Expressionism As an International Literary Phenomenon: Twenty-one Essays and a Bibliography (Comparative History of Literatures in European Languages)

EXPRESSIONISM AS AN INTERNATIONAL LITERARY PHENOMENON

A COMPARATIVE HISTORY OF LITERATURES IN EUROPEAN LANGUAGES SPONSORED BY THE INTERNATIONAL COMPARATIVE LITERATURE ASSOCIATION HISTOIRE COMPARÉE DES LITTÉRATURES DE LANGUES EUROPÉENNES SOUS LES AUSPICES DE L’ASSOCIATION INTERNATIONAL DE LITTÉRATURE COMPARÉE

Coordinating Committee for A Comparative History of Literatures in European Languages Comité de Coordination de l’Histoire Comparée des Littératures de Langues Européennes 2010–2013

President/Président Margaret R. Higonnet (University of Connecticut) Vice-President/Vice-Président Marcel Cornis-Pope (Virginia Commonwealth University) Secretary Treasurer/Secrétaire Trésorier Svend Erik Larsen (Aarhus University) Acting Treasurer/Trésorier par intérim Vivian Liska (University of Antwerp) Members/Membres assesseurs Theo D’haen, César Dómínguez Prieto, Angela Esterhammer, Patrizia Lombardo, Inocência Mata, Thomas Nolden, Anders Pettersson, Fridrun Rinner, Franca Sinopoli, Steven P. Sondrup, Francesco Stella, Anja Tippner Past Presidents Randolph D. Pope (Charlottesville) †â•›Henry H.H. Remak (Indiana) Mihály Szegedy-Maszák (Bloomington) Mario J. Valdés (Toronto) †â•›Jacques Voisine (Paris) Jean Weisgerber (Bruxelles) Past Secretaries Daniel F. Chamberlain (Kingston) †â•›Milan V. Dimić (Edmonton) Margaret R. Higonnet (Storrs) †â•›György M. Vajda (Budapest) Volume I Expressionism as an International Literary Phenomenon Twenty-one essays and a bibliography Edited by Ulrich Weisstein

EXPRESSIONISM AS AN INTERNATIONAL LITERARY PHENOMENON TWENTY-ONE ESSAYS AND A BIBLIOGRAPHY

Edited by ULRICH WEISSTEIN

JOHN BENJAMINS PUBLISHING COMPANY AMSTERDAM/PHILADELPHIA

8

TM

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences — Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Expressionism as an international literary phenomenon. 21 essays and a bibliography / edited by Ulrich Weisstein. â•…â•… p.â•…â•… cm. -- (Comparative history of literatures in European languages = Histoire comparée des littératures de langues européennes, ISSN 0238-0668 ; v. 1) â•… Includes bibliographical references and index. ╇ 1. Expressionism (Art). NX600.DE9 W44â•…â•… 1973 709/.04 74166499 ISBN 978 1 58811 670 3 (hb; alk. paper) CIP © 2011 - John Benjamins B.V. / Association Internationale de Littérature Comparée Published 1973 by Librairie Marcel Didier, Paris and Akadémiai Kiadó, Budapest No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any other means, without written permission from the publisher. John Benjamins Publishing Co. • P.O.Box 36224 • 1020 ME Amsterdam • The Netherlands John Benjamins North America • P.O.Box 27519 • Philadelphia PA 19118-0519 • USA

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface Ulrich Weisstein, Bloomington (Indiana) "Expressionism as an International Literary Phenomenon" Ulrich Weisstein, Bloomington (Indiana) "Expressionism: Style or Weltanschauung ?" Ulrich Weisstein, Bloomington (Indiana) "Outline of the Philosophic Backgrounds of Expressionism" György M. Vajda "Foreign Influences on German Expressionist Drama" H. F . Garten, London "Foreign Influences on German Expressionist Poetry" Reinhold Grimm, Madison (Wisconsin) and Henry J. Schmidt, Columbus (Ohio) "Foreign Influences on German Expressionist Prose'' Armin Arnold, Montreal "Dadaism and Expressionism" Richard Brinkmann, Tübingen "Expressionist Literature and Painting" Paul Hadermann, Brussels "Expressionist Literature and Music" Henry A. Lea, Amherst (Massachussetts) "A Contribution to the Definition of the Expressionist Film" Lotte H. Eisner, Paris "Vorticism: Expressionism English Style" Ulrich Weisstein, Bloomington (Indiana) "Expressionism in English Drama and Prose Literature" Breon Mitchell, Bloomington (Indiana) "Expressionism in the American Theater" Mardi Valgemae, New York City "Expressionist Stage Techniques in the Russian Theater" Eugene Bristow, Bloomington (Indiana) "Expressionism in Scandinavia" Richard Vowles, Madison (Wisconsin) "Expressionism in Belgium and Holland" Paul Hadermann and Jean Weisgerber, Brussels "Expressionism and the South Slavs" Zoran Konstantinovic, Innsbruck

7 15 29 45 59

69 79 97 111 141 161 167 181 193 205 211 225 259

"Rumanian Expressionism" Al. Dima and Dan Grigorescu, Bucharest "Expressionism in Hungary" Miklós Szabolcsi, Budapest "Expressionism in Poland" Jan Jozef Lipski, Warsaw "Russian Expressionism'' Vladimir Markov, Los Angeles Expressionism as an International Phenomenon: An Annotated Bibliography Compiled by U.W. Index

269 287 299 315

329 351

PREFACE

The present volume forms part of the international project of "A Comparative History of Literatures in European Languages," sponsored by the International Comparative Literature Association. It constitutes a sort of companion piece to Wolfgang Rothe's massive compilation Expressionismus als Literatur (Berne/Munich: Francke, 1969), which offers a comprehensive survey of German Expressionist (and Dadaist) literature consisting of ten essays on general topics—partly generically, partly historically, and partly weltanschaulich oriented—and thirty-seven monographic chapters dealing with the leading poets, playwrights and prosaists linked with that prominent and influential movement. Accordingly, it seeks to avoid any duplication of materials already pre­ sented in that volume, which explains the absence of a chapter solely devoted to Ger­ man E. and its replacement by three essays, each concerned with the impact of foreign writers on one major genre in the time-span covered by this collection. Although this is not the first book-length study of E. as an international or inter­ disciplinary phenomenon, it is the fullest account published so far. To be precise: Expressionism as an International Lierary Phenomenon has been preceded by two collec­ tions, namely, 1) the proceedings of the symposium "Ineontri con I'espressionismo" organized, in April, 1964, by the Accademia Nazionale L. Cherubini in Florence and published under the title Bilancio dell' Espressionismo (Florence: Vallecchi, 1965) and 2) the proceedings of another conference on E. held in Zagreb, Yugoslavia, in 1969 and lished, that same year, in a special issue of the periodical Kritika (Zagreb) labelled pubEkspresionizam i hrvatska knijzevnost. (It is by no means coincidental that the two meetings occurred in Italy and Yugoslavia respectively, for these two countries—the one almost totally unaffected by E. and the other heavily impinged upon—have produced a vast amount of secondary literature on the movement, which, in both quantity and quality, is matched only by German scholarship in this area of specialization.) To these must now be added the proceedings of the Strasbourg conference held in 1969 and recently published by the Editions du Centre Nationale de la Recherche Scientifique, under the title l'Expressionnisme dans le théâtre européen. The range of the two former publications is severely limited, however, with regard to size as well as scope. Thus Bilancio delV Espressionismo boasts of no more than 129 pages, offers only Italian contributions, and is restricted to a discussion, in sequence, of German Expressionist literature, painting, music, cinematography and theater. Ekspresionizam i hrvatska knijzevnost (156 pages), on the other hand, is truly cosmo­ politan but focuses on the impact of German E. on the Central-East-European litera7

tures, those of Poland, Bulgaria, Rumania, Hungary and Yugoslavia, Serbian and Croatian as well as Slovenian. Special attention is paid to Miroslav Krleza, the dean of South Slavic Expressionists. The proceedings of two other symposia on E. viewed from a supranational and inter­ disciplinary vantage point have not—in one case not as yet—been published. To start with the least ambitious of the two: during the V. Congress of the ICLA/AILC, held in Belgrade in late August/early September, 1967, I organized a two-hour conference on the subject in which Professors Armin Arnold, Zoran Konstantinovic, Gerhard Loose, Richard Vowles and I myself participated. Unfortunately, the texts of the papers read on that occasion were not included in the Proceedings of the congress published by Swets & Zeitlinger in Amsterdam (1969). However, Professor Vowles' communication (which I would have liked to see expanded) is reprinted in this volume, Professor Konstantinovic has enlarged his paper for our benefit, and Professor Arnold's findings have been incorporated in his book Liferatur und Expressionismus (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer). A much greater (and, hopefully, temporary) loss to scholarship is caused by the absence of a printed record of the conference held, between May 18 and 23, 1964, in conjunction with the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino. Luckily, some of the papers read at t h a t Convegno Internazionale di Studi sull' Espressionismo have appeared in schol­ arly and semi-scholarly journals, several of them in the form of a small anthology published in the lavishly illustrated periodical Mataré. (For details see the bibliography appended to the present volume.) Like the pieces gathered in Bilancio dell' Espressionismo, the, roughly, twenty-five relazione di base (position papers, as we might call them) presented on t h a t memorable occasion were primarily interdisciplinary, rather than international, in character. Moreover, most of the participants in the Convegno were either Germans or Italians—scholarly experts in the various fields, like Ladislao Mittner, Paul Poertner, Hans H. Stuckenschmidt, Willi Reich, Aurel Milosz (for the dance), L. M. Ungers (for architecture), and Lotte Eisner (for cinematography). Miss Eisner's contribution has, in fact, been embodied in our volume of otherwise freshly commissioned essays since the survey originally contracted for did not materialize. The journalistic and scholarly coverage of the Maggio Musicale and the Convegno of 1964 has been unusually broad, especially in Italy and France (where a whole issue of the magazine L ' A r c : Cahiers Mediterranéens was reserved for the topic of E.). And I recommend the readers the critical evaluations found in Professor Mittner's book Saggi, divagazioni, polemiche (Naples, 1964) as well as in the opening portion of Paolo Chiarini's monograph L'Espressionismo; storia e struttura (Florence, 1969)—probably the best overall survey of Expressionist literature in any language. Insofar as the outlook presupposed for the present volume is more international than interdisciplinary, the latter will complement, rather than conflict with, the published record of the Florentine conference. Ultimately, the four volumes—Expressionismus als Liferatur, flanked by Expressionism as an International Literary Phenomenon, the Convegno proceedings, and l'Expressionnisme dans le théatre europeen—will form a quartet of intestimable value for the comparatist seeking to understand European "modernism". I would be less than candid, however, if I did not admit, at the very 8

start, t h a t this volume has certain gaps, which were unavoidable, given the vast scope of t h e undertaking and the pragmatic difficulties involved in commissioning and collect­ ing essays from contributors residing in a dozen different countries. Nor do I hide the fact t h a t the issues broached and views presented by the contributors are at times somewhat lopsided or idiosyncratic. In some cases, I would even regard them as unten­ able. They must, at any rate, be regarded as the authors' own opinions and cannot be construed as reflecting the views of the editor. Yet, insofar as we are still in a very early phase of the study of E. as an international movement and any attempt at making a synthesis would be premature, all papers have been printed as submitted, in the hope that, at some future time, a more fully integrated picture can be presented — prefer­ ably in a volume which will account for avantgarde literature as a whole. Specifically, I note the absence of two chapters dealing with Czech and Slovak E., respectively, for which unforeseen external circumstances are responsible. The chapter on Expressionism in the Latin countries (France, Italy, Spain, Portugal and South America), commissioned in due time, also failed to materialize. The inclusion of a chapter on E. in Russian literature (and not merely in the Russian theater) was originally contemplated, but after an exchange of view with the editors of the projected two volumes on the literary avantgarde, to be prepared—as part of the international project—at centers in Prague and Bratislava, the topic was ceded to that team, since it can be more meaningfully treated in the context of Russian Futurism. In the mean­ time, Professor Vladimir Markov has published a remarkable essay (the first of its kind) which presents and tentatively evaluates the rare materials available for the study of how German E. affected Russian letters in the turbulent years immediately following the Revolution. His paper "Russian Expressionism" (California Slavic Studies, V I [1971], 145-160) is required reading for the specialist and I am happy to be able to include it in our volume. I also alert the readers to Marian Galik's study "Über die kritische Auseinandersetzung Chinas mit dem deutschen Expressionismus ,, (Nachrichten der Gesellschaft für Natur- und Völkerkunde Ostasiens, Hamburg, No. 103 [1968], pp. 39-59), of which I am, unfortunately, unable to offer an English version. As is natural in a volume of this size, by no means all the "eligible" writers, painters and composers could be mentioned in the appropriate chapters on E. in the non-Ger­ man-speaking countries on one hand, and in painting, music, and cinematography on the other. Thus I personally, for example, regret the absence of any reference to Dennis Johnston, O'Casey's Irish compatriot and fellow playwright, whose preface to The Old Lady Says 'No'!, a "Romantic Play in Two Parts with Choral Interludes" (1929), contains the sentences: Although many of (the play's) expressionist tricks are now commonplace, especially in radio production, it was, at the time of writing, a fairly original type of play, and technically it owes less to other dramatists than anything t h a t I have written since. The play's actual foster parents are neither Evreinov, O'Neill nor Georg Kaiser. Nor has Joyce got much to do with it, although I gratefully acknowledge the presence of his finger in the stirring of some of my later pies . . . The two plays to which this experiment does owe something are, firstly, Kaufman and Connelly's Beggar on Horseback—a superb piece of 9

American Expressionism that I have always admired—and secondly a conti­ nental satire called The Land of Many Names that I once saw in the 'twenties. Who wrote it, and where it came from, I have often since wondered. I think it may have been one of the Čapeks. Writers from the Anglo-Saxon world who have elsewhere been discussed in the context of E. and whose names might have been profitably adduced in the present volume include the Sitwells in England (see Bernhard Fehr's article listed in our bib­ liography) and e. e. cummings—whose parody of O'Neill's The Great God Brown in a scene of Him is mentioned by Professor Valgemae—in the United States. The case for D. H. Lawrence, the Expressionist, made by Max Wildi and other Anglicists, is a weak one, to begin with. Even less successful is the attempt to pull Virginia Woolf into this orbit, whereas the role of Joyce is hard to assess. On the other hand, it would be intrigu­ ing to look at Faulkner's experimental novels, The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying, from this perspective; for some of the most prominent features of these works would seem, at first glance, to be strikingly Expressionistic. To be sure, no solid links between Faulkner and German E. (except by way of O'Neill) can presently be forged; but what if there existed a filiation from Dostoevsky, that "granddaddy" of Werfel, Trakl, Toller and certain Expressionist prose writers? One could also have wished for a more extensive treatment of the dramatic theo­ ries (and practices) of Scandinavian writers like Par Lagerkvist and Svend Borberg, which are traceable through their essays first published in the magazine Litteraturen, as well as of the oeuvre of certain Swedish poets. Moreover, as Professor Markov observes in a footnote to his essay on "Russian Expressionism", several Russian authors have been treated, both at home and abroad, under the sign of E. They include Majakovsky, Kuzmin, Pasternak and the "Surrealist" Jury Olesha. In the West, Leonid Andreev is sometimes called a forerunner of the movement—but quite mistakenly so. For a close examination of the play usually introduced by way of evidence, The Black Maskers, shows rather convincingly that his true models were Edgar Allan Poe and the Symbolists (primarily Maeterlinck, one would suppose). The entire plot of this play is, more or less, an extension of the poem recited by Roderick Usher, the owner of the famous "falling" house, insofar as (speaking with Andreev) "the strange black maskers are the powers whose field of action is the soul of man and whose mysterious action he can never fathom". To be sure, this use of a technique labelled "Ausstrahlungen des Ichs" in reference to Strindberg's To Damascus and his Dream Play has its Expressionist applications; but in its deeply allegorical mode it also harks back to the late medieval Moralities. In their essay on E. in the Flemish-speaking countries, Professors Hadermann and Weisgerber briefly talk about Ghelderode and Crommelynck, whose dramatic oeuvres might also warrant a closer look, especially in the case of Ghelderode, who was directly exposed to German E. through the mediation of Carl Sternheim. As the Belgian playwright puts it in the second of his Entretiens d'Ostende (Paris: L'Arche, 1956): Je n'ai pratiquement pas eu de contacts avec l'expressionisme littéraire allemand. Peu de ces oeuvres devaient être traduites, et ma connaissance de 10

la langue allemande était insuffisante pour me permettre d'approfondir les écrits nouveaux des poètes et des dramaturges. Seul, après Sternheim qui me traduisait un peu Wedekind, Kaiser ou Kokoschka au théatre, Ie dadaiste Beige Clément Pansaers me révéla, en 1917, quelques poètes allemands d'esprit nouveau. Cependant, par des revues illustrées telles que Der Sturm qui nous arrivaient de Berlin, j'ai connu l'expressionisme a son debut, dans la sculpture et la peinture. (p. 77) Compared with the most representative plays of Kaiser, Goering, Toller or Barlach, Ghelderode's scenic spectacles do not really strike one as being in the same tra­ dition. Rather, while deeply imbued with the spirit of the grotesque (which Ghelderode imbibed from the proto-Expressionist James Ensor), they are much closer to the experimental, but essentially playful, art of the French Avantgardists Apollinaire (Les Mamelies de Tirésias), Cocteau and Blaise Cendrars, as Camille Poupeye points out in his perceptive introduction to La Mort du Docteur Faust. As for the Romance countries, Italy, for one, has hardly produced any works that might be labelled Expressionist or proto-Expressionist. However, as Paolo Chiarini has stressed in a highly suggestive essay listed in our bibliography, certain aspects of the Teatro del grottesco in general, and the work of Rosso di San Secondo in particular, might yield some clues to an affinity. Among the French writers prominent in the 'teens and twenties, Henri Lenormand is occasionally singled out as an Expressionist (for instance by Mardi Valgemae in his essay on the Pinwheel controversy). No such links, however, are mentioned in Lenormand's autobiography, Les Confessions d'un auteur dramatique, which stresses, instead, the role of Freud and Strindberg. The plays Le Mangeur des Rêves and Le Temps est un Songe bear out this contention, in addition to showing, most emphatically, the ductus of Maeterlinck. Paul Claudel was hailed by some Expressionists (notably by Lothar Schreyer of the Sturmbühne) as a truly congenial writer. Some of his plays were performed at the experimental stage in Dresden-Hellerau, where Kokoschka's dramatic tours de force were also mounted. And in an essay primarily devoted to the style of the Unanimist Jules Romains—which he makes out to be Expressionist—Leo Spitzer suggests that Claudel's style, too, might well be studied from that perspective, and Henri Barbusse and the Clarté group would ideologically match the German Activists. Finally, one wonders how Antonin Artaud's theory and practice of the theater would fit into the context of E., once the biographical and factual links with Surrealism are taken care of. Like Ghelderode and Lenormand, Artaud was profoundly affected by the Elizabethan theater which—if it had been better known and more easily available to German writers in the first and second decades of our century—might well have served as a major source of inspiration for dramatic E. But, clearly, there is no end to speculation. In a field as attractive and as poorly defined as International Expressionism there is much room for both expansion and consolidation, and there is no need to apologize for so abruptly terminating the catalogue of tantalizing possibilities for further research from a comparative point of view, which might also include the Swiss playwrights Hans Ganz and Hermann Schneider mentioned by Chiarini (op. cit., p. 45). It now remains for me to say a few words about the nature and purpose of the appended bibliography—as far as I know, the most comprehensive of its kind—and 11

to express my gratitude to the many individuals who have helped me at various stages in the preparation of this book. —Unlike the essays constituting the bulk of the volume, the bibliography which concludes it is meant to be all-encompassing. Thus, in addition to listing the standard reference works, bibliographies, reviews of research, memoirs, collections of documents, manifestos and letters, it includes a list of major anthologies of German Expressionist literature published in Germany and abroad (TV), as well as an extensive catalogue of secondary literature about German literary E. (VI), a section devoted to Sekundarliteratur published abroad and in foreign tongues (VII), a section bibliographically detailing the impact of German E. beyond the confines of the Ger­ man-speaking area (VIII), and a list of publications concerned with E. in the arts other than literature (IX). Like all such compilations, it is bound to be fragmentary—especi­ ally with regard to items originating in the East European and Asian countries. Every effort has been made, however, to ascertain and verify the accuracy of the listed entries. Anticipating a second edition of the volume, I heartily welcome any additions and corrections on the part of the readers. The number of friends, colleagues and students who have, in one way or another, assisted in this labor of love is very large, and I can acknowledge only those debts which are considerable. First of all, I wish to thank Miss Linda Brust and Mrs. Josee Duytschaever, who have had a hand in translating material from the French and German, and Mrs. Anna Strikis, who typed the final manuscript with exquisite care and great attention to detail. Miss Zoë Theoharis has been an extremely conscientious proof­ reader, and Mr. Charles Loker has helped in the preparation of the index. Mr. Thomas Glastras, the reference librarian of the Indiana University Library, and Mrs. Gail Mathews, our Interlibrary Loan Librarian, have done their utmost to identify and procure materials located in libraries across the United States, thus allowing me, in many instances, to view the physical evidence where otherwise I would have had to content myself with copying bibliographical data, which are often misleading or unreliable. My colleagues here at Indiana University, Professors Samuel Fiszman and Ante Kadic, have been most patient and kind in collecting, explaining and translating data pertaining to E. in Polish and Yugoslav literature. Mr. David Queen, a doctoral candi­ date in Comparative Literature, has translated material from the Russian. Professor Karl-Ludwig Schneider of the University of Hamburg was kind enough to loan me xeroxed copies of the relazione di base presented at the Florence Convegno. To Lotte Eisner I am grateful for permitting me to translate her contribution to the Convegno. Professor Vladimir Markov has obliged me by letting me have an advance copy of his essay on Russian E., and Professor Henry Glade of Manchester College in Manchester, Indiana, was good enough to lend me his personal copy of a recent volume of essays on E. published in the Soviet Union. To Professors Zdenek Mathauser and Rene Wellek, appointed readers of this volume, as well as György M. Vajda, Secretary of the Co-Ordinating Committee of the international project, "A Comparative History of Literatures in European Languages", I owe special thanks for the candid views they have expressed in this capacity. I have greatly benefited from their criticism. Financially, I am in­ debted to the Graduate School of Indiana University, as well as to the International 12

Comparative Literature Association, for the modest grants which have enabled me to pay for the translations of the contributions submitted in French or German respectively and for the typing of the final version. My family has, once again, demonstrated its patience with regard to a husband and father who spends too much time hacking away at his typewriter in the local skyscraper known as Ballantine Hall.

Bloomington, Indiana, January, 1972 ULRICH WEISSTEIN

13

EXPRESSIONISM AS AN INTERNATIONAL LITERARY PHENOMENON INTRODUCTION by

ULRICH WEISSTEIN

The exact definition of Expressionism—unlike that of Cubism, Futurism (Italian style), Dadaism, and Surrealism in its first, "automatic" phase—has always been a touchy and highly problematic issue, to be compared, in its complexity and in the amount of excitement it has generated in over half a century, with the relatively futile attempts, so far undertaken by literary critics and historians, to determine the exact nature and scope of European Symbolism and literary Impressionism. The first question which arises, naturally enough, in this connection concerns the temporal and spatial limits of the phenomenon. More specifically: should European E. be regarded as a movement in its own right (i.e., as a given set of fairly coherent, self-conscious and self-critical activities pursued by a number of contemporaries—but not necessarily coevals—sharing a common outlook), is it a trend dominating, or at least characteristic of, a certain period, or must it be viewed as a universal current or tendency surfacing periodically throughout history? At the outset, I should like to state emphatically that the present volume was conceived in such a manner as to forestall the danger of succumbing to a belief in the kind of perennial E. preached by Wilhelm Worringer and asserted, with various degrees of force and conviction, by many of his followers, both critics and creators. To be sure, Worringer never explicitly used the word Expressionism when formulating his doctrine of an art raising the banner of abstraction against the "Vicious" forces of empathy. (It was, chronologically, too early for him to do so, since he wrote Abstra1ktion und Einfühlung already in 1906.) Still, for him and his disciples contemporary avantgarde art surely took its place side by side—typologically speaking—with primitive art, Egyptian art, Gothic art, Baroque art and Romantic art, as well as constituting an earthier variant of the decoratively abstract art of the Orient. For him, it was opposed to the stable or stabilizing forces asserting themselves in classical Greece, in Rome, during the Renaissance, in European neo-classicism, during the Enlightenment and in the art of nineteenth-century Realism-Naturalism and Impressionism. In a volume like ours, which forms part of a comprehensive, internationally con­ ceived series, the focus cannot possibly be on things which are subject to the mysterious "law" of eternal returns but must be strictly and sharply aimed at a specifio body of works and opinions—a relatively dense core surrounded by a less clearly defined fringe zone—indigenous to the German-speaking countries and covering a closely circum­ scribed time-span, the so-called Expressionist decade extending from, roughly, 1910 to, roughly, 1920 or 1925. If it aims at being complete, such a survey, apart from taking 15

stock of the strong but often elusive influence of philosophers like Nietzsche, must also account for the most important forerunners of the movement, both at home and abroad. In our case, this would, ideally, entail extended references to writers like Strindberg, Wedekind and Sternheim in the drama, Whitman, Verhaeren and Marinetti in poetry, Van Gogh and Munch in the plastic arts. Whereas these artists might well be called proto-Expressionists, other predecessors—such as Maeterlinck in the drama and Rimbaud in poetry—merely constitute the frame of reference without which E. as a historical phenomenon cannot be fully grasped. And while they themselves can hardly be said to have furnished the specific models appropriate to, and valid for, the new style, their—often significant—influence must be taken into account whenever the evolution of Expressionists such as Barlach, Kandinsky, Kokoschka, Przybyzewski and Trakl is traced. I n fact, Symbolism, which, in nearly every way, rejects what E. stands for (as Professor Lipski shows in the opening sections of his essay), is a stage through which many Expressionists had to pass in order to reach their artistic desti­ nations. Other artists whose works sometimes appear in studies devoted to literary E. —Leonid Andreev and Henri Lenormand, for instance—never got beyond t h a t stage and can be linked with E. only by means of their subjectivism, which Symbolism shares with E., without emulating the latter's example insofar as its subsequent change of direction—the turning outward in a violent projection of soul states—is concerned. The frame of reference for the subject matter dealt with in our volume would be incomplete without the other bracket, Neue Sachlichkeif, the successor movement to E. Here the task would be t h a t of showing a different kind of overlap, since most of the writers surfacing in the twenties (Bertolt Brecht, for instance, and Carl Zuckmayer) grew up in an atmosphere charged with Expressionist energy and slow in being depressurized. Similarly, the faculty of the Bauhaus was largely composed of artists with strongly Expressionist roots; nor could Erwin Piscator's theory and practice of the political theater be adequately defined without t h a t context. And even the slowly emerging doctrine of Socialist Realism crystallized in the course of a prolonged and heated debate over E . A survey such as ours, if it indulges in the Utopian desire of being complete and fully rounded, must further seek to trace the fortune of German E. in the rest of Europe as well as overseas; and, in doing so, it must endeavor to show the ideological or aesthe­ tic modifications effected in the various national environments, as well as explaining the reasons, for such time lags as may have occurred between the flowering of E. in Germany a n d the inroads it made into other literatures. Nor can it afford to slight the second wave of E., the ultimte uses made of it, say, by a Wolfgang Borchert, Friedrich Dürrenmatt, Thornton Wilder and Tennessee Williams. B u t even thus it would be sorely deficient and lacking in both authority and authen­ ticity if it failed to mention the role taken by E. in other spheres of human—primarily artistic—endeavor. After all, who would forget—even for one moment—that E . was initially tied to the plastic arts and only subsequently transferred to literature, and t h a t it flourished in music, the dance (two genuine Ausdruckskünste), as well as in cinematography and the theater—the one major exception being architecture, and 16

t h a t for reasons cogently explained by Ö. M. Ungers in his contribution to the Florence Convegno: Transferred to architecture, the idea underlying Expressionism, which culmi­ nates in the total detachment from reality by means of a purely visionary experience, cannot be directly realized. This is due to the innate quality of architecture, which, much more so than all the other arts, is tied to its mate­ rials, its purpose, its function and the principles of construction. The call for a pure vision can hardly be heeded by architecture, unless one restricts oneself to the realm of designs, i.e., ideas . . . Architecture is incap­ able of expressing all psychological phenomena. I t can achieve purely spiritual expression only if, in itself, it is not reality but reproduction, i.e., illusion. Therefore it is only correct to speak of Expressionist architecture insofar as its visionary aspect is concerned. The second issue regarding the true nature of E. pertains to the question as to wheth­ er t h a t phenomenon, in its German guise at least, was a movement sensu strictu. The an­ swer would certainly be in the negative if we were to include all the artists and works with a vested historical right to be housed under t h a t umbrella. Upon closer scrutiny on stylistic grounds, for instance, several poets represented in Menschheitsdammerung would probably have to be dismissed for various reasons—among them Georg Trakl (a Surrealist avant la lettre ?), Else Lasker-Schüler and Iwan Goll, to name only the most prominent "victims". Pinthus, who noted this discrepancy, sought to restore some kind of unity by stressing the common Weltgefühl—not necessarily Weltanschauung —and through the thematic grouping of the poems. But this does not alter the fact t h a t the twenty-three poets of his choice never subscribed to a common program, whether explicitly (by signing a manifesto) or implicitly. What we have, in fact, is not one E. but a number of loosely connected and subtly—or not so subtly—differentiated Expressionisms. Here we run into another question looming large for the concerned specialist; for each critic/historian must decide for himself whether to stress the stylistic, thematic or ideological sector and how to integrate these components to achieve unity-in-diversity. Since we are, first and foremost, students of literature as an art, we would do well to focus initially on the use of the medium (language), which should then be explained with a view toward the underlying attitudes and the themes which they engender. This question turns out to be especially burning if one looks for Expressionist traits in foreign literatures; for although there, too, analogous linguistic devices and techniques are occasionally used (not to mention documented and traceable influences, like t h a t of Marinetti on Becher, Döblin and Stramm, or the structural repercussions of Kaiser's Von morgens bis mitternacMs in O'Neill's Emperor Jones and Elmer Rice's derivative Adding Machine), thematic or theoretic approaches are much more promising, on the whole, since they do not have to account for changes imposed by the language barrier. Returning, for a moment, to the problem of E. as a movement, we observe that, in spite of the enormous variety of phenomena commonly subsumed under that label, certain relatively clearcut divisions and subdivisions can nevertheless be discerned and 17

methodologically adumbrated. Thus we may, by stretching a point, isolate the powerful strain of Activism manifesting itself in publications like Die Aktion and Das Ziel. A complex of views primarily weltanschaulich in nature, Activism fortunately permits us to syphon off the ideological components of E. Thus it is entirely symptomatic that, both in Eastern Europe and in Ireland, Toller had a much greater impact than Georg Kaiser or the "existential" Expressionist Ernst Barlach, and that Becher, Rubiner and the Weltfreund Werfel (representing what I might venture to call the mystic strain of Activism) far outstripped Trakl and Benn as intermediaries. Speaking in art-historical terms, we note that Die Brüche was a genuine Künstlergemeinschaft (artists' commune) whose members shared distinct stylistic preferences and formed a much more closely knit group than did Les Fauves, their French compeers, who cultivated an ornamental E. culminating in the florescent style of Henri Matisse. Der Blaue Beiter, in turn, was more diffuse in its aims and practices, and what held it together as a group gathering around its almanac was a craving for the spiritual in art—to borrow the title of Kandinsky's influential treatise. Über das Geistige in der Kunst, by the way, was largely responsible for the shadow cast abroad by German Expressionist art, as is proved by the various "instant" translations into other tongues. Worringer's Abstraktion und Einfühlung, on the other hand, was too theoretical and not sufficiently topical to have the same direct appeal to foreign artists. It was savored only by philosophic minds like T. E. Hulme, who transmitted his knowledge to Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis, the two kingmakers of Vorticism. Unlike Hermann Bahr's inane little monograph, which enjoyed an international reputation far exceeding its intrinsic worth, it was not immediately translated into English; nor was Däubler's paradigmatic book of essays, Der neue Standpunkt. (In literature, minor critics like Friedrich Marcus Huebner and Lenore Ripke-Kühn, in some instances, seem to have been more effective ambassadors of Expressionist goodwill than a Kasimir Edschmid or a Max Krell On the whole, however, it was probably Kurt Pinthus who was the most successful propagator.) In the verbal arts, the term "Expressionist movement" is most aptly applied to the equipe gathered around Herwarth Walden and Der Sturm, with its radical Wortkunstwerk theories and its many organizational outlets, such as the Sturm-Galerie, the Sturm-Verlag, the Sturmbühne and the various Sturmschulen. Since here was a fairly coherent body of doctrine, many foreign artists and writers were attracted to this circle and absorbed E. in this manner. Most of the German Expressionists unconnected with Der Sturm or Die Aktion, however, were either Einzelganger (like Trakl, Kaiser, Barlach or, ultimately, Kokoschka) or briefly adhered to cliques promoting a plethora of short-lived magazines and forming constantly shifting designs in the richly varied mosaic. Thus German E. might well be regarded as a "combination of a highly charged core with ill-defined margins" (John Willett). And as we move outward beyond the linguistic borders of Teutonia, the fringe zone surrounding that core grows perceptibly larger as well as hazier, and we enter—to use Paul Hadermann's expression—a difficult "terrain with moving frontiers". Off and on in this collective enterprise, the reader will chance upon the notion that in E. we have to do with tendencies characteristic of modern art as a whole, rather 18

than traits inherent only in certain parts—the implication being that, basically, all "progressive" and "experimental" art of the twentieth century may, in one way or another, be treated as an aspect of an entity called Modernism. As Breon Mitchell puts it in his essay, "there has been a recent tendency to broaden the definition of E. in such a way as to subsume the whole of the modern development of the arts". Un­ fortunately, the tendency is not so recent, and for many decades a persistent inability or unwillingness, on the part of certain critics, to make distinctions where they are both needed and warranted has greatly obscured the issue. Historically, it was not until well into the second decade of our century that the line was drawn between E., Cubism and Futurism, for example. The lack of a clear temporal perspective may be blamed, and serves as an excuse, for this critical myopia of keen but early observers like Daubler and Walden. Far less excusable, from the historical point of view, is Gottfried Benn's dogged persistence in this perspectivist error, which, as late as 1933, caused him—within the broad framework of his courageous apology for E.—to treat these terms coextensively: "Der Futurismus als Stil, auch Kubismus genannt, in Deutschland vorwiegend als Expressionismus bezeichnet, vielfältig in seiner empirischen Abwandlung, einheitlich in seiner inneren Grundhaltung . . . " Nor was Benn later to repent this sin; for in 1955, when preparing a modified version of the essay he had written more than twenty years earlier—his preface to the anthology Lyrik des expressionistischen Jahrzehnts--he added injury to insult by offer­ ing still another synonym: "Ich werde im folgenden die Bezeichnung Expressionismus unkritisch in dem ihr seit vier Jahrzehnten angewachsenen Sinn verwenden. Zunachst möchte ich darauf hinweisen, dass dieser Stil—der in anderen Landern Futurismus, Kubismus, spater Surrealismus genannt wurde—in Deutschland die Bezeichnung Expressionismus [behalt]." It is fortunate that today—at least in Germany and the Anglo-Saxon countries—the distinction between these four germinative movements is often made with great sub­ tlety and acumen, presupposing an awareness of the need for analytical dissection rather than an untimely urge for synthetic constructs held together either by vast generali­ zations or by commonplaces pointing to an ideological superstructure. The same cannot, or not as yet, be said of the majority or critics in the Romania and in Eastern Europe. As Renato Poggioli has persuasively argued in his book The Theory of the Avantgarde, in the Latin countries the notion of the avantgarde as a force uniting all "progressive" tendencies "in the two spheres of social and artistic thought" has long been prevalent, whereas this label is rarely used in England, America and—we may add—in Germany as well, because here "a less rigid classical tradition . . . has made the sense of exception, novelty and surprise less acute, by natural contrast". But even though, historically, the socio-political nature of the phenomenon is taken for granted and somehow or other impinges on the study of avantgarde art in France, Italy, Spain and South America, the discussion itself often focuses on the cultural products. The same cannot always be said of the use which is made of the concept by critics dealing with the East European avantgarde. Actually, most historians of twentieth-century literature in Poland, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Rumania, etc., tend to substitute the designation Modernism for the term 19

Avantgarde. Modernism, for them, is an all-embracing force responsible for most twen­ tieth-century developments in the Slavic literatures. Once again, the vast complexity of the cultural scene is reduced, in the hands of some single-minded critics, to a pattern much more uniform and rigid than actually emerges from the observable facts. Luckily, the crude overview offered by Dmitri Čizewsky in his Outline of the History of Slavic Literatures is balanced by the skilful adumbration of the subject in surveys such as Endre Bojtar's essay "Le Problème des tendances dans la poésie est-européenne entre les deux guerres" (Studia Slavica Hungarica, XIV [1968], 63-73), where a breakdown of national and supra-national trends into specific movements and groupings is attempted: L'activisme hongrois, le futurisme russe, la poésie tchèque dite 'civilisatrice', le futurisme polonais; puis la seconde vague: l'expressionnisme polonais, tchèque et letton, le groupe tardif (et de la sorte englobant le constructivisme aussi) des keturvejininkas lithuaniens, le futurisme des divers groupes d'Ukraine, l'expressionnisme bulgare; enfin, la troisième vague, le groupe con­ structiviste-surréaliste: constructivisme de Kassák en Hongrie, le L E F russe, la littérature des faits, la Nowa Sztuka polonaise, l'Awangarda de Cracovie, le 'poétisme' tchèque. Ajoutons encore la poésie prolétarienne qui présente dans tous les pays et embrasse une très large gamme de tendances du symbo­ lisme a certains éléments du constructivisme, en passant par l'expressionnisme, de la plus fréquente de toutes. Il s'agit la, dans chaque cas, de groupes littéraires, même s'ils portent des denominations de tendance, telles l'expressionnisme, le futurisme, etc. La cause de ce phénomène est qu'en Europe orientale les tendances se sont mélangées et différent sensiblement des manifestations occidentales du même nom. Ainsi le futurisme russe n'a rien de commun, outre sa denomination, avec le mouvement de Marinetti et de ses amis. Professor Konstantinovic's statement regarding Croatian, Serbian, Slovenian and Bulgarian literature, to the effect t h a t "hitherto E. has not been accepted as a generally valid concept of period in South Slavic literary history," could easily be extended t o mean that, actually, nowhere but in Germany itself E. was, at any given time, the dominant style or trend in modern art. For depending on the many variables which determine the overall picture of an age, whether culturally, socially, politically, econo­ mically or in matters of religion, no two scenes will be exactly alike. Thus the readers of this volume should not be surprised to find t h a t repeatedly (whether in Belgium, Holland, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Rumania and even Denmark) the cultu­ ral physiognomy of a country, or part thereof, was formed only after a battle—some­ times ending in a stalemate—between the Teutonic forces of E. and the Latin phalanx of movements ranging from Symbolism by way of Apollinaire and Futurism to Dada and Surrealism. Some countries—such as Yugoslavia, where the Serbs embraced Surrealism and the Croatians E.—were split right down the middle, whereas in others the conflict was brief and less incisive. Thus England rid itself of Futurism and Surreal­ ism as a duck shakes off water after dipping into a pond. Most of the Latin countries, on the other hand, did not have to face the issue; literary Germany, in its turn, channell­ ed Dada into political life, thereby avoiding a confrontation with Surrealism (which occurred only after World War Two). When analyzing these cultural tensions, which prevailed, for longer or shorter periods, in many of the smaller, more peripherally 20

located countries, especially in Eastern Europe, we must also keep in mind their enormous Nachholbedarf, i.e., the urgent need, after their socio-political emancipation, for catching up with Central European developments from ca. 1870 on. Hence the near-simultaneity, observed in Hungary and elsewhere, of Naturalism, E. and Sur­ realism. I t is for reasons of historical accuracy and scholarly precision t h a t I question the value of Professor Vajda's assertion that "even in its very name . . . Expressionism represents one of the characteristic traits of all Romantic-Modernistic tendencies''. For such a view would seem to deny, by implication, the modernity of the classical vein inherent in Cubism, De Stijl, Constructivism, Suprematism and even Vorticism, and I hesitate to accept the pragmatic conclusions drawn from the assertion of the "primacy of the subjective and creative element of artistic activity" in twentieth-century art: We will not emphasize the manifold gradations of various tendencies within modern literature and art—which, in any case, have lost some of their dis­ tinctness with the passing of time—but rather their methodological similarities, which may be seen in Expressionism. The philosophical background to which Expressionism harks back is thus decisive for modernistic art, i.e., for the art of the artistic and literary avant-garde of our century in its totality. Discussing particular authors and works in this exceedingly broad framework, one should beware of implicating writers like Kafka, Joyce, and Garcia Lorca unless one is ready to use extremely fine tools of stylistic analysis. Thus Kafka—like Alfred Kubin, whom Professor Hadermann mentions in his essay because he was briefly linked with Der Blaue Reiter, of which the rabid individualist Paul Klee was also a temporary member—did not really "move in the circle of the Prague Expressionists," as Professor Vajda will have us believe. For no such circle actually existed; and if there really was a grouping, it was so loose as to defy description in terms of a movement or cénacle. To be sure, if only for historical reasons, Werfel must be regarded as an Ex­ pressionist; b u t can the same be reasonably said of Martin Buber and Max Brod? As for Kafka, his work—except for some very early pieces—shows no stylistic affinity with E. Much more meaningful, in my view, would be a linking of the so-called Prague School (Kafka, Kubin and Meyrink) with Surrealism, which was then, admittedly, non-existent as a historical phenomenon but which had its roots in German and French Romanticism. By discussing these writers in his book on the grotesque (in the chapter entitled "Die Erzahler des Grauens"), Wolfgang Kayser took a first, important step in the right direction. As for Joyce—whose name figures in many essays seeking to define the nature of English E.—he may have had some brittle first-hand connection with the movement (primarily, one imagines, through Eugène Jolas and his influential magazine transition), but as a bold experimenter in structure and language he stands clearly outside any such tradition. Oddly enough, but not surprisingly, he exerted a decisive and measurable influence on such German "Expressionist" prose writers as Hans Henny J a h n n (Perrudja) and Alfred Döblin (Berlin Alexanderplatz). Döblin, by the way, also borrowed 21

some of his techniques from John Dos Passos, author of Manhattan Transfer and him­ self a fairly active participant in the dramatic experiments undertaken by the Expressionistically inclined New Playwrights. Neither would Federico Garcia Lorca seem to fit into a pigeonhole called E. (much less so, at any rate, than the Rilke of some of the Duino Elegies and certain of the Sonnets to Orpheus). He moves, instead, in the rich and suggestive atmosphere of Surrealism, a movement whose underlying world view the Spaniards found congenial to their temper, and whose rich pictorial language he himself infused with folkloristic elements. Thus while a play like Blood Wedding may well be discussed without reference to Andre Breton and his cohort, Lorca's odes (to Dali, to the Immaculate Conception, etc.) and his lyrical cycle A Poet in New York should be studied in that context. It is a stroke of historical irony that the poet referred to in the title (Walt Whitman) was also an acknowledged forerunner of E. My cautionary note regarding facile equations or sweeping generalizations applies, with equal force, to Professor Arnold's essay on foreign models for German Expression­ ist prose, especially to the author's suggestion "that the Expressionists were ready to use any style whatever" which, naturally, tips the scale in favor of thematic and ideo­ logical criteria. Thus Arnold inadvertently commits the same fallacy as Walter Sokel, whose book The Writer in Extremis stresses the subject matter preferred in the literature of E. In his contribution to the Rothe volume, on the other hand, Sokel discerns in Expressionist prose an "objectivating narrative tradition"—and that with reference to a style usually praised or blamed for its utter subjectivism! How much scholarly uncertainty still prevails in this particular field of inquiry is demonstrated, once again, by the fact that Arnold considers the d'Annunzianesque traits inherent in works like Heinrich Mann's trilogy Die Göttinnen to be proto-Expressionist, which leads him to suspect Flaubert-—the author of Salammbô and the Tentation . . . rather than the creator of Madame Bovary or IS Education sentimentale—of being an ancestor of E. (On alto­ gether different grounds—and with how much greater justification!—Benn celebrated the French master as the champion of Ausdruckskunst which, in his eyes, meant an art of pure abstraction rather than E. in the historical sense.) Little is gained, however, by introjecting elements more properly placed in the context of décadenceand fin-desiècle art into the discussion of literary E., unless it were done with the intention of demonstrating the transitional nature of certain works stylistically suspended between two ages. Nor would it be altogether "cricket" to eschew the question of what constitutes German Expressionist prose by choosing as exhibits solely narratives written by authors rightly or wrongly linked with E. This is the facile solution embraced by Fritz Martini in his Reclam anthology Prosa des Expressionismus, where rather conventional stories by Kafka and Heinrich Mann appear side by side with more relevant selections by Benn, Sternheim, Edschmid and Döblin. Perhaps the most intelligent way of solving this knotty problem—which, apart from Max Krell's suggestive monograph in the series Tribüne der Kunst und Zeit, has so far been most intelligently treated in three or four German dissertations—would be to apply the stylistic criteria adduced in most studies of Expressionist drama and poetry, especially those listed in Edschmid's pro22

grammatic lecture "Uber den dichterischen Expressionismus". If one were to do this systematically (using such features as concentration, intensity, distortion, black-white contrast as in the film, dynamieism, succinctness, telescoping, telegram style and so forth as yardsticks), only a handful of the works assembled by Martini would qualify, and the authors one would wish to focus on initially would most likely be Sternheim and Benn, followed by Edschmid, Döblin and Rene Schickele, with Heinrich Mann's parodistic novella "Kobes" bringing up the rear. In my essay "Expressionism: Style or Weltanschauung?" (reprinted in the present volume), I have dressed the catalogue of traits ingrained in German E. In the following pages, I should like to review this list in order to set the stage for a brief resumé of the basic differences between E. and its chief contenders. There is, first of all, no quarrel­ ling with the fact that, in order to qualify as a bona fide Expressionist, an artist must reject the mimetic approach. Thus, epistemologically, E. undermines the foundations of realistic art, whether couched in the form of Realism, Naturalism or Impressionism (where, paradoxically, extreme subjectivism turns out to be the only truly objective stance). Thus Edschmid asserts: "Die Welt ist da. Es ware sinnlos, sie zu wiederholen," and Paul Klee opens his "creative confession" with the maxim "Kunst gibt nicht das Sichtbare wieder, sondern macht sichtbar". What Expressionist art seeks to render visible, however, are soul states and the violent emotions welling up from the innermost recesses of the subconscious. (Hence the Expressionist cult of the primitive as that state in which Seelenstände—Hermann Bahr's German rendition of the French états d'âme—h^ve not yet been filtered through the various layers of consciousness.) What is caught here, on the canvas or in the poem, are extreme moods, such as numinous fear or ecstatic joy, externalized by means of projection and outwardly manifesting themselves as distortions of color, shape, syntax, vocabulary or tonal relationships ( = dissonance). On the surface, this may seem to be the same kind of dislocation which is generally considered to be the hallmark of satire. But it would be a crucial error to identify E. with the satirical mode, as Thomas Mann has done in a famous passage of his autobio­ graphical Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen directed at his brother Heinrich. Satire, after all, is a technique deliberately used for moral or political ends. Perhaps the Ex­ pressionist distortions are more closely related to the grotesque which, in Wolfgang Kayser's opinion, reveals a rift between the numinal and the phenomenal world, and which shows man to be ill at ease in the presence of events and situations eluding his grasp, just as Worringer claims primitive man to have been in the face of a terrifying, anonymous and inscrutable nature. Distortion, taken to its extreme, is bound to result in one or the other kind of abstraction—and all too frequently E. is confused with abstract art, partly, one as­ sumes, due to a misinterpretation of Worringer's use of the term Abstraktion. However, even though Expressionist art, along with Cubism and Impressionism, may lead the way toward non-representation, qua E. it has nothing in common with the controlled, disciplined and, at times, serene Ausdruckskunst of Neo-Plasticism or Suprematism. It is most emphatically content-oriented (which is not the same as saying that its orientation is thematic), and Edschmid speaks with contempt of what he calls 23

"öde Abstraktion". Like Schönberg (the pre-Twelve Tone Schönberg, that is to say), Kandinsky subscribes to Inhaltskunst and insists that his own "abstract" compositions, expressing specific moods, purposively manipulate the viewer's emotions and consti­ tute a literal application of the principle of internal necessity. Here, then, are the roots of Abstract Expressionism—an apparent contradictio in adiecfo which is, nevertheless, in keeping with Kandinsky's theory. In objecting to the inherent lyricism of Kandinsky's canvases, which he, in a manner of speaking, took to be non-Expressionist, Wyndham Lewis asserted the primacy of the volitional element, the Kunstwollen which, enshrined by Worringer, causes E. to differ radically from both Impressionism (the gentle art of drifting) and Surrealism (whose nonvolitional bent explains its penchant for psychic automatism). Being heavily focused on the human soul and the pains and pleasures it is prone to, E. is a distinctly anthropocentric art for which, as K u r t Pinthus phrases it, man is the "Ausgangspunkt, Mittelpunkt, Zielpunkt" of the creative process, even to the point where landscapes, animals and inanimate objects (such as Delaunay's painted Eiffel Tower, according to Daubler) are "vermenschlicht". I n this respect, it is clearly at odds with Futurism (with its glorification of the machine as a perpetrator of speed) as well as Vorticism, which likes the machine only when it is at rest. Nor, by the way, does E. emulate Cubism or Futurism in their obsession with simultaneity (of states and processes respectively)—no matter what Theodor Daubler and others would have us believe. For Daubler's "Wenn einer gehangt wird, erlebt er im letzten Augenblick sein ganzes Leben nochmals , , presupposes a rapid shifting of scenes and images, and not their temporal coalescence. The force and violence of the Expressionist projection, it seems, can only be channelled into unilinear expression. While focusing on man, the Expressionists did not treat him as a person, individual or character in the accepted sense. The projection of soul states they were concerned with aimed much rather at a collective or metaphysical sphere, and their preferred realm was either cosmic (pervaded with mystico-religious feelings, as in many paintings by Van Gogh, or shot through with visionary elements) or broadly humanitarian (centered in what is typical and repre­ sentative rather than what is unique and eccentric). Actually, the much touted "Zersplitterung des I c h " initiates a process of allegorization, and even the most intimate Wandlung or personal Aufbruch operates on a fairly high level of abstraction. I n short: in their yearning for spiritualization the Expressionists clung to essences without ridding themselves of the phenomenal world. For a pragmatic Englishman like John Gals­ worthy, addressing the English Association in a lecture entitled "On Expression'' (1924), this urge seemed ludicrous and farcical: Some few years ago painters coined the word "expressionism". When asked what they meant by it, they became involved and hot. Only fools—they thought— could mistake their meaning. Amazing number of fools in those days! At last a great good painter made it clear. Expressionism meant depicting the inside of a phenomenon without depicting the outside in a way t h a t could be recognised. That is to say, if you wanted to express an apple-tree you drew and coloured one vertical and three fairly horizontal lines, attached a small coloured circle to one of these, and wrote the word " F r u i t y " in the 24

catalogue. To express an Englishman by the expressionistic method you drew a pump, coloured it in a subdued manner and wrote the words "not working properly" in the catalogue. Seeking to disown individualism, the Expressionists threw psychology—or at least Individual-Psychologie—overboard and dethroned causality. Their stance, how­ ever, must not be confused with the wilfully destructive manner of the Dadaists who overthrew logic and reason with the express purpose of reducing all existing values, cultural as well as socio-political, to non-sense. And nothing could be further from the truth than to assert that, like Dada, E. was an anarchist movement. Breaking through the individual shell or mask, (persona), Expressionist art (para­ doxically) fuses the extremely subjective with the starkly objective. Unlike Surrealism, which, abandoning surface psychology but not depth psychology, would gladly align itself with Freud (without sharing the latter's obsession with complexes and inhibi­ tions), initially moved in a realm of pure and utter subjectivity, E. would feel more at home with Jung's universalizing notion of the collective unconscious. In fact, O'Neill's Emperor Jones, which is a paragon of literary E., traces precisely this movement away from psychological motivation and toward a supra-personal (and ultimately racial) consciousness, which is that of the primitive. Stravinsky's Sacre du Prinfemps, that model of musical E., on the other hand, moves altogether in the prehistorical realm and does not touch upon civilization. While, theoretically, it may be simple enough to distinguish the various strains of Modernism, given the necessary skill, knowledge and sophistication, in actual practice, when it comes to screening specific works and showing exactly what trends have inter­ acted to produce them, we are sometimes faced with a real dilemma. At other times, it may be possible to anatomize such Mischformen. Thus, in the vers libre poems of J. R. Becher the impact of Whitman makes itself, at times, as strongly felt as does that of Marinetti; and both influences are fused by means of the Activist world view which makes a product like "Menseh stehe auf!" so topical and so uniquely German. The abyss which, on the other hand, separates an Expressionist Lautgedicht like Rudolf Blümner's "Ango Laina" from a Dadaist non-sense poem like Hans Arp's "Elefantenkarawane" cannot be fathomed by a mere confrontation of these works, since both poets use language abstractly and without apparent reference to intelligible meaning. What is needed here is a knowledge of the theoretical assumption underlying Expression­ ist and Dadaist practice respectively. Similarly, the Dadaists, who were proud of being intellectual and artistic scav­ engers, gladly availed themselves of Bruitist music, using it in a way incompatible with the function assigned to martial noise in Futurist theory, where the notion of Larmmusik originated. Sometimes it is merely a name which throws the comparatist researching twentieth-century art and literature off the track. Thus while Vorticism warmly embraced the views outlined by Worringer, it combined the latter's Weltanschauung with Bergsonian theories adapted—one might even say: inverted—by T.E. Hulme. What it produced in the plastic arts, however, were works outwardly unrelated to E., i.e., machine-like constructs striking the beholder as being Cubo-Futuristic. And just as Hulme extracted from the Impressionist flux a hardened, classicist 25

"manifold intensity," so, under the hands of Ezra Pound, Imagism turned into a Parnassian variant of poetic Impressionism. (E. and Vorticism part ways in several other respects as well, most strikingly perhaps in their disparate views regarding the Gesamtlcunstwerk.) As a rule, the mixture of styles so characteristic of our age, and illustrating the profusion of conflicting and overlapping tendencies in the first two decades of this century, can be more readily discerned in painting than in literature—especially in an international context where each phenomenon is apprehended in a manner that is actually or potentially comparative. For each language has stylistic and grammatical features which cannot be exactly reproduced in other languages. Thus an influence from abroad may not leave any visible traces in the work of an author who has absorbed it, and cases like that of August Stramm's (linguistic) impact on the Dutch Expressionist Marsman are relatively rare. Pictorial language, however, is, within stated limits, uni­ versal; hence the relative ease with which art critics dissect even the most eclectic paintings. Thus Picasso's justly famous "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon" (1907) marks a decisive point in the history of modern art; for, as the finished canvas demonstrates, the artist found himself at a cross-roads, one path leading in the direction of what may be loosely termed Expressionist primitivism, the other having Cubism as its goal. And while the Spaniard may have been tempted to choose the former path, the "natu­ ralized'' Frenchman took the latter. Futurist painting which, being dynamic, glorifies speed and goes so far as to invest inanimate objects—a street or a row of houses—with rhythmic motion, can be divided into two main branches, depending on the style which it accelerates. Thus, works like Balla's "Leash in Motion" could be viewed as examples of accelerated Impressionism, while Russolo's Dynamism of an Automobile or Severini's Dynamic Hieroglyphic of the Bal Tabarin exemplify an accelerated Cubism—as opposed to Wyndham Lewis' arrested Futurism. Within the tradition of German pictorial E., a brief glance at three such androgynous works may suffice: Franz Marc's "Blue Horses", exemplifying (like so many of that painter's canvases) the Cubist strain within the E. of Der Blaue Reiter; the same artist's late "Tierschicksale", painted in a manner reminiscent of the Futurists' accelerated Cubism but used for entirely different ends (they depict a world on the brink of chaos rather than glorifying war, speed and the machine); and Lyonel Feininger's geometrized cityscapes, which anticipate the constructivism of the Bauhaus style. This crossing of trends, which results in a mixture of styles compatible with the mentality, the world view and the genius of individual artists, whole movements or entire ethnic groups, constitutes a formidable challenge for the comparatist who seeks to isolate the various national or regional strains of E. even in cases where they are intricately blended in a mélange known as avantgarde art, modernism or what have you. Thus it will be his principal task to name the ingredients which went into the making of such Expressionist, semi-Expressionist or pseudo-Expressionist phenomena as Zenitism in Yugoslavia, Vorticism in England, Poetism in Czechoslovakia, Catastrophism in Poland, Vitalism in Holland, Aktivizmus in Hungary and Centrifugism in Russia. With a similar attention to detail, he will have to study the contents of such 26

"progressive'' journals as Blast in England, transition in France, Zenit in Yugoslavia, Tett and Ma in Hungary, Zdrój in Poland, Integral in Romania, Vezni in Bulgaria, Ruimte in Belgium and Het Getij in Holland, in order to determine to what extent these publi­ cations actually merit the epithet "Expressionist". Surely, no definitions of E. found in the current handbooks or dictionaries of literature will serve our purpose; and it is both shocking and amusing to read and to compare the relevant entries found in ref­ erence works like A Modern Lexicon of Literary Terms, A Reader's Guide to Literary Terms, the Handbook to Literature by Thrall and Hibbard (where Eliot's "Waste Land" is called "the poetic classic of the movement") or Laffont-Bompiani's Dictionnaire universel des lettres (whose definition would seem to be more appropriate to Surrealism). Trying to base a synthetic definition of international E. on such epitomes, as graduate students have done repeatedly at my behest, is a futile exercise having considerable pedagogical value. The most immediate satisfaction in the search for the magic formula encompassing the system of norms constituting European E. can probably be derived from the study of those artists who were self-proclaimed addicts to, and propagators of, the movement and who published proclamations bolstering their position. Among their number we find writers like Henrik Marsman ("Divagatie over het expressionisme") and Karel van den Oever ("Rond wat men moent: expressionisme") in Holland, Lajos Kassók ("Aktivizmus") in Hungary, Geo Milev in Bulgaria, Lucien Blaga in Rumania, Ippolit Sokoiov in Russia, Stanislaw Przybyzewski in Poland, A. B. Šimić and Stanislav Vinavér (Manifest ekspressionisticke skole) in Yugoslavia, and the New Playwrights (Em Jo Basshe's essay "The New Showmanship") in the U.S.A. But even in such apparently clearcut cases one must not be fooled by the use of the term "Expressionism"; for some of these self-styled Expressionists misunderstood, or garbled the message signalled from abroad. Obviously, the mere application of a convenient label means little to a skilled investigator. Wyndham Lewis, for example, never called himself an Expressionist, even though he publicly acknowledged the debt he and his fellow-Vorticists owed to "unofficial Germany". And the Swedish playwright Par Lagerkvist altogether avoided the term in his programmatic essay "Modern Theater: Point of View and Attack" (1918), where the only reference to German E. is an oblique one buried in the following passage about Strindberg: What has been taken by force is something that, in a much higher degree, remains Strindberg's inviolable personal property. It is that genuine Strindbergian atmosphere in a drama, the storm and eruption, the violent outburst of morbid and raging genius. This is what they have hurried to take possession of. In Germany—with a shriek as from jubilant dervishes—and even, if much more modestly, in Sweden. Other writers who are widely acknowledged as Expressionists have expressly denied their German "ancestry". This is true of O'Neill and Elmer Rice in the U.S.A. and, less emphatically so, of O'Casey and Dennis Johnston on the other shore of the Atlantic. (Not unreasonably, it has been suggested that O'Neill as well as Susan Glas27

pell may have been under the spell of German Expressionist films such as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, an influence frankly acknowledged by Ghelderode.) But such a personal disavowal does not obliterate the fact t h a t firsthand knowledge must be presupposed in one or the other instance. Thus, even if we wisely refrain from exploring parallels and analogies due, perhaps, to a mysterious Zeitgeist, we still face a task so arduous as to defy description. Nevertheless, it is a task which we, as comparative literary critics and historians, must tackle. For while a defeatist acquiescence in the state of perma­ nent chaos may sometimes be preferable to the superimposition of an artificial order, even the most hopelessly tangled web can often be sufficiently unravelled to reveal, or at least suggest, a basic design.

28

ULRICH WEISSTEIN

EXPRESSIONISM: STYLE OR "WELTANSCHAUUNG" ?*

"No matter how things turn out, one will have to admit that E. was the last common, general, and conscious attempt of a whole generation to instill new life into art, music, and literature." 1 I think that this holds true even though, geographically speaking, E. was more or less restricted to the Teutonic part of Europe: Germany, Scandinavia, and the Netherlands, including the northern, Flemish part of Belgium (James Ensor). Although, except in the theater—where Alexander Tairov and Vsevelod Meyerhold helped in shaping the physiognomy of "Revolutionary Romanticism" — Russia did not substantially contribute to this general Aufbruch, inspiration for many German "Expressionist" writers (such as Franz Werfel and, later, Hermann Hesse) came from Dostoevsky, just as some of the Activists were fond of Tolstoy. And in painting, the spirit of Russian mysticism strongly pervaded the aesthetic thinking of the Blaue Eeiter. It is not generally known that the latter group, apart from its whip Wassily Kandinsky, counted a considerable number of Russians among its members, as did its predecessor, the Neue Künstlervereinigung. Wladimir Bechtejeff, the brothers Burliuk, Axel von Jawlensky, Moissej Kogan, and Marianne von Werefkin are perhaps the most prominent of these. As a curiosity it might be mentioned that one of the Blaue Beiter was the American Albert Bloch, who subsequently became Professor of Art at the University of Kansas. On the whole, E. had little immediate impact on the Anglo-Saxon world, however. John Marin and the cubistically inclined Lyonel Feininger (who spent the decisive years of his career in Germany) embraced the cause; and shortly before World War I Wyndham Lewis and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska briefly raised the Vorticist flag in London.2 The plays of Georg Kaiser, Werfel, and Ernst Toller, performed on the New York stage around 1920, gave impetus to playwrights like Eugene O'Neill, Elmer Rice and, later, Thornton Wilder; and the English Group Theatre of W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood, including T. S. Eliot's Aristophanic minstrel show Sweeney Agonistes, was not unaffected by the German model. Yet it is no secret that, until fairly recently, the Busch-Reisinger Museum at Harvard University owned the only representative collection of paintings by members * Reprinted from Criticism, A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts, Vol. IX, No. 1 (Winter, 1967), with the permission of the editors. 1 Menschheitsdämmerung: Ein Dokument des Expressionismus, new ed. (Hamburg, 1959), p. 16. All translations used in this essay are my own. 2 For a discussion of Vorticism see my article "Vortieism: Expressionism English Style" in the Yearbook of Comparative and General Literature, X I I I (1964), pp. 28-40, as reprinted in this volume. 29

of the Brücke group to be found anywhere in the United States. But now the graphic and pictorial work of these artists is suddenly in great demand, and Peter Selz' monu­ mental study of German Expressionist Painting offers the most authoritative analysis of their art. 3 German Expressionist literature, on the other hand, is still unfamiliar and poorly understood in America and England. At least a few anthologies of plays and poetry in translation are now available: Michael Hamburger and Christopher Middleton's German Poetry 1919-1960 and Walter H. Sokel's An Anthology of German Expressionist Drama, absurdly subtitled "A Prelude to the Absurd".4 And one critical monograph in English, Sokel's The Writer in Extremis, has been published, albeit its predominantly thematic orientation reduces its value for those who seek to define the Expressionist style? But, after all: As E. had first to be discovered in England and America, it had to be rediscovered in post-war Germany. For Adolf Hitler had consigned it to aesthetic Limbo when he labelled all art that failed to live up to the naturalistic standards of Wilhelm Leibl "entartet". The Latin countries found E. uncongenial to their way of thinking and feeling. Being classicists at heart, the French prefer an art that seeks to depict objectively verifiable and measurable formal beauty. The father of Cubism was a Frenchman, Paul Cézanne; but it was a Dutchman, Piet Mondrian, who lifted the quasi-abstract art of Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso into the untroubled realm of what he called Pure Plastic Art. For the true Expressionist, however, Classicism was the very establishment whose foundations he sought to undermine, his Weltgefühl being admittedly closer to that of the Romantics. Gottfried Benn's introduction to the collection Lyrik des expressionistischen Jahrzehnts—which is a revised version of an essay in defense of E. published, courageously, in 19335a—culminates in the rhetorical assertion: "[E.] rose, fought its battles on the fields of Chalons, and was defeated. It raised its flag on the Bastille, the Kreml, and at Golgotha, but never reached Mount Olympus and other classical terrain." 6 Apart from Georges Rouault's neo-medieval stained-glass technique, the only kind of E. France produced was the decorative "Ausdruckskunst" of Les Fauves: the "wild beasts" André Derain, Maurice Vlaminck, and Henri Matisse in their paint­ ings executed between 1905 and 1910. Like the members of Die Brücke in the Dresden of those years, the Fauves developed a sudden, intense interest in primitive art, which had hitherto lingered away in ethnographic museums. But their Gallic esprit kept them from getting too fiercely involved in the quest for a revival of the barbaric spirit. Standing at the crossroads between Cubism and E., Picasso created his "Demoiselles d'Avignon" (1907), but then moved on to an art that was less contorted and more serene. Italy witnessed the spectacular rise of the proto-Fascist movement known as Futurism: a violent action art which sought, like Dadaism, to destroy the past with its 3 4

Peter Selz, German Expressionist Painting (Berkeley, 1957). Michael Hamburger and Christopher Middleton, German Poetry 1910-1960 (New York, 1962): Walter H. Sokel, An Anthology of German Expressionist Drama (New York, 1963). 5 Walter H. Sokel, The Writer in Extremis (Stanford, 1959). 5a For a discussion of the two versions of this essay, see my contribution to the volome Dichter und Leser: Studien zur Literatur (Groningen: Wolters, 1972), pp. 9 — 27, entitled "Vor Tische las man's anders: Eine Literarpolitische Studie über die beiden Fassungen (1933 und 1955) von Gottfried Benns Expressionismus—Aufsatz". 6 Lyrik des expressionistischen Jahrzehnts (Munich, 1962), p. 16. The essay "Expressionismus" appears in Bonn's Gesammelte Werke, ed. Dieter Wellershoff (Wiesbaden, 1959), I, pp. 240-256. 30

burdensome heritage. The Futurists indulged in a blind worship of speed and the ma­ chine, preferably when used as a means of warfare. In literature, they sought, in the words of Filippo Marinetti's Technical Manifesto, to free language by releasing it from the fetters of Latin grammar: "It is an urgent necessity to liberate the words by dragging them out of the cage of Latin syntax." 7 Their recipes were used by some of the radical German Expressionists: Johannes R. Becher, one of the most violent makers of word cascades, and Alfred Döblin, author of "Die Ermordung einer Butterblume" (The Assassination of a Buttercup) and Die drei Sprünge des Wang-Lun (The Three Leaps of Wang-Lun). Spain, to complete our rapid survey of the international situation, remained quite unaffected by E., even though the naturalized Toledan Domenico Theotocopuli, better known as El Greco, was, like Matthias Grünewald, regarded as one of the spiritual godfathers of Germany's twentieth-century "Stürmer und Dranger". In his autobiog­ raphy, Salvador Dalí reports that when he entered the Madrid Academy his teachers, belated Impressionists, had just begun to notice that shadows weren't black and were duly shocked when he blithely proceeded to demonstrate Cubist techniques of painting. Spain, perhaps partly on account of its Moorish background, soon afterwards came under the spell of French Surrealism. Kurt Pinthus' initially quoted statement was not invalidated by the birth of Surrealism in 1924, i.e., at a time when E. had already spent its force. True, Surrealismdue, most likely, to its Freudian underpinning—gained far more universal recognition than was ever bestowed on its German counterpart. But as a movement it was origi­ nally tied to poetry, painting being formally introduced only after Dali's arrival in Paris, when Andre Breton decided that an extension of the Surrealist aesthetic to the plastic arts was feasible. However, the movement, as was inevitable, produced a wealth of artistically inferior works due to the underlying assumption that art must rely on chance, and that the automatic transcription of subliminal experiences is a valid form of expression. At least in the first, experimental phase, the Surrealists wished nothing better than to ibe appareils enregisfreurs, just as the Impressionists had shown them­ selves satisfied with being "nothing but eyes", to use a phrase coined by Cézanne and aimed at Claude Monet. Surrealism altogether eschews the volitional element in art, the intention or what Wilhelm Worringer calls the Kunstwollen. Precisely this aspect, however, prevails in Expressionist art, where it predicates a total involvement of the artist, thereby pre­ cluding any sort of playful experimentation or automatism. No doubt: a lot of Ex­ pressionist art, both poetry and painting, has also dated on account of its pronounced stylistic mannerisms; but enough literary and pictorial works of sound value remain to make E. a vital and enduring force in modern European culture. What renders E. doubly interesting to students of contemporary art is the fact that its gospel spread to all the arts, thereby encouraging the formation and cultiva­ tion of Doppelbegabungen, which is hardly surprising if one keeps in mind that what mattered to the Expressionists was not so much the formal perfection of the finished 7 Filippo Marinetti, "Manifesto tecnico della letteratura futurista" in I Poeti (Milan, 1912), p. 12f.

Futuristi

31

product, i.e., the craft and technical skill (Worringer's Könneri) as the intensity of the artistic drive. As Ernst Stadler puts it in a poem that has often been called pro­ grammatic: Form und Riegel mussten erst zerspringen, Welt durch aufgeschlossne Röhren dringen: Form ist Wollust, Friede, himmlisches Genügen, Doch mich reisst es, Ackerschollen umzupflügen. Form will mich verschnüren und verengen, Doch ich will mein Sein in alle Weiten drangen. "Form wants to oppress and stifle me, but I desire a vast expansion of my being"; such is the message to which many artists of that generation barkened. Oskar Kokoschka is not only a painter but also the author of boldly experimental plays like Mörder Hoffnung der Frauen, a prototype of the Expressionist Schrei-Drama. Arnold Schönberg was a composer, a dramatist (he wrote the texts for several of his operas) and a painter. Indeed, some of his paintings were included in the first exhibition of the Blaue Reiter. Ernst Barlach, finally, was a sculptor and graphic artist as well as novelist and playwright, a man who expressed himself with equal force in several media. Bar­ lach, who hated to be classed with any group or movement, was perhaps the most genuine Expressionist, an Expressionist "beyond fashion and full of necessity".8 One of his basic themes was resurrection; and he treated it most poignantly in those comedies (Der arme Vetter and Der blaue Boll) where transcendence is achieved in a thoroughly earthy setting delineated with the utmost realism. Barlach was greatly shocked when he discovered that, at the Berlin Staatstheater, his characters were portrayed with Expressionist onesidedness.9 Following Pinthus, I have, so far, carefully avoided calling E. a movement. For viewed as a historical phenomenon in its totality, it cannot be properly regarded as such. The term movement, that is to say, should be reserved for groups of contemporaries having a common goal and subscribing to a formulated program. To be sure, in painting we have Die Brücke, a true Künstlergemeinschaft until Ernst Ludwig Kirchner's chron­ icle met with the disapproval of his fellow painters. The Blaue Reiter, on the other hand, showed relatively little artistic coherence. In literature, the situation was even more chaotic; and, with the exception of the clique gathered around Herwarth Walden's periodical Der Sturm, programs were written and theories developed only after the fact by critics, editors, anthologists and other "outsiders". In the introduction to his pamphlet Über neue Prosa (which forms part of the wellknown series Tribune der Kunst und Zeit), Max Krell observes that E. is a collective term used to refer to a complex of views and feelings ("Sammelwort eines Gefühlsund Anschauungskomplexes") but that the individual Expressionist prefers Lösung (creative freedom or independence) to Bindung (adherence to a common cause).10 8 From Julius Bab's Ghronik des deutschen Dramas (Berlin, 1922), iv, 106, as quoted in Expressionismus: Literatur und Kunst 1910-1923 (Munich, 1960), p. 312. 9 See Barlach's letter to his brother Karl of October 18, 1924. 10 Über neue Prosa (Berlin, 1919), p . 11.

32

However, as Krell points out, there are the Activists, a group of writers associated with publications like Das Ziel, Die Aktion, and Rene Schickele's far less virulent Die weissen Blatter. The Activists, of whom Heinrich Mann was the most prominent, had specific goals and shared a Weltanschauung, the term being here used in the narrower, socio-political sense. Perhaps they actually were, as one writer puts it, thwarted human­ ists who had discovered that the world in which they lived did not measure up to the ideal glowingly painted by their teachers.11 The literary output of the Activists was infused with a rigorously ethical spirit; for what they had in common with their Expressionist brethren was a craving for the renaissance of man. Their idol was Friedrieh Schiller, whom Friedrich Nietzsche, in an unforgettable phrase, had dubbed the "Moraltrompeter von Sackingen". These Zivilisationsliteraten, as Thomas Mann calls them in his autobiographical Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen, were invariably Pacifists, but, unlike the Dadaists, constructive ones. Many of them actively participated in setting up local and regional governments during the revolution of 1918-1919. The lines of distinction between E. and Activism have been admirably drawn in a book by Wolfgang Paulsen.12 What, however, makes it possible for us to discuss the Expressionists as a group, if there is no such thing as an Expressionist program or manifesto ? And can we, in spite of the apparent incoherence of views and styles, find some common denominator for all their efforts ? I think most of the writers and painters whom we now regard as Ex­ pressionists would have agreed that they were primarily concerned with capturing the essence of things rather than their external appearance. They found nothing more con­ temptible than the Naturalistic "slice of life" and its Impressionist variant. "Mensch werde wesentlich", the clarion call sounded by the Baroque epigrammatist Angelus Silesius, was their motto. The essence or core of things, however, can be reached only by resolutely piercing through the various layers of social, political, and psychological reality. This thrust, this plunging into depth, i.e., into a realm forbidden to the senses, presupposes a quasi-religious fervor, an urge to bring about a total Vergeistigung (spiritualization) of life and art. In the works of E., man is, therefore, directly confronted with eternity. Art, for these writers and painters, was not a substitute for religion; it was religion itself. And their principal line of communication, like that of the Mystics, was not a horizontal but a vertical one. This, naturally, poses an entirely new problem of communication on the human plane. Even before World War I, a number of critics conversant with the current trends sought to isolate certain traits in order to gain valid criteria for analyzing contemporary works of art. They did so almost invariably in terms of style, not content. For even if one concedes that certain themes—such as the father-son conflict, the struggle between duty and conviction, the Aufbruch from one mode of existence to another—occur fre­ quently in Expressionist literature, the thematic approach is doomed to failure when it

11 "Die Expressionisten waren enttauschte Humanisten, da die Wirklichkeit, in der sie lebten, nichts gemein hatte mit jener, die der Humanist der Gymnasien und Universitäiten lehrte" (Pinthus in Menschheitsdammerung, p. 15). 12 Aktivismus und Éxpressionismus: Eine typologische Untersuchung (Berne/Leipzig, 1935).

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comes to judging the plastic arts or comparing poetic with pictorial works. Pinthus, who singled out "intensity'' as the principal feature of E., himself succumbed to the thematic fallacy—which he rejected in theory—when arranging the contents of his* anthology. In his collection of essays Der neue Standpunkt, one of the first and most eloquent apologies for the new art, Theodor Daubler—the man whom Barlach seems to have used as a model for Der blaue Boll13—lists "speed, simultaneity, and extreme intensity in the telescopic view of the world" as traits characteristic of a style which, in his as yet undifferentiated view, comprises Cubism, Futurism, and E.14 "When a man is hanged, he relives his entire life in a final moment" is another way in which Daubler expresses the same idea.15 Viewed historically, such a description would seem to be more appli­ cable to paintings like Marc Chagall' sproto-Surrealistic "I and the Village" (1917) or Gino Severini's "Dynamic Hieroglyphic of the Bal Tabarin" (1912) than to any Ex­ pressionist work, except perhaps of the type represented by Franz Marc's "Tierschicksale" (The Fate of the Animals, 1913). Daubler also refers to Expressionist art as that of a highly concentrated vision: "A vision seeks to manifest itself with extreme succinctness in the realm of mannered simplicity: that is E. in every style."16 With regard to literature, Kasimir Edschmid, another pioneer of E. in both theory and practice, claims that "the rhythmic construc­ tion of the sentences is different. They serve the same intention, the same spiritual urge which renders only the essential."17 The sentences "link peak with peak, are telescoped into each other, and have ceased to be connected by the buffers of logical transition or the external plaster of psychology."18 An excellent illustration of this technique occurs in Kaiser's play Von morgens bis mitternachts, when the protagonist—a bank clerk who has absconded with a large sum of money and is now trying to reap the fruits of his Aufbruch—describes the effect of the climactic moment of a tandem race upon the already frenzied audience: "This is the utmost concentration of fact. Here it does the impossible. A fusion of all galleries. The utter dissolution of the individual leads to the formation of a dense core: passion."19 And later, when the waiter of a restaurant enters the chambre separée to inquire what he wants to eat, the clerk replies: "Peaks, peaks, from beginning to end. Peaks are the 13 In 1913, Barlach wrote to his publisher, Reinhard Piper: "[Der blaue Boll] ist ein schönes Modell, aber schwer. Man denkt: so viel Fleisch und Bein soll und will überwunden werden." 14 "Schnelligkeit, Simultaneitat, höehste Anspannung una die Ineinandergehörigkeit des Geschauten," Der neue Standpunkt (Dresden-Hellerau, 1916), p . 179. 15 "Wenn einer gehangt wird, so erlebt er im letzten Augenblick sein ganzes Leben nochmals," Ibid. 16 "Eine Vision will sich in letzter Knappheit im Bezirk verstiegener Vereinfachung kundgeben: das ist E. in jedem Stil," Ibid. 17 "Die Satze [liegen] im Rhythmus anders gefaltet als gewohnt. Sie unterstehen der gleichen Absicht, demselben Strom des Geistes, der nur das Eigentliche gibt." Über den Expressionismus in der Literatur und die neue Dichtung (Berlin, 1919), p. 65. 18 "[Sie] binden Spitze an Spitze, sie schnellen ineinander, nicht mehr verbunden durch Puffer logischer Überleitung, nicht mehr durch den federnden ausserlichen Kitt der Psychologie." Ibid., p. 66. 19 "Das ist die letzte Ballung des Tatsachlichen. Hier schwingt es sich zu einer schwindelhaften Leistung auf. Vom ersten Rang bis in die Galerie Verschmelzung. Aus siedender Auflösung des einzelnen geballt der Kern: Leidenschaft." Deutsckes Theater des Expressionismus, ed. Joachim Schondorff (Munich, n.d. [1963]), p . 217.

34

utmost concentrations in everything."20 It is this passion for intensity which explains, among other things, the telegram style of the Expressionist Schrei-Drama, as exempli­ fied by Reinhard Goering's famous Seeschlacht. This telegram style is the very opposite of the Naturalist Sekundenstil, which forms the literary equivalent of the "slice of life". Phrases such as "Höhe des Gefühls", "Spitzen des Gefühls", "Berge des Herzens" (this latter coined by Rainer Maria Rilke) abound in Expressionist literature, indicat­ ing that its mysticism is dynamic. Indeed, nothing could be further from the Expres­ sionist than to imitate the saints in the First Duino Elegy who, experiencing levitation, "knieten, Unmögliche, weiter und achtetens nicht". (Kept on kneeling, impossible ones, and did not heed it.) Perhaps the word most frequently uttered by Expressionist protagonists is Aufbruch which, untranslatable into English, suggests a complete de­ sertion of the past, a burning of bridges, a progress beyond the point of no return. Aufbruch is the catchword of a generation which, following Faust's example, seeks "auf neuer Bahn den Ather zu durchdringen / Zu neuen Spharen reiner Tatigkeit" (to penetrate the ether on new paths toward new spheres of pure activity). Such an awakening may occur either in the form of a sudden, volcanic eruption or, as in the Stationendrama of Strindbergian provenience, in a number of stages leading to some sort of spiritual catharsis, as in the protagonist's contrived Ecce Homo pose at the end of Von morgens bis mitternachts. The "Weltgefühl" which animates the Expressionist writers is captured in the titles of the numerous magazines, books, series, and anthologies issued between 1910 and 1920: Erhebung, Anbruch, Verkündigung, Botschaft, Entfaltung, Das neue Pathos, Der jüngste Tag, whereas the Activist publications carry names like Kameraden der Menschheit or Gemeinschaft. Menschheitsdammerung, patterned after Richard Wagner's Götterddmmerung and Nietzsche's Götzendammerung, points both to the end (dusk) of an epoch and to the beginning (dawn) of a new era. By far the most influential of these periodicals was Der Sturm, not only because, in its pages, literature, painting, and the graphic arts found themselves united—for that was a feature common to many publi­ cations of the time—but also because its editor, Herwarth Walden, solidified his own views on modern art by extracting a literary theory from the poems of August Stramm and by founding and supporting institutions like the Sturmschule and the Sturmbühne. The title of my essay must seem paradoxical to those who believe that, whether directly or indirectly, style must be a reflection of Weltanschauung, Weltanschauung being the sum total of intellectual views and emotional attitudes embraced by a given individual. No such paradox applies to those artistic movements which aim at repro­ ducing tangible reality by means of imitation. If Realism, which is the most moderate and commonsensical of these movements, can be defined, with Vivian de Sola Pinto, as "that art which gives a truthful impression of actuality as it appears to the normal consciousness,"21 then the "advance" of Naturalism or Impressionism can be measured 20

"Spitzen, Spitzen . . . Von Anfang bis zu Ende nur Spitzen . . . Spitzen sind letzte Ballungen in allen Dingen," Ibid., p. 220 f. 21 "Realism in English Poetry," Essays and Studies by Members of the English Association, XXV (1939), pp. 81-101. 35

as a deviation from that norm, as a shift of accent or change in emphasis effected by a Gustave Courbet or Claude Monet, a Paul Verlaine or Emile Zola. Realists, Naturalists and Impressionists, in their different ways, wish to portray solely that which is visible, audible, etc., not only to themselves but to all men. They fight their pitched battles uniformly in the name of objectivity. With the Expression­ ists—as, by the way, also with the Surrealists—the matter is radically different. In their opinion, the function of art is not to reproduce the visible but, in Paul Klee's words ("Kunst gibt nicht das Sichtbare wieder, sondern macht sichtbar"),22 to make visible that which is not ordinarily revealed to the senses. "The world exists already", says Edschmid. "It would be useless to repeat it." 23 Unlike the Surrealists, however, the Expressionists realized that before one can make the invisible visible one must ex­ perience a vision. As Marcel Proust points out in Du Coté de chez Swann, this externalization of the internal is natural enough to the writer, who enjoys the inestimable advantage of being able to place himself and his readers inside the characters he has created, whereas in real life we cannot intuit other people's soul states: A real person, profoundly as we may sympathise with him, is in a great measure perceptible only through our senses, that is to say, he remains opaque, offers a dead weight which our sensibilities have not the strength to lift. . . The novelist's happy discovery was to think of substituting for those opaque sec­ tions, impenetrable by the human spirit, their equivalent in immaterial sections, things, that is, which the spirit can assimilate to itself.24 But how is the painter to accomplish a similar feat? How can he, being so closely tied to the world of ordinary sense perception, break through the shell in order to reveal what it hides from view, i.e., our inmost thoughts and feelings? The answer furnished by the Expressionists is simple: through style; style meaning primarily shapes and colors representing an order of things that is different from the natural one. Seen from the mimetic point of view, however, this signifies abstraction or, at least, some sort of more or less violent distortion. Unlike mere Stilisierung, as we find it, say, in Mannerism or Art Nouveau (Jugendstil), style is not constituted by a gradual, decorative abstraction from organic form, resulting in a kind of arabesque. In the most radical instances of Expressionist style, the beholder, unless he prefers to ignore the artist's intentions by concentrating on formal values, is thus faced with the grim task of reuniting "abstract" compositions with their underlying Weltanschauung. The arguments I have adduced are partly taken from Worringer's book Abstraktion und Einfühlung which, originally published in 1908, was the aesthetic Bible of E., especially of the Blaue Reiter. Worringer contends that the urge for abstraction (Abstraktionsdrang) arises on two different levels of man's spiritual evolution: (a) at the primitive stage when, numinously overwhelmed by the supernatural forces which he thinks inherent in nature, man fashions objects which, being geometric and regular, i.e., 22 Schöpferische Konfession 23 Op. cü., p. 56. 24

(Berlin, 1920), p . 28.

Swarm's Way, tr. C. K. Scott Moncrieff (New York, n.d.), p . 118 f.

36

unnatural, give him a sense of superiority and, hence, security; and (b) at a highly sophisticated stage when the world of matter becomes indifferent, and transcendence is, once more, desired. This latter phase produces the abstract, spiritualized and highly ornamental art of the Orient. Worringer and his British disciple T. E. Hulme—the man who laid the theoretical foundations for Vorticism—scorned the realistic stage which intervenes between a and b. They spoke contemptuously of the classical art of Greece, of the Renaissance, and of the positivistic nineteenth century. Inspiring the Expressionists, Worringer singled out the Gothic and the Baroque as the only two ages which, due to their spiritual unrest and mystical aspiration, ought to be admired by the moderns. He himself pre­ ferred the Gothic to the Baroque, because the latter, by intensifying the sensual until it became suprasensual,25 had chosen a devious way toward spiritualization, whereas in the Gothic cathedral man's urge toward spiritual transcendence (Vergeistigung) was directly embodied. In Worringer's and Hulme's opinion, all classical art, grown out of a harmonious relationship between man and nature, signals an abdication of the will. Kunstwollen (artistic volition), however, to their mind, was the agent which assured man's ascen­ dancy over his environment. Empathy and imitation are the cornerstones of an aesthetic formed by weaklings. They were now to be deposed, and alienation and abstraction crowned in their place. The two leading German schools of Expressionist art may serve to illustrate the two levels of abstraction named by Worringer: the Brücke group representing the neoprimitive phase, and the Blaue Better the oriental. As Hermann Bahr states in his book Expressionismus, "Just as primitive man, frightened by nature, hides within himself, we moderns flee a civilization that devours man's soul."26 How the members of Die Brücke saved their souls was demonstrated, some years ago, by the exhibition "Das Ursprüngliche und die Moderne," which was held at the West Berlin Akademie der Künste. Here the primitive objects owned by the Berlin and Dresden ethnographic museums were shown side by side with the paintings and sculptures they had inspired. Following in the footsteps of Paul Gauguin, Emil Nolde and Max Pechstein sepa­ rately visited the South Sea Islands in 1913 and 1914. Both returned imbued with the "savage" spirit. Pechstein's Credo in the volume Schöpferische Konfession begins with exclamations like "Work! Frenzy! Crush the brain! Chew! Devour! Gulp! Squash! Blissful pains of delivery. The brush cracks and should like to pierce the canvas. Trample on the paint tubes . . . Paint! Roll in paints, wallow in chords ! In the thick of chaos."27 At approximately the same time, Igor Stravinsky reincarnated the savage 25 "Only twice [in the history of Western art] a large-scale attempt was made to broaden the narrow frame of the relationship [between individualism and sensualism] and to reach out for God by creating a supernatural and suprapersonal, spiritualized art. In the age of the Baroque, this was done covertly, in E. overtly, i.e., in the former through the exaggeration of the sensualistic, in the latter through the exaggeration of the individualistic component of this relationship." Fragen und Gegenfragen (Munich, 1956), p . 97 f. 26 Expressionismus (Munich, 1920), p . 115. 27 "Arbeiten! Rausch ! Gehirn zerschmettern ! Kauen, fressen, schlingen, zerwühlen! Wonnevolle Schmerzen des Gebärens! Krachen des Pinsels, am liebsten Durchstossen der Leinwände. Zertrampeln der Farbtuben . . . Malen ! Wühlen in Farben, Walzen in Klangen! l m Brei des Chaos !" Schöpferische Konfession, p. 19.

37

state in his Sacre du Prinfemps, and O'Neill followed suit with his drama Thé Emperor Jones. The neo-primitives of the Brüclce group were at their best in the graphic arts, es­ pecially in the woodcut. Wyndham Lewis found their work to be "African, in that it is sturdy, cutting through. . . to the monotonous wall of space, and intense yet hale; permeated by eternity—an atmosphere in which only the black core of life rises and is silhouetted". For him, the woodcut was "a miniature sculpture where the black nervous fluid of existence in flood forms into hard stagnant masses".28 What appealed to the Expressionists in this medium, as used by the German primitives of the fifteenth century, was its imperviousness to psychological finesse, as well as its harsh angularity.—In the field of sculpture, Amedeo Modigliani in France (with his Caryatids) and GaudierBrzeska in England came perhaps closest to reaching this Vorticist-Expressionist ideal, whereas Germany, Barlach excepted, produced no major Expressionist sculptor, even though Wilhelm Lehmbruck's elongated figures are often drawn into the dis­ cussion. The works of several Blaue Reiter, on the other hand, breathe the spirit of Worringer's post-empathetic phase. Marc looked at his own art in much the same light, as is shown by his remark: "Our European urge for abstract form is nothing but our hyperconscious, superactive reaction to, and triumph over, the sentimental spirit. Primitive man, however, had not met the latter when he loved abstraction."29 August Macke, reaching, at least experimentally, the stage of pure abstraction in 1907, wrote to his fiancée: "Just now all my bliss derives from pure colors. Last week I placed colors side by side on a wooden board without thinking of any object, such as men or trees, as in crochetry."30 Kandinsky and Adolf Hoelzel—Nolde's and Willi Baumeister's teacherbroke the barrier around 1910, and Marc, with his "Fighting Forms", four years later. Of the members of Die Brücke, Kirchner was probably the only one to grope his way toward abstraction in his colored woodcut illustrations to Adelbert von Chamisso's Peter Schlemihl. We have reached the crucial point in any discussion of E. in literature or painting; for whoever wishes to make his peace with that style has to know where to draw the line between so-called nonobjective and representational art. In statement after state­ ment, the Expressionists professed that it was their aim to mate the abstract with the concrete, soul with body, and spirit with matter—just as the Surrealists wished to reconcile the world of dreams with that of waking, the subconscious with the conscious. Walter von Hollander, for example, calls Paul Kornfeld's drama Die Verführung Ex28 29

Wyndham Lewis, the Artist (London, 1939), p. 109. "Unser europaischer Wille zur abstrakten Form ist ja nichts anderes als unsre höchst bewusste, tatenheisse Erwiderung und Überwindung des sentimentalen Geistes. Jener frühe Mensch aber war dem Sentimentalen noch nicht begegnet, als er das Abstrakte liebte." Quoted from Briefe, Aufzeichnungen und Aphorismen (Berlin, 1920) in Will Grohmann, Bildende Kunst und Architektur [zwischen den beiden Kriegen] (Frankfurt a.M., 1953), p. 411. 30 "Meine ganze Seligkeit suche ich jetzt fast nur in reinen Farben. Vorige Woche habe ich auf einem Brett versucht, Farben zusammenzusetzen, ohne an irgendwelche Gegenstande, wie Menschen oder Baume, zu denken, ähnlich wie bei der Stickerei." The letter, dating May 16, 1907, is quoted in the catalogue of the exhibition Der Blaue Reiter held in 1963 in the Stadtische Galerie, Munich. I t appears opposite the illustration No. 46. 38

pressionistic in so far as, in it, the soul finds an outlet through the body.31 And Edschmid bluntly states: " We want theflesh,but in sharpened suprasensual pleasures.''32 As the chief apologist for Expressionist literature, Edschmid fought the notion that a school of pure abstraction might develop within its framework. "The urge for abstraction no longer knows any limits, no longer realizes how subtle the balance of content and creative form. Exceeding the boundaries of the sensuous, it creates pure theory/' 33 Edschmid was undoubtedly shocked by Däubler's definition of the new style as "color without a name, line without boundary", but the criterion of "rhythmi­ cally placed nouns without attributes'' 34 must have been more to his taste. Still, Edschmid must have rejected the extreme views pushed by the artists of the Sturm circle: Rudolf Blümner's use of abstract word formations and Lothar Schreyer's theory of the Expressionist Gesamtkunstwerk composed of pure words, sounds, forms, colors, and rhythms. Indeed, "Abstract Expressionism" is a logical absurdity unless we can somehow salvage Kandinsky's concept of art as based on the principle of inner necessity. Kandinsky himself would not have called his works abstractions, since, for him, form was always the expression of a content.35 Thus, as far as the underlying intentions are concerned, his Impressions, Improvisations and Compositions are polar opposites of the serene abstractions of De Stijl and the stark geometries of Kasimir Malevich's Suprematism. Kandinsky's aesthetic issues from the conviction that art is a vehicle of communi­ cation between the artist and his audience. In his programmatic treatise Über das Geistige in der Kunst (Concerning the Spiritual in Art) he uses the piano to show that art is "purposive playing with the human soul". With the aid of color and form, the feelings of the beholders of his pictures are to be manipulated in such a way that "[color] is the keyboard, the eyes are the hammers, the soul is the piano with many strings, [and] the artist is the hand that plays, touching one key or another purposively, to cause vibration in the soul".36 To this end all of Kandinsky's efforts were directed. Ideally, he wanted the be­ holder to be compelled to "wander around" in the finished picture,37 just as Klee, writing in Schöpferische Konfession, invites us to take a little journey.38 What Kandinsky hoped 31 Quoted from Die Neue Rundschau in Expressionismus: Literatur und Kunst 1910-1923, p . 304. 32 "Wir wollen das Fleisch, aber in gehobenen Übersinnslüsten." From the essay "Döblin und die Futuristen" in Die doppelköpfige Nymphe (Berlin, 1920), p . 133. 33 Über den dichterischen Expressionismus . . . , p. 73. 34 "Farbe ohne Bezeichnung, Zeichnung und kein Erklaren . . . im Rhythmus festgesetztes Hauptwort ohne Attribut," Der neue Standpunkt, p. 179. 35 "Since form is merely the expression of a content, and the content differs with different artists, it is obvious that several equally valid forms may exist at the same time." Quoted from the essay "Über die Formfrage" (Der Blaue Reiter, p. 75) in the exhibition catalogue opposite the illustration No. 25. The Blaue Reiter has been newly edited by Klaus Lankheit (Munich, 1965). 36 Concerning the Spiritual in Art (New York, 1947), p. 47. 37 "For many years, I have tried to find a way of making the viewer walk around in my pic­ tures, of forcing him to forget himself in the act of contemplation." Exhibition catalogue Der Blaue Reiter,38 opposite the illustration No. 20. "Let us make a little trip into the land of greater insight, with the help of a topographic plan," Schöpferische Konfession, p. 29.

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to achieve was, paradoxically enough, a sort ot "empathy through abstraction". But how was this empathy to be brought about? For assuming even that one sincerely believes in the veracity of the feelings an artist claims to have channelled into his work, it is, and always will be, quite impossible to extract such feelings from their visual record on the canvas. Of course, we may rely on intuition, which found so strong an advocate in Henri Bergson. But intuition is an unreliable guide and difficult to translate into the language of ordinary logic. Thus Kandinsky's paintings after 1910, to quote Däubler's beautifully turned phrases, are "blue manifestations of a decision before their embodiment in action; Mongolianisms which mistily invade us, creating chaos through the mystical use of color or [generating] a cosmos".39 Schönberg, the inventor of the "method of composition with twelve tones which are related only with one another", broke resolutely with the musical past by completing a process that had begun with Wagner's chromaticism and continued via Claude Debussy's experiments to the full emancipation of dissonance in Stravinsky's Sacre. Similarly, Kandinsky broke with the tradition of representational art by pushing to the limit the implications of a statement with which Vincent van Gogh, writing from Aries to his brother Theo, had announced the emancipation of pictorial dissonance: Because instead of trying to reproduce exactly what I have before my eyes, I use color more arbitrarily so as to express myself more forcefully. Well, let that be as a matter of theory, but I am going to give you an example of what I mean. I should like to paint the portrait of an artist friend, a man who dreams great dreams, who works as the nightingale sings, because it is his nature. He'll be a fair man. I want to put into the picture my appreciation, the love that I have for him. So I paint him as he is, as faithfully as I can, to begin with. But the picture is not finished yet. To finish it I am now going to be the arbitrary colorist. I exaggerate the fairness of the hair, I get to orange tones, chromes and pale lemon yellow. Beyond the head, instead of painting the ordinary wall of the mean room, I paint infinity, a plain background of the richest, intensest blue that I can contrive, and by this simple combination the bright head illuminated against a rich blue background acquires a mysterious effect, like the star in the depths of an azure sky.40 I do not think that the Expressionist theory of art in general, and of portrait painting in particular, has ever been more clearly articulated. The painter's statement helps to resolve the dichotomy posed by our contention that the Expressionists wanted to show the essence of things (their Wesen) and Herbert Read's definition of the style as one which seeks to reproduce "not the objective reality of the world, but the sub39 "Blaue Kundgebungen des Beschlusses vor ihren Einkörperungen in Taten" or "Mongoleien" which "farbenmystisch chaotisierend oder einen Kosmos ergrenzend, zu uns hereinwolken," Der newe Standpunkt, p . 183 ff. 40 The letter, written in mid-August, 1888, appears in The Letters of Vincent van Gogh (New York, 1963), p. 276 ff.

40

jective reality of the feelings which objects and events arouse in us". 41 For the finished product, as indicated by Van Gogh, was to embody both the sitter's personality and the artist's estimation thereof, i.e., a perfect blend of the objective (not conceived in a superficial, realistic way) and the subjective. With the coming of E., the focus of attention was, once again, shifted from physical to human nature. Indeed, the Expressionists are among the greatest portrait painters of all time. They invariably show their sitters en face, never in profile, because the eyes "are the windows of the sour'.42 It is precisely the soul, however—especially the soul in writhing anguish—which the Expressionists desired to project. Edvard Munch, many of whose paintings are, in Daubler's words, "highly erotic but not sensual",43 reflects this anguish in his pictorial allegory of the Scream, which seems to illustrate Bahr's puzzling statement: "Impressionism treated the eye like an ear, E. like a mouth. The ear is dumb, and Impressionism bade the soul to be silent. The mouth is deaf, and the Expressionist cannot hear the world."44 Paula ModersohnBecker's portrait of Rilke (1906) represents one of the earliest stages in the Expression­ ist search for the pictorial equivalent of soul states; and Kokoschka's masterful SelfPortrait of 1917 reveals the "ghost" of the painter through the enormously dilated pale blue eyes and the twisted hands that look like caterpillars. According to Edschmid, a literary parallel to this phenomenon is found in the work of Döblin, "who so fabulously permeates and irradiates the flesh with injections of spirit that the ghost (a different thing from the skeleton) becomes solely visible".45 Edschmid credits August Strindberg—we think of his Ghost Sonata—with having done the same thing in drama. Unlike Munch, Modersohn-Becker, and Kokoschka, certain Expressionists sought to plumb the depth of the souls of animals. According to Macke, "the senses are a bridge connecting the visible and the invisible. To look at plants and animals means to feel their secret."46 Thus Marc, the Expressionist animal painter par excellence, sought to portray the world of beasts not as we see it but as the eagle, the horse, the cow, or the tiger see it. Every animal thus becomes, in Daubler's words, "the incarnation of its cosmic rhythm". 47 Moving still further down the Great Chain of Being, other Expressionists breathed a soul even into inanimate things, not in order to reveal their inner geometry (for that was what the Cubists aimed at doing) but with the intention of demonstrating their latent dynamism. Speaking of Robert Delaunay, Daubler calls him the first Expressionist on account of his "portraits" of the Eiffel Tower. In fact, the tower is 41 42

The Philosophy of Modern Art (New York, 1955), p . 51. For a discussion of this problem see Karen Macho ver, Personality Projection in the Drawing of the Human Figure (Springfield, 111., 1949), p . 47 ff. 43 Der neue Standpunkt, p. 86. 44 " H a t der Impressionismus das Auge zum blossen Ohr gemacht, so macht es der E. zum blossen Mund. Das Ohr ist stumm; der Impressionist liess die Seele schweigen. Der Mund ist taub; der Expressionist kann die Welt nicht horen." Op. cit.f p . 116. 45 ". . . der das Fleisch mit Geistinjektionen so fabelhaft durchwühlt und durchschimmert, dass nur das Gespenst (was eine andere Geschichte ist als das Skelett) entsteht." Die doppélköpfige Nymphe, p . 133. 46 Quoted from August Macke's essay "Die Masken" (Der Blaue Reiter, p. 21) in the exhibi­ tion catalogue, opposite illustration No. 48. 47 Der neue Standpunkt, p . 138. 41

"scaffold and skeleton of the future . . . [It] is the first Expressionist. . . [it] has a soul . . . [it] is an a r t i s t . . . It is also the father of Delaunay".48 Thus Worringer hits the mark when, surveying E. in a retrospective essay, he credits it with having theomorphized the world in its drive for total spiritualization.49 Impressionism having run its course, landscape, too—in the words of Pinthus—was no longer "copied, described, glorified . . . but wholly humanized''.50 Such an interpretation could well be placed on El Greco's View of Toledo or Van Gogh's Starry Night. On the pictorial plane, such spiritualization is invariably manifested as distortion. Distortion of form or color is, in fact, the very hallmark of Expressionist art. But how about Expressionist literature? I believe that even in this respect a perfect paral­ lelism exists between the two media. A few hints may suffice in the present context. The immediate forerunners of German literary E. were Frank Wedekind and Carl Sternheim, whose tools were caricature, the grotesque, and satire; in other words: techniques which invariably involve distortion. When Thomas Mann defined E. in his Befrachtungen, he singled out these very traits to show how totally writers like his brother Heinrich had lost touch with contemporary life and political reality. The syntactical distortions which occur in Expressionist poetry are nowhere more prominent than in Benn's poem "Karyatide", which contains the difficult lines "Bespei die Saulensucht: toderschlagene / Greisige Hande bebten sie / Verhangenen Himmeln zu," which Hamburger renders clumsily as "Spit on this column mania: done to death/ mere senile hands they trembled/towards cloud-covered heavens," and Lohner/Corman more appropriately "Spit on this passion for pillars: the death-dealing/ hoary hands trembled them / to overhanging heaven."51 To be sure, in the realm of language it seems particularly bold to strive for the kind of simplification and foreshortening found in the woodcuts of the Brücke group or the type of abstraction familiar from Kandinsky. Nevertheless, such tendencies made themselves felt in the poetry of Stramm and other, more radical exponents of Sturm art. Walden demanded that the poet should use words and rhythm in the same way in which the painter uses color and form, and the composer sound and rhythm. Stramm, who was not a theoretician, transformed Dichtung (poetry) into Wortkunst, as in the poem "Schwermut", which reads: Schreiten Streben Leben sehnt Schauern Stehen Blicke suchen Sterben wachst Das Kommen Schreit! Tief Stummen Wir. 48 Ibid., p. 181 f. 49 Fragen und Gegenfragen, p. 50 Menschheitsddmmerung, p. 51

Striding Striving Life yearns Shuddering Standing Glances seek Dying grows The coming Cries! Deeply We Mute.

89. 29. Hamburger's translation appears in Hamburger/Middleton, German Poetry the Lohner/Corman version in Origin, VII (Autumn, 1952), 144. 42

1910-1960,

Under the aegis of Blümner, the level of pure abstraction was reached shortly afterwards in the Lautkunst of poems like "Ango Laina", which opens with the cryptic line "Oiaí laéla oia ssisialu" and ends with what sounds like a parody of Stramm's one-word lines: "gádse / ina / leíola / kbáo / sagór / kadó." Blümner took the matter very seriously and would have been offended had anybody told him about the curious resemblance between "Ango Laina" and certain Dadaist nonsense poems. Like the experiments with abstract rhythms which Edith Sitwell undertook in her sequence of poems Façade, Lautkunst entails a complete breakdown of communication on the level on which language commonly operates. For how are we to extract any sort of meaning from Blümner's African-sounding word formations ? Benn, who was fascinated by what he called "das südliche Wort", and who dreamed of realizing the purely formal art which Gustave Flaubert envisaged when he stood on the Acropolis, wisely refrained from putting his theory into practice. So did Ezra Pound, a great admirer of Kandinsky, who wished to rid poetry of air literary values (as Verlaine had proclaimed in his poem "Art Poétique") and who, at least in the Imagist-Vorticist phase of his career, cham­ pioned an art devoid of meaning. For while the general public has, at long last, been reconciled with abstraction in the pictorial arts, abstraction in literature, or even a private, synthetic language of the kind employed in James Joyce's non-novel Finnegans Wake, is not likely ever to be fashionable. As a term, E., which had been launched by the French painter Julien-Auguste Hervé in 1901, found general acceptance in 1911 when a number of German art critics applied it to the Fauvist paintings included in an exhibition of the Berlin Sezession. Worringer gave his blessing when, writing in Der Sturm, he spoke of the "Pariser Synthetisten und Expressionisten: Cézanne, Van Gogh, Matisse". No transfer to litera­ ture was attempted until several years later, probably 1914 or 1915;52 and as early as 1918 Edschmid spoke of literary E. as a fad embraced by a horde of imitators. Four years later, Pinthus, asked to prepare a new edition of his anthology, decided to leave Menschheitsdammerung untouched. For he felt that "after the completion of this lyrical symphony, no poetry has been written that inalienably belongs to it". 53 Those were the years of transition from E. to Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity). Soon the Bauhaus was to be the most influential force in the fine and applied arts, and sobriety began to reassert itself in literature and music. E. was an impulse quickly spent. The Weltanschauung at its root, and the style to which it gave rise, were those of youthful enthusiasts who overreached themselves or slid back into more conventional channels of expression. "Let the young", said Rudolf Kurtz in a phrase that applies to the Storm and Stress as well as to E., "stay young even to the point of catastrophe. Immaturity is the most potent yeast of history."54 The title of our essay posed the question as to whether E. should be viewed primarily as a stylistic phenomenon or as a Weltanschauung, i.e., whether it should be 52 The history of the term E. in its literary application has been discussed by Armin Arnold in his53 book Die Literatur des Expressionismus (Stuttgart, 1966), pp. 9-15. Menschheitsdammerung, p . 33. 54 From Kurtz' introduction to Die neue Kunst, a bimonthly publication edited by F. S. Bachmair, I/1 (1913-14), as quoted on p . 67 of Expressionismus: Literatur und Kunst 1910-1923.

43

judged by aesthetic or extra-aesthetic criteria. We pointed out that, luckily, its socio­ political aspect can be subsumed under the term Activism. If, excluding this aspect, one defines the term broadly enough to include man's attitude toward himself, his fellow-beings and the world at large, one can defend the use of Weltanschauung in the sense of a sharp rejection of previously embraced views on the part of an entire generation. This is what the Expressionists meant by Aufbruch, by their concentration on soul states, by their determination to make the invisible visible. Hence the intensity, the spiritual unrest and the emotionally charged atmosphere of their products. Indeed, one cannot imagine an Expressionist work to be conceived rationally and in cold blood. Although, as critics and historians of art, we prefer to approach E. inductively (through an analysis of stylistic devices), we see nothing wrong with the deductive method, provided that it leads to tangible results and comes to grips with specific problems. We object, however, to the thematic treatment proffered in Sokel's book The Writer in Extremis. For as is shown by the unrepresentativeness of the examples adduced there, what mattered to the Expressionists was not the what—or, for that matter, the why—but only the how of a given phenomenon. They simply did not care whether the Aufbruch they sought to portray occurred in the life of a son, a bank teller, or an artist.

44

GYÖRGY M. VAJDA

OUTLINE OF THE PHILOSOPHIC BACKGROUNDS OP EXPRESSIONISM

Even in its very name, which stresses the primacy of the subjective and creative element of artistic activity, E. represents one of the characteristic traits of all Romantic Modern­ istic tendencies. In the following pages, we shall deal with it, in this sense, in its repre­ sentative quality. We will not emphasize the manifold gradations of various tendencies within modern literature and art—which, in any case, have lost some of their distinct­ ness with the passing of time—but rather their methodological similarities, which may be seen in E. The philosophical background to which E. harks back is thus decisive for Modernistic art, i.e., for the art of the artistic and literary avant-garde of our century in its totality. (1) EXPRESSIONISM: MOVEMENT, METHOD, STYLE

Because of the representative nature of E., it follows that its lifespan cannot be limited to the "Expressionistic decade". The literary and artistic movement in the German-speaking area which called itself E. died quickly. Bertolt Brecht, for example, whose career began around 1918, had scarcely anything to do with it. But the artistic method which the Expressionists employed, and some of the stylistic devices which they developed, survived. Indeed, they existed even prior to the blossoming of the movement and have not yet ceased to exist. Painting, that realm of art from which E. borrowed its name, still shows the ten­ dency to express primarily soul states and emotional qualities by means of forms and colors. This tendency was already advocated by the "forefathers" of E.: Cézanne, Van Gogh, Munch, Gauguin, and was ingrained among the members of Die Brücke and Der Blaue Reiter, Both "Pre-" and "Post-" Expressionists attempted to use the moodcreating power of color at the expense of the objective representation of the objects of the external world, and to fashion a world of pure fantasy instead of depicting empiri­ cal space. Architecture has no Expressionist style. But we know that Walter Gropius introduced the observation and simplification of space practiced by the early Cubists— Picasso, Braque, Fernand Leger—into architecture and offered, in the theater studio of his Bauhaus in Weimar, a home for the Constructivist endeavors of Oskar Schlemmer and László Moholy-Nagy. He thus assured the success of these tendencies in the at­ mosphere of E., within which the whole theory and practice of the Bauhaus developed. And it was Gropius who provided the decisive impetus for modern architecture with his first factory building, erected in 1911. The novel sounds of Schönberg and Béla 45

Bartók were already resounding at the beginning of the century; subsequently they came into contact with Expressionist music, which was still flowering in the 1920's and even today continues to influence modern composition. In respect to literature, finally, we must be content with a few hints. Through its radical style, its daring neologisms, and its blurring of traditional rhythms, the lyric poetry of E. left unmistakable traces on the prosody of many literatures. It is often said that prose was the most questionable genre of Expressionist literature. But when we think of how many parallels there are between Expressionist prose and Joyce's Ulysses, and of how Franz Kafka, who moved in the circle of the Prague Expressionists, began to exert his tremendous influence on world literature only after the Second World War, we might have to change our opinion about the function of prose in the literature of E. Most visible of all, however, is the survival of Expressionist dramaturgy, along with its stage techniques. Rebelling against the lack of poetry in Naturalism, Expressio­ nist drama assigned to lyric poetry an important role initiated by Maurice Maeterlinck and Hugo von Hofmannsthal and reaching our stages by way of Brecht, and—on different paths—through Federico García Lorca, in whose work, as in that of many modern writers of Eastern Europe, modernity and folklore were amalgamated, just as they are in modern Czech, Spanish, and Hungarian music. Blatantly epic scene sequences were naturalized on today's stage by Strindberg and through the mediation of the Expressionists. After the "synthetic" dramatic attempts of Kandinsky, the experiments aimed at "totalization" and "theatricalization" of the theater proceeded on parallel courses in Berlin, Moscow, Paris and in the Prague of the twenties. The variations of the abstract representation of the world on the stage, the projection of space which did not intend to reconstruct actual space, the destruction of the temporal sequence of the phases of dramatic action, the interior monologue—all these are means and effects to which we have now become accustomed, but which were already present in the theater of E. And in 1916, Walter Hasenclever was already defending the right to project the "inner world" onto the stage (a right concerning which Eugéne Ionesco is still—half a century later—polemicizing against Brecht [L'Impromptu de l'Alma]). (2) METHODOLOGICAL PRINCIPLES

The methods and stylistic devices of the Expressionists have also survived the properly Expressionist decade by merging with the techniques of the other branches of the artistic avant-garde. This fusion was possible because the artists' aesthetic views, as well as their methodological principles, had several essential features in common. We first want to enumerate some of these, even though they are not unknown and even though, like every generalization, they are not applicable to all specific instances. After the common principles, we shall mention a few which are primarily characteristic of E. Basic to all Modernist tendencies was the principle of subjectivity. The Classicists, the Realists, and even the Naturalists treated their subjects objectively; they subordi­ nated their art to the representation of a reality which was independent of them. The avant-garde of the twentieth century, however, insisted on the right of the subjective. 46

It found this trend foreshadowed in the Romantics. Instead of the objective reproduc­ tion of the world, the modern artists preferred total creative freedom. Through the work of art, they wanted to create an autonomous world; for what mattered to them was not the world outside the self, but their own artistic consciousness. This principle of the primacy of the artist's consciousness led to a negation of reality on the part of the "radicals" of the avant-garde. It led the "moderates" to emphasize, or even over­ emphasize, the importance of the poetic experience; and in the case of the Activists, it led to the artistic demand for an ideal world. With the increasing role of the artist's consciousness, the effectiveness of the law of causality began to falter. The principle of spontaneity ruled their visions, dreams, and outbursts of emotion; it also explains the lack of motivation in their dramas and novels. The inner world of the works, issuing from the caprice of the subject, the contents of his consciousness, and freedom of spontaneity, was not subject to the laws of causality. But from the three previously enumerated principles there follows a fourth, which was decisive for the avant-garde of our century: the avoidance of mimesis, of imitation, copying or representation of the "external" world, about whose relations to the sub­ ject and to the individual consciousness the representatives of the avant-garde could not get a clear-cut answer from the philosophy of the time. At the root of the avoidance of the mimetic method lay a philosophic doubt, an uncertainty which could be laid solely through reference to the only certain existence, that of the self. Therefore, in­ stead of applying the mimetic principles of the traditional methods, the avant-garde accentuated the principle of expressing oneself, and of expressiveness in general. (For this reason, we may consider Ausdruckskunst to be, in this respect, somewhat repre­ sentative of the whole avant-garde.) But if the poet and the artist did not represent the external, intelligible world by way of imitation, to what should he give expression in his work ? For the Expression­ ist, the purpose of representation lay in the essence of things (an idea which shows the unmistakable influence of contemporary philosophy); and, the method by which it could be expressed was that of abstraction. The principle of abstraction, a method bestowed by science, was valid not only for E., but also for those schools of avant-garde art which wanted to combine spontaneity with a principle of order (e.g., Cubism and Constructivism). The expression of what is essential required concentration on the mode of expression itself. The intent was to express the thing in one, and in no other way; thence the forced, desperate, volitional quality of many Expressionist works. We call the methodological basis of this characteristic the principle of artistic volition ("Kunstwollen"), a term popularized by Worringer. But let us remember that, for Worringer, the concept applies to art in general, and to the choice of style in every epoch. In the following pages, we shall attempt to illustrate the above principles with reference to the writings of the time. It is well known that the Expressionists wanted to dissociate themselves from Naturalism. The aspect of Naturalism which they most fervently rejected was its method of imitation, of reproducing the external object, i.e., the world. The Expression­ ist, Pinthus wrote in the foreword to Menschheitsdammerung, avoids "the Naturalistic portrayal of reality as a means of representation, no matter how palpable this decayed 47

reality was; rather, with a tremendous and violent energy, [the Expressionists] derive their means of expression from spiritual energy • . . " And further on he states: "Thus the social element is not represented as realistic detail, objectively, as for example in the painting of misery (found in the art around 1890), but it is always aimed at the general, at the great ideas of humanity. And even the war, which crushed many of these poets, is not described in an impartial, realistic manner; it is always there as vision. . ." The objective representation of reality disappears behind the vision, which is called upon to express a deeper truth, a more essential insight. As Pinthus wrote else­ where in his foreword: "They [the Expressionists] began to dissolve the surrounding reality (Umwirklichkeit) into unreality (Unwirklichkeif), to push through appearances to the essence, to embrace and destroy the enemy in an assault of the spirit. . ." Simi­ larly Georg Trakl wrote in a letter: "You can believe that it isn't easy for me, and never will be, to subordinate myself unconditionally to that which is to be represented, and I will have to correct myself over and over again in order to give unto truth the things that are truth's . . . " The leader of the Hungarian avant-garde, Lajos Kassak, saw in the work of art the subjective become objective: "Every work of art is an objectification of a world view and a world consciousness in a new synthetic form . . . Art is the quintessence of life, and he who thirsts for art must be, in life, the devil's dissatisfied son" (Foreword to the collection of poems Máglyák Énekelnek [Funeral Pyres are Sing­ ing], 1920.) And Béla Balázs, the famous film aesthetician, explained the essence of the cartoon from a truly Expressionist point of view: In this world only sketched beings exist. Yet their lines are not only rep­ resentations of their appearance but also their real substance. Appearance is not transformed into reality. . ., it does not turn into something that is no longer a picture. Art is not transformed into nature. Here, there is no difference at all between appearance and reality. If the tail of Felix [Pat Sulli­ van's well-known character, G.M.V.] curls and looks like a wheel, he can immediately use it as a bicycle. Why should it first have to become reality? 1 Similarly, Benn called E. the "shattering of reality", "a ruthless getting-to-theroot-of-things, where they are no longer individually and sensualistically tinged. . . but where, in the permanent acausal silence of the absolute ego, they approach the rare calling of the creative spirit".2 And the problematic relationship between art and reality may also have found in Benn its most radical formulation, in so far as here reality as such, and as a model for art, is simply rejected: "There is no reality, there is only the human consciousness, which incessantly forms new worlds from its own crea­ tive resources, transforms them, assimilates them by hard work, and spiritually stamps them. There is only the thought, the objective thought, which is eternity, the order of the world, which lives from abstraction and is the formula of art" ("Lebensweg eines Intellektualisten" [1934]). Thus, if there existed any model for art, it could only be a 1 2

48

Der Geist des Films (Halle, 1930), pp. 127f. From Benn's essay on E. (1933).

mental one, given to the consciousness: according to Benn, the only artistic method would be abstraction. Worringer is responsible for the fact that abstraction became one of the key con­ cepts of the new art. His dissertation, Abstraktion und Einfühlung, sought to demon­ strate "that the art work, as an independent organism, stands alongside of nature on equal terms and, in its deepest essence, has no connection with it, in so far as man understands 'nature' to be the visible surface of things". 3 The independent work of art, then, cannot be generated through imitation of nature. Thus the anti-Aristotelian dramaturgy of Brecht has its roots in the aesthetics of incipient E. Worringer also attacks Aristotle by asserting: "Here it is necessary to agree that the mimetic urge, this elementary drive, stands outside the realm of aesthetics proper, and that its satis­ faction has, basically, nothing to do with art." 4 In this view, art arises from artistic volition. Worringer got his inspiration from the works of the Viennese art historian Alois Riegl, who saw in "artistic volition", on the one hand, the original psychic source of all artistic activity, while, on the other hand, describing it as the particularized "will to art", which revealed itself in different ways in the human beings of different ages. Accordingly, the style of every period is dependent on its own particular type of artistic volition. The Gothic artist worked in the Gothic style not because he could not but because he did not want to do otherwise. We may add that the modern artist, too, is thus able to create his art according to his own artistic volition, which, according to Worringer, already determined the art of primitive peo­ ples, namely in the guise of an urge to abstraction. In abstraction man found peace and satisfaction from the world, in the face of which he felt insecure, and by which he felt himself threatened. Worringer makes the proposition: "The simple line and its development in pure geometrical regularity was bound to offer the greatest possibility of happiness to the man disturbed by the confusion and obscurity of the things sur­ rounding him. For here the last traces of the connection with, and dependence on, life have been obliterated, and the highest absolute form, the purest abstraction has been attained: law and necessity now reign where the effect of the organic used to prevail. But no natural object serves as a model for such abstraction" (italics are mine, G.M.V.). Kandinsky, who in 1910—two years after the appearance of Worringer's disser­ tation—painted the first consciously abstract pictures in the history of modern art, already used Worringer's concepts with complete naturalness in his treatise Über das Geistige in der Kunst, a book which is equally basic for E. His assertions were based on the practice of art. And he saw everywhere "the seeds of the striving toward the non-natural, toward the abstract and toward inner nature . . .", just as he envisaged, as a result, the mutual approximation of the arts on the basis of the common principle of spiritual renewal: "An artist who sees no goal for himself in the imitation of natural phenomena, even in an artistic one, and who is a creator wanting arid having to express his inner world, jealously sees how such goals are naturally and easily reached in today's most immaterial art, i.e., music . . ."5 3 4 5

Abstraktion und Einfühlung, new ed. (Munich, 1964), p. 35. Ibid., p. 44. Über das Geistige in der Kunst (Munich, 1912), pp. 36f. 49

I t is understandable t h a t Worringer's book struck the adherents of modern art with the force of a revelation. The philosophical bases of its theory are evident in Worringer as well as in Kandinsky. Through abstraction, the artist is able to penetrate from the world of external objects to "the thing itself", and to lay hold of and portray the essence of things, their profounder truth. He is able to reach the common goal of all contemporary science, philosophy and art—expressed in the actual terminology of the philosophical "revolt" of the times. In addition, however, one finds in Worringer a historical explanation characteristic for the method of the new art: its explanation by reference to the contemporary situation. Although the arguments are simplified, they contain a great deal of truth. Worringer does not talk about decadence but re­ cognizes the transvaluation of values and the loss of the feeling of security such as man in the nineteenth century still possessed. The loss of the sheltered feeling induces in the individual of the pre-war era a state of mind out of which abstract art is born. The urge for empathy and the corresponding method of artistic representation presupposes, according to Worringer, "a certain familial relation between man and the outside world . . . I n a people predisposed in such a way, this sensuous surety, this blind faith in the external world, this unproblematic feeling of well-being, will lead, theologically speaking, to a naive anthropomorphic pantheism or polytheism, and, artistically speak­ ing, to a carefree worldly naturalism." 6 "Naturalism'' must not be understood here as the literary current by that name, but as t h a t art which is dependent on nature as a model. By contrast, as we have already seen, "the urge for abstraction is the result of a great inner unrest in man caused b y phenomena of the external world. I t corresponds, in the religious sphere, to a strong transcendental coloring of ideas. We should like to call this condition an immense spiritual agoraphobia. When Tibullus says primum in mundo fecit deus timor, the same feelings of fear may also be presumed to lie at the root of artistic creation." 7 This is an accurate analysis of the situation in which the restive Expressionist generation began to uproot the traditional poetic world view; it was the generation in which Georg Heym, Trakl, and Kafka created their works. But in a broader sense, the analysis also applies to the philosophy of the times, which, strictly speaking, was reacting to the same unrest of man at the turn of the century.

(3) PILOSOPHICAL BACKGROUNDS AND PARALLELS

"Spiritual motivation", "reality and vision", "appearance and essence", the "hid­ den face of things", "feeling of dread": it is not difficult to hear, in these terms, which served to characterize E., the voice of those philosophical currents which, for the most part, were generated around the turn of the century, and which were shortly to form the main stream of contemporary Idealistic thought. One could call them "neo-Romantic", not only because the majority of their exponents actually fell back upon Romantic philosophy, but because, emphasizing the emotions as being partly irrational and 6 7

50

Abstraktion und Einfühlung, Ibid., p. 49.

p. 83.

blurred, they gave expression to a "world view" similar to that of the Romantic period, while, at the same time, entailing, or at least aiming at, the dissolution of the systematic body of thought of mid-nineteenth-century philosophy. This philosophical neo-Romanticism discovered the works of Sören Kierkegaard and appraised his Angst theory as the symptom of the modern age. The "existential dread {Angst)" never left the artist of the dawning century. The "founding father" of neo-Romantic philosophy, who exercised perhaps the greatest influence on the art of the generations immediately following, was Nietzsche, who denounced the material­ istic natural science of his time as superficial and who looked for the principle of the "higher life" in the spiritual realm. In opposition to the deterministic world of matter, he emphasized the creative force of the spirit, which, since it is not subject to causality, gives free play to the will. In well-known ways, these thoughts carried over into the province of artistic creativity. The great turn to the "spiritual", of which Kandinsky spoke, found its exemplary expression in Nietzsche's philosophy. Intimately related to Romanticism (as Karl Joel had pointed out to his contemporaries in his book Nietzsche und die Romantik [1905]), Nietzsche aided the aesthetic thinking, as well as the art of his age in destroying the traditional categories of thought, aesthetics, and morality. Moreover, the Vitalistic enthusiasm in which the artists luxuriated at the turn of the century was largely derived from him. From the "surface" of the phenomenal world, the neo-Romantic trend of thought tended "to the depths". Bergson considered empirical knowledge to be unsatisfactory and, therefore, looked for the source of true knowledge in non-empirical, even nonrational, intuition; behind the "ostensible" contexts of reality he found something "deeper", a creative vitality (élan vital). He also discovered behind "ostensible" empirical time a "real" time which cannot be measured by the clock. Wilhelm Dilthey, too, found the essence of poetry to lie in "something deeper" than the reflection of the external world through literature, namely in experience. As if quoting Dilthey, Barlach wrote about the insignificance of the material object: "My eyes intercept a cypher, and in the darkness of m y Self it is translated and adapted {verarbeitet) . . . the thing may continue in its track . . .; the one harmony only, the one piece of eternity which I grabbed for myself, has full value . . ." 8 The direction of Sigmund Freud's analysis also tended toward a "deeper" level of the soul; from consciousness into the subcon­ scious, from the "visible" surface of the human psyche into its darker regions. We do not want to speak here about the incalculable influence of psychoanalysis or depth psychology on art and literature. Let us merely note that their influence corresponded to the general philosophical trend of the times. Another direction of contemporary philosophy, and a very important one, harked back to pre-Romanticism and was inspired by the thinker who, still under the influence of the Enlightenment, himself had fascinated so many Romantics, i.e., Immanuel Kant. "Phenomenon", "noumenon", "appearance", "Ding an sich" as contrasting principles were decisive for the philosophy that emerged at the turn of the century. 8 As quoted from the Güstrower Fragmente (1913) in Paul Pörtner, ed., 1910-1925 (Neuwied, 1960), I, p . 31.

Literatur-Revolution

51

The neo-Kantian schools were agreed in the assumption that, experientially, man can recognize only appearances: the essence, the "Ding an sich", remains inaccessible to the mind. The modernized version of Kant's doctrines, however, could not be satisfied with a simple agnosticism. It rather sought out methods with whose help to make the thinking individual capable of penetrating to the essence of reality by means of ex­ periential phenomena like symbols, cyphers, and signs. Other schools denied the rift between the appearance and the hidden essence, or, rather, limited themselves to the investigation of the mere contents of consciousness. The Empirio-criticist Ernst Mach recognized as "realities" only the experiences and sensations contained in the conscious­ ness. According to him, the world consists of our complexes of sensations, and we need not distinguish between an "external" and an "internal" world. Ernst Cassirer treated the "symbolic forms"—linguistic signs or symbols of mythical thought—as such "meanings" through which the true countenance of things is made accessible to us. The most comprehensive philosophical trend which cropped up around the turn of the century was Phenomenology, whose founder, Edmund Husserl, went beyond the Kantian dualism—at least in respect to his method—by advancing "to the things themselves" and investigating these as phenomena given in the "pure consciousness" — not, however, as mere psychological experiences, but as actualities reduced to their essence (Eidos). What corresponded to these facts of the pure consciousness "outside of" the consciousness was of no interest for the phenomenologist. Everything accessory to the object under investigation (even its existence in the real world) was "put into parentheses", disregarded, for it might have disturbed the study of the true nature of the object. The essential objects were even given to the pure consciousness through the latter's "intentional act", such that the consciousness acquired the task of experiencing the world as well as that of performing the act of entering into an intentional relation­ ship with the given object. In the intentional act, the subject was essentially related to the object, and the object was given essentially to the subject, and nothing that was more essential lay behind the phenomenon established in this manner. The duplication of the world was thus—according to Husserl—overcome through the Phenomenological method. If we apply Husserl's philosophy to art, it will probably be apparent that a creative act which does not want to copy "the given" but "intends" to fashion, i.e., call into existence, its own artistic world, proceeds, in this respect, in a manner similar to the Phenomenological method. The expression of what is essential, supplanting the repro­ duction of what merely exists, appears to be the salient point of this artistic trend. Max Scheler, next to Husserl the most original Phenomenologist, rightly spoke of a "knowledge of the structure of the essence" which is superior to purely "inductive knowledge". Phenomenology, as founded by Husserl, was a strict "academic" method, a closed scientific theory. Thus only certain basic concepts of this method were able to exert an influence on the artistic practice of the time, above all those concepts which were also used in other contemporary philosophical trends. Only a few artists and poets are known to have had actual contact with Phenomenology itself as, for example, Max Brod, who played an important role among Prague Modernists (which engaged in an 52

especially lively intellectual intercourse) and in the development of Kafka. It would not be difficult to discover in Kafka's art elements which are related to some of the principles of Phenomenology. If Phenomenology discarded the traditional, descriptive psycho­ logy, Kafka dispensed with the psychological motivation of his figures. He presented movements, situations, actions and processes without further explanation, and obscured the boundaries between reality and appearance, as if there were no difference between the real world and its reflection in the consciousness. The situations and events of his stories fluctuate between reality and the dream world; they move from one world to the other, and back again, and realistic details alternate with grotesque and fantastic elements, as if reality and fantasy were in principle separated by no boundaries. Con­ sequently, Kafka's world does not appear as something which exists independently, but rather as something given or intended in the consciousness. Even the pre-formation of man's basic existential situation, which is partly founded on Kafka's contact with Kierkegaard, points, from another angle, to an "ontological kinship" with Phenom­ enology, which served, and serves, as the basis of modern Existentialism. The method and style of E. was, to a certain extent, an artistic expression of these modern philosophies. The anti-materialistic "revolt" of the philosophers and the violent movement of the avant-gardists were called forth, at the turn of the century, by the same social conditions and historical tendencies. In both, concrete reality gave way to the "creative idea", and the object was pushed into the background by the activity of the subject. Not the laws of the former, but the activity of the latter, was decisive for the recognition of the true nature of the world, and the illumination of the essential features rather than the reproduction of the object, became the goal of art. Husserl's pupil, the aesthetician Moritz Geiger, thusly characterized this procedure: "And one can, finally, try, as several brands of E. do, to present the essence of an object in pure form, without including its appearance."9 The early abstractionists gave their pictures the title "Eidos" (i.e., "essence" in Husserl) and Walter Meckauer studied Wesenhafte Kunst (1920). This aiming at essences also explains the hectic, voluntaristic character of Ex­ pressionist art, in whose world the modus operandi of reality lost its validity—just as Husserl had placed it "in parentheses" —; no causality prevailed, and no broad structure of material relationships was described. At the turn of the century, a-causal thinking to a certain extent made its presence felt even in the natural sciences, as in the de­ scriptive psychology of Behaviorism, in linguistics and in literary criticism. In the latter two disciplines, the question regarding the function of language and the study of poetic expression was prominently raised. The genetic explanation of the work of art was de-emphasized, and the structural method asserted itself in the case of the Russian Formalists, the Czech Structuralists, the Anglo-Saxon semanticists and the German styliaticians—all of them young innovators in their fields in the teens and twenties, who, for the most part, were on a friendly footing with the representatives of the lit­ erary avant-garde. Formalists and Futurists, Structuralists and Poeticists worked together; and Max Scheler's philosophic journalism became a vital factor in contempo9

Zugänge zur Ästhetik (Leipzig, 1928), p . 94. 53

rary literature. Literary critics like Alfred Kerr and Karl Kraus were not untouched by the stylistic influence of E., and it might be fruitful to investigate what connection there is between the style of the Expressionists and t h a t of the scholarly representatives of Geisteswissenschaf'f —-and not only between their styles. Robert Musil, who combined the knowledge and practice of natural science and lit­ erary criticism, philosophy and literature in his own person, thanks to his talent and education, wrote his first novel, Die Verwirrungen des Zöglings Törless (Young Törless), expressly on the model of the "Visible surface" behind which a secret but true "essence" is hidden. Two years after the novel, he published his dissertation "Beitrag zur Beurteilung der Lehren Machs" (Contribution to the Evaluation of Mach's Doctrines, 1908), which is prefaced by a general characterization of modern natural science as reflected in the teachings of Mach. This introduction now appears to us to aim directly at the interest of the modern writer and to contain, as it were, the seeds of an Expressionist theory of art. "All natural science," Musil states, "merely describes what has happened, instead of explaining i t . . . As there are no explanations in general, there are, partic­ ularly, no causal ones . . . . With causality, an essential part of the meaning of the concepts relating to things and substances vanishes, and the philosophical hope of throwing light on the world of experience through causal relationships is, to a certain extent, cut in half by the disappearance of causality." Thus not only causality itself, but also the concepts relating to substance disappear, and only elements and sensations remain—but no self and no soul, as a result of which "the desperate problem of the relation between psychological and physiological phenomena becomes meaningless". Musil adopted Mach's views, but not without reservation; he even criticized them sharply. For us, his discussion serves as proof that Naturalism and its method was not the only trend based on the natural science of the age. For the Expressionists, the antimaterialist "revolt" did not mean a renunciation of natural science, which itsel under­ went a radical change around the turn of the century. I t is an open question to what extent the philosophical and, especially, the aesthetic consequences of this change were correctly drawn by Idealistic thinkers. The great natural scientists of the age, such as Albert Einstein, protested against the unjustified philosophical "exploitation" of their doctrines. B u t Kandinsky and many of his contemporaries found "material reality upon which, even yesterday, everything was based, and by which the whole universe was supported, called into question". 10 We do not have to repeat the cata­ logue of these consequences.

