Sheppard1995 PDF

J European Studies, xxv (1995), 241-282
241- Printed m England
Georg Lukacs, Wilhelm Worringer and German

1
Expressionism
RICHARD SHEPPARD* University of Oxford
Georg von Lukacs, or Georg Lukacs as he was officially known since

about his thirty-third birthday, wrote three essays on Expressionism.’
The first is extremely well known and has been very influential; the
second is almost unknown, not least because it exists only in Russian
and Hungarian; and the third essay has been discussed at length
because it forms the core contribution to the ’Expressionism Debate’
which was conducted in the pages of Das Wort (The Word) in Moscow
1937-1938.3 But to date, no-one has tried to assess what Lukacs really
knew about Expressionism and the part it played over the years in
helping him develop his own theory of art. This is true even of the
two best-researched biographical works on Lukacs.4 Kadarkay’s
authoritative book devotes two pages to the problem (336-8),
referring simply to Lukacs’s ’intemperate attacks on Expressionism’
(336), and does not list a single Expressionist in its index apart from
Johannes R. Becher. Sziklai’s detailed study of Lukacs’s years in the
Soviet Union discusses the first and third essays (182-3 and 233-8),
but without going into the empirical basis of their critique. But
neither even mentions Wilhelm Worringer, an aesthetic theoretician
who, as we shall see, was an important early influence on Lukacs and
came to be closely linked in his mind with Expressionism and all that
it stood for.
This gap in the research is not surprising, for only a selection of
LukAcs’s letters have been published, covering the years 1902-1920,~
and Lukacs himself was extremely reticent about his own biography
until the very last years of his life - a fact which makes the two
studies referred to above all the more valuable and impressive.
Indeed, it was only in 1971, a few months before his death on 4 June,
that he began to dictate notes for a projected autobiography and, in
March-May of that year, recorded a series of interviews with Istvdn
Ebrsi and Erzsebet Vezer on the basis of those notes.6So it is entirely
appropriate that in his copy of Franz Blei’s In Memoriam Oscar Wilde
*
Address for correspondence: Dr Richard Sheppard, Magdalen College, Oxford
OX1 4AU.
0047-2441/95/2503-0241 $5.00 ~ 1995 Richard Sadler Ltd
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242
(see below), he should have put a line against the following
epigram:
’Die Kunst zu offenbaren, den Kiinstler zu verbergen - das ist das
Ziel der Kunst’ (’To reveal the art, to conceal the artist - that is the
goal of art’) (85). Nevertheless, a large number of Lukacs’s writings
are now readily available in English, German and Hungarian, some
as part of his Collected Works (see note 2) and some as separata. And
in Spring 1993, I was able to examine Lukics’s library which,
although part of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, is still located
in his former flat in Budapest’s Belgrad rakpart 2. From these sources,
it is possible to arrive at a much clearer picture of Lukacs’s
relationship with Expressionism.
Periodization
The results of my investigations are set out below, but first we need
to be clear about the eight main phases of Lukdcs’s life when he
came, or could have come, directly or indirectly, in contact with the
Expressionists and their work:’
(i) Berlin: February 1910 - February 1911. After this period, when
he studied under Georg Simmel, he travelled extensively in
Italy and France and spent time in Budapest. Here, he
published his two-volume History of the Development of Modern
Drama in Hungarian (Werke 15, 1981). This work had been
completed in 1908 and its first two chapters accepted as
Lukdcs’s doctorate at the University of Budapest in 1909.
(ii) Heidelberg: c. May 1912 - Autumn 1918, with periods in

Budapest October 1915 - July 1916, when he served as a
military mail censor, and 1917, when
8
he participated in Bela
Balazs’s Free School of Humanities.8
(iii) Vienna: Autumn 1919 (following Horthy’s overthrow of Bela

Kun’s Soviet Republic in which Lukacs had participated as the
People’s Commissar for Education) - March 1930. During this
period, he was heavily involved with the Hungarian
Communist Party until October 1929 when, according to
Kadarkay (295), he was expelled from the Party and
summoned to Moscow as a result of his so-called ’Blum-
Theses’ of 1928 (Werke 2, 697-722) in which he had outlined his
heretical concept of a ’democratic dictatorship’.
(iv) Moscow: March 19309 (to take part in the Second Party
Conference) - Summer 1931.10 During this period, he worked
under David Rjasanow in the Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute.
243
(v) Berlin: Summer 1931 - March/April 1933.11 During this period,

he was involved in the controversies splitting the Bund
proletarisch-revolutionärer Schriftsteller (League of Proletarian-
Revolutionary Writers (BPRS)).
(vi) Moscow: April 1933- October 1941. During this period, he was
centrally concerned with working out his ideas on Critical
Realism and completed the MS of Der junge Hegel (The Young
Hegel) (Werke 8).
(vii) Tashkent and Kazan: October 1941 - July 1942; Moscow July
1942 - late August 1945.this period, he defended Der
During
junge Hegel as a doctoral dissertation at the University of
Moscow (December 1942) and completed the MS of Die
Zerstörung der Vernunft (The Destruction of Reason) (Werke 9).
(viii) Budapest: December 1944 toDuring this period, he
June 1971.
was a member of Imre Nagy’s revolutionary government
October - November 1956; deported to Roumania until 10
April 1957 and expelled from the Hungarian Socialist Workers’
[i.e. Communist] Party (reinstated 1969). During the early part
of this period he worked primarily on his Asthetik (Aesthetics)
(Werke 11 and 12), and in the latter part on his Ontologie des
gesellschaftlichen Seins (Ontology of Societal Being) (Werke 13 and
14), which he completed shortly before his death.
Expressionist texts and letters relating to Expressionism to be

found in Lukics’s Library
In the light of the above chronology, it would be a gross and obvious
simplification to suggest that Lukacs’s knowledge of Expressionism
can be deduced solely from the extant contents of his library, large
though it is. As we shall see, he must have lost books and letters
during his various moves, at least four of which must have happened
in considerable haste. He may have borrowed Expressionist texts
from friends and libraries; he must have read about Expressionism in
newspapers and journals; and, given his enduring interest in the
theatre, he must have seen productions of at least some Expressionist
plays since he mentions and even discusses items in his published
work which are not present in his library. Nevertheless, a list of the
extant relevant holdings is extremely useful for our discussion since a
lot of Lukdcs’s books are marked with Russian stamps (indicating
that he acquired them during one of his two periods in Russia).
Moreover, some are marked in pencil - either heavily or lightly, the
inference being that the lighter markings, often marginal crosses
244 II
rather than marginal linings or underlinings, came from the hand of

the older Lukacs.
Appendix A lists 15 letters to and from writers connected with
Expressionism in Lukacs’s Nachlafi, and Appendix B lists 42 books in
the Lukacs library by Expressionist writers or on Expressionism.
The principal annotations

In the works listed in Appendix B, the most extensive and significant
annotations occur in Abstraktion und Einffihlung (Abstraction and
Empathy), Die Erhebung (The Uprising) and Menschheitsd41nlnerung
(Twilight of Humanity). These annotations are listed in detail in
Appendix C.
(a) Abstraktion und Einffihlung had first appeared as a dissertation in
Berne in 1907; the first and second German book editions appeared in
1908 and 1909 respectively; and the third German edition,
supplemented by the appendix ’Von Transzendenz und Immanenz in
der Kunst’ (’On Transcendence and Immanence in Art’) appeared in
1911. The copy in Luk6cs’s library is a later, unaltered printing of this
third edition. But when Lukacs wrote GV in the early 1930s (see
below), he almost certainly used the second edition, since he gives
the date of Abstraktion und Einffihlung there as 1909 and cites two
passages from that edition (allegedly from 16-18 but actually from
17-18) which would appear on 23-4 of the third and subsequent
editions. Precisely the same edition and passages are cited in FIN
(173) - although by the time he wrote that essay (see below), he could
well have copied them from GV. Moreover, as one of the footnotes in
FIN involves the date 1974 (179), it is not clear how much of the
footnoting was done by the editors of Ei after Lukacs’s death or by
Lukacs himself when writing the original essay. Then again, the two
passages cited in GV (’Je weniger [...]erstrebt wird’ and ’bei dem
primitiven Menschen [...]der primitive Mensch’) are not annotated
in the copy in Lukacs’s library. All this probably means that Lukacs
lost his original copy of Worringer’s treatise by the early 1930s and
acquired a new copy at a later date. But when? Lukacs cites
Abstraktion und Einfiihlung verbatim only once during his Moscow
years (FIN, 173); most of the annotations in the extant copy were very
clearly made by Lukacs while he was working on his Asthetik after
1945; and it contains no Russian stamp. All of which would suggest
that he acquired the extant copy after 1945. But on the other hand,
some of the annotations
give the impression of having been made by
a younger hand; and the use of a
popular/colloquial verb form in
one of the marginalia (see Appendix C, note 2 ) indicates that Lukacs
245
was reading Abstraktion und Einftihlung when he was thinking and
speaking in colloquial Russian - i.e. during his period in Russia.
Moreover, the absence of a Russian stamp does not necessarily mean
that Lukacs did not acquire any given book while in the Soviet Union
since at least one book which Lukacs definitely acquired in the Soviet
Union, the Dada Almanach (Appendix B, note 2), bears no Russian
stamp. And just to add a final level of confusion, in FIN (174 and
note 6), Lukacs quotes from and refers to Paul Ernst’s Ein Credo (A
Creed) (183-7), i.e. to precisely that passage referred to in a marginal
note on the extant copy of Abstraktion und Einftihlung (Appendix C,
note 2)! So did Lukacs add that marginal note at an early date, when
he was writing FIN, or at a later date, remembering and referring
back to a passage which had been relevant to his earlier essay? The
evidence can be interpreted in several ways, but on balance, Lukacs
probably acquired his extant copy of Abstraktion und Einfühlung either
very late on in his stay in the Soviet Union or very soon after his
return to Hungary in 1945.
Annotations to Abstraktion und Einfühlung are listed in Appendix
C(a).
(b) Die Erhebung. Pp. 46-7 (Franz Werfel, ’Gesang einer Frau’ [’Song
of a Woman’]); pp. 56-7 (Ernst Toller, ’Totentanz’ [’Dance of Death’],
from Die Wandlung [The Transformation]); and pp. 172-3 (Paul
Kornfeld, Himmel und Holle [Heaven and Hell], Act IV) are interleaved
with three torn-out scraps of newspaper from the Deutsche Zentral-
Zeitung, the German-language newspaper produced in Moscow by
Pravda for emigris from 1926 to 12 July 1939. One of these refers to an
event of 11 October [no year]. Copies of this newspaper exist outside
Russia only for the years 1933 to 1939 and the articles involving the
relevant scraps are not contained in them. Thus, it is likely that one, if
not all three, scraps date either from October 1930 (when Lukacs was
in the Soviet Union for the first time), or, more probably, from
October 1932 (when Lukacs was preparing GV).
Annotations to Die Erhebung are listed in Appendix C(b).
(c) Menschheitsdämmerung. Pp. 4-5 (Johannes R. Becher, ’Verfall’

[’Decay’]; pp. 28-9);12 pp. 34-5 (Franz Werfel, ’Fremde sind wir auf
der Erde Alle’ [’We are all Strangers on this Earth’], c.f. GV, 138); pp.
36-7 (Albert Ehrenstein, ’Ich bin des Lebens und des Todes mfde’ [’I
am Weary of Life and Death’], c.f. GV, 138-9); pp. 56-7
(Georg Heym,
’Die Morgue’ [’The Mortuary’]) and pp. 246-7 (Johannes R. Becher,
’Hymne an Rosa Luxemburg’ [’Hymn to Rosa Luxemburg’]) are
interleaved with strips of paper, some of which have Russian
printing on them. Again, given the two cross-references to GV, it
246
seems probable that Lukacs was reading Menschheitsd41nlnerung
when writing GV in late 1932.
On p.309, the Index, Lukacs has put a tick against the titles of the
following poems: all 14 by Becher; 16 out of 17 by Daubler (not
’Dammerung’ [’Twilight’], p.121); 18 out of 19 by Hasenclever (not
’Begegnung’ [’Encounter’], p. 105); all 14 by Else Lasker-Schiiler; 10
out of 11 by Schickele (not ’Ode an die Engel’ [’Ode to the Angels’],
p. 156); 12 out of 13 by Stramm (not ’Traum’ [’Dream’], p. 126) and all
27 by Werfel. Correspondingly, on pp. 310-17, ticks are to be found
against the names of the seven poets just named. What these ticks
signify is not entirely clear since Lukacs’s criticisms of Werfel and
Hasenclever indicate that they do not necessarily imply approval.
Rather, they probably mean either that Lukacs liked the poems (as in
the case of Becher) or that the poems were useful to his argument
against Expressionism - either in a positive or a negative way.
Other annotations to Menschheitsddmmerung are listed in Appendix
C(c).
Lukics’s knowledge of Expressionism

(i) Before late 1911
Lukacs’s history of modern drama was written too early for him to
have known anything about Expressionist drama and the very
concept of Expressionism began to gain a limited currency only after
he had left Berlin. 13 Nevertheless, judging from his early
correspondence, he had no contact with, let alone knowledge of the
embryonic avant-garde circles in Berlin. These included the Neue Club
(New Club), several of whose members also attended Simmel’s
lectures, which went public in November 1909 and staged four of its
Neopathetische Cabarets during Lukdcs’s year in Berlin,’4 and the
groups which were forming around Herwarth Walden’s Der Sturm
(Storm) and Franz Pfemfert’s Die Aktion (Action) (the first issues of
which appeared on 3 March 1910 and 20 February 1911 respectively).
Then again, by the time Salomo Friedlaender (Mynona) wrote to
Lukacs on 12 July 1911, thanking him for sending him an off-print of
his essay on the ’Metaphsyics of Tragedy’ (BW, 288) which Lukacs
had just published in Volume 2, Number 1 of Logos, Friedlaender had
published over 20 items in Der Sturm or Die Aktion under his own name
or pseudonymously. But when Lukacs replied (BW, 231-3), his letter
indicates that he knew Friedlaender only as the author of Friedrich
Nietzsche: Eine intellektuelle Biographie (Friedrich Nietzsche: An Intellectual
Biography) (Leipzig, 1911 ), and was not familiar with his contributions
to the two major Expressionist periodicals, most of which were
reviews or ’Grotesques’ rather than philosophical pieces.
247
On 10 December 1910, Lukacs described Paul Cassirer’s and

