Limits to Art Legislating For The World

Reading How Writers Survived Fascism by Gustav Jonsson pointed out the limits of art in the face of brutal force:

All of this is a rude corrective to the lofty hope that literature is the “unacknowledged legislator” of society. The writer may not be a “powerless observer,” but it is political movements, not poets, who make history. There were heroes like Toller who organized the intellectual resistance to Nazism. They wrote pamphlets, signed petitions, convened committees. None of it mattered. The German public, Wittstock observes, thought the academy’s literature section gave expression to “the intellectual voice of the nation,” but in reality, it was paralyzed by petty internal squabbles. Brecht, meanwhile, proposed to some comrades that they should “get a Schutzstaffel for threatened writers.” But Heinrich Mann soon punctured Brecht’s confidence: How could a handful of poetry-loving bruisers ever take on the Nazi storm troopers?

Let us hope we do not learn this lesson after January 6, 2025.

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