26
Published by: Duke University Press

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 Benjamin andLukacs. Historical Notes
on the Relationship Between Their
Political and Aesthetic Theories

by Bernd Witte
The supremacy of the category of totality is the
bearer of the revolutionary principle in science.
Lukacs, Rosa Luxemburg as a Marxist (1921)

Greatness, in its historical materialistic mean-

ing, is determined by the extent to which the
"indifference" of the individual becomes
"creative" through responsibility.
Benjamin, Critique of Lenin,
Letters to Maxim Gorki (1926)

Only with the recent politicization of West German society did scholars of
German literature abandon their undifferentiated notion of a single Marxist
aesthetic and, in an analysis of the Brecht-Lukics debate, 1 begin to confron
the historical controversies surrounding the theory of socialist realis
Although virtually ignored until the present, the similarly intense disp
between Benjamin and Lukacs is as important for a materialist theory
literature as is this now classical Brecht-Lukics exchange. Martin Walser
correctly stated that Benjamin and Lukacs delineate "in their unresolv
opposition the most advanced positions yet developed" in the sphere o
materialist aesthetics. 2 It was perhaps all the easier to forget the coordinate
of these positions, in that even while Benjamin has been promoted repeatedly
in the name of Marxism - particularly in recent years--his concrete historic

1. The most important stages in this process of reception are: Werner Mittenzwei, "D
Brecht-Lukics Debatte," Sinn und Form 19 (1967), 235ff. and reprinted in Das Argumen
(1968), 12-32; Helga Gallas, Marxistische Literaturtheorie (Neuwied and Berlin, 1971
Lothar Baier, "Streit um den schwarzen Kasten. Zur sogenannten Brecht-Lukics Deba
Text und Kritik, Sonderband Bertolt Brecht I (Munich, 1971), 37-44. Baier denies any cur
significance of this debate.
2. Martin Walser, Wie und wovon handelt Literatur (Frankfurt am Main, 1973), p. 1

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4 NEW GERMAN CRITIQUE

position with respect to Marxism's most influential representative in aesthetic

theory has never been investigated.3
This neglect is connected in part to the fact that Benjamin and Lukacs
seldom expressed direct opposition to each other's position and, though
acquainted, remained distant in their personal relationship. As far as can be
determined from the rather meager biographical sources available, a meeting
was arranged through their common friend Ernst Bloch. From Vienna in
June, 1921 Benjamin wrote Georg Scholem (then studying at Munich) that he
had sought out Lukics in his Viennese hideout: "Bloch can't visit his friend
[Lukics] here, I told him that. He can't be received until the fall. So I will
meet Bloch in Munich."4 It is clear from this deliberately cryptic
communication that Benjamin acted as middleman between Bloch and
Lukics in Vienna, where Lukacs was living underground as one of the leading
members of the Hungarian Exile Communist Party, having served as
Commissar of Education in Bela Kun's Soviet Republic. But this first meeting
does not seem to have led to a closer personal relationship, presumably in
part because Benjamin had not come into literary prominence comparable to
that author, seven years his senior, who wrote the collection of essays The Soul
and the Forms (Die Seele und die Formen) and the Theory of the Novel
(Theorie des Romans).
Two years later, when the Malik publishing house issued Lukics' political
essays under the title History and Class Consciousness (Geschichte und
Klassenbewusstsein), Benjamin was one of the first to recognize the
importance of the book and to point to it in his letters.s For him personally
the book became a decisive influence in his philosophical development toward
Marxism. Withdrawing from Berlin in the spring of 1924, he left for Capri to
begin writing The Origin of German Tragedy (Der Ursprung des deutschen
Trauerspiels), intended as a postdoctoral thesis. There he met the Latvian
Communist and assistant to Brecht, Asja Lacis, whose political views brought
him into closer contact with the problems of communism at that time. While
this relationship certainly meant the interruption of his "bourgeois rhythm of
life" and therefore of his literary projects, it also meant a "vital liberation and
an intensive insight into the relevance of a radical form of communism."6

3. Karl August Horst, "Literatur von links. Anmerkungen zu Walter Benjamin und George
(sic) Lukaics," Wort und Wahrheit 11 (1956), 519-526. At best, this pamphlet is interesting as a
document of the ideology of its author. It makes no contribution to the understanding of the
relationship of Brecht and Lukaics.
4. Walter Benjamin, Briefe, eds., G. Scholem and Th. W. Adorno (Frankfurt am Main,
1966), p. 263.
5. Even his acquaintance with the book seems to be due to Bloch. See letter to Scholem dated
June 13, 1924, Briefe, p. 350.
6. Ibid., p. 351.

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 BENJAMIN AND LUKACS 5

This experience was deepened on the theoretical level by a simultaneous

confrontation with Lukics' theses. In a letter dated September 16, 1924
Benjamin cautiously and apologetically tried to communicate to his friend
Scholem in Jerusalem the importance of the book for the formation of his own
political and literary position: "I probably wrote you that several factors
converged here: in addition to one of a private nature [Asja Lacis], there was
Lukics' book, which astounded me because Lukics proceeds from political
considerations to a theory of cognition and arrives at theses which at least
partially--although perhaps not so extensively as I first assumed--recall or
corroborate my own."7 Under an entry for May, 1925 in a list of completed
readings, Benjamin recorded, along with Thomas Mann's The Magic
Mountain and Valery's Eupalinos or the Architect, the final notation:
"History and Class Consciousness, an extraordinary collection of Lukics'
political writings."8
Five years later Benjamin reconfirmed publicly his original opinion of
History and Class Consciousness. In the May 17, 1929 issue of Die Literarische
Welt he introduced the work, under the rubric "books which have remained
alive," as "the most consistent philosophical work of Marxist literature."9
This praise of the book contains at the same time a critique of its author.
Meanwhile, criticized by Moscow for leftist deviation, LukAcs had withdrawn
his own work from the market and disavowed the theoretical principles
presented in it. That Benjamin raised the book to such prominence in spite of
this fact is already an indication of the opposition between him and the later
Lukcs, which may be one reason why no closer contact developed in the early
thirties, even though Benjamin enjoyed some notoriety in Berlin intellectual
circles and Lukdcs spent an extended time there as a member of the Union of
Proletarian-Revolutionary Writers. In 1933, when the National Socialists
drove both men out of Germany, the distance between them manifested itself
geographically. Benjamin fled to Paris, Lukics went into exile in Moscow.

II

The conception of political theory developed by Lukics in History and

Class Consciousness is based on volume one of Marx's Capital and is derived

7. Ibid., p. 355. The editors of the letters are responsible for the omission. This is especially
regretable since Benjamin writes about his position vis-a-vis communism both before and after
this point in the text and therefore probably discussed something similar in the part omitted.
8. Ibid., p. 381.
9. Now in Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, ed., H. Tiedemann-Bartels, 3 (Frankfurt am
Main, 1972), p. 171.

