German Literature

B

Expressionism

Originating in painting, Expressionism began to influence German literature in about 1910. A reaction to Naturalism and Impressionism, which were concerned primarily with the realistic representation of existence, the new movement had as its object the expression, or portrayal, of the inner feelings, experiences, and reactions of the artist or writer. The Expressionist writer embodied Nietzsche’s concept of the artist as a critic of traditional values. Like the painter, moreover, the poet or novelist was expected to portray the powerful forces within the human personality. Exaggerated emotional language and the depiction of abstract types rather than realistic characters became means to this end. The German playwright Frank Wedekind, a forerunner of Expressionism, employed a sense of grotesque humour to challenge social convention and contemporary sexual attitudes. Such forces as adolescent rebellion and amoral sexuality are portrayed in his plays Frühlings Erwachen (1891; Spring Awakening, 1909) and Die Büchse der Pandora (1904; Pandora’s Box, 1918). The latter was the basis both for a film (1928) and for Lulu, an opera by the Austrian composer Alban Berg.

The conflict of generations became for several Expressionist writers a symbol of the criticism of traditional values, as in Der Sohn (The Son, 1914) by Walter Hasenclever. Anti-war attitudes found expression after World War I in plays by Ernst Toller, Fritz von Unruh, and others. Georg Kaiser, in his immense dramatic production, was a specialist in epigrammatic dialogue, which suited the abstract, symbolic nature of his characters. However, Carl Zuckmayer, perhaps the most popular dramatist of his generation, shows very few traces of the Expressionist style, opting instead for conventional settings and vivid characterizations. Among his best-known works are the drama Der Hauptmann von Köpenick (1931; The Captain of Koepenick, 1932) and the script for Der Blaue Engel (The Blue Angel, 1930), a film for Josef von Sternberg.

The Expressionist movement produced several poets of remarkable originality. Their central topic was the crisis of individual and collective values, as in the poems of Georg Trakl, filled with longing and loneliness; or of Georg Heym, who expressed despair over the misery and solitude of urban life. Franz Werfel, an Austrian writer, the greatest poet of Expressionism, wrote of his longing for harmony between people and nature.

C

Epic Theatre

The most original and stimulating dramatist of the modern period was Bertolt Brecht. He began as an Expressionist but soon developed his own style—epic theatre—using ballads, documentary techniques, and other innovations as commentary on the dramatic action. He unashamedly used the stage as a forum for political messages, his early didactic pieces advocating communist solutions to the problems of human society. His later, and better, plays, however, among them Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder (1941; Mother Courage and Her Children, 1962), Der Kaukasische Kreidekreis (1944-1945; The Caucasian Chalk Circle, 1948), and Der Gute Mensch von Sezuan (1943; The Good Woman of Setzuan, 1948) are more ambiguous, seeking to educate the audience about social injustice but less ready to offer glib remedies. Brecht’s influence spread worldwide, and many younger writers adopted the dramatic techniques he developed. Among them were Peter Weiss, best known for his radical and violent play Marat/Sade (1964; trans. 1965), and Rolf Hochhuth, whose controversial documentary drama Der Stellvertreter (1963; The Representative, 1963) sought to indict Pope Pius XII for his failure to speak out on behalf of the Jews during World War II. The plays of the Swiss dramatist Friedrich Dürrenmatt, most notably Der Besuch der Alten Dame (1956; The Visit, 1958), presented a macabre mix of the comic and the tragic, while his fellow countryman, Max Frisch, powerfully addressed the issue of individual moral responsibility in his best-known play Andorra (1961; trans. 1962).

