The lyric poetry in German culture since the 1870s is caught between polarities of aesthetic and political allegiance perhaps more extreme than in any other genre. Between an ethically responsible poetry engaged with the real and a poetry of privileged inwardness, there can, it seems, be little common ground. The conflict between these impulses is demonstrated with unique clarity in reactions to the Holocaust. Yet, reviewing the period as a whole, it is striking how this central opposition is reformulated time and again in shifting constellations. What links these different impulses is a knowing reflection on the self and the character of poetic creativity. That, it might be argued, defines the crucial signature of the modern.

A new poetry: paths out of the 'Gründerzeit'

The period from 1870 to 1890 saw a definitive change in German poetry. Wide-scale literacy programmes, technical innovations in printing and paper-production and the popularity of lending libraries and masscirculation family magazines created a new appetite for culture among the middle classes. The great names of the dominant Erlebnislyrik (poetry of experience), Theodor Storm and Gottfried Keller, published their final collections; the moral poetry of popular anthologies remained decorative but trivial; nationalist poets like Emanuel Geibel produced hymns of patriotic fervour and heroic cliche. Torn between inflated idealism and salon culture, the central problem for poetry as a genre was how to negotiate between public and private demands in a rapidly changing world.

The three concepts of Volkskultur, mass culture and alternative culture are seminal for an understanding of the history of German modernity. They reflect different conceptions of the popular and it is important to outline their functional significance within the development of German cultural, ideological and political history. Special attention is to be paid to the authors of high culture as both promoters and critics of popular culture in order to highlight the negotiation of attitudes between the educated classes and the rest of the population. Paradoxically, the varieties of 'low' culture are in some respects creations of the same elites who otherwise insist on keeping the sophisticated and reflexive culture of the minority separate from that of the majority. Just as folk culture, mass culture and alternative culture spell out distinct phases within the trajectory of modernity, so the relationship between the cultural intelligentsia and the mass of the people changes. While the three basic forms of popular culture today stand for parallel and intermixing trends within the diversification of contemporary civilisation, they arose within successive historical conjunctures which were laden with both liberating and fatal potential. The ideological functions of popular culture reveal most conspicuously the contradictory set of hopes and prejudices as well as the antagonistic discourses which accompanied civil society as it unfolded in Germany during the past couple of centuries.

Introduction

The two revolutions

T S. Eliot, like many other commentators, identifies two revolutions in the history of poetic language since 1776. The ‘revolution which Wordsworth announced in his prefaces’, conventionally known as the Romantic revolution, is commonly dated from the collaborative production of Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge in 1798. The second revolution – Modernism – has its equivalent landmark publication in Eliot's own The Waste Land of 1922, though the movement began over a decade earlier, with the arrival in London of Eliot's mentor Ezra Pound in 1908 and the impact of the first exhibition of Post-Impressionist painting in 1910.

In the years between 1910 and 1922, Eliot, Pound, and other members of their circle were anxious to stress the stylistic gulf dividing them from their nineteenth-century predecessors and to represent Modernism as a counter-revolution against Romanticism. But in (1), reviewing events from the retroperspective of the 1940s, Eliot emphasises instead the common ground between the two movements and defines this as ‘a return to common speech'. It's a definition that may seem paradoxical to those who share the belief, voiced by Larkin in (2), that Modernism fosters élitist and difficult forms of writing which remove literature from common speech:

Since 1871 Germany has had five different constitutions and six different forms of the state - monarchical and republican, democratic and dictatorial, federal and unitary, divided and unified. There are no countries where the exercise of political authority and the perception of civil rights derive solely from the letter of the law or the structure of institutions; they depend as much on mentalities, traditions and conventions. It is difficult enough to maintain a consensus on such matters in countries with stable constitutional systems, like Britain or the United States. It is therefore hardly surprising that the roles of the state and the citizen and the rival claims of order and liberty are subject to dispute and misunderstanding in a country like Germany, with its broken constitutional history.

