The Attractions of Ideology

Toller was a writer. He was not a political scholar or a philosopher. However, in the framework of German culture, any political conversation or controversy was deeply immersed in philosophical and cultural vocabulary in a way it was not in the United States, Britain, or any other part of continental Europe. It was a uniquely German discussion concerned with the Geistig (spiritual) justification of political institutions. Art, culture, philosophy, and politics were intertwined in a way they were not elsewhere. We see this in the works of the Right and the Left. They surface in a wide array of German writers—Thomas Mann, Herman Hesse, Ernst Jünger, Gottfried Benn, as well as Toller. As historian Kurt Sontheimer noted in his study of thought patterns in the Weimar Republic, “The Weimar Republic experienced a veritable onslaught of Geist on political and social reality, such as scarcely any other phase of German history witnessed. Seldom has the claim of Geist to transcend reality been made with such arrogance, with such pitiless radicalism.”^[1] Idealism is a vague term in English; it is even more so in German. It was derived from the age of Goethe, Kant, Fichte, and Schiller, taught in the schools, spoken about at home, accepted as a common currency. Part metaphorical, part quasi-religious, part moral imperative and aesthetic theory, it was venerated by those who were educated, admired by those who were not, and aspired to by those in the middle. It was the cultivation of Innerlichkeit, an internal reality at once personal and messianic. And it was also specifically German, as the German historian Friedrich Meinecke put it: “Specifically German also . . . was the tendency to elevate something primarily practical into a universal world-view theory.”^[2] In the nineteenth century, it was most often nonpolitical. By the early twentieth, things began to change.

Literature and politics are two terms that in German history, at least, seem to be in some tension with each other. It is significant that Kurt Hiller, in his introduction to an anthology of Toller’s work, went to great length to refute the “nonsense” that literature could be separated from politics.^[3] “Which German,” commented Wolfgang Paulsen in contrast, “does not immediately think when he hears the words literature and politics of Goethe’s dictum that a political song is supposed to be a dirty song?”^[4] If the critic seeks a general characteristic of much of German literature, he may well be led to conclude that it is more philosophical and metaphysical than social and political.^[5] There is a German tradition that looks upon Kultur—the use of the German spelling is intentional—as a replacement for politics. It vilifies the second and glorifies the first. Its aesthetic appeal, critical to understanding the Nazi era, is heard in Hitler’s statement that whoever did not understand Wagner did not understand National Socialism, and this was reflected in the coterie of his well-educated, musically-sensitive associates who appeared to view their politics as an ersatz for art. The propagandist Joseph Goebbels and ruthless S.S. leader Reinhard Heydrich come to mind as particularly distasteful examples, but there were many others. It is a tradition that can be traced to the late eighteenth century and continued, with frightful consequences, into the twentieth. Weimar Republic intellectuals showed a particular vulnerability for Utopianism and messianic visions, as well as distaste for the political.^[6] The early Toller shared in this. As he experienced more, he began to share less.

The dichotomy in German literature between the demands of art (or thought) and those of politics can already be seen in the eighteenth century. Goethe’s relative lack of concern with politics is well known. Even Schiller, to whom we would be doing an injustice to characterize as totally apolitical, when he asked in 1784 for contributions to a literary journal he was planning, made it clear that he wished to avoid all political questions. In his unfinished poem “Deutsche Grosse,” he expressly states Germany’s strength is in her spirit and not in her politics,^[7] an assumption to which German history in the twentieth century perhaps lends a higher degree of truth than Schiller could have realized at the time. Jacques Droz saw Germany’s tragedy in such a separation of politics from intellect. German intellect was concerned with philosophy, while German politics was an affair of cabinets.^[8] Fritz Ringer, an historian who has carefully studied these phenomena among German academics, writes:

There were, of course, exceptions, and to assert that German literature was totally unconcerned with political and social problems would be both foolish and misleading. Probably, the most active period of literary-political activity before expressionism was Young Germany; however, with the exception of Heine and Büchner, it produced few first-rate authors. With Germany’s increasing industrialization later in the century, many writers began to express strong social and political tendencies in their work, Hauptmann’s Die Weber being one of the best examples. Yet neither Young Germany nor Naturalism formulated a program of literary politics. This was left to the twentieth-century activists of expressionism.

Thomas Mann once observed that a characteristic of the twentieth century was the “politicization of everything.” Certainly, for many German intellectuals, the impact of the century’s first great war moved them toward an increasing concern with political and social questions. The reality of a horrible war had affected German society politically. To remain divorced from politics, Wirklichkeitsfremd, during the most destructive European war since 1618, when every aspect of life was radically altered by the political and economic problems of war, was now impossible: even those who were apolitical had to mediate on politics.^[10] As one member of the war generation put it: “politics had now become our destiny and it has never since surrendered its hold on me. Rather, in many respects it has determined our lives.”^[11] Not only in politics but also in literature the war caused a change. Conventional artistic genres seemed irrelevant when set against trench warfare.

All compromise with prewar aesthetics was altered. The awareness that 1914 was the culmination of the past social evolution, not a break in it, meant that culture, associated with the upper classes who were held responsible for the war, was condemned as the whole literary garbage pail of a generation whose cowardice and thoughtlessness, as Erwin Piscator, a producer of Toller’s plays during the 1920s, noted, served “to drive us into the trenches . . . New methods were now developed to express the new war vision rather than adopting techniques that had been appropriate in a pre-war world.”^[12]

On a personal level, Toller’s war experience and his turn to pacifism were not unique. Author Rudolf Leonhard and the expressionist author Fritz von Unruh went through much the same process. The response was at first one of emotion, based on the hard and unsentimental reality of trench warfare. The experience of war, however, soon called forth a theory that articulated the emotional feelings of sensitive young intellectuals such as Toller and, in the process, created the occasion for the intellectual to formulate a theory of political and literary involvement. The theory turned its back on literature divorced from politics and experienced literature as a political fever. Initially, politically neutral expressionism proved itself well-suited to writers desiring to become political leaders. Starting as a literary movement, by the end of the war expressionism had developed a more active aspect, one that emphasized concern for social questions and spoke the enthusiastic yet vague language of revolution. While the movements of expressionism and activism were not synonymous,^[13] the two were linked; although not strictly a war phenomenon, their popularity rose the longer the war dragged on. Reaching a peak in 1918–1920, their fortunes fell as quickly as revolutionary excitement evaporated; both faded in the disillusion of Germany’s intellectuals with postwar society.

It was not accidental that Toller became an expressionist. The literary movement was well-suited to attract someone with his background. Young, from a moderately affluent Jewish background, and reasonably well educated, he shared much in common with others drawn to that volatile genre.^[14] While its emotional rhetoric appealed to the emotional Toller, its literary style also had a political dimension that made it greater than just an aesthetic theory. More than just a literary methodology, expressionism could also be ideology that, beneath its ecstatic and declamatory prose, had far-reaching implications for German intellectual life.

The stylistic classification of artistic movements, a favorite pastime of literary historians, may prove that history is, after all, only a trick the living play on the dead. It is significant that, while most expressionists felt they were expressing their ideas in a novel fashion, by a literary paradox they rarely applied the term to themselves; indeed, at times they even showed some hostility toward it. Kurt Wolff, one of the main publishers of works of authors commonly considered expressionists, rejected the term as giving such writers “a common stamp which they never in fact possessed.” The artist, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, was positively revolted to be associated with such a “degrading” movement. Toller, who became one of the best-known and most widely translated of the German expressionists, vigorously asserted that he “did not know what ‘Expressionism’ was.”^[15] Toller’s repudiation of expressionism was less evidence of his ignorance than it was of his independence, the perhaps justified reluctance of a creative artist to be arbitrarily classified as the representative of a particular literary school. Yet Toller was not a thoroughgoing pragmatist who shied away from doctrine and worked by his own unique combination of insight and experience. Toller’s ideas were not always empirical or even rational; they were emotional and ethical ideas that he derived from expressionism. After his discharge, it was already clear that Toller was turning to expressionism. A reviewer in the Münchener Zeitung, for example, unappreciative of the new avant-garde trends in literature, reproached Toller for his expressionist style.^[16] If expressionism is defined as a literary quality, however, Toller was only an expressionist during the early part of his career. His later prose is less exuberant, more moderate and exact, his statements less intense and more subtle. In general, it resembles a later literary style in Germany called the New Realism, neue Sachlichkeit, although Toller disassociated himself with the movement.^[17] If seen as a social philosophy, however, one could say that Toller remained an expressionist until his death. When we seek the reasons he became a revolutionary and what he expected for Germany, not only during the revolution but for years after as well, we must turn to expressionism. It is as impossible to explain Toller’s thought without regard to expressionism as it is to explain Dante without Thomas Aquinas, Marx without Hegel, or Nietzsche without Christ.

