The Real Georg Büchner and his Fascist Misrepresentation, by Georg Lukacs 1935
Written: 1937
First Published: 19 February 1937 in Das Wort, no. 2, on the hundredth anniversary of his death (in German: Der faschistisch verfälschte und der wirkliche Georg Büchner)
Source: Theater der Zeit
Translated by: Anton P.
For the impartial reader of Georg Büchner, it sounds completely improbable that fascism could even attempt to claim Büchner for itself. (For example, the old-fashioned reactionary Treitschke recognized what was revolutionary in Büchner and consequently rejected it.) And yet this improbable has become a fact. Just as the fascist German “literary history” tried to make a prophet of the “Third Reich” out of the late Jacobin Hölderlin, so it also dares to approach Büchner.
The method of this fascist perversion is essentially the same as that used in Hölderlin and other great revolutionary transitional figures. Everything revolutionary in their life and work is supposed to be explained away with forgery and interpretation tricks. In the case of Georg Büchner, too, the fascists have forerunners in the literary scholars of the imperialist period, above all in Friedrich Gundolf. Of course, he makes Büchner only a belated romantic, a poet of “atmosphere.” Gundolf dissolved Büchner’s entire social criticism into such a mood: “The social class is a mood in Woyzeck ... Here only the landscape of fate with its soul is effective. Everything that was otherwise social criticism in the drama glows down in Woyzeck to the prehuman realm. No German who wanted to show the poor, the bad, the gloomy, has touched his foundations as closely as Büchner.”
The German fascists continue on this path. The revolutionary poet Büchner in particular is to become the forerunner of their “revolution.” This attempt has been made in two major papers in recent years. Both approach this task “scientifically,” that is, they seek to fascize Büchner in complicated detours. For Büchner cannot be made into a direct forerunner of the Führer even by using the most sophisticated fascist means of falsification.
The starting point of both treatises is Büchner’s alleged despair, his classification in the Schopenhauer-Kierkegaard-Dostoevsky-Nietzsche-Strindberg-Heidegger series. It sounds very Heideggerian when Viëtor sees Büchner’s greatness in resolutely standing in the void. Pfeiffer also says of Büchner’s conception of history: “Surrendered to the power of incomprehensibly higher powers, which with ultimate irresponsibility and cruelty make people the victims of a reprehensible addiction or a whim, that is how the human being is part of history.”
According to Pfeiffer, Büchner’s participation in the uprising attempts after the July Revolution in Hesse is an expression of a temporary “alienation from reality”. This shows very clearly which methods of clumsy lying are used for such a “refined” fascization. Pfeiffer “proves” this assertion by saying that the student Büchner stays away from the activities of the fraternity at Giessen University. Luckily, Büchner was very clear about this in a letter to his family: He hates these guys because of their conceit and arrogance, because they despise the majority of their fellow human beings because of a ridiculous pseudo-education. “Aristocratism is the most shameful contempt for the holy spirit in man; against it I turn its own weapons: pride against pride, ridicule against ridicule.”
After the defeat of his attempts at revolution, Büchner wrote Danton, interpreted by the fascists mentioned as an expression of his disappointment. Both call Büchner great because he shaped the disappointment in the revolution.
This is why Viëtor calls his study The Tragedy of Heroic Pessimism. He says of Danton: “one who is overwhelmed by great disappointment and does not want to act. Does not want to act anymore, that is what matters... The drama begins at the moment when Danton’s revolutionary belief is broken by the realization of the hopeless bondage of man and the inseparability of life.” What is this disappointment? In his analysis of the scene with Robespierre, Viëtor gives a clear answer: “Robespierre is naive enough to believe that the sole purpose of the revolution is to create better conditions for the people ... This dangerously stupid terrorist dogma ignites Danton’s enmity.” Danton – and with him Büchner – is deeper and more “realistic” than Robespierre precisely because of his disappointment. And the content of this disappointment: “It was a religious truth, one that related to the last, eternal questions of mankind ... a realization ... before which all actions seem meaningless.” Büchner thus creates “a religious truth from history. The Death of Danton is the tragedy of the great politician who is destroyed the moment he finds his way back from the frenzy of radical action to statesmanlike prudence and renewed vigour.” For Viëtor, the disappointment with the revolution and the resulting despair is the real building block for the positive, for “statesmanlike prudence.”
Pfeiffer is even more radical. His book is based on a new “historical philosophy of drama”. This theory is based on the fact that the drama is heroic-demonic-Germanic, while the epic is Christian-Jewish. It is not worth dealing with this theory factually. Just to shed light on Pfeiffer’s working method, it should be emphasized that he thinks he can base this view on Schelling. And as follows: Pfeiffer calls the epic, with Schelling, representation of the finite in the infinite. And he then quotes Schelling’s statement about Christianity: “The direction peculiar to Christianity is from the finite to the infinite.” (emphasis mine, G. L.) It is clear simply from the grammatical sense of both sentences, without any consideration of Schelling’s conception of the infinite, that Schelling is saying exactly the opposite of what Pfeiffer is putting in his mouth. Accordingly, Schelling regards Homer as the typical representative of the epic and shows the dissolution of the old epic in Christianity. This contrast between Pfeiffer and Schelling even goes so far that Pfeiffer sees the cohesive form of the epic in the rhyming couplets, while for Schelling the hexameter is the typical meter of the epic. So if Pfeiffer wants to cover his “theory” with Schelling’s authority, his only “method” is to speculate on the ignorance and inattention of his readers.
