[In the following excerpt, Waller comments on criticism leveled against Expressionist writers by five contemporary critics: R. M. Rilke, Thomas Mann, Georg Lukács, Stefan George (through Friedrich Gundolf), and Robert Musil.]

Literary criticism ought to be a history of man's ideas and imaginings in the setting of the conditions which have shaped them.¹

This book takes as its starting-point, and will use as a framework, a series of criticisms of Expressionism by contemporary writers, who have something pertinent and incisive to say about the movement. There are two principal bands of criticism, the formal and the thematic. Rilke and George, who focus their attention on formal considerations, regard Expressionism as a cult of formlessness, whereas Lukács and Thomas Mann argue that Expressionism claims a vital involvement in the political and social spheres, but has no insight into the practical responsibilities which are the inevitable concomitants of such involvement. It is rare for a critic to object to Expressionism on both counts, although it is certainly possible to see the objection of formal irresponsibility as analogous to that of political irresponsibility: indeed, by 1930, Thomas Mann, who makes his original criticism of Expressionism in 1918, is deeply aware of the analogy. The five writers, whose reservations are recorded here, are not some kind of unimpeachable critical idols. Issue will be taken with their criticism; they are, after all, very much part of the same literary and social ambience from which Expressionism emerged, and the charges which they level at Expressionism can frequently be turned round and directed at their own work. What is particularly interesting is that, from an early date, these writers demur to be swept along by the fervour of the latest literary fashion; they resist it, they raise important objections to it, and, no matter how loosely they may voice their objections, they offer potentially fruitful ways to approach Expressionist writing.

(A) R. M. RILKE

… this salutary antagonism … there must be not only a partnership, but a union; an interpenetration of passion and of will, of spontaneous impulse and of voluntary purpose.²

Rilke's life represents one long repudiation of the political branch of Expressionism known as activism. Where he interprets any commitment to his own age or to philanthropic goals merely as a source of inauthenticity and as a potentially fatal impoverishment of his uncompromising view of his poetic mission, the activist Expressionist writers derive their literary sustenance and existential justification from a feeling of commitment and responsibility. In his memoirs, Erich Mühsam, an activist Expressionist, recounts how he was once chided by Wedekind for dissipating his time and energies, for dividing his efforts, for seeking to play two roles in life—that of a ‘Caféhausliterat’ and that of a fighter for proletarian rights:

‘You are standing on the back of two horses straining in different directions; they will rip your legs apart’.

‘If I let one go,’ I replied, ‘I shall lose my balance and break my neck’.³

Against this determination to ‘ride two horses’ Rilke sets the example of Rodin and the image of ‘the mighty course of the river which refuses to divide into two branches’.⁴ This image appears in a letter written in 1903, but it could easily have been written in 1913 or 1923 (though not with reference to Rodin) as a counter-example to the likes of Mühsam, Pinthus, Pfemfert, Rubiner and Hiller. Expressionism's will-to-diffuseness, which Rilke regards as fissiparous and wastefully arrogant, is offset by his monumental will-to-be-all-of-a-piece, will-to-create-whatever-one-is. His rejection both of political activism and of the whole movement of Expressionism is contained in one particular letter, written on 12 September 1919. The actress Anni Mewes had sent him a ‘carefully and beautifully sealed little parcel’. In it was a pamphlet entitled Die Silbergäule written by Heinrich Vogeler, a painter, whom Rilke had visited in Worpswede in 1900. In his reply to Anni, Rilke sharply dismisses the pamphlet and its message of Expressionist love for all mankind. His use of the image of the train leaping off the rails soon indicates that his main objection to Expressionism is going to be concerned with poetic form. Expressionism, according to him, is uncontrolled and undisciplined, it takes an appearance of intensity to be the actual quality of intensity, it is a premature outer manifestation of inner dynamism, and Rilke dismisses Vogeler's grandiose philanthropic project as a paradigm of just this sort of wilful scattering of inner resources. It is not fortuitous or self-contradictory that four years earlier, in his warm praise of the early Expressionist poet Georg Trakl,⁵ Rilke should use such words as ‘Zäune’ (fences), ‘eingezäunt’ (fenced in) and ‘Einfriedungen’ (enclosures) to signal the kind of control which characterizes Trakl's best work. Rilke's criticism of the Expressionist poet is founded in precisely the same objections as those which he levels against Vogeler and other activists:

The Expressionist, this explosive spirit pouring its boiling lava over all things and insisting that the arbitrary form into which the crusts harden is the new, the future, the veritable outline of being,—is a desperate soul …

(12 September 1919)

Expressionism, Rilke argues, is like an erupting volcano and is an example of that ‘imageless act’ (‘Tun ohne Bild’) in the Ninth Elegy, activity without necessary intellectual curb and concomitant mental picture. The Expressionist poet, like the volcano, may indeed by overwhelmed by a kind of inner necessity to gush forth, but the whole point is, Rilke implies, that he should not be like a volcano. By patience and craftsmanship he should shape his inspiration (which Rilke does not for a moment deny him) and should eliminate all arbitrariness and adventitiousness—these are the qualities which Rilke repudiates above all in Expressionist poetry. It is a question of finding Coleridge's ‘salutary antagonism’, of matching deeply felt emotion with painstakingly sought form and coherence.

