[In the following essay, Freedman discusses the Expressionist technique of blurring the contours of ordinary objects in order to explore the relationship between human consciousness and the real world.]

I

If it is at all true that artists express the needs and values of their culture, it follows that they also reflect its impasse. In our time, they have sought to isolate this crucial recognition by distorting the world around them—their own features, and ours, as well as those “classical” forms we still intuitively accept as our standards. We want to determine what these modern distortions mean in our cultural history—whether they suggest a height of artistic power, as most of us now think, or whether, as the old term “decadence” implies, they are symptoms of decline. These are odd questions to ask in the late nineteen-sixties, nearly a century after “Le Bâteau Ivre,” more than half a century after the first serious impact of Ezra Pound and James Joyce, after Franz Kafka and Hermann Broch, after the imagists, the surrealists, the expressionists, the nouveau roman, and the theater of the absurd. And yet they remain persistent questions, for though individual forms have changed and yesterday's avant-garde today seems very old-fashioned, “distortion” has remained as a symptom, at times acting as a subversive undercurrent, at other times emerging as a dominant style in painting and music, poetry and prose.

In what sense, then, does “modernism” express a uniquely contemporary impasse? Radical distortions may be produced by a vision of “higher” truths at variance with an inadequate “real” world, a vision derived from private insights otherwise incommunicable. Or distortions may reflect despair, an awareness of a loss of coherence, the need to portray incoherence precisely. Or they may reflect our rejection of contemporary values, our assertion that in an enslaved and enslaving world man is free only in a realm of the imagination he creates for himself. Naturally, each of these motives has governed artists at one point or another during the past century's history of peculiarly “modern” distortions. But perhaps it is also true that none of these common explanations is quite sufficient, that the motives for the most intense distortions may lie deeper, that they may be rooted in our growing obsession with the conditions of our awareness, with the way in which we self-consciously relate ourselves to our modes of thinking and feeling, with a questioning not so much of appearances and values themselves as of our sense of appearances and values by which we have been conditioned.

The work of Franz Kafka and Hermann Broch may, briefly, serve as an example to point out two different modes of distortion which have dominated the modern sensibility. One way, Kafka's, we may associate with a “realistic” sense of distortion, a manner of analyzing the relations between consciousness and objects. The other way, which is made remarkably clear in Broch's Death of Virgil, suggests an internal exploration of consciousness, a widening of eyesight into visionary experience. Most of the novel is suspended between the poet's window and his bed, the figures of life and death, of waking and dreaming experience, of present and past, merging with one another as the outer eye is joined with the inner. The distortions which result from this juxtaposition suggest one manner of rendering reality that seems to be peculiarly “modern.” Things are absorbed by the mind which transforms their images into visions: a mirroring of life and death in various layers of consciousness.

The other source of distortion, which can be found in Kafka, results from the encounter between minds and objects. If in Broch's Death of Virgil the outer world is absorbed by the sensibility, in Kafka's work it remains independent, functioning as an antagonist of the self. The dislocations of “The Metamorphosis” or The Trial emerge from the hero's self-conscious encounter with a significantly rearranged reality (the world of the beetle; the transformed world of the Trial). Reminiscent of grotesques, or satires like Swift's, these shifts in reality are used to reveal essential characteristics of objects and conditions in relation to minds. Distortions, then, may occur not because an imaginative, hallucinatory, or symbolic sensibility is at work, but because minds have observed certain essential characteristics in the outside world which they may wish to reveal more succinctly.

The reciprocal impact upon one another of mind and object (or consciousness and reality) has emerged as the artist's accommodation of a philosophical and literary realism to the twentieth century “atmosphere of the mind.” Kafka's dislocations of the world suggest one such way. Another would be Rainer Maria Rilke's manner of endowing objects with semblances of human consciousness. For even in some of Rilke's most descriptive work, like New Poems, we can discern a tendency to project the self into things rather than absorbing things into the mind. The following passage from one of Rilke's essays on Rodin may serve as an example. Describing his master's reading, Rilke relates how objects can be seen:

He [Rodin] read Dante's Divine Comedy for the first time. It was a revelation. He saw the suffering bodies of another generation, beyond all the days of his life, a century whose garments had been torn off, saw the great unforgettable judgment which a poet had passed on his time. There were images which justified his judgment, and when he read of the weeping feet of Nicholas III, he already knew that there was such a thing as weeping feet, that there is one great weeping that was everywhere, all over the entire person, which poured from all pores.¹

This passage seems indeed to convey a fresh picture of reality—of a world whose contours had been subtly changed by a painter's and a poet's consciousness: Dante, Rodin, Rilke, apprehending universal tears pouring from all things as an emblem of man's state. Objects are infused with recognitions that bend them out of focus so that there can be such a thing as weeping feet to convey a meaningful statement about the world. Rilke's style, then, suggests yet another way in which the modern concern with mind has been utilized to render a clearer picture of things, of life and history, and of the spiritual and social reality in which we live. It also describes one of the most conspicuous methods used by a movement until recently far too neglected: literary expressionism—a movement which was concerned precisely with the meaning of the object in relation to minds and which has used this concern in its creation of a new style.

