Rebecca SC French 602F2576 MA in German Studies - Rhodes ...

adically political nature, particularly during the 1918/1919 revolution. Thomas Mann‟s
thoughts on the matter, published in his Gedanken im Kriege (1914), trace this dissatisfaction
with the status quo, by no means unique to Germany at the time but surfacing across Europe 13 , to
what was essentially a materialization of the eternal opposites of nature and mind, in this case
manifesting as the opposition of culture and civilisation. (Eberle 1985: 4) One would not
immediately see these two as standing in sharp contrast to each other, however Mann‟s case is
quite convincing: culture involved art, war, magic and genius. Civilisation, on the other hand
was “reason, enlightenment, mildness and manners, scepticism, dissolution – mind. Yes, the
mind is civil, bourgeois: it is the sworn enemy of the instincts, the passions; it is anti-demonic,
anti-heroic; and I am only apparently contradicting myself when I add that it is, moreover, anti-
genius” (Mann in Eberle 1985: 4). Mann would go on to explore this opposition in great depth
in his Doktor Faustus, where we see all the above elements combine to form an interesting and
sinister portrayal of a nation so wracked by the intimate interplay of opposites that shaped its
core.
Playwrights around the time of the post-war Revolution were dabbling in Expressionism as well
as themes of a more overtly political nature. We encounter in Mephisto the character of Oskar
H. Kroge, who was “sehr beliebt und angesehen in Frankfurt a.M. und überall dort im Lande, wo
man an den kühnen Experimenten eines geistigen Theaters Anteil nahm. […Er] gehörte zu den
aktivisten und erfolgsreichsten Vorkämpfern des dramatischen Expressionismus.” (Mann, K.
2006: 29f.)
One of the most important stages for these performances was Max Reinhardt‟s Großes
Schauspielhaus (the so-called „theatre of 5000‟) in Berlin, where classical, revolutionary and
Expressionist spectacles were staged from 1919 to 1923, when the venture collapsed. (Willet
1984: 29f.) Smaller Volkstheater were alive and well and housing such productions as Die
Wandlung an “anti-war drama” (Willet 1984: 29) written by Ernst Toller, a poet and leading
Munich revolutionary, who had, a few months prior to the play being staged, been arrested for a
reward of 10,000 marks, convicted of high treason and imprisoned for 5 years. (Willet 1984: 32)
His alleged treason lay in the fact that he had supported the counter-revolution, which had
attempted to carry out the November Revolution according to Bolshevik principles. (Willet
1984: 32)
13 Manifest particularly in the emergence of the Futurist movement in Italy and the Cubist movement in France.
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