xXXVlll HISTORY AND CLASS CONSCIOUSNESS PREFACE TO THE NEW EDITION(1967) notorious self-criticism of History and Class Consciousness. I must NOTE begin by confessing that having once discarded any of my works I In Georg Lukas gum si I remain indifferent to them for the whole of my life. A year urtstag, Aufba n,I955 fter the publication of The Soul and the Forms( Die Seele und die Hited by 1967,pp,323 Formen), for example, I wrote a letter of thanks to Margarethe 2 Development of the Mode 9ll(in Susmann for her review of the book. In it i observed that"both the book and its form had become quite alien to me". It had been the 3 Ibid. in german translation, 2nd Edition, Luchterhand, Neuwied 1963, P 5 and also the 3rd same with the Theory of the NoDel and it was the same now in the 4 Theorien uber den Mehrwert, Il, 1, Stuttgart, 1921 case of History and Class Consciousness. I returned to the Sovict Lenin, Werk, Wien-Berlin, IV, II, P) Union in 1933 with every prospect of frutful activity: the oppos 6 Georg Lukacs, History and Clas Conea 6 f. pp309 f. tional role of the magazine Literaturni Kritik on questions of literary theory in the years 1934-39 is well known. Tactically I of this edition it was, however, necessary to distance myself publicly from History and Class Consciousness so that the real partisan warfare gainst official and semi-official theories of literature would not 67,pp.87f e impeded by counter-attacks in which my opponents would have been objectively in the right in my view, however narrow- minded they might otherwise be. Of course, in order to publish 13 In Internationale Literatur, Vol 3, No. 2, Moscow, 1933, pp.95-126 a self-criticism it was necessary to adopt the current official jargon. This is the only conformist element in the declaration I nade at this time. It too was an entry-ticket to all further partis warfare: the difference between this declaration and my earlier retraction of the Blum Theses is merely' that I sincerely believe that History and Class Consciousmess was mistaken and I think that to this day When, later on, the errors enshrined in the book were converted into fashionable notions, I resisted the attempt to identify these with my own ideas and in this too I believe I was in the right. The four decades that have elapsed since the appearance of History and Class Consciousness, the changed situation in the struggle for a true Marxist method, my own production during this period, all these factors may perhaps king a less one-sided view now. It is my task to establish how far particular, rightly-conceived tendencies in History and Class Consciousness really produced fruitful results in my own later activities and perhaps in those of others. That would be to raise a whole complex of questions whose resolution I may be allowed to leave to the judgement of histor Budapest, March 1967