DIE LINKSKURVE

Die Linkskurve: translation

   the KPD's leading literary journal. It was founded in August 1929 by the Hungarian journalist and emigre Andor Gabor, the poet Johannes Becher (the son of a judicial official and a one-time Expressionist,* he had written before the war for Die Aktion*), the writer Kurt Klaber, the satirist Erich Weinert, and the former army captain Ludwig Renn (of Saxon nobility; his real name was Arnold Friedrich von Golssenau). The journal s editors—collectively, the League of German Proletarian-Revolutionary Writers— contended that only authors of proletarian origin could produce authentic liter-ature, a rule from which at least three founders (Gabor, Becher, and Renn) excluded themselves.In its three years of publication, Linkskurve vigorously pursued all signs of revisionism in the writings of those claiming Communist sympathies. Since its prominence coincided with Moscow s policy of castigating Social Democracy, Linkskurve ignored the mortal threat posed by Nazism and aimed its harshest rebuke at the SPD and writers for Die Weltbuhne,* both deemed "social Fascistic. At best, it treated non-Communist leftists with con-descension. Among those insulted by its editorials were Erwin Piscator,* Alfred Döblin,* Ernst Toller,* Erich Maria Remarque,* Heinrich Mann* (from whom "the world of progress can no longer expect anything ), Kurt Tucholsky* (a fashionable snob), and the Bauhaus* (among the "hidden props of the ruling class ); the NSDAP was comforted by its targets. In December 1932, burdened by financial difficulties, it quietly vanished.

   REFERENCES:Angress, "Pegasus and Insurrection"; Deak, Weimar Germany's Left-Wing Intellectuals; Koestler, Invisible Writing; Laqueur, Weimar.