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 6 NEW GERMAN CRITIQUE

from an analysis of the fetish character of commodities, a phenomenon which

originates as the misunderstanding of the nature of the commodity. 10
According to Lukacs, all human activities and relationships in a capitalist
system are reduced to the mere function of exchanging commodities; or, in
the terminology which History and Class Consciousness first introduced into
philosophical language, they become reified. Such reification of social life
finds ideological expression in the "antinomies of bourgeois thinking," which
Lukics pointed out in science, philosophy and ethics. He analyzed the most
glaring examples of these as the antinomy between progressive rationalization
at the individual level and the irrationality of the social process as a whole.
The proletariat alone, according to Lukacs' analysis, is free of the general
false consciousness, for it experiences daily the social reality of the commodity
in a physical way by having to sell its labor power. This insight derived from
conditions determined by class proves to be the only one capable of
penetrating immediate and actual contradictions and resolving them through
political action. Therefore it is the class-conscious proletariat alone who is
qualified to take possession of the heritage of philosophy, a philosophy which
will only then become practical, i.e. revolutionary.
In the spirit of Rosa Luxemburg and with express reference to her, Lukics
conceived of the revolution as the teleological moment of the total historical
process unfolding dialectically out of the antinomies of capitalism. For him it
was an "objective historical necessity." In this model, developed entirely in
Hegelian categories, where the proletariat emerges as the embodiment of the
World Spirit reunited with itself, the party is restricted to the function of the
"bearer of class-consciousness of the proletariat,"11 thereby minimizing the
active role ascribed by Lenin to the party as the vanguard of the prole-
tariat. Instead, this model tacitly places the intellectual at the forefront
of social progress as the activator bringing workers to an awareness of their
situation, thus organizing them. Such a concept of theory becoming practice
was greeted by the young opositional intelligentsia of the Weimar Republic as
an epoch-making redefinition of their own social role. In an exhaustive 1924
book review, Ernst Bloch characterized that "identification of the Marxist

10. Georg Lukics, "Die Verdinglichung und das Bewusstsein des Proletariats," Geschichte
und Klassenbewusstsein. Studien iiber marxistische Dialektik (Berlin, 1923), p. 94 ff.
11. Lukics, "Rosa Luxemburg als Marxist," (1921) in Geschichte und Klassenbewusstsein, p.
49 (quotation by Lukics from Luxemburg's Akkumulation des Kapitals) and p. 53. In the same
book, in the article "Kritische Bemerkungen iber Rosa Luxemburgs 'Kritik der russischen
Revolution' (1922)" (p. 276 ff.), Lukics seems partially to retract his pro-Luxemburg position.
Even here he seems not so much to criticize her theoretical analysis but rather, from his own
revolutionary experience, her statements on the use of violence and freedom of opinion.

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 BENJAMIN AND LUKACS 7

concept with the class-consciousness of the proletariat" made by Lukacs as the

theoretical and practical consummation of the historical moment.12 The
reaction in Moscow was different. There Lukics' book was condemned
categorically as deviant, despite the preface in which Lukics claimed that he
was only concerned with the interpretation of Marx's canonical texts, in other
words with the strictest orthodoxy.'3 At the Fifth Congress of the Comintern in
Moscow June and July 1924, Grigorii Zinov'ev, then President of the Executive
Committee of the Comintern, characterized Lukacs' work as a perfect
example of "theoretical revisionism" and called for an energetic struggle
against the tendencies it represented.14
Not only did Benjamin deal with Lukics' theories exhaustively, he also was
acquainted with the critique Moscow had directed at Lukics. During his stay
in Paris in spring of 1926 he read "the reproofs against Lukics in
Arbeiter-Literatur (which I can't make heads or tails of)," as he wrote
Scholem.15 The reference is to the essays of Abram Deborin and Ladislaus
Rudas published in 1924 in Arbeiter-Literatur, a magazine edited by the
Austrian Communist Johannes Wertheim. These theses condemned Lukacs'
book, completely in the spirit of the Comintern, as an expression of
tendencies toward "left" intellectual deviation. Rudas disqualified it as "the
book of an idealist, an agnostic and a mystic" and demanded of the author
self-criticism.16 Three years later, when Benjamin wrote his discussion of
History and Class Consciousness for Die Literarische Welt, he was able to
make both heads and tails of the attacks from Moscow. In these notes he put
particular emphasis on the specific theoretic positions which had been
condemned by the Comintern. According to him, the "uniqueness" of the
book lay in "the certainty with which it had grasped in the critical situation of
class struggle and an impending concrete revolution, the absolute

12. Ernst Bloch, "Aktualitat und Utopie. Zu Lukics' Philosophie des Marxismus," Der neue
Merkur 7 (1924), 469.
13. Lukaics, op.cit., p. 7.
14. Lukacs, "G. Zinov'ev gegen die Ultralinken (1924)," Schriften zu Ideologie und Politik,
ed., P. Ludz (Neuwied und Berlin, 1967), p. 720 f.
Bloch (op.cit., p. 459) had anticipated this reaction from Moscow: "Indeed, it will not be easy
for the book to find good readers. The Russians, for instance, who act philosophically, but who
think like uneducated dogs, will smell a defection in it. Infinitely different from the revisionists,
they are driven off almost in the same way by the philosophical heritage. Some of them will say,
Marx didn't set Hegel on his feet in order that Lukics could set Marx back on his head again."
15. Benjamin, Briefe, p. 417.
16. Ladislaus Rudas, "Orthodoxer Marxismus," Arbeiter-Literatur 9 (1924), 493-517;
Abram Deborin, "Lukics und seine Kritik des Marxismus," Arbeiter-Literatfir 10 (1924),
615-640; Ladislaus Rudas, "Die Klassenbewusstseinstheorie von Lukics," Arbeiter-Literatur 10
(1924), 669-696 and 12 (1924), 1064-1089 (Quotation, p. 516 f.).

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8 NEW GERMAN CRITIQUE

precondition, indeed the absolute fulfillment and the last word of theoretic
knowledge. The polemics published against this work by high officials of the
Communist Party under the leadership of Deborin serve in their own way to
confirm its significance."l7 It was in this fashion, fully conscious of the
condemnation by Moscow orthodoxy, that Benjamin adopted the basic idea
of Lukacs' book as his own creed.
These notes mark the close of a development that had begun in 192
turning point in Benjamin's personal and intellectual life. On his retu
Berlin from Capri in December, 1924 he wrote to Scholem: "The comm
signals also... were, at first, indications of a turning point, which awa
in me the determination not to mask in Old Franconian fashion the actual
and political aspects in my thinking, as earlier, but to develop them, develop
them experimentally, in the extreme... As long as I, in my accustomed role
as commentator, am prevented from getting to texts of a quite different
significance and totality, I will probably spin 'politics' out of myself. And, of
course, I am always taken by surprise at my proximity to various aspects of an
extreme Bolshevik theory."18 Fragments of this kind of political theory are
contained in One- Way Street (Einbahnstrasse) published in 1928 and
dedicated to Asja Lacis. The earliest part of the book which can be dated, the
"Trip Through German Inflation," had been conceived already in September

of 1923-- in other words, before Benjamin had read Lukacs' book-- and had
been given to Scholem in the form of a scroll when he emigrated to
Palestine.'9 In this "descriptive analysis of German decadence" Benjamin
focused on the symptoms signaling the final decline of bourgeois social order
in Germany. The permanent condition of crisis and general impoverishment,
according to Benjamin, subjects both human beings and things ever
increasingly to basic economic necessity, thereby depriving them of their
autonomy. Bourgeois people lose their social sense of orientation. They ex-
ploit nature without letting it reach maturity. They are beset with "insecurity,
indeed the perversion of the instincts vital to life, together with impotence
and decline of intellect. This is the state of mind of German citizenry as a
whole."20 By way of a pragmatic analysis of the conditions of postwar
Germany, Benjamin had come to conclusions similar to those gained by

Luk.cs through his interpretation of Marx. Benjamin's alternative, in wh

he proposed therapeutic measures, was in 1923--as was typical of all his early
work-still a moralistic, if not a metaphysical one: "But he [the individual]

17. Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, 3, p. 171.

