History of German Literature Georg Lukacs 1947
We had to anticipate this. But Hauptmann’s fate sheds light on the whole literary movement. It expresses a general tendency, the fate of many writers of his generation. For all of them, sympathy with socialism was just an episode, a transition. After the futile revolt of the young, the socialist wave in literature is over, and with it the rule of consistent naturalism as a style. As early as the early 1890s, Bahr proclaimed the need to overcome it. For the time being, Maeterlinck takes over from Zola and lbsen. The influence of Nordic and French Impressionists also comes to the fore. However, these influences only mark the surface; artistically, the transition between the individual, violently warring styles is smooth. It is important to turn away from the social messianism of the 1880s.
It would be wrong to speak of a reneging here. The majority of these writers have never been socialists in the true sense of the word. Their rapprochement or their joining the social-democratic movement follows from an instinctive democratic feeling. Richard Dehmel gives very fine and interesting artistic analyzes of the limits of the naturalistic style, especially in language, but goes little into the decisive social and ideological questions that determine this style. Only at one point does he touch on the core problem: “Is the skin already the body, and is the body the human being, and is the human being his life, and is his life his time?” This question contains the possibility of going beyond that naturalistic principle: about getting stuck in the reproduction of the immediately given reality. The genuine: overcoming naturalism would be knowledge, the artistic experience of an objective reality independent of our sensory impressions, but essence and lawfulness that go beyond this immediacy must by no means remain closed to us. With Recht, Dehmel rejects the mere immediacy of the naturalistic mode of expression, but does not see that this can only be overcome when those objective, socio-historical powers of life, which determine the characters, the developments, the history of people without them being aware of it, are given the place in the organization that is their due.
The immediacy of naturalism represents the world as it appears directly in the characters’ experiences themselves. In order to achieve perfect authenticity, the naturalistic writer does not go beyond the horizon of his characters, either in terms of content or form; its horizon is at the same time that of the work. It is now clear that a problem of the artistic world view is touched on here. It was a matter of course for the older writers to take the objective forces of life as the starting point, the basis of their works. They did not care how far the heroes of fiction understand their own destiny. Fontane, for example, who considers this to be quite unfashionable, designs the social and human prerequisites of the Jena catastrophe in Schach von Wuthenow’s tragic love adventure, although even the idea of such connections goes far beyond the ability of his hero to think of objective reality from the limits of thought and feeling of his heroes. Even in Hauptmann, the Peasant War is only visible to us to the extent that his Florian Geyer is able to experience it.
This is the spiritual and ideological basic principle of naturalism, the scope of which, however, remained unknown to both the founders and the conquerors of naturalism. That is why these latter criticized the means of expression of naturalism: although they often sharply and correctly criticized it, but adopted and continued its spiritual and ideological foundations unchanged. As a result, however, the barriers of naturalism had to reappear again and again. For merely linguistically going beyond the average expression of everyday life, the artistic refinement in the rendering of moods, indeed even an intellectual elevation (be it in the reflections of the writers or in the dialogue of the characters) changes nothing in the main thing, if the objective horizon of the work does not correspond to that of the social reality it reflects, if it does not overarch, refute, and replace the subjective horizon of the individual figures, thereby making it understandable. And in this spiritual and ideological sense, the German literature of the imperialist age, with few exceptions, always remained naturalistic. Whether the literary-artistic form was called Impressionism or Expressionism, Symbolism or New Objectivity, in this respect there was never a decisive break with naturalism.
Here again the undemocratic development in Germany, the fact that there was no influential democratic opposition in Germany, had an unfavorable effect on literature. The formal overcoming of naturalism is a sign of turning away from the social messianism of the 1880s and 1890s. The basic mood of this period of fermentation is now fixed (very strongly influenced by Nietzsche) in the fact that the original democratic demand for the all-round developed human being often takes on a fundamentally anti-social character. If for these writers every society is an enemy of personality development, the particular contours of contemporary German anti-democratism must become blurred in the chiaroscuro of this abstraction. People’s social relationships are not only evaporated, they are also discredited as secondary and irrelevant. Only the purely inner problematic of the individual appears as poetically legitimate material.