The appropriateness of Rilke's criticism of Expressionist form can be gauged from the fact that Expressionist writers continually avail themselves of the same image of the volcano when they define their attitude to poetic form. Max Deri, for example, in a 1918 article entitled ‘Expressionismus und Idealismus’, explains how intensity of feeling is a value in itself in Expressionist poetry: ‘all the dams of Classical restraint are burst asunder. Dynamic feeling seeks an outlet, “expression” in an upsurge of almost unchecked ecstasy. Anything which does not course down from the peaks with an incandescent glow has no worth’.⁶ Yet Rilke's repudiation of Expressionist form should not be accepted uncritically. Given that Expressionist poets do write in the way Rilke portrays in his image of the volcano, why should that self-evidently make their poetry into a ‘bad thing’? The genesis of a poem tells us nothing about the quality of the poem as artifact. What of the Elegies, for instance? Arriving with whirlwind force in January 1912, finished in what reads by Rilke's own account like an excess of Expressionist fervour almost exactly ten years later, do they not represent a powerful counter-argument to Rilke's criticism of Expressionist poetry? Is there not something intensely Expressionistic about their genesis, something of Expressionism's intensity about them? The answer is plainly yes and no: they did pour forth, but they had, after all, ‘fermented’ for ten years, ten years of single-minded concentration and strenuousness. There is no question in them of a sort of inspirational slopping-over, of what Rilke in his poem ‘Doute’ calls a ‘premature exaltation’, or of settling for the first stammering, faltering words which adventitiously enter the poet's mind and of which Valéry, a great contemporary poet and an important influence on Rilke's thought, warns:

Il faut prendre garde aux premiers mots qui prononcent une question dans notre esprit. Une question nouvelle est d'abord à l'état d'enfance en nous; elle balbutie: elle ne trouve que des termes étrangers, tout chargés de valeurs et d'associations accidentelles; elle est obligée de les emprunter.⁷

Only the trance-like act of hearkening to and recording the dictates of inspiration bears the hallmark of Expressionism, as Rilke defines it. Like all his work from the Neue Gedichte onwards, the Elegies are ‘a fully matured configuration, pervaded by the glow of the poet's inspiration’.⁸ To which Expressionist poems can one apply a similar description? To those of Heym and Trakl, to some poems by Werfel, to all the poems of Stramm (whose work Rilke did not know), and to very few others. Rilke's criticism of Expressionism is all of a piece with his general views on poetry and with his own poetic practice. This criticism can be interpreted as a corrective to those among the Expressionist poets who believed that immediacy of inspiration and heedless intensity of themselves produced a good poem. As a contemporary poet who felt that such a corrective was needed, Rilke renders the same kind of service to twentieth-century German poetry as Eliot does to twentieth-century English poetry—the same kind, but not to the same degree. Eliot with his conviction that ‘the “greatness”, the intensity, of the emotions, the components are not what counts, but the intensity of the artistic process, the pressure under which the fusion takes place’ provided precisely the sort of stabilizing influence and corrective to excesses which twentieth-century German poetry lacks—in spite of the example and achievement of Rilke. And in the famous lines from the fifth section of ‘Little Gidding’, ‘… every word is at home, / Taking its place to support the others …’, Eliot underlines the very qualities which Rilke misses in Expressionist poetry: an indissoluble harmony between felt emotion and articulated word, balance, symmetry and proportion—all antitheses to the arbitrariness and luxuriance of ‘the Expressionist, this explosive spirit …’

(B) THOMAS MANN

Only reality, though certainly not every reality—but a selected reality.⁹

Reality—, Europe's demonic concept.¹⁰

Thomas Mann, on the later of the two principal occasions in Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen (1918) where he discusses Expressionism, reiterates part of Rilke's description of the Expressionist poet:

Expressionism … is that artistic trend which, in violent contrast to the passivity, the meekly receptive and reproductive methods of Impressionism, has the utmost scorn for any attempt to imitate reality and, resolutely repudiating any obligation to reality, places in its stead the sovereign, explosive, heedlessly creative authority of the intellect/spirit (‘Geist’).¹¹

Even more categorically than Rilke, Mann rejects the movement: his parody of the Expressionist poets, as represented by Daniel Zur Höhe in Doktor Faustus, is blatant and crude. Unlike Rilke, however, Mann's criticism offers metaphysics instead of concrete insight, generalization instead of detail, rhetorical bluster instead of conveyed understanding. Nevertheless it should be borne in mind that Mann's reservations about Expressionism are voiced as early as 1918 (that is, at a time when many were still rallying to its banner) and also that his criticism yields two categories—those of ‘reality’ and ‘responsibility’—which are central to any understanding of Expressionism and consequently need further elaboration.

