Literature of the Weimar Republic

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The literature of the Weimar Republic has during the Weimar Republic created and the preferred at this time from the reading public literature . While the early 1920s were still characterized by the expressionism of the war and pre-war periods, the middle and the end of this decade were marked by a shift towards reality-based representations, which were understood as the literary expression of the New Objectivity . The abundance and diversity of German literature in this era would, however, be distorted if one wanted to bring it to a single term. There was little cohesion between the large number of well-known writers, poets and dramatists; There was hardly any communication between left and right-wing literati. The literary magazines each represented the opinion of smaller groups or political parties.

Classics, rediscovered and trailblazers

Poetry and dramas played an important role in the literary life of the Weimar Republic. According to Peter Gay's impression, poetry possessed a remarkable power over the Germans who adored their poets, based on the Weimar Classics of Goethe and Schiller . In addition to these continually quoted, a number of other poets in the republican era came through their works to a kind of renaissance.

Against the background of the circumstances of the time, Holderlin's Hyperion , for example, was cited with a lot of references , where the consequences of the war , the November Revolution and the Versailles Treaty were dealt with intellectually: “I can't think of a people that would be more torn than the Germans. You see craftsmen, but no people, thinkers but no people, priests, but no people, masters and servants, boys and sedate people, but no people. "Holderlin is interpreted by Gay as a harbinger of a modern world that is breaking up people, alienates him from society and from his true being.

Heinrich von Kleist and his work also received new attention : Kleist research and worship of Kleist were reflected in a large number of book publications and in the founding of the Kleist Society in 1920. It was joined by Gerhart Hauptmann , Hugo von Hofmannsthal , Ernst Cassirer and Max Liebermann , among others . The Kleist Prize was the most important literary award of the Weimar Republic.

Republicans and leftists during the Weimar period were particularly fond of Georg Büchner among the important writers of the past: his compassion for the poor, his abhorrence of authorities and his realistic and drastic description of society provided democrats, socialists and communists with a gripping offer of orientation and identification The opera Wozzeck , composed by Alban Berg based on Büchner's Woyzeck , a combination of twelve-tone music, spoken song and conventional musical means, was premiered in Berlin in 1925 and made a decisive contribution to the popularization of Büchner and his play.

Major contemporary poets whose lives and works extended into the Weimar Republic include in particular Stefan George and Rainer Maria Rilke . In his social appearance, George developed a specific aura and homoerotic charisma that produced a following that was closely connected to him, the George Circle . His Blätter für die Kunst , founded in 1892, contained carefully staged conversations with young men who unfolded his visions and aimed at an audience for his poetic work. Inspired by Baudelaire and Mallarmé , and also influenced by Hölderlin and Nietzsche , he pursued the renewal of an aristocratic attitude towards life under the sign of perpetuating cultural values, a thoroughly elitist program.

Rilke's following was not concentrated in a chosen circle, but extended to all of his extraordinarily large readership. He was a favorite poet in all groups of the youth movement . It was recited around the campfire and its poems printed in their own magazines. “You could read Rilke for pure pleasure and bathe in his pictures. One could read Rilke as the poet of alienation or as the high priest of a pagan universe, in which human feelings and inanimate things, love and suffering, life and death came together to form a harmonious whole. "

Diversity of the era

The end of the First World War and the November Revolution were also seen by writers as a turning point and in many cases as a signal for a departure that also led to new forms in literature. Expressionism continued. The important anthology Menschheitsdämmerung , which Kurt Pinthus compiled, did not appear until 1919. Dadaism led to collage and montage novels. In addition, new media such as film and radio influenced literature. What is striking is the wide variety of topics and genres . Quite a few authors were politically active. The members of the League of Proletarian Revolutionary Writers explicitly saw themselves as propagandists for the policies of the KPD . The authors, who leaned towards the new objectivity, combined their writing with an impartial, realistic view of contemporary social conditions. The relationship between the individual and the crowd as well as aspects of everyday culture became important new topics .

Writers such as Karl May , Hermann Löns , Hans Carossa , Ernst Wiechert , Rudolf G. Binding and Hedwig Courths-Mahler were popular in large parts of the population . Ina Seidel's desired child , Hermann Stehr's Heiligenhof and Emil Strauss 's veil were among the most widely read books . Walter Laqueur describes the two Nobel Prize winners in literature Gerhart Hauptmann (1912) and Thomas Mann (1929) as “classics of the republic” .

