Bloch was educated in Bavaria at Wurzburg and Munich. He soon displayed polymathic gifts, studying philosophy, physics and music. He first met Lukács when in his early twenties, at a soirée of Georg Simmel’s 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 Lukács towards serious study of Hegel, while it was Lukács who directed Bloch towards Christian mysticism, especially the work of Kierkegaard and Dostoievsky.1 Russia on the eve of the revolution held a magnetic interest for the two men, together with others in Max Weber’s circle at Heidelberg at the time. The onset of the First World War marked their first divergence: Lukács 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, Lukács was still suggesting to Bloch that they collaborate together on an Aesthetic, with Bloch contributing to it on music. Bloch’s first major work, Der Geist der Utopie (1918), a wild synthesis of religio-apocalyptic and proto-socialist ideas, contained ardent tributes to his friend.
After the war, Lukács joined the Hungarian Communist Party, fought for the Commune, and then worked in exile as a party organizer and Marxist theorist within the Third International throughout the twenties. Bloch, by contrast, did not join the KPD in Germany, remaining a heterodox sympathizer rather than enlisted militant – herald of a revolutionary romanticism that he was never to disavow. Bloch, too, was much closer to experimental and esoteric literary circles in Weimar Germany.2 The philosophical trajectory of the two men now increasingly separated, as Lukács 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, Lukács to Moscow. Their responses to the victory of fascism soon proved to be sharply contrasted in emphasis. Bloch’s 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. Lukács, 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, Lukács’s 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.
It was these antithetical interventions by Bloch and Lukács, immediately after the victory of Nazism, that form the background to the exchange below. In 1935 the Comintern switched to the Popular Front strategy. In July, the International Writers Congress for the Defence of Culture in Paris approved a decision to create a German literary journal in exile, as a forum for anti-fascist writers and critics. The three formal editors were intended to reflect a representative spectrum of opinion: Bertolt Brecht, a Marxist without official party affiliation, Willi Bredel of the KPD, and Leon Feuchtwanger, a bourgeois admirer of the USSR. The journal was published from Moscow and since none of these writers was on the spot for long, their contribution and influence varied notably. Feuchtwanger showed the greatest enthusiasm, while Brecht remained luke-warm, confining his own contributions largely to poems and extracts from his plays. After staying in Moscow for six months, Bredel left for the Spanish Civil War. Effective control was thus exercised by Fritz Erpenbeck, a journalist and actor who had been active in Piscator’s theatre. His views tallied in all essentials with those of Lukács.
Once controversial, Lukács’s views had meanwhile been steadily gaining in influence and in 1937, some two years after the Seventh World Congress of the Comintern, a coordinated assault on German Expressionism was launched in Das Wort. The signal for it was given by Alfred Kurella – a disciple of Lukács who was later to rise to prominence in the DDR – with a violent attack on the heritage of Expressionism, manifestly inspired by Lukács’s long essay three years before. Kurella’s article provoked a flood of replies, only some of which could be published. Among those to appear were contributions by former Expressionists like Wangenheim, Leschnitzer and most importantly, Herwarth Walden – who, as the editor of Der Sturm (1910–32) had played a key role in publicizing the works of the Expressionists, as well as those of foreign schools like Cubism. Other essays were written by associates of Brecht like Johannes Eisler, and a number of other defenders of modernism, including Bela Balazs. The most trenchant rejoinder, however, came from Bloch. Dismissing Kurella, he now directly engaged with Lukács as the source of the current polemics against Expressionism. It was his essay which brought Lukács himself into the fray, with a lengthy reply.
Why did Expressionism excite so intense a debate in the German emigration? Expressionism as a movement had flourished from about 1906 to the early twenties. It had been composed of a series of small groups complexly inter-related and extending over the visual arts, music and literature. Die Brücke and Der Blaue Reiter were essentially pre-war phenomena, though of a number of their artists survived into the thirties. Most of the leading poets, however, had died during or even before the war (Heym, Stadler, Trakl, Stramm), or had turned away from Expressionism (Werfel, Benn, Döblin). Its last major achievements were the retrospective anthology of poems, Menschheitsdämmerung (1920) and the plays of Toller and Kaiser. If the normal definitions are slightly extended, Expressionism may lay claim to Karl Kraus’s The Last Days of Mankind and the early works of Bertolt Brecht. A number of factors determined the demise of the movement. Among them was the War, which the Expressionists had at first prophesied and then opposed, and whose end rendered them superfluous. A profound disillusionment followed when their League of Nations dream of a new mankind was exploded. Expressionism was also upstaged by more ‘radical’ movements like Dada and Surrealism, while in Germany the anti-revolutionary mood and cynical ‘realism’ of Neo-Objectivity (Neue Sachlichkeit) made their idealism look naively theatrical. Finally, the Nazi take-over drove the survivors into silence, exile or imprisonment. Yet, although it had petered out in such failure, Expressionism had memorably and indisputably represented the first German version of modern art. The arguments between Bloch and Lukács and their respective allies over its fate were thus essentially a contest over the historical meaning of modernism in general. Bloch’s plea for Expressionism started with an effective counter-attack against Lukács’s remoteness from the actual productions of the movement, especially in the field of painting, where the most durable achievements of Expressionism (Marc had long been admired by Bloch)3
