The Twentieth Century 1890-1945

Raymond Furness

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000759204
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Collections
• Index: Literature

Originally published in 1978, this study presents a detailed analysis of the major literary movements in Austria and Germany from the end of the nineteenth century to the collapse of the Third Reich. It examines the plethora of literary genres which marked the transition from the nineteenth to the twentieth century: the short-lived Naturalist movement rapidly giving way to various forms of symbolism and neo-romanticism. The situation in Vienna is studied in detail; the concept of modernism vis-à-vis expressionism with special regard to Rilke and Kafka. The literature of the Weimar period is also analysed, with emphasis on the symphonic novels of the time and the anti-illusionist devices of Brecht. It also draws a comparison between the literary situation in Nazi Germany and the literature of exile, and the positions of Thomas and Heinrich Mann, Brecht and Gottfried Benn are examined.

1 AN INTRODUCTION: NATURALISM AND ITS DECLINE

In a famous passage in Book One of Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften Robert Musil portrays with accuracy and irony the intellectual atmosphere in which the ‘man without qualities’ and his friends passed their formative years. The plethora of artistic styles and movements, the rich confusion, with no clear-cut tendency or direction is described as follows:

Aus dem ölglatten Geist der zwei letzten Jahrzehnte des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts hatte sich plötzlich in ganz Europa ein beflügelndes Fieber erhoben. Niemand wußte genau, was im Werden war; niemand vermochte zu sagen, ob es eine neue Kunst, ein neuer Mensch, eine neue Moral oder vielleicht eine Umschichtung der Gesellschaft sein solle ... Es wurde der Übermensch geliebt, und es wurde der Untermensch geliebt; es wurden die Gesundheit und die Sonne angebetet, und es wurde die Zärtlichkeit brustkranker Mädchen angebetet; man begeisterte sich für das Heldenglaubensbekenntnis und für das soziale Allemannsglaubensbekenntnis; man war gläubig und skeptisch, naturalistisch und preziös, robust und morbid; man träumte von alten Schloßalleen, herbstlichen Gärten, gläsernen Weihern, Edelsteinen, Haschisch, Krankheit, Dämonen, aber auch von Prärien, gewaltigen Horizonten, von Schmiede- under Walzwerken, nackten Kämpfern, Aufständen der Arbeitssklaven, menschlichen Urpaaren und Zertrümmerung der Gesellschaft.¹

There seemed to be at this time, Musil implies, a profound uncertainty in man’s emotional response to the world around him: it appeared that a new man was needed, or a new morality, or else a radical dislocation of society. The superman was hailed, the subhuman was extolled, the sun was worshipped, as were consumptive girls; one praised the hero, and also the humble working man; one had faith, one was sceptical, one was naturalistic, also precious; one was robust, yet also morbid, dreaming one moment of autumnal gardens, old castles, remote pools, opium, and decay, and at the next of prairies, mímense horizons, foundries, factories, naked warriors, revolution, primitive communities and social upheaval. A better description of the fertile, even febrile, artistic and intellectual concoction with which the nineteenth century ended and the twentieth century began would be difficult to find. Nietzsche, naturalism, symbolism, decadence and the beginnings of expressionism — the 1890s appear more and more to be a fascinating and crucial decade in German literature where creative imitation and original contribution, rejection of past models and anticipation of future developments are extraordinarily juxtaposed. This book will therefore begin by considering the salient features of that decade. The fact that one year, 1892, saw not only the appearance of Stefan George’s Algabal poems, but also Hofmannsthal’s lyrical drama Der Tod des Tizian and the completion of Hauptmann’sZ>/e Weber, bears out Musil’s description of the coexistence of disparate artistic tendencies. Although the chief feature of the calendar of the 1890s would be the rise of aestheticism and neo-romanticism, the impact of Hauptmann’s Vor Sonnenaufgang (1889) was not short-lived. Musil specifically mentions the word ‘naturalistisch’, contrasting this with ‘preziös’, and although naturalism, with its belief in biological determinism and mechanical laws, seems to smack more of the nineteenth century than the twentieth, it must stand at the beginning of this introduction, for its great value may be seen in its claim to being the ‘Entbindung der Moderne’.

As the nineteenth century drew to its close the avant-garde in Germany realised more and more that German literature, particularly lyric poetry, was dull and unimaginative when compared with that of France: the circle of writers in Munich, of whom Emanuel Geibel and Paul Heyse were the most eminent, seemed of slight stature when juxtaposed with such names as Baudelaire, Verlaine, Mallarmé and Rimbaud; the novelists Spielhagen and Freytag cut sorry figures indeed when measured against the great French, English and Russian masters. The monumentalising grandeur of the Gründerjahre and the historicising sentimentality of much of the art of those years confirmed the parlous nature of the German cultural situation when compared with that of other countries: as early as 1871 Nietzsche had warned of the ‘Niederlage, ja Exstirpation des deutschen Geistes zugunsten des deutschen “Reiches” ’.² It was France particularly which served as a cultural model: Zola, vilified and rejected by the bourgeoisie, was hailed by the younger writers as the great liberator, as was Tolstoi (and, later, Dostoevski), and in the theatre it was Henrik Ibsen who represented the breakthrough to a new daring.