(4) FUNCTIONAL CHANGES: METHOD AND STYLE

The sources of the philosophical inspiration of the Expressionist method—the currents in philosophy and the natural sciences which followed a course parallel' with the artistic movement—were not secret. At least some of the contemporaries were fully aware of them, and one of the first literary historians of E., Albert Soergel (Im Banne des ExpressionismuSy 1925) pointed to some of the philosophical parallels with that 10

54

Über das Geistige in der Kunst, p . 23.

school. And in his book Die Überwindung des Expressionismus (1927), Emil Utitz did not forget to treat the philosophical connections of the movement. In the meantime, new trends and new groups appeared and, in part, resumed the depiction of objective reality; and a "new objectivity" came into being. But certain methodological peculiari­ ties of E. (especially the new forms of abstraction) were not lost, and many of its stylistic devices continued to be used. What Erwin Piscator wrote in his book Das politische Theater (1929) is symptomatic of this development: "Whatever is said must be said unaffectedly, not experimentally, 'Expressionistically', or pathetically, but guided by a simple, undisguised revolutionary purpose and will.,, But further on he writes: Naturally, one should not neglect to apply the new techniques and stylistic means of the last epoch of art, insofar as such application serves the designated purposes and does not serve a purely artistic end-in-itself. In all questions of style, the decisive question must be: Will the majority of proletarian listeners be able to benefit by it, or will they be bored or infected by bourgeois ideas ?11 The utilization of Expressionist techniques by some of the progressive writers of the Weimar Republic, and the fact that the majority of the Expressionists belonged to different, and primarily "progressive", groups in the literary life of the twenties, made that direction suspicious and undesirable in the eyes of the National Socialists. There­ fore, immediately after their seizure of power, Benn felt called upon to act as spokes­ man for the movement by writing the essay "Bekenntnis zum Expressionismus" (1933). With this step he did the memory of E. a disservice and succeeded only in making it suspect also in the eyes of many of its previous adherents. In this situation, György Lukacs published, in 1934, his essay "Grösse und Verfall des Expressionismus", which, in its theoretical parts, though not in all of its conclusions still remains valid. His analysis of the, partly familiar, relations between the Idealistic bases of the phi­ losophy of the turn of the century and the artistic principles and practices of E. were confirmed, five years later, by the non-Marxist Wilhelmina Stuyver in her dissertation "Deutsche expressionistische Dichtung im Lichte der Philosophie der Gegenwart" (Amsterdam, 1939). It could not have been otherwise; the facts spoke for themselves. And it was no accident that, in his plea, Benn pointed to the example of Futurism, which the Fascist government of Italy had promoted. In the last sentence of his study, Lukacs referred to the possibility that the "creative method" of E. need not "be distorted in order to be pressed into the service of the Fascist demagogy, [which is] the unity of decadence and retrogression". In 1938, other participants in the E. debate of the Moscow German emigrant periodical Das Wort went even further by assigning to E. the role of predecessor of Fascism. Immediately after the Second World War, this assumption was repeated, as it were, in Max Ferdinand Eugen van Bruggen's non-Marxist dissertation "Im Schatten des Nihilismus. Die expressionistische Lyrik im Rahmen und als Ausdruck der geistigen Situation Deutschlands" (Amsterdam, 1946). In the reservoir of ideas contained in Expressionist poetry, van Bruggen was able to discover ideological factors which an11

Das politische Theater (Berlin, 1929), p . 30. 55

ticipated the antihumanism of the Third Reich. And he was right, indeed. But, as we know, among the Expressionists, there were also those who wanted to bring about radical moral or social changes for the sake of all mankind. An anarchy of feelings and views prevailed, in which the negative was mixed with the positive. A common frame was conferred upon the representatives of these various ideological, political, and moral tendencies by the artistic method and style whose contemporary philosophical backgrounds have occupied us in this essay. The philosophical backgrounds of Expressionist method and style were those currents of thought which emerged around the turn of the century. They were not the only trends dominating the thought of this era. And together with other modern literary and artistic movements Expressionist method and style can be neither praised nor condemned merely for the source they originally derived. The Expressionists were able to express different ideological concepts, political and moral contents and were not bound to one of them exclusively. Purely methodological and stylistic devices did not actually serve for the preparation of revolutionary or counter-revolutionary political movements. Ideas expressed by these devices could do that. It was not Futurist method that led to Fascism in Italy, though some concepts expressed by the Futurists were picked up by the Fascists. It was not the method of E. that factually contributed to the inthronization of Hitler's regime. The true motives of such phenomena lie in a deep structural layer of society. The international history of E. clearly confirms the fact that many of the adherents of this artistic tendency, especially in the countries which were backward as a result of their politico-economic structure or which suffered from the strong pressure of reactionary politics, connected the "revolution in literature'' with the demand for social renewal. This combination even characterized the German Expressionist move­ ment at the end of the First World War, and even more so those adherents and followers who used stylistic devices inherited from E. Thus Johannes R. Becher wrote in an article about the situation of the Expressionist writers at the end of the war: "Almost all of these writers were opponents of the war and in 1918 stood on the side of the revo­ lution. The failure of the German revolution also resulted in the banalization and dis­ integration of E." 12 Limiting ourselves to one more example, we cite the Hungarian Socialist emigrant, Sandor Barta, who, in 1922, saw the adequate expression of the revolutionary spirit in E.: "The human being who had been cleansed through the com­ mon misery of the war found his voice here for the first time, and it is no accident that it was precisely E. which exerted the greatest influence on the literature of people who held Socialist views."13 We could reel off pages of such quotations, for the number of writers and artists of the avant-garde who stood up for the social or moral renewal of the world was large. These writers turned their eyes to reality. Their goal was not the "shattering of reality", or they merely wanted to shatter the old reality in order to replace it with a new one, 12 "Über die proletarisch-revolutionare Literatur in Deutschland" (1927), reprinted in Zur Tradition der sozialistischen Literatur in Deutschland (Berlin, 1962), p. 19. 13 Quoted from the editorial of the review Akasztott ember (Hanged Man) (Vienna, November, 1922).

56

and t h a t not taken in an aesthetic sense. How could they, therefore, employ an artistic method and use a style whose philosophical backgrounds and parallels questioned reality itself, the material world (or at least the possibility of knowing it), or which disregarded it, p u t it "in parentheses'', and limited itself entirely to the acknowledge­ ment of the contents of consciousness ? The literary realism of the nineteenth century, like every mimetic, reproductive method, proceeded from the (perhaps implicit) assumption t h a t the objective world exists independently of consciousness. For what else would there be to 'imitate' or 'copy' ? Honoré de Balzac and Tolstoy confirmed, through their creative methods, the philosophical doctrine of the primacy of objective reality. This is the basic position of every materialistic philosophy: which is not to say, however, that every realist in art is also a philosophical materialist. But in order to prove how clear this relationship between art and materialism was precisely to the "artists of consciousness," we may turn to Virginia Woolf, who in one of her critical essays ("Modern Fiction", 1919) called prose writers like John Galsworthy or H. G. Wells "materialists", because they were deeply concerned also with externals, instead of solely concentrating on "the true and the enduring". " I n contrast with those whom we called materialists," she wrote, "Mr. Joyce is spiritual; he is concerned at all costs to reveal the flickerings of the innermost flame which flashes its message through the brain." 1 4 The artistic realism of the nineteenth century, which built on the basis of a materialistic epistemology, forcefully separated the world of reality from t h a t of consciousness, and the imagination. Of poetry it demanded the expression of the direct experience of reality, and from drama and prose a depiction of natural, chronological order, and of characters who are socially and psychologically motivated and operate in a causal nexus. This method was not acknowledged by E. as a way of expressing the essential, for it sought other stylistic means and evolved its method on the basis of a philosophical world view which renounced the emphasis on the primacy of objective reality. The method of the Naturalist Zola agreed with that of the Realists on account of its theory of knowledge. When, in his novel Germinal, he describes the march of the rebellious miners, he gives an exact picture of the world of concrete reality through the enumeration of many small details. The same claim cannot be made for Kafka, although he, too, does not spare us small details in his account of Gregor Samsa's transformation into a beetle. B y implication, he states the deeper truth about the beetle existence of the little man of his world, and about the impossibility of communicating with the powers which judge the life of man; but his method is not aimed at representing the world of concrete experience in order to clarify the ideational content. Similarly, Becher's impassioned lyrical prose of the twenties did not aim at a representation of the external world for its own sake, but the writer sharply focused on reality, since he wanted to shock and awaken the reader. Ernst Toller's dramas show no trace of imitation, yet they were aimed at reality and wanted to direct the viewer to it. And to a still greater extent this can be said about the didactic plays of Brecht—and not only about those. 14

Collected Essays (London, 1966), II, p. 105. 57

The sense of "artistic volition", this key concept of the Expressionistic method, taken by itself, designates the desire, the intention, and the purpose of the artist. Artistic volition makes its presence more intensely felt in the genetic process of a work of art in which non-mimetic methods and techniques are employed than in the calm, classical art which follows nature faithfully. The volitional character of E. permitted it to employ its methods and stylistic devices for the purpose of a pure "art of consciousness", as well as for an art which focused on, and pointed to, reality. In spite of the philosophical background of his method, the Expressionist—or the artist who borrowed methods and techniques from E.—could express reality and truth just as well as the artist who used realistic methods. The artistic volition of the Expressionists was also capable of chang­ ing the function of its own method and its means of creation. It was able to reflect the real world, though not as broadly and adequately as that of the Realist, who was true to nature. By pointing to reality, it mobilized its public, whipped up passions and in­ spired to action even more strongly than the latter. If the creative individual is a conscious and active participant in the structure of the reality of which he forms part, then his will manifests itself by representing, criticizing, and changing that structure by means of self-expression, since his subject, in an aesthetic sense, represents objective reality. Therefore objective reality emerges through his subject, and the objective social goal through his art. Thus realistic art has several variations of its method at its disposal, each of which mirrors reality, re­ presents it, and orients itself toward it. In the one strain, which makes use primarily of the style that is faithful to nature, the object dominates. The other style, which also makes use of "anti-Naturalistic" techniques, assigns a greater and more flexible role to the subject. Both can express reality, and both can becloud it. Thus what Brecht said in the course of the E. debate (1938) in his well-known essay "Weite und Vielfalt der realistischen Schreibweise" seems worth while pondering: "Reality, and not aes­ thetics,—not even the aesthetics of Realism—, must be consulted about literary forms. The truth can be stated and withheld in many ways."15 (Translated from the German by Linda Brust.)

15

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Bertolt Brecht, Gesammelte Werke (Frankfurt, 1968), X I X , p . 349.

H. F .

GARTEN

F O R E I G N INFLUENCES ON GERMAN EXPRESSIONIST DRAMA

I t is no mere accident that, as a literary movement, E. first made itself felt in lyric poetry. For lyric poetry is, by its very nature, the expression of subjective emotions and experiences. And subjectivism is the hallmark of E., at least in its early stages. Subjective drama seems, at first sight, a contradiction in terms, for drama presupposes a clash between opposing characters or forces. However subjective the primary creative impulse of the dramatists, and however close his identification with the central character—some degree of objectivity is necessary to engender drama in the accepted sense. I n view of this circumstance it is surprising how quickly E. invaded the theater, at any rate in Germany. Indeed, it may be argued that it was in the drama that German E. found its most significant and potent form. Many social, political, and intellectual factors had to come together to produce Expressionist drama as it emerged in Germany around 1910, gathered momentum during the First World War, reached its peak after the revolution of 1918, and subsided around 1923. I n the course of this development, it took on many forms and underwent several changes. I n the years before the war, it bore the stamp of the ecstatic lyricism from which it had sprung (e.g., in the early plays of Kokoschka, in Reinhard Johannes Sorge's Der Bettler and Werfel's Die Troerinnen). Soon, however, a social note was struck: the world of reality in its manifold facets—the big city, the machine, war, capitalism—took on more and more concrete forms, symbolizing a corrupt society from which the Expressionist hero tried to break away, or which he sought to trans­ form in the light of his vision. Thus Expressionist drama acquired a messianic fervor which, around 1918, reached a revolutionary pitch in the plays of Kaiser, Toller, Ludwig Rubiner, and Hasenclever. In short, from an aesthetic concept E. turned into a social and political force. This development is a specifically German phenomenon which is closely linked with the political and ideological history of Germany during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: the growing estrangement of the intellectuals from society, the violent indictment of bourgeois values, the opposition to the Emperor's autocratic regime, and, finally, the defeat and collapse of the whole social fabric as a result of the war. I t is, therefore, quite possible to explain the emergence of Expressionist drama merely in terms of German social and literary history. Nevertheless, this drama was by no means an isolated feature; it was stimulated by and, in its turn, stimulated developments in other European countries. In tracing these interchanges, it is not easy to distinguish between independent parallel developments and direct "influences", 59

since the movement which, in Germany, came to be known as E. corresponded to similar contemporary movements—Imagism and Vorticism in England, Surrealism in France, and Futurism in Italy. Moreover, we must distinguish between those foreign influences which affected the Expressionist movement generally, and those which stimulated the drama in par­ ticular. We are here concerned only with the drama. In order to elucidate the emergence of German Expressionist drama, one must call to mind the situation of European drama at the turn of the century. By then, Naturalism, which had dominated the 1880's and '90's, had spent its force as a literary movement. It had been superseded by Symbolism (or Neo-Romanticism, as it is usually labelled in Germany in connection with the drama), which was, in many ways, its very opposite. Curiously enough, it was the very champions of realistic and Naturalistic drama — Henrik Ibsen, Gerhart Hauptmann, and Strindberg—who, in their creative development, moved from the one to the other and, with their later works, turned Symbolist. Along with them, there emerged genuinely Symbolist playwrights like Maeterlinck, Gabriele D'Annunzio, Hofmannsthal, and many others. Much as they differ in their individual approach, they have certain fundamental traits in common: the conscious withdrawal from the contemporary scene into the realm of legend, folklore, and myth; the cult of "beauty" and sensitive refinement, and the probing into the innermost recesses of the human soul. Instead of closely reproducing reality, they gave full rein to poetry and imagina­ tion. These aesthetic concepts called for a new kind of scenic representation. In Paris, the Naturalistic Theatre Libre of Andre Antoine was succeeded by Lugné-Poë's Theatre de l'Oeuvre (which, significantly, opened in 1893 with Maeterlinck's Pelléas et Mélisande). In Berlin, the champion of Naturalist drama, Otto Brahm, found his successor in Max Reinhardt, who met the demands of the Symbolist and Neo-Romantic play­ wrights with his sumptuous display of color, light, and music—"the stage as a dream image", as Hofmannsthal defined it. It was from this type of play that the Expressionist drama grew and against which it violently reacted. It is not easy, at first sight, to draw the borderline between Symbolist and early Expressionist drama. The transition from the one to the other was often imperceptible. Some of the foremost Expressionist playwrights began with Symbolist and Neo-Romantic works (e.g., Sternheim's Don Juan [1906], Kaiser's König Hahnrei and Die jüdische Witwe [1908 and 1910]) and, vice versa, some Sym­ bolist playwrights evolved, in their later works, Expressionist tendencies (e.g., Carl Hauptmann with his Krieg [1913], Stefan Zweig with Jeremias [1917], or Paul Claudel with his mystery play L'Annonce faite a Marie [1912]). In many ways, the Symbolist drama, which was clearly inspired by the French Symbolist poets from Stéphane Mallarmé to Rimbaud, prepared the ground for the Expressionist theater. It transcended surface reality, adding a spiritual and meta­ physical dimension; it used poetic, non-naturalistic language and, above all, it employed symbols to express universal concepts. In short, without the Symbolist movement, which dominated European drama at the beginning of the century, German Expression­ ist drama could never have developed as it did. Much as the early Expressionist play­ wrights were influenced by Symbolist drama, they reacted violently against it. Thus 60

they rejected its aestheticism, its cult of "beauty", its detachment from contemporary life and social problems, and its ethical relativism and fatalism. The Symbolists still thought of man as being ruled by uncontrollable forces—not by material conditions, as the Naturalists believed, but by a transcendental destiny (cf. Mélisande's "C'est quelque chose qui est plus forte que moi" [There is something stronger than myself]). By way of contrast, E. turned from the past to the future, from legend and myth to the contemporary world, from Vart pour Vart to life. Above all, it believed in man's active potentialities in shaping his destiny by transforming himself and the world. Richard Samuel defines the ambivalent relationship of Expressionist drama to its immediate predecessors as follows: It rejected the Neo-Romantic surrender to impressions, its analysis of the soul, its preoccupation with history, legend and fairy-tale, and its lack of a definite programme for the future. It accepted from Neo-Romanticism . . . the cult of the irrational, the representation of the dream-world, the application of sym­ bols, and the heightening of the emotional effect to the point of ecstasy. From Naturalism it inherited the emphasis on the social defects of the existing milieu and criticism of the bourgeois world. Upon these traditional features it imposes new ideas and ideals.1 These new ideas and ideals were carried by a new generation in revolt against the old one. This revolt is epitomized in the conflict between father and son—one of the dominant themes of Expressionist drama, from Sorge's Der Bettler and Hasenclever's Der Sohn to Arnolt Bronnen's Vatermord. It is in the revolt of son against father, cul­ minating in actual parricide, that the revolutionary impulse of Expressionist drama first found vent. The son, mouthpiece of the young generation, became the prophet of a new world of peace and happiness for all. The idea of transformation (Wandlung) and regeneration (Erneuerung) became the central theme of all Expressionist drama. This new spirit, which pervaded the drama as well as every other art form, was stimulated by influences from various European countries. From Russia came the powerful impulse of Dostoevsky (the standard German edition of whose works began to appear in 1907); from France, Bergson's concept of Creative Evolution (L'évolution créatrice [also 1907]), with its emphasis on intuition, instead of analytical reasoning, as revealing the essence of things. To this may be added Claudel, whose drama L'Annonce faite a Marie, performed in Germany in 1913 under the title Die Verkündigung, was widely accepted as a valid contribution to Expressionist drama. The greatest single influence from abroad was undoubtedly Strindberg, especially his two plays, To Damascus and A Dream Play. The impact of the Swedish dramatist on Germany was deeper and more far-reaching than on any other country. It grew steadily from the late 1890's to the First World War and reached its peak between 1913 and 1915, when twenty-four of his plays were staged in more than a thousand performances in sixty-two German cities. In his creative development, Strindberg reflected, and partly anticipated, the main literary movements of his time, Naturalism, 1 Richard Samuel and R. Hinton Thomas, Expressionism Theatre (Cambridge, England, 1939), p . 59.

in German Life, Literature and the

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Symbolism, and E. But all three were, to a larger or smaller degree, latent in all his works; for he infused them with his own singular genius and used them at will for his artistic purposes. Even his early, ostensibly Naturalistic plays already contain Expressionistic elements. Their characters, though still realistically drawn and psychologically motivated, are larger than life; and some of them are nameless, like the Captain in The Father. Already here the war of the sexes, the dominant theme of all of Strindberg's works, is not conditioned by time and place, but has a timeless, symbolic quality. The same applies to Miss Julie, for although the play presents a "slice of life'' in the Naturalistic sense, the two protagonists are really embodiments of elemental forces, locked in a perennial struggle. This is even more evident in later plays such as Dance of Death which, for all its realistic detail, reaches beyond its specific time and place. The decisive turning-point occurred at the end of the century with To Damascus (1898-1903). This trilogy, grown out of Strindberg's mental agony known as the "In­ ferno" crisis, is generally regarded as the prototype of Expressionist drama, anticipating the rise of the movement by several years. In his book Anarchie im Drama, Bernhard Diebold calls it "die Mutterzelle des expressionistischen Dramas" (the germ of Expres­ sionist drama).2 In Strindberg's play, both the external form and the spiritual substance of Expressionist drama are, for the first time, fully realized: first, the reduction of the dramatis personae to nameless types, such as the Unknown Man, the Lady, the Beggar, the Doctor, and so on; secondly, the breaking-down of the analytical form with its exposition, denouement, and catastrophe, and its replacement by a succession of scenes, denoting stages (Stationen) on the central character's road toward a spiritual goal; and thirdly, the identification of the author with his central figure, the Unknown Man, who passes through every kind of mental agony until he finds salvation in the Christian faith. There is no antagonist equivalent to this central figure. All the other characters have no empirical existence but are merely projections or manifestations of his own Self—"Ausstrahlungen des Ich", as Dahlström calls them.3 Similarly, the scenes are not realistic settings but reflections of the hero's inner consciousness, merging and changing like pictures in a dream. In short, the whole play is virtually a monodrama, and its basic structure is monological. To quote Diebold once again: In Nach Damaskus steht mit dem Unbekannten zum erstenmal der Monologist des expressionistischen Dramas auf dem Theater. Jener im Kerne eher lyrische als dramatische Anklager der Menschheit und Ausschreier seiner Schmerzen, wie Sorges Bettier, Hasenclevers Sohn und Kornfelds Bitterlich, deren meiste Gegenspieler weniger Vertreter von wirklichen Gegenwillen sind als Materiali­ sation ihrer eigenen Seelen.4 The Expressionist character of To Damascus is evident not only in its formal struc­ ture but also in its spiritual content. Its central idea—a man's transformation and 2

Bernhard Diebold, Anarchie im Drama, third ed. (Frankfurt, 1925), p. 165. C. E. W. Dahlström, Strindberg's Dramatic Expressionism (Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1930). " I n To Damascus, the soliloquist of the Expressionist drama appears for the first time in the person of the Stranger, (this soliloquist is) a basically more lyrical than dramatic accuser of mankind and forceful proclaimer of his pains, like Sorge's Bettler, Hasenclever's Sohn and Kornfeld's Bitterlich, most of whose antagonists are less representatives of actual wills opposed to them than materializations of their own souls." Diebold, op. cit., p. 165 f. 3 4

62

regeneration—becomes the dominant theme of German Expressionist drama, from Der Betller to Toller's Die Wandlung and Kaiser's Nebeneinander. As Sokel puts it, "The haughty, stubborn, passionate self of the Unknown Man must be broken to be reborn in humility and love."5 The very title of the play points to the Christian idea of conversion. In fact, the analogy with Christian concepts is apparent in many Expres­ sionist plays, even where it is not expressly stated, as in To Damascus. Strindberg's hero, whose suffering is representative of the suffering of mankind, has a Christ-like quality about him: "I suffer as though I were the whole of humanity." We find the same quality in many of the central figures of Expressionist drama proclaiming the message of spiritual and ethical transformation. Although To Damascus shows all the essential features of Expressionist drama, there are, nevertheless, some important differences. First of all, the central character, for all his universal implications, is, in every detail, a self-portrait of Strindberg. His obsession with the problem of marriage, his petty financial worries, his persecution mania, his vacillation between self-abasement and megalomania, his preoccupation with alchemy—all these are clearly autobiographical traits. No social issues are touched upon; and suffering and redemption, the central problems of the drama, are confined to the solitary individual. On his road of martyrdom, the hero is weighed down by a sense of inexorable fate against which he struggles in vain. Even his final salvation lies in passive submission and resignation. In these respects, To Damascus is still a product of the fin de siècle. Moreover, it is the work of a middle-aged man, worn down by half a lifetime of intense emotional experience. It is not so much a conscious attempt at creating a new dramatic form as the spontaneous expression of an acute personal crisis. Moreover, it is unique within Strindberg's dramatic work, for he never again employed a similar form (except perhaps in his last play, The Great Highway, subtitled "A Wander-Drama in Seven Stations"). The other play by Strindberg which exercised a strong influence on German Expres­ sionist drama was his Dream Play of 1902. In his preface, Strindberg relates it expressly to To Damascus: "As he did in his previous dream play, so in this one the author has tried to imitate the disconnected but seemingly logical form of the dream. Anything may happen: everything is possible and probable. Time and space do not exist ...The characters split, double, multiply, vanish, solidify, blur, clarify." Here, however, there is no central character comparable to the Unknown Man: "One consciousness reigns above them all—that of the dreamer." Strindberg's Ego may be said to split into three characters—the Officer, the Lawyer, and the Poet. But he is really immanent in every character as he himself is the dreamer in whose consciousness the whole phantasmagoria unfolds. Here, too, all the characters are nameless types, but the social range is much wider; here, too, the dominant theme is suffering—not the ego­ centric suffering of a single individual but that of all humanity, culminating in the ultimate knowledge that "Life is evil". This suffering is epitomized in the cry of Indra's Daughter which, as a constant refrain, echoes through the play: "Man is to be pitied!" (or, in its more poignant German version: "Es ist schade um die Menschen !"). Through5

Sokel, The Writer in Extremis, p. 155. 63

out, however, she remains a passive onlooker, unable to change man's predicament. Thus the whole play is suffused with a sense of hopelessness, barely relieved by the final symbol of the opening flower. It is this deep pessimism which distinguishes Strindberg's Dream Play from genuine Expressionist drama. Ideologically, the play is closer to the world of Maeterlinck than to E. This is equally true of Strindberg's later plays, the so-called "chamber plays", culminating in Ghost Sonata (1907). With their complex symbolism and their dark mood of inescapable fate, they are late offsprings of the Symbolist movement rather than marking the beginning of E. Yet they, too, contain undoubtedly "expressionistic elements", as Dahlström demonstrates in his detailed study. More influential than the verbal content are the nonverbal elements of Strindberg's dramatic art, that is, his bold innovations in stagecraft and scenery: the symbolic use of light, color, music, and decor to express states of the mind. It is in these scenic devices that Strindberg comes closest to E. Referring to a new production of A Dream Play in his "Letters to the Intimate Theatre" he suggests that "instead of painted scenery we shall look only for color effects; for we have discovered that the red plush curtain can take on all shades of color merely by letting different light fall on it. We shall set up allegorical attributes which symbolize the scene by an image: e.g., some large shells indicate the proximity of the sea, a few cypresses take us to Italy, two flags in red and blue signify Foulstrand . . ." Here the principles of the Expressionist stage are already fully applied. It is illuminating to compare Sorge's Der Bettler (1910), the first full-fledged Expres­ sionist play, with Strindberg's work. Its dramatic form is closely akin to that of To Damascus. The characters are nameless types, divided into "Human Beings", "Groups", "Mute Figures", and "Projections of the Poet". The central character, alternately called "The Poet", "The Youth", and "The Beggar", is the author himself, who voices his innermost conflicts and aspirations in a series of ecstatic-lyrical monologues. He sees himself as the pioneer of a "new drama" which will address itself not to a select few but to the masses. This drama, which will express itself "in symbols of eternity", will sanctify and purify mankind, leading it to an ideal future of "love never loved before". In fact, the whole play, subtitled "a dramatic mission", delineates the process of writing this very drama. It is this missionary zeal, the basic belief that man can be transformed and raised to a higher level of existence, which distinguished Expressionist drama from the pessimism and disillusionment of Strindberg's world. While the Un­ known Man is fundamentally egocentric, striving only for his own salvation, Sorge's Beggar projects his spiritual conflicts onto the whole of mankind and feels himself to be the prophet of a Utopian future. While Indra's Daughter helplessly watches the sufferings of men and returns defeated to her transcendental realm, Sorge and the Expressionist playwrights who followed in his wake hoped for an earthly paradise— however far away. This gave German Expressionist drama an activist, revolutionary momentum which eventually carried it to regions far removed from its origin. An important aspect of Expressionist drama often underrated or altogether ignored is its realization on the stage. Without the revolution in stage design and in the general concepts of theatrical representation which marked the early years of the century, 64

the Expressionist playwrights could hardly have materialized their visions in terms of the theater. This revolution was initiated mainly by two men, the Swiss designer Adolphe Appia and the Englishman Edward Gordon Craig. Much as these two men differed in their specific aims, they met in their emphatic rejection of the realistic stage, brought to perfection in the theaters of Otto Brahm and Konstantin Stanislavski. Instead, they envisaged a stylized stage which ignores all realistic detail and reflects the symbolic and spiritual content of the drama. Appia drew his inspiration from Bayreuth. Although Wagner, in his own productions, was still constrained by the realistic style of his time, the mythical content of his work called for a totally different approach. It was Appia who first visualized these possibilities. His two theoretical works, La mise en scene du drame Wagnerien (1895) and Die Musik und die Inszenierung (1899), though mainly dealing with the operatic stage, prepared the ground for a general revolution in scenic design. While Appia's influence remained largely ephemeral, the impact of Craig on the German theater just before the rise of the Expressionist movement was of vital impor­ tance. After trying in vain to realize his ideas in England, Craig went to Germany in 1904 and, after a short stay in Weimar, arrived in Berlin, where he met Brahm and Bernhardt. It was for these two that he designed the sets for Hofmannsthal's plays Das gerettete Venedig and Elektra. His influence, promoted by exhibitions in many German cities, spread rapidly. In 1905, he formulated his ideas in his book, The Art of the Theatre, which was immediately translated into German. These ideas cover the whole field of theatrical presentation, décor, acting, shape of the auditorium, etc., and many of them clearly foreshadow the Expressionist theater. "To be theatrical—that should be the highest aim of the Theatre of today and of to-morrow. To chant—to strike attitudes—to sweep on and off the stage—to mouth— to glare—to whisper with baited breath . . . to become more, not less theatrical." Craig vehemently attacked "the falseness and pretentious thought of hideous Realism". Against this he set his ideal of a "Theatre of Truth and Beauty". His aim as a stage designer was "to realise in scene the vision of the poet".6 Craig's repudiation of realism in scenery and acting, his emphasis on light, color, rhythm, and abstract decor, prepared the ground in which Expressionist drama could take root. By concentrating the light on the central figure, or by picking out segments of the stage from the surrounding darkness, the essential structure of Expressionist drama could be realized in terms of the theater. Craig himself was, of course, still unaware of E.; he merely spoke of the "new movement" which would transform the theater. Moreover, he still lacked the plays corresponding to his vision. His own work was devoted to such dramatists as Ibsen, Hofmannsthal, William Butler Yeats, and, above all, Shakespeare. With his emphasis on "Beauty" as the guiding principle of the theater of the future, he still shared the aesthetic concepts of the Symbolist and Neo-Romantic movements. Yet the crucial two years during which Craig lived and worked in Germany (1904—1906) gave a powerful impulse to the rise of Expressionist drama. Strindberg, who was well ac6

Edward Gordon Craig, Index to the Story of My Days (London, 1957), p. 290 ff. 65

quainted with Craig's writings, noted in his "Letters to the Intimate Theatre": "There is a whole literature on the theatrical revival, and first and foremost I would like to mention Gordon Craig's wonderful magazine, The Mask."7 Craig's vision of a flight of steps as the dominant feature of the stage found its fulfillment in Leopold Jessner's famous "Treppe" (Stairs); and his ideas about acting were taken up, consciously or unconsciously, by Kornfeld, who demanded that the Expressionist actor should not merely be an "imitator" striving to "fake reality", but should "abstract from the attributes of reality and be nothing but a representative of ideas, of emotions, or of fate!" Craig's radical notions about the predominance of the visual elements over the spoken drama were echoed by the Sturm circle, whose theatrical theorist, Lothar Schreyer, declared that "color, form, sound and movement" are the only means by which a drama can give expression to a "vision"—a theory carried to its extreme in the plays of Stramm and in Hasenclever's Mensehen, where the spoken text is reduced to a bare minimum. But more important than any specific links between Craig's theories and E. was the revolutionary impulse he gave to the German theater in the years immediately preceding that movement. Another vital impulse for German E. came from Futurism 8 and, in particular, from its chief propagator, Filippo Marinetti. Although this movement was initially concerned with the visual arts, it soon extended its influence to literature. E. and Futurism had arisen independently, but they soon established close links. In 1909, Marinetti published his first Futurist manifesto and his novel Mafarka le Futuriste. These were followed, in 191.1 and 1912 respectively, by his manifestos on Futurist painting and literature. During these years, he visited Berlin several times to organize exhibitions of Futurist painting. Here he came into contact with Walden, who published his manifestos in Der Sturm. Marinetti's theories were eagerly taken up by such writers as Walden, Stramm, and Döblin. In his manifesto on literature (published in Der Sturm, 1912, under the title Die futuristische Literatur: Technisches Manifest), Marinetti expounds the principles of Futurist writing. He violently attacks the Symbolists for indulging in verbal beauty and rhetoric, and calls for a new mode of writing which will "use all brutal tones, all expressive cries of violent life that surrounds us". He then proceeds to outline in detail his rules for a new syntax aiming at condensation and emphasis—elimination of articles, adjectives, adverbs, and concentration on nouns and verbs. It is evident that these principles are closely akin to those underlying Expressionist language, as employed by Sternheim, Kaiser, and many others. While Marinetti's literary manifesto applied mainly to poetry and prose, his Teatro del varieta (1913) and his Manifesto del teatro sintetico (1916) are specifically relevant to the drama. He vehemently rejects traditional drama, with its psychological motivation and logical development, and calls for "synthetic drama" which reduces acts and scenes to a few words and concentrates on the climactic moments of the action. 7 8

66

Quoted by Denis Balet, Edward Gordon Craig (London, 1966), p. 104. See Arnold, Die Literatur des Expressionismus, p. 26.

We find these principles fully applied in the plays of Stramm, such as Krafte (Forces) and Geschehen (Happening), published in 1914, a year before their author was killed in the war. Other ideas propounded by Marinetti—his glorification of the circus and the cabaret and his demand for eliminating the separation of stage and audience—bore fruit only in the post-Expressionist period, in Dadaism and, finally, in the theater of Brecht. There are very close affinities between Futurism and E.: both propagate a radical break with the past, vehemently attack "bourgeois" values, and rely on intuition and ecstasy as opposed to logic and intelligence. However, there are also significant differ­ ences: Marinetti's worship of the machine, his ecstatic vision of the "mechanical man" of the future, finds no echo in Expressionist writing. On the contrary, German E. sees in the machine the tyrant of man, impeding his full spiritual development (cf. Kaiser's Gas trilogy and Toller's Die Maschinenstürmer). Similarly, Marinetti's glo­ rification of war as the remedy for all social ills stands in glaring contrast to the anti­ war attitude of the German Expressionists. These differences largely account for the different directions which the two movements took in their further development: while Marinetti became an ardent supporter of Fascism, the German Expressionists prepared the way for the socialist revolution of 1918. The First World War severed all cultural and intellectual ties between Germany and the outside world. But it was during these crucial years that German Expressionist drama got into its full stride. In fact, the war, the defeat, and the ensuing revolution were already foreshadowed in some significant plays written before the outbreak of war —Carl Hauptmann's Krieg (1913), Kaiser's Die Bürger von Calais (1913), and Werfel's Die Troerinnen (1914). When war broke out, it merely confirmed the chaos which the Expressionists had foreseen in their visions. From out of this chaos arose the cry for spiritual rebirth and the brotherhood of man. In this way, German Expressionist drama began to veer toward social and political issues which were originally outside its range. This development can be clearly traced through the war years. The year 1916 marked a crucial turning-point: in that year, such plays as Goering's Seeschlacht and Fritz von Unruh's Ein Geschlecht were written, to be followed, in 1917, by Toller's Die Wandlung and Kaiser's Gas. When, in 1918, the revolution broke out and the social structure of Wilhelminian Germany disintegrated, the Expressionists saw their visions fulfilled. The end of the war released the full flood of Expressionist writing, above all, in the theater. The years immediately following the revolution can be regarded as the peak of the Expressionist movement in German drama: for a brief moment, the Expres­ sionist vision seemed to coincide with reality. This development of the movement from a primarily aesthetic program to an active revolutionary force was a peculiarly German phenomenon, conditioned by social and political factors—the intelligentsia's mounting antagonism to the imperial regime, and the total collapse of this regime through defeat in war. There was no parallel in any other country and consequently no "influence" from the outside—with one sig­ nificant exception: the Russian revolution. The October Revolution of 1917 had an overwhelming impact on Germany, not only in the political but also in the intellectual and literary sphere. For a brief moment 67

it seemed that the chiliastic hopes of the Expressionists had been realized in the estab­ lishment of a Communist society. Since their antagonism was, from the outset, directed against the bourgeois and capitalist order, the future they visualized tended to take the shape of a socialist or, in its radical form, Communist society. The plays written immediately after the German revolution of 1918 clearly show the impact of these ideas (e.g., Toller's Masse-Mensch, Rubiner's Die Gewaltlosen, Kaiser's Holle Weg Erde, and Julius Maria Becker's Das letzte Gericht, whose hero even has a Russian name). However, with this definite political fixation the Expressionist movement lost its essential character. For the essence of E. was the spiritual regeneration of man, unrelated to any specific social program. By consciously embracing the Communist creed, the Expressionist playwrights ceased to be Expressionists. This process is clearly illustrated by the two successive versions of Becher's drama Arbeiter, Bauern, Soldaten. The first version, written in 1919, is fully Expressionist, preaching, in ecstatic verse, man's spiritual transformation in religious terms. In the end, the "Saint" leads mankind to the "land of promise, the holy land". The second version of 1924, on the other hand, is unmistakably a political manifesto propagating world revolution in the Marxist sense. The language is toned down; good and evil are seen unequivocally in terms of Communism and capitalism; and the ultimate goal is now the Communist society carried by the proletariat. Apart from this ideological influence of the Russian revolution on the final phase of E., the German Expressionist stage received fresh impulses from the Russian revo­ lutionary theater, especially from the work of Tairov and Meyerhold.9 Both stage directors had broken away, in the early years of the century, from Stanislavski's Moscow Art Theatre and had founded their own "studios", in which they developed, each in his way, new theatrical forms. Their common ground was the rejection of the naturalistic stage. Tairov evolved what he termed the "unfettered theater" (das entfesselte Theater), which turned the stage into a riot of Colors and geometrical shapes and demanded the "synthetic actor", who masters every form of expression, including dancing, singing, and acrobatics. Meyerhold, in turn, developed his concept of "bio­ mechanics", filling the bare stage with scaffolding, steps, and ladders. Like German E., the Russian theatrical reform began before 1914 as a purely aesthetic, apolitical movement but eventually fell in with the political revolution of 1917. Its champions became the protagonists of the revolutionary theater, putting their art at the service of the Communist state. Their influence on the German stage came too late to change substantially the course of Expressionist drama. On the contrary, it hastened its end. The "constructive stage" of Meyerhold and the "unfettered theater" of Tairov made its full impact only in the post-Expressionist era, on the theater of Piscator and, finally, Brecht.10 They thus initiated the drama of critical realism or "Neue Sachlichkeit", which superseded the Expressionist movement. 9 10

See the essay by Eugene Bristow in this volume. See Ulrich Weisstein's essay on Piscator in Reinhold Grimm, ed., Deutsche Dramentheorien (Frankfurt, 1971), pp. 516-547. 68

REINHOLD GRIMM and HENRY J. SCHMIDT

FOREIGN INFLUENCES ON GERMAN EXPRESSIONIST POETRY*

In the course of literary history, many German poets have been influenced by foreign models. But the appearance of Stefan George's translation of numerous poems from Charles Baudelaire's Fleurs du Mal in 1901 was an event of especially prophetic sig­ nificance. During the first three decades of the twentieth century, the German poetic idiom was to be affected more strongly than ever before by impulses from abroad. This is particularly true of Expressionist poetry, where the importation of aesthetic theories and poetic styles was not simply a diffuse aspect of Zeitgeist but a readily traceable factor of artistic development. Exposure to the lyric heritage of other lands was, for the German Expressionists, both a formative and subjective experience. Occasionally, they went as far as to seek and find in this heritage the source material of their art. The Expressionist poets generally acquired their knowledge of foreign poetry through translations. Some were themselves translators. Although the act of trans­ lation does not invariably indicate an affinity to the original, it can be indicative of stylistic or aesthetic preferences and may tend to reflect a poet's Weltanschauung. Once again, this is exemplified by the generation preceding that of the Expressionists. George, for instance, was selective in his translations from Baudelaire; he chose to omit, among other poems, "Une Charogne". Admiring Baudelaire, the Symbolist, George, the formalist, rejected the glorification of the repellently ugly. Rilke, on the other hand, singled out this poem for special praise in Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge (The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge) and wrote in a letter to his wife: "Ich musste daran denken, dass ohne dies Gedicht die ganze Entwicklung zum sachlichen Sagen... nicht hatte anheben können" (I had to consider that, without this poem, the entire development toward objectified expression... could not have begun).1 Both George and Rilke translated extensively. Yet these endeavors were of sig­ nificance primarily to the poet-translators themselves. The wide popularity which François Villon, Arthur Rimbaud, and other French poets enjoyed in the Germanspeaking countries was mainly due to the skill and dedication of a man who did not aspire to be a major poet in his own right: Karl Klammer (1897-1959).2 Best known * All German Quotations were translated by the editor, U. W. 1 Letter of October 19, 1907. 2 See Reinhold Grimm, "Werk und Wirkung des Übersetzers Karl Klammer" in Neophilologus, XLIV (1960), pp. 20—36. Reprinted in Grimm, Strukturen: Essays zur deutschen Literatur (Göttingen, 1963). 69

under the pseudonym of K. L. Ammer, he published the bulk of his influential trans­ lations in 1906 and 1907. They included selected works of Maeterlinck (in collaboration with Friedrich von Oppeln-Bronikowski), Villon (a volume from which Brecht was to borrow so extensively that he was accused of plagiarism) and, most important of all, Rimbaud. Klammer's Rimbaud translations, together with Stefan Zweig's adulatory characterization of the French poet, made an immediate and lasting impact on the literary avant-garde. As early as 1908, Rudolf Kurtz, writing in Die Gegenwart, celebrat­ ed the Frenchman as a great liberator, who "with an unequalled jolt tears up the irk­ some form of language . . . Modern poetry in France and the beginnings of modern poetry in Germany bear his stamp". 3 Klammer's role can hardly be overestimated. As his friend, Alexander LernetHolenia, has correctly stated, "What we call modern poetry in Germany has begun with K. L. Ammer's translation of Arthur Rimbaud's poems".4 The poets whose verses echo Klammer's translations are legion. Apart from Brecht, they include Heym, Rubiner, Iwan Goll, numerous minor writers and, above all, Trakl. There cannot be the slightest doubt that Trakl's intensive study of Rimbaud—mostly via Klammer— caused him to become aware of new possibilities of lyric expression.5 To a somewhat lesser degree, the same holds true for German Expressionist poetry as a whole. Klammer's Rimbaud translations inspired similar but definitely inferior efforts by Däubler (1917), Paul Zech (1924 and 1927), and Alfred Wolfenstein (1930). Single poems from these collections had appeared earlier, especially in Expressionist journals such as Die Ahtion and Die Weissen Blatter. Die Weissen Blatter also published Zech's and Ludwig Scharf's translations of poems by Emile Verhaeren, Daubler's translations of Verlaine, Franz Blei's translations of Mallarmé, and Ernst Stadler's rendering of the "Franziskanischen Gebete" by Francis Jammes. Between 1911 and 1916, Die Aktion offered translations of poems by Baudelaire, Verlaine, Mallarmé, Emile Ver­ haeren, Jammes and Marinetti from the pen of writers like Stadler, Wolfenstein, Goll, Wilhelm Klemm, Ferdinand Hardekopf, and Alfred Richard Meyer. Ausgewahlte Gedichte, an important "Nachdichtung" of Verhaeren's poetry by Stefan Zweig, was already in its second edition in 1910. An extension of this list would reaffirm a basic fact: poetry translated by the Ger­ man Expressionists (or by writers who influenced them) was overwhelmingly French. Maeterlinck and Verhaeren, though Belgians of Flemish origin, wrote in French, and even the Italian Futurist Marinetti used that language extensively. Only one foreign poet equalled the French influence at that time: Walt Whitman. English and American poets were generally of little interest to the German writers of the early twentieth century. George had actually translated poems by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Charles Algernon Swinburne and Ernest Dowson for his Zeifgenössische Dichter I, 3 4 5

"Arthur Rimbaud" in Die Gegenwart, LXXIV (1908), p. 184 ff. and 202 ff. Quoted in Grimm, Strukturen, p. 144. See Reinhold Grimm, "Georg Trakls Verhältnis zu Rimbaud" in Germanisch-Bomanische Monatsschrift, N. F . I X (1959), pp. 288—315, as reprinted in Zur Lyrik-Diskussion, ed. R. Grimm (Darmstadt, 1966). See also Herbert Lindenberger, "Georg Trakl and Rimbaud" in Comparative Literature, X (1958), pp. 21—35, and F . Pamp, "Der Einfluss Rimbauds auf Georg Trakl" in Revue de littérature comparée, X X X I I (1958), pp. 396-406. 70

and there exist Rilke translations of poetry by Elizabeth Barrett Browning; yet neither the contributors to the Expressionist periodicals nor the Expressionists at large inclined toward these schools. Whitman was an exception. The story of Whitman's fame in Germany bears a striking resemblance to that of Rimbaud's German reputation. It differs from it only in so far as it begins a few years earlier. Whitman was first introduced to German readers in 1868 by the poet Ferdinand Freiligrath, who was then living in London. Freiligrath translated ten poems from Leaves of Grass. Subsequently, in 1889, a larger selection of poems was made available in German by T. W. Rolleston and Karl Knortz. In 1907, that banner year for translations, Johannes Schlaf produced a translation of eighty-four poems by Whitman in what has been called the first popular edition in German.6 What this collection achieved in popularity it lacked in quality, for Schlaf uncritically adopted all the faults of earlier translators. This becomes easily understandable if one accepts the statement of the critic O. E. Lessing: "Schlaf ist ein begabter Dichter, aber seine Kenntnisse der englischen Sprache sind gleich null" (S. is a gifted poet, but his knowledge of English is practically nil).7 Klammer, on the other hand, was well versed in French and was certainly as gifted a poet as Schlaf. What made his translations both extremely popular and yet somewhat deficient in quality stemmed from the boldness with which he not only changed and regrouped Rimbaud's lines but also imbued them with the poetic idiom of German Romanticism. Thus Klammer and Schlaf, though for entirely different reasons, achieved a similar effect. Contrary to Rimbaud, who was hailed as a lyrical anarchist, Whitman was wel­ comed as the poet of democracy and socialism. Five additional translations based on Leaves of Grass appeared between 1899 and 1909, along with selections from Whitman's prose, and Blei contributed some translations of poems to Die Aktion in 1914 and 1915. But the most important contribution came from the German Socialist Gustav Landauer, whose "Walt Whitman, Krieg: Zehn Gedichte" appeared in Die Weissen Blatter in 1915. Harry Law-Robertson assesses it as follows: "Apart from the clearly recognizable, one-sidedly socialistic tendency of this selection, which tears several stanzas out of their context in order to render the alleged social mission of the American more prom­ inent, the examples offered here have been literally translated and are also stylistically close to the original" (p. 27). One would, therefore, expect to find a good deal of Whit­ man in periodicals such as the Sozialistischen Monatshefte, and indeed, approximately sixty Whitman poems in translation were published in that journal. These translations, however, were all inferior to the selection published by Hans Reisiger in 1919, but they undoubtedly contributed to Whitman's impact on the Activist wing of German E. Having established the vehicle of influence to some degree, we can now turn to ascertainable traces of that influence. Expressionist poetry abounds with them. Nowhere are they more clearly noticeable than in the relationship of Trakl to Rimbaud. Between Trakl's lyrics and Klammer's translations there exist correspon­ dences which are often literal, often related with respect to imagery, motifs, 6 7

Harry Law-Robertson, Walt Whitman in Deutschland (Giessen, 1935), p. 22. Quoted ibid., p . 25. 71

"dynamic metaphors" 8 or structural aspects of composition. In Trakl's poetry we encounter literal borrowings of almost entire lines and sentences, extensive overlapping in the vocabulary, especially with regard to the sphere of the ugly and repel­ lent; and, finally, the reproduction of syntactic peculiarities, as well as those pertaining to word formation. Even in the choice of titles and the assignment of names there exist affinities. The influence even extends to the intonation, the syntax and the verbal structure. Metrical and versificatory correspondences, which seem to betray an occupation with French literature in general, are also in evidence. Primarily, however, it is Rimbaud's daring, innovative and idiosyncratic metaphors and motifs, often coagulating into stereotype formulas and fusing the most diverse elements, which left an indelible influence on Trakl's poetry.9 In many respects, Klammer's translation of Rimbaud served as Trakl's "quarry" from which he mined material for his lyric experimentation.10 This does not preclude, however, that in his most mature works a thorough assimilation of imagery and motifs took place, irrespective of their original context.11 Heym also seems to have found inspiration not only through Klammer but from Rimbaud directly. A case in point is the dance metaphor in Rimbaud's "Bal des Pendus" which occurs repeatedly in Heym's verse. This dual influence of Klammer's translation and the French original can be summarized as follows: "The courage to treat ugly and unusual things, the violent revaluation of reality through metaphors, such as is exemplified by the demonization of the universe, and the novel ways of using colors—all these stylistic traits visible in Heym's works are prefigured in Klammer and Rimbaud. Especially close is the relationship in the grandiose furor of the imagery."12 Heym was attracted not only to Rimbaud's poetic vigor and exuberance but also to his personality. Like Trakl, he was fascinated by the poète maudit whom he ranked highly among his literary idols. "Ich liebe alle, die in sich ein zerrissenes Herz haben," he wrote in his diary, "ich liebe Kleist, Grabbe, Hölderlin, Büchner, ich liebe Rimbaud und Marlowe."13 Even in Rimbaud's decision to leave Europe for Africa the Expressionists saw an act of rebellion against the establishment. The artistic manifestation of such a revolutionary philosophy is revealed most typically in the "absolute metaphor", which, once again, is traceable to Rimbaud. Baudelaire figures here as well, since both poets were anti-traditionalists and rejected the sterile artificiality of their literary heritage, as they sought out new subjects and 8 A term used by Karl-Ludwig Schneider in his book Der bildhafte Ausdruck in den Dichtungen Georg9 Heyms, Georg Trakls und Ernst Stadlers (Heidelberg, 1954). Grimm in Zur Lyrik-Diskussion, p. 298. 10 Maeterlinck and Verlaine also figure in Trakl's "quarry". See Reinhold Grimm, "Zur Wirkungsgeschichte Maurice Maeterlincks in der deutschsprachigen Literatur" in Revue de littérature comparée, X X X I I I (1959), pp. 535-544, and Walther Killy, Wandlungen des lyrischen Bildes, fourth ed. (Göttingen, 1964), p. 116. 11 See especially Bernhard Böschenstein, "Wirkungen des franzosischen Symbolismus auf die deutsche Lyrik der Jahrhundertwende" in Euphorion, LVIII (1964), pp. 375-395. 12 Grimm, Strukturen, pp. 139f. 13 Georg Heym, Dichtungen und Schriften, ed. K.-L. Schneider (Hamburg and Munich), I I I . (1960), p. 128.

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shockingly new modes of expression. Themes changed as well as form: the morgue, the insane asylum, the dissection table replaced the idyllic settings of conventional poetry, and Rimbaud's idea of a "derèglement raisonnée de tous les sens" induced Trakl and other German Expressionists to break with the concept of logical continuity within the poem. In Trakl's works, this transformation is crucial, "and what originally had been merely an unheard-of foreshortening of logically still coherent parts finally turned into alogical imagery".14 Alogical or absolute metaphors were occasionally produced by an abstract series of sounds, as in Rimbaud's "Memoire" ("les roses des roseaux dès longtemps dévorées"), the vowels of which have their exact counterpart—paradoxical though this may seem from the point of view of content—in Trakl's "Oh, die Rosen, grollend in Donnern". More often, however, they are achieved by a coupling of disparate images, as in the following stanzas: lm grünen Tempel glüht Verwesung. Die Fische stehen still. Gotts Odem Weckt sacht ein Saitenspiel im Brodem Aussatzigen winkt die Flut Genesung. Geist Dädals schwebt in blauen Schatten, Ein Duft von Milch in Haselzweigen. Man hört noch lang den Lehrer geigen, lm leeren Hof den Schrei der Ratten. Trakl's poem "Kleines Konzert", from which these lines are taken, combines the most heterogeneous elements: a landscape in decay, several totally independent images and motifs from Klammer's Rimbaud translation, a sudden echoing of Hölderlin,15 and a "fragment of crude, unformed reality from the two spheres of the banal and the repulsive".l6 As Paul Valéry states, although in a different context, such a manner of expression is a perfect example of "incohérence harmonique".17 Yet in the last analysis, a precise quantitative evaluation of direct or indirect borrowings is not only impossible but unnecessary. Only by means of a qualitative investigation can one attempt to clarify that which is uniquely Expressionistic. Bernhard Blume has noted, for instance, that the inclination of the Expressionist poets toward "Aaspoesie" is derivative in its origin yet uniquely Expressionist in its postRimbaud development.18 Previous to Rimbaud's treatment of the Ophelia motif, a girl's drowning represented the final act of a tragic existence. But Rimbaud's influence and the glorification of the then popular figure of the "Inconnue de la Seine" in Rilke's Malte Laurids Brigge mark a turning point: the girl's corpse is no longer symbolically reminiscent of a previous life but exists solely in the present. Rimbaud's "Ophélie", 14 15 16 17 18

Grimm, Zur Lyrik-Diskussion, p. 307. See "Dadalus' Geist" in Hölderlin's poem "An Zimmern". Grimm, Zur Lyrik-Diskussiori p. 312. Lettres a quelques-uns (Paris, 1952), p. 240. "Das ertrunkene Madchen: Rimbaud's 'Ophelie' und die deutsche Literatur" in Germanischromaniscke Monatsschrift, N. F. IV (1954), pp. 108-119. 73

written in 1870, inspired similar treatments by Wolfenstein, Zech, Benn, Heym, Ernst Balcke, Armin T. Wegner, and finally, Brecht. According to Blume, the motif represents the loss of belief in the rationality of human existence and the decay of the self which completely lacks the power to resist. Thus the poignant death of Shakespeare's heroine becomes a source of elemental disintegration in Heym's "Ophelia": lm Haar ein Nest von jungen Wasserratten, Und die beringten Hande auf der Flut Wie Flossen, also treibt sie durch den Schatten Des grossen Urwalds, der im Wasser ruht . . . This image, rats included, is more grotesque yet in Benn's early poem "Schone Jugend" from his collection Morgue: Der Mund eines Madehens, das lange im Schilf gelegen hatte, sah so angeknabbert aus. Als man die Brust aufbrach, war die Speiseröhre so löcherig. Schliesslich in einer Laube unter dem Zwerchfell fand man ein Nest von jungen Ratten . . . Such verses obviously hark back to Baudelaire's daring "Une Charogne". But the Ophelia motif is not invariably coupled with an emphasis upon the repellently grotesque. Brecht's "Vom ertrunkenen Madchen" (1920), for example, equates physical decay with spiritual eradication: Als ihr bleicher Leib im Wasser verfaulet war, Geschah es (sehr langsam), dass Gott sie allmahlich vergass. Erst ihr Gesicht, dann die Hande und ganz zuletzt erst ihr Haar. Dann ward sie Aas in Flüssen mit vielem Aas. Here Ophelia not only loses her self but the very memory of her being. During the heyday of the personality cult surrounding Rimbaud, adulation of Whitman was reaching ecstatic proportions. Once again the avant-garde had found a figure considered to be an anti-traditionalist, although of a different school. The Young Socialists of the 1880's and after praised Whitman as a prophet of their political idealism, a messiah of universal democracy; and Schlaf, his most prominent disciple, claimed in 1896 to see in Whitman the ideal of Nietzsche's superman and the Utopian ideal of the Socialists. Three years later, these attitudes had already broadened into a pseudo-religion. Critical assessments of the prophet and his works were vigorously attacked by Schlaf and his followers, although few of Whitman's disciples had read his poetry in the original. At the outset of the war, the workers' press helped spread Whitman's fame to the working classes. The poet, ironically, first was called a "Sanger des Krieges" but subsequently became an inspirational panacea for the suffering masses in Germany, 74

who regarded his works as a "Bibel der Demokratie". Sehlaf remained at the forefront, and in 1919 he proclaimed: Hundertmal nötiger als das tagliche Brot—und wir stehen gegenwartig dicht vor der Hungersnot!—brauchen wir Religion. Drum auf! Kommt zu Whitman! Erkennt, was Religion und wahre Demokratie ist! Ich wüsste bis zu diesem Augenblicke niemand, bei dem wir es so überwaltigend erfahren könnten, als ihn! Jetzt erst ist seine Zeit gekommen !19 Such democratic pathos and enthusiasm had long been admired in Whitman by the Expressionists and some of their predecessors, who often adopted his free-flowing style and long lines of verse. For instance, Max Dauthendey's Die geflügelte Erde: Ein Lied der Liebe und der Wunder um sieben Meere (The Winged Earth: A Song of Love and the Wonders around Seven Seas, 1910) reflects Whitman's humanistic, all-embracing pathos in verses which are unquestionably Whitmanesque. Whereas Schlaf's colleague Arno Holz emphatically disclaimed any desire to imitate the American poet in his Phantasus, the list of those upon whom Whitman left his mark is extensive. It includes Hasenclever, Alfons Paquet, Bahr, Karl Otten, Goll (a Whitman translator), Rubiner and Werfel, as well as the Arbeiterdichter Gerrit Engelke, Karl Bröger, and Heinrich Lersch. Most of them were Expressionists. Schlaf's comments on Werfel's volume Wir sind are thus not wide of the mark: "Unsere neue expressionistische Dichtung ist ohne Whitman nicht denkbar und tritt wohl in Zukunft noch entschiedener in sein Zeichen" (Our new Expressionist poetry is inconceivable without Whitman and, in the future, it will bear his stamp even more prominently).20 Wegner, for example, went so far as to preface his collection of poems Das Antlitz der Städte (The Face of the Cities) with the following lines from Whitman: "Nun aber ziehen wir aus unserer Verborgenheit, einen gewaltigen Hunger zu stillen. / Nun ziehen wir aus, zu empfangen was Erde und Meer uns niemals gab./Nicht durch die machtigen Walder ziehen wir, sondern durch die machtigeren Stadte." Law-Robertson sees Whitmanesque traits in Wegner's use of direct discourse, repetition, and free verse. Stadler's long lines are equally reminiscent of Whitman's style; and so is what Sokel calls Stadler's "loving interest in the small, concrete things of everyday life", as in poems like "Hier ist Einkehr" and "Kleine Stadt".20a The Expressionist poet most profoundly devoted to Whitman was doubtless the Activist Becher.21 His poem "Die Schlacht" offers not only Whitmanesque word clusters, rhythmical language, and the use of such French phrases as en masse and en avant but is expressly "Walt Whitman nachgedichtet". In Das neue Gedicht (1919), 19 "A hundred times more necessary than our daily bread—and we are directly facing a period of starvation—is religion. Let us rise, then I Come to Whitman! Realize what religion and true democracy are like ! Up to this time, I knew of nobody from whom we could learn it as forcefully as from him ! Only now our time has come !" Quoted by Law-Robertson, op. cit., p. 71. 20 Quoted ibid., p. 78. Law-Robertson, however, shows little familiarity with the subject matter and style of early Expressionist poetry and underestimates the Activist tendencies that it shared with Whitman's verses. 20a Walter H. Sokel, The Writer in Extremis (Sanford, 1964), p. 160. 21 In Die Literatur des Expressionismus, p. 137, Armin Arnold calls Becher "einen hysterischen Whitman".

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Becher wrote a "Nachschrift für Bruder Whitman", which includes the following panegyric: Sieh, mein lieber Bruder Whitman, dies Gedicht hier habe ich vor acht Tagen aufgeschrieben, da schlug ich eben heute wieder Dein unsterbliches Buch auf . . . und da erlebte ich, als ob ich Auge in Auge, Hand in Hand mit Dir stünde—: O unendlich schmelzender allverbindender ewiger Kontakt... Lieber Bruder Whitman—: Hoffnung, Ansporn, absolute Gesichertheit, aus der dampfenden Masse Deiner wogenden Strophen-Armeen bestatige ich mich. Ja, hatte ich beinahe gesagt, ich übernehme für dieses Jahrhundert Dein Kommando . . . Ja, mein alterer Bruder, mein weiser, mein erfahrener Du—ich verspreche es Dir, darf ich Dir vortragen wie ich meine Mission auszuwirken gedenke—: Ich will das Neue Gedicht von Tribünen herab, an alien Orten . . . Ein heftiger Wille zur Macht armiert uns, lasst uns unsere Ideen verwirklichen . . . O Schlacht um den Endsieg der Menschheit !22 The young Becher was thoroughly dedicated to Whitman and, characteristically, no less profoundly devoted to Rimbaud. These were the two "über alles Geliebten" to whom not only Becher but Expressionist poetry in general owed the most. One other figure cannot be ignored, however. The most cohesive group of Expres­ sionists were the contributors to Walden's periodical Der Sturm. In 1912 Walden sponsored exhibitions of Futurist art and lectures on Italian Futurist poetry by Marinetti whose teachings exerted a great and lasting influence on the writers of this generation. As late as 1934, Benn testified to this when he addressed Marinetti, in a politically rather embarrassing speech, as "the creative power", indeed the "prophet of Futurism", i.e., of modern art and poetry. "Sie und die von Ihnen geschaffene Kunstrichtung", he said, "war es, die die stupide Psychologie des Naturalismus hinter sich warf, das faul und zah gewordene Massiv des bürgerlichen Romans durchstiess und mit der funkelnden und rapiden Strophik Ihrer Hymnen auf das Grundgesetz der Kunst zurückging: Schöpfung und Stil."23 Marinetti's manifestos, to which Benn ascribed "incredible effects", appeared in various issues of Der Sturm, attacking the cliche-ridden poetry of earlier generations by replacing it with a glorification of technology. Equally strident were Marinetti's linguistic theories which propounded a deliberate destruction of syntactic logic. Liter­ ature is not beautiful, he proclaimed; it will use "all brutal sounds . . . all expressive screams of the violent life that encircles us. Let us use the 'ugly' in literature, and let 22 "See, my dear brother Whitman, I have composed this poem a week ago. Today once again I opened your immortal book . . . and felt as if I were facing you and taking your hand. Oh, infinite, dissolving, all-embracing, eternal contact. . . Dear brother Whitman: hope, inspiration, complete reliance; I affirm my existence from the steaming mass of your surging stanza armies. Yes, I almost said: for this century I take over your command . . . Yes, my elder brother, my wise, my experienced one —I promise you, may I tell you how I seek to fulfill my mission—: I want to proclaim the New Poem from the grandstands, everywhere . . . A strong craving for power arms us, let us to realize our ideas . . . O battle for the final victory of mankind." 23 "You and the artistic trend you have established have succeeded in throwing the stupid psychology of Naturalism behind, you have bored through the massif of the middle-class novel, which had become sluggish and tough, and, with the sparkling and rapid stanzas of your hymns, you have re-established the basic law of art: creation and style." Gesammelte Werke, ed. Dieter Wellershof (Wiesbaden, 1959), I, p . 479.

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us kill solemnity everywhere! Don't adopt the poses of high priests in listening to me! Every day one ought to spit at the 'altar of art'. We enter the unlimited realm of free intuition. After the free verse (we must) also (have) words in freedom." Thus Marinetti, too, was a prophet. Besides Whitman's "démocracy" and Rimbaud's "dérèglement raisonnée", his slogan parole in libertá was to become the third battle cry of German Expressionist poetry. Marinetti's strongest impact was upon the most radical Expressionist, Stramm. Although rather belatedly, Stramm learned of Marinetti via Walden and decided to effect a total break with his previous development as a poet. He destroyed every line of poetry he had written before 1914 and created a style based on dissecting and reassembling the elements of language, avoiding, in his linguistic transformation, the shopworn poetry which all Expressionists despised. Like Trakl, Stramm worked painstakingly at his verse. His poem "Freudenhaus" —note especially the amalgam "schamzerpört" —is an excellent example of such consciously and carefully contrived language: Lichte dirnen aus den Fenstern die Seuche spreitet an der Tür und bietet Weiberstöhnen aus ! Frauenseelen schamen grelle Lache ! Mutterschösse gahnen Kindestod! Ungeborenes geistet dünstelnd durch die Raume! Scheu im Winkel schamzerpört verkriecht sich das Geschlecht!

Lights whore from the windows The epidemic Spreads at the door And offers female moaning for sale ! Female souls shame strident laughs ! Mothers' wombs gape children's death ! Unborn lives Roam Ghostlike Through the rooms! Shyly In the corner Wrought with shame Sex Hides away!

Marinetti's teachings, in particular his Technical Manifesto and its Supplement, had a truly cathartic effect on Stramm. Nevertheless, Arnold is justified in stating that he was by no means an imitator of Marinetti. Stramm had been led by the Italian to discover the immense possibilities of creative language. He had realized that a poet could do away with syntax and enrich his vocabulary, and that the fastest and most concise expression was the best. Summing up our brief survey, then, we can conclude that significant foreign influences on German Expressionist poetry came from three countries and operated on three levels. France was by far the most important of these sources, followed by America and Italy. French literature, represented mainly by Rimbaud and including a great many other writers, dominated in the realm of imagery. Whitman, the sole representative of American literature, fostered a new humanitarian pathos and new verse forms; and Italian Futurism, under its leader Marinetti, was responsible pri­ marily for linguistic innovations. Modern themes, ranging from the repellently ugly to the unequivocal praise of technology, were offered by all three. As far as we 77

know, no other foreign literature or literary figure exerted any noteworthy influence on German Expressionist poetry. After 1920, when E. began to decline, these foreign models gradually lost their impact. There is ample proof, however, that the influence of Marinetti or Rimbaud did not end with the Expressionist phase. Aside from the general evolution of modern poetry, which has recently led to the movement of concrete poetry, evidence indicating such continuity is most strikingly prominent in the works of Brecht. Although it is highly debatable whether even his earliest writings should be subsumed under the heading "Expressionist", it cannot be denied that he shared the Expressionists' recep­ tivity to a number of the foreign poets mentioned above, specifically Rimbaud, Villon, Whitman, and Verhaeren. The latter inspired Brecht's juvenile poem "Der brennende Baum"; Whitman is referred to in an early version of the drama Baal, and Klammer's rendering of Villon's ballads permeates the songs of the Dreigroschenoper. Another early play, Im Dickicht der Städte, contains a direct reference to Rimbaud,24 direct quotations from Klammer's translation of Une Saison en enfer, and slightly altered passages from "Enfance". Rimbaud's famous "Bateau ivre" echoes in the verses of "Das Schiff" and "Ballade auf vielen Schiffen" in Brecht's Hauspostille, and his style is noticeable even in such works as the "Vier Psalmen". In spite of such traces of continuity, however, it cannot be denied that after 1920 E. "died".25 The former Expressionists themselves were fully aware of this change. It is, therefore, not surprising that those beloved masters whom they had admired and praised so passionately now became objects of parody and satire. And once again, the Expressionists themselves were the first to launch this attack. Toller's satirical play Der entfesselte Wotan (Wotan Unbound), which ridicules the grotesquely Expressionistic "Aufbruch" of a chauvinist barber, provides a cogent example: Reporter: Wie denken Sie über Amerika? Wotan:

Ein glühender Verehrer bekennt sich zu ihm. Kamerado, du rührst kein Buch, du rührst einen Mensehen an.

Reporter: Oh, Sie kennen Walt Whitman ? Wotan:

Mein Herr, seit Jahren frequentiere ich jüngste Weltliteratur.

Reporter: Very interesting.26 In this short passage, the impact of foreign models on German Expressionist poetry is both implicitly summarized and mercilessly ridiculed. 24 "Ich verkaufe Ihnen die Ansichten von . . . Mr. Arthur Rimbaud, aber ich verkaufe Ihnen nicht meine Ansicht darüber." Gesammelte Werke, I, p. 128. 25 "Der Expressionismus stirbt aus" was the title of an essay by Iwan Goll, written in 1921. 26 Ernst Toller, Der entfesselte Wotan, second ed. (Potsdam, 1924), p. 49. In his first reply, Wotan is referring to Whitman's poem "So long" ("Camerado, this is no b o o k / W h o touches this touches a man . . . " ) .

78

ARMIN ARNOLD

FOREIGN INFLUENCES ON GERMAN EXPRESSIONIST PROSE*

While terms like "Expressionist poetry", "Expressionist theater", and "Expressionist film" carry, by now, rather well-defined meanings, the term "Expressionist prose" would still mean different things to different people. Some would argue that there is no such thing at all, for when Heym, Trakl, or Stadler wrote in prose their style was quite conventional. Others would say that writers like Edschmid, Carl Einstein, and Döblin did, indeed, discover new dimensions in German prose style and that, hence, their writings could be called Expressionistic. Many would agree on one point only, namely that the German Expressionists produced excellent poetry and some interesting plays, but that narrative prose (at least the novel) was not an appropriate medium for their ideas. Kafka, some of them would add, cannot be considered an Expressionist. All the usual prejudices regarding this matter were summed up by Erich von Kahler, who states: "Thus the forms in which E. appears at its purest and most appropriate are poetry and the drama. Prose is too drawn-out, too calm for emotional outbursts. It does not permit the urgent, immediate interchange between individuals which E. demands." Expressionist prose is, accordingly, "primarily a byproduct of the move­ ment". 1 Kahler is talking about style only, and not about content. According to him, the following traits are characteristic for the Expressionist prose style: "Brevity, speed, daring precision, and a foreshortening of the narration which sharply delineates the essential." He concludes, therefore, that neither Holz nor Musil, and still less Kafka, can be numbered among the Expressionists. Another critic who has defined the Expressionist style is Egbert Krispyn, who calls it "antithetic, dynamic, and rhetorical".2 In his view, the Expressionist is addres­ sing a public he wishes to convince, less by logical argument than by pathos, for the reader must be won at any cost. Krispyn quotes Kurt Hiller, who had spoken of the "raised psychic temperature" of the Expressionists. In line with this definition, he concludes his study by stating that Trakl, Alfred Mombert and Else Lasker-Schüler cannot qualify as Expressionists. * This is a slightly revised and somewhat shortened version of Professor Arnold's original contribution, undertaken, with the author's permission, by the editor, who is also responsible for the translations. U. W. 1 Erich von Kahler: "Die Prosa des Expressionismus" in Der deutsche Expressionismus : Formen und Gestalten, ed. Hans Steffen (Göttingen, 1965), p. 165. 2 Egbert Krispyn, Style and Society in German Literary Expressionism (Gainesville, Florida, 1964), p. 45. 79

Walter Sokel's observations on Expressionist prose are more convincing than those of both Krispyn and Kahler. As he sees it, Einstein (Bebuquin oder Die Dilettanten des Wunders) and Döblin (Die drei Sprünge des Wang-lun) are the two poles between whom most other Expressionist prose writers can be lined up. They have one thing in common, however: "One may call this modern narrative tradition objectivating because it seeks to exclude the subjectivity of the narrator—his personality and his mentality—as far as possible and wants to concentrate entirely on the description of the objects and events, as well as the audible and inaudible speech of the characters." 3 Einstein wrote the novel Bebuquin between 1906 and 1909, published it in Die Aktion and dedicated it to Andre Gide, whose book Paludes (1895) had strongly influenced him as well as Benn. In Sokel's view, "Einstein's pacemaking novel combines four narrative principles which, often separately, affect the Expressionistic prose: monologic reflection, phantastic allegory, aphoristic irony, and pulpit-like oratory". Stylistically, Döblin's novel is completely different, in so far as it displays "brevity, force, and precision". However, what the two books have in common are the lack of psychology, the absence of logical thinking, and the shock effect exerted upon the reader. Concerning Expressionist style as such, Sokel observes: "If there is anything at all that, from a linguistic point of view, characterizes Expressionist prose, it is the following three factors: parataxis, ellipsis and, finally, syntactical distortion." This would mean that Kafka, Heinrich Mann, and Alfred Kubin could not be considered Expressionists. But Sokel is more cautious than Kahler and Krispyn, for he quickly adds: "If, on the other hand, point of view, narrative technique and narrative structure, rather than the linguistic and stylistic elements, are used as criteria, the three abovementioned authors surely qualify as Expressionists."4 Sokel analyzes specific works by Kafka, Döblin, Paul Adler, and Heym, and finds that the point of view of the person telling the story is, in each case, such that the world he sees appears to be completely out of focus.5 While Sokel's observations are to the point, Kahler's and Krispyn's procedure is somewhat dubious, since they come up with definitions first and then find out who fits and who does not fit them. On the whole, there seems, thus, to be no agreement who the Expressionist prose writers really were; and it may be useful to solve this problem pragmatically before we proceed any further. Expressionist short stories and novellas have found their way into several anthologies, the most representative of which are Ahnung und Aufbruch and Ego und Eros, both edited by Karl Otten. Together, they offer selections by nearly sixty authors, many of them well known (such as Benn, Brod, Daubler, Döblin, Edschmid, Leonhard Frank, Goll, Heym, Kafka, Klabund, Lasker-Schüler, Oskar Loerke, Heinrich Mann, Musil, Schickele, Sternheim, Trakl, Unruh, Werfel, Wolfenstein, Zech and Arnold Zweig) and many now largely or totally forgotten (Martin Beradt, Friedrich Bischoff, Paul Boldt, Hans 3 Walter Sokel, "Die Prosa des Expressionismus" in Expressionismus als Literatur, ed. Wolf­ gang 4Rothe (Berne/Munich, 1969), p . 155. Ibid., pp. 163-165. 5 Wolfgang Paulsen's book Expressionismus und Aktivismus also contains a chapter on Ex­ pressionist prose (pp. 200—219). Paulsen analyzes Sternheim's, Heinrich Mann's, Edschmid's and Einstein's style.

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von Flesch-Bruningen, Franz Jung, Philipp Keller, Bohuslav Kokosehka, Simon Kronberg, Alfred Lemm, Robert Müller, Heinrich Schaefer, and Hermann Ungar). 6 On the whole, it is quite difficult to obtain copies of novels written by the lesser known Expressionists. Few libraries own the hundreds of titles mentioned by Soergel in his monumental literary history or by Rudolf Majut in his survey. 7 When Wolfgang Rothe commissioned some fifty essays for his volume Expressionismus als Literatur, he had difficulties in finding authors who were competent to write on Expressionist prose writers. 8 I n the end, he found eight scholars to discuss the work of Heinrich Mann, Mynona, Döblin, Ernst Weiss, Einstein, Gustav Sack, Ehrenstein, and Edschmid. (Kafka is absent since he appears in another volume edited by Rothe.) Having mentioned most of the authors who are generally credited with being Expressionists and who wrote all or part of their works in prose, we must ask ourselves what is the common denominator between Sternheim's experiments in syntax, Döblin's cascades of happenings, Franz Jung's "chaotic prose", Mynona's cool satire, Edschmid's ecstatic stenography, Klabund's film scripts, Kafka's bureaucratic use of relative clauses, Einstein's brainstorms, Stramm's interior monologues (except for two such monologues, he wrote no narrative prose), and Arnold Zweig's exquisite echoes of Eugenie Marlitt (in his Novellen um Claudia). One concludes t h a t Kahler is, quite unintentionally, right: if we consider style alone, there would be little reason to exclude Thomas Mann from E. I t is, in fact, characteristic that the Expressionists were ready to use any style whatever. I t is exactly the unlimited variety of styles and moods which is characteristic of the movement; for never before in the history of German literature such stylistic variety has existed. However, there was a tendency toward extremes, and it is understandable t h a t the critics (like the public) should have become conscious of the stylistic extremists first of all, and t h a t they should have tried to characterize the Expressionist style as being concentrated, abstract, hymnic, ecstatic, as the case might be. The danger of such a definition is that it can be applied to only a small portion of Expressionist prose. By about 1925, when Soergel's book appeared, one knew who was definitely not an Expressionist: Thomas Mann, Hesse (who, at one time, thought otherwise), Hauptmann—in short, those not listed in the appropriate chapters of t h a t volume. Almost all of those listed, however, have since been considered genuine Expressionists or writers in close contact with the movement. I n fact, since 1914, the term "Expressionist" could have any of the following connotations: subjective, ecstatic, hysterical, crazy, modern, eccentric, anti-bourgeois, written in a concentrated style, written in a hymnic style, written with complete disregard for logic and psychology, written with inten­ tional disregard for literary taboos, excellent, Futurist, degenerate, etc. The word, 6

Ahnung und Aufbruch (Neuwied, 1957); Ego und Eros (Stuttgart, 1963). See also Fritz Martini's anthology Prosa des Expressionismus (Stuttgart, 1970). 7 Albert Soergel, Dichter und Dichtung der Zeit: Im Banne des Expressionismus (Leipzig, 1925). Rudolf Majut, "Der deutsche Roman" in Deutsche Philologie im Aufriss, eds. P . Merker and W. Stammler, second ed. (Berlin, 1960), pp. 1604-36. 8 I t is interesting to note that Hermann Friedmann and Otto Mann's volume Expressionismus : Gestalten einer literarischen Bewegung (Heidelberg, 1956) has only two parts, "Lyrik" and "Drama", and contains no section on prose writers. 81

coined in analogy to the prevailing popular use of the term "Impressionist", was even used in the sense of "unscientific". Thus Harnack called Karl Barth's unorthodox and, in his view, unscientific method ''expressionistisch". 0 To sum up: it seems t h a t few prose writers of the Expressionist period had any preconceived ideas about what Expressionist prose should be like. There were no valid or generally accepted standards in the field of the novel or the short story. Nor was there a prose anthology similar in importance to K u r t Pinthus' lyric anthology MenschJieitsddmmerung. II Before embarking on our search for possible foreign influences on German Expres­ sionist prose, let us, by way of introduction, briefly discuss two authors whose prose style and prose writings would seem to be uniquely German: Kasimir Edschmid and Carl Sternheim. I t is generally accepted that the former (whom K u r t Hiller jokingly nicknamed Rasimir Edschmid) invented the "speediest" German prose when he wrote the stories collected, in 1915, under the title Die sechs Mündungen. Except for his rapid description of the action, Edschmid is by no means "objektivierend". The first story ("Der Lazo"), for instance, begins as follows: "Raoul Perten verliess das Haus. Seine Füsse stiegen die Treppe herunter, er fühlte es und die Bewusstheit des mechanischen Vorgangs erfüllte ihn ganz, beruhigte ihn fast, obwohl keine Erregung in diesen Tagen vorangegangen war, und dies erstaunte ihn ein wenig" (R. P . left the house. His feet descended the stairs. He felt this, and the awareness of the mecha­ nical process satisfied him completely, almost reassured him, although no excitement had preceded in these days; and this surprised him a little). 10 The passage reminds us of Büchner's Lenz (in the novella by that name) who wanted to walk on his head and was as introspective as Raoul Perten. The narrator obviously knows every thought and feeling of his hero, and we are as far from the anti-psychologists as possible. The contemporary reviewers stamped Edschmid's prose as typically Expressionist, and Edschmid himself subsequently did everything in his power to preserve this image of himself. But, actually, his prose had little influence on other writers, and his stories are of a decidedly inferior quality. Moreover, the idea t h a t one's tales should be short even though the reader might lose the thread by being deprived of the usual explanations had been taken up by many other writers as well. Everybody was conscious of the new speed in life, of velocità: and this was the reason why many writers shortened their previously published stories when revising them for a second publication. Wolfenstein, for instance, reduced his story "Dika" to onethird of its original length when revising it in 1.918.11 As we have stated: Edschmid's and Sternheim's prose is uniquely German. Both writers knew Flaubert, of course, but Edschmid rarely succeeded in preserving a single point of view throughout a story, and Sternheim's strenuous exercises to appear 9 Martin Rumscheidt, "The Correspondence between Harnack and Barth." Diss., McGill University (Montréal), 1967, pp. 28, 91, and 93. 10 K. Edschmid, Die sechs Mündungen (Leipzig, 1915) p. 2. 11 See Peter Fischer, Alfred Wolfenstein: Der Expressionismus und die verendende Kunst (Munich, 1968), pp. 105-126.

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(grammatically at least) original only served to make his prose amusingly unreadable. I t sounds slightly Futuristic, though, when the wife in "Vanderbilt" (Vier Novellen, 1918) ponders the acquisition of a hat: "Fünf Tage vor der Abreise brach aus unteren Bezirken, wo sie ihn gebandigt hatte, an den zu kaufenden H u t der Gedanke mit elementarer Macht herauf." But, as it turns out, her husband does not like the idea: "Dann merkt sie ihres Mannes Blick sie greifen schmecken festhalten und mit Ruck, der sie bis ins Mark spaltet, yon sich schütteln . . . Von Alfons zu ihr hatte es sich blitzschnell entschieden: Null Greuel Kompost war der Hut, entsprach in keiner Weise." 12 When Edschmid wrote the novel D i e achatnen Kugeln (1919), he must have been influenced, to a certain degree, by Sternheim. For having read the novel, the latter wrote to its author on J a n u a r y 5, 1920: Am schnellsten verstandige ich mich Ihrer Sprache wegen. Die ist stellenweise zum Weinen schön! Ich sehe, wo Sie von mir gelernt haben, indem Sie es zu Eigenem (als Einziger) machten. Ich weiss, Sie zerschlagen mit mir, reihen weise starker, die bornierte Rinde des Begriffs und bringen ihn von innen zu einer zweiten Explosion. Es gibt Satze, wo ich kein Vergleich mehr bin, aber Baudelaire ist. Nur ist auch in der Sprache fur mich—kaum ein anderer darf das aussetzen—in der wilden Rebellion, alten Plunder aufzuräumen, das Tempo der Hast zu standig. 13 III Having established the names of those authors who have been, or might be, numbered among the Expressionist prose writers, and having given an indication of the wide variety of their styles, we can now try to find out by which foreign authors they were influenced. Let us first have a look at the two leading periodicals of early E. and see what writers from abroad received the most attention on the part of their editors. Franz Pfemfert's Die Aktion is a veritable treasury for the student of Compara­ tive Literature. Pfemfert himself was married to Alexandra Ramm, a Russian, whose sister was Carl Einstein's wife. Both women were active as translators from the Russian. Pfemfert was deeply interested in the literature of other countries and, from time to time, dedicated entire issues to Russian, French, Italian, Belgian, English and Polish letters. He was especially fond of the Russian and French novelists of the nine­ teenth century. The first four volumes of Die Aktion (1911-1915) contain contributions by and about Alain, Hermann Bang, Balzac, Baudelaire, Paolo Buzzi, Edward Car­ penter (three essays), Blaise Cendrars, Leon Deubel, Dostoevsky, Flaubert, Gide, Maxim Gorky, Jules Laforgue, Walter Savage Landor, Pierre Loti, Marinetti, Camille Mauclair, Multatuli, Charles Péguy, Stanislaw Przybyszewski, Strindberg, Verhaeren, 12 13

Carl Sternheim, Das Gesamtwerk, ed. Wilhelm Emrich (Neuwied, 1963), IV, p. 256. " I come most quickly to terms with you on account of your language which, at times, moves me to tears. I see where you have learned from me by adapting my style (the only one to do so) to yourself. I know that, together with me—being stronger in formation—you will destroy the shell of abstract concepts and make them explode, from the inside, a second time. There are sentences that can no longer be compared with anything in my works, but only with Baudelaire. But even for me (and nobody else has a right to raise this objection) the rapid speed which you maintain in the urge to dispense with the old rubbish is too consistently hectic." 33

Verlaine, Whitman, and Oscar Wilde, as well as numerous reviews of books by these and other foreign authors.14 In his introduction to the reprint edition of Die Aktion, Paul Raabe, one of the foremost authorities on E., makes some interesting observations concerning foreign influences. In his view, Nietzsche, Strindberg, Whitman and Wedekind must be regarded as authors whose works form the background and basis (Hintergrund and Untergrund) of Expressionist literature. Similarly, the novels of the Danish writer Hermann Bang (1857-1912) made a strong impact on the German novel at the turn of the century, and the French poet Léon Deubel (1879-1913) was highly esteemed by many Expressionists, including Zech, who translated his poetry. The Polish writer Przybyszewski (1868-1927) was himself an admirer of Nietzsche, and his ecstatic plays (Der Schrei, etc.), written in German, strongly affected the Expres­ sionist movement. Concerning Strindberg, Raabe states: "His plays and novels with their descriptions of an intoxicatingly intensified, self-destructive existence have strongly influenced German literature at the turn of the century, as well as E." 15 If we glance at the first seven volumes (1909-1915) of Der Sturm, we find, among many others, contributions by Guillaume Apollinaire, Artur Babillotte (his novel Die Schwermut des Geniessers [The Melancholy of the Sybarite] in twenty-one install­ ments), Bang, André Beaunier, William Blake, Umberto Boccioni, Cendrars, Claudel, Flaubert, Aage von Kohl (three stories and the novel Der Weg durch die Nacht, in twenty installments, translated from the Danish by Nell Walden), Laforgue, Par Lagerkvist, Marinetti, Octave Mirbeau, Aldo Palazzeschi, Przybyszewski, Rimbaud, Jacques Riviére, Marcel Schwob, Strindberg, and Rabindranath Tagore (who became popular in Germany after receiving the Nobel Prize in 1913). We also encounter essays about Balzac, Bang, Baudelaire, Edward Carpenter, Flaubert, Charles Louis Philippe, Marinetti, Schwob, Strindberg, Tolstoy, and Whitman, as well as dozens of contri­ butions by, and essays about, non-German painters and composers. Again, one is astonished by the scope of Walden's periodical, which was truly international.16 From this point, we would have to proceed in the following way: we should first have to familiarize ourselves with those texts by foreign authors which were easily available (preferably in translation) to the Expressionist prose writers. Then we should have to read the latter's works, their critical writings and their letters, and establish, in each case, the extent of their knowledge of foreign literature and the extent of possible or probable influences. The task is, unfortunately, still a forbidding one, because it is so difficult to obtain the works of most Expressionists listed in connection with Otten's anthologies. In the case of most authors, no biographies or bibliographies are available, nor have their letters or journals been published. In some instances, one cannot even ascertain whether any manuscripts, diaries or letters have survived, where they are located, and who owns the copyright. What follows will, therefore, 14 Books by the following authors were reviewed (the figures in parentheses indicate the number of reviews): d'Annunzio (4), Bang (6), Björnsterne Björnson (3), Boccioni, Dickens, translated by Meyrink, (2), Flaubert, Hamsun (6), Lafcadio Hearn (5), Ibsen (3), Johannes V. Jensen (4), Selma Lagerlof (2), Emil Rasmussen (2), Otto Rung (3), G. B. Shaw, Strindberg (4), Tolstoy, and Turgenev. 15 Paul Raabe, ed., Die Aktion (1911-1915). Reprint (Stuttgart, 1961). 16 See Nell Walden and Lothar Schreyer, Das Sturmbuch (Baden-Baden, 1954).

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be bits and pieces of information, most of them requiring further study and more careful analysis. Indeed, the field of Expressionist prose offers hundreds of research topics for the literary bibliographer, biographer, editor, critic, historian and for the student of Comparative Literature. IV For the Naturalist, man was the product of heredity and environment, whereas the Expressionists believed (or pretended to believe) in man's ability to transform himself. By killing their fathers (in literature only!), they hoped, subconsciously, to destroy their bourgeois "heredity". The Futurists, on the other hand, ignored or despised women. Thus, without a woman's help, Marinetti's Mafarka le Futuriste (1909) produces a child resembling an airplane. In his novel in free verse, Le Monoplan du Tape (1911), the same author kills over a thousand women who try to derail the trains transporting their husbands/fathers to the front. Marinetti kills them by flying so low that the wings of his airplane decapitate them. The German Expressionists were less radical. With them, it was usually the male who became a New Man, but the help of women was occasionally still needed and appreciated. Thus, in Kaiser's drama Gas it is a woman who makes up her mind to produce the New Man. Nevertheless, the woman in Expressionist literature is often a ruthless, spiteful being who brings disaster upon her idealist lover. Such women, of course, had been popular in French literature for some time already. Balzac, Zola, and Maupassant had depicted them, and Strindberg had put them on the stage. The incredibly ruthless women in Jakob Wassermann's novel Das Gansemannchen (1915) and Ernst Weiss' novel Tiere in Ketten (1918) strongly remind one of certain Strindbergian females whose behavior on stage had frightened even some hard-boiled Activists. In a review published in Die Aktion (October 9, 1912), we find the following shocked reaction to a play by the Swedish dramatist: "It is horrible, it is terrible; one cannot defend oneself against this man, Strindberg. For he is right. Woman is a beast, a sly, thin-skinned and tough beast." In theory, the Naturalist had to be interested in the dreary and hopeless life of the proletariat. He should thus have had no room for the extraordinary human being, the great hero, the psychologically unique individual, the pathological case—unless that individual had been conceived under the influence of alcohol. The Expressionist, on the other hand, preferred the extraordinary creature. He used the homme moyen sensuel and the average bourgeois only for satirical purposes and was interested in the workers only as a mass, and not as a group of individuals. Their function was, for him, to follow the leader. There has never been any doubt about the influence of Nietzsche's Also sprach Zarathustra on the Expressionists. How direct an influence this was is quite another matter. There is good reason to believe, for instance, that d'Annunzio's, Marinetti's, and Jack London's supermen were as familiar to German readers as was Zarathustra himself. Gabriele d'Annunzio (1863–1938) was for the world of 1900-1920 what Ernest Hemingway was for that of 1920-1940. In Italy, he became known at the age of 85

sixteen with the publication of a volume of poetry entitled Primo vere, and his reputa­ tion spread after an erroneous report that he had died. His love affair with Eleonora Duse made him famous. By about 1900 his works had been translated into many languages and were received enthusiastically, especially in Germany. In 1898 he was elected to parliament. Although d'Annunzio's income was considerable, he spent so much money that he owed millions to his creditors. He saved himself by escaping to France in March, 1910. After his return to Italy, five years later, he became famous for his aviatic feats; and his flight over Vienna to drop propaganda leaflets is mentioned in the history of aviation. In 1919 he occupied Fiume with a small detachment of soldiers and held the town for over a year. D'Annunzio was the incarnation of the superman: a famous poet, a politician, a military leader, an aviatic pioneer, and a hero (he lost one eye during an emergency landing). What he was the Expressionists of the Activist school would have liked to be. A writer whose works were anything but Naturalist or (except at the very beginning of his career) Verist, he admired Wagner and Nietzsche, as well as Hellenism, the Renaissance, the extraordinary man, and the superman. Even his early tales are colorful, drastic, and often gruesome. In the Novelle della Pescara (1884-1886) we find stories like "L'eroe" and "La madia". In the former, L'Ummalido cuts off his squashed hand in front of the altar and offers it as a sacrifice to Sante Gunzelve—and t h a t in the presence of the entire community! In the latter, the cruel Luca, who is sick in bed, refuses to give his starving, crippled brother food. When the cripple tries to steal it, Luca wakes u p and kills him—probably with the author's approval; for, after all, cripples should be done away with in order t o make room for the supermen. D'Annunzio's works appeared in German from about 1900 on: Trionfo della Morte (1894, German 1899), Il Piacere (1896, German 1898), La Citta Morta (1898, German 1901), Il Fuoco (1900, German 1900), Le Novelle della Pescara (German 1903), etc. The German translation of Forse che si, forse che no appeared in 1910, those of L'Innocente and Le Vergini delle Rocce in 1912. They were enthusiastically and widely reviewed. Thus Karl Vollmoeller's "Nachdichtung" of Forse che sï, forse che no (Vielleicht— Vielleicht auch nicht) was lavishly praised by Heinrich Eduard Jacob (Die Aktion, August 21, 1911): "There is no desire (Genussverlangen) —with the exception of that which, hating the sight of perfection, longs for imperfection-which could not be indulged, quenched or satisfied in this book." Forse che sì, forse che no is a novel con­ cerned with love, pilots and flying. The translator, Karl Vollmoeller, was himself an enthusiastic aviator, and, according to Else Lasker-Schüler, his splendid "Katharine von Armagnac [war] die erste Aviatikerin der Welt". 1 7 In reviewing the novel, Jacob maintained that, so far, German writers had not succeeded in adequately describing the technical innovations of the age. 18 17 Else Lasker-Schüler, "Wenn mein Herz gesund war—Kinematographisches" in Ahnung und Aufbruch, p . 414. 18 "Stehen nicht die Tage kaum hinter uns, da zu gestalten noch völlig misslang, was um uns dampfte, was um uns schnob, hammerte, auf Schienenstrangen einherdonnerte und schwere Kolben hob? 1st nicht Gerhart Hauptmanns Jugendgedicht vom eilenden Schnellzuge, jenes konventionell -programmatische, eine einzige peinbereitende Geschmacklosigkeit ? Sind wir nicht im­ mer noch Zeuge der ohnmächtigen Versuche, welche die Hamburgische Dichterschule unternimmt,

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D'Annunzio's coming to grips with modern technology is only one aspect of the novel which Jacob praises. (The poetry of Heym and Zech, Kaiser's Gas trilogy and Döblin's novels Wadzeks Kampf mil der Dampfturbine, Berge Meere und Giganten, and Berlin Alexanderplatz were to be concerned with technical progress as well, but their authors would be much more skeptical about it than d'Annunzio or Marinetti.) He also lauds the intense colors pervading the work and the author's ability to evoke associations: "Whenever a Persian rug is mentioned, all of Persia with its fervid air, the rocky Kurdish desert and the roses of Shiraz are invoked; and whenever the Adriatic Sea is referred to, a hundred promontories, islands, and ships float past our brightened eyes." Jacob compares the novel to Wilde's Dorian Gray, Joris Karl Huysmans' A Reborns and Wassermann's Alexander in Babylon and finds it to be "the richest in asso­ ciations, moods, splendors and decorative paintings we know of". His admiration for d'Annunzio was, in fact, boundless, and for him (who was himself an Expressionist and wrote a great deal about the movement) the Italian writer was one of those great authors who were rejected by the contemporary (1910) p l e b s – m e n like George, Rilke, Hofmannsthal, Heinrich Mann, and Wassermann. No wonder, then, that it was Rudolf G. Binding who translated d'Annunzio's La Nave (Das Schiff, 1910) and Fedra (Phädra, 1910) into German. Die Auferstehung des Kentauren (The Resurrection of the Centaur, 1909) appeared in Binding's German version even before the Italian original was published, and Otto von Taube translated d'Annunzio's essay on Nietzsche. The Expressionists, then, were quite ready to absorb the aspect of pompous splendor in d'Annunzio (whose German publisher was the InselVerlag, which showed little enthusiasm for the movement), although they frowned upon similar undertakings on the part of George and his disciples. D'Annunzio's style may have annoyed them, but not so his ideas, as expressed, e.g., in the following passage from Die Auferstehung des Kentauren: Ein unersattlicher Wissensdurst treibt ihn [den neuen Menschen], alle Raume zu durchmessen, alle Grenzen zu überschreiten, weiter und weiter gegen ferne Horizonte die Schranken seiner Herrschaft zurückzudrangen, die immer der Wunsch an Grösse übertrifft. Im Wettlauf mit dem Sturm, dem Blitz und seinen eigenen Gedanken berauscht er sich an wuchtiger Schnelligkeit, befreit sich von dem hemmenden Gesetze der Schwere, vervielfaltigt die Kraft seiner Sinneswerkzeuge. 19 Like Shaw, d'Annunzio saw that technological progress could lead to the destruc­ tion of humanity. In this vein, the quotation continues: urn sprachlich etwas zu unterjochen, was sich eben nur von Grösseren unterjochen lässt? Lebt nicht noch Richard Dehmel und mit ihm das vielfach lachelnde Gedenken an die 'Zwei Menschen', in denen meisterlich ungeschickt Telephon und Veloziped in die Complexe der Hochsprache eingefangen werden sollten? Freilich: mit den Mitteln eines liliencronesken Sprachgebrauchs liess sich derlei nicht bewaltigen." Die Aktion, I (1911), columns 851-855. 19 "An unquenchable thirst for knowledge drives the new man to penetrate all spaces, trans­ gress all limits and push the borders of his domain, which is always exceeded by desire, further and further toward the horizon. Competing with the storm, the lightning and his own thoughts, he is intoxicated with mighty speed, rids himself of the restrictive laws of gravity, and multiplies the force of his sense organs." Die Auferstehung des Kentauren (Leipzig, 1909), pp. 3f. 87

H a t nicht in diesem Bilde das tragische und asketische Geschlecht des neuen Menschen Gestalt gewonnen? Des neuen Menschen, der, nachdem er seinem Leben die fürchterlichsten Regungen und Kraftausserungen der Elemente aufgezwungen hat, nun seinen Geist auf den Gipfel seines Könnens erhebt, um die Übergriffe jener Gewalt zu meistern, die ihn mit sich fortzureissen und zu vernichten bereit ist, wenn er auch nur einen Augenblick die Herrschaft über sich verliert oder seine Willenskraft verlangsamt. 20 D'Annunzio's early short stories (Le Novelle della Pescara) could have been entitled Contes cruels, the title which Villiers de l''Isle Adam had assigned to a volume of his tales published in 1883. (Villiers' collected works in German translation began to appear in 1909, and the first volume included Grausame Geschichten, translated by H. H. Ewers.) This title could also have been used for Otten's anthologies. Despite the enthusiastic talk about the superman, few writers of the age actually believed in his coming. Jack London, for instance, mentions Nietzsche on the first page of his novel The Sea Wolf, before introducing his superman Wolf Larsen. Evidently at the beginning his sympathies lie with Larsen, since he is thrilled by his excessive cruelty; but in the end he lets him die a horrible death, implying t h a t the superman cannot survive but only lives and dies more intensely than others. Wassermann's Alexander (in Alexander in Babylon, 1904) resembles Wolf Larsen in many ways. Zarathustra is mentioned in the book, and the hero is a superman who, like Larsen, must discover t h a t he has no power over his decaying body. Wassermann anticipates Marinetti's and Döblin's enthusiasm for monstrous occurrences. Thus Alexander's army is almost starving in the desert when a soldier finds a puddle of dirty water: Einer von den Suchenden stiess ein misstönendes Triumphgeschrei aus. Neben einer aufgewehten Düne hatte er eine Pfütze mit brackigem, stinkendem Was­ ser entdeckt; er lag schon bis zum Gürtel darin und trank nicht nur mit den Lippen, sondern mit dem ganzen Gesicht. Schwer atmend warfen sich an­ dere neben ihn und tranken lautlos, bemiiht, ihren Fund geheimzuhalten. Ihre Körper erstarrten vor Wollust. Aber als hatten sie das Wasser in der Luft gerochen, erfuhren es die nahe lagernden Scharen der Messenier. Mit kraftlos wankenden Beinen stürzten sie herbei und verloren unterwegs Helme und Mützen. Nach wenigen Augenblicken bezeichnete ein Haufen von Gliedmassen, Rümpfen und Köpfen die Stelle, wo vorher das elende Rinnsal gewesen, und Hunderte von Zuspatkommenden scharrten heulend im Sand. 21 20 "Is it not that, in this image, the tragic and ascetic race of the new man has taken shape? Of the new man who, having imposed upon his life the most awesome motions and forces of the elements, raises his spirit to the height of its ability, in order to stave off the attack of that force which is ready to carry him off and destroy him if, only for a single moment, he loses control over himself or slows down his will power." Ibid. 21 "One of the seekers uttered a strident, triumphant scream. Close to a dune lifted by the wind he had found a puddle with stale, odoriferous water. He was lying in it up to his belt and drank, not only with his lips but with the entire face. Breathing heavily, others fell down beside him and drank silently, eager to keep their discovery hidden. Their bodies were rigid with pleasure. —But as if they had smelled the water in the air, the Messenian troops resting nearby discovered the secret. On wobbly legs they rushed up and, on the way, lost their caps and helmets. After a few seconds, a heap of extremities, torsos and heads marked the spot where previously had been the pitiful trickle, and hundreds of latecomers howlingly scratched the sand." Jakob Wassermann, Historische Erzählungen (Berlin, 1924), p. 8.

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D'Annunzio's and Marinetti's aviators are of the game kind as Wolf Larsen; they enjoy superhuman thrills when flying over the Alps but risk their lives every time they leave the ground. This cruelty and this readiness to risk one's life for the sake of sen­ sational thrills, as well as the desire for "erhöhte Temperatur" at any cost, is charac­ teristic of much of Expressionist literature. V There is no doubt that German E. was strongly influenced by Futurism. In order to describe the gigantic new machines, modern industry, airplanes, bicycle and car racing, a new vocabulary and a new style were needed. "Speed'' was probably the most important factor of the new age. No wonder that the Expressionist prose style is "speedier'' than any previous style in German literature, and t h a t Thomas Mann or Musil were, for all their modernity, often regarded as belated nineteenth-century realists. One aspect of velocity is simultaneity: instead of reporting one event after another, everything is described as happening at once. Joyce became the world's greatest addict of simultaneità when he wrote Finnegans Wake. If one wants to tell something quickly, there is no time for qualifying adjectives and for psychological explanations and ruminations on the author's part. I n fact, the personality of the author completely disappears, and there is no room for elaborate comparisons, symbols, and metaphors. On the whole, most Expressionist novels are considerably shorter than their realistic and Naturalistic predecessors. And if they are long (as in the case of Döblin's works), one has the feeling that ten volumes have been compressed into one. Speaking of Döblin: that author frankly admitted that Marinetti's Mafarha le Futuriste had meant a great deal to him. That novel, written in French, was published in Paris in the same year which saw the publication of the first Futurist manifesto (in Le Figaro of February 20, 1909). While Döblin subsequently attacked the German translations of Marinetti's 1912 manifestos in Der Sturm (March, 1913), he had nothing but praise for Mafarka, the novel which largely influenced the language of Die drei Sprünge des Wang-lun (1915), Wadzeks Kampf mit der Dampffurbine (1919), Wallenstein (1920), and Berge Meere und Giganten (1924). Like Marinetti, Döblin relies mainly on masses of nouns and verbs, which he lines up in long sequences without separating them by punctuation. As Edschmid put it, "Döblin is a long mason (langer Maurer); he continuously walks back and forth with stones but puts no plaster in between. He merely places one broad, square and evenly shaped piece on top of another." 22 This is to say t h a t Döblin (like Marinetti) ignores the usual psychological motivations for the actions carried out by his protagonists. They act one way but could as well act in another. A few words uttered by Spendius in Flaubert's Salammbô could put an entire army on the move; b u t in Mafarha and Wang-lun no motivation at all is needed. An idea occurs to the hero, who indulges in a certain mood, and the gigantic action takes a different (and completely unexpected) turn. Marinetti had a definite political program: war against Austria, the return of 22

K. Edschmid, Frühe Manifeste (Darmstadt, 1957), p. 110. 89

Trieste to Italy, and the conquest of Lybia. He was opposed to clericalism and royalism, as well as to socialism and Communism. He loved machines, and his pet project was the industrialization of Venice. Döblin's political ideas were totally different, and al­ though the German author, too, was fascinated by machines and the new, rapid means of transportation, he was afraid of technological progress. Thus his sympathy clearly lies with Wadzek rather than with the new industrial giants, and with Bieberkopf rather than with the Moloch Berlin to whom he succumbs again and again. And the tremendous vision of the new world in Berge Meere und Giganten is that of a man who is afraid that, one day, it might become reality. (It is possible that Johannes V. Jensen's book Der Glelscher: Ein Mythos vom ersten Menschen, 1911, also had some influence on this novel.) What fascinated Döblin was Marinetti's style, his anti-psychology, and his use of the modern superman. While Mafarka's orgies take place in Africa, where they are more credible than if set in Europe, Wang-lun performs his feats in China. Walter Muschg, who has described the genesis of Die drei Sprünge des Wang-lun, was unable to find its Chinese sources, but in the meantime, Ingrid Schuster has identi­ fied them and demonstrated their influence. 23 Döblin's and Marinetti's supermen are descendants of Nietzsche's Zarathustra, but they are as different from their model as Expressionist sons are from their nine­ teenth-century fathers. Zarathustra looked back and longed for the old Hellenic pa­ ganism. In Marinetti's words, he is a compound of three corpses: Apollo, Bacchus, and Mars. He is the disciple of the Engine, the enemy of books, an exponent of personal experience. He is a manifold product not of an inherited culture but of his own activity. His glory rests on his personal qualities, a lucid inspiration, a keen discernment, a flashing rapidity of decision, a savage instinct, courage and temerity. The children of the present generation who live in the cosmopolis of science, who witness the rising tide of syndicalism and the daring con quests of aviators, are but precursors of the superman we envisage. 24 The poet who writes about such supermen must be well acquainted with tech­ nology. He must be more enthusiastic about speed than about beauty and love, and he must have a greater interest in motors than in women. The root of his writings must not be memory, longing, pity, and logic, but rather intuition. "Intuition, in its un­ conscious, unreflecting, spontaneous vivacity," says R. T. Clough, "is what sends the poet down the stream of motion, synchronizes his breathing with the rhythm of the motor and his pulse-beat with the throbs of metal, of stones, of wood." 25 On these points Döblin was in full agreement with Marinetti, and he proved it in his novels written between 1915 and 1924. For Otto Weininger (author of the book Geschlecht und Charakler), Strindberg and Shaw, women were evil and dangerous, seeking to enslave man, to suppress his 23 W. Muschg, "Nachwort" in Döblin, Die drei Sprünge des Wang-lum (Olten, 1960); Ingrid Schuster, "Döblins chinesiseher Roman," Wirkendes Wort, X X (1970), 339—346. 24 Marinetti, as quoted in R. T. Clough, Futurism, the Story of a Modern Art Movement: A New Appraisal (New York, 1961), pp. 33f. 25 Ibid., p. 47.

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artistic talent and his freedom, using him to produce children, trapping him with romantic love and other lies, and finally destroying him. The Futurists turned the table cm women by ignoring them altogether. Feminine beauty did not interest them, and they found a motor car more interesting than a pretty girl. Döblin, too, considered love stories stereotyped/Like Marinetti, he admitted love mainly in the form of sexual orgies indulged in by masses of people. Accordingly, the pure love of the Chinese youth Tai in Wang-lun is mentioned in a few ironic words. The lovers are ridiculously oldfashioned, and they die because of it: she is raped by other men (because her friend did not dare take her himself), whereupon he hangs himself from a tree. In his several essays on the novel, written between 1913 and 1919, Döblin spoke out, over and again, against the use of psychology in fiction, as well as against a dramatic structure of the novel (i.e., a structure relying on one principal action, with every element being introduced only for the purpose of preparing for the final epitome). He preferred a rapid narration of many happenings, a cinematographic "montage" of scenes (Kinostil). A good novel, he said, can be cut into ten parts, and each part will continue to live on its own, like the parts of an earthworm. Marinetti, no doubt, would have fully subscribed to Döblin's theory and practice. 26 VI Turning to the influence of French literature on the prose writings of the German Expressionists, we note that the novel which served as a model for Wassermann and Heinrich Mann, just as it did for Marinetti, was Flaubert's Salammbó (1862). After completing his psychological study of petit-bourgeois souls (Madame Bovary), Flaubert turned to writing a gigantic epic, set in and around the African city of Carthage. The novel describes monumental events, tremendous sufferings, fierce hatreds, and the movements of thousands of people driven to frenzy by a few neurotic leaders. Salammbô is anything but petit-bourgeois, and none of its characters acts like a nineteenthcentury middle-class individual. Flaubert uses no psychology, and the reader is fur­ nished with almost no clues and explanations as to the characters' behavior. As the author keeps himself completely in the background, the reader merely watches in horror, fascinated. Salammbó is, in fact, the prototype of the "objektivierender Roman" in world literature. Marinetti's Mafarka would seem to be directly based on Salammbô, and the same applies to Wassermann's already mentioned novel Alexander in Babylon. In addition, Bernhard Kellermann's scenes of mass hysteria (in Der Tunnel, 1913), with their thousands of choking workers and their rallies of thousands of fanatical wives, were inspired by either Flaubert, Marinetti or Jensen. Döblin must have known Der Tunnel when he wrote Berge Meere und Giganten. We also know t h a t Heinrich Mann was deeply influenced by Salammbó, so much so in fact that his fragmentary novella "Die Königin von Cypern" is a direct outgrowth of his reading of that novel. Mann did not translate Flaubert (as he translated Anatole France, Choderlos de Laclos, and 26

For a more detailed study of Marinetti's influence on Döblin, consult my book, Die Literatur des Expressionismus: Sprachliche und thematische Quellen, pp. 80-107. 91

Alfred Capus), but in 1905 he wrote an essay on that writer's relationship to George Sand. Mann's rapid, objective way of telling the story in Die Göttinnen oder Die drei Romane der Herzogin von Assy (1903) reminds one of Salammbo, while d'Annunzio's influence seems to be responsible for the mellower colors and moods of the Italian background. The following is an example of Flaubert's manner—the speed of the narra­ tive, the impulsiveness and cruelty of the crowd of Africans, and the impassiveness of the narrator: A ce moment-la, il se fit un rassemblement sous les platanes. C'était pour voir un nègre qui se roulait en b a t t a n t le sol avec ses membres, la prunelle fixe, le cou tordu, l'ècume aux lèvres. Quelqu'un cria qu'il était empoisonnée. Tous se crurent empoisonnés. Ils tombèrent sur les esclaves; une clameur épouvantable s'éléva, et un vertige de destruction tourbillona sur l'armée ivre. Ils frappaient au hasard, autour d'eux, ils brisaient, ils tuaient: quelques-unes lancèrent des flambeaux dans les feuillages; d'autres, s'accoudant sur la balustrade des lions, les massacrèrent a coups de flèches; les plus hardis coururent aux elephants, ils voulaient leur abattre la trompe et manger de I'ivoire. 27 In Die Göttinnen, cruelty, treason and torture occur on a more individual level, and there are few mob scenes. But the speed and the laconism of the narrator are the same as in Salammbô. I n the first part of the trilogy, Mann covers an entire year in the life of the duchess in one paragraph: Der Herzog brach sofort mit ihr auf. Am Morgen nach ihrer Ankunft in Wien lag er tot im Bett. Sie reiste weiter, von der Leiche begleitet, und sie begrub sie in der Assyschen Gruft zu Zara, auf jenem feierlichen Friedhofe, dem entgegen mit d ü t e r m Pomp der Zug der Zypressen schreitet. Dann verschloss sie sich in ihrem düstern Palais. Die Gesellschaft der dalmatinischen Hauptstadt rückte vor ihrer Tür an, doch beobachtete die Herzogin ein strenges Trauerjahr. 28 Apart from the far-reaching influence of Flaubert, on which all German Expres­ sionists agreed, many other French novels were widely read, among them the already mentioned Contes cruets by Villiers de l'Isle Adam and Huysmans' decadent A Rebours. In fact, it is not entirely correct to say that the Expressionists tried to supersede the decadents by inventing the New Man; for Expressionist prose features several "decadents" in the style of Lord Henry (from Wilde's Picture of Dorian Gray) or Des Esseintes. Wilde in particular was very popular in the Germany of 1900-1914. Alfred Lichtenstein, Mynona, Einstein (Bebuquin), Schickele (Benkal der Frauentröster), Döblin, Sternheim ("Posinsky") and Ehrenstein (Tubutsch) all created figures as eccentric as any to be found in French or English literature. 27 28

Gustave Flaubert, Salammbô (Paris, 1964), p. 34. "The Duke left with her immediately. On the morning after their arrival in Vienna he lay dead in his bed. She travelled on, accompanied by the corpse, whom she buried in the Assy tomb at Zara, in that solemn cemetery toward which the procession of the cypresses moved with somber pomp. Then she locked herself up in her somber palace. The society of the Dalmatian capital appeared at her door; but the duchess observed a strict year of mourning." Die Göttinnen (Berlin, 1932), p. 26. 92

Generally speaking, the Expressionists and the decadents had one thing in common: their hatred of middle-class society. Thus Strindberg's Axel Borg (an intellectual kind of superman in the novel Am offenen Meer, 1891) gradually breaks off all contacts with society and dies in solitude on an island off the Scandinavian coast, whereas Des Esseintes remains in the heart of Paris, after having locked the world out. The eccentric decorations and exotic perfumes of his house (plus a goodly dose of phantasy) enable him to forget altogether the reality surrounding him and to live a life of satisfying illusions. The eccentrics of E. either emulated Axel Borg and Des Esseintes, turned into revolutionaries or went insane. Perhaps it would be worth while for the student of E. to investigate the influence of Pierre Loti and his exotic world, of Barbey d'Aurevilly (Les Diaboliques, 1874; Histoire sans nom, 1882), of Claudel, and of Mirbeau who, in 1907, authored one of the first novels about the motor car (La 628 E8). Furthermore, Gide's book Les Nourrifures terrestres (1897) contains ideas picked up by Marinetti over a decade later, such as the exclamation "Nathanael! quand aurons-nous brûlé tous les livres ! !" And Marinetti would have endorsed the statement: "Il ne me suffit pas de lire que les sables des plages sont doux; je veux que mes pieds nus le sentent . . . Toute connaissance que n'a pas précédée par une sensation m'est inutile. ,,29 Gide's ideas were in direct contrast to those offered in A Rebours. German E. offered both alternatives: the vitalist who enjoys the phenomenon of life in the flesh, and the eccentric who withdraws into spiritual self-contemplation. The latter alternative is the one that was most frequently embraced and usually more convincing. Only in the case of a few German Expressionist writers has the impact of French prose literature already been assessed. Thus Erich von Kahler mentions Flaubert in connection with Heinrich Mann, and in his essay on Schickele Ferdinand Lion refers to Maurice Barrès, the influence of whose books, such as L'Homme libre and Les Deracinés, he discerns in Schickele's first novel, Der Fremde; "In accordance with Barrès' technique, here, too, the self is carefully probed and, turning inward, desires to know itself. This urge subsequently projects its findings onto the external landscapes."30 In his dissertation on Ehrenstein, Gabriel Beck traces the influence of Xavier de Maistre on Tubutsch,31 and when Edschmid discussed Knut Hamsun in 1920 (the year in which the Norwegian author received the Nobel Prize), he linked him to two French authors, Henri Barbusse and Anatole France.32 But the Clarté movement (Barbusse) came too late to influence early Expressionist prose. Although we are solely concerned with prose, we should mention Maeterlinck, whose plays, strange as this may seem, strongly affected certain Expressionist prose works. La Princesse Maleine, L'Intruse, and Pelléas et Mélisande had already been translated before 1900, whereas Marie Madeleine appeared in 1909 (German translation 1910) and L'Oiseau bleu in 1910 (German translation 1911).

29 André Gide, Les Nourritures terrestres (Paris, 1964), p . 33. 30 Ferdinand Lion, "René Schickele" in Friedmann/Mann, 31 "Die erzahlende Prosa Albert Ehrensteins (1886-1950)", 32

op. cit., pp. 205 ff. Fribourg/Switzerland, 1969, p. 29.

Kasimir Edschmid, Frühe Manifeste, p. 44.

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VII As regards the impact of English literature, we have already mentioned Shaw and Wilde. Shaw's influence on the German Expressionist drama (notably Kaiser) cannot be overrated; but Wilde's novels were also widely read. Thus Max Brod's novel Schloss Nornepygge (1908) owes a great deal to The Picture of Dorian Gray (as well as to Huysmans). This "Roman des Indifferenten", in turn, influenced many Expressionists. Among the English poets familiar to the Expressionists we name only Swinburne and Whitman (although, curiously enough, Sack adored Byron and Shelley), and among the novelists Conrad with his South Sea novels. Reinhold Grimm has discovered still another author whose influence may have been considerable: William Beckford. 33 Beckford's novel Vathek had originally appeared in 1786. The first French edition is dated 1787, the first German one 1788. In 1907 Blei produced a new German version of the work. Grimm quotes Benn, who called Beckford "the father of the entire nondidactic, non-redemptive literature", and refers to an essay on Vathek which Carl Einstein included in his volume Anmerkungen (1916). I t is almost certain t h a t Einstein had read Blei's translation and knew Mallarmé's "Préface a Vathek" (1876). Indeed, his Bebuquin is, at least at first glance, anything but "didactic and redemptive". Actually, the rediscovery of Vathek was by no means limited to Germany. The English Review, for instance, published several hitherto unknown manuscripts by Beckford (in French) in 1909 and 1910. They had been unearthed by Beckford's biographer, Lewis Melville. The principal characters of Vathek have no conscience. Both the protagonist and his mother are ready to kill people by the thousands in order to procure wealth, knowl­ edge and sensations. They are Faustians more ruthless thàn Johann Faust, because they have no qualms when selling their souls to the devil. After having lived an exquisite life in their luxurious castle, they will have to suffer eternal pains; but only in the end do they occasionally think of what is to come, although even then they are too proud to despair. "Vathek is the book of inexhaustible desire, of the excessive urge for origi­ nality; concluding with infernal boredom and desperate banality," Einstein exclaimed in a review published in 1913.34 When the Expressionists stated t h a t they detested psychology in literature, they did not mean to imply t h a t they despised Freud, Adler, or Jung. Whereas for the Naturalists "psychology" was the logical conse­ quence once the milieu and heredity had been established, they treated their protag­ onists in a completely different manner, making them feel and do the most unexpected and "illogical" things. Their own ambition was never t o . b e conventional. Hence Einstein's enthusiasm for Vathek: Vathek eröffnet die Reihe der Bücher, welche uns die Erkenntnis und Zucht der reinen Kunst spendeten, diese in das Gebiet der abgeschlossenen Imagina33

Reinhold Grimm, "Vathek in Deutschland: Zwei Zwischenfalle ohne Folgen?" Revue de littérature comparée, X X X V I I I (1964), pp. '127–135. 34 Sabine Ree (pseudonym for Carl Einstein), "Über das Bueh Vathek", Die Aktion I I I (1913), columns 298–301. Einstein's pantomime Nuronihar (1913) is based on Vathek. 94

tion verwies, und in ihr die Kraft eines in sich vollendeten Organismus verlieh. Damit wurde dem allegorisehen Charakter der Literatur ein Ende gesetzt; zunachst durchdrang die Gewissheit einer isolierten Kunst, die gesetzmassige Willkür, den Stoff. Man sucht kostbare Materiale auf, die aristokratische Technik fordert Auslese und Seltenheit. Wir verspüren etwas von literarischem Kunstgewerbe. Als wertvollste neuere Oeuvres dieser Klasse bezeichne ich: Mallarmé, Hérodiade; Flaubert, Hérodias, Salammbo; Beardsley, Under the Hill; Baudelaire, z. B. "Harmonies" (sic).35 Vathek preaches a religion of beauty, which is considered to be more important than morality or goodness. Wilde (and the Preraphaelites) shared this opinion; hence the appropriateness of the rediscovery of Beckford. I n this connection, we should mention William Morris' fantastic novels. The World Beyond the World (1895), for instance, is a fairytale for adults. What happens is of little importance and has nothing to do with logic; and the reader derives his enjoyment solely from the beautiful type, the archaic language, and the beauty of the words and the rhythm. There is nothing in the book t h a t could be called "didactic" or "redemptive". Morris' novel breathes the same spirit as Vathek; at the same time, it is also reminiscent of L'Oiseau bleu. VIII In winding up our survey, we observe that the great Russian novelists, who had already influenced the Naturalists, were by no means ignored or slighted by the Expres­ sionists. Sokel has studied their impact and concluded that it was mainly the religious aspect of their work which interested the Expressionists. For all that, Dostoevsky was more significant than Tolstoy; for it was in the novels of the former (a complete edition of which in German was published, under the editorship of Moeller vanden Bruck, by the Piper-Verlag, 1907ff.) that they found the neurotic intellectuals, the vitalistic saints, the visionaries and the new men whom they themselves were propagating. According to Sokel, Wassermann, Kornfeld, Kafka, Trakl, Daubler, Werfel, Wolfenstein, and Leonhard Frank were the writers most profoundly influenced by Dostoevsky, whose Sonia (from Crime and Punishment), who sacrifices herself in order to support her family, was the model for the proverbial "good prostitute" encountered in the works of Johst, Wolfenstein, Kornfeld, Döblin, Becher, Brecht, and others. Tolstoy's conversion was also, evidently, the act of a new man, and several Expres­ sionists followed in his footsteps. In some ways, Tolstoy even replaced Zarathustra. What Italy meant for Werfel and Heinrich Mann, Russia meant for Rubiner, Barlach, and Rilke. As Sokel puts it, For Barlach as well as for Trakl, Kafka and Kornfeld, it was the mysticdemonic Russia of Dostoevsky, and for Rubiner, Goll, Becher and Frank the 35 "Vathek opens the series of books which gave us the insight and discipline of pure art by relegating it to the sphere of pure imagination and endowed it with the force of a self-contained organism. In this way, an end was put to the allegorical character of literature. Initially, the cer­ tainty of an isolated art and its lawful arbitrariness, pervaded the subject matter. Precious mate­ rials were chosen, since the aristocratic technique required selectivity and rarity. We get an inkling of literary Kunstgewerbe (applied art). The most valuable representatives of this class are . . "

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Russia of Tolstoy, the village commune and, a few years later, the Bolshevik revolution which appeared as a liberating force. But within and without the Russian experience in the two guises they found that which both Dostoevsky and Tolstoy preached and the village commune exemplified: the image of brotherly coexistence within apostolic Christianity. For the German Expressionists, Russia pointed back to Christ.36 Reading through Die Aktion and Der Sturm, one gains the impression that almost any book was reviewed enthusiastically in these Expressionist periodicals as long as it was extraordinary in one way or another. One was simply bored by conventional life and literature. But, in the long run, it was sufficient to set a love story in an exotic country to convince the reader that he was, in fact, facing a piece of unconventional modern literature. Anything was acceptable as long as the action took place in Africa or Asia. Thus a review of Emil Rasmussen's Sultana: Em arabisches Frauenschicksal demonstrates that the contents of this novel were embarrassingly banal: "Basically, nothing more than the story of a man and a woman fated to love each other and unable to meet. Death intervenes at the very moment when they were certain of ful­ fillment." What saves the novel in the eyes of the reviewer? Merely the fact that "the landscape pervades the entire book: the intense heat of Africa which makes people passionate and fanatical".37 Here we have a kind of superficial E. where the out-of-the-way setting replaces a genuine foreign influence. Like Flaubert, Gide, and Marinetti before them, that is to say, some Expressionists indulged in transposing the action of their novels to unfamiliar countries: China (Döblin, Ehrenstein), Africa (Daubler, Weiss), or the Far North (Döblin, Jahnn). Europe, after all, was a conven­ tional place—with the exception, in some cases, of Italy (Heinrich Mann's Die kleine Stadt, Benn's "südüches Wort")—and unconventional actions and characters were more credible when depicted as occurring under exotic skies. Our indications of foreign influences on German Expressionist prose have, of necessity, been fairly vague. We have not mentioned Jens Peter Jacobsen, for instance, and have ignored the role played by the "Anti-Erotiker" Paul Scheerbart, by Paris von Gütersloh, and Gustav Meyrink. Nor have we mentioned the, presumably vast, influence exerted by translations from the Chinese and Japanese, such as appeared in the decade before World War I. For this influence was by no means restricted to Pound and Yeats, but extended to Kubin, Döblin, and later Ehrenstein, and other German authors as well. In brief, our survey can only serve as a point of departure, and further investigations are badly needed.

36 37

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W. H. Sokel, Der literarische- Expressionismus Die Aktion, I (1911), columns 569—570,

(Munich, 1960), p. 192.

RICHARD

BRINKMANN

DADAISM AND EXPRESSIONISM

"Dadaism holds more future for us than does E.," Fritz Usinger declared in 1956, arguing as follows: The Expressionist way of relating to the world, with its violent intensification of expression, is no longer spiritually or intellectually accessible to us, for the material presuppositions of the state of affairs, both terrestrial and cosmic, no longer permit it. The linguistic achievements of E. have retained their value and, after having temporarily receded into the background, are now coming to the fore again, especially in recent poetry. But precisely in this realm Dadaism is even bolder, even more radical and considerably more diversified. Especially the overall conception of Dadaism, with its inclusion of the spiritual, is much more acute and topical than the Expressionist soul manifestos. Dada­ ism lives from a remarkable correspondence with our state of mind, and the time of its full discovery is still to come. I t is still completely undigested, where­ as E. has already become history—literary history—, for its genetic conditions have been swept downstream by the river of time, and only its verbal and artis­ tic results are meaningful to us as a historic transition to our own position. 1 What was prognostic in these remarks has, in the meantime, been confirmed. Although the interest in E. has continued to grow, new texts have become accessible, new facts have been uncovered, and mountains of secondary literature have piled up, precisely those things to which the concept of E. has been increasingly limited, and upon which it has focused in the last decade, must now be regarded as things of the past whose resurrection historical and critical observation can neither confirm nor support, even though they have had certain consequences in the aesthetic and political spheres, as well as in the realm of Geistesgeschichte. The historiographers of literature and art have also begun to take stock of the Dadaist achievement, and here documen­ tation and interpretation continue to remain a fruitful field of endeavor for scholars, critics and publishers. But in this case the source of interest is, actually, of a different kind, for it is not merely aimed at past causes which have an effect in a—totally different —present. Rather, Dadaism, even if it is historically traceable to specific events, persons and manifestations of the past, is still felt to be of burning and topical interest - a fact which must be understood not only as a prerequisite, but also as an ingredient, of the present. I t would be anachronistic to act or write today expressionistically. Dada1 "Der Dadaismus" in Expressionismus: Gestalten einer literarischen Beivegung, ed. H. Friedmann and O. Mann (Hei berg, 1956), pp. 341—350; here: p. 342.

