Jung,these questions can be answered by treatingreading asadialogic process,
aprocess based on the refusal of identification in the traditionalsense, and even
more importantly,through the advancement of collective feeling and thinking.
After all,afictional work is“not just exclusively plot plus narrative structure
but an integralpart of our selves, the events in and with us, our feelings, that
sense of being linked togetherasaliving community.”²⁴Asserting thatall art
“is andmust onlybethe product of class, of classideology, and of classdiffer-
ence,”²⁵Jung recognizesthe obstaclesto the developmentofaproletarian art in
the present.Healso expresses absolute certainty about its full emergence after
the victory of the revolutionary workingclass. In themeantime, he concludes,
proletarian literatureinparticularmust strengthen“the idea of community in
an oppressed class thatnot onlythirsts after fighting the oppressors but already
builds the new through its owncreative energies.”²⁶It is preciselythis anticipa-
tory qualitythat distinguishesJung’sreconstruction of the revolutionary situa-
tion from the revisionist accounts offered by the proponents of strongidentifica-
tions. And it is this strongbelief in modernisttechnique as an instrument of
proletarian mobilization that he shares withFranzWilhelm Seiwert of the Co-
logne Progressives, the subject of the next chapter.Last but not least,itisthe
fundamentallydifferent approach to artistic technique and political emotion
that makes the four case studies on proletarian modernism presented in chapters
10,11, 17,and 18 so essential toacriticalreassessment of the productive encoun-
ter between modernism and communism, which sustained the artistic and polit-
icalavant-gardes from the late 1910s to the early1930s, includingthrough their
activist,collectivist,and internationalist commitments.
Jung,“Arbeitsfriede,”105.
Jung,“Proletarische Erzählkunst,”Feinde ringsum,241.
Jung,“Proletarische Erzählkunst,”242.
204 Chapter10