Hanns von Gumppenberg (1866–1928) Ein Münchner Schriftsteller zwischen Okkultismus, Kabarett und Kritik by Martin Lau (review)

The writer Hanns von Gumppenberg (1866–1928) is today best remembered, if at all, for his lyrical parodies (Das teutsche Dichterroß, in allen Gangarten vorgeritten,an enormous success in multiple editions, 1901–1929) and his short dramatic spoofs, the so-calledÜberdramen (3 vols., 1902), which were hits in the early German cabarets. Alongside these incidental works, written under the pseudonym Jodok, he had an enormous output of serious dramas, which he considered his real legacy, but which were seldom performed, critically derided, and are now justly forgotten. Gumppenberg was a conspicuous figure in the bohemian scene of turn-of-the-century Munich: in the Schwabing artists’ pubs, in journals of early modernism, and as a participant in the cabaret Die elf Scharfrichter. In this 2014 dissertation (only now available as a book), Martin Lau attempts to rediscover and rehabilitate the writer as a key player in the modernist movement, whose admittedly contradictory and problematic story is paradigmatic for the tensions of Munich’s artistic life around 1900. Going beyond Karl-Wilhelm von Wintzigerode-Knorr’s 1959 dissertation, which focused on Gumppenberg’s literary work, Lau looks at the broader biographical and cultural context and reaches into the archives to flesh out the story with unknown documents. Lau’s study has three main complexes: early modernism in Munich, spiritualism and mysticism, and the comic and critical works.

Caught up in tensions between tradition and modernity, idealism and revolution, Hanns von Gumppenberg was a remarkably multifaceted literary and journalistic figure who was in close contact to the pioneers of the modernist movement. He was integrally involved in artistic circles and literary journals from the Gesellschaft für modernes Leben to Jugend and even produced his own short-lived journal, Licht und Schatten (1910). He was an accomplished translator, while as an outspoken and sometimes scathing theatrical critic he was entangled in brutal power struggles and bitterly attacked as a threat to the theatrical art. One of his plays, Die Verdammten (1901), was produced and moderately successful, but his idealistic and tragic dramas are all but unreadable, as Lau admits: “Die humorlose Inbrunst, die er bei seinen Prophezeihungen, seinen weihevoll-epigonalen ernsten Gedichten, wie bei seinen Trauerspielen zeigte, ist nach heutigen Maßstäben nur schwer zu ertragen” (134). Even his friends Wedekind and Bierbaum mocked him savagely in their literary work. For Lau, Gumppenberg is a mediator, at times a vanguard, but full of contradictions and self-deceptions. Lau portrays an artist struggling to find his voice between conservatism, elitism, innovation, and rebellion: ambiguities that were characteristic for the conflicts of his day. The eccentric Gumppenberg was radical even to the verge of insanity, and ultimately became a tragic figure. He lost his edge after the war and fell victim to poverty, illness, and depression; his dream of a complete edition of his works went unrealized, and his memoirs only appeared posthumously.

Unlike contemporaries such as Wedekind, Gumppenberg showed no interest in the sexual revolution that marked much of the literature of his time, and which retains its fascination today. The novel and most interesting complex of this study, on the other hand, concerns Gumppenberg’s explorations and writings on mysticism and séances. Gumppenberg produced a number of religious dramas and tracts that may well prove bewildering to modern readers. His scandalous tragedy Der Messias (1890) radically reinterpreted Jesus as a swindler who takes on guilt as a path to salvation, a martyrdom with which Gumppenberg apparently identified. He turned to the occult with his account Das dritte Testament: Eine Offenbarung Gottes (1891), which reflected his own séance experiences as guided by the spirit of a seventeenth-century Oriental vestal virgin named Geben through table-turning and Ouija-board prophecies. Such spiritualistic experiments were, Lau reminds us, a booming phenomenon of the era: expressions of a crisis of faith...