SOURCE: Nicholls, Peter. “Cruel Structures: The Development of Expressionism.” In Modernisms: A Literary Guide, pp. 136-64. London, England: Macmillan, 1995.

[In the following excerpt, Nicholls focuses on the elements of linguistic and sexual violence in the poetry and drama of the Expressionist period.]

In previous chapters we have seen Paris emerge as a magnetic cultural centre, as the very hub of European modernist activity. Here a sense of energy and dynamism brought art and metropolitan life into powerful association—the Paris of Delaunay was preeminently the city of light, colour, and movement, the city where expanding consumerism had acquired an exciting erotic aura. If that sense of erotic modernity was connected, via the new painting, with an attack on forms of representation, it was above all because the Symbolist preoccupation with desire as the response to loss was now being called into question by the sense of modernity as an experience of plenitude and abundance. In this respect, dynamism and simultaneity expressed what the Russian writers referred to as the ‘self-sufficiency’ of the medium, be it paint, stone, or language. Delaunay's vision of Paris caught exactly that sense of self-sufficiency in its association of non-figurative forms with a vividly coloured expression of energy and confidence.

Yet not all visitors to Paris saw it like this. In a partly autobiographical novel published in 1910, the Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke has his narrator begin with a strikingly gloomy question: ‘People come here, then, to live? I should have thought that they came here to die.’¹ For Rilke's protagonist Malte Laurids Brigge, Paris is a city of poverty and disease—‘I have been out, and I saw hospitals,’ he continues. Malte's view of modernity has more in common with that of Huysmans's Des Esseintes than it does with the erotic fantasies of Cendrars and Apollinaire. For him, the new is threatening and invasive—‘The electric street-cars rage through my room with ringing fury. Automobiles race over me’ (4)—and where this interpenetration of inner and outer spaces might put us in mind of Futurist images like Umberto Boccioni's vibrant The Street Enters the House (1911), for Malte the permeability of self and other is a source of real terror. Not only does this Paris connote the mortality of the body rather than its pleasures, but Malte's isolated existence shows him cut adrift from others. ‘I belonged among the outcasts,’ he concludes, with the sick of the Salpêtrière and with those who, like the man he sees afflicted with St Vitus Dance, experience life as some sort of terrible invasion of the self.

This novel shows no trace of those unanimist fantasies of disembodiment and loss of self in the crowd; Malte finds himself confronting not an exciting future but an exhausted past. Rilke sets his story against the declining fortunes of his protagonist's aristocratic family—Malte is, like Des Esseintes, its last scion—and the complex mood of the novel reminds us that German-language modernism is much less sanguine about the loss of narrative and genealogical continuities than its French and Russian counterparts. As Malte's Notebook shows, the family retains its hold and the new tensions and mutations within it provide the most sensitive register of the condition which is modernity. The family may now be seen as ‘decayed’, as Hanno puts it in Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks (1901),² but it remains the matrix of the conflicting economies which structure the present. In Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Futurist sense of rupture with the past did not figure in the same way, even though by 1914 Germany had become the greatest industrial nation in Europe. The cultural effects of modernisation were felt differently here, as an unstable interpenetration of old and new, with the sentimental, semi-feudal past of conservative and military values drawn into alliance with the brutal realism of new capitalist power. Within German-language modernism, then, there was little libidinal investment in fantasies of technology and urbanism, even though the structures of patriarchal authority which persisted were often felt to be repressive and inhuman.

This was to be the world of Expressionism, and its underlying tension is predicted in Malte's Notebook, where the narrator recalls being comforted by his mother: ‘we remained like this, weeping tenderly and kissing one another, until we felt that Father was there and that we must separate’ (91). A moment of emotional unity is shattered by the arrival of the Father, but in line with the form of the Oedipal drama the moment retains its intensity, thus ensuring ‘the unending reality of my childhood’ (188).³ For Rilke, as for the Expressionists, any dream of a future uncontaminated by the past will be undermined by the narrative frame which attaches to experience: Malte, for example, realises that if ‘I persisted in thinking that my childhood was past, then in that same moment my whole future also vanished’ (188). What is most characteristic of this particular modernism is the way in which this sense of tension between past and present produces a parallel opposition between the social and the aesthetic. Where the French modernists had derived new art-forms from the novel world around them, the German-language writers tended to value a radical aesthetic for its capacity to bring release from a claustrophobic social environment.

The tension is pronounced in Rilke's work, where we find a constant preoccupation with death as the ultimate horizon of the aesthetic. From this perspective, the family is regarded as a powerful nexus of desires and interests which always stands over against the autonomy and inwardness of the art-work. This is the moral of Rilke's version of the story of the Prodigal Son which closes Malte's Notebook, a parable which is here reshaped to become ‘the legend of one who did not want to be loved’ (235). The love of others always changes or ‘consumes’ the one who is loved, such is the text of Rilke's version; and if the Son is able to return after a long absence it is because he has realised that the members of his family do not really know him, for all their protestations of love: ‘What did they know of him? He was now terribly difficult to love, and he felt that One alone was capable of loving him. But he was not yet willing’ (243).

Rilke's preoccupation with the idea of ‘a well-finished death’ (8), which consummates the death we carry within us ‘as a fruit bears its kernel’ (9), links a major decadent theme to a new way of identifying art with death. With the decline of Christianity, the only authentic existence seems to be one which grasps death not just as part of the totality which is life, but as the final objectification of that absence of desire as self-interest which is, for Rilke, the condition of the greatest art. Like other modernists, he finds models for writing in the visual arts—Rodin and Cézanne, in this case—but where Cubism had been drawn to forms of exteriorisation, here the emphasis is very different. In the first Rodin-Book (1902), for example, Rilke explains that ‘This distinguishing characteristic of things, complete self-absorption, was what gave to plastic art its calm; it must have no desire nor expectation beyond itself, nor bear any reference to what lies beyond, nor be aware of anything outside itself.’⁴ Rodin's objects seem to Rilke to embody ‘this turning-inward-upon-oneself, this tense listening to inner depths’⁵ which connote freedom from all desire, ‘the great calm of objects which know no urge’⁶. Yet something more than just the interiorisation of elements of the external world is involved here: for while, as Malte knows, ‘even the unheard-of must become an inward thing’ (70), this becoming-inward allows things to retain their own shape because it is not motivated by desire or possessiveness. In another early piece on Rodin, Rilke imagines occasions

when a bird-call in the open and in his inner consciousness were one, when it did not, as it were, break on the barrier of his body, but gathered both together into an undivided space, in which there was only one region of the purest, deepest consciousness, mysteriously protected.⁷

In contrast to Futurist fantasies of absolute presence, Rilke's ‘undivided space’ is marked by absence, as it maps the passage from outer to inner. This is the principal paradox which lies behind his development from the impressionism of the early poems of The Book of Hours (1905) and The Book of Pictures (1902, 1906) to the New Poems of 1907 and 1908. The ‘new objectivity’ of ‘thing-poems’ (Ding-Gedichte) such as ‘The Panther’ and ‘Archaic Torso of Apollo’ requires an attention not merely to the things themselves, but to the patterns of association which enable the mind to draw objects inward without interfering with them. The effect Rilke pursues here is akin to something he admires in Cézanne's still-life painting: the fruits with which the painter so often worked ‘cease to be edible altogether’, Rilke observes, ‘that's how thinglike and real they become, how simply indestructible in their stubborn thereness’.⁸ We might contrast the similar-sounding sense of ‘thereness’ in Cendrars's work (his emphasis on ‘reality itself’), for in Rilke's case it is not a matter of remarking how the presentness of things eludes language but rather of seeing how that ‘thereness’ can be grasped only in the absence of all desire.⁹

This is the train of thought which will issue in the warning against ‘that hidden, guilty river-god of the blood’ in the Third of the Duino Elegies (written in Paris in 1913), prompting us to ask, perhaps, whether too high a price does not have to be paid for this type of aesthetic perception. Is there not a kind of ultimate cruelty precisely in the withholding of all desire? This is the poet who boasts that ‘I have no beloved, no house, no place where I live’,¹⁰ the advocate of ‘possessionless love’ and one who shares Malte's confused ideas about the poor (‘I know that if one tried to love them, they would weigh upon one’ [201]). Rilke, however, seems to confront the issue in a poem of 1914 called ‘Turning-Point’:

Work of the eyes is done, now
go and do heart-work
on all the images imprisoned within you; for you
overpowered them: but even now you don't know them.(11)

In the great Elegies of the early twenties, this ‘heart-work’ is closely allied to the idea of praising the world, of transforming things into words. In the famous Ninth Elegy, inwardness is elided with the celebratory, not to say hymnic, function of language: ‘For when the traveler returns from the mountain-slopes into the valley, / he brings, not a handful of earth, unsayable to others, but instead / some word he has gained, some pure word, the yellow and blue / gentian.’¹²

The Elegies thus exist in tension with a modernity increasingly tied to modes of objectification—‘Earth, isn't this what you want: to arise within us, / invisible? Isn't it your dream / to be wholly invisible someday?’ The question is asked because language seems increasingly to lack its former intimacy with things; as Rilke put it in a letter to his Polish translator, ‘The lived and living things, the things that share our thoughts, these are on the decline and can no more be replaced.’¹³ This is an effect of modernity and, more specifically perhaps, of ‘the unexperienced nature of technology’, as Heidegger puts it in his discussion of Rilke,¹⁴ a condition in which ‘empty indifferent things … counterfeit things’ can only be restored to intimacy through making them ‘invisible’ within the human medium of language.