Mann uses the protean term ‘reality’ twice in the quoted extract. He is certainly right to insist that Expressionism, if it means anything at all, is a rejection of the mimetic approach in art. Expressionist writers are intent on destroying the prestige of empirical reality; they scorn any idea of merely reproducing the visible world and indeed regard reality and art as mutually exclusive—‘the era of modern art is founded in the burgeoning insight that reality and art are not dependent on or conditioned by each other: on the contrary, they are incompatible’.¹² What does Pinthus mean here by ‘reality’? What does Mann mean by ‘reality’? Mann is clearly using the word in the conventional, quotidian sense which Pinthus defines on another occasion, in ‘Rede für die Zukunft’ (1920), an unwitting retort to Mann's charge and an endeavour to demonstrate how ‘responsible’ Expressionism is to ‘reality’. Pinthus writes:

Reality means to man everything which is and has been outside him, around him, in front of him. Reality is nature and all manifestations of nature, the form and workings of which he perceives through the exhilarating and yet wretched apparatus of his senses—perceives and takes to be true. Reality means man's past and man's history, and, at any given time, he regards himself as the last link in that history. When man talks of reality he means all those associations and institutions which he created for himself (state, economic system, social order) in order to relieve the agony of living and which, subsequently, dominated him as if they were his god.¹³

This, or something like this, is what Thomas Mann understands by the ‘reality’ for which the Expressionist writer is denying all responsibility. It is, moreover, precisely this ‘reality’ which Expressionist writers dismiss as … ‘unreal’. Pinthus in ‘Rede für die Zukunft’ provides an example of the Expressionist polemicist's habit of setting up a series of alleged dialectical opposites from which he then derives a kind of intense, emotional momentum. On one side there is Mann's ‘reality’ which is dismissed variously (by Pinthus and other Expressionist writers) as ‘so-called’, ‘infinitely inferior to the reality created by the poet’, ‘bogus’, ‘chimaerical’, ‘a mistake’, ‘non-existent’, as the tedious old world of the senses with its wearisome ‘social conditions’, fit only to be destroyed or to be ‘the plaything of the poet's grotesque games’. On the other side is the Expressionist writer's view of ‘reality’—‘real reality’, ‘inner reality’, abstract, timeless, higher, ethical, new. These stereotyped oppositions are rehearsed again and again by Expressionist writers, who hedge the word ‘reality’ round with a series of qualifying adjectives intended to underline its otherness.

As for the second category to which Mann introduces us—‘responsibility’—Expressionist writers, too, talk of ‘responsibility to reality’. Pinthus, for example, in ‘Rede für die Zukunft’, enjoins the artist to ‘acknowledge his task and responsibility’, and Rubiner expatiates on the artist's ‘personal responsibility to his fellow-men’.¹⁴ A contemporary of Thomas Mann, Max Weber, illuminates this elusive word ‘responsibility’. In his 1918/19 essay ‘Politik als Beruf’ Weber establishes a nice difference between ‘gesinnungsethisch’ which represents a category of uncompromising, chiliastic idealism and ‘verantwortungsethisch’ which amounts to a much more pragmatic and rational kind of idealism. Weber argues that, whilst passion is an integral part of any good politician's character, it must be tempered by such qualities as a sense of proportion (‘Augenmaß’) and a sense of responsibility (‘Verantwortungsgefühl’) which, in turn, are sustained by objectivity and distance.¹⁵ It is true that Weber is writing about politics, and that Mann is writing about literature and art, but the whole point is that for the Expressionist/activist writer any dividing-line between politics and art is erased. In a quite definite way, Weber's depiction of the ‘responsible politician’ recalls Rilke's poetic criteria and Coleridge's ‘salutary antagonism’. Weber could well have Expressionist writers in mind when he discusses politics and politicians:

For the problem is precisely this: how can ardent passion and cool judgement be harnessed together in the same cause? The politician must use his head, not other parts of his body or soul. And yet devotion to politics, if it is to be a genuinely human activity and not some frivolous intellectual game, must be born of passion and sustained by passion. That powerful taming of the soul which distinguishes the passionate politician and differentiates him from the merely ‘sterile sensationalism’ of the political dilettante can be achieved only if an attitude of detachment is adopted.

(p. 436)

‘Tamed passion’ as against ‘sterile amateurish sensationalism’—this is the kind of opposition which Rilke's criticism of Expressionism sets up, and Rilke's emphasis on craftsmanship, patience and scrupulous work is paralleled by Weber's ‘Politics is a steady, slow drilling of hard planks, using passion and a sense of proportion at the same time’ (p. 450) and by his ‘Politics is a difficult business, and anyone who takes it upon himself to interfere with the spokes of the wheel of the political development of his country must not be so sentimental that he cannot practise earthly politics’.¹⁶

Mann's categories of ‘responsibility’ and ‘reality’ are extremely helpful, even though he provides little elaboration of them. Weber offers valuable insights into the concept of political responsibility, and Expressionist writers define, even if they do not make altogether clear, what they mean by ‘reality’. What remains to be examined is the extent to which Expressionist theorizing about ‘reality’ is distilled in the poetry—in other words, the extent to which Expressionist poets take issue with reality in the conventional sense and keep faith with their professed intention of concentrating on a ‘superior’ reality. As far as ‘responsibility’ is concerned, this is essentially a nebulous, extra-literary concept and becomes a vital factor only because the Expressionist poets were keen to make it so by arrogating all kinds of poetical, ethical and moral responsibilities to themselves and thus unhesitatingly making their literature available to the political sphere. By 1944 the Expressionist writer's impetuous arrogation of responsibility has issued, in at least one instance, into a penitential mea culpa. Franz Werfel unambiguously acknowledges the responsibility which he and his generation bear for the greatest catastrophe of all:

