German Lit
Accepting the political revolution which, with remarkably little fuss, had put an end to German monarchy, did not imply abandoning the struggle against ‘civilization’. Indeed, Spengler saw his vast ‘morphological’ survey of world history, The Decline of the West ( Der Untergang des Abendlandes, 1918, 1922) as evidence of a pyrrhic victory of the German mind, which through him had been able to make sense of the coming displacement of traditional European culture by technological and mathematical organization.
For Germany the war did not end in 1918. Starvation, infl uenza, civil war, the reoccupation of territory by France to exact reparations, the economic disruption caused by the loss of population and resources and culminating in the infl ation of 1923, all prolonged the conditions of wartime emergency for fi ve years.
By the time the crisis was over, the Weimar Republic consisted 122
of a few magnates whose property interests had survived the infl ation, a working population directly exposed to fl uctuations in the world economy, and the administrators and benefi ciaries of a welfare state 13 times larger than its equivalent in 1914. The intimations of the coming collapse of the European bourgeoisie that unsettled the pre-war world were fi rst fulfi lled in Germany.
The literature of this period of revolutionary transition refl ected the instability of institutions and the isolation of individuals.
It was not a time for realism. It was a time for despair, abstract revolt, and utopian hopes of a new beginning. The movement of
‘Expressionism’ was correspondingly most active in the prophetic and emotional forms of poetry and drama. In 1920 the anthology Twilight of Humanity ( Menschheitsdämmerung) brought together poems by 23 poets in the service of an indeterminate Tr
moral enthusiasm:
aumas and memories (1914– )
Ewig eint uns das Wort:
MENSCH
we are for ever united by the word ‘Man’
Expressionist theatre was similarly characterized by a deliberate striving for abstractness and generality through heightened and declamatory language, but by its use of choruses, and stylization of character, it had more success than the poets in representing large-scale industrial and political confl ict: the works of Reinhard Goering (1887–1936), Georg Kaiser (1878–1945), and Ernst Toller (1893–1939) are now undeservedly neglected.
Profound though the social revolution was, it did not change everything. In 1919, commenting on the atmosphere in Berlin, Albert Einstein compared Germany to ‘someone with a badly upset stomach who hasn’t vomited enough yet’. Once the American Dawes Plan of 1924 and a huge associated loan had stabilized the German economy, the Expressionist era was 123
effectively over, a ‘new sobriety’ ( Neue Sachlichkeit) reigned in literature, and the continuities could re-establish themselves.
Weimar had seemed an appropriate place for the constituent assembly of the new republic to do its work at least partly because of the late 19th-century myth that in Goethe’s Weimar a cultural nation had been born which prefi gured the political nation. This mythical Weimar could now be regarded as the true and abiding Germany. Nor was the continuity simply ideological. Germany’s multiple theatres survived the deposition of their princely patrons and, subsidized now by government and freed from censorship, continued to provide a forum for drama conceived as ‘art’ rather than simply entertainment. The Protestant clergy and, above all, the universities carried over the role of offi cial intelligentsia that they had occupied under the monarchy into an era that, bewilderingly, lacked a monarch, and the universities almost immediately began an intellectual assault on the new republic.