D

The 20th-Century Novel

The strong narrative trend that can be felt in some of Hauptmann’s plays became prominent in his novel Der Narr in Christo Emanuel Quint (1910; The Fool in Christ, Emanuel Quint, 1911), the story of a religiously enraptured young carpenter whose martyrdom is frustrated by the profane world. Schnitzler’s prose forfeited action in favour of interior monologue. In Leutnant Gustl (1901; None but the Brave, 1926) and Fräulein Else (1924; trans. 1925) he created a new technique of dealing with the subconscious. Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (3 vols., 1930-1942; The Man Without Qualities, 1953-1960) by the Austrian writer Robert Musil is an intellectual and psychological mirror of a dying cultural epoch in Europe. Hermann Broch, in his trilogy Die Schlafwandler (1931-1932; The Sleepwalkers, 1932), also described the disintegration and decay of the old bourgeois society. Monumental pictures of historical events and personalities can be found in the writings of Ricarda Huch. In prose Franz Werfel’s best-known works are the novels Die Vierzig Tage des Musa Dagh (1933; The Forty Days of Musa Dagh, 1934) and Das Lied von Bernadette (1941; The Song of Bernadette, 1942). Alfred Döblin in his novel Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929; trans. 1931) found an original montage-like style for presenting the lives of those living on the social margins in the Berlin of the 1920s.

The most eminent modern German novelists from the early part of the century are Thomas Mann, Hermann Hesse, and Franz Kafka. Mann, in his first novel, Buddenbrooks (1901; trans. 1904), stated a recurrent theme of his work: the conflict between the smug, prosperous representatives of healthy bourgeois life and the perceptive, often sickly artist. The conflicts and difficulties of the creative personality are the topic of many of Mann’s masterly novels and short stories. In Der Zauberberg (1924; The Magic Mountain, 1927) he offered what is in effect an allegory of Western intellectual life on the eve of World War I. A bitter opponent of National Socialism, Mann left Germany in 1933, and several of the four volumes of Joseph und Seine Brüder (1933-1944; Joseph and His Brothers, 1933-1944) were finished in exile. His despair over the fate of Germany and his concern with the creative artist are eloquently portrayed in Doctor Faustus (1947; trans. 1948), a study of German cultural life during the rise of National Socialism. Heinrich Mann, the brother of the great novelist, was also an opponent of fascism and is known for such political satires as Der Untertan (1918; The Patrioteer, 1921).

The writings of Hesse express a sense of spiritual loneliness, often tempered by the wisdom and the mysticism of Oriental philosophy. Hesse described the alienation and duality of nature of modern people in his Demian (1919; trans. 1923) and Steppenwolf (1927; trans. 1929). Perhaps his greatest work, Das Glasperlenspiel (1943; trans. as Magister Ludi, 1949; trans. as The Glass Bead Game, 1969), advocates a new ethical and intellectual aristocracy. Hesse, once little read except in Germany, enjoyed a considerable revival during the 1960s, especially among US students.

No modern writer in German has exercised a more extraordinary influence on contemporary fiction than the Austrian writer Kafka. His novels Der Prozess (1925; The Trial, 1937), Das Schloss (1926; The Castle, 1930), and Amerika (1927; trans. 1938) and his many short stories evoke in a deeply unsettling way a disjointed world haunted by loss of faith and meaning. His apparently simple narrative style makes use of suggestive symbols to convey the perplexity of human experience.

E

Modern Poetry

The modern era of German poetry begins with Nietzsche, who wrote lyric poetry of the Impressionist and Expressionist schools. His influence can be traced in the lyrics and prose of Gottfried Benn, whose almost nihilistic disillusion and despair underlie his search for positive values. A strong resentment of social injustice characterizes the poems of Richard Dehmel. Hugo von Hofmannsthal developed his poetic gifts in lyric poems and in librettos for operas by the German composer Richard Strauss. The most influential collection of poetry at this time was the anthology Menschheitsdämmerung (The Twilight of Humanity, 1920) containing work by some 23 poets; although many of the poems dealt with the shock of industrialization and urbanization, or with the horrors of war, some also looked forward with hope that, after the carnage, a new humanity would arise and the twilight thus become a dawn. The leading exponent of the Symbolist movement in German poetry was Stefan George, who, like Nietzsche, attempted to revive the role of the poet as a critic of materialism and corruption. A similar mission was proposed by Rainer Maria Rilke, who in his Die Sonette an Orpheus (1923; Sonnets to Orpheus, 1936), sought to convey the poet’s mysterious perceptions of beauty. In marked contrast were the mordant verses of Bertolt Brecht, whose first collection Hauspostille (1927) broke with poetic convention by adopting the tone of the folk ballad, with scant attention to the niceties of rhythm or metre and a crude energy designed more for live performance than private reading.