I have come to know many kinds of arrogance, in myself and in others. Yet there is no more consuming, more brazen, more disdainful, more diabolical arrogance than that of the avant-garde artists and radical intellectuals, bursting with the vain passion to be profound and obscure and difficult, and to cause pain: all this I can confirm from my own experience, since in my youth I myself was of that company for a while. Mocked in amused indignation by a few philistines, we inconsiderable men were the first to bring fuel to the hell-fire in which mankind is now roasting.¹⁷

Where Werfel speaks of his generation's ‘bringing fuel to the hell-fire in which mankind is now roasting’, Thomas Mann in his 1930 speech ‘Deutsche Ansprache’ writes that extra-political causes have assisted National Socialism, that it has been sustained by ‘succour from intellectual/spiritual sources’. Mann elaborates on what these sources might be. In fact, he concentrates on one source, namely the economic decline of the middle class and the intensely anti-bourgeois attitude of those who in pre-war Germany had proclaimed ‘a new spiritual situation for all mankind’. This proclamation, this revolt against all that the bourgeoisie stood for, found its artistic voice in ‘the Expressionist soul-scream’.¹⁸ Mann's undefined charge of ‘irresponsibility to reality’ has, by 1930, sharpened into an altogether more incisive and pertinent accusation, for by that date he has come to see Expressionism as a precipitate of all that was worst in Romanticism, as a powerful force for irrationalism and as an accomplice of National Socialism.

(C) GEORG LUKáCS

Expressionism offered the revolutionary gesture, the upraised arm, the clenched fist in papier-mâché.¹⁹

Marxist literary theory has always looked at Expressionism from one angle—as an ideological phenomenon. However much individual insights and judgements of Expressionism may differ, the method of regarding Expressionism as a political and ideological phenomenon has persisted. Georg Lukács's 1934 essay ‘“Größe und Verfall” des Expressionismus’ triggered a series of assenting and dissenting articles which were printed in the pages of the periodical Das Wort in 1937 and 1938. Lukács's essay, in spite of the expectations raised by its title, is primarily a work of demolition, and, as if to reinforce his 1934 essay, Lukács repeats many of the same points four years later in his contribution to the ‘Expressionismus-Debatte’, namely an essay called ‘Es geht um den Realismus’, and in his much later Deutsche Literatur im Zeitalter des Imperialismus (1950).

He founds his whole case against Expressionism in what he sees as the latter's defective response to reality. It is an anaemic, solipsistic ‘abstracting away from reality’. Transferred to the political sphere, Expressionism represents the literary form of the USP ideology in all its subjective idealism, has no authentic point of contact with the proletariat, offers only abstract and Bohemian opposition to the bourgeoisie and, because it is under the sway of some ‘mystic objective idealism’ or ‘a subjective idealism’, it has no grasp at all of social, historical, economic and political forces. Lukács quotes Lenin to the effect that any search for that Expressionist ideal, ‘the pure essence’ (devoid of a socio-politico-economical context) is bound to be futile. He might also have quoted from that section called ‘German, or “True”, Socialism’ towards the end of the Manifesto of the Communist Party, where Marx and Engels inveigh against the abstract German Socialism of the 1840s which emphasizes ‘not true requirements, but the requirements of truth’ and ‘not the interests of the proletariat, but the interests of Human Nature, of Man in general, who belongs to no class, has no reality, who exists only in the misty realm of philosophical fantasy’. Expressionism, Lukács argues in the manifesto, is an epigonal manifestation of this kind of Utopian Socialism, a seam in what Marx and Engels describe as ‘the robe of speculative cobwebs, embroidered with flowers of rhetoric, steeped in the dew of sickly sentiment, this extravagant robe in which German Socialists wrapped their sorry “eternal truths”, all skin and bone’.

Expressionism, Lukács maintains, is parasitic upon the bourgeoisie, it flees the battle-field of the class-struggle, it distends and distorts all contemporary questions into eternal abstractions. Its fight against the war and the bourgeoisie is a cheap masquerade, because it is a fight against War and the Bourgeoisie. Lukács sets up a litany of arraignment in which phrases like ‘abstracting poverty of content’, ‘extraordinary meagreness of substance’ and ‘abstract distortion of basic questions’ are continually rehearsed. In denying causality and logic, and in aiming for totality, the Expressionist writer leaves out a living context: his resort to simultaneism in an effort to replace that context is a desperate and futile manoeuvre. The end-result of all his manoeuvres is that Expressionism assists in the growth of Fascism: Expressionism is ‘without doubt one of the numerous bourgeois-ideological currents which subsequently issue into Fascism, and the part it plays in preparing the way for Fascist ideology is no greater—and no smaller—than that played by many other contemporary currents’.²⁰

And Expressionist form? It is ‘arbitrary’ and ‘subjective’; detached from empirical reality, devoid of substance, the Expressionist scream amounts to no more than ‘an empty aggregate of emotional effusions’, ‘the hysterical distillation of inflated images and symbols which jostle haphazardly together and lack all intrinsic coherence’. Seizing upon Nietzsche's interpretation of ‘style de décadence’ in the seventh section of Der Fall Wagner, in which stylistic decadence is seen to arise when the word is made sovereign at the expense of the whole, Lukács turns his attack on Herwarth Walden, the editor of the Expressionist magazine Der Sturm. He belabours Expressionist writers for neglecting the ‘living context’ of the sentence—in the same way as he has belaboured them for ignoring a living social and political context. Here, once again, as with the Rilke-Weber-Mann criticism of Expressionism, the movement's formal irresponsibility is set on a parallel course with its political irresponsibility. The papier-mâché poetry of Expressionism is, according to Lukács, a faithful reflection of the whole movement's catchpenny response to political issues and social problems: the poetry, heavy with apocalyptic promise, proves to be as nugatory as the political opposition to capitalism and imperialism.

