SOURCE: Murphy, Richard. “Re-Writing the Discursive World: Revolution and the Expressionist Avant-Garde.” In Theorizing the Avant-Garde: Modernism, Expressionism, and the Problem of Postmodernity, pp. 49-73. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

[In the following excerpt, Murphy explores the revolutionary tendency of many Expressionist poets, citing their use of such techniques as irony, skepticism, and manipulation of the signifier in language.]

“Death to the Moonlight!”

(Futurist slogan)

The heterogeneous and frequently vague nature of the many manifestoes and programmatic statements produced by the numerous writers of the expressionist movement has made it a notoriously difficult phenomenon to pin down to any clear ideological line.¹ The great variety of political and religious groupings which many of its prominent associates went on to join after its official demise, such as the various socialist and communist factions, the National-Socialists, Christians and radical Zionists, may be an indication that a breadth of opinion already existed within its ranks which made the attempt at anything more than a broad and very fleeting affiliation of like-minded thinkers virtually impossible.²

The question of expressionism's impact as a revolutionary event in a social and ideological sense is made even more difficult to answer by the fact that any genuinely radical political agendas proposed in the literary or programmatic writings of the movement are invariably obscured or “overdetermined” by factors apparently extraneous to the issues at stake. For besides fulfilling the intellectual's need to overcome the social and spiritual isolation through engagement within the community,³ the notion of a revolution often appears to offer the possibility merely of curing the self vicariously through the attempt to heal the world.⁴ Alternatively, the ideal of revolution frequently seems to have been embraced as part of a more general desire for spiritual renewal or even as a criminal and destructive act offering a stimulating experiential “rush” or “Lebenssteigerung.”⁵

It is undeniable of course that the expressionist avant-garde's “programmatic” texts present a powerful criticism of the ideological and institutional foundations of Wilhelmine bourgeois society and its culture of affirmation. It is also no coincidence that besides the shorter literary forms of the poem, novella and the one-act play, much expressionist thought was mediated via the more direct and powerful polemical forms, such as their manifestoes and pamphlets,⁶ while as a generic form the expressionist broadsheet, with its shocking, terse and excessive statements had a wide-ranging influence on the movement, constituting one of the major factors behind the belligerent and provocative tone characteristic of its “expressiveness.” However it is the very diversity and vagueness of the revolutionary programs, their refusal to be fixed to a determinate set of social goals and ideologies, or to adopt a single-minded sense of direction, which may turn out, paradoxically, to offer a means of understanding the revolutionary nature of expressionism as an avant-garde literary movement. As I shall show in this [essay] (with reference mainly to the poetic and programmatic texts of the movement), the particular ideological tendency of any overt intentions or stated political goals of the expressionists is ultimately much less significant for their consideration as an avant-garde⁷ than the oppositional edge they give to the iconoclastic poetics they develop.⁸

More important for expressionism as an avant-garde literary movement is that a “revolutionary” impulse is inscribed into its poetics of representation which ensures that the first premise of its construction of the real is the constant interrogation of all ideological and epistemological foundations, all inherited models of reality and all established structures of perception and experience: in short as an avant-garde it questions those dominant social discourses supported by the institution of art, and creates in their place a set of oppositional discourses. Hence the truly revolutionary element of these texts is their constant overturning of the inherited world and its images, so that the final aim appears to lie in the very act of revolution itself as a constant and ongoing process.

DOMINANT SOCIAL DISCOURSE: THE PRISON-HOUSE OF LANGUAGE

For many expressionists the subversion of the inherited world is perceived in part as the active participation in, and continuation of an anomic process which has already been set in motion.⁹ The expressionist writer (and later dadaist) Hugo Ball documents a typical revolutionary response of expressionism to what was perceived as the acute crisis of modernity:

God is dead. A world broke apart … Religion, science, morals—phenomena which emerged from the anxieties of primitive peoples. A world breaks apart. A millenial culture breaks apart. There are no more pillars and supports, no foundations that would not have been shattered. Churches have become castles in the air. Convictions prejudices … The meaning of the world faded away … Chaos broke out … Man lost his heavenly face, became matter, chance, conglomerate, animal, the product of insanity, of abrupt, inadequate and convulsive thoughts. Man lost his special position, which reason had vouchsafed for him.¹⁰

This crisis is the experience of an epoch in which all meaning seems to have disappeared from the world, leaving a mere chaos of fragmented myths and cosmologies. The text registers the onset of chaos firstly as a decisive break in the continuity of religious and philosophical thought (“There are no more pillars and supports, no foundations”) and of normative values. And as with the writing of the important predecessor of the expressionist poets and thinkers, Friedrich Nietzsche, the system's breakdown, (“the death of God”) also has an important ideology-critical function: the break-up of a millennial culture is seen as bringing with it not just chaos but, more positively, the possibility of release from the constraints of conventional interpretative and orienting systems. It allows the possibility of seeing through ideologies, the reified forms of thought which have been established as objective truths (“Convictions [have become] prejudices”), and which have been set up as the foundations of meaning: “the principles of logic, of centrality, unity and reason are revealed as the postulates of a domineering theology” says Ball later in the text.¹¹

The prevalence in this period of such iconoclastic and revolutionary sentiments suggests that towards the end of the nineteenth century the pervasive experience of crisis, moral chaos and discontinuity documented here by Ball emerges as the symptom of a deeper and fundamental epistemological fracture. For at precisely this time a series of Copernican revolutions shake the foundations of Western thought. In particular the work of Nietzsche, but also of Mach, Vaihinger and Freud has the effect of subjecting conventional social discourse to a rigorous re-examination of its most cherished notions.¹²

The writing of these thinkers functions as a form of “ideology-critique” and “Fiktionskritik” (“critique of fictions”). Their general effect is to show that no systems of thought regarding man and social reality are anchored by any “natural law” but possess the status merely of instruments of reflection and meaning, as mere hypotheses or “useful fictions”: they are patterns of meaning postulated by man which are imposed upon the phenomenal world in order to formulate it and bring it under his control. If the function of all “transcendental signifieds” (Derrida), such as those cited in the text by Ball (“Reason,” “Man,” “Religion”) is thus to anchor those systems of meaning which are imposed upon the world of experience, then it is these that are now increasingly exposed to skepticism.

Such systems are created by a semantic activity which formulates experience and encapsulates a world by the use of fictions and language. As Nietzsche's famous aphorism has it, “What then is Truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonymies, anthropomorphisms, in short the sum of human relations.”¹³ This semantic activity has the primary function then of creating a set of representational codes and ideological formations which present reality as an eminently discursive construction.

Now the growing awareness in this period of the discursive nature of realities—an awareness, as we have seen, that is dialectically related to the experience of their break-up—has important consequences. Firstly, it leads to the sense that, as a centering system, discourse may serve as a self-contained and all-embracing machinery which encloses the subject within itself, separating off any other modalities of experience: the “prison-house of language” was Nietzsche's expression for this phenomenon. This awareness of being enclosed within an ideological system of fictions placing limitations on experience brings with it the pervasive sense of alienation from a more “genuine” realm of being, an alternative dimension of experience¹⁴ which the expressionists can only gesture towards, and which they hope to attain through the pursuit of what they term “spirit,” “essence” or “power” (“Geist,” “Wesen”¹⁵ or “Kraft”).