Wilhelm Herzog’s literary magazine Pan (the first number of which
had appeared on I November 1910 and in which only minor pieces
by Schickele, Herzog and Ludwig Rubiner had appeared by the time
of Lukdcs’s letter) as ’not particularly distinguished’ when writing to
his friend, the art critic Leo Popper (1886-1911) (BW, 174). During the
same period, Lukacs also corresponded with Franz Blei, who is often
numbered among the Expressionists and one of whose books may
already have been in Lukacs’s possession. But he did so not because
Blei was connected with the literary avant-garde in Munich (where
Blei was living in 1910), but because he was a potential publisher for
Lukacs’s collection of essays Die Seele und die Formen (The Soul and its
Forms) (written 1907-1910) (BW, 190-1 and 196).
Nevertheless, it seems very clear that the early work of Wilhelm
Worringer was extremely important to Lukacs during this early
period, even though Kadarkay does not accord him a single mention.
Lukacs thought sufficiently well of Worringer’s relatively unknown
book Lukas Cranach (1908) to send a copy to Popper in late
October/early November 1910 (BW, 158). And when Egon Fleischel
and Co. published Die Seele und die Formen in late 1911, Worringer’s
unpublished letter to Lukacs of 11 December 1911 implies very
clearly that Lukacs had specifically asked his publishers to send
Worringer a free copy. As has been argued above, Lukacs almost
certainly owned the second edition of Worringer’s seminal work
Abstraktion und Einfuhlung (1909). Now, although Lukdcs never
mentions Worringer’s name once in Die Seele und die Formen and
although Lukacs’s ideas on aesthetics as those are set out there are far
removed from Worringer’s aesthetic relativism, being essentialist,
platonic even, there is no mistaking Worringer’s impact on Lukacs’s
early terminology, especially in the three essays written in 1910.15 Not
only do the typically Worringerian terms ’Form’ and ’Abstraktion’
occur with considerable frequency, but in passages like the following,
Lukacs seems to be offering a slightly adapted version of Worringer’s
ideas on abstract geometricity:
’Du sagtest: zwischen Saulen sind diese Fresken gemalt, und wenn die
Geb5rden ihrer Menschen auch marionettenhaft starr sind und
jeder Gesichtsausdruck nur eine Maske ist, so ist dies alles doch
lebendiger, als die Saulen, die die Bilder umrahmen, mit denen
sie eine dekorative Einheit bilden. Ein wenig lebendiger nur,
denn die Einheit muQ erhalten bleiben; aber lebendiger dennoch,
damit die Illusion eines Lebens entstehe [...]Je tiefer die Frage dringt
[...] desto linearer werden die Bilder; in desto weniger Flachen
wird alles zusammengedrdngt; desto blasser und stumpfer glanzend
werden die Farben; desto einfacher der Reichtum und das
248
Vielerlei der Welt; desto maskenhafter der Gesichtsausdruck der
Menschen [...]’ (14).
’You say: these frescos are painted between pillars, and even if the
gestures of the people depicted there are stiff, like those of marionettes,
and every facial expression is only a mask, nevertheless all this is more
full of life than the pillars which frame the pictures. Only slightly more
so, since unity must be preserved; but more full of life for all that so
that the illusion of life may be created [...]The more penetrating the
question [...]the more linear the pictures; everything is compressed
into even fewer plane surfaces; the colours become all the more pallid
and luminously matt; the richness and multiplicity of the world
become all the simpler; the facial expressions of the people become all
the more mask-like [...]’.
Or:
Die grofe Sehnsucht ist immer verschwiegen und tragt die
verschiedensten Masken. Vielleicht ist es gar nicht paradox zu sagen:
die Maske ist ihre Form. Die Maske ist aber auch der grof3e, doppelte
.
Kampf des Lebens: der Kampf um das Erkanntwerden und der Kampf
um das Verhflltbleiben (199).
The Great Yearning is always veiled in silence and wears the most
diverse masks. Perhaps it is not too much of a paradox to say: the mask
is its form. But the mask is also the great, twofold struggle of life: the
struggle to be recognized and the struggle to remain veiled.
For Worringer, strict geometrical form was a means by which non-
Western and pre-modern cultures defended themselves against a
hostile universe. But for the young Lukacs, a high degree of artistic
stylization was a kind of mask which simultaneously pointed to and
concealed intense, difficult and painful inner problems which needed
to be resolved. Hence his question:
Ist es moglich, etwas zu ergreifen, als Wesentliches aus der Form-

Abstraktion, und es so zu ergreifen, daf nicht alles heutige Leben
herausflieQe? Ist es moglich, die morgen vielleicht nicht mehr
bestehenden Farben, den Duft und den Blftenstaub unserer
Augenblicke auf ewige Zeit haltbar zu machen und - wenn auch von
uns selbst unerkannt - sein innerstes Wesen zu greifen? (249)
Is it to grasp hold of something essential out of an abstract

possible
form, and grasp hold of it in such a way that all of its present vitality
does not flow out of it? Is it possible to give permanence for all eternity
to those colours which may not exist tomorrow, to the scent and pollen
of those instants which are ours and - even if we do not realize that we
are doingso - to grasp its innermost essence?
Is it possible, Lukacs is asking, to create works of art which, although
.
249
abstract, mediate a quality which is timeless, essential and reliable?

Lukacs’s implicit essentialism is fundamentally irreconcilable with
Worringer’s semiotic relativism and Lukacs would soon become
aware of this fact and highly critical of Worringer. But at this stage in
his intellectual career, Lukacs was clearly more impressed by their
superficial affinity. As indeed was Worringer, who instantly recognized
himself in Lukacs’s book and wrote its author an ecstatic letter on 29
December 1911 in which he said that Lukacs’s essays had cast him
into a ’trancelike state’ which involved ’Zuerst das Aufgeben der
eigenen Materialitat, das Sichselbstentriicken, [...]und dann das
allmahliche Sichwiederschauen in einer neuen idealen Materialisation
[...]’ (’first the surrender of one’s own materiality, the sense of being
taken outside of oneself, [...]and then the gradual recognition of
oneself once more in a new, ideal materialization’) (BW, 266).
(ii) May 1912 to 1918

c.
Worringer almost certainly retained his importance for Lukacs

during his first year in Heidelberg, and it is quite possible that he
acquired the second edition of Formprobleme der Gotik (Formal
Problems of Gothic Art) which is still in his library as a result of Ernst
Bloch’s recommendation of 31 December 1911 (BW, 267-8). Certainly,
39 pages of that copy carry annotations, most of which are, however,
the lightly-pencilled crosses more typical of the older Lukacs. But
seven of the annotations are more heavily pencilled marginal linings
or underlinings, suggesting a younger hand. So although we cannot
be certain about the date when Lukacs acquired or annotated
Formprobleme, it is interesting to note that two of the seven heavily
lined passages deal with matters which relate very closely to the
passages cited above from Die Seele und die Formen:
[...]lichen Entwicklung von dem Beschw6rungscharakter ganzlich
entbunden ist und sich nun rfckhaltlos dem Leben und seiner
organischen Fflle zuwenden kann. Der Transzendentalismus der
Kunst, der direkte religiose Charakter ihrer Werte hat damit ein Ende
erreicht. Sie wird zu einer idealen Steigerung des Lebens, wo sie
vorher Beschwbrung und Negation des Lebens war (17).
[...]ly development has become completely detached from its function

as a means of conjuration and can now address itself unreservedly to
life and its organic plenitude. With that, the transcendentalism of art,
the unmediatedly religious nature of its values has run its course.
Where previously it had been a means of conjuration and a negation of
life, it now becomes an idealized intensification of life.
And:
[...] auseinander heraus. Wie der Innenraum [einer gotischen
250
Kathedrale] ganz Mystik ist, so ist der Aussenbau ganz Scholastik. Es
ist derselbe Tran- [...](108)
[...]out of one another. Just as the interior space [of a Gothic cathedral]
is all mysticism, so its external structure is all scholasticism. It is the
same tran- [...]
At one level, the first passage deals with the way in which art loses
its transcendental quality during classical periods. But at another, it
suggests that art can, during other periods, be imbued with that
essential, metaphysical quality which was, in Die Seele und die
Formen, the object of ’die grof3e Sehnsucht’ (’the Great Yearning’ - the
title of a chapter of Part III of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra) to which
Lukacs alludes there (199) and which, according to some critics,
informs all his thinking about aesthetics.16 And although the second
passage is about Gothic architecture, it is very close in spirit to
Lukdcs&dquo;s discussion in Die Seele und die Formen (14 and 199) of the
relationship between formal mask and emotional content. In contrast,
the passages marked with a lightly pencilled cross relate more to his
post-1945 critique of Worringer (see below).
However, the fragmentary MS from Lukacs’s Heidelberg period
published posthumously in Werke 16 as Philosophie der Kunst
(Philosophy of Art) (1912-1914) involves a clear move away from
Worringer, largely due to Lukacs’s reading of Kant’s Kritik der
Urteilskraft (Critique of Judgement).&dquo; From the very first page, it is clear
that Lukacs is trying to formulate a normative definition of a work of
art and that the ’fundamental questions posed by Kant’ will form the
basis of his argument. Thus, in the first part of his thesis, Lukacs tries
to establish aesthetics as ’a science in its own right’ (as opposed to a
’propadeutic preparatory stage for metaphysics or the philosophy of
religion’) by seeking out ’such presuppositions [...]as make it possible
for the work of art, their ultimate embodiment of value, to have an
autotelic significance which is purely its own’ (36). Correspondingly,
Worringer’s terminology has disappeared almost entirely, and in the
third part, entitled, significantly, ’Historicity and A-temporality of the
Work of Art’ (151-232), Lukacs explicitly contrasts the ’a-historicism’
of ’all purely aesthetic contemplation of art’ with the ’sociological,
historico-philosophical and relativistic modes’ which typify Riegl,
Wickhoff and Worringer (192). He then criticizes Worringer’s
reduction of ’such heterogeneous phenomena as Eastern and Gothic
art’ to one single principle: that of abstraction (216). Finally, it is
highly revealing to see how, in the second section, Lukacs resolves a
problem which is posed initially in terms that are reminiscent of
Worringer’s account of the generative origins of abstract art:
So entstehen die bildenden Kiinste aus der Verlorenheit des
251
Betrachters und mit ihm der Dinge in einem Raum, der sie ihrem
innersten Wesen fremd und darum feindlich, undurchsichtig und im
Tiefsten unklar umgibt, aus der Ratlosigkeit und Zerrissenheit dieses
Betrachters in einer Welt, in der jedes Ding dem andern vollig
heterogen ist, in der es nur praktisch-abstrakte, reflexive Ausgleiche
zwischen dem Wunsch nach Einheit und Ordnung und der Welt, mit
der man sich auseinander zu setzen [sic] hat, zu geben scheint (127).
Thus, the visual arts are generated from the beholder’s sense that he
and all objects are lost in a space which is, in its innermost being, alien
to them and which encloses them in a manner that is hostile,
impenetrable and profoundly obscure - from this beholder’s sense of
perplexity and inner turmoil in a world where any given object is
completely different from the adjacent object, in which only abstractly
practical and reflexive compromises appear to be possible between the
desire for unity and order and the world with which one has to
grapple and come to terms.
Where Worringer had concluded that geometric-abstract art is
generated in the kind of existential situation described above by
Lukacs as a means of giving people some kind of security, Lukacs
went on to conclude that in such a situation, the artist takes the
dissonant elements into himself, affirms them, thereby gives them
’eine Heimat’ (’a home’) and so catalyses ’ein Reicherwerden ihrer
Einheit’ (’a process which issues in a richer sense of their unity’)
(127-8). Or to put it another way, Lukacs is arguing that the
experience of existential alienation does not necessarily generate de-
centred or abstract works of art, but can, instead, produce an art
which, while remaining centred and representational, is denser,
richer, more complex.
Similarly, the title of two drafts of a lecture, ’Das Formproblem der
Malerei’ (’The Problem of Form in Painting’) (written at about the
same time as Philosophie der Kunst; Werke 17, 229-51 and 277-8) 18
clearly echoes that of Worringer’s second major treatise. Nevertheless,

Lukacs does not mention Worringer there once by name, even
though he discusses in detail the ideas of older aestheticians like von
Hildebrand, Fiedler and Riegl. The nature of the ideal work of art
which Lukacs is trying to adumbrate in this lecture makes it very
clear why this should be so. At one point, Lukacs says that the ideal
work of art ’bedeutet, dag es eine Welt gibt, dag es eine vollkommen
harmonische, in sich abgeschlossene, beglfckende Totalitat gibt. Es
ist eine Art utopischer Welt, die in allem unserer sehnsuchtsvollen,
verlangenden Wirklichkeit entspricht, und zwar das Werk ist [etwas
Konkret-Individuelles]’ (’signifies that there is a world, that there is a
completely harmonious, integrated totality which can induce a state
of happiness. It is a kind of utopian world which corresponds in
252
every respect to the reality of our yearning and desire - indeed, such
a work is [something concrete and individual]’) (233). And at
another, he asserts that all great works of art should be models of a

world ’wo die aufs auf3erst Intensive, auf Ausdruck gerichtete
Menschheit vollkommen ruhig, harmonisch ist’ (’where humanity,
which currently directs its energies towards what is extremely
intense, towards expression, is in a state of total repose and
harmony’) (241). This conception is an extremely long way from
Worringer’s relativist apologia for modes of abstract art which
compensate for a frightening world in which mankind is not at home,
and, incidentally, Kandinsky’s quasi-mystical justification of abstract
art as the image of dynamic, sub-material ’Spirit’. Or in other words,
by late 1913/early 1914, Lukacs had realized that the differences
between his position and that of at least one, and possibly two, of the
foremost theoreticians of Expressionist abstraction were far more
significant than any superficial similarities. Which probably explains
why he never again, as far as is known, corresponded with Worringer.
Lukacs’s move away from Worringer was paralleled during his
Heidelberg period by a marked lack of interest in the art and
literature of the (Expressionist) avant-garde, even though this was
generating much more controversy and attracting much more
attention than it had done during Lukacs’s Berlin period. Twenty
years later, in GV, he would refer dismissively to Kurt Hiller’s Der
Kondor (The Condor), the first anthology of Expressionist poetry
(which Richard Weii3bach published in Heidelberg in late May 1912)
(117). And on two other occasions in the same essay, he would cite
Hiller’s two-volume anthology of prose pieces from 1910-1913, Die
Weisheit der Langenweile (The Wisdom of Tedium), which appeared in
Leipzig in November 1913 (117-18 and 121-2) . But neither of these
texts are in Lukacs’s library, and if he knew of them when they
appeared or even acquired them, he did not think them important
enough to mention them in his writings at the time. By the same
token, he may also have known Ernst Bias’s anthology of
Expressionist poetry Die Straj3en komme ich entlang geweht (I am blown
by the Wind along the Streets), for it appeared under the same imprint
as Der Kondor towards the end of 1912. And after BlaB fled fom
Expressionist Berlin to become a member of the circle around Stefan

George in romantic Heidelberg in Autumn 1912/9 it is quite possible
that Lukacs met him, since it emerges from Marianne Weber’s
biography of her husband, the sociologist Max Weber, that ’the
Hungarian Georg von Lukacz [sic]’2° was a frequent visitor at the
Webers’ home before the Great War and that the literati whom he
would have encountered there most frequently were members of the
George-Circle. Furthermore, Lukacs may have known of BIaQ’s
253
periodical Die Argonauten (The Argonauts), since this first appeared in

Heidelberg in January 1914; continued to appear sporadically until
December 1921; and contained items by Bla6 himself, Blei, Franz
Jung, Carl Sternheim and Werfel. It also included one essay in Spring
1914 by Lukacs’s friend Ernst Bloch.21 But this is speculation, since
Lukacs’s library contains nothing written or edited by Blai3 and
Lukacs never mentions his name once. So if Lukacs did encounter
Blai3, he probably judged him, as he would Hiller, as just another,
insignificant member of the ’Coffee-House Boh~me’ (GV,117).
The few mentions of the contemporary avant-garde to be found in
Lukacs’s letters and writings from his Heidelberg period confirm his
lack of interest. In mid-1911, he had corresponded with Salomo
Friedlaender, the philosopher of ’Indifferenz’ (’Balance amid
Opposites’) (BW, 228-9 and 230-1) and tried to reconcile his own,
increasingly dialectical concept of ’Form’ (’der zur Ewigkeit erloste
Krieg der streitenden Prinzipien’ [’the eternal conflict of warring
principles’]) with Friedlaender’s concept of ’lebendige Indifferenz
der Pole’ (’dynamic balance of polar opposites’) (BW, 230). But
nothing suggests that he followed up that initial interest by reading
Friedlaender’s first major philosophical piece to appear in an
Expressionist journal under his own name. This article, ’Polaritat’
(’Polarity’), was published in Der Sturm during a month, January
1912, when Lukacs was mainly in Florence and Budapest, but also
briefly in Berlin, and it focuses on the concept which not only
underpins Friedlaender’s book on Nietzsche (13-14), but had also
attracted Lukacs’s attention, too. Nor did Lukacs ever correspond
with or refer to Friedlaender in his capacity as the author of
Expressionist ’Grotesques’, the first volume of which, Rosa die schdne
Schutzmanns frau (Rosie, the Policeman’s Beautiful Wife), appeared in
1913. Then again, in April 1913, Lukacs had to write to Paul Ernst to
ask whether this older writer knew anything about Otto Flake (who
had, by then, published six books and numerous articles in avant-
garde periodicals And on 6 February 1917, his attention was first
drawn by Franz Baumgarten to Hiller’s first Ziel-Jahrbuch (The Goal: A
Yearbook) (BW, 393), from which Lukacs would quote in GV but
which he probably had no chance to read when it first came out as it
was rapidly confiscated by the police. Indeed, the only hard
indications that Lukacs knew anything about the contemporary
avant-garde are to be found in his unpublished letters of [1913-1914]
and 21 July 1915 to Franz Blei and a letter of May 1916 to Paul Ernst.23
In his letters to Blei, he indicates that he knows of both the series Der
jüngste Tag (Judgement Day or The Latest / Most Recent Day) and the
periodical Die weiflen Bldtter (White Leaves) as publications which
were receptive to the writings of the young avant-garde (like his
254
friend Bela Balazs). And in his letter to Ernst, he even asked him to
persuade Kurt Wolff to publish his own dialogue ’Von der Armut am
Geiste’ (’On Poverty of Spirit’) in Der jiingste Tag.24
Then again, although Ernst Toller and Lukacs may have come
across one another in Heidelberg in Summer-Autumn 1917 (since
both men frequented the Webers’ house)}5 neither seems to have
made any kind of impression on the other. Lukacs was working on
his Heidelberger Asthetik (Heidelberg Aesthetics) from 1916 to 1918
(Werke 7, 7-228), and Toller, recently arrived from Munich after his
shattering experiences at the Front between March 1915 and May
1916,26 had published nothing literary by this date. Indeed, to the
extent that he was known at all in Heidelberg, it would have been as
the leading member of a group of radical pacifist students calling
itself The Cultural and Political League of German Youth. 27 Consequently,
in Toller’s eyes, Lukacs must have seemed like an unworldly
academic aesthetician who had been fortunate enough to avoid all
but the most token military service; and in Lukacs’s eyes, Toller must
have been simply one more student suffering from shell-shock and
idealism in equal measure. Similarly, Toller attended the second of
the Burg Lauenstein congresses organized by the publisher Eugen
Diederichs in May and September 1917 (and, according to Marianne
Weber, irritated her husband greatly by ’the confused nature of his
political agenda and lack of a sense of reality’ (608-9 and 613)). But
Lukacs, who was getting ready to leave for Munich and Budapest
and who, ironically, would, within eighteen months, find himself in a
revolutionary situation in Budapest which was similar to that of
Toller in Munich, did not (BW, 405). And by the time Lukacs returned
to Heidelberg in early 1918, Toller had long since departed for Berlin
and Munich where, by now a member of the USPD, he helped
organize the anti-war strikes which would earn him his first term of
imprisonment. 28
The Heidelberger Asthetik clinches the argument about Lukdcs’s
early relationship with Expressionism. Throughout its 220 pages, he
never once mentions an Expressionist writer, painter or aesthetician,
being concerned to develop a theory of art based on classical and

