German Expressionism 1905 1925

German Expressionism: 1905-1925
Author(s): H. Stefan Schultz

Source: Chicago Review, Vol. 13, No. 1 (Winter - Spring, 1959), pp. 8-24
Published by: Chicago Review
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H. STEFAN SCHULTZ
GERMAN EXPRESSIONISM:!905-1925
The late Gottfried Benn was asked to write an introduction
for a collection to be entitled "Lyric Poetry of Expressionism,"
in 1955. He looked at the publisher's manuscript and found that
many of the selections had nothing to do with expressionism.
He questioned the term "expressionistic" when applied to some
of his own verses and wondered about the inclusion of half a
dozen writers. But the publisher informed him that the poems
in question had been called "typically expressionistic works" by
professional literary historians and essayists. The result of many
weeks of reading and research, on the part of Benn and the editors
of the proposed anthology, was the realization that apparently
not all poets dubbed expressionistic are actually "expressive,"
nor were all the expressive ones representatives of the period.
The collection was finally published under the title Lyric Poetry
of the Expressionistic Decade with the tacit assumption that the
public knew, as a matter of course, the ten years from 1910 to
1920 were meant. If we add "forerunners" and "stragglers" we
may, with some justification, enlarge the period and arrive at
two decades, from about 1905 to 1925. Yet as soon as we try to
recollect the events of these twenty years, we are overwhelmed
by the number and force of momentous changes. Where will we
find the common denominator for an age that saw the placid
peace of capitalist Europe turned into a First World War, fol
lowed by revolutions and galloping inflations? And how could
we hope to press into a few pages the history of literary expres
sionism in Germany when Albert Soergel needed, in 1925, some
eight hundred and ninety-five pages for his Under the Spell of
Expressionism? Soergel wrote a very good book containing a
wealth of material and many quotations from sources that are
practically unobtainable now.
No one seems to know how and when the handy term "expre
sionism" was applied to the new movement. The literary arts,
as usual, borrowed from the visual arts, or rather from art his
torians. When Wilhelm Worringer's Abstraction and Empathy
appeared in 1908, artists of the new movement found a theoreti
cal basis for their practice of "abstraction." Worringer showed
that man's artistic purposes have not always been the same. He
believed that a sympathetic relationship between man and the
external world, which he called "empathy," tends toward the
production of organic, naturalistic, classical works of art: art
melts into nature. But there are other epochs?the primitive, the
Byzantine, the late Roman, the new art of C?zanne, Van Gogh
and Matisse?when man feels the need to tear the object from its
natural context in the world and give it a new and absolute form
?geometric or stylized.
When Hermann Bahr published his Expressionism in August
1914, he put the matter in a slightly different way: man possesses
the physical sense of sight, a passive organ that receives impres
sions; the mind, to be sure, transforms them, but the result is a
work of art close to nature. But man has also an inner eye capable
of visions; it is the eye of the spirit that turns away from external
life toward the inner life, listens to the voices of the hidden
within, and believes man is not merely the echo of his world, but
rather its maker ("T?ter"), or at least just as strong as the world.
Bahr said (p. 92) : "Impressionism is after all nothing but the final
word of classical art, its completion and fulfillment. It tries to
enhance the external vision to the highest degree and to exclude
as much as possible the inner vision, it tries to weaken more and
more the eye's spontaneous life, its self-activity, its will, and
thus turns man into a debtor to his senses." Bahr quotes Maurice
Barr?s as an example of this state of man: "But I myself no longer
existed, I was simply the sum of all that I saw."
It is worth noting that both Worringer and Bahr base their
arguments not on artistic forms and styles as they occured in
history, but on human attitudes and faculties that, by necessity,
had to produce certain artistic types. The human being comes
first; the formal aspects of art are secondary. This is surprising
to us who recognize the new art?be it expressionistic, futuristic,
or cubistic?by its formal aspects. Yet Kandinsky wrote, in the
second edition of Der blaue Reiter (1914) when he could look
back on the two years since the inception of the group in Munich,
that his primary, though unfulfilled, aim had been to show by
practical example and theoretical proof that "the question of form
in art was of secondary importance, that the question of art was
principally one of content." Kadinsky meant by "content" "the
10
inner element of the work, created by the vibration of the soul."
The formal element was a matter for the academicians, what
mattered now was a "geistige Bewegung," which is a "spiritual"
rather than an "intellectual" movement in English. Kadinsky also
speaks of "das geistige Leben" (the spiritual life) and the mutual
