The Writer in Extremis, Expressionism in Twentieth-Century German Literature by Walter H. Sokel (review)

98 MODERN DRAMA May THE WRITER IN EXTREMIS, EXPRESSIONISM IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY GERMAN LITERATURE, by Walter H. Sokel, Stanford, California, Stanford University Press, 1959, 251 pp. Price $5.00. The title of Professor Walter H. Sokel's recently published study is an index to both the general and the particular aspects of the material that he has considered. Writers in extremis were scattered throughout the countries of the West; they were not limited by national boundaries. The agony of the artist was a general condition evident not only among German writers of the last hundred years but also those of other countries; for example, Rimbaud in France, Dostoevski in Russia, and Strindberg in Sweden. Sokel, of course, rightly interested himself in the general cultural atmosphere only to the extent that it provided a setting for his specific discussion: "Expressionism in Twentieth-Century German Literature." Early in the book the author clearly explains the nature of his study: The task of his study is to come to an understanding of Expressionism through an understanding of some of the philosophical assumptions underlying the practices of modem art and literature; the social situation in which these assumptions were first formulated; the primary formal tendency of Expressionism in relation to other modernist tendencies; and, above all, the SOcial-personal problems or "the existential situation" of the Expressionists. • . . Seeking to shed light on the complex and multi-faced phenomenon of Expressionism, this study, it is hoped, will also contribute to a further understanding of the "modernist" artist and clarify some aspects of the social and cultural history of twentieth-century Germany. (p. 4.) The book is divided into two parts, each consisting of several chapters. Part One is entitled "The New Form" and is developed through five chapters: "Pure Form and Pure Formlessness," "Music and Existence," "Poeta Dolorosus," "The Thorn of Socrates," and "The Impotence of the Heart." Part Two is called 'The New Man" and has three chapters: "Anti-Zarathustra," "The Revolt," and "The Recoil." As a closing chapter Sokel offers an "Epilogue: The Parting of the Ways." For those who have not yet made a beginning in this area of modernism, the following items of information may prove helpful. The first "fully Expressionist drama ever written" is To Damascus (1898) by August Strindberg (p. 34). The "first German Expressionist drama" was composed by Reinhard Sorge. It is The Beggar, which appeared in 1912 (p. 36). The "most famous drama of all Expressionist literature" is Georg Kaiser's Gas I, a product of 1918 (p. 192). The term "Expressionism" was employed as early as 1901 in reference to painting (p. 1), and in Germany it probably gained first significance in literature on the occasion of "Max Brod's reading of WerfeI's poem 'An den Leser' to a group of Berlin students and literati in 1910" (note 1, p. 141). As regards the philosophical basis of modernism, Professor SokeI points to the difference between the Aristotelian concept of mimesis and the Kantian view that "aesthetic ideas, i.e., the ideas forming a work of art, are very different from logical thought" (p. 10). It is the latter view that provides the basis ror modernism . The artist works in a world unrelated to that of physical reality or the enterprise of practical living. He is a creator, taking out of himself the stuff of his art and the rules for giving it form. Because of its philosophical basis, modernism cannot be narrowly limited to a single school or movement. Expressionism itself is "a collective term" (p. 29) 1960 BOOK REvmws 99 and "expressionism proper" may be defined as "the existential or protoexistential form of modernism" (p. 30). "There are surrealist Expressionists, notably the poets Heym, Lichtenstein, Van Hoddis, but Trakl, Kafka, and several dramatists come close to it, too. There are also cubist Expressionists; the most pronouncedly cubist among them is Gottfried Benn. The poets of the Sturm circle, and the dramatists Wedekind, Sternheim, and Kaiser come close to it." (p. 29). Yet, Sokel says, Expressionism is in general closer to Surrealism than to Cubism. "It is subjective, dreamlike, visionary rather than object-centered, intellectual, and linguistically experimental. What distinguishes it from Surrealism is its...