by Peter Watson
The Psychoanalytic Institute, the Warburg Institute, the Deutsche Hochschule fur Politik, and the Frankfurt School were all part of what Peter Gay has called ‘the community of reason,’ an attempt to bring the clear light of scientific rationality to communal problems and experiences. But not everyone felt that way.
One part of what became a campaign against the ‘cold positivism’ of science in Weimar Germany was led by the Kreis (‘circle’) of poets and writers that formed around Stefan George, ‘king of a secret Germany.’30 Born in 1868, George was already fifty-one when World War I ended. He was very widely read, in all the literatures of Europe, and his poems at times bordered on the precious, brimming over with an ‘aesthetic of arrogant intuitionism.’ Although led by a poet, the Kreis was more important for what it stood for than for what it actually produced. Most of its writers were biographers – which wasn’t accidental. Their intention was to highlight ‘great men,’ especially those from more ‘heroic’ ages, men who had by their will changed the course of events. The most successful book was Ernst Kantorowicz’s biography of the thirteenth-century emperor Frederick II.31 For George and his circle, Weimar Germany was a distinctly unheroic age; science had no answer to such a predicament, and the task of the writer was to inspire others by means of his superior intuition.
George never had the influence that he expected because he was overshadowed by a much greater poetic talent, Rainer Maria Rilke. Born René Maria Rilke in Prague in 1875 (he Germanised his name only in 1897), Rilke was educated at military school.32 An inveterate traveller and something of a snob (or at least a collector of aristocratic friendships), his path crossed with those of Friedrich Nietzsche, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Arthur Schnitzler, Paula Modersohn-Becker, Gerhart Hauptmann, Oskar Kokoschka, and Ellen Key (author of The Century of the Child., see chapter 5).33 Early in his career, Rilke tried plays as well as biography and poetry, but it was the latter form that, as he grew older, distinguished him as a remarkable writer, influencing W. H. Auden, among others.34 His reputation was transformed by Five Cantos/August 1914, which he wrote in response to World War I. Young German soldiers ‘took his slim volumes with them to the front, and his were often the last words they read before they died. He therefore had the popularity of Rupert Brooke without the accompanying danger, becoming … “the idol of a generation without men.” ’35 Rilke’s most famous poems, the Duino Elegies, were published in 1923 during the Weimar years, their mystical, philosophical, ‘oceanic’ tone perfectly capturing the mood of the moment.36 The ten elegies were in fact begun well before World War I, while Rilke was a guest at Duino Castle, south of Trieste on the Adriatic coast, where Dante was supposed to have stayed. The castle belonged to one of Rilke’s many aristocratic friends, Princess Marie von Thurn und Taxis-Hohenlohe. But the bulk of the elegies were ‘poured out’ in a ‘spiritual hurricane’ in one week, between 7 and 14 February 1922.37 Lyrical, metaphysical, and very concentrated, they have proved lastingly popular, no less in translation than in the original German. After he had finished his exhausting week that February, he wrote to a friend that the elegies ‘had arrived’ (it had been eleven years since he had started), as if he were the mouthpiece of some other, perhaps divine, voice. This is indeed how Rilke thought and, according to friends and observers, behaved. In the elegies Rilke wrestles with the meaning of life, the ‘great land of grief,’ casting his net over the fine arts, literary history, mythology, and the sciences, in particular biology, anthropology, and psychoanalysis.38 The poems are peopled by angels, lovers, children, dogs, saints, and heroes, reflecting a very Germanic vision, but also by more down-to-earth creatures such as acrobats and the saltimbanques Rilke had seen in Picasso’s early work. Rilke celebrates life, heaping original image upon original image (in a slightly uncomfortable rhythm that keeps the reader focused on the words), and yet juxtaposes the natural world with the mechanics of modernity. At the same time that he celebrates life, however, Rilke reminds us of its fragility, the elegiac quality arising from man’s unique awareness among life forms of his approaching death. For E. M. Butler, Rilke’s biographer, the poet’s concept of ‘radiant angels’ was his truest poetical creation; not ‘susceptible of rational interpretation … they stand like a liquid barrier of fire between man and his maker.’
