Foreword: remembering H. Gustav Klaus

The admirable effort made by John Goodridge and Adam Bridgen to put together a collection of essays in remembrance of the work of H. Gustav Klaus, who died unexpectedly in February 2020 at the age of seventy-five after a short and aggressive illness, has resulted in the current volume that, I am convinced, Klaus would have appreciated a lot and been very eager to read. His dominant interest, in line with the bulk of the essays in this volume, lay with a critical focus designed to contribute to an alternative literary history, one that looks at literature from the margins and from below. His work attained a degree of visibility and recognition beyond the boundaries of German academia that remains unusual among German scholars of English literature. The present volume throws this into relief.

In many respects, the emerging critical and political discourses that were marginal in English studies when Klaus began to publish on Marxist criticism, working-class literature and socialist fiction have moved towards the centre, a development that has gone hand in hand with the radical questioning of the ideas of canonicity and of cultural centrality per se. Arguably, though, this is less true for the category ‘class’ than for the other markers of the fundamental changes in perspective that characterised the humanities in the 1970s and beyond: postcolonialism, feminism and gender studies, and, subsequently, ecocriticism. Despite its overall importance and its blatant visibility in real life, class is a category that often remains underrated and underexposed in critical (literary) discourse. Klaus was one of not too many dedicated critics who, throughout his career as an academic and writer, never lost track of the austerities and structural discriminations, but also of the solidarity and the anti-bourgeois sentiments associated with the category ‘class’.

Apart from his reputation as one of the outstanding experts in British working-class literature, Klaus is widely recognised (in Germany) as a central figure in the process of introducing themes and theoretical concepts of British cultural studies to German departments of Anglistik (English studies) in the 1970s and 1980s – when cultural studies was still largely a project of the political left. Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall, Richard Hoggart, E.P. Thompson and Perry Anderson: these now household names in theory, criticism and cultural studies, and the work and ideas associated with them, were popularised by Klaus in academia and beyond in Germany (and in German) via publications and translations (for example of Raymond Williams’s Innovations). This aspect plays a minor role in the context of this volume. However, it is important to understand Klaus’s intellectual biography, which was profoundly influenced by the innovations, paradigm shifts and institutional transformations associated with these thinkers. Yet while his research, his collaborations and his political commitments align him with the concerns of cultural studies during the early years of the field’s emergence, he continued to regard himself as a scholar of literature and literary criticism. Perhaps this was partly a response to the field’s gradual consolidation as a discipline that, at times, seemed more akin to a version of critical media studies than to the political endeavour it had started out as, during the early days. His own approach to literature kept insisting upon the necessity to uncover the material conditions and means of production of writing and distributing literature, to take into account the social mediators and institutions in the process of literary communication and, more generally, to view literature as one (important) arena among many, where the struggle for hegemony between dominant, residual and emergent ideas and ideologies was acted out.

Klaus’s intellectual biography had been shaped by his student years in Frankfurt am Main, Marburg and West Berlin in the late 1960s. This was the time when the cracks in the façade of what was widely recognised as the cultural, social and political post-war consensus became more and more visible, and demand for change was gaining momentum, especially among politicised students at the universities. In tune with these movements, Klaus’s first editorship was an anthology of British Marxist literary criticism of the 1930s, translated and introduced by himself, in 1973, and his first monograph was a study of Christopher Caudwell’s exemplary career from journalist and literary author to Marxist critic. These early publications set the course for the general direction which his future research and work would take, up until Voices of Anger and Hope: Studies in the Literature of Labour and Socialism. Written over a period of almost twenty years, this 2019 collection of essays was to become Klaus’s last major publication. The title captures in a nutshell the major concerns and interests of a writer, literary critic and scholar with a remarkably consistent focus. Anger and hope, social protest and utopian vision, were traits and modes embodied by many of the marginalised fictional characters and some of their authors – ‘radicals, agitators, rebels, tramps, opponents of conscription, militant trade unionists, socialists and communists’ – that had fallen into obscurity and were now unearthed, rediscovered or brought to the attention of a wider academic readership. He insisted on the necessity of a politically charged and socially relevant form of literary criticism to keep the utopian dimensions of literature alive and to prevent literary studies from becoming the intellectual pastime of a small bourgeois elite. These convictions manifested themselves in his research but also in his university teaching. As an inspiring teacher who was deeply convinced of the integration of scholarly research and university education, many of the issues that concerned his research found their way into his seminars and lectures, thus bringing alive these texts and contexts for a fresh audience in the twenty-first century.