II

The contours of modern expressionism are vague, indeed. In its widest sense, the term may be used to describe any expressive language, or any “expression” as opposed to a “communication” theory of art. As a special kind of expressiveness, it has been traced to Baudelaire, Rimbaud, or George. Its vision of man has been seen prefigured in Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, Strindberg. But as a specific contribution to literature, the term might be limited to a particular historical situation, a particular way of conceiving reality as an infusion of the world by minds, which was especially favored by a movement that radiated outward from German-speaking countries between 1910 and 1933, when, ecstatically, a new style was created.

New moments of stylistic creation are exciting points in literary and intellectual history. Accompanied by manifestos and appropriate slogans, at the very least they give insight into the sensibility of a generation; at best they shed light on a new phase in the development of several literatures. Such was the case with literary expressionism. Although many of its practitioners are either not yet or no longer widely known, expressionism defined that new way of looking at reality which the modern drive towards the clarification of its values had revealed: a solution of that awkward discrepancy between self and thing. At the same time, the movement itself was bafflingly diversified (composed of political activists, religious mystics, or didactic artists of the most various shades), although deeply united in an angry protest against the literary, academic, and social establishment. The chief point of agreement between them was found in the use of language, a particular style in both poetry and prose which paralleled the motions and dislocations of form found in expressionistic painting.²

Our first question, then, concerns the unity of the expressionistic movement in relation to its style. What common ground is there between the following selections from Johannes R. Becher's “Wannsee” (1917), Franz Werfel's morality play Spiegelmensch (Mirror Man, 1920), and Georg Heym's poem “Der Gott der Stadt” (“The God of the City,” 1910), except a similar stylistic principle? Becher's early poem, squarely within his “expressionistic period,” is acidulous social criticism as it describes sunbathers at the beach of the Wannsee near Berlin:

Zinnobrer Tag! Im dürren Paradiese,
Ein Mosaik im Abrutsch schaukelnder Kabinen,
Vor deren Gärten farbene Huren blühen.
Azurene Fläche sich aus deren Mündern giesst.
Vermillion day. In the desiccated paradise,
A mosaic of swaying cabins sliding downward,
With gardens before which blossom colorful whores.
Azure surfaces out of their mouths pouring.(3)

In content and lyrical mood, the following lines spoken by Mirror Man (“soul”), appearing as Seductive Woman, to the hero, Thamal (representing Man), seem to be a striking contrast:

Weisst du denn nicht? Noch warten goldene Zonen,
Das Südlicht rollt durch Palmen-Avenuen.
Du wirst mit mir in grellen Häusern wohnen,
Lust-Scheiterhaufen, die uns nie verglühn.
Wenn schlaff wir ruhn auf flutenden Terrassen,
Wird sich Orchesterwonne niederlassen,
Wie Tiefsee-Fische schlafen wir im Grund
Der Weltmusik, befriedigt, schwebend, bunt!
Do you not know then? Golden zones still await us.
The southern light rolls down palmtree avenues.
You will reside with me in homes that glare with brightness,
Burning stakes of lust that for us will never dim.
When, limp, we shall recline on flooding terraces,
Orchestral bliss will settle down, and
Like deep-sea fish we shall slumber at the bottom
Of the world's music—sated, floating, multi-colored!(4)

Or, to provide yet another contrast, lines taken from Georg Heym's interesting poem about the city show modern urban life against the destructive image of itself personified as a latter-day Baal:

Vom Abend glänzt der rote Bauch dem Baal,
Die grossen Städte knien um ihn her.
Der Kirchenglocken ungeheure Zahl
Wogt auf zu ihm aus schwarzer Türme Meer.
Toward evening-time the red belly glows on Baal
And the large cities kneel all about him.
Massed church bells in enormous numbers
Surge up to him from the black-towered sea.(5)

In each case, we note an animation of reality. However divergent the purpose—to shock, to teach, to describe—the poet appears to be concerned with extracting a peculiarly meaningful relation between his own vision (and that of the beholder) and the world of things on which he focused. To be sure, we find here varying degrees of distortion, but no symbolic refashioning of life, nor even symbolic references to a world of experience suppressed and evoked by the poem's language. When Becher writes “Azure surfaces out of [the whores'] mouths pouring,” he creates a series of images which are supposed to express a moral point: the open mouths, the azure of water and sky, the aggressive outpouring are telescoped and, together, reveal the meaning not of the metaphoric whores, but of the whole lascivious business of sunbathing as a bourgeois enterprise. Yet there is no transformation into symbol, aesthetic or psychological. It is the distortion of an existing visual pattern which makes the point with disarming directness. Similarly, the passage from Werfel is a bold attempt to suggest the sexual act, whose vision of Seductive Woman flashes before Thamal's eyes to suggest it in its totality, its drama, its universal arrogance, without ever leaving the framework of described objects or without forcing the objects to stand for anything but themselves. Attention is focused on the object; by animating reality, the poet affirms the conditions in terms of which alone the object can exist: its relevance to persons or to ideas meaningful to persons.

