Exile and Social Thought: Hungarian Intellectuals in Germany and Austria, 1919-1933
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Exile and Social Thought: Hungarian Intellectuals in Germany and Austria, 1919-1933
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Originally published in 1991.
The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780691636863 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 04/19/2016 |
| Series: | Princeton Legacy Library , #1146 |
| Pages: | 394 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.10(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.10(d) |
Read an Excerpt
EXILE AND SOCIAL THOUGHT
HUNGARIAN INTELLECTUALS IN GERMANY AND AUSTRIA, 1919â?"1933
By Lee Congdon
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1991 PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESSAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-03159-0
CHAPTER 1
GEORG LUKÁCS:
THE ROAD TO LENIN
The Lure of Politics
AFTER RESIGNING in favor of a caretaker trade-union government, the Soviet Republic's leaders left for Austria aboard a train protected by the Italian military mission. Lukács did not accompany them because Kun had instructed him and Ottó Korvin, the Republic's security chief, to stay behind and organize an underground movement aimed at reestablishing communist rule. It was a hopeless and dangerous mission. Lukács had all he could do just to escape detection. At great personal risk, Béla Zalai's widow, Olga Máté, hid him in her attic during daylight hours. When, on August 7, Lukács learned that the police had apprehended Korvin, he contemplated suicide, but finally concluded that "a member of the Central Committee must set the example." On September 1, Karl Mannheim, the sculptor Márk Vedres, and others arranged for him to pose as the chauffeur for a German officer traveling to Vienna. Since Lukács did not know how to drive, his friends bound up his arm so that he could claim to have had an accident en route, and thus account for the fact that the officer was at the wheel.
By late summer of 1919, Vienna was no longer a proud and prosperous imperial capital. More than one hundred thousand Viennese were out of work, and even those who could put food on the table looked forward to a particularly uncertain future. Under the circumstances, Karl Renner's government did not welcome the Hungarian Soviet Republic's fugitive leaders. Authorities permitted the Social Democrats to settle in Austria, but arrested most of the Communists. They detained Lukács, a noted scholar, only briefly, but kept him under surveillance. On September 6, István Friedrich's new, non–socialist government demanded that Kun and eight others be extradited. Lukács's name did not appear on the list because the Hungarians believed that he was still in Hungary. In Vienna, his life depended upon Austrian willingness to grant him political asylum.
In an effort to forestall Lukács's extradition, two friends, Franz Baumgarten and Bruno Steinbach, drafted an appeal that appeared in the Berliner Tageblatt on November 12, 1919.
Not Georg von Lukács the politician, but the man and thinker ought to be vindicated. Once he gave up the allurements of the pampered life that were his by birth for the office of responsible, solitary thought. When he applied himself to politics, he sacrificed what was most dear to him—his freedom as a thinker—for the reformer's work he intended to accomplish. The Hungarian government demands his extradition from Austria.... He is said to have instigated the murder of political opponents, but only blind hate can believe the accusation. Lukács's salvation is no party matter. All who have come to know personally his human purity and who admire the high spirituality of his philosophic-aesthetic books are duty bound to protest the extradition.
The statement was signed by Baumgarten, Richard Beer-Hofmann, Richard Dehmel, Paul Ernst, Bruno Frank, Maximilian Harden, Alfred Kerr, Heinrich Mann, Thomas Mann, Emil Praetorius, and Karl Scheffler.
Ernst Bloch added his voice to the chorus of protest in the December issue of Die weissen Blätter. He branded charges that Lukács was a murderer as infamous lies, praised his friend's philosophic gift, and predicted that he would travel to the end the theoretical journey begun by Tolstoi and Dostoevski. Max Weber made no public appeal, but he did send a telegram to the Hungarian Ministry of Justice, warning officials that Hungary's reputation would be damaged if they prosecuted Lukács.
Aware that the extradition of Lukács and the other Hungarian Communists would be tantamount to a death sentence and concerned about Austrian citizens still in Russia, the Austrian government decided not to accede to the Hungarian demand. Nevertheless, Lukács's initial Austrian permit was valid for only six months, and it is hardly surprising that he presented "the most heart-rending spectacle; deathly pale, haggard, nervous, and disconsolate. He ... walks about with a revolver in his pocket, because he has reason to fear that they will abduct him."
Balázs was even more nervous, and confessed to his diary that he was avoiding Lukács because he did not want to compromise himself in the eyes of the authorities. Nor did he want to have anything to do with emigré politics: "The truth is that I do not wish to take part any longer in politics, just as I did not take part in them before, because they are not my concern. Communism is my religion, not my politics, and from now on I want only to be an artist and nothing more!"
