What is German Expessionism? Part 1 of 2
Defining the Indefinite—Definitions of Expressionism—from my own notes
If there’s one thing literary scholars and art historians usually agree upon when they discuss Expressionism, it’s that the movement resists easy definition. There is not the sort of founding document of Expressionism that pretends to great authority over the art movement and which lists its prerogatives or sketches out its aims such as we have with, say, Futurism and its Futurist Manifesto of 1909 (by Filippo Marinetti), or Surrealism and its Surrealist Manifesto of 1924 (by Yvan Goll and André Breton). Scholar and Guggenheim Fellow Ulrich W. Weisstein has claimed Expressionism was more “a syndrome of thoughts and feelings” than a programmatic movement, “—in short: a Weltanschauung” (comprehensive worldview).
Although various writers and artists associated with Expressionism produced some manifesto-like documents, the Expressionist phenomenon did not have the same ideological consistency or doctrinal rigor that characterized other art movements in modernity. Despite this difficulty, the Expressionist tendency was never so vague as to be completely indeterminate. It is possible to limn out its defining characteristics, both from statements by participants in the Expressionist phenomenon itself as well as from recent scholars that have looked back at the movement in retrospect.
Above, I mentioned the literary scholar Ulrich Weisstein. Weisstein is probably the single greatest 20th-century English-language scholar of literary German Expressionism who was not a part of the original Expressionist movement, and this is reflected in the several times I use him as a source for definitions of the genre below, though others are certainly quoted—including Vincent Van Gogh himself, whose private correspondence with his brother served well in offering up a definition of Expressionism that many participants in the movement, consciously or not, appear to have followed.
So, what follows are mostly my own notes of passages I’ve copied while searching for my own authoritative definition of “German Expressionism.”
I should first note that I follow most art and literary historians in dating German (and Austrian) Expressionism to about 1905 through approximately 1925—and I use the phrases “about 1905” and “approximately 1925” because there are some important Expressionist works that date before and after the 20-year period. This is especially true in the movement's non-literary forms—such as Expressionist cinema, nowadays the most popular form of the movement, especially its horror films. (The dystopian science fiction film Metropolis is one of the best-known examples of cinematic Expressionism, and it was released in 1927, for example, two years after my own arbitrary 1925 cut-off date for the movement..)
And as much as it might pain some to admit, the official 1933 labeling and repression by the Nazis of most Expressionist art and literature as “degenerate” (entartete kunst) really seems to have been a final nail in the coffin of the Expressionist movement. Official state repression was intended to quash Expressionism, and it succeeded in not just snuffing out the movement but in ending many of the lives of several of its principal participants—such as the poets Jakob van Hoddis and Walter Hasenclever, both murdered by Nazis. Both their works appeared in the 1919 Twilight of Humanity anthology of German Expressionist literature. (For more information, see the Empty Library memorial to books burned by the Nazis, many of which were Expressionist texts.)
Doch war es nur Papier, was sie verbrannt.
Wir sind noch da. Wir sind noch nicht begraben.
(That was only paper, that they burned.
We are still here. We are not yet in our graves.)
—Erich Weinert, ‘Der Brand auf dem Opernplatz’ (1935)
In the Introduction to the 1919 TWILIGHT OF HUMANITY (“Menschheitsdämmerung”) anthology of Expressionist poetry—the volume after which this Substack is named—editor Kurt Pinthus spends more time explaining, via negatives, what Expressionism is not rather than what it positively is. Expressionist poets aim “to penetrate through appearances to the essence” of things, Pinthus does write, however, in his Introduction. And this is a key idea that comes up in all attempts to provide a conclusive definition of Expressionism: Penetrating through externalities to grasp, experientially, internalities.
Expressionist poet Johannes R. Becher, whose poems also appeared in Pinthus’ Twilight of Humanity, wrote, for example, “[W]e drove ourselves to fathom the unfathomable.”
Above all, Expressionists were united in a desire to represent not external or surface realities, as in photorealist art or in landscape painting and portraiture, but to portray the internal or essential qualities of things regardless of how ugly, nightmarish, or abstract such things might reveal themselves to be.
