legitimacy of Expressionism, ideologically as a protest against the imperialist war and artistically as a response to the crises of a transitional epoch, when the cultural universe of the bourgeoisie was disintegrating, while that of the revolutionary proletariat was still inchoate. Finally, Bloch sought to acquit Expressionism of the recurrent charges of elitism and cultural nihilism, by stressing its latent humanism and the interest shown by its exponents in popular, traditional forms of art and decoration. Lukács remained unmoved. In answer to Bloch’s reflections on the fragmentary character of contemporary social experience, he insisted that capitalism formed a unitary whole, and most visibly at precisely those moments of crisis that prompted Bloch to speak of fragmentation. The characteristic subjectivism of Expressionist art was a denial of this cardinal truth and a repudiation of the objective of all valid art, the faithful reflection of the real. Furthermore, he argued, ‘popularity’ in art implied much more than the idiosyncratic enthusiasms of the Expressionists. Authentically popular art was distinguished by its affirmation of the most progressive experience of the nation, and by its close ties with realism, an aesthetic form that was truly accessible to ‘the people’.
Few will dissent from Bloch’s comments on his adversary’s critical methods. Lukács’s normal procedure was to construct an ideal type of what he took to be the ideological substrate of the works in question; these were then judged collectively, in the light of his own politico-ideological positions. The results of this were often grave conflations and reductions, and sometimes, when he did venture to analyse individual works, sheer blindness – as Adorno, unconstrained by feelings of friendship as Bloch may well have been, later showed. This difference of procedure was not simply technical. For Lukács, literary history composed an ordered and univocal past whose meaning and value were fixed by the wider history that determined it; the tradition handed down to the present by the ‘progressive’ epochs of the past was a set of compelling norms, a mortmain that literary legatees must honour on pain of disinheritance. For Bloch, on the other hand, this history was the Erbe, a reservoir in which nothing was ever simply or definitively ‘past’, less a system of precepts than a sum of possibilities. Thus, no work was simply replaceable by another, by virtue of its ideological exchange-value, or wholly to be discounted because of its divergence from this or that aesthetic canon. The appropriate focus of a criticism so motivated was the individual art-work, the notorious blind spot of Lukácsian criticism. At the same time, however, it should be said that Lukács’s procedure was also part of the greater coherence and ambition of his work, which produced, as no other contemporaneous oeuvre did, the elements of a systematic history of prose narrative and a sustained account of the relations between ideology and literary form – his Historical Novel, written around the same time as the rejoinder to Bloch, is perhaps the strongest example.
The pivotal issue of the exchange – the relationship between Expressionist art and social reality – is not easily arbitrated. Bloch’s defence of Expressionism avoided direct confrontation with the aesthetic premisses of Lukács’s attack. Circumventing his opponent’s assumption that the proper function of art was to portray objective reality, in organic and concrete works from which all heterogeneous material, and especially conceptual statement, was excluded, Bloch chose instead to insist on the historical authenticity of the experience that underlay Expressionism. It was thus left open to Lukács simply to remind him that the subjective impression of fragmentation was theoretically groundless, and to conclude that Expressionism, as an art that typically misrepresented the real nature of the social whole, was invalid. The effect of Bloch’s démarche was to distract Lukács’s attention, and his own, from one of the most crucial issues in the exchange between them. Driven by the ‘impressionistic’ character of Bloch’s defence to emphasize the unity of the social whole, Lukács failed to register its essential point: that this unity was irreducibly contradictory. In this way, an opportunity to debate the problems of the artistic presentation of contradiction – the absent context of Bloch’s remarks on montage, and a stubborn crux in Lukács’s realist aesthetics – was missed.
The explicit politico-cultural context of the exchange was the Popular Front. It may be said, indeed, that it represented one of the high points of popular-frontist cultural debate in that period. But it should also be noted that both essays are weakest at precisely that point. If Lukács was right to point out that Bloch’s catalogue of Expressionism’s popular interests and debts was quite arbitrary, and that modernism in general was objectively elitist and thus estranged from ‘the people’ in every practical sense, it seems no less clear that his own invocations of national popular traditions, especially those of Germany, were at best strained and at worst vapid. The problems of defining a ‘popular’ literary practice were not necessarily entirely intractable, as the example of Brecht was to show. However, final judgment of the rival theses of Bloch and Lukács in the matter should probably be referred to a wider enquiry into the cultural and political limits of popular frontism itself.4 In that perspective, the roles of the two men in the period would probably be revealed in yet another light. For, despite the lamentable conclusion of Lukács’s essay – so far below the level of his main argument, and so symptomatic of the administrative tone of official culture within the Comintern during the Popular Front – it would be a mistake to assume that Bloch was freer than Lukács from the worst deformation of the time. In fact, it was Bloch in Czechoslovakia who volunteered fulsome affidavits for the Moscow trials, complete with the official tales of Nazi-Japanese plots in the Bolshevik Party, at the very same time that he was resisting the campaign against Expressionism;5 while Lukács in the USSR, undeceived, avoided the subject wherever he could – compromising himself far less seriously. The real history of the epoch affords no comfort to facile retrospective alignments, in either aesthetics or politics.
It is excellent that people should be starting to argue about this again. Not so long ago such a thing seemed unthinkable; the Blue Rider1 was dead. Now we hear voices invoking its memory once more, and not only with reverence. It is almost more important that there are people who can get so worked up over a movement long since past, as if it still existed and were standing in their way. Expressionism assuredly does not belong to the present; yet can it be that it still shows signs of life?
Ziegler has represented it as at most a haunting memory in the minds of a few elderly people.2 Such people were once flushed with the zeal of youth; now they declare their allegiance to the classical heritage, but still suffer from the after-effects of their earlier beliefs. Benn – a particularly striking exponent of Expressionism – ended up in Fascism. Ziegler observes his evolution and concludes: ‘Such a development was inevitable. The other Expressionists were simply too illogical to arrive at the same goal. Today we can clearly see what sort of a phenomenon Expressionism was and where it leads, if followed to its logical end; it leads to Fascism.’
The irritation recently provoked by the Expressionists is thus not simply private; it also has a cultural-political aspect, an anti-Fascist dimension. The Dawn of Mankind3 turned out to be one of the preconditions of Hitler. Unfortunately for Ziegler, just a few weeks before his research into the antecedents of Fascism was published, Hitler completely failed to recognize them in his Munich speech and at the exhibition there.4 Indeed, seldom has the absurdity of a false deduction, a hurried negative judgement been so swiftly and so strikingly demonstrated.
But was the absurdity demonstrated absolutely, in such a way to persuade us today? To concur with Hitler in his denunciation of Expressionism must have been a shock to Ziegler, for such a coincidence of views would be lethal to any man. Yet the charlatan in Munich might have had his reasons (though what it is hard to see) for covering the tracks of Fascism. So if we are to get to the heart of the matter, we should not focus on Ziegler’s chronological misfortune, or even on his article itself, but instead direct our attention to the prelude to the whole discussion cited by Leschnitzer