Dramas

The main works of the playwright Gerhart Hauptmann were long ago during the Weimar Republic: Before sunrise was published in 1889, Die Weber in 1894. Hauptmann had greeted the First World War with patriotic poems; Just as enthusiastically he welcomed the republic five years later as "the most important event in a thousand years of German history". In 1919 he was even proposed as President of the Reich. After the premiere of his play Before Sunset in 1932, the multi-faceted and much-visited Republican theater ended in front of half-empty seats, due to the aftermath of the Great Depression, although the work was highly praised by critics.

The widely varied socio-critical theme of a new generation of playwrights was the father-son conflict as a continued onslaught of youth "against the old world, and its political, social and artistic conventions." The heroes of the new dramas included strangers, sufferers, and suicides Prostitute. Political dramas by authors such as Walter Hasenclever or Leonhard Frank revolved around the hope for a new humanity, born from the experience of life and suffering during and after the war. Ludwig Rubiner developed the idea of ​​a nonviolent revolution in his drama The Violent One (1919) . Even Ernst Toller championed in his expressionist dramas mass man (1921) and Hinkemann ideas of pacifism and nonviolence. Georg Kaiser designed in pieces like Die Bürger von Calais (1914) or Gas (1918/20) the vision of a new human being who rises above the inhuman technology, is free and ready to make sacrifices. Similarly, Fritz von Unruh's dramas A Sex (1918) or Platz (1920) developed a mythical pathos of the rejection of war and the announcement of global brotherhood.

One of the new discoveries in the Weimar literature and theater business was Bertolt Brecht , who, at the age of 24, had his first performance with drums in the night of 1922 and received the Kleist Prize that same year. With the Threepenny Opera , which came on stage in 1928, Brecht achieved his greatest public success. In the didactic play The Measure (1930) he turned to the inner workings of communist group and party organization by bringing about the liquidation of a young communist by his comrades. By acting compassionately towards the exploited, the young man carelessly endangers the group's conspiratorial camouflage; he is killed by them in order to ensure the survival of the others and the success of the mission. Like the pioneer of proletarian theater Erwin Piscator , Brecht occasionally used film projections and newspaper headlines in his plays, but also used the conventional dramatic means of chorus, narrator and contrasting effects.

As a folk playwright, Carl Zuckmayer established himself on German-speaking theaters in 1925 with the comedy The Merry Vineyard . In Berlin, the comedy ran for almost three years in a row, sometimes dismissed by the critics as too shallow entertainment. Before that, Zuckmayer, like others, had tried his hand at expressionist drama; in the era of New Objectivity, however, it offered the audience a richly enriched, broad naturalism of its own. The important theater critic Alfred Kerr summed up his impressions after attending the performance as follows: “ Sic transit gloria expressionismi.” Zuckmayer's Der Hauptmann von Köpenick , a gripping combination of slapstick comedy and severe tragedy, became a phenomenal and even more lasting success in 1931 .

Revitalizing and redesigning the novel

The literature of the Weimar Republic was extremely diverse beyond poetry and drama. The novel , less represented in Expressionism , became a particularly sought-after literary genre during the 1920s . From the mid-1920s, the New Objectivity of the Zeitroman reappeared, in which a realistic description and discussion of social developments was sought. B. with life in the big city, the situation of the new employees , with unemployment and impoverishment in the economic crisis.

The literary event of 1924 was the publication of Thomas Mann's novel The Magic Mountain , which immediately found great sales. In the alpine height and seclusion of a Davos lung clinic, an allusive ambience of the bourgeois way of life and ways of thinking is created during the last years before the First World War, in which the author and his characters' confrontation with death plays a central role. The precise observer and brilliant narrator Thomas Mann gives the characters in the novel some features of living contemporaries. For example, the fellow writer Gerhart Hauptmann was recognized in the figure of the bon vivant Peeperkorn, and in the Settembrini, who embodied a lively and enlightening optimism, his own brother Heinrich Mann, apostrophized as a “civilization literary” .

