journalist,offeredacompromise solution that allowed for the temporary inclu-
sion ofafew classic works in an evolving socialist canon:“Hail to tendentious
art if the tendencyisours and the artwork in question great art.But tendency
alone is not artand cannot take the place of artinadrama.”³⁰Accused by
Stampferofmistaking class instinct for aesthetic judgment,Sperber responded
that progress in literary and political terms could onlybemade once the class
instinct had been strengthened and the art of the ruling class thoroughlyreject-
ed.³¹Forreasons discussed in great detail in chapter8onthe discourse of culture
and education,Sperber’spositionremainedaminorityposition among Social
Democrats, but his insistenceontendencyestablished an earlymodel for the
KPD’senlistment of literature inahighlyconfrontationalKampfkulturorganized
around theradicalizing effects of partiality.
Identifying the BPRS proletarian writers with what was now called(bad) ten-
dency allowedLukács in“Tendency or Partiality?”at onceto promotethe nine-
teenth-century realist novel asasuperior model for contemporary literature and
to denounce modernist experimentation asasymptom of social and cultural
decay. The realist novel, he would later expound in his main contributionto a
Marxist aesthetic, representedamodernversion of the traditionalepic and pro-
vided privileged access to the grand narrativesofhistory.These qualities were
presumablymissing from the novels by BPRSauthors, giventheir preference
for typical stories of typical workers and their choice of description over narra-
tion as an appropriate mode of fiction.Incontrasttothe false immediacyprom-
ised by modernism asastyle and technique, the formal complexities of the re-
alist novel accordingtoLukácsofferedafictional mode in which individuals
functioned as embodiments of social contradictions and, in so doing,reaffirmed
the ability of the Hegelian dialecticsto captureobjective reality in itstotality.
Lukács’sdenunciation of literarytendencyand his attack on literary mod-
ernism mayhavebeen informed by idealistphilosophyaschanneled through
Mehring,but his political interventions in the early1930s are inseparable from
the KPD’sconfrontational course in political and artistic matters duringthe
finalyears of theWeimar Republic. The debates inDie Linkskurveestablished
the terms under which normative aesthetics and communist orthodoxy could be-
come one, not least through the competing emotional and aesthetic techniques
called tendencyand partiality.Scholarlyassessments have evaluated these de-
Friedrich Stampfer,“Ku nst und Klassenkampf,”reprinted in Bürgel,Tendenzkunst-Debatte,
56.
SeeFriedrich Stampfer,“Klasseninstinkt undKunstverständnis,”in Bürgel,Tendenzkunst-
Debatte,61–64 and Heinz Sperber,“Klasseninstinkt undKunstverständnis,”in Bürgel,Tenden-
zkunst-Debatte,64–67.
268 Chapter 14