[In the following essay, Weisstein considers the question of whether scholars should evaluate Expressionism primarily as a literary style, or whether they need to take into account its social and political dimensions as well.]

“No matter how things turn out, one will have to admit that Expressionism was the last common, general, and conscious attempt of a whole generation to instill new life into art, music, and literature.”¹ I think that this holds true even though, geographically speaking, Expressionism was more or less restricted to the Teutonic part of Europe: Germany, Scandinavia, and the Netherlands, including the northern, Flemish part of Belgium (James Ensor). Although, except in the theater—where Tairoff and Meyerhold helped in shaping the physiognomy of “Revolutionary Romanticism”—Russia did not substantially contribute to this general Aufbruch, inspiration for many German Expressionistic writers (such as Franz Werfel and, later, Hermann Hesse) came from Dostoievsky, just as some of the Activists were fond of Tolstoi. And in painting, the spirit of Russian mysticism strongly pervaded the esthetic thinking of the Blaue Reiter.

It is not generally known that the latter group, apart from its whip Kandinsky, counted a considerable number of Russians among its members, as did its predecessor, the Neue Künstlervereinigung. Wladimir Bechtejeff, the brothers Burliuk, Axel von Jawlensky, Moissej Kogan, and Marianne von Werefkin are perhaps the most prominent of these. As a curiosity it might be mentioned that one of the Blaue Reiter was the American Albert Bloch, who subsequently became Professor of Art at the University of Kansas.

On the whole, Expressionism had little immediate impact on the Anglo-Saxon world, however. John Marin and the cubistically inclined Lyonel Feininger (who spent the decisive years of his career in Germany) embraced the cause; and shortly before World War I Wyndham Lewis and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska briefly raised the Vorticist flag in London.² The plays of Georg Kaiser, Franz Werfel, and Ernst Toller, performed on the New York stage around 1920, gave impetus to playwrights like Eugene O'Neill, Elmer Rice and, later, Thornton Wilder; and the English Group Theatre of Auden and Isherwood, including T. S. Eliot's Aristophanic minstrel show Sweeney Agonistes, was not unaffected by the German model.

Yet it is no secret that, until fairly recently, the Busch-Reisinger Museum at Harvard University owned the only representative collection of paintings by members of the Brücke group to be found anywhere in the United States. But now the graphic and pictorial work of these artists is suddenly in great demand, and Peter Selz' monumental study of German Expressionist Painting offers the most authoritative analysis of their art.³ German Expressionist literature, on the other hand, is still unfamiliar and poorly understood in America and England. At least a few anthologies of plays and poetry in translation are now available: Hamburger and Middleton's German Poetry 1910-1960 and Sokel's An Anthology of German Expressionist Drama, absurdly subtitled “A Prelude to the Absurd.”⁴ And one critical monograph in English, Sokel's The Writer in Extremis, has been published, albeit its predominantly thematic orientation reduces its value for those who seek to define the Expressionistic style.⁵ But, after all: As Expressionism had first to be discovered in England and America, it had to be rediscovered in post-war Germany. For Adolf Hitler had consigned it to esthetic Limbo when he labelled all art that failed to live up to the naturalistic standards of Franz Leibl “entartet.”

The Latin countries found Expressionism uncongenial to their way of thinking and feeling. Being classicists at heart, the French prefer an art that seeks to depict objectively verifiable and measurable formal beauty. The father of Cubism was a Frenchman, Paul Cézanne; but it was a Dutchman, Piet Mondrian, who lifted the quasi-abstract art of Braque and Picasso into the untroubled realm of what he called Pure Plastic Art. For the true Expressionist, however, Classicism was the very establishment whose foundations he sought to undermine, his Weltgefühl being admittedly closer to that of the Romantics. Gottfried Benn's introduction to the collection Lyrik des expressionistischen Jahrzehnts—which is a revised version of an essay in defense of Expressionism published, courageously, in 1933—culminates in the rhetorical assertion: “[Expressionism] rose, fought its battles on the Catalonian fields, and was defeated. It raised its flag on the Bastille, the Kreml, and at Golgatha, but never reached Mount Olympus and other classical terrain.”⁶

Apart from Georges Rouault's neo-medieval stained-glass technique, the only kind of Expressionism France produced was the decorative “Ausdruckskunst” of Les Fauves: the wild beasts André Derain, Maurice Vlaminck, and Henri Matisse in their paintings executed between 1905 and 1910. Like the members of Die Brücke in the Dresden of those years, the Fauves developed a sudden, intense interest in primitive art, which had hitherto lingered away in ethnographic museums. But their Gallic esprit kept them from getting too fiercely involved in the quest for a revival of the barbaric spirit. Standing at the crossroads between Cubism and Expressionism, Picasso created his “Demoiselles d'Avignon” (1908), but then moved on to an art that was less contorted and more serene.

Italy witnessed the spectacular rise of the proto-Fascist movement known as Futurism: a violent action art which sought, like Dadaism, to destroy the past with its burdensome heritage. The Futurists indulged in a blind worship of speed and the machine, preferably when used as a means of warfare. In literature, they sought, in the words of Filippo Marinetti's Technical Manifesto, to free language by releasing it from the fetters of Latin grammar: “It is an urgent necessity to liberate the words by dragging them out of the cage of Latin syntax.”⁷ Their recipes were used by some of the radical German Expressionists: Johannes R. Becher, the late Minister of Culture in the German Democratic Republic, but then one of the most violent makers of word cascades, and Alfred Döblin, author of Die Ermordung einer Butterblume and Die drei Sprünge des Wang-Lun.

Spain, to complete our rapid survey of the international situation, remained quite unaffected by Expressionism, even though the naturalized Toledan Domenico Theotocopuli, better known as El Greco, was, like Matthias Grünewald, regarded as one of the spiritual godfathers of Germany's twentieth century “Stürmer und Dränger.” In his autobiography, Salvador Dali reports that when he entered the Madrid Academy his teachers had just begun to notice that shadows weren't black and were duly shocked when he blithely proceeded to demonstrate Cubist techniques of painting. Spain, perhaps partly on account of its Moorish background, soon afterwards came under the spell of French Surrealism.