Therein lies the decisive reason why the most radical conquerors of naturalism have remained naturalists in the spiritual and ideological sense outlined above. In this artistic respect, too, the Nietzschean influence is of great importance. Nietzsche polemicizes against the dualism of the idealistic philosophy of the past and of his time, but only for the purpose of epistemologically destroying every conception of objective reality in order to state the directly experienced environment of man as the sole reality. The high point of mankind, the world of Zarathustra, is characterized by him as follows: “The apparent world is the only one: the true world is only a lie.” The effectiveness of this view, that of the artistic attitude of the writers In the imperialist age it is reinforced by the fact that the most influential philosophical currents of the time (Neo-Kantianism, Machism, Pragmatism, etc.) proclaim very similar principles.
The personality confronted with society finds the moral standard exclusively within itself; it radically rejects any social compass. This sanctifies all instincts, including those in which the distortion and crippling of man through the social structure of imperialism and especially through the undemocratic German development is expressed, also the instincts of greed for power, cruelty, even bestial egoism. Here, too, Nietzsche is the Musagetes of the new German literature.
Ludwig Feuerbach clearly formulated the decisive side of the problem here in the urge for democracy: “Our ideal is not a castrated, disembodied, stripped being, our ideal is the whole, real, all-round, fully trained human being.” The writers of this generation hated bourgeois society, because it did not give personality this scope for development. They turned downwards, because they saw fellow sufferers there, above all in the suppression of personality. They became socialists out of unclear messianism. As their views became at least subjectively more conscious, as they turned more resolutely to the problem of personality development, their real central problem, they lost interest in socialist ideals and at the same time they began to turn away from naturalism, which had now become too narrow for them. Dehmel, whose successful poems form lasting monuments of this period alongside Hauptmann’s plays, writes about the limits of naturalism:
“The essential is crushed by the formal ... The new way of writing is also incapable of bringing the deepest emotions of the soul to light with complete clarity because it is forced from the outset to remain on the surface due to its fundamental model, colloquial language. In this way, however, it brings about a deceptive appearance of everyday reality ... but man’s need for the interpretation of reality, his longing for truth, gets nothing.”
As an aesthetic critique, these remarks are quite apt. The only question is what the essential demanded by Dehmel consists of. A Nietzsche cult is developing in German literature, which plays the decisive role in the overcoming of naturalism, from E. Hartleben to Felix Hollaender.
The important poet Detlev von Liliencron, who was stylistically close to the new movement without ever sharing its social messianism, clearly expresses the mood of the time when naturalism was overcome: “No, I do not understand the social-democratic nonsense. What I understand is anarchism. I praise myself for that: there comes out the hideous beast of prey called man, yet directly and without hypocrisy.” Anarchist sympathies, linked in many cases to Nietzsche, are general in this period, only that very few writers are able to articulate the consequences of this turn with such uninhibited freshness as Liliencron did here and elsewhere, nor does he hesitate to state openly that such anarchist sympathies are quite compatible with an affirmation of imperialism. He once asked what a later period would find in his epic Poggfred: “The philistine wretchedness of everyday life, the social, moral and religious hypocrisy, the cowardly criticism of all strong instincts, the nonetheless uncontrollable flight of personal imagination, the ineradicable joy in natural existence, in the adventures of love, war and world traffic, but above all the unrestrained humor of the man of the world who is completely on his own, who always says to every meanness of human fate: Je m’en fiche.”
Here imperialism is openly and sans phrase affirmed. We are, of course, far from saying that this was the general tone of German literature; we will very soon see the opposite. But the contrast lies more in the mood than in the ultimate human and social content, than in the problem statement, in the design questions. An unreserved affirmation of imperialism, however, is rarely found among any reasonably important writers of this period. The attitude toward contemporary society is seldom friendly or even simply affirmative. What remains is the accusation against society because of the perishing and wasting away of the people in it and through it; the feeling that a genuine human being can only assert his or her innermost potential against or apart from present-day society. This mood later appears in its purest form in Leonhard Frank’s novels, above all in the Raeuberbande and in the Ochsenfurter Male Quartet.
