A number of specialized periodicals, published in Berlin, Munich, Vienna, and Prague, led to a wide dissemination of Aestheticist writing. Magazines such as Pan and Die weissen Blatter (“White Pages”) welcomed short texts by young authors experimenting with what was regarded at the time as the “modern” style; and the annual Inselalmanach (“Insel Yearbook”) featured new writing by authors in the then-Aestheticist Insel Publishing House. Stefan George’s early lyric poetry, together with Hofmannsthal’s poems and lyrical dramas and Arthur Schnitzler’s dramas and short stories, set the tone for the Aestheticist movement in the 1890s. The influence of French Symbolism is especially evident in the poetry of George and Hofmannsthal. A novel by Thomas Mann, Buddenbrooks (1901; subtitled Verfall einer Famille, or “The Decline of a Family,” Eng. trans. Buddenbrooks), links aesthetic decadence with social and moral decline. Arthur Schopenhauer’s philosophy of the will and Nietzsche’s cultural pessimism are important ingredients in Mann’s engagement with Aestheticism. His early stories, for example Tonio Kröger (1903) and the novella Der Tod in Venedig (1912; Death in Venice), turn upon a simultaneous fascination with and critique of the Aestheticist impulse. His preoccupation with the figure of the artist, perennially longing to participate in the active and robust life of bourgeois society but perennially condemned to decadence, illness, and an inability to cope with practical realities, is a characteristic theme of Aestheticism. Rainer Maria Rilke and Hermann Hesse also explore this problematic relation between the artist and real life. Rilke’s early poetry belongs to the Aestheticist movement, and even his later, more boldly experimental works, Duineser Elegien (1923; Duino Elegies) and Sonette an Orpheus (1923; Sonnets to Orpheus), bear clear traces of his Aestheticist origins. The early stories of Franz Kafka also owe much to Aestheticism. The 20th century German Modernism Expressionism
German Modernism emerged from turn-of-the-century Aestheticism. Like European Modernism as a whole, German Modernism was in fact a cluster of different literary movements, including Expressionism, Neue Sachlichkeit (“New Objectivity”), and Dada. Of these, Expressionism is the best known and most important. Beginning about 1910 and reaching its culmination during World War I, Expressionism was a powerful response to the chaos and suffering of modern life. Georg Trakl, Georg Heym, and Gottfried Benn created terrifying images of war, urban life, oppression, and illness in their lyric poetry, and, although Trakl expressed a visionary mysticism in his battlefield scenes, Heym and Benn presented reality as grotesque, distorted, and starkly unrelieved. At the same time, their poetry, like Expressionist art of the period, is full of such colours as red, gold, purple, and blue, which bear an often hermetic or deeply personal significance for these writers. The anthology Menschheitsdämmerung (1919; The Dawn of Humanity), edited by Kurt Pinthus, was a rich and influential collection of Expressionist poetry. Expressionist drama used the same methods of grotesque distortion to attack what it saw as the soullessness of modern technology and the subjection of workers to machines. Yet Expressionist drama often took a more optimistic approach to the machine age, in part because of impulses derived from Italian Futurism. Whereas the Futurists glorified the machine, however, the Expressionists saw it more as an instrument that might help bring about a socialist utopia. The Expressionist stage became a vehicle to effect a transformation of consciousness in the audience. Die Wandlung (1919; Transfiguration), a play by Ernst Toller, depicts this kind of transformation in a young man who turns his horrific war experience into a new awareness of the brotherhood of man; his play Masse-Mensch (1920; Man and the Masses) presents the tragic attempt of a woman worker to effect a mass revolution among her fellow workers and lead them beyond violence toward peaceful coexistence. The dramas Gas I (1918) and Gas II (1920), by Georg Kaiser, show how a group of gas production workers are thwarted in their attempt to gain control of technology and establish a workers’ utopia in brotherhood and peace. Franz Kafka
The works of Franz Kafka, especially his two stories Das Urteil (1913; The Judgment) and Die Verwandlung (1915; The Metamorphosis), owe much to Expressionism and are often considered in the context of that movement. But his writing is better understood as an early phase of experimental Modernism. Kafka’s central concern, like that of other 20th-century Modernists, is the problematic nature of human subjectivity and the limitations of individual perception and knowledge. His striking narrative technique, first developed in The Judgment, of presenting reality from a limited third-person point of view enables readers to identify with his oppressed and passive protagonists while also recognizing that their view is deeply flawed. Kafka’s unfinished novels, especially Der Prozess (1925; The Trial) and Das Schloss (1926; The Castle), explore further aspects of the individual’s inescapable entrapment in subjectivity. Like many other Modernists, Kafka also treated problems of authority and power. His characters feel hopelessly subjugated to inexplicable forces associated with patriarchal social structures and an overly mechanized and bureaucratic modern world. The Brief an den Vater (posthumously published, 1960; “Letter to His Father,” bilingual edition, 1966), written in 1919 but never actually delivered to his father, reveals the autobiographical background to the father-son conflict Kafka depicted in many of his stories, a thematic concern he shared with the Expressionists. The grotesque element in Kafka’s writing stems from his tendency to take metaphors literally, as when the “spineless” Gregor Samsa, protagonist of The Metamorphosis, wakes up one morning to find he has become an insect, a creature without a spine. Kafka’s love of paradoxes and logical puzzles gave rise to a highly symbolic style of writing that makes his works resistant to any single interpretive key. Other works of German Modernism