Imperial Germany, 1871-1918

The Empire that was proclaimed in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles on 18 January 1871 was the first approximation to a nation state in German history. Yet it had come into being not through popular acclamation or plebiscite, but through Prussian military victories. It was a nation state in that the great majority of the German-speakers of Europe were included in it; except for a Polish minority in the East and smaller Danish and French minorities in the North and the West, its population was homogeneously German. But the people had played little part in its creation, except as conscript soldiers.

The divided culture

On 10 May 1933, the Association of German Students staged the burning of more than twenty thousand books in the square in front of Berlin's opera house. Like all National Socialist acts of allegedly spontaneous public violence, the burning of the books was carefully orchestrated. As they flung works of named writers such as Heinrich Mann, Erich Kästner, Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, Erich Maria Remarque, Kurt Tucholsky and Carl von Ossietzky into the flames, and before they let everyone join in the destruction, nine specially selected 'callers' pronounced what they expected from a culture they would regard as German. Their declamations sounded like a litany of anti-modernism: 'Against decadence and moral decay! For decency and propriety in family and state!' 'Against anti-German views and political treason, for devotion to people and state!'

The cultural cleansing by the student ideologues of 1933 highlights more sharply than any other event in the history of German culture the rifts that have divided it. These manifested themselves well before the First World War in a division between cultural traditionalism and modernism. The year 1896, for instance, saw the erection of the Kyffhäuser memorial commemorating Frederick II, also known as Barbarossa, a medieval emperor and the subject of a myth of resurrection and national unification. In 1913, the Völkerschlachtdenkmal, a monumental structure near Leipzig, celebrated the victory over the French one hundred years earlier as the onset of German national unification.

The significance of Germany's contribution

One might imagine that a nation's lack of a strong tradition in the performing arts would inhibit its ability to develop exciting and internationally acclaimed achievements in theatre and dance in the modern period. However, in the case of Germany, it may be argued that it was precisely because of this lack of tradition that the conditions were created for innovation and experiment, so that over the last hundred years the German-speaking nations have excelled in theatre, dance, opera and dramatic literature, in both theory and practice, in ways that have been both adventurous and influential. The story of modern theatre could not be told without reference to Brecht, nor that of dance without mention of Laban, and these are merely the best-known names of the many practitioners who worked in German-speaking nations to transform the performing arts of this century.

Eighteenth-century Germany had no golden age of theatre to look back on, no Shakespeare, no Racine, no Calderon. The reasons for this were several: for centuries Germany had served as the battleground of Europe; the German language itself was held in low esteem; and, most importantly, Germany did not exist as a nation, comprising in fact several hundred kingdoms, dukedoms, bishoprics, etc., with no major cultural centre like London or Paris.

Theoretical foundations

Most lists of the critics of modern culture would include Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, Max Weber, Martin Heidegger, and T. W. Adorno before writers in other languages. The perceived importance of such German critics of modern culture has much to do with the desire to understand the disastrous course of German history in the first half of the twentieth century as a model of the dangers of modernity. From the Romantic period onwards many of the critiques of culture which preceded the catastrophic events reflect concerns about the destruction of tradition which became central to those events, and during the events themselves ideas about culture became dangerous political issues. It is, though, often unclear what links together the abovementioned thinkers as proponents of a 'critique of culture': neither term in this notion - which, as Adorno says of the word Kulturkritik, 'like “automobile”... is stuck together from Latin and Greek' - is self-explanatory. The meaning of the word 'culture', with its links both to the search for permanence and to growth and development, is, for example, significantly suspended between the ideas of identity and change.

From Old English to new Englishes: unity in diversity?