Lukács, on the other hand, elected to engage in political work—organizational and theoretical. For that and other reasons, the intellectual alliance that he and Balázs had forged before the war came to an end. In his diary, the latter wrote a fitting epitaph:
It seems that one must choose whether one writes or lives one's ethic, just as the philosopher of religion reckons with but does not live God. If this is true, then it seems that György Lukács, out of integrity and moral imperative, is going to live his life to the very end in untruth, because Lukács the conspiratorial, active politician and revolutionary is assuming a mask,/is living in/ untruth; it is not his metaphysically rooted mission. He was born a quiet scholar, a lonely sage, a seer of things eternal; not, however, to search for stolen party funds in spacious coffeehouses, to keep an eye on the daily stream of ephemeral politics, or to strive to influence the masses—he who is not speaking his own language if more than ten people understand. His is a terrible banishment; he is truly homeless because he has lost his home. Of course, the question is: What is more important, purity or the truth? He lives an inauthentic life out of purity (he does not live his own life). He commits a metaphysical sin, but it is not given to us either to intervene in the decision of a man of such profound ethical worth or to judge him. Who knows what kind of reasons he has.
Lukács's father also hoped that his son's political involvement would prove to be a passing aberration. In a letter of 1920, he appealed to the dramatist Paul Ernst to do what he could "to rescue him from accursed politics" and to guide him back to scholarship. He must, the elder Lukács wrote, return to Heidelberg. There was little, however, that Ernst could do, for if Lukács did not listen to Balázs, he was wholly deaf to entreaties from Ernst or his father. He turned instead to the one person who seemed to understand him—Gertrúd Bortstieber.
In the spring of 1917, when he delivered his Free School lectures on ethics, Lukács renewed his acquaintance with Bortstieber. Many years earlier his sister Mici had introduced them, but their paths soon diverged. She married the mathematician Imre Jánossy and bore him two sons. An economist by training, she united "in her person the qualities of great practical wisdom and sense of realism with an irrepressibly serene outlook on life and a radiating warmth of character." In the last year of his life, Lukács remembered this woman, who became his second wife, with love and gratitude: "The beginning of the new bond: obscure, but the feeling that, finally, for the first time in my life, love, completion, solid basis for life (examination of thought), not opposition.... I don't know whether the inner metamorphosis of my thought (1917–19) would have occurred without the help of this examination." As those who were closest to Lukács during his last years have testified repeatedly, it was Gertrúd Bortstieber's "unique personality, a combination of traits of a grande dame of the Enlightenment and a plebeian heroine in a Gottfried Keller novella, that taught him to appreciate the 'ordinary life' he had formerly despised."
Early in 1920, following her husband's death, the widow Jánossy and her sons went to live with her sister in Hütteldorf, near Vienna; before long, Lukács joined them. Later, he and Gertrúd moved to Vienna's eighth district and had a daughter of their own, although they did not marry immediately for fear that she might lose her widow's pension. This family life, which he had never before known, made it necessary for Lukács to come to terms daily with "specific human reality." Indeed, his life with Gertrúd created in him a new, and far more affirmative attitude toward reality.
Lukács's friendship with Jeno Landler only deepened his new appreciation for reality. A Social Democrat turned Communist whom he had come to know during the final days of the Soviet Republic, Landler always "endeavored to derive the political and organizational tasks of the Hungarian communist movement from the concrete problems of Hungary's concrete situation." His ability to discern political possibilities at any given moment contributed much to Lukács's growing suspicion of left-wing communism.
Lukács had not been in Vienna for long when the emigré Communists had a falling out. In part the issue was Kun, an arrogant and dictatorial man with whom Lukács had never been on good terms. The Russian revolutionary Victor Serge remembered that to Lukács and others, Kun "was a remarkably odious figure. He was the incarnation of intellectual inadequacy, uncertainty of will, and authoritarian corruption." On his arrival in Vienna, Kun had been taken into custody and placed under house arrest at Karlstein near the Czech border, because officials could not guarantee his safety in the capital. Due to the fact that the building in which he was detained could not be adequately heated, Kun threatened a hunger strike; thus, on February 7, 1920, he was taken to Stockerau near Vienna, where he occupied the local hospital's empty psychiatric ward. A few days later, he joined some of his comrades at Vienna's Steinhof Institute for Neurology. Eager to be rid of him, the Austrians agreed to a Soviet proposal that he be sent to Russia, and, on August 11, he reached Petrograd. Physically removed from the Viennese emigration, Kun could not prevent the organization of an intraparty opposition.
The issues that occasioned the Party's split into factions were not, of course, merely personal; from his new place of exile in Moscow, Kun wished to continue to control the Hungarian Communist movement. Landler, on the other hand, insisted that the emigration, cut off as it was from Hungarian reality, ought to act in support of the movement in Hungary. Thus, while Kun hatched ambitious plots to reestablish the Soviet Republic, Landler fixed his eyes on the Party's real, and decidedly limited, possibilities. His was not a counsel of despair, but of patience and commitment to small but steady efforts to regain the initiative.
Matters came to a head in the fall of 1921 when Kun, embarrassed by the failure of his revolutionary "March Action" in Germany, demanded that the Communists living in Hungary refuse any longer to pay the Social Democratic party dues included in trade union assessments. Outraged, Landler argued that such a refusal would preclude further legal work in Hungary. He was convinced that the Communists, whose party was outlawed, had no choice but to work within—and attempt to gain control of—trade unions and the legal Social Democratic party. From the first, Lukács sided with Landler.