An adequate outline of expressionism certainly is not due to a lack of secondary material; indeed, the more the evidence has proliferated, the less sure one is about what expressionism was. The almost Sisyphean task of arriving at a synthetic view appears more frustrating than ever. If, among its practitioners, the acceptance of the appellation “expressionist” was not axiomatic, this has little troubled their critics. The plethora of adumbrations, observations, commentaries, books, and articles on expressionism at least suggests that the term may have some validity. Although it was looked down upon during the Nazi years as degenerate art, postwar literary critics were quick to acknowledge its importance. In German alone, during the eight years between 1952 and 1960, almost three hundred titles of works on expressionism have been noted.^[18] With such a surfeit of interpretive riches, any definition will have more than its share of those embarrassing nuances and anomalies that seem to bedevil any definitive statement on the nature of a literary movement.

Although particularly popular immediately after World War I, expressionism was not just a product of the war years. As Toller noted, “the essential tendencies of postwar German drama began to develop years before, although it was only the war that brought them suddenly to eruption.”^[19] The movement can be seen as a part of the general shift in European thought that took place during the 1890s.^[20] Politically, the era that began with the fin de siècle and ended with the outbreak of the war was characterized by rising social tension in both foreign and domestic affairs—a tension that seemed at variance with liberal ideas of progress and social harmony.^[21] Intellectually also a time of tension, the positivistic assumptions of much nineteenth-century thought were undergoing increasing revision. Growing awareness of the subconscious and nonrational in intellectual life frequently called into question many formally dominant social ideas. In Germany, literature had begun to find a way out of the impasse it had reached since political unification. Only a decade before in the 1880s, German literature had reached a low point. Although Nietzsche had written some of his best work during these ten years, it was left for the next decade to appreciate fully its value. Moreover, not a single gifted author was born for the score of years around mid-century.^[22] In addition, the genres of classic German literature, the drama, lyric, and Bildungsroman, all appeared depressingly tired. Yet by the 1890s, and in particular at the turn of the century, the once little-known Nietzsche had been rediscovered while figures such as Thomas and Heinrich Mann, Rilke, Stefan Georg, and Wedekind all contributed to a renaissance of German letters. Indeed, looking back from a vantage point of almost twenty years, the Austrian author Robert Musil could write of a “stimulating fever” that arose to wake society up “to do battle against the old order.”^[23]

Musil’s stimulating fever was vividly seen in expressionism’s rejection of the dominant assumptions of traditional prose. In its literary style, expressionism was part of the general modernistic trend from an art based on transition to one based on juxtaposition.^[24] The classic conception of art, going back to Aristotle, had traditionally required unity and a clear articulation of the relation between words or forms. In prose, this meant a logical connection of words; in drama, it meant a unity of form in which the well-made play had a beginning, a middle, and an end. In short, traditional art decreed that each part must orderly follow from the last to the next. The beginnings of a breakdown in form can already be seen in impressionism, yet it was not until around 1910 that a forceful art of juxtaposition “broke out like a rash.”^[25]

Apollinaire, Cendrars’s and Reverdy’s Simultanism, Unanimism, and Futurism all attest to the flaunting of classic transitional convention. Mimesis and verisimilitude were being replaced by the more abstract inner vision of the artist. Searching within itself rather than in objective reality, twentieth-century art became narcissistic, concerned not with photographic representation, a technique better left to the camera, but with the subjective state of the artist. Revolting against a scientific positivism and the attention naturalism had paid to surface detail, the expressionists attempted to probe more deeply in their search for genuine reality. In his influential anthology, Menschheitsdämmerung, Kurt Pinthus, a contemporary of Toller’s who served in the Soldiers Soviet during the 1919 revolution and later helped publish numerous expressionist writers, observes that expressionism: “avoids naturalistic description of reality. . . . Rather it produces its means of expression with mighty, violent energy from the . . . power of the spirit itself. . . . Never in world literature did the shriek, the fall, the longing of age ring out so loudly, liberatingly and startlingly.^[26]

It is clear that for Pinthus, and most expressionists as well, art had become an emotional, not a purely aesthetic, experience. Outrageous to early critics but tame to later readers, the authors of such intensely volatile outpourings were derisively called Explosionists.^[27] The “highly active, forward pressing wish to cause peace-disturbing noise”^[28] was mirrored in expressionist language: syntax became dynamic in an attempt to emphasize imagery and rhythm; the grammar was not one of clarity but one of thought and feeling; words became an abstract pattern that corresponded to the author’s emotions. Of particularly great influence was Marinetti’s “Manifesto of Futurism,” printed in the 1910 edition of Der Sturm, which advocated elimination of adjectives, adverbs, and conjunctions and stressed the infinitive in an attempt to convey emotionalism in speech.^[29]

Like most expressionist dramas, Toller’s were hostile to the conventional canons of what a well-made play should be. Sometimes illogical in staging and always emotional in language, expressionist plays featured speech that rose to a series of explosions. The short, emotional expressionist prose, almost barren of adjectives and staccato in presentation, is evident in his early work. However, by the time Toller had written his first play, expressionist innovation in prose, which in prewar writers such as Heym and Trakl was original, had degenerated into a self-conscious mannerism that today makes so many expressionist plays seem embarrassingly naïve and at times poorly written. Expressionist drama, in an attempt to be different, often ended up being only stale and flat. While the dynamism, the asyntatic, and exclamatory phrases of the early expressionists exist in the works of Toller and the later expressionists, they had become mere rhetorical devices, a series of emotional explosions. The reader does not extract emotion from such prose; rather, the author pours it in. In great works of art, it is passion that gives them life; while the expressionist prose of Toller is passionate, it is occasionally excessive, or so it appears to us nearly a century later. Nevertheless, such emotional intensity undoubtedly suited Toller’s emotional temperament. Indeed, it remained with him throughout his life.^[30] Yet the expressionism to which he was attracted was more than just intoxicating grammatical contortion or eccentrically staged drama. Although in part a theory of literature, expressionism could also be a theory of social change. It was the latter that Toller advocated:

Few literary ideas have had a more ambitious political and social program; despite its programmatic ambiguities, few have had so clear an ethical mission. None became a victim of the twentieth century so fast.

From the outset, expressionism was potentially revolutionary. Its emotional cries revealed the unsettling qualities of its work. Although the experience of war and revolution intensified the social activism of the movement, it was not its cause. Like all literature, expressionism was in part the effect of social conditions, but, as Toller noted, it also tried to be the cause of social effects. Unconcerned with the settled past, it looked forward to the future and sought to influence events. Its disturbing language could easily allow expressionism to slip over into the realm of the political. Poet Ludwig Rubiner proudly announced that for the expressionist “the name disturber is an honorary title . . . for us destroyer is a religious concept, inseparable for us today from creator. And, therefore, it is right that literature explode into politics.”^[32]

Rebels with a cause, the expressionists lacked clear-cut goals or concrete programs. Such vagueness allowed a diversity that enabled its adherents to draw upon almost any revolutionary solution. Whatever their particular ideology, one which could range from the idealistic humanism of Toller to the National Socialism of Emil Nolde, the expressionists were a generation in revolt.

It was certainly not an accident that so many expressionist writers were of the young war generation; nor was it accidental that, throughout his life, Toller placed great hope in the power of the young to cause social change. As early as 1906, the Dresden group Die Brücke, one of the first associations later termed expressionist, appealed to youth “upon whose shoulders the future rests, to win freedom of life and action against the entrenched forces of age.”^[33] Similarly, Toller noted that:

The father-son theme “demanded of every good young writer,” according to playwright Carl Zuckmayer,^[35] became so general among many expressionists as to become almost a cliché. Yet the struggle of youth against age was not the exclusive preserve of the expressionists. The prewar youth movement, a mélange of idiosyncratic tendencies ranging from sexual abnegation to homosexuality, atheism to quasi-religious fanaticism, pacifism to chauvinism, all joined hands in their rejection of prewar Germany. The natural rebelliousness of youth was added to an estrangement from what appeared to be the stifling and even tyrannical qualities of social life. It was a “form of opposition to a civilization that had little to offer the young generation, a protest against the lack of vitality, warmth, emotions and ideals in German society.”^[36] Those of this generation inclined toward literature were able to give verbal expression to the general malaise of their colleagues. How pervasive the theme of generation conflict was is clear from the particularly large number of works that dealt with the topic. In the fifty years between 1880 and 1930, almost as many literary works treating the theme were published as from the Middle Ages to 1880.^[37] Although youth versus age was a motif already employed by Wedekind, one of the first well-known plays to deal with it was Walter Hasenclever’s Der Sohn, written in 1914. German publisher Kurt Wolff observed that it was “explosive material for the generation born around 1890.”^[38] Quickly following were Sorge’s first drama, Werfel’s poems against the old generation, and later Bronnen’s play, significantly entitled Vatermord. Analyzing the reasons for the theme, Toller saw youth as striving “for the Absolute. He compared the ideals announced in the school with the reality of the world and felt hatred against school and parents.”^[39]

