‚Arbeit an den Sachen selbst‘. Zu Praxis und Programmatik der Literatursoziologie Karl Viëtors

Abstract This article focuses on Karl Viëtor’s (1892–1951) literary-sociological oriented Baroque research and follows its development up to a generalized literary-sociological research program. Viëtor defines his stance on the sociology of literature by distancing himself from two strands of thought: on the one hand, from different versions of “Geistesgeschichte” (represented e. g. by Fritz Strich, Oskar Walzel, or Emil Ermatinger), and, on the other hand, from various materialistic positions based on the base/superstructure-model (such as those by Franz Mehring or Karl August Wittfogel). First, I will examine Viëtor’s unpublished lecture History of German Literature in the Age of Baroque (Geschichte der deutschen Literatur im Zeitalter des Barock, 1922/1923 until 1937), which is his repository for his baroque publications in the 1920 s, that also inspired in-depth research conducted by his students. Secondly, I will analyze Viëtor’s Program of a Sociology of Literature (Programm einer Literatursoziologie, 1934), a critical examination of relevant contributions by Erich Rothacker and others, both from bourgeois and Marxist backgrounds. In this text, Viëtor outlines the sociology of literature in two ways: as a sociology of literary life and as a sociology of literary works.