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urn:nbn:it:unica-29728
Francesca Goll
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On the Epic of the Collective: Erik Reger's <em>Union der festen Hand</em> (1931)
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Francesca Goll
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urn:nbn:it:unica-29728
On the Epic of the Collective: Erik Reger's <em>Union der festen Hand</em> (1931)
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13
            On the Epic of the Collective:
                 Erik Reger’s Union
                der festen Hand (1931)

                                 Francesca Goll

Abstract
      The present contribution intends to investigate Erik Reger’s positions
on the relationship between culture, literature and the industry – including
its technological advancements and its influence on the workers as individ-
uals – by scrutinizing several different sources. Reger, who was a journalist
and later editor and director of the Berlin based newspaper Der Tagesspiegel,
has written numerous articles on the subject and his archive is kept at the
Akademie der Künste (AdK) in Berlin. By drawing on reviews, archival materi-
als and writings, this article will highlight Reger’s specific position and relate
it to Sergey Tretyakov’s pamphlet “The Biography of the Object” (1929).

Keywords
industrial literature; Ruhr; Weimar Republic; Tretjakov; Erik Reger; Mining




Between, vol. XIII, n. 26 (novembre/November 2023)
issn: 2039-6597
doi: 10.13125/2039-6597/5774
Francesca Goll, On the Epic of the Colective: Eric Reger’s Union der festen Hand (1931)




             On the Epic of the Collective:
             Erik Reger’s Union der festen
                     Hand (1931)

                                     Francesca Goll



                                                1.
      In an article published in 1929 – and reprinted in a comprehensive
collection of his writings edited by Erhard Schütz more recently – with the
programmatic title “Industrierevier und Zeittheater” (Reger 1993: 88-94)
Reger argues for leaving behind the traditional forms of «Gesellschafts-und
Bildungstheater» (ibid.: 88) and for the development of new forms of thea-
tre, more apt to embrace the wake of a new time. He states:

         Es gibt kein Gebiet in Deutschland, das mehr Anfang, mehr
      Gegenwart wäre als das Industriegebiet an der Ruhr. Kein Gebiet,
      in welches das abgewirtschaftete, vergreiste Theater weniger
      hineinpaßte. Kein Gebiet, in dem eine Kunst mit fertigem Gesicht
      isolierter dastünde. (Ibid.: 88)

     Reger identifies specific characteristics of the vast industrial landscape
by the Ruhr and auspicates that the technological and economic develop-
ments shall be accompanied by a renewal of cultural and artistic forms.
A few years earlier, in 1922, Egon Erwin Kisch had visited the area and
described Essen in Der rasende Reporter (1925) in very gloomy terms, which
stand in stark opposition to Reger’s attitude:

         Immer dunkler tönt sich das Grau der Häuserwände, immer
      dunkler, und bald sind sie beinschwarz. Nackte, kahle, rußige
      Ziegelmauern unendlicher Fabriken und unendlicher Arbeitshöfe sind
      die Seitenkulissen der Straßen, das Balkengewirr eines Förderturmes
      und Schlote von ungeahnter Breite mit eisernen Wendeltreppen an
      der Außenseite und ein unmutiger Himmel sind ihr Hintergrund.



110
                           “Between, vol. XIII, n. 26 (novembre/November 2023)” on page 109



     Nirgends eine Zierde, nirgends ein Schmuck, außer dem Kuppelturm
     des Verwaltungsgebäudes, einem Mausoleum gleich. (Kisch 1925: 73)

      In his sub-chapter dedicated to Essen with the title “Das Nest der
Kanonenkönige: Essen” Kisch’s sardonic tone is not to be overread: a
gloomy industrial province revering generations of Krupp family mem-
bers, who have fueled warmongering world-wide. Nonetheless, Kisch
overlooks significant developments taking place in Essen in the very same
year. As Andreas Rossmann stresses in his afterword to the latest edition of
Reger’s Union der festen Hand, in 1922 the city of Essen and the specifically
founded Museum Association acquired equal shares of the pioneering col-
lection of contemporary art patron and philanthropist Karl Ernst Osthaus
(Rossmann 2022: 623-638). The Folkwang Museum in one fell swoop to
an internationally acclaimed house which Paul J. Sachs, one of the seven
founders of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, raved about
as «the most beautiful museum in the world» after his visit in 1932. In
1927 the stage designer Heinz Heckroth, the choreographer Kurt Jooss and
the opera director Rudolf Schulz-Dornburg founded the Folkwang School
of Music, Dance and Speech (Rossmann 2022: 627). United with the Uni-
versity of Applied Sciences for Design the following year, this institution
formed influential artists and choreographers as Anton Stankowski, Agnes
Giebel, Pina Bausch, Jürgen Prochnow and Frank Peter Zimmermann.
      Although this marked a significant step in the direction of strength-
ening the arts in an industrial region, the relationship between the arts
and the industrial estate still remained fragile: when in 1927 Bertolt Bre-
cht, Kurt Weill and the film director Carl Koch visited the Ruhr area with
the idea of developing a multimedia theatre project called “Ruhrepos”, the
cultural minister of the region suddenly aborted the planned industrial
opera house, justifying it with rising costs. Despite this failed attempt, Re-
ger continued to vocally advocate new forms of art for the Ruhrgebiet,
demanding that the theaters should not only represent but also be located
in the very places where the labour force lives and works. The «Kunst mit
fertigem Gesicht» named in the article quoted above, refers, so Reger, to
values which no longer apply, they are long overcome:

        Dieser Teil [der Werktätigen], der tagsüber im Büro und Betrieb
     die harten Wirklichkeitsanforderungen des Wirtschaftslebens an
     sich verspürt, will sich abends keinen blauen Dunst aus Regionen
     vormachen lassen, die nie existiert haben, oder deren Grundlagen sich
     längst verschoben haben. Werte, die dem romantischen Bildungsideal



                                                                                      111
Francesca Goll, On the Epic of the Colective: Eric Reger’s Union der festen Hand (1931)



          entspringen und den Widerspruch zwischen Schein und Sein
          verschärfen, sind deplaziert. Werte, die der heutigen Lebensform
          entstammen und das primitive Kollektivgefühl nicht mit privaten
          Gefühlen und Ausnahmezuständen verfälschen, sind notwendig.
          (Reger 1993: 92)

     One aspect certainly affecting the «heutige[n] Lebensform» is the ris-
ing advent of technology, which has in different ways played out on the
workers’ routines, both with regard to industrial mechanization and inno-
vation processes, and in relation to an acceleration of the rhythm of life and
work. Reger does not partake in the veneration of technology, he is aware
of the advantages it brings, but also fears its effects of the individuals.
     In a different article published in 1929, Reger addresses the relation-
ship between technology and poetry in very sharp terms, arguing that the
introduction of new terms and vocabulary does not suffice to capture the
process of innovation, as well as the emerging new worldview. The totality
of a technical world calls for a new literary totality and he names Hanns
Küpper as example for the type of poetry he has in mind. The worker has,
so Reger, long served as cliché for different types of poetry:

             Wenn eine Lyrik, die nach dem an allen Mittelschulen eingeführten
          ästhetischen Leitfaden arbeitet, den Industriearbeiter zum Anlaß
          eines Gefühlsergusses nahm, so mußte sie zugleich, bei allem
          Naturalismus der Motive, eine idealistische Färbung annehmen. Sie
          strebte von Mitleidsdichtung und sentimentaler Armeleutepoesie
          über die doktrinäre Klassenkampfgesinnung hinweg wieder zum
          ethischen Gefühl hin und endete zwangsläufig in Ekstasen von
          Menschenverbrüderung und Völkerbefreiung. Nur die Achtung vor
          der artistischen Substanz hält uns heute noch und vielleicht schon
          morgen nicht mehr davon zurück, Dehmels Verse vom Arbeitsmann,
          dem, um frei sein, wie die Vögel sind, nur die Kleinigkeit Zeit fehlt,
          verlogen zu nennen. (Reger 1993: 126-130 (128))

   «Economy, technology, industry, all very much in demand, all very
modern, we’re going along with it, we’re really not backward»1, was how



      Reger published the article „Maschinenwelt und Gartenlaubenromantik“
      1

under the pseudonym Heinz Lamprecht in the journal Der Scheinwerfer in April-
May 1930. The most significant articles have been reprinted by Erhard Schütz
and Jochen Vogt in 1986 (Reger in Schütz, Vogt 1986: 42-46).


112
                             “Between, vol. XIII, n. 26 (novembre/November 2023)” on page 109



