Regarding The Young Lukacs or The Powers of Love: Anna Seghers and Thomas Mann
Regarding The Young Lukacs or The Powers of Love: Anna Seghers and Thomas Mann
Regarding The Young Lukacs or The Powers of Love: Anna Seghers and Thomas Mann
Helen Fehervary
1. Mann was a signatory to the appeal "Zur Rettung von Georg Lukics" that
appeared on 12 November 1919 in the Berliner Tageblatt; when Lukdes was threatened
with expulsion from Vienna in 1929 Mann wrote a personal letter on his behalf to the
Austrian Chancellor Ignaz Seipel. For accounts of Mann's avoidance of Lukacs during
the 1955 Schiller commemoration in Jena (their first encounter since 1922 and in fact
their last), see Lukacs, Record of a Life, ed. Istvan Eorsi, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Lon-
don: Verso, 1983) 95; and Hans Mayer, Thomas Mann (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1980)
17-18.
81
82 Seghers and Mann on Young Lukacs
7. Arthur Eloesser, Thomas Mann: Sein Leben und Werk (Berlin: S. Fisciier, 1925)
193-94.
8. Quoted in Michael Lowy, Georg Lukacs: From Romanticism to Bolshevism,
trans. Patrick Camiiler (London: New Left Books, 1979) 198.
9. E.g. Ervin Sinko, Optimistdk: Tortenyelmi regeny 1918/19-bdl (Optimists: An
historical novel of 1918/19), 2 vols. (Novi Sad: Forum, 1965); Bela Illes, Die Generat-
probe: Der Roman der ungarischen Revolution [trans, of Eg a Tisza; later published in
German as Brennende Theifi] (Berlin: Intemationaler Arbeiter-Verlag, 1929). For Lukacs's
positive assessment of Sinko's novel, see Record of a Life, 55. Sinko wrote his novel fairly
early but failed to find a publisher until after 1945. On this see his Roman eines Romans:
Moskauer Tagebuch 1935-37 (Berlin: Das Arsenal, 1991). Two later novels also cast the
Lukacs of 1918-19 as a fictional figure, the one by Lukacs's sister "Sundayer" and life-
long friend Anna Leznai: Spatherbst in Eden (Karlsruhe: Stahlberg, 1965); the other by his
adversary JozsefLengyel: f^.segra^;'wfca (Budapest: Magveto, 1972).
84 Seghers and Mann on Young Lukdcs
10. Eberhard Rohner, "Nicht gleichwertig, aber verwandt: Gesprach mit Stephan
Hermlin," Argonautenschiff: Jahrbuch der Anna-Seghers-Gesellschaft 4 (1995): 159.
11. ROhner, "Gesprach mit Stephan Hermlin" 158-59.
12. E.g. "Der Wille zum Gluck," "Luischen," "Walsungenblut" as well as "Konig-
liche Hoheit."
Helen Fehervary 85
13. Letter of 8 July 1924 to Gyula Foldessy; Petofi Irodalmi Muzeutn, Budapest.
86 Seghers and Mann on Young Lukacs
14. Seghers, Der lelzte Mann der Hohle: Erzahlungen 1924-1933 (Berlin: Aufbau,
1994)7.
15. For an extended discussion of her relationship to Lukdcs and the Sunday Circle,
see Helen Fehervary, Anna Seghers: The Mythic Dimension (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P,
2001)66-147.
Helen Fehervary 87
16. Seghers, "Georg Lukacs," in Uber Kunstwerk und Wirklichkeit, vol. 3, ed. Sigrid
Bock (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1971) 162-63.
17. Seghers to Inge Diersen (n.d.), quoted in Diersen, Seghers-Studies: Interpreta-
tionen von Werken aus den Jahren 1926-1935 (Berlin: Rutten & Loening, 1965) 316, n. 5.
88 Seghers and Mann on Young Lukacs
18. See Karl Mannheim's "Heidelberger Briefe" (1921/1922) and B6la BalSzs's
diary entries of 1919-1922 in Lukacs, Mannheim und der Sonntagskreis, ed. Eva Karddi
and Erzsebet Vezer (Frankfurt/Main: Sendler, 1985) 73-91, 120-28.
19. Netty Reiling (Anna Seghers), Jude und Judentum im Werke Rembrandts
(Leipzig: Reclam, 1981)44.
Helen Fehervary 89
then traces the lives in exile of survivors of the White Terror, among
them four intellectuals based in a by and large historically accurate but
by no means naturalistic way on Lukacs, Karl Mannheim, Bela Balazs
and Laszlo Radvanyi.
The Lukacs figure, the former university professor Bato, is cast as a
vulnerable but quietly persistent man who on his return from Moscow
(to where, in an effort to "control" him, Lukacs was summoned in
1930), takes up his work in Berlin with no hope of having significant
political infiuence or effect. The Radvanyi figure Bohm, whose teacher
and mentor Bato was in Budapest, is contrasted to the elder man in that
despite their common disppointments, he has found new meaning in his
political work — an oblique reference to Radvanyi's enormous success
as director of the Greater-Berlin Marxist Workers School and its affili-
ates elsewhere in Germany.^*' Now married to a German woman, Bohm
feels momentarily nostalgic but soon out of place at a gathering of
exiles where conversation revolves around the specially ordered Mag-
yar cuisine and memories of shared adventures during the heady months
of the Council Republic. The effusive raconteur at this gathering is
Faludi — based largely on Bela Balazs, whose assistant Radvanyi was
at the Division of Drama and Theater in the Council Republic's Com-
missariat of Education —, a man whose personal warmth and cheerful
demeanor belie the precipitous course his life has taken in exile. At first
determined to fan the revolutionary momentum in meanwhile White
Hungary by traveling as an agitator to the Carpathian region of the
short-lived Council Republic of Kassa (Kosice), he subsequently works
in more conventional spheres while trying unsuccessfully to maintain his
standing within the Party. Indeed Bela Balazs's political adventurism and
often erratic behavior incurred not only the Party's rancor but eventually
caused the rift between him and his oldest and closest friend Lukacs.
In the novel's first chapter we read of Faludi's escape from Hungary
inside a stowage crate on a Danube night steamer traveling from
Budapest to Vienna. He shares the crate with the university professor
Dr. Steiner — modelled on Karl Mannheim — who has also been
smuggled on board. Unlike Faludi, who calmly observes their situation
as the final stretch of a journey involving things far more dangerous,
and absurd; Steiner experiences this voyage (into the diaspora) as the
21. As Mannheim wrote in his first "Heidelberg Letter": "The Hungarian jug has
been smashed and its hundred shards are scattered in a hundred directions." In Lukacs.
Mannheim und der Sonntagskreis 73.
22. Quoted in Lukacs, Mannheim und der Sonntagskreis 10.
23. Siegfried Kracauer, "Eine Martyrer-Chronik von heute," Frankfurter Zeitung
und Handelsblatt 13 Nov. 1932.
24. Mann, The Magic Mountain 705.
Helen Fehervary 91
25. Seghers, Reise ins Elfte Reich: Erzahlungen 1934-1946 (Berlin: Aufbau, 1994)
45.
26. Seghers, Reise ins Elfte Reich 46.
27. Mann, The Magic Mountain 706.
28. Seghers, Reise ins Elfte Reich 46.
29. Lukacs, "A Correspondence with Anna Seghers (1938/9)," in GL., Essays on
Realism, ed. Rodney Livingstone, trans. David Fembach (London: Lawrence and Wishart,
1980) 175. Translation modified, HF.
92 Seghers and Mann on Young Lukacs