The final decades of the eighteenth century provide the starting point for this volume – a time when arguably less was happening to shape the structure of the English language than to shape attitudes towards it in a social climate that became increasingly prescriptive. Baugh and Cable (1993) appropriately entitle their chapter on the period from 1650 to 1800 ‘The Appeal to Authority’, characterising the intellectual spirit of the age as one seeking order and stability, both political and linguistic. This so-called Augustan Age was one of refinement. After two centuries of effort to remedy the perceived inadequacies of English to enable it to meet a continually expanding range of functions, the eighteenth century was a time for putting the final touches on it, to fix things once and for all. In the nineteenth century and early part of the twentieth the success of England as an imperial nation combined with romantic ideas about language being the expression of a people's genius would engender a triumphalist and patriotic attitude to English. The language was now not so much to be improved but preserved as a great national monument and defended from threat in a battle over whose norms would prevail. As the demographic shift in the English-speaking population moved away from Britain, the twentieth would be declared the American century, and the Empire would strike back.

The most radical changes to English grammar had already taken place over the roughly one thousand years preceding the starting year of this volume. Certainly MacMahon's chapter makes clear how in our own period the phonology of English underwent nothing like the series of changes called the Great Vowel Shift (see Lass, volume III). It is noteworthy too that changes affecting morphology are insignificant by comparison with those of previous periods.

Introductory background

The course of modern art in Germany has followed a path significantly different from that of its neighbouring European cultures. The artistic achievements of its Renaissance period, notably those of Albrecht Dürer, Hans Holbein, Matthias Grünewald and Hans Baldung Grien, were to remain unequalled in the wake of the Lutheran Reformation, the Peasants' War and the Thirty Years War which worked to weaken both the economy and the morale of the country. The political fragmentation of Germany made cultural communication difficult. In the early nineteenth century the lack of a metropolis and a 'grand tradition' led painters and sculptors to look for enrichment through the adaptation of philosophical, religious and poetic issues and sensibilities. Artists such as Phillip Otto Runge and Caspar David Friedrich, the Nazarenes or the Neo-Romantics Feuerbach and Bocklin were deeply influenced by religious and philosophical treatises and tried to create pictorial expression for them. It is here that we can identify the roots of what is becoming increasingly acknowledged as one of the main hallmarks of German modernism, namely, the unique interconnections between ideas, events and artistic representations within this school of painting and sculpture.

Introduction

This chapter addresses three closely related questions: Where was/is Germany? Who were/are Germans? What kind of a nation state was/is the German state? The discussion will concentrate on politics and their impact on 'ordinary' Germans, leaving aside the well-studied subject of nationalist doctrines.

Nationalism is modern. As a doctrine it asserts a connection between culture and politics. First, it claims to identify and describe a particular nation, an all-encompassing group of people, usually concentrated into a particular territory, which is constituted variously through common language, history, sentiments, customs, racial characteristics, etc. The precise form of the claim varies from case to case and within each case. The German National Assembly of 1848-9 had a different conception of the nation from that of the Third Reich but there was a common assertion of the existence of a nation.

Second, nationalism demands that the nation should be selfdetermined. This normally means that the nation should have its own territorial state. There are disagreements concerning the type of autonomy and how the nation state should be organised. Nevertheless the 'core' doctrine of nationalism combines assertions about cultural identity with demands for self-determination. The manner in which this core doctrine is elaborated into particular forms of nationalism is most easily and frequently studied through the writings of nationalist intellectuals and the programmes of nationalist movements. More difficult to estimate is the impact of such ideas upon state and society.

Preamble

The term proper name deserves some theoretical discussion, as it is not uncontroversial. For the purposes of this chapter, it can be understood in an entirely traditional way; but needs to be elucidated with great care when discussing the ways in which ordinary expressions of a language become proper names. I shall define the term as meaning a species of noun phrase intended, on a particular occasion of use, to achieve individual reference to some person, object, place, institution, etc. Proper names differ from other noun phrases in achieving such reference independently of the semantic characteristics of the words out of which they may appear to be constructed. In short, proper names have no sense (as defined by e.g. Lyons 1977: 197–206), or, to use the term taken from a tradition begun by J. S. Mill and used by Cecily Clark in the corresponding chapter of volume II, they have no connotation. The theoretical issues surrounding these remarks are dealt with more fully in a related paper (Coates 1990). The distinction between denotation and reference should be clearly maintained if confusion is to be avoided. Proper names are often said to be ‘names for individuals’; whilst it is true to say that they are typically used to refer to individuals (i.e. on particular occasions of use), it is quite false of the most typical ones to say that they denote individuals. For brevity, the word name will mean ‘proper name’ throughout.