Reger ironically described the literary attempts of his contemporaries in
1930, who were dealing with a theme that was fashionable in the Twenties
and at the beginning of the Thirties. What was considered «modern», at the
time, was the reference to the motif of technology, but upon a closer look it
becomes evident that this was not entirely new: just like the representation
of the production sphere, technology also belonged the subject matter of
naturalism, as well as to the early – and – working-class literature of ex-
pressionism. What was different, though, is the fact that while naturalism
and early expressionism were reacting, challenging or, at least, observing,
the emergence of modern industrial societies, the literature of the 1920s
and 1930s is tied to a very advanced form of capitalist society. Within the
Weimar Republic, new forms start to develop, which attempt to respond to
an increasingly industrialized and technological society. These partly very
divergent approaches can be subsumed under the umbrella term Neue
Sachlichkeit, which despite all differences still had a number of common
traits, such as the turning away from a psychological focus and towards
social issues, creating typical figures with an exemplary function, describ-
ing work processes as precisely as possible and revealing the grievances in
the working sphere, assessing literary forms according to their utility val-
ue and oscillating between technological exhilaration and disillusionment.
This is the context within which Reger is active: he advocates new forms
and sharply criticizes those attempts, some made by fellow journalists as
Heinrich Hauser, who enthusiastically embrace technology in anthropo-
morphic terms2.
      Besides those attempts, there was a very partisan left-wing litera-
ture targeting the representation of everyday proletarian life, as Ludwig
Turek’s autobiography Ein Prolet erzählt (1930), Hans Marchwitza’s Schlacht
vor Kohle (1931) and Walzwerk (1932) or still Willy Bredel’s Maschinenfabrik
N. und K. (1930). Those novels describe the everyday life of the industrial
worker, the hand movements at the workbench, the assembly line, the ac-
cidents, the strike movements and mostly draw on their authors first-hand
experiences. The industrial enterprise is viewed from the workplace. How-
ever, while there are significant overlaps between Reger’s approach and
this type of novels, this factual literature follows a political agenda, it’s a
party literature which simplifies much more complex relations. In an open-
ly polemic article published in the Dortmunder General-Anzeiger in January


    2
       Cf. his articles published in spring 1928 in the series „Mensch und Maschi-
ne“ in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.


                                                                                        113
Francesca Goll, On the Epic of the Colective: Eric Reger’s Union der festen Hand (1931)



1931, Reger summarizes his criticism to the party literature, underlining
that, despite its facticity, it manages to eschew reality:

            Wären die Kapitalisten und die Machtorgane so einfältig brutal
          und so sadistisch wie sie in den sogenannten proletarischen Romanen
          geschildert worden, so wären sie längst erledigt. Diese Schilderungen
          verhalten sich zur schwierigen Realität ungefähr so wie die an
          Drähten gezogenen Ziele auf Schießübungsplätzen sich zur faktischen
          Beweglichkeit lebender Heere verhalten. (Reger 1931: 9-11 (10))

     While his position against left-wing party literature is unforgiving,
Reger is equally harsh to the literary attempts made by the workers them-
selves, the Arbeiterdichter. In the same piece quoted above, published in
Der Scheinwerfer in 1930, he sharply criticizes the Arbeiterdichter by rid-
iculing their lyric attempts: «Eichendorff als Mechanikus. Es schienen
so golden die Sterne, am Fenster ich einsam stand und hörte aus weiter
Ferne Maschinenlärm im Land» (Reger in Schütz, Vogt 1986: 43). For him,
as he argues elsewhere3, this is grotesque, since the poets are led by the
naïve assumption that the industrial boom has destroyed the sentiment for
the beauty of the fine arts. In his programmatic essay “Die publizistische
Funktion der Dichtung“, published in March 1931 in the Dortmunder Gen-
eral-Anzeiger, he self-declares his own passage «vom Poeten zum Publi-
zisten», «vom privaten Stoff zum öffentlichen Thema». Literature and art
need to take up an enlightening function: «Wenn der Künstler überhaupt
noch eine Funktion hat, so kann es nur eine publizistische, keine poetische
sein» (Reger 1931: 14).

                                                2.
     Regers understanding of literature as a secondary, or rather follow-up
function, to his main journalistic activities, as well as the merging of the
two aspects, can be easily detected in his novel Union der festen Hand (1931).
The novel was published by Rowohlt and covers 588 dense pages – some of
those, just to testify to the merging of genres, are slightly modified versions
of his own articles and journalistic contributions. His novel is dedicated
«Dem deutschen Volke», the same exact wording as the inscription on the


      3
       Fritz Schulten ten Hoevel (Erik Reger): „Literatur der komischen Käuze“,
in Der Scheinwerfer, April 1931.


114
                           “Between, vol. XIII, n. 26 (novembre/November 2023)” on page 109



architrave above the west portal of the Reichstag building. The patriotic
slogan expresses the book’s aspiration to represent all citizens, which are
in the course of the novel addressed as citoyens, testifying both to his un-
derstanding of literature as actively partaking in the social restructuring,
as well as homage to the Enlightenment. The novel provoked a very vivid
and controversial response. Carl Zuckmayer awarded Reger (and Ödön
von Horvath) the Kleist-Preis and, as Rossmann’s carefully researched af-
terword reports, in his laudatory speech he attested to the novel’s socio-
logical meticulousness and to the author’s ability of portraying spiritual
and physical conditions with almost biological fidelity and impartiality
(Rossmann 2022: 632). The reviews by the leading left-wing and liberal
intellectuals gave a differentiated and overwhelmingly positive picture
of opinion. Alfons Goldschmidt proclaimed Union der festen Hand in the
newspaper Weltbühne to be the «best German industrial novel». Ludwig
Marcuse, in his long and insightful review praised it as a «highly signifi-
cant event in post-war writing» and Ernst Weiß described it as a «factual
novel of unusual format». The Austrian intellectual and communist Ernst
Fischer was also enthusiastic:

