Reading Mehring on Lessing, Heine, Goethe, Schiller, Herweghs, and Freiligrath is more than an intellectual treat. Among Mehring’s many substantial contributions to Marxism, and to the liberation of our class, were his literary and cultural studies, many of them revelatory and trail-blazing. They would help to define the fields of literary and cultural criticism, Marxist and otherwise, that followed. Essays rich even beyond their rich subjects, Mehring himself was no dilettante in the world words and crafted not only classics of literary criticism, but classics of literature itself.

‘Literature and the Class Struggle’ by Franz Mehring from The Communist. Vol. 8 No. 7. July, 1929.

(Editor’s Note: We reprint below some extracts from the chapter on “The French Revolution and Its Results” in Franz Mehring’s book GERMAN HISTORY FROM THE CLOSE OF THE MIDDLE AGES. The translation is by Gertrude Haessler.)

FROM now on (after the success of Goethe’s “Faust”—Trans.) Goethe, throughout the long period of his old age, stood upon a lonely height over and above the nation. Even its struggle for a national existence did not touch him; he adopted a completely neutral stand toward the wars against Napoleon, with which he has been both justifiably and unjustifiably reproached. Unjustifiably insofar as he was too much a cultured person to find any taste whatever in the anti-French absurdities, and justifiably insofar as he could feel content, during a period of world-shaking struggles, to remain in the miserable little cage of the court of a German princeling. The great poet now all too frequently and all too completely disappeared behind the little minister, as the powerful master of words contented himself with an empty ceremonious senile style.

But Goethe nevertheless remained a power in German life—as the greatest and also the last representative of classic literature, which, so long as he lived, formed the only indisputable claim of the German people to being a modern cultured nation. With the Russian barbarians as allies, the so-called “wars of liberation” against the heirs of the French Revolution were won and a desperate reaction followed. Classic literature, however, had created its own place, and this is what Goethe had in mind when he despatched the boastful arrogance of the romantic school of poetry, which had arisen under the impact of the feudal East on the bourgeois west, with the words: “The classic is the healthy, and the romantic is the unhealthy.”

But it was a different matter with the opposition, which even before this time had thrown the robust elements of the bourgeoisie, joyfully anticipating the future, against Goethe. He died March 22, 1832, when the Paris July Revolution set up a goal for the sorrowful days of European reaction, and when the people remembered their rights against the princes. The German youth, who had begun to think and to act politically, who had seen only the old Goethe, and who had found little even in his youthful writings to stir their hearts, were compelled to take up a hostile and antagonistic attitude toward Goethe. This was unavoidably accompanied by bitter, sharp and undeserved condemnation; we need only remember what even Boerne and Heine wrote about Goethe. But that is no reason for joining the cry that the nation had done its greatest son a wrong. A nation is always much greater than its greatest son; it must develop its gifts and energies in all spheres of human activities, which is something that an individual, limited as he is comparatively in space and time, can never do. Sharp and undeserved as the condemnation of Goethe was at that time, it yet arose from a historical necessity: were the German people again to become a unified and conscious nation, it was imperative that the charm of the great name of Goethe, once inspiring and now benumbing, be broken.

It is stupid to believe that the opposition which arose against Goethe with the development of political life in Germany could be invalidated by stating that it ruined art by blending it with political tendencies; the political poetry of Heine, Herweghs, Freiligrath and others is an aesthetic absurdity which does not exist before the bar of good taste. It is certainly true that poetry and politics are separate spheres, that a poem which does not operate through artistic means, but merely speculates on political passions and tendencies which happen to be in the forefront of political interests, like the Hohenzollern dramas of Wildenbruch, is reprehensibly tendentious. But one must not draw the conclusion therefrom that poetry must not deal with political problems or social catastrophes. ‘This demand comes to nought by the very fact that it is inherently impossible to fulfil. Poets and artists do not descend like snow from the skies, nor do they wander round in the clouds; they live in the midst of the class struggles of their peoples and their times. Various minds can, of course, be affected by them in the most varied ways, but beyond them no poet or thinker can go.

Thus our classical literature was nothing but the unfolding struggle for emancipation of the German bourgeoisie. To imagine that in the second half of the eighteenth century a great number of talented literary minds developed particularly on German soil because of a lucky accident or because of an unfathomable decree of Providence, is untenable. The economic development of that period gave the bourgeois classes in Germany a strong impetus; but since these classes were nevertheless too weak to struggle for political power, as in France, they created for themselves an ideal of the bourgeois world in their literature. In Klopstock and Lessing and young Schiller, the revolutionary bourgeois thought appeared sufficiently clear and sharp, but since it found no echo in the mass of the people, it contented itself, in the very prime of our classical literature, which is characterized by the friendship of Goethe and Schiller, with a realm of “aesthetic glory,” which deliberately limited itself to a small circle of select souls and which carefully divorced itself from all political and social tendencies at the very time when the revolutionary wars were overturning feudal Europe from one end to the other.