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Rilke's work cannot be subsumed under the rubric of Expressionism, though it shares with that strand of German-language modernism a preoccupation with themes of inwardness, loss, death, and the family. Like Rilke, the Expressionists were also closely concerned with the interrelation of writing and the visual arts. ‘Painterly’ questions were thus very much to the fore, and it was with the XXII Berliner Sezession of April 1911 that the term ‘Expressionist’ came into general use; 1911 was also the year in which Reinhard Sorge's play The Beggar was first performed, an occasion which is sometimes taken to mark the beginning of literary Expressionism. As usual, though, we can detect precedents for the movement which was to take shape. A group of Dresden painters known collectively from 1905 as the ‘Bridge’ (Die Brücke), and including Ernst Kirchner, Otto Mueller and Erich Heckel, had explored aggressive effects of colour and a kind of ‘savage’ simplicity of form derived from Gauguin and Van Gogh. The Bridge painters felt a powerful affinity with all types of primitive art, placing a strong emphasis on self-expression through a vigorous use of line and a thematic and emotional association of the sensual and the spiritual.

In Munich, a second group, calling itself the ‘Blue Rider’, took shape in 1911 around the painters Franz Marc and Wassily Kandinsky. This group was also interested in primitive art, but largely at Kandinsky's instigation the work of the Blue Rider was to move in the direction of abstraction and angularity of form (Kandinsky painted what may be the first completely abstract canvas in 1911). The second group also had more to say about the theory behind their painting, and The Blue Rider Almanac (1912) provided an intriguing cross-section of a modernism as eclectic as it was internationally focused. Contributors to the Almanac were keen to stress that their new art would inaugurate a spiritual age no longer tainted by nineteenth-century materialism, and that their modernism would thus renew connections with the art of earlier epochs. So, for example, Franz Marc illustrated his essay on ‘Spiritual Treasures’ with images drawn from a wide range of traditions (they include German woodcuts, Chinese painting, Bavarian Mirror Painting, Picasso's Woman with Mandolin at the Piano, and two drawings by children). This eclecticism is both helpful and unhelpful when it comes to unravelling the complicated origins of Expressionism. On the one hand, it points to a grandness of purpose which situates this avant-garde within a broad Romantic tradition; on the other, it places an emphasis on what Kandinsky calls ‘form’, the outward manifestation of ‘inner need’, as he puts it in his most influential essay, Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1911).¹⁵ For the artist to move away from ‘mere representation’ was, for Kandinsky, to discover—or to re-discover—a spiritual dimension obscured by contemporary materialism.

There was always a danger, of course, that Expressionism might be equated with mere expressivity, since, as one critic puts it, what the new art ‘seeks to render visible … are soul states and the violent emotions welling up from the innermost recesses of the subconscious’.¹⁶ There are several reasons for the Expressionists' preoccupation with violent emotion, first among which was their generally shared view of modernity as a condition of servitude from which humanity must break free. In contrast to the Futurists, these writers and artists were obsessed with the infernal nature of the city, with its subordination of the individual to the mechanistic environments of tenement and factory. In Hermann Bahr's words, Expressionism was a product of ‘the strenuous battle between the soul and the machine for the possession of man’.¹⁷ Subjective emotion seemed to suffer a constant repression, and in its boldness and grandiosity Expressionist art sought to direct that emotion as a transformative energy against social constraints. In practice, Expressionism veered between an often decadent preoccupation with types of spiritual ‘sickness’ and an attempt to harness liberated emotion to this project of social renewal; humanity might thus be regenerated, bourgeois individualism might yield to an active sense of spiritual community, the dawn of the ‘New Man’ may be in sight.

These large-scale objectives led on the aesthetic front to a fundamental opposition of Expressionism to earlier forms of Naturalism and Impressionism. For these writers and artists, Impressionism simply reflected humanity's servitude, projecting the passive image of ‘man lowered to the position of a gramophone record of the outer world’, as Hermann Bahr put it in one of the most famous manifestos of the new movement.¹⁸ Like the Cubists, the Expressionists were interested in arriving at unfamiliar images of the world through calculated modes of distortion, but where the French artists sought some kind of analytic distance and detachment from the objects to which they alluded, the Expressionist emphasis was always on an intensity of perception secured by infusing the world with violent emotion.

For painters like Kandinsky and Marc, colour was a measure of ‘spiritual’ intensity and had little or nothing to do with actual objects, which provided merely a starting-point. As another spokesman for Expressionism put it:

The world is here, it would be meaningless to reproduce it. To seek it out in its last convulsions, its intrinsic essence and to create it anew—that is the greatest meaning of art.¹⁹

We may note the apocalyptic implications here and the ‘convulsive’ energies associated with new creation. Expressionism is, characteristically, committed to an exploration of ‘essence’, penetrating beneath the veil of matter. The result is an art which takes pride in its ‘self-sufficiency’, grasping the outward world as merely ‘a stimulus to improvise in colour and form’, as Arnold Schönberg noted of Kandinsky and Oskar Kokoschka.²⁰ At the same time, though, the Expressionist painters stressed the importance of ‘inner meaning’, to use Kandinsky's phrase, a meaning which expressed spiritual intensity and thereby avoided the ‘trap’ of Cubist formalism. While the changing styles of Picasso and Braque would develop in the general direction of mastery and analysis, the Expressionists used primitive and naive forms as models for an art which sought a return to origin, to the instinctual and ostensibly ‘innocent’ springs of expression.

This trope of a ‘return’ reminds us once again of Expressionism's divergence from the main preoccupations of Futurism, a divergence all the more surprising in view of Marinetti's apparent success in promoting the movement in Germany. Two exhibitions including Italian painting were in fact held in 1912, the second attracting particular attention as it made its way from Berlin to Cologne, Munich, Karlsruhe and Dresden. Six Futurist manifestos were published in Der Sturm between March 1912 and March 1913, and Marinetti—here nicknamed ‘Marionetti’—gave a reading of his work in Berlin in the Spring of 1913.²¹ Yet for all this exposure (even a volume of Marinetti's poems appeared in German), few writers joined the Futurist camp. The anti-humanist thrust of the Italian movement was fundamentally at odds with the psychological and political preoccupations of Expressionism, and if the two avant-gardes had any common ground it amounted to little more than a shared fascination with art as an expression of energy (one contemporary American critic spoke aptly of German ‘explosionism’²²).

Of the Expressionist poets, only August Stramm sought to develop Marinetti's words-in-freedom as a kind of ‘telegram style’ based on a concatenation of nouns. In Stramm's hands, though, the technique yielded rather different results, with ‘clenched’ strings of participles and nouns creating moments of macabre intensity. Poems like ‘Melancholy’, for example, which register Stramm's wartime experience, record a world for which previous maps, syntactical and otherwise, are painfully obsolete:

Striding striving
living longs
shuddering standing
glances look for
dying grows
the coming
screams!
Deeply
we
dumb.(23)

Of the Expressionist poets, Stramm was, however, the only one to carry experimentalism so far, and for the most part the violence of the new writing was more a matter of imagery and content than of linguistic ‘distortion’. One of the first poems of the Expressionist wave, Jakob van Hoddis's ‘End of the World’ (1911), set the tone for much that was to follow. The first stanza evokes great winds and rising waters, and in the second, concluding one, we read:

The storm has come, the seas run wild and skip
Landwards, to squash big jetties there.
Most people have a cold, their noses drip.
Trains tumble from the bridges everywhere.(24)

The form is regular enough, and, as Michael Hamburger notes, the novelty of the poem resides mainly in its shifting viewpoint and its collaging of disparate elements.²⁵ The tone has a quality of lugubrious excitement which is typical of Expressionist writing and which colours the urban landscapes of so many of these poems.