        Das ist das große, immer wiederkehrende Leitmotiv des Romans:
     der Sieg der Maske über das Wesen, der Phrase über das Leben, der
     Illusion über die Wirklichkeit. […] Eine Geschichte der Phrasen und
     Schlagworte, die seit 1917 wirksam waren – das ist dieser Roman.
     Aber er ist auch noch mehr; er ist das erste, große, unverlogene Epos
     der deutschen Industrie, die schonungslose Darstellung ihres äußeren
     Aufstiegs und ihres inneren Zusammenbruches, in Röntgenaufnahmen
     ein Film des deutschen Kapitalismus. (Fischer 1931, AdK, Erik-Reger-
     Archiv, 224)

      What Fischer partly refers to in his emphasis on «Phrasen» and slo-
gans is Reger’s incessant polemic against culture as media and propaganda
establishment. In the novel, he ridicules the work-loyal after-work decora-
tors, such as the Christian working-class poet Christoph Wieprecht, as well
as the travelling reporters, as Kisch or Heinrich Hauser, who fall for the
industry’s staging and are incapable of sharp vision. They are represent-
ed as the duped cheap suppliers of the information industry. In the end,
apart from the main figure of the disillusioned, lone wolf worker Adam
Griguszies, all that remains is the press spokesperson – drawn in a mark-
edly grey way – who sits at the centre of information production and anal-
ysis. For readers who expected political handouts or a positive outlook, the



                                                                                      115
Francesca Goll, On the Epic of the Colective: Eric Reger’s Union der festen Hand (1931)



novel was disappointing, because it drew an almost totally closed world of
self-deception and propagandistic illusion, of dangerous retardation and
negligent illusion of the future.
      Despite the positive reception, the novel’s success was more political
and literary than commercial. In 1946 the novel was reprinted by Aufbau:
Johannes R. Becher, president of the Kulturbund, pushed for the reprint of
several novels in the immediate post-war years. In an interview he stated:

         Es wird in Kürze im Aufbau-Verlag eine größere Anzahl
      schöngeistiger Werke erscheinen, darunter der Roman Stalingrad von
      Theodor Plivier, neue, bisher unveröffentlichte Gedichte Gerhard
      Hauptmanns, der Roman Verwandte und Bekannte von Willi Bredel,
      Adam Scharrers Maulwürfe, eine Neuausgabe von Heinrich Manns
      Der Untertan und Erik Regers Union der festen Hand. Somit ist ein
      Anfang gemacht, der Literatur die geschichtliche Rolle zuzuweisen,
      die ihr bei der geistigen Neugeburt unseres Volkes zukommt. (Becher:
      1945, AdK, Erik-Reger-Archiv, 224)

      While in his preface to the new edition Reger states that the first edi-
tion of 1931 enjoyed the echo he wished for when he wrote it, in the end
the two editions were printed in ten thousand copies of which just under
eight thousand were sold. Reger the antifascist, once again, was trapped
between the new political fronts: he opposed the forced unification of SPD
and KPD and was rapidly declared a political enemy in the Soviet occupa-
tion zone (DDR after 1949). The novel hence fell into oblivion on both sides
of the Iron Curtain: in the DDR because of the anti-communist standing of
its author and in the BRD because it critically commented on the industri-
al and economic boom. In 1965 Jost Hermand wrote an influential article
which marked the beginning of a phase of rediscovery of Reger’s novel.
Hermand wonders why the novel has received so little attention and for-
mulates his assumption:

         Man fragt sich, wie es dazu kommen konnte? War das
      Antifaschistische inzwischen veraltet, oder empfand man das andere
      Thema des Romans, die ideologische Massenbeeinflussung von Seiten
      der führenden Wirtschaftskreise, nicht mehr aktuell genug? Mit der
      nötigen Ehrlichkeit kann man beide Fragen nur mit „nein“ beantworten.
      Der eigentliche Grund dieser Nichtbeachtung liegt wahrscheinlich
      in der unbestechlichen Sachlichkeit dieses Buches, das sich nicht in
      den Dienst einer bestimmten Weltanschauung einspannen läßt. Die
      Union der festen Hand fiel daher in die Kategorie der „unbequemen



116
                            “Between, vol. XIII, n. 26 (novembre/November 2023)” on page 109



     Literatur,“ in der man so manche Größen der späten zwanziger Jahre
     eingesargt hat, um sich nicht in den gängigen Alternativen beirren zu
     lassen. (Hermand 1965: 113)