The following points ought to be made in answer to Lukács; his criticism represents the habitual charge of any literary-critical conservatism against any poetic revolution; in castigating Expressionism for being ‘abstract’ and ‘timeless’, he employs many of the epithets which Expressionist writers liked to use of themselves (Pinthus, for example, in his 1915 essay ‘Zur jüngsten Dichtung’, repudiates as ‘the hotchpotch of our social, cultural, political, economic relations and institutions’ precisely that ‘reality’ for which Lukács searches in vain in Expressionism); there is nothing in Lukács's formulations that could not be turned round and used against him and his literary-metaphysical jargon; his assertion that Expressionism was ‘one of the bourgeois ideological currents which subsequently issue into Fascism’ should be weighed against the fact that the Communists disrupted Weimar no less than the National Socialists with whom they were allied in 1932. Lukács's criticism of Expressionism is, moreover, clothed in the same kind of abstract language which he finds so objectionable in Expressionist writing: this is partly because he, like Expressionist writers, relies on the terminology of idealism to do his work for him and partly because he gleans almost all his material from diffuse Expressionist theoreticians. Consider the following glaireous slab which contains the nub of his criticism:

This abstracting impoverishment of content is not only an indication of Expressionism's line of development and, thus, of its fate, it is from the very beginning Expressionism's fundamental, insurmountable stylistic problem, for the extraordinary meagerness of content which is the direct result stands in screaming contrast to the pretentious claims of the delivery.²¹

How can it be ‘Verarmung’ ‘from the very beginning’ when the German prefix ‘ver-’ implies gradual, subsequent deterioration? Why the portentousness of ‘fate’ when all he means is ‘development’? Why, of all words, ‘screaming contrast’ without a hint of irony and humour? This is exaggerated, pretentious, and … Expressionist stuff. So why bother with it? First, because Marxist criticism (of which Lukács is the leading practitioner) represents a major, influential dissenting voice and secondly, as with Thomas Mann's criticism, crucial and productive critical categories come to the surface—for example, the invertebrate and abstract quality of Expressionism's political involvement.

(D) STEFAN GEORGE/FRIEDRICH GUNDOLF

Man screams—not for the sake of screaming, but in order to rouse himself and his fellow human beings into offering help.²²

Stefan George never belonged to the artistic avant-garde, yet he was a close observer of the contemporary literary scene. His career ran parallel with that of Expressionism, and many Expressionist writers admired George and were fascinated by him. Edschmid, in his 1918 speech ‘Expressionismus in der Dichtung’, asserts that ‘after George it could not be forgotten that a great form was indispensable to a work of art’, Benn's 1934 speech, ‘Rede auf Stefan George’, is emphatically pro-George, and Heym once tried to join the George circle. The implicit and explicit reverence felt by some Expressionist writers for George the poet and exemplary teacher is not reciprocated, for he despised and dismissed all Expressionist poetry wholesale. His repudiation of Expressionism is succinctly recorded by Edgar Salin: ‘Expressionism as it was called also appeared to represent [between 1918-23] … a genuine resurgence of art—the disciples were strongly influenced by it. George listened to them patiently, scrutinized many Expressionist poems and rejected the lot’.²³ Early in his career George declares that ‘art cannot concern itself with world reform and dreams of universal happiness which, at the present time according to some people in this country, contain the seed of everything new and yet, however attractive they may indeed be, belong to a different realm from that of poetry’²⁴ and subsequently remains faithful to this credo for much of his life. And as a poet who is concerned with transforming experience in the medium of art and with indirect expression of that experience by specific artistic means, he is set on a collision course with a political, activist movement which enthusiastically makes art available to a social purpose and, moreover, seeks to cast feelings, immediately and unmediated, into poetic form. A short piece of prose which George wrote in 1896 contains ante facto his critique of Expressionism. He takes it up again in 1903 and, with more relevance to our theme, in 1933 when clearly, in republishing it, he may have been casting a retrospective glance at Expressionism. It is called ‘Uber Kraft’:

One should be on one's guard against excessively violent eruptions of power in a work of art … behind such eruptions there is often no trace at all of authentic, deep feeling, but only festering immaturity or the strenuous effort to persuade oneself by means of one's own screams of something which is not present. True power is demonstrated if these eruptions are controlled … art is not pain, nor is it sensual pleasure, it is the triumph over the former and the transfiguration of the latter …²⁵

In this quotation many of the threads of Expressionist criticism and of general poetic theory which we have used come together: Coleridge's ‘interpenetration of spontaneous impulse and of voluntary purpose’, Rilke's image of the volcano, Eliot's emphasis on due proportions and harmony, Weber's appeal for ‘tamed passion’, and the whole Valéryan ethos of maturity and his admonition that ‘il faut prendre garde aux premiers mots …’.

