Munich and Theatrical Modernism: Politics, Playwriting, and Performance, 1890-1914 9780674588356, 9780674588363

Table of contents :
Frontmatter
Introduction: Modernism, Theater, Munich (page 1)
ONE Munich in 1890 (page 11)
TWO Carnivalesque Modernism: Sexuality and Satire (page 53)
THREE Analytic Modernism: Art and Mammon in Wedekind's Drama (page 100)
FOUR Cabaretic Modernism: Between Political Aggression and Aesthetic Intimacy (page 139)
FIVE Retheatricalized Modernism: The Künstler-theater and Its Affinities (page 186)
SIX Activist Modernism: Failed Compromise, Renewed Assault (page 236)
Conclusion: Revolution of the Theater and Theaters of Revolution (page 285)
Appendix: Patrons of Modernist Theater (page 311)
Abbreviations (page 314)
Notes (page 315)
Bibliography (page 367)
Index (page 397)

Citation preview

MUNICH AND

THEATRICAL

MODERNISM |

MUNICH AND THEATRICAL

| MODERNISM } \ Politics, Playwriting, and Performance

.189O-191

SS F PETER JELAVICH

HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS | Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England

Copyright © 1985 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America : Second printing, 1996 Publication of this book has been aided by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation First Harvard University Press paperback edition, 1996

Jelavich, Peter. , | Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Munich and theatrical modernism. Bibliography: p. Includes index.

1. ‘Theater—Germany (West)—Munich—History—

20th Century. 2. Experimental theater—Germany | (West)—Munich. 3. Theater—Political aspects. 4. Munich (Germany)—Popular culture. I. Title.

PN2656.M7J4 1985 792'.0943'36 84-28958 ISBN 0-674-58835-5 (cloth) ISBN 0-674-58836-3 (pbk.) Designed by Gwen Frankfeldt

Preface

URING THE PRINZREGENTENZEIT, THE

years of Prince Luitpold’s regency (1886-1912), Munich harbored a vibrant modernist movement that placed it next to Berlin and Vienna as a Central European capital of avant-

garde culture. The novels of Thomas Mann, Frank Wedekind’s plays, the poems of Stefan George, Vassily Kandinsky’s paintings, the music of Richard Strauss—all of these works, along with the contributions of a host of other |

artists, laid the basis for much of the elite culture of the twentieth century. Munich’s modernist movement made particularly generous contributions to theater, broadly defined. At the turn of the century, the Bavarian capital witnessed the appearance of new styles of playwriting, novel modes of acting and directing, innovative designs for stages

and auditoria, and a quintessentially modern feeling for “theatricality,” for the unbounded expressive and communi-

cative possibilities of the stage. |

This book seeks to reconstruct a context—the political

and cultural world of Munich from 1890 to 1914—in which much of theatrical modernism evolved. Inasmuch as cultural historians aspire to explain both the causes of artistic innovation and the actual products of such change, I hope to illuminate a particular (historically and geographically specific) dynamic of cultural transformation, as well as to contribute to the interpretation of the resulting artifacts. [ have not attempted to present a comprehensive study of Munich at the

turn of the century; rather, | have sought to highlight the city’s major contributions to modernist theater in particular.

Vi + PREFACE

Although I define “modernism” somewhat narrowly, in a manner that excludes much that is simply “modern”—such ! as the works of the naturalists or Ludwig Thoma—l perceive “theater” in a broad sense, to include playwriting, directing, acting, staging, architecture, and “lesser” genres

such as cabaret.

Because | wish to link innovations in these areas to the political forces of the day, I have been required to draw upon a variety of sources. The public debate over the “politics” of

theater, and theater censorship in particular, is reflected in the minutes of the Bavarian parliament, reports in Munich’s ideologically diverse daily newspapers, and articles in a vari-

ety of journals devoted to the arts. Less public, but highly illuminating behind-the-scenes accounts of this struggle can be gleaned from the archives of the Munich police and the Bavarian Ministry of the Interior on the one hand, and the Nachlasse of playwrights and directors on the other. Many of these same sources also elucidate two other concurrent controversies: a debate over style, which questioned the artistic validity and merit of modernist innovations; and a critique of commercialism, which concerned the degree to which artists should be subservient to public taste. I will contend that these political, aesthetic, and commercialist debates, which arose in response to nascent modernism, helped

shape the development of that movement in turn. This fact can best be established by examining the cultural artifacts: the plays, productions, and theaters created by the modernists.

While researching and writing this study, I have profited from the advice and assistance of many scholars. First and

foremost, I wish to extend my cordial thanks to Carl Schorske, who has been a most stimulating, supportive, and

productively critical adviser during my years of graduate study and beyond. I have also learned much from my discussions with several experts on fin-de-siécle Munich, notably Michael Bauer, Charles Haxthausen, Richard Lemp, Robin Lenman, Winfried Nerdinger, and Peg Weiss. I have bene-

PREFACE « vil fited greatly from others who have provided critical readings

of this manuscript in its various manifestations, namely Ruth Angress, Brigitte. Bradley, Klemens von Klemperer, Arno Mayer, Karen Rosenberg, Jerrold Seigel, Gary Stark,

Maria Tatar, and Cheryl Welch. At Harvard University Press, the kind assistance and expert advice of Aida Donald,

Elizabeth Suttell, and especially Ann Louise McLaughlin have contributed greatly toward improving the final version

of my manuscript. |

This project was supported by the generous financial as-

sistance of the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD); the Society of Fellows at Harvard University; and Harvard’s Clark Fund.

For permissions to reproduce illustrations and to cite copyrighted or previously published materials, I would like to thank: K. Freiherr von Andrian-Werburg, Staatsarchiv Miinchen; Uta Balzer and Reinhard Hippen, Deutsches Kabarett Archiv, Mainz; Marjorie Anne Bennett, Wesleyan

University Press; James Bergin, J. F. Bergin Publishers; Hermann-Joseph Busley, Bayerisches Hauptstaatsarchiv; the Schiller-Nationalmuseum and Deutsches Literaturarchiv, Marbach am Neckar; Claudia Dickhoff, Deutsches ‘Theatermuseum, Munich; Fritz Fenzl and Richard Lemp, - Handschriften-Abteilung, Stadtbibliothek Miinchen; Winfried Nerdinger, Architektursammlung, Technische Universitat Miinchen; Roger Stoddard, the Houghton Library, Harvard University; Douglas Unfug, Central European History; and Armin Zweite, Stadtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich. Finally, I would like to add some very personal words of thanks. I am deeply grateful for the constant support and encouragement of my parents; it was they, after all, who first

introduced me both to Bavaria and to the historical profession.

tA \

Contents

Introduction Modernism, Theater, Munich - 1

ONE Munich in 1890: 11 Anticlericalism, “Official” Classicism, and the Challenge of Wagner and Ibsen = 72

Munich’s Naturalist Movement: Michael Georg Conrad

and the Modern Life Society 26 |

Naturalist Theater and Drama in Munich 44

TWO Carnivalesque Modernism: Sexuality

and Satire - 53

Oskar Panizza and The Council of Love 54 Frank Wedekind and Spring Awakening 74

THREE Analytic Modernism: Art and Mammon | in Wedekind’s Drama - 100

Earth Spirit and Pandora’s Box: The Marketing of Art

and Eros 101

The Deutsches Theater: The Making and Unmaking of a ‘“‘Modern” Stage = 15

The Marquts of Keith: Dramatizing the Culture of

Commercialism = /25

xX . CONTENTS FOUR Cabaretic Modernism: Between Political Aggression and Aesthetic Intimacy - 139 Political Harbingers of Cabaret: Jugend, Simplicissimus,

Lex Heinze 140

Exclusivist Tendencies in Modernism: Halbe’s Intimes , Theater and Stollberg’s Schauspielhaus = /5/ The Attraction of Vaudeville 7/60

The Elf Scharfrichter 167 a

| FIVE ~ Retheatricalized Modernism: The Kinstlertheater and Its Affinities - 186

Circus 208 |

Georg Fuchs: The Rites of Mystic Nationalism 187 Max Reinhardt: High Culture as Cabaret and

Vassily Kandinsky: ‘The Theater of Spiritual

Awakening 2/7

SIX Activist Modernism: Failed Compromise, Renewed Assault - 236 Vallé’s Intimes Theater: Morality Campaigners and

Commercialized Cabaret 237

The Limits of Compromise: Munich’s Censorship — | Council 247

The Erotic Catholicism of Heinrich Lautensack 260

Erich Mihsam and the Origins of Activism 268

Conclusion Revolution of the Theater and Theaters | of Revolution - 285 Appendix Patrons of Modernist Theater - 311

Abbreviations 3/4 | Notes = 3/5

Bibliography 367

Index 397

Illustrations

l Diagram by Oskar Schlemmer (1925). Copyright © 1961 by Wesleyan University. Reprinted from Walter Gropius, ed., The Theater of the Bauhaus, trans.

, Arthur Wensinger, by permission of Wesleyan Uni-

versity Press 4 2 Wedekind, Spring Awakening, final scene. World premiere directed by Max Reinhardt, with Wedekind as the Masked Gentleman (Berlin, 1906). HandschriftenAbteilung der Stadtbibliothek Miinchen —_ 92

, 3 Wedekind, Earth Spirit, act 3, with Frank and Tilly _ Wedekind as Schon and Lulu. Handschriften-Abteilung der Stadtbibliothek Miinchen = 735

4 Location of the Schauspielhaus. From Das Minchner Schauspielbaus: Denkschrift zur Feier der Erdffnung (Munich: L. Werner, 1901), p. 3-157

5 Interior of the Schauspielhaus: view from the stage. Architektursammlung, Technische Universitat

, Miinchen 1/58

6 Interior of the Schauspielhaus: view from the balcony. Architektursammlung, Technische Universitat

Miinchen 159

7 View from the stage of the Elf Scharfrichter cabaret. , , Reproduced by permission from “Sich fligen—hetsst ligen”: 80 Jahre deutsches Kabarett, catalogue, Deutsches Kabarett Archiv, Reinhard Hippen

(Mainz: Schmidt & Bédige, 1981), p.47 168

8 Bruno Paul, program cover, Elf Scharfrichter cabaret (1902). By permission of the Houghton Library, Har-

vard University 1/69

X11 ILLUSTRATIONS 9 Carnival masquers dressed as the “Eleven Executioners,”

, Munich, ca. 1902. Reproduced by permission from “Sich

fiigen—heisst ltiigen,” p.23 170 ,

10 Thomas Theodor Heine, program cover with Marya Delvard, Elf Scharfrichter cabaret. By permission of the _ Houghton Library, Harvard University 178

1] Peter Behrens, design for.a theater. From Die Rheinlande, 1, no. 4 (January 1901): 30. By permission

of the Houghton Library, Harvard University 19/

12 ~ Georg Fuchs, “Das Zeichen,” performed at the — Darmstadt Artists’ Colony on May 15, 1901, with costumes by Peter Behrens. From Alexander Koch, ed., Grossherzog Ernst Ludwig und die Darmstddter Ktunstler-Kolonie (Darmstadt: Alexander Koch, 1901),

p. 61 192 13 Max Littmann, design for a theater, based on proposals of Georg Fuchs. From Georg Fuchs, Die Schaubtihne der Zukunft (Berlin: Schuster & Loeffler, 1905), p.48 194

14 Max Littmann: Munich Kinstlertheater, longitudinal _ section. Courtesy of the Deutsches Theatermuseum,

Munich 204

15 Munich Kinstlertheater, auditorium. From the Stiddeutsche Bauzeitung, vol. 18, no. 43 (October 1908), p. 347. Courtesy of the Deutsches Theatermuseum, Munich = 205

16 The Oresteia of Aeschylus, directed by Max Reinhardt in the Musikfesthalle, Munich, 1911. Courtesy of the

Deutsches Theatermuseum, Munich 2/5

17 Vassily Kandinsky, Das bunte Leben (The Motley Life;

Munich = 223 , | 1907). Stadtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus,

| 18 Hugo Ball in cubistic costume, ca. 1917. Ball first recited his sound poetry in this costume at the Cabaret Voltaire in June 1916. Deutsches Literaturarchiv im Schiller-Nationalmuseum, Marbach am Neckar

(photographic services) 298 ,

MUNICH AND

THEATRICAL

MODERNISM

Ne ‘ S INTRODUCTION

(“ iw Modernism, \WXS . Theater, Munich

a SWOT HE DEFINITION OF MODERNISM—ITS FORMS,

themes, chronology, and geography—has been a subject of dispute ever since the movement gained self-consciousness in the late nineteenth century. At that time writers and artists became acutely aware of the multifarious social possibil-

ities of their media. Art could create spiritual utopias transcending worldly concerns; it could strive to mirror ex-

isting conditions in either laudatory or disapproving terms; | or it could mediate between the existent and the not-yetpresent by discovering potentialities latent in humanity and society.

Art had possessed these varied social functions through- ] out history, albeit in an unconscious manner. Not until the end of the eighteenth century, during the heyday of German classicism, did Schiller explicitly formulate the notion that art was a privileged locus for both refuge from and assault upon society. Throughout the nineteenth century the train

of thought initiated by Schiller became increasingly pressing, as the disruption of traditional institutions of cultural production and distribution forced writers and artists to ex- | amine critically the relation of art to society. The end of courtly patronage, the growth of anonymous markets for the arts, the fluctuating censorship policies of changing regimes, and the rise to social prominence of the pragmatic bourgeois class—these developments fundamentally altered the conditions under which cultural creation took place. In the 1880s, after a century of piecemeal accommodation to these incremental changes, a generation of writers and artists arose that

2 * INTRODUCTION | desired systematically to evaluate and reform the nature and function of the arts in the modern world. This new genera-

tion called itself the “Moderne.” | Jacques Barzun has suggested that “the one thing that unifiles men in a given age is not their individual philosophies

but the dominant problem that these philosophies are designed to solve.”' This was certainly true of the selfproclaimed modernists, who found radically divergent answers to a common set of queries: What is art, and what

should it be? What is society, and how should it be reformed? And what are the actual and potential mediations between the two? By posing these questions, the modernists opened a Pandora’s Box—a favored image of the move-

ment—from which further queries and anxieties have escaped up to the present day. By questioning the nature of “society” and of “‘art,”’ writers and artists became aware that

these verbal ciphers conveniently masked highly complex phenomena. Critical modernists perceived that “society” | was a hypostatized concept which, upon close scrutiny, dissolved into conflicting groups and individuals. In turn, the individual was viewed as an increasingly problematic entity,

whose essence could be evoked only in an intuitive manner, | if by any means at all. The most radical modernists came to realize that language—broadly defined as the medium of imputing, organizing, and communicating meaning—likewise crumbled upon close examination.

The crises of community, individuality, and language gave modernism its great dynamism. On the one hand, writers and artists came to realize that new forms of language and new systems of meaning would have to be devised in order to describe their novel and critical perceptions of reality. On the other hand, they gradually learned that language was not merely reflective, but also constructive of society: the superficial coherence of the social order resulted from

the common acceptance of prevailing values and world views. [his acceptance was largely unconscious and uncritical. Just as, in Marx’s analysis, men had become unwitting

| slaves of social relations created to free them from submis-

Modernism, Theater, Munich - 3 sion to nature, so too were men enslaved to their own systems of designating and imputing meaning to the social and natural worlds. Rather than being creators of culture, men were its creatures; the limits of thought were determined, in Nietzsche’s words, by “the prison-house of language.” The most innovative modernists sought to break out of this jail (or at least enlarge the area of incarceration) by forcing language to the limits of the spoken word and by proceeding

to nonverbal means of expression. |

The concern of German modernists with examining and redefining society, humanity, and language predisposed them

to place special emphasis on theater. Ever since the eighteenth century, the German middle classes had been taught that theater was an institution of ethical education. In the

early twentieth century Thomas Mann could still write: “We Germans have an inborn reverence for theater un-

known to any other nation. What the rest of Europe consid-

ers a form of convivial amusement, we regard at the very least as an educational experience. Recently the Kaiser told a French actress: Just as the university is a continuation of the Gymnasium, so too the theater is a continuation of the uni-

versity.”’ This “inborn reverence” for theater predisposed German modernists to see the stage as an influential social rostrum. More significantly, modernists turned to theater because

its fusion of several arts—prose, poetry, acting, music, dance, painting—made it a laboratory where the general — state of culture could be presented and new possibilities explored. Theater proved to be a totalizing art form in its own

right, as well as a medium for expanding the expressive pos- | sibilities of several other arts simultaneously. By the last half

of the nineteenth century, German theater was dominated by the spoken word; yet the modernists increasingly questioned the ability of spoken words to describe character or propel dramatic action. Drama, the written text, was gradually subordinated to theater, the physical performance, as playwrights and directors became more aware of the specific

nature and unexplored possibilities of the theatrical me-

4 + INTRODUCTION , dium. Spoken drama was revitalized by a host of theatrical forms that ranged from ritual gesture to boisterous play, and its expressive repertory was broadened to include pantomime, clowning, acrobatics, ballet, song, and even plays of pure light and inanimate objects. This expanded conception of the potentials of theater was laid out in a schema devised by Oskar Schlemmer in the 1920s, which described a spectrum ranging from “religious cult activity” to ‘folk enter-

« -- re . |

tainment” (figure 1). The central line of the diagram (“theater of illusion”) designated the type of performance favored by the elites of the nineteenth century; the rest of the field described the paths that advocates of modernist the-

ater sought to rediscover or blaze afresh.* , |

Theatrical experimentation in Germany was concentrated in Berlin and Munich. Around 1900 Berlin was the undisputed center of naturalist drama, which continued to place major emphasis on realistic acting and dialogue. In contrast,

| the less verbal and more gestural variants of theatrical modernism tended to flourish in Munich, a city that attracted a SCHEME FOR STAGE, CULT, AND POPULAR ENTERTAINMENT ACCORDING TO:

: : STAGE — of ON tac 1S — a Sane

RELIGIOUS CULT ACTIVITY | sermon | oratorio |

STYLIZED OR v SCHILLER CHORIC S>( tester ) §

sae" =

es ee mr CABARET es es vaRieve } SIMPLEST STAGE , CONFERENCIER| MUSIC HALL | CARICATURE

ae ~ \ (Vaudeville) ee ee ee 1+ Diagram by Oskar Schlemmer (1925).

Modernism, Theater, Munich + 5

growing number of important young dramatists and directors. Between 1890 and 1920 Oskar Panizza, Frank Wedekind, Hanns von Gumppenberg, Otto Julius Bierbaum, Max Halbe, Georg Hirschfeld, Elsa Bernstein (Ernst Rosmer),

Ernst von Wolzogen, Josef Ruederer, Ludwig Thoma,

Georg Fuchs, Carl Sternheim, Heinrich Lautensack, Erich | Mihsam, Vassily Kandinsky, Ernst Toller, and Bertolt Brecht spent important stages of their careers in Munich. Certainly one misses two outstanding German dramatists, Gerhart Hauptmann and Georg Kaiser, as well as the two Viennese luminaries, Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Arthur - Schnitzler. Their absence does not, however, obviate the fact that Munich possessed the greatest cross section of innovative German playwrights during the Wilhelmine pe-

riod. The Bavarian capital was, moreover, the site of important modernist theatrical institutions, such as the Elf Scharfrichter, the most famous cabaret of Wilhelmine Germany; the Schauspielhaus, the epitome of Jugendstil archi-

| tecture in the theater; and the Kinstlertheater, the first major European stage dedicated to a new gestural theatricality. In his survey of The German Stage in the Nineteenth Century, Marvin Carlson could justifiably conclude that,

compared with Berlin or Vienna, fin-de-siécle Munich “proved more radical in production experimentation and more responsive than either to the full range of experimentation of playwriting of the period.’” Every center of European culture left its particular local

imprint on modernism. To be sure, the movement as a whole was international in character. The ready availability and growing number of journals devoted to cultural matters, as well as the geographic mobility of many writers and art-

ists, encouraged an active interchange of ideas across regional and national boundaries. Certainly many figures discussed in this work were influenced by experiences abroad (such as Wedekind in Paris, or Kandinsky in Russia). Nevertheless, it cannot be denied that each center of | modernist culture had a particular confluence of political, socioeconomic, and cultural characteristics that encouraged its

6 + INTRODUCTION | local avant-garde movement to develop in a distinct manner.

Four factors, not unique to Bavaria, but accentuated there, contributed preeminently to the rise and development of modernism in Munich: the decline of liberalism and the growth of political Catholicism; the prevalence of a classical tradition in the arts; the increasing commercialization of cultural production and diffusion; and the persistence of tradi-

tional forms of popular culture. | | The political context within which Munich’s modernist movement developed was characterized by moribund liberalism and resurgent political Catholicism. Over the course of the nineteenth century Bavarian monarchs generally sought to undermine the power of the Catholic Church and to appease the increasingly influential middle classes by fostering

a Central European variant of liberalism. This liberalism |. espoused secularization of education, restricted parliamentary power, a franchise limited to educated and propertied men, laissez-faire in commercial matters, and vigorous state sponsorship of education, science, and the arts. From the 1860s on, these policies came under attack from Bavaria’s Catholic party (the Bavarian Patriots’ Party, renamed the Bavarian Center Party in 1887), which mobilized the peas- —s_—>

antry and lower middle classes and gained an absolute majority of seats in the Bavarian parliament in 1869. There-

after, the Center Party waged an on-again, off-again struggle | with the liberal regimes until a Centrist cabinet was finally appointed in 1912.

Much of this battle centered on the issue of censorship, and the censorship of modernism in particular. At the same time that Catholicism was attempting to shore up traditional

| social, familial, and religious values, the modernist movement was calling into question many previously accepted institutions, morals, and modes of behavior. Increasingly, liberal cabinets, under Centrist parliamentary pressure, saw themselves compelled to prevent “obscene” and “blasphemous” modernist plays from reaching the stage. This development discredited both liberalism and political Catholicism

in the eyes of the modernists, whose own political views

Modernism, Theater, Munich + 7 became increasingly polarized and radicalized. The modern-

ists responded to public rebuffs by dividing into a quiescent, apolitical, and aesthetically introverted group on the one hand, and an increasingly politicized and activist faction on the other. Among the latter group a small number began to follow and contribute to right-wing and protofascist ideologies, which called for a radical refashioning of society through the creation of a unified, homogenized, and totalitarian culture. The artist, it was believed, could play a commanding role in this enterprise, 1n which the divisiveness of pluralistic parliamentary politics would give way to charismatic and ritual modes of rule. Even more modernists, however, espoused anarchist principles. Anarchism promised, after all, a type of utopia that would realize the two conflicting ideals sought by so many avantgarde artists: a high degree of individual freedom, and a strong (but supposedly voluntary) sense of community.° Insofar as discontent with the middle ground of parliamentary politics led to a radicalization of the avant-garde toward the left as well as the right, the modernism of prewar | Munich presaged the political polarization that would characterize Weimar culture. Whereas Bavarian royal politics was marked by liberalism

through much of the nineteenth century, its major cultural expression was neoclassicism, the Grecophile movement that had arisen in eighteenth-century Germany. The secular and rational values embodied in neoclassicism perfectly suited the Bavarian monarchs’ domestic and foreign goals: they hoped to weaken the power of the Church by fostering secular humanistic values, and they sought to increase the prestige of their kingdom by turning Munich into the Central European capital of modern science and enlightened arts. [he cultures of classical Greece and eighteenth-century Germany ultimately proved to be an ambiguous heritage, however, inasmuch as they harbored many socially critical and sensuous elements that could be turned against the political and cultural rationalism espoused by the monarchs. When the modernists began to challenge the “official cul-

8 + INTRODUCTION

ture” of rationalist, idealized neoclassicism in the 1890s, they based their arguments in part on a “closer reading” of ancient Greek and eighteenth-century German texts, with

‘emphasis upon the sensualist and libertarian content. Whereas the official, “Apollonian” classicism of the nineteenth century was used to refine and temper the mind, and explosive, “Dionysian” classicism of the modernists became

a vehicle for freeing the emotions and liberating the body. While state-supported neoclassicism provided one context (as well as target) for nascent modernism, the mass marketplace for cultural products provided another. Since the eigh-

teenth century the middle class had emerged as a major financial sponsor of the arts, one that came to rival and ulti- | mately supercede courtly patrons. The growing bourgeois public supported artistic modes ranging from the inspirational to the sentimental to the sensational. Over time, the “sensational” fare of the cultural marketplace sank to a lowest common denominator of taste, which invariably tended toward crude depictions of sexual situations. After mid-century, boudoir farces and sexually suggestive skits dominated commercial stages and vaudevilles, much to the

horror of the Church, the state, the classically educated classes, and the modernists as well. At the same time that modernists encouraged a healthy openness toward eroticism, _

| they criticized the sexual hypocrisy and voyeurism of the commercial fare against which they had to compete. To be sure, occasionally it was hard to distinguish “redeeming” from “unredeeming”’ accounts of sexuality, insofar as some modernists succumbed to the (often lucrative) temptation to speculate on the prurient instiz:cts of the audience. In general, though, modernist playwrights deplored the fact that they were compelled to submit to market demands at all. Commercial pressures were considered as nefarious as politi-

cal pressures, inasmuch as both of them deprived artists of the expressive and experimental freedom that was the sine qua non of modernism. Artistically, this anti-commercial sentiment became embodied 1n a new mode of analytic social

Modernism, Theater, Munich - 9 drama, while politically, it fed the anarchist and activist currents among the modernists. The third cultural context of Munich modernism, in addition to state-sponsored neoclassicism and the incipient mass culture of the marketplace, was traditional popular culture.

Peasant arts and crafts, fairground theaters, puppet shows, and traditional festivities such as Fasching (the carnival season) embodied a visual and gestural vitality that had disappeared from the overly “literary” paintings and plays of the educated elites. As modernists came to question rationalism and its fundamental modes of expression—the written and spoken word, mimetic art—they turned increasingly to the nonverbal and emotionally suggestive arts of the populace.

Moreover, the modernists perceived in popular culture a ‘“carnivalesque” spirit that opposed social, political, and cultural hierarchies, and that dismissed the “civilized”’ bifurca-

: tion of mind and body. Popular culture’s conflation of , seemingly opposite concepts and its breakdown of socially accepted barriers had an enormous impact upon both the style and the content of modernist theater. The modernists’ explosion of “elite’’ conventions and their propagation of new forms were often inspired by the diversity and vitality of the popular theatrical arts. Moribund liberalism, censorious political Catholicism, “official” neoclassicism, a nascent commercial mass culture, and a lingering traditional popular culture—all of these factors composed the context within which modernist theater developed in fin-de-siécle Munich. One often reads that the Prinzregentenzeit was the “golden age” of Munich. To be sure, the three decades that preceded the outbreak of World War I were certainly “golden” in comparison with events after August 1914, but the horrors of war and its aftermath should not blind one to the political and cultural conflicts of

| Munich’s modernist community at the turn of the century.’ It was not some ineffable gemiitlich quality of Bavarian life _ that led to Munich’s modernist fluorescence, but rather a myriad of tensions, uncertainties, and frustrations. Mod-

10 + INTRODUCTION ernism was the product of a game played with diverse cultural pieces on a political, social, and commercial terrain that was constantly shifting. The progress of that game and the

artistic configurations that resulted are the subject of this _ book.

al CHAPTER ONE

x Munich in 1890 —_ BAVARIA’S POLITICAL AND CULTURAL DEVEL-

opments over the course of the nineteenth century generated both the foundations and the targets of the modernist movement that arose in Munich in the 1890s. On the most fundamental level Bavarian politics was marked by a struggle of the royal government and bureaucracy against the Catholic

Church and its political arm, the Center Party. In this confrontation the government availed itself of German ‘“‘classi-

cal” arts and education to foster a secular and rational, but

politically quietist mentality among the citizenry. After mid-century, the apolitical nature of this “official culture” was challenged by a new critical spirit in the arts, embodied

in the works of Richard Wagner and Henrik Ibsen, two part-time residents of Munich. Their music-dramas and plays inspired the rise of naturalism, the first “modern,” albeit not yet modernist movement in the Bavarian capital. The virulent opposition of the Catholic press and politicians, who had regained a large measure of worldly influence since the 1860s, prevented the Munich naturalists from developing their full potential. Nevertheless, despite the fact that Munich’s naturalist movement could point to few major achievements, its criticism of “official culture,” bourgeois

society, and Catholic politics inspired many subsequent modernist playwrights, and its realistic aesthetics served as a foil against which modernist forms could develop. Indeed, the modernist movement defined itself in opposition to all of Bavaria’s conflicting political and cultural currents in 1890: liberalism and Catholicism, classicism and naturalism.

12 + MUNICH IN 1890 -_ Anticlericalism, “Official” Classicism, and the Challenge of Wagner and Ibsen

The struggle between the Catholic Church and a state- — sponsored classical-liberal tradition had its origins in the eighteenth century and constituted a significant turning point in Bavarian history. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when Bavaria was elevated from a duchy to an electorate of the Holy Roman Empire, the Wittelsbach dynasty had been a militant defender of Counter-Reformation Catholicism. Over the course of the eighteenth century, though, strains between the court and the clergy developed, as the Electors of Bavaria sought to weaken the power of the

| Church in keeping with the European trend toward enlightened absolutism. Ultimately the administration of Count Montgelas, chief adviser of Max Joseph IV (1799-1825), marked a decisive break between the Church and the mod- | ernizing state. In 1803 the turmoil of the Napoleonic era en-

abled Montgelas to suppress numerous religious orders and to confiscate the holdings of the Church, which controlled over half of the arable land of Bavaria. Three years later Max Joseph was proclaimed King Maximilian I by Napoleon, and the new Kingdom of Bavaria was allowed to augment is ter-

ritory by incorporating predominantly Protestant lands to the north. Whereas Bavaria had formerly been almost entirely Catholic, by 1815 one out of four citizens of the kingdom was Protestant. The population of the new territories constituted an important basis of support for the govern- | ment’s policy of limiting the power of the Catholic Church.

| By mid-century Protestants filled major positions in the royal cabinets and the burgeoning bureaucracy, and the franchise for the Bavarian parliament favored urban areas where Protestant and liberal attitudes predominated. '

In the 1860s the Church and its adherents responded to these developments by launching a major campaign to regain worldly influence. The signal for the attack came from Rome, where the syllabus of errors (1864) and the procla- |

mation of papal infallibility (1870) were designed to

Munich in i890 + 13 strengthen the internal discipline of the Church in its battle with the modern state and secular culture. Closer to home, Bavarian Catholics were frightened by the move toward unification with Prussia, since the influence of Bavaria’s Protes-

tant minority would be further consolidated by formal allegiance to the Prussian emperor. To counter this development, Bavarian Catholics formed the Patriots’ Party in 1868

(renamed the Bavarian Center Party in 1887), which con- | sisted of an alliance of Catholic peasants, lesser bourgeois, clerics, and old nobility against the liberal bureaucracy and urban bourgeoisie. Faced with the impending unification of Germany, the Patriots agitated for either the continuation of Bavarian independence or a grossdeutsch solution, whereby Catholic parity would be assured through the incorporation

of Austrian Germans.’ :

Even though the creation of a predominantly Prussian kleindeutsch Reich in 1871 spelled the end of these dreams,

the federal structure of the new Empire allowed Bavaria, more than any other German state, to retain a great degree of internal political autonomy.’ Consequently, the struggle between Catholics and the liberal regime that had commenced

in the 1860s continued to define Bavarian political culture well into the twentieth century. In 1869, within a year of its founding, the Patriots’ Party was able to gain an absolute majority of seats in the Bavarian Landtag (parliament), and it retained that majority until the end of the monarchy (except for the years 1893-1899, when it lost votes to the Peas-

ant League). Despite this superiority of Catholics in the legislature, the royal government was able to maintain liberal domination by three means: oligarchical rule, gerrymandering, and franchise restrictions. Bavarian cabinets were appointed by the monarch, to whom they were exclusively responsible. As noted, the kings surrounded themselves with

liberal and often Protestant advisers in order to maintain

their independence of the Church. However, since the bud- | getary powers of the parliament gave it great political lever-

age, the royal government sought to skew the electoral system in favor of the liberals. The decree that created the

, 14 + MUNICH IN 1890 parliament in 1848 stipulated that the cabinet should draw the boundaries of voting districts for each election; thus, electoral maps were carefully designed to favor liberal cities

and Protestant regions over the Catholic countryside. The appalling inegality of this system was made manifest in elec-

tions like that of 1875, when liberals, with 196,700 votes, gained seventy-six seats in parliament, while Catholics, with

280,000 votes, had only seventy-nine delegates. Moreover, _ the Bavarian government restricted parliamentary and municipal voting to the upper tax brackets, thereby favoring those with education and property. Only two-thirds of the men eligible to vote for the national Reichstag, which enjoyed universal male suffrage, could vote for the Bavarian

parliament, and municipal franchises were even narrower. , Around 1905, for example, 130,000 men in Munich could vote for the Reichstag, 90,000 for the Bavarian Landtag, and only 30,000 for the city council.*

| _ These undemocratic measures constituted ultimately futile attempts to reduce the impact of the rapid erosion of the

liberals’ strength at the polls. In the 1850s and 1860s liberals | dominated municipal and parliamentary politics, which at that time were a preserve of the urban middle classes. At the end of the 1860s, however, the newly organized Patriots sought out and attracted a mass base in the countryside. The

results were dramatic: between 1871 and 1874, votes for Catholic Reichstag candidates rose from 220,000 to 480,000,

while liberal strength fell from 291,000 to 227,000. Moreover, from the 1880s on, Social Democrats challenged the liberals in their urban strongholds; as early as 1890 both of Munich’s delegates to the Reichstag were Social Democrats.

, By 1903 the Reichstag elections in Bavaria netted 423,000 votes for the Center, 210,000 for the Socialists, and only 190,000 for the liberals. Similarly, liberal representation in the Bavarian Landtag had fallen from 49 percent in 1869 to

16 percent in 1905. | Despite these parliamentary gains by the Center Party,

both Ludwig II (1864-1886) and Luitpold (regent, 1886-1912) continued to appoint liberal cabinets. In fact,

Munich in i890 + 15 the 1870s and 1880s witnessed an intensification of the church-state struggle. Attempts were made to restrict Catholic influence in schools, to introduce compulsory secular marriage, to stop the appointment of priests more loyal to Rome than to Bavaria, and to encourage the resistance of the Altkatholiken (Catholics who opposed the doctrine of papal

| infallibility). Above all, the Bavarian government wholeheartedly supported Chancellor Bismarck’s notorious Kulturkampf, the assault upon Roman Catholicism throughout

| the new Reich in the 1870s.’ |

The struggle between Catholicism and the Bavarian state was especially notable in the cultural sphere, where a statesponsored secular classicism challenged Catholic faith and

values. As in the political realm, this development repre- ,

sented an about-face on the part of the Wittelsbachs. During

the Counter-Reformation the Bavarian electors had been generous patrons of baroque art, architecture, and music, and Munich had been the major center of Jesuit theater in Central Europe. Over the course of the eighteenth century, this sponsorship of Catholic culture fell victim to the estrangement of Church and state. The process culminated in the early nineteenth century, when the “secularization” of 1803 deprived the Church of its financial basis for cultural patronage, and the Bavarian monarchs turned to classical culture to imbue their citizenry with an anticlerical spirit of secular rationalism. The ambiguous political implications of the German classical tradition made it especially useful to both enlightened-absolutist and constitutional monarchies in

Central Europe. Such governments not only sought to weaken the power of the Church and the nobility, but they also hoped to foster an educated and politically loyal middle class that would fill bureaucratic positions and contribute to economic and scientific advancement. The desired combination of secular rationalism and public-service spirit was to be found in German classicism.

The classicism of Goethe and Schiller, which adopted many ideals of the Enlightenment from Lessing and Kant, was concerned with the creation of a Nation and the educa-

| 16 * MUNICH IN 1890 tion of the men who were to constitute it. The desired Nation was not a politically unified German state, but rather a body of educated citizens who would employ a common (German) language to maintain a constant public discourse on philosophical, religious, scientific, artistic, social, and po-

litical issues. This was no small demand in the late eighteenth century, a time when French was the language of “polite society” and Central Europe consisted of several hundred formally independent political entities. The enlightened and classical authors of Central Europe believed that their best hope for a “national” audience lay with the Protestant middle classes, who enjoyed high rates of literacy and a religious culture that sensitized them to spiritual and

intellectual discourse. | oe

Significantly, the creation of such a Nation would have been meaningless without a fundamental change in the sociopolitical system as well. The petty aristocratic potentates of Central Europe would have to abandon their belief that

, subordinate classes existed for their personal benefit; the privileged orders would also have to see themselves as part of the Nation. Once this occurred, however, the very function of the aristocracy would be put into question. If public discourse was to generate the principles of correct govern- —

ment, then it would be only proper for the discussants to | have some share in collective rule. This process of democratization could not occur, however, until rulers and ruled had

been fashioned into responsible “national” citizens by a

classical education that was both moral and aesthetic.° The most thorough statement of the political function of classical culture was Schiller’s On the Aesthetic Education of Man 1n a Series of Letters (1795). Like many other Ger-

man writers, Schiller was sympathetic to the goals of the French Revolution, yet he abhorred the excesses of the Terror. Although he never relinquished his democratic ideals, he believed that the Terror demonstrated that his contemporaries lacked the emotional and moral self-restraint neces-

sary for collective self-government. He contended that the needed balance of self-expression and self-control could be

Munich in 1890 + 17 acquired through immersion in classical culture; aesthetic education could teach the individual to form his sensual and spiritual potentialities into a harmonious whole. This would,

in turn, lay the basis for his development into an ethical being capable of mediating between personal desires and collective demands: “In order to solve practically the problem of politics, man must address the problem of aesthetics,

since it is through Beauty that one progresses to Freedom.”” | Schiller thus attributed to the artist the role of guiding humanity to collective political maturity, and he believed that the playwright was especially well suited to this function. In his essay of 1784 on the stage as a moral institution, he contended that in previous ages religion had been a major force that informed and guided human emotions, values, and actions. Religion possessed this power because of its “sen-

suous” (sinnlich) appeal: “religion acts primarily on the sensuous element of the populace—perhaps it is through its sensuousness alone that it works so unfailingly.” However, the spread of rationalist, Cartesian faith and the consequent destruction of “‘the images of heaven and hell” had robbed

religion of its sensuous attraction and popular influence. Schiller believed that theater was the only institution that could replace religion as a moral force that appealed to the senses as well as the soul. It was, moreover, a forum that addressed both the rulers and the ruled: 1t could teach despots the virtues of ““humanitarianism and toleration,” and it could spread enlightenment to the still superstitious sectors of the population. Rulers and ruled would learn what it means “to

be a human [ein Mensch zu sein].” Eventually the theater could transform the divided and benighted polity into an enlightened nation: “if we had a national theater [ Natzonalbiihne|, we would also become a Nation.” ° Schiller’s two-step political goal was the creation of en_ lightened monarchies wherein ethically informed and emotionally self-controlled citizenries would develop; upon maturity, the citizens would peacefully assume governmen-

tal responsibilities. This ambiguity in Schiller’s vision, hovering between enlightened monarchy and democracy,

18 + MUNICH IN 1890 allowed it to be appropriated by both radical citizens and reformist bureaucrats. Although Schiller hoped for an evo_ lutionary movement to democracy, he also recognized that under absolutist rule more strident opposition might be needed to defend humanist values: The artist is a child of his times, but woe unto him if he is also its pupil, or worse still, its minion. Let a benevolent deity tear

the infant from its mother’s breast at the appropriate time, nourish him with the milk of a better age, and allow him to

| grow to maturity under Greek skies. When he has become a man, then let him return, an alien figure, to his own country; but not in order to please it with his appearance, but rather to

purify it, terrible like Agamemnon’s son.” , Many educated bourgeois came to consider themselves such

children of Agamemnon. During the Vormdrz, the years preceding the revolutions of 1848, a generation of democratic intellectuals—ranging from constitutional monarchists to radical republicans in politics, and including Left Hegelians in philosophy and Young Germans in literature—correctly sensed the subversive nature of classicism; they invoked Schiller as a herald of the approaching age of freedom. This libertarian tradition inspired many of the political demands made by the rebellious intelligentsia throughout Germany in 1848.'° In the interim, the authoritarian states of Central Europe

had been able to refashion the classical tradition for their | own ends. In his letters on aesthetic education, Schiller explicitly stated that in order to play a politically educative role, art would have to remain free from state interference:

‘All improvements in the political sphere are to proceed from the ennobling of character—but how can a character subjected to the influence of a barbarous constitution ennoble itself? One needs to find an institution that does not proceed from the state, and that opens up springs that remain

clear and pure in the face of all political corruption.”"' In 1795, when he penned these lines, Schiller viewed classical education, free of state influence, as such an instrument; but | little more than a decade later the Prussian state, under the

Munichin 1890 -* 19 influence of Wilhelm von Humboldt, adopted classical culture as the basis of its reformed secondary schools (Gymna-

sia). Numerous other German states, including Bavaria, soon followed suit. Consequently, during the Restoration and the Vormarz, the classical tradition was refashioned into

a state-sponsored instrument for depoliticizing the middle classes. In practice, classical education was transformed into an entrance-ticket into the civil service and the professions, as well as a means of attaining individual (and asocial) self-

fulfillment in one’s leisure hours. Whereas Schiller saw “Beauty” as the path to active political “Freedom,” the “affirmative culture” of the state projected “Beauty” as a pas-

_ sive realm of freedom from political and social concern. Classicism became thereby an instrument of authoritarian rule." The use of classical culture for both state control and © public depoliticization was especially pronounced in Bavaria. [he desire of Maximilian I to attenuate the power of the Church and to mold an educated but politically docile

citizenry turned him into a sponsor of classical theater. He | commissioned the construction of a Nationalbiihne in the Bavarian capital; significantly, a Franciscan monastery was

demolished to make room for the new edifice. In contrast to , the exquisite rococo Residenztheater of Francois Cuvilliés (1753), which had been open only to members of the court circle, the “Hof- und Nationaltheater” (1818) of the neoclassical architect Karl von Fischer catered both to the court and to Munich’s middle-class citizenry. With 2,600 seats, it _ was the largest theater in Europe, a truly immense public forum for a city whose population was only 40,000.'* The theater’s spoken repertory consisted of tragedies involving the exemplary lives of great historic personages, and bourgeois dramas and comedies that propounded enlightened middle-class virtues. Simultaneously, in the realm of secondary education, the classical content of Bavaria’s Gymnasia was fortified, so that by 1830 Bavarian pupils were receiving a training in classical languages that was more thorough than anywhere else in the German-speaking world.” Maximilian’s sponsorship of classical culture among the

20 + MUNICH IN 1890 middle classes was not only a means of providing a secular alternative to the pervasive baroque religiosity of southern Germany but also an attempt to gain prestige vis-a-vis the

other states of Central Europe. Under Maximilian’s son Ludwig I (1825-1848), Munich became Germany’s cultural showpiece. Ludwig proclaimed: “I want to turn Munich into such a city, that no one shall know Germany who does not know Munich.”’” In the 1830s the architects Leo von Klenze and Friedrich von Gartner undertook a major remodeling of

| the Bavarian capital’s outward appearance. Munich’s Gothic © and baroque core became surrounded by spacious boulevards lined with stark neoclassical and neo-Renaissance edifices that housed the offices of the royal administration and the cultural landmarks of the capital: the university, the Na-

tionaltheater, and the royal collections of painting and sculpture. Munich’s new face gave powerful expression to the city’s transformation from a center of baroque Cathol1cism to the administrative and cultural capital of a secular, neoabsolutist state. Ludwig’s classical predilections led to the installment of his son Otto upon the throne of the newly

independent Greek state; and in an ironic reversal of the “tyranny of Greece over Germany,” Klenze and Gartner designed modern Athens in a neoclassical style resembling that of Munich.’®

Ludwig’s policy of turning Munich into a cultural showcase was continued by his son Maximilian II (1848-1864), a firm believer in the so-called 7rias-Idee, or tripartite-principle. He contended that Prussia and Austria should be balanced by a coalition of middling German states with Bavaria at their head. Bavaria’s claim to such leadership would be based upon its cultural and scientific prestige, as Maximilian informed his minister of culture: “Because nature and history have made Bavaria the third power in Germany, it 1s duty-bound: to stand at the head of the second- and third-

class German states and of south Germany in general; to raise the prestige of Germany internally and internationally; and to light the way for Germany in matters of the Good, the Beautiful, and the Modern, so to speak, as a central point

Munichin i890 +: 21 of crystallization.”'’ With this goal in mind, Maximilian summoned to Munich many of Germany’s outstanding (and

largely Protestant) scholars, scientists, artists, and writers. The latter formed themselves into the Munich Poets’ Circle,

| whose preeminent members were Emanuel Geibel and Paul

Heyse. — |

The literary products of the Munich Circle, which at-

tained a wide readership throughout Central Europe, epito-

mized the apolitical and “epigonal’’ classicism that

dominated official and middle-class culture in the nineteenth century. Since Ludwig I had been forced to abdicate in the face of revolt in 1848, it was hardly surprising that his son sponsored the depoliticized classical tradition. The epigonal

writers at the court of Maximilian II treated art as an ideal sphere, a realm of pure beauty divorced from the concerns of everyday life. Whereas Schiller had hoped that immersion in

classical culture would lay the basis for political engagement, the members of the Munich Circle preferred to bask contentedly “under Greek skies” and to forget the problems of the present. They placed great emphasis upon formal purity and elegance in their novellas, poems, and plays. Their | themes were drawn almost exclusively from older eras (the classical world, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance) or from other countries (preferably Italy or the Orient). More recent or local themes were addressed only if they could be idealized and generalized into the “timelessness” that was demanded of art. Significantly, the only truly topical issue propounded by the Munich Circle was anticlericalism, which was expressed in works like Paul Heyse’s Kinder der Welt (1873). Inasmuch as they filled the pages of “family” journals in the later nineteenth century, the works of the. Munich Circle, which consisted of an easily digestible blend of idealism, sentimentality, and exoticism, became a staple in the literary diet of Germany’s middle-class reading public." - Although Maximilian’s Munich Circle retained cultural prominence and social respect until the end of the century, a major new (and potentially radical) development in theater, associated with the works of Richard Wagner, arose during

22 * MUNICH IN 1890 the reign of Ludwig II (1864-1886). Only nineteen years old when he assumed the throne, Ludwig already showed signs of the schizophrenia that would mar his reign. In place of the pragmatic public-service mentality of his father, Maximilian II, Ludwig hoped to substitute a charismatic and theatrical mode of rule; he wanted the court and the populace to be overcome by the spectacle of his royal aura. This advocate of charismatic rule was himself a victim of artistic charisma, inasmuch as he was passionately devoted to Richard

Wagner, who likewise revolted against the “bourgeois century.” Wagner (1813-1883) sought to revitalize and radicalize German classicism’s concern for personal develop-

ment and communal integration. Whereas the classicists desired a Nation, Wagner sought a Volk; whereas the classicists called for well-formed personalities, Wagner demanded instinctual expression. A Nation, in the sense of an educated and politically informed citizenry, had been generally established by 1848; a generation later, formal national unification |

had been achieved in Germany as well. Nevertheless, new forms of class differentiation kept German society as divided

as ever and prevented a true integration of all citizens. Wagner believed that a genuine consolidation of the entire

Volk, not merely the educated polity, could be achieved only by forging emotional bonds through theatrical means: the deepest urges of every individual would have to be ca| thected onto common dramatic symbols. Schiller had already underscored the sensuous and not entirely rational appeal of

theater that allowed it to replace religion; Wagner now sought to overwhelm the beholder by mobilizing all of the aural and spectacular arts of the stage.

The emotions that Wagner sought to arouse were, at a basic level, erotic—or “Dionysian,” to use the more comprehensive and evocative phrase of Wagner’s most eloquent propagandist, the young Friedrich Nietzsche (see The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music, 1872). Wagner hoped to replace the utilitarian rationality, individualism, and personal asceticism of the German middle classes with intense emotional bondings based on erotic sensations and (imag-

| Munich in 1890 + 23 ined) feelings of racial unity. In his music dramas reason _ gave way to mythic and symbolic intuition; Germanic and medieval tales of struggle and passion were reformulated to evoke an intense collective response that would stimulate both erotic and national fervor. Whereas the apolitical Munich Circle, having no desire to change the status quo, provided restrained and idealized visions of human existence that had little connections with the contemporary world, the highly political Wagner, a veteran of the revolutions of 1848-1849, sought to infuse his audience with intensely passionate feelings of national and racial communality."” This notion of forging a national community through theatrical media appealed to Ludwig II, who sought to maintain Munich’s cultural centrality in the emerging German state. Hoping that the Bavarian capital would become a site of na-

tional rejuvenation through communal theater, he inau| gurated his reign by summoning Wagner to Munich in May 1864. Four of his music-dramas received their world premieres at the Nationaltheater between 1865 and 1870 (T71stan, Die Meistersinger, Das Rheingold, Die Walktire), and

plans were made to construct a “Festspielhaus” devoted to | Wagnerian theater. However, the vociferous opposition of bureaucratic, bourgeois, and clerical circles to Wagner—because of his “immoral” operas, his adulterous and extravagant personal life, and his attempts to meddle in Bavarian politics at the highest level—forced the composer to leave the Bavarian capital after little more than a year (December 1865). Embittered by the hostility shown to Wagner, Ludwig turned his back on Munich and reserved his patronage for the Wagnerian festival-house that was eventually erected | in Bayreuth (1876), as well as for the fairy-tale palaces, replete with Wagnerian motifs, that he commissioned among the mountains of southern Bavaria (Linderhof, Neuschwanstein, Herrenchiemsee).””

Another model for the social relevance of the arts, less spectacular than that of Wagner, but even more important for the rise of naturalism, was provided by the plays of Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906). Feeling constrained by what he ©

24 + MUNICH IN 1890 considered the narrow intellectual horizons and limited artistic opportunities of his native country, Ibsen left Norway

, in 1868 and eventually settled in Munich (1875-1891). During his years in the Bavarian capital he composed his socially critical masterworks, which dramatized the struggle of willful individuals against the oppressive demands of social

conformity. In particular, the men and women of Ibsen’s | plays sought spiritual and social liberation from the bourgeois family and middle-class community. Ibsen stripped these institutions of their garbs of “decency” and ‘“morality’: he depicted the family as a cover for paternal domina-

| tion and sexual hypocrisy (A Doll’s House, The Wild Duck, | Ghosts, Rosmersholm), and community values as a disguise for economic self-interest (Pillars of Society, An Enemy of

the People). Bourgeois order was shown to be a mask for

, profound moral disorder, inasmuch as it allowed petty and | selfish people to achieve their ends, while ethically upright and spiritually independent men and women were ostracized and subjugated. By dramatizing the personal tragedies

brought about by the “healthy” functioning of “normal” middle-class communities, Ibsen called upon the public to engage in self-emancipation by challenging and rethinking accepted values and social roles.”’ Despite their obvious differences, both Wagner and Ibsen exercised a major influence on the rise of modernist theater.

On the one hand, the composer’s notion of the Gesamtkunstwerk—the unity of several arts under the aegis of _ music-drama—ultimately had a great impact upon later modernist experiments to expand the range of theatrical ex-

pression. Furthermore, his employment of myths encouraged the rise of symbolist and nonrational currents in fin-de-siécle drama. On the other hand, Ibsen’s realistic plays, set in middle-class milieux, had a more immediate impact by contributing to the development of naturalist social drama. Apart from such differences, Ibsen and Wagner shared an important point of convergence in their social and political views insofar as both men criticized the limits that

Munich in i890 + 25 bourgeois convention placed upon individuality. In Wagner’s Ring, as in Ibsen’s plays, the bondage of marriage and the quest for money are trademarks of a bourgeois-capitalist order that can be shattered only by heroic individuals inspired by higher visions.” Although the ultimate goals of Wagner and Ibsen were radically different—the composer hoped to create an impassioned vdlkisch community, while the playwright called for an elite of critically minded citizens that spurned communal conventions—-both men depicted the actions of strong-willed characters who challenge the hypocritical morality and materialist values of the middle-class “‘mass.” ‘This emphasis on critical individuality from such divergent sources encouraged tendencies toward intellectual elitism as well as social anarchism among many modernist playwrights.