Earliest triumphs, and high creation’s favourites,
Mountain-ranges and dawn-red ridges,
Since all beginning, pollen of blossoming godhead,
Articulate light, avenues, stairways, thrones,
Spaces of being, shields of delight, tumults
Of stormily-rapturous feeling, and suddenly, singly,
Mirrors, drawing back within themselves
The beauty radiant from their countenance.39
Delivering a eulogy after Rilke’s death, Stefan Zweig accorded him the accolade of Dichter.40 For Rilke, the meaning of life, the sense that could be made of it, was to be found in language, in the ability to speak or ‘say’ truths, to transform machine-run civilisation into something more heroic, more spiritual, something more worthy of lovers and saints. Although at times an obscure poet, Rilke became a cult figure with an international following. Thousands of readers, mostly women, wrote to him, and when a collection of his replies was published, his cult received a further boost. There are those who see in the Rilke cult early signs of the völkisch nationalism that was to overtake Germany in the late 1920s and 1930s. In some ways, certainly, Rilke anticipates Heidegger’s philosophy. But in fairness to the poet, he himself always saw the dangers of such a cult. Many of the young in Germany were confused because, as he put it, they ‘understood the call of art as a call to art.’41 This was an echo of the old problem identified by Hofmannsthal: What is the fate of those who cannot create? For Rilke, the cult of art was a form of retreat from life, by those who wanted to be artists rather than lead a life.42 Rilke did not create the enthusiasm for spirituality in Weimar Germany; it was an old German obsession. But he did reinvigorate it. Peter Gay again: ‘His magnificent gift for language paved the way to music rather than to logic.’43
Whereas Rilke shared with Hofmannsthal the belief that the artist can help shape the prevailing mentality of an age, Thomas Mann was more concerned, as Schnitzler had been, to describe that change as dramatically as possible. Mann’s most famous novel was published in 1924. The Magic Mountain did extremely well (it was published in two volumes), selling fifty thousand copies in its first year. It is heavily laden with symbolism, and the English translation has succeeded in losing some of Mann’s humour, not exactly a rich commodity in his work. But the symbolism is important, for as we shall see, it is a familiar one. The Magic Mountain is about the wasteland that caused, or at least preceded, The Waste Land. Set on the eve of World War I, it tells the story of Hans Castorp, ‘a simple young man’ who goes to a Swiss sanatorium to visit a cousin who has tuberculosis (a visit Alfred Einstein actually made, to deliver a lecture).44 Expecting to stay only a short time, he catches the disease himself and is forced to remain in the clinic for seven years. During the course of the book he meets various members of staff, fellow patients, and visitors. Each of these represents a distinct point of view competing for the soul of Hans. The overall symbolism is pretty heavy-handed. The hospital is Europe, a stable, long-standing institution but filled with decay and corruption. Like the generals starting the war, Hans expects his visit to the clinic to be short, over in no time.45 Like them, he is surprised – appalled – to discover that his whole time frame has to be changed. Among the other characters there is the liberal Settembrini, anticlerical, optimistic, above all rational. He is opposed by Naphta, eloquent but with a dark streak, the advocate of heroic passion and instinct, ‘the apostle of irrationalism.’46 Peeperkorn is in some ways a creature out of Rilke, a sensualist, a celebrant of life, whose words come tumbling out but expose him as having little to say. His body is like his mind: diseased and impotent.47 Clawdia Chauchat, a Russian, has a different kind of innocence from Hans’s. She is self-p
ossessed but innocent of knowledge, particularly scientific knowledge. Hans assumes that by revealing all the scientific knowledge he has, he will possess her. They enjoy a brief affair, but Hans no more possesses her mind and soul than scientific facts equal wisdom.48 Finally, there is the soldier Joachim, Hans’s cousin, who is the least romantic of all of them, especially about war. When he is killed, we feel his loss like an amputation. Castorp is redeemed – but through a dream, the sort of dream Freud would have relished (but which in fact rarely exists in real life), full of symbolism leading to the conclusion that love is the master of all, that love is stronger than reason, that love alone can conquer the forces that are bringing death all around. Hans does not forsake reason entirely, but he realises that a life without passion is but half a life.49 Unlike Rilke, whose aim was to transform experience into art, Mann’s goal was to sum up the human condition (at least, the Western condition), in detail as well as in generalities, aware as Rilke was that a whole era was coming to an end. With compassion and an absence of mysticism, Mann grasped that heroes were not the answer. For Mann, modern man was self-conscious as never before. But was self-consciousness a form of reason? Or an instinct?
Over the last half of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth, Paris, Vienna, and briefly Zurich dominated the intellectual and cultural life of Europe. Now it was Berlin’s turn. Viscount D’Abernon, the British ambassador to Berlin, described in his memoirs the period after 1925 as an ‘epoch of splendour’ in the city’s cultural life.50 Bertolt Brecht moved there; so did Heinrich Mann and Erich Kästner, after he had been fired from the Leipzig newspaper where he worked. Painters, journalists, and architects flocked to the city, but it was above all a place for performers. Alongside the city’s 120 newspapers, there were forty theatres providing, according to one observer, ‘unparalleled mental alertness.’51 But it was also a golden age for political cabaret, art films, satirical songs, Erwin Piscator’s experimental theatre, Franz Léhar operettas.
