imaginary.¹⁷With these largerquestions in mind, Hermann Duncker proposed
that proletarian writers once and for all jettison the belief in individual agency
and personal freedom that until now had kept them beholden to bourgeois val-
ues.¹⁸ForKarl Grünbergthe main goal of proletarian literature wasakind of
emotionalreeducation, namely“to preparethoseparts of the front for battle
whereour heavy artillery of editorials,lectures,and informational brochures
has failed and do so through poems or reportages, shortstories or novels, agit-
prop scenes or dramas.”¹⁹Using an even more aggressive tone,Becher called on
proletarian-revolutionary writers to draw inspiration from their“active hatred of
everything that oppresses human beingsfrom the outside and the inside, of ev-
erything thathinders the free development and growth of human faculties, ha-
tred of all forms of laziness, freeloading, superficiality,aspersonified by various
opportunists andgood for nothings.”²⁰
Twoliterary congresses playedanimportant part in the formulation ofDie
Linkskurve’sofficial position in line with ongoing developments in the Soviet
Union. The First International ConferenceofProletarian and RevolutionaryWrit-
ers in Moscow in 1927 had led to the foundingofthe BPRS in October 1928 at a
time when Germanywas considered the center of world communism outside the
Soviet Union. The 1930 Kharkov Conference, attended by Grünbergand March-
witza, affirmeddialectical materialism as the foundation of proletarian literature
butwithinanarrower definition of socialist realism. Henceforth, clear rulesguid-
ed the literarytreatment of the relationship between objective and subjective re-
ality and the forms of mediation establishing individual and society as mutually
constitutive terms.Itwas leftto journals likeDie Linkskurveto enforcethe liter-
ary rules and conventions that could protect the workingclass from the double
threat of bourgeois psychologism and modern formalism. Thediscourses of ten-
dency and partiality provided the main criteria for evaluatingproletarian-revolu-
tionary literature along these lines, with the originallyfavored“tendency”even-
F. C. Weiskopf andKurt Hirschfeld,“Über den proletarischen Roman,”inZur Tradition der
deutschen sozialistischenLiteratur:EineAuswahl von Dokumenten,ed. Alfred Klein (Berlin:Auf-
bau, 1979), 210–219.
Hermann Duncker,“Schriftsteller undWeltanschauung,”reprinted in Klein,Zur Tradition
der deutschen sozialistischen Literatur,206–210.
Karl Grünberg,“Waswir wollen,”reprinted inZur Tradition der deutschen sozialistischen Lit-
eratur,178–179.
JohannesR.Becher,“UnserBund,”reprintedinZur Tradition der deutschen sozialistischen
Literatur,115–116.
264 Chapter 14