The Volk against Fascism: Socialist Realism and the Aesthetics of Expressionism

This essay analyzes critical disputes of the 1930s that theorized the "Volk" as an aesthetic phenomenon. After addressing the work of the erstwhile expressionist Gottfried Benn, in particular Benn's contributions to National Socialism, the essay turns to the charge leveled by members of the Popular Front that expressionism was complicit in the rise of fascism. The essay argues that instead of rejecting the concept of the Volk as a product of the political right, leftists like Georg Lukács and Alfred Kurella theorized an anti-fascist Volk whose revolutionary potential is inextricable from its aesthetic determination.