gram forasocialist culturebut concluded thatatrue proletarian art could only
flourish after the revolution.
Mehring first presented the Social Democratic position on the classics in an
1893series of articles on the so-called Lessinglegend, that is, the insistenceby
conservative scholars onadirect connection between the rise of eighteenth-cen-
tury German literature and the rise of Prussia asaEuropean power duringFred-
erick the Great’srule. The passageisworth quoting at length:
The workofLessing’slife does not belongtothe bourgeoisie, butto the proletariat.Inthe
middle class of the eighteenth century both classes werestill united. But the natureand the
aim of Lessing’sstruggle have been relinquished by the bourgeoisie and takenupbythe
proletariat; the bourgeois class struggle for whichLessingfound the refuge of philosophy
was takenout of this spherebyMarx and became the proletarian class struggle. As the
bourgeoisie rejectedthe intellectual workofits representatives, this precious inheritance
hadto become the arsenal fromwhich theworking class took their first keen and shining
weapons.²⁴The so-called Schiller debate, the next occasion for Mehringto further clarify his
position,represented the socialist contribution to the 1905 centennialofthe writ-
er’sdeath and involved acritical evaluation of the project of aesthetic education
in light of growingdoubts about theromance of revolution.²⁵Schiller’sstatus as
aFreiheitsdichter(poet of liberation) and hisaura ofVolkstümlichkeit(folksiness)
had made him ideallysuited for socialist popularizationsand appropriations.
His 1794 Lettersonthe Aesthetic Education of Man,inparticular, provided an im-
portant blueprint for using aesthetic education in reconcilingthe different as-
pects of human nature (e.g., the sensual and therational) and establishing
the aesthetic state as the foundation of new forms of sociability.For Social Dem-
ocrats, the social foundation of artand its significance as an expression of or-
ganic growth provedkeytotheir self-understanding asasocial movement; the
same can be concluded about therole of aesthetic experience in the self-trans-
formationofthe workingclass into the universal class.
All earlier attempts at breakingfree of Schiller and his Storm and Stress had
failed to produceasocialist aesthetic thatacknowledgedthe complexities and
contradictions of modernlife. Marx diagnosed this problem earlyonwhen he
Franz Mehring,TheLessing Legend,trans. A. S. Grogan. Online at https://www.marxists.org/
archive/mehring/1892/lessing/chap6.htm,1March2017.Die Lessing Legendewas published in
book form in 1893.
The Schiller debatehas been documented in GiselaJonas,ed.,Schiller-Debatte 1905. Doku-
mente zur Literaturtheorie und Literaturkritik der revolutionären deutschen Sozialdemokratie(Ber-
lin: Akademie, 1988).
The Socialist Project ofCulture andEducation 169