approximation and interpretation of the heretofore separate realms
of the intellectual-spiritual life. The very catholicity of Der blaue
Reiter?its content ranging from a Goethe-quotation to Pablo
Picasso, from Bavarian votive pictures to the Douanier Rousseau,
from Rus?an folk-art to Japanese pen-drawings?indicates the
pluralism of forms which, at least, the Munich group found
acceptable. Kandinsky said: "Matter is the pantry from which
the spirit, like a cook, chooses that which is necessary in the par
ticular case." The abstract spirit is like a white fructifying ray,
it is the creator of new values. Life rejoices in the victory of the
new value. But as soon as the new value is accepted by the many
it becomes a barrier against tomorrow. The transformation of the
new value (the fruit of freedom) into a petrified form (a wall
against freedom) is the work of the "blackhand." All evolution
has to destroy, once more, the barriers against freedom even
though they had been created out of new values. Thus we see
that not the new value is the most important thing, but the spirit
revealed in this value. The absolute is not to be looked for in the
form. Form is always temporal, i.e. relative, since it is no more
than the temporal necessary means by which a temporal revela
tion is announced. Therefore, we should not make of form a god.
We should not look for salvation in one kind of form, for every
form carries the stamp of the artist's personality. Kandinsky's
argumentation, with its echo of the Hegelian dialectics of history
and its metaphors of "the white beam" and "the black hand,"
reminds us of the romantics of the early nineteenth century. The
"wild men" of pre-war expressionism were a dedicated brother
hood of individualists. This is quite apparent in Franz Marc's
preface to Der blatte Reiter. Since his remarks to my knowledge
have never been translated, they may be given as further proof
11
for the variety and pluralism in the seemingly monolithic new art.
'All that becomes can only be started on this earth.' This sentence of
D?ubler's can stand as a motto over our whole work and intention. A ful
fillment will come, at some time, in a new world, in a different existence.
On earth, we can only indicate the theme. This first book is the opening
chord to a new theme. Its jumping, restlessly moving manner has probably
revealed to the attentive listener the sense in which it was conceived. This
listener found himself in a region of sources, where, at a hundred places
simultaneously, the waters pulsate, full of secrets, sing, and murmur, some
times in a hidden way, sometimes openly. We went with the divining rod
through the art of the ages and of the present. We showed only that which
was alive and untouched by the compulsion of conventions. Our love was
dedicated to all in art that was born of itself, lives of itself, and does not
walk on the crutches of convention. We pointed at any crack in the crust
of convention, since we hoped for some power underneath which some
day would come to light. Many of these cracks have since been closed
again, our hope was in vain; from others, however, there bubbles today al
ready a living fountain. But this is not the only meaning of this book. The
great comfort of history has forever been that nature always pushes up new
energies through dead rubbish; if we were to see our task merely as one
that has to point to the natural spring-time of a new generation, then we
might safely leave it to the sure course of time; there would be no reason
for conjuring up and calling for the spirit of a great turn of the times.
We set against great centuries a NO. We well know that by this simple
NO we shall not interrupt the serious and methodical course of the
sciences and of triumphant "progress." Nor do we intend to get ahead of
this development, but we pursue a side-road?to the scornful astonishment
of our contemporaries?which scarcely seems to be a road at all, and we
say: This is the main road for the development of mankind. We know that
the many cannot follow us today; the road is for them too steep and too
untravelled. That some, however, want to walk with us has been the lesson
of the fate of this first book which we publish once more without changes
while we ourselves have already left it behind and are engaged in new
work. We do not know when we shall gather for the second book. Per
haps only at a time when we shall be once again quite alone; when modern
ism will have stopped its attempt to industrialize the primeval forest of new
ideas. Before the coming of the new book, much has to be stripped off and
torn off that has clung to the movement in these years. We know that all
may be lost when the beginnings of a spiritual discipline are not saved
from the greed and impurity of the many. We are wrestling for pure
thoughts, for a world in which pure thoughts can be and spoken without
becoming impure. Only then shall we, or others who are called, be able
to show the other face of the Janus-head which today is still hidden and
and turned away from the times.
12
How we admire the disciples of early Christianity because they found
the strength for inner stillness in the roaring noise of that time. We pray
hourly for this stillness and strive for it.
Notable is the feeling of a turning point in the history of man

