Literary revolution

The term literary revolution outlines a multitude of heterogeneous and sometimes short-lived individual literary currents and groups that emerged in European literature at the beginning of the 20th century. These include u. a.

the futurism ,
of Expressionism , especially the storm circle ,
of Dadaism ,
of Cubism ,
the surrealism and
the poetism .

Often literary naturalism and the aesthetic counter-tendencies at the end of the 19th century, such as symbolism or impressionism, are viewed as phases of the literary revolution, as the first and second moderns .

The individual styles unite with all the differences that they

the traditions of the educated middle rejected, in particular its at the Weimar Classicism and Romanticism trained understanding of literature and poetry, all forms of bourgeois aesthetics ,
New possibilities of expression were looking for in the conception of language as acoustic, phonetic, grammatical or visual material, e.g. B. led to abstract and concrete poetry , montage and collage and
represented a political or ideological commitment to many other literary trends - pacifism , anarchism , communism , fascism .

They are contradictory aspects within the opening of all arts to stylistic pluralism , which radically reinterpreted the relationship between art and reality in order to define the role of art in the political, social and scientific upheavals on the threshold of modernity. It is difficult and often impossible to distinguish the individual styles according to formal aspects, since they use the same means for very different purposes. The montage of language materials served to glorify war and fascism in Italian Futurism, and in the Zurich Dada School to promote unconditional pacifism. The styles themselves do not represent uniform groupings, such as For example, the Zurich and Berlin Dadaists differed, or the quarreling Surrealists.

A demarcation is only possible where the groups took political sides in the social upheaval, such as Russian futurism for communism and Italian futurism for fascism; Instead of a single term, the couple literature and revolution is often used , e.g. B. in Leon Trotsky's eponymous work (1923) and his manifesto for an independent revolutionary art , written together with André Breton ( Pour un art indépendant révolutionnaire , 1938). However, since the aesthetic approaches of the individual styles were primarily reflections of social reality, the term literary revolution is nevertheless justified.

From the 1950s onwards, groups such as the Darmstädter Kreis , the Wiener Gruppe and the Stuttgart group / school around Max Bense emerged from the roots of the literary revolution . In addition, individual poets and writers such as Helmut Heißenbüttel , Arno Schmidt or HC Artmann were inspired. Forms of expression such as visual poetry , lettrism , computer , media and net art , anti-novel and anti- theater emerged as a result of the reception.

literature

Leon Trotsky: Literature and Revolution . (German by Eugen Schäfer and Hans von Riesen) Essen 1994. ISBN 3-88634-062-7
Paul Pörtner (Ed.): Literature Revolution 1910–1925. Documents, manifestos, programs. Volume 1: On aesthetics a. Poetics . Darmstadt, Neuwied, Berlin-Spandau 1960
Paul Pörtner (Ed.): Literature Revolution 1910–1925. Documents, manifestos, programs. Volume 2: On the definition of “isms” . Darmstadt, Neuwied, Berlin-Spandau 1961