Kurt Pinthus' statement was not invalidated by the birth of Surrealism in 1924, i. e. at a time when Expressionism had spent its force. True, Surrealism—due, most likely, to its Freudian underpinning—gained far more universal recognition than was ever bestowed on its German counterpart. But as a movement it was originally tied to poetry, painting being formally introduced only after Dali's arrival in Paris, when André Breton decided that an extension of the Surrealist esthetic to the plastic arts was feasible. However, the movement, as was inevitable, produced a wealth of artistically inferior works due to the underlying assumption that art must rely on chance, and that the automatic transcription of subliminal experiences is a valid form of expression. At least in the first, experimental phase, the Surrealists wished nothing better than to be appareils enregistreurs, just as the Impressionists had shown themselves satisfied with being “nothing but eyes,” to use a phrase coined by Cézanne and aimed at Monet.

Surrealism altogether eschews the volitional element in art, the intention or what Wilhelm Worringer calls the Kunstwollen. Precisely this aspect prevails in Expressionistic art, where it predicates a total involvement of the artist, thereby precluding any sort of playful experimentation or automatism. No doubt: a lot of Expressionistic art, both poetry and painting, has also dated on account of its pronounced stylistic mannerisms; but enough literary and pictorial works of sound value remain to make Expressionism a vital and enduring force in modern European culture.

What renders Expressionism doubly interesting to students of contemporary art is the fact that its gospel spread to all the arts, thereby encouraging the formation and cultivation of Doppelbegabungen. Which is hardly surprising if one keeps in mind that what mattered to the Expressionists was not so much the formal perfection of the finished product, i. e., the craft and technical skill (Worringer's Können) as the intensity of the artistic drive. As Ernst Stadler puts it in a poem that has often been called programmatic:

Form und Riegel mussten erst zerspringen,
Welt durch aufgeschlossne Röhren dringen:
Form ist Wollust, Friede, himmlisches Genügen,
Doch mich reisst es, Ackerschollen umzupflügen.
Form will mich verschnüren und verengen,
Doch ich will mein Sein in alle Weiten drängen.

“Form wants to oppress and stifle me, but I desire a vast expansion of my being”; such is the message to which many artists of that generation harkened. Oskar Kokoschka is not only a painter but also the author of boldly experimental plays like Mörder Hoffnung der Frauen, a prototype of the Expressionistic Schreidrama. Arnold Schönberg was a composer, a dramatist (he wrote the texts for several of his operas) and a painter. Indeed, some of his paintings were included in the first exhibition of the Blaue Reiter. Ernst Barlach, finally, was a sculptor and graphic artist as well as novelist and playwright, a man who expressed himself with equal force in several media. Barlach, who hated to be classed with any group or movement, was perhaps the most genuine Expressionist, an Expressionist “beyond fashion and full of necessity.”⁸ One of his basic themes was resurrection; and he treated it most poignantly in those comedies (Der arme Vetter and Der blaue Boll) where transcendence is achieved in a thoroughly earthy setting delineated with the utmost realism. Barlach was greatly shocked when he discovered that, at the Berlin Staatstheater, his characters were portrayed with Expressionistic onesidedness.⁹

Following Kurt Pinthus, I have, so far, carefully avoided calling Expressionism a movement. For viewed as a historical phenomenon in its totality, it cannot be properly regarded as such. The term movement, that is to say, should be reserved for groups of contemporaries having a common goal and subscribing to a formulated program. To be sure, in painting we have Die Brücke, a true Künstlergemeinschaft until 1913 when Ernst Ludwig Kirchner's chronicle met with the disapproval of his fellow painters. The Blaue Reiter, on the other hand, showed relatively little artistic coherence. In literature, the situation was even more chaotic; and, with the exception of the clique gathered around Herwarth Walden's periodical Der Sturm, programs were written and theories developed only after the fact by critics, editors, anthologists and other “outsiders.”

In the introduction to his pamphlet Über neue Prosa (which forms part of the well-known series Tribüne der Kunst und Zeit), Max Krell observes that Expressionism is a collective term used to refer to a complex of views and feelings (“Sammelwort eines Gefühls- und Anschauungskomplexes”) but that the individual Expressionist prefers Lösung (creative freedom or independence) to Bindung (adherence to a common cause).¹⁰ However, as Krell points out, there are the Activists, a group of writers associated with publications like Das Ziel, Die Aktion, and René Schickele's far less virulent Die weissen Blätter. The Activists, of whom Heinrich Mann was the most prominent, had specific goals and shared a Weltanschauung, the term being here used in the narrower, socio-political sense. Perhaps they actually were, as on writer puts it, thwarted humanists who had discovered that the world in which they lived did not measure up to the ideal glowingly painted by their teachers.¹¹

The literary output of the Activists was infused with a rigorously ethical spirit; for what they had in common with their Expressionistic brethren was a craving for the Renaissance of man. Their idol was Friedrich Schiller, whom Nietzsche, in an unforgettable phrase, had dubbed the “Moraltrompeter von Säckingen.” These Zivilisationsliteraten, as Thomas Mann calls them in his autobiographical Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen, were invariably Pacifists, but, unlike the Dadaists, constructive ones. Many of them actively participated in setting up local and regional governments during the revolution of 1918-1919. The lines of distinction between Expressionism and Activism have been admirably drawn in a book by Wolfgang Paulsen.¹²

What, however, makes it possible for us to discuss the Expressionists as a group, if there is no such thing as an Expressionistic program or manifesto? And can we, in spite of the apparent incoherence of views and styles, find some common denominator for all their efforts? I think most of the writers and painters whom we now regard as Expressionists would have agreed that they were primarily concerned with capturing the essence of things rather than their external appearance. They found nothing more contemptible than the Naturalistic “slice of life” and its Impressionist variant. “Mensch werde wesentlich,” the clarion call sounded by the Baroque epigrammatist Angelus Silesius, was their motto. The essence or core of things, however, can be reached only by resolutely piercing the various layers of social, political, and psychological reality. This thrust, this plunging into depth, i. e. into a realm forbidden to the senses, presupposes a quasi-religious fervor, an urge to bring about a total Vergeistigung (spiritualization) of life and art. In the works of Expressionism, man is, therefore, directly confronted with eternity. Art, for these writers and painters, was not a substitute for religion; it was religion itself. And their principal line of communication, like that of the Mystics, was not a horizontal but a vertical one. This, naturally, poses an entirely new problem of communication on the human plane.

