To paraphrase the self-appointed preceptor of German Communist authors, Georg Lukács (before he ceased including Bredel in his purview), Willi Bredel was a highly talented writer capable of artistic growth. He conceived all-embracing epic frames; but there was an unresolved conflict between Bredel's concepts and his narrative style, for the latter was more appropriate to press releases than to art. In Lukács's 1931 six-page critique of Bredel's earliest novels the critic faulted the proletarian author further for the absence of "living men and vibrant, changing, fluid relationships between human beings" as well as for the failure to apply "dialectics in literary representation." Bredel's marginal importance in the West probably lies in his role as a Communist literary practitioner of genuine working-class origin; he was not, as were Lukács and Bertolt Brecht, a convert from the more privileged classes. In the Communist bloc Bredel...