Yet there is method behind all this nonsense. Pfeiffer only wants to recognize the old Germanic sayings and songs as dramatic in his sense. In all of modern times drama is being made into an epic; also in Shakespeare, but especially in the German classics. Only with Kleist does a real Germanic-demonic drama begin. In the history of literature, Pfeiffer continues the line of the official philosopher of the “Third Reich”, Alfred Baeumler, who, in his inaugural speech at Berlin University, made the ideological struggle against the humanism of the German classics the main task of “political education”. Pfeiffer wants to insert Georg Büchner into this demonic-dramatic line.
Danton has succumbed to the demonic in-between. He is heroic in an unheroic time. The obstacle to his heroism is democracy: “Danton has recognized that the heroic step is not possible for him because of the preponderance of unheroic spirit in the world around him.”
According to Pfeiffer, the tragedy of Danton is that Danton has to act with the crowd, but the crowd cannot keep up with his heroic goals. His tragedy is that he is not yet able to successfully apply the fascist methods of social demagogy. This is his tragic disappointment and despair; this is also the demonic despair of his poet. The more open and blunt Viëtor gives the game away more imprudently. He comments on the words Büchner has put in Robespierre’s mouth that the revolution must be completed as follows: “When is a revolution complete? This is not an objectively definable state, this being-completed; a revolution is complete when a state is reached which satisfies the basic requirement of the revolutionary leaders.” (My emphasis, G. L.)
In this way and with such methods, it is “scientifically proven” that Büchner was a tragically desperate, vanguished forerunner of the “National Socialist Revolution.”
What is the real tragedy of Danton in Büchner? Arnold Zweig remarked very delicately about this drama: “And so Büchner makes the dramatic mistake of assuming the enormous necessity and praiseworthiness of the revolution as such, as he himself felt it.” Irrespective of whether or not Zweig’s demand can be fulfilled within the framework of Büchner’s conception of Danton’s tragedy, Zweig is absolutely correct with regard to the playwright himself and goes to the core of his being. Büchner has always been a consistent revolutionary, was astonishingly mature and lucid for his age, and exhibited an astonishing consistency in the ebb and flow of his fate as a revolutionary, human being and playwright.
We cannot even give a sketch of Büchner’s biography here. In order to destroy the legend of his “disappointment in the revolution” we must content ourselves with citing isolated statements from the various periods of his life. The essence of Büchner’s nature is a glowing revolutionary hatred of all forms of exploitation and oppression. Already in a speech at the Gymnasium he glorified Cato against Caesar. As a student in Strasbourg, he wrote to his family: “Young people are accused of using violence. But are we not in an eternal state of violence? Because we were born and raised in prison, we no longer notice that we are stuck in a hole with hands and feet chained and a gag in our mouth. What do you mean by law? A law that turns the great mass of citizens into slave cattle to feed the unnatural needs of an insignificant and depraved minority?”
Because of this sentiment, Büchner joined the revolutionary secret organization in Hesse, although he had expressed his skepticism on several occasions in Strasbourg as to whether a revolutionary uprising was possible in Germany. His fascist falsifiers see a “contradiction” in the fact that he nonetheless places himself at the head of the revolutionary secret organization. This contradiction, however, is easily resolved if we consider Büchner’s special position within the German revolutionary movement. Büchner is perhaps the only one among the revolutionaries of that time who made the economic liberation of the masses the focus of his revolutionary activities. He therefore has the sharpest conflicts with his like-minded people. Weidig, the leader of the Hessian revolutionary secret organization, changed the word rich to noble everywhere in Büchner’s draft of the Hessian Courier and thereby switched the writing in the direction of liberalism, exclusively against the feudal-absolutist remnants. According to Büchner’s conception, however, the revolution stands and falls with whether the masses of the poor will rise up against the rich. For this reason, the court testimony by Becker, a friend of the poet, explains Büchner’s participation in the Hessian revolution attempts more clearly than any commentary: “With the pamphlet he wrote, he (Büchner, G. L.) initially only wanted to explore the mood of the people and the German revolutionaries. When he later heard that the peasants had handed in most of the pamphlets found to the police, when he heard that the patriots also spoke out against his pamphlet, he gave up all his political hopes of becoming different.”
Where is the “disappointment” in the revolution here? Before his revolutionary activity, Büchner wrote to his family: “I will always act according to my principles, but I have recently learned that only the necessary needs of the masses can bring about changes, that every movement and shouting of the individual is foolish in vain.” And after his escape, that is at the time of his “disappointment”, he wrote to Gutzkow: “The whole revolution has already divided itself into liberals and absolutists and must be eaten up by the uneducated and poor class; the relationship between rich and poor is the only revolutionary element in the world; hunger alone can become the goddess of freedom....” There are few examples in history that a young revolutionary between the ages of twenty and twenty-four had begun his political line in such a way and stuck it out so consistently. Büchner is therefore a plebeian revolutionary who is beginning to understand the economic principles of liberating the working masses. He is an important figure in the series that leads from Gracchus Babeuf to Blanqui (in the June 1848 uprising).