Expressionistic style, then, is more than expressive language; it is a particular kind of expressive language. Indeed, it exists as a pivot between two phases of style which had emerged from the nineteenth century. One is the “underground” style of heightened romanticism: Baudelaire's carcass, Rimbaud's drunken boat, which culminated in Mallarmé's pure, self-denying order, and Valéry's geometrical world of light, or in psychological or mystical visions, the internal imagery of Cocteau or Eluard. The other is the style of naturalism, i.e., a heightening of realistic depiction, in which the poet is suppressed. Expressionism partook of both these styles, and worlds, at once. Not only concerned with the self's “remarkable visions,” refusing to absorb objects into dream but intensifying them by dream, the expressionistic style focused attention on the world of things. Distortions were not to lead to formations of symbols; sensations were not to be frozen into golden birds of heraldic significance. Rather, the world of objects was distorted to reveal its essential meaning. And “essential” is a value term imparted by people. Expressionism, therefore, described the relations between man and object; it commanded engagement.

III

One of the striking features of expressionistic language is its way of suggesting thematic meanings (political or metaphysical) while resolutely remaining itself. The engagement, i.e., the concealed meaning within the object, is built into the very description. The following lines from Ernst Stadler's poem, “Fahrt über die Kölner Rheinbrücke bei Nacht” (“Journey Across the Rhine River Bridge at Cologne by Night”) may illustrate this point:

Der Schnellzug tastet sich
                    und stösst die Dunkelheit entlang.
Kein Stern will vor. Die ganze Welt ist nur ein enger
                    nachtumschienter Minengang.
Darein zuweilen Förderstellen
                    blauen Lichtes jähe Horizonte reissen: Feuerkreis
Von Kugellampen, Dächern, Schloten,
                    dampfend, strömend … nur sekundenweis …
Und alles wieder schwarz,
                    Als führen wir ins Eingeweid der Nacht zur Schicht.
The express train gropes
                    and pushes along the darkness ahead.
No star will come forward. The entire world is but a narrow
                    night-tracked mine-shaft,
Wherein at times way stations
                    of blue light tear off sudden horizons: fiery circle
Of bowl lamps, roofs, smokestacks,
                    steaming, streaming … only for seconds …
And all is black again,
                    As if we were riding to our shift through the innards of
                              the night.

Most of the comparisons in this poem are absorbed into the language itself. For example, the untranslatable phrase “nachtumschienter Minengang” represents a complex telescoping of different images and allusions. The basic image alluded to is “nachtumschienen,” already forced but referring to “shone upon by night” or even “suffused by the absence of light, by night.” “Schienen,” however, are railroad tracks pushing through the mine-shaft at night. The image obviously means: the trip across the bridge at night is like travelling through a mine-shaft; the mine-shaft suffused by night, is also like a mine-shaft imprisoned by tracks, telescoping the negative light of night and the tracks into a single abbreviated expression. Indeed, expressionistic language, which among its drearier practitioners so often reverts to mere animation, can be made fresh and exciting by images of this sort. The simile of riding into the night as if penetrating the innards of the night is more direct. Yet neither creates that new metaphoric level which we have come to expect from the symbolist experiment. In the last lines of the poem, the human point is extracted from the dark landscape:

Und dann die langen Einsamkeiten. Nackte Ufer.
          Stille. Nacht. Besinnung. Einkehr. Kommunion.
          Und Glut und Drang
Zum Letzten, Segnenden. Zum Zeugungsfest.
          Zur Wollust. Zum Gebet. Zum Meer.
          Zum Untergang.
And then the long stretches of loneliness. Naked banks.
          Silence. Night. Concentration. Contemplation. Communion.
          And Passion and urge,
To the last one, to him who bestows blessings. To the feast of
                                                                                                                                                      procreation.
To lust. To prayer. To the sea.
To doom.(6)

This ending is not really defensible, even if the poem itself is linguistically striking. There is too much Götterdämmerung; too many identifications of lust, sex, prayer, and death are extracted from this simple trip across the Rhine in an express train to make the image work. But it does illustrate the expressionistic method of extraction: the abstract statement of the conclusion literally forces itself upon the text. More technically, what we may perhaps find disturbing is that the language is “straight” both ways: the distorted vision of the object as well as the linguistic utterance are given without being pressed into a combining metaphor. But this very fact forms part of the dramatic, declamatory method of expressionism—in content as well as in style. The picture is retained (the sounds of the utterance continue to imitate the moving train and so force the listener to remain within the framework of the initial situation); but the meaning is also stated.