This revolt against school and parents was a particularly powerful movement in Germany just before the war. There can be little doubt Toller shared in the animosity of which he wrote. Few were the political leaders, and even fewer the intellectuals among those born between 1890 and 1920, who were not at one time or another members of the youth movement or influenced by it in their most impressionable years.^[40] Although there is no evidence that Toller actually joined one of the many youth groups, the movement did exercise a great influence on him. Throughout the Weimar years and the period of the Third Reich, he continually called on youth to regenerate and save society. During the war, he remained acutely aware that “our generation had a noble heritage that must be added to. That heritage, we thought, was the one thing that mattered. Riches, wine, comfort—those things were for weaklings.”^[41]

Bitterly, he indicted the elders for allowing this generation to die in battle: “Our parents—they are the war!” More specifically, Toller divided the family into two irreconcilable groups. On the one side, the father, symbol of uninspired materialism, darkness, and destruction; on the other, the mother, representative of light, rebirth, and love. Thus, in his autobiography, he noted he would never forget the horrible words his dying father cried out to his son: “‘It’s your fault,’ he groans, ‘it’s your fault.’” During the war, it is “the fathers” who bring death and destruction to youth. In Die Wandlung, Toller has its hero, Friedrich, acidly speak of “good kind father! He would talk to me about living respectably, about the solid virtues. And when I wanted to get away—to get away from here—he forced me to stay. He was my jailer.”^[42] If the father is tyranny and destruction, the mother is renewal. Although the sons die in war, it is the mothers who will create a new generation.^[43] While at Diederichs’, Toller had given one of his poems to poet Richard Dehmel and quoted him as saying: “That poem of yours which ends: I died / Was reborn / Died / Was reborn / I was my own mother—that’s all that matters. Once in his life every man must cast adrift from everything_, even from his mother; he must become his own mother.”^[44]

Thus, the search for freedom and identity in Toller’s work corresponds to a father rejection that assumes the form of a mother search. Fragmentation and continuity become a part of a contrapuntal relation. The motif is one too obvious not to be taken into account.

Intellectuals in conflict with their society, the expressionists decried what they saw as the domination of the ubiquitous father and instead asserted their own vision. Like the romantics, they set up the image of the artist-intellectual, one in which the minority of the creative did battle against the majority of the philistines. Such an attitude could easily slide over into elitism; it was little wonder that many expressionists lived precariously on the thin line between a desire to change society and among mutterings on the banality and utter hopelessness of the middle class. The concept of “middle class” (Burger) became a catchword for all that was despised as the unadventurous and respectable world of the bourgeoisie. In his critique of the Majority Socialists, for example, Toller could find no greater invective to hurl at them than that their limited aims extended no farther than “the juste milieu of bourgeois society.”^[45] Expressionist anti–middle-class attacks perhaps reached their apogee in Carl Sternheim’s series of satires, Aus dem bürgerlichen Heldenleben. Distorted images of nobles, officers, judges, doctors, clergy, industrialists, and social parvenus all take on a strange and disturbing realism. Toller’s later play Hoppla! wir leben, in which he gave full vent to his disillusion with Weimar Germany, is full of such representatives of the middle-class world; despised as philistines and reactionaries, they must be rejected if society is to be saved. Bourgeois society becomes apocalyptic, doomed to fall through its own rottenness.

The age and social position of expressionist authors help explain their vehement rejection of middle-class values. As a group they were fairly young. At the outbreak of the war, most were, like Toller, in their twenties.^[46] A preponderant number were Jews and freelance writers left out of the German intellectual establishment. In spite of their evident estrangement, however, they remained reluctant to sever all ties with middle-class standards. Although Rubiner wrote of his “comrades,” the “prostitutes, poets, sub proletarians,”^[47] few actually became members of Rubiner’s “holy mob” of the socially despised. Few embraced the underworld of Bohemia and lost all ties with bourgeois life. Most dressed conventionally, and few fell to the level of proletarians, pimps, or thieves. Although Toller frequently wrote of the proletariat and contrasted the opulence of established society with its domestic squalor, there is no evidence that Toller himself had any desire to partake of their suffering, a quality characteristic of many radical middle-class intellectuals. While he fought for the outcasts of society and was in genuine sympathy with their plight, he remained carefully removed from their style of life.

This failure to embrace fully the proletarian style of life indicated that although the mentality of the middle class was rejected, seldom were its outward conventions. Yet in mind, if not in appearance, the expressionist was a man in revolt. The themes of radical social change, of a complete break with existing conditions, a “twilight of humanity” (Menschheitsdämmerung) from which a new world was to emerge, were common in this apocalyptic genre. Rather than occupying himself as the naturalist did with individual social evils, the expressionist demanded nothing less than the dissolving of the world in a cosmic ecstasy of world revolution. The critic looks in vain, however, for any exact program of revolution or any specific hint of the nature of the new expressionist world. The language of revolution was no doubt exciting, but it was, nevertheless, conveniently vague. Toller’s Kulturpolitischen Bund, for example, wished to inflame humanity and had as its goal the “true community of spirit” in which suffering, hate, and war would have no place. It remained distressingly silent on how such a world was to come about. For the author Johannes Becher, echoing the hostility of fathers and sons, the new world was the desire of the younger generation to distinguish itself from that of the fathers. Alfred Wolf was even less specific; for him it was the creation of that which had never before existed.^[48] Such programmatic ambiguities were understandable, particularly after 1914. Conscious of living in an unstable world, the destruction of the war made it appear that it would take little to overthrow a society that was already so obligingly engaged in the task of self-destruction. In addition, for Toller, the war would not only bring on a new society by eliminating the old; it would also destroy the father world that had sent its sons to die: “Our fathers had betrayed us and we the young, who had known war, hard and unsentimental, would begin the business of spring cleaning.”^[49]

It is this desire, one might even go further and call it a passion, to remold society that firmly places Toller in the activist wing of expressionism. Expressionism’s relation with society could allow three responses: a total withdrawal from society into aesthetic contemplation, a defiant snub of society, or an attempt to integrate the intellectual into society and through this to alter social relations. To some extent, the journal Der Sturm followed the first, Wedekind and Sternheim the second. For the activist expressionist, however, the third offered the most enticing of possibilities. The intellectual could, like Toller, fight against what he saw as decaying and corrupt social values and enthusiastically prepare the way for a new and better world.^[50] Alienated, the intellectual could overcome his alienation. He could give up ironic detachment, hostility, or aesthetic self-perfection and, instead, change society, elevate the image of man, and create a truly integrated social order. They rejected the ordered and sterile society of the present (Gesellschaft) and joyfully embraced the revolutionary people’s community (Gemeinschaft) of the future.

Such a Gemeinschaft was not a mechanical alteration of politics but the transformation of man. Revolution became parousia. Social salvation could not come from without but only through an inner regeneration of humanity.^[51] During a time when increasing industrialization had alienated many, the expressionist asserted the primacy of social integration that would reveal the true nature of man. Many expressionists took the view that man was naturally good. The evils of society were not the result of human nature but of institutions that corrupted man’s basic personality. It was important, therefore, that the individual experience an inner transformation (Wandlung) that would allow his true nature to assert itself. Toller’s Friedrich, for example, speaks of institutions victimizing and distorting humanity, twisting it into a caricature of its true self, conditioning it to act unnaturally: “You, all of you are human beings no longer, but distorted images of your real personality. And yet you could be men and women, still be human, if only you had faith in yourselves and in humanity . . .”:

If alteration of society becomes possible through the transformation of its individual members, in this process the intellectual becomes the agent of social salvation. His duty is to preach, exhort, and change. Converting a part of humanity, he comes rooted in his inner self and becomes a missionary whose task is to convert all. As Friedrich puts it: “Through pestilential streets and fields of poppies over sunlit, snowy mountain peaks and through the barren wilderness—knowing all the time that I am not uprooted, knowing I am rooted in myself.”^[53]

The experience of the war was particularly decisive in the development of the expressionist new man. As has been seen, Toller experienced his own personal transformation from narrow nationalism to cosmopolitan humanism as a result of frontline duty. War was at once rejected as a product of the old world, yet at the same time it was the harbinger of the new that was to emerge at its end. For some, war and conflict were replaced by pacifism. While not all expressionists were, like Toller, pacifists, over one-half were,^[54] and René Schickele even equated expressionism with pacifism.^[55] In the place of war and hate, many hoped for peace and cooperation. Activist journals such as Die weissen Blätter and Die Aktion, expressionist plays such as Toller’s Die Wandlung and Unruh’s Ein Geschlecht, all fought against what they saw as senseless slaughter and damned those they believed responsible. Many called for open resistance: Toller’s Friedrich advocates revolution; at the end of Unruh’s Ein Geschlecht, the cry is raised for soldiers to throw down their weapons; and in Hasenclever’s poem “Der politische Dichter,” the action demanded is “to wave from the factories the red flag against the grey sky.”^[56] For the expressionist pacifist, killing for ideology or nation was rejected. Kurt Hiller, for example, felt it a moral imperative not to “murder for even the loftiest idea, for no idea is loftier than living.”^[57] The hero of Toller’s Masse Mensch is made to feel much the same way: “No man may kill for a cause. / Unholy every cause that needs to kill.”^[58]

Their desire to bring universal peace caused the expressionists to fight force without using violence. While the war lasted, the idea seemed attractive. It was only when the attempt was made after the war to put pacifism into practice, as Toller attempted in Bavaria, that its inner contradictions arose. Sure that man could be saved, they neglected the possibility that man may not wish salvation. Convinced that force could be replaced by cooperation, they overlooked the ubiquity of aggression.^[59] They yearned for, but were never able to attain, that which they so ardently desired.