In accordance with this concrete historical position, the clarity of Georg Büchner’s views should not be measured by the yardstick of the later struggles of the proletariat, which had already been organized into a class. Büchner, although a contemporary of Chartism in England and the Lyon uprisings in France, as a practical German revolutionary, could not yet see and recognize the proletariat as a class. A true plebeian revolutionary, he focuses on the economic and political liberation of the poor; in accordance with German conditions, of course, primarily on that of the peasants. His consistent commitment to this brought him, both theoretically and practically, into an irresolvable conflict with the liberals among his contemporaries, whom he repeatedly criticized with sharp irony, as did the important revolutionary democrats later. It goes without saying that this state of affairs means that Büchner’s revolutionary perspective contains a great deal of ambiguity. So he writes in the letter to Gutzkow that we quoted above: “Feed the peasants and the revolution will have an apoplexy. A hen in every peasant’s pot makes the Gallic rooster perish.” The unclear tendencies are expressed even more clearly a little later in another letter to Gutzkow. After a harsh criticism of the “uncomfortable relationship” between the educated liberals and the people, he says: “And the big class itself? For them there are only two levers: material misery and religious fanaticism. Any party that knows how to use these levers will win. Our time needs iron and bread, and then a cross or something else.” The fact that the consistent and pugnacious materialist Büchner was able, albeit temporarily, to come to such views about the revolutionary role of religion or a substitute for religion shows how deep and unresolved were the contradictions of the transition in his time.
And by no means only in Büchner’s head, but in general, in the broader historical sense. The productive forces of capitalism, liberated by the French Revolution and the industrial revolution in England, allowed social contradictions to emerge in a completely different way than in the eighteenth century. A few great thinkers had already drawn socialist conclusions from the contradictions of capitalist society; Admittedly utopian, of course without even suspecting the importance of the proletariat as the revolutionary implementer of these demands. The followers of the greatest theoretician of capitalist economics, Ricardo, began to draw socialist conclusions from the theory of surplus value very soon after the master’s death; admittedly, again not through a dialectical knowledge of the laws of movement in society, not through the knowledge of the role of the proletariat in the revolution, but through an ethical interpretation of the theory of surplus value. On the other hand, those thinkers and politicians who were directly connected with the incipient specific struggles of the proletariat, which was organizing itself into a class, tried to conceptually work out the special goals of the proletarian class struggle by placing them in stark contrast to all the goals of the previous upheavals; but in this period they got stuck in the immediate stark juxtaposition. (From the Luddites to the beginnings of syndicalism.) The resolute plebeian revolutionaries, on the other hand, sought a way in the rigorously pursued democratic revolution that was to eliminate the economic and social contradictions of capitalist society in a revolutionary way. But as long as in reality, and accordingly in the minds of the revolutionaries, the poor did not become a real proletariat, it was impossible for them to see the problems clearly.
The deeper, more radical, and more comprehensive a revolutionary democrat posed the questions at this stage of development, the deeper and more insoluble contradictions he had to become entangled in. Listen to Büchner comment on Gutzkow’s positive perspective: “I believe that in social matters one must proceed absolutely from the principle of justice, and seek the creation of new spiritual life in the people and let this superannuated modem sociery go to the devil. What is the point of such individuals continuing to live? Their whole existence consists of trying to rid themselves of the most terrible boredom. They may die out, that is the only novelty they may still experience.”
The great democratic revolutionary of France, Blanqui, in the course of a long life, advanced from a notion of the poor to the proletariat, from Babeuf to a recognition of Marxism. The twenty-four-year-old Büchner died at the beginning of the same path. However, with the exception of Heine, he is the only one in Germany who has gone down this path. Along with Heine, he is the only German writer who can be compared at all with the later, greater and more mature revolutionary democrats, with Chernyshevsky and Dobrolyubov.
It is easy to understand that this transitional crisis of the revolutionary movements on the continent raises one of the most important questions in the critical analysis of the French Revolution. After all, this not only deeply stirred up the life of the French people, but also gave the whole of Europe a different face; precisely the face of those deep contradictions whose ideological manifestations we have just pointed out. It is natural that two completely opposite views had to emerge. On the one hand, from the fact that this upheaval in the world only aggravated the material situation of the emerging proletariat, a rejection of any political-democratic revolution was concluded (this view is most blatantly visible in Proudhon, but it has many antecedents in France at the time of Büchner). On the other hand, the democratic-plebeian revolutionaries are under the illusion that consistently bringing the Jacobin terror to its extreme culmination would automatically lead to the salvation of the masses from their material misery. How deep and significant this antinomy was can be observed in the history of the French labor movement, where, even in the imperialist period, Sorel and Jaurès represented the two extreme poles of this antinomy.
As a tragic contradiction, this antinomy underlies Büchner’s The Death of Danton. In this tragedy, then, not some subjective experience of a young person (disappointment, despair, etc.) was shaped; on the contrary, Büchner sought, with the great instinct of a real, epoch-making tragedian, to portray the major contradiction of his period in the mirror of the French Revolution. And not in such a way that he carried the problems of his time into this period and used the revolution as a costume. On the contrary, with the right perspective of the important tragedian, he recognized that this problem of his epoch had surfaced during the French Revolution and had taken on an important historical and polemical form.
This problem is exposed right from the first scenes of the drama with a clarity and vehemence reminiscent of Shakespeare. Danton and his friends speak of the need to end the revolution. “The revolution must end and the republic must begin,” says Hérault. Immediately afterwards, Büchner shows in an animated and realistic popular scene of how the poor think about the achievements of the revolution so far. “They (namely the rich, G. L.) have no blood in their veins but what they sucked from us. They told us: kill the aristocrats, they are wolves. We hung the aristocrats on the lantern. They said: The veto is taking the bread from your mouths; so we killed the veto. They said: the Girondins are starving you; so we guillotined the Girondins. But they pulled the clothes from the dead men’s backs and left us freezing and barefoot as before.”
In all popular scenes, Büchner depicts this deep exasperation of the impoverished masses. And at the same time he shows, as a great realist, that these masses cannot yet have a clear consciousness of what expedient actions their bitterness could turn into. The insolvability of the objective contradictions in reality (and also in Büchner’s head) is reflected in the fact that the bitterness of the people is still directionless, fluctuating, swinging from one extreme to the other. The only consistent feature is exasperation itself and a cynical, sincere expression of the immediately visible reasons why the masses are disappointed. Büchner is poetically quite consistent when he creates this folk scene with a grotesquely realistic, bitter Shakespearean humor.
