György Lukács

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Lore & Background

Lukács was born Bernát György Löwinger in Budapest, Austria-Hungary, on 13 April 1885, to a wealthy Jewish family that converted to Lutheranism in 1907. His father was knighted by the empire and received a baronial title, making Lukács a baron through inheritance. He received his doctorate in economic and political sciences in 1906 from the Royal Hungarian University of Kolozsvár, and completed his doctorate in philosophy in 1909 at the University of Budapest. In his pre-Marxist period, he was part of socialist intellectual circles, meeting Ervin Szabó who introduced him to Georges Sorel. From 1904 to 1908 he was part of a theatre troupe producing modernist plays by Ibsen, Strindberg, and Hauptmann. Between 1906 and 1909 he worked on his 1,000-page *A modern dráma fejlődésének története* (History of the Development of the Modern Drama), published in 1911. He studied at the University of Berlin from 1906 to 1907, making the acquaintance of Georg Simmel, and later in Heidelberg befriended Max Weber, Emil Lask, Ernst Bloch, and Stefan George. He published *Soul and Form* (1911) and *The Theory of the Novel* (1916/1920). After the First World War, he became a committed Marxist and joined the Communist Party of Hungary in 1918. During the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic (March–August 1919), he was appointed People's Commissar for Education and Culture. After the republic's defeat, he fled to Vienna, where he wrote his magnum opus *History and Class Consciousness* (1923). His 'Blum theses' of 1928, advocating a democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry, were condemned by the Comintern, after which he retreated from active politics into theoretical work. He spent time in Moscow and Berlin, surviving the purges of the Great Terror, and returned to Hungary in 1945.

Reader's Guide

Lukács was especially influential as a critic due to his theoretical developments of literary realism and of the novel as a literary genre. His major work *History and Class Consciousness* (1923) provided Leninism with a substantive philosophical basis, though it was attacked by Grigory Zinoviev at the Fifth Comintern Congress in July 1924. In 1925 he published *Lenin: A Study in the Unity of His Thought*. During the Hungarian Soviet Republic, Lukács wrote in *Népszava* on 15 April 1919 that 'The possession of the power of the state is also a moment for the destruction of the oppressing classes. A moment, we have to use.' He later became a commissar of the Fifth Division of the Hungarian Red Army, in which capacity he ordered the execution of eight of his own soldiers in Poroszló in May 1919, which he later admitted in an interview. After the republic's defeat, he was ordered by Béla Kun to remain behind with Ottó Korvin to clandestinely reorganize the communist movement, but this proved impossible. He was arrested in Vienna but saved from extradition by a group of writers including Thomas and Heinrich Mann; Thomas Mann later based the character Naphta on Lukács in *The Magic Mountain*. In 1930, summoned to Moscow, Lukács was 'prevented' from leaving and assigned to work alongside David Riazanov at the Marx–Engels Institute. Shortly after the German invasion of the Soviet Union, on 29 June 1941, he was arrested by the NKVD but released on 26 August, then evacuated to Tashkent with a group of German-speaking writers. His legacy remains contested, reflecting the tensions between orthodox and critical Marxism.

Did You Know?

• Lukács was born Bernát György Löwinger to a wealthy Jewish family that converted to Lutheranism in 1907.
• His father was knighted by the empire, making Lukács a baron through inheritance.
• During the Hungarian Soviet Republic, Lukács ordered the execution of eight of his own soldiers in Poroszló in May 1919.
• Thomas Mann based the character Naphta on Lukács in his novel *The Magic Mountain*.
• Lukács was arrested by the NKVD on 29 June 1941 but released on 26 August, then evacuated to Tashkent.