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like events, "happenings", manifestations, demonstrations and forms of expression, on the other hand, would not seem merely to be props unearthed from the historical storage box or residues of a sickness long since cured. They are, rather, forms or media of adaptation to the still unclarified circumstances of a reality closed to us—forms and media of an almost indisputable "necessity" and, as such, appropriate to our own age. And yet Dadaism erupted—if we may use that expression—in the immediate vicinity (not only chronologically speaking) of E.; and even today scholars often take it to be one of the latter's more extreme variants. The clever phrase describing Dadaism as a "satyr play following the tragedy", coined by Soergel and retained by Curt Hohoff, is still frequently considered to be an apt label for that movement.2 No matter what is meant by tragedy in this context (Hohoff cautiously dropped the word from Soergel's formula), it can hardly be anything other than E. with its ardent and pathetic serious­ ness. As it is, the attractive slogan is paradoxical even in matters of chronology. For even if one ignores "DADA before DADA"3 and considers the founding of the Cabaret Voltaire in early 1916 as Dada's birthday, one can scarcely maintain that, at this point, the "tragedy" had been concluded, and that the time for the postlude had arrived. Indeed, the founders and collaborators of the Cabaret Voltaire did not operate under this assumption. II Reinhard Döhl properly distinguishes three phases in the development of Zurich Dadaism: first, the "still completely un-Dadaistic phase of the Cabaret Voltaire" in its beginnings, then a stage marked by attempts to differentiate the movement from E. and other contemporary trends, and finally a phase of "logical continuation and radicalization". Only at this point, Döhl believes, does its real birth occur.4 On February 2, 1916, Hugo Ball quotes the following newspaper report in his diary: "Cabaret Voltaire. Unter diesem Namen hat sich eine Gesellschaft junger Künstler und Literaten etabliert, deren Ziel es ist, einen Mittelpunkt für die künstlerische Unterhaltung zu schaffen. Das Prinzip des Kabaretts soll sein, dass bei den taglichen Zusammenkünften musikalische und rezitatorische Vortrage der als Gaste verkehrenden Künstler stattfinden, und es ergeht an die junge Künstlerschaft Zürichs die Einladung, sich ohne Rücksicht auf eine besondere Richtung mit Vorschlagen und Beitragen einzufinden."5 The contributions listed by Ball and his colleagues for the first month after the founding of the Cabaret Voltaire show no specific direction or clearcut antagonism. "Alle Stilarten der letzten zwanzig Jahre gaben sich gestern ein Stelldichein" Ball 2

"Das Satyrspiel nach der Tragödie" in Albert Soergel, Dichtung und Dichter der Zeit: Im Banne des Expressionismus (Leipzig, 1925), pp. 623—634; Soergel/Hohoff, Dichtung und Dichter der Zeit: Vom Naturalismus bis zur Gegenwart (Düsseldorf, 1961), II, pp. 311—323. 3 "Dada before Dada" by Paul Pörtner in Das war Dada: Dichtungen und Dokumente, ed. Peter Schifferli (Zurich, 1963), p . 9. 4 See Reinhard Döhl, "Dadaismus" in Expressionismus als Literatur, pp. 719-739. 6 Hugo Ball, Die Flucht aus der Zeit, second ed. (Lucerne, 1946), p. 71. "Cabaret Voltaire. Under this name, a society of young artists and writers has been founded whose goal it is to create a focus for artistic entertainment. The cabaret intends to offer musical and literary presentations by the artists who frequent the establishment as guests at their daily meetings. They invite all the young artists of Zurich, irrespective of their orientation, to make suggestions and contributions." 98

notes on March 30.6 And, in fact, the list of names extends from the nineteenth century to the contemporary period, including all the -isms which had established themselves in European art and literature until t h a t time, some of them not as yet properly defined. The Expressionists played by no means the least important part, and at first they were thought to be likeminded and congenial. The periodical Cabaret Voltaire, which appeared in June, 1916, and contained contributions by Apollinaire, Hans Arp, Ball, Francesco Cangiullo, Cendrars, E m m y Hennings, Jakob van Hoddis, Richard Hülsenbeck, Marcel Janco, Kandinsky, Marinetti, Modigliani, Max Oppenheimer (Mop), Picasso, Otto van Rees, Marcel Slodki and Tristan Tzara, "the founders of E., Futurism and Cubism", was for Ball "the first synthesis of modern trends in art and literature". To be sure, Ball himself noted "with shame" and embarrassment "the farrago of diverse styles and convictions". 7 In the reflections of his diary, the awareness of an attitude toward reality, literature and art which is no longer compatible with most of the tendencies in t h a t "farrago" emerges more and more distinctly. Even before 1916 Ball penned apergus which point to the coming eruption and the direction it will take. Thus he writes: "Die Nihilisten berufen sich auf die Vernunft (ihre eigene namlich). Aber gerade mit dem Vernunftsystem muss gebrochen werden, aus Grimden einer höheren Vernunft. Das Wort Nihilist bedeutet übrigens weniger, als es besagt. Es bedeutet: auf nichts kann man sich verlassen, mit allem muss man brechen." 8 Or: "Man muss sich verlieren, wenn man sich finden will." 9 Or: "Das Ich ablegen wie einen durchlöcherten Mantel. Was nicht aufrechtzuerhalten ist, muss man fallen lassen. Es gibt Menschen, die es absolut nicht vertragen, ihr Ich herzugeben. Sie wahnen, dass sie nur ein Exemplar davon haben. Der Mensch hat aber viele Ichs, wie die Zwiebel viele Schalen hat. Auf ein Ich mehr oder weniger kommt es nicht an. Der Kern ist immer noch Schale genug. Es ist erstaunlich zu sehen, wie zah der Mensch an seinen Vorurteilen festhalt. E r ertragt die bitterste Qual, nur um sich nicht auszuliefern." 10 Or: "Wer das Leben befreien will, muss die Traume befreien." 11 Ball also speaks of artistic products, "die in ihrem Widerspruch unzahmbar sind und jeglicher Annaherung und Begreiflichkeit spotten". 1 2 "Alle lebendige Kunst," he feels, "wird irrational, primitiv und komplexhaft sein, eine Geheimsprache führen und Dokumente nicht der Erbauung, sondern der Paradoxie hinterlassen." 13 All this 6 7 8

"All the styles of the last two decades had a rendezvous yesterday." Ibid., p. 79. Ibid., p . 91. "The Nihilists appeal to reason (namely their own). But it is precisely with the rational system that we must break for the sake of a higher reason. The word Nihilist, by the way, means less than it purports. I t means: one can rely on nothing, one must break with everything." Ibid., p . 15. 9 "One must lose oneself in order to find himself." Ibid., p. 20. 10 "Throw the Self aside like a torn coat. What cannot be sustained must be dropped. There are people who absolutely cannot bear to surrender their Selves. They believe that they possess only one copy thereof. But every human being has many selves, as the onion has many skins. One Self more or less doesn't matter. The core is always skin enough. I t is amazing to See how tena­ ciously man clings to his prejudices. He suffers the greatest torment in order not to have to yield himself." Ibid., p . 41. 11 " H e who would liberate life must liberate the dreams." Ibid., p. 61. 12 ". . . which are indomitable in their contradictions and scorn any approach and intelli­ gibility." Ibid., p . 64. 13 "All vital art will be irrational, primitive and complex, it will speak a private language and bequeathe paradoxical rather than edifying documents." Ibid., p. 70. 99

is still very general. But it is symptomatic for the predisposition of a consciousness which will no longer find satisfaction in one of the clearly defined "isms" of the modern age. After the founding of the Cabaret Voltaire, and certainly also as a result of the joint philosophizing with his companions, Ball's remarks become clearer and, at times, more polemical. Regarding some verses by Hülsenbeck, for example, he states that they constitute an attempt "to gather in one translucent melody the totality of this inexpressible age with all its cracks and fissures, with all its malicious and insane jovialities, with all its noise and muffled din. The Gorgon's head of boundless terror is smiling out of this fantastic annihilation". In isolated thought splinters, attempts are made to draw closer to the Dadaistic impulse. Thus we encounter sentences like "Was wir zelebrieren, ist eine Buffonade und eine Totenmesse zugleich"14 or "Was wir Dada nennen, ist ein Narrenspiel aus dem Nichts, in das alle höheren Fragen verwickelt sind; eine Gladiatorengeste; ein Spiel mit den schabigen Überbleibseln; eine Hinrichtung der posierten Moralitat und Fülle".15 Ball further states: "Der Dadaist liebt das Aussergewöhnliche, ja das Absurde. Er weiss, dass sich im Widerspruch das Leben behauptet und dass seine Zeit wie keine vorher auf die Vernichtung des Generösen abzielt. Jede Art Maske ist ihm darum willkommen. Jedes Versteckspiel, dem eine düpierende Kraft innewohnt. Das Direkte und Primitive erscheint ihm inmitten enormer Unnatur als das Unglaubliche selbst. Da der Bankrott der Ideen das Menschenbild bis in die innersten Schichten zerblattert hat, treten in pathologischer Weise die Triebe und Hintergründe hervor. Da keinerlei Kunst, Politik oder Bekenntnis diesem Dammbruch gewachsen scheinen, bleibt nur die Blague und die blutige Pose... Der Dadaist kampft gegen die Agonie und den Todestaumel der Zeit. Abgeneigt jeder klugen Zurückhaltung, pflegt er die Neugier dessen, der eine belustigte Freude noch an der fraglichsten Form der Fronde empfindet. Er weiss, dass die Welt der Systeme in Trümmer ging, und dass die auf Barzahlung drangende Zeit einen Ramschausverkauf der entgötterten Philosophien eröffnet hat. Wo für die Budenbesitzer der Schreck und das schlechte Gewissen beginnt, da beginnt für den Dadaisten ein helles Gelächter und eine milde Begütigung."16 "Der Dadaismus—ein Maskenspiel, ein Gelachter?" Ball asks, and adds the question: "Und dahinter eine Synthese der romantischen, dandystischen —und dämoni14 "What we pompously enact is both a buffoonery and a Requiem Mass." Ibid., p . 78. 15 "What we call Dada is a buffoonery from the nadir in which all the weightier questions are implicated; a gladiator's gesture; a game with the shabby remnants; the execution of an affected morality and a pretended abundance." Ibid., p. 91. 16 "The Dadaist loves the extraordinary, even the absurd. He knows that life asserts itself in contradictions, and that his age, as none before, aims at the annihilation of all things generous. He, therefore, welcomes every kind of mask and every game of hide-and-seek which implies a deceptively effectual strength. I n the midst of an enormous unnaturalness, the direct and the primitive strike him as being the incredible itself. Because the bankruptcy of ideas has stripped the image of man to its barest essentials, instinctive drives and subliminal forces emerge pathologi­ cally. Since no art, politics or confession can apparently cope with this disaster, empty talk and bloody pose are all t h a t remains . . . The Dadaist fights the agony and the death throes of the age. Rejecting all prudent abstention, he cultivates the curiosity of one who still takes pleasure in the most questionable form of enforced labor. He knows that the world of systems has gone to pieces and t h a t the age, insisting on immediate cash payment, has opened a rummage sale of desecrated philosophies. Where the storekeepers are touched by fear and a bad conscience, the Dadaists be­ gin to laugh brightly and to be mildly appeased." Ibid., p. 92. 100

schen Theorien des 19. Jahrhunderts?" 1 7 I t is no accident that he quotes Nostradamus' prophecy, Einen Missklang wird die Trombe geben, der dem Himmel selbst den Kopf zerbricht. Blut wird am blutdürstigen Munde kleben, Milch und Honig an des Narrn Gesicht. 18 Reinhard Döhl has gathered the key words offering themselves in the attempt to describe the Dadaist engagement of Ball and his comrades-in-arms. Some of the essential ones are found in the quotes cited above. Accordingly, for Döhl "the role of the demonstrating Dadaist . . . is approximately . . . that of the fool, or the clown on the absurd stage of the time, in an absurd world theater devoid of rhyme and reason". 19 No matter how common this idea was, in principle, to the Dadaists in Switzerland and the other countries, even among its exponents in Zurich it showed various nuances and grew out of different intentions. The following entry in Ball's diary, however, may well apply to all the Dadaists: "Die Theorien . . . immer auf den Menschen, auf die Person anwenden, und sich nicht in die Asthetik abdrangen lassen. Urn den Menschen geht es, nicht urn die Kunst. Wenigstens nicht in erster Linie um die Kunst." 2 0 The various Dadaists sought to realize this program in contradictory ways. Some were directly stimulated by politics and social reality, such as Hülsenbeck in his early phase. Others, like Arp, were directly concerned with a new aesthetic order and its very indirect humane function. The radical descent to the zero point, the "total skepti­ cism" conducive to "total freedom", "the resolute chaos brought about through the greatest effort" where "the basic, demonic urges . . . initially come to the fore" and "the old names and words perish" 2 1 —all this pits the Dadaists decisively against E., precisely because there are some misunderstandings which might give rise to confusion.22 Yet the Dadaists found the Expressionist pathos, the spirit, the soul, the New Man, life and whatever else E. propagated as the ultimate truth—the ens realissimum which, untrammeled by convention, was to seek expression in exaggerated forms—to behighly dubious. They believed that they were able to see through the nebulous irrationalism which was at work there, which, because it lacked an obvious content, could be filled with all sorts of ideologies, and which, ultimately, confirmed the status quo of the existing order, no matter how revolutionary the outward pose. 17 "Dadaism—a play of masks, a laughter? And behind it a synthesis of the romantic, dandy­ fied and demoniacal theories of the nineteenth century?" Ibid., p. 162. 18 "The whirlwind will produce a dissonance which breaks the head ( = causes a headache) of heaven itself. Blood will stick to the bloodthirsty mouth, Milk and honey to the fool's face." Quoted ibid., p. 163 19 Reinhard Döhl, Das literarische Werk Hans Arps 1903-1930: Zur poetischen Vorstellungswelt des Dadaismus (Stuttgart, 1967), p. 42f. 20 "Apply the theories always to human beings, persons, and don't let yourself be shunted off into aesthetics. What matters primarily is the individual, not art." Die Flucht aus der Zeit, p. 76. 21 See ibid., p. 83. 22 Some of the following observations are drawn from an earlier essay of mine: "Über einige Voraussetzungen von Dada: Ein Vortrag" in Festschrift für Klaus Ziegler, ed. Eckehard Catholy and Winfried Hellmann (Tübingen, 1968), pp. 361-384.

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In a Dadaist manifesto issued in 1918 and signed by many more individuals than had been members of the original group we still read: Has E. fulfilled our expectations for an art which would be a ballotting of our most vital concerns ? NO, NO, NO. Have the Expressionists fulfilled our expectations for an art which brands our flesh with the essence of life ? NO, NO, NO. Under the pretense of spiritualization, the Expressionists in literature and painting have formed a generation which even today longingly awaits its acceptance in literary and art history, and which campaigns for an honorable recognition on the part of the middle-class. Under the pretense of propagating the soul, they have reverted, in the fight against Naturalism, to the abstractpathetic gestures which presuppose an empty, comfortable and inactive life. The stages are filled with kings, poets and Faustian natures of all kinds; and inactive minds are haunted by the theory of a melioristic world view whose childish and psychologically naive manner must remain significant for a critical elaboration of E. The hatred of the press, of advertising and of sensationalism speaks for men who care more for their armchairs than for the noise of the streets, and who consider it an advantage to be duped by every crook. That sentimental resistance against the age, which is neither better nor worse, neith­ er more reactionary nor more revolutionary than any other age, t h a t feeble op­ position ogling for prayers and incense if it does not prefer to make cardboard bullets out of Attic iambs—these are qualities of a youth which has never known how to be young. E., which was found abroad and which, in Germany, has, as usual, turned into a rank idyl and the expectation of a substantial pen­ sion, has no longer anything to do with the endeavors of active individuals. 23 This criticism was aimed also at those Expressionist groups which advocated a turning from art to concrete social and political action, such as the circle around Pfemfert's periodical Die Aktion which, like so many others, was temporarily inactive on account of the war. I n positing the hopelessness of any practical steps designed to change the existing order, the Dadaists attempted a different turn from art to action by doing t h a t which, at t h a t moment, appeared to be the only possible and necessary thing: the dissolution of art as such, because only the radical destruction of all previous manners of expression and representation could offer the chance of constituting a new consciousness t h a t was unhampered by conventions and traditions. This, at least, was what they thought. I t is certainly wrong to see in Dadaism merely a systematic radicalization of E. B u t on the other hand, there can be no question that, a few years prior to the outbreak of the war, and preceding Dadaism, E. too had been born, among other things, of the impetus to dissolve the old forms and the conventional language, in order that, through a rearrangement of its fragments, a new form of expression might be rendered possible t h a t would be unprejudiced, in principle, by an already established linguistic and struc­ tural world view. For as early as 1910, Kandinsky had written the famous sentence "Das Wort ist ein innerer Klang" (the word is an inner resonance). One of the differ­ ences between the Expressionists and the Dadaists, to be sure, is the belief, cherished 23 Quoted from Dada: Eine literarische Dokumentation, ed. Richard Huelsenbeck (Hamburg, 1964), p. 27f.

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by the former, that there is such a resonance, and that, beyond the conventional frames of thought and expression, there exists a true spirit and a true human order which might dawn upon the world in the language of art and poetry if language were freed from the restrictions of its false history. The Dadaists thought t h a t this, too, was de­ lusion and ideology, just as they regarded the Expressionist forms and means of de­ struction to be insufficient and inconsistent. III To speak of E. means to speak of the German situation and of the typically German, and relatively late, variety of modern art and literature. In France at least, the modern tendencies aiming at the dissolution of the old reality, asserted themselves much earlier; and it was not via the detour of German E. t h a t the beginnings of a European art and literature inclining toward the non-representational and the abstract affected the development of the Dadaist position. The same is true of certain Dadaist forms and techniques, such as the Bruitist poem which, as is stated in one manifesto, describes "a tramway as it is, the essence of a tramway, with the yawning of the retired Mr. Schulze and the squeaking of brakes", or the simultaneous poem which teaches "the meaning of the violent interpenetration of all things": "While Mr. Schulze reads, the Balkan Express crosses the bridge near Nisch, and a pig squeals in the basement of the butcher Nuttke." 2 4 The Bruitist poem, the simultaneous poem and the collage, in which chance par­ ticles of civilization are put together in a kind of picture, are forms of representation whose antecedents can be found in various pre-Dadaist experiments. An important role in this development is played by Italian Futurism and its founder, Marinetti. In fact, the Futurist manifestos offer many suggestions and precepts which, subsequently, were almost literally emulated by the Dadaists. The call for a radical uprooting of all existing art and culture—the famous "Destroy the museums, burn down the lib­ raries !"—corresponds to the tenor of Dadaist proclamations. And Bruitist music, too, is a Futurist invention. If one wishes to designate one European avantgarde writer as being supremely important for the Expressionists and Futurists as well as for the Dadaists, it is Apollinaire, who was brought up in Italy by Polish parents of Russian citizenship and who, after a lengthy sojourn in Germany, settled down in France and wrote in French—that "cosmopolitan pupil of all European literatures", as he has been called, who virtually signals the beginning of the modern literary experiment. The Dadaists found his poems, tending to the absurd, to be congenial to their way of thinking; and Apollinaire's works were freely recited at the Cabaret Voltaire. The principle of free association according to the laws of chance and simultaneity, which is part of the Dadaist "method", was first experimentally applied by Apollinaire. If it is true t h a t one of the essential impulses of Dadaism was the turning from art to action, and to demonstration in the sense of a display of the self, this tendency, too, must be seen in the context of a general trend of European art and literature 24

Ibid., p. 28. 103

aiming at the abolition of the traditional subject-object relationship and, as Hermann Broch puts it, introducing the observer himself into the field of observation, in analogy to modern natural science. The propensity of modern art and literature to the nonobjective and the abstract is undoubtedly connected with this trend. The means of expression were to be purified, and compositions which were not derived from the world of observation and experience were to delineate something that was not immanent in the familiar contexts of empirical reality. I t must be stressed, however, that Dadaism was neither abstract nor non-objective art, and that, rather than the principle of construction and composition— however abstract—, it was t h a t of pure chance which permitted the fragments of the shattered civilization, art and culture to be combined in the Dadaist modes of expression. In the dissolution of language, Dadaism went considerably beyond the most radical attempts undertaken by the Expressionists. I n line with the trend which the Futurists around Marinetti had started by setting the words free, the sentence was sacrificed to the word. The word itself finally lost its traditional shape, as Rimbaud's notion of the "alchimie du verbe" was carried to its extreme: "Man ziehe sich in die innerste Alchimie des Wortes zurück, man gebe auch das Wort noch preis, und bewahre so der Dichtung ihren letzten, heiligsten Bezirk." 25 This far surpasses the examples of Expressionist poetry in which a meta-language, integrating the elements of traditional speech and imagery, was meant to produce new forms of expression which were, never­ theless, still meaningful. Surrealism was one of the alternatives for escaping the non-sense of Dadaism. For the Dadaists themselves, in so far as they remained loyal to their creed, the idea of a psychic automatism and a thought dictation without any rational control was not an acceptable solution. When Breton speaks of free association and aimless play, he decisively narrows the role of chance as the Dadaists conceived it; and the belief in the supremacy of the dream, which he proclaimed, presupposes an intelligible con­ text, even though it must first be made manifest by means of suitable methods. IV What, however, caused the Dadaist secession from the main stream of the artistic revolution, and of modern art in general—a secession which, as stated before, turned out to be less sectarian and more vital than most "-isms" of the modern age? This question is difficult to answer, especially since Dadaist ideas and Happenings were generated in various European countries and the United States almost simultaneously, though not always under the same conditions and presuppositions. A few reasons can be given in the case of the Zurich strain, which can claim a certain priority and a greater measure of reflection than most contemporary and subsequent phenomena of a similar nature. These reasons may, mutatis mutandis, prevail in other strains, and even in the comparable Happenings of our day. 25 "Let us withdraw into the innermost alchemy of the word; let us even sacrifice the word, thus reserving its last and holiest precinct." Die Flucht aus der Zeit, p. 100.

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First of all, there was the social situation of the emigrants gathered in Zurich. 26 They had left their several European homelands for political reasons, which have often enough been detailed. To take the logical step of emigration was by no means selfevident for them and, taken by itself, constituted an act of separation from the group of intellectuals and writers in the countries which were engaged in the war. For not only the political parties, but also the overwhelming majority of European intellectuals identified themselves, at least initially, with the nationalistic ideologies and the practice of war. At first, many Expressionists regarded the war as the great liberation, the deci­ sive purifying event, and the long desired call for action, just as the Futurists saw beauty in fight, and the best hygiene of the world in war. But the prospect of gathering the forces ready to fight for a new and more humane social order soon seemed to have been ruined forever. Sheer senselessness triumphed and surrounded itself with the delusion of higher goals. Fanaticized ideologies and nationalistic myths took the place of objective analysis and of constructive and intelligible ideas, and art and literature were to have no other purpose than the justification and proclamation of these notions and the brutal facts. As Arp put it, Wahnsinn und Mord wetteiferten miteinander, als Dada 1916 in Zürich aus dem Urgrund emporstieg. Die Menschen, die nicht unmittelbar an der ungeheuerlichen Raserei des Weltkrieges beteiligt waren, taten so, als begriffen sie nicht, was um sie her vorging. Wie verirrte Lammer bliekten sie aus glasigen Augen in die Welt. Dada wollte die Menschen aus ihrer jämmerlichen Ohnmacht aufschrecken. Dada verabscheute die Resignation. 27 However, the external circumstances of the First World War made the younger generation of artists aware of certain inconsistencies going beyond the political and social situation. The sciences and, finally, art itself seemed to confirm and sanction inhumanity by their attitude toward reality and man. That which had been suspected and known before the war now appeared in its catastrophic consequences, in the destructive reality. As Pinthus points out in his introduction to Menschheitsdämmerung, "the impossibility of a humanity which had become fully dependent on its own crea­ tions—science, technology, statistics, commerce, and industry'' and the impossibility of humanistic scholarship which "irresponsibly applied scientific laws to intellectual processes" 28 was ever more strongly felt. Some time before the war already, this aware­ ness had taken hold not only of the young generation of writers and artists but of progressive scientists and philosophers as well; and they had begun to develop counterpositions designed to overcome the heritage of the nineteenth century. B u t one reason for the disappointment of the few individuals referred to was that the great majority 26

Regarding this problem, see Miklavz Prosenc, Die Dadaïsten in Zürich (Bonn, 1967). The book is a sociological study of the group, i.e., of its structure and history. I have learned a great deal from this scholarly contribution. 27 "Madness and murder competed with each other when, in 1916, Dada arose from the pri­ meval depths. Those persons who were not directly involved in the furious madness of the world war acted as if they did not comprehend what was going on around them. Like lost lambs, they looked a t the world through glassy eyes. Dada wanted to rouse people from their pitiful stagnation. Dada despised resignation." Hans Arp, Unsern taglichen Traum . . .: Erinnerungen, Dichtungen und Betrachtungen aus den Jahren 1914—1954 (Zurich, 1955), p. 20. 28 Menschheitsdammerung, pp. 22, 26. 105

of those who should have known better and should have taken the initiative abandoned all reason and the revolutionary impetus in all fields of endeavor, and enthusiastically welcomed the war as the fulfillment of their expectations, or accepted it, stunned, like a natural catastrophe, without offering even spiritual resistance. The formation of new groups among the emigrants, especially among the emigrated artists, was initially difficult, although their common plight should have facilitated such measures. In fact, a number of such attempts at consolidation are known. The role which the Zurich Café played as a forum for such meetings is well known. To this must be added the founding of several magazines and the feeling of solidarity displayed, for a short time, by the collaborators of Die Aktion—who were gathered in Zurich—as well as of thé writers centering around Die Weissen Blatter, which, at the beginning of the war, moved its editorial office, presided over by Schickele, from Berlin to Zurich. Other groups formed, naturally, around the Russian Marxists. However, the excep­ tional situation encountered in the foreign city also entailed particular difficulties in the formation of such groups and increased competition among them, as well as among specific individuals. And even though Switzerland and its big cities were, in principle, more liberal and open-minded than the war-torn countries which the emigrants had left behind, it was by no means easy for individuals or groups to find a suitable public which, along with patrons—whose support often depended on circumstances—, could both guarantee economic support and give them an opportunity to define and constitute themselves clearly and decisively. In spite of a certain interest displayed by circles within the conservative Swiss citizenry for the all but conservative tendencies and utterances of most of the emigrants (and there are conflicting reports regarding this interest), the emigrant's social position remained unnatural and engendered a strong feeling of frustration. The newly-founded cabarets and periodicals were, for the most part, extremely short-lived and frequently ended in debt and bankruptcy. With a few exceptions, the motive for emigrating had not been primarily the hope for escaping from persecution to the comfort of a peaceful existence. In spite of many accusations and prohibitions, the danger to which Leftist sympathizers were exposed in the European countries was not in the least comparable with, say, the situation encountered during the Nazi years. I t was primarily a question of making it possible, in a region which had not been drawn into the whirlpool of the war, to do what these men considered proper and necessary. In this respect, the limitation of their activities and the lack of a broad public was a vastly more trenchant problem than the social isolation and disintegration from which, at any rate, the avant-garde artist and—-in a certain sense—the modern artist in general has suffered since the age of Romanticism. I n its specifically modern form, the problem of the relation of the artist to society was perhaps for the first time formulated in Karl Philipp Moritz' novel Anton Reiser and, even more outspokenly, in Heinrich Wackenroder's Herzensergiessungen eines kunstHebenden Klosterbruders (Emotional Outpourings of an Art-Loving Friar) and the same author's Phantasien über die Kunst. This problem, which crops up, in many variations, throughout the entire nineteenth century and which, symptomatically, Thomas Mann raises in his earliest novellas, reveals itself with exceptional intensity in the situation of the emigrants. 106

In Wackenroder's book, the problem of the composer Joseph Berglinger had been his awareness that art, if it wants to come to full fruition, must divorce itself from the public for which, and with a view toward which, it actually exists. Art as such becomes questionable in this paradoxical situation of both needing the public and setting itself sharply off against it. I do not wish to maintain, however, that the situation of the modern artist—and, particularly, that of the artists in emigration—is adequately summarized in this formula; nor do I want to indulge in unhistorieal analogies. Still, the model presented by Wackenroder would seem to adumbrate a basic predicament of the modern artist, including the avant-garde artists of our century and—in an aggravated form—those artists who are known as Dadaists. To be sure, twentieth-century conditions were much more sober than were the conditions prevailing in the age of Romanticism, and it was no longer the dignity of art and the mystique of creativity which called for the retreat from an injudicious public. Rather, it seemed to be only the pressure of circumstances and the public indifference which brought about the artists' separation from society. Yet even the modern artists harbor the notion that they embrace a cause whose progressive humanitarianism cannot be grasped by the bourgeoisie and the philistines. The rift between artists, writers and their audience, which (especially in France) is occasionally found in the nineteenth and more patently so in the twentieth century, originates by no means only in the public. The particular situation of the emigrants in Zurich—and, mutatis mutandis, in other cities—had an almost paradigmatic character in respect to this interrelationship. The artists were lacking a larger and more effective audience not only on account of the unfavorable circumstances, but, in order to be efficacious and achieve their goals at all, they had to define themselves over against this very public, provoking the latter in order to conquer it. In other words, they had to reject society in order to secure a place in it. Miklavz Prosenc, who has convincingly demonstrated the truth of this paradox, appropriately quotes from Talcott Parsons' well-known study Certain Primary Sources and Patterns of Aggression in the Social Structure of the Western World. Insecurity and disturbances in 'functional achievement', Parsons observes, engender "the dis­ position on the part of an individual or a collectivity to orient its action to goals which include a conscious or unconscious intention illegitimately to injure the interests of other individuals or collectivities in the same system".29 If, originally, the Dadaists provocatively distanced themselves from all modes of expression which remained, even implicitly, within the limits of intelligibility estab­ lished by the existing order, one of the presuppositions and reasons for this attitude is certainly to be found in the attitude analyzed by Parsons. In principle, the precarious relationship between the artist and society in the modern age can perhaps be seen to be partly due to this position. This may also explain another aspect of the matter which plays a crucial role in Dada, namely the step from theory to practice, from mean­ ingful, and still somehow realistic, presentation to self-projection through modes of 29 Talcott Parsons, Essays in Sociological Theory Pure and Applied (Glencoe, Illinois, 1949), p. 273, quoted by Prosenc, op. cit., p. 25.

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expression which, precisely in so far as they serve action and self-projection, transform any conceptually verifiable sense into "non-sense", as the Dadaists themselves called it—which is not the same as ordinary nonsense. The complete negation and the inthronization of chance, as well as other charac­ teristic features of Dadaism, by virtue of which it may be contrasted with E., also have their basis in the psychological and intellectual predispositions of the individual members of the various Dadaist groups. This mental disposition and intellectual atti­ tude are not to be understood simply as strains of the so-called "Zeitgeist" or as a topical psychological feature. To be sure, certain relevant aspects can be identified as to their origin and may perhaps also be sociologically interpreted. But this does not get us very far. We must rather take cognizance of, and accept, these individual mentalities and spiritual dispositions as factors relevant to the genesis of a phenomenon like Dadaism. Ball, who played a crucial role in the founding of the Zurich group, may serve as an example. I n his notes and letters we can find unmistakable traces of what he had read and picked up, directly or indirectly, from philosophy and literature. And as in the case of many of his contemporaries, it is, above all, the ideas of Nietzsche which hover about and between the lines. Characteristically, no name is as frequently mentioned as t h a t of the German philosopher. But we also encounter ideas of a totally different kind derived from altogether different traditions absorbed by Ball in accord­ ance with his own intellectual and spiritual make-up. Ball adopts, transforms and finally amalgamates this information with the stimuli reaching him via the ideas and inspira­ tions of his fellow-Dadaists, which have a catalytic effect upon him. By no means least of all these are mystical thoughts which impinge upon his thinking. A distinct skepticism with regard to the established culture and society, with regard to the rationalism of K a n t and his successors, and in view of the individual and his delusions and prejudices, can be traced in Ball's notes from the very beginning. And quite soon the idea emerges t h a t in abandoning all systematic thought—indeed all positive notions, and finally even the self—lies the only chance of learning something about what life—and perhaps truth and reality—can actually mean. This is difficult, perhaps even impossible, to express in words; for every concept used would already mean a positing of ideas in lieu of t h a t which is still to be experienced. In order to explain the breaking away of the Dadaists from the context of modern art, and especially E., psychological categories have also been used; it has been said, for instance, t h a t the phenomenon Dada is to be understood as a regression in the Freudian sense. Freud had attempted to explain the manifestations of the war— the cruelty of the soldiers, the blind hatred—in terms of such a regression, i.e., of man's return to earlier stages of his development—more exactly, to the time before the fourth year of life, where neither conscience nor reason as yet controls and restrains the in­ stincts. Similarly, it was thought, by some, that the Dadaists' behavior could be inter­ preted in this manner. The parallelism between the regressive attitude displayed by the soldiers in the trenches on one hand, and by the Dadaist writers and artists on the other, could, according to Freud and his successors, be explained in the sense ''that such regressions occur when an individual cannot cope with external reality and ex­ periences bitter disappointment. In order to protect himself against further disappoint108

ments, he regresses, on the basis of existing fixations, into a time in which he believes himself to have been happier. Thus, externally, regression is a protest but, internally, it is a means of self-defense on the part of the despairing individual. The pleasure apparently procured in this manner is a primitive satisfaction of instinctual urges unrestrained by adult reason and conscience." 30 The difference between such a compulsory regression and the typical regression (as well as the form it takes) of the Dadaists should be seen in the fact that the latter, in contrast to pathologically regressive persons, "knew that they were infantile". They were thus "in control of their actions [and] had the strength and perspicacity to guide and interrupt them. Thus they cannot be compared with madmen, no matter how exceptionally gifted. The comparison with the insane can only serve to elucidate the operation of the mental forces." 31 In fact, quite a few reasons could be adduced in support of such an interpretation, among them, once again, several statements by Ball, who stated, for example: " E s gibt eine gnostische Sekte, deren Adepten vom Bilde der Kindheit Jesu derart benommen waren, dass sie sich quakend in eine Wiege legten und von den Frauen sich saugen und wickeln Hessen. Die Dadaisten sind ahnliche Wickelkinder einer neuen Zeit." 32 Another entry in Ball's diary reads as follows: Die Kindlichkeit, die ich meine, grenzt an das Infantile, an die Demenz, an die Paranoia. Sie kommt aus dem Glauben an eine Ur-Erinnerung, an eine bis zur Unkenntlichkeit verdrängte und verschüttete Welt, die in der Kunst durch den hemmungslosen Enthusiasmus, im Irrenhaus aber durch eine Erkrankung befreit wird. Die Revolutionare, die ich meine, sind eher dort, als in der heutigen meehanisierten Literatur und Politik zu suchen. I m unbedacht Infantilen, im Irrsinn, wo die Hemmungen zerstört sind, treten die von der Logik und vom Apparat unberührten, unerreichten Ur-Schichten hervor, eine Welt mit eignen Gesetzen und eigener Figur, die neue Ratsel und neue Aufgaben stellt, ebenso wie ein neuentdeckter Weltteil. Im Menschen selbst liegen die Hebel, diese unsere verbrauchte Welt aus den Angeln zu heben. Man braucht nicht wie jene antike Mechaniker nach einem Punkte draussen im Weltall zu suchen. 33 The interpretation of Dadaist forms of expression as an act of regression can also be supported by the other reasons I have given. 30

Hans Kreitler, "Die Psychologie des Dadaismus" in Dada: Monographic einer Bewegung, ed. Willy Verkauf (Teufen, 1957), pp. 74-87; here: p. 79. 31 Ibid., p . 81. 32 "There is a gnostic sect whose adherents were so affected by the picture of Jesus' childhood that they lay down blathering in a cradle and let themselves be nursed and swaddled by women. The Dadaists are similar swaddle children of a new age." Die Flucht aus der Zeit, p. 93. 33 "The childlike behavior I have in mind borders on the infantile, on dementia, on paranoia. I t stems from the belief in a primitive memory, in a world which has been de­ stroyed and obscured beyond recognition and which, in art, is liberated through untrammeled enthusiasm and, in the asylum, through illness. The revolutionaries I have in mind are to be found there rather than in the mechanized literature and politics of today. In that which is thoughtlessly infantile, in madness where the restraints are gone, there emerge primitive layers t h a t are un­ touched by logic and by mechanisms—a world with its own laws and its own shape which offers new riddles and presents new tasks, just like a newly found continent. In man himself lie the levers needed for renewing our used-up world. One need not seek for a point in outer space, as did that ancient mechanic." Ibid., p. 104. 109

V Returning to our point of departure, we are perhaps justified in saying that Dadaism has survived E. because it did not share the latter's preoccupation with content—which was either more or less vague or much too concrete—and because its principle of total freedom offered a possibility for constituting a new awareness of reality, excluding, at least temporarily and in definite contrast to E., any historical prejudice. In our day, this openness permits the repetition of actions and demonstra­ tions which look Dadaistic and which are still based on Dada's presuppositions, whereas E. was inevitably destined to wax historical along with the specific situations which determined its origins and served as its points of reference. In order to ascertain to what extent the position of Dadaism is also historically qualified and limited, one must go beyond the conditions of its genesis as I have sketched them. For even the absurd "transcendentally poetic" attempt—if one may call it that—to resist all fixation and immediately negate all affirmations of meaning cannot save the Dadaists from being seen as a historical phenomenon whose pretended lack of meaning itself must finally be ascribed to the nature of the epoch. (Translated from the German by Linda Brust)

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P A U L HADERMANN

EXPRESSIONIST LITERATURE AND PAINTING

Pygmalion, in love with Aphrodite, carved his caresses in ivory and went to bed with the statue. Clement as she was, the goddess endowed the ivory with life and let this dream of confounding art and life come true a dream often since repeated in different forms. Art restored to life: not only does this refer to Zeuxis' grapes attracting the birds or to the spider's feast organized by the "realistic" art work congealing the world in its descriptive twists and turns; it also means the "zurück zur N a t u r " desired by so many generations, each time as an expression of a different idea of nature. In short, today more than ever, it is the artist and the poet trying to integrate their art in the evolution of a society that seems perfectly able to do without them. I t is their, more or less conscious, desire to "change the world" by undeceiving it and offering it new forms, new ideas, and a utopia. The sundry testimonies bearing upon the Expressionist period, coming from artists and writers who have survived World War I and Nazism— memoirs, letters, prefaces to anthologies or new editions, the recollections gathered by Paul Raabe, and so on—, even when they emphasize the formal aspect of the works, share a general atmosphere which keeps emerging from those years, a passionate way of looking upon the world and living it fully, an intoxication of the spirit. I t is difficult to dissociate from the literary and artistic revolution certain philosophical or political currents, such as Activism, pacifism, anarchism, the influence of the Clarté groups, the social or mystical ideas of Heinrich Mann, Hiller, Peter Hille, Martin Buber or Brod, because they are part of the everyday experience and of the intellectual framework of the Expressionists. The fact t h a t the spirit of socio-political revolt, of which many of these artists gave proof, has seldom gone beyond the stage of gesturing, that even their pacifism as Brod has noted—had lacked authenticity before their first fighting, does not justify the refusal to take into consideration this aspect of their literary personality—no more so than the pure and simple condemnation pronounced by Lukacs. 1 I t is perhaps by the force of circumstances that we are bound to attribute to some of their works a much greater fictionality than they themselves wanted to put into them, which leads us to stress their rhetorical character. Yet it would be presumptuous to question the profound sincerity of a young generation t h a t was first to face a crisis from which the Western 1 Georg Lukács, "Grösse unci Verfall des E . " in Probleme des Realismus (Berlin, 1955), pp. 146–183,

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world is still far from recovering. They expressed their fear, as well as their hope, with a violence t h a t shook the traditional framework designed for the art work by a stable bourgeois society. Eager to change the world, that generation changed only art and literature—not, however, without being condemned, as "entartete Künstler" (degener­ ate artists), to fifteen years of silence. But form, too, shapes history. Even when—and perhaps because—it expresses itself as a cry. "Das Stück beginnt mit einem Schrei'' (The play opens with a scream). This pre­ fatory note to Goering's Seeschlacht might serve as a motto to any study of E. "Sturz und Schrei" is the title of the first section of Menschheitsdammerung, and one thinks of the cry of agony painted in 1893 by Munch, who, together with Van Gogh, is the precursor par excellence of E. I t would be wrong, however, to interpret the intensity of Expressionist diction solely in a mournful or anguished sense. Perhaps literature tends to induce in us this error in judgment more easily than painting; whereas the former, in its finest products, offers a majority of sombre, violent and despondent works, the latter, by contrast, seems to have a greater share in the joy of living and perceiving, as expressed in the use of bold colors and motifs that are often happy. Yet it is not im­ possible that this difference passed unnoticed by the contemporaries. Our eyes have been accustomed to the great spots of harsh or opaque colors, as well as the linear distortions, and we venture to interpret the pictures differently from what the painters would have intended. However, the difference is certainly slight, considering the short time that has since passed, and probably lies only in the degree of expressive intensity perceived. What is more, nothing indicates that this is not also the case with the effect created by a poem of that period. Let it, therefore, suffice to state that the Expressionist cry can express both joy and pain, but that, in any case, it conveys an intensity of subjective life with more vigor than was ever shown by any style of the past, preventing, precisely on account of this, the birth of a truly unique Expressionist "style". What could be more diverse, in fact, than the schools, magazines, and groups that were founded during the decade preceding the First World War: Die Brücke (1905), Der Blaue Belter (1911), Der Sturm (1910), Die Aktion (1911), Die Weissen Blatter (1913), and Das Neue Pathos (1913 ?) From the art of Marc to that of Max Beckmann, from the poems of Lasker-Schüler to those of Benn, where could a common denominator be found ? This cogently explains the disagreement which prevails even with regard to the definition of E., even more so in literature than in painting. Some scholars reserve ex­ clusive rights that remind us of Walden's strictures, who claimed for the contributors of Der Sturm alone the appellation of pure Expressionists. Others resign themselves to perpetuate the use of the term in the rather broad sense understood by Soergel, yet adding prudent restrictions by talking, in quotation marks, of the "sogenannter (socalled) Expressionismus". I n the realm, already full of pitfalls, t h a t constitutes the comparison of art and literature, it is a hazardous enterprise to confront two phenomena with moving and ill-defined frontiers such as literary and pictorial E. I do not in the least intend to pro­ pose a new line of demarcation between these two zones but will use the term here in the broad sense of "sogenannter Expressionismus", sticking to its historical meaning as a movement or state of mind that arose in Germany and Austria at the beginning of 112

this century, and which, during and after the First World War, had spread, with certain modifications, to the adjoining regions. I n order to avoid attaching an exaggerated importance to marginal elements and falsifying the perspective by loading it with regional variants, I will generally limit my comparisons to German and Austrian E., occasionally allowing myself some brief excursions. I n a more general way—it must be granted—studies like those of Hugo Friedrich, Richard Brinkmann, or Edgar Lohner have shown the brittle foundations on which any purely stylistic classification, tending to isolate literary E. from the whole body of modern poetry since Baudelaire and, above all, Rimbaud, is based. 2 As far as painting is concerned, the exhibition of European Expressionist art held in 1970 in Munich and Paris has proved, by its daring comparisons which, to be sure, might be criticized in some cases, how difficult it is clearly to distinguish, on the basis of formal criteria, the various "expressive'' tendencies in the art of the end of the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century. If the artists of the Blaue Reiter have experienced a close affinity with the Cubists, if Walden in Berlin and Paul van Ostaijen in Antwerp have sometimes tended to "annex'' Futurism and Cubism to E., the reason for this was not only the necessity to counter Impressionism, fin-de-siècïe aestheticism or public hostility but, first and fore­ most, their awareness of the fact t h a t beyond the differences of intention and mentality, there was one thing that united the whole avant-garde and its immediate predecessors. Henceforth it was no longer a question of reproducing the external world, not even of viewing it "through a temperament" and analyzing the impressions thus obtained; on the contrary, it was one of expressing a more authentic and profound reality. This applied equally well to forces which the Futurists meant to set free, to the idea of the object as circumvented by the Cubists, to the often convulsive state of mind in which the Expressionists flung themselves into the universe, and to the dynamic designs of the Suprematists and Neo-Plasticists. F a r from corresponding to self-searching or ascetic renunciation, this attitude was dictated by a common need for conforming to the new image of life, the world and man—essentially changing, unstable, and dynamic — conveyed by the sciences as well as the humanities. In most cases, moreover, the artist and the poet did not turn their back upon appearances. The Futurists conveyed movement by means of a cinematographic analysis of its various stages, which they juxtaposed on the canvas, or by a succession of onomatopoeias and descriptive terms within the poem. The Cubist painters proceeded by associa­ tion and dissection of forms, multiplying their points of view around the object in order to recreate a multi-faceted image. Could not a similar apprehension of psychic space by way of successive approaches—justify the appellation of "Cubists" as applied to certain poets, novelists and playwrights? 3 2 Hugo Friedrich, Die Struklur der modernen Lyrik (Hamburg, 1956); Richard Brinkmann, E.: Forschimgsprobleme 1952—1960 (Stuttgart, 1961); Edgar Lohner, "Die Lyrik des E . " in E. als Literatur, ed. W. Rothe. (Bern-Munich, 1969). 3 See G. E. Clancier, De Rimbaud au Surréalisme (Paris, 1953), and especially Wylie Sypher, Rococo to Cubism in Art and Literature (New York, 1960).

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The Expressionists did not detach themselves from the world either. They thor­ oughly dug it out, removed its conventional patina and make-up, paradoxically enough - a n d in spite of their subjective vision—putting to their own use one of the foundations of Realistic and Naturalistic technique. " I t is no longer possible to paint interiors filled with men reading and women knitting. On the contrary, they must be live human beings, breathing, feeling, suffering, and loving/' 4 As the young Munch wrote these sentences in 1889, he forgot that the knitters and readers already testified, however modestly, against the narrow observance of academic traditions, and that the profound tendency from which his art took root had asserted itself with some major scandals in the middle of the century: Edouard Manet's "Man with the Pipe", his "Luncheon on the Grass", and his "Olympia", inaugurating, as much as Madame Bovary, the rejection of decorative clichés in the name of the real thing and a conception of man free from bourgeois hypocrisies and romantic dreams of grandeur. The anti-Venus appeared on the scene simultaneously with the anti-hero. Models, dancers, clowns, peasants, and beggars—these picturesque motifs had suddenly turned into human beings, whose trite existence inspired interest, passion or revolt. Soon, beyond the individual, the painters unveiled the social drama, paralleling the work of Zola or Hauptmann. Their predilection for the outcasts of fortune very different from those painted by Estéban Murillo was sometimes accompanied by an indictment of the judges representing the Establishment in its omnipotence. There is a distinct continuity from Honoré Daumier to Rouault. Other painters, or those already mentioned, extended the tragic sense to the entire human condition, without, therefore, disparaging the social background. And after Daumier, Edgar Degas, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, the great testimony of Van Gogh and Munch paved the way for the double tendency of E., which is humanitarian and expressive. During that time, Gauguin, retreating from society, gave shape to the nostalgia for primitive life which marked so many works of the period, either in theme or composition. I n the same way as the Cubists referred to Cézanne, the Expressionist painters con­ sidered Munch, Van Gogh and Gauguin as their models. We know what an important role Munch had played, in spite of his "Art Nouveau" curves, in the elaboration of the xylographic technique of Die Brücke, and how great had been the impact of his ex­ hibitions, which toured Germany, beginning in 1892. Similarly, it has become quite superfluous to point out the formal influence of Gauguin and Van Gogh. What the Expressionists admired in their spiritual fathers was more than style; it was their way of feeling and their conception of life. Thus Erich Heckel primarily recognized "eine Verwandtschaft zu Munch im Erleben und in der Einstellung zum Menschen". 5 Van Gogh's mystical and humanitarian tendencies, which led him to paint his peasants "as if he were one of them, feeling and thinking like them", 6 and the passion which animated his art, have at least been as important as his work. The idea he conceived of 4 Cited by Wilhelm Haftmann, Malerei im 20. Jahrhundert, second ed. (Munich, 1957), pp. 86-89. 5 Lothar G. Buchheim, Die Künstlergemeinschaft Brücke (Feldafing, 1956), p. 67. 6 Lettres de Vincent van Gogh a son frére Theo (Brussels, 1946), p. 151 (letter 404).

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an artistic community to a great extent accounts for the founding of Die Brücke (1905), which might be considered the beginning of E. 7 As for Gauguin, besides his re­ jection of bourgeois society, his legend embodied the thirst for exoticism and primitivism characteristic of Kirchner, for example, who from 1904 onwards, i.e., about the time when negro art was "discovered" in France, was irresistibly attracted by the ethno­ graphic section of the Dresden museum. 8 The admiration for Munch, Gauguin, and, above all, Van Gogh, transformed these painters into nearly mythical, or at any rate exemplary, personages who seduced the writers as well as the painters. As late as 1924, Sternheim wrote a short story about "Gauguin und Van Gogh". The name of Van Gogh also crops up in the letters of Benn 9 and Heym, 1 0 some of whose poems were inspired by the painter's work. In 1911, Worringer for the first time mentioned E. in connection with Van Gogh, Cézanne, and Matisse in an article published in Der Sturm.11 Daubler, the pre-eminent mediator between painting and literature of the period, calls Van Gogh the first Expressionist and effusively comments on his work in his book Der neue Standpunkt, published in 1916. There he also admires the paintings of Gauguin and Munch, to which he devotes lyri­ cally written chapters. Munch, whom Reinhardt called upon for his stage designs, impressed Kokoschka by the diagnosis he made of the "panische Weltangst". 1 2 To be sure, the Expressionists - artists as well as writers—did not only select painters to fill their pantheon. I t is quite interesting to observe the craving for litera­ ture that obsessed these young artists, who, emulating the Fauves, initially called themselves "die Wilden Deutschlands", 1 3 but who apparently did not share the hatred of culture which was typical of their Futurist contemporaries and Dadaist successors. On the contrary, their desire to leave the aesthetic ghetto and the specialization of their craft urged them—like Gauguin looking for contacts with Symbolist poets, or Walter Crane and Morris assigning a social function to Art Nouveau—toward the greatest possible awareness of the ideas and the literary trends of their time. This is not in the least surprising among a youth of whom Bahr wrote: "Jetzt aber scheint's, dass sich in der heraufkommenden Jugend mit Heftigkeit der Geist wieder meldet. [Sie] glaubt wieder, dass der Mensch nicht bloss das Echo seiner Welt, sondern vielleicht eher ihr Tater oder doch jedenfalls selbst ebenso stark ist wie sie." 14 This accounts for the fact that Die Brücke was not simply an association of painters who gathered some ideas on the subject of their craft, but a real "Bund'', with a common life, a common mission, and common pleasures as their goal. A large part of their activ7 See the account given by Bernard S, Myers in The German 8 See Buchheim, op. cit., p. 50. . 9 Letter to Paul Zech dated September 2, 1913. 10 Letter to Wolfsohn dated September 2, 1910. 11 "Zur Entwieklunsgeschichte der modernen Malerei," Der 12 E.: Literatur und Kunst, 1910-1923, p. 18. 13

Expressionists (New York, 1957)*

Sturm) I I (1911),-No. 75, p. 597.

" I n unserer Epoche des grossen Kampfes um die neue Kunst streiten wir als 'Wilde', nicht Organisierte gegen eine alte, organisierte Macht . . . Die gefürchteten Waffen der 'Wilden' sind ihre neuen Gedanken; sie töten besser als Stahl und brechen, was für unzerbrechlich galt." Franz Marc in Der Blaue Eeiter (Munich, 1912), pp. 5—7 (reprint Munich, 1965). 14 "But now it seems that, in the upcoming generation, the spirit violently reasserts itself. This youth once again believes that man is not the echo of his world but perhaps rather its perpe­ trator, or, at any rate, as strong as it is." Quoted in Buchheim, op. cit., p. 26. 115

ities was devoted to the reading and discussion of literary works. There was still a lively enthusiasm for Naturalism. Kirchner read to the others Charles Louis Philippe's Bubu de Montparnasse and works by Guy de Maupassant. Ibsen, Strindberg, Wedekind, Hauptmann, and Dostoevsky were simply devoured. The Symbolists equally carried the day, as did Rimbaud, Verhaeren, and Whitman. 1 5 But it was Nietzsche, above all, who nourished the passionate discussions. His influence on Expressionist literature has been assessed by Sokel. In these preferences one recognizes the basic contradiction in­ herent in the Expressionist Weltanschauung, which is divided between the conscious­ ness of a creative self as isolated from his fellow beings by the very act of creativity, on the one hand, and, on the other, the need to dissolve into a humanitarian and cosmic communion of Jewish-Christian inspiration. The same bell was sounded in Der Blaue Belter, where Nietzschean thought deeply affected Kandinsky and Marc, —which did not keep the latter from planning, in the mystical and messianic spirit characteristic for him, the edition of a large Bible illus­ trated by Klee, Heckel, Kubin, Kokoschka and himself. Although this group was much more ephemeral and less coherent, the common interests and ideas of its members are very apparent in their writings which, greater in number and more remarkable than those of the members of Die Brücke (with the exception of Kirchner), draw from the same literary sources: Ibsen, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Wagner, etc., while reserving a greater share to music. The aesthetics of Der Blaue Belter notably differs from those of Die Brücke, among other things by its more intellectual and rational cast, which comes closer to Cubism and the art of Delaunay. At its root, however, lies a similar social utopia, which, inherited from Art Nouveau, was later taken up by the Bauhaus, where Klee, Kandinsky, and Feininger were subsequently rejoined. The famous Bauhaus manifesto, dating from 1919, illustrated by Feininger and culminating in an act of faith in the architecture of the future, "kristallenes Sinnbild eines neuen kommenden Glaubens", 16 was the logical outcome of the Brücke manifesto directed against "die wohlangesessenen alteren Krafte" 1 7 and of the Blaue Reiter almanac, where Marc, for example, meant to create the symbols, "die auf die Altare der kommenden geistigen Religion gehören". 18 This demonstrates how, even outside of their art (which was very soon discussed in the literary periodicals), these painters had a common ground where their preoccupations joined with those of numerous writers, eternalists, activists, or "Neopathetiker". Periodicals such as Die Weissen Blätter, Der Sturm, Das neue Pathos, Das Kunstblatt, and even Die Aktion, which was more directly political, shared the conviction t h a t a new world was on the point of being established, based on human brotherhood and a higher spirituality. They all seemed to believe—even in spite of the war—in this "Epoche des grossen Geistigen" announced in 1911 by Kandinsky in Über das Gelstlge in der Kunst. They all attached great importance to the pictorial avant-garde, 15 16 17 18

See ibid., pp. 39, 170. "The crystal image of a future belief." "The well-established older forces." See Buchheim, op. cit., p. 89. "Which should be placed on the altars of the coming spiritual religion." Der Blaue Belter, loe. cit. 116

whose major role in the artistic and spiritual revolution of the twentieth century was deeply felt by them, as was also the case with Apollinaire. Die Weissen Blätter and Die Aktion had a less specific literary and artistic orientation than the other periodicals. And yet they abounded in articles dealing with con­ temporary painting, whether from the pen of Daubler, Behne, Daniel Henry (Kahnweiler), Wilhelm Hausenstein and Leonore Ripke-Kühn in the former, or of Serner or Rubiner in the latter review. In an article entitled "Maler bauen Barrikaden", Rubiner even directly associated painting with revolutionary action. 19 (Pechstein, Otto Mueller, George Grosz, and Otto Dix responded to his summons by joining the Novembergruppe in I918. 20 ) Die Aktion published drawings—mainly portraits from the pen of Ko» koschka, Ludwig Meidner, Oppenheimer, Egon Schiele, and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, among others. The latter, together with Meidner and Heckel, also contributed to Das Neue Pathos. Above all, credit goes to Der Sturm for having revealed the importance of Expres­ sionist painting and for having served as a platform for the literary and artistic avantgarde in Germany. (Paul Westheim's luxurious periodical Das Kunstblait appeared only in 1917 and, in the main, did nothing but perpetuate established reputations.) The role played by Der Sturm is familiar enough. Walden made of his periodical one of the principal meeting points of contemporary art, literature, and music. Der Sturm indulged in the luxury of spawning an art gallery (1912), a publishing firm (1914), and soon afterwards a Sturm-Schule (1916), and a Sturm-Bühne (1918); it also organized evenings devoted to poetry. Initially, the periodical was the rallying-point of diverse tendencies: poems by Lasker-Schüler (Walden's first wife) and b y Lichtenstein appeared side by side with aphorisms of Karl Kraus, short stories by Mynona and Paul Scheerbart, Kokoschka's play Mörder Hoffnung der Frauen, articles by K u r t Hiller and, significantly, by Apolli­ naire, Marinetti, Leger, and Delaunay (the latter's contribution translated by Klee). Under the influence of Kandinsky's, Klee's and Delaunay's ideas, and after Walden's "discovery" of Stramm, the aesthetic theories of Der Sturm became more specific, emphasizing the formal, aesthetic side of the work of art—whether literary (and thea­ trical) or pictorial. In its search for a pure and absolute art, Der Sturm moved toward Constructivism, the poetry of sounds (Lautdichtung), and the gestic, geometrical thea­ ter advocated by Schreyer. This development, quite apparent in the periodical, in its theater and in the Sturm-Abende, did not reverberate in the program of the one hundred exhibitions which, from 1912 to 1921, revealed, or helped to reveal, in Berlin and abroad the works of countless painters, Futurists, Cubists, and, above all, Expressionists, to whom one should add Gauguin, Rik Wouters, Ensor, Chagall, Delaunay, Arp, Ernst, K u r t Schwitters, as well as others. Among the Expressionists, Walden assigned the lion's share to the members of Der Blaue Belter and, most of all, to Klee. Dissolved by 1913, Die Brücke had sometimes been represented in the Sturm gallery, for instance, at the time 19 20

Die Aktion, IV (1914), col. 353-364. See Buchheim, op. cit., p . 81. 117

of the Berlin Neue Sezession exhibition. But from the very beginning it was felt that Walden and his collaborators preferred a more "structured" art. This did not prevent them, however, from reproducing, in their periodical, works by Heckel, Kirchner, Nolcle, Pechstein, and Schmidt-Rottluff, as well as Alexander Archipenko, Chagall, Picasso, Feininger, Johannes Itten, Kandinsky, Klee, Kokoschka, Kubin, Macke, Marc, Georg Muche, Schlemmer, Schreyer, Schwitters, and many others. Prior to its Bolshevist phase, which began about 1923, the importance of Der Sturm for the propagation and development of E. can hardly be overestimated. Its "erster deutscher Herbstsalon" (1913) was the second great joint avant-garde exhibi­ tion held in Germany, one year after the famous Cologne "Ausstellung des Sonderbundes". The periodical also revealed the poetry of Stramm and Schwitters, and the selections made by Walden from the work of other poets were as perspicacious, on the whole, as was their artistic quality. What is more, by gradually shifting the emphasis — in painting as well as in literature—from the subjective and passionate expression toward a more intellectual and abstractly formal composition, Der Sturm had a large share in modifying the over-all aspect of German E. Walden's essays on art, such as Einblick in die Kunst (1917), while simplifying them, reiterated the favorite ideas of Kandinsky—who, because of the war, had returned to Russia but came back in 1921 on the organic work of art, constructed with forms and colors put together according to the principle of internal necessity. Über das Geistige in der Kunst remained somewhat ambiguous as to the nature of this necessity, which could depend as much on the creative individual as on the internal structure of the painting. Walden dissipates the equivoca­ tion on behalf of the objectivized and depersonalized work, in the very sense of the development which Kandinsky's art was to go through about the time when Gropius called him to the Bauhaus (1922). Besides, Walden boldly applied to poetry the theory of artistic autonomy and of the respect for the material appropriate to each art, as upheld by Kandinsky, who had written as early as 1911: "Das Wort ist ein innerer Klang". 2 1 In fact, Kandinsky had already sounded the resources of the poetic "con­ centration" and "decentration" of which Walden's friend Stramm was to make such an extensive and convincing use in Der Sturm in 1914 and 1915.22 The neglect of syntax and prosody—traditionally coordinated by linguistic usage—for the sake of the iso­ lated word corresponded to a reluctance to imitate, in art, the forms of nature according to the conventional mode of perspective. The extreme stages of this double rejection were the "Lautdichtung" of Rudolf Blümner, the ancestor of Lettrism, and in painting the geometrical abstractions represented in Der Sturm by Rudolf Bauer, Kandinsky, Moholy-Nagy, Johannes Molzahn, Muche, Arnold Topp, and William Wauer. The various avant-garde tendencies of the Expressionist theater, ushered in by Döblin (Lydia und Mäxchen) and Kokoschka (Sphinx und Strohmann) as early as 1906–1907, culminated in the Sturm-Bühne and the Kampfbühne of Hamburg, both initiated by Schreyer. The recourse to pantomime, baffling mises en scène, music, masks, cries, and ritual was completed by a plastic conception of the theater, based on the 21 "The word is an inner resonance." Über das Geistige in der Kunst, 1952), p. 45. 22 Ibid., pp. 45–46.

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fourth ed. (Berne,

play of lights and shapes and realized in 1912 in Kandinsky's "Bühneiikomposition" Der gelbe Klang. In Munich, Kandinsky—together with other members of Der Blaue Reiter—belonged to a small group formed in 1914 by Ball with the aim of investigating new modes of dramatic expression. This group designed "total" spectacles, in which Klee, Marc, Schönberg, and Kandinsky, among others, were to collaborate. I n Über das Geistige in der Kunst, Kandinsky did not conceal his admiration for Wagner. As early as 1910, Walden, on his part, had published Kokoschka's Mörder Hoffnung der Frauen, and he himself had written the music and the scenario for plays, turning to ridicule and exploiting everyday language for its resonant qualities. He had also composed the musical part of a pantomime by Wauer, who, as early as 1905, had also been preoccupied with theatrical innovations, writing articles on the subject for Der Sturm. The Sturm-Bühne, founded in 1918, unified these ideas and attempts in a system, related them to the Wortkunstwerk and produced Gesamtkkunstwerke such as Stramm's Sancta Susanna (written in 1914 and produced in 1918) and Schreyer's Meer sehnte Mann (1918). In 1921 Schreyer was called upon to direct the theatrical workshop of the Bauhaus, where Schlemmer further pursued his Constructivist experiments. 23 All this astounding activity of Der Sturm should not induce us to underestimate the role of numerous other periodicals which— well into the post-war period—did a useful job in gathering the great names of literary and artistic E.: thus DieNeue Kunst (1913), Das Neue Pathos (1913-1919), and, above all, Genius (1919-1921), edited by K u r t Wolff under the supervision of Hans Mardersteig, Pinthus, and C. G. Heise. There were, of course, other possibilities for contact between painters and poets, such as the publishing firms, for example that of K u r t Wolff who, in 1913, had taken over the first Rowohlt-Verlag, founded in 1907. Wolff became the principal publisher of E., although he subsequently denied this claim by refusing to attach any significance to the term. 24 The first four authors whose works he published were Brod, Werfel, Kafka, and Hasenclever, soon followed by Trakl and Meyrink. Wolff published the famous series "Der jüngste Tag", which was devoted to young authors. Pinthus had been his first reader. Mardersteig, who was responsible for the lay-out, had introduced to him Frans Masereel. From 1913 on, Wolff published art books, such as the Dramen und Bilder of Kokoschka who, at that time, made several portraits of Hasenclever–as well as studies about Kirchner, Nolde, Modersohn-Becker, and Masereel. Noteworthy is also the publication, in 1914, of Das Kinobuch, containing Kinodramen by Brod, Ehrenstein, Hasenclever, Lasker-Schüler, Rubiner, and others, and demonstrating the interest taken by Wolff and his authors in the youngest plastic art. Rallying places of artists and writers par excellence, the literary cafes functioned as an exchange remembered with emotion and nostalgia by those of its beneficiaries who are still alive. Running through the pages of Paul Raabe's collection of reminis­ cences sufficiently demonstrates how significant these cafés were in the intellectual life of that generation. In Berlin there was the Café des Westens, the Café Grössemvahn—

23 24

See the documentation in Pörtner's Literatur-Revolution 1910—1925, I I , 194-211. See E.: Aufzeichnungen und Erinnerungen der Zeitgenossen, ed. Paul Raabe (Olten/Freiburg, 1965), pp. 292-294. 119

succeeded by the Romanisches Café—and Café Kutschera, where Miller's Neuer Club held its meetings; in Leipzig there was the restaurant Der Kaffeebaum, and Wilhelms Weinstuben flourished equally; in Munich the meeting place was the Café Stefanie, and in Vienna the Café Central to cite only the most important localities. 25 The present essay could not claim to draw up an exhaustive list of the many per­ sonal relationships between the Expressionist painters and writers. Assessing the extent of these relationships and their influence on particular works will always remain a very delicate business. In most cases, it will be found that it is basically a matter of common experiences—the discovery of city life, the frequentation of the same cafés, contri­ butions to the same periodical—rather than a concrete exchange of ideas and tech­ niques. Thus in the early part of 1914, Ernst Wilhelm Lotz and Meidner lived together in Dresden and, according to the latter, both were elated at the spectacle of the city, in the course of long enthusiastic walks. 26 Lotz, the poet, sometimes painted, and the artists whom he especially admired were Delaunay, Marc, and Kandinsky, whose works had nothing in common with those of Meidner. The latter, in truth, wrote poems such as "Alaunstrasse in Dresden", evidently showing kinship with some of his paintings by their panoramic and descriptive nature, while only the exalted tone might possibly recall the poetry of Lotz or other Expressionist poets and Pathefiker with whom he had associated in Berlin. (His Expressionist prose saw the light much later, i.e., during the war.) Otten, who, before the war, frequented the group of Rhenish painters and sculp­ tors, shared with them the passionate love for life and man, and the aesthetic conviction expressed by their leader Macke in Der Blaue Belter: "Die Freuden, die Leiden des Menschen, der Völker stehen hinter den Inschriften, den Bildern, den Tempeln, den Domen und Masken, hinter den musikalischen Werken, den Schaustücken und Tanzen. Wo sie nicht dahinterstehen, wo Formen leer, grundlos gemacht werden, da ist auch nicht Kunst." 2 7 B u t there is not the slightest resemblance between Otten's extravagant hymns or his pathetic appeals to the humanitarian revolution and Macke's subtle art so full of warmly pulsating colors, kept in a perfect formal harmony, with happy loungers and pensive girls smoothly integrated with a perpetually sunny landscape. Although the friendship between Marc and Else Lasker-Schuier has left definite traces in the form of letters, poems, and the famous postcard series designed by Marc, i t has not profoundly affected their respective works. 28 Yet, for all that, a similar ex­ perience of space, distributed around the living beings in magnetic fields related to the cosmos, forms the basis of their creations. In Vienna, Kokoschka and Trakl experienced a solidarity due to the ostracism which struck them on the part of the well-meaning public, as well as to their common 25 26 27

The appropriate references can be found in the above collection. Ibid., pp. 146ff. "The joys, the sorrows of men and peoples are behind the inscriptions, the pictures, the temples, cathedrals and masks, behind the compositions, plays and dances. Where they are not present in this way, where empty forms are created without this foundation, we have no art." Der Blaue Belter, pp. 20—26. 28 See B. Kühl-Wiese, "Georg Trakl—Der Blaue Reiter: Form- und Farbstrukturen in Dichtung und Malerei des E.," Diss., Münster, 1963, pp. 19ff. 120

spiritual restlessness and anguish 29 . One of Kokoschka's pictures may well have in­ spired Trakl's "Die Nacht", and the "Windsbraut" appears in the work of either. The themes of fear, madness, devouring night, solitude, adolescence, guilt, and blood were part of their vision which, however, was not determined by the interaction of their personalities. I t was answerable to the specific situation of Austrian E., at once more lucid (Kraus) and more nightmarish (Kubin) in its profound tendencies than German E. generally, while being, at the same time, more closely akin to the morbid fin-desiècle climate. Schiele's cartilaginous portraits sometimes recall the figures of Gustav Klimt. The latter, besides, was the teacher of Kokoschka, who dedicated to him" Die traumenden Knaben". The poet Paul van Ostaijen, who introduced the Futurist, Expressionist and Cubist theories into Flanders, loved to discuss painting with his friends—the sculptor Oscar Jespers and the painters Paul Joostens, Floris Jespers, Fritz Stuckenberg, and Heinrich Campendonk. His critical writings helped to spread their reputation, and his personal acquaintance with them made him more aware of the formal problems of his time. Yet, even if one of their works particularly inspired him in the same degree as did his other experiences, the only fruitful comparisons that are to be drawn are on the level of a common vision anteceding any concrete "influence". In the present case, a synthesis between Cubism and E., which mutually checked each other in an intuitive apprehension of everyday reality, occurred. Van Ostaijen and Campendonk shared an admiration for the popular Bavarian painters, yet their conscious naiveté led to differ­ ent results, according to the media they chose. Similarly, the influence of the German Expressionist painters, and more particu­ larly t h a t of Bauer, on the Dutch poet Hendrik Marsman can only be measured (if at all) in terms of a certain vitalistic attitude or an appropriation of space, and not in terms of the concreteness of the works, short of falling into generalities valid for E. as a whole. (This does not pertain, of course, to the literary influence of Stramm, for example.) The instances cited above do not seek to prove the impossibility of any particular influence of a painter on a writer or vice versa; on the contrary, they tend to demonstrate the difficulty of delineating the contours of such an influence within the far larger circle of the entire avant-garde. Such an influence is much more easily verifiable in terms of intentions—such as, for example, Kokoschka allowing himself to write at the in­ stigation of his literary friends, or Van Ostaijen enthusiastically clinging to Kandinsky's theories—than in terms of the artistic products. This is why the dissemina­ tion of theoretical works was so important, since they manifested the urge to innovate t h a t was common to an entire generation. There is a need for monographs studying in more detail the influence on the creative artistic and literary thought of such great theoretical works as Worringer's Abstraktion und Einfühlung, Kandinsky's Über das Geisfige in der Kunst, Apollinaire's Les Peintres Cubistes, the books of Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger devoted

29

See Johannes Klein's essay on Trakl in E. als Literatur, p. 376, 121

to Cubism, the essays of Delaunay, Marc, Klee, and Kirchner, the syntheses of Max Raphael, P . E. Klippers, Wilhelm Michel, Bahr, Daubler, and many other books that passed from hand to hand and contributed to the creation of an Expres­ sionist "climate'' . 30 Let us observe, in passing, that Expressionist literature lacked personalities such as Worringer or Kandinsky. From the viewpoint of aesthetics as well as from that of the creative act, it has stood in need of individuals competent or willing enough thoroughly to analyze the phenomenon of literary E. and to place it in a broader perspective, Edsehmid, Benn, Walden, Van Ostaijen—no matter how lucid and penetrating their mani­ festos, statements or critical writings—seldom went beyond the limits of producing a lecture or an article. Probably the painters felt a greater didactic vocation, the Bauhaus being a typical phenomenon. But it must be admitted that the novelty of their plastic language was much easier to discern than the language of literature, which has almost always been tributary to the familiar words. Basically, what was called in question as far as poetic technique was concerned,—with the exception of a few borderline cases — , was the way in which the words were linked to each other. In art, beyond the articu­ lation of forms, the forms themselves were radically transformed, generating the neces­ sity for a theoretical justification which was based on a more revolutionary approach toreality and, in fact, questioned the very status of that reality. I t may well be that a deeper awareness of this problem induced several painters also to take to writing. Simultaneously, they exercised the artistic vocation and the critical function–as was the case with Kandinsky, Klee, Marc, Macke, and Kirchner — or even the literary vocation as well, as was done successfully by Kandinsky, Klee, Kubin, and, above all, Kokoschka and Barlach. 31 The parallelism of the development of art and literature seems to be more obvious than the hypothetical influence of an artist X on a writer Y. In fact, the unknown, constituted by the exact role and nature of the external interference, is eliminated when the same creative subjectivity makes use of two different kinds of expression. A splitting of the personality seems hardly probable in this domain, and the following testimony of Kandinsky could probably be extended to the other artists: "For me [it] is a 'change of instrument'. I say 'instru­ ment' because the force that drives me to my work remains the same, namely an inter­ nal pressure . . ." 32 Neither in his case nor in that of the other artists in question does literature seem to have been a compensatory activity. On the contrary, in each case an obviously similar vision emerges from the plastic as well as the literary works. Kubin is a case in point. His fantastic novel Die andere Seite (1908), illustrated by the author himself, is the counterpart of an essentially narrative art describing the world of nightmares, as experienced in dreams, in everyday reality, or while reading tales of horror. The years during which Kubin worked on his novel saw the growth of his mature graphic style, dry, nervous, at once probing and suggestive, with the 30

I h a v e m a d e such a n a t t e m p t in m y b o o k Het Vuur in de Verte: Paul van Ostaijens in het licht van de Europese avant-garde ( A n t w e r p , 1970). Their contemporary Arp developed in a direction different from E . 32 Quoted b y Carola Giedion-Welcker in Poètes a l'Ecart: Anthologie der Abseitigen 1946), p. 54.

kunstop-

vattingen 31

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horror in the foreground only gradually revealing the one lurking all around. In the case of Kubin's book as well as his drawings, the eyes have first got to acclimatize. Kandinsky and Klee, and occasionally Meidner as well, were poets; but the pathetic distortion and t h e burning fever of Meidner's pictures—in m y opinion wrongly de­ precated b y Werner Haftmann— 3 3 do not cross the threshold of poetic expression. Here bombast has been substituted for passion, disparate enumerations for dynamic panoramas, rhetorical exclamations for quivering lines and twisting forms. And yet the fundamental experience is the same: man's frenzy or anguish when confronted with the enormous city life and the apocalyptic forces which he is capable of letting loose upon it. Paintings such as "Ich und die Stadt", 3 4 ,"Apokalyptische Landschaft", and "Brennende Stadt" are sometimes reminiscent of Kokoschka and enhance the pathetic, passionate, unbridled tendency of E. They come closer to the art of Die Brücke than to t h a t of Der Blaue Reiter. Kandinsky, who was a member of the latter group, certainly did not shun subjec­ tive emotions, yet he controlled them better. One might even follow the nearly parallel stages in which he reinforced this control in his art and in his poetry. Between 1910 and 1912, the abstract quality of his "Compositions" and "Improvisations" mingled with the figurative art still typical of the preceding stage. Similarly, the volume Klänge (1913) contains descriptions of animated landscapes side by side with poems of a strictly musical quality. One might compare, for example, the beginning of "Fagott" ("Ganz grosse Hauser stürzten plötzlich. Kleine Hauser blieben ruhig stehen. / Eine dicke harte eiför'mige Orangewolke hing plötzlich über die Stadt") 3 5 with the end of "Bliek und Blitz': "Aber der Rotzacken, der Gelbhacken am Nordpollacken wie eine Rakete am Mittag !" 36 As in his art—henceforth non-figurative—the tendency to abstraction grew equally strong in the subsequent poems, as in the one recited a t the Cabaret Voltaire in 1916: "Blaues, Blaues hob sich, hob sich und fiel./ Spitzes, Dünnes pfiff und drangte sich ein, stach aber nicht durch. / An alien Ecken hats gedröhnt. / Dickbraunes blieb han­ gen scheinbar auf alle Ewigkeiten..." 37 Here one seems to be witnessing a transposition into a temporal medium or the elaboration of an abstract painting. Though not a painter, Van Ostaijen made a similar experiment in "Merkwaardige aanval". 3 8 Of course, such a "transcription" constitutes an exception. Yet it should be noted t h a t neutral, nounally used color and other adjectives, "gesichtslose Neutra", as Clemens Heselhaus calls them, 39 corresponding to the "abstract" use of color in painting, are frequently found

33

Malerei im 20, Jahrhundert, p. 204, Van Ostaijen could have borrowed from Meidner's "Ich und die Stadt" the title for a cycle of poems in his collection Sienjaal, where he comes closest to humanitarian E. 36 "Very tall houses suddenly collapsed. Small houses stood unperturbed. /A thick, hard, eggshaped orange cloud suddenly hung over the city." Poètes a VEcart, pp. 55—56. 36 "But the red peaks, the yellow heels at the North Pollack like a rocket at noon." Ibid., 34

3 ' "Blue things, blue things, rose, rose and fell./Sharp things, thin things whistled and pushed in but did not penetrate. / Reverberations everywhere. / Thickly brown things stayed behind, apparently forever and ever." Ibid. 38 Verzamelt Werk: Grotesken en ander Proza, second ed. (The Hague and Antwerp, 1966), pp. 101-103. 39 Clemens Heselhaus, "Die Elis-Gediehte von Georg Trakl," Deutsche Vierteljahresschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte, XXVIII (1954), 384–413, esp. p. 408.

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in Expressionist poetry by reason of their suggestive force, Trakl was a master in the use of this technique: "Ein Rot, das traumhaft dich erschüttert"; "Das Blau fliesst voll Reseden"; " F ü r Einsames ist eine Schenke da." 4 0 Beginning with his Bauhaus period, Kandinsky made more room for the empty space, the interval that separates the forms; he started to compare and balance them, Similarly, his sluggish verses became shorter, with more abrupt breaks, and more pauses. The compositions became more sober, the themes more "intellectually" playful: "Unregelmassig / Regelmassig / Massig / Wo ist es ?" 41 Closer to the ordinary world in his formal repertoire and, at the same time, generally more detached by the way in which he made use of it, Klee was successful in his venture to dwell on the frontiers of mystery without ever departing from a simplicity of style that puts the mark of clarity on his work as a whole. His art really makes "visible", in compliance with his famous slogan: "Kunst gibt nicht das Sichtbare wieder, sondern macht sichtbar." 42 As Claude Roy has observed: "Cosmic sentiment, humor, metaphysi­ cal anguish, dream world, the leitmotifs of Klee, the painter, recur in the texts of Klee, the poet." 43 Perhaps it was the allusive and musical character of his paintings — "denn auch der Raum ist ein zeitlicher Begriff" 44 — t h a t made him avoid the danger of a too heavily pictorial poetry, as is sometimes found in Kandinsky. Like his paintings, Klee's poems constitute fixed microcosms and mixtures of extremely simple elements, where abstraction counterbalances the animal and vegetative themes in a delicate equilibrium of movements leading in opposite directions: "Mein Stern ging auf / tief unter meinen Füssen / wo haust im Winter mein Fuchs? / wo schlaft meine Schlange?" 45 I t is significant that the only two Expressionist painters who really impressed themselves as writers upon their contemporaries, have done so by way of the theater, whose tendency to approach the other arts has already been stressed. As is the case with most Expressionist playwrights, they created a theater of archetypes. Barlach's and Kokoschka's dramatic characters have a mythical significance which is enhanced by their great plasticity. Barlach had conceived his idea of God and man in the Russian steppe, as he was traveling on a spiritual itinerary very much like Rilke's, whose Stundenbuch (1905) was a foreshadowing, or even an inauguration, of the mystical tendencies of E. Prop­ erly speaking, there are no individuals in Barlach's sculpture or in his dramas. In general his figures are not even types representing specific passions or vices. Essentially they sum up the human condition by reducing it to a few fundamental attitudes: submission, revolt, love, hate, compromise, and thirst for the absolute. Although topical 40 "A red which profoundly affects you as in a dream"; "The blue overflows with mignon­ ettes"; "For loneliness there is an inn." Georg Trakl, Dichtungen, sixth ed. (Salzburg, n. d.), pp. 30, 33, 78. See also the chapter entitled "Absolute Metaphorik" in Kühl-Wiese's dissertation cited above. 41 The pun on massig (moderately) and regelmassig (regularly) is untranslatable. Poètes a p. 59. l'Ecart, 42 "Art does not reproduce the visible, but makes visible." Schöpferische Konfession, ed. Kasimir Edschmid (Berlin, 1920), p. 28. 43 C. Roy, Paul Klee aux sources de la peinture (Paris, 1963), p. 84. 44 "For space, too, is a temporal concept." Schöpferische Konfession, p. 33. 45 "My star rose/deep under my feet/ where does my fox dwell in the winter? / where does my snake sleep?" Poètes a l'Ecart, p. 106.

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events are alluded to at times, this is done sub specie aefernitatis. Thus a staggering charcoal sketch of 1916, entitled "Anno Domini MCMXVI Post Christum Natum", shows us a man ravaged by despair, who, in front of a cemetery swarming with small crosses, calls to account a perplexed Christ who is obviously puzzled by the events. More than the intercourse among people, Barlach, as a rule, represents the dialogue between the soul and a God vaguely conceived according to a Jewish-Christian per­ spective. The heavy folds in which he imprisons the bodies have been compared to the brute matter from which the heroes of his plays want to free themselves. 46 Yet, since the woodcuts of "Die Wandlungen Gottes" show us the Creator draped in the same folds, I would rather interpret them as a rejection of the anecdotal and the individual. What is more, these folds constitute a major expressive feature of his art. The ample robes which, inspired by the sculptures of the late Middle Ages, free man from his tem­ poral context, the faces simplified to the extreme, of a solid and rough cast, the broad gestures all of a piece—all these characteristics confer on Barlach's figures the same archaic monumentality at which he aimed in his plays by using themes and phrases borrowed from the Old Testament or from popular tradition, and by a majestic reci­ tative style. Although Kokoschka also resorted to Biblical images and themes, his dramas transport us into a more primitive and pagan world governed by the primordial laws of sex and violence. His diction approaches the cry; the breath is short, and the images unfold in a frenzied rhythm. While Barlach's characters assert their presence in space (also in his theater) as monolithic blocks, those of Kokoschka waste away in it by im­ parting the spasms of their exposed nerves. The shriveled contours, the perversity of the strokes, the abrupt phosphorescences of the colors, form a counterpart to the force and the barbaric refinement of the vocabulary used in Kokoschka's plays. Between the archetypal incarnations of the subconscious pulsations which people Kokoschka's poems and dramas on the one hand, and the individuals treated "with the scalpel'' in his portraits of the same period on the other, the contrast is only super­ ficial. Being Freud's spiritual brother, Kokoschka crossed the subconscious threshold of a personality in the latter case, and of a culture in the former. From both he tore away the mask and discovered his own obsessions underneath. B y the prehistoric aspect of its figures, the brutal distortions and the sadistic incisions in the flesh, the famous drawing which illustrates "Mörder Hoffnung der Frauen" perfectly matches the subject and structure of the play, performed in 1908 and published in 1910. This is not the case with "Die traumenden Knaben", published as early as 1908, whose lithographs are still largely answerable to the Jugendstil. Yet this long poem is one of the first experiments in literary E. by its rejection of traditional forms and rhythms, by an impetuous visionary quality, a purely oneiric chain of images and, above all, by a grasp of the subjective and dynamic universe whose unexpected approaches, retreats and leaps condition the supple structure of the verses and stanzas. 46 Otto Mann, "Ernst Barlach" in E,: Gestalten einer Bewegung, ed. H. Friedmann and O. Mann, pp. 303-304.

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In both creative realms, Kokoschka henceforth sought to circumvent, as much as possible, the connection between subjective vision and reality. This actually became the theme of his plays where the shadows of the self and of love interpenetrate. Thus, as early as 1907, Sphinx unci Slrohmann, a "comedy for automatons'', in which the wife possesses no soul but the one mistakenly lent to her by her husband, already announced the famous life-size doll which "der tolle Kokoschka" took with him to the theater or in his car, and which would serve him as a model. Meanwhile his relationship with Alma Mahler had inspired paintings and plays which, culminating in Die Windsbraut and Orpheus und Eurydice, respectively, are among the most lucid and poignant expressions of this struggle between two subjectivities tending to absorb and annul each other: "Ob es Hass ist, solche Liebe?" 4 7 Perhaps the theme of the couple occurs so frequently in Kokoschka's art because it embodies the enigma of the subjective vision: the man often tormented or adventur­ ous, the woman placid or enigmatic, a doll or a sphinx, like reality itself, given a mean­ ing only when being apprehended and raped. Similar to any other segment of reality, the global image of the couple is, in its turn, submitted to the distorting vision of the painter which is, itself, waiting to be raped by our look: "Dann aber werde ich nichts mehr sein, als eine, Ihre Einbildung." 48 Yet no skepticism whatsoever, no sense of vanity results from such a conception; on the contrary, it is a passsionate affirma­ tion of subjectivity. The case of the "double talents" which I have briefly evoked might encourage research seeking to define, chiefly in spatial terms, certain structures common to both fields of expression. Such a study appears to be all the more legitimate since the Ex­ pressionist writers themselves often emphasized the essentially "visionary" character of their art. Thus they attached central importance to the problem of the subjective dimension in the visual perception of reality. Like Cubism, Futurism, and other avant-garde movements, E. was an answer to the uncertainty and confusion caused, at the beginning of our century, by the overthrow of the values and principles on which a fixed world view was previously based. I t was an answer—not of the intellect, as Cubism was—but of passion. Rather than restricting itself to a search for new technical solutions, it tended to engage the entire man, the very sense of his existence, and the consciousness of his being. A negative, distressed, tortured reaction characterizes the work of Trakl, Heym, Kokoschka, Nolde, and Kubin, who projected into their perception of the universe their own terror, anguish, or violence. A desire for lucidity urged numerous Expressionists to represent and recapitulate the drama of the human condition in non-individualized characters and typical conflicts. The motifs freed by the Naturalists from the strangle­ hold of taboos, where "good form" had repressed them, were now reduced to their

47 "Whether such love is hatred?" This line occurs in the poem "Alios Makar" which, as the anagrammatic title indicates, deals with the same theme (Alma-Oskar). See II. Schumacher, "Oskar Kokoschka" in E. als Literatur, p. 517. 48 " B u t then I will be nothing but a, (i.e., your) imagination." Kokoschka's essay on the artistic vision, "Gesichte," ends with this sentence. 126

essential polarities: father and son, man and woman, active and contemplative man bourgeois and proletarian confronted each other at daggers drawn. The theater is, obviously the place to present such conflicts, yet some painters did not hesitate to introduce this more "narrative" element into their art. We have already mentioned t h a t Kokoschka painted and etched the war between the sexes. Kirchner more dis­ creetly limited himself to representing the provocation of great women birds in red dresses, sporting quivering feathers and nailing the walkers to the spot. Grosz insisted on the venality of Aphrodite and attacked the bourgeois with vitriol, in a way similar to Dix. Heckel calls to mind Dostoevsky in his "Two Men at Table" (sometimes entitled "The Brothers Raramazov"), where the brothers confront each other under the image of the Crucified. Beckmann fathomed, in a hallucinatory manner, the theme of the hangman and his victim. The answer was optimistic—even though it sometimes took the form of an indict­ ment—in the case of Werfel, Rubiner, Barlach, R a t h e Rollwitz, and the Mexican "Expressionists", for it was based on the hope for a new humanity. In these artists' opinion, the advent of a golden age, on the social or spiritual plane, justified, or even valorized, suffering and evil in the sense of a Dostoevskian purification. Giving evidence of an "amor fati" t h a t was more firmly anchored in the present, the poems of Stadler and Van Ostaijen, and the paintings of Die Brücke, as well as those of Feininger, Klee, Marc, and Campendonk, often rendered the intoxication which the mind experienced by living in communion with the world: the powerful rhythms of the city and its crowds, the exciting speed of trains, the joy of sporting naked near lakes of a blue deeper than the sky, the crystalline nuptials of architecture and space, and the happy feeling induced by penetrating the dreams of animals. With the exception of Dix, who developed in the direction of Neue Sachlichkeit, the beings and objects were nowhere "described" or enumerated in a realistic fashion. What mattered was the psychological condition in which the poet or artist encountered things, made them his own in a cumulative vision and recognized them as signs of his internal reality. This extremely close contact between the self and the world differs from Romantic contemplation in being more tyrannical. The Expressionist does not make his escape into the other world; he rather annexes it. Whether this experience is painful or n o t does not matter much at the moment he takes it upon himself and forces his own spiritual law upon it. By this subjective course he interrelates the beings and links them to the universe, unless he directly expresses his creative impulse in the abstract sign or the Lautgedicht (Randinsky, Blümner). The environment presented may be the city or a more or less unspoiled nature. In any case, it is conceived as the place where subject and object meet, whether this subject concretely appears in human or animal form in the "decor" to which it gives its meaning, or whether the artist's subjectivity is revealed without intermediary vehicle, and solely through the formal structure imposed upon reality. By vehicle I mean a creature or object into which the creative self is intuitively projected and whose topographic situation orders and conditions the structure of the poem, novel, play, or painting, as, for example, the train in Stadler's "Fahrt über die Rölner Rheinbrücke bei Nacht", or Franz Biberkopf in Döblin's novel Berlin Alexander127

platz49, the son in Hasenclever's Der Sohn,50 Meidner's self-portrait in "Ich und die Stadt", or the animals of Marc, whose movements are echoed by the lines surrounding them. The function of such a vehicle is to activate space in the sense of subjective emo­ tion, or, to express it more plainly, to justify, through an "explicative'' presence, the expressive distortion to which the evoked objects are subjected. Dix painted an empty "Road with Street Lamps'' (1913) under a starry sky, where the relay is established at the very bottom of the picture, through a vague, curved silhouette standing out against a small pool of pale light. This light puddle is projected onto the road by six street lamps surrounded by pointed beams, such as children would draw. Behind them, the perspective of multistoried houses is falsified in pro­ portion to t h a t of the sidewalk, with the effect of erecting a kind of barrier to the per­ son's walk. The tension inherent in the work is primarily determined by the fact that beyond its star-shaped halo each street lamp points one of its rays, like a dagger, at the walker's head. Conforming to the rhythm of his walk, the figure, consequently, seems to move along with him an enormous crown of painful rays to which corresponds a luminous cascade at the top of the picture, arbitrarily underlining the black contours of the roofs. Only the passer-by himself can have the impression t h a t all these rays converge in his dazzled retina and follow him like search-lights on his solitary walk. Dix has put himself in his position, and puts us there in our turn. Moreover, the figure's feet are cut by the frame, and he is thus almost outside of the picture. The space juts out of the canvas, not in accordance with the reassuring geometric continuity of the tradi­ tional perspective, but through a striking transfer. The light, which is made lively and mobile through the dynamic perception of the walker, almost blots out the latter in the consciousness of the spectator, who is literally absorbed by the image and the solitude expressed by it. B y means of the black silhouette, the painter has identified us with his creative self in order to let us share his subjective vision more immediately, without having recourse to the anecdotal expression of a face or any sort of symbolism. Such a vehicle may recall the use of the second person in poetry, a device which was not restricted to the Expressionists alone,—far from it—, but for which the latter showed a particular predilection. In Van Hoddis' poem "Morgens", for example, one can observe how the subjective sensations draw nearer, materialize and culminate in the du, subsequently giving rise to the conscious reaction on the part of the subject—a eaction which has to become ours as well: Ein starker Wind sprang empor. Öffnet des eiternden Himmels blutende Tore. Schlagt an die Türme. Hellklingend laut geschmeidig über die eherne Ebene der Stadt. Die Morgensonne russig. Auf Dammen donnern Züge. 49 See Herman Meyer, "Raumgestaltung und Raumsymbolik in moderner Erzahlkunst und Malerei" in Bildende Kunst und Literatur: Beitrage zum Problem ihrer Wechselbeziehungen im neunzehnten Jahrhundert, ed. Wolfdietrieh Rasch (Frankfurt, 1970), pp. 18—34. 50 Concerning this matter, Pinthus observes: "In Hasenclever's play, . . . the perspective is, throughout, that of the son. This is how we ought to look at the characters; not, according to pre­ vious usage, as objectively sketched by the author, but such as the son sees them," "Versuch eines zukünftigen Dramas'* in Die Schaubühne X/14 (1914), pp. 292–293.

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Durch Wolken pflügen goldne Engelpflüge. Starker Wind über der bleichen Stadt. Dampfer und Krane erwachen am schmutzig fliessenden Strom. Verdrossen klopfen die Glocken am verwitterten Dom. Viele Weiber siehst du und Madchen zur Arbeit gehn. Im bleichen Licht. Wild von der Nacht. Ihre Röcke wehn. Glieder zur Liebe geschaffen. Hin zur Maschine und mürrischem Mühn. Sieh in das zartliche Licht. In der Bäume zartliches Grün. Horch ! Die Spatzen schrein. Und draussen auf wilderen Feldern singen Lerchen. 51 The past tense of the first line becomes present tense from the second line onwards. Short phrases, full of imagery and highly colored, and carrying along dynamic personi­ fications embracing the city spectacle, succeed each other. The first stage ends with the synthetic statement summing up an absolute state through the absence of the verb: "Starker Wind über der bleichen Stadt". Then follows the waking of machines and bells, evoking the filth and fatigue of the life led by their slaves: "schmutzig", "verdrossen", "verwittert". At the very moment of their appearance, the subject becomes aware of himself and addresses himself: "Viele Weiber siehst du und Madchen zur Arbeit gehn." The rest of the poem exploits the contrast between the alienated reality of man ("Hin zur Maschine . . .") and his vocation of happiness ("Glieder zur Liebe geschaffen"), yet without discursive rhetoric. Instead we get imperatives ("Sieh!", "Horch!"), calling attention to the spectacle of nature. From the sparrows to the larks, from the street to the "wilder" fields, the enlargement of perspective suggests the need for free­ dom and the necessity to change the world. The exclamatory " H o r c h ! " is certainly meant for the reader as well, who, by virtue of the "du", is assimilated to the subject whose consciousness awakens, and who is thus gradually brought to accept as his own the implicit message of the poem. One could question the need for such vehicles. I t could be argued that the use of the second person here or the foreground silhouette there is only a palliative masking the lack of persuasive power. And yet, the device essentially corresponds to the need 51

A strong wind arose. Opens the bleeding gates of the pus-like sky. Knocks at the towers. Brightly sounding loud sleek across the ironlike plain of the city. The morning sun sooty. Trains thunder on trestles. Golden angel ploughs plough through clouds. A strong wind above the pale city. Steamers and cranes awaken by the dirtily flowing stream. Ill-tempered, the bells knock at the weathered cathedral. Many women and girls are seen going to work. In the pale light. Wild from the night, their skirts billow. Limbs made for love. Toward the machine and morose effort. Glance at the tender light. At the tender green of the trees. Hark ! The sparrows scream. And beyond, on the wilder fields, larks are singing.

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for communication and communion as expressed in a pathetic, sometimes even awk­ ward, manner adopted by such poets as K u r t Heynicke: "Oh, dass wir DU sind einander," 52 or Werfel: "Mein einziger Wunsch ist dir, o Mensch, verwandt zu sein! . . . / Mein Mensch, wenn ich Erinnerung singe, / Sei nicht hart, und löse dich mit mir in Tranen auf."53 This communion soon turned into persuasion or hypnosis. Few movements have so much insisted on the adhesion, even the submission, of the spectator or reader to the work—whether in the case of Kandinsky seeking, with functional means, i.e., forms and colors, "die zweckmassige Berührung der menschlichen Seele", 54 or in the case of Werfel supplicating "Wolle mir, bitte, nicht widerstehn !"55 Having annexed the world, the Expressionist's vision wants to thrust itself totally upon the spectator in order to absorb him body and soul. Hence the recourse to strong measures: expressive distortions, personifications, synaesthesia, the arbitrary use of colors, extreme simplifications, accentuation of contrasts, panoramic views, close-ups and montages. Let us now examine somewhat closer these literary and pictorial devices, keeping in mind t h a t they are neither the exclusive domain nor the proper creations of E. Only their frequent and joint occurrence, together with the employment of the sub­ jective vision, can be considered characteristic for this art. Such devices are found in painting as well as literature. Their common denominators are the creation of a sub­ jective space and, consequently, the sometimes mitigated rejection of old traditions, being, on the one hand, the reproduction of reality according to a perspective prism and an atmospheric vision and, on the other, the communication of emotions or ideas in accordance with a discursive, syntactic, or prosodic a priori. I t is a truism to say that most of the Expressionists are immediately recognizable by their expressive distortion of reality. In their works the human form is hollowed out, schematized around a detail which reduces it to the essential or the typical. A line such as Benn's "Bartflechte kauft Nelken, Doppelkinn zu erweichen" 56 suggests the caricatures of Grosz, where a moustache or monocle suffices to establish a human presence. Heckel's "The Humiliated One" is not only a portrait, but, above all, a play of sagging and shriveling lines expressing a convulsive and disgraceful suffering. Simi­ larly, Paul Boldt does not allude to a specific poet but to The Poet of his heart, "hinter die Zahne bergend seinen Schrei" (hiding his scream behind his teeth). Jawlensky, painting "The Hunchback", Barlach carving "The Blind Beggar", Heym portraying "Der Blinde", instead of merely offering a description, prefer to bring to light some specific traits intensifying the human drama at the expense of the realistic anecdote. In extolling the use of masks in the theater, Ball went even one step further: "Was an den Masken uns allesamt fasziniert, ist, dass sie nicht menschliche, sondern überlebens52

"Oh, that we are you to each other." Menschheitsdammerung (Berlin, 1920), p. 265. 53 "My only wish is to be related to you, oh human being! . . . My human being, when I sing remembrance, don't be hard and dissolve with me in tears." Ibid., p. 231. 54 "The purposive manipulation of the human soul." Über das Geistige in der Kunst, p. 69. 55 "Please, do not seek to resist me !" Menschheitsdammerung, p. 239. 56 "Barber's itch buys carnations, in order to move double chin." Viewing the wealth of quo­ tations adduced below, I have desisted from giving bibliographical references. 130

grosse Charaktere und Leidenschaften verkörpern. Das Grauen dieser Zeit, der paralysierende Hintergrund der Dinge ist sichtbar gemacht." 57 The cityscapes and the landscapes are animated with mysterious forces, which the painters translate into an entanglement of planes (Heckel, Schmidt-Rottluff, Beckmann), into flames resembling those of Van Gogh (Meidner, Kokoschka), waves (Nolde), crystallizations (Marc, Klee, Feininger), or nervous vibrations (Kirchner). Similarly, the poets liquefy, crystallize, or inflame things, and one is reminded of the model constituted by Rimbaud's "Marine", which is based on a perfect coincidence of the sea and the fields. Lotz speaks of the "flammenden Garten des Sommers" (the flaming gardens of summer). For Stadler: "Wie ein See, durch den das starke Treiben eines jungen Flusses wühlt, / Ist die ganze Stadt von Jugend und Heimkehr überspült" (Like a lake stirred up by the strong drift of a young river / The whole city is washed over by youth and homecoming). Boldt transforms the forest into a submarine bed: "Die Walder wandern mondwarts, schwarze Quallen, / ins Blaumeer" (The woods wander toward the moon, black medusas, / into the blue sea). And in one of Lichtenstein's poems we read that "an einem Fenster klebt ein fetter Mann" (a fat man sticks to a window). Almost entirely absent from Expressionist painting (unless one includes Chagall), personification is the most common device through which the poets give life to the static elements of common experience, whether in the form of symbols or allegories, as in Heym's "Der Gott der Stadt" and the lines by Van Hoddis quoted above, or in the form of metaphors, as in the case of Lichtenstein's "Ein paar Laternen waten zu der Stadt" (A few lanterns wade into town), Arthur Drey's "Die Gasse flieht mit mir vor Hauserwellen" (The lane flees with me from waves of houses), Trakl's "und ein Kanal speit plötzlich feistes Blut" (and a canal suddenly spits up fat blood), Wolfenstein's "drangend fassen /Hauser sich so dicht an, dass die Strassen/grau geschwollen wie Gewürgte sehn" (crowding each other, / houses press so closely together that the streets, / gray and swollen, look like people suffocated), Hermann Kasack's "Der schmerzliche Baum / greift in den Himmel" (The painful tree / reaches out for the sky), and Stramm's "Die Steine feinden" (The stones act like enemies). In the case of Stramm and other Sturm poets, the words themselves are subject to expressive distortions or give rise to neologisms, nouns and adjectives giving birth to verbs, and vice versa. These words form dynamic climaxes distinct from the composite neologisms in the use of which the end of the nineteenth century had exhausted the smallest perceptive nuances. Synaesthesia, a heritage of Symbolism, is more difficult to trace in painting than in poetry. I t is useless to list the poetic examples, from Klabund ("Schluchze, Enzianblau!") to Benn ("Die Geigen grünen"). A picture, by contrast, can merely suggest or provoke the synaesthesia, but cannot explicitly contain it. One will be tempted to look for it only when a poem is meant to approximate music, as in the case of Klee and Kandinsky, or else if the title of the work is suggestive. Thus in Van Gogh's "Berceuse", Munch's "Cry", and Kokoschka's "The Power of Music" it would seem obvious that the old-fashioned motif of the painted paper, the enormous sound wave in the shape of a 57 "What fascinates all of us in masks is the fact that they don't represent human but super­ human characters and passions. The horror of this age, the paralyzing background of things is made visible." Quoted in Pörtner's essay " E . und Theater," E. als Liter'aiur, pp. 202-203. 131

cloud, and the red garment of the figure dancing to the trumpet tune open up many passages from one sensorial world to the other. The arbitrary use of colors is quite another matter. Contrary to the case of color hearing, the question here is not one of interference among the five senses but of a deliberate jamming of the optical perception by the creative subjectivity. Since the advent of Fauvism, whose influence on E. is well known, we have become used to seeing red tree-trunks and green faces. The Expressionists, however, heightened the emotional potential58 or the symbolic value of these colors,—which does not mean that they were the first to do so, either, since Denis Seurat and Gauguin had preceded them on this point in practice as well as in theory. Literary Symbolism, in its turn, widened the path that had already been opened by everyday speech with phrases like "purple with rage", "green with envy", etc. Thus E. merely enhanced and systematized an already current practice. Surprise, nevertheless, subsists when horses are painted blue (Marc) or "wenn schwarz der Tau tropft von den kahlen Weiden" (when the dew drips blackly from the bare willows) (Trakl). I will not further enlarge upon the Expressionist use of color symbolism. Besides, it would be better to limit such an investigation to individual artists or poets, since it does not pertain to a language that is common to them all, — in spite of some systematic efforts on the part of Kandinsky and Marc, for example.59 Not only do the colors of "vision" fail to correspond to those registered by the normal retina, but sometimes they also have the tendency to break away from their objects. A first stage would be constituted by the overflowing of contours, as demon­ strated by Raoul Dufy. This device is pretty rare indeed in Expressionist painting, which, as a rule, emphasizes the forms in a crude fashion. Yet relevant examples can be found in the art of Nolde, Klee, and Kokoschka. In general, the aim is to suggest the mobility of contours, as in some of Kokoschka's portraits or in Klee's picture entitled "They Persuade the Child", or else to make the color "radiant" so as to convey a stronger emotional quality: "O Tulpenleuchten gelben Haares!" (0 tulip radiance of yellow hair) (Ferdinand Hardekopf). As we have observed, Trakl loved to use colors nounally, thereby suggesting an undetermined presence. The following image is located half­ way on the road towards this indetermination: "Im Dunkel der Kastanien schwebt ein Blau, / Der süsse Mantel einer fremden Frau" (In the dark of the chestnut trees hovers a blue, / The sweet cloak of a strange woman). In this case, the blue color seems to be a spot which, by way of "floating", is only vaguely coincident with the coat. From here it is but one step to complete color autonomy, which is relative, to be sure, since— especially in poetry—-color often recalls the objects whence it originated. Lines such as Trakl's "Vorm Fenster tönendes Grün und Rot" (Green and red sounding in front of the window) or "Das Blau fliesst voll Reseden" (The blue flows over with mignonettes) remind us of Kandinsky's semi-figurative compositions, Marc's last paintings, which can hardly be called abstract, and the no-man's-land in which Klee mingled signs and objects. On the other hand, we have seen that Kandinsky and Van Ostaijen went so far as to postulate the total autonomy of color in poetry. 58 59

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See the letter by Van Gogh cited on p. 40 of this volume. See W. Hess, Das Problem der Farbe in den Sélbstzeugnissen moderner Maler (Munich, 1953).

Half-way between Symbolism and synaesthesia, the application of colors to abstract concepts was a favorite device of the Expressionist poets. Karl Ludwig Schneider has demonstrated this usage, relating its application by Lasker-Schüler ("meine blaue Seele"), Heym ("Ganz grün bin ich innen") and Trakl ("blaue Kühle) to Van Gogh's intention of "expressing in red and green the terrible human passions" in his famous painting "The Café B y Night". 6 0 Forms seemed to pass through various states of matter, and colors were detached from their concrete habitual basis; yet they did not, therefore, disappear. On the contrary, they were subjected to a tension exploiting to the full their expressive possi­ bilities, by letting them speak the most direct language possible, "mobilizing" the spectator's subconscious at least as much as his intellect. The Expressionists did not linger over the delicate nuances guided by the Impressionist perception of reality. On the contrary, they preferred simple colors. Reds, blues, greens, and yellows were mainly used "as they came out of the tube". Similarly, the poets generally used the most common and least "literary" words, and t h a t not merely in order to suggest a specific color. The primitivism of expression in Nolde's work is not a mere form of decorative exoticism; what it meant was an actual return to the sources, on the level of vision. To the young Friedrich Hebbel Benn ascribes the following artistic credo—another form of "relay": " . . . und die Welt starrt von Schwertspitzen / Jede hungert nach meinem Herzen. / Jede muss ich, Waffenloser, / in meinem Blut zerschmelzen" (and the world is full of sword points, / Each of them thirsting for my heart. / Each of them, I, unarm­ ed, / must melt in my blood). To this desire or necessity corresponds a technique which pretends to be savage, mobilizing the whole being, and rejecting any aesthetic subtleties: " I h r schnitzt und bildet: den gelenken Meissel/in einer feinen weichen H a n d ! Ich schlage mit der Stirn am Marmorblock / die Form heraus." 6 1 The Expressionist simplification has nothing in common with a diagram but is a means of aggression. Shock effects, surprises, violent contrasts are, according to Kandinsky, the main characteristics of the new aesthetics: Kampf der Töne, das verlorene Gleichgewicht, fallende 'Prinzipien', unerwartete Trommelschlage, grosse Fragen, scheinbar zerrissener Drang und Sehnsucht, zerschlagene Ketten und Bander, die mehrere zu einem machen, Gegensatze und Widersprüche, das ist unsere Harmonie. 62 Thus, to give a crude example, the Expressionists would preserve the extreme colora­ tion of a face while suppressing the nuances. The light parts of the face would be uni­ formly yellow, for instance, and the shadows, standing out distinctly, would be dark 60 Karl-Ludwig Schneider, "Wort und Bild im E . " in Zerbrochene Formen (Hamburg, 1967), pp. 7—31. 61 "You carve and shape, the supple chisel/in a smooth, soft hand! I hammer the form out of the block of marble with my forehead." "Der junge Hebbel'' in Menschheitsdämmerung, p. 30. 62 "Struggle of sounds, the lost equilibrium, falling 'principles,' unexpected drum beats, great questions, allegedly torn urge and desire, broken chains and ribbons which confound several things in one, contradictions and paradoxes—that is our harmony. Über das Geistige in der Kunst, pp. 108—109. Italics in the text.

133

blue and green, each color serving as a "foil" to the other, The contrasted passions mutually reinforce each other, thus imbuing the work with a greater degree of expressive reality. The contrast eliminates the transition. The same applies to the poetic image. There the explicit comparison disappears in favor of an extremely dense metaphoric structure. How trivial would be the 'classical' transcription of a line like: "Durch schmiege Nacht / Schweigt unser Schritt dahin" (Through cuddly night / Our step moves mutely) (Stramm). Here, too, only the strong expressive terms subsist, giving each word its most palpable presence. On the structural level, one can observe, in numerous instances, an elimination of anecdotal details and euphonic embellishments. Expressive lines and schematic compo­ sition are the general practice of the members of Die Brücke as well as of Der Blaue Reifer. As in the case of Trakl, Benn, and Stramm, often banishing atrophic and metric regularity, the verse aims at a diction of utmost intensity. I t is perhaps no coincidence that many of the most valid examples of Expressionist art are to be found in the medium of woodcuts or linotype engravings. The absence of color, the forced simplification of planes and lines, the reduction of tonal values to the sharpest and most expressive contrasts, all this minimalizes the tendency to slavishly "reproduce" reality, and directly situates this technique in the neighborhood of the pictorial sign. Should one look for similar reasons as regards the predilection of literary E. for the lyrical genre? More detached than the prose of everyday speech, less tempted to "describe" the world, more stylized, and more "artificial", it provides a more suitable tool for subjective expression. Operating in silence, it cuts out the verse, as a woodcut makes its impression black on white—a dialectic of emptiness and meaning, the realm of the most simple contrast and the most conspicuous sign. Once more, however, it should be stressed t h a t the Expressionist sign totally de­ tached itself from the perceived world only in some borderline cases, namely in those of the abstract painters and the "Lautdichter" of Der Sturm who endeavored, in a kind of experience in the vacuum, to capture the vital force and the creative impulse itself. This intention was already present in the idea of the "organic" art work upheld b y Kandinsky as early as 1911. Most of the Expressionist painters and writers wanted to reconcile the mark of their subjectivity with their attachment to the world. Or rather, they did not conceive of the one without the other, since they experienced the world primarily as a field of projection, a "drillground" of the self. The Expressionist space, scoured with vibrations, trepidations, spasms, or a grand lyric breath, is that of the encounter of the total self with the entire world. I t is the straightest possible expression of a human situation whose experience is fixed by the artist at the point of utmost intensity. Its structure is frequently determined by the over-all character of this experience. The painters as well as the poets are fond of the panoramic or bird's eye view in the most dynamic sense of the term. The juxtaposition of objects is not static but operates according to the magnetic field of a subjective vision, following the lines of force of a lyrical prehension or the subjective association of words, sounds, lines, and colors. Centered upon a message, the humanitarian Expressionist poem often evolves in the sense of an expansion that tends to affect the reader by its rhetorical form as well 134

as by the images it is made of. Van Hoddis' lines, as quoted above, may serve as an example. Becker's "Vorbereitung" obeys the same law, in so far as it opens with a de­ finition of the poet and ends with an injunction addressed to all mankind: " L e r n t ! Vorbereitet! Ü b t euch !" (Learn! Prepare! Practice!). Often the final image surges up like an explosion following a crescendo: "Renne renne renne gegen die alte Z e i t ! ! ! " (Run run run against the old time !!) (Werfel); "MenschMensch Mensch stehe auf stehe a u f ! ! ! " (Man! Man! Man! Rise! Rise!) (Becher); "Menschheit! Liebe! und das Donnerwort: Gerechtigkeit!" (Humanity! Love! and the thundering word: Justice!) (Leonhard). The poem ending with the latter words is entitled "Prolog zu jeder kommenden Revolution." 63 I t is based on a rising, fugue-like movement. The irruption of each new voice enlarges the ideological and spatial dimensions of the poem: "Der erste Chor / springt aus den Hausern der Geduckten vor / in den Wind . . . Eine andere Gruppe erhob zu ihrem Gang / gross den alten Gesang . . . Aber die dritten Scharen begannen vor Glück zu weinen" (The first chorus / jumps forward from the houses of those squatting / into the wind . . . Another group loudly raised the old chant for their walk . . . But the third bands began to cry with happiness). The expansion occurs by way of successive leaps, beginning with these major pronouncements. Similarly, the humanitarian art of Kathe Kollwitz wants to involve us by its passionate eloquence. Yet the desperate gesture of the mother offering her child to sacrifice, the hand of the stooping woman who, with an electric torch, explores some formless remains on a battle-field, the pathetic affirmation of the poster "Nie wieder Krieg" are still the products of a Naturalistic world view. Rather one should turn to Grosz and his "Homage to Panizza" in order to find such a spatial structure embracing a persuasive discourse. This picture unleashes the red and black multitude of a chaotic and grotesque crowd utterly confused by the revolution. I t calls to mind Ensor's " E n t r y of Christ into Brussels'', whose procession likewise tends to overstep the border of the canvas, as the figures come to meet the spectator. However, Grosz further enhanced the impression of vertigo by letting the perspectives of the façades intersect each other. The total Expressionist vision is not always brought about by means of eloquence or unilinear movement guided b y " commit ment'' and the desire to persuade. Often tlie bird's eye view gathers a number of more or less disparate facts or objects, whose interrelationship is subsequently falsified by the painter or writer in favor of a subjective order. Distances are abolished in a desire for cosmic communion —as in the case of Marc or Campendonk — or violence, as in the case of Beckmann. They stretch, by contrast, in the mineral universe of Feininger, where the human figure, thin and solitary, is but a signature at the base of cathedrals. Generally speaking, since the Expressionist retains from reality only the elements which are essential to his subjective vision, these are often put on the same level and seldom distributed in accordance with the data of a "normal", "objective" space perception. Thus in Lichtenstein's famous poem "Die Dammerung" all the diverse facts

63

"Prologue to Every Future Revolution." Menschheitsdämmerung,

pp. 221 — 222. 135

have the same importance. 64 Sometimes this is even manifest in the length of the sen­ tences recording those facts: "Ein dicker Junge spielt mit einem Teich. / Der Wind hat sich in einem Baum gefangen. / . . . / Ein blonder Dichter wird vielleicht verrückt. / Ein Pferdchen stolpert über eine Dame" (A fat boy plays with a pond. / The wind is tangled up in a tree. / . . . / A blonde poet may go mad. / A pony stumbles over a lady), etc. The technique of juxtaposing nearly interchangeable images was used by a great number of Expressionist poets, especially Trakl, Van Hoddis, and Benn. This poetic equivalence of all phenomena corresponds, in my opinion, to the pictorial conception of Nolde, Kandinsky, Marc, Campendonk, and many others, for whom there is no di­ minishing scale in accordance with the laws of perspective, just as there are no depth effects. These painters present the objects on a single level, the vertical plane of the can­ vas, where the artist's subjectivity alone determines the relationship and proportions I n this respect, the difference between the Expressionist point of view and that of the Cubists, who also integrate the objects on a non-perspectivist plane, should once again be noted. This difference resides in the fact that the Cubists, in a way, compensate for the lack of depth by a multiplicity of viewpoints which, transferred in projection, are, by their addition, supposed to produce an objective synthesis, being the perfect result, in a closed space, of a formal insight. The Expressionist utilization of the plane, on the contrary, reminds us of the Futurists and, to a lesser extent, of Matisse and Delaunay, who are oriented more toward a search for plastic balance. Kirchner, Pechtein, and Grosz eagerly lift up the background of the painting to pour out the formssand colors and make them swing toward the spectator. Nolde, Heckel, Klee, and Jaw lensky, like Rouault, love to fill the picture frame to the point of bursting with closeups overwhelming the viewer. The same close contact between subject and object is sought by Benn when, in the volume Schöpferische Konfession, he quotes two sentences from his short stories: "Gross glühte heran der Hafenkomplex" and "da geschah ihm die Olive." 65 The differ­ ence between Futurism and E. liss, above all, in the nature of our "participation". In front of a Futurist painting thie involvement will be more mechanical, because it is conditioned by the dynamism of the lines of force and the vibration of colors t h a t stimulate our retina. Even when the Futurists pretend to convey a state of mind, they communicate, above all, their receptivity and permeability as regards the simultaneous impressions which reach them from the outside. An Expressionist painting, on the other hand, might take such a receptivity as a possible point of departure, but it goes further by inducing us to identify with a more intentional course, distorting reality in propor­ tion to the subjective emotion contained in it, instead of seeing it as a "Hieroglyph of the Ball Tabarin" or any other sign possessing an objective value. Similarly, the olive or the harbor mentioned by Benn exist as "Geschehnisse", i.e., as unique and reveal­ ing experiences. If there is such a thing as a hieroglyph, the one traced by the Expres­ sionist can never be more than his own encephalogram. In connection with Trakl's poem 64 65

Ibid., p. 11. "The harbor complex loomed up in a glow" and "then the olive happened to him." Schöpfeische Konfession, p. 49. 136

"Das Gewitter," Heselhaus has rightly wondered whether its origin should be traced to the natural phenomenon of the thunderstorm, or to a state of despair—so intimate is the interpenetration of the external landscape and the poet's own mental world. 66 Resulting from an understanding or, rather, a sudden consciousness, not of the object but of its subjective "grasp" in a privileged moment, the Expressionist work of art aims at re-creating this lightning in the spectator by involving him emotionally. To be sure, the Expressionists were aware of the possible artificiality t h a t lies in a contrived reconstruction of a state of inspiration or trance. I n this respect, Brod, Van Ostaijen, and even Werfel regarded the poetic expression as a makeshift. All the more they concentrated their attention on those technical means t h a t are suscept­ ible to resuscitating, however palely, the past experience. Most of the theoretical writ­ ings of the period emphasize the visionary and passionate character of poetry—"Ihnen entfaltete das Gefühl sich masslos"; "sie hatten Gesichte", etc. 67 Yet, for all that, one can feel, sometimes between the lines, the difficulty of a confrontation with the problem of its re-creation on the canvas. Parallel to Kandinsky's favorite idea of "Komposition", the notion—if not the term—"montage" here acts as an expedient. Brod was struck by the interaction and interdependence of meaning and rhythm in the verse, and Carl Einstein was of the opinion "dass den autonomen Formen des Dichterischen autonome Gebilde entsprechen, die gleichsam von Beginn an spezifisch dichterisch sind". 68 I n a kind of poetic landscape entitled "Die neue Syntax", Becher amusingly defined the role he assigned in poetry to the various parts of speech: "Imperativ/ schnellt steil empor. Phantastische Satzelandschaft überzüngelnd." 69 In "Die Dämmerung", Lichtenstein disowned the reproduction of "eine als real denkbare Landschaft" (a landscape one might take to be real); what he wanted was, with the help of disparate elements borrowed from a dismantled space, to reconstruct a unity of a different kind, t h a t of time as it is apprehended b y the poet, "der voll verzweifelter Sehnsucht in den Abend sinnt (wahrscheinlich aus einer Dachluke)". 7 0 One kind of unity is here destroyed at the expense of another. Werfel conceived a specifically poetic space, characterized by the organic unity of the whole and its parts: "Dichterischer Raum ist geometrisch gesprochen die Beziehung aller Punkte zu alien Punkten . . . Der dichterische R a u m ist absolute Gebundenheit." 7 1 This calls to mind Kandinsky's views: Die rein malerische Komposition hat in Bezug auf die Form zwei Aufgaben vor sich: 1. Die Komposition des ganzen Bildes. 2. Die Schaffung der ein66 Clemens Heselhaus, "Deutsche Lyrik der Moderne von Nietzsche bis Yvan Goll, second ed. (Dtisseldorf, 1962), pp. 232ff. 67 "Their feelings unfolded boundlessly"; "they had visions." Kasimir Edschmid, Frühe Manifeste (Neuwied, 1960), p. 31. 68 "That, in analogy to the autonomous poetic forms, there are autonomous (pictorial) forms which seem to be inherently poetic." Carl Einstein, "Über Paul Claudel" in Die Weissen Blätter, I (1913/14), p. 289. 69 "Imperative rises up steeply, overarching a fantastic syntactical landscape." Lyrik des expressionistischen Jahrzehnts, p. 149. 70 "Who, with desperate longing, ponders into the night (probably from a loft window)." A. Lichtenstein, "Zu meinem Gedicht 'Die Dämmerung' " in Die Aktion, III/40 (1913), col. 942. 71 "Geometrically speaking, poetic space is the relationship of all points with each other . . . The poetic space is absolute constraint." "Notiz zu einer Poetik" in Die Aktion, VI (1917), col. 4—8.

137

zelnen Formen, die in versehiedenen Kombinationen zueinander stehen, sich der Komposition des Ganzen unterordnen. So werden mehrere Gegenstande (reale und eventuell abstrakte) im Bild einer grossen Form untergeordnet und so verandert, dass sie in diese Form passen, diese Form bilden. 72 Let us also remember Döblin's observations: " I m Roman heisst es schichten, haufen, walzen, schieben." 73 These few examples demonstrate that Der Sturm was not the only place where the autonomy of the literary structures was extolled besides those of the fine arts. The idea of a "Laboratorium für Worte", later formulated by Benn, and the constructivist — indeed, the functional—tendencies of the Bauhaus existed already in nuce in the techni­ cal preoccupations of the Expressionists, who aimed at producing a maximum effect on the reader and the spectator. As early as 1911, it had become clear to Kandinsky "dass die Formenharmonie nur auf dem Prinzip der zweckmassigen Berührung der menschlichen Seele ruhen muss" (that the harmony of forms depends solely on the deliberate manipulation of the human soul). Similarly, Carl Einstein had written in 1912 in an article devoted to the novel: "Kunst ist eine Technik, tatsachliche Bestande und Affekte zu erzeugen." 74 There is no fundamental contradiction between a passionate world view and the attempt to re-create, in cold blood, its poetic or artistic equivalent, with the aim of releasing that same passion within us. The ideal toward which the Expressionist work aspired has perhaps been most cogently voiced by Stadler in his review of Benn's Morgue cycle: "Gefuhl ist hier ganz Gegenstand geworden, Realitat, Tatsachenwucht." 7 5 Together with Futurism, E. was the first contemporary artistic movement with an explicit desire to engage its public. To these two trends —if one takes into consideration the theatrical, musical, and architectural interferences—can be traced back those present techniques which seek to include and absorb the spectator or reader (who has often become a listener) into a space that is at once real and fantastic. The transition from E. to environmental techniques is illustrated by the course followed by David Siqueiros, whose painting has taken on an increasingly monumental character, literally freeing itself from the fetters of the canvas. At the Museum of Chapultepec, Siqueiros has gone so far as to abolish the angles of a gallery whose back and side walls he enlivened with the irresistible movement of a marching crowd. In this fresco, "The Mexican Revolution against Porfirio Diaz' Dictatorship", the entire Mexi­ can people advances toward the spectator, surrounding him and enclosing him in its ranks. I t might be added that the Mexicans —Siqueiros, Diego Rivera, and Clemente 72 "With regard to form, the purely pictorial composition is faced with two tasks: 1. the com­ position of the entire picture, and 2. the creation of the individual shapes which, being juxtaposed in different ways, are subordinated to the composition of the whole. Thus several objects (real and perhaps even abstract ones) are subordinated to one large form and so transformed that they fit into that form and constitute it." Über das Geistige in der Kunst, p. 72. 73 "In the novel we must stratify, cumulate, roll and push." "Bemerkungen zum Roman" in Die74 Neue Rundschau, 1917, I, p. 410. "Art is a technique designed to produce actual values and emotions." Carl Einstein, "Über den Roman" in Die Aktion, I I (1912), col. 1269. 75 "Here feeling has been altogether transformed into object, reality and the overwhelming power of facts." Cited by Clemens Heselhaus in Deutsche Lyrik der Moderne, p. 282.

138

Orozco—are the only painters who have succeeded in giving a pictorially convincing form to the humanitarian and revolutionary program of E. At present, Siqueiros is creating an entire auditorium, the "Polyforum", whose walls and floor are slanted to enhance even more the impression of vertigo that is communicated by its "escultopinturas", a sort of gigantic bas-relief in violent colors. The spatial preoccupations of an art aiming at a "presence" —a degree of reality as intense as possible - a r e linked with those of the contemporary theater, which is just beginning to apply the scenic innovations of Kandinsky, Kokoschka, Schreyer, Piscator, the Bauhaus, and the Russian "Proletkult". The demolition of the invisible wall between the stage and the audience corresponds—with some 'delay—to the abandonment of the perspective prism in painting. Formerly, in either case, an art based on illusion prudently shut itself up inside the "peep-hole" and the gild frame customarily prescribed for it. With the advent of E. and Futurism, the frames were cracked, the curtains dropped down, the spaces were confounded, and ornamental art has made room for an art that is far more disquieting and harder to restrain—an art of "unveiling" and, indeed, of conditioning. I t should be observed, however, that the Expressionist period has not produced the dramatic authors claimed by its most pre­ sumptuous theories. Playwrights such as Ionesco, Artur Adamov, and Tennessee Williams have appeared belatedly, and that in spite of the very nature of E., whose theatrical proclivity was emphasized as early as 1917 by Walter von Hollander: "Keiner Kunst ist der Expressionismus gemasser als der Schauspielkunst. Körperlichkeit als Urgrund und Entblössung als Folge wären beiden gemeinsam." 76 Similarly, the ultimate consequences of Kandinsky's "innere Notwendigkeit" (inner necessity) have been drawn by Action Painting or by "Cobra" only after a long eclipse during which geometrical abstraction, functionalism, Neue SachlichJceit, and Dada, though partly issued from E., had consigned the direct expression of creative subjectivity to the background. I t is true, however, t h a t it has since come back full pace, as is manifest in the present cult of expressive signs and gestures, considered by themselves, whether in the form of cries, leaps, spots, or gashes. (Translated from the French by Josee Duytschaever.)

76

" E . is more congenial to acting than to any other art. Both have in common corporeality as the cause and exposure as the consequence." " E . des Schauspielers" as cited by Pörtner in E. als Literatur, p. 204. 139

H E N R Y A. L E A

E X P R E S S I O N I S T L I T E R A T U R E AND MUSIC

I n the introduction to his study of Mozart's Don Giovanni, which forms part of his book Either-Or, Kierkegaard makes some pertinent remarks about the relationship between music and language. He notes t h a t both media operate in time rather than space, and t h a t both appeal primarily to the ear. As to content, he finds that the pres­ ence of reflection in language makes it a less direct but more specific medium than music, which communicates its content without requiring reflection on the part of the listener. Being conceptual, language uses more concrete, but also more limited, symbols than music, which is less denotative and more abstract because notes are not reducible to precise meanings. And while a literary work can be read, and a play experienced, in printed form, music exists only in performance. The score, that is to say, is merely a means of making it available to the performer and student, but it is decidedly not the work itself. 1 The elusive quality of music led Kierkegaard to observe t h a t longer and deeper experience is needed to make informed musical judgments than is the case with literature. I t may be added t h a t these factors help explain the slower acceptance of modern music as compared with the relatively quick reception of modern literature and art. As a non-verbal, non-visual, and non-representational art, music is less accessible than literature and the plastic arts because it presupposes more specialized knowledge or training and requires extensive and active listening. This applies particularly to modern music with its more experimental idiom. There are undoubtedly more people who can read Joyce than people who can listen to Schönberg with genuine understand­ ing. And, until fairly recently, competent performers of modern music were harder to find than actors of avant-garde drama or interpreters of experimental novels. Even today, modern music has a limited audience, partly because much of it is not written for the orchestra or a solo instrument. I n fact, the active musical repertoire—vocal and instrumental—is largely built around the Romantic works because their melodic fertility, harmonic richness and instrumental color strongly appeal to both performer and listener, and because their expansive content and large-scale design make them suitable for public performance. They also happen to include a large number of master­ pieces. Indeed, the musical flowering of the Romantic age, extending from Carl Maria 1

"Wir Musiker sind ja übler dran als die Dichter. Lesen kann jeder. Aber eine gedruckte Partitur ist ein Buch mit sieben Siegeln." (We musicians are worse off than the writers. Everybody can read. But a printed score is a book with seven seals.) Gustav Mahler, as quoted in Kurt Blaukopf, Gustav Mahler oder Der Zeitgenosse der Zukunft (Vienna- Munich—Zürich, 1969), p. 232. 141

von Weber to Gustav Mahler, is hardly matched, in quality or quantity, by the Roman­ tic literatures of Europe. And in Germany, where Romanticism began and where, for cultural and political reasons, it had a more sustained impact, its influence extended into the early years of the twentieth century, as a study of musical E. clearly demon­ strates. An examination of Expressionist works from the present perspective suggests t h a t E. is a stage through which the arts had to pass in their development from Roman­ ticism to the age of abstraction. Dating the beginning of modern art around 1910, as is now customary, makes E., with its rejection of realism and its strong dissociating tendencies, the innovating force that marked the direction of the arts in the twen­ tieth century. In his preface to the anthology Lyrik des expressionisfischen Jahrzehnts, Benn cites examples of pre-Expressionist style in Goethe, Friedrich Hölderlin, and Heinrich von Kleist. Analogous passages can be found in Ludwig van Beethoven and Franz Schu­ bert. 2 These works have an eruptive force that breaks through classical canons of beauty and brings into question the affirmations already missing in Kleist and Hölderlin. Beethoven and Kleist are particularly prophetic in this respect. 3 Especially notable is the abrupt, untamed, unvarnished, and uncompromising quality of their art, as shown in Beethoven's craggy writing for voices and instruments, in Kleist's daring choice of theme and language, and in the exploitation of extreme registers as well as the functional use of ugliness by both artists. Prophetic, too, is their departure from realism, their tapping of new levels of consciousness (in the introspectiveness of Beethoven's late works and Kleist's exploration of the subconscious), the prevalence of large-scale con­ flict and their tendency to use open forms which offer brief visions of a better world. The social dislocation and rebelliousness of these two artists are also relevant. The emotional intensity and refractory nature of their work, occurring at a cataclysmic period of European history, suggest that Expressionist features may appear at a transitional time when traditional forms lose their meaning and give way to new ones. As a recognizable artistic style, E. made its appearance around 1890, in Van Gogh's last paintings, in the art of the young Munch, in the plays of Strindberg and Wedekind, and in Mahler's symphonies. These works share a visionary quality, a tendency to monumentalization and distortion, emotional directness, a wide expressive range and an aesthetic that stresses content at the expense of form. While their orientation is anti-classical and anti-Impressionist, their most radical aspect is their anti-realism. Strindberg's plays The Father (1887) and Miss Julie (1888), though labeled "natu­ ralistic" by their author, transcend Naturalism by concentrating on the battle of the sexes at the expense of a detailed description of the milieu, and by a tendency to make 2 For example, in the last movement of the Hammerklavier Sonata and in the Grosse Fuge by Beethoven, and in Schubert's String Quartet No. 15 in G major (opening section of first move­ ment and measures 43—80 in the second movement), and in the middle section of the second move­ ment of his posthumous A major piano sonata. 3 In Hesse's Steppenwolf, the dreamer Harry Haller takes Goethe to task for having rejected Beethoven and Kleist, "die Bekenner der Tiefe, die Stimmen der verzweifelten Wahrheit. . . (those who acknowledge the depth, the voices of desperate truth) (See p . 98 of the Suhrkamp edition [Frankfurt, 1961].)

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types of the characters. By placing the action of Miss Julie in the Midsummer Night, Strindberg suggests a primordial event. In 1889, when Naturalism was celebrating its first stage success in Germany, Wedekind had one of his figures say: "When realism has outlived itself, its representatives will earn their living as detectives. ,,4 More signif­ icant still is the manifestation of non-realism in the fabric of Wedekind's plays. Already in Frühlings Erwachen (written in 1890-1891), we encounter the following exchange: Martha: "How the water seeps into the shoes !" Wendla: "How the wind blows on the cheeks !" Thea: "How the heart pounds !"5 This is not a dialogue but a series of exclamations with which each character greets the approaching spring in her own way, without communicating directly with the others. Each one "expresses" herself, independently of the others, and makes a pro­ nouncement. The exaggeratedly poetic style is far removed from realism, and the use of the impersonal pronoun "einem" emphasizes the stylized quality of these lines, which are literally projected into the cosmos. In later, more fully developed examples of Ex­ pressionist drama, the dialogue serves to express the point of view of the speaker or engages in rhetorical summations, rather than providing an exposition, furthering the plot, or analyzing character. The characters rather tend to become spokesmen for a way of life and deliver solemn statements that fan out into universality. 6 An example is the opening of Kaiser's play Die Bürger von Calais (1914), where several representa­ tive characters enunciate, rather than argue, their positions. In early E., which is fruitful for this study because it enables us to trace the emerging Expressionist mentality in both media, the interlacing of the universal with the particular produces a multi-layered texture in which the old and the new confront each other with startling effect. In Wedekind's Erdgeist (1893), Lulu, Woman Incarnate, is having her portrait painted by Schwarz, who tries to make love to her a person trying to interact with a personification: Lulu Schwarz Lulu

Schwarz

(evading him): . . . " I n a long dress I would have succumbed to you.—But dressed as Pierrot !" (throwing himself on the sofa): ' T v e got you !" (hits him over the head with the tiger skin): "Good night !" (jumps over the podium, climbs up the stepladder.) " I [can see beyond all the cities of the earth . . . " (emerging from the blanket): "That brat !"

4 "Wenn sich der Realismus überlebt hat, werden seine Vertreter ihr Brot als Geheimpolizisten finden." (Frank Wedekind, Gesammelte Werke [Munich, 1924], I I , 76.) 5' Martha: "Wie einem das Wasser ins Schuhwerk dringt !" Wendla: "Wie einem der Wind um die Wangen saust !" "Wie einem das Herz hämmert!" Thea: Ibid., II, p. 106. 6 See Walter H. Sokel, "Dialogführang und Dialog im expressionistischen Drama," in A spekte des Expressionismus, ed. Wolfgang Paulsen (Heidelberg, 1968), particularly pp. 67—68.

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Lulu: "I reach into the heavens and put stars in my hair." Schwarz (climbing after her): "I'll shake till you fall down/' 7 Especially noteworthy in this passage are the sudden shifts in tone, the suspension of rational discourse, the clash between slapstick and the demonic, and the echoes of classical prosody, all of which give a distinctly parodistic flavor to the scene. In general, Wedekind likes to combine his message with parody; it sometimes seems as if he had been unable to shake the German classics out of his system. A remarkably similar situation prevails in Mahler's music. Mahler's indebtedness to the musical tradition is so evident that his departures from it, in the form of satirical comment, also amount to self-parody. In the last movement of the Third Symphony (1896), an exalted conclusion to a gigantic work and, as such, devoid of satire, a soaring, agitated melody in the first violins and flutes is broken up by a syncopated beat in the violas, which gives the passage a jazzed-up quality that is completely out of character.8 Similarly, Mahler likes to assign ironic counter-melodies to the high wood­ winds, as in the four-bar oboe passage in the third movement of his First Symphony (1888).9 Like Wedekind, he typically combines 'elevated' and 'popular' material in the same passage, thereby giving a historical and critical dimension to his music. In fact, these passages are good examples of musical 'Verfremdung'. Mahler's scherzos illus­ trate the extremity of an older form as it strains for cosmic expression. Most of them begin on a small scale with few instruments, but grow in size, structure, and meaning to apocalyptic proportions. The conflict between vision and satire in these works is characteristic of both Wedekind and Mahler, despite the many differences prevailing otherwise between them. In Expressionist art, the emotional and stylistic range becomes extremely wide. The effect of a given work is to break up its formal, logical continuity by abrupt shifts in the level of utterance, and to abandon conventional dramatic or symphonic sub­ stance and structure. By introducing several stylistic levels into the same work, the Expressionist makes both a positive and a negative comment: he pays his respect to a great tradition but, in the same breath, makes it clear that he does no longer embrace it.10 7

(ausweichend):... " I n langen Kleidern ware ich Ihnen langst in die Hände gefallen. —Aber in dem Pierrot!" Schwarz (sich der Lange nach über die Ottomane werfend): "Habe ich dich !" (schlägt ihm das Tigerfell über den Kopf): "Gute Nacht !" (Springt über das Podium, Lulu klettert auf dieTrittleiter.) "Ieh sehe über alle Stad te der Erde weg . . . " Schwarz (sich aus der Decke wickelnd): "Dieser Balg !" Lulu: "Ich greife in den Himmel und stecke mir die Sterne ins Haar." Schwarz (ihr nachkletternd): "Ich schüttle, bis Sie herunterfallen." Gesammelte Werke, I I I , p . 27. 8 The passage begins at no. 14 on p. 215 of the score published by Boosey and Hawkes, Ltd. (London and New York), in the series "Hawkes Pocket Scores". 9 The passage begins at no. 3 on p. 78 of the score published in the same series. 10 Gf. Theodor W. Adorno's statement in his essay "Musik und neue Musik": "Die neue Musiksprache, die sich als positive Negation der überlieferten formiert, ist aber nicht auf die Trivialitat zu bringen, man habe etwas Neues und anderes gewollt . . . Vielmehr meint neue Musik zugleich Kritik der traditionellen" (The new musical language, which constitutes itself as a posi­ tive negation of tradition, must not be trivialized by stressing its desire for innovations . . . New music rather implies a critique of traditional music). (Quasi una fantasia [Frankfurt, 1963], pp. 353—354.)

