The contest of realism

The community of German-language Marxist intellectuals living in exile in the 1930s was riven by the so-called “Expressionism Debate,” often also referred to as “Realism Debate.” In essays published in the Moscow-based exile journal Das Wort in 1937 and 1938, the initial contributors to the debate castigated expressionism, a quintessentially German variant of avantgarde experimentalism, for facilitating Nazism’s rise to power due to its bourgeois aestheticist atavism; later contributors, some of whom had themselves begun their literary careers as expressionists, defended expressionism, arguing that avantgarde experimentation is not inherently reactionary, nor must it be considered antithetical to a Marxist aesthetics. This exploratory essay tracks the debate from its inception in Das Wort through its late-1930s extensions, specifically the Seghers-Lukács-correspondence and Bertolt Brecht’s numerous essay fragments directed against Georg Lukács (fragments published only after Brecht’s death in 1956), to the 1950/1960s Lukács-Adorno debate (inasmuch as it can be called a debate), recapitulating the “Expressionism Debate’s” relevance for the discussion of realism, Marxism and literary experimentalism.