18. Benjamin, Briefe (to Scholem, December 22, 1924), p. 368.
19. First published in Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, ed., T. Rexroth, 4/2, pp. 928-935.
20. Ibid., p. 929.

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 BENJAMIN AND LUKACS 9

may never make peace with poverty when it casts its gigantic shadow over his
people and his home. He should keep his senses alert for every humiliation
that assails him, and discipline himself until his suffering no longer opens
onto the precipitous road of hate, rather onto the ascending path of
prayer."21 Benjamin, whose own family was ruined economically by inflation
and who was affected by it materially and spiritually, limited himself at first
to a purely contemplative attitude toward these social catastrophes. Only
under the influence of Marxist theory as communicated by Lukics did he
begin to articulate more strongly the political elements in his thought. In the
printed version of the paragraph quoted above, published in 1928, the last
phrase reads: "until his suffering no longer opens onto the precipitous
road of grief, but instead onto the ascending path of revolt."22 The changing
of the two nouns points to a radical reevaluation. The meditative attitude
with its positive emphasis in the first version appears transformed into the
negative: the emphasis now is on grief. The activism which had been
denigrated as "hate" in 1923 now becomes the bearer of hope in the form of
"revolt."
The newly acquired materialist point of view, which Benjamin used in his
attempt to fix the historical moment in other sections of One- Way Street as
well, is no more "orthodox" than that of LukAcs. In fact, several of the
fragments in this collection proceed directly from LukAcs' dialectical theory
of history. In the section entitled "Fire Alarm" ("Feuermelder"), for example,
the philologist Benjamin observed characteristically that the words "class
struggle" are misleading: "Class struggle isn't a question of a test of strength
which will decide the question who triumphs and who will be defeated... To
think that way is to create a romantic illusion about the facts. For whether the
bourgeoisie is victorious or defeated in the battle, it remains condemned to
decline by virtue of its internal contradictions-contradictions which
eventually will prove fatal. The only real question is whether it will destroy
itself or be destroyed by the proletariat. The answer to that question will
determine the continuation or the end of a cultural development of three
thousand years."23These sentences summarize succinctly Luk'Acs' theses of the
antinomies of capitalism and show to what extent the breakthrough of a social
totality depends on the victory of the proletariat. However, Benjamin did not
merely paraphrase; he also shifted emphasis. Be relinquishing any kind of
coherent framework of profit-here, in particular, an economic frame-
work--he lent to words the authoritarian character of dogma. What is

21. Ibid., p. 931.

22. Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften 4/1, p. 97.
23. Ibid., p. 122.

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10 NEW GERMAN CRITIQUE

more, unlike Lukics he did not see the victory of the proletariat as a historical
necessity, but decidedly as a matter of doubt. Benjamin's intent becomes even
clearer in the allegorical image with which he ends the text: "And if the
abolition of the bourgeoisie hasn't been achieved by a certain almost
calculable point in the economic and technical development (inflation and
gas warfare are signals of its approach), then everything is lost. Before the
spark reaches the dynamite, the burning fuse must be severed. The moment
of intervention, the danger and tempo are technical, not chivalrous
question."24Here, as in every allegory, the intended meaning can be clearly
associated with individual elements of the image. The dynamite symbolizes
the contradictions within the bourgeoisie and at the same time the technical
and economic potential which it has amassed and which give the insoluble
contradictions their explosive force. The glowing fuse represents the ever
inflating power of the bourgeoisie. According to the image, Benjamin saw as
the duty of the revolutionary proletariat the interruption of the process of
domination, and thereby a diverting of the fatal catastrophe.
Revolution--in the "Kaiser Panorama" ("Kaiserpanorama") it is called
more precisely "revolt"- as a radical break with the whole of development up
to the present, indeed with history itself, stands in opposition to Lukacs' view
of revolution as the consummation of the historical process. The radical break
is the invariable touchstone or constant in Benjamin's thought. As early as
1921 in the essay "Toward a Critique of Force" ("Zur Kritik der Gewalt"),
historical force applied to the assertion and preservation of rights is
contrasted with revolutionary force, "which is the name for the highest
manifestation of pure force on the part of mankind."25 But here this
distinction remains rooted merely in historico-philosophical and metaphysical
categories: Benjamin identified myth as the source of the objectionable force
in history, while he characterized the force which will destroy history as
"divine" and "provident." Only through his encounter with communism did
his thought become socially grounded. Yet even then the eschatological
aspect is retained, which is a decided contrast between Benjamin's concept of
revolution and that of Marx. Benjamin confirmed this himself in a later
fragment belonging to the "Passagen-Arbeit": "Marx says that revolutions
are the locomotives of world history. But the situation may be quite different.
Perhaps revolutions are not the train ride, but the human race grabbing for

24. Ibid., p. 122.

25. Benjamin, "Zur Kritik der Gewalt," Archiv fir Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik 47
(1920/21), 809-832. Quoted from Zur Kritik der Gewalt und andere Aufsatze (Frankfurt am
Main, 1965), p. 64.

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 BENJAMIN AND LUKACS 11

the emergency brake."26 Cutting the fuse, grabbing the emergency

brake--revealed in these images is the hope that the proletarian revolution
will explode the undesirable continuum of history. It is therefore also a
"messianic" revolution, as stated in the theses "Concerning the Concept of
History." Thus in Benjamin's own theory the "hunchbacked dwarf' of
theology was appointed to serve the "puppet called 'historical materialism.' "
This explains the attraction of his thought and at the same time the obscurity
which cannot be fully rationalized.
In his methodology as well as in the positing of goals for his political theory,
Benjamin proves to be the diametric opposite of the systematic thinker
LukAcs. Lukics' essays grew directly out of his experience with the revolution
of 1918-1919 and were written in the "midst of party work." They make no
pretension, as their author modestly said, "of being anything more than an
interpretation, an explanation of Marx's teaching in Marx's spirit." By
returning to Hegelian dialectic, Benjamin intended to revive Lukacs' teaching
from its reduction to economic evolutionism in the theory and practice of
Social.Democracy. In this process his own revolutionary experience was to
confirm for him that he had "found the correct method of research in
dialectical Marxism."27 Benjamin, too, substantiated his politics by mean
interpretation. But just as his experience was not that of revolutionar
struggle, rather financial ruin endured and observed individually, so to
did not turn to the "classics"; instead, he turned to a literature that was
devoid of authority and could only gain its political significance by way of his
interpretation.
His essay "Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia"
("Der Surrealismus. Die letzte Momentaufnahme der europaiischen
Intelligenz") published in 1929 in Die Literarische Welt can be seen as
paradigmatic for this approach. Through an analysis of the poetic and politi-
cal practice of French Modernity, Benjamin attempted "to win the powers of
intoxication for the revolution."28 In Aragon's The Peasant of Paris and
Breton's Nadja he discovered a "materialistic, anthropological inspiration"
which permitted these texts to appear as documents of revolt against
conditions in contemporary society. These texts indeed illustrate how the

26. An unpublished loose page in the complex of historico-philosophical theses, quoted by

Rolf Tiedemann in the afterword to Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire. Ein Lyriker im
Zeitalter des Hochkapitalismus (Frankfurt am Main, 1969), p. 189.
27. Lukacs, Geschichte und Klassenbewusstsein, pp. 5, 7, 13.
28. Lukics, "Der Surrealismus. Die letzte Momentaufnahme der europiischen Intelligenz,"
Die literarische Welt, February 1, 8, and 15, 1929. Quoted from Benjamin, Angelus Novus.
Ausgewdhlte Schriften 2 (Frankfurt am Main, 1966), p. 212.