However, the compositional significance of this folk scene goes beyond the Shakespearean model. The role of the people as the chorus, which socially justifies the individual tragedies of the protagonists and comments on them in terms of action and social ideals, grew extraordinarily in the development period of the drama before and after the French Revolution. The folk scenes in Egmont (Goethe), Wallenstein’s Camp (Schiller), etc. clearly show this path: there is a closer connection between what happens above, in the tragic intertwining of fates of the main heroes, and the movements, developments below, in the life of the people themselves. Büchner now goes one step further: for him the material situation, the intellectual and moral condition of the people of Paris that arises from it, is the ultimate reason both for the conflict between Robespierre and Danton and for its outcome, the downfall of Danton and his followers. This chorus is therefore more active than the ancient one and intervenes directly in the action. And yet Büchner – with a very conscious artistry – limits the role of the folk scenes to accompanying the tragic fates of the leading, “world-historical individuals” in a choral, idealistic and atmospheric way. For that historical awareness which the world crisis depicted here could have received its highest expression in the struggles between Robespierre and Danton. The still directionless exasperation of the people is therefore at the same time above and below the tragic individual struggles taking place above. Büchner gave this deep and correct historical knowledge an overwhelming dramatic form in his original, Shakespeareanized chorus-like portrayal ofunderlying social conditions, an approach that nevertheless went beyond Shakespeare’s own conception of the people.
On this basis the great political contrast in the drama between the followers of Danton on the one hand and Robespierre and Saint-Just on the other is brought to a dramatic climax. Danton, as we have seen, wants to end the revolution, Robespierre – in his sense – to continue the revolution. Danton’s demand to give up revolutionary terror is only the logical conclusion from his premises. That is why he says right at the beginning of the decisive conversation with Robespierre: “Where self-defense ends, murder begins, I see no reason why we should be compelled to kill any longer.” Robespierre’s answer is: “The social revolution is not yet finished; whoever leaves a revolution half-complete digs his own grave. The society of the privileged is not yet dead. The robust strength of the people must replace this utterly effete class.”
The common view of this decisive scene of the play is that Danton refutes with great contempt, with objective intellectual superiority, the moralizing of the narrow-minded and limited Robespierre. It is true that Danton treats Robespierre with contempt. It is also true that Büchner shares Danton’s philosophical and ideological view of Epicurean materialism and therefore, as we shall see, has a dramatic and lyrical sympathy for his character. However, the actual intellectual and dramatic course of the conversation is completely different, and this is precisely where Büchner’s great dramatic and tragic talent is expressed. Danton does not refute Robespierre’s political views at all. On the contrary, he avoids a political discussion, he has not a single argument against the political accusation, against Robespierre’s political conception, which, if we remember the letters of Büchner just cited, is essentially the conception of the poet himself. Danton leads the conversation to a discussion of the principles of morality, and here, as a materialist, achieves an easy victory over Robespierre’s Rousseauian moral principles. But this cheap victory in the discussion contains no answer to the central question of the political situation, to the question of the contrast between rich and poor. Büchner shows himself here as a born dramatist, in that he embodies the great social contradiction, which also lives as an insoluble contradiction in his own feelings and thoughts, in two historical figures – each endowed with the necessary level of greatness and narrow-mindedness.
Danton’s avoidance is no coincidence, but the very essence of his tragedy. In Büchner’s work, Danton is a great bourgeois revolutionary, but he is in no way able to go beyond the bourgeois goals of the revolution. He is an Epicurean materialist, in the spirit of the 18th century, in the spirit of Holbach and Helvetius. This materialism is the highest and most consistent ideological form of pre-revolutionary France, the world view of the ideological preparation of the revolution. Marx characterizes this philosophy as follows: “Holbach’s theory is the historically justified, philosophical illusion of the bourgeoisie that was just emerging in France, whose desire for exploitation could still be interpreted as desire for the full development of individuals in an intercourse freed from the old feudal ties. Liberation from the point of view of the bourgeoisie, that is, free competition, was however, the only possible way in the eighteenth century to open up a new path of freer development for individuals.”
But precisely with the victory of the revolution over the king and the feudal lords, in which Danton played a leading role, new contradictions arose in society, which Danton found alien and hostile to, and to which his world view could not provide an answer. Robespierre and Saint-Just want to continue the revolution, for Danton this continuation is no longer his revolution. He fought for liberation from feudalism; the redemption of the poor from the yoke of capitalism has nothing to do with his goals. In a conversation about the people, immediately before the great dispute with Robespierre, he says: “They hate those who enjoy themselves like a eunuch hates men.”
For this reason he feels alienated from the people and also from politics. In conversations with his friends, it is repeatedly said that he is a “dead saint” of the revolution. It is no coincidence that the memory of the September massacres, the pangs of conscience about them, surfaced in Danton just before his arrest. As long as the revolution was his own, as in September 1792, he acted resolutely and bravely and regarded the September massacres as a natural, necessary measure to save the revolution. But if the revolution goes beyond that, if it follows the plebeian paths of Robespierre and Saint-Just, then Danton’s alienation from this revolution necessarily creates a conflict of conscience.
