War Neurosis and PTSD in German Expressionism
Psychological Trauma in German Expressionist Poetry
German Expressionism was, through all its media—through its artwork, plays, cinema, and literature—the first Western art movement to extensively incorporate ideas from the relatively new field of psychoanalysis. In fact, psychoanalysis was coming into its own at about the same time the German Expressionist movement reached its peak. Both movements developed in the same region of Europe (Germany and Austria).
German neurologist Ernst Simmel set forth his idea of psychological trauma—what we now might call PTSD—in an influential 1918 work titled Kriegs-Neurosen und ‘Psyches-Trauma’ (“War Neurosis and ‘Psychic Trauma’”). Simmel suggested a revolutionary idea—that the Great War had caused serious psychological damage not only to its combatants but also to the civilians who’d suffered through the war experience more broadly:
When I speak about the war as an event, as the cause of illness, I anticipate something which has revealed itself in my experiences—namely that it is not only the bloody war which leaves such devastating traces in those who took part in it. Rather, it is also the difficult conflict in which the individual finds himself in his fight against a world transformed by war. It is a fight in which the victim of war neurosis succumbs in silent, often unrecognized, torment… He can leave the war without physical illness, his physical wounds, if any, already healed. Nevertheless he departs from the arena of war as one branded with a so-called ‘functional’ illness, namely war neurosis. The damage which the war neurotic suffers as a result of his participation in the war either in the trenches or at home can befall a single organ, or it may encompass the entire person.
This idea would undergo several iterations, “shell-shock” among them, before arriving in the present day with the diagnostic term “Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.” As suggested by Simmel in 1918, this kind of trauma can affect not only those who have seen combat but can manifest in members of the civilian population as well. The German Expressionists vividly portrayed war and post-war traumata across their works, whether they had experienced battlefield trauma firsthand or had felt its effects socially, gleaned through artistic intuition. Neurosis, insanity, paranoia, and other forms of acute psychological distress are profoundly present in the works of Expressionism’s chief figures.
Although many contemporary collections of poems from World War I focus on English-language works by poets such as Wilfred Owen and John McRae, it’s worth noting that one of the best and most extensive collections of Great War poetry, Tim Cross’s The Lost Voices of World War I, contains no less than 64 poems from the Expressionist movement. These include works from many of the poets that also appeared in German Expressionism’s poetic Bible, the 1919 anthology Menschheitsdämmerung, or “Twilight of Humanity”—which is, of course, the focus of the Substack you’re now reading. With its inclusion of poems from Ernst Stadler, Georg Trakl, August Stramm, and Ernst Lotz—poets who also appear in Twilight of Humanity—Cross’s anthology was the single largest English-language collection of German Expressionist verse when it was published in 1988.
An oft-overlooked work from the German Expressionist film movement also has relevance here. One of the most poignant visual representations of the psychological distress depicted in much Expressionist poetry can be found in Robert Reinert’s Nerven (“Nerves”). Nerves was released the same year as Twilight of Humanity—that is, in 1919, a year after Simmel’s influential treatise on postwar psychological trauma was published—and like many Expressionist poems the movie portrays society caught in the grip of nervous disintegration. As the entry for Nerves at Letterboxd states:
[Nerves] tries to capture the “nervous epidemic” caused by war and misery which “drives people mad.” This unique portrait of life in 1919 Germany, filmed on location in Munich, describes the cases of different people from all levels of society: Factory owner Roloff, who loses his mind in view of catastrophes and social disturbances; teacher John, who is the hero of the masses; and Marja who turns into a radical revolutionary.
By 1923 the situation would only worsen as hyperinflation caused the public to succumb to “overwrought nerves” (“Überreizte Nerven”), according to writer Friedrich Kroner, who reported on the scene at the time: “It pounds daily on the nerves: the insanity of numbers, the uncertain future, today, and tomorrow become doubtful once more overnight. An epidemic of fear, naked need… Somewhere patience explodes. Resignation breaks.” (The economic turmoil of German society in the 1920s will be explored in another post.)
By the time Twilight of Humanity was published in 1919, six of its contributing poets had already died, many in World War I.
August Stramm was one of these poets. Stramm perished on the Eastern Front on September 1, 1915, shot in the head by a Russian soldier, according to reports. His short, staccato poems written during the Great War would go on to exert an influence on Dada, but much of his work appeared in the Expressionist Twilight of Humanity collection as well. Stramm felt “that reality was composed not of static objects but of dynamic energies,” according to poet-translator Richard Sheppard. In Stramm’s poems, violent bursts of words play to anti-rhythms that reflect war’s meaningless chaos.
This is one of Stramm’s war poems, “Assault” (“Sturmangriff”):
ASSAULT (1915)
by August Stramm
From all around terrors scream urgencies
Scream,
Lash
Life
Forward
Ahead
Itself
Death is gasping desperately
The heavens shatter.
Blind butcheries surrounding wild horrors.
[original: STURMANGRIFF / Aus allen Winkeln gellen Fürchte Wollen / Kreisch / Peitscht / Das Leben / Vor / Sich / Her / Den keuchen Tod / Die Himmel fetzen. / Blinde schlächtert wildum das Entsetzen.]
This is Twilight of Humanity: German Expressionist Poetry in English.