The business of this chapter is to discuss English names (as defined above) since 1776. The English language has been used for onomastic purposes far outside its original heardand, most notably in formerly Celtic Britain, Ireland, the United States and Canada, the other former British Dominions, the surviving British colonies, to some extent in the New Commonwealth (especially the Caribbean islands), in Antarctica, and on the ocean floor.

Even if Chaucer had not in a famous moment referred to his friend as ‘moral’, our image of Gower would be much the same. To Shakespeare he was already synonymous with sententious precept and exemplary fable, and later criticism has made him the moral voice of his age, the ‘articulate citizen’, or less flatteringly ‘an encyclopedia of current prejudices and ideals’. The subtitle of Fisher’s pioneering monograph, ‘Moral Philosopher and Friend of Chaucer’, reinforces the traditional image, neatly eliding Gower’s role as poet in the process. But the tradition begins with Gower himself: in manuscripts whose preparation he oversaw, a colophon defines his three major works, the Anglo-Norman Mirour de l’Omme, the Latin Vox Clamantis, and his English masterpiece, the Confessio Amantis, as ‘three learned books’, composed ‘between work and leisure’ to instruct his society and its leaders. Each reviews the estates of society from its own perspective: in the case of the Mirour the focus is provided by the moral doctrine of the penitentials; in the Vox, by a review of the state of contemporary England; and in the Confessio by world history and ancient political thought, punctuated with episodes from the historians, poets and philosophers.

Selective and somewhat misleading as a characterization of Gower’s corpus, the colophons make plain that he wanted his poetry to matter as social criticism. It is clear too that his appeals for reform were heard in high places, though the life records show nothing like Chaucer’s lifelong service to the crown, and we can only guess at the grounds on which Gower presumed to dedicate the Confessio, first to Richard II, then to his successor-to-be, Henry of Lancaster.

This section, which employs the problematic but indispensable organizational categories of ‘Britain’ and ‘the British Isles’, begins with chapters on Wales, Ireland and Scotland. We then move to a study of historical writing in England – the mode of writing that did most to define English imaginings of, and claims to, Wales, Ireland and Scotland. We end with a study of writing in the English capital between 1375 and 1485, a period which seals a shift away from monastic domination of documentary, historical, and myth-making practices.

Wales, Scotland and Ireland have generated literary traditions, sponsoring institutions, and forms of imaginative pleasure that are peculiarly their own; the chapters dedicated to them here write their histories, so to speak, from the inside out (with the English sometimes visible, sometimes not). Developments in these countries often run against the teleological grain of traditional English historiography. For Scotland, 1058 (when Malcolm III ascended the throne) is a more important date than 1066. In Gwynedd (north Wales), territories lost after 1066 were regained in 1135; the next sixty years witnessed a great cultural revival. And in fifteenth-century Ireland, Irish was winning the battle to become the pre-eminent vernacular (as Norman French faded away and English struggled to hold on). Each of these countries elaborated cultural and geographic conceptions that made scant reference to England. Welsh bards, effectively inventing the notion of ‘Britain’, sang of a territory that took in large areas of northern English and Scottish territory; Gaelic poets in Scotland and Ireland shared links through the Gaidhealtachd that persisted long after the Middle Ages. All three nations absorbed cultural influences through contacts with Anglo-Normans (or Cambro-Normans, Hiberno-Normans and Norman Scots); but all three also enjoyed direct and fruitful dealings with the continental French.

