History of German Literature Georg Lukacs 1947
We have purposely not dealt in detail with the succession of the various overcomings of naturalism. Not only because the transitions are very smooth and do not express the essentials; the really important figures of the pre-war period appear here much less organically than the young Hauptmann in naturalism. The merging of directions has its objective reason in a certain inner unity of the Wilhelminian period from the time when it had overcome its initial crisis to the outbreak of the world war. On the outside, general prosperity, rapid economic upswing. Internal dangers seem to have been overcome, nobody seriously thinks about a revolutionary change, nobody fears or hopes for it. It is, as later reactionary criticism used to say, the age of security.
In literary terms, too, German literature has gained a recognized position in international intellectual life since naturalism. Figures like Hauptmann, Heinrich and Thomas Mann, Rilke and George are undoubtedly European phenomena. An inner upswing seems to correspond to the outer upswing; an inwardness protected by power (Thomas Mann) has emerged.
However, the real literature of that time does not express satisfaction. The social accusation is completely silent. All the more frequently and energetically do we hear internal complaints or accusations: people’s deep dissatisfaction with themselves, with their development opportunities, with the forms of personality that their environment gives or allows them to have. This is seldom called society, it fades, it evaporates into world, fate, cosmos or other abstractions.
But in complaints and accusations, often unintentionally, almost always unconsciously, the real object of misery, the unrecognized structure of society, acquires a poetic objectivity. All the more so since naturalism and especially its overcoming have created a suppleness of linguistic expression hitherto unknown in German literature. The most fleeting observations, the slightest changes of mood, can acquire a poetically sensual objectivity from the newly flourished language. And the cult of these means of expression, of this scope for expression, trains the real poets to be honest with themselves, even if the barriers of the horizon cannot be broken through by subjective honesty. As much as the process that takes place in the writers is objectively often pushed away from the great problems of the epoch and their adequate poetic comprehension in people, in situations or symbols, the artistic refinement and internalization of language is based on a clairvoyant, clairaudient coping with the individual experience.
To be sure, the tendencies of the objectively false social situation of German writers often interfere in this process. They sometimes change subjective honesty into an inextricable mixture of confession, self-stylization and also self-deception; they can even turn completely mendacious. Poetic sincerity, this sincerity between two eyes, is all the more undisturbed and uninhibited the less the material to be formed encompasses the totality of the external world, the less ignorance (and wanting not to know) between the designer and the object to be formed.
Therefore it is no coincidence that the position of German people in the age of Wilhelminian imperialism finds its purest expression in the great poets. They are, one might say, the keys to deciphering the epic and the dramatic of this period.
Rilke is a poet of this certainty. The external problems of existence, which were the focus of Dehmel’s work, disappear almost completely. It is striking, however, that the feeling of being lost has never found such genuine tones before. Rilke’s complaint is not about a personal suffering, not a concrete, difficult experience as with most older poets: “and to realize with a foreboding how impersonal, how universally the suffering happened.” The images that he sees, the sounds that he absorbs, the fates that often only touch his own as they scurry by, unexpectedly turn into lamentations about a world that is impossible to grasp, in which it is impossible to live. Rilke sings about a panther in the Jardin des Plantes:
Sein Blick ist vom Voruebergehn der Staebe
so mued geworden, dass er nichts mehr haelt.
Ihm ist, als ob es tausend Staebe gaebe
und hinter tausend Staeben keine Welt.
(His gaze against the sweeping of the bars
has grown so weary, it can hold no more.
To him, there seem to be a thousand bars
and back behind those thousand bars no world.)
Rilke is not a pessimist in the usual sense. As a poet, he affirms everything creatively, even the smallest, most inconspicuous things and occurrences, he also grasps the ghastly and horrible, he expresses them exquisitely with such enthusiasm in grasping, in living as few poets before him. From the simplest object, or better: from Rilke’s grasp of the simplest object, this lamentation about the lostness of man in a fundamentally alien, even hostile world sounds again and again, and with his maturity ever purer:
...denn das Schoene ist nichts
als des Schrecklichen Anfang, den wir noch gerade ertragen,
und wir bewundern es so, weil es gelassen verschmaeht,
uns zu zerstoeren.
(For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror
which we are barely able to endure and are awed
because it serenely disdains to annihilate us.)
