Literary Politics in World War I: Die Aktion and the Problem of the Intellectual Revolutionary
1979; Wiley; Volume: 52; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.2307/405753
ISSN1756-1183
Autores Tópico(s)Central European national history
ResumoIn November 1918 Franz Pfemfert, editor of Die Aktion, proudly stated his journal's achievement: Wir aber stehen vor der Menschheit aufrecht! ... Ein Volk von siebzig Millionen-und ein einziges kleines Wochenblatt repriisentierte im August 1914 die unbedingte Kriegsfeindschaft, die 'Menschlichkeit, das Gewissen!' Many of his readers would have agreed. Erwin Piscator, for instance, explaining importance of journal for him, young soldier, mentions that he learned from Pfemfert how war was not fate but quite simply a crime against mankind.2 Pfemfert, Piscator remembers, embodied for him and many of his friends kind of unswerving and unconditional truth which will stop at nothing or nobody, the truth regardless of what one means by it. He had accepted pitiless believer in mankind,3 charismatic leader.4 It was important to him that this leader's radical temperament enabled him to set an unambiguous example of an anti-nationalist, anti-militarist, anti-bourgeois position in tightly controlled chaos, moral inversion of war. He did not question ultimate usefulness, nor did he see implications of such an example. In this context at any rate, Piscator seems unaware of problematic aspects of intellectual revolutionary whose social imagination is sufficient to project an ideal mankind, but insufficient to tolerate uncertain and unpredictable social behavior of individual human beings. In this paper I will apply these considerations to Pfemfert's changing concept of his journal's cultural function. For Piscator as well as for most of critics seeking to define Pfemfert's achievement, Die Aktion underwent three distinct stages. There is no question Pfemfert was always solely responsible for editorial policy of his journal (Aktion 1918, Sp. 338). Before war journal was distinguished by its innovative, imaginative literary politics: most of young writers attempting to articulate their experience of new time-the Friihexpressionisten anthologized in Kurt Hiller's 1912 Kondor-were connected with Die Aktion. Pfem-
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