Here, however, a specifically German problem of distortion sets in. In Romantic anti-capitalism, for example in Rembrandt as Educator (Julius Langbehn), an ever-expanding ideological journalism emerges, which absorbs the essential Romantic elements of the critique of capitalism, combines them with the critique of democracy, but from this apparently very radically-critical consideration draws the conclusion that the backward political-social structure of Germany is a higher form of the true state, of the true society, than the western democracies. Hohenzollern Germany is therefore no longer defended from the conservative point of view as before (of course also this point of view has its ideological representatives, especially in the narrow, provincialist, anti-metropolitan Heimatkunst growing out of naturalism), but vice versa: democracy and socialism are rejected as antiquated, outdated forms. The authoritarian state appears as something new, as overcoming the contradictions of capitalism and democracy.
This ideology is very influential. It has an effect, often indirectly, of course, on the worldview of many leading writers. In the current of such a view of life, they can very well be convinced that they have progressed further in their often oppositional criticism of society, all the more so if they give their “anti-capitalist”, anti-democratic attitude, their growing aristocratism a general anti-social emphasis, when they, often unconsciously, stylize Wilhelminian Germany as utopian, but criticize and even reject its concrete forms. Objectively, however, they are driven by the line of their socially critical attitude to a reconciliation with Wilhelminian Germany.
Of course, under German conditions, this often appears as a turn away from social problems in general. An orientation to the purely ideological, purely artistic emerges. Social reality is now, objectively, accepted uncritically: Whether we like it or not, we stand on the ground of developing imperialism. The old demand for personality development (its authenticity, size, depth, development), originating from revolutionary democracy, continues to have an effect as the sole dominant motive, turns inwards, condemns society, but precisely in this way reduces it to something externally irrelevant, to a mere frame, a scenery, a cause of the inner happenings. From the subjective experience, from the inner developmental laws of the individual, it seeks to gain a firm ideological basis. However, it becomes clear again and again that an emptiness, a cavity, necessarily arises around such an individual.
Great artistic dangers arise from this. The development in Germany led to a weakening of the social perspective of writers, that is, a weakening of their ability to see the social element in people and their destiny as an inseparable structural element. Naturalism, despite its tendency towards the superficial of everyday life, has worked against this weakness. Now there is another distraction. On this basis, a false dilemma arises in the psychology of important German writers. Either they give what is socially too direct, like naturalism (and later the New Objectivity), skipping the individual human mediations, and then a flat psychology emerges, without dimensions; or the social mediations are skipped, making the whole psychology wrong-dimensioned. The result is a meaningless pseudo-depth that loses itself in arbitrariness. A similar false dilemma arises in the subject matter and, stemming from it, in the course of the action. It is either too direct, nakedly tendentious, cramming people into typical schemes, or it becomes eccentric, in that the ultimate questions are immediately attached to purely subjective experiences (sometimes even scraps of experience), seeming to grow directly out of them.
All this does not mean, of course, that the subject matter and psychology of German writers did not grow objectively out of social problems. But writers from democratic countries or with revolutionary-democratic traditions have a much higher awareness of the connections between their subjects and forms, and therefore have a much finer sense and inventive talent for human and action-related mediation. Where a Tolstoy or Anatole France finds simple, typical situations, unaffected mental transitions with great certainty, the modern German falls into the thicket of mystical arbitrariness.
We lack the space here to even hint at this development in its entirety. We only cite Jakob Wassermann as its representative. Here the comparison with the great Russians suggests itself, because Wassermann very often worked on their motifs in his own way. So, to cite just one example, the basic conflict of his Christian Wahnschaffe is a German variant of Tolstoy’s Resurrection: a person from higher society is led to the realization of the hollowness of life in the upper classes and is now looking for true humanity below, a meaningful life. But where, in the case of the Russian, simple and powerful conflicts arise from natural conditions, here a tangle of reportage-like action and psychology squinting at depth arises. For all of Wassermann’s talent, an unwanted, mystifying caricature of his role model has been created here.