3

The Literary Movements

Many prominent artistic movements, that became well-known after 1945, began during the war itself. They reflected projects that had been kept on hold because of censorship.30 Most of these “movements” were informal and at first did not think of themselves as movements or organized groups at all. French Existentialism, “Neo-Realism” in Italy, the German “Group 47” (Gruppe 47), and the “Theater of the Absurd” became well-known later. Others were less familiar but no less distinctive: the Japanese “Wasteland” (Arechi) and A.S.A. groups, “The Movement” in England, the “War Generation” or “Columbuses” (Kolumbowie) in Poland, “Modernists” in Hungary, “Pickaxe and Spade” writers in Yugoslavia.31

Unlike the prewar avant-garde movements—Futurism, Dada, and Surrealism—the groups were not doctrinaire, and at first did not think of themselves as “groups” at all; they avoided programs, manifestoes, and group declarations, reacting against the ideology-inspired violence of the preceding years. Writing about Italian Neo-realism, Italo Calvino insisted “it is not a school.”32 What came to be called the “Theater of the Absurd” was at first a very loose grouping of writers that included both English- and non-English-speaking playwrights such as Samuel Beckett and Vaclav Havel. Martin Esslin noted that they were individuals who usually regarded themselves as lone outsiders.33

Some of the movements were short-lived, lasting only a few years; others like the German “Group 47” continued to be active as late as the 1970s. Both the Japanese Arechi (“Wasteland”) group and the Czech “Group 42” began to meet during the war itself. Probably we should not draw too sharp a line for the beginning and end of these movements, as all of their formative experiences predated 1945.

Almost all the groups were hostile to cohesive doctrines. This reflected their opposition to ideological abstractions they often identified with the causes of the war they just lived through. Some of the most original, striking movements developed in countries that were defeated in the war, and had been subjected to the most extreme abuse of language, distortions, and rhetoric. We consider here several of the informal movements: the German “Group 47,” Italian “Neo-Realism,” and the Japanese “Wasteland” or Arechi group.

Group 47, which later became one of the most influential literary groups in Europe, emerged in the ruins of a country that had caused much of the suffering in World War II. Gunter Eich became a member of Group 47, and he was the recipient of the first of a series of prizes given to contemporary writers.

One of the first concerns of German writers was language. Several wrote that people were surrounded by the “rubble” of language just as they were surrounded by the rubble of cities. They directed their revolt against the German language that had been abused, manipulated, and deformed during the past thirteen years. A metaphor repeated by writers in Germany during the years 1945–46 was Kahlschlag. Literally it meant “complete deforestation” or “clear-cutting.” It was a graphic image for the necessary “clearing out” of language. The main task was to remove the superfluous growth that had inundated the spoken and written German word. Language had been subordinated to the party’s needs, and became an instrument of control. Helmuth von Moltke, executed by the Nazis in 1942 for conspiring against the regime, wrote in his diary in 1941, “Words . . . serve the state.”34 The metaphor of “the clearing out of language” emphasized the necessity to start from zero. It was a need not just for change but complete change. The metaphor also applies to Eich’s poem “Inventory” written in a camp for prisoners of war—“This is my notebook, / This is my tent”—that expressed a revolt against rhetoric and inflationary language.

1945 marked the beginning of attempts to reformulate the German language. In an inaugural issue the editors of Die Zeit described “Our Task” in this way: “The years that lie behind us, especially the six years of war, have shut off the German reader from the world and surrounded him with a fog of propaganda.” The editors of Frankfurter Hefte wrote: “We—meaning the editors, staff, and readers included—wish to help all to clarify the opaque and the enigmatic, insofar as that is permitted to us as we emerge from the depths.” The philosopher Karl Jaspers noted at this time: “We can speak publicly with one another once again. Let us see what we have to say.”35

One of the most influential new newspapers was called Der Ruf (“The Call”) that later became the nucleus of Group 47. Its two principal editors, Alfred Andersch and Hans Werner Richter, wrote that they shared a desire to liberate German politics from “the totalitarian demands of doctrine” and “from empty abstractions.” They wanted to avoid an outlook either too mechanistic or too theoretical when confronted with the reality of “the concrete.” Andersch, Richter, and Eich were founding members of Group 47.

Although some readers saw in Eich’s poem “Inventory” a sort of declaration, Group 47 never adopted a formal program. This is one of the most unique features of the group, if it was a “group” at all. Texts were read aloud and debated. The group supplied badly needed contact and continuity to writers dispersed in a country that had no dominant cultural center. Richter noted: “Only (the possibility of) communication within one’s own circle remained—reading aloud and criticism as substitutes for a journal that we did not possess and for a literary public that did not exist.”

The movement had a long life, and almost all the major German writers attended its meetings at one time or another: Heinrich Boell, Eugen Kogon, Guenter Grass, Paul Celan, and Uwe Johnson.36 The group’s membership fluctuated. Richter wrote, “There was no program, no theme, no welcoming speeches, no rules, no ceremonial dinner, no treasurer’s report.” Nor were there dues, officers, or memberships. Anti-authoritarian in orientation, it did not exclude writers from behind the Iron Curtain, and welcomed every kind of literary project from realism to experimentalism.

