Georg Lukács

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Georg Lukács (1952)

Georg Lukács [ ˈlukaːtʃ ] (with full name György Lukács de Szeged ; born April 13, 1885 in Budapest , Austria-Hungary ; † June 4, 1971 there ) was a Hungarian philosopher , literary scholar and critic . Lukács is (together with Ernst Bloch , Antonio Gramsci and Karl Korsch ) an important developer of a Marxist philosophy and theory in the first half of the 20th century.

life and work

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Lukács came from a wealthy family of the Hungarian-Jewish bourgeoisie: his father Josef was a bank director in Budapest and had changed the family name Löwinger to Lukács in 1890, his mother, Adele nee. Wertheimer, was the wealthy heiress of a branch of the Neuschloss timber merchant dynasty. Georg Lukács first studied at the university in his hometown, where he received his doctorate in 1906. rer. oec. and in 1909 Dr. phil. received his doctorate. In the following years he lived mostly abroad, for example in Berlin and Heidelberg , where he maintained contact with the circles around Max Weber and Stefan George and wrote his theory of the novel (1914/15). In 1918, after his final return to Budapest, Georg Lukács joined the Hungarian Communist Party . During the four-month Hungarian Soviet Republic in 1919, he was Deputy People's Commissar for Education in the government of Béla Kun .

During the months of April-June he was political commissar of the 5th Division of the Hungarian Red Army on all fronts in operations. In his autobiographical memoirs, Lukács reports from this time that during the Hungarian-Romanian War he convened an extraordinary court martial in order to have eight people from a defensive battalion , which he said had fled from Tiszafüred , shot on the market square in Poroszló . After that, order was restored.

Originally influenced by Neo-Kantianism ( Emil Lask ) as well as by Georg Simmel and Max Weber, Lukács was equally committed in his early philosophical writings to Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Karl Marx and later turned to a Marxism shaped by German idealism . He got to know Ernst Bloch early on . Both took part in the discussion group around Max Weber.

He received a lot of attention with his theory of the novel (1916), an analysis of the philosophy of life , in which he emphasizes historicity as a central category of social being and addresses the "transcendental homelessness" of the bourgeois world.

Lukács joined the Communist Party in late 1918. After turning to communism , Lukács understood this problem as that of alienation . In this sense, his most effective work strikes against history and class consciousness . Studies on Marxist Dialectics from 1923 a bridge from Hegel via Marx to Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg . Although the book was rejected by the KPD , it made a decisive contribution to the left-wing orientation of European intellectuals in the 1920s and to the development of neo-Marxism . Lukács later distanced himself in part from this work (see the preface to the new edition from 1967).

In May 1923 he took part in the Marxist Work Week .

With the theses published under the pseudonym Blum ( Blum Theses , 1928), in which Lukács formulated the idea of ​​a democratic dictatorship of the proletariat , he contradicted the party line of the KPD and was forced to “self-criticize”.

After the failure of the Hungarian Soviet Republic, Lukács fled via Vienna and Berlin to Moscow, where he narrowly escaped the Great Terror . In 1941 he was temporarily detained in the Lubyanka prison by the NKVD . Before that, he himself had participated in a “ political cleansing ” in a “ closed party meeting” of the German party group of the Soviet Writers' Union, which took place from September 4 to 9, 1936 .

In Moscow, during the Stalinist era , especially in the 1930s, important struggles took place over the valid aesthetic understanding of Marxists. In the expressionism debate, Lukács opposed the results of modern literature and the claim to leadership of the so-called avant - garde . On the other hand, he turned against the emerging vulgar sociological ideas of Soviet literary scholars who tried to reinterpret world literature as a reflection of the class-bound psychology of the respective author. In these and other aesthetic struggles, Lukács received support from Alfred Kurella and Michail Lifschitz . Lukács' collaboration with Lifschitz was in the Russian-Soviet journal Literaturnyjkritik , in which Lukács published his most important essays in Russian . After Stalin's death, Lukács made the controversial claim that he had acted in opposition to the official (ie Stalinist) literary policy in the context of this magazine.

His numerous aesthetic writings and work analyzes by German, English, French and Russian poets from the 18th to 20th centuries are primarily based on ideas related to Hegel's aesthetics, which he was able to develop further. With the theory of the literary reflection of social conditions in their totality, he worked out the foundations of a Marxist aesthetic.

He saw the method of the novels of bourgeois-critical realism in contrast to the officially propagated workers' literature and also in contrast to modern avant-garde literature ( James Joyce , Dos Passos, etc.) as exemplary for (socialist) art, for which he on the one hand disdain for socialist Realism and , on the other hand, openness towards new art forms. In addition to his writings on questions of realism (especially storytelling or describing , art and objective truth, as well as It's about realism ) and his debates with the great poets of world literature, the works The historical novel , its aesthetics , its ontology are also of great importance of social being , The Destruction of Reason and The Young Hegel .

After the liberation from fascism, Lukács returned to Hungary in 1944/45. In 1948 he became professor for aesthetics and cultural philosophy in Budapest. In The Destruction of Reason (1954), he criticized German bourgeois philosophy since Hegel as the spiritual preconditions for irrationalism , fascism and imperialism .

