German Expressionism

‘Insolent mockery of the Divine under centrist rule’

Slogan from the entartete Kunst exhibit, Munich 1937

Herwald Walden used the term ‘Expressionism’ in his polemic magazine Der Sturm in 1912, but it was not referred to as a movement until it had almost died out.What is now referenced ‘German Expressionism’ is probably Germany’s most original and important artistic mode since the Middle Ages. The heterogeneity of its artistic and stylistic means, its varied intellectual sources and its social and political agendas, make it inherently difficult to define. 

Politically, German Expressionism is usually equated with communism, but the expressionist ideology fed in to a multitude of political standpoints. While the largely Jewish ethnicity of Expressionist artists, for example Carl Einstein, Georg Kaiser, Gunther and Schultze-Naumburg, set it in opposition with the anti-Semitism of Nazi Germany, the expressionist ideal was no more left wing than National Socialism. In fact, the Expressionist tendency to the extreme, and the desire for a new society, a new goal, and new man, is something the Expressionists had in common with the National Socialism that we now consider right wing. Expressionist playwrights Arnolt Brionnen and Hans Johnst, and poet Gottfried Benn (a close friend of Carl Einstein!), became Nazis.

Expressionist work was marked by aesthetic intensity, a wilful divergence from prior modes of thinking, a tendency to short forms as a way of concentrating and condensing, and an acute self consciousness about the limits of language and, the converse, the expressive potential of language. This ‘language’ could be visual or linguistic. Indeed, the notion of visual art as a language was to be further developed towards the end of the Expressionist movement by Georges Bataille, Michel Leiris and Carl Einstein in the avant-garde art journal Documents. Expressionism was a self-consciously Post-Impressionist movement; a turn away from the notion of aesthetic beauty in harmonious proportion; ‘Symmatry’ says Bebuquin, ‘is as boring as mechanics’[i].  

In Spring 1914, united Germany seemed stable under Kaiser Wilhelm. It was a time of massive development and change. Industrialisation brought a huge population increase and Germany had the most powerful steel, chemical and electrical industries in Europe. With a huge navy and was decidedly imperialist ideals, Germany pursued its colonial ambitions with an aggression that resulted in its isolation by the other powers.

German Expressionism began as a reaction to the conditions of Wilhelminian Germany; a rejection of the pre-war German bourgeois culture as chronicled in the likes of Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain. Young intellectuals felt excluded and classless in a complacent, materialistic Germany. Expressionism began as a turn away industrialisation, mechanization, and from patriarchy in the broader sense.  The German Expressionists moved towards ‘primitive art’ as a model of abstraction, or non representational, non-academic, non-bourgeois art of existential immediacy.

The expressionist notion of primitivism is widely attributed to Carl Einstein, whose book Negerplastik, published at the start of World War 1, was the first to recognise African sculpture as an aesthetic art form. Primitivism in German Expressionism stands in relation to German colonial practice in Africa. It served as a decolonization of the mind of the German avant-garde from its bourgeois, imperialist upbringing. The embracing of primitivism is a rejection, by the Expressionists, of Wilhelmein Germany and all it represented. It was also (again based on a certain reading of African art, and on Nietzsche’s ambiguous terms) a rejection of reason as a means to truth; ‘Let us murder reason,’ says Einstein’s ‘Bebuquin’, ‘reason has created the shapeless death in which there is nothing to see.’ [ii]

The turn of the century Expressionist generation took inspiration from Nietzsche with emphasis on the revolutionary potential of his views in the immediate practical context of politics, art and religion. With its attacks on liberalism and socialism, its impulse towards violence and prophecies of great wars, Nietzschean thought is often attributed to justifying colonial aims and to the development of fascism, but aspects of his thought also backed the reaction against these developments. ‘The young artists of this movement,’ writes Seth Taylor, ‘saw in Nietzsche’s antipolitical philosophy the material to combat the militarism, authoritarianism, and illiberalism of German society which Nietzsche is usually creditied with engendering’[iii]

The Nietzschean notion of the individual creative impulse struggling for expression is a central feature in pre-1913 German Expressionist writing. In its youth the movement was based on the apparently paradoxical ideas of individual expression and of united brotherhood. To use loosely Nietzsche’s meaning of the term; it was rooted in the notion of the Dionysian. Taking from Schopenhauer, the Expressionists were inspired by the possibility of using art to go beyond the limits of human reason, of reaching the elusive truth, the essence, by non-rational means. Although participants in the Expressionist movement went on to cover a wide range of political standpoints, it was initially based on frustration at the pettiness and materialism of Wilhelminian Germany, and heavily embedded in Schopenhauer’s idea of ‘the need to embrace the brotherhood of man’.

