About the origins of socialist realism in Germany

Abstract

early development (1920s – 1930s) of socialist realism in Germany. It was at that time that the need to put literature at the service of party and class interests was declared. The main problems of the works correspond to the spirit of party propaganda and popularization of social-democratic ideas. In the history of the formation of Marxist aesthetics as the foundation for socialist literature, a great role belongs to F. Mering, who justified one of the basic differences between socialist literature and other socio-critical literary trends, which only depicted social conflicts, but did not connected their resolution with the ideas of class struggle and proletarian revolution. Among the initiators of socialist realism in Germany (1920–1930-ies) were I. R. Becher, B. Brecht, F. Wolf, A. Zegers, etc. They were well acquainted with Soviet literary policy and practice (M. Gorky and others) and transferred it to German soil. The main postulates of the literature of that period were: a socialist work © Кудрявцева Т. В., 2022 ISSUES OF GLOBAL LITERATURE POETICS 195 should strive for the knowledge of truly dialectical objectivity and take pains to provide a comprehensive, concrete and profound demonstration of the unity of the driving forces of history. The famous Marxist philosopher G. Lukács made a great impact on theory and practice of German socialist realism. His ideas that the creators of socialist art and the artistic “ideological avant-garde” are called upon to discover the typical and show new trends in the development of essential features of modern life following the best traditions of European realism, as well as the idea of the popular art understood in the spirit of Marxist-Leninist aesthetics, were actively followed by German proletarian writers in the Weimar Republic and anti-fascist writers during the Third Reich. K e y w o r d s : working-class literature; socialist literature; Marxist-Leninist aesthetics; socialist realism; ideological avant-garde; German literature; German writers; literary creative activity; literary genres. A c k n o w l e d g m e n t s : the study has been accomplished at A. M. Gorky Institute of World literature of the Russian Academy of Sciences with the support of the Russian Science Foundation Grant (RSF, Project Number