One of the principal champions of Expressionism as a literary movement was German writer and artist Kasimir Edschmid. He defined the movement thus:
1. “The Expressionist poet does not see, he beholds. He does not describe, he experiences. He does not represent, he forms anew. He does not accept, he seeks. Now there is no longer a chain of facts: houses, factories, sickness, whores, screams, and hunger. Now there is the VISION of these things. Facts are significant only in so far as the hand of the artist reaches through them to grasp what lies beyond. He sees what is human in a prostitute, what is divine in a factory. He weaves the individual phenomenon into that great pattern, which goes to make up the world.”
—KASIMIR EDSCHMID, quoted by Heinrich Eduard Jacob, "Pre-War Writing and Atmosphere in Berlin," in THE ERA OF GERMAN EXPRESSIONISM, edited by Paul Raabe (Woodstock, NY: Overlook Press, 1985)
Other definitions follow:
2. "To say something about an amorphous phenomenon like literary Expressionism is not easy. Even if one is not required to give any theoretical definition but only chase memories of various people who are reckoned as belonging to such a movement. Basically they did not really belong together, rather were they original forces going their own way and as such obeying the incalculable impulse of the spirit of the times and its melos."
—JACOB PICARD, "Ernst Blass, His Associates in Heidelberg and Die Argonauten," in THE ERA OF GERMAN EXPRESSIONISM, edited by Paul Raabe (Woodstock, NY: Overlook Press, 1985)
Henri Eduard Jacob wrote: “By 1920 everyone knew what an Expressionist was. But in 1910, when Expressionism began, nobody really knew it as such… The Expressionists themselves least of all!”
3. "[Expressionism was] a revolt with eruptions, ecstasies, hate, longing for a new humanity, with the dashing of language in order to dash the world... They [the poets] condensed, filtered, experimented so that with this expressive method they could lift themselves, their spirit, the disintegrated, tortured, deranged existence of their decades up into those spheres of form in which, over sunken metropolises and decayed imperiums, the artist, he alone, consecrates his epoch and his people to human immortality... But there it is still, 1910-1920. My generation. Hammering the absolute into abstract, hard forms: image, verse, flute song... It was an incriminated generation: ridiculed, jeered, cast out politically as degenerate—a generation precipitous, sparkling, surging, affected by calamities and wars, marked for a short life... In other words, Expressionism and the Expressionist decade: ...It rose up, fought its battles on all the Catalaunian fields, and declined. Raised its flag over Bastille, Kremlin, Golgotha—only Olympus it could not reach, nor any other classical terrain.”
—GOTTFRIED BENN, “Lyrical Poetry of the Expressionist Decade” ("Lyrik des expressionistischen Jahrzehnts”), 1955 (written in retrospect, when Benn was 69)
4. "'Expressionism,' we now know, as method and technique, can have two meanings. The term can, and mostly does, mean a historically fixed period, 1910-1925 or so, in which certain manifestoes and works of art proclaimed a new style and a new experience. But expressionism is, at the same time, an ever-possible form, just as are romanticism or surrealism, of artistic experience. Most mystics are expressionists."
—WERNER VORDTRIEDE, "The Expressionism of Georg Heym: A Note and Two Translations," Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature, Vol. 4, No. 3, Studies of Recent British & Continental Literature (Autumn, 1963), pp. 284-297 (14 pages). Online at: https://www.jstor.org/stable/1207280
5. "Unlike naturalism and surrealism in literature and impressionism in painting, literary expressionism was not a movement in the strict sense of the word, i.e., to use René Wellek’s definition, a body of 'self-conscious and self-critical activities' resulting in 'consciously formulated programs.' It was, rather, a syndrome of thoughts and feelings—in short: a Weltanschauung—giving rise to certain techniques and engendering a preference for certain types of subject matter, such as the conflict of generations... [A]ll the expressionists proper seem to have had in common was, in the words of Gottfried Benn, their urge for Wirklichkeitszertriimmerung ('destruction of external reality’).”
—ULRICH WEISSTEIN, Dictionary of the History of Ideas: Studies of Selected Pivotal Ideas, Vol. 2., edited by Philip P. Wiener (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons), 1973.