Even before World War I, a number of critics conversant with the current trends sought to isolate certain traits in order to gain valid criteria for analyzing contemporary works of art. They did so almost invariably in terms of style, not content. For even if one concedes that certain themes—such as the father-son conflict, the struggle between duty and conviction, the Aufbruch from one mode of existence to another—occur frequently in Expressionistic literature, the thematic approach is doomed to failure when it comes to judging the plastic arts or comparing poetic with pictorial works. Kurt Pinthus, who singled out “intensity” as the principal feature of Expressionism, himself succumbed to the thematic fallacy—which he rejected in theory—when arranging the contents of his anthology.

In his collection of essays Der neue Standpunkt, one of the first and most eloquent apologies for the new art, Theodor Däubler—the man whom Barlach seems to have used as a model for Der blaue Boll¹³—lists “speed, simultaneity, and extreme intensity in the telescopic view of the world” as traits characteristic of a style which, in his as yet undifferentiated view, comprises Cubism, Futurism, and Expressionism.¹⁴ “When a man is hanged, he relives his entire life over again in a final moment” is another way in which Däubler expresses the same idea.¹⁵ Viewed historically, such a description would seem to be more applicable to paintings like Chagall's proto-Surrealistic “I and the Village” (1917) or Gino Severini's “Dynamic Hieroglyphic of the Bal Tabarin” (1912) than to any Expressionistic work, except perhaps of the type represented by Franz Marc's “Tierschicksale” (1913).

Däubler also refers to Expressionistic art as that of a highly concentrated vision: “A vision seeks to manifest itself with extreme succinctness in the realm of mannered simplicity: that is Expressionism in every style.”¹⁶ With regard to literature, Kasimir Edschmid, another pioneer of Expressionism in both theory and practice, claims that “the rhythmic construction of the sentences is different. They serve the same intention, the same spiritual urge which renders only the essential.”¹⁷ The sentences “link peak with peak, are telescoped into each other, and have ceased to be connected by the buffers of logical transition or the external plaster of psychology.”¹⁸

An excellent illustration of this technique occurs in Georg Kaiser's play Von morgens bis mitternachts, when the protagonist—a bank clerk who has absconded with a large sum of money and is now trying to reap the fruits of his Aufbruch—describes the effect of the climactic moment of a tandem race upon the already frenzied audience: “This is the utmost concentration of fact. Here it does the impossible. A fusion of all galleries. The utter dissolution of the individual leads to the formation of a dense core: passion.”¹⁹ And later, when the waiter of a restaurant enters the chambre separée to inquire what he wants to eat, the clerk replies: “Peaks, peaks, from beginning to end. Peaks are the utmost concentrations in everything.”²⁰ It is this passion for intensity which explains, among other things, the telegram style of the Expressionistic Schrei-Drama, as exemplified by Reinhard Goering's famous Seeschlacht. This telegram style is the very opposite of the Naturalistic Sekundenstil, which forms the literary equivalent of the “slice of life.”

Phrases such as “Höhe des Gefühls,” “Spitzen des Gefühls,” “Berge des Herzens” (this latter coined by Rilke) abound in Expressionistic literature, indicating that its mysticism is dynamic. Indeed, nothing could be further from the Expressionist than to imitate the saints in the First Duino Elegy who, experiencing levitation, “knieten, Unmögliche, weiter und achtetens nicht.” Perhaps the word most frequently uttered by Expressionistic protagonists is Aufbruch which, untranslatable into English, suggests a complete desertion of the past, a burning of bridges, a progress beyond the point of no return. Aufbruch is the catchword of a generation which, following Faust's example, seeks “auf neuer Bahn den Äther zu durchdringen / Zu neuen Sphären reiner Tätigkeit.” Such an awakening may occur either in the form of a sudden, volcanic eruption or, as in the Stationendrama of Strindbergian provenience, in a number of stages leading to some sort of spiritual catharsis, as in the protagonist's contrived Ecce Homo pose at the end of Von morgens bis mitternachts.

The “Weltgefühl” which animates the Expressionistic writers is captured in the titles of the numerous magazines, books, series, and anthologies issued between 1910 and 1920: Erhebung, Anbruch, Verkündigung, Botschaft, Entfaltung, Das neue Pathos, Der jüngste Tag, whereas the Activist publications carry names like Kameraden der Menschheit or Gemeinschaft. Menschheitsdämmerung, patterned after Wagner's Götterdämmerung and Nietzsche's Götzendämmerung, points both to the end (dusk) of an epoch and to the beginning (dawn) of a new era. By far the most influential of all these periodicals was Der Sturm, not only because in its pages literature, painting, and the graphic arts found themselves united—for that was a feature common to many publications of the time—but also because its editor, Herwarth Walden, solidified his own views on modern art by extracting a literary theory from the poems of August Stramm and by founding and supporting institutions like the Sturmschule and the Sturmbühne.

The title of this essay must seem paradoxical to those who believe that, whether directly or indirectly, style must be a reflection of Weltanschauung, Weltanschauung being the sum total of intellectual views and emotional attitudes embraced by a given individual. No such paradox applies to those artistic movements which aim at reproducing tangible reality by means of imitation. If Realism, which is the most moderate and commonsensical of these movements, can be defined, with Vivian de Sola Pinto, as “that art which gives a truthful impression of actuality as it appears to the normal consciousness,”²¹ then the “advance” of Naturalism or Impressionism can be measured as a deviation from that norm, as a shift of accent or change in emphasis effected by a Courbet or Monet, a Verlaine or Zola.