And this alienation from the people is not Danton’s imagination, as his followers accuse him of. After talking to Robespierre, he goes to the sections to alert them against Robespierre; “They were reverential, but bitter as a corpse,” says Danton himself. His ravishing eloquence when in the dock makes a tremendous impression on the audience. But this impression is only temporary and cannot change the basic mood of the broad masses. Büchner immediately adds a popular scene in front of the palace of justice to Danton’s last great speech. There one of the townsfolk says: “Danton has nice clothes, Danton has a nice house, Danton has a nice wife, he bathes in burgundy, eats venison off silver plates, and sleeps with your wives and daughters when he is drunk. Danton was poor like you. Where did he get all that from?”
In this light, Danton’s cynical apathy, his weary boredom, his unwillingness to act do not appear as contradictory psychological traits of the once energetic revolutionary, but are the necessary psychological reflexes of his situation. It should not be forgotten that Büchner sees this boredom as the predominant feature of the well-fed bourgeoisie. We recall the letter to Gutzkow quoted earlier, we also refer to the character of Leonce in his later comedy.
But Büchner’s Danton is not a reactionary bourgeois. He cynically scoffs at Robespierre’s moral theory, but (except for Camille Desmoulins) he has no sympathy for his own followers. What can he fight for? Who should he fight with? His follower Lacroix calls himself a scoundrel; General Dillon wants to liberate Danton with such an appendage: “I will find enough people, old soldiers, Girondists, ex-nobles.” And the fact that Büchner’s Danton does not want such a fight with such allies shows that the revolutionary element has remained in him.
The peculiar way in which Büchner’s political and human sympathies are distributed is reflected in the whole structure of the drama. Robespierre, and especially Saint-Just, are the real, dramatic, propulsive characters. Danton is the focus of both the first half of the drama and the end, but is more the object than the driving force behind the action. It is no coincidence, but Büchner’s significant dramatic compositional power, that the first act ends with the conversation between Robespierre and Saint-Just after the Danton-Robespierre dialogue, and the second with the Convention scene and the speeches of Robespierre and Saint-Just. And we have seen that even the third act, in which Danton’s defense speeches also place him dramatically and scenically at the center of the action, does not end with these great rhetorical outbursts, but with the scene from which we have quoted the people’s judgment of Danton. And finally the drama closes with that little scene in which Lucile Desmoulins, who has gone mad, calls out “Long live the king” at the place of the guillotination. Danton’s fate is thus the focus of the action, but it is not the hero’s activity that moves the drama. Danton meets his fate.
And yet it is the tragedy of Danton and not that of Robespierre and Saint-Just that takes center stage. A decade later, Karl Marx outlined the tragic conflict between these Jacobins in The Holy Family. In his Robespierre, Büchner hinted at individual human conflicts (unfortunately also – and this is one of the few inconsistencies in the characterization – at the “envy” of Danton adopted from bourgeois historians); Saint-Just bears only a few psychologically individual traits, he is the embodiment of the energetic, unbroken, plebeian revolutionary, more a wishful thinking than a fully worked out figure. Dramatically, mutatis mutandis, he has a similar contrasting function to Danton as Fortinbras does to Hamlet in Shakespeare.
Danton’s dramatic and tragic central position is related to the fact that Büchner not only portrayed the political and social crisis of the revolutionary aspirations of the 18th century at the turning point of the French Revolution with extraordinary poetic depth, but at the same time, inextricably linked with this question, the crisis of ideology of this transition, the crisis of the old mechanical materialism as the worldview of the bourgeois revolution. Danton’s character, Danton’s fate, is the tragic embodiment of those contradictions raised by the historical development of the period between 1789 and 1848, which the old materialism cannot solve.
The social character of Epicurean materialism is lost. The materialists of the 18th century could, as a result of the objective situation, consider that their – philosophically idealistic – theory of society and history arises from their materialistic epistemology, could believe that they really took the compass of their actions from their Epicurean materialism. Helvetius says: Un homme est juste, lorsque toutes ses actions tendent au bien public (A man is just when all his actions promote the public good). And he believes he has derived the content of this sociality, its necessary connection with the ethics of individuals, from Epicurean egoism.
The victory of the bourgeoisie in the revolution shatters these illusions. It is precisely at the stage of development at which Danton has to act that the contradictions within the bien public come to the fore sharply. Simple egoism turns into capitalist swindle, into cynical moral nihilism. Büchner portrays this process with deep irony and great, discreet, always creative poetic power and never resorting to subjective commentary. The common upstart Barrère says: “The world would have to be upside down if the so-called rascals were to be hanged by the so-called legal people.” And the spy Laflotte, who is about to betray General Dillon, defends this act with Dantonian, Epicurean-egoistic arguments: “Pain is the only sin and suffering is the only vice; I will remain virtuous.”
Robespierre and Saint-Just, on the other hand, have a standard of action, since they want the plebeian revolution; admittedly, due to a rejection of philosophical materialism, due to a Rousseauian idealism, which – in itself, viewed in isolation from the political situation of his immediate actions – Danton can combat playfully, ironically and with intellectually superior combat, especially in the field of morality. But since political action is the task of the day, this philosophical superiority of materialism is of no use to Danton. As a politician, as a thinker, as a human being, he has lost all direction.
In this great tragedy the inability of the old materialism to grasp history comes to the fore. Büchner himself experienced this conflict very deeply without being able to solve it philosophically. He writes (from Giessen to his fiancee) about his study of the history of the revolution: “I felt crushed under the hideous fatalism of history. I find in human nature a terrible equality, in human relationships an inevitable power bestowed on all and on no one, I find the individual to be only foam on the wave, the size a mere coincidence, the reign of genius a puppet show, a ridiculous struggle against an iron law, to recognize it the highest, to master it impossible. It no longer occurs to me to stoop before the parade horses and corner-posters of history... Must is one of the words of condemnation with which man was baptized. The saying, There must be trouble, but woe to him by whom it comes is dreadful. What is it within us that lies, kills, steals?”