In their cries of revolt and desire for transformation, the expressionists were calling for an end to social fragmentation. No more would there exist isolated and suffering individuals. In the place of such a fragmented society, the image was set up of the union of all men: not that which separated but that which united, not the new Darwinist struggle for existence but universal cooperation were to be the foundation of the new world. “I belong,” proclaimed Toller, “to those who fight ruthlessly against the defilement of the image of humanity.”^[60] The intensity of much expressionist prose and poetry was exceeded only by its raptures over such an image of humanity, one based on the brotherhood of man and not the selfish interests of the few.

The embrace of humanity, which Pinthus saw as the main motif of expressionism, was an attempt to overcome the alienation of the artist from society. Society was not to be changed directly; it was to be transcended through love. Lack of love, Friedrich observes, has twisted man’s personality. Those who cannot love are “sick, corrupted with disease.” The Sick Man in Die Wandlung laments his incapacity to believe in love and tragically bewails the fact that no one has ever loved him. A decade later, Toller saw only “one sin against the Spirit: to destroy among one’s neighbours the capacity for Love.”^[61] The expressionist concept of love, however, was not physical. The cerebral creativity of the artist that marked him off from society became submerged in his love of man. His creative mind allowed him to set up the universal essence of love abstracted from any one individual. The alienated writer could, therefore, give up the hostile real world for the more amenable world of abstract love divorced from any single person.^[62]

The expressionist emphasis on love, community, and regeneration was, in fact, the outcry of the artist in his suffering, an expression of his loneliness, and, at the same time, the joyful exclamation of his happiness at finding a way out of his painful isolation. Starting with estrangement, he finds acceptance.^[63] In this schema, regeneration stands for an end to alienation. For Toller, the Jewish outsider, seeking community feeling and wishing, as he wrote in his manifesto for the Bund, to end the separation of the intellectual from the nation, such ideas must have had particular fascination. Toller wished a reintegration of society into a totality, a spiritual unification that would complete Germany’s political unification. Love and regeneration are mystical invocations to this unity, a unity that rallies and roots the individual in the community. Thus, in his program for the Bund, Toller frequently invoked the idea of humanity and of a society liberated from the artificial bonds that separate man from man: “Only from an inner Wandlung of humanity can the Gemeinschaft for which we strive, grow.”^[64]

In addition to the role of the intellectual as spiritual mentor, activist expressionists found it an easy transition to the role of the intellectual as social leader. Oskar Kokoschka, one of the few expressionists known for his works of both literature and art, noted that “The concern is, after all, with . . . society; anything that does not lead to its solution has become senseless.”^[65] The society desired, however, was at times more a religious than a secular idea. Its messianic fervor was echoed in the expressionist writer Fritz von Unruh’s assertion that expressionist communalism was the attempt to communicate to all men “the one great holy vision of their deification.”^[66] The idea of regeneration perhaps received its classic example in the conversion of the apostle Paul, and at least one observer has seen a direct connection between the New Testament experience and expressionist Wandlung.^[67] Rejecting the supernatural basis of religion, expressionists frequently asserted the possibility that a regenerated society could be established on earth. The activists of expressionism rejected the Christian dichotomy of the things of Caesar and those of the Lord. Although the expressionist community was transcendental, it was, unlike that of paradise, attainable on earth. Supernatural religion was rejected in favor of the possibility that man himself might usher in a new age.

Toller frankly confessed both to the religious nature of his literature and those of his politics as well: “The basic prerequisite of the political writer (who somehow always is a religious writer) is: to feel responsible for himself and every one of his brothers in the human community. Once again: one who feels himself responsible for all.”^[68] For Toller, religion became the responsibility of the individual for humanity and art became merged into politics; the goal of political activity, then, becomes the realization of religion. The image of an Old Testament was never far from Toller. From the heights of an expressionist Pisgah, it seems he had caught a fleeting yet alluring glimpse of a future and took it upon himself to lead his people out of the corrupt wilderness of the present and into the pleasures of an expressionist promised land. Fighting for a new society, he sought a certain religious timelessness by binding himself to the present and instilling in that present society the vision of its future.^[69] Dedicated to an “idea,” a vision of a regenerated humanity, the writer as prophet works at making his idea a reality. Spokesman for the inarticulate, he obeys the demands of spirit, that high moral imperative toward human self-realization. The writer or intellectual became for Toller the director of action, one who shows society its faults and points it in a new direction “when the times betray the spirit.”^[70]

It is Toller’s evocation of the word spirit (Geist) that plays a central role in his later critique of German society and, in addition, gives Toller’s thought an abstract quality, indeed at times even an irrational one. Geist or “the idea” (Toller uses the words synonymously) is a universal and timeless ethical postulate: “They exist beyond the social classes, for they reveal the relationship between man and the universe.”^[71] Unlike naturalism, which aimed at representing a mirror of the world, expressionism sought to probe more deeply into the nature of reality and convey the transcendental quality of existence that naturalism’s attention to surface detail tended to neglect. At times, the expressionist could border on mysticism. Toller, for example, wrote with pleasure of those dream-like times when “we are not clearly conscious either of ourselves or of the rest of our earthly bustle. We feel ourselves mysteriously separated from all connection with reality and resting lightly, who knows in what middle place, at last in the reach of our final, our nearest, our furthest aim, that no tongue names and no truth stammers.”^[72]

Like the dreaming mind, in expressionism reality became distorted, exaggeration became commonplace and, at times, even bordered on the grotesque. Inner reality took on a more real quality than the external world of everyday objects. Concerned with the ineffable, the expressionist became an idealist paradoxically seeking to communicate the incommunicable feeling of transcendental experience. Paul Kornfeld, one of the leading expressionists, contrasted the “psychological man” who could be portrayed and the “souled man” who could only be felt.^[73] The power of such a “felt” force was a central one to the genre. The demands of reality and those of Geist were in continual conflict, and the intellectual, himself imbued with Geist, was called upon to fight an incessant battle with the practical demands of society. A genuine cooperative society was only to be attained when the demands of the spirit coincided with those of the world. The personal vision of the intellectual took on a particularly important function since it was only through the creative artist that such a community could come about.^[74]

Pinthus’s dichotomy between spirit and reality was evident in the concept of Wandlung. The transformation was from man as he is into the higher reality of man as he ought to be. Friedrich’s “distorted images” become “real men,” with the sensitive artist performing Pinthus’s role of the intellectual as missionary of the spirit. In his role as an intellectual, Toller saw as one of his main tasks a struggle against that which “denies the spirit.”^[75] It is the duty of the intellectual, asserted Toller, to make men conscious of their true nature. For Toller, lack of Geist distorts humanity; all social classes are equally affected, and the writer-intellectual has “no right to close his eyes to the tragedy of human life which is to be found among the middle-class as well as among the proletariat.”^[76] All classes are deformed and dehumanized, unwittingly subject to forces that deny their true nature. Even the rich, asserts Toller’s Friedrich, have hearts and are a part of the human community.

