Chapter 14
MarxistLiteraryTheoryand Communist Militant
Culture
The“literary writer”glorifies the proletarian because he,adeclassedrabbi, is onlycapable
of fightingfor gods.Whenarevolutionary shows him theweaknesses of proletarians,he
shouts“traitorand counterrevolutionary!”Not because he defends the proletarians but be-
cause he defends his cult.ErnstToller,“Splitter”Marxist literary theory and criticism is never justconcerned with narratives,
characters,themes, or styles.Onthe contrary,these categories conveycompeting
views on the political function of literature and serveasindicators of wider so-
cial and culturalchanges.Writing about literature meansestablishing connec-
tions between dominant and oppositional emotionalregime,onthe one hand
and literarydevices such as character identification and narrative point of
view,onthe other.Unspoken assumptions and value judgmentsabout the
place of emotion in literature informliterarycriticism inmultiple ways:inthe
demand for moving stories and convincing characters,inthe genderedhierarchy
of literarygenres basedontheir moods and styles,inthe prescriptions forappro-
priate forms of reading, and so forth. In all instances,the criteria of literary eval-
uation tendto reproducenot onlydominant discourses of class but also prevail-
ing attitudesabout literature as bothasite of psychological interiority and a
laboratory for new emotions and sensibilities.
Unsurprisingly,this connection proved of great interestto the writers,critics,
and functionaries who set out to define proletarian literature in line with Marxist
theory and party policy.Reread through the lens of political emotions, the liter-
ary debates in the SPD and KPD press,preoccupied on the surface with ques-
tions ofauthorship, narrative,realism, and tendency, offer privileged access to
the intensifyingstruggle over competingmodels of proletarian identifications be-
tween the visions of precapitalistand postcapitalist community that had in-
spired nineteenth-century Social Democracy and the decidedlymodern forms
of collectivity emerging afterWorld WarIand October Revolution.
In the epigraph, ErnstToller (1893–1939) mocks fellow leftist writers who
claimed the label“proletarian”for their ownfantasies of literature andrevolu-
tion. As theauthor of several expressionist plays about the modernmasses
and an active participant in the short-livedBavarian Council Republic, he may
have even been describingaformerversion of himself; in fact,these lines