The fault lines separatingpolitical and artisticavant-gardes have often been
examined through the latter’srepresentational strategies,beginning with the dis-
tinctionbetween figuration and abstraction. The definitionofmodern art es-
poused by van Doesburgand others privileged formal innovation–in this in-
stance, abstraction–as amark of aestheticautonomyand hailedmodern art
as liberation from social determinations, national differences, and historical tra-
ditions. Meanwhile, influential communist critics defined politically engaged art
as synonymous with figurative art,outlining ideological positions thatcontinued
both in their promotion of socialrealism and, later,socialist realism and in their
antimodernist stance in the formalismdebates of the early1930s and beyond.
The arguments over modernism, to which the bookwill return in chapter 18,
werefirst articulated duringthe prewar debates on Social Democracy concerning
socialist literature and the bourgeois heritageand bear witness,above all,to the
conservative tastes of the party leadership.
What wouldFranz Mehring,ClaraZetkin, or Gertrud Alexander make of
communist artists who not onlyexpanded the boundaries ofrealism with the
help ofmodernist techniques but alsorejected the emotional regimes that had
dominatedpolitically committed artduring theWilhelmineyears?Instead of re-
lyingoncompassion or pity as conduits to classsolidarity,enlisting melodramat-
ic and sentimental modes for proletarian identifications, or promotingworking-
class pride through allegory andmythology, they drew on distinctlymodernist
strategies to uncover the mechanisms of class rule and propose emotional strat-
egies for political resistanceand critique. Discussing photographs of the Krupp
and AEG factories,BertoltBrecht once famouslydeclared thatamere reflection
of reality no longer reveals anything about socialreality because the truth about
power relations has disappearedinto the functional and, asaresult, seeing can
no longer be equatedwith knowing.⁵The sameargument applies to the condi-
tions under which political emotions could be expressed and developed through
artistic means.With the preferred emotional and aesthetic modalities of working-
class culture–pathos and sentimentality–no longer ableto sustain the revolu-
tionary fantasy in thewake of the October Revolution, theterms of emotional en-
gagementhad to beredefined as well. Notwithstanding the frequent association
of the modernist aesthetic with coldness,asinthe cool conduct analyzed by Hel-
mut Lethen in his evocativereflections onaWeimar-eracultureofdistance, it
would be counterproductive to describe the figurative constructivism of the Co-
BertoltBrecht,“The ThreepennyLawsuit,”inBrechtonFilm and Radio,ed. and trans. by Marc
Silberman (London: Methuen,2001), 164–165.
Franz Wilhelm Seiwert’sCriticalEmpathy 207