History of German Literature Georg Lukacs 1947
The outbreak of the first imperialist war in Germany carried away the entire intelligentsia, including the literary world, with enthusiasm. Heinrich Mann, Leonhard Frank, Johannes R. Becher and a few others were among the notable exceptions who took a stand against the imperialist war from the start. Were the others therefore all really unconditional supporters of German imperialist aggression, as one might assume from the unanimity and content of their war writings? A flat affirmative answer to this question would be a simplification. It is precisely here that we face the specifically German intellectual problem: defenselessness in all ideological questions in the face of reaction. Its cause is above all the alienation from real social problems, from real insight into social connections, to a degree that is not the case in any other civilized country in the world. Ricarda Huch praises the fact that the heroine, who is portrayed as sympathetic and clever, never reads newspapers, and Ernst Wiechert speaks of reading newspapers as the silent vice of our civilization. In this way, such intellectuals are at the mercy of reactionary demagogy to a degree that which is impossible in countries with a lively (even if, as in Tsarist Russia, underground) political-social public opinion. In addition, there is the deep inner insecurity, which we have shown in various types, the feeling of pathlessness and aimlessness in this apparently so beautiful and consolidated world of security.
When the Wilhelminian regime appealed to the patriotism of Germans, who were attacked from all over the world when the war broke out, when the Kaiser declared: “I no longer know any political parties, I only know German people,” people readily believed him, and not only because a bourgeois servility had been instilled for half a century, but because what was new about the war, the immersion in a national community that was close to the people, seemed to point the way out of the insoluble conflicts of the pre-war period. If one reads the direct documents of the war participants, especially the letters of young intellectuals, one can see that this feeling consistently formed the undertone of otherwise clever and sensitive war enthusiasts. Admittedly, where this arose into a world-view (and the wastage of such ad hoc philosophy and ad hoc history fills libraries and bears the best names in German literature and science) it finds its theoretical foundation in the alleged philosophy already emphasized by us: the superiority of the Prussian-German authoritarian state over the western democracies. Heroes fight against merchants (Sombart); the ideas of 1914 are to be enforced against those of 1789 (Plenge).
Few writers of the older generation took a stand against this flooding of German intellectuals with the crude, mendacious and distorting ideology of aggressive German imperialism and Hohenzollern Germany’s aspirations to world domination. On the other hand, for the first time since the 1880s, the literary youth rose up violently and passionately: as champions of militant Expressionism.
One should never overestimate and exaggerate parallels; one comes to wrong conclusions. Nevertheless, certain typically German traits are expressed in this parallelism, which one should not ignore when considering the differences and contrasts that are just as important. It is typical above all that a radically new art is proclaimed, a complete break with all literary traditions. Of course, the objective circumstances in literature – to stay with them for the time being – have become fundamentally different. When the literary revolution of naturalism waged a relentless war against the pseudo-art of Wildenbruch and Baumbach, it thereby objectively rescued German literature from the morass of Bismarck’s glorification on the founding of the Reich. The literary revolution of Expressionism, however, was directed against a body of writing whose literary rank was undoubtedly considerable, no matter how pathetic its role as guide, as praeceptor Germaniae may have been. The fact that, given this difference in the literary situation, the revolt of the Expressionist youth was largely directed towards the creation of a radically new art is a sign of their central ideological weakness: their lack of insight into the decisive defects and limitations of modern German literature already in naturalism the concentration on the problems of the radically new technique was a narrowing, this applies even more now. Legions of experimenters now take the place of the theoretical and practical form experiments of Holz and Schlaf.
By placing the main emphasis on what was formal and artistic, on what was different from the past, the young poets overlooked how little they had really overcome the weaknesses and limitations in the world of feelings and thoughts of the previous generation, how deeply they themselves were still in touch with this world, were inwardly connected to the hopeless forsakenness of man in the world (in the opaque imperialist reality of Germany). We illustrate this with three individually and poetically very different personalities. For example, when Johannes R. Becher asks himself:
Bin ich zerbroeckelnde Mauer,
Saeuule am Wegrand, die schweigt?
Oder Baum der Trauer,
Ueber den Abgrund geneigt?
(Am I a crumbling wall,
A column by the wayside that is silent?
Or a tree of sorrow,
Leaning over the abyss?)
and gives the answer:
Ja, verfaulter Stamm...
(Yes, a rotten trunk...)
when Albert Ehrenstein complains about fatigue of life and death:
Und ob die grossen Autohummeln sausen,
Aeroplane im Aether hausen,
Es fehlt dem Menschen die stete,
welterschuetternde Kraft.
Er ist wie Schleim, gespuckt auf eine Schiene.
Die brausenden Stroeme ertrinken machtlos im Meer.
Nicht fuehlten die Siouxindianer in ihren Kriegstaenzen Goethe,
Und nicht fuehlte die Leiden Christi der erbarmungslos ewige
Nie durchzuckt von Gefuehl,
Unfuehlend einander und starr
Steigen und sinken
Sonnen, Atome: die Koerper im Raum.
(And though the engines brashly roar
And airplanes soar up in the sky
Man lacks the constant, world-shaking power.
He is like mucus, spat on a rail . . .
The rushing torrents drown helplessly in the sea.
The Sioux Indians in their war-dances are unaware of Goethe
And the pitiless eternal Sirius does not feel the passion of Christ.
Suns and atoms, bodies in space,
Rise and fall without the tug of feeling
Rigidly unaware of one another.)