Secondly, since all points of orientation are seen simply as discursive fictions which have merely been postulated, not consolidated, all values appear as relative—“There is no perspective left in the moral world. Up is down, down is up.” writes Ball.¹⁶ With the proclamation of the death of God a full-scale interrogation of the discourse of reality begins, a questioning of the fictional nature of all those “essences” (the “pillars and supports” as Ball says) which anchor systems of meaning.

EPISTEMOLOGICAL SKEPTICISM

The literary text of this period is consequently forced to a degree to undergo a functional transformation (“Funktionswandel”) if it is to respond to these changed circumstances. As a result it becomes a common practice among the Expressionist writers to create the kinds of “counter-discourse” which foreground precisely the disjunction between, on the one hand, the world of fictions and discursive orders and on the other, the reality of the referential object. The more progressive literature of the movement consequently draws attention to the mediate nature of all discursive images of the world—such as the epistemological and ideological universes which man inhabits—and simultaneously to the contingency and instability of the (fictional) concepts which underpin them.

There are several texts, drawn from the field of expressionist poetry, which we can cite briefly as typifying this skeptical consciousness of the times. Many thematize directly the shortcomings of such fictions and the individual's inability to come to terms with the world from inside the discursive system in which he is enclosed. Gustav Sack's poem “The World” is an unusually explicit presentation of this “Erkenntniskritik” or skeptical attitude towards epistemology: “… it's all imagery, / which so colorfully places itself before our senses, / an X, from which the veil never falls, / yes, our senses themselves are paintings, / the world, the thing, causality, time and space / everything's a difficult and puzzling dream. / And today they scream out loudly on all the streets: / no, there it is, it's concrete reality—.”¹⁷ In conceding that the world which one experiences is actually only “imagery” or the result of “painting” (“Bilderei,” or “Malerei”) Sack points to the discursive and fictional nature of that “dream” one might otherwise take for “concrete reality.” But his attack is not simply a logical, Kantian form of cognitive criticism. In fact, it has much in common with expressionism's resistance to such rationalism.¹⁸ For as in the works of Benn and Döblin which I will examine in chapter 3 its real targets are precisely the logical categories underpinning the dominant discourse of rationalism upon which this counterfeit world of “images” and “veils” is constructed, such as the categories cited by Sack, namely “causality, time and space.”

From a similar epistemological standpoint Ernst Stadler too warns against the danger of being convinced by simple meanings and explanations, and consequently of taking appearances for essences:

And when I …
Lift up to myself appearances, lies, and games instead of the essence,
If I pleasingly lie to myself with easy meanings,
As if dark were clear, as if life didn't carry a thousand wildly bolted
gates.(19)

Again, what the text typifies is a historical sense of the danger which lies in wait for those who do not practice some form of epistemological skepticism with regard to what are, in effect, discursive fictions. The implication is that when these fictions ultimately evaporate, the individual will be abandoned to the experience of nothingness. From this same historical perspective Brecht writes: “And when the fallacies are all worn out? The last one keeping us company / sitting right across from us / is nothingness”²⁰

THE EXPRESSIONIST AVANT-GARDE: THE CYNICAL SUBLATION OF ART AND LIFE

With this critical shift towards an attitude of skepticism the realization grows that since there is no longer any single ideological constellation which can have an ultimate claim on the truth, alternative discourses may be created to displace the dominant ideological constructs. It becomes a widely held belief among the expressionists, for example, that if meaning and order are no longer already “given” in the world, these must be imposed by an act of will on the part of the subject: as Kurt Pinthus says, “Everything else outside of ourselves is unreal and first becomes reality, when we turn it into reality by virtue of the power of the mind.”²¹ Pinthus' stance here is paradigmatic for the expressionist urge to create the world anew. It also bears a similarity to that characteristically “animistic” attitude of the Expressionist poets and playwrights who create in their texts an alternative world of selfhood in which figures and events are meaningful only as essences²² or as correlatives of consciousness,²³ and in which “the mind forms reality according to the idea.”²⁴

The urge to create an alternative reality of discourse thus becomes a powerful revolutionary drive in the expressionist movement. This new discursive heterocosm serves both to displace a previous reality (which is now perceived as having lost its legitimacy) and to open up new meanings to the individual as well as an altered relationship to experience based on the imposition of an intensely personal version of world. Lothar Schreyer, echoing Pinthus writes, “In us the old world shatters. The new world arises within.”²⁵

One of the primary means by which this alternative discursive reality is created is through a strategy linked intimately to the avant-garde's program of creating a set of oppositional discourses marked by desublimation, de-aestheticization and the distortion of organic form. It involves a massive re-coding of what had previously been accepted as “nature”: the world is now re-interpreted and re-constituted in terms of a new discourse which liberates both the object and its perception from the conditions pertaining to the given. Rather than creating the kind of literary work which reproduces the natural world and which thus attempts—like the conventions of organic art that Bürger critiques—to erase the marks of its artificiality in order to assimilate itself as closely as possible to nature, the expressionist text adopts one of the central strategies of the avant-garde, the procedure embodied preeminently in the montage: it foregrounds its own artifice and constructedness.²⁶ Thus, far from emulating the organic—and thereby implicitly substantiating the referential realm of the determinate and the given—it appears instead to valorize the “artificial” world of human creativity, the realm of the signifier, and the sovereign autonomy of consciousness.

Now since the perspective by which nature had previously been perceived was strongly influenced and “aestheticized” by the mediation of conventional, idealist and romantic topoi (such as stars and heaven, meadow and brook), the expressionist recoding of nature takes the form of a direct onslaught on such sublimating myths. Alfred Lichtenstein writes:

The sky is like a blue jellyfish.
And all around are fields, green meadow hills—
Peaceful world, you great mouse trap.
The earth is like a fat Sunday roast,
Nicely dipped in sweet sun-sauce.(27)

Ernst Blass describes another conventionalized topos, the moon, as like “a slime / On an enormous velour of the falling night. / The stars quiver tenderly like embryos.”²⁸ Similarly the poet Klabund describes the “evening clouds” as “like a procession of grey tattered vagabonds / swaying threateningly like drunken coffins.”²⁹

Significantly, the title of the latter poem, “Ironic Landscape” (“Ironische Landschaft”) points to the expressionist avant-garde's oppositional strategy in creating such pointedly desublimated and de-aestheticized tropes. Traditional poetic codes—the dominant conventions of the aesthetic discourse in which tradition (and the institution of art) have imprisoned perception—are exploded by the ironic treatment they receive at the hands of the expressionist poets. This serves both to defamiliarize vision and to unlock conventionalized constructions, while encouraging the reader towards a free-play of associations and a mode of intellectual reflection quite at odds with the traditional “empathetic” reception demanded by previous schools of nature poetry, as well as by other affirmative and sublimating forms of art: rather than diverting attention away from reality towards an idealized and aestheticized realm of the sublime beyond, the avant-garde's aesthetics of “desublimation” enforces a close examination of the world and its image.

