to combine education in the fi ne arts and in crafts into a single institution in Weimar, known as the ‘Bauhaus’. The idealist German Lit
concept of life-transforming ‘Art’, united with functionalist notions of design, was here applied to mass production in industry, buildings, and furniture. In literature too there was a serious quest for ways of adapting old forms to the unprecedented circumstances of a society more deeply revolutionized in defeat than any of the victor powers. The prolifi c novelist Alfred Döblin (1878–1957), a Jewish doctor in the East of Berlin who eventually became a Catholic, wrote his masterpiece in Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929), which uses a highly fragmented manner, reminiscent of Ulysses (though Döblin did not know Joyce’s book when he started), to evoke life in a great industrialized city. Despite its title, it is not a novel of place: Berlin in 1928 is too vast and too modern to have the cosy identity of Dublin in 1904. Berlin Alexanderplatz is a novel of language. The dialect of the main characters, proletarians and petty criminals, informs their semi-articulate conversations and indirectly reported thoughts, carries over 132
into some of the various narrative voices, and is cross-cut with offi cialese, newspaper stories, advertisements, age-old folk songs and 1920s musical hits, parodies and quotations of the German classics, statistical reports, and the propaganda of politicians.
Through this modern Babel we make out the story of the released jailbird Franz Biberkopf, big, dim, goodhearted, and shamefully abused by his friends, the breakdown of his attempt to be ‘decent’, and his eventual recovery (perhaps). It is a worm’s-eye view of the Weimar Republic, with its socialists, communists, and anarchists fi ghting obscurely in the background and the National Socialists remorselessly on the rise. Marching songs and rhythms and the memory and prospect of war run as leitmotifs through the book, and the overwhelming symbol of Biberkopf ’s life ‘under the poll-axe’ is provided by a centre-piece description of the main Tr
Berlin slaughter-house, fed by converging railway lines from all aumas and memories (1914– )
over the country, a symbol more terrifyingly apposite than Döblin could know.
An intellectual’s view of the destructive possibilities inherent in the directionless multiplicity of modern life was provided in 1927
by the most adventurous book of an author who had previously specialized either in monuments to self-pity or sugary (and not always well-written) stories of post-Nietzschean ‘ Bildung’: individuals who ripen beyond good and evil into mystical or aesthetic fulfi lment. Hermann Hesse (1877–1962) did not deny his origins but he supped German life with a long spoon: born in Württemberg, he travelled in India and settled in Switzerland.
The Wolf from the Steppes ( Der Steppenwolf) is a transparently autobiographical account of a personal mental crisis but it is also a psychogram of the contemporary German middle classes.
Harry Haller, the main narrator, personifi es the disorientated
‘ Bildungsbürger’ in the post-war era, caught, he recognizes, between two worlds: he loves the orderliness of the bourgeoisie and lives off his investments, he is devoted to the German offi cial culture of classical literature and music, and he also embodies the wolf-like, anti-social, Nietzschean individualism 133
that his class has secretly fostered. However, the new, wide open, Americanized world of the 1920s, with jazz and foxtrots, gramophones and radios, offers him the possibility of dissolving the shadow side of his psyche, the wolf from the steppes, into the myriad alternative personalities latent in him and so of escaping from ‘ Bildungsbürgertum’ altogether. In the ‘magic theatre’ of the saxophonist Pablo he enjoys, as if by the aid of hallucinogenic drugs, such experiences as sleeping with all the women he has ever set eyes on, meeting Mozart (who gives him a cigarette), and playing at being a terrorist and a murderer. But evidently this is a highly ambiguous liberation. Haller, who opposed the First World War, knows that in the new age that is remaking him, ‘the next war is being prepared with great zeal day by day by many thousands of people’, and that it will be ‘even more horrible’ than the previous one, and we can see that the ‘magic theatre’ is one of the means by which the horror is being rehearsed. However, since Haller can no more stop war than he can stop death, he ature er turns instead to learning to love, and to laugh at himself. Hesse is honest; he depicts both his own path to equilibrium and its cost: the withdrawal from responsibility for a monstrous, German Lit
carnivorous mechanism whose workings he has understood with grim clarity.
