Theodor Adorno - Aesthetics and Politics

The conflict between Ernst Bloch and Georg Lukcs over expressionism in 1938 forms one of the most revealing episodes in modern German letters. Its resonance is in part due to the criss-crossing of intellectual evolution and political destiny between its two protagonists. The main outlines of the career of Lukcs are now well-known in the Anglo-Saxon world; those of his intimate friend and exact contemporary Bloch less so. Born in Ludwigshafen in the Rhineland in 1885, the son of a railway official, Bloch was educated in Bavaria at Wurzburg and Munich. He soon displayed polymathic gifts, studying philosophy, physics and music. He first met Lukcs when in his early twenties, at a soire of Georg Simmels in Berlin, and later during a visit to Budapest. However, it was in the period of their common residence in Heidelberg, from 1912 to 1914, that the two men were drawn together into an intense philosophical partnership. Paradoxically, in view of their later development, it was Bloch who essentially influenced Lukcs towards serious study of Hegel, while it was Lukcs who directed Bloch towards Christian mysticism, especially the work of Kierkegaard and Dostoievsky. Russia on the eve of the revolution held a magnetic interest for the two men, together with others in Max Webers circle at Heidelberg at the time. The onset of the First World War marked their first divergence: Lukcs answered the call-up in Hungary, to the incomprehension of Bloch whose much more radical rejection of the war took him to Switzerland and a form of revolutionary defeatism. However, even four years later, Lukcs was still suggesting to Bloch that they collaborate together on an Aesthetic, with Bloch contributing to it on music. Blochs first major work, Der Geist der Utopie (1918), a wild synthesis of religio-apocalyptic and proto-socialist ideas, contained ardent tributes to his friend.

The philosophical trajectory of the two men now increasingly separated, as Lukcs exalted the realism of the later Hegel and Bloch defended the irrationalist reaction of Schopenhauer to it. The Nazi seizure of power drove them from Germany. Bloch went to Prague, Lukcs to Moscow. Their responses to the victory of fascism soon proved to be sharply contrasted in emphasis. Blochs book Erbschaft dieser Zeit, published in exile in 1934, took the form of a kaleidoscopic set of aphoristic reflections and evocations from the quotidian and cultural life of Germany in the twenties. It sought to understand the elements of genuine protest however irrational their guise in the revolt of the German petty-bourgeoisie that had been captured by fascism. To extricate these and to win the pauperized petty-bourgeois masses over to the working-class was, he argued, as important a task for the revolution in Germany as the conquest of the peasantry had been in Russia. Lukcs, on the other hand, had from 1931 onwards at a time of extreme Third Period sectarianism in the Comintern been developing literary positions that anticipated the cultural policies of the Popular Front period. Their main watchwords were to be: reverence for the classical heritage of the Enlightenment, rejection of any irrationalist contaminations of it, assimilation of modernist trends in literature to irrationalism, identification of irrationalism with fascism. After the installation of the Nazi dictatorship, Lukcss first major essay was a scathing requisitory of Expressionism as a phenomenon within German culture, published in the journal Internationale Literatur in January 1934.

In it, he argued that Wilhelmine Germany, increasingly a society of parasitic rentiers, had been dominated by philosophies (Neo-Kantianism, Machism, Vitalism) that conjured away the connections between ideology and economics or politics, preventing any perception or critique of imperialist society as a whole. Expressionism had been a literary reflection of that obfuscation. Its creative method was a search for essences pursued through stylization and abstraction. While the Expressionists professed to attain the kernel of reality, they merely gave vent to their own passions, in a subjectivism that verged on the solipsistic, since words were used not referentially but only expressively. Politically, the Expressionists had opposed the War; while in other respects their confusions were a kind of cultural analogue of the political ideology of the Independent Socialists (USPD). The Expressionists voiced a general hostility to the bourgeois, but they were unable to locate bourgeois vices in any particular class. Thus they could discern capitalist symptoms in workers, and could postulate an eternal conflict, beyond mere class struggle, between bourgeois and non-bourgeois. The latter were seen as an elite that should rule the nation, an illusion that eventually led to fascism.