Depravity lurks everywhere in the Expressionist city, peopled as it is by beggars, prostitutes and murderers. The mood of urban degeneration and apocalypse can lead, as in the poems of Georg Heym, to feelings of despair and doom, or, as in some of Ernst Stadler's work, to a sense of a new beginning.²⁶ What is common to the early Expressionist poets, though, is the sense of cultural emergency which makes personal anguish invest the larger scene. The loudness of such writing—both literal and figurative—constantly stresses the need for a return to that which is primal in humanity, a shedding of cultural inhibition in the name of the naked ‘cry’ (Schrei) rather than the ‘intellectual’ word. Such poetry is perhaps best taken in small doses, partly because of the strain imposed by its favourite devices of exclamation and repetition, but also because its cosmic ambitions lead to a calculated abstractness of theme. The subject headings of the principal anthology of Expressionist verse, Karl Pinthus's The Twilight of Humanity (1920), are revealing in this respect: ‘decline and cry’, ‘the awakening of hearts’, ‘proclamation and revolt’, ‘the love of humanity’.²⁷ Published in 1920, the anthology encapsulates the two main phases of Expressionism: the first, running from 1911 to 1914, when the central concern is with themes of death and decline, and the second, from 1914 through to 1920, charting the phase of political or messianic Expressionism, which was finally wrecked on the failure of the November Revolution of 1918.

The major poetry of the movement was produced in the first phase, with many of its most significant talents—Stadler, Georg Heym, Alfred Lichtenstein, and Georg Trakl—perishing in the War. Of these, the Austrian poet Georg Trakl was the most important, as he was the most equivocal, figure. Pinthus published ten of his poems in the Twilight anthology, though Trakl's work is altogether quieter and ostensibly more passive in tone than the familiar declamatory mode of Expressionist writing. Trakl's poem called ‘Occident’ is thus somewhat unusual in the apocalyptic imagery of its final stanza (‘Gruesome sunset red / is breeding fear / in the thunderclouds. / You dying peoples!’²⁸); more customary is the gloomy landscape elsewhere in the poem, with its imagery of the ‘rocky path’, the ‘evening pond’ and ‘nocturnal shadows’—a landscape haunted by a mythical figure called Elis. The motif of decline is everywhere in Trakl's verse, though it is generally evoked through a psychic landscape rather than being voiced rhetorically. The quality of inwardness in these poems is arguably more extreme than any we have looked at so far, though in contrast to mainstream Expressionism it is not the product of overt emotional pressure, of the exterior world distorted by a projected intensity. Trakl's poems disturb, rather, because any sense of a shared external reality seems to have been lost.

The characteristic mood is an autumnal one, the present tense of the poem poised between fading memories of an idyllic past and intimations of darkness and decay to come. The loud Expressionist ‘I’ is rarely in evidence—in fact Trakl described his work as an attempt ‘to subordinate myself unconditionally to the object to be represented’²⁹—and the burden of emotion resides almost wholly in a repertoire of recurring images. ‘Evening Song’ will provide an example:

Walking along dark paths in the evening,
Our pale shapes appear before us.
When we are thirsty,
We drink the white waters of the pool,
The sweetness of our mournful childhood.
Dead, we rest beneath the elder bushes,
Watching the grey gulls.
Spring clouds rise over the dark city
Silenced by monks of nobler times.
When I took your slender hands
You opened your soft round eyes.
That was a long time ago.
Yet when a darker melody visits the soul,
You appear, white, in your friend's autumn landscape.(30)

The poem is striking partly on account of its shifting perspectives. The two ‘friends’ appear first as ‘pale forms’, which may suggest either a trick of the evening light or that they are ghosts. With the third stanza we are told that they are dead (erstorbene), and the perspective then changes again to give an image of Spring against the ‘dark city’, which could be either regenerative or destructive. The tense now shifts to the past, linking a moment of shared emotion with ‘the monks of nobler times’. The final stanza, with its suggestion that the friend (the ‘white’ one associated still with childhood) will reappear whenever a ‘dark’ (or ‘gloomy’, dunkler) ‘harmony haunts the soul’, makes another temporal shift, implying that the present tense of the opening lines is that of fantasy.

The combination of dark and light imagery in association with these ideas of childhood suggests that the perception of the past is somehow double, ambivalent. Trakl's work returns obsessively to a moment of loss which is generally understood in terms of his incestuous desire for his sister; ‘Evening Song’ was in fact part of a textual complex later refashioned as the long poem ‘Helion’, a work which connects the poet's ‘madness’ with the loss of his sister to marriage with an older man (‘A pale angel / The son steps into the empty house of his fathers / The sisters have gone far away to white old men’³¹). The poems pull constantly into the past of remembered experience, back to the ‘dark stillness of childhood’³², though the contrasting imagery of whiteness and paleness, associated with the conjoint figure of ‘a dying youth, the sister’,³³ suggests that behind this lies what Heidegger, in his account of Trakl, calls ‘the earliness of stiller childhood’.³⁴ This seems to be the burden of the prose poem ‘Dream and Derangement’, where the narrator's childhood is recalled as ‘full of sickness, dread and sullen darkness’. Yet running through this text are intermittent references to ‘the white form of an angel’ and to ‘the starry face of purity’ which contrast with the ‘dark rooms’ of the guilt-laden family tradition (‘O blighted race, accursed genealogy’).

These images refer to an impossible time before guilt, a time before the crime which seems to initiate an Oedipal history (‘when in the flourishing summer garden he raped the quiet child, and reflected in the afterglow, saw that profound darkness, his own face’³⁵). This moment of violence, real or imagined, inaugurates the rule of sexual difference, and the insistent figures of decline and descent in the poems, associated even as they are with evening and autumn, evoke a return to some primal oneness. In ‘Western Song’, for example:

O the bitter hour of decline,
When we regard a stony face in black waters.
But radiant the lovers raise their silver eyelids:
One kin. From rosy pillows incense pours
And the sweet canticle of the bodies resurrected.(36)

‘Ein Geschlecht’: ‘one kin’, but the word has a range of interconnected meanings, ‘sex, genre, family, state, race, lineage, generation’.³⁷ As Heidegger observes, a weight of emphasis attaches to ‘one’ in these lines, evoking ‘The force which marks the tribes of mankind as the simple oneness of “one generation,” and thus restores them and mankind to the stiller childhood’, to ‘the stiller onefold simplicity of childhood [in which] is hidden also the kindred twofoldness of mankind’.³⁸

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The full articulation of this theme in Trakl's work is too complex to be pursued here, but his fantasy of a ‘stiller childhood’ which does not yet know the ‘curse’ of genealogy and sexual difference is one which also governed the development of Expressionist theatre. In fact the play usually taken to inaugurate Expressionist drama, Kokoschka's Murderer, Hope of Women (1907), is a macarbre exploration of the negative power of sexuality, here understood in terms of a violent struggle of man against woman.³⁹ When Kokoschka's play was first performed in 1909, at a small outdoor theatre in Vienna, there were riotous scenes as soldiers fought with members of the audience. While these violent confrontations may have had no direct relation to the play, they accorded well enough with the electric atmosphere Kokoschka was trying to create. The players' faces bore heavily made-up mask-like expressions, while veins and muscles were vividly painted on their arms and legs. The stage-setting itself was at once starkly simple and dramatically coloured:

Night sky. Tower with large red grille as door; torches the only light; black ground, rising to the tower in such a way that all the figures appear in relief.

As the play opens, a warlord enters, followed by a group of men; almost immediately a woman appears with her female attendants. The Woman is transfixed by sexual desire: ‘Why do you bind me, man, with your gaze?’, she cries, ‘Devouring life overpowers me. O take away my terrible hope—and may torment overpower you.’ The Man's response is to order his attendants to brand her as his possession—an old man steps forward, tears open her dress and marks her with a hot iron. In her pain and fury the Woman springs at the Man, wounding him in the side with her knife. It seems that the wound will be fatal, for the Man is placed in a coffin behind the bars of the tower. But while the rival factions of men and women now begin to sport in the shadows, the Woman is inconsolable. ‘She creeps around the cage like a panther’, trying to awaken the Man (she ‘prods his wound, hissing maliciously, like an adder’). Suddenly, though, there is a crowing of cocks, and the Man seems to revive. In a bizarre tableau, the ‘Woman covers him entirely with her body; separated by the grille, to which she clings high up in the air like a monkey’. A terrible struggle now takes place, the Man finally draining the Woman's strength (‘you vampire, piecemeal you feed on me, weaken me’). With a ‘slowly diminishing scream’ she expires, leaving the Man to wreak havoc on the male and female attendants.

CHORUS:
The devil! Tame him, save yourselves, save yourselves if you can—all is lost!
He walks straight towards them. Kills them like mosquitoes and leaves red behind. From very far away, crowing of cocks.

