David Midgley on Critical Realism in German LiteratureDavid Midgely investigates the diversity of German literary culture during the Weimar period
What made me think we needed a new account of German literature in the
Weimar period? There were two things. One of them had to do with the way
the period has commonly been treated within the academic discipline of
‘Germanistik’, and the other had to do with the way it is commonly perceived,
beyond the boundaries of that discipline, in the English-speaking world.
In the English-speaking world, the picture the general reader gets of
Weimar culture is heavily coloured by the political history of the period.
Weimar is the period which starts with the defeat of Germany in the First
World War, continues with a sequence of economic and political crises, and
concludes with the appointment of Hitler as Chancellor. At one extreme
there is the tendency to view the literary writing primarily as evidence of
cultural factors which contributed to the rise of Hitler; at the other
there is the tendency to treat it as belonging wholly to that left-wing and
avant-garde culture which the Nazis obliterated when they came to power.
Now, I would certainly not want to lose sight of the political developments
which define the Weimar period, nor of their significance in the lives and
works of German authors. But I do want to show that the currents in German
literary culture during the Weimar period are much more differentiated than
either of these commonplace perceptions suggests.
Within the discipline of ‘Germanistik’ itself, it has become increasingly
apparent that the processes of cultural change in Weimar Germany do not
straightforwardly conform to the political timetable, nor do they take the
form of a straightforward paradigm shift from Expressionism to ‘Neue
Sachlichkeit’, as it has often been described in literary histories. What we
are dealing with is, rather, a contest over the nature and purposes of
literary writing in relation to a variety of issues and circumstances,
which has important implications not only for this particular period in
German history, but for the development of German culture over a longer
timespan.
In my book I have tried to separate out the main strands which run through
the Weimar period, and which together constitute its literary culture. I
begin by asking how ‘Neue Sachlichkeit’ became the umbrella concept under
which such diverse features of German culture as functional design and
ebullient popular entertainment, social satire and technological innovation
were linked together, and by assessing the role this term actually played
in the cultural debates of the time. I show how lyric poetry is not
straightforwardly eclipsed by the ruthless functionalism of the 1920s, and
that poetic practice is itself transformed by being opened up to the
language of public discourse. My chapter on the theatre, which naturally
focuses on the achievements of Brecht and Piscator, examines the senses in
which writers of the time are looking beyond issues of simple political
allegiance, and trying to use theatrical performance to promote a critical
awareness of the social world. I consider the major novels of the period
(by Döblin, Musil, Broch, and the brothers Mann) both as representations of
the historical experience of their time and as texts which reflect
self-critically upon the nature of narrative representation in the context
of twentieth-century society. And for those who are inclined to see a
sterile cynicism as the dominant characteristic of German culture after the
First World War, I show how a range of novelists also developed strategies
of constructive disillusionment in their narrative representation of their
times.
The sense that authors are taking part in a contest for meaning in the
post-1918 world is clearer still when we look at their treatment of
specific issues. The spectacular wave of war novels which appears ten years
after the event is an obvious case in point: I ask how these authors battle
for control of the terms in which the war is remembered. The strong sense
of antagonism between the culture of the city (especially that of Berlin)
and that of the provinces is another such issue; it was heavily
politicised, but there is a substantial number of authors who can be seen
as mediating in one way or another between polarised positions. As for the
literary representation of technology in the period, which I discuss in my
final chapter, the apparent volte-face in the literary culture — from
outright hostility in Expressionist drama to uncritical celebration in
documentary writings of the mid-1920s — turns out to mask some underlying
continuities and some genuinely innovative investigations of the
implications of technology for human endeavour and human society.
In these ways, I have tried to provide an account of the literary culture
of Weimar Germany which will show the specialist the current state of our
knowledge of the period, while also being accessible to the general reader.
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