The impact of Wagner and Ibsen was felt by modernist writers and artists throughout Europe, but it was particularly intense in Munich, where the physical presence of both

| men had encountered mixed reactions on the part of the general public and the paladins of “official culture.” Although Wagner had been driven from the Bavarian capital by out-

| raged citizens, by the time of his death, two decades later, his operas had gained an enthusiastic following among Munich’s middle classes. The reception accorded Ibsen was likewise ambivalent. He initially befriended members of the Munich Poets’ Circle in the 1870s, but the increasingly criti-

cal tenor of his plays soon estranged him from that group.

| Nevertheless, over the course of the following decade the

| Nationaltheater made an exception to its rule of avoiding | “tendentious””’ dramas by sponsoring some of the earliest

German productions of Pillars of Society and A Doll’s House, as well as the world premiere of Hedda Gabler (based upon the life and suicide of a Méanchnerin with whom Ibsen had been personally acquainted). Ghosts and Rosmersholm, considered too controversial for the Munich court stage, had their German premieres in the municipal

theater of nearby Augsburg.** Such performances of works

26 + MUNICH IN 1890 by Ibsen and Wagner on the stages of the Bavarian court theaters provided inspiration for the naturalist movement

that arose in Munich. ,

Munich’s Naturalist Movement: Michael Georg Conrad and the Modern Life Soctety

Naturalism was the first of the self-proclaimed “modern” movements witnessed by Germany at the end of the nine| teenth century. Over the course of the 1880s a generation of writers and artists, for the most part residents of Munich and

Berlin, referred to themselves collectively as the “Moderne,” | _ inasmuch as they sought to focus the public’s attention on the perplexing problems and harsh realities of the modern world. For these people the designations “‘Realismus,” “‘Naturalismus,” and the “Moderne” were interchangeable, inas-

much as they believed that being “modern” implied depicting “nature,” especially social and human nature, as it was “in reality.” To be sure, “reality” is an elusive concept, and the naturalists in Berlin and Munich espoused differing

definitions of the term. Whereas many Berlin naturalists opted for an “objective” realism and “thoroughgoing” (konsequenter) naturalism that aspired to depict modern urban and industrial life in exacting detail, the Munich naturalists _

| stressed the fact that “reality” was very much determined by the perceptions and interventions of the observer. For the |

Munich naturalists the social relevance of art was to be achieved not through passive observation but active engage-

ment: forceful and critical personalities were supposed to project new values into the social and political arena. With reference to Zola’s celebrated formulation of his naturalist credo——“‘a work of art is a corner of nature viewed through a

temperament’— one might say that the Munich naturalists, as disciples of Wagner and Ibsen, stressed their ‘‘temperaments.” [This emphasis upon the personality of the artist is apparent in the words of a leading Munich naturalist, who defined realistic art as “an energetically individualist portrayal, by a writer of great temperament, which provides a

Munich in 1890 + 27

complete impression of being true to nature, of depicting the | fullness, strength, and originality of life. Hence the realistic style of art is infinitely more difficult than the conventional, romantic, and idealist styles, and the successful execution of

that style requires a much greater measure of natural strength, of firmly resolute and full-blooded character, and of sharp powers of observation.” This characteristically wordy definition of realism was penned by Michael Georg Conrad (1846-1927), who stood at the center of Munich’s naturalist movement. The son of a cooper, Conrad was born a Protestant in a predominantly Catholic area of eastern Franconia. After serving as a teacher

in the Bavarian countryside for several years, he turned to free-lance writing and journalism and began a decade of travel. He lived in Italy from 1871 to 1878, and he spent the

following three years as the Paris correspondent for the , Frankfurter Zeitung before settling permanently in Munich. Conrad’s experiences as a Protestant child in a predominantly Catholic area, as well as his firsthand observation in Italy of the militant anti-modernism of the Roman Church, transformed him into a virulently anticlerical writer. Two of the books he wrote during his stay 1n Italy were so vituperatively anti-Catholic that in 1878 they were banned in post-

Kulturkampf Prussia.”° Conrad also took great interest in the | most modern and controversial cultural figures of the day. In

the 1850s, when still a child, he had become enthralled by the music of Wagner. He read Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy upon its appearance in 1872, and he met the author in Sorrento four years later. While in Paris he befriended Emile

Zola, and in Munich he became acquainted with Ibsen. These men—Wagner, Nietzsche, Zola, and [bsen—became for him embodiments of the critical potential of the artist in the modern world.

The juxtaposition of seemingly disparate figures like Wagner, Nietzsche, and Zola was on the surface as problematic to many of Conrad’s contemporaries as it might seem to

readers today, and he took pains to explain the underlying

precepts that united the three: | |

28 - MUNICH IN 1890 Even people with more intelligence and insight could not

comprehend how I, an avid admirer of Wagner and — Nietzsche, could also promote Zola with so much vigor and affection. Of course it soon became evident that in the case of | Wagner, Nietzsche and Zola—who, as fundamentally tragic

artists, embodied a revolutionary substance of enormous force—the triumph of their personalities was decided already

with their first entrances into the contemporary intellectual struggle [Geisterkampf der Zeit|. Such powers [ Potenzen], be they romantic or naturalist, Dionysian or Apollonian, prevent their most reluctant and sedentary contemporaries from ever sitting still again. On the basis of strong opposition and initial antipathy, they build up their world-wide success to _ giddying heights. In all three the aesthetics of power [ Asthe-

tik der Macht]| has achieved its most imposing triumphs. , All three, confronting “the world of the nineteenth century,

choking amid breathless materialism, propounded with their | bodies and souls the holy gravity and redemptive power of art as the highest task of civilized humanity. The artist as mentor and guide, the artist as connoisseur of life and shaper

of the future [Lebenserkenner und Zukunftsgestalter |— that is the new and naturalist conception of the position and

significance of art in a civilized state [im Kulturstaate].”’

These citations touch upon two concepts that were in- , strumental in creating as well as undoing the naturalist movement in Munich: the glorification of forceful artistic | personalities, and the “aesthetics of power.” Conrad _ believed that strong artistic personalities could play commanding roles in the ideologically divided German nation. They could act as social critics, in the manner of Zola, as well as forgers of a national consciousness, on the lines of Wagner and the early Nietzsche. In essence, Conrad gave a German nationalist twist to the social criticism of the French natural- _

ist. Like Zola in France, he contended that capitalism had | engendered a spirit of false individualism in Germany. All classes of society, “from the day-laborer to the Junker,” had

come to see themselves as isolated economic units competing |

against all others. This “rending of every affective bond” |

Munich in 1890 + 29 within the nation was matched by the divisive politics of the Bismarckian era, the playing-off of “good Germans” against

Catholics, militarists against progressive liberal “traitors,” and all classes against Social Democratic workers.”> This

| Bismarckian policy of multiple bifurcation encouraged the stigmatized groups, such as Catholics and Social Democrats, to place their allegiance beyond the nation’s frontiers, in the

ultramontane Church or the international workers’ movement. At the same time that capitalism was pulling apart the social fabric along a thousand different seams, the national

allegiance of numerous groups was being loosened by a divi-

sive political culture. In contrast, Conrad hoped to replace | the atomized individualism of laissez-faire capitalism with greater social cooperation, and he wished that the struggle between chauvinistic and internationalist ideologies would

give way to a common spirit of German patriotism that would tolerate and even encourage critical individuality. Like so many other German liberals throughout the nineteenth century, Conrad looked to the state to initiate these

changes. He thought that the situation could be remedied

through an alliance of “a strong state ... in open understanding with an enlightened and free people, pervaded by a sense of its world-historical significance and humane mission.””” The accomplishment of this goal was predicated on the success of two factors. On the one hand, the monarchy

would have to ward off the pressures of special-interest groups and legislate in a manner productive of social harmony. By 1890 Conrad was heartened by reports that the new Kaiser would inaugurate an era of Sozialpolitik that

would reconcile the working classes to the Reich. On the | other hand, while the state strove to transcend and resolve class divisions, the populace would have to be forged into a ‘homogeneous, strong community of folk-comrades [ Volks-

genossen |, who are moved by one faith, inspired by one

| ideal, spurred by ove anguish to renew their ethical conscience and to awaken and consolidate all of their slum-

bering and repressed energies for a lofty, common goal.” |

Conrad contended that German writers and artists should

30 + MUNICH IN 1890 work with the state to achieve this “spiritual-ethical rebirth of the whole populace in a nationalist and, at the same time,

modern spirit.””° | a Conrad believed that Munich was potentially the ideal lo-

cation for the growth of a nationalist movement centering on the cooperation of enlightened monarchs and committed artists. The alliance of rulers and artists had long been the hallmark of the city, ‘““which owes its existence to the brilliant

high-mindedness of its sovereigns.”*' To be sure, Paul Heyse and other paladins of Munich’s official culture had turned their backs to the divisive social reality and had fled into a realm of false idealism. On other occasions, though, Bavarian monarchs had used the arts as a positive social force. The culmination of this tendency had been the association of Ludwig II with Richard Wagner. The planned con-

| struction of the Wagnerian festival theater in Munich might have marked the beginning of a national rebirth; genuinely popular audiences might have been treated to performances

of the Ring, with its anti-capitalist thrust and its national mythmaking potential. This project was thwarted, though, by the machinations of the narrow-minded Catholics, busi- _ nessmen, and bureaucrats who had driven Wagner out of Munich—a fact which demonstrated once again that “the most splendid artistic projects founder on the meanness of the moneybags and the denseness of the masses.’”*’

| After the deaths of Wagner and Ludwig II in the 1880s Conrad hoped that Munich’s fledgling naturalist movement could be forged into a new source of social and national rebirth. The “aesthetics of power” he formulated entailed the assembling of an “aristocracy of the spirit,” a select group of forceful artistic personalities whose attempts to reform the thoughts and values of the nation would leave no person disinterested; whether as bitter opponents or faithful followers, all Germans would be forced to confront the criticisms and solutions projected by such artists into the center of national consciousness. In order to attract a group of like-minded li-

_ terati for this project, Conrad founded Die Gesellschaft in the fall of 1884. This monthly journal soon became the

Munich in i890 - 31 major German periodical dedicated to naturalism. Since the immediate cause for the creation of Die Gesellschaft was — Heyse’s attack on a naturalist colleague of Conrad, the programmatic introduction to the first issue had harsh words for Heyse’s brand of literature. It attacked the “cultured liars,”

the “pedantic philistines,” and the “police-loving hypocrites’” whose works catered to the sentimental and moralizing tastes of the bourgeoisie.’* On numerous occasions, Die Gesellschaft lambasted the “epigonal” writers of the Bavarian capital who studiously avoided addressing contemporary concerns. With a population of over 300,000 by the 1880s,

Munich had grown tenfold since the beginning of the century, and its residents could no longer afford to overlook the disruptions of modernization. Conrad thus argued in the pages of Die Gesellschaft that writers and artists should reject Munich’s official culture in favor of the more challenging ideals of Ibsen and Wagner: “For us, Ibsen is primarily the great caller-to-arms in the battle against the artistic dissoluteness and moral degeneration of the stage. And here too

lies our inner point of contact with the tremendous [ur- | gewaltig | reformer of opera, the brilliant creator of the new

| music-drama, the master of Bayreuth. The treatises of Richard Wagner have done more toward the furthering of our national literary revolution and for the unfolding of genuine naturalism in Germany than the professorial criticasters can imagine.””**

The introduction to the first issue of Conrad’s journal proclaimed: “Our Gesellschaft will cultivate that true aristocracy of the spirit [ Getstesaristokratie | that is called upon

to take over the high command of literature, art, and the public sphere.”*’ Die Gesellschaft did help galvanize the

naturalist movement throughout Germany. Although Conrad’s broad editorial policy and eclectic tastes induced

| him to publish much dilettantish work, he also printed the early products of such outstanding young naturalists as - Gerhart Hauptmann, Arno Holz, Johannes Schlaf, and Max Halbe. The essays, short stories, lyrics, and (occasionally ) scenes from plays published dealt with the major themes of

32 + MUNICH IN 1890 the naturalist movement: the nature of middle-class marriage and sexual morality, the condition of the working class, the role of the artist in German society, proposals for the political and spiritual invigoration of Germany, and—as a particu-

larly Bavarian contribution to naturalism—the threat posed | by Catholicism to German nationalism and modern art. After several years of prolific publishing, however, the Munich naturalists had to admit that a mere journal such as Die Gesellschaft, which had at most a thousand subscribers, was

| hardly a sufficient instrument for placing an “aristocracy of the spirit” in charge of cultural and worldly affairs. A more

direct approach, less mediated by the printed word, was : needed, and in December 1890 Conrad founded a society of

Munich naturalists, the Gesellschaft fiir modernes Leben

(Modern Life Society ). | | Major political changes in Bavaria and the Reich made

1890 an auspicious year for founding a naturalist society in Munich. September saw the death of Johann von Lutz, who, as Bavarian prime minister since 1880, had sustained vigorously the spirit of the Kulturkampf long after the issue had been resolved in Prussia. In his final years, though, Lutz had ~ been forced to make concessions to Bavarian Catholics. The

prestige of the crown and the liberal cabinet had been severely shaken by the crisis of 1886, when the increasingly | schizophrenic Ludwig II was deposed by his ministers, and | drowned soon thereafter while attempting to escape house arrest. Even though the popular monarch’s death had been |

accidental, many citizens believed that he had been murdered by scheming liberal politicians. To make matters worse, Ludwig could not be succeeded by Otto, his psychotic brother, so a regency had to be established under their uncle Luitpold.*® Given this unstable political situa-

tion, Lutz believed that compromise with the Catholic Landtag was imperative. After Lutz’s death, anticlericals like

| Conrad feared that his successor, Krafft von Crailsheim, would further give way to Centrist pressure unless strongly anti-Catholic groups were created to provide public support for the liberal government.*’ In contrast, the political climate

Munich in 1890 + 33 seemed more promising at the level of the Reich, inasmuch

as the anti-socialist laws had been lifted by the Reichstag and their author, Bismarck, had been dismissed by the new Emperor. [The February decrees of Wilhelm II, which promised social reform for workers, seemed to indicate that he was attempting to reconcile all classes to the German state. Fearful of the shaky power of liberals in Bavaria and heartened by the policies of the young Kaiser, Conrad believed that the time was ripe for Munich naturalists to make

themselves more loudly heard. |

On December 18, 1890, Conrad reported to the police the creation of the “Gesellschaft fiir modernes Leben,” which he

characterized as a “nonpolitical, literary-artistic association.”*® The seven founding members of the society, which grew out of Conrad’s cultural Stammtisch, were united not

so much by shared ideals as by their common hostility to Munich’s official culture and their separate desires to become influential literati. The group included Conrad, who |

became the society’s chairman; Julius Schaumberger (1858-1924), the editor of Mtinchener Kunst, a journal devoted to naturalist art; Georg Schaumberg (b. 1855), a play-

wright, sometime actor, journalist, and editor of the short-lived Miinchener Stadtzeitung; Otto Julius Bierbaum (1865-1909), a freelance writer and student of oriental philology; Hanns von Gumppenberg (1866-1928), a playwright

and journalist; Rudolf Maison (b. 1854), a sculptor; and Detlev von Liliencron (1844-1909), one of the more famous poets of the time.*” The real organizational work of the

society was performed by the first five men, who coopted the latter two for cosmetic purposes: Maison was a token plastic artist among the otherwise literary group, and Lilien-

cron’s name added prestige to the society. | The first article of the society’s statutes stated that its purpose was the “cultivation and propagation of the modern creative spirit in all areas (literature, art, science, and public

life) through exhibitions, the creation of an independent theater [ freie Buhne], the organization and exhibition of visual arts, and the issuing of a journal and other literary

34 * MUNICH IN 1890 publications.”*” On January 29, 1891, the society held its first evening of public lectures in order to explain its purpose and increase its membership, which had risen to over a hundred in the month since its formation. Munich’s major news-

_ paper, the liberal Munchener Neueste Nachrichten, reported that interest in the first meeting was so great that “hundreds” of curious people had to be turned away because of lack of space. The police observer sent to the meet-

ing reported that “there were many Social Democrats present, as well as many young businessmen and Jews; also many elegantly dressed women were to be seen, whose toilettes suffered greatly in the crush .. . I noticed no person of

| distinction among those present.”*' The evening’s offerings were rather straightforward: Conrad spoke of the society’s goals, Bierbaum talked about modern poetry, Schaumberger

discussed contemporary prose fiction, and some modern lyrics were recited. Only at the end, when Gumppenberg parodied the poems of Heyse and other stalwarts of Munich’s official culture, did shouts of protest arise from the au- | dience. This fact suggested that many opponents of the new movement, or at least supporters of the old, were present.”

The hostility shown Gumppenberg at the first public meeting grew in intensity over the ensuing months. This first victim among the Modern Life Society was, paradoxically, the person who least deserved that role, inasmuch as he was one of its more conservative members. The son of an | impoverished Catholic nobleman and a Protestant Biurgerin,

Gumppenberg had been a member of the exclusive royal | page corps during his years in Gymnasium. He studied German literature at the University of Munich, but a lack of money forced him to abandon pursuit of an academic career. In 1889 he became a freelance writer. As a young man he

had already written several historical plays in the idealist style of the day. One of them, Thorwald, was presented in the Residenztheater in 1888, but it was removed from the

| repertory after two performances when a Bavarian princess complained that the fugitive king in the play was a covert al- | lusion to Ludwig II. This misinterpretation closed the court

| Munich in 1890 + 35 — theater to Gumppenberg for the immediate future. In order to support himself he wrote concert and drama reviews for

Schaumberger’s Mtinchener Kunst and Schaumberg’s Miinchener Stadtzeitung.” Gumppenberg was an especially clear example of a young

| writer without independent means who joined the modern camp more out of necessity than conviction. In his own words, he was attracted to the Conrad circle because of its opposition to established cultural institutions, “whose hostility to youth and change I myself had experienced” and “which had condemned me to be a penniless proletarian, despite my education and ability.”** Moreover, Gumppenberg, who spoke openly of his social and cultural superiority over

- the average man, was attracted to the Munich naturalists’ search for an “aristocracy of the spirit.”” He opposed, however, the Berlin variant of naturalism: in the first issue of the Moderne Blatter, the weekly journal of the Munich naturalists that replaced Muinchener Kunst, he called for a subjec-

tive “realism” that would transcend both epigonal idealism | and overly objective naturalism.” Gumppenberg’s public difficulties resulted from the fact

that he had a decidedly agnostic approach to religion (the result, perhaps, of his religiously mixed parentage). Soon after the first public meeting of the Modern Life Society, Gumppenberg’s Messias appeared in bookstores. Stylistically it was a very conventional play, with unrhymed pentameters, monologues, asides, and similar nonrealistic and ‘“epigonal” dramatic conventions. Nevertheless, in conform-

ity with other naturalist portrayals of Christ,*° the drama depicted Jesus as a thoroughly human, nondivine apostle of peace and social justice, who advanced his noble ideals by deliberately concocting lies about his divine origin and by staging seemingly magical charades (such as “resurrecting”’

the “dead” daughter of Jairus). The Catholic press, in particular the Miinchener Fremdenblatt, immediately decried the work as atheistic and blasphemous. Gumppenberg’s fa- _ ther, fearful of losing his job in the postal service, purchased all remaining copies of the work from the publisher. Rather

36 * MUNICH IN 1890 | | than let the issue rest, Gumppenberg replied to his critics on

February 27 at the second public meeting of the Modern Life Society, where he delivered a talk on “The Aesthetic — Treatment of Religious Subjects.” In its account of the lecture, the Miinchener Fremdenblatt claimed that Gumppen-

| berg had spoken of Christ as a “laughable bugaboo” and a “loathesome character” (lacherliche Popanz and widerliche Gestalt ).*’ On the basis of this newspaper report, the police brought charges of blasphemy against Gumppenberg. The

charges were dropped, however, when the FremdenbDlatt re- | - porter refused to state under oath that Gumppenberg had used the reported phrases. In reality, Gumppenberg had said © merely that the Catholic image of Christ was that of an abstract and unreal Popanz; his own Messias, in contrast, had tried to humanize Jesus.”

Despite this temporary defeat, the Catholic press finally } succeeded in having Gumppenberg imprisoned for his presentation at the third public meeting of the Modern Life Society, on March 20, where he read verses by the Berlin social

poet Karl Henckell. One of the poems, ‘An die deutsche | Nation,” suggested that the Kaiserthron was a seat of injustice, megalomania, and spiritual insipidness. At this point in the recitation, officers in the audience shouted their disap-

proval and walked out, while the naturalists and Social Democratic workers applauded ostentatiously. Predictably, the Fremdenblatt accused Gumppenberg of having attacked the Kaiser personally as well as the institution of monarchy in general.*” Again charges were brought against him, this time for lese majesty. Gumppenberg was acquitted at the first trial, but the prosecution appealed the verdict, and a re-

trial was held before the Oberlandesgericht at the end of | August. In his own defense Gumppenberg argued that he was interested mainly in the artistic aspects of Henckell’s poem and did not subscribe to its political content. This latter point was supported by Anna Croissant-Rust, a naturalist writer who testified that “Gumppenberg’s pronounced

aristocratic viewpoints and attitudes are notorious.” Furthermore, the defense argued, Gumppenberg had read a

Munich in 1890 + 37 poem from a book that was sold openly. The prosecution re-

plied by noting that German law applied more stringent censorship standards to the spoken than to the written word: what was permissible in print was not always allowable on stage or in the lecture hall, since people were more readily influenced by what they heard and saw than by what they read. [he judges finally ruled that, even though Gumppen-

berg had not intended to insult the Kaiser or any other crowned head, he should have known that the poem would seem provocative in the given context. He was sentenced to two months of fortress arrest, even though the state prosecutor had called for four months’ imprisonment.”! A few days after Gumppenberg’s conviction, the police confiscated the twenty-second issue of the Moderne Blatter as well as 545 copies of Modernes Leben, an anthology of

works by Munich naturalists. The former was seized for reasons of obscenity, inasmuch as it contained a short story by Anna Croissant-Rust evoking a bride’s anxiety over defloration on her wedding night.’* The anthology was confis-

cated on multiple charges of obscenity and blasphemy in

connection with works by Bierbaum, Conrad, Scharf, Schaumberger, and a doctor-turned-writer, Oskar Panizza.”° Although eventually both volumes were released for distri-

bution, Schaumberger could justifiably write at the end of September: “With united effort we have brought it to the point where the police and the courts are actively concerned with us.”’* Within the space of eight months, the Munich naturalists had been accused of blasphemy, obscenity, and lese majesty—charges that were to plague modernist theater and literature in Bavaria well into the twentieth century. Blasphemy and obscenity were the “offenses” of the Munich naturalists that most provoked the Bavarian Catholics. The beginning of the nineteenth century had witnessed the

destruction of the economic and political power of the Church in Central Europe, and after mid-century it sought to regain its authority by tightening dogma (mariolatry, syllabus of errors, papal infallibility) and by concentrating its doctrinal efforts on the most basic units of socialization—the

38 + MUNICH IN 1890 , family, the parish church, and the public school. With its _ lands confiscated and its political power curbed by liberal and often Protestant elites, the Church strove to base its worldly influence upon belief in the Holy Family in heaven _ and the Catholic family on earth. Unfortunately for the Church, the social changes of the nineteenth century—secu-

larization, urbanization, and industrialization—had _pro-

duced a decrease in church attendance, an increase in geographical mobility that severed familial ties, and changes in sexual behavior that resulted in high rates of illegitimacy, nonmarital households, and prostitution. Although most historians today would cite socioeconomic causes for these developments,’’ Catholic writers, who saw spiritual factors as

the motive forces of society, placed the blame on corrupt ideas: the breakdown of the family was caused by the spread.

| of an irreligious, materialist, and individualist spirit. Although Bavarian Catholics generally equated this spirit with

liberalism—a “Satanic abortion,” in the words of one

beliefs. ,

priest’°-—they saw its most insolent expression in the “blasphemous” and “pornographic” works of the naturalists, who

openly questioned traditional sexual values and religious The definition of blasphemy and obscenity in _ literature

and the arts was at least as much a matter of style as of sub- | ject matter. Catholic critics, such as those of the Mtinchener Fremdenblatt, the Bayertscher Kurier, and the Augsburger Postzeitung, believed that the application of too much “realism’’ to religious or sexual themes resulted in blasphemy or pornography respectively. Such topics were acceptable only if a proper degree of idealization was employed.’’ In January 1880 Max Liebermann’s painting Jesus in the Temple was bitterly denounced in the Bavarian parliament for its realistic portrayal of Christ as a young lad (sans halo) in a very

ordinary synagogue.”> Gumppenberg’s humanistic dramati- , zation of Jesus in Messias ten years later was considered equally blasphemous. Such attacks on attempts to bring the Son of God down to earth were complemented by opposi-

tion to naturalist portrayals of sexuality. The naturalists

Munich in i890 - 39 were condemned not only for their focus on “immoral” subjects (premarital sex, adultery, prostitution) but also for their accounts of sexual tensions and anxieties within an “acceptable” marital relationship (such as Croissant-Rust’s story of bridal anxiety). The Catholics argued that the naturalists encouraged the problems they depicted; the naturalists replied that they were only reproducing their “real-life”

observations and experiences. |

The conflict between artistic realism and idealism was hence not merely an aesthetic debate but also an issue of considerable political importance to Catholics. By challeng-

| ing traditional religious and familial values, the naturalists threatened the pillars upon which modern Catholic faith rested. The Catholics fought back with all political and legal means available to them, notably articles 166 and 184 of the

Criminal Code, which forbade blasphemy and obscenity. Then as now, however, both concepts were very hard to define, and many modernist works, like Croissant-Rust’s story and the Modernes Leben anthology, were acquitted in court on account of the legal imprecision of the terms. The legal imprecision of terms like “blasphemy” and “‘ob-

scenity,’ though infuriating to Catholics, was a muchappreciated safety valve for the liberal government, which was loath to impose strict moral censorship and yet was increasingly forced to heed the demands of the politically influential Catholics. Police observers regularly made note of potentially blasphemous or obscene comments, but judicial

proceedings were generally initiated only if public com- _ plaints were made by the Catholic clergy, party, or press. By

handing modern works over to the courts, even in cases where successful prosecution was doubtful, the government could placate the Catholics without, in the end, seeming too harsh to the liberals. This use of trials to appease the politically powerful Catholics was made explicit in a letter of Max von Feilitzsch, the minister of the interior, in response to a police query concerning the advisability of prosecuting the chairman of the Munich Freethinker’s Society for attacking the Catholic practice of confession:

40 + MUNICH IN 1890 Because the Center has repeatedly claimed that the Catholic

Church in Bavaria has not received adequate protection against insults—as guaranteed by article 14 of the Concordat—the Royal Ministry of the Interior cannot avoid the opinion that it would be advisable, simply for political reasons, to put the case before a court. Admittedly, the case might result in exoneration or dismissal, but this is of no concern to us, since after such a judicial exoneration or dismissal of the case, the charge can no longer be made that the state has

not done everything it could in order to ensure the punishment of an insult.”

In short, by handing freethinkers, naturalists, and other anti-Catholics over to the courts, the liberal government hoped to assuage the mounting discontent of political Catholicism. In reality, the government often became thereby an unwitting tool of the Center. Whereas the liberal government might have felt unhappy in its role of prosecuting outspoken enemies of Catholicism, it had its own reasons for suppressing lese majesty. The only justification for the liberals’ rule was their proximity to the throne: parliamentary rule would have swept them from office. Thus, they had a vested interest in maintaining monar-

chical authority intact. Unfortunately for them, the royal - aura had become severely sullied in Bavaria. The forced abdication of Ludwig II in 1886 had shown that kings were not

untouchable, especially when their cabinets wanted them

replaced. Although the ministers needed the monarchy to , insure their legitimacy, they themselves had dimmed the royal aura to arresting a popular king. Royal authority was | further weakened by the fact that the hopelessly insane Otto I had to be represented by a regent. The misfortunes of the Wittelsbachs were compounded by the fact that an increasing number of Bavarians placed their primary loyalty in the German emperor, rather than the local dynasty.” Since the

| monarchical principle was becoming progressively weakened in Bavaria, the court and the cabinet were sensitive to attacks on specific kings as well as on royal government in the abstract. Their concern was demonstrated by the termi-

Munich in i890 - 41 nation of Gumppenberg’s Thorwald at the Residenztheater and his confinement for reading some rather innocuous lines of poetry. Within the first half-year of their organized existence, the Munich naturalists had succeeded in alienating not only the Church and the state but also the proletariat. Initially it appeared that the “modern” writers and the Social Democrats

might form an alliance. In the winter and spring of 1890-1891 Conrad, Schaumberger, and Panizza held lectures before a dozen working-class associations, with audiences of up to a thousand people, on subjects ranging from tuberculosis to modern theater. The Mtinchener Post, Munich’s Social Democratic daily newspaper, welcomed these overtures to workers and lauded the formation of the Mod-

ern Life Society.°' Needless to say, this potential alliance of | workers and naturalists was viewed with suspicion by both the Church and the state. After the first public meeting of the Modern Life Society, the Catholic Mtinchener Fremdenblatt called the naturalists “socialists in tail coats [Soz1alisten im Frack |” who were even more dangerous than the proletarian Social Democrats: “this socialism of kid gloves

... wants to carry out among the upper ten thousand the | work that the Social Democrats are carrying out among the ‘socially dispossessed.’ ”’ The paper continued: “both wings. of modern socialism are striving for the same goal, the overthrow of the entire Christian Weltanschauung and hence the ruin of our whole legal, cultural, and ethical system.” A sim-

ilar view, less polemically stated, was held by the Munich , police, who concluded that some of the naturalists “belong to the younger writers who unreservedly draw near to the SPD.””

In response to these charges Conrad immediately sent a | letter to the police, protesting the Fremdenblatt’s attempts to “depict me as a subversive | Umsttirzler |, atheist, nihilist, etc., and to denounce me to the state’s security apparatus as a public enemy.””’ He included with the letter a verbatim transcript of his opening address as well as a vindicatory letter from Martin Greif, a very respected (and decidedly non-

42 + MUNICH IN 1890 naturalist) Bavarian poet. Conrad also sent letters to the local newspapers, claiming that “I stand on the ground of the Gospels, not on the ground of atheism or nihilism.”** To demonstrate his loyalty even further, on March 8 he repre-

toast.” |

sented the Modern Life Society at a celebration of the Regent’s seventieth birthday, where he ostentatiously led a

Conrad protested the equation of his stance with Social |

Democracy not only because he feared judicial reprisal but also because he genuinely opposed the Marxist party. He believed that a monarchist state, in alliance with enlightened artists and intellectuals, should fashion a social order based on class harmony. In 1890 he welcomed enthusiastically the social policies of the young Kaiser, and he quoted approv-

ingly an author who claimed that the workers’ question could be settled best by a “type of aristocratic radicalism,”

| ‘‘a social-radical monarchy.”’ Conrad believed that a “‘socialmonarchist party” should be created “tas a champion of re- |

formist socialism, in conscious opposition to the revolu- , tionary socialism of the Social Democrats.” After establishing contacts with workers through lectures, he hoped to wean them away from the revolutionary party. In response to Catholic accusations of radicalism, Conrad not

| only denied publicly that he was a socialist but also attacked the SPD. At the fourth public meeting of the Modern Life Society, at the end of April, he claimed that far from standing “on subversive, Social-Democratic ground,” the modern

movement hoped to “serve the state’ by supporting progressive ideas and class harmony.®’ Throughout the summer he published anonymous articles in the Moderne Blatter, in which he attacked the “materialism,” cultural “dogmatism,” and anti-monarchist republicanism of the SPD.” By December he was even equating the socialists with his greatest enemy: “In Germany, clericalism and Social Democracy have the same characteristic: devastation of the national spirit.”®” By then, the welcoming overtures of

the Mtinchener Post had turned to counterattacks, and the police observer at the next public meeting of the Modern

| Munich in 1890 + 43 Life Society noted that “workers were not at all to be

seen.”

Conrad’s nationalist, statist, Protestant, and anti-socialist — rhetoric, which cut the Munich naturalists off from their potentially broadest base of support, did not go unchallenged by his younger colleagues in the directorate of the Modern

Life Society. As early as January 6, 1891, Schaumberger wrote to Max Halbe: “Yesterday a very agitated board meeting. The ‘young’ against Conrad.” A month later, following Conrad’s public denial of the charges of atheism, Schaumberger and Bierbaum sent the local newspapers a

letter stating that they “personally do not share Dr. Conrad’s standpoint ‘on the ground of the Gospels,’ but rather subscribe to all dimensions of modern thought, even in this matter.” ’’ The conflict intensified over the course of the year. In December, Conrad finally resigned the chair-

manship of the society that he had founded. Even before making his resignation public, he sent the police a letter which stated: “giving way to the radical undercurrents of the ‘thorough-going’ modernists, I have resigned my position as chairman of the Modern Life Society.”’” The man who had accused Paul Heyse of being a “police-loving hypo-

crite’ and who had protested the Fremdenblatt’s attempts — “to denounce me to the state’s security apparatus” was himself quite eager to alert the police to the “radical undercur-

rents” among his colleagues. | In a more innocuous public statement, Conrad based his resignation on the fact that “under my chairmanship, the directorate lacked the absolutely necessary unity. I could not

| achieve this unity because I do not share the Weltanschauung and social views of the majority of the directorate.” Already at the end of September, Schaumberger had written to Halbe: “Our Modern Life Society had become too diffuse

and though it has achieved some things, these ‘pillars of [the] society’ lack the necessary unity and concensus. ‘Everyone in his own manner’ is theoretically very nice, but practically it is hard to reconcile that principle with successful cooperation.”’* Naturalists like Conrad wanted to be

44 + MUNICH IN 1890 , leaders and have followers, but refused to follow and be led.

Unity was possible only as long as attacks were aimed ata common enemy, such as Heyse, Catholicism, or the state censor. Agreement on positive issues—the audience to be addressed, the style to be employed, the degree of radicalism to be espoused—was much less easy. The theatrical projects of the Munich naturalists were also to fall victim to this lack of unity.

Naturalist Theater and Drama in Munich The sponsoring of modern drama was one of the primary stated goals of the Modern Life Society, inasmuch as none of

Munich’s established stages would present such works. In 1890 the Bavarian capital had a population of 350,000, yet it

possessed only four theaters. Three of them—the Nationaltheater, the Residenztheater, and the Theater am Gartner-

platz’°—were administered by the court. Only the Volkstheater was privately owned. The last-named performed

sentimental Bavarian plays and skits; the Theater am Garnterplatz specialized in musicals and operettas; the Residenztheater presented comedies and conversational dramas;

and the Nationaltheater was dedicated to operas and classi- | cal tragedy. This division of the repertory left no room for

| the performance of serious modern works. To be sure, | Conrad (whose wife, Marie Conrad-Ramlo, was an actress with the royal troupe”® ) persistently claimed that Munich

| had the best court theaters in Germany. By 1889 they had four plays of Ibsen in their repertory, albeit in censored ver-

sions (The Vikings of Helgoland, Pillars of Society, A | Doll’s House, and An Enemy of the People). Nevertheless, their doors remained closed to the more “radical” works of Ibsen and other modern writers. As noted above, the objec-

tions of a Bavarian princess could lead to the cancellation of : an innocuous work like Gumppenberg’s Thorwald. More significantly, the court theaters were sensitive to pressures from Catholic circles. Jocza Savits, one of the court’s more progressive directors, constantly complained in private that

Munich in 1890 + 45 the court and clerical circles severely limited his ability to mount modern or experimental works.’’ In the winter of 1890-1891, when the Modern Life Society was founded,

clerical opposition forced the termination of the opera Murillo by Ferdinand Langer as well as Ludwig Anzengruber’s anticlerical Viertes Gebot and Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler.”* In 1891, when the public debate on Munich naturalism was most intense, the Residenztheater staged Heyse’s

Wahrheit? and Paul Lindau’s Die Sonne, both of which parodied [bsen and other modern dramatists. Commercial theaters such as the Volkstheater were even less receptive to

modern works than the court theaters. On the one hand, since they had to submit scripts to the police censors prior to

performance, they had little hope that “radical” works would be permitted; and on the other hand, they did not wish to risk the financial loss involved in the production of | “modern” works which had not yet attracted a numerically substantial public. Because royal and commercial theaters remained impervious to critical and modern drama, new organizational forms had to be devised to evade censorship and secure an audience. One solution was the creation of closed theatrical so-

cieties. Almost anything could be presented on stage, free of : censorship, as long as it was performed in the privacy of informal gatherings or formally constituted Vereine (volun-

tary associations). The legal definition of privacy was ful- | filled as long as only Verein members and their invited guests attended and no admission fee was charged for a par-

ticular performance. (Annual dues and private patronage covered the cost of such productions.) As early as 1886 a number of Munich literati had sponsored a ‘“‘closed”’ performance of Ibsen’s Ghosts in Augsburg.’”” Three years later a

group of writers headed by Otto Brahm created the Freie Buhne in Berlin, which presented modern works before a well-to-do audience of over a thousand members. Its staging of publicly prohibited or commercially unprofitable works (such as Ibsen’s Ghosts, Hauptmann’s Vor Sonnenaufgang,

Strindberg’s Father and Miss Julie, and Holz and Schlaf’s

46 * MUNICH IN 1890 | Familie Selicke) marked the first major breakthrough of modern drama in Germany. Soon thereafter, in July 1890, Bruno Wille founded the Freie Volksbihne in Berlin, which charged low annual dues and thus permitted a proletarian audience of over four thousand members to see a variety of socially critical classical and modern works (by Schiller, Hebbel, Gogol, Zola, Ibsen, Hauptmann, and Halbe).”°

The creation of the Freie Bihne and of the Freie

Volksbiihne transformed the Prussian capital into the undisputed center of naturalist theater in Germany, much to the

chagrin of Bavarian writers like Conrad. Consequently, when the Modern Life Society was founded, one of its major — goals was the “creation of a freie Buhne.” Unfortunately this

endeavor fell victim to the same external and internal

pressures that disrupted the organization as a whole. In1tially, Conrad tried to hire the actors and rent the stage of the Residenztheater, but on February 17 the court intendant

publicly denied rumors that permission to do so had been | granted.”’ On April 2 Conrad announced that the owner of

| an unnamed restaurant had agreed to allow the Munich naturalists to perform plays in his establishment; two weeks later Bierbaum reported that Catholic pressure had persuaded the restaurateur to retract this agreement.” Despite these rebuffs from the court and private enter- | prise, a Verein “Freie Buhne” was formally constituted on May 8, with a directorate consisting of Conrad, Bierbaum, - Panizza, Schaumberger, and Friedrich Rosenthal, a lawyer.”> On May 15 the Munich newspapers printed an — announcement circulated by the new group, which proclaimed: “The Verein ‘Freie Buhne’ has chosen the poet Henrik Ibsen, who has lived in Munich for the past fifteen years and has written his outstanding dramas here, to be honorary president. Ibsen has accepted the nomination.” A day later the same newspapers printed a letter from Ibsen, in

which he claimed that “in several respects, the aforementioned statements are, to use a moderate phrase, not cor-

| rect.”** Ibsen denied having accepted the presidency. An _

Munich in 1890 + 47 ensuing spate of press reports and public letters from all parties concerned revealed that Ibsen had tentatively agreed to accept the position on certain conditions that had not yet

been met when the public announcement was made. _ Through this indiscretion the Munich naturalists alienated a man whose support they well could have used.

At the same time that an independent theater devoted to | modern drama was being organized, the Munich naturalists

attempted to create a popular and patriotic counterpart to Berlin’s proletarian Freie Volksbiihne as well. In February 1891 Schaumberger had written: “I do not believe that the Modern Life Society should create a Freie Volksbiihne on the Berlin model; rather, an independent theater that is open to workers as well as bourgeois and civil servants, artists, and | intellectuals. In short, an independent theater for the Volk in the widest sense.”® During the ensuing summer the Munich naturalists saw the upcoming Oktoberfest as an opportunity to create such a multiclass, patriotic theater. An open letter

addressed to the Munich city council at the beginning of June suggested the erection of an open-air amphitheater for five thousand spectators, where stirring events from German

-and Bavarian history could be dramatized. Such a theater would not only allow massive attendance at low prices but would also be a more “truly German”’ stage: whereas contemporary theater architecture was derived from Italian Renaissance playhouses designed for nocturnal performances, the “truly German” stage was the open-air, daylight spectacle of the middle ages, which could still be seen at the folk pageants of Oberammergau and Oberdorf.*° This proposal to present patriotic plays to a popular audience demonstrated once again the nationalist and socially reconciliatory tendencies within the Modern Life Society. Nevertheless, in spite of the association’s public insistence®’ that its proposed

independent theater and the Oktoberfest stage were two totally different projects—the one devoted to naturalist drama, the other to patriotic spectacles—the Munich city council wanted nothing to do with the latter. Instead, the Munich

48 + MUNICH IN 1890 © 7 police sent an inquiry to their colleagues in Berlin, asking whether any means of censoring or supervising the proletarian Freie Volksbihne had been devised.*® The suspicions and precautionary inquiries of the police

, proved unnecessary, inasmuch as the disorganization of the Modern Life Society, culminating in Conrad’s resignation,

prevented any concerted action during 1891. In January 1892 Schaumberger wrote to Halbe: “Yes, yes, Conrad! He

| just wouldn’t do. He’s getting too old—-Now we'll advance fearlessly forward with fresh stength. We'll start with an 1n-

dependent theater, at first as an experimental stage in the narrower circle of members and their guests.” Several weeks

later Schaumberger had to admit to Halbe that no plays would be performed: “But we still want to mount public dramatic readings this season.”®’ In the end, the grandiose

theatrical projects of the Modern Life Society materialized in the form of two evenings of dramatic readings from the plays of Hauptmann, Halbe, and Schlaf (May 6 and July 1, 1892).”” Far from consisting of all classes of society, the three hundred listeners comprised, in the words of a police observer, “a very respectable group |[eime ganz respektable Gesellschaft].””' By February 1893 interest in the Modern Life Society had dwindled to the point where the society was dissolved.” The inability of the Munich naturalists to organize a the- | ater devoted to modern drama was matched by their poor

performance as playwrights. Their lack of sensitivity to dra- | matic talent was epitomized by the fact that Conrad rejected

Hauptmann’s Vor Sonnenaufgang when it was submitted to Die Gesellschaft for publication in 1889. The Munich journal thus missed the opportunity of printing what soon would become the most famous German naturalist drama. Generally the output of Munich dramatists was mediocre in comparison to that of Berliners like Hauptmann, Holz, Schlaf, or Sudermann. The Munich naturalists had little feel for drama or theater as such. They saw the stage as a lectern, a place from which ideas could be expounded. As a result,

their plays contained “modern” themes but were composed |

Munich in 1890 + 49

in conventional forms. A play such as Conrad’s Firma Goldberg (1889) portrayed a typically naturalist conception

of life among the capitalist upper bourgeoisie: marriages were made for money instead of love, art was viewed as a mere commodity, and bankruptcy was an ever-present fear. In contrast to these “modern” themes, the play employed many of the residual nonrealist conventions of salon drama which the Berliners had surpassed, such as monologues, — asides, and an undifferentiated literary language for all characters. Conrad’s play even concluded with a sentimental fi-

nale, the marriage of two young lovers. It was thus not surprising that the Berlin Freie Buhne refused to perform Firma Goldberg—a fact that earned the Berlin group

Conrad’s undying hatred.”’ — |

By far the most common theme of the Munich dramatists was the divorce of the sensitive and idealistic artist or intellectual from his business-minded bourgeois environment. This theme appeared not only in Firma Goldberg, but also in Gumppenberg’s Apollo (1889), Panizza’s Ein guter Kerl

(1895), and Schaumberger’s Fin pietdtsloser Mensch (1893) and Die Stinde wider den heiligen Geist (1895). In these works artists have to choose between living and creating according to their own ideals and suffering poverty, or prostituting themselves by catering to middle-class tastes and adopting bourgeois professions. [hese alternatives were certainly faced by many young writers and artists, and it would be unfair to dismiss the traumatic nature of such dilemmas. Yet one can also understand why middle-class audiences were not too interested in the internal problems of the

artistic community, especially when blame was placed on - that same middle class. |

| It was, however, more the style than the theme that condemned such works to oblivion. Characters were mouth-

pieces for ideas rather than dramatic personalities. Frequently, naturalist authors wrote one-act plays, which were by nature more conducive to expressing beliefs or 1llustrating a “slice of life” than to developing plot-lines. Five

years after he rejected Conrad’s firma Goldberg for the

50 + MUNICH IN 1890 Freie Buhne, Otto Brahm turned down Schaumberger’s

| one-act Die Stinde wider den hetligen Getst because of its | undramatic quality: “The simple fact that a poet is forced by want to give up writing and thus to commit ‘the sin against the Holy Spirit’ can assume deeper interest only if we see either how the ‘Holy Spirit’ was alive in him beforehand, or how the ‘sin’ revenges itself on him afterward. Neither is

here the case.”"* |

As playwrights and as producers of modern drama, the Munich naturalists had met with failure. Indeed, most of the endeavors of the Modern Life Society were tainted with a

cruelly ironic tinge. The Munich naturalists advocated the | expression of forceful artistic personality, but they themselves were mediocre talents. They called for an “aristocracy of the spirit,” but they were too pettily individualistic to en-

gage in concerted action. They sought to project themselves _ into the center of public life, but they were rudely rebuffed by the state, the Church, and the proletariat. In spite of these setbacks, Munich’s naturalist movement unwittingly set the stage for the ensuing development of

| modernist theater in that city. Many of the issues addressed by the naturalists—the social role of the artist, the impact of. capitalism on society and culture, the relation of artists to

the liberal state, and the clerical party—continued to be major concerns of later playwrights. Moreover, the two models of the socially critical theater provided by Wagner and Ibsen—-demanding volkisch consolidation on the one hand, and forceful individualism on the other—were reflected in the aspirations of the naturalists and passed on to the ensuing modernist generation. As we shall see, the ideal of a national Volksbihne, based upon both Wagnerian the-

ater and popular spectacle, reappeared in the Kiinstlerthe- | ater of Georg Fuchs, while at the other political extreme,

| socially critical conversational drama was furthered by the anarchist writer Erich Mihsam.

The Modern Life Society was also significant inasmuch as

it defined the terrain upon which the modernist movement

: Munich in 1890 -: 51 would subsequently develop in Munich. The naturalists’ alienation of the Church, the state, and the socialist working class inaugurated the isolation that was to plague the modernist movement as a whole. Realization of this fact induced

| many modernists to attenuate their political aspirations, and to turn toward forms of art that became increasingly aesthet-

icist and “intimate.” Simultaneously, the hostility of the Munich environment could propel other modernists toward

ever greater extremes of the political Left (Mithsam) or Right (Fuchs). An ambiguous and unstable fusion of aesthetic intimacy and political aggression became one of the hallmarks of Munich’s modernist movement.

It was over the question of style that the modernists parted company with the naturalists most decisively. Naturalism was bound to the mimetic conventions of nineteenthcentury realism. Whether in print, on canvas, or on stage, the naturalists sought to create an illusion of reality, a belief that one was witnessing a “‘slice of life,” to use the expression of the day. They regarded art not as artifice, but as a mirror of the existing world. It was permissible to color the reflection with one’s socially critical or morally didactic intentions, but such tinting was not supposed to disrupt the public’s illusion of perceiving a corner of reality. ‘To the ex-_ tent that the Munich naturalists were unable to create works that were “true to life,” their efforts were deemed failures by their own standards.

The modernists, in contrast, sought to turn that failure into a victory: they embraced art as artifice. Munich’s first two modernist playwrights who rejected illusory mimesis in

favor of critical distortion were Oskar Panizza and Frank Wedekind. Although both men lauded the naturalists’ opposition to the political powers and the social injustices of the day, they objected to the stylistic realism of the naturalist movement. A truly aggressive art, they contended, should strive not just to mirror existing evils but to change basic patterns of perception and thought. In contrast to the naturalists, who considered drama a mimetic art that faithfully reproduced social situations, Panizza and Wedekind advo-

52 + MUNICH IN 1890 cated a “higher realism” that willfully distorted appearances in order to reach underlying truths. Their stylistic innova-

tions marked the beginnings of a truly modernist German drama. The naturalists might have lost the battle for modern theater, but the war had just begun.

iP . | ; l¢ CHAPTER TWO

@ Carnivalesque Modernism: Sexuality and Satire

7 MUNICH WAS THE RESIDENCE OF THE AUthors of the two most radically experimental German dramas of the early 1890s: Frank Wedekind’s Spring Awak-

ening and Oskar Panizza’s The Council of Love. These were challenging works, thematically and _ stylistically. Whereas Panizza satirized Catholicism, the rising political force in Bavaria, Wedekind assaulted the German classical tradition which formed the basis of that state’s official culture. Panizza and Wedekind contested these forces in order to liberate not only the mind but also the body of the modern citizen: sexual as well as spiritual freedom was their in-

terlocking goal. Because both Catholicism and _ official classicism evaluated the world in binary terms (good/evil, order/disorder, mind/body, sacred/profane), Panizza and Wedekind sought inspiration from traditions that denied such bifurcations: popular culture and “aesthetic paganism.” Desiring to reverse accepted relationships and to unite what

, convention sundered, the two playwrights composed “carnivalesque” dramas in which traditional values were inverted, holy images were shown to be profane, and profanity _was deemed a source of sanctity. In the process of seeking to”

destroy nineteenth-century values, Panizza and Wedekind contributed as well to the breakdown of traditional genres of nineteenth-century drama, and they opened the way for the rise of a modernist theater based upon unfettered play of

| fantasy and free play of theatrical forms. The composition of The Council of Love and Spring Awakening marked the birth of truly modernist drama in the Bavarian capital.

54 + CARNIVALESQUE MODERNISM

Oskar Panizza and The Council of Love Like Conrad, his closest friend among the Munich naturalists, Oskar Panizza (1853-1921) was born in a staunchly Catholic corner of Bavarian Franconia. Although his mother

| was devoutly, some said fanatically, Protestant, his Catholic father insisted that their five children be baptized and raised in the Roman faith. Upon the death of Carl Panizza in 1855, Mathilde attempted to raise her children as Protestants. But the Catholic Church used all available legal means to force her to give her children a Catholic upbringing, and the Bavarian state, right up to Maximilian II, the highest level of appeal, saw itself compelled to uphold the demands of the Church. Mathilde evaded the authorities by hiding her chil- __

dren with various friends and relatives throughout Germany, until, in 1861, the state and the Church gave up their

| demands. Her legal battle to allow her children to be raised as Protestants was reflected in the life of her notorious son,

who willfully combated the law and the Catholic Church throughout his career.’ After a somewhat erratic secondary education, Panizza studied medicine in Munich, where he attained his medical _ degree (1881) and served his residency in a mental hospital (1882-1884). Thereafter, his mother guaranteed him an annual income of six thousand marks from her hotel business in Franconia, which not only enabled him to open a private practice in the Bavarian capital but also allowed him to take time off from work for travel and writing. During trips to Paris (1881-1882) and London (1885-1886), he read literature, attended theaters and vaudeville shows, and composed poems and short stories. During the late 1880s he befriended

Conrad, who persuaded him to devote his full time to writ- | ing. He became a prolific writer and speaker for Munich’s naturalist movement, and in May 1891 he joined the executive committee of the Modern Life Society. Over the course of the next four years Panizza’s conflicts with the law intensified his opposition to church and state. His childhood experiences and the travails of the Munich

Sexuality and Satire - 55 naturalist circle induced him to compose scathing satires about the Catholic Church, which he considered the predominant power in Bavarian politics and everyday life. His

interest in mentally (and especially sexually) disturbed | people manifested itself in poems and short stories that dwelled on “perverse” sexual practices. A major reason for

the confiscation of the naturalists’ anthology, Modernes

Leben, in September 1891 was the inclusion of a story by | Panizza that dealt with masturbation. At the same time, Panizza, a medical officer in the Bavarian army reserve, was ordered by his superiors to resign from the Modern Life Society; his refusal to do so led to immediate discharge.’ Like Conrad in the 1870s, Panizza proceeded to write two virulently anti-Catholic books that were also banned.’ Censor-

ship of sexual subjects was satirized in Der hetlige Staatsanwalt (The Holy Public Prosecutor), a short play published in 1894. The same year saw the appearance of Das Liebeskonzil (The Council of Love), which earned the author a year in jail.