What kind of security is it that sounds like this in its purest singer?
Stefan George gives a clearer answer here. The world of security in its outer outline is more clearly visible to him than to Rilke. A large part of his life-work (and the poetically only really valuable part) is dedicated to pure inwardness, to the purely mental events of this time. They are lyrically formed people, not just shadows of impressions who act and suffer within its magically beautiful, magically protected landscapes, but they are people who have consciously turned away from the life of society, who no longer deny society at all, for before experiencing their ego it sinks into nothingness and is not even visible as a horizon. It is not for nothing that George’s poetically most perfect collections of poems are called The Year of the Soul and The Carpet of Life. Well protected, where no shore of bourgeois prose is to be seen. A harshly aristocratic world, filled with the inner-emotional problems of the present. At the same time a world surrounded by the deepest melancholy: because renunciation, resignation, beautiful parting, at best beautiful minutes, shadowed by their inevitable transience, which also sounds in the intoxication, form its content.
A harshly aristocratic world. George passionately rejected the social life of his day. He sees in it nothing but soul-destroying prose, nothing but embodied depravity. His aristocratism is unbrotherly: in him there is only creative genius and raw mass without intermediate stages, without mediation, without any fellowship. There are real people who are able to follow him to his spiritual heights, who can only breathe in such a pure and thin atmosphere ... and there are rabble, people of the lowly, who are excluded from real life through their own fault, their own blindness and inferiority.
Alles habend, alles wissend seufzen sie:
Karges leben, drang und hunger ueberall!
Fuelle fehlt.
Speicher weiss ich ueber jedem haus
Voll von korn das fliegt und neu sich haeuft –
Keiner nimmt.
Keller unter jedem hof wo siegt
Und im sand verstroemt der edelwein
Keiner trinkt.
Tonnen puren golds verstreut im staub:
Volk in lumpen streift es mit dem saum –
Keiner sieht.
(Having everything, knowing everything, they sigh:
Sparse life, pressure and hunger everywhere!
Fullness is absent.
Brimming lofts are under every roof:
Grain that scatters and is stacked anew,
No one takes!
Cellars down in every hall where wines
Dry or ooze away into the sand,
No one drinks!
Tons of gold abandoned in the dust,
Men in tatters brush it with their hems,
No one sees!)
Here the consequences of the German nuance of a Romantic anti-capitalism are clearly visible. Out of hatred of this world, the world of contemporary capitalism and democracy, George’s “prophecy” grows.
With him, the dualism latent in the poems, of finely resigned, carefully guarded sensibility and the unbrotherly harsh egoism of the imperialist rentier, becomes apparent. The “prophet” George becomes the follower of Nietzsche, whose character, incidentally, shows a very similar dualism. But the revelation of his deepest convictions becomes disastrous for George. As a poet, he loses his tender intimacy and succumbs to a priestly exaggerated, often hollow rhetorical pathos. As a whole, he becomes one of the spiritual leaders of the emerging new reaction. He not only raises passionate accusations against the present, he also proclaims more and more sharply its necessary downfall and at the same time the rise of another world, a New Kingdom (Reich) of salvation from this wickedness and ugliness, a world devoid of the “shallow swamp of deceitful brotherhood”, brought about by a growing pure youth created by a Georgean genius of action:
Der sprengt die ketten fegt auf truemmerstaetten
Die ordnung, geisselt die verlaufnen heim
Ins ewige recht wo grosses wiederum gross ist
Herr wiederum herr, zucht wiederum zucht, er heftet
Das wahre sinnbild auf das voelkische banner
Er fuehrt durch sturm und grausige signale
Des fruehrots seiner treuen schar zum werk
Des wachen tags und pflanzt das Neue Reich.
(He breaks the chains and sweeps aside the rubble,
He scourges home the lost to lasting law,
Where lord is lord again, the great is great
And where integrity returns. He fastens
The true device upon the nation’s banner.
Through tempests and the dread fanfares of dawning
He leads his tried and faithful to the work
Of sober day and founds the Kingdom Come.)
