Introduction to German Literature, 1871–1990

223 Pages·1994·24.761 MB·English

by  Malcolm Humble, Raymond Furness

INTRODUCTION TO GERMAN LITERATURE, 1871-1990
Introduction to
Gertnan Literature,
1871-1990
Malcolm Humble and Raymond Furness
M
MACMILLAN
©Malcolm Humble and Raymond Furness 1994
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ISBN 978-0-333-46037-5 ISBN 978-1-349-23200-0 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-23200-0
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from the British Library.
Contents
Preface vii
1 The Period of Transition 1
2 From the Jahrhundertwende to Weimar 17
3 The Literature of the Weimar Republic and 41
the First Austrian Republic
4 The Literature of the Third Reich 71
5 The Literature of the Exile 93
6 The Literature of the Federal Republic of Germany 120
and the Second Austrian Republic until1968
7 The Literature of the German Democratic Republic 151
8 The Literature of the Federal Republic of Germany 179
and the Second Austrian Republic from 19.68 to 1990
Bibliography 207
Index 211
v
Preface
To write a history of the literature of the German-speaking peoples
of the last one hundred and twenty years, from the foundation of
the Second Reich under Bismarck to the breaching of the Berlin
Wall and the subsequent reunification of Germany in 1990, is by no
means an easy task. For the journey is a momentous one, and the
literary responses to the vicissitudes of modern German history are
manifold and complex. The literature of the Griinderzeit will reflect
or reject the values of Wilhelmine Germany; the experiments of the
Naturalists, and the cultivation of aestheticism which followed
them, both owe much to the awareness of international trends;
the explosion of Expressionism, that 'gash of fire across the world'
of which Paul Celan spoke, is a major German contribution. The
literary and cultural achievements of the Weimar period are
acknowledged to be of outstanding merit; the jejune and eccentric
offerings of the Third Reich betray, in contrast to the writings of
Exilliteratur, a Germanness both sterile and banal. The collapse of
1945 is an obvious caesura, and the literary historian has then to
contend with ever more divergent literatures - those of the erst-
while German Democratic Republic, the Republic of Adenauer and
his successors, of Austria and, to a lesser extent, of Switzerland.
The theme of Vergangenheitsbewiiltigung will loom large, as will the
reaction to materialism, student disaffection and to terrorism. The
literary response to the far-reaching events of 1989 and 1990 will
conclude the volume, the response of those writers to the challenge
facing Germany as the country moves towards an uncertain future.
Many of the texts under discussion will reflect, then, the world
around them-but there will also be a place for those writers who
seek inwardness and utopias (or dystopias) in their aesthetic re-
enactments.
It was Franz Kafka who demanded that a book be an axe to break
open the frozen sea within us. And axes the German literature of
the last century or so will provide aplenty, some to wield, others to
grind. The uncertainties, restless energies and tortuous attempts at
vii
viii Preface
self-definition of the German-speaking peoples of the twentieth
century will provide many fascinating formulations. And as the
century nears its end it may well be seen that the German contri-
bution to world literature has perhaps made the most striking
impact.
The authors of this book have attempted to give a survey of the
major figures and of those works which, in their opinion, are the
most significant. They have for the most part eschewed quotations
in German and also cumbersome footnotes in order that the reader
may be presented with an unimpeded and lucid narrative.
Although we have been guided by our personal knowledge and
judgement, our work would not have been possible without resort
to the many publications on the history of twentieth-century
German literature which have recently appeared, many of them
supplying new emphases, and which are listed in the bibliography.
The present volume is in part a reflection of the sifting process
undertaken and the critical conspectus developed in these vol-
umes, to which acknowledgement is due. Because the view which
emerges from these works conforms to present-day reading
patterns, it can be claimed that most of the texts referred to, with
the exception of the literature of the Third Reich, are generally
available in book-shops and libraries in German-speaking coun-
tries and that a good many have been translated into English.
We may reasonably be accused of having given the literature of
German-speaking Switzerland short shrift. Faced with the decision
whether or not to include a consideration of it, we settled for
the compromise of placing the two major figures of post-1945
Swiss literature, Frisch and Diirrenmatt, within the context of
developments elsewhere.
Raymond Furness wishes to acknowledge a term's leave of
absence from the University of St Andrews and the generosity of
the Carnegie Trust which enabled him to complete those chapters
for which he was responsible. Both authors are deeply indebted to
Hazel Dunstan for her patience and efficiency in preparing the
typescript.
M.H.
R.F.
1
The Period of Transition
It is a commonplace of literary history to designate the generation
born in the 1880s as that which so altered modes of writing and
thinking as to be called modernist or revolutionary; it was this
generation which, in late adolescence, rejected the values of the
previous one and continued to map out new frontiers in works
which, although originally deemed alien, are now accepted in any
list of modern European classics. It would seem appropriate, there-
fore, to begin this book on twentieth-century German literature
with the Jahrhundertwende, to look at that febrile artistic and intel-
lectual concoction with which the nineteenth century ended and
the twentieth century began, a time whose plethora of conflicting
styles Robert Musil (born 1880) so well described in his gigantic
novel Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften. But another writer of that gen-
eration, Gottfried Benn (born 1886), when discussing the intellec-
tual preoccupations of his contemporaries, insisted that practically
everything that they had discussed and suffered, everything, that