It is extraordinarily interesting how and with what variations this outburst by Büchner returns in Danton’s scene before his arrest. Büchner takes individual sayings almost verbatim from this letter and puts them in the doubting, desperate Danton’s mouth. One can see to what extent the Danton figure became the poetic expression of these contradictions, which Büchner experienced deeply. But at the same time we have to pay attention to the differences in wording and emphasis. Danton arrives at a mystical agnosticism, at a desperate inability to understand history. For Büchner, recognizing historical necessity, even if one cannot master it, remains the highest. That is why this must in Büchner is not desperate, not pessimistic as in Danton. In the drama, too, Büchner gives a structured answer to Danton’s doubts with Saint-Just’s great Convention speech, in which the iron and inhuman necessity of history, which revolutionarily crushes entire generations that stand in its way, which works like an irresistible volcanic eruption or an earthquake, is affirmed and glorified with passionate pathos.
Here, too, we see how much the two protagonists of the drama embody the contradiction, the crisis in Büchner’s life and thinking. But only both together, in their tragic interaction, embody Büchner’s thoughts, neither Danton nor Saint-Just is a mouthpiece for the poet. However, Saint-Just’s view comes closest to Büchner’s conception of the solution to the “stomach question”. Also, both Robespierre and Saint-Just bear traits whose lyrical traces we can find in Büchner’s speech on Cato. But Robespierre and Saint-Just are no more identical with Büchner than Danton. And precisely because Büchner steadfastly adheres to materialistic philosophy in this great intellectual crisis and never loses the belief that with its help he can solve the great problems of life, Danton is closer to his feelings than Saint-Just, who is politically related to him.
The contradiction, which is treated tragically in relation to the materialistic affirmation of life, to the philosophy of enjoyment, is also a major ideological problem of the transitional period. Camille Desmoulins says in the first scene of the drama: “The divine Epicurus and sweet-buttocked Venus must become the bouncers of the republic instead of Saints Marat and Chalier.” That sounds rather Thermidorian here. But the lust for life and joie de vivre of the bourgeois class that had come to power was mixed up again and again during this period with the longing for a new and better world in which human virtue would know no ascetic restrictions whatsoever. Heine, too, proclaims this new joie de vivre in verse and prose; he almost always proclaims in such a way that both currents sound together. “The blossoming flesh in Titian’s paintings is all Protestantism. The loins of his Venus are much more thorough theses than the theses which the German monk stuck to the church door in Wittenberg.” However, Heine’s path leads straight from here to that other, “better song”, which proclaims the joy of life and worldliness of liberated humanity.
Seen from the other side, this contradiction lives in the emerging revolutionary movement of the working class. Babeuf inherits both the old materialism and the ascetic-revolutionary in Robespierre. Great poets like Heine and Büchner, great thinkers like Fourier, are equally convinced of the inadequacy of both extremes; none of them can find an incontrovertible solution. And even the young Marx and Engels are forced, already on the basis of dialectical materialism, to fight against the ascetic conception of the revolution.
Heine is broader, more agile, richer than Büchner; he processed Hegel’s dialectics in his own way, not ignoring them like Büchner. But he can only express the contradictory tendencies in their contradictoriness, intellectually as well as poetically, by no means revealing the uniform principle that moves them. Of course, Büchner cannot find a way out either. What he is looking for politically, the concretisation of the poor into a revolutionary proletariat, does not exist in his German reality. That is why he cannot find the dialectical conception of history even in his consistent materialism. But Büchner’s personal peculiarity consists in following his contradictory path in a really straight line, without hesitation, unconcerned about the contradictions, and not, like Heine, in flexibly and elastically oscillating back and forth between the contradictory extremes.
From this emerges Büchner’s significant realism, trained in the tradition of Shakespeare and Goethe. His political longing desires the poor who have become conscious and have awakened to political activity. As a great realist, however, he portrayed Woyzeck, who had been abandoned, exploited, restlessly chased here and there and kicked by everyone, as the greatest figure of the poor man in Germany at the time.
Gundolf and Pfeiffer want to falsify this magnificent image of society in mood painting, whereby Pfeiffer “deepens” Gundolf’s aestheticizing falsification to the effect that Büchner’s art of mood is the expression of his demonic nature. “He has a mood: the constant presence of the demonic. Moons means the demonic constantly breathing down our necks.” These analyses tend to make Büchner a forerunner of Strindberg and Expressionism as a writer. This, too, turns historical truth on its head. Büchner portrays Woyzeck’s physical and ideological helplessness against his oppressors and exploiters; that is, a real social helplessness that is shaped by being, the essence of which Woyzeck, if not clearly sees, at least suspects. When his captain accuses him of immorality, Woyzeck replies: “Us poor people – you see, Captain: money, money. If a man has no money – just let him try to reproduce his kind in a moral sort of way! We’re made of flesh and blood like other people. Our sort will always be unblessed in this world and the next. I think that if we went to heaven, we’d have to help make thunder.” Strindberg, on the other hand, creates the deep experience of his own helplessness against the unleashed forces of capitalism; he does not see through them and therefore has to mystify them. He does not shape the concrete, existential helplessness, but rather the ideological reflexes of his own experience of helplessness. In poetic terms, therefore, he is not a continuator, but rather a counterpoint to Büchner.