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12 NEW GERMAN CRITIQUE

surrealist rapturously loses the self in esoteric love; how he breaks through the
inhibitions and conventions of the bourgeois individual in order to produce
an unrestrictive public sphere; and, finally, how he frees objects from the
spell cast upon them by their perversion as commodities by discovering
utopian potentials in what has "become" outmoded and historic.
In this poetic explosion of the bourgeois world, the chains capitalism has
put on nature and society are broken. It is therefore no coincidence that the
world discovered in the works of the surrealists appears as the counter-image
to the description of social decline shown in "Trip Through German
Inflation." For Benjamin, social praxis is manifested in these novels.The
anti-bourgeois behavior of the surrealists and their cooperation with the
communists is a guarantee for him that their intention for a poetic
destruction of a malign reality includes its social destruction. Bourgeois
society itself pushes the intellectual to revolt. In fact, the "animosity of the
bourgeoisie toward any and every manifestation of radical intellectual
freedom" is the basis for the "transformation of an extremely contemplative
attitude into revolutionary opposition," a phenomenon Benjamin first located
in Apollinaire and which he saw as typical for the surrealists' turn toward
political practice. "This animosity pushed surrealism to the left."29 Hence
Benjamin saw the position of the literary avant-garde as analogous to that of
the proletariat. Just as in LukAcs' analysis the proletariat is driven to
revolution by the antinomies in capitalism, so too, for Benjamin, the
intellectual in advanced capitalist society had also become a revolutionary
factor. Whereas, however, the proletariat comes to a consciousness of itself on
the basis of the insoluble contradictions of its class conditions, the intellectual
discovers his social role on the basis of the contradiction between society's
ideology, which he formulates and transmits, and its reality. This discovery
helped Benjamin see the ambivalence of the "intoxicated" revolt, which in
actuality is directed toward the past and which rests "on a feeling of
obligation, not to the revolution, but to traditional culture." In this way the
intellectual fights for the ideals of a bourgeois society which that society has
long since betrayed. Therefore there is always the risk that the intellectual will
leave his ally, the proletariat, in the lurch. From this analysis is also derived
the mystic term "profane illumination"30 which Benjamin applied to the
insight found in the surrealist texts. This insight is "profane" in two respects.
First, its sources do not lie in divine inspiration, but in an understanding of
history; second, it does not seek the salvation of the individual in God, but

29. Ibid., p. 208.

30. Ibid., p. 202.

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 BENJAMIN AND LUKACS 13

rather the salvation of society. The insight is an "illumination" nevertheless;

hashish intoxication and religion are its basic prerequisites, according to
Benjamin, and it is experienced by the individual only in the ecstatic
moments of poetic creation or absurd insurrection.
Benjamin's study is simultaneously self-analysis. In tracing the
politicization of surrealism to the point of commitment to the proletarian
revolution, he was also describing the history of his own development toward
political consciousness. As such, he revealed his reflections on his own position
in society as the real stimulus for his construction of a political theory. As a
German intellectual, the elimination of his privileges had driven him into
opposition to bourgeois society; he was forced to experience in the flesh "the
extremely exposed position between anarchistic fronde and revolutionary
discipline."31 Only in the light of this experience was he able to grasp the
"crisis of the intelligentsia" as an opportunity for a renewal of the
revolutionary potential of the proletariat. Because of this, "profane
illumination" also applies in the last analysis to the subjective experience from
which Benjamin's theory of an anti-historical, messianic revolution derives.
Under the impact of the fascist threat to Europe and his own physical and
intellectual marginal existence in exile, Benjamin adopted a more radical
critique of the "belief in progress," which socialism took on as the heritage of
the bourgeois enlightenment. In his theses written in 1940 and entitled
"Concerning the Concept of History" ("Ueber den Begriff der Geschichte")
Benjamin wrote that this belief "wishes to see only advances in domination
over nature, not the regressions of society. It already reveals the technocratic
elements which will later be found in fascism."32 In the extreme situation
made personally more difficult for the refugee Benjamin by the Hitler-Stalin
Pact, comments which originally seemed to be directed only against the
evolutionary optimism of Social Democracy now turn against communism as
well. Benjamin stated in the Tenth Thesis that his train of thought aimed at
"freeing the political worldling from the ensnaring nets of those politicians in
whom hope had been placed that they would be opponents of fascism, but
who in this moment lie flat on their backs, affirming their defeat with the
betrayal of their cause. It was [Benjamin's] conviction that these politicians'
stubborn belief in progress, their reliance on their 'mass base,' and finally
their subordination to an uncontrollable apparatus have all been three sides
of the same thing."33 Here Benjamin criticized not only the concrete historical

31. Ibid., p. 200.

32. Benjamin, "Ueber den Begriff der Geschichte XI," Gesammelte Schriften 1/2, p. 699.
33. "Ueber den Begriff der Geschichte X," Gesammelte Schriften 1/2, p. 698.

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 14 NEW GERMAN CRITIQUE

decisions of orthodox Marxist policy of the Moscow school, but also the
revolutionary optimism of LukAcs, then living in Moscow. Defeat of German
Social Democracy and Stalinism in Soviet Russia are no accident de parcours
in his eyes, rather the necessary results of Marxism's incomplete
understanding of revolution.

III

Lukacs' aesthetic position is inseparable from his political theo

Confusion on this issue has stemmed from the fact that LukAcs was criticized
by Moscow as a political thinker in 1924 and even more strongly in 1928 after
the publication of his Blum Theses, while only a few years later Stalin
elevated "Socialist Realism" to official literary doctrine. Based on Lukacs'
own words from his Mehring essay, Fritz Raddatz was led to the false
conclusion in his Lukics-biography that Lukics is an author "who attempts to
join leftist ethics and rightist aesthetics."34 Such categories serve only to pass
on unquestioned the conclusions reached by the representatives of political
power, in this case the Soviet Union, and have therefore more to do with shifts
in Moscow's self-interest than with Lukics himself.

In point of fact, both the political and aesthetic thought of Lukacs center
on the Hegelian concept of "wholeness," or "totality." In the early Theory of
the Novel both aspects are still considered a unity. The totality of life is the
mark of the early period in Greece and is simultaneously given form in
characteristic genre, the epic poem. What at this point dominates
aesthetic construct of history both as source and goal, emerges after Lukics
turn to Marxism as categories which divide the social and historical from th
aesthetic. In History and Class Consciousness the concept of totality is gi
political application: the victory of the proletariat will at last resolve
contradictions and produce the world and society in its totality within
In contrast to the earlier definition determined by content, the concept
totality functions for the new aesthetic theory as a formal criterion of the wo
of art. In other words, Lukacs considered art to be great and realistic only i
portrays reality in its totality, thereby reflecting society in its c
antagonisms. During the same period when the essays of History and C
Consciousness were written, Lukacs demonstrated this basic principle of
Marxist aesthetics for the first time in a short essay on Balzac. The arti
published April 26, 1922 in Die Rote Fahne, analyzed Balzac's novels as

34. Fritz J. Raddatz, Georg Lukdcs in Selbstzeugnissen und Bilddokumenten (Reinb

1972), p. 86.