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Lulu

Expressionist works of literature and music give evidence of a hard and unresolved struggle to free themselves from an honored but burdensome tradition. Nowhere is this tendency more conspicuous than in the transitional compositions of the so-called Vienna School, whose most important members are Schönberg, Alban Berg, and Anton Webern. 11 In this context, the term 'transitional' refers to those works which come between the early, post-Romantic works of these composers and their adoption of the twelve-tone method of composition. In the case of Schönberg, this covers the works written between 1907 and 1922, beginning with the Second String Quartet, op. 10, and extending through the Four Orchestral Songs (op. 22).12 In the case of Berg, the least orthodox practitioner of the twelve-tone method, all works from the Four Songs, op. 2, (1909-1910,) to his last composition, the Violin Con­ certo (1935), can be included, and in Webern's case, the pertinent phase opens with the Five Songs op. 3, (1907-1908) and ends with the Five Canons (op. 16; 19231924). These works are transitional in the sense t h a t their composers are clearly abandon­ ing Romanticism and groping for a new language. A comparison of Schönberg's sym­ phonic poem Pelléas und Mélisande (op. 5), completed in 1903, with his Five Pieces for Orchestra (op. 16), completed in 1909, shows his development toward a sparser, more sharply profiled and harmonically more advanced idiom. The rich chromaticism of the tone poem gives way to a more abstract, non-melodic style in the later work, where the orchestral writing is more subtle and differentiated and tends to aim at chamber music effects. Rhythmically, Pelléas und Mélisande is surging and propulsive, in keeping with the Romantic subject, whereas the later work is generally more static and, in a few passages, more frenetic, with the rhythm becoming increasingly freer. The shift from the programmatic title of the tone poem to the nondescript title of Opus 16 is also significant. Originally Schönberg had given brief descriptive titles to the five pieces, but he omitted them from the published score of 1912.13 Like Mahler, he was moving toward a more absolute music. An extreme example of this development can be heard by comparing Webera's orchestral idyll Im Sommerwind (1904) with his Six Pieces for Orchestra, op. 6, (1909). The earlier work is so mellifluously Romantic that it is hard to believe that the same composer could have written the elliptic and pungent Six Pieces. Especially notable in this shift from Romanticism to E. is the reduction in the instrumentation 11 Other composers in this group, such as Josef Matthias Hauer, Ernst Krenek, Franz Schrekeer and Egon Wellesz, have not been included in this study because recordings of their music wer, not readily available to this writer. 12 I n a letter to Nicolas Slonimsky, dated June 3, 1937, Schönberg reports that his first twelvetone compositions were some movements of the Suite for Piano (op. 25), which he composed in the fall of 1921. According to the documentary information in the Schönberg catalogue, the movements in question are probably the Prelude and the Intermezzo. Schönberg's letter to Slonimsky is quoted on pp. 173—174 of Willi Reich's book Arnold Schönberg oder der konservative Revolutionär (Vienna, 1968); Schönberg's works are catalogued by Josef Rufer in Das Werk Arnold Schönbergs (Kassei, 1959), which documents the composition of the Suite op. 25 on pp. 25—27. 13 In a diary entry for January 27, 1912, quoted on pp. 13—14 of Rufer's catalogue, the com­ poser explains that he added the titles to the 1922 edition at the request of his publisher. A very detailed and knowledgeable analysis of this work by Robert Craft may be found in the booklet t h a t accompanies Volume I I I of The Music of Arnold Schönberg, as recorded by Columbia (Album M2L 309), and which includes a brief and vivid recorded interview with Schönberg,

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(the use of the instruments, it not always their number) and in the length; the later works being invariably shorter and more thinly orchestrated, since an effort is made to concentrate the material to what is essential. Between his Opus 1 (1908) and his Opus 31 (1941-43), his last completed work, 14 Webern, who went further in this direction than the others, did not compose a single piece lasting longer than fifteen minutes. But what strikes the listener most forcefully in the Expressionist works is that they dismantle the Romantic apparatus — the large forms and performing groups, the picturesque content, the self-dramatization and heroics, the sensuous writing, the "thrust and counterthrust methods" of construction 15 —while retaining certain traces of it in the rhythm, the leaping intervals and the use of tone color. Webern's tendency to end many of his pre-1914 pieces very softly emphasizes his rejection of the closing fanfares in many Romantic symphonies. The lack of recapitulations, and the rejection of the entire concept of repeatability and symmetry, may also be regarded as typical innovations in Expressionist music. 16 These compositions sound fragmented, disjointed, and sus­ pended. Lacking the organizing force and forward thrust of the classical and Romantic symphony, they seem to have no inner core. I t is this lack of impulsion, combined with the absence of traditional harmony, that makes them difficult to listen to even for the musically sophisticated listener. The rapid historical development from tonal to atonal music is an artistic revo­ lution of radical proportions t h a t has no equivalent in literature. The closest literary parallel t h a t comes to mind is Joyce's Finnegans Wake.17 But unlike music, words, however uniquely written or arranged, can be deciphered, as scholars have actually succeeded in doing in the case of Joyce. And, curiously enough, the sense of logic seems to be less deeply ingrained than the sense of harmony. Finally, music is a more 'culi­ nary' art, in Brecht's sense, than literature; it engages the emotions more, and the intel­ lect less, than literature, at least as far as the listener is concerned. For even the most active listening constitutes a more passive act than reading and requires less focused and sustained attention. If music is a more readily 'consumed' art than literature, the displacement of the ultra-'culinary' Romantic style by the non-'culinary' atonal one may help to explain the limited audience appeal of modern music.

14 Webern's Second Cantata (op. 31) is described as "the longest opus in time of performance, lasting about ten and one-half minutes . . . the time required for the performance in Anton Webern : The Complete Music (Columbia Album K4L-232), directed by Robert Craft", though Webern himself estimated that the work would take a half hour in performance. See Anton von Webern : Perspectives, compiled by Hans Moldenhauer, edited by Demar Irvine (Seattle, 1966), p. 70. 15 Constant Lambert's characterization of German Romantic music, in his book Music Ho! (London, 1937), p. 17. 16 Cf. the relevant statements in the article on E. in Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart. Allgemeine Enzyklopàdie der Musik, ed. Friedrich Blume, I I I (1954), 1658ff. 17 A perceptive comparison between Joyce and Schönberg is made by the British composer, conductor and critic Constant Lambert in his book Music Ho! Lambert argues that both artists were basically romantics who, finding Romanticism no longer adequate, created a highly sophis­ ticated manner of expressing themselves in order to do justice to the complexities of the modern temper and of their own imagination. According to Lambert, the conflict between their Romantic outlook and their "crossword puzzle technique" gives their work its characteristic flavor and marks them as self-conscious modern artists. (See pp. 206—211.) From today's perspective, it might be added that both men were exiles whose emigration merely confirmed their spiritual alienation.

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K u r t Weill's music for Brecht's plays, which is neither 'culinary' nor atonal, is a special case in point because it was written to underline and comment on Brecht's words. I t is functional music composed for specific scenes. But although it completely lacks the pathos which usually marks the Expressionist style, 18 it is Expressionist in some important respects; it is written for a small number of instruments of charac­ teristic and widely differing timbres, sounds mordant, uses 'Sprechstimme', and is a defining rather than an atmospheric idiom. If its breakup of Romanticism is more deliberate than in the music of the Vienna School, it is because it was set to antiRomantic words and because it was written considerably later. The development from a post-Romantic idiom to a less melodious, less decorative and more compact style can be observed in literature by comparing a poem by Hofmannsthal with one by Stramm—to cite an obvious example—or a Neo-Romantic play, such as Ernst Hardt's Tantris der Narr, with an Expressionist play, such as Kai­ ser's Von morgens bis mitfernachts. The staccato style in the latter play, the lack of transitions, the bare stage, the anonymity of the characters and the 'unreal', disembodied atmosphere constitute a parallel to the stripped-down musical aphorisms of the Vienna School. Ideologically, there was a shift from the super-individualism of the NeoRomantic writers to the social ethic of the Expressionists, just as the post-Wagnerian paganism of Schönberg's Gurrelieder gave way to the religious affirmation of his Jahobsleiter. The swift and sharp transition from a Neo-Romantic to an Expressionist idiom in one artist is not encountered, to this degree, in literature, perhaps because of the more limited expressive scope of that medium. Kaiser may be cited as an analogous literary figure, whose early plays (Die jüdische Witwe and König Hahnrei, for example) deal with Neo-Romantic themes while their ironic tone introduces a critical note that is absent from Neo-Romantic writing. In numerous works of the early twentieth century, we find a conjunction of NeoRomanticism and E., sometimes combined with Jugendstil. I t is found in Heym, whose poems fuse a highly developed sense of color, expressed in many descriptive adjectives, with a brevity of line, compressed syntax and apocalyptic visions. 19 Among contempo­ rary plays, Werfel's Der Besuch ans dem Elysium, Sorge's Der Bettier and Hasenclever's Der Sohn have an Expressionist ambience in which their characters contend with sex problems and savior complexes. A Freudian atmosphere hovers over these strangely «ambivalent works. Their half-psychological, half-visionary character is found also in the Vienna School music of the pre-1914 period, particularly in the vocal works, which completely lack the messianic element and concentrate on desolation and highly stylized

18 In his study of E., Egbert Krispyn identifies pathos as being "defined by . . . antithesis, dynamism, and rhetoric" and concludes that it is "the hallmark of expressionist style". See Style and Society in German Literary Expressionism (Gainesville, Florida, 1964), p. 48 and p . 53. 19 The link with Neo-Romanticism is most noticeable in those poems of Heym that deal with nature and the seasons. Many of them express an isolation and a transitoriness that recall the poetry of George and Hofmannsthal, whose rhythm and tone are occasionally echoed. An early analysis of Heym's transitional position is found in Ferdinand Josef Schneider, Der expressive Mensch und die deutsche Lyrih der Gegenwart (Stuttgart, 1927), pp. 32—37; Schneider notes Heym's preoccupation with the moon and with death—themes that give his poetry a fin-de-siècle quality also found in Expressionist music,

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erotic situations. The atmosphere is Gothic, but the music has a searing intensity far transcending the meaning of the words. Schönberg's Erwartung (op. 17; 1909), subtitled 'monodrama', is the monologue of a woman who searches for her lover, finds him murdered in the forest and sings a lament to him. Applying a revolutionary musical language to a fig-de-siècle text, the work conveys a sense of doom more characteristic of musical than of literary E. Expressionistic in particular is the highly individual deployment of the many instruments that are given much solo work and occur in extreme sonorities (flutter-tonguing in brass and woodwinds, muted trumpets, glissando trombones, strings playing close to the bridge or tapping their bows), the use of a large and specialized group of percussion instruments (celesta, xylophone, glockenspiel, gong, rod, triangle, cymbals, large and small drums), broad leaps in the vocal and instrumental parts, a wide dynamic range, strong accentuation, sharp dissonance and the jagged, improvisatory overall effect of the work. The rhythm here is fluid and agogic, in so far as the changes affect only the speed and the length of bar, but not the beat itself. This music is not polyrhythmic and does not possess the kinetic quality found in Bartók and Stravinsky. In fact, its lack of rhythmic variety gives it a curiously static effect, despite the many frenetic passages. In this respect, too, it reflects the German musical tradition (Wagner in particular), which does not excel in rhythmic inventiveness. Parallels between Die Erwartung and literary E. are constituted by the lack of elaborate staging, the declamatory vocal part, the designation of the single character as 'Woman', and the straining of expressive resources. The libretto by Marie Pappenheim is based on an idea by Schönberg, who wrote his own text for his next stage work, Die glückliche Hand (op. 18; 1910-1913). This 'drama with music' elaborates on the theme of loneliness—this time in the modern artist who is barred from love and from the world of reality. As in Erwartung, the drama takes place in the protagonist's soul, and the main characters are identified only as 'Man', 'Woman', and 'Gentleman'. The work is noted for its ghostly chorus which voices the protagonist's tormenting selfdoubts, partly in the 'Sprechstimme' first used by Schönberg in the Gurrelieder.20 In his detailed interpretation of the text, Theodor W. Adorno discusses two aspects that specifically link this work with E.: the dream form and content— as shown in the con­ trast between the anxiety-ridden, dream-crossed protagonist and the realistically costumed workers— and the influence of Strindberg, as expressed in the erotic torment that is a major theme of these librettos.21 Strindberg is undoubtedly an important point of contact between musical and literary E., but whereas the mental climate of Schönberg's early atonal pieces reflects his earlier, less metaphysical work, the writers were more deeply influenced by his later, more religiously oriented plays.22 The nightmarish 20 The Expressionist qualities of Die glückliche Hand, with emphasis on its staging, are dis­ cussed by Dika Newlin in Bruckner, Mahler, Schönberg (New York, 1947), pp. 254—256; its plot is described by Willi Reich in Arnold Schönberg oder der konservative Revolutionäir (Vienna, 1968), pp. 111—115. According to Reich, a plan to film the work with Schönberg's assistance did not materialize. 21 See Adorno's book Die Philosophie der neuen Musik (Frankfurt, 1958), pp. 46—49. 22 While Strindberg's influence on the literary Expressionists is well known, his significance for the musical Expressionists is less well documented. A brief and preliminary account would include the following observations:

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quality of Strindberg's work and the larger-than-life dimension of his characters have left their mark on both groups, however. Two other vocal works by Schönberg, written at about the same time, deserve to be mentioned in this connection. Herzgevjächse (op. 20; 1911), set to a text by Maeter­ linck, is famous for its high soprano part culminating in a stratospheric F t h a t has to be sung very softly (pppp) and held for four beats. I n contrast with Erwartung and Die glückliche Hand, this work is scored only for celesta, harmonium, and harp. I t was first published in Der Blaue Reiter.23 The song cycle Pierrot Lunaire (op. 21; 1912), on the other hand, is composed for 'Sprechstimme' and eight instruments, but the full instrumental complement is used only in the last song. I n a prefatory note, the compo­ ser emphasizes t h a t the recitation must not be realistic and yet must not approach the level of singing. The cycle consists of twenty-one songs by the Belgian poet Albert Giraud in a translation by Otto Erich Hartleben. The tone of the work hovers uneasily between t h e grotesque and the satiric. Schönberg later wrote t h a t he had conceived it in a "light ironic-satiric tone", 2 4 but it sounds musically and textually uncomfortably like a half-satanic, half-parodistic updating of one of the Romantic German song cycles. The moonstruck atmosphere recalls the poetry of Joseph von Eichendorff, while the subject matter echoes Robert Schumann's piano suite Carnaval. More so than Schön­ berg's earlier works, Pierrot Lunaire raises questions about the choice of texts and the conjunction of demonic and popular elements in his music. Since the composers of the Vienna School were primarily vocal composers—here again revealing their Romantic origin—their choice of texts calls for some comment. An examination of their œuvre (completed and incomplete, published and unpublished) permits the following observations: First, of the classical German poets only Goethe and Matthias Claudius are represented—Claudius once and Goethe five times, once as an adapter of Ossian. Second, numerous traditional texts, both sacred and secular, were set by Schönberg and Webern. These include Biblical texts and several poems from Des Knaben Wunderhorn. Third, the remaining German texts all date from the nine1. Schönberg considered Strindberg's Jacob Wrestling (a,n autobiographical prose work writ ten in 1897-1898 and included in the Inferno. Legenden volume of the complete German edition of his works) as a possible text for an oratorio dealing with modern man's search for God. He sub­ sequently wrote his own text for Die Jakobsleiter, which was left unfinished, however. See Schönberg's letter to Dehmel, dated December 13, 1912, in Arnold Schönberg: Briefe, selected and edited by Erwin Stein (Mainz, 1958), pp. 30—32. 2. Schönberg's reference to Strindberg's play Moses (written in 1905; this is the first part of a posthumously published "world-historical trilogy" which also includes Socrates and Christ) indicates t h a t he examined the play in connection with his own opera Moses und Aron. See his letter to Alban Berg, dated August 5, 1930, ibid., pp. 153—154. 3. Schönberg mentions Strindberg, together with Maeterlinck and Weininger, as serious thinkers and seekers who reject the status quo and remind us that there are unsolved prob­ lems that demand our attention. See his Harmonielehre, third ed. (Vienna, 1922), p. vi. 4. A cursory check of Berg's early letters reveals deep admiration and affinity for Strindberg's work and mentality. In the letter of August 15, 1907, Berg includes Strindberg in a list of his favo­ rite writers. See Alban Berg : Briefe an seine Frau, ed. Helene Berg (Munich, 1965), pp. 16, 29—30, 72, 88-90. 5. Webern set one Strindberg text, the poem from The Ghost Sonata (op. 12, No. 3). 23 24

Der Blaue Reiter, pp. 230—237. This is a facsimile of Schönberg's manuscript. See the excerpt from Schönberg's letter to Fritz Stiedry, dated August 31, 1940, as quoted in Rufer's book, Das Werk Arnold Schönbergs, p. 20. 149

teenth and early twentieth centuries, with the majority stemming from the fin-desiècle. The most important German authors represented—listed in a more or less chronological order—are Georg Büchner, Conrad Ferdinand Meyer, Peter Altenberg, Richard Dehmel, Wedekind, George, Alfred Mombert, Rilke, and Trakl, Fourth, foreign texts in German translations play an important part: Petrarca, Eyron, Baudelaire, Jacobsen, Strindberg, Tagore, Maeterlinck, and Dowson. Several major compositions (the Gurrelieder and Pierrot Lunaire by Schönberg, Der Wein by Berg) were inspired by translations, Fifth, in several important instances, Schönberg and Webern wrote their own texts. Schönberg himself wrote numerous texts, notably for the oratorio Die Jakohsleiter and for his opera Moses und Aron, as well as choral settings, whereas Webern found a writer congenial to him, the Austrian poetess Hildegard Jone, and used numerous texts written by her. And sixth, in a few cases, purely instrumental compositions ( Verklärte Nacht and Pelléas und Melisande by Schönberg, lm Sommerwind by Webern) were in­ spired by literary works. Judging by the above facts, it is fair to conclude that these composers possessed considerable literary sophistication, that their literary knowledge and interest was not limited to German poetry, and that the poems (but not the plays) set by them during their Expressionist phases show a decidedly Neo-Romantic preference. Many of these poems are not among the best examples of their age and kind, and often not even among the best poems of their authors; and, with the possible exception of Wedekind and Trakl, none of the writers most important for this music can be considered as an Expressionist. 25 The fact t h a t very few Expressionist texts were set by these composers is, first of all, a matter of chronology, since musical E. slightly antedated its literary equiv­ alent. B u t more significant is the time lag that usually separates the creation of a text from its musical setting. I t seems that poems have to be around for a while, and t h a t their essential qualities have to be absorbed before a composer can respond to them creatively. As to the artistic stature of poetic texts, there are enough precedents (Die schone Müllerin and Die Winterreise by Schubert, the Wesendonck Songs by Wagner, the Kinderfotenlieder by Mahler) to show that major compositions are frequently in­ spired by minor poems, perhaps because powerful texts may collide with, rather than complement, strong musical ideas. In his essay "Das Verhältnis zum Text", 2 6 Schön­ berg explains t h a t he set poems to music on the basis of their sound and not their meaning; but this does not settle the matter because he wrote some of his own texts and because many of the texts he chose have more than sound in common. One can only conclude t h a t these composers found the Neo-Romanticism of their chosen texts temperamentally congenial. 25 The discovery of a list of seventy early songs by Berg, all but one unpublished, as reproduced in H. F. Redlich's Alban Berg (Vienna, 1957), pp. 330—332, after this section was written, re­ quires some corrections but does not essentially change these conclusions. Texts by major German poets used by Berg include one by Walther von der Vogelweide, three by Goethe, one each by Eichendorff, Heine, and Mörike, and two each by Hofmannsthal and Rilke. Foreign texts in­ clude one each by Burns, Ibsen, and Björnson. The remaining authors, as far as they can be iden­ tified, are mostly minor German poets of the nineteenth century. 26 Der Blaue Beiter, pp. 60—75. The relevant passage is on pp. 65—66.

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In their music, however, the Expressionists convey the collapse of traditional values at a far deeper level. Not only does it heighten the effect of words: it breaks them open and exposes their inherent despair. The breakdown of harmony and the extreme exacerbation of musical expressiveness actually amount to a 'Verfremdung' of the text, in t h a t the musical treatment destroys the illusion and calls for critical judgment. Such passages occur at Measures 28 to 31 of Schönberg's song Seraphita, op. 22, No. 1, (1913), with words by Dowson as translated by George, and in the first of Berg's Altenberg Songs, op. 4, No. 1, (1912) at Measures 29 to 30. The piercing clari­ net part at the words "Sonst löscht die laute Angst der Wasser vor der Zeit das helle Leuchten" in the Schönberg song and the instrumentation of the line "Und über beiden liegt noch ein trüber Hauch, eh das Gewölk sich verzog" (for pizzicato strings, brass, and xylophone) in Berg's song intensify the text far beyond its literary capacity. More obvious examples of 'Verfremdung', however, occur within the music itself, both as to content and form. In the second movement of his "Second String Quartet'' op. 10, (1907–1908), for example, Schönberg introduces the folksong "O du lieber Augustin, alles ist hin". Suddenly appearing in the midst of much tortured Romanticism and embroidered with a counter-melodic canon, this ditty makes a startling effect in its musical context. In this case we have Schönberg's own statement, quoted by one of his students, to the effect t h a t "alles ist hin" is" not ironical" but has "a real emotion­ al significance". 27 This means, no doubt, that this folksong world and its way of life is gone. Confronting it with the atonal idiom dramatizes the gap between two worlds and measures the historical and emotional distance which separates them, both aesthe­ tically (musical simplicity vs. complexity) and sociologically (folksinger vs. alienated artist). Mahler frequently quotes and transforms folksongs in order to express a similar mentality—for example, in the haunting posthorn episode in the scherzo of the "Third Symphony", which recalls and, at the same time, lays to rest the moonlit world of Eichendorff. But whereas in Mahler one feels that he still half-shares this romantic spirit, for Schönberg it is no longer viable. 'Verfremdung', as defined by Brecht, performs several functions: it transforms something familiar into something striking and unexpected, in order to reveal it in a new light and make it better known; it treats the material historically, thereby indicat­ ing t h a t it is characteristic of a particular era and is to be superseded; and it develops a critical perspective toward the material t h a t enables us to judge it with detachment. The numerous musical quotations in the above works fulfill these functions in a special way t h a t differentiates them from quotations as used by other composers, for the composers of the Vienna School show a strong emotional attachment to the music they are quoting. When Schönberg uses the folksong "Ännchen von Tharau" as the theme for a set of atonal variations (third movement of the Suite, op. 29 [1925–1926]or when Berg cites two bars from the prelude to Tristan und Isolde in the last movement of his Lyric Suite (1925-1926), one senses in the solemn tone that they are quoting music t h a t is in their bloodstream. This element is lacking in other composers who are fond of quoting music. When Bartok quotes folksongs at the end of his Fifth String Quartet or in the last movement of his Divertimento for Strings, when Stravinsky 27

See Dika Newlin, Bruckner, Mahler, Schönberg (New York, 1947), p. 235. 151

quotes Tchaikovsky in Le Baiser de la fee, or when Hindemith quotes Weber in his Symphonic Metamorphoses, this is done in a playful and, at times, even virtuoso manner t h a t does not convey the spiritual conflict inherent in the Expressionist works. The quotations of patriotic songs in Charles Ives' Second Symphony and his Second String Quartet come much closer because they constitute a commentary on the com­ poser's own cultural legacy; but they too lack the aura of tragedy and the sense of a doomed heritage t h a t pervades the musical reminiscences of Schönberg and Berg. Perhaps the most poignant examples of this kind occur in Berg's Violin Concerto (1935). I n this composition—Berg's last work and, in a sense, also the swan song of musical E.—the composer quotes a Carinthian Landler in the first part, and toward the end of the piece he introduces a chorale from Bach's Cantata No. 60 (O Ewigkeit, du Donnerwort). The variations on this chorale, which conclude the work, are suspended by a brief reminiscence of the Landler, played "as if from a distance, but much more slowly than the first time". The Landler and the chorale, whose text is written into the score, encompass heaven and earth, life and death, the sacred and the profane—evoking a musical and spiritual cosmos t h a t eludes verbal definition. Confronting the old with the new is a characteristic trait of Expressionist music, which uses the familiar in order to transform it while retaining an emotional link to it. Especially striking is the ambivalent attitude toward the familiar, which is part of the composer's cultural heritage but has been reduced to meaninglessness in the modern context. While acknowledging his debt to it, the modern artist uncovers its dark re­ cesses. Not only individual melodies but entire musical forms as well are treated in this manner—particularly dances and marches—perhaps because as basic rhythmic ex­ pressions they reach deep into the cultural subsoil and span both popular and art forms. Thus the Landler and the waltz, already demonized in Mahler's symphonies, are dis­ integrated by the Vienna School. The atonal waltzes in Schönberg's works (in the second, fifth, and nineteenth songs of Pierrot Lunaire, in the last piece of the Five Piano Pieces op. 23, and in the second movement of the Suite, op. 29) and the Landler in the second of Berg's Three Orchestral Pieces op. 6, and in the tavern scene of Wozzeck are savage distortions of these dances, far too serious and too deeply in­ grained in the works to be considered parodies or caricatures. This is not 'Verfremdung" in the Brechtian sense, but a danse macabre into the abyss. Here the sense of crisis is unmistakable. An awe-inspiring example of this usage is the march in Berg's Three Orchestral Pieces (op. 6). Employing a gigantic orchestra, the composer literally unhinges the march and tears it to shreds. The implications of this piece—the reverberations of Beethoven, Schubert, and Mahler, and of all patriotic marches ever written—and the awareness t h a t the march as a musical form has been irrevocably debased (the work was completed on August 23, 1914, shortly after the outbreak of World War I), make the work a remarkable document of musical E. Berg's Opus 6 is perhaps the last 'culinary' work of the new music. Here traditional devices, though grotesquely dis­ figured, are still discernible, and quotes from Mahler and Debussy 28 link the work 28 The slow movement of Mahler's Sixth Symphony is quoted in bars 99—101 of the March; Debussy's piano piece La Cathédrale engloutie is quoted in bars 110-112 of the Reigen.

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with the immediate past. Taken as a whole, it has the emotional force and some of the impetus of Romantic music, while the break-up of melody, harmony, and rhythm, and the increased use of percussion, point to the future. That this work is so rarely performed even fifty-six years after its completion shows not only t h a t it is difficult to play but that its idiom remains forbidding. If one compares this march with the march in the first movement of Carl Nielsen's Fifth Symphony (op. 50; 1921-1922), with the fanfares in the first and last move­ ments of Leos Janacek's Sinfonieita (1926) or with the march in Bartók's Sixth String Quartet (1939), all of which treat the march in a strongly personal way, one finds that each of them is written without reference to an earlier style, either harmonically, rhythmically, or emotionally, and without Berg's sense of impending catastrophe. The extended march in the first movement of Dmitri Shostakovich's Seventh Sym­ phony, (1942), in turn, is a piece of program music that memorializes a particular battle, whereas Berg, avoiding any references to specific events, pronounces the death of the traditional march. Berg's Wozzeck begins with a military drum roll. Ominous military music, a sign of Wozzeck's soldiering and of the threatening presence of the drum major, the captain and the entire military system, pervades the entire work. Both the text and the music convey the banalization of traditional Kulturgut. Büchner's protagonist is steeped in popular lore (Biblical, folkloristic, military) which, though integral to his background, is no longer adequate to his situation. The playwright was clearly aware of the abysses of the human soul, as well as of the decline of human values in a materialistic society. This decline is expressed in numerous folksongs, proverbs, and folk tales, for example, when Wozzeck, replying to the Captain's complaint that his child is illegitimate, quotes Jesus' words "Let the children come to me," or when a well-known hunting song is heard as Wozzeck watches Marie dance with the drum major. 29 The references to hunt­ ing suggest both hunters (like the drum major) and hunted (like Wozzeck). I n this context, they are bitterly ironic and destroy all romantic associations with one stroke. Andres' little hunting song in Act I (Measures 212 to 222) and the recurring hunting chorus of soldiers and apprentices in Act I I (Measures 560 to 577, 581 to 589, 636 to 639) are counterpointed against Wozzeck's agony as a taunting refrain of normality. All the romantic hunting songs and fanfares ever written or composed-^by Weber, Eichendorff, Felix Mendelssohn, Schumann, Wagner, Anton Bruckner, and Richard Strauss—are buried here. In this manner, the Expressionists alienated not only the romantic clichés but also venerable musical forms, such as passacaglia, fugue and rondo. In every case, the motivation and the effect seem peculiarly ambivalent in a way that is characteristic of the style of these composers: it is a mark of respect (as if they would and could not write otherwise) and a way of showing how far the dissociation of form and content has gone. Perhaps the retention of these forms is even a way of containing the extreme

29 In the piano score of the opera by Fritz Heinrieh Klein (Universal Edition: Vienna, 1958) the words of Jesus occur on p . 20 at bars 131—132 of Act I; the hunting chorus "Ein Jager aus der Pfalz" begins on p. 149 at bar 560 of Act I I .

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expressiveness of this music. Thus it has been shown 30 t h a t the second act of Wozzeck is cast in the form of a five-movement symphony in which the tavern scene is the scherzo, but it would be difficult for a listener to detect this. What is discernible, especially in the tavern scene, is the multi-layered texture and meaning, the confrontation of two worlds and even of two orchestras. 31 The satanic dance music played on stage—waltz, handler, polka—with appropriate instrumentation that includes a pianino, an accordion, a bombardon and several guitars, is another high point of musical E., which uses Romantic devices for anti-Romantic purposes by driving them beyond their harmonic, rhythmic, and expressive limits, 32 while the declamatory vocal line uses Wagnerian melos to anti-Wagnerian effect. Thus the various levels of diction in Büchner's play are heightened by the music which voices the doctor's scientific jargon, the cap­ tain's sanctimonious taunts, and the drum major's vainglorious rhetoric in their variously exaggerated vocal parts. And the children's folksong in the final scene of the opera intensifies the tragedy of Wozzeck's child, whose mother has just been murdered. Literary parallels to this tormented attitude toward Romanticism are hard to find because Romantic devices are less insinuating in their verbal form. In literary E., the treatment of Romanticism is, on the whole, openly parodistic or satirical. Karl Kraus's Die letzten Tage der Menschheit (written between 1915 and 1919, first published in 1919, revised in 1920 and 1921, and re-published in 1922, and thus almost exactly contemporaneous with Wozzeck, which was begun in 1914, completed in 1921, and first published in piano score in 1922) is filled with bitter parodies of German literature as well as of patriotic and military songs, which are satirized by being used in an incon­ gruous context. Since the entire work is a gigantic satire and an outcry against war, with innumerable allusions to specific persons and events, it is openly political and, as a verbal work, explicit in a way that a musical work cannot be. However, the 'Verfremdung' of language—its degradation to jargon, its misuse for destructive purposes, 30 In his essay "Die musikalischen Formen in meiner Oper Wozzeck," Berg states that Scene 1 of Act I I follows the classical sonata-form and that Scene 4 of Act I I forms the scherzo movement. (See Willi Reich, Alban Berg, pp. 178—179.) Based on Berg's statements, an outline of the opera's structure has been worked out, followed by a detailed scene-by-scene analysis. See ibid., pp. 64—86. 31 Expressionist works in all media share this multi-level composition and the resulting wealth of meaning that is difficult to pin down because it rests on mental associations between dis­ sociated elements. Sometimes these collage-like devices serve to make connections and references, to uncover contradictions, or to combine formal with popular elements; sometimes they even call the work itself into question. This aspect of E. is more poignant in musical works because of the greater connotative quality of music. 32 See Adorno''s Philosophie der neuen Musik: "Die neuen Mittel der Musik aber sind aus der immanenten Bewegung der alten hervorgegangen, von der sie sich zugleich durch qualitativen Sprung absetzt" (But the new musical means have resulted from the immanent movement of the old ones from which they detach themselves by means of a qualitative leap), p. 18. "Es sind nicht Leidenschaften mehr fingiert, sondern im Medium der Musik unverstellt leibhafte Regungen des Unbewussten, Schocks, Traumata registriert" (The passions are no longer invented but in the medium of music the actual stirring of the unconscious, shocks, and traumas are frankly recorded). Ibid., p. 42. "Die expressionistische Musik hatte das Prinzip des Ausdrucks aus der traditionell romantischen so genau genommen, dass es Protokollcharakter annahm. Damit aber schlagt es urn. Musik als Ausdrucksprotokoll ist nicht langer 'ausdrueksvoll'" (Expressionist music took the principle of expression as applied in traditional Romantic music so literally that it took on a docu­ mentary character. In this way, however, a change is brought about, for music as a protocol of expression is no longer 'expressive'). Ibid., p. 52.

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the perversion of cultural values-and of form (the morality play) is analogous to the handling of musical tradition by the Vienna School. In Sternheim's cycle Aus dem bürgerlichen Heldenleben (From the Heroic Life of the Bourgeoisie), the satire is chiefly directed against Romanticism, which is debunked as the vulgarized property of philistine minds. Expressed in Sternheim's characteristic imitation of pretentious rhetoric, the prince's pride in German song, in Bürger Schippel (1913),33 is ludicrously exemplified in the parodistic abduction scene (Act I I I , Scene 1), where, trying to emulate Romeo but lacking literary sophistication, the prince steals away with Thekla to the sound of Schippel's pseudo-Shakespearean love song, and embraces her to the voices of the quartet intoning a pseudo-Eichendorffian hunt­ ing chorus. In the drama 1913 (1915), which contains premonitions of the war, like Berg's opus 6, Ottilie's inability to cope with the times is exemplified by her singing of Eichendorff's Mondnacht in Schumann's setting (Act I I I , Scene 1). In Expressionist literature, Eichendorff and Wagner are the two most widely parodied romantics. The fatuous Wagner-mania of Mandelstam in Sternheim's Die Hose (1911), the tenor in Wedekind's Der Kammersänger (1899)—who literally walks over the dead body of a woman infatuated with him in order to fulfill an engagement as Tristan—and the bank clerk's daughter practicing the Tannhäuser overture in Kaiser's Von morgens bis mitternachts show that Wagner, like Eichendorff, captured a basic feeling that appealed to the unsophisticated and lent itself to being trivialized. Implicit in all these examples is the warning against false Romanticism and the fear that, because of its emotional appeal, Romanticism is easily perverted and can lead to escapism and worse in uncritical hands. I t is the banalization of Romanticism and its abuse for nationalistic ends t h a t is particularly stressed in the literary examples we have adduced. Though this treatment is sharply satirical in contrast to the compo­ sers' valedictory treatment of such material, Expressionist music is nevertheless clearly distinguishable from its non-Expressionist counterparts by its critical attitude toward Romanticism. If one examines Strauss' handling of Romanticism in Also sprach Zarathustra (1896) and Salome (1905), or Hans Pfitzner's in his setting of Eichendorff texts in the cantata Von deutscher Seele (1921; title not by Eichendorff), 34 the difference between their uncritical acceptance and the Expressionists' 'Verfremdung' of Romanti­ cism becomes obvious. (Non-German composers like Bartók or Stravinsky, being un­ touched by German Romanticism, wrote from a very different perspective.) 'Ver­ fremdung' of their respective languages', though differing in intent, degree, and effect according to medium, is used by the Expressionist writers and composers in order to 33 34

Sternhei m, Werke, I, p. 491, In his im portant and richly documented study of Eichendorff interpretation, Eberhard Lammert points o u t that in Pfitzner's score, and even in some Eichendorff editions, the word "Sinnen" in the couplet Wohl vor lauter Sinnen, Singen Kommen wir nicht recht zum Leben appears as "Singen", and concludes that this change and its occurrence in a choral song shows vividly "wieviel leichter es den Deutschen wurde, ihren Eichendorff zu singen als ihn bedenkend anzuhören" (how much easier it was for the Germans to sing their Eichendorff than to listen to him reflectively). See Eberhard Lammert, "Eichendorffs Wandel unter den Deutschen: Überlegungen zur Wirkungsgeschichte seiner Dichtung," in Die deutsche Romantik, ed. Hans Steffen (Göttingen, 196 7), p. 243 and Note 72a. 155

come to terms with the past. Thus the extreme stylization of language in the plays of Wedekind, Kaiser, and Sternheim, as shown in the artificiality of their dialogue, which alternates between "golden age" rhetoric and flat workaday prose, finds a parallel in the mixture of pathos and banality present in Expressionist music. 35 The Expressionist perspective is a critical one and involves an active social con­ cern. To be sure, all art is, to some extent, critical in the sense t h a t it shapes reality according to a personal vision, but in the case of the Expressionists the artist's vision was coupled with a specific program. The Expressionists in all media were tireless writers of manifestos. Schönberg, Berg, and Webern also wrote prolifically in an effort to define their aesthetic views. Formally and informally (in books, essays, lectures, and letters), they explained their art and fought for it. Because their music was constantly under attack for its dissonance and inaccessibility, their writings became strongly polemic. This is particularly true of Schönberg, who had a longer career than the others and who emerges from his writings as a militant spokesman for an ideology which, in addition to music, encompasses education, politics, ethics, religion, and other human concerns. Schönberg's writings stamp him as an activist with a powerful mind who was absolutely convinced of the Tightness of his cause and never ceased to fight for it. One gains a strong impression of uncompromising integrity and sincerity with more than a touch of obsessiveness. Schonberg's beliefs and convictions are set forth not only in theo­ retical works and many essays and letters, but they also dominate his literary efforts, which culminate in the text to the opera Moses und Aron (1926-1932; Schönberg did not compose the music for the last act). Moses' final address to Aron and the Seventy Elders, rejecting materialism and accommodation to the world and affirming belief in God and His covenant with Israel, not only reflects the author's own religious and artistic strug­ gles b u t also conveys an idealism and a sense of mission t h a t is characteristic of E. Like those of the literary Expressionists, the concerns of the Schönberg group range from detailed aesthetic problems to man's relation to God. On the musical level, they advocate contrapuntal writing, the interweaving of several voices rather than the homophonic style of Romanticism in which one voice predominates; variation in place of repetition, which had degenerated into cliché in the Romantic sonata and symphony; asymmetry and disparity as a departure from the regularity and evenness of much classical and nineteenth-century music, with its tendency to congeal the increasingly unclassical content; and the "emancipation of dissonance" 36 and its functional use on 35 Cf. the introduction of a tango into a twelve-tone composition in Berg's concert aria Der Wein (from measures 39 to 63, briefly recapitulated from measures 182 to 195) and the use of the alto saxophone in this piece and in Berg's opera Lulu. In the first scene of Act I I I of Lulu, at Casti-Piani's line "Von den unzahligen Abenteuerinnen . . . " (Measure 103), Berg introduces Wedekind's tune to a lute song which, according to Robert Craft, is a Berlin street-walkers' song. Berg also uses this theme in the Variations movement of his Lulu-Symphonie. See Willi Reich, Alban Berg, p. 121, and Robert Craft's notes for his recordings in the album Music of Alban Berg (Columbia M2L 271). 36 In his lecture on "Composition with Twelve Tones," given at the University of California at Los Angeles on March 26, 1941, Schönberg explained that the development of chromaticism had drastically changed the concept of harmony, leading to extended tonality and then to the "emancipation of dissonance". "The term emancipation of the dissonance refers to its comprehensibility, which is considered equivalent to the consonance's comprehensibility. A style based on this premise treats dissonances like consonances and renounces a tonal center." Style and Idea (New York, 1950), pp. 104-105.

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an equal basis with consonance. The latter principle embodies an important tenet of E.: to make available to serious art what had previously been excluded as unsuitable. Both in literature (Hauptmann's Vor Sonnenaufgang, 1889) and in music (Strauss's Till Eulenspiegel, 1895), Naturalism had pioneered in this search, but its innovations were more in the area of subject matter and style and did not make a philosophical contribution. Naturalism extended realism b u t did not change the way of looking at reality and, hence, did not attack the basis of art. Naturalism also lacked the visionary quality of E. and its practice of combining disparate elements to expose hidden mean­ ings and associations as well as dissociations. I n Naturalism ugliness was used to present "a slice of life", whereas the Expres­ sionists went beyond the social aspect to challenge the traditional meaning of the word. Schönberg believed t h a t the development of harmony was making 'consonance' and 'dissonance' obsolete. Denying the existence of non-harmonic tones, he proclaimed the equality of all twelve tones of the scale: "There are no non-harmonic tones, but only tones alien to the harmonic system . . . Possibilities for combining tones are unlimited; only the possibilities of bringing the combinations into a system that establishes their aesthetic validity can have limits. For the time being, t h a t is; later this, too, will change." 37 The use of all twelve notes of the scale without regard to traditional harmony is directly related to the rejection of mimesis found in E., for the Expressionist does not observe or imitate reality, but wishes to create it anew in his own image. 38 Twelvetone composition in music is equivalent to the absence of realism in literature and to non-representation in the plastic arts. I t emphasizes the subjectivism and dissociation of Expressionist art by concentrating on a highly personal and intense vision that sets the inner world sharply apart from the outer one. The Expressionist radicalizes art in order to lay bare deep-seated psychic layers at the root of human consciousness. He seeks to reorder the basic ingredients of artistic expression, in keeping with drastic changes in human existence. Truth is ranked above beauty, and content takes prece­ dence over form. The title of Schönberg's collection of essays, Style and Idea, indicates t h a t the author distinguishes between execution and conception. He believes that the composer must have a concept, an idea, and a controlling vision t h a t will dictate its own treat­ ment. Style, which for Schönberg includes form and technique as well as the personal 37 "Harmoniefremde Töne gibt es also nicht, sondern nur dem Harmoniesystem fremde . , . Den Mögliehkeiten des Zusammenklangs sind keine Grenzen gezogen; höchstens den Möglichkeiten, die Zusammenklange in ein System zu bringen, das ihre asthetische Wertigkeit feststellt. Vorlaufig; später wird wohl auch das gelingen." Harmonielehre, p. 389. 38 "Die Realität muss von uns geschaffen werden. Der Sinn des Gegenstands muss erwühlt sein. Begnügt darf sich nicht werden mit der geglaubten, gewahnten, notierten Tatsache, es muss das Bild der Welt rein und unverfalscht gespiegelt werden. Das aber ist nur in uns selbst. So wird der ganze Raum des expressionistischenKünstlers Vision." (We have to create reality. The meaning of the object must be deeply fathomed. We must not be content with the believed, imagined, re­ corded fact, but the picture of the world must be reflected purely and clearly. But it is (found) in ourselves alone. Thus the entire cosmos of the Expressionist turns into vision). Kasimir Edschmid, "Über den dichterischen Expressionismus", Fruhe Manifeste, p. 32. "Auf ihrer höchsten Stufe befasst sich die Kunst ausschliesslich mit der Wiedergabe der inneren N a t u r " (On its highest level, art is exclusively concerned with the reproduction of internal nature). Harmonielehre, p. 14.

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stamp, must not be the determining factor but the means to an end. Schönberg dis­ parages the use of sound and color for their own sake which he finds in the music of Strauss, and which Berg found reflected in Pfitzner's attack on the new music. "More mature minds resist the temptation to become intoxicated by colors and prefer to be coldly convinced by the transparency of clear-cut ideas." 39 On one level the argument is between art and craft. Schönberg wrote: " I believe t h a t art does not stem from ability but from necessity." 40 In his view, as in that of Kandinsky, the true artist creates out of an inner compulsion, a need to express him­ self, and develops the skill to do so without conscious application, whereas the crafts­ man has the skill without having anything vital to say: "Art is the outcry of those who partake of the fate of mankind, who do not resign themselves to it but confront i t . . . who do not avert their eyes to protect themselves from emotions but open them wide to do whatever has to be done." 4 1 The pedagogical aim of these composers, set forth in the 191.1 preface to Schönberg's Harmonielehre, extends to a concern with reform in the arts and in the quality of life. Like their compeers in literature and painting, the composers joined hands and actively promoted greater integrity in artistic expression and performance. In November, 1918, Schönberg founded a "Society for Private Performances of Music" (Verein für musikalische Privataufführungen) devoted to renditions of modern music that were carefully prepared and free from commercialism. In the official prospectus, written by Berg, the clarity of musical presentation and the lack of competitive spirit were particularly stressed: "The only success an artist should have here is the one that should mean the most to him: to have made the work and, with it, the author intelligible." 42 Similar thoughts were expressed by Schönberg in a 1919 document dealing with the relation between government and the arts, in which he called for improvements in the social status of musicians. And Webern fulfilled an active educational and social function by directing several workers' orchestras and choruses and introducing them and their audiences to new music. The social conscience of these composers expresses itself in their work through their concern with human rights and through their international outlook. After their early, fin-de-siècle compositions, they chose subjects dealing with figures on the fringes of society, particularly the persecuted and oppressed (Berg's Wozzeck and Lulu, Schön­ berg's A Survivor from Warsaiv), and with questions of religious salvation (Schönberg's Kol Nidre, his Psalms op. 50, and his Moses und Aron, as well as Webern's two cantatas, op. 29 and op. 31). In a brief piece entitled "Human Rights" Schönberg wrote t h a t 39 Arnold Schönberg, Style and Idea (New York, 1950), p. 131. See also his programmatic statement "Die Musik soll nicht schmücken, sie soll wahr sein" (Music should not be decorative but true), quoted by Theodor W. Adorno, Philosophie der neuen Musik, p . 45. 40 "Ich glaube: Kunst kommt nicht von Können, sondern von Müssen !" Arnold Schönberg, Schöpferische Konfessionen, selected and edited by Willi Reich (Zürich, 1964), p. 37; the statement, italicized by Schönberg, was made in 1911. 41 "Kunst ist der Notschrei jener, die an sich das Schicksal der Menschheit erleben. Die nicht mit ihm sich abfinden, sondern sich mit ihm auseinandersetzen . . . Die nicht die Augen abwenden, um sich vor Emotionen zu behüten, sondern sie aufreissen, urn anzugehen, was angegangen werden muss." Ibid., p. 12. See also the related statement "Der Mittelweg ist der einzige, der nicht nach Rom fülirt," quoted by Willi Reich, Schönberg oderder konservative Revolutionar (Vienna, 1968), p, 200. 42 Quoted by Willi Reich, ibid,, p, 160,

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" a certain minimum of rights equally valid for all peoples and races should be searched for." 43 And in his messianic view of art, music was to voice man's aspirations for a more humane and inspired existence: "My personal feeling is that music conveys a prophetic message revealing a higher form of life toward which mankind evolves. And it is because of this message that music appeals to men of all races and cultures." 44 With the literary Expressionists Schönberg shared the view that art should proclaim the new man: "A new sound is an instinctively discovered symbol that announces the new man expressing himself."46 Ideologically Schönberg's position was closely akin to that of the metaphysically oriented Expressionist writers. His plan for a large-scale choral-orchestral work, as outlined in a letter to Dehmel dated December 13, 1912, and several statements in the Harmonielehre show that he ranked spiritual regeneration higher than material im­ provement - a view t h a t is shared by Werfel in his programmatic essay "Die christliche Sendung" (1917).46 Schönberg , sreforming spirit, anti-establishment stance, and internationalism re­ flect the exposed social position of many Expressionists. Among them are found more outsiders than insiders, as the movement was decisively shaped by artists who were spiritual exiles. Many Expressionists were Jews, and among those who were not there was a conspicuous group of uprooted or declasse figures. A comparison between Hauptraann and Wedekind, Strauss and Mahler among the older group; between Thomas Mann and Döblin, Max Reger and Schönberg among the middle group; between Carl Zuckmayer and Toller, Hindemith and Weill among the younger group exemplifies these differences in outlook and artistic profile. The supranationalism of many Expressionists may be attributed to their malaise in a conservative society to whose flaws they were particularly vulnerable. Among them were numerous figures from the borderlands, especially from the Austro-Hungarian empire—persons who, by their origin, lacked a sense of national identity and served as mediators between two cultures. Often their situation produced a kind of cultural diaspora that gives E., as a German-based move­ ment, its peculiar tension. The sharp division between outer and inner reality—sharper than is usually found in works of art—may perhaps be explained by the lack of political maturity and national fulfillment in the German-speaking area and by the concomitant search for substitute religions—art, for example. 43 44 45

Style and Idea, p. 205. Ibid., p. 194. "Ein neuer Klang ist ein unwillkürlich gefundenes Symbol, das den neuen Menschen ankündigt, der sich da ausspricht . . . " Harmonielehre, p. 479. 46 "leh will seit langem ein Oratorium schreiben, das als Inhalt haben sollte: wie der Mensch von heute, der dnrch den Materialismus, Sozialismus, Anarchie durchgegangen ist, der Atheist war, aber sich doch ein Restenen alten Glaubens bewahrt hat . . ., wie dieser moderne Menseh mit Gott streitet. . . und schliesslich dazu gelangt, Gott zu finden und religiös zu werden" (For some time now I have wished to write an oratorio dealing with the following subject: how con­ temporary man, having passed through materialism, socialism, and anarchism, and having been an atheist, still retains some of the old belief. . . , (and) how this modern man quarrels with God . . . and finally succeeds in finding Him and turning religious). Briefe, p. 31. "Die geistigen Folgen eines Gedankens sind, da sie geistiger Natur sind, bleibend; aber die Folgen der Revolutionen, die sich im Materiellen abspielen, sind vorübergehend" (The spiritual consequences of a thought are permanent, in so far as they are of a spiritual kind; but the consequenees of revolutions in the material world are transitory). Harmonielehre, p, 481. 159

The extraterritoriality 47 of many Expressionists reveals itself in the lack of popular or regional accents in their work. Most of them hail from the city; and as cosmo­ politans without strong roots, they addressed humanity in a new language. The music of Schönberg, Berg, and Webern is extremely sophisticated, undancelike, highly organized, and self-conscious. Unlike the music of Ralph Vaughan Williams, Ives, Bartók, or Stravinsky, Expressionist music seems divorced from the pulse and flavor of the indigenous musical spirit. The fact that Vienna is the home of E. in music points up both its non-national cast and its complex link to the local musical tradition. The music of the Vienna School is non-national in that it lacks a characteristic regional flavor and tends to abstraction by its avoidance of melody and tonality; but it is linked with local musical tradition by an occasional Viennese echo so startling that the psycho­ logical distance between the composer and his social setting is readily apparent. I t is, generally, characteristic of Expressionist art t h a t stylized and popular components do not mesh and t h a t the popular element is Verfremdet'. But the Expressionist composers have stronger and more positive ties with the tradition of classical and Romantic music than the writers have with the corresponding literary heritage, because the musical tradition is longer and more distinguished, besides being rooted precisely in Vienna. As the capital of a polyglot, supra-national empire (until 1918) and a city with a rich musical tradition, Vienna undoubtedly provided a more favorable atmosphere for these composers than any other city in the German-speaking area. As we have seen, modern music developed more suddenly and more radically than modern literature, perhaps because music, having developed more slowly before, is capable of more far-reaching technical innovations. Because theory and practice are harder to reconcile in music than they are in literature—theory is verbal, music is non-verbal — the Expressionist theory is not confirmed in practice; for while the theory is loftily idealistic, the music sounds doom-haunted—more evocative of a crumbling old world than of a dawning new one. Expressionist literature shares this despair, but has a more aspiring and dynamic ring and looks more to the future than to the past. Both, however, undertake a radically new examination of the bases of human existence.

47

Adorno's term applied to Schönberg. (See Quasi una fantasia, p. 283.) Adorno finds this element in Schönberg's gypsy-like physiognomy, in his "undomesticated" quality, in a non-Western aspect expressed by the Jewish mysticism also found in Mahler, Kraus, and Kafka, and in the essential strangeness of his music. He also mentions the lack of formal training, the avoidance of professionalism in Schönberg as well as in Bruckner and Mahler, 160

LOTTE H.

EISNER

A CONTRIBUTION TO T H E D E F I N I T I O N OF T H E EXPRESSIONIST FILM

Even at the risk of being considered a rigorous purist, I would like to offer, at long last, my own definition of the Expressionist film, for in most countries, especially in France, there seems to be an increasing tendency toward regarding all of the "classic'' German films of the twenties as Expressionistic. I suspect that, in spite of all my attempts at explanation in the book L'écran démoniaque {The Haunted Screen in the English version), the latter's subtitle "Influence de Max Reinhardt et de l'expressionnisme" has caused this misunderstanding because one sought to substitute or for and. I n the first issue of Cinéma 55 I published an article entitled "Mise en garde et mise au point'' (Warning and Redefinition) which deals with the Expressionist school, or rather movement, and in which I tried to clarify my position, apparently without success. For in the 69th and 70th issues of Cinéma 62 (i.e., quite a few years later) a certain gentleman declared, in a narticle called "Actualité de l'expressionnisme," that Max Reinhardt was an undaunted Expressionist. (The gentleman in question, by the way, plagiarized my book rather unscrupulously by borrowing entire phrases and whole passages, from which he drew the wrong conclusions.) I t is well known, however, t h a t Reinhardt had relatively little to do with the Sunday matinees of the Junges Deutschland, and t h a t he almost invariably entrusted these productions to his collaborators. Unlike (Jürgen) Fehling and (Leopold) Jessner, he was rather in­ different toward E., and if he allowed Expressionist plays to be staged at all, this was done outside of the repertory and simply because the spirit of the time demanded it. 1 I t is not for personal but for factual reasons that I wish to quote, at this point, a passage from my previously mentioned article: The word Expressionism is often indiscriminately applied to every German film of the 'classic' period. Is it still necessary, however, to emphasize that certain chiaroscuro effects often considered to be Expressionist were actually used in advance of Caligari? Since (Siegfried) Kracauer, in his book From Caligari to Hitler, discussed the Expressionist staging of Reinhard Sorge's play Der Bettler (The Beggar), produced by Reinhardt in 1917, most film 1 See pp. 91f. of Max Fleischmann's book Max Reinhardt (Vienna: Neff, 1948): "Reinhardt was rather indifferent toward, and had little sympathy with, the very modern, young, Expression­ ist writers. Neither ideologically nor stylistically, they suited his taste. If their works were performed at this theater, this was done mostly in the form of closed cycles, like "Das junge Deutschland" in Berlin and "Das Theater des Neuen" in Vienna. Reinhardt had almost no personal share in these productions. This was the great and tireless innovator's way of showing that he wanted to have no hand in these experiments."

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enthusiasts seem bent on believing t h a t ReinharcLt was an Expressionist stage director, and that this was, in fact, implied by the subtitle of my book. Actually, Reinhardt used the learned magic of chiaroscuro, i.e., of light that is gently modelled by the shadows, in a truly Impressionist manner; and thus many of the light effects we note in the old German films are not neces­ sarily signs of an Expressionist technique. This is hardly the place for pointing out how decisively the German film of the 'teens- especially the so-called costume film—was influenced by Reinhardt's stage productions, even in cases where the genius of this great dramaturgist of light is hardly recognizable. After all, most of the film stars of that period, as well as several film directors, were originally employed at Reinhardt's theaters. Whereas Reinhardt was after mysterious light effects a la Rembrandt (whose source is often unidentified) by causing light in the form of softly flowing triangular shapes to filter from a high window into a dark room, 2 the Expressionists, for whom all things and objects were brought to life anthropomorphically, turned light into a frenzied cry of anguish devoured by the greedy maws of the shadows. The key prin­ ciple of Expressionist lighting techniques is, in fact, this clash and this pitiless struggle between light and darkness. But how many films actually show this kind of abruptness ? I know only a few in which these effects are consistently aimed at. Strange as it may seem, the tinted contemporary copies, as well as the subsequently dubbed black-and-white ones, of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari—a film in which painted cast shadows and budlike light effects were sought after—hardly convey this shock effect, except perhaps in the case of the dark alley where we see the murderer err about. We encounter the stark contrast between light and darkness in Karl Heinz Martin's film Von morgens bis mitternachts (From Morn till Midnight), as well as in the rising triangular and lozenge-shaped forms of the Jack-the-Ripper episode in Paul Leni's film Das Wachsfigurenkabinett (Waxworks). Elsewhere it appears only in scattered episodes, such as in the spotlighted grooves and cornices of the portal of the vault of the dead lovers in Fritz Lang's Der müde Tod (Destiny). At times, as in Rippert's Homunculus films, a pale face emerges from the dark or, as in Robert Wiene's Orlacs Hände, white hands suddenly spread out in convulsion or the gleaming of a knife issues from the black void. I have mentioned Rippert's Homunculus films, which were shot in 1916, i.e., prior to Caligari. Here the Expressionist techniques are used almost unconsciously; just as in the basically Impressionist first version of the Student von Prag we come upon light effects that strike us as being quasi-Expressionistic. 3 2

Such a scene is found especially in Oswald's film Karlos und Elisabeth) there is a similar one in his Lucrezia Borgia, at the point where Lucrezia discovers her dead husband. The cathedral scene in Lang's Siegfrieds Tod should be mentioned in this connection, and even in the church scene of Murnau's Sunrise an analogous light effect is used. 3 In the second version of Der Student von Prag, directed by Galeen, Expressionist visions abound—for instance, the dark, winding street in which the student is persistently confronted by his ghostlike mirror image. The first version of that film, directed by Stellan Rye, contains many shots made on location, which makes them inherently Impressionistic. In this case, only the contrastive use of the shadows cast by the colonnade on the terrace produces an expressive—and almost Expressionistic—effect, as does also the view through the window upon the real street. 162

Thus basically, with regard to Dr. Caligari, one can only say that this was the first Expressionist film in respect to the architectural settings and the bodily poses of the actors that were induced by them, whereas the Expressionist use of light is already found in some earlier films, usually at such points where the dramatic expression calls for it. Whereas doubts may arise concerning the Expressionist use of light—especially given the condition of newly dubbed copies of the originals—it can be stated that most of the films which strictly adhere to the Expressionist distortion of the settings use light Impressionistically. When, after the great success which Caligari enjoyed among the intellectuals, Wiene engaged Andrei Andreev for his film Baskolnikoff, he is supposed to have told the puzzled stage designer of the Moscow Art Theater: "Simply make everything oblique, walls, windows, doors and the furniture!" And yet, the Expressionistically distorted interiors of that film (where, considerably more so than in Caligari, the natural forms remain visible underneath) show soft Impres­ sionist light effects, since Wiene did not insist on a starkly contrastive use of light and shadow. Paul Wegener invariably protested when people called his second Golem Expressionistic; for in that film Impressionistically shaded light flows into the elliptically distorted Gothic interiors, and only at certain points a starker light effect lifts out a passage-way or causes a stairwell suddenly to pierce the dark. In their use of light, the German films of the period frequently use these two styles in an almost hybrid mixture. In fact, it is precisely this paradox, this partly intentional and partly uninten­ tional stylistic discrepancy, which lends them their peculiar charm. The clay forms used in G. W. Pabst's film Der Schatz (The Treasure), which seem to owe a great deal to Hans Poelzig's architectural designs for Der Golem, are distorted and inflated. In these interiors, too, the light flows softly gleaming and Rembrandtesque. The same applies to the Expressionistically warped interiors of the Harun-al-Raschid episode in Das Wachsfigurenlcabinett, where only the intermittent gleaming of orna­ mental details shows Expressionist features. The flowing, opalescent and misty atmos­ phere of the Ivan-the-Terrible episode (in the same film) even more strongly illustrates this tendency, as is only natural in the case of Leni, who was himself an Expressionist painter. Only the action of the frame story and the concluding episode which comple­ ments it are stylistically coherent. There are, then, altogether no more than a handful of purely Expressionist films, the majority of the works so far referred to being either films with Expressionist settings or using Expressionist techniques of acting. However, even the ambiguous use of light may be conducive to Expressionist effects. One of the best examples of this kind is constituted by the congested, streaming crowd in the ghetto street of Der Golem, which gives a flamelike, stippling impression, whereas the light in the background flows softly and broadly. Where, in such cases, does E. begin and Impressionism end? In order to ascertain the stylistic affiliation of these visual effects, one must contrast them with such radically different ones as are found in the Wintergarten scene of Variété (Variety), where Impressionism reigns su­ preme in the guise of a thousand colored dots. But precisely in that film we discover traces of a dissolving E., as in the scene with the prisoners walking in a circle in the 163

narrow shaft of the dark courtyard, which contains, in fact, an allusion to a painting b y the Impressionist Van Gogh—another instance of the inherent contradiction. Wiene desperately clung to E. by trying to shoot Genuine in the manner of Caligari, and, given Cesar Klein's ornamental sets, he produced a rather abstruse pattern which only rarely lent itself to contrastive light effects. We have already seen how, in Raskolnikoff, Klein's successor, Andreev, led him to an Impressionistically tinged E. And how about directors like Fritz Lang and F . W. Murnau ? Can one call them Expressionists, as is so often done, or may at least some of their films be regarded in this light? Lang certainly was too much of an eclectic to be subsumed under any common label. Thus, the symmetry of the Nibelungen settings, for instance, in no way conforms with the Expressionist will-to-style, and the skyscraper façades of Metropolis, surrounded by an aura of light, are not Expressionistically conceived. But Expressionist traits are constantly evident: the sharply delineated white crosses of the subterranean church, for example, are decidedly Expressionistic, and so are the brightly lit road markers in the pursuit scene of the Testament of Dr. Mabuse. Like most of the great German directors, Lang was an artist who profited from pass­ ing through the experience of the Expressionist sense of style. The same can be said of Murnau, who also employed Expressionist techniques whenever he deemed them ap­ propriate for the dramatic expression, as in the dream scene of his film Der letzte Mann (The Last Laugh). If Nosferatu is often taken to be a paragon of Expressionist cinematography, this is due to the fact that two Expressionist actors—Max Schreck as Nosferatu and Alexander Granach as the real-estate agent Knock—have put their stamp upon this film. But they are cast opposite inferior 'naturalistic' perform­ ers. 4 The same applies to Caligari, where only Werner Krauss in the role of the diabolic doctor and Conrad Veidt as the somnambulist Cesare succeed in Expressionistically blending with the distorted settings. The other actors vainly seek to adjust to this particular style, and the sequence depicting the servants perturbed by the abduction of the beautiful J a n e (Lil Dagover) reaches the point of being farcical. And can G. W. Pabst, the subsequent "champion of realism", be called an Expressionist merely be­ cause in Der Schatz he used Expressionist stage settings ? Or because in his Freud film Geheimnisse einer Seele (Secrets of a Soul) he occasionally uses Expressionist light ef­ fects which serve his intention of reproducing subconscious processes unrealistically ? Even a film like Hintertreppe (Backstairs), created by artists as devoted to the Expressionist will-to-style as Paul Leni and Leopold Jessner, does not strike us as being altogether Expressionistic as far as the style of acting is concerned. Fritz Kortner, the Expressionist actor par excellence (in the theater as well as in the movies), is not supported by the 'naturalistically' plump Henny Porten or the naive-dynamic Wilhelm Dieterle. The same is true of Schatten (Warning Shadows), where the charming actress R u t h Weyer, surrounded by an aura of light, has neither sufficient expertise nor stage 4 Ruth Landshoff, for instance, was no professional actress but a high-school student. Murnau had seen her on the street and had prevailed upon her mother to let her join the cast during her vacation. "As if catapulting stones, we threw words into the audience," Leontine Sagan is known to have said with reference to the Expressionist style of acting. The actors in the silent Expressionist films had to replace this abrupt and disconnected verbal projection with facial expressions, gestures and expressive poses.

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presence to master the abrupt, incoherent gestures and the bizarre poses demanded by the Expressionists. The director of Schatten, Arthur Robison—an American brought up in Germany— wavers between a flowing Impressionism, to which Murnau's Tartuffe and Faust were to be greatly indebted, and an E. indulging in shadow contrasts and represented primarily by the two Expressionist actors Kortner and Granach. In Die Chronik von Grieshuus (The Chronicle of G.), Arthur von Gerlach also opts for flowing Impres­ sionism—and this in spite of the Expressionist settings. For in this film the designers Herlth and Röhrig emulated, while slightly modifying, the Expressionist intentions of Hans Poelzig, the creator of the Golem settings, who was first asked to make the settings of this film as well. Gerlach's Impressionism is further strengthened by the exterior scenes which were shot outdoors. In Karl Grune's film Die Strasse (The Street), to which Ludwig Meidner contrib­ uted his flame-like, distorted sets, the light effects, as well as Eugen Klöpfer's poses, are Expressionist in many ways. But Klöpfer was no truly Expressionist actor like Kortner, and with him Expressionist moments alternate with realistic ones, as had already been the case in Lupu Pick's film Sylvester. And here we encounter the most radical mixture of styles; for the anti-Expressionist "Kammerspiel" films which Pick intended as "naturalistic slaps in the face of Expressionist snobs", are inherently paradoxical. For while, on the one hand, the extremely talented script writer Carl Mayer furnished a psychologically motivated, individualistic tragedy, on the other hand he remained, in his own words, an Expressionistic visual poet. Moreover, Pick's decided preference for symbolic stylization and his enthusiasm for metaphysical speculations of the visionary type produces an atmosphere congenial to E., even though the Expressionists violently rejected metaphysics along with psychology and indi­ vidualism. And E. A. Dupont? This Impressionistically oriented director very rarely slipped into the use of Expressionist light effects, as he did, for example, in Das alte Gesetz (The Ancient Law). I n Moulin Rouge, he finally realized an Impressionistically tinged Baroque style. I n the German directors of this period, then, one constantly meets with a tendency toward mixing stylistic elements, which seems to be characteristic for the age. Only one single director was unaffected by this trend: Ernst Lubitsch, the realist, who profited from Reinhardt in his own peculiar way. I t should be obvious even to those who call all the German films of this era Expressionistic that this man never subscribed to the tenets of t h a t movement. His film Die Bergkatze (The Mountain Cat) is rather a parody of Expressionist tendencies. Indeed, for this film Ernst Stern, Reinhardt's stage designer, having a typically Impressionist background, created pseudo-Expres­ sionist settings which parody that style. Should our reflections be interpreted as an attempt to effect a revision of the prevailing views regarding cinematographic E. ? I do not want to convey that impression but merely wish to point out how rarely, in all the above instances, one can speak of a consistently applied Expressionist technique. There are strictly Expressionist actors (but they, too, modify their style), as well as Expressionist films, although 165

even those created by directors fully devoted to the Expressionist will-to-style harbor Impressionist elements—mostly in the use of light effects. The only feature rather consistently used in these films is the Expressionist nature of the settings, and this may explain why such forms survived, long after the decease of E., in German cinematography. The steep roofs and gables in Murnau's Faust and his Sunrise offer an excellent case in point. And because an architect like Otto Hunte was assigned to the Impressionistically inclined Austro-American Josef von Sternberg, the dark and narrow lanes leading to the cabaret in Der Blaue Engel—like the slum streets in Oswald's Alraune—sound a distinct echo of the previously men­ tioned lane in Caligari, even though the light is handled Impressionistically. 5 Perhaps it is these heterogeneous elements fused in the films of the " classic'' period which are to blame for the failure of all post-World War I I attempts to renew German cinema­ tographic E. Der Apfel ist ab (The Apple Fell) contents itself with a lot of ado in the music-hall style; and so does Die Berliner Ballade (Berlin Ballad). Only Peter Lorre's Der Verlorene (The Lost One) recaptures some of the Expressionist traits of the films made in the pre-Hitler era because here some of the visions and intentions inherent in Fritz Lang's M are further explored and no stylistic exaggerations are attempted. (Translated by Ulrich Weisstein)

5 For all that, Hunte, who constructed the balanced, spacious and symmetrical sets of Metropolis and the Nibelungen films, was no Expressionist architect, not even Herlth or Röhrig—in whose settings impressionistic chiaroscuro values can be seen—can be considered as such. But, after all, narrow streets and stairwells have always been depicted in a mysterious way since Caligari.

166

ULRICH

WEISSTEIN

VORTICISM: EXPRESSIONISM ENGLISH STYLE*

In order to place Vorticism, that Anglo-Saxon offshoot of E., in its proper historical context, I should like to state, by way of introduction, that this movement was but one of several manifestations of the anti-Impressionist spirit prevalent in Europe in the first two decades of our century. But while Cubism and E. were, in part, accepted by the Vorticists, Futurism or—to use Pound's terminology—"accelerated Impres­ sionism" was attacked by them beginning with the first issue of Blast, the Vorticist declaration of independence. 1 As for the chronology of events that led to the formulation of Vorticist doctrine, Geoffrey Wagner has pointed out t h a t Wyndham Lewis's artistic rebellion stemmed from his break with Roger Fry, whose Omega Workshops he had joined in July, 1913.2 I t was in consequence of a quarrel over a mural commission that Lewis and three of his fellow-Vorticists-in-the-making quit the Workshops in the fall of 1913. They stated their reasons for doing so in an open letter, which Virginia Woolf reproduced in her biography of Fry. 3 Being free agents, the dissenters immediately founded their own school, the so-called Rebel Art Center with offices in Great Ormond Street. Frequent gatherings were held at the "Cave of the Golden Calf" owned by the third Mrs. Strindberg and adorned with works by Lewis himself and the sculptor Jacob Epstein. Toward the end of 1913, the group was joined by Pound, who had come to London five years earlier as an "M. A. in Romantics" and stigmatized member of the faculty of Wabash College, as well as by the sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska. Pound, that professional discoverer of genius, had recently promoted the cause of Robert Frost, a poor candidate for Vorticism's Hall of Fame on account of his potato-without-the-dirt realism, and was about to launch the literary career of "the only American I know of who has made what I can call adequate preparation for writing", T. S. Eliot, the author of a satirical poem entitled "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock". Pound was desperately trying to "sell" this poem to the reluctant Harriett Monroe, founder and editor of Poetry Magazine, of which he was the English correspondent. What is more, Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was shortly to appear in serial form in The Egoist, the former Freewoman, a magazine which enjoyed Pound's special protection. * Reprinted, with permission, from the Yearbook of Comparative and General Literature, X I I I (1964) pp. 28-40. 1 For a brief account of Lewis's attitude toward Futurism, see The Letters of Wyndham Lewis. ed. W.2 K. Rose (London, 1963), p. 61f. Wyndham Lewis: A Portrait of the Artist as the Enemy (New Haven, 1957). 3 New York, 1940, p. 192. 167

"We are getting our little gang after five years," the Vorticist kingmaker Pound wrote to William Carlos Williams on December 19, 1913, in a letter that also contains the first reference to the Great Vortex, a label that Pound himself is said to have in, vented. On January 22, 1914, T. E. Hulme, the spiritual godfather of the movementthough not a cosigner of its manifestos, lectured publicly on "Modern Art and Its Philosophy". 4 And on May 5 of the same year Marinetti delivered the second of two lectures on Futurism at the Doré Gallery, a performance that, eye-witnesses say, met with violent physical protest on the part of Lewis, Hulme, and Gaudier-Brzeska. Lewis is also supposed to have been outraged by the manifesto "Vital English A r t " which Marinetti and his disciple C. R. W. Nevinson inserted in several London news­ papers. I t is hard to fathom, however, what was so offensive to him in this fairly innocu­ ous document (reprinted in Nevinson's book Paint and Prejudice).5 Probably the shock caused by Futurist activities made the first issue of Blast appear in its present form. Originally the magazine, announced for April, 1914 (i.e., prior to Marinetti's demonstrations), was merely to be devoted "to the discussion of Cubism, Futurism, Imagism, and all vital forms of modern art". 6 Blast was finally published on June 20. A sizable volume of 160 pages, it contains various preliminary, general Vortices, the specialized Vortices of Pound, Lewis, and Gaudier-Brzeska, several poems by Pound, Lewis's Enemy of the Stars, stories by Ford Madox Hueffer and Rebecca West, a review of Kandinsky's book by the painter Edward Wadsworth, and a number of reproductions. The preliminary Vortices are patently Expressionist in tone, just as the "Blasts and Blesses" attached to them are Expressionist in typo­ graphy. A somewhat ambiguous reference to the unconscious is strangely out of keeping with Lewis's views on art, and none of his other writings bears out the contention t h a t "intrinsic beauty is in the interpreter or seer, not in the object or content". Lewis never sympathized with Kandinsky's art, and it is hard to see how he could have subscribed to the concluding remarks of Wadsworth's review which stipulate t h a t "the insistence on the value of one's own feelings as the only aesthetic impulse means logically t h a t the artist is not only entitled to treat form and color according to his inner dictates but t h a t it is his duty to do so, and [that] consequently his life . . . becomes raw material of which he must carve his creations". I n allowing this review to be printed in Blast, Lewis seems to have made concessions to Pound, who was an ardent Kandinskyan. The ties between Vorticism in the plastic arts and the poetic style known, since late 1912, as Imagisme were tentatively established in Pound's first Vortex. But no solid link was forged until Pound's essay on Vorticism appeared in the Fortnightly Review of September 1, 1914. In November of that year, Pound announced the opening of a College of Arts. The members of its faculty, as listed in The Egoist for November 2, were to consist mainly of Vorticists and their "fellow travellers"; and the courses to be offered were to cover almost the entire range of arts and crafts. Pound himself planned to give a course in Comparative Poetry. 4 5 6

168

The essay is found in Speculations (New York, n.d.), pp. 73—109. New York, 1938, pp. 79-81. According to the announcement in The Egoist and Poetry Magazine of June, 1914.

Late in 1914 Gaudier-Brzeska voluntarily joined the French army in the trenches and shortly afterwards, hardened by the war, he dispatched a violent anti-Teutonic manifesto to his mentor. This manifesto, announcing the Vortex of Will and Conscious­ ness, was subsequently printed in the second and last issue of Blast. In March, 1915, a Vorticist exhibition was held at the Doré Gallery. But the Vorticist year of grace was over; and with the death of Gaudier-Brzeska in June the group lost its most ener­ getic member. Lewis's attempt to revitalize the movement through a second issue of Blast in July, 1915, was bound to fail. For the student of Vorticism as an English out­ growth of E., however, this issue is of interest insofar as it carries the admission that "unofficial Germany has done more for the movement this paper was founded to propagate . . . than any other country". But, on the whole, this supplementary Blast could not hide the fact that, as a movement, Vorticism had virtually ceased to exist. With Hulme's death in 1917, moreover, Lewis lost his lieutenant in charge of ideology. Yet neither Pound nor he was willing to forsake their brain child. As late as October, 1919, Lewis demanded, in a pamphlet entitled The Caliph's Design, the creation of an architectural Vortex. And in the twenties his American confrère solemnly informed the world of his discovery of the musical Vorticist George Antheil, the American "Bad Boy of Music" best known as the composer of the score for Leger's famous Ballet Mécanique. Following this historical sketch, we must now discuss the basic assumptions of the movement. Let us recall t h a t both Romanticists and Impressionists had wanted either to merge the arts, as in Wagner's Gesamtkunstwerk, or, at least, to use them interchangeably: Impressionist poetry sought to turn into music, and Impressionist music was eminently pictorial. Anti-Impressionism, and thus Vorticism, on the other hand, wishes to save the arts from such pollution. And like the makers of epic opera and epic drama, the Vorticists in particular sought to forbid any intercourse between the arts, since they feared t h a t it would result in the interpenetration and, ultimately, the confusion of their distinctly unique properties. Indeed, the Vorticist knows no greater offense against aesthetic propriety than the attempt to express "one thing in terms of another". Obviously, says the purist Pound, "you cannot have 'cubist' poetry or 'imagist' painting". 7 Being a "system t h a t swallows up those who approach it", the Vortex was to divest the arts of all but their "primary pigments or forms in which every concept, every emotion presents itself to the vivid consciousness". 8 What precisely, however, are these "primary pigments" which form the still center of each art? They are, in Pound's words, "sound in music, formed words in literature, images in poetry, forms in design, color in position in painting, and form or design in three planes in sculpture". The difficulties Pound faced with regard to some of these definitions are obvious. What these pigments have in common is their formal, as contrasted with a possible conceptual, value. "Our respect is not for subject matter", says Pound the Vorticist. 9 Indeed, in order to be truly Vorticist an art must be either abstract or capable of 7

Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir (London, n.d.), p. 81. «Ibid., p. 93. 9 Ibid., p. 98. 169

abstraction. I t is precisely in this way that Daubler speaks of E. as aiming at "Farbe ohne Bezeichnung, Zeichnung und kein Erklären, im Rhythmus festgesetztes Hauptwort". Pound, b u t especially Lewis, wished to concentrate on the point of maximum energy, the heart of the Vortex, "where it has not yet spread itself into flaccidity, elaboration and secondary application"; 10 in other words, before it has acquired content. At this stage Pound was very eager to oust what he called "literary values" and pre­ ferred non-programmatic music, non-symbolic literature, and non-representative paint­ ing and sculpture. One final note concerning the problem of communication as posed by Romanti­ cism/Impressionism and the anti-Impressionist school respectively. The basic difference between these approaches can be gauged from the title of Worringer's book Absfraldion und Einfühlung (1908), to be discussed below. The Romantic artist sought to establish the closest possible rapport between himself, his works, and his audience. The public thus is invariably asked to empathize through the finished product with its maker. The anti-Impressionist, on the other hand, wants to place a barrier of abstraction or alienation between himself and the beholder. This applies even to Kandinsky's "Expres­ sionist" paintings; for no matter how vigorously their creator would deny this, it is impossible to empathize with compositions made up of geometrical shapes or purely ornamental designs, which, although they may well be repositories of genuine feelings, cannot convey such feelings with any degree of accuracy. Theoretically, E. affirms the Romantic/Impressionist position in this respect, but, practically, it is barred from main­ taining it, at least in the plastic arts, whereas Expressionist poetry and music—and, to a lesser extent, the drama—are much more frankly emotional. This distinction is important if one wishes to understand why the Vorticists leaned so heavily on Expres­ sionist painting but slighted Expressionist music and totally ignored German Expres­ sionist poetry. Worringer's book (which was not translated into English until 1953) may not have been known by Pound and Lewis at first hand, 1 1 although they were unquestion­ ably exposed to its thesis through Hulme's extended paraphrase in his lecture. Abstraktion und Einfühlung, at any rate, is an anthropologically oriented psychology of art which, even though it had no immediate application to the contemporary scene, closely reflected the spirit of the age of anxiety ushered in during the years preceding World War I. I t thus possesses what Worringer calls "inner topicality". As a psychologist of Weltanschauung, Worringer discerns three basic approaches to art or, more specifically, to the conditions which give rise to art. He rejects the Aris­ totelian notion of art as a reflection of the mimetic urge; for that would reduce it, as in the Platonic view, to a mere copy of nature. Nor does he share the opinion of those nineteenth-century writers who claimed that art was wholly or largely conditioned by the materials at the artist's disposal. For here, too, art would fail to express an

10 11

Ibid., p. 102. Although Lewis studied in Munich in February and March of 1906, he does not mention Worringer anywhere in the published letters. 170

individual urge. And what, under such circumstances, would become of the cherished concept of originality? Art, according to Worringer, can be satisfactorily explained only if one assumes that it results from a creative impulse generated in the aesthetically predisposed indi­ vidual. Kunst, for the Expressionist, is not a matter of ability (Können) but stems from an inner spiritual necessity, an artistic volition (Kunstwollen) that exists prior to, and independent of, any object or mode of operation. The Vorticist, too, exalts the inventive faculty and creative energy, both mental and physical, t h a t goes into the making of an objet (d'art. Art thus comes into being when the absolute, i.e., abstract formative will, encounters the world of concretions that forms the raw material. And the creative act is regarded as the embodiment of the Kunstwollen in a tangible medium. Theoretically, however, a Raphael without hands is still a Raphael. Enlarging on this view, the Expressionist took the conscious or unconscious in­ tentions, and the extent to which they have been realized, to constitute the chief criteria in the critical evaluation of artistic phenomena. He thus inevitably succumbed to the intentional fallacy. Art criticism, if it follows in Worringer's footsteps, must cease to apply conventional intrinsic standards, such as beauty determined by mathe­ matical proportion or symmetry measured by the number of acts in a play or feet in a line, and must concern itself solely with the force and intensity of the Kunstwollen invested in a given work. Worringer lists two different modes in which the formative will asserts itself: the one aims at reproducing organic form, while the other seeks to avoid or transcend nature. The former type of Kunstwollen gives rise to realistic (Worringer says "natural­ istic") art, the latter to an art of more or less rigid abstraction. The urge to abstraction (Abstrakfionsdrang), the only one which Worringer takes seriously, is equally strong in primitive and in highly sophisticated societies, i.e., in those societies that either antecede or succeed what Hulme called the humanistic phase. In a primitive society, the urge to abstraction issues from a numinous feeling, a space shyness which alienates the savage from the world surrounding him. In order not to be crushed by his en­ vironment he, therefore, creates two-dimensional, geometric forms which affirm his superiority. Civilized man, on the other hand, by studying and exploring nature, learns to understand it, until he begins to feel at home in it. Only at that stage of development, Worringer claims, does he derive pleasure from reproducing it. And in the extreme case of a daydreaming promeneur solitaire he may even wish to merge back into it. This empathetic attitude toward nature and art is abandoned when nature, having been intellectually transcended, becomes indifferent to the beholder. Then it is no longer capable of inspiring awe or worthy of being joyfully contemplated. Thus the Oriental artist, adduced b y Worringer as a paradigm, formulates a strictly anti-realistic aesthetic and creates an artistic world entirely sui generis. Expressionists and Vorticists alike eagerly embraced these views. Suspicious of the so-called humanistic art, i.e., the art of Greece and Rome, of the Renaissance, Neo-Classicism, and the art from Romanticism to Impressionism, they either sought to regress to the primitive stage or to reach the level of abstraction. The members 171

of the Brücke group, whose graphic work Lewis greatly admired, were deeply imbued with the spirit of African and especially Polynesian art, while Kandinsky indulged in a far more serene and suspiciously decorative, pseudo-Oriental manner, and Marc applied the Cubist lesson to his increasingly abstract, i.e., spiritualized, animal paint­ ings. The Vorticists, finally, aimed at joining the organic with the mechanical by pro­ longing the movement toward abstraction to the point where man begins to resemble the machine. I n what, according to Pound's report in The Egoist of February 16, 1914, was an "almost unintelligible lecture'' presented to the London Quest Society, the young English Bergsonian T. E . Hulme epitomized Worringer's theories with a view toward linking the, by now manifestly Expressionist, aesthetic to a theological theory of dis­ satisfaction and the ensuing philosophical pessimism. Hulme emphasized the qualita­ tive leap t h a t separates transcendence from immanence, the absolute from the relative, stability from the flux, and Classicism from Romanticism. A classicist to the bone, he wanted to restore space shyness on a conscious, intellectual level. On this level, but not in the lyrical manner of Kandinsky (whom he despised), he wished the modern artist to operate, although he himself was by no means sure of what the new art he envisaged would be like. One thing, however, he never questioned: namely, that once again art had become the only medium capable of relieving man from the tension gener­ ated by his fall; the only way, as a matter of fact, to achieve some sort of satisfaction. Hulme felt that, while the scientist must content himself with describing surface phenomena, artistic genius has the gift for entering the heart of things. Science, in other words, is concerned with appearances, art with essences. The scientist, piecing together innumerable fragments of observation, hopefully aims at reconstructing the universe in his laboratory. B u t since he remains unable to see the inner springs, as it were, the motivations inherent in the natural processes, the explanations he provides are only skin-deep. Instead of condensing reality, he spreads it thin, substitutes quan­ tity for quality, and makes complex statements about simple phenomena. Opposed to these laboriously constructed "extensive manifolds" (to use Hulme's terminology) are the intensive ones which give rise to art and which art gives rise to. I n Bergson's view, the absolute (Hulme's "intensive manifold") cannot be known by means of the intellect or expressed symbolically, but it has to be grasped by the intuition. Like the ecstatic unio of the mystic, the intuition (whose nature Bergson defined in his Introduction to Metaphysics, of which Hulme furnished an authorized English version) places us inside the manifold and thereby enables us to be one with it. Unfortunately, however, the intuitional synthesis is not durable. I t is rather a momentary flash of insight incapable of repetition and immediately swallowed by the flux. But is there no means, Hulme—turning anti-Bergsonian—asks himself, of detaching the intuition from its living context, and of preserving it from the ravages of time, which is the destroyer of things organic ? Certainly there must be. For as long as it lasts, the intuition seems "eternal" and not subject to decay, since it subsists in the spatial substratum of time, which is the indivisible moment. If the vision could somehow be transferred to a non-temporal sphere, it would be safe. What was needed, in short, was a geometric rather than a vital or realistic art. 172

The artist, to be entrusted with this task, is ideally equipped to eternalize the flash of insight by grafting it onto whatever medium is most congenial to him. He is the man who, dissatisfied with the generalized notions of ordinary perception, seeks to reproduce the "exact curve" of his experience. He will not succeed in doing so, however, unless he treats his subject directly and in such a way as to keep feelings, reflections, and other secondary applications from intervening. The artist must have "the particular faculty of mind to see things as they really are, and apart from con­ ventional ways in which he has been trained to see them". He needs "the concentrated state of mind, the grip over himself which is necessary in the actual expression of what one sees". "Wherever one gets sincerity," Hulme concludes, "one gets the fundamental quality of good a r t " . Let me reiterate emphatically that what Hulme has in mind is decidedly not an Impressionistic art of the flux, as the phrase "exact curve" might lead one to believe. I t is not a cinematographic art in which the flashes follow each other in rapid succession, but an essentially static art culminating in the fixation of "suspended energy". For good reasons, the machine is the object most dearly loved by the Vorticists but loved only when in repose. Nowhere within the orbit of Expressionist painting do we encounter the urge to reduce man to the machine which characterizes Lewis's pictorial style from about 1912 to the end of that crucial decade. But if we consider the two extremes of Expres­ sionist art, Kandinsky's decorative style and the terse, neo-primitive woodcuts of the Dresden group, it becomes clear why Lewis should have been drawn toward the latter rather than the former. In the second issue of Blast Lewis attacked Kandinsky as a maker of "ethereal, lyrical and cloud-like pictures" who, in spite of his being "the only purely abstract painter in Europe", is "so careful to be passive, medium-like and com­ mitted by his theory to avoid almost all powerful and definite forms that he is, at best, wandering and slack". 12 For the one thing no Vorticist can condone is the lack of form which results from the absence or suppression of the formative will. What makes a Vorticist is precisely "the weeding out of sentiment and the retention of what is hard, clean and plastic". 1 3 As far as their views on Kandinsky were concerned, Pound and Lewis failed to see eye to eye. For whom but the Russian painter could Pound have had in mind when he spoke of the primary pigment of painting as being "color in position?" Pound was equally fascinated, no doubt, by Kandinsky's treatment of his art in musical terms, i.e., by his avowed attempt to express emotions unattached to specific, recognizable objects. Recounting a crucial moment in the pre-verbal phase of the composition óf " I n a Station of the Metro", the American poet confided: When I came to read Kandinsky's chapter on the language of form and color, I found little t h a t was new to me. I only felt t h a t someone else under­ stood what I understood, and had written it out very clearly. I t seems quite natural to me t h a t an artist should have just as much pleasure in an arrange12 13

Wyndham Lewis, the Artist (London, 1939), p. 140. Ibid., p. 147. 173

ment of planes or in a pattern of figures, as in painting portraits of fine ladies, or in portraying the Mother of God, as the Symbolists bid us. 14 Lewis agreed with the Brücke group in so far as their craving for simplicity and their insistence on essentials was concerned. He found their art to be "African, in t h a t it is sturdy, cutting through every time to the monotonous wall of space, and intense yet hale: permeated by eternity—an atmosphere in which only the black core of life rises and is silhouetted". These artists did their best in the woodcut medium, "this miniature sculpture where the black nervous fluid of existence in flood forms into hard stagnant masses". 15 While sympathetic toward the end product of the creative endeavors of these artists, Lewis is sure to have questioned the psychological basis of their art. True, the primitivism of a Kirchner and a Pechstein was neither as naive as t h a t displayed by the douanier Rousseau nor as formal as that of Picasso; for they had made primitive sculpture the point of departure in their quest for the aesthetic correlate of the collective unconscious. Modern man, in wanting to plumb the depths of the primitive soul—as O'Neill was shortly to undertake in The Emperor Jones—must first rid himself of consciousness and the repressions imposed by it. Only when the top layers of the mind have been pierced can he hope to abandon himself to the instincts and emotions which play around the dark core of life, t h a t boiling lava which heats the human soul. Having touched bottom, however, the Expressionist seeks to reascend to the surface by means of a violent projection. Thus Expressionist art has no structure in the classical sense of the word, no harmonious proportions, that is to say, or symmetry. Instead, the beholder is faced with what, from the mimetic point of view, we are forced to call distortions: foreshortenings and jagged zigzag lines reflecting the frenzied dynamism of the soul. "When the noose is put around the condemned man's neck," says Däubler, "he recapitulates his entire life in a single moment. That can only be E . " While the Expressionists sought to expose the throbbing heart of the anguished organism, man, the Vorticists had radically different intentions. For where the Expres­ sionist works initially from the outside in, from the shell to the core, from intellect to emotion, and then suddenly reverses his direction, the Vorticist, using the initial flash of insight as his starting point, focuses on the gradual hardening in the direction of the shell. With Lewis, he begins by "becoming" nature. Around that Bergsonian intuition, and guided by the "living will from within", he then progresses from the center outward (in the ex post facto reconstruction of the process). The force of the impulse diminishes in proportion to the growing distance from the core; and as the surface is reached, the pace is slackened and a hardening of forms occurs. Since the shell, however, is the only visible portion of the work and the only tangible record of its formation, the finished product will be outwardly static. Thus, while soul states are manifestly present in Expressionist art, they are merely implied in its Vorticist counterpart. E. shows life in the raw, Van Gogh's "red-hot furnace of humanity", whereas Vorticism seeks to absorb the machine into the aesthetic consciousness. The 14 15

174

Gaudier-Brzesha: A Memoir, p. 100f. Wyndham Lewis, the Artist, p. 109.

machine, in Vorticist philosophy, suggests a state of transition from organism to mecha­ nism, or vice versa. Its aesthetic validity lies in the fact that it is neither of these and refuses to be committed one way or the other since, as Lewis puts it, "the sudden extinc­ tion and neutralization awaits you as matter or as the machine". "Some adjustment between the approach of a conscious being to that mechanical perfection, and the fact of his mechanical incompetence," Lewis stated, "is t h a t situation which produces art. The game consists in seeing how near you can get". The finest art, accordingly, is "not unorganized life". I t is rather that in which "Euclid is buried in the living flesh". A machine in action loses its shape; a machine that fails even to suggest movement, on the other hand, is dead. As Hugh Kenner suggests, Lewis chose the Vortex as his emblem "because it negates the stream, and because it is a spatial rather than a temporal image". 16 Yet, he should have added, it implies fierce motion. Thus it is both true and false to say that the Vorticists engaged in an intermi­ nable "war against time". Common sense would indicate that, as an art, sculpture is more "primitive" than painting. For the sculptor literally, i.e., three-dimensionally, copies nature, whereas the painter is forced to reduce sculptural masses to two-dimensional, flat surfaces. I t is only by means of a highly complex method known as three-point perspective that the painter manages to give a semblance of reality. Thus sculptural forms, being plastic, are real, while pictorial forms remain fictitious. Worringer, from his anthro­ pological viewpoint, however, suggested that, in its primitive stage, sculpture is actually more sophisticated than painting or drawing, though surely unwittingly so. For in his eyes the fact that primitive sculpture is almost invariably endowed "with the more permanent values of necessity and regularity" went to prove that, in this early phase, art was fighting a battle against nature. For Worringer, sculpture "becomes a real work of art only when it appears to be two-dimensional". Vorticist sculpture was to be the living proof of this contention. Gaudier-Brzeska spoke of the plastic soul as "intensity of life bursting the plane" and defined sculptural feeling as the "appreciation of masses in relation". For him, the sculptor's greatest asset was his ability to define these masses by planes. Sculpture was to be "energy cut into stone" and thus immobilized. Epstein, Constantin Brancusi, Archipenko, and Modigliani were the Vorticist sculptor's true comrades-in-arms, since they, too, were moving on the fringe of abstraction. The father of sculptural evil, on the other hand, was Auguste Rodin, the Bergsonian maker of "perverted cascades of sleek, white, machine-ground stone". 17 True, in the final phase of Impressionism, subject matter begins to disappear as the act of seeing becomes more important than the thing seen. But no matter how abstract this art may become—witness Monet's late Nymphéas series—it invariably remains an art of the surface. I t can never be "the abstraction of intense feeling". In deploring the "formless, vague assertions" of Kandinsky's paintings, Gaudier-Brzeska, in fact, treated t h a t master as an Impressionist. 16 17

Wyndham Lewis (Norfolk, 1954), p. 66. Wyndham Lewis, Men Without Art (London, 1934), p. 117. 175

Returning to the sculptural Vortex, we call to mind that, the machine being a plastic thing, the Vorticist painter, by reducing it to two dimensions, was able to absorb it into the aesthetic consciousness. But the Vorticist sculptor could do nothing of the sort, since he himself works in the plastic medium. The utilitarian machine as a symbol of progress and energy thus enters directly into competition with art. From this premise, Gaudier-Brzeska concluded that, while "the field for combination of abstract form is nearly unexplored in Occidental painting . . . machinery itself has used up so many of the fine combinations of three-dimensional inorganic forms that there is very little use in experimenting with them in sculpture". And while clinging to his definition of sculpture as an expression of "abstract thoughts of conscious superior­ ity", he contemplated a return to natural forms, although hardly of the kind which Pound condemned as "caressable". As for the struggle for pre-eminence among the Vorticist arts, the advantage, which, according to the group's aesthetic, painting enjoys over sculpture as a medium, is partly offset by the sculptor's privilege to leave visible traces of the energy expended in the creative act. The painter traditionally glosses over the physical labor that goes into the making of a panel by smoothing out its surface when all is done. Although the Impressionists, with their impulsive and irregular brush-stroke, broke with t h a t tradition (as artists of earlier times had sometimes done with their impasto), still so little energy is needed to wield a brush that the stroke, no matter how vigorous, will not seem to be an imprint of manual labor. The sculptor, however, especially when working with hard, recalcitrant materials, literally cuts energy into the stone; and Michelangelo's pride is also that of Gaudier-Brzeska, who admired those masters in whose works "every inch of the surface is won at the point of the chisel [and] every stroke of the hammer is a physical and mental effort". Before turning to the literary Vortex, we ought to take note that Wyndham Lewis's call for an architectural Vortex, as issued in The Caliph's Design, remained unheeded. Houses, for Lewis—as for Le Corbusier—were machines for living developed in accor­ dance with a somewhat mysterious "law of efficient evolution". Everything was to start from the box shape, with all surface ornaments being banished. The design of the box, however, was to be left to the artist rather than the engineer. One suspects that the functionalism of the Bauhaus style, which wrought a revolution in architecture as well as interior design, fulfilled some of the vaguely adumbrated conditions of the Vortex. In literature, the Vorticists concentrated almost exclusively on poetry, both lyrical and satiric, and prose satire. Pound was the apologist for the former, Lewis for the latter. What they agreed upon was the need for an utmost economy of means and precision of statement, as well as the elimination of all rhetorical padding. Pound shared John Yeats's views on the "relation of beauty to certitude" and preferred "satire, which is due to emotion, to any sham emotion". Certitude, in Pound's vocab­ ulary, meant the search for le mot juste, in which Ford Madox Hueffer, the self-styled "grandfather of Vorticism", was engaged, or for l'image juste, the image exactly corre­ sponding to the feeling it is meant to convey, in the absence of all sentimental gushing. 176

Since Pound regarded the image as the "primary pigment" of lyrical poetry, the art which he and his fellow-Vorticists practiced is justly called Imagisme. The poetic method used by this school consists largely in what Pound, in the section "Language" of his essay How to Read, calls Phanopoeia or "the casting of images upon the visual imagination". As he puts it in his book on Gaudier-Brzeska, poetry must be of the kind where painting and sculpture seem as if they were "just coming over into speech". The primary pigment of poetry was thus openly borrowed from a sister art. An image, in Pound's opinion, is that which "presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time". In so doing, it gives " a sudden-sense of liberation from the limits of time and space", thereby constituting what Hulme would have called an intensive manifold delivered from the flux. Such a manifold, however, can only be grasped by means of an intuition, just as it owes its existence to a flash of insight. Hence the logical absurdity of an explication de texte of the Imagist poem or the Japanese haiku, its F a r Eastern prototype. "The whole art," Pound stated in a letter of July 27, 1916, to Iris Barry, "is divided into (a) concision of style, or saying what you mean in the clearest and fewest words, (b) the actual necessity for creating or constructing something; of presenting an image, or enough images of concrete things arranged to stir the reader". 18 The rest is either psychological plaster or, in Pound's own words, "simple emotional statements of facts" or "simple credos". But statements of fact and credos are "purely optional, not essential, often superfluous and therefore bad". By ousting literary values, as Pound felt Whistler, Kandinsky, and the Cubists had done in painting, he sought to purify the art of poetry through a process analogous to, but hardly identical with, the method described in Verlaine's programmatic poem "Art Poétique". Lifted from the flux, the image and, hence, the poem takes on a distinctly spatial quality. I t renounces the temporal dimension, whereas the Impressionists sought to overcome the spatial limitations of their art by showing a given subject at different hours of the day or seasons of the year. Imagist poetry rejects any portrayal of action or character. For none of the images it sees fit to use resembles the Proustian madeleine around which a vast body of memories, and ultimately the entire past, is meant to crystallize. Such secondary applications, in Pound's view, merely soften the "hard light" and blunt the "clear edges" which he regarded as the hallmarks of Imagist poetry. Imagisme, then, harks back to the art of the Parnassians rather than to any other school of poetry. As for the image itself, Pound prefers to use it without any symbolic overtones. " I believe," he argued, " t h a t the proper and perfect symbol is the natural object, that if a man use 'symbols' he must so use them that their symbolic function does not obtrude; so that a sense, and the poetic quality of the passage, is not lost to those who do not understand the symbol as such, to whom, for instance, a hawk is a hawk." 1 9 The image used as symbol, i.e., doubled, is obviously no longer a primary pigment in the Vorticist sense. Unlike the more elaborate figures of speech, it always forms 18 19

The Letters of Ezra Pound, 1907-1941, ed. D. D. Paige (New York, 1950), p. 90f. Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, ed. T. S. Eliot (London, 1954), p. 9. 177

part of the "record of the precise instant when a thing outward and objective trans­ forms itself into a thing inward and subjective". This notion, which should be seen in the light of Lewis's pictorial theory, is strikingly illustrated by the transition from the first to the second line of " I n a Station of the Metro". In a footnote to his essay on Henry James (1918), Pound remarks that "most good prose arises, perhaps, from an instinct of negation", that "it is the detailed and convincing analysis of something detestable, of something t h a t one wants to eliminate", and that poetry is "the assertion of a positive, i.e., of a desire, and endures for a longer period" "Poetic satire", Pound decrees, "is only an assertion of this positive inversely, i.e., as if of an opposed hatred". I n Pound's view, the satiric poet is a surgeon who, cutting into the decadent body of poetry, purifies the dialect of the tribe. "The cult of ugliness —," Pound said in corroboration of this view, "Villon, Baudelaire, Corbière, Beardsley are diagnosis. Flaubert is diagnosis. Satire, if we are to ride this metaphor to staggers, is surgery, insertions and amputations." 2 0 Ultimately, however, the cult of ugliness (poetic satire) was to be replaced by the cult of beauty (Imagisme), the surgery proper by plastic surgery. With Pound, then, poetic satire was a prerequisite to poetry, while Wyndham Lewis sought to identify prose satire with art. Lewis's views on satire are prefigured in the preliminary Vortices of the first Blast, where Swift is blessed "for his bleak and solemn wisdom of laughter", and black humor (to use a Surrealist label) is shown to be desirable only "if it has fought like tragedy". Summarizing Lewis's theory of satire, as developed in Men Without Art, we note that this arch-Vorticist wished to reduce organic form to geometric abstraction, without, however, quite removing all vestiges of life. Satire, in analogy to Vorticist painting, was to be "a resistant and finely sculptured surface" of words, something conceived primarily in visual terms. Since the eye was to be supreme, it was the shell, and not the core, of things t h a t mattered. Essences were to be conveyed b y means of this exter­ nalized approach and in keeping with "the classical manner of apprehending". Empathy was to be banished; and Lewis accused his fellow-writers Joyce and Proust of drifting along on their characters' stream of consciousness. In so doing, he claimed, both sacri­ ficed the principle of objectivity to the quest for an evanescent "inner reality". He justly maintained t h a t "to let the reader into the minds of the characters . . . is the method least suited to satire". For the "jellyfish that floats in the center of the sub­ terranean stream of the 'dark' Unconscious", he wished, accordingly, to substitute "the shield of the tortoise, or the rigid stylistic articulations of the grasshopper". Only "the extremely aged, young children, half-wits and animals" were to be shown from the inside. Thus Lewis resumed his warfare against time. He was also convinced t h a t satire must be strictly non-ethical, meaning that it must not deal with specific individuals, classes, or societies in a given historical context. Instead, he wanted it to be "metaphysical" and aimed at man in general. Unlike the caricaturist, who suppresses certain details at the expense of others which are more prominent, the "metaphysical" satirist seeks to delete specific references with a view 20

178

Ibid., p. 45.

toward finding the lowest common denominator. This leads to an increasing dehumanization of art, to use a phrase originally coined by Lewis and later driven home by José Ortega y Gasset. Precisely this dehumanization, however, was to be "the chief diagnostic of the modern world of the machine age". Lewis the satirist was satisfied only when he had reached the point where his figures "turn into machines governed by routine". He wished to provoke a cruel laughter t h a t was to be tragic in its effect, "if a. thing can be tragic without pity and terror". In postulating the Vorticist theory of satire, Lewis was well aware of the difficulties entailed by its application. For literature, as he saw it, "is far more directly involved in life than the pictorial, or the plastic". The kind of abstraction he had in mind was, therefore, much harder to come by. " I do not believe," Lewis stated, " t h a t anything in the literary field can be done t h a t will correspond with what has been called abstract design." This brooks no doubt as long as one defines literature as that art which con­ veys a verbal meaning. And neither Pound nor Lewis was ready to emulate the example of those German Expressionists who, having rid themselves of Dichtung, moved in the direction first of Wortkunst and then of Lautkunst, i.e., a kind of poetry in which words or sounds are used abstractly and solely for their rhythmic and musical qualities. Space limitations forbid even the briefest summary of Pound's strange and mani­ festly lopsided theory of Vorticist music which, originating in views not dissimilar to those held by Jean Cocteau and Les Six—who were violently anti-Wagnerian and anti-Impressionist—was subsequently set forth in a volume entitled Antheil and the Treatise on Harmony,21 The book redounds in praise of spatialized tone clusters ("musical slabs of sound"), and its central argument revolves around the view that the art of composing consists "in knowing what note you want, how long you want it held, and how long one is to wait for the next note, and in making the exact design for these durations". In concluding, it seems natural to ask why the movement under discussion did not survive, why it failed to make an impact on the contemporary English scene, and why it did not merge into the main stream of European avant-garde art. Lewis himself repeatedly complained that England was a country in which no movement, i.e., no coherent group of contemporaries pursuing an identical goal and subscribing to a clearly formulated program, could flourish. Neither Naturalism nor Impressionism —which counted so many British painters among its forebears — made history in Eng­ land. E. and Futurism did not fare any better, and Futurism was so short-lived that it collapsed with the departure of Marinetti. Surrealism, though noisily proclaimed by Herbert Read, never really caught on. Neither the nineteenth nor the twentieth century produced an indigenous English movement; and the gap t h a t Vorticism was meant to fill remained open. A second reason adduced by Lewis concerns the fact that abstract art, so widely accepted in Germany, Russia, Holland, and the rest of the continent, was too far advanced for the Pre-Raphaelite taste of the conservative public used to what Lewis called the "regular British time-lag". I t was only with the arrival of Henry Moore, 21

Chicago, 1927. 179

Barbara Hepworth, Ben Nicholson, and Paul Nash that the breakthrough occurred. And even then Vorticism was cheated of its reward, since nobody seemed to remember its pioneering contribution. Thirdly, and lastly, there are the intrinsic factors. Shortly before his death, GaudierBrzeska began to realize the need for a return to organic forms in sculpture. Around 1921 Lewis followed suit by creating a series of paintings described as "pure abstraction and stylized nature", and by 1939 he was a convert to "super-Naturalism," his anti­ dote to the poison of super-Realism/Surrealism. In literature, Pound and Lewis shirked any experiment with abstract sound combinations and thereby doomed their own efforts to oust literary values from literature. In music, Vorticism was never more than a personal whim, almost a hoax. The fragmentation of Vorticist art was thus inevitable almost from the start. And the critic trying to recapture the spirit of this movement is tempted to exclaim with Faust: "We have the components in our hand/ but lack, alas, the spiritual band." Whereas E., temporarily obscured by Neue Sachlichkeif, went into hiding in 1933, only to emerge triumphantly after World War II, Vorticism, its British stepchild, was not destined to outlive its infancy.

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BREON

MITCHELL

EXPRESSIONISM I N ENGLISH DRAMA AND PROSE L I T E R A T U R E

As Ulrich Weisstein points out in the preceding essay, England as a nation has shown itself singularly unreceptive to literary movements imported from abroad. Since the First World War this has been particularly true with regard to contemporary German literature and art. The strong anti-German bias, still present, to a certain extent, in literary and academic circles, was undoubtedly a hindrance to the direct impact of E. on English literature. There were, however, manifestations in English cultural life which shared some common stylistic features with that movement: Vorticism and cer­ tain prose experiments in the English novel, discussed below. Furthermore, there were developments in the English theater of the thirties which seemed to point, in part, to the influence of Expressionist themes and techniques. Finally, there has been a recent tendency, on the part of some literary critics, to broaden the definition of the term E. in such a way as to subsume almost the whole of the modern development of the arts. 1 I do not intend, in this essay, to search for interesting parallels in English literature to such a broadly defined conception of the movement. Rather I shall discuss the reception of German E., and its characteristic stylistic innovations, in England, and attempt to clarify and delimit its influence upon t h a t country's dramatic and narrative literature. II Only one aspect of German Expressionist literature significantly occupied English readers and theater-goers between the two world wars: the Expressionist drama. 2 As early as 1920, Londoners had the opportunity to see Kaisers From Morn till Midnight produced by the Stage Society. By 1928 it had received four additional produc­ tions, two in London, and one each in Oxford and Cambridge. There also had been three 1 An extreme example of this tendency may be found in Johannes Fabricius, The Unconscious and Mr. Eliot: A Study in E. (Copenhagen, 1967). The author defines E. as "an artistic attitude which, far from viewing the elements of the outer world as an independent reality to be described, conceives the phenomena of nature as the material for the expression of a subjective state of mind" (p. 9). In Jungian terms, he sees "T. S. Eliot and the whole movement of Expressionist a r t " as representing "the eruption of the collective unconscious into the conscious strata of modern civi­ lization and modern Zeitgeist" (p. 11). 2 For a detailed discussion of the critical reception of German drama in England during this period see Hans Galinsky, Deutsches Schrifttum der Gegenwart in der englischen Kritik der Nachkriegszeit (1919-1936) (Munich, 1938). The reception of E. is treated in Chapter IV, pp. 163-194, to which I am indebted.

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productions in English of Gas, and single productions of four other Kaiser plays in London, Hampsted, and Dublin. But it was Toller who proved to be the most successful and widely-known German Expressionist in England, beginning with the Stage Society production of Masses and Man in 1924. By the end of the Twenties, English theater­ goers were familiar with The Machine-Wreckers, Hoppla, wir leben, and Broken-Bow (Hinkemann) as well. Interest in both the form and subject matter of the German drama was further strengthened by a personal interest in Toller. As early as 1922, the Times Literary Supplement spoke favorably of "the young Bolshevist writer, who is still in prison". 3 The image of the imprisoned artist seemingly caught the imagination of the public and prepared the friendly reception he received in 1933, upon his exile from Nazi Germany. Those who attended the productions of German Expressionist dramas in England were clearly motivated by a general interest in the state of post-war Germany and, in particular, the political situation in t h a t defeated country. The propagandistic aspect of several of Toller's plays was not lost upon English critics, who spent a good deal of time discussing the problem of art versus propaganda. Although the term "Ex­ pressionist" was almost never used in the twenties, several formal aspects were singled out which bore the stamp of the Expressionist style; and the general force and dramatic power of the presentations were frequently noted. The originality of form and stage technique was often alluded to, although the reactions were, at first, primarily negative. The "loose" and "rhetorical" style, as well as the highly emotional tone, of these plays ran against the natural grain of the English character, as well as the English theatrical tradition. From Morn till Midnight was the first German play to be produced in England after the war (1920), and with it arose a "mild controversy... as to whether German works should now be performed in England". 4 But critical attention ultimately cen­ tered upon the formal and stylistic innovations of Gas. The "unorthodoxy of dramat­ ic technique" 5 was seen to consist in the episodic structure of this play and Kaiser's use of types rather than individual characters. The reaction was by no means entirely positive, and critics remained puzzled by the new drama. Reviewing Gas, Graham Sutton put the question most directly: Surely, such violent contradictions of normality must have symbolic mean­ ings? But in our efforts to discover these meanings, we are losing touch with the play . . . What is E. anyway? I protest I ask in all seriousness. No one seems to know this secret, except earnest folk without the gift of impart­ ing it . . . My own eyes, both physical and spiritual, are baffled by the black lips and so forth; the floor-lamps throw no light on anybody's nature, for me. 6 Arnold Bennett pronounced the most damning judgment in his Journal (1929): "Extraordinary and incomprehensible, the prestige of German plays in advanced 3 Times Literary Supplement, December 28, 1922, p. 872 (a favorable review of Die Maschinenstürmer). 4 "Editorial Notes", The London Mercury, II/7 (May, 1920), p. 5. «A. W. G. Randall, The Criterion, V (1927), pp. 350-351. 6 Graham Sutton, "Two Foreign Plays", The Bookman, L X X I (December, 1926), p. 206.

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L o n d o n ! . . . Both these German plays 7 are ill-constructed or not constructed at all, sentimental, long-winded, full of impossible dialogue, and in a general way feeble and messy. They are not original, but they have an air of originality, because they are episodic, cinematographic, fragmentary, and occupied with low or vicious life." 8 But the "prestige" of German plays alluded to, in so far as it went beyond the public's simple curiosity about, and interest in, post-war Germany, rested primarily in the stylistic features which upset Bennett. As late as 1936, in a review of a volume of Toller's plays in English translation, Michael Sayers praised them as a "stimulating model for the young dramatist". 9 Even the varied critical reaction could not ob­ scure the fact t h a t German Expressionist drama formed a major part of the theatrical life of London in the twenties. English critics first began to discuss E. as a literary style around 1924, that is, at about the same time it was dying out in Germany. By the early thirties, the interest in producing Expressionist plays had waned, and the phenomenon could be viewed in what approached a historical perspective. E., in retrospect, was regarded as a typically "German" literary movement, reflecting the particular social and political problems of the German people. Its positive elements were said to include creative innovations in stage technique and dramatic form (which, in allowing scope for the creative talents of the stage director, had undoubtedly contributed to the frequency of productions). On the negative side, its themes were seen as an overly-pessimistic reading of the problems of post-war Germany: "This drama had truth and passion; but it was also a drama of despair, lacking a positive faith and invoking the complete ruin of the old order of things as a way of escape from the nation's humiliation. As such it was doomed to failure." 10 The interest German Expressionist drama aroused in English theatrical circles seems to have been out of all proportion to its impact on English playwrights. In the light of what has already been said, the reason for this discrepancy seems to be fairly obvious. The thematic material used by the Expressionists held little attraction for English writers. The problems dramatized and the questions raised may have been burning ones in Germany but had no direct bearing on England. In the twenties, after all, England was a victorious and relatively stable nation. A sharp break with tradition, the complete restructuring of the social and political order, and violent Aufbruch even on the personal level simply were not ideas appealing to literary England, writers and readers alike. If Expressionist drama was to make itself felt in English literature, it would have to be in terms other than thematic. But even its stylistic and formal innovations were ill-suited to present the familiar English subjects. I t was not until the thirties that English theatrical productions began to take on some of the characteristics of the Expressionist stage, and even then the impact 7 The plays were The Outskirts (of undetermined authorship) and Toller's Hoppla!, both produced at the Gate Theatre. 8 Arnold Bennett, Journal of Things Old and New (Garden City, New York, 1930), pp. 221— 222. Bennett adds: " I saw Hoppla in Berlin once, and in the middle of the performance unobtru­ sively slipped away from the theatre" (p. 222). 9 Michael Sayers, "A Year in the Theatre", The Criterion (July, 1936), p. 651. 10 R. D. Charques, Contemporary Literature and Social Revolution (London, 1933), p. 154.

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was largely indirect. Within the English theater proper only the verse plays of Auden and Isherwood displayed certain "Expressionist" features. But the dramatic experi­ ments of T. S. Eliot, and the powerful creations of Sean O'Casey should also be discussed in this context. In its originality and intellectual subtlety, the poetry of T. S. Eliot strongly resists categorization. But it is worth noting Eliot's involvement, around 1910, with the Vorticist-Imagist movement. 11 By the mid-twenties he began attempting to cast his verse in dramatic form, with the hope of creating a poetry of the theater which would approach the rhythms of natural speech and present a modern counterpart to the blank verse of Elizabethan drama. His first experiment, Sweeney Agonistes: Fragments of an Aristophanic Melodrama (1926-1927), remained unfinished. The breadth of literary allusion already apparent in the title makes the play more akin, in this respect, to the work of a writer like Thomas Mann than to t h a t of the Expres­ sionists. But structurally and stylistically it seems to have some affinities with the latter, and it has been referred to as "a piece of pure Expressionism both in form and content". 1 2 Among the most prominent "Expressionist" features of this drama are the use of symbolic types rather than individual characters, and the "wholly abstract" atmosphere, setting, and gestures, including the use of masks, a chorus, and drumbeats to accompany the spoken lines. Although Eliot's wide literary interests may have prompted him to read or see German Expressionist plays prior to 1926, the particular characteristics here alluded to can easily be traced to other, seemingly sufficient, sources. Here are Eliot's own words regarding the matter: " I n Sweeney Agonistes the action should be stylized as in the Noh drama—see Ezra Pound's book and Yeats's preface to The Hawk's Well. Characters ought to wear masks... Diction should not have too much expression. I had intended the whole play to be accompanied by light drum taps to accentuate the beats." 1 3 Indeed, Eliot's reference to the Noh drama, and the work of his personal friends, as well as a subsequent reference, in the same passage, to Francis Cornford's book The Origins of Attic Comedy, seem much more illuminating than generalizations about the influence of German E. In 1934 Eliot further experimented with the use of the chorus in The Rock. However, he was careful to disavow responsibility for anything but the choruses and one section of the work. That section, cast entirely in verse, depicts a confrontation between two groups, the Red-shirts and the Black-shirts, who are offering solutions to political problems. Again the resemblance to E. is probably super­ ficial. When Eliot began to write his own full-length plays, starting with Murder in the Cathedral (1935), he retained certain of the above stylistic features; but they merely seem to mark the plays as products of the twentieth century. Prom this point onward, Eliot's plays become steadily more traditional in terms of stage technique, although they are clearly stamped with his poetic power. All in all, there is little reason to see a major German influence at work in his dramatic output. 11 12 13

See Weisstein, above, p. 167. Fabrieius, p. 10. Letter to Hallie Flanagan dated March 18, 1933, in H. Flanagan, Dynamo (New York, 1943), p. 82. 184

In a quiet way, the dramatic experiments of T. S. Eliot had their effect on two young English writers, Auden and Isherwood. Auden was the outstanding young poet of his generation in England, and three plays on which he collaborated with Isher­ wood are considered to be among the few significant English dramas of the thirties. They are The Dog Beneath the Skin (1935), The Ascent of F 6 (1938), and On the Frontier (1939). Until recently, these works have been loosely regarded as having been written under the influence of German E. and the early plays of Brecht. 14 Indeed, on the surface, they are sometimes remarkably similar to those of the Expressionist stage; for they are written in a mixture of verse and prose, are loosely constructed and episodic, present types rather than characters, and the language employed in them is, at times, highly rhetorical and emotional (e.g., the Vicar's speech in The Dog Beneath the Skin). In content the plays are topical, dealing primarily with the question of the commitment of the individual and the quest for meaning in a troubled time. To this surface resemblance with the Expressionist drama is added the fact t h a t both Auden and Isherwood lived in Berlin for varying lengths of time between 1929 and 1933 and thus had ample opportunity to see contemporary plays performed. But in spite of the widespread assumption that their own plays were l 'strongly influ­ enced by German expressionist drama", 1 5 the facts seem to have been otherwise, for it turns out t h a t neither Auden nor Isherwood were familiar with the German language prior to their arrival in Berlin. Nor had either of them studied German literature. Moreover, both poets do not remember having seen a play by Kaiser, Toller or any other Expressionist while in Berlin. 16 I t is not surprising, then, that they deny any influence from t h a t direction. Auden states t h a t he disliked the drama of Kaiser and Toller when he became familiar with it through seeing productions in England, and Isherwood, who seems to have seen only Gas at the Gate, was "amused rather than impressed". He speaks of a "very indirect" literary influence while in Berlin "by talking to people rather than reading or seeing plays". Auden was also affected by the Berlin experience, but mostly in non-literary ways. The real impact seems to have been the atmosphere of crisis and unrest prevailing in the German capital. In a revealing passage from his autobiographical reflections published in The New Yorker, he wrote: "Looking back now it seems to me incredible how secure life seemed [in England]. Too young for the war to have made any impres­ sion upon us, we imagined t h a t the world was essentially the same as it had been in 1913." 17 Auden's first year in Berlin brought an end to this feeling: " I was awakened in t h a t for the first time I felt the shaking of the foundations of things." Thus the Berlin experience seems to have been meaningful for these men, but in a much more personal, and less specifically literary, way than was commonly believed. We are thus left with the task of explaining the "Expressionistic" features of the plays under discussion. As in the case of Eliot, one finds that almost every "German" 14 For a detailed account of this topic see Breon Mitchell, "W. H. Auden and C hristophe Isherwood: The 'German Influence,' " Oxford German Studies, No. 1, 1966, pp. 163—172. 15 Joseph Warren Beach, The Making of the Auden Canon (Minneapolis, 1957), p. 148. 16 This and all other references to the personal recollections or opinions of the two poets, unless17otherwise indicated, are taken from personal conversations and correspondence. The New Yorker, April 3, 1965, p. 190.

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characteristic found therein may actually be traced to a non-German source. Auden and Isherwood themselves have pointed to the plays of Shaw, Cocteau, and Eliot, as well as Hans Christian Andersen's Snow Queen, Ibsen's Peer Gynf, and Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland as their models. Indeed, many of the formal characteristics of their plays can be explained by examining the above list, and so can the non-Expressionist lightness lent to them by the influence of fairytale and fable. "The most important single influence" in The Dog Beneath the Skin, however, according to Auden, has yet to be mentioned. I t is the genre of the English Christmas pantomime, a model which suggested the original structure of the work. 18 Auden himself specifically states: "The impact on me and, I'm sure, many other children was partly due to the fact t h a t the pantomime was the first drama we ever saw." In 1934 A. E. Wilson described the Christmas pantomime "as we now know it—a strange medley of burlesque, musical comedy, fairy play, music hall turns, and revue." 1 9 The aptness of this description in its application to the plays of Auden and Isherwood is readily apparent and, in itself, goes a long way toward helping us understand their common stylistic features. Even more revealing perhaps is the fact t h a t these young men felt t h a t they were writing within an established English theatrical tradition, not against it. This attitude is symptomatic of the spiritual and cultural distance which separated the English playwrights from the earlier generation of German Expressionists. For the young men of the thirties, E. was already a thing of the past, a phenomenon of the twenties, and in the following years, the spiritual gap continued to widen. Quite recently Isherwood spoke of the plays of Kaiser and Toller as "charmingly nostalgic, like Gilbert and Sullivan". Such an unlikely comparison could only be made by a writer who, in a profound way, had remained untouched by German E. The most powerful English drama of the British Isles in the thirties was being written in Ireland, however. The amazingly rich literary life of Dublin, in exile and at home, produced yet another outstanding young writer in Sean O'Casey. His early dramatic works, written from 1923-1926, are, for the most part, straightforward naturalistic dramas. But already at this time, before there was any question of influence from abroad, his plays demonstrated non-naturalistic tendencies which help to explain his later development. Almost all critics agree t h a t The Silver Tassie (1929) marks the turning point of O'Casey's dramatic production in the direction of E. Although much has been written on the subject, the question of the extent and origin of the 'Expressionist' influence in these dramas has not yet been resolved. 20 O'Casey himself has explained both his thematic and formal intentions in writing The Silver Tassie: " H e would show a wide expanse of war in the midst of timorous 18 This was revealed by the investigation of a previously unnoticed early typescript version of the play in the possession of the library of Exeter College, Oxford. I t had been deposited there by Professor Neville Coghill, to whom I am indebted, in the thirties. See Mitchell, op. cit., pp. 170-171. 19 A. E. Wilson, Christmas Pantomime: The Story of an English Institution (London, 1934), p. 18. 20 For the most complete statement on this topic so far see the chapter "Expressionistische Allegorik und poetische Rhetorik" in Thomas Metscher's Sean O'Caseys dramatischer Stil (Braun­ schweig, 1968), pp. 173—187. Metscher includes a detailed bibliography of secondary material relating to O'Casey and E.

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hope and overweening fear; amidst a galaxy of guns; silently show the garlanded horror of war . . . And he would do it in a new way. There was no importance in trying to do the same thing again, letting the second play imitate the first, and the third the second. He wanted a change from what the Irish critics had called burlesque, photo­ graphic realism. . . ." 21 The two major drives—to depict the horror of war, and to break away from dramatic realism—link O'Casey to the spiritual basis of E. far more closely than anything we may point to in his English counterparts. And the results were to move Shaw to the declaration: "There is a new drama rising from unplumbed depths to sweep the nice little bourgeois efforts of myself and my contemporaries into the dustbin . . ." 22 In The Silver Tassie, O'Casey mixes Naturalistic and anti-Naturalistic devices. Only the second act seems to be purely "Expressionistic"; it is composed of a series of scenes set in a ruined monastery where anonymous soldiers stand for Everyman at war. The repetitive rhythm of their prose songs seems to echo the language of the German Expressionists, although in his notes to the play O'Casey himself referred to the passages as "simply Plain Song", pointing to Gregorian Chant, rather than to a particular German source. Once more we are faced with the fact that presumably Expressionist features may have very little to do, in a causal sense, with German E. The formal and stylistic tendencies apparent in this act reach their high point in Within the Gates (1933) and continue to be a vital part of O'Casey's dramatic art in such plays as The Star Turns Red (1940, a depiction of the class struggle) and Oak Leaves and Lavender (1946). Almost inadvertently, O'Casey's political beliefs also tend to make his plays resemble, thematically, those characteristic of German E. The danger here of equating thematic similarity with "influence" is obvious. O'Casey's later plays show an attempted synthesis of almost all the dramatic styles with which he had already experimented, as well as new elements of song, music, and dance. This is seen most clearly in the play he considered to be his best, Cock-a-Doodle-Dandy (1949). In the search for the possible dramatic influences which helped O'Casey to redirect his dramas starting with The Silver Tassie, O'Neill has emerged as the most likely candidate. 23 Such an influence is certainly not surprising, considering O'Neill's power as an innovator and the common language shared by the two playwrights. I t is also clear that many of the dramatic innovations in O'Casey's works may be detected in similar forms encountered in O'Neill. I t is not our purpose to determine the extent to which O'Neill was indebted to German E., but it seems possible that O'Casey was confronted with certain characteristics of t h a t style, and t h a t any influence of E. itself is thus most likely to have been indirect. The possibility of Toller's influence on O'Casey's work has often been mentioned but never fully investigated. 24 O'Casey is said to have become acquainted with Toller's 21 22 23

Sean O'Casey, Rose and Grown (New York, 1956), p. 32. Quoted in Metscher, p. 5. See R. G. Rollins, "O'Casey, O'Neill, and E. in The Silver Tassie," The Bucknell Review X, 4 (1962), pp. 364—369. In a letter to Rollins, O'Casey described the impact of O'Neill's The Hairy Ape: "This was a play that gave more than a facsimile of life; it brought the inward outward through symbolic distortion" (p. 365). 24 Metscher, p. 174, n. 10, enlarges only slightly upon the topic. 187

work through a production of Masses and Man in Dublin, prior to his writing The Silver Tassie.25 Although he mentions Toller a few times in The Green Crow and elsewhere, he does not say anything which would lead us to believe that Toller was a major influ­ ence upon his work. Certainly similarities with Toller's dramas may be found in his, but none t h a t are particularly striking. On the basis of the available evidence, therefore, there is little reason for believing t h a t Toller, or German E. in general, was directly influential in the works of Sean O'Casey.26 O'Casey's references to Toller bring us to a final point worth noting. In 1933 Toller left Germany, where he had become "unwanted", and came to England. His stay there resulted in the publication of the book I was a German (1933) and a collection of seven of his plays. Toller made contact with every major literary figure within reach. Contemporary reports indicate t h a t he was anxious to secure an audience for his plays and to inform the world about the frightening situation in Germany. To this end he seems to have made a great effort to get those plays translated which were not yet available to English readers and, if possible, to have this done by respected poets. Stephen Spender, for example, translated Pastor Hall at Toller's request, although he did not care for the play. He simply felt that it was impossible to turn down such a request from a man in Toller's unfortunate position. 27 For similar reasons, Auden translated the lyrics from Toller's No More Peace (1937), thus implicitly showing his approval and leaving the door open for critics to point to the "evidence" of the influence of German E. So it happens t h a t Toller's name appears in the personal remi­ niscences of English writers of this period more often than is warranted by his literary impact. His suicide in 1939 even moved Auden to compose a poetic tribute in his memory.

III Whereas German Expressionist drama formed a significant part of English theatri­ cal life in the twenties, Expressionist prose went almost literally unnoticed. The prose works of writers like Edschmid, Einstein, Heym, Lasker-Schüler and, at first, Döblin were simply unknown, and for the most part have remained so. 28 Among the innovators of modern German prose literature, the writings of Franz Kafka, available since the mid-twenties, stimulated the greatest interest, and after 1930 Döblin's novel Berlin 25 26

G. Fallon, "Pathway of a Dramatist," Theatre Arts, X X X I V (January, 1950), p. 38. In his most direct statement on the matter, O'Casey denied that he "consciously adopted E., which I don't understand and never did". Letter to R. Rollins, March 24, 1960, quoted by Rollins, p. 365. 27 These statements are taken from a personal conversation with Spender in London, March 11, 1965. An interesting contemporary account of Toller's sojourn in England may be found in Encounter (October, 1952), pp. 29—33, where Isherwood offers a "semi-fictional sketch" of Toller— a subjective account which he nevertheless considers to be an accurate impression of the man. Here is a sample passage: I heard several complaints from my friends of the tasks he had contrived to set them—one was ordered to produce letters of introduction, another to use his influence with an important uncle, a third had to translate an entire blank-verse play. He found uses for everybody, even the humblest. And no one had ventured to refuse. I knew, only too well, t h a t I shouldn't have the moral courage to refuse him, myself. (p. 31) 28 For a detailed account see Galinsky, op. cit., pp. 190—194. 188

Alexanderplatz was at least a temporary success. But most English readers, in so far as they were aware of German novels, remained loyal to the more traditional authors. I t is, therefore, very difficult to speak of the impact of German Expressionist prose in England. Certainly the names of several leading novelists writing in English have been linked with E.; Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and D. H. Lawrence being mentioned most often in this context. 29 But those critics who have approached the topic have invariably done so solely in terms of parallel development of theme and style, without postulating any direct influence. And the available evidence clearly indicates t h a t we cannot speak of any direct impact of German Expressionist prose upon these nov­ elists. Inversely, it is possible, however, that Joyce may have given impetus to certain developments in the German novel discussed below. The topic at hand is even more difficult to handle because many of the basic features of E. are, almost by definition, unsuitable for use in the novel. This seems particularly true of such characteristics as high emotional intensity and such stylistic techniques as the Telegrammstil. Neither that tone nor that style seems suitable for consistent use throughout a novel of some length. And yet it is equally difficult to imagine an "Expressionist'' novel with long stretches of placid prose or one in which the style reverts, for several pages at a time, to a more naturalistic presentation. For this reason the standard examples of Expressionist prose tend to be short stories or sketches in which stylistic unity may be preserved. A brief look at the theory of Expressionist prose is thus necessary to accurately assess the relationship of German to English fiction in this period. Walter Sokel has at­ tempted to distinguish two main directions, represented by the theoretical pronounce­ ments of Dublin, on the one hand, and Carl Einstein on the other. 30 He suggests t h a t Döblin saw the problem primarily in terms of narrative technique (objectivity of presen­ tation, depersonalization, complete withdrawal of the commenting author), and that he regarded E., seen in this light, as Naturalism taken to its logical extreme. Carl Einstein, who had practically nothing to say about the technical aspects of writing such prose, concentrated, instead, on the subject matter, which, in his opinion, was to turn from description (Darstellung) to ideas (weltanschaulicher Inhalt). The problem of writing a modern novel is thus seen in philosophical rather than literary terms. As a result, the narrative perspective envisaged by Einstein is in sharp contrast to Döblin's suggestions; and the author or main figure (when the novel is written in the first person) takes a central role as a commenting and reflecting mind. In both cases, the resulting prose shows Expressionist features: a tendency toward brevity in language and sentence structure, as well as dynamism and conciseness of expression. Nevertheless, as Sokel points out, in the prose writings of the two men 29 Studies relating these authors to E. include: Wilhelm Reichwagen, Der expressionistische Zug im neueren englischen Roman (Gütersloh, 1935) (deals mainly with Joyce and Lawrence); Erna Weidner, "Impressionismus und Expressionismus in den Komanen Virginia Woolfs," Diss., Greifswald, 1934; Max Wildi, "The Birth of E. in the Work of D. H. Lawrence," English Studies, X I X (1937), pp. 241—259; J. W. Beach, The Twentieth Century Novel: Studies in Technique (New York, 1932), Chapter Thirty-Eight, " E . : Woolf, Frank," pp. 485-500. Other novelists who have been mentioned in this connection include Wyndham Lewis, Richard Aldington, Rhys Davies, and J. D. Baresford. 30 "Die Prosa des E . " in E. als Literatur, pp. 153-170,

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these characteristics are evident in very different ways. Einstein and the writers of similar persuasion show syntactic brevity in an aphoristic style in which the parable becomes an important literary form. Only in Dublin's works, however, do these same characteristics appear in a style closely related to the syntactical structures of dramatic E., where parataxis and ellipsis play an important role. "Nicht erzahlen, sondern bauen" (not telling but building) is Döblin's goal, and he wishes to replace psychological investigation by the simple notation of mental process. Turning to the English novel of that period, we find that Lawrence and Joyce could be considered representative of these two major tendencies. Like Einstein, Lawrence was not primarily interested in problems of narrative technique, but rather in communicating, in a forceful way, a moral world view which he considered vitally important to England. I n his works, ideas, such as they are, outweigh simple narrative presentation. Those characteristics of E. which are most easily recognizable inLawrenee's prose are contained in the visionary—at times ecstatic—passages which mark the voice of the prophet. I t is true that, in Lawrence's later works, the presentation of reality tends to become more abstract, and thus more closely akin to what we conceive of as E., but on the whole it is in spiritual rather than literary terms that Lawrence seems related to the German movement. The closing passage of The Rainbow may serve as a typical example: And the rainbow stood on the earth. She knew that the sordid people . . . were living still, t h a t the rainbow was arched in their blood and would quiver to life in their spirit, t h a t they would cast off their horny covering of disinte­ gration to a new growth . . . She saw in the rainbow the earth's new archi­ tecture, the old, brittle corruption of houses and factories swept away, the world built up in a living fabric of Truth, fitted to the overarching heaven. The voice is the voice of the Expressionists, but the prose is that of England. Joyce, like Döblin, on the other hand, was vitally interested in problems of nar­ rative technique. He differed from Döblin most strikingly in that he licked the problems which the former recognized but could not adequately resolve in prose. Their common interest in 'building' a prose work rather than telling a story relates them closely, as does their common belief in the artist's withdrawal behind his work. Consider Joyce's literary credo as expressed in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916): "The personality of the artist . . . finally refines itself out of existence, impersonalizes itself, so to speak . . . The artist, like the God of creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails." Joyce's innovations in narrative style and technique approach E. in their assertion of the right of the artist to form, and at times deform, his material. But unlike Lawrence, Joyce is not spiritually inclined to use the thematic material preferred by the German writers. Regardless of the similarities between these novelists, it is clear that, as such, German E. had no direct literary influence on Lawrence or Joyce. As Armin Arnold has shown, Lawrence was unaware of the most exciting developments in contemporary 31 See Arnold's book D. H. Lawrence and German Literature, with Two Hitherto Unknown Essays by D. H. Lawrence (Montreal, 1963), pp. 51—58.