The advent of Freudian and Jungian psychology in the first quarter of the century added another dimension to the new ideas clamouring for influence in the mindscape of the young Expressionists. These new ways of understanding constituted a challenge to the writer to express latent states of mind. Speaking of Expressionist theatre, the critic J.L. Styan writes “in its early stages expressionistic drama was a dramatization of the subconscious, a kind of scripted dream, with the consequent loss of character motivation and rational plot development of the well-made play. This loss, however, did not necessarily imply a surrealistic formlessness; a play’s true, inner unity could be supplied by the single vision of the dreamer himself.” [iv]  The same can be said of Expressionist works in their visual, poetic, and prosaic forms.

The very nature of Expressionism resulted in a crossing and blurring of the boundaries of these art forms. Traditional forms could not contain the creator’s intent, and the result is an array of art forms each straddling the others’ territory; ‘Every second,’ wrote Einstein, ‘was three-dimensional, distinct, the eye saw the sound.’ [v] Expressionist theatre did not adhere to the rules of the well made play. Poetry, prose, and visual art bled into one another in an aesthetically intense effort to attain the ‘essence’.

The German Expressionists, and Einstein in particular, put into practice the theories of Werringer, who split art into empathy and abstraction. By empathy, he referred to an existential comfort in the world; a sense of harmony and control over nature. ‘Abstraction’ stood for metaphysical anxiety, and primordial psychic anguish associated with jarring formations and non representational, abstract art.

World War 1 gave new ferocity and intensity to the Expressionist movement. Initially there was belief that the upheavals would bring about a new civilisation. This was to be the great “‘Kehraus’; the sweeping clean of the materialism and complacency that had stifled the spirit of man” [vi]. The Expressionist notion of the regeneration of man took on a new significance in this context. The reality of war, however, meant that many Expressionists turned against it. Prussian playwright Fritz Von Unruh, for example, who had written the militaristic plays Offiziere and Prinz Louis Ferdinand before fighting in the 1914 war, returned convinced of the horrors of modern war. His work is ‘quintessentially expressionistic in that it is an outburst (albeit in traditional verse form) of pent-up, lava-like emotions: it combines an optimistic humanitarian ideal with a shrill, hectic sadism which is only just dispelled”[vii]. The anarchist publication Die Aktion, which was the first to publish Carl Einstein’s Bebuquin, led a peace campaign during the war.

The collapse of Germany and the installation of the Weimer republic brought with it extreme politics, how could man now be ‘Renewed’ according to the beliefs of the pre-war Expressionist generation? Expressionists continued to be profoundly and repeatedly disillusioned in the years between the wars. Playwright Ernst Toller, went into physical and emotional collapse at the front while fighting with the army in 1914. He joined the extreme left in Munich and was imprisoned for pacifism. His 1917-18 play Die Wandlung, performed in Berlin in 1919, demonstrates the conversion of a hero from unthinking patriot to fervent revolutionary leader, and is full of the dying hope for regeneration held by some of the post-war Expressionists. The violence of the 1919 Soviet Republic in Munich was at odds with the pacifist views which Toller had believed communism stood for. His next play, performed in 1921, about the conflict between intellectuals and the masses, resulted in his imprisonment.

Like many of the Expressionist practitioners, Toller became increasingly desperate and disillusioned about the impotence of social change to relieve suffering (‘primordial angst’), and eventually committed suicide.

Painter Otto Dix was profoundly affected by the sights of the war, and it was after these experiences that Dix began to paint expressionist works. He represented his traumatic experiences in a portfolio of fifty etchings called War, published in 1924.

