Volume 34, Number 4 · March 12, 1987
The Convert
By István Deák
Georg Lukács: Record of a Life—An Autobiographical Sketch
edited by István Eörsi, translated by Rodney Livingstone
Verso Edition, 204 pp., $7.95 (paper)
Georg Lukács and His Generation: 1900–1918
by Mary Gluck
Harvard University Press, 265 pp., $25.00
The Young Lukács
by Lee Congdon
The University of North Carolina Press, 235 pp., $22.50
Georg Lukács: His Life in Pictures and Documents
compiled by Éva Fekete, by Éva Karádi
Corvina Kiadó (Budapest), 265 pp., 100 Ft
Georg Lukács, Karl Mannheim und der Sonntagskreis
edited by Éva Karádi, by Erzsébet Vezér, Translated from the Hungarian by Albrecht Friedrich
Sendler Verlag (Frankfurt), 319 pp., DM32
Georg Lukács: Selected Correspondence, 1902–1920, dialogues with Weber, Simmel, Buber, Mannheim, and Others
selected, edited, translated, and annotated by Judith Marcus, by Zoltán Tar, with an introduction by Zoltán Tar
Columbia University Press, 318 pp., $25.00
In Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain, Naphta, the fanatical Jewish Jesuit, says of the proletariat: 'Its task is to strike terror into the world for the healing of the world, that man may finally achieve salvation and deliverance and win back the freedom from law and from distinction of classes, and return to his original status as a child of God.'[1] Such a pronouncement, full of deep disenchantment with the human condition and manifesting at once Marxist and mystical leanings, is made to Settembrini, the calm and plodding rationalist. Naphta the atheist, who rejects secularism and paganism, is also Naphta the Christian heretic, who longs for paradise on earth. Having repudiated bourgeois individualism, he has entered the world of a militant religious community that holds to a bewildering orthodoxy, at once—like Naphta himself—seductive and slippery.
Review, 7251 words
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