Among this concatenation of talent, this unparalleled mental alertness, three figures from the performing arts stand out: Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg, and Bertolt Brecht. Between 1915 and 1923 Schoenberg composed very little, but in 1923 he gave the world what one critic called ‘a new way of musical organisation.’52 Two years before, in 1921, Schoenberg, embittered by years of hardship, had announced that he had ‘discovered something which will assure the supremacy of German music for the next hundred years.’53 This was what became known as ‘serial music.’ Schoenberg himself gave rise to the phrase when he wrote, ‘I called this procedure “Method of composing with twelve tones which are related only with one another.” ’54 ‘Procedure’ was an apt word for it, since serialism is not so much a style as a ‘new grammar’ for music. Atonalism, Schoenberg’s earlier invention, was partly designed to eliminate the individual intellect from musical composition; serialism took that process further, minimalising the tendency of any note to prevail. Under this system a composition is made up of a series from the twelve notes of the chromatic scale, arranged in an order that is chosen for the purpose and varies from work to work. Normally, no note in the row or series is repeated, so that no single note is given more importance than any other, lest the music take on the feeling of a tonal centre, as in traditional music with a key. Schoenberg’s tone series could be played in its original version, upside down (inversion), backward (retrograde) or even backward upside down (retrograde inversion). The point of this new music was that it was horizontal, or contrapuntal, rather than vertical, or harmonic.55 Its melodic line was often jerky, with huge leaps in tone and gaps in rhythm. Instead of themes grouped harmonically and repeated, the music was divided into ‘cells.’ Repetition was by definition avoided. Huge variations were possible under the new system – including the use of voices and instruments in unusual registers. However, compositions always had a degree of harmonic coherence, ‘since the fundamental interval pattern is always the same.’56
The first completely serial work is generally held to be Schoenberg’s Piano Suite (op. 25), performed in 1923. Both Berg and Anton von Webern enthusiastically adopted Schoenberg’s new technique, and for many people Berg’s two operas Wozzeck and Lulu have become the most familiar examples of, first, atonality, and second, serialism. Berg began to work on Wozzeck in 1918, although it was not premiered until 1925, in Berlin. Based on a short unfinished play by Georg Büchner, the action revolves around an inadequate, simple soldier who is preyed upon and betrayed by his mistress, his doctor, his captain, and his drum major; in some ways it is a musical version of George Grosz’s savage pictures.57 The soldier ends up committing both murder and suicide. Berg, a large, handsome man, had shed the influence of romanticism less well than Schoenberg or Webern (which is perhaps why his works are more popular), and Wozzeck is very rich in moods and forms – rhapsody, lullaby, a military march, rondo, each character vividly drawn.58 The first night, with Erich Kleiber conducting, took place only after ‘an unprecedented series of rehearsals,’ but even so the opera created a furore.59 It was labelled ‘degenerate,’ and the critic for Deutsche Zeitung wrote, ‘As I was leaving the State Opera, I had the sensation of having been not in a public theatre but in an insane asylum. On the stage, in the orchestra, in the stalls – plain madness…. We deal here, from a musical viewpoint, with a composer dangerous to the public welfare.’60 But not everyone was affronted; some critics praised Berg’s ‘instinctive perception,’ and other European opera houses clamoured to stage it. Lulu is in some ways the reverse of Wozzeck. Whereas the soldier was prey to those around him, Lulu is a predator, an amoral temptress ‘who ruins all she touches.’61 Based on two dramas by Frank Wedekind, this serial opera also verges on atonality. Unfinished at Berg’s death in 1935, it is full of bravura patches, elaborate coloratura, and confrontations between a heroine-turned-prostitute and her murderer. Lulu is the ‘evangelist of a new century,’ killed by the man who fears her.62 It was the very embodiment of the Berlin that Bertolt Brecht, among others, was at home in.
