Literature and Party Line

LITERATURE AND PARTY LINE ILeonard Forster One of the major problems of literature in general and of lyric poetry in particular in our society is the growing gap between the creative artist and his public. It is a commonplace in these days that the question "For whom does the poet write?" has no satisfactory answer. Poetry is for many poets what Gottfried Benn said of his own poetry-an art of monologue. Whereas in the West a poet feels himself cut off from his audience, a Communist poet, ideally, addresses himself directly to an audience which he knows and with which he feels himself in contact. As a Communist his feeling of team awareness binds him to his public, or at least to part of it. But what is his public? The public of a Communist poet in a non-Communist state does not consist entirely of Commupists; it also includes people who have to be won over, whose allegiance to their own society must be shaken, whose social consciences must be aroused, or who in the last extreme are that sort of bourgeois who is there to be epate, shocked, or made ridiculous. These people, moreover , make up the majority of his audience. He cannot be content with a monologue; he must get at them somehow. If he restricts himself to writing party slogans, marching songs, and so forth, he is really preaching to the converted, though of course it is always a good thing to keep them steadfast in the faith. But a wider public demands different treatment, and here a Marxist poet can ally himself with those bourgeois poets who, without being Marxists, criticize the society in which they live with varying degrees of vehemence from a wide variety of points of view and who appeal to all those whose social conscience pricks them, whose idealism shows up the discrepancy between the present and the ideal, or whose youth renders them impatient of existing conditions-in fact all those whom Sartre calls "revoltes, non pas revolutionnaires" (Situations, II, Paris, 1948, p. 176). Here a Marxist finds considerable support. He may indeed have started his literary career as just such a bourgeois poet him- 98 LEONARD FORSTER self, as have a number of Communist writers of our day, including two poets, Brecht and Becher, whom I wish to consider. A writer in a Marxist state however has a different function. It is his duty not to criticize (except within certain well-defined limits laid down by party policy from time to time) but to soothe, encourage, and persuade, "to produce great socialist works of art which are partisan and close to the people"; great importance is attached to "the work of persuasion in which firmness of principle and sensibility are linked" (Theses of the Cultural Conference of the S.E.D., [Sozialistische Einheitspartei] Berlin, October 1957, reported in Democratic German Report, January 3, 1958). This function sets a writer different problems and we shall see how our two poets have dealt with them. Both were born in the 1890's, Johannes R. Becher in 1891, Bertolt Brecht in 1898, both into good bourgeois homes in South Germany, Becher as the son of an Oberlandesgerichtsrat in Munich, Brecht of a well-to-do factory manager in Augsburg. Both studied medicine, a study which brings young people closer to human misery than most others and introduces them in the course of their clinical work to social conditions outside the normal experience of well-brought-up middle-class children. Becher had already begun to publish before World War !-wild prophetic outpourings, chaotic in form and content; he was, like many of his contemporaries, a revolte not a revolutionnaire. But behind the chaos there was a search for a Utopia, for an order somehow to arise out of the chaos. He was to find this order and this Utopia in the Communist Party, which he joined in 1918. Brecht's literary beginnings came later. His service in the army medical corps kept him occupied in the war years, and it was not until 1922 that he came to the fore with two plays-Trommeln in der Nacht and Baal-both owing much...