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German literature and considered Thomas Mann to be the typical representative of the modern movement. He was among the first to introduce Mann's work to English readers, and the concluding sentence of his introductory article amply demonstrates his limited understanding of the contemporary spirit in German letters: "But Thomas Mann is old—and we are young. Germany does not feel very young to me," 3 2 Joyce was even less aware of contemporary German literature, and as late as 1936 he had no idea who Kafka was. 33 He only came to know of such writers as Döblin and Broch after they had reacted positively to his work. And there is no evidence that he ever read a word they wrote beyond what they wrote about him. 34 Joyce, however, seems to have had an important influence on German literature. W h a t had been noticeably lacking in the German novel during the period of E, was a revolution of form similar to t h a t which so clearly separated Expressionist drama from the mainstream of the German dramatic tradition. In spite of all the theoretical pronouncements, the German novel had remained essentially unchanged, both in terms of structure and narrative techniques, until the late twenties. Novels like Döblin's Die drei Sprüng e des Wang-lun (1915) employ a prose which is clearly marked by Expres­ sionist features, b u t remain, on the whole, disappointingly traditional. The same is true of Döblin's narrative technique, for in spite of an increased interest in the inner workings of the mind, the techniques he employed to render those thoughts remain almost exclusively those which had been used for the last two centuries in German literature. The gap between Döblin's theory and his practice was not closed until Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929). His enthusiasm over Ulysses, which he reviewed while working on his own novel, led him to stress the realization of new formal possibilities in the novel: "Ich entsinne mich nicht, in den beiden letzten Jahrzehnten einem umfangreichen Schriftwerk von derartiger Radikalität in der Form begegnet zu sein.... Es ist ein literarischer Vorstoss aus dem Gewissen des heutigen geistigen Menschen heraus. Es sucht auf seine Weise die Frage zu beantworten: wie kannman heute dichten ? Zunächst hat jeder ernste Schriftsteller sich mit diesem Buch zu befassen." 35 I t is impossible here to indicate in any detail the extent of Joyce's influence upon the German novel. But much evidence does exist which points to his impact upon Alexanderplatz, the development of that genre, and specifically upon Döblin's Berlin 36 Jahnn's Perrudja (1929), and Broch's Die Schlafwandler (1931–1932). These novels 32 33 34

Quoted ibid., p. 58. See Richard Ellmann, James Joyce (New York, 1959) p. 715. Joyce used their names in passages in Finnegans Wake, where the suggestion is clearly made that they were "borrowing" from him. For details see Breon Mitchell, "Swobbing Broguen Eeriesh Myth Brockendootsch: Two German Novelists in Finnegans Wake,'' A Wake Newslitter, V/5 (1968), pp. 7 0 - 7 1 . 35 " I cannot remember having encountered, in the last two decades, a sizeable literary work that is more radical in matters of form . . . I t is a literary experiment guided by the conscience of the modern intellectual. In its way, it seeks to answer the question: how can one writeliterature in our time ? For the time being, every serious writer should occupy himself with this book." Alfred Döblin, "Ulysses von Joyce" (1928) as reprinted in Aufsatze zur Literatur (Olten, 1963), p. 287ff., and quoted from that source, pp. 287 and 290. 36 See Breon Mitchell, "Hans Henny Jahnn and James Joyce: The Birth of the Inner Mono­ logue in the German Novel," Arcadia, VI (1971), pp. 44—71; and the same author's "Joyce and Döblin At the Crossroads of Berlin Alexanderplatz", Contemporary Literature, XII (1970), 173-187. 191

were, in turn, influential in enlivening the genre in Germany, and discussion of the "Expressionist novel" often includes these and later works by the same authors as the best examples of the form. Joyce, in revolutionizing the form of the novel, and showing, for the first time, how inner monologue could be used effectively in longer prose works, helped loosen the hold of tradition on the German novel.

IV As far as England was concerned, E. was a German dramatic style which died out in the twenties. I t was of interest in what it revealed about post-war Germany and the particular problems of the German people, but had little to say to the average Englishman. Its formal innovations were alternately praised and attacked by con­ temporary English critics, and later simply forgotten, to reemerge only after the Second World War in full historical perspective. The influence of German E. on English drama was slight at best. Both culturally and intellectually, English dramatists seemed unreceptive to the Weltanschauung of their German contemporaries, and any formal similarities which may be found would seem to be largely coincidental—parallel developments out of a different dramatic tradition. The impact of German Expressionist prose on the English novel was prac­ tically nil. If anything, the influences flowed in the other direction. E. in prose literature was not even recognized by English critics, let alone emulated by English novelists. One more literary complex of ideas and aesthetic innovations had crossed the channel for a brief visit, but did not find a home. Only in the most general sense has German E. invaded English literary life, and t h a t is the sense in which the movement was, after all, seminal for twentieth-century art in general. As Edschmid puts it, Die Versuche, für die expressionistische Dichtung in Frankreich Liebhaber zu finden, waren nicht ganz, aber beinahe vergeblich. In England und Amerika war es ebenso . . . Spater, im Surrealistischen, war die Verbindung leichter herzustellen. Sowohl Apollinaire wie auch Cocteau, Proust wie Eliot, Pound wie Montale und Durrell übernahmen, ob sie es wollten, ob sie es wussten oder nicht, Expressionismus. Etwas anders gefarbt. Mit realistischen Tricks durchsetzt . . . Aber der Impetus kam, gegen jeden Widerspruch gesagt, wie die französische Romantik, aus Deutschland. 37

37 "All attempts to find readers for German Expressionist literature in France were almost entirely vain. The same holds true of England and America . . . Later on, in the realm of Surrealism, the link was more easily fashioned. Whether they knew it or not, Apolli­ naire as well as Cocteau, Proust as well as Eliot, and Pound as well as Montale and Dur­ rell absorbed 'Expressionism' slightly deformed. Shot through with realistic sleights-ofh a n d . . . But no matter what the objections, the impetus, as in the case of French Bomanticism, came from Germany." Kasimir Edschmid, Lebendiger Expressionismus (Munich, 1961), p. 367.

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M A R D I VALGEMAE

EXPRESSIONISM I N T H E AMERICAN T H E A T E R *

I n an essay on the development of modern American drama, the late critic and theater historian John Gassner noted that "when our theatre arrived at maturity, it absorbed two originally divergent aims of the modern European theatre—that of the realists and naturalists and t h a t of the symbolists and expressionists". 1 Gassner's generally valid observation would be even more to the point if we substituted for "our theatre arriv[ing] at maturity" the contribution of O'Neill, who single-handedly catapulted American drama into world prominence. Like most of his contemporaries and successors, from Elmer Rice and J o h n Howard Lawson to Edward Albee and the playwrights of the lofts, churches, and coffee-houses of Off-Off Broadway, O'Neill was stimulated by the aesthetic principles of European E. and selected from these the techniques t h a t best suited his purposes in dramatic construction. Thus there is a marked tendency in modern American drama and stagecraft to concretize subjective experiences, though such objectification rarely assumes the intensity of distortion that characterizes much of European—especially German—E. Yet even before O'Neill, most native experimenters with dramatic form or stage design were indebted to European sources. Percy MacKaye, whose The Scarecrow (1911)2 anticipates subsequent treatments of the split personality, drew inspiration —misapplied as it was—from Gordon Craig. Theodore Dreiser, who published his bizarre Plays of the Natural and the Supernatural in 1916, knew Strindberg's Dream Play. Alfred Kreymborg, whose stylized Lima Beans (1916) and Vote the New Moon (1920) were produced by the Provincetown Players, edited such little magazines as The Glebe, which published translations of plays by Wedekind and Leonid Andreev. Robert Edmond Jones, whose masks and grotesque settings for Arthur Hopkins' 1921 Broadway production of Macbeth signaled the beginning of Expressionist stagecraft in the professional theater, had studied with Reinhardt. And Cleon Throckmorton, whose subjectively distorted design for the second act of Susan Glaspell's The Verge (1921) reminded reviewers of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, was an ardent admirer of the German Expressionist film. In short, the revolution t h a t swept through the American theater in the late teens and early twenties of the present century was inspired largely by the achievements of the European avantgarde theater. * For a more extensive treatment of the subject under consideration see the author's book Accelerated Grimace: Expressionism in the American Drama of the 1920s (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1972). 1 John Gassner, "Modern American Drama," A Treasury of the Theatre, revised ed. (New York, 1951), I I I , 785. 2 All dates, unless otherwise noted, are production- dates. 193

The scenes of projection in most experimental American plays prior to O'Neill (e.g., The Scarecrow) appear to be a mere groping toward the new form. Other, more uniformly stylized works (e.g., those by Dreiser and Kreymborg), left no mark on the theatrical life of the day. One early attempt at concretizing subjective states did, how-ever, create a great deal of excitement: O'NeilFs The Emperor Jones, staged by the Provincetown Players in November, 1920, marks the beginning of the modern movement in American drama, which has fertilized even the sterile landscape of Broadway. O'Neill had read Greek, Elizabethan and modern plays while spending five months in a sanatorium during the winter of 1912/1913. During his one year at Harvard (in 1914/1915) he began to study German in order to read Nietzsche and Wedekind in the original. By the time he had spent several seasons with the Provincetown Players, whom he joined in 1916, he had already acquired considerable familiarity with the new Continental drama. In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech he spoke of his indebt­ edness to Strindberg, and his debt to the German Expressionists–hough he has denied having been influenced by Kaiser—emerges from a perusal of his letters and other unpublished documents, from conversations with his friends, and from the published comments of his second wife.3 As has been noted by O'Neill scholars, the fable and the form of The Emperor Jones closely resemble Kaiser's From Mom till Midnight, which O'Neill said he had read before it was produced in New York in 1922, but which, he insisted, had not influenced him. In Kaiser's play, the seven relatively short scenes are held together by the figure of the Teller who has embezzled bank funds. Through the monologues and the dizzy wanderings of this allegorical character who, like Brutus Jones, is a fugitive on account of his greed, Kaiser presents the action of the play as seen through the mind of the protagonist. The skeleton in the tree, the identically dressed gentlemen, and the masked prostitutes are all emanations from his unconscious mind, not unlike the visions experienced by Jones. For the forest through which Jones must pass in order to reach safety is a jungle not only of physical trees but also of mental images, ranging from the "Little Formless Fears", an Expressionist projection of his guilty conscience, to the crocodile god who rules over O'Neill's version of the heart of darkness. Secondary sources also reveal O'Neill's Expressionist orientation. In his reply to a query about the possibility of filming The Emperor Jones, the playwright stated that the movie rights to the play were "not open at present" and added, by way of explanation: "I am working out a scheme for its filming along Expressionistic lines."4 Nothing came of this project, but O'Neill continued with the Expressionist mode in The Hairy Ape, in which he again projects the inner experience of the protagonist. 3 Agnes Boulton, "An Experimental Theatre: The Provincetown Playhouse,'* Theatre Arts Monthly, VIII (March, 1924), p. 185. Some of the comments made by O'Neill's associates are recorded in Mardi Valgemae, "O'Neill and German Expressionism," Modem Drama, X (1967), p. 112. See also O'Neill's undated letter (1923/24?) to Kenneth Macgowan (in the Eugene O'Neill Collection at Yale), in which he refers to the work of the Russian Expressionist director Tairov and suggests that the Provincetown Players stage the works of Strindberg, Wedekind, Andreev, 4

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O'Neill to Harry Weinberger, January 26, 1922 (at Yale),

The opening scene of The Hairy Ape requires a setting t h a t mirrors the distorted mental state of Yank, and in specifying that the treatment should not be naturalistic, O'Neill obviously had in mind the stage techniques of the Continental Expressionists, for in a letter to George Jean Nathan he expressed hope that Robert Edmond Jones would do the sets, which "must be in the Expressionistic method". 5 When the play opened at the Provincetown Playhouse in March, 1922, the sets did reflect subjective states, and the Fifth Avenue scene was played with masks. O'NenTs use of nightmarish sight and sound effects in the stokehole, and the creation of a subjectively distorted scene on Fifth Avenue bring to mind episodes from the plays of Kaiser, notably The Coral, Gas, P a r t I, and Hell, Road, Earth. When the time came for The Hairy Ape to be made into a movie, O'Neill suggested t h a t a brief Expressionist scene be added to the script. "Yank, after his frustrated I.W.W. experiences," he wrote, "resolves he'll blow up steel all on his own. . . . But again, a fiasco and frustration. All his attempt does is to blow down a section of wall—and immediately an army of workers rebuilds the wall up before his eyes (an Expressionist touch)." 6 O'Neill's frequent use of rapidly moving short scenes has been compared to the technique of the motion picture. Thus critics have suggested that The Emperor Jones and The Hairy Ape should be seen in relation to such films as Eisenstein's Battleship Pofemkin (1925) and October (1928), both of which postdate The Hairy Ape. The basic principles underlying the form of The Hairy Ape may, however, be more profitably compared to those employed in the German Expressionist film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. The action of Caligari reflects the workings of the insane mind of the protag­ onist, and the visual aspects of the film are correspondingly distorted. I t is not at all inconceivable that O'Neill's description of the forecastle and a number of other specific visual images in The Hairy Ape were suggested by the German film, which O'Neill saw in the summer of 1921, and soon afterwards he communicated to a friend his enthusiastic reaction: " I saw 'Caligari' and it sure opened my eyes to wonderful pos­ sibilities I have never dreamed of before." Six months later he quickly recast a now lost short story t h a t contained "the germ idea" of The Hairy Ape in the form of a play characterized by Expressionist distortions. 7 In an interview given in 1924, O'Neill said t h a t "the real contribution of the ex­ pressionist has been in the dynamic qualities of his plays," for these works "express some­ thing in modern life better than did the old plays." Then he added, " I have some­ thing of this method in The Hairy Ape."8 Something of this method appears in O'Neill's The Great God Brown, produced at the Greenwich Village Theatre in January, 1926. In his manuscript foreword to the play, O'Neill calls realism "insufficient" for portraying 5 6 7

Quoted in Arthur and Barbara Gelb, O'Neill (New York, 1962), p. 492. O'Neill to Robert F. Sisk, March 21, 1935 (at Yale). O'Neill to Ralph Block, June 10, 1921, in the Walter Hampden Memorial Library at the Players, New York. According to a notation which concludes the MS of The Hairy Ape (Princeton University Library), the play was begun on December 7 and finished on December 23, 1921. For the short story see O'Neill's letter to Richard Dana Skinner in the latter's book Eugene O'Neill : A Poet's Quest (New York, 1935), p. viii. 8 "Eugene O'Neill Talks of His Own and the Plays of Others," New York Herald Tribune, November 16, 1924, Sec. 8, p. 14; reprinted in Oscar Cargill et al., eds., O'Neill and His Plays: Four Decades of Criticism (New York, 1961), pp. 110—112. 195

the inner life of man. Like Edschmid, for whom facts had meaning only as long as the artist penetrates them in order to grasp that which lies beyond, O'Neill felt that "the theatre should be a refuge from the facts of life which . . . have nothing to do with the truth". The theater, he stated, should lift us to a plane beyond realism and drive us "deep into the unknown within and behind ourselves".9 The Great God Brown is a probing into that beyond, involving an elaborate use of masks and the projection of a split personality, with Dion Anthony and Billy Brown representing the two warring personae of one individual, whom Cybel calls "Dion Brown".10 In a note addressed to the actor John Barrymore, O'Neill offers external evidence in support of this interpretation: "Am taking liberty send you my latest play The Great God Brown thinking may interest you as vehicle. Dion in first half and Brown in rest of play should be played by same actor." 11 The genesis of DionBrown's dual personality may go back to O'Neill's reading of Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, Euripides' Bacchae, or even Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy. The Expressionist projection of the split personality suggests, however, the influence of Andreev's The Black Maskers, while the melodramatic involutions of the plot resemble those found in Kaiser's The Coral. Among O'Neill's other Expressionist plays are All God's Ghillun Got Wings (1924), Lazarus Laughed (published in 1927), Dynamo (1929), Days Without End (1934), and a dramatization of Coleridge's The Ancient Mariner (1924). Later plays that contain some Expressionist elements include The Iceman Cometh (1946) and More Stately Mansions (1967). Though he had a number of plays produced by the Theatre Guild, O'Neill's name is most frequently linked with the Provincetown Players, who provided him and other native playwrights with a laboratory in which to experiment with new dramatic techniques. In addition to producing such works of European E. as Strindberg's Ghost Sonata (1924) and Dream Play (1926), Hasenclever's Beyond (1925), and Carlo Gozzi's eighteenth-century comedy Princess Turandot (1926) in emulation of Eugene Vakhtangov's celebrated Expressionist version of that play, the Provincetown Players staged a number of American dramas that were written in the new mode. The first of these, following the plays of Kreymborg, Glaspell, and O'Neill, was Edmund Wilson's Grime in the Whistler Room (1924). As a critic has quipped, "one of the several crimes in the play is the introduction of expressionistic dream sequences in what is otherwise an ordinary drawing room comedy".12 One of the dream sequences in Wilson's play projects the protagonist's fears about an impending algebra examination. She is shown working at a gigantic black­ board covered with large chalked figures, while the tutor sits on a high stool behind a tall desk. Throckmorton's designs for this scene featured a grotesquely elongated stool and desk, pronounced shadows, a mask for the tutor, and two enormous black9 Mardi Valgemae, "Eugene O'Neill's Preface to The Great God Brown" Yale University Library Gazette, X L I I I (July, 1968), p . 29. 10 The Plays of Eugene O'Neill (New York, 1955), I I I , 320. 11 Holograph draft of a telegram, July 6, 1925, in the Landauer Collection, Dartmouth College Library. 12 Sherman Paul, Edmund Wilson (Urbana, 111., 1965), p, 41.

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boards sufficiently askew to suggest the influence of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Wilson, too, knew Continental E. at first hand, for he alluded to the new drama and film in his critical articles. At the same time he was writing other experimental plays, including Cronkhite's Clocks, a grotesque pantomime reminiscent of the work of the Dadaists, the Triadic Ballet, and Schlemmer's novelties at the Bauhaus theater. Among other Expressionist or semi-Expressionist plays staged by the Provincetown Players were E m J o Basshe's Adam Solitaire (1925), Paul Green's Pulitzer Prizewinning In Abraham's Bosom (1926), Lajos Egri's Rapid Transit (1927), and Cummings's Him (1928). Like Eliot's "The Love Song of J . Alfred Prufrock," Him begins with " a patient etherized upon a table": a doctor is anesthetizing a woman. Her eyes close and the play unfolds as a projection of her thoughts and memories, with the doctor reappearing in different roles throughout the play. Unlike the sterile Prufrock, however, the woman in Him is about to give birth to a child, and the play is a subjectively dis­ torted presentation of her affair with the father of the child, who is a playwright grap­ pling with the problems of art and reality. Cummings's concern with the ego of the artist— with the Ausstrahlungen of his own Ich, as the Germans would put it—-is characteristically Expressionistic. In matters of form, too, Cummings rebelled against the conventions of realistic dramaturgy. Reviewing a performance of the visiting Moscow Art Theater Musical Studio, he spoke derisively of the "pennyintheslot peepshow parlor" proscenium stage, for which should be substituted "an aesthetic continent" where tourists pay their way in "constructivist" or "expressionist" currency. 13 P a r t of the Expressionist currency in Him involves the chorus of the three Miss Weirds, who wear identical maskfaces, and Cummings's dramatization of the split personality of Him and his mirror image, O. Him, brings to mind Werfel's Spiegelmensch (Mirror-Man) as well as O'Neill's The Great God Brown. I n 1926, the year the latter play was produced, Cummings reported on the New York theater scene in the Dial, and in Act Two, Scene Four, of Him he parodies O'Neill's use of masks and the complicated business of Billy Brown's murder. Also in 1928 the Provincetown Players staged The Final Balance, an experimental play by the Yiddish dramatist David Pinski, gave a reading from O'Neill's Lazarus Laughed (which Schreyer considered to be the ultimate in Expressionist drama), and made plans to produce Paul Green's Tread the Green Grass, subtitled "A Folk Fantasy in Two Parts With Interludes, Music, Dumb-show, and Cinema (to be produced with masks when possible)." 14 The play is a powerful Expressionist dream vision, con­ taining echoes of The Great God Brown and WerfeFs Goat Song (which the Theatre Guild produced in 1926). Though the Players rehearsed Tread the Green Grass, the production was canceled. The Provincetown board apparently dropped Green's experimental play because they needed a commercial success. Yet neither the substitution of another play nor the generous pledges of support by a number of wealthy patrons were able to save the theater when the stock market crashed in October, 1929. A decade, a way of life, and a great experimental theater expired in the crash. 13

E . E . Cummings, "The Theatre," The Dial, L X X X (1926), p . 344; reprinted in George J. Firmage, ed., E. E, Cummings : A Miscellany (New York, 1958), p. 73 14 In Paul Green, The House of Connelly and Other Plays (New York, 1931), p. 225. 197

The depression that followed in the wake of the chaos on Wall Street focused the attention of more and more playwrights on social and economic issues, with Clifford Odets's agit-prop Waiting for Lefty (1935) setting the tone for much of the drama of t h a t decade. Yet plays dealing with economic problems were by no means the exclusive province of the 1930's. For the social orientation of the experimental playwrights of the thirties was anticipated in the twenties by the work of Rice, Lawson, and the members of the New Playwrights' Theatre. Rice's The Adding Machine, produced by the Theatre Guild in 1923, remains his best-known work. In it the playwright projects the mind and soul of Mr. Zero, a depart­ ment store bookkeeper. Like Kaiser and other Continental Expressionists, Rice casti­ gates modern industrial procedures that waste away men's souls by demanding from them only the mechanical use of their limbs. In the Guild production, Lee Simonson's use of masks and tilted settings transformed Rice's visual images into effective stage poetry, with the result that The Adding Machine has become the most frequently cited example of American Expressionist theater. The modest success of The Adding Machine may have influenced its author to attempt another play in the same mode. Yet The Subway (written in 1923) was not produced until 1929. Although Rice has said t h a t The Subway, like The Adding Machine, deals with the slavery of the machine-age, an analysis of the Expressionist techniques that comprise the most vivid aural and visual moments of the play suggests that the work owes as much to erotic considerations as to economic impulses. I n The Subway Rice objectifies the sexual fears and fantasies of a young woman named Sophie Smith. Thus when a man stares at her in Scene One, Sophie literally feels naked: "her dress becomes diaphanous, revealing the outlines of her figure."15 Scene Two finds Sophie in the subway during the rush hour. A crowd of seemingly beastly men surround her, and Rice externalizes Sophie's repulsion at feeling their bodies press against her by means of a simple but theatrically effective Expressionist tech­ nique. As the flickering lights of the subway black out, the men don various grotesque and ugly animal masks. Other scenes continue in this manner, until, deflowered and about to be deserted by her lover, Sophie has the inevitable Expressionist nightmare in Scene Eight. Accusing fingers shoot out at her from the blackness surrounding her bed, and she hears a number of voices that grow louder and louder. In desperation, she rushes out and throws herself in front of the phallic subway train, thus suggesting t h a t the play owes as much to the gospel according to Freud as to the teachings of Marx. Other works by Rice that contain greatly diluted Expressionist elements include The Sidewalks of New York (written in 1925), Two on an Island (1940), A New Life (1943), and The Grand Tour (1951). Lawson's best-known play, Processional, was produced by the Theatre Guild in 1925. Earlier, the Equity Players had given his Roger Bloomer (1923). Lawson's later plays were staged by the New Playwrights' Theatre. Roger Bloomer, which Nathan called "an attempt to see New York through the eyes of a Georg Kaiser or Walter Hasenklever [sic]," 16 depicts the spiritual journey of a Midwestern youth who rebels 15 16

198

Elmer Rice, The Subway (New York, 1929), p. 20. George Jean Nathan, The House of Satan (New York, 1926), p. 156.

against middle-class values and flees to the big city in search of maturity. The work is thoroughly Expressionist and bears a slight resemblance to Henri-René Lenormand's play Failures. Lawson, who, like Cummings, had been a member of the famed ambulance corps, remembers seeing t h a t French Expressionist play in Paris soon after World War I. 17 With Processional Lawson abandoned his complete reliance on Expressionist dramaturgy, but like his Nirvana (1926), Loud Speaker (1927), and The International (1928), Processional contains a number of genuine Expressionist elements. As in the case of Wilson's Crime in the Whistler Room, Lawson's early plays conclude on a note of hope, reminiscent of a number of German Expressionist dramas proclaiming the coming of the utopian New Man. In the nightmare scene in Roger Bloomer, the spirit of the protagonist's dead girl friend chases away the obscene Old Women by saying, "Away, ghosts of yesterday, for the young are coming marching, marching; . . . can't you hear them singing a new song?" In Processional, the heroine's optimistic curtain line, " I ' m agonna raise my kid, sing to him soft . . .," 18 strongly suggests an ideological affinity between Lawson and the German Expres­ sionists. I t was no doubt this quality in Processional, coupled with its Expressionist techniques, t h a t prompted O'Neill to refer to it as "too much German patent American goods". 19 The termination of Lawson's experimental phase roughly coincides with the closing of the New Playwrights' Theatre, which produced his Loud Speaker and The International. Like these imaginative works, most of the other plays staged by this group contain Expressionist elements. Influenced by Expressionist theory as well as by the production methods of Russian constructivism and Piscator's Epic Theater, the New Playwrights issued an Artaudesque manifesto proclaiming "a theatre where the spirit, the movement, the music of this age is carried on, accentuated, amplified, crystallized. A theatre which shocks, terrifies, matches wits with the audience. . . . In all, a theatre which is as drunken, as barbaric, as clangorous as our age". 20 The choice of adjectives in this outburst of radical sentiment mirrored the tone of the exhibits on display at the International Theater Exposition, held in New York early in 1926. According to Lawson, the impact of the exposition on him and his soon-to-be-colleagues at the New Playwrights' Theatre was "tremendous". Among the non-realistic plays staged by the New Playwrights' Theatre, in addition to those by Lawson, were Basshe's The Centuries (1927), a kaleidoscopic picture of Jewish immigrant life in the sweat shops of New York; Paul Sifton's The Belt (1927), a social protest play attacking Henry Ford; Michael Gold's anti-racist Hoboken Blues (1928), which anticipates Jean Genet's The Blacks in so far as Gold demands an allNegro cast with white roles to be played b y Negroes in white masks; and Upton Sin17

Unless otherwise documented, specific information concerning Lawson and the New Play­ wrights' Theatre was furnished by Mr. Lawson in a series of conversation, in Los Angeles, California, in the summer of 1966. 18 John Howard Lawson, Boger Bloomer (New York, 1923), p. 222; Processional (New York, 1925), p. 218. 19 Letter from O'Neill to Michael Gold, February 12, 1925, in the Landauer Collection, Dart­ mouth20 College Library. E m J o Basshe, "The Revolt in Fifty-Second Street," New York Times, February 27, 1927, Sec. 7, p. 4. 199

clair's Singing Jailbirds (1928), which had the longest run of the plays presented by the group. As John Dos Passos subsequently noted, the popular success of Sinclair's socialist play was due to the fact that the staging "did not depart too far from the methods of Expressionism with which [the audiences] were already familiar" 2 1 No consistently Expressionist plays by the two other members of the New Play­ wrights' Theatre, Dos Passos and Francis Edwards Faragoh, were staged by the group (which gave Dos Passos's Airways, Inc.), but one Expressionist play by each of these writers did see production in New York. Dos Passos's The Garbage Man, retitled The Moon is a Gong, was staged at the Cherry Lane Playhouse in March, 1926. The play projects the inner world of two young lovers who are haunted by Death in various guises, including t h a t of a Garbage Man. P a r t Two of the play is a grotesquely distorted vision of modern America, not unlike that revealed in Manhattan Transfer. Speaking of his early novels, Dos Passos later admitted that his "excitement over the 'expres­ sionist' theatre of the nineteen-twenties had a good deal to do with shaping their style", and in a letter to the present writer, he speaks of his indebtedness to Continental sources: "We were all very much influenced by expressionist developments in Europe. . . .. I saw a couple of plays by Andreev in translation, but in my case I suspect t h a t the Diaghilev ballet was the great influence." 22 The Diaghilev ballet seems to have left its impact also on Faragoh's Pinwheel, whose production at the Neighborhood Playhouse (February, 1927) caused what one newspaper termed "The Civil War Between the Expressionists". 23 I n the 1930's, Expressionist elements enlivened the matter-of-fact content of crude left-wing agit-prop plays (of which Odets's Waiting for Lefty is one of the most sophisticated), and social revolutionaries argued in the pages of Workers' Theatre (later renamed New Theatre) whether to use realism or E. in order to undermine the bourgeois theater. The proletarian troupes were united under the League of Workers' Theatres (later the New Theatre League). One of the League's most successful pro­ ductions was Irwin Shaw's Bury the Dead (1936), which invites comparison with Toller's Transfiguration and Hans Chlumberg's Miracle at Verdun. Another workers' company of the thirties was the Theatre Union. Its first season opened with Peace on Earth (1933) by George Sklar and Albert Maltz. This anti-war play about a pacifist college professor begins realistically but ends with an Expressionist dream sequence. Expressionist elements can also be found in the work of the Federal Theatre Project. Of the many new plays produced by the Federal Theatre, John Hunter Booth's Created Equal could be taken as an example of the Expressionist social protest play of the thirties. The work makes use of masks and contains a scene with a huge stock ticker t h a t emits enormous quantities of ribbon. Top-hatted plutocrats, chewing fat cigars, study the tape while voices in the background speak in disconnected language. Yet the most original contribution of the Federal Theatre Project was undoubtedly 21

John Dos Passos, "Did the New Playwrights Theatre Fail?" New Masses, V (August, 1929), p, 13. 22 John Dos Passos, "Looking Back on 'U.S.A.,' " New York Times, October 25, 1959, Sec. 2, p. 5; 23Dos Passos to Mardi Valgemae, September 5, 1966 For details see Mardi Valgemae, "Civil War Among the Expressionists: John Howard Lawson and the Pinwheel Controversy," Educational Theatre Journal, X X (March, 1968), pp. 8—14. 200

the Living Newspaper. Influenced by the work of the Soviet Blue Blouse troupes, Brecht, Piscator, as well as the Expressionists, the Living Newspaper frequently distorted character, speech, setting, time, and action in order to express inner meanings. Thus in Power (1937) the justices of the Supreme Court, hearing arguments on the TVA case, are represented by nine forbidding masks placed on a high bench. In 1935 (1936) Louisiana legislators are depicted as lifeless puppets whose strings are literally pulled by Huey Long. Traces of E. are also to be found in the plays of Archibald MacLeish, and recent scholarship has paid attention to the same mode as used in the work of Thornton Wilder. In the 1940's, E. left its mark on the plays of William Saroyan and William Carlos Williams and invaded the field of musical comedy. As far back as 1924, the new mode had become thoroughly commercialized by George S. Kaufman and Marc Connelly when their successful Beggar on Horseback, an adaptation of a German play, opened on Broadway. With such native Expressionist plays as J . P . McEvoy's Americana (1926) and God Loves Us (1926), William Gaston's Damn the Tears (1927), Sophie Treadwell's Machinal (1928), and Channing Pollock's Mr. Money penny (1928) firmly entrenched on Broadway in the twenties, 24 it comes as no surprise that some of the musicals of the forties made use of the same techniques. Among those who did borrow from E. were Rogers and Hammerstein in Allegro (1947) and K u r t Weill and Moss Hart in Lady in the Dark (1941). In the H a r t musical, Liza Elliott's Freudian dreams are acted out with the help of grotesquely distorted props, and at one point Liza's lover appears as a circus ringmaster, snapping a whip in the manner of Mr. Moneypenny in Pollock's play. The circus scene then changes into a courtroom, reminiscent of the musical dream trial in Beggar on Horseback. Hart has written about the impact which this comedy made on him. Another important influence on H a r t was a young man who talked of Kaiser and Meyerhold, 25 whose shadows loom even larger over the post-World War I I American theater and the work of playwrights from Arthur Laurents (A Clearing in the Woods) to Adrienne Kennedy (The Owl Answers), Tom Eyen (The White Whore and the Bit Player), and Julie Bovasso (Gloria and Esperanza). And the plays of the three universally recognized American dramatists of this period Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, and Edward Albee - are all heavily indebted to Expressionist dramaturgy. Pondering the question of dramatic form in an essay, Miller suggests t h a t there are two general "ideas" that govern the choosing of the right form, namely those of family and society. The first of these demands realism, while social relationships are best revealed through E. Miller then analyzes two recent plays, Eliot's The Cocktail Party and Wilder's Our Town. The Cocktail Party fails, in his view, because Eliot's poetic mode clashes with the play's essentially realistic family relationship. Our Town, however, is concerned with society as a whole. "Wilder," writes Miller, "sees 24 An entirely different mood of E, permeated Broadway when the Habima Theatre of Moscow arrived in New York and presented Vakhtangov's celebrated version of Salamon Ansky's The Dybbuk at the Mansfield Theatre in December, 1926. Expressionist productions were mounted also by the Yiddish Art Theatre, the Artef Players, and the Unzer Theater. 25 Moss Hart, Act One (New York, 1960), pp. 73, 102.

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his characters in this play not primarily as personalities, as individuals, but as forces.'' I t is appropriate, therefore, t h a t Wilder chose E. as a vehicle. But "the price paid by Our Town" Miller adds, "is psychological characterization forfeited in the cause of the symbol." A successful play must bridge the gap between the private life of a man (realism) and his social life (E.), and Miller urges the creation of a form " t h a t will unite both elements". 26 I n his own Death of a Salesman (1949) he achieved this synthesis of realistic and Expressionist modes. I n the introduction to his Collected Plays, Miller speaks of the genesis of this play, which began as an Evreinovesque monodrama: "The first image that occurred to me which was to result in Death of a Salesman was of an enormous face the height of the proscenium arch which would appear and then open up, and we would see the inside of a man's head." I t was his aim, writes Miller, "to create a form which, in itself as a form, would literally be the process of Willy Loman's way of mind". In other words, "the play's eye was to revolve from within Willy's head." I t does—not only in Death of a Salesman, but also in After the Fall (1964). Miller also states that he "had always been attracted and repelled by the brilliance of German E". 2 7 A less ambiguous view is held by Tennessee Williams. " E . and all other uncon­ ventional techniques in drama," he writes in the production notes to The Glass Menagerie (1945), "have only one valid aim, and that is a closer approach to truth." Wil­ liams discards the photographic approach and speaks of using poetic imagination in order to change reality into "other forms than those which were merely present in ap­ pearance". 2 8 Aided by the directorial hand of Elia Kazan (who staged Miller's Death of a Salesman as well as After the Fall) and the scenic effects of J o Mielziner, these "other forms" appear here and there in Williams's plays (e.g., the projection of the ter­ ror in Blanche's mind in A Streetcar Named Desire [1947] by means of grotesquely dis­ torted visual and aural images) and find their most sustained application in Camino Real (1953), whose street cleaners probably derive from Dos Passos's The Garbage Man. Albee, whose The American Dream (1961) and Malcolm (1966) contain Expression­ ist distortions, referred at a press conference to his Tiny Alice (1964) as "something of a metaphysical dream play which must be entered into and experienced without pre­ determination of how a play is supposed to go". 29 Since Albee was, at the time, lecturing the critics, his warning about "predetermination" in all probability related to thinking conditioned by the conventions of Broadway realism. For by calling Tiny Alice " a metaphysical dream play", he placed his own work in the tradition of dramatic E. that goes back to Strindberg's dream plays. When we add to this statement a consid­ eration of the structure and imagery of the play, we are justified in interpreting Tiny Alice as an Expressionist projection of Brother Julian's nightmare or hallucination. 26 Arthur 27 Arthur 28

Miller, "The Family in Modern Drama," Atlantic Monthly, April, 1956, pp. 35—41. Miller, Collected Plays (New York, 1957), pp. 23-24, 30, 39. Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie (New York, 1949), p. ix. For an extended discus­ sion of Williams's indebtedness to E. see Esther Merle Jackson, The Broken World of Tennessee Williams (Madison, Wisc., 1965). 29 Quoted in Louis Calta, "Albee Lectures Critics on Taste," New York Times, March,'23, 1965, p. 33. For a consideration of E. in Tiny Alice and the play's affinity with The Great God Brown see Mardi Valgemae, "Albee's Great God Alice," Modern Drama, X (1967), pp. 267—273. 202

A similar approach to the play was taken by William Ball, who, in directing the work for the American Conservatory Theatre, made use of exaggerated properties and em­ ployed masks far beyond the application prescribed by Albee's stage directions. Tiny Alice not only contains a number of familiar Expressionist techniques (masks, visually expressed transferrals of personality, symbolic distortions of reality) but derives, in part, from O'Neill's The Great God Brown. Other plays of the sixties are indebted to American Expressionist plays of earlier decades. For example, Murray Schisgal's The Typists (1963) owes much to both Rice's The Adding Machine and Wilder's The Long Christmas Dinner, Lewis John Carlino's Objective Case (1963) is reminiscent of Kreymborg's Manikin and Minikin as well as Wilson's Cronkhite's Clocks, and the grotesque puppets and masks of Jean-Claude van Itallie's America Hurrah (1965) are not unlike the giant effigies of cheer leaders and pop venders in Gaston's Damn the Tears. Similarly, the new centers of avant-garde drama, such as the Caffe Gino, the Living Theatre, La Mama Experimental Theatre Club, the Open Theatre, and Theatre Genesis, are the spiritual heirs of the Provincetown Players, the Washington Square Players, the Neighborhood Playhouse, and the New Playwrights' Theatre. The extent of the indebtedness of the "new" American drama of the sixties to E. (as well as to other movements influenced by E., such as the " a r t " film and the theater of the absurd) is revealed in the notes to Megan Terry's Keep Tightly Closed in a Cool Dry Place (1965). The play, says its author, "can be directed literally or as a fantasy or dream", and its three characters can be seen "as aspects of one personality". In talking about the Open Theatre production of Keep Tightly Closed, the director, Peter Feldman, states t h a t the formal innovations of Miss Terry's play have been anticipated by earlier forms of theater, including "Expressionistic plays", the films of Federico Fellini, and the work of the absurdist playwrights, whose approach to character "is a way to get beyond the nervous system into the soul". 30 We recall that it was Toller who observed t h a t the playwright skinned the human being in order to find his soul under the skin. Most serious American playwrights as well as many scene designers and directors since the 1920's have grasped the imaginative tools of E. in order to expose the soul by hacking through what O'Neill called "the banality of surfaces". Numerically, Amer­ ican E. was not overwhelming. I t is significant, however, t h a t the leading playwrights from O'Neill to Albee and beyond have utilized the Expressionist mode. While verse drama, or what Cocteau called "poetry in the theatre", has all but disappeared from the modern American stage, a different kind of "poetry of the theatre" has taken its place. Similarly, such well-known scene designers and directors as Robert Edmond Jones, Throckmorton, Simonson, Kazan, Mielziner, and Rail have assimilated the new mode into their work. Utilizing Expressionist techniques, imaginative writers and scenic artists have created a ritualistic poetry of visual stage metaphors and rhythms that reveals the essence of the human predicament. Ry dramatizing the tortured inner life of twentieth-century man, American E. has added to the modern repertory a significant body of vivid and dynamic plays.

30

Megan Terry, Viet Rock and Other Plays (New York, 1967), pp. 155-156, 201-202. 203

E U G E N E BRISTOW

EXPRESSIONIST STAGE TECHNIQUES I N T H E RUSSIAN T H E A T E R

From the beginnings to the present, the theatrical genius of Vsevolod Meyerhold has been instrumental in shaping both the nature and the uses of E. in the Russian theater. U p to 1930 Meyerhold staged almost two hundred productions, and since most of his work consisted of experiments in new forms and techniques, he provided a multitude of stage techniques t h a t were used in various styles ranging from realism to the "absurd". Meyerhold died in 1940 but with the subsequent publication of his writings in the fifties and the memoirs of those who had worked with him or had seen his original productions, his experiments with Expressionist stage techniques continue to influence the present-day theater. My purpose in this paper is to examine in detail the first periods of experimentation in the Russian theater, from the beginnings to the Revolution, and to sketch briefly the consequences. 1905–1908 Among the memorable events in the modern Russian theater, few perhaps equal in significance the Moscow Art Theater production of Chekhov's Čaika (The Seagull) in December, 1898. Although the production faced several odds against success, the highly favorable response by both audience and critics ensured the establishment of the new theater and led to the submission of new scripts by the author. The symbol of the "seagull", stitched to the curtain of the Moscow Art Theater and stamped on its posters, tickets, and programs, not only sealed in visible form the inseparable linking of theater, author, and play, but also marks the transition from one art movement to the other in the history of Russian theater. The production of The Seagull asserted the domain of the Naturalist —subsequently refined to Realist — movement in the use of the proscenium arch theater of illusion and, at the same time, signified the introduc­ tion of the modern theater of multiple forms, techniques, and styles. Reviving the aims of Alexander Ostrovsky in establishing a national theater, and the techniques of the Meiningen Players in creating productions of pictorial illusion, the founders of the Moscow Art Theater intended to reform the Russian theater; but "like all revolutionaries", as Konstantin Stanislavsky put it, "we broke the old and exaggerated the value of the new". 1 In short, during the early years of the Moscow 1 Konstantin Stanislavskv, My Life in Art, trans. J. J, Bobbins (New York, 1956), p. 330, (Orig, pub, in 1924.)

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Art Theater both Stanislavsky and Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko discarded the obvious theatrical devices ingrained in the Russian court theaters of their day and sought their ''genuine artistic t r u t h ' ' in the materials and techniques of Naturalism: ' ' I t was the truth of things, furniture, costumes, properties, lighting effects, as well as of the outward image of the actor, and his external physical life." 2 Only in later years, chiefly under the influence of Chekhov's works, Stanislavsky discarded the ex­ cesses of Naturalism and sought to discover the devices that led to the "inner realism", or "perezivanie", of his productions. Both an incident at a rehearsal of The Seagull and the script itself presaged the modern theater of multiple forms. In the script, the character Arkadina is a successful actress in the contemporary "peephole" theater, which her son Treplyov describes as being "in a rut, ingrained with conventionalism [predrassudok]".3 I n the first act, Treplyov passionately repudiates that theater: When the curtain rises on a room with three walls illuminated by artificial light, when I see these extremely talented persons, these high priests of a holy art, showing the way people eat, drink, make love, walk around, and wear their jackets; when out of trite scenes and empty phrases they try to fish a moral—a tiny moral, easy to grasp and useful for everyday practice in the home; when in a thousand variations they treat me to one and the same thing over and over again, then I run, I run away . . .4 Treplyov's conclusion that "new forms are needed" in the theater is eventually qualified in the fourth act when he realizes that it is "not a question of old and new forms, but t h a t one writes . . . because it pours freely out of his own soul". 5 Thus, in the character of Treplyov as well as in the image of the "seagull", Chekhov gave recognition to the gathering forces of Symbolism in Russia. The rehearsal incident occurred in early September, 1898, when Chekhov arrived in Moscow to see the company in operation. Among those actors who talked with him was Meyerhold, who not only played the role of Treplyov but also made the following entry in his diary: One of the actors said t h a t in The Seagull there would be croaking frogs, the sound of dragonflies, and the barking of dogs offstage. " W h y ? " Chekhov asked in a tone of dissatisfaction, " I t is realistic," the actor answered. " I t is realistic," Chekhov repeated with a laugh, and after a short pause, he said: "The stage is art. There is a genre painting by Kramskoi in which the 2 K. S. Stanislavskij Moia žizn' v iskusstve (My Life in Art) (Moscow, 1936), p. 309. (Orig. pub. in 1925.) All translations in this paper, with the exceptions noted, have been made by the author of this paper. 3 A. P. Chekhov, P'esy (London, 1963), p. 145. 4 Ibid., pp. 145-146. 6 Ibid., p. 189. In his excellent two-volume biography (in Russian) of Meyerhold, Nikolai Volkov concluded that the character of Treplyov expressed the feelings of a new generation of artists in the period from 1898 to 1908. Nikolai Volkov, Meierhol'd (Moscow—Leningrad, 1929), I, 90-94.

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faces are magnificently depicted. Suppose a nose were cut out of one of the faces and a live one substituted? The nose would be 'realistic', but the paint­ ing would be spoiled.'' One of the actors proudly said that, at the end of the third act of The Seagull, the director wanted to introduce on stage the entire house­ hold, including a woman with a weeping child. " I t ' s unnecessary," Chekhov said. " I t would be like playing the piano pia-nissimo at the moment the lid of the piano drops." " B u t in life it often happens t h a t a forfe digs into the pianissimo unexpectedly for us," one of the actors tried to object.

quite

"Yes, but the stage," Chekhov said, "demands a certain convention (izvestnoj uslovnosti). You have no fourth wall. Besides, the stage is art, the stage reflects in itself the quintessence of life, and it is unnecessary to introduce anything superfluous on the stage." 6 Chekhov's complaints about superfluous naturalistic detail in the Moscow Art Theater, his belief t h a t the theater is an art and, therefore, subject to the conditions of t h a t art, and his recognition t h a t even the illusionistic "peephole" theater—the kind of theater for which he wrote his own plays -required "a certain convention", not only underscored his brilliant insight into the relationship between life and art but also framed the essential points in the argument over the aims and uses of the theater that have engaged the attention of Russian playwrights, theorists, critics, and directors from t h a t day on. In the course of this century, essentially two directions were provided in the search for the proper aims and uses of the Russian theater. One direction, exemplified, at its best, by the Moscow Art Theater, continued along the same course which, having originated in the Renaissance roofed playhouse, led to the realistic theater of illusion, where everything was arranged to transport the spectator into the universe of the play being enacted on the stage. Stanislavsky "rejoiced in the fact t h a t the spectator used to come to the Art Theater for a performance of Tri sestry (The Three Sisters), not as though coming into a theater, but as though for a visit to the Prozorov family". 7 Con­ sidering such an audience response as the highest achievement of the theater, he de­ scribed the chief aim of the Moscow Art Theater in the following terms: "As soon as the spectator is seated in his place, and the curtain has opened, there and then we take possession of him, we induce him to forget that he is in the theater. We take him to ourselves, into our own setting, into our own atmosphere, into that environment which now exists on the stage." 8 A significant portion of Stanislavsky's artistic life was de­ voted to the search for the proper techniques allowing the action to take hold of the 6 Statement from Meyerhold's diary, printed in E. A. Polockaja, "Čekov i Mejerhol'd", Literaturnos nasledstvo, LXVIII (1960), pp. 418—419. This statement was first published by Meyerhold in 1907. For an earlier discussion of conventions in the theater see Valerij Bryusov "Nenuzhnaia pravda" in Mir iskusstva, VII—VIII, nos. 1—6 (1902), pp. 67—74. 7 Quoted from Evg. Vaxtangov, "Dve besedy s ucenikami" (April 10, 1922), printed in L. D. Vendrovskaja, Evg. Vakhtangov, Materialy is staVi (Moscow, 1959), p. 206. 8 Quotation attributed to Stanislavsky, as reported by Vakhtangov, ibid., p, 206,

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spectator. That his system was subsequently designated as the "official" means for the actor to use during the thirties and forties not only stresses the degree of Stanislavsky's success but also clarifies the aims and uses of the Russian theater of t h a t time. The second direction, exemplified, at its best, by Meyerhold's career, was in large measure the continuation of an older course t h a t had been interrupted in the eighteenth century and largely diverted, in the nineteenth century, by the Naturalist movement. The impetus for returning to the older course and the subsequent endorsement of the "new" theater—which was largely the "old" theater modified by new theories and practices—had a number of sources. The antiquarian movement in nineteenth-century Europe, aided by archeological field work chiefly in the ancient theater and by new research on theatrical institutions in various historical periods, contributed to the increasing awareness t h a t theatrical forms, techniques, and styles in earlier cultures were shaped by aims and uses other than those which prevailed in the Russian theater at the turn of the century. The members of the avantgarde were particularly interested in the ancient Greek theater. For example, Valery Bryusov noted the uses of conventions such as the chorus, masks, prologues, and the lack of scenery; Vyacheslav Ivanov studied the theater in terms of its ritual; and Fyodor Sologub believed that the contemporary theater should employ the ritual. The spectators coming into the theater should "leave their coarse, pettybourgeois clothing at the door [and] dart off into a light dance", he urged, and "the crowd which has come to observe will be transformed into a chorus come to participate in the tragic action". 9 The new artistic movements in Western Europe, particularly in the visual arts and music, coupled with the new theatrical theories and practices introduced by designers like Appia and Craig, b y directors like Reinhardt, and by writers like George Fuchs, paralleled to a new generation of artists, musicians, writers, and directors in Russia. A new journal, Mir iskusstva (The World of Art), published by Sergei Diaghilev and his associates at the turn of the century, served not only as a means of spreading informa­ tion about the arts in Western Europe, but also provided a sounding board for the avantgarde in Russia. Materials published in the journal included letters from art centers in cities like Rome and Paris, accounts of Russia's historical past, foreign and domestic criticism and theory, and beautiful illustrations. New methods in the staging of Russian opera, having originated in the 1880's under Savva Mamontov and contin­ uing almost twenty-five years under his guidance, resulted in lavish productions fea­ turing singers like Fyodor Shalyapin, composers like Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov, and scenes and costume designs by artists like Mikhail Vrubel, Konstantin Korovin, and Vasily Polenov. Mamontov's work, in turn, initiated a renaissance in the opera and ballet productions at the Imperial theaters; and in the first decade of this century, Diaghilev organized special Russian tours abroad that included, in the beginning, art exhibitions and concert performances, and later, "seasons" of Russian opera and ballet. In all these endeavors, the members of the Russian avantgarde were, as Marc Slonim 9

Fyodor Sologub, "Teatr odnoj voli," Teatr, Kniga o novem teatre (St. Petersburg, September, 1908), p 198. 208

observes, united more "by the community of taste than by ideology"; but "all hated provincialism, naturalism, sloppiness of execution, substitution of social righteousness for craft, and replacement of excellence by virtuous intentions''. 1 0 The Russian theater was the last of the arts to respond to the new movement in Europe. Not until 1905, with Meyerhold's work at the Theater Studio established by the Moscow Art Theater, was there a deliberate effort to experiment with new theories and practices. Although the productions at the Theater Studio were never open to the public, the nature of the work done there shaped the course of the new theater in Russia. In 1906, Meyerhold joined the Theater of Vera Komissarzhevskaya in St. Pe­ tersburg and, continuing experiments similar jto those initiated in Moscow, he staged fourteen productions in less than two years. By 1908 the foundations of the new theater had been laid, chiefly under his guidance, and thereafter two kinds of theater were available in Russia: the realistic one and the uslovnij theater of conventions. The aims and uses of these two kinds differed greatly, and although each drew sustenance from the other, it was primarily the uslovnij theater that can be rightly called the theater of multiple forms, techniques, and styles. Moreover, it was in this, and not in the realistic theater, that Expressionist stage techniques were first developed. If the chief aim of the realistic theater was to induce the spectator "to forget t h a t he is in the theater", the chief aim of the uslovnij theater was to remind him t h a t he was indeed there. I n reviewing the work of Reinhardt in Berlin in 1907, Meyerhold subscribed to the terms of the uslovnij theater, as defined by Leonid Andreev in a letter to the young director: "[In the uslovnij theater] the spectator should not forget for one moment that in front of him there are actors who are acting; nor the actors that in front of them is the audience, that beneath their feet is a stage, that on each side is the setting." 1 1 Whereas the realistic theater sought to incorporate the spectator into the play being enacted before him, the uslovnij theater intended to supply only what was necessary—"to help the spectator", as Bryusov put it, "in the slightest way to reconstruct, in his imagination, the scene required by the plot". 12 In the uslovnij theater, Meyerhold declared, there were four creators, and although each performed separate functions, they were inseparably linked to each other by a creative process which Meyerhold explained both diagrammatically and verbally as follows: Author

Director

Actor

Spectator

The director of the uslovnij theater makes it his task only to direct the actor, not to govern him (the opposite of the Meiningen director). He serves only as a bridge which connects the soul of the author with the soul of the actor. Having assimilated the director's creative work, the actor is left alone, face 10 Marc Slonim, Russian Theater from the Empire to the Soviets (New York, 1962), p. 188. For accounts in Russian, see the following: V. Vsevolodskij (Gerngross), Istorija russkogo teatra (Lenin­ grad—Moscow, 1929), I I , 262—267; Evg. A. Znosko-Borovskij, Éusskij teatr nachala XX veka (Prague, 1925), pp. 246-253. 11 From a letter by Andreev to Meyerhold, printed first in an article by Meyerhold on Reinhardt's productions, which he saw in Berlin in April, 1907. See Vesy, VI (1907), 93—98, reprinted in V. 12E. Meierhol'd's Stat'i, pis'ma, reči, besedy (Moscow, 1968), I, 164. Bryusov, op. cit., p. 73,

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to face with the spectator, and from the friction of these two uncombined sources—the creative work of the actor and the creative imagination of the spectator—a true bright flame is kindled. 13 In this analysis of the creative process, Meyerhold laid the foundation for all of his experimentation. The process was flexible enough to serve various styles; and it was particularly appropriate in the development of Expressionist stage techniques. What­ ever devices the author incorporated in his script, the. director could employ them as given, add to them, or discard them; the actor was free to improvise, should that serve the director's intent, but he must participate in the creative process mutually enacted between the actor and the spectator. Various Expressionist techniques, ranging from distorted scenic units, area lighting, or symbolic costume to the mask, the grotesque, and ironic by-play illustrate the flexibility of Meyerhold's creative process. That the uses of the theater are conditioned by the conventions employed in it was a substantial part of his theory. However much the members of the Russian avantgarde disagreed among them­ selves concerning the means of production, the relationship of author, director, and actor, or the aims of the theater, they were all firmly convinced that the theater was not only an art conditioned by its innate conventions, but also that the spectator should never forget that he was in the theater. Although from 1905 to 1908 Meyerhold produced primarily Symbolist plays, several of his stage techniques were later used in the production of Expressionist drama. At the Theater Studio in 1905, the architectural setting was discarded and Meyerhold's designers used the decorative panel with furniture and properties selected in terms of suggestion and exaggeration. In a scene depicting an artist's studio, for example, a large canvas with a picture partially completed (the remainder outlined in charcoal) dominated half of the stage, only part of the skylight was revealed, and the pieces of furniture and props were few in number and chosen for their functional purpose (as required by the action of the play). In the production of Hauptmann's Schluck und Jau (1905), the original designs, which featured "a great number of details", were replaced by "one or two prominent brush strokes": in the first scene, huge castle gates; in the royal bedchamber, a gigantic bed of exaggerated proportions complete with an "in­ credible" canopy; in the third scene, a blue sky with clouds painted on the backdrop, a row of roses running the entire width of the upstage area, and a row of arbors devised like wicker baskets on the forestage. In this scene, Meyerhold introduced the principle of uniform movement and gesture performed simultaneously by the group, in opposi­ tion to the naturalistic use of diversification. As the curtain rises, the princess, seated in the central arbor, is flanked by her ladies-in-waiting seated in identical arbors, each of them embroidering a single broad ribbon with ivory needles, all in identical time. A duet, sung to the accompaniment of harp and harpsichord, is heard offstage. "The musical rhythm is evident throughout," Meyerhold said, "in the movements, lines, gestures, words, colors of the setting and colors of the costumes." 14 13

Vs. Meierhol'd's "Teatr (K istorii i tekhnike)," Teatr, Kniga o novom teatre (St. Petersburg, 1908),14pp. 159, 175. Ibid., pp. 130-132. 210

At Poltava in the summer of 1906, Meyerhold introduced several new stage tech­ niques. He changed the architectural design of the theater by dismantling the footlights and covering the orchestra with a floor that was on the same level as the stage itself. In this way, the actors were brought closer to the audience. In Ibsen's Ghosts, he discard­ ed the front curtain and dressed the actors in symbolic colors, e.g., Oswald in black and Regina in bright red. In Arthur Schnitzler's Der Ruf des Lebens (The Call of Life), a sofa as long as the stage was placed parallel to the footlights, and the props were multi­ plied to reduce the characters to insignificance. Using a Japanese device, Meyerhold carefully plotted the movements of the actors in terms of dance steps which either fol­ lowed or preceded the individual lines of the dialogue. Meyerhold's productions in 1906 and 1907 in St. Petersburg contributed numerous stage techniques that were later employed in production after production. In several plays, the stage was thrust close to the footlights, the decorative panel was used, and the actors appeared in the form of bas-relief. In Ibsen's HeddaGabler (1906), the costume and scene designers worked to harmonize the color scheme. In the costumes, for ex­ ample, line and mass were combined with color symbolism to express the inner nature as well as the typical traits of the characters, e.g., green for Hedda, pink for Thea, brown for Lovborg. The setting, the furniture, and the properties were similarly treated. As a compositional device Meyerhold used widely-spaced groupings (two actors on opposite sides of the stage), actors speaking en face, and the static pose of the character in associa­ tion with a particular property, e.g., Brack in the pose of a lawn, Hedda seated like a queen on a huge armchair covered with white fur. Long pauses, coldly-minted vocal sounds, separate rhythms for voice and body were combined with patterns of movement and static poses in order to enable the spectator not only to hear the spoken dialogue but also to penetrate to the ''inner secret dialogue of forebodings and emotional ex­ periences which cannot be expressed in words". The aim of the production was to pre­ sent "a primitive, pure expression to what is felt behind Ibsen's play: a cold, royal, autumnal Hedda". 1 5 In Andreev's Žizn' Čeloveka (The Life of Man 1907), Meyerhold discarded both the decorative panel and the usual lighting system, substituted draperies which were hung on the walls of the stagehouse, and introduced area lighting from a single light source. Properties were constructed in exaggerated proportions, and only a few pieces of furniture were selected to suggest the typical, and, given the low intensity of the light, the walls appeared invisible. On account of a special use of light and draperies, the characters were bathed in a dream-like atmosphere. The episodic structure of Wedekind's Frühlings Erwachen (1907) posed a serious problem in the shifting of eighteen scenes which Meyerhold and his designer solved by placing the entire setting on the stage and by spotlighting only the portion required by a particular episode. In this way, rapid changes of scene took place. Meyerhold's technique of area spotlight­ ing was subsequently elaborated and proved particularly useful for Expressionist drama by allowing a large number of episodes to be set in many different places of action; two 15 From the description of the production of Hedda Gabler by P. M. Jarcev, printed by Meyerhold in his book, O teatre (St. Petersburg, 1913), reprinted in Meierhold's Stat'i, 1, 242.

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or more places to be revealed at the same time; and rapid shifts of contrasting actions to move from place to place (montage). For his last production at the Komissarzhevskaya Theater, Sologub's Pobeda Smerti (The Victory [of Death, 1907), Meyerhold devised a flight of stairs that ran the full width and depth of the stage, from the rear wall to the edge of the proscenium. Through a large center arch, which was flanked by smaller openings, the steps rose to the large double door at the rear of the stage. Meyerhold had wanted to extend the stairs into the auditorium itself but was persuaded to stop at the edge of the prosce­ nium. I n some of his productions after 1908, however, he had his way, and the gulf between the actors and the audience was bridged; and the critics noted the excellent grouping of actors on the flight of steps. Both Tairov and Leopold Jessner later per­ fected this use of actors in plastic groupings and movements on steps and levels of varying heights. Meyerhold's most important production in this period was that of Alexander Blok's Balagancik (The Puppet Show) in 1906. I t marked a turning point in his career and after 1908 led to further experimentation with the techniques of the commedia dell'arte and the show-booth theater (balagan). Blue drapes were hung at the rear and the sides of the stage house, and a small booth theater, complete with its own stage, curtain, setting, and proscenium, was placed near the edge of the footlights. No mask­ ing was used to conceal the top of the booth theater, the ropes attached to the scenery in the booth theater were visible, and its settings were flown aloft in full view of the audience. Moreover, the light in the auditorium was on during performance. The char­ acters executed only suggestive movements and gestures. When the "doll" wept, for example, the handkerchief did not touch the eyes, and when it killed, the sword did not touch the victim. Pierrot, who was played by Meyerhold himself, used precise gestures (flapping arms) which were consistently repeated and were associated only with t h a t figure. At one point, the Clown was "struck" with a wooden sword and ex­ claimed t h a t cranberry juice was running from his wound. As Marjorie Hoover has observed, "the argument that the doll 'show' and not 'be' the character it portrays foreshadows the 'alienation' Brecht demands of his actors". 1 6 Both the script and the production of Blok's play were conceived in terms of the ambiguity of the mask, the dialectics of illusion/reality/irony, and the grotesque. I n the first phase of his career, Meyerhold experimented with a number of stage techniques which were subsequently refined and used in the production of Expression­ ist drama. By 1908 he had made the following innovations: designing the settings, fur­ niture, properties, and costumes in terms of selectivity, suggestion, and exaggeration; using the stage light, such as low-intensity light, to suggest mood and the area spot­ lighting to change multiple episodic scenes; exploiting the variable relationships be­ tween stage and auditorium, such as bringing actors closer to the audience, removing the footlights and the front curtain, retaining full light in the auditorium during the 16 Marjorie L. Hoover, "V. E. Meyerhold: A Russian Predecessor of Avant-Garde Theater," Comparative Literature, XVII (1965), 243. For descriptions of productions staged by Meyerhold in this period, see the following: Meierkhol'd, Stat'i, I, 95–97, 215–217, 239–257; Volkov, op. cit., I, 245—246; Znosko-Borovskij, op. cit., pp. 266-295,

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performance; using voice and diction to express an inner dialogue; the groupings and patterns of movement for the actors, including simultaneous and uniform group action, the static pose, dance patterns related to dialogue, and plastic groupings and movements on steps and levels; and employing musical rhythm, the mask, and the grotesque to define and control the elements of the production. 1913-1915 While the first stage of Meyerhold's career was marked by the introduction of Expressionist stage technique, the second was characterized by refinement and elabo­ ration. Along with several other directors, as well as Futurist writers and painters, Meyerhold added new devices, perfected the old, and prepared the way for the heyday of Expressionist stage production in the twenties. Among the directors who experimented with such devices were Nikolay Evreinov and Fyodor Komissarzhevsky, Vera's brother. Evreinov was instrumental in organizing two seasons (1907-1908; 1911-1912) at the Ancient Theater in St. Petersburg, during which medieval and seventeenth-century plays were staged in terms of their original conventions. Like Meyerhold in his second phase, Evreinov worked in cabarets, staging improvisations and plays characterized chiefly by parody and the grotesque. Among his views, like t h a t of "theatricalizing life" (which posits a universal theatrical instinct in mankind), the theory and practice of monodrama were most appropriate to the staging of Expressionist drama. "Every play," he said, "could be the drama or comedy of a single person, a central hero. The crowd of other persons . . . must only be shown from a single point of view, namely t h a t of the hero . . . One could thus produce all the variations of the hero's mood, extract them from his soul, and project them through the other characters." 17 Evreinov wrote and produced monodramas in which the central character is divided and multiplied, and the stage light changes in color and intensity as the mood of the character changes. Komissarzhevsky was an innovator of forms and styles from 1910 until his emigra­ tion in 1919. Like Meyerhold, he produced both operas and plays, experimented with the devices of the commedia dell'arte and the show-booth theater, staged plays by Ostrovsky and Molière, and developed the use of musical rhythm and the grotesque. He proposed a synthetic theater in which the performer was to combine the talents of dramatic actor, singer, and dancer. His production of Carlo Gozzi's Princess Turandot featured several aspects later incorporated by Vakhtangov in his own production: the actors enter from the auditorium, improvise speeches, actions, and asides; scenery in the form of screens appears and disappears in full view of the audience; and the style of the whole production is fantastic and grotesque. Among Komissarzhevsky's many productions, his concept of a play based on Dostoevsky's Skvernyj anekdot (A Sordid Story) is an excellent illustration of the uses of theatrical E. "The delirious images of 17 Znosko-Borovskij, op. cit., pp. 329—330. For discussions of Evreinov, see the following: Nicolas Evreinoff, The Theatre in Life, ed. and trans. Alexander I. Nazaroff (New York, 1927); N. N. Evreinov, Istorija russkogo teatra s drevnejšix vremen do 1917 goda (New York, 1955), pp. 402—405; Nikolai A. Gorchakov, The Theater in Soviet Russia, trans. Edgar Lehrman (New York, 1957), pp. 77-85.

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the hero of the play," Yevgeny Znosko-Borovsky observes, "were expressed in the broken, unnatural lines of the décor, in the degenerate houses, in the interrupted move­ ments of the characters, the unexpected pauses, the stumbling rhythm, speech, etc." 1 8 From 1908 to 1918 Meyerhold was employed as a director of both opera and drama at the Imperial theaters in St. Petersburg, and using the Hoffmannes que pseudonym of Dr. Dapertutto, he continued his experiments in cabarets and in his own theater studio. Two productions at the Interlude House in 1910 illustrate how he elaborated his earlier devices. He removed the footlights, added steps to link the stage with the auditorium, and substituted tables and chairs for the rows of seats. Schnitzler's scenario Der Schleier der Pierette (Pierette's Veil), under the title Sarf Kolombiny (Columbine's Scarf) was changed to a pantomime in the style of E.T.A. Hoffmann. Dividing the three scenes into fourteen episodes, in order to contrast the sharp changes in mood and to stress the nightmarish atmosphere, Meyerhold developed the uses of the grotesque. The action and nature of the chief characters, drawn from the commedia dell'arte, were manipulated by the changing musical rhythms supplied by the large-headed Kapellmeister and his four grotesque musicians. The movement spread into the auditorium with a dance of wedding guests around the tables and with the Kapellmeister's flight through the audience after the discovery of the bodies of Columbine and Pierrot. In Znosko-Borovsky's comedy, Obrascenny princ (The Transformed Prince), Meyerhold demonstrated the transformation from prince to king by having the courtiers add a gray wig and long beard to the prince in full view of the audience. At one point, during a battle scene, a soldier crawled out from underneath the scenery, described the violent conflict, was interrupted by shots, fell down the stairs into the auditorium, slid under a table, and eventually ran through the audience, shouting for everyone to save himself. In 1914 Meyerhold produced Blok's Neznakomka (The Unknown Woman) and The Puppet Show in St. Petersburg. Using devices borrowed from the Japanese Kabuki and No theaters for staging the first play, he experimented with using the property men, who held, waved, or moved gauze curtains, veils, and other objects to change both place and time. The bridge in The Unknown Woman was later described as the "first experiment of designing scenic space in the spirit ot constructivism". 19 In the same year, Meyerhold opened his own actors' studio, which featured physical training in the use of various devices from the commedia dell' arte, and the Hindu, Japanese, and Chi­ nese theaters, as well as instruction in acrobatic skills, in speaking prose and verse, and in theater history. Although the studio closed in 1917, it pioneered the training methods, emerging, under the name of biomechanics, in the twenties. Meyerhold's productions at the Imperial theaters, on the other hand, were, in the words of Edward Braun, "largely a consolidation of lessons already learnt". 2 0 His most outstanding production was t h a t of Mikhail Lermontov's Maskarad (Masquerade, 1917) on the very eve of the Revolution. As in The Puppet Show and Columbine's Scarf, Meyerhold here emphasized the mask and the grotesque. 18 19

Znosko-Borovskij, op. cit., p. 359. Volkov, op. cit., II, 324, quoting from Teatr im. Vs. Meierkhol'da (Moscow, 192G). For descriptions of the productions at the Interlude House in 1910 and Blok'c plays in 1914, see Volkov, op. cit., II, 124-132, 318-325, and Znosko-Borovskij, op. cit., pp. 302–318. 20 Edward Braun (tr. and ed.), Meyerhold on Theatre (New York, 1969), p. 78. 214

Since the grotesque was an important stage technique in the production of Ex­ pressionist drama after the Revolution, Meyerhold's theory influenced a number of directors. In his article, "The Show Booth (Balagan),'' published in 1913, Meyerhold examined not only the nature and theatrical use of the grotesque but also the desired response on the part of the audience. Even though certain plays by Blok, Sologub, and Wedekind may be classified as realistic, Meyerhold explained, something altogether different has been injected into their depiction of everyday life. He ascribed these unusual effects to the nature of the grotesque; that is, the particular realism in these plays forces the spectator to respond ambivalently to what is happening on the stage. The task of the grotesque "is to keep the spectator constantly in the condition of this ambivalent response to the scenic action, which changes its own course by means of contrasting touches". As Meyerhold pointed out, the effect of the grotesque upon the audience is similar to the responses of an observer to certain life-like figures by Jacques Callot, in that one senses something familiar and, at the same time, alien, and that thereby enigmatic hints are evoked by means of the grotesque. Hence, it is the aim of the artist employing the grotesque in the theater "to take the spectator out of one level of perception which he has just achieved to another which the spectator has by no means expected". The nature of the grotesque, according to Meyerhold, is, essentially, the struggle between form and content. A mixture of opposites, the grotesque is fantas­ tic and depends on its own originality in performance. I t may be found in both the comic and the tragic modes and expresses "the demonic in the deepest irony; the tragi­ comic in the everyday". I t strives for a "consistent improbability [Pushkin's phrase, uslovnoe nepravdopodobie], for enigmatic hints, for substitution [of something false for something true, podmena] and for transformation". I t neutralizes "what is sentimentally weak in the romantic" and employs sharp incongruity as well as "dissonance, elevated to the harmoniously beautiful and the overcoming of the daily grind in everyday life [preodolenie byta v byte]".21 As Volkov has observed, the method of the grotesque served as the basis for Meyerhold's device of changeover (pereključenie) which he used in his production of Alexey Faiko's UčiteV Bubus (The Teacher Bubus) in 1925. The work of the Russian Futurists in both art and the theater was revealed to the public in the period from 1913 to .1915. In December, 1913, the Society of Youth in St. Petersburg staged performances of two Futurist works at the Luna Park, in the same theater where Meyerhold had staged plays for Vera Komissarzhevskaya six years earlier. The works produced were Alexey Kruchenykh's opera Pobeda nad solncent (The Victory over the Sun) and Mayakovsky's play, Vladimir MayaJeovsky, A Tra­ gedy. The opera, divided into two acts with a prologue by Viktor Khlebnikov, depicts the forces of the future struggling with those of the past, as well as the problems which men of the future will face. Malevich designed both the sets and costumes for the pro­ duction. According to Kruchenykh, the scenery "was made of big sheets—triangles, circles, bits of machinery". 22 One of the backdrops consisted of an abstract geometrical design composed simply of a black and white square. The remaining backdrops in21

Meierhol'd, Stat'i, I, 2 2 5 - 2 2 9 . Volkov, op. cit., I I , 247. From the unpublished memoirs of Kruchenykh, "Nas v y x o d , " quoted and trans, b y Camilla G r a y , The Great Experiment: Russian Art, 1863-1922 (New York, 1962), p. 308. For Malevich and his designs, see Gray, p . 136 a n d p l a t e 99. 22

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cluded triangles, curves, and semi crides. A second-act curtain was made of white calico on which the designer, composer, and author were represented by three sets of hieroglyphs. Malevich subsequently explained that it was in this production t h a t Suprematism was born. The costumes, in design revealing the influence of Picasso's Cubist works, were made of cardboard and wire; and the performers wore masks, some of them resembling gas masks. Written in verse, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Á Tragedy is divided into two acts, framed by a prologue and an epilogue in the form of a soliloquy. The script contains various Expressionist devices combined with Futurist themes. Its protagonist is the poet, played by himself, dressed in his everyday clothes, including overcoat, top hat, and a blouse with orange and black stripes. In the short opening monologue, the Poet appears alone and introduces several of his basic themes and ideas, as well as those of his Futurist colleagues: "Urbanism, primitivism, and anti-estheticism; the themes of hysterical despair, of lack of understanding, and of the soul of a new man and the souls of things." 2 3 Remaining on stage throughout the play, Mayakovsky is visited by abstract agents characterized in the manner of the grotesque. Although some of these agents, such as the Old Man with Scrawny Black Cats, the Man without an Ear, the Man without an Eye and a Leg, and the man with Two Kisses, have lengthy monologues, all except the Ordinary Young Man are simply personifications of various aspects of the poet. I n the production, these agents were acted chiefly by university students carrying shields on which the various deformities or features had been painted by Pavel Filonov. Maya­ kovsky, who served as director as well as author and protagonist, directed the performers to walk only in straight lines and to keep their faces (painted like masks) hidden behind the shields except when speaking. Mayakovsky drew upon the ancient Greek theater and its tragedy for some of the ritual content and several conventions. The Poet in his play is sympathetic to the suffering of the city and its inhabitants, eventually takes on their burdens in the form of tears (which resembled giant fish bubbles in the production), packs them into his suitcase, and deserts the community, leaving behind shreds of his soul on the lances of the city. As in Greek tragedy, little happens on stage, but offstage events are reported by messengers. The poet's role as scapegoat resembles that of Oedipus; and following Aeschylus, Mayakovsky as author/director/actor combined three of the four creators whom Meyerhold declared essential in the theater. Not only were the agents, other than the Poet, treated in the manner of the grotesque, as Meyerhold had defined it, but costumes, properties, and scenery were also designed with the aim of distortion. For example, the agent called The Known Woman (a travesty on Blok's Unknown Woman) was characterized as huge and some two fathoms tall, while the two backdrops for the production were designed to reveal abstract and geometrical distortions. Filonov's backdrop for the prologue and epilogue consisted of a black rectangular cardboard on which objects, inscriptions, and colored spots were painted. Shkolnik's backdrop for the two acts, as described by Rostotsky, depicted "in the uslovnyi manner a city in a maze of streets, with houses that are falling down and squeezed together, streetcars, 23

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Vladimir Markov, Russian Futurism: A History (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1968), p. 143.

signboards, telegraph poles, streeet lamps, and other characteristic parts of the city landscape". 24 Mayakovsky's lyrical tragedy incorporated certain aspects of Evreinov's theory of monodrama, revealed the Expressionist devices of Meyerhold's grotesque, and proved significant in his subsequent development as a poet and playwright. As Lawrence Stahlberger sees it, "tragic content, with a mythic base or core, expressed in grotesque imagery, and emphasizing the absurdity of existence, are the underlying characteristics of much of his work". 25 Moreover, Mayakovsky's three major plays written after the Revolution featured several Expressionist stage techniques first used in his tragedy in 1913. A play called Ogon' (Fire), written by Yuri Bondi, Meyerhold, and Vladimir Solovyov, and published in Meyerhold's journal Ljubov' k treni apeVsinam (The Love of Three Oranges) not only influenced Meyerhold's production of Sergey Tretyakov's Zemlya dybom (The Earth Upside Down) in 1923 but was also an early example of Expressionist drama in Russia. A scenario—to allow for improvisations - i n eight scenes with an apotheosis, Fire, was never produced. Although inspired by the GermanBelgian confrontation, its authors aimed at a depiction of war in general and sought to achieve the maximum emotional effect. Comparing the production of The Earth Upside Down with this script, Volkov noted certain similarities: each consisted of eight epi­ sodes and had the same purpose, namely, "to arouse heroic feelings in the audience". 26 Moreover, the stage directions in Fire recall Lyubov Popova's constructivist settings for Tretyakov's play: [Scene 8, Fire.] A system of iron trusses and beams, the center is occupied by an observation platform joined by a whole row of catwalks to the invisible foundations of the whole structure. On the platform a system of levers regulat­ ing a complex series of dikes . . .27 In December, 1914, Tairov opened his Kamerny (chamber) Theater with the pro­ duction of Kalidasa's Shakuntala, with Alisa Koonen in the leading role. Konstantin Balmont, an early Symbolist poet, had made the translation, and Pavel Kuznetsov, a noted painter, designed the scenery for this production. The critical response to this production of Shakuntala was typical for that accorded to many productions at the Kamerny. Since Tairov believed in careful preparation, he directed no more than four new plays each season. His productions were characterized by the fusion of all the theatrical arts, by the use of music and musical rhythm, and by the combination of various talents ranging from ballet to the circus. Among Tairov's productions before the Revolution which demonstrated Expres­ sionist stage techniques was Innokenty Annensky's Famira Kifared in 1916, for which Alexandra Ekster, a noted painter, had designed both the scenery and the costumes, 24 B. Rostotskij, Maiakovshij 25 Lawrence Leo Stahlberger, 26 Volkov, op. cit., I I , 347. 27

i teatr (Moscow, 1952), p. 35. The Symbolic System of Majakovskij (London, 1964), p. 43.

Iu. Bondi, Vs. Meierkhol'd, VI. Solov'ev, "Ogon' (p'esa)," Liubov' ktrem apeVsinam (1914), nos. 6—7, p. 50. 217

As Tairov explained, the problem in designing the Betting was to create appropriate spaces for two rhythmic tasks: the bacchanalian and satyrical moments (Dionysian) as contrasted with the tragedy of Famira (Apollonian): " Working together with Aleksandra E k s t e r , . , we gave the whole central part of the model's background to platforms which expressed the Apollonian rhythm [Famira] . . ., while all the side scenes were occupied by forms which, piled up around the basic rhythmic design of the center, vibrated with all the multiformity of rhythmic oscillation characteristic of the cult of Dionysus." 28 Ekster provided three long steps leading to a platform in the center and surrounded by cubes and conical forms in various shapes and sizes. Her costumes were designed to express the true nature of characters and to enhance their emotional gestures and movements. Famira Kifared illustrated Tairov's principle of breaking up the level stage floor with systems of steps, platforms, and ramps designed to express the rhythmical movement and the plastic groupings of actors. His use of rhythm in creating a scenic atmosphere dominated his productions of Expressionist plays in the 1920's. Moreover, Tairov continued to bring first-rate painters and architects into his theater: Nataliya Goncharova designed the scenery and costumes for Carlo Goldoni's Fan (1915), Alexandr Vesnin the scenery for G. K. Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday (1923), Georgy Yakulov that for Charles Lecocq's Giroflé-Giroflà (1922); and Vladimir and George Stenberg that for O'Neill's The Hairy Ape (1926). After the Revolution the Russian theater became one of the foremost international centers of the performing arts. In the first few years of the Soviet Union, some of the Futurist writers and artists, as well as important directors, continued their work for the stage. Foremost among the movements in scenic design was the widespread use of constructivism after 1921. Characteristically, Meyerhold was the first to demonstrate this technique in his production of Fernand Crommelynck's The Magnanimous Cuckold (1922). Although Edward Braun concludes that Meyerhold's production of Marcel Martinet's Night, rewritten by Tretyakov under the title The Earth Upside Down (1923), "constituted the first significant attempt in Russia to relate Expressionist abstractions to political reality," 29 the two productions of Mayakovsky's Misterija-Buff (Mystery Bouffe, 1918 and 1921), staged by Meyerhold and the author, were earlier examples of political purposivencss combined with Expressionist stage techniques. Russia's outstanding representatives of E., Mayakovsky (according to Markov, the "truest" Russian playwright "of this aesthetic kind" 30 ) and Meyerhold (the most prolific in­ ventor of Expressionist stage techniques), always worked side by side in the production of Mayakovsky's major plays. German Expressionist drama was imported to Russia beginning in 1920 when Anatoly Lunacharsky, the Commissar of Education, recommended the plays of Kaiser, 28 Alcksandr Tairov, Zàpiski režissera (Moscow, 1021), p. 141. For a comparinoli of Tairov with Meyerhold, see "Introduction" by William Kuhlke (tr.) to his edition of Tairov's Notes of a Director '(Coral Gablos, Florida, 1969), pp. 24-28, 33-34. 29 Braun, op. cit., p. 189. 30 Markov, op. cit., p. 238. Markov notes that "Pasternak and Mayakovsky are, in different ways, the truest Russian representatives" of E., "which was born (but never actually identified) on the frontier of symbolism and futurism". Ibid.

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Toller, and Hasenclever for production, By 1922, however, he wrote about the Expres­ sionist "grimace" on the face of the German theater. 3 1 In the following year, he issued his famous slogan "Back to Ostrovsky," and from that moment, as Vsevolodsky notes, "the path in the development of the Soviet theater might be described as the rush from the uslovnyj to the realistic". 32 Although productions of Expressionist plays were rarer after 1923, directors like Tairov continued to use the methods of constructivism. Tairov demonstrated his principles not only in the previously mentioned productions of Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday (1923), and O'Neill's The Hairy Ape (1926), but also by staging Hasenclever's Antigone (1927). Expressionist stage techniques were used by various directors like Nikolay Okhlopkov as late as 1936.

31 A. V. Lunacharskij, Teatr i revoliutsija (Moscow, 1924), p. 89. For an account of the impact of Russian Expressionist stage techniques on the German theater of the 1920's, see Jürgen Rüble, Theater und Revolution (Munich, 1963). 32 Vsevolodskij, op. cit., II, 411. For descriptions of productions of Expressionist drama, see A. Anastas'ev, et al., Istorija sovetskogo dramaticeskogo teatr a v sesti tomax (Moscow, 1966), I I , 56-58, 92-116, 148-149, 446-449; I I I , 1 0 4 - 1 0 6 . For a discussion of Vakhtangov's work, see the unpublished diss. (Iowa, 1965) by William Lonnie Kuhlke, "Vakhtangov's Legacy." For a description of Meyerhold's productions of Toller's plays at the Theater of Revolution, see Z. G. Dal'tsev, "Moskva, 1917—1923 (iz vospominanij)," in the book U istokov (Moscow, 1960), pp. 215-224.

219

RICHARD VOWLES

EXPRESSIONISM I N SCANDINAVIA

A consideration of the arena of E. presents us with an essential antinomy: movement vs. national identity. On the one hand, E. seems to deal with universals: vision, sub­ jectivism, distortion, and revolt. Moreover, few movements can lay claim to so much interaction and interfusion of the arts: literature, art, and music, with some practi­ tioners, namely Kokoschka and Barlach, working ably in two media. On the other hand, E. is frequently considered a German phenomenon and sometimes even dismissed as being excessively localized in both time and place. Undeniably the movement flour­ ished in Germany for particular social and political reasons; just as undeniably, however, it had a wider significance that transcends the transmission of a bag of habits and tricks. E. in Scandinavia is a matter of some importance because, as some say, it originated there, and also because this region presents interesting problems of homogeneity and diversity, as well as a proximity to Germany. To discover the shape and continuity of E. in the various Scandinavian countries is, therefore, to illuminate the nature of the movement and the peculiar workings of nationalism. Strindberg can probably be called the first Expressionist, independent of whether he is more important as an originator, synthesizer or transmitter. The interaction of Strindberg and Munch in both Berlin and Paris was an event of great significance, since the flow of ideas from one medium to another was established. Strindberg was himself a painter, curiously anticipating abstract E.; and in Munch we observe an unusual literalization of the canvas in his idea of a frieze of life. Perhaps more deep-seated are the shared themes of anguish, revolt against parentage and pietism, the projection of states of mind, and soul, and a diversity of metaphors, such as vampirism, madonnaism, and the world as inferno. One would think that, accordingly, Munch would have been an important emissary of E. to Norway. After all, did not Bahr, with an eye on Munch's canvas of t h a t name, maintain that the "scream" was the essential Expressionist gesture ? But E. found no fertile soil in Norway, and for all practical purposes it is useless to look for an Expressionist tradition there. Perhaps the reason is that Munch failed to develop along these lines. I t is indicative of his development that his talents were applied to Ibsen's realistic plays, and t h a t his art took on the rather bland, public form of murals for the Oslo University aula and a Norwegian chocolate factory. More to the point, Munch's paintings from about 1905, while executed in rich broken color, have lost intensity and have changed their focus from man to landscape. Nevertheless, one would expect Munch to have had a greater literary effect than he actually did. 221

The force of Ibsen's example had much to do with establishing a realistic tradition in the Norwegian drama. There is little deviation from the Ibsenesque format to be found in the major Norwegian playwrights Gunnar Heiberg, Helge Krog, and Nordahl Grieg. By and large, they wrote problem plays - suffused with new ideas, but problem plays nonetheless - cast pretty much in the form of the well-made-play. The one creator of dream plays in Norway, Tore 0rjesaeter, probably owed as much to Peer Gynt as he did to Strindberg's Dream Play. I t is quite common to take flight from a major figure, as Dryden fled from the long shadow of Shakespeare, but not so where a country is finding itself, literarily speaking, and where a writer, however independent and in» ventive he may be, is likely to follow established paths. Social conditions were also major determinants in the Norwegian scene. Proletarian preoccupations insisted on realism, whether the concern was with folklore, the rural community, self-conscious urbanization and unionization, or intellectual Communism (much more dominant among major writers in Norway than in the other Scandinavian countries). I t is also possible that the political atmosphere surrounding Norway's separation from Sweden meant not merely an assertion of national identity but an avoidance of Swedish models like Strindberg. J u s t recently, the Norwegian writer Finn Alnaes has lamented the fact that Norwegians paid too little heed to Strindberg's later plays, and in all probability at a time when it would have been decisive. There are, of course, Expressionist elements in the works which Hamsun wrote in the 1890's, and Hamsun was a sturdy exponent of Strindberg's writing at that time. But their effect, singly or together, is scarcely to be noted in Norwegian letters. Individual Expressionist traits may be noted, but never the peculiarly feverish convergence of ele­ ments that constituted dramatic E. What emanated from Hamsun's blood was not so much a scream as it was a whisper. Strindberg casts as long a shadow in Sweden as Ibsen does in Norway, and Swed­ ish E. is definitely Strindbergian. The underlying reasons are rather more aesthetic than social. To some extent, they depend on a rhythm of events. Only six years after Strindberg's death, Par Lagerkvist published a dramatic manifesto that picked up the echo of Strindberg's reputation and amplified it for generations of playwrights to come. I t is fair to say that most modern Swedish plays of any consequence come somewhere near being an extrapolation of the line originating in Strindberg's dream plays and proceeding through such plays by Lagerkvist as The Invisible (1923) and He Who Got to Live His Life Over Again (1928), the titles of which are, in themselves, indicative. But in his book Modern Theatre—all the more striking because of its strong pathos and monumental loneliness (he wrote little criticism thereafter)—Lagerkvist clearly rejects Ibsenesque realism and all showy and supercilious theatricality in favor of a theater of vision attuned to the moralities and mysteries of the Middle Ages. I t could, of course, be argued that Lagerkvist is as far from German E. as is Ghelderode, with whom he has a good many things in common. Nevertheless he is, in other ways, attuned to the Expressionist movement. His poems "Anguish" (1916) and "Torso" (1922) establish an important affinity with Expressionist poetry on the conti­ nent and are, essentially, subjective. "Torso", for example, deals with personal mutila­ tion, whereas Ivan GoiPs poem of the same name treats political mutilation. The differ222

ence is illuminating, for Swedish E., on the whole, is personal rather than political. There was, indeed, no special reason for it to be political, since the conflict was not externalized in the neutral Sweden of World War I. The other important playwright of Lagerkvist's generation, Hjalmar Bergman, was so eclectic t h a t he can hardly be said to belong to any one tradition. However, in the teens and twenties he wrote a sufficient number of parables, doppelgänger plays to align himself with, and certainly to suggest no strong departure from, the evolving theater of E. The playwrights to follow, Stig Dagerman, Werner Apenström and Ingmar Bergman, sustain and fulfill Strindberg's heritage in a remarkably pure and persistent fashion. I t is illuminating to compare Lagerkvist's early triptych, The Difficult Hour (1918), with the early plays of Kokoschka. The stage tableaux are as rich and lurid in color but less violent, and they are crosshatched with the angularities and overlapping planes of Cubism. After all, Lagerkvist had read Apollinaire's Les Peintures cubistes as if it were gospel. These early plays, anticipating the theater of the absurd rather more than most of E., are both more intellectual and more subjective than the body of German Expressionist drama. Thus Swedish E. went its own way, which was Strindberg's. Many circumstances—literary, social, and political—render the history of E. more complicated in Denmark. For one thing, there is a substantial body of Expressionist poetry in the Denmark of the early twenties. I t is, however, an E. that owes as much to Futurism and Whitman as it does to the German practitioners of the style and, con­ sequently, it takes on a character of its own. I t could probably be demonstrated t h a t Denmark had special affinities with Italy at the time. I t is also clear that the poetry of Johannes V. Jensen introjected Whitman into the lifeblood of Danish poetry, and, in­ deed, this event had a separate culmination in the scholarship of Frederik Schyberg. As a result, the lost generation of the Danish twenties found itself, or, shall we say, muddled through, by means of various, surviving Expressionist energies. The Danish theater got its E. chiefly from Germany, in spite of occasional direct influences from Sweden, like the impact of Strindberg on Kjell Abell. I t is easy to name the intermediaries, especially Svend Borberg, whose unswerving German orientation got him in trouble as late as World War I I . I t is almost as easy to isolate and identify the presence of Unruh, Toller, Kaiser, Hasenclever, and Sorge in the Danish theater of the twenties, but not much is gained by so doing. What is important is that Denmark attached itself to satiric rather than visionary E,, merging it with its own tradition of humor reaching from the Plautine exercises of Ludwig Holberg to the vaudevilles of Johann Ludvig Heiberg and to the satyr plays of Gustav Wied, always enriching itself, on the way, from such non-dramatic sources as Andersen's sly and deliberately ingenuous wit and Kierkegaard's comedy of faith. Rebellion against all forms of the establishment, and shades of the complacent and the "comfy", lie at the heart of the E. of Abell and Soya, two of the leading playwrights to emerge in the twenties and thirties. Abell's dramatic style is, however, strongly shaped by revue techniques, the directing of Louis Jouvet, and a kind of Gallic elegance he acquired as a scene designer and apprentice of Balanchine in Paris. Con­ sequently, he strongly reminds one of Jean Giraudoux, though there is a more compel223

ling moral authority at the heart of his drama than is usually the case with that Freud­ ian author. Carl Erik Soya has picked up all the ploys of the German Expressionists, but he suffuses them with a temperament quite Danish. Generally speaking, however earnest Danish writers may be, they have little feeling for the strain of anguish t h a t runs like a raw nerve through Swedish literature. If we had time to analyze the various Scandinavian reactions to the new mannerists and the theater of the absurd, we could demonstrate how each national tradition tends to perpetuate itself and absorb what is essentially compatible with its identity. Furthermore, we could show with some precision t h a t music and art in Sweden pursued the direction of visionary E., whereas in Denmark they tended to be witty—albeit with metaphysical overtones—, satiric, and social. Critics like James Agate, who dispose of E. as an isolated event with no significant after-effects are hopelessly hemmed in by their own cultural boundaries and encapsu­ lated in their egos. Of course, much so-called E. in Sweden can be attributed to the mysticism of Swedenborg and the surreal elements of Swedish folklore, just as much so-called E. in Denmark can be characterized as an evolving union of indigenous wit and temperament; but the rhythms are new (sometimes hectic, sometimes hortatory, sometimes passionate), and the distorted shapes and flights of human fantasy adum­ brate the character of life ahead. After all, E., far from being static, is a mode of thought and creation in constant motion and turmoil. However frantic and random some of its manifestations, its dynamism in Scandinavia is still being felt.

224

P A U L HADEKMANN and J E A N W E I S G E R B E H

EXPRESSIONISM I N BELGIUM AND HOLLAND

Flemish and Dutch E. are distinguished by two common traits: their short duration and their heterogeneity. Their apparition coincides very nearly with the debut of the poet Paul van Ostaijen (1916) and the founding of the magazine Het Getij (1916-1924); and some ten years later already their exponents have disappeared from the literary scene or have chosen other paths. Between 1925 and 1930, E., renouncing any official role, imperceptibly withdrew behind the scenes, from where, for a while, it watched over the destinies of the novel, until the second wave of Modernism (1950) put it once more in the limelight. In the linguistic realm, which is our concern, it constitutes the most coherent and remarkable expression of the first avantgarde, which developed in Berlin, Rome, Paris, and Russia before World War I, but reached Brussels, Antwerp and Amsterdam only between 1914 and 1918. Its importance, however, should not be overestimated. Even if it eclipsed Cubism, Dadaism, and Surrealism, for example, the Expression­ ist current never dominated Dutch literature entirely but only represented a sector, no doubt the most active and advanced, but also the most contested one. Moreover, foreign influences were profoundly changed by the contact with local traditions, as is always the case when they penetrate into Flanders and the Netherlands. Among the writers treated in this chapter, there are very few who perfectly meet the criteria of the German Expressionist doctrines (which, as it is, are often vague and contradictory). Nor did any of them adhere, for any length of time, to the formulas which they had borrowed. For most of them, E. was, at most, only a way of looking at things, a phase, a tool, i.e., something fragmentary or transient. In that respect, the careers of Hendrik Marsman and even of Van Ostaijen the two figures at the fore of the movement are particularly significant. Among the components of Belgian and Dutch E., preference must be given to Vitalism. One encounters it already in Germany, where it was spotlighted, and it was just in this form that E. survived well beyond the thirties. We will return to this question later on. Let us merely add, at this point, that poetry alone benefited from the revival. At a time in which, officially, E. was already dead, the narrative genre did not feel the effect except on the rebound and behind the scenes. As to the theater, a domain which had been relatively infertile for a long time, E. (with the exception of Herman Teirlinck) recruited only a few adherents among the young. I t should finally be noted 225

t h a t this poetic efflorescence passed by almost unnoticed outside of the country, save for certain writers of French Belgium (Michel de Ghelderode, Franz Hellens). 1 * "To be Flemish in order to become European." This slogan, launched by August Vermeylen, adequately defines the problem which the Flemish intelligentsia had to face at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century. I n the young Belgian state which, as a consequence of historical and social circumstances, had only recently recognized Dutch as an official language next to French, this elite was simultaneously aware of its individuality and of a terrible cultural backwardness — especially in literature. Some writers regarded themselves spontaneously as being European and chose French as the vehicle of their art, since this was often the lan­ guage in which they had been brought up, as sons of the upper middle class. Moreover, they sometimes achieved an international reputation which they probably would not have gained had they written in the other language. Thus Verhaeren and Maeter­ linck, each of whom added a very specific note to French literature. Others, generally bilingual, opted for Dutch but saw themselves confronting a regionalist tradition due precisely to the Romantic trend derived from the debut of the Flemish movement half a century earlier. The latter writers deliberately set about to surpass their provincial boundaries and to Europeanize their art while not denying their origins, whether by means of a Naturalism which was often idyllic (Cyril Buysse, Stijn Streuvels), a deca­ dent Symbolism with a very earthy flavor (Karel van de Woestijne), an aestheticism glorifying the powers of instinct (Teirlinck) or an intellectualism which attempted to communicate with the great cosmic rhythms (Vermeylen). These writers, gathering around the magazine Van Nu en Straks (Today and To­ morrow, 1893-1901), aligned themselves, as one can easily see, on the side of synthesis. Their cosmopolitan spirit and their attachment to Flanders influenced a part of the following generation, notably Paul van Ostaijen, the leader of Flemish E., although he tried to deny it. The fact is t h a t for certain young men whose political conscience was awakened during the First World War, the differences which separated them from their elders concealed their similarities. These differences, however, were considerable. There was, to be sure, the conflict of generations which manifested itself, at least in the case of a few writers, in a rejection of the Neo-Romantic and Symbolist sensibility.

1

As a whole, the Dutch Expressionist literature of Belgium has been presented only in certain chapters forming part of general surveys, such as A. Vermeylen's De Vlaamse letteren van Oezelle tot heden, fourth ed. (Amsterdam/Brussels, 1949), A. Demedts's De Vlaamsche poëzie sinds 1918, second ed. (Diest, 1945), and R. F . Lissens's De Vlaamse Letterkunde van 1780 tot heden, fourth ed. (Brussels, 1967). In addition to the monographs on specific authors, mentioned below, one should also consult the study which F . van Passel has consecrated to the periodical Ruimte: Het tijdschrift "Ruimte" (1920—1921) als brandpunt van humanitair expressionisme (Antwerp, 1958), as well as the essay by E. Krispyn, "Herman van den Bergh, Marsman en het Noord-Nederlands expressionisme" in De Gids, I (1958), 237-240. As for the literature in French, we shall have oc­ casion to point out that, properly speaking, there was no Expressionist current, although certain writers sometimes showed an affinity with that movement. Regarding this subject, see the Histoire illustré des lettres françaises de Belgique, published under the general editorship of G. Charlier and J, Hanse (Brussels, 1958). 226

But that, for them, was not essential. The essential lay, rather, in the political preference of those students who, after studies conducted more or less in their mother tongue, found themselves, on the eve of the war, at universities which were still Frenchspeaking. The German invader, in order to divide the country, instituted a very clever "Flamenpolitik", one of whose trumps was the transformation of the university of Ghent into a Dutch-speaking institution. The overwhelming majority of the Flemish people abstained from responding to the German advances, reckoning that it was necessary to wait until the end of the war to pursue, loyally and legally, the policy of cultural emancipation. But not everyone saw things in that light, especially in the ranks of the young, who were particularly sensitive to linguistic problems and disheart­ ened by certain declarations of Belgian ministers residing in France (the government had fled to Le Havre). Since the beginning of the century, clubs of students profoundly influenced by the ideals of Van Nu en Straks had been organized in some schools. When the principal speakers of that review, above all Vermeylen, refused, in 1914, to profit by the German separatist policy, several groups of young people advocated immediate action and regarded even the abstention of their elders as a betrayal of the Flemish cause. These "Activists"—the term was taken, it appears, from an analogous Swedish movement but probably also reveals the influence of German Leftist Activism and its magazine, Die Aktion—had, as its principal rallying point, the monthly which, for years, had served as the central organ for groupings of students: Jong-Vlaanderen (Young Flanders), whose title they changed to De Goedendag. This new name (The 'Good-Day') alludes to the weapon, as primitive as it was formidable, with which, in 1302, at the time of the Battle of the Golden Spurs, the weavers and butchers of the Flemish free towns had sent to their deaths the flower of French chivalry, which had come to subdue a revolt of these rebellious subjects of the count of Flanders, a vassal of the French crown. The periodical, in effect, intended, from the time of its founding, to stem the Gallicization of Flanders by its ruling classes and, accordingly, devoted itself to denouncing all linguistic abuses, especially in respect to education. I t continued its project at the beginning of the war and published, along with a few traditional poems, some articles which were essentially political or of local interest, attacking the "Passivism" of their elders and the government of Le Havre, stressing the deficiencies in secondary educa­ tion, or exhorting the students to chasten their language. As the successive editors themselves confessed, all this was without any guideline except for the major concern with the interests of Flanders. Nothing indicated t h a t this rather disparate magazine would one day be called upon to play a role in the literary life of the country, until, in June, 1916, it published an article entitled "Nasionalisme en het nieuwe geslacht" (Nationalism and the New Generation), signed P . van Ostaijen. The author, who, already in the preceding issue, had published a rather mediocre poem celebrating the Battle of the Golden Spurs, enlarged the Europeanism of Vermeylen into an Inter­ nationalism in which the harmony of the various national literatures emanations—of the specific character of each people—was simultaneously the sign and the condition of a new human fraternity. Citing, in support of his thesis, the examples of Léon Bloy, 227

Claudel and Jammes in France, and of Werfel in Germany, he thus inserted Activist nationalism into the context of a literary avant-garde, which was something totally new for Belgium. At the same time, he rejected "the romanticism and sentimental drivel" of the first Flemish nationalists, since it was oriented toward the past. Van Ostaijen grossly deceived himself in considering nationalism to be the main feature of the European literary revolution at t h a t time, but this error in perspective is perhaps responsible for both his and De Goedendag's Expressionist leanings. I t is rather striking t h a t in the same issue, to our knowledge for the first time in Flanders, an attempt at a definition of the term E. was made, and, what is more, that the occasion for this attempt was furnished by the review of a book by the same Van Ostaijen (Music-Hall) which had just been published. One can only admire the perspicacity of the critic, 0[scar] d[e] S[medt], who immediately saw not only the faults of this collec­ tion of pieces written by a beginner but also its revolutionary qualities and what was definitely promising about it in respect to the poet's work. De Smedt himself was president of the "Vlaamsche Kring" (Flemish Circle) of Antwerp, where he had just organized a series of important debates concerning South Africa, the Irish question, Polish nationalism, etc. He was not content with indicating the implicit or explicit ideology of these poems but also related their technique to the dynamic principles of the Futurists and the young German poets. Actually, it is, above all, to French Unanimism that it would have been appropriate to link the most modern­ istic poems of this still heterogeneous collection, for the global unity in which the dy­ namic sensations of modern life are fused is sought after more in the spirit of l'Abbaye than in t h a t of Futurism. Better informed about German than about French literature, De Smedt, on the other hand, discerns very well the germs of a "Menschheits- und Allgefühl" in Music-Hall—they developed into the theme of Van Ostaijen's next collection, Het Sienjaal (The Signal)—and it is in this connection t h a t he circumscribes the term 'E', in a way which is quite vague and banal, by opposing it to Impressionism and by referring to a definition of Lenore Ripke-Kühn which had appeared in Die Weissen Blätter (I [1914], 1048-52). One must note t h a t De Smedt retains the most general aspects of this definition: ''umfassende . . . und bedeutsame Formel für das neue Zeitideal und Weltgefühl," but leaves aside the formal characteristics enunciated in the same article, i.e., conciseness, concentration, solidity of contours, and pathos of expression. I t is true that Miss Ripke-Kühn's article was primarily concerned with sculpture, and t h a t De Smedt had to realize the difficulty of applying the first of these criteria to the only Expressionist poet whom he offered as an example to Van Ostaijen : Werfel, a few of whose poems he himself had translated. One can see that literary E. was, implicitly, identified here with its Humanitarian and cosmic trends, i.e., those trends which would recruit the most adherents in Flanders. From the "Activist" en­ gagement in the political and social battle to the Pacifist Internationalism of Die Weissen Blätter, it was essentially the will to "change the world" which animated Flemish E. in those of its productions which were the most numerous and often, artisti­ cally, the least valuable. Die Weissen Blätter, to which the library of the City of Antwerp had subscribed before the war, was apparently the Expressionist periodical most often read by the 228

writers of De Goedendag. I t is, in any case, the periodical whose title or contributors are most frequently cited in the articles which henceforth followed one another at a rapid pace, alternately from the pen of Van Ostaijen and De Smedt (pseudonym Marc), who were soon joined by Brunclair (pseudonym Bardemeyer). Thanks to them, De Goedendag became an avantgarde periodical which devoted itself to moulding its young readers by informing them about the great contemporary currents, above all literary, in accordance with the promise of the editors, explicitly stated in 1917, to see the po­ litical struggle and the cultural movement simultaneously conducted. I t is to be noted t h a t this education aimed essentially at the most contemporaneous literature, Dehmel being the oldest of the authors mentioned. Here, too, we note a strong determination to break with the past. Actually, there is nothing surprising about the fact that the Ger­ man avantgarde was the best known; for the newspapers and periodicals of other countries could penetrate only sporadically during the occupation. I t is more surprising t h a t the Germans permitted the dispersal of magazines with revolutionary or Pacifist tendencies outside of their own borders. In addition to the writers of Die Weissen Blätter, one finds t h a t Hiller, Rubiner, Pfemfert, and Die Aktion were also read, and t h a t their combative attitude was approved by the contributors to De Goedendag. Even though these writers were sometimes insufficiently aware of the latest inno­ vations in France, their orientation toward French literature was no less important. Even in De Goedendag, it was not at all a matter of rejecting the culture with which, throughout its history, Flemish as well as Walloon Belgium had found itself most fruit­ fully impregnated. Rather, it was simply a matter of not stifling the national aspirations in the process. I t is thus that De Smedt recommended, in an article written in 1917 and entitled "Aktuele beschouwingen" (Topical Considerations), the reading not only of Dehmel, Mombert, Rilke, Max Dauthendey, Schickele, Däubler, Werfel, Ehrenstein, Becher, Sternheim, Heinrich Mann, Meyrinck, Brod, etc., but also of Jammes, Péguy, Claudel, Verhaeren, Jules Romains, Georges Chennevière, Charles Vildrac, Alexandre Mercereau, Tancrède de Visan, and Apollinaire. In a later issue of the same year, Van Ostaijen contrasted Apollinaire with Verlaine in order to explain his conception of poetry, and expressed his admiration for Claudel and Romains, while Brunclair analyzed a few of the tendencies of the young French literature: the paroxysm of Henri Beauduin, the dramatism of Barzun and the Unanimism of Romains, Vildrac, Pierre Jean Jouve, Jacques Duhamel, Arcos and Chennevière. In these articles, the lion's share goes to French and German writers: apart from these men of letters, our authors mention only Marinetti, Giovanni Papini, Arthur Symons, Whitman, Edgar Allan Poe, Tagore and Brezina. I t is noteworthy that De Goedendag, in spite of its nationalistic bias, brought scarcely any Flemish or Dutch literature to the attention of its readers (with the ex­ ception of rare reviews of books of the very latest fashion, like Van Ostaijen's Music Hall). The reason was that the stand taken in favor of Modernism outweighed national pride in this case, and that the reaction against the most recent past more easily dis­ cerned the detestable aestheticism of the Dutch and Flemish than that of foreign poets. Finding favor in the eyes of De Smedt were only those poets who spiritualized the real, like Boutens, or those who prepared the advent of a new social order, like Henriette 229

Roland Hoist-van der Schalk. But even they were offered only as conductors of transi­ tional exercises, for it is not possible to leap with impunity "from [Jacques] Perk or [Willem] Kloos to Werfel". Real homage was rendered only to one poet, a Belgian who used the French idiom: Verhaeren. We know what success Verhaeren had outside of his own country, notably in France, where his disciple Henri Guilbeaux propagated the "poetry of machines", and even more so in the ranks of the German Expressionists, who considered him to be one of their precursors, for the same reason as Whitman (cf. Stadler speaking in the Cahiers alsaciens, of "die neue und heftigere Intensität des Welterlebens, deren erste Verkünder Whitman und Verhaeren waren"). Some poems by Verhaeren had appeared in periodicals like Das Neue Pathos, Der Hahn, Neue Blätter, Die Weissen Blätter, Die Gegenwart, Die Schaubühne, Die Aktion, etc. The article which F.-Cl. Chrispeels dedicated to the poet on the occasion of his death praises him, on the one hand, as the bard of the Flemish soil and, on the other, as the poet of tentacular cities, industrial landscapes, and "the future, displayed like a country in flames". The choice of quotations demonstrates a marked preference for the humanitarian aspect of his work: "J'aime l'homme et le monde et j'adore la force / qui donne et prend sa force à l'homme et l'univers." De Goedendag did not actually formulate a literary program. I t was not a deliber­ ately Expressionist periodical. But from that point at which it began to associate a resolutely Modernistic point of view with nationalism, its major contributors oriented themselves toward the Unanimist, Humanitarian and cosmic tendencies of contemporary literature. Denying or rejecting the reality of the war, they believed in the beauty of the modern world, provided that the latter be accepted in a spirit of communion and human fraternity. I t was not until 1918, the last year of publication, that they identified this ideal explicitly with E.: Brunclair then directly attacked art for art's sake, Im­ pressionism, and individualism as outmoded values of a moribund bourgeois society. He declared t h a t the communitarian conscience, friendship, love, fraternity, and a spirit of cosmic harmony would determine, for the artist and the poet, a synthetic view of the world, reconstructed by the idea. Since 1917, Van Ostaijen proclaimed this primacy of the idea, of the spiritual in art as well as literature, with an ample supply of quotations borrowed from the Blaue Reiter, Daniel Henry (Kahnweiler), and Kandinsky. Facing a world transformed by technology and the machine, which had upset the notions of time and space, he affirmed t h a t the human spirit, covering the domains which are the vastest and most profound, had become essentially dynamic and synthetic. For this reason the artist was, henceforth, to denounce the servile imitation of things and express, first of all, the turmoil in which his spirit recreates them. As for the poet, he would no longer "describe", one by one, the feelings which inspired him, but would proceed, after the fashion of Apollinaire in "Zone", by successive leaps and by associa­ tions of ideas, images, and sounds. 2 2 Regarding Van Ostaijen see the following monographs: J. Muls et al., Paul van Ostaijen (Antwerp, Brussels, Louvain, 1928); GL Burssens, Paul van Ostaijen zoals hij was en is (Wilrijk, Antwerp, 1933); P. de Rijck, Van Ostaijen, fascinerend dichter (Antwerp, 1939); A. T. W. Bellemans, Poëtiek van Paul van Ostaijen (Antwerp, 1939); P. de Rijck, Bezinning over Van Ostaijen (Ghent, 1951); E. Schoonhoven, Paul van Ostaijen: Introduction à sa poétique (Antwerp, 1952); M. Gilliams et al., Paul van Ostaijen (Antwerp, The Hague, Amsterdam, 1952); M. E, Tralbaut, Van Gogh —

230

The fruit of this new poetics, on the one hand, and the ideas of the Unanimists and Expressionists, on the other, was the second collection of poetry by Van Ostaijen, entitled Het Sienjaal. One senses here, on the level of ideas as well as on that of form, the influence of the Bible, Verhaeren, Whitman, and the Claudel of the Cinq Grandes Odes: but it is, above all, to Humanitarian E. that it is appropriate to relate these pathetic exhortations, these prayers, and these series of images which follow one another in an almost uninterrupted stream of long free verses. Typically Expressionist are the themes of "Hassliebe" of the large city, the expansion of the soul in the cosmos, the hope for a new society founded on neighborly love, the Christian notions of sin, humility, and repentance, the desire for purification through suffering, and the prophetic mission of the poet, who gives the "signal" of a life which is finally "authentic" and in which individual catharsis must prepare the great Pacifist revolution. Announced by De Goedendag, which had published several of the poems contained in it, this book actually inaugurated E. in Flemish poetry. Having appeared in Antwerp in 1918, it was almost immediately confiscated by the Belgian authorities hunting for Activist witches at the end of the war. Thus Het Sienjaal could barely be read by the impassioned students and the young poets who soon were going to take over the re­ sponsibility for transmitting its message of peace and of human fraternity, as well as some of its Expressionist rhetoric. The armistice also marked the end of De Goedendag, of which the principal merits had been, from the literary point of view, its spreading of the Humanitarian, Unanimist, and Expressionist ideas of the 1910's (for the first time in Belgium), and its grouping together, along with a few authors who would choose a different path, the majority of those who would "make" Flemish E.: the poets Van Ostaijen, Gaston Burssens, Brunclair, René de Clerq, Paul Verbruggen, Maurits van de Moortel, and the sociologist Herman Vos. Only one important name is still missing from the list: t h a t of Wies Moens. This poet, in fact, made his debut elsewhere, namely in the magazine of the Flemish university of Ghent, Aula, whose foundation was warmly greeted in 191.7 by De Goedendag. Van Ostaijen and Burssens immediately submitted some poems to it. Although the orientation of Aula was more academic and less ex­ clusively modernistic, there was, during the two years of its existence, a fertile exchange of views with De Goedendag. We cite among the critiques and reviews published in it those of Geo van Tichelen, Karel Chrispeels, and Fernand-Martin Pauwels. Aula dis­ appeared at the end of 1918 for the same political reasons that affected De Goedendag and other ephemeral periodicals like Ons Land (1914), De Stroom (1918), and the popular­ izing weekly Vlaamsch Leven (1915-1918), with which the authors mentioned so far collaborated more or less sporadically.

reflexies op Van Ostaijen (Deurne, 1956); G. Burssens, Paul van Ostaijen: De dichter (Brussels, 1957); A. de Roo ver, Paul van Ostaijen (Bruges, 1958); H. Uyttersprot, Paul van Ostaijen en zijn proza (Antwerp/Rotterdam, 1959); A, Westerlinck, "Een Visie op Paul van Ostaijen" in Wandelen al peinzend (Louvain, 1960—62), pp. 174—237; A. C. M. Meeuwesse, Over Poëzie en Poëtik van Martinus Nijhoff en Paul van Ostaijen (Amsterdam, 1961); P. Hadermann, De Kringen naar Binnen : De dichterlijke Wereld van Paul van Ostaijen (Antwerp, 1965); P. de Vree and H. F. Jespers, Paul van Ostaijen (Antwerp, 1967). Van Ostaijen's works have been edited by L. Borgers: Verzameld Werk (Antwerp/The Hague/Amsterdam, 1952—1956) in 4 vols. 231

Let us draw attention particularly to a long essay by Van Ostaijen, which appeared in De Stroom (I, 103-117, 152-171, 208-224) and was entitled ''Expressionisme in Vlaanderen". The author, taking up ideas developed earlier in several articles dedicated to painting, situates the art of his Antwerp Expressionist friends (the painters Paul Joostens and Floris Jespers and the sculptor Oscar Jespers) in relation to the main contemporary currents of Futurism, Cubism, and E. He devotes himself, above all, to indicating what points these movements have in common, perhaps because he was not always able to clearly put his finger on their divergences. The primacy of the creator over the perceived object, the conception of a new beauty made of shocks and contrasts, and the autonomy and organic unity of the work of art, whether it synthesizes the forms of objects or expresses the inner world of the artist in lyrical abstractions—all these principles, illustrated by quotations from Kandinsky, Marc, Gleizes, and Metzinger and by detailed analyses of French, Italian, German, Russian, and Flemish works, show how much Van Ostaijen was interested in the formal problem of avantgarde art. He did not conceal the arbitrary character of the label E., which was applied to the ensemble of new schools, but he employed it in order to accentuate the contrast to Impressionism, an art which, according to him, was individualistic and bourgeois. At present, so he argued, works were needed which could decorate the rooms of railroad stations and factories, works whose simplicity of expression affects everyone and permits serial reproduction—in short: a collective and communal art corresponding to the great mutation of the contemporary spirit. Thus one finds in the theories of Van Ostaijen the same humanitarian intentions which were present in his poetry of the moment. But whereas the latter contents itself with expres­ sing in a fitting, and usually lyrical, manner, the ideas of fraternity and universal love, one senses t h a t the theoretician of art concentrates to a greater extent on the possibili­ ties of formal language. The art critic was thus in advance of the poet, as well as of his compatriots, who continued, for a few more years, the fashion of Humanitarian E., whereas he himself would soon disavow his Sienjaal. The Activist sympathies or activities of the majority of these writers explain why E., scarcely having become aware of itself, experienced a certain lull after 1918. Im­ prisoned, emigrated, or temporarily constrained to silence, its champions secretly brought to fruition an art which had not often had the chance to express itself fully. One must remember that, except for Van Ostaijen, at the end of the war E. in Flemish literature was more of an intention or a doctrine than a concrete reality. No new blood was infused into literature by the return to political and cultural life of those who, from 1914 to 1918, had preferred to abstain from being active. At most, one can ascertain among the older people the will to re-establish the status quo, or sometimes the inten­ tion to outdo the individualistic and aestheticizing propensity of Van Nu en Straks cultivated before the war by De Boomgaard (The Orchard, 1909-1911). I t is thus that Het Roode Zeil (The Red Sail, 1920) for a year proposed the ideal of a ''Decadent Flan­ ders", impregnated with dandyism and mundane nonchalance. But it is quite evident that the young revolutionaries, the soldiers having come home from the front, the debunked Activists and the unemployed students (those of the Dutch-speaking university of Ghent were no longer authorized to pursue their 232

studies) were only waiting for the first opportunity to regroup themselves in places other than the old periodicals which were recovering their breath. One witnesses, first of all, the birth of little subversive pamphlets (like Staatsgevaarlik [Dangerous to the State]) which changed their names at every turn in order to escape the vigilance of legislators and judges. Teeming with pseudonyms, this periodical affirmed in its four issues (from September to October, 1919) the endurance of Activism and its solidarity with the idealism of Karl Liebknecht, Romain Rolland, and Barbusse. I t launched some of the manifestos of Flemish youth, of the new Internationalism, etc., defended Fem­ inism, and published a few poems by prisoners or political emigrés, among them, a humanitarian poem by Brunclair, "Het nieuwe Chanaän" (New Canaan), in which the author appeals to the Flemish people to participate in the world-wide revolution. 1920 finally saw the birth of the avantgarde periodical which was going to take up the torch of Humanitarian E. and make it burn full force: Ruimte (Space). I t was the fruit of the efforts of the publisher E. de Bock, who had earlier founded De Stroom and who now intended to carry on its task by appealing to writers, artists and specialists in economic and social questions. The sociologist Vos was given the task of writing the manifesto for the first issue. Clarifying the name of the periodical, this manifesto bears witness to a new breadth of spirit and to a firm determination to apply questions of a literary and artistic nature to political and economic life. "Space" signifies both the international extension of the movement, already advocated by De Goedendag—whose crew was reunited here, minus De Clercq but with the addition of a few new writers, among them Moens and Marnix Gijsen—and the surpassing of individualistic aesthetics (as understood by Van Nu en Straks, and often attacked in the new periodical) in favor of a social ethic which, this time, would be well-defined and based on a communal ideal. The artist and the intellectual must, above all, show themselves to be men of action, from whom it is proper to expect a dynamic outlook and the organization of a system of collective cultural values corresponding to the needs of the proletariat, the Socialist party and the State. One would think he were hearing a manifest of Die Aktion. Not all the contributors to Ruimte were equally politically committed, but all shared an ideal of human fraternity and the hope of putting an end to misery in the world. I t is rather remarkable that the tone adopted by these writers did not tend toward bitterness, disappointment or pessimism, in spite of the personal ups and downs which several of them had experienced. In Dutch literature there are few pieces of writing as ardent, as enthusiastic and as youthfully idealistic as those of Moens, written at a time when, after having seen his house on fire, he was incarcerated, released to see his mother die, and returned to prison a few months later. There is no doubt —and a number of his colleagues were promptly irritated by this fact — that the halo of the martyr made the laurels of the poet shine. Indeed, Moens's popularity was tremendous. His Celbrieven (Letters from a Cell), full of hope for the "eudaemonistic" society of tomorrow, and his De Boodschap (The Message), a fresh and spontaneous expression of Christian faith and universal fraternity, achieved, from the time of their publication in book form (1920), an even greater success than the poetry of De Sieenjal, with which Van Ostaijen had had rather bad luck. In the same year, Ruimte published the most outstanding poems of De Boodschap, as well as a few poems by Däubler translated by 233

Moens and taken from Das Sternenkind. In the following year, Moens published his translations of Lasker-Schiiler. A former student of Germanic philology, he put his knowledge to further use by translating still other works. 3 I t is not certain that the German influences, in particular that of Lasker-Schiiler, favorably influenced Moens' poetry which, after De Boodschap, is often weighted down with gratuitous or redundant Baroque images. This danger of a rhetoric which is cer­ tainly the mark of imitation weighs heavily on most of the poets of Ruimte who were fascinated, we now believe, by the "recipes" of Humanitarian E. Chrispeels sent admir­ ing reports from Germany, among them one about Menschheitsdämmerung. He may also have been the first to call attention to the Expressionist theater, with which he became acquainted in Cologne. De Bock has mentioned the favorite writers of the group: Brod, Buber, Edschmid, Lasker-Schiiler and Werfel. Remembering probably the reli­ giosity and the pathetic exclamations of the latter, Gijsen, still a Catholic at this time, wrote a long "Lof-litanie van den H. Franciscus van Assisië" (Litany in praise of St. Francis of Assisi), in which the virtues of humility and the love of God and neighbor are expressed in a flood of Biblical and oriental images sprinkled with one's "Modernism". 4 In order for a poem to be truly Expressionist, Brunclair said in this connection, it was not enough that a saint reek of gasoline instead of holy water. Yet Gijsen intro­ duced unexpected contrasts and striking images which hold our attention, while others were content with replacing the trees of their native countryside with telegraph poles and passed off their false naiveté under the guise of Christian humility. This is the case with Karel van den Oever, a neophyte to E. and a deserter from the preceding gen­ eration, whom Gijsen introduced to the editorial staff. His "Gebed" (Prayer) and the extracts from "De Zee" (The Sea), published in Ruimte, are no more convincing than his traditional poems. 5 More authentically Expressionist in their conception, the dy­ namic poems of Burssens, for example, strongly betray the influence of Van Ostaijen; for here, too, it is against the moving backdrop of the big city and its crowds t h a t a message of peace and of confidence in mankind emerges. For several years, and not least of all in his Liederen uit de Stad en uit de Sel (Songs from the City and from the Cell, 1919), this poet seems to justify Chrispeels, who had greeted his first productions with the sarcastic remark "Mr. Van Ostaijen has just had a child". But more than Van Ostaijen, Burssens cultivated the oriental mode introduced by German E. He also translated (after Klabund) a Chinese anthology, De Yade fluit (The Jade Flute, 1919), and soon afterwards some poems by Li T'ai-po and Hafiz. In addition, Negro art pro­ foundly impressed him (his brother taught Congolese languages at Ghent). 6 One finds the same primitivism in the work of Brunclair, who also conformed to the great humani­ tarian vogue and admired Whitman, Werfel, and the poets of Die Weissen Blätter. 3 4

Regarding Moens, see W. Noe, De Ontwikkelingsgang van een volks dichter (Tielt, 1944). Regarding Gijsen, see A. Grootjans, Marnix Gijsen (Antwerp, 1933); R. Goris and J. Greshoff, Marnix Gijsen (Antwerp, The Hague, 1955); M. Roelants, Marnix Gijsen (Brussels, 1958). 5 Regarding Van den Oever, see Fr. Verachtert, Karel van den Oever (Louvain, 1940); M. Gijsen, Karel van den Oever, (Brussels, 1958). 6 Regarding Burssens, see J. Walravens, Gaston Burssens (Brussels, 1960). 234

Along with his poems, which sometimes teem with syncopation and sonorous virtuosity, and which did not appear as a collection until some years later (De Dwaze Rondschouw [The Stupid Panorama], 1926), Ruimte published several of his articles about the ten­ dencies of modern art, in which one notes several definite echoes from Van Ostaijen's essay on E. and from other texts by the same author, whom Brunclair does not hesitate to quote at length. The writer who was least influenced by the German "Oh-Mensch-Lyrik" was Verbruggen, a poet with an elegiac and reticent temperament, whose presence in this periodical seems, at first glance, surprising. Nevertheless, technically speaking, his poetry is not out of place here because of the importance which it attaches to the image and to the subjective association. I t is on this principle of composition that Verbruggen's poems are based, and his method often resulted in very original images. More surprising, however, is the absence, in the first seven issues of Ruimte, of the works of the pioneer of humanitarian E., Van Ostaijen, who suddenly fills the eighth number almost single-handedly with a few poems, some pieces in prose entitled ''Grotesques", and an essay on Picasso. In fact, he had been reluctant for a long time because he himself had had in mind, since his trip to Berlin, the founding of a new magazine, which would have met his own exigencies. The poetic conceptions oïRuimte — inherited from Het Sienjaal — were, according to him, out of date. He would have liked to assemble a group similar to that constituted by the contributors to Der Sturm. Thus he did not give in to the urgings of De Bock until after a few soundings made him realize t h a t the enterprise he was dreaming of would be premature in Flanders. Van Ostaijen's essay on Picasso fits very well into the context of Ruimte. In it, the poet describes the return of Picasso to a more classically figurative art and to a more "bourgeois'' conception of painting, and attacks the fashionable critics who saw in this metamorphosis a sign of the imminent death of Cubism. His poems, on the other hand, struck a totally new note. Even if one of them, dedicated to the memory of a student killed in a demonstration ("In Memoriam H. van den Reek"), is related, by its subject matter, to the struggle for Flemish emancipation, the formal research to which they bear witness was nothing at all in common with the hymnic poets writing like Werfel. As to Van Ostaijen's grotesque prose, it was so new in Flanders (as it was not in Germany) that it passed by half-unnoticed: no one had to take it seriously. However, one may perhaps consider it, together with Moens' Celbrieven, —which was admittedly more accessible–, to be the only good creative prose which appeared in Ruimte. Van Ostaijen, of whom we will speak again, may be regarded as an ''outsider" in this periodical. His concerns were, at that time, of an aesthetic rather than political and social nature, at least in his purely literary works. But even in so far as the other poets mentioned above are concerned, we are forced to state that none of them really lived up to what the readers of the Ruimte manifesto had a right to expect: generosity, cer­ tainly, humanitarianism beyond any doubt; but no social art for all that, and no concern of a pragmatic nature. I t is true that, in 1920, Brunclair felt personally attracted by a more militant stance. 7 He admired Hiller and his "Bund des Geistes", became secretary 7

Regarding Brunclair, see P. de Wispelaere, V. J. Brunclair (Brussels, 1960). 235

of the Antwerp section of the "Clarté" group, a Pacifist and Internationalist league founded by Barbusse and Rolland, and contributed to its periodical Opstanding. But none of this transpires in Ruimte. The only contributor who tried to concretely realize the aspirations formulated by Vos was one of his students, Van de Moortel. A convinced Socialist, he adhered to the principles of Die Aktion, chose Rubiner as his favorite author and recommended a literature catering to the proletariat. Under the pseudonym of W. de Man he sang in Ruimte of daily life in society in very simple verses which are pretty much the only examples—and, at that, unconvincing ones—of "Arbeiterdich­ t u n g " in Flanders. Aside from Van de Moortel, only a few Flemish essayists conceived of literature as immediate involvement in political action. There was, first of all and above all. Vos himself, who analyzed literary works from an essentially Socialist and nationalist point of view and willingly reviewed works of a political and economic nature, which served him as springboards for setting forth his own ideas. More strictly "Activist", in the sense which the word conveyed in Flanders during the war, A. Jacob attacked the historian Henri Pirenne, who had demonstrated the fundamental unity of Belgium, and praised to the skies the poetry and person of Moens, a type of knight whom he compared with Schiller. As to De Bock, the founder of the periodical, his contribution was relatively mod­ est. In his book reviews he remained calmly objective except when he was attacking the political indifference of Vermeylen and his friends or exalting the role of the modern writer in society. According to him, this role was not essentially one of combat: it was, above all, a matter of making the masses aware of philosophical and scientific problems. De Bock was concerned with practical matters and began by demanding public libra­ ries of a modern cast. On the whole, his magazine did not have the revolutionary and political character suggested by its manifesto: on the other hand, by bringing together the most active young men of letters of this generation, it created a favorable atmo­ sphere for the modernists and Expressionists in Flemish literature, a role which its predecessor, De Goedendag, was not able to claim, by reason of its narrower scope. Moved by the same concern to keep readers informed of the international state of cultural affairs and encouraged by De Bock, who wanted his magazine to cover as many topics as possible, the writers of Ruimte deepened their knowledge of Expressionist, Futurist and, above all, Cubist painting; they discovered modern music by way of Cocteau (Le Coq et l'Arlequin), as well as saluting the appearance of the Dutch periodi­ cal De Stem, in which they recognized their own social and (sometimes) religious aspi­ rations (while at the same time reproaching it for lacking a system and the dogmatism necessary in every political action). They finally turned away from Van Nu en Straks in favor of the Russians, the prophets of a new society. What distinguished Ruimte from De Goedendag was, nevertheless, not its systematic spirit, but rather its definite leanings towards the theories of Däubler and of Friedrich Marcus Huebner in particular and toward German E. in the broadest sense. One sees reflected here, as a matter of fact, most of the attitudes which characterize the poets of the Expressionist decade in Germany: from "Literatentum", which Vos combined with social concern, to the more frankly aesthetic direction taken by Van Ostaijen 236

after Het Sienjaal, by way of the humanitarian lyricism of Moens, who affected the periodical most profoundly. The disparate spirit of this avantgarde, to which one must add those artists who illustrated the various issues,—P. Joostens, Jozef Peeters, Jozef Cantre, Prosper de Troyer, F . Jespers, etc., —was precisely the cause of the rapid decease of Ruimte which, founded in 1920, published its last number in October, 1921, in consequence of quarrels of a personal nature or over matters of principle. The last issue contained only two texts which could serve as an epilogue to the history of the magazine. The one, taken from the Nieuwe Rotterdamsche Courant, contained a critique formulated by one of the moving forces of Van Nu en Straks, Van de Woestijne, against the young "grave-diggers". Van de Woestijne stressed their discord and incertitude regarding what sense to give to their ideal of "gemeenschapskunst'' (art of the community). The other text was De Bock's response to this article. The principal complaints he formulated against Van Nu en Straks (and which often merely resumed arguments already presented in Ruimte) are political abstentionism, literary elitism, pseudo-aesthetic individualism, and shop­ worn hedonism. On these, often unjust, reproaches, applying to a stereotyped image of the preceding generation, all of the contributors of Ruimte would have agreed. But they were no longer there. Taking account less of the homogeneity of their opposition to Van Nu en Straks than of the differences t h a t had arisen among them, some of them agreed to the principle of a fusion with Vlaamsche Arbeid, a rather conservative magazine whose editor, Jozef Muls, had asked them to co-operate right after the war. Others had started new maga­ zines which better corresponded to their own objectives, and which subscribed to more strictly delimited programs. The diverse orientations of these reviews emphasize the internal contradictions on which the spirit of Ruimte rested: on the one hand, the ethical tendency was affirmed and defined with a greater stress on the political, economic, cultu­ ral and religious situation of the times in Belgium—Opstanding (Resurrection), Ter Waarheid (Towards the Truth), Pogen (Attempts)—and on the other hand, the aesthe­ tic tendency imbued periodicals of a more international character in which the plastic arts had at least as much importance as literature—Het Overzicht (The Panorama), De Driehoek (The Triangle). If Opstanding, the organ of the "Clarté" groups, did not outlive Ruimte (1920– 1921), the Catholic magazines had more success: these are Ter Waarheid (1921-1924), where we re-encounter Moens and Verbruggen, and Pogen (1923-1925), founded by Moens, whose humanitarian and Christian ideals were gradually narrowed down to a sort of Catholic and "volksverbunden" nationalism, which limited the significance of his later work and rigidified its forms. This did not prevent him from exercising a pro­ found influence on Flanders and, soon afterwards, on Holland where, contributing, since 1922, to the periodical Roeping, he was welcomed with enthusiasm by his co­ religionists. He also opened the columns of Pogen to the Catholic authors of the Nether­ lands (e.g., Albert Kuykle and G. Bruning) and personally submitted some essays deal­ ing with contemporary literature in the Low Countries. Besides Moens, let us name among the principal contributors to Pogen Van den Oever, Verbruggen, Gijsen, André Demedts, and, above all, the young Gerard Walschap, 237

whose novel Waldo (1928), filled with ecstatic religiosity, testified to the influence of Moens. Some years afterwards, Walschap was to leave the bosom of the Church, but his Vitalistic novels would still remind one of some Expressionist tendencies: primitivism, anti-intellectualism, spontaneous communion with the cosmos, and a rejection of aestheticism. The chef-d'œuvre of this genre in Flanders was his Houtekiet (1939).8 The ''aesthetic'' tendency was primarily represented by Het Overzicht (19211925), founded by Fernand Berckelaers (who later used the pseudonym of Michel Seuphor) and Geert Pynenburg, and also by De Driehoek, which took it over (1925-1926) under the direction of Peeters and Edgar du Perron. There also, they sometimes spoke in rather vague terms about communal art, but the stress was laid, above all, on formal problems. These reviews focused on criticism of international art and published poems by Burssens and Van Ostaijen. This "Formalist" tendency which, though least represented, nevertheless constitutes the most original contribution of Flemish E., had its origin, as did the other, in Van Ostaijen's creative and critical work. Ever since his arrival, at the end of 1918, in Berlin, he passed through a nihilistic crisis which caused him to deny the major premises of Het Sienjaal and abandon, at the same time, the broad hymnic forms. A first manifestation of this change was De Feesten van Angst en Pijn (The Feasts of Anguish and of Sorrow), written from 1918 to 1921 but published only after the poet's death. At first glance, a chaotic impression is created by the words thrown feverishly and jerkily onto the page. Syntax and rhetoric are replaced by the cry. Between the words, or the groups of words, there is emptiness. Following the ex­ ample of Stramm, Van Ostaijen here employed the method of "Konzentration", which eliminates articles, conjunctions, punctuation, etc. The direct contacts he had with Walden and Der Sturm at this time certainly influenced him in this respect. The rela­ tions between the words are indicated by the respective sizes of the letters, their recur­ rence and their ascending and descending movement on the page. One could compare this technique with t h a t of Mallarmé's Coup de dés, Cendrars's Prose du Transsibérien, or Apollinaire's Calligrammes, although the diction of De Feesten is more discontinuous than that of the former two, and the author does not aim at producing the effect of a musical score. The Feasts are a direct expression of the internal struggle presented by the poet, who is torn between his nostalgia for a lost God and his despair of living in a world where the ideas proclaimed a short time ago are nothing but empty formulas or vain utopias. One can say as much for the following collection, Bezette Stad (Occupied City), published in 1921, except that the image of Antwerp during the war here serves as a self-projection of the author, who in some manner objectivizes his personal drama in poems totally devoid of all "confession". The "concentrated" style and the rhythmic typography make this work the printed counterpart of the manuscript of Feasts. This time the theme is centered around the external world, submitted to some deformations and hallucinations whose Expressionist and visionary character reminds one as much of the 8 Regarding Walschap, see K. Elebaers, De romankunst van G. Walschap (Diest, 1942); B. F. van Vlierden, Gerard Walschap (Bruges, 1958); J. C. Brandt Corstius, Gerard Walschap (Brussels, 1960); J. Weisgerber, Formes et domaines du roman flamand, 1927–1960 (Brussels, 1963), pp. 83— 101,

