Item #115 Deutsche Literatur im Zeitalter des Imperialismus. Eine Übersicht ihrer Hauptströmungen. Georg Lukacs, György Lukács.
Deutsche Literatur im Zeitalter des Imperialismus. Eine Übersicht ihrer Hauptströmungen.
Inscribed to the Hungarian Minister of Education

Deutsche Literatur im Zeitalter des Imperialismus. Eine Übersicht ihrer Hauptströmungen.

Berlin: Aufbau, 1946. A presentation copy. In original paper. Inscribed to József Révai and his wife Lili Révai (written Józsi and Lili). 71, (1) p. In fine condition.

József Révai (1898–1959) was a communist politician, one of the founders of the Hungarian Communist Party in 1918. He became friend with Lukács before the time of the Hungarian Soviet Republic. Révai was member of Lajos Kassák’s Ma circle and published his poems in Kassák’s periodicals. He was also member of the Galilei Circe the association of progressive left wing intellects, and the editor of “Vörös Újság” (Red Journal) the newspaper of the Hungarian communists. After the fall of the Hungarian Soviet Republic he fled to Vienna, where he worked as a journalist. In 1930 he went back to Hungary where he got arrested and sentenced to prison for three years. In 1934 he fled to the Soviet Union and worked for the Comintern. Révai went back to Hungary in 1944 as one of the four leaders of the communist dictatorship. Between 1945–1956 he was member of the Central Committee and the Political Committee (1945–1953, 1956). Révai was the Minister of Culture from 1949, controlled all aspects of the cultural life.

Georg (György) Lukács (1885–1971) was a Marxists political thinker, aesthete, university teacher, politician, literary critic, member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Lukács was among the most important and most influential philosophers of the era, the founder of the tradition of Western Marxism. He studied in Budapest, Berlin where he made acquaintance with Georg Simmel, in Heidelberg where he became friends with Max Weber, Ernst Bloch and Stefan George. He was actively involved in the Communist movement and became People’s Commissar for Education and Culture (deputy to the Commissar for Education) and the political commissar of the Hungarian Red Army during the Hungarian Soviet Republic in 1919. After the fall of the régime he was arrested in Vienna and only the intervene of Western writers saved him from extradition. Among these authors were Heinrich and Thomas Mann who later based Naphta’s character in “The Magic Mountain” on Lukács. In 1923, during the exile in Vienna his first major work “Geschichte und Klassen-bewusstsein” (History of Class Consciousness) was published by Malik Verlag. Lukács lived in Berlin in the early 1930’s than he moved to the Soviet Union in 1933 and stayed there until the end of Second World War when he moved back to Budapest, to establish the new Hungarian government as member of the Hungarian Communist Party. He had major role in the removal of independent and non-communist intellectuals from all positions. During the Revolution in 1956 he served as minister in the revolutionary government of Imre Nagy which opposed the Soviet Union. After the revolution he was not allowed to publish in Hungary until 1964. Lukács’s major works are History and Class Consciousness which is considered as the base of Western Marxism, and The Historical Novel in which he defines the genre of historical fiction and traces its development.

.

Price: €1,500.00

See all items by ,