In The Council of Love Panizza brought to life the already very realistic members of the anthropomorphic Catholic pantheon. At a time when the Church was promoting

mariolatry and the doctrine of papal infallibility, he com- | posed a grotesque satire of the Holy Family and the papal court. The play is set in 1495, a year that saw Rodrigo Bor-

gia on the throne of Saint Peter as well as the first documented outbreak of syphilis in Europe. To explain the temporal coincidence of these two historical facts, Panizza opens the play in heaven, where cherubs are repairing God’s shaky throne. Shakier still is God himself, who enters supported by two angels. He is old, tottering, perpetually spit-

ting and coughing, and infatuated with a young cherub in his retinue. Although a report of the lasciviousness of the papal court infuriates him, he refrains from his impulsive _ desire to destroy mankind when an angel warns him that he

would not have enough strength thereafter to create humanity anew. God then summons Christ and Mary to discuss the papal iniquity. [he Son of God 1s a totally passive character,

56 * CARNIVALESQUE MODERNISM

emaciated from mankind’s persistent consumption of his _ — flesh and blood. In contrast, Mary is vivacious, haughty, vain, and perpetually concerned with her sexual allure; she _

| speaks French, reads Boccaccio, and dabbles in lesbianism. This Holy Family decides that before they take any actions, they should witness personally the proceedings of the papal court, which they accomplish by inhaling hashish and fall-

ing into a trance. | |

In the second act, which takes place in the court of Pope Alexander VI, strains of the De profundts float over from Saint Peter’s basilica, while culinary and sexual orgies tran-

spire in the papal palace. (For skeptical readers, Panizza provided extensive footnotes testifying to the historical veracity of this scene.) Outraged at the iniquity which they have witnessed, the Holy Family summons the devil to heaven in the third act. Because the fallen angel is the only supraterrestrial figure who still has enough strength to accomplish anything on earth, he is commissioned to design a punishment for mankind that will destroy the flesh but leave the soul intact for purposes of repentance. The devil invents syphilis. In return, he expects the Holy Family to allow his books to circulate freely in heaven and on earth, for “when

someone thinks and 1s not allowed to communicate his thoughts to others—that is the worst of all tortures.””* In the fourth act the devil introduces Mary to the syphilitic woman

whom he has fathered. Mary is overcome by the woman’s beauty and kisses her. She soon expels the woman from

heaven, however, since she fears that Christ might fall vic- | tim to her allures. In the fifth and final act the syphilitic woman infects the pope and his retinue and sets out to poison the rest of the world as well.

The Council of Love, published in Zurich in October 1894, was obviously written as a provocation of the Catholic

Church, and Bavarian authorities could not stand idly by. Ironically, they learned of the play’s content from a favorable review in the Miinchener Post, which called the work “witty and very much worth reading [getstreich und sehr

lesenswerth].””’ In the first week of January 1895 the prose- |

Sexuality and Satire + 57 cutor in Munich ordered the confiscation of all copies of The

Council of Love, and he prepared to indict Panizza for “crimes against religion, committed through the press.” The indictment turned out to be a rather complicated affair. In order to prosecute the author, the state had to prove that at least one reader of the book had taken offense as its contents. The police interrogated Munich’s booksellers: who specialized in modern literature and discovered that only twenty copies of the book had been sold prior to its confiscation. When asked to give the names of purchasers, the booksellers

refused. Only after being threatened with legal action for failure to testify did they name some purchasers; these were men like Josef Ruederer and Ludwig Quidde, outspoken anticlericals who would hardly have been offended by

Panizza’s work.° | When the search for enraged readers proved fruitless in

Munich, the Bavarian authorities asked police departments

in other German cities whether they could discover offended readers of The Council of Love. The Leipzig police department replied that, upon receipt of the inquiry, two of its officers had read the play and been disgusted. The Munich authorities decided that they had found the requisite “offended citizens” and thus could proceed with the case.’ Needless to say, the Munich prosecutor severely bent the spirit of the law by allowing investigative officers to substi-

tute for outraged citizens. Even more debatable was the issue of charging Panizza with infractions of German law. | After all, the play had been published in Switzerland, and concerned observers wondered whether a German could be put on trial for publishing a work abroad. The prosecution argued, again somewhat lamely, that although Panizza had printed the work in Switzerland, he “consciously and willingly” desired it to be sold in Germany.” ©

Like the Munich prosecutors, Panizza was unwilling to allow legal technicalities to stand in the way of his trial: he very much wanted a public forum to attack the Church and

, the state that defended it. The Council of Love was a provo- | cation that called for judicial retribution; it begged to be put

58 + CARNIVALESQUE MODERNISM

on trial. Indeed, since a public staging of the play was unthinkable, a trial of the author was the only public “performance” that Panizza could have expected. Owing to the

gravity of the offense, his friends urged him to flee Ger- | many, for they believed that he would receive the maximum

(three-year) sentence for blasphemy. Panizza thought he would be acquitted; but 1n any case, he considered it his po-

litical duty to stay in Munich and to confront both the Catholic Church, which had denied him freedom of religious

upbringing, and the Bavarian state, which had repeatedly banned his anti-Catholic publications. Panizza assumed an aggressive stance at his trial, which was held on April 30, 1895. With regard to the appropriateness of being prosecuted for a work published abroad, he brazenly admitted that he desired its circulation in Germany: “I wanted my literary friends in Munich to read the book, I also wanted wider circles in Germany to take note of

the work in order to make propaganda for the ideas it con- | tains. Thus, it was my desire and intent to circulate the book, The Council of Love, in Germany.” He further admitted that his work might contain “objectively” blasphemous statements, but he contended that the general intent was not blasphemous. Rather, “I was simply concerned with solving an artistic problem,” namely: how must Alexander VI have visualized God? What conception of heaven could have been held by a vicar of Christ who celebrated sexual orgies in the Vatican?’ Panizza defended himself against charges of blasphemy by saying that the papacy itself had been blasphemous: “I denigrated the Christian gods [sic]

and did so very intentionally, because I saw them in the. mirror of the fifteenth century; I saw them through the papal spectacles of Alexander VI.”'® Needless to say, Panizza did not fool anyone by claiming that he was concerned solely with an “artistic problem.” In-

stead, he hoped to strike the Catholic Church at its most vulnerable points: the relatively recent doctrines of Mary’s immaculate conception (1854), and retroactive papal infallibility (1870). He implied that it would be hard to imagine

Sexuality and Satire + 59 the Borgia pope as a mouthpiece of God, even when speaking ex cathedra. With respect to the Holy Family, Panizza

contended during his initial interrogation (January 12, 1895): “Through the portrayal of Christ as an impotent, consumptive person, I wanted to depict the dispossession of Christ by the mariolatry of the Catholic Church. According to Catholic doctrine, the worship of Christ has fallen far behind the cult of Mary.”"’ Panizza noted further that he felt justified in treating Mary as an “erotic” person because that was precisely the way she had been depicted in numerous Jesuit pictures and pamphlets; he had provided documenta-

tion of this fact in his book, Der teutsche Michel und der romische Papst, which had been confiscated on account of its virulently anti-Catholic content. In short, Panizza argued that far from being blasphemous himself, it was the Catholic Church that had offended God: the Vatican had been a hot-

bed of perversion, Christ was being denigrated in favor of Mary, and the Jesuits themselves had not always cast chaste

eyes on the Blessed Virgin. |

Panizza’s arguments had little impact on the jury, which heeded the prosecutor’s pointed call to “show it” to the naturalists, to make of Panizza an example that his colleagues would not forget.'* The defendant was sentenced to a year in jail. That was the harshest sentence meted out to a writer during the Wilhelmine period, inasmuch as several weeks of fortress arrest was the norm for most “crimes committed in the press.” Although the severe sentence met with the approval of numerous Catholic commentators, it was soundly

condemned by most liberal and many conservative newspa- , pers throughout Central Europe. Anticlerical writers were

especially appalled at the conviction, which seemed incon- | gruous at the end of a century of progressive de-Christianization. The elderly ‘Theodor Fontane wrote in August 1895: Yes, Panizza. Incidently, a name that one cannot get out of one’s head ... [His] book 1s justified by a legend that has been raised to an implacable dogma. Whoever expects me to believe the story of Christ’s nativity, whoever demands of me

60 + CARNIVALESQUE MODERNISM that I should populate heaven according to the Preraphaelite

painters: God in the middle, Mary left, Christ right, Holy Ghost in the background as a shining sun, a wreath of apostles

, at their feet, then a wreath of prophets, then a garland of saints—whoever expects that of me, forces me over to Pa-

: nizza’s side."

Many other writers expressed the view that not only laws against blasphemy, but any attempts whatsoever to criminalize works of art were unconscionable. In his defense of Panizza at the latter’s trial, Conrad noted: “The only forum to which writers and artists are responsible is aesthetic criticism.”’'* This line of argument was elaborated by Theodor _ Lessing, a medical student in Munich who was to become an outspoken social critic during the Weimar Republic. In his

tract on Der Fall Panizza (1895) Lessing claimed that no- | tions like blasphemy, obscenity, and lese majesty were nonsensical, and that works of art could not in any case be judged according to conventional moral, political, or reli-

| gious standards.'’ The demand that art be accorded a privileged legal position persisted among Munich’s writers and artists, as the struggles over the Lex Heinze (1900) and the Censorship Advisory Council (1908-1914) were to indicate. Although the debates over the legality of The Council of Love have persisted into the recent past—an edition of the play was confiscated in the Federal Republic of Germany as late as 1962—the historical importance of the work lies in its

political and aesthetic dimensions. To be sure, Panizza sought to challenge the Catholic Church, which constantly threatened to exert cultural censorship through its political arm, the Center Party. However, Panizza considered his attacks on Catholicism more than just a localized struggle for

confessional and artistic freedom in Bavaria. The author viewed his opposition to established authority as nothing | less than a psychic necessity. While in jail, Panizza, whose mother was descended from French Huguenots, explained his refusal to flee Germany prior to his trial: “It was Huguenot love of opposition and hostility to the state that made me remain in Munich. We Huguenots feel uneasy when we are

Sexuality and Satire + 61

d’accord with the state ... We say: You must educate this thing, your soul, the best thing that you have, to be hostile to

the state. Only then do you feel well. Only then are you—

you.”

This contention that one could be “oneself”? only in opposition to the state lay at the heart of Panizza’s concept of individualism, which he expounded in his tract on Der Illusionismus und die Rettung der Personlichkeit (Illusionism and the Salvation of Personality, 1895). Basing his ideas on recent psychological speculations concerning the psyche and the subconscious, Panizza, formerly a practicing psychiatrist and still an obsessive self-analyst, concluded that the actions of every individual were governed by irrational promptings that emanated from inaccessible regions of the mind. He called the source of such individual impulses the “Damon,” after the Socratic daimon. This was not, according to Panizza, a mystical or transcendental force; he denied the existence of a personal God or any consciousness apart from that of man. The Damon was, instead, a natural source of 1mpulses, within the psyche but beyond consciousness.'’ Although the basis of its promptings could not be explained

rationally, its effects could be studied through the type of | intense self-examination to which Panizza subjected himself, and through a study of the interaction of willful individuals and society throughout history.

On the basis of historical study and his own increasing conflicts with the law, Panizza concluded that individual impulses and social demands were ultimately irreconcilable. The state and society cohered only as long as individuals repressed the promptings of their inner selves. Panizza’s use of

the word “Damon” evoked not only the Socratic daimon, but also the more conventional “‘demon,” since that force’s hostility to social demands might result in “demonic” violence when constraints upon the individual became too great. He summarized his political and historical views in

the following entry in his extensive notebooks: | I am an anarchist, i.e. as an artist and thinker I advocate the |

principle that in man’s nature there are impulses which, com- |

62 * CARNIVALESQUE MODERNISM pared to the socializing and state-building capacities that one __ might call herd-instincts, are deeper, more decisive, and more formative of man’s essence. The outbreak of these impulses in

the form of individual violence, conspiracy, revolution, or murder becomes necessary and manifests itself when the ties of social organization have weakened or the forms of state threaten to become ossified and sterile."®

Panizza developed an ultimately tragic view of history, which postulated that genuine freedom—the ability to live according to the urgings of the Damon—vwas possible only in times of chaos and upheaval: “Unity is princely violence, is tyrannical rule. Discord is popular violence, is freedom.””” The greatest upheavals occur when an individual sensitive to

the promptings of his Damon gives expression to them in religious terms that speak to the subconscious desires of the masses: “What are hallucinations? They are autochthonous expressions of the human psyche that make us aware of the most hidden depths of the human soul, the ultimate authority that we conscious beings possess. If such hallucinations are religiously tinged, they are unconquerable. Because they encounter similar depths and abysses among the listen-

ing masses. If they are accepted, then they become ‘the truth.’ ”’”° Panizza was consequently intrigued by those religious, political, and artistic leaders whom Max Weber would

soon be calling “charismatic’”—people like Christ, Mo- | hammed, Savonarola, Jan Hus, Martin Luther, Thomas | Miinzer, Ferdinand Lassalle, even Richard Wagner. According to Panizza, the tragedy of human history resided in the fact that the libertarian visions of such men either were suppressed or, when victorious, eventually ossified into dog-

- matic institutions like the Roman Catholic Church or the Social Democratic Party. History was thus a futile cycle of popular rebellions inspired by the visions of great personali-

ties, which resulted in novel historical configurations that again constrained individuality and provoked renewed outbreaks of revolt. Panizza contended that such cyclical revolutions were not only historically inevitable but also morally

imperative, since only within the fractured social space

Sexuality and Satire + 63 brought about by political upheavals could the individual re-

alize the promptings of his Damon. | If this vision of humanity, the psyche, and society sounds | more like that of the later Nietzsche, Freud, or Weber than that of the naturalists, it 1s because Panizza stood at the point

where the naturalist enterprise was reaching conclusions

that negated its assumptions. Contemporary observers clas- , sified Panizza as a naturalist with only slight misgivings. Like other naturalists, he devoted his attention to the nature of man and society in the modern world, and he studied it in what he considered a scientific fashion. His major interests—society, religion, sexuality—were certainly primary concerns of the naturalist movement as a whole. The differ- . ences become clear when one considers that most other naturalists held positivist notions of man. They believed that human behavior was empirically observable and that human motivation was relatively transparent. In contrast, Panizza, one of the very few naturalists to have extensive training in the natural sciences, medicine, and psychology, found no basis in his life or research for this faith in the ability to comprehend human behavior. For him, the ultimate psychic wellsprings remained obscure. Unlike the literary nonscientists who uncritically accepted the optimistic and rationalistic positivism of the nineteenth century, Panizza recognized the limits of scientific thought. His belief in the ultimate incomprehensibility of human behavior complemented his contention that full social integration of the individual would be, in the end, elusive. This image of a radical disyuncture between the individual | and society also marked a break with the classical tradition that had shaped the social and political attitudes of German writers throughout the nineteenth century. In his Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man Schiller had written: “every individual carries within himself, according to his talents and destiny, a pure idealistic human, with whose immutable unity, in all its variations, it is the great duty of his existence to conform.””' This inner self, which could be brought forth by classical education, might relate to society in a concilia-

64 + CARNIVALESQUE MODERNISM tory or adversary manner. Nevertheless, Schiller—and the ensuing century of reformist German artists and intellectuals, including the naturalists—never doubted the possibility of achieving a social state where the ideal promptings of the individual might harmonize with those of his fellow men. This belief, which Lionel Trilling has dubbed the doctrine of “sincerity,” gave way in the works of Panizza to what Trilling called “authenticity,” the notion that confor-

mity to one’s inner drives necessitates perpetual conflict | with society.** Having replaced Schiller’s “pure idealistic human” with an irrational Damon, Panizza argued that all social structures and conventions were mere “illusions” that the individual should feel free to challenge. In Der I/lusionismus und die Rettung der Personlichkeit, Panizza declared: ‘In order to free yourself from illusions, you may dare to do anything ... ‘State,’ ‘society,’ ‘religion,’ ‘marriage,’ ‘virtue,’

‘dalai-lamaism, ‘morality,’ those are illusions, which you

may fight and destroy. When you can. When you must. When it is demanded by your Damon, the ultimate authority to which you owe obeisance.””’? Although Panizza had become atheistic by the 1890s, his Protestant upbring- ing was reflected in the fact that he praised Martin Luther as the outstanding example of a man who shattered a world after heeding his conscience: “no man has ever stormed as fiercely against the outer world, after he made sure that he was steadfast and secure within himself.””* Panizza was certainly no Luther, but at least he sought to practice what he preached: his composition of The Council of Love was an attempt to liberate individuals from religious

, and statist “illusions.” By ridiculing Catholic dogma, he hoped to weaken the foundations of religious faith; by standing trial, he sought to underscore the injustice of the law and thereby destroy public respect for the Bavarian state. For Panizza, his trial represented a fundamental conflict between oppressive order and libertarian disorder: ‘Here, two Weltanschauungen crash against each other: the

dalai-lamaian, firmly riveted and locked in dogmas, and the—how shall I say it?—subversive barricade-stance,

Sexuality and Satire + 65 which dares to topple the last monument.””’ He believed that the desire of writers like himself and the provocative Ludwig Quidde to “force their way into jail” was “a great danger to the state. With another dozen of such people, the remainder of our medieval legislation will have disappeared —

from Germany by the end of the century.””° Although this belief was woefully naive, at least one of Panizza’s fellow anticlerical psychiatrists lauded The Council of Love as a “powerfully revolutionary” play. That man was Sigmund

Freud.”’ | With such principles, it is not surprising that Panizza considered himself an anarchist. Whereas most self-styled anar-

chists among the European avant-garde subscribed to the more pacific and community-oriented anarchism of Kropotkin or Tolstoy, Panizza admired its most radical and violent forms—the writings of Max Stirner and the “propaganda by deed” of the French and Italian terrorists. In the middle of

the nineteenth century Stirner—like Panizza, a Franconian | by birth—had argued that the individual was a law unto himself and that the authority of the ego must inevitably conflict with that of the state. Many of the ideas propounded

in Der Illusionismus und die Rettung der Personlichkeit |

were, in fact, derived from Stirner, to whose memory that work was dedicated. Moreover, as Panizza’s own hostility to established authority waxed over the course of the 1890s, he looked approvingly at the anarchist outrages that were plaguing Europe and America (most notably the assassinations of Tsar Alexander II in 1881, President Carnot in 1894, Empress Elisabeth in 1898, King Umberto in 1900, and President McKinley in 1901). He began to question the efficacy of his literary efforts, compared with the immediate success of the men of “the deed.” In 1899, after several newspapers conflated his career with that of a like-named Italian terror-

ist, Panizza issued a statement which lauded the dagger at the expense of the pen: “A man of the deed, like Attilio Panizza—a man who is ready to stand up for his ideas with his

dagger, who every day 1s ready to die on the gallows for his brother, who is never bothered with improving his own ma-

66 * CARNIVALESQUE MODERNISM

terial condition, but rather has always been concerned with the well-being of his people—such a man towers above a... writer, who exists among ideas, who makes use of a style in-

stead of a stile [dagger].””* ,

Perhaps to compensate psychologically for his de facto political impotence, Panizza believed rather wishfully that his

ideals were shared by the populace at large. His perception of adversary undercurrents in popular thought and culture proved to be one of his most significant contributions to the politics and the aesthetics of the modernist movement. Panizza believed that Bavaria’s rural population harbored an intense dislike of both secular and clerical authorities. In

voluminous notebooks he collected accounts of the two major expressions of popular hostility toward the Church and the Bavarian state in the 1890s: charivaris (Haberfeldtreiben) and the activities of the Peasant League (Bauernbund). Bavarian peasants staged rowdy charivaris either to protest infringements on their local rights by the expanding state bureaucracy or to maintain the moral (especially sexual) order of their communities on the basis of traditional ethical codes that differed from those of the law books and

| the Church. Since many of the charivaris were directed against local mayors, judges, gendarmes, and priests, they were seen as a threat to social order by the state and the Church. In October 1893 the archbishop of Munich-Freising pronounced a ban of excommunication upon all participants in charivaris, and the courts began to impose such stiff penalties upon arrested offenders that their activities were completely stamped out by 1897.”

Whereas charivaris were attacked by both liberals and Catholics, they were defended by the Social Democrats as well as by members of the Peasant League. Indeed, the upsurge of charivaris in the 1890s and their consequent repression were intimately linked to the heightened political tensions in the countryside that also gave rise to the Peasant

League. Although the Center Party had made impressive electoral gains throughout the 1870s and 1880s, Bavarian peasants became increasingly disturbed by the Church’s

Sexuality and Satire + 67 doctrinal severity and the Center’s failure to represent the economic interests of the small farmer; they were particularly infuriated by Centrist support given to Chancellor Leo von Caprivi’s abolition of protective agricultural tariffs in the early 1890s. Discontent crystalized in the 1890s in the form of the Bavarian Peasant League, a populist party whose

motto—‘“no nobles, no bureaucrats, no priests’”—underscored its anti-statist and anticlerical bias. At its first electoral appearance, in 1893, the Peasant League gained over 8 percent of the votes cast, and thus deprived the Center of its absolute majority in the Bavarian parliament. Faced with the

| growth of political radicalism in the normally docile countryside, both the liberals and the Catholics waged a campaign against the Peasant League, which they considered a rural analog to Social Democracy.” Panizza took great interest in these developments because they underscored his contention that, far from being docile, the populace at large harbored a growing enmity toward the Church and the state. His extensive notes on rural discontent resulted in several articles in which he described and lauded charivaris. He argued that their activities expressed a desire for local autonomy which rejected the centralizing tendencies of the modern state, and an openness toward sexuality which contrasted markedly with the ascetic norms of

| the Church. By underscoring the latter point, he indirectly refuted the Center’s primary argument for upholding and expanding the laws against “pornography” in the arts. Whereas the Center argued that the “virtuous” populace had to be protected from the moral and sexual “corruption” that

many naturalist works might inspire, Panizza contended that peasants had nothing to learn from bourgeois writers 1 puncto sexualis. Indeed, many of the documented charivari songs, which used crude and (by urban standards) obscene language, were censored from Panizza’s publications.’! Panizza imputed an adversary spirit not only to the politi-

cal activities and sexual mores of the peasants but also to their artistic products. He was the first German playwright to recognize the “carnivalesque” nature of popular culture,

68 * CARNIVALESQUE MODERNISM | | and he consciously employed carnivalesque techniques in his own dramas. “Carnivalization”—a term that has gained scholarly currency through the works of Mikhail Bakhtin— implies the conflation or inversion of concepts and values that are normally kept apart: sacred and profane, spirit and body, elite and popular, ruler and ruled, in short, “high” and

“low” in all of their social and cultural connotations.” Whereas the “civilized” bourgeois divides the world into

spheres of acceptable and unacceptable behavior, Panizza argued that the peasant “does not know this double consciousness. Surrounded by nature in all its freedom and im-

mensity, he sees delightful and terrifying things close together. He finds similar contrasts on the farm and in the barn, in front of the house and behind the house. He calmly and freely calls everything by its proper name, and with the same equanimity and certainty he perceives the nobility and

| baseness of humanity.””’

According to Panizza, this ability to see the world in its wholeness, this refusal to bifurcate the realms of experience, | was carried over into a conflation of the ostensibly greatest opposites: sexuality and religion. He observed, for example,

that in popular representations of Christ’s passion—from medieval mystery plays to Stations of the Cross carved by more recent peasant artists—sacred and profane principles commingled: pain (crucifixion) and sincere religiosity (the apostles) were juxtaposed with sexual excitement (Mary Magdalene) and crude jesting (soldiers at Golgotha, devils). In popular representations of figures like Mary Magdalene—“pressing her mostly bared breasts together in intense pain, sobbing with open mouth, and looking up to the cross

with tear-drenched eyes’’—religious devotion and sexual longing seemed to coalesce.** Panizza considered such con-

flations “‘a tendency of the people to place the great, the meek, the gruesome, and the pitiable close together.”*’ This combination of “deep, sincere faith with gruesome, obscene _ wit” could also be found in cities like Munich. Speaking of

the populace of the Bavarian capital during Fasching, Panizza concluded: “No other people has such ability to weave

Sexuality and Satire - 69 together the heavenly with the earthly.”*® This spirit was not only an expression of the genuine popular belief in the congruence of the sacred with the secular but also a statement of the common man’s “superclever roguishness and

know-it-all attitude’: by treating the sacred in a human, all- | too-human fashion, by portraying the saintly in familiar, alltoo-familiar terms, popular culture not only incorporated the

divine into its own realm, but also parodied elite, hierarchi- | cal, and spiritualized notions of religiosity.’’

Panizza noted that this carnivalesque spirit of popular culture had been under attack from secular and clerical elites

ever since the eighteenth century. Desiring to modernize their domains, the increasingly “enlightened” and absolutistic Bavarian electors abolished many Catholic festivals in order to increase the number of days that the lower classes could be compelled to work. Simultaneously the spread of

post-Cartesian rationalist Catholicism induced many Church leaders to concur in the suppression of ‘“superstition” and baroque religiosity. In the 1750s the performance of Christmas and Passion plays was banned, as was the representation of any members of the Holy Family on stage. Only after persistent appeals did Oberammergau win permission to resume its decennial Passion play, but it was forced to expunge the more jocose elements of the performance. In the nineteenth century much baroque and popular religious art, with its ebullience and earthy sensuality, was destroyed and replaced by works composed in more restrained and “dignified” styles (such as those of the Nazarenes).”»

Panizza attempted to revive elements of the carnivalesque ©

tradition by including them in his own works, such as The Council of Love. At his trial he held a long discourse on the history of the popular satire, a theme that he had discussed more than three years before at the seventh public meeting of the Modern Life Society. He lectured the judges and the jury about the seemingly blasphemous works of numerous “respectable” writers, ranging from Rabelais to Sebastian Sailer, a popular eighteenth-century Swabian priest who

70 + CARNIVALESQUE MODERNISM

composed plays depicting the Holy Family in a comic and crudely familiar manner.’”? Panizza conceded that such works were not necessarily “high art,” but he pointed out

that they had enjoyed toleration until recent, more repressive times. The playwright thus implied that his own use of carnivalesque techniques, such as his portrayal of an oversexed Virgin or his juxtaposition of the De profundis with papal orgies, would have encountered greater understanding and toleration in earlier, pre-“enlightened”’ eras. The fact that Panizza was condemned to jail by a lowerclass jury suggests that his particular conception of “popular carnivalesque culture” was not shared by the actual “popu-

lace.” Indeed, one of the jurors quipped after the trial: “If that dog had been tried in Lower Bavaria, he wouldn’t have

| gotten away alive.’”*” Although The Council of Love bears some superficial resemblances to various medieval, baroque,

and popular parodies of religious customs and beliefs, its complete lack of religious devotion made it alien to the popu-

lar spirit.*’ Panizza’s case illustrates well the disjuncture be- |

tween enthusiasm for a perceived popular culture and distance from the actual popular mentality that was typical

, of many elite.modernist artists. As we shall see, it was precisely a form of censorious populism that caused the avantgarde much grief after 1900.

Although Panizza’s appeals to literary precedents and popular culture did not impress the jury, hisemployment of _ “popular” carnivalesque techniques won the admiration of his fellow literati. In later years no less a critic than Walter Benjamin noted that “the art of Oskar Panizza is rooted in the folk.”** Many of Panizza’s admirers recognized that the chaotic mixture of conflicting forms and contents was central to his carnivalesque style. The Austrian critic Hermann Bahr said of The Council of Love, “Christian mythology 1s

treated here as Offenbach treated classical mythology”; Walter Benjamin wrote, “a heretical icon painter—that is

the shortest formula for Oskar Panizza”’; Richard Weinhoppel, the composer of the Elf Scharfrichter cabaret, referred to Panizza’s “mixture of peasant crudity and refined

Sexuality and Satire + 71 | connoisseurship”’; and Otto Julius Bierbaum, a founding | member of the Modern Life Society, praised Panizza’s mastery of “the science of inversion [die Wissenschaft vom Verkehrten].”” Panizza himself stated: “The most powerful attribute that man possesses is the ability to make the crooked straight, and black white ... This is the type of art that can move mountains.””* Panizza’s topsy-turvy world may not have moved moun~ tains, but it did mark an abrupt break from the predominant artistic realism. Both Heyse’s Munich Circle and Conrad’s

| Modern Life Society were exponents of realism, broadly defined. Neither group challenged the notion of art as mimesis, the idea that art should evoke an illusion of reality among its

audience. They differed merely over questions of theme, form, and degree of realistic technique. Whereas the Munich Circle employed elegant forms to evoke events in the histor-

ically distant past, the Modern Life Society called for an honest depiction of the here and now, preferably the seamier sides of modern life. Although Panizza accepted the naturalists’ espousal of socially critical art, he rejected their realistic

style and their concern with observable social reality. He

contended that naturalistic mimesis was itself a form of , subservience to the status quo and a denial of the power of the Damon in particular. “Whosoever possesses nothing but the hopeless characteristic of letting the milieu be the milieu, man be man, facts be facts, the so-called ‘objective’ people, they possess nothing (or almost nothing) of this fundamental power of the soul. They are not driven by any delusions, but neither are they elevated by any ideas.”” According to Panizza, a truly critical transcendence was to be achieved not by mirroring reality, but rather by willfully distorting things, people, thoughts, and values. The goal of art was not simply to make the viewer appalled at existing reality but to force him to question the conventional values, categories, and thought forms through which reality was perceived. “The purpose of art 1s not to put nature on

display, or even to give a nearly exact illusion of it, but rather, through a subjective metamorphosis of nature in the

72 + CARNIVALESQUE MODERNISM

perception of the creative artist, through exaggeration or | diminution, through overstatement or reduction, even through distortion and twisting, to bring us, the spectators, out of our equilibrium, to upset, interest, and amuse us.””*° In The Council of Love, Panizza employed a style of “exag-

geration” and “distortion” that was both “amusing’’ and “upsetting.” By taking Catholicism’s saintly pantheon too literally, by depicting the Holy Family with “merciless naturalism” (Conrad), he provided a reductio ad absurdum of anthropomorphic religiosity.*’ The whole play was suffused

with a carnivalesque conflation of theatrical genres: the scenes set in heaven combined the conventions of Oberam-

| mergau with those of boudoir farce, while events in the | papal palace mixed historical drama with vaudeville acts (wrestling, striptease, pantomime). This juxtaposition of accepted genres destroyed the theatrical illusion of each, very much in the manner of what Brecht would later call ‘“Verfremdung.”’

Disruption of artistic illusion was one of the major components of Panizza’s campaign to destroy illusions in general, in order to free the fantasy of the individual. The structures of social life and the precepts of moral codes, as well as the |

conventions whereby one describes and portrays reality, were to be called into question in order to allow freer expression for the Damon. By replacing realism with carnivalization, Panizza opened the way for a style of art whose only

limitation was the fantasy and audacity of the artist. Panizza’s satirical style was both a means toward and a product of his goal, liberation of the imagination. As early as 1893 Bierbaum sensed that Panizza’s inversions were public prov-

ocations only superficially: more fundamentally, they were expressions of the author’s private fantasy. Bierbaum, who by 1893 was also looking beyond naturalism, considered

, this fantastic element Panizza’s most modern trait, since “for _ the moderns, fantasy is the means to the limitless develop-

ment of personality.” Panizza’s art was essentially a mental | game, a search for totally new and personal ways of perceiv-

ing, rearranging, and depicting the psychic and material

Sexuality and Satire + 73

worlds. Benjamin, too, regarded him as one of the outstand- | ing fantastic storytellers of the modern age, along with E. T. A. Hoffmann, Edgar Allen Poe, and Alfred Kubin.” Panizza’s ultimate paradox was the fact that public provocation and private aesthetic play came together in his works. The means—the satirical destruction of received ideas and institutions-—were themselves expressions of the end—free play of fantasy. Social combativeness and psychic liberation united in a project that required the slaying of the Christian

God for the liberation of the inner “demon.” In 1894 Panizza contended that “the psychiatrist is for us today a more important person than the Pope.’ It is probable that this displacement was one of the symbolic parricides through which Panizza attempted to overcome personal psychological difficulties. By assaulting the Holy Father in Rome, who had been championed by his own father, he vindicated his Protestant mother; and by replacing the pope with the psychiatrist, he (a sometime practicing psychiatrist himself) could dispell the spiritual and political enemies of his childhood and manhood. Whether or not one sees such an oedipal

underpinning to Panizza’s project, it is undeniable that by creating an art that was both intensely aggressive and intensely personal, he attempted to conquer a social space for his private fantasies. Panizza’s simultaneous advocacy of subversive politics, personal fantasy, and carnivalesque art placed him at the beginning of Munich’s modernist movement, but he had to pay

| dearly for this distinction. All appeals to annul, reduce, or commute his jail term to fortress arrest were turned down, so, beginning in August 1895, he spent a year in Amberg prison. Upon his release he renounced his Bavarian citizenship and settled in Switzerland, after having written Ab-

schied von Mtinchen (Farewell to Munich), a bitterly anti-Catholic pamphlet, which was promptly banned. In 1898 he was expelled from Zurich as an undesirable alien and moved to Paris.

After his imprisonment Panizza developed an increasingly severe persecution complex. In response to what he

74 + CARNIVALESQUE MODERNISM

believed to be constant harrassment by German agents, he composed vituperative works like Parisjana (1899), a series of poems that attacked the Kaiser in scatological terms. The book was dedicated to Conrad, Panizza’s erstwhile friend, but that staunchly nationalist and monarchist writer pub-

| licly rejected the dedication in a fit of outrage and horror.” Soon thereafter the Bavarian police, unable to have Panizza extradicted from Paris for his offensive book, confiscated his mother’s trust fund, from which he had continued to receive an annual income. Lacking other means of support, the impoverished author was forced to return to Germany in 1901 to stand trial again. This time he was judged mentally unfit to be tried and in 1904 he was permanently committed to an asylum. His tragic life exemplified a statement he had writ-

ten while serving his prison sentence for The Council of Love: ‘““Today, when someone expresses a free thought, he 1s

left with only three choices: the insane asylum, jail, or exile.””?

Frank Wedekind and Spring Awakening Frank Wedekind did not, like Panizza, end up in an asylum, but he too was forced to spend part of his life in Swiss and Parisian exile, and he was confined for several months to fortress arrest. Moreover, the German police were not the only

people who regarded Panizza and Wedekind as two of a kind: many of their literary colleagues approvingly noted the

similarities between them. Friedrich Gundolf, the outstanding literary critic of Stefan George’s circle, noted that “the most savage satires” were to be found in their works of Panizza and Wedekind, and Kurt Tucholsky frequently mentioned them in the same breath.’* The two playwrights may be viewed as complementary for the purposes of this book as

well. Not only did they inaugurate a modernist mode of drama but they also assaulted the dominant ideologies of , nineteenth-century Bavaria. Whereas The Council of Love attacked the fundamental precepts of resurgent Catholicism,

| Spring Awakening assaulted the official culture of neoclassi-

Sexuality and Satire - 75 cism as embodied in the Gymnasium. In addition, the two works carnivalized ascetic Catholicism and cerebral classicism by confronting them with their polar opposite: sexuality. Frank Wedekind was born into a family that had taken ac-

tive part in the revolutionary struggles of nineteenthcentury Germany. His father, Friedrich Wilhelm Wedekind, was a physician deeply involved in left-liberal causes. In 1848 he went to Frankfurt to engage in political journalism, and, like many other liberal professionals, he emigrated to the United States after the suppression of the revolution.

In San Francisco he met and married the actress Emilie Kammerer, daughter of a south German industrialist who ,

had emigrated to Switzerland after having been jailed twice on charges of political radicalism. In 1864 Friedrich Wedekind returned with his wife to Germany, where he wrote numerous articles that criticized Bismarck and advocated the establishment of a Grossdeutschland under the constitution of 1849. Unlike most liberals of the 1860s, he regarded the unification of Germany under Prussian hegemony as a na-

tional calamity, and he took his family into self-imposed

exile in 1872.”° |

Benjamin Franklin Wedekind (1864-1918), whose name

reflected his father’s democratic sympathies, grew up in a family which aspired to uphold in exile the ideals of German

liberalism and “revolutionary” classicism. Just as Panizza was attuned to the conflicts within the Christian tradition through his Protestant mother’s struggles with the Catholic Church, Wedekind became aware of the contradictory currents of classicism through his father’s polemics attacking German authoritarian policies. Friedrich Wedekind wrote hymns in praise of Schiller, whom he admired as a spokesman against despotism.”* For the politically engaged physi-

cian, classicism stood for a defense of individual rights against arbitrary government, as it had for so many intellec-

tuals during the upheavals of 1848. A generation later, though, his son found this political activism misplaced. In the 1880s Frank Wedekind could see in the fate of his father »

76 * CARNIVALESQUE MODERNISM

the futility of political criticism and the impossibility of po-

litical change within Germany: the National Liberals had submitted to the Bismarckian state, the Social Democrats | were outlawed, and the few remaining true disciples of 1848,

such as Friedrich Wedekind, suffered political impotence

and embittered isolation. , More fundamentally, Frank Wedekind saw his father as an embodiment of the hypocritical liberalism that advocated

civil and political liberties for adult males, yet reproduced

| the authoritarianism of the state within the confines of the | family. As a youth, he was disturbed by the fact that his father’s politically liberal facade masked the conventional pro-

fessional prejudices and patriarchal values of the German bourgeoisie. At the outset of their marriage Friedrich Wede- — kind had forced his wife to terminate her acting career. Sim1-

larly, he determined that his son should remain within the bounds of bourgeois respectability, and sent him to Munich in October 1884 to study law. Frank, however, was captivated more by Munich’s theatrical culture than by his legal studies. By the middle of December he wrote his aunt: “I go to the theater six or seven times a week and have already seen some very wonderful things.” Since he saw no less than eighty-four performances during his first winter in the Bavarian capital, it is no wonder that he wrote: “It’s quite strange that the stage is almost as large as the rest of the world; here in Munich, it’s almost larger.” ° Wedekind soon decided to embark on a literary career, and to become a play-

- wright in particular. This choice was hardly surprising, insofar as his mother had been an actress, his father had lauded the political fire of German classical drama, and his Gymnasium had taught him that drama was the highest form of art. Nevertheless, his father was appalled at his unwillingness to

pursue a more stable and lucrative profession. The mounting tensions between father and son led to a violent confron-

tation in October 1886, when Frank struck his father.

| Banished from home and deprived of all financial support, he was forced to eke out a meager living as a freelance writer

of feuilletons and advertisements in Zurich. However, in

Sexuality and Satire + 77

| 1888 his father’s death provided him with a small inheritance that allowed him to return to Munich and to devote

himself fully to belles-lettres. The first major drama that came out of this period was Frihlings Erwachen: Eine Kin-

1891). ,

dertragodie (Spring Awakening: A Children’s Tragedy; | Wedekind’s drama of frustrated adolescence combined experiences from his childhood (parental conflicts, the suicide of two classmates) with a theme that was to dominate much of his literary oeuvre: sexuality.’’ Eroticism was very much a tabooed subject in public discourse, especially in the Gymnasium, which promoted a conception of classicism that was

not only apolitical, but asexual as well. The young Wede-

, kind discovered, however, that the German classical tradi- , tion included highly erotic dimensions. In contrast to _ Panizza, who saw classicism and popular culture as irrecon-

cilable opposites, he perceived erotic and carnivalesque aspects in both popular entertainment and certain undercurrents of the German classical tradition. In the latter half of the eighteenth century part of the impetus of German classicism had been directed against ascetic Christianity, and the proponents of “aesthetic paganism” advocated bodily and emotional development in the fullest sense.’® The outstanding spokesman of this notion was Goethe, who saw no reason to exalt the spirit over the body; he considered sexuality very much a part of man, and very much a medium of God.

Goethe’s greatest monument to this vision was Faust, wherein the hero overcomes the dichotomy beween the pure

intellectuality of academic life and the animal sexuality of the Germanic Walpurgisnacht in the harmonious fusion of sexual and spiritual sensitivity that marks the Helen episode

and the classical Walpurgisnacht. Not surprisingly, the young Melchior Gabor in Spring Awakening says of Faust: ‘“T have found no book in which there are so many beautiful things.””” These words could have been spoken just as well by Wedekind, for whom Goethe’s play became the most lasting literary influence. Wedekind distanced himself from Goethe’s drama in one

78 + CARNIVALESQUE MODERNISM

important respect. In congruence with Schiller’s demand that classical education serve as a preparation for worldly in-

volvement, Faust’s fusion of spirituality and sensuality in the Helen episode serves as a basis for his active involvement in politics and social reform. Wedekind, disillusioned by the failure of the political aspirations of his father’s generation, shifted the focus by viewing classical education as a means

of unmasking bourgeois morality and the oppressive structures of daily existence. This less overtly political reading of the social implications of classicism was prefigured in the works of Heinrich Heine, a favorite author of Wedekind. The following passage from Heine’s On the History of Religion and Philosophy in Germany (1834) appears in one of Wedekind’s early notebooks: © [The great slogan of the Revolution, spoken by Saint-Just: Le pain est le droit du peuple, reads for us:] Le pain est le droit

divin de ’homme. We are not fighting for the civil rights of the people, but rather for the divine rights of man. In this and in other respects we distinguish ourselves from the heroes of the Revolution. We do not want sans-culottes, frugal citizens, incorruptible presidents. We are establishing a democracy of equally splendid, equally holy, equally blissful gods. You demand abstinent mores, simple dress, unspiced pleasures. On the contrary, we demand nectar and ambrosia, purple cloaks, expensive perfumes, voluptuousness, and splendor, the laugh-

ing dance of nymphs, music, and comedies.” | Wedekind’s citation of this passage is noteworthy because

it coincides both with his distance from his father’s standpoint and with the direction that his own thought would take in the future. Just as Heine, temporarily suffering from post-1830 disillusionment, hoped to press beyond the predominantly political concerns of the French revolutions, Wedekind sensed the insufficiency and inefficacy of his father’s exclusively political struggles. Both Heine and Wedekind were dissatisfied with political movements that strove

only for full stomachs, civil rights, and a democratic franchise, while leaving bourgeois morality untouched. They

, Sexuality and Satire + 79 desired instead a moral revolution that would replace the bourgeois tradition of frugality and self-denial with an enjoyment of bodily pleasures. The struggle for civil freedom in the political arena was useless as long as repressive attitudes predominated in the realm of everyday life. At the most general level Spring Awakening sought to reintegrate mind with body and spirit with sex. In the work just quoted Heine had distinguished between “two social systems,” those of the “spiritualists” (or “Nazarenes”) and the “sensualists” (or “Hellenes”): “We give the name ‘spiritualism’ to the criminal presumption of the spirit [Geist]

| that strives for exclusive glorification and seeks to crush matter underfoot; and we afhix the name ‘sensualism’ to the opposition, which .. . desires a rehabilitation of matter and a vindication of the rights of the senses, without denying the rights or even the supremacy of the spirit.”°' This idea was echoed in “Aufklarungen” (1910), one of Wedekind’s late

essays in which he divided humanity into “two large | classes”: those who say “flesh remains flesh, in opposition to

spirit,’ and those who contend that “flesh has its own spirit.” The same concern for rehabilitating the body as an

equal and harmonious counterpart to the mind—the carnivalesque conflation of spirit and sex—lies at the heart of Spring Awakening. . The main plot of Spring Awakening \s simply told. At the outset fourteen-year-old Wendla Bergmann cannot persuade

her mother to explain the “facts of life,” her emotional and physical changes at the onset of puberty. Lacking any notion

of sexuality, she is surprised when she becomes pregnant

after a (literal) roll-in-the-hay with a schoolboy, Melchior |

Gabor. Wendla’s horrified mother arranges an abortion for her daughter; it proves fatal. Meanwhile Melchoir has composed an illustrated tract to explain the same “facts of life” to his sexually unenlightened and emotionally disturbed class-

mate, Moritz Stiefel. The latter is so overwhelmed by the onset of puberty that he flunks out of school and commits suicide. He is buried to the sound of curses from the pastor, his teachers, and his father. Wendla’s pregnancy and the dis-

80 ° CARNIVALESQUE MODERNISM

covery of the sexual tract among the dead Moritz’s possessions induce the teachers to expel Melchior from school. His parents send him to a reformatory, from which he escapes.

In a fantastic final graveyard scene, Melchior meets the dead | Moritz, who holds his blown-off head under his arm. Moritz tries to persuade Melchior to join him in death, but a myste-

rious Masked Gentleman appears and leads Melchior back _ into life.

One of Wedekind’s notes from the winter of 1890-91, when he composed Spring Awakening, states: “the males as well as the females are all fourteen years old. The slender

stalk has shot up, the heavy bud, bursting with sap, _ threatens to snap it, the petals have not yet unfolded, but the calyx stands open.”®’ Both the rather obvious sexual imagery and the sense of uncertain expectancy—will the flower break or will it come to full bloom?—underscore the main themes of the play. Wedekind portrayed adolescence as the

nodal point in personal growth, the time that determines whether a person will either be broken in to fulfill conventional social roles or be allowed to determine his life according to his own values and inclinations. The play condemns the institutions of primary socialization—family, school, and church—in terms of their effects upon the growing individ-

ual. It is a drama about the formation and malformation of

character, about Bildung—or Missbildung—in its most fundamental sense.

Spring Awakening dramatizes the ways in which the bourgeois family and the “classical” Gymnasium attempt to suppress the nascent sexuality of young adolescents and turn them into pliant members of bourgeois society. The success

of this attempt is predicated upon the ability to drive a wedge between body and spirit. The Gymnasium seeks to | overburden the minds of its pupils in order to distract them from their instinctual inclinations. Typical homework assignments—Central America! Louis the Fifteenth! Sixty

lines of Homer! ... The Latin essay!”—introduce pupils to the temporally and geographically distant topics adored by the Munich Circle and other proponents of “official” classi-

Sexuality and Satire - 81 cism, but fail to address the more pressing problems of ado‘lescence. This conflict between external and internal demands threatens to overwhelm the young protagonists of Wedekind’s play. For example, Moritz Stiefel is a scholastically weak pupil who feels tremendous parental pressure to succeed in school. He believes that his whole life is channeled toward schoolwork, which becomes an obsessive

mania: “One can’t think about anything without having homework get in the way.” However, the opposite is just as

true; the “anything” about which Moritz would rather think—sexuality—haunts him equally obsessively and disrupts his scholastic concentration. His desire to let his instincts triumph is represented 1n his dream-vision of “legs in sky-blue tights that mounted the teacher’s desk” —a marvellous image that prefigures Heinrich Mann’s Professor Unrat by fifteen years. In the end Moritz overcomes the excessive cerebrality of his schooling by blowing out his brains—the most extreme form of a series of symbolic decapitations pervading the play, which underscore the separation of mind and body in bourgeois society.

Although classical education stands in the way of the children’s self-experience, it also provides one of the means through which they try to come to terms with themselves.

The children in Spring Awakening make several halting (and laughable) attempts to express their personal feelings through classical imagery. These pathetic endeavors to bridge the gap between classical education and personal life underscore the incongruence of plying nineteenth-century pupils with antiquated concepts. One of the girls in the play

expresses her physical attraction to Melchior by saying: ‘““That’s how I imagine the young Alexander, as he went to study with Aristotle.” Melchior himself refers to the belief in omens as “a Charybdis, into which people fall after they

have freed themselves from the Scylla of religious delusions.” Melchior also says that he would like to be “a young

dryad who spends the whole night in the highest branches, , swaying and rocking away,” while Moritz says that he slept

“like the drunken Polyphemos.”” |

82 + CARNIVALESQUE MODERNISM | Whereas these attempts of fourteen-year-old youths to express personal feelings through classical verbiage are little more than ludicrous, Hanschen Rilow, a secondary charac-

ter in the play, makes a more sustained effort to fuse his classical education with his physical needs. The two scenes in which he figures are significant because they illustrate in

outrageous fashion Wedekind’s carnivalesque contention | that the erotic components of genuine classicism can explode the cerebral schooling of the “classical” Gymnasium. In the

penultimate scene of the play Hanschen has a homosexual | encounter with a classmate—in other words, he emulates the

form of eroticism supposedly preferred by the Greek authors whom the boys are forced to read in school. Hanschen

likewise places Western Civilization in the service of his | erotic impulses in an earlier monologue, which he delivers while masturbating in an outhouse (act 2, scene 3); there he employs quotes from Othello to provide a lascivious commentary on reproductions of nudes painted by past masters and contemporary academic artists like Palma Vecchio, Correggio, Bouguereau, van Beers, Makart, and Lossow. Unlike Moritz, Hanschen shows some ingenuity in combining his Grecophile and Shakespeare-saturated schooling with “ofhcial” art to satisfy his immediate adolescent needs. ©

Wedekind’s satire at this point was not gratuitous, but rather directed at a very contemporary debate. Through the middle of the nineteenth century, artistic representations of the human nude were visible only in museums and as expensive reproductions, and thus limited to a propertied and educated elite. Since the 1860s, though, technical developments in the printing industry allowed inexpensive reproductions of such works to become available to the lower classes and middle-class youths, two groups that supposedly lacked the education needed to view such art in a properly

“disinterested” manner. Up through World War I the German police regularly confiscated cheap reproductions of nudes by artists like Michelangelo, Palma Vecchio, Titian, Veronese, Giorgione, Correggio, van Dyck, Rubens, and Ingres, even though the originals were openly displayed in

Sexuality and Satire + 83 museums.” In Spring Awakening Wedekind hoped both to

shock and to satirize the defenders of public morality by dramatizing their worst fears about the fate of classical nudes in immature hands.

Wedekind also suggested that adolescents were not the only “immature” connoisseurs of academic art. After all, Hanschen had to abduct one of the nudes “from the secret drawer of Daddy’s desk in order to incorporate her into my harem.” Wedekind implied that precisely the so-called educated classes were most prone to see such works in purely sexual terms, since the taboo of erotic themes at home and in school created an excessive discomfiture whenever sexuality

manifested itself. This becomes quite explicit in the scene where Melchior and Moritz read Faust, to the dismay of Melchior’s mother. After she leaves, the boys comment:

Moritz: Your mother means the story about Gretchen. Melchior: Did we even spend one second talking about it?

Moritz: Faust himself couldn’t have brushed her aside in a more cold-blooded manner!

Melchior: After all, the work doesn’t culminate in that atrocity!—Faust could have promised to marry

the girl and then left her, and he wouldn’t be any less culpable in my eyes. Gretchen might

| then have died of a broken heart. Just look at how right away everyone glances frantically at that scene—as if the whole world turned around

| p... and v...°°

In a work where Melchior sees “many beautiful things,”

adults see only genitalia. |

Wedekind employed other satirical devices throughout the play. The inhumanity of the teachers belies the precepts of Rousseau and Pestalozzi, whose busts are displayed in the classroom; the pastor explicates Christian precepts in a most un-Christian manner at Moritz’s funeral; the correctional in-

stitution to which Melchior is sent to learn about “the

84 + CARNIVALESQUE MODERNISM | Good” is a hothouse of sexual depravity; and Melchior regales his fellow delinquents with Biblical tales of erotic per- | version. As might be expected, Wedekind’s constant use of such inversions earned him the adulation of Panizza, who

considered Spring Awakening “our most brilliant [genialste] dramatic work.”” Panizza proclaimed: “Germany will never—I speak not of a couple of hundred connoisseurs and artists, but rather of the booted Germans that are drilled in the army and bureaucracy—Germany will never, even in

a hundred years, no matter how much it intermarries with

| the Jews, be able to fetch the honey that lies buried in this

delightful book.’ Until Max Reinhardt succeeded in ma-

neuvering a heavily censored version of the play past the Berlin police in 1906, Spring Awakening did indeed remain a book for “connoisseurs and artists,” a literary curiosity

within the context of modern German drama.