Realists, Naturalists and Impressionists, in their different ways, wish to portray solely that which is visible, audible, etc., not only to themselves but to everybody else as well. They fight their pitched battles uniformly in the name of objectivity. With the Expressionists—as, by the way, also with the Surrealists—the matter is radically different. In their opinion, the function of art is not to reproduce the visible but, in Paul Klee's words (“Kunst gibt nicht das Sichtbare wieder, sondern macht sichtbar”),²² to make visible that which is not ordinarily revealed to the senses. “The world exists already,” says Kasimir Edschmid. “It would be useless to repeat it.”²³ Unlike the Surrealists, however, the Expressionists realized that before one can make the invisible visible one must experience a vision.

As Proust points out in Du Coté de chez Swann, this externalization of the internal is natural enough to the writer, who enjoys the inestimable advantage of being able to place himself and his readers inside the characters he has created, whereas in real life we cannot intuit other people's soul states:

A real person, profoundly as we may sympathise with him, is in a great measure perceptible only through our senses, that is to say, he remains opaque, offers a dead weight which our sensibilities have not the strength to lift. … The novelist's happy discovery was to think of substituting for those opaque sections, impenetrable by the human spirit, their equivalent in immaterial sections, things, that is, which the spirit can assimilate to itself.²⁴

But how is the painter to accomplish a similar feat? How can he, being so closely tied to the world of ordinary sense perception, break through the shell in order to reveal what it hides from view, i. e., our inmost thoughts and feelings? The answer furnished by the Expressionists is simple: through style; style meaning primarily shapes and colors representing an order of things that is different from the natural one. Seen from the mimetic point of view, however, this signifies abstraction or, at least, some sort of more or less violent distortion. Unlike mere stylization, as we find it, say, in Mannerism or Art Nouveau (Jugendstil), style is not constituted by a mild, gradual, decorative abstraction from organic form, resulting in a kind of arabesque. In the most radical instances of Expressionistic style, the beholder, unless he prefers to ignore intentions by concentrating on formal values, is thus faced with the grim task of reuniting “abstract” compositions with their underlying Weltanschauung.

The arguments I have used are partly taken from Wilhelm Worringer's book Abstraktion und Einfühlung which, originally published in 1908, was the esthetic Bible of Expressionism, especially of the Blaue Reiter. Worringer contends that the urge for abstraction (Abstraktionsdrang) arises on two different stages of man's spiritual evolution: a) at the primitive stage when, numinously overwhelmed by the supernatural forces which he thinks inherent in nature, man fashions objects which, being geometric and regular, i. e. unnatural, give him a sense of superiority and, hence, security; and b) at a highly sophisticated stage when the world of matter becomes indifferent and transcendence is, once more, desired. This latter phase produces the abstract, spiritualized and highly ornamental art of the Orient.

Worringer and his British disciple T. E. Hulme—the man who laid the theoretical foundations for Vorticism—scorned the realistic stage which intervenes between a and b. They spoke contemptuously of the classical art of Greece, of the Renaissance, and of the positivistic nineteenth century. Inspiring the Expressionists, Worringer singled out the Gothic and the Baroque as the only two ages which, due to their spiritual unrest and mystical aspiration, ought to be admired by the moderns. He himself preferred the Gothic to the Baroque, because the latter, by intensifying the sensual until it became suprasensual,²⁵ had chosen a devious way toward spiritualization, whereas in the Gothic cathedral man's urge toward spiritual transcendence (Vergeistigung) was directly embodied.

In Worringer's and Hulme's opinion, all classical art, grown out of a harmonious relationship between man and nature, signals an abdication of the will. Kunstwollen (artistic volition), however, to their mind, was the agent which assured man's ascendancy over his environment. Empathy and imitation are the cornerstones of an esthetic formed by weaklings. They were now to be deposed, and alienation and abstraction crowned in their place.

The two leading German schools of Expressionistic art may serve to illustrate the two levels of abstraction named by Worringer: the Brücke group representing the neo-primitive phase, and the Blaue Reiter the oriental. As Hermann Bahr states in his book Expressionismus, “Just as primitive man, frightened by nature, hides within himself, we moderns flee a civilization that devours man's soul.”²⁶ How the members of Die Brücke saved their souls was recently demonstrated by the exhibition “Das Ursprüngliche und die Moderne,” which was held at the West Berlin Akademie der Künste. Here the primitive objects owned by the Berlin and Dresden ethnographic museums were shown side by side with the paintings and sculptures they had inspired.

Following in the footsteps of Paul Gauguin, Emil Nolde and Max Pechstein separately visited the South Sea Islands in 1913 and 1914. Both returned imbued with the “savage” spirit. Pechstein's Credo in the volume Schöpferische Konfession begins with exclamations like “Work. Frenzy. Crush the brain. Chew. Devour. Gulp. Squash. Blissful pains of delivery. The brush cracks and should like to pierce the canvas. Trample on the paint tubes … Paint. Roll in paints, wallow in chords. In the thick of chaos.”²⁷ At approximately the same time, Stravinsky reincarnated the savage state in his Sacre du Printemps, and O'Neill followed suit with his Emperor Jones.

The neo-primitives of the Brücke group were at their best in the graphic arts, especially in the woodcut. Wyndham Lewis found their work to be “African, in that it is sturdy, cutting through … to the monotonous wall of space, and intense yet hale; permeated by eternity—an atmosphere in which only the black core of life rises and is silhouetted.” For him, the woodcut was “a miniature sculpture where the black nervous fluid of existence in flood forms into hard stagnant masses.”²⁸ What appealed to the Expressionists in this medium, as used by the German primitives of the fifteenth century, was its imperviousness to psychological finesse, as well as its harsh angularity.—In the field of sculpture, Amedeo Modigliani in France (with his Caryatids) and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska in England came perhaps closest to reaching this Vorticist-Expressionist ideal, whereas Germany, Barlach excepted, produced no major Expressionistic sculptor, even though Lehmbruck's elongated figures are often drawn into the discussion.

