By contrast, the Neoclassicists emerge as true giants. Theirs alone is the heritage. For Ziegler this includes even Winckelmann’s conception of antiquity, with its noble simplicity and serene grandeur, the culture of a bourgeoisie which had not yet disintegrated, the world of a century ago and more. In the face of such a simplification we need to remind ourselves that the age of Neo-classicism witnessed the rise not only of the German bourgeoisie but also of the Holy Alliance; that the Neoclassical columns and the ‘austere’ manorial style take account of this reaction; that Winckelmann’s Antiquity itself is by no means without feudal passivity. True enough, the laudatores temporis acta do not confine themselves to Homer and Goethe. Lukács holds Balzac in the highest esteem, makes a case for Heine as a poet of national stature, and is on occasion so out of touch with Classicism that in his essay on Heine he can describe Mörike, who has always been regarded by lovers of earlier poetry as one of the most authentic of German lyricists, as a ‘charming nonentity’. But in general, the Classical is seen as healthy, the Romantic as sick, and Expressionism as sickest of all, and this is not simply by contrast with the undiluted objective realism which characterized Classicism.
This is not the occasion for a detailed discussion of an issue so crucial that only the most thorough analysis can do it justice: for it involves all the problems of the dialectical-materialist theory of reflection (Abbildlehre). I will make only one point. Lukács’s thought takes for granted a closed and integrated reality that does indeed exclude the subjectivity of idealism, but not the seamless ‘totality’ which has always thriven best in idealist systems, including those of classical German philosophy. Whether such a totality in fact constitutes reality, is open to question. If it does, then Expressionist experiments with disruptive and interpolative techniques are but an empty jeu d’esprit, as are the more recent experiments with montage and other devices of discontinuity. But what if Lukács’s reality – a coherent, infinitely mediated totality – is not so objective after all? What if his conception of reality has failed to liberate itself completely from Classical systems? What if authentic reality is also discontinuity? Since Lukács operates with a closed, objectivistic conception of reality, when he comes to examine Expressionism he resolutely rejects any attempt on the part of artists to shatter any image of the world, even that of capitalism. Any art which strives to exploit the real fissures in surface inter-relations and to discover the new in their crevices, appears in his eyes merely as a wilful act of destruction. He thereby equates experiment in demolition with a condition of decadence.
At this point, even his ingenuity finally flags. It is undoubtedly the case that the Expressionists utilized, and even exacerbated, the decadence of late bourgeois civilization. Lukács resents their ‘collusion in the ideological decay of the imperialist bourgeoisie, without offering either criticism or resistance, acting indeed on occasion as its vanguard’. But in the first place there is very little truth in the crude idea of ‘collusion’; Lukács himself acknowledges that Expressionism ‘was ideologically a not insignificant component of the anti-war movement’. Secondly, so far as ‘collusion’ in an active sense goes, the actual furtherance of cultural decline, one must ask: are there not dialectical links between growth and decay? Are confusion, immaturity and incomprehensibility always and in every case to be categorized as bourgeois decadence? Might they not equally – in contrast with this simplistic and surely unrevolutionary view – be part of the transition from the old world to the new? Or at least be part of the struggle leading to that transition? This is an issue which can only be resolved by concrete examination of the works themselves; it cannot be settled by omniscient parti-pris judgements. So the Expressionists were the ‘vanguard’ of decadence. Should they instead have aspired to play doctor at the sick-bed of capitalism? Should they have tried to plaster over the surface of reality, in the spirit, say, of the Neo-classicists or the representatives of Neo-objectivity,8 instead of persisting in their efforts of demolition? Ziegler even reproaches the Expressionists with ‘subversion of subversion’, without realizing in his detestation that two minuses produce a plus. He is quite incapable of appreciating the significance of the demise of Neo-classicism. He is even less able to comprehend the strange phenomena which emerged just at the moment when the old surface reality collapsed, to say nothing of the problems of montage. In his eyes all this is just ‘junk clumsily glued together’, rubbish for which he cannot forgive the Fascists, even though they will have none of it either – in fact entirely share his opinion.
The importance of Expressionism is to be found exactly where Ziegler condemns it: it undermined the schematic routines and academicism to which the ‘values of art’ had been reduced. Instead of eternal ‘formal analyses’ of the work of art, it directed attention to human beings and their substance, in their quest for the most authentic expression possible. There is no doubt that there were frauds who took over its uncertain and easily-imitable directness of tone, and that its unduly subjectivist breakthroughs and vague presentiments were not always, or indeed hardly ever, to achieve a lasting authority. But a just and dispassionate evaluation must be based on the work of the real Expressionists and not – to make criticism simpler – on distortions, let alone on mere misrecollections. As a phenomenon, Expressionism was unprecedented, but it did not by any means think of itself as lacking in tradition. Quite the reverse. As the Blue Rider proves, it ransacked the past for like-minded witnesses, thought it could discern correspondences in Grünewald, in primitive art and even in Baroque. If anything, it unearthed too many parallels rather than too few. It found literary predecessors in the Storm and Stress movement of the 1770s, it discovered revered models in the visionary works of the youthful and the aged Goethe – in Wanderers Sturmlied, in Harzreise im Winter, in Pandora and in the Second Part of Faust. Moreover, it is untrue that the Expressionists were estranged from ordinary people by their overwhelming arrogance. Again, the opposite is the case. The Blue Rider imitated the glass paintings at Murnau;9 in fact they were the first to open people’s eyes to this moving and uncanny folk-art. In the same way, they focused attention on the drawings of children and prisoners, on the disturbing works of the mentally sick and on primitive art. They rediscovered ‘Nordic decorative art’, the fantastically complex carvings to be found on peasant chairs and chests down to the 18th century, interpreting it as the first ‘organic-psychic style’ and defining it as a sort of secret Gothic tradition, of greater worth than the inhumanly crystalline, aristocratic style of Egypt, and even than Neo-classicism. We need hardly add that ‘Nordic decorative art’ is a technical term from art-history, and that neither the genre nor the solemn fervour with which the Expressionists welcomed it has anything in common with Rosenberg’s fraudulent cult of the Nordic, of which it is certainly not an ‘origin’. Indeed his Nordic carving is full of Oriental influences; tapestries and ‘linear ornamentation’ in general were a further element in Expressionism. There is one further point that is the most important of all. For all the pleasure the Expressionists took in ‘barbaric art’, their ultimate goal was humane; their themes were almost exclusively human expressions of the incognito, the mystery of man. Quite apart from their pacifism, this is borne out even by their caricatures and their use of industrial motifs; the word ‘man’ was as common a feature of Expressionist parlance in those days as its opposite, the ‘beautiful beast’, is today among the Nazis. It was also subject to abuse. ‘Resolute humanity’ turned up all over the place; anthologies had titles like Menschheitsdämmerung (The Dawn of Mankind) or Kameraden der Menschheit (Friends of Mankind) – lifeless categories, no doubt, but a far cry from pre-Fascist ones. An authentically revolutionary, lucid humanist materialism has every reason to repudiate such vapid rhetoric; no-one maintains that Expressionism should be taken as a model or regarded as a ‘precursor’. But neither is there any justification for refurbishing interest in Neo-classicism by renewing outmoded battles with an Expressionism long since devalued. Even if an artistic movement is not a ‘precursor’ of anything, it may for that very reason seem closer to young artists than * [a third-hand classicism which calls itself ‘socialist realism’ and is