INTOXICATION, REJUVENATION, COMMUNITY: LITERARY EXPRESSIONISTS AND RADICAL WEIMAR CONSERVATIVES IN EARLY TWENTIETH-CENTURY GERMANY
Open Access
- Author:
- Wallo, Michael Chad
- Graduate Program:
- German
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- April 28, 2010
- Committee Members:
- Daniel Leonhard Purdy, Dissertation Advisor/Co-Advisor
Daniel Leonhard Purdy, Committee Chair/Co-Chair
Sophie C De Schaepdrijver, Committee Member
Martina Kolb, Committee Member
Thomas Oliver Beebee, Committee Member - Keywords:
- New Human Being
Community
World War I
Weimar Republic
Conservative Revolution
Expressionism
Ernst Junger
Georg Kaiser - Abstract:
- This dissertation compares and contrasts postwar literary Expressionists and radical conservative writers of the Weimar Republic. Both Expressionists and radical Weimar conservatives believed that the world engendered chaos, pain, fear, horror, fragmentation, and other emotions that could shock an individual into abstraction, or into a psychologically distant state from normal perceptions and the order of the world. Related to abstraction and littered throughout Expressionist and Weimar right-wingers’ works are the terms “intoxication,” “Tat,” (‘activity/action”) “Leben” (“life”), and “Aufbruch” (“break through/departure”). These terms entail people’s uprooting from their submissive, everyday existences making them more active individuals who seek discharge for their actions. To designate a person’s acceptance of their new ideas, Expressionists and Weimar’s ultraconservatives use the term Wandlung, or other words such as Verwandlung (“metamorphosis”/”change”), Erneuerung (“rejuvenation”), Wiedergeburt (“rebirth”), and the “New Human Being,” which stand for everything that Expressionists and radical Weimar conservatives viewed as positive. After the rebirth of the human being, an all-encompassing rebirth of humans will lead to the Gemeinschaft or “community.” Despite being both groups’ teleologies, the birth of the “New Human Being” and ultimately the “Gemeinschaft” are methods to propagate their own very different ideologies. In other words, they are structures or significations that are conceptualized through more important ideas or content. Late Expressionism consisted for the most part of either leftist or apolitical pacifists who often fought in the German Revolution of 1918/1919, who pleaded for a loving and more humane world, and who preached a European or international fraternity of human beings. Conversely, radical Weimar conservatives praised the First World War, reprobated the Revolution of 1918/1919, celebrated the German nation, and demanded that a dictatorship seize power in Germany. Both Expressionists and radical Weimar conservatives used these signifiers with radically different content to disseminate their ideologies because they best appealed to the commonality of feelings, experiences, and sufferings of Germans during this time period. Since the National Socialists used many of the same constructs as late Expressionists and radical conservatives of the Weimar Republic in promoting their fascist ideology, this dissertation helps explain the etiology of National Socialism among a disillusioned German populace.