Like Berg, Kurt Weill, and Paul Hindemith, Brecht was a member of the Novembergruppe, founded in 1918 and dedicated to disseminating a new art appropriate to a new age. Though the group broke up after 1924, when the second phase of life in the Weimar Republic began, the revolutionary spirit, as we have seen, survived. And it survived in style in Brecht. Born in Augsburg in 1898, though he liked to say he came from the Black Forest, Brecht was one of the first artists/writers/poets to grow up under the influence of film (and Chaplin, in particular). From an early age, he was always fascinated by America and American ideas – jazz and the work of Upton Sinclair were to be other influences later. Augsburg was about forty miles from Munich, and it was there that Brecht spent his formative years. Somewhat protected by his parents, Bertolt (christened Eugen, a name he later dropped) grew up as a self-confident and even ‘ruthless’ child, with the ‘watchful eyes of a raccoon.’63 Initially a poet, he was also an accomplished guitarist, with which talent, according to some (like Lion Feuchtwanger) he used to ‘impose himself’ on others, smelling ‘unmistakably of revolution’.64 He collaborated and formed friendships with Karl Kraus, Carl Zuckmayer, Erwin Piscator, Paul Hindemith, Kurt Weill, Gerhart and Elisabeth Hauptmann, and an actor who ‘looked like a tadpole.’ The latter’s name was Peter Lorre. In his twenties, Brecht gravitated toward theatre, Marxism, and Berlin.65
Brecht’s early works, like Baal, earned him a reputation among the avantgarde, but it was with The Threepenny Opera (tided Die Dreigroschenoper in German) that he first found real fame. This work was based on a 1728 ballad opera by John Gay, The Beggar’s Opera, which had been revived in 1920 by Sir Nigel Playfair at the Lyric Theatre in London, where it ran for four years. Realising that it could be equally successful in Germany, Elisabeth Hauptmann translated it for Brecht.66 He liked it, found a producer and a theatre, and removed himself to Le Lavandou, in the south of France near Saint Tropez, with the composer Kurt Weill to work on the show. John
Gay’s main aim had been to ridicule the pretensions of Italian grand opera, though he did also take the odd swipe at the prime minister of the day, Sir Robert Walpole, who was suspected of taking bribes and having a mistress. But Brecht’s aim was more serious. He moved the action to Victorian times – nearer home – and made the show an attack on bourgeois respectability and its self-satisfied self-image. Here too the beggars masquerade as disabled, like the war cripples so vividly portrayed in George Grosz’s paintings. Rehearsals were disastrous. Actresses walked out or suffered inexplicable illness. The stars objected to changes in the script and even to some of the moves they were directed to make. Songs about sex had to be removed because the actresses refused to sing them. And this was not the only way Dreigroschenoper resembled Salomé: rumours about the back-stage dramas circulated in Berlin, together with the belief that the theatre owner was desperately searching for another show to stage as soon as Brecht’s and Weill’s had failed.67
The first night did not start well. For the first two songs the audience sat in unresponsive silence. There was a near-disaster when the barrel organ designed to accompany the first song refused to function and the actor was forced to sing the first stanza unaided (the orchestra rallied for the second verse). But the third song, the duet between Macheath and the Police Chief, Tiger Brown, reminiscing about their early days in India, was rapturously received.68 The manager had specified that no encores would be sung that night, but the audience wouldn’t let the show proceed without repeats and so he had to overrule himself. The opera’s success was due in part to the fact that its avowed Marxism was muted. As Brecht’s biographer Ronald Hayman put it, ‘It was not wholly insulting to the bourgeoisie to expatiate on what it had in common with ruthless criminals; the arson and the throat-cutting are mentioned only casually and melodically, while the well-dressed entrepreneurs in the stalls could feel comfortably superior to the robber gang that aped the social pretensions of the nouveaux-riches.’69 Another reason for the success was the fashion in Germany at the time for Zeitoper, opera with a contemporary relevance. Other examples in 1929–30 were Hindemith’s Neues von Tage (Daily News), a story of newspaper rivalry; Jonny spielt auf, by Ernst Kreutz; Max Brandt’s Maschinist Hopkins; and Schoenberg’s Von Heute auf Morgen.70 Brecht and Weill repeated their success with the Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny – like The Threepenny Opera, a parable of modern society. As Weill put it, ‘Mahagonny, like Sodom and Gomorrah, falls on account of the crimes, the licentiousness and the general confusion of its inhabitants.’71 Musically, the opera was popular because the bitter, commercialised sounds of jazz symbolised not the freedom of Africa or America but the corruption of capitalism. The idea of degeneration wasn’t far away, either. Brecht’s version of Marxism had convinced him that works of art were conditioned, like everything else, by the commercial network of theatres, newspapers, advertisers, and so on. Mahagonny, therefore, was designed so that ‘some irrationality, unreality and frivolity should be introduced in the right places to assert a double meaning.’72 It was also epic theatre, which for Brecht was central: ‘The premise for dramatic theatre was that human nature could not be changed; epic theatre assumed not only that it could but that it was already changing.’73