With the crash of 1929, the time for fantasies of individual fulfi lment was over. As the political tensions within the Republic reached breaking point and unemployment rose to 30%, the cultural compromise that had created the ‘ Bildungsbürger’ lost all plausibility. Brecht dropped his fl irtation with consumerism and from 1929 to 1932 wrote a series of ‘didactic plays’
( Lehrstücke), several in cantata form, with minimal character interest, intended to encourage audiences (particularly of school-children) to think of solving problems by subordinating individual concerns, and even lives, to collective programmes.
Knowing arrest was imminent, Brecht left Germany on the day after the Reichstag fi re in February 1933 that gave the recently elected Nazi government the excuse to take emergency powers 134
and introduce totalitarian rule. Those who then supported the political nationalism which was Germany’s response to global economic protectionism were the immediate agents of the self-immolation of ‘culture’. Heidegger, now a member of the Party, gave his inaugural address as rector of Freiburg University in May, its title, The Self-Assertion of the German University ( Die Selbstbehauptung der deutschen Universität) revealing the cruel delusion of Hitler’s camp-followers. For in the Third Empire there was to be no self-assertion by any institution other than the Party and its Leader, let alone by the university, which for over 300 years had been the heart of the German bureaucracy and for over 200 had given a unique character to Germany’s literary culture. The fi nal degradation of German offi cialdom to dutiful executants of murderous tyranny was at hand.
Tr
Heidegger lent his support to the new government’s rejection of aumas and memories (1914– )
globalization by campaigning for Germany’s withdrawal from the League of Nations, but within a year he had resigned his offi ce and was discarded by the regime, though he remained in the Party.
17. Martin Heidegger (indicated by the cross) at an election rally of German academics at the Alberthalle, Leipzig, on 11 November 1933
135
A similar fate befell Benn, seduced by the idea of ‘surrendering the ego to the totality’. In a radio broadcast in April 1933, he coarsely denounced the obsolete internationalism of ‘liberal intellectuals’, whether Marxists who thought of nothing higher than wage-rates or ‘bourgeois capitalists’ who knew nothing of the world of work, and opposed to it the new totalitarian nation-state which – he claimed, combining Nietzsche and Spengler – had history and biology on its side and showed its strength by controlling the thoughts and publications of its members. So it did, and after a series of violent attacks on him in the Party press for the
‘indecency’ of his poems, he took cover, like Jünger, by rejoining the army – ‘the aristocratic form of emigration’, he said, salving the smart – and in 1938 he was offi cially forbidden to publish or write. Stefan George bowed out with more dignity before he died in December 1933, refusing (for unclear reasons) to serve in succession to Heinrich Mann as president of the newly purged Prussian Academy. Hauptmann stayed in Silesia, without offi ce, ature er but accepting honours and censorship ( The Weavers was not to be performed) until he died after experiencing the bombing of Dresden. Otherwise, virtually all German writers and artists of German Lit
signifi cance either emigrated or withdrew from sight. German literature could be said to have been offi cially terminated on 10
May 1933 when the German Student Federation arranged public burnings of ‘
un-German works’ throughout the country.
