The Routledge Dictionary of Literary Terms

a passionate wish to murder the father –
or the Rimbaldian desire to find a saving,
spiritual dimension beyond the sterile
surface and demonic night-side of the
modern city (Georg Heym’s Novellen;
Georg Traki’s last poems and Wassily
Kandinsky’s theoretical work Über das
Geistige in der Kunst).
The outbreak of war reinforced the
early Expressionist vision and gave
urgency to some of the possible responses.
Thus, the urban landscape seemed to the
Expressionists to have prefigured the battlefields
of the Great War whose mechanized
slaughter was, in turn, seen as a
horrendous extension of the Capitalist
system of production, with people and
material going in at one end and corpses
coming out of the other. Correspondingly,
although the War was greeted enthusiastically
by some Expressionists for a few
weeks or months as a means of overcoming
everyday boredom and revitalizing
a dead Society (Hugo Ball, Rudolf
Leonhard, Hans Leyboid, Ernst Wilhelm
Lotz), the experience of trench warfare
soon made it clear that something more
than affective dynamism was necessary
for social renewal. This realization accentuated
in some Expressionists the temptation
to withdraw from the modern world
(Gottfried Benn) or surrender to cosmic
pessimism (August Stramm).
At the same time, Autumn 1914
saw the emergence of Kurt Hiller’s
Aktivismus – a pacifist neo-humanism,
shorn of idealist metaphysics, which
attracted considerable support from
among the Expressionists and which
placed its hopes in the emergence of
a new, spiritualized humanity and
redeemed society out of the Purgatory of
the War. These and similar millenarian
Expressionism 81
aspirations intensified and spread as the
War went on, merging by 1918 with a
sterile revolutionary rhetoric of which
the final scenes of Ernst Toller’s Die
Wandlung (1917–18) are an example and
the whole of Toller’s Masse Mensch
(1920–1) a critique. When the German
Revolution of 1918–19 failed to produce
the hoped-for total revolution, a widespread
disillusion set in among surviving
Expressionists which frequently ended in
suicide, exile, or a ‘sell-out’ to some totalitarian
organization, and which is
reflected in the drama of cultural and
political despair, such as Georg Kaiser’s
Gas trilogy (1916–19).
Expressionism issued into DADA, the
Bauhaus and Constructivism. Where
DADA continued the metaphysical investigations
of early Expressionism, offering
systematic folly and carnivalization both
as a means of coming to terms with a
many-layered and paradoxical vision of
reality and as a political weapon, the
Bauhaus and Constructivism, through
the medium of architecture, investigated
how the utopian neo-humanism of late
Expressionism might be realized with the
new techniques and materials provided by
the twentieth century.
A comprehensive anthology on this
subject is Thomas Anz and Michael Stark
(eds), Expressionismus: Manfeste und
Dokumente zur deutschen Literatur
1910–1920 (1982). Critical works include:
R. F. Allen, German Expressionist Poetry
(1979); R. S. Furness, Expressionism
(1973); J. Ritchie, German Expressionist
Drama (1976); W. H. Sokel, The Writer
in Extremis (1959); S. Vietta and
H.-G. Kemper, Expressionismus (1975);
J. Willett, Expressionism (1970).
RWS