Decadence poetry

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Decadence poetry ( French décadence "decay") is the vague and controversial term for a large number of literary movements and individual works at the turn of the century (1900), the commonality of which lies in their resolute rejection of naturalism . A general characteristic is a subjectivist - aestheticist view of art and the world, which leads to a consciously anti-bourgeois, anti-moral, anti-realistic and anti-vital self-determination and is perceived as over-refinement.

This over-refinement was interpreted as a symptom of a time of cultural decline (see decadence ) and, at least since Friedrich Nietzsche, the subject of a polemical criticism of the times . The term decadence was introduced by the French poet Paul Verlaine . The latter said of himself: “Je suis l'Empire à la fin de la Décadence.” This means: “I am the empire at the end of decadence.” Reich is the epoch from the first French empire under Napoléon Bonaparte to the end of second empire under Napoléon III. meant that was defeated in the war against Germany in 1870 . While the sensitivity of poets like Charles Baudelaire to the sublime, intoxicating, atmospheric and morbid was celebrated at times , especially in the French literary scene , Nietzsche illustrates his negative judgment of a modern “nervous art” as exhaustion and dissolution in Der Fall Wagner (1888). Oswald Spengler continued this alarmist view of history in Der Untergang des Abendlandes (1918).

Important representatives

Since it is difficult to distinguish actual decadence literature from the symbolism of Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine or the impressionism of Hugo von Hofmannsthal or Rainer Maria Rilke , authors as diverse as Anton Chekhov (Russia), Gabriele d'Annunzio (Italy), Maurice Maeterlinck (Belgium), Jens Peter Jacobsen (Denmark), Oscar Wilde (Ireland), Peter Altenberg (Austria) or Thomas and Heinrich Mann (Germany). In France, poets such as Jules Laforgue , Tristan Corbière , Lautréamont and writers such as Marcel Schwob , Rachilde , Félicien Champsaur , Jane de la Vaudère , Edouard Dujardin , Élémir Bourges , Joris-Karl Huysmans and Maurice Barrès are assigned to the decadence poetry .

Literary figures, motifs and styles

Jost Hermand works out some typical literary figures of decadence poetry. In the first place there is the unhappy self-mirroring artist who fights more or less unsuccessfully against his depression because of his artistic weakness, the inability to accomplish, whereby the transition from the bohemian of the naturalistic phase to decadence is fluid. While the bohemian feels like a member of an anti-bourgeois opposition, the decadent sees himself as a norm-violating, cross-border loner.

Furthermore, Hermand names the suffering aesthet, for whom suffering is at the same time pleasure; the dying young man mourning his unlived life; the enthusiastic nightwalker who foresees his untimely death; the precocious or eternally sick bourgeois son who is too weak for life and especially for business, such as Hanno Buddenbrook in Thomas Mann's novel; the in agony dilapidated needle but can be carried away to dangerous passions of hindämmert unemployed before him; the childish Demivierge , the femme fatale (e.g. Salome ) or the femme fragile .

Alice Guszalewicz in the role of Salome with the head of Jokanaan in Richard Strauss ' opera, around 19086/1910

Recurring motifs, according to Hermand, are the feeling of the inaccessible, of the flowing and sliding past (like in a Venetian gondola, for example in D'Annunzio) or of being still alive. Karl Lamprecht speaks of “irritability” as a characteristic of decadence, which it shares with Impressionism.

Apart from the thematic brackets of the interplay of lust for life and weariness, decadence poetry often works with the destruction of traditional narrative structures and replaces their coherence with a consciously artificial totality, which is characterized by the enigmatic of plot and characters, frequent (motive) repetitions as well as self-referentiality and one Dominance of isolated (often optical) text details. The authors are increasingly questioning conventional language; instead, body expression and sensory impressions gain in importance.

At the beginning of the 20th century, the melancholy of decadence changes to an end times mood , it turns into fear or fear of the world as with Rilke , yes into horror as with Trakl .

See also

literature

  • Christiane Barz: Flight from the world and faith in life. Aspects of decadence in Scandinavian and German modern literature around 1900. Edited by Kirchhof and Franke, Leipzig / Berlin 2003, ISBN 978-3-933816-20-7
  • Roger Bauer: Decadence at Nietzsche. Attempt to take stock. in: Joseph P. Strelka (ed.): Literary theory and criticism. Festschrift. Presented to René Wellek in honor of his eighteenth birthday. Vol. 1. Lang, Zurich 1984, ISBN 0-8204-0178-1 , pp. 35-68
  • Alexandra Beilharz: The Décadence and Sade. Investigations into narrative texts of the French fin de siècle. M&P, Stuttgart 1996, ISBN 3-476-45161-5
  • Ina-Gabriele Dahlem: Dissolving and producing. On the dialectical procedure of literary decadence in Heinrich Mann's “Goddess Trilogy” . Lang, Frankfurt am Main 2001, ISBN 3-631-37156-X
  • Jósef Heistein: Décadentisme , symbolisme, avant-garde dans les littératures européennes. Wrocław / Paris 1987
  • Dieter Kafitz: Decadence in Germany. Studies on a lost discourse of the 1890s. University Press C. Winter, Heidelberg 2004, ISBN 3-8253-1613-0
  • Andrea Kottow: The sick man. On the dichotomies disease / health and femininity / masculinity in texts around 1900. Diss., Berlin 2004, online
  • Henning Mehnert: On the meaning of the terms "symbolisme", "décadentisme" and "dégénérescence" in the 19th century, in: W.Droz: Belief in progress and consciousness of decadence in 19th century Europe; Heidelberg 1986
  • Wolfdietrich Rasch : The literary decadence around 1900. Beck, Munich 1986
  • Carlo Salinari: Miti e coscienza del decadentismo italiano . 4th edition. Feltrinelli, Milan 1991, ISBN 88-07-10067-3 . (First edition 1960)
  • Werner Wille: Studies on decadence in novels at the turn of the century . Greifswald 1930
  • Ariane Wild: Poetology and Decadence in the Poetry of Baudelaires, Verlaines, Trakls and Rilkes . Würzburg 2002, ISBN 3-8260-2214-9

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Engel, Eduard : History of French literature. From the beginning to the present . 10th edition, Friedrich Brandstetter Verlag, Leipzig 1927, page 503
  2. ↑ See also Rebecca Stott: The Fabrication of the Late-Victorian `Femme Fatale´: The Kiss of Death on the types of women in decadence literature. Houndmills 1992, and Ariane Thomalla: The `femme fragile´. A literary type of woman at the turn of the century . (= Literature in Society. Volume 15). Düsseldorf: Bertelsmann Universitätsverlag 1972.
  3. ^ Richard Hamann , Jost Hermand : Impressionism. (= Epochs of German culture from 1870 to the present. Volume 3.) Munich, 2nd ed. 1974, pp. 147–162.
  4. ↑ Jost Hermand 1974, p. 169.