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 BENJAMIN AND LUKACS 15

"literary expression of the aspiring, progressive bourgeoisie."35 They are "a

vision of passion, character and destiny, of individuals, class and society,
recalling vaguely the corruption of what Marx called the economic character
mask." The royalist Balzac is stylized into a forerunner of Marx. The
"cunning of reason" uses the working class to reach its goals in history; in
literature it uses the great individual, the artist, who, if able to portray the
totality of the societal process, simultaneously reveals the progressive
tendencies of history.
This literary theory conceived at least as early as 1922 had its first effect on
cultural politics with the discussions of the Union of Proletarian-Revolution-
ary Writers in the early 1930s. Its influence on the development of a socialist
literature in Germany has been all the more lasting.36 After the Frankfurt
Party Conference in 1924 and the decision of the German Communist Party
to organize itself into factory cells, the Party began to follow the Soviet
example of encouraging workers themselves to participate in literary
production. They were to begin by reporting in newspapers about their
everyday life, their working conditions and their work places. The founding
of the Proletarian Feuilleton Correspondence in 1927 provided the
movement with its first organizational framework. After 1929 members of the
Union of Proletarian-Revolutionary Writers attempted to expand reportage
and correspondence into the proletarian novel. The Party considered Lenin's
1905 essay on "Party Organization and Party Literature" as the theoretical
foundation of an independent proletarian literature. A German translation
was published for the first time in 1924 in the Viennese periodical
Arbeiter-Literatur.37 In the same year in which Moscow published its final
theoretical reckoning with Lukacs (the Deborin article cited earlier), Zinov'ev
published an article under the title "On the Tasks of the Proletarian
Newspapers." In it he described the praxis of the worker-correspondent
movement in the Soviet Union, and asked for a further encouragement of the
German worker as writer.38 This literary theory was still a part of the
pre-Stalinist phase of socialist construction.39 During this period, in fact in

35. Georg Lukics, "Der Nachruhm Balzacs," Die Rote Fahne, April 26, 1922; reprinted in:
Walter Fahnders and Martin Rector, eds., Literatur im Klassenkampf. Zur proletarisch-
revolutiondren Literaturtheorie 1919-1923 (Munich, 1971), pp. 61-64.
36. See Gerald Stieg and Bernd Witte, Abriss einer Geschichte der deutschen Arbeiter-
literatur (Stuttgart, 1973), p. 74ff.
37. W.I. Lenin, "Parteiorganisation und Parteiliteratur," Arbeiter-Literatur, 3/4 (1924).
38. G. Zinov'ev, "Ueber die Aufgaben der proletarischen Zeitungen," Arbeiter-Literatur,
12 (1924), 942ff.
39. See in the same number the article: "Die Aufgaben der russischen Arbeiterkorres-
pondenten. 1) Das Vermichtnis Lenins und die Arbeiterkorrespondenten (by N. Bucharin).
2) Die Kontrolle durch die Massen und die Arbeiterkorrespondenten (by N.K. Krupskaja)."

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16 NEW GERMAN CRITIQUE

the same year, Zinov'ev condemned Lukics as a revisionist at the Fifth

Congress of the Comintern.
Without an awareness of these historical relationships, it may be hard to
understand why LukAcs attacked proletarian-revolutionary literature with
such vehemence after 1932. By then Stalin had removed Zinov'ev from power
and sent him into exile. Indirectly through aesthetics, and in harmony with
Stalin's concept of "socialism in one country" initiating the shift of the
Cominter to popular front politics,40 Lukics was now able to bring his
revisionist theory to bear. In a series of essays in Die Linkskurve he attacked
the literature produced by the worker-correspondent movement. He could
not acknowledge reportage as an art form, because for him an understanding
of the totality of societal processes cannot take a concrete form in them, but
can, at best, be brought in on a theoretical level. The formal principle of lit-
erature must not be this kind of tendency, but instead a real "partisanship,"
the artistic portrayal of reality in its totality, understood from a Marxist
perspective. "Why?--Because only a portrayal of the total process dissolves
the fetishism of the economic and societal forms of capitalism and exposes
them for what they really are: class-determined relationships of people to one
another."41 In this aesthetic argumentation it is easy to recognize the
sociological theory coming from History and Class Consciousness, where the
intellectual anticipates in theory what is anticipated by the artist here in the
form of literature, and what will finally be realized in society through the
achievement of socialism. The fact that on the basis of his radical
social-democratic political theory Lukacs attacked in Die Linkskurve wha
called the "Luxemburg remnants" in the aesthetic theory of the workin
movement 42 is only an apparent paradox. The paradox is resolved
considers that Lukaics was really polemicizing against a theory of
spontaneity corresponding to the stage of political discussion in the
Union from 1924 to 1928 and associated by him with the name "Luxemb
only out of tactical considerations for the immediate political issues
year 1932. Transferred into the realm of aesthetics, his own concep
revolution, very similar to that of Rosa Luxemburg, could now be inter
in the spirit of Stalinism, because its central category of totality had rem
ambiguous. What Lukics intended to be understood for the time be

40. See Helga Gallas, Marxistische Literaturtheorie. Kontroversen im Bund prole

rezvolutiondrer Schriftsteller (Neuwied and Berlin, 1971), p. 64ff.
41. Georg Lukics, "Reportage oder Gestaltung? Kritische Bemerkungen anlss
Romans von Ottwalt," Die Linkskurve, 4/7 (1932), 29.
42. Georg Lukics, "Gegen die Spontaneitatstheorie in der Literatur," Die Linksku
(1932), 30ff.

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 BENJAMIN AND LUKACS 17

only a formal aesthetic category, but which he projected as the content of the
final goal into the future, was in turn interpreted by official theory to mean
that the social totality as well had already been achieved. In the perfected
socialism of the Soviet Union the work of art need only "reflect" that socialism
in order to achieve wholeness in content and form. As long as Lukics was in
Moscow, he understandably took no measures to correct this misinter-
pretaion. Thus the doctrine of socialist realism formulated under Stalin was
to remain the final word in Marxist literary discussion for a long time to
come. Even Brecht, then in exile in Denmark, thought it advisable to
withhold from publication in the periodical Das Wort his articles directed
against Lukacs' concept of realism in order to avoid challenging Moscow.
"Every one of their critiques contains a threat," he remarked to Benjamin
during the latter's visit to Svendborg in 1938.43
Benjamin called special attention to the practice of workers themselves
writing (writer-workers)--a policy that had been condemned in its theory and
repressed on political grounds-both in his 1934 address in Paris entitled
"The Author as Producer" ("Der Autor als Produzent") and in his essay "The
Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" ("Das Kunstwerk im
Zeitalter der technischen Reproduzierbarkeit,"1936). Thus Benjamin, who
had known about the literary practices of the Union of Proletarian-Revolu-
tionary Writers, but kept his distance,44 now took these up, along with
Chaplin's films, as the only examples of the positive transformation of art
through a revolution in its production techniques. Once in the hands of the
proletariat, the newspaper, as a mass communication medium, was to
provide workers with the possibility of publishing reports about their own
special areas of experience. Hence they are transformed from passive readers
into authors, producers of texts, and as such they in turn activate other
readers as well. In this way literature acquires an organizing function in
respect to its readers, by making them into potential authors, while at the
same time acquiring an operative function by bringing special practical
problems to a public with expertise. "Today there is hardly a gainfully
employed European who could not, in principle, find an opportunity to
publish somewhere or other comments on his work, grievances, documentary
reports or that sort of thing. Thus the distinction between author and public

43. Walter Benjamin, Versuche aber Brecht, ed., R. Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main,
1966), p. 132.
44. See the comment by Asja Lacis in Revolutiondr im Beruf, ed., H. Brenner (Munich,
1971), p. 59: "Benjamin almost always accompanied me to the public events of the Union of
Proletarian Writers when Becher, Weinert and Eisler were to appear at the gatherings."