6. "Expressionism lacks a solid core and single point of reference: ‘Wir sind Einzelne, die sich hier in gleichem Streben zusammentun, um doch Einzelne zu bleiben.’ (‘We are individuals who come together here in a shared pursuit, yet we remain individuals.’) We might do well, in fact, to posit the existence of diverse Expressionisms loosely linked by a common Weltgeffuhl, a fluctuating pattern of individuals and groups with shifting—and even conflicting—loyalties, and with pre-occupations ranging from the almost strictly esthetic to the almost purely socio-political. In addition to such centers of gravity as were constituted by specific individuals, periodicals, or publishers (Kurt Wolff, Ernst Rowohlt, Erich Reiss), there were artists like Kokoschka and Ernst Barlach who got quickly tired of cenacle-dom or refused the very beginning, to be drawn into the maelstrom. Thus, seen with the requisite historical detachment, no one group or confraternity can typify Expressionism as a whole."
—ULRICH WEISSTEIN, “German Literary Expressionism: An Anatomy,” The German Quarterly, Vol. 54, No. 3 (May, 1981), pp. 262-283 (22 pages)
7. "The Expressionists, more or less ignoring historical truth, wished to pierce the outer shell of ordinary reality and to descend from surface to depth, from appearance to essence, with the intention of subsequently projecting that core, in a highly condensed and concentrated form and with the utmost intensity, back into external reality, causing the latter to be—or at least appear—distorted." —Ibid.
8. "[Expressionist] poets were imbued with a common revolutionary mentality that was at one and the same time a protest and a plea. It was a passionate protest against the military-industrial complex of their day, against the dangers of technology and urbanization, against the stupidity of war, against the dissolution personal autonomy in a mass society, against the abuse of the poor as mere objects of history, against the existential ineffectiveness of the “dead” God the human spirit, for a renewal of everything timelessly human beyond the boundaries of tribe, of state, of class, of religion, of race, a plea for cosmic unity and universal brotherhood."
—JOANNA M. RATYCH, RALPH LEY, and ROBERT C. CONRAD, Foreward to a 1994 English-language edition of Dawn of Humanity.
9. ”The leaning towards violent contrast—which in Expressionist literature can be seen in the use of staccato sentences—and the inborn German liking for chiaroscuro and shadow, obviously found an ideal artistic outlet in the cinema. Visions nourished by moods of vague and troubled yearning could have found no more apt mode of expression, at once concrete and unreal.”
—LOTTE H. EISNER, “The Beginnings of Expressionist Film,” in The Classic Cinema: Essays in Criticism, edited by Stanley J. Solomon (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich), 1973.
As we near the email length limit, we’ll continue our discussion in Part 2 in a few days.
This is Twilight of Humanity: German Expressionist Poetry in English.
Metropolis is my favorite movie.
I have meant to stop by and tell you what an exceptional Substack you are creating with Twilight of Humanity. I wish I could get the paid subscription, but every dime I have is spoken for. I am getting a further education on the important but not as well-known artists leading up to and during one of my favorite periods for art, music, fashion, photography, and architecture: the Expressionists, including Bauhaus and the Weimer period. You are filling in the lesser-known writers and filmmakers I have not been exposed to, and I thank you so much. Your writing is excellent, and I'm happy that you are bringing to the fore these influential artists whose brilliant creativity was either annihilated by the evil of Hitler and his minions or lost to that horrible period in humanity’s history. Wonderful sub, Oliver, truly.
This quote is an example of the research you are conducting to bring this great sub and its subject matter to the fore;
One of the principal champions of Expressionism as a literary movement was German writer and artist Kasimir Edschmid. He defined the movement thus:
1. “The Expressionist poet does not see, he beholds. He does not describe, he experiences. He does not represent, he forms anew. He does not accept, he seeks. Now there is no longer a chain of facts: houses, factories, sickness, whores, screams, and hunger. Now there is the VISION of these things. Facts are significant only in so far as the hand of the artist reaches through them to grasp what lies beyond. He sees what is human in a prostitute, what is divine in a factory. He weaves the individual phenomenon into that great pattern, which goes to make up the world.”
—KASIMIR EDSCHMID, quoted by Heinrich Eduard Jacob, "Pre-War Writing and Atmosphere in Berlin," in THE ERA OF GERMAN EXPRESSIONISM, edited by Paul Raabe (Woodstock, NY: Overlook Press, 1985)
Excellent quote that gives me a further, much clearer understanding. If it weren't for all the time and love you put into creating this informative sub, I wouldn't have nearly the knowledge of this period I love so much.