Revisiting German Proletarian-Revolutionary Literature

Abstract

This article provides an overview of the emergence of proletarian literature in Germany, and the focuses in on the key texts, figures and debates of the Communist Party-affiliated Federation of Revolutionary-Proletarian Writers (BPRS) and the important debates about literature and politics in its journal Die Linkskurve between 1929 and 1932. At the same time, I argue for a complicated and sometimes conflictual relationship between the increasingly Hegelian aesthetic position of the journal and the more operatively-oriented work of BPRS authors.