kind and the desire for a spiritual renewal. Marc's voice speaks
gently and with a seriousness which reminds us of the German
Nazarenes in Rome almost a hundred years before Der blaue
Reiter, or of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Others say the
same thing, but in a shriller tone. The titles of magazines founded
at the time tell something of the wish for the destruction of the
old and outworn. A mighty storm was to cleanse the air, the
young were to storm the citadels of convention, action was the
watchword. In 1902, a group of Alsatian artists founded the
short-lived Der St?rmer. Herwarth Waiden started Der Sturm
in Berlin in 1910 as a weekly for culture and the arts. Die Aktion,
edited as a weekly by Franz Pfemfert in Berlin from 1910 to
1933, embodied in its title the call to action. So did Die Tat, on
the conservative side, a "monthly for the future of German cul
ture," published from 1908 to 1933, when it was forced to con
form to the new tenets of the Nazis. Das neue Pathos from 1913
emphasized the rhetorical phrase that was to become paramount
in the writings during the years of 1918 and 1919.
Der Sturm was probably the most influential periodical of the
new art. It was truly an international gathering place of artists
and spread the new gospel through more than 150 exhibitions
in Europe and abroad. Here we read: "Expressionism is not a
fashion. It is a view of the world (Weltanschauung) ; and a view
by the senses, not by concepts. And at that, a view of the uni
verse of which the earth is a part." Lothar Schreyer and Her
warth Waiden speak out against the cult of personality; impres
sionistic portraits, for instance, are proof of the arrogance of
personality. A changed world means a changed art. The changed
man returns to himself. Expressionism is the intellectual move
ment of a time which places the inner experience above external
life. But this inner experience is not personal; the artist is the
13
involuntary (blind) servant of the "Never experienced." He
announces the experience of "intuitive knowledge." "The art of
the present is the message of revealed knowledge." Art is there
fore a secret which to unriddle is as impossible as to solve the
secrets of life, love, or god. "This apocalyptic time separates the
poor people, who maintain that they know love, from those men
who have love. It separates people who claim to know art from
human beings who have art." We note the language of Gnosis
and religious mysticism, even though the practice of Herwarth
Waiden, for instance, makes us doubt the "involuntary" and
"visionary" nature of his production. His puns and play with
words are products of the purposeful intellect rather than of
inner visions compelling the writer's expression. Puns as well as
dialectical contrasts result from an analysis of language. Her
warth Walden's epitaph to Franz Marc is a case in point:
The animals listened to him, and he gave them the colors of his love./The
love of his colors. How they love each other, the colors, if one does not
disturb them. How the forms embrace if one does not break them./No
fire burns those who themselves are burning.
August Stramm, born in 1874, died in Russia in September,