238

fantastic world of Ensor as of the grimacing caricatures of Grosz (Van Ostaijen men­ tions the latter in his letters and hailed the former as the great precursor of E. in Flan­ ders). If it is permitted to play the gratuitous game of comparisons for a moment, one could define Bezette Stad as the work of a Heym expressing himself in the language of a Stramm having been acquainted with Dada. Noting with bitterness t h a t the post-war period, far from realizing the dreams of humanitarianism, had returned to power the middle-class in all its splendor, Van Ostaijen, while in Berlin, actually felt very close to Dadaism. We know that in this city, more distinctly than elsewhere, Dada was characterized by social protest, and that often Dadaists, Communists, and Spartacans made common cause there. I t is in the sense of a fundamental opposition to the return of the bourgeois order that one can speak of a Dadaist influence in Bezette Stad, as well as in the grotesque prose pieces which its author began to write at approximately the same time, after reading Scheerbart and Mynona, who are cited as models in his correspondence. These grotesque pieces are often posthumous and difficult to date. They are stories in which political satire con­ tends with nonsense of the most dishevelled sort. Next to direct allusions to political facts or personalities of the m o m e n t – " D e Stad der Opbouwers'' (The City of the Con­ structors), "De Generaal" (The General)–one encounters texts of a corrosive humor in which, for example, the logic of a situation or a character is carried to its extreme, so that the reader ends by losing his foothold, swept along by an inexorable mechanism which sometimes reminds one of Kafka ("Kluwen van Ariadne", [Ariadne's Thread]). In 1924, Van Ostaijen actually translated into Dutch a few of Kafka's short fragments. In spite of the despair which made him renounce all forms of human community, sometimes even to the point of refusing to use the second person singular ("You, you, who is you ?"), Van Ostaijen did not go as far as to advocate the anti-art of the Dadaists. Quite on the contrary, it appears that it was his aesthetic endeavors, in which he was encouraged by Der Sturm, which sustained him morally in these years of nearly total misery and solitude. His articles of the period 1918-1921 (in 1921 he returned to Bel­ gium for the first time), devoted to art or to the defense of his own poetic ideas, witness to this fact. If he had lost faith in the possibilities of an immediate revolution, he still retained the ideal of an art which, by its essence alone –and not by some sort of huma­ nitarian "message" —could prepare the spirit and the mentality of the classless society of tomorrow. One of the principal characteristics of the art which Van Ostaijen then considered to be really "modern" was "disindividualization". From then on, his own poems tended in this direction, after the fashion of certain paintings and sculptures by Campendonck, and especially by O. Jespers which he submitted to the admiration of his readers. The goal of art, according to him, was to assure a spiritual communion among men. The individual and his personal taste put an obstacle in its way, and this is the reason why Van Ostaijen admired the great mystics who, from Mechtild of Magdeburg to Jeanne Marie de la Motte-Guyon, set aside their critical and rational selves to the sole advantage of intuitive powers, which he supposed to be common to all men. In the same manner, both Der Sturm (Schreyer) and Das Kunstblatt conveyed a mystical tendency battling the individualism of the Renaissance. This attitude paralleled that of a theoretician of 239

art like Worringer, whose Abstraktion und Einfühlung Van Ostaijen knew well and cited more than once. One can compare these ideas to those which Kandinsky set forth in Das Geistige in der Kunst, but in Van Ostaijen one also finds, beyond E., the influence of some of the theories of the Bauhaus, several of whose members Van Ostaijen visited, and of Gleizes, whose new book Du Cubisme et des moyens de la comprendre Van Ostaijen had acclaimed since its publication. Discovering in Cubism, especially in the light of this last essay, the objectivity of expression, the simplification of forms and colors and, by these very means, the possibility of producing, in industrial quantity, works which could meet the needs of the collectivity, Van Ostaijen even wanted to launch a literary and artistic review which would have been the organ of ''emancipated Cubism". Would it be suit­ able to call "Cubist" some of his last poems, which appeared in Vlaamsche Arbeid, Het Overzicht, De Driehoek, and Avontuur before being published in posthumous collections ? He himself always preferred to speak of E. of a Constructivist leaning, or of Organic E., meaning by t h a t a poetic transposition of the laws of artistic autonomy, of internal necessity, of respect for specific materials and of organic unity as formulated by Kan­ dinsky and, after him, by Gleizes for painting. The only German Expressionist poet whom Van Ostaijen always recognized as such was Stramm, who exploits all the sono­ rous and plastic qualities of words to the maximum while the poet himself remains hidden. The "disparition élocutoire" of the poet which Mallarmé talks about is made subservient not to an idea of order, beauty, or to some sort of atmosphere, but to the expressiveness contained in the materials. Van Ostaijen wanted only to write poems which contained their own causality: even before Henri Brémond he spoke of "pure poetry". The deliberate impersonality of his poems adhered to an idea of art conceived, paradoxically enough, simultaneously as an autonomous end and as a means of attain­ ing an intuitive knowledge of the real. Words would have, for him, a revelatory power because their deepest resonances awaken in our (collective) subconscious the memory of the Platonic Idea. The unexpected associations, the isolation of the word, the musical variation blossoming almost automatically after a "premise" phrase—these would be the principal poetic means of which Organic E. was to make use. In this respect, the theories of Surrealism are closely related, with the difference, however, that Van Ostaijen permitted, and even demanded, the final intervention of a principle of order which makes the poem self-enclosed and insures its unity. With reference to these theories, which Van Ostaijen summed up more clearly in a posthumous essay entitled Gebruiksaanwijzing der Lyriek (How to Use Poetry), one has a right to ask if he is still talking about E. But where are we to find the definition which will, one day, clearly delimit this terrain with moving frontiers? If E. signifies, above all, an art in which the expression of the subjectivity of the artist reigns supreme, then we do not have E. here, for Van Ostaijen precisely wanted to efface all signs of individuality from the poem, and all emotional "élan" as well (it is this élan for which he reproaches the long-winded free verses of humanitarianism). If one conceives of the term in a broader sense—, as contrasting with Realism and its derivatives, and as a new vision centered on the very problem of expression—we can apply it to the theories 240

of Van Ostaijen and to a few of his poems which correspond to them. But in practice, the problem is of minor importance, for there are many poems in which he expresses, in a most startling manner, by means of shocking images or musical effects, his pessi­ mistic vision of the world, his anguish in the face of death, or the joy he feels at seeing a child discover things. The deformations which he imposes on the syntax, the extreme liberty of his verse, and the original, sometimes puzzling, character of his images had the result t h a t few of his contemporaries took him seriously. Having returned to Belgium for good in 1923, after his military service which had sent him back to Germany, Van Ostaijen neither really succeeded in estab­ lishing a school nor even in forming a homogeneous group. The "Humanitarians", who were not spared by his sharp pen, turned their backs on him, and the official circles ignored him and did nothing to aid him materially in the illness which caused his death in 1928. The Expressionist adventure was reaching its end, as it were, as Moens chose the path of a militant Catholicism and of a narrow na­ tionalism which oriented him more and more toward propaganda. Gijsen had chosen a new sober and prosaic style of reporting, in the verses of Het Huis (The House, 1925), some everyday actions and banal anecdotes from which a profound sense of human dignity radiates — before quitting the literary scene for a long time. De Clercq, retired into himself, wrote only love poems or epic poems of Biblical inspi­ ration. Brunclair, after having attacked Werfel's disciples—that is, Moens and the other "Messianists" (Over moderne litteraturen, 1922) — , wore himself out in an attempt at writing an Expressionist novel which, symptomatically, describes, in a chaotic way, the failure of a Humanitarian dream and of a Socialist utopia. De Monnik in het Westen (The Monk in the Western World), written in 1927 and pub­ lished in 1929, bears eloquent witness to the failure of Idealistic E. Is this to say that E. in Flemish literature was nothing more than a brief interlude ? Certainly not. Following in the wake of Van Ostaijen, Burssens, in his turn, took the path of Organic E. and of verbal experiments, which he was the only one to practice until the moment when, in 1950, the Tijd en Mens generation, which descended indi­ rectly from Dutch E. and French Surrealism, formulated the principles of an "experi­ mental art", of which Van Ostaijen was deemed the precursor. For a time, the art of Brunclair was also oriented in this direction, but with less success. These are but isolated cases, although one could doubtlessly cite many others in which some Expressionist tendencies manifested themselves long after 1930. Achilles Mussche, for example, probably remembered his humanitarian period (De twee Vaderlanden [The Two Fatherlands], 1927) when, in 1950, he created the vast epic fresco Aan de voet van hef Belfort (At the Foot of the Belfry), in which he traces, in a visionary manner, the history of the resistance of the Flemish weavers to capital and the machine. But E. also continued to survive in a literary genre which was indebted to it for a profound renovation: the theater. This genre, flourishing in the Middle Ages, had since then produced only a few valuable works in Flanders. The epoch of Van Nu en Straks h a d not significantly changed this situation, which found expression in translations of the most facile and banal plays of other countries. In several newspaper articles, Van 241

Ostaijen had already deplored the choice of repertoires in Belgium, which were almost exclusively limited to boulevard comedies and soap operas. Without proposing a real solution, he contented himself with expressing his preference for Shaw's plays of ideas and for the Dutch Naturalist theater of Herman Heijermans. Ruimte must be given the credit for having called attention to the new aspects of foreign drama and, more especi­ ally, to the German Expressionist theater. We have seen that Chrispeels had been in charge of this department since 1920. One of the plays which impressed him most was Unruh's Ein Geschlecht, because of its universal implications and the concluding mes­ sage of hope, because of the quasi-allegorical figuration of the subconscious, the exacer­ bated style of the dialogues, the simplification of the decor, and the fact that a Sunday morning had been chosen for the performance so as to give the play a ritual and commu­ nal character. Along with Ruimte, Pogen was also interested in the new perspectives in the theater. Thus the ideas of Gordon Craig, Appia, Marinetti, etc., were praised in general terms by G. Heyndrickx, in 1923. Heyndrickx admired, in passing, the "Karsenty" theater of Moscow and the Russian Ballet, but above all he dwelled on the German Expressionist "school". After having expressed his mistrust of the extremism of the " Sturm-Bühne", he enumerated the playwrights whom he considered to be most representative of the era: Sternheim, Kornfeld, Friedrich Wolf, Kokoschka, and Kaiser. Once more, the E. of "ideas", that of the "Mensch in der Mitte", held more attraction than the formal experiments from the "Laboratorium für Worte". In the same article, Heyndrickx spoke highly of the Flemish stage-director J. 0 . de Gruyter, who, since 1920, had directed the itinerant troupe of the "Vlaamsche Volkstooneel" (Flemish Folk Theater). The latter originated from the "Fronttooneel" created during the war. The secretary of the "Vlaamsche Volkstooneel" after 1922 was none other than Moens, whose interest in this enterprise should not surprise us. About this time, he translated several authors, among whom were Anton Wildgans and Henri Ghéon, whose "medieval" theater, of a religious and popular inspiration, achieved great success in Belgium. But Moens him­ self never wrote an original play. I t is rather surprising that none of the humanitarian and social poets had the desire—or the means—to write for the stage, since drama is the "communitarian" art par excellence. The lack of a real tradition made itself cruelly felt here. Paradoxi­ cally, the first and only writer who contributed a few valuable Expressionist works to the Flemish theater belonged to the Van Nu en Straks group. Teirlinck, whose repu­ tation as a novelist was still to increase after World War II, has sometimes been called the Proteus of Flemish letters. His ideas about communal theater were a logical con­ sequence of the artistic ideas of Van Nu en Starks, ignored with such levity or bad faith by Ruimte. Teirlinck applied his concepts to his staging of foreign plays and to the plays he wrote himself. Sometimes the baroque aestheticism of his novels was blended with a sort of pagan Vitalism which bore certain similarities to the mystical trend of E., but the only deliberately Expressionist part of his artistic production was his drama. In 1921 he wrote De Vertraagde Film (The Slow-Motion Film), staged in Brussels in the following year. Other plays followed: Ik Dien (I Serve, 1924), a dramatization of the medieval legend of Beatrice; De Man zonder Lijf (The Man Without a Body, 1925); and 242

Borne open-air plays in which Teirlinck also blazed a trail: Bet Torenspel (The Tower Game, 1923), Het A-Z Spel (The A - Z Game, 1924), and Ave (1928). Reacting against the Naturalism cultivated by his predecessors and against the conventional bourgeois theater, Teirlinck liberated the stage from the dogmas of realism and from chronological, spatial, and psychological verisimilitude, in order to highlight types and ideas which never fall into the stagnation or degeneration of the abstract. He did not hesitate to take recourse to allegorical figures or upset traditional conceptions about décor and staging. He was reproached for not always having been able to adapt his manneristic language to the " collectivist" spirit of his plays. Nonethe­ less, no other contemporary Flemish playwright, including Anton van de Velde, Willem Putman, and Dirk Vansina, achieved a reputation equal to his. 9 Still, the stage was changing completely, thanks, above all, to the efforts of the "Vlaamsche Volkstooneel", directed, since 1924, by J. de Meester. Under the guidance of this Dutch director, the troupe acquired international fame because of its avantgarde performances. Its repertoire included Shakespeare, O'Neill, Claudel, Cocteau, Ghéon, Michel de Ghelderode, and Van de Velde, as well as popular plays like the medi­ eval miracle play Mariken van Nieumeghen, a folkloristic-religious play by Felix Tim­ mermans and Veterman, En waar de Ster bleef stille staan (Where the Star Stopped), and Reinaert de Vos (Reynard the Fox) by Paul de Mont. Popular theater out of doors or in the auditorium achieved tremendous success in Flanders until the eve of the Second World War. The collective genre par excellence, it was generally inspired by native folklore, by the Middle Ages, by religious sentiment, by the fantastic, by satire, and by farce. 10 Only a genius like de Ghelderode, however, was able to fuse these data into something universal. He was a writer of Flemish origin, who integrated them into a visionary, truculent, and brutal form. He wrote his plays in French for J. de Meester. The latter had them immediately translated and performed: it is thus that Images de la vie de Saint François d'Assise, Barabbas, and Pantagleize were created with success in Dutch, a quarter of a century before the French public discovered the modernism of this author. De Ghelderode, heir to Maeterlinck and Strindberg, was, for a time, in­ fluenced by the E. of the theater and of the cinema in some of his formal experiments like La Mort du docteur Faust (1926) and Don Juan (1928), which he called, respectively, "tragedy for the music hall" and ''drama-farce for the music hall". But at the risk of dangerously expanding the scope of what should remain a ''period term", one could discern an even profounder E. in de Ghelderode, which consists of an exacerbated syn­ thesis in an atmosphere of horror and of contradictory tendencies, such as the mystic and the grotesque—in a sort of excess which makes one think of Bosch even more than of Ensor, or of Alfred Jarry, to whom de Ghelderode felt himself akin. 11 9 R e g a r d i n g Teirlinck, see W . P u t m a n , Tooneeldagboek (1928-1938) ( A n t w e r p , n . d . ) ; P . B r a c h i n , L' Expressionisme dans le théâtre de H. Teirlinck (Paris, 1958). 10 R e g a r d i n g t h e B e l g i a n t h e a t e r a t t h a t period, see W . P u t m a n , Tooneelgroei (1921-1926) gestalten en spelen ( A n t w e r p , n.d.) a n d Tooneeldagboek (1928-1938); L. M o n t e y n e , Stroomingen, in het naoorlogsh Vlaamsch tooneelleven (Ghent, 1938); C Godelaine, Het vlaamsche Volkstooneel ( L o u v a i n , 1939); A. de M a y e r a n d R . R o e m a n s , Een kwart eeuw tooneelleven in Vlaanderen ( A n t w e r p , 1948); S. Lilar, The Belgian Theatre since 1890 (New Y o r k , 1950); id., Soixante ans de théâtre belge (Brussels, 1952). 11 R e g a r d i n g de Ghelderode, see J . F r a n c i s , Michel de Ghelderode, dramaturge des pays de par

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One could also include in a discussion of E. the highly colorful dramatic art of Fernand Crommelynck, a French-speaking Belgian, whose Cocu Magnifique, a tragi­ comedy about jealousy and masochism, was premiered in 1921 in Paris, in the Theatre de l'Oeuvre. Crommelynck's plays reach the pathetic or the delirious by means of the disproportionate enhancement of the banal or ridiculous and by means of the confron­ tation of an impossible desire for purity with the worst of vulgarities. Thus in Tripes d'Or, staged by Jouvet in 1925, Crommelynck goes Molière one better and announces the theater of the absurd by having a miser eat his money until death ensues. 12 Also tending toward mysticism but just as caricaturizing and grating in their expression, the French plays of Henri Soumagne reflect Meyerhold's and Piscator's ideas on the theater by mixing the marvelous with the ordinary. Soumagne's L'Autre Messie was produced by Lugne-Poë in 1923. French letters in Belgium nevertheless remained largely inaccessible to E.: here there was no violent reaction against the generation of La Jeune Belgique (Young Bel­ gium), a periodical which one may consider as the counterpart to Van Nu en Straks. On the other hand, literary groups, often perpetuating Symbolism or sometimes return­ ing to regionalism, adhered little to a movement which seemed foreign to the Walloon spirit, being fonder of order and "classicism". Is it accidental t h a t Verhaeren, a pre­ cursor of E., was Flemish by birth, like de Ghelderode? And that, among the major poets who could be mentioned here, the greatest was Hellens (pseudonym of F . van Erminghem), who spent his youth near Ghent before settling down in Paris? But in the work of this visionary, for whom dreaming was "the normal state of being" and who admired the German Romantics, one would look in vain for the excesses and the systematic bent of mind characteristic of so many Expressionists. He himself was un­ concerned with labels and -isms, which is not to say t h a t he withdrew from the con­ temporary literary scene. Quite to the contrary, he was the co-founder of important avantgarde periodicals like Le Disque Vert (1921-1925) and Signaux de France et de Belgique (1920-1921). 13 A phenomenon of essentially Germanic origin, as much in painting as in literature, E. was imported into Belgium. War, politics, anda s imilarity of language were re­ sponsible for the short-lived favor it enjoyed in Belgium and which was limited to the Northern part of the country. But it would be wrong to assume that it reigned there alone and supreme. Its influence on poetry was quickly counterbalanced by that of Italian Futurism, by the Dadaist International and, above all, by the French avantgarde. In his last period, Van Ostaijen, for example, felt himself closer to Apollinaire, Cocteau, Cendrars, and Max Jacob than to the Expressionists, with the sole exception deça (Brussels, 1949); M. de Ghelderode, Les Entretiens d'Ostende (Paris, 1956); A. Lepage, Michel de Ghelderode (Brussels, 1960); A. Grisay, Bibliographie de Michel de Ghelderode (Brussels, 1962); P. Vandromme, Michel de Ghelderode (Paris, 1963); J. Francis, L'Eternel Aujourd'hui de Michel de Ghelderode (Brussels, 1968). 12 Regarding Crommelynck, see A. Berger, A la Rencontre de Fernand Crommelynck (Brussels, 1946); A. Grisay, Bibliographie des editions originales de Fernand Crommelynck (Brussels, 1964). 13 Regarding Hellens, see M. J. Hachelle, L'Oeuvre de Franz Bellens (Brussels, 1937); P . Meral, G. Ungaretti, and V. Larbaud, Franz Hellens ou la transfiguration du réel (Brussels, 1941); J. De Bosschere et al., Franz Hellens (Lyon, 1956); A Grisay, L'Oeuvre de Franz Hellens (Liège, 1962); A. Lebois, Franz Hellens (Paris, 1963). 244

of Stramm. Other forms of poetry manifested themselves in an independent manner, whether these were more traditionalist in spirit or whether they innovated in the direction of a greater cerebrality. With few exceptions, the novel—and prose in gen­ eral—scarcely felt the effects of E. before 1928. As for the theater, one should speak of a striking similarity of contemporary ideas rather than of the direct and exclusive in­ fluence of German writers. As is often the case, the greatest artists were those who freed themselves from literary fashions or pointed in entirely new directions: Van Ostaijen, Burssens, Gijsen, Walschap, and de Ghelderode. * There are very few studies relating to E. in Holland, all of them posterior to the revival of interest in the movement about 1950, at the time of the blossoming of the "experimental" school. The broad outlines of this subject have already been sketched by N. A. Donkersloot (1954), J . C. Brandt Corstius (1957), and E. Krispyn (1958).14 To these three articles must be added a few others devoted principally to Herman van den Bergh and Hendrik Marsman. Finally, A. Lehning wrote a little book on Marsman and E. 1 5 One could ask oneself in this connection why the two branches of literature in the Dutch language are always studied separately and if this does not imply an error of perspective due to the confusion of politics and art. But this is not the case; for as far as E. is concerned, we face two phenomena related from a linguistic point of view but different in many other respects, and whose disparity derives precisely from dissimilari­ ties in the historical circumstances. Closely linked with the German occupation and the struggle of the Flemish Movement, Belgian E. took on the air of an explosion which was at once political and aesthetic. I n Flanders, E. was set in motion earlier and with greater violence than in Holland, where the Activism, the social commitment and the militant fervor of Moens find their equivalent only in the young Catholics. The North was more individualistic and more concerned with exclusively aesthetic questions than the South—a contrast which is quite apparent when one compares De Nieuwe Gids with Van Nu en Straks. This tradition dates back to the nineteenth century; in Flanders, the cultural con­ text has always tended to subjugate the artist to the collectivity, whereas Holland grants him greater autonomy. The Dutch writers were less eager to upset—by means of their pen—society, morality, and the State. Furthermore, because of the delay, they benefited from the Flemish experiments while undergoing the influence of German 14 N . A. Donkersloot, "Expressionisme in de Nederlandse letterkunde" in Het Expressionisme : Zes lezingen . . . (The Hague, 1954), pp. 5—24; J. C. Brandt Corstius, "Die Nieuwe Beweging" in De Gids, I (1957), 363-389; E. Krispyn, op. cit. 15 G. Stuiveling, "Herman van den Bergh en de eerste jaargang van Het Getij" in Raam, 32 (February, 1967), pp. 27—38; id., "Het Getij, Herman van den Bergh en het expressionisme" in Handelingen van het XXVIe Vlaams Filologencongres (1967), pp. 100—111; R. P. Meijer, "Ex­ pressionist Influence in Marsman's Early Poetry" in Australasian Universities Modern Language Association Journal, I I I (1955); M. J. G. de Jong, "Marsman und August Stramm" in Levende Talen (April, 1959), 181—190; A. Lehning, Marsman en het expressionisme (The Hague, 1959).

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ideas. Flemish E. was born under the combined pressure of French and German trends; by fusing them, it furthered, in its turn, a parallel movement in Holland. Here the contribution of Germany was considerably smaller and was not really assimilated until shortly after the war. In the meantime—and this is essential—an autonomous E. appeared in the Netherlands, without any contact with Berlin, Munich, or Vienna, and totally unaware of Van Ostaijen's Sienjaal. The North differs from the South on this point as well. Equally remarkable, finally, is the contrast between the generally eclectic Dutch periodicals, in which E. played a modest role, and the organs of combat which appeared in Belgium. As we have seen, these differences resulted from the diversity of the literary heri­ tage, from the fact, for example, that in Flanders, literature for a long time had to serve the emancipation of the people, and that the aestheticism of Willem Kloos, although much admired, was hardly imitated there. Moreover, the war spared the Netherlands, but cruelly hit Belgium. The four years of occupation which that country had to un­ dergo explain, among other things, the precedence of the German influence, as well as the power and the importance of the renewal. Fate nevertheless willed t h a t Het Getij was founded the same year in which Van Ostaijen published Music Hall (1916). Neither the first issues of the Dutch magazine nor the debut of the Flemish poet show any traces of E., strictly speaking, and yet it is from these that it drew inspiration. The elaboration of an authentically Dutch E., exempt from all German or Flemish ties, proceeded from the literary evolution begun in 1880. For in 1916 it was still in relation to the principles enunciated thirty years earlier in De Nieuwe Gids that litera­ ture was defined, although the attitude of the young people had turned from enthusiasm or indulgence to revolt. This shows unequivocally from the time of the first "study" of Van den Bergh in Het Getij (1917) where, already in the preceding year, C. van Wessem had declared that today truth was preferred above art and artifice. The enemy to be fought was aestheticism, and a new taste for reality supplanted the cult of the beauti­ ful. To be sure, De Nieuwe Gids had attracted attention to society and politics through the medium of Frank van der Goes and Frederik van Eeden. Nevertheless, this did not prevent posterity from identifying the image of the movement of 1880 especially with the program of Kloos and of Van Deyssel. Still, the major figures of the past were not rejected wholesale—far from it. If Kloos is sometimes described as a monster of egocentricity, E. Groenevelt paid homage to his pioneering work, while, at the same time, specifying t h a t he had seen his day. Marsman went even so far as to dedicate a poem to him (much later, in 1938). Nothing here recalls the animosity with which Gijsen went about demolishing Van de Woestijne. A similar moderation impregnates the verdicts about Herman Gorter and Albert Verwey. In fact, the former fares quite well, in spite of his Impressionism. His vitality, his freshness, his experimental tendencies commended him in the eyes of the innova­ tors. 16 Gerhard Bruning did not hide his admiration for him, Karel van den Oever called 16 See T. Kurpershoek-Scherft, De Episode van "Het Getij": De Noordnederlandse van 1916 tot 1922 (The Hague, 1956).

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Dichtkunst

him a precursor of E., 17 and Marsman wrote a poem and a long essay about him. The case of Verwey is more ambiguous. On the one hand he repudiated, like Gorter, indi­ vidualism, aestheticism, and the mannered style advocated by Kloos, and in founding De Beweging (1905-1919), he became the leader of those for whom art was based not on impressions of the tangible world, but on idea and imagination. Having a mind open to novelty, he published in De Beweging some prose by E. de Bock (1915 and 1916), a thorough study by Theo van Doesburg on contemporary painting (1916) and some poetry by Marsman (1919). What is more, he welcomed A. H. Feijs's modernistic poems, and did not hide his sympathy for Kandinsky and Marc. On the other hand, his philo­ sophical turn of mind and his preference for fixed forms were to repel Van den Bergli, although the latter's theories—notably the preeminence he accords to the sentence over the nuances of the isolated word—are related to those of Verwey. 18 In short, by rejecting matter and by renouncing sensations in favor of concepts, Verwey decisively influenced the development of Dutch literature and prepared the advent of E. as well as other avant-garde movements. The tendency toward internalization was not characteristic of Verwey alone who, like Gorter, burned what he formerly adored after the fashion of Kloos and Van Deyssel. What Kandinsky calls "das Geistige in der Kunst'' also permeates the work of P . C. Boutens and of the poets whom Verwey gathered around himself in De Beweging (P. N. van Eyck, J. C. Bloem, etc.). About 1910, the Impressionist and Naturalist techniques were entirely outmoded (at least in the view of an active minority), and the founda­ tions of the Platonic Constructivism of Mondrian and the E. of Van den Bergh had been laid. But on the whole, the young poets were wide off the mark. If the general orientation had changed, the feelings, the themes and the means of expression had remained pretty much the same. One ought not be surprised, then, that Van den Bergh began by tackling the problem of language. But it is time to describe the main features of an evolution which, beginning with De Nieuwe Gids (1885), proceeds to De Stijl (1917-1932), Het Getij (1916-1924), Herman van den Bergh, and finally, Marsman, the brothers Bruning, and H. de Vries. The rupture with the cult of the Beautiful and the Self, incarnated by Kloos, was marked not only by contempt for the unique and ephemeral sensation and for the refined pleasures it affords. One of the slogans of the times was Dynamism, in contrast to the passive and receptive attitude embraced by Impressionism. The rejection of a strict mimesis, the shift of focus from matter to spirit and from perception to Idea, was accompanied by an "updating'' of the poetic sensitivity, which was until then indiffer­ ent to the rhythm of urban life and technology. After the physicists and the Futurists, the Dutch poets discovered that reality was energy, movement, and tension. Symptomatically, the first collection of Van den Bergh is entitled De Boog (The Bow). Kloos was judged to be guilty, first and foremost, of individualism. His narcissism was judged to belong to the heritage of the Renaissance, which was rejected by com17 K . v a n d e n Oever, " R o n d w a t m e n n o e m t : e x p r e s s i o n i s m e " in Roeping ( 1 9 2 5 - 2 6 ) , I V , 130—148, esp. p . 133. V e r w e y used t h e t e r m E . since 1913. See J . K a m e r b e e k , J r . , Albert Verwey en het nieuwe classicisme (Groningen, 1966), p . 47. 18 See J . J . Oversteegen, Vorm of vent : Opvattingen over de aard van het literaire werk in de Nederlandse kritiek tussen de twee wereldoorlogen ( A m s t e r d a m , 1969), p . 39.

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mon consent. In 1925, Marsman, enunciating one of his famous "Theses", declared: ''The cause of the ruin of this civilization is individualism. Only a new, original religion can save the world." Even if one makes allowance for Marsman's personal concerns one may discover in his words a desire which had already been latent for a long time: t h a t of transcending the limits of the ego and identifying oneself with a religious, polit­ ical, social or simply artistic cause—a desire for expansion which would nonetheless not stifle the awareness of human fragility. This dream of fraternity, universality, and cosmopolitanism, and this wish to embrace life in its totality, animated Het Getij as well as De Stijl. The war and the Russian revolution probably reinforced an aspiration which dates from Verhaeren, Rolland and their precursors. The abstract, geometric forms of Mondrian, which stress only the spiritual side, are at the same time universal. Similarly, Van den Bergh proclaimed the superiority of the sentence over the word, t h a t is, of the whole over its parts. The renovation of the world begins with the renovation of language; for a poet, this stood to reason. To the emancipation of language Van den Bergh devoted a series of elaborately technical studies which gave eloquent expression to his phobia for the "nuance", the blurred and the vague—including vague longings of the soul—character­ istic of Impressionism. "Extreme sobriety of the word, richness of the sentence,"—this is the controlling idea of his poetics after January, 1917. The tendency is toward syn­ thesis, and no longer toward analysis; and now the global vision holds sway over the minute observation of details. Let us emphasize that these views had already been for­ mulated by Verwey four years earlier. Van Wessem, for his part, insisted that the im­ pression of nature and the verbal image constitute an indissoluble unity "of such a kind t h a t by naming the image one also expresses the essence". The key word has been spoken: appearances—forms, colors, and sounds—do not suffice; and it is necessary to penetrate to the heart of things. To the extent that one deviates from mimesis the idea of an autonomous art, detached from the tangible world, takes shape. Van den Bergh regarded poetry as an independent universe, and for Van Doesburg words were the materials which the writer manipulates in the same way as the painter works with color. Thus the poem becomes an object made of language, a verbal organism, as Van Ostaijen also suggested. All these ideas will come once more to the fore around 1950. From 1916 to 1920, the new positions were consolidated; they were often poorly delineated in Het Getij, but extremely well defined in De Stijl. Unfortunately, De Stijl is of little interest to the historian of E., and it is basically through the back door t h a t the latter movement enters the Netherlands. The Getij contributors saw themselves only as reformers. Their program hardly merits its name, and the first issues of the magazine contain nothing new except in poetry, namely the poems and critical essays of Van den Bergh. In 1917, the foreign authors who were held up as examples were, besides Verhaeren and Rolland, Paul Adam and Henri Bordeaux ! I t was not until 1918 t h a t Het Getij was modernized, notably under the influence of Van Doesburg. In 1921, Van Doesburg contributed a more or less regular survey of avantgarde art, while Joseph Leonard, who belonged to the Ruimte group, dealt, also in Het Getij, with Flemish letters. Little by little, the windows facing the outer world were opening. Speaking, in 1921, of the "Avant-Garde in Holland", Van Doesburg did not abstain from using 248

sarcasm: "All the periodicals constantly warm up the egg of 1880 and eagerly take delight in the remains left by Gorter, Van Deyssel, Kloos, Van Eeden, etc." This was probably the opinion of Dirk Coster as well, who, in 1920, omitted Het Getij from his somewhat scant panorama of literary activities in the Netherlands. Het Getij was almost exclusively focused on France, the most notable exceptions being Tagore and, above all, Whitman, whose Leaves of Grass, translated by Maurits Wagen voort in 1917, was enthusiastically greeted by Van den Bergh and admired by Van Wessem. Whitman's vigor, his idealism and his free verse exercised an undeniable influence on the humanitarian poets, as was also the case in Flanders. For similar reasons, Verhaeren was the favorite French writer. Martin Permys (pseudonym of M. J . Premsela) was one of his most fervent disciples, and the reading of Verhaeren was an authentic revelation for Van den Bergh. The similarities between Van den Bergh and this or t h a t German or Flemish Expressionist whom the Dutchman did not even know existed are to be primarily explained by their common infatuations. Whereas De Nieuwe Gids had still followed in the footsteps of Shelley and Keats, the generation of 1916 read the French Symbolists and their successors. Long after German E. had taken root in Holland, France continued to make its authority felt there. From 1916 to 1925, then, attention was called not only to Baudelaire, Jammes, Henri de Régnier, Laforgue, Corbière, Rimbaud, and Villiers de I'Isle-Adam, but also to Alfred Jarry, whose Ubu Roi appeared in translation in Het Getij in 1922; to Cocteau, who influenced the work of Constant van Wessem; to Cendrars, admired by Marsman; and to Apollinaire, whom Van den Bergh studied in the first issues of De Vrije Bladen (1924). I t is quite obvious: from Symbolism the movement proceeds gradually to literary Cubism, whose effect was surely as considerable in Holland as it was in Belgium. The historical circumstances, the evolution of literature after the turn of the century and the favorable reception given to Whitman, Verhaeren, and the French poets led to a blossoming of Dutch E. apart from any German influence. The phe­ nomenon is similar to the one which had taken place in Germany itself a few years earlier, but it is a movement on a small scale. Martin Permys, who initiated this current, swore only by Verhaeren and Maeterlinck, and was impervious to what was going on at the time in occupied Flanders and in Germany. In 1916, Feijs employed a harsh, abrupt style (Oorlog, Verzen in Staccato), whose popularity spread after the war, under the impact of Cubism and Stramm. But it was Van den Bergh (1897-1967) who, with his two collections (De Boog, 1917; De Spiegel [The Mirror], 1925) constituted the soul of this trend. His poems come under the heading of E. by virtue of several essential features: the primacy of vision over perception, their re-creation of nature by means of language, and their sense of the movement and unity of the universe. An individualist, Van den Bergh nevertheless aimed at the universal. In his pagan dithyrambs about the Earth he paved the way for the Vitalism of the twenties and the cosmic images of Marsman. His style, though concentrated, never reaches the excessiveness of Stramm, for it banishes, as we have seen, the isolated word in favor of the sentence. Moreover, it is characterized by count­ less neologisms and paradoxes, the concretization of abstract words, the omission of articles, the fusion of heterogeneous images and a typically Expressionist use of colors. 249

The poetry of Van den Bergh breaks with classical metrics and introduces the staccato rhythm which subsequently triumphed with Marsman and H. de Vries. His studies, collected in Nieuwe Tucht (A New Discipline, 1928) exercised, according to Binnendijk, less influence than his poems. Van den Bergh retired from the literary scene about 1925, when E. began to recede; the volumes which he published after the Second World War, at the time when the ''expérimental'' poets rescued him from oblivion, witness to the survival of his earlier manner. An Expressionist without knowing it, Van den Bergh is situated at an equal dis­ tance from Humanitarianism and the verbal experiments of Der Sturm. Marsman, H. de Vries and J a n Slauerhoff are his debtors. Better informed of international currents, more daring, b u t literarily less gifted, Van Doesburg (1883-1931) embarked, at about the same time, on some attempts which had no future, but which demonstrated that Holland intended to participate in European Modernism. The neo-Plasticism of De Stijl was one of its most original manifestations, and the autonomous E. of Van den Bergh was joined to Futurism, Cubism, and Dada, with which E. was often amalgamated. Once the armistice was signed, German E. set out to swamp the literature of the Netherlands. I t is noteworthy that the vanguard of the invasion included scarcely any poets. The doctrines of Mondrian and, above all, those of Van Doesburg base themselves partly on Kandinsky and the Blaue Reiter group; but this is not surprising, since De Stijl was primarily interested in the plastic arts. 1 9 Van Doesburg being also a writer, Kandinsky's ideas quickly reached literature in a roundabout way. Über das Geistige in der Kunst dates from 1912, and as early as 1912-1913, Van Doesburg emulated its fundamental principles. We know t h a t Verwey was taken by Marc as well as by Kandinsky, about whom even before the war he wrote a poem ("De Schilder"). In short, the painters preceded the writers by making use of a medium which transcends linguistic barriers and painlessly adjusts to a milieu in which the pictorial tradition enjoyed an unparalleled prestige and from which came Van Gogh himself, who is con­ sidered to be one of the ancestors of E. Most of the periodicals so far referred to re­ served an important place for the fine arts, which often provided the poets with a frame of reference. Marsman, for example, "cited" Marc's famous blue horses in his poem about Berlin ("Berlijn"). Without realizing it, Verwey had identified in 1916 the two painters whose role was going to be decisive. If the cult of Van Gogh was already taking shape at this time, if here and there Flemish painters like A. Servaes or G. de Smet were mentioned, if Marsman saw in Rudolf Bauer the ideal incarnation of his E., the names which most constantly recurred were those of Marc and Kandinsky. 2 0 The former made a deep impression on Marsman, who wrote a cycle of poems about German and Dutch cities ("Seinen" [Signals]) as well as "Aanteekeningen over Franz Marc" (Some Notes on Franz Marc) after having visited the extensive one-man show, organized in Berlin in 1922. For Marsman, Marc had effected the synthesis of Stramm and Cendrars, t h a t is 19

See H. L. C. Jaffé, "De Stijl", 1917—1931 : The Dutch Contribution to Modern Art (Amster­ dam, 1956). The second manifesto, concerned with literature, appeared in De Stijl, I I I (1920), pp. 49-50. 20 See H. Marsman, "Divagatie over expressionisme" in Den Gulden Winckel, 1921, pp. 3—5. 250

of E. and Cubism, and of the heart and the mind. Marc, he said, was "the Cubist of sentiment". This is also the goal he set himself; and it is again to Marc that Marsman's colors, which transmit purely subjective information with no reference to the tangible world, are related. As for Kandinsky, Het Getij published in 1921 some extracts from his treatise which deal with literature. We have already indicated how much Van Doesburg owed to him. For Marsman, who was a friend of the painter A. de Winter, one of the Dutch disciples of Kandinsky, the Russian was a representative of the authen­ tic E. he loved and extolled. In the Netherlands, E. is generally thought of as a foreign phenomenon, "Germanic" and "Slavic" as people used to say at that time, and consequently opposed to "Latin" Cubism. This turn of mind, in which the conflicts of nationalism are reflected, manifests itself also in the evolution of Marsman, who was later to soften and equilibrate his "Germanic" nature through contact with "Mediterranean" Humanism. The first publications mentioning German E. scarcely date back beyond 19141918. Here are the oldest and most important ones: 1914 E. Wichman and C. L. Dake, Nieuwe Richtingen in de Schilderkunst sionisme, futurisme, etc.) (Baarn, 1914).

(cubisme, expres­

1916 Th. van Doesburg, "De Nieuwe Beweging in de Schilderkunst," Het Getij (1918), pp. 180-190, 212-215. O. van Tussenbroek, Review of H. Bahr, Expressionismus in Den Gulden Winckel (1918), pp. 85-86. 1919 Th. van Doesburg, "Rondblik. Het expressionisme," De Stijl (1919), pp. 140-144. 1920 R. Houwink, Review of K. Edschmid, Die achatenen Kugeln in Den Gulden Winckel (1920), pp. 151-153. F. M. Huebner, "Het expressionisme in Duitschland" in De nieuwe Europeesche Geest in Kunst en Letteren (Arnhem, 1920). W. Retera Wzn., "Over uitersten in de beeldhouwkunst," Het Getij (1920), pp. 487-492, 650-653. 1921 Th. van Doesburg, "Revue der Avant-Garde," Het Getij (1921), pp. 193-200. Th. van Doesburg, "Beeldende K u n s t " Het Getij (1921), pp. 50-57, 73-76. F. M. Huebner, "Deutscher Brief," Het Getij (1921), pp. 145-160. F. M. Huebner, "Neue Erzählkunst," Het Getij (1921), pp. 427-432. H. Marsman, "Divagatie over expressionisme," Den Gulden Winckel (1921), pp. 3-5. H. Marsman, Review of K. Pinthus, Menschheitsdämmerung in Den Gulden Winckel (1921), pp. 50-51. M. H. Werkman, "Vooruitstrevende Duitsche Lyriek," Groot Wederland, I I (1921), 495-524. H. Wolf, Studies over hedendaagsche Duitsche Letterkunde (Arnhem, 1921). 251

The list clearly shows that the breakthrough of German E. in Holland occurred about 1920 (at this date, literary E. was still unknown in the Netherlands) and t h a t its most active pioneers were Van Doesburg, F . M. Huebner, and Marsman. Not only did German culture reach Amsterdam and The Hague, but, peace having returned, one was able to become acquainted with it on the spot. Marsman took several trips to Germany (1921, 1922, 1923), visiting exhibitions and meeting writers, among them Hermann Kasack. Van Doesburg also travelled to Weimar, where he established close relations with the Bauhaus (1921). I t would be superfluous to study in detail the influence which German writers of the past and present exerted in Holland. I n many cases, a name appears but once, not to be heard of again. Let us, nevertheless, cite Nietzsche, the reading of whose works left evident traces in the work of Marsman and Menno ter Braak; 2 1 Novalis, Büchner, and Rilke, in whom Marsman was particularly interested; and Hofmannsthal, whom he read when he was eighteen. Among the Expressionists and Modernists, the periodicals mention, in addition to Schönberg, a host of poets, novelists, and dramatists: Döblin, Leonhard Frank, Hasenclever, Kaiser, Lasker-Schüler, Mynona, Rubiner, Stadler, Sternheim, etc. There are even more influential figures: Worringer, whose Abstraktion und Einfühlung was well known; K. Edschmid (Die achatenen Kugeln), appreciated b y Roel Houwink and F . M. Huebner; Trakl and Heym, two of Marsman's favorite authors (no one, he writes in 1924, could go further than Trakl "without turning stark mad"); Heynicke, whom Marsman accused of having let himself be overtaken by the humanitarian vogue; and Schreyer, whose article on "Die neue K u n s t " he had read in Der Sturm (1919). The latter magazine, to which Van den Bergh drew attention as early as 1917, contributed,—together with Menschheitsdämmerung—, to fixing the image of German E. in the Netherlands. Thus, Marsman condemned Pinthus and subscribed to the ideas of Walden: art and commitment had nothing in common for him, either. Of all the Sturm poets, it was Stramm who carried off the honors. Admired by Van Doesburg, he aided Marsman in fashioning his poetic idiom, concentrated in the extreme, the use of which culminates in "Seinen". M. J. G. de Jong has shown that if Schreyer compared Stramm with the Cubists, Marsman contrasted them because he did not understand t h a t Stramm's "cries" concealed a deliberate intention. Moreover, it is possible t h a t Stramm's style was also imitated—indirectly, through Marsman?—by H. Bruning. The other aspect of E., the Weltfreund of Werfel, seduced the "Humanitarians", who were less numerous and less obstreperous than in Flanders. In spite of its variety, P i n t h u s ' anthology was almost unanimously considered to be the archetype of this current: the young Catholics of Roeping read Menschheitsdämmerung with enthusiasm, and Marsman with a repulsion which he openly expressed—the first time in 1921, the second in 1929. Poetry, for him, was not dynamite, but diamond. To the list of those who unconsciously laid the foundations of the new literature it would be necessary to add Dostoevsky, who left his mark upon the Vitalism of Van Wessem ("Love life more than its meaning"), inspired Dirk Coster to write several 21

252

See R. Henrard, Menno ter Braak in het licht van Friedrich Nietzsche (Hasselt, 1963).

essays and influenced Marsman as well as the brothers Bruning. 22 But let us rather see b y which roads and at what time Flemish E. crossed the frontier and how it was received in the North. 1919 L. Monteyne, "Over Vlaamsche Boeken uit Bezet-België," Den Gulden Winckel (1919), pp. 85-87; principally about Van Ostaijen's Music Hall and Het Sienjaal. 1920 L. Monteyne, "Vlaamsche Boeken uit België," Den Gulden Winckel (1920), pp. 186189, about Ruimte. 1921 I. K. Bt's (Th. van Doesburg), "Kritische Tesseracts," De Stijl (1921), p. 179, debunking Bezette Stad. Th. van Doesburg, "Revue der Avant-Garde," Het Getij (1921), pp. 25-29. Jos. Leonard, "Brief uit Vlaanderen," Het Getij (1921), pp. 97-101; ibid., pp. 206-210, about M. Gijsen's Lof-Litanie; ibid., pp. 122-126, on Van Ostaijen. H. Marsman, "Bezette Stad," Den Gulden Winckel (1921), pp. 86-89. 1922 G. Bruning, "Wies Moens," Roeping (1922-23), pp. 131-140. D. Coster, "Een Stem uit het jonge Vlaanderen," De Stem (1922), pp. 1041-56; about W. Moens and the Celbrieven. M. Gijsen, "Mijn vadertje" (poem), Roeping (1922-23), p. 299. R. Houwink, "Wies Moens," Den Gulden Winckel (1922), pp. 40-41. W. Moens, "Aanwezigheid" (poem), Het Getij (1922), pp. 189-190. W. Moens, "Gebed voor ons, Dichters" (poem), Roeping (1922-23), p. 372. W. Moens, "Het nieuwe Dichten" (essay), De Stem (1922), pp. 868-881. H. W. E. Moller, "Nieuwe Dichtkunst. Karel van den Oever: Het open Luik" Roeping (1922-23), pp. 69-72, 139-144. Paul van Ostaijen, Open letter to I. Leonhard concerning the typography of his volume Bezette Stad in Het Getij (1922), pp. 85-91. I t thus appears t h a t the first contacts with Flanders were slightly lagging after those which had just been established with Germany, and t h a t the breakthrough (19211922) was as extensive as it was rapid—a success easily accounted for by the common language. The Flemings at first took charge of their propaganda themselves, and from the time of the founding of Roeping, 1922, an organ of militant Catholicism, they regu­ larly contributed to it as well as to De Stem (1921) and De Gemeenschap (1925). Van den Oever and Moens soon became co-editors of Roeping, for that matter. However, if Nieuwe Geluiden (1924), the anthology compiled by Coster, introduced Flemish Humanitarianism to the general public, only the Catholic circles received it with enthusiasm. Here, indeed, Humanitarianism was to last for a long time—as long as E. itself — and to provoke emulation. 22 Anon., "Flaubert en Dostojefski in Nederland: Naar aanleidig van de gedenkdagen van hun geboorte" in Den Gulden Winckel, 1921, pp. 182—184.

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Of the four most popular writers, Moens was the one who ran away with the largest number of votes; his name was called attention to in Het Getij, De Stem, Roeping, and De Gemeenschap: and in 1926, he was still interviewed at length by Den Gulden Winckel. Along with Menschheitsdämmerung, Verhaeren, Whitman, and Unanimism, he was the chief source of Dutch Humanitarianism. He was particularly esteemed by Houwink and Coster, who devoted two pages of commentary to him in Nieuwe Geluiden, as well as by G. Bruning, Gerard Knuvelder, H. Moller, and A. Van Duinkerken. K. van den Oever, although very active—he published an interesting lecture on E. in Roeping—never won the fame of Moens, nor t h a t of Gijsen, whose sobriety in Het Huis was praised by Marsman, and who helped to launch "Franciscanism" with his famous Lof-litanie. The opinions about Van Ostaijen were more reserved. Praised to the skies by some of his compatriots, but decried by Van Doesburg, he did not arouse the enthusiasm of Marsman, either; it is on this note, at any rate, that the latter con­ cluded his review of Bezette Stad in 1921, although he confessed ten years later to having "admired him very much". Outside of the literary circles, Van Ostaijen was scarcely read; the Borgers edition of his works was to give him a stunning revenge a quarter of a century later. No matter how much foreign painters, poets, novelists and critics were respected or imitated, Holland's idea of E. certainly remained rather confused. But it is true t h a t even in Germany, its country of origin, the term was given divergent meanings. Van Doesburg, for example, stressed the fact that in reconstructing life, E. was charac­ terized by a movement from the internal to the external, which is accurate; but as he gave preference to other currents, especially Cubism, most of his commentaries on E. lack impartiality. For him, E. was a "primitive" formula and already outmoded. One finds in Het Getij a definition of E. by E. Groenevelt—"the immediate externalization of impressions produced by objects on the soul of the artist"—which would apply almost as well to Impressionism. Marsman's criticism, finally,—as is the case with many poets — , gives us more and better information about himself than about the things he is discussing; but on the whole, his "divagations", as he himself calls them, are among the most pertinent and best documented essays in this field. Paradoxically, it was Van Doesburg, always fond of novelty, who, as one of the first Dutchmen, placed his works under the banner of E. in the "Expressionistischliteraire Komposities", prose sketches he published in Het Getij in February, 1919. The others published their poems without baptizing them. This was also the case with the Humanitarians, who were largely recruited from the Catholic minority, that is, especially in the Southern provinces. Moved by its underlying idealism, E. was often concerned with political, social, and religious questions: propaganda, vehemence, Messianism, ecstasy all suit it very well. As in Flanders, it devoted itself to the service of an active coterie, although in the beginning—as with M. Permys—, Humanitarianism did not at all crusade for the Church militant. The heyday of the Catholic movement in Holland coincides with the discovery of Moens: Roeping (1922) and De Gemeenschap (1925) fell into step behind Ruimte (1920) and Ter Waarheid (1921), recommending a poetry often copied from that of the Flemish Activists and characterized by an ardent faith, by pathos, the use of free verse and a simplified spelling (spelling reform 254

is one of the traditional traits of the avantgarde in this linguistic area), and the con­ sciousness of a cultural and religious solidarity with Flanders. Roeping launched the formula of direct expression of the (Catholic) soul, thus affirming its allegiance as much to the creed of E. as to the most rigid conceptions of the Roman dogma. Free verse, which was inspired sometimes by the Bible as well as by Whitman and Werfel, and sometimes by Stramm's staccato rhythms, admirably reflects the dynamism of the new aesthetics and the desire for expansion which characterized it: the vital impulsion toward God and Man. According to Van den Oever, this form is born from the rhythm of the soul itself. Because it praised fraternity, Humanitarianism turned toward the place where crowds assemble: the ''tentacular'' city, symbol of an industrial civilization which is integrated into the poetic language but whose abuses are at the same time denounced. One thus sees the Good Lord get into trains and walk around in the metropolis. Works of this kind, which appeared in Het Getij (M. Permys, E. Groenevelt), achieved their greatest triumph in Roeping, so much so that even Moens and Van den Oever judged them to be exaggerated. Saint Francis notably, whom Gijsen had extolled in Flanders, embodied the humility and the mystic faith toward which the young poets aspired; no wonder t h a t the air was ringing with his praises. The Humanitarianism of the twenties stemmed from diverse sources: the Humani­ tarianism which had already come to the fore before the war (Verhaeren, the Unanimists, etc.), the revulsion of feeling provoked by the conflict, the reaction of the indi­ vidual against increasing mechanization, the German and Flemish example and, in particular, the minority situation of Dutch Catholicism, which encouraged an Activism comparable to that which had developed in Belgium politically. One must confess that this poetry suffers from monotony to such a degree that it is sometimes difficult to tell the authors from one another. Backed up by a number of minor writers, it was the brothers Bruning and J. Engelman who essentially assured its success. Gerard Bruning (1898-1926), one of the extremists, wrote not only poems, but also some essays about Rembrandt and Gorter, as well as prose in an Expressionist vein: he was a believer in the manner of Léon Bloy, a "Christian Vitalist", as Van Duinkerken called him, as ardent in his attacks on democracy as in his professions of faith. His brother Henri (1900) published some poems which could be regarded as prototypes of this trend; decked out in modernistic finery, they witness to his consciousness of human impotence and his thirst for God (De Sirkel [The Circle], 1924). Let us also point out that he was one of the very few writers in this group who attempted to write a novel. Speaking of the bathos in the works of the brothers Bruning, Van den Oever observed, not without spitefulness, that they formed a procession by themselves. J a n Engelman (1900), co-editor of De Gemeenschap, excelled by greater reserve, modesty and more respect for the traditional forms. A partisan of musical verse, he was soon won over to pure poetry. Whether they were Catholics, Protestants, or atheists, Humanitarians or not, the young poets all participated, each in his own way, in the Vitalistic movement, which, extolling the élan vital, the irrational, and instinct, originated from a reaction against the massacres of 1914-1918, the obsolete structure of bourgeois society, the 255

intellectualism of Verwey, Neo-Romantic sentimentalism, and the pre-eminence given by De Nieuwe Gids to art over life. The authorities to which they referred were Dostoevsky, Verhaeren, and Nietzsche, among others. Inseparable from Dutch E.—and some­ times linked up with German E. - , one finds this spirit in Het Getij, in Van den Bergh, in Van Wessem, who speaks of fidelity to "primitive life", and in Retera, who mentions Worringer in this connection. Vitalism outlived E. in the work of Marsman, furnishing him with one of his fundamental themes, as also in that of H. de Vries. I t manifested itself in a variety of forms, few concepts being as many-sided as "life": a taste for risk and adventure (Slauerhoff), extolling pagan sexuality (Van den Bergh), the polarity of life and death (obsession with the latter being usually accompanied by glorification of the former), solidarity with mankind (as in Humanitarianism) or, by contrast, "anarchic" and "aesthetic" individualism (as in Marsman), basic amorality or worship of the Divinity through Creation (Roeping). If there is one principle on which everyone agreed, it was certainly t h a t stated by Marsman and Molenaar, namely that the value of art is measured by t h a t of man and by the vital intensity which his works reveal. Henceforth, literature was viewed sub specie vitae. The history of Vitalism, which begins with Van den Bergh's De Boog, is closely related to Marsman's own development. This poet's theorizing about Vitalism began at the time when he personally no longer thought of it as an absolute value. I n 1933, he was to issue its death certificate ("De Dood van het Vitalisme"), proclaiming with nostalgia: "le vitalisme c'était moi." This was one of the central aspects of Marsman's lyricism until his death (1940) and even one of the main characteristics of Dutch literature, as much in Flanders as in the Netherlands, from 1920 to 1950. From an aesthetic point of view, Dutch E. reached its apogee with De Vries's and Marsman's first poems. De Vries (born in 1896) published De Nacht (The Night) in 1920, Vlamrood (Fiery Red) in 1921 and Lofzangen (Hymns) in 1923. On the one hand, he combined E. with a keen sense of the national tradition (he was influenced by Jost van den Vondel and Willem Bilderdijk). On the other hand, the imagination of a visionary who takes delight in horror, nightmare, and decay manifests itself in his work. This makes one think of Poe and of the Nachtseite of Romanticism, by which a number of German Expressionists were also fascinated. The dynamism of De Vries, the terseness of his syntax and of his images, his pictures of modern city life all reflect the climate of the times. On the other hand, his anguish, his morbidity, and his taste for incantation are his personal characteristics. I t is unnecessary to emphasize the importance of Marsman (1899-1940), one of the greatest writers in the Dutch language. His Expressionist period, which some con­ sider to be the summit of his short career, lasted approximately from 1919 to 1926 (Verzen [Poems], 1923; Paradise Regained, 1927). Schooled by his readings in German and French,—and by reading Van den Bergh as well—, this thorough-going individ­ ualist virulently denounced Humanitarianism for its "softness" and its scorn of form; hence his sympathy with Cubism. The self of the poet, "both atom and cosmos", extends over the universe, over which it reigns until light—an element favorable to the expansion of the self—fails him, and night and death, the antipodes and comple­ ments of the Vitalist strain, triumph. This is, basically, the existential drama which 256

Marsman described throughout his career and which sheds light on the question of his borrowings from Stramm, Heym, and Trakl, as well as on the problem of his affinity with the Expressionist movement. In his famous "Divagatie over het expressionisme" (1921), he gave one of the best definitions of E. framed in Holland. Basically, he says, it is a matter of working "with one's eyes closed" : The vision . . . nourished and continually driven by means of elementary 'feel­ ing', mingled with numerous personal factors . . . becomes an image which causes the spectator to experience more or less the equivalent of the 'feeling' from which it issued. The process can be summarized as follows: 'feeling' . . . vision . . . work . . . 'vision' . . . 'feeling'. The abrupt, "explosive" style, which culminated in Seinen, the subjective value of colors, the fusion of man and nature or subject with object, and the construction of reality through the medium of words: these are the aspects by which Marsman is related to E.—and sometimes to other trends of Modernism as well. He did not dare go beyond the formal experiments of Seinen, whose diction lies halfway between articu­ lated language and cry. After 1926, he drew even closer to the classical canon, al­ though E. still proved influential. Regarding poetry as a vital activity of the individ­ ual, he was able to avoid both the Humanitarianism of Moens and the formalism of Van Ostaijen's Eerste Boek van Schmoll. In drawing up the balance sheet of Dutch E., one can, without hesitation, place Marsman at the head of the list. Though not very voluminous, his production easily bears comparison with that of Trakl, Heym, and Van Ostaijen. Two small collections by Marsman, two or three by de Vries, two by Van den Bergh, a few poems and essays scattered in the periodicals: the inventory is rather meager, but the products are of fine quality. Historically, the movement marked a turning point, for it modified, for a time, the way in which the relations between art and reality were conceived, created a new style, and gave life to Vitalism. However, it almost exclusively concerned the poetic and critical domains. The theater did not benefit by it, and it contributed very little to the novel, except on the rebound. As early as 1918, Van Doesburg had predicted the overthrow of the traditional conception of narrative time and space. Three years later, Houwink announced the end of the Naturalistic and psychological novel, which, in the meantime, had been attacked in the literary manifesto of De Stijl (1920). These ideas, however, did not take shape in a convincing manner. As in Flanders, fragments and prose poems seemed to suffice, and the Netherlands did not even produce the equivalent of the admirable grotesques of Van Ostaijen. G. van Duyn —an isolated case—published De verlaten Stad (The Deserted Town) in 1924. As for the attempts of Van Doesburg, G. and H. Bruning, Houwink, and Marsman, they hardly went beyond the short story. The novel was regenerated by Albert Helman, Slauerhoff, Du Perron and others only when E. had carried out its mission, i.e., about 1929. The parallelism with Flanders is clear, and the reasons are—in part—identical. At this point, humanitarian messianism and the formal experiments had had their day; a synthesis was now possible between the ideal of the Weltfreund, derided by history, and the isolation of the poetic laboratory. This synthesis was related to the notion of 257

"personality"—of the individual involved in a network of social, moral, and philo­ sophical relationships—, a notion embodied in the magazine Forum (1932) and a fit subject for the social novel and the novel of ideas. Simultaneously, the language lost the pre-eminence and the autonomy which Expressionist poetry had conferred upon it and was made subservient, instead, to the building up of fiction, which will be, by its very nature, a world of personalities and problems much more than one of bodily forms and actions. Thus, in the long run, E. did contribute to the internalization of the narrative genre. A flash in the pan, the Dutch E. of German and Flemish origin made its first appearances about 1920 and vanished as early as 1924-1926. All are agreed on this last point. In 1924, Marsman observed that tradition was getting the upper hand again, and he himself sought out new directions. In the same year, Coster announced a return to "discipline"; and in 1925, Van den Oever ceased to believe in the future of the movement. Imperceptibly, the Dutch writers returned to the regular forms of syntax, stanza, meter, and rhyme. The ballad began to reappear, a lyrico-epic genre which was to remain fashionable until the Second World War, and in which the last echoes of dynamism and Humanitarianism made themselves heard, but subjected to a stricter control. The reaction, a logical result of the dialectics of cultural history, had not been long in coming in a milieu traditionally fond of order. The economic crisis and the rise of Fascism and National Socialism, moreover, were soon radically to transform the literary climate. E. as such was dying, but from its ashes were to emerge a renovated novel and poetry, and, eventually, the avantgarde of 1950. (Translated from the French by Linda Brust)

258

ZORAN

KONSTANTINOVIĆ

EXPRESSIONISM AND T H E SOUTH SLAVS

That apparently pan-European literary context which was created in the first decades of our century, which links the literary avantgarde of the various peoples and which, as E., acquires its peculiarly profound character in Germany, is of extemely great interest to South Slavic literary research. For within this context an extremely important process of assimilation was completed by the Southern Slavs as well. For several centuries, the largest portion of the South Slavic area was hermetically sealed off from the European cultural community, and the Serbs, in the age of Romanticism, were the first to regain their national independence, which they had lost in the Middle Ages. In the first phase of their resurrected literature, they combined enlighteneddidactic, neoclassical and Romantic-sentimental forms of expression. The Bulgarians acquired their full national independence at a time when West European literature had already reached the end of its realistic period, and, hurriedly catching up, they now experienced Romanticism and Realism almost simultaneously. Macedonia, how­ ever, ceased to be a Turkish province during the years in which E. was already in full swing in the German-speaking area. As for the Slovenians and Croatians, whose con­ tinuous development had not been interrupted by Turkish domination, they, too, lived on the periphery of the European literary development. Since even the German parts of the Habsburg monarchy, with which the Slovenian and Croatian regions were integrated, went through the various phases of literary history belatedly, the various literary currents reached those subjects of the Empire who spoke other languages even more belatedly. At the beginning of our century, many of the South Slavic peoples had already attained a social structure which was fully adapted to the general European pattern. For that reason they were also seized by the same spiritual unrest which caused that meaningful process of fermentation in literature. In Pörtner's anthology, Literatur­ revolution 1910-1925, the reader is faced, for the first time, with documents originat­ ing from the South Slavs as a direct contribution to the formation of a literary move­ ment. The so-called Modernism in South Slavic literature—a concept which is admit­ tedly broad—thus also becomes the first intellectual movement in which it takes its place in the literary life of the European peoples without any temporal lag. South Slavic literary scholarship is thus given the task of thoroughly investigating, and then presenting in their totality, the points of contact between this Modernism on the one hand and Futurism, the art of Apollinaire and his French successors, as well as 259

Vladimir Mayakovsky's Russian brand of Futurism and, especially, German E., on the other. 1 Chronologically speaking, in the South Slavic region we encounter the term E. for the first time in 1.912, in the Slovenian magazine Dom in svet (Home and World) (Nos. 77/78). Interestingly enough, the term was not borrowed from the Germanspeaking countries, but from the English periodical The Studio. I. Cankar, the editor-inchief of Dom in svet, was also the translator of this article, entitled "On Impressionism and E . " and offering a dialogue between a young painter and an art critic. The Slovenians wrote their first decidedly Expressionist poems in 1914 and 1915; and this is probably the first Expressionist poetry of the South Slavs in general. These poems, however, certainly did not come into being as a result of reading the above article; nor were they washed up on the waves of a violent literary storm. They rather seem to be the slow realization of certain individual views on the part of Slovenian poets, especially their negative attitude toward the war, their condemnation of militarism, and their renunciation of the hapless realism and Symbolism which had failed to stimulate the masses intellectually. 2 But all this happened in close intellectual proximity with similar tendencies prevailing in Germany. The individual phases of the development of Slo­ venian E. can also be compared with the chronological scheme generally accepted by German literary scholarship: first the phase of the forerunners, the first signs of a coming Expressionist literature (Oton Župancič with his poems "Vizija" [Vision] and "Nocni psalm" [Night psalm]), then the phase marked by the experience of the First World War (Jože Lavrencic and France Bevk), followed by the great wave of Expressionist poetry which branches off into the cosmic, visionary poetry of Miran J a r c ("Modre dalje" [Blue Distances]), certainly the most gifted of the Slovenian Ex­ pressionists, into an anarchist poetry (Anton Podbevsek) and into a socially oriented E. (Tone Seliskar, Milan Klopčič, and Srecko Kosovel). As in Germany, this phase was followed by a prolonged late phase of E. Along with its cosmic, anarchistic, and social tendencies, Slovenian E. is character­ ized by a very strong mystico-religious component (represented especially by Anton Vodnik), which makes use, above all, of the sacred symbols of the Catholic Church: 1 An extremely useful point of departure for such an investigation was, for instance, the sym­ posium "Srednjoevropski ekspresionizam i hrvatska knjizevnost," Zagreb, 1969. (The proceedings were published in the volume Ekspresionizam i hrvatska knjizevnost, also Zagreb, 1969.) But in studying such points of contact, this type of investigation must take one problem into special consideration. For if a programmatic or poetological concept transcends linguistic boundaries and takes hold in a foreign literature, it may change, occasionally, also in respect to its contents. At times, the use of a certain label in the literary scholarship of a country is denounced as a form of recognition of the epigonal nature of one's own literature. This very type of protest developed in Croatian literary studies. Thus G. Krklec's essay "Ausklang des deutschen E. in Kroatien" is contra­ dicted by M. Franjić's theory of an autonomous E. in Croatian letters (Pristup problemu autohtonosti ekspresionizma u hrvatskoj knjizevnosti [Zagreb, 1968]). 2 In regard to Slovenian E., I should like to mention especially two articles: J. Pogacnik, "Novija slovenska lirika," Izraz, 1965/10, pp. 1018—1036, and F. Petré, "Uz genezu hrvatskog i slovenskog ekspresionizma," Ekspresionizam i hrvatska knjizevnost, pp. 43—49. These studies seem to me to be important in respect to the problem of periodization in Slovenian E. For a more inten­ sive look at German—South Slavic literary relations and the philosophical (ideological) content of South Slavic E. two further studies by Petré should be consulted: "Der slowenische E . " (Die Welt der Slawen, 1956, pp. 159—177), and "Idejnost i izraz ekspresionizma: Nekoliko nacelnih primjedaba" (Umjetnost riječi, 1957, pp. 81—98).

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the chalice, the monstrance, the oil lamp, the bell-ringing, the cathedral, etc. We must surely look for the cause of such a religious E. in the strong Catholic tradition of the Slovenian people and, beyond that, in a very special interest in theoretical ques­ tions of art on the part of Catholic circles at the beginning of our century. On this occa­ sion, they primarily raised the question of whether the idea of God could be expressed in every artistic style. The Twenty-Third Eucharistie Congress in 1912 furnished the answer by stating that it could be voiced in every style, even in the most modern one. The Croatians, too, have a very strong Catholic tradition, yet no Catholic E. was generated. The reason for this lies surely in the fact that Croatian E. is primarily the work of Miroslav Krleža. Krleža, however, is a Marxist who bases his ideas about art on a materialistic world view and uses the Expressionist style to this end. Along with him, August Cesarec and Gustav Krklec gave Croatian E. its peculiar ideological character. In the history of Croatian literature, E. gives the impression of being some­ thing unified and self-contained. The catholically inclined literary critic Ljubomir Marakovic describes it as a trend which, even though it was not organized, was very com­ pact in itself, being characterized by a common artistic method, a common world view, and a common means of expression. 3 Marakovic, a contemporary of the Croatian Expressionists, thoroughly studied their development and limited it to the decade 1915-1925; t h a t is, to a time-span covering the period from the creation of Krleža's Pan to the performance of that author's last Expressionist play, Michelangelo Buonarroti. A. B. Simic is undoubtedly the most important exponent of the Expressionist style in Croatian literature, although, in his lifetime, he published only one book of poems, entitled Preobrazanje (Metamorphosis). Simic consistently adheres to a reality based on inner perception, without, however, deciding in favor of those last linguistic con­ sequences which were drawn by the Dadaist offshoots of E. in Germany. His poetry is autocentric; he joins animate with inanimate things, the abstract with the concrete, and addresses himself to the whole universe. Much like Lasker-Schüler, Däubler and Trakl, Simic also prefers the color blue and sings of the blue morning, the blue coun­ tenance and the blue stars. 4 At approximately the same time when Simic was writing his article about the humanitarian ideal of E. ("Ekspresionizam i svecovjecanstvo," published posthu­ mously), 5 —only a few months, t h a t is to say, before the periodical Kritika carried his excellent survey of German Expressionist poetry, in which he notes the differences between, and assesses the aesthetic value of, the poetic works of Däubler, LaskerSchüler, Heym, Stadler, van Hoddis, Lichtenstein, Stramm, Werfel, Ehrenstein, Hardekopf, and Benn (containing insights which are far ahead of his time and which only the most recent research on E. has attained) 6 — , Stanislav Vinavér in Belgrade published his manifesto of the Expressionist school (Manifest ekspresionisticke skole, 3 4

Lj. Marakovic, "Iza eksprezionizma. Pokusaj bilanse," Hrvatsko kolo, 1927, p. 342. For more thorough studies concerning A. B. Simic, see especially V. Žmegac, "Antun Branko Simic als Lyriker: Ein Beitrag zur Erforschung des kroatischen E.," Die Welt der Slawen, I I I (1958), 151-165, and R. S. Bauer, "A. B. Simic i njemacki ekspresionizam," Ekspresionizam i hrvatska knjizevnost, pp. 84-87. 5 "Antun Branko Simic," Sabrana djela, III, pp. 182-190. 6 "Novi njemacki pjesinici," Kritika, 1922 (reprinted in Antun Branko Simic, Sabrana djela, I I I , 400–420). 261

1921), where he asserts: "We are all Expressionists. We all use reality as a means of creation. Our goal is creation, not the creative product." Vinavér was doubtlessly right when asserting: "We are all Expressionists," for E. had taken hold of Serbian literature like a whirlwind, and even poets who were deeply rooted in the indigenous poetic tradition now turned to E. At one moment it seemed as if all of Serbian poetry would swim in the stream of this Modernism proclaimed by Vinavér. I t loudly resounded with the uproar it bore within itself, behaved extremely eccentrically, threatened to overabound in the ecstasy of destruction, and in the free play of mental associations it freed itself from all traditional ties and formal-aesthetic rules. Along with Vinavér, Rastko Petrovic and Rade Drainac were the leaders of this rebellion. But what happened next is interesting: E. disappeared from the stage of Serbian literature just as unexpectedly and vehemently as it had emerged. I t had to give up its positions and thus proved to be extremely short-lived. For the Serbs' connection with French literature was simply too strong to be severed by such a single assault by German culture. Thus the spontaneous, rebellious and contagious outburst, which was closely related to German E., was, on the one hand, supplanted by the tightly organized Surrealism; and, on the other hand, it flowed into Zenitism, which suffuses E. with traits characteristic of the Balkan mentality. In the time between the two World Wars, Belgrade became the center of a strong Surrealist school which picked up the threads of E. and perpetuated its revolt and its renunciation of the existing order, but which, otherwise, holds to the aesthetic-social and moral-psychological theories derived from the Surrealist Manifesto of 1924. Above all, it did not accept the direct experience of reality which is the focus of the Expressionists' desires. Thus in Belgrade, the periodical Zenit, being a counterpart of the French Surrealist journals which increasingly capture the attention of present-day research, made its appearance. In this richly variegated picture of influences on the individual South Slavic literatures it is symptomatic that Bulgarian literature which, for most of the time, had been under the influence of Russian and, subsequently, French letters, does not owe its contact with German E. to the effect of an influence operating in the traditional way, but rather to the personal contact of Geo Milev, who studied philosophy and psychology in Germany and upon his return brought E. to Bulgaria. 7 This intellectually powerful personality, initially devoted to nihilistic and anarchistic theories, later turned into one of the most important revolutionary Bulgarian figures. Milev wrote Expres­ sionist poems dedicated to the proletariat, and he fought for a revolutionary art which was to overcome the contemplative tendency of bourgeois art and express the ideas of a new age. In the context of all South Slavic literatures, Bulgarian poetry seems to have retained, even in its Expressionist phase, the closest ties with folk poetry, that charac7 Concerning these Bulgarian Expressionists, see Georgi Markov's biography Geo Milev (Sofia, 1964). The first study which draws comparisons with the E. of the other South Slavic peoples from the Bulgarian point of view is definitely Gančo Savov's contribution to the Zagreb E. symposium "Srednjoevropski ekspresionizam i knjizevnost Bulgara i Hrvata," Ekspresionizam i hrvatska knjizevnost, pp. 55—61.

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teristic element of all Slavic literature. In this respect, it would perhaps suffice to remem­ ber Milev's poem "Das Grab" in order to ascertain the links with motifs and techniques of folk poetry. For the rest, Bulgarian E. appears to be more closely related to Croatian E. than to any of the other related phenomena among the South Slavic peoples. Like the Croatian Expressionists, Milev and his successors (after their initial enthusiasm for ideologically indifferent values) embraced a Leftist world view and directed litera­ ture toward a coming world revolution. Like Croatian E., Bulgarian E., too, became the mouthpiece of serious revolutionary endeavors. In consequence, the artistic experi­ ment was relegated to second place; yet it strongly affected the future literary develop­ ment, insofar as Simic as well as Milev altered and developed the structure and the meters of their national poetry, fomented the spirit of literature and, in this way, created the possibility of a dynamic and expressive conception of drama and prose. I t must be apparent by now that E. in the South Slavic area cannot be seen as a simple reception of this stylistic phase of German literature. A few examples may further elucidate this point. Thus the Croatian journalist A. H. Žarkovic tells how, on an autumn day in 1916, he and a group of friends saw an issue of Der Sturm in a bookstore in Zagreb, and how, thereupon, they began to read the Sturm, as well as Die Aktion, Walden's Einführung in die Kunst, Bahr's Expressionismus, and Kandinsky's Über das Geistige in der Kunst. "We immediately recognized," Žarkovic reports, "that the Expressionist generation is akin to us, and that E. is only one branch, the Ger­ man, of the European literary and intellectual movement of the new generation rising from the World War and the collapsing old world." 8 This group of friends also included Simic, whose work is, throughout, distinguished by a very balanced and distanced judgment of German E. 9 A stance against E. was also taken in the early issues of the first Expressionistically tinged magazine of the South Slavic area, Ulderiko Donadini's Kokot (The Rooster, 191.6). Donadini attacked Bahr and rejected Expressionist art as a "still-birth", as "something unintelligible, which would have no effect on the feelings", and as "the exclusive property of the artist who has created such Expressionist art"; and he compared this state of affairs with the fact that "every madman also has his own world, his own feelings, and his own logic, by means of which he moves about in the world". 10 But if one wanted to draw conclusions on the basis of the contents of this magazine, they would undoubt­ edly favor E. Donadini's Vaskresenje dusa (Resurrection of the Souls) can surely be taken as the first Expressionist manifesto in South Slavic literature: "You, poet, may no longer let your soul be crucified on the crossbeams of hexameters and iambs ; you may no longer allow rhyme to tyrannize you; and, indeed, your Venus, oh modern

8 9

"Uspomene o A. B. Šimicu," Krugovi, 1955, Nos. 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6. After Simic became acquainted with Der Sturm, he published, as early as 1917, in the Zagreb newspaper Novine the article "Berlinski Sturm ili Nova umetnost germanska," which concludes with the words: "These poets storm at everything. Storm. Let us see whether they will destroy the world." (Sobraría djela, I I I , p. 400). In his article "Novi njemacki pjesnici" (Kritika, 1922), Simic says not only that the word E. "cannot be defined, but that it can scarcely have any meaning at all . . . The concept E. gets lost in indeterminate breadths and has no contours at all" (Sabrana djela, I I , p. 275). 10 Kokot, 1916, p. 116. 263

artist, no longer needs a lovely bodice." 11 And it was Donadini himself who, in 1918, published the poem "Bolan sam" (I am Suffering): J a uzimam tvoju dusu J a je žderem Radjam dijete Dajem svoju dusu zvijezdi Moja dusa sjaji sa zvijezde u noć . . . 12 No one can deny that this is an Expressionist poem of pure water. Moreover, Donadini, because he attacked the bourgeois periodicals, was attacked by them, in turn; and on this occasion he was accused of the great vice of being an Expressionist. 13 An especially characteristic example of this tension between the artist's statements about himself and our statements about him is undoubtedly provided by Krleza. In retrospect, this important Croatian writer would more and more like to dissociate himself from E., 14 even though, for many years, his literary output was abundantly influenced b y it, so that he could be described as "both quantitatively and qualitatively one of the best Expressionist writers in world literature". 1 5 In 1959, Krleža wrote a short essay on E., in which he ironically settles his account with this movement, calling it a ''freak", a "phrase borrowed from the Impressionist movement in the plastic arts and stood on its head, like a clown",—a phrase which, according to him, expresses itself in "nebulous ingredients from the subconscious and the instincts, in muddled, half-religious and half-supernatural images, in a plastic and linguistic confusion which, all too often, constitutes a mask meant to hide the lack of any sincerity and ability". 16 Everything of permanent value created in the era of so-called E. and having survived "this dim hausse", belongs, in Krleža's opinion, to the pre-war phase of Symbolism or Impressionism. E. itself is, from this point of view, "an abstraction, today completely superannuated like such derivative trends as Dadaism, Cubism, Constructivism, Imagism, and Futurism". 1 7 Such divergencies can only be another proof that, in the elucidation of such questions, we must always separate the historical aspects of the issues from their theoretical import, and especially the poet's own understanding from the objective facts which determine this and every other literary tendency. In the South Slavic area, too, the poets congenial to E. gathered about literary magazines. Chronologically, the first was Donadini's Kokot. The Croatians also published 11 Ibid., 12

p. 117. I take your soul I devour it I bear a child I give my soul to the star My soul shines from the star into the night . . . 13 See I. Krsnjavi, Narodne novine, 1917, p. 57. 14 I have attempted to offer a complete survey of all of Krleza's statements on this topic in the chapter "Ekspresionisticki 'intermeco' " of my study "Krleza o nemackoj i skandinavskoj knjizevnosti" in Miroslav Krleza, ed. N. Stipcevic (Belgrade, 1967), pp. 145-198. 15 Branislav Choma, "Miroslav Krleza i ekspresionizam, " Ekspresionizam i hrvatska knjizevnost, p. 124. 16 Evropa danas, p. 276. 17 Ibid. 264

the magazines Vijavica (Storm, from 1917 on) and Juris (Assault, from 1919 on), both important for the Expressionist phase; and Expressionist tendencies are also visible in Krleža's Flamen (Flame). Among the Slovenians, the Expressionist fermenta­ tions are even visible in the leading but generally conservative magazine Dom in svet; but they found their fullest expression in the periodicals Tri labodje (Three Seagulls, from 1922 on), and Tank, which made its appearance in 1924 with a declaration of war against the epical heroic pathos as well as against lyrical eccentricity. Epochmaking for Bulgarian E. was Geo Milev's magazine Vezni (Scales). The entire contents of these magazines, especially the programs and manifestos published there, distinctly show that all these writers regarded themselves as the pioneers of a new art and wished to be recognized as such. Deserving special attention among these magazines is Zenit, which in 1923 began publication in Zagreb and then moved to Belgrade. I t represents and develops a specific variant of South Slavic E. 38 In its subtitle, the magazine calls itself an ''International Review for Art and Culture", and here, for the first time, the attempt is made to ignore the traditional nationalistic principles of journalism and to constitute a literary mag­ azine which would be, in principle, polyglot. In its introductory manifesto, the editorin-chief, Ljubomir Micić, announced that art "is the deepest expression of the soul and the intellect, a human cry for immediacy, and that, therefore, it is bound to no models and norms, neither to the beauty of antiquity nor to the ideal of a stale aestheticism". 19 Micić designated these endeavors as Zenitism, which he defined as "abstract metacosmic E " . At this point we should perhaps mention, in passing, that Zenit secured extensive international cooperation on the part of the European avantgarde, and that in the individual issues we find contributions by Boris Pasternak, Mayakovsky, IIja Ehren­ burg, Michel Seuphor, Kassák, and Barbusse—primarily, however, by the German Expressionists, mostly presented in the original: Yvan and Claire Goll, Walden, Hey­ nicke, Einstein, Raoul Hausmann, Franz Richard Behrens, Kaiser, Benn, and Josef André Kalmer, i.e., preponderantly authors who, at that time, were contributors to Der Sturm and Die Aktion.20 The most interesting personality among them was surely Goll, who temporarily functioned as co-editor of the magazine. His most important poem, "Paris brennt", was published for the first time in a special supplement to Zenit— this first version being much longer and differing in several details from the later versions. I t can even be assumed that this early version was entirely unknown to the editors of the Luchterhand edition of Goll's works. But precisely in this form the poem was regarded by the Zenitists as a model of modern poetry, and the idea of simul­ taneity which it promulgates was particularly emphasized. Because countless different, illogical and mutually independent events take place at a given moment, the poetic

18 This periodical is now frequently mentioned. For basic information, see V. Zmegac's "Zenit, eine vergessene Zeitschrift," Die Welt der Slawen, X I I (1967), 353—362. 19 "Čovek i umetnost" (Man and Art), Zenit, 1924. 20 A similarly extensive international cooperation also developed in the case of the periodical Tank (in Ljubljana), edited by Ferdinand Delak. Its collaborators included Marinetti, Lunacharsky, Tzara, Walden, Hannes Meyer, and Schwitters.

265

rendering of such a moment must also be illogical. As an example of this procedure, the editor strings the headlines of a newspaper together into a poem: Russenmenschen sterben Hungers Ein Professor vergewaltigt seine Schülerin aus Freude, weil sie Logik lernte Zeitungstod Lenjins Charlie Chaplin reitet Esel Einfuhr von Luxusartikeln verboten. 21 This is a moment from the life of man in the year 1922. However, along with this idea of simultaneity and the linguistic experiment, which, in many respects, points forward to Dadaism, the most important contribution made by Zenit was the theory of Balkanization and its implicit notion of the barbarian genius. As a literary program, this Balkanization was intended to express the desire for leading Europe back to a form of culture in which, according to the Zenitists, ethical notions and unqualified humaneness had been prevalent. The barbarian genius is thought of as the original image of such humaneness, the "vehicle of an unsenti­ mental and violent vitality of pure belief, an undistorted soul, and genuine feelings". In the opinion of the Zenitists, it is precisely the Serbs and the Russians who were to revive this human type. This belief in the mission of the Serbs and the Russians subsequently degenerated into mysticism. A poem b y Micić, dedicated to Goll and pub­ lished in a German translation, ends with the lines: Alfa und Pons U n d die rotgefärbten Kreuze hochschwenken Auf den Milchgläsern des gelben Wagens Die visionäre Fahne der Erlösung U n d singen das ostslawische Lied der Auferstehung . . . I t is characteristic for Micić and his circle t h a t here the "East Slavic hymn of resurrec­ tion"—that is, a Slavophile or even Slavic orthodox motif, that of the religious feast of Easter—is sounded, and motifs of the "Slavic idea" are synthesized with the motifs of E. Among the Germans themselves, the first reference to a South Slavic E. seems to have come from Goll, who, in 1921, published in the periodical Der Arrarat, a Zenitist manifesto carrying the editorial note: "The magazine Zenit is a polyglot inter­ national magazine published by pure young people in Zagreb, SHS." Understandably, it was the Sturm circle—Herwarth Walden first and foremost—which showed the 21

Russian people die of hunger A professor rapes his student, being so happy that she had studied logic The newspaper death of Lenin Charlie Chaplin rides donkey Importation of luxury articles forbidden. The quote is taken from the July, 1922, issue of Zenit, which appeared completely in German. 266

greatest interest in South Slavic E. In the fourth issue of Der Sturm for 1925 there appears an article by Micić with the title "Zenitosophie oder die Energetik des schöp­ ferischen Zenitismus" (Zenitosophy or the Energetics of Creative Zenitism). The ninth issue of the next volume is dedicated to Slovenian E., and, from 1927 on, Der Sturm began to publish translations of Serbian Expressionist literature. I n the issue of January, 1929, we find articles about "young Slovenian art", while the OctoberNovember issue of the same year is entirely devoted to modern Bulgarian literature, literary criticism, painting, sculpture, and architecture. Finally, from the many questions touched upon here I might draw the following conclusions, elaborating on them as I go along. Most importantly, hitherto E. has not been accepted as a generally valid concept of periodization in South Slavic literary history. In the literary histories of the individual South Slavic peoples, the term is used and interpreted in several different ways. I n the case of the Slovenians, E. is already firmly anchored in their literary history, whereas the Croatians link it to the concept of "Modernism". The Serbs still have to extract it more clearly from its con­ fusion with Surrealism, and in Bulgaria it is not detectable as a period term but exists only as filtered through the personality of Milev. But in contrast to Futurism, German E. is much more intensely a part of the literary awareness of the Southern Slavs, while, in comparison with Surrealism, it appears to be fragmentary, immature, scattered over too wide an area and, in the last analysis, less effective. Yet, in comparison with Russian Futurism, it has a more far-reaching effect. Although, in its beginnings, it was rather uniform in the whole South Slavic region, in the course of its progress E. took on a different cast for each of the South Slavic peoples. Moreover, Slovenian E. is characterized b y a distinctly Catholic-religious strain, while Zenitism presents a peculiar combination of the Slavic sense of mission with a heroic and ethical idea of the Balkan type. Nevertheless, the sources of South Slavic E. are to be found in its contacts with the German movement, and the idea of an indigenous E. among the individual South Slavic peoples is hardly scientifically tenable. In general, the South Slavic Expressionists, whether or not they took on this name, understood themselves to be the vanquishers of a deterministic realism in art, and they felt this expressive art to be an act of liberation from the chains of scientific, causal thinking, as well as a return to long-hidden sources of artistic creation. Fascinated b y the verbal art of E., they also shook the structure and meter of South Slavic poetry to its very foundations; shattering its traditional laws and effecting the breakthrough of new ideas, above all in poetry, but also in drama and prose. Thematically and ideologically, the so-called Leftist E. predominated, and South Slavic Expressionist writing much less frequently tends to the opposite direction, namely by escaping into extreme subjectivism. Stamped chronologically by the premonition of World War I, formed by the expe­ rience of the war itself and of the years immediately following, E. in the South Slavic area meant a breaking away from nationalistic themes. At a time of profound national differences between Germany and the various parts of the South Slavic area, the con­ tact and cooperation between the German and South Slavic Expressionists was perhaps one of the first bridges rebuilt, in this respect, after the First World War. In addition, 267

E. links the South Slavs and the Hungarians in a very special way, 22 and it even had a unifying effect among the South Slavs themselves. Today, from a temporal distance, it is possible to assess the artistic achievement of this movement, including its effects on the South Slavs more thoroughly, and to define the impulses more closely. In order to do this, however, we still need many scholarly editions and additional studies and monographs. But the methodological principles seem to be assured. They rest on the comparative study of cultural and social structures and conditions, personal contacts and developments, stylistic devices and linguistic modes of expression, with each single contribution to the study of Expres­ sionist literature being evaluated in respect to both its historical relevance and its artistic uniqueness. (Translated from the German by Linda Brust)

22 See Zoltán Csuka, "Ekspresionizam u madjarskoj knjizevnosti Jugoslavije," Ekspresionizam i hrvatska knjizevnost, pp. 61—65.

268

A L . DIMA and

DAN

GRIGORESCU

RUMANIAN EXPRESSIONISM*

E. in Rumanian culture took several different directions incorporating some very diversified forms of art. Actually, the history of Rumanian literature and art makes no reference to organized Expressionist groups acting in the spirit of a manifesto or a specific program. One can observe the same phenomenon in other European countries. Without doubt, this corresponds, for the most part, to the general character of this movement, which exalted, first and foremost, the individuality of the creator. And what is more, one can sometimes find reflections of the Expressionist attitude in artists formally adhering to other currents and contributing to periodicals whose aesthetic tendencies were totally different. The Rumanian intellectuals who studied in Germany before World War I were the first to acquaint their native audience with the essential problems of E. And it is perhaps natural t h a t the echoes of E. resounded, at first, primarily in the plastic arts. Being more directly transmissible, the visual impressions exercised an influence upon certain painters whose temperamental predisposition strengthened a lucid interest in the capacity to grasp and express vast problems by means of the new Expressionist style. One must note t h a t Rumanian art represented, above all, the realistic trend of E. This was the tendency which had affirmed its militant credo and its adhesion to an anti-bourgeois and anti-militarist ideology by means of post-Expressionist Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity). The conscience of a great number of artists was torment­ ed by the vision of a tragic world; and to the traditions of Rumanian twentieth-century art, which had reflected the most important events of the epoch, the suggestions of German E., conveyed through its new manner of expressing an ethical and political attitude, had just been added. N. N. Tonitza (1886-1940) was one of the most active militant artists after World War I. This painter studied the life of humble people and discovered the tragic sense of the world. In his sketches, he was more successful in defining his polemical attitude toward established society. In several socialist periodicals he published pictorial com­ mentaries on daily events, seeking to discover their larger significance. The pictures of children asking for alms in the street, or of women in fixed attitudes near fresh tombs — , these were comments on a social situation which this artist considered to be a consequence of the war. One must remember that, for the majority of Rumanian A valuable study on Rumanian literary E. (O.S. Crohmâlnieeanu, Expresionismul si literatura romana, [Bucharest, 1971]) was published several months after our article had been sent to press. We call the attention of those interested in a comprehensive analyis of the phenomenon to this study. 269

artists, the front represented the heroism of the soldiers who fought for the indepen­ dence of their country; "the real disasters of the war"—to use Goya's familiar title were to be found primarily behind the front. In Tonitza's sketches, the political demonstrations, the strikes, the intervention of the police and the army are dealt with by means of a nervous line. The props are often strikingly Expressionistic: skulls, skeletons, masks, echoing (as in the works of Ensor) the Baroque. But the fantastic element is converted into allegory, and the scenes depicted by Tonitza do not express the feeling of universal suffering which deforms contours and exalts color. Thus E. is implied in the themes treated rather than in the stylistic devices employed. Aurei Marculescu (1884-1946) prolonged the experiment in Expressionist graphic art until after World War I I . His engravings (to some extent edulcorated) depict the provincial suburbs, alternating with those in which Fascism and its horrors are submitted to a vehement indictment. Mărculescu lived through the tragedy of concentration camps on which he later commented in his engravings, which are filled with dense emotion. The sketches which portray Hitler and his acolytes are not cari­ catures in the current sense of the word; drawn in the tradition of Goya and Daumier, they are veritable pamphlets composed in the name of those human ideals which at t h a t time were threatened by the Nazi offensive. Nicolae Cristea (1908-1936), self-educated like Märculescu, commented on social drama with a line that is less firm but testifies to a heightened sensibility. The world presented in these drawings is that of the sordid suburbs, peopled with human beings who are sorely afflicted, with half-starved children and women who have lost their femininity. But the artist turns toward another reality, that of irreducible conflicts and of a harsh existence: the modern factory, "hell", as Cristea calls it in one of his sketches, taking recourse to an allegory. And although his contours and his hatchings show a certain Impressionist influence, the deformations and the simplifications of the physiognomies have a real Expressionist touch to them. The universe of Aurei Jiquidi (1896-1962) adds what one might call the type of an age. His spiritual link with the great Rumanian humorist Caragiale (whose work he illustrated) has often been noted. Jiquidi also reconstitutes a world, but one which lives in his drama with an inviolable unconsciousness. From this point of view, the atmosphere of his drawings is not Expressionistic; for it lacks the shudder of the great convulsions and spiritual devastations. But when he reaches the realm of the grotesque, he is merciless, and his caricature attacks the lack of humanity. A village enveloped in a heavy atmosphere, drunks with trivial faces, heavily rouged women, people dom­ inated by vulgar instincts, gluttony and drunkenness; musicians in rags and tatters, orchestras of blind men (tragic figures with eyes covered by the black patches of glasses), coachmen waiting in vain for passengers,—all of this reconstitutes a Breughelian world dominated by the figure of the fiscal agent, the policeman and the speculator. The misery begins during infancy, as the children portrayed by Jiquidi live out this drama in great innocence. They suffer the persecution of their employers and their teachers. Misery pursues man until the end of his life; and even the burials are not lacking in the grotesque and the macabre. But the most virulent accents of this 270

artist's satire are those which mark his anti-Fascist works: Rumanian Fascists assas­ sinating their political adversaries in hospital rooms and setting fire to piles of books. The Hitlerites and the Fascists are portrayed in sketches which have a scathing touch and whose deformations have psychological as well as aesthetic significance. This militant attitude is a characteristic trait of Expressionist art in Rumania. Almost all of the sketches published in the socialist periodicals of the time evidence this trait. Thus the sculptor Gheza Vida, moulding shapes in a violent movement, rediscovers the same strong and discontinuous rhythm in his sketches, and Béla Gy. Szabó approaches Expressionist aesthetics in his illustrations for Toller's Schwalbenbuch. Other artists, whose subsequent evolution took different stylistic directions, made use of Expressionist devices in order to express a sarcastic attitude toward Fascism. Mattis-Teutsch of Brasov was, at one time, one of the prominent figures in certain Expressionist circles of Western Europe. His work lets us catch a glimpse of the different stages in the evolution of E. after the war, beginning with the temperamental explosion of works characteristic for the artists of the Walden group, 1 and ending with the har­ monious and lucid constructions favored by the Bauhaus. Mattis-Teutsch attached himself to Gropius because—as some critics say—"he found in his humanism a basis for exploring the social functions of a total art". As a painter he followed the direction indicated by Der Blaue Reiter, demonstrating—like other artists in Munich—the inconsistencies of the Expressionist aesthetic, its evolution toward an abstract art. He tried to achieve the symphonic effects of color but also occupied himself, more assiduously than Marc or Kandinsky, with the implications of man's relation to nature and the whole universe. The values of color found in his works betray a spiritual tension suited to capture the effluvia of light and the essence of the human spirit. MattisTeutsch became interested in what he called "the structures of universal existence" and expressed them in paintings and sculptures whose symbolic meaning—not always easy to decipher—is the proof of a conscience troubled by grave questions. " I am the child of the twentieth century," he would later say. "As an artist, I observe, from the very beginning, all t h a t occurs around me from a personal point of view, and I walk straight on my chosen path." In general, the relations of the Rumanian literary and artistic avantgarde with the German Expressionist groups were numerous and explicit. Articles by Walden were published in one of the most representative avantgarde periodicals of Rumania, Integral, which appeared between 1925 and 1928 and defined its Constructivist credo in "trenchant formulas". One programmatic article, written by Ilarie Voronca and printed in the first issue of Integral (March 1, 1925), expressed hostility towards Sur­ realism. I t declared that the movement was not consonant with "the rhythm of the times" and considered it to be "an involution compared with the Dadaism of Tzara". 2 I t is interesting to observe that Voronca contrasted the "backward experiment" of Surrealism with previous Modernistic literature—E., Futurism, and Cubism—implicitly 1

Walden organized expositions in which Mattis-Teutsch appears side by side with artists like Klee, Chagall, and Archipenko, who had already achieved great prestige. 2 See Matei Cälinescu's preface to the Antologia literaturii romane de avangardä (Anthology of Rumanian Avant-Garde Literature) (Bucharest, 1969), p. 25. 271

considering these latter -isms to be more congenial to the contemporary sensibility. This fact is even more significant if one considers that the Rumanian poet rejected the Surrealist experiment in the name of Integralism, i.e., "order-synthesis" and "order— constructive, classical, integral essence" (the words are underlined in the original text). This style was contrasted with the "sickly, romantic Surrealist disaggregation". This attitude suggests adhesion to the Expressionist group in Munich, which was interested in the depiction of a geometrical order, rather than to the lively art of Die Brüche, which wanted to express the profound contortions of the human soul in desperation over this ''order'' established by modern technology. I n any case, a Dadaist-Constructivist manifesto which proclaims "adhesion to the epoch" of E. is not often found in European literature. One can perhaps detect, in this case, a reflex of a characteristic trait of Rumanian culture, often demonstrated by its critics: the inclination toward equilibrium and reason. Most often, Rumanian E. (especially in its plastic manifes­ tations) takes the form of a reaction against an absurd existence and a poorly con­ structed world. Lascăr Vorel was one of the Rumanian artists who reacted profoundly against this world and the existing moral order. I t has been said that he was not "attached to any specific artistic school", and that he did not directly participate in any current of the time. 3 This is true, considering that he did not subscribe to the aesthetic program of the groups active in Germany during his long sojourn in that country. Vorel's artistic debuts in Munich (where he had established himself around 1899, studying under Franz von Stuck, the former teacher of Klee and Kandinsky) stand under the influence of Jugendstil and Secessionism. Subsequently, he evolved toward an E. which tends to trace the moral profile of one class, the upper-middle-class. Persons with somber looks and satisfied smiles which distort their features are surprised in the characteristic moments of modern life: in the foyers of theaters, the cabaret, and the hippodrome. Their violently geometrized silhouettes inscribe themselves in a closed, suffocating space. Even the colors (the whites and the violets which Vorel uses) have a harshness which reinforces the dominant mood. Physiognomic detail is not eliminated but, on the cont­ rary, it is accentuated by a somber touch around the eyes, by wrinkles, irregular dentu­ res or toothless gums. The mouth, infact, is the detail which Vorel most heavily emphasizes. Even the women, majestic and statuesque presences in the Jugendstil manner, are dehumanized beings in Vorel's sketches and his gouaches. Impassive and cold, they are "creatures of luxury", in contrast to the men, who have a heavy, vulgar air about them. Vorel's vision is t h a t of a hell on earth. The scenes depicting acrobats (men with strong torsos, muscular, but with very small skulls) join in this misanthropic analysis of a world filled with insignificant people devoid of ideas. "Posedatii" (The Possessed), one of the last works by Vorel, comes perhaps closest to illustrating the Expressionist technique. The subject, often treated by the artists of Die Brücke, offered him the possibility of analyzing certain exalted psychologies. Moreover, this analysis stays within the limits of allegory and of a typology of Romantic origin: the figures who fill the geometrically delimited space, an agglomeration of trunks, 3

272

Petru Comarnescu, Lascăr Vorel (Bucharest, 1968), p. 5.

pyramids and prisms, have the hallucinatory looks of figures ravaged by fear. But they represent, in fact, a social class; the are judges, officers, bankers, and men of the world, and this is what gives Vorel's depictions a precise, polemical significance. If one finds in Rumanian graphic art numerous examples of artists who have undergone the influence of E. (in the sense of a modulation of the means of social criti­ cism), Rumanian painting knew only a few cases of artists who consistently adhered to the Expressionist principles. Ion Tuculescu is an exception in this respect. His singular presence manifested itself "in the atmosphere of a harmonious art". Now and then, this painter became aware of the necessity of disciplining—in the classicist sense—the volcanic eruptions of his temperament in order to create canvasses composed in a vigorous and concentrated manner, clearly distinct in both form and thought. He made, and sometimes succeeded in, the attempt to work in this manner, but his Expressionist works carry the greatest weight in his oeuvre. 4 The tormented soul of Tuculescu expressed itself in violent chromatic explosions. Folklore was integrated into his vision precisely in the sense of the mystery toward which the popular artist has descended, since ancient times, in this world of profound emotional tension. A chromatic universe in which the black helps define a fantastic atmosphere, shivering nights, and fields agitated as if by a cosmic wind—Tuculescu created the vast image of a humanity haunted by the essential questions of a superior sense of life. I t is a concen­ trated art having a densely dramatic, and profoundly human air. I n Rumanian art, E. thus manifested itself primarily in the sense of a militant attitude with broad social implications, founded on a distinctive stylistic structure, or else —as in the case of Tuculescu—there is an assimilation of the philosophical mean­ ings of folklore. The feeling of nothingness and irreparable spiritual collapse is not even found in the works in which the reasons for misanthropy are clearest; it is replaced by a straightforward social polemic or else by a very broad Humanism. We must bear in mind t h a t the Rumanian philosophers believed that they had discovered, in the aesthetic foundations of E., the suggestion of an affirmation of human existence. The question poses itself, above all, in connection with the translation of the term Einfühlung, which posed problems to other non-German aestheticians as well (for example in the case of Roger Munier, the French translator of Worringer's Einfühlung). book, Absfraktion und Petre Andrei, a Rumanian philosopher who has made valuable contributions in several branches of philosophy, had been acquainted, during his years of study in Germany, with the ideas which Worringer's book had put into circulation. In a study written in 1919-1920 5 he observed that by Einfühlung is understood "our own manner of objectifying things, a manner of reflecting our selves in the exterior world". And he added (note the aesthetic sense which he attributed to this word): "The aesthetic value is thus created by the affirmation of life. . . Negation of life in an object constitutes — according to Theodor Lipps—the ugly. In order to appreciate and enhance the aes­ thetic value, we consider what is human and are aware of the value as existing in 4 5

Petru Comarnescu, Ion Tuculescu (Bucharest, 1967), pp. 13—14. Published after his death in the periodical Cronica de Iassy (Nos. 4 and 8, 1968). 273

ourselves, but also as an objectivized value. We feel an aesthetic sympathy for every object into which we put life" (italics are ours). An attitude characteristic for Rumanian philosophy, whose concerns center around the study of the significations of E., was thus defined at the end of the second decade of our century. The relations with human existence are stressed and a major importance assigned to them. The value of Expressionist art (and not exclusively of it) was attrib­ uted to its capacity for expressing a human ideal and for penetrating into the very core of human existence. Another personality (still very young at this time), Tudor Vianu—one of the most important Rumanian aestheticians, and the founder of the Rumanian school devoted to the study of world and comparative literature-occupied himself with Worringer's theory in his book Estetica. He extolled the ''enlargement of the field of aesthetic observation by means of the products of oriental and primitive art, which do not represent organic and living forms, but almost always forms which are abstract and dead". 6 Worringer's idea that classical and primitive man nourishes the same aspira­ tion to happiness and that, therefore, art's permanent raison d'être "consists in the reali­ zation of this need" 7 (an idea stressed by Vianu) made it possible to view E., which is dominated by this idea, in a new perspective. The conclusion of the Rumanian aesthetician was, then, that Expressionist art would retain, in its depths, the aspiration toward happiness, and t h a t its significations would be all the more tragic the more brutally this aspiration was contradicted. At the same time, the attitude of some Rumanian philosophers toward the formal conceptions of certain contemporary aestheticians is characteristic. In his Geschichte der Malerei des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts, for example, Max Deri articulated the famous division of the "fundamental dispositions of modern art". In this work, published in 1920, he expressed his belief t h a t these directions were Naturalism (which stresses the passivity of the spirit), Idealism ("the tendency toward presenting not only the con­ crete idea of a thing, but also toward retouching its purely individual features"), and E., restoring "the creative rights" of the spirit. Lucian Blaga (whose philosophical outlook—a symptomatic fact, in our opinion — was, to a certain degree, indebted to the German school) rejected this division by justly objecting t h a t these categories were altogether relative, and that there were types and objects which belong to all three of these styles. But what is important in Blaga's polemic is that it has led to a philosophical investigation of the sources of E., envisaged no longer as historical facts but as elements of an aesthetic attitude, and a specific way of viewing the world. I t is generally known t h a t many exegetes of E. considered Grünewald to have been an artist who foresaw one of the trends of E. And it may be true t h a t this sixteenth-century painter appeared as an obvious predecessor of this creation traversed by the sigh of ecstatic and redemptive suffering. I n a work entitled Filozofia stilului (Philosophy of Style) Blaga (whose poetry has—as we shall see — indisputable links with E.) investigated the ties existing between Grünewald and the 6 7

274

Tudor Vianu, Estetica, third ed. (Bucharest, 1968), p. 26. Ibid.

Expressionist vision. He demonstrated precisely those artistic rapports which were not accidental, while rejecting the exaggerations of a falsely comparative reasoning tempted to integrate into E. certain artists, and even some isolated works, offering peripheral resemblances, and not a genuine correspondence of feeling and thought. Blaga's description of the Isenheim altarpiece constitutes an admirable inter­ pretation of artistic creation. I t has—at the same time—the merit of fixing the exact premises of a discussion concerning the precursors of E.: I t is, without doubt, a moving crucifixion, comparable to no other; the arms of the cross give way under the weight of the crucified body . . . The body of Jesus, to which death has given a greenish tint, is bristling with thorns issuing from the flesh. The legs, twisted by the dreadful grief, are torn by the nails like those of beasts at the butcher's . . . The whole is an ecstatic vision of redemptive pain, a vision realized by a visible exaggeration of the natural. In spite of this, to define E. by nothing but an increase of potentiality, by the reinforcement and intensification of the individual, means to limit one­ self to an almost negative definition. Instead of seeking out the positive values materialized in E., one commits the error of taking nature as one's point of de­ parture, with regard to which E. can only be a deviation. In seeking to define E. by a negation—as a deviation of nature, in the sense of an exaggeration of its individual traits, one does not sufficiently differentiate E. from caricature, which perfectly corresponds to the same definition. . . . The grief in Grune­ wald's vision assumes proportions which surpass the individual; they are "absolute". Every time something is presented in such a manner that its power, its inner tension exceeds it, when it is transcendent, establishing connections with the cosmic elements, we have to do with an Expressionist work of art.8 Thus, in Blaga's opinion, the exaltation of the individual does not always signify E., and suffering alone cannot be regarded as an Expressionist trait. That which defines E. is not only the intensity of feeling but also its quality of suggesting the absurdity of an individual or social existence, the dolorous rendings of a conscience which discov­ ers the impossibility of realizing its aspirations. And what is equally important for Blaga is the fact that the object of poetry is transcendent "in betraying its relations with the cosmic elements". I t is only in this perspective that one can understand the relationship between E. and Blaga's poetry. As a poet, Blaga integrates a whole mythology of mysteries while evolving from the pantheism of his first compositions toward an ascetic vision of nature. One of the profoundest commentators on Rumanian literature, George Cälinescu, has noted the pantheism of Blaga's youthful poetry which "assumes Virgilian forms". 9 From this "infatuation with the vegetal, with fruits, with cold animality" 1 0 the poet subsequently moved toward a conversion of myth into poetry, in the tradition of Novalis and German Romanticism in general ("alles Poetische muss märchenhaft sein"). I t has been said of this poetry t h a t it represents "a kind of magic idealism, viewing the world 8 Lucian Blaga, Filozofia stilului (Bucharest, 1924), pp. 67—69, et passim. The italics in this t e x t are by the author of the article. 9 George Cälinescu, Istoria literaturii romane, fifth ed. (Bucharest, 1968), p. 352. 10 Ibid.

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as a fantastic projection of a magic self, overcome by dreams and gilded with miracles". 31 This is only partially true, for the miracle, in Blaga's vision, descends from an old folkloric tradition in which the propensity of material phenomena is evident. Even in the poems in which one notes the inflections of orthodoxy the mystic visions have something of the naiveté (deliberate in this case) of popular iconography: Fecioara Maria a legat rod ca un pom 12 An image sketched in this manner, not lacking in grace, comes perhaps closer to the images of Emily Dickinson than to Expressionist poetry. After the fashion of the American poetess, Blaga cultivates the mystery of the universe by placing it on the vegetable plane, like a materialization of the mystery of germination and death: Apoi cu frunza cobori. Şi tärna ti-o tragi peste ochi ca o grava pleoapä. 13 In Blaga's poetry, the metaphorical associations are often vegetal; even the mi­ racle of the world is a "corolla" which the poet does not want to "crush". Like Trakl (in "Abendlied", "Verfall", or "Landschaft", for example), the Rumanian poet ex­ presses the ardent necessity of discovering the wonderful spiritual world of dreams in which sleep is an experience on the same level as the miracle. Moreover, one of Blaga's volumes bears the evocative title Lauda somnului (Praise of Sleep). But the mythology of Blaga, in contrast to that of the German Expressionists, is not t h a t of an agonizing, grief-filled, and somber vision. His mystery is accentuated (as in the canvasses of Van Gogh, for whom he often expressed his admiration) by the light which never fades. The title of one of his volumes of verse, Poemele luminii (Poems of Light) is significant in this respect. Blaga thus approached those zones of archaic Greek mystery in which he rediscovered the ancient mythology of the people inhabit­ ing the present territory of Rumania. He did not aim at the expression of "integral existence" in the exotic world of the Polynesian islands, like the German painters of Die Brücke, but rather in the mythic religion of his Dacian ancestors. The mystery of Zamolxis (a Dacian divinity whom Blaga often evoked in his work) is a mystery of light and the sun. The poet cultivates this call for a return to the ancestral stage, to the times immemorial of the legend which he glorified on many occasions in his philo­ sophical works, as well as in his poetry and his aphorisms. But the myths encountered in Blaga's poetry are most often those of Rumanian folklore, which the poet has integrated into a vision t h a t is simultaneously universal and specific. The long popular poem Mioriţa, which translates the feeling of communion 11 Al. Piru, Panorama deceniului literar românesc (Panorama of the Rumanian Literary Decade [1940–1950], Bucharest, 1968), p. 25. 12 The Virgin Mary / conceived the fruit like a tree. 13 Then, with the leaf, you descend. And with dust / you „cover your eyes/ as with a solemn lid.

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with nature (peculiar to the Rumanian people) into a symbolic language, provided the poet with the occasion for repeatedly trying to discern the horizons of human existence on Rumanian soil, which Blaga called "spaţiul mioritic". But what the anonymous poet experienced as the feeling of the unknown was for Blaga the reason for the irrational. Călinescu, among others, recognized the Platonic structure of Blaga's philosophical system which, being called "Satanic knowledge" by the Rumanian poet and philosopher, "permits of delirium as a means of investigation". 14 The cosmology of Lucian Blaga also stems from Platonic sources, as has been fre­ quently pointed out. The observation that the geographical factor has an influence (often decisive) on the intellectual perception of an entire people is here transformed into a theory concerning "the unfathomable ethnic space" governed by an all-power­ ful entity called, by Blaga, "The Great Anonymous One" and corresponding to Plato's demiurge. This facilitates the comprehension of a line which makes up part of the Gintec penfru anul 2000 (Song for the Year 2,000), in which Blaga declares himself to be contemporaneous with the vision of Rilke, to whom he dedicated a poem, as the man who was "killed by a thorn plunged into the blue", that is to say, by "the thirst for the absolute". 15 To be sure, the mysteries referred to by Blaga are only deciphered by the reve­ lation which holds no terror or internal confrontations: Incă ieri, numai ieri, doar ieri mă apăram cu frica de zodia noua ce se ridica. Şi azi, dintr-odată, neaşteptat, acest räsărit. Ce cîntec nemăsurat ! Ca unui orb vindecat lumea-n lumina mi s-a lărgit. Puterile mişca-n zenit. Deschid porţile: Timp neumblat, bine-ai venit, bine-ai venit !16 From this unaccustomed mixture of Platonic philosophy, pantheism, orthodox mysticism and Rumanian folklore issued a very dense and profound lyric poetry which does not attain the level of irremediable despair, thus serving as evidence of the Rumanian literary tradition, which believes in the human capacity to find happiness in the surrounding world. This is because the mystic revelation invites Blaga to dis­ cover the truth of palpable nature. In utilizing, for example, the suggestion of the ancient myth of Zamolxe, he composed a poem dedicated to the rapport between the creator and his work (the conclusion of which was, as in the case of a drama based on a 14 15

Op. cit., p. 388. See Al. Piru, op. cit., p. 27. Yesterday again, yesterday only, only yesterday / I defended myself, afraid / Against the new sign which is appearing. / And today, suddenly, unexpectedly, this aurora. / What an im­ mense s o n g ! / A s for a blind man cured,/The world in the light has become larger for m e . / T h e powers stir in the zenith. / I open the doors: Times which our feet have not yet touched,/ Welcome/ Welcome ! 16

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Rumanian medieval legend, M esterni Manole (Master Manole), that fiction surpasses its creator). Zamolxe, seeker of the absolute, rejoices at direct contact with nature: Altada nopţile-mi erau un leagăn de odihnä, iar ziua lucrurile dimprejur se prefăceau în mine într-un vis atît de linistit, că reci şi jilave şopîrlele veneau sä caute soarele pe picioarele mele goale. 17 Zamolxe lives in the midst of a bucolic nature, exempt from great conflicts, and he fishes "salmons round as the legs of young girls" or sacrifices his sheep and cries "into their wool". Even in the later poems, in which the "Virgilianism" is spiritualized and "the rural elements sanctified", nature remains the same beneficient power which he praises in his own way, as does popular Rumanian poetry. I t is a nature which does not know fear and which does not terrify man but approaches him submissively and tenderly. The roe-deer drink water from his palm, the dogs are tame, as in the preRenaissance pictures depicting Francis of Assisi. Nor do the apocalypses of Blaga's poetry have the terrifying atmosphere of the nights of Trakl, with "strange g a r d e n s . . . filled with snakes, night-butterflies, spiders and bats"; they introduce the typical Expressionist vision of cities ravaged by terrible disasters but proclaim, at the same time, the triumph of nature over civilization. Din depártate sälbăticii cu stele mari, doar cäprioare vor pătrunde în oraşe sä pască iarba din cenuşă. Cerbi cu ochi uriaşi şi blînzi intra-vor în bisericile vechi cu portile deschise — uitîndu-se mirati în jur . . . 18 The feeling of solitude attains in Blaga's works an intensity different from that of German Expressionist poetry. In the case of the Rumanian poet, it results from a philo­ sophical argument and not from a simple impulse of temperament. In this respect, it is interesting to point out Blaga's ideas concerning the contribution of the subcon­ scious to cultural life. Blaga describes the case (not very frequent) of an Expressionist who critically contemplates the Freudian theory of the creative function of the sub­ conscious. In his view, "the unfathomable coordinates", as Blaga calls them, must be studied in relation to the conscious products of culture; but he rejects the Freudian analogy between the ideas of psychopaths and those of primitive peoples, consider­ ing—with good reason—these latter as cultural, and not pathological, phenomena. 17 Formerly the nights were the cradle of my repose, / but in the daytime the things which surrounded me became within / so sweet a dream, / that, cold and humid, the lizards came / to seek the sun / at my bare feet. 18 From savage corners, distant, to the great stars / only the roe-deer are going to penetrate into the cities/to graze on the grass among the cinders./The cerfs with tender, immense eyes/ will enter the old churches / with open doors / and look around astonished . . .

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Blaga rarely refers to Freud; one could mention, in this connection, a play, Daria, whose theme slightly resembles that of Wedekind's Frühlings Erwachen. But, in this case, the problem of the noxious intervention of a hypocritical or conservative pedagogy is not linked with the appearance of the sexual instinct at the time of adolescence, but with the normal life of a married woman who has an old husband and who falls ill, having certain obsessions. Basically, the author advocates a free exercise of the in­ stincts, as is also the case in the plays of Strindberg. As in the case of many Rumanian painters, Blaga's E. constitutes a particular phenomenon with striking individual features which give it a special place in the com­ plex European artistic movement. Although the interpretations of Rumanian folklore distance themselves from the spirit of this creation, the poetry of Blaga completes the landscape of modern Rumanian poetry. Alexandra Philippide provides Rumanian E. with a personal accent; he thirsts for the absolute and confronts the great troubling questions, tempted by the sym­ bols of eternal nature, and first of all, quite clearly by that of Pan, who—to him—sig­ nifies both totality and victorious soaring: Vreau să m-amestec pe deplin Cu plasma din adînc a vieţii, Să fiu la fel cu-acel elin De care pomenesc poeţii Si căruia în vremuri vechi Un zeu îi dase drept pedeapsă Să-i crească frunze din urechi Şi negre rădăcini din coapsă. 19 I t is interesting to note that critics have often considered Philippide to be representa­ tive of an anti-Modernist trend, relating him to a sort of late Romanticism stemming from the tradition of Poe and E.T.A. Hoffmann. This is due, perhaps, to the form of his poems (which do not seek merely to adhere to a fixed prosody) and sometimes to the pattern of metaphors fitted to a somber symbolism. But, in truth, beyond this formal austerity and apparently tranquil surface somber depths and a bitter fear of death are hidden. The poet feels himself surrounded by eternity while living in the midst of a great solitude in which he is "a Robinson" who "carries his island in his soul". The landscape of this poetry is that of agitated gloom, as in Dante, peopled with phantom-like, sinister apparitions. Sometimes this universe is constituted—as in the case of so many other Expressionists - by the fragments of a concrete urban landscape with sordid suburbs. But these images fade away as soon as the poet afiirms aspirations toward the light of a humanity which dreams of forging a world of beauty and hope. The poetry thus be­ comes an alternation of infernal horizons (in which the wind howls like dogs) and of seraphic skies, traversed by the poet in a barge in which a lily holds the helm. This 19 I want to merge completely / with the plasma of the depths of life, / I want to be like that Greek / of whom the poets speak / and who was condemned, long ago, by a god / to put leaves in his e a r s / a n d black roots in his thigh.

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passage from somber sadness to exuberance is not only "Romantic", as it has been called; but the hypersensitivity of the poet, receptive to changes in the ambient sur­ roundings, reverberates and amplifies them with an intensity proper also to E. As in Heym, the war is a monster which lacerates the lives of men. Humanity must be regenerated by great fraternity and love (a theme which recalls the poetry of Werf el, among others). Thus Philippide dedicated some very moving lines to the anti-Fascist heroes whose ideas he shared: Cînd aţi pornit cu suflet flamînd de nemurire Rîvnind spre-o lume dreaptă de tihnă şi splendoare, Cine-ar fi spus că visul de-azur şi strălucire Şi idealul nostru de pace Şi iubire Vor fi scuipate, frînte, călcate în picioare ? Cine-ar fi spus, prieteni, că veti pieri în drum, Prin cîmpuri teutone, în munci ucigătoare Zvîrliţi de vii prin ruguri şi-n cuptoare ? Nu doarme-n nici o urnă sărmanul vostru scrum, Si vîntul e mormîntul vostru-acum. Dar visul vostru cîntă în visul meu mereu; De vorbă stau acuma cu voi ca altădată; Si în adincul sufletului meu Adun cenuşa voastră— mprăştiată. 2 0 This poetry, dominated by the feeling of participation in the destiny of the anti-Hitler­ ite combatants, established at base a connection between two fundamental directions of Expressionist art, both present in Philippide's work. His obsession with the night, the menacing landscape, things darkly fantastic, and merciless destiny, is reinforced by a revolutionary tone and by the firm condemnation of a whole social system. Especially after the war, the poetry of Philippide became more serene, celebrat­ ing the future of humanity, which he finds more and more to lie in fraternity and love among peoples. Now the prophetic tone and the sacerdotal gesture embrace a new reality, while hell itself appears to be lost in the wind. While descending into Styx, the poet ascertains t h a t the black waves of the river have become clear, that—symbo­ lically—the boatman of death, Charon, Cerberus and even the shades have vanished forever. The return to the living is not impossible, for the poet leaves the subterranean countries and returns to the land of human beings, thus outlining a total aesthetic conception based on the belief t h a t everything stands in relation to our imaginative power and to the "standard against which we measure ourselves". In the poetry of Philippide, the affinities between the ephemeral and the eternal are presented in a very meaningful way: the instant signifies eternity, and art is an 20 When you have gone, the soul, hungry for eternal glory,/Desirous of a righteous world full of peace and splendor,/ Who would have said that upon the dream of azure and of breathtaking beauty, / That on our ideal of peace and love / They would spit, they would destroy them, they would trample them to bits ? / Who would have said, friend, that you would be killed en route / On the Teutonic fields, by overwhelming tasks / Burned alive in the ovens ? / Your poor ashes can­ not repose in any urn, /And the wind is your tomb at present / But your dream sings forever in my dream; / As at that time, I converse with you, / A n d at the bottom of my soul, / I gather your lost ashes.

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immaculate human permanence. But with this is mind, he proclaims the necessity of a renewed art capable of grasping a more complex spiritual reality. Otherwise, poetry is irremediably condemned to remain a strange museum piece: Rugină nefolositoare Sufletelor viitoare, Te văd în timpuri foarte — apropíate Zăcînd printre unelte demodate, Maşina cu-ntrebuinţări uitate, Mai nebăgată-n seamă în giulgiul tău de praf Decît montgolfierii sau primul batiscafi 2 1 Based on the consciousness of universal and individual tragedy, the "sumptuous and black" elegy of Philippide is illuminated in proportion as the poet witnesses and participates in the accomplishment of certain Humanitarian ideas. In the poetry of other Rumanian writers, E. assumed even less specific forms, their (accidental) inflections often being closer to other literary currents. A reference to them nevertheless contributes, in our opinion, to the completion of the lively tableau of modern Rumanian literature, even if it is considered only from the perspective of a single aesthetic movement. The Expressionist echoes in the poetry of Scarlat Callimachi, for example, do not come—from all appearances—directly from German liter­ ature, but through the mediation of Russian Futurism. The relations with the Ruma­ nian avantgarde were concretized especially in the pages of the magazine Puncf (The Point), published between March, 1924, and April, 1925, of which Callimachi was edi­ tor-in-chief and where he published numerous contemporary anti-conformist poems. Callimachi painted a dark picture of the days of the war, foreseeing the revolution in a manner which, to a certain extent, recalls that of Alexander Blok: Zăpadă, Cruci şi sînge înegrit de vaiete şi lacrimi Un cerşetor, o oarbă şi-un cîine-n căutarea unui os uscat. Strigăte, rîsete şi sanitări pătate de sînge şi de teamă. Palate, ruini, soldaţi în uniforme rupte şi parfumate. 21 Useless rust / for future souls, / I see you shortly hence / Lying among outmoded tools, / Machine for forgotten uses, / In your shroud of dust, more neglected / Than the first bathyscope, than the montgolfiers !

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Iub tri, credintă si prostituţii în braţe obosite de neant. 22 The war also constitutes the dramatic substance of Callimachi's play Zail Sturm, where realistic description is mixed with grandiloquent dialogue and strange metaphors evoking the plays of Maeterlinck. Assuming a prophetic, menacing tone are, above all, the fragments in which the wounded have hallucinations in the sordid room of an improvised hospital: "Destul ! Îmi ardeti ochii. . .Vine moartea . . . vine moartea . . . lăsaţi-mă . . . Sînge . . . E negru . . . negru . . . negru . . . Soarele se prăvaleste în nori. Auzi ? Vin cîinii. Vor sä ne mănînce. Le e foame . . . Sînge... Lăsati-mă . . . Sînt s ă r a c . . . sărac . . . o rubia . . . Mi-e sete . . . sete . . . sint bun . . . bun . . . Vă iubesc. Negru negru . . . Sînge. Vorbiti. De ce tăceti? Soare? Nu. Nu, mîine . . . e negru . . . " 2 3 Even in those scenes where the dialogue retains its logical coherence, the relentless, somber visions have a sorrowful intensity: "Am väzut lucruri îngrozitoare. Moarte pretutindeni, sînge şi urlete. Nu, Nu, e prea îngrozitor. Cînd imi amintesc, plîng. I-am văzut scuipînd singe şi pămînt. Adunîndu-şi matele din praf. Aruncîndu-şi fraţii în mormintele pierdute ín imensitatea nemiloasä. Urlau cuvinte murdare, cînd ţîşnea sîngele din trupul lor . . . Dumnezeu era departe de toţi aceşti oameni. Dumnezeu . . . (Gerne) Mă doare . . . Mi-e frig . . . frig . . . " 2 4 An interesting poetic personality, combining ingenuity and mystification, is Dimitrie Stelaru, whose connections with the modern literary movements are rather vague. His poetry comes rather from the tradition of Poe. We witness not only an imitation"of the themes (sometimes even the versification) favored by the American poet, but even of his life, viewed in its nebulous, fantastic aspects. I t has been stressed t h a t the strange geography of Stelaru's poems and their onomastic system closely follow those of Poe. 25 But the result is a poetry of great inner tension, of nightmares and deliriums, in which the image of the world is recomposed of somber fragments whose prophetie tone has a very personal ring: Asculaţi-mă ! Aţi crezut cä zilele sînt zdrenţe I n mînile voastre. 22 Snow, / cross / and blood turned black by lamentations / and by tears. / A beggar, / a blind woman/ and a dog in pursuit of a dried / bone. / Cries, / smiles / and kisses sullied by blood / and by fear. / Palace / ruins, soldiers in torn uniforms / perfumed / By the loves, / the faith / and prosti­ tution23 in the fatigued arms of / nothingness. Enough ! You are burning my eyes . . . Death is coming . . . Here is death . . . leave me alone . . . Blood . . . I t is black . . . black . . . black . . . The sun is crumbling away in the clouds. Do you hear ? The dogs are arriving. They want to devour us . . . They are hungry . . . Blood . . . Leave me alone . . . I am poor . . . poor . . . a rouble . . . I'm thirsty . . . thirsty . . . I am good . . . good . . . I love you. Black, black... Blood. Speak. Speak. Why are you silent ? The sun ? No, no, tomorrow... it is black . . . 24 I saw some terrible things. Death everywhere, blood and moaning. NO, no, it was too horrible ! When I remember it, I cry. I saw them spitting blood and soil. Gathering their entrails from the dust. Throwing their brothers into tombs lost in merciless immensity. They screamed dirty words while the blood gushed out of their bodies . . . God was far from these men. God . . . (He groans) I'm ill . . . I'm cold . . . cold . . . 25 See Al. Piru, op. cit., pp. 133-136.

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Le-aţi răsturnat, aţi intrat în ele Şi m-aţi găsit zeul etern Nu v-aţi născut nieiodată, Nu v'aţi născut nieiodată, Lumina a fost pentru voi săgeata. Urlaţi şi vă muşcati liniştea Asteptînd vaierul geniului Pe care îl roadeţi, îl spînzurati în pieţe Grîul vostru nu e decît pleavă Şi rugină. 26 The horror in the tone of Stelaru's poems, which could seem to be self-idolatry ("Dimitrie Stelaru, the new Jesus Christ. . . ") conceals, at base, a dolorous revolt against the great potentates of the pre-war and war years. With grandiloquent ges­ tures, the poet attacks the bourgeois order, singing the praise (like Villon and, more recently, Expressionists like Bröger and Alfons Petzold) of those who are outside the law. Ne-am răsturnat oasele pe-Iespezile bisericilor, Prin păduri, la marginea oraşelor, Nimeni nu ne-a primit niciodată, Nimeni, nimeni . . . Marii judecători ne-au închis Stăruind în ceata legilor lor . . . Odată-poate cu înfriguratele zori vom singera Si spînzuratorile ne vor ridica la cer. Dar lasă, Dimitrie Stelaru, mai lasă ! înt r-o zi vom avea şi noi sărbătoare— Vom avea pîine, pîine Şi-un kilogram de izmă pe masa. 27 The poem which Stelaru sought had—except for this often-noted ostentation— a mean­ ing of protest, which, it is true, was not always clearly expressed. But in the universe of this ''fantastic hour", in the accumulation of abstract divinities and black hells, of the light of heavens which are always serene and of the smoke of dark, sad taverns, the authentic purity of the lyricism is finely distilled. This is because Stelaru believes in the capacity of art to bring beauty and the Humanitarian spirit into the world. To a certain extent, the remonstrative lyricism of Victor Torynopol is similar to t h a t of Stelaru. I t lacks the prophetic vision of a better, purer world which illuminates 26 Listen to me ! / You have thought that the days are rags / In your hands / You have turned them upside down, you have entered into them / A n d you have found me there, eternal god./ You were never born. / You were never born. / To you, light was an arrow. / Scream and bite into the silence / While waiting for the plaint of the genius / Whom you gnaw at, whom you hang on the squares./Your wheat is nothing but straw, / Nothing but mildew. 27 We have poured out our bones on the flagstones of the churches / In the forests, on the edges of the cities, / No one ever opened the door to us / No one, no one . . . / . . . / The great judges have jailed us / Insisting on the mist of their laws. / . . . / One day perhaps we will bleed with the feverish dawn, / And the gallows will lift us to the sky. / But let it be, Dimitrie Stelaru, let it be. / One day we also will have a holiday. / We will have bread, bread / And a kilo of absinthe on the table.

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the poetry of the latter. Torynopol constantly returns to a sordid universe, insisting on images which suggest physical and moral misery; he is obsessed with the slow decom­ position and the pestilential miasmas of the mire, as well as by the blood of the hospital rooms. This world has no hope; and in the Expressionist tradition, the unhappiness of his existence is increased by the machines of modern technology. The images (often recalling those of the Surrealists, with their specific discontinuities) convey, at root, a depressing Expressionist feeling, an exasperated vision of a sick world, irremediably condemned: Uzine pleacă la muncă Infirmierele se-ntorc de la spital. Ce-i dacă hamalii şi-aruncă viaţa, plamînii-n canal? Caravanele cu ser antitific lipesc vignete galbene pe porţi: "aici sînt trei, acolo şase morţi." Trenurile nu mai opresc m gara, îmi pare că oraşul se mută. I n casa noastră melcii urcă pe pereti şi-n colţ s-au spart fiolele cu spută. 28 From this mixture of somber poetry and Naturalistic, detailed description of the disease, a lyric work whose interior throbbing does not always succeed in transforming itself into aesthetic value takes shape. The Rumanian novel has assimilated the influence (marked by a limited number of works which are not masterpieces) in the sense of this interpénétration of techniques characteristic of Expressionist prose and the Naturalist novel. On the one hand, the prestige of the novels written in the first decades of the century (Livin Rebreanu, Mihail Sadoveanu, Camil Petrescu, Hortensia Papadat-Bengescu) has caused a turning of more recent Rumanian prose in this traditional direction. On the other hand, the more recent influences added to this tradition came rather from French and AngloAmerican fiction, countries in which, as we know, E. depended much less on German literature. And we need not consider the "avantgarde" prose whose sources must be sought rather in Surrealism and French Dadaism or in the indigenous works of Urmuz, the real precursor of the Dadaists. Among the few Expressionist stories, special mention is due to those belonging to the cycle La margined cîmpiei (By the Side of the Field) of Ruxandra Oteteleşanu. In her case, the themes (sometimes even the denouements) treated in the plays of O'Neill are taken up. For example, a young man is loved by two women, the daughter and the mother, at the same time. I n the end, the solution of this tragic dilemma is found in the 28 The factory is going to work. / The nurses are returning from the hospital. / What does it matter if the porters throw out / Their lives, their lungs into the sewer. / The caravans with anti­ typhoid serum/ glue yellow vignettes on the doors/ "Here there are three, there six dead men." / The trains are no longer stopping in the stations. / I t seems to me that the city is going to move away. / In our house, the snails are climbing on the wall, / and in the corner the spittoons are broken.