Spring Awakening was censored by the German police and neglected for so long by the reading public not only because of its biting satire and ‘‘obscene” content, but also because of its stylistic radicalism, which questioned traditional

notions of tragedy, dramatic structure, and language itself. | Even though Spring Awakening bore the subtitle A Children’s Tragedy, it was no tragedy in any conventional sense, given its lavish use of humorous, satirical and carnivalesque

devices. In later years Wedekind said of the play: “While writing I rather prided myself on the fact that in no scene, however serious, was humor missing,” since “I think that the play becomes that much more gripping when it is played

| in an innocent, sunny, laughing manner ... I think that the | play might be somewhat repulsive if the tragedy and pathos are emphasized.”’' It was precisely this plethora of buoyant

humor in a play which billed itself a “tragedy” that police | censors found difficult to fathom. For fifteen years Spring Awakening was either rejected outright as pornographic or dismissed as frivolous, because censors assumed that the au-

thor would have employed a conventionally “pathetic” tragic tone if he had really intended to write a “‘serious”’ so-

cial drama. When the play was finally cleared for perfor-

| Sexuality and Satire + 85 mance by the Munich censors in 1908, they stipulated not only that all scenes involving Hanschen Rilow be cut but also that the “proper” tone be maintained throughout. The chief of police informed the sponsoring theater that Wedekind’s play could be staged, “‘only as long as the entire performance proceeds in accordance with the spirit of tragedy, as long as the production meets this requirement at every point, and in particular only as long as the propriety imposed by the seriousness of the plot is not attenuated, and the tragic tone is maintained strictly in the course of future performances. Should any coarsening or caricature of the performance become evident in the future, then permission for the performance will be retracted.””” These stipulations suggest that subversive dimensions were perceived not only in Wedekind’s socially critical con-

tent but also in his innovative style. The police believed that | the maintenance of a tone of high tragedy would raise the

story above the level of the here-and-now into the lofty realm of “timeless art,” as advocated by official culture. This was precisely the type of response that Wedekind hoped to avoid: he wanted to achieve an immediacy of emotional engagement by appealing directly to a broad spectrum of emotions, by buffeting the audience between humor and horror. Moreover, Spring Awakening was “dangerous” insofar as it threatened to collapse the hierarchy of genres established by

German official culture. By conflating the highest genre, tragedy, with the “frivolity” of satire and carnivalesque humor, Wedekind threatened to destroy the aesthetic framework of official classicism. This classicism was the foundation of Bavaria’s secular ideology, so it was not surprising that Munich’s chief of police should have prohibited precisely those two aspects of the play that carnivalized official

culture: the Hanschen Rilow scenes, and the conflation of “high” tragedy with “low” humor. Even with these cuts, the

theater critic of the Bayerischer Kurier said of the play’s | Munich premiere: “as far as ’m concerned, Spring Awakening, in its present form, blatantly exemplifies not only the moral but also the purely aesthetic process of subversion.”

86 * CARNIVALESQUE MODERNISM

Satirical content and conflation of genres did not constitute Wedekind’s most radical departure from the canons of

oficial culture. More fundamentally, Spring Awakening was the first modern German drama that consciously played with and put into question language as such. The play was as much concerned with speech, language, and expression as it was with the folly of official classicism and the social repression of adolescent sexuality. In fact, the two themes of language and eros were intimately related, inasmuch as the

limits of emotional expression were shown to coincide with | the limits of everyday language. Wedekind did not contend that the sad state of affairs presented in Spring Awakening was the product of conscious animosity on the part of teachers and parents or the result of an innate inclination to perversion on the part of children. Rather, he portrayed sexual repression as a major component of a larger context of obedi-

ence to tradition and authority. This authority remained unquestioned because the vocabulary of critical inquiry was excluded from everyday language. On the one hand, conventional language consisted of a series of interlocking clichés that obstructed critical thought and perception. On the other hand, everyday speech did not permit an uninhibited expression of emotions, especially those of a sexual nature.

Stigmatization of bodily pleasure, and even of reference thereto in daily discourse, prevented individuals from rais-

| ing very basic questions about the quality and purpose of their lives. Wedekind contended in “Aufklarungen:”

path. | Youth does not grow up innately stupid and blind. On the contrary, it is an irresponsible crime systematically to train and educate youths to be stupid and blind with respect to their sexuality, to lead them systematically along the wrong This crime has been generally perpetrated in school and at home for the past hundred years. And for what reason was this crime committed? Out of fear that serious discussion

about eroticism and sexuality would damage growing youths.

This fear is the product of a great self-deception. Parents avoid such conversations not because they fear that they might

Sexuality and Satire + 87 harm their children (as they have talked themselves into believing), but rather because they themselves cannot speak about erotic questions, since they have not learned to talk

seriously about such matters.” |

Twenty years earlier Wedekind had dramatized this inability to discuss sexuality in Spring Awakening. It is presented most obviously in the scene where Wendla asks her mother to explain human reproduction. Frau Bergmann can only stammer: “In order to have a child—you have to love the man—to whom you are married—TI say /ove—as only a

husband can be loved! You have to love him with your whole heart, { can’t tell you how!” Frau Bergmann literally cannot “tell how” because she herself has never learned to

speak of such things: “To tell such things to a fourteenyear-old girl! I would have been more prepared to see the sun go out. [ didn’t treat you any differently from the way

my dear good mother treated me.”” } |

Not only is the inability to speak about sexual matters perpetuated from generation to generation, but the merest

mention of eroticism 1s immediately branded as “moral cor- —

ruption” by the teachers, the pastor, and Melchior’s father. These men, the keepers of social order, are also the guardians of a system of language and thought that admits no consideration of personal, emotional, or sexual matters. Far from being a means of interpersonal communication, language be-

comes a smokescreen that obscures authentic human concerns. Rector Sonnenstich can easily dismiss any concern or

| guilt regarding the suicide of Moritz by proclaiming: “Suicide, the gravest conceivable transgression against the moral order of the world, is the greatest conceivable proof of the

moral order of the world, inasmuch as the perpetrator of suicide spares the moral order of the world the task of pass-

ing judgment and thus confirms its validity.”’° This and similar passages, in which rhetorical authority and formality of syntax mask a total illogic of meaning, are largely humor-

ous parodies of academic German. Less amusing is the struggle between Herr and Frau Gabor over their son’s fate.

88 + CARNIVALESQUE MODERNISM

Indeed, this scene (act 3, scene 3), which is modeled after

‘“Triber Tag, Feld” in Faust, is the only part of the play |

that Wedekind intended to be totally devoid of humor.”’ Melchior’s father, a jurist par excellence, is so imbued with

formalism that his son becomes for him an alien object which he condemns according to clichés ranging from brutal adages—‘“‘whoever is too weak for the march, falls by the wayside’ —to questionable forensic formulae (“moral insanity”). His wife screams back at him: “You have to be a man in order to speak like that! You have to be a man in order to

be so blinded by the written word! ... You have to lack all human understanding—you must be a totally soulless bureaucrat, or totally stupid, in order to see moral corruption in our son!”’® Empathy and communication are stifled by

the “written word” that defends a “soulless” patriarchal order which is “blind” to human reality. Wedekind proceeded beyond a recognition of the obscurantist function of conventional and bureaucratic language

by seeking novel means of communicating emotional con- | cern. The techniques that he developed in Spring Awaken-

ing prefigured and often directly influenced many of the linguistic devices that were to characterize expressionist lit-

erature. In contrast to the rhetoric of the teachers, where syntactical rigor masks conceptual illogic, stands the language of some of the children, where a total breakdown of syntax and logical sequence becomes a prerequisite for expressing hardly expressible emotions. This becomes evident

in the monologues of Wendla, Moritz, and Melchior. In the following stream-of-consciousness monologue, Wendla tries to come to grips with her recent sexual encounter with

Melchior: |

Why did you slink out of the house?—To look for vio-

words... ,

lets!—Because Mother sees me smiling —And why can’t you

bring your lips together again?—I don’t know, I can’t find The path is like a plush carpet—no pebbles, no thorns. My ©

feet don’t touch the ground.... Oh, how I slept last night! They used to stand here. I’m becoming as serious as a nun

Sexuality and Satire + 89 | at communion.—Sweet violets!——-Quiet, Mommy, I’ll put on my penitential gown.—Oh God, if only someone would ap-

pear, so I could throw my arms around him and tell him everything!”

Wendla’s inability to find either words or an interlocutor forces her, in the beginning of the monologue, to hold a dialogue with herself, to play the part of both questioner and answerer. Monologue is thus the product of the fact that dialogue has been banished from a social context, and is conse-

| quently interiorized. Not only is the social context of communication lost, but conventional language proves incapable of expressing emotions. The children’s groping for words culminates in the

barely coherent cries that Moritz emits just before his sui- | cide (“I will—scream!—scream!” ).°° One is reminded of Hermann Bahr’s famous definition of expressionism, penned a generation later: ““Never had man been so small. Never had

joy been so far away and freedom so dead. So anguish let | forth a scream: man screams for his soul, the whole era becomes a single scream for help ... That is expressionism.” In fact, in Spring Awakening Wedekind anticipated a major contention of expressionism and, more radically, of dada, namely, that syntax and logic are parts of the social order that curbs self-expression; hence linguistic liberation must be achieved by fragmenting language into a series of exclamations and images which the recipient is forced to interpret emotionally because logical structure is lacking.

This breakdown of language in Spring Awakening was paralleled by a collapse of conventional dramatic structure.

, To be sure, the “formlessness” of the play was in part a result of the manner in which Wedekind went about its com-

position: “I began to write without any plan, with the intention of jotting down whatever pleased me. The plan took shape after the third scene.’’** His use of an episodic, non-Artistotelian structure was not, however, merely a matter of chance or convenience. It conformed fully to his vision

of an atomized social reality. Dramatic structure had to be

90 + CARNIVALESQUE MODERNISM

dissolved because society was fragmented. The separation between the generations, between the sexes, between public morals and personal inclinations, had progressed to the extent that the direct confrontations and inexorable chain of events upon which classical tragedy had been based were no longer conceivable. There is no scene in the play where the

younger and older generations clash as equals. The only scene where a direct confrontation begins to occur is the teachers’ conference, but Melchior’s protests against their inquisition are immediately stifled (act 3, scene 1). Significantly, Melchior and his father—strong personalities who propound individual freedom and social conformity respectively—never confront each other in the play. Most scenes between parents and children are nondialogues between representatives of totally different worlds of experience (Frau Gabor with Melchoir and Moritz, or Frau Bergmann with Wendla). The isolation of individuals implicit in this view of society necessitates the episodic structure of the play. The mosaic of monologues and short scenes, many of which are peripheral to the main plot, provides the spectator with an

impressionistic view of childhood that he must piece together empathetically. The dissolution of plot, like the disintegration of language, requires the spectator to engage in active mental and emotional participation and thus stimulates his personal involvement in the issues at hand.*? Spring Awakening was not just a social drama about misguided adolescents, inhumane teachers, hypocritical parents,

and the misuse of the classical tradition; it posed very basic , questions about genre, dramatic structure, and the ability of language to convey meaning. It is important to note that this incipiently modernist approach to art and language divorced Wedekind not only from official classicism but from naturalism as well. He explicitly noted that Spring Awakening was a consciously anti-naturalist work.** He had never had much love for naturalism. In May 1886, during his student days in Munich, he wrote a relative: “I’ve had the honor of becoming acquainted with one of the coryphaei of this perverted-

poetry-school [Lasterdichterschule|, namely, Herr Dr.

Sexuality and Satire + 91 Konrad [sic], a most angry Zolaist.”*’ Wedekind’s hostility to naturalism was exacerbated when Gerhart Hauptmann,

who had befriended him in Zurich, published Das Friedensfest: Eine kFamtlienkatastrophe (Celebration of Peace: A Family Catastrophe; 1890), whose central characters are transparently modeled after Wedekind and his father. By

| portraying the domestic life of a man who, like Friedrich Wedekind, “began on the barricades in 1848 and ended as a

lonely hypochondriac,” Hauptmann hoped to depict the degeneration of bourgeois radicals into an apolitical, socially

isolated, and atomized group.*° Wedekind replied with Kinder und Narren (Children and Fools; 1891), a comedy that depicted Hauptmann as a writer whose naturalist “radicalism” was a mere literary pose divorced from social reality,

and whose influence was as negligible as that of the aging Forty-Eighters. This assessment of the inefficacy of the naturalist movement kept Wedekind from participating in the Modern Life Society, even though he befriended its more prominent members.” In general, Wedekind shared the naturalists’ concern with the oppressive character of social institutions, but (like Panizza) he believed that the superficially realistic reproduction

of milieu, gesture, and language did nothing to change the status quo. Instead, he sought to evoke and encourage pre-

cisely those inner emotions which were prevented from sur- , facing in bourgeois society. In Kinder und Narren he had attacked Hauptmann for neglecting humanity’s vital essence: “Because you don’t know life, you drained yourself to | the last drop of blood and fell victim to realism ... Realism has made you forget man.’®* Wedekind tried to evoke “life”

and the experiential dimensions of man in Spring Awakening. By creating an episodic and panoramic depiction of ado-

lescence, he hoped to give his public an impressionistic sensation of the experience of youth; by putting suggestive and expressive fragments of verbal imagery into the mouths of children, he hoped to draw an empathetic response from his audience. Impressionistic evocation of emotions was the positive counterpart to the social criticism embodied in the

92 + CARNIVALESQUE MODERNISM

carnivalesque and satirical dimensions of the play. The antinaturalist impetus and evocative imagery of Spring Awakening culminated in the final, fantastic scene, where Melchior, the headless Moritz, and the mysterious yet eminently bourgeois “Masked Gentleman” engage in a conversation that jumps from philosophic aphorisms to grotesque jokes to _ prosaic banter (see figure 2). This final scene of Spring Awakening is not only an example of the play’s stylistic radicalism; it also, inadvertently, embodies the problems inherent in the carnivalesque and satirical mode that Wedekind favored. There is, after all, much debate over the “radical” or “conservative” nature of carni-_ val: is it a vehicle for critical reflection and change or merely a safety valve, an instrument that helps define and defuse tensions in the status quo?” The play’s resolution, or lack

thereof, in the final scene underscores that issue. Faust again serves as a model for Wedekind, inasmuch as the Masked

re ——lh— Oe list

— srr rlrrr—iCOSS ll iwi

Tne re a

ee Oe Ee ee 2+ Wedekind, Spring Awakening, final scene, with Wedekind as the

Masked Gentleman.

Sexuality and Satire - 93 Gentleman’s offer, which snatches Melchior from the temptation of suicide, has a clearly Mephistophelian ring: “T’ll open up the world for you ... I'll lead you among men. [’ll

give you the opportunity to broaden your horizons in the most marvelous manner. I will make you acquainted with everything interesting in the world, without exception.” The Masked Gentleman’s offer stands in direct contrast to the principle of Herr Gabor, who states that his son should learn “what is good rather than what is interesting, and should act according to the /aw, rather than according to his natural disposition.” Instead of seeing the good and the interesting, law and nature, as mutually exclusive opposites, the Masked Gentleman offers a more subtle formula which admits the validity and reality of both standpoints: “I understand morality to be the real product of two imaginary quantities. These imaginary quantities are obligation and volition [Sollen and Wollen]. The result is called morality, and its reality cannot be denied.” The “moral” of Spring Awakening is summarized in this aphoristic statement,”' and may be paraphrased as follows: Morality, the precepts by which an individual determines his or her life, is a dynamic product of social expectations and personal inclinations. Failure to compromise between these two leads to disaster, as the play dramatizes. On the one hand, free pursuit of one’s emotions can lead to social retribution, as Melchior, Wendla, and others discover. On the other hand, those who live rigidly according to the letter of social expectations—such as the teachers, Herr Gabor, and, in the final analysis, even Frau Gabor and Frau Bergmann—deny their human inclinations to the extent that

they destroy their own offspring. In order to preserve one’s ; sanity and humanity, Wedekind argued that the individual

must perpetually balance the contradictory dictates of obli- , gation and volition. In the modern world, marked by social change and the revaluation of values, the classical notion of the harmonious man who enjoys stable personal and social

integration must give way to a dynamic balancing of inner | drives and communal needs.” This dynamism can best be maintained, according to Wedekind, by consciously loos-

94 + CARNIVALESQUE MODERNISM

ening the rigid dichotomies of thought and perception that characterize conventional morality and by bringing traditionally polar opposites into creative interplay: mind and body, spirituality and sexuality, are to be seen not as con-

| flicting poles but as complementary pairs that exist in every human being. Realization of this fact can only be achieved through a radical critique of language—of words, syntax,

| conventional logic, and systems of thought. Such a critique must be based upon deliberate attempts to bypass conventional categories and to look instead at the changing reality embodied in oneself and others; one must constantly

scrutinize one’s own desires as well as society’s expectations.

Spring Awakening provides two (not wholly positive) examples of a conscious balance between personal inclination and social expectation. One possible model is provided in the penultimate scene of the play, in the homosexual encounter between Hianschen Rilow and Ernst Robel. In typically Wedekindian fashion, the combination of idyllic atmosphere (vineyard, setting sun, ringing church bells)

and homosexuality is intended both to shock the middleclass audience and to unmask its hypocrisy. After all, homosexuality is a rather logical outcome of a social system that

segregates the sexes during youth. Moreover, as already noted, it may be considered an emulation of the classical — - Greeks, normally the bane of schoolboys’ existence.” In fact, neither Hanschen nor Ernst consider their homosexuality a defiantly anti-bourgeois proclivity. Both plan to integrate themselves fully into the middle classes; Ernst even

| dreams of becoming a “reverend pastor.’’ Whereas Melchior, the fathers, and the teachers take principled stands either for or against obligation, Hanschen and Ernst see through the

sham facade of bourgeois morality. After all, it was Hanschen who had abducted the nude from his father’s desk, so he is unwilling to take moral lectures from the elder generation too seriously: “Virtue is becoming, but it must be worn by impressive personalities.””* He has every intent of

keeping up an outward facade of bourgeois respectability,

Sexuality and Satire + 95 yet will live his private life according to his own inclinations.

Even if he succeeds in remaining true to himself in certain ways, his life-style will not challenge the structure of bourgeois society, and his mode of existence will be hypocritcal.

Similar problems mark the life of Ilse, a secondary charac-

ter who integrates herself as a model and mistress into the artistic boheme. Her seemingly uninhibited existence allows her to lead a life of sexual freedom, thus making her the erotically most vital child in the play: many commentators have

noted that Ilse is the Masked Gentleman’s alter ego, inasmuch as both are indirectly equated with “life.””’ Nevertheless, it is important to note that the ostensibly anti-bourgeois boheme has a symbiotic relationship with bourgeois society.

After all, the paintings and photographs for which Ilse models (as Ariadne, Leda, Ganymede, and so on) are the very type of pictures that end up in the secret drawer of Herr Rilow’s desk. Wedekind contends, 1n essence, that selfprostit ution—compromising with bourgeois society in some

form or other—is unavoidable: Ilse earns her money as a model and mistress of the artists, while the artists earn money by creating sexually suggestive pictures for bourgeois consumption. Ironically, it is the hypocritical closet voyeurism of the repressed bourgeoisie that provides the financial base for the anti-bourgeois vie de bohéme. Ilse seems

untroubled by this compromise, and she claims that she is happiest among her artistic friends. Structurally, though, she helps diffuse the tensions (and thus maintain the foun-

dations) of bourgeois society. |

On the surface, the last act of Spring Awakening leaves the audience with a dynamic image of social integration: it stresses the inevitability of compromising with bourgeois society as well as the rather wide possibilities for self-development open to those who treat social conventions as means

rather than ends. The internal evidence of the play itself suggests, however, that this concept, like carnival, helps conserve social structures. Although Wedekind hoped for a

general revaluation of bourgeois values, he believed that

96 * CARNIVALESQUE MODERNISM

| change must begin with the individual; but since he acknowledged that individuals would have to compromise

| with bourgeois society for the foreseeable future, he left the basic structures of bourgeois society intact. Wedekind himself became increasingly aware of the conservative implications of his views, and he soon had to revise the optimistic vision which concluded Spring Awakening. His early works

suggested that the greatest amount of individual freedom

was to be found within the various sub- and countercultures that existed on the fringes of bourgeois society: in the artistic boheme (Spring Awakening), in the circus (Der Liebestrank; 1891), and in brothels (Das Sonnenspektrum;

fragment, ca. 1894). As we shall see in the next chapter, | however, his frequent contacts with proletarianized artists, prostitutes, and circus performers during his impoverished years in Paris taught him the misery of such styles of life. Thus already in the Lulu plays (first version, 1895), his pre-

vious forms of self-expression were negated: the painter Schwarz suffers from his financial subservience to his bourgeois patrons; the circus performer Rodrigo Quast is a boor-

ish exploiter of Lulu; and Lulu herself finds the role of artist’s model degrading, and later experiences prostitution as a tormenting and ultimately murderous profession. Although Wedekind never equaled the radicalism of Panizza in thought or deed, his growing perception that bourgeois society left little room for individual spontaneity, along with his increasing battles with the censors, induced him to take a more contestatory stance after the century turned.

The carnivalesque plays of Panizza and Wedekind displayed, like carnival itself, exuberant imagination, radical satirical inversions, and an ambiguous promise of social reform. Fundamentally, Wedekind and Panizza advocated a freeing of personal fantasy—the type of fantasy that invigorated the daily life of the individual and resulted in the startling artistic novelty of works like The Council of Love and Spring Awakening. Such mental and artistic liberation | required a destruction of cultural constraints, which had be-

Sexuality and Satire + 97 come embodied in the ascetic Catholicism and official classi-

cism of nineteenth-century Bavaria. Since the repression of ‘sexuality was a goal of both the Church and the Gymnasium, Panizza and Wedekind, inspired by popular culture and “aesthetic paganism,’’ asserted the rights of the body along with those of the mind. The eroticization of the Holy Family and the classical tradition was one of their primary carnivalesque techniques. Moreover, their admixture of spiritual and bodily values, their fusion of sacred and profane images, was complemented by a chaotic juxtaposition of theatrical genres. Passion plays, boudoir farce, historical drama,

| and vaudeville are fused in The Council of Love; Spring Awakening shows the fragmentation of drama into episodic sequernices ranging from conversational realism to supernatu-

ral symbolism, from grotesque caricature to evocatively lyrical impressionism. Although the first major dramas of Wedekind and Panizza display striking similarities, the influence of the two authors upon their contemporaries ultimately lay in different areas. Not surprisingly, because Panizza was more overtly politi-

cal, he was remembered more for his aggressive activism than for his innovative playwriting. Implicit in his political stance was an anarchistic call for permanent revolution, or at least for a perpetual criticism of prevailing values and insti-

tutions. [his personal imperative to challenge all strictures on thought and action became a fundamental precept of certain sectors of the German avant-garde in the twentieth century. Politically, it proved to be a mixed blessing. At best it induced some writers and artists (like Erich Mithsam) to attack the injustices of the Wilhelmine, Weimar, and Nazi states——at the risk of their freedom and, ultimately, of their

lives. However, such radical individualism could just as well | result in a satirical stance that made light of everything without being able to find a basis for positive construction.

As we shall see, the cabaret movement, which Panizza helped call into being, suffered from this dilemma. Significantly, Panizza’s greatest admirer in the pre-Nazi era was

the brilliant satirist of Weimar society, Kurt Tucholsky,

98 - CARNIVALESQUE MODERNISM

who lauded the author of The Council of Love as “the most

| impudent and audacious, the most witty and revolutionary prophet of his country:””° However, Tucholsky shared with Panizza the political impotence of the nondoctrinaire, nonparty left. Suspicious of all forms of organization, hence un-

willing to ally themselves with any larger movement, the | “free floating’ German satirists could arouse indignation over alleged political absurdities, but they could not effect any positive change in the legal and political structure of the

nation. |

While Panizza provided engagé German literati with a political model of aggressive (albeit ultimately Sisyphean) an-

archism, Wedekind’s impact was primarily artistic. His combination of empathetic impressionism and caustic satire took the Berlin theater public by storm following Max Rein-

hardt’s premiere of a heavily censored version of Spring Awakening in November 1906. The play held the stage in the Prussian capital for over a year (with two hundred performances in fifteen months), and new productions prolif-

erated throughout Central Europe. Spring Awakening _ inspired a series of outstanding early expressionist “youthdramas” that were composed between 1910 and 1918 (Rein-

hard Sorge’s Der Bettler, Arnolt Bronnen’s Vatermord, Walter Hasenclever’s Der Sohn and Menschen, and Hanns Johst’s Der junge Mensch). On the most superficial level the young expressionists were especially fond of paraphrasing the grotesque graveyard scene that concluded Wedekind’s

play: at the beginning of Hasenclever’s Menschen a dead man rises from his grave to receive his severed head in a sack

from his murderer; at the end of Johst’s Der junge Mensch the deceased hero witnesses his own funeral while sitting

on a graveyard wall, then leaps forth into the audience. More fundamentally, Wedekind’s expressive monologues, fantastic images, and breakdown of conventional language contributed to the visual and verbal revolution of the expressionists.”’

Whereas Spring Awakening eventually became the most-

performed “modernist”? German drama of the twentieth

Sexuality and Satire -° 99

century, The Council of Love has only recently become known to a larger public through the medium of film.”” Nevertheless, both works played important roles in defining and directing the modernist movement in Germany. Wedekind’s

play inaugurated an important current of expressionist dramas of adolescence; Panizza’s drama initiated a contestatory stance that was to become increasingly pronounced in the German avant-garde. Above all, both authors pushed satirical and carnivalesque techniques to new extremes and — freed German drama from its mooring of nineteenth-century realism. A new era of theatrical experimentation was born.

Ag CHAPTER THREE Analytic Modernism:

| . Art and Mammon

‘ | in Wedekind’s Drama

-_ mw FRANK WEDEKIND ONCE SAID OF Spring Awakening: “I resisted terminating the play among schoolchildren, without the prospect of life among adults. There-

fore I introduced the Masked Gentleman into the final

scene.” The “life among adults” to which the Masked Gentleman introduced Melchior became the subject of Wedekind’s subsequent plays. He dramatized a bourgeois world so completely dominated by commerce that whatever humane values one could salvage past puberty were invariably crushed by the materialistic concerns of adult life. Wedekind acquired this new perspective from his personal travails in

the “cultural proletariat” and his observation of the Deut- | sches Theater affair in Munich in 1896. Wedekind matched this change of theme with a radical alteration of his dramatic technique. Although many aspects of Spring Awakening—tits satirical style, depiction of noncommunication, and humor interspersed with horror—reap_ peared in his later works, four major aspects of the play—its episodic structure, fantastic imagery, adolescent theme, and

groping for emotional expressivity—-were not repeated. Soon after completing Spring Awakening, Wedekind came to the painful conclusion that all attempts to arouse empathetic responses from an audience were futile, inasmuch as art

| could never bridge the estrangement of man from man. In striking contrast to Spring Awakening, which sought to evoke the inner troubles of its protagonists, the Lulu plays | argued that art could never capture the essence of a person, nor could it project humanity’s vital, sensual, and emotional

Art and Mammon in Wedekind’s Drama -: 101

core. By the time Wedekind composed The Marquis of Keith, he had developed an abstractly structured style of drama in which the characters were unidimensional ciphers devoid of psychological depth. The episodic, evocative, and expressive dimensions of his drama of adolescent turmoil gave way to a tightly structured, analytic, and anti-psycho-

| logical style that sought to explore the dynamics of bourgeois society without attempting to uncover the stifled humanity in the depths of bourgeois man. Ultimately plays like Earth Spirit, Pandora’s Box, and The Marquis of Keith inaugurated a current of anti-capitalist drama that proved to

be one of the most significant trends in twentieth-century |

German theater.

and Eros |

‘Earth Spirit and Pandora’s Box: The Marketing of Art Wedekind was by no means the first German author to experience the effects of commercialization of the arts. The rise of a Central Furopean market for literature dated back to the

eighteenth century, where the growth of a middle-class reading public enabled some authors to support themselves from the sale of their writings. Initially middle-class writers

| welcomed this expanding bourgeois market as a means of breaking the chains of aristocratic and princely patronage; but eventually they discovered that the “free” market im- » posed equally stringent restraints upon authorship. By the end of the century a relative surplus of writers with respect to the reading public had created a “literary proletariat” dependent upon publishers for financial existence. In turn, publishers recognized that marketability was determined by public taste. Hence they sponsored the sentimental or sensational Trivialliteratur that catered to bourgeois readers. This situation posed a dilemma for writers who saw their profession as a means of educating and enlightening. rather than merely distracting and entertaining, the middle classes. Even such recognized literary giants as Lessing, Goethe, and

102 + ANALYTIC MODERNISM , Schiller had difficulty balancing their educational ideals with market demands. Schiller lamented: ‘To satisfy the se-

vere requirements of art and, at the same time, toearnevena | minimal subsistence through diligent writing—this is impossible in our German literary world.” He concluded: ‘The only relationship to the public that one cannot regret is war.” This dilemma persisted and intensified over the course of the nineteenth century. The rapid growth of the number of

publishing houses, journals, and theaters during the Griinderzeit, the heady years after Germany’s unification, encouraged the oversized ranks of writers, artists, and actors to expand even more. In 1869 the laissez-faire Trade Laws of the North German Confederation removed legal restrictions

on the formation of commercial theaters, whose number had been limited to prevent competition with the statesponsored court theaters. This proclamation of cultural free trade, as well as the economic boom that followed the victo-

rious outcome of the Franco-Prussian war, enabled numerous entrepreneurs to establish commercial theaters and vaudevilles during the first two years of the Reich. Although many of these ventures did not survive the crash of 1873, the number of theaters swelled continuously. By 1896 six hun-

dred theaters (not including vaudevilles) could be counted

in Germany, thrice the number in 1870.’ The vast majority were commercial enterprises that competed against each other for the right to stage successful works, and the financial rewards for the author of a popular play were considerable. Playwrights usually received 5 to 10 percent of box

| office receipts, so a moderately successful play could easily earn its author over ten thousand marks, while hits might re-

alize six-digit incomes. This prospect of instant wealth induced many—too many—to try their hands at writing plays.

In 1893 the cultural journal Der Kunstwart reported that whereas 4000 original plays were submitted to German the-

aters annually, only 120 of them (that is, 3 percent) were performed during the 1890-1891 season." Consequently, a few wealthy playwrights stood apart from a mass of impov-

erished writers. | |

| Art and Mammon in Wedekind’s Drama «+ 103 In this highly competitive situation, dramatists desiring an audience had to tailor their output to a public that sought, in the words of a Social Democratic critic, “enjoyment that.

demands no exertion and that satisfies sexual instincts.” The most successful plays among bourgeois audiences 1n the latter half of the nineteenth century were French salon plays and their German imitations. These comedies of manners or

boudoir farces invariably depicted the life of the upper _ bourgeoisie and dealt with sexual themes. Although adultery was the most common subject, the endings were almost

always happy and served to uphold traditional familial values. By packaging a modicum of sexual titillation in a

ences. |

- conservative moral framework, authors of such plays simul-

taneously enticed and reassured their middle-class audiThe commercial reality of middle-class theater was culturally and socially unsettling for the generation of writers that came of age in the 1880s. The Gymnasia had taught - them that art was the highest accomplishment of man and that drama was the supreme form of art. However, those young men who sought to become playwrights discovered soon after graduation that there was little public demand for

idealist theater. ‘Tragedies and poetry were fine for the class- | room, but Detlev von Liliencron, a founding member of the - Modern Life Society, was told by his publisher: “Under no circumstances tragedies and poems .. . There is no money to

| be had in dramas and poems, because they are unmarketable goods.’ Writers such as Karl Bleibtreu, a coeditor of Die Gesellschaft, were forced to conclude: “In every other profession ... the best worker is paid the most. In literature, just the opposite: bad and worthless work 1s that much more

marketable—significant and principled work is that much more unsellable.’”’

For young writers the cultural shock of seeing youthful | ideals destroyed by market realities was compounded by the

| social trauma of déclassement. Most writers came from wellto-do, albeit not wealthy, bourgeois families. Without inde-

pendent incomes, they were forced to earn their keep through journalistic activities (especially criticism), trans- —

104 - ANALYTIC MODERNISM

lating, and acting, all of which paid low wages to unknown names, at most one or two thousand marks annually. This “‘proletarianization” (the word was common at the time)

spawned a social ambivalence among younger writers, a longing for bourgeois stability as well as a hatred of the “philistine” commercial middle classes. Criticism of bourgeois crassness and cultural commercialism was already a major theme of Munich’s naturalist playwrights. The clash between cultural ideals and commercial realities turned modernism into an anti-bourgeois bourgeois movement. Not surprisingly, Frank Wedekind was especially sensitive to this dilemma. In 1886, when he decided to terminate his study of law and devote himself completely to writing,

| he was not completely oblivious to the travails that he might be forced to endure. In an essay composed during his last year in Gymnasium he had described an imaginary dialogue between a poet and a banker. The moral of the discussion 1s that the banker may earn more money, but the poet obtains cultural fulfillment to compensate for his poverty.® This trite juxtaposition of affluent philistinism and impoverished aes-

theticism was elaborated in Wedekind’s first full-length play, written in 1886. Der Schnellmaler: Kunst und Mammon , (Painting on Demand: Art and Mammon) is a rather crude farce about a poor and unsuccessful painter who wants to marry the daughter of an industrialist, yet does not have the means to support her. He nearly abandons “art” in favor of ‘“mammon”—the pursuit of a solid business career—until

| the intendant of a royal art gallery purchases his previously unrecognized masterpiece. This deus ex machina, signifi- __ cantly of royal rather than bourgeois origin, allows the painter to combine artistic activity, financial success, and marriage. Twenty years were to pass before Wedekind himself could attain these three goals. The young Wedekind realized that a literary career would

initially condemn him to poverty, but he believed that cul- | tural stimulation would compensate for material want. This | attitude did not prepare him for the full misery of the liter-

ary proletariat into which he was soon projected. Left to

Art and Mammon in Wedekind’s Drama + 105

fend for himself after his father renounced him in October | 1886, Wedekind soon found a job in Zurich in the advertis-

ing division of the newly founded Maggi soup and spice company. [he advertising business introduced him to the use of artistic forms for commercial ends. He was paid by the line for composing jingles and short stories in praise of | instant soups and bouillon cubes. Low pay, long hours, and abhorrence of “tailoring philanthropic jackets for profitmak-

ing” led him to quit the position and turn to free-lance | writing. Here too he met with discouragement. No theater would accept Der Schnellmaler, and the earnings from a few

feuilleton articles published in the Neue Zuiricher Zeitung were insufficient to support him. The aspiring artist then bowed to mammon: he begged forgiveness in a groveling letter to his father in September 1887.'° The two were reconciled, and Wedekind resumed his legal studies. Only the modest inheritance left him at his father’s death in 1888 per-

mitted him to return to Munich and to devote his time to writing Spring Awakening. Indeed the audacity of that play, which had no prospects of passing theater censorship,

can be explained in part by the fact that the author did not © feel financially compelled to produce a stageable work.

In December 1891 Wedekind moved from Munich to Paris, where he stayed until 1895. His experiences during

these years sharpened his analytic and artistic powers to the point where he could compose the Lulu plays, Earth Spirit and Pandora’s Box. In Paris, Wedekind came to see clearly

the power of money to corrupt both art and sexuality. At first he was able to support himself with his inheritance, but those funds dried up by the end of 1893. Thereafter he expe-

rienced once again the impoverishment of his years in Zurich. He was eventually saved from destitution by Willy

| Grétor, an art dealer who not only traded but also forged Great Masters.'' Taking pity on the impoverished writer, Grétor hired Wedekind as a personal secretary, and thereby persuaded the desperate author that compassion was sooner to be found among criminals than among respected burgh-

ers. (he alliance with Grétor also taught him that in the

106 * ANALYTIC MODERNISM

market for cultural products success was based more upon business acumen than upon artistic talent. While Wedekind formed these opinions of cultural commercialism by day, at night he learned about the market for sex. His contacts with Parisian prostitutes, documented in detail in his notebooks

of those years, showed him the degree to which human bodies and emotions could be objectified by a market relationship.'* The commercial corruption of art and sex that Wedekind observed in his Parisian years became the subject of his Lulu plays. Earth Spirit (first version, 1895) is Wedekind’s first detailed analysis of the interaction of spirit, sex, art, and money

in modern bourgeois society.’’ It dramatizes the manner in | which man’s intellect, geared toward the acquisition of capi-

tal, uses commercialized art as a means of containing, exploiting, and suppressing the sensual. Like Spring Awak- _ ening, Earth Spirit presents a confrontation of cold ratio-

nalism and human emotions, which are embodied

respectively in two major figures, Schon and Lulu. The title , of the play refers to the Earth Spirit in Goethe’s Faust, the life-force that Faust conjures up but cannot capture because his intellect cannot come to grips with vital and sensuous nature. Lulu is Wedekind’s Earth Spirit, and like that of Goethe, she remains incomprehensible to the men that sur-

round her. She is a street orphan whose background is shrouded in mystery; she does not even know her real name. | It is implied that she escaped the socialization processes of family, school, and church to which the children of Spring Awakening were subjected. This transcendence of social determination allows her to embody an immediacy of emotion (primarily erotic) that is untainted by bourgeois prejudices. She wants to be treated as an individual, a unique character free from definition by bourgeois norms. However, all men view her according to their own standards, and they use art as a means of fashioning her to fit their needs. Before the opening of the play Lulu had been taken off the streets and adopted by the newspaper magnate, Dr. Schon,

, who made her his mistress. Despite his intense physical at-

Art and Mammon in Wedekind’s Drama + 107

traction to Lulu, Schén hopes to wed a wealthy woman of more respectable background, so he has married his protégée off to Dr. Goll, a rich but impotent physician. The opening of the play, set in the atelier of Schwarz, a painter, immediately introduces the problem of the function and marketing of art. Goll seeks to compensate for his inability to appropri-

ate Lulu physically by turning her into a voyeuristically consumable artifact. With this goal in mind, he has commissioned Schwarz to paint a sexually suggestive portrait of her so that he can “savor” her, “at least in spirit.”” The painter

hired to undertake this task is a proletarianized artist who lives “from palette to mouth.”'* Schwarz’s financial dependence on commissions makes him artistically subservient to Goll, who dictates every brushstroke “apodictically, reproachfully, as to a day-laborer.”’” The resulting portrait of Lulu is neither an artistic expression of her nature nor a concretization of Schwarz’s personal impressions; rather, it is a product of Goll’s desire to turn her into a French post-

card, of the type that might end up in the hands of

Hanschen Rilow, the perverted adolescent connoisseur in Spring Awakening. In short, art acquires a distancing and dehumanizing function insofar as it becomes a substitute for — Goll’s inability to establish a normal sexual relationship with

his wife. |

In the second act, after Goll’s death, art once again acts as a barrier between Lulu and her new husband, Schwarz, who

is unable to see her as anything but an exquisite painter’s model. Although Lulu’s inheritance has made Schwarz a rich man, his previous proletarianized dependence upon the _ artistic dictates of his commissioners has prevented him from developing his own judgment of human character. He repeatedly paints Lulu’s portrait, which proves highly marketable, yet he sees her only as “Wezb,” as woman in the abstract, as an aesthetic cliché. Lulu complains: “I am nothing but Woman and only Woman to him... He knows no differ-

ences.”’° Schwarz cannot transcend a painter-model relationship to Lulu because that 1s the only form of human interaction that his economic situation has allowed him to

108 - ANALYTIC MODERNISM . | | develop. His inability to come to terms with Lulu’s true personality eventually drives him to suicide. In the next act the play proceeds to the mass marketing of the arts. Frustrated by two unsuccessful attempts to dispose

of Lulu through marriage, Schon puts her up for public auc- |

| tion. He sets her on a career as a dancer in the hope that ~ someone in the audience will marry her, especially since her

vaudeville stints allow her to appear publicly in various states of undress. In the interim Sch6n view’s Lulu’s performances as a means of transforming the spectators’ lustful appetites into ringing coin. He tells Lulu: “Your indecency is

the reason that people weigh your every step in gold ... As long as you have an ounce of self-respect left, you aren’t yet a perfect dancer!”’’ Here again an art form serves as an ex-

cuse for voyeurism, but now an element of mass consumerism is added. By satisfying voyeuristic desires on a mass scale for profit, Lulu’s dancing becomes a mediator in the marketing of sex, one step removed from prostitution. Suitors predictably appear, but Lulu rejects them and finally persuades Schon to marry her after all. However, the marriage is doomed to failure because the dichotomy of rationality and emotion proves unbridgeable. In Wedekind’s

words, Schon is a “brutal predatory intelligence,”’® who, in , the process of seeking to repress his sexuality and to subject Lulu to calculated control, reveals “the ludicrous overestimation of self, the ineffectual waste of energy, in short: the

Don-Quixotery of human consciousness.”’” Lulu is attracted to Sch6n’s extreme vitality, which could be turned against the conventions of bourgeois existence. Sch6n is strongly attracted to Lulu in return, but he fears precisely what she de-

sires, that any deep emotional involvement would lead toa destruction of his rational bourgeois existence. Unlike his predecessors, Schon cannot temper his sexuality through the mediation of art, because he stands above all aesthetic illusions. As a newspaper magnate, he is accustomed to mani-

pulating art for profit. Through well-timed reviews he has |

| directed the public’s attention to Schwarz’s paintings and Lulu’s dancing: “He doesn’t believe in art. He only believes

Art and Mammon in Wedekind’s Drama - 109

in newspapers,” complains Lulu. Since every artist is a cipher, a “Rechenexempel” to him, he sees art as a mere com-

modity, rather than as an aesthetic illusion capable of mediating and attenuating sexuality.“” Schon is thus forced

to confront openly the struggle between his instrumental rationality and his human emotions. His inability to bridge this dichotomy drives him to insanity and a fatal confrontation with Lulu. In the ensuing play, Pandora’s Box (published 1902), all aesthetic mediations are discarded as Lulu is

forced to market herself directly as a sexual commodity. After an interlude as a high-class prostitute in Paris, she ends her life as a destitute London streetwalker murdered by Jack the Ripper. The first scene of Earth Spirit shows Schwarz marketing his artistic abilities; the last scene of Pandora’s Box depicts Lulu selling her sexual attributes. The cycle begins with the commercialization of art and ends with the commercializa-

tion of sex; the denigration of the spirit and the body through the market becomes the overarching theme. Step by step commercialized art is shown to be equivalent to a pros-

tituted body. The “aesthetic pagan” authors to whom the young Wedekind was so attracted had employed artistic forms to advocate the incorporation of sensuality and sexuality into the life of the individual. In contrast, the Lulu plays show that because sexuality is considered a threat to rational bourgeois behavior in the modern world, art is used instead as a means of harnessing and attenuating emotions. This be- _ comes possible to the extent that both sex and art are trans-

formed into marketable commodities. Sexuality becomes commercialized as either prostitution or marriage. With prostitution, payment is made for a relationship that is temporary and exclusively physical. Marriage has greater duration, yet it is essentially a means of capital accumulation; Schon loves Lulu, but he seeks to marry a woman who has “mehr Fond.” *' In those instances where an emotional involvement that is neither temporary prostitution nor loveless marriage threatens to develop, art becomes a means of atten-

uating sexuality. By placing art between themselves and

110 + ANALYTIC MODERNISM

Lulu, by treating her as a voyeuristically pleasurable artifact, men are able to avoid their own and Lulu’s sexuality. The bourgeois incapacity to sustain a sexual relationship mediated by neither money nor art is represented in the fate

~ of Schon. | |

To a great extent Wedekind blamed this perversion of art on its commercialization: painters, writers, dancers, impresarios, and other artists were financially beholden to the middle-class market that demanded sexually titillating (but not personally fulfilling) products. At a more fundamental level, though, Wedekind argued that art itself, whether or not in

commercialized form, could not be used to establish or express personal relationships in a nonrestrictive fashion. In

Spring Awakening he had experimented with expressive monologues to evoke a direct empathetic response from the audience; but by the time he wrote the Lulu plays, he had given up the belief that artistic forms could express emotions in any undistorted manner. Wedekind came to the conclusion that art always implies objectification, hence distance

and limitation; art is not only impersonal, but profoundly anti-personal. This fact is admitted by Schon’s son, Alwa, a writer who is enamoured of Lulu, yet who also desires to write a play about her. He tells her: ““There 1s a most intimate interaction between my sensuality and my artistic creativity. For example, with respect to you, I have the choice of either giving you artistic form, or loving you.””” As long as Lulu is married to Schén, Alwa composes a play about her; but as soon as his father dies and she becomes his lover, Alwa ceases writing. Wedekind’s recognition of the reifying forces of art posed

a major dilemma. If art is incapable of expressing genuine subjectivity, how can it maintain a “humanistic” function? If art distorts personality, are nonexploitative and nonre-

pressive cultural forms at all conceivable? Wedekind concluded that in order to remain libertarian, art must become socially analytic rather than subjectively evocative. Drama. could not express personality because that was beyond the

| power of all linguistic and artistic forms. It could, however,

Art and Mammon in Wedekind’s Drama + 111 portray what one might call “ideal types” of human motiva-

tion and interaction, basic personality structures that did not | exist in pure form in any one individual, yet which ac-

counted for the general contours of bourgeois social inter- , course. Whereas the major trends of European drama in the late nineteenth century sought to uncover inner motivations or to express subjective moods (see the later works of Ibsen, Strindberg, Halbe, and Hauptmann, as well as Spring Awak- _

| ening ), the Lulu plays mark the beginning of Wedekind’s | purposefully anti-psychological dramas. Most of his characters become ciphers devoid of psychological depth, superficial figures motivated by two goals: financial gain and sexual domination. Wedekind’s archetype of bourgeois man is an unstable synthesis of homo economicus, the abstract calculator, and homo eroticus, the irrationally passionate animal. Not all of Wedekind’s characters are caricatures. It is implied that Lulu, for example, is in some sense fully human, inasmuch as she acts according to an indecipherable multiplicity of personal desires and impulses. However, since Wedekind no longer believed that such a personality could

be expressed positively in a nondistorted fashion, he resorted to what might be called a negative characterization. He could not show what Lulu’s personality was, but he : could indicate what it was not. He systematically demonstrated that the conventional modes of characterizing indi-

viduals have nothing to do with the authentic human | subject. Lulu has no known parentage and no definable so-

cial class. She even lacks a proper name: her suitors variously call her Nellie, Eva, Mignon, and Lulu. Not only

is she a bureaucrat’s nightmare that lacks name, date, and place of birth, but she also refuses to take a stand on any religious or moral grounds:

Schwarz: Can you tell the truth?

Lulu: I don’t know.

Schwarz: Do you believe in a creator?

Lulu: I don’t know.

Schwarz: Can you swear by anything? |

112 + ANALYTIC MODERNISM | | Lulu: I don’t know...

Lulu: I don’t know. | . Lulu: I don’t know. . | Schwarz: What do you believe? Schwarz: Do you have a soul?

Schwarz: Have you ever loved anyone?

Lulu: I don’t know. | Schwarz: She doesn’t know.

Lulu: I don’t know.’? ,

This litany of negativity underscores the fact that Lulu retains for herself a liminal position within bourgeois society. She is forced to interact with others, but she refuses to be tagged with any conventional means of characterization (name, descent, class, beliefs). Sch6n sums up the situation when he says of her: “You can’t possibly count on applying

bourgeois standards.”** |

Since Lulu’s personality refuses characterization by bourgeois norms, it also rejects representation by bourgeois authors like Frank Wedekind. As a social being, as a victim of

her middle-class environment, she can be integrated into drama; but as a human individual whose personality resists

objectification, she rejects the artistic forms that Wedekind | might have imposed on her as much as she refuses to be lim-

ited by the artistic roles assigned to her by Goll, Schwarz, Schon, and Alwa. In the play Lulu is told: “You would make a bad actress.” She herself insists: “I was not created for the stage.” In Sch6n’s words, she 1s “‘a picture before which art _ despairs.””’ Thus, Wedekind consciously toyed with a paradox: he presented Lulu on stage with the purpose of demon-

strating that he could not do so in any subjectively meaningful manner. Her enigmatic personality exists beyond the confines of art. Art can never be life; art must al-

ways be artificial. | Wedekind drove home this paradox at the very beginning

of Earth Spirit. The play opens with a prologue spoken by an animal tamer before a circus tent that represents the stage on which the play will transpire. To the sound of cymbals,

Art and Mammon in Wedekind’s Drama + 113

drums, and pistol shots, the tamer invites the audience to “step right up to the menagerie!’”*° Like the Director in the prologue to Goethe’s Faust, he complains that the public has been drawn to other attractions: ‘““The times are bad! The

ladies and gentlemen who used to crowd around my cage now honor farces, [bsen, opera, and drama with their esteemed presence.”’ [he tamer proceeds to complain about actors, the public, and Gerhart Hauptmann in particular. He then claims that he will present the audience with the true menagerie of bourgeois society and proceeds to introduce the characters of the play in the shape of animals: Sch6n as tiger, Goll as bear, Alwa as ape, Schwarz as camel, and Lulu

as that mythically ambiguous beast, the snake. This is the first and last time that any attempt is made to characterize the personalities of these figures in allegorical terms, as well

as to suggest that all of them possess vital and animalistic cores. In the course of the play, the animals that lie at the center of human nature remain obscured by the social trappings of the bourgeoisie and the objectifying conventions of art. This dilemma 1s highlighted by the animal tamer’s promise to show the audience, “soulless creation ... tamed by human genius.” In effect, he tells the public that he will present the true human beast (“the true animal, the wild, beautiful animal’), yet he qualifies (and hence negates) this promise by admitting that such animals will be shown in tamed (gebdndigt) form. The true, untamed beast can be neither conceived nor represented without recourse to social

and artistic conventions, hence falsification. |

The prologue to Earth Spirit stresses the limits of art as well as the unavoidably artificial nature of the play. By addressing the audience directly and by referring to the ensu-

ing performance, the animal tamer emphasizes that the drama is not an illusionistic slice of life seeking the public’s empathetic involvement but a conscious construct that is to be observed at an emotional distance. Throughout the play | the audience is reminded of the artificiality of the presentation; indeed, Wedekind developed many devices that would later constitute Brecht’s techniques of audience-estrange-

114 + ANALYTIC MODERNISM | ment. Like Panizza, Wedekind “misused” dramatic genres in

| order to ensure that the audience would keep a proper emotional distance. Ostensibly tragic events, like Goll’s heart at-

tack, Schwarz’s suicide, and the shooting of Scho6n, are | presented in a farcical manner. (Significantly, Lulu’s mur-

der by Jack the Ripper is properly horrifying—the only genuine person in the play cannot die as a caricature). A further illusion-destroying device is the reference to the play —

itself within the play. In the third act of Earth Spirit Alwa muses about Lulu: “Of course one could write an interesting

play about her ... Act One: Goll. Already fishy! ... Act Two: Walter Schwarz. Even more improbable!... Act Three? Can it go on like this?” It can, and it does. At the beginning of Pandora’s Box Alwa refers to “my Earth Spirit”

and says (at a time when Lulu 1s still imprisoned for the murder of Schon): “I have asked myself for the past week

| whether somebody who has been condemned to jail could

ever serve as the central character in a modern drama.””’ The rest of the play constitutes an afhirmative response to the query. In his Lulu plays Wedekind introduced two new and significant themes: the commercialization of art and eros, and the inability of art to be subjectively expressive in any nondistorting fashion. His shift of focus from subjective expres-

sion to social analysis, from individual experience to the dynamics of society, had been inspired by his own maturation. In Spring Awakening Wedekind had come to terms

with his adolescence and with the misuse of the German |

classical tradition. Thereafter he needed to come to grips _ with his travails as an adult. His own impoverishment and his contacts with the Parisian demimonde of prostitutes and confidence men had revealed the importance of mammon in all aspects of modern life. This shift of focus from classicism to commercialism is documented 1n the successive drafts of

Earth Spirit. In the earliest version (1892) Schon 1s described as a “Paul Heyse,” a writer of historical plays.”* In subsequent versions, where cultural commercialization re-

_ places epigonal classicism as the center of concern, he is

Art and Mammon in Wedekina’s Drama + 115

transformed into a speculator in journalistic and artistic markets. Wedekind matched this change of thematic emphasis with a transformation of dramatic technique: his _ plays became analytic and objectifying tools that sought to pry open and lay bare the mechanisms of modern commercial society. This new perception of society and novel conception of theater would soon be fortified by the Deutsches Theater affair, which he witnessed after his return to Munich in 1895.

The Deutsches Theater: The Making and Unmaking of a “Modern” Stage Hoping to find a stage for his plays, Wedekind returned to Munich in the summer of 1895. He soon learned that discovering a theater willing to produce modern works was difh-

cult business, especially in the Bavarian capital. The projected independent theater of the Modern Life Society had failed to materialize in the face of official opposition and disunity among the naturalists. To be sure, the ice that cov-

ered modern drama in Munich was finally broken in the summer of 1892, when a group of enterprising university students, assisted by members of the Modern Life Society, founded the Akademisch-Dramatischer Verein (AcademicDramatic Society), an organization devoted to private performances of controversial contemporary plays. However,

even though the group managed to sponsor the first performances in Munich of works like Ibsen’s Ghosts and | Hauptmann’s Die Weber, it was able to mount only three one-night productions a year.” Despite the fact that modern theater got off to a slow and fitful start in Munich, the increasing notoriety of writers like Panizza laid the basis for at least a limited public interest in

the movement. As early as August 1891 Panizza wrote: “Here are only Heyse, Lingg, Grosse, Schack [all members

of the Munich Circle] on the one side, and we, die Neuen, on the other. ... They call us pigs, wallowers in manure, fin-

de-siécle men, literary social democrats, and who knows

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what else; but they read us, discuss us, attend our soirées, buy our books, our pamphlets, etc.’’” Four years later Panizza must have had somewhat more ambiguous feelings _ about the pleasures of notoriety: although only twenty people in Munich had bought The Council of Love before its | confiscation, his trial and conviction made the work so infamous that the Swiss publisher had come out with a third edition by 1897 and engaged in a brisk illicit trade of the book across Germany’s borders. One of the first people to derive some material profit from

this increased interest 1n modern drama was Emil Messthaler (1869-1926). The son of a Munich hotel owner, Messthaler entered the stage world as an actor, but his lack | of success in that role induced him to turn to theatrical en-

trepreneurship.’' In 1892 he founded the Miunchener Schauspiel-Ensemble, a group of ten young actors who toured Germany performing modern plays. Such works were not popular enough to allow repeated performances in repertory theaters in the early 1890s, but Messthaler sensed __ that public curiosity was great enough to permit short runs of the more controversial dramas in all major German cities.