For those emigrants who survived – Benjamin committed suicide rather than fall into the hands of the Gestapo and Toller did the same out of sheer despair – exile in a non-German-speaking country where they were unknown and had little opportunity of publishing usually put the end to a literary career. Alfred Kerr (1867–1948), for example, who made and broke reputations as a theatre critic in Naturalist and Expressionist Berlin, dwindled to a refugee Jewish invalid in his London fl at, though his daughter wrote a touching memoir of their life of banishment in her trilogy beginning with When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit. For Brecht, however, emigration meant liberation. Until 1941 he lived mainly 136
in Denmark and Finland, but he was already internationally known, he travelled widely, and his plays were put on in Paris, Copenhagen, New York, and Zurich. Since, however, he was writing in professional, though not personal, isolation, and no longer had his own theatre, what he wrote became gradually more refl ective, less closely involved with German circumstances, and, without losing its theatricality, emotionally and psychologically more multidimensional. His poetry blossomed. He already resembled Luther and Goethe as a townsman with a love of the vernacular who had taken up with the politics of authoritarianism, and he now came to resemble them in the hide-and-seek his contradictory personality played with the public. (The theories of drama which he now elaborated were part of this game, and need not be taken seriously.) Perhaps because the public had become Tr
more diffi cult to defi ne, broader both in space and time than in aumas and memories (1914– )
the Weimar forcing-house, his poetic voice achieved a new level of generality, a German voice, certainly, but addressing everyone caught up in the global confl ict:
Was sind das für Zeiten, wo
Ein Gespräch über Bäume fast ein Verbrechen ist Weil es ein Schweigen über so viele Untaten einschließt! […]
Ihr, die ihr auftauchen werdet aus der Flut
In der wir untergegangen sind
Gedenkt
Wenn ihr von unseren Schwächen sprecht
Auch der fi nsteren Zeit
Der ihr entronnen seid. (‘An die Nachgeborenen’) 137
[What sort of times are these when a conversation about trees is almost a crime because it includes silence about so many misdeeds
[…] You who will emerge from the tide in which we have sunk, remember too, when you speak of our weaknesses, the dark time from which you have escaped.]
(‘To later generations’, 1939)
From 1938 Brecht was writing what were effectively morality plays for a world audience, in which the deeper themes of his early work returned: his passionate sense that pleasure and goodness are what human beings are made for and that justice requires that pleasure should be universal and goodness rewarded; his bitter countervailing belief that injustice is general, that it is often necessary for the survival even of the good, and that it may be remediable only by unjust means; and a Marxism which is not a source of answers to these dilemmas, but a background conviction that answers are possible and so should be looked for.
ature er The Good Woman of Szechuan ( Der gute Mensch von Sezuan, 1938–9, fi rst performed 1943) was still just about interpretable German Lit
as a demonstration that in capitalist society moral goodness was necessarily symbiotic with economic exploitation, if the anguished love of the ‘good woman’ herself was overlooked, but The Life of Galileo ( Leben des Galilei, 1938–9, fi rst performed 1943) was Brecht’s most personal play, and despite extensively adapting it after 1945, he was unable to fi t it into a Marxist scheme. The pleasure-loving genius with a huge appetite for life who fails the political test and recants when threatened by the Inquisition, but who argues that he serves progress better by devious compliance than by pointless heroism, clearly embodies some of Brecht’s own feelings about the priority he was giving – and had always given – to his literary work over the political struggle. His one genuinely tragic play, Mother Courage and her Children ( Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder, 1939, fi rst performed 1941), though written before war had broken out, was the nearest he came in a major drama to commentary on the great events of his age. Set in early 17th-century Germany, in a state of war without beginning 138
or end, it dramatizes ‘the dark time’ in which Brecht’s generation had, somehow or other, to live. Mother Courage, who has little more than her name in common with Grimmelshausen’s character (and even that has lost most of its sexual connotations), drags her sutler’s wagon after the marauding armies on which she depends for a livelihood. Her calculating, unscrupulous, shopkeeper’s realism – like Galileo’s cunning – makes sense for as long as it serves the purpose of keeping her family alive and together.
But one by one she loses her children to different forms of the goodness she has warned them against. Alone at the end, she has survived – but what for? It was Brecht’s own question to himself.
In 1941 Brecht left Finland for Russia and, without stopping to inspect the workings of socialism, took the trans-Siberian Tr
route to the Pacifi c Ocean and California. There he met W. H.