As so often in Germany, the theoretical justification for an uncompromising modernity in the arts preceded the actual works themselves. The 1880s were characterised by a wealth of periodicals, pamphlets, journals and manifestoes, each attempting to define the basic position. Modernity and naturalism became the watchwords, and Zola’s much quoted dictum ‘une oeuvre d’art est un coin de la nature vu à travers un tempérament’³ provided the apparent justification for mimesis, for a portrayal of man and nature without recourse to metaphysical doctrines, and a determination to describe without sentiment or embellishment. But Zola’s prodigious and exuberant imagination, indeed, his reference to a ‘tempérament’, by no means precluded subjectivity; although the scientific writings of Darwin and Haeckel, and the positivist-materialism of Comte and Taine were widely extolled, the German literary imagination did not feel entirely at ease in the observation of the minutiae of day-to-day living. Empirical analysis of environment and heredity was very much the order of the day, but the excessive emphasis upon determinism would soon prove irksome to the more imaginative writers. The social concerns of the day were deemed worthy of artistic portrayal: the plight of the proletariat, and man as an economic or political cipher, were to be described with possible amelioration in mind, and yet (and here Ibsen is the over-riding influence) naturalist drama would deal predominantly with middle-class problems and preoccupations. From the outset it must be made clear that naturalism in Germany was an elusive phenomenon: a recent study has rightly seen that as soon as the movement became creative rather than theoretical, then it fell apart, unable to resolve the tensions between the specifically German and the more radical European manifestations.⁴

The two centres associated with what may be called naturalism were Berlin and Munich. The former city, with its slums and concomitant social problems, apparently offered enough material for the writer bent on a discussion of modern industrial problems; Munich, although relatively unspoilt by industrialisation, had been associated with the pallid school of poets gathered by Maximilian for his symposia, and here was all that the avant-garde rejected. In Berlin the brothers Heinrich and Julius Hart founded the Kritische Waffengänge (1882-1884), a periodical concerned predominantly with the drama and the lyric, and looking above all to Tolstoi, Ibsen and Strindberg; in Munich Michael Georg Conrad founded, in 1885, Die Gesellschaft, a vital organ for the new mentality in the arts, and one more allied to Zola’s work and aims than the Berlin venture. The Hart brothers stressed the need for an Ideal-Realismus’, and propounded their admiration for the ‘natural’, meaning basically the spontaneous and the anti-formal, in a manner which derived more from Nietzsche; the Polish-German writer Stanislaw Przybyszewski, in his Erinnerungen an das literarische Berlin, described his meeting with the Hart brothers in the Berlin suburb of Friedrichshagen, and spoke slightingly of their attempts to emulate the great figures of Russia and Scandinavia.⁵ In 1885 appeared the anthology of new poetry Moderne Dichtercharaktere, to which the brothers Hart contributed, as did such writers as Hermann Conradi, Karl Henckell, O.E. Hartleben and Arno Holz. Karl Henckell called the new poetry ‘durchtränkt vom Lebensstrom der Zeit und der Nation’,⁶ but it had little in common with Zola and the French naturalists; it betrays the influence of Nietzsche (as does Hermann Conradi’s desire for ‘eine Zeit der großen Seelen und tiefen Gefühle’)⁷ and moves in the direction of Heimatdichtung. The Hart brothers also attempted to publish the Berliner Monatshefte für Literatur, Kritik und Theater which, however, only survived six months and came to an end in October 1885. The younger writers, the ‘Jüngstdeutschen’, were dissatisfied and defected to the far more radical Conrad and his Munich journal.

In 1886 there appeared in Die Gesellschaft an article by Julius Hillebrand entitled ‘Naturalismus schlechtweg!’. The author proclaimed: ‘Ist doch Realismus nichts anderes als die künstlerische Zurückspiegelung des Seienden, was ja die echten, großen Dichter von jeher bewußt oder unbewußt als ihre Aufgabe anerkannten ... Ist denn die künstlerische Arbeit des Realisten ihrer inneren Natur nach eine andere als die des Idealisten?’⁸ Hillebrand attempted to refute the view that the writer is a mere camera, registering with absolute objectivity the real as a purely perceptual entity: he stressed ‘Individualität’ as, indeed, Zola had stressed the ‘tempérament’ and had betrayed at all points an abundant imaginative power. The German theorists moved away from the concept of passive registration of phenomena, which approximated to a form of impressionism, towards the emphasis upon subjectivity and individuality. An important document is Karl Bleibtreu’s Revolution der Literatur, which appeared in Leipzig in 1886. Bleibtreu discusses the new tendency in literature (which he calls realism) and takes pains to stress that this is invalid if it merely concentrates upon the ugly and the depraved: ‘Dem Realismus allein gehört die Zukunft der Literatur. Allerdings nicht dem PseudoRealismus .. . Der Mensch ist weder Maschine noch Tier, er ist halt ein - Mensch, d.h. ein rätselhaftes, unseliges Wesen, in dem sich psychische Aspiration und physische Instinkte bis in den Tod und bis an den Tod befehden.’⁹ Bleibtreu p...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1. An Introduction: Naturalism and its Decline
• 2. Jung-Wien
• 3. Aestheticism, Decadence and Neo-Romanticism in Germany
• 4. The Cosmic Dimension
• 5. Modernism and ‘Sprachkrise’
• 6. The Problem of Expressionism
• 7. The 1920s and 1930s
• 8. Barbarism, Exile and Return
• Bibliography
• Index