Die Tücke des Körpers : Taming the Nervous Body in Alfred Döblin's "Die Ermordung einer Butterblume" and "Die Tänzerin und der Leib"

If one were looking for a thematic link between the various strands of German expressionism in the early twentieth century, not the least plausible answer might lie in the obsession with modern pathologies. From Ernst Ludwig Kirchner's sickly urban street figures to the cancerous material bodies of Gottfried Benn's early poetry to the shell-shocked postwar visions of Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari, expressionist artists were consistently attracted to bodies suffering from the diseases and traumas of modernization. While this preoccupation with modern illness in expressionist art has been well documented, its relation to expressionism's self-understanding as a cultural and aesthetic movement is perhaps less obvious (Anz, Literatur der Existenz). For beginning with the earliest expressionist manifestoes around 1910, the emerging movement was explicitly conceived as an endeavour to overcome the sickly, nervous dispositions associated with the impressionist and decadent literature of the fin de siècle. More specifically, expressionist artists and critics sought to replace the nervous hypersensitivity cultivated by impressionist writers with a model of artistic creation conceived as a vitalist act, one in which the artist imposes his will upon the body's perceptive apparatus and the aesthetic material. Writing in 1911, for example, Kurt Hiller described the burgeoning expressionist movement in art and literature precisely as an effort to counter the languid passivity of aestheticism: "Wenigstens erscheinen uns jene Ästheten, die nur zu reagieren verstehen, die nur Wachsplatten für Eindrücke sind und exakt-nuancensa Rm arbeitende Deskribiermaschinen [...] als ehrlich inferior. Wir sind Expressionisten. Es kommt uns wieder auf den Gehalt, das Wollen, das Ethos an" (34–35). Hiller's understanding of the expressionist project would find numerous echoes in various manifestoes throughout the 1910s, all of them conceiving the "visionary" turn in expressionist aesthetics as an effort to overcome what they saw as an all too passive subservience to the hypersensitive body in impressionism. The central characteristic of the expressionist artist, according to these manifestoes, was the ability to impose order, through the power of the spirit or the will, onto the artistic material. For Kasimir Edschmid, for example, expressionism, which he saw as the aesthetic transposition of the Jugendbewegung, represented nothing short of a struggle to reestablish the spirit's control over matter on the aesthetic plane: "Nun diktiert der Geist, wohl eng verschmolzen der Materie, doch sie gestaltend, nicht in ihrer Abhängigkeit" (Edschmid 22).

At stake in this model of expressionist aesthetics as a struggle between the spirit and the matter to which it should give form was clearly an effort to imagine autonomy – what the poet Erich Mühsam called "die Selbstbestimmung des Menschen"(147) and Ludwig Rubiner a worldview with "man" at the "centre" of the world (220). Within this context one can see the frequent depictions, in expressionist art and literature, of the material body in rebellion against the spirit as metaphors for the very struggle for autonomy over the artistic material. Of course, rebellious, nervous bodies abound in turn-of-the-century literature, from the hysterical bodies populating the works of decadent authors such as Felix Dörmann (Sensationen, 1897) in Vienna or Stanislaw Przybyszewski (Totenmesse, 1892) in Berlin to the convulsive urban bodies of Rilke's Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge (1910) – above all with its description of the St. Vitus dancer (70). In all of these works, one can establish a parallel between the excessive, pathological body and the artistic material. While the expressionist imagination largely adopted this parallel from its forerunners, it differed from the former most specifically in its insistence on reestablishing the autonomy of the (artistic) spirit by taming the unruly materiality of body and text.

At the same time, that expressionist fantasy of subjecting the artistic material to the power of the spirit makes sense only when understood as part of a much broader cultural fantasy of coming to terms with what contemporaries described the "epoch of nervousness" in the early twentieth century (Radkau). Attributed to the effects of modernization generally and to modern...