(‘Ich bin des Lebens und des Todes muede’ [I am tired of life and death] in Menschheitsdaemmerung, p. 37)
when Georg Heym sings about the Morgue:
Wir zogen aus, geguertet wie Giganten,
Ein jeder klirrte wie ein Goliath.
Nun haben wir die Maeuse zu Trabanten,
Und unser Fleisch ward duerrer Maden Pfad.
Was fanden wir im Glanz der Himmelsenden?
Ein leeres Nichts. Nun schlappt uns das Gebein,
Wie einen Pfennig in den leeren Haenden
Ein Bettler klappern laesst am Strassenrain.
(We went out girded like giants,
Each rattled like a Goliath.
Now we have the mice to satellites,
And our flesh became dry maggot path.
What did we find in the splendor of the heavenly ends?
An empty nothing. Now our bones are slipping
Like a penny in empty hands
That a beggar rattles on the sidewalk.)
where is there a fundamentally new poetic content compared to Rilke and the other poets of the lostness of people in life? It is not a question of whether individual images, individual rhythms, along with a tangled mass of deliberately abstract exaggeration, along with ingenious studio bombast, do not also contain something original and poetically valuable. There is no question that this is also present in Expressionism, albeit to a much more modest extent than was believed and proclaimed at the time. However, a historical survey like ours must ask the question for every literary revolution: What new human and social content does it openly have? How did the new artistic physiognomy of a young generation that came to light in it contribute to illuminating the paths of the German nation? And this result is more than poor in Expressionism.
This can be seen even more clearly in expressionist drama. We do not even want to talk about the theory, which is filled with fragments of thought from Husserl, Bergson, etc., and which, for example, variegates the worst nihilistic cynicism of the imperialist period in Dadaism, which is admittedly somewhat remote. Georg Kaiser’s drama From morning to midnight is certainly original in terms of scenery and dialogue. But in its final content is it more than a formally new depiction of the little man hopelessly eaten up by the milieu, as has been done countless times in and since naturalism? Or how does Hasenclever’s Sohn lead beyond similar father-son conflicts since naturalism and its consequences, ideally or socially psychologically? And so on and so on.
None of this would constitute a decisive objection to Expressionism; a period poses its own problems, and the poets have to deal with them, consciously or unconsciously. But it is not so much a question of the great objective social problems of mankind (with these it is almost poetic duty to continue) but rather of that specifically German ideological distortion of the problems which we have repeatedly ascertained for Wilhelminian imperialism, which, due to this distortion, precisely in its warpedness and skewness was accepted uncritically, not adjusted ideologically. This correction required a thorough revision of the social-human content. Expressionism, however, took over unconsciously the mental distortion from the heritage, which was only formally rejected, and concentrated its criticism and interest exclusively on – compared to this question – secondary problems of formal expression. Secondary also in decisive artistic terms; for the whole attitude of the Expressionists has the inevitable consequence that, in the sense we explained earlier, they did not get beyond the naturalistic barrier spiritually and ideologically.
Of course, there is something really new here, insofar as Expressionism, in its essential representatives, is actually sharply oppositional literature. Here again the awkwardness of the German situation, which we have repeatedly discussed, is visible again: to be oppositional means to be something like a socialist. Even during the war, the German petty bourgeoisie was unable to develop any principled opposition to imperialism that would have been able to carry out the long overdue democratic restructuring of Germany, to put an end to the German misery or at least to prepare this process ideologically. The majority of social democracy took part in the imperialist war, and later the majority socialists were content with superficial democratic ornaments and left all the essentials of the old system not only almost untouched but gave the reaction in the post-war period a wide opportunity to concentrate its forces and prepare its dictatorship. Only the revolutionary left took a decisive position against the imperialist war and made heroic attempts to break the reactionary powers in the post-war period.
The literary youth, who sympathized with this left-wing movement, gave a confused, utopian, manifesting and lyrical picture of the disorganized state of affairs in Germany. This picture, however, is so abstract that its lack of realism appears as a caricature if we do not look at it in isolation, that is, from an aesthetic point of view, but relate it to the real tragedy, the poetic expression of which it pretends to be. I will only cite Becher’s Hymn to Rosa Luxemburg:
O Wuerze du der paradiesischen Auen:
Du Einzige! Du Heilige! O Weib! –
Durch die Welten rase ich – :
Einmal noch deine Hand, diese Hand zu fassen:
Zauberisches Gezweig an Gottes Rosen-Oel-Baum.
Wuenschel-Rute dem Glueck-Sucher.
(O spice, you, of the paradise meadows:
You only one! You saint! O woman! –
Through the worlds I race – :
Your hand once more, to grasp this hand:
Magical branches on God’s rose oil tree.
Dowsing rod for the seeker of happiness.)
Poetic words are seldom mentioned, it is seldom hinted, even if only fleetingly, that a tragic turning point in the fate of the entire German people is taking place, that Germany has lost its way again, as it did in 1848, and that the door to renewal has not been opened yet.
But that is the task of poetry in all great periods, and it was not least fulfilled by Russian literature. Of course, it was not only German literature that failed in this great crisis; this may serve as an excuse for the individual poet. If, however, the entire Expressionist movement rejected the depiction of reality through literature, in order to put in its place a passionately proclaimed poetic prophecy, the comparison of subjective expression and objective historical facts reveals that this literary revolution is based only on paper, lived out only in formal experiments by literary circles, without enlightening and illuminating the darkness by intervening in the life of the people itself by shaping the deepest content of the real problems of the epoch.