Idealist concepts like ’autotelic structure’ (12); ’objectivity which is
ready-made and given’ (26); ’the normative subject of aesthetics’ (53);
’the transcendental basis of immanent experience which both
sustains and structures the pure subjectivity of the aesthetic
experience’ (101); ’the intention of the experiencing subject which is
directed towards an object that is entirely appropriate to the pure act
of experiencing’ (106); ’the Beautiful [... as] the principle which gives
form to the Cosmos’ (139) and ’reconciliation of Nature and Art in
the concept of Beauty’ (192). That is to say, throughout the second
255
half of the War, Lukacs was fighting a rearguard action on behalf of a
set of aesthetic principles derived from Kant and Hegel2’ and based on
the classically Western metaphysics of presence which Expressionist
art and literature, especially that of the pre-1916 period, tended,
nolens volens, to subvert. No wonder then, that Lukics’s terminology
is so impenetrable and his argumentation so serpentine, abstract,
repetitive and hedged around with qualifications. He was trying to
defend an aesthetic ideal which contemporary experience was
rendering indefensible. Thus, it is highly significant that the
fragmentary ’Appendix II’ which the editors publish after the main
body of the text (227-8) should actually imply this by saying:
Die Grundtatsache, die hier den Ausgangspunkt bildet, ist die
Unmoglichkeit einer zugleich einheitlichen, allesumfassenden und
konstitutiven Systematisation der Totalitat der Welt und darum die
Unmoglichkeit einer Stellungnahme zu ihr, die derart beschaffen ist,
daf3 sie alle anderen moglichen Stellungnahmen gewissermaBen in sich
vereinigt oder wenigstens aus sich - restlos und sprunglos - ableitbar
macht (228).
The basic datum-line from which I am starting my deliberations is the
impossibility of making the world as a whole into a coherent system
that is both unified and all-embracing, and, concomitantly, the
impossibility of finding a perspective on that world which is of such a
nature that it, to a certain extent, subsumes and unifies all other
perspectives - or at the very least enables one to derive those other
perspectives from it in a way that precludes any logical breaks or
elements which cannot be accounted for.
In writing this Appendix, Lukacs was, in effect, doing what
Wittgenstein was advising the putative reader of his Tractatus Logico-
Philosophicus to do at almost exactly the same time (see Proposition
6.54). He was throwing away the ladder after he had climbed up it;
transcending his own ideas; or, as we would say today, deconstructing
an aesthetic system whose very tortuousness was its own, implicit
disproof. Thus, his conversion to Communism in 1918, which

Kadarkay aptly describes as occurring ’over the charred ruins of his
youth’s single-minded pursuit of salvation’ (193), can be seen as an
attempt to break out of a cul-de-sac and move in a new, more
defensible direction, but without abandoning that desire for
’Totalitat’ which was so central to his thinking and which he must
have sensed was missing from the work of the contemporary avant-
garde. 31
(iii) Autumn 1919 to March 1930
During the 1920s, when he was living in Vienna, Lukacs’s interest
shifted very obviously from aesthetics to politics. Correspondingly,
256
the most comprehensive bibliography to date31 lists 97 publications
1920-1930, of which only three deal with matters cultural or literary.
Nevertheless, it would not be correct to assume that Lukacs lost
interest in such matters entirely since Hartmann’s bibliography is far
from complete, omitting the many articles on literature, for example,
which Lukacs contributed to the major German communist
newspaper Die rote Fahne (The Red Banner) from 23 April 1922
onwards. 12 But the shift of interest is clear, and it was accompanied
by even less of an interest in the art and literature of Expressionism
than has been registered so far.
During the 1920s, Lukacs may well have acquired the following
books on Expressionism or by Expressionists which are still in his
library: Bahr, Expressionismus (Expressionism); Blei, Das grofie Bestiarium
(The Great Bestiary); the (expanded) second edition of Diebold,
Anarchie im Drama (Drama and Anarchy); Kaiser, Kolportage (Colportage)
Lasker-Schfler, Die gesammelten Gedichte (Collected Poems); von Sydow,
Die deutsche expressionistische Kultur und Malerei (German Expressionist
Culture and Painting); Toller, Der deutsche Hinkemann (Hinkemann the
German) and Die Maschinenstürmer (The Machine-Wreckers); von
Unruh, Ein Geschlecht (One Family); Werfel, Verdi; Wolfenstein, Die
Erhebung, Vol. 1 and Worringer, Die Anfinge der Ta felmalerei (The
Origins of Painting on Wood and Canvas) and Griechentum und Gotik
(Hellenism and Gothic Art), since none of these bears a Russian stamp.
But if he did acquire these books during the 1920s, the quality of his
interest can be gauged from the fact that only Bahr’s and Diebold’s
theoretical works, Wolfenstein’s anthology, Toller’s Maschinensturmer
and Worringer’s Die An fdnge der Tafelmalerei are in any way annotated.
Moreover, as we shall see, the annotations to Die Erhebung almost
certainly come from the early 1930s, when Lukacs was writing GV;
and the ten annotations in Die Anf4nge der Ta felmalerei seem to have
been made in equal proportions at an early date and after 1945. The
nature and quality of three of the four annotations in Die
Maschinenstürmer suggest that they derive from Lukdcs’s most
intensely political period (i.e. the 1920s)?3 The annotations in Bahr’s
book consist mainly of lined passages, suggesting an early date, with
Lukacs then recalling his general, negative impression of Bahr’s book
several years later, when he mentioned it disparagingly for the first
time in EGR (333) in the context of the ’Expressionism Debate’ of
1937-1938.~ And of the ten annotations in Diebold’s book, all
marginal linings, nine relate to Strindberg (165, 169, 214, 216, 218,
221, 222, 223 and 231) and only one to the copious range of
Expressionist dramatists discussed in the book’s first half. On p. 89
we find a line
against: ’[Sternheim] totet den bourgeoisen Schwulst
mit dem Literatenjargon. Vertreibt den zersausten Teufel grfndlich
257
mit dem frisierten Beelzebub’ (’[Sternheim] slays bourgeois
pomposity with the jargon of the literary man. Drives out the shock-
headed Devil once and for all by means of a well-groomed
Beelzebub’). Strindberg had featured prominently in Lukacs’s early
book on the development of modern drama; he published his first
independent article on Strindberg in 1909 35 and his relevance in the
present context can be inferred from an article commemorating the
tenth anniversary of Strindberg’s death which Lukacs published in
1922. Here we read: ’[...]so ist August Strindberg der Vorlaufer und
Klassiker der letzten bewuf3ten Niedergangsform des bfrgerlichen
Dramas: des Expressionismus’ (’[...]thus, August Strindberg is both
the precursor and classic exemplar of the final, consciously decadent
form of bourgeois drama: Expressionism’).36 Or in other words, for
Lukacs, Strindberg was the last modern dramatist who deserved to
be taken seriously and in comparison with whom the Expressionists
were a symptom of decay - a judgement which Lukacs repeated in a
slightly different form four years later when he wrote: ’Die

asthetenhaften Formsucher, mogen sie Neoromantiker oder
Expressionisten heiflen, mussen notwendig innerlich formlos bleiben’
(’Whether they call themselves Neoromantics or Expressionists, those
would-be aesthetes who spend their time searching for form, will, of
necessity, always be inwardly formless ’).3’
The above two sweeping dismissals of Expressionism are the only
two places known to me in Lukacs’s published writings from the
1920s where he makes reference to the phenomenon as a whole or to
its individual members. Furthermore, his negative attitude must
have been reinforced by the literary reviews in Die rote Fahne where,
on the whole, the avant-garde in general and the Expressionists in
particular were treated equally dismissively 38 To take two examples

only. He may well have read and assimilated Gertrud Alexander’s
swingeing critiques of Pinthus’s Menschheitsddmmerung and
Rubiner’s Kameraden der Menschheit (Comrades in Humanity) in Die rote
Fahne on 13 and 14 June 1921, for much of what she has to say there
anticipates GV. And even more pertinently, he may also have read the
following, anonymous judgement in the same newspaper on 5
January 1921: ’[...]der Expressionismus etwa ist nur die jfngste
Erscheinung dieses Irrationalismus, der in der Geschichte oft und oft
aufgetaucht ist, wenn eine Klasse am Ende ihres Lateins angelangt
war’ (’[...]Expressionism, for example, is simply the most recent
manifestation of that irrationalism which, throughout the course of
history, has surfaced again and again whenever a class was on the
point of exhaustion’) since this assertion, as we shall see, has a direct
bearing on Lukdcs’s later thinking. 31
258
(iv) March 1930 to Spring 1933

GV is arguably Lukdcs’s most important and penetrating statement
on Expressionism even though EGR has received more attention. 40
Nevertheless, it is based on a remarkably small selection of named
texts, fourteen in all plus a general reference to Sternheim: Walter
Hasenclever’s Der Sohn (The Son) (see below); Hiller’s Der Kondor, Die
Weisheit der Langenweile and the first two Ziel-Jahrbücher (1916 and
1918); Kaiser’s Von morgens bis mitternachts (From Morn to Midnight)
(1916) (though Lukacs obviously knew other plays by Kaiser (138));
Pinthus’s Menschheitsddmmerung; Rubiner’s drama Die Gewaltlosen
(The Pacifists) and two anthologies Kameraden der Menschheit and Die
Gemeinschaft (The Community) (all from 1919); Herwarth Walden’s
anthology of Sturm-poetry entitled Expressionistische Dichtung
(Expressionist Poetry) which, according to one critic, catalysed the
essay,41 the first volume of Die Erhebung and Worringer’s Abstraktion
und Einffihlung and Künstlerische Zeitfragen (Questions on Art for Our
Time), a lecture from October 1920 which had appeared in book form
in Munich in 1921 and in which Worringer had proclaimed the death
of Expressionism. Of these texts, only three still exist in Lukacs’s
library (plus three plays by Kaiser, none of which is named in GV);
and of these three texts, only one, Menschheitsdämmerung, carries a
Russian stamp. As three of the six poems from this anthology singled
out in GV are marked in some way in Lukdcs’s copy (Hasenclever,
’Der politische Dichter’ (GV, 136); Werfel, ’Fremde sind wir auf der
Erde Alle’ (GV, 138) and Ehrenstein, ’Ich bin des Lebens und des
Todes mfde’ (GV, 138)) 42 it seems likely that Lukacs acquired this
anthology and possibly read it for the first time during his first
extended stay in Moscow. But whether he acquired the other two
texts before that period or after his return to Berlin cannot be
determined with any certainty.
Whatever, Lukacs must have written GV some time after Summer
1932 (see note 41) and, according to Diirr (106), in January 1933 at the
very latest. Over and above the more specific reasons for his hostility
towards Expressionism, Lukacs seems to have been moved to write
GV by six contextual factors. First, between 1930 and 1933, Lukacs,
under the influence of Marx’s writings on aesthetics, was beginning
to develop his own brand of Marxist criticism which would issue in
his anti-modernist doctrine of ’grof3er’ or ’kritischer Realismus’
(’Grand’ or ’Critical Realism’) in the second half of the decade (EGR,
332 and 340).43 Second, with the backing of the KPD leadership,
Lukacs, using the pseudonym Dr Hans Keller, was sent back to Berlin
in Summer 1931 to help Becher, the one member of the Expressionist
generation to enjoy his consistent approbation after 1930,44 combat
259
the increasingly influential, but sectarian, ultra-left wing of the BPRS
(founded in March 1928). Together with Becher et al., Lukacs worked
out a new policy document whose aim was to help the BPRS’s
membership overcome the ’Sozialfaschismustheorie’ (’The Thesis of
Social Fascism’) and break out of their ’self-imposed ideological
ghetto’ in order to become ’a real political force in the field of
literaure’.45 Although Lukacs enjoyed some short-term success in
organizing a United Front movement involving left-bourgeois, SPD
and KPD writers, the BPRS collapsed at the end of 1932. Moreover, a
plan by Walter Benjamin, Brecht, Herbert Ihering and Bernard von
Brentano to launch a non-sectarian journal called Krisis und Kritik
(Crisis and Criticism) with Lukdcs&dquo;s help came to nothing. In the
context of this work with the BPRS, Lukacs was bitterly reproached
for seeming to overestimate bourgeois literature at the expense of
that of the proletariat. So, with Hitler’s seizure of power imminent
and his memory of fascism in Hungary still live,46 Lukacs must have
experienced an intense sense of frustration with and anger at writers
whose sense of reality was so distorted that sectarian differences
were more important to them than a willingness to make common
front against the real enemy. Third, Ei includes four essays from 1930
to early 1933 which were originally written and/or published in
German and in which Lukacs gave several indications that he could
see in which political direction such notable members of the
Expressionist generation as Hanns Johst and Ernst Jünger were