Martin Heidegger (1889–1976), born a Catholic at a time when ature er Catholics were second-class Germans, converted to Lutheranism in 1919 and so gained access to the wider and better-connected world of the Protestant universities. In Being and Time I ( Sein German Lit
und Zeit I, 1927; Part II was never written), Heidegger strangely combined a radically depersonalized re-reading of some of the most fundamental questions in philosophy with a rather Lutheran account of individual moral salvation. His ‘existentialism’ thus provided both the conceptual means for rejecting contemporary society as ‘inauthentic’ and, with his belief that one chooses one’s own history, the excuse for political activism regardless of rationality. Heidegger rapidly became an intellectual totem of the right, but Stefan George’s disciples, now in professorial chairs, also had a deep infl uence on academic discourse in the humanities, directing it away from social and economic concerns to what became known as ‘history of the mind’ ( Geistesgeschichte) and elaborating the Master’s cult of the lonely, world-changing historical personality. Friedrich Gundolf (1880–1931) in Heidelberg published an epoch-making study of Goethe in 1916, and Ernst Bertram (1884–1957), professor in Bonn, published a 124
similar study of Nietzsche in 1918, with George’s swastika sign on the title page. The year 1928 saw the publication not only of a major work of literary criticism by Max Kommerell (1902–44), professor in Frankfurt and Marburg, The Poet as Leader in German Classicism ( Der Dichter als Führer in der deutschen Klassik), a title which already combined the Wilhelmine vision of Germany with the National Socialist version of monarchy, but also a new and fi nal collection of poems by George himself, The New Empire ( Das neue Reich). To express a political opinion was infi nitely beneath George’s dignity, but it was clear from the Hölderlinian diction and military rhythms of the prophetically entitled ‘To a young leader in the fi rst world war’ (‘ Einem jungen Führer im ersten Weltkrieg’) that in his view Germany’s humiliation in the recent confl ict was only a prelude to a greater Tr
future:
aumas and memories (1914– )
Alles wozu du gediehst rühmliches ringen hindurch Bleibt dir untilgbar bewahrt stärkt dich für künftig getös …
[Everything for which you grew and fl ourished throughout your glorious struggle remains your indelible own, strengthens you for future uproar … ]
Of all state employees, members of the armed forces were least likely to feel loyalty to the new régime which had signed the instruments of surrender and the Versailles Treaty. Ernst Jünger (1895–1998) fought throughout the World War with great distinction and his recollections of four years’ front-line service, Storms of Steel ( In Stahlgewittern, 1920), are evidence of the chilling dispassion that was necessary to survive. ‘To live is to kill’, he later wrote, and though the enormous success of Storms of Steel established him as a professional writer, he continued to speak from and to his generation’s experience of mechanized mass warfare. In The Worker ( Der Arbeiter, 1931), he interpreted modern economic life as an extension of the total mobilization 125
of wartime: he rightly saw that the extinction of the bourgeoisie and proletarianization of the middle classes, already far advanced in Germany, was destined to become universal, but he wrongly assumed that only a bureaucratic and military command structure could organize the resulting industrial society. Heidegger was impressed by Jünger’s analysis of the modern world, though his reaction was to turn to Hölderlin and Nietzsche as guides to Germany’s future. Gottfried Benn, who had spent the war as a military doctor (and in that capacity had attended the execution of Edith Cavell), was yet more radical in his rejection of the civilian world from whose corruption he lived (he became a specialist in venereal disease). Infl uenced partly by Spengler, and partly by his own experiments with narcotics, he came in the 1920s to despise the superfi cial order modern civilization had constructed over the archaic and mythical layers of human experience: the only true order seemed to him that which he imposed on his poems, sometimes by rather too obvious force. His avowed refusal ature er of a social role for the poet was a deliberate provocation to the socialists and communists who had fi gured alongside him in Twilight of Humanity. Like Heidegger and Jünger, however, he German Lit
willingly lent an appearance of intellectual respectability to the imperious rhetoric of m
ilitary leadership favoured by right-wing opponents of the republic.
Not that the left wing was any better. The Communists, bent on their own revolution, and under instructions from Moscow that their fi rst aim must be to destroy the ruling socialist party, were as willing as the right to make use of an anti-bourgeois rhetoric which after the infl ation no longer had a real object but which served to destabilize the fragile political consensus. The savage cartoons of George Grosz (1893–1959) created an image of Weimar Germany as a land of freebooting capitalism run wild, but when Grosz moved to 1930s America, where there was much more free enterprise, and much less social welfare, but where the political impetus provided by the German context was lacking, 126
16. Bertolt Brecht in 1927, just before the great success of The
Threepenny Opera
127
his inspiration deserted him. A sense not just that politics matter, but that political institutions matter too, is lacking throughout the otherwise multifarious and often humane work of the poet and dramatist Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956).