The revolutionary function of this iconoclasm lies also in its gesture of clearing the way for a radical reinterpretation of nature. For in important respects, the expressionist avant-garde's aesthetics of desublimation corresponds at the figural level to the process of cynical re-interpretation occurring at the level of ideology and discourse: in a sense, it is as if the expressionists indeed respond to the break-up of the old cosmological fictions, the “facade of the totality,” in the manner that Ernst Bloch suggests, namely “by ripping it open even further.”³⁰ If it retains any meaning at all, the organic world is now frequently reduced merely to a set of signs pointing to humankind's spiritual abandonment and “transcendental homelessness” (Lukacs).

The common eschatological orientation of the poems is also important here, since natural phenomena now take on significance not as uplifting terrestrial manifestations of a sublime, redemptive ideal world beyond but in terms of a coming catastrophe or a failure of redemption. Van Hoddis' poem “End of the World” (“Weltende”) and Heym's “Umbra Vitae”—the two texts which open Pinthus' important collection of expressionist poetry Menschheitsdämmerung (Dawn of Humanity)—are outstanding examples of this tendency. The “natural” presentiments of disaster are for example storms: “And along the coasts—the paper says—the tide is rising. / The storm is here, the wild seas are hopping / Ashore …”;³¹ or alternatively foreboding presents itself in the form of an uncannily becalmed sea: “The seas stagnate. In the waves / the ships hang mouldering and sullen …”;³² meanwhile humankind's state of spiritual excommunication may be read in the skies: although many search the heavens for a positive sign, “all of heaven's gates are closed shut.”³³

Even in those poems in which the negative reinterpretation of nature is not foregrounded quite as obviously as in these examples, the emphasis is still frequently upon its re-reading not as an entity which constitutes an end in itself or even a source of spiritual comfort and balm, but as a mere correlative or icon for man's troubled existence in a world of pain and anxiety. For van Hoddis, birdsong for example becomes an expression of pain: “The sparrows scream” (“Die Spatzen schrein”).³⁴ For Lichtenstein nature is frequently a sign of disease or death, and his images are of “Bloodless trees” (“Blutlose Bäume”), “the swollen night” (“die aufgeschwollne Nacht”), and “the poisonous moon, the fat fog-spider” (“Der giftge Mond, die fette Nebelspinne”).³⁵ Such purposefully “unnatural” uses of the organic image become a central characteristic of the expressionist poem's cynical sublation of art and life by means of desublimation: through expressionism's de-aestheticization of poetry, as well as its re-writing of the world, nature is made to undergo a reductive transformation, through which it is instrumentalized as a sign, or marginalized as a mere function of human consciousness.

Typical of the revolutionary and avant-garde impulse within expressionism is that it not only reverses traditional hierarchies but subverts those conventional values associated with nature, such as the monumental and sublime, which appear to be held in place by nature's unarguable “givenness.” As nature's human counterpart, the body too is subject to a similar re-coding. Whereas the lyrical poetry of a former period had upheld the idea of the body as a criterion of beauty, with the expressionists what had been the temple of the spirit often becomes a mere heap of decaying flesh, a token of a latterday version of baroque “Vergänglichkeit” or “transience.” Benn's poetry of the dissection table in the “Morgue” collection is typical of this direction in the new poetry.

Here it is again the provocative and blatant re-coding of traditional romantic themes which is prominent. Benn's poem “Schöne Jugend” for example focuses on the image of the mouth of a young girl. This is not, however, because it figures as the romantic object of a lover's desire, but rather because it “looked so gnawed-at” (“sah so angeknabbert aus”) on account of the rats which found an arbor (“Laube”) in her body after she drowned.³⁶ Typically the hierarchical relationship between humanity and the spirit on the one hand, and bestiality and materiality on the other is reversed. The avant-garde's defining feature of a “cynical sublation” of art and reality is important here: if the poem reduces the differences between art and life, then instead of elevating life to the sublime level of art in an aestheticized image (or reconstituting life in a formulation whose aesthetic necessity “masters” the horror of the real) it now joins the two by descending with art to the circle of the unredeemable: the earthly, the ugly and the profane. The “lovely childhood” (“schöne Jugend”) of the title turns out to refer not to the human subject, but to the life of the young rodents. Thus the girl appears merely as an object, a store of flesh for the young rats, rather than as a vessel of the spirit. In this manner the romantic Ophelia-motif of the drowned lover is evoked but then inverted, so that any remaining idealist notions of an autonomous human subject necessarily suffer a re-interpretation, as the individual becomes mere matter, a corpse tossed carelessly onto a slab.

With this revolutionary re-coding of nature, of the body, of conventional poetic topoi and of cognitive fictions, several new perspectives are opened up. Firstly an anachronistic “Weltbild” (or “image of the world”) is displaced. The subversion of those traditional “transcendental signifieds,” such as God (whose heaven is now repeatedly described as “empty”)³⁷ and the subject (now a “dissociated” entity, a “fragmented” corpse) is accomplished by their being replaced by autonomous and indeterminate signifiers. This means that the reality which these ideological “centers” had formerly anchored, together with the codes and myths which they had legitimized and held in place, are necessarily liberated.

Secondly, besides marking the break-up of the inherited world of continuity and belief, the subversion of the natural world and the linked tendencies towards dehumanization and the re-coding of the body have a further specific target: they offer a release from the values associated with the Romantic tradition of an order close to nature and retaining a precious conception of selfhood based on an anachronistic sense of “Innerlichkeit” (or “interiority”).³⁸

Thirdly, it is evident that other strategies of reversal similar to the re-coding of nature are common practice in expressionist texts: for example the resurrection of the socially marginal, such as madmen, prostitutes and other outcasts, and their valorization as the new prophets, saints and heroes of the age. However, this procedure is seldom utilized with any concretely political goal in mind, such as an egalitarian class revolution. Instead, by exposing the contingency of the hierarchy within such ideologies the system's boundaries and its mechanisms of exclusion per se are called into question. As an onslaught on the familiar, bringing with it a de-automatizing renewal of vision, the real revolutionary goal becomes the act of reversal itself: it brings about the epistemological critique of those institutionalized codes of representation which had held the concepts of the “natural” and the “organic” so firmly in place.

There are several other means by which this radical strategy of recoding is carried over into the poetics of the expressionist text, and it is to these that we now turn.

FORMS OF COUNTER-DISCOURSE: THE AVANT-GARDE POETICS OF REPRESENTATION AS RE-WRITING

The new discursive orders which the expressionists create should not necessarily be thought of merely as a means of creating a new orderliness and fixity to replace the old. For their function is not the banishment of chaos. Chaos is often valorized by these writers for its apparent resistance to being instrumentalized by ideology and is even embraced by the strong-willed of the expressionist generation for its radical and anti-systematic character. As Huelsenbeck suggests, writing on the expressionist theme of the “New Man,” this figure “recognizes no system for the living, he welcomes chaos as a friend, since he bears order in his soul.”³⁹ Rather than the establishment of a new dominant order we may assume then that it is the destruction of inherited cosmologies and illusions of meaning that assumes the greater importance. Again, the practice of revolution itself—as a provocative and life-enhancing activity in its own right—becomes the aim, rather than the pragmatic goal of the establishment through revolution of a new social order.