Given this appeal to the public’s desire for ‘‘sensational” _ fare, there was some dispute over whether the troupe was more devoted to art or to mammon. Hermann Sinsheimer, a

noted Munich writer of the interwar years, recalled that Messthaler had battled for modern drama, “more from calculation than conviction,” and called him ‘“‘an entrepreneur experimenting with art.” The playwright Max Halbe, who

moved from Berlin to Munich in 1895, also took note of Messthaler’s “uncontrolled passion for profit,” but he al-

, lowed that “the spark of an artistic nature glowed in the heart of this stony, ruthless businessman.”*”

Messthaler’s breakthrough to fame came in the spring of ) 1894, when his Munich troupe, renamed the Theater der Modernen, played for two weeks to sold-out houses in Leipzig. [his success resulted largely from the fact that the local conservative newspapers had severely criticized the appear-

ance of the troupe prior to its arrival. The free publicity

Art and Mammon in Wedekind’s Drama + 117 generated by these attacks unwittingly insured full houses.”” The troupe’s two appearances in Munich (June 18-30, 1894,

April 19-30, 1895) likewise enjoyed heavy public attendance. Theatergoers were treated to the first public performances in the Bavarian capital of Halbe’s Jugend, Ibsen’s Ghosts, Hauptmann’s Einsame Menschen, Zola’s Thérése Raquin, and similar works which formerly had been staged only in the privacy of the Academic-Dramatic Society.** The successful appearance of Messthaler’s troupe in Munich caught the attention of Friedrich Haenle, a wealthy in-

dustrialist, and Alexander Bluhm, an architect, who were planning to construct a theater in the vicinity of Munich’s main railroad station. The two men had pooled their resources and persuaded numerous banks and private individ-

uals to invest heavily in the Deutsches Theater, an entertainment palace which, in the words of Haenle, ‘would greatly surpass all analogous institutions on the continent.”

On November 26, 1894, Bluhm applied to the police for permission to operate “an entertainment-establishment, in which balls (both popular and elegant), musicals, theatrical productions, as well as ballets, could be performed. It will be. ahead of its time in artistic as well as economic respects and will satisfy all requirements that can be made of a first-rate enterprise.”’’ A month later, without waiting for a positive

reply to his application (which he believed would be granted automatically ), Bluhm hired Messthaler as manager of the projected theater. Significantly, the contract between

the two guaranteed that Messthaler would not have complete say over what transpired on stage. The agreement stipulated that “the repertory shall consist of new dramas, comedies, and farces, as well as older, crowd-pleasing [zugkraftig | plays of these genres ... Plays which do not become crowd-pleasers are to be removed from the repertory, and plays with revolutionary content are prohibited.””®

Moreover, Bluhm reserved the right to schedule performances by other entertainers either before or after Mess-

thaler’s productions. | | Despite these stipulations, the hiring of Messthaler was

118 - ANALYTIC MODERNISM

| considered a victory for Munich’s modern writers. After all, Halbe’s Jugend had been one of the staples of Messthaler’s

traveling repertory, to which Schaumberger’s Die Sinde wider den heiligen Geist and Panizza’s Ein guter Kerl were added in 1895. Enthusiasm was so great that several members of Munich’s naturalist and modernist community, including Wedekind, founded a weekly journal (entitled Me-

phisto) to express support for the new theater. Naturally the Catholic press voiced equally strong opposition to the project. The Bayerisches Vaterland protested the creation of

such an “institute for moral pig-breeding” and “pigstyheadquarters of the ‘moderns,’ ”’ and the Bayerischer Kurier asked: “Should a home for vulgarities a la Council of Love

of Mr. Panizza be created in Munich? Should the heredity- | theories of Mr. Ibsen, which other theaters have rejected with good reason, be performed here? To be sure, we expect the royal police department to impose an energetic veto on

such things.”*” | The Munich police did not seem too concerned that the |

proposed theater, with its respectable financial backing,

would turn into a hotbed of moral sedition. In his letters to the police of March 1895 Bluhm assured them that his enterprise would cater exclusively to the middle classes; the moderate but not cheap price of tickets would “close” the theater “‘to a public of the lower classes.” Bluhm and Haenle also informed the police that Messthaler would not be al-

lowed to perform “political” plays and that the premises would not be available for political meetings.”®

Although the police accepted Bluhm’s claim that his establishment would be socially highly respectable, they de- — layed the granting of an acceptable theater concession for over a year on account of the virulent opposition of the intendant of the court theaters. Even though the Trade Laws of 1869 established the principle of laissez-faire in the cultural realm, certain clauses permitted the police to deny licenses to new establishments if they posed a financial threat

| to existing institutions “of higher artistic merit.” Thus, the police routinely sent an inquiry to the court theaters in

Art and Mammon in Wedekind’s Drama + 119

March 1895, asking whether any objections could be made

to the proposed Deutsches Theater. A prompt response came from Ernst von Possart, a famous classical actor and the staunchly conservative intendant of the court theaters,

who vehemently protested that the projected Deutsches Theater would cause “permanent and serious damage to the

material interests of the royal theaters.”’” The Deutsches Theater would not attain the artistic standards of the latter, but its lower prices would draw the middle classes away from them. In order to protect the box office receipts of the royal theaters, Possart suggested that the Deutsches Theater be permitted to perform dramas, comedies, and modern plays only after having secured his permission for each work. The

concession granted to Bluhm on April 25, 1895, confirmed Possart’s request. The Deutsches Theater was prohibited from performing operas and classical drama (the repertory

of the Nationaltheater) as well as operettas and Bavarian | | Volksstticke (staples of the Theater am Gartnerplatz ). Since

the remaining genres conflicted with the programs of the Residenztheater, the police stipulated that “new dramas and comedies can be performed only with the approval of the intendant of the court theaters.”*°

Bluhm complained to the press about these regulations and initiated a series of administrative appeals to reverse them. The police decision to give a de facto monopoly to Possart met with strong public disapproval. No less a bulwark of court culture than Paul Heyse deplored this infringement upon artistic freedom, and even conservative newspapers like the Bayerischer Kurier, which called for strict moral surveillance over the Deutsches Theater, pro-

tested Possart’s monopolistic ambitions.*' Liberal papers | and modern writers were especially incensed. The Miinchener Neueste Nachrichten blamed the current “sleepy repose” of Munich’s theatrical life on the preeminent position of the court theaters, and noted that Berlin’s theatri- — cal vitality was a product of the intense competition among

| its numerous stages.” Ernst von Wolzogen, a modern writer who had directed some plays for the Academic-

120 + ANALYTIC MODERNISM | | Dramatic Society, wrote that Munich needed a new theater which “through good performances of a modern repertory would keep an educated public abreast of the powerful and promising struggles of our German as well as selected foreign authors. A court theater constrained by considerations of all kinds cannot fulfill this task, especially a court theater such as ours.” He challenged: “Can one seriously believe that the police should assume responsibility for the finances of the court theater?! By the same token, they should order gendarmes to arrest wealthy people off the streets, escort them to the box office, and force them to purchase tickets for a cycle of Shakespearean plays!’ Despite these loud protests in the press, Bluhm was able

to annul the powers granted to the court theaters only after making persistent appeals to successively higher administra- _ tive courts of the government of Upper Bavaria. The debates

within those bodies, which lasted from May 1895 to the summer of 1896, indicated that the government continued to

regard the neoclassical culture embodied in the Nationaltheater as a vital social concern. At issue was not only the somewhat ambiguous letter of the free-trade law but also the question, How could Munich’s cultural life be fostered best? Opponents of Possart like Wilhelm von Borscht, the mayor of Munich, argued that competition encouraged cultural vi-

tality; if court theaters suffered financially on account of the Deutsches Theater, Possart would be forced to improve | his repertory.** In contrast, Possart’s defenders argued that competition led to vulgarization and that, with a totally

| free market, all theaters would sink to a lowest common denominator of taste. The century-old notion that court the-

aters could and did fulfill important moral functions continued to be reflected in the ruling of an appellate body,

which stated: “The material interests of institutions of higher art coincide with the public interest. When the material interests of an artistic institution of a higher order suffer

| significant loss, then it must be feared that any such institution will no longer be able to fulfill the elevated task in the realm of general education and the refinement of taste with

Art and Mammon in Wedekind’s Drama + 121

which it has been entrusted, since this task is possible only through great material expense.”* In accordance with this

statement, the appellate body ruled in July 1895 that al- | | though Possart could not be granted a direct veto over the repertory of the Deutsches Theater, police censors could prohibit the new theater from performing works that threatened the financial interests of the court theaters. It was not until the next year that this ruling too was overturned, because German law allowed censorship exclusively on the basis of “protecting public order (morality), peace, and se-

curity.”*° The letter of the free-trade law belatedly triumphed over the tenacious prerogatives of Bavarian courtly culture. By the summer of 1896 all legal restrictions on Bluhm’s

operation of a theater were lifted, but he still did not have a | | theater to operate. The legal battle over the concession became a secondary concern as slow construction, difficulties in compliance with fire-prevention regulations, and massive cost overruns threatened the project with bankruptcy even before its opening. In September 1896 Bluhm and Haenle had to persuade their creditors to accept a six-month repayment moratorium and to lend an additional 150,000 marks.*’ The theater finally opened on September 29, 1896, a year

after its originally scheduled date of completion. Strindberg’s Creditors had been planned for the inaugural performance, but the jokes that title elicited from the press induced Messthaler to perform instead Schaumberger’s Die Stinde wider den heiligen Geist (The Sin against the Holy Spirit ).** It soon became evident that this title, too, was

ironically appropriate. |

| Max Halbe noted that “everybody regarded the opening of the Deutsches Theater under Messthaler’s direction as the enthronement of the ‘moderns’ in Munich.” Just prior to the

first performance, Julius Schaumberger, whose short play was to open the house, confidently announced in Mephisto: ‘Modern drama shall have an imposing, indeed predominant

role on the stage of the Deutsches Theater. After having en- | joyed only scant hospitality in Munich, modern drama shall

122 + ANALYTIC MODERNISM

find here a sumptuous ... home. Aside from the Deutsches Theater in Berlin, there is probably no theater in all of Germany that opens its doors to modern drama so freely and bravely as the Deutsches Theater in Munich.’”*”’ Unfortu-

nately the theater’s opening night dampened these extrava- , gant hopes. Four offerings were squeezed into that first

| evening: Beethoven’s “Consecration of the House”; Schaumberger’s one-act Die Stinde wider den heiligen Getst; Halbe’s three-act Jugend; and “The Banquet of Nero,” a decorative ballet composed by Raida, the theater’s resident conductor and composer. Even reviewers sympathetic to modern drama noted that Schaumberger’s artistically negligible work could not have succeeded on any stage.

| More disturbing was the fact that Halbe’s Jugend, one of the few modern works that enjoyed considerable popular success, also fell flat. The dreadful acoustics of the enormous (two-thousand-seat) theater, with its plush chairs, carpets, and curtains, militated against the success of any serious drama performed in a conversational tone, as were all natu_ ralist works. The reviewer for Die Gesellschaft was forced to conclude that the new theater was appropriate only for or- | nate spectacles like the decorative but most un-modern bal-

| let that concluded the first evening.”° | Actually, Bluhm had always considered modern drama only a small component of the wide range of entertainment that his establishment would offer. Excessive public attention had been focused on Messthaler owing to the exaggerated hopes of the Moderns and the exaggerated fears of the Catholic press. In reality, Bluhm had granted Raida, a popular waltz composer from Berlin, the same administrative status as Messthaler. Moreover, Raida was placed in charge of a hundred dancers and fifty-five musicians, while Messthaler was permitted a troupe of only twenty actors. Above all, Bluhm had confided to the police that his establishment would not be a “theater in the strict sense,” but rather a shopping and eating bazaar with an entertainment hall attached. He indicated that a melange of music, drama, and ballet would be provided every evening, “with long in-

Art and Mammon in Wedekind’s Drama + 123

termissions between the various performances, which will give the public an opportunity to move about the foyers, the winter gardens, and so on, and to make use of the eating facilities.”’! These included two restaurants, a café, several salons and smoking rooms with buffets, two winter gardens, two bowling alleys, and twenty shops.”

The dispensability of modern drama at the Deutsches Theater was made manifest within a week of its opening. The unfavorable impression of the inaugural evening was repeated by the ensuing performance of Hauptmann’s naturalist comedy Der Biberpelz. On October 5, barely a week

after the opening of the house, the local newspapers announced that Messthaler would be dismissed at the end of the month. Bluhm claimed that Messthaler had failed to present “crowd-pleasers,” as stipulated in his contract, and local reviewers had deplored the mediocre quality of the actors. Although Bluhm had not helped matters by budget, ing more funds for music and ballet than for drama, Messthaler had paid himself most of the money reserved for spoken theater and did not have sufficient capital to hire a competent troupe.’ Although Messthaler managed to produce socially critical

and modern works like Schnitzler’s Liebelet and Sudermann’s Die Ehre during the remaining weeks of October, modern drama disappeared from the stage after his dismissal. Bluhm and Raida proceeded to piece together a repertory consisting exclusively of farces and musicals, a fact

that led Schaumberger to lament in Mephisto: “in record time the present management has been able to degrade Messthaler’s undeniably serious and artistically disposed theater into a stage for farce.”’* Ironically, this popularization of the repertory led to an even greater loss of revenue. Whereas spoken drama had grossed 45,000 marks a month under Messthaler, that figure fell to 27,000 and eventually 20,000 marks in ensuing months.’ Audiences learned that

they could see the same repertory of farces and musicals ] with much better acting and staging at the Theater am Gartnerplatz. Moreover, the decorative ballets had to com-

124 * ANALYTIC MODERNISM

- pete with similar shows in Munich’s numerous vaudeville halls, and the restaurants did not fare nearly as well as antici-

pated, since prices were too high not only for “a public of the lower classes’’ but for the average middle-class clientele

as well.°° When the theater’s debts reached five million marks, the enterprise was declared bankrupt. On September 16, 1897, less than a year after it opened, the Deutsches Theater was sold for 3,660,000 marks. Many small investors who

bore the brunt of the miullion-and-a-half mark loss were ruined.” The new purchaser of the entertainment complex, Hugo Oertel, had transformed the Monachia restaurant into a vaudeville in 1887 and had founded the Blumensale-V ariété

in 1892. Now he proceeded to convert the Deutsches Theater into a highly successful vaudeville as well. The stage

where modern drama was to have been enthroned was

given over to song, dance, skits, acrobatics, and a novel form of entertainment, the film. Above all, Oertel made the Deutsches Theater the hub of the annual Fasching season. By the

| early 1900s the theater had become, in the words of Max Halbe, “the flashy center of Munich’s carnival.””®

The Deutsches Theater affair underscored the commercial realities of theater in Munich in the 1890s. On the one hand, it indicated that the court theaters feared competition

| from commercial stages, hence they tried to revive (unsuccessfully) the protection they had enjoyed before the days of cultural free trade. On the other hand, the fate of the Deutsches Theater indicated that commercial theaters, in turn, were increasingly challenged by vaudeville, which was gaining popularity among broad sectors of the middle class. As we shall see, the commercial success of variety shows led modernist dramatists to create their own vaudevillian institution, the cabaret. More immediately, the Deutsches The-

ater affair taught modern playwrights that, despite the | limited success enjoyed by Messthaler’s traveling troupe, there still was no stable basis of support for modern drama

among the paying public. Above all, the incident underscored the fact that cultural institutions were subservient to _

Art and Mammon in Wedekind’s Drama + 125

market forces and entrepreneurial gamesmen like Haenle, Bluhm, Oertel, and Messthaler. Wedekind in particular believed that the Deutsches Theater affair confirmed his previous perceptions of cultural commercialization, and he used the incident as the basis for Der Marquis von Keith, which

he considered his finest drama. |

of Commercialism | The Marquis of Keith: Dramatizing the Culture

Der Marquis von Keith (Uhe Marquis of Keith; 1900), originally entitled Mtinchner Szenen, nach dem Leben aufgezeichnet (Munich Scenes, Drawn from Life), 1s the story of

a confidence man operating in Munich’s world of commercialized culture in 1899. The title character 1s modeled

after Willy Grétor, the cultural con-man who had saved Wedekind from destitution in Paris. In later years Wedekind

said of Grétor, to whom he had dedicated the Lulu plays: “Never again did anyone influence me as strongly, he was

the most inspiring person that I have ever known.’”” Whereas the protagonist of Keith is based upon an “inspiring” confidence man, the play’s plot is a thinly veiled version

of the Deutsches Theater affair. In the drama the selfproclaimed Marquis of Keith attempts to raise capital for the construction of a “Fairy Palace” (Feenpalast ) of the arts, in

which a theater, concert hall, exhibition rooms, restaurant, ~ and cafe will be combined under one roof. Like Sch6n in Earth Spirit, Keith is a manipulator of the cultural market, but unlike Schon, he seeks to transcend the

ascetic bourgeois business mentality. Whereas Schon’s ‘whole life is embittered by [his] possessions” (according to Lulu), Keith regards wealth not as a value in itelf, but as a prerequisite for joie de vivre (Lebensgenuss). Not without reason does he, despite his illegitimate and petit bourgeois background, use the false title of Marquis, inasmuch as his ultimate goal is aristocratic conspicuous consumption as opposed to ascetic bourgeois capital accumulation. He hopes

passionately—all too passionately—to become an urban

126 + ANALYTIC MODERNISM ventier with appropriate trappings: “I’ve had an eventful life

behind me, but now I’m seriously considering building my- | self a home—a house with ceilings as high as possible, with a

park, and an ornamental staircase at the entrance. The approaches must be garnished with beggars.”

, Whereas Wedekind called Schon a “Don Quixote of human consciousness,” he described his “Munich Scenes”’ as

“the relationship between a Don Quixote of Lebensgenuss

| (Keith) and a Don Quixote of morality (Scholz).”°' Opposite Keith, the would-be parvenu, stands the figure of Ernst Scholz, who represents bourgeois asceticism. In a car-

nivalesque inversion of social titles and class values, the bourgeois Keith has assumed a false patent of nobility, while

Scholz is in reality Count Trautenau, sole heir of a large aristocratic fortune. Despite his noble background, the count has become infected with the bourgeois work ethic; he feels

| he must labor in order to justify his existence. All of his at- | tempts to do so, however, have come to naught. His engage-

ment to a proletarian woman was broken off owing to - incompatibility, and his employment at a railway office resulted in a horrible train collision. These failures induce

Scholz to ask Keith, a childhood friend, to teach him how to transcend his ascetic scruples and to enjoy life in a properly aristocratic fashion. Keith has the desire but not the capital

- for enjoying life in a grandiose manner, while Scholz possesses the money but lacks the spirit to do the same. Hence

the two form a symbiotic relationship: Scholz opens his wallet to Keith, who promises in turn to introduce the count to the spicier sides of la vie munichoise.”

, Keith and Scholz, both Prussians, are attracted to the li- | minal space provided by Munich’s cultural life. On the sur-

face, Munich’s official culture is devoted to the operas of Wagner and the paintings of Arnold Bocklin; but underneath there is a demimonde of failed artists, confidence men, and playgirls who parasitically converge on the wealth of bour-

geois society. [he ease of sexual mores in this bohemia makes it a proper environment for the ascetic Scholz to learn about sensuality. Keith entices him with the standard clichés:

Art and Mammon in Wedekind’s Drama «+ 127

| “Munich is at once an Arcadia and a Babylon. The muted saturnalian giddiness that overcomes the soul at every opportunity retains its allure even for the most fastidious of

men.” Keith hints that his voluptuous mistress, Anna Huber—a former shopgirl, now the widowed “Countess Werdenfels’”—might someday become Scholz’s lover as well. For his own part, Keith believes that this saturnalian atmosphere might be conducive to the flourishing of speculative ventures. Much like Schon, he sees the cultural market as a system of manipulated tastes in which the greatest artist is the con-artist. He dabbles in three forms of cultural mar-

keting—art dealership, journalistic criticism, and concert management—1in order to sell questionable artistic products.

For example, he writes an article on “The Aesthetics of Modern Landscape Painting” to encourage the sale of paintings by a client; however, until that article makes an impact on the buying public, the artist in question keeps himself fed _

by forging Bocklins. Similarly, Keith tries to sponsor the atrocious music of another client by touting him as “the

greatest musical genius since Wagner.” However, Keith | himself admits that these petty swindles are “not worth mention” compared to the Fairy Palace venture, whereby he

hopes to skim money from Munich’s wealthy and (in his opinion) gullible haute bourgeoisie. His three major backers, his “‘caryatids,” are a beer brewer, a construction contractor, and a restaurateur, representatives of what were in fact three of the major businesses in Munich’s still rather traditional economy—an economy characterized, 1n the irreverent words of Lion Feuchtwanger, by “Bauen, Brauen, : Sauen” (building, brewing, pigging-out ).° Keith hopes to attract other gullible investors by organizing a promotional concert featuring the “artistry” of Anna Huber, who represents the vulgarity of taste in the Bavarian capital. Just as Schén profits from Lulu’s dancing in the third act of Earth Spirit, Keith tries to use the stage appearances of his exceedingly well-proportioned mistress as sex-

| ual bait for his enterprise. At the inaugural concert of the Fairy Palace venture, Anna is presented as an up-and-

128 - ANALYTIC MODERNISM :

coming Wagnerian soprano; 1n reality the public’s attention is focused on her “voluptuous beauty” rather than her paltry — voice. Keith tells her beforehand: “I will have such a concert

gown made for you, that you won't need a voice to be a singer.” Anna’s performance does indeed attract capital, but

not in the manner that Keith had anticipated. The next morning she receives a marriage proposal from Consul Casi-

mir, a wealthy wholesale merchant, who notes: “Incidentally, I must compliment you especially for your choice of concert gown last night. It let you develop such imposing © self-assurance and it brought out your figure so effectively that, I must admit, I was hardly able to follow your vocal re-

| cital with the appropriate attention.” Without much hesitation, Anna decides to marry Casimir, “the most respected

man in Munich.” | |

This turn of events spells disaster for Keith, who loses not only his star attraction but also the financial support of the

sexually disappointed and emotionally distraught Scholz. Soon the three “caryatids” also turn against him when they

| discover that he has failed to keep proper accounting records; all he can present is a notebook with a single entry describing “‘a silvery cascade of satin and sequins from the shoulders to the ankles.” The final blow comes when Casimir discovers that Keith had forged his name to a telegram expressing support of the Fairy Palace venture. Threatened with jail for fraudulent activities, Keith is persuaded to sign over his shares in the Fairy Palace to Casimir and to leave

Munich forever. |

The end of Keith shows the triumph of cautious commercial capitalism over adventurous speculative entrepreneur-

ship. The wholesale merchant, restaurateur, brewer, and construction contractor embody a type of traditional and impregnable wealth that exceeds and outlasts the cultural speculations represented by Keith. The three “bleary-eyed Munich philistines” and the Consul can invest sparingly, wait,

and then swallow up a new enterprise if it promises to be profitable.” Keith’s greatest mistake is to assume that such

businessmen are gullible simply because they are boor-

) Art and Mammon in Wedekind’s Drama + 129 ish. In reality they are much more pragmatic than Keith, and

they have law and capital on their side. Where Keith surpasses them, though, is in his innovative speculative vision. The compulsive work ethic of Scholz and the cautious entrepreneurship of Munich’s Grossburgertum represent a tradi-

tional, conservative, and uninspired world of bourgeois virtues. In contrast, Keith embodies (in rather Sombartian fashion) the older aristocratic virtues of gambling, adventure, and conspicuous consumption.” Indeed, in notes for an © uncompleted drama, Wedekind referred to the “business ad-

venturer—speculator” as “today’s representative of chivalry.”°> Keith feeds off the wealth of others, but he also brings it into motion in novel ways. He introduces dynamism and innovation into a routinized commercial economy. Wedekind’s dramatization of the cultural world of fin-desiécle Munich is as critical of modern artists and cultural entrepreneurs as it is of the Bavarian bourgeoisie. The writers, painters, and composers depicted in the play are parasites of

bourgeois wealth and plagiarizers of their more successful colleagues. In turn, artistic success is shown to be a result of the machinations of the commercial middlemen of culture— critics, art dealers, publishers, managers—-who manipulate

bourgeois tastes and artistic trends. [he three components of cultural commerce—artists, middlemen, and financiers— all share the goal of milking profits from the general public and from each other, and there is little honor and no mutual respect among this pack of petty thieves. Wedekind certainly presented a caricatured image of Munich’s cultural milieu, but the distortion was not extreme.

The business world of prewar Munich was indeed dominated by brewers, merchants, restaurateurs, and construction contractors, and aspiring artists learned that if they were to succeed, they would have to attract the wealth of such “philistines.” Modern writers hoped to benefit from the Deutsches Theater, whose organizers—an architect and a manufacturer/construction contractor—attempted to capti-

~ talize on modernism’s notoriety by hiring Messthaler. As soon as it became obvious that the modern style would

130 + ANALYTIC MODERNISM

, not sell, the Deutsches Theater reverted to more conven- | tional brands of theater. After passing into the hands of Oertel, a restaurateur, the theater was dedicated to the most _

| popular form of entertainment—vaudeville. Modern drama , ultimately found a home in the Schauspielhaus, but only after receiving subsidies from a brewer. Like it or not, Munich’s modernist playwrights were at the mercy of such “caryatids,”’ and they were forced to conclude, along with Keith, that so-called higher values “are called ‘higher’ because they grow out of property and are made possible only

through property.”” |

Just as Spring Awakening inspired the early expressionist

dramas of youth revolt, Keith stood at the beginning of a | concurrent trend of plays that depicted the hectic dynamics of commercial society. In contrast to Wedekind’s earlier works, Keith minimized sexual thematics and concentrated instead on the modern world of commercial ventures and adventures. Some naturalist plays had been set in the world of the haute bourgeoisie of industry, commerce, and finance,

but Keith was the first extended dramatization of modern commercial activity. Wedekind believed that because commerce was the lifeblood of the present—and since a truly liberating sexuality was absent or suppressed, as the Lulu plays had shown—the world of business was the only milieu

in which the vitality of modern man could be displayed. This concept was to be formulated explicitly by Carl Stern- —

heim, a playwright heavily influenced by Wedekind, in 1919: “The ability to use our spirit gradually disappeared. Language still provided adequate notions for dealing solely with economic phenomena, and when that point had been reached, vitality could be found only in economic affairs in Germany.” This fact was dramatized in works like Sternheim’s cycle of plays, From the Heroic Life of the Bour-

geoisie, as well as Georg Kaiser’s From Morning to Midnight and Brecht’s In the Jungle of Cities.” Keith represented a major turning point in German drama not only in terms of its theme but also with respect to its formal characteristics. Wedekind himself noted in August

| Art and Mammon in Wedekind’s Drama -: 131 1902 that Keith was “by far the best work that I have ever written,” and ten years later he still considered the play “my artistically ripest and intellectually most substantial work, and Keith himself the best role that I have written.”’’ Be that as it may, Keith was certainly Wedekind’s most analytic

and structured play, a far cry from the episodic impressionism of Spring Awakening. It represented a totally new

| form of analytic social drama that bordered on theoretical

abstraction. The central characters are unidimensional ciphers, each pursuing a single goal with monomaniacal passion. Wedekind insisted that the manner of performance be “highly dramatic” and that Keith and Scholz be acted in a “nassionate” and “crazed” manner.’”” The passion with which such characters chase after money, sex, or other illusory fortunes is Wedekind’s prime—and often only—means

of characterization. The playwright noted: “Passion | Le7denschaft |—that is what I put in the mouths of my characters, and the means whereby I sought to give them dramatic and plastic form.””* In contrast to the preferred dramatic practice of the day, there is no character development or _ psychological complexity in Keith: each figure has a single purpose, which he pursues with blind intensity. Carl Heine, a director of modern drama in Leipzig, observed that Wedekind’s tendency to turn a character “into a formula, into a schema” makes “character development in a conventional theatrical sense more difficult, indeed, impossible, as the formulation becomes more firm.” His characters “‘are suddenly

there, and upon appearance they immediately begin that breathtaking dice-game, which leaves no room for leisurely _

conversation, petty cares, or metaphysical observations.”’* | This novel mode of characterization necessitated further innovations in the language and structure of Wedekind’s dramas. In sharp contrast to the fragmented monologues and dialogues of Spring Awakening, which sought to evoke an empathetic impression of adolescent turmoil, the lines spoken in Keith are short, clear, grammatical, and often aphoris-

tic; the characters know what they want and what they think, and they say so. Wedekind saw no contradiction be-

132 + ANALYTIC MODERNISM

tween such clarity of dialogue and passion of characterization. He noted: “The soul and essence of acting is to embody passions, even in those cases where passion does not express

itself in inarticulate cries of nature, but rather, as in our classics, in words which give the audience something to think about.”” If one recalls the “inarticulate cries of nature” in Spring Awakening, one can imagine the extent to | ~ which Wedekind’s mode of composition had changed. Wedekind emulated “our classics” not only with respect to dialogue but also in the structure of his drama. In contrast to Spring Awakening, with its episodic patchwork, and the

Lulu plays, with their iterative patterns, Keith follows a more “classical” five-act form, in which the fortunes of the protagonists reach their apex in the third act. Wedekind outlined the plot structure as follows:

Act One. — Keith and Scholz despair.

Act Two. Keith and Scholz gain new hope. | Act Three. Paroxysms of joy in both. The sore points of each become apparent. Act Four. — Scholz tries to act the superior and to teach his

teacher. Both collapse. |

Act Five. — 1. The business departs.

, 2. The luxury woman departs. | 3. The brother in sorrow departs.

4. The life companion departs.” | This adoption of tighter dramatic structure was a product of Wedekind’s desire to depict the constraining dynamics of commercial society, where the range of social roles and the outcome of personal efforts are determined by the forces of the market. Whereas passion became the essence of his mode

of characterization, the larger context of the plot showed how such passions become channeled and often frustrated by the larger commercial context. As in Smithian economics, personal interests fuel the economy, but the outcome is beyond the individual’s control. The market acquires the role assigned to God or Fate in classical drama: the five-act

Art and Mammon in Wedekind’s Drama + 133 rise and fall of Keith is, 1n essence, the story of Keith’s business cycle, and thus of business cycles in general. Wedekind noted: “[ have never put my own convictions in the mouth of any character in any of my works ... My convictions are expressed only at the end of the plays in the balance sheets

| Bilanzen | that result from the dramatic course of events and the fates of the protagonists.”’’ Like Schon, for whom all artists are ““Rechenexempel,” Wedekind treated his characters as ciphers, and his plays became balance sheets of their interaction. Drama was fashioned into an account book

of commercial society. | Although Keith inaugurated a major current of analytic dramatizations of commercial society, it did not gain much - recognition among the general public until the Weimar period. Despite the selective appropriation of certain elements of classical drama, the abstractly constructed style of the play was too novel for audiences at the turn of the century. Wedekind had had great difficulty finding the proper structure to allow the work to be both analytic and believably

dramatic. He aspired to write a play that would be both thought-provoking and entertaining, but he complained that his early drafts were “terribly skeletal and unplastic.”’® Un-

fortunately, actors, critics, and audiences found the final version of the play little better. Critics who were accustomed to Ibsen and naturalist drama objected to the play’s total lack of psychological depth. Actors unused to frenzied tones in modern drama presented Keith in a light conversa-

tional manner, with the Marquis as a traditional bon vivant.’” Audiences tended to be hopelessly lost, and the premiere in Berlin on October 11, 1901, was a fiasco.

The incomprehension with which directors, actors, and audiences greeted The Marquis of Keith induced Wedekind to take to the stage personally, in order to demonstrate how his plays should be performed. Most “modern” troupes had adopted a naturalist style of acting, which aspired to be as “true to life” as possible. However, Wedekind’s analytic plots and anti-psychological characters were not amenable to realistic performance: attempts to portray monomaniacs like

134 * ANALYTIC MODERNISM Keith as “real people” seemed ludicrous. Since Wedekind’s novel dramas called for a new manner of acting that had yet to be developed, the playwright was compelled to become an

actor as well. Already at the premiere of Earth Spirit in Leipzig on February 25, 1898, he had been forced to play the pivotal role of Schon. The naturalist actors of Carl Heine’s

‘“Tbsen- Theater,” a traveling troupe devoted to modern drama (much like Messthaler’s early ensemble), treated the play as a burlesque, since they were unable to integrate the elements of tragedy into the performance. Wedekind thus had to take over the major male role in order to demonstrate that the work encompassed elements of both genres and could not be acted in a strictly tragic or exclusively farcical manner. As long as Wedekind played Schon, the performances were favorably received by the public. However, as soon as one of Heine’s naturalist actors took over the lead,

| audiences rejected the play, and it was removed from the repertory.” This incident taught Wedekind that his personal presence on stage might be necessary to ensure understanding of his works. Consequently, a year after the failure of the premiere of Keith in Berlin, he assumed the lead in a Munich production of that play (October 1902). From then until his death in 1918 he appeared on stage in his own plays

| over five hundred times (figure 3).

Most contemporary critics agreed that Wedekind was a respectable amateur actor, but only a few observers realized that he was consciously developing a new style of performance, a manner of acting that ultimately had great impact on expressionist and Brechtian theater. His acting was often described as an alternation between a “dry,” ““wooden,” and ‘“puppetlike’” manner and a “forced” or “overly pathetic”

style. This fact was initially imputed to Wedekind’s ama-

teurish talent, but over the years certain critics came to ap- | preciate the fact that he did not wish to have his characters portrayed in a veristic manner. In Schauspielkunst (1910), a collection of programmatic aphorisms about acting, Wede-

| kind explicitly castigated the naturalists’ attempts to reproduce everyday speech and action on stage. What he offered

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though he disliked composing “poems, jokes, and other Mist” for the journal, since it paid little and detracted from his playwriting, it did give him a steady income and made his name known to a wider public.!* It also made his name known to the police, and his hilarious parodies of sexual stufhness, conservative policies, and Germany’s colonial

| ventures led to the confiscation of Simplicissimus on several occasions. Langen generally considered these confiscations a

welcome form of publicity for the upstart journal, but he overshot his mark in September 1898 with the publication of

“Im Heiligen Land” (In the Holy Land), Wedekind’s spoof _ of Wilhelm’s trip to Palestine.'’ Both Langen and Wedekind had to flee Germany to avoid arrest for lese majesty. After an

interlude in Zurich and Paris (where he renewed his acquaintance with Panizza), Wedekind returned to Germany to stand trial in 1899. He was sentenced to seven months of _ fortress confinement, during which time he completed the

final version of Kezth. |

As the home of Jugend and Simplicissimus, as well as the |

center of the German Jugendstil movement, Munich was the city where opposition to the Lex Heinze was most intense. In January 1893 the anti-Lex Heinze meeting of the Modern Life Society had attracted an audience of only two hundred

| and fifty. By the spring of 1900, when the revived bill had

Between Political Aggression and Aesthetic Intimacy + 147

come up for debate (and almost certain approval) on the floor of the Reichstag, meetings opposed to the proposal drew crowds of three thousand (March 7), four thousand (April 7), and even six thousand (March 21) listeners in the Bavarian capital. [The committee that sponsored the meeting in the Biirgerbraukeller on March 7 included the most prom-

inent proponents of the modern movement in all the arts: Bierbaum, Conrad, Halbe, Schaumberger, other contributors to Jugend and Simplicissimus, and impressionists and secessionists like Lovis Corinth, Max Slevogt, Fritz Uhde, and Franz Stuck. More significant perhaps was the fact that the committee also included representatives of Munich’s anti-modernist official culture (Martin Greif, Hermann Lingg, Franz Lenbach). Even Paul Heyse, who was out of town at the time, sent the assembly a telegram expressing his support. Under the chairmanship of Georg Hirth, a series of speakers denounced the Lex Heinze in furious fashion. Max Bernstein came perilously close to lese majesty when he said that the Kaiser should keep his aesthetic opinions to himself,

and the police considered prosecuting Theodor Lipps, a major aesthetic theorist of Jugendstil, for his assertion that the German judiciary was corrupt. In the end, the assembly sent the Reichstag a resolution which claimed that, “under the rule of the Lex Heinze, our Munich would cease to be a center of artistic and intellectual life—indeed, it would cease to be ‘Munich.’ ”'®

The next day Max Halbe and others called for the crea-

| tion of a “Schutzbund fiir deutsche Kunst und Kultur” (Protective League for German Art and Culture), to be called the “Goethebund.” Goethe’s life, thought, and works had long been targets of German Catholics, who regarded the eighteenth-century heathen as the progenitor of modern

paganism. By calling their organization Goethebund, the modern writers and artists deliberately challenged conservative morality campaigners with the suggestion that anything written or done by Germany’s greatest poet could not be considered immoral or un-German—and there were precious few things that Goethe did not write or do. The spirit

148 + CABARETIC MODERNISM of the group was best expressed by its unofficial slogan, “Lex mihi ars.”. When read on paper, it seemed to state: “for me, art is [its own] law.” But when spoken aloud with a German accent, it was an invitation to leck mich am Arsch."’ On March 15 the executive committee of the Goethebund, which now consisted of Halbe and Hirth as co-chairmen and

Heyse as honorary president, registered the organization with the police and issued a call for membership. Four thou-

sand people attended the Goethebund’s inaugural meeting three weeks later. Meanwhile, Halbe and Hirth had sent out a call to create similar organizations throughout Germany. Within a few weeks there were chapters of the Goethebund

in Berlin, Breslau, Dresden, Dusseldorf, Hamburg, Karlsruhe, Kiel, Leipzig, Mainz, and Stuttgart. At a Goethebund meeting in Berlin at the end of March the Lex Heinze was denounced, not only by modern playwrights and directors like Hauptmann, Sudermann, and Otto Brahm but also > by paragons of official Wilhelmine culture like the painter Adolph Menzel, the playwright Friedrich Spielhagen, and Reinhold Begas, creator of the sculptures that ‘“‘graced” the Kaiser’s beloved Siegesallee.'®

Although the attendance in Berlin (six hundred) was not nearly as impressive as that in Munich, the Prussian capital became the focus of attention because the fate of the Lex Heinze was being decided there. The most outspoken opponents of the bill in the Reichstag were Ernst Miller-Meinin-

gen and Georg von Vollmar, the leaders of Bavarian left-liberalism and Social Democracy respectively. ‘The major spokesmen in favor of the legislation were two prom1-

nent Centrists, Hermann Roeren and Adolf Grober (from Cologne and Wurttemberg), as well as the outspoken Prussian anti-Semite Adolf Stécker. Both sides set forth their

arguments in an unambiguous manner. When MillerMeiningen claimed that many works of Goethe, Schiller, and Shakespeare—not to mention Halbe, Hauptmann, and Sudermann—could be prohibited under this bill, Roeren readily agreed.'”

Roeren had a reason to be self-confident, for the Lex

Between Political Aggression and Aesthetic Intimacy - 149

Heinze seemed to be headed for certain victory. Only the socialists and the left liberals (and, after the debates, the _ National Liberals) opposed it. However, the bill was eventually killed through parliamentary subterfuge. On March 15 the socialists and the left liberals demanded a roll-call vote and promptly walked out of the chamber, leaving the Reichstag without a quorum. When the debate resumed two days later, the socialists tried to attach ridiculous riders to the bill. By that time the governments in Berlin and Munich had come to regard the Lex Heinze as a major embarrassment, especially because so many of the artist-friends of the Kaiser and the Bavarian Regent were speaking so sharply — against it. Thus, in the interim the imperial government worked behind the scenes to delete the culturally censorious clauses of the bill. In the end, the provisions against procuring and prostitution were passed, but the original article 184 was amended only slightly, and the clauses concerning obscenity on stage were dropped entirely. Much to the dismay of the conservative majority of the Reichstag, parliamentary obstruction and governmental embarrassment had led to the deletion of the clauses that threat-

ened classical and modernist culture. In the name of the Munich Goethebund, Halbe and Hirth proclaimed: “The battle over the Lex Heinze is terminated; it has ended with a

victory of the freedom- and art-loving minority of the Reichstag. This minority was able to win because of its masterful strategy and unflagging persistence, and because

of the moral backing received from the powerful protest movement that swept all educated Germans along with it.””” In spite of the boisterous celebrations and sighs of relief in

Munich’s cultural community, many artists realized that they had won a pyrrhic victory at best. Conservatism was the prevailing sentiment in the Reichstag, and the Bavarian Center, after having lost votes to the Peasants’ League in

1893, had regained an absolute majority of seats in the Landtag in 1899. Modern artists would thus have to be on guard for the foreseeable future, and the critical spirit and pressure-group politicking of the Lex Heinze debates would

150 * CABARETIC MODERNISM | have to be sustained if modernists were to survive renewed conservative onslaughts. The desire to continue liberal modernist agitation was expressed by young members of the Academic-Dramatic Society, which had sponsored occasional closed performances

of modern plays since 1892. In his memoirs, Otto Falckenberg, who was to be director of Munich’s avant-garde Kam-

merspiele from 1915 to 1944, reported that he and other students from the dramatic club had organized a carnival procession opposing the Lex Heinze in early 1900. They carried placards and chanted that they would commit every conceivable form of violence, but they would refrain from the ultimate crime—appearing in the buff (“Aber nacket, nacket, nacket gehn wir nicht!”).”! Falckenberg subsequently became the secretary of the Munich Goethebund, and he edited Das Buch von der Lex Heinze, where promi-

nent members of Munich’s cultural community castigated | the bill. After the defeat of the Lex Heinze, the desire of Falckenberg and his fellow students to sustain their critical agitation was shared by certain contributors to Simplicissimus and the Revue franco-allemande, a Munich journal that promoted peace and cultural rapprochement between France and Germany. Marc Henry, one of the editors of the publication, had been affiliated with the original Parisian ca-

baret, the Chat noir of Rodolphe Salis, in the 1880s and 1890s. Henry suggested that Munich’s young writers, artists, and composers should create a similar institution as a haven for liberal modernism. By the fall of 1900 plans were | well under way to form the cabaret Die Elf Scharfrichter, which would star four writers (Otto Falckenberg, Leo Greiner, Marc Henry, Willy Rath), three painters and graphic artists (Viktor Frisch, Ernst Neumann, Willy Oer-

, tel), a sculptor (Wilhelm Hiisgen), an architect (Max Langheinrich), a composer (Richard Weinhoéppel), and a

lawyer who composed and sang songs (Robert Kothe). Others who joined the venture were Frank Wedekind, who replaced Willy Rath soon after the opening of the cabaret; Hanns von Gumppenberg; the young writers Heinrich Lau-

Between Political Aggression and Aesthetic Inttmacy + 151

tensack and Paul Schlesinger; and Marya Delvard, a young music student from Alsace-Lorraine. Exclusivist Tendencies in Modernism: Halbe’s Intimes

Theater and Stollberg’s Schauspielhaus :

Although the political events of the spring of 1900 provided

the immediate impetus for the creation of the Elf Scharfrichter, the cabaret was also the product of various cultural subcurrents that had arisen in Munich over the course of the 1890s. The programmatic statement written by its founders, in the winter of 1900-1901, alluded to this heritage: Just as the arts and crafts movement has made visual art use-

ful for practical life, the organization Die Elf Scharfrichter | has set itself the goal of putting all arts in the service of light entertainment which, up to now, has been offered exclusively by low-quality vaudevilles and witless costume plays. For this type of theatrical entertainment it 1s necessary to develop a style that has arisen organically from the present, much like the Parisian cabarets, yet 1s independently rooted in German

soil. We hope to achieve this task—for which the modern German satirical magazine has prepared the way to a certain extent—-through the creation of an intimate stage which shall present, among other things, artistic shadow plays, literary and political parodies, modern pantomimes, the psychological

couplet (chanson rosse), the review, plastic caricatures, dances with colored lights, and folk songs.”

In addition to the reference to “the modern German satirical

magazine” (Jugend and Simplicissimus ), two elements of | this statement deserve particular attention: the allusion to intimate theaters and to vaudevilles. The Scharfrichter’s use of an “intimate stage” to perform socially, politically, and culturally critical works underscored the dilemma faced by modernist artists and their supporters at the turn of the century. The Lex Heinze had been defeated, but only through the parliamentary subterfuge of a minority of Reichstag delegates. Moreover, modern

152 + CABARETIC MODERNISM |

drama was patronized by only a small percentage of Munich’s theatergoing public. Conscious of their minority status (both politically and artistically ), modernist playwrights

and their supporters made a virtue out of public neglect: they began to consider themselves an elite avant-garde of the culture of the future. The ambiguity of this stance—politi-

| cally aggressive and artistically forward-looking, but isolated and defensive in practice—found a suitable embodiment in the intimate theaters and the arts and crafts movement that had arisen in Munich after 1895.

The first self-styled intimate theater in Germany was created by Max Halbe in Munich in 1895. Although Halbe’s Jugend (a partly naturalist, partly sentimental drama of adolescent love) had been one of the few “modern” plays of the

early 1890s that scored considerable popular success, his other works encountered the same public neglect which plagued the modern movement as a whole.”’ In 1895 the dis-

couraged author moved from Berlin to Munich, where he had attended the university in the 1880s. Soon after his arrival, he organized the Intimes Theater (Intimate Theater), a private stage for artistic connoisseurs that was supposed to be free of commercial and political pressures. In a program-

matic article setting forth the goals of the new venture, Halbe wrote: ‘Whosoever wants to grant art true freedom, © _ let him keep the masses at a distance, as well as that which opens the gate for the masses, money. The Intimes Theater must not be accessible to money. Let the circle be open only

to artists and friends of art.” Since only such people had the ability to judge what was truly artistic, to praise and blame on purely aesthetic grounds, Halbe proposed the creation of “a specialists’ stage by and for artists, a stage free

from all nonartistic considerations, an intimate theater where experts and connoisseurs ‘can be alone among themselves.’””**

Halbe’s Intimes Theater did not have a very impressive production record. It mounted just two plays: Strindberg’s Creditors, and the world premiere of Biichner’s Leonce und Lena (April 29 and May 31, 1895). Nevertheless, the experi-

Between Political Aggression and Aesthetic Intimacy +: 153

ment was significant for two reasons. The Intimes Theater | was the first occasion where modern playwrights personally took to the stage as a group to present modern plays: the actors consisted of people like Halbe, Panizza, Schaumberger, Schaumberg, and Wolzogen. This casting of writers as actors presaged the cabaret movement of 1901. Second,

the Intimes Theater bore witness to the isolation of the mod- — | | ernist movement, even among the propertied and educated classes. The audience consisted of an invited public of forty

members of “the cultural elite of Munich, poets, artists, actors, journalists, directors, socialites, friends of art.” Much

to Halbe’s dismay, this “select” public had little taste for modernism, since it found Strindberg’s work “sick and distorted, nauseating, and, to top 1t off, boring.” Not surprisingly, this attitude ensured the rapid demise of the Intimes Theater. The rejection of modernist drama by a hand-picked audience of Munich’s cultural “elite” in the summer of 1895, followed by the rapid “demodernization” of the commercial ~ Deutsches Theater little more than a year later, underscored the isolation and seeming hopelessness of Munich’s modern

| - movement in the mid-1890s. Only after 1896, when the success of Jugend, Simplicissimus, and the Jugendstil movement signaled an increasing acceptance of modern art and literature, could the concept of an “intimate theater” receive

successful embodiments in the Elf Scharfrichter and Rich- |

in April 1901.

ard Riemerschmid’s Schauspielhaus, both or which opened The Schauspielhaus was a direct descendent of the Deutsches Theater. One of Messthaler’s stage directors, Georg

Stollberg (1853-1926), forged the new company out of some remnants of Messthaler’s Deutsches Theater troupe. Born in Vienna, Stollberg had been a director with Berlin’s naturalist Freie Biihne in the early 1890s, and he remained deeply committed to modern drama throughout his life.”° After the Deutsches Theater was transformed into a vaudeville in the fall of 1897, Stollberg attempted to reconstitute the troupe in a new location—paradoxically, in a former vaudeville hall. Although few people believed that his ven-

154 + CABARETIC MODERNISM ture would be viable in the long run, he hoped to make it profitable by presenting a mixed repertory consisting of the . latest and most risqué French farces, which drew large middle-class crowds, as well as more serious contemporary — works. Moreover, Stollberg received an ‘absolute financial guarantee” to cover losses during the first year from a wealthy brewer, Cajetan Schmederer.’’ This co-owner of the Zacherlbrauerei was one of the few Munich millionaires who generously patronized modern drama. Since much of

the wealth of the Bavarian capital was concentrated in the hands of the culturally conservative brewers, Max Halbe noted that it was both novel and important that “a member of the great brewery families for once graced literature and theater with his abundance.””* By maintaining high standards of acting and directing, moderate salaries for actors, generous doses of French farce,

and a carefully selected repertory of the more successful modern dramas (such as Halbe’s Jugend and the plays of Hauptmann and Ibsen), the Schauspielhaus was actually able to make a profit by the summer of 1899, at the end of its first season. At that time Stollberg and Schmederer also as-

| sumed control of the Theater am Gartnerplatz with its operetta and comedy ensemble, which the royal intendants had supported only halfheartedly. The Schauspielhaus and the Theater am Gartnerplatz were thus jointly administered as the Vereinigte Theater (United Theaters) of Stollberg and Schmederer. In the combined repertories of these two the-

, aters, farce and operetta predominated. The guaranteed suc| cess of such works among tourists and Munich’s middle- and lower-middle classes provided the financial cushion needed to maintain the somewhat adventurous modern repertory of _

Stollberg’s narrower “literary” audience. The commercial outlook was favorable enough to allow Stollberg and Schmederer to commission a new theater for the Schauspielhaus troupe, which had continued to perform on the stage of a former vaudeville hall. The result of that commission, Richard Riemerschmid’s exquisitely intimate Schauspielhaus of 1901, remains to this day the outstanding example of a theater designed in Jugendstil.