      He argues, in somewhat hyperbolic terms, that the 1920s have been
retrospectively hyped as a wild, hedonistic and mostly merry decade of
expressionists, dadaists and bohemians, while the more engaged authors,
as Ernst Toller (Hoppla, wir leben!, 1927), Arnold Zweig (Grischa, 1927), Lud-
wig Renn (Krieg, 1928), Hermann Broch (Die Schlafwandler, 1931/32), the
early Ödön von Horvarth or Reger, have been largely disregarded. What
Hermand implies here is a growing distance between political and liter-
ary matters, along the lines of Oscar Wilde’s famous statement about Zola:
«Zola sits down to give us a picture of the Second Empire. Who cares for
the Second Empire now? It is out of date. Life goes faster than Realism»
(Wilde, 1954: 931).
      Probably the most important question arising in this context concerns
the literary representation of those seemingly anonymous complexes of re-
ality hidden behind the expression «modern economic world». Is the nov-
el, which has largely dealt with single individual characters, at all capable
of representing collective enterprises of sorts? A quick flashback into the
history of the industrial novel shows that the narrative form and the sty-
listic devices in the Twenties and Thirties, in Reger’s time, are still tied to
the tradition of bourgeois realism: focused on the individual, increasingly
aware of the group, but as yet ignoring the masses. The narrative perspec-
tive plays a crucial role, the options appear to be two: either a perspective
from above, hence through the lens of the employer, or a view from below,
recounted by the employees. The first type was much more popular, since
it allowed to fuse the industrial novel with a family saga, whereby the
generational unfolding of the family stands in the foreground, while the
business matters increasingly fade into the background. The specific new-
ness of modern large-scale industry, namely the concentration of capital
and thus the growing anonymity of economic and political power, remains
largely unacknowledged even in such works, which try to tie the depic-
tion of industrial contexts to specific places, rather than families. Bernhard
Kellermann’s Stadt Anatol (1932) is set in a Rumanian city and recounts,
partly in a very humorous way, the workings in the oil industry, while Di-
erck Seeberg’s novel saga Die Metallstadt (1924-30) covers different labour
enviroments in the Ruhr area, whereby each novel focuses on a specific
context: Die Unterstadt (1930) with mining, Die Zwischenstadt (1927) with
small agents and people working in offices, and Die Oberstadt (1927) focus-


                                                                                       117
Francesca Goll, On the Epic of the Colective: Eric Reger’s Union der festen Hand (1931)



ing on the industry and its most influential figures as Kirberg, Thyssen and
Krupp. Seeberg too, in Die Oberstadt, fails to distance himself from these
individual figures and to portray a «type», who stands for much more than
just himself. Even these authors are still tied to bourgeois group ideas, in-
stead of envisaging the supra-individual dimension of this world: the in-
creasing mechanization of work processes, the impact of mass media, the
internal erosion of previous liberalism and the increasing alienation of hu-
mans from their pre-industrial living conditions. This is precisely the point,
it seems to me, where Reger sets a completely new standard. In Union der
festen Hand, for the first time, an attempt is made to present the collective
in a collectivist way, and to do so as objectively as possible, in that Reger
sticks purely to the organisational, the mechanical and the apparatus-like
aspects.
      He is neither concerned with the senseless, excessive juxtaposition of
figures and episodes, nor with a false idealisation of the collective, but with
the uncannily perfect apparatus behind it: the «Union der festen Hand».
Reger constructs the novel in five stages, structured along the main po-
litical and economic events between 1918 and 1929: collapse, revolution,
inflation, stabilisation and world economic crisis, whereby he places the
«Bericht des Generalanzeigers», hence the press report in the newspaper,
as the «official» interpretation at the end of the first four chapters, leav-
ing only the conclusion – the victory of the Nazis – to the readers’ pow-
er of thought. The author makes use of an exemplary episodic technique
through which certain political or social constellations are illuminated in a
flash. One of the most convincing is found right at the beginning: the unex-
pected visit of Emperor Wilhelm to the Geschoßdreherei III in the summer
of 1918, during which «embarrassing» incidents strike the already insecure
emperor a severe blow. Other constructed but “typical” scenes are a super-
visory board meeting, a factory owners’ breakfast, a workers’ wedding, a
workers’ and soldiers’ council meeting, a strike procession, the description
of certain work processes and other recurring routines from the factory
milieu. The crucial point is that Reger avoids any inner sympathy in these
scenes and strictly adheres to the boundaries of the real circumstances. He
delivers a cross-section in which the decisive factor is not the narrative
setting but the uncovering of the economic driving forces. To make this in-
tention even clearer, he opens the novel with «instructions for use», warn-
ing the «user» of this work not to be deceived by the fact that this book
is described as a novel on the title page: «Gebrauchsanweisung. 1. Man
lasse sich nicht dadurch täuschen, dass dieses Buch auf dem Titelblatt als
Roman bezeichnet wird» (9). With regard to these instructions Hermand’s


118
                            “Between, vol. XIII, n. 26 (novembre/November 2023)” on page 109



otherwise very lucid and detailed analysis overlooks an aspect which, it
seems to me, is crucial: the influence of Sergej Tretjakow’s pamphlet “Biog-
raphy of the Object”.

