LITERATURE & HUMANITIES

The Politics of German Expressionism

Chaired by Dr Robert Blackburn

Peter Rex Valentine

BRLSI Member

18 May 2004

The speaker opened his talk by stating that, we were lucky to have survived two world wars and the demise of Communism and be able to be wise after these events, but that the Europeans including the Germans at the beginning of the 20^th century were not in that position.

He then compared Expressionism with Romanticism.

Showing briefly an expansive early landscape of Turner, he emphasised that although in Romanticism both the representation of the object and the feelings of the subject or artist were important, in Expressionism and in Modernism generally the emphasis had shifted to the perception and feelings of the artist who now uses the exactness of intellectual constructivism not to convey exact perspective as studied mathematically or the exact representation of anatomy to show convincing figure painting as in the Italian Renaissance but to convey something which we think of as inexact transient and ephemeral, that is to say emotion.

He then used slides of Van Gogh’s ‘Wheatfield with Crows’, pointing out the ordinariness of the scene compared with the expansive Turner landscape. Van Gogh was saying to us, ‘Look at this ordinary scene, I want you to feel the wind bending the wheat stems, feel the sun penetrating between the pregnant clouds, feel the lightness of the birds flying over the fields’.

As another origin of Expressionism he showed Edvard Munch’s ‘Puberty’, and described Munch’s familiarity with death. In both Munch and Van Gogh he emphasised there was no attempt to hide the presence of brushstrokes.

Taking what he called another step towards German Expressionism he showed two slides of portraits by Chaim Soutine, a Russian Jew working in Paris at that time, to show what he called the Painters’ Expressionism without the German qualities which he said made German Expressionism a Special Case. He then showed the characteristics specific to German Expressionism including introspection, tension, anxiety and fear, the grip of psychological forces not under-stood.

Moving on to Politics as it affected the Expressionists, Valentine pointed out the two main factors:

(insert illus: © ‘Grey Day’ Bourgeois Philistine liberal. George Gross 1921

Nationalism, chauvinism, imperialism, industrial materialism and scientific rationalism, driven by capitalism. They were anti-revolution, wanting to preserve the status quo at all costs, so creating a Bland Egalitarian society within the bourgeois with no recognition of the working classes who had done the dirty work of the industrial revolution. The Expressionists saw them as Philistine. As historians put it, ‘the advancement of the industrial revolution had completely outstripped the socio-political advance.’

Quoting Hesse’s Steppenwolf -‘Human life is reduced to hell only when two ages two cultures overlap. Now there are times when a whole generation is caught between two ages with a consequence it looses all power to understand itself and has no standards no security no simple acquiescence... such as Nietzsche had to suffer...’

Showing Otto Dix’s only sculpture of Nietzsche, he moved on to Nietzsche’s influence after his death in 1900. Although full of contradictions and ambiguities, he said everything the artist wanted to hear. The Nietzsche effect was summed up by Gottfried Benn, ‘His Seductive way of writing, with all its thunder and lightening, his relentless diction, his refusal to allow himself any idyllic repose or any universal explanation- the whole of psychoanalysis, the whole of existentialism, this is all of his doing. He is the universal giant of the post Goertian age’.

By stating ‘Art and nothing but Art! It is the great means of making life possible, the great seduction of life, the great stimulant of life. Art the only counterforce to all will to denial of life, as that which is anti-Christian, anti-Buddhist and anti-nihilist par excellence,’ Nietzsche makes Art the only redeeming factor in an otherwise nihilist godless world.

During and after the war many of the Nietzschians felt they needed to reconcile their cultural and individual views with some kind of practical political system, but try as they may to square the circle of Nietzsche’s apolitical, anti-democratic aristocraticism, the nearest application of Nietzschian vital-ism to the collective was either anarchism or communism. The polemics of their intellectual contortions was recorded in detail in Seth Taylor’s Left Wing Nietzschians, The Politics of German Expressionism (published 1990) with articles taken from Herwart Walden’s ‘Der Sturm’ or Franz Pfemfert’s ‘Die Aktion’ and other avant–garde Literary/ Political journals of the time.

The views of the rebelling ‘New Men’ or younger generation Expressionists which included artists, writers, philosophers poets and psychologists, closely mimicked Nietzschian philosophy. This was a middle class revolt, mainly by Left wing intellectuals against what they saw as philistine bourgeois Wilhelmenian liberals responsible for an unadventurous inhibited society. Driven by a spiritual rather than materialistic entelechy they were against everything the liberals stood for - authoritarianism, bureaucraticism, imperialism, nationalism, scientific rationalism or any form of complacency and what they saw as servile conformism. So great were the changes they required that war became an acceptable apocalypse as a means to this end. In literature and art this was translated into a morbid manic-fixation with death, illness, madness, loneliness, desperation, anxiety and alienation. As in Kafka, Werfel, Strindberg, Gottfried-Benn, Alban Berg, Otto Dix, George Grosz. Their main weakness was their elitism; in practical terms they were indecisive, politically ineffective and lacking in unity.

