2023
First Published
504
Number of Pages
Part of Series
How did the revolutionary Left view cultural modernists? Their uneasy relationship is illustrated in this book with quotations ranging from Alexander’s ‘Dada is merely an impertinence’ through Trotsky’s ‘There cannot be a proletarian culture’ to Averbakh’s ‘Tear off the masks!’ and Becher’s ‘There can only be one kind of genuine fighting art’ This book covers communist attitudes to the whole field of cultural innovation, from the art of the left abstractionists to the literature of the worker-correspondent movement and the music of Weill and Eisler, through to proletarian film, theatre and photography. Historian Ben Fowkes takes full account of the impact on Weimar left culture of external events, such as the First World War, the ‘Great Change’ in the Soviet Union, and internal German developments―including the failure of revolution after 1918 and the rise of Nazism. Each chapter starts with an introduction that provides context for the relevant documents and explores the current state of research.
Author
Ben Fowkes
Author · 1 books
Ben Fowkes was for twenty-five years Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Humanities at the University of North London. He has carried out archival research in Vienna, Munich, Bonn, Prague and Moscow. He is the author of several works on communist and post-communist history and politics, including The Rise and Fall of Communism in Eastern Europe, The Disintegration of the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe from Stalinism to Stagnation and The Post-Communist Era.