The works of several Blaue Reiter, on the other hand, breathe the spirit of Worringer's post-empathetic phase. Franz Marc looked at his own art in much the same light, as it shown by his remark: “Our European urge for abstract form is nothing but our hyperconscious, superactive reaction to, and triumph over, the sentimental spirit. Primitive man, however, had not met the latter when he loved abstraction.”²⁹ August Macke, reaching, at least experimentally, the stage of pure abstraction in 1907, wrote to his fiancée: “Just now all my bliss derives from pure colors. Last week I placed colors side by side on a wooden board without thinking of any object, such as men or trees, as in crochetry.”³⁰ Kandinsky and Adolf Hoelzel—Nolde's and Baumeister's teacher—broke the barrier around 1910, and Franz Marc, with his “Fighting Forms,” four years later. Of the members of Die Brücke, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner was probably the only one to grope his way toward abstraction in his colored woodcut illustrations to Peter Schlemihl.

We have reached the crucial point in any discussion of Expressionism in literature or painting; for whoever wishes to make his peace with that style has to know where to draw the line between so-called non-objective and representational art. In statement after statement, the Expressionists professed that it was their aim to mate the abstract with the concrete, soul with body, and spirit with matter—just as the Surrealists wished to reconcile the world of dreams with that of waking, the subconscious with the conscious. Walter von Hollander, for example, calls Paul Kornfeld's drama Die Verführung Expressionistic in so far as, in it, the soul finds an outlet through the body.³¹ And Kasimir Edschmid bluntly states: “We want the flesh, but in sharpened suprasensual pleasures.”³²

As the chief apologist for Expressionistic literature, Edschmid fought the notion that a school of pure abstraction might develop within its framework. “The urge for abstraction no longer knows any limits, no longer realizes how subtle the balance of content and creative form. Exceeding the boundaries of the sensuous, it creates pure theory.”³³ Edschmid was undoubtedly shocked by Däubler's definition of the new style as “color without a name, line without definition,” but “rhythmically placed nouns without attributes”³⁴ must have been more to his taste. Still, Edschmid must have rejected the extreme views pushed by the artists of the Sturm circle: Rudolf Blümner's use of abstract word formations and Lothar Schreyer's theory of the Expressionistic Gesamtkunstwerk composed of pure words, sounds, forms, colors, and rhythms.

Indeed, “Abstract Expressionism” is a logical absurdity unless we can somehow salvage Kandinsky's concept of art as based on the principle of inner necessity. Kandinsky himself would not have called his works abstractions, since, for him, form was always the expression of a content.³⁵ Thus, as far as the underlying intentions are concerned, his Impressions, Improvisations and Compositions are polar opposites of the serene abstractions of De Stijl and the stark geometries of Malevich's Suprematism.

Kandinsky's esthetic issues from the conviction that art is a vehicle of communication between the artist and his audience. In his programmatic treatise Über das Geistige in der Kunst, he uses the piano to show that art is “purposive playing with the human soul.” With the aid of color and form, the feelings of the beholders of his pictures are to be manipulated in such a way that “[color] is the keyboard, the eyes are the hammers, the soul is the piano with many strings, [and] the artist is the hand that plays, touching one key or another purposively, to cause vibration in the soul.”³⁶

To this end all of Kandinsky's efforts were directed. Ideally, he wanted the beholder to be compelled to “wander around” in the finished picture,³⁷ just as Paul Klee, writing in Schöpferische Konfession, invites us to take a little journey.³⁸ What Kandinsky hoped to achieve was, paradoxically enough, a sort of “empathy through abstraction.” But how is this empathy to be brought about? For assuming even that one sincerely believes in the veracity of the feelings an artist claims to have channelled into his work, it is, and always will be, quite impossible to extract such feelings from their visual record on the canvas. Of course we may rely on intuition, which found so strong an advocate in Henri Bergson. But intuition is an unreliable guide and difficult to translate into the language of ordinary logic. Thus Kandinsky's paintings after 1910, to quote Däubler's beautifully turned phrases, are “Blue manifestations of a decision before their embodiment in action; Mongolianisms which mistily invade us, creating chaos through the mystical use of color or [generating] a cosmos.”³⁹

Arnold Schönberg, the inventor of the “method of composition with twelve tones which are related only with one another,” broke resolutely with the musical past by completing a process that had begun with Wagner's chromaticism and continued via Debussy's experiments to the full emancipation of dissonance in Stravinsky's Sacre. Similarly, Kandinsky broke with the tradition of representational art by pushing to the limit the implications of a statement with which van Gogh, writing from Arles to his brother Theo, had announced the emancipation of pictorial dissonance:

Because instead of trying to reproduce exactly what I have before my eyes, I use color more arbitrarily so as to express myself more forcefully. Well, let that be as a matter of theory, but I am going to give you an example of what I mean.

I should like to paint the portrait of an artist friend, a man who dreams great dreams, who works as the nightingale sings, because it is his nature. He'll be a fair man. I want to put into the picture my appreciation, the love that I have for him. So I paint him as he is, as faithfully as I can, to begin with.

But the picture is not finished yet. To finish it I am now going to be the arbitrary colorist. I exaggerate the fairness of the hair, I get to orange tones, chromes and pale lemon yellow.

Beyond the head, instead of painting the ordinary wall of the mean room, I paint infinity, a plain background of the richest, intensest blue that I can contrive, and by this simple combination the bright head illuminated against a rich blue background acquires a mysterious effect, like the star in the depths of an azure sky.⁴⁰

I do not think that the Expressionistic theory of art in general, and of portrait painting in particular, has ever been more clearly articulated. The painter's statement helps to resolve the dichotomy posed by our contention that the Expressionists wanted to show the essence of things (their Wesen) and Herbert Read's definition of the style as one which seeks to reproduce “not the objective reality of the world, but the subjective reality of the feelings which objects and events arouse in us.”⁴¹ For the finished product, as indicated by van Gogh, was to embody both the sitter's personality and the artist's estimation thereof, i.e., a perfect blend of the objective (not conceived in a superficial, realistic way) and the subjective.