We could only include the present chapter in a history of ‘English’ literature through a catachresis that risks imposing a distorted perspective on Scottish history and culture. If the title of the present section displays its good intentions by using the more inclusive term ‘British Isles’, the volume none the less insists on a problematic choice of dates, for neither the Battle of Hastings nor the dissolution of the English monasteries is of direct consequence to Scotland, which remained an independent kingdom of international significance throughout the Middle Ages. The following chapter therefore begins with the reign of Malcolm III (‘Canmore’) and concludes with the Reformation Parliament. By beginning and ending with Gaelic materials, moreover, the chapter points to a two-fold opposition between Lowlands Scots and Gaelic culture on the one hand, and Scotland and England on the other.

The medieval kingdom of the Scots brought many peoples and language groups into an often fragile association. The ninth-century assimilation of the Pictish kingdom in the north-east provided a stable territorial base for more recent additions to the expansionist kingdom, including the satellite British (Cumbric) kingdom of Strathclyde and the Anglian-speaking territory of Lothian south of the Firth of Forth. In the opening years of our survey, however, the Western and Northern Isles still remained under Norse control: the Hebrides were not officially ceded until the Treaty of Perth in 1266; the Orkney and Shetland Islands followed in 1468–9.

The word ‘friar’, the English reflex of the Middle French frere, means ‘brother’. Well before Chaucer’s time it had taken on as its commonest meaning a male religious of one of several new orders established in the Latin Church in the thirteenth century. These orders are sometimes called ‘fraternal’, in reference to their aspirations of spiritual brotherhood, and sometimes ‘mendicant’, in recognition of a commitment to ‘apostolic poverty’, a commitment theoretically requiring their members to live day-to-day by begging. The priests among the friars were called the ‘regular clergy’ to betoken that they lived under the specific rule (regula) of their order as opposed to the more numerous parish priests, the ‘secular clergy’, who carried on their work in ‘the world’ (saeculum). Mendicant religion emerged as a significant spiritual movement in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. It took many and varied forms, some of a local and transitory character, and the Church soon stepped in to discourage the proliferation of new orders. When Chaucer writes of his friar that there was no smoother a talker ‘in alle the ordres foure’ (CT 1.210), he refers to the four fraternal orders recognized by the pope and currently active in England as throughout Europe. These were the Franciscans (Order of Friars Minor, often called the ‘greyfriars’ in England, and conventionally abbreviated OFM), the Dominicans (Order of Preachers, ‘blackfriars’, OP), the Carmelites (Order of the Hermits of the Blessed Virgin Mary of Mount Carmel, ‘whitefrairs’, O. Carm.), and the Augustinians (Order of Hermits of St Augustine, ‘Austin friars’, OESA).

For more than three centuries of Norman and Plantagenet rule, the British Isles were, with the exception of the Norman kingdom in Sicily, the most significantly multilingual and multicultural territory in western Europe. The interactions of William the Conqueror’s followers and peoples native to Britain were not simply adversarial, nor were the ethnic conceptions and political ambitions of the time equivalent to those inspiring Britain’s modern attempts at empire. The conquerors and their followers were unquestionably bent on dominating the inhabitants of Britain, but this process was not entirely a matter of force, nor should the inhabitants’ responding manoeuvres and successes be elided into a model of helpless subjection. The extent to which intermarriage, bilingualism and cultural adoptions came to characterize Norman rule sharply contrasts with the later British programme of empire-building and testifies both to the Normans’ desire to make Britain their permanent home and to the conquered inhabitants’ success at imposing themselves and their ways on the new arrivals. Chapters below on writing in Wales, Ireland and Scotland leave to this chapter the conquerors’ experience of England.

Conquest and accommodation

To be sure, the process of conquest begins with ethnic as well as military hostilities. Wace’s account of the minstrel Taillefer singing at the Battle of Hastings about Roland at the Battle of Roncevaux, an anecdote also found in William of Malmesbury’s chronicle, may indicate that the Normans considered Charlemagne’s men to be their own heroic predecessors – however recently the Normans had borrowed them from the Franks after moving in about 911 from Scandinavia into northern France. Taillefer’s song anticipates the Anglo-Norman copy of the Song of Roland, Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Digby 23, made some seventy-five years after the Battle of Hastings.