Despite the disappointments that the real war brought to the notion of ‘Kehraus’, the feeling of camaraderie was intensified by war, and suffering became ‘the crucible in which a new sense of brotherhood and solidarity was to be formed.’[viii] In this way the 1st World War paved the way for the political activism and the lasting extremism that was to mark the next decades of politics and art in Europe

After the war, many Expressionists still believed in the idea of a ‘new man’ and ‘the renewal of man’. Playwrights such as Georg Kaiser tried to develop appropriate language in which to portray, or invent this ‘new man’, a language which was ‘a remarkable fusion of the cerebral and passionate’[ix]

The first Expressionist films ‘Kammerspielfilm’ were created between the wars. Films like The Golem (1920), Destiny (1921), and The Last Laugh (1924), were highly symbolic and deliberately surrealistic portrayals of filmed stories. The first Expressionist films made up for a lack of lavish budgets by using set designs with wildly non-realistic, geometrically absurd sets, along with designs painted on walls and floors to represent lights, shadows, and objects. The plots and stories often dealt with madness, insanity, betrayal, and other "intellectual" topics. Later films like Metropolis (1927) and M (1931), by Fritz Lang films, are often categorized as part of the brief history of German Expressionist.

German Expressionism reached its height between 1917 and 1923. Theatre, with its accessibility (in theory at least…) to the masses, and its embedment in group experience, was a particularly favoured form for expressionist practitioners. The Expressionist writers held the notion, compatible with the tradition of ancient Dionysian festivals which were the birth of European theatre, of ‘Kunstwollen’ (artistic volition), which, given reign, lead to ‘Weltgefuhle’ (worldfeeling), resulting in a metaphysical disposition towards the kosmos. Georg Kaiser and Gerhart Hauptmann, were the most frequently performed playwrights in the Weimar Republic. Between 1917 and 1923, 24 plays by Kaiser were performed in German. His works were plays of ideas more than of characters; dialectical progressions rather than well-made plays.

None of the ambiguities of Nietzchean thought were clarified by practitioners at this time. Unaware, perhaps, of how high the stakes were, the Expressionists embraced the notions of violence and upheaval, and clung to the idea of ‘a new man’. Like much of the work to come out of Expressionism, there are contradictions in Kaiser’s work, between the ideas of renewal of spirit and regeneration and of a “ruthless, almost cruel element, a narcissistic sense of power”[x], more sinister in hindsight than it may then have seemed. Reflected in Kaiser’s works is the disillusionment of Weimer Germany, especially on those plays written btw 1917-23. The sets were symbolistic, with bleak, harsh lighting and raw, metallic construction.

From 1923, with a sense of normality returning to the Weimer Republic, German Expressionism began to lose some of its$ potency. Bauhaus, and the alienation techniques of the likes of Brecht, replaced the ideas of Expressionism.

In any case Expressionism was not to survive Hitler’s Germany. Not only were the Jewish artists, many of whom were expressionists, prosecuted under Hitler, but Nazi ideology considered modern art as decadent and contributing to the decline of Western civilization. There was still a strong link between Expressionism and the peace campaign of the first World War, and avant-garde was very much a development of the Weimer Republic. The desire for regeneration was something the Nazis shared with expressionists, but for Hitler, the avant-garde artists were something to be swept away, they were something standing in the way of the ‘new man’. The Third Reich wanted to destroy and recreate the cultural system of which the expressionists had become a part.

More sinister, was the concept of ‘degeneration’ in art, developed from the ideas of Cesare Lombroso and Max Nordau, both Jewish thinkers who held theories of racial superiority and inferiority. Nordau’s theory was presented in his 1892 book, Entartung, which held that modern art was the work of those so corrupted and enfeebled by modern life that they have lost the self-control needed to produce coherent works. He drew upon the writings of the criminologist, Lombroso, whose The Criminal Man, published in 1876, attempted to prove that there were "born criminals" whose atavistic personality traits could be detected by scientifically measuring abnormal physical characteristics. Nordau developed from this premise his theory of artistic degeneracy. He attacked Aestheticism in English literature and described the mysticism of the Symbolist movement in French literature as a product of mental pathology.

Despite the fact that Nordau was Jewish and a key figure in the Zionist movement, his work, with its notions of pathology and physical perfection, lent itself easily to the Nazi ideology. Nordau’s ideas had been absorbed into the consciousness of the German people by the time of The Third Reich, and could be used to back anti-Semitic ideas despite its origins.

The book burning of 1933 included many Expressionist works.