Durzak, in his excellent book²⁶ on George, does not doubt that ‘Über Kraft’ contains George's critique of Expressionism. He is probably right. What is certain is that Friedrich Gundolf in his fierce condemnation of Expressionism is representing Stefan George's view of Expressionist poetry. That condemnation is to be found in the first chapter of Gundolf's George (Berlin, 1920). In this first chapter Gundolf is concerned to achieve three objectives: to eulogize the poetry of his master, to level a broadside at Expressionism, and to play down (or to unmask as a misunderstanding) the influence which George had on certain Expressionist writers. Gundolf's assault is vituperative. He draws up an inventory of Expressionism's sins—‘fanatical humanitarianism and overblown compassion’, ‘the demolition of all forms in a spiritual or material pulp’, ‘a lack of restraint, moderation and nucleus’, ‘luxuriating narcissism’, ‘abstract, all-inclusive philanthropy’, ‘repudiation of all standards’ etc. etc. and the Expressionist writers themselves are ‘puffed-up, second-rate school-masters’, ‘demented priests’, ‘ranting charlatans’ etc. etc. Their characteristic noise is the scream. Then he continues:

The scream is at one and the same time an animal reaction, a political social programme and spiritual tension. They are screaming for the unattainable, for utopia, because the act of screaming itself is already an unburdening, a release, no matter what is being screamed for. Language is shattered into its illogical, sightless components, its prespiritual infantine babble because this very act of shattering is an expression of something.²⁷

This is the conventional picture of the Expressionist poet—straining at the leash, pent-up passion bursting forth, yearning for unrealizable dreams, screaming for the sake of it, bestial, primitive, purely destructive, wreaking all sorts of havoc on language. It is the conventional picture in 1920 and the one arrived at and propagated ten years later in a seminal National Socialist work—

The freakish excrescence called Expressionism—a whole generation screamed for expression and found it no longer had anything to express. It called for beauty and had no ideal of beauty any more. In a new creative spirit it sought to thrust its way into life and had lost all real power to create. So expression became mannerism; no new power, no new style was evolved; instead, the process of atomisation was continued. Rootless, emotionally adrift, people devoured ‘primitive art’ …²⁸

It is neither fortuitous nor arbitrary that the names of Gundolf/George and Rosenberg, set up by Hitler as the official National Socialist philosopher/historian, should be linked in the same context: Gundolf and George, courted without ultimate success by the National Socialists, who with characteristic eclecticism took from everywhere whatever could be made to serve their purpose, and Rosenberg, representing that wing of National Socialism which saw Expressionism as an integral part of degenerate modern art, come together in endorsing the standard image of the Expressionist poet. The names of Gundolf and Goebbels (much less hostile than Rosenberg to Expressionism) had already been linked in 1920/21 when Goebbels was working on his dissertation (‘The Dramatist Wilhelm von Schütz. A Contribution to the History of the Romantic Drama’) under Gundolf's direction in Heidelberg.

(E) ROBERT MUSIL

Let us avoid big words; we have too frequently seen such words in league with vile deeds: let us not conjure the unconjurable!²⁹

Musil's antipathy toward Expressionism is total and culminates, in Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften, in the figure of the young poet Friedel Feuermaul,³⁰ an amusing parody of the activist philanthropic branch of Expressionism in general and of Werfel in particular. Feuermaul is ‘gifted, young, immature’. He is also a pathetic figure, ‘a little lambkin running to fat before its time’, a careerist for ever mouthing ‘Man is good’ and other bromides, a Messiah, a ‘man of feeling’ not concerned to explain anything by rational argument or reasoned debate, an ‘exponent of the spirit of the times’, a champion of revolutionary views (‘only so long as it doesn't actually come to any sort of revolution’), a man motivated by a profound ‘sentiment towards “the old country” and its mission to mankind’—a sentiment, Musil adds caustically, ‘that would as easily have turned to bringing back the obsolete omnibus with its three-horse team as to propaganda for Viennese porcelain’. Musil's satire is acrimonious and pertinent, for he believes that Feuermaul and poets like him are dangerous. Feuermaul raises huge expectations and claims all sorts of powers, yet, in practice, does nothing except add to universal moral chaos and to what Musil calls ‘the general rubble of futile feelings’. Ultimately, when it matters, when a stand has to be taken, he and the message he brings are useless: he pales beside other characters in the novel, for example the fiercely pragmatic and hard-headed Bremshuber. Through another character, Arnheim, Musil speaks of ‘modern youth's craving for stability and leadership’: Feuermaul arrogates to himself the reins of moral, political and poetic leadership and, in his very small way, joins the ranks of those ‘intellectual dictators’ who Musil, in the 1930s, retrospectively believes have played a disproportionately large and fateful role in Germany's history: ‘Long before the dictators our age brought forth a veneration for intellectual dictators. Think of George, Kraus and Freud, Adler and Jung. Add Klages and Heidegger to the list. The common factor here is probably a need for domination and leadership, for the essential characteristics of the saviour’.³¹