In an article published in June 1915 in a journal affiliated with the expressionists, Die weißen Blätter, Rudolf Leonhard addresses this notion of a continuous revolutionary momentum, describing the poet as bound to a perpetual oppositional activity with a permanently rebellious and anti-ideological function: although capable of becoming happily intoxicated with the ideals of the revolution he is still quite likely to turn towards his comrades on the barricade and stick out his tongue at them, “for he is the revolutionary in every camp, the one who is dissatisfied with every situation …”⁴⁰ Far from being expelled from the Platonic state for this destabilizing and subversive political stance, Leonhard argues that the poet should be retained precisely on account of his function as an ideological “gadfly.” His role is to oppose the perennial danger of stasis: “This is where the poet can have a counter-effect. The state cannot get by without him. It needs the stimulation of agitation in its machinery. It should hire revolutionaries, the ambiguous ones, who rebel despairingly against all sides.”⁴¹

It is clear that through this constant revolutionary agitation and subversion a particular form of epistemological and ideological critique emerges which is characteristic of expressionism as an avant-garde movement. It produces a form of insight both into alterity—the possibility of alternative ideologies—and consequently into the discursive status of reality. As a result an ideologically informed awareness is produced that opposes dogma and fixity of the kind which might pose the danger of becoming the “center” of any new order. It is for this reason that the expressionists attempt to inscribe this chaos and openness into their texts—in ways that extend far beyond the principle of montage as analyzed by Bürger—in order to acknowledge the provisional and fictional status of the heterocosms they create.

Now it is precisely the insistence upon this unavailability to closure and fixity of the discursive reality and upon the necessarily “inorganic” and “unnatural” status of all ideological universes which constitutes a key element of the way that the poetics of expressionism functions as an avant-garde. This is evident in the attitude to mimesis. The expressionists' immediate literary-historical predecessors—the writers of the naturalist movement—typically believed that their modes of formulating and representing reality bore a necessary correspondence to the phenomenal world. Clearly this position can no longer be upheld against the historical breakdown in discursive fictions of order, and such uncomplicated attitudes towards representation in the previous generation give way to a profound skepticism with regard to mimesis amongst the expressionists. They, by contrast, reject any naive mimetic stance which would re-present its object by attempting to make the literary discourse mediating it disappear. That is, they are opposed to the kind of text which, like the organic work of art or “classic realist text,” erases the marks of the enunciation and, by thus effacing the indications of its own fictionality attempts to become a transparent window on the world.

Instead, as we have seen, the new generation of expressionist writers around 1910 adopts certain practices—for example the re-coding of nature and of the body, the subversion of traditional topoi, or the reversal of conventional hierarchies of value (such as placing the sublime over the marginal, the natural over the artificial)—which “re-write” the world as a construction of human consciousness, thereby liberating it from inherited values and perceptions. By emphasizing the artificial and constructed nature of their texts and the contingency of its images vis-à-vis the notional object of representation they foreground the inherent fictionality and perspectivism in any form of representation. Thus they draw attention away from the referential object as such and redirect it towards the materiality and mediated nature of the text and of its signs. In this way the balance in the representational relationship is shifted: rather than emphasizing the referent, the text is itself foregrounded first and foremost as a signifier.

This autonomy of the signifier and its liberation from the realm of the referential is linked to the purely “expressive” function of these texts. As we shall see in chapter 4 (on expressionist melodrama), the hysteria and the hyperbole characteristic of the movement underline this expressivity. Rather than striving like aestheticism for purity of the aesthetic image, or like classic realism for transparency of the representation (with the aim of forming the image as an authentic reflection of the referential object), expressionism concentrates only on developing an explosive force which will tear away surface appearances. As Pinthus says,

Art for art's sake and the aesthetic were never so disrespected as in that poetry referred to as the “new” or as “expressionist,” which is all eruption, explosion, intensity—and which has to be so in order to break open the malignant crust [around reality]. That is why it avoids the naturalistic description of reality as a descriptive means …⁴²

The emphasis is now on the medium itself as “Ausdruckskunst.” Yet not in the sense of producing the refined and self-sufficient formal consciousness characteristic of aestheticism. The “aesthetic” criteria have changed in this de-aestheticized art:

For this reason one should not ask about the quality of this art, but about its intensity. The intensity is what constitutes its value. For it is not a matter of artistic accomplishment, but of the will … This art will blow apart the aesthetic, if one conceives of the aesthetic as the pleasurable formation of the given …⁴³

In expressionism it is now the directness and “intensity” of expression offered in the image which count, not the sublations of form or the “artistic accomplishment” (“Kunstfertigkeit”). And this “intensity” frequently comes to mean that the signifiers free themselves from a prior, denotative relationship to the referent and its details in order to become the “unmediated” reflex of the “will” or of a more essential personal vision or realm of consciousness.

We can observe this connection between the intensity of the vision and the growing autonomy of the signifier in the pointedly arbitrary and idiosyncratic uses of metaphor in expressionist poetry. In examining the discursive re-coding of nature and the body we have already seen that this strategy often targets existing thematic conventions, for example the language and imagery through which the world is articulated and perceived within a certain tradition. An important aspect of this poetic re-orientation involved an assault upon traditional modes of perception and experience, and hence an attack upon dominant codes of representation. As an iconoclastic gesture such onslaughts foreground the fact that the perception of phenomena rests on a fiction, a metaphor imposed upon the world. Now this same foregrounding of fictionality through the violence of an imposed image may be seen again in the rather contorted and daring comparisons of which the expressionist poets were fond. To take some brief examples from the poetry of Lichtenstein: “The sky is grey wrapping paper / Onto which the sun is glued—a butter stain”⁴⁴; or “The sun, a buttercup, balances / On a smokestack, its thin stalk.”⁴⁵

Clearly such images work by producing a clash between very different contexts which thereby creates a profoundly bathetic effect. More specifically however, it is the strategy of de-aestheticization common to the avant-garde and its “cynical sublation” of art and life which is responsible for this provocative effect. For by calling up a conventional romantic or sublime topos (the heavens, the sun) only to thrust it down into the context of the all too mundane and earthly is to produce an anti-aesthetics: a reversal of conventional aesthetic values which “shocks the bourgeois,” frustrates his or her institutionally nurtured expectations and offends his or her sense of cultural propriety.

Such de-aestheticized images and idiosyncratic comparisons have their roots in the fundamental expressionist aesthetic which dictates that the images need not be “realistic,” but rather should derive their validity from other criteria, such as the “power” they display, or from the assertion of “Wille”—sheer willpower. In this they are related to the painter Franz Marc's famous blue horses,⁴⁶ or to the personal color coding in Trakl's poems where the very contingency of the choice of epithet is in the forefront.⁴⁷

The apparent arbitrariness of the epithet is crucial. Not only does it underline the rebellion against conventional modes of seeing and representing, but in emphasizing the necessarily fictional nature of the constructed image, it presents its message as merely one possible mode of perception among many. In the case of Trakl's poetry the choice of color or metaphor may be either completely contingent, or—as in the case of an important predecessor in the development of expressionist aesthetics, namely van Gogh—highly personal.⁴⁸ But in either case the function is the same, as we shall see.

