Polymorphous Eroticism in the Early Plays of Hans Henny Jahnn

Abstract

Hans Henny Jahnn is still an almost unknown modernist. Thus his works can still give the shock of the new that has inevitably worn off in the case of the canonized modernists. Yet Jahnn’s work also causes shock by its content, by its uncritical, even affirmative, representation of a polymorphous and transgressive eroticism mixed with violence. When his first published play, Pastor Ephraim Magnus, appeared in 1919, when it was awarded the prestigious Kleist Prize in 1920, and when it was produced in 1923 by Bertolt Brecht and Arnolt Bronnen, the press reacted with outrage verging on hysteria: journalists called it a ‘a mixture of slime and excrement’, ‘an abyss filled with manure-heaps’, ‘the prize-winning drama by an erotomaniac’.¹ Even now, almost a century later, such reactions cannot be dismissed as mere conservative prudery. Jahnn’s major plays of the 1920s — Pastor Ephraim Magnus, Die Krönung Richards III. (The Coronation of Richard III) and Medea — are deeply problematic works, but they are so because they explore a vision of life, and in particular a conception of the erotic body, with a thoroughness and consistency that can at times appear almost demented. In doing so, they exhibit an imaginative power that is arresting, disturbing, sometimes overwhelming. The inevitable comparison is with D. H. Lawrence, though this parallel is closest in the intensely sensuous evocations of the natural world and of erotic experience in Jahnn’s unfinished novel Perrudja (1929) rather than in his plays.²