1915, expressed the extreme theory and practice of the new move
ment. A Ph.D. and a high official in the postal service, Stramm
composed his visions for twenty years and was turned down by
every journal and publisher until Waiden opened the pages of
Der Sturm to him. Waiden described Stramm as a mere tool of
his visions: words flow through him and out of him, he is the
vessel for eternal flow, for the parable of art. But Stramm was
writing every poem thirty, fifty, a hundred times. His letters
testify to his minute deliberation over every word. Utmost con
centration and ultimate simplicity are his aims. Punctuation is
absent, with the exception of exclamation marks. Instead of sen
tences and the logic of syntax, we have erratic blocks of words
strung along as "phonetic gestures." The "I" and the personal
ending of the verb are frequently suppressed?Marinetti was to
say in his Futurist Manifesto of 1909, "One must abolish the
14
adjective and destroy the "I" in literature." Stramm loves infini
tives: impersonal activity. This makes translation of many, or
most, of his poems an impossibility, for an absolute infinitive in
German has to be rendered in English by a gerund, which by
its very -ing ending approaches the adjective. There is, in a 1914
collection of love poems entitled Du, a poem "Bordello" begin
ning: "Lights whore from the windows/Lues spreads at the
door" with the line "Motherwombs yawn childrendeath." One
line in this poem consists of the word "Schomzerp?rt" which a
thinking and attentive type-setter changed into the more obvious
Ci? schamzerst?rt ," i.e. destroyed by shame. Stramm wrote to Wai
den and defended his neologism as follows:
"Scham" and "Emp?rung" struggle with each other and "Scham, zer
dr?ckt." Schamemp?rt does not express this in any way; furthermore, the
characteristic of the word emp?ren is in my feeling not in the em, which
has importance only as a clue to word formation. For our feeling, the idea
of emp?ren is contained merely in p?ren or rather, simply and completely,
in the one sound p?. Omit the dots over the o and the whole concept is
ruined. This is the reason why I consider schomzerp?rt the only word
that says everything.
Stramm's trick of combining shame, indignation, and the feeling

of being crushed by them in one word may have parallels in
Joyce's Anna Livia Plurabelle. But Joyce, unlike Stramm, had
to call on languages other than English for many of his neolog
isms. Like Joyce, Stramm did not establish a 'school.'
While Stramm frequently reduced the lines of a poem to one
word or even one syllable, Ernst Stadler wrote the longest lines
in German poetry. Stadler was born in 1883 at Colmar in the
Alsace. Rhodes scholar at Oxford, Professor extraordinary at
Brussels, able translator of Francis Jammes, Stadler had been called
to the University of Toronto when the outbreak of the war, and
his death in action in October, 1914, put an end to the most
promising of young poets. His "Journey at night over the Rhine
Bridge at Cologne" may serve as a sample of his poetry (it seems
almost a verbal parallel to Luigi Russolo's painting "Train at full
speed"). The poem was published in his Preludes of 1904.
15
The express gropes and pushes along darkness.
No star wants forward. The whole world only a narrow
nightroundrailed mine gallery,
where at the face at times spots of blue light tear open
sudden horizons: fiery circle
of spheric lamps, roofs, chimneys, steaming,
flowing... only for seconds...
and again all black. As if we drove into the
bowels of night to our shift.
Now lights tumble toward us... lost, alone without
solace. ?. more ... and gather... and thicken.
Skeletons of gray house-fronts lie bare, in twilight
paling, dead?something must come ...
oh, I feel it heavily
in my brain. A tightness sings in my blood. Then
the ground suddenly thunders like a sea:
We fly, uplifted, royally, through air snatched from
the night, high above the river. O bending of
millions of lights, a silent watch
before whose lightening parade heavy the waters down
ward roll, an endless lane, drawn up as
greeting at night!
Storming like torches! Joyful! Salute of ships
beyond the blue sea! Starry feast!
Swarming, a throng with bright eyes! Up to where
the city's last houses release their guest.
And then the long solitudes. Naked banks.
Quiet. Night. Reflection. Heart-searching. Communion.
And fervor and zeal
for the ultimate blessing. For the feast of creation. For
lust. For prayer. For the sea. For extinction.
In early expressionist poetry, traditional language and neolog

