Introduction

Syntactic change

The topic of syntactic change in late Modern English is only just beginning to get its share of serious scholarly attention, and compared with the towers of published syntactic research which the Syntax chapters of volumes I–III in this series have been launched from, this chapter has had to rely rather more on its own bootstraps. All research surveys are by definition provisional, this one especially so.

By 1776 the English language had already undergone most of the syntactic changes which differentiate Present-Day English (henceforth PDE) from Old English (henceforth OE) (see CHEL I: 170–1). Older patterns of word order with the verb at the clause end or in second constituent position had long been replaced by an unmarked order framed by the sequence subject–verb–object or subject–verb–complement. A subject noun phrase (NP) was virtually obligatory in simple clauses other than imperatives. Great simplifications had taken place in morphology, so that the noun and adjective had already reached their present, vestigial inflectional systems, and the verb nearly so. The number and frequency of prepositions had expanded greatly, and prepositions now served to mark a variety of nominal functions. Prepositions, particles and other words frequently joined simple lexical verbs to form group-verbs like speakto, makeup, takenotice of. Such formations as the prepositional and indirect passives had become commonplace.The complexity of the English auxiliary system had grown to encompass a wide range of mood and aspect marking, and much of its present systematic structure was already in place, including the dummy auxiliary do. Some patterns involving finite and nonfinite subordinate clauses had been rare or impossible in OE; by 1776 most of the present repertoire was available.

The 'German Question', however one phrases it, always involves, at least by implication, German Jewry. In its classical formulation - on national development and territorial unity - the query raises issues of citizenship, political participation and social change with immediate bearing on the Jewish communities in Germany. More recently, the German Question asks how the country could have embarked on the terrible course that led to the Third Reich, the Second World War and the Holocaust, which very nearly realised its goal of eliminating the Jewish presence in German society. In short, the story of German-Jewish relations reflects at once the hope and the horror of German history.

Jews and Germans have lived together for nearly 2000 years, and different but related tensions characterise this association - variously described as a symbiosis, a dialogue, a long quarrel and an alliance based on deception - before and after Auschwitz. The Holocaust marks a singular historical moment that has everything to do with German-Jewish relations today. But one damages the past by conflating all of German-Jewish experience with the Holocaust, or by reading events of the last centuries as simply a prelude to National Socialist atrocities. For an adequate understanding of the meaning and direction of the German-Jewish history, one must consider the longer record of Jews in Germany.

Arguably one of the most conspicuous leitmotifs running through German cultural history is the degree to which music has assumed a role of national significance far exceeding that in any other European country. An obvious starting-point for explaining such a phenomenon would be the almost unbroken legacy of major German-speaking composers who have exercised a lasting international influence over musical developments over the past 200 years. But other factors have proved equally vital to the all-pervasive influence of music. Consider, for example, the multiplicity of opera houses and orchestras (something in the region of 150 at the present time) that have existed in each major provincial and metropolitan centre since the nineteenth century, or the unparalleled opportunities that Germany has offered for music education, drawing students from all over the world. Then one must take into account the strong musicological traditions in German-speaking countries which have provided the fundamental principles for almost all musical scholarship of recent years. In statistical terms, this preoccupation with musical analysis, research and theory has been exemplified by a much greater number of specialised periodicals devoted to music than in any other country.

In the roughly 150 years between the middle of the eighteenth century and re-unification, German society faced two major economic and socio-structural revolutions. The industrial revolution, which lasted from the early 1840s to the eve of the First World War, turned a still predominantly feudal society into a largely industrial society. The second revolution, which one might call a material revolution, transformed post-war German society between 1950 and 1970 from a society deeply scarred by dictatorship, defeat, and destruction into one of the most affluent societies in Western Europe. Despite the structural similarities of the two revolutions, their outcomes were radically different. The industrial revolution ended in totalitarian dictatorship and the most destructive war in European history; from the second revolution, the vast majority of the divided nation emerged as a stable and increasingly pluralist democracy.

Historians and social scientists have proposed a number of interpretations to explain how a combination of various 'peculiarities of German history' in the nineteenth century led to the catastrophes of the first half of the twentieth century. Although the notion of a German Sonderweg (idiosyncratic development) has been significantly modified and to some extent discredited, it still retains some validity with respect to at least one problem: namely, that in Germany in the nineteenth century, the transformation of the social and political structure failed to keep pace with the progress of industrialisation. In Germany, unlike other industrialised countries, pre-industrial elites retained their predominant social and political position against the newly emerging industrial classes, stifling societal modernisation and inhibiting the evolution of a democratic political culture.

The birth of film in Germany

On 1 November 1895, nearly two months before the famous Lumière screening in Paris, the brothers Max and Emil Skladanowsky showed a fifteen-minute film programme at the Berlin Wintergarten using their Bioscop, and by June of the following year the inventor and entrepreneur Oskar Messter had sold his first flicker-free projector incorporating the Maltese cross mechanism. Soon after the turn of the century Messter was experimenting with the synchronisation of film footage and gramophone records and establishing his reputation as Germany's first major film producer. Germany thus had its share of pioneers at the start of film history. However, large-scale production of narrative film was slow to develop, allowing French, Danish, Italian and American films to dominate until the First World War.

In the wake of increasingly vociferous attacks on cinema for its low moral standards and corrupting influence the term Autorenfilm (writer's film) was coined in 1913. This tag was intended to enhance the reputation of the medium through the script of a recognised author, as exemplified by Max Mack's Der Andere (The Other, 1913), a variation on the Jekyll-and-Hyde motif, written by the playwright Paul Lindau. It was during this period that leading theatre directors, including Max Reinhardt, began to work in cinema, and filmmakers, drawing creatively on the German Romantic tradition, devised special effects to stage fantastic narratives: Stellan Rye's Der Student von Prag (The Student of Prague, 1913) introduced the motif of the Doppelgänger, and Paul Wegener and Henrik Galeen's Der Golem (The Golem, 1914) drew on the cabbalistic legend of the clay man.

Vocabulary is central to both the system and the use of language. Words are what are pronounced and written and organised into sentences and other grammatical combinations, being the fundamental units of meaning. Words are also what ordinary users think of as language, for they are accessible and reflect more fully the whole culture and respond more quickly to changes in society than do other aspects of language.

The study of the English vocabulary

Vocabulary study has a long history, going back in the Western world to Plato's Cratylus. The study of English vocabulary, however, received a sharp boost with the interest of members of the Philological Society in making a New English Dictionary, eventually renamed The Oxford English Dictionary (Murray, Bradley, Craigie & Onions 1884–1933). In the middle of the nineteenth century, Dean Trench (1851, 1855), who had been instrumental in beginning the OED, was a significant contributor to the field. Caught in the Web of Words (Murray 1977) traces the history of this major dictionary, and Empire of Words (Willinsky 1994) critically analyses its strengths and weaknesses.

The most important general English dictionary of the twentieth century is Webster's Third New International Dictionary of the English Language, edited by Philip Babcock Gove (1961). Its history has been traced by Herbert C. Morton (1994). The most important new specialised dictionary of the century is the Dictionary of American English (Cassidy and Hall 1985–).The history of English language lexicography before the period covered by this volume has been treated by Starnes and Noyes (1946), and that of American lexicography during the post-1775 period by Algeo (1990).

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.