It is now clear that this realm of aesthetic glory must fade out in proportion as the political and social consciousness awoke in the bourgeois classes. What had formerly been an advance, the highest development of aesthetic culture of Goethe and Schiller, became now a reaction, just as soon as the objective conditions arose for political and social struggle; what had formerly constituted the ideal of the best minds, harmonious beauty and fulfillment in the realm of aesthetic glory, became now the vulgar phrase of reactionary philistines who wanted to be left in peace and who rejected all historical progress; it became the commonplace phrase of the political tendentious poetry which has nothing in common with art. But in the face of such reactionary talk, it must always be kept in mind that it is not the honest and open political and social tendency which is artistically reprehensible, but only its representation with artistically impermissible means. And this is the very thing which the working class must keep in mind, for it might otherwise adopt the senseless attitude that that which constitutes the best content of its life must not be used as the object of poetic or artistic representation.

Examining the reverse side of the medal, we find that Goethe, because of the one-sidedness of his purely aesthetic philosophy fell into the hands of the pedants and philistines, as Gottfried Keller, who is deservedly called the Swiss Goethe, had already bluntly stated. In world literature there is no figure which lends itself so well to hero worship, but whoever devotes himself now to the Goethe Cult wanders friendlessly and aimlessly about. A classical example is the book of Victor Hehn on Goethe, which contains wonderful paragraphs revealing Goethe’s innermost secrets; but which sets forth the most narrow and odious opinions of Schiller, Lessing, Buerger, Heine and in general of those giants of German literature in whom the revolutionary bourgeois soul lived most forcefully; a book which condemns the German Revolution of March, 1848 as a political prank; in short, a book which betrays the most complete stupidity toward the political and social problems of the time. These are the consequences to which the unconditional Goethe Cult lead; it is condemned to complete sterility with regard to the great problems of the time, and it cuts a ridiculous figure when it complains about the stupidity of the masses who know nothing and wish to know nothing of Goethe.

There is only one reply: man does not live on bread alone, but neither does he live alone on art; before he can create a beautiful life, he must make his life secure. ‘The working class of today possesses at least a morsel of the economic and political freedom which the bourgeois class of the 18th century lacked; it can get directly at its foe and requires no round-about artistic way. It is no handicap, but rather an advantage of the proletarian struggle for emancipation that it can and therefore must concentrate its energies on the political and social field, and that, while not neglecting the demands of aesthetic culture, it nevertheless gives them second place.

Malicious and short-sighted as usual, the opponents draw the conclusion therefrom that art is the prerogative of a dominant minority, and in order to glorify themselves, they have even preached the insolent dogma, that the masses will never be able to bear the blazing sunshine of art, but at most, a few subdued rays of this light. This dogma can spread as long as ruling classes exist, as long as the oppressed masses must struggle for their bare existence; for only after they have secured this much, can they even think of creating a beautiful life. Nothing is more stupid than the illusion that when the ruling classes fall, art will also go under. It will fall, it is true; not as art however, but as a monopoly; it will at last become what in essence it should actually be—the primary possession of humanity. Not until then will Goethe come completely into his own; the day on which the German nation becomes economically and politically free will be the jubilee of its greatest artist, because then art will become the common property of the whole people.

There were a number of journals with this name in the history of the movement. This ‘The Communist’ was the main theoretical journal of the Communist Party from 1927 until 1944. Its origins lie with the folding of The Liberator, Soviet Russia Pictorial, and Labor Herald together into Workers Monthly as the new unified Communist Party’s official cultural and discussion magazine in November, 1924. Workers Monthly became The Communist in March, 1927 and was also published monthly. The Communist contains the most thorough archive of the Communist Party’s positions and thinking during its run. The New Masses became the main cultural vehicle for the CP and the Communist, though it began with with more vibrancy and discussion, became increasingly an organ of Comintern and CP program. Over its run the tagline went from “A Theoretical Magazine for the Discussion of Revolutionary Problems” to “A Magazine of the Theory and Practice of Marxism-Leninism” to “A Marxist Magazine Devoted to Advancement of Democratic Thought and Action.” The aesthetic of the journal also changed dramatically over its years. Editors included Earl Browder, Alex Bittelman, Max Bedacht, and Bertram D. Wolfe.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/communist/v08n07-jul-1929-communist.pdf