Carl Einstein
German Expressionist novelist and commentator
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'Probably every kind of aesthetic admiration is nothing more than degenerate devotion, a substitute.'
Carl Einstein (aka Karl Einstein) 1885 -1940
Carl Einstein -experimental prose writer, theorist of Expressionist poetics, art critic, anarchist combatant and communist sympathiser- was central to the European discovery of African Art for aesthetic merit, and contributer, therefore, to a principal aspect of German Expressionism. He was a participant in Dadaism and surrealism, as well as an uncompromising critic of avant-garde productions. As a theorist he focussed on the limits of symbolic language and of Western conceptual culture.
Although his work was for decades considered a preamble to Modernism, Einstein was to his contemporaries an important Expressionist author and theorist, and has in recent years been hailed again as ‘a first rate Modernist'[1]; an important player in the development of German Expressionism at the turn of the century.
He became known as a prestigious art critic, but only by default. Art Criticism was Einstein's ‘money job', and he regarded himself first off as an Expressionist writer. The portrait of Einstein left by his contemporaries in Berlin is of Einstein the hard-working socialite, who spent a lot of his time in cafes and bars, and was infamous for his arrogance. He was by all accounts a dandy. Emil Szittya remembered artists' parties where there would be ‘real literary people, for example, Karl Einstein, who wears a real Franz Blei monocle...'
Carl Einstein was born in Neuwied near Karlsruhe, the capital city of Baden, Germany on April 26th 1885. He was the nephew of German physician, Albert Einstein, and second child of Daniel Einstein, a highly active member of the Jewish community. When Carl was three, the family moved to Karlsruhe due to his father's appointment as director of a boarding school for Jewish religious teachers in Würzburg. Documents from the time would indicate that Daniel Einstein was a devout, hardworking and well respected man, but he suffered from mental collapse and died in the mental hospital in Ilenau when Carl was fifteen. There is mystery surrounding the death. Sibylle Penkert, who has researched the family extensively, believes that it may have been a suicide that was hushed up. Interestingly, the title character of his novel, Bebuquin, ‘collapses'; simply dying of scepticism, unemotional despair, and emptiness. Carl Einstein ended his own life forty one years later to escape Nazi persecution.
As an adult Einstein downplayed both his religious and educational background, perhaps considering it a feature of the pre-war bourgeois culture that the Expressionists were reacting against. It is clear, however, that he was a highly educated youth. Even after his father's death, which left the family with very little money, Einstein continued to attend the Kahrlsruhe Gymnasium, which had an excellent academic reputation and an extensive library. Although himself and his school-friend rebelliously left in the middle of their ‘Abitur' (final school exams), Einstein attended the Friedrich-Wilhelms Universität in Berlin between 1904 and 1908. He was not allowed to sit exams there, having not obtained the necessary qualification, but he attended lectures by philosophers Simmel and Riehl, art historian Wölfflin and the philologist von Willamowitz-Moellendorff.
The first chapter of Bebuquin was published in 1907 in Die Opal, an avant-garde literary magazine edited by Franze Blei. This is Einstein's first published text on record. He began to contribute articles and short stories to literary and political magazines such as Der Demokrat, Neue Blätter Die Gegenwart, Merker and Hyperion, also edited by Blei. Most of these publications were short-lived, but Die Aktion, which published Bebuquin in book form in 1912, existed until the 1930s. It was well received and widely reviewed.
Einstein's work was for decades considered a preamble to Expressionism, just as Expressionism itself was considered a sideshow to Modernsim. Conor Joyce, author of an entire book on Einstein's Documents, even claims that Bebuquin, which is now considered a primary Expressionist Modernist text, is ‘difficult to class as expressionist' because there is ‘no interest in subjectivity or sensation'. It is hard to see how this text, which opens with the aesthetically intense phrase, ‘Splinters of a glass yellow lamp clattered from the voice of the slattern', and in which the title character laments, ‘I am a mirror, a motionless puddle reflected in gaslight', could be considered anything less than an exemplary Expressionist text, even a modernist cliché. The book contains ‘the chaotic smashing of language' described by Pinthus as a feature of Expressioism, and all the problems of subjectivity, truth and originality inherent to modernist texts. The publication of Bebuquin added to the momentum of Expressionism, and to Modernism as a whole, influencing artists like the Dadaist Hugo Bell.
