Recycling Lenin: The Role of Lenin’s The Imperialist War: The Struggle Against Social-Chauvinism and Social-Pacifism in Brecht’s “Neue Dramatik”

Summary

In the years following Lenin's death in 1924, Brecht began to study his life and writings. He judged Henri Guilbeaux's Wladimir Iljitsch Lenin: Ein treues Bild seines Wesens ( Vladimir Ilyich Lenin: A True Picture of His Character) to be one of the best books he read in 1926. That year he also read Lenin's unfinished pamphlet The State and Revolution: The Marxist Theory of the State and the Tasks of the Proletariat in the Revolution (written August–September 1917). The sudden coming of the October Revolution presented, as Lenin says in the postscript to the first edition, a “welcomed” interference with his plan to complete the book. The fragment ends with an accusation that seems to call for an additional chapter that would deal with imperialism, specifically the Second International’s

distortion and hushing up of the question of the relation of the proletarian revolution to the state … at a time when states, which possess a military apparatus expanded as a consequence of imperialist rivalry, have become military monsters which are exterminating millions of people in order to settle the issue as to whether Britain or Germany— this or that finance capital—is to rule the world.

Before 1926, only one of Lenin's writings on imperialism, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism: A Popular Outline (written in 1916), was available in German. Sociologist Fritz Sternberg, whom Brecht met in 1927 and whom he called “my first teacher,” noted this in the foreword to his 1926 book, Der Imperialismus (Imperialism).

I

By 1929, however, the situation had changed completely. Sternberg's book of that year, “Der Imperialismus” und seine Kritiker (“Imperialism” and Its Critics)—a copy of which the author gave to Brecht in December 1929— contained, among the advertisements at the end, one for the newly published German translation of Lenin's The Imperialist War: The Struggle against Social-Chauvinism and Social-Pacifism. The Imperialist War is a collection of Lenin's writings from August 1914 through December 1915 in which he addresses repeatedly and in detail issues surrounding the Second International's “distortion and hushing up of the relation of the proletarian revolution to the state.”