Political Literature
Political literature is a fuzzy collective term for literary works that deal with political topics, ideas or events and reflect them differently.
Scope of terms
Assuming a broad functional concept, every literary text can be interpreted as political literature because of its social background. In this way, it includes texts that relate to political issues as well as those that are deliberately apolitical .
The spectrum of political literature ranges from historical avant-garde - such as the Vormärz - to examples of state propaganda , such as in National Socialist or GDR literature .
It is true that in the narrower sense political literature makes use of all genres; nevertheless, smaller forms with parodistic, satirical-polemical potential are preferred. These include songs and chansons , epigrams and leaflets , essays , tracts and reports .
Background and development
Without the gradual detachment of literature and art from certain social purposes since the late 18th century ( autonomy of the work of art ), political literature could not have developed.
From a literary point of view, it is only one form among others, so that there is no continuous history of this genre. Nevertheless, in phases of social upheaval, it can be observed that the topics relevant there are preferentially processed in literary terms. The conflicts between the church , the nobility and the rising bourgeoisie characterized the political poetry of the 14th and 15th centuries, while in the 17th century politicization went hand in hand with confessionalization . The focus of literary processing was on territorial power struggles, but above all the Thirty Years' War .
In the context of the French Revolution , the shift from literary to political public in the 18th century drew interest to the institutions of power.
At the beginning of the 19th century the topics relevant for the coming period emerged. This included national unity, questions of democracy and social aspects. In various publications of the Vormärz , which set themselves apart from the Biedermeier , the political awareness of the people should be reached.
reception
At the same time as the writings of Junge Deutschland , which included different authors such as Heinrich Heine , Karl Gutzkow and Heinrich Laube , voices have risen up to the present day that dismiss “political literature” as a tendency poetry and attack it for various reasons. A frequently put forward argument goes in the direction that their partiality is incompatible with the claims of autonomous art , an approach that was later taken up by Theodor W. Adorno .
Since that time, political literature has been caught in the tension of criticism. On the one hand, they hold affirmative rhetoric and political agitation against it, and object that it would allow itself to be instrumentalized by different power and interest groups. On the other hand, there is the conception of the autonomous individual, which goes back to Friedrich Schiller , who through education and aesthetic upbringing can overcome the Kantian opposition between inclination and duty and the rigor of moral law and thus be able to offer aesthetic resistance .
The perceived contradiction of the term is exemplified in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Faust , when Studiosus Brander in Auerbach's cellar describes the political song as a “nasty song”.
The reservations expressed in Germany relate - in different positions - to the value of the connection between politics and poetry in general or the justifiability of the text in particular. Poetry is not an appropriate medium for politics, and politics is not an appropriate content for poetry.
Adorno's criticism - based on and differentiating itself from Sartre's concept of “ committed literature ” - occupies a middle position: it is true that committed works disenchanted those of L'art pour l'art , which, laid out side by side in the “pantheon of non-binding education, decay into cultural assets (en ) “, Where its value (the difference) is just threatened by false harmony. The pure work of art is exposed as a fetish and "idle gimmick" of those "who slept through the threatening deluge" and thus appears dialectically as "political apolitical". On the other hand, these considerations contradict the autonomous factories , and for them they represent the catastrophe that the “committed” warn against.
The contrast that appears in this antithesis points to the questionable nature of today's art. Both alternatives negate themselves: “Committed art because, as art, it is necessarily set apart from reality, it crosses out the difference from reality; that of l'art pour l'art, because by making it absolute it also denies that inextinguishable relationship to reality which is contained in the independence of art from the real as its polemical a priori. "
Individual evidence
- ↑ Metzler, Lexikon Literatur, Politische Literatur , p. 597, Weimar, 2007
- ↑ name "ME07-597
- ^ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust. A tragedy , Goethe's works, Dramatic seals I, Hamburg edition, Volume 3, CH Beck, Munich 1998, p. 68
- ↑ Walther Killy, Literaturlexikon, Politische Dichtung , Volume 14, p. 222
- ↑ a b Theodor W. Adorno, Engagement , Notes on Literature, Collected Writings Volume 11, SS 409-410.