Büchner proclaimed his realistic tendencies uninterruptedly, openly and at a high theoretical level. His theory of realism is: poetic reflection of life in its mobility, liveliness and its inexhaustible richness. He demands historical fidelity from historical drama. Desmoulins already railed against artistic idealism in The Death of Danton. And in the short story fragment Lenz, Büchner has his hero, the well-known friend of Goethe’s from his youth, express the following commitment to true realism: “This idealism is the most shameful contempt for human nature. Try once to immerse yourself in the life of the little one and reproduce it in the twitches, the hints, the whole delicate, hardly noticed play of expressions; you would have tried something like that in the Hofmeister und die Soldaten. They are the most prosaic men under the sun; but the vein of feeling is the same in almost everyone, only the shell through which it has to break is more or less dense. You just have to have an eye and an ear for it.” Here the ideological connection between Büchner’s efforts towards consistent popular democracy and his literary realism becomes very clear.
Thus Büchner’s picture stands before us very clearly. As a revolutionary and great realist in the miserable Germany of the 1830s, how should he not have experienced outbursts of anger and exasperation in such miserable reality? But in the line of his life these do not even result in such fluctuations as in Heine, let alone turn into “disappointment” or “despair”. Büchner worked consistently and without hesitation in the few years of his life: as a plebeian-democratic revolutionary in his political activities, as a philosophical materialist in his worldview, as a successor to Shakespeare and Goethe in great realism.
But why does fascism need the falsification of Büchner, why does it transform Büchner into someone who “despaired”? Despite all the art of forgery, neither Viëtor nor Pfeiffer could brand him as the herald of the “Third Reich”. But what is gained for them when the revolutionary is falsified as the representative of “heroic pessimism” and the realist as the “mood artist of the demonic”?
One should not underestimate the serious political impact of such demagoguery in literary history, however blatant and gross these falsifications are.
To be sure, the entire fascist German press is constantly proclaiming belief in the future of fascist Germany. But it proclaims a faith, and a blind faith at that, no knowledge, no real perspective of the future. Those who are not thinking but who are hypnotized to lack of will should flock to the “Führer”. For this it is necessary to create an atmosphere of blind faith, for this the annihilation of every rational conception of nature and history is essential. Every philosophy of the past that German fascism embraces (Schopenhauer, Romanticism, Nietzsche) denies the knowability of the world. Out of the chaos, out of nothing, out of the darkness of despair, people are supposed to be saved by the “miracle”, by the “leader”.
But beyond that, National Socialism came to power as a result of the desperation of the masses (including the masses of the intelligentsia). This despair had very real economic and ideological reasons: the impending collapse of the capitalist system and with it the real collapse of the existence of millions of working people, the collapse of the hitherto dominant bourgeois ideology. The desperation of the masses that arises on such a soil can be the starting point for their revolutionary uprising, but at the same time offers starting points for the wildest and clumsiest demagogy. On the eve of the victorious October Revolution, Lenin wrote the following about this despair of the masses: “And is it surprising that the masses, tormented and tortured by hunger and the long war, take the poison of the Black Hundreds? Can one imagine a capitalist society on the eve of collapse without the despair of the oppressed masses? And can the desperation of the masses, among whom ignorance is rampant, be expressed in any other way than in the increased sales of every poison?” The despair of the German masses was systematically fueled by the social and national demagogy of the Nazis; every thought, every search for truth was choked off in order to prepare for the “miracle” in order to later throw those who, as a result of the further deterioration of their material and ideological situation, remained desparate and could no longer be filly anesthetized by the opium of Nazi propaganda, into torture chambers and concentration camps.
The crisis of every social system is always accompanied by a great crisis of worldview; one need only think of late Ancient Rome, or of the dissolution of feudal society. Precisely in their collapse, the economic categories document how much they are “forms of existence”, “determinations of existence”: the uprooting of the material, social existence of broad masses necessarily brings with it a world view of rootlessness, despair, pessimism and mysticism.
The ideological crisis of the capitalist system has already begun. The ugliness, mendacity, insecurity and injustice, the senselessness of life under capitalism appears very early on in a number of poets and thinkers as the senselessness of life in general, in those poets and thinkers who do not even imagine a perspective of renewal. The resulting despair, which is often honest, critical and even rebellious, is repeatedly being used by the sycophants of capitalism to at least tempt those people who cannot be directly won over to the side of the capitalist system, to be paralyzed in a pathless and goalless state of despair that therefore poses no danger for the capitalist system. Such desperate people are not harmful to capitalism, or, as experience shows, sooner or later a large proportion of them will openly capitulate. Dostoevsky says that the true atheist is only one step from God.
The deeper the crisis of the capitalist system, the greater the social significance of this despair, because it penetrates ever broader masses and influences the thinking and lives of the people ever more deeply. And at the same time as this increasing social importance, the ideological level of despair declines, but at the same time takes on ever more feverish, ever more virulent forms, ending in mysticism. One need only think of the series comprising Schopenhauer-Kierkegaard-Dostoevsky-Nietzsche.
The deeper the crisis, the less able are simple apologetics to provide an ideological defense of the capitalist system. The meaninglessness, cruelty and bestiality of life, man’s exposure to the chaos of life, and pessimism as the adequate ideological reaction to this chaos, all have to be taken into account and affirmed; and the apologetics consist in educating the masses, on the basis of this uncritical affirmation, to expect a miracle, to distract them from an unbiased investigation of the concrete social causes of this situation. This new period of capitalist apologetics commences with Nietzsche. The so-called philosophies put forward by Spengler, Klages, Baumler, etc., are a repeated call for despair – in the service of a reactionary capitalism.