Attractive as such a spiritual community was, the legacy of Geist could be contradictory, and expressionism split between an “abstractionist” and an “activist” conception of the role that Geist should play in social life. Walter Sokel, in his study of expressionism, has observed how the activist abstractly:

The abstractionist, therefore, asserts the primacy of Geist within himself. Spirit and reality become two separate spheres. For the activist, on the other hand, reality is not accepted and contemplation becomes linked with social change. The sensitive intellectual rebels against society and seeks to alter it through an infusion of Geist. The activist was a Utopian, but nevertheless one impatient with Utopias relegated to the distant future; for him, social transformation was imminent, to be born through spiritual conversion. The task of the activist-intellectual, then, is to unite the concerns of the present with those of the spirit and in the process make the intellectual into an agent for social change. Thus, for the true writer, according to Toller, literature is the “obligation to fight, because the word, created by Geist, is the highest means of influencing human beings.”^[78]

In short, activism asserted the primacy of the intellect and at the same time attempted to unite Geist with political involvement.^[79] The movement had no well-defined program; indeed, there were probably as many activisms as there were activists. Their only dogma was “intellectual honesty and an uncompromising desire to say the truth.”^[80] Yet the movement was not all intellectual chaos. Activists asserted that intellect (and, hence, the intellectual) had a place in social development and sought to bring mind and society into close contact. In Heinrich Mann’s novel Zwischen den Rassen, for example, its activist hero opposes the unintellectual society in which he lives. Based on force, the intellectual seeks to change it through the power of his mind. He will succeed in his self-proclaimed task only by asserting the power of his spirit through social action. By so doing, he performs his social function, regenerating both himself and society as well. The activist idea on the role of the intellectual greatly influenced Toller’s own self-image of the task of the writer. “We often ask ourselves,” he wrote, “can art influence reality? Can the writer at his desk influence the politics of his time? There are authors who answer this question in the negative; I in the affirmative.”^[81] Toller was, of course, speaking of his own intellectual development, but his affirmation is also a suitable symbol representing the activist generation. Littérature engagée is hardly the invention of existentialist authors. It is part of an age born during World War I that found itself abruptly experiencing Stephen Dedalus’s nightmare and a formulation by those who desired to transform anguish into action. Literature became aggressive, concerned not with analysis but with change. Sometimes lyrically naïve but always militant, belief in the “power of the word” to change society became the common property of many German intellectuals toward the end of the war. They wrote not in order to write, but in order to agitate. With Voltaire they would agree: “I have no need of a sword. I have a pen.”

In 1911, Heinrich Mann gave theoretic formulation to such ideas and produced what Kurt Hiller regarded as the first activist manifesto. Published in the journal Pan, Mann’s “Geist und Tat” was a spirited indictment of the passivity of German intellectuals who, in contrast to their French counterparts, were men content only to theorize and not to act.^[82] According to Mann’s argument, German intellectuals (Geister), although noted for the profundity of their thought, have been unable to abolish unjust power. Mostly antidemocratic and anti-parliamentarian, they have for too long been apologists for the status quo and “have glorified the Ungeist, worked for the sophistic justification of the unjust, and for [his] ‘the writer’s’ mortal enemy, power.”^[83] In contrast to the establishment intellectuals, Mann praised the writer. In direct opposition to the Literat tradition, which had assigned the writer an inferior social position, Mann set up the image of the writer so dear to activism. A constant fighter against social injustice, the writer’s duty was one “imposed by the spirit” to assert the dignity of humanity and dedicate his life to the pursuit of the truth. A destroyer of society’s false illusions, he makes the great seem small and the small see mirrored in themselves that basic human dignity too long denied them. The devotee of Littérature engagée proudly defended not only the respectability of the free writer, unattached to those in authority, but also the peculiar social role such men assigned themselves. Observed Mann:

Toller’s frequent use of the words Geist and Idea and his later indictment of Germany for “betrayal of the spirit” show a probable familiarity with Mann’s essay. Under the influence of Gustav Landauer, Toller would become even further committed to activism.^[85] Toller’s image of the role of the writer-intellectual owes a clear debt to activism, for Toller’s conception of the writer, like Mann’s, stood in stark contrast to those German intellectuals content only to theorize and not to act. The barrier separating words from deeds, expression from experience, was keenly felt, as was the attempt made to destroy it. Toller’s experience with Eugen Diederichs had already disillusioned him with much of German intellectual life: “I had been bitterly disappointed by my stay at Lauenstein. Great words were spoken, but nothing done.”^[86] His respect for traditional men of letters was further decreased when he wrote to Gerhart Hauptmann during the war calling on him to become the “spiritual leader” of youth and speak out against the government. Toller waited in vain for a reply. It was, in part, this experience that called forth his wrath ten years later against those intellectuals “too cowardly to take a simple stand.”^[87] Earlier, he had indicted German intellectuals (geistig Arbeiter) for “their blindness [to] social problems, their isolation from all contemporary forces, their time-tested inability to identify themselves with the lower classes.”^[88]

Against those locked away in “little ivory towers,” carefully isolated in tranquil contemplation from the dominant social forces of contemporary life, Toller set up the image of the writer as agitator, one who stimulates and strengthens the “will for freedom.”^[89] As for Mann, the purpose of literature was not to bring peace but change, and the writer was committed by his words and deeds to the fight against injustice, violence, and oppression. In his hands, art becomes a weapon, and the “fighting artist’s obligation [is] to fight, because the word, created by the spirit, is the highest means of influencing humanity . . .”^[90] Should the artist not partake in the struggles of contemporary history, according to Toller, he runs the danger “of becoming an aesthetic.”^[91] In a tribute to Henri Barbusse, similar to that Mann had paid to the French tradition personified in Voltaire, Toller favorably spoke of the tradition of the revolutionary poet, “one who, at the decisive moment, stands up from his desk and actively places himself against the injustice and misuse of power.” For the engaged author, to write was not a playful dream (“spielerisches Bilden”) but a fighting duty (“kämpferische Verpflichtung”).^[92] In an older society, Toller seemed to be saying, where institutions were more stable, literature might be unconcerned with society; now, however, if literature were to keep pace with history, it had to have a hand in making it.

Not content to be a detached spectator, the writer must become an active participant. As an active participant, Toller refused to exclude political themes from his work. When asked in 1928 whether drama should have a political bias (Tendenz), Toller thought the question “wrongly put. More correctly it should be: can drama not have a Tendenz?”^[93] Earlier, he had frankly confessed that there were no plays without political bearings.^[94] There was, however, the chance that such engaged literature could be used as party dogma, that art could become propaganda, the danger that in the precarious coalescence of art and politics, the exigencies of the latter would overwhelm the former. The accusation has been made that Toller was a victim of such a danger. Wrote one critic: “He could not distinguish between the theatre and a political platform.”^[95] Yet Toller himself was aware of such pitfalls and realized that good political literature needed literary craftsmanship not propaganda:

Toller’s defense of the political in literature was valid, although many of his fellow Germans might have resented the intrusions of contemporary affairs on the eternal concerns of literature. Yet the etchings of Goya are not inferior as art because they have political intent, nor does the intrusion of politics in Dostoyevsky’s The Possessed make it any less of a great novel, just as Picasso’s Guernica, a political protest, is no less a work of art. Yet the critic is forced to confess that, while Toller may have made a distinction between art and propaganda, his social fervor has contributed to the relative neglect of much of his work. Political literature belongs to its historic milieu, but, if it is to be eternal, it must also be autonomous enough to transcend its environment and appeal to a different generation. It must produce a timeless interchange between the author and his subsequent readers. Although clearly appealing to his own generation, Toller was unable to transcend his environment. For the historian, the fact that Toller’s plays reflect the times during which they were written makes them invaluable as historical documents, but the time-bound qualities of his work unfortunately do not make them into literary classics.

The experience of the war was particularly decisive in the development of Toller’s ideas on the role of the writer in society. It became the duty of all those who took part to reveal the false romanticism of a mentality that glorified conflict. For those who had gone through the war, Toller wrote: “The chaos of the time is mirrored in our work. We did not want to bring peace and order, but we wanted to create unrest. We wanted, in Hebbel’s words, to stir the world from its sleep.”^[97]

To the emerging young dramatist, the theater was particularly well suited to perform this role. Unlike the novel, its appeal was more widespread; unlike poetry, it was less esoteric. In common with many expressionists, Toller shared the view that the theater was not just a place of entertainment. The stage had ethical tasks; it “arouses the listener’s will to revolutionary activity; it causes him to commit himself for the struggle against present injustice.”^[98] Particularly in a time of great social change, it was “a crime to see only nuance and present only fine shadings which illuminate life while concealing with deceptive embellishments the hideous and plain contours of commonplace existence.”^[99]

The popular appeal of drama made the theater into a didactic institution, a place of moral edification that could serve to alter social conditions and end that pernicious separation Toller saw existing between the intellectual and the nation: “What we dream of is a great Gemeinschaft between stage and public, a Gemeinschaft of a feeling for life, for the world, the Gemeinschaft of the Idea. . . .”^[100] Toller’s view of the educational function of drama was not the exclusive invention of expressionism. Since Lessing, the theater had been viewed in Germany as a place that could spread moral and social standards. Notes one observer:

In this tradition, the twenty-four-year-old Toller had written his first play, Die Wandlung. Started in 1917 and finished early the following year, he candidly considered it:

Die Wandlung is Toller’s only optimistic play.^[103] The contradictions between pacifism and love of humanity and between war and cruelty are starkly outlined. In his later works, there is much more ambiguity, and the proposed moral solutions offered become more tragic. The play reflected Toller’s entire background—his Jewishness, his alienation from the German nation, and his own personal transformation. It was a representation of an ideology as yet untouched by the experience he met when the attempt was made in the Munich of 1919 to make that crucial and ultimately disappointing transition from theory to practice. His concern with the suffering fraternity of mankind had shown the urgency of ending war; the ideals of expressionism pointed the way toward a vision, ecstatic and Utopian, that was to be attained by the regeneration of society. When the emotional excesses of his ideas finally gave way to somber reality, the experience was profoundly discouraging; yet, for the rest of his life, anguish and despair were tempered by his hope for a new future, and, up to the last years of his life, he retained a touching and, one is forced to confess, naïve faith in many of the ideals formulated before the Bavarian revolution proved them utterly impractical.