These considerations lead to the conclusion that both in its history and in its technical achievement, expressionistic writing achieved a heightening of rather than, as its practitioners thought, a counter-statement to naturalism. Indeed, if most of the expressionists rejected naturalism, they did so not because it was aesthetically unsatisfying, but because, in a very special sense, it was ideologically unsatisfying. If the romantic imagination produced an extension of the poet's vision and knowledge, the naturalist's imagination had been equivalent to the world itself. As Zola pointed out in the Roman expérimental, the ideal poet-author, being detached, is by definition noncommittal, unengaged. He may be seized by rage at the conditions he describes, but officially at least he does not take a stand. Ideally, his attitude is scientific, his analysis detached. The expressionist, on the other hand, took a stand. The external world, in fact, had no meaning, no raison d'être by itself. Die Welt ist da. (So wrote the theoretician Kasimir Edschmid.) Es wäre sinnlos sie zu wiederholen. (“The world exists. It would be senseless to repeat it.”) Presenting “a pure, unfalsified picture of the world,” the expressionist seeks to create it anew. For the world is relevant only insofar as consciousness reshapes it and makes it meaningful to people, as it conveys an “essence.”⁷

In this latter sense, the expressionistic poets we have examined thought of themselves as diametrically opposed to naturalism. They refused to accept the “objective” conception of reality. They equally rejected the pure analysis of the soul, cultivated in symbolist writing. Rather, the world must be distorted to reveal its inner meaning. As the eyes of hungry children, for example, are shown large on the prints of Käthe Kollwitz, so in expressionist literature men and women, psychologically motivated plots, and poetic imagery are equally stylized to illuminate their relevance to people. This involvement of expressionist poets in human fate, whether political or religious, lends a specific moral weight to their sometimes overwrought images and plots, and leads to their formation of their own language. For instance, Becher's prose description of wounded German soldiers returning from the lines in World War I, exaggerates and wrenches out of focus the underlying naturalistic description:

There comes, hurrying across the field—immensely heightened—a procession of soldiers whose intestines are breaking out of their bodies. Swirling foam. Around their necks they are wearing (like amulets) white placards with mysterious signs on them: certifying the fact that they were wounded. A great wind roars and blows billows of smoke like powdery dust. Riders dance in the distance. They have smoked out a small Galician village; girls, charred, hang in the windows. Earth is darkening. …⁸

Partly we respond to the sense of speed and animation in an otherwise static situation: swirling foam, roaring wind, dancing riders, darkening earth. Partly, however, we discern the exaggerated realism, its deliberate push from the horror of the given towards the irrational to make the thematic point. Becher's passage, of course, is programmatic. But Gottfried Benn's terrifying poem, “Schöne Jugend” (“Beautiful Youth”), taken from his early Morgue poems, pursues a similar course without an evident programmatic intention, to reveal, one might suppose, the hideousness and terror of both man and world.

Der Mund eines Mädchens, das lange im Schilf gelegen hatte,
Sah so angeknabbert aus.
Als man die Brust aufbrach war die Speiseröhre
                                                                                                              so löcherig.
Schliesslich in einer Laube unter dem Zerchfell
fand man ein Nest von jungen Ratten.
The mouth of a girl who had long lain in the reeds
Looked sort of gnawed on.
When they opened her chest, the esophagus was sort of
                                                                                                              punctured.
Finally, in a bower under the diaphragm
they found a nest of young rats.(9)

A further tendency in naturalism is to view the self as being helplessly acted upon, oppressed by an external world it cannot control, by a fate it is powerless to prevent. Expressionist poets shared this image of the passive, suffering self, because, unlike many other avant-gardists of their time, they could not view the poet's imaginative consciousness as sufficiently powerful in itself to liberate the enslaved self from the bondage of time, place, and milieu. For example, surrealistic poetry, coinciding with the self's inner vision, with Rimbaud's deliberately disordered dream, can retain the poet's mind as a principal motive power—unconscious dream absorbs and transforms outer reality. Similarly, Mallarmé and Stefan George both acted as high priests whose magic could convert the limiting world of the senses into liberating art. But the expressionists—bent upon rendering the drama of human suffering and redemption—had to recognize that once the confrontation between “mind” and “thing” is accepted, the exposed self is continuously assailed by powers in reality evidently superior to itself. Again, it may be Rilke among the great poets of this rich period who pointed the way to the expressionist experiment, not only in his heightened language, his preoccupation with things, his difficult syntax, but especially in his projection of the self as a passive image, of the poet as sufferer, as the man who endures. Whatever may have been his ultimate purpose in the loose poetic novel, The Note-Books of Malte Laurids Brigge (1910), for example, its hero is Job and the Suffering Servant, assailed by things and by the vision of God before he is turned into the Prodigal Son. However different from naturalistic writing in its lyrical tone (though not wholly divorced from it in its descriptions of city landscapes, of horror and dread), in its subjective mood and its heraldic imagery this novel may be, it does project clearly an image of the poet as the enduring self. And it is this image which the expressionists, too, had evolved from naturalism before turning it in the bizarre, contorted light of their particular perspective.

The expressionist poet, then, like the hero of expressionist fiction and drama, endures. In the works of social protest, he endures injustice inflicted upon him by society. In the religious and mystical works, he is destined to suffer before redemption is possible, like Thamal in Werfel's morality play Spiegelmensch (Mirror Man). In both cases, the naturalistic premise that man and the world are defined by causality was heightened and distorted by the peculiar concerns of the expressionists. It was reshaped by ideas and artistic purposes alike. For if the hero of expressionist literature with a revolutionary or social message suffered because of pressure from a threatening, mechanistic society, the hero of the religious literature did so because suffering is a Christian condition. Suffering thus becomes a way not only of presenting reality but also of reaching the idea: in the first instance because the endurance of wrongs is a step towards the revolution, in the second instance because it is a step towards redemption. And both, in their intensely stylized way, aim towards a definition of man, who, like Kafka's K., helplessly struggles among an overpowering, if contorted, world of things.

