Appendix
An Entire Epoch of Inhumanity
Georg Lukács
This is the Foreword written by Lukács in December 1964 for Volume 6 (‘The Problems
of Realism, 3’) of his Collected Works (Georg Lukács, Werke, 17 vols., Neuwied and
Berlin: Luchterhand, 1962–1974). Volume 6 contains The Historical Novel (1937)
and a series of essays collected under the title ‘Balzac and French Realism’ (written in the
period between 1934 and 1940). Lukács included three shorter texts in an appendix:
‘Don Quixote’ (1952), ‘On an Aspect of Shakespeare’s Timeliness’ (1964), and ‘Faust
Studies’ (1940). The first paragraph of the Foreword, which is essentially an extended
erratum note, is omitted here. All notes are by the translator.
I have always found it regrettable that my detailed discussions of literature
have been confined to the nineteenth century. The demands placed on me by
my daily life and theoretical work were such that I never had the opportunity to
write about authors who sometimes meant more to me than others whom
I have treated at length. I therefore include the modest preface to Cervantes
and the short piece on Shakespeare here not because I attach particular impor-
tance to them. Rather, their presence bears witness to the painful gap in my
literary-historical writing of which I am constantly aware.
The main topic of this volume is the intellectual and artistic transition from
the eighteenth to the nineteenth century. The new novel that emerges here –
and the novel, the bourgeois epopee, is the leading literary genre of this period –
will set the tone for the entire nineteenth century in both its form and its idea.
I am, in fact, convinced that this novel form has not lost its significance even
today. That is not to say that we should see it as an immediate model or exem-
plar [Vorbild]. No such exemplarity exists in the entire history of art; where it is
claimed, we usually find a misunderstanding of the ‘ideal’ (even if this misun-
derstanding is often productive). This holds true for the relationship between
the tragédie classique and antiquity as well as the relationship between Goethe or
Pushkin and Shakespeare. Aesthetically speaking, there is something far more
complicated at work in the problem of exemplarity. Every great work of art
conforms to the laws of its genre but extends their limits at the same time.
Among writers of the greatest genius and originality, this is the expression of a
historical transformation with which the subsequent generation must come to
222 George Lukács: Fundamental Dissonance of Existence
terms. This leads to a double dilemma that confronts truly great, truly universal
writers when it comes to their creative process: their modification of formal
laws must incorporate that which is permanent and points to the future, but it
must also exhibit a conformity commensurate with their historical situation.
Already [Edward] Young, in the eighteenth century, was aware that exemplarity
should not simply produce imitation. Only weak artists and confused times find
themselves standing at that false crossroads where one must choose between
the path of imitating so-called ‘models’ and that of a deracinated ‘originality’
that is just as dubious.
When it comes to the modern epic, the great achievement of combining
conformity with modification can be credited to Walter Scott, who united the
totality and completeness of the epic form with a content that was consciously
socio-historical in its entirety as well as its details. I am fully aware that this
characterization must sound completely outdated to the majority of those who
make pronouncements about literature today. That the whole is synonymous
with untruth has become a fashionable slogan for the most diverse forms
of modern worldviews [Weltanschauungen] and repudiations of worldviews
[Weltanschauungslosigkeiten], for whom the socio-historical appears to be a
surface without essence. My aim here is not at all to portray Walter Scott as
pointing the way back to a ‘return’. In fact, his example illustrates most clearly
the dialectic that these essays attempt to shed light on. In a certain way, Scott is
not really a great writer at all. He does not possess that gift for charming and
fascinating animation that extends to the smallest details of every figure in
Tolstoy. Neither is he simply a discoverer of new territory, such as George Lillo
and Denis Diderot are for bourgeois drama (even if this groundbreaking
reputation might exist only among historians). Instead, he ‘merely’ gives shape
to something whose newness he was the first to experience: the socio-historical
as it manifests itself in the destiny of each individual. Whether it comes to the
limitations of person and gifts, or to the question of that grand one-sided
ambition required of all significant discoverers, Walter Scott ascends to literary
heights only when he writes about man rising above his historical hic et nunc,
about the way its irresistible might constrains his most authentic desires, about
the uncomprehending confrontation between men whose attitudes are
thoroughly determined by opposing social forces, etc. etc. The discrepancy
between such heights of composition and descents into purely individual
fortunes is what characterizes the greatness and the limitation of this writer in
his singular incomparability.