Toller’s Die Wandlung opens with Friedrich, a young middle-class Jew, caught between a religion that marks him as an outsider and a passionate desire to be like “the others.” He soon finds a way out of his dilemma and volunteers to fight in a colonial war. Here, he hopes to prove himself a genuine member of the nation. The vision of a community of the Fatherland repeatedly enables him to risk his life in battle and to resist the disgruntled mutterings of his fellow soldiers who denounce the war and the nation that has sent them to die. Friedrich’s gallantry in battle is rewarded with a decoration, and he is temporarily allowed to feel that finally he “belongs” and is one of “them.” His newly found feeling allows him to overlook a slight pang of conscience when he hears the tumultuous celebrations of his comrades who rejoice at the killing of 10,000 of the enemy.

After the war, Friedrich turns to sculpture and begins work on a large statue of a man to be called “Victory of the Fatherland.” Friedrich, however, soon begins to see the effects of war. When he meets a beggar and her husband, now made a cripple through a venereal infection caught during the war, Friedrich begins to become aware of the degrading effects of conflict and hatred. He destroys his statue and, out of sheer despair, contemplates suicide but is saved by his sister, who performs a role similar to Dante’s Beatrice and points the way toward God, whom she has found realized in humanity. Friedrich renounces patriotism; he now attaches himself to mankind and finds the true nature of community. Possessed of Geist, he dedicates his life to the reawakening of his fellow man.

Friedrich is soon presented with the opportunity to transform others. At a mass meeting, a communist agitator receives an enthusiastic response when he advocates class dictatorship and violent revolution as the only way to overthrow an unjust society. The crowd becomes a mob ready to march, but Friedrich appears and pleads they reconsider their decision. He denounces the agitator as one who has no faith in humanity, one who can offer only the cold materialism of bread and not the inner warmth of regeneration, one whose ideas of class war will only bring more misery. In opposition to this, Friedrich puts forth a vision of a new society: “No more suffering, no war, no hate.”^[104] The next day, when the crowd reassembles, Friedrich forcefully advocates the ideas of transformation. He knows of the poverty-stricken and empty lives of the young and old, the rich and poor—all are distorted images of their real selves. They have built the “evil phantoms” of state, church, and materialism and allowed them to rule over society:

His words have their effect. During his speech, there is an ever-increasing agitation among the crowd. Some have piously kneeled down; others are openly weeping and have buried their heads in their hands. At the end, they rise in great gladness and open their arms to heaven. There is now the final, profound realization that they had forgotten their humanity. Redeemed through Friedrich, they are ready to use their spirit to march against the forces of injustice and oppression and destroy the “false castles of illusion”:

The ideas expressed in the play represent Toller’s ideology before his participation in the Bavarian revolution and need to be carefully examined.^[107] Antiwar in nature, the drama is also avowedly revolutionary. It attacks religion, the state, nationalism, militarism—indeed, the whole configuration of social and political relations. Religion and the state encourage hatred and war. The economic order encourages an obnoxious and destructive materialism rather than human welfare. All institutions enslave and corrupt not only the body but, more importantly, the spirit. Die Wandlung demands the overthrow of a society that allows such conditions to exist; it asks for nothing less than total revolution. Yet Toller, the pacifist, believer in universal peace and brotherhood, was not prepared to resort to physical force. Resort to violence is contrary to the whole thrust of the play. War and injustice are to be overcome through spirit, by the impact of a regenerated humanity. Thus, Toller’s hero opposes appeals to revolution based on hatred and class conflict. As victims of an unjust social order, all men are united in that vast union of humanity, and Toller reserved his greatest strictures against those who sought to deny that essential unity. The communist agitator who advocates proletarian violence appeals only to the undifferentiated crowd: “For him the people are the masses; he knows nothing of the people as men and women. Have no faith in him, for he has no faith in humanity. And before you set out on your great march, you must have faith in humanity.”^[108]

Unable to distinguish Masse from Volk, the agitator stands for class conflict and a materialism incapable of satisfying the spiritual needs of man. Friedrich, on the other hand, addresses himself to the Volk, the totality of humanity without class distinction. It is the Volk who realize that all men, regardless of class, are brothers; it is they who enthusiastically respond to Friedrich’s vision of a humanity regenerated. Friedrich’s revolution is one of Wandlung, a revolution of love.

The battles of World War I aided the cause of modernism in art and Utopianism in politics by their promise that a new world was at hand. Particularly during the last two years of the war, the prophetic theme came to play an ever more central role in German expressionism. Whether the individual author was optimist or pessimist, violent or, like Toller, humanitarian and pacifist, the hope seldom varied: man must be redeemed by suffering and living, that man must be purified and give birth to a higher species.^[109]

In the months before November 1918, this apocalyptic strain of chiliastic revolutionary change through spiritual conversion received renewed impetus by a belief in neuer Geist—an intensified conviction that a new world, a genuine step in the direction of Paradise, was at hand.^[110] Neuer Geist was the expression of a passionately if vaguely held idealism that led to a heightening of activist expressionism. New periodicals soon responded to the call of the new spirit. The newly established Neue Blätter für Kunst und Dichtung in July 1918 featured an article by Walter Hasenclever on the activist aspects of art. Former literary journals such as Die neue Rundschau and Die Weltbühne increasingly turned toward questions of social and political reorganization.

The result of such revolutionary strivings could, and did, produce political chaos. Many expressionists declared themselves independent and would have agreed with Kurt Pinthus that the politics of mankind were above the politics of party.^[111] Yet the vagueness of what different expressionists desired from revolution allowed for a diversity of political opinions. Most of the activists were men of the Left. Karl Otten declared himself a Communist (one of the few openly to do so); Becher, Leonhard Frank, Rubiner, Pfemfert all belonged to the German Socialist Party.^[112] After the breakup of the Socialist Party in 1917, many like Toller attempted to find a political home in the new Independent Socialist Party of Germany (USPD). Yet the more mystical aspects of expressionism allowed a certain irrationalism that could equally as well find a home on the radical Right. Hanns Johst and Gottfried Benn with their nihilistic leanings, and Emil Nolde with his anti-Semitic and anti-French outlook, as well as his early participation in the Nazi party—the very antithesis of Toller—showed expressionism compatible with all political opinion. Commitment to passion transcended a narrow commitment to one political party. The vagueness of revolutionary phraseology allowed revolutions both of love and nihilism.

Particularly for those of the Left, the vagueness of their program was a fatal handicap when the attempt was made to put their ideas into practice. The Oh Mensch poetry of mankind, the vision of a new Paradise, was a mélange of idealist, anarchist, and Bohemian theories that culminated in the demand for a Utopian community. Exactly how this community was to be reached was, of course, unclear. With no leader and no program, it was not surprising that the activist expressionist was invariably powerless, consigned to the borders of political life. During the revolution in Bavaria, for example, Heinrich Mann did organize a Rat Geistiger Arbeiter; however, perhaps the kindest words one could apply would be to call it ignored and ineffective. With Shelley, the activist might with rapt defiance insist that poets were the unacknowledged legislators of the world, yet they were of that most tragic species of lawgiver—legislators without a mandate.

While they had no program for revolution, the revolutionaries of the spirit, nevertheless, had a revolutionary program. Thus, when revolution finally did come to Germany, expressionists of all hues supported it. The Novembergruppe, founded in December 1918, attracted expressionists from Nolde to Toller. “The future of art and the seriousness of this hour force us revolutionaries of the spirit . . . toward unity and close cooperation,” announced their manifesto.^[113] While many joined the group, few were given the opportunity actually to take part in the mechanics of revolution. Toller, however, was one of the few intellectuals who not only supported revolution but actually had a hand in making one and leading it. Although an utter failure, it was important for several reasons.

In June 1919, a Congress of Activists had met in Berlin. Like other activist organs, it, too, was politically ineffective. The only genuine experiment in the application of expressionist ideals on social reorganization occurred in Bavaria. The earliest and most radical of the German revolutions, it was only here that a peculiar constellation of forces created the opportunity that for a time made it appear that perhaps the expressionist Wandlung had finally come. Its failure in May 1919 was the practical collapse of activism; it certainly signified the end of any genuine left-wing revolutionary possibilities for German society.

