stead, the events mark the beginning ofadeeper crisis of legitimation to which
the various partiesresponded with actionism, dogmatism, and the periodic purg-
ing of left and right deviations. Thesetendencies continued well into the postwar
years and became an integralpart of the cultureofcommemoration that, during
the GDR,included the MarchAction among the greatmoments of working-class
history.⁹
Jung’scontributionto the revolutionary fantasy breaks with these prevailing
models of historical and emotional revisionism byrefusing character identifica-
tion and, similarly, by de-emphasizingthe perceptive of gender.Aman ofmany
contradictions,Jung wasamember of the MunichbohèmeandBerlin Dada, a
student of economics and psychoanalysis,and anavid reader ofFriedrich
Nietzsche and Max Stirner.Jung’slife during theWeimaryearsincluded periods
of intense political activism and repeated prison stays, which he used for unin-
terrupted writing.His evolving literarystyle benefited greatlyfrom intermittent
work asabusiness correspondent clearlyinformed his astute analysis of capital-
ism inTheConquest of the Machines.¹⁰Jung’saffinity for outsider perspectives
extended to his political commitments as one of the founding members of the
KAPD.Infavor of spontaneous action, along the lines of RosaLuxemburg’stheo-
ry ofmass strike, and opposed to the vanguard party model of the KPD,the
KAPD was chosen by Lenin as the main exhibit in his trenchant critique of
“left-wing communism as an infantile disorder,”and it never gained much trac-
tion in the political culture of theWeimar Republic.¹¹
Nonetheless,for Jung,the KAPD’sanalysis of the objective conditions for
revolution and the subjective obstacles to its realization proved crucial to his
own literaryreconceptualization of proletarian subjectivity.The samecan be
said for his close attention to questions of form in addressing what the party’s
TheWeimar-ear KPD celebrated the MarchAction as part of local struggles goingbackto the
PeasantWars; see OttoKilian,Warum die Kirschbäume inMansfeld im Herbst blutrote Blätter
haben. Bilder aus der Geschichte desMansfelder Lands inVerehrung seines tapferen roten Prole-
tariats(Leipzig:Uns-Produktivegenossenschaft,1925); reprintedin1975. In the GDR,the March
Action was commemorated as part of the heroichistory of the Germanworking class.Thus the
year 1971 sawthe publication ofyetanotherversion of Gotsche’sMärzstürmeandapamphlet on
Die Märzkämpfe 1921. Eine ruhmvolleKampfaktion des mitteldeutschen Proletariatspublished by
the local SED branch in Aschersleben.
The best introductionto Jung can be found inWolfgang Rieger,Glückstechnikund Lebensnot.
Leben undWerk FranzJungs(FreiburgimBreisgau: Ça Ira, 1987).Arecent reading ofEroberung
derMaschinenas part ofareassessment of realism can be found in DevinFore,Realism after
Modernism:TheRehumanization of Art and Literature(Cambridge,MA: MITPress,2012), 87 – 115.
VladimirIlyich Lenin,“’Left-Wing’Communism: An Infantile Disorder,”CollectedWorks
(London: Lawrence&Wisehart,1964–70), 31:17–118.
TheRevolutionaryFantasy Revisited 197