Between Political Aggression and Aesthetic Intimacy + 155

The employment of Jugendstil to create an intimate theater underscored the socially ambiguous nature of Munich’s arts-and-crafts movement, which combined outward-going and rejuvenating aspirations with involuted and narcissistic tendencies. On the one hand, the arts-and-crafts movement,

like the journal Jugend after which it was named, attempted to encourage a new vitality amid the bourgeoisie by refashioning the shapes of everyday existence. Jugendstil artists sought to transform the material minutiae of bourgeois daily life, ranging from exterior facades to interior design, from furniture to ceramics and silverware, into vibrant works of art.” On the other hand, this seemingly revitalizing art often masked an essentially defensive position. Artists and their _ bourgeois sponsors sometimes used Jugendstil to stake out a stylistically segregated Lebensraum amid an increasingly

hostile environment. At the turn of the century Munich’s liberal bourgeoisie, the major patron of modernist theater (see the Appendix), was caught between a rightward swing in Bavarian and imperial German politics and a leftward movement among the laboring population of the Bavarian capital. As early as 1890 both of Munich’s Reichstag seats had been won by Social Democrats. Moreover, the working class made its presence physically felt in the gray tracts of unadorned housing complexes that sprang up in Munich’s rapidly expanding suburbs in the 1880s and 1890s. Consequently, enclaves of brightly colored Jugendstil apartment blocks and villas in neighborhoods like Schwabing and Bogenhausen could serve as refuges from the increasing ugli-

ness of the urban milieu. The sister-in-law of Otto

Eckmann, an outstanding Munich Jugendstil artist, said of his self-designed apartment: “It was nice at their place, and

whoever left there experienced the world outside as doubly | ugly, unharmonious, and heartless. But this environment also emanated a type of paralysis, something that tore one

forcefully away from real life.’””*” A significant manifestation of this aesthetic escapism was the new Schauspielhaus, which was jointly designed by the

architect Max Littmann and the Jugendstil artist Richard | Riemerschmid. Although the architect and the artist left few

156 + CABARETIC MODERNISM

explicit records of their intentions, the visual and spatial characteristics of the theater suggest that it was conceived as an intimate context for modern drama that would, paradoxically, express both segregation and integration. The

, space and design of the Schauspielhaus made the theatergoer aware of his separation from the larger world as well as his organic amalgamation into a select cultural community. The most basic spatial dimension of the theater—its physical location—emphasized its seclusion. It was erected, not in

a prominent open space, but in the interior courtyard of a

| housing block on the Maximilianstrasse (figure 4). A few steps through the two inconspicuous entrances on that street took the theatergoer from one world into another—from the

majestic public thoroughfare, uniformly designed in neoGothic style, to the encapsulated space of the theater, enveloped in organic and vegetative forms. Politics and commerce, symbolized by the administrative offices, shops, and trafic of the Maximilianstrasse, were left behind as one entered a realm that was both artificial and suggestively organic. Because enclosed passageways led from the street directly into the foyers and the theater’s location in an inner courtyard hid it from public view, one was never aware of the theater as a separate, externally distinguishable presence. Encountered exclusively from the interior, it gave the impression of a secluded haven. One would fully con-

form to the spirit of Jugendstil if one compared it to a womb—hidden, vitalizing, and, above all, the source of Jugend. Max Littmann wrote that “in designing the auditorium,

we strove for the most intimate character possible.” The number of seats was limited to 727, for “the artistic tendencies cultivated in the Schauspielhaus obviate a larger mass of spectators.”’ Littmann was normally a staunch advocate of wedge-shaped auditoria whose seats directly face the

stage—a design he employed in his two other theaters

in Munich, the Prinzregententheater (1901) and the Kinstlertheater (1908). For the Schauspielhaus, he utilized amore traditional curved balcony that folded the audience in

Between Political Aggression and Aesthetic Inttmacy + 157

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| 170 * CABARETIC MODERNISM | dining area the same motif was repeated atop the Schandpfahl (pillory), where a bewigged skull was cloven in half by an enormous axe. On this pillory were tacked, in the words of Marc Henry, “the latest political insanity, the newest 1m-

perial howler, the last word in reactionary legislation, the dernier cri of snobbery, anything that stupid advertisements praised without reason, whatever insulted good taste or good sense.” [his attitude was summed up in the cabaret’s name, which Ernst Stern, a young artist who assisted the venture, explicated in the following manner: “The title of the cabaret,

‘The Eleven Executioners,’ was intended to suggest that judgment was sharp and execution summary in the battle against reaction and obscurantism.” Such judgments emanated primarily from the raised stage, which was separated from the audience by a sunken pit that could lodge either musicians or puppeteers. Simplicity was stressed in most presentations and props were kept to a minimum. Most solo | performances took place before a curved blue-gray backdrop (a great novelty for the time), and the atmospheric mood could be modified through variations in the advanced system of lighting.°°

1G For Kandinsky, the art, culture, and religion of the peasantry seemed to embody a more genuine expression of aesthetic pleasure, human understanding, and spiritual sincerity than their analogs among the “educated”’ classes. Although Kandinsky’s aesthetic and spiritual proclivities eventually led him to the Bavarian countryside, his initial choice of Munich as a site for artistic training was not surprising, given that city’s long-standing attraction for Russians. Among these were political refugees like Trotsky and Lenin, who edited and published the first issues of Iskra

, there at the turn of the century. However, most Russians in ~ Munich were students, and many of them had come there to

study art.’ One such student, Kuzma Sergeevich PetrovVodkin, noted that Russians went to Munich to escape the artistic provincialism of their native country, only to fall victim to “another provincialism—blind following of German modernism.” Fortunately, Kandinsky had sufficient artistic self-assurance to take from Munich what appealed to him, and to look elsewhere for—or to invent—whatever it

lacked. After studying at private schools and the Munich Academy, he proceeded to develop his own artistic style within self-selected contexts. As noted in the previous chapter, he was one of the cofounders of ‘‘Phalanx,” a cooperative

exhibition society that sponsored shows of young Munich artists as well as foreign modernists (such as his beloved Monet). Initially, Kandinsky worked within the context of Munich’s Jugendstil movement, but he soon became dissat-

The Kiinstlertheater and Its Affinities - 221 isfied with its “soulless’’ ornamental effects and sought instead a spiritual expressivity absent from the art of his day.

As early as 1904 Kandinsky outlined the project that |

would determine the remainder of his artistic career: “If destiny shall grant me enough time, I shall discover a new language that will endure for ever and continually enrich itself. And it will not be called Esperanto. Its name will be Malerei [painting]—an old word that has been misused. It should have been called Abmalerei [copying]; up till now it has consisted of imitating.”®’ Like theater, which had ‘“degenerated”’ into a realistic dramatization of human conversation and interaction, nineteenth-century painting strove to attain a faithful mimetic reproduction of the material world; indeed, much academic painting, which depicted subjects from the historical or mythological past, was just as “liter-

ary” and “narrative” as epigonal drama. Kandinsky objected | to crudely mimetic and narrative painting, which he considered illustrated literature. Since the visual arts, like music, had greater expressive potential than words, he sought to de-

velop a truly painterly language that would overcome the communicative poverty of literary drama and mimetic art.® Kandinsky’s new language came to consist of colors, lines,

and shapes that were expressive in and of themselves (that

is, divorced from any reference to objects). His increasing rejection of narrative and figurative components in the arts

complemented his earlier renunciation of social science. Since realistically portrayed objects and events appealed to the rational, educated mind and everyday emotions, Kandinsky came to believe that a truly “spiritual” response at a

trans-phenomenal level could be evoked only by “pure” color, line, and shape, used in a non-narrative and nonfigurative manner. He contended that various colors, shapes, and lines expressed specific moods and ideas that were valid for all people at all times, and he sought to codify these relationships in his major theoretical works.” Kandinsky simultaneously developed a hieroglyphic visual vocabulary consisting of images derived from Christian folk art. Far from being a dogmatic believer, he saw the es-

222 * RETHEATRICALIZED MODERNISM

sence of Christianity embodied in the Book of Revelation, which had long been a source of inspiration for heretics. The Apocalypse, with its powerful images of the destruction of

the old world and the creation of the New Jerusalem, seemed to express the spirit of the day as perceived by Kandinsky. He saw the present age as the darkest hour of man’s history, a period when human values and perceptions were

wholly material; yet it was also the time that would give birth to a new faith, a Third Testament, and the “epoch of the great spirituality | poche des grossen Geistigen |.” Men would learn to overcome their concern with superficial

| thoughts, feelings, and appearances, and would rediscover the long-suppressed “inner resonances” of the human soul. In this apocalyptic drama, wherein the greatest materialism gave way to the greatest spirituality, the artist was cast in the role of a “Moses,” who by laying bare his own “inner resonances” through liberated artistic forms would provide a

- model for others to uncover their spiritual essences.”

| Kandinsky sought inspiration from Bavarian and Russian peasant art while pursuing his path to spiritually expressive abstraction between 1908 and 1914. Peasant arts and crafts demonstrated a delight in forms, lines, and colors for their own sake and showed little concern for an exact depiction of reality. Moreover, popular religion in Catholic and Orthodox lands celebrated figures and themes that could be used to express the coming spiritual upheaval and the messianic role of the artist (such as Saint George, the angel Gabriel,

the Deluge, the Apocalypse). Above all, Kandinsky, like Panizza, believed that popular culture alone took full account of the contradictions that infused human existence: _ life and death, love and hate, humor and tragedy, secular and

sacred. In Das bunte Leben (The Motley Life; 1907), an important pre-abstract work, Kandinsky sought to capture | this carnivalesque world view in scenes from popular life in medieval Russia (figure 17). In this painting images of a

: young man chasing a woman, lovers embracing, and a mother fondling her child are interspersed among scenes of strife and death: groups of men assault each other with sticks and swords, and a funeral procession passes a graveyard.”

The Kinstlertheater and Its Affinities + 223

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Cee cae EE | Se ae) ies We) ae ae * ed eee 17 - Vassily Kandinsky, Das bunte Leben (The Motley Life; 1907).

Such unity of opposites—the juxtaposition of life and death in popular culture, and the simultaneity of destruction and

, redemption in the Book of Revelation—became a major | theme in Kandinsky’s abstract compositions. After 1908 Kandinsky lived intermittently in the Bavarian village of Murnau, where Hinterglasmalerei, or painting on

glass, was practiced by the local peasant population. he bright colors, strong lines, and religious imagery appealed to

the Russian artist, who began to paint works in the same

| medium. Over the course of a few years these images of Apocalypse, which (by his own account) juxtaposed “ser1ous” and “humorous” forms, evolved into Kandinsky’s first abstract pictures.°’ In these later works, popular renderings of saints, the Apocalypse, and Paradise acquired barely recognizable shapes. They served as residual signs of a picture’s meaning, which received more powerful expression through

224 ° RETHEATRICALIZED MODERNISM

abstract form, line, and color. In essence, Kandinsky had freed the strong linear and coloristic elements of folk art from their objects and used them to express visions of de-

| struction and redemption in an expressively abstract manner. Hardly discernible, yet still recognizable, popular Christian imagery was retained in order to allow a traditional public to step into the picture. Having recognized the rudimentary message of the work according to accepted religious symbols, the viewer could then proceed to experience a profounder expression of its meaning through pure form,

line, and color.” | Similar principles were operative in the four plays that

Kandinsky composed between 1909 and 1914 (The Yellow

Sound, The Green Sound, Black and White, Violet). The painter saw theater as a composite of the arts, a forum for the presentation of Gesamtkunstwerke that would combine musical, visual, and verbal impressions. Such works would be markedly different from the stage fare common in his day,

which, he contended, had been reduced to a “narration of events’ and a “description of external life’; contemporary drama, like nineteenth-century art in general, lacked “the life of the soul” and “the cosmic element.” To rectify this situation, Kandinsky developed a theatrical language that paralleled his visual language. Its two components were the “pure” elements of theater (color, sound, and motion), and a compendium of gestures derived from popular theatrics. It was no wonder, wrote Kandinsky, that people turned ‘to vaudeville, circus, cabaret, and film.” Such popular amusements expressed a greater enjoyment of sound, motion, and spectacle than “museum-forms” like drama, opera, and ballet.°’ Moreoever, some types of popular theater rejected the narrative structure of elite drama: “Clowns, in particular, build their composition on a very definite alogicality. Their action has no definite development, their movements are in- | congruous, their efforts lead nowhere and, indeed, they’re not meant to. But at the same time, the spectator experiences impressions with total intensity.”’? Kandinsky could hardly

have given a better characterization of his own scenarios,

The Kinstlertheater and Its Affinities + 225 | which are highly expressive but lack conventional narration __ or plot-lines. Formally, Kandinsky’s plays betray a love of popular theatrics at least as great as that shared by Panizza, Wedekind, and Reinhardt. Marionettes, actors on stilts, painted faces, colorful patchwork clothes, morris dancing—these and other elements associated with circus, vaudeville, and puppet shows

appear in his scenarios. At times, though, Kandinsky drove

theater to levels of abstraction never before attained by either popular or modernist artists. Reinhardt had been able to eliminate words and reduce theater to colorful narrative pantomime, but Kandinsky called for a rejection of narrative plot and even the human actor, since he believed that theater could consist of “pure” color, sound, and motion. Sometimes

a play of light was the sole “action” that he called for on stage.’’ At other times “the sound of the human voice was used in pure form, that is, without obfuscation through - words, through the meaning of words;” one thinks of nonsense-cries in his plays, like “Kalasimunafakula!” in The Yellow Sound. Fuchs had contended that “drama is possible _ without word and sound, without sets and costumes, purely as rhythmic movement of the human body.” Kandinsky went even further, claiming that drama and dance could do without rhythm as well, as in the following scene: “A white man makes indeterminate, but very rapid movements at times with his arms, at times with his legs. Here and there he holds a movement for some time and remains in the corresponding position a few moments. It is like a type of dance. Only the tempo often changes, and sometimes moves together with, sometimes apart from the music.””” Kandinsky employed this totally free theatrical medium to express the themes that were explained in his theoretical treatises and depicted in his increasingly abstract paintings. Viewing middle-class rationalism and materialism as the major enemy of spirituality, he composed Violet as a theatri-

cal attempt to épater le bourgeois. Although one can scarcely speak of “plots” or “sub-plots” in this work, one of the play’s dominant motifs is the battle between the bour-

226 + RETHEATRICALIZED MODERNISM

geoisie and the color violet. The bourgeoisie is represented primarily by three figures: a woman in a décolleté gown, an elegant man in a top hat, and a cow.” In his essay On the Spiritual in Art (1912), Kandinsky compared the bourgeoisie to “a fat, very healthy, sedentary cow, which is capable only of masticating and beholding the world with stupid, dull eyes.”’* In Violet, however, neither the bourgeoisie nor the cow are very healthy, inasmuch as they are occasionally threatened by violet, a “sickly” color.” At the beginning of the play, the man and the woman have to beat off an aggressive violet curtain, and later the cow is pursued by a violet

light.” The bourgeoisie is in ill health because reason, mea- | surement, and calculability—the positive and _ scientific values in which Kandinsky himself had earlier believed—are

crumbling. In the wildly chaotic second scene a man calls out: ‘Measure! Measure! Measure exactly, that’s all there 1s

| to it!’”’’ Simultaneously another pair of men come to the disturbing conclusion that nothing can be certain. In the same scene a group of people act as if they were being tossed about in a boat, perhaps a reference to the passage in On the

Spiritual in Art where Kandinsky contended that those of his contemporaries who were losing their faith in positivism harbored a “hidden fear, bewilderment, shakiness, and insecurity, as in the heads of passengers on a large, solid ocean steamship, when black clouds arise over the high seas and the dismal wind rolls up the water into black mountains.””® Worst of all, the bourgeoisie finds that everyday language has become problematic. Ironically, in one of the few passages of comprehensible dialogue in the play, the bourgeois woman becomes tongue-tied as soon as she begins to speak

of the soul:

You know well that in the heart of every being ... Oh! You'll understand me! I don’t know how to express my thoughts properly. But you could say it like that, can’t you? © It’s a current expression, isn’t it? Can’t you express yourself

like that? Truly, I wouldn’t know how to say it otherwise! Besides, there’s a lot of truth in that expression! Truly! And

The Kunstlertheater and Its Affinities + 227 how else could I express it? In the heart of every being ... (After a few moments of hesitation:) It’s true that that’s a bit funny, almost comical. (Timidly:) I express myself like an — old lady. But I don’t know—how to say ... Yes! No! I can’t express myself any other way!”

At this point the gentleman asks her to continue, but the — woman stands at attention like a soldier and refuses to say another word. Like Wedekind before him, Kandinsky dramatized the fact that the conventional, conversational language of the middle class was incapable of expressing emotion in any subjectively meaningful manner.

As if to complement Violet, which is full of scenes of bourgeois discomfiture and premonitions of the demise of

| materialist society, The Yellow Sound is a mystery play that provides mythic grounding for the celebration of the Buntes

| Leben of the future. The introduction displays a stage suffused with a blue light—the color of spirituality, according to Kandinsky—-while a hidden chorus intones a litany of contradictions: Tears and laughter ... Curses while praying ... The union of joy and of blackest battles.

Somber light during ... sunniest ... day, Glaring shadows in darkest night!*°

Following the “spirituality” of the introduction, the first scene opens with five giants of a bright yellow coloration— the hue of earthliness, according to Kandinsky. The yellow giants and the blue light represent the chthonic and spiritual paths along which humanity’s progress to utopia occurs.”’ The evolution of man in The Yellow Sound begins in the

first scene with vaguely humanoid birds with large heads that flit across the stage. By the second scene, men have evolved into figures that carry flowers and wear “formless” clothes, each of a different coloration. They remain huddled together and act in unison, “as if on command.” Upon the appearance of another group dressed in indistinct green-gray clothes, the flowers turn blood-red and the first group flees

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to the foreground. Finally, in the fifth scene, figures in colored tights initially make hesitant, puppetlike motions, but

their movements acquire greater diversity and fluidity until | a wildly chaotic dance erupts. Rhythmic and arhythmic ges-

tures, communal and individualized motions, are interspersed. As soon as some semblance of order is established, it rapidly breaks down again. At the point of “highest confusion in the orchestra, the movements, and the lights,” the

set darkens and shifts, ‘“‘as fast as possible,” to the final tab- . leau, which depicts a bright yellow giant with his arms held | out to form a cross against a blue background.” It is impossible to interpret The Yellow Sound with any certainty, and the few critics who have ventured to discuss | the play fail to agree on its meaning.®’ However, it seems | that at least part of the work 1s concerned with the social and spiritual evolution of humanity. In the first scene men are still partly animals, with no distinguishing characteristics. By the second scene they have evolved into a primitive so-

ciety that is still very attached to nature and to the land | (symbolized by the flowers in their hands as well as the huge yellow flower that dominates the stage). Although they recognize individuality, inasmuch as each figure wears | a different color, they act in a fully communal fashion. The figures that frighten them are even more homogeneous: they all wear indistinct green-gray clothes, and they walk slowly

in single file, staring forward. Given Kandinsky’s social views, it seems that these groups represent the peasantry and the bourgeoisie respectively. Kandinsky believed that peasant activity, though weighted down by customs and traditions, had respect for individuality, a view that would ac-

count for the coloristic diversity amid the communal | solidarity. The fact that he had peasants in mind at this point is further suggested by the original (manuscript) ver-

sion of The Yellow Sound, which speaks of “people in bright | peasant-costumes [Trachten] with many flowers.”** The artist might have been inspired to compose this scene by his trips to rural Russia in the late 1880s, when he encountered

“villages, where suddenly the whole population ... dis-

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played a colorful array of costumes [7Tvachten| which seemed like colorful living pictures on two legs.” In contrast

| to these peasant characters, the file of green-gray figures is clearly bourgeois. Kandinsky considered middle-class society fully homogeneous, and tagged it with the color green, which (which its sister-color gray) represents immobility, dullness, and stupidity.” If we accept the end of the second scene as an image of contemporary society—peasants huddled in the front, the bourgeoisie trudging along in back—then one can surmise , that the fifth scene depicts the society of the future. In contrast to the “formless” clothes of the previous groups, the actors now wear tights, which bring out the human form to the fullest extent. The figures slowly learn how to move and interact, and they ultimately join in a wildly chaotic dance. However, this occurs only after the disappearance of

all figures dressed in “bourgeois” gray, “otherworldly” white, and “deathly” black.*° With all such moribund figures gone, the way is open for a dance of the “colorful” or

“motley” (bunte) people—a true Buntes Leben: “There arises a general dance: it begins in various areas and slowly spreads, tearing all people along. Running, jumping, running

toward and away from each other, falling. Some rapidly move only their arms while standing, others only their legs, their heads, their torsos. Some combine all of these motions. Sometimes these are group movements. Whole groups sometimes make one and the same movement.”®’ This is clearly a state of great vitality and excitement in which individuality

and community freely flow into each other. The ideality of | this condition is suggested by the fact that it is interrupted | by a rapid cut to a symbolic tableau that shows a harmonious reconciliation of the body and the spirit. This is indi-

cated by the juxtaposition of blue light with the yellow giant, as well as by the latter’s tmitatio Christi—his impersonation of the man who, more than anyone else, signifies spirit become flesh. With the realization of the Buntes Leben,

the “epoch of the great spirituality” has arrived. If this reading of The Yellow Sound is passably correct,

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_ then we can conclude that Kandinsky has composed a utopian mystery play. His ideal society is characterized by self-

regulating anarchy, and his age of spirituality is brought about by a liberation of body and soul. Man and God join hands in carnival as the uniformity and superficiality of bourgeois society dissolve. The linear unity of middle-class

| life is replaced by a hectic but ultimately harmonious counterpoint of individualized personalities. In order to dramatize this world view Kandinsky united two seemingly opposed strands of theater. Works as dispar- _ ate as Wedekind’s Spring Awakening and the productions

of Fuchs and Reinhardt (as well as the plays of the later Ibsen, Halbe, Strindberg, Maeterlinck, and others) stressed emotional mood: the spectator was supposed to yield himself psychically to an evocative state of mind. In contrast, the

later works of Wedekind sought to maintain a critical dis_ tance between the play and the audience; his constructivist principles addressed the analytic faculties of the public. Kandinsky attempted to combine these two opposing tendencies, inasmuch as he sought to evoke a complex emotion _ through a constructivist technique. Kandinsky believed that the ultimate goal of art was to evoke a Klang (sound or resonance) deep in the viewer’s soul. Ihe most fundamental Klang that true faith and great art could awaken was the mystic sensation of the essential unity of all worldly opposites.** Kandinsky contended that this perception could be communicated only along tortuous paths. Although he admired Wagner’s notion of the Gesamtkunstwerk, he considered Wagnerian practice woefully superficial. Wagner had employed an “additive” technique, insofar as music, text, and gesture would underscore the same feeling or idea. In contrast, Kandinsky called for a “counterpoint” of contradictions. Often the sounds, sights, and movements in his plays would express entirely different

| feelings and ideas simultaneously, and would proceed according to different tempi.”’ Kandinsky applauded the use of

a similar technique by his friend Arnold Schonberg, who contended that in songs the musical accompaniment need

The Kiinstlertheater and Its Affinities + 231

not underscore the sung text; these two elements could evolve separately, as long as they proceeded from a common

Klang.”” Furthermore, Kandinsky (like Wedekind) used disruptive devices to prevent the audience from succumbing

to theatrical illusion. “This is the beginning” are the first words of the gentleman at the outset of Violet, and the sec-

ond scene commences with workmen constructing the set | upon which the ensuing actions will take place.”!

Kandinsky did not believe that such disruptive devices would destroy emotional engagement. On the contrary, he asserted that the “smoothness” of Wagnerian and similar works evoked psychic responses only on the most superficial level. Disruption of the spectator’s conventional faculties of perception and emotion was necessary in order to cut deeply

into the mind and the soul. This, in turn, would stimulate the fantasy of the viewer and encourage a creative spiritual response to the spectacle. Ideally, by the end of the performance the spectator would perceive the spiritual unity underlying the aural and visual confusion. The achievement of | this immense task—the evocation of the harmony behind the plenitude of contradictions—necessitated the employment of what Kandinsky called a “constructive [Rkonstruktiv |”

, technique. Both spiritual sensitivity and conscious planning were required to devise an appropriate artistic structure of dissonances and dislocations which, in the end, would evoke

a mystic sensation of universal harmony. This path would culminate in a new artistic purity, since “the replacement of the objective with the constructive is the first step of the pure art now commencing.”

| Kandinsky used a political term to describe his style of composition: anarchy. Like political anarchism, which the bourgeoisie “does not understand and which it only knows by its terrifying name,””’ Kandinsky’s artistic anarchy sought to reconcile unity and diversity: “Anarchy” is what many. call the current state of painting. The same word is also used here and there to characterize the present state of music. People falsely use the term to denote planless disruption and disorder. Anarchy 1s really methodi-

232 * RETHEATRICALIZED MODERNISM calness and order, which is not established through external and ultimately futile force, but rather through a sensation of the good. \n other words, limits are also established here, but these limits must be called internal and they will replace the external ones. And these limits will also be expanded continuously, whereby a constantly augmented freedom will arise,

, which in turn will clear the way for further revelations. The art of the present, which may correctly be called anarchistic in this sense, does not only mirror the spiritual standpoint already attained, but also embodies, as a materializing force, a spirituality that has matured into revelation [das zur Offenbarung gereifte Geistige ].”*

In a letter to Schonberg in August 1912, Kandinsky spe-

cifically noted that this notion of anarchy was also to be found in The Yellow Sound:

I want to show that construction may also be attained by the “principle” of disharmony or, better yet, that it offers many more possibilities, which absolutely must be expressed in the epoch that is now beginning. The Yellow Sound is con-

structed in that manner, 1.e. in the same fashion as my pictures. That is what people call “anarchy,” which they take to

be lawlessness,... but which should be understood as an order (in art, construction) which is, however, rooted in an-

other sphere, in inner necessity.” |

In these two passages Kandinsky underscored the fact that

his social and artistic “anarchism” complemented each other. Just as the anarchic utopia at the end of The Yellow

| Sound depicted a continual interchange of individuality and communality, his “constructiv::”” compositional methods sought to realize freedom and order simultaneously. Like

many other idealistic anarchists of the day, especially those | inspired by his fellow countryman Peter Kropotkin, Kan- | dinsky believed that modern society corrupted man, who is

inherently good and cooperative by nature. Unlike Panizza, whose destructive anarchism contended that the individual’s Damon must invariably clash with social conformity, Kan-

The Kiinstlertheater and [ts Affinities + 233

| dinsky believed that people uncorrupted by material civilization would establish a community whose harmony, rooted in the spiritual Klang of common humanity, would encompass the seeming contradictions of personal differentiation.

It was the artist’s duty to strip away, by means of highly spiritual cultural forms, the superficial and material factors dividing individuals in order to uncover the “inner necessity” that could unite mankind amid “motley” diversity. Kandinsky was not a practical social reformer, and his anarchist vision was hopelessly utopian. Nevertheless, this vision inspired his scenarios as well as his paintings, and his revolution of theater had the potential to be as far-reaching as his revolution of the visual arts. To a greater extent than anyone before him, Kandinsky sought to liberate the constit-

uent elements of theater and to recombine them in startlingly novel ways. Unfortunately, his scenarios never reached the stage during his lifetime. ‘The proposed produc-

tion of The Yellow Sound at the Kiinstlertheater in the

summer of 1914 would have been a true monument to modernist artistic anarchism: Kandinsky was slated to design the

sets; Thomas von Hartmann, the composer who was well advanced in his composition of a score for The Yellow Sound, had contributed an essay “On Anarchy in Music’”’ to

the Blue Rider Almanach; and Alexander Sacharoft, who was scheduled to dance the solo roles, was known as a man whose performances “opened the floodgates of the anarchical.””° However, despite the protests of Munich’s artist com-

munity, the managers of the exhibition park stood by the _ Disseldorf troupe’s contract for the Kinstlertheater. Before alternate arrangements could be made for staging The Yellow Sound and a matinee performance of Violet, war had broken out, and Kandinsky was forced to leave Germany as an “enemy alien,””’

Even under more favorable conditions, it is difficult to conceive how Kandinsky’s proposal to stage Violet and The Yellow Sound would have been realized. Although some of the effects he demanded could have been accomplished (and

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may even have been inspired) by the stage and especially the lighting system of the Kiinstlertheater, many parts of his scenarios would have been hard to realize with the technology of his day. That is perhaps why he began to think more in terms of the new medium of film around 1914.”? Above all, it is hard to believe that public response to Kandinsky’s _

complex, non-narrative “constructions” would have been encouraging; the virulently hostile reception of his “infantile,” “insane,” and “insulting” paintings by more traditional artists, critics, and the general public certainly boded ill for his plays.”’ Like Panizza, Kandinsky was a great enthusiast of popular culture, but his very personal and willful appro-

| priation of “popular” principles met with public ridicule

and incomprehension. | Oo

in Munich, the six years prior to the outbreak of World War I witnessed important innovations in theatrical theory, composition, and performance. Despite his artistic and political faults, Fuchs had the energy to realize the construction

of the Kiinstlertheater, which became a symbol of the emerging “retheatricalization of theater’ and encouraged other directors and playwrights who strove for similar goals. Hampered by dogmatic attachment to the relief-stage as well as his volkisch politics, Fuchs’s productions enjoyed at best a

modicum of critical respect, but they were not a popular success. [hat distinction was enjoyed by Reinhardt, whose _ well-earned fame and fortune were products of his sensitiv- _ ity to public taste and his unprecedented openness to the myriad forms of theatrical practice from all lands and all | ages. Reinhardt used his appearances at the Kunstlertheater to expand his experimental eclecticism, and the Miinchener

Volksfestspiele provided him with the opportunity to inaugurate his famous arena-theater productions for mass audiences. Bridging the gap between classical and modernist drama on the one hand and commercial mass culture on the other, he created the models and set the standards for successful “art theaters” on both sides of the Atlantic. In striking contrast, Kandinsky stood at the “unpopular” extreme of

The Kunstlertheater and Its Affinities + 235

the theatrical avant-garde, insofar as his scenarios failed to reach performance, let alone find a public. Despite his appropriation of the color and vitality of popular theatrics, his visions and his message were too personal and too utopian to gain acceptance outside his immediate modernist milieu. Nevertheless, they represent the logical extreme of the un-

leashing of the theatrical arts, the reestablishment of the stage as a source of spectacle, sound, and motion. ‘That was a | goal that all three men held in common, and together they managed to push the possibilities of the theatrical medium far beyond the elite literary drama of their day.

| Political differences marked the three as well. Reinhardt avoided overt political involvement, even though his masstheatrical techniques proved amenable to effective emulation by leftists and rightists in the interwar era. Ironically, Fuchs and Kandinsky, who had more explicit social and political visions, were least able to achieve their public goals. Uhe day had not yet come for Fuchs’s volkisch totalitarianism, and Kandinsky’s communitarian anarchism was too nebulously utopian for any age. The apolitical attitude of Reinhardt and the social inconsequence of Fuchs and Kandinsky does not imply, however, that Munich’s other modernist playwrights were spared political involvement in the decade before the outbreak of war. The more focused issues that had caused such trouble in the 1890s—notably dramatizations of sexual

and religious themes—drew increasing political fire as the _ years wore on, and the exacerbated tensions ultimately gave rise to modernist activism.

, ¢ CHAPTER SIX | | @ Activist Modernism: Failed Compromise, Renewed Assault

| WHILE INNOVATION OF MUNICH’S THEATRIcal practice was centered on the Kinstlertheater in the years prior to World War I, the most overtly political debates focused on the issue of censorship. The fall of Crailsheim in 1903 marked the beginning of the Center’s final drive for political supremacy, which it attained with the appointment of

the Hertling cabinet in 1912. That decade witnessed the growing strength of Christian morality leagues, which suc- | cessfully demanded the suppression of “indecent” performances. [hese groups initially attacked the “obscenity” of | second-rate cabarets such as Josef Vallé’s “Intimes Theater.” Soon, however, much of the ire of the censorious populists was focused on the works of Frank Wedekind. The persistent censorship of Wedekind’s undeniably serious and artistic dramas elicited plaudits from conservative moralists, but provoked protests from liberal and Social-Democratic literati and politicians. In response to the continued prohibition of Spring Awakening in June 1907, at the time when

the Kiinstlertheater was first being proposed, the Mtnchener Post proclaimed: “Faced with such unbelievably narrow provinciality, Munich’s theaters will surely de-

generate. [herefore, instead of creating a_ so-called ‘Kiinstlertheater,’ it is even more imperative to raise a collective protest against this regimentation by a police bureau-

cracy that 1s absolutely unqualified to make artistic judgments.” In 1908, as the Kiinstlertheater was nearing completion, the police responded to the conflicting political pressures of

, Failed Compromise, Renewed Assault + 237 , the cultural world by forming the Censorship Advisory Council, a committee of liberal and conservative experts who advised the censors in particularly difficult cases, such as that of Wedekind. This attempt to institutionalize a compromise of liberal and conservative opinion had a parallel in

| the dramas of Heinrich Lautensack, a devotee of Wedekind who sought to fuse Catholic and modernist culture by reviving the erotic dimensions of baroque and popular religiosity.

Neither the Censorship Council nor Lautensack could diminish the success of populist demands for censorship, and the growing strength of the culturally reactionary parties

contributed to the political radicalization of Erich Mihsam, | another disciple of Wedekind and the first major exponent of the prewar activist movement in Germany.

Vallé’s Inttmes Theater: Morality Campaigners and Commercialized Cabaret The political crisis of 1903 that brought down Crailsheim and forced the closing of the Scharfrichter marked a turn for

the worse for both liberal politicians and practitioners of modern art. Initially, Prime Minister Podewils, Crailsheim’s

successor, hoped to balance the interests of liberals and Catholics. In May 1903 he wrote to a confidant: “At the mo-

ment one can’t rule with any particular party in Bavaria. The government must stand above the parties and must attempt to maintain relations with the moderate and judicious elements of the liberals and the ultramontanes who will allow it to carry out its plans.” This policy of attempting to rule through a coalition of contending nonsocialist parties paralleled Chancellor Bulow’s tactics in Berlin. However, Podewils had as much trouble standing “above the parties” as his Imperial counterpart. In Bavaria, as in the Reich, the | first decade of the twentieth century was a time of exacerbated political tensions. Between 1906 and 1908 the Bavarian Center party forced the government to introduce more democratic procedures into parliamentary and municipal elections. These major defeats for the liberals, who based

238 + ACTIVIST MODERNISM much of their power on franchise restrictions, indicated that Podewils was forced increasingly to tip the political balance

| in favor of the Center.’

Catholic legislative successes encouraged local morality leagues to renew the anti-modernist agitation that had char-

_ acterized the Lex Heinze movement. In Munich populist opposition to modernist culture became focused around Armin Kausen (1855-1913). Originally a Catholic journal- | ist in the Rhineland, Kausen came to Munich in 1889 to edit

the Miinchener Fremdenblatt, which launched vicious verbal assaults and made false accusations against the Modern Life Society two years later. From 1897 to 1904 Kausen edited Die Wahrheit, which he transformed from Munich’s

most virulently anti-Semitic newspaper into a staunchly conservative Catholic journal that regularly attacked the modern movement. In November 1903 the Bavarian minis- | ter of religion and education justified the disbanding of the Academic-Dramatic Society by citing Kausen’s denunciatory editorial in Die Wahrheit.’ In 1904 Kausen launched a totally new journal, the Allgemeine Rundschau, which soon became a formidable weapon against modernist culture. In May 1906 Kausen expanded his activities from aggres-

sive journalism to mass mobilization by founding the Miunchener Mannerverein zur Bekampfung der offentlichen _ Unsittlichkeit (Munich Men’s League for Combating Public

Immorality). By July the organization numbered 2,400 members, and within eighteen months it could boast 53,510

affiliates throughout Bavaria.* Although the bulk of this membership came from the lower middle classes, the Men’s _ League included prominent politicians like Georg von Orterer and Georg von Hertling, leaders of the Center in the Bavarian parliament and the Reichstag respectively. By means of mass rallies and petitions, the Men’s League attacked the modernist “immorality” that Kausen castigated in

his journals. In November 1907 Kausen boasted that this | agitation had led to the trial and conviction of vendors of cheap reproductions of “pornographic” art.’ This attack on

Failed Compromise, Renewed Assault + 239

the suppliers of Munich’s Hanschen Rilows and Dr. Golls was followed by similar assaults on modernist galleries, booksellers, and theaters. Among them was Vallé’s Intimes Theater. The story of the Intimes Theater cabaret—not to be confused with Halbe’s short-lived venture of 1895—-provides insight not only into the mechanics of anti-modernist agitation but also into the effects of commercialization on modernist culture. The Intimes Theater was one of the many dubious theatrical enterprises established by Josef Hunkele (b. 1867), who used the stage-name “Vallé.” This would-be

Marquis of Keith was a cultural parasite of the first order. He made his living from second-rate imitations of first-rate ventures. Whereas the Scharfrichter had hoped to raise variety shows to the level of high art, Vallé succeeded in pulling cabaret down below the level of vaudeville.

| In September 1901 the Miinchener Post had reported that the “Miinchener Tingel- Tangel Direktor Vallé” had opened a putatively “original Munich cabaret” in Berlin under the name “Die Zwolf Scharfrichterinnen.” This patent plagiarism of the Elf Scharfrichter did not fare well in the Prussian metropolis, so Vallé’s troupe returned to Munich and made guest appearances under various names at several different vaudeville halls. On January 30, 1904, soon after the demise of the real Scharfrichter, Vallé opened a cabaret named “Die Sieben Tantenmorder” (The Seven Aunt-Slayers )—a ref-

erence to “Der Tantenmorder,” one of Wedekind’s most popular songs. Advertisements announced that the new cabaret would consist of members of the defunct Scharfrichter. Opening night revealed, however, that Vallé’s standard ensemble had been augmented by only three former members of the famous cabaret: Heinrich Lautensack, the soubrette Dora Stratton, and Hans Dorbe, known for his

pleasantly ironic songs about the Bavarian army. A police observer noted that the new venture “was in no sense a replacement of the Elf Scharfrichter and their productions; rather, it seems to be one of Valle’s repeated feints [Tau-

240 + ACTIVIST MODERNISM

schungsmandéver ] to attract an audience.” Although Vallé promised his spectators that his program would be “infused with a genuine Szmplicissimus spirit,” reviews in Munich’s

newspapers predicted that the mediocre cabaret would not , last long. This prophecy soon proved true, and Vallé took his troupe on tour for the summer of 1904.° Even though the members of the Elf Scharfrichter had ridiculed Vallé as the “hyena of cabaret,” he was in fact able to outlast his more illustrious counterparts.’ Undaunted by

the failure of the Sieben Tantenmorder, he returned with

his troupe to Munich in October 1904 and formed the ‘““Miinchener Kinstler-Kabarett-Intimes Theater.” This time Vallé was able to attract a sizable audience by hiring

Wedekind for nightly appearances. The popular

Burgerschreck-balladeer detested his cabaret appearances more than ever, but financial necessity forced him to keep performing until 1906. Vallé paid him correspondingly well: for example, Wedekind earned six hundred marks at the Intimes Theater in July 1905, a sum that many writers would have envied.°

Wedekind’s presence brought Vallé not only a greater audience but also increased police surveillance. An officer of the law noted that, even though the performance of Decem-

ber 4, 1904, was “heavily attended by the better-dressed classes,” Wedekind’s performance was not above reproach: “Frank Wedekind sang, among other things, a song about two dogs in heat and a song entitled ‘For the Young Man.’

Both ‘ballads’ deal with activities relating to the sexual drive, | the former one between a dog and a bitch and a young man and a young woman; the latter one concerns the fatigue of a youth and a man after the sexual act. The other ballads had a similar content and were in general fit to disgust non-perverted people.”’ Wedekind’s songs kept the censors busy. A tightening of standards could be inferred from the fact that

in May 1905 the censor prohibited the performance of “Der | Zoologe von Berlin,” a rather tame Wedekindian satire on lese-majesty laws which the author had sung often at the Scharfrichter. The Intimes Theater soon was compelled to

Failed Compromise, Renewed Assault - 241 hold occasional “closed” performances in order to stage prohibited works. In February 1905 the cabaret sponsored a re-

stricted presentation of the third act of Pandora’s Box, wherein Lulu is murdered by Jack the Ripper.” This was a sensational event for Munich, which had seen the controver-

sial play only once in its entirety, at a closed performance at | the Schauspielhaus in March 1904. Financial considerations, rather than any intrinsic love of

modernist art, induced Vallé to sponsor Wedekind. Vallé systematically capitalized on the clichés of modernism in a most obnoxious, and often fraudulent, manner. Especially when his troupe was on tour, he would claim that the In-

times Theater was the legitimate successor to the Elf Scharfrichter. Aside from the regular appearances of Wede-

kind, there was no justification for this contention. Vallé’s | assertion during an appearance in Vienna that he had hired ‘almost all members of the Elf Scharfrichter” was an outright lie, as was the advertisement in a Berlin newspaper which asserted that Mary Irber, Vallé’s most popular soubrette, had been a member of the Scharfrichter. The Munich police assessed the situation correctly when they warned their counterparts in Salzburg that the touring Intimes Theater was at best a “bad imitation” of the Scharfrichter."”

Such “imitation” of modernist ventures often took the form of outright plagiarism. At times poems from Jugend would be used without acknowledgment of the original source, and vignettes by Thomas Theodor Heine, the famous Simplicissimus illustrator, would be reproduced on posters advertising the Intimes Theater without the artist’s consent.'’ Moreover, Vallé’s troupes sometimes toured under the name “Kabarett Simplicissimus.” This constant evocation of the Scharfrichter, Jugend, and Simplicissimus indicated that those names had acquired both commercial appeal and the dubious status of clichés. Such linguistic vul-

garization began to plague the modern movement as a whole. At the same time that the Jugendstil movement was

falling into disgrace owing to the mass production of art nouveau kitsch, the ventures of men like Vallé were giving

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the word “cabaret” the dubious connotations that it has in popular parlance today. Whereas cabarets had originally been considered artistic institutions (or, at worst, “artsy” vaudevilles), Vallé and his kin gave the genre its current popular association with striptease shows. Marc Henry’s promise to show his audience

“piquant” scenes during the last program of the Scharfrichter had indicated that even the most artistic cabarets

were compelled to appeal to the voyeuristic desires of the | audience. The much less scrupulous Vallé pushed “piquant” scenes to the furthest limit of the law. During a performance

of the Intimes Theater in Nuremberg, in June 1906, a reviewer for a local newspaper noted that the program provided “‘a sampling of the most modern art of décolletage”’ and concluded: “Slowly but surely the Intimes Theater 1s retreating from its artistic presentations and seems to be sinking to the level of a mediocre vaudeville.” This tendency had been under way by September 1905, when Vallé introduced ‘““The Wedding Night,” the first of a series of strip-

tease numbers. This scene of a woman undressing for her wedding night was performed 154 times by May 1907, and it continued to be a hit until the Intimes Theater was forcibly closed in 1909.'* On no less than three occasions the skit was prohibited by the police for long stretches of time, but Vallé

invariably managed to have the prohibitions rescinded by

promising that future performances would be decent. Whenever “The Wedding Night” was banned, Vallé could mount skits like “After the First Ball,” in which a young woman undresses after her first dance, or “In the Bathtub,” where actresses could show off the latest bathing fashions. Vallé hired a rotating series of actresses to fill these roles and

thus keep up public interest 1n the redundant scenes. The - most highly touted of these starlets was Mary Irber, whose

| special number was a suggestive dance entitled, ironically, “Die Frauenbewegung” (The Women’s Movement).

The police were sorely annoyed by Vallé’s “desire to accommodate to the greatest possible extent the taste of a

, Fatled Compromise, Renewed Assault + 243 certain part of the public for strip-tease scenes [ Entkleidungszenen |.” he thickness of folders on the Intimes Theater in Munich’s police archives gives some indication of the amount of time that the officers of the law had to expend on that second-rate cabaret. Vallé submitted for approval large numbers of songs and skits which had to be read, evaluated, and either approved or rejected. ‘The police complained that “between November 1 and December 14, 1906, no less than

eleven skits and twenty-two songs had to be rejected” —

| clearly a waste of time for all parties concerned. Furthermore, the police continually had to send observers to verify whether the skits and songs were being performed in a de-

cent fashion. In April 1907 the police reported that “only through constant supervision can the Intimes Theater be prevented from exceeding the stipulations of its concession.” Police observers were required to note every detail of dress and undress, as the following report from March 1909 indicates: “She wore a very short little skirt, much like those of ballerinas, and shoes and stockings which came only halfway up the calf. The legs were bare from the calf to far be-

yond the knee, approximately to the middle of the thighs. The underwear did not consist of the opaque ruffled skirts

worn by ballerinas, but rather simple skirts and panties. | While dancing, her main endeavor was to raise the skirts far above her behind (when seen from the back) and above her pubic area (when seen from the front).””’ One might well wonder why the police did not simply re-

_ voke the concession of the Intimes Theater. Such a move was considered as early as September 1905 and again in April 1908. However, as long as there was no major public or political outcry (on the level of Schadler’s assault in the Landtag on the Academic-Dramatic Society and the Elf Scharfrichter), the police refrained from crushing the Intimes Theater for fear of alienating liberal opinion. Police observers constantly noted that the Intimes Theater, like the Scharfrichter before it, drew its public from the “better classes” of society.'* For reasons that are not entirely clear, it

244 °* ACTIVIST MODERNISM

became fashionable for the upper classes to attend the Intimes Theater. Even young Wittelsbach princes could occa-

sionally be seen at the shows. Mary Irber had become something of a tongue-in-cheek mascot for the artistic com-

munity, and her appearances at carnival balls and benefit

concerts were ostentatiously applauded."” | The popularity of Mary Irber and the Intimes Theater among the “better classes” could not protect them from morality campaigners in the long run. Vallé successfully sued two Catholic newspapers—the Bayerisches Vaterland and the Augsburger Postzeitung—for accusing the Intimes The-

ater of gross indecency.'° However, he met his match in September 1908, when Kausen’s Allgemeine Rundschau de-

nounced the Intimes Theater as a “workshop of shameless

obscenity.” The scathing article left Vallé no choice but to | seek legal redress. During the trial for libel, which took place on January 12, 1909, Kausen read aloud one of the cabaret’s

more offensive skits (which dealt with the seduction of a minor), and he brought forth a string of witnesses who testified that Mary Irber “imitates the movements of sexual intercourse while singing some of her songs.”'’ The highly publicized evidence was so damning that Kausen was declared innocent of libel, and the police were compelled to revoke Vallé’s concession on January 27. Kausen’s testimony at the trial was cited explicitly as the reason for the revocation.

The Intimes Theater continued to perform until midMay, while Vallé appealed the revocation of his license as | well as his libel suit against Kausen. His adversary magnified the assault in the interim. In February and March the Men’s League circulated a petition demanding the closing of the Intimes Theater and similar ventures. The signatories

included Orterer and Hertling, and the petition received the , corporate endorsement of Munich’s conservative Catholic,

Protestant, and Jewish women’s leagues.’® At the same time, Kausen successfully sued Vallé’s lawyer for having circu- — lated a pamphlet accusing him of engaging in morality campaigns for personal financial gain.'” Finally, when Vallé’s

Failed Compromise, Renewed Assault + 245 libel suit was heard by an appellate court at the end of April,

Kausen presented a new barrage of outraged witnesses. Vallé lost his case, and Kausen informed Munich’s chief of police that the protocol of this second trial would be issued ~ “as many thousands of offprints and distributed to members of the better classes of Munich free of charge.””” Soon thereafter Kausen achieved his objective: the Intimes Theater was forced to close its doors on May 15. Within a week the Mu-

nich police gave public notice that no licenses would be granted to such cabarets in the future.’ This is not a tale with a tragic ending. By the end of 1909 © Vallé’s troupe was resurrected along the banks of the Main in the form of the “Frankfurter Intimes Theater.”’” Nevertheless, the story is significant because it underscores some serious conflicts in the cultural life of the Bavarian capital. On the one hand, Kausen and his Men’s League represented the

views of a large number of people who were genuinely | shocked by what they perceived to be a rising tide of moral

depravity. Their opinions were shared by the party that controlled the Bavarian parliament. On the other hand, liberals balked at censorious interference in cultural institu-

tions, however mediocre or tasteless they might be. In February 1909 the Munchener Neueste Nachrichten argued

that the police should not punish the Intimes Theater for , performing works that had passed the censor’s desk. The liberal newspaper considered such actions evidence of police

‘arbitrariness [Willkdr |” and warned: “This legal insecurity is all the more dangerous and destructive for public and private interests in Munich, insofar as the suspicion is all too

well founded that the civil authorities are less concerned with standing on the basis of the law, than with willingly capitulating to reactionary ultramontane influence. And the end of this trend 1s not in sight, given the political situa-

tion.””? |

Despite the participation of Wedekind, the Intimes Theater was not a major cultural enterprise. Nevertheless, its fate was indicative of the political and commercial pressures __

exerted on the modern movement as a whole. Playwrights, |

246 + ACTIVIST MODERNISM

cabaretists, and vaudeville producers faced the commercial pressures of a public that tended to enjoy crudified forms of sexuality on stage. Like Wedekind, the Scharfrichter had been proponents of a liberating eroticism that found expression in “aesthetic paganism” and modernist culture; but as _ soon as Marc Henry—and ultimately Josef Vallé—started aiming for the lowest common denominator of middle-class taste, that eroticism was perverted into sexual voyeurism. Even the Schauspielhaus succumbed to this tendency. Ever since its inception, Stollberg and Schmederer realized that

they would have to subsidize modern drama through the performance of French and German farces. By 1910, however, these boudoir comedies had become so crude that the police complained about Stollberg’s productions of “‘the latest French farces, whose viability is based solely on the extremely despicable trick of employing insipid striptease and bed scenes to speculate on the lasciviousness of the public.”

The police threatened to ban completely all such farces un- | less Stollberg cleaned up his performances, though the chief

of police privately acknowledged that a few such works “might not be entirely dispensable from the standpoint of the box-office.”’**

While recognizing the commercial demands posed by a “lascivious” public, Stollberg tried to keep modern drama and boudoir farce separate. However, for morality campaigners like Kausen, the difference was miminal: he could see no distinction between the liberating eroticism of Wedekind’s plays and the sexual voyeurism of French farce and the Intimes Theater. Kausen and his associates were all too

willing to believe Vallé’s repeated claim that the Intimes Theater, the Elf Scharfrichter, Jugend, and Simplicissimus were facets of the same culture. Fortunately, numerous peo-

| ple in Munich did attempt to distinguish between pornography and serious artistic attempts to deal with sexuality. Their efforts to define the thin and often fluid line between the two acquired institutional form in the Zensurbeirat of 1908.

Failed Compromise, Renewed Assault + 247

The Limits of Compromise: Munich’s Censorship Council The first years of the twentieth century witnessed the imposition of increasingly stringent regulations, not only on “sec-

ondary” theatrical ventures like the Elf Scharfrichter, the ~ Academic-Dramatic Society, and Vallé’s Intimes Theater, | but also on more established theaters and recognized dramatists. Wedekind spent the turn of the new century in invol-_ untary confinement for having ridiculed the Kaiser in the

pages of Simplicisstmus. His position as chief lyric satirist of , that journal was taken over by Ludwig Thoma, a staunchly

liberal and anticlerical writer whose immensely popular plays ridiculed Bavarian politics. In 1906 it was Thoma’s turn to sit in jail for six weeks, after having satirized Germany’s morality leagues in the pages of Simplicissimus.”’ Just as Wedekind used the enforced leisure of imprisonment to write Keith, Thoma bided his time with the composition of Moral, a comedy centered around complications that develop when the police discover that prominent members of a morality league are regular customers of a high-class pros- titute. In general, the increasing audacity of modernist writ-

ers and the growing outspokenness of anti-modernist moralizers resulted in an intensified censorship of the stage.

Ernst Miiller-Meiningen, the leader of Bavarian leftliberalism, declared in the Landtag: “Until 1901 one scarcely

heard about theater censorship in Bavaria. But from 1901 to | 1907 the theater censors went about their business in a

1908. |

_ rather rigorous manner.””° The increasing conflict between censors and modernist playwrights led to the creation of the

Munich Zensurbeirat (Censorship Advisory Council) in From its inception, the Censorship Council was primarily

concerned with the dramas of Frank Wedekind. Aside from | Oaha (1907), Hidalla (1904) was the last play in which Wedekind analyzed the impact of commercialization upon cultural production.’’ After 1905 increasing financial success

248 + ACTIVIST MODERNISM as well as the beginning of a troubled marriage with the actress Tilly Newes induced him to cease attacking exploit-

ative commercialism and to resume the dramatization of sexuality that had marked his earlier works (Spring Awakening, Earth Spirit, Pandora’s Box). However, sexuality remained very much a taboo topic for Bavarian stages. Tod

und Teufel (Death and the Devil), which Wedekind wrote in 1905, was a case in point. The play, set in a brothel, criticized two contemporary views of “women’s liberation”: the

belief that women should refrain from sexual activity in order to free themselves from male domination, and the contention that sexual promiscuity would bring true happiness

to women. The published play was confiscated upon its ap- | pearance in Munich in February 1906. Although the script was released for sale a month later, Stollberg’s request to perform the work was denied on June 11.*° Nine days later, in the Bavarian Landtag, August Fischer, a liberal delegate, denounced this suppression of a serious and certainly non- | pornographic work. After attacking censorship in general, and the ban on Tod und Teufel in particular, Fischer suggested that a commission of experts should be established to draw up guidelines for censorship and to counsel the police in especially difficult cases. Although he believed that such a

body would moderate police interference in theatrical affairs, Fischer stressed that it would have a purely advisory | function; the police would still be empowered to reject any recommendations that might be made.” Fischer’s proposal was studied by the Munich police,

whose censorship policy was “to maintain a middle course—excluding all extreme demands—by opposing violations of public peace, order, morality, and safety but also by keeping open a path for art, which is constantly striving in new directions.” This laudable policy was easier to formulate in writing than to maintain 1n practice. [he growing power of the Center and the morality leagues forced the police to impose more rigorous censorship, but all such assaults

| on cultural freedom raised storms of protest from liberal politicians and literati. [he police soon realized that a blue-rib-

Failed Compromise, Renewed Assault + 249

bon committee of the kind proposed by Fischer might relieve them of some of the public onus of their repressive du-

ties. The chief of police informed the minister of the interior: “The backing of ‘expert opinions’ or a ‘censorship council’ can be seen politically as a type of safety valve visa-vis the public, as a welcome diminution of official respon-

sibility toward the outside world.” Such a commission would of course have to be selected to accommodate liberal and conservative positions, without deviating from the middle course: “Without overlooking the moderns, it must take into account men of conservative persuasion who through their entire activity up to now guarantee that censorship will

not lose its rightful and legitimate position as a positive, state-supporting, nationalist, and monarchist institution.”*” This rather candid statement paralleled similar policies conducted in the political sphere by Podewils. As we shall see, both attempts at mediating conservatives and liberals proved equally futile.