In a series of articles, reviews and essays written between 1912 and 1920, Musil is for ever taking the side of the intellect and rational thinking against passion and emotion. For example, in his 1912 essay ‘Das Geistliche, der Modernismus und die Metaphysik’, he writes scathingly of ‘the soul's attempt to erupt’ and of ‘a shapeless excess of feeling from whose gelatinous mess modernism, too, draws its sustenance’. He reserves his real venom for those ‘sceptics and reformers who dispense with precise thinking and then, with the help of an alleged “emotional intuition”, invent a universal spirit or a cosmic soul or a god to satisfy their temperament or to achieve the “necessary” harmony or to round off their theory of life’. He believes that modern artists have not only renounced precise thinking, but have ceased to think altogether. In a 1913 review entitled ‘Pilgrimage into the Interior’³² he expresses anxiety about the modern writer's preoccupation with metaphysics and mysticism—the review begins ‘Metaphysics is on the increase; woe to anyone who offers shelter to metaphysics! Quest by writers everywhere for God …’. People, he argues, are peculiarly vulnerable at this time (‘… blithe defencelessness in the face of purveyors of doctrines of salvation’), the hawkers of pseudo-mystical panaceas are not accountable to anyone, and feeling is all. In Margarete Susmann's Vom Sinn der Liebe, one of the two books under review, the question ‘Do you love me?’ has been ousted by ‘Do you love?’, the stability of a belief in God by ‘the dispossessed, consistently religious feeling in search of a new Lord’. A great deal of raw and fervent emotion is waiting, homeless and expectant, for the right strong cause.

Musil, like Thomas Mann, regards Expressionism as a force for irrationalism and unchecked emotionality. Expressionism, according to him, feeds into, and is in turn nourished by, the reservoir of hectically expectant public feeling and is symptomatic of what, in Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften, is characterized as ‘the new generation's attack on objectivity. intellectual responsibility and the balanced personality’ (p. 405). Its humanistic-philanthropic attitudes amount to little more than a pathetic gesture, exemplified by the fiasco of the 1918 revolution (‘it lacked even the seriousness with which people turned out to watch the fire-brigade’; p. 630). Musil's particular scorn is reserved for Werfel: his diaries, essays and aphorisms are littered with more or less snide remarks about Werfel whom he regards as a charlatan. Yet, for a time he is at least outwardly close to early Expressionism because of his work on the Leipzig-based periodical Der lose Vogel. His recorded comments on Expressionism are without exception hostile and very dependent on Thomas Mann. There is, however, at least one occasion when Musil writes at length and in his own voice about Expressionism, in a 1921 essay entitled ‘Geist und Erfahrung. Anmerkungen für Leser, welche dem “Untergang des Abendlandes” entronnen sind' (Tagebücher, Aphorismen …, pp. 651-67). Having completed a diagnosis of his age and rehearsed some of the themes which had appeared in his pre-war reviews, he turns to Expressionism:

This age, to give another example of it, has combined with Expressionism to vulgarize and dilute one of art's basic insights because those who sought to introduce spirit (‘Geist’) into poetry were not capable of thinking. They were not capable of it because they think in empty slogans (‘Luftworte’) which lack content, the restraint imposed by empiricism. Naturalism offered reality without spirit, Expressionism spirit without reality: both are un-spirit (‘Ungeist’).

(p. 666)

Lack of true content, lack of regard for practical experience, opposition to Naturalism—these are familiar comments, though they are strikingly well stated. Defective thinking, a fondness for heady bombast, and the primacy given to ‘Geist’—these charges are certainly implied in the four other principal criticisms, but not with Musil's force. What is ‘Geist’? Whole chapters have been devoted to skirmishing with the word's accretions and contradictions,³³ but Musil himself is in no doubt—at least, on the evidence of a letter to Adolf Frisé in January 1931, he is in no doubt that it is composed of reason and feeling and amounts to a mutual interpenetration of both. But for the Expressionist writers it has a mystical, all-purpose, incantatory quality which resides partly in its elusiveness and indefinability as its meaning distends to include irrationality, intuition, spirit, subconscious, passion and intellect, rationality, mind etc … The fundamental credo of Expressionism is that empirical reality is inferior to ‘geistig’ reality, but Musil, too, shares the same credo. He may disapprove of the kind of metaphysics practised by the Expressionist writers, he may come to voice his reservations about contemporary reverence for ‘geistig’ dictators, but he himself is involved in a spiritual quest, a search for some all-embracing ‘geistig’ reality (note how in the above extract, he rejects both Naturalism and Expressionism as ‘Ungeist’) composed of mysticism and reason, punctiliousness and soul, ratio and emotion—a reality which is as difficult to envisage as all the Expressionist blather about ‘essence’ (‘Wesen’). There is very little trace in his Verwirrungen des Zöglings Törless or in Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften of a stringent condemnation of the fastidiously ‘geistig’ protagonists. The Expressionist credo, at all events, culminates in Hiller's loudly proclaimed project of founding a ‘Bund der Geistigen’ in 1918. Various seminal Expressionist works parade the word: Heinrich Mann's Geist und Tat (1910), Kandinsky's Über das Geistige in der Kunst (1912) and Hiller's Tätiger Geist (1917/18) are obvious examples. Ironically, Musil, by employing ‘Geist’ in his critique of Expressionism, is echoing one of the most popular slogans (i.e. ‘Luftworte’) of the day,³⁴ popular not only with Expressionist writers and artists, but also part of the common currency amongst intellectuals like Henry Pachter who, looking back in 1971 to the stance he and people like him adopted in the 1920s, still resorts to this mysterious and untranslatable talisman:

We too were Romantics about the state; we too agreed that the Republic had no Geist; we too lacked real contact with the masses; we too saw ourselves as members of the elite; we too ridiculed the Republic as an ugly thing. We agreed: The Republic had no style.³⁵

It remains to determine whether it is merely another Expressionist ‘Luftwort’ or can stand as a useful and fruitful critical category in any consideration of the movement.