With the coming of Expressionism, the focus of attention was, once again, shifted from physical to human nature. Indeed, the Expressionists are among the greatest portrait painters of all time. They invariably show their sitters en face, never in profile, because the eyes “are the windows of the soul.”⁴² It is precisely the soul, however—especially the soul in writhing anguish—which the Expressionists desired to project.

Edvard Munch, many of whose paintings are, in Däubler's words, “highly erotic but not sensual,”⁴³ reflects this anguish in his pictorial allegory of the “Scream,” which seems to illustrate Hermann Bahr's puzzling statement: “Impressionism treated the eye like an ear, Expressionism like a mouth. The ear is dumb, and Impressionism bade the soul be silent. The mouth is deaf, and the Expressionist cannot hear the world.”⁴⁴ Paula Modersohn-Becker's portrait of Rainer Maria Rilke (1906) represents one of the earliest stages in the Expressionistic search for the pictorial equivalent of soul states; and Oskar Kokoschka's masterful Self-Portrait of 1917 reveals the “ghost” of the painter through the enormously dilated pale blue eyes and the twisted hands that look like caterpillars. According to Edschmid, a literary parallel to this phenomenon is found in the work of Alfred Döblin, “who so fabulously permeates and irradiates the flesh with injections of spirit that the ghost (a different thing from the skeleton) becomes solely visible.”⁴⁵ Edschmid credits August Strindberg—we think of his Ghost Sonata—with having done the same thing in drama.

Unlike Munch, Modersohn-Becker, and Kokoschka, certain Expressionists sought to plumb the depth of the souls of animals. According to August Macke, “the senses are a bridge connecting the visible and the invisible. To look at plants and animals means to feel their secret.”⁴⁶ Thus Franz Marc, the Expressionistic animal painter par excellence, sought to portray the world of beasts not as we see it but as the eagle, the horse, the cow, or the tiger see it. Every animal thus becomes, in Däubler's words, “the incarnation of its cosmic rhythm.”⁴⁷

Moving still further down the Great Chain of Being, other Expressionists breathed a soul even into inanimate things, not in order to reveal their inner geometry (for that was what the Cubists aimed at doing) but with the intention of demonstrating their latent dynamism. Speaking of Robert Delaunay, Däubler calls him the first Expressionist on account of his “portraits” of the Eiffel Tower. In fact, that tower is “scaffold and skeleton of the future … [It] is the first Expressionist … [it] has a soul … [it] is an artist … It is also the father of Delaunay.”⁴⁸ Thus Wilhelm Worringer hits the mark when, surveying Expressionism in a retrospective essay, he credits it with having theomorphized the world in its drive for total spiritualization.⁴⁹ Impressionism having run its course, landscape, too—in the words of Kurt Pinthus—was no longer “copied, described, glorified … but wholly humanized.”⁵⁰ Such an interpretation could well be placed on El Greco's “View of Toledo” or van Gogh's “Starry Night.”

On the pictorial plane, such spiritualization is invariably manifested as distortion. Distortion of form or color is, in fact, the very hallmark of Expressionistic art. But how about Expressionistic literature? I believe that even in this respect a perfect parallelism exists between the two media. A few hints may suffice in the present context. The immediate forerunners of German literary Expressionism were Frank Wedekind and Carl Sternheim, whose tools were caricature, the grotesque, and satire; in other words: techniques which invariably involve distortion. When Thomas Mann defined Expressionism in the Betrachtungen, he singled out these very traits to show how totally writers like his brother Heinrich had lost touch with contemporary life and political reality.

The syntactical distortions which occur in Expressionistic poetry are nowhere more prominent than in Gottfried Benn's “Karyatide,” which contains the difficult lines “Bespei die Säulensucht: toderschlagene / Greisige Hände bebten sie / Verhangenen Himmeln zu,” which Michael Hamburger renders clumsily as “Spit on this column mania: done to death / mere senile hands they trembled / towards cloud-covered heavens,” and Lohner / Corman more appropriately “Spit on this passion for pillars: the death-dealing / hoary hands trembled them / to overhanging heaven.”⁵¹

To be sure, in the realm of language it seems particularly bold to strive for the kind of simplification and foreshortening found in the woodcuts of the Brücke group or the kind of abstraction familiar from Kandinsky. Nevertheless, such tendencies made themselves felt in the poetry of August Stramm and other, more radical exponents of Sturm art. Herwarth Walden demanded that the poet should use words and rhythm in the same way in which the painter uses color and form, and the composer sound and rhythm. Stramm, who was not a theoretician, transformed Dichtung (poetry) into Wortkunst, as in the poem “Schwermut,” which reads:

Schreiten Streben
Leben sehnt
Schauern Stehen
Blicke suchen
Sterben wächst
Das Kommen
Schreit!
Tief
Stummen
Wir.

Under the aegis of Rudolf Blümner, the level of pure abstraction was reached shortly afterwards in the Lautkunst of poems like “Ango Laina,” which opens with the cryptic line “Oiaí laéla oía ssísialu” and ends with what sounds like a parody of Stramm's one-word lines: “gádse / ina / leíola / kbáo / sagór / kadó.” Blümner took the matter very seriously and would have been offended had anybody told him about the curious resemblance between “Ango Laina” and certain Dadaist nonsense poems. Like the experiments with abstract rhythms which Edith Sitwell undertook in Façade, Lautkunst entails a complete breakdown of communication of the level on which language commonly operates. For how are we to extract any sort of meaning from Blümner's African-sounding word formations? Benn, who was fascinated by what he called “das südliche Wort,” and who dreamed of realizing the purely formal art which Gustave Flaubert envisaged when he stood on the Acropolis, wisely refrained from putting his theory into practice. So did Ezra Pound, a great admirer of Kandinsky, who wished to rid poetry of all literary values (as Verlaine had proclaimed in “Art Poétique”) and who, at least in the Imagist-Vorticist phase of his career, championed an art devoid of meaning. For while the general public has, at long last, been reconciled with abstraction in the pictorial arts, abstraction in literature, or even a private, synthetic language of the kind employed in Finnegans Wake, is not likely ever to be fashionable.

