German Left and Aesthetic Politics

The German Left and Aesthetic Politics examines the articulation of contending materialist aesthetic practices within the ideological fractures of the German Left between the Second and Third International. It is hinged on the major literary critical contributions of Franz Mehring, representative of the Second, and Karl Wittfogel and Georg Lukacs representing the Third. Both parties focussed on the bourgeois revolutionary cultural heritage and how it might provide examples for emulation. However, post the 1918 November Revolution a radical politically avant-garde challenged that tradition, and through figures like the Berlin Dadaists, Piscator's proletarian theatre and later Brecht, with contributions from dissident Marxist intellectuals, like Karl Korsch and Fritz Sternberg, asked other questions and proposed other answers. Revisiting the contexts and contents of these exchanges allows one to understand the serious role allocated to the cultural in constructing the 'third pillar of socialism', its integrative dimension.