VIII

Literature Since 1945: From Division to Unification

The National Socialists virtually destroyed German culture, imposing a trivial realism upon literature and requiring it to reflect their own fanatical nationalism. As a result of the changes in the political and cultural climate many writers left Germany, and the only significant German literature produced during this period came from writers in exile. Among these were Bertolt Brecht, Thomas Mann, and the poet Nelly Sachs (co-winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1966), whose 1945 poem “O die Schornsteine” (O the Chimneys) was the first verse in German to evoke the reality of the Holocaust. Another such, and possibly the best known of all, was “Todesfuge” (1948; Fugue of Death, 1962) by Paul Celan, whose compressed metaphors convey in 36 lines of chilling intensity the Jewish experience of Auschwitz.

West German writing immediately after the war was given the soubriquet of Trümmerliteratur (rubble literature), its most notable example being Draussen vor der Tür (1947; The Man Outside, 1952), Wolfgang Borchert’s powerful play of a soldier returning to a Hamburg in ruins. In the same year Gruppe 47 was formed, a loose grouping of young writers determined to rescue the German language from its debasement under Hitler and to challenge complacent attitudes towards the war. Among these were the poets Günter Eich and Ingeborg Bachmann and the Austrian prose-writer Ilse Aichinger. Another was Heinrich Böll, winner of the 1972 Nobel Prize for Literature, whose early short stories described the squalor and futility of warfare. In later works such as the novel Gruppenbild mit Dame (1971; Group Portrait with Lady, 1972) he combined this theme with a trenchant denunciation of what he perceived as the dehumanized materialism of the West German Federal Republic. His criticism of social values received further striking expression in the short narrative Die Verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum (1974; The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum, 1975), based upon his own experience at the hands of the Bild newspaper and telling of the character assassination of a young woman by the gutter press. The story was filmed in 1975.

No less eminent and arguably more inventive than Böll is, Günter Grass, whose novel Die Blechtrommel (1959; The Tin Drum, 1962), filmed in 1979, created a storm with its impious vulgarities, portraying Nazi Germany and the post-war era from the bizarre perspective of an eternal three-year old. Also a poet and playwright, Grass has continued to comment on social and political issues in works such as the play Die Plebejer Proben den Aufstand (1966; The Plebeians Rehearse the Uprising, 1972) and the novel Der Butt (1976; The Flounder, 1978). Among other novelists from the same generation are Siegfried Lenz, best known for his gentle but incisive presentation of the question of guilt in Deutschstunde (1968; The German Lesson, 1971); Uwe Johnson, whose panoramic four-volume novel Jahrestage (1968-1983; Anniversaries, part trans., 1975) evokes historical events in Germany and the United States from the 1930s to 1968; and Martin Walser, the author of more than a dozen novels, initially critical in tone but later mellowing into the often comic creation of inadequate male heroes bewildered by their lives in contemporary society.

