OVERVIEW

The two most distinctive characteristics of the Expressionist movement in literature and drama were its theme of cultural regeneration and the self-conscious artificiality of its creative methods. The idea of renewal took on a variety of practical postures ranging from defiant, emotional rejection of Wilhelmine culture to mystical, spiritual transcendence of it. Accordingly, “Expressionism” manifested itself in markedly divergent forms, and this situation was no where more evident than in the theatre productions themselves. Stylistically, what most clearly linked the varieties of theatre performance which were called “Expressionist” was a firm rejection of the mimetic representation of social life in favor of an abstract, or at least overtly theatrical, rendering of it. Why Expressionism in the theatre developed a strategy of deliberate artificiality to effect its vision of social regeneration is the question this opening chapter will address. The short answer is that modern European anti-realist artists – the Germans not least – assumed that a revolution in aesthetic form amounted to a full scale cultural revolution. Why the Expressionists, in particular, made that assumption is the underlying question that requires a more detailed analysis of the particular sensibility which blossomed in young German artists and intellectuals in the first two decades of the twentieth century. The germs of that sensibility are to be found generally in the philosophical tradition shaped by Kant, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Bergson, and particularly in the socio-economic dynamics of middle-class Wilhelmine culture.