Richter summoned the group to a meeting by ringing a cowbell. They took turns reading their works, the reader sitting in what was humorously called “the electric chair.” One participant recalled, “We squatted in unconventional fashion . . . on the floor, smoked tobacco that did not always smell very good, and read from our works . . . What the debaters lacked in subtlety of formulation they redeemed with their ruthless but friendly candor. No one took offense at another since we were united by a common goal: to indicate a new, realistic path for German literature, free from false emotional outpourings.” Probably an important reason for the group’s continued success was its lack of any narrow program.

One of the best-known artistic movements of all was Italian “Neo-Realism,” that produced some of the most famous films after the war: The Bicycle Thief, and Open City. It coincided with a flowering of literature and other arts. Almost all of the chroniclers of Neo-Realism agree that it was neither a “school” nor a movement.

Italo Calvino always used the term “Neo-Realism” in quotes. He wrote categorically, “‘Neo-Realism’ was not a school (We must try to state things precisely.). It was a collection of voices, largely marginal, a multiple discovery of the various Italys, even—or particularly—the Italys previously unknown to literature.”37 Calvino also spoke of an “atmosphere,” and “the anonymous voice of that time.” Critics have spoken of Neo-Realism as “a state of mind,” and “a catchword, a slogan, at best a kind of useful orientation.”38

Like other postwar cultural movements it was a pent-up, explosive reaction to what had preceded it. Several of the “postwar” movements were wartime movements postponed because of material obstacles and censorship. Calvino described the moment when Italy emerged from a world war that overlapped with another, civil war: “With our renewed freedom of speech, all at first felt a rage to narrate: in the trains that were beginning to run again, crammed with people and sacks of flour and drums of olive oil, every passenger told his vicissitudes to strangers, and so did every customer at the tables of the cheap restaurants, every woman waiting in line outside a shop. The grayness of daily life seemed to belong to other periods; we moved in a varicolored universe of stories.”

What Calvino called “the explosive charge of freedom that animated the young writer” came from the endurance of twenty-three years of Fascism. Toward the end it coincided with the presence of one of the largest resistance movements in Europe; the Resistenza Armata counted more than 200,000 men and women, dwarfing the French “Resistance.” Italian Fascism had made a cult of abstractions. Many refused to take its pretensions seriously, calling it “exhibitionistic narcissism.” As far back as 1925 Benedetto Croce had attacked Fascism for its loose inconsistent rhetoric: “(It was) an incoherent and bizarre mixture of appeals to authority and demagoguery, of proclaimed reverence for and actual violation of laws, of ultramodern concepts and moldy rubbish, of absolutist attitudes and bolshevist tendencies . . . of loathing for culture and sterile groping for culture without a basis, of mystic sentimentality and cynicism.”39 Fascism had followed another tradition dating back to the nineteenth century that was rhetorical and formal, erecting a high barrier between life and literature.40

This long period of deprivation explains Calvino’s insistence on the multitude of diverse “voices” clamoring to be heard, also why a desire to simplify language went hand in hand with a use of dialect. There was no contradiction between the two. The desire to cleanse language of the rhetorical excesses practiced for decades was best put by Ignazio Silone in his early novel Fontamara: “For our old Baroque culture it would be an immense good fortune if we could start from the beginning, recommence with fresh straw and clear water, if we could pick our way gingerly, putting big words (parolini) through a sieve one by one.”41

The postwar desire to cleanse language of the muddy distortions of propaganda was intense. Above all came the desire to return to honest, direct language, and communication. In Italy the abstractions were often more hollow than deadly; the antidote was a return to everyday speech with human voices. For Italian writers like Pavese and Pintor, language was the symbol of a great gap between an aristocratic and a popular culture. For generations symbolism and allegory were accepted as necessary literary tools. Now, writers sought a language that would speak to the masses and intellectuals alike, that would be inclusive and not exclusive. In a country riven by regional, political, and cultural differences, they would find a common tongue for men of good will.42

The emphasis on the spoken voice can be seen in the novel, the cinema, and poetry. Regional dialect was revived—dialect, voice, and sense of place merged. Calvino wrote of the discovery of “the variety of dialects”: “Local characterization was intended to give the flavor of truth to a depiction in which the whole wide world could be recognized.”43 Novels by Pratolini, Vittonini, Pavese, and Cassola published at the close of the war were about the lives of ordinary men and women. This was also true of the films of the period. A scenario writer, Cesare Zavattini, wrote: “The true function of the cinema is . . . to tell a reality as though it were a story: there must be no gap between life and what is on the screen.”44 The reaction against the old rhetorical tradition, that insisted on separating life and art, could not be more complete; now the two were a seamless continuum.