The 1960s introduced a period of flux and upheaval, symbolized by an attack by Peter Handke upon the writers of Gruppe 47 for what he saw as the sterile descriptiveness of their prose. Handke’s own work, such as the play Kaspar (1968) or the story Die Angst des Tormanns beim Elfmeter (1970; The Goalkeeper’s Fear of the Penalty, 1972), examined the ambiguity of reality and the unstable relationship between language and meaning. Far more directly political were the writings of Hans Magnus Enzensberger, whose essays and poems offered a Marxist analysis of society (a position he has long since abandoned). The conventionally structured novels of Gabriele Wohmann, with their cool portrayals of middle-class domestic life, and the experimental and nihilistic works of the Austrian Thomas Bernhard illustrate the variety of German literary culture in the years that followed. A spate of so-called “father-novels”, such as Ruth Rehmann’s Der Mann auf der Kanzel (1979; The Man in the Pulpit, 1997), Christoph Meckel’s Suchbild Über meinen Vater (1980; Image for Investigation: About my Father, 1987), or Peter Härtling’s Nachgetragene Liebe (A Grudging Love, 1980), showed a younger generation critically scrutinizing the role played by their fathers during the Nazi era. Among noteworthy works in the 1980s were Peter Schneider’s Der Mauerspringer (1982; The Wall Jumper, 1983), a remarkably prescient narrative on Germany’s division, Patrick Süskind’s internationally best-selling quasi-detective novel, Das Parfum (1985; Perfume 1986), and, from Austria, Elfriede Jelinek’s controversial treatment of sexuality in Lust (1989; Lust, 1992).

Literature in the East German state, the German Democratic Republic (GDR), was produced under very different conditions from those in the Federal Republic. Writing within the constraints of Soviet-style Socialist Realism, authors were expected to use their works to advance the prevailing orthodoxy and heighten the political consciousness of their readers. The later novels of Anna Seghers are painful illustrations of the arid prose that could result. But the history of GDR literature is in essence that of a process in which the limits of the permissible were continually being challenged and enlarged. The young poets of the so-called “lyrical wave” in the 1960s, among them Günter Kunert, Sarah Kirsch, Reiner Kunze, and Volker Braun, without repudiating their allegiance to the state, sought to carve out a greater freedom for subjective expression. That this was often fraught with difficulties was illustrated by the fate of the epoch-making Modernist novel Nachdenken über Christa T. (1968; The Quest for Christa T., 1970) by Christa Wolf, freely available in the West but suppressed by the authorities in the GDR until 1973. Nevertheless, work of great originality was written and published, not only Christa Wolf’s own later works, among them Kindheitsmuster (1976; A Model Childhood, 1980) and Kassandra (1982; Cassandra, 1984), but the witty satirical novels of Stefan Heym, for example Der König-David-Bericht (1972; The King David Report, 1973) or Ahasver (1981; The Wandering Jew, 1984), Ulrich Plenzdorf’s ingenious tale of teenage rebellion, Die Neuen Leiden des Jungen W. (The New Sufferings of Young W., 1973), or the radical dramas of Heiner Müller. But the authorities were ever watchful for supposed subversion and in 1976 stripped one of their most trenchant critics, the singer and poet Wolf Biermann, of his East German citizenship and expelled him to the West. This marked the start of an exodus, sustained for the next 13 years, of other leading GDR writers and artists, all disillusioned with the reality of East German socialism. Innovative literature continued to be produced, notably Christoph Hein’s laconic chronicles of GDR life, the feminist novels of Irmtraud Morgner, or the vibrant poetry of the anarchic counter-culture centred upon the East Berlin district of Prenzlauer Berg. But not even those writers, like Braun, Heym, and Wolf, who remained loyal to their state and were urging democratic reform to the very end, could save the GDR from final collapse.

German unification in 1990 saw the outbreak of an uncommonly bitter literary dispute, the so-called Literaturstreit, launched by some younger critics in the West. Although their accusation of opportunism and political naivety was initially directed at Christa Wolf and her short story Was Bleibt (1990; What Remains, 1993), it developed into a denunciation of GDR writers in general for their alleged role in sustaining a corrupt regime. In the ensuing debate the process of revision was extended to West German literature, with the suggestion that the works of such as Böll had been revered more for their moral posture than their literary quality, the corollary being that German writers should now concern themselves with aesthetics rather than politics. The merits of this argument are by no means self-evident, but since unification German writers have certainly lost the authority and public esteem they had previously enjoyed in both East and West. Nevertheless, the response to Günter Grass’ Ein Weites Feld (A Broad Field, 1995), a wide-ranging novel articulating his long-held doubts about German unification, showed that some German writers, at least, have lost none of their ability to arouse controversy and stimulate lively public debate. Grass was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1999.