Brecht’s family, paper-makers in Augsburg, belonged to the vanishing bourgeoisie; but after he moved to Berlin in 1924 to become a professional writer-director, his study of Marxism brought him close to those who saw the future in total rule by the state, though he was never a member of the Communist Party. Instead, like Grosz, he drew grotesques, satirical, comic, sometimes even tragic, particularly of an imaginary version of the Anglo-Saxon world – whether 18th-century England, 19th-century America, or Kipling’s Empire – which in the war, and in the boom years that eventually followed, seemed once again to have imposed itself on Germany as the authoritative embodiment of modernity. The jaunty discordancy of Brecht’s works of the 1920s, ature er especially his collaborations with Kurt Weill, The Threepenny Opera ( Die Dreigroschenoper, 1928) and Rise and Fall of the Town of Mahagonny ( Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny, German Lit
1928–9), derived from powerfully confl icting feelings towards this vision, or mirage, of ‘capitalist’ life. On the one hand, there was a mischievously amoral appetite for the opportunities of consumption and uninhibited enjoyment that it offered – a theme of Brecht’s since his fi rst play Baal (1918), about a poet who is as ruthlessly self-indulgent as he is totally un-self-pitying. But there was also the moral sense of offi cial Germany, with its long tradition of being offended by irresponsible consumerism, here expressing itself in bitter satire. The driving moral force behind this economic critique, however, was not a political concern for the integrity of the state but a demand, so to speak, for hedonistic justice, for equity in the distribution of pleasure, and solidarity with those to whom pleasure is denied or for whom it is turned into pain. There was a link of substance, as well as of form, with Büchner. One of the weightiest ballads in Brecht’s fi rst collection of poems, Domestic Breviary ( Hauspostille, 1927), takes up the 128
‘Storm and Stress’ theme of the infanticide mother, and the song
‘Pirate Jenny’ in The Threepenny Opera shows us a washer-up who dreams of the ship with eight sails and 50 guns that will put out its fl ags in her honour and then bombard the town where she suffers. But Brecht’s engagement with the society of which he was a part did not extend beyond the desire to shoot it up. For all his claims that the ironical devices which made his productions both scandalous and successful were intended to set his audiences thinking about the political issues that they raised, the only institution of the Weimar Republic that Brecht’s plays really concerned was the theatre. The placards descending from the fl ies, the direct addresses to the spectators, the parodies of grand opera, and the reduction of characters to marionettes in Wedekind’s manner, all encouraged thinking, not about public Tr
affairs, but about the theatricality of the performance. It was a aumas and memories (1914– )
complete and successful break with the native German tradition of drama-as-book, but it was also an inverted aestheticism, making Art out of criticizing Art.
The same tendency to perpetuate old concepts under an appearance of criticizing the new can be found in the writings, many of them published posthumously, of Brecht’s Berlin friend and admirer, Walter Benjamin (1892–1940). Benjamin attempted unsuccessfully to become a professor of German literature, and at fi rst devoted himself to relatively unpolitical ‘ Geistesgeschichte’.
He later moved closer to Marxism in the quest for a more materialist theory of the relation between art and society, eventually expressed programmatically in the essay ‘The work of art in the age of its technical reproducibility’ (‘ Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit’, 1936). Here he argued, rather like Brecht, that in the age of mass-media Art, being no longer able to create individual beautiful objects, had to become political. He thus overlooked the specifi cally German roots of the concept of ‘Art’, the extent to which it was part of the ideology of bureaucratic absolutism, and the consequence that to criticize society in the name of Art was to maintain the values 129
of an oppressive era. Benjamin was for a while associated with the Institute for Social Research (Institut für Sozialforschung) in Frankfurt, founded in 1923 by the son of a millionaire corn-merchant to investigate the condition of the working classes and later incorporated into the new local university (opened in 1914). When Max Horkheimer (1895–1973) became its director in 1931, it turned to a new project: developing a critical theory of society in general. Among the brilliant talents Horkheimer briefl y concentrated in Frankfurt were the Hegelian and Marxist philosopher Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979), the psychologist Erich Fromm (1900–80), and a young composer and theorist of music, Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno (1903–69), a pupil of Alban Berg. Adorno, committed to the German musical tradition and impressed by Benjamin’s defence of the role of Art in modern society, was only being consistent when in 1934 he welcomed the Nazis’ ban on broadcasting the degenerate American form of music known as jazz.