This tendency is equally marked in the pure lyric. For example, the early Werfel's handling of anxiety and depression, with all their oppressive and redemptive qualities, exaggerates the action of objects upon the poet's consciousness as he gives himself to their power. Thus, the first stanza of his “Ballade von Wahn und Tod” (“Ballad of Delusion and Death”):

Im grossen Raum des Tags,—
Die Stadt ging hohl, Novembermeer, und schallte schwer
Wie Sinai schallt. Vom Turm geballt
Die Wolke fiel.—Erstickten Schlags
Mein Ohr die Stunde traf,
Als ich gebeugt sass über mich zu sehr.
Und ich entfiel mir, rollte hin, und schwankte da auf einem Schlaf.
In the grand expanse of day,—
The city walked hollow, November sea, and sounded hard
The way Sinai sounds. Clenched to a ball by the tower
The cloud fell down.—With muffled blow
My ear hit the hour,
As, too far bent over myself, I sat.
And fell from myself, rolled off, and swayed upon a sleep.(10)

In addition to the poet's passive role, moreover, we also discern the taut rendering of a consciousness suspended between dream-like perception and death-like sleep, seeking to determine objects through its awareness while itself being determined by them. The strained language starkly mirrors these relations.

Finally, the inversion of the naturalistic premise, the heightening of naturalistic effect, while lending expressionism its striking, paradoxical character, is only part of its definition. Distortions, as we have seen, do not necessarily concern themselves with horrible or ugly subjects. Rather, the point of expressionism is to show that distortion per se becomes a means of revealing the mutual relations between mind and thing through the infusion of an idea. Hence, poets, novelists, or dramatists may indeed distort any situation, even a landscape, to bare its hidden, essential significance. In his beautiful poem “Geburt” (“Birth”), whose expressionistic traits are clearly marked, Georg Trakl, for example, discerns interweaving relations between a mountain landscape, and its hunting men, and the birth of a child, which he telescopes and renders as a single imagistic expression.

Gebirge: Schwärze, Schweigen und Schnee.
Rot vom Wald niedersteigt die Jagd;
O, die moosigen Blicke des Wilds.
Stille der Mutter; unter schwarzen Tannen
Öffnen sich die schlafenden Hände,
Wenn verfallen der kalte Mond erscheint.
Weh, der Gebärenden Schrei. Mit schwarzem Flügel
Rührt die Knabenschläfe die Nacht,
Schnee, der leise aus purpurner Wolke sinkt.
Mountain ranges: blackness, silence, and snow.
Red, the hunters descend from the forest;
Oh, the mossy glances of the deer.
The mother's silence; under the black fir trees
Sleeping hands open
When the cold moon appears, withered.
Woe, the screams of her who gives birth. With its black wing
Night fans the boys' temples,
Snow, gently drifting down from its purple cloud.(11)

The animation of the world, and the motion discernible in the diction transferring the drama of birth to the landscape and letting both partake of an image of man's fate—all of these are distinctly expressionistic. But we note especially how the act of birth and the mountain landscape, the hunters, the children of Man, are all distorted by the poet's consciousness holding them together in a single sustained yet moving image.

In prose, too, the projection of any idea, whether ideological or mystical, can transform the diction and the imagery of concrete objects without seeming to be in any way derived from naturalistic distortion. The following passage, for example, is taken from the opening pages of Johannnes R. Becher's first novel, Erde (Earth; 1912), an as yet unpolitical book, in which sexuality becomes religion and religion relentlessly sexual:

The night began with the song of bells. The wind rustled in the trees. Thus he hung in the death of the room, an unclear height, given over to pious contemplation: the Savior, the dear Lord, the humanly sacrificed. Arms given over to the night, five wounds of the grossest colors of urgent red. … The gentle force of the darkness robbed the bright star of its child-like pleasure. So relentlessly reigned Black. Only near the distant hills did Mildness hover: the great festive roar, moving towards the sea, the eternal sea.¹²

The poet, whatever his subject, sought to convey neither mind nor object by itself, but the meaning which emerged from a relation between them both, a rational or political, irrational or nihilistic, religious or mystically ecstatic meaning. Evidently, the type of diction with which Heym described the confluence of City and Baal, or Trakl that of landscape and birth, can also communicate the idea of delusion and death, or the intermingling of redemptive themes both sexual and religious.

