Revolution and the City: Marxist Anthropologies in the Interwar Realist Novel

Abstract

The German Revolution of 1918-1919 failed to topple the capitalist system that interwar Marxists held responsible for World War I. For those Marxists, the interwar era’s unprecedented urbanization reinstated capital’s dominance, representing a counterpart to the wartime destruction. Theorists including Georg Lukacs and writers such as Siegfried Kracauer, Arnold Zweig and Alfred Doblin held that the capitalist city, like the battlefield before it, distorted and diminished human nature, foreclosing the possibility of revolutionary social transformation. This dissertation argues that interwar Marxist philosophers and authors consequently turned to the realist novel; they imagined it as a poetic form of architecture that literarily reconstructed urban space to expose its capitalist foundations. The realist novel thereby empowered readers to imagine alternative spaces and emboldened them to resist by reactivating their capacities for collective action and creative transformation. The dissertation first demonstrates that Lukacs’s interwar writings intervene into architectural and urban planning discourses to present the realist novel as a shelter from and a weapon against the capitalist city. Three exemplary literary works then reveal how this literary challenge to the capitalist city was imagined and reimagined as Germany’s political situation deteriorated. Written during the Weimar Republic’s Golden Age, Kracauer’s Ginster (1928) depicts a destructive wartime homogenization of space that transforms both battlefield and home front. The novel resists this homogenization by mapping alternative spatial organizations intent on fostering human potentialities. Penned during fascism’s rise, Zweig’s Erziehung vor Verdun (1935) shows how urban technological progress under capitalism unleashes the very destruction that flattens the city during the war. Zweig’s novel unfurls an ideal of construction capable of breaking this self-destructive cycle by reconnecting humanity’s innovations with human need. Commenced as war loomed again, Doblin’s November 1918 (1939, 1948, 1950) shows how the 1918-1919 revolution was misdirected by the urban spaces it sought to conquer. Drawing lessons from this historic failure, Doblin’s roman-fleuve sketches a limitless and dialectical progression as a critical corrective to existing conceptions of revolution. Ultimately, this dissertation uncovers a hitherto overlooked literary tradition that presents the realist novel as a critical tool for reckoning with capitalism’s domination of our built environments.