The attempt to merge Geist with Tat was to prove a failure. To the poet-revolutionary, Ernst Toller, the practical necessities of revolutionary activity were to be profoundly disappointing. The gap between theory and reality, which Friedrich had found nonexistent, proved for Toller to be unbridgeable. Toller soon found that the demands of the intellectual and those of the politician increasingly diverged. Activism was a theory that made the poetic or intellectual self half of a split personality. In theory, poetry was to merge with politics. The future society, as Gustav Landauer saw it, was to be characterized by “strongly connected Geist” and “the power of the Spirit will step in the place of the brutal power of the sword.”^[114] After the clash of poetry and politics in Bavaria, it became increasingly difficult for Toller to keep up his poetic function, his view of the writer as social leader whose Geist can save society, his ideas that Geist could influence matter. Toller’s later writings and activity show a remarkably honest, poignant, and tragic narration of the difficulties of remaining an intellectual in the twentieth century.

In November 1918, however, such disappointments still lay in the future. Toller expected the German revolution to realize those ideals that the activist wished and the revolution would guarantee. It was, then, with a bright expectancy that some writers greeted the events of November. The enthusiasm with which most intellectuals had greeted the outbreak of war was repeated in their welcome of revolution. Writer René Schickele hoped for “a new world” and a “liberated mankind.” For Schickele:

Schickele’s view was shared among many intellectuals. Germany had experienced a revolution, something it had not had in seventy years. The activists were determined that this particular revolution would not, like the abortive revolutions of 1848, be a failure. With Toller’s Friedrich, they could shout: “Brothers, stretch out your tortured hands. With cries of radiant, ringing joy! / Stride freely through our liberated land. With cries of Revolution, Revolution!”

The young author did not know then that he was starting a new life, one that had sprouted in the trenches of World War I, had grown, and was about to be harvested in an event that would tear Germany apart and determine the future course of Ernst Toller’s life.

Notes

Kurt Sontheimer, Antidemokratisches Denken in der Weimarer Republik (Munich: Nymphenburger, 1968), 39.

Fritz Stern, The Politics of Cultural Despair (New York: Doubleday, 1965), 16–17.

Ernst Toller, introduction to Prosa, Briefe, Dramen, Gedichte (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1961), 7. Hereafter referred to as PBDG.

Wolfgang Paulsen, introduction to Der Dichter und seine Zeit: Politik im Spiegel der Literatur. Drittes Amherster Kolloquium zur modernen deutschen Literatur (Heidelberg: Stiehm, 1970), 7.

“Deeply ingrained in German literary criticism is the aversion against any art that somehow seems to lack an ideal metaphysical axis. Failure of a work to fit into a traditional frame of reference within a transcendent spiritual-intellectual sphere would almost automatically condemn it to rejection as slight.” William Pfeiler, German Literature in Exile: The Concern of the Poets (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1957), 7. See also Anthony Phelan, “Some Weimar Theories of the Intellectual,” in The Weimar Dilemma: Intellectuals and the Weimar Republic (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 1985), and Wolf Lepenies’ excellent book, The Seduction of Culture in German History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006).

See Klaus Schreiner, “Messianism in the Political Culture of the Weimar Republic,” in Toward the Millennium: Messianic Expectations from the Bible to Waco, edited by Peter Schäfer and Mark R. Cohen (Leiden: Brill 1998), 311.

Ludwig Kahn, “Goethe and the Problem of Leben and Geist in German Literature,” German Life and Letters 6, no. 4 (1953): 239–40.

Jacques Droz, “L’Allemagne et la Révolution française,” Revue Historique 198 (1947): 177.

Fritz Ringer, The Decline of the German Mandarins: The German Academic Community, 1890–1933 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970), 20–21.

10.

Stern, The Politics of Cultural Despair, 259.

11.

Carl Zuckmayer, A Part of Myself (New York: Harcourt, Brace Jovanovich, 1970)_,188.

12.

C. D. Innes, Erwin Piscator’s Political Theatre: The Development of Modern German Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 1972), 11.

13.

There did exist inactive expressionists. Herwarth Walden’s Der Sturm (Berlin, 1925), for example, asserted the independence of expressionism from attempts to employ it for social ends. Albert Soergel classified activism and aesthetic expressionism as the two wings of the expressionist movement. See Dichtung und Dichter der Zeit (Leipzig: R. Voigtländers, 1925), 27.

14.

For a sociological analysis of expressionist authors, see Helmut Grüber, “The Politics of German Literature, 1914–1933: A Study of the Expressionist and Objectivist Movements” (unpublished PhD dissertation, Columbia University, 1962), 12.

15.

John Willett, Expressionism (New York: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1970), 7; Walter Sokel, ed., Anthology of German Expressionist Drama: A Prelude to the Absurd (New York: Cornell University Press, 1963), xi–xii; Ernst Toller, Letter to T. D., 1920, in Look Through the Bars: Letters from Prison, Poems and a New Version of “The Swallow Book” (New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1937), 47.

16.

“Kunst and Wissenschaft,” Münchener Zeitung, February 2, 1917.

17.

Ernst Toller, “Ruckblick,” Berliner Tageblatt, December 23, 1928.

18.

Richard Brinkmann, Expressionismus: Forschungs–probleme, 1952–1960 (Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, 1961), 5.

19.

Ernst Toller, “Bemerkungen zum deutschen Nachkriegsdrama,” Die literarische Welt 5, no. 16 (1929): 9.

20.

Egbert Krispyn, Georg Heym: A Reluctant Rebel (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1968), 2.

21.

See Arno Mayer’s suggestive essay, “Domestic Causes of the First World War,” in The Responsibility of Power: Historical Essays in Honor of Hajo Holborn, edited by Leonard Krieger and Fritz Stern (New York: Macmillan, 1967).

22.

Henry Hatfield, Modern German Literature: The Major Figures in Context (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1968), 1.

23.

Robert Musil, Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1952), 56, cited in Hatfield, Modern German Literature, 59.

24.

Roger Shattuck, The Banquet Years: The Origins of the Avant-Garde in France, 1885 to World War I (New York: Vintage Books, 1968), 352–53.

25.

Shattuck, The Banquet Years, 334.

26.

Kurt Pinthus, ed., Menschheitsdämmerung: Symphonie jüngster Dichtung (Berlin: E. Rowohlt, 1919), xiv–xv.

27.

Jost Hermand, “Expressionismus als Revolution,” in Von Mainz nach Weimar (1793–1919) (Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, 1969), 311.

28.

Albert Ehrenstein, Der Mensch schreit (Leipzig: Kurt Wolf, 1916), 186.

29.

Armin Arnold, Der Literatur des Expressionismus: Sprachliche und thematische Quellen (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1966), 16–27.

30.

Many observers attested to Toller’s emotionalism. Harry Kessler, for example, noted in his diary that “Toller in conversation is hyper-excitable and touchy to a degree, speaks softly and stares at his interlocutor with glowing eyes.” Harry Kessler, In the Twenties: The Diaries of Harry Kessler (New York: Holt, Reinhart and Winston, 1971), 277.

31.

Ernst Toller, “Bemerkungen zum deutschen Nachkriegsdrama,” 9.

32.

Ludwig Meidner, Septemberschrei: Hymnen, Gebete, Lästerungen (Berlin: Paul Cassirer, 1920), 15.

33.

Cited in Victor Miesel, Voices of German Expressionism (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1970), 13; Willett, Expressionism, 63.

34.

Toller, “Bemerkungen zum deutschen Nachkriegsdrama,” 9.

35.

Cited in Peter Gay, Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), 114.

36.

Walter Laqueur, “Reflections on Youth Movements,” in Out of the Ruins of Europe (New York: Library Press, 1971), 114.

37.

Kurt Wais, Das Vater-Sohn-Motiv in der Dichtung (Berlin: W. de Gruyter, 1931), quoted by Krispyn, Georg Heym, 9.

38.

Cited in Gay, Weimar Culture, 112.

39.

Ernst Toller, “Konflikte der Jugend in Deutschland,” in Quer Durch: Reisebilder und Reden (Berlin: Kiepenheuer, 1930), 258.

40.

Walter Laqueur, Young Germany: A History of the German Youth Movement (New York,

Basic Books, 1962), xi.

41.

Toller, quoted by Howard de Forest, “Pacifist in Exile,” The Living Age 351 (February 1937): 507.

42.

Toller, Eine Jugend, in PBDG, 47; Toller, “Bemerkungen zum deutschen Nachkriegsdrama,” 9; Ernst Toller, Die Wandlung, in PBDG, 246.

43.

See his postwar poem “To the Mothers,” in Look Through the Bars, 8.

44.

Toller, Eine Jugend, in PBDG, 77.

45.

Toller, Eine Jugend, in PBDG, 99.

46.

Just old enough to serve in the army—a fact that may help account for the decline of expressionism during the early twenties. Some of its best writers were killed. In the first two years of war, Alfred Lichtenstein, August Macke, Ernst Stadler, Georg Trakl, and August Stramm, had all fought—and died. Willett, Expressionism, 104.

47.