IV

Stylistic distortion to render the meaning-relation existing between subject and thing naturally received its first formulation, as well as rationale, through painting. Although the term “expressionism” was first applied to painters like Cézanne, Van Gogh, and Matisse, and was later extended to all Fauvist painters, it soon emerged as a more specific self-conscious phenomenon.¹³ Directly and indirectly, we discern a tendency towards statement: in Ernst Barlach, for example, who also wrote plays and prose, in Oskar Kokoschka, who was both painter and playwright, in Käthe Kollwitz, who portrayed social themes; but also, among many others, in much of Franz Marc and Paul Klee. These artists, like the more programmatic literary expressionists, eroded and often expanded contours, changed and animated their lines, to reach an essential meaning of the thing. But they did not dissolve the external form, i.e., they neither refashioned the form as an abstract design nor did they dissolve it into mental imagery. In painting, as in literature, the artist discerns the meaning (i.e., the idea) in the object and communicates it to the audience. The expressionistic artist thus confronts a dual situation. On the one hand, his beliefs are lodged in the aesthetic object, and the artist makes the object express these beliefs (by rearranging reality accordingly). Expressiveness is heightened. On the other hand, he communicates these beliefs to the audience by means of the object. Communication is enhanced.

This double action, implied in the didactic nature of expressionistic literature, draws the contours of both language and literary forms. Drama, of course, is most suitable for this purpose, since through its action the interplay between person and world can be made visually accessible. Plays in which these relationships are developed for political purposes include such well-known landmarks of the revolutionary era following World War I as Ernst Toller's Masse Mensch (Mass Man; 1920) or Maschinenstürmer (Machine Breakers; 1922) or Georg Kaiser's Gas plays (1917-25). Reality in these plays is generalized through a stylization of realistic form. Characters are turned into types; action is declamatory, approaching the starkest forms of classical tragedy. But expressionism also developed new forms in spheres other than those of social involvement, as its language focused on mystical and religious themes as well. Beginning as early as Reinhard Sorge's “first drama of expressionism” Der Bettler (The Beggar; 1912), the drama, like lyrical poetry, started out with highly allusive, ecstatic language that sought to infuse the world with an animating consciousness. It also evolved towards forms like the mystery plays and allegories, while retaining the directness of the stylized statement. Such plays may include Fritz von Unruh's Ein Geschlecht (A Generation; 1916), a one-act tragedy about the consequences of murder, or Oskar Kokoschka's short play Hiob (Job; 1917). Pointedly, perhaps, the expressionistic style has also produced iconoclastic statements of sexual and religious rebellion like Hans Henny Jahnn's Pastor Ephraim Magnus (1919), a drama in which the decision to go the way of the world is rewarded by murder and death, but the decision to shoulder Christ's sacrifice by an eternal sentence to labor in the grave without peace, without being able to decompose. Yet, like the social drama of the expressionists, so their spiritual forms turned more and more towards a new ritualism. Werfel's morality play Spiegelmensch, from which we cited, is a fair example of this trend which, by turning the realism implied in expressionistic imagery towards ritual, also approached the allegorical. There is no meaning to Thamar's plight, which is surprisingly like Faust's, if it did not point beyond him. Similarly, Ernst Barlach's shattering play, Die Sündflut (The Deluge; 1924), a play in five parts about that crucial episode in Genesis, is clearly ritual allegory, and the existential horror that emerges when devil, leper, and handless angel die in the slime of the Flood becomes an apocalyptic vision of reality. “Noah's God,” shouts the devil, “is as fierce as I used to be, and I am scared of his divinity.” But these images do not function through symbolic transformations; rather, they obtain their horror, and their meaning as a whole, through a pointed reshaping of the external world.

In expressionistic prose, the double action of expressiveness and communication we noted in other genres is also evident, although after a time it seems to have followed an almost separate development. Johannes R. Becher's first novel, Erde, with its ecstatic identification of carnal and spiritual love, naturally accompanied its author's preoccupation with the language of lyrical poetry. But as we look toward and into the nineteen-twenties, expressionistic prose began to evolve a style of its own. Indeed, the principles governing the movement's theory of language, while ostensibly pertinent to all literary diction and style, and to all genres, became particularly suitable for prose which seemed to respond most fully to the expressionistic penchant for direct statement. A few sentences from an erotic novella in overwrought prose, Die Fürstin (The Princess; 1916) by the movement's theoretician Kasimir Edschmid may show the beginning of this development: “The sails' bellies bowed deeper and brushed across the colorless water and emerged once more, raised, into the red sun”—as a description of sailing at dusk. Animation occurs through the verbs which lend the object the semblance of human activity. Hence this description of the sky: “Coolly arched stands our sky, still blossoming antiquely.” Or, a sentence from a description of the author's visit to the zoo with his mistress:

Peacocks sprang into the trees and, menacingly, turned unheard-of wheels towards the reddened west and screamed with longing. Towards the bars, white bears grew out of their cages, roared as if crucified and, under the steadily waxing moon, bit into the iron.¹⁴

The word, Edschmid wrote a year later in his theoretical manifesto (1917), must become an arrow; it must hit the core of the object and reveal its soul. But we have already seen how this “interior” or essential core suggests the presence of mind—of the relevance of the object to consciousness and hence their engagement in poetry and now particularly in prose. “The personal grows into the general,” wrote Edschmid. “All things will be built back towards their essential being: the simple, the universal, the essential.”¹⁵