Citing such poems, fascism has claimed George for itself. Not with full justification as far as the poet himself is concerned. George did not want anything to do with Hitlerism either: he died in voluntary exile. (However, it should be noted that George, like Spengler, does not reject Hitler for his tyranny, despotic arbitrariness or aggressive imperialism, but only for the demagogic forms of his rule.) Objectively, however, there are undoubtedly significant connections. They show how much the inner development of German literature under imperialism is pushing in the direction of an autocratic dictatorship, how much the ground was prepared for a smashing of democracy, for a repression of freedom and human rights even among talented and convinced Germans of this time.
And even further. With the loss of the social standards for the full inner development of the individual, with the emergence of an aristocratism of inwardness, every moral-artistic standard for the justification or the depravity of human feelings, thoughts, experiences is lost. Beautiful or ugly, full of experiences or empty replace good or bad as standards. The resulting moral lack of direction, the self-created moral chaos, brings forth in George the glorification of the megalomaniac Roman butcher Heliogabalus:
Sieh ich bin zart wie eine apfelbluete
Und friedenfroher denn ein neues lamm,
Doch liegen eisen stein und feuerschwamm
Gefaehrlich im erschuetterten gemuete.
Hernieder steig ich eine marmortreppe,
Ein leichnam ohne haupt inmitten ruht,
Dort sickert meines teuren bruders blut,
Ich raffe leise nur die purpurschleppe.
(See, I am delicate as apple bloom,
More peaceful than a new-born lamb, but should
My soul be gashed, its stone and iron would
Ignite the tinder ominous with doom.
I pace the marble stair and half-way down
I come upon a corpse without a head,
My brother’s precious blood is clotted-red...
I merely lift my purple trailing gown.)
In George’s case, this explosion of anti-humanity grows out of the aristocratic-aesthetic unfraternity of his worldview. As a sign of the times, however, it has an even more general meaning. For even with the completely apolitical Rilke, who is purely directed towards tender empathy, such tones are not lacking. The overly refined Rilke is able to write this poem about the freedom fighter who was burned alive, about the King of Muenster:
Der Koenig war geschoren;
nun ging ihm die Krone zu weit,
und bog ein wenig die Ohren,
in die von Zeit zu Zeit gehaessiges Gelaerme aus Hungermaeulern fand.
Er sass, von wegen der Waerme,
auf seiner rechten Hand,
muerrisch und schwergesaessig.
Er fuehlte sich nicht mehr echt:
der Herr in ihm war maessig,
und der Beischlaf war schlecht.
(The king was shaved;
now the crown went too far for him,
and bent his ears a little,
into which from time to time hateful noises
from hungry mouths found their way.
He sat, because of the warmth,
on his right hand
grumpy and heavy-handed.
He didn’t feel real anymore:
the Lord in him was temperate,
and the sleep was bad.)
No comment is necessary on the feelings expressed here by George and Rilke, on the barbaric attitude that comes to the fore here. It suffices to point out how they have completely lost their level here too, how they have sunk to the intellectual and human point of view of that malicious petty bourgeoisie which later became Hitler’s real field of advertising. But this fall is also evident in the purely artistic. No reader will have failed to notice that the beauty of George’s Heliogabalus bears colportage-like traits and that Rilke’s poem completely lacks its usual musical and pictorial vibrancy: it is the dreary prose of malicious, reactionary slander, set in dry, bumpy verse.
In this way man’s lostness in the world receives a new moral face. Not only is it frightening that intellectually superior, finely organized people suddenly glorify bestiality, that they sink morally to the level of a petty bourgeoisie who has become sadistic, but that this happens to them unexpectedly, unconsciously, that they slip into this bestiality without noticing it and in the next moment they proclaim the finest sentiments in the choicest language. The underworld opens its gates in the souls of the most refined spirits of the period. For these people, not only has the world been lost, not only has man become homeless in it, but the inner human cosmos that seems to be the only one left is also dissolving. The late Rilke sincerely and beautifully expresses the self-knowledge of this dissolution:
Und wir, Zuschauer, immer, ueberall,
dem allen zugewandt und nie hinaus.
Uns ueberfuellt’s. Wir ordnen. Es zerfaellt.
Wir ordnen’s wieder und zerfallen selbst.
(And we, observers, relentless, everywhere,
intent on objects, never looking outside them!
They overfill us. We arrange them. They break up.
Once more we arrange. We ourselves are broken.)