The period during which Einstein was overlooked as an important literary figure is used as an example in Richard Brinkmann's research reports. The reports show how it takes decades for scholarly research to gain perspective on an individual career, or to realize the depth or importance of a single work, and then to reassess the status of an artist or writer such as Carl Einstein.
Die Aktion took an anarchist position and published many Expressionist authors. After the publication of Bebuquin, Einstein became part of the inner circle of Die Aktion, and married Maria Ramm, who worked on the magazine. Her sister Alexandra was also involved in Die Aktion, and married the editor, Pfemfert.
Einstein did not, however, belong to Die Aktion's anti-war group, which was lead by his brother-in-law. By 1915, the year that his ground-breaking Negerplastik was published, the same year that his daughter, Nina, was born, Einstein had become a voluntary soldier in the First World War.
Despite Einstein's reluctance to be identified as an art critic, it is the book of African Art, Negerplastik, that gives him such weight as an Expressionist. Contemporary thought on Expressionism understands the primitivism of Expressionist art in relation to Germany's colonial practices, and it was Negerplastik that first introduced African sculpture to a European audience as a serious art form, consolidating the Expressionist's conceptual debt to African Art.
In her review of Negerplastik published in the Leipzig journal in 1916, Sasha Schwabacher wrote that Einstein's intent was to destroy ‘all judgments of value reached by aesthetics up to now'. It was Einstein who first understood African Art within the discourse of Cubism. He is recognised as the first to consider Cubism as a movement. In his introduction to this publication -a collection of 119 photographic plates of African sculpture- Einstein uses the terms of ‘form and space', in the abstract senses deriving from Hildebrand and Kant, and likens African sculpture to Cubist painting, and even to his contemporary and associate, Picasso.
Einstein was heavily involved in the 1918 soldier's revolt in occupied Brussels. He was appointed press officer to the Brussels soldiers' council, and diplomatic representative in its dealings with the Belgian civil authorities. He remained representative of the soldier's council in the subsequent negotiations with the Belgian authorities and the Allies to organize the orderly withdrawal of the German soldiers. Back in Berlin the situation was chaotic, with the Sparticist revolt underway. Some of Einstein's associates such as Wieland Herzfeld, with whom he worked on the satirical political magazine Die Pleite, were arrested. It is likely that he was on the list for arrest, and hearsay of the time had it that Einstein was moving from house to house. He was contributing to Die Pleite, and, after the paper was banned, he edited the successor publication with George Grosz.
In 1921 Einstein's play on the crucifixion of Christ, Die Schlimme Botschaft, was published. It was an anarchist work which led to a much publicized blasphemy case. Einstein and the publisher lost the case and had to pay a fine of 15,000 Marks. This was a small sum given the rate of inflation in post-war Germany.
After this experience, Einstein's involvement in political activity waned. There is no record of any collaboration in the 1920's with the Berlin Dadaists, with whom he had worked closely on political papers in the previous decade. He turned again to art criticism and African studies. Afrikanische Plastik, his second book on African art, was published in the same year as Die Schlimme Botschaft, and he dedicated some time to Afrikanische Legenden- a book of African short stories. In terms the primitivism of Expressionism, it is clear in hindsight that Einstein was still making a valuable contribution to Modernist thinking. Through the twenties he wrote introductions and essays for art books such as a book on the Polish painter Moise Kisling, a book of early Japanese woodcuts, and a study of the set designer Leon Bakst. He was also writing art criticism for the magazine Kunstblatt, edited and published by art historian Paul Westheim, and the left-wing review Der Querschnitt. He wrote articles on Picasso, Braque, Kandinsky, Dix, Grosz and Rudolf Belling, as well as those, like Georges Michel, who did not fall within any of the twentieth century avant-gardes but were still active in the earlier years of the century. With Westheim, he edited Europa-Almanach, a review book on the currents state of the visual arts.