Individual accomplishment matters less here than the effects [Ausstrahlun-
gen] of the accomplishment, which corroborates the difference (the opposi-
tion) between exemplarity and imitation proposed earlier. Scott’s discovery in
relation to totality and historicity had direct consequences, of course, but who
would on this account consider Manzoni or Pushkin an ‘epigone’ of Scott?
There is a creatively productive distance that separates them from Scott, because
their figures and stories grow out of a completely different history in which they
find their proper home. The decisive thing about Scott’s effect, and the thing
Appendix 223
that makes him unique in his age, is that the novel of society historicized itself
in his wake, challenging writers after him to grasp and give form to their own
present moment as a historical one. This brought about a turn whose conse-
quences are still in effect today and which is disregarded only at the risk of
artistic inferiority.
No rule in the history of art remains without exception: the contrast between
the novel of the eighteenth century and that of the nineteenth century is imme-
diately eye-catching, but it does not apply to Swift. Or if it does, it is only with
significant qualification. In Swift, a conscious expression of the socio-historical
hic et nunc is not just absent, but explicitly and artistically set to the side. We find
an entire human epoch, with its most universal conflicts, confronting man in
general [überhaupt] or perhaps man who bears the faintest traces of his time.
Today, one calls this the human condition, but this expression fails to capture
Swift’s true subject matter: not man in general but rather his fate in a histori-
cally determined society. Swift’s unique genius lies in his ability to take in an
entire epoch prophetically with his gaze on society. In our time, something
analogous is offered only by Kafka, who sets in motion an entire epoch of inhu-
manity as an antagonist to the Austrian (Bohemian-German-Jewish) man of
Franz Joseph’s reign. His world, which can only be interpreted as the human
condition in a strictly formal sense, thus contains a profound and disturbing
truth. It stands in contrast to that which is aimed directly at the pure, abstract
(and through abstraction, distorted) generality of human existence, which has
no historical background, basis or perspective and thus ends up always striking
at perfect emptiness and nothingness. Even if this nothing might be adorned
with an arbitrary, somewhat existential ornamentation, it remains, in contrast
to what we find in Swift and Kafka, an empty nothing.
The necessary historicity of art is only a subdomain of the general problem of
historicity. This problem has been on the agenda since the French Revolution,
and German Romanticism presented the world with a solution to it whose false-
ness continues to afflict us. With the help of the pamphleteer Edmund Burke,
German Romanticism advanced the thesis that the Enlightenment was antihis-
torical in spirit. It held the French Revolution to be proof of this, and claimed
that the historical spirit awakens only with Romanticism and only in the theory
and practice of Restoration. To still have to waste words on this thesis is tire-
some: it dismisses the reality of the great historians of the Enlightenment (one
needs only to think of Gibbon) and amputates the category of progress from
history. It acknowledges only that which has emerged ‘organically’ as historical,
and considers any upheaval or conscious action aimed at real change to be
antihistorical. This is how Ranke gradually became (above all in Germany) the
model of the historical spirit, while the positions represented by Condorcet and
Fourier, Hegel and Marx came to be considered antihistorical. As facile and
intuitive as it might seem, it would be nonetheless accurate to connect the
beginnings of this line of thought with the countermovement against the
French Revolution, especially since many of its earliest and most prominent
advocates also served the cause of Restoration. This is not the place to describe
224 George Lukács: Fundamental Dissonance of Existence
how the theorists and practitioners of this view of history eventually became
the leading ideologues of the ‘Second Reich’ and its disastrous Wilhelminian
policies. Such a view persists into the present, although sometimes accompa-
nied by a very different intellectual apparatus. Whenever the Metternichian
Restoration, for example, is celebrated as a realization of ‘European thought’,
it is not hard to discern an intimate relationship with a primal ideology of
restoration, regardless of any historically specific differences.