Perhaps not surprisingly, this curiously ugly play—or, more precisely, theatrical event (it runs to only a few pages of text)—is often regarded as a forerunner of Expressionist drama, and its subsequent ‘revivals’ show that it continued to occupy a place in the later repertoire.⁴⁰ Even my brief sketch of the play's action should indicate its proto-Expressionist qualities. Naturalistic psychology is jettisoned in favour of an extreme stylisation, and Kokoschka builds the play around a sequence of emotional intensities rather than according to a clear narrative logic. These intensities are coupled with a primitivism of setting and emotion which gives this conflict of the sexes the quality of a primal scene. As if to reinforce this sense of the primitive and its displacement of social by sexual conflict, the play foregrounds non-textual effects of gesture and mise en scène. The acting style demanded by the play prefigures that ‘convulsive equation of body and soul’⁴¹ which was to become the mark of Expressionist performance and which produced the notorious staccato sound-effects of ‘scream-theatre’ [Schreidrama]. In Murderer, there is a high-pitched lyricism which approximates to ‘singing higher and higher, soaring’;⁴² indeed, the primacy of sound over meaning becomes the very mark of the violence and excessiveness of desire.

This connection between sexual violence and a kind of formal ‘excess’ epitomises that aspect of Expressionism which would prove least assimilable to Anglo-American notions of modernism. T. S. Eliot's idea of an ‘objective correlative’ is a useful way of gauging the difference, especially since the term derives from a consideration of a dramatic work, Shakespeare's Hamlet. The famous definition is as follows:

The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an ‘objective correlative’; in other words, a set of objects, a chain of events, which shall be the formula of that particular emotion.⁴³

It is this ‘correlative’ which Hamlet apparently lacks, the play failing to ensure the ‘complete adequacy of the external to the emotion’. On closer scrutiny we find that Eliot's idea that the play ‘is like the sonnets, full of some stuff that the writer could not drag to light, contemplate, or manipulate into art’ is closely bound up with an anxiety about the feminine as fundamentally intractable to representation.⁴⁴ Eliot's commitment to ‘objectification’ points up the dissociation between inner and outer, subjective and objective, which is central to his conception of art's power to transmute the primitive ‘stuff’ of emotion. In producing a ‘formula’ for the emotion, art is able to constrain that ‘bodily’ affect which he tends to associate with a kind of pathology.⁴⁵

Now, as the example of Kokoschka's Murderer will show, the priorities of Expressionist drama are very different from those which govern Eliot's reading of Hamlet. In this new theatre we find that narrative indeterminacy and the hyperbolic pitch of emotion conspire to unsettle and exceed representation. Where, for Eliot, sexuality seems to threaten a moment of pure self-presence which blocks Oedipal resolution and escapes formulation in the differential medium of language (sound is dangerously privileged over meaning), in Expressionist drama a certain negativity attaches to sexuality, not because it is intractable to the ‘chain’ of representation but because it is already bound by it. To put it another way, sexuality here always exists within a structure, whether it be one of violent opposition or the Oedipal triangle itself.

So we find in Murderer a kind of imbalance between the perennial ‘battle of the sexes’—a structure determined above all by narrative and repetition—and a countervailing use of dramatic effects to elide distinctions between inner and outer, self and other, so as to dissolve the symbolic in moments of pure ‘bodily’ affect. Eliot's representational ‘chain’ of objects and events is, in fact, precisely what the excessive modes of Expressionist drama seek to disrupt, for to be bound by this ‘chain’ is to be bound by the law of secondariness—a law which the new theatre constantly strives to violate in its struggle to establish itself as pure ‘event’ rather than as narrative, as ‘scream’ rather than speech. The difficulty we may have in interpreting Murderer thus stems mainly from the way in which Kokoschka employs a range of formal intensities which are deliberately (in Eliot's phrase) ‘in excess of the facts’. Light, sound, gesture, a strangely overdetermined symbolism—these elements create a slippage of meaning which substitutes spectacle for narrative. Are we, for example, to explain the ugliness of the play in terms of that misogyny which seems to pervade Expressionist writing, or is narrative indeterminacy a clue to subtler contradictions of attitude?

There are few close interpretations of Murderer, but even these are divided by some fundamental disagreements. Perhaps the most straightforward reading of the play is that given by Frank Whitford: ‘the male, threatened by the woman's sexual desire, regains his strength by killing her’.⁴⁶ But if the play expresses a triumphant misogyny, why does it end, as two other critics have observed, on a note of pessimism and foreboding?⁴⁷ And to make matters worse, Kokoschka's own comments on the play tend to complicate rather than resolve problems of interpretation. In a letter of 1931, for example, he refers to Murderer as ‘my expressionistic dawn chorus, sung in honour of an anonymous Penthesilea’,⁴⁸ and in an essay of 1935 (‘On Experience’) he describes the play as striking ‘a blow against the thoughtlessness of our male civilization with my fundamental notion that man is mortal and woman immortal, and that only the murderer tries to reverse this basic fact in the modern world’.⁴⁹ In his autobiography, however, Kokoschka describes the famous poster advertising the play in rather different terms: ‘The man is blood-red, the colour of life. But he is lying in the lap of a woman who is white, the colour of death.’⁵⁰

These apparent contradictions arise because Murderer actually focuses less on gender oppositions than on something violent and contradictory which undercuts them and appears as sexuality itself. This at any rate seems to be the implication of other remarks in the autobiography, where sexual conflict is linked with those ‘Greek ideas of Eros and Thanatos’ which are ‘the counterparts of progress and enlightenment’, ideas which, according to Kokoschka, he derived from the work of J. J. Bachofen and Robert Briffault:

one thing was certain: the instinct for self-preservation which begins with the first movement in the womb and ends in death. … Fear makes for inactivity, but behind that shadow of Thanatos, which had dogged me from my childhood onwards, there lurked the ever more enticing abyss of Eros. Here, in this new existence to which I began to seek the key, is perhaps the secret of my first stage play, Mörder, Hoffnung der Frauen.⁵¹

In contrast to the superficially similar polemics of Italian Futurism against the ‘feminine’, Kokoschka locates a certain irredeemable negativity within sexuality itself (Eros is inextricably intertwined with Thanatos).

This line of thought clearly has its place in that view of ‘the deathly hatred of the sexes’⁵² which had already received definitive expression in the work of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, but it does not solve completely the problem of the play's title. Why should Man as Murderer be the ‘hope of Women’? To conclude simply that Murderer ends with ‘the victorious male passing through all who stand in his way’⁵³ is not only to miss the final association of Man with death, but also to underestimate the extent to which the flamboyant experimentalism of the play is, at one level, an effect of ‘excessive’ female desire.

One solution lies in Otto Weininger's Sex and Character, first published in 1903 and a work with which Kokoschka was almost certainly familiar. In this hugely influential book (twelve editions were published between May 1903 and May 1910), Weininger combined cultural evaluation with pseudo-science to create a sprawling monument to misogyny and antisemitism. Woman, for Weininger, is ‘nothing but sexuality … she is sexuality itself’.⁵⁴ In attempting to argue this case, Weininger assembles the main elements of traditional misogyny but gives them a polemical twist of his own: if woman's inferiority results from her failure to ‘overcome the sexuality that binds her’ (279), she can only be raised from her lowly status by the intervention of man, who, by denying her sexual fulfilment, will open for her the way to a new transcendence. Wagner's Kundry is, for Weininger, ‘probably the most perfect representation of woman in art’ (319) because she submits to the redemptive force of ‘a sinless, immaculate man—Parsifal’ (344).

Not surprisingly, perhaps, it has been suggested that Sex and Character can be read almost as an early Expressionist manifesto,⁵⁵ not least because of its habit of linking violence with regeneration. ‘Love’, says Weininger, ‘is murder. The sexual impulse destroys the body and mind of the woman, and the psychical eroticism destroys her psychical existence’ (249). But if ‘sexual union … is allied to murder’ (248), the act of desired ‘regeneration’ is also linked to death: ‘she must certainly be destroyed, as woman; but only to be raised again from the ashes’ (345). Weininger's unpleasant but influential fantasies may thus explain Kokoschka's title and the withholding of sexuality, which is the play's major theme, but questions still remain to be answered. Woman, for Weininger, is incapable of conceptual thought or self-knowledge. She lives an ‘unconnected, discontinous’ life and represents ‘negation, the opposite pole of Godhead’ (146). Throughout the book, Weininger categorises the feminine as the realm of the body and the unconscious, and it is this aspect of his polemic which is directed at the ‘feminised’ and decadent art of the Secession, an art which, in privileging the ‘material’ values of sound and ornament, allegedly obstructs the conceptual clarity of male thought.⁵⁶ ‘A being like the female, without the power of making concepts, is unable to make judgments. In her “mind” subjective and objective are not separated’ (194); ‘It is the conception which brings freedom from the eternally subjective’ (192).

