A Few Notes on Max Barthel and German Proletarian Literature

A Few Notes on Max Barthel and German Proletarian Literature

Robert Steuckers 

In Germany, since the mid-19th century, there has been talk of ‘workers' literature’ (Arbeiterliteratur). This does not mean that authors are only included if they have a basic level of education: under Bismarck's Second Reich, the level of education was higher, especially among the working classes. Among the names that deserve more in-depth study than this article allows are Heinrich Lersch (1889-1936), Gerrit Engelke (1890-1918, friend of Richard Dehmel who fell at Etaples), Karl Bröger (1896-1944, member of the socialist SPD but, against his will, an influencer of the Hitler Youth), Otto Wohlgemuth (1884-1965) and, finally, Max Barthel (1893-1975), whose biography shows us that the ideological divides that our contemporaries believe to be fixed and unbreakable are not, in reality.

Max Barthel began his career in the most radical circles: a combatant during the First World War, he published pacifist poems (Verse aus der Argonnen) in strong language, quickly joining the Spartakusbund in Stuttgart and becoming involved in communist gangs, which earned him six months in prison.

Selected by the Moscow headquarters of the international communist movement, led by the famous Willi Münzenberg (who was the mentor of the pre-war communist Koestler), he made two long stays in the USSR in 1920 and 1923 as a German delegate. The second stay detached him from communism and brought him back into the more peaceful fold of the socialist SPD. This earned him the usual insult of ‘social-fascist traitor’. 

The economic crisis of 1929 led him to switch to nationalism, while remaining active in the SDS (Schutzverband Deutscher Schriftsteller), which he helped to ‘bring into line’ after the National Socialists took power. They particularly appreciated his novel Das unsterbliche Volk (" The Immortal People‘), which certainly extols the ’people's community‘ as a ’community of destiny" but does not contain the other elements of racialist rhetoric that had become commonplace in the new regime. Barthel also became a contributor to Goebbels' newspaper, Der Angriff. He joined the Bamberger Dichterkreis (Bamberg Circle of Writers), which sought to promote ‘literature rooted in the people’ (Volkhafte Literatur).

However, this involvement in the cultural structures of the Nazi regime was not a foregone conclusion: in 1934, he had to leave the Büchergilde (Book Guild) because his rather radical communist past had not been forgotten and some criticised him for facilitating the publication of works by Jack London and Stefan Anders, among others, authors who were controversial but not censored in the Nazi context. Nevertheless, Barthel did not give in to his opponents: in 1934, he wrote his first book on Jack London, presenting him as a ‘child of the people’, and revised the translations of a dozen novels by this American author.

But Barthel's originality in the 1930s lay in his many travels and writings on the Orient, Central Asia, India and the Caucasus. He was a lecturer on trips organised by the Kraft durch Freude organisation and then in occupied countries (including France). These activities made him persona non grata in the Sovietised GDR after the Second World War, but on the eve of his death, he was awarded the ‘Cross of Merit’ by the FRG in 1974.

Max Barthel's career spans most of the 20th century: his work has successively and always positively addressed the world of combat from 1914 to 1918 through the prism of non-moralising pacifism, the Soviet revolutionary world, socialist engagement, the National Socialist interlude, and the dual revolutionary-red and populist-German view of the East, India, Central Asia and the Caucasus, without ever forgetting the need to remain rooted in the everyday life of the working classes. All the more reason to rediscover it, to identify the common denominators of these multiple commitments and to help us abandon the grotesque political and conceptual Manichaeism that poisons the literary life of our sad times.