Sense and Form: “Sense and Form” turns 75: Save the spirit of time!

What would have happened if Federal President Richard von Weizsäcker had not praised the reprint edition of the first ten years of “Sinn und Form” (1949 to 1958), which appeared simultaneously in East and West in 1988, as a highlight of German intellectual history? The magazine probably wouldn’t have survived the early 90s.

“Sinn and Form”, founded by Johannes R. Becher and Paul Wiegler, initially represented the GDR’s claim to German national culture as well as the internationalism that wanted to give contemporary European literature a forum. Among the German authors, it was primarily emigrants who had returned to Germany – the vast majority of them went to the GDR, not to Adenauer’s Federal Republic. The returnees were clearly different from one another. Johannes R. Becher and Georg Lukács, for example, came back from Moscow, Arnold Zweig from Palestine, Anna Seghers from Mexico. For Ernst Bloch and Hans Mayer, the path led from the USA to the University of Leipzig. Brecht also came to the East from America. Others like Ernst Niekisch, who was known as a “National Bolshevik” in 1932 with the book “Hitler –“a German fate” had caused a sensation and had been sentenced to life in prison by the Nazis for high treason, then sat for the SED in the People’s Chamber from 1949 onwards. With their very different experiences – and forms of expression – they all shaped the first years of “Sinn und Form”.

Becher, head of the Kulturbund at the time, pushed his idea of ​​German national culture, on the basis of which he hoped to be able to prepare for German unity. However, after Adenauer finally rejected the “Stalin Notes” on German unity from 1952 in favor of ties to the West and NATO, Becher’s policy also failed. It is against this extremely dramatic background that one must read the first years. It is a treasure trove of diverse approaches and stylistic devices that is still unparalleled today.

The first editor-in-chief was Peter Huchel, who tried to survive the Nazi era with non-political works as an author after 1933 until he was drafted as a soldier in 1941. He brought his apolitical self-image to “Sinn and Form” – and that was what Becher wanted because he expected the magazine to have a pan-German impact. The authors were not required to be communists; the decisive factor was their literary level. Like Hegel, it was important for him to “capture time in thought” – which means the opposite of ideology. This claim to “spirit” has been polarizing from the beginning – until today. But “Sinn and Form” never wanted to be politically manageable in the sense of Friedrich Wolf’s “Art is a weapon.” Here poetry contained philosophy, which brought the form of the essay into the center of interest.

The first issue in 1949 seems programmatic. Romain Rolland opened with his “Youth Memories,” followed by poems from Oskar Loerke’s estate. Then we read in “Convalescent Home”: “Why did they cripple him? / He thought behind his forehead: / Then the club / opened his skull, and brain was just brain again.” This is followed by Mayakovsky’s “Myself – An Autobiography,” which begins: “I am a poet. That’s what makes me interesting. That’s what I’m writing about. About the rest too – that’s all we’ve said.” This is followed by poems from the Resistance (with Aragon), diary entries by Gerhart Hauptmann, Niekisch’s comments on the problem of the elite in Ortega y Gasset and Hermann Kasack’s story “The Loom”. What a magazine that you will immediately find yourself reading again. And so it goes, number by number, every other month.

35 years ago, filmmaker Thomas Grimm recorded the 40th anniversary of “Sinn und Form” at the Academy of Arts. What a memorable document, so shortly before the fall of communism. One of the main players at the time was Sebastian Kleinschmidt, who had studied philosophy at Humboldt University and received his doctorate on Georg Lukács. Her father was the Schwerin cathedral preacher and religious socialist Karl Kleinschmidt, who became known in the GDR with the etiquette book “Don’t be afraid of good morals.” In the editorial department since 1984, he became editor-in-chief in 1991. At the 40th anniversary celebrations, the debates in “sense and form” that were central to GDR cultural policy were discussed – in the 1980s, as a student, I experienced these first hand using the example of Ernst Bloch and Friedrich Nietzsche and their membership in the canon of cultural heritage was bitterly debated in the magazine. The dramatic clash between Wolfgang Harich and Stephan Hermlin in the Nietzsche case was memorable. A whole history of the GDR’s spirit and mentality could be developed from this.

During GDR times, “Sinn und Form” had a circulation of well under ten thousand copies (today there are much fewer), so people could afford the luxury of a censorship-free zone. But there was increasing melancholy in the air. In the first issue from 1979 I read “My Diamond Crown,” the memoirs of Valentin Katayev, the author of the highly poetic and deeply disturbing book “The Grass of Forgetting.” A brutal statement about the city of Moscow can be found here: “Memory is being destroyed like the old city. The desolate spots of Moscow, which is undergoing upheaval, are being filled with new architectural content. And in the ruins of memory all that remained were the shadows of streets, alleys, dead ends that no longer exist today…”

A similar feeling came over me in Berlin after 1990. It was a stroke of luck that Sebastian Kleinschmidt opened the magazine to me in 1992 for my first text (about Luise Rinser), which was then followed by half a dozen more. Under Kleinschmidt, who headed the magazine until 2013, memory always had something urgent, never something arbitrary.

And now the event for “75 years of ‘Sinn and Form’” in the Academy of Arts at Pariser Platz. On this occasion, the digital archive from 1949 to 1991 was opened, with at least 4,000 texts. The podium demonstrates continuity, even though Sebastian Kleinschmidt did not want to travel from his summer residence in Ahrenshoop. Here it is – alongside the two moderating editors Matthias Weichelt and Elisa Primavera-Lévy – Friedrich Dieckmann who embodies the intellectual tradition of the magazine. The son of the GDR Volkskammer President Johannes Dieckmann published more than a hundred articles in “Sinn und Form” in half a century, making him the undisputed front runner.

Ulrich Matthes reads various articles from earlier issues, including a biting, polemical response from Dieckmann to the historian Wolfgang Ruge, who had accused Dieckmann of bourgeois historical revisionism. Eugen Ruge later characterized his father Wolfgang as an opportunist in his novel “In Times of Fading Light.” But at least Wolfgang Ruge’s book “Lenin, Forerunner of Stalin” (ed. Wladislaw Hedeler), published posthumously by Matthes & Seitz in 2010, is illuminating. So contradictory are those who try to capture the “spirit of the time” in terms of concepts.

The podium is stingy with memories. Angela Krauß was practically celebrating her amnesia when she was asked about her first text in “Sinn und Form” from the mid-80s. She couldn’t remember anything about it at all. Memory is obviously a strange thing. Because Kerstin Hensel is now hearing the first of her – very beautiful – poems printed in the magazine as if for the first time.

It is Ulrich Matthes who visualizes these texts by reading them. Also the “Three Naked Men” by Franz Fühmann, which first appeared in “Sinn und Form”. Volker Braun was then inspired by the subject of the high official and his driver for his “Hinze-Kunze novel”. Strange how one thing is always connected to the other.