In 1946 Lukács became a member of the Hungarian parliament . He became one of the intellectual leaders of the Petofi Club and thus of the Budapest uprising in 1956. For a few days he held the function of Minister of Culture in the government of Imre Nagy , with whom he was arrested after the uprising was put down, and was accepted into the party's central committee . Shortly before the arrest, there were plans in the GDR to evacuate Lukács from Hungary. The writer friend Anna Seghers and Johannes R. Becher , at the time Minister of Culture of the GDR, asked his friend, also with Lukács head of construction publishing , Walter Janka to bring the writer to Berlin. Janka agreed, but Johannes R. Becher asked Walter Ulbricht for permission; this prohibited the project. Since then Lukács was ostracized, relieved of his teaching post and excluded from the academy. With a few exceptions, his works were only printed in Western European countries, where they gained considerable influence, especially on the New Left .

In 1967 his exclusion from the party was lifted. In the last years of his life, Lukács was able to rally a group of young philosophers and social scientists - including the philosopher Ágnes Heller - ("Lukács Circle") and thus left an intellectual mark on many Hungarian thinkers in the decades that followed.

Reception and criticism

Among the theorists influenced by Lukács, in addition to the authors of the so-called Frankfurt School , who benefited significantly from Lukács' work, Ágnes Heller , Leo Kofler , Lucien Goldmann and Rudi Dutschke .

The Berlin comparator Winfried Menninghaus writes in an essay that Lukács systematically misunderstood Kant, Hegel and Marx himself, especially with regard to the terms “dialectic” and “reification”. One misunderstanding follows the next.

The destruction of reason is seen as the lowest point in Lukács' work. Theodor W. Adorno criticized this work as follows: "Nietzsche and Freud simply became fascists for him, and he managed to speak of Nietzsche's 'unusual talent' in the condescending tone of a Wilhelmine Provincial School Board" ".

The publicly accessible Georg Lukács Archive has existed in Budapest since 1972 in the premises he once lived in. a. Lukács' estate is located and is trying to develop his work. The archive was closed in 2016 despite international protests. A monument to Lukács in the Szent-István-Park of the Hungarian capital is to disappear according to the decision of the Budapest City Council, the statue has been replaced by a monument to Bálint Hóman .

Role model in literary works

Georg Lukács was the model for the figure of Naphta in Thomas Mann's novel The Magic Mountain . After their only brief encounter, after the First World War in Vienna, Thomas Mann was deeply impressed by Lukács, namely by his “ascetic nature both sensual and spiritual” and by the “almost uncanny abstraction of his theories”. In Mann's assessment, the model “apparently did not recognize itself” in Naphta.

György Dalos included Georg Lukács as a character in the novel The Hide and Seeker. Robert Menasse wrote his novel Blessed Times, Brittle World approximated on the basis of Lukács' youth biography. Lukács can also be found as a character in the play The Voice of His Lord by István Eörsi and in the novel The Story of the Rich Young Man by Martina Wied .

Works

Single issues

Correspondence

See also

literature

Web links

Commons : Georg Lukács  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ See Lived Thinking. An autobiography in dialogue , Frankfurt am Main 1981, p. 105.
  2. ↑ Leszek Kolokowski: The main currents of Marxism . Ed .: R. Piper & Co. Volume 3 . R. Piper & Co., Munich, Zurich 1979, p. 282 .
  3. ^ Georg Lukács, Johannes R. Becher, Friedrich Wolf a. a .: The Purge - Moscow 1936. Shorthand of a closed party meeting. Rowohlt, Reinbek 1991, ISBN 3-499-13012-2
  4. ↑ On the question of the extent to which the journal Literaturnyj kritik was oppositional, cf. Meier, Nils: The magazine »Literaturnyj kritik« under the sign of Soviet literary politics. Munich, Otto Sagner, 2014. ISBN 978-3-86688-433-5 ; e-Book: 978-3-86688-434-2. In particular pp. 166-172, 188-189, 193-203
  5. ↑ See Lukács' preface to the new edition from 1968 in Ders .: History and Class Consciousness. Neuwied, 1970, p. 45.
  6. ↑ Leszek Kolakowski: The main currents of Marxism . Ed .: R. Piper & Co. Verlag. tape 3 . R. Piper & Co. Verlag, Munich, Zurich 1979, p. 287-288 .
  7. ↑ p. 294 in: Alexander Behrens: Johannes R. Becher. A political biography. Böhlau Verlag, Cologne 2003, ISBN 3-412-03203-4
  8. ↑ “Kant, Hegel and Marx in Lukács' Theory of Reification. Destruction of a neo-Marxist 'classic' ”. In: Mirror and Parable. Festschrift for Jacob Taubes. Edited by Norbert W. Bolz and Wolfgang Hübener. Würzburg (Königshausen and Neumann) 1983, pp. 318-330.
  9. ^ Udo Bermbach, Günter Trautmann: Georg Lukács, Opladen 1987, p. 191.
  10. ^ Theodor W. Adorno, Notes on Literature II, Frankfurt am Main 1961, p. 153.
  11. ↑ Website of the Georg Lukács Archive ( Memento of the original from March 25, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / web.phil-inst.hu
  12. ↑ Rüdiger Dannemann: Is it over for the Lukács archive or a new beginning? , hagalil.com, March 21, 2016
  13. ^ Hungary disposed of the memorial Jüdische Allgemeine, February 2, 2017
personal data
SURNAME Lukács, Georg
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Lukács, György; Löwinger, Georg
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Jewish-Hungarian philosopher, literary scholar and critic
DATE OF BIRTH April 13, 1885
PLACE OF BIRTH Budapest
DATE OF DEATH 4th June 1971
Place of death Budapest