isms wrenched from customary syntax are to be found side by
side. A violent subjectivism may go hand in hand with the desire
to merge the "I" with cosmic forces, or with the common "We."
A joyful ecstasy and a fervent wish for death may be joined, as
in Stadler's "Night Journey."
Victor Hadwiger (1879-1911) from Prague, published in 1903
poems under the title / am. The theme of his poetry, however,
is not "being" as much as a dissolution of the "I" in death, in
love, in song, in beauty. The husk of individuality bursts: "the
16
land grows light before me and boundless the glow /1 am the
brook, I am the flow, / gently the fields incline towards my
course." The sentiment, if not the poetry, is like that of the
young Goethe in the early 1770's. It is perhaps no accident that
so many of this first expressionist generation either died before
the First World War, or became its victims. Most of them were
in their twenties: Georg Trakl, Reinhard Johannes Sorge, Ernst
Wilhelm Lotz, Alfred Lichtenstein, to name just a few writers.
Their visions of doom and destruction, of a great cataclysm, a
twilight of the gods, and of mankind anticipated the coming
reality.
Georg Heym drowned while skating on the Havel in 1912.
He was 24 years old. He used traditional metres and rhymes
with great skill; the content of his poetry shows a keen eye for
the daemonic and ghoulish reality of modern life: the smoke
stacks of the big cities, freight trains, slums, the poor, the blind,
the sick in hospitals, the dead and dying. Heym does not accuse,
he simply states: the god of the city is the red-bellied Baal to
whom clouds from factories rise like incense. We are never told
why the god is wrathful and furious, he just consumes, with his
fists of a butcher, the city in a tremendous conflagration. Heym's
"War" of 1911 is a vision which became reality only in the
tremendous destructions of the Second World War. Huge cities
throw themselves into the belly of the abyss, night is parched
by the torch of war. That there is something inevitable and
deserved about the cataclysm is barely indicated in the last line
of the poem: "Pitch and fire dripping on Gomorrha."
The world's end, however, does not always come in an out
ward destruction, where "the smoke of the country went up as
the smoke of a furnace," but is at times pictured as an all-per
vading distress, a weeping as though God had died, as though
life had been laid to rest in the coffins of our hearts, as though
there was an unfulfilled longing of which man had to die, for
instance Else Lasker-Schiiler's "End of the World" (1902). A
poem with the same title by Jakob van Hoddis initiated, in Janu
ary, 1911, the lyric poetry of the journal Die Aktion. Hoddis'
17
world ended 14 years before Mr. Eliot's "not with a bang but
a whimper." T. S. Eliot's irony is perhaps more sophisticated
and devastating because of his turning liturgical forms into the
ritual of children's games, but Hoddis achieves a similar effect
by understatement and images reminding us of Humpty-Dump
ty's fall. A prosy translation of Hoddis' rhymes gives at least
the content, though not the flavor of his doomsday:
From pointed heads of burghers fly their hats/The air is filled with shriek
ing everywhere/Roofers fall headlong and break in two/The flood is rising
on the shore?the papers say./The gale is here, the wild seas hop/on land
to crush fat dikes/Most people have a cold/The railroad trains fall from
the bridges.
The condensation and concentration of language and thought