Expressionistic narrative, developing from these linguistic principles, emphasized a close relationship between the essential or general aspects of language and the precise particularity of objects. It used the erosion of contours, stylization, the rendering of reality as ritual, clearly reminiscent of poetic technique, within the medium of consecutive narration. It therefore emphasized even further both intensity and speed of diction. Intensity is clearly revealed in a tragic narrative like von Unruh's Opfergang (Sacrificial Pilgrimage; 1919) which deals with the debacle of Verdun. In a later work, Klabund's Pjotr (1923), short, abrupt strokes of intensely penetrating, swiftly moving language seek to capture the essential “core” of Peter the Great and his historical stature. Gradually, however, further forms distilled themselves. For example, Alfred Döblin's expressionistic prose changed and radicalized both the strength and the tempo of its distortions from his early Drei Sprünge des Wang-Lun (The Three Leaps of Wang-Lun; 1915) to his final and best known expressionistic novel, Berlin-Alexanderplatz (1929), where the external reality of the city and the internal reality of the confused criminal Franz Biberkopf are juxtaposed in violent and often interlocking encounters. Or Hermann Hesse's work of his so-called “expressionistic period” of the mid-nineteen-twenties—work that culminated in his Steppenwolf (1927)—matches the violent reality of the urban and mechanized present with a hallucinatory eternity produced by a heightened consciousness that telescopes both in a single image.

The experimentations in lyrical poetry, then, bore fruit for the novel in an increasingly rich manner as a new prose style emerged, flourished, and, even in declining, left clear imprints upon modern fiction. It was a style supple enough to render the thing as it is and its meaning (or “essence”) simultaneously. Or, as Wilhelm Emrich suggests in his book on Kafka, expressionism could, as could no other style, develop a metaphysical level of existence without abandoning the physical level. Indeed, it is this element in Kafka's seemingly realistic prose which lends it a further dimension of meaning—the sense that the clearest object is at once never itself and fully itself. This “absolutely new element in Kafka's work,” wrote Emrich, is the use of figurative language, even imagery, which is beyond allegory and symbol, as all things are endowed with a particular significance while resolutely remaining themselves. Expressionism has made possible this type of reference with its “dualistic metaphorical language.”¹⁶ It is in this sense that in the narratives of Kafka, expressionistic prose achieved its most refined and impressive dimension.

V

Our analyses, first of expressionistic language, then of expressionistic forms, have distilled for us the relationships which expressionism as an artistic style has striven to define. Describing this style epistemologically, we might say that expressionistic distortion—in poetry, the drama, and in narrative prose—is based, in various ways, on the distinction between consciousness and objects. Although there is a tendency to rearrange the world in a hallucinatory, dream-like way or to lend language a verve that seems inspired by the movements of consciousness, neither language nor things are purified out of existence, nor are they made exclusively part of the poet's mental furniture or his internal landscape. The vivacity, the horror, the spiritual meaning exist through linguistic rearrangements designed to reveal a point—didactic, political, religious, existential—which determines the relationship between self and thing, or their paradoxical contraction.

For this reason, expressionistic technique has produced strained, if interesting, diction and imagery in lyrical poetry, but it has excelled particularly in those genres which display the interaction between consciousness and world. Therefore, painting where the artist must relate himself to the object; the drama where man and world interact demonstrably; or fiction where consciousness projects itself into and among the things of reality, have all developed peculiar techniques which have intensified and enlarged the artistic discoveries of the expressionists. Moreover, their concern with the dualisms of consciousness and object, and of didactic communication and expressiveness, obviously had to extend far beyond their specifically German artistic climate to make them part of the general European avant-garde. The futurists, as Philippo Marinetti's Manifesto (1909) makes clear, celebrated dynamism as an end in itself. And although, as we noted, surrealism in many ways represented a pole opposite to that of expressionism, its techniques recur in expressionistic language as well. Indeed, the lines often blur, and some of the artists of the time, like René Schickele and Hans Arp, were active in both movements. But in its effect, too, the expressionistic manner of distorting reality left clear imprints on other literatures, especially in the drama. The familiar indebtedness to expressionism of the American stage of the 'twenties and 'thirties is a case in point. Distortion and erosion of contours favor satire and social comedies, like Kaufmann's and Connely's Beggar on Horseback or Elmer Rice's The Adding Machine, but they also extend to serious social drama of the 'thirties, that ritualistic enactment of reality which we note, for example, in Odets and which has now become a common dramatic form.

Whether in their relevance to other genres or in their meaning to the international avant-garde, the principles that have defined expressionism are mostly succinctly rendered in its language. Although, as we had occasion to discover, the expressionistic lyric remained exaggeratedly strained, it still gave us our first clue to the direction the movement was to take. Such a clue may also be given to us by E. E. Cummings, especially in his poetry of the nineteen-twenties, which suggests a similar didactic streamlining of the self's encounters and a similar projection of a consciousness into the object. A few lines from an early poem by Cummings may illustrate this relationship:

in making marjorie god hurried
a boy's body on unsuspicious
legs of a girl, his left hand quarried
the quartz-like face, his right slapped
the amusing big vital vicious
vegetable of her mouth.(17)

This poem seems indeed to return us to the linguistic point with which we began. For these lines emerge as a statement. Although at first glance the language appears strained, it soon turns out to be simple and direct. The image of the person, Marjorie, is described through God's action in creating her, in composing her “picture.” And the imposition of this action upon the parts of Marjorie's face and body creates a sense of distortion, an apparent rearrangement through the unexpected movements we see God perform—hurrying one form upon another, one hand quarrying, the other slapping, etc. But clearly this distortion is produced by statement rather than through any transformation of reality into symbol; it is part of a direct address to the audience. And if we compare these lines to Gottfried Benn's poem about the rats found in the girl's corpse—“Schöne Jugend”—we note a similar heightening of realistic detail and a similar manner of rendering this detail through direct activity. Distortion is produced in both poems to reveal the meaning of existence, both of mind and of thing.