moving.&dquo; Fourth, Hiller published an article entitled ’Die Schuldigen
strafen’ (’Punish the Guilty’) in Die Weltbiihne (The World-Stage)
(no.31) on 4 August 1931 (165-6) in response to Bruning’s Emergency
Press Decree of 17 July 1931. The second paragraph of this Decree
provided for the prohibition and confiscation of printed matter if it
endangered public order and security, and Hiller’s response clearly
reinforced Lukacs’s conviction that Hiller and those of like mind
were completely lacking in political nous. For in an essay which
Lukacs wrote in Moscow in 1933, two years after Hiller’s relatively
minor article had appeared, he said of it:
Ich will nur ein besonders krasses Beispiel anffhren. Als im Sommer
1931 die Brfning-Regierung mit ihrer Presse-Notverordnung einen
entscheidenden Schritt in der Richtung auf Faschisierung der
offentlichen Meinung tat, ist in der linksbiirgerlichen Intelligenz ein
Sturm der Entrustung entstanden. Aber ein besonders ’radikaler’
Vertreter dieser Intelligenz, Kurt Hiller, fand dag ’der Staat’ - der Staat
als ’ewiger Begriff’ - das Recht habe und das Recht haben mfsse, auch
in der ihm gegnerischen Presse zu Worte zu kommen; daB also
der erste beriichtigte Paragraph dieser Notverordnung, der
Ver6ffentlichungszwang der Regierungserkldrungen in der Presse
260
ohne das Recht auf gleichzeitige Polemik, zu bejahen ware. Ich weiQ:
Kurt Hiller glaubte auch damals, ein ’Gegner’ Brunings zu sein [...], es
ist aber klar, daB er damit zu einem inkonsequenten Anhdnger Brunings
geworden ist; dai3 er sich zu Bruning so verhielt wie Bruning zu
Hugenberg und zu Hitler.48
I’ll just give you particularly glaring example. When, in Summer
one
1931, the Bruning Government took a major step towards the fascist-
ization of public opinion by means of its Emergency Press Decree, a
storm of indignation broke out among left-bourgeois intellectuals. But
Kurt Hiller, a particularly radical member of this caste, felt that ’the
state’ - the state as a timeless concept - had the right and must have
the right to have its say in the very press which opposed it and so
concluded that the first, notorious paragraph of this Emergency Decree
(which provided for the compulsory publication of governmental
statements in the press without the press having the corresponding
right to answer back) should be welcomed. I know: Kurt Hiller really
did believe, even then, that he was an opponent of Bruning [...], but it
is clear that in saying what he did, he was actually siding, totally
inconsistently, with Bruning, and that his attitude to Bruning was just
like Briining’s attitude to Hugenberg and Hitler.
In fact, Lukacs is being very unfair to Hiller. Although Hiller had said
that the (liberal) government had a right to defend itself in the press
against lies (being propagated by the Right), Lukacs makes it seem as
though Hiller was talking about governments of any persuasion.
Moreover, although Hiller had, on numerous occasions over the
previous 20 years, proclaimed the need for a ’Logocracy’, i.e.
government by a senate of ’Geistige’ (’Intellectuals’), his offending
article nowhere refers to ’the state as a timeless concept’. And finally,
Hiller’s piece was very obviously written against the Emergency
Decree, particularly its second paragraph! In other words, by the
early 1930s, Expressionism and Hiller’s Activism were elided to such
an extent in Lukacs’s mind and so associated with a naive
utopianism that Lukacs was almost incapable of seeing any good in

the real phenomenon which that syncretic construct concealed. Had
Lukacs known that the Friend in Hasenclever’s largely autobio-
graphical Der Sohn, whose speech in Act IV, Scene 2 he would quote
in extenso in GV (141-2), was based on Hiller,49 his worst fears about
Expressionism would have been confirmed given that he describes
Der Sohn there as the ’typically Expressionist drama’ (GV, 142). Fifth,
by mid-1932, Lukacs was referring to Expressionist literature as
Ischeinrevolutiondre &dquo;Menschheitsdichtung&dquo;, [...]I die mit dem
Zuruckfluten der revolutionaren Welle wieder in Bfrgerlichkeit
versandete’ (’pseudo-revolutionary &dquo;poetry of humanity&dquo; [...]which
petered out like the bourgeois phenomenon it was as the
261
revolutionary tide turned and ebbed’).50 And sixth, at exactly the

same juncture, Lukacs was explicitly linking Abstraktion und
Einffihlung with the ’Ausbildung der expressionistischen Kunsttheorie’

(’development of the Expressionist theory of art’ ), accusing Worringer
of attacking ’empathetic’ (i.e. humanist) art (Werke 4, 63) and thereby
associating Expressionism with that attack.
Lukacs’s more specific critique of Expressionism arose directly
from this general context and involved the following eight charges.
First, citing Rubiner’s Afterword to Kameraden der Menschheit (176),
the passage in Picard’s contribution to Die Erhebung, where he
personifies war as Mars,51 Rubiner’s Die Gewaltlosen, the two poems
specified in note 42 and Der Sohn, Lukacs accuses Expressionism of
attacking metonyms rather than the military-industrial complex for
which those parts stand (GV, 110), and fantasms, abstractions and
personifications rather than realities (GV,114, 131 and 140-1). Second,
Lukacs accuses Expressionism, like the right wing of the USPD after
the Halle Conference of October 1920 (when the left wing broke away
to join up with the KPD), of helping to stabilize capitalism (GV, 110)
and so facilitate the rise of fascism (GV, 121). Third, citing Hiller’s
’Kaiser Wilhelm und wir’ (’Kaiser Wilhelm and us’), and ’Ein
deutsches Herrenhaus’ (’A German Dynasty’ ),12 and reinforcing his
argument with Werfel’s critique of Hiller entitled ’Die christliche
Sendung: Offener Brief an Kurt Hiller’ (’The Mission of Christianity:
An Open Letter to Kurt Hiller’),53 Lukacs accuses Expressionism of
fostering a grotesque, crypto-conservative aristocratism under the
mask of radicalism, of preaching ’revolution against one order on
behalf of another order, which was constituted in exactly the same
way even though it looked different’ (GV, 134, misquoting Werfel,
218). Fourth, citing Rudolf Leonhard’s and Hans Bliiher’s
contributions to the second Ziel-Jahrbuch,54 Werfel’s contribution to
the first Ziel-Jahrbuch,55 and Hasenclever’s poem ’Der politische
Dichter’, Lukacs accuses Expressionism of blurring the boundaries
between classes in the name of an anti-bourgeois bohemianism and
so denying the reality of class war (GV, 120 and 124-5). Fifth, citing
Hiller’s essay on ’Relativismus in der Rechtsphilosophie’ (’Relativism
in the Philosophy of Right’),56 Wilhelm Herzog’s contribution to Die
Gemeinschaft,57 Pinthus’s Foreword to Menschheitsddmmerung (x) and
contribution to Die Erhebung,58 Der Sohn, Walden’s conception of
poetry as expressed in the Introduction to his 1932 anthology (11-16),
Flake’s contribution to Die Erhebung59 and the alleged ’Fluchtideologie’
(’ideology of escapism’) embedded in Abstraktion und Einfiihlung,
whose ’profound ideological connection with Expressionism’ is again
made explicit (GV, 121-4, 131-2, 137-8 and 140-5), Lukacs accuses
Expressionism of a psycho-political autism, of being in ’a state of
262
embarrassment’ and of ’an inability to do anything when it is a
question of solving practical problems’ (GV, 124). As a result,
Expressionism is marked by a subjectivism, a failure to understand
the determinants of history, a hostility to ’empathetic’, i.e. humanist
art and an anti-essentialism: ’Die Abstraktion Worringers, die
&dquo;Loslosung aus den Beziehungen&dquo; Picards, das &dquo;Wesen&dquo; Pinthus’
bedeuten daher ein bewuQtes Verarmen des Inhalts der gestalteten
Wirklichkeit’ (’Consequently, Worringer’s concept of abstraction;
Picard’s desire to &dquo;remove things from their context&dquo;; Pinthus’s
concept of &dquo;essence&dquo; are all indices of a conscious diminution of the
content of reality as that is shaped and formed’) (GV, 143).6° Sixth,
citing Pinthus’s Foreword once more (xiii), Lukacs arraigns the
pacifism of so many Expressionists during the later and post-war
years on the grounds that it had failed to distinguish between just
and unjust wars (GV, 125 and 131). Like Karl Kautsky, the (initially)
USPD ideologue who had wanted to bring about the Dictatorship of
the Proletariat without violence (GV, 134), the Expressionists wanted
qualitative social change without the bloody, but necessary reality of
class war. Thus, Lukacs implies, those who still subscribe uncritically
to that doctrine will fail to offer any real resistance to Hitler. Seventh,
citing Pinthus’s ’Rede fiir die Zukunft’ yet again, Kaiser’s Von
morgens bis mitternachts, Sternheim’s comedies, Werfel’s poem
’Fremde sind wir auf der Erde Alle’ and Ehrenstein’s poem ’Ich bin
des Lebens und des Todes mfde’, Lukacs accuses Expressionism of
defeatism in the face of the realities which determine material history
(’Determinanten, die aui3erhalb seines Geistes liegen’ (GV, 132 and
138)). 61
But finally, without reference to any particular text, Expressionism
is accused of seeking a ’Totalitat’ which, unlike that of communism
we are to assume, is ’purely formal and vacuous’ (GV, 145), the
product of a ’pseudo-activism’ (GV, 148), and of being based on

’foundations which are irrational and mythological by nature’ (GV,
148). The fact that the latter accusation is made so briefly and so late
on in the argument points away from Pike’s contention that Lukacs’s
theoretical writings of the Berlin period were ’a bid to get back in the
good graces of the Stalinist powers that be after his second brush
with disaster in 1930 and 1931’ (53) via a sustained attack on
Luxemburgian ’spontaneism’ (63-4). For if this were the case and
Lukacs was, like his new friend Becher, primarily concerned to ally
himself with Stalin’s recent letter to Proletarskaya revolutsiya
(Proletarian Revolution) attacking that particular heresy (55), then GV
would have been the ideal place to achieve this aim. For, as Fahnders
and Rector showed over 20 years ago, late Expressionism, on which
Lukacs concentrated the brunt of his polemic, was saturated with the
263
Luxemburgist doctrine of ’spontaneism’. Thus, if the desire to prove

his ideological orthodoxy had been at the forefront of Lukdcs’s mind,
then surely, he would have made Expressionist irrationalism a more
prominent target in GV and linked it with Rosa Luxemburg (whom
he does not even mention) rather than with Kautsky and the USPD?
Lukdcs’s charges were, on the whole, not new. In the SPD and KPD
press of the early Weimar years, a variety of critics had made such
charges over and over again. So in other words, Lukacs is
summarizing rather than saying anything particularly novel, and the
importance of his essay lies in its pungency and compression. From a
left-wing point of view, there is undeniably a large amount of truth in
what Lukacs has to say, and the lined passages in Die Erhebung not
used in GV indicate that he had a lot more ammunition in reserve.
But the short-comings of his case should also be registered. As his
dismissal of Der Kondor (GV, 117), reference to the ’pre-eminence’ of
Expressionism during the years 1916 to 1920 (GV, 147) and almost
total disregard of the work in Menschheitsdämmerung of such major
early Expressionist poets as Heym, Trakl, Stadler, Benn, Lichtenstein
and Lotz indicate, Expressionism for Lukacs in 1932 meant late
Expressionism - a very selective judgement. Moreover, not only is his
choice of texts meagre and unrepresentative, his judgements are
arbitrary. What allows him to claim, for example, that Pinthus is ’the
authentic theoretician of Expressionism’ (GV, 132) and that Der Sohn
is the ’typically Expressionist drama’ (GV, 142)? One can easily think
of theoreticians who and dramas which have an equally good claim
to be privileged in such a way. Why attach so much importance to
Max Picard who, despite his essay in Die Erhebung, was not himself
an Expressionist and seems to have based his essay, originally a
lecture, on an equally meagre selection of evidence? Then again,
Lukacs bases far too much of his argument on theoretical essays,
especially from the group around Hiller, too little on literary texts
and no part of it whatsoever on visual work. Furthermore, as Sziklai
and I have variously pointed out, Lukacs’s ’ideological analogy’
between Expressionism and the USPD which lies ’at the heart of both
the content and the structure’ of the essay is ’false’ and factually
incorrect.62 Finally, Lukacs is not always a very scrupulous reader. In
GV, he quotes two passages from Abstraktion und Einfuhlung and then
concludes that Worringer, like Pinthus, considers the ’Thing in itself’
to be ’unknowable’ (GV, 123-4). But in fact, Worringer is saying
something quite different, arguing that the ’primitive human being’
had a very well-developed sense of the ’Thing in itself’ (i.e. the
metaphysical), but that modernity involves ’ein Abstumpfen, ein
Getrübtwerden dieses Instinkts’ (’a blunting, an occlusion of this
instinct’) (23). Nor is it true that Worringer advocates abstraction: he
264
merely defends it as a mode of art which characterizes certain types of

culture. All of which suggests that by late 1932/early 1933,
Expressionism, a movement in which Lukacs had taken precious
little interest previously, had become a reified mental construct which
had two functions. On the one hand, he could use it as an object on
which to vent his spleen at the course which political events had
taken in Germany and the capitulation of would-be left-wing or
radical writers in the face of those events. And on the other, he could
use it as a negative in contrast to which he could shape his own ideas
on left-wing aesthetics and political literature.
(v) Spring 1933 to Summer 1945
During the thirteen years of his exile, Lukacs wrote about a dozen
articles on or involving references to Expressionism. Apart from the
two major pieces (FIN and EGR), most of Lukacs’s remarks repeat
what he had said in GV and none of the essays indicate that any of
the 20 extant books which he probably acquired while in the Soviet
Union made any impression on him whatsoever. For example, a
review in Russian of a Russian edition of Stefan Zweig’s Novellas
from 1936 repeats his negative judgement on Kaiser’s Von morgens bis
mitternachts.63 Other essays repeat his criticisms of Jünger, Johst64 and
Worringer65 who is described yet again as the principal theoretician
of early Expressionism (Werke 10, 284). But in April 1934, Lukacs
published a review in Literaturnaya Gazeta (The Literary Gazette)66 of
Walther Linden’s Aufgaben einer nationalen Literatur (The Tasks of a
National Literature) (Munich, 1934). This essay added three new
names to the list of Expressionists cited by Lukacs to date and
developed the idea which had emerged at the end of GV In his book
(33), Linden had written off Sternheim; distinguished between such
’healthy minds/spirits’ as ’Trakl, Stadler, Heymel [sic]’6’ and,
according to Lukacs, claimed Expressionism and Neue Sachlichkeit as
an ’inheritance which was in part healthy’ (Ei, 141). Lukacs had
mixed feelings about Sternheim the satiriSt68 but a massive blind spot
where early Expressionism was concerned. So Linden’s book must
have confirmed his growing view, from which the manuscript of Die
Zerstörung der Vernunft would issue during the 1930s,69 that
Expressionism, especially its early manifestations, led directly to the
irrationalism of fascism&dquo; and that, conversely, fascist literary
criticism instinctively rejected one of the few members of the
Expressionist generation who, in Lukdcs’s eyes, showed at least some
critical understanding of capitalism in its decline.
It is highly probable that Lukacs took Die Erhebung with him to the
Soviet Union, and there he may have re-read those contributions
which he considered really important when writing FIN. The most
265
important of these were Picard’s ’Expressionismus’ and Pinthus’s

’Rede fiir die Zukunft’, since he quotes from both verbatim in FIN
(176): in the first instance from Die Erhebung, I, 333 (one of the pages
interleaved with a piece of plain paper); in the second from the same
work (403); and in both cases from passages which he had already
used in GV. To a considerable extent, FIN’s argument synthesizes
those of GV and the review of Linden’s book discussed above. But
two significant shifts have occurred. First, the two Aktivisten, Hiller
and Rubiner, and Herwarth Walden no longer feature as the objects
of Lukacs’s polemic. This is presumably because Hiller, after a period
in Sachsenhausen, had fled to Prague in September 1934 and Walden,
like Lukacs, was in exile in Moscow teaching languages. Hiller and
Walden might have got it wrong in the early 1930s, but at least they
were now experiencing the political implications of their lack of
judgement. Instead, Expressionism for Lukacs now means Johst (FIN,