in lyric poetry makes it relatively easy to experiment in that
medium. But it is a different matter with the prose of the story
teller and novelist. We want to read a well told story. We are
looking for plot, action, character. We expect, in a novel, the
long wind of an epic writer and, if the turns of the language are
interesting, accept even a certain pedantry, as in Thomas Mann's
Joseph stories. Do we have a good expressionistic novel in Ger
many? The very tenets of expressionism, as stated in the fall of
1917 by Kasimir Edschmid's "On poetic expressionism," seem to
deny everything that traditionally belonged to the epic genre.
The love for detail, for the characteristic which belongs only to
one individual, for local color?all this is, for Edschmid, part of
bourgeois and capitalistic thinking. The artists of the new move
ment want to express their own feelings infinitely. They do not
see, they have visions. They do not describe, they experience.
They do not reproduce, they create. Their new picture of the
world is like the great landscape of paradise which God originally
created. It is more splendid, colorful, and infinite than that which
our empirical blindness can see. Everything must show its bond
with eternity and with the universe, the great existence of heaven
and earth. A sick man must not be described as a suffering cripple,
he must become sickness itself, the suffering of all creatures must
shine forth from him and call down the pity from the creator.
18
A house must not be an object with definite attributes and dimen
sions, it must rise above these particularities, it must be freed
from the dull compulsion of a false reality and be resurrected as
the house. Human beings in art are no longer individuals, bound
by duty, morality, society, and family. Man in this art is nothing
but the most sublime and the most miserable: he becomes Man.
Neither inhuman, nor superhuman; but only Man, cowardly and
strong, good and mean and splendid, as God released him from
his creation. He is a cosmic man without need of psychology.
Psychology and analysis are perverse ways of thinking; man
made and desecrated by man, guided by well-known causalities.
But there can be no explanation for the inexplicable, for the
world and for God. The new men do not reflect about the
cosmos, they abandon themselves to the divine. They are direct.
They are primitive. They are simple, because the simple is the
most difficult and the most complicated, and leads to the greatest
revelations.
Edschmid was aware of the dangers inherent in the new move
ment: for instance a cold abstraction, a mere theory, a conscious
primitivism. Decisive for him is the honesty of the artist, his faith,
the creative strength of his soul, the fervor of his spirit. But how
does the reality and practice look, in Edschmid's own works for
instance? There are many clever tricks, apparently pour ?pater
le bourgeois: "By the way, the history of mankind is possible
without Aischylos and Dante, but impossible without sailing . . .
The battle for Troy is a trifle, the fact that it was described is
a joke. But that one was able to sail to Troy, that was the true
achievement." A sample from his "Deadly May" of 1916 appears
today funny and boring rather than exciting and novel:
There was music. At times, the wind ran violendy through the un
hooked windows, and there was a wave of light which stormed over all.
Then the violins from the music rose on high and trembled over space
with nameless points./There he was seized by the tumult of existence with
a raving inebriation. He felt himself thrown from hottest excitement into
rigid cold and then anew hurled against biting heat. An orchestra raged in
his heart, organs burned upward, and the trumpets were lifted in long,
cruel convolutions to a terrible blast.
19
Edschmid's own words at the end of his essay on poetic expres
sionism are prophetic in their warning against mistaking ambition