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18 NEW GERMAN CRITIQUE

is on the verge of losing its basic character. The difference becomes merely
functional, it varies from case to case. At any moment the reader is ready to
turn into a writer. As an expert, which he had to become, for better or worse,
in an extremely specialized work process, .. he gains access to authorship. In
the Soviet Union, work itself is given a voice. To present it verbally is part of
man's ability to perform the work. Literary competence is now founded on
polytechnic rather than specialized training and thus becomes common
property."45 The very sober factuality of this statement contains a political
provocation: workers writing in a Western Europe overshadowed by fascism
and workers writing in the Soviet Union of 1936 where Zinov'ev had just been
condemned in one of the first big Stalinist show trials. Benjamin was not so
naive as to miss the political significance of his own words.46 His quotation
was a conscious one. In it he held onto a progressive literary tradition which
had been repressed by both fascism and Stalinism.

IV

In the idealistic structuring of history in Theory of the Novel, Lukics

contrasted the epic poem as the formal expression of totality with the novel as
the art form of the modern age, the era of "transcendent homelessness."
Lying behind this opposition for the dialectician is the unexpressed demand
for a synthesis in a new art form which would encompass in itself the
wholeness of a world rejoined with itself. For the later Lukics, the socialist
realist novelcan be understood as this synthesis. He was seldom willing to give
a concrete example of the socialist realist novel, limiting himself instead to its
bourgeois predecessors. This can be appraised as an indication that he
intended the concept to describe that final and total synthesis which is not yet
historically realized, not even in socialist states. Just as Benjamin was not able
to follow Lukaics' dialectic of history, neither was he prepared to accept a
comparable treatment of the novel as something absolute, as the single and
final literary form of the modern age. For Benjamin's great essay "The
Story-Teller" ("Der Erzaihler"), published 1936 in the exile magazine Orient
und Occident, the basic ideas had already been conceived in the 1920s.47

45. Walter Benjamin, "Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit,"

Gesammelte Schriften 1/2, p. 493.
46. In any case Horkheimer and Adorno had recognized how inopportune the reference to
the Soviet Union was. The reference is not made in the first publication of the essay, which they
brought out in the journal they were publishing: Zeitschrift ftir Sozialforschung, 5 (1936), 56.
There the sentence reads: "Le travail lui-meme prend la parole." Because of the lack of this
historical reference point Benjamin's political statement is blunted.

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 BENJAMIN AND LUKACS 19

Here Benjamin offers, as he wrote in a letter to Scholem, "a new 'theory of the
novel,' sure to gain your strong approval and a place next to Lukacs."48
In his own theory, consciously drawing upon Lukics' model, Benjamin
locates the place of the story-form historically and systematically between the
epic and the novel, the two poles established by Lukaics. Story-telling,.
according to Benjamin, represents "an almost artisan-like form of
communication." 49 That means first and foremost it is tied to a pre-industrial
society, to the lives of peasants, artisans and traders in whose workrooms and
inns, not yet illuminated by electricity, stories are told. That also means that
the stories themselves have the quality of handicraft: they are handed down
from generation to generation. Experience is accumulated in them,
expanded by each new story-teller, and is then passed on as "good advice,"
the moral which all stories contain. Like a valuable tool, the story is not
created by one individual artist; into its making goes the collective experience
of whole generations.
With the waning of the original artisan and peasant life-styles, story-telling
also begins to lose ground--not that it immediately and radically
disappeared. As one of the most outstanding examples of the story-teller,
Benjamin cited Johann Peter Hebel, whose art was possible even in the midst
of the progressing industrialization of the 19th century because he was close to
the peasants and artisans of Baden. Benjamin considered even Kafka to be a
story-teller, albeit an extremely borderline case. The forms of oral tradition
and therefore story-telling are still available to Kafka through the Jewish
tradition, yet their content, their experience, has been lost. Kafka is a
story-teller in a world in which there is nothing more to tell; hence, he has no
advice to pass on. His case demonstrates, however, the time-lags and faults
occurring in the alteration of literary forms: "The transformations of epic
forms must be imagined as occurring in rhythms comparable to the rhythmic
changes of the earth's surface in the course of millenia."so
The sign of the new age in Benjamin's words is "the rise of the novel at the
beginning of the modern period." For industrialization not only gradually

47. See the sketches "Warum es mit der Kunst, Geschichten zu erzihlen, zu Ende geht" of the
year 1928-1929, which are mentioned in Gesammelte Schriften 4/2, p. 1010.
48. Briefe (to Scholem, November 30, 1928), p. 482. That this reference applies to the
revision of the essay "Der Erzahler" seems to be established by the materials recently published.
The note by the editor of this volume of letters that "it is uncertain which work is referred to"
(Briefe, p. 484) can thus be corrected accordingly.
49. "Der Erzihler. Betrachtungen zum Werk Nikolai Lesskows," Orient und Occident, NF, 3
(1936), 16-33; cited here from Illuminationen. Ausgewahte Schriften, ed., S. Unseld (Frankfurt
am Main, 1961), p. 418.
50. Ibid., p. 414.

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 20 NEW GERMAN CRITIQUE

destroyed the social prerequisites for story-telling by transforming artisans

and peasants into marginal social groups, it also created simultaneously the
technical prerequisites for the new epic genre, the novel. "Only with the
invention of the art of printing does the emergence of the novel become
possible." 51 The rise of a new class and the concurrent revolutionizing of
reproduction techniques for literature bound to that class are for Benjamin
the conditions which make possible a new epic form.
Compared to the story, the novel itself is already an expression of
disorientation. The meaning becomes clear only as construed in retrospect
from the perspective of the hero's death. For ideological reasons the author
projected as meaningful the individual life and its relationship to the world,
and these in turn are received by the individual reader. In addition, through
this subjectivizing process, the novel proves itself to be the symbol of an era
where technology and its organization in capitalist production processes have
created the basic life conditions of the bourgeois individual: "Anyone listen-
ing to a story in the company of the story-teller; even when reading one
participates in this fellowship. The reader of a novel, however, is alone."52
This analysis clarifies the difference between Benjamin's method and that
of LukAcs. For Benjamin, changes in art forms are not, as for Lukacs, directly
dependent on general economic conditions of production; rather, they are
mediated by many interim steps, the most important of which is the way the
work of art is handed down. The change from oral narration to the
reproduction of the story in book form marks most clearly the difference
between story and novel. The literary work is a function of what Benjamin
called "literary technique," conditioned primarily by the reproduction
technique, but also by the social situation of authors, their cultural tradi-
tions and their personal experience. Finally, Benjamin saw all these factors
in relation to the stage of the economic conditions of production, thus
showing his Marxist perspective. The multiple mediations, however, free the
work of art from acting as a mere reflection of reality. Based on its unequal
levels of development, which are considered by him less a utopian
prefiguration than a rescue of the past and therefore a construction of the
historically determined subject, the work of art can become an active force in
the present.
The novel in turn is also faced with a crisis due to the appearance of a new
reproduction technique. This new medium is the newspaper; its content is
information. Benjamin described the dialectic of this transition of forms:

51. Ibid., p. 413.

52. Ibid., p. 427.

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 BENJAMIN AND LUKACS 21

"The novel, whose beginnings reach back into antiquity, needed hundreds of
years before it found in the developing bourgeoisie the elements bringing it to
fruition. With the appearance of these elements the story began its slow
retreat into obsolescence .... On the other hand, we recognize that with the
established rule of the bourgeoisie and the emergence of the press as one of
the most important instruments of capitalism, a new form of communication
appears which, no matter how far in the past its origins may lie, has never
before influenced the epic form in any decisive way... This new form of
communication is information."53 Only today is it fully clear just how much
the superabundance of information has changed the function and reception
of literature. On the one hand, literature attempts to assimilate itself to the
new reality as documentary literature. On the other hand, at least in Western
society, the novel, as popular literature, deteriorates to the level of politically
inferior mass entertainment or as high literature, it becomes, with few
exceptions, a plaything for intellectual interpretation. This means that the
novel is less and less able to fill the functions of consciousness-forming and
socialization that it had for the rising bourgeoisie. These functions are
increasingly taken over by the excess of historical and topical documentation
offered by the mass media, especially television.
Benjamin only experienced newspapers, radio and film as vehicles of mass
communication. Unlike Adorno and Horkheimer, however, he does not reject
them out of hand as "culture industry." Instead, he sees in them a new supra-
individual form of communication which will lead to a new collective art if it
can be freed from the domination of capital. This is why Benjamin puts such
emphasis on the experiment with writer-workers; for in their communications
the individual no longer describes his private fate or that of a fictional hero,
rather he communicates social experiences. According to Benjamin, this is a
return of the story on a higher level, since here it becomes a depository for
collective knowledge. In contrast to traditional story-telling, this type of
writing lacks aura, that is historical uniqueness. Its supra-individual aspect no
longer arises from a natural succession of generations of story-tellers; rather it
arises from the universal synchronism brought about by technology, the
negative expression of which is the omnipresence of events diffused as
information by the mass media.
Intended as a polemic against Lukacs, Brecht's remark speaks directly to
Benjamin's literary praxis: "Our starting point is not the good old, it is the
bad new. The problem is not to reduce technology, but to expand it."54 Ben-

53. Ibid., p. 414f.

54. Bertolt Brecht, "Die Essays von Georg LukAcs," Gesammelte Werke 19 (Frankfurt am
Main, 1967), p. 298. See also Benjamin, Versuche iiber Brecht, p. 135.

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22 NEW GERMAN CRITIQUE

jamin puts this statement into practice by giving his own production the form
of newspaper articles. The texts One- Way Street and Berlin Childhood as well
as his literary essays and critiques were first published in daily newspapers and
magazines, primarily in the Frankfurter Zeitung. Benjamin, conscious of his
role as an intellectual, lacks, of course, the societal experience which he
himself sees as necessary. All that remained for him was the portrayal of his
own path, his "one-way street" to a new social consciousness and his memories
of a childhood spent in the security of the upper middle class. That this myth
of childhood takes the form of loosely juxtaposed feuilleton texts rather
than that of the novel, as in the case of his admired model Proust, bears
witness to Benjamin's intentions. What he first tested in the private realm was
to be carried over onto the historico-philosophical level of his work on
Baudelaire and 19th-century Paris. Just as Benjamin calls revolution an
emergency brake, a cutting of the buring fuse, so is his literary work an
attempt to bring the negative historical moment to a standstill, to ground a
perspective based on the unredeemed claims of the past. His dialectical
images resurrect the past as a vantage point from which to penetrate the
present. In active literary production, the importance of which Benjamin was
the first to emphasize as an alternative to passive reading, the intellectual uses
reflection on personally experienced history to aim at a transformation of
historical time, the same transformation which the worker brings directly into
his reportage as experience derived from praxis in society. Both intend to
achieve the same goal, through the act of writing, which, according to
Benjamin, political struggle should achieve in the revolution: the destruction
of history in favor of a happiness without history. This, however, requires the
mobilization of language "in the service of struggle or work; in any case in the
transformation of reality, not in its description."ss55 The opposition of
Benjamin's aesthetic theory to that of Lukics cannot be more clearly
expressed than in this sentence written in 1933.

Only in 1955, fifteen years after his death, does Benjamin's name appear
for the first time in an important context in Lukacs' writings. The occasion
was the study The Meaning of Contemporary Realism written in fall 1955 and
presented as a lecture to the German Academy of the Arts in January, 1956.56
Probably stimulated by the two-volume collection of Benjamin's writings

55. "Erfahrung und Armut," Die Welt im Wort (Dec. 7, 1933); cited here from
Illuminationen, p. 316.
56. Georg Lukics, "Die Gegenwartsbedeutung des kritischen Realismus" (1957), in: "Essays
iiber Realismus," W'erke 4 (Neuwied and Berlin, 1971), p. 459.

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 BENJAMIN AND LUKACS 23

edited by Theodor W. Adorno in the same year, Lukics comments on the

aesthetic ideas expressed in Benjamin's book on tragedy. Lukacs' essay traces
precisely the aesthetic and political position which he affirmed openly in the
period of the thaw in 1956, but which in essence had always been his own. In
April, 1957 Lukics returned to Budapest after the period of exile imposed on
him for his participation in the government of Imre Nagy. In the preface to
the German edition of his book written in the same month57 Lukics
delineated sharply the two fronts of his political position: against Wes
decadence, but also against the "dogmatism of Stalin and of the Stali
period." "Here too our standpoint is a tertium datur."s58 This demand
"third way," which necessarily makes Lukacs appear once more a
adversary of orthodoxy, is based on the observation of an alleged "c
vergence," manifested in the West by the "humanistic revolt aga
imperialism" and in the East by the liberation from Stalinism.
Starting from the political basis of these events, Lukics once m
developed his familiar aesthetic principles. In literature, too, he saw the on
possible path as the middle of the road between overly dogmatic Par
literature and what he called "avant-gardism." He attempted to disasso
his concept of realism from the sterile schematism of the Stalinist period.
the same time, however, he continued his struggle against the literatu
modernism. He saw as the "philosophical cornerstone" of modernism
notion of "human isolation as an ontological principle," from which
indifference to the world and a loss of history, the deterioration of
personality and other manifestations of decadence necessarily derive, even
such divergent authors as Joyce and Musil, Benn and Hofmannsthal, G
Faulkner, Eliot, Beckett, Montherlant and Proust. It was Adorno's refutatio
of Lukics which first pointed out that isolation in the works of these auth
must be understood as socially mediated, and that consequently
reproach of decadence was untrue and ahistorical.9 But Lukaics' th
is not just the error of a thinker caught in the constraint of "forced r
ciliation" (erpresste Versohnung). It is also a part of the historical re
in which he lived. When he asked the rhetorical question "Franz Kafk
Thomas Mann?" and answered without reservation in favor of the latter, he
considered himself the defender and theoretician of humanistic realism, a
tradition reaching from the Greeks through Goethe and Schiller to the great
novelists of the nineteenth century and the present. And he knew that in

57. Under the title: Wider den missverstandenen Realismus (Hamburg, 1958).
58. "Essays uber Realismus," p. 160.
59. Theodor W. Adorno, "Erpresste Vers5hnung," Noten zur Literatur II (Frankfurt am
Main, 1963), p. 170ff.