After a turbulent youth in Württemberg , Hermann Hesse finally settled in Switzerland before the First World War. His works published during the Weimar Republic included Demian (1919) as the most widely read, Siddhartha. An Indian poem , The Steppenwolf , Narcissus and Goldmund and The Journey of the Orient . As a “biography of the soul”, his books reflected “the decomposition of the old world of European security”.

The work Berlin Alexanderplatz , published in 1929, was created by the practicing psychiatrist and epic writer Alfred Döblin , unrivaled in world literature as the “symphony of city life” . The novel is about the search for orientation and failure of the simple wage laborer Franz Biberkopf, who was released from prison after four years in prison, in the Berlin urban jungle, a life without purpose and aim, which is exposed to the "whole terrible swelling and waning of the rhythm and the dissonances of the metropolis" . "For the only time the city came to life in German literature," says Laqueur.

The experience of the First World War, without which the spirit of the 1920s cannot be understood, was literarily processed from different perspectives. While Ernst Jünger tends to enjoy war in his book publications In Stahlgewittern (1920) and The Struggle as an inner experience (1922) and portrays it as an exciting adventure, Erich Maria Remarque's anti-war novel : In the West Nothing New (1929), in which, among other things the horrors of barrage and shell fire in the endless trench warfare are drastically demonstrated, becoming the great bestseller of the late years of the republic. Ludwig Renn's novel Krieg (1928) is also an important anti-war literature .

The world economic crisis , which heralded the beginning of the end of the Weimar Republic at the beginning of the 1930s, was also reflected in literary products. At the height of the economic crisis, Erich Kästner's novel Fabian (1931) lets his protagonist act as a bon vivant with gallows humor, before he drowns himself trying to save a child from the water. Hans Fallada deals sensitively and faithfully reflecting the zeitgeist in the widely read novel Little Man - What Now? (1932) with the rapid descent of his title hero from the salaried precariat in times of wage and benefit cuts and rampant unemployment.

The journalist and writer Egon Erwin Kisch was named Der rasende Reporter (title of his reportage volume published in 1925) to personify the new objective author who moves in an emerging mass society. The authors' interest in reality was so strong in the late phase of the republic that they incorporated reportage elements into their novels. Examples are Ernst Ottwalts Because they know what they are doing and Willi Bredels Maschinenfabrik N. & K. called. In his novel, Ernst Ottwald deals with the justice system of the Weimar Republic. He invents a protagonist, a young lawyer who made a career in the Weimar Republic and who learned of many unjust judgments of the time and was partly involved in them. Bredel came from the workers' correspondence movement and for him it was a matter of course to incorporate articles that he had already published in company newspapers into his novel.

Other well-known writers and works

Cover of the weekly newspaper Die Weltbühne, which was co-designed by many renowned authors, on December 2, 1930

Writers' associations

Books were becoming more and more mass-produced and writers often felt at the mercy of the market. Therefore, writers' associations became more important, which not only formulated political positions but also represented the economic interests of the authors. The most important of these associations was the Protection Association of German Writers (SDS). It had already been founded in 1909, but only now gained solid importance. The Prussian Academy of the Arts received a section for poetry, which Heinrich Mann warmly welcomed. In his opinion, this meant an appreciation for writers by the state.

Other associations were also politically oriented, for example the League of Proletarian Revolutionary Writers was an association that was close to the KPD .

censorship

In Article 118 of the Weimar Constitution , freedom of speech and writing was guaranteed. However, as early as 1922 after the murder of Walther Rathenau, the Republic Protection Act was passed, which again restricted this freedom. In practice, this law was only used against “left” authors, but not against “right-wing” authors who, for example, openly glorified violence in Freicorps novels.

In 1925 a novel by Johannes R. Bechers was confiscated and the author was tried for high treason. The charges were not based on any deeds, only Becher's publications. Public protests then led to the proceedings being terminated.

In 1926 the law for the protection of young people from trash and dirty writing was passed, behind which Thomas Mann suspected a political thrust from the beginning. In fact, it was against films like Kuhle Wampe or: Who Owns the World? and Battleship Potemkin and the plays by Brecht Die Mutter and Saint Johanna der Schlachthöfe were banned from performance. Heinrich Mann commented that freedom of speech and freedom of writing only mean bourgeois speech and writing.