This way of fashioning reality lends itself to Gothic distortion—not the Gothic of the romantic tale or even of Poe where distortion symbolizes an internal state, but the Gothic in its earlier, preromantic character—as a presentation of a deliberately rearranged reality superficially at least as an end in itself. Romantic writers, in exploiting Gothic distortions and fairy-tale devices, often lost the sense that reality can be changed to reveal purpose or purposelessness in itself. (Horror may exist, as Ingmar Bergmann has shown, as a state of the soul.) But expressionism has led to another way of viewing the Gothic, and of using Gothic devices and motifs, a way which has since come to life in Ernst Jünger and in Beckett: the sense that reality—though deeply relevant to human beings—must be distorted qua reality to reveal meaning or meaninglessness as the case may be. Eschewing the symbolic transformations we know well from Coleridge, or Novalis, or Baudelaire, expressionism states its point through a purposive reformulation of its world.

Romantic and symbolist poets, and the heroes they created, were visionaries for whom the world was ultimately an extension of themselves. Expressionism, at first a less respectable and recalcitrant offshoot of this tradition, concerned itself with the object of the vision, with the world as it is revealed by the vision and infused by it. The theater of Jean-Paul Sartre and Bertolt Brecht, as well as those sharp, traumatic encounters between man and world in “existentialist” fiction, have enlarged these premises of the expressionist generation. For its unique way of distorting reality not to produce symbolism per se but to develop a moral point, its offbeat, ecstatic way of seeing the world, its strange identification of the carnal and divine, and its mixtures of the material and the mystical—all of these point, in the inter-war period and beyond, to a further alternative to the post-romantic involvement in the mind. Thus expressionism has functioned as a poetry of statement and as a literature of objects, portraying the intense encounter between the modern consciousness and the realities of its world. It may, in all these respects, correspond to a new “baroque,” drawing those “refractory visions” in life and art which have shaped the modern sensibility.

Notes

1. Sämtliche Werke (Frankfurt, 1965), V, 152.

2. Walter H. Sokel's The Writer in Extremis: Expressionism in Twentieth-Century German Literature (Stanford, 1959), which develops different points from those pursued in this essay, remains one of the fullest recent surveys of the subject in English.

3. Ausgewählte Gedichte: 1911-18 (Berlin/Weimar, 1965), p. 328.

4. Part III (“Fenster”), Scene 5. Die Dramen (Frankfurt, 1959), p. 328.

5. Dichtungen und Schriften, ed. Karl Ludwig Schneider (Hamburg, 1964), I (Lyrik), 192.

6. Dichtungen, ed. Karl Ludwig Schneider (Hamburg, n.d.), I, 161-62. Cited, with particular attention to expressionistic “animation,” by Richard Samuel and R. Hinton Thomas, Expressionism in German Life, Literature, and the Theater (Cambridge, 1939), p. 176.

7. Kasimir Edschmid, “Uber den dichterischen Expressionismus” (Autumn 1917), Frühe Manifeste (Hamburg, 1957), pp. 32, 34.

8. Cited from Helmut Uhlig, “Johannes R. Becher” in Expressionismus. Gestalten einer literarischen Bewegung, ed. Hermann Friedmann and Otto Mann (Heidelberg, 1956), p. 188. For the relationship between expressionism and naturalism, see “Introduction.”

9. Gesammelte Gedichte (Zürich, 1956), p. 18.

10. Das Lyrische Werk, ed. Adolf Klarmann (Frankfurt, 1967), p. 199.

11. Die Dichtungen (Salzburg, 1938), p. 136.

12. Erde (Berlin, 1912), p. 6.

13. Expressionism as a term was first introduced in painting, in an exhibition in 1901 at the Salon des indépendants by Julien-Auguste Hervé. In 1911 Wilhelm Worringer applied it to Cézanne, Matisse, and others.

14. Die Fürstin (München, 1916), pp. 6-7, 23. For the “double action” as part of the shift from naturalism to expressionism in prose, see Erich V. Kahler, “Die Prosa des Expressionismus,” Der deutsche Expressionismus, ed. Hans Steffen (Göttingen, 1965), pp. 159 ff.

15. Ibid., pp. 38-39.

16. Franz Kafka (Bonn, 1958), pp. 74-91 et passim. See also Walter Muschg, Von Trakl zu Brecht. Dichter des Expressionismus (München, 1962), pp. 149-173.

17. Poems 1923-1954 (New York, 1954), p. 114.