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Communism and the Avant-Garde in Weimar Germany. A Selection of Documents

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Published Nov 2022

Ben Fowkes

Author: Ben Fowkes
How did the revolutionary Left view cultural modernists? Their uneasy relationship is illustrated in this book with quotations ranging from Alexander’s ‘Dada is merely an impertinence’ through Trotsky’s ‘There cannot be a proletarian culture’ to Averbakh’s ‘Tear off the masks!’ and Becher’s ‘There can only be one kind of genuine art: fighting art.’ This book covers communist attitudes to the whole field of cultural innovation, from the art of the left abstractionists to the literature of the worker-correspondent movement and the music of Weill and Eisler through to proletarian film, theatre and photography and takes full account of the impact on Weimar left culture of external events, such as the First World War, the ‘Great Change’ in the Soviet Union, and internal German developments such as the failure of revolution after 1918 and the rise of Nazism. Each chapter starts with an introduction that provides a context to the documents and indicates the current state of research.

Biographical Note

Ben Fowkes, B.A. (Oxon.) (1961), Ph.D. (1966), London School of Economics, taught history at the universities of Sheffield and North London. He has published books on Communism in Germany and the communist era in Eastern Europe and Russia. He has translated several volumes of the work of Karl Marx, including The Economic Manuscript of 1863-1865, published by Brill.

Readership

Subject areas: intellectual and social history, cultural studies, modern literature, modern art, film studies, theatre studies, politics. Readership: students of the above subject areas, general readers.

Table of Contents

Preface
Acknowledgements
Abbreviations

1 Introduction: The Avant-Garde and Cultural Innovation

2 The German Setting

3 The Shock of War and Its Aftermath

4 Following the ‘Alexander Line’

5 The Revolt of Art becomes a Revolt Against Art

6 Parallel Developments: The Wider European Context

7 The Soviet Cultural Background: The Debates of the 1920s and Their Relevance

8 The New Start of 1925 in Germany

9 New Forms and New Participants: Worker-Correspondents and Worker-Photographers

10 The Impact of the Great Change: The Attempt to Organise and Unify Proletarian Culture

11 Political, Literary, and Artistic Aspects of the Proletarian Culture Movement

Conclusion: The End of Weimar and the Coming of Socialist Realism

Appendix: List of Documents by Chapter
Note on Sources
Bibliography
Index