and good will for achievement. "A good impressionist is a greater
artist and has more chance to live in eternity than the mediocre
creation of the expressionist looking for immortality. Zola's shame
less, gigantic, stuttering, naked power will perhaps better stand
the tribunal of the day of judgment than our great wrestling
with God. But this, too, is fate." Yet are we confronted with
the honesty of the artist or with an easy alibi when Edschmid
closes with the words "Here, we do not know. This is in the
hands of God who touched us that we should create. We have
no judgment, only faith. We also serve in little things. This, too,
is immortal."
There is much talk of God and of the New Man. The language
of the Old and of the New Testament sounds through many
expressionistic works. But is God more than a name to be in
voked? Does he still exist as a reality of human experience, as
the acknowledgment on man's part that there is something higher
than man under whatever name it may appear? I do not think so.
Man himself has taken over the creative functions of the deity.
Expressionism is, in this respect, no more than the culmination
of a development that began with the Renaissance. Much as the
expressionists themselves may claim that this development came
to an end with impressionism, they are in no way different from
Rilke, for instance, who said that the artist does not stand oppo
site the gods, but looks with them in the same direction. This
world is man-made, and only man can re-make it. It is a thor
oughly secularized world; some would say a "humanized" world
and be proud of it.
If we read Georg Kaiser's The Citizens of Cal?s (1914) as
a literary drama and do not mistake it for "an argued condem
nation of war" we have to admit that a historical incident, the sur
render of Calais to the British in 1347, has been written up as a
mystery play. Eustache de Saint-Pierre is the Christ who is will
ing to sacrifice himself so that the city and its harbor may live.
He calls for the new deed and the new doers, changed men.
20
The symbol presiding over the second act is a tapestry, present
ing a capitalist history of salvation. The mighty tapestry shows,
in its three fields ("with...) the strength of forms and colors of an
early art, the building of the harbor of Calais." To the left is the
steep coast, against which the sea beats violently. The center
shows the finished harbor. The right panel represents lively
activity during the building of the harbor. This is really the nine
teenth century dream of the conquest of nature so that the citizen
may live in the comfort of peaceful activity. Kaiser provides
then the religion for this pursuit of wealth. He has to use religious
forms of an early art: the last supper of the seven, the clamor
of the populace similar to the cries of the Jews before Pilate,
the mother of the third citizen like Mary, her heart pierced by
swords, reminiscences of the garden of Gethsemane, countless
echoes from Exodus, Judges, Jeremiah. In the third act, the blind
father of Eustache can say of his dead son "I have seen the new
man?in this night was he born." Self-sacrifice is the birth to a
new life. The blind father is one of the blessed "that have not
seen, and yet have believed." After the birth of the new man,
it is almost too much when a British officer announces: "In this
night a son was born to the King of England in his camp before
Calais. On this morning the King of England will for the sake of
the new life not destroy a life." Still the final stage directions
once more underline the new gospel: "Light floods the tympanon
over the door: in its lower part a burial is represented; the slender
body of the judged man lies limp on shrouds?six stand bowed
at the couch.-The upper part shows the apotheosis of the dead
man: he stands freely and weightless in the air?the heads of the
six are turned toward him with astonishment."
The intellectual background of "The Citizens of Calais," as

