During the 1930s Bernard von Brentano gained some prominence both in the Weimar Republic and in his Swiss exile. He had been critical of the psychological novel for its reliance on "characters" and for its political abstinence, and he favored the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) because it tended to confront social conditions and ideological patterns by means of reportage rather than imagination and of montage rather than imitation. But under the influence of Marxism, Brentano went beyond the passive registering of reality advocated by the adepts of the "Neue Sachlichkeit," and in his own work of sociopolitical reportage, Der Beginn der Barbarei in Deutschland (The Beginning of Barbarism in Germany, 1932), he combined descriptive methods and theoretical elements to produce a piece of "operative" literature which would have a positive function in class warfare.

Theodor Chindler: Roman einer deutschen Familie (1936), Brentano's first novel and by far his most widely...