181-2), Jiinger (FIN, 179-83), Pinthus (FIN, 176), Worringer (FIN, 173,
176 and 188), Trakl, Stadler and Heym because of Linden’s
assessment of them (FIN, 192), and the painters Emil Nolde and Ernst
Barlach (FIN, 192). And second, despite the overlap with GV and the
1934 review, Lukacs’s attack on Expressionism has acquired two new
aspects. Citing an essay by Johst (FIN, 181-2)&dquo; and an unidentified
work by the art historian Alois [?] Schardt in which all realism is
declared an un-German phenomenon (FIN, 192), Lukacs implicitly
rejects Expressionism because of its lack of realism (i.e. because of its
’Germanness’ in the Nazi sense). And citing Schardt again, he also
implicitly attacks Expressionism because it could be assimilated so
easily to an irrationalist tradition whose essence is said to be ’the
Gothic-Faustian will to the infinite’ and which is said to extend ’from
Walther von der Vogelweide and the Naumburg sculptures through
Grfnewald, to Stefan George, Nolde and Barlach’ (FIN, 192). Once
again, Expressionism is being used as a negative to define Lukacs’s
positive: just as non-realism and irrationalism lead to fascism, so
realism and rationality lead to Marxism-Leninism. But unlike GV,
FIN’s argument is compressed, poorly documented, schematic,
highly unspecific and operates, especially in its second half, by
means of guilt through association: because certain
right-wing
theoreticians have approved of Expressionism, then it must, ipso facto,
be reprehensible.
EGR, written in 1938, continues this trend, beginning:
Die Expressionismus-Debatte des Wort bietet fur den verspateten
Teilnehmer eine gewisse Schwierigkeit; viele haben den Expressionismus
leidenschaftlich verteidigt. In dem Augenblick aber, als man konkret
sagen sollte, wer nun der vorbildliche expressionistische Schriftsteller
sein sollte, ja wer fberhaupt verdient, Expressionist genannt zu
266
werden, gehen die Meinungen schroff auseinander, daf3 es keinen
so
einzigen nicht umstrittenen Namen gibt. Man hat sogar - gerade beim
Lesen der leidenschaftlichen Verteidigungsreden - zuweilen das
Gefuhl : gab es fberhaupt Expressionisten? Da wir hier nicht fber die
Bewertung einzelner Schriftsteller, sondern um Prinzipien in der
Entwicklung der Literatur streiten werden, ist die Entscheidung dieser
Frage fur uns nicht allzu wichtig. Fur die Literaturgeschichte gibt es
zweifellos einen Expressionismus als Richtung, mit seinen Dichtern
und Kritikern. Ich werde mich in den folgenden Bemerkungen auf die
prinzipiellen Probleme beschranken (EGR, 313).
The Expressionism Debate in Das Wort involves a certain amount of
difficulty for the participant who joins in relatively late on; many
people have defended Expressionism passionately. But at precisely that
moment when one ought to say who the model Expressionist writer is
supposed to be - indeed, who actually merits the title of Expressionist,
opinions diverge so drastically that it is impossible to come up with
one, uncontentious name. From time to time - especially when one
reads the impassioned speeches for the defence - one even begins to
wonder whether any Expressionists actually existed. But as we are
here debating not the relative merit of individual writers, but
principles which have contributed to the development of literature, the
solution to this problem is not all that important for us. As far as
literary history is concerned, I am sure that there was a trend called
Expressionism which had its creative writers and critics. In my
following remarks, I shall confine myself to addressing problems of
principle.
Thereafter, apart from brief, peripheral and/or dismissive
references to Picard, Pinthus, Leonhard, Heinrich Vogeler,72 Benn, 73
Walden’4 and Der blaue Reiter (EGR, 315, 325-7, 329-30 and 337), and
two approving references to the convert Becher (EG, 337) and the re-
constructed Döblin/5 Lukacs does not discuss any Expressionist
work or author in any detail. Rather, he spends the essay either
attacking other participants in the ’Expressionism Debate’ or
reiterating and defending several of the charges which he had
already laid at Expressionism’s door in GV71 So in EGR,
Expressionism has become even more of a whipping-boy or
schematized negative. But unlike GV and FIN, the Lukacs who wrote
EGR is now able to foreground the positive literary principles on
which his critique is based - this time, as Sziklai pointed out, from
’within the anti-Fascist camp’ (234). These can be summarized as
follows. First, literature should be realist, not in the superficial
photographic sense (EGR, 332), but by foregrounding ’die
lebendigen, aber unmittelbar noch verborgenen Tendenzen der
objektiven Wirklichkeit so tief und so wahr, dafl ihre Gestaltung von
der spdteren Wirklichkeitsentwicklung bestatigt wird’ (’the vital
267
currents which, although at work within objective reality, are still
hidden from the naked eye, with such depth and verisimilitude that
their literary transcription is later confirmed by the way in which
reality develops’) and by offering a ’Widerspiegelung [der] unter der
Oberfldche [der Wirklichkeit] verborgenen Tendenzen, die erst in
einer sp5teren Entwicklungsstufe voll entfaltet und fur alle
wahrnehmbar in Erscheinung treten’ (’reflection of those currents
which lie concealed behind the surface [of reality], and which emerge
fully and become visible to everybody only at a later stage of
historical development’) (EGR, 332). Second, literature should be so
comprehensible to ordinary people that it enables them to clarify
their own experience of the ’groQen progressiven und
demokratischen Entwicklungsepochen der Menschheit’ (’great
progressive and democratic developmental periods in the history of
humanity’) and so, by means of a living Humanism, prepares them
for revolutionary democracy as that is embodied in the Popular Front
(EGR, 340-1). Ironically, as I have shown with reference to
Expressionist drama,’ Expressionist literature can fulfil the former
requirement provided that one uses Freudian rather than Marxist
categories as a hermeneutic tool. But Lukacs is undeniably correct in
believing that Expressionism does not and cannot fulfil the second
requirement. On the whole, the view of man and history which
informs early Expressionist literature is anti-humanist and anti-
progressivist. Conversely, the view of man and history which informs
late Expressionist literature is so idealist, hyper-humanist and
chiliastic that it all too easily tips over into radical pessimism,
apocalyptic despair or apolitical withdrawal. Although Lukacs is
currently unfashionable and his view of Expressionism badly flawed
in several respects, what he has to say about that movement from a
Marxist perspective cannot be simply written off as invalid tout court.
(vi) Summer 1945 to 1971

After Lukdcs’s return to Hungary, his ideas on aesthetics now well
defined and the Nazi millenium over, only sparse references to
Expressionism as a movement occur in his published work 1945-
1957, and none are to be found after the publication of the two halves
of Part I of his Asthetik in 1963. One finds complimentary, but passing
references to Becher in an essay of 1954-1955 (Werke 10, 695 and 769);
an approving citation of Cesare Pavese’s comment that the work of
Doblin and Dos Passos oscillates ’between &dquo;superficial Verism&dquo;
(Naturalism) and &dquo;abstract Expressionist construction&dquo;’’8 and the
dismissal of Max Ernst’s paintings as ’sheer, &dquo;high-handed&dquo;
arbitrariness’ (Werke 12, 768). But overall, the unimportance of
Expressionism for Luk4s during his final years can be gauged from
268
the fact that the final version of Die Zerstörung der Vernunft (note 69),
which one might have expected to be full of asides about
Expressionist irrationalism, refers only to three writers whom Lukacs
associated with Expressionism: Jünger (Werke 9, 461-6 and 729),
Sternheim (note 68) and Worringer (708) .
Indeed, after 1945, Lukacs’s interest in Expressionism became
narrowed down almost entirely to Junger, Worringer and Benn, two
of whose post-war publications, Doppelleben (Double Life) (1950) and
Provoziertes Leben (Life Provoked) (1955) are in his library. It is easy to
see why Junger and Benn, whom Lukacs often mentions virtually in
the same breath, should have aroused his ire. Both are declared to be
cynics who sold out to Hitler (Werke 4, 478, 520, 522, 572 and 573).
The work of both is condemned as ’schematic’ (Werke 4, 503). Citing
Benn’s poem ’Gesange I’ (’Songs I’) in full - which Lukacs must have
known from Menschheitsdämmerung, 136 (Werke 4, 484) - and Jünger’s
Der Arbeiter (The Worker) (Werke 9; 461-6) - an unmarked copy of
which is still in his library - these two writers are said, respectively,
to be guilty of a ’perverted Rousseauism’ involving a ’flight into
Nothingness’ (Werke 4, 484-5) and a ’vitalistic and demagogic critique
of bourgeois culture’ which is of the greatest importance for the
’ideological underpinning of fascism’ (Werke 9, 461; c.f. also 729).
Additionally, Benn is accused of denying that there is such a thing as
reality (Werke 4, 476); of transforming man from a unified being into
’ein regelloses Nacheinander von augenblicklichen Erlebnisfetzen’
(’an unstructured concatenation of short-lived experiential fragments’)
(ibid.); of making disbelief in historical development the touchstone
of truth (ibid., 487) and of implying that the objective basis of those
forces which determine society is unknowable (Werke 7, 587).
All of this is fairly predictable and has a certain justification
-
though one wonders why Lukacs never mentions Johst after 1945,
given that his involvement with Nazism was much deeper than that
of Junger or Benn. What is more surprising is that Lukacs should
continue his onslaught on Worringer, especially since he makes
positive use of two long passages from Die Anf4nge der Tafelmalerei (32
and 34) late on in his Asthetik (Werke 12, 702). The first of these
includes material from a page in Lukacs’s own copy which is
annotated and interleaved with a strip of paper and is used to
support Lukacs’s account of Giotto: his first approving reference to
Worringer for half a century. But although he cedes this particular
point, Lukacs’s post-war polemic against Worringer involves an even
more pronounced tendency to misread him than was noted in respect
of GV. In an essay of 1952, for instance, Worringer is said to be a
representative of the bourgeois aesthetic of the age of imperialism
(Werke 10, 164; c.f. Werke 9, 708). This is a particularly perverse
269
judgement given the hostility of the German art establisment to

abstraction during the Wilhelmine and Nazi periods and Lukacs’s
more typical evaluation of Worringer as the proponent of escapism.
Moreover, it is untrue: Worringer’s theory is fundamentally anti-
imperialist precisely because his apologia for the art of so-called
’primitive’ cultures demolishes the cultural justification for
imperialism. If non-Western art is not inferior to but simply different
from post-Renaissance Western art, then there is no excuse for
imperialism on the grounds that the colonizers are bringing the
sweetness and light of Christian civilization to the heathen hordes.
Moreover, the two volumes of Lukacs’s Asthetik contain a total of
eighteen pages on which he makes (largely negative) references to
Worringer, on nine occasions quoting directly from three of
Worringer’s works, mainly Abstraktion und Einffihlung. Five of these
involve particularly lengthy passages from interleaved and/or
annotated pages of Lukacs’s own copy?9 So, to get a clearer idea of
the quality of his post-war critique of Worringer, it is worth
examining his use of these passages in some detail. To begin with,
Worringer’s statement:
[...]in der Betrachtung eines Notwendigen und Unverrückbaren erlost
zu werden vom Zufalligen des Menschseins uberhaupt, von der
scheinbaren Willkur der allgemeinen organischen Existenz. Das Leben
als solches wird als St6rung des dsthetischen Genusses empfunden (31).
[...]to be redeemed from the random contingency of being human and
from the apparent arbitrariness of organic life in general through the
contemplation of something that is necessary and immovable. Life as
such is experienced as a disruption of aesthetic enjoyment.
is used to justify the contention ’So wird hier das Antihumane als das
grofle, leitende Prinzip von Leben und Kunst ausgesprochen’ (’Thus,
what is anti-human is declared here to be the great guiding principle
behind life and art’) (Werke 11, 347). That is simply not true, for
Worringer is arguing that in cultures where life is experienced as
hostile and governed by chance, people try to save a sense of their
human otherness by the aesthetic enjoyment of fixed, abstract forms.
Vielmehr dürfen wir mutmassen, dass die Sch6pfung der
geometrischen Abstraktion eine reine Selbstschopfung aus den
Bedingungen des menschlichen Organismus heraus war... Sie
erscheint uns, wie gesagt, als reine Instinktsch6pfung (46).
Rather, we may suppose that the creation of geometric abstraction was
a pure act ofspontaneous creation out of the limitations of the human
organism ... As has been said, it looks to us like a pure, instinctual act
of creation.
270
is said to be the radical formulation of the fear and reluctance
(’Scheu’) of modern art theories to recognize ’the essential motive
force behind the work as the reflection of reality’ (Werke 11, 291-2).
Again, Lukacs’s gloss is inaccurate. Worringer, as the six omitted
lines (...) make clear, is trying to explain here why and how so-called
’primitive’ cultures produce abstract art. He is not prescribing an
anti-representationalist programme for modern artists.
Die banalen Nachahmungstheorien, von denen unsere Asthetik dank
der sklavischen Abhdngigkeit unseres gesamten Bildungsgehaltes von
aristotelischen Begriffen nie loskam, haben uns blind gemacht fur die
eigentlichen psychischen Werte, die Ausgangspunkt und Ziel aller
kiinstlerischen Produktion sind (168).
Banal theories of mimesis, from which our aesthetics have never been
able to free themselves thanks to the slavish dependence of all our
educational theory on aristotelian concepts, have blinded us to the real
psychic values which form both starting-point and goal of all artistic
production.
is equated with Worringer’s ’brusque rejection of any representation
of reality’ (Werke 11, 345). Again, this is a non sequitur, for Worringer
goes on to say that ’artistic production [is] nothing other than a
continual transcription of the massive dialectical process
[ &dquo;Auseinandersetzungsprozesses&dquo;in which human beings and the
outside world have been involved since the dawn of creation and
will be involved until the end of time’ (168-9). In some epochs, this
’dialectical process’ generates abstract art, and in others represen-
tational art: it all depends upon man’s sense of reality. Besides which,
he is actually not attacking representationalism as such, but banal
representationalism - i.e. knee-jerk theory which has forgotten its
origins and presuppositions and so become reified into unthinking
dogma.
Der Instinkt des Menschen aber ist nicht Weltfrommigkeit, sondern
Furcht. Nicht jene korperliche Furcht, sondern eine Furcht des Geistes.
Eine Art geistiger Raumscheu angesichts der bunten Verworrenheit
und Willkur der Erscheinungswelt (170-1).
Man’s instinctive reaction to the world is not, however, one of pious
reverence but of fear. Not bodily fear, but a fear which afflicts the spirit.
A kind of spiritual agoraphobia in the face of the kaleidoscopic
confusion and arbitrariness of the phenomenal world.
is used as evidence for the assertion:
[...]das Wesentliche fur Worringer ist, was aus diesen subjektiv folgt.
271
Denn seine Auseinandersetzung zwischen Mensch und Welt ist in
Wahrheit die zwischen Instinkt und Verstand. Und Worringer z6gert
nicht, seine Entscheidung fur die ’transzendente’ Weltanschauung im
Sinne des Irrationalismus, der Vorherrschaft des ’Instinktiven’ zu fallen
(Werke 11, 346).
[...]for Worringer, the essential thing is the subjective effect of all these
factors. For his concept of the dialectical relationship between mankind
and the surrounding world is actually the same as that between
instinct and reason. And Worringer does not hesitate to decide in
favour of a ’transcendent’ view of the world - i.e. for an irrationalism
and the primacy of the ’instinctual’.
Again, Lukacs has badly misread his text. Far from advocating a
vitalism or an irrationalism, Worringer is at pains to stress the
’spiritual’ nature of the agoraphobia from which, in his view, abstract
art is generated. Nor can his concept of the ’dialectical relationship
between mankind and the surrounding world’ be equated with a
struggle between ’instinct and reason’ since, in Worringer’s
understanding, the former dialectical relationship engages both
reason and instinct. And where, by instinct, Worringer means a
faculty akin to intuition, Lukacs writes as though he were advocating

a kind of Dionysian mindlessness.
Finally, Worringer’s statement:

Alle transzendentale Kunst geht auf eine Entorganisierung des
Organischen hinaus, d.h. auf eine Uebersetzung des Wechselnden und
Bedingten in unbedingte Notwendigkeitswerte. Solche Notwendigkeit
aber vermag der Mensch nur im grossen Jenseits des Lebendigen, im
Anorganischen, zu empfinden. Das fuhrte ihn zur starren Linie, zur
toten kristallinischen Form (177).
All transcendental art issues in a de-organicizing of the organic, i.e. in

the transformation of what is changeable and contingent into values
that are unconditional and necessary. But Man is able to experience
such necessity only in that great Beyond which is inorganic and which
lies behind all living things. That led him towards the rigid line,
towards the dead, crystalline form.
is interpreted to mean:
Die geometrische Kunst des Anorganischen ist also weitaus mehr als
eine bestimmte, innerhalb des Geltungsbereichs ihrer Prinzipien
vollberechtigte Abart der Kunst, sie ist vielmehr ihr schlechthinniges
Vorbild: das Unorganische, das Lebensfeindliche ist das groQe Ziel, das
jede echte Kunst erstrebt (Werke 11, 346-7).
So the geometrical art of the inorganic is considerably more than one
particular variety of art which, within its particular terms of reference,
is entirely valid and justifiable. Rather, geometrical art is the model for
272
all art, whatever the circumstances: to be inorganic and hostile to life is
the great aim to which all authentic art aspires.
That, too, is a fallacious reading, for once again, Worringer is talking
about one kind of art, ’transcendental art’, not art in general, and he
is being descriptive, not prescriptive. Moreover, the whole thrust of
his argument is towards the conclusion that one cannot legitimately
talk of ’authentic’ or ’inauthentic’ art, for all art is a sign-system, to
decode which one needs to understand the dialectical interaction that
has taken place between mankind and the particular environment
from which the sign-system was generated.
Thus, determined to do Worringer down, Lukacs finally reaches
the untenable conclusion: ’Worringer nahm den Kampf gegen die
&dquo;Einfuhlungstheorie&dquo; von rechts, im Namen einer reaktionaren
Irrationalitat auf [...]Worringer streitet fur Tod und Unmenschlichkeit’
(’Worringer took up the struggle against the &dquo;theory of empathy&dquo;
from a right-wing point of view, in the name of a reactionary
irrationalism [...]Worringer is fighting on behalf of death and
inhumanity’) (Werke 12, 186). Lukdcs has got it upside down. In
Abstraktion und Einffihlung, Worringer was campaigning on behalf of
modes of art which, because they were not humanist, had been
dismissed as sub-human and so, by implication, campaigning for the
humanity of the cultures which had begotten them. He was not
attacking empathetic art - merely relativizing its values. Thus, if
Lukacs could misread Worringer this badly, it is not surprising that
he was also capable of eliding Brecht’s and Worringer’s concepts of
’Einffhlung’ (’Empathy’) (Werke 4, 545). In other words, Lukacs is
using Worringer much as he had used Expressionism as a whole in
the 1930s - as a whipping-boy, as a negative, but in a much cruder
way. Indeed, the sheer quantity of Lukdcs’s annotations in the extant
copy of Abstraktion und Einffihlung suggests that he read and re-read
that particular work, determined at all costs to find passages which
he could misread for his own, polemical purposes.
So when all is said and done, Lukacs knew relatively little about
Expressionism. Nevertheless, that knowledge enabled him to collect
and formulate some undeniably penetrating criticisms of the
movement in the 1930s, especially in GV. But in his final years, his
treatment of Worringer, by then, perhaps, a residual metonym both
for a movement he had written off and for Modernism in general, is
an object lesson to us all. For the best of motives, on behalf of the
worthiest of (humanist) ideals, impelled by high moral beliefs about
human nature and politics, and determined to find a positive role for
art in a materialistic age, Lukacs began to lose precisely those
qualities which he accused Expressionism of lacking and Worringer
of attacking: a sense of reality which is open to complex and
273
uncomfortable evidence and the power of empathy. As Lukacs’s own

views on art and literature hardened, so his polemic against a largely
imaginary enemy became cruder and less convincing, making it
difficult for the dispassionate reader to take his later work on
aesthetics as seriously as his earlier work deserves to be taken.
NOTES
1. I would like to thank the following persons and institutions who helped me
during the preparation of this article: Dr Jennifer Baines and Dr Ron Truman
(Oxford), who provided me with the information on Russian verbs contained in
note 2 of Appendix C; Professor Robert Evans (Oxford) who very generously
translated various passages for me which are currently available only in
Hungarian; Esko Rahikainen (Helsinki) and Hermione Graham (Oxford), who
helped me search the Deutsche Zentral-Zeitung; Ingrid Gruninger (Marbach/
Neckar) who provided me with much bibliographical information; the Georg
Lukács-Archive (Budapest), especially its Director, Dr László Sziklai, who pointed
me towards a host of MSS and printed material which was completely unknown
to me; and the British Academy and the Deutsches Literaturarchiv
(Marbach/Neckar) who variously funded aspects of the research.
2. (1) Georg Lukács, "’Große und Verfall" des Expressionismus’ [’The "Greatness
and Decline" of Expressionism’], Internationale Literatur, iv (January 1934), 153-73;
first published as "’Velichie i padenie" ekspresionizma’, Literaturnyi Kritik, No.2
(July 1933), 34-54; cited in this essay as GV, with the pagination referring to
Probleme des Realismus I, Vol.4 of the still incomplete edition of Lukdcs’s Werke
which began to appear in German in 1962 (i.e. during Lukács’s life-time) under
the general editorship of Frank Benseler (109-49). (2) Gyorgy Lukács, ’A fasizmus
és az irodalomelmélet Németországban’ [’Fascism and Literary Theory in
Germany’]; first published in Russian in Protiv fashistskogo mrakobesiya i demagogii
Against Fascist Obscurantism and Demagoguery] (Moscow, 1936), 295-336; cited in
[
this essay as FIN, with the pagination referring to the Hungarian translation in
, edited
Gyorgy Lukács, Esztetikai írások 1930-1945 [Aesthetic Writings 1930-1945
]
by László Sziklai (Budapest, 1982), 168-97, hereafter cited in the text as Ei.
(3) Georg Lukács, ’Es geht um den Realismus’ [’It’s a Question of Realism’], Das
Wort, vi, No.6 (June 1938), 112-38; cited in this essay as EGR, with pagination
referring to Werke 4, 313-43.
3. For a complete documentation of this debate, see Hans-Jürgen Schmitt (ed.), Die
Expressionismusdebatte: Materialien zu einer marxistischen Realismuskonzeption
(Frankfurt/Main, 1973). EGR is to be found there (192-203) in a fuller form than
in the more readily accessible Werke 4 (cf. notes 74 and 75). For a full discussion of
the debate, see Josef Dürr, Die Expressionismusdebatte Untersuchungen zum Werk
von Georg Lukács, Diss. Ph.D. unpub. (Munster, 1982).
4. Arpad Kadarkay, Georg Lukács: Life, Thought, and Politics (Oxford, 1991); László
Sziklai, After the Proletarian Revolution: Georg Lukács’s Marxist Development,
1930-1945 (Budapest, 1992).
5. The vast majority of the letters to and from Lukács which are still extant were
written before 1917 or after 1945. The German edition of the letters is the most
extensive and covers the early period: Éva Karádi and Éva Fekete (eds), Georg
Lukacs: Briefwechsel 1902-1917 (Stuttgart, 1982); cited in this essay as BW plus
pagination. A misprint in Kadarkay’s book (517) makes it seem as though the
English edition, an abridged version of BW, contains letters up to 1929. For the
story of how the early letters came to survive, see BW, 5 and Kadarkay,182.
6. Istvan Eorsi (ed.), Georg Lukács: Gelebtes Denken - Eine Autobiographie im Dialog
(Frankfurt/Main, 1981).
7. The most comprehensive chronology of Lukács’s life is to be found in Frank
274
Benseler (ed.), Revolutionares Denken - Georg Lukács: Eine Einfuhrung in Leben und
Werk (Darmstadt, 1984), 26-49. This now needs to be supplemented and corrected
by dates derived from his letters and the more detailed information provided by
Sziklai and Kadarkay
8. Kadarkay,176 and 180-1.
9. Kadarkay, 299.
10. Eorsi,146.
11. Eörsi, 146 and 157.
12. None of the poems on these two pages (Georg Trakl, ’Ruh und Schweigen’ [’Peace
and Silence’] and ’In den Nachmittag geflustert’ [’Whispered into the Afternoon’];
Albert Ehrenstein, ’Verzweiflung’ [’Despair’], ’Leid’ [’Sorrow’/’Suffering’] and
’Auf der hartherzigen Erde’ [’On the Hard-hearted Earth’]) are annotated or have
a tick against them in the index. So, judging from GV, 138-9, Lukács’s attention
was probably caught by one or more of Ehrenstein’s poems.
13. Armin Arnold, Die Literatur des Expressionismus (Stuttgart, Cologne, Berlin and
Mainz, 1966), 11-13
14. See Richard Sheppard (ed.), Die Schriften des Neuen Clubs, 2 vols (Hildesheim,
1980-83).
15. ’Uber Wesen und Form des Essays’ [’On Essence and Form of the Essay’], 3-39;
’Sehnsucht und Form’ [’Yearning and Form’], 197-227 and ’Metaphysik der
Tragodie’ [’Metaphysics of Tragedy’], 327-73. Cited here from the first edition,
since Werke 1, which includes Die Seele und die Formen, has still not appeared.
16. C.f. Viktor &Zcaron;mega&ccaron;,
’Es geht um den Realismus’ [’It’s a Question of Realism’], in:
Kunst und Wirklichkeit (Bad Homburg, Berlin and Zurich, 1969), 29; Hans-Joachim
Lenger, ’Ernst Bloch, Georg Lukács: Kontroverse um den Expressionismus’
[’Ernst Bloch, Georg Lukács: Controversy over Expressionism’], Sozialistische
Zeitschrift fur Kunst und Gesellschaft, No.3/4 (1977), 100; Jorg Zimmermann, ’Essay,
Kampfschrift, "große Asthetik" - Zu einigen Problemen der Darstellungsform bei
Georg Lukács’ [’Essay Polemic, "Great Aesthetic" - On some Problems raised by
Georg Lukács’s Form of Presentation’], in: Udo Bermbach and Günter Trautmann
(eds), Georg Lukács: Kultur - Politik - Ontologie (Opladen, 1987), 234.
17. By enclosing the footnotes in square brackets, the editors of Werke 16 do not make
it clear whether they are Lukács’s own or whether they themselves have deduced
which edition Lukács used. Whichever, all the references to Kant’s third Critique
(and Kant is, incidentally, cited here more frequently than any other philosopher)
are from Ernst Cassirer’s edition of 1914.
18. In this connection, one wonders whether Lukács knew Kandinsky’s essay ’Uber
die Formfrage’ [’On the Question of Form’] which had appeared in the Almanach
Der blaue Reiter [Blue Horseman Almanach] in 1912 or Kandinsky’s seminal Uber das
Geistige in der Kunst [On the Spiritual in Art] which appeared in late 1911, given
Lukács’s reflections on the abstract use of colour in this lecture (Werke 17, 234).
19. See Sheppard, Die Schriften des Neuen Clubs, II, 510-21 and 582-3.
20. Marianne Weber, Max Weber: Ein Lebensbild (Tübingen, 1926), 473.
21. Ernst Bloch, ’Die Melodie im Kino oder immanente und transzendentale Musik’
[’Music in the Cinema or Immanent and Transcendent Music’], Die Argonauten, i
(1914), 82-90.
22. Paul Ernst, letter to Georg Lukács of 18 April [1913], in: Karl August Kutzbach
(ed.), Paul Ernst und Georg Lukács: Dokumente einer Freundschaft (Emsdetten, 1974),
45. For an account of Paul Ernst’s relationship with German Social Democracy, see
Stanley Pierson, Marxist Intellectuals and the Worktng-Class Mentality in Germany
1887-1912 (Cambridge, Mass. and London, 1993), passim.
23. Kutzbach, 86. ’Von der Armut am Geist’ was written in August 1911 and had
appeared twice in periodicals: ’A lelki szegénységrõl’, A Szellem, i, No.2 (1911),
202-14; ’Von der Armut am Geiste. Ein Gespräch und ein Brief’, Neue Blatter, 2.
Folge, No.5/6 (1912), 5-6 and 67-92.
24. The first number of Der Jungste Tag appeared in May 1913; thirteen had appeared
by the earliest date when Lukács first mentioned the series to Blei; and about 30
had appeared by mid-1915.
275
25. Weber, 613-14. Toller apparently used to bring poems to read aloud (613). See also
Richard Dove, He was a German: A Biography of Ernst Toller (London, 1990), 30.
26. Dove, 22 and 26-30.
27. According to Dove (35), Toller’s first publication of any kind was a leaflet signed
on behalf of 135
Heidelberg students which appeared in October 1917 and was
also published in the Munchner Zeitung on 10 November 1917.
28. Dove, 40-7.
29. Cited in extenso 26 and 20 times respectively.
30. I have argued elsewhere that the poetry of August Stramm involves a similar,
self-deconstructive tendency and that its apparent linguistic radicalism conceals a
complex of conservative, classical assumptions which Stramm was unwilling or
unable to give up (Richard Sheppard, ’The Poetry of August Stramm: A Suitable
Case for Deconstruction’, in: Richard Sheppard (ed.), New Ways in Germanistik
(Oxford, 1990), 211-42). Given this homology, it is perhaps no accident that
Lukdcs’s attention was, surprisingly, drawn to Stramm’s abstract poetry in
Menschheitsdammerung, for he ticked it almost to the same extent as he ticked
Becher’s poetry. Although he probably annotated Menschheitsdammerung at least
twelve years after he shelved the Heidelberger Asthetik and although he never
mentions Stramm anywhere in his published work, either approvingly or
disapprovingly, one cannot help wondering whether, at a very deep level, he
sensed an elective affinity between himself and Stramm.
31. Despite the scope of Hartmann’s bibliography (Appendix B, note 3) - it lists 886
items - it does not always give the correct dates on which Lukács’s articles
appeared. Nor is it always clear whether Hartmann is referring to the volume or
issue of the periodical in question.
32. Georg Lukács, ’Tagores Ghandi-Roman’ [’Tagores Ghandi-Novel’], Die rote Fahne,
No.189 (23 April 1922). The Lukdcs-Archive holds a second extensive
bibliography which complements Hartmann’s: Janós Ambros, A Selected
Bibliography of Works by Georg Lukács [typescript] ([Budapest], 1987). This lists
many, but by no means all of the Rote Fahne articles.
Moreover, the details given in
Hartmann’s and Ambros’s bibliographies do not always tally.
33. P.27 line 2 ’Elend’ underlined, x against ’Man treibt mit Herzblut keinen Scherz,
Mutter’; p. 40 dash against ’DIE ARBEITER: Wir schworen Haß!’; p. 55 ’DER
ALTE REAPER: Glaubst du an Gottes Reich ... ans Reich des Friedens? JIMMY:
Ich kampf’, als glaubte ich daran.’ underlined uniquely in red - an interesting
side-light, perhaps, on the nature of Lukdcs’s own commitment.
34. Lukács was to say of Bahr in EGR, probably with this book in mind: ’Herr Bahr ist
selbstverstandlich eine Karikatur, und es liegt mir ganz fern, die uberzeugten
Verteidiger mit ihm gleichzustellen’ (’It goes without saying that Herr Bahr is a
caricature, and the last thing I want to do is put him in the same category as the
really committed proponents [of Expressionism]’)(333).
35. Georg Lukács, ’August Strindberg hatvanadik születése napján’ [’On August
Strindberg’s Sixtieth Birthday’], Huszadik Század, x ( February 1909), 172-5 .
36. Georg Lukács, ’Zum zehnten Todestag August Strindbergs’ [’On the Tenth
Anniversary of August Strindberg’s Death’], Die rote Fahne, No.291 (25 June 1922);
reproduced in Georg Lukács, Politische Aufsatze [1918-1929], edited by Jorg
Kammler and Frank Benseler, 5 Vols (Darmstadt and Neuwied, 1968-1979), III
(Organisation und Illusion),
148-51 .
37. Georg Lukics, ’L’Art pour L’Art und proletarische Dichtung’ [’Art for Art’s Sake
and Proletarian Poetry’], Die Tat, xviii, No.3 (June 1926), 221-2; reproduced in
Politische Aufsätze, v (Demokratische Diktatur), 42-6 .
38. Lukács had begun reading Die rote Fahne by at least Autumn 1920 (i.e. before he
began to contribute articles himself). See the reference in Georg Lukács, ’Die Krise
des Syndikalismus in Italien’ [’The Crisis of Syndicalism in Italy’], Kommunismus,
i, No.40 (23 September 1920), 1432-40; reproduced in Politische Aufsatze, II
(Revolution und Gegenrevolution),
129-41 (133); see also III, 100.
39. G.G.L., ’Literaturbesprechung’ [’Literary Review’], Die rote Fahne, No.264 (13 June
1921) and No.265 (14 June 1921); anon., ’Der Kampf gegen den historischen
Materialismus’ [’The Struggle against Historical Materialism’], Die rote Fahne,
No.6 (5 January 1921).
276
40. See, for instance, David Pike, Lukács and Brecht (Chapel Hill and London, 1985).
Although Pike discusses the period during which GV was written (53-71) and
Brecht’s part in the ’Expressionism Debate’ (213-21), he never mentions GV once.
41. Richard Weisbach, Wir und der Expressionismus (Berlin, 1973), 95. The Deutsche
Bibliothek in Leipzig received its copy on 12 July 1932 - which suggests that the
anthology must have appeared about then and that Lukács had access to it
around the same time, especially since Walden, too, was a member of the B p
S. p
42. The other three poems are Karl Otten’s ’Arbeiter’ (’Workers’), René’ ckele’s
’Abschwur’ (’Renunciation’) (GV, 133) and Werfel’s ’Revolutionsaufrur’ (’Call to
Revolution’) (GV,135).
43. Sziklai,117; Pike, 64.
44. See Georg Lukács, ’Das Hohelied vom Fünfjahrplan’ [’Hymn in Praise of the Five-
Year Plan’], Moskauer Rundschau, iii, No.55 (152) (20 December 1931), a positive
review of Becher’s long poem of the same name; GV, 110-11, where Becher is
described as one of the few writers to have discarded ’the baggage of
Expressionist ideology’ and ’the creative method peculiar to Expressionism’; ’Wie
ist Deutschland zum Zentrum der reaktionaren Ideologie geworden?’ [’How did
Germany become the Centre of Reactionary Ideology?’], in: Georg Lukács, Zur
Kritik der faschistischen Ideologie, edited by Jurgen Jahn (Berlin-GDR, 1989), 219-383
(376), where Becher is cited in the same breath as Thomas and Heinrich Mann and
Arnold Zweig; and ’Deutsche Realisten des 19. Jahrhunderts’ [’German Realists of
the Nineteenth Century’] (1950), Werke 7, 187-498 (196), where Becher, along with
Anna Seghers, Heinrich Mann and Arnold Zweig, is said to offer ’a real
possibility for the renewal of German literature’. Lukács probably acquired his
copy of Becher’s Ein Mensch unserer Zeit (A Man of our Time) shortly after its
publication in 1930 and his library also includes the multi-volume GDR edition of
Becher’s works.
45. Christoph M. Hem, Der BPRS: Biographie eines ktilturpolitischen Experiments in der
Weimarer Republik (Munster, 1990), 92; see also Kadarkay, 349 and Sziklai, 159-65.
46. Six years later, in EGR, Lukács would say that he could still hear the bullets
whistling around him (334).
47. Georg Lukács, ’Marx és Engels a dramaturgia kérdéseiröl’ [’Marx and Engels on
Questions of Dramaturgy’], Ei , 32-47 (especially 47), cited here from the
unpublished German MS of 1930 in the Lukács-Archive; ’A nacionalista
mozgalom irodalomelméletéhez’ [’On the Theory of Literature propounded by
the Nationalist Movement’], Ei, 108-22 (especially 109, 111, 115, 120 and 121),
cited here from the unpublished German MS written after September 1932 in the
Lukács-Archive; ’Der faschisierte Goethe’ [’The Goethe who has been taken over
by Fascism’], Die Linkskurve, Goethe Special Issue ([March] 1932), 33-40; ’Gerhart
Hauptmann változatlanul a fasiszta irodalmi akadémia [’Gerhart
Hauptmann has remained a Member of the Fascist Academy of Letters’], Ei,
370-86 (especially 371), cited here from the unpublished MS of c. April 1933 in the
tagja’
Lukács-Archive.
48. Georg Lukács, ’Wie ist die faschistische Philosophie in Deutschland entstanden?’
[’How did Fascist Ideology arise in Germany?’], in: Zur Kritik der faschistischen
Ideologie, 7-217 (29).
49. Hasenclever was in constant correspondence with Hiller when writing Der Sohn
in Autumn 1913/early 1914 and the play was first read out in Hiller’s Cabaret
’Gnu’ on c. 19 February, 1914. There is a document relating to Hasenclever’s
breakdown after his play’s first performance in Dresden on 8 October 1916 in the
Nationale Forschungs- und Gedenkstatten (Weimar) which indicates how
Hasenclever envisaged the staging of Der Sohn. Hasenclever wanted the Friend to
be bald and Hiller was as bald as an egg by 1910. In the speech in question the
Friend cites the ’struggle against the father’ in connection with the struggle
against the princes of a century previously. In Lukács’s view, this would not have
been just a gross, metonymic simplification, it would also have circumvented the
real problem of the contemporary struggle against capitalism.
50. Georg Lukács, ’Reportage oder Gestaltung: Kritische Bemerkungen anlaßlich
eines Romans von Ottwalt’ [’Reportage or Creative Formation: Critical Remarks
277
occasioned by a Novel by Ottwalt’], Die Lmkskurve, iv, No.7 (July 1932), 23-30 and
No.8 (August 1932), 26-31, cited here from Werke 4, 35-68 (63). Another version of
this critique is to be found in ’Zur Frage der Satire’ [’On the Question of Satire’],
Internationale Literatur, ii, No.4/5 (December 1932), 136-53, where Lukács accuses
Doblin of simulating, in Berlin Alexanderplatz, ’a representation of reality which is,
in fact, false’ by means of ’details taken from reality’; cited here from Werke 4,
83-107 (95).
51. Max Picard, ’Expressionismus: Ein Vortrag’, Die Erhebung, I, 329-38 (331); the
passage in question is lined in Lukács’s own copy.
52. The first of these pieces was first published in Die Aktion, iii, No.26 (25 June 1913),
635-7 and then, with minor alterations, in Die Weisheit der Langenweile, II, 54-6; the
second in Ztel-Jahrbuch, II (Berlin and Munich, 1918), 379-425 (413).
53. Franz Werfel, ’Die christliche Sendung: Offener Brief an Kurt Hiller’, Ziel-
Jahrbuch, II, 202-31 (215-18).
54. R[udolf] L[eonhard], untitled article, Ziel-Jahrbuch, II, 375; Hans Bluher ’Der Bund
der Geistigen’ [’The Federation of the Spiritual’], ibid., 12-50 (13); Rudolf
Leonhard, ’Kultur und Parlamentarismus’ [’Culture and Parliamentarism’], ibid.,
105-15 (115).
55. Franz Werfel, ’Brief an einen Staatsmann’ [’Letter to a Statesman’], Ziel-Jahrbuch, I
(Berlin and Munich, 1916), 91-8 (96).
56. First published as ’Der Relativismus in der Rechtsphilosophie und seine
Uberwindung durch die Restitution des Willens’, Der Sturm, ii, No.59 (15 April
1911), 468-70 and then, with minor alterations, in Die Weisheit der Langenweile, II,
85-122 (117-18 and 122).
57. Wilhelm Herzog, ’Auch Eure Uhr ist abgelaufen’ [’Your Time is up, too’], Die
Gemeinschaft (Potsdam, 1919), 63-8 (64).
58. Kurt Pinthus, ’Rede fur die Zukunft’, Die Erhebung, , 398-422 (402 and 411). Both
I
relevant pages are heavily annotated in Lukács’s copy.
59. Otto Flake, ’Souveranitat’, Die Erhebung, I, 338-46.
60. The words in inverted commas are actually paraphrases, not quotations.
61. Pinthus,’Rede fur die Zukunft’, 402.
62. Sziklai, 182; Richard Sheppard, ’Artists, Intellectuals and the USPD 1917-1922’,
Literaturwissenschaftliches Jahrbuch, xxxii (1991), 175-216.
63. Georg Lukács, ’Stefan Zweig: Novellak’ [’Stefan Zweig: Novellas’], Ei , 440-6
(442); cited here from the unpublished German MS of 1937 in the Lukács-Archive.
64. Georg Lukács, ’Wie ist die faschistische Philosophie in Deutschland entstanden?’,
102-5; ’Hans Fallada’ (Appendix B, note 3), Ei , 410-12; ’Mi az úJ a müvészetben?’
[’What is New in Art?’], Ei , 740-97 (752); cited here from the unpublished German
MS of c. 1939-40 in the Lukács-Archive.
65. Georg Lukács, ’Alfred Rosenberg, a nemzetiszocializmus esztétája’ [’Alfred
Rosenberg The Aesthetic of National Socialism’], Ei , 136-9 (138), first published
as ’Alfred Rosenberg - estetik natsional-sozialisma’,
Literaturnaya Gazeta, No.26
(4 March 1939), 3, no German MS extant; ’Karl Marx i Friedrich Theodor Vischer’
[’Karl Marx and Friedrich Theodor Vischer’], Literaturnoe Nasledstvo, No.15 (1934),
1-56, cited here from Werke 10, 233-306 (284).
66. Georg Lukács, ’A német irodalom fasiszta mítosza’ [’The Fascist Myth of German
Literature’], Ei , 139-43, cited here from the unpublished German MS of 1934 in
the Lukács-Archive.
67. Lukács corrected ’Heymel’ to ’Heym’ in his German MS, but judging from its
index, the editor of Ei thought that Linden and Lukács were referring to Stefan,
not Georg Heym.
68. For a diversity of views on Sternheim, see the
marginal annotation to Diebold, 89
(discussed above); GV, 138; Die Zerstorung der Vernunft, Werke 9, 65 and ’Wie ist
Deutschland zum Zentrum der reaktionaren Ideologie geworden?’, 261.
69. Eorsi, 141; cf. Pike, 85 (note 40). Die Zerstörung der Vernunft was not published
until 1954.
70. cf. Pike, 86-7.
71. Hanns Johst, ’Vom neuen Drama’ [’On the New Drama’], in: Professor Heinz
278
Kindermann (ed.), Des deutschen Dichters Sendung in der Gegenwart (Leipzig, 1933),
206-9.
72. Lukács does not cite any text by Leonhard or Vogeler written during the
Expressionist period, but only from the essays which they had contributed to Das
Wort in the context of the ’Expressionism Debate’ earlier in 1938. See Schmitt
(note 3), 157-71 (165) and 172-9 (174 and 177).
73. Lukács must have known some of Benn’s poetry through Menschheitsdammerung.
He must also have known of Benn’s involvement with the Nazis since that is how
the ’Expressionism Debate’ began (Schmitt, 8-9) - though whether he knew of
Benn’s disillusion with the Nazis (see Werner Mittenzwei, ’Die Ernuchterung
Gottfried Benns’ [’The Sudden Sobering of Gottfried Benn’], Neue deutsche
Literatur, xl, No.475 (July 1992), 37-62) is less certain. He may also have known of
Benn’s defence of Expressionism (’Bekenntnis zum Expressionismus’
[’Declaration of Belief in Expressionism’], Deutsche Zukunft, i, No.4 (5 November
1933), 15-17), which Benn published during his Nazi interlude since Klaus Mann
referred to it obliquely in his essay in Das Wort of 1937 which initiated the
’Expressionism Debate’ (Schmitt, 39-49 (48)). Nevertheless, it is a strange fact that
this appears to be the first time that Lukács ever mentions Benn in his published
writings. And then, instead of using Benn’s life and work as the living proof of
his ideas about Expressionism and its political implications, he refuses to get
involved ’in the discussion about whether and to what extent Gottfried Benn may
be viewed as a typical Expressionist’, and simply uses an extract from Benn’s
Donsche Welt: Eine Untersuchung uber die Beziehung von Kunst und Macht [The Doric
World: An Investigation into the Relationship of Art and Power] (Berlin, 1934) to
reinforce his by now familiar contention that Expressionism involves an
’abstraction away from’ a fragmented, capitalist world (EGR, 326).
74. In the original version of EGR, Lukács cited critically the passages from the
Introduction to Walden’s 1932 anthology (11-12) which he had used in GV. But
when he edited EGR for his collected works, he omitted all reference to Walden.
Compare Schmitt, 212 with Werke 4, 329.
75. Lukács also omitted the reference to Doblin from EGR when preparing it for his
collected works. Compare Schmitt, 229 with Werke 4, 342.
76. cf. Durr, 13-14 (note 3).
77. Richard Sheppard, ’Unholy Families: The Oedipal Psychopathology of Four
Expressionist Ich-Dramen’, in: New Ways in Germanistik, 164-91.
78. Georg Lukács, ’Die Gegenwartsbedeutung des kritischen Realismus’ [’The
Contemporary Significance of Critical Realism’], Werke 4, 459-603 (474). First
published Il as significato attuale del realismo critico (Turin, 1957) and better known
as Wider den mi verstandenen Realismus [Against Misunderstood Realism] (Hamburg,
ß
1958).
79. Oddly enough, when citing Worringer in Werke 11 and 12, Lukács indicates that
he is using the first edition of 1908, whereas, in fact, the pagination is that of the
third and subsequent editions.
APPENDIX A
Letters to and from writers connected with Expressionism in the Luk6cs