Firstly, to take the example of Marc's blue horses, the painted body of the horse is turned into a mere function of its color, and with its shocking lack of “authenticity,” the color is now by far the more striking component. In a similar way, with the examples from Lichtenstein above, the referent of the poem becomes a mere vehicle for the metaphor, so that the traditional rhetorical hierarchy between the two elements is overturned. Secondly, the subversion of the referent and of its naturalistic detail re-directs the recipient away from a distracting concern with the mere particulars of the appearance towards a more essential or conceptual level of the phenomenon.

Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, besides allowing the presented image to be understood thus as one of the many “manifestations of the concept ‘horse’,”⁴⁹ it is as if the deliberate “distortion,” the contingency of the choice of color or epithet, serves as the attempt to place this particular manifestation “under erasure” (Derrida), or as if the artist were both using and then crossing through a term which could only be employed with caution. By invoking but simultaneously suspending the signifier the artist appears in other words only to gesture towards an entity which is either unrepresentable as such or which would only be falsified by succumbing to a concrete and “representable” form. Thus the violent discrepancy created by the shocking color or epithet emphasizes the provisional nature of the particular concretization of “das Wesen” which has emerged, insisting on the impossibility of final closure.

Furthermore, to the extent that the image is used under erasure it is also freed from any direct subservience to a referent, and can emerge as a liberated signifier.⁵⁰ Like all such terms used under erasure these signifiers can only be thought of as being grasped or comprehended in a very provisional sense, since, as their foregrounding as fictions or metaphors makes clear, they are involved in a permanent process of slippage and displacement by other possible metaphors. It is in this vital sense that the expressionist text must be understood as aiming at a permanent revolution: where the signifiers of the text are inscribed in a differential chain of signification they are constantly being effaced and so are resistant to any attempt to reduce them to a fixable meaning. This permanent denial of stability and fixity to fictions (whether aesthetic or epistemological), the constant overturning of reified or “naturalized” ideological codes and unquestioned epistemological premises defines expressionism's participation in the historical avant-garde and constitutes precisely the sense of the “expressionist revolution.”

FUNCTIONAL AND STYLISTIC TRANSFORMATIONS

In conclusion we can now draw together certain perspectives developed in the foregoing analyses regarding the nature of this revolution. It should now be clear that the frequent reluctance shown by many expressionists to pin themselves down to particular ideological tendencies or to state their goals in precise political terms does not mean that one must write off their revolutionary intentions as the vague rebellious aspirations of a band of adolescent literati who were either unwilling to abandon the protection offered by a conventionalized form of aesthetic autonomy, or who were unable to give this aesthetic autonomy a purposefully ideological edge.⁵¹ Rather one must place these aims in a different category, on an ideological and epistemological level rather than in the realm of genuine social praxis.⁵²

As we have seen, it is not through concrete social plans that the expressionists present their revolutionary agenda but through a vision which, in its extremism, in its pointed artificiality or subjectivism, may even appear at first glance quite unrelated to the concrete conditions prevailing in the social world.⁵³ Correspondingly, it is not through an accurate mimetic representation of the status quo that their critical standpoint is achieved. Rather, as with Peter Bürger's category of the montage or non-organic work, it is paradoxically through the distortions, through the pointed constructedness and artificiality of the image that this impulse towards change comes to the fore.

The comparison with the strategies of the naturalist movement is again instructive in this respect. From a socio-historical perspective one might advance the general proposition that new literary movements are frequently subject to a kind of “cultural lag” (Ogburn) in their response to a changed social and ideological situation.⁵⁴ They often display a discrepancy between the “functional transformation” (‘Funktionswandel”), that is, the new critical functions accruing to their texts as they negotiate their response to the changed set of conditions and problematics pertaining to a new historical period, and the “stylistic transformations” (“Stilwandel”) or stylistic means developed to mediate the innovation and so account formally for this socio-historical change. Now it appears to be just such a cultural lag which frequently produces within the naturalist text the kind of contradiction between progressive “tendency” and conservative “technique” which Benjamin ascribes to a failure to comprehend the institutionalized cultural codes. For although the discourse of naturalist drama for example is progressive, encouraging social change and rebellion against the constraints of determinism and milieu, its dramatic form, even down to the very props it employs on stage, are so solid, and its verisimilitude so precise and uncompromising, that against its own intentions it overwhelms us with an impression of the unchangeable fixity and immovable determinacy of the world and its appearance.⁵⁵

The importance of expressionism's revolutionary iconoclasm and avant-garde innovations in this regard is that they resolve many of the literary-historical deficits and contradictions bequeathed by its main predecessor, naturalism. For example by contrast with the solidity of naturalist verisimilitude, what the expressionist text attempts to do is to undermine appearances in order firstly to shock the audience and undermine both the inherent conservatism and the sense of reassurance it derives from recognizing the familiar, and secondly to destroy the audience's comforting illusion of having conceptually mastered or “fixed” reality.

But there is a further important dimension to this avant-garde assault on aesthetic convention. If the “real” in art is an effect produced by the use of certain culturally-privileged codes of representation, then through the forceful re-writing of old codes expressionism militates against this semiotic hegemony. It is in breaking decisively with these old ways of seeing, that it rebels against the real. For by constructing its images through forms which are tentative or “under erasure,” by foregrounding their fictionality and by presenting them as pure constructions it succeeds in inscribing a revolutionary opennes and resistance to closure into the texts. In this it fulfills a primary goal of the avant-garde: it loosens the grip of dominant cultural codes (and thus of the institution of art) upon the construction of the real by holding open the possibility of alternative constructions, and by demonstrating the infinite re-writability of the real. Through this two-fold openness expressionism's message of dissent is made to correspond to its means.

Finally, if expressionism is to be seen primarily as a conceptual art full of anthropomorphosed concepts and concretized ideas—in Jost Hermand's words, as a “poetic formulation of definitions” of a “purely epistemological kind” (“definitorische Dichtung,” “rein erkenntnismäßiger Natur”)⁵⁶—then it must be conceded that its revolutionary function is of the same order: it operates on the theoretical level of an ideological and epistemological rethinking, in other words as a form of “Ideologie-” and “Erkenntniskritik” which challenges not only conventional views of the world but also the orienting concepts which support them, in order to reveal their fictionality, their arbitrary nature, and thus their fundamental susceptibility to change.