Much of the art of The Bicycle Thief and the early Rosselini films consisted in an apparent lack of illusion. The main ingredients of the style were shooting on location, use of natural lighting, and untrained, nonprofessional actors. The footage of Open City—a harsh depiction of the final days of the Resistance in Rome—included scenes of German soldiers taken secretly from rooftops at the actual time of their departure. The result was that each spectator became both a spectator and an eyewitness.

Neo-Realism stressed the concrete, the specific, and the tangible; in another part of the world, in Japan, other movements—“The Wasteland” (Arechi) and A.S.A.—discovered entirely new genres and forms. “Concrete poetry” was widely practiced. The pictorial nature of Japanese ideograms lent itself to this highly visual genre.45

The Japanese group “The Wasteland” is little known in English-speaking countries, yet it was one of the most original movements to re-emerge from the war. The group took its name from a translation of Eliot’s The Wasteland by Ayukawa as early as 1940. A small magazine was put out with that same title, which took from Eliot’s poem a central image but not all Eliot’s metaphysics. The magazine was suppressed, its title declared to be “dangerously negative.” The friends scattered.46 After the war the poet Tamura Ryuichi returned to Tokyo where he took a job editing children’s picture books. Soon he was using the second floor of the company as a meeting place of the new “Wasteland” group, and they revived the old Wasteland magazine.

The group was informal, enjoyed humor and parody, and had a whimsical side. A dominant characteristic of the group was skepticism. They doubted everything, and every value. Tamura insisted that the group was not nihilistic:

We were glad to be the living dead with nothing to lose. We wanted to question the basic Principles behind an industrial society based on the illusion of the isolation of the individual and the deification of economic growth based on war and imperialism. I tried to make my poems into holes or windows, to catch sight of the invisible spiritual waste as well as the obvious material destruction.47

Tamura’s main effort was to discover ways to bypass the old Japanese lyric mode that was anti-critical and antiphilosophical. He embarked on a frontal attack on prewar Japanese traditions. One device he discovered was creating fictional characters or personae in his poems. It was an attempt to break away from what he called the confessional monologue, the voice of authority that had obsessed prewar Japanese poets and novelists. Tamura wanted to wring the neck of this lonely, self-absorbed “I.” He would juxtapose it against other voices that violently collided with it and limited it, achieving honesty. Tamura wrote that the old “single-voiced” poet believed that he was a unique center of meaning: that his personal wounds were as absolute and beautiful as flowers.

Hence, Tamura claimed, the confessional and narcissistic prewar “I” was none other than the emperor himself. The emperor, whose countless imperial symbols such as the chrysanthemum and rising sun accompanied the Japanese Imperial armies and navies on their invasions abroad.

By extension, Tamura thought that the Second World War could be seen as the ultimate “lyric” poem. The war was the expression by a group—or the whole state—of the primacy of its own “me-feeling.” By means of the lyric, a poet reduced himself to a single “I.” Subjectivity, above all collective subjectivity, was the basis for authority. Through war, a nation could act as a single subject.

In support of Tamura’s thesis we could quote a poem written by Admiral

Ugaki of the battleship Yamato. After a victory in which he sank four American aircraft carriers and three battleships, he promptly retired to the solitude of his cabin and wrote three haiku poems:

After the battle I forgot the heat

while contemplating

the sixteen-day moon.

Contemplating the moon,

I mourn

the enemy’s sacrifice.

Beneath the moon

stretches a sea at whose bottom

lie many ships. 48

The Admiral, withdrawing to his cabin where he could contemplate the moon, was indeed conjuring up a lyrical and lonely poetic mood. Many Japanese admirals and generals wrote poetry of this type. According to Tamura the “I-” or “me-feeling” acquired absolute primacy.

The lyrical feeling described by Tamura recalls the German tradition of innerlichkeit or “inwardness”; Thomas Mann also criticized a tradition of “power-protected inwardness.”49 Tamura stressed that it required aggrandizement and action. Hence, expansionist war was the ultimate Iyric poem.

Tamura claimed that the most powerful modern Japanese “poem” ever written was the announcement of war by the Japanese High Command on December 8, 1941:

Before dawn this morning, the 8th, the Imperial

Army and Navy entered a condition of combat with

American and British forces in the Western Pacific.

Tamura claimed that no other Japanese poem had with so few words made so many people shudder so deeply.50

The identification of the “me-feeling” with expansionism and declaration of combat cut through thickets of rhetoric, euphemisms, propaganda, and mythology. It was an act of great daring. Tamura’s originality was to bring the Japanese High Command into the domain of poetry. His criticism was satirical, but at the same time deeply serious.

The Italian Neo-realists had also broken through a barrier separating art forms from contemporary events, introducing documentary footage and nonprofessional actors into a film; Tamura’s revolt against earlier wartime traditions was to point out the close connection between culture and war. They were not separated, there was no gap between the two, the war was a kind of “poetry.” Japanese society and the training of the ordinary soldier—with highly emotional, subjective ceremonies, symbols, and rituals—were pervaded by the “lyric” emotion he described. The surge toward expansionism depended on it. It required isolation from others, both “loneliness” and collective feeling at the same time.