Nachlaf3
Franz Blei to GL, 26 December 1910 (BW, 189)’
GL to Franz Blei, late December 1910 (BW, 190-1)
GL to Franz Blei, 6 January 1911 (BW, 196)
GL to Franz Blei, [before Autumn 1911(not in B W)
GL to Franz Blei, [between May and September 1911(not in B W)
279
GL to Franz Blei, 11 November 1911 (not in B W)
GL to Franz Blei, c. 9 December 1911 (BW, 261)
GL to Franz Blei, March 1914 (B W, 333-4)
GL to Franz Blei, [between December 1913 and July 1914] (not in B W)
GL to Franz Blei, 21 July 1915 (not in BW)
GL to Franz Blei, [September 1915] (not in B W)
Salomo Friedlaender [Mynona] to GL, 12 July 1911 (BW, 228-9)
GL to Salomo Friedlaender, c. mid-1911 (B W, 228-9)
Wilhelm Worringer to GL, 10 December 1911 (not in B W)
Wilhelm Worringer to GL, 29 December 1911 (BW, 266)2
NOTES TO APPENDIX A
1. B W indicates Georg Lukács: Briefwechsel 1902-1917 (see note 5 above).
2. Lukács’s letters to Worringer are not preserved in Worringer’s Nachlaβ m the
Germanisches National-Museum, Nuremberg.
APPENDIX B
1
Books in Lukics’s library by Expressionist writers or on Expressionism’
Hermann Bahr, Expressionismus (Munich, 1918, 2nd ed.) (NRS; HPM)
Johannes R. Becher, Ein Mensch unserer Zeit (Berlin, 1930) (NRS; HPM)
Franz Blei, Das grof3e Bestiarium der Literatur (Berlin, 1924, 6th-8th eds)
(NRS; UM)
Franz Blei, In Memoriam Oscar Wilde (Leipzig, 1905) (NRS; LPM)
Franz Blei, Männer und Masken (Berlin, 1930) (NRS; UM)
Franz Blei, Das Rokoko (Munich and Leipzig, 1911) (RS; UM)
Bernhard Diebold, Anarchie im Drama (Frankfurt/Main, 1925, 3rd ed.)
(NRS; LPM)
Alfred Doblin, Berlin Alexanderplatz (Berlin, 1930) (RS; UM)
Leonhard Frank, Der Burger (Berlin, 1924) (RS; UM)
Leonhard Frank, Die Räuberbande (Stockholm and Amsterdam, 1939)
(NRS; UM)
Leonhard Frank, Die Ursache (Munich, 1916) (RS; UM)
Walter Hasenclever, Das unendliche Gesprdch [Der júngste Tag, Bd.2] (Leipzig,
1913) (RS; UM)
Richard Huelsenbeck (ed.), Dada Almanach (Berlin, 1920) (UM)2
Ernst Junger, Der Arbeiter (Hamburg, 1932) (NRS; UM)3
Georg Kaiser, Der gerettete Alkibiades (Potsdam, n.d.) (RS; UM)4
Georg Kaiser, Kolportage (Berlin, 1924) (NRS; UM)
Georg Kaiser, Die Koralle (Potsdam, 1920) (RS; UM)
Else Lasker-Schfler, Die gesammelten Gedichte (Leipzig, [1920], 2nd ed.) (NRS;
UM)
Lu Marten, Historisch-materialistisches über Wesen und Veranderung der Kiinste
(Berlin, 1920) (NRS; UM)
Kurt Pinthus (ed.), Menschheitsddmmerung (Berlin, 1920) (RS; LPM; HPM)
Carl Sternheim, Busekow [Der jüngste Tag, Bd.14] (Leipzig, 1914) (RS; UM)
Carl Sternheim, Meta [Der jüngste Tag, Bd.26] (Leipzig, 1916) (RS; UM)
280
Carl Sternheim, Schuhlin [Der jüngste Tag, Bd.21] (Leipzig, 1915) (RS; UM)
Carl Sternheim, Ulrike [Der jüngste Tag, Bd.50] (Leipzig,1918) (RS; UM)
Eckart von Sydow, Die deutsche expressionistische Kultur und Malerei
(Potsdam, 1923) (NRS; UM)
Ernst Toller, Der deutsche Hinkemann (Potsdam, 1923) (NRS; UM)
Ernst Toller, Feuer aus den Kesseln (Berlin,1930) (RS; UM)5
Ernst Toller, Die Maschinenstürmer (Leipzig and Vienna, 1922) (NRS; HPM)
Ernst Toller, Masse Mensch (Potsdam, 1924) (RS; UM)
Fritz von Unruh, Ein Geschlecht (Leipzig, 1918) (NRS; UM)
Fritz von Unruh, Louis Ferdinand Prinz von Preuflen (Berlin, 1919, 4th ed.)
(RS; UM)
Fritz Unruh, Platz (Munich, 1920) (RS; UM)’
von
Franz Werfel, Der Abituriententag (Berlin and Vienna, 1928) (RS; UM)
Franz Werfel, Gesange aus drei Reichen [Der jiingste Tag, Bd.29/30] (Leipzig,
1917) (RS; UM)
Franz Werfel, Der Tod des Kleinbiirgers (Berlin and Vienna, 1927) (RS; UM)
Franz Werfel, Verdi (Berlin and Vienna, 1926) (NRS; UM)
Alfred Wolfenstein (ed.), Die Erhebung, Bd.l (Berlin, [1919]) (NRS; HPM)
Wilhelm Worringer, Abstraktion und Einfuhlung (Munich, 1918, 3rd ed.)
(NRS; LPM; HPM)
Wilhelm Worringer, Agyptische Kunst (Munich, 1927f
Wilhelm Worringer, Die Anfänge der Tafelmalerei (Munich, 1924) (NRS; LPM)
Wilhelm Worringer, Formprobleme der Gotik (Munich, 1912, 2nd ed.) (NRS;
LPM; HPM)
Wilhelm Worringer, Griechentum und Gotik (Munich, 1928) (NRS; UM)
NOTES TO APPENDIX B
1. The following abbreviations are used in the list of texts: RS book marked with =
a Russian stamp; NRS no Russian stamp; HPM = heavy pencil markings;

=
LPM light pencil markings; UM unmarked copy.