Here we can begin to see just how equivocal Weininger's influence was for the Expressionists, for their whole project was founded on a revaluation of subjectivity and its ‘visionary’ capabilities. An early essay by Kokoschka, for example, ‘On the Nature of Visions’, directly opposes any Weiningerian claims for ‘logic’: ‘The consciousness of visions is not a mode of perceiving and understanding existing objects. It is a condition in which we experience the visions themselves.’⁵⁷ Kokoschka goes on to claim that

This consciousness of visions has a life which derives power from itself. This power freely organizes visions whether complete or barely perceptible irrespective of how they relate to each other, and in complete independence of temporal or spatial logic.

(98)

As that last phrase suggests, verbal expression operates here according to very different criteria from those of Weininger:

Thus we have to listen with complete attention to our inner voice in order to get past the shadows of words to their very source. ‘The Word became flesh and dwelt among us.’ And then the inner source frees itself, sometimes vigorously, sometimes feebly, from the words within which it lives like a charm.

(99)

To experience ‘visions’ is ‘[t]o be possessed’, and Kokoschka uses a striking analogy to describe its effect: ‘Suddenly an image will take shape for us, like the first look, like the first shriek of a child, newborn, coming from its mother's womb’ (100).

Kokoschka's essay demonstrates the way in which Expressionism could assimilate Weininger's negative view of sexuality while at the same time exploiting those very non-conceptual qualities which he had derided as ‘feminine’ and anti-modern. An explanation for this lies in the essay's vocabulary of ‘source’ and ‘origin’, which points back towards primal intensities which pre-exist a modern sexuality contaminated by repetition and commodification; for early Expressionism is indelibly marked by the fin de siècle fascination with the figure of the prostitute and by that ‘“mechanistic” and sadistic imagination which separates love from a modern eroticism without aura’.⁵⁸ Kokoschka's reference to child-birth suggests a contrasting network of associations, linking the new and visionary with the pre-discursive and pre-Oedipal in a movement which seeks to rediscover the lost aura within artistic form itself. The connection with the maternal and (in Lacan's sense) the Imaginary not only runs counter to Weiningerian ‘logic’, but also suggests a domain which is unavailable to linguistic expression and which exists prior to structures of gender and family.

From this point of view it is perhaps not fortuitous that the earliest exponents of an Expressionist theatre, Kokoschka and Wassily Kandinsky, were both painters. Kokoschka's association of the visionary with a fantasy of uterine return certainly informs much painterly theory in this period, as we can see from the Blue Rider Almanac and the writings of artist Paul Klee. This is how Klee puts it in On Modern Art:

Chosen are those artists who penetrate to that secret place where primeval power nurtures all evolution. There, where the powerhouse of all time and space—call it brain or heart of creation—activates every function; who is the artist who would not dwell there? In the womb of nature, at the source of creation, where the secret key to all lies guarded.⁵⁹

For the dramatist, Klee's ‘secret place’ might arguably be the point at which narrative structure suddenly yields to dramatic event, the point at which theatre seems to attain an ‘impossible’ freedom from the trace of externality.

Yet as we can see from the late plays of Strindberg, commonly regarded as the precursors of Expressionism proper, this fantasy of origin and presence is constantly threatened by the transcendental pull of theatricality itself, a structure of re-presentation working tirelessly to absorb affective intensity and the movement of desire. Strindberg, too, was a keen admirer of Weininger, but the impact of Sex and Character on his theatre prefigured the Expressionist twist later given to this set of ideas: for while he fully endorsed Weininger's anti-feminism, the dream-like structure of his own ‘station-dramas’ [Stationendramen] had a surprising affinity with Weininger's contemptuous description of woman's life as ‘discrete, unconnected, discontinuous, swayed by the perceptions of the moment instead of dominating them’ (146).⁶⁰

In a well-known preface to A Dream Play (1901), Strindberg outlines the technique at work here and in the earlier To Damascus (Parts I and II 1898):

Everything can happen, everything is possible and probable. Time and place do not exist; on an insignificant basis of reality the imagination spins, weaving new patterns; a mixture of memories, experiences, free fancies, incongruities and improvisations. The characters split, double, multiply, evaporate, condense, disperse, assemble.⁶¹

Yet Strindberg's description, which bears a strong resemblance to Freud's later account of the ‘primary process’,⁶² is in marked contrast to one of the major themes of To Damascus (and, indeed, of A Dream Play and Ghost Sonata), the theme of repetition. ‘Why does everything recur?’ asks the Stranger at the beginning of Part I, and as the plays unfold it becomes increasingly clear that sexuality and its domestic scene (the ‘inferno’ of Strindberg's life and art) are marked by interminable struggle. The Lady and the Stranger endlessly torment each other, as Strindberg evokes what is described in A Dream Play as ‘the fairest of things, which is the bitterest: love, a wife and a home; the best thing, and the worst’ (584). This drama is ultimately less a matter of ‘weaving new patterns’ than of concluding that, in the words of the Advocate, ‘We must torture each other, then. What makes one happy, torments the other’ (588). Sexuality here becomes ‘the worst thing’, standing as ‘Repetition. Repeating the pattern’ (606).

While there is a kind of heroism ultimately claimed in the knowledge that, as the Daughter concludes in A Dream Play, ‘Strife between opposites generates power, just as fire and water generate steam’ (629), the only real but intermittent hope lies elsewhere. In To Damascus, for example, the Stranger awakens in the Lady ‘a feeling of motherhood which I had never known before’ (201), and he confesses that ‘I longed to sleep at a mother's breast’ (204), a wish momentarily granted later in the play (‘Come, my child, and I will repay the debt I owe you. On my lap I shall rock you to peace’ [224]). It is therefore not by chance that this desire to return to the mother, to an original plenitude which precedes all repetitive strife, is articulated in a dramatic form in which the ‘spinning’ play of imagination and improvisation seeks to undermine the structure of representation. Indeed, this seems a decisive clue to some of the concerns of early Expressionism, opposing sexuality, as structure and repetition, to the ‘timeless’, non-sexual love of mother and child. If the episodic, dream-like form of Strindberg's late plays offers a model for a modernist drama, it is perhaps because it strives to couple the non-representational with a fantasy of fullness not predicated upon a lack or absence. In dramatic terms, then, the dream of the Mother is also the dream of a theatre with no ‘outside’, a theatre sufficient to itself and freed from the tyranny of both external reality and textual authority.

Kokoschka's Murderer seems to engage directly with these ideas and in so doing to test the limits of the dramatic medium itself. As several critics have observed, and as Kokoschka himself made clear in his autobiography, a decisive influence on his early work was J. J. Bachofen's Mother Right (1861).⁶³ The importance of Bachofen's thesis—it had a strong impact on writers as diverse as Nietzsche, Hauptmann, Klages, Rilke, Mann and Kafka⁶⁴—lay in its imaginative account of three main phases of human development: the ‘hetaerist-aphroditic’ phase, characterised by female promiscuity and symbolised by the wild vegetation of the swamp; the Demetrian phase of mother-love and a settled, agricultural society; and finally the phase of father-right, of individual property and the division of labour. Bachofen concluded that ‘Matriarchy is followed by patriarchy and preceded by unregulated hetaerism.’⁶⁵

This evolutionary process might lie behind the attenuated narrative of Murderer, though Kokoschka hardly shares Bachofen's optimistic view of ‘[t]he progress from the maternal to the paternal conception of man’.⁶⁶ If Eros precedes or lies behind Thanatos, as Kokoschka suggests in his autobiography, the Man's final victory seems to represent the triumph of the deathly principle of patriarchal law, a principle governing desire and external to it. In the ‘A text’ of Murderer, the moment when the Woman covers the Man with her body is initially one of maternal affection—‘Who nourishes me?’ the Man cries, ‘Who suckles me with blood? I devour your melting flesh’⁶⁷—but as the lurid allusions to vampirism indicate, the ‘iron chains’ of male desire can no longer be resisted. In the ensuing massacre, Kokoschka again hints through the sound of the cock-crow (the sign that Peter will betray Christ) that we have entered the age of theology and transcendence.

In the echo of that symbolic cock-crow, Murderer seems to perform a complex interrogation of the dramatic medium, its prefiguring of Expressionist modes bound up with a desire for the pre-figurative which defines an impossible and absolute theatricality. Indeed, the association here of closure with some form of patriarchal law recalls Jacques Derrida's rather similar sense of a theatrical ‘evolution’:

The origin of theater, such as it must be restored, is the hand lifted against the abusive wielder of the logos, against the father, against the God of a stage subjected to the power of speech and the text.⁶⁸

Derrida analyses Antonin Artaud's ‘theatre of cruelty’ as an attempt to escape repetition and the law of representation. Artaud's ‘writing of the body’, an ideal ‘language without trace’ (175), seeks to evade the absent authority of ‘a primary logos which does not belong to the theatrical site and governs it from a distance’ (235).