But the desperation of the masses themselves is genuine, even rebellious. It is only diverted in a reactionary direction by fascist demagogy. And fascism appeals, as Dimitrov has excellently explained, not only to the backwardness in the thinking and emotional life of the masses, but to the developing, still unclear instincts that even tend in the direction of real liberation. It is a vital interest of fascism to confine the despair of the masses to such stultification, dullness and fruitlessness.
So if fascist “philosophy” cherishes and nurtures this despair, and denounces every investigation of the economic foundations of the existential collapse of the masses as shallow, crude, un-Germanic, etc., then in certain circles it performs the same demagogic propaganda services for fascism as Streicher’s crude anti-Semitism otherwise does. Therefore, the inferior content of this ideology of despair cannot be looked down upon with arrogance. Of course, Pfeiffer’s theory of the demonic is sheer nonsense. But this nonsense skilfully connects to the immediate ideological situation of broad sections of the intelligentsia, demagogically distracts them from real knowledge of their situation, leads them into the false depths of a hopeless darkness, into the world of chronic despair, of Heidegger’s “never-ending nothingness”; breeds a psychology that sees in despair itself a sign of a higher human being, which isolates people with the help of despair, throws them back on themselves, which educates the intelligentsia to haughtily turn away from the masses.
Such crude and clumsy falsifications thus have very concrete social bases and political purposes. And our struggle to win back the seduced intelligence must work tirelessly to expose these falsifications. Dostoevsky is wrong when he sees atheism as a precursor to the perfect belief in God. His atheists, however, occupy this position. But the path of Jacobsen’s Niels Lyhne or Turgenev’s Bazarov never leads to any belief in God. If one were to present the history of atheism in such a way that it culminates in Ivan Karamazov as the supreme figure of atheism, this falsification of history would have been accomplished. According to such a method, late Jacobins like Hölderlin, revolutionary democrats like Georg Büchner, indeed, even rebels like Flaubert and Baudelaire who have become disappointed, have become skeptical and are sometimes seized by mystical impulses, are falsified into victims of despair à la Klages or Heidegger.
But their always concrete despair, their pessimism, their skepticism have nothing to do with this imperialist demagogy. Their thinking is, as we have shown with the example of Büchner, concrete, historical and social and for that very reason deeply and comprehensively human. When Büchner is “despairing” that no plebeian democratic revolution can be kindled in Germany in the 1830s, his bitterness is great and pregnant with the future, because – in his case with a clear awareness, in others more or less unconsciously – directed towards the real future of mankind, aimed at the real liberation of human beings from society’s yoke. But such a tendency is inherent, at least as a possibility, in every despairing mood of the masses at the collapse of their material and ideological existence. And this possibility can be brought to life, to clarity, by poets like Büchner or Hölderlin. That is why the correctly understood great poets and thinkers of the past are a real danger for fascism. That is why they have to be falsified, so that the desperate intellectual of the present sees in Büchner a forerunner of his own lack of clarity and not as an aid in achieving clarity, in entering the fray.
The struggle against these falsifications can only be that of historical concreteness. Because only the concoction of an eternally human, supra-historical, supra-social despair can block the way to correct knowledge. Our task is to bring this open and clear language of historical reality to life. In the case of the really great figures of the past, however, this voice is the concrete struggle for the liberation of mankind. The formation of legends in German literary history, for example, made a “pessimist” out of Büchner’s older, softer, less clear contemporary, Nikolaus Lenau. Lenau was very clear about the real reason for his “pessimism.” In the final stanzas of his Albigenser he says about his own situation: “A fate shared with fighters long since passed away will expand our breasts for posterity so that in our misfortune we can rejoice in advance and have no fear of struggle and pain and death without victory. Thus in far happier days to come posterity will ask after the sources of our grief. Whence springs the dark discontent of our age, the anger, haste and divisiveness? Dying in the twilight is to blame for this impatience so bereft of joy; it is a harsh fate not to glimpse this long-awaited light, to go to the grave by the grey light of dawn.”
And although Lenau has clearly shown throughout his poem what he means by liberation, he completes it in the last stanza by enumerating the long series of liberation struggles from the Albigensians to the storming of the Bastille, and the words “and so on”, to say quite unequivocally that his “despair” is a concrete, historical one, the indignation and impatience at the long delays in the democratic revolution in Germany, that his “pessimism” was about the German misery of his day and harbored the hope of bright prospects for the future, of the final realization of the revolution.
When we contemplate this glaring contrast of historical facts and their fascist falsification, we must feel a certain sense of guilt. All the more so since all these blunt fascist lies are based on “subtle” falsifications of history from earlier periods, from periods when we still had the legal possibility of fighting against any falsification. Undoubtedly, the narrow and rigid method of vulgar sociology, which ignores the richness and complexity of great historical figures, is partly to blame for the fact that Marxism has not communicated the correct understanding of history sufficiently to the masses, or has not had a profound enough impact on a sufficiently broad section of the intelligentsia. But our anti-fascist friends among the writers and literary theorists should also devote some thought to this. They should examine whether they did not in fact make too many concessions to those dangerous ideologies that prepared the way for fascism out of some misunderstood “modernity”, out of an uncritical collaboration with philosophical currents of the day. Whether they did not for their part – to remain with the case in point – promote dehistoricization, desocialization, the abstract etemalization of “despair” in the field of literary history. Is the linking of Büchner to Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky and Heidegger really a purely fascist invention, or were the fascists able to pounce on “preparatory works” which, although intended as quite the opposite, nonetheless pointed in this direction?
Unmasking fascist demagogy means to scrutinize the intellectual weaponry everywhere, not only among Communists, but also among all honest anti-fascists.