Having stated the socio-political background, the speaker described in outline the main Art Movements.

First he took ‘Die Brucke’ founded in Dresden 1905, by four Architect students, including Ludwig Kirchner and Erich Heckel. Here he emphasised the theme of primitivism and modernism simultaneously, saying that unlike Virginia Woolf (‘around about Dec. 1910 human nature changed’). These artists sought those things in human nature that had not changed and the threatening potential of the primitive dormant in modern man to be released in extremis. He compared it with Picasso’s African masks used in a modern setting such as ‘Les Demoiselles D’Avignon’, and equated The Paris Musee de L’Homme with the Berlin Osthaus Museum. Showing slides of primitive Arcadia by Heckel and Pechstein. He then went on to Nolde who although in the group for only a short time was typically expressionist and of interest because of his religious and right wing views. He was an advocate of a master race but on returning from his ethnic studies in the German territories of the South Pacific concluded ‘ We live in an evil era in which the white man brings the whole earth into servitude’.

He then moved on to ‘Der Blaue Reiter’ founded by Kandinsky and Franz Marc in Munich in 1910, the ethos of this group being more spiritual than primitive. Quoting from Kandinsky’s On the Spiritual in Art, ‘When Religion, Science and Morality are shaken (by the mighty hand of Nietzsche) When the external support threatens to collapse then mans gaze turns away from the external towards himself.’ He then showed Kandinsky’s transitional abstractions and Marc’s ‘Red and Blue Horse in a Landscape’ to demonstrate arbitrary colours characteristic of Expressionism.

Following with 3 slides of Max Beckman to illustrate how, although initially influenced by Edvard Munch as in ‘The Great Scene of Death’ the experience of the reality of war changed his attitude and style, heightening his sense of obligation to show the truth in all its horror as in his war drawings and ‘Night’ (1918-1919) anticipating the knock on the door at 4 o’clock in the morning with its assault and rape which was already becoming a reality.

Taking Kokoschka associated with the newly formed Viennese secession group the speaker described him as typical expressionist in his talents as writer as well, and known for his deeply psychological portraits. Kokoschka moved to Berlin and helped Herwart Walden (whose position was comparable to Pounds in London and Paris) to set up ‘Der Sturm’. He showed a portrait of Walden and ‘The Tempest’ a romantic expressionistic portrait of Kokoschka himself with Alma Mahler.

Valentine now emphasised that one of the ways of making sense of the numerous painters an different styles of the so-called German Expressionism was to see the post-war art as ‘The New Objectivity’ or ‘Der Neue Sachlichkieit ‘, when the reality and horrors of war force the object back onto the consciousness of the artist. As the three examples of this he took, Otto Dix, George Grosz, and Kathe Kollwitz (for social commentary), showing the appalling state of Germany after the war and the German Communist Revolution of Jan 1919. These included Grosz’s ‘Metropolis’ Dix’s war etchings and maimed veterans, and Kathe Kollwitz Memorial woodcut to the murdered Karl Liebknecht ‘ The Living to the Dead’.

As an attempt to end at some kind of optimism, when Germany’s last chance to avoid tyranny had now been lost, the speaker concluded by showing a slide of the queues of people waiting in the rain to see Entartete Kunst or The Degenerate Art Exhibition which toured Germany in 1937. He then asked the question: ‘Were they there out of fear or fascination?’ and suggested they should be given the benefit of the doubt, that it was in an instinctive recognition of the real art as opposed to the dead pseudo classicism of the emerging Third Reich, the true philistines.

Discussion

A member asked what was the ethos of German Expressionism, suggesting it was ‘cultural despair’. The speaker reiterated his title phrase: ‘an explosive cocktail of cultural despair and political instability’, adding that the German character seemed almost morbid in its realistic attitude to the tragedy and horrors of war, in deep contrast to the romantic evasive approach of some of the English WWI artists as described in Paul Gough’s lecture, ‘Visions of War and Peace’.

The interesting question of the Bauhaus relationship to Expressionism was raised and it was pointed out that it was partly Marxist influence. The speaker agreed and compared it with the William Morris movement in England with its emphasis on craftsmanship. He felt that because of the professions particularly the architects like Walter Gropius, it was a matter of restoring craftsmanship and design in everything, including the functional.

Art as social commentary was discussed in relationship to Kathe Kollwitz.

How had so much German Expressionist painting had been preserved? The speaker pointed out that in spite of ‘philistinism’ the German collectors were very responsive to ‘avant-garde’ art, thanks to people like Walden, and hid it away from the Nazi purge early.

Why the Nazis felt it necessary to expel so called ‘degenerate art’? The speaker said all tyrannies hated any kind of freethinking and saw it as a threat to their authority. The same conditions existed in Stalin’s Soviet Union.