A talk given in 1917 by Robert Müller describes this attack on conventional “Weltbilder” (or “images of the world”) in terms of a revolutionary displacement of old regimes and systems of meaning, and as an assault precisely on the fixity and closure which they prescribe:

We are going over to the elastic systems. The rigid classical systems are a cas limite and are only occasionally satisfying …

The picture of the new painter is independent of those moments of rigidity through which we reify our daily visual impressions … The picture of the new painter rocks the boat. Rock with it, give up your own rigidity—that is expressionism.⁵⁷

From this it is clear that the task of the expressionist artist is to displace the fixity of the old systems with a new “elasticity”—a quality directly comparable, in terms of our discussion above, to the “openness” always inscribed into the texts of the expressionist avant-garde.⁵⁸ Through this new “elasticity” a picture is created which unsettles and “rocks” (“schaukelt”) the recipient's everyday fixed images and rigid systems. Thus rather than confirming the reader's positioning within the inherited cosmology, as an avant-garde movement expressionism breaks up the stiff ideologies and fixed images on which the individual relies. This is a widespread practice within the movement, even embracing the sober poetics of Franz Kafka and his view that the text should serve as an axe “for the frozen sea within us” provoking and forcing the reader out of conventional attitudes and modes of behaviour.⁵⁹

More than simply shocking the burgher (“épater le bourgeois”), such strategies as this “schaukeln” destabilize the social and discursive conventions by which he is protected. By thus revealing their own fictional nature the effect of such avant-garde texts is to decenter the reader, that is, to force the subject out of any habitual positioning by these systems and to offer not simply an alternative (and consequently equally fixed) ideological position, but rather a multiplicity of alternatives—even if these appear only tentative and “under erasure.”⁶⁰

In 1910 at the outset of the movement, in the first edition of one of the most influential expressionist journals, Der Sturm, Rudolf Kurtz offers a warning to the audience about this revolutionary and decentering function of expressionism: “We don't want to entertain them. We want to demolish their comfortable, serious and noble view of life artfully.”⁶¹ Given the ongoing nature of the revolution prescribed by Expressionism and the shockwaves which it has sent out in the intervening years throughout the modern and postmodern world, it is a warning which must still be taken seriously.⁶²

Notes

1. A broad selection of these writings are collected in Anz and Stark (eds.), Manifeste und Dokumente in the section “Literatur und Politik,” (especially “Expressionismus und Revolution,” 326-353). See also the collection by Paul Pörtner (ed.), Literaturrevolution 1910-1925. Dokumente, Manifeste, Programme, 2 vols. (Luchterhand: Neuwied, 1960). Parts of the present chapter were originally published in German Quarterly 64.4 (1991): 464-74.

2. The variety of affiliations taken up by former expressionists may also be indicative of their need, long postponed, for a spiritual or ideological community. See Walter H. Sokel, The Writer in Extremis, 228.

3. See the discussion and collection of texts on this theme in Anz and Stark (eds.), Manifeste und Dokumente, in the section “Soziale Entfremdung und Gemeinschaft,” 247-250.

4. Sokel, The Writer in Extremis, 218.

5. Richard Hamann and Jost Hermand, Expressionismus (Munich: Nymphenberger Verlagshandlung, 1976), 114.

6. It is worth noting for example that the dadaist manifestations and “happenings” which Bürger cites as typically avant-gardistic forms (through which art is “confronted” directly with life and with the shocked reactions of the audience) took as their precedent the expressionists' provocative and often shocking “literary cabarets,” in which their fantastic stories, dissonant poetry, and often grotesque one-act plays were read or performed.

7. Edgar Lohner observes that it is important to build upon Peter Bürger's theoretical analysis of the historical avant-garde by examining concretely the artists' own conceptualizations of their progressive mission. See Lohner, “Die Problematik des Begriffes der Avantgarde,” 124.

8. In a similar vein Wolfgang Paulsen writes “no matter how revolutionary Expressionism seemed to be, it was not a political, nor even in any sense a socially oriented movement. At best it could be deemed a literary movement with larger political and social implications.” In “Expressionism and the Tradition of Revolt” Expressionism Reconsidered, Houston German Studies vol. 1, ed. G. B. Pickar and K. E. Webb (Munich: Fink, 1979), 8. This is not to deny, however, the genuine engagement and political praxis of many individual expressionist (and dadaist) writers, especially those associated with the November revolution such as Toller. On this question see Frank Trommler, Sozialistische Literatur in Deutschland. Ein historischer Überblick (Stuttgart: Kröner, 1976) in particular the section “Schriftsteller und Revolution,” 412-442; Wolfgang Frühwald, “Kunst als Tat und Leben. Über den Anteil deutscher Schriftsteller an der Revolution in München 1918/1919,” Sprache und Bekenntnis. Festschrift für Hermann Kunisch, ed. Wolfgang Frühwald and Günter Niggl (Berlin: Dinker, 1971); Hans Meyer, “Expressionismus und Novemberrevolution,” Spuren 5 (1978): 10-13.

9. This function of actively extending a destructive process which has already been set in motion is valorized by Ernst Bloch in his defence of expressionism over and against Lukacs' charge that these poets merely participated naively in “the ideological demise of the imperialist bourgeoisie” (“den ideologischen Verfall der imperialistischen Bourgeoisie”). As we have seen in the previous chapter, Bloch asks provocatively whether it would have been better “if they had patched up the surface of reality instead of tearing it even further apart” (“wenn sie den Oberflächenzusammenhang wieder geflickt hätten … statt ihn immer weiter aufzureißen?”). He thereby circumscribes the ideology-critical function of the literary movement. See Bloch, “Diskussionen über Expressionismus,” Expressionismusdebatte, 187.

10. “Gott ist tot. Eine Welt brach zusammen … Religion, Wissenschaft, Moral—Phänomene, die aus Angstzuständen primitiver Völker entstanden sind. Eine Welt bricht zusammen. Eine tausendjährige Kultur bricht zusammen. Es gibt keine Pfeiler und Stützen, keine Fundamente mehr, die nicht zersprengt worden wären. Kirchen sind Luftschlösser geworden. Überzeugungen Vorurteile … Der Sinn der Welt schwand … Chaos brach hervor … Der Mensch verlor sein himmlisches Gesicht, wurde Materie, Zufall, Konglomerat, Tier, Wahnsinnsprodukt abrupt und unzulänglicher zuckender Gedanken. Der Mensch verlor seine Sonderstellung, die ihm die Vernunft gewährt hatte.” Hugo Ball, “Kandinsky.” Lecture held in Galerie Dada, Zürich, April 7, 1917. Manifeste und Dokumente, 124.

11. “Die Prinzipien der Logik, des Zentrums, Einheit und Vernunft wurden als Postulate einer herrschsüchtigen Theologie durchschaut.”

12. The nihilism and critique of fictions and ideology which were prominent at the turn of the century and which played such an important role in expressionism are dealt with extensively by Silvio Vietta and Hans-Georg Kemper in Expressionismus, (Munich: UTB, 1975), 134-152.

13. “Was ist also Wahrheit? Ein bewegliches Heer von Metaphern, Metonymien, Anthropomorphismen, kurz eine Summe von menschlichen Relationen.” Friedrich Nietzsche, “Über Wahrheit und Lüge im außermoralischen Sinne,” Werke III (Frankfurt: Ullstein 1969), 1022. [Schlechta edition, vol. III, 314].

14. An example of this widespread tendency is expressed by the expressionist painter Franz Marc. He articulates his generation's search for this undefined (and undefinable) source of alterity: “Wherever we saw a crack in the crust of convention, that's what we pointed to: only there, for we hoped for a power beneath which would one day come to light” (“Wo wir einen Riß in der Kruste der Konvention sahen, da deuteten wir hin; nur dahin, da wir darunter eine Kraft erhofften, die eines Tages ans Licht kommen würde”). Franz Marc, “Der Blaue Reiter” (1914), rpt. in Manifeste Manifeste. 1905-1933, ed. Diether Schmidt (Dresden: Verlag der Kunst, 1956), 56.