Einstein's marriage had collapsed by 1915, and he had a new girlfriend, Aga von Hagen, thirteen years his senior. His relationships with women were not tender and probably in keeping with the brutal sexism of Bebuquin, but his correspondence with male friends was more affectionate. Although he had several girlfriends during these years, he spent some time living with Aga von Hagen in her house in Frohnau, a suburb of Berlin. During this time he worked on Die Kunst des 20 Jahrhunderts. In this book Einstein focuses on the Cubism of Picasso and Braque, and the French art that preceded it, and particularly on Klee of the Blau Reiter group, whom he later came to admire as much as the Cubists. Oddly, the artists with whom Einstein had the closest personal relationships, the Dadaists, were omitted from the book. Die Kunst des 20 Jahrhunderts was a commercial success, with three editions following in close succession.
Einstein argued against literature -belles lettres- as the culture of subjectivity, of metaphor and interiority. He attempted to theorize an immediacy of visual experience, and yet he still did not regard art criticism as his most important work. He was frustrated by his inability to produce a sequel to Bebuquin, calling his work in progress, 'Beb II.' 'I have to create a lawful but different art,' he said, 'or I'll fail my purpose in life . I'd only be a journalist, which is tantamount to suicide.'
The diary of one of his romantic entanglements, Tony Simon-Wolfskehl, records Einstein calling his art criticism ‘Kunstschmarren', and telling her that drinking and socialising was his way of avoiding the reality that he was not doing his real work as an experimental writer. He made plans to marry Simon-Wolfskehl, but they came to nothing, and he continued to live with Von Hagen. In 1924 he wrote in a letter to Kahnweiler "I've got to get out of Germany... It is not a country to do concentrated work".
In 1928, Einstein moved to Paris. A year later he joined Georges Bataille and Michel Leiris on the Parisian avant-garde journel 'Documents'. His aesthetic theory was most fully developed in these journals. Central to this theory was the notion of contemporary painting as a language. His thought was somewhat out of sync now, with those of his.
He co-scripted the 1935 film Toni, with director Jean Renoir, assisted by Luchino Visconti, one of the founding members of the neorealist movement. The film was made at the height of Renoir's career. It is notable for its use of non-professional actors and is also generally considered the major precursor to the Italian neorealist movement.
In 1936 Einstein headed to Spain along with other compatriots like Helmut Rudiger, to fight on the republican side in the Spanish Civil War with the anarchist trade union, the CNT. He fought with the international group of the Durruti Column, and was wounded in combat. On November 22, 1936 he gave the funeral oration for the slain Durruti in Barcelona. An extract from his speech was later inscribed on a plaque in the Boel-Bezing cemetery in the Atlantic Pyrenees; 'Where the Column advances, one collectivises. The land is given to the community, the agricultural proletarians, slaves of caciques which they were, metamorphose themselves as free men.One passes from agrarian feudalism to free Communism'
Following defeat of the revolution, he crossed the Pyrenees and was interned in the infamous camps in Southern France containing the antifascists combatants and the Spanish population fleeing the exactions of the pro-Franco troops. He was liberated later in the spring of 1940 as a result of the chaotic circumstances in the face of the rapidly progressing German invasion. Finally the implications of the geopolitical advances of the German army isolated and eventually trapped Einstein on the French border with Franco's Spain. In July 1940, to escape Nazis persecutions, Einstein committed suicide in Lestelle-Bétharram (Basses-Pyrenées), France.
[1] Neil H. Donohue in his introduction to German Expressionism; art and society, Stephanie Barron. London: Thomas and Hudson 1997