is, that became part of the stock-in-trade of the European mind,
had received authentic formulation already by a man who had
anticipated the whole of psychoanalysis, and the whole of existen-
tialism: he was, according to Benn, the 'earthquake of the epoch'
and the 'greatest genius of the German language since Luther'.
This is Friedrich Nietzsche, who died, clinically insane, in 1900, on
the threshold of the new century, and who is indeed indispensable
for any understanding of the intellectual and artistic climate of the
last decades of the nineteenth century and most of this. It is conse-
quently with the 1870s that we shall begin, to consider the litera-
ture of the first thirty years of the new German Kaiserreich and to
detect those innovatory tendencies which anticipate much of what
is to come. Our survey must necessarily be succinct and selective,
but the period of transition described is one which, it is to be
hoped, will contain much that is surprisingly modern amongst the
stilted and the genteel.
Monumentalism and grandiloquent gestures characterise much
1
2 Introduction to German Literature, 1871-1990
of the art of the 1870s: the second Reich, proud of its conquests in
the field of battle, and secure, despite the financial crash in 1873, in
its industrial might, demanded self-glorification, a literature of
sycophantic praise for the Hohenzollerns, such as was provided by
Ernst von Wildenbruch, author of numerous patriotic plays.
Prussia's defeat of France called forth much nationalistic fervour
and writing which commemorated German power and
Nibelungentreue: the ending of Felix Dahn's Ein Kampf urn Rom, a
novel which rapidly became a best-seller on its appearance in 1876
(and which the self-righteous hero of Gerhart Hauptmann's Vor
Sonnenaufgang extolled as being an exemplary book, a work which
pointed the way ahead), describes in colourful prose the return
of the Vikings with their dead heroes to the North. The gleam of
helmet and spear, the streaming flags and purple waves, create an
obvious set-piece reminiscent of the paintings of Anton von
Werner or Hans Makart or, in literature, of Conrad Ferdinand
Meyer's historical tableaux, the Swiss writer whose powerful
novel fiirg Jenatsch appeared in the same year. The portentous
motto from Emanuel Geibel at the beginning of Dahn's novel,
advocating fortitude in the face of implacable destiny, seems very
much of its time, deriving from a mentality compounded of defi-
ance, dedication and heroic attitudinising. This year, 1876, wit-
nessed the most important cultural event in Germany - or even
Europe: the opening of the Festspielhaus in Bayreuth and the per-
formance of Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen before emperors,
kings, artists and patrons: a sophisticated nineteenth-century audi-
ence saw unfolded before it a world of mythical archetypes, a pro-
found fairy-tale plot suffused by music of overwhelming intensity.
A work redolent of the Griinderzeit, perhaps, but also atavistic and
ultramodern, as Thomas Mann well knew; Nietzsche had likewise,
in his brilliant analysis of the overture to Die Meistersinger (in
Jenseits von Gut und Bose, 1885), talked of Germany's uncertainty,
despite the apparent successes of the day, of its place in the scheme
of things.
He had, as early as 1873, warned of the defeat of the German
spirit, of its extirpation even, at the expense of the new German
Reich: victory over the French at Sedan should not, he claimed, be
thought by his fellow countrymen to signify superiority in cultural
matters. His preoccupation, obsession even, with cultural values
led Nietzsche again and again to look at developments within the
Kaiserreich and to criticise them most harshly. Of crucial impor-
The Period of Transition 3
tance was his first major work, Die Geburt der Tragodie of 1872,
which, inspired by Wagner's music-dramas, posits the distinction
between the Apolline and the Dionysian, the former representing
serenity and repose, the latter darkness, chaos and violence. Greek
art, the argument runs, is exemplary in that it represents a synthe-
sis of these two forces, a synthesis achieved only after a struggle:
the art of modern times should recognise the chthonic powers, the
world of the subconscious (as Sigmund Freud would later argue)
and draw from this fecund source. The striking image of the tree
which must put down deep roots into the earth in order that the
branches may soar into the light, found within Also sprach
Zarathustra (1883-92), contains the idea in nucleo: this vast prose-
poem showed Nietzsche to be an unparalleled Dichterphilosoph and
would inspire a whole generation with its provocative imagery
and rhapsodic fervour. The hectic emphasis on heroism and the
call for the destruction of the moribund would appeal above all to
the young; the euphoric excesses and daring apostacy, rarely found
elsewhere in Nietzsche's elegant prose, could, however, be seen as
advocating a dangerous irrationalism. The immense range of
Nietzsche's writing was such that the Naturalist writers of the
1880s could applaud his attack on bourgeois complacency; the aes-
thetes of the 1890s would learn much from his aphorisms on art;
and the Expressionist generation would extol his emphasis on the
daring transvaluation of all values and the vision of the New Man.
Nietzsche's voice, in extreme isolation, grew increasingly more
shrill: the full scope and impact of his thought would only become
apparent in the century which he did not see and which, he proph-
esied, would be convulsed by wars the like of which the world had
never experienced. His influence, as Gottfried Benn explained in
his essay Nietzsche-nach fiinfzig Jahren, was all-pervasive, and his
world stature assured. Less extreme, more provincial and more
typical are the descriptions of Bismarck's Germany, and later the
Germany of Wilhelm the Second, to be found in the novelists of the
day. Felix Dahn's bestseller, which spoke of Goth and Viking but
which was very much of the 1870s, has been mentioned; very pop-
ular were also the novels of Friedrich Spielhagen, whose portrayal
of the opulence, concupiscence and material values of that decade
makes exemplary reading. Sturmflut (1877), in three volumes,
describes a world of financial speculation and lavish style, a world
shot through with ruthless managerial ambition. The flood of the
title is symbolic of that inundation of finance, greed and market