As a term, Expressionism, which had been launched by the French painter Julien-Auguste Harvé in 1901, found general acceptance in 1911 when a number of German art critics applied it to the Fauvist paintings included in an exhibition of the Berlin Sezession. Worringer gave his blessing when, writing in Der Sturm, he spoke of the “Pariser Synthetisten und Expressionisten: Cézanne, van Gogh, Matisse.” No transfer to literature was attempted until several years later, probably 1914 or 1915; and as early as 1918 Kasimir Edschmid spoke of literary Expressionism as a fad embraced by a horde of imitators. Four years later, Kurt Pinthus, asked to prepare a new edition of his anthology, decided to leave Menschheitsdämmerung untouched. For he felt that “after the completion of this lyrical symphony, no poetry has been written that inalienably belongs to it.”⁵²

Those were the years of transition from Expressionism to Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity). Soon the Bauhaus was to be the most influential force in the fine and applied arts, and sobriety began to reassert itself in literature and music. Expressionism was an impulse quickly spent. The Weltanschauung at its root, and the style to which it gave rise, were those of youthful enthusiasts who overreached themselves or slid back into more conventional channels of expression. “Let the young,” said Rudolf Kurtz in a phrase that applies to the Storm and Stress as well as to Expressionism, “stay young even to the point of catastrophe. Immaturity is the most powerful yeast of history.”⁵³

The title of our essay posed the question as to whether Expressionism should be viewed primarily as a stylistic phenomenon or as a Weltanschauung, i. e., whether it should be judged by esthetic or extra-esthetic criteria. We pointed out that, luckily, the socio-political aspect can be subsumed by the term Activism. If, excluding this aspect, one defines the term broadly enough to include man's attitude toward himself, his fellow-beings and the world at large, one can defend the use of Weltanschauung in the sense of a sharp rejection of previously embraced views on the part of an entire generation. This is what the Expressionists meant by Aufbruch, by their concentration on soul states, by their determination to make the invisible visible. Hence the intensity, the spiritual unrest, the emotionally charged atmosphere of their products. Indeed, one cannot imagine an Expressionist work to be conceived rationally and in cold blood.

Although, as critics and historians of art, we prefer to approach Expressionism inductively (through an analysis of stylistic devices), we see nothing wrong with the deductive method, provided that it leads to tangible results and comes to grips with specific problems. We object, however, to the thematic treatment proffered in The Writer in Extremis. For as is shown by the unrepresentativeness of the examples adduced by Sokel, what mattered to the Expressionists was not the what—or, for that matter, the why—but only the how of a given phenomenon. They simply did not care whether the Aufbruch they sought to portray occurred in the life of a son, a bank teller, or an artist.

Notes

1. Menschheitsdämmerung: Ein Dokument des Expressionismus (Hamburg, 1959), p. 16. All translations used in this essay are my own.

2. For a discussion of Vorticism see my article “Vorticism: Expressionism English Style” in the Yearbook of Comparative and General Literature, XIII (1964), 28-40.

3. Peter Selz, German Expressionist Painting (Berkeley, 1957).

4. Michael Hamburger and Christopher Middleton, German Poetry 1910-1960 (New York, 1962); Walter H. Sokel, ed., An Anthology of German Expressionist Drama (New York, 1963).

5. Walter H. Sokel, The Writer in Extremis (Stanford, 1959).

6. Lyrik des expressionistischen Jahrzehnts (Munich, 1962), p. 16. The essay “Expressionismus” appears in Benn's Gesammelte Werke, ed. Dieter Wellershoff (Wiesbaden, 1959), I, 240-256.

7. Filippo Marinetti, “Manifesto Tecnico della letteratura futurista” in I Poeti Futuristi (Milano, 1912), p. 12 f.

8. From Julius Bab's Chronik des deutschen Dramas (Berlin, 1922), iv, 106, as quoted in Expressionismus: Literatur und Kunst 1910-1923 (Munich, 1960), p. 312.

9. See Barlach's letter to his brother Karl of October 18, 1924.

10. Über neue Prosa (Berlin, 1919), p. 11.

11. “Die Expressionisten waren enttäuschte Humanisten, da die Wirklichkeit, in der sie lebten, nichts gemein hatte mit jener, die der Humanist der Gymnasien und Universitäten lehrte” (Pinthus in Menschheitsdämmerung, p. 15).

12. Aktivismus und Expressionismus: Eine typologische Untersuchung (Bern/Leipzig, 1935).

13. In 1913, Barlach wrote to his publisher, Reinhard Piper: “[Der blaue Boll] ist ein schönes Modell, aber schwer. Man denkt: so viel Fleisch und Bein soll und will überwunden werden.”

14. “Schnelligkeit, Simultaneität, höchste Anspannung um die Ineinandergehörigkeit des Geschauten” Der neue Standpunkt (Dresden-Hellerau, 1916), p. 179.

15. “Wenn einer gehängt wird, so erlebt er im letzten Augenblick sein ganzes Leben nochmals” Ibid.

16. “Eine Vision will sich in letzter Knappheit im Bezirk verstiegener Vereinfachung kundgeben: das ist Expressionismus in jedem Stil” Ibid.

17. “Die Sätze [liegen] im Rhythmus anders gefaltet als gewohnt. Sie unterstehen der gleichen Absicht, demselben Strom des Geistes, der nur das Eigentliche gibt.” Über den Expressionismus in der Literatur und die neue Dichtung (Berlin, 1919), p. 65.

18. “(Sie) binden Spitze an Spitze, sie schnellen ineinander, nicht mehr verbunden durch Puffer logischer Überleitung, nicht mehr durch den federnden äusserlichen Kitt der Psychologie” Ibid., p. 66.

19. “Das ist die letzte Ballung des Tatsächlichen. Hier schwingt es sich zu seiner schwindelhaften Leistung auf. Vom ersten Rang bis in die Galerie Verschmelzung. Aus siedender Auflösung des einzelnen geballt der Kern: Leidenschaft!” Deutsches Theater des Expressionismus, ed. Joachim Schondorff (Munich, n. d. [1963]), p. 217.