                                        3.
     On 12th October 1931, shortly after the publication of his novel, Re-
ger receives a letter by Annemarie Ittmann, living in 8, rue Philippe de
Champagne, XIII arrondissement, Paris. She writes on behalf of Ilja Ehren-
burg, whom she does background research for, stating that she is currently
seeking information «über die Herren Hugenberg, Flick, Bosch, Petcek und
Jakob Goldschmidt» (Adk, Erik-Reger-Archiv, 55). In particular, she seeks
insights into their relationship to Russia, as well as personal details about
them. Ittmann has read Union der festen Hand and raises a few questions:

        Die Union der festen Hand [handwritten, no italics in the original,
     F.G.] habe ich übrigens mit sehr viel Freude gelesen. Da ich nun aber
     auf diesem Gebiet unwissender bin als vielleicht der Durchschnitt,
     habe ich zwar Menschen wie Krupp etc. Hugenberg, Kirdorf,
     Duisberg herausgefunden; finde mich aber mit dem anderen schlecht
     zurecht. Können Sie mir da helfen? Kann ich das, was Sie bezgl.
     Hugenberg-Hachenpoot sagen als Dokumentation verwenden,
     besonders die Programmrede und den Unterrockausspruch bei der
     letzten Generalversammlung. Hugenbergs Weggang soll, wie mir
     vielfach gesagt wurde, auf eine Unterredung Stresemanns bei Krupps
     zurückzuführen sein daher auch sein besonders starker Hass gegen
     Stresemann. Des Weiteren: Wo hat Hugenberg nach dem Ausscheiden
     von Krupp gelebt und welche Rolle spielt er in den Fragen der
     Ruhrbesetzung? Desgleichen liegt mir an den Bedingungen, unter
     denen bei den verschiedenen Herren gearbeitet wird. (Adk, Erik-
     Reger-Archiv, 55).

      Ittmann treats Union der festen Hand as a roman à clef and is looking for
the right combination in order to decode the text. She is certainly aware
that Reger (actually Hermann Dannenberger) had detailed insights and
the greatest expertise, having worked as a technician, accountant, balance
sheet critic and press officer at the Krupp-Werke until 1927. Her long letter
consists in a series of questions about prominent figures in the Ruhr indus-
try, she asks for further bibliographical indications and quite cheekily ends
by auspicating a quick answer: «Und wenn Sie mir bezgl. der übrigen Fra-
gen helfen und bald Antwort schreiben würden, wären Ihnen Herr Ehren-


                                                                                       119
Francesca Goll, On the Epic of the Colective: Eric Reger’s Union der festen Hand (1931)



burg und ich besonders dankbar» (ibid.). Reger does not reply to her letter,
a few weeks later she writes him a short note, he answers that he never
got the original letter and therefore she sends him a copy of it. His answer,
dated 17th November 1931 is very insightful, both with regard to the way
he works and to his poetics:

         Sehr geehrte Frau Ittmann,
         ich nehme an, daß Herr Ehrenburg Verständnis dafür haben wird,
      wenn ich ihm sage, daß ich ein peinlich genaues und intimes Material,
      das ich in jahrelanger persönlicher Arbeit gesammelt habe, nicht für
      fremde Zwecke zur Verfügung stellen kann. Es würde Sie auch nichts
      nutzen, wenn ich Ihnen den Weg angäbe, auf dem ich dieses Material
      gesammelt habe, denn dieser Weg ist für Sie nicht bestreitbar. Ohne die
      lebendige Gegenwart der Dinge, ohne ihre lebendige Anschauung hilft
      das beste Material nichts. Ich sage Ihnen das offen und nehme keine
      Zuflucht in Ausreden. Eine kleine Berichtigung noch hinsichtlich der
      „Union der festen Hand“. Zwar habe ich dokumentarisch gearbeitet,
      aber die Namen sind keine einfachen Decknamen für lebende
      Personen, sondern selbstständige Inkarnation industrieller Typen,
      die aus den wirklichen Vorbildern herauskristallisiert wurden. (Adk,
      Erik-Reger-Archiv, 55)

     Reger highlights Ittmann’s crucial misunderstanding, while contem-
porarily making his procedure explicit: his material is drawn from real
observation and expertise throughout his years of employment at Krupp,
but his literary transposition goes far beyond the individual figures of the
entrepreneurs. Quite opposite to that, Union der festen Hand highlights
the extent to which individuality is swallowed by the dynamics govern-
ing labour relations within the large-scale industrial sites. In that sense,
Ehrenburg and Ittmann completely misunderstand the novel: its aim is
not representing the roles and workings of these influential figures, but
rather showing the relations within these contexts by exemplifying specific
“types” of figures, which retain its validity in any other equivalent context.
Reger’s answer clearly recalls the poetic vision of the Soviet avant-gardist
Sergej Tretjakow, who claimed the necessity for new visions and new forms
facing the radically new society inaugurated with the Bolshevik Revolu-
tion. The novelty of the details, conditions and processes, so Tretjakow,
must be described and must not disappear in the retracing of known older
things. What the fighters and the struggles of socialist industrialisation and
collectivisation were really like and in what world-historical circumstances
they stood could not be determined by world-historical recollections alone.