This theory of history justifies itself as an attack against an abstract concept of
progress. But such a concept of progress is a mere myth, at least as far as the
significant thinkers and writers of the nineteenth century are concerned. One
does not need a fatalistic and mechanistic concept of ‘progress’ to account for
historical change and the way completely new constellations emerge from the
finest changes in interpersonal and intra-personal human relations. It would
suffice to speak of an irresistible movement [Fortbewegung] with one consistent
direction and tendency despite all internal and external contradictions. From
Thierry to Gordon Childe, from Scott to Thomas Mann – one will find no forth-
right and rigorous thinker among them to confirm in the least this myth of
mechanical progress. Quite the contrary. While we are on the topic of litera-
ture: the nonrestorative character of its view of history is grounded in the fact
that its significant representatives portray and give shape to irresistible socio-
historical tendencies that form men and are formed by the actions of men. The
effects and results of these tendencies remain objective and independent from
the convictions, wishes and sympathies of writers. This is the view of life that
prevails in great literature, from the decline of clans in Walter Scott to the
uprooting of the Buddenbrooks to the tragedy of Leverkühn. But the (ulti-
mately, and admittedly only ultimately) irresistible movement of history consists
of the activity of men, as it occurs among men and to men. No elaborate,
abstract theory is needed to portray the historical existence of men as a product
of their own acts and passions, in order to artistically or practically lend truth to
their continuities and prospects. Only when present conditions congeal into
timeless fetishes, losing their mobility and connection to concrete men, do
‘living images’ of the human condition arise, lending fixity to an often despised
and contemptible present and turning it into an unbegotten and unchanging
fate. Such a ‘will to art’ [Kunstwollen]1 is possibly (but not necessarily) the
product of genuine desperation, and its aims are possibly (but not necessarily)
unrelated to any conscious goal of restoration; in its effect, however, it always
tends towards an alliance with restoration. The tension that plays itself out
around this ‘possibly’ is itself socio-historical: one finds no traces of restoration
in Kafka himself, but many in his aesthetic successors. A respected sociologist of
our day has offered the following generalization of this state of affairs: the end
of history has already arrived, and the future can only consist of different ways
of dealing with the forms and contents that we know today.2
This view of life and literature, along with our modern literary historical
understanding, draws support from the assertion that all important figures and
developments of the nineteenth century are essentially Romantic. Trends
Appendix 225
towards homogenization have always been fashionable in the history of litera-
ture. As a young student, I heard from classmates at the university in Berlin
about Dilthey’s cutting remarks on the conventional understanding of the
eighteenth century: ‘If it doesn’t make sense, call it “Spinoza” ’. The same thing
happens today with Romanticism, and it changes nothing that the flattening,
conventionalizing effect of overgeneralization now passes for interesting and
unconventional. Romanticism is an important intellectual movement of the
nineteenth century that began as opposition – set off by the French Revolution
in the realm of politics and literature, and by the parallel Industrial Revolution
in the economic and social world. One therefore finds in its truly significant
representatives a sharp, sometimes even profoundly, penetrating critique of the
new contradictions that accompanied these fundamental transformations of
social reality. This critique always loses its edge, however, because Romantic
writers do not direct the dynamic energy of these contradictions towards the
future, as do great utopian thinkers such as Fourier or [Robert] Owen. Instead,
they seek to turn back the wheel of history, pitting the Middle Ages and the
ancien régime against the present, and simple commodity exchange against
capitalism. In literary terms, real Romanticism begins with Chateaubriand and
passes through the German Romantic School to [Alfred de] Vigny or Coleridge.