indicated in the title, was primarily the world of B?rgertum.
In Gas I (1918), Kaiser grapples with the problem of an indus
trialized society in which human beings have become mere func
tions in a productive process. They are proud of their functional
character, they are professionals and experts first and foremost;
the Engineer is a specialist, the Secretary is a specialist, every
21
worker is a specialist. Then the catastrophy occurs: the gas
explodes. The formula is correct, the manufacturing process is
without fault, no human error is involved, nor any mechanical
failure. A limit has been reached, the calculations of man are
correct in one way, they are incorrect in another way. What is
to be done? "Forward, from explosion to explosion" is the general
cry which the Billionaire's Son vainly opposes by a plea for a
return to nature. His case would seem eminently sound as the
only alternative to destruction, but no one wants to become a
"peasant." When the Billionaire's Son argues for a true humanity,
a new man who will function with the totality of his faculties
and not just through the hypertrophy of one part, he is left alone
with his widowed daughter?"alone like every one who wanted
to become one with all." He asks: "Where is man? When will
he appear?and call himself by his name: Man? When will he
understand himself?and shake from the branches his knowledge?
When will he pass the curse?and create the new creation which
he spoiled:?Man ?!-... .Am I not a witness for him?and
for his origin and arrival?is he not known to me through a
strong vision? . . . Shall I still doubt?!!" "I shall bear him," says
the kneeling daughter.
Gas II takes place some twenty years later. The Billionaire's
grandson is now the Billionaire-Worker, one among many. The
countries are at war. The Great-Engineer proposes a solution
in the same spirit as his predecessor: gas should be turned into
poison-gas, the workers shall become avengers?fighters?victors.
The Billionaire's Grandson calls this seduction and pleads: "For
merely, you were great?become greater now?sufferers... be suf
ferers in your work?be released to yourselves! !. . . Build the
kingdom! ??which you are in yourselves with a final confirma
tion! not of this world is the kingdom! ! ! !" The decision of the
workers is unanimously against the millenium and for the Great
Engineer. Whereupon the Billionaire's Grandson sums up his
own and his forebears' efforts with a partial quotation from the
29th Psalm. "Our voice could shake the wilderness?man grew
deaf before it! ! I am justified! ! I can fulfill! !" Seizing the
22
sphere of poison-gas, he smashes it on the floor of the concrete
hall. At the same moment the enemy barrage shatters the walls.
After the smoke has cleared, an enemy soldier sees the grotesque
shapes of the dead stripped of their flesh and scattered among
concrete slabs. He telephones back to his own troops ". . .?turn
the guns against yourselves and destroy yourselves?the dead
throng from their graves?last judgment?dies irae?solvet?in
favil?(With a shot, he smashes the rest of the word in his
mouth)."
Quite possibly, this is the way our world will actually end. But
Kaiser's romantic return to a rural mode of life is an escape, not
a solution. Ernst J?nger, no expressionist, faced the same situation
unblinkingly from which Kaiser tried to escape, either through
the birth of a new Adam, or failing that, through an acceptance
of the end, stated in terms of the Judaeo-Christian tradition.
In The Worker (1932), Ernst J?nger wanted to evoke the
Gestalt of the new type of man. Gestalt is the indestructible
totality of body and soul, not subject to the elements, but part of
eternity. "Man's inborn, unchangeable, and imperishable merit,
his highest existence and his deepest confirmation lies in his
Gestalt, quite independent of every merely moral evaluation,
every salvation and every "striving endeavor." Whatever this
may mean, the Gestalt of J?nger's Man is not created in the
image of God. J?nger draws the logical consequence from his
image of man: "The result of this consciousness is a new rela
tionship to Man, a more fervent love and a more terrible pitiless
ness. There results the possibility of serene anarchy which co
incides with the strictest order?a spectacle already indicated in
the great battles and the gigantic cities whose images stand at
the beginning of our century. In this sense, the gasoline motor
is not the ruler, but the symbol of our time, the emblem of a
power for which explosion and precision are no longer opposites.
It is the daring toy of a race of men who are capable of exploding
themselves with a will and still see in this action a confirmation
of order."
There are perhaps two reasons which may account for the
23
absence of really great literary productions in the expressionist
movement. One might be stated in T. S. Eliot's words in "Tra
dition and the Individual Talent": "Poetry is not a turning loose
of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression
of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course,
only those who have personality and emotions know what it
means to escape from these things." There were many person
alities with strong emotions among German artists during the
first quarter of this century. There are quite a few just as good
as Eliot. But I should say that there are only three great poets
who had "worked their emotions and personalities up into po
etry," and they cannot be counted among the expressionists,
even though they share with them common themes. I am thinking
of George, Hofmannsthal, and Rilke.
The other reason may be elucidated by a quotation from
Rudolf Bliimner's The Spirit of Cubism and the Arts (Berlin,
Verlag Der Sturm, 1921. p. 66). Bl?mner found the justification
for expressionism in the distinction which Thomas Aquinas made
between species impressa and species express a. Bl?mner wrote:
"It is easy to understand my great delight when I read in him:
the species impressa is a matter for sinful man, the species expressa
is for the angels and for souls freed from the body."
Perhaps, that's just it. After all, we are sinful men, still a
little lower than the angels, and it may not be good for our souls,
at least as long as they are united with our bodies, to arrogate
to us the work of angels.
24

German Expressionism 1905 1925

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German Expressionism 1905 1925

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German Expressionism: 1905-1925

Author(s): H. Stefan Schultz

Notable is the feeling of a turning point in the history of man

August Stramm, born in 1874, died in Russia in September,

Stramm's trick of combining shame, indignation, and the feeling

In early expressionist poetry, traditional language and neolog

The condensation and concentration of language and thought

The intellectual background of "The Citizens of Calais," as

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