Dawn of mankind
The Menschheitsdämmerung - with the original subtitle " Symphony recently seal " - is an expressionist lyric - anthology , which by the German writer and journalist Kurt Pinthus end of 1919 only in a small publishing house and then from 1920 in the Rowohlt Verlag was issued.
The four chapters Fall and Scream , Awakening of the Heart , Riot and Outrage and Love for People bring together poems by important German-speaking Expressionist poets .
Fourteen portrait drawings based on models by Ludwig Meidner (Jakob van Hoddis, Rene Schickele, Johannes R. Becher, Paul Zech, Alfred Wolfenstein, Franz Werfel), Oskar Kokoschka (Albert Ehrenstein, Walter Hasenclever), Wilhelm Lehmbruck (Ludwig Rubiner), Egon Schiele ( Karl Otten) a. a. complete the collection.
The first poem in the anthology End of the World by Jakob van Hoddis became widely famous .
Of the 23 recorded authors, six did not live to see the publication; four had died in the First World War .
The anthology was burned during the book burning in Germany in 1933 .
Edition history
The twilight of mankind is considered the standard work of literary expressionism . No other expressionist poetry anthology and no collection of expressionist prose achieved a comparable significance. In 1920 alone there were three editions of 5,000 copies each. In the spring of 1922 , when the total circulation reached 20,000, the editor summed up in his preface entitled " Nachklang ":
- I decided to leave the work unchanged. Not only because those who judged all attitudes and tendencies said that the main value of this book was its uniformity, its symphonic effect; not only because one felt - which was intended - that this was a complete document for the troubled feeling and poetic expression of a contemporary generation. Rather, looking critically at our time and poetry, I must see that the twilight of mankind is not just a closed, but a closed, concluding document of this epoch.
1959 was the 40th anniversary of its first publication. " No poetry collection of our century has been cited as often as the twilight of mankind , and what is printed about it is many times its size, " wrote Kurt Pinthus looking back. With a circulation of 164,000 copies (1999) by Rowohlt Verlag alone, it is now one of the most successful anthologies in literary history .
Authors
in alphabetical order, number of poems
- Johannes R. Becher (* 1891; † 1958), 14
- Gottfried Benn (* 1886; † 1956), 8
- Theodor Däubler (* 1876; † 1934), 17
- Albert Ehrenstein (* 1886; † 1950), 20
- Iwan Goll (* 1891; † 1950), 7
- Walter Hasenclever (* 1890; † 1940), 19
- Georg Heym (* 1887; † 1912), 13
- Kurt Heynicke (* 1891; † 1985), 12
- Jakob van Hoddis (* 1887; † 1942), 5
- Wilhelm Klemm (* 1881; † 1968), 19th century
- Else Lasker-Schüler (* 1869; † 1945), 15
- Rudolf Leonhard (* 1889; † 1953), 5
- Alfred Lichtenstein (* 1889; † 1914), 8
- Ernst Wilhelm Lotz (* 1890; † 1914), 6
- Karl Otten (* 1889; † 1963), 6
- Kurt Pinthus (* 1886; † 1975), forewords
- Ludwig Rubiner (* 1881; † 1920), 5
- René Schickele (* 1883; † 1940), 11
- Ernst Stadler (* 1883; † 1914), 10
- August Stramm (* 1874; † 1915), 13
- Georg Trakl (* 1887; † 1914), 10
- Franz Werfel (* 1890; † 1945), 27
- Alfred Wolfenstein (* 1883; † 1945), 13
- Paul Zech (* 1881; † 1946), 12
literature
-
Dawn of mankind. Symphony of Recent Poetry. Rowohlt, Berlin 1920
- With biographies and bibliographies re-edited by Kurt Pinthus. Rowohlt's Classics of Literature and Science 55/56 - German Literature Volume 4. Rowohlt, Reinbek 1959 - 34th edition 2006, ISBN 3-499-45055-0
- New edition Anaconda Verlag , Cologne 2008 ISBN 978-3866472303
- New edition Rowohlt, with an afterword by Florian Illies , Hamburg 2019, ISBN 978-3-498-00138-4
Individual evidence
Web links
- "World, how you stagger!" 100 years of "the twilight of mankind". A radio feature by Thomas Diecks. Production: rbbKultur 2020. Broadcast on February 29, 2020