Reportage ou figuration ? Remarques critiques à propos d’un roman d’Ottwalt

This essay, offered in French translation here for the first time, was published in 1932 in Germany. Pleading the cause of grand realism, Lukács, who greatly preferred the enlightened bourgeois Thomas Mann’s novels to the engaged prose of the proletarian writers, conducts a detailed and balanced critique of Denn sie wissen, was sie tun. Ein deutscher Justiz-Roman (For They Know What They Do: A German Novel on Justice), a novel-cum-report published in 1931 by Ernst Ottwalt, one of Bertolt Brecht’s collaborators.