Artaud's is an ‘impossible’ theatre, founded, as Derrida observes, not only on an ideal of linguistic ‘non-difference’ but on a related fantasy of pure self-presence which abolishes Oedipal structure:

Restored to its absolute and terrifying proximity, the stage of cruelty will thus return me to the autarchic immediacy of my birth, my body and my speech. Where has Artaud better defined the stage of cruelty than in Here Lies, outside any apparent reference to the theater: ‘I, Antonin Artaud, am my son / my father, my mother / and myself’?

(190)

Artaud may be the best-known exponent of these claims for an ‘absolute’ theatre, but the Expressionists, too, dreamed of a drama which might be said to ‘shelter an indestructible desire for full presence, for nondifference: simultaneously life and death’ (194). Yet the theatre is, as Derrida observes, an exemplary instance of the general rule by which ‘all destructive discourses … must inhabit the structures they demolish’ (194).

That parodoxical condition, endlessly affirming difference and exteriority, is the object of ritual confrontation in Expressionist drama, a confrontation staged (as we see in Murderer) between two theatrical limits: on the one hand, there is a theatre prefiguring the ideal of Artaud in its search for an immediate, pre-discursive reality; on the other, there is a drama endlessly preoccupied with Oedipal structure and with an ideal of transcending it (the theme of the ‘New Man’ which figures so prominently in the later theatre of Expressionism). That we should find few pure instances of either type both supports Derrida's case and reflects the peculiarly hybrid nature of so many Expressionist plays.

Of the first form of Expressionist theatre Kandinsky's The Yellow Sound (1909) is almost the only ‘pure’ example.⁶⁹ This brief dramatic event comprises six scenes or ‘Pictures’ (Bilder), as Kandinsky calls them. As that term suggests, the text of the play is not so much a script as a series of directions for movements, coloured lighting and musical effects. We are given few clues to the meaning of the ‘characters’ here (they comprise Five Giants, Vague Creatures, a Child, a Man, People in Flowing Robes, People in Tights, a Chorus, and a Tenor (backstage). There seems to be some sort of progression from the indeterminate to the human, with timeless space giving way to recognisable objects, and it may be that the play has a utopian theme linked to Kandinsky's concept of spiritual form: ‘This white ray leads to evolution, to elevation. Behind matter, within matter, the creative spirit is hidden.’⁷⁰ Ultimately, though, the play claims our attention less on account of some hidden narrative than for its radical break with the conventions of nineteenth-century drama, condemned by Kandinsky for remaining ‘under the spell of external events’.⁷¹ In contrast, The Yellow Sound, he suggests, ‘finally consists of the complex of inner experiences (soul = vibrations) of the audience’.⁷²

Kandinsky's play was, in fact, never performed, and perhaps for that reason the text published in the Blaue Reiter Almanac came to represent an extreme of experimentalism. It was an extreme, however, which subsequent Expressionist drama would only fitfully explore, for Kandinsky had moved far toward that apparently pre-linguistic ‘ground’ (Urgrund) of experience where all structure seemed about to dissolve in a play of purely physical effects:

The word, independent or in sentences, was used to create a certain ‘atmosphere’ that frees the soul and makes it receptive. The sound of the human voice was also used pure, i.e., without being obscured by words, or by the meaning of words.⁷³

Colour was therefore of primary importance to this project, producing ‘irrational pictorial spaces’ which allowed a kind of ‘spiritual’ or psychic mobility, a freedom from determinate social and psychic structures.⁷⁴

If Kandinsky's play in some sense anticipates what André Green has termed in another context a post-Freudian theatre,⁷⁵ the major plays of fully-fledged Expressionism are dominated by the imperatives of structure, and specifically by the binding forms of the Oedipal plot. Not only does sexuality imply ineluctable repetition, as in Strindberg and Kokoschka, but its controlling network of desires is deeply embedded within the family narrative. Here the Father returns to exercise control, governing theatrical expression either directly or ‘at a distance’, and while plays of filial rebellion, such as Walter Hasenclever's The Son (1914), strive to create a final, liberating sense of independence, this amounts in practice to little more than a familiar avant-garde fantasy of self-authoring.

Although critics have tended to disregard the determinism of psychological structure in Expressionist theatre,⁷⁶ it is not just the sensational cases like Sorge's The Beggar, Hasenclever's The Son or Arnolt Bronnen's Parricide (1915) which bring to the fore the Oedipal conflict between father and son. Bronnen's play, in which the son kills his father and is then wooed by his naked mother, may provide the most luridly memorable handling of the theme, but the family narrative is, in fact, everywhere in Expressionist theatre, working its effects in plays as diverse as Hanns Johst's The Young Man (1916), Fritz von Unruh's A Family (1916), and Georg Kaiser's From Morning to Midnight (1916).

One reason why critics have tended to underestimate the determining power of the Oedipal plot is that the recurring motifs of rebellion and parricide gesture towards a new independence, a freedom from the constraints of the past and the family, and accession to the status of ‘new man’. This utopian attempt to refigure masculinity in terms of a transcendence of social roles caught in the Oedipal net is clearly expressed in an influential manifesto by Kasimir Edschmid:

Each person is no longer simply an individual bound by duty, morality, society and family. In this art, each becomes the most elevated and the most deplorable of things: becomes a human being.⁷⁷

Such, then, is the dream of a new beginning (Aufbruch) which animates Expressionist drama, a recreation of the self which aims to purge it of any contact with the past, and, specifically, with the Father. For in these plays the force of repetition is derived from the law of the Father, and freedom can be found only in a regeneration equivalent to Artaud's idea of self-birth. The attempt to free theatre from mimesis is thus inextricably bound up with the generational struggle against paternity: representation is at once a theatrical mode which disastrously situates repetition at the heart of performance and that genealogical chain by which a son is bound to represent his father. Yet, as Richard Sheppard has shown in a discussion of four of these plays, ‘the iron law that sons must succeed their fathers’ is one which, finally, it is impossible to break. Each of these plays is, he concludes, ‘caught in the classic double bind of castration by a yet secret dependence upon a more or less sadistic but absent Father’.⁷⁸

As for the theme of salvation so much emphasised in readings of these plays (and, for example, in Hasenclever's description of The Son as ‘the revolt of the spirit against reality’⁷⁹), Sheppard concludes that

No sooner does an ‘anoedipal’ drive manifest itself in the plays, than it is assimilated into the Oedipal chain of lack and dependence, rendered harmless by being allowed to exhaust itself in aggression against part-objects or turned into a regressive flight to the mother.

(376)

The importance which Sheppard attaches to the ‘closed circuit of the Oedipal drama’ certainly accords with what we have already seen of the relation between sexuality and structure in early Expressionism. Yet, as Kokoschka's Murderer shows, the tendency to ‘excess’ in Expressionism means that its drama is never quite as diagrammatic as this ‘circuit’ suggests. Sheppard argues that ‘the Ich-Dramen cannot envisage an essential drive in the human personality which … can produce free individuals’ (377), thereby leaving us with ‘a loss that can never be made good’ (378). It is the ideal of self-presence which is complicated here: on the one hand, it exists at the thematic level, as the desired escape from structure which, expressed in the familiar rhetoric of Expressionism, is ultimately re-contained in a discursive, Oedipal order; on the other hand, though, the curiously uneven, hybrid quality of these plays arises because this thematic ‘circuit’ is, as it were, broken by its production as dramatic event.

Much Expressionist drama is, like Kokoschka's Murderer, governed by this fundamental tension between a narrative structure always already contaminated by sexuality and the Oedipal chain, and a displacement of libidinal energy into a form whose ecstatic ‘bodily’ rhythms strive to defer the return of the Father. To stress the compensatory effects of that form is not simply to engage in conventional critical pieties about performance values; for the tension between narrative and event, between sexuality and unstructured affect, is actually interiorised in the acting-style of Expressionism—interiorised, that is, as strain (at the level of voice, diaphragm, musculature) and a straining after the condition of ‘pure’, non-discursive theatricality.⁸⁰

.....

That quality of strain is something we now readily associate with Expressionism, but to follow the later mutations of its dramatic style is to see how such tension was increasingly resolved at the level of rhetoric. By 1920, the Oedipal theme was commonplace; as the Secretary puts it in Georg Kaiser's The Coral (1920), ‘Father and son are drawn in opposite directions. It is always a life and death struggle.’⁸¹ Yet while the opening phase had been characterised by acts of filial rebellion, plays of the twenties, like Franz Werfel's Mirror-Man (1920), focused increasingly on what Peter Gay has called the ‘Revenge of the Father’.⁸² In this changed climate the work of Ernst Toller affirmed the radical potential of theatre, but it did so through a political vision which transferred attention from the individual to the group. In Transfiguration (1919), for example, the way towards a ‘true humanity’ is seen to lie through the rejection of sexual love (‘Can't you see that love and goodness are eternally separated by a hopeless gulf?’⁸³), and Toller's search for a ‘collectively valid subjectivity’ led in his next play to the proposition that ‘Only the Masses are holy.’⁸⁴ Toller thus offered one path out of what the Marxist critic Georg Lukács would soon be calling the ‘self-trumpeting emotionalism’ of subjective Expressionism.⁸⁵ Toller was a revolutionary (he spent five years in prison as a result of the part he played in the November Revolution of 1918), and he was able to transcend the Oedipal narrative in favour of larger social and economic themes. Yet it was precisely the largeness of such themes which ultimately proved difficult to handle, and with the exception of The Machine-Wreckers (1922), most of Toller's work drifted too easily towards the purely didactic and allegorical.