20. “Spitzen, Spitzen … Von Anfang bis zu Ende nur Spitzen … Spitzen sind letzte Ballungen in allen Dingen” Ibid., p. 220 f.

21. “Realism in English Poetry,” Essays and Studies by Members of the English Association, XXV (1939), 81-101.

22. Schöpferische Konfession (Berlin, 1920), p. 28.

23. Op. cit., p. 56.

24. Swann's Way, tr. C. K. Scott Moncrieff (New York, n. d.), p. 118 f.

25. “Only twice [in the history of Western art] a large scale attempt was made to broaden the narrow frame of the relationship [between individualism and sensualism] and to reach out for God by creating a supernatural and suprapersonal, spiritualized art. In the age of the Baroque, this was done covertly, in Expressionism overtly, i. e., in the former through the exaggeration of the sensualistic, in the latter through the exaggeration of the individualistic component of this relationship.” Fragen und Gegenfragen (Munich, 1956), p. 97 f.

26. Expressionismus (Munich, 1920), p. 115.

27. “Arbeiten! Rausch! Gehirn zerschmettern! Kauen, fressen, schlingen, zerwühlen! Wonnevolle Schmerzen des Gebärens! Krachen des Pinsels, am liebsten Durchstossen der Leinwände. Zertrampeln der Farbtuben … Malen! Wühlen in Farben, Wälzen in Klängen! Im Brei des Chaos!” Schöpferische Konfession, p. 19.

28. Wyndham Lewis, the Artist (London, 1939), p. 109.

29. “Unser europäischer Wille zur abstrakten Form ist ja nichts anderes als unsre höchst bewusste, tatenheisse Erwiderung und Überwindung des sentimentalen Geistes. Jener frühe Mensch aber war dem Sentimentalen noch nicht begegnet, als er das Abstrakte liebte.” Quoted from Briefe, Aufzeichnungen und Aphorismen (Berlin, 1920) in Will Grohmann, Bildende Kunst und Architektur [zwischen den beiden Kriegen] (Frankfurt a. M., 1953), p. 411.

30. “Meine ganze Seligkeit suche ich jetzt fast nur in reinen Farben. Vorige Woche habe ich auf einem Brett versucht, Farben zusammenzusetzen, ohne an irgendwelche Gegenstände, wie Menschen oder Bäume, zu denken, ähnlich wie bei der Stickerei.” The letter, dating May 16, 1907, is quoted in the catalogue of the exhibition Der Blaue Reiter held in 1963 in the Städtische Galerie, Munich. It appears opposite the illustration No. 46.

31. Quoted from Die Neue Rundschau in Expressionismus: Literature und Kunst 1910-1923, p. 304.

32. “Wir wollen das Fleisch, aber in gehobenen Übersinnslüsten.” From the essay “Döblin und die Futuristen” in Die doppelköpfige Nymphe (Berlin, 1920), p. 133.

33. Über den dichterischen Expressionismus …, p. 73.

34. “Farbe ohne Bezeichnung, Zeichnung und kein Erklären … im Rhythmus festgesetztes Hauptwort ohne Attribut” Der neue Standpunkt, p. 179.

35. “Since form is merely the expression of a content, and the content differs with different artists, it is obvious that several equally valid forms may exist at the same time.” Quoted from the essay “Über die Formfrage” (Der Blaue Reiter, p. 75) in the exhibition catalogue opposite the illustration No. 25. The Blaue Reiter has been newly edited by Klaus Lankheit (Munich, 1965).

36. Concerning the Spiritual in Art (New York, 1947), p. 47.

37. “For many years, I have tried to find a way of making the viewer walk around in my pictures, of forcing him to forget himself in the act of contemplation” Exhibition catalogue Der Blaue Reiter, opposite the illustration No. 20.

38. “Let us make a little trip into the land of greater insight, with the help of a topographic plan” Schöpferische Konfession, p. 29.

39. “Blaue Kundgebungen des Beschlusses vor ihren Einkörperungen in Taten” or “Mongoleien” which “farbenmystisch chaotisierend oder einen Kosmos ergrenzend, zu uns hereinwolken” Der neue Standpunkt, p. 183 f.

40. The letter, written in mid-August, 1888, appears in The Letters of Vincent van Gogh (New York, 1963), p. 276 ff.

41. The Philosophy of Modern Art (New York, 1955), p. 51.

42. For a discussion of this problem see Karen Machover, Personality Projection in the Drawing of the Human Figure (Springfield, Ill., 1949), p. 47 ff.

43. Der neue Standpunkt, p. 86.

44. “Hat der Impressionismus das Auge zum blossen Ohr gemacht, so macht es der Expressionismus zum blossen Mund. Das Ohr ist stumm; der Impressionist liess die Seele schweigen. Der Mund ist taub; der Expressionist kann die Welt nicht hören.” Op. cit., p. 116.

45. “… der das Fleisch mit Geistinjektionen so fabelhaft durchwühlt und durchschimmert, dass nur das Gespenst (was eine andere Geschichte ist als das Skelett) entsteht.” Die doppelköpfige Nymphe, p. 133.

46. Quoted from August Macke's essay “Die Masken” (Der Blaue Reiter, p. 21) in the exhibition catalogue, opposite illustration No. 48.

47. Der neue Standpunkt, p. 138.

48. Ibid., p. 181 f.

49. Fragen und Gegenfragen, p. 89.

50. Menschheitsdämmerung, p. 29.

51. Hamburger's translation appears in Hamburger, Middleton, German Poetry 1910-1960, the Lohner Corman version in Origin, VII (Autumn, 1952), 144.

52. Menschheitsdämmerung, p. 33.

53. From Kurtz' introduction to Die neue Kunst, a bimonthly publication edited by F. S. Bachmair, I/1 (1913-14), as quoted on p. 67 of Expressionismus: Literatur und Kunst 1910-1923.