The minister of the interior approved the suggestion of the chief of police to create an advisory committee consisting of “artists, writers (especially playwrights), doctors, educators.” The inclusion of doctors and educators reflected contemporary concerns over the effects of “immoral” art on the

mental state of adults and the moral fiber of youth. Politicians and churchmen, who might be directly subjected to political and clerical pressures, were to be excluded. A list of

suitable “experts” was drawn up, and in February 1908 twenty-five dignitaries were invited to join the Censorship Council. All but one agreed to serve, even though Ernst von

Possart correctly noted in his acceptance letter: “A difficult | task, to balance wisely the ethical demands of the conservative parties and the pressures of the modern elements!””*! The twenty-four committeemen included three Gymnasium and five university professors (mainly of classics and Ger-

man literature), four doctors, six artists and writers, three playwrights (Max Halbe, Josef Ruederer, and Wiihelm Weigand), and three members of the court theater (Possart, as well as Jocza Savits and Fritz Basil, both directors).

250 + ACTIVIST MODERNISM There was a slight preponderance of Protestant over Catholic members.

Given the objectives of the police, the committee was chosen extremely well. There were no radicals of any persuasion, and liberal playwrights like Halbe and Ruederer were balanced by staunch conservatives like Max Gruber and Alfred Mensi-Klarbach, members of the Men’s League who would soon number among Kausen’s witnesses against the Intimes Theater.*” The announcement of the composition of the Censorship Council met with a predictably mixed public reaction. The Social Democrats claimed that censorship should be abolished altogether; the liberals welcomed the inclusion of Halbe and Ruederer, but deplored the committee’s purely advisory capacity; and Kausen complained that no conservative playwrights or Center politicians were included in the group.”’

The twenty-four “experts” were divided into four subcommittees to evaluate on a rotating basis any plays that proved to be especially problematic from the standpoint of censorship. The Censorship Council began its work at the end of April 1908, and its first decision drew it into the thick of controversy. In 1907 Max Reinhardt, whose Berlin troupe was making a guest appearance in the Schauspielhaus, applied to the Munich police for permission to perform Spring Awakening, which was being played with tremendous suc-

cess in Berlin. The police had denied Reinhardt’s request (amid a storm of protest in the liberal press), so Stollberg resubmitted the play for evaluation as soon as the Zensurbeirat was organized. To the dismay of the police, all but one of the committeemen voted to overturn the ban. Few of the “experts” admired Wedekind’s drama, but all agreed that it was a serious work which, with proper cuts, could not be considered immoral. It would have been highly undiplomatic to overturn the first decision of the blue-ribbon commission, so the police reluctantly allowed Stollberg to stage Spring Awakening.”*

The liberal Miinchener Zeitung declared that “the first act of the commission is definitely guaranteed to inspire

Failed Compromise, Renewed Assault +. 251

confidence,” but the Catholic Augsburger Postzeitung fumed: “The ruling circles have to be not only deaf, but also blind, if they don’t see what terrible, immeasurable damage

is inflicted upon morality, and thus upon the health and strength of a people, when its ethics are poisoned and destroyed from the stage. Is the Christian population totally defenseless against such attempted poisoning? And is there

no one in the ruling circles who would just once have the courage to speak an honest word?” Evidently the fears of such moralists were not entirely unfounded: immediately after seeing a performance of Spring Awakening in Vienna, the adolescent Adolf Hitler was inspired to walk through a prostitutes’ alley. However, he let his curiosity be satisfied

with purely visual impressions.” |

Armin Kausen mustered the soldiers of his Men’s League to do battle with Spring Awakening as soon as the Censorship Council’s verdict was announced. In a scathing article

, in the Allgemeine Rundschau, he declared that the Censorship Council might as well be composed of Wedekind, Schnitzler, Hirth, Conrad, Vallé, Mary Irber, and the staff | of Simplicissimus. In June the Men’s League lodged a protest with the minister of the interior, and two months later Spring Awakening became the subject of debate in the Bavarian Landtag. Although a liberal delegate called it ‘‘an extremely fine play,” a Catholic representative declared that it included “just about every type of moral perversion that one can find in young people.”’® Despite such protests, Spring Awakening was successfully performed at the Schauspielhaus in November under Wedekind’s personal direction. The conservative outcry did have some effect on the Censorship Council, which proceeded to recommend the prohibition of two other plays by Wedekind in the fall of 1908. One was Oaha (1907), a transparent satire on Albert Langen and the editorial boad of Simplicissimus, against which Wedekind continued to harbor resentment owing to the circumstances of his imprisonment in 1899. Because the play

maligned living individuals, the Censorship Council suggested that it be banned. Simultaneously, all evaluators of

252 + ACTIVIST MODERNISM

Pandora’s Box, with the exception of Halbe, recommended | upholding the prohibition of that play on account of its brutal ending, the disemboweling of Lulu by Jack the Ripper.*’ Wedekind used all means at his disposal to overturn these bans. In the fall of 1908 he even wrote a short play that de-

fended the second of his Lulu dramas: ‘As for the moral dangers that a public performance of my Pandora’s Box would entail, I have discussed all possible angles of that question in my one-act play, Die Zensur (Censorship).””* In that work the writer Buridan, an obvious self-portrait of the author, claims that the ultimate purpose of his dramas 1s ~ to reconcile the spirit and the body, “holiness and beauty,” which have become sundered in the modern world.*” Zen-

sur easily passed the censor’s desk and received its world premiere at the Schauspielhaus in July 1909. Nevertheless, | it failed to change the opinions of the police or the Censor- | ship Council concerning Pandora’s Box. In October 1910 the commission again recommended upholding the ban on that play, which had been resubmitted in somewhat modi-

| fied form. This did not stop the Schauspielhaus from presenting a closed performance of the work the following month. The production, which was attended by 220 theater critics from all over Europe, was a great artistic success.” It convinced Wedekind’s supporters that the play deserved to be performed publicly. By that time Wedekind had become thoroughly infuriated with the Censorship Council, which had also voted to uphold the ban on Tod und Teufel in May 1910 (ostensibly because of the middle scene, which is set in a brothel). He was galled not so much by the fact that the commission had

recommended the prohibition of three of his four plays sub- , mitted to them, as by the fact that the committee repre-

sented a breach of collegiality among the intelligentsia. |

Wedekind contended that it was dishonorable for educated men to judge the works of other educated men in secret ses-

sion. In March 1911 he published a poem entitled ‘“Miinchener Zensurbeirat,” in which he deplored the fact that “honorable gentlemen” would volunteer for such “un-

Fatled Compromise, Renewed Assault + 253

dignified buffoonery.” The following month Wedekind’s publisher, the Georg Miller Verlag of Munich, issued a statement calling for the abolition of restrictions on the performance of Wedekind’s plays. The signatories included Hermann Bahr, Michael Georg Conrad, Lovis Corinth, Ludwig Ganghofer, Karl Henckell, Georg Hirth, Leopold

Jessner, Alfred Kerr, Max Liebermann, Heinrich and Thomas Mann, Hans Pfitzner, Max Reinhardt, Arthur Schnitzler, Max Slevogt, Georg Stollberg, Richard Strauss, and Felix Weingartner—one of the most impressive lists of

names assembled for a cultural-political protest since the days of the Lex Heinze. Among the signatories were Fritz Basil and Max Halbe, both members of the Censorship Council.” Wedekind’s public denunciations and his ability to muster

statements of support from Germany’s cultural luminaries put the Censorship Council under moral pressure to recommend Schloss Wetterstein (Wetterstein Castle) for public performance when it came up for consideration in October

1911. This play, which dealt with sexual abnormalities ranging from nymphomania to sadomasochism, was significantly worse (from both a moral and an artistic standpoint) than Tod und Teufel and Pandora’s Box. Nevertheless, the six evaluators of the Censorship Council voted their unanimous approval of the work. Many justified their decision by saying that they did not want to give Wedekind any more fuel for his anti-censorship fire. Von der Heydte, Munich’s chief of police, was appalled by this exoneration of the play and called a general meeting of the Censorship Council to discuss the matter. However, when only three members of the commission agreed with his arguments for banning the work, he found himself compelled to issue a prohibition on the basis of his own authority (October 30, 1911).*

This single-handed ban on Schloss Wetterstein, against | the nearly unanimous opinion of the Censorship Council, provoked Wedekind to intensify his press campaign. At the end of November he wrote an open letter to Munich’s newspapers, in which he recounted conversations with two offi-

254 + ACTIVIST MODERNISM cial guardians of Munich’s cultural life. In response to Wedekind’s query about the grounds for prohibiting Oaha, von

der Heydte had said: “You have public opinion against you.” When the playwright had asked Albert von Speidel, Possart’s successor as intendant of the court theaters, why he hesitated to perform Wedekind’s innocuous play Der Kam-

mersdnger (The Tenor), the intendant had replied: “Give — me time. It’s not so easy. You know, you have a faction against you.” Having recounted these conversations in his open letter, Wedekind posed three questions:

1. What does public opinion have against me? | |

this party be found? 3. Is it not true that in the Kunststadt Mtinchen the de- |

2. Which faction has something against me and where can

termining factor in artistic questions is not what you can do, but rather, who is against your _ Within days of the publication of this letter Max Halbe, a long-time friend of Wedekind, resigned his seat in the Cen-.

principle.””* | |

sorship Council, “in view of the heightened conflicts of

Halbe’s vacant seat in the Censorship Council was filled ,

by Thomas Mann, who had maintained an attitude of studied indifference to the political concerns of artists since the 1890s. Indeed, he initially had tended to side with the forces of repression. His first published review was a short note on The Council of Love which appeared in August 1895, three months after Panizza’s trial. Mann, who contended that “‘the court has to represent interests other than those of art,” at-

tacked Conrad and the modern movement for deploring Panizza’s conviction. The tone of his article implied that the trial was a trivial affair, a modernist tempest in a Bavarian teapot.’ Five years later he responded to the Lex Heinze affair by composing “Gladius Dei,” a rather vicious story that ridiculed both the Catholics (in the form of a zealous monk) and the modernists (in the person of a Jewish art-dealer who

displays a “modern,” eroticized picture of the Madonna). Similarly, Mann’s only play, Fiorenza (1905), was a noncommittal piéce 4 clef about conditions in Munich. Whereas The Council of Love described orgies at the papal court of

Failed Compromise, Renewed Assault + 255

the 1490s, Fiorenza ostensibly dramatized a struggle between ascetics and libertines in Florence during the same decade. The Catholic populists were represented by the fanatical Savonarola, who had the majority of the Florentine population behind him. The classical and “pagan” arts of the Renaissance, which were patronized by the Florentine elites, were represented by eleven quarrelsome poets and decora-

tive artists who remind one of the Elf Scharfrichter. Mann gave equal dramatic weight to both sides of the argument, _ and left the outcome undecided. His somewhat ironic atti- _ tude toward both sides of Munich’s cultural battles, his de-

| sire to stand ‘‘above the parties,” made Mann a perfect candidate for Halbe’s vacant position. As soon as he accepted the post, however, Wedekind’s friendship with him turned to icy coldness, despite Mann’s apologetic assertion that “my task as a member of the Censorship Council is to warn the overseers of public order against interference with artistically significant work.” At the end of December 1911, a month after the publica-

, tion of his three public queries, Wedekind addressed seven - more questions to each member of the Censorship Council and published the text of his questionnaire in major newspa-

pers throughout Germany. Among other things, he asked | _ whether there was any difference between the Censorship - Council and the Inquisition, and he demanded to know what qualifications the committee members possessed that entitled them to judge his works in secret session. For the time

being, the members of the Council, sans Halbe, remained | undaunted by Wedekind’s attacks, and they concurred with von der Heydte’s suggestion that silence was the best reply to the playwright’s insinuating queries. Indeed, Georg Kerschensteiner, a noted pedagogical theorist and campaigner for

vocational education, hastened to assure von der Heydte that, “‘since I have been on the committee, I cannot complain that the police have shown severity in any way in questions of censorship. I am of the opinion that we have good reason not to be too Jenient toward current manifestations of artistic liberalism [Kunstliberalismus ].”*°

This statement was made at a time when cultural liber-

256 + ACTIVIST MODERNISM

alism was not the only type of liberalism at stake. In the winter of 1911-12 Bavaria was undergoing its worst political

crisis since the death of Ludwig II. The Center faction in the Landtag was withholding funding for transportation be, cause Heinrich von Frauendorfer, the left-liberal minister of | transportation, had acceded to certain demands of a socialist: railmen’s union. Consequently, the Regent was forced to dissolve the parliament for the first time since 1869. In a furious electoral campaign, the liberals and socialists formed a

| united Grossblock to break the Center’s parliamentary majority. The Catholic Party returned from the polls with diminished representation, but with a majority nonetheless. Meanwhile, the Regent had become fearful of the liberals’ alliance with the socialists. Distrust of the Left, as well as the

need to establish a working relationship with the Landtag,

| induced the Regent to appoint Georg von Hertling, the Center’s premier politician, as prime minister in February

1912.*” Moreover, the death of Luitpold in December and the accession of Ludwig, his staunchly Catholic and conservative son (regent, 1912-1913; king, 1913-1918), implied

that crown, cabinet, and parliament were firmly in reactionary hands by the end of 1912. The creation of a cabinet dominated by the Center and the fact that Hertling was a member of Kausen’s Men’s League was bad news for Munich’s modernist community. The liberals and literati of the Bavarian capital prepared for the worst. Liberal members of the Censorship Council who had considered emulating Halbe’s protest-resignation now felt obliged to remain on the committee. Richard du Moulin

wrote fellow committeeman Josef Ruederer: “As for the Censorship Council, I suggest that you stay. [ll do so too. If we leave, then only Gruber, Kerschensteiner, etc. etc. will remain. And we have to stay on, especially when these people get angry, so we can hassle them. The new cabinet 1s staunchly Catholic [stock-schwarz].”* Public debates over Wedekind’s works continued un-

abated throughout 1912. In February, Wedekind published | a satirical poem about von der Heydte, and in March he

Failed Compromise, Renewed Assault + 257

printed an essay ‘On the Psychology of Censorship,” which contended: “It is no spurious exaggeration, but rather a fact, that the gagging of dramatic literature has never been pursued as fanatically as it is today.” He cited the prohibition of Carl Sternheim’s Die Hose and Heinrich Lautensack’s Habnenkampf, two rather Wedekindian plays, as evidence of his contention. On July 2 Miller-Meiningen complained in the Landtag about “the mass prohibition of Wedekind’s plays

without any genuine reason,” asserting that disagreement with the playwright’s views was no justification for “hunting him down like game.” He also argued that the Censorship Council should have a binding voice in censorship decisions, and that its proceedings should allow the play- _ wrights and directors in question to have an opportunity to state their cases. For a short while public pressure seemed to

swing in Wedekind’s favor. Without even consulting the Censorship Council, the police released Oaha for public performance in the summer of 1912, after the editorial board of Simplicissimus stated publicly that it would not be offended

by a performance of that play.*” Wedekind’s latest work, Franziska, the story of a “female Faust,” was allowed to be staged in November, even though a scene critical of censorship was censored. Despite these two modest gains for Wedekind, Munich’s modernist community became increasingly embittered during the first year of Hertling’s regime. An indication of the coming “official culture” was perceived in the third production of the Munich Volksfestspiele. Previously it had sponsored Reinhardt’s versions of Oedipus and the Oresteza in an arena-theater; now it organized a performance of Calderén’s

The Constant Prince at the Nationaltheater. The man cho-

| sen to write an adaptation of this Counter-Reformation drama of religious martyrdom was none other than Georg Fuchs. By all accounts, the dramatic vitality of the original work was lost in this version, which Fuchs (to quote his own words) had attempted to recast as a “Passion play.” The premiere (September 5, 1912) was a fiasco, and medernists like Erich Mihsam were happy to note not only that

258 + ACTIVIST MODERNISM ‘‘the audience rejected this crude chumming-up to the ruling

political party with stunning unanimity” but also that “Georg Fuchs is finished as a manager of Munich culture.”

The accumulated animosity toward the police and the Center cabinet erupted in May 1913, after the Censorship Council recommended the prohibition of Wedekind’s Lulu,

a compressed version of Earth Spirit and Pandora’s Box. The committee argued that as long as Lulu was murdered by Jack the Ripper in the final scene, the play would have to | be considered unfit for public consumption. This ruling

provoked the Munich chapter of the “Schutzverband

| | deutscher Schriftsteller’ (German Writers’ Defense League), an organization founded in 1909 to protect the legal and financial interests of writers, to take action. A large meeting called by the Writers’ League on May 27 passed a

resolution that stated: “membership in the Censorship Council is no longer compatible with the honor of a German

writer.” The following day Kurt Martens, chairman of the

Munich chapter of the Writers’ League, issued an even stronger statement in the Miunchener Neueste Nachrichten:

“The gentlemen who are now at the rudder should think

| twice whether it is politically wise systematically to slight the intelligentsia ... They thereby drive hordes of German writers, who by nature are in no way enemies of the state and of morality, into the camp of principled opposition.” In

this tense atmosphere Thomas Mann, who had actually voted against censoring Lulu, resigned from the Censorship Council on grounds of “collegial considerations.””’ In order to maintain his stance above all factions, he also terminated

his membership in the Writers’ League. |

The resignation of Halbe and Mann indicated that the Censorship Council could not maintain the cooperation of even moderate modernists, and that the experiment in cultural compromise would ultimately fail. The police had established the committee as a composite of liberal and conservative taste, and its members had voted accordingly: only two of five plays by Wedekind had met with their approval. However, the persistent rightward push of Bavarian

Failed Compromise, Renewed Assault - 259

politics forced the police to take an even firmer stand than that enunciated by the committee of “experts,” inasmuch as von der Heydte felt obliged to reverse the Council’s approval of Schloss Wetterstein. A similar situation developed in June 1914 when the police banned Wedekind’s Simson, a morally innocuous play that had been performed without incident in Berlin, Vienna,

Posen, Zurich, and other cities. Although the first months of | 1914 witnessed a marked increase in the activity of Munich’s

censors in general, the prohibition of Simson was an unu-

| sually explicit affront to Wedekind’s supporters in particular, inasmuch as the drama was being staged in celebration of the author’s fiftieth birthday. Because the play had been performed without incident in other cities, the Schauspielhaus had already spent several thousand marks on costumes and decorations when it learned of the prohibition on June 16, a mere eight days before the scheduled premiere. Stollberg was even more incensed when he learned that almost all evaluators in the Censorship Council had approved the play; the ban was based upon the vociferous opposition of Possart, who called the work a “Schweinerei.””? Once again, the (by then) aged paragon of Munich’s classical theatrical culture was able to disrupt the modernist movement. Predictably, the Writers’ League immediately decried the ban and set in

motion a mounting wave of opposition. On June 24, at a birthday banquet for Wedekind attended by many of Germany’s cultural luminaries, Max Halbe again demanded that all members of the Censorship Council resign.’’ Two weeks

later the same injunction was expressed in a resolution passed by a public assembly of seven hundred irate Munich literati. This time the appeal seemed to have an effect on the committee: on July 9 Ruederer reported that it was on the

brink of dissolution.’* However, before the process of disin- | tegration could run its course, the outbreak of war made the debate over modern drama pale into insignificance.

The fate of the Censorship Council and of Wedekind’s plays illustrates well the public passions and _ political pressures that modernist culture could provoke.”’ As in the

260 +: ACTIVIST MODERNISM

days of the Lex Heinze, Munich’s modernist community saw itself threatened by a rightward swing in politics. Unlike 1900, though, the years after 1903 witnessed a losing battle for innovative art in the public sphere. Just as the attempt of Prime Minister Podewils to reconcile Catholics and

liberals had come to naught, the endeavor of the police to form a consensus of liberal and conservative opinion on the issue of censorship was ultimately a failure. Under these conditions it was not surprising that the censors turned a

| deaf ear to Wedekind’s disciple Heinrich Lautensack, who was attempting to dramatize a fusion of Catholic and modernist ideas. The Erotic Catholicism of Heinrich Lautensack ©

Modernist playwrights in Munich liked to remind their public that Catholic culture had not always been hostile to the promptings of the flesh. In The Council of Love and Fiorenza, Oskar Panizza and Thomas Mann portrayed the art- and women-loving potentates of the Renaissance Church, and in Die Zensur (subtitled Theodizee) Wedekind stressed that his own desire to unite holiness and beauty had once been a goal of Catholicism. These nonCatholic authors mainly sought to embarrass their Catholic contemporaries by uncovering the “modernist” elements in _ the Church’s past. The playwright Heinrich Lautensack, on the contrary, a devout Catholic and equally devoted disciple of Wedekind, sincerely sought a reconciliation of Roman faith and modernist culture.

Lautensack (1881-1919), born and raised in and near Passau, was infused with the still very baroque faith that characterized Lower Bavaria at that time. His parents were Kleinbtrger with many ties to the countryside: from their small textile store in Passau, they often carted their wares to

the peasants of the surrounding communities. They hoped | that their son would rise in society, yet still remain attached to the rural world, so they sent him to Munich’s Technical

| University in 1899 to learn surveying techniques. Like so |

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many other young men, though, Lautensack became enthralled by the modernist milieu of the Bavarian capital. Within two years of his arrival, he had become a full-time participant in the Elf Scharfrichter cabaret.”® Franz Blei noted that “Lautensack was the factotum of the Scharfrichter, insofar as this totum implied everything un-

_ pleasant that no one else wanted to do. He was prompter, ticket salesman, role-copier, and secretary ... Among his colleagues Lautensack counted for nothing, or for a good-natured oaf.”’ Lautensack was aware that others took advantage

of him; nevertheless he clung to modernist circles, and to Wedekind in particular. Falckenberg wrote in his memoirs: ‘“Lautensack worshiped Wedekind with the faithfulness and devotion of a stray dog. He was spellbound by Wedekind’s

phenomenally fascinating personality. Wedekind was for him the embodiment of literature pure and simple ... Wedekind . .. did not know what to do with the awkward youth who followed at his heels, and wanted to see as little of him as possible.”’’ Although such recollections cast Lautensack in the role of a country bumpkin captivated by the glamour of urbane artists, he revealed a sincerity and depth of personal vision that many of the other Scharfrichter lacked. This vision first expressed itself in the lyrics and songs that Lautensack composed for the Scharfrichter. For Falckenberg, these works were marked by a “furious confusion of religiosity and sexuality.”’* Lautensack viewed Eros as a medium of spiritual salvation, the realm where the cosmic drama of every Christian was enacted. Sexuality could be selfish and heartless and hence sinful, but eroticism could also encourage humanity, compassion, and sacrifice. Eros created communities of lovers whose emotions and actions prefigured the spiritual communion of mankind promised by Christ. Sex was the medium for perpetuating human society on earth in the same way that Christ was the vehicle for sustaining souls through eternity. In “Der Tod singt” » (Death Sings), Lautensack’s most celebrated Scharfrichtersong, a man dies at the moment that his child, whose eyes are those of Christ, is born. Christ is thus as much a child of

262 - ACTIVIST MODERNISM | | earthly passion and a promise of worldly continuity as he is a sacrifical victim of cosmic passion and a guarantor of the

- soul. In a related poem Mary Magdalene gives birth to Christ’s child at the hour of crucifixion. Here again, Christ’s | promise of life is as earthly as it is heavenly, and sexuality 1s

the means of fulfilling that promise.’’ Whereas Panizza’s sexualization of the Christian pantheon had been purely satirical, Lautensack sincerely believed that the cathexis of eroticism and faith was rooted in the Judaeo-Christian tradition, beginning with the Song of Songs, which spoke of heavenly love in carnal terms. His translation of Solomon’s

| verses was one of Marya Delvard’s most successful numbers at the Scharfrichter. Lautensack’s poems underscored the sensual dimensions of the Christian tradition, but his early plays imitated modernist dramatizations of eroticism. His adulation of Wedekind was based largely on that playwright’s propensity for sexual themes. Indeed, Lautensack’s first dramatic works

were heavily influenced by Wedekind. Like the Melchior/Wendla seduction scene in Spring Awakening, Lau-

— tensack’s Glihhitze (Red Heat) is set in a hayloft, where | the passionate fantasies of a young couple rise with the sum-

mer temperature. [his extended (thirty-minute) dialogue, which failed to gain the censor’s approval, was performed at one of the Scharfrichter’s few “closed”’ performances (No-

vember 10, 1902). Iwo years later Leo Greiner, an exScharfrichter, called Lautensack’s first major play, Medusa, a “scrap from Wedekind’s table.” The work dramatizes the frustrated love between a small-town woman and a visiting childhood friend, now a writer in Munich. In what might well be the most passionate scene in any German drama of the day, the writer, Heinrich, expresses his love for Helene amid a near-total breakdown of language. Lautensack gave

his characters the name Heinrich (Faust) and Helene (of | Troy) in order to demonstrate that his own small-town milieu could be the scene of cosmic drama. In a reversal of Goethe and the classical myth, Lautensack’s Helene is not the most beautiful woman in the world but rather homely;

Failed Compromise, Renewed Assault + 263 the “Medusa” in the title is the nickname given to Helene by cruel classmates during her childhood. Lautensack’s suggestion that people should look beyond external appearances to

the spirit concealed within material forms is a “Christian”

| challenge to both classical aesthetics and Jugendstil, which

| laid such stress on beautiful appearance. Seemingly unChristian, though, 1s Lautensack’s further implication that a recognition of spiritual affinity should express itself in intense sexual passion. [he author underscored this conflation

of conflicting traditions through the following epigraph, which appears on the play’s title page: “Christian art cannot keep pace with modern art unless it uses the same pagan and sinful means and dissimulates as much as possible its pious

and faithful goal.”*! |

Medusa’s sexual passion, frenzied dialogue, fragmented syntax, and reformulations of Faust owed much to Wede-

kind, but its Christian foundation was alien to his spirit. Lautensack soon went his own stylistic way by turning to baroque and Bavarian popular culture for inspiration. The very titles of his poems and anthologies evoke a cathexis of sexuality and popular Catholic religiosity: “Die Heiligsprechung der Hetire,’ “Die Apotheose des Bettes,” “Erotische Votivtafeln” (The Canonization of the Hetaira, The Apoth-

eosis of the Bed, Erotic Votive Tablets). Lautensack summed up his dilemma when he wrote: “I don’t know—I’d like to accept Catholicism as paganism ... or do I see paganism as being Catholic?” He finally concluded that this was an unnecessary dichotomy, which the Catholic church had begun to maintain only in modern times. Like Panizza, Lau-

tensack recognized that as long as Catholicism had sought universal integration—through the age of the baroque, in | other words—it was willing to assimilate popular customs and beliefs, which often had origins in pagan fertility rites.

| However, with the rise of the absolutist state and rationalist - religiosity in the eighteenth century, the “enlightened” elites sought to suppress all vestiges of “‘superstition.” These

attempts to “purify” popular faith threatened to destroy the integration of flesh and spirit embodied in baroque Catholi-

264 + ACTIVIST MODERNISM cism. Lautensack came to believe that by evoking this earlier

and still popular tradition, he was not only vindicating a more tolerant and universalist expression of Christian faith but also defending the culture of his provincial childhood against the urbane elites that treated nim and his kind with unwarranted condescension. This realization gave rise to his

komoadie. |

two greatest dramas, Hahnenkampf and Die Pfarrhaus-

Hahnenkampf (Cockfight; 1908) ts an incisive dramatization of the political climate of the Bavarian countryside during the 1890s. It is set in a fictitious market town in 1895. The year tells all: it was a time of intense popular animosity toward the Catholic church, the Center party, and the liberal

state. The Church was in disfavor because ever since the | 1860s it had been replacing the older generation of tolerant

and generally bon-vivant peasant pastors with a younger group of militant, well-educated, and ascetic priests.°’ The Center party was disliked because it supported Chancellor Caprivi’s reduction of agricultural import tariffs; for this reason the Center lost control of the Bavarian Landtag, because the peasants had thrown their support behind the newly founded Peasant League in the elections of 1893. The liberal state was hated more than anything else for its mas-

sacre of the defenseless peasants of Fuchsmihl in October 1894. The poor inhabitants of that economically depressed village had traditionally gleaned firewood from a forest owned by Ludwig von Zoller, a brother of the head of Luitpold’s privy council. In 1894, however, Zoller chose to termuinate the peasants’ customary right by paying a lump sum to the community. Because this money was immediately impounded by the peasants’ creditors, the villagers faced a win-

ter with neither cash nor fuel. On October 29 over a | hundred peasants entered the forest to glean wood. Zoller notified the local gendarmes, but they were unable to force _ the peasants to disperse. He then called in an infantry regiment, and when the villagers returned the following day, they were attacked by fifty armed soldiers. Even though the peasants showed no resistance, two men in their late sixties

Failed Compromise, Renewed Assault + 265

were bayoneted to death. In the ensuing political storm the minister of the interior and the liberals defended the actions of Zoller and the soldiers. This incident discredited the lib-

eral elites in the eyes of the rural population once and for all.

In Hahnenkampf, which takes place several months after the Fuchsmihl massacre, the hostility of the market town’s population is focused on a new gendarme who has come to assist the village’s well-liked police chief. Whereas the police chief respects the customs of the villagers, the younger gen-

_ darme considers himself a servant of the bureaucratic state whose highest duty is to enforce the letter of the law. Not long before, the same attitude had been displayed by a local forestry official who had killed a poacher—an unwise move, since poachers were traditionally regarded as folk-heroes in rural Bavaria. The whole village had attended the poacher’s _ funeral, and soon thereafter the forester was murdered—by

everyone and no one. The new gendarme encounters outright hostility when he seeks to enforce state laws that prohibit marketing “after hours.”” Meanwhile, he falls in love with Innocenzia, a local woman who returns his affection. He becomes infuriated when he discovers that she is also the

mistress of five local notables (a druggist, a merchant, a brewer, a teacher, and the police chief), and he threatens to _ hand them all over to the courts. The druggist responds by murdering the gendarme, and the police chief reports the death as a suicide. Once again the village has succeeded in eliminating a disruptor of its habits.

At the height of the drama, the druggist tells the gendarme: “You're neither hot nor cold. Priests and you, Ba| varia’s elite. They’re dishonest, you’re stupid. Both wooden. They have so little to do with the true Trinity—in which I believe and before which I will know how to justify myself someday——as you have to do with the law. In your hands the best rule becomes the worst .. . The people’s voice, the voice

of God.” No other play dramatized so bluntly the population’s hatred of arrogant elites, be they of the Church or the state. At the same time, the work depicted rural lenience in

266 + ACTIVIST MODERNISM

sexual matters. Upon the appearance of the drama in 1908, Lion Feuchtwanger wrote: “What Wedekind wants to say is

expressed here in a much more pure and unadulterated - manner.’”°° A comparison with Panizza would have been even more apt. [he author of The Council of Love had made extensive notes of popular opposition to Catholic moralists and state officials, but he never succeeded in giving the

subject dramatic form. That task was left to Lautensack, who showed that rural communities had no trouble reconciling Christian faith, social order, and sexual indulgence. Trouble arose only when outsiders interfered in local affairs.

_ The sexually tolerant peasant mentality was likewise the

subject of Lautensack’s magnum opus, Die Pfarrhauskomodie (Uhe Parsonage Comedy; 1911). The play drama-

tizes the Priesterehen (literally, “priests’ marriages’) that were not uncommon in the Bavarian countryside up to the end of the nineteenth century: rural priests sometimes had : sexual relationships with their cooks or housekeepers, and the local population benignly closed its eyes to this breach of

the vows of celibacy. At the beginning of Lautensack’s “comedy,” Ambrosia (the cook) has to leave the household of Achatius (the priest) in order to deliver her child. She is replaced by Irma, who soon begins an affair with the new deacon, Vincenz. Neither of these couples considers their relationship sinful, as Achatius tells Ambrosia: ‘““‘What are we? ~ Humans. I, too, am only human. That’s what original sin is all about. If only so-called marriages, Christian marriages, if only all were as sincere as ... as between us two! That’s not, that’s no sin at all.” Such relations need not stand in the way of “faith” or “eternal salvation.”’®’ Feelings of guilt arise only

| when Achatius and Irma have an affair while Vincenz is away for a weekend. After that, the elder priest and the new

cook feel that they have committed adultery, in the true sense of the term, and only with great difficulty are they able

to restore the harmony of the parsonage. __ In his Pfarrhauskomédie, Lautensack attempted to dram-

atize what he considered the true spirit of Catholicism, which stood in marked contrast to the dogmatism and asceticism of the Church hierarchy of his day. His old-fashioned

Failed Compromise, Renewed Assault + 267

priests and peasant cooks accept original sin, sexuality, and worldly life as integral parts of God’s benevolent order, in

which salvation is guaranteed to those who are sincere in faith and honest toward others. In Lautensack’s presentation of the peasant world view the overriding importance of good intentions, even though the consequences might break canon or civil law, is analogous to the spirit of peasant culture that Kandinsky had observed and admired in Russia. Both Lau-

tensack and Kandinsky viewed peasant societies as states in | which the directness of personal relations allowed one to | distinguish good from evil instinctively, on the basis of the spirit that infused the act. Such was the faith that Lautensack considered “Catholic,” genuinely “universal” in the original sense of the term.

| Hahnenkampf and Die Pfarrhauskomodie were immediately recognized as major literary works, and theaters throughout Germany and Austria sought to perform them. Nevertheless, except for a production of Hahnenkampf in Vienna (1911), censorship prohibited their staging in the

rest of Central Europe. The murder of the gendarme in Hahnenkampf and the guiltless sexuality of the “celibates” in Die Pfarrhauskomédie were more shocking to the state and the Church than anything written by Wedekind. These prohibitions were an especially hard blow to the impoverished Lautensack, who kept himself alive by performing on Germany’s second- and third-rate cabaret circuits. After the collapse of the Scharfrichter, he performed for a while with Vallé’s Sieben Tantenmorder, but worse was yet to come: ‘‘As a former member of the Elf Scharfrichter, I was dependent upon earnings from ever more vile and stench-filled cabarets, down to the brothel of the Tenth Muse in M[agdeburg |], where I had to wade among the dregs of humanity.” The disgusted Lautensack quit the cabaret in 1909 and

took odd jobs in Berlin as a translator, journalist, and even , writer of screenplays for films.°* He protested the censor-

ship of his plays in public letters that appeared in Die Schaubtihne (October 1910) and Die Aktion (January

1912)—but to no avail.” |

The failure of the Censorship Council to achieve a con-

268 - ACTIVIST MODERNISM sensus of liberal and conservative attitudes toward modern drama paralleled the censors’ deafness to Lautensack’s fusion of Catholic and modernist values. ‘The anti-pluralist mentality of resurgent political Catholicism destroyed both of these

attempts at cultural compromise. Modernist playwrights and liberal politicians were not merely on the defensive; they were clearly losing their respective struggles. This inability to ward off reactionary pressures in the realm of state politics and cultural policy eventually gave rise to modernist activism, whose first major spokesman was Erich Mihsam.

Erich Mitihsam and the Origins of Activism

The years that preceded World War I witnessed the progressive radicalization of numerous young writers and artists who demanded political activism (Aktion). Up to then, the modern movement had rarely been “radical’’ in any significant sense, Panizza’s pronouncements notwithstanding. At best, one could point to left-liberal programs of bourgeois reform, as exemplified by certain aspects of Ju-

gendstil, Simplicissimus, or the plays of Wedekind. Repre- | sentatives of this trend did not seek social justice or a transformation of the structures of society, but rather a revaluation of middle-class values. Their political engagement was limited to a defense of the civil and cultural sphere from interference by the state. At times such defensive reactions

could be intense, as illustrated by the Lex Heinze debates. In general, though, left-liberal modernism achieved at best a

“negative integration” into Wilhelmine society. It was granted a certain latitute of Narrenfretheit, or carnival li-

or public morality. |

~_cense, as long as it did not constitute a threat to social order Like carnival license, the critical satire embodied in Simplicissimus and the Elf Scharfrichter could even be considered a safety valve that helped alleviate political discontent. By means of purely verbal aggressions, frustrated liberals could “let off steam” in a politically inconsequential manner.

Referring to the cabaret movement, Ernst von Wolzogen

Fatled Compromise, Renewed Assault - 269

noted: “Che paw with splayed claws that is laughingly slapped upon the knee is much more harmless than the fist clenched in the pocket.” This same fact was admitted by Ludwig Thoma, who wrote in his reminiscences that dissat-

isfaction with the glaring injustices of prewar Germany | “could not always be met with silent misgiving; it had to find expression, and mockery allowed greater emotional release than heavy-handed criticism, because it illuminated in a flash, with incontestible sharpness, the matter in question, and the provocativeness of the thing perceived was softened by the possibility of laughing heartily at it.” The basic inef- | fectiveness of this tactic was underscored by the Mzinchener

Post in 1912: “Despite its unbridled and self-assured spirit, | despite its extraordinary artistic originality, Simplicissimus has not become a political force. It succeeds in creating and spreading a ‘Simplicissimus-spirit,’ but the laughter that it provokes does not result in action and cannot prevent anything from happening. Wit and caricature have become ends in themselves, and they absorb their own force of impact.””° The same could be said of the works of Panizza, Wedekind, and other satirical and socially critical modernists. The essentially defensive stance of the modernist movement insured that the increasingly well-organized spokesmen of cultural conservatism would gain the upper hand in

the long run. After the spring of 1903, whenever Catholic | journalists or politicians winked, chances were good that modernist theaters and dramas would fall. Despite intensive

_ lobbying, Wedekind never saw Pandora’s Box, Tod und Teufel, or Schloss Wetterstein presented on public stages during his lifetime, and Lautensack had even less hope for performance of his work. Since the political impotence of the modernists became increasingly apparent with every passing year of the new century, a growing number of young writers and artists came to the conclusion that political organization and aggressive campaigning were the only means of regaining the public territory that was being denied to modernist culture. This trend resulted in the activist movements that arose on the eve of World War I.

270 + ACTIVIST MODERNISM Although German activism eventually became centered

, in Berlin, it first manifested itself in the deeds of Erich Miithsam in Munich. As a youth in Libeck, Mitthsam (1878-1934) had rebelled against the strict upbringing imposed on him by his father, a druggist with very conserva-

tive National Liberal leanings. As for so many other disaffected children of bourgeois background, vaudeville and parodistic journalism provided outlets for his dissatisfaction. |

In order to gain the pocket money that his father denied him, the sixteen-year-old Muhsam secretly composed satiri-

cal couplets on current events for use by a comedian at a local vaudeville. A year later he was expelled from the Liibeck Gymnasium for having published in the local Social Democratic newspaper a parody of the rector’s nationalistic

diatribes.’' After graduating from the Gymnasium of a nearby town, and after being unhappily apprenticed to one of his father’s fellow apothecaries, Miihsam fled from his provincial lower-middle-class milieu by joining the bohéme —| of Berlin in 1901.

Mihsam rapidly became a well-known and well-liked member of the bohemian community of the Prussian capital.

He eked out a meager living by publishing poems in various journals and by reciting lyrics in cabarets. His verse tended toward either jovial satire or bitter social criticism. The latter was reserved for publication in obscure anarchist journals, and it appeared in his volumes of collected poetry,

Die Wiste (1904) and Der Krater (1909). Mihsam’s lighter works were printed in more “reputable” publications, such as Jugend and Simplicissimus, and they were also performed in cabarets. In 1902 and 1903 Miihsam was a reg-

ular participant in the small cabaret “Zum siebten Himmel,” where he earned the following compliment in Hanns

Heinz Ewers’ survey of Berlin cabarets (1904): “This | unique artistic nature is up to now only a promise, but one that inspires a strong hope of fulfillment.” In 1903 Miihsam also helped to found the short-lived “Cabaret zum Peter Hille.” Nevertheless, like Wedekind, he had little love for his cabaret appearances. He wrote in retrospect: “I never re-

Failed Compromise, Renewed Assault + 271

garded the cabaret, which had become a merchantile institution, as anything other than a source of income. During the many years that I appeared for a longer or shorter time as a

cabaretist, [ never performed anything other than wordgames or other innocuous things. Even when it was re-

quested of me, I always refused to recite serious works before a paying public.”””

The only German cabaret for which Mihsam had any great respect was the Elf Scharfrichter, the immediate destination of his trip to Munich in 1902. Even though stalwarts like Wedekind, Weinhéppel, Henry, and Delvard were away

| on tour, Miihsam was impressed by what he saw, and he met the performers after the show. Already on his second eve-

ning in Munich, he was asked to perform some of his works | at the Scharfrichter. The following morning Lautensack in-

vited him to join the group. Mithsam turned down the tempting offer on account of a romantic attachment in Berlin, a decision that he greatly regretted later. Nevertheless, over the next few years he was able to expand the contacts that he had made in Munich. In 1905, during an extended stay there, he finally became acquainted with Wedekind, Henry, and Delvard. The following year he performed with Vallé’s Intimes Theater, and he also appeared in the Viennese cabaret ‘‘Nachtlicht,” which Henry and Delvard had

founded as a (legitimate) successor to the Elf Scharfrichter.’”* Finally, in 1908, Miihsam decided to settle perma- | nently in Munich. During the first decade of the century Miuhsam fell increasingly under the influence of Wedekind’s works and,

after 1908, of Wedekind himself. In his reminiscences,

Mihsam spoke of his “almost daily contacts over many | years” with Wedekind, whom he considered (along with the

social anarchist Gustav Landauer) “the most significant spirit [Geist] that I have met.”’* Even before he had become personally acquainted with the controversial playwright, Mihsam had become a close friend of Donald Wedekind, who performed his elder brother’s songs in Berlin cabarets.’” These works had considerable influence

| lyrics. | 272 * ACTIVIST MODERNISM

on Miihsam’s own flippant and rather cynical cabaretic Wedekind’s influence on Mithsam’s first two plays was

even more pronounced. Die Hochstapler and Die Freivermahlten embodied two major anti-bourgeois ideas that _

Miihsam had derived from Wedekind: glorification of conartistry and “free love.” Stylistically, neither of Mithsam’s first two dramas was in any way distinguished; both were conversational plays in the style of salon drama. Thematically, however, they represented a radicalization of Wedekindian positions. Die Hochstapler (The Con-Men; 1906), which critics correctly recognized as a poor imitation of the Marquis of Keith,’° made crudely explicit what was implicit in Wedekind’s works—that capitalists are morally inferior to

confidence men. In his play Mithsam tried to direct the sympathies of the audience toward three con-artists who abscond with the three million marks that a capitalist has invested in nonexistent oil wells. The moral of the story is that one can legitimately steal what capitalists have gained from other men’s labor; the one form of “theft” is no worse than

the other. This same point was made in Mihsam’s “Lumpenlied” (Song of a Tramp):

Pray tell, how does the bourgeoisie | | It steals them just as we do.”’ Get guns and gold?—Through burglary:

Wedekind never engaged in criticism of capitalism on such a | | direct and simplistic level—but Wedekind was not as rigor- | ous an opponent of commercialism as Mihsam. Wedekind

, struggled persistently to find markets and an audience for his plays; Miihsam was so suspicious of the cash nexus that he refused to accept money for his serious works. At the beginning of his career he withheld his critical lyrics from the paying public of cabarets, and 1n the spring of 1919, at the height of his political career, he refused to be paid a salary for his services to the Bavarian Soviet Republic. His insistence on a clean anti-capitalist conscience condemned him to perpetual penury.

| Failed Compromise, Renewed Assault + 273 | Die Freivermahblten (Open Marriage; completed 1909, published 1914) was dedicated to Wedekind. The play argues that true love allows for promiscuity—a thesis that Wedekind supposedly preached and that Mihsam certainly practiced. In Wedekindian fashion, Die Freivermahliten dramatizes a paradoxical situation. Although one couple in the play refuses on principle to be legally married, the man regards his partner with as much possessiveness as any conventional husband would. In contrast, another couple (with whom the audience is supposed to sympathize) has decided to marry in order to avoid legal and social complications, but

both husband and wife freely engage in extramarital escapades. Essentially, Mihsam sought to eliminate jealousy and

possessiveness from all human relationships. He believed that the imposition of restrictions on the actions of others

encouraged the characteristics of dominance and subser- | vience that allowed capitalism and the authoritarian state to flourish. Conversely, encouragement of sexual promiscuity ~ would weaken the personality traits that allowed social repression to persist.’° Once again, although Muhsam used Wedekind’s problem-

atization of marriage and sexuality as a starting point, he

| adopted a position that was more radical than that of his master. He noted later in his life: “Very early, Wedekind’s fanfares for a new sexual morality found the strongest re-

sponse in my own personal experience, although the radicalism of his ideas hardly tended toward the extreme social conclusion of demanding polygamistic rights for women as well.” ‘The latter statement was undoubtedly true, inasmuch as Wedekind’s marriage to Tilly Newes was marred by his unfounded jealousy and suspicion, which bordered on paranoia.’” Even though Die Freivermahliten was dedicated to Wedekind, Miihsam included in it a passage that explicitly proclaimed the differences between the two authors. Camillo Rack, a fictional persona of Mihsam, states: “Have you ever read a criticism of anything I have written that did not claim that I am an epigone of Wladimir Frank [Frank Wedekind]?

Look here, I have the proofs for a new play, called Die Freivermiahiten ... A polemical play, in which the problems of

274 * ACTIVIST MODERNISM free love, open marriage, faithfulness, and jealousy are stud-

ied. No critic will ever bother to note the sharp differences __ of thought and diction, and especially of principles and world-outlook, that separate me from Wladimir Frank.’*° Ironically, the passage begins with an imitation of the lines in Pandora’s Box where Alwa speaks of “his” play, Earth Spirit. Mihsam thereby simultaneously disclaimed and acknowledged his mentor. Mihsam not only believed that his play was more radical than the works of Wedekind, he also contended that it was a

new type of propagandistic drama. In its introduction he wrote: “The ensuing work is a tendentious play [| Tendenz-

stick |. It is written with the purpose of arousing support for very specific sociorevolutionary goals through dialogue and illustration. From beginning to end the dialogue consists of variations on a single theme, and it becomes clear that the opinions of the raisonneur [Camillo Rack] are those of the author.” Despite its crudity, Miithsam’s sloganeering style gained the approval of young writers like Ferdinand Harde-

| kopf, who would soon become a contributor to Franz Pfemfert’s journal of expressionistic activism, Die Aktion (1911-1932). In a review of Die Freivermahliten that appeared in Die Schaubtihne in November 1909, Hardekopf castigated the predominance of aestheticism in the theater and expressed the hope that the plays of Wedekind—“the only person who has anything to say to us’ —would inaugurate a new theater of radical morality and social policy: Das

Theater soll radikal wirken. Hardekopf hailed Mihsam as the first proponent of such a theater, a theater that cared lit-

tle about its aesthetic quality as long as it succeeded in changing thought and behavior. Wedekind may have been a Robespierre, but Miihsam was a Jacques Roux—less imposing, but more radical. This analogy, which must have grati-

fied Mihsam, was followed in Hardekopf’s review by a general statement in support of Tendez-Theater and the proclamation: “Let us inaugurate the epoch in which the spirit will become active.””®’

On the very day that this call for artistic activism ap-

Failed Compromise, Renewed Assault + 275

peared in Die Schaubtihne (November 4, 1909), Mithsam was being detained 1n a Berlin jail on charges of having plot-

ted to blow up Munich’s main courthouse, the Justizpalast. These totally fallacious charges stemmed from his continuing efforts to realize the revolutionary practice demanded by Hardekopf. Since the beginning of the century Mithsam had maintained contacts with the miniscule anarchist circles that existed in the Prussian capital. He wrote articles and poems

| for obscure anarchist journals, and he was fined five hundred marks for having circulated an anarchist pamphlet calling upon workers to stage a general strike in 1906. Although Germany’s anarchist movement was pitifully small and ineffective, it was closely watched by the German police, who actively participated in international efforts to stamp out anarchism following the outrages of the 1890s in France and

| Italy. The paranoia aroused by “anarchism’”—most of which was nonviolent—can be measured by the fact that police ob-

servers repeatedly took special note of Mithsam’s appear- | ances in Vallé’s Intimes Theater. However, given his policy of serving only “word-games and other innocuous things” to

| _ the cabaret’s paying public, the police were forced to conclude that his performances “were without political coloration, criticized no state institutions, and were in general dry

and pointless.” Although his cabaret appearances posed no threat to the social order, Miihsam soon developed novel forms of anarchist organization that catered to a nonproletarian Fifth Es_ tate of social dropouts. These projects were inspired in part by Wedekindian drama. In his search for exponents of anti-

bourgeois mores, Wedekind had dismissed the workers’ movement on account of its thoroughly bourgeois work ethic and sexual code. Instead, he contended that figures on the fringes of middle-class society—confidence men, prostitutes, circus artists, literary bohemians—often expressed an

: individual spontaneity and a moral flexibility markedly different from bourgeois ethics. Similar ideas were echoed by

Mihsam in “Bohéme’” (1906), an article in which he claimed that because the Social Democrats merely sought to

276 + ACTIVIST MODERNISM

transform workers into middle-class citizens, true social transformation would have to be brought about by the genuine social outcasts—criminals, vagabonds, prostitutes, and those artists ““who do not debase their art to commercial production.” Miihsam believed that the destructive anarchism

of these groups, their instinctive hostility to the state and bourgeois society, could be transformed into a constructive anarchism of voluntary group solidarity. He concluded his

essay with the proclamation: “Criminals, vagabonds, whores, and artists—that is the bohéme that points the way to the new culture.’”®’

Whereas Wedekind had employed fictional representatives of such groups as dramatic foils of bourgeois morality, Mihsam actively sought to organize their living counterparts into a social force. Beginning in March 1909, he

combed the hangouts of Munich’s down-and-out population to find followers for his anarchist movement. By May he had organized some petty thieves, unemployed youths, vagabonds, draft-evaders, and prostitutes (both male and female) into the “Gruppe Tat.” The purpose of this organization was to give more focus to what Mihsam assumed to be the derelicts’ vague sense of hostility to society and to teach them some elementary forms of group solidarity, such as sharing personal possessions and living in communal quarters. By the beginning of August, in an article entitled “New _ Friends,” he claimed a certain amount of success in his organizational efforts, although rarely more than twenty people attended his meetings. Their public activities were limited

to door-to-door distribution of leaflets urging an end to church membership, and occasional appearances at SocialDemocratic meetings, where their calls for election boycotts or general strikes were met with hostile shouts and some physical roughing-up.”*

What should have remained a pitifully obscure organization achieved sudden notoriety through a curious set of coin-

cidences. The last half of October 1909 saw major public debates in Munich over the execution in Spain of Francisco Ferrer, an anarchist and organizer of nondenominational

Failed Compromise, Renewed Assault + 277

schools. Protest rallies organized by Munich’s societies of freethinkers condemned “the execution of the founder of free schools in Spain as an abominable crime of the Spanish clerics, which reveals in a frightening manner the danger posed by clerics and ultramontanes to our entire political and ethical culture.” Such equations of Catholicism in toto with judicial murder provoked large and equally outraged counterdemonstrations by Catholics, whose posters proclaimed: “It is a battle of life and death .. . The entire Catholic population must rise up and gear itself for battle.” In this state of heightened tension between liberals and Catholics, a sensation was created by a series of incidents that transpired between October 18 and 21: the theft of the escutcheon in front of the Spanish embassy, an explosion that shattered windows on both sides of a street near city hall, and the discovery of three packages of dynamite in the Jus-

tizpalast.°” | Although the police initially searched the homes of Mu-

nich’s prominent freethinkers, a politically imnocuous

suspect was arrested on October 24.°° Under questioning, | Heinrich Kellner, a seventeen-year-old apprentice fitter, admitted that he had stolen some dynamite from a construction site, exploded part of it near city hall as a prank, and hid the rest in the courthouse.®’ The police tended to believe this story until they learned that Kellner had sought refuge

with some friends who happened to be members of Miihsam’s Tat circle. Fearing an anarchist bomb plot, the Munich police ordered the arrest of Mihsam, who was visiting friends in Berlin. On October 29, as he was about to board a train for Zurich to make a joint cabaret appearance with Henry and Delvard, Mihsam was apprehended by the Prussian police. They released him two weeks later owing to a lack of incriminating evidence.” Kellner and those who hid him were quickly convicted of

youthful rowdiness and sentenced to a year in jail, but the ‘Munich prosecutors labored for several months to build a case against Miihsam, whom they had come to consider an undesirable inhabitant of the Bavarian capital. In June 1910,

278 + ACTIVIST MODERNISM _ | he was brought to trial on charges of Gehetmbiindelei, the creation of a secret society with the intention of overthrowing the state. On the basis of testimony by the imprisoned members of the Tat circle, Mihsam was accused of having encouraged theft and violence, and even of having spoken of

| a plot to bomb all of the major police stations of Europe. Reports of the ensuing trial, which revealed the gullibility of both Miithsam and the police vis-a-vis the Fifth Estate, are

among the more amusing documents of fin-de-siécle Munich. Under public questioning by the defense attorney, the

witnesses for the prosecution admitted that their tales of Mihsam’s violent plots were fictitious. Annoyed at the persistence of police interrogators who demanded to hear incriminating evidence against Miihsam, the “witnesses” had concocted outlandish tales of planned bank robberies, “Hollenmaschinen,” and the like. Although this testimony humiliated the prosecution, further statements placed Miibsam in a ridiculous light. The prostitutes admitted having attended the ‘lat meetings in order to find clients. Others contended that they were attracted by the free beer. When asked whether Miihsam had propagated anarchist ideas at the meetings, one witness claimed to have been too drunk to understand anything that had been said. By the end of the

trial, the embarrassed prosecutor withdrew all charges against Mihsam.” In spite of the public ridicule that Mishsam had to endure because of his attempts to organize Munich’s beer-thirsty

lumpenproletariat, his efforts to educate the Fifth Estate persisted until 1912, when a dearth of followers and contin-

ued police harrassment induced him to abandon such endeavors. However, his goal of organizing social outcasts was not discredited in the eyes of all. In a famous proclamation

of 1912, the activist poet and playwright Ludwig Rubiner listed his potential revolutionary “comrades” as “prostitutes, poets, procurers, collectors of lost objects, part-time thieves,

do-nothings, love couples amid their embraces, religious madmen, drunkards, chain-smokers, the jobless, gluttons, bums, burglars, blackmailers, critics, riffraff. And at times

every woman in the world.” A year later Johannes R.