By 1925, in fact, the whole Expressionist experiment had begun to seem dated and out of step with modernity. An exhibition held at the Mannheim Kunsthalle in the middle of that year gave a name to a very different tendency in the arts: Die Neue Sachlichkeit, the new objectivity. The principal artists contributing to the show—Otto Dix, George Grosz, Max Beckmann among them—announced a return to figurative painting and to a hard-edged style of social criticism. The second half of the decade would now see a swing against the subjectivism of Expressionist art and towards a new quality of formal control and cynical detachment which ran parallel to a fascination with technology and urban capitalism (America became in several senses a cultural lodestone during this period).⁸⁶

The collision of these two very different artistic tendencies can be seen in the early, pre-Marxist theatre of Bertolt Brecht. In Baal (1922), for example, Brecht depicts a wandering poet whose hedonism and flouting of social convention deliberately parody the grand humanist aspirations of later Expressionist drama (at the literary dinner which opens the play, Baal gets outrageously drunk while a young lady reads her Expressionist verse: ‘The new world / Exterminating the world of pain, / Island of rapturous humanity’, etc.⁸⁷). Baal rejects all moral constraints and dedicates himself to the pursuit of pleasure. Where Expressionist theatre had struggled with the deterministic thrust of narrative, Brecht's play, with its brief, loosely articulated scenes, enacts what one critic has called ‘a dream of transience accepted, of conflict enjoyed and of contradiction sustained with equanimity’.⁸⁸ This ‘acceptance’ of contradiction produces a nihilistic tone in the early plays which couples a cynical realism with an indifference to political struggle. The best example is Drums in the Night (1922), in which the protagonist Kragler deliberately turns against revolution in order to win back his fiancée. Brecht later remarked that ‘It seems just about the shabbiest possible solution, particularly as there is a faint suspicion of approval on the part of the author’,⁸⁹ but the element of ‘approval’ is motivated by a deep distrust of communal relationships and the rhetoric in which they had been celebrated in much Expressionist drama.

In rejecting didactic and allegorical modes at this point in his career, Brecht was also formulating a scepticism about the tortured modes of ‘deep’ subjectivity which had recently dominated the stage. With In the Jungle of Cities (1924) and A Man's a Man (1927), his drama became harder and more ‘objective’, mingling elements from farce with a darkly pessimistic sense of oppression. In the ‘jungle of the big city’, supposedly Chicago in 1912, an ‘inexplicable’ struggle takes place between two men.⁹⁰ In his prologue to the play, Brecht warned his audience: ‘Don't worry your heads about the motives for the fight, concentrate on the stakes.’ As is clear from the play's opening scene, what is at stake is nothing less than the possibility of personal freedom: when the timber merchant Shlink meets the younger Garga, a bookseller, he requests his opinion of a book and then asks: ‘Is that your personal opinion? I'll buy your opinion. Is ten dollars enough?’ Shlink thus begins a series of challenges to Garga's sense of the inviolability of his personal life—if his literary opinions can be bought for cash, so perhaps can his private fantasies of a bohemian existence in Tahiti.

The ‘fight’ that ensues forges a powerful sadomasochistic bond between the two men, and Brecht seems to imply that, in contrast to the ineluctable and predetermined Oedipal struggles of the Expressionist theatre, the conflict between Garga and Shlink is chosen by them as the only authentic medium of social contact—at the very end of the play, after the death of Shlink, Garga concludes: ‘It's a good thing to be alone. The chaos is spent. That was the best time.’⁹¹ Here and in A Man's a Man, farce and dramatic irony destroy psychological depth, reducing social life to exploitative trickery and mechanical gestures. Brecht commented on the later play that ‘Every single scene of the comedy is so far removed from the problem-play or the psychological type of play that any naive actor would be bound to be able to reproduce it simply from memory.’⁹² So, in A Man's a Man, a completely new identity is forged for Galy Gay—as the Widow Begbeck puts it in her ‘Interjection’:

Mister Brecht appends this item to the bill:
You can do with a human being what you will.
Take him apart like a car, rebuild him bit by bit—
As you will see, he has nothing to lose by it.(93)

Brecht gave a similar account of the play in an interview in 1926: ‘It's about a man being taken to pieces and rebuilt as someone else for a particular purpose.’⁹⁴ Brecht was on the verge of discovering Marxism, but the sardonic humour of A Man's a Man is already enough to make us feel that the tortured humanism of Expressionist theatre belongs to another time.

Notes

1. Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebook of Malte Laurids Brigge, p. 3 Further references will be given in the text.

2. Thomas Mann, Buddenbrooks, p. 574. In ‘Thomas Mann's “Buddenbrooks”’ (1901), Rilke remarked that ‘even a few years ago a modern writer would have found it sufficient to portray the last stages of this decline, the last scion, who dies of his own and his forefathers' illness’ (quoted in Judith Ryan, The Vanishing Subject, p. 58).

3. The emotional and temporal complexity of this moment is registered similarly in Arthur Schnitzler's The Road into the Open (1908), p. 215: ‘And it seemed to him like a vague and sweet dream, as if he lay as a boy at the feet of his mother, and this moment was already a memory, remote and painful, as he was experiencing it.’

4. Rainer Maria Rilke, Rodin and Other Prose Pieces, p. 15.

5. Ibid., p. 17.

6. Ibid., p. 46.

7. Ibid., p. 112.

8. Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters on Cézanne, pp. 32-3.

9. See also Rainer Maria Rilke, Selected Letters, p. 123: ‘Looking is such a marvellous thing, of which we know but little; through it, we are turned absolutely towards the Outside, but when we are most of all so, things happen in us that have waited longingly to be observed, and while they reach completion in us, intact and curiously anonymous, without our aid,—their significance grows up in the object outside.’

10. ‘Der Dichter’, quoted in Patricia Pollock Brodsky, Rainer Maria Rilke, p. 103.

11. Rainer Maria Rilke, Selected Poetry, p. 135.

12. Ibid., p. 199.

13. Rilke, Selected Letters, p. 394.

14. Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, p. 113.

15. Wassily Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, p. 26.

16. Ulrich Weisstein, ‘Introduction’ to Expressionism as an International Phenomenon, p. 23.

17. Hermann Bahr, Expressionism (1916), p. 83.

18. Ibid., p. 85.

19. Kasimir Edschmid, ‘Concerning Poetic Experience’ (1917), quoted in Mardi Valgemae, Accelerated Grimace, p. 4.

20. Arnold Schönberg, ‘The Relationship of the Text’, in Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc (eds), The Blaue Reiter Almanac, p. 102.

21. See Ulrich Weisstein, ‘Futurism in Germany and England: Two Flashes in the Pan?’, p. 471; Lionel Richard, ‘Futurisme et Expressionisme en Allemagne’, pp. 193-8; Hanne Bergius, ‘Contribution à la réception du futurisme en Allemagne’, in Giovanni Lista (ed.), Marinetti et le futurisme, pp. 171-4.

22. Herman George Scheffauer, The New Vision in the German Arts (1924), pp. 26-7.

23. August Stramm, ‘Melancholy’, trans. in Michael Hamburger (ed.), German Poetry 1910-1975, p. 9.

24. Ibid., p. 83.

25. Ibid., p. xxv.

26. See Michael Hamburger, The Truth of Poetry, pp. 176-80.

27. Karl Pinthus (ed.), Menschheitsdämmerung.

28. Georg Trakl, Georg Trakl: A Profile, ed. Frank Graziano, p. 59.

29. Quoted in Herbert Lindenberger, Georg Trakl, p. 42.

30. Georg Trakl, Autumn Sonata: Selected Poems of Georg Trakl, p. 57. See also the commentary in Francis Michael Sharp, The Poet's Madness, pp. 106-9.

31. Georg Trakl: A Profile, p. 31.

32. Quoted from ‘Year’, in Martin Heidegger, On the Way to Language, p. 176.

33. ‘Dream and Derangement’, Georg Trakl: A Profile, p. 80.