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death of the mother, who drowns herself. The theme of the ' Vornan- vampire", of the woman who attracts bad luck, and that of the violent contrast between pure and sen­ sual love, also recall Strindberg and Munch. In the story "Portretul" (The Portrait), the fantastic, foreboding atmosphere is accentuated by the strong suggestion of cer­ tain repressed existences of horrendous sensuality—all this in the dull setting of a pro­ vincial town. The climax is reached in the description of the swollen face of a woman, stricken by a dreadful malady, who had, at one time, been a great beauty, as the por­ trait she keeps in her room demonstrates. Without presenting vaster ideas or a clearer philosophical position, the stories of Ruxandra Oteteleşanu (incontestably written with great vivacity) bear comparison with a number of Expressionist works rather by reason of the strange effects resulting from the heroes' actions than by dint of their psychology. In its turn, the Rumanian drama hardly displays Expressionist qualities. Even the plays which draw their substance from the psychological analysis of their heroes, while following the meanderings of their psyche rather than their external gestures (as in the work of Petrescu, George Mihail Zamfirescu or Mihail Sorbul) very rarely show any connections with the Expressionist theater. Among these dramas, Sorbul's Fatima Rosie (The Red Passion) employs, to a certain extent, the techniques of the Expressionist drama, especially t h a t of Werfel. The point of comparison lies in the violence of the confrontation of temperaments (some of the characters are under the despotic sign of "the red passion", t h a t is to say, the passion for shedding blood, which descends into dark ancestral depths). The action is of a carefully worked-out simplicity. I t de­ picts the paradoxical psychology of a woman who tries to overcome the resistance of a man who has the reputation of being a lady killer, after having refused the marriage proposal of a young man who is in love with her and whom she had indubitably loved. Exasperated by his resistance (the man is trying to find a pure love after an adventurous life), she kills him. The drama, which could have easily succumbed to the faults of salon literature, is saved by its detailed analysis of the instincts and by a refined gra­ dation of dramatic effects. One could also add the aphoristic commentaries of another figure, a lucid drunk whose flaunted cynicism hides a deep human warmth (like the judge Azdak in Brecht's The Caucasian Chalk Circle, written much later than the Ruma­ nian drama). Reaching deep layers of human psychology, in which dark hereditary in­ stincts jostle each other about, Sorbul's play offers the possibility of establishing definite comparisons with Expressionist drama. Even more obvious is the connection of certain dramas by Ion Luca with E. The religious overtones (and, above all, the grandiloquent language which makes certain replies, and even some larger meanings, quite unintelligible) darkens the atmosphere of his plays, beginning with the very first one, Salba reginei (The Queen's Necklace), which nevertheless conveys a certain strange lyricism derived from Christian mythology. The intrigue is complicated by philosophical tendencies expressed with some difficulty and whose role should be to demonstrate the incorruptible force of destiny which each of the characters (such as Jesus, Judas, and the Pharisee Ana) carries within himself. Equally complicated is the intrigue of Javra pamîntului (The Cursed Dog of the Earth), whose principal hero is the famous Rasputin. But the idea of redemption by .285

sin, which this drama illustrates in a morbid and nebulous atmosphere, probably comes from Dostoevsky rather than from the Expressionists, who, themselves, took up the mystical themes of the Russian novelist. The triumph of evil over good and, above all, the nebulous cult of the chthonic energies—of menacing, dark spirits rising up from invisible depths, spreading terror and sin—suggests links —distant ones, to be sure—with Expressionist dramaturgy, which is also interested in these primitive myths. Pavel Chihaia's drama La farmecul nopfii (Under the Spell of Night) which also un­ folds in a fantastic world, is not only better structured but depicts the spiritual state of the characters in a more realistic way. The action takes place in a region situated near the Black Sea, where the memory of Thracian tribes is everywhere present in the solitary landscape. At the same time, the characters act out a drama of impossible happiness, plagued, at all times, by terrible maladies (one of them is cancerous, another has frequent attacks of psychasthenia, losing control of his actions) and by a primitive mentality as well as a severe and unpardonable morality. The characters ensnare one another, kill each other in the night, and seek terrible vengeances for faults which they insufficiently comprehend. The denouement of the heroes' spiritual crises is—in its turn—terrible; the heroine, who is basically innocent, but who has provoked the murderous passions of the others, loses her way at night and drowns in a marsh, while her husband commits suicide (following the advice of a haunting old man, a guardian of the old savage traditions of these countries), drowning the others in the water of the same swamp. As in Ibsen's Rosmersholm, the marsh, dumb and menacing, is always imperceptibly present. But the most evident influence apparent in this well-constructed drama is—as has been noted—that of O'NeüTs Strange Interlude, for Chihaia's characters find their exact equivalents in the work of the American dramatist. Thus the heroine of Farmecul nopfii greatly resembles Nina Leeds, while her husband, Sam Evans, resembles Marsden, the dying old man, and the doctor who wants to win the heroine and dies at the hand of her husband recalls Darwell. Nevertheless, the best works of Rumanian E. are rather those produced by the poets and painters. Strong personalities like Blaga and Philippide, Tonitza and Vorel, have bequeathed a well-defined legacy whose fundamental trait seems to be a profound sense of the human. Rumanian E. (or the aesthetic orientations which have echoed and remolded European E. idiosyncratically) preserves its individuality in the general land­ scape of modern art because it largely shares the social aspirations of the collectivity, being nourished by its aesthetic ideals, and because it seeks new meanings in the tra­ ditional essence of Rumanian folklore and popular art. (Translated from the French by Linda Brust)

286

MIKLÓS

SZABOLCSI

EXPRESSIONISM I N HUNGARY

"During my career I have become associated with all the more important -isms, and I have learned something from each without actually having joined any of them." 1 I t is with such words t h a t Lajos Kassák, the most significant representative—both as artist and as organizer—of the Hungarian avantgarde characterized himself. From t h a t sentence one may guess that, in examining the appearance, the manifestations, and the variety of the literary styles, schools, or movements of twentieth-century Hungarian literature, one will face grave questions of methodology. A discussion of these points may prove to be illuminating, for it may shed light on how literary trends become modified in territories far removed from where they originated. One of the most conspicuous characteristics of more recent Hungarian literature is the simultaneous existence of several trends. At the beginning of the present century, various movements sprang up concurrently, thereby intensifying each other, while in the countries where they first emerged they were separated by an interval of several decades and thus reacted against each other. To mention only one example: although translations of Baudelaire, Verlaine, and Rimbaud had previously appeared in Hungary, their influence became manifest only at the beginning of our century, almost simul­ taneously with the cult of Jammes and the Unanimists. Similarly, Futurism, Cubism, and E. became influential at the same time, charging each other and blending in a special way. I t is also characteristic t h a t the same movement may acquire a new func­ tion in a different social atmosphere, cultural tradition, and language. 2 This is also true of Hungarian E., which was shot through with folkloristic tendencies and local concepts. A distinction should be made, however, between E. as a movement or "schoor' (or, at least, as a consciously developed and coherent body of aesthetic theories), on the one hand, and the stylistic devices and clichés of E., on the other. These latter are, naturally, much more widespread, but a writer who makes use of them should not necessarily be regarded as an Expressionist. The term E. as referring to literature occurs first about 1915 in Hungarian criti­ cism, and the history of Hungarian E. also begins in the second year of the Great War. 3 1 2

Lajos Kassák, "Önarckép háttérrel," Kortárs, 1961/1962, p. 284. Regarding such changes of function in Eastern and Central Europe, see Miklós Szabolcsi, "L'avant-garde littéraire et artistique comme phénomène international" in Actes du Ve Congrès de VA.I.L.C. (Amsterdam, 1969), pp. 318-334. 3 More recent studies on the history of Hungarian E.: Akos Koczogh, Az expresszionizmus (Budapest, 51964), pp. 96ff.; Imre Bori, "A magyar avant-garde történetéból, III: A magyar expreszszionizmus, ' Új Symposion (Novi Sad), 1967. Nos. 24—25, pp. 22—25; Nos. 26—27, pp. 11—14; No. 28, pp. 6 - 9 . 287

Still, its antecedents are to be found in the preceding years. One must remember t h a t the evolution of modern Hungarian literature started in the first year of this century with the group of writers associated with the literary periodical Nyugat (West) and, first of all, with the development of Endre Ady's mature style. I t is not easy to place this current in literary history. Generally speaking, it entailed a cult of subjectivism and the poet's self, a style full of modern tensions, highly stylized forms of expression, and, at the same time, a desire to portray the conditions of Hungarian society and to change a world which these writers regarded as narrow and old-fashioned. Their works can be linked with Naturalism and the literary variant of "Art Nouveau", with late Symbolism, and sometimes even with a new Classicism or Impressionism. I n his lyrics, the most important of these writers, the poet Ady, combined various stylistic trends of the period and synthesized them in his own, personal fashion. Until the 1910's this movement, started by the contributors to the above-men­ tioned periodical, produced the most up-to-date, dominant, modern and progressive literature in Hungary. Its representatives fought a decisive battle against conservative literature and criticism, against the resistance and the attacks on the part of the author­ ities and against the conservative, nationalistic readers who considered this movement t o b e dangerous and anti-patriotic. The literary development in the whole of Europe proves that E. can be the result of a step-by-step evolution from Symbolism, with Symbolist E. constituting an intermediate stage. In a situation as full of literary and social tensions as the one characteristic of Hungary at the turn of the century, the emotions of the individual may turn into a formless cry, the poetic self may become so vast t h a t it can embrace the whole world, and social conflicts may cause writers to develop a style t h a t is also full of tensions. German literature, it should be remembered, had been traditionally well-known in Hungary. Thus certain German authors, among them the Expressionist poets, also exerted a certain influence, although there were no conscious imitations. From about 1908 on, Hungary produced writers who might be called proto-Expressionists or "un­ conscious Expressionists" on the basis of their vision and their style. Such a writer was Béla Révész (1876-1944), a leading social-democratic journalist, who, "avant la lettre", used devices characteristic of E. in his "miniatures" (short stories of workingclass life) and, above all, in a story which has the characteristic title: "Vonagló falvak" (Agonizing Villages). In Révész's works, villages and natural forces are personified by passion, the whole world turns into an expression of the writer's poetic self, and the enumerations, as well as the use of adjectives, remind the reader of the Expressioniststyle. As Révész himself wrote in 1936, "If I cultivated E., I must confess t h a t I realized the fact only later . . . That tone, style, and literary form has been with me ever since I was born." Another representative of proto-E. was Dezsô Szabó (1879-1945), one of the most highly individual figures in the whole of Hungarian literature. Having begun his career as a fine scholar, a Francophile teacher, and a man of extremely great ambitions, he absorbed all literary currents of the period. His early short stories, written about 1910, show not only the influence of late Symbolism, Nietzsche, and the surcharged atmo­ sphere characteristic of the literary equivalent of Art Nouveau, but also features rem288

iniscent of E., for in them the world as seen with ''the eyes of the spirit"—to use a phrase coined by Bahr—, and implying the idea that man can change the material world through his mental power. In Szabó's works, as in those of some German Expressionists, the technical devices of Symbolism turn into musical leitmotifs, and the lonely hero, who is faced with a world represented by extremely abstract allegories, and who brings salvation to that world without anybody's help, is in the center. Here Vitalism is com­ bined with a mysticism pervading the phenomenon of death. Both Szabó's highly idiosyncratic style and his handling of sentence structure are relatively close to E. For unlike his Hungarian contemporaries, Szabó did not enlarge the vocabulary, but modified the grammatical system, especially by verbalizing nouns and using verbal noun forms as often as possible. His style is certainly akin to that of E., but it also echoes the Hungarian ecclesiastic style of the sixteenth century. Both Szabó's vision and his style became very influential and served as a direct inspiration for Lajos Kassák. 4 Lajos Kassák (1887-1968) was the self-conscious, programmatic leader of the Hungarian avantgarde, who organized the movement with exceptional energy. The first issue of his periodical Tett (Action), the first review to unite all representatives of the movement, appeared on November 1, 1915. I n 1916 it was suppressed by the author­ ities, but in the fall of that year Kassák founded its successor: Ma (Today), which survived until 1925. These two reviews, the verse collections and anthologies published, and the lectures and exhibitions organized, by its contributors, were the chief manifes­ tations of the literary trend which followed as a reaction against the generation of Nyugat and represents the first stage in the history of the Hungarian avantgarde. The contents of the first issues of Tett prove that the movement had its foreign models in Apollinaire and the Unanimist Romains, as well as in the Futurists and the Expressionists. In fact, the two above-mentioned periodicals effected a combination of Futurist and Expressionist doctrines, and the Hungarian writing they contained showed a similarly mixed influence of the two movements. This peculiar synthesis can be ob» served in the following passage from the manifesto written by Kassák: 1. Although the new literature was not born during the war, the war con­ tributed to its development, in so far as it facilitated the change from the evocative tendencies and the Weltschmerz of the earlier generation to the lyric of the conscious will. As a necessary social phenomenon, [this literature] must be in close contact with all progressive economic and political movements. Its major representatives must have their share in directing the state machinery, revising the existing laws and making new ones in the same way as do commercial, industrial, and political forces. 2. In order to manifest its own importance and to be influential in its truths and beauties (which have their origin in the very essence of life), the new literature must throw off all "ideological" and technical shackles. For all t h a t had been creative form or essential content for the artists of yester­ day can only be a canal built on a slope through which the essence may escape. 4

See Péter Nagy, Szabó Dezsô (Budapest, 1964), pp. 171—183, and Gergely Gergely, Szahó Dezsö stilusa (Szeged, n.d.). 289

3. The new literature cannot swear by the colors of any -ism. I t cannot admit the new possibilities of Christianity, and it must oppose Futurism. At one extreme, ascetics have been leading a life of passive contem­ plation for thousands of years, while, at the other, little primadonnas are singing the apotheosis of war. In any case, decadent aesthetes, sheer virtuosi, or sacred mediocrities are on the scene. 4. The new literature must take notice of all natural phenomena. There must be no gaps in space or time that it cannot bridge. I t aids the sciences and, conversely, is aware of spiritual forces and tries to illuminate them with its proper means. I t aims at embodying the mystery of the soul, the erotic magnificence of blood and flesh, the vapor of dunghills at spring, the marconigraphs t h a t are hungry for the infinite, locomotives measuring the globe, aeroplanes feeling their way in the sky, and the enormous silence which is the language of the souls of the objects. 5. The new literature beautifies the foot cloth [sic] of the will t h a t tries to liberate itself. I t is skeptical and enthusiastic at the same time; a lover of everything unattainable, it is entirely indifferent to dead gods and vague obsessions. 6. The new literature glorifies the creative forces. I t encourages the free competition of free forces, i.e., reformation and revolution; it is against all wars, for war [pace what the Futurists assert, M.S.] harnesses all forces in the meanest way. 7. The ultimate aim of the new literature cannot be racial or national ! 8. The new literature cannot consist of a series of melodious rhymes written by snobs who have shining foreheads, with the only purpose of serving as sleeping pills for hysterical women. 9. The new literature must be a pillar of fire rising from the soul of the age. 10. The subject of the new literature is the whole cosmos ! 11. The voice of the new literature sings the song of forces t h a t have become aware of themselves. 12. The glorified ideal of the new literature is Man who is aware of the infinite !5 One can see from this manifesto how certain elements of Futurism and E. are combined in a program which tries to open a new path even in politics and calls for a participation in the struggle of economic and social forces. At the same time, it repeats Expressionist clichés with naive enthusiasm. Yet the spirit of revolt and the character­ istics of the Man of the Future had gained, in time, in historical eonereteness, and the result was a program that could be realized. The revolt of the artistic intelligentsia paralleled the people's desire for a revolution: the two urges mutually supported each other. Thus, a trend appeared in artistic theory and practice which Kassák himself called "Activism". As he wrote at a later date, "Both Der Sturm and Die Aktion were in close contact with Ma, for the latter effected a synthesis of these two movements; * Tett, No. 10, March 20, 1916. 290

its artists contributed to Der Sturm, and its political art had a considerable influence on Die Aktion" ? This sort of "Activism", which can be regarded as the Hungarian variant of E., developed a new attitude and creative method in the service of a political program which had relatively clear outlines but was far less clear in its details. I t took inspira­ tion from Whitman as much as from Ady, and from Unanimism as well as Futurism. What brought "Activism" closer to E. in the strict sense of the term was its rather vague and abstract image of man, the "leap into the future", the "cosmic" perspec­ tive, and, on the formal side, the breaking up of verse and its transformation into an inarticulate cry or a breathless verve, but also the presentation of abstract concepts, and the revolt of allegories. Between 1916 and 1919 numerous documents and artistic expressions of this Activist attitude were published in the two periodicals. Take, for example, the following statement: The art of Ma is the new art with an outlook shared by up-to-date forces. The young artists who have joined us have brought with them not only a new sense of form, but also a self-conscious socialist world view.—All buildings must be pulled down to give way to new possibilities in architecture. — So much for the will. And we assert that the fact t h a t after a five years' war the masses demand a socialist society is due partly to the drive which we, as anarchists, have spearheaded. 7 Activism, a local variant of E., was the main characteristic of the art of Kassák and his collaborators. Kassák defined his own artistic aims by stating the intention: "firmly to hold together things that are falling apart; to create a new unity out of the chaos surrounding us." And he continued: The inner dynamics broke up forms t h a t had become rigid. I wish to give form to the materiality of verse and not to playful rhymes or vibrating moods. I feel words as if they were bricks or stones cut into cubes, and I put them on top of, or beside, one another, as if I were building a house. . . . 'Futurism', they say. 'It is not t r u e / I answer, 'Although these poems are different from what I have written until now, they are more direct and sincere.' I hold t h a t in many respects Futurism moves on the surface, whereas this art is coming from the innermost part of myself. This is not art which exists apart from me; it is myself, all my humanity contained in words. 8 In the Activists' view, the poet is the prophet of a creative and glorious life. His poems embody an explosive power, a vocation, and they fly toward the glorious future. The dynamic, verbalizing style, the one-word exclamations, the new compound words, and the high ecstasy prove that the Activist revolutionists, foreseeing a historical change, were the advocates of the ideal of a new vitalism. Their works were to be the 6 Lajos Kassák and Imre Pan, "A modern müvészeti irányok története," Nagyvilág, May. 1957, 7p. 276. 'Quoted by Imre Bori and Eva Körner, Kassák irodalma és festészete (Budapest, 1967), pp. 68-69. 8 Quoted by György Rónay, "Kassák ás az izmusok," Irodalomtörténet, 1959, No. 1, pp. 48—49.

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voice of Man who is ready to act, taking impartial notice of the manifestations of the industrial revolution, the age of machines, and the world of nature. The Activist poet regarded the world as one of blissfull simplicity and as one which was immediately redeemable. For him, the rhythm of his odes was dictated by a sense of universal brotherhood. "The happy flags of life are playing in the perspective [sic]." That line, taken from Kassák's poem "Fiatai munkás" (Young Worker), can be regarded as the motto of these years. 9 As a Hungarian literary historian described the poetry of Kassák: " I n the texture of the images which contribute to the perception of one who works on his own initiative, of a world raised and saved by itself, one can see the lines of force of a stream moving outwards. These images are extremely functional: 'And now a man dashes into space'." 1 0 E., Activism, ecstasy, and the "leap into the future" can be illustrated by quoting a poem which Kassák wrote in 1917: Stretch out your hands the lady is dead oh oh the lady is gone oh oh she had vitriol and blue lilies in her knee-cap they pulled her to the middle of the room the closet stand in her pulphead bottomside up shame the stage has broken down on us and nothing is certain not even t h a t 2 x 2 = 4 peasants rear metropolitan bedbugs in their pallets how can the worldwheel run on without fragrant bunds the undertakers started unofficial actions everywhere and o god the streets gurgle black cards below angels playing Boccaccio's Memoirs on the harp yet pity most the operas where tattooed legs are sung into the eyes of lean generals what about the aspic-bodied count and the jewellers the lady was lovely remember her ruby-nippled breasts her eyes were domesticated predators living on loins gold and drop-outs lower the sadness down from the loft far in the East hothouse-flowers bend down and our ancestors' red asses dance a dance of mourning romantic race is still alive in them we are the only ones fallen thru the riddle and turned into ugly selfish beasts with crooked mustaches under the nose memories stab into our hearts with gingers words b u t we keep on singing oh oh the lady's dead oh oh the lady's gone lovely she was hallelujah remember her ruby-nippled breasts oh oh OH OH 9 See Miklós Béládi, "Kassák Lajos költészete" in Arcképek a magyar szocialista irodalomhól, ed. László Illés (Budapest, 1967), p. 63. 10 Imre Bori, "A magyar expresszionizmus," loe. cit., p, 24.

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The whole development has been aptly summarized by Imre Bori: The phases of this poetry were simultaneous with those phases of E. which had a general significance. The principal feature of Hungarian E. was that the experience of social, human, and existential misery was presented as a reflex of the misery brought about by the war; whereas peace, or rather the image of the end of the war, was associated with revolutionary action and turned into the image of a characteristically revolutionary apocalypse. 11 I n addition to Kassák, other members of the Hungarian Expressionist-Activist group should be mentioned. One of them, Aladar Komját (1891-1937), developed an Expressionist diction as early as 1914. In his work, the fragmentary world was present­ ed in fragmentary poems and broken exclamations that tended to be highly ecstatic. Komját combined Expressionist diction with the dramatic qualities of the Hungarian folk ballad, and this synthesis gave special power to his poems. He attacked the war with increasing vehemence, making use of Expressionist deformations and putting his own poetic self in the center. Sometimes he arrived at an extreme conciseness, as in a line like "My body is a mouth shouting. , , Later Komját joined the anti-militarist movement and then the Communist party, thus parting company with Kassák. Sándor Barta (1897-1938)—a writer using a strident, hyperbolic and grotesque tone—and the short-story writer Erzsi Újvári (1899-1940) also started their career as members of the Expressionist group. The experimental one-act plays and the dramatic theory of János Mácza (1893-) also revealed the influence of E. Later, in his article on the Absolute Theater, Mácza developed the concept of an Expressionist theater which counted upon the whole people as its audience. János Lékai (1895-1925) also started as a writer of dramatic works written in "free rhythms" and displaying emotional and stylistic traits characteristic of E. His play János Ember can be taken as a model of Hungarian Expressionist Activism. 12 I t embodies the creed of a young politician who believes in Communism, but is written in an Expressionist idiom. As Lékai himself confessed, he wrote that play "at the height of ecstasy . . . in an extremely quick and ecstatic outburst". With exceptional clarity and perceptiveness, he described the Weltanschauung characteristic of Expressionist writers at the time: "The revolutionary transformation of a burning world knew neither martyrs nor heroes. There were only those who intuitively felt the age of revolutionary torrents. These did not confront the injustices of earthly existence with their eyes closed, b u t retained all their high-flung emotions while being carried off in the tempest pre­ ceding the volcanic eruption." 1 3 The contributors of Ma repeatedly emphasized that E. was identical with world revolution; and in their special way they did their best to prepare the way for such a revolution. The tone of their journal became more and more radical, and its special issues, devoted to "international" and "ideological" questions, contained documents 11 Ibid., p. 116, 12 A German version, 13

Der Mensch, was published in Konstanz, in 1923. János Lékai, "A forradalmár." A Hét, December 1, 1918; reprinted in János Lékai válogatott irásai, ed. László Illes (Budapest, 1963), p. 542. 293

concerning the revolution of the proletariat, Thus it was no accident t h a t the Hun­ garian Communist P a r t y came into being in Kassák's flat. This shows that, in certain cases, the revolt of the artistic intelligentsia moves entirely parallel with the direction of revolutionary development. I t can be helpful even for the understanding of presentday developments to examine what mental elements of avant-garde literature and art, that is, of the manifestations of an artistic intelligentsia in search of new ways, con­ tributed to the construction of the socialist revolution. In 1919, when the Hungarian Soviet Republic was established, the Activist move­ ment, which had prepared the way for the revolution, became an important constit­ uent of literary life. At the same time, the "profile" of Hungarian Activism underwent a change, simultaneously with the change in the political situation. The leaders and the members of the group declared that, once political power had been won, their purpose was no more to engage in direct political propaganda, but to strive for the formation of a new image of man, the preparation of "the collective individual", and the creation of a new human ideal. In accordance with this theoretical program, as well as with the tradition of E., and other contemporary trends in world literature, the literary works published in Ma in 1919 were full of ecstasy, and the torrent of emotions was expressed in an idiom combining elements of E., Symbolism, and folk literature, resulting in the "mythology of misery" and the abstract image of the man of the future who is a worker and an artist at the same time. This art is exemplified, on a high artistic level, by "Boldog köszöntés" (Happy Salutation), a poem in which Kassák carries on his polemics with Béla Kun. Subsequently, the Activists of Ma entered into a controversy with the representa­ tives of other literary trends. Various groups were fighting for hegemony and the right to represent Activism. There were, on the one hand, the conservatives advocating the "workers' poetry" of an earlier type or a lighter, urban literature of distinctly bourgeois character; on the other hand, there were the impatient Maximalists who wanted to have everything right away. If one adds to all this the fact that the menace of right-wing elements was only too real, one will have a vague notion of the atmosphere pervading the period. These debates foreshadowed the later tensions in Hungary as well as in other countries between the socialist system in the form in which it was ulti­ mately realized and the avantgarde artists. In 1919 the process was halted before it had reached its full development, for the Hungarian Soviet Republic collapsed after a few months. What happened subsequent to this event was a virtual disintegration of Hungarian E. The tension caused by the war and the various social problems slackened. Having lost its driving force, E. was devoid of substance. From the fall of 1919, Hungary was under a "white" rule; many Hungarian writers were persecuted, while others went into exile. Most of these latter continued their activity in Vienna. Gradually, E. split up into four trends, or rather its impulses developed in four different ways. Kassák also left Hungary for Vienna. Most members of his group followed him, and it was in that city that Ma was published for a number of years. Kassák and his group went on calling themselves Activists, but after 1919 the meaning of that word had 294

changed. 14 All hope had vanished, and under the influence of despair the group moved in the direction of Dadaism. Although, subsequently, Surrealism also made its in­ fluence on their work felt, the dominant trend with which the members of this group were definitely associated as early as 1922 was Constructivism. The highly passionate Ë. and its naive cult of man seemed to be old-iashioned to these writers, who thought that Futurism and E. represented an earlier phase in a development whose turning point and consummation were Cubism and Constructivism, respectively. They felt that the new world of the new man had to be designed and presented with utmost geometrical precision and architectural boldness. Thus, little by little, "Activism" became identical with Constructivism. The Expressionist style of other members of the group as in the case of Komját and, later, Barta-became more moderate and survived almost exclu­ sively on the surface, in passionate exclamations and in the verbal style, whereasthe underlying Weltanschauung and the content were no longer Expressionistic. The ideal was no longer the man of the Future, goodness, or love, but the revolutionary communist led by the optimism of the revolutionary surge of the 1920's. At the same time, E, survived in Hungary. What is more, about 1920 it became fashionable among the young to write in that particular style. The first works of the "second generation", of those writers who started their career about 1920, were Ex­ pressionist poems. I t is easy to understand this development, for the belief in Man, in goodness, and in the power of words comforts one under the pressure of a dark age: You all are good, So why should you do something evil, and I t is not me who is shouting, it is the earth that is rumbling, and O, we are really so pure . « . This is the voice of Attila József (1905-1937), the greatest Hungarian poet of the next generation, speaking in his early voice (1923-1924). Lörinc Szabó (1900-1957) also used an Expressionist idiom when, in the name of the young rebels, he expressed his desire for life and for the destruction of old patterns. True, soon both writers abandoned these early experiments, and their essays show that it was a highly conscious reaction which, in the early thirties, urged them to get rid of an E. they felt to be far too subjective, unrestrained, and disintegrating. Their reaction was in accordance with the "objective" tendencies prevalent in contemporary poetry. Szabó even changed the diction of his early poems when he included them in his later volumes. In the works of young or second-rate poets, the Expressionist impulse developed in various ways, but in most cases it became insipid. Those who started to write in the spirit of socialist ideas went on using broken, passionate, and evocative exclamations, 14

See Kassák's statement "Aktivizmus," Ma, April, 10, 1919, pp. 46-51. 295

while other groups of "lost" young writers brought the Expressionist syntax close to the Hungarian national tradition and celebrated the man of the twenty-fifth [sic] century in poems reminiscent of oral formulae and written in very long lines. There were instances in which E. verged on the anarchist grotesque—as in the work of Ferene Pintér (1895-1932), who starved to death and who could be regarded as an early re­ presentative of the Hungarian beatniks. E. also had its theoreticians, among whom Iván Hevesy, who tried to develop an art for the masses on an Expressionist basis, was the most notable. Taking the prevailing circumstances into consideration, one must not be surprised t h a t no dramatic works were written in that style: it was obvious that such plays could not have been staged in a country with a conservative, right-wing policy. That is why the representatives of E. escaped into lyrical poetry or literary theory. A third branch of E. was the survival of that variant which Dezsó Szabó had repre­ sented. What we have said about Hungarian E. having turned insipid and having changed its function applies especially to this branch. Szabó suddenly turned from a scholarly man of letters into a ringleader. After 1919, his roman fleuve, Az elsodort falu (A Village Swept Away) became the Bible of young men who were full of social emotions but worked them off with the help of right-wing, anti-Semitic, and racist ideas. Thus, Vitalism, allegories, and the love of the people and of the land were combined with an Expressionist technique and served as the emotional basis of Hungarian fascism. One must admit t h a t Szabó combined all this with considerable artistry. The myths of the Land, the Race, and the Blood, as well as the caricature-like idealization of the Great Man and the Artist which he cultivated, seem to be extremely old-fashioned nowadays. But the changes from nominal to verbal forms, the personifications, the 'leaps into the infinite," the 'living" concepts, and the desperate cries combined with a characteristi­ cally Hungarian diction and vocabulary taken from the poems of Ady had a consider­ able influence on Szabó. This explains why most of the young writers who were either themselves of peasant origin or were the spokesmen of the Hungarian peasantry—e.g., Pál Szabó, Aron Tamási, and László Németh—, and who started their career in a rightwing circle wrote their first works in a style closely reminiscent of that of Szabó, and why the phrases and allegories used by this second wave of Hungarian E. appeared in the right-wing press and political language, so t h a t in the forties the idiom of the movemerits of the Hungarian extreme right wing contained many Expressionist elements. The long way traversed from Rubiner, Toller, and Werfel to the vocabulary of the programs announced by the right-wing terrorists is one of the most paradoxical func­ tional changes in the history of E. And last, but not least, E. had a much longer survival in the Hungarian literature of territories which after 1920 belonged to other countries, where writers profited from a freer political atmosphere. Thus, in Czechoslovakia Imre Forbáth (1898-1967) became an eminent representative of Expressionist poetry: a characteristic variant of E. emerged in Yugoslavia in the poetry of Zoltán Csuka (1901-) and Lajos Fekete (1900-); and the Expressionist idiom had a considerable influence on several Hungarian literary works written in Rumania, as, for instance, on a characteristic example of socialist fiction, Új pászfor (The New Shepherd), written by András Szilágyi (1904-). 296

E. enjoyed a second life in these variants, but its main current ceased to flow at the beginning of the Thirties, as the perceptive Hungarian critic, György Bálint, ob­ served in 1932. What he said corresponded to the general opinion: "At that time they caused a sensation . . . Today they seem to be rather interesting and even a bit ridic­ ulous. The representatives of Expressionism had ceased to write in that style long ago; they have now entered a new, richer, and more creative period; they now write in a calmer tone." And Bálint's prophecy is equally characteristic: "The great. Sturm und Drang of the white man and the social crisis of the world have not yet ended, but art and literature, which always slightly anticipate the social development, already an­ nounce a new age, a new relaxation, a new Classicism." 15

15

György Bálint, "Az izmusok születése és halála," A Toll, IV, (1932), No. 4, p. 155. 207

JAN JOZEF

LIPSKI

EXPRESSIONISM IN POLAND

I t was as a result of its contact with German culture and literature that Polish E, was born and developed. For it was in Germany -partly through the influence of Scandi­ navian writers like Strindberg— that the new tendency first made itself felt and the first consciously Expressionist programs were subsequently formulated. Yet, by the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century the cultural situation of that country was, in many ways, similar to that of European culture as a whole, and this for various reasons. Eventually, this similarity resulted in a fairly uniform and more or less integrated pattern. This integration was facilitated by a thriving exchange of cultural products (and news about them) by means of translations, visits abroad and studies at foreign universities. Besides, almost every national culture in Europe had already exhibited some traits and tendencies which might be regarded as foreboding E. Let us mention William Blake in England, Dostoevsky in Russia, Rim­ baud in France, and— in view of our present topic—some of the Polish Romanticists, especially Adam Mickiewicz and his predecessors, Juliusz Slowacki in his writings of the mystical period, and Zygmunt Krasinski with his Nieboska Komedia (Undivine Comedy, 1835). In all European literatures—and more distinctly so in Eastern than in Central Europe—we encounter areas or phenomena with regard to which a leading role was played not only by the native literary tradition but by various foreign ones (and by the current situation of world literature) as well; and this is true not only for literature but for culture as a whole. This fact should not be viewed, however, as resulting pri­ marily from an almost mechanical exchange—the borrowing and conscious adaptation of foreign models—but rather in direct relation to the fact that some writers or groups of writers originated from a cultural borderland. Although the nationality of such writers might be indisputable, their relations with a foreign culture were often so rich and so complex t h a t the nature of their art cannot be explained with reference to the tradition or literary history of any one country, including a writer's personal life, social standing, political views, ethnic background, etc. Thus, in order to properly interpret the developments which occurred in one province of a national literature one needs to be thoroughly versed in the traditions prevailing in the adjoining countries. But this knowledge is hardly sufficient to explain the autonomous process of growth, in the course of which the adopted patterns were often transformed and evolved on their own and apart from the native roots, 299

Supplementing its internal growth, Polish literature of the Romantic period had close ties with two other national traditions—the French (with which its links were firm and well-established) and the German (with which it had only recently come in touch). As Modernism came into its own, both literatures exerted considerable influence; but it was the latter which was more organic and, consequently, more creative and original. There were no less than four different subcurrents in Polish Modernism: Symbolism, E., Impressionism, and Neo-Classicism (partly identified with Parnassianism). Un­ fortunately, we cannot discuss here the fourfold nature of this phenomenon, however relevant it might be to the history of Polish E. Another aspect we have to skip over for lack of space is the dynamic nature of Polish Modernism which, by 1905, had given rise to a new literary situation, regarding which there is still considerable doubt as to whether it represents an outgrowth of or a rebellion against Modernism. At any rate, to give a general picture of the Expressionist current in Polish letters we must start with a brief presentation of the fundamental incompatibility between E. and Symbolism, the two principal trends. Perhaps the outstanding feature of Symbolism is its underlying cognitive approach which is founded on the belief in an objective world of ideas. The aim of Symbolist poetry is, accordingly, to reach out for these ideas, which it seeks to comprehend, while E. does not make such claims. The Symbolists also considered reality as being dualistic and maintained t h a t all phenomena were to be seen in relation to ideas and, ultimately, the principal Idea, often called the Absolute. While sharing this dualistic world view, the Expressionists focused on the dualism of matter and spirit (or soul) and often identified the most spiritual phenomenon, God, as their Absolute. In fact, they fre­ quently identified the despised matter with sensual perception. P u t differently, E. stresses the polarity of will, freedom, and soul, on the one hand, and determinism, necessity, and matter, on the other. Hence it is possible to interpret Symbolism as a form of Platonic idealism, while E. has its closest counterpart in the Hindu idealism of Sankara, as indeed one can trace its Indian antecedents—so fashionable in the mod­ ernistic period—to Schopenhauer. Let us briefly list a few other important dichotomies between the two movements under consideration, such as 1. In Symbolist axiology a close relationship exists between ontology and epistemology (insofar as the Absolute and Truth are identified with Beauty). I n Expressionist axiology, ontology and epistemology are similarly related, in t h a t goodness is identi­ fied with the soul, and evil with matter, just as cognition of value is identified with cognition as such. 2. Symbolist axiology is monistic, i.e., beauty exists as an ideal, substantial being, while ugliness is only a lack of beauty, and thus a form of non-being. Expressionist axiology, on the other hand, is dualistic, in that both good and evil are taken to be real substances. 3. Consistent with their idealistic cognitive outlook is the Symbolists' acceptance of the world as it is (though not as the best of those existing), while the attitude of the ethical Expressionists is often rebellious and activist. 300

4. Given their aestheticism, their cognitive rather than activist attitude, and their concern with ideal and absolute values, the Symbolists tend to regard human relations as insignificant. Since the philosophy of Symbolism is individualistic, a total indifference toward collective interests prevails. By way of contrast, the Expressionists like to engage in common tasks. They identify themselves with the community and fight for its own good, quite often furiously attacking the social status quo for ethical reasons. Generally speaking, then, their attitude is one of participation. 5. In searching for the Absolute and remaining indifferent with regard to social phenomena, Symbolism centers around the ideal and the eternal. That is to say, it is apt to disregard the historical facts as well as the contemporary situation, while, in spite of its fundamental belief in eternal values, E. is rather anthropocentric and historistic. For the Expressionist, values are embodied in the communal biography which is history, and history past and present is regarded as a continual struggle be­ tween good and evil. Hence the difference in temporal perspective: the Symbolists, taking time to be an attribute of the phenomenal world, consider it to be irrelevant, whereas the Expressionists understand any change or movement to be an attribute of the soul fighting against matter, evil and its own inertia while striving for selfrealization. The Symbolists, accordingly, tend to depict timeless situations and phenom­ ena. Even in the historical novel they look for a fabulous "somewhere'' and "some­ time", i.e., a condition outside of time and space, while the Expressionists regard time and its dynamic unfolding as constitutive agents in the struggle of good with evil, and soul with matter. For them, the prospect of a future whether it be a prospect for catastrophe or Utopia—is both formally and ideologically significant. 6. Being monistic in its axiology, Symbolism tends to construct the depicted reality without any conflicts, while E. is essentially conflict-conscious in passing judg­ ment on the world. Hence what matters in the poetics of Symbolism is the endeavor to harmonize the means of expression, while the Expressionists prefer contradictions. Moreover, whereas Symbolism leans toward the use of static devices, E. prefers dynamic forms and techniques. 7. The fundamental structural unit of Symbolism is the symbol as constituting the organizing principle of the depicted world and as an important agent influencing the poetic language. Conversely, expression is the basic structural unit of E. In Symbolism, we have to do with semantics on three different levels: the word-sign level, the level of connotation and denotation, and the level of ideas denoted with the help of the wordsign designations. In E., owing to the semantic character of the act of expression, a direct semantic relationship exists between the word-sign level and a given subject. Hence it is characteristic for E. to depict reality as reduced to the "I". But the " I " , which is the subject of Expressionist literature, tends to identify itself with communal values and values of a cosmic nature, with the universal Soul acting as a cosmic force, etc. Thus the dialectics of extreme subjectivism pitted against universal tendencies is essential for t h a t movement. A whole set of formal traits and preferred subjects is linked with the above-men­ tioned philosophical and structural features of Polish (and perhaps all) E., whose mor­ alistic outlook and subjectivist standpoint result in an urge for meaningful deformation 301

of the depicted reality. Here one of the favorite methods is that of using the grotesque along with hyperbolic style and imagery, or of adapting styles like the Gothic, Baroque mysticism, or folkloric primitivism. A meaningful deformation is achieved when an image or figure, as a result of a change in its natural appearance, is endowed with a new quality. Thus the Expressionists use animal metaphors in order to stress aesthetically displeasing, revolting or horrible features; or they concern themselves with physical or mental illness. In fact, these methods are characteristic of the anti-aestheticism of almost all Expressionist writers, linking them, as it were, with the Naturalist tra­ dition—although "naturalism" plays an entirely different role here. E. also likes to depict reality through the broken mirror of a nightmare, a schizophrenic delusion, etc. This tendency also affects the relationship between motive and action by breaking up or obliterating the cause-effect relationship and manifesting itself in a peculiar kind of word formation, by means of which the world of things and that of phenomena are dissociated in order to achieve an adequate expression. Ultimately, syntax, ver­ sification and word formation disintegrate in consequence thereof. I t is obvious that the attempted survey of Polish E. can only be regarded as a model; for I doubt that among the Expressionist works of literature there is a single one which has all the markings needed for purposes of illustration. Perhaps it would be possible to classify the works to be dealt with, so that the attained typology, attesting to the dispersion of traits and the wealth of their combination, would constitute an overview of Polish E. This task would be tempting but cannot possibly be accomplished within the limits of this article. When speaking of borderline cases, for instance, one single aspect of a writer's work—that of Juliusz Kaden-Bandrowski, among others may place him among the Expressionists. If the story of Polish E., on the other hand, were limited to the writings of those authors who considered themselves adherents to the movement, the picture would be a very skimpy one. For in that case a discussion of the periodical Zdroj (Mineral Water), published from 1917 to 1923, would do the trick. The problem, however, is infinitely more complex. For some time now, in modern literary history (as in the monograph by Soke!) the view has prevailed that the beginnings of the current here under consideration could be discerned as far back as the last decade of the nineteenth century. This temporal extension resulted in a further enrichment of the picture through the late works of the writers who did not consider themselves Expressionists but whose writings, neverthe­ less, display certain characteristic features of that movement. In the history of Polish literature, this view is advocated by Kazimierz Wyka in a book (1953) which was published at a time when this idea was still new and original. I t is by no means acciden­ tal that the first generation of Polish Expressionists includes several writers who were closely linked to German letters and thought. This is especially true of Stanislaw Przybyszewski, J a n Kasprowicz, Waclaw Berent, and, partly, Tadeusz Micinski. These authors were the initiators of the movement, which has since proceeded by its own impetus, though from time to time converging with the history of German E. One could call Przybyszewski (1868-1927) the godfather of Polish E. if it were not for the fact that the baby was only christened when it had already grown into a big child. Educated in German schools and at German universities, an active member of 302

t h e German-Scandinavian Bohème in Berlin, a friend of Dehmel's and a close acquaint­ ance of Strindberg (to name only a few of his contacts), Przybyszewski started out as a German writer and took to writing in Polish at a time when he was well established on the German literary scene. His fame temporarily subsided in Poland, and even more so in Germany; but by the end of the century (after the publication of his ecstatic prose poems Totenmesse, 1893; De Profundis, 1895; and Vigilien, 1895; as well as his essays —also written in poetic p r o s e – Z u r Psychologie des Individuums, 1892; Das Werk des Edward Munch, 1894; Auf den Wegen der Seele, 1897; and Die Synagoge des Satans, 1897; and the novels Homo Sapiens, 1895/98; and Satans Kinder, 1897) he found himself among the writers who counted in German literature. As far back as the period between the two World Wars, the historians of literature saw in Przybyszewski a forerunner of E. Today, viewing our recent change of perspec­ tive with regard to t h a t movement, we may even regard him (with Dehmel or Strind­ berg) as one of the first Expressionists. His theory of art, based on the concept of the ''naked soul", fits well into this pattern, especially as he applied it to the study of Frédéric Chopin and Munch. Equally Expressionistic was Przybyszewski's metaphysics of sex (pansexualism) and his ethics (satanism, known also to several Symbolists, but here used in support of a philosophy of freedom and revolt). But most Expressionist perhaps is his literary style, which is exclamatory and hyperbolic, psychological issues being transposed to the level of a metaphysical gigantomachia. When Przybyszewski returned to his native country, he acted as ferment in Polish literary life. In Cracow he assumed, in 1898, the editorship of Zycie (Life), one of the most ambitious periodicals in the history of Polish letters, and was the very life and soul of the extremely dynamic contemporary Bohemia. Actually, Zycie cannot be regarded as an exclusively Expressionist journal; for although this whole generation was keenly aware of the contrast between the old and the new, no differentiations were made within the broadly defined current known as Modernism. Nevertheless, from time to time, the magazine published Expressionist works of considerable historical impor­ tance, such as Kasprowiez's " H y m n y " (Hymns). But Przybyszewski himself, now writing in Polish, did not produce new significant works of his own. The third phase of Przybyszewski's life which is significant for Polish E. were the years of his close association with the Poznan periodical Zdroj, about which more later. At that time, he wrote the following essays relevant to our topic: "Szlakiem düszy polskiej" (Following the P a t h of the Polish Psyche, 1917), "Ekspresjonizm, Slowacki i Genezis z Ducha" (E., Slowacki and his Genesis out of the Spirit, 1918) and "Powrotna fala: Naokolo ekspresjonizmu" (The Tide of Return: Around E., 1918). The importance of this half-poetic and ecstatic prose lies in the fact that it implies a search for a native tradition in Polish Romanticism. At the end of his life, Przybyszewski wrote two volumes of memoirs, entitled Moi wspólczesni (My Contemporaries). The first of these, Wsród obych (Among Foreigners, 1926), is a highly significant contribution to the history of German E,, while its sequel is often regarded as his most significant book. One of the most important achievements of Polish literary E. is, undoubtedly, Kasprowiez's (1860-1926) Hymns, (First published in two slim volumes called Salve 303

Regina, 1898, and Ginacemu swiatu [To the Perishing World, 1902], these poems were integrated in 1922.) These Hymns were of great consequence, not only within the context of Polish E. but also in the rest of Europe, although their impact abroad was not es­ pecially strong. Educated in Germany and, as a writer, deeply influenced by German literature, Kasprowicz, in composing the Hymns, created not only an outstanding work of art but produced a sample of mature Expressionist poetry, even before such forceful and accomplished works in that style were produced in the homeland of the movement. The importance of these lyrics is also, in part, due to their being evidence of the essential oneness of European literature. Every European country has its own national literature; yet these are not separate pieces of a puzzle but integral organs of one body, Europe being a melting pot for many ideas, currents, and influences which would be hard to understand and interpret if viewed as being confined within the borders of one country. In his Hymns, Kasprowicz uses a poetic technique which is fundamental to E. throughout its history. The moods, thoughts and images contained in these great poems are sharply contrasted with each other, the scenery is cosmic, and hyperboles expres­ sing religious and ethical notions abound. Prayer is juxtaposed with blasphemy, and obedience to God's will or blind fate with Promethean revolt. Kasprowicz's main sub­ jects are sin and guilt, i.e., problems characteristic of literature in the ambience of E, from Strindberg to Kafka. The Hymns also belong to the first phase of Polish Catastrophism, insofar as they abound with visions of a total extermination (cf. "Dies Irae"), The apocalyptic motif, however, was quite prominent in German Expressionist litera­ ture as well. In Polish letters, Catastrophism (always closely linked with E.) recurs frequently, giving voice not only to a metaphysical perception but offering substantial criticism of contemporary civilization and expressing apprehension regarding its impli­ cations. To name only the most prominent instances of neo-Catastrophism: the poetry of the Skamander group active after World War I, the Catastrophism of the younger generation of poets writing on the eve of World War II, the young poets of the Resis­ tance (AK) during the second World War, and, in the late fifties, following the sociorealistic period, the Catastrophism born out of the fear of nuclear extermination and the crushing force of totalitarianism. In the history of Polish E., the publication of every novel by Waclaw Berent (1873-1940) was an outstanding event. Berent started out as a realist and an epigone of positivism (in Polish literature, positivism was a branch of realism in the second half of the nineteenth century); but already his second novel, Fródino (The Rot), published in 1903, is Expressionist in character. Berent also belonged to the group of writers linked to German culture and thought. He studied in Munich, was well acquainted with the works of Nietzsche, which he translated and by which he was greatly influenced, as is evident from the title of his book Zródta i ujsćia nietzscheanizmu (The Sources and Outlets of Nietzscheanism, 1906). The scene of Fródino is laid in the Polish-German circle of the Munich Bohème. The novel itself, being one of the most typical works of Polish Modernism, is extremely critical of the whole complex of attitudes and behavior known as decadence in art and life but is, at the same time, greatly influenced by the fin-de-siècle. Frodino was the first novel to expose the internal conflict of Polish Mod304

ernism, i.e., the conflict (unknown to the writers themselves) between Expressionist activism and the quietistic attitudes typical of the other forms of Modernism. The activism of the Polish Expressionists of the Mloda Polska (Young Poland) group, flourishing at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of our century, resulted in an interesting and important crossbreeding when grafted onto the indigenous Polish tradition. To tell the truth, the literary tradition was relatively insignificant in this connection. For in the nineteenth century almost all Polish literature constituted a direct or indirect commentary on the contemporary political situation. By the end of the seventeenth century, Poland had lost her independence and was partitioned by three foreign powers.These facts were the main source of inspiration for Polish Romanti­ cism, the period of the most brilliant achievements in Polish letters, at least in the fields of poetry and drama. Polish literature has always been patriotic and nationalistic, constantly looking for an answer to the question of national independence, especially after the failure of insurrections and in periods of deep social change. The beginning of Polish E. coincided with a new struggle for independence on the part of some influential groups, harboring the belief in armed rebellion as a means of liberation. Thus, at t h a t time, action was not only a matter of philosophical outlook or literary conviction but one of the keys to the problem of Polish national existence. This problem was, accord­ ingly, reflected in the writers' attitude toward the Romantic heritage. Previously, Polish Romanticism had been accused of inspiring national uprisings which, time and again, ended in defeat. (This was obviously an exaggeration.) The Modernists, in turn, while in many ways harking back to Romanticism, were the first to call our Romantic poetry "graveyard poetry" and to point out the quietistic effects of the so-called Messianism. In fact, Messianism greatly influenced the Polish Romanticists, insofar as the slogan "Poland is the Messiah of nations" gave new meaning to the nation's defeats and sufferings. But it was not the only weapon of modernist criticism in its attacks against Romanticism. The above tendencies generated in Polish E. a body of works of great significance both in our literature and ideology. The most prominent figure to be mentioned here is Stanislaw Brzozowski (1876-1911), a critic who argued against Polish Romanticism and the literature of the time in his book Legenda Mtodej Polski (Young Poland's Legend, 1909), which preaches a philosophy of work and action. Brzozowski's connec­ tions with E. have not yet been studied; but a kinship between his writings and those of Berent and Stanislaw Wyspiánski is quite evident. I t is interesting to note that Brzozowski's novels, dealing with the struggle between Polish and Russian revolution­ aries and the tsardom, display many features linking them with E. In more recent criticism, Wyspiánski (1869-1907) is frequently labeled an Ex­ pressionist. B u t the question at issue is whether Wesele (The Wedding, 1901), the most popular of his plays, deserves to be called Expressionist or whether that label should be reserved for Wyzwolenie (Liberation, 1903), which might well be regarded as one of the first Expressionist dramas in European literature. The subjects of the two plays are similar in several ways: both are concerned, with our national—the Romantic — tradition by depicting the birth of a modern, socially stratified nation, all of whose classes are fully aware of both their common nationality and their specific political 305

aims. B u t in Wesele Wyspiánski makes extensive use of the techniques characteristic of the Symbolist drama, whereas, primarily with respect to its dramatic form, Wyzwolenie is Expressionist in nature. I n fact, E. established its own dramatic convention, relying heavily on the peculiar nature of the new theater. To make a long story short, Expressionist drama was more theatrical than literary. A stage director as well as a brilliant poet-playwright, Wyspiánski realized these possibilities and knew how to put them to use. We must add, however, that both Wyzwolenie and, to a degree, Wesele directly refer back to the tradition of Polish Romantic drama. This explains why those who prefer to call the modernist literature of the Young Poland group Neoromantic have chosen Wyspiánski's works as their chief object of demonstration. The author of Ozimina (Winter Crop, 1911), Berent, like Wyspiánski, is regarded as one of the chief representatives of the above tendency to link E. with a search for the new ideological prospects of Polish national life. For a long time, the critics have pointed out his ties with Wyspiánski, not only as regards their common ideas and beliefs, b u t also in the choice of the settings in which their drama of ideas unfolds. Both Ozimina and Wesele feature a dance, lasting all night, during which many people, representing different strata of society, different orientations, attitudes and generations, are brought together. This kind of setting is so deeply rooted in the Polish literary tradition t h a t even after World War I I it was used, to similar purpose, in such out­ standing works as Mury Jerycha (The Walls of Jericho) by Tadeusz Breza (born 1905), Jerzy Andrzejewski's Popiól i diamant (Ashes and Diamonds, 1948) and, subsequently, in Wajda's brilliant cinematographic adaptation of the piece, as well as in Slawomir Mrozek's Tango. Among the Expressionists of the Young Poland group, Tadeusz Miciñski (18731919)—author of the book of poems W mroku gwiazd (In the Darkness of Stars, 1920), the plays Kniáz Patiomkin (Prince Patiomkin, 1907) and Bazylissa Teofanu (In the Darkness of a Gold Palace, 1909), and the novels Nietota (1910) and Xiadz Faust (Father Faust, 1913) —occupies a special place. He was the most original, experimental and unpredictable writer of the period. Micinski's contemporaries were shocked by his poetry, which was often taken to be Symbolist, although its Expressionist traits are predominant. I n many ways, Miciński harked back to the art of Slowacki, especially the latter's mystical works; but he also employed Byronic themes and devices, such as the English poet's lonely and mighty Luciferian rebels. His works abound with images reminiscent of Secessionist art and make ample use of typically Expressionist tech­ niques (ellipsis, hyperbole, etc.). Miciñski even went so far as to anticipate Surrealist techniques by introducing nightmare images. His plays Kniáz Patiomkin and Bazylissa Teofanu are veritable classics of E., especially the former work, whose plot is based on the revolt of the Russian Black Sea fleet in 1905. Set against the backdrop of a fantastic scenery, the play is intended as an allegory of the cosmic struggle between good and evil. I t antic­ ipates the German Expressionist drama of World War I and the immediate post-war period (Kaiser, Toller, Unruh and others). Bazylissa Teofanu, on the other hand, deals with an event in the history of Byzantium, which is only used as a pretext, however. For everything in the play is unreal, nightmarish, and ambiguous, just as the plot is 306

vague and the motivations cryptic. As for Miciński's novels, they depict worlds governed by their own laws, half fictional but full of references to issues and persons belonging to the cultural elite of the author's age. Their plots are so nebulous that they seem to be records of paranoic ravings. For the first time in Polish E., extensive use was being made of the grotesque, infused with a considerable dose of dramatic mysticism; and the catastrophic and apocalyptic motifs were not lacking. After the revolution of 1905, Polish Modernism underwent a profound crisis, which had a more detrimental effect on the Symbolist strain than on the strictly Expressionist one, which, precisely in this period, produced a couple of truly outstanding works. Nevertheless, when during World War I, the first Polish periodical fostering the cause of E. was founded, E. itself was coming to an end, and a tendency to return to already existing traditions in the midst of entirely new developments re­ asserted itself. In this second phase of Polish E., the periodical Zdroj was the exponent of the most orthodox aspects of t h a t movement. While directly referring to the German Expressionist programs—not only by using the labels but also by publishing translations of works identified as tending in this direction—it also took up the cause of Polish E. To a degree, this was a result of its choice of contributors. We have already seen that Przybyszewski was one of its most prominent collaborators. Similarly, Berent's third great Expressionist novel, Zywe kamienie (Living Stones, 1918) was published in Zdroj as a "half-mythical tale from the late Middle Ages and the dawn of the Renaissance". This novel once more confirms Nietzsche's influence on Berent's writings while showing, on the other hand, that Berent was a serious student of history. Zywe kamienie adds another complication to the range of problems concerning E . E. Theoretically, that is to say, the Expressionists should refrain from stylization as a device violating the tenets of spontaneity and direct expression. But, in practice, there existed acknowledged bonds of kinship between E. on the one hand and primitive, Gothic, and Baroque art on the other. Viewed in connection with Berent's other works, Zywe kamienie is seen to take up, once again, a subject central in his Expressionist oeuvre. Whereas Próchno offers a critique of the artistic impotence of the decadents and Ozimina a critique of the indolence of the higher strata of Polish society, Zywe kamienie deals with the problems of acedia, the social illness of an obsolete and inert world. In comparison with the other works published in Zdroj, Berent's novel was sensa­ tional. Although the periodical succeeded in drawing together a group of contributors, one or two of whom were to acquire lasting fame, the central focus of a great personality was lacking. The best known of the frequent collaborators was Emil Zegadlowicz (1888-1941), the author of Odejsćie Ralfa Moora (The Departure of Ralph Moor, 1919), one of the most characteristic post-war Expressionist poems. Here great historical changes are depicted in an unreal, fantastic manner and a grandiloquent style. The hero of the poem takes on the dimensions of a mythical giant in an enormous and wellnigh cosmic urban setting; and syntactically as well as prosodically, the poem counter­ mands the sing-song melody of Symbolist poetry. But the true significance of Zegadlowicz's work for Polish literature in general, and Polish Expressionism in particular, did not emerge until a later date and took on a different cast. 307

The editor-in-chief of Zdrój was Jerzy Hulewicz (1886-1941), a graphic artist, novelist (Kratery [The Craters, 1924]) and playwright (Aruna [1920], Kain [1922], and Achim [Joachim, 1922]). As a writer he was mediocre, and his works were not very popular; but he was daring and adventurous enough to experiment with Expressionist techniques. His brother, Witold Hulewicz (1895-1941), the poet and translator of Rilke, leaned a little toward Symbolism but also wrote a biography of Beethoven (Przybleda Bozy [He Who Strayed from God, 1927]) which is a pendant to the German Expressionist, or pseudo-Expressionist biographies of the twenties. Jean Stur (18951923), a minor poet, was a fairly accomplished critic, whose criticism, however, is somewhat vague and pathetically poetical. I t was he who, in his volume of essays Na przelomie (At the Turning Point, 1921), presented an outline of Polish Expressionist criticism. In his Hymny (1920), Jozef Wittlin (born 1896) returned to the forms devel­ oped by Kasprowicz but used them for different purposes. These poems are protests against the war, and their hero is the man on the street. Wittlin's poetry shows affinity with a current in German E . sometimes known as Communionism and, in this sense, occasionally reminds one of Werfel. For a short while, Zdrój published works written by members of the Warsaw group of poets, who soon succeeded in founding their own organ, SJcamander (1920-1928, 1935-1939). The group included Julian Tuwim, Kazimierz Wierzynski, and Jaroslaw Iwaszkiewicz. Shortly afterwards, the Zdroj and SJcamander groups parted ways, and a bitter polemical struggle developed between them. But at least the early works of the S kamander poets belong to Polish E. The period of World War I—or, to be more precise, the period of the wars, since 1918 brought no peace for Poland—was a pregnant one for another Polish Expression­ ist, Andrzej Strug (pseudonym for Tadeusz Godecki, 1871-1937), who had already gained a literary reputation through his brilliant short stories and novels, relating key events in the history of the Socialist movement, the uprising of 1863 and the Polish revolution of 1905. He also played an important role in political life, being a member of the Polish Socialist party and a prominent figure in Polish Free Masonry. Even his earlier works displayed certain Expressionist features; but his most important Expres­ sionist work was a volume of short stories, Klucz otchlani (A Key to the Abyss, 1917) and his novels Grób nieznanego zolnierza (The Monument of the Unknown Soldier, 1922) and Pokolenie Marka Swidy (Marek Swida's Generation, 1925). The literary techniques adopted by Strug aimed at bringing together elements of reality, dream, delusion, hallucination and telepathic vision. Everything he wrote was a mark of his profound engagement in politics and Poland's newly won independence, as well as in the lot of the Polish combatants in the in vaders'—and subsequently in the Polish—army. Strug's later novels are less markedly Expressionistic, although until his death he remained an author partly inspired by this movement. Abandoning the chronological order in which we ought to discuss the Skamander poets, we now turn to Kaden-Bandrowski (1885-1944), whose E. is of a peculiarly complex nature. Distinctly Expressionist traits (largely confined to style in the strict sense, i.e., syntax, vocabulary, imagery) were quickly noticed by the critics of his early prose works, E., t h a t is to say, did not initially affect his world view and, above all, 308

had no influence on the ontologica! structure of the world which he depicted. KadenBandrowski's E., accordingly, is rather one-sided. And if it were not for the stylistic similarities, one would tend to classify him rather as a Naturalist. One of his most mature novels, for example—Luk (A Bow, 1919), the story of a lonely woman wanting to free herself from all fetters—is obviously written in the Naturalistic manner. And the same might be said of his ambitious political novels, written during the first years of our independence: General Barcz (1922), Czarne skrzydla (The Black Wings, 19251929), and Mateusz Bigda (1933). Their Expressionist character results mainly from the author's search for strong and rare expressions, from the animalization of the characters and situations, and from the characters 1 extremely expressive behavior. After Poland had won her independence, the whole country underwent a shock, not only in its political and social life but also with regard to its national culture. Such outstanding novelists as Strug and Kaden-Bandrowski engaged in politics, while poetry (free from any obligations to serve political ends during Romanticism as well as during the Young Poland period) came to be a barometer indicating social change more precisely than ever. In the time between the wars, some poets of the Skamander group chose as their subject aspects of contemporary life—often the most everyday, vulgar and prosaic manifestations in the life of the man in the street —while depriving them of the vestiges of reality when embodying them in their lyrics. For the first time, poets observed the crowd, the mass, its agitations, and inner ferment. But of the five or six poets who constituted the group (Tuwim, Antoni Slonimski, Wierzynski, J a n Lechón, Iwaskiewicz, and Maria Pawlikowska-Jasnorzewska) only two produced poems of some consequence. These were Tuwim and Slonimski, the latter being more representative in this respect. Let us mention here, by way of digression, that it has always been a matter of controversy for Polish critics whether it is at all possible to find a common denominator for the Skamandrites or whether they should merely be regarded as a social group, to be studied by the sociologist of literature rather than the literary critic or historian. From a literary point of view, it is undoubtedly Tuwim who made the greatest contri­ bution to Polish E., whereas Slonimski counts only with certain of his poems. I t should be added that the E. in the works of these two authors is rather similar, even though otherwise their oeuvres are completely different stylistically. Iwaskiewicz, on the other hand, produced his own brand of E., as did Wierzynski in his early, vigorous works. But no traces of the influence of that movement can be found in the poems of Lechón and Pawlikowska. The E. of Tuwim (1894-1953) is perhaps the one most closely related to the Ger­ man model, a fact which is rather puzzling insofar as his relations with Russian and French literature have always been known (he translated Rimbaud and admired Verhaeren), while almost nothing is known about his contacts with German letters. Never­ theless, one of the most typically Expressionist poems in Polish literature, "Chrystus miasta" (A City Christ) from the volume Czyhanie na Boga (In Wait for God, 1918) exactly parallels German lyrical poetry of the "communionistic" trend and is replete with pseudo-mystical humanism. Written in protest against the slaughter of war, and caricaturing and criticizing modern civilization in an often grotesque and catas309

trophic manner, Tuwim's poems are more intelligible than is the case with much Ger­ man Expressionist poetry. But it should be added that Tuwim's versification was eclectic; for he would write, in the same period, poems couched in a number of different styles. Paradoxically, almost all of his poems, notwithstanding their diversity, bear the mark of their author's personality and constitute a body of poetry unique in character. After World War I, Catastrophism expressed itself in the poems of Antoni Slonimski (born 1895) rather than those written by Tuwim. We are referring to the poem "Czarna wiosna" (Black Spring, 1918), which is a sort of declaration of Slonimski's anarchism (and was promptly confiscated), as well as to the drama Wieza Babel (The Tower of Babel, 1927), which harks back to a poem by the same title written four years earlier. In these two works, we find all the tension of this period of revolution, depression and cataclysm brought to a climax by a poet who only rarely looked toward E. as a stylistic model. Nor was Iwaskiewicz (born 1894) an Expressionist throughout his life and in all of his poetry. Yet he was attracted by the current in the years immediately follow­ ing World War I. His poems dating from this time were collected in the volume Dionizje (1922), whose title is self-explanatory, even though it does not say anything about the discordant versification Iwaskiewicz used in this phase of his career. I t is difficult to classify the work of Boleslaw Lesmian (1878-1937) in the history of Polish E. Perhaps we should have discussed him together with the writers of the Young Poland group, as the date of his first publication and his age would seem to suggest. The handbooks of Polish literary history usually place him in this context. At any rate, both the Skamander poets and the poets belonging to other literary movements and groups owed much to him, although it is only now that his true importance is being recognized by the literary historians. Lésmian stood at least as much under the influence of Symbolism as under that of E.; but he created his own, original style, and his personal language and versification, whose nature cannot be explained with reference to any interplay of literary currents a general rule with great artists—and, last but not least, a very interesting world view reflected in the structure of the depicted world. We shall not undertake the difficult task of trying to characterize Lésmian's poetry, but we can, more or less, ascertain that while his early writings were influenced by Symbolism, already his second volume of poetry, Laica (The Meadow, 1920), is distinctly related to E., his version being original and quite unique. The poems in question are those dominated by the ghostly fantasy of the ballad and stylistically as well as thematically indebted to folkloristic models. Rich in grotesque devices and primitivist lore, they start a new trend in Polish poetry of the interwar period. I t should be made clear, however, that Lésmian's contribution to E. was decidedly less signif­ icant than his contribution to Polish lyrical poetry in general. The primitivism which played so great a part in the history of E . - more so in painting than in literature—had three principal sources: exotic art and poetry, the "naive" medieval art, and the native folklore. Polish Expressionist or pseudoExpressionist primitivism was almost exclusively of the third kind. As far as the first kind is concerned, we refer to Niam-Niam (1923), an anthology of professional Negro poetry compiled by Zegadlowicz and Edward Kozikowski. The second kind is represented by a number of poems from Micinski's collections Wrolcu Gwiazd (In 310

the Darkness of Stars) and Piosenka umarlego (The Song of a Dead Man, 1937), as well as Tuwim's adaptations of the old medieval couplet in a contemporary setting. The third kind of primitivism, finally, was, in part, introduced by Lésmian's ballads and flourished mainly in the regional poetry written by poets connected with the period­ ical Czartak (1922-1928) and influenced, to some extent, by the last volume of Kasprowicz's poetry, Mój swiat (My World, 1926), where primitivism and E. interact rather loosely, as well as by the Pastoralki (Pastorals, 1925) of Tytus Czyzewski (1885-1945), one of the Polish Futurists and the author of a number of poems betraying Expressionist inspiration. The Czartak group advocated regionalism and drew inspiration from the folk art of the Polish submontane district, which it regarded as a treasury of true feelings uncorrupted by the false values of civilization. One of the real discoveries of this group was Jçdrzej Wowro, a peasant sculptor, graphic artist, and poet. The outstanding members of the group were Zegadlowicz and Kozikowski. Lésmian, while contributing to the journal, was not a member. The most representative publication of the circle was a volume of ballads by Zegadlowicz, Powsinogi beskidzkie (The Loiterers of the Beskid Mountains, 1923), which is filled with near-pantheistic mysticism and whose protagon­ ists are folk artists, artisans, etc. Even in his later works, Zegadlowicz retained the Expressionist versification, not­ withstanding the many abrupt changes in his style, which render it difficult to discern a uniform pattern in his works. Powsinogi beskidzkie is quite different from Odejscie Malfa Moor a, and the link between them remains obscure until a general outline of E. has been completed. Zegadlowicz's subsequent poetry, as well as the plays he published in the twenties, do not concern us in the present context. But his "penny grotesque" Lyziki ksiezyc (The Spoons and the Moon), staged in 1928 but published, posthumously, after World War I I , constitutes one of the most interesting achievements in Polish Expressionist drama. Here the questions of art, revolution, etc., are depicted gro­ tesquely, with occasional reference to folk pageants on the one hand and contemporary Expressionist drama on the other. Conversely, the Polish public was rather shocked by Zegadlowicz's novels Zmory (The Ghosts, 1936) and Motory (Motors, 1938) and justly accused their religiously and mystically inclined author of having produced pornographic works. The latter novel was promptly confiscated. Both narratives dis­ play elements of E. and Naturalism as well as Psychologism, a typical Polish trend in the fiction of the inter-war period. The history of Polish literary E. in the latter portion of the period between the wars was closely linked with Catastrophism. But if, at first, the tendency—mainly in Kasprowicz's works— was to attempt a symbolic transposition of the moral corruption of the modern age into large metaphysical metaphors and cosmic, apocalyptic visions, the Catastrophism of the Skamandrites had a more solid historical background and t h a t in spite of its fantastic or abstract way of presenting social and historical reality. In their turn, the Catastrophic novels of Roman Jaworski (1883-1944) and Ignacy Witkiewicz (1885-1939), treating very real social and political problems, made this background even more solid, although both writers embraced the principle of the fantastic grotesque. 311

Jaworski's novel Wesele hrabiego Orgaza (The Wedding of the Count Orgaz, 1925) and Witkiewicz's novels of the inter-war period Pozegnanie jesieni (A Farewell to Autumn, 1925) and Nienasycenie (Insatiability, 1930)— are closely related, even though the authors' means of expression differ. Dealing with a crisis of modern civilization, these novels grotesquely distort the social and political conditions of post-war Europe. The novels of Witkiewicz, one of the most prominent writers of the age, are very original if somewhat formless. Each of them constitutes an essay with a plot which, in turn, represents a strange mixture of the traditional devices of Polish Expressionist fiction (such as Micinski's novels), literary trash, cheap pornography, etc. Witkiewicz himself did not regard his novels as art sensu stricto but as a kind of philosophical journalism, an amorphous bag to be filled with all sorts of material. His attitude toward drama was quite different. Preceding the future achievements of the European avant-garde of the post-World War I I period, as well as the Theater of the Absurd, his prolific dramatic output could be described—at least partly and in some of its aspects as Expressionist, if it were not for the author's own dramatic theory, which was radically anti-Expression­ ist. Witkiewicz, t h a t is to say, emphasized the importance of pure form, a fact which renders it extremely difficult to interpret his plays and to determine, for the time being, the exact nature of their affinity with E. Catastrophism continued to be a current tendency in Polish poetry in the period between the wars; and from time to time it definitely flourished. But, as we have seen, this body of poetry was not always and necessarily Expressionist, although, for example, some of the poems written by the poets connected with the periodical Kwadryga (19271931) could be classified as Expressionists or near-Expressionists - I think especially of writers like Konstanty Ildefons Galczyński (1905-1953) and Wladyslaw Sebyla (1902-1940). The same applies to some of Tuwim's pre-World War I I poems, to certain lyrics by Jozef Czechowicz (1903-1939) and—to name a rather complex subject—to the Catastrophic writings of a group of poets from Vilna who were first drawn together by the periodical Zagory (1931-1934): Czeslaw Milosz (born 1911), Jerzy Zagórski (born 1907), and Aleksander Rymkiewicz (born 1913). The latter's poetry is rather novel and, though born under the star of E., has little in common with the Expressionist Catastrophism of Mieczyslaw Jastrun, Slonimski and others. A particularly significant example of the Catastrophist trend in the period between the wars is Galczynski's poem "Bal u Salomona" (A Ball at Solomon's, 1933), whose author, undoubtedly one of the most talented Polish lyricists of our century, amalga­ mates a number of differing elements: sentimental lyricism (making bold use of con­ cert-hall and music-hall means of expression), burlesque exaggeration, mockery and parody. Sebyla's works, on the other hand, are more traditional though unique in tone and also employing burlesque devices. But Sebyla was using primarily apocalyptic motifs or appealing to people's hidden fears and phobias. I should like to mention one other poet of the Kwadryga group, Stefan Flukowski (born 1902), the author of a brilli­ antly written volume of prose, Pada deszcz (It Rains, 1931) which, in itself, constitutes an original interpretation of E., and whose maker explores, among other things, various aspects of depth psychology and psychoanalysis, this practice being quite common with German and Anglo-Saxon Expressionists, but rarely with their Polish peers. 312

One of the most outstanding works of Polish Catastrophic E, is Tuwim's poem "Bal w operze" (A Ball in the Opera House, 1936), some fragments of which were pub­ lished before the war. I t offers a violent and dynamic criticism of the political and finan­ cial elite of capitalist society, the world being depicted in a grotesque and satirical manner. The poem is full of both lyricism and vulgarity and contains music-hall tricks alongside apocalyptic motifs. In the lyrical poetry of the war years, we are once more confronted with Catastrophe ism. In the poetry of such young members of the underground fighting the German invaders as Krysztof Kamil Baczynski (1921-1944), Tadeus Gajcy (1922-1944) and Tadeusz Borowski (1922-1951), the voice of a despairing country and generation was heard, in mimeographed editions, to speak of our tragic history. These young poets were highly talented, Gajcy being the most Expressionistically inclined. Their personal fate tells their story: Baczynski and Gajcy, both members of the Home Army, were killed during the Warsaw uprising of 1944, and Borowski, an ex-prisoner of Auschwitz, committed suicide in the Stalin era. Special reference should finally be made to one of Poland's greatest Expressionists, Bruno Schulz (1892-1942), the famous author of the original picture of a small town—a picture composed of a nightmare, a child's dream and pure fantasy, with reality being transformed poetically. Born and raised in a cultural borderland, Schulz wrote two brilliant volumes of short stories, Sklepy cynamonowe (The Cinnamon Stores, 1934) and Sanatorium pod Klepsydra (Sanatorium under the Sign of the Obituary, 1937), as well as translating Kafka's The Trial (1936). He grew up not only in the context of Polish culture but also in the artistically prolific atmosphere of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy of Franz Joseph, which produced such writers as Kafka, Musil, Broch, the Prague Ex­ pressionists, Italo Svevo and many others. The prosaist Kazimierz Truchanowski (born 1904) belongs to the very same family of writers. The end of World War I I did not put a stop to the Expressionist trend in Polish literature, though after the end of hostilities that trend considerably lost in strength and impact. Among the works still displaying the Expressionist influence we mention Leonard Buczkowski's (born 1905) novels, of which the first, Wertepy (The Pathless Tract, 1947), was written before the war, and the second, Gzarny potok (A Black Brook, 1954) within a decade following that holocaust. Buczkowski's E. is quite unconventional insofar as his style is highly subjective, and the inward logic of the plot and the psycho­ logical motivation of the characters are deliberately vague—especially in the second novel, which, as it were, records a hallucination in which the dimensions of time and the events and characters themselves become fluent and indiscernible. I t might be said that, after 1956, the poetry written by the young generation indicates t h a t E. lives on. However, this matter is still unresolved, as specialized studies are lacking. Time and perspective are needed to make a fair evaluation. Yet it is reason­ ably safe to state t h a t Expressionist traces can be found in some of the lyrical poems by Stanislaw Swen Czachorowski (as well as in his prose), and also in Jerzy Harasymowicz's and Tadeusz Nowak's attempts at neo-primitivism. As we have seen, Polish E. was born under the influence of German literature. I t developed almost contemporaneously with German E. and, from the very beginning, 313

showed itself to be creative and innovative. With time, its inward strength became increasingly independent and free from outside influences, although Polish literature of the period between the wars responded to impulses coming from the rest of Europe. Since World War I I the Expressionist tendency in Polish literature has markedly abated, though there is, at present, no evidence of its having altogether vanished. 1

1 The point was made by the theoreticians of Symbolism and generally accepted by other scholars. Later on, it was thoroughly re-examined, however, and found to be invalid. The misunder­ standing arose by dint of mistaking the symbol for a trope of the symbolic structure of the depicted reality. Actually, the symbol-as-trope is not characteristic of Symbolism; it plays no leading part in the arsenal of Symbolist devices.

314

VLADIMIR MARKOV

RUSSIAN EXPRESSIONISM*

Western European poetic E, did not attract the attention of Russian poets, critics, and scholars until after the revolution of 1917; however, this statement may be slightly modi­ fied by future research. Interest in this movement, both in its literary and artistic manifestations, became noticeable only at the very beginning of the 1920's; then suddenly it produced a minor flood of essays and books which either discussed E, from a variety of viewpoints or attempted to inform the reader of its scope, content, aims, and essence. 1 B u t was there a Russian E. ? This question can be answered in two different ways. First, there have been attempts to reinterpret some well-known figures of modern Rus­ sian literature, or simply to label them as Expressionist, whether they considered themselves so or not. Such attempts actually belong to the history of Russian literary criticism, and they may still be a topic for discussion. 2 * Reprinted, by permission of the University of California Press, from California Slavic Studies, V I (1971). 1 Some examples are the translation of chapter 4 from the 2nd edition of Oskar Walzel's Die deutsche Literatur seit Goethes Tod, which appeared in Russian as a book under the title Impressionizm i èkspressionizm v sovremennoj Germanii (Petersburg: Academia, 1922); Vsemirnaja Litera­ tura's collection of essays on expressionism, translated from German, edited by E. M. Braudo and N. E . R a d l o v , entitled Èkspressionizm (Petrograd—Moscow, 1923), which, as stated in the preface, was published to fight confusion in the Soviet interpretation of the term; A. Lunacarskij's "Neskolko slov o nemeckom èkspressionizme," Zizn', no. 1 (1922); E. Boricevskij, "Filosofija èkspressionizma," Sipovnik, no. 1 (1922); B. Arvatov, "Èkspressionizm kak social'noe javlenie," Kniga i Revoljucija, no. 6 (18) (1922). After a long silence on the subject, Èkspressionizm : Sbornik statej (Moscow: Nauka, 1966) appeared recently and was immediately sold out; in this book, many prere volutionary and Soviet artists and theater men are called expressionists and even in Majakovskij's work expressionist features are found (p. 12). 2 A Lunacarskij considers Majakovskij, Vasilij Kamenskij, Aseev, Tret'jakov, and, "partially", Pasternak expressionists ("Georg Kajzer," Sobranie socinenij v vos'md tomax, V [Moscow, 1965], 420). È. Gollerbax in Poèzija Davida Burljuka (New York, 1931), pp. 22—23, sees in his subject "some affinity" with E.; he also calls the late work of Mixail Kuzmin expressionistic and adds that E . touched, more or less, all "progressive phenomena in art", but he admits that the idea of E. is "vague". In his ambitious study Èkspressionizm v Rossii (Trudy Vjatskogo Pedagogiceskogo Instituía imeni V. I. Lenina, torn 1, vypusk 4, 1928), K. V. Drjagin tries to prove that Leonid Andreev's drama is expressionistic rather than symbolist. He also considers Majakovskij an ex­ pressionist, though not a pure one. The unjustly forgotten book by I. I. loffe, Sinteticeskaja istorija iskusstv : Vvedenie v istoriju xudozestvennogo myšlenija (Leningrad, 1933) chooses Pasternak to represent E. ("psychic functionalism") in poetry and sees its essence in the "deformation of the visible". Among the recent applications of the term to Russian literature, see William E. Harkins 9 Freudian analysis of Jurij Olesa in "The Theme of Sterility in Olesha's Envy" (Slavic Review, XXV, no. 3, 1966) in which the author also undertakes a definition of E.; Aleksis Rannit's intro­ ductory essay ("Zabolotskij—A Visionary at the Crossroads of Expressionism") to Nikolaj Zabolockij's Stixotvorenija, (Washington D. C —New York: Inter-Language Literary Associates, 315

There was, however, at the beginning of the 1920's, in Moscow, a group (or perhaps two) of poets which called itself Expressionist. I t was, to be sure, a small group, easily dwarfed by the celebrated Imagists of that time, but it had an interesting and by no means short history by avant-garde standards—at least three and a half years and more than a dozen publications. Moreover, the group had ties, both expected and unexpected, with Russian as well as European literature. In addition to this, E. was part of the colorful literary background of those years when (at one point, namely in March, 1922) there were 143 private publishing enterprises in Moscow,3 and when a critic complained that the time may be near when he will have to write reviews about those who do not write poetry rather than about those who do. 4 At no other time was there such a large number of poetic groups and organizations. In addition to the fami­ liar Symbolists, Acmeists, and Futurists (with or without the prefix "neo-"), there were Centrifugists, Biocosmists, Luminists, Presentists, Neoclassicists, Nonsensists, Kthematicists, Nothingists, Fuists, Antitaxidermists, and probably many others. Even granted t h a t the creative efforts of some of these poets produced, to borrow a Zoščenko phrase, malovysokoxudozestvennaja literatura, it is one-sided, to put it mildly, to reduce the literary history of this period to monochromatic descriptions of the activities of prole­ tarian groups. The history of Russian E. begins with one man Ippolit Vasil'evic Sokolov. In 1919 he considered himself a "Euphuist" and was active in and around the All-Russian Union of Poets. On July 11, 1919, as he himself reports it, the idea of "Expressionism" as a synthesis of Futurism dawned on him. 5 There was nothing special in such an idea; any group with avant-garde claims at that time felt obliged to do something with Futurism: either to reject it, wholly or partially, or in some way to "overcome" it; and either attempt invariably remained just a statement on paper. In Moscow in 1919 the only real Futurist poet in sight was Majakovskij (since all his friends were scattered across Russia by the Civil War), and such a situation was probably felt by the young poets to be a poetic vacuum. Sokolov shared his idea with the world at one of the nu­ merous public appearances sponsored by the above-mentioned Union of Poets, and the prominent Marxist critic V. L'vov-Rogacevskij mentioned him later in one of his public talks, sponsored by the same union; and this was enough to set his hopes soaring. 6 Ippolit Sokolov was, however, no greenhorn in literature. Only a month before his discovery of E. he published a slim, "M"-page 7 booklet which contained only six

1965); and the rather indiscriminate use of the term by Johannes von Guenther in his Die Literatur Russlands (Stuttgart: Union Verlag, 1964). Von Guenther calls Remizov "the first Russian ex­ pressionist prose writer" (p. 186) and, in contradiction to this, Zamjatin "the first Russian expres­ sionist" (p. 197). He also considers Prisvin "an expressionist-naturalist" (p. 187), Zabolockij "an expressionist with a predilection for surrealism" (p. 213), and says that Vasilij Kazin "wrote in a concentrated expressionist language" (p. 197). 3 I storija russkoj sovetskoj literatury v trex tomax, I (Moscow: Izdatel'stvo Akademii Nauk SSSR,4 1958), 595. E. Bik (Sergej Bobrov), review in Pečat' i Revoljucija, no. 1 (1922), p. 299. 5 Ippolit Sokolov, Bunt èkspressionista (Moscow, 1919), p. 6. 6 Ippolit Sokolov, Èkspressionizm (Moscow, 1920), p. 3. 7 In this book the pages are lettered alphabetically, instead of being numbered. 316

poems but was entitled Polnoe sobranie socinenij. Izdanie ne posmertnoe. Ne stixi., which he later described as being "without the author's portrait and without a criticalbiographical essay by V. Brjusov". 8 The only manifesto-like element of the book was the sentence preceding the poems: "Well, I am hurling [at you?] my new, poly metrical principles." Sokolov's "polymetry" turned out to be simply free verse which, in imagery, combined the "Mezzanine of Poetry", which, at t h a t time, had been dead for five years, with Imagism (imazinizm), a movement beginning just then. The former is evident in Sokolov's poetic landscapes in which nature is consistently "translated" into the terms of the beauty salon and of women's (and occasionally men's) wardrobe (manteau, face powder, curlers, fabrics, make-up, tuxedoes) with an admixture of theatrical and "cultural" imagery (such as " a ravine with Voltaire's sarcastic smile"). Sokolov is, however, interested in unusual metaphor as such, and occasionally he abandons the atmosphere of the drawing-room, dressing-table, and dance-hall, or, rather he eclectically combines it with "unaesthetical" tropes like "pockmarked sky". Finally, in the poem "Madonna" he comes close to the combination of blasphemy and sex one is accustomed to expect from Russian Imagists: the poem ends with the poet going to bed with the Madonna—only in his dream, however. In addition, one finds urbanist imagery of restaurants and streets of definitely Futurist character, reminiscent of Majakovskij. Polnoe sobranie socinenij was to remain Sokolov's only book of verse. From then on, he published theoretical writings and his poetry appeared only in joint collections (or as an appendix to his own theories). A more ambitious book by Sokolov came out in the fall of the same year with the title Bunt èkspressionista on its cover (and further down the page "published, of course, by the author himself"). The first pages in the book contain a manifesto of E., "Xartija èkspressionista", which begins with a quotation from Gogol's madman, Popriscin, and ends with a quotation from St. Luke. The manifesto cheerfully launches what it calls E. and contains practically everything a good manifesto should contain: a histori­ cal perspective, polemics, and a constructive program. The two "-isms" Sokolov argues against are Imagism and Futurism, but his interpretation of these two familiar terms is not quite customary. Sokolov claims t h a t Imagism (which he spells imazizm, and not imazinizm) is just a device and not a school, that its representatives are Majakovskij, Vadim Šeršenevič, Konstantin Bol'čakoy, and Sergej Tret'jakov; and that its flowering took place in 1913-1915. As to the contemporary Imagism of 1919, Sokolov dismisses it as pseudo-Imagism that vulgarizes its own principles, is newspaper-oriented, and amounts to nothing more than poor Futurism. He suggests that a better name for it is "Hyperbolism". Futurism, on the other hand (which for Sokolov includes Marinetti, Ezra Pound, Apollinaire, and, again, Majakovskij), however great it might have been, belongs to the past: during its nine-year history it became fragmented, with each part cultivating only one aspect of the Futurist creed. E. does not reject any of these predecessors, but it claims to be a synthesis of all facets of Futurism. A "revolutionary", constructive part follows, which lists: (1) abolition of the old versification from Homer to Majakovskij * Bunt èkspressionista, p. 17. 317

as well as introduction of a new, "chromatic" verse based on musical pitch; (2) "polystanzaies"; and (3) "higher euphony". All t h a t Sokolov offers in the way of definition is t h a t his E. aims at a "maximum of expression" and a "dynamism of perception and thinking". Sokolov's poetry which follows the "charter" is a very questionable illustration of his tenets. The ambitious, five-page "Fesenebel'naja noč", offered as an "essay in chromatic versification", is nothing more than free verse, reminiscent of Xlebnikov's "Zverinec", otherwise differing very little from Sokolov's earlier verse. He merely tries to shock the reader more (veter-onanist, tverdoe kak posle zapora kalo ljudej, anal'noe otverstie doma), but, as before, he combines this anti-aesthetic imagery with the salon dandyism of the "Mezzanine". Too often he slavishly follows the Imagism he castigates so much in the polemical part of the book, and he himself indulges in "Hyperbolism" ("A woman's foot with an instep as steep as the peak of the Himalayas"). In other poems he experiments, and not very originally, with rhyme. There was no poetry in Sokolov's Ekspressionizm, which appeared in the summer of 1920 and contained little that was not already in Bunt èkspressionista : the phrases about "maximum of expression" and "dynamism of perception" appear again, and so does the expressed desire to create a synthesis of "amorphous Russian Futurism", the latter being subdivided by Sokolov into Imagism, Rhythmism, Cubism, and Euphonism. In fact, he visualizes a new era of "high Futurism" (i.e., E.) which will replace "early Futurism", just as was the case with the Italian Renaissance—or so he says. ' The immodesty of the last remark is explained elsewhere in the essay: Sokolov writes that some time during the spring of 1920 he learned about the existence of E. in Europe and rejoiced at being able to show L'vov-Rogacevskij that he, Sokolov, was not a curio and an ephemeron, but part of a strong, European movement which had already touched Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Latvia, and Finland. The unexpected perspective obviously made Sokolov slightly dizzy, and, as a result, this work of his is more fanfare than substance; accordingly, his predilection for making syntheses went to extremes: he not only generously labels as "geniuses" some of his contemporaries (and, by implication, himself), but claims in a rather Xlestakovian way to have created the theory of E. in the theater, which combines the Meiningen theater, the Moscow Art Theater, Diaghilev, Mejerxol'd, Aleksej Krucenyx, Nikolaj Evreinov, Vjaceslav Ivanov, Reinhardt, the Communist cultural commissar Kerzencev, Tairov, and Marinetti. Sokolov also names his source of information about western European E,— Teodor Markovic Levit (b. 1904), a shadowy, marginal figure in the literature of that time, who, like Majakovskij, wrote texts for "Rosta" propaganda posters, was briefly listed as a Futurist in a Poets' Union publication, published little poetry, was a member of a later, Expressionist-oriented group "Moskovskij Parnas", and soon faded out of literature. I t was evidently he who also acquainted Sokolov with Edschmid's well known book Über den Expressionismus in der Literatur und die neue Dichtung, after which Sokolov decided t h a t Edschmid's and his main tenets "coincide" technically, philosophically, and historically, However, the only examples he gives of this coincidence 318

are the desire to know the essence of things and the presence of E. in all nations and times.9 Sokolov wrote this time as the leader of a group, and he named, in addition to himself, three Russian Expressionists: Boris Zemenkov, Gurij Sidorov, and Sergej Reksin.10 Boris Sergeevic Zemenkov (b. 1902) joined the group, like Sokolov, both as a theoretician and a poet. His only book of verse, Steorin [sic] s prosed'ju: Voennye stixi èkspressionista (1920), consists of poetical impressions, based on his own Civil War experience and is bursting with catachrestic imagery strongly reminiscent of Šeršenevič, who clearly also influenced Zemenkov's metrics and rhyme. Of slightly later origin is his treatise Koryto umozaključenij (1920), written at the end of 1919 and the beginning of 1920, in which Zemenkov tries to lay foundations for E. in the pictorial arts. This abstruse essay, filled with foreign words whose meanings, one suspects, are not quite clear to the author, is, nevertheless, on the whole, closer to the idea of Western E. than the theoretical writings of Sokolov. Zemenkov postulates the final aim of the world as "dematerialization" and demands from art persuasiveness rather than truth, a persuasiveness which is equal to that of incantation. Gurij Sidorov was, by that time, not only the author of two books of verse, but a veteran of the young Soviet movie industry as well: he had appeared in Majakovskij's film version of Jack London's Martin Eden (called Ne dlja deneg rodivšijsja)i Both of his books, Easkolotoe solnce (a poema) and Vedro ognja, were rather inart)culate imitations of Majakovskij (especially of Oblako v šianax), Šeršenevič (rhymee, and Bol'šakov (occasional agrammaticality). In spite of this imitativeness, his pootry is not devoid of some wild originality of its own. His joining the Expressionists pr bably resulted in his third publication, Xoduli (1920), for which Zemenkov designed thecover. This and the next slim collection, Jalik (also published in 1920, but including much of his earlier poetry), contain strongly emotional love poems and hyperbolic cityiscapes, written in rhymed or rhymeless verse and using most available metrical poss bilities - from traditional meters to free verse. There is much self-affirmation in thisopoetry as well as the "cosmic" quality, fashionable at that time, occasionally apprsaching the apocalyptic. Sidorov's nervous, chaotic, and ecstatic quality was to diappear in his last known book of verse Stebli (1922), a poetic account of his affair with a married woman, slightly reminiscent of Vasilij Kamenskij's poetry. In the meantime, Sokolov continued to publish theoretical writings, and his most ambitious undertaking in this genre was Bedeker po èkspressionizmu (1920), the "climax" of Russian E. just before its sudden demise. It was a naive attempt to "deepen" his earlier theories by using impressive sounding "-ism" terms and by filling his sentences with as many names as possible. Sokolov kept his old slogan about "the maximum of expression", but found his previous synthesis of Futurism too narrow. 9 The edition of Edschmid's book referred to by Sokolov is Berlin, 1919. Sokolov does show, however, any firsthand knowledge of Edschmid's essay (originally a speech of 1917), it is safe to assume that he knew it only from Levit's oral report. Many of Edschmid's points in fact, in direct contradiction to what Sokolov said in his theoretical writings. 10 Otherwise, Reksin published only one "Majakovskian" imagist-oriented poem in miscellany Jav' (Moscow, 1919), He never published anything with the Expressionists,

not and are, the

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He declared his E. not only: a "new vision", but a "synthesis of all achievements in all arts". I n addition to this "Synthesism", as he calls it, Sokolov added two more essential features: "Europeanism" and "Transcendentalism-Noumenalism". All this develops into a paean to Bergson, whose philosophy is declared to be the successor to outdated Christianity. In addition to this, Sokolov scatters throughout the essay undeveloped ideas and statements like "perhaps there are 20 or 30 dimensions and 20 or 30 sensations", or "We have a feeling of the end". He also alludes to the broadest possible spiritual basis for his E. including occultism, anthroposophy, etc. Anticipating well deserved criticism, Sokolov hastens to add at the end that his E. "is not a moronic desire on the part of a few young poetasters to attach to themselves, at any price, a sonorous label with a n ' i s m ' in it in order to conceal, somehow, the mediocrity of their doggerel". At the same time or, most likely, a little earlier, Sokolov also published his "pro­ paganda leaflet", Renessans XX veka, in which he announced the existence of "panFuturism". The list of those scientists, writers, and scholars who belong to the move­ ment (among them, Bergson, Einstein, Losskij, Roman Jakobson, Vasilij Rozanov) as well as artists, poets (of which only four Russians are named: Majakovskij, Sokolov, Šeršenevič, and Xlebnikov), et al. is endless and makes the leaflet a veritable orgy of names, to which Sokolov adds another list—that of outstanding "passeists". At the end of his catalogue, the author calls himself the "Russian Marinetti" and proclaims the arrival of the "Renaissance of the twentieth, century" from his "Mount Sinai". Despite all his efforts, the days of Sokolov's E. were numbered, and all his attempts to inflate it were in vain. One reason he failed was that in Sokolov's (or in his fellow Expressionists') poetic practice he could never separate himself from Russian Imagism, then the dernier cri in poetry. Sokolov not only imitated some aspects of Mariengof's rhyme or much of Šeršenevič's imagery, but often aped and caricatured the early, pre-Imagist poems of the latter, which probably both flattered and amused Šeršenevič. At any rate, Šeršenevič later wrote, "The most murderous criticism of my poetry is to be found not in the witchdoctor-like babbling of the Frices and the Kogans [the Marxist critics of the day] but in Sokolov's book of verse." 1 1 There is reason to believe t h a t all three Expressionists tried to join Imagism but, perhaps, were eventually given a cold shoulder. The second edition of Sidorov's Jalik was published by the "Imažinisty" publishing enterprise. Zèmenkov managed to attract two Imagists, including Šeršenevič himself, to the miscellany Ot mamy na pjat' minut (1920), which he published under the imprint "Farširovannye manžety" and in which he also printed his p o e t r y - s t i l l labeled Expressionist. As for Ippolit Sokolov, in 1921 he published his next essay, Imažinistika, which was, for the most part on a higher level than all his Expressionist theory and makes one suspect t h a t the author seriously considered becoming a leader and a theoretician in the Imagist movement. In his book Sokolov applies a statistical method to the study of tropes and tries to trace a quantitative and qualitative evolution of tropes in Russian poetry, 11 Vadim Šeršenevič, 2 X 2. = : Listy imažinista (Moscow: Imažinisty, 1920), p. 16; Ivan Grazinov also treated Sokolov contemptuously in Gostinica dlja puteăestvujuăcix v prekrasnom, no, 4 (1924), p. 13

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beginning with Kantemir. Imagism (which, he again insists, ought to be called in Russian imazizm, and not imazinizm) is considered a logical, and crowning, stage in this evolution. Sokolov even points to the ways in which the image has to develop in the future, and here he touches on some tenets of future Constructivism. All three Expressionists of the "first period" were preparing new books of verse, and Sokolov intended to investigate E. in painting and in the theater and also announced a book with the title "Opyt postroenija programm nemeckogo, francuzskogo, ital'janskogo i anglijskogo èkspressionizma. ,, Edschmid's book mentioned above was announced for publication in Levit's translation and with his preface and commentaries. 12 I n 1921 the original Expressionists, after the disintegration of their group, tried alliances with some of the mushrooming and short-lived grouplets of the period, Zemenkov went over to the nicevoki ("Nothingists"). Sokolov's peregrinations were more complex. Zemenkov applied for membership in the nicevoki group on April 15, 1921; and only two days later he was a cosignatory of one of their "decrees". Then he wrote his own ''decree'' on painting, became a part of the nicevoki "tribunal", and planned the publication of a book of his own verse in their publishing enterprise called Xobo (Hobo) which they defined as "a refined, revolutionary t r a m p " . Much of this activity was in direct contradiction to their much-quoted slogan which read in part, "Don't write anything, don't publish anything". 1 3 The nicevoki, whose history has many fascinating details and deserves closer scrutiny, originated in Rostov-on-the-Don in August, 1920, and had a rather unpromis­ ing start with the slim collection Vam. This book contained a militant and incoherent manifesto which "buried" both Imagism and E., and some poetry which was nothing but a poor imitation of Imagism. I t is to the nicevoki's credit, though, that later, when the "movement" moved to Moscow, they openly recognized Imagism. 14 "Anyone can be a nicevok" was declared in one of their decrees, 15 and they divided themselves into "nicevoki of creativity" and "nicevoki of life". Only one of them developed into a poet worthy of attention—Rjurik Rok, whose best poetry can be found in the poèma, Of Rjurika Roka čtenie (1921), but even in this work with apocalyptical overtones he remained essentially an Imagist (with an admixture of the "Scythian" Esenin and of Majakovskij). The ideology of the nicevoki consisted not only of revolutionary nihilism with the professed aim "to disintegrate and to demoralize belles-lettres", but of antimaterialism and a sort of neo-idealism. Minor points of their aesthetics echoed E. The nicevoki were active until the beginning of 1923, and in January and February, 1922, they confronted Majakovskij and denied him the right to purge Soviet poetry, as he had attempted to do at that time. Some reports say that the nicevoki were un­ successful in this attempt and were finally condemned, sharing this "honor" with such unlikely bedfellows as Axmatova and Vjaceslav Ivanov. 1 6 The climax of the nicevoki movement can be found in the two editions of Sobačij jaščik (1921 and 1923), in which 12 See p. 8 of Èkspressionizm. Levit was mentioned by Veniamin Kaverin as his co-member in the group "Zelenoe Kol'co" in 1919 and "junosa neobycajnyx sposobnostej i poznanij" (V. Kaverin, Avtobiograficeskie rasskazy, Moscow: Biblioteka "Ogonek," 1961, p. 52). 13 Nicevoki: S obacij jaScik (Moscow: Xobo, 1923), p. 8. 14 Ibid., p. 8. 15 Ibid., p. 6. 16 See V. Majakovskij, Polnoe sobranie sočinenij v trinadcati tomax, X I I (Moscow, 1919), p. 461.

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they practically admitted their desire to be a Russian version of Dada and which, this time in better agreement with their slogans, contained no poetry. Within this framework, it is of interest to note t h a t Rjurik Rok was preparing a book on both Dada and E. and t h a t he published a translation of GolFs Die Chapliniade.11 In Xobo's last publication, there was an announcement of three books b y the " F u i s t " poets, and this is an interesting piece of evidence not only of ties between the two groups of that period but also of the transition from the "imagist" E. to the "centrifugist'' E., as we shall see later. Actually, the Fuists began their activities much earlier, at the beginning of 1921, when they published a collection under the laconic title A. One of the three co-authors was Ippolit Sokolov, who contributed four poems containing apocalyptic (cf. "feeling of the end" in his Bedeker po èxpressionizmu) and macabre imagery. There is urbanism and the familiar desire to shock in these poems, but there is also the appearance of Lenin, radio, and "the victory of new forces". Sokolov did not continue his association with the Fuists, b u t one of the original three remained a Fuist to the very end. He was Boris Perelësin, and he was joined in the next collection (Mozgovoj razziz, 1922) by Nikolaj Lepok in advocating the destruction of imagery. Finally, their ranks were increased in April, 1923, when Boris Nesmelov became a part of the group, and they published the three books mentioned above. 18 However, this seeming climax was also the end of Fuism. Their theory, as presented in the prefaces to each of the three publi­ cations, though complicated by the inclusion of the Asiatic element, obviously entered the stage of stagnation and vagueness, while looking ambitious and super-polemical on the surface. Nesmelov and Perelësin were later associated with Krucenyx. 1 9 Despite their theoretical shortcomings, some of the Fuists' poetry would reward the attention not only of the scholar, but of the general reader as well. Their rhyme and some of their poetical syntax definitely deserve study. Sergej Bobrov, the most important of Centrifuga's leaders, was benevolent towards Lepok and Perelësin and wrote about their deriving from the poetic practice of his group. 20 The Fuists were, however, only a transitional group, leading to "Centrifugist" E. The beginnings of this second phase of Russian E. are to be found in the 16-page joint collection Èkspressionisty, published in 1921, again in Moscow. The participants, in addition to the ubiquitous Sokolov, were Sergej Spasskij, Evgenij Gabrilovic, and Boris Lapin. Sokolov was generously represented in what was apparently his farewell to poetry. These poems add little to what he wrote before: the same preoc­ cupation with tropes based on remote associations or on shocking contrasts, this time with an occasional "baring the device" (ohnazenie priema), and the same free verse (occasionally rhymed). His themes here are mostly erotic, but there are also theosophical and the familiar apocalyptical poems. Sergej Dmitrievic Spasskij (1898-1956) 17

p. 4.

Rjurik Kok, Sorok sorokov : Dialekticeskiepoèmy nicevokom sodejannye (Moscow: Xobo, 1923),

18 Bel'ma Salara by Perelësin, Dialektika segodnja by Perelësin and Lepok, and Rodit' muzcinam by Nesmelov—all three in April, 1923. 19 For example, Nesmelov wrote a preface to Kručenyx's četyre foneticeskix romana (Moscow, 1927).20 Pečat' i Revoljucija, no. 1 (1922), p. 301.

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had many avant-garde affiliations throughout his varied, but peripheral, literary career; but he remained essentially a neo-Symbolist poet (a fact especially noticeable in the poems printed in Èkspressionisty). Occasionally he reminds one of Pasternak, which, of course, does not contradict his neo-Symbolist quality. 21 The same Pasternakian (or rather "Centrifugist") features can be discerned in the bold, though obscure, imagery of Boris Matveevic Lapin (1905-1941), who, together with Evgenij Iosifoviè Gabrilovič (b. 1899), soon became a central figure of this late, non-Imagist, "Centrifuge"-oriented phase in Russian E. Gabrilovič's prose in Èkspressionisty is highly elaborate in its use of punctuation, typographical effects, and contrasting syntactic structures as well as in its fragmentation, mixing of planes, repetitions, and pauses. I t is movie-script-like prose with an admixture of lyrical poetry and bears resemblance to both Andrej Belyj and Viktor Šklovskij. Similar traits can be seen in Gabriloviö's other Expressionist prose, "Lamentacija", printed in Molnijanin (Moscow, 1922), where fragmentation again reigns supreme and where minimal description is combined with stream of consciousness. Gabriloviö shares the pages of this book with Lapin, who contributes fourteen poems. Lapin's poetry is definitely immature, but intriguing, being a strange melange of metrical and metaphorical restraint (especially if compared with the Imagists and their followers) and show-off erudition. Noticeable is a strong German orientation, particularly in epi­ graphs and dedications; and it extends from E. (Ehrenstein) to the romantic (E. T. A. Hoffmann) and the preromantic times (J. M. R. Lenz); there are even German titles to poems. Also noticeable is a tribute to the "Centrifuge": an epigraph from Bobrov, a dedication to Ivan Aksënov, and some influence of Pasternak. The distinguishing characteristic of Lapin's poetry is, however, a certain strangeness which touches on the absurd and makes him a predecessor of Russian oberiuty. Molnijanin aimed, how­ ever, at more than showing samples of Expressionist prose and poetry. I t begins with a mannered manifesto, full of topical allusions, which makes one thing clear: Lapin and Gabriloviö consider themselves Expressionists; they reject Russian Futurism as a passé thing, and they show respect for the "Moskovskij Parnas" group (which, incidentally, published Molnijanin), This E. is not defined, except t h a t they "re-tune (their) iron lyres to a lyrical tonality" and thus say good-bye (au) to their Futurism, which, nevertheless, means "no return to the Casta diva". Highly interesting is the list of writers' ancestors, "the indestructible names of our uncles"; and they make it clear that "the shining world of E . " has practically no other names to its credit besides Aseev, Aksënov, Becher, Bobrov, Ehrenstein, Pasternak, and Xlebnikov. 21 Spasskij was a prolific poet and probably had his work printed in more cities than any other Russian man of letters. His literary debut took place in Tiflis, then he published poetry not only in Moscow and Petrograd (Leningrad), but in Penza, Niznij Novgorod, Rjazan', and Samarkand as well. Before E. he was close to Futurism: K. Bol'sakov wrote a preface to his collection of verse Kak sneg (Moscow, 1917), he knew Xlebnikov well, participated in the Gazeta futuristov, and re­ cited his poetry in "Kafe Poètov". In 1930 he joined "Pereval". In addition to several collections of his own poems, much of his poetry can be found in miscellanies of different origin and affiliations (e.g., Bez muz, Jav', Sopo, and even in the anti-Futurist Cet i necet). More interesting than his books of poems are his autobiographical povest' in verse Neudačniki (Moscow, 1929) and his short novel Parad osuzdennyx (Leningrad, 1931), which has Velimir Xlebnikov among the characters and depicts scenes of life in the anarchist colonies in Moscow soon after the Revolution. Also noteworthy is his book of memoirs, Majakovskij i ego sputniki (Leningrad, 1940).

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"The Parnassus of Moscow", whose branch the second-wave Expressionists con­ sidered themselves to be, was actually nothing but the last stage in the evolution of the "Centrifuge" group, in which prerevolutionary neo-Symbolism is to be found merged with Futurism. To be sure, the ''Centrifuge" proper still existed by that time, and "The Parnassus of Moscow" included poets who did not belong to the "Centri­ fuge", namely, Benar, Adalis, Sisov, V. Kovalevskij, et al. Nevertheless, Sergej Bobrov and Ivan Aksënov, the two "Centrifuge" leaders who. were very influential in the Muscovite literary circles at the beginning of the 1920's, clearly dominated "The Parnassus of Moscow". The group published two issues of the miscellany with the same name, b u t No. 1 never went on sale. I t was announced, however, that Bobrov, Aksënov, Aseev, Spasskij, and Gabrilovič were to be among the contributors. The second issue did appear, containing, among other things, poetry, prose, and criticism by Bobrov, poetry by Aksënov (who, in the prefatory essay to the book, emphasized the uncon­ scious element in art and considered the latter an attempt to remember a dream) and by another Centrifugist, Evgenij Silling, a story written jointly by Lapin (whose poetry was also included) and Gabrilovič and a critical review by Levit on a book about E. T. A. Hoffmann. What makes the issue especially interesting for us, however, is the abundance of translations from German Expressionists, nearly all of them done by Lapin and many of them accompanied by brief notes about the author and/or biographical data as well as by announcements of plans to publish books of translations of their work. Among this material there is an essay by Wieland Herzfelde on the funeral of another Expressionist, Alfred Lichtenstein, poems by Lichtenstein himself (who is presented as "the greatest poet of early E."), as well as by van Hoddis, and Heym. There are references (epigraphs, etc.) to, and translations from, other European poets and writers from Angelus Silesius to the obscure Dadaist Theophil Müller, and from Jules Romains to the Communist poet and Comintern functionary, Henri Guilbeaux. I t was "The Parnassus of Moscow", too, that published the only book of verse by Boris Lapin in October, 1922 (1923 on the cover). The book was entitled 1922-ja kniga stixov and was the most promising publication of Russian E. as well as, ironically, its finale. I n the highly allusive preface to the book, Lapin both rejects in advance the possible accusation that the collection is "non-Futurist" and attacks the Futurists. 22 Surprisingly, the antidote to harmful Futurism and an ideal ("life in poetry" as opposed to the contemporary Futurist "tours de force and pretensions" [fokusnicestvo i akterstvo]) are found in Russian and German Romanticism of the early nineteenth century. Zukovskij, Novalis, 23 and Schelling are mentioned (or quoted) and further, in a poem. Lapin calls Tieck, Brentano, and Eichendorff "my forefathers". The forty-seven poems comprising the collection are not, however, a reconstruction of t h a t professed Romanticism, though names, motives, and echoes from German Romantic poetry can be found in abundance on its pages: in addition to those named above, there are E. T. A. Hoffmann, Kleist, Friedrich Schlegel, and La Motte-Fouqué. This does not 22 I t is difficult to say whom he calls "Futurists". My guess is that these Futurists might be the budding Constructivists, who might have caused the disintegration of the postrevolutionary "Centrifuge". 23 Cf. Petnikov's preoccupation with Novalis,

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exhaust the German, and Western, element: one can add Schiller and even Klopstock as well as Kipling and the English ballad (there is also American couleur locale in the mention of Chicago and the word "boss"). On the Russian side, 2ukovskij is joined by Lermontov, Marlinskij, and Fet. There had hardly been such wholesale embracing of German Romanticism in Russian literature since 2ukovskij, and the themes of Lapin's poetry conform to, or, at least, do not contradict it: poetry, death, the motives of the "last Romantic", alchemy, astrology. P a r t of this derives, of course, from Sergej Bobrov and the early "Centrifuge" cult of Hoffmann. The Bobrovian display of erudi­ tion, references to Bobrov's works, his very tone of voice can be found in these poems; and the introductory poem resembles the verse manifesto of the "Centrifuge" of 1914. However, there is a definite parodie element, perhaps a version of German romantic irony for the Russian 1920's, which, nevertheless, touches on the absurd and clearly anticipates the poetry of Xarms and other oberiu poets. Finally, there is the cult of Xlebnikov: 24 a poem on his death, a few neologisms in his manner, some use of his "internal declension"; and finally, in the "postscript" to the book, Xlebnikov, to the readers' surprise, is proclaimed to be the one who found the needed middle ground between Futurism and neoclassical trends. The prevalent impression of Lapin's book is that of strangeness, which originates mainly from the fact t h a t the romantic "content" is presented in an avant-garde garb. There are irrelevant epithets as well as a general predilection for the absurd, the reverse and the oxymora (tixo i sumno; severojug ; a dol opuscen vzoru) and a tendency for mixing everything. There are also many irregularities, used, however, with restraint, especially the "agrammatical" and "asyntactical" structures (ub'ja; ulybaja; ocen ljubov', ocen' krov'). Being a "Centrifuge" apprentice, Lapin indulges in metrical ad­ ventures; he is attracted by unusual kinds of the udarnik verse and even produces a dol'nik version of the Sapphic stanza. At least some of Lapin's metrical rarities might represent an attempt to reproduce jazz rhythms in verse (see the postscript to the book). Lexically, Lapin's poetry is a curious cocktail of various names, coarse words, technical terms, foreign words, and neologisms; and the sonic aspect is characterized by the use of paronomasia and of many kinds of and devices in the area of rhyme, such as asso­ nances, split rhymes, placing rhyming clausulas far from each other, etc. The book ends with an envoy in prose addressed to Gabrilovic which contains some Expressionist ideas, though the word "Expressionism" is never used. Lapin speaks about the "elusive reality of objects", juxtaposes the Futurist "word material" and the Expressionist "word-revelation" and says: "Turning into a word, reality becomes a new world on this earth, the world of wild reflex and relativity." Lapin's book, though not a masterpiece, was interesting and highly promising; but it was hardly noticed. Brjusov, in a review, 25 condescendingly admitted that Lapin was gifted, b u t chided him for affectation, tortuous imagery, "desperate" metaphors, childish distortion of language, and obscurity (which, Brjusov hastens to add, any reader of Mallarmé, the decadents, and the Futurists could decipher). 24 See also Lapin's "Xlebnikovu" in Molnijanin. Xlebnikova" in no. 2 of Moskovskij Pamas. 25 Pečat i Revoljucija, no. 4 (1923), p. 136.

Also see V. Kovalevskij's poem "Na smert"

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But this book was also the end of Russian E. When, in November, 1924, the Brjusov Institute (from which Lapin graduated) organized an Evening of Contemporary Poetry, such poetry was represented by Lef, Oktjabr,' Molodaja Gvardija, Pereval, and the Imagists, but it boasted no Expressionists, Fuists or nicevoki. Ippolit Sokolov be­ came active in the Soviet movie industry, 27 Zemenkov illustrated books and wrote books on the arts, and later became associated with art museums; 27 Gabrilovic first joined the Constructivists, then achieved prominence in journalism and especially in film script writing. His recent memoirs 28 ignore the Expressionist episode in his life. Lapin, too, was close to the Constructivists. He came to neglect poetry and soon was known in Soviet literature mainly as a journalist who specialized in the frontier areas of Russia. He traveled abroad a good deal and wrote, individually and jointly, numerous books about his experiences. He faithfully followed all the twists and turns of Soviet literary policies, published his essays in a collection on the construction of the White Sea canal or in a miscellany entitled I zizn' xorosa i zit' xoroso, among other things. He also translated. Some time before World War I I he became a war correspondent. He con­ tinued to write verse, but seldom published it, except that he used it occasionally in his books of essays. Some of his unpublished poetry, taken from the archive of his friend Il'ja Èrenburg's widow, appeared in the anthology, Sovetskie poèty pavšie na Velikoj Otečestvennoj Vojne (Biblioteka poèta, Bol''saja serija, M.-L., 1965). No avant-garde features can be seen in it, even in the poems dated 1923. Such was the "external" history of Russian E. An analysis of its poetry for the establishment of its precise ties with the West and contemporary Russian poetry is a task for the future; here it could only be suggested. Even without such analysis, however, a few things can be summed up at the end of this survey. Russian E. was born in 1919 as one of numerous groups which, at that time, tried to build a new avant-garde poetry on the ruins of pre-revolutionary Russian Futurism; it lasted until 1923. Its pioneer was Ippolit Sokolov, who aspired to create a synthesis of Russian Futurism in his theory, but in his poetry continued the traditions of the "Mezzanine of Poetry", resulting only in another version of Imagism. When news about "genuine" E. in the West reached Sokolov, he was forced partly to change and to broaden considerably his theoretical tenets; and this led to overextension: Sokolov's Expres­ sionism burst like a soap bubble. Participants in this early, Imagist phase of E. had contact with some other avant-garde groups of the period, such as the nicevoki and the Fuists who, in their turn, displayed occasional interest in Western E. The second phase was connected with the names of Lapin and Gabrilovic, and for them E. meant 26 His first book on the subject was Kinoscenarij : Teorija i texnika (Moscow, 1926). Later he wrote a monograph on Chaplin, Carli Čaplin : Žizn' i tvorcestvo (Moscow, 1938) and compiled Istorija sovetskogo kinoiskusstva zvukovogo perioda (Moscow, 1940). The switch of Russian avant-garde poets to cinematography is a subject worth investigating. Rjurik Rok and his brother, Marian Goring, became movie directors (they published jointly the book on art in the United States, Xèp, xèp, mister (Moscow: Proletkul't, 1926); one day they did not come back from a European trip and they continued to be active in films abroad. Šeršenevič switched from imagist poems to writing books about film actors. Krucenyx wrote a book Govorjascee kino (Moscow, 1928). Especially in­ teresting is the impact of German expressionist film evident in Kuzmin's last book of verse, ForeV razbivaet led (Leningrad, 1929). 27 Udarnoe iskusstvo okon satiry (1930), Grafika v bytu (1930); Gogol' v Moskve (1954), Pamjatnye mesta Moskvy (1959); Ocerki moskovskoj zizni (1962). 28 Evg. Gabrilovic, 0 torn cto prošlo (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1967).

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an amalgam of "Centrifuge", German E., Xlebnikov, and German Romanticism. The "Centrifuge" itself during this last period of its existence came close to German E. — closer, in fact, than any variety of Russian E. proper. An unmistakable achievement of Russian E. was the poetry of Boris Lapin which, though lacking maturity, showed originality and great potentialities. His poetry, wheth­ er in its real or potential qualities, was a part of an unnoticed flowering which included the late verse of Benedikt Livsic, Mixail Kuzmin, Ivan Aksënov, and Sergej Bobrov and which would be an interesting subject for future study and, appreciation. This poetry was overshadowed by the publicity accompanying other avant-garde groups, not to mention the groups encouraged by the government, and an investigation of this poetry has yet to be made. So far, out of all this poetry, only the genius of Mandel'stam begins to break through the crust of neglect accumulated for decades.

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EXPRESSIONISM AS AN INTERNATIONAL PHENOMENON An Annotated Bibliography * Starred items have heen checked by the compiler.

U.W.

I. REVIEWS OF RESEARCH AND BIBLIOGRAPHIES

* Brinkmann, Richard. Expressionismus: Forschungsprobleme 1952—1960 (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1961). 98 pp. From the Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte. * Demange, Camille. "Orientations de la recherche sur l'expressionisme depuis 1960". Etudes Germaniques, X X I I (1967), 87-92. * Hill, Claude and Ralph Ley. The Drama of German Expressionism : A German—English Bibliography (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1960). 211 pp. —General bibliography (pp. 6—38) lists 682 items. The second part (listing over 3000 items) offers sections devoted to Barlach, Brecht (only English-language publications), Bronnen, Goering, Hasenclever, Jahnn, Johst, Kaiser, Kokoschka, Kornfeld, Rubiner, Sorge, Sternheim, Toller, Unruh and Werfel respectively. * Konrad, Gustav. "Expressionismus: Ein kritisches Referat". Wirkendes Wort, VII (1957), 351-367. Paulsen, Wolfgang. "Die deutsche expressionistische Dichtung und ihre Erforschung". Universitas, XVII (1962), 411-422. Raabe, Paul. "Expressionismus: Eine Literaturübersicht". Der Deutschunterricht, XVI/2 (1964) Supplement, pp. 1—32. * Schneider, Karl-Ludwig. "Neuere Literatur zur Dichtung des deutschen Expressionismus". Euphorion, XLVII (1953), pp. 99-110. II. COLLECTIONS OF ESSAYS, SPECIAL ISSUES

* Bilancio dell'espressionismo (Florence: Vallecchi, 1965). 129 pp. —Six essays originally read at a conference held in Florence in April, 1964, with the theme "Incontri con l'espressionismo". Abbreviation: Bilancio . . . * Einführung in die Kunst der Gegenwart, ed. Max Deri (Leipzig: Seemann, 1919). 148 pp. 48 ills. — Essays by Deri, Max Dessoir, Arnold Schering, Alwin Kronacher, Max Martersteig, and Oskar Walzel. Abbreviation: Einführung . . . *L'Expressionisme dans le théâtre européen (Paris: Editions du Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, 1971), 407 pp.—Proceedings of the Strasbourg Colloquium. 25 essays, a number of documentary statements by Hasenclever, Kaiser, Kornfeld and Goll, a chronology (pp. 363— 390) and 110 ills. * Friedmann, Hermann and Otto Mann, eds. Expressionismus : Gestalten einer literarischen Bewegung (Heidelberg: Rothe, 1956). 356 pp. —General introduction by Otto Mann, an essay on the precursors by Bernhard Rang, a section on poetry (eleven poets, with an introductory essay by Edgar Lohner), a section on drama (five playwrights, with an introductory essay by Otto Mann), and a chapter on Dada written by Fritz Usinger. Biographies, bibliographies and a chronology of publication dates. * Ekspresionizam i hrvatska knjizevnost. Special issue of the periodical Kritika (Zagreb, 1969). 156 pp. —Essays on Yugoslav, Polish, Hungarian, Rumanian, and Bulgarian E. Abbrevation: Ekspresionizam . . . * Imprimatur. Special issue on E.: N. F. III (1961/62), pp. 82 —257.—Contains a variety of essays, many of them devoted to Expressionist activities and manifestations in various German lo­ calities. An essay by Klaus Ziegler on "Dichtung und Gesellschaft im deutschen E . " is also included. * Marcatré, special issue Nos. 8/10 (1964) contains an anthology of papers read at the Florence convegno, among them those by Gregotti, Reich and Wörner listed below, as well as M. Brizio's "L'espressionismo in rapporto al passato", E. Debenedetti's "Chagall e l'espressionismo" and reports by, and interviews with, Raffaello Ramat, Roman Vlad, M. Volpi and N. Ponente. * Paulsen, Wolfgang, ed. Aspekte des Expressionismus : Periodisierung, Stil, Gedankenwelt (Heidel­ berg: Stiehm, 1968). 175 pp. —Seven papers read at the Amherst Colloquium 1967, including 329

contributions—not separately listed—by Wilhelm Emrich, Wolfgang Paulsen, Reinhold Grimm, and Andrzej Wirth. * Rothe, Wolfgang, ed. Expressionismus als Literatur (Berne: Francke, 1969). 797 pp.—The most exhaustive survey of German literary E.now available. Includes comprehensive bibliographies. Following three introductory essays by Erich von Kahler, R. Hinton Thomas, and Wolfgang Rothe, the volume offers five main sections: I. "Übergănge, Gattungen, Querschnitte" (7 essays); I I . "Expressionistische Lyriker" (14 essays); I I I . "Expressionistische Drama­ tiker" (12 essays); IV. "Expressionistische Prosaisten" (8 essays), and V. "Der Dadaismus" (4 essays). * Steifen, Hans, ed. Der deutsche Expressionismus : Formen und Gestalten (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1965). 268 pp.—Twelve lectures presented at the German Cultural Institute in Paris. Covers many aspects of German E., including literature, painting, and music. * Das Wort, I I (1937), I I I (1938). —An extended discussion of E. in this German-language periodi­ cal published in Moscow on the eve of World War II. 19 contributions in six issues, including essays by Klaus Mann, Herwarth Walden, Béla Balázs, Georg Lukács, and Ernst Bloch. I I I . DOCUMENTS, MEMOIRS, CATALOGUES, SYMPOSIA, MANIFESTOS

Chiarini, Paolo, Franco Lo Re, and Ida Porena, eds. Caos e geometria : per un regesto delle poetiche espressioniste (Florence, 1964). 240 pp.—The Italian counterpart of Pörtner's collection (see below). "Convegno internazionale di studi sull'espressionismo," held, in May, 1965, as part of the Florentine Maggio Musicale of that year. Exhibitions, musical performances (opera and concert) and literary symposia. Proceedings unpublished, except for a selection of papers printed in the periodical Marcatré and numerous individual contributions published in various Italian and foreign periodicals. Reports and references in many books and periodicals. See especially Paolo Chiarini's book Espressionismo : storia e struttura (listed below) and Ladislao Mittner's monograph (also listed below), as well as the latter's Saggi, divagazioni, polemiche (Naples: Morano, 1964). * Dietz, Ludwig. " K u r t Wolffs Bücherei 'Der jüngste Tag': Seine Geschichte und Bibliographie". Philobiblon, V I I (1962), pp. 96-118. * DuTzak, Manfred. "Dokumente des Expressionismus: Das Kurt-Wolff-Archiv". Euphorion, LX (1966), pp. 337-369. — Catalogues and describes the holdings of the archive at Yale, especi­ ally the letters, many of which are found in Wolff's Briefwechsel (listed below). * Edschmid, Kasimir, ed. Briefe der Expressionisten (Berlin: Ullstein, 1964). 189 pp. * —.Lebendiger Expressionismus: Auseinandersetzungen, Gestalten, Erinnerungen (Munich: Desch, 1961). 409 pp. * —, ed. Schöpferische Konfession (Berlin: Reiss, 1920). "Tribüne der Kunst und Zeit" No. 12.— Perhaps the most important collection of statements by German Expressionist writers and artists. Credos by Pechstein, Beckmann, Klee, Edwin Scharff, Felixmüller, Marc, HÖlzel, Schönberg, Benn, Unruh, Toller, Schickele, Becher, and Kaiser. 101 pp. * Der Aktivismus 1915-1920, ed. Wolfgang Rothe (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch-Verlag, 1969). 160 pp.-Selections from Das Ziel, Tătiger Geist and the two volumes of Die Erhebung. * Ich schneide die Zeit aus: Expressionismus und Politik in Franz Pfemferts "Aktion", ed. Paul Raabe (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch-Verlag, 1964). 386 pp.—Vast selection of materials published between 1911 and 1918. * Der jüngste Tag : Die Bücherei einer Epoche, ed. H. Schöffler (Frankfurt: Scheffler, 1970). 2 vols., 1803 and 1767 pp.—Reprints all 86 booklets issued in this series. Documentary supplement in II, 1553ff. * Miesel, Victor H., ed. Voices of German Expressionism (Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice Hall, 1970). 211 pp. — Statements, primarily by German painters. * Pörtner, Paul, ed. Literatur-Revolution 1910—1925 : Dokumente, Manifeste, Programme (Neuwied: Luchterhand, 1960) .2 vols., 503 and 613 pp. I: Zur ăsthetik und Poetik, I I : Zur Begriffsbestim­ mung der Ismen. — Section on E.: II, pp. 143—383. * Raabe, Paul, ed. Expressionismus: Aufzeichnungen und Erinnerungen der Zeitgenossen (Olten/ Freiburg: Walter, 1965). 422 pp.—Extensive notes. * —, ed. Expressionismus: Der Kampf um eine literarische Bewegung (Munich: Deutscher Taschen­ buch-Verlag, 1965). 319 pp. —Critical statements pro and con dating from 1909 to 1938. Ex­ tensive bibliography of such statements published in German periodicals between 1909 and 1932 (pp. 308-314). * —, ed. Der spăte Expressionismus, 1918—1922: Bücher, Bilder, Zeitschriften, Dokumente (Biberach: Biberacher Verlagsdruckerei, 1966). 58 pp. —Catalogue of an exhibition. *— and H. L. Greve, eds. Expressionismus: Literatur und Kunst 1910—1923 (Munich: Langen/ Müller, 1960). 349 pp. Many ills. —Catalogue of an exhibition held at the Schiller-National­ museum in Marbach. 330

* Schreyer, Lothar. Eri?inerungen an Sturm und Bauhaus: Was ist des Menschen Bild? (Munich: Langen/Müller, 1956; paperback ed. Munich: List, 1966). 295 pp. * Symposium on E., conducted during the 5th ICLA-Congress in Belgrade (1967). Not included in the Proceedings. Papers by Armin Arnold, Zoran Konstantinovic, Gerhard Loose, and Richard Vowles, with introductory material by Ulrich Weisstein. Unpublished. * Walden, Nell and Lothar Schreyer, eds. Der Sturm: Ein Erinnerungsbuch an Herwarth Walden und die Künstler des Sturmkreises (Baden Baden: Klein, 1954). 274 pp. Numerous ills. —Con­ tains essays by Nell Walden ("Aus meinen Erinnerungen an H. W. und die Sturm-Zeit", pp. 9—63), Lothar Schreyer ("Herwarth Waldens Werk", pp. 113—159), as well as letters by August Stramm (pp. 74—99), a complete list of contributions to Der Sturm (vols. I—XIV), a list of Sturm exhibitions and publications, and some poetry. . * Wolff, Kurt. Briefwechsel eines Verlegers, 1911-1963 (Frankfurt: Schemer, 1966). 621 pp.— Letters by Hasenclever, Trakl, Stadler, Werfel, Edschmid, Schickele, Unruh, Hiller, and Toller, among others. Note: Most of the important Expressionist periodicals (Der Sturm, Die Aktion, Die Weissen Blătter) and many of the minor ones listed by Raabe (see below) have been reprinted in recent years. IV. ANTHOLOGIES OF GERMAN EXPRESSIONIST PROSE, POETRY AND DRAMA

Bode, Dietrich, ed. Gedichte des Expressionismus (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1966). Reclams UniversalBibliothek Nos. 8726-28. * Denkler, Horst, ed. Einakter und kleine Dramen des Expressionismus (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1968). 285 pp. Reclams Universal-Bibliothek, Nos. 8562—64. — Sixteen plays by Döblin, Kokoschka, Kandinsky, Werfel, Hasenclever, Benn, Sorge, Kasack, Johst, Koffka, Becher, Kaiser, Brust, Goll, Britting, and Franz Jung. * Kandier, Klaus, ed. Expressionismus: Dramen, 2 vols. (Berlin: Aufbau-Verlag, 1967). * Heselhaus, Clemens, ed. Die Lyrik des Expressionismus (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1956.) 199 pp. "Deutsche Texte 5".—Extensive notes (pp. 164—195). * Lyrik des expressionistischen Jahrzehnts, ed. Max Niedermayer (Wiesbaden: Limes-Verlag, 1956; reprinted by the Deutscher Taschenbuch-Verlag in Munich, 1965). —Preface by Gottfried Benn. * Martini, Fritz, ed. Prosa des Expressionismus (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1970). 318 pp. Reclams Uni­ versal-Bibliothek, Nos. 8379—82.—A long introduction by the editor (pp. 3—48) is followed by one selection each from the work of sixteen authors. * Otten, Karl, ed. Ahnung und Aufbruch: Expressionistische Prosa (Darmstadt: Luchterhand, 1957). 567 pp. * —, ed. Ego und Eros: Meistererzăhlungen des Expressionismus (Stuttgart: Goverts, 1963). 584 pp. — Postscript by H. Schöffler. *—, ed. Expressionismus—grotesk (Zurich: Die Arche, 1962). 106 pp. * —, ed. Schrei und Bekenntnis: Expressionistisches Theater (Darmstadt: Luchterhand, 1959).; 1012 pp. — Contains thirty-six plays. * Pandolfi, Vito, ed. Il teatro espressionista tedesco. 2 vols. (Bologna: Zanichelli, 1956). * Pinthus, Kurt, ed. Menschheitsdămmerung: Eine Symphonie der jüngsten Dichtung, new ed. (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1959). 382 pp.— With a postscript "Nach 40 Jahren" (pp. 7-21) and enlarged biographies and bibliographies. * Ritchie, J. M., ed. and transi. Seven Expressionist Plays (London: Calder & Boyars, 1968).— Ritchie has also edited and translated five plays each by Sternheim (Calder & Boyars, 1970) and Georg Kaiser (Calder & Boyars, 1970). — , ed. and transi. Vision and Aftermath: Four Expressionist War Plays (London: Calder & Boyars, 1969). * Schondorff, Joachim, ed. Deutsches Theater des Expressionismus (Munich: Langen/Müller, n.d. [1961]). — Contains Goering's Seeschlacht, Kaiser's Von morgens bis mitternachts, Barlach's Der blaue Boll and works by Wedekind, Lasker-Schüler, and Hans Henny Jahnn. * Sokel, Walter H. An Anthology of German Expressionist Drama : A Prelude to the Absurd (Garden City: Anchor Books, 1963). — Contains two plays by Kokoschka, Sternheim's Kassette, Hasenclever's Der Sohn, Sorge's Der Bettler (Acts I—III), Kaiser's Der gerettete Alkibiades and plays by Goll and Lauckner, plus several essays in English translation. V. THE WORD "EXPRESSIONISM"

* Arnold, Armin. "Um den Begriff 'Expressionismus'". Die Literatur des Expressionismus (Stutt­ gart: Kohlhammer, 1966), pp. 9—15. * Gordon, Donald. "On the Origin of the Word 'Expressionism' ". Journal of the Warburg/Gourtauld Institute, X X I X (1966), 368-385. 331

* Kreuzer, Helmut. "The Expressionist : Ein wortgeschichtlicher Hinweis". Monatshefte, LVI (1964), pp. 336-337. Pörtner, Paul. "Was heisst Expressionismus?" Neue Zürcher Zeitung, January 29, 1961. Schmalenbach, Fritz. "Das Wort 'Expressionismus' ". Neue Zürcher Zeitung, March 11, 1961.