In 1930 the Republic Protection Act was renewed and in 1931 a press emergency ordinance came into force, which allowed the confiscation of publications and the ban on newspapers for several months. Willi Bredel was sentenced to two years imprisonment for literary treason and treason and Carl von Ossietzky was charged with treason for having written about secret armaments in the air force sector.

The Protection Association of German Writers split in 1932 over the question of censorship. The authors disagreed on the question of whether the association had a political mandate.

As early as 1932, the Völkischer Beobachter threatened to ban books.

literature

  • Helmuth Kiesel : History of German-Language Literature 1918 to 1933 (= History of German Literature from the Beginnings to the Present Volume X). CH Beck Verlag, Munich 2017, ISBN 978-3-406-70799-5

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Individual evidence

  1. ^ Walter Laqueur : Weimar. The culture of the republic. Frankfurt 1976, p. 156 f.
  2. ↑ Peter Gay: The Republic of the Outsiders. Spirit and culture in the Weimar period 1918–1933. Frankfurt am Main 1987, pp. 95 and 98.
  3. ↑ Quoted from Peter Gay: The Republic of Outsiders. Spirit and culture in the Weimar period 1918–1933. Frankfurt am Main 1987, p. 86.
  4. ↑ Peter Gay: The Republic of the Outsiders. Spirit and culture in the Weimar period 1918–1933. Frankfurt am Main 1987, p. 87.
  5. ↑ Peter Gay: The Republic of the Outsiders. Spirit and culture in the Weimar period 1918–1933. Frankfurt am Main 1987, p. 89.
  6. ↑ Peter Gay: The Republic of the Outsiders. Spirit and culture in the Weimar period 1918–1933. Frankfurt am Main 1987, pp. 91-93.
  7. ↑ Peter Gay: The Republic of the Outsiders. Spirit and culture in the Weimar period 1918–1933. Frankfurt am Main 1987, p. 156 f.
  8. ↑ Peter Gay: The Republic of the Outsiders. Spirit and culture in the Weimar period 1918–1933. Frankfurt am Main 1987, p. 78 ff .; Quote p. 83.
  9. ^ Walter Laqueur: Weimar. The culture of the republic. Frankfurt 1976, p. 173.
  10. ^ Walter Laqueur: Weimar. The culture of the republic. Frankfurt 1976, p. 151 f.
  11. ↑ Quoted from Walter Laqueur: Weimar. The culture of the republic. Frankfurt 1976, p. 153.
  12. ^ Walter Laqueur: Weimar. The culture of the republic. Frankfurt 1976, p. 93.
  13. ^ Walter Laqueur: Weimar. The culture of the republic. Frankfurt 1976, p. 176 and 327.
  14. ^ Walter Laqueur: Weimar. The culture of the republic. Frankfurt 1976, p. 181; Peter Gay: The Republic of Outsiders. Spirit and culture in the Weimar period 1918–1933. Frankfurt am Main 1987, pp. 152-157.
  15. ↑ Peter Gay: The Republic of the Outsiders. Spirit and culture in the Weimar period 1918–1933. Frankfurt am Main 1987, p. 151.
  16. ^ Walter Laqueur: Weimar. The culture of the republic. Frankfurt 1976, pp. 187-189 and 193.
  17. ↑ Quoted from Peter Gay: The Republic of Outsiders. Spirit and culture in the Weimar period 1918–1933. Frankfurt am Main 1987, p. 162.
  18. ^ Walter Laqueur: Weimar. The culture of the republic. Frankfurt 1976, p. 194 f.
  19. ↑ Peter Gay: The Republic of the Outsiders. Spirit and culture in the Weimar period 1918–1933. Frankfurt am Main 1987, pp. 163-168.
  20. ^ Walter Laqueur: Weimar. The culture of the republic. Frankfurt 1976, p. 160.
  21. ^ Walter Laqueur: Weimar. The culture of the republic. Frankfurt 1976, p. 167 f.
  22. ^ Walter Laqueur: Weimar. The culture of the republic. Frankfurt 1976, p. 170.
  23. ^ Walter Laqueur: Weimar. The culture of the republic. Frankfurt 1976, pp. 169-171.
  24. ^ Walter Laqueur: Weimar. The culture of the republic. Frankfurt 1976, p. 172.
  25. ^ Wolfgang Beutin: German history of literature. From the beginning to the present. Metzler , Stuttgart, pp. 393-396.