Critical work and personal political convictions cannot be seen as independent in Klaus’s strong focus on neglected and overlooked aspects of the literary tradition – something that was also a central concern of British cultural studies during its early years. This holds true for his 1985 monograph The Literature of Labour: Two Hundred Years of Working-Class Writing, the two collections he edited on socialist fiction (The Socialist Novel in Britain, 1982, and The Rise of Socialist Fiction, 1880–1914, 1987), for his edition of writings by the Spanish Civil War volunteer Thomas O’Brien (Strong Words, Brave Deeds: The Poetry, Life and Times of Thomas O’Brien, 1994), and also for his excursion into the field of detective fiction (ed. with Stephen Knight, The Art of Murder: New Essays on Detective Fiction, 1998). While crime fiction is not necessarily associated with a lack of popularity, Klaus made sure that the major and well-explored lines of the generic tradition were complemented with little-known sources, ideas and authors which turn this particular type of genre fiction into an ideal site to investigate the interrelation of culture and society. Most obviously, his work at the recovery of an alternative literary tradition is predominant in Tramps, Workmates and Revolutionaries, a collection of short stories of the 1920s he edited in 1993. The volume assembles writers whose names rarely make an appearance in standard literary histories. It was the odd story by well-known authors, not the majority of stories by more obscure ones, that the editor deemed in need of justification in the preface: because ‘some readers might be surprised, or alarmed, to find DH Lawrence and Katherine Mansfield in this company’. His decision to place them in a context ‘different from the one in which they are usually placed’ throws into relief his method, as it were, of rewriting literary history. In his many writings about the literature and criticism of the 1920s and 1930s, the celebrated high modernists – Joyce, Woolf, Eliot, and so on – are marginal figures who make appearances, if at all, as a contrastive foil to the writings of less well-known, sometimes completely forgotten, authors.

Even though Klaus’s critical perspective was always also a matter of personal conviction and political sympathy, he never allowed these sympathies to cloud his judgement as a literary critic. The result was a form of politically and historically engaged criticism that did not run into danger to defer to current fashions or to jump onto whichever passing bandwagon, and that often pursued trajectories counter to the zeitgeist. Following his own intellectual compass right from the beginning of his intellectual career, Klaus set himself to resurrect authors of the past and the present and to put them in their historical, political and cultural context rather than to celebrate their theoretical death. His many important contributions to the field of British literature, mainly from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, bear witness to the diligence and sympathy with which he listened to the overlooked and suppressed in whose voices he often sensed an active hatred of despotism, authoritarianism and injustice – from the Scottish ‘Factory Girl’ and poet Ellen Johnston (Klaus, 1998 and 2008) to James Kelman’s ‘Busconductor Hines’ (2019, pp. 183–98), and from Chartist concerns (2019, pp. 5–34) to the unhoused young men and women growing up in an environmentally ravaged Corby in John Burnside’s ‘industrial novel’ Living Nowhere (2003) (2019, pp. 183–98).

One of Klaus’s later publications was an obituary of Stuart Hall that appeared in the 2015 volume of the Germany-based Journal for the Study of British Cultures. As much a personal memoir as an obituary, it leaves the reader struck not only by the extent of Klaus’s involvement with the transformation, in Germany, of English departments during the 1970s and 1980s, but also by the role he played as part of a generation that was at the same time an international community of left-wing scholars. Personal contact was always a powerful catalyst for his work. Several of his publications were based upon preceding conferences that he helped to organise, for example in Rostock or Oxford. The events he cherished most were characterised by small groups of scholars working on related issues who met in an equally familiar and intense atmosphere. They were carefully planned so that both intellectual exchange and informal talk had a good chance to come into their own. The Red and the Green: Ecology and the Literature of the British Left (Klaus and Rignall, 2012) is a case in point, where conference and publication went hand in hand. The 2007 conference, organised together with John Rignall, underlines Klaus’s openness to critical developments (ecocriticism, literature and the environment) which, as he himself admitted in the 2010 essay ‘Raymond Williams and Ecology’, had been alien to him to the point that he automatically heard ‘economy’ when people said ‘ecology’. Even though new questions are being asked across these various fields and about the writers that Klaus worked on, his work remains as important, as ground-breaking and as generative as ever, reflecting a major contribution to the history of working-class literature.

I would like to end on a personal note. Gustav and I had been colleagues in Rostock, where he held the chair for Literature of the British Isles (1994–2009) for almost ten years before he retired in 2009. Our collegial exchange and friendship continued after his retirement and his move to the south of Germany. I have personally profited a lot from Gustav’s generosity in sharing his knowledge and erudition, from his commitment to the causes he believed in, but most of all from his sympathetic personality and his everyday practical politics. The mildly ironic confidence with which he confronted the impositions of an increasingly bureaucratised academic environment, in order to safeguard his liberty as a thinker and scholar, still serve as a model for me. It is for all these reasons that I am very grateful to the editors of and the contributors to a volume which, in many ways, shares the fundamental ideas and, as it were, the spirit of H. Gustav Klaus.