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 24 NEW GERMAN CRITIQUE

appreciating this tradition, he was in harmony with the society whose

experiences are the basis for his writings. For him, science and art were the
expression of "an all-encompassing human this-worldliness" (Diesseitzgkeit)
where each individual phenomenon has its meaningful place, as he said in
intentionally Goethean terms at the end of his A esthetics.60 "The idea that no
detail is interchangeable with another is based on faith in a final, immanent
reasonableness and meaningfulness of the world, its openness, its intelli-
gibility for mankind."61 This kind of "immanence of meaning" is no longer
projected back into an idealized antiquity as in the Theory of the Novel; it is
guaranteed by the anticipated communist society. This faith formulated by
Lukaics, and upon which he supported the conservation of traditional culture,
is no longer that of an individual thinker; it belongs to a whole social system,
and-with the name of its author deleted-it survived his fall in 1956.62
Lukacs' philosophical and aesthetic theory proved on closer analysis to be
idealism carried to its logical conclusion, just as his political theory proved to
be radical democracy. As opponent in his role as defender of the classical
heritage, Lukdcs himself identifies the Benjamin of the book on tragedy. For
Lukics, Benjamin is the "most important aesthetician of avant-gardism"
because he succeeded in "formulating clearly the explosion in traditional
aesthetics caused by the political tendencies emerging in allegory."63 In
Benjamin's description of allegory as a historico-philosophical idea Lukaics
found the transformation of the particular into the absolute, a process he saw
as characteristic of the inability of modernism to represent the world in an
ordered and meaningful whole, as a totality. Here at the conclusion of his
aesthetics Lukics once more contrasted the description of allegory in

60. Georg Lukacs, "Die Eigenart des Aesthetischen," 2 Hbb., "Aesthetik Teil I," Werke 12
(Neuwied and Berlin, 1963), p. 872.
61. "Essays iber Realismus," p. 496.
62. See in addition the most recent discussion of the complex of problems concerning
"socialism and the cultural heritage" in Sinn und Form, 25 (1973), Nos. 1, 3 and 4. In the article
"Der entlaufene Dingo, das vergessene Floss. Aus Anlass der 'Macbeth'-Bearbeitung von Heiner
MiAller" Wolfgang Harich makes the following quite concise formulation of Lukacs' position:
"The way that socialism accomplished this dialectical achievement, i.e., the establishing of
historical continuity through measures of revolutionary change, was to set for society as a whole
a goal worth striving for, which is called communism, and to channel the self-interest of
individuals active in political, economic and cultural spheres into a rationally determined overall
development bringing this goal nearer day by day." See Sinn und Form, 25 (1973), 213. On the
other hand, the attempt has recently been made to make Lukacs' theory of the cultural "heritage
of the past" productive for literary scholarship in the Federal Republic as well. Cf. Gert
Mattenklott and Klaus Schulte, "Literaturgeschichte im Kapitalismus," in Neue Ansichten einer
kiinftigen Germanistik, ed., Jurgen Kolbe (Munich, 1973), pp. 75-101. This attempt failed
because the authors, like Lukics himself, did not analyze their own social role and that of their
students.

63. Lukics, Essays fiber Realismus, p. 494.

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 BENJAMIN AND LUKACS 25

Benjamin's book with Goethe's concept of the symbol and thus summarized
the opposition of the two views of art and the world.
Lukics correctly understood Benjamin's historical study of the Baroque
theater as a systematic study of anticlassical art. By adopting Benjamin
unconditionally in order to apply his analysis negatively against modernism,
Lukics made it appear as a theoretical position counter to his own aesthetics.
What Lukaics actually accomplished is firstly a displacement of emphasis, for
Benjamin's esoteric work could never have and was never intended to have the
social impact of Lukics' statements. Moreover, it is also a distortion of
Benjamin's intentions, in that even as a negative antipode it places him back
into a basically bourgeois tradition, one which Lukics considered binding for
himself, but which Benjamin had long since abandoned. Benjamin's own
theoretical position lies in another system of coordinates. It is characterized
by his experiences as a member of the metropolitan intelligentsia and his
contact with the judaic-mystical tradition. As a solitary intellectual divested
of a social function, he came to see society's poverty, the decay of tradition
which has led to a "new barbarism."64 Indeed, from the clippings, fragments
and left-overs of what he ironically called "cultural wealth" he was able to
read the sign of the times; thus, the most heterogeneous elements point to
present poverty and coming catastrophes: the experience of human impo-
tence in technological warfare, glass architecture, Scheerbarth's novel
Lesebandio, figures by Klee and verses by Brecht.65 In his own writings,
however, these fragments are given organization by the messianic hope for an
end of history. In the light of this faith mediated by the Jewish tradition, even
a figure like Mickey Mouse, which might appear as a prototype of the modem
lack of tradition, becomes the pledge of another undistorted world.
"Benjamin," Lukics writes, "thus sees quite clearly that the contradiction
between allegory and symbol... cannot in the last analysis be a product--
whether spontaneous or conscious--of the aesthetic formulation itself, but is
fed from deeper sources: from the necessary attitude of people toward the
reality in which they live, in which their activities develop or are inhibited in
their development."66 This sentence is not only true of the poetic praxis which

it intendedBenjamin
Benjamin. to describe;
had it is also
been applicable
forced to leadtothe
thelife
theorists Luk.cs and
of a destitute intel-
lectual beginning with the impoverishment of his parents through inflation
and continuing during his life in exile. By this dispossession and the necessity
to sell his literary production as a commodity, he experienced solidarity with

64. Benjamin, "Erfahrung und Armut," Illuminationen, p. 314.

65. Op.cit., p. 317 f.
66. Lukics, Die Eigenart des Aesthetischen, 2, p. 763.

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 26 NEW GERMAN CRITIQUE

the oppressed and became a revolutionary thinker. Nonetheless, this very

insight into the societal role of the intellectual prevented him from identifying
unconditionally with the proletariat. He was conscious, after all, that his
"little writing factory" was located right in the center of bourgeois Berlin. He
wrote to Scholem in a metaphoric and lightly ironic style: "Where are my
production facilities located? They are located - and I don't have the slightest
illusion about it--in Berlin-West-West-West so to speak. Not only do the
most advanced civilization and the 'most modern' culture belong to my
private comforts, they are in part the means of my production. That means
that it isn't within my power to move my production facilities to Berlin-East or
Berlin-North."67 Thus the destruction and self-annihilation of bourgeois
society in Germany in the 1920s and early 1930s and in France during the
collapse of the Third Republic robbed him not only of material means of
subsistence, but also of the moral foundations of his production. Lukacs'
situation was entirely different. Although judging by his social origins he too
should be located in Budapest-West-West-West, to use Benjamin's image, he
placed more value on his political solidarity with the proletariat than on his
origins in the bourgeoisie and remained a Party member despite forced self-
criticism. Because he was spared the experience of being a social outcast, the
fundamental contradiction between the social influences upon his own
writing and the political praxis of the proletariat was not a problem. For him,
Marxism became paradoxically a means both to preserve bourgeois realism,
the "great tradition" and, perhaps, for himself a bourgeois life style68 and to
carry them into a new era. For Benjamin, in contrast, Marxism served to put
all these things into question.
In this connection, Lukics' claim of absoluteness for his aesthetics should
and can be relativized on the basis of its own principles: in a society which has
repressed its own ties with tradition through an excess of topical information,
Lukics' theory and the classical heritage which it preserves become
dysfunctional. Instead Benjamin's method appears more useful; to recon-
struct history from a single thoroughly understood moment and thus
transform it.

67. Benjamin, Briefe (to Scholem, April 17, 1931), p. 531.

68. Hans Dieter Bahr, "Zuversicht statt Hoffnung, Ein Besuch bei Georg Lukics," Der
Monat, 18/209 (1966), 72.

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