The criticisms assembled in the preceding pages also embrace the principal charges which have been levelled at Expressionism by commentators other than those quoted. Without exception, the criticisms are either directly or indirectly adverse and cast in general terms. The fact that on occasions they can be turned round and directed at the critic's own work or that profound reservations may be expressed about their tone or their terminology does not necessarily diminish their validity or importance. The critical categories can be distilled to: formal arbitrariness and adventitiousness, political irresponsibility culminating in some kind of complicity in the rise of National Socialism, thematic insubstantiality, irrationalism, excessive emotionality, syntactical iconoclasm and heady rhetorical effluvium.

Notes

1. E. Wilson, Axel's Castle (London, 1964), dedication.

2. S. T. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, edited by J. Shawcross, 2 vols (Oxford, 1973), II, 49-50.

3. E. Mühsam, Unpolitische Erinnerungen (Berlin, 1961), p. 12.

4. Letter to Lou Andreas-Salomé, 8 August 1903; Briefe aus den Jahren 1892-1904 (Leipzig, 1939), p. 380.

5. See the letter to Ficker of 8 February 1915; Briefe aus den Jahren 1914-1921 (Leipzig, 1938), pp. 33-35.

6. Quoted in: E. Kolinsky, Engagierter Expressionismus (Stuttgart, 1970), p. 78.

7. Paul Valéry, Variété V (Paris, 1945), p. 131.

8. Rilke (1903-04), quoted in: P. Zech, Rainer Maria Rilke: Der Mensch und das Werk (Dresden, 1930), pp. 113-14.

9. F. Nietzsche, Menschliches, Allzumenschliches II; Nietzsche Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe, edited by G. Colli and M. Montinari, 30 vols (Berlin, 1967-), IV/3, 62. Unless otherwise stated, all quotations from Nietzsche's work will be taken from this edition.

10. G. Benn, ‘Expressionismus’; Gesammelte Werke, I (1959), 246.

11. Thomas Mann, Gesammelte Werke, 13 vols (Frankfurt a.M., 1974), XII, 564.

12. K. Pinthus, ‘Zur jüngsten Dichtung’, Die Weißen Blätter, 2, Heft 12 (July-September 1915), 1503.

13. K. Pinthus, ‘Rede für die Zukunft’, Die Erhebung, 1 (Berlin, 1920), 411.

14. L. Rubiner (ed.), Kameraden der Menschheit (Potsdam, 1919), p. 173.

15. Max Weber, Gesammelte Politische Schriften (Munich, 1921), p. 435.

16. Quoted by G. Hufnagel, Kritik als Beruf. Der kritische Gehalt im Werke Max Webers (Frankfurt a.M., 1971), p. 121.

17. F. Werfel, Zwischen oben und unten (Stockholm, 1946), pp. 361-62. Note this passage is quoted by Joachim Fest in his brilliant Das Gesicht des Dritten Reiches (Munich, 1963), p. 353, to clinch his argument that culture played a part in its own destruction and in the rise of National Socialism.

18. For all these quotations from Mann's ‘Deutsche Ansprache’ see Gesammelte Werke, XI, 876-77.

19. W. Benjamin, ‘Linke Melancholie’, in: Lesezeichen, edited by G. Seidel (Leipzig, 1970), p. 255.

20. Georg Lukács, ‘“Größe und Verfall” des Expressionismus’; Werke, 17 vols (Neuwied and Berlin, 1962-75), IV (1971), 121.

21. ‘“Größe und Verfall”’; Werke, IV, 121.

22. K. Pinthus, ‘Rede für die Zukunft’, p. 419.

23. E. Salin, Um Stefan George (Munich and Düsseldorf, 1954), p. 216.

24. S. George, Blätter für die Kunst, Preface to first series, 1 (1892).

25. Werke, 2 vols (Munich and Düsseldorf, 1958), I, 531-32.

26. M. Durzak, Zwischen Symbolismus und Expressionismus: Stefan George (Stuttgart, Berlin, Cologne and Mainz, 1974).

27. F. Gundolf, George (Berlin, 1920), p. 20.

28. A. Rosenberg, Der Mythus des zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts (Munich, 1930), p. 284.

29. H. Carossa, Ungleiche Welten, in: Sämtliche Werke, 2 vols (Frankfurt a.M., 1962), II, 838.

30. See chapters 36, 37 and 38 of Book 2, third part.

31. R. Musil (1934-37), Tagebücher, Aphorismen, Essays und Reden (Hamburg, 1955), p. 398.

32. To be found in: Die Neue Rundschau, 24 (1913), vol. 1, 588.

33. For a discussion of the word, see Pascal, From Naturalism …, pp. 297-305.

34. Thomas Mann uses the word in his critique of Expressionism, and note how the article from which Musil's critique is extracted is headed ‘Geist und Erfahrung …’.

35. Quoted in: R. G. L. Waite, The Psychopathic God Adolf Hitler (New York, 1977), p. 320.