34. Heidegger, On the Way to Language, p. 177.

35. Georg Trakl: A Profile, p. 77.

36. Ibid., p. 52.

37. Noted in Jacques Derrida, ‘Geschlecht: Sexual Difference, Ontological Difference’, A Derrida Reader, p. 385.

38. Heidegger, On the Way to Language, pp. 195, 185. See also, Sharp, The Poet's Madness, p. 159, on ‘Dream and Degeneration’: ‘The guiltless recognition of the tie between siblings undermines the incest taboo and anticipates the destruction of the family.’

39. For German texts of the play, see Oskar Kokoschka, Dichtungen und Dramen, pp. 33-51. The translation quoted is by Michael Hamburger, from Walter H. Sokel (ed.), Anthology of German Expressionist Drama, pp. 17-21. There are four versions of the play (hereafter referred to as Murderer); an account of textual variations is given in Horst Denkler, ‘Die Druckfassungen der Dramen Oskar Kokoschkas’, pp. 90-108. Carol Diethe, Aspects of Distorted Sexual Attitudes in German Expressionist Drama, pp. 130-5, divides the main variants to produce an ‘A text’ and a ‘B text’. Sokel translates the ‘A text’, while the other available English version, in Seven Expressionist Plays, trans. J. M. Ritchie and H. F. Garten, pp. 25-32, uses the later ‘B text’. Confusingly, neither Ritchie nor Sokel indicates which version is the one translated.

40. See Michael Patterson, The Revolution in German Theatre, pp. 194, 196.

41. Roger Cardinal, Expressionism, p. 96.

42. Murderer, in Sokel, Anthology, p. 20.

43. T. S. Eliot, Selected Essays, p. 145.

44. See Jacqueline Rose, Sexuality in the Field of Vision, pp. 123-40.

45. See Andrew Ross, The Failure of Modernism, p. 22.

46. Frank Whitford, Oskar Kokoschka: A Life, p. 37.

47. Peter Vergo and Yvonne Modlin, ‘Murderer Hope of Women’, p. 31.

48. Quoted in ibid., p. 29.

49. Quoted in ibid., p. 31, n. 61.

50. Oskar Kokoschka, My Life, p. 26.

51. Ibid., pp. 26, 27.

52. Nietzsche's description of the theme of Strindberg's The Father, quoted in Raymond Williams, The Politics of Modernism, p. 50.

53. J. M. Ritchie, German Expressionist Drama, p. 45.

54. Otto Weininger, Sex and Character, p. 92; further references will be given in the text. This idea is a recurrent one in the obsessive preoccupation with prostitution in German literature; in Wedekind's Pandora's Box (1904), for example, it is said of Lulu that ‘she can't make a living out of love because love is her life’.

55. See Jacques Le Rider, Le Cas Otto Weininger, p. 221.

56. See Jacques Le Rider, ‘Modernisme-Féminisme/Modernité-Virilité’, pp. 5-20.

57. Oskar Kokoschka, ‘On the Nature of Visions’, in V. H. Miesel (ed.), Voices of German Expressionism, p. 98. Further references will be given in the text.

58. Christine Buci-Glucksman, La Raison baroque, p. 214. See also, the discussion of woman as commodity in Wedekind's drama in Gail Finney, Women in Modern Drama, pp. 79-101.

59. Paul Klee, On Modern Art, p. 45.

60. Strindberg's Stationen are ‘stages in the central character's journey toward spiritual renewal’ (Henry L. Schvey, Oskar Kokoschka, p. 24).

61. August Strindberg, The Plays, vol. 2, p. 555. Further references will be given in the text.

62. See Sigmund Freud, ‘The Unconscious’ (1915), Pelican Freud Library, vol. 11, pp. 190-1.

63. Noted by Vergo and Modlin, and by Donald E. Gordon, ‘Oskar Kokoschka and the Visionary Tradition’, in Gerald Chappel and Hans H. Schulte (eds), The Turn of the Century, pp. 23-52.

64. See, for example, Le Rider, Le Cas Otto Weininger, p. 127, and the discussion of the Cosmic Circle in Martin Green, The Von Richthofen Sisters.

65. J. J. Bachofen, Myth, Religion, and Mother Right, p. 93.

66. Ibid., p. 109.

67. Sokel, Anthology, p. 21. In the ‘B text’ the references to vampirism disappear and the Woman claims to be the Man's wife.

68. Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, p. 239. Further references will be given in the text.

69. On Kandinsky's other related experiments, see Peg Weiss, Kandinsky and Munich, p. 92. The translation of The Yellow Sound used here is from the Blaue Reiter Almanac, pp. 207-25.

70. Blaue Reiter Almanac, p. 147.

71. Ibid., p. 194, n. 4.

72. Ibid., p. 205.

73. Ibid., p. 206.

74. Paul Vogt, The Blue Rider, p. 81. Peg Weiss, Kandinsky and Munich, p. 99, notes the importance of the Shadow-play theatre (founded in 1907) in suggesting ‘mystical or psychic spaces beyond the limits of conventional perspective’. The idea of an alternative spatial dimension might be compared with Robert Delaunay's concept of ‘depth’, an important reference point for early Expressionist art.

75. See André Green, The Tragic Effect, p. 16.

76. Sokel, Anthology, p. xvi, remarks that ‘Expressionist drama is theme-centered rather than plot- or conflict-centered’, and Carl E. Schorske, ‘Generational Conflict and Social Change’, in Gerald Chapple and Hans H. Schulte (eds), The Turn of the Century, p. 428, concludes that ‘Musil and the Expressionist generation totally dismissed the Oedipal problem by subsuming it under a historical reality proclaimed dead.’

77. Quoted in Peter Szondi, Theory of the Modern Drama, p. 65.

78. Richard Sheppard, ‘Unholy Families’, p. 363. Further references will be given in the text.

79. Quoted in Ritchie, German Expressionist Drama, p. 70.

80. On dramatic technique, see, for example, Mel Gordon, ‘German Expressionist Acting’, pp. 34-50.

81. Georg Kaiser, Five Plays, pp. 168-9.

82. Peter Gay, Weimar Culture, pp. 102-18.

83. Ernst Toller, Seven Plays, p. 102.

84. Ernst Toller, ‘My Works’, p. 222; Masses and Man (1920), in Seven Plays, p. 150.

85. Georg Lukács, ‘Expressionism: Its Significance and Decline’ (1934), in Essays on Realism, p. 110.

86. For an account of the Neue Sachlichkeit, see John Willett, The New Sobriety.

87. Brecht, Baal, in Collected Plays, vol. 1, 6.

88. Ronald Speirs, Brecht's Early Plays, p. 20.

89. Bertolt Brecht, Collected Plays, vol. 1, p. 406.

90. Ibid., vol. 1, p. 118.

91. Ibid., vol. 1, p. 178.

92. Quoted in Ronald Speirs, Brecht's Early Plays, p. 131. As Peter Brooker notes in Bertolt Brecht, p. 110, Brecht's poetry during the twenties is also much concerned with ‘the theme of the loss of self’.

93. Bertolt Brecht, A Man's a Man, in Seven Plays, p. 103.

94. Quoted in Willett, The New Sobriety, p. 153.

List of Abbreviations

AA Antonin Artaud, Selected Writings, ed. Susan Sontag (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988).

AOA Apollinaire on Art: Essays and Reviews, 1902-1918, ed. Leroy C. Breunig (New York: Viking Press, 1972).

BSW Baudelaire: Selected Writings on Art and Artists, trans. P. E. Charvet (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1972).

F Marinetti: Selected Writings, trans. R. W. Flint (London: Secker & Warburg, 1972).

FM Futurist Manifestos, ed. Umbro Apollonio (London: Thames and Hudson, 1973).

I William Carlos Williams, Imaginations, ed. Webster Schott (New York: New Directions, 1971).

LMN Gertrude Stein, Look at Me Now and Here I Am: Writings and Lectures 1909-45, ed. Patricia Meyerowitz (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1971).

MFT Modern French Theater: The Avant-Garde, Dada and Surrealism, trans. George Wellwarth and Michael Benedikt (New York: Dutton, 1966).

MS André Breton, Manifestos of Surrealism, trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1972).

MSP Mallarmé: Selected Prose Poems, Essays, and Letters, trans. Bradford Cook (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1956).

NS Pierre Reverdy, Nord-Sud, Self-Defence et autres écrits sur l'art et la poésie (1917-1926) (Paris: Flammarion, 1975).

NT Ezra Pound and Ernest Fenollosa, The Classic Noh Theatre of Japan (New York: New Directions, 1959).

PL Poems of Jules Laforgue, trans. Peter Dale (London: Anvil Press, 1986).

RFM Russian Futurism through its Manifestos, 1912-1928, trans. Anna Lawton and Herbert Eagle (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1988).

RP Arthur Rimbaud: Collected Poems, trans. Oliver Bernard (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1987).