By 1937 the concept of degeneracy in art was firmly entrenched in Nazi policy. Hitler rejected all forms of modernism. Only in Stalin's Soviet Union, where Socialist Realism was the mandatory style, had a state shown such concern with regulation of the arts. In the case of Germany, the model was to be classical Greek and Roman art, seen by Hitler as an art whose exterior form embodied an inner racial ideal.  Music was expected to be tonal and free of any jazz influences. Avant-garde art had become the art of the Weimer republic, for which Nazi propaganda wished to perpetrate the utmost revulsion.

From 1936 onwards Nazi repression and anti-semitism became much stronger and fuller. In 1937 Hitler declared ‘From now on we are going to wage a relentless cleaning-up campaign against the last subversive elements of our culture’[xi]. In the same year the entartete Kunst exhibition was mounted in Munich. The exhibition consisted of modernist artworks chaotically hung and accompanied by text labels deriding the art and declaiming how much public money had been wasted on these artists and these pictures. Designed to inflame public opinion against modernism, the exhibition subsequently traveled to several other cities in Germany and Austria. Although only six of the 112 artists exhibited were Jewish, the works were all considered examples of ‘Jewish Bolshevism’.

The exhibit was held on the second floor of a building formerly occupied by the Institute of Archaeology. Viewers had to reach the exhibit by means of a narrow staircase. The first sculpture was an oversized, theatrical portrait of Jesus, which purposely intimidated viewers as they literally bumped into it in order to enter. The rooms were made of temporary partitions and deliberately chaotic and overfilled. Pictures were crowded together, sometimes unframed, usually hung by cord. The exhibition was a type of politically fuelled installation art in itself, and has penetrated the European cultural consciousness.

• There were slogans painted on the walls. For example:
•  Insolent mockery of the Divine under Centrist rule
•  Revelation of the Jewish racial soul
•  An insult to German womanhood
•  The ideal--cretin and whore
•  Deliberate sabotage of national defense
•  German farmers--a Yiddish view
•  The Jewish longing for the wilderness reveals itself - in Germany the Negro becomes the racial ideal of a degenerate art
•  Madness becomes method
•  Nature as seen by sick minds

Expressionist painter Nolde was a supporter of the Nazi party from the early 1920s, having become a member of its Danish section. He expressed anti-semitic views, and considered Expressionism to be a distinctively Germanic style. This view was shared by some other members of the Nazi party, notably Joseph Goebbels. Goebbels had originally been a supporter of Expressionism, declaring ‘We are all Expressionists today: people who want to shape the world from within themselves. Expressionism is building a new world inside itself. Its power and its secret lie in its passion.’[xii] However, when Nazi attitudes to Expressionism changed, Nolde’s work was seized and he was banned from painting.

Avant-garde German artists were now branded both enemies of the state and a threat to German culture. Painters were banned from obtaining painting materials, though some still worked in secret, often using watercolors to avoid the tell-tale smell of oil paint. Although there were no executions as a punishment for practicing modernist art, many expressionists fled the country out of fear, or because they could no longer bear life in The Third Reich. A disproportionate number committed suicide. Many Jewish Expressionists were taken to concentration camps and consequently died or killed themselves. Avant-garde journals such as Documents, published in Paris, disappeared as Hitler gained power. Many works that were burned have disappeared completely, and some of the paintings and sculpture seized for the entartete Kunst exhibition were never recovered.

MOST RECENT PUBLICATION

ONLY €9 TO BUY ONLINE IN PAPERBACK! 

Some of our authors

Thomas Page

Master of Entomological Bio Terror.

L. P. Davies

The British answer to Philip K. Dick. Mind altering drugs? Perhaps a hot cup of tea instead...

R. L. Dione

Prize fighter, teacher, philosopher and UFOlogist. The man sweats charisma.

Carl Einstein

"I'd rather f**k myself in the river than let them get their hands on me": German Expressionist novelist of the 1920s.

Upcoming launches

• Tom Page Book Signing at Dark Delicacies March 01, 2008 ~ Burbank, California
• Trashface Launch Party March 01, 2008 ~ Dublin
• The Collected works of L.P. Davies April 07, 2008 ~ Dublin
• The Man Who Would Not Die
  By Thomas Page April 07, 2008 ~ Dublin