15. See Kurt Pinthus, “Rede für die Zukunft,” Die Erhebung (1919), cited below.

16. “[E]s gibt keine Perspektive mehr in der moralischen Welt. Oben ist unten, unten ist oben.” Hugo Ball, “Kandinsky.” Manifeste und Dokumente, 124.

17. “… es ist alles Bilderei, / was sich so bunt vor unsre Sinne stellt, / ein X, von dem niemals der Schleier fällt, / ja unsre Sinne selbst sind Malerei, / die Welt, das Ding, die Folge, Zeit und Raum / alles ein schwerer, rätselwirrer Traum. / Und heute schreit man laut auf allen Gassen: / nein, sie ist da, ist harte Wirklichkeit …” Gustav Sack, “Die Welt,” Lyrik des Expressionismus (Tübingen, 1976), 203.

18. On this theme, see Vietta and Kemper, Expressionismus, esp. 144-176.

19. “Und wenn ich … / Schein, Lug und Spiel zu mir anstatt des Wesens hebe, / Wenn ich gefällig mich mit raschem Sinn belüge, / Als wäre Dunkles klar, als wenn nicht Leben tausend / wild verschloßne Tore trüge.” Stadler, “Der Spruch,” Menschheitsdämmerung (hereafter MHD), ed. Kurt Pinthus (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1963), 196. Wherever possible I have used the translation (hereafter MHD-DH) Menschheitsdämmerung: Dawn of Humanity. A Document of Expressionism, trs. J. M. Ratych, R. Ley, R. C. Conard (Columbia S.C.: Camden House 1994). Klemm's poem “Philosophie” shares this same epistemological caution: “We do not know what light is / Nor what the ether and its oscillations are—/ … Hidden from us is what the stars signify / And the solemn march of time … / We do not know what God is!” MHD-DH, 94 (“Wir wissen nicht was das Licht ist / Noch was der Ather und seine Schwingungen—… Fremd ist uns, was die Sterne bedeuten / Und der Feiergang der Zeit. / … Wir wissen nicht was Gott ist!” Lyrik des Expressionismus, 202).

20. “Wenn die Irrtümer verbraucht sind? Sitzt als letzter Gesellschafter / Uns das Nichts gegenüber.” Brecht,“Der Nachgeborene,” Lyrik des Expressionismus, 249.

21. “[A]lles andere außer uns ist unwirklich und wird erst zur Wirklichkeit, wenn wir kraft der Kraft des Geistes es zur Wirklichkeit machen.”Kurt Pinthus, “Rede für die Zukunft” in Die Erhebung. Jahrbuch für neue Dichtung und Wertung, ed. A. Wolfenstein (Berlin: Fischer 1919), 414.

22. Gottfried Benn for example explains that he has to write in this “essential” manner, “since I never see people but only the ‘I’, and never events, but only existence …” (“da ich nie Personen sehe, sondern immer nur das Ich, und nie Geschehnisse, sondern immer nur das Dasein. …”) See “Schöpferische Konfession” Gesammelte Werke, vol. 4, ed. Dieter Wellershoff (Limes: Wiesbaden, 1958), 189.

23. Examples of this attitude would be the “Ich-” and “Stationendramen”, the doubling and splitting of characters throughout the texts of the movement.

24. “der Geist formt die Wirklichkeit nach der Idee.” Pinthus, “Rede für die Zukunft,” 413.

25. “In uns zerbricht die alte Welt. Die neue Welt ersteht in uns.”Lothar Schreyer, “Der neue Mensch.” Manifeste und Dokumente, 140.

26. For example one might cite the foregrounded artificiality of the common expressionist forms of montage or “Telegrammstil,” or again the artificial and seemingly purely conceptual nature of figures in the dramas and in many of the prose texts (Einstein's “Bebuquin,” Kafka's “Beschreibung eines Kampfes” etc.).

27. “Der Himmel ist wie eine blaue Qualle. / Und rings sind Felder, grüne Wiesenhügel—/ Friedliche Welt, du große Mausefalle. … / Die Erde ist wie ein fetter Sonntagsbraten, / Hübsch eingetünkt in süße Sonnensauce.” Lichtenstein, “Sommerfrische,” MHD 63 (my emphasis).

28. “ein Schleim / Auf ungeheuer nachtendem Velours. / Die Sterne zucken zart wie Embryos.” Lyrik des Expressionismus, 48.

29. “Gleich einem Zug grau zerlumpter Strolche, / Bedrohlich schwankend wie betrunkne Särge.” Klabund, “Ironische Landschaft,” Lyrik des Expressionismus, 208.

30. See Bloch, “Diskussionen über Expressionismus,” Expressionismusdebatte, 187.

31. MHD-DH 61. “Und an den Küsten—liest man—steigt die Flut. / Der Sturm ist da, die wilden Meere hupfen / An Land. …” Van Hoddis, “Weltende,” MHD, 39.

32. “Die Meere aber stocken. In den Wogen / Die Schiffe hängen modernd und verdrossen …” Heym, “Umbra Vitae,” MHD, 39.

33. “Und aller Himmel Höfe sind verschlossen.” Heym, “Umbra Vitae,” MHD, 39.

34. Jakob v. Hoddis, “Morgens,” MHD, 168.

35. Lichtenstein, “Nebel,” MHD, 59.

36. Gottfried Benn, Gesammelte Werke, vol. 3, 8.

37. On this theme see the poems in the section “Gott ist tot—Gespräche mit Gott” in Vietta's collection Lyrik des Expressionismus, 155-179. For example Oskar Loerke writes: “The house of heaven pales into uncertainty” (“Ins Ungewisse bleicht das Himmelshaus” in “Die Ebene,” 159); Alfred Lichtenstein: “And over everything hangs an old rag—/ The heavens … heathenish and without sense” “Und über allem hängt ein alter Lappen—/ Der Himmel … heidenhaft und ohne Sinn” in “Die Fahrt nach der Irrenanstalt I” (“Journey to the Insane-Asylum I”), 166.

38. For an analysis of this tendency towards dehumanization and “denaturization,” see Jost Hermand, “Expressionismus als Revolution,” Von Mainz nach Weimar (Stuttgart: Luchterhand 1969), 342-343.

39. “er kennt kein System für Lebendes, Chaos ist ihm willkommen als Freund, weil er die Ordnung in seiner Seele trägt.” Richard Huelsenbeck, “Der neue Mensch,” Neue Jugend 1 (May 23, 1917), 2-3. Rpt. Manifeste und Dokumente, 132.

40. “Denn er ist der Revolutionär in allen Lagern, der Unzufriedene mit allen Zuständen …” R. Leonhard, “Die Politik der Dichter,” Die weißen Blätter 2, 6 (June 1915), 814-816. Rpt. Manifeste und Dokumente 364.

41. “Hier kann der Dichter gegenwirken; der Staat kann ohne ihn nicht auskommen. Er braucht die treibende Unruhe im Getriebe, er sollte Revolutionäre anstellen, zweideutige, die verzweifelt gegen alle Seiten sich empören.” Leonhard, “Die Politik der Dichter.” Manifeste und Dokumente, 365.