VI. GERMAN EXPRESSIONISM: SECONDARY LITERATURE IN GERMAN

(including foreign influences on German Expressionist literature) 1. General (primarily books. A rather extensive list of relevant articles published between 1919 and 1932 is found on pp. 308—314 of the previously listed collection Expressionismus : Der Kampf um eine Bewegung, ed. Paul Raabe.) * Arnold, Armin. Die Literatur des Expressionismus : Sprachliche und thematische Quellen (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1966). 200 pp. — The impact of Marinetti and Futurism is dicussed on pp. 16—27 and 69-79. * Bachmann, Frieda. "Die Theorie, die historischen Beziehungen und die Eigenart des Expressio­ nismus". Germanie Review, I I (1927), pp. 229—243. Bambauer, Eleonore. "Schizophrenie und Expressionismus". Dissertation, University of Munich (Medical School), 1951. 39 pp. * Benn, Gottfried. "Bekenntnis zum Expressionismus". Deutsche Zukunft, November 5, 1933. Reprinted in the volume Kunst und Macht (1934). * —. Introduction to the volume Lyrik des expressionistischen Jahrzehnts, ed. M. Niedermayer (Wiesbaden: Limes-Verlag, 1956).—This essay is a revised version of the above piece. Bense, Max. "Exkurs über den Expressionismus" in Plakatwelt: 4 Essays (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1952), pp. 38-62. * Bloch, Ernst. Three essays concerning E. in Die Kunst, Schiller zu sprechen, und andere Aufsătze (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1969). —"Der E., jetzt erblickt" (1937; pp. 73 — 83); "Diskussionen über E . " (1938; pp. 83-97), and "Problem des E. nochmals" (1940; pp. 97-101). Blunck, Richard. Der Impuls des Expressionismus (Hamburg: Harms, 1921). 50 pp. * Boise, Elisabeth B. "Expressionismus als literarhistorischer Periodenbegriff". Dissertation, New York University, 1963. Dissertation Abstracts, XXV (1965), 5925. 181 pp. Brinkmann, Karl. Impressionismus und Expressionismus in der deutschen Literatur (Hollfeld/Obb.: Bange, 1962). 95 pp. "Königs Erlăuterungen zu den Klassikern", vol. 267. * Brösel, Karl. Veranschaulichung im Realismus, Impressionismus und Früh-Expressionismus (Munich: Hueber, 1928). 64 pp.—Vol. 2 in the series "Wortkunst: Untersuchungen zur Sprachund Literaturgeschichte". — I: "Wille und Făhigkeit zur Schaffung greifbarer Anschauungs­ werte in realistischer und ihr verwandter Dichtung"; I I : "Stellung frühexpress. und ihr ver­ wandter Dichtung zum Naturvorbild: Gegensătzliche Haltung des Realismus". * Bruggen, M. F . E. van. Im Schatten des Nihilismus : Die expressionistische Lyrik im Rahmen und als Ausdruck der geistigen Situation Deutschlands (Amsterdam: Paris, 1946). 234 pp. — Dutch dissertation. Daxlberger, R. "Das Heilige in der deutschen Dichtung zur Zeit des Expressionismus". Disser­ tation, University of Munich, 1937. Domino, Ruth. "Die Programmatik des Expressionismus". Dissertation, University of Vienna, 1933. * Dürsteier, Heinz Peter. Sprachliche Neuschöpfungen im Expressionismus (Berne: "Wir jungen Schweizer", 1954). 86 pp.—Berne dissertation (1953). I: "Der E. und sein Verhăltnis zur Sprache" (pp. 7—22); I I : "Die sprachlichen Neuschöpfungen" (pp. 23—72). The most ex­ haustive treatment of this important subject. * Duwe, Wilhelm. Deutsche Dichtung des 20. Jahrhunderts vom Naturalismus zum Surrealismus (Zurich: Füssli, 1969). —"Express. Dichtung" (I, pp. 142-176), "Express. Prosa" (I, pp. 461-508), "Express. Drama" (II, pp. 298-374). * Edschmid, Kasimir. Die doppelköpfige Nymphe (Berlin: Cassirer, 1920). 238 pp.—A collection of essays, many of them relevant to our topic. Especially noteworthy are the following pieces: "Situation der deutschen Dichtung" (pp. 11—18), "Dăubler und die Schule der Abstrakten" (pp. 116-125), "Döblin und die Futuristen" (pp. 129-134), "Durchstich durch den 24. Januar 1920 in der deutschen Prosa" (pp. 169-198), and "Bilanz" (pp. 209-231). * —. Über den Expressionismus in der Literatur und die neue Dichtung (Berlin: Reiss, 1920). "Tri­ büne der Kunst und Zeit", 1. 79 pp.—Contains two very important essays: "Über die dichte­ rische deutsche Jugend" (a lecture presented in March, 1918, in various Scandinavian cities) and "Über den dichterischen Expressionismus" (fall, 1917). Translated into various languages. A Russian version was announced but never published. 332

* Erken, Günther. "Der Expressionismus: Anreger, Herausgeber, Verleger" in Kunisch/Hennecke, eds., Handbuch der deutschen Gegenwartsliteratur (Munich: Nymphenburger, 1965), pp. 647— 676. * Falk, Walter. Leid und Verwandlung : Rilke, Kafka, Trakl und der Epochenstil des Impressionismus und Expressionismus (Salzburg: Müller, 1961). — Of very marginal importance: "Impressio­ nismus und E. als Problem" (pp. 11—15) and "Wesensmerkmale des I. und E . " (pp. 403 — 406). * Gallas, Helga. Marxistische Literaturtheorie: Kontroversen im Bund proletarisch-revolutionărer Schriftsteller (Neuwied: Luchterhand, 1971).—About the so-called "E.-Debatte": pp. 18—25, 182-184. Goepfert, Herbert G. "Der expressionistische Verlag: Versuch einer Übersicht". Brandenburger Vortrăge, Sonderdruck 1962, pp. 43 — 68. Gruber, Helmut. "The Political and Ethical Mission of German Expressionism". German Quarterly, X L (1967), 186-203. Haas, Willy. "Jugendstil und Expressionismus: Eine Anmerkung". Eckart-Jahrbuch, 1963/64, pp. 65-72. Harms, Gertrude ."Ein Beitrag zur Begriffsbestimmung des Expressionismus". Dissertation, Uni­ versity of Bonn, 1931. * Hatvani, Paul. "Über den Expressionismus". Bulletin des Leo-Baeck-Instituts (Tel-Aviv), V I I I (1965), pp. 177-206. * Heller, Peter. "Eisgekühlter Expressionismus". Merkur, I X (1955), pp. 1095—1100. * Hermand, Jost. "Expressionismus als Revolution" in Von Mainz nach Weimar (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1969), pp. 298—355.—Negative approach to E. Factually not always reliable. (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag; Munich: Nymphenburger). Vol. 6 of Richard —. Expressionismus Hamann and Jost Hermand, Epochen der deutschen Kultur von 1870 bis zur Gegenwart. An­ nounced for publication in 1972. Hiermann, Rainer. "Expressionismus und Psychoanalyse". Dissertation, University of Vienna, 1950. Kayser, Rudolf. "Das Ende des Expressionismus". Der Neue Merkur, IV (1920), pp. 248—258. * Klages, Ludwig. Ausdrucksbewegung und Gestaltungskraft : Grundlegung der Wissenschaft vom Ausdruck (Leipzig: Barth, 1923). 205 pp. Knevels, W. Expressionismus und Religion, gezeigt an der neuesten deutschen Lyrik (Tübingen: Mohr, 1927). * Kolinsky, Eva. Engagierter Expressionismus: Politik und Literatur zwischen Weltkrieg und Weimarer Republik: Eine Analyse expressionistischer Zeitschriften (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1970). 232 pp. — Covers period 1914—1920, focuses on Die Aktion and Die Weissen Blătter. Kühl-Wiese, B. "Georg Trakl und der Blaue Reiter: Form- und Farbstrukturen in Dichtung und Malerei des Expressionismus". Dissertation, University of Münster, 1965. Loewenthal, Leo. "Die Auffassung Dostojewskis im Vorkriegsdeutschland". Zeitschrift für Sozial­ forschung, I I I (1934), pp. 343-381. * Lukács, Georg. "Grösse und Verfall des Expressionismus". Internationale Literatur, I (1934), pp. 153-173. Also in Werke (Neuwied: Luchterhand), IV (1971), pp. 111-149. — I: "Zur Ideologie der deutschen Intellektuellen in der imperialistischen Periode"; I I : Der E. und die USP-Ideologie"; I I I : "Schöpferische Methode des E " . * Martini, Fritz. "Expressionismus" in Reallexikon der deutschen Literaturgeschichte, ed. Kohl­ schmidt/Mohr, I (1958), pp. 420-432.—Extensive bibl. * —. Was war Expressionismus ? (Urach: Port-Verlag, 1948). 244 pp. —"Der E. als dichterische Bewegung" (pp. 9—65), "Der E. und die lyrische Sprache" (pp. 66—92), "Die Dichter" (pp. 95-174), "Die Gedichte". * Mayer, Hans. "Rückblick auf den Expressionismus". Neue Deutsche Hefte, X I I I , No. 4 (1966), pp. 32—51. As "Retrospektive des Expressionismus" in Mayer's book Zur deutschen Literatur der Zeit (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1967), pp. 37—53. Originally presented at the Florence convegno and published in the special issue of Marcatré. * Meyer, Alfred Richard. Die maer von der musa expressionistica : zugleich eine quasi-Literaturgeschichte mit 130 praktischen Beispielen (Düsseldorf-Kaiserwerth: Die Faehre, 1948). 130 pp. Müller, Robert. Die idealistischen Grundzüge der expressionistischen Literatur (Berlin: Dietzler, 1931). * Muschg, Walter. Von Trakl zu Brecht: Dichter des Expressionismus (Munich: Piper, 1963). 380 pp.—Essays on specific authors. "Von Trakl zu Brecht" (introductory essay on pp. 11—93) subdivided into 1. "Das Schlagwort" (pp. 11-23), 2. "Die Hochburg" (pp. 24-57), 3. "Ex­ press. Sprache" (pp. 57—82) and 4. "Express. Form" (pp. 83—93). * Paulsen, Wolfgang. Expressionismus und Aktivismus (Berlin/Leipzig: Gotthelf, 1935). 240 pp. — Originally published in Strasbourg. Pfister, Oskar. Der psychologische und biologische Untergrund expressionistischer Bilder (Berne: Bircher, 1920). 185 pp. 12 ills. —English translation published in New York (1923). Picard. Max, Das Ende des Expressionismus (Zurich-Erlenbach: Rentsch, 1916, 1920). 76 pp. 333

* Raabe, Paul. "Der Expressionismus als historisches Phănomen". Deutschunterricht, XVII, No. 5 (1965), pp. 5-20. *— . "Die Revolte der Dichter: Die frühen Jahre des Expressionismus, 1909—1914". Der Monat, Heft 191 (1964), pp. 86-93. * —. Die Zeitschriften und Sammlungen des literarischen Expressionismus (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1964). 263 pp. * Rasch, Wolfdietrich. "Was war Expressionismus?" Akzente, I I I (1956), 368—373. Reprinted in Zur deutschen Literatur seit der Jahrhundertwende (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1967), pp. 221—227. Richter, Wilfried. "Massen und Massenführung in der deutschen Literatur des Zeitraumes des Expressionismus". Dissertation, Free University, Berlin, 1955. 146 pp. * Rühle, Jürgen. "Das Theater der deutschen Revolution" in Theater und Revolution (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch-Verlag, 1963), pp. 127—158. Sallwürck, Edmund von. Der Weg zum literarischen Expressionismus (Langensalza: Beyer, 1919). 28 pp. —No. 275 of "Friedrich Manns Pădagogisches Magazin". Schacherl, Lillian. "Zeitschriften des Expressionismus: Versuch einer zeitungswissenschaftlichen Strukturanalyse". Dissertation, University of Munich, 1958. 157 pp. * Schneider, Karl-Ludwig. Zerbrochene Formen: Wort und Bild im Expressionismus (Hamburg: Hoffmann & Campe, 1967). 204 pp. Some ills. —"E.: Dichtung und Malerei" (pp. 7-32). * Schonauer, Franz. "Expressionismus und Faschismus: Eine Diskussion aus dem Jahre 1938". Literatur und Kritik, 1(1966), No. 7 pp. 44—54, No. 8, pp. 45—55. —Regarding the controversy in Das Wort. * Schreyer, Lothar. "Das war Der Sturm" in Minotaurus, ed. Alfred Döblin (Wiesbaden: Steiner, n. d. [1953]), pp. 112-130. —. Die neue Kunst (Berlin: Der Sturm-Verlag, 1916). Stehlin, Peter. Zum Goethebild des literarischen Expressionismus (Zurich: Juris-Verlag, 1967). 96 pp. * Stuyver, Wilhelmina. Deutsche expressionistische Dichtung im Lichte der Philosophie der Gegenwart (Amsterdam: Paris, 1937). 219 pp.—Dutch diss. Utiz, Emil. Die Grundlagen der jüngsten Kunstbewegung: Ein Vortrag (Stuttgart: Enke, 1913). 27 pp. —. Die Kultur der Gegenwart, in den Grundzügen dargestellt (Stuttgart: Enke, 1921). 292 pp. *— Die Überwindung des Expressionismus: Gharakterologische Studien zur Kultur der Gegenwart (Stuttgart: Enke, 1927). 190 pp.—Contains sections on E. (p. 17ff.), "Der express. Mensch" (p. 26ff.), "Der nachexpress. Mensch" (p. 38ff.), "Expressive Tanz-Tendenzen" (p. 45ff.), "Nachexpressive Tanz-Tendenzen" (p. 47), "Nachexpressive Tendenzen in den bildenden Kün­ sten" (p. 59ff.) and "Expressive Pădagogik" (p. 72ff.). Vogeler, Heinrich. Expressionismus: Eine Zeitstudie (Hamburg: Hăuf, n.d. [1921]). 29 pp. * Walzel, Oskar. "Eindruckskunst und Ausdruckskunst in der Dichtung" in Einführung . . . , pp. 26—46. A Russian version of this essay, in the form included in W's book Die deutsche Literatur seit Goethes Tod, was published under the title Impressionizm i ekspressionizm v sovremennoj Germanii (St. Petersburg: Academia, 1922). Wiese, Leopold von. Strindberg und die junge Generation (Cologne: Rheinland-Verlag, 1921). 16 pp. * Worringer, Wilhelm. "Künstlerische Zeitfragen" in Fragen und Gegenfragen (Munich: Piper, 1956), pp. 106-129. —A lecture delivered in 1921. Ziesche, Kurt. Vom Expressionismus : Eine Geivissensforschung (Leipzig: Vier Quellen-Verlag, 1919). 60 pp. 2. Expressionism

and Drama

Beer, Willy. "Untersuchungen zur Problematik des expressionistischen Dramas, unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der Dramatik Georg Kaisers und Fritz von Unruhs". Dissertation, Univer­ sity of Breslau, 1934. * Denkler, Horst. Drama des Expressionismus : Programm, Spieltext, Theater (Munich: Fink, 1967). 260 pp. * Diebold, Bernhard. Anarchie im Drama (Frankfurt: Frankfurter Verlagsanstalt, 1921). 479 pp. —A basic study emphasizing the impact of Strindberg's late dramas and introducing the triad Ich-, Schrei- and Pflichtdramen. * Emmel, Felix. Das ekstatische Theater (Prien: Kampmann & Schnabel, 1924). 356 pp.—Pleads for the "unerbittliche Austreibung der Psychologie" and aims at giving dramatic art "eine neue überintellektuelle Grundlage: die Ekstase des Blutes". Contains sections on "ekstatische Regie" (pp, 15—34), "ekstatische Schauspielkunst" (pp. 34—42). The main portion of the book offers drama reviews written for the Preussische Jahrbücher, among them (in the section "Theater der Lebenden") reviews of Toller's Masse-Mensch, O'Neill's The Emperor Jones, and Brecht's Trommeln in der Nacht. Concluding essay by Luise Dumont ("Ursprache"). 334

Fărber, Otto M. "Die iliusionsauflösende Tendenz im dramaturgischen Programm des Expressio­ nismus". Dissertation, University of Vienna, 1958. Frank, Rudolf. Das expressionistische Drama (Frankfurt: Verlag des Bühnenvolksbundes, 1921). 16 pp. Series "Dichter und Bühne". * Guthke, Karl S. "Das Drama des Expressionismus und die Metaphysik der Enttăuschung" in Aspekte . . . , pp. 33—58. * Hain, Mathilde. Studien über das Wesen des frühexpressionistischen Dramas (Frankfurt: Diesterweg, 1933). 102 pp. * Hinck, Walter. "Individuum und Gesellschaft im expressionistischen Drama" in Festschrift für Klaus Ziegler, ed. E. Catholy (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1968), pp. 343-359. * Hohendahl, Peter Uwe. Das Bild der bürgerlichen Welt im expressionistischen Drama (Heidel­ berg: Winter, 1967), 305 pp. * —. "Der Abenteurer im expressionistischen Drama: Zur Soziologie des literarischen Wandels". Orbis Litterarum, X X I (1966), 181-201. * Kandier, Klaus, "Das expressionistische Drama vor dem ersten Weltkrieg". Dissertation, Uni­ versity of Leipzig, 1969. * —. Postscript to the second volume of the anthology Expressionismus : Dramen. (Berlin: AufbauVerlag, 1970), pp. 363-404. * Kaufmann, Hans. "Expressionistische Dramatik" in Krisen und Wandlungen der deutschen Literatur von Wedekind bis Feuchtwanger (Berlin: Aufbau-Verlag, 1969), pp. 253—293. Keller, Marie V. Der deutsche Expressionismus im Drama seiner Hauptvertreter (Weimar: Böhlau, 1936), 66 pp. * Krell, Max, ed. Das deutsche Theater der Gegenwart (Munich: Rosi, 1923). 256 pp. —Contains an essay by Rolf Lauckner: "Der Weg zur expressiven Schauspielkunst". * Lammert, Eberhard. "Das expressionistische Verkündigungsdrama" in Der deutsche Expressio­ nismus, ed. H. Steffen, pp. 138—156. Peduzzi, Karl. "Beobachtungen über die dramatische Kraftsprache im Sturm und Drang und im Expressionismus". Dissertation, University of Vienna, 1924. Petsch, Robert. "Von der Bühnendichtung der jüngsten Vergangenheit". Zeitschrift für deutsche Kultur, X X X V I (1922), 420—445. Hill & Ley list many other relevant contributions by Petsch (p. 14). * Pörtner, Paul. "Die Satire im expressionistischen Theater". Maske & Kothurn, I X (1963), 169—181* Riedel, Walter E. "Studien zum neuen Menschen im deutschen Drama des 20. Jahrhunderts". Dissertation, McGill University, Montreal, 1966. — .Der neue Mensch: Mythos und Wirklichkeit (Bonn: Bouvier, 1970). 124 pp. — Chapters on Sorge, Kaiser, Toller, Johst, and Brecht. Runge, Erika. "Vom Wesen des Expressionismus im Drama der Sturmbühne". Dissertation, Uni­ versity of Munich, 1962. Schmitt, Norbert. "Grundzüge der expressionistischen Dramatik in Deutschland unter besonderer Berücksichtigung Georg Kaisers". Dissertation, University of Münster, 1952. 179 pp. Schneider, Manfred. Der Expressionismus im Drama: Ein einführender Vortrag (Stuttgart: Hoff­ mann, 1919). 32 pp. * Schreyer, Lothar. Expressionistisches Theater: Aus meinen Erinnerungen (Hamburg: Toth, 1948). 233 pp. —O'Neill's Lazarus Laughed discussed on pp. 161—166, Claudel on pp. 226—233. Sinsheimer, Hermann. Das neue Pathos auf der Bühne (Munich: Sachs, 1917). 18 pp. *Sokel, Walter H. "Dialogführung und Dialog im expressionistischen Drama: Ein Beitrag zur Bestimmung des Begriffs 'expressionistisch' im deutschen Drama" in Aspekte . . . , pp. 59—84. Tintner, Elisabeth. "Über die Entwicklung des dichterischen Expressionismus mit besonderer Berücksichtigung der dramatischen Probleme". Dissertation, University of Vienna, 1936. * Viviani, Annalisa. Das Drama des Expressionismus : Kommentar zu einer Epochs (Munich: Wink­ ler, 1970). 190 pp. Extensive bibliography on pp. 149—184. * —. Dramaturgische Elemente im expressionistischen Drama (Bonn: Bouvier, 1970). 187 pp. * Vriesen, Hellmuth. "Die Stationentechnik im neueren deutschen Drama". Dissertation, Uni­ versity of Kiel, 1934. Published Essen, 1934. 88 pp. Wasserka, Ingo. "Die Sturm- und Kampf bühne: Kunsttheorie und szenische Wirklichkeit im expressionistischen Theater Lothar Schreyers". Dissertation, University of Vienna, 1965. * Weiisstein, Ulrich. "Soziologisches Drama und politisches Theater: Erwin Piscators Beitrag zum Drama der zwanziger J a h r e " in Deutsche Dramentheorien, ed. R. Grimm (Frankfurt: Athenăum, 1971), pp. 516-547. Wicke, Ernst-August. "Das Phănomen der Menschenliebe im expressionistischen Drama als săku­ larisierte Form der christlichen Agape". Dissertation, University of Marburg, 1952. 224 pp. Wyatt, R. C. "The Symbolism of Color in the Drama of German Expressionism". Dissertation, University of Iowa, 1956. Wyler, Paul. "Der 'neue Mensch' im Drama des deutschen Expressionismus". Dissertation, Stanford University (1944). Ziegler, Klaus. "Das Drama des Expressionismus". Der Deutschunterricht, V (1953), 57-72. 335

3. Expressionism and Poetry * Brinkmann, Richard. " 'Abstrakte' Lyrik im Expressionismus und die Möglichkeit symbolischer Aussage" in Der deutsche Expressionismus, ed. H. Steffen, pp. 88—114. * —. "Zur Wortkunst des Sturm-Kreises: Anmerkung über Möglichkeiten und Grenzen abstrakter Dichtung" in Unterscheidung und Bewahrung : Festschrift für Hermann Kunisch, ed. K. Lazarowicz and W. Krön (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1961), pp. 63—78. * Denkler, Horst, ed. Gedichte der "Menschheitsdămmerung": Interpretationen expressionistischer Lyrik, mit einer Einleitung von Kurt Pinthus (Munich: Fink, 1971).—Interpretations of one poem each by sixteen of the poets represented in the famous anthology. Eight of these had previously appeared in a booklet published by the Oldenburg-Verlag in Munich. Eberling, Rudolf D. "Studien zur Lyrik des Expressionismus". Dissertation, University of Frei­ burg, 1951. 121 pp. * Eykman, Christoph. Die Funktion des Hăsslichen in der Lyrik Georg Heyms, Georg Trakts, Gottfried Benns : Zur Krise der Wirklichkeitserfahrung im deutschen Expressionismus (Bonn: Bouvier, 1965). 306 pp. Falkenmeyer, F. "Expressionistische Lyrik". Dissertation, University of Würzburg, 1927. * Kohlschmidt, Werner. "Der deutsche Früh-Expressionismus im Werke Georg Heyms und Georg Trakls". Orbis Litterarum, I X (1954), 3-17, 100-119. Lohn, Reinhold. "Ein Beitrag zur Erschliessung des lyrischen Sprachstils des Früh-Expressionis­ mus". Dissertation, University of Bonn, 1957. 420 pp. * Luther, Gisela. Barocker Expressionismus ? : Zur Problematik der Beziehung zwischen der Bild­ lichkeit expressionistischer und barocker Lyrik (The Hague: Mouton, 1969). 177 p p . — A Stanford University dissertation. Maier, Dieter. "Absolute Wortkunst im Zeitraum des Expressionismus: Theorie, Gestaltung, Gründe". Dissertation, University of Innsbruck, 1967. Maté, M. "Die Dichtungssprache des Expressionismus". Dissertation, University of Vienna, 1935. * Mautz, Kurt. "Die Farbensprache der expressionistischen Lyrik". Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte, X X X I (1957), 198 — 240. * Rittich, Werner. Kunsttheorie, Wortkunsttheorie und lyrische Wortkunst im "Sturm" (Greifswald: Bamberger, 1933). 117 pp. A Greifswald dissertation. Ruesch, Jürg-Peter. Ophelia im Wandel des lyrischen Bildes: Das Motiv der navigatio vitae bei Arthur Rimbaud und im deutschen Expressionismus (Zurich: Juris-Verlag, 1964). 158 pp. * Schirokauer, Arno. "Expressionistische Lyrik" in Weltliteratur der Gegenwart, ed. L. Marcuse (Leipzig, 1924), I I , 53—133. Also in Schirokauer's Germanistische Studien, ed. Fritz Strich (Hamburg, 1957), pp. 20-117. * Schneider, Franz Josef. Der expressive Mensch und die deutsche Lyrik der Gegenwart: Geist und Form moderner Dichtung (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1927). 155 pp. Chapters IV—VII are relevant to E. * Schneider, Karl-Ludwig. Der bildhafte Ausdruck in den Dichtungen Georg Heyms, Georg Trakls und Ernst Stadlers (Heidelberg: Lambert Schneider, 1954). Schulz, E. W. "Zeiterfahrung und Zeitdarstellung in der Lyrik des Expressionismus". Wort und Welt, XIV (1968), 131-160. Schumann, Detlev W. "Expressionism and Post-Expressionism in German Lyrics". Germanic Review I X (1934), pp. 54-66, 115-129. *—. "Motifs of Cultural Eschatology in German Poetry from Naturalism to Expressionism". PMLA LVIII (1943), pp. 1125-77. Steifes, Egbert. "Wirksame Krăfte in Gehalt und Gestalt der Lyrik im Zeitraum des Expressionis­ mus". Dissertation, University of Munich, 1956. 191 pp. Stolte, H. "Über expressionistische Lyrik" in the volume Kultur und Dichtung (not otherwise identified). 4. Expressionism

and Prose Literature

* Arnold, Armin. Prosa des Expressionismus: Herkunft, Analyse, Inventar. Stuttgart: Kohl­ hammer, 1972. 210 pp. Special emphasis on Franz Jung, Edschmid, Flake and Curt Corrinth. Dimic née Bidanchon, Colette. "Das Groteske in der Erzăhlung des Expressionismus". Dissertation, University of Freiburg, 1960. 240 and 139 pp. Jens née Puttfarken, Inge. "Studien zur Entwicklung der expressionistischen Novelle". Disser­ tation, University of Tübingen, 1954. 318 pp. * Kahler, Erich von. "Die Prosa des Expressionismus" in Der deutsche Expressionismus, ed. H. Steffen, pp. 157-178. Klee, Wolfhart Gotthold. "Die charakteristischen Motive der expressionistischen Erzăhlungs­ literatur". Dissertation, University of Leipzig, 1933. 151 pp. Published Berlin, 1934. 336

* Krell, Max. Über neue Prosa (Berlin: Reiss, 1919). ''Tribüne der Kunst und Zeit" No. 7. 80 pp.— Considers especially Edschmid, Döblin, Wilhelm Lehmann, Heinrich Mann, Leonhard Frank, Schickele, Sternheim, Meyrink and Benn. * Liede, Helmut. "Stiltendenzen expressionistischer Prosa". Dissertation, University of Freiburg, 1960. 399 pp. Schneider, Otto. "Bedeutung und Gedanke der Einheit in der expressionistischen Prosa". Disser­ tation, University of B/Ostock, 1949. * Sokel, Walter H. "Die Prosa des Expressionismus" in Expressionismus als Literatur, ed. W. Rothe, pp. 153-170. 5. Individual Authors : Studies about Writers who are not normally regarded as Expressionists or who are otherwise little known * Akzente stellen vor: "Heinrich Nowak, ein verschollener Expressionist". Akzente, X (1963), pp. 453-489. * Bausinger, W. "Robert Musil und die Ablehnung des Expressionismus". Studi Germanici, I I I (1965), 384-386. Bonnardel, C. "La technique de Brecht dans ses œuvres expressionistes". Thèse, Lyon, 1962. * David, Claude. "Rilke et 1'Expressionisme". Etudes Germaniques, XVII (1962), 144—157. * Durzak, Manfred. "Nachwirkungen Stefan Georges im Expressionismus". German Quarterly, X L I I (1969), pp. 393-417. * Fritz, Horst. Literarischer Jugendstil und Expressionismus : Zur Kunsttheorie, Dichtung und Wir­ kung Richard Lehmeis (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1969). —IV: "Die express. Schicht in Dehmels Werk"; VI: "Jugendstil als Hintergrund express. Dichtung" and VII: "Der Versuch eines neuen Daseins-Entwurfs: Aufbruch und Verklărung des E " . Haueis, Eduard. "Karl Kraus und der Expressionismus". Dissertation, University of Erlangen, 1968. * Hirschbach, Frank D. "Alfred Kerr und der Expressionismus." German Quarterly, XL (1967), 204-211. * Krispyn, Egbert. "Brecht and Expressionism: Notes on a Scene from Baal". Revue des Langues Vivantes, X X X I (1965), 211—218. —Invalidated by recent research. Lenz, Piotr. "Hermann Bahr und die expressionistische Bewegung". Germanica Wratislaviensa, X I (1967), 105-117. * Pachmuss, Tamira. "Dostojevskij and Franz Werfel". German Quarterly, XXXVI (1963), pp. 445— 458.—Not particularly relevant. * Raabe, Paul. "Franz Kafka und der Expressionismus". Zeitschrift für deutsche Philologie, LXXXVI (1967), 161-175. * Saas, Christa. "Rilkes Expressionismus". Dissertation, Indiana University. Dissertation Abstracts, X X V I I I (1968), 3863A. 250 pp. * Sokel, Walter H. "Brecht und der Expressionismus" in Die sogenannten zwanziger Jahre, ed. R. Grimm and J. Hermand (Bad Homburg: Gehlen, 1970), pp. 47—74. * Sperile, Jean-Edouard. "L'Expressionisme dans les nouvelles de Hermann Kesser". Mercure de France, September 15, 1926, pp. 595—610. Syring, R. A. " J . P. Richter's Affinity to the Expressionists". Dissertation, University of Cin­ cinnati, 1950. * Vandenrath, Johannes. "Carl Zuckmayers expressionistischer Erstling: Kreuzweg". Revue des Langues Vivantes, 1957, No. 2, pp. 37—59. * Weisstein, Ulrich. "Heinrich Mann und der Expressionismus" in Expressionismus als Literatur, ed. W. Rothe, pp. 609-622. *— "The Lonely Baal: Brecht's First Play as a Parody of Hanns Johst's Der Einsame". Modern Drama, X I I I (1970), 284 303. Especially pp. 286-289. VII. GERMAN EXPRESSIONISM DISCUSSED ABROAD

1. Czechoslovakia * Götz, Frantisek. "Ke ktirice literárniho expressionizmu". Host: Mêsičnik pro moderni culturu, I (1921/22), 66-60. * Grebenickowá, Rûzena. "Kafka a expressionizmus". Slovenska pohlády, L X X I X (1963), 78—86. * Teige, Karel. "Cterni o nemeckem expressionizmu". Host, I (1921/22), 157—161. * Terray, Elemir. "Nemecky literarny expressionizmus". Slovenska póhlady, LXXXI, No. 10 (1965), 74-79. * — . " Z u r Kunstauffassung des Berliner Sturmkreises" (in German with summary in Slovak). Philologica (Bratislava), XVII (1966), 71-82. 337

2.

England/USA

* Beach, Joseph Warren. The Twentieth-Century Novel: Studies in Technique (New York: Appleton Century Crofts, 1932). — Part V is, quite capriciously, entitled "Expressionism". In this part, Virginia Woolf and Waldo Frank are specifically discussed under the heading " E " . (pp. 485— 500): "The term 'expressionism' I set here at the head of a chapter to indicate, somewhat loosely, a variety of tendencies opposed to the formerly prevailing literalness in the rendering of life. E. stands, strictly speaking, in opposition to Impressionism . . . * Boyd, Ernest. "Expressionism Without Tears" in Studies from Ten Literatures (New York: Scribner's, 1925), pp. 231-255. * Galsworthy, John. "On Expression". The English Association Pamphlet, No. 59 (July, 1924), pp. 3—18. —Presidential address to the Association. Offers, on p. 13, a definition of E. "by a great good English painter". Variously reprinted. * Goldberg, Isaac. "Expressionistic Theory" in The Drama of Transition : Native and Exotic Playcraft (Cincinnati: Steward Kidd, 1922), pp. 269-279. * Freedman, Ralph. "Refractory Visions: The Contour of Literary Expressionism". Contemporary Literature, X (1968), 54-74. * Gorelik, Mordecai. "Cynicism and Hysteria" in New Theatres for Old (New York: French, 1941), pp. 246-254. * Hamburger, Michael. "1912" in Reason and Energy: Studies in German Literature (New York: Grove Press, 1957), pp. 213-236. * Hiller, H. Why Expressionism? (Hollywood: The Author, 1946). 207 pp. Presents a theory of psychocromatic design. Irrelevant to the study of E. * Klarmann, Adolf. "Expressionism in German Literature: A Retrospect of Half a Century". Modern Language Quarterly, XXVI (1965), 62—92. * Krispyn, Egbert, Style and Society in German Literary Expressionism (Gainesville, Fla.: Univer­ sity of Florida Press, 1964), 60 pp. Loving, Piere. Revolt in German Drama (Girard/Kansas: Haldemann, 1925). 64 pp. "Little Blue Book" 7777. * Middleton, John C. "Dada versus Expressionism: or The Red King's Dream". German Life & Letters. XV (1961), 37-52. Palmer, Lucille. "The Language of German Expressionism". Dissertation, University of Illinois, 1938. Raabe, Paul and J. M. Ritchie, eds. The Era of German Expressionism (London: Calder & Boyars, 1970). Ca. 450 pp. Not verified. * Rose, William. Men, Myths and Movements in German Literature (London: 1931). 272 pp.]— " E . in German lit", (pp. 201-223); "The German Drama 1914-1921" (pp. 225-244); "The Spirit of Revolt in German Literature" (pp. 245—272). * Samuel, Richard and R. Hinton Thomas. Expressionism in German Life, Literature and the Theatre, 1910-1924 (Cambridge: Heifer, 1939). 203 pp. — "Emergence and Nature of E . " (pp. 1-18). * Scheffauer, Herman George. The New Vision in the German Arts (New York: Huebsch, 1924). 274 pp.—"The Essence of E . " (pp. 1—41) treats Toller, the film, Georg Kaiser, and Jessner's stage productions. * Schultz, H. Stefan. "German Expressionism 1905—1925". Chicago Review, X I I I , No. 1 (Winter, 1959), pp. 8-24. Selle, C. M. "Notes on Expressionism". The Carrell (University of Miami, Florida), I I I , No. 1 (1962), pp. 13-20. * Sokel, Walter H. The Writer in Extremis : Expressionism in Twentieth-Century German Literature (Stanford University Press, 1959), 251 pp. German edition, Der literarische Expressionismus, published by Langen/Müller in Munich (1960). — Thematologically oriented. Defines E. much too loosely. * Webb, Benjamin. "The Demise of the New Man: An Analysis of Late German Expressionism". Dissertation, University of Southern California, 1968. Dissertation Abstracts, X X I X (1968), pp. 1909-10A. * Weisstein, Ulrich. "Expressionism: Style or Weltanschauung?" Criticism, I X (1967), 42—62. —Reprinted in this volume. 3. France and French-speaking

Belgium

Berton, C. "Expressionisme". Les Nouvelles littéraires, November 11, 1924. * Demange, Camille. "L'Expressionisme allemand et le mouvement revolutionnaire" in Le Théâtre moderne: Hommes et tendances, ed. Jean Jacquot (Paris: Editions du Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, 1958), pp. 165—174. * Expressionisme. Special issue of the periodical L'Arc published in Aix-en-Provence (No. 25). 95 pp. — A report on the Florence convegno, an essay by J.-P. Faye (largely on Futurism), 338

brief anthologies of German Expressionist poetry and prose, brief surveys of Expressionist drama, music, painting, and film, and a section entitled "A Nouveau", with contributions by Pierre Jean Jouve, André Masson, Andrzej Wirth, Otto Hahn, and Ernst Erich Noth. * Gamier, Use and Pierre. L'Expressionisme allemand (Paris: Editions Silvaire, 1962). 174 pp.— Introduction (to p. 122) and anthology (pp. 125—162). * Gravier, Maurice. "Les Héros expressionistes" in Le Théâtre moderne . . . , pp. 117—130. * — .Strindberg et le théâtre moderne: I. L'Allemagne (Lyon: Bibliothèque de la Société des Etudes Germaniques, 1949). — Strindberg and German E. treated on pp. 83—179. * Lauret, R. Le Théâtre allemand d''aujourd'hui (Paris, 1934). — Chapter IV (pp. 106—124) con­ cerned with E. Poupeye, Camille. "Le Théâtre expressioniste" in his Les Dramaturges exotiques, vol. 2 (Brussels: La Renaissance d'Occident, [1927?]).— Not verified. 4. Hungary * Koczogh, Akos, ed. and transl. Az expresszionizmus : A bevezetô tanulmányt irta, a szövegeket válogatta, forditotta (Budapest: Gondolat, 1964). 318 pp. — Introduction ("Az expresszionizmus"), pp. 5—117; documents ("Az expresszionizmus dokumentumai"), pp. 121—263: includes state­ ments by Worringer, Marc, Macke, Kandinsky, Schönberg, Dăubler, Bahr, Edschmid, Pinthus and several Hungarian writers and critics; anthology ("Irodalmi szemelvények"), pp. 260—305 of German and Hungarian poetry; 6 ills.; fairly extensive but spotty bibliography. —. "Expressionismus" in Jahrbuch des Deutschen Instituts der Kgl. Ungarischen Péter-PázmányUniversităt Budapest, 1. Abteilung, IV (1938/39), 1-102. * Vajda, György M. "La Philosophie des formes expressionistes". Acta litteraria, I X (1967), 197—214. — A revised version of the essay is included in this volume. 5. Italy * Chiarini, Paolo. L'Espressionismo: storia e struttura (Florence: La nuova Italia, 1969). 139 pp. * —. "L'espressionismo tedesco: un problema di metodo critico" in Studi in onore di Lorenzo Bianchi, ed. H. Rüdiger and M. Pensa (Bologna: Zanichelli, 1960), pp. 29-58. * —. "Disegno del teatro tedesco espressionista" in his book La letteratura tedesco del novecento: studi e richerche (Rome: Edizioni dell'Ateneo, 1961), pp. 7—35. —Reprint of an essay pub­ lished in 1957. * — .Il teatro tedesco espressionista (Bologna: Ciappelli, 1959). 139 pp. — No. 3 in the series "Docu­ menti di teatro". Seven chapters, systematically and chronologically arranged. * —. "Per una periodizzazione storica e stilistica dell'espressionismo: note e appunti" in Annali del corso di lingue e letterature straniere presso l'Università di Bari, IV (1960), pp. 225—265. * Maione, Italo. La Germania espressionista (Naples: Libreria scientifìcia, n.d. [1959?]). — Sections on Werfel, Trakl, Heym, Kaiser, and an anthology. * Masini, Ferruccio. "Espressionismo e 'Ausdruckswelt' nella poetica di Gottfried Benn". Studi Germanici, I I I (1965), 365-372. Mazzuchetti-Jollos, Lavinia. "Le due grandi antologie dell'espressionismo" and "L'epopea dell' espressionismo" in her book Novecento in Germania (Milan, 1959). * Mittner, Ladislao. L'espressionismo (Bari: Laterza, 1965). 151 pp. * —. "L'espressionismo fra l'impressionismo e la "neue Sachlichkeit': fratture e continuità". Studi Germanici, I I (1964), 37-82. * —. "L'espressionismo letterario" in Bilancio . . . , pp. 11—29. Pandolfì, Vito. "Interpretazione del teatro tedesco espressionista". Società, I (1954), Nos. 1/2, pp. 64-90. —."Le manifestazioni e il significato del teatro espressionistico" in Bilancio . . . , pp. 31—45. An essay by the same title appeared in 1956 as a preface to the collection II teatro espressionista tedesco. —. "Vita e morte del teatro tedesco espressionista". Preface to an Italian version of Toller's Hinkemann (Turin, 1947). * Scardigli, P. "Considerazioni sul linguaggio degli espressionisti". Rivista di letterature moderne e comparate, XVII (1964), 17—24. — Paper read at the Florence convegno. * Secci, Lia. Il mito greco nel teatro tedesco espressionista (Rome: Bulzoni, 1969). 335 pp. Tilgher, Adriano. "Il teatro dell'espressionismo" in his book La scena e la vita: nuovi studi sul teatro contemporaneo (Rome, 1925). 6. Japan Doitsu Hyogenshugi (German E.). Collected Essays by members of the German department of the University of Kyoto (Tokyo: Hakushisha), I (1964), I I (1965). 339

7. Korea "Literary Expressionism in Germany" (in Korean) in the German literature periodical published at the University of Seoul, 1966/67, pp. 87-95. 8.

Rumania

Blaga, Lucían. "Filosofìa stilului: Expresionismul". Misçana literară (Bucharest), I, No. 2, 1924. Dominic, A. "Germania intelectuala de azi Expresszionismul". Gîndirea (Cluj), II, No. 7, (1922/23. *Secolul 20 : Revista de literara universala (Bucharest), Nos. 11/12, 1969, constitute a special issue devoted to E., with an anthology and documents. 311 pp. Vector. "Expresionism si realism". Viata Romaneascá (Bucharest), XIV, No. 7 (1961). 9. Russia Arvatov, B. "Ekspressionizm kaka social'noe javlenie". Kniga i Revolucija, No. 6, 1922. Borichevski, E. "Filosofija ekspressionizma". Sipovnik, No. 1, 1922. * Braudo, E. M. and N. E. Radlov, eds. Ekspressionizm (Petrograd/Moscow, 1923). —A collection of essays translated from the German. 232 pp. Includes pieces by Max Martersteig, Max Krell, Wilhelm Hausenstein, Julius Bab, Arnold Schering and F. M. Huebner taken, in part, from the volume Einführung in die Kunst der Gegenwart, ed. M. Deri (Leipzig, 1919). * Fradkin, A. "Reply to Motyljowa". Voprosy literatury, 1955, No. 6. Grozdev, A. Teatr poslevoennou Germanii (Leningrad/Moscow, 1933).—A book on the post-war German theater. * Kopelev, L. "Dramaturgija nemeckogo" in Singermann . . . (below) Lunacharski, A. "Neskol'ko slov o nemeckom ekspressionizm". ¿izn, No. 1, 1922. * Motyljowa, T. "Questions of Socialist Realism in Western Literatures" (in Russian) in Voprosy literatury, 1958, No. 11. * —. "Reply to Fradkin" (in Russian). Ibid., 1959, No. 8. * Nedoschiwin, G. "Das Problem des Expressionismus" (in German translation) in Kunst und Lite­ ratur, XVI (1968), 73—90. Probably identical with the article in Singerm-ann . . . * Pavlova, Nina. "Expressionism and Realism" (in Russian) in Voprosy literatury, 1961, No. 5, pp. 120—141. A German version of the essay appeared in the volume Zur Geschichte der sozia­ listischen Literatur, 1919-1933 (Berlin: Aufbau-Verlag, 1963), pp. 141-159, 349-350. —. Article on E. in the Istorija nemetskoj literatury (Moscow: Nauka, 1968), IV, pp. 536—564. —. Essay on E. in a volume of essays on trends in 20th-century literature, announced for publi­ cation in 1971. (Information supplied by Professor Henry Glade of Manchester College). * Singermann, B. I., ed. Ekspressionizm (Moscow: Nauka, 1966). 154 pp. 40 ills. — Five essays on Expressionist drama, painting, music, cinema and the graphic arts. Brief review by Henry Glade in Books Abroad, X L I I (1968), 154. * Thun, Nyota. "Moskauer Literatur-Diskussion". Neue deutsche Literatur, VIII, No. 1 (1960), pp. 115—123. —The Motyljowa—Fradkin controversy. 10. South

Africa

Burssens, G. "Standpunten van het expressionisme". Standpunten (Kapstadt), IV, No. 4. 11. Spain and South America * Brugger, Ilse T. B. de. Teatro alemán expresionista (Buenos Aires: Mandragora, 1959), 172 pp. Gasch, Sebastian. El expresionismo (Barcelona, 1955). * Guerrero Zamora, Juan. La imagen activa y el expresionismo dramático (Madrid: Ateneo, 1955). 40 pp. —A lecture presented on February 10, 1955. Has brief sections on Wedekind, Strind­ berg, O'Neill and Elmer Rice. Kafka is treated on pp. 27—29 and Artur Adamov on pp. 36—40. Kohnen, Mansueto. "Der deutsche Expressionismus". Boletin de estudios germanicos, VI (1967), 11-20. * Modern, Rodolfo. El expresionismo literario (Buenos Aires: Editorial Nova, 1958). 146 pp. — In­ troduction to p. 95, followed by an anthology. 340

12.

Yugoslavia

*Bogner, Josip. "Poceci ekspresionizma u hrvatskoj knjizevnosti". Knjizevnik, I I I (1930), 343—348. * Konstantinović, Zoran. Ekspresionizam (Cetinje: "Obod", 1967). 200 pp. — Introduction to p. 67, followed by an anthology. * Marakovic, Ljubomir. "Iza ekspresionizma: Pokusăj bilanse". Hrvatsko kolo, V I I I (1927), 341-353. VIII. EXPRESSIONISM ABROAD (THE GERMAN IMPACT)

1. Antiquity

(!!!)

* La Penna, Antonio. "Tre poesie espressionistiche di Orazio (ed uno meno espressionistica)." Belfagor, XVIII (1963), 181—192. —Two epodes and one satire by Horace. 2.

Austria

Sappe, Theodor. "Die Expressionistendichtung Österreichs". Wort und Zeit, X, Nos. 7/8 (1964), pp. 10-26. 3. Holland and Belgium

(Flanders)

* Brachin, Pierre. "L'Expressionisme dans le théâtre de H. Teirlinck" in Le Théâtre moderne . . . , ed. Jean Jacquot, pp. 131 — 148. * Brandt Corstius, Jan. "Die Nieuwe Beweging: Haar internationale karakter en het aandeel van Noord- en Zuid-Nederland". De Gids, n.s. I (1957), 363-389. * Donkersloot, N. A. et al. Het Expressionisme : Zes lesingen (The Hague: Servire, 1954). 144 pp. — Contains D's essay "Expressionisme in de Nederlandse letterkunde" (pp. 5—24), in addi­ tion to pieces on French Surrealism and Franz Kafka, as well as several others listed below. * Hadermann, Paul. Het vuur in de verte : Paul van Ostaijens kunstopvattingen in het licht van de Europese avant-garde (Antwerp: Ontwikkeling, 1970). 348 pp. — No direct references to E. * de Jong, M. J. G. "Marsman en het expressionisme". Levende Talen, 1959, pp. 181—190. * Kazemier, G. "Paul van Ostaijen en Marsman" in Het Expressionisme . . . , pp. 56—86. * Krispyn, Egbert. "Herman van den Bergh, Marsman en het noord-nederlandse expressionisme". De Gids, n.s., I I (1958), 231-249. * Lehning, Arthur. Marsman en het expressionisme (The Hague: Boucher, 1959), 61 pp. Some ills. and facsimiles. Marsman, H. "Divagatie over expressionisme". Den gulden Winckel, 1921, No. 20, pp. 3—5. * Meijer, R. P. "Expressionist Influences in Marsman's Early Poetry". A UM LA Journal, I I I (1955), pp. 1 4 - 2 2 . Oever, Karel van den. "Rond wat men noemt expressionisme". Roeping, 1925/26, No. 4, pp. 130-146. Ostaijen, Paul van. "Expressionisme in Vlaanderen". De Stroom, 1918, Nos. 1—4. Reprinted in Ostaijen's Krities proza (Antwerp, 1929), p. 12ff. * Passel, Frans van. Het tijdschrift "Ruimte" (1920—1921) als brandpunt van humanitair expres­ sionisme (Antwerp: De Sikkel, 1958). 162 pp.— Introduction: "Het humanitair expr. in Duitsland" (pp. 1—18); I: "De externe geschiedenis van hetj tijdschrift Ruimte" (pp. 21—71); I I . "De Betekenis van het tijdschrift voor onze cultuur" (pp. 75—143). * Stuiveling, G. "Het Getij, Herman van den Bergh en het expressionisme" in Handelingen van het XXVIeVlaams Filologencongres (1967), pp. 100-111. 4. Bulgaria * Savov, Ganco. "Srednjoevropski ekspresionizam i knjizevnost bugara i Hrvata" in Eksprezionizam . . . , pp. 55—60. 5. China Galik, Marián. "The Expressionistic Criticism of Kuo Mu-jo". Bulletin of the Tokyo Sinological Society, X I I I (1967), pp. 231-243. * —. "Über die kritische Auseinandersetzung Chinas mit dem deutschen Expressionismus". Nach­ richten der Gesellschaft für Natur- und Völkerkunde Ostasiens (Hamburg), No. 103 (1968), pp. 39-59. 341

6. Czechoslovakia Götz, František. "Nekolik pohledu na expresionizmus i dramate sveto vem i ceskem". Divádlo, I X (1956), pp. 333 ff. * Grebenickova, Ruzena. "L'Expressionisme tchèque et les structures du dialogue dramatique". L' Expressionisme au théâtre européen, pp. 277—284. * Kucerová, Hana. "Proza slovenskeho v prunich letech poralecnych". Česka literatura, XVI (1968), pp. 514-533. * Kudelka, Viktor. "Od expresionimu k socialnimu realismu: Nektere problemy slovinske literatury v letech 1918-1941". Slama, X X X V I I (1968), pp. 449-473. * Vlasin, Stepan. "Expresionismus a poetismus". Česka literatura, XVI (1968), 323—329.

7. England * de Baun, Vincent C. "Sean O'Casey and the Road to Expressionism". Modern Drama, IV (1961), 254-259. * Blast: Review of the Great English Vortex. 2 issues (1914/1915). Reprinted by Kraus Reprint Co. (New York, 1967). 160 and 102 pp. * Fabricius, Johannes. The Unconscious and Mr. Eliot : A Study in Expressionism (Copenhagen: Nyt Nordisk Forlag Arnold Busck, 1967). 160 pp. — Irrelevant to the study of E. F's starting point and initial thesis is "that T. S.Eliot and the whole movement of Expressionist art repre­ sent the eruption of the collective unconscious into the conscious strata of modern civilization and modern Zeitgeist". * Fehr, Bernhard. "Expressionismus in der neuesten englischen Lyrik" in Brittanica: Max Förster zum 60. Geburtstag (Leipzig: Tauchnitz, 1929), pp. 267—276.— Deals with Imagists (as oper­ ating halfway between Impressionism and E.) and, in particular, Osbert Sitwell. * Ferrar, H. "Denis Johnston and the Irish Theatre". Dissertation, Columbia University, 1967. Dissertation Abstracts, X X I X (1967), p. 3143A. — May not be relevant in its approach to Johnston's art. * Galinsky, Hans. Deutsches Schrifttum der Gegenwart in der englischen Kritik der Nachkriegszeit (Munich: Hueber, 1938). — Subtitle: "Ein Versuch über die Lebensbedingungen und das kul­ turpolitische Wirken des deutschen Buches im Ausland, 1919—1935". Relevant portions on pp. 164—194 ("Der Reiz eines Stils: Der E.") and pp. 462-470 ("Der express. Stil"). * Hogan, Robert. "Expressionism and Romantic Anarchy" in The Experiments of Sean O'Casey (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1960), pp. 55—79. — Chapter IV of the monograph. * Metscher, Thomas. "Expressionistische Allegorik und poetische Rhetorik" in Sean O'Caseys dramatischer Stil (Braunschweig: Westermann, 1968), pp. 173—187. * Mitchell, Breon. "W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood: The 'German Influence"'. Oxford German Studies, No. 1 (1968), pp 163—172. — Based on personal interviews with the two authors. Reichwagen, Wilhelm. Der expressionistische Zug im neueren englischen Roman (Greifswald: Dallmeyer, 1935). — Greifswald dissertation dealing with Joyce and Lawrence, among others. * Rollins, R. G. "O'Casey, O' Neill and Expressionism in The Silver Tassie". The Bucknell Review, X (1962), 364-369. * —. "O'Casey, O'Neill and the Expressionism of Within the Gates". West Virginia University Philological Papers, XVIII (1961), 76-81. * Spender, Stephen. "Poetry and Expressionism". New Statesman & Nation, March 12, 1938, pp. 407—409. — A few casual references to English writers on p. 409. * Thomas, R. Hinton. German Perspectives: Essays on German Literature (Cambridge: Heffer, 1940). — Has a chapter "German E. and the Contemporary English Stage" (pp. 26—40). * Watson, Sheila M. "Wyndham Lewis and Expressionism". Dissertation, University of Toronto, 1965. Dissertation Abstracts, X X V I I (1966). 2 vols. * Wees, W. C. Vorticism and the English Avant-Garde, 1910—1925 (Manchester University Press, 1971). — Dissertation written at Northwestern University. Weidner, Erna. "Impressionismus und Expressionismus in den Romanen Virginia Woolfs". Disser­ tation, University of Greifswald, 1934. * Weisstein, Ulrich. "Vorticism: Expressionism English Style". Yearbook of Comparative and General Literature, X I I I (1964), 28—40. —Reprinted in this volume. * Wildi, Max. "The Birth of Expressionism in the Works of D. H. Lawrence". English Studies, X I X (1937), pp. 241-259. —On L. and Expressionism (The Rainbow) pp. 258-259. "The term E. is here applied to the spiritual attitude of a whole irrespective of form. Of such E. (Lawrence) certainly is an important witness".

342

8. France * Gravier, Maurice. "L'Expressionisme dramatique en France entre les deux guerres". L'Expres­ sionisme au théâtre européen, pp. 285—298. * Spitzer, Leo. "Der Unanimismus Jules Romains' im Spiegel seiner Sprache: Eine Vorstudie zur Sprache des französischen Expressionismus". Aus Archivum Romanicum, reprinted in Stilstu­ dien, I I : Stilsprachen (Munich: Hueber, 1961), pp. 208—300. — Also refers to Paul Morand and Paul Claudel in this connection. Especially significant are pp. 268—271, 286—291, and 294—298. Some additional secondary literature in the footnotes. 9. Hungary * Bori, Imre: "A magyar avant-garde történetéból: I I I . A magyar expressionizmus". Uj Symposion (Novi Sad), 1967, Nos. 24/25, pp. 22-25; Nos. 26/27, pp. 11-14; No. 28, pp. 6-10. * Csuka, Zoltán. "Ekspresionizam u madarskoj knjizevnosti Jugoslavije" in Ekspresionizam . . . pp. 61-64. * Koczogh, Akos. "Magyar és kelet-európai expresszionisták" in Az Expresszionizmus (Budapest: Gondolat, 1964), pp. 96—109. — In its documetary part, this volume also presents essays on E. by Dezsó Szabó, Lajos Kassák, János Mácza, Iván Hevesy, and Pal Hatvani. Ma, ed. Lajos Kassák. Reprint of an important periodical published between 1916 and 1925, first in Budapest and then in Vienna. Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 1971. 4 vols. 10. Italy * Chiarini, Paolo. "Rosso di San Secondo e il teatro tedesco del 1900". Studi Germanici, I I I (1965), 90-117, 321-355. * Isella, Dante. "Nascita dell'espressionismo Dossiano" in La lingua e lo stile di Carlo Dossi (Milan/Naples: Ricciardi, 1958), pp. 5—13. * Mazzuchetti-Jollos, Lavinia. "Primo ingresso dell'espressionismo letterario in Italia". Rivista di letterature moderne e comparate, XVI (1964), 112—119. — Paper read at Florence convegno and reprinted in the author's Cronache e saggi (Milan, 1966), pp. 307—317. * Rosenfeld, Emmy. "Luigi Pirandello und die deutsche Literatur". Literaturwissenschaftliches Jahrbuch der Görres-Gesellschaft, N. F. IV (1963), 73—93. — Brief reference to E. in connection with Werfel's Spiegelmensch on p. 90.

11. Poland Florynska, Halina. "Zwiastun ekspresjonizmu". Przeglad humanistyczny, X I I (1968), pp. III— 132. — On Miciński. Klein, Karol. "Ekspresjonizm polski: Grupa Zdroju". Przeglad humanistyczny, 1932, Nos. 4/5. Klossowicz, Jan. "Samotnosc i uniwersalizm Witkacego" in Z problemów literatury polskiej xx wieku, ed. S. Zolkiewski (Warsaw, 1965), II, pp. 193-211. Klossowski, Jan. "Polscy ekspresjonisci." Dialog, 1960, No. 7. Kwiatkowski, Jerzy. "Dionizje: Ekspresjonizm i mitologia" in Z problemów . . . , II, pp. 87—128. * Loth, R. " J . Kasprowicz und die deutsche Literatur". Zeitschrift für Slawistik, X I I (1967), 517—536.—Not particularly relevant. * Nowak, Bozena. "Poljski ekspresionizam" in Ekspresionizam . . . , pp. 50—54. Prokop, Jan. "O piervwszych polskich ekspresjonistach" in Z problemów . . . , I, pp. 129—153. Przybyszewski, Stanislaw. Ekspresjonizm, Slowacki i "Genezis z Ducha" (Poznan, 1918). Ratajcak, J. "Grupa Zdroju: czyli przypomnienie ekspresjonizmu". Wspóczesnosc. Spring, 1961. —. "Programy Zdroju". Przeglad humanistyczny, 1967, No. 1. 12.

Rumania

Cotrus, Ovidiu, "Elementi ekspresionizma u rumunskoj poeziji" in Ekspresionizam . . . , pp. 65—71. Cromălniceanu, Ovidiu S. "Expresionismul in constiinta literară românească." Secolul 20, Nos. 11/12 (1969), pp. 177-196. *—Literatura romana si expresionismul (Bucharest: Eminescu, 1971). Doinas, Stefan A. "Atitudini expresioniste in poezia româneasca". Secolul 20, Nos. 11/12 (1967), pp. 197-212. 343

13. Russia (information largely provided by Professor Vladimir Markov). Drjagin, K. V. Ekspressionizm v Rossii (Moscow: Vjatka, 1928). — Treats Andreev as an Expression­ ist and Majakovski partly so. * Hiller, B. "Konstantin Fedin und der deutsche Expressionismus" Zeitschrift für Slawistik, X (1965), pp. 35-52. Ioffe, I. I. Sinteticeskaja istorija iskusstv : Vvedenie v istoriju xudozestvennogo myslenija (Leningrad, 1933). — Discusses Pasternak and E. * Markov, Vladimir. "Russian Expressionism". California Slavic Studies, VI (1971). Reprinted in this volume. Rannit, Aleksis. "Zabolotskij: A Visionary at the Crossroads of Expressionism and Classicism". Preface to Zabolocki's Stixotvorenija (Washington/New York: Interlanguage Literary Asso­ ciates, 1965). Sokolov, Ippolit. Bunt èkspressionista (Moscow, 1919). —. Ekspressionizm (Moscow, 1920). —. Bedeker po èkspressionizmu (Moscow, 1920). * Tairov, Alexander. Das entfesselte Theater : Aufzeichnungen eines Regisseurs (Potsdam: Kiepenheuer, 1923). 112 pp. — German version of this Russian classic. 14.

Scandinavia

* Borberg, Svend. "Skuespiellets Forfald". Litteraturen, I I (1919/20), 466-480. * Dahlström, Carl E. W. "August Strindberg: The Father of Dramatic Expressionism" in Papers of the Michigan Academy of Science, Arts and Letters, X (1928), pp. 261—272. —Reprinted in D's book. * —. Strindberg's Dramatic Expressionism (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1930). * Durand, Frederic. "Les Voies de 1'expressionisme dans la poésie suedoise: Esquisse d'une étude comparatiste". Etudes Germaniques, X (1955), 187—199.— Par Lagerkvist, Edith Södergran, Elmer Diktonius and others. * Halleux, Pierre. "Le Domaine scandinave". L'Expressionisme au théâtre européen, pp. 299—310. * Holm, Ingvar. "Strindberg et F Expressionisme: Notes sur l'art dramatique du naturalisme et de l'expressionisme. "L' Expressionisme au théâtre européen, pp. 39—64. ♦Lagerkvist, Par. "Modem Theatre: Points of View and Attack" (1918) in Modem Theatre: Seven Plays and an Essay, ed. T. R. Buckmann (University of Nebraska Press, 1966), pp. 3— 37.—Repudiates Naturalism" and exalts the post-Naturalistic plays of Strindberg. Against Reinhardt and for Gordon Craig. Only one brief reference to German drama on p. 28. Sverker, E. K. "Par Lagerkvist: En svensk expressionistik diktare". Litteraturen, I (1918). * Tideström, Gunnar. Edith Södergran (Helsinki: Schildts, 1949). — Passim. 15. Switzerland Lang, P. "Das Schweizer Drama, 1914—1954." Jahrbuch der Gesellschaft für Schweizerische Theaterkultur, XIV esp. pp. 30—37. — Mentions Hans Ganz and Hermann Schneider. 16. United States of America * Bauland, Peter. "Spectacle and Experiment, 1919—1928" in The Hooded Eagle: Modern German Drama on the New York Stage (Syracuse University Press, 1968), pp. 43—95. * Blackburn, C. "Continental Influences on Eugene O'Neill's Expressionistic Dramas". American Literature, X I I I (1941), pp. 109-133. * Elwood, William G. "An Interview with Elmer Rice on Expressionism". Educational Theater Journal, X X (1968), 1—7. —Mainly concerned with The Adding Machine. * Fulton, A. R. "Expressionism Twenty Years After". Sewanee Reviev), L I I (1944), pp. 398—413. — Survey of American Expr. drama. * Goldoni, Annalisa. "L'espressionismo nel teatro americano (1920—1930)." Studi Americani, X I I I (1967), pp. 377-416. * Jackson, Esther Merle. The Broken World of Tennessee Williams (University of Wisconsin Press, 1965). —E. and Expressionists defined and discussed on pp. 20—22, 90—93 (Glass Menagerie). Includes Piscator and Brecht among the Expressionists. Refers to T. W's production notes for Glass Menagerie. * Macgowan, Kenneth. "Broadway at the Spring: New York Sees its First Expressionistic Play". Theatre Arts, VI (1922), 179-190. -Mentions The Hairy Ape on pp. 187-189. * Mounier, Catherine. "L'Expressionisme dans l'oeuvre d'Eugène O'neill". L'Expressionisme au théâtre européen, pp. 329—340. * Valgemae, Mardi. Accelerated Grimace: Expressionism in the American Drama of the 1920s. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1972. 145 pp. Based on V.s' dissertation. * - . "Albee's Great God Alice". Modem Drama, X (1967), 267-273. 344

* —. "Civil War Among the Expressionists: John Howard Lawson and the Pinweel Controversy". Educational Theatre Journal, XX (1968), pp. 8—14. * —. "Expressionism in American Drama". Dissertation, University of California at Los Angeles, 1964. Dissertation Abstracts, XXVI (1965), pp. 377-378. Extensive bibliography. 229 pp. * —. "O'Neill and German Expressionism". Modern Drama, X (1967), 111—123. * Walstrum, Arthur D. "Expressionism as a Movement in the American Theatre". M. A. Thesis, Indiana University, 1951. 213 pp. 17. Yugoslavia (Serbo-Croatian and Slovenian) * Baur, Ruprecht S. "A. B. Šimić i njemacki ekspresionizam" in Ekspresionizam . . . , pp. 84—87. * Choma, Branislav. "Miroslav Krleza i ekspresionizam" in Ekspresionizam.. . , pp. 118—124. * Donat. Branimir. "Politicki teatar Miroslava Krleze i nasljede evropskog ekspresionizma" in Ekspresionizam . . . , pp. 88—100. * Franic, Ante. "Oautohtonim izvorima ekspresionizma u hrvatskoj knjizevnosti". Zadarska Revija, XVIII (1969), pp. 1—45. —With supplementary bibliography. Franjic, M. Pristup problemu authohtonosti ekspresionizma u hrvatskoj knjizevnosti (Zagreb, 1968). * Jutronic, Andre. "Pilog na temu zenitizma". Mogucnosti (Split), X, No. 1 (1963), pp. 97—105. —. Concerning the periodical Zenit. * Konstantino vić, Zoran. "Krleza o nemackoj i skandinavskoj knjizevnosti", in Miroslav Krleza ed. N. Stipcević (Belgrade: Prosveta, 1967), pp. 145—198. * Krklec, Gustav. "Ausklang des deutschen Expressionismus in Kroatien zwischen den beiden Weltkriegen". Jahrbuch der Deutschen Akademie für Sprache und Dichtung in Darmstadt (Heidelberg: Lambert Schneider, 1967), pp. 11—23. Markovic, S. Z. "Expressionism in Yugoslav Literature". Helicon, X (1964), pp. 195—206. —. Eksprezionizam u jugoslavenskoj knjizevnosti (Belgrade, 1965). * Mozejko. Edward. "Rastko Petrović: Modernista, nadrealista, ekspresjonista". S cando-Slavica, XIII (1967), 93-103. * Petré, Fran. "Der slowenische Expressionismus". Welt der Slawen, I (1956), pp. 159—171. * —. "Idejnost i izraz exspresionizma: Nekoliko nacelnih primjedab". Umjetnost rijeci: Časopis za nauku o knjizevnosti, I (1957), pp. 81—98. * —. "Uz genezu hrvatskog i slovenskog ekspresionizsma". in Ekspresionizam . . . , pp. 43—49. * Pogacnik, Joze. "Novija slovenska lirikă". Izraz: Öasopis za knjizevnu i umjetnicku kritiku (Sara­ jevo), 1965, No. 10, pp. 1018-32. Simic, A. B. "Berlinski Sturm ili nova umjetnost germanska" (1917) in Sobraría djela (Zagreb, 1960), III, 398 * Slamnig, Ivan. "Strindbergov 'neonaturalizma' i Krlezine Legende" in Ekspresionizam . . . , pp. 125-135. * Stalev, Georgi. "Pokusaj interpretaci je ekspresionizam u poeziji Janka Policá Kamova (Psovka) in Ekspresionizam . . . , pp. 152—155. * Zadravec, Franc. "Futurizem in ekspresionizem v slovenski poeziji" in Pot skozi noe : Izbor iz slovenske futuristićne in ekspresionistićne poezije (Ljubljana: Mladinska Knjiga, 1966), pp. 93—138. — This is an anthology of Expressionist and Futurist poetry written in Slovenian. * Žmegac, Viktor. "Antun Branko Simic als Lyriker: Ein Beitrag zur Erforschung des kroatischen Expressionismus". Welt der Slawen, I I I (1958), 151—165. *■— "Zenit, eine vergessene Zeitschrift". Welt der Slawen XII (1967), 253—263. *— "Zur Poetik der expressionistischen Phase der kroatischen Literatur". Welt der Slawen, XIV (1969), 113-136. IX. EXPRESSIONISM AND THE OTHEE ARTS

1. The Visual Arts Apollonio, Umbro. "Die Brücke" e la cultura dell'espressionismo (Venice: Alfieri, 1952). 102 pp. * Bahr, Hermann. Expressionismus (Munich: Delphin-Verlag, 1916, 21920), 152 pp. 20 ills. — Heavily indebted to Worringer. Extended references to Goethe. An English translation by R. E. Gribble appeared in 1926 (New York: Boni & Liveright), an Italian version by G. Maffei in 1945. From an international point of view, one of the most significant, though rather misleading, theoretical statements concerning E. * Der Blaue Heiter, ed. Franz Marc and Wassili Kandinsky (Munich: Piper, 1912. 131 pp. 141 ills. 3 musical examples. A scholarly edition of this Almanack was prepared by Klaus Lankheit (Munich: Piper, 1965). An Italian translation appeared in 1967. — Contains 19 contributions, three of them by Marc, Kandinsky's essays "Über die Formfrage", "Über Bühnenkomposi­ tion" and his text Der gelbe Klang, August Macke's "Die Masken", Arnold Schönberg's "Das Verhăltnis zum Text", as well as pieces on the Russian Fauves, Robert Delaunay and Alexan­ der Skrjabin. 345

* —. Catalogue of a retrospective exhibition held at the Stădtische Galerie in Munich in 1963. No pagination. 82 ills. — Contains excerpts from writings by the painters included in the show, a long excerpt from Hans K. Roethel's book Moderne deutsche Malerei, and a letter by Kandinsky. * Breysig, Kurt. Eindruckskunst und Ausdruckskunst : Ein Blick auf die Entwicklung des zeit­ genössischen Kunstgeistes von Millet bis zu Marc (Berlin, 1927). * Buccarelli, Palma. "L'espressionismo nella pittura e nella scultura" in Bilancio ..., pp. 73—93. * Buchheim, Lothar Günther. "Der Blaue Reiter'' und die "Neue Künstlervereinigung München" (Feldafing: Buchheim, 1959). 344 pp. * —. Die Künstlergemeinschaft "Brücke" (Feldafing: Buchheim, 1955). 408 pp. 410 ills. * — .Graphik des Expressionismus (Feldafing: Buchheim, 1958). 292 pp. English version, The Graphic Art of Expressionism, published in 1964. * Cheney, Sheldon. Expressionism in Art (New York: Liveright, 1934; revised ed. 1948). 415 pp. 205 ill. — Has a chapter on "The Arts other than Painting" (pp. 373—408) dealing with archi­ tecture (Frank Lloyd Wright), the dance (Isadora Duncan, Mary Wigman), sculpture (Lehmbruck, Maillol), and the theater (Appia, Craig, Norman Bel Geddes). In the two pages devoted to literature, the author mentions the Imagists, Emily Dickinson ( ! !) and Joyce. * Cirlot, Juan-Eduardo. Del expresionismo a la abstraccion. (Barcelona: Seix-Barral, 1955). 93 pp. 32 ills. —Treats E. proper (including the forerunners) on pp. 25—65. Has a section "La expansion del expresionismo" (pp. 48—53) referring to American, French, and Spanish followers of E. * Dăubler, Theodor. Der neue Standpunkt (Dresden: Hellerauer Verlag, 1916). 201 pp.— Essays on Munch, Barlach, Matisse, Henri Rousseau, Chagall, Marc and Picasso as well as general surveys: "Simultaneităt", "Unser Erbteil", "Futuristen" and "Expressionismus".—Very important internationally. * Deri. Max. Naturalismus, Idealismus, Expressionismus (Leipzig: Seemann, 1921). 83 pp.—An enlarged version of Deri's contribution to the volume Einführung . . . (pp. 47 — 129) which was published separately in 1920 (Leipzig: Seemann). * Ettlinger, L. D. "German Expressionism and Primitive Art". Burlington Magazine, CX (1968), 191-201. L'Expressionisme européen. Catalogue of an exhibition held at the Munich Haus der Kunst and the Musée de l'Art Moderne in Paris in 1970. 70 pp. * The Expressionists : A Survey of their Graphic Art, intr. by Carl Zigrosser (New York: Braziller, 1957). 122 pp. 8 ills. * Fechter, Paul. Der Expressionismus (Munich: Piper, 1919). 64 pp. — I: "Impressionistische Situ­ ation"; I I : "Die frühen Gegenbewegungen"; I I I : "Die spăten Gegenbewegungen (E., Kubis­ mus, Futurismus)". Fierens, P. Les Antecédents de l'Expressionisme. Brussels, 1951. — .L'Expressionisme flamand, Lille, 1953. George, W. La Peinture expressioniste. Paris, 1960. * Grigorescu, Dan. Expresionismul (Bucharest: Editura meridiana, 1959). 203 pp. 45 ills.— E. in other countries dealt with on pp. 146—200 (France, Romania, Austria, Belgium) * Hartlaub, Geno F . Die Graphik des Expressionismus in Deutschland (Stuttgart: Hatje, 1947). 69 pp. 64 ills. Hausenstein, Wilhelm. Über Expressionismus in der Malerei (Berlin: Reiss, 1919). 76 pp. "Tribüne der Kunst und Zeit", No. 2. Hevesy, Iván. Az impresszionizmus, futurizmus, kubizmus és expresszionizmus (Budapest, 1919). Hildebrandt, Hans. Der Expressionismus in der Malerei: Ein Vortrag zur Einführung indas Schaffen der Gegenwart (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1919). 27 pp. Hofmann, Werner, ed. Aquarelle des Expressionismus (English version: Expressionist Watercolors 1905—1920). New York: Abrams, 1967, 101 pp. Huyghe, René. "La Nouvelle Subjectivité: L'Expressionisme dans Fart français". L'Amour de VArt, XV (1934), 315-316. Joseph, Ragnar, and Erik Wettergren. Expressionism (Stockholm, 1946). —This book is listed by Ragon (p. 361) but has not been otherwise identified. * Kandinsky, Wassili. Über das Geistige in der Kunst (Munich: Piper, 1912). — Several new editions. Italian version by Calonna di Cesaro published in 1940 (Rome: Edizione di Religio); English versions by Michael Sadleir (London: Constable, 1914), Hilla Rebay (New York: Museum of Non-Objective Painting, 1946) and a new, revised edition of the Sadleir translation (New York: Wittenborn, Schultz, 1947). French version by Pierre Volbout: Du spirituel dans Vart (Paris, 1954). Kirchner, Ernst Ludwig. "Chronik der Brücke" (1913).—Unpublished due to dissension among the members of the group. The manuscript copy in Munich described by Selz (p. 14If.) has two essays by Kirchner ("Über die Malerei" and "Über die Graphik") as well as the Chronik itself, a list of members and friends, and numerous reproductions and photographs. 346

* Knapp, Fritz. "Impressionismus und Expressionismus" in Neue Jahrbücher für Wissenschaft und Jugendbildung, I (1925), pp. 517—526. * Kokoschka, Oskar. "Edvard Munch's Expressionism". College Art Journal, X(1950), pp. 50-54. * Landsberger, Franz. Impressionismus und Expressionismus : Eine Einführung in das Wesen der neuen Kunst (Leipzig: Klinckhardt & Biermann, 1919). 47 pp. 24 ills. Lorck, Karl von. Expressionismus: Einführung in die europăische Kunst des 20. Jahrhunderts (Lübeck: Wildner, 1947). 63 pp. 40 ills. Marlier, G. Bilan de l'expressionisme flamand (Antwerp, 1920). —Not verified. —. "L'Expressionisme en Belgique: L'Ecole de Laethem-Saint Martin". L'Amour de l'Art, XV (1934), pp. 389-398. Mayer, August Liebmann. Expressionistische Miniaturen des deutschen Mittelalters (Munich: Delphin-Verlag, 1918.) Meckauer, Walter. Wesenhafte Kunst: Ein Aufbau (Munich: Delphin-Verlag, 1920). 64 pp. * Myers, Bernard S. The German Expressionists : A Generation in Revolt (New York: Praeger, 1956; paperback version 1966). 140 ills. —German version, Malerei des E. : Eine Generation im Auf­ bruch, appeared in 1957 (Cologne: Du Mont Schauberg). Standard survey in English. * Nelken, Margarita. El expresionismo en la plastica mexicana de hoy (Mexico City: Instituto Nacio­ nal de Bellas Artes, 1964). 297 pp. 118 ills. — Brief general introduction and sixteen chapters, beginning with a discussion of Orozco and Siqueiros. * Pavolini, Corrado. Cubismo, futurismo, espressionismo (Bologna: Zanichelli, 1926). 190 pp.— E. discussed on pp. 129—153. * Picard, Max. Expressionistische Bauernmalerei (Munich: Delphin-Verlag, 1915). 22 pp. 24 ills. * Ragon, Michael. L'Expressionisme (Lausanne: Editions Rencontre, 1966). 207 pp. Numerous illustrations. Contains a chronology and a dictionary. Ridder, A. de. Het expressionisme in de Vlaamssche Schilderkust (Bruges: van Acker & de Grave, 1937). —. L'Expressionisme en Belgique. Brussels, 1951. Roh, Franz. Nach-Expressionismus, Magischer Realismus: Probleme der neuesten europăischen Malerei (Leipzig: Klinckhardt & Biermann, 1925). Scheyer, Ernst. "Expressionismus in Holland". Maandblad voor de beeldende kunsten, December, 1950, pp. 286-305. (Basel: Schmalenbach, Fritz. Kunsthistorische Studien: Grundlinien des Früh-Expressionismus Schudel, 1941). * Selz, Peter. German Expressionist Painting. (University of California Press, 1957). 379 pp. 180 ills. Extensive bibliography of books and articles on pp. 354—370. The best scholarly survey in English. Sosset, L. L. Permanence et Actualité de l'Expressionisme. Brussels, n.d. * Sydow, Eckart von. Die deutsche expressionistische Kultur und Malerei (Berlin: Furche-Verlag, 1920). 151 pp. - "Express. ăsthetik" (pp. 41-60). * Turova, V. "Grafika ekspressionizma" in Singermann..., pp. 84—119. * Das Ursprüngliche und die Moderne. — Catalogue of an exhibition held at West Berlin Akademie der Künste in 1964 and confronting primitive models with the use made of them in 20thcentury painting and sculpture. * Valentiner, Rudolf. "Expressionism and Abstract Art". The Art Quarterly, IV (1941), pp. 210-234. Walden, Herwarth. Einblick in die Kunst: Expressionismus, Futurismus, Kubismus (Berlin: Sturm-Verlag, 1917). 173 pp. — .Expressionismus: Die Kunstwende (Berlin: Sturm-Verlag, 1918). —. Die neue Malerei (Berlin: Sturm-Verlag, 1919). Werner, Alfred. Impressionismus und Expressionismus: Grundbegriffe allgemeiner Kunstwissen­ schaft (Frankfurt: Kesselring, 1917). 59 pp. Whitford, Frank. Expressionism (London/New York: Hamlyn, 1970). * Willett, John. Expressionism (New York: McGraw Hill, 1970). 256 pp. 115 ills. — Best short overall survey in English, mainly concerned with art but offering extended comments on literature. Mostly German art but some discussion of foreign and American art (pp. 161 — 184). Survey includes Neue Sachlichkeit as well as the entartete Kunst phase. * Worringer, Wilhelm. Abstraktion und Einfühlung (Munich: Piper, 1908; new edition 1946). — An essay in the psychology of art, originally presented as a dissertation. Together with Kandinsky's Über das Geistige . . . the most influential treatise internationally. English ver­ sion, Abstraction and Empathy (tr. Michael Bullock) published by Routledge & Kegan Paul in 1953. French translation 1959 by Roger Munier. 2. Expressionism and Architecture * Argan, Giulio Claudio. "L'architettura dell'espressionismo" in Bilancio . . . , pp. 95—108. 347

* Borsi, Franco and G. K. König. Architettura dell'espressionismo (Genoa: Vitali & Guianda, Paris: Vincent, Fréal & Co., 1967). 367 pp. 120 ills. — Prefatory essay in French, German and English. Shades over into Bauhaus architecture. Gregotti, V. "L'archi ttetura dell'espressionismo". Casabella, No. 254 (1961), pp. 24—50. Pehnt, W. "Gewissheit des Wunders: Der Expressionismus in der Architektur". Der Kunstwart, XVII (March, 1964), 2 - 1 1 . * Sharp, Dennis. Modern Architecture and Expressionism (London: Longmans, New York: Brazil ler, 1967). 204 pp. —Standard survey in English. Ungers, O. M. "Die Erscheinungsformen des Expressionismus in der Architektur". —Paper read at the Florence convegno and, according to Borsi (p. 14), published in Cologne. Italian version in the special issue of Marcatré. Zevi, Bruno. "L'eredità dell'espressionismo in archittetura". — Paper read at the Florence convegno and published in Marcatré, Nos. 8/10 (1964). 3. Expressionism

and Cinematography

* Abramov, N. "Ekspressionizam v kinoiskusstve" in Singermann . . . , pp. 130—153. Balăzs, Béla. Der sichtbare Mensch (Vienna, 1924). — Balázs wrote several other books and many articles connecting the film with E. They cannot be listed in this selective bibliography. Byrne, Richard B. "German Cinematographic Expressionism, 1919—1924". Dissertation, Univer­ sity of Iowa, 1962. Dissertation Abstracts, X X I I I (1963), pp. 3021-22. * Chiarini, Luigi. "L'espressionismo e il linguaggio del film" in Bilancio . . . , pp. 109—127. * Eisner, Lotte. The Haunted Screen : Expressionism in the German Cinema and the Influence of Max Reinhardt (University of California Press, 1969). 360 pp. Numerous ills. Bibliography on pp. 346—347, filmography on pp. 348—354. Original French version: L'Ecran demoniaque: Influence de Max Reinhardt et de l'expressionisme (Paris, 1952).—An authoritative survey of the demonic element in the silent film of the late teens and twenties, but rather disappointing as far as cinematographic E. is concerned. Mainly useful for the wealth of material collected by the author. * —. "Mise en garde et mise en point". Cinéma 55, No. 1. An English version of this article is included in this volume. * —."Beitrag zur Definition des expressionistischen Films". Unpublished contribution to the Florence convegno. 11 pp. Hevesy, Iván. "Az expresszionista film és a film expresszionizmusa". Filmvilág, November 15, 1961. * Kracauer, Siegfried. From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film (Princeton University Press, 1947). —Chapter on Caligari and E. on pp. 61—76. * Kurtz, Rudolf. Expressionismus und Film (Berlin: Verlag der Lichtbildbühne, 1926; fotomechanical reprint Zurich, 1965, 135 pp. 73 ills. — Following a general introduction (pp. 9—50), Kurtz discusses "Film und Expressionismus" on pp. 51—60, "Der expressionistische Film" (mainly Caligari, Von morgens bis mitternachts, Genuine, Haus zum Mond, RasJcolnikov and Wachsfigurenkabinett) on pp. 61—85, "Absolute Kunst" (Eggeling, Richter, Ruttmann, Leger, Picabia) on pp. 86—109, and "Stil des express. Films" on pp. 109—126. * Pinthus, Kurt, ed. Das Kinobuch (1913; documentary re-edition Zurich: Die Arche, 1963). 157 pp. —Pieces by Hasenclever, Lasker-Schüler, Brod, Ehrenstein, Pinthus, Rubiner, Zech, Lauten­ sack, Blei, etc. 4. Expressionism and Music * Adorno, Theodor W. Philosophie der neuen Musik (Tübingen: Mohr, 1949). 142 pp.— Although only one small section of the book is expressly devoted to E., the entire study (concerned with Schönberg and Stravinsky) is highly relevant. Bekker, Paul. Neue Musik (Berlin: Reiss, 1919). "Tribüne der Kunst und Zeit", No. 6. * Blessinger, Karl. "Das Problem des Expressionismus: I I I . Expressionismus und Musik". Der schwăbische Bund, February, 1920, pp. 497—506. * Curiel, Hans. "Le Théâtre lyrique expressioniste et sa mise en scène". L'Expressionisme au théâtre européen, pp. 221—236. * Jacqout, Jean. "Les musiciens et l'expressionisme". L'Expressionisme au théâtre européen, pp. 245-276. * Konen, V. "Etjud o musykal'nom ekspressioniste" in Singermann . . . , pp. 120—129. * Lea, Henry A. "Gustav Mahler und der Expressionismus" in Aspekte . . . , pp. 85-102. * Leibowitz, René. "Théâtre lyrique et expressionisme". L'Expressionisme au théâtre européen, pp. 237-244. Reich, Willi. "Die Oper im Zeichen des Expressionismus". Paper read at the Florence convegno (1964). Italian version in the special issue of Marcatré. —. "Über Expressionismus und Zwölftonmusik". Melos, I I I (1955), pp. 212 ff. 348

* Rognoni, Luigi, Espressionismo e dodecafonia (Turin: Einaudi, 1954), 393 pp.—The most ex­ haustive study of the subject. I : "Dissoluzione tonale e interiorizzazione espressiva" (pp. 38—67); I I : "La nuova vocalità e l'allucinazione drammatica" (pp. 68—85); I I I : "Il destino e l'eredità dell'espressionismo: Gebrauchsmusik e dodecafonia" (pp. 86—100). In an appendix, Italian translations of essays by Berg, Kandinsky and Schönberg. * —. "Espressionismo e dodecafonia". Bilancio . . . , pp. 47—71. —. "Il significato dell'espressionismo come fenomenologia del linguaggio musicale". Paper read at the Florence convegno. In special issue of Marcatré. Rufer, Josef. "Das Erbe des Expressionismus in der Zwölftonmusik". Paper read at the same occasion. * Schering, Emil. "Die expressionistische Bewegung in der Musik" in Einfuhrung . . . , pp. 139— 161. Stuckenschmidt, H. H. "Das Erbe des Expressionismus in der Musik". Paper read at the Florence convegno. * Wiedman, Robert W. "Expressionism in Music: An Interpretation and Analysis of the Expressionistic Style in Modern Music". Dissertation, New York University, 1955. Dissertation Abstracts, XV (1955), 1189—90. 487 pp.— Uses the criteria applied by Dahlström. Singles out polyphonic saturation, distortion and atonality as characteristic features. Focuses on Berg, Schönberg and Webern. Worner, K. H. "Der Expressionismus in der Musik und sein Verhăltnis zur Vergangenheit". Paper read at the Florence convegno. Italian version in special issue of Marcatré. 5. Expressionism

and Dance

* Milosz, Aurelio M. "Das Erbe des Expressionismus im Tanz", unpubl. paper presented at the Florence convegno. 19 pp.

349

INDEX OF NAMES* (exclusive of those mentioned in the footnotes and the bibliography)

Abell, Kjeld 223 Adalis (Adelina E. Efron) 324 Adam, Paul 248 Adamov, Arthur 139 Adler, Paul 80, 94 Adorno, Theodor W. 148 Ady, Endre 288, 291, 296 Aeschylus 216 Agate, James 224 Akhmatova, Anna 321 Aksenov, Ivan 323, 324, 327 Alain 83 Albee, Edward 201, 202, 203 Alnaes, Finn 222 Altenberg, Peter 150, 151 Andersen, Hans Christian 186, 223 Andreev, Andrei 163, 164 Andreev, Leonid 16. 196, 200, 209, 211 Andrei, Petre 273 Andreyev, Leonid (see Andreev) Andrzejewski, Jerzy 306 Angelus Silesius 33, 324 Annensky, Innokenty 217 Antheil, George 169, 179 Antoine, André 60 Apollinaire, Guillaume 20, 84, 99, 103, 117, 121, 192, 223, 229, 230, 238, 244, 249, 259, 289 Appia, Adolphe 65, 209, 242 Arehipenko, Alexander 118, 175 Arcos, Renée 229 Aristophanes 29 Aristotle 49 Arnold, Armin 77 Arp, Hans (Jean) 25, 99, 101, 105, 117 Artaud, Antonin 11, 69 Aseev, Nikolai 323, 324 Aspenström, Werner 223 Auden, W. H. 29, 185, 186, 187, 188 Axmatova, Anna (see Akhmatova) Babillotte, Artur 84 Bach, Johann Sebastian 152 Baczynski, Krysztof 313 Balanchine, Georges 223 Baláza, Béla 48 Balcke, Ernst 74 * The spelling of Polish, Rumanian, Russian and Serbo-Croatian names follows PMLA style whenever possible.

Bálint, György 297 Ball, Hugo 9 8 - 1 0 2 , 108, 109, 119, 130 Ball, William 202, 203 Balla, Giacomo 26 Balmont, Konstantin 217 Balzac, Honoré de 57, 83, 84, 85 Bang, Herman 83, 84 Barbusse, Henri 11, 93, 233, 236, 265 Bahr, Hermann 18, 23, 37, 41, 75, 115, 122, 221 263 289 Barlach,' Ernst 16, 18, 32, 34, 38, 51, 95, 122, 124, 127, 221 Barres, Maurice 93 Barry, Iris 177 Barrymore, John 196 Barta, Sándor 56, 293, 295 Barth, Karl 82 Bartók, Béla 46, 148, 151, 153, 155, 160 Barzun, Henri-Martin 229 Basshe, Em Jo 27, 197, 199 Baudelaire, Charles 69, 72, 74, 83, 113, 150, 178, 249, 287 Bauer, Rudolf 118, 121, 250 Baumeister, Willi 38 Beardsley, Aubrey 95, 178 Beauduin, Henri 229 Beaunier, André 84 Becher, Johannes R. 17, 18, 25, 31, 56, 57, 68, 75, 76, 95, 135, 137, 229, 323 Bechtejeff, Wladimir 29 Beck, Gabriel 93 Becker, Julius Maria 68 Beckford, William 94, 95 Beckmann, Max 112, 127, 131, 135 Beethoven, Ludwig van 14, 152, 308 Behne, Adolf 117 Behrens, Franz Richard 265 Bely, Andrei 323 Benar, Natalia 324 Benn, Gottfried 18, 19, 22, 23, 30, 42, 48, 55, 74, 76, 80, 94, 96, 112, 115, 122, 130, 131, 133, 134, 136, 138, 141, 261, 265 Bennet, Arnold 183 Beradt, Martin 80 Berckelaers, Fernand (see Seuphor) Berent, Waclaw 302, 304, 305, 307 Berg, Alban 145, 150, 151, 152, 153, 155, 156, 158, 160 Bergh, Herman van den 245, 246, 247, 248, 249, 250, 252, 256, 257 Bergman, Hjalmar 223 351

Bergman, Ingmar 223 Bergson, Henri 25, 40, öl, 61, 172, 174, 320 Bevk, France 260 Bilderdijk, Willem 256 Binnendijk, D. A. M. 250 Bischoff, Friedrich 80 Binding, Rudolf G. 87 Bjely, Andrey (see Bely) Blaga, Lucian 27, 274—279, 286 Blake, William 84, 299 Blei, Franz 70, 71, 94 Bloch, Albert 29 Bloem, J. C. 247 Blok, Alesandr 212, 214, 281 Bloy, Léon 227, 255 Blume, Bernhard 73 Blümner, Rudolf 25, 39, 43, 118, 127 Bobrov Sergei 322, 323, 324, 325, 327 Boccioni, Umberto 84 Bock, E. de 234, 235, 236, 237, 247 Bojtár, Endre 20 Bolsakov, Konstantin 317, 318 Boldt, Paul 130, 131 Bondi, Yuri 217 Booth, John Hunter 200 Borberg, Svend 10, 223 Borchert, Wolfgang 16 Bordeaux, Henri 248 Bori, Imre 293 Borowski, Tadeusz 313 Bosch, Hieronymus 243 Boutens, P. C. 229, 247 Bovasso, Julie 201 Braak, Menno ter 252 Brahm, Otto 60, 65 Brancusi, Constantin 175 Brandt Corstius, J a n 245 Braque, Georges 30, 45 Braun, Edward 214 Brecht, Bertolt 16, 45, 46, 49, 57, 58, 67, 68, 70, 74, 78, 95, 146, 151, 152, 201, 285 Brémond, Henri 240 Brentano, Clemens 22, 31, 104, 324 Breton, André 22, 31, 104 Breughel, Pieter 270 Breza, Tadeusz 306 Březina, Otokar 229 Briusov, Valery 317, 325, 326 Broch, Hermann 113, 191, 313 Brod, Max 21, 52, 80, 111, 119, 137, 229, 234 Bröger, Karl 75, 283 Bronnen, Arnolt 61 Browning, Elizabeth Barrett 71 Bruckner, Anton 153 Bruggen, Max Ferdinand Eugen van 55 Brunclair, Victor J. (ps. Bardemeyer) 229, 230, 231, 233, 234, 235, 241 Bruning, Gerard 254, 255, 257 Bruning, Henri 252, 253 Bruning, Victor and Henri 237, 246, 247 Bryusov, Valery (see Briusov) Brzozowski, Stanislaw 305 Buber, Martin 21, 111, 234 Büchner, Georg 72, 82, 150, 153, 154, 252 Buczkowski, Leonard 313 Burliuk, David and Vladimir 29 352

Burssens, Gaston 231, 234, 238, 241, 245 Buysse, Cyriel 226 Buzzi, Paolo 83 Byron, George Gordon, Lord 94, 150, 306 Călinescu, George 275, 277 Callimachi, Scarlat 281, 282 Callot, Jacques 215 Campendonk, Heinrich 121,127,135,136, 239 Cangiullo, Francesco 99 Cankar, I. 260 Cantre, Joszef 237 Čapek, Karel and Josef 10 Capus, Alfred 92 Caragiale, Ion Luca 270 Carlino, Lewis John 203 Carpenter, Edward 83, 84 Carroll, Lewis 186 Cassirer, Ernst 52 Cendrars, Blaise 83, 84, 99, 230, 244, 249, 250 Cesareć, August 261 Cézanne, Paul 30, 31, 43, 45, 114 Chagall, Marc 34, 117, 118 Chamisso, Adelbert von 38 Chekhov, Anton 205—207 Chennevière, Georges 225 Chesterton, Gilbert K. 218, 219 Chihaia, Pavel 286 Chlebnikov, Velimir (see Khlebnikov) Chlumberg, Hans 200 Chopin, Frédéric 303 Chrispeels, F.-Cl. 230, 231, 234, 242 Čizevsky, Dmitri 20 Claudel, Paul 11, 60, 61, 84, 93, 228, 229, 231, 243 Claudius, Matthias 149 Clerq, René de 231, 233, 241 Clough, Arthur T. 90 Cocteau, Jean 179, 186, 192, 203, 236, 243, 244, 249 Coleridge, Samuel T. 196 Connelly, Marc 9, 201 Conrad, Joseph 94 Corbière, Tristan 178, 249 Corman, Cid 42 Cornford, Francis 184 Coster, Dirk 249, 252, 253, 254, 258 Courbet, Gustave 36 Craig, Gordon 65, 66, 208, 242 Crane, Walter 115 Cristea, Nicolae 270 Crommelynck, Fernand 10, 218, 244 Csuka, Zoltán 296 Cummings, E.E. 197, 199 Czachorowski, Stanislaw Swen 313 Czechowicz, Józef 312 Czyzewski, Tytus 311 Dagerman, Stig 223 Dagover, Lil 164 Dali, Salvador 31 D'Annunzio, Gabriele 22, 60, 8 5 - 8 8 , 92 Daumier, Honoré de 114, 270 Dăubler, Theodor 18, 19, 24, 34, 39, 40, 70, 80, 96, 115, 117, 122, 170, 174, 229, 236, 261

D'Aurevilly, Barbey 92 Dauthendey, Max 75, 229 Debussy, Claude 40, 152 Degas, Edgar 114 Dehmel, Richard 150, 159, 229, 303 Delaunay, Robert 24, 41, 42, 116, 117, 120, 122, 136 Demedts, André 237 Derain, André 30 Deri, Max 274 Deubel, Leon 83, 84 Deyssel, Lodewijk van 246, 247, 249 Diaghilev, Sergei 200, 208, 318 Diaz, Porfirio 138 Dickinson, Emily 276 Diebold, Bernhard 62 Dieterle, Wilhelm (William) 164 Dilthey, Wilhelm 51 Dix, Otto 117, 126, 127, 128 Döblin, Alfred 17, 21, 22, 23, 31, 41, 66, 79, 80, 81, 87, 88, 90, 91, 95, 96, 117, 127, 138, 159, 188, 189, 191, 239 Doesburg, Theo van 247, 248, 250, 251, 252, 254, 259 Döhl, Reinhold 98, 101 Donadini, Ulderiko 263, 264 Donkersloot, N. A. 245 Dos Passos, John 22, 200, 202 Dowson, Ernest 70, 150, 151 Drainac, Rade 262 Dreiser, Theodore 193, 194 Dostoevsky, Fedor 29, 61, 83, 95, 116, 127, 213, 252, 256, 286 Drey, Arthur 131 Dryden, John 222 Dufy, Raoul 132 Duhamel, Jacques 225 Duinkerken, A. van 252, 255 Du Perron, Edgar 230, 238 Dupont, E. A. 165 Dürrenmatt, Friedrich 16 Duse, Eleonora 86 Duyn, G. van 257 Edschmid, Kasimir 18, 22, 23, 34, 36, 39, 41, 43, 79, 80, 81, 82, 89, 188, 192, 234, 252, 318, 322 Eeden, Frederik van 246, 249 Egri, Lajos 197 Ehrenburg, Ilya 326 Ehrenstein, Albert 81, 9.2, 93, 96, 119, 229, 261, 323 Eichendorff, Josef von 149, 151, 153, 155 324 Einstein, Albert 54, 320 Einstein, Carl 80, 81, 83, 92, 94, 137, 138, 188, 189, 265 Eisenstein, Sergei 311 Ekster, Alexandra 217 Eliot, T. S. 27, 29, 167, 184, 186, 192, 197, 201 Engelke, Gerrit 75 Engelman, J a n 255 Ensor, James 29, 117, 135, 243, 270 Erenburg, Ilya (see Ehrenburg) Esenin, Sergei A. 321

Epstein, Jacob 167, 175 Ernst, Max 117 Euripides 196 Evreinov, Nikolai 9, 202, 203, 217 Ewers, Hanns Heinz 88 Eyck, P. N. van 247 Eyen, Tom 201 Faiko, Alexei 215 Faragoh, Francis Edward 200 Faulkner, William 10 Fehling, Jürgen 161 Feijs, A. H. 247, 249 Feininger, Lyonel 26, 29, 116, 118, 127, 131 Fekete, Lajos 296 Feldman, Peter 203 Fellini, Federico 203 Fet, Afanasy A. 325 Filonov, Pavel 216 Flaubert, Gustave 22, 43, 82, 83, 84, 89, 91, 92, 93, 96, 178 Flesch-Bruningen, Hans von 81 Flukowski, Stefan 312 Forbáth, Imre 296 Ford, Henry 199 France, Anatole 91, 93 Frank, Leonhard 80, 95, 252 Freiligrath, Ferdinand 71 Freud, Sigmund 25, 31, 51, 108, 125. 147, 164, 201, 278 Friedrich, Hugo 113 Frost, Robert 167 Fry, Roger 167 Fuchs, George 201 Gabrilovic, Evgenij 322, 323, 324, 325, 326 Gajey, Tadeusz 313 Galczyński, Konstanty Hdefons 312 Galsworthy, John 24, 57 Gaston, William 201, 203 Gaudier-Brzeska, Henri 29, 38, 167, 168, 169, 175, 176, 177 Gauguin, Paul 37, 45, 114, 115, 117, 132 Geiger, Moritz 53 Genet, Jean 195 George, Stefan 69, 70, 87, 150, 151 Gerlach, Arthur von 165 Ghelderode, Michel de 10, 11, 222, 226, 243, 245 Ghéon, Henri 242, 243 Gide, André 80, 83, 93, 96 Gijsen, Marnix 233, 234, 237, 241, 245, 246, 255 Gilbert, Henry Schwenck 186 Giraud, Albert 149 Giraudoux, Jean 223 Glaspell, Susan 27, 196 Gleizes, Albert 121, 232, 240 Goering, Reinhard 11, 35, 67, 112 Goes, Frank van der 246 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 11, 141, 149 Gogh, Vincent van 16, 24, 40, 42, 43, 45, 112, 114,115,131, 141, 164, 174, 250, 276 Gogol, Nikolai 317 Gold, Michael 199 Goldoni, Carlo 218 353

Goll, Claire 265 Goll, I v a n 17, 22, 70, 80, 95, 265, 266 Goncharova, Natalia 218 Gorki, Maxim 83 Gorter, H e r m a n 246, 247, 249, 255 Goya, Francisco 270 Gozzi, Carlo 196, 213 Grabbe, Christian D . 72 Granach, Alexander 164, 165 El Greco 31, 42 Green, Paul 196, 197 Grieg, Nordahl 222 Grimm, Reinhold 94 Groenevelt, E . 254, 255 Gropius, Walter 45, 118 Grosz, George 117, 127, 130, 135, 136, 230 Grune, Karl 165 Grünewald, Mathias 31, 274, 275 Gruyter, J. O. de 242 Guilbeaux, Henri 230 Gütersloh, Paris von 96 Hafiz 234 Haftmann, Werner 123 Hamburger, Michael 30, 43 Hammerstein, Oskar 201 Hamsun, K n u t 93, 222 Harasymowicz, Jerzy 313 Hardekopf, Ferdinand 70, 132, 261 Hardt, Ernst 147 Harnack, Adolf 82 Hartleben, Otto Erich 149 Hasenclever, Walter 46, 59, 61, 62, 66, 75, 119, 128, 147, 196, 198, 219, 223, 252 Hart, Moss 201 Hauptmann, Carl 60, 67 Hauptmann, Gerhart 60, 81, 114, 116, 157, 210 Hausenstein, Wilhelm 117 Hausmann, Raoul 265 Hebbel, Friedrich 133 Heckel, Erich 114, 116, 117, 118, 126, 127, 130, 131, 136 Heiberg, Gunnar 222, 223 Heijermans, Herman 241 Heise, Carl Georg 119 Hellens, Franz (ps. F. van Erminghen) 226, 244 Helman, Albert 257 Hemingway, Ernest 85 Hennings, E m m y 99 Henry, Daniel (ps. Kahnweiler) 117, 230 Hepworth, Barbara 180 Herlth, Gustav 165 Hervé, Julien-Auguste 43 Herzfelde, Wieland 324 Heselhaus, Clemens 123, 137 Hesse, Hermann 29, 81, 142 H e v e s y , I v a n 296 H e y m , Georg 50, 70, 72, 74, 79, 80, 87, 115, 130, 131, 133, 147, 188, 239, 257, 261, 280, 324 Heyndrickx, G. 242 Heynicke, Kurt 130, 265 Hilie, Peter 111 Hiller, Kurt 79, 82, 111, 117, 120, 229, 235 354

Hindemith, Paul 152, 159 Hitler, Adolf 30, 56 Hoddis, Jakob v a n 99, 128, 131, 136, 261, 324 Hoffmann, E . T. A. 279, 323, 324, 325 Hofmannsthal, Hugo von 46, 60, 65, 87, 147, 252 Hohoff, Curt 98 Holberg, Ludvig 223 Hölderlin, Friedrich 72, 73, 141 Hollander,.Walther von 38, 139 Holz, Arno 75, 79 Hölzel, Adolf 38 Hoover, Marjorie 212 Hopkins, Arthur 193 Huebner, Friedrich Markus 18, 236, 252 Hueffer, Ford Madox (Ford) 168 Hulewicz, Jerzy 308 Hulewicz, Witold 308 Hulme, T. E . 18. 25, 37, 168, 170, 171, 172, 173, 177 Hülsenbeck, Richard 99, 100 Hunte, Otto 166 Husserl, Edmund 52, 53 Huysmans, Joris K. 87, 92, 94 Ibsen, Henrik 60, 65, 116, 186, 211, 221, 222, 286 Ionesco, Eugène 46, 139 Isherwood, Christopher 29, 185, 186 Itten, Johannes 118 Ivano v, Vyacheslav 321 Ives, Charles 152, 160 Iwaskiewicz, Jaroslaw 308, 309, 310 Jacob, A. 236 Jacob, Heinrich Eduard 86, 87 Jacob, Max 244 Jacobsen, Jens Peter 96, 150 Jakobson, R o m a n 320 Jahnn, H a n s H e n n y 21, 96, 191 James, Henry 178 Jammes, Francis 70, 228, 249, 287 Janaček, Leos 153 Janco, Marcel 99 Jarc, Miran 260 Jarry, Alfred 243, 249 Jastrun, Mieczyslav 312 Jawlensky, Axel von 29, 130, 136 Jaworski, R o m a n 311, 312 Jensen, Johannes V. 91, 223 Jespers, Floris 121, 232, 237, 239 Jespers, Oscar 121, 232 Jessner, Leopold 66, 161, 164 Jiguidi, Aurei 270 Joel, Karl 51 Johnston, Dennis 9, 27 Johst, H a n n s 95 Jolas, Eugène 21 Jone, Hildegard 150 Jones, Robert Edmond 194, 195, 203 Jong, Martien G. de 252 Joostens, Paul 232, 237 Jouve, Pierre Jean 229 Jouvet, Louis 223, 244

Joyce, James 21, 43, 46, 57, 89, 141, 146, 167, 178, 189, 191, 192 József, Attila 295 Jung, Carl Gustav 25, 94 Jung, Franz 81, 82 Kaden-Bandrowski, Juliusz 303, 308, 309 Kafka, Franz 21, 46, 50, 53, 57, 79, 80, 81, 95, 188, 191, 239, 304, 313 Kahler, Erich 79, 80, 81, 93 Kahnweiler, Daniel Henry (see Henry) Kaiser, Georg 9, 17, 18, 29, 34, 59, 60, 63, 64, 66, 67, 68, 85, 87, 94, 143, 147, 155, 156, 181, 185, 186, 196, 198, 201, 218, 223, 242, 252, 265 Kalidasa 217 Kalmer, Joseph André 265 Kamensky, Vasili 319 Kandinsky, Wassily 16, 18, 24, 29, 39, 40, 49, 50, 51, 54, 99, 102, 116, 117, 119, 120 121, 122, 123, 124, 127, 130, 131, 132, 133, 134, 136, 137, 138, 139 158, 168, 172, 173, 175, 177, 230, 232, 240, 247, 250, 251, 271, 272 Kant, Immanuel 51, 52, 108 Kantemir, A. 320 Kasack, Hermann 131, 252 Kasprowiez, J a n 302, 303, 304, 308, 311 Kassák, Lajos 20, 27, 48, 287, 289, 290, 291, 292 Kaufman, George S. 9, 201 Kayser, Wolfgang 21, 23 Kazan, Elia 202, 203 Keats, John 249 Keller, Philipp 81 Kellermann, Bernhard 91 Kennedy, Adrienne 201 Kenner, Hugh 175 Kerr, Alfred 54 Kershentsev, Platon M. 318 Kharms, Daniel 325 Khlebnikov, Viktor 215, 318, 320, 323, 327 Kierkegaard, Soren 51, 53, 141, 223 Kipling, Rudyard 325 Klabund 80, 81, 131, 234 Klammer, Karl (p.s. K. L. Ammer) 69, 70, 71 73 78 Kirchner, Ernst Ludwig 32, 115, 116, 118, 119, 122, 126, 131, 136, 174 Klee, Paul 23, 36, 39, 116, 117, 118, 119, 122, 124, 127, 131, 132, 136, 272 Klein, César 164 Kleist, Heinrich von 72, 141, 324, Klemm, Wilhelm 70 Klimt, Gustav 121 Kloos, Willem 230, 246, 247, 249 Klopcic, Milan 260 Klöpfer, Eugen 165 Klopstock, Friedrich Gottlieb 325 Knortz, Karl 71 Knuvelder, Gerard 254 Kogan, Moissej 29 Kohl, Aaage von 84 Kokoschka, Bohuslav 81 Kokoschka, Oskar 16, 18, 32, 41, 59, 81, 115, 116, 117, 118, 119, 120, 121, 122, 123,

124, 125, 126, 131, 132, 139, 221, 223, 242 Kollwitz, Kăthe 127, 135 Komját, Aladár 293 Komissarzhevskaya, Vera 209, 215 Komissarzhevsky, Fyodor 213 Koonen, Alisa 217 Kornfeld, Paul 38, 62, 66, 95, 242 Korovin, Konstantin 208 Kortner, Fritz 164, 165 Kosovel, Srecko 260 Kovalevsky, V. 324 Kozikowski, Edward 310, 311 Kracauer, Siegfried 161 Krasinski, Zygmunt 299 Kramskoi, Ivan N. 206 Kraus, Karl 54, 117, 121, 154 Krauss, Werner 164 Krell, Max 22, 32, 33 Kreymborg, Alfred 196, 203 Krispyn, Egbert 245 Krklec, Gustav 261 Krleza, Miroslav 261, 263, 264 Krog, Helge 222 Kronberg, Simon 81 Kruchenikh, Alexei E. 318, 322 Kubin, Alfred 21, 80, 96, 116, 118, 121, 122, 123, 126 Kun, Béla 294 Küppers, P . E. 122 Kurtz, Rudolf 43, 70 Kutznetsov, Pavel 217 Kuyle, Albert 237 Kuzmin, Mihail 10, 327 Laclos, Choderlos de 91 Laforgue, Jules 83, 84, 249 Lagerkvist, Păr 10, 27, 84, 222, 223 La Motte Fouqué, Friedrich 324 Landauer, Gustav 71 Landor, Walter Savage 83 Lang, Fritz 162, 164, 166 Lapin, Boris 322, 323, 324, 325, 326 Lasker-Schüler, Else 17, 79, 86, 112, 117, 119, 120, 132, 188, 234, 252, 261 Laurents, Arthur 201 Lavrencic, Joze 260 Law-Robertson, Harry 71, 75 Lawrence, D. H. 10, 189, Lawson, John H. 198, 199 Lechón, J a n 309 Lecocq, Charles 218 Le Corbusier, Edouard 176 Léger, Ferdinand 45, 169 Lehmbruck, Wilhelm 38 Leibl, Wilhelm 30 Lékai, János 293 Lemm, Alfred 81 Leni, Paul 162, 164 Lenormand, Henri 11, 16, 199 Lenz, Jakob R. M. 323 Leonard, Joseph 248 Leonhard, Rudolf 135 Lepok, Nikolay 322 Lermontov, Mihail 325 Lernet-Holenia, Alexander 70 355

Lersch, Heinrich 75 Lesmian, Boleslaw 310, 311 Lessing, O. E. 71 Levit, Teodor 318, 321, 324 Lewis, Wyndham 18, 27, 29, 38, 167, 168, 169, 170, 172, 173, 174, 175, 176, 178, 179, 180 Li T'ai-po 234 Lichtenstein, Alfred 92, 117, 131, 135, 137, 261, 324 Liebknecht, Karl 233 Lion, Ferdinand 93 Lipps, Theodor 273 Livsic, Benedikt 327 Loerke, Oskar 80 Lohner, Edgar 42, 113 London, Jack 85, 88, 319 Lorca, Federigo Garcia 21, 22, 46 Lorre, Peter 166 Losski, Nikolai 320 Loti, Pierre 83, 93 Lotz, Ernst Wilhelm 120, 131 Luca, Ion 285 Lubitsch, Ernst 165 Lugne-Poë, Aurélien-Marie 60 Lukács, György 55, 111 Lunacharski, Anatoly 218 L'vov-Rogacevsky, V. 316, 318 MacKaye, Percy 193 Macke, August 38, 41, 118, 120, 122 MacLeish, Archibald 201 Mach, Ernst 52, 54 Mácza, János 293 Maeterlinck, Maurice 11, 16, 45, 60, 70, 72, 93, 149, 150, 226, 243, 249 Mahler, Gustav 142, 144, 150, 151, 152, 159 Maiakovsky, Vladimir 10, 215, 216, 217, 218, 260, 316, 317, 320, 321 Maistre, Xavier de 93 Majut, Rudolf 81 Malevich, Kasimir 39, 215, 216 Mallarmé, Stéfane 60, 70, 94, 238, 240 Maltz, Albert 200 Mamontov, Savva 208 Mandelstam, Osip 327 Manet, Edouard 114 Mann, Heinrich 22, 23, 33, 42, 80, 81, 87, 91, 92, 93, 95, 96, 111, 225 Mann, Thomas 23, 33, 42, 81, 89, 106 Marakovic, Ljubomir 261 Marc, Franz 26, 34, 38, 41, 112, 116, 118, 119, 120, 122, 127, 128, 131, 132, 135, 136, 172, 232, 247, 250, 251, 271 Mărculescu, Aurei 270 Marin, John 29 Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso 16, 17, 20, 31, 66, 67, 70, 76, 77, 78, 83, 84, 85, 88, 89, 90, 91, 93, 96, 99, 103, 104, 117, 168, 179, 229, 242 Marlinsky 325 Marlowe, Christopher 72 Marsman, Henrik 26, 27, 121, 225, 245, 247, 248, 249, 250, 251, 252, 253, 254, 256, 257, 258 Martin, Karl Heinz 162 356

Martinet, Marcel 218 Martini, Fritz 22, 23 Marx, Karl 198 Masereel, Frans 119 Mattis-Teutsch of Brasov 271 Matisse, Henri 18, 30, 43, 136 Mauclair, Camille 83 Maupassant, Guy de 85, 116 Mayer, Carl 165 McEvoy, J. P. 301 Mechthild von Magdeburg 239 Meckauer, Walter 53 Meester, J. de 243 Meidner, Ludwig 117, 120, 123, 165 Mej'erhold, Vselovod (see Meyerhold) Melville, Lewis 94 Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, Felix 153 Mercereau, Alexandre 229 Metzinger, Jean 121, 232 Meyer, Alfred Richard 70 Meyer, Conrad Ferdinand 150 Meyerhold, Vsevolod 27, 68, 201, 205, 206, 208, 209, 210, 211, 212, 213, 214, 215, 216, 217, 218, 244, 318 Meyrinck, Gustav 21. 96, 119, 229 Michel, Wilhelm 122 Michelangelo Buonarroti 176 Micić, Ljubomir 265, 266, 267 Micinsky, Tadeusz 302, 306, 307, 310, 312 Mickiewicz, Adam 299 Middleton, Christopher 30 Mielziner, Jo 202, 203 Milev, Geo 27, 262, 263, 265, 267 Miller, Arthur 201, 202 Milosz, Czeslaw 312 Mirbeau, Octave 84, 93 Modersohn-Becker, Paula 41, 119 Modigliani, Amedeo 38, 99, 175 Moens, Wies 231, 233, 234, 235, 236, 237, 238, 241, 242, 245, 253, 254, 255, 257 Moholy-Nagy, László 45, 118 Molenaar, Maurits 256 Molière 213, 244 Moller, H. 254 Möller van den Brück, Arthur 95 Molzahn, Johannes 118 Mombert, Alfred 79, 150, 229 Mondrian, Piet 30, 247, 250 Monet, Claude 31, 36, 175 Monroe, Harriett 167 Mont, Paul de 243 Montale, Eugenio 192 Moore, Henry 179 Moortel, Maurits van de (ps. W. de Man) 231 236 Moritz, Karl Philipp 106 Morris, William 95, 115 Motte-Guyon, Jeanne Marie de 235 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus 141 Mrozek, Slawomir 306 Muche, Georg 118 Mueller, Otto 117 Müller, Robert 81 Müller, Theophil 324 Muls, Jozef 237 Multatuli (ps. of Eduard Douwes Dekker) 83

Munch, Edvard 16, 41, 45, 112, 114, 115, 131, 221, 285, 303 Munier, Roger 273 Murnau, F. W. 164, 165, 166 Murillo, Esteban 114 Muschg, Walter 90 Musil, Robert 54, 79, 80, 89, 313 Musshe, Achilles 241 Mynona 81, 92, 117, 239 Nash, Paul 180 Németh, László 296 Nemirovich-Danchenko, Vladimir 206 Nesmelov, Boris 322 Nevinson, C. R. W. 168 Nicholson, Ben 180 Nielsen, Carl 153 Nietzsche, Friedrich 15, 33, 35, 51, 74, 83, 84, 85, 86, 88, 116, 196, 252, 256, 288, 304, 307 Nolde, Emil 37, 38, 118, 119, 126, 131, 132, 133, 136 Novalis (ps. of Friedrich von Hardenberg) 252, 324 Nowak, Tadeusz 313 O'Casey, Sean 9, 27, 184, 186, 188 Odets, Clifford 198, 200 Oever, Karel van den 234, 237, 246, 253, 254, 255, 258 Okhlopov, Nikolay 219 Olesha, Yuri 10 O'Neill, Eugene 9, 10, 17, 25, 27, 29, 38, 174, 196, 197, 199, 203, 218, 243, 284, 286 Oppeln-Bronikowski, Friedrich von 70 Oppenheimer, Max (ps. Mop) 99, 117 Orjesaeter, Tore 222 Orozco, Clemente 138 Ortega y Gasset, Jose 179 Ostaijen, Paul van 225, 226, 227, 228, 229, 230, 231, 234, 235, 236, 238, 239, 240, 241, 244, 245, 246, 248, 254, 257 Ostrovski, Alexander 205, 213 Oswald, Richard 166 Otetelesanu, Ruxandra 284, 285 Otten, Karl 75, 84, 88, 120 Pabst, G. W. 163, 164 Palazzeschi, Aldo 84 Panizza, Oskar 135 Papadat-Bengescu, Hortensia 284 Papini, Giovanni 229 Pappenheim, Marie von 148 Paquet, Alfons 75 Parsons, Talcott 107 Pasternak, Boris 10, 323, 265 Paulsen, Wolfgang 33 Pauwels, Fernand-Martin 231 Pawlikowska-Jasnorzewska, Maria 309 Pechstein, Max 37, 117, 118, 136, 174 Peeters, Jozef 237, 238 Péguy, Charles 83, 229 Perelesin, Boris 322 Perk, Jacques 230 Permys, Martin (ps. of M. J. Premsela) 249, 254

Petrarca, Francesco 150 Petrescu, Camil 284, 285 Petrović, Rastko 261 Petzold, Alfons 283 Pfemfert, Franz 83, 102, 229 Pfitzner, Hans 155, 158 Philippe, Charles Louis 84, 116 Philippide, Alexandra 2 7 9 - 2 8 1 , 286 Picasso, Pablo 26, 30, 45, 99, 118, 216, 235 Pick, Lupu 165 Pinski, David 197 Pinter, Ferenc 296 Pinthus, Kurt 17, 18, 24, 29, 31, 32, 42, 43, 47, 48, 82, 105, 119, 252 Pirenne, Henri 236 Piscator, Erwin 16, 55, 68, 139, 199, 201, 244 Plato 300 Plautus 223 Podbevsek, Anton 260 Foe, Edgar Allan 10, 229, 256, 279, 282 Poggioli, Renato 19 Polenov, Vassily 208 Pollock, Channing 201 Pölzig, Hans 163, 165 Popo va, Lyubov 217 Porten, Henny 164 Pörtner, Paul 259 Pound, Ezra 18, 26, 43, 96, 167, 168, 169, 170, 173, 176, 177, 178, 179, 180, 184, 192 Prosenc, Miklasz 107 Proust, Marcel 36, 177, 178, 192 Przybyzewski, Stanislaw 16, 27, 83, 84, 3 0 2 304, 307 Pushkin, Alexander S. 215 Putman, Willem 243 Pynenburg, Fernand 238 Raabe, Paul 84, 111, 119 Ramm, Alexandra 83 Raphael (Raffaele Santo) 171 Raphael, Max 122 Rasmussen, Emil 96 Read, Herbert 40, 179 Rebreanu, Liviu 284 Rees, Otto van 99 Reger, Max 159 Régnier, Henri de 249 Reinhardt, Max 60, 115, 161, 162, 208, 209, 318 Reisiger, Hans 71 Reksin, Sergei 318 Rembrandt 163 Retera, W. 256 Révész, Béla 288 Rice, Elmer 17, 27, 29, 198, 203 Riegl, Alois 49 Rilke, Rainer Maria 22, 35, 41, 71, 73, 87, 95, 124, 229, 252, 308 Rimbaud, Arthur 16, 60, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 76, 77, 78, 84, 104, 113, 116, 131, 249, 287, 299, 309 Rimsky-Korssakov, Nikolai 205 Ripke-Kühn, Leonore 18, 117, 228 Rippert, Otto 162 357

Rivera, Diego 138 Rivière, Jacques 84 Robison, Arthur 165 Rodgers, Richard 201 Rodin, Auguste 175 Röhrig, Walter 165 Rok, Rjurik 321, 322 Roland Holst, Henriette 230 Rolland, Romain 233, 236, 248 Rolleston, T. W. 71 Romains, Jules 11, 289, 324 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel 70 Rostotsky, B. 216 Rothe, Wolfgang 81 Rouault, Georges 116, 136 Rousseau, Henri 174 Roy, Claude 124 Rozanov, Vasily 320 Rubiner, Ludwig 18, 59, 68, 70, 75, 95, 117, 119, 127, 229, 236, 252, 296 Russolo, Luigi 26 Rymkiewicz, Aleksander 312 Sack, Gustav 81, 94 Sadoveanu, Mihail 284 Samuel, Richard 61 San Secondo, Rosso di 11 Sand, George 92 Saroyan, William 201 Sayers, Michael 183 Schaefer, Heinrich 81 Scharf, Ludwig 70 Scheerbart, Paul 96, 117, 239 Scheler, Max 52, 53 Schelling, F . W. J. 324 Schickele, René 23, 33, 80, 93, 106, 229 Schiele, Egon 117, 121 Schiller, Friedrich von 33, 326 Schisgal, Murray 203 Schlaf, Johannes 71, 74, 75 Schlegel, Friedrich 324 Schlemmer, Oskar 45, 117, 118 Schmidt-Rottluff, Karl 118, 131 Schneider, Karl-Ludwig 133 Schnitzler, Arthur 211, 214 Schönberg, Arnold 24, 40, 45, 119, 141, 145, 147-152,156-160 Schopenhauer, Arthur 300 Schreck, Max 164 Schreyer, Lothar 11, 39, 66, 117, 118, 119, 139, 197, 239, 252 Schubert, Franz 141, 150, 152 Schulz, Bruno 313 Schumann, Robert 149, 153 Schuster, Ingrid 90 Schwitters, Kurt 117, 118 Schwob, Marcel 84 Schyberg, Frederik 223 Sebyta, Wladislaw 312 Seliskar, Tone 260 Selz, Peter 30 Serner, Martin G. 117 Šeršenevič, Vadim (see Shershenevich) Servaes, A. 250 Seuphor, Michael (ps. of Fernand Berckelaers) 265 358

Seurat, Denis 132 Severini, Gino 26, 34 Shakespeare, William 65, 155, 222, 243 Shalyapin, Fjodor 208 Shaw, George Bernard 87, 90, 94, 186, 241 Shaw, Irwin 200 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 94, 249 Shershenevich, Vadim 317, 318, 320 Shkolnik, I. 216 Shklovski, Viktor 323 Shostakovich, Dmitri 153 Sidorov, Gurij 318 Sifton, Paul 199 Silling, Evgeny 324 Simic, A. B. 27, 261, 263 Simonson, Lee 198, 203 Sinclair, Upton 199, 200 Siqueiros, David 138, 139 Sisov, 324 Sitwell, Edith 10, 43 Sitwell, Sacherevell 10 Sklar, George 200 Šklovsky, Viktor (see Shklovski) Slauerhoff, J a n 250, 256, 257 Slodki, Marcel 99 Slonim, Marc 208 Slonimski, Antoni 309, 310, 312 Slowacki, Juliusz 299, 303 Smedt, Oscar de (ps. Marc) 228, 229, 250 Soergel, Albert 54, 81, 98, 112 Sokel, Walter 30, 44, 63, 80, 95, 116, 189 Sokolov, Ippolit 27, 3 1 6 - 3 2 7 Sola Pinto, Vivian de 35 Sologub, Fjodor 208, 212 Soloviev, Vladimir 217 Sorbul, Mihail 285 Sorge, Reinhard J. 59, 61, 62, 64, 147, 161, 223 Soumagne, Henri 244 Soya, Carl Erik 223, 224 Spassky, Dmitrievic 322 Spender, Stephen 188 Stadler, Ernst 32, 70, 75, 79, 121, 131, 138, 252, 261 Stanislavsky, Konstantin 65, 68, 205—208 Stelaru, Dimitrie 282, 283 Stenberg, Georgy 218 Stenberg, Vladimir 218 Stern, Ernst 165 Sternberg, Joseph von 166 Sternheim, Carl 10, 16, 22, 42, 66, 80, 81, 82, 83, 92, 115, 155, 156, 229, 242, 252 Stramm, August 26, 42, 43, 66, 67, 77, 81, 117, 118, 119, 121, 131, 134, 147, 238, 239, 245, 249, 250, 255, 257, 261 Strauss, Richard 153, 155, 157, 158, 159 Stravinsky, Igor 25, 37, 148, 151, 155, 160 Streuvels, Stijn 226 Strindberg, August 10, 11, 16, 27, 46, 60, 61, 62, 63, 65, 83, 84, 90, 93, 116, 141, 143, 149, 150, 196, 202, 221, 222, 223, 243, 279, 285, 303, 304 Strug, Andrzej 308, 309 Stuck, Franz von 272 Stuckenberg, Fritz 121 Stur, Jean 308

Stuyver, Wilhelmina 55 Sullivan, Pat 48 Sutton, Graham 182 Svevo, Italo 313 Swedenborg, Emanuel 224 Swift, Jonathan 178 Swinburne, Charles Algernon 70, 94 Symons, Arthur 229 Szabó, Dezso 288, 289 Szabó, Lorinc 295, 296 Szabó, Pál 296 Szilágyi, András 296 Tagore, Rabindranath 84, 150, 229, 249 Tairov, Alexander 27, 68, 212, 217, 218, 219, 318 Tamási, Áron 296 Taube, Otto von 87 Teirlinck, Herman 225, 242, 243 Terry, Megan 203 They, E. 123 Throckmorton, Cleon 193, 196, 203 Tibullus 50 Tichelen, Geo van 231 Tieck, Ludwig 324 Timmermans, Felix 243 Toller, Ernst 10, 18, 29, 57, 59, 63, 67, 68, 78, 159, 183, 185, 186, 187, 203, 218, 223, 296, 306 Tolstoi, Leo 57, 84, 95, 96 Tonitza, N. N. 269, 270, 286 Topp, Arnold 118 Tornyopol, Victor 283, 284 Trakl, Georg 10, 16, 17, 18, 48, 50, 70, 71, 72, 73, 77, 79, 80, 95, 119, 120, 121, 131, 132, 133, 134, 136, 150, 252, 257, 261 Toulouse-Lautrec, Henri de 114 Treadwell, Sophie 201 Tretjakov, Sergey 217, 218, 317 Troyer, Prosper de 237 Truchanowski, Kazimierz 313 Tschaikovsky, Peter Iljitsch 152 Tuculescu, Ion 273 Tuwim, Julian 308, 309, 310, 311, 313 Tzara, Tristan 99, 271 Ujvári, Erzsi 293 Ungar, Hermann 81 Unruh, Fritz von 67, 80, 223, 241, 306 Urmuz 284 Usinger, Fritz 97 Utitz, Emil 55 Vakhtangov, Evgeny 191, 255 Valéry, Paul 73 van Itallie, Jean-Claude 203 Vansina, Dirk 243 Vaughan Williams, Ralph 160 Veidt, Conrad 164 Velde, Anton van de 243 Verbruggen, Paul 231, 235, 237 Verhaeren, Emil 16, 70, 78, 83, 226, 229, 230, 231, 244, 248, 254, 256, 309 Verlaine, Paul 36, 70, 72, 83, 117, 287 Vermeylen, August 226, 227, 236 Verwey, Albert 246, 247, 248, 256

Vesnin, Aleksandr 218 Veterman, F. 243 Vianu, Tudor 274 Vida, Gheza 271 Vildrac, Charles 229 Villiers de Piale Adam 88, 92, 249 Villon, François 69, 70, 78, 178, 282 Vinaver, Stanislav 27, 261, 262 Virgil 275 Visan, Tancrède de 229 Vlaminck, Maurice 30 Volkov, Nikolai 215 Vollmöller, Karl Gustav 86 Voltaire 317 Vondel, Jost van den 256 Vorel, Lascăr 272, 273, 286 Voronca, Ilarie 271 Vos, Herman 231, 233, 236 Vries, H. de 250, 256, 257 Vrubel, Mihail 208 Vsevolodsky, V. 219 Wackenroder, Heinrich 106, 107 Wadsworth, Edward 168 Wagenvoort, Maurits 249 Wagner, Geoffrey 167 Wagner, Richard 35, 40, 65, 86, 116, 119, 147, 148, 150, 153, 154, 155, 168, 191 Wajda, Andrzej 306 Walden, Herwarth 18, 19, 33, 35, 42, 66, 76, 84, 113, 117, 118, 122, 238, 252, 263, 266 Walden, Nell 84 Walschap, Gerard 237, 245 Wassermann, Jakob 85, 87, 88, 91, 95 Wauer, William 118, 119 Weber, Carl Maria von 142, 149, 150, 152, 153 Webern, Anton 145, 146, 156, 158, 160 Wedekind, Frank 16, 42, 83, 116, 141, 143 144, 150, 155, 156, 159, 211, 215, 279 Wegener, Paul 163 Wegner, Armin T. 74, 75 Weill, Kurt 147, 159, 201 Weininger, Otto 90 Weiss, Ernst 81, 85 Weisstein, Ulrich 181 Wells, H. G. 57 Werefkin, Marianne von 29 Werfel, Franz 10, 18, 29, 59, 67, 75, 80, 119, 127, 130, 135, 137, 147, 197, 228, 229, 230, 234, 235, 252, 261, 296, 308 Wessem, C. van 246, 248, 249, 252, 256 West, Rebecca 168 Westheim, Paul 117 Weyer, Ruth 164 Whistler, James McNeill 177 Whitman, Walt 22, 25, 70, 71, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 83, 84, 94, 223, 229, 230, 231, 234, 249, 254, 255, 291 Wied, Gustav 223 Wiene, Robert 162, 164 Wierzyński, Kazimierz 308 Wilde, Oscar 83, 87, 92, 94, 196 Wilder, Thornton 16, 29, 201, 202, 203 Wildgans, Anton 242 Williams, Tennessee 16, 139, 201, 202 Williams, William Carlos 168, 201 359

Wilson, A. E. 186 Wilson, Edmund 196, 199, 203 Winter, A. de 251 Witkiewiez, Ignacy 311 Wittlin, Józef 308 Woestijne, Karl van de 226, 237, 246 Wolf, Friedrich 242 Wolfenstein, Alfred 70, 74, 80, 82, 95, 131 Wolff, Kurt 119 Woolf, Virginia 10, 57, 189 Worringer, Wilhelm 15, 18, 23, 24, 25, 32, 36, 37, 42, 43, 46, 49, 50, 122, 170, 171, 175, 240, 252, 256, 273, 274 Wouters, Rik 117 Wowro, Jedrzej 311 Wyka, Kazimierz 302 Wyspianski, Stanislaw 305, 306 Xarms (see Kharms) Xlebnikov (see Khlebnikov)

360

Yakulov, Georgy 218 Yeats, John 176 Yeats, William Butler 65, 96, 184 Zagorski, Jerzy 312 Zamfirescu, George Mihail 285 Žarkovic, A. H. 263 Zech, Paul 70, 74, 80, 84, 87 Zegadlowiez, Emil 307, 310, 311 Zemenkov, Boris 318, 321, 326 Zeuxis 111 Znosko-Borovsky, Evgeny 214 Zola, Emile 36,57, 85, 114 Zoshehenko, Mihail 316 Zuckmayer, Carl 16, 159 Zupancic, Oton 260 Zweig, Arnold 80, 81 Zweig, Stefan 60, 70

ON THE ORGANIZATION AND SCOPE OF THE SERIES A COMPARATIVE HISTORY OF LITERATURES IN EUROPEAN LANGUAGES

This series will contain scholarly works dealing with literary works produced in Europe, in the Americas and elsewhere in languages of European origin. The project is directed by an inter­ national Coordinating Conimittee composed of eminent scholars of comparative literature. The Committee has, in turn, set up Research Centers throughout the world for dealing each with a special literary epoch or movement. I t is the Centers' task to provide the volumes with editorial staffs recruited from experts of various countries, that is, to secure true international co-operation for each of the volumes. In the course of the past few years, the following types of volumes have been established: VOLUMES DEALING

WITH. LITERARY

EPOCHS

Each working center has a definite field of research such as, for instance, th© B u d a p e s t Paris Center, where the research fellows of both the Institute of General and Comparative Literature at the Sorbonne and of the Institute for Literary Studies of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences deal with the Literature of Europe at the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries (1770—1815).

VOLUMES CONTAINING STUDIES ON EUROPEAN LITERARY TRENDS A very significant work of this type is the present volume: Expressionism as an International Literary Phenomenon. This volume has been prepared by a Center at Indiana University.

VOLUMES DEALING W I T H SPECIAL PROBLEMS A type of publication intending to give both scholars and readers a chronology of world literature will be the result of the joint efforts of Centers already functioning. The series is to consist of 20 to 30 volumes in all.

F U R T H E R TITLES UNDER WAY La Littérature de la Renaissance Transformations littéraires européennes au tournant du XVIII e et X I X e siècle Romanticism and Folklore The Literature of the ««fin de siècle"

Fig. 1. Ludwig Meidner Ich und die Stadt (The Town and I), 1913 Private Collection, Cologne

Fig. 2. Emil Nolde Legende, Heilige Maria von Ägypten, Die Bekehrung (Legend of the Blessed Virgin of Egypt. Conversion), 1912 Kunsthalle, Hamburg. (With authorization of the Nolde-Stiftung Secbüll)

Fig. 3. Alexej von Jawlensky Dornenkrone (Crown of Thorns), 1918 Coll. Ernst Schneider, Düsseldorf

Fig. 4. Erich Heckel Hockende (Crouching Woman), 1914 Xylography