Background
Märten, Lu was born on September 24, 1879 in Charlottenburg, Berlin.
Aesthetician commentator journalist
Märten, Lu was born on September 24, 1879 in Charlottenburg, Berlin.
Self-educated because of poor health when young. 1903, joined the Social Democratic Party (SDP). 1920, joined the German Communist Party (KDP).
From 1898, worked as a journalist and writer contributing reviews, stories, and literary and art criticism to a range of publications including Gleichheit and Arbeiterinnen-Zeitung.
Marten’s philosophical development was closely interwoven with the experience of her deprived and difficult youth: the early deaths of her parents and siblings and the poverty-stricken conditions under which she strove for intellectual and artistic self-realization. She earned a living by journalism but wrote concurrently on the theory and sociology of art. Three early books were followed in 1924 by her major theoretical work, which was largely ignored at the time of its publication. Thereafter, financial difficulties supervened, forcing Märten to live in seclusion while she endeavoured but failed to make money by writing film scripts. She turned to journalism again in 1945 and worked as well as a publishers’ reader, at the same time resuming her writing on politics, women and aesthetics. In 1950 she withdrew from all engagement in public debate as a protest against the cultural policy of theGDR. Märten maintained that art developed out of work but that the unity of art and work was destroyed by the division of labour in society, rendering art a ‘luxury’ and a ‘special area’. She proposed that the concept of ‘art’ be abandoned and replaced by that of ‘form’, with the aim of propounding a comprehensive theory of the purposive-practical activity of human beings. Working within a historico-materialism, and in the belief that ‘every era discovers its own method’, she sought to analyse types of art and the various forms of artistic expression and to relate them to ‘being and change’. She was unsympathetic to the notion of the autonomy of art but also to contemporary communist debates that ignored formal qualities. ‘It should be understood’, she wrote, ‘that so-called art, seen historically, is not merely content but in the first instance is form.’ She urged attention to the art of film as a medium for the development of new forms and thought.