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New industrial policies imply new labour relations, which call for new
artistic forms. The epoch-comparative representation of the new object re-
quired the meticulous research of the new social facts and relations, the
inclusion of all units of socialist activity, in order not to take the contempo-
rary phenomena for mere side pieces of older phenomena (Mierau 2007: 9).
      In the first issue of the journal Nowy LEF, Viktor Schklowski summa-
rises the procedure at the end of his essay as follows:

        One must learn to write correspondences, chronicles, essays,
     feuilletons, short stories, theatre reviews, sketches of milieus, and also
     that which replaces the novel; that is, one must learn to work towards
     the future, towards the form that you must create yourselves. Teaching
     people literary forms, that is, teaching them how to solve problems
     instead of mathematics – that is stealing from the future and breeding
     banalities. (Schklowski 1927: 33) (my own translation)

      This focus on finding a new form, as well as on the merging of liter-
ary genres, recalls Reger’s observations voiced in the articles written just
a few years after the Nowy LEF publications. More than that, when Reger
states in his letter to Ittmann and Ehrenburg that his material, even if they
had it, would be of no use to them, verges on the idea that «dead» mate-
rial resulting from indirect sources is useless: it is necessary to have first-
hand experience and to then abstract from there. The starting point, for
Reger as much as for Tretjakow, is the real, lived observation – not observa-
tions from the vantage point of visitors (which is what Reger reproaches,
for instance, to Kisch), but from the vantage point of within, of someone
working there in whichever function. This requires, firstly, the practical
cooperation of the writer and, secondly, a long-term continuity and renew-
al of contact with the explored regions. In the Soviet context, for Nikolai
Tikhonov or Vladimir Lugovskoy, the Central Asian Soviet republics be-
came a space of discovery of new facts and circumstances at the turn of the
decade. Valentin Katayev, Marietta Shaginyan, Ilya Ehrenburg, Alexander
Besymensky, Ilya Zelvinsky went to the large construction sites of the first
Five-Year Plan. Tretjakow himself worked this way, too. In the discussions
about new forms of literature, two main aspects come to light: on the one
hand, it is a question of determining the working method and the social
competence of the writer, while on the other hand, the increased inclusion
of memoirs, experience and travel reports, diaries, letters etc. imply a re-
definition of what literature is, ultimately promoting an expansion of the
concept of literature.The mentioned merging of genres takes Reger’s own


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Francesca Goll, On the Epic of the Colective: Eric Reger’s Union der festen Hand (1931)



poetic one step futher: while Reger argues, as discussed above, that if at all,
the artist’s function is «publizistisch» and not poetic, thereby maintaining
a distinction, the Nowy LEF advocates a renewed understanding of litera-
ture and poetry, so as to include different types of texts.
      One of the most striking aspects of Union der festen Hand are the in-
structions for use, which give away much of its author’s poetic. His four
instructions mark a progression from a provocative genre statement about
the novel and its role (points 1 and 2) to its effects on the readership (points
3 and 4). The first point introduces the genre question by addressing the
tension between reality and fiction: «1. Man lasse sich nicht dadurch täus-
chen, dass dieses Buch auf dem Titelblatt als Roman bezeichnet wird»
(9). What Reger implies is that it is all real, nothing has been invented –
and in order to address the reader’s objections to that, he continues: «2.
Man beachte, dass in diesem Buche nicht die Wirklichkeit von Personen
oder Begebenheiten wiedergegeben, sondern die Wirklichkeit einer Sache
und eines geistigen Zustandes dargestellt wird» (9). This is the indication
which Ittmann (and possibly Ehrenburg) overlooked: Reger draws from
real facts and figures, but then constructs representations of it which are
typologies, models which are valid beyond the exact setting they originate
from. Nonetheless, the relationship between reality and fiction is further
complicated by the next indications, which highlights the extent to which
the two aspects are merged:

        3.Wenn man in den Reden einzelner Personen Stellen findet, die
      besonders unwahrscheinlich klingen, so hat man es mit tatsächlichen
      Äußerungen führender Geister der Nation zu tun, oder wenigstens
      mit Gedankengängen, die auf solche zurückgehen. (9)