In socioeconomic terms, we find it in Sismondi, Cobbett or the young Carlyle.
There is a tendency that runs from Scott to Balzac to Tolstoy and Thomas Mann
(although there are naturally a few significant writers who could be excluded
from it), and the overcoming of this tendency through the integration of
legitimate critical elements into a realistic image of the world is a more or less
essential moment in its development towards maturity.
We seem to have lost sight of this critical point of view today. Beginning with
Byron (whose life-motto Goethe so wittily summarized as ‘more money and less
governance’) and moving on to the antiquity-inspired utopian socialist Shelley
and that disciple of the Enlightenment, Stendhal: the list of supposed Roman-
tics proceeds to infinity. Wherever we find someone sympathetic and relevant
for the present, we readily extend a diploma attesting to Romantic heritage.
This veneration has not changed even after Fascism followed the Romantic
premise to its furthest and most gruesome conclusion: contrasting the
problematic present with a mythologized and idealized past, it called for an
actualization of the latter in order to solve the difficulties of the former. Hitler
and Rosenberg were not the only ones who took recourse to this ‘primal state’,
which was a modern equivalent of the revival of the ancien régime or feudalism;
[Ludwig] Klages, Jung and many others made similar attempts before them.
The collapse of Fascism was not followed by a coming to terms with the past,
either intellectually or in other spheres closer to daily praxis. When I had occa-
sion to speak to staff officers of the Paulus Army after Stalingrad, I experienced
in personal proximity for the first time how a sharp criticism of Hitler’s
‘mistake’ was compatible in practical terms with an affirmation of German
imperialist expansion, and in theoretical terms with a strategic retreat to the
position of Spengler and Nietzsche. To what extent the unexamined past has
226 George Lukács: Fundamental Dissonance of Existence
played a role in the renaissance of Romanticism remains unexplored, not least
because it is part of the method of literary history (and here it is not alone
among disciplines) to skim over vast historical differences elegantly and focus
attention on semantic or psychological parallels. We therefore get boundless
theories of boundlessness, flavoured with a titillating blend of the most modern
and a dash of Marxism. That groups of objects have no fixed boundaries is self-
evident for Marxist dialectics. For example, the exact point of division between
feudal and capitalist formations is not subject to precise definition in principle,
although what opposes feudalism and capitalism in principle certainly is. In the
theories of boundlessness, however, objectivity itself dissolves into a semantically
well-appointed nothing. One might as well conclude with the sentence that was
already given a philosophical twist by Hegel: ‘By night, all cows are Romantic’.3
These few and fleeting remarks are meant to make clear that the author of
these essays – most of which are more than a quarter of a century old – still
stands by the principles that guided his old investigations today, heedless of the
rebirth of the All-Romantic whose currents have swept along even those who
before the tyranny of this fashion had correctly perceived the historical situa-
tions. (That individual interpretations here have been rendered obsolete by
history is a different matter that has nothing to do with this question).
Budapest, December 1964
Translated by Zachary Sng
Notes
1
The term Kunstwollen was coined by the art historian Alois Riegel (1858–1905),
whom Lukács in History and Class Consciousness refers to as one of the ‘really
important historians of the nineteenth century’ (HCC 153).
2
Lukács may be referring here to the conservative sociologist and philosopher
Arnold Gehlen (1904–1976). In Zeit-Bilder: Zur Soziologie und Ästhetik der modernen
Malerei, Gehlen argued that the avant-garde art movements of the early twentieth
century would be followed by nothing but repetitions and variations in terms of
both technique and content.
3
The reference here is to Hegel’s famous criticism of Schelling’s concept of the
Absolute, which in the Phenomenology of Spirit he dismisses as a reduction of
difference into ‘a night in which, as the saying goes, all cows are black’ (9).
Works Cited
Gehlen, Arnold (1960), Zeit-Bilder: Zur Soziologie und Ästhetik der modernen Malerei.
Frankfurt: Klostermann.
Hegel, G.W.F. (1977), Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
