no free, liberating literature could blossom. The most gifted men were either vanquished by Reaction, as in the case of Hebbel, or broken, as Grillparzer was broken. The discontent of smaller men found utterance in mere protests, after the fashion of Stirner and Nietzsche. Heine fled to France, while Richard Wagner made his peace with Imperialism and its outward brilliance. Finally, the younger writers adapted themselves too lightly to the successive phases of Prussian policy, or bowed their heads in non-political retirement. All eyes were dazzled by the triumph of Prussia. Indeed, the exaggerations and vulgarities of German “Naturalism,” “Modernism,” Decadence and Symbolism—as the various literary fashions were named—the incoherence of Impressionism and the feeble megalomania of the so-called “Expressionism” reflect the moral crisis and the decay of the new German society after 1870.
In Prague I had followed the course of German literature, and, by comparing it constantly with Czech, French, British, American, Scandinavian and Russian literature, I became convinced that German civilization and culture were passing through a real crisis in which their weakness, their inadequacy, not to say their breakdown, were revealed. To this weakness may be attributed both the striking influence of Scandinavian, Russian and French writers upon them and the perpetual German attempts to return to the past and, above all, to Goethe. From such an attempt, in which weakness and strength were strangely mingled, the writings of Gerhart Hauptmann seem to have sprung.
“Expressionism” is pre-eminently German, an aspect of German subjectivism, and therefore damned from birth. The Expressionists are nothing but interpreters of Kantian or neo-Kantian doctrine and of subjectivism after the manner of Nietzsche. Expressionism, as Herman Bahr describes it, creates a universe of its own. The expressionist poet and critic Paulsen—it is something more than an accident that he should be the son of the philosopher Paulsen who was a follower of Kant—explains that the poet bears in himself the “finished forms” (a Kantian term) out of which the whole world grows. This is subjectivism in all its violent absurdity. Paulsen says rightly that expressionism is essentially German. And I do the Germans no wrong if I say that, during the war, their literature was more chauvinistic than any, in quantity and quality, or that German writers and journalists drove their people towards war, in Berlin, Vienna and