Failed Compromise, Renewed Assault + 279

Becher, a writer at home in the radical bohéme of Munich and Berlin (and later the poet laureate of the German Democratic Republic), proclaimed this “song of freedom”: “You mongrels, you boozers! Clowns! Fops! Onanists! Pederasts!

Fetishists! Merchants, burghers, aviators, soldiers! Pimps, whores! You great harlots! Syphilitics! Brothers, all children of mankind! Wake up! Wake up! [ summon you to a violent

rebellion, to fiery anarchy. I inspire you, I provoke you to

malevolent battle! Revolution! Revolutionaries! Anarchists!””” One must distinguish between writers like Rubiner and Becher, who let their imagination run wild, and Mihsam, who attempted to transform a more moderate version of such ideas into reality. Wedekind had dramatized a communality of attitude among the “parasites” of bourgeois

, society—artists, clowns, prostitutes, and confidence men. Mihsam tried to convert this anti-bourgeois metaphor into social fact by forging an actual community of such people. It

was an initial step, however ludicrous, along the path that

would culminate in the Munich “writers’ revolution” of 1918-1919.

Having failed to organize the social outcasts, Mihsam

| tried to initiate a protest movement among the liberal intel- | | _lectuals. As one of the principal coordinators of protests against the censorship of Wedekind’s works, he hoped that

the intelligentsia’s indignation over the repression of his mentor’s plays would form the basis for more widespread agitation against censorship and the state. In reaction to the Georg Miller Verlag’s statement supporting Wedekind that had been signed by Germany’s cultural luminaries in April 1911, Miithsam expressed the hope that it would not remain

“a list of names with purely statistical value,” but rather broaden into a “powerful and permanent campaign [Aktion |” against “the presumptuous predominance of the police saber in all spheres of public life.” As he feared, the statement of April 1911 remained an “occasional protest,” so Mithsam decided to take matters into his own hands by call-

ing a public meeting on the subject of “State, Church, Police, and Remedial Action.” At this assembly on November 30, 1911, attended by over a thousand people, and in an arti-

280 - ACTIVIST MODERNISM , cle published simultaneously in his monthly journal, Kazn, he attacked the police and the Censorship Council. He contended that “of all cities in Germany, Munich has the most reactionary police”; even Berlin was ‘“‘an Eldorado of freedom compared to Munich.” (This was certainly true with respect to Wedekind’s plays, which received more lenient treatment in the Prussian capital.) Miihsam proposed activism as the only remedy to the situation: “Artists belong in

| the social struggle! They are the chosen ones who must protect the freedom of spiritual life against police intimidation and police authority! They belong on the side of the mal-

| contents and the revolutionaries! ... With protests and witty scribblings alone, they cannot accomplish anything against | those who stand united with the priestly guardians of stupidity and the enemies of culture. Into the battle, artists! Onto the tribunals! Into the streets! Tua res agitur!’”’' Such rhetoric went several paces beyond the vocabulary used by

| the Goethebund at its anti-Lex Heinze meetings, and it foreshadowed the language that one associates with Weimar activism.

Miihsam’s attempts to foment a middle-class protest movement made slow but steady gains. In July 1912 he failed to persuade the “Neuer Verein,” a successor to the Academic-Dramatic Society, to sponsor a public meeting protesting censorship.” A year later he had more success as one of the two major organizers of the protest of the German Writers’ Defense League against the prohibition of Lulu. — He even brought criminal charges against von der Heydte, Munich’s chief of police, on account of supposed irregular-

ities in the handling of the Lulu case. Although these charges were eventually dropped by the public prosecutor, Mithsam’s accusations were widely discussed in Munich's

| press.”* Finally, in July 1914, Miihsam was the chief organizer and main speaker at the large meeting that condemned

the ban on Simson. The resolution adopted by the seven hundred participants not only called for the resignation of the members of the Censorship Council—a demand that al-

most dissolved the committee—but also appealed for the creation of a “strong popular protest movement with the

Failed Compromise, Renewed Assault + 281

goal of completely abolishing a police censorship that has outlived its time and is hostile to culture.” Mihsam proposed that dramatists withhold their new plays until censorship was abolished and that concerned citizens boycott state

institutions (including, he added facetiously, the Hofbrauhaus). He suggested the creation of a “Verein Simson,” a “closed” society whose sole purpose would be the sponsorship of a production of that work.”*

[t is impossible to determine whether a major protest movement against censorship might have been mounted had the war not intervened. The increasing success of Mithsam and Wedekind in staging public protests against the exacer-

bated censorship under the Hertling regime made heightened liberal opposition a likely prospect. Be that as it may, it is significant that Miihsam tried to convert sporadic liberal

protests into a sustained movement of opposition to the state. Like his efforts to organize the Lumpenproletariat, his attempts to galvanize the liberal intelligentsia were part of his endeavor to realize the radical ideas and exploit the politica] tensions latent in the modernist community. Miuhsam’s political agitation heralded the type of activism soon to become associated with the Central European expressionist movement in the second decade of the century, as embodied in journals like Herwarth Walden’s Der Sturm and Franz Pfemfert’s Die Aktion, as well as in the writings

of Kurt Hiller and Ludwig Rubiner. Although one could hardly label Miihsam an expressionist, he maintained. peripheral contacts with that diffuse movement. Indeed, in Oc-

| tober 1913 the first issue of Revolution, one of the few expressionist journals to come out of Munich, opened with Miuhsam’s definition of the journal’s title:

Revolution is the movement between two conditions. One should not imagine it as a slowly turning roller, but as a bursting volcano, an exploding bomb, or a nun stripping herself.

All revolution is active, unique, sudden, and deracinates its own roots. Revolution arises when a condition has become untenable;

282 °* ACTIVIST MODERNISM such a condition may be stabilized in the political or social relations of a country, in a spiritual or religious culture, or in the

character of an individual ... A few forms of revolution: tyrannicide, removal of a ruler, establishment of a religion, breaking old tablets (of propriety and art), creation of a work of art; the sexual act.

A few synonyms of revolution: God, life, lust, ecstasy, ,

chaos. Let us |be chaotic!” |

Perhaps no text better illustrates the foggy conception of “revolution” shared by the expressionists and activists of prewar Germany. The imagery of sudden upheaval, so reminiscent of Panizza, underscores the impulsive and instinctive nature of their activism. Miithsam noted, “I was an anarchist even before I knew what anarchism was,” inasmuch as his urge to revolt was a personal response to what he considered

the intolerable strictures imposed by family, marriage, | school, commercial society, and the state. He hoped that this personally felt sense of injustice, which had inspired Panizza, Wedekind, and many other modernists, could be awakened among the populace at large and channeled into an ac-

- tivist campaign: “This is the purpose of all propaganda and

| all action: to arouse thoughts in minds of a similar disposition, to turn feelings into convictions, and to fulfill yearnings

through the drive toward action.””° | The urge to transform public attitudes toward sexuality and the self had been part of the Jugendstil movement (broadly defined) and Wedekindian drama, but these earlier tendencies were merely reformist and did not seek to change

the basic structures of society. In contrast, the prewar expressionists and activists sought a fundamental transformation of social relations, a dissolution of family and the state. The call for “chaos” was in many ways a call for the carnivalization of society. Like Kandinsky, who is commonly labeled an expressionist, Miihsam and his kin yearned for a new order based upon free expression of individuality. It is | significant that Mihsam and others wrote articles in defense of Fasching, Munich’s carnival season, the only traditional

Failed Compromise, Renewed Assault + 283

context in which the bonds of convention, authority, and marriage were sometimes discarded in practice. Modernists

| like Miihsam protested the intensification of police supervision over Schwabing’s carnival festivities in the early months of 1913; Wedekind even considered writing a play,

to be entitled Der Kriminaltanzmeister, about the gendarmes’ attempts to suppress the “lascivious” dancing that took place at artists’ carnival balls.’ For the modernists, Fasching was not simply mindless fun but a premonition of the sought-for social condition, which could be realized on a

large scale only after overcoming repression of individuality in everyday life. Miihsam’s organization of artists and outcasts as well as his agitation against the state embodied “concrete” means toward his carnivalesque end. Both means and end were woefully illusory.

Mihsam, Lautensack, and Wedekind were all aware that their interests, ideas, and even life-patterns were similar. All three considered eroticism a crucial social and cultural issue in the modern world; they viewed censorship as the greatest

obstacle to the expression of their beliefs; and they were forced to play the Central European cabaret circuit while | censors kept their dramas off of more lucrative stages. Given

these common patterns, it is not surprising that they spoke | out in defense of each other’s works, and that Wedekind provided a modicum of financial assistance to the other two after his less controversial plays became regular fare in mod-

ernist theaters.”> Whereas Wedekind and Mihsam vociferously attacked a censorious state that was giving in to Catholic pressure, Lautensack sought to reconcile Catholic and modernist values. Both strategies were equally unsuccessful. Ultimately there was no simple answer to the modernists’ demand for broader public space in an increasingly reactionary state. The problem demanded a radical solution, which Mihsam alone perceived and sought to realize during the revolutionary turmoil of 1918-1919. Neither Wedekind nor Lautensack lived to witness these

| events. The former died during the war; the latter, like Pa-

284 + ACTIVIST MODERNISM nizza, fell victim to severe psychosis. Lautensack’s inability to

gain public acceptance for his fusion of Wedekindian modernism and baroque Catholicism eventually proved too tax-

ing for his psyche. The following sentence, in which he compared himself to two of Wedekind’s characters, stands out among the increasingly incoherent entries near the end of his diary: “I am Moritz Stiefel and the son of the prosecutor in one. Who buys my books? Who reads them, when the

censors prohibit my best works and the directors are cowards?’ Lautensack’s increasing mental distress came to a head at the graveside of Wedekind, one of the many indirect

| casualties of the war. Wedekind was so weakened physically , by the food shortages of the winter of 1917-18 that he suc-

cumbed to a routine hernia operation on March 9, 1918. Three days later he was buried in the Munich Waldfriedhof. _ While an actor recited commemorative verses that Miithsam had written for the occasion, Lautensack burst through the crowd of mourners, sank down next to the open grave, and screamed: “Frank Wedekind, my teacher, my ideal, my master—your most unworthy pupil!” Fighting furiously, he had to be carried away. So, too, did Mithsam, who broke down crying when he saw his friend of twenty years go insane at the graveside of their common mentor.”

Within a year, Lautensack died in a sanatorium, and Mihsam laid the groundwork for the proclamation of the Bavarian Soviet Republic.

Ag CONCLUSION

4 \" Revolution of the Theater

: ~ and [heaters of Revolution

we 6 WS IN) HINKEMANN, HIS GROTESQUE DRAMA OF

postwar Germany, Ernst Toller has a fairground barker proclaim: In the first booth we’ll show you: Monachia, tattooed lady, with the most wonderful paintings of Rembrandt and Rubens on her front, and the most modern expressionist, futurist, and | dadaist pictures on the behind of her naked body! The lady bares not only her arms, the lady bares not only her legs, the lady bares not only her back, the lady bares all parts of her body, and the law and the church permit her to be seen 0-0-oonly by ladies and gentlemen eighteen and over!

When we consider that “Monachia” is a feminine variant of “Monachium,” the Latin name for Munich, it becomes obvious that the tattooed lady quite literally embodied the state of culture in the Bavarian capital in the second decade of the

twentieth century. Munich presented itself “up front’ as a center of European elite culture: its state galleries housed “the most wonderful paintings of Rembrandt and Rubens,” its Academy maintained the beaux-arts traditions of the nineteenth century, and its Nationaltheater staged operas and the Greek and German classics. “Behind” this veneer of neoclassical respectability, however, there arose a modernist movement that challenged official culture: Jugendstil design and the abstract expressivity of the Blue Rider group represented radical departures from the academic tradition, while the modernist plays of Panizza, Wedekind, and their succes-

sors exploded the conventions of both idealist and realist

286 + CONCLUSION | drama. Munich’s neoclassical “front”’ and its modernist ‘“‘be-

hind” were, however, two subsidiary facets of bourgeois | taste, which generally tended to favor an increasingly sexualized and commercialized vaudeville culture, where underdressed women came to dominate the stage. Even official as well as modernist art often succumbed to this middle-class proclivity for titillating fare, inasmuch as academic painting, _ Jugendstil graphics, and modernist plays and cabarets could be sexually suggestive without being socially redeeming. Those artists and writers who propounded a liberating eroticism that challenged both asceticism and pornography had

difficulty differentiating their products from less serious works in the eyes of the public. In any case, ‘“‘the law and the

church” tended to lump modernist art and commercial pornography together, and to limit access to them or ban them

: outright.

| Toller, a resident of Munich since the fall of 1914, cleverly and accurately portrayed Munich’s cultural scene in the shape of his fairground stripper, who embodies in many ways the crude end-product of the developments that this book has sought to uncover. However, she represents only one strand of the story. After all, the grotesque and socially

critical play in which she appears, Hinkemann, could not have been written without the prototype of Wedekindian drama. Moreover, ‘Toller might not have had the “leisure”’ or

inclination to compose the work had he not been sitting in jail, a result of his participation (alongside Mihsam) in the Munich “writers’ revolution” of 1918-1919. Toller’s carica~ ture of “Monachia,” his grotesquely satirical Hinkemann, and his activist politics were all continuations of the multifaceted developments that had commenced on Munich’s stages at the outset of the twentieth century. To appreciate the “revolution of the theater” that took place between 1890 and 1914, one need only recall the state of affairs that prevailed at the beginning of Luitpold’s regency. In 1890 Munich possessed only two theaters that catered to the educated middle classes: the Nationaltheater, which produced operas and tragedies, and the Residenz-

Revolution of the Theater and Theaters of Revolution + 287 theater, which staged conversational drama and comedies. In addition, the Theater am Gartnerplatz and the Volkstheater, with their repertories of operetta and down-home Bavarian

comedy, catered to the broader middle and lower-middle classes. With such meager fare for a population that reached half a million in 1900, it was no wonder that a vaudeville culture flourished in the 1880s and 1890s. Elite drama was stagnant; popular plays and musicals were insipid; vaudeville was vibrant.

A younger generation of middle-class writers, drawn to drama by personal inclination and century-old adages about the national significance of the stage, sought to revitalize elite theater by bringing it more 1n touch with the times. Although the Munich naturalists failed to launch an independent theater in 1891, they were able to propagate the notion that drama could and should be critical of society. As “‘so-

ciety” in general did not want to hear such messages, intimate forms of theater were devised to cater to connoisseurs of the arts and the liberal upper bourgeoisie, whose sphere of political influence was also becoming more “intimate” as the years wore on. First formulated in Halbe’s Intimes Theater of 1895, this social and cultural exclusivity was institutionalized in the architectural configuration and modern repertory of the Schauspielhaus. [he resurgence of a combative liberal spirit around 1900 led to the creation of a new and aggressive theatrical form, the cabaret, but its assaults were contained

within an intimate context as well. Even though the Elf Scharfrichter became the first victims of the cultural reaction that commenced in 1903, the cabaret movement opened

up new theatrical possibilities that were embodied in two further novelties: the Kiinstlertheater and Reinhardt’s arena stage. Like the Schauspielhaus, these ventures represented innovative conceptions of theatrical architecture and space;

but unlike Stollberg’s intimate theater, they were intended to cater to large sectors of the populace. Whereas most of Reinhardt’s productions set the standards for commercial ‘art theaters,” his arena stage inadvertently inaugurated a theatrical practice that would feed into the mass political

288 + CONCLUSION dramaturgy of the agitational Left and the National Socialist Right. In the case of Fuchs, the desire to devise a stage that would serve authoritarian vélkisch ends was conscious and

deliberate, but he enjoyed no personal success in this endeavor.

The new forms of organizing and presenting drama were matched by an explosion of theatrical genres. Middle-class theaters in 1890 produced classical and epigonal drama and salon plays, but a plethora of new styles arose during the

next two decades. Mihsam held fast to the conventional forms of conversational salon drama, but he used them for

agitational purposes. A stylistically more innovative theater was developed by Panizza and Wedekind, who employed carnivalesque techniques to satirize the injustices of the day and to champion the rights of the body. Much of the style and spirit of these works was passed on to the songs and skits

of the cabaret movement, which Panizza and Wedekind helped bring into existence. During the course of the 1890s,

though, Wedekind’s own style underwent substantial change. While Spring Awakening had been marked by an episodic impressionism that sought to evoke a subjective ex-

perience of adolescent ebullience and despair, his ensuing

dramas—Earth Spirit, Pandora’s Box, The Marquis of Keith—were tightly analytic and anti-psychological works that sought to objectify the dynamics of modern commercial society. Whereas Spring Awakening became the model of early expressionist dramas of adolescent revolt after 1910, Wedekind’s dramatization of modern commerce inspired a treatment of similar themes by Carl Sternheim, Georg Kaiser, and Bertolt Brecht. This innovative playwriting was complemented by reactions against the realistic staging and naturalistic acting of the outgoing nineteenth century. Wedekind’s analytic plays called for an “estranged” manner of performance that con-

| sciously sought to destroy theatrical illusion. In sharp contrast, Fuchs advocated a rhythmic and ritualized style of acting that would mesmerize the audience. More commonly, _ though, acting acquired a new vitality that was introduced

Revolution of the Theater and Theaters of Revolution + 289

to elite stages from popular theatrics via the cabaret. The plays of Panizza and Wedekind, the productions of Reinhardt, and the scenarios of Kandinsky brought circus and vaudeville onto the “polite” stage. Most radical of all, Kandinsky believed that he could dispense with acting altogether: lights, shapes, and sounds could become an aural and

spectacular show in and of themselves. The Munich modernists had, in short, rediscovered theatricality. This new awareness of the potential of the stage became a hallmark of

twentieth-century modernism throughout Europe. Writing in the period 1915-1920, the Russian director Tairov noted:

“True theatrical action moves repeatedly between two poles—mystery and harlequinade.”” And on March 12, 1916, Hugo Ball, founder of the newly established dadaist

Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich, wrote in his diary: “What we celebrate is buffoonery and a requiem mass simultaneously.”* The carnivalization of theatrical styles was

complete. |

The Munich modernists’ prewar innovations in theatrical organization, architecture, playwriting, staging, and acting

were reactions to commercial malaise and political conflicts. While modernist theater changed, commercial taste stagnated; in 1910 as in 1890, French-style farces and vaude-

villes were the preferred fare of the bourgeois public. Nu-

merous modernist ventures were subdued by _ this commercial fact: the Vereinigte Theater (Schauspielhaus/Gérnterplatztheater) devoted most of their combined repertories to operetta and farce; the Deutsches Theater was transformed into a vaudeville; the cabaret movement degenerated into striptease; and the Kinstlertheater was turned into a stage for operetta. Modernists responded to these realities with both critical rejection and creative acquiescence.

Halbe’s Intimes Theater sought to avoid the pressures of censorship and the market by creating an exclusive stage by and for artists; but six years after the failure of that venture, modernists had considerably greater success with the cabaret, another “intimate” stage by artists but for the paying public. Similarly, at the same time that Wedekind developed

290 + CONCLUSION

| an analytic style of drama that castigated the commercialization of the arts, he tried to make his own works more popular by adding elements of song, dance, and vaudeville. Once playwrights had overcome the first commercial hurdle by having their works accepted by managers, they had to face the censor. This barrier became increasingly formidable, since Catholic power waxed along with the modernists’ propensity to address controversial sexual, religious, and political issues. ‘This led to the political radicalization of many dramatists. While Wedekind and other members of the cabaret movement remained within the context of left-liberal opposition, Panizza and Miihsam openly called themselves

anarchists. If the state must be censorious, they said, let there be no state at all. Even Kandinsky harbored anarchist sympathies: for the Russian, as for Panizza and Mihsam, the chaos of carnival was in some ways the happiest condition of all. Of course not all modernist playwrights had left-liberal

or anarchist leanings. Fuchs feared social chaos, and he hoped to consolidate the Volk through a ritual theater that

| prefigured National Socialism’s “aestheticization of pollitics.”

The modernists’ polarization between the anarchist Left and the proto-fascist Right was to a large extent a product of | the fact that the parties of the middle, whether liberal or Catholic, had discredited themselves in the eyes of many literati. The democratization of Bavarian politics, measured by the growth of parliamentary power, entailed, paradoxically, a relative loss of cultural freedom. During the Regency, the Bavarian franchise was expanded, parliament played an increasingly decisive role in political decisionmaking, and fi-

nally a cabinet was formed in 1912 that reflected the attitudes of the Landtag’s Centrist majority. This majority was, however, censorious and even authoritarian at a fundamental level. To be sure, the liberals had been markedly olligarchical in the sphere of politics, insofar as they governed against the will of the electorate. Nevertheless, they sought to guarantee significant latitudes of freedom in personal, eco-

nomic, religious, and cultural activities. In contrast, the

Revolution of the Theater and Theaters of Revolution + 291

Centrists and populists strove to overcome the rule of the liberal minority, yet they also hoped to tighten strictures over personal behavior and everyday life. Familial relations, religion, schooling, and the arts were to be brought into conformity with moral precepts that often were more stringent

than those of the “traditional” past, as modernist admirers

of popular culture’s carnivalesque spirit were fond of noting. This political situation was not unique to Bavaria; it was a

classic case of opposition between “freedom” and “democracy, between the rights of the minority and the will of the majority. But even though this conflict is somewhat endemic to modern societies, it played itself out in Bavaria and in the German-speaking world in a particularly catastrophic manner. As liberalism was crushed between Social Democrats on the left and Bavarian Centrists, Prussian conservatives, and Austrian Christian Socialists on the right, the middle ground of Central European politics eroded. The loss of a viable center forced many modernists to seek salvation in various imaginary peripheries. Munich’s modernists, like the educated bourgeoisie in general, initially sided with the liberal monarchical state, inasmuch as they considered it the best guarantor of cultural freedom. As the Bavarian state gave way to Centrist demands, however, many dramatists

formed anti-censorship campaigns that increasingly chal- | lenged the liberal regime as well. Eventually the frustrations aroused by such left-liberal opposition to a conservative-lib-

eral state induced some modernists to abandon the liberal camp altogether and to flee into the realm of political irreality. [The growing strength of populism indicated that the future of the state lay in the hands of the Volk, and modernist

conceptions of the politics of “the people” betrayed many markings of personal wish-fulfillment. Men like Panizza, Mihsam, and Kandinsky imputed their own anarchist proclivities to the populace—a view that was not entirely un-

founded but certainly not true to the degree that they imagined. At the other extreme, a theatrical theorist like Fuchs perceived the Volk as a fragmented entity that desired

292 + CONCLUSION a rigid form to “free” itself from its atomized condition. For him, the artist was a “liberating” dictator. This state of affairs was a watershed in the political history of the German stage, which had long been considered a

locus of liberation. At the turn of the preceding century, German writers had seen theater as a tool for forging a Na- | tion of intellectually enlightened, emotionally balanced, morally upright, and politically responsible citizens. In contrast, modernists after 1900 came to see theater as an instru- | ment either for an anarchic dissolution of social restraints or for an unprecedented tightening of communal bonds. The twin tendencies of classical culture—liberation and cohesion—had been sundered and pushed to their extremes. These political attitudes and artistic products of Munich’s

dramatists and directors were not entirely unique; modernism was, after all, an international movement par excellence. Nevertheless, some of the peculiarity of Munich’s contribution can be gauged from a comparison with two other centers of avant-garde culture, Berlin and Vienna. In purely quantitative terms, Berlin had the most active theatrical life: its immense and rapidly expanding population sup-

ported a dozen major (and numerous other minor) stages, which Munich’s playwrights often regarded with longing and envy. Nevertheless, apart from naturalism, which drew inspiration from the industrial and eminently urban character of the Prussian metropolis, Berlin was not the site of major innovations in playwriting or performance until the expressionist era that emerged in World War I. Differing degrees of commercialism and political tension might account for this contrast with Munich. On the one hand, Berlin’s theatrical world was even more commercialized than that of Munich, and the capital of the Reich sheltered numerous playwrights who churned out the scores of farces and situation comedies that fared so well on commercial stages. Dramatists who desired to follow that route invariably congregated in Berlin. Munich, in contrast, had fewer commercial opportunities, but it offered a more cohesive modernist community that encouraged quality and innova-

Revolution of the Theater and Theaters of Revolution + 293 tion; commercialism was not taken for granted in Munich to

the extent that it was in Berlin. On the other hand, people | who went to Munich found a greater degree of stage censorship than in Prussia. To be sure, Berliners were repeatedly treated to the Kaiser’s reactionary pronouncements on cul-

tural matters, and the city had its share of morality campaigners (from the Protestant and German-nationalist camps). Nevertheless, Prussian theaters enjoyed the distinct advantage of being able to appeal decisions of the censor to the courts, where they often received favorable hearings. In _ Bavaria, in contrast, appeals could be made only to higher bodies of the executive branch, which upheld the decisions of local censors in every instance. The greater intransigence of Bavarian censors (which the Censorship Council failed to alleviate), along with the persistent confrontation with censorious populists, brought out a greater tendency to social

criticism (as well as a greater fixation on Catholicism) among Munich’s playwrights. Only Bavaria could have produced Panizza and Lautensack, and, despite formative expe-

riences in Switzerland and Paris, Wedekind, too, was strongly influenced by conditions in Munich. There was one outstanding innovator of theatrical practice in Berlin: Max Reinhardt. To a large extent, though, his sensibility had been shaped in Vienna. It would be rather

| clichéd to say that his commercialism was berlinerisch while his theatricalism was Viennese; yet such a statement would not be entirely incorrect. Even while building up his empire in Prussia, Reinhardt maintained his artistic ties to Austria

through his collaborations with Hofmannsthal, and in the 1920s he transferred his center of operations to Vienna and Salzburg, where he revived baroque theatrical traditions. Austria hosted a theatrical culture much closer to that of Munich than Berlin. The persistence of popular arts, the sensuality of Catholic culture (as opposed to the spirituality of Protestantism), the prevalence of ritual in court ceremony and the Catholic Mass, and a political life marked by mori-

bund liberalism and resurgent populism—these factors shaped the development of the Viennese avant-garde. Not

294 - CONCLUSION

surprisingly, the naturalist movement fared even worse there than it had in Munich, and it was rapidly superceded

by a truly modernist sensibility. The stage-works of

| Schnitzler, Hofmannsthal, Kokoschka, and Schonberg be_ tray, In varying proportions, the same attempts at sexual ex-_

pression, the same hostility to commercialism, the same concern over populist politics, the same fascination with popular culture, and, above all, the same desire to revive

“theatricality” encountered in the endeavors of Wedekind, Panizza, Lautensack, Fuchs, and Kandinsky. The similar cultural traditions and political atmosphere of Munich and | Vienna were especially conducive to theatrical innovation at the outset of the twentieth century.* —

The rise of theatrical modernism in fin-de-siécle Munich set the stage for important developments in the interwar era.

Not only did many aspects of avant-garde culture derive from prewar models, but the political radicalism of numerous Weimar artists had roots. in their experiences during the Bavarian Regency and the Wilhelmine age. The significance of the earlier developments can be measured by the manner in which they played themselves out during the decade after

the outbreak of war. The European conflagration radicalized | the younger generation (toward both left and right) to a greater extent than any previous aggravations. The Center Party, von der Heydte, Kausen, censors, schoolmasters, and commercialization paled into insignificance next to the carnage of the battlefield. Nevertheless, avant-garde responses to the war and to the ensuing revolutionary upheavals drew inspiration from the art and activity of the prewar modernists.

| During the war, the artistically most radical reaction to the conflagration was the dadaist movement that arose in Zurich around Hans Arp, Marcel Janco, Tristan Tzara, and especially Hugo Ball. The initiator of the notorious Cabaret Voltaire, Ball (1886-1927) was a full-fledged product of Munich’s prewar modernist milieu. Soon after his arrival as a student in the Bavarian capital in 1906, he (like Lautensack

before him) had become captivated by modernist theater

Revolution of the Theater and Theaters of Revolution + 295

and decided to devote himself to the stage. In 1910 he enrolled for a year in Reinhardt’s school for actors in Berlin, and he spent the ensuing year as a dramaturge and occasional actor at the provincial theater in Plauen. In 1912 he

| returned to Munich, where, at the recommendation of Halbe and Wedekind, he was hired as dramaturge at the Kammerspiele, a new theatrical venture that hoped to challenge the

Schauspielhaus for the honor of being Munich’s primary sponsor of modernist drama.’ At the same time, Ball composed two grotesque plays, Die Nase des Michelangelo (1911) and Der Henker von Brescia (1914). In October 1913 the first issue of the expressionist journal Revolution, whose title had been defined by Mithsam, was confiscated on

account of Ball’s “Der Henker” (The Executioner), which enraged readers had called to the attention of the police.® This poem, which described in crass detail an executioner’s salacious thoughts while dispatching a lovely woman, combined religious and sexual imagery in a rather Lautensackian manner (without, however, possessing Lautensack’s sincer-

ity of faith). Ironically, the expressionist imagery and verbiage was so obscure that the judges of a Bavarian court were unable to decipher the poem’s content, and the confis-

cation of the journal had to be rescinded, to the horror of the | public prosecutor.’ The following summer, when censorship

had intensified in Bavaria, Ball planned to edit a book entitled Die Konfiszierten (The Confiscated), an anthology

| of thirty writers whose works had been seized and prohibited.

In the years before the outbreak of war Ball fell fully under the influence of Wedekind and Kandinsky. He noted in his diary: “In 1910-1914 everything was theater for me: life, humanity, love, morality. Theater meant to me: inconceivable freedom. My strongest impression of that kind was the poet as a terrible, cynical play: Frank Wedekind. I saw him at many rehearsals and in almost all of his works. He sought to dissolve the last remains of a hitherto solidly based civilization and the last remnants of himself into nothingness

on stage.”” Whereas Wedekind seemed to dramatize a civili- |

296 *- CONCLUSION zation in dissolution, Kandinsky, whom Ball met frequently in the spring of 1914,’ symbolized an attempt to construct a new culture: “At that time Munich hosted an artist whose

simple presence made that city preeminently modernist among the other German cities: Vassily Kandinsky ... He was preoccupied with the rebirth of society from a union of all artistic media and potentialities. He did not experiment with any artistic genre without traversing completely new paths ... His goal was to be exemplary in every single crea-

tion, to break through convention, and to prove that the world was still as young as it had been on the first day.”"' Ball himself was persuaded that “theater alone is able to fashion the new society,” and in the spring of 1914 he led the campaign to turn the Kiinstlertheater over to the Blue Rider

group. He also planned a series of six modernist theatrical matinees, which would have included scenes from Kandinsky’s Violet and a play by Lautensack.'* Moreover, he was busy editing a companion volume to the Blue Rider AlI-

manach, to be entitled Das Neue Theater, which would present scenarios, set designs, architectural plans, and musi- | cal compositions by leading expressionist artists (including

Kandinsky, Marc, Thomas von Hartmann, Oskar Kokoschka, and Mikhail Fokin)."’ Tragically, Kandinsky’s apocalyptic visions soon proved more real than his redemptive hopes, and all of these projects

were brushed aside with the outbreak of war. In August 1914 Ball, swept up in the national hysteria, volunteered for the army, but he was discharged after several weeks due to a

heart condition. Undaunted, he traveled on his own to the Belgian war zone in November. The carnage he witnessed at the front shocked him so profoundly that he went into selfimposed exile in Switzerland. For several months he and his companion, the cabaret singer Emmy Hennings, eked out a meager existence in Zurich through vaudeville appearances. Finally, on February 5, 1916, they opened a venture of their own: the Cabaret Voltaire, the cradle of dada. While the con-

tinental powers decimated each others’ populations on the battlefield, the dadaists celebrated a death-dance of Euro-

Revolution of the Theater and Theaters of Revolution + 297

pean culture. Poems and songs of Wedekind, Mihsam, and Kandinsky were Munich’s contribution to that cabaret’s international programs, which also included works by Italian and Russian futurists and the French avant-garde.” Dada’s rejection of traditional European culture was formalized in a total breakdown of language. The dissolution of the word, which had commenced in the works of Wedekind,

Kandinsky, and other prewar modernists, was completed in Ball’s pure sound poetry. Ball had been particularly inspired

| by Kandinsky, “who took the last step even further. In The Yellow Sound, he was the first man to discover the most ab-

stract sound-expression [Lautausdruck|, which consists only of harmonized vowels and consonants.”!’ Clad in an absurdly abstract outfit (figure 18), Ball recited verses composed of meaningless syllables, including the famous poem that began: “gadji ber1 bimba.” ‘The war having shattered all cultural ideals, the only things remaining were pure noise and pure gesture, theater in its pristine nakedness. On April 14, 1916, soon after he adopted the. nonsense-word “dada” for his endeavors, Ball wrote in his diary: “Our cabaret is a gesture. Every word that is spoken or sung here testifies at the very least that this demeaning age has not been able to command our respect. What could be respectable and im-

posing? The cannons? Our drums drown them out. Idealism? It has long since become laughable, in its popular and its academic form. [he grandiose battles and the cannibalistic heroics? Our voluntary madness, our enthusiasm for illu-

sion, will put it to shame.”’® Despite the seemingly | aggressive stance, this was aesthetic introversion at its worst. The Scharfrichter’s self-deceptive containment of political assault within an intimate context was repeated in the Cab-

aret Voltaire at a time when the human stakes were infinitely higher; by drowning out the noise of cannons, the dadaists were deluding and saving only themselves. Having rejected all the political and cultural bases of their age, they

had no ground upon which to stand. Ball and his friends soon recognized the futility of their venture and the vapidness of their gestures. By July 1916 the Cabaret Voltaire had |

298 + CONCLUS

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Revolution of the Theater and Theaters of Revolution - 299 year they joined with Heinrich Mann to form the nucleus of a pacifist discussion circle in Munich. As the war progressed

and disaffection mounted among the populace at large, Mihsam found greater opportunities for political agitation than ever before. By the end of 1917 he had allied himself with Kurt Eisner, the wayward Social Democrat (and

sometime drama critic for the Miinchener Post) who founded the Munich chapter of the anti-war Independent Social Democrats (USPD). Together with Ernst Toller, they organized a strike of eight thousand munitions workers in the Bavarian capital at the end of January 1918. After Eisner was arrested on February 2, Miihsam attempted to

become unofficial leader of the Munich USPD; on April 24, | he too was imprisoned. Both men were released at the end of October, in time to help proclaim the Bavarian Republic.

The events in the Bavarian capital during the winter and spring of 1918-19 have often been called a ‘writers’ revolu-

tion.”'* Although this phrase distorts the fact that large segments of Munich’s laboring population were active, _ enthusiastic, and autonomous participants in the events, the | appellation underscores the prominence of literati in positions of leadership. In the wake of the collapse of the Habs-

burg monarchy and the Kiel mutiny in the first week of November, over two hundred thousand people demonstrated for peace on Munich’s Theresienwiese, workers’ and soldiers’ councils were formed, and Ludwig III fled his capital. At five in the afternoon of November 7, Miihsam was the first person to proclaim publicly the abolition of a German monarchy. Later that evening Kurt Eisner was able to take advantage of the fluid situation by having himself appointed provisional prime minister of the new Bavarian Republic by the councils. He agreed to hold elections for a new Landtag, scheduled for January 12. In opposition to such “bourgeois

parliamentarianism,” Miuhsam, Toller, and Gustav Landauer, their elder social anarchist mentor, advocated a continuation of council rule. Mihsam was the greatest activist among the three and the most outspoken opponent of Eisner.

On December 6 a band from the soldiers’ soviet under

300 + CONCLUSION Mihsam’s leadership occupied the offices of the Bayerischer

Kurier and the Neues Miinchener Tagblatt. The previous opponent of all censorship now demanded censorship of bourgeois publications, and he commenced by “socializing”’ two of the newspapers that had been the most outspoken op-

ponents of modernist culture before the war. Within hours Miihsam’s action was overruled by Eisner. A month later Eisner was so fearful of Mihsam’s ability to incite radical acts that he had him arrested on January 10, the eve of the Landtag elections. This action touched off bloody demonstrations that achieved Miihsam’s speedy release.

Although all parties to the left of the Social Democrats were dealt a crushing blow at the polls, the assassination of Eisner on the eve of his resignation (February 21) sparked

new waves of revolutionary unrest. Mihsam’s appeal for the | proclamation of a Bavarian Soviet Republic (February 28) was finally realized in Munich, Augsburg, and several other

Bavarian cities at the beginning of April. However, the Landtag and the new Social Democratic prime minister, Johannes Hoffmann, were able to muster an army of rightist soldiers who brutally suppressed the Munich council movement at the beginning of May. Gustav Landauer was one of

over a thousand killed, and Toller and Miihsam spent the following five years in jail. There both wrote plays loosely based on the Munich munition workers’ strike of January _ 1918, with reflections about the moral dilemmas posed by political activism and revolutionary violence (Mihsam’s Judas, Toller’s Masse-Mensch )."”

Although there might appear to be a great gap between Miuhsam’s organization of Wedekindian outcasts in 1909 and his championing of the council movement a decade later, his sympathy for the soviets was a logical outcome of his prewar

anarchist activism. The council movement seemed to embody a spontaneous outburst of the spirit of political opposi-

tion and self-determination which he had unsuccessfully tried to arouse in the prewar lumpenproletariat. Nevertheless, Miithsam himself recognized the fundamental qualita-

tive difference between his earlier activism under

Revolution of the Theater and Theaters of Revolution + 301

Wedekindian influence and his later revolutionary endeavors. He acknowledged that Wedekind’s burial in March 1918 marked the end of his previous political naiveté: “The earth

| that rolled over the mortal remains of Frank Wedekind buried the artistic levity of my own life.””° Wedekind was not, however, a dead issue. The creation of the Weimar Republic brought with it the abolition of censorship, and the stage was finally opened to all of the works of writers like Lautensack and Wedekind. Pandora’s Box received its first public performance at the Schauspielhaus on ~ June 18, 1919. Even earlier, the Kammerspiele—rival of the

Schauspielhaus, now under the direction of the former Scharfrichter, Otto Falckenberg—-had mounted the public premiere of Tod und Teufel. Uhe posthumous rehabilitation of censored modernists seemed complete on December 6, 1919, the simultaneous opening night of Lautensack’s late

play, Das Geltibde (The Vow; 1916), at the Schauspielhaus and Wedekind’s Schloss Wetterstein at the Kammerspiele.

These performances provoked a rightist response of un-

| precedented virulence. Lautensack’s drama about the sexual dilemmas of priestly celibates was interrupted by numerous vocal disturbances.”! Wetterstein was likewise disrupted by

students and officers raising shouts of “whorehouse, stud | farm, brothel, Jewish pig-band, lascivious pack [| Hurenstall, Sprungstall, Bordell, jidische Schweinebande, geile Gesell-schaft).””* In the fall of 1903 students and officers had called

for more “piquant” scenes from the Elf Scharfrichter. Six-

teen years later the severity of war and revolution had driven these same people into the ideological arms of the extreme Right and had turned them into fanatical opponents of

“moral corruption.” Although the ensuing four performances of Wetterstein took place without incident, the sixth performance was terminated in the middle of the second act by an organized protest of fifty students and Reichswehr officers. Potatoes and stinkbombs were thrown on stage, then violence was directed at the “enemy” in the audience. In the words of a reviewer for the Mtinchener Post: “Those people

302 + CONCLUSION | who appeared to be Jewish were beaten up. For example, five or six students jumped on a Jewish-looking gentleman who had been standing calmly in front of me; they worked him over with their fists and chased him out the door. AsI | looked on, speechless and shaking my head, another horde of wild youths jumped me. I could save myself only by declaring that I was not Jewish.””’ The following day the chief of police told the managers of

the Kammerspiele that they should cease future performances of Wetterstein. The representatives of the theater reyected the suggestion and demanded police protection in-

stead.’* That evening, two stinkbombs were exploded in the | audience as soon as the curtain was raised. They were thrown by an army sergeant who told the police after his arrest that, “as a good German, he could not stand the sight of the moral and ethical depravation of the Volk through such plays.” Although there were no further disruptions that evening, the next performance was canceled owing to rumors

that Reichswehr cadets had planned a rumble. After the eighth performance of the play was disrupted by five dem- | onstrators (December 22), the police prohibited all further performances of the work on the basis of article 48 of the Weimar constitution, which contained the emergencypowers paragraph. The officers of the law argued that the escalation of violence provoked by the play might “eventually lead to fights with guns and grenades. Even a Judenpogrom is within the realm of possibility.””’

The Schloss Wetterstein affair is significant because it highlights the similarities and the differences between the Wilhelmine and Weimar reactions to modernism. Before 1914, conservative groups—Catholic, interdenominational, and/or anti-Semitic—had agitated vociferously against modernist drama. Often their demands were heeded by the cen-

sors, sometimes they were not; but in all cases, the - conservative groups remained within the limits of the law.

Attacks in the press, protest meetings, mass petitions, and | verbal assaults in parliament were employed by the conservatives, but physical violence was eschewed. Now war and

Revolution of the Theater and Theaters of Revolution + 303

revolution had brutalized the younger generation to the point where it felt no compunction about resorting to force in defense of “German morality.” Another major difference between the pre- and postwar eras was the strongly anti-Semitic tone of the Wetterstein disturbances. Although anti-Semites had played a large role in the Lex Heinze campaign, most conservative opponents of cultural modernism refrained from overtly anti-Semitic

, agitation. Indeed, Armin Kausen actively sought the support of conservative Jewish groups for his interdenominational campaign against modernist immorality. In contrast, the postwar years saw a widespread equation of Judaism with modernism, immorality, revolution, and all things un-German. Such ideas had been fueled by the fact that the six leaders of the revolution in Munich—Eisner, Mihsam, Landauer, Toller, Levien, and Leviné—were all Jewish. In Mu-

nich there was a wave of anti-Semitic disturbances, especially by students, in November and December 1919.” By that time the rightist rowdies blindly assumed that anything as un-German as Wetterstern must have been sponsored by a “Judenbande,” and they directed their aggression toward the Jewish members of the audience. After the pro-

hibition of further performances of the play, the police re- | ceived a letter signed by “Deutsche Hochschiler” who applauded the ban on the “Schweine-Stiick ‘Schloss Wet- | terstein’”’ and demanded that the police move against “the numerous Jewish vaudevilles [die zahlreichen jstidischen Tingel-Tangel|” as well. The letter closed with the warning: “Should the police fail to prevent a continuation of the systematic poisoning of the Volk, harsher acts of self-help would be the inevitable consequence.””’ Such threats were not entirely necessary, since the police sympathized with the views of the rightist officers and stu-

dents. The policeman who reported the incidents on the opening night of Wetterstein editorialized: ‘Given the fact that the basic plot catered to perverted sensuality, it was to be expected that the performance of this morally questionable play would provoke an energetic response from healthy

| 304 - CONCLUSION , and natural people.” Similar comments had been made by police observers of modernist drama and cabaret during the ~ Regency. What was new was the anti-Semitic tone that pervaded the policeman’s report: he declared that the audience consisted “primarily of Jews of all orientations [dberwiegend Juden aller Richtungen |,” and he spoke disparagingly of the complaint of a “Jewess with pronounced asiatic features | Juidin mit ausgesprochen asiatischem Typus |.” New, too, for such reports was the nationalist note that crept into the comments of the policeman who apprehended the stinkbomb-throwing sergeant: “One can easily understand that a German who still feels German to some degree and who is not morally and ethically perverted looks with greatest disgust” upon the public enjoyment of Wedekind’s plays.”* Even more nefarious were the attitudes and activities of the police officials who eventually banned Schloss Wetterstein: Ernst Pohner, the chief of police, and his right-hand man, Wilhelm Frick. On December 15, 1919, Pohner told the representatives of the Kammerspiele that he would have prohibited the play if censorship had still been in effect, and he and Frick were reluctant to provide police protection for the theater. Instead of defending the Kammerspiele from the assaults of the Reichswehr, they suspended performances of

Wetterstein on the basis of emergency powers granted by article 48 of the Weimar constitution—the same clause that eventually helped destroy the Republic. The directors of the Kammerspiele went to court to challenge this questionable use of emergency powers; after all, article 48, which allowed

a Land government to take “necessary steps’ to restore , ‘public security and order,” was clearly intended to be used only at times of grave crisis. Nevertheless, on November 4, 1919, the Bavarian cabinet had empowered Munich’s chief of police to invoke article 48 for use as he saw fit within the

boundaries of the capital city. On this basis, the Bavarian courts upheld Péhner’s prohibition of Schloss Wetterstein.”” This was not the last time that the Weimar Republic would

| witness a de facto complicity of Reichswehr, police, and judges in the interest of illegal rightist activities.

Revolution of the Theater and Theaters of Revolution - 305 Nor was it the last time that Pohner and Frick would conspire against democratic liberties: both men welcomed the rise of the nascent Nazi movement in Munich. At Hitler’s trial following the abortive “beer-hall putsch” of November 1923, Frick declared that he and Péhner “recognized that this movement of the National Socialist party, which was

still small then, ... should not be suppressed. We consciously refrained from doing so, because we were convinced that this movement was the one most qualified to get

a foothold among the Marxist-infested workers and to lead the working class back into the nationalist camp. Thus, we held our protecting hand over Herr Hitler and the National Socialist party.”*° Pohner died in 1925, but Frick lived on and rose rapidly up through the ranks of National Socialism.

_As minister of the interior and education for Thuringia in 1930-193 1—the first cabinet post held by a Nazi—he promulgated the notorious law “Against Negro Culture, For our German Heritage” in May 1930, and he proceeded to ban modernist plays and concerts, remove modern art from state galleries, and destroy Oskar Schlemmer’s frescoes at the Bauhaus building in Weimar.’' Even before 1933 Frick was perfecting the culturally repressive practice that he had

affair. ,

first demonstrated in his handling of the Schloss Wetterstein

The violence directed against Wedekind’s works in 1919 could not, however, keep them off the stage for long. The Weimar Republic was the heyday of Wedekind and his cultural progeny. Lautensack’s Pfarrhauskomodie became one

of the most-performed (and most-disrupted) plays of the | 1920s.’* The youth dramas that one associates with the early

Weimar era had their immediate roots in Spring Awaken- | ing, and the anti-commercialism of the Lulu plays and Keith was echoed in expressionist dramatizations of capitalist so-

ciety. Brecht, however, dismissed the expressionists as “Strindhiigeln und Wedebabies,” and he claimed that the | genuine Wedekindian spirit lay not in emotional pathos, but

| rather in a style of drama that was simultaneously humorous and analytic.”*

| 306 - CONCLUSION | , Bertolt Brecht (1898-1955) was in many ways the true heir of Wedekind. The two major theatrical influences of his youth were the fairground stages of his native Augsburg and the 1912 edition of Wedekind’s collected works that his father had given him in 1914. Four years later these volumes showed signs of heavy wear, and Brecht had become an avid singer of Wedekind’s ballads. At the beginning of his years

in Munich (1916-1924), Brecht witnessed the last appearances of Wedekind as actor and balladeer and wrote: “No other singer has inspired and moved me as much. This personal magic was a product of the man’s immense vitality, the

energy that allowed him to create his song of songs for humanity in the face of laughter and derision. He did not seem mortal.”** Many of Brecht’s early works were inspired by Wedekind. The hero of Baal, Brecht’s first play, is a poet and songwriter who 1s explicitly compared to Wedekind in early versions of the work (1918, 1919). Critics have often called Baal a male Lulu—more slovenly and aggressive, but equally hostile to cultural entrepreneurs and equally fatal to his sexual partners. The fact that parts of Baal, like the third act of Earth Spirit, transpire “In the Wings of a Cabaret” reminds us that Brecht, like Wedekind, also became a parttime cabaret artist, and that he, too, incorporated songs into many of his plays.”

Brecht’s admiration for Wedekind soon extended to a dramatization of commercial themes as well as an appropriation of his principles of acting and directing. In the Jungle of

Cities (1923) portrayed a Wedekindian world of intense commercial conflict in which human isolation could never be overcome. This still very apolitical vision of commercial so-

ciety became more focused in Brecht’s later works, as his

, conversion to Marxism gave him a more specifically classoriented conception of society than Wedekind ever pos- . sessed. Nevertheless, these later dramas still availed themselves of Wedekindian techniques, which became formalized in the Brechtian principles of Verfremdung, or audienceestrangement. Already in his early productions at the Kam-

Revolution of the Theater and Theaters of Revolution +: 307

merspiele—Drums in the Night (1922), In the Jungle of Cities (1923), and his adaptation of Marlowe’s Edward II (1924)—Brecht employed many anti-realist, illusion-destroying sets and styles of acting that prevented the audience

from following the story-line in a naive and unreflecting - manner.*° This analytic impetus was complemented by a keen sense for the “theatricality” of popular culture which had inspired the prewar modernists as well. Like Wedekind before him, Brecht strove for an entertaining didacticism, a form of theater that would amuse, in-

spire, or enrage the audience at the same time that it imparted a more objective and analytic understanding of social dynamics. In Brecht’s mature works, the destruction of illusions on stage was to have modular value for the destruction of the illusions that masked the reality of capitalist life. Conversely, the vitality of the entertainment, the element of

play, was intended to demonstrate the human creativity upon which a new social order could be based: ““Uhe theater of the scientific age can make dialectics a pleasure. ‘The sur-

_ prises of development, proceeding logically or in leaps, the instability of circumstances, the humor of contradictions, and the like, these are amusements caused by the vitality of man, and they enhance the art of life as well as the joy of | living.”’’ Brecht’s combination of analytic criticism and vital laughter furthered and updated the spirit of Wedekindian drama. His works have scattered the seeds of Munich’s modernist theatricality throughout the world.

| Paradoxically, modernism received short shrift in postwar Munich. By 1924, the year Brecht moved to Berlin, the Bavarian capital was well on its way to becoming a Provinzstadt of the modern movement, as the political reaction that commenced in May 1919 increasingly took its toll of avantgarde culture.*® The climate was such that many artists vol-

, untarily abandoned cultural pursuits in favor of the radical practice that would tear the Republic apart. After being released from prison in 1