The Period of Transition

Abstract

It is a commonplace of literary history to designate the generation born in the 1880s as that which so altered modes of writing and thinking as to be called modernist or revolutionary; it was this generation which, in late adolescence, rejected the values of the previous one and continued to map out new frontiers in works which, although originally deemed alien, are now accepted in any list of modern European classics. It would seem appropriate, therefore, to begin this book on twentieth-century German literature with the Jahrhundertwende, to look at that febrile artistic and intellectual concoction with which the nineteenth century ended and the twentieth century began, a time whose plethora of conflicting styles Robert Musil (born 1880) so well described in his gigantic novel Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften. But another writer of that generation, Gottfried Benn (born 1886), when discussing the intellectual preoccupations of his contemporaries, insisted that practically everything that they had discussed and suffered, everything, that is, that became part of the stock-in-trade of the European mind, had received authentic formulation already by a man who had anticipated the whole of psychoanalysis, and the whole of existentialism: he was, according to Benn, the ‘earthquake of the epoch’ and the ‘greatest genius of the German language since Luther’. This is Friedrich Nietzsche, who died, clinically insane, in 1900, on the threshold of the new century, and who is indeed indispensable for any understanding of the intellectual and artistic climate of the last decades of the nineteenth century and most of this. It is consequently with the 1870s that we shall begin, to consider the literature of the first thirty years of the new German Kaiserreich and to detect those innovatory tendencies which anticipate much of what is to come. Our survey must necessarily be succinct and selective, but the period of transition described is one which, it is to be hoped, will contain much that is surprisingly modern amongst the stilted and the genteel.