The Sunday Circle’s fascination with the redemptive powers of art had some predictable consequences. For a time they flirted with mysticism and, as Mary Gluck describes it, in her history of the Sunday circle, turned against science. (This was a problem for Mannheim; sociology was especially strong in Hungary and regarded itself as a science that would, eventually, explain the evolution of society.) The Sundays also embraced the erotic.46 In Bluebeard’s Castle, Béla Balázs described an erotic encounter between a man and a woman, his focus being what he saw as the inevitable sexual struggle between them. In Bartók’s musical version of the story, Judith enters Prince Bluebeard’s Castle as his bride. With increasing confidence, she explores the hidden layers – or chambers – of man’s consciousness. To begin with she brings joy into the gloom. In the deeper recesses, however, there is a growing resistance. She is forced to become increasingly reckless and will not be dissuaded from opening the seventh, forbidden door. Total intimacy, implies Balázs, leads only to a ‘final struggle’ for power. And power is a chimera, bringing only ‘renewed solitude.’47
Step by step, therefore, Lukács and the others came to the view that art could only ever have a limited role in human affairs, ‘islands in a sea of fragmentation.’48 This was – so far as art was concerned – the eclipse of meaning. And this cold comfort became the main message of the Free School for Humanistic Studies, which the Sunday Circle set up during the war years. The very existence of the Free School was itself instructive. It was no longer Sunday-afternoon discussions – but action.
Then came the Bolshevik revolution. Hitherto, Marxism had sounded too materialistic and scientistic for the Sunday Circle. But after so much darkness, and after Lukács’s own journey through art, to the point where he had much reduced expectations and hopes of redemption in that direction, socialism began to seem to him and others in the group like the only option that offered a way forward: ‘Like Kant, Lukács endorsed the primacy of ethics in politics.’49 A sense of urgency was added by the emergence of an intransigent left wing throughout Europe, committed to ending the war without delay. In 1917 Lukács had written, ‘Bolshevism is based on the metaphysical premise that out of evil, good can come, that it is possible to lie our way to the truth. [I am] incapable of sharing this faith.’50 A few weeks later Lukács joined the Communist Party of Hungary. He gave his reasons in an article entitled ‘Tactics and Ethics.’ The central question hadn’t changed: ‘Was it justifiable to bring about socialism through terror, through the violation of individual rights,’ in the interests of the majority? Could one lie one’s way to power? Or were such tactics irredeemably opposed to the principles of socialism? Once incapable of sharing the faith, Lukács now concluded that terror was legitimate in the socialist context, ‘and that therefore Bolshevism was a true embodiment of socialism.’ Moreover, ‘the class struggle – the basis of socialism – was a transcendental experience and the old rules no longer applied.’51
In short, this was the eclipse of ethics, the replacement of one set of principles by another. Lukács is important here because he openly admitted the change in himself, the justification of terror. Conrad had already foreseen such a change, Kafka was about to record its deep psychological effects on all concerned, and a whole generation of intellectuals, maybe two generations, would be compromised as Lukács was. At least he had the courage to entitle his paper ‘Tactics and Ethics.’ With him, the issue was out in the open, which it wouldn’t always be.
By the end of 1919 the Sunday Circle was itself on the verge of eclipse. The police had it under surveillance and once went so far as to confiscate Balász’s diaries, which were scrutinised for damaging admissions. The police had no luck, but the attention was too much for some of the Sundays. The Circle was reconvened in Vienna (on Mondays), but not for long, because the Hungarians were charged with using fake identities.52 By then Lukács, its centre of gravity, had other things on his mind: he had become part of the Communist underground. In December 1919 Balázs gave this description: ‘He presents the most heart-rending sight imaginable, deathly pale, hollow cheeked, impatient and sad. He is watched and followed, he goes around with a gun in his pocket…. There is a warrant out for his arrest in Budapest which would condemn him to death nine times over…. And here [in Vienna] he is active in hopeless conspiratorial party work, tracking down people who have absconded with party funds … in the meantime his philosophic genius remains repressed, like a stream forced underground which loosens and destroys the ground above.’53 Vivid, but not wholly true. At the back of Lukács’s mind, while he was otherwise engaged on futile conspiratorial work, he was conceiving what would become his most well known book, History and Class Consciousness.
The Vienna–Budapest (and Prague) axis did not disappear completely after World War I. The Vienna Circle of philosophers, led by Moritz Schlick, flourished in the 1920s, and Franz Kafka and Robert Musil produced their most important works. The society still produced thinkers such as Michael Polanyi, Friedrich von Hayek, Ludwig von Bertalanffy, Karl Popper, and Ernst Gombrich – but they came to prominence only after the rise of the Nazis caused them to flee to the West. Vienna as a buzzing intellectual centre did not survive the end of empire.
Between 1914 and 1918 all direct links between Great Britain and Germany had been cut off, as Wittgenstein discovered when he was unable to return to Cambridge after his holiday. But Holland, like Switzerland, remained neutral, and at the University of Leiden, in 1915, W. de Sitter was sent a copy of Einstein’s paper on the general theory of relativity. An accomplished physicist, de Sitter was well connected and realised that as a Dutch neutral he was an important go-between. He therefore passed on a copy of Einstein’s paper to Arthur Eddington in London.54 Eddington was already a central figure in the British scientific establishment, despite having a ‘mystical bent,’ according to one of his biographers.55 Born in Kendal in the Lake District in 1882, into a Quaker family of farmers, he was educated first at home and then at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he was senior wrangler and came into contact with J. J. Thomson and Ernest Rutherford. Fascinated by astronomy since he was a boy, he took up an appointment at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich from 1906, and in 1912 became secretary of the Royal Astronomical Society. His first important work was a massive and ambitious survey of the structure of the universe. This survey, combined with the work of other researchers and the development of more powerful telescopes, had revealed a great deal about the size, structure, and age of the heavens. Its main discovery, made in 1912, was that the brightness of so-called Cepheid stars pulsated in a regular way associated with their sizes. This helped establish real distances in the heavens and showed that our own galaxy has a diameter of about 100,000 light-years and that the sun, which had been thought to be at its centre, is in fact about 30,000 light-years excentric. The second important result of Cepheid research was the discovery that the spiral nebulae were in fact extragalactic objects, entire galaxies themselves, and very far away (the nearest, the Great Nebula in Andromeda, being 750,000 light-years away). This eventually provided a figure for the distance of the farthest objects, 500 million light-years away, and an age for the universe of between 10 and 20 billion years.56