42. “Niemals war das Asthetische und das l'art pour l'art so mißachtet wie in dieser Dichtung, die man die ‘jüngste’ oder ‘expressionistische’ nennt, weil sie ganz Eruption, Explosion, Intensität ist—sein muß um jene feindliche Krüste zu sprengen. Deshalb meidet sie die naturalistische Schilderung der Realität als Darstellungsmittel …” Pinthus, “Zuvor,” Preface to MHD (1920). Rpt. Manifeste und Dokumente, 58.

43. “Deshalb frage man nicht nach der Qualität dieser Kunst, sondern nach ihrer Intensität. Die Intensität macht ihren Wert aus. Denn es geht nicht um die Kunstfertigkeit, sondern um den Willen … Diese Kunst wird allenthalben das Ästhetische zersprengen, wenn man das Ästhetische als wohlgefällige Formung des Gegebenen auffaßt.” Kurt Pinthus, “Rede für die Zukunft” Die Erhebung (1919), 420. Rpt. W. Rothe (ed.), Der Aktivismus 1915-20, 132.

44. “Der Himmel ist ein graues Packpapier / Auf dem die Sonne klebt—ein Butterfleck.” Lichtenstein, “Landschaft,” Lyrik des Expressionismus, 209.

45. “Die Sonne, eine Butterblume, wiegt sich / Auf einem Schornstein, ihrem schlanken Stiele.” Lichtenstein, “Nachmittag, Felder und Fabrik,” Lyrik des Expressionismus, 73.

46. Franz Marc, Turm der blauen Pferde, 1914.

47. See especially Trakl's “Elis” and “An den Knaben Elis,” MHD, 100, 101.

48. In a letter to his brother Theo of August 1888, Vincent van Gogh writes, “instead of trying to produce exactly what I have before my eyes, I use color more arbitrarily so as to express myself more forcefully.” The Letters of Vincent van Gogh (New York, 1963), 276. John Willett also describes the influence of van Gogh's aesthetics in Expressionism (London: Weidenfeld, 1970), passim.

49. Hamann and Hermand, Expressionismus, 133.

50. Further evidence of the growing autonomy of the signifier may be seen for example in such diverse forms as the “Lautgedicht” or “sound poem” of Stramm and Ball, where the “materiality” of the medium itself is emphasized. It may also be traced, as we have seen in chapter one, in the many Expressionist narratives and dramas whose figures become increasingly free of the representational concerns of identity, plot and causality, and who tend instead to become free-floating symbols or “objective correlatives” (Sokel) rather than “realistic” characters. This independence is also related—as in the montage-structure—to a growing sense of autonomy of the various parts within the work, as for example in the conceptions of the “epic” in Brecht and Döblin.

51. For a commentary and extensive bibliography on the political commitment and active participation of many expressionists in revolutionary activity such as the November revolution. See Manifeste und Dokumente, 326-332.

52. The question of political engagement is often parried in the programmatic statements, frequently in a manner which does not so much sidestep a clear ideological commitment, as refuse to acknowledge the dichotomy between art and reality implied by such questions. Typically the dichotomy is itself subverted by the introduction of a third term, notably “Geist” (“spirit,” or “soul”): “art is not a flight from reality,—but rather a flight into the reality of the spirit. It is not a form of balm, but rather of agitation …” (“Die Kunst ist nicht Flucht aus der Wirklichkeit,—sondern Flucht in die Wirklichkeit des Geistes. Sie ist nicht Beruhigung, sondern Erregung …”) writes Kurt Pinthus in “Rede für die Zukunft,” Die Erhebung (1919) 415. Similarly Kurt Hiller sees the task of activism as “politicizing the spirit” (“den Geist zu politisieren”). In Das Ziel Jb. III, 1. Halbband, (Leipzig: Wolff, 1919). Quoted in Manifeste und Dokumente, 326.

53. See Sokel, The Writer in Extremis, 161.

54. According to Ogburn's famous thesis, a “cultural lag occurs when one of two parts of culture which are correlated changes before or in greater degree than the other part does …” See William F. Ogburn, “Cultural Lag as Theory” (1957) On Culture and Social Change (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), 86.

55. In his Literary Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983) Terry Eagleton makes this point in a discussion of Raymond Williams' theory of drama (187).

56. Hermand, “Expressionismus als Revolution,” 337.

57. “Wir gehen zu den elastischen Systemen über. Die klassischen starren Systeme sind Grenzfall und befriedigen nur fallweise … Das Bild des neuen Malers ist unabhängig von jenen Starrheitsmomenten, auf die hin wir unsere täglichen optischen Eindrücke versteifen … Das Bild des Malers schaukelt. Schaukeln Sie mit, geben Sie Ihre eigene Starre auf—das ist Expressionismus.” Robert Müller, “Die Zeitrasse.” In Der Anbruch 1 (1917/18). Rpt. Manifeste und Dokumente, 137.

58. As we shall see in the chapter on the poetics of expressionism, this openness is precisely what distinguishes the work of the avant-garde writers from the “monological” texts of the “naive” expressionists.

59. Franz Kafka, Briefe 1902-1924, ed. Max Brod (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1975), 28.

60. Thus expressionism's mode of liberation may occasionally take the paradoxical form of making the reader aware that the real world which he or she inhabits is a fiction which simultaneously serves as a prison or labyrinth preventing him from gaining access to “genuine” experience. The work of Franz Kafka with his thematization of the labyrinthine nature of truth (“Gesetz”) and his sceptical attitude towards interpretation as a mere “expression of despair” must be seen in this expressionist context.

61. “Wir wollen sie nicht unterhalten. Wir wollen ihr bequemes ernst-erhabenes Weltbild tückisch demolieren.” Rudolf Kurtz, “Programmatisches,” Der Sturm 1 (3 March 1910), 2-3. Rpt. Manifeste und Dokumente, 515.

62. An anonymous reviewer of an earlier version of this chapter (published as an article in German Quarterly) quite rightly pointed to the seemingly conservative features in what I describe as the “revolutionary” make-up of expressionism, and in particular to the “religious and prophetic” tendencies which respond to the death of God by “resurrecting such essentials as ‘Geist’.” I would account for this apparently conciliatory moment however by maintaining firstly that an important feature of the expressionists' proclamation of these “essentials” is that such values remain, like “Geist” or the “new Man” (“neuer Mensch”), amorphous and provocatively obscure, as if the goal were the iconoclastic act of proclaiming an impossible new order, rather than the more difficult and pedestrian task (more characteristic of the earlier utopian and “idealist” avant-garde) of defining its “center,” and so fixing the new order to a single position. Secondly, it should be observed that there is a self-critical tendency within expressionism—embodied precisely by its genuinely avant-garde wing rather than its idealist faction—which comes to the fore especially in the later period of its “recoil” from such prophetic excesses (Sokel), and which eschews even such vague proclamations and subjects them to parody. This recoil has its counterpart in dada's later onslaughts on the expressionists' prophetic excesses, where the very name of the group “dada” itself becomes an empty signifier parodying the often repeated watchword of the idealists within expressionism: “Geist” (i.e. “spirit,” “mind” or “soul”). This central term, like the name “dada” itself, could be thought of as a hollow vessel, and one which is receptive for any new contents one cares to fill it with.

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