= =
2. A note inside indicates that Lukács acquired this book on 22 December 1939.
3. Although not strictly an Expressionist, Junger’s work, like Worringer’s, became
closely associated in Lukács’s mind with the problems raised by that
phenomenon. See Georg Lukács, ’Hans Fallada: Egy tehetséges Író tragédiája a
fasizmus alatt’ [’Hans Fallada: The Tragedy of a Gifted Writer under Fascism’], Ei ,
408-18 (410-12). Here, Jünger is described as an extreme form of the failure to face
reality which is said to characterize the post-war generation as a whole.
According to Ei , 812, this essay was first published in Literaturnyi Kritik in 1935,
but according to the fullest bibliography in print, Jurgen Hartmann,
’Chronologische Bibliographie von Georg Lukács’, in: Frank Benseler (ed.)
Festschrift zum achtzigsten Geburtstag von Georg Lukács (Neuwied and Berlin, 1965),
625-86 (639), this essay first appeared in that journal on 21 July 1934. I have been
unable to locate this essay in either of these places and am working here from the
unpublished German MS in the Lukács-Archive.
4. A note inside indicates that Lukács acquired this book on 20 May 1937 .
5. This play, based on real documents, deals with the USPD-inspired naval mutiny
in Kiel (1917-1918) and it is strange that Lukács never referred to it in GV or EGR
when criticizing the revolutionary policies of the USPD.
6. Lukács probably never read this play as 106-7 and 110-11 are uncut.
7. Although this book is listed in the catalogue of Lukács’s library, it could not be
located during my visit of April 1993.
281
APPENDIX C
Lists of annotations’1
(a) Abstraktion und Einfuhling
Pp. 30-1 and 132-3 are interleaved with plain strips of paper.
P4 l.a. 11.3-7 and 16; p.16 x against 1.11 f.b., 11.6-9 f.b. u; p.17 l.a. 11.6-9 f.b.;
p.18 x against 1.10 and footnote; p.19 x against 1.3, l.a. 11.2-3 f.b.; p.20 x
against 1.10 and footnote; p.21 x against 1.9 f.b.; p.29 x against 1.9; p.30 x
against 11.5-6; p.31 l.a. 11.9-10, x against 1.11, l.a. 11.17-18 Z p.32 x against 1.11;
p.33 x against 1.3 of footnote; p.34 l.a. 11.14-15; p.35 x against 11.12 and 19;
p.41 x against 1.6 f.b.; p.42 l.a. 1.9 f.b.; p.45 x against 1.8; p.46 x against 1.4, l.a.
11.7 and 14, x against 1.7 f.b., brackets around 1.11 f.b. (’und dass’) to 1.6 f.b.
(’gab’); p.49 x against 1.7, ’a)’ against 1.8 f.b., ’b)’ against 1.5 f.b.; p.56 l.a.
11.6-10; p.58 x against 1.11 f.b.; p.61 x against 11.2, 6 and 22; p. 62 x against 1.1,
1.4 f.b. and 1.2 f.b.; p.66 x against 1.3; p.68 x against 1.8 f.b.; p.69 x against 11.17,
21, 24 and 1.3 f.b.; p.72 x against 1.8; p.77 l.a. 11.12-14; p.78 l.a. 11.13-15; p.79 x
against 1.10; p.82 x against 1.4; p.103 x against 1.8, l.a. 11.11-18; p.106 l.a.
11.10-12 f.b.; p.107 l.a. 1.6 f.b.; p.108 l.a. 11.3-6 f.b.; p.114 l.a. 11.10-13; p.115 x
against 1.9 f.b.; p.116 x against 11.1, 3 and 1.5 f.b.; p.117 l.a. 11.9-11; p.127 x
against 1.13 f.b., l.a. 11.1-8 f.b.; p.128 l.a. 1.1; p.131 l.a. 11.1-3, 10-11 and 13-14;
p.132 x against 1.9 f.b.; p.133 l.a. 11.9-10 and 1.9 f.b.; p.134 l.a. 11.1-2, x against
1.4, l.a. 11.7-8, 12-13, x against 1.13 f.b., l.a. 11.3, 6 and 8 f.b.; p.135 l.a. 11.1-2;
p.136 x against 1.2 and 11-15; p.139 l.a. 11.5-6, 12-13 and 11.10-11 f.b.; p.140 l.a.
11.14 and 5 f.b.; p.141 l.a. 11.13-14 f.b.; p.143 x against 1.8 and 1.7 f.b.; p.144 x
against 11.4 and 6, l.a. 11.11-13 f.b.; p.147 x against 11.2 and 7; p.148 l.a. 11.6-8
f.b., x against 1.2 f.b.; p.149 x against 11.7 and 16; p.150 x against 1.2 and 1.6
f.b.; p.151 l.a. 11.4-5; p.154 x against 11.3 and 14; p.158 x against 1.4 f.b.; p.162
l.a. 11.11-12 f.b.; p.167 x against 1.4 f.b.; p.168 x against 1.12, l.a. 11.14-15; p.169
x
against 1.11 f.b., l.a. 11.6-9 f.b.; p.170 l.a. 11.13-17 and 11.3-4 f.b.; p.171 l.a. 11.1
and 3, x against 1.11 f.b., l.a. 1.6 f.b.; p.172 l.a. 11.11-12, x against 1.17; p.173 x
against 1.5 and 1.8 f.b.; p.174 x against 11.16 and 19; p.177 l.a. 11.9-16.
(b) Die Erhebung
Pp.330-1 and 332-3 (Max Picard, ’Expressionismus: Ein Vortrag’
[’Expressionism: A Lecture’]) are interleaved with strips of plain paper.
Alfred Wolfenstein, ’Vorwort’ (’Foreword’): p.2 l.a. 11.8-9 f.b.; p.3 l.a. 11.7-8;
p.4 l.a. 11.1-4.
Paul Kornfeld, ’Himmel und Holle’ (’Heaven and Hell’): p.95 l.a. 11.3-7,
10-13 and 17-18; p.173 l.a. 11.12-15 f.b.; p.182 l.a. 11.11-14; p.184 l.a. 11.1-7 f.b.
Max Picard, ’Expressionismus: Ein Vortrag’: p.329 l.a. 11.1-3 and 11.8-9 f.b.;
p.330 l.a. 11.1-2 (also u); p.331 l.a. 11.4-13; p.332 l.a. 11.9-10 and 17-20; p.335
l.a.11.1-2; p.336 double l.a.11.7 and 20; p.337 I.a. 11.11-14,11.11-12 and ’Begriff’
(1.14) also u, exclamation mark in the margin next to 11.11-14.
Otto Flake, ’Souveranitat’ (’Sovereignty’/’On Being in Control’): p.339 l.a.
11.1-9 f.b.; p.340 l.a. 11.16-21; p.341 l.a. 11.16-24, double l.a. 11.23-4; p.342 l.a.
282
11.8-11 and 11.11-12 f.b., 11.8-9 u, 1.12 f.b. u; p.343 l.a. 11.1-3 f.b.; p.344 l.a. 1.15
f.b., ’romantische Ironie’ (1.15 f.b.) u; p.346 l.a. 11.12-16.
Rudolf Kayser, ’Subjektivismus’ (’Subjectivism’): p.349 11.1-4 f:b. u.
Leo Matthias, ’Der Stierkampf’ (’The Bull-fight’): p.357 l.a. 11.10-11 and
14-16; 1.10 (’heroische’) u, 1.11 u and 11.15-16 u; p.358 l.a. 11.16-21.
Kurt Hiller, ’Ortsbestimmung des Aktivismus’ (’On Defining the Position of
Activism’): p.363 l.a. 11.3-4 and 13-14, 11.17-27 u; p.364 l.a. 11.11-13 f.b.; p.369
l.a.11.9-13 f.b., also u; p.371 l.a.11.2-3 f.b.
Kurt Pinthus, ’Rede fiir die Zukunft’ (’A Speech for the Future’): p.398 l.a. 1.7
f.b.; p.399 l.a. 1.6; p.401 l.a. 11.5-11 and 1-4 f.b.; p.402 l.a. 11.1-6 and 14-15;
p.403 l.a. 11.14-16; p.404 l.a. 11.10, 15-16, 11.12 f.b. and 4-5 f.b.; p.405 l.a.
11.16-17; p.406 l.a. 11.9-10; p.407 l.a. 11.13-17 f.b.; p.408 l.a. 1.15; p.411 l.a. 11.2-12
and 11.13-14 f.b.; p.414 l.a. 11.1-9 f.b.; p.415 l.a. 11.1-3; p.419 l.a. 11.6-18; p.420
l.a. 11.16-22.
(c) Menschheitsdammerung
P.5 l.a. 11.7-10 (Johannes R. Becher, ’Verfall’ [’Decay’]); p.8 x against 1.8 f.b.
(Johannes R. Becher, ’Berlin’); p.9 x against 1.4 f.b. (ibid.); p.34 l.a. 11.7-12 f.b.
(Franz Werfel, ’Fremde sind wir auf der Erde Alle’ [’We are all Strangers on
this Earth’]); p.35 l.a. 11.2-6 (ibid.); p.37 l.a. 11.1-4 and 13-20 (Albert
Ehrenstein, ’Ich bin des Lebens und des Todes mude’ [’I am Weary of Life
and Death’]); p.57 x against 11.9 and 21 (George Heym, ’Die Morgue’
[’The Mortuary’]); p.108 l.a. 11.1-12 f.b. (Johannes R. Becher, ’Der Wald’ [’The
Forest’]); p.163 x against 1.1, l.a. 11.4, 6 and 18-22 (Johannes R. Becher,
’Vorbereitung’ [’Preparation’]); p.167 l.a. 1.6 (Walter Hasenclever, ’Der
politische Dichter’ [’The Political Poet’]); p.211 x against 1.24 f.b., l.a. 11.3-9
f.b. (Johannes R. Becher, ’Mensch stehe auf’ [’Arise, 0 Man’]); p.247 x against
11.5 and 9 (Johannes R. Becher, ’Hymne auf Rosa Luxemburg’ [’Hymn to
Rosa Luxemburg’]).
Several poems are ticked in the index; see the discussion in the text of the essay
NOTES TO APPENDIX C
1. The abbreviations are used: I
following line; 11 lines; l.a.
=
line against;
= =
u =
underlined;
x cross in the margin against the line in question; f.b. = from the
=
bottom of the page.

2. A marginal note on p. 31 reads: ’P[aul] E[rnst] Credo [2 vols (Berlin, 1912)], I [,]
183 Oubeg a[us] Unsere[r] Zeit 115, 126, 133, 142, 147’. Lukács had a long-
standing friendship with Paul Ernst (see note 22) until the latter’s flirtation with
the Nazis. Although the first page number clearly refers to Ernst’s Ein Credo, it is
not clear whether the other six do as well, since four of them could well be cross-
references to heavily annotated pages in Lukács’s edition of Abstraktion und
Einfuhlung. ’Oubeg’ (’ubeg’) is the third-person singular of the past tense of the
Russian verb ’ubech" = ’to flee’ or ’to run away from’. This verb is a popular or
colloquial form of the normal verb ’ubezhat". The relevance of this marginal note
- ’he has fled out of our time/age’ - for the main thesis of his attack on Worringer
will by now be abundantly clear.

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J European Studies, xxv (1995), 241-282

241- Printed m England

Georg Lukacs, Wilhelm Worringer and German

Georg von Lukacs, or Georg Lukacs as he was officially known since

0047-2441/95/2503-0241 $5.00 ~ 1995 Richard Sadler Ltd

(ii) Heidelberg: c. May 1912 - Autumn 1918, with periods in

(iii) Vienna: Autumn 1919 (following Horthy’s overthrow of Bela

(v) Berlin: Summer 1931 - March/April 1933.11 During this period,

Expressionist texts and letters relating to Expressionism to be

rather than marginal linings or underlinings, came from the hand of

The principal annotations

(c) Menschheitsdämmerung. Pp. 4-5 (Johannes R. Becher, ’Verfall’

Lukics’s knowledge of Expressionism

On 10 December 1910, Lukacs described Paul Cassirer’s and

Ist es moglich, etwas zu ergreifen, als Wesentliches aus der Form-

Is it to grasp hold of something essential out of an abstract

Is it possible, Lukacs is asking, to create works of art which, although

abstract, mediate a quality which is timeless, essential and reliable?

(ii) May 1912 to 1918

Worringer almost certainly retained his importance for Lukacs

[...]ly development has become completely detached from its function

clearly echoes that of Worringer’s second major treatise. Nevertheless,

another, he asserts that all great works of art should be models of a

Expressionist Berlin to become a member of the circle around Stefan

periodical Die Argonauten (The Argonauts), since this first appeared in

being concerned to develop a theory of art based on classical and

disproof. Thus, his conversion to Communism in 1918, which

slightly different form four years later when he wrote: ’Die

particular were treated equally dismissively 38 To take two examples

(iv) March 1930 to Spring 1933

Expressionist generation as Hanns Johst and Ernst Jünger were

utopianism that Lukacs was almost incapable of seeing any good in

revolutionary tide turned and ebbed’).50 And sixth, at exactly the

Einffihlung with the ’Ausbildung der expressionistischen Kunsttheorie’

product of a ’pseudo-activism’ (GV, 148), and of being based on

Luxemburgist doctrine of ’spontaneism’. Thus, if the desire to prove

merely defends it as a mode of art which characterizes certain types of

(v) Spring 1933 to Summer 1945

important of these were Picard’s ’Expressionismus’ and Pinthus’s

judgement. Instead, Expressionism for Lukacs now means Johst (FIN,

(vi) Summer 1945 to 1971

judgement given the hostility of the German art establisment to

faculty akin to intuition, Lukacs writes as though he were advocating

Finally, Worringer’s statement:

All transcendental art issues in a de-organicizing of the organic, i.e. in

uncomfortable evidence and the power of empathy. As Lukacs’s own

Letters to and from writers connected with Expressionism in the Luk6cs

a Russian stamp; NRS no Russian stamp; HPM = heavy pencil markings;

LPM light pencil markings; UM unmarked copy.

bottom of the page.

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