Rubiner, “Der Mensch in der Mitte,” in Anthology of German Expressionist Drama, edited by Sokel, 3–4.

48.

Helmut Grüber, “The Political-Ethical Mission of German Expressionism,” German Quarterly 40, no. 2 (1967): 195.

49.

Toller, Eine Jugend, in PBDG, 89.

50.

See Pinthus, ed., introduction to Menscheitsdämmerung, 23.

51.

Pinthus, ed., Menscheitsdämmerung, 27.

52.

Toller, Die Wandlung, in PBDG, 284–85.

53.

Toller, Die Wandlung, in PBDG, 283.

54.

Grüber, “The Politics of German Literature,” 18.

55.

René Schickele, “Wie verhält es sich mit dem Expressionismus?” Die Weissen Blätter 7 (August 1920): 339.

56.

Walter Hasenclever, “Der politische Dichter,” in Menschheitsdämmerung, edited by Pinthus, 215.

57.

Hasenclever, “Der politische Dichter,” in Menschheitsdämmerung, edited by Pinthus, 215.

58.

Quoted by Helmut Grüber, “The Political-Ethical Mission of German Expressionism,” 192.

59.

Grüber, “The Political-Ethical Mission of German Expressionism,” 192.

60.

Toller, Letter to Stefan Zweig, 1921, in Look Through the Bars, 73.

61.

Ernst Toller, “Art and Life: From my Notebook,” London Mercury 32, no. 192 (1935): 460.

62.

Walter Sokel, The Writer in Extremis: Expressionism in Twentieth Century German Literature (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1958), 117.

63.

Sokel, The Writer in Extremis, 159.

64.

Ernst Toller, “Leitsätze für einen Kulturpolitischen Bund der Jugend in Deutschland,” Menschen Montagsblatt-Dresden, no. 26 (June 16, 1919).

65.

Quoted by Sokel, The Writer in Extremis, 147.

66.

Quoted by Sokel, The Writer in Extremis, 147.

67.

Arnold, Der Literatur des Expressionismus, 61. See also Wayne Cristaudo, Messianism, Apocalypse and Redemption in 20th Century German Thought (Adelaide, Australia: ATF Press, 2006), and Lisa Marie Anderson, German Expressionism and the Messianism of a Generation (New York: Rodopi, 2001).

68.

Ernst Toller, “Bemerkungen zu meinem Drama Die Wandlung,” Tribüne der Kunst und Zeit 13 (1919): 46–47.

69.

Erich Heller, “The Writer’s Image of the Writer: A Study in the Ideologies of Six German Authors, 1918–1933” (unpublished PhD dissertation, Columbia University, 1951), 116.

70.

Ernst Toller, “Rede auf dem Pariser Kongress der Schriftsteller am 25. Juli 1938,” Das Wort 3, no. 10 (1938): 124.

71.

Toller, Quer Durch, 167.

72.

Toller, Letter “To Tessa,” Niederschönenfeld, 18.5.21, in Look Through the Bars.

73.

See Sokel, The Writer in Extremis, 52.

74.

For a statement of this position, see Kurt Pinthus, “Rede für die Zukunft,” Die Erhebung 1 (1919): 411.

75.

Toller, Letter to Kurt Tucholsky, 1921, in Look Through the Bars, 82.

76.

Toller, Letter to Siegfried Jakobson, Niederschönenfeld, 1920, in Look Through the Bars, 49.

77.

Soke1, The Writer in Extremis, 175–76.

78.

Toller, Quer Durch, 278–79.

79.

See Lewis Wurgaft, “Kurt Hiller and the Activist Program” (unpublished PhD dissertation, Harvard University, 1970), and Wolfgang Rothe, introduction to Der Aktivismus, 1915–1920 (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch, 1969). See also Eva Kolinsky, Engagierter Expressionismus: Politik und Literatur zwischen Weltkrieg und Weimarer Republik (Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, 1970).

80.

Rothe, Der Aktivismus, 12.

81.

Toller, Quer Durch, 295.

82.

In later essays on Voltaire and Zola, Mann further unfavorably contrasted the French with the German literary tradition. Voltaire in particular was praised for placing himself at the head of those who opposed power. Goethe, on the other hand, only looked out from his “Olympian heights of detachment.” His work, his thoughts, his name in Germany changed nothing. Behind his coffin, there is no Calas family. Heinrich Mann, Essays (Hamburg: Claassen, 1960), 19. Mann may have exaggerated. Voltaire was not averse to accepting financial support from the powerful. Mann also seems to have overlooked how much both he and Goethe shared. Goethe, too, rejected narrow German nationalism. Moreover, at a time when many were surrendering to anti-Western Germanophilism, he firmly remained an adherent of Weltbürgertum and refused to engage in the beginnings of a widespread German intellectual arrogance that contrasted German depth and spirituality with “superficial” French culture. Indeed, like Mann, Goethe had much praise for the French. The intellectual milieu of later years, however, was closer to Mann’s analysis.

83.

Mann, “Geist und Tat,” in Essays, 13.

84.

Mann, “Geist und Tat,” in Essays, 14.

85.

This is given further treatment in chapter 5.

86.

Toller, Eine Jugend, in PBDG, 78.

87.

Toller, Quer Durch, 270.

88.

Ernst Toller, “Die Künsterkolonie,” Die Weltbühne 24, no. 46 (1928): 754.

89.

Toller, Letter to Siegfried Jakobson, Niederschönenfeld, 1920, in Look Through the Bars, 49.

90.

Toller, Quer Durch, 272, 296.

91.

Ernst Toller, “Auf dem Wege zur Kunst,” Das Programm der Piscatorbühne, no. 1 (1927).

92.

Ernst Toller, “Henri Barbusse,” Die Weltbühne 25 (1929): 413.

93.

Toller, writing in Die Scene 18 (1928): 329.

94.

Toller, Letter to Editor of the Tagebuch, 14.4.24, in Look Through the Bars, 302.

95.

Stanley Kunitz and Howard Haycraft, eds., Twentieth Century Authors (New York: H. W. Wilson, 1942), 1410.

96.

Toller, Quer Durch, 287–88.

97.

Toller, “Rede auf dem Pariser Kongress der Schriftsteller,” 123.

98.

Ernst Toller, “Ein Wort für Finkelnberg,” Das Wort 3, no. 6 (1938): 122–26.

99.

Toller, Quer Durch, 268.

100.

Ernst Toller, “Zur Revolution der Buhne,” Die Rampe (Olmütz) 1, no.1 (1923–1924).

101.

Innes, Erwin Piscator’s Political Theatre, 11.

102.

Ernst Toller, “Bemerkungen zu meinem Drama Die Wandlung,” 46–47.

103.

For a discussion of Toller’s dramatic work, see Cecil Davies, The Plays of Ernst Toller: A Revaluation (Amsterdam: Harwood Academic, 1996).

104.

Toller, Die Wandlung, in PBDG, 277. Cecil Davies, “Ernst Tollers Dramen als ‘Engagierte Literatur,’” in Engagierte Literatur zwischen den Weltkriegen, edited by Stefan Neuhaus, Rolf Selbmann, and Thorsten Unger (Würzberg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2002), 269.

105.

Toller, Die Wandlung, in PBDG, 284.

106.

Toller, Die Wandlung, in PBDG, 284–85. The play is a particularly difficult work to summarize adequately, and the above covers only the main plot. Toller had scattered throughout the play a series of dream-like scenes that symbolically represented Friedrich’s path to regeneration. In one, for example, a “wanderer” with Friedrich’s face is surrounded by a thick fog. In a later scene, the fog has vanished. A mountain climber, again Friedrich’s features, joyfully climbs to the summit. The process of the hero’s rebirth is thus suggested by a series of episodic scenes ranging from pessimistic and sordid, before Wandlung, to ecstatic regeneration after. In the end, it is the reborn hero who, after enduring his inner conflicts, emerges to preach the gospel of humanity and inner transformation.

107.

W. A. Willibrand, Ernst Toller and his Ideology (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1945), 39–41.

108.

Toller, Die Wandlung, in PBDG, 276.

109.

Gay, Weimar Culture, 113.

110.

See Wurgaft, “Kurt Hiller and the Activist Program,” 150–69.

111.

Kurt Pinthus, “Zur jüngsten Dichtung,” in Vom jüngsten Tag: Ein Almansch neuer Dichtung (Leipzig: Kurt Wolff, 1917), 244.

112.

Grüber, “The Political-Ethical Mission of German Expressionism,” 70.

113.

Cited in Bernard Myers, The German Expressionists: A Generation in Revolt (New York: Praeger, 1966), 220.

114.

Quoted by Ulrich Linse, Organisierter Anarchismus im deutschen Kaiserreich von 1871 (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1969), 282.

115.

Quoted by István Deák, Weimar Germany’s Left-Wing Intellectuals: A Political History of the Weltbühne and Its Circle (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), 74.