     Here, he emphasizes the extent to which his novel draws on reality
by stating that, in fact, reality is much more «unwahrscheinlich» than fic-
tion can ever be. The oddest and unlikeliest statements are those derived
from speeches, statements or at least positions voiced by some among the
most influential figures in the country. While up until here he played with
the opposition between real and imaginary, in the second part of this in-
struction, he mentions the reasons why he decided not to highlight those
quotations:

         a) weil es das Auge stören würde;
         b) weil der Leser sich angewöhnen würde, darüber hinwegzusehen;
         c) weil der Leser sich vorzeitig einbilden würde, diese Stellen von



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     selbst erkannt zu haben. (9)

      These three arguments are of different nature: the first one is aesthet-
ic, the second one verges on the readers habit of overlooking reality and
the third one on their blind ambition to recognise the passages in advance.
In all three cases, the function of those quotations remains ineffective, as
the readers are distracted either by their different formatting, or by their
reality. Instead, as Reger highlights in his last instruction, he calls for an
active and participative readership:

        4. Man beachte, dass in diesem Buch fünf Stationen durchlaufen
     werden, und bemühe sich, die Zahnräder des Getriebes zu erkennen.
     Der jeweilige Haltepunkt wird auf den ersten vier Strecken durch
     den „Bericht des Generalanzeigers“ kenntlich gemacht. Bei genauer
     Befolgung dieser Anleitung wird es dem Leser möglich sein, nach
     der fünften Strecke den „Bericht des Generalanzeigers“ selbst zu
     schreiben. (9)

      In the best case, in the course of the novel the readership acquires
the capacity of a clearer outlook, which enables them to formulate the last
report themselves. Unlike the traditional novel, which filtered the compli-
cated interactions of manifold social groups through the impacted psyche
of a single character, Reger’s poetic resounds Tretjakow’s object biography,
which promotes a kind of anti-Bildungsroman focusing not on psycholog-
ical consistency, but on people who are declined by a variety of production
processes. If the traditional novel was held together by the hero, the biog-
raphy of the object is held together by the act of labour. Both Reger and
Tretjakow, as well as, a few years later, Walter Benjamin in his essay Der
Autor als Produzent (1934), regard the novel as a Gebrauchsobjekt, geared
at representing an increasingly complex social and economic set-up, while
challenging the role of the media within this power structure. Merging the
concepts of reality and fiction, facticity and imagination, provokes a pow-
erful reflection on the role of literature in contemporary societies, which is
as crucial today, as it was hundred years ago.




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Francesca Goll, On the Epic of the Colective: Eric Reger’s Union der festen Hand (1931)



                                      Works Cited
Becker, Sabrina - Helmut, Kiesel (eds.), Literarische Moderne. Begriff und Phä-
    nomen, Berlin/New York, de Gruyter, 2007.
Becker, Sabrina - Robert, Krause (eds.), Jahrbuch zur Kultur und Literatur
    der Weimarer Republik, Vol. 22 2021/22, München, edition text+kritik,
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Hermand, Jost, „Erik Regers Union der festen Hand. Roman oder Reporta-
    ge?“, Monatshefte, 1965, Vol. 53 Nr. 3, 113-133.
Kisch, Egon Erwin, Der rasende Reporter, Berlin, Aufbau, 1993 (first ed. 1925)
Mierau, Fritz, „Literatur des Dings und Biographie des Fakts“, Reihe Ar-
    beitsblätter für die Sachbuchforschung (#12), Berlin/Hildesheim, 2007,
    pp. 9-19.
Muller, Francoise, „Neue Sachlichkeit und Arbeitswelt. Monde du travail
    et Nouvelle Objectivité”, Germanica Vol. 9/1991: 55-70.
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Reger, Erik, Kleine Schriften. Band 1-2, ed. by Erhard Schütz, Berlin, Argon,
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Tretjakow Sergey, „Biographie des Dings“, Reihe Arbeitsblätter für die Sach-
    buchforschung (#12), Berlin/Hildesheim, 2007: 4-8.
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                                   Archival sources
Erik-Reger-Archiv, Akademie der Künste, Berlin.




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                            “Between, vol. XIII, n. 26 (novembre/November 2023)” on page 109



                                The Author
     Francesca Goll

      Francesca Goll is a researcher in German literature at the Diparti-
mento di Lingue, Letterature e Culture Straniere, Università degli Studi
di Bergamo. She works on GDR literature, industrial literature, poetics of
artifice and galant novels. She is currently editing a special issue of the
journal Oxford German Studies on the reception of Kafka in the GDR and
the Soviet Union and an annotated edition of Casper von Muralt’s letters
to Pietro Calepio.

     Email: francesca.goll@unibg.it



                                The Article
     Date sent: 31/03/2023
     Date accepted: 31/07/2023
     Date published: 30/11/2023



                        How to cite this article
      Goll, Francesca, “On the Epic of the Collective: Erik Reger’s Union
der festen Hand (1931)”, Representations of Work in Literature and Visual Cul-
ture, Eds. R. Calzoni - V. Serra, Between, XIII.26 (2023): 109-125, http://www.
Between-journal.it/




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