Utopia and Bureaucracy
Against this background of factional struggles, Lukács began to work out in print his conception of Marxism and proposals for political action. Between 1920 and 1922, he published numerous essays in the Hungarian-language Proletár (Proletarian) and the German-language Kommunismus. Taken together, those theoretical explorations constituted a defense of the Communist party as that organization capable of steering a course between the Scylla of utopia and the Charybdis of bureaucracy.
By 1920, utopia was anathema to Lukács. "Genuine revolutionaries," he wrote in Kommunismus, "above all Lenin, distinguish themselves from petit–bourgeois utopianism by their want of illusion." The greatest illusion of all, he believed, was that to which he himself had earlier succumbed: that the new world could be brought into being at one stroke. "This transition from 'necessity' to 'freedom,'" he had become convinced, "cannot under any circum– stances be a once-for-all, sudden, and unmediated act, but only a process." He was now a "realist," a historical rather than an abstract thinker.
Contemptuous of his ideological opponents, Lukács accepted criticism from only one man—Lenin, the consummate revolutionary realist whose theoretical work came as a revelation. We know that because of an essay entitled "On the Question of Parliamentarianism" that the Hungarian published early in 1920. Inspired by the contemporary debate in Communist circles throughout Europe, he attacked those who advocated parliamentary participation. As bourgeois institutions, he argued, parliaments could serve only to undermine true revolutionary action, as represented by genuine "workers' councils" (soviets). To his dismay, Lenin was displeased: "G. L.'s article is very left-wing and very poor. Its Marxism is purely verbal; ... it gives no concrete analysis of precise and definite historical situations; it takes no account of what is more essential (the need to take over and to learn to take over, all fields of work and all institutions in which the bourgeoisie exerts its influence over the masses, etc.)."
Lenin had made "left-wing" communism one of his central concerns, witness his famous treatise, Left-Wing Communism-An Infantile Disorder. While the goal of communism did not change, he wrote, the path to that goal was never the same. The refusal, "on principle," to participate in bourgeois parliaments reflected an abstract, undialectical, and unhistorical understanding. Although Communists recognized that parliamentarianism would give place to soviets, only the rash concluded that parliaments were no longer political realities with which to reckon. Communists had to destroy parliamentarianism from within parliaments; they had to cooperate with parliamentary parties in order to subvert parliamentary government.
Impressed by Lenin's reasoning, Lukács was embarrassed to discover that he had not completely freed himself from utopianism. At the same time that he embraced the bolshevik leader's position, however, he continued to affirm his faith in the proletariat's messianic mission, for to lose all sight of utopia, he believed, would be to encourage the growth of bureaucracy and a bureaucratic mentality. Recalling Max Weber's work and his old fears of institutional forms alienated from life, Lukács attacked bureaucratization within the Communist movement with all the means at his command.
The old parties, he wrote, were compromise collectivities of heterogeneous individuals. Consequently, they rapidly became bureaucratized, generating an aristocracy of party officials cut off from the masses. Precisely because of the bureaucratic character of the old parties, many revolutionaries had turned to syndicalism. But the parties were not alone guilty. The Second International itself possessed only a bureaucratic unity. There was no greater danger to the Communist party and the Third International than bureaucratization, and in Lukács's judgment, the Central Committee of the Hungarian Communist Party headed by Kun had already (by 1922) degenerated into an "empty bureaucracy."
Lukács maintained that the Russian Communist party had succumbed neither to utopianism nor to bureaucratization; it constituted a tertium datur. It was, to be sure, an "organization," but one wholly unlike bureaucratic organizations. For the Communist party, "organization is not the prerequisite of action, but rather a constant interplay of prerequisite and result during action. Indeed, if one of these two aspects predominates, organization ought to be understood as result rather than as prerequisite." The Communist party was not simply a means to an end—the revolution; it was an end in itself. The seizure of power was an important step in the building of communism, but it was only one step. The Party and the revolution were dialectically related; without the Party there could be no revolution, and without the revolution the Party would remain the home of a minority.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from EXILE AND SOCIAL THOUGHT by Lee Congdon. Copyright © 1991 PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents
- FrontMatter, pg. i
- CONTENTS, pg. vii
- LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS, pg. ix
- PREFACE, pg. xi
- ACKNOWLEDGMENTS, pg. xv
- INTRODUCTION: Hungarian Intellectuals in War and Revolution, 1914–1919, pg. 1
- ONE Georg Lukács: The Road to Lenin, pg. 45
- TWO. Béla Balázs: The Road to the Party, pg. 100
- THREE. Lajos Kassák: The Ma Circle, pg. 139
- FOUR. László Moholy-Nagy: The Bauhaus, pg. 177
- FIVE. Aurel Kolnai: The Path to Rome, pg. 213
- SIX. Karl Mannheim: The Sociology of Knowledge, pg. 254
- CONCLUSION: Community and Consciousness, pg. 304
- NOTES, pg. 307
- BIBLIOGRAPHY, pg. 339
- INDEX, pg. 367