aumas and memories (1914– )
Auden (who thought him the most immoral man he had ever known) and found a colony of German émigrés, such as Erich Maria Remarque (1898–1970), author of the gripping pot-boiler All Quiet on the Western Front ( Im Westen nichts Neues, 1929), many of them attracted, like him, by the prospect of work in Hollywood. There too Brecht wrote his happiest – and last signifi cant – play, The Caucasian Chalk Circle ( Der kaukasische Kreidekreis, 1944–5, fi rst performed 1948, in English). In it the pure, self-sacrifi cing love of another ‘good woman’ and the self-preserving immoralism of an unjust judge, embodied in characters as fully drawn as Mother Courage or Galileo, are united in a moment ‘almost of justice’, while Marxism is relegated to sedately utopian, socialist-realist framework scenes which pretend to underwrite the hope expressed in the principal action. Not all of Brecht’s fellow exiles were as easily reconciled to life in the USA, however. Horkheimer and Adorno managed to re-establish the Institute of Social Research in California and tried there to use the inherited concepts of German philosophy to explain the barbarism engulfi ng Europe. But their joint study, Dialectic of Enlightenment ( Dialektik der Aufklärung, 1944), suffers, like the Marxist tradition itself, and like Brecht’s feeble attempts at direct 139
representation of the Nazi regime, from an inadequate theory of politics (treated simply as a cloak for economic interests) and from a limited understanding of the special character of the German society from which they came. It was boorish and inept to equate the capitalism of America, which was paying in blood to save their lives and their work, with genocidal Fascism (as Brecht also did in his lesser plays). Their assault on the American entertainment industry was not just the snobbery of expatriates from the homeland of Art: Adorno and Horkheimer explicitly defended, against the mass market and mass politics that had swept them away, 19th-century Germany’s ‘princes and principalities’, the
‘protectors’ of the institutions – ‘the universities, the theatres, the orchestras and the museums’ – which had maintained the idea of a freedom available through Art and transcending the (supposedly) false freedoms of economic and political life. In thus preparing to hand on to a later generation, as the key to modern existence, the concepts and slogans of the defunct German confl ict ature er between bourgeoisie and bureaucracy, Adorno and Horkheimer committed themselves to much the same half-truths as a writer for whom they had no time at all, Hermann Hesse.
German Lit
In 1943 Hesse issued from his Swiss retreat his own reaction to the contemporary crisis, The Glass-Bead Game ( Das Glasperlenspiel), a novel of personal ‘ Bildung’ set in the distant future and in the imaginary European province of Castalia. As the allusion to the Muses’ sacred spring suggests, Castalia is devoted to Art, but an Art which has absorbed all previous forms of artistic and intellectual
expression into a single supreme activity, the Glass-Bead Game. A secular monastic order is dedicated to the cultivation of the Game, and the novel tells of the development of its greatest master, Josef Knecht, to the point where he recognizes the need to relate this religion of Art to the world beyond it.
Castalia is threatened by war, economic pressures, and political hostility, as in the ‘warlike age’ of the mid-20th century, in which the Game originated. Knecht’s end, however, and that of the novel, is obscure: has he indeed secured the survival of the Castalia that 140
preserves his memory? Or has he, as his Castalian successors would clearly like to believe, betrayed Art to Life and been punished accordingly? The Castalian world of the Spirit ( Geist) seems hermetically detached from the historical world of society, and even if Spirit is in reality dependent on Society, it seems not to acknowledge, or even to know, that it is. Hesse’s anxiety about the ability of Art and the Spirit to survive into the post-war era is expressed with more modesty, and greater political astuteness, than we fi nd in Dialectic of Enlightenment, but he is no more able than Adorno and Horkheimer to represent those concepts as peculiar to a particular time and place and tradition.
That was to be the task of another German resident of California, Thomas Mann, who had arrived in America in 1939, and from Tr
1943, following daily the news of Germany’s military collapse, aumas and memories (1914– )
worked intensively on his greatest novel, completed and published in 1947, Doctor Faustus. The life of the German composer Adrian Leverkühn, narrated by a friend ( Doktor Faustus. Das Leben des deutschen Tonsetzers Adrian Leverkühn erzählt von einem Freunde). Mann consulted Adorno about his manuscript, particularly its musical sections, and sent Hesse a copy of the published work with the inscription, ‘the glass-bead game with black beads’, but his book went to the heart of the issue that their books evaded. Doctor Faustus is a reckoning with the German past at many levels. It gives a fi ctionalized account of the social and intellectual world of the Second Empire and the Weimar Republic, particularly Munich (complete with proto-fascist poets).
German Literature Page 15