ature er
The Weimar Republic had few friends among its intelligentsia, but the best and most indefatigable proved, in the end, to be German Lit
Thomas Mann. During the long German postlude to the war, he rather grudgingly admitted that his elder brother’s politics had proved more realistic than his own, but in 1922 the murder, by right-wing extremists, of Germany’s Jewish foreign minister, the respected and successful Walter Rathenau, shocked him into whole-hearted commitment to the Republican cause. Over the next ten years and with the authority, after 1929, of a Nobel prizewinner, he delivered a number of high-profi le addresses in support of a system he now saw as fulfi lling the promise of the German Enlightenment. At a time when hostility to a Social Democrat government, in which emancipated Jews were understandably prominent, was increasingly taking the form of anti-Semitism, he embarked on an enormous series of linked variations on biblical narratives, Joseph and his Brothers ( Joseph und seine Brüder, 1933–43), that deliberately drew attention 130
to the Jewish roots of Western history. The crisis of 1922 also enabled Mann to fi nd a focus for the book he had been writing since 1913, The Magic Mountain ( Der Zauberberg), fi nally published in 1924. A sanatorium in Davos provided him in this novel with a metaphor for the rarefi ed atmosphere of high culture in the immediately pre-war years, cosseted, morally lax, and impregnated with a sense of coming dissolution. Hans Castorp, an average ‘unpolitical’ German bourgeois, succumbs, in this unreal environment in which time seems to stand still, to a series of more and less intellectual temptations, from materialist science to hypochondria and sexual dalliance, from psychoanalysis to X-rays and recorded music. A half-comic, but in the end suicidally tragic, dispute on political and moral matters is maintained between Lodovico Settembrini, a representative of liberal and democratic Tr
bourgeois Enlightenment, and Leo Naphta, a Jewish Jesuit, whose aumas and memories (1914– ) arguments for amoral theocratic Terror seem – like Nietzsche, whom they echo – a nightmare condensation of the entire German offi cial
tradition, Left and Right. In an extreme and climactic moment, Hans Castorp escapes from the sanatorium into the snow but only narrowly avoids death from hypothermia. What draws him back into life is a belief in ‘love and goodness’ which transcends the opposition between Settembrini and Naphta.
He recognizes that his German, Romantic inheritance – from Novalis to Schopenhauer, Wagner, and Nietzsche – gives him a special understanding of the background of death against which life is defi ned, and which, by contrast, gives life its value, but he also recognizes that ‘loyalty to death and to what is past is only wickedness and dark delight and misanthropy if it determines our thinking and the way we allow ourselves to be governed’.
With this insight, more exactly prophetic than any of Stefan George’s oracles, Thomas Mann drew a lesson from the fall of the Second Empire which he could pass on to the Weimar Republic, and which could guide him in his own political engagement, unashamedly German, but unambiguously on the side of ‘life and goodness’. Unfortunately it is an insight that Hans Castorp forgets 131
once he is safe, and he drifts through the fi nal stages of cultural decline into the killing fi elds of the World War. That too was prophetic.
Germany in the 1920s was a mature industrial state, at the forefront of technological innovation (its fi lm industry produced more fi lms than all its European competitors combined), with no empire, a proletarianized bourgeoisie, an active but headless offi cial class, mass communications, and a colossal problem of identity. Its social and political postmodernity made it a natural incubator for cultural tendencies that have since spread widely as other nations have arrived in its condition. With Ernst Jünger, Carl Schmitt (1888–1985) and Leo Strauss (1899–1973) pioneered political neo-conservatism. Heidegger, one of the fi rst to use the concept of ‘deconstruction’, was the fountainhead of most French philosophy in the second half of the 20th century. The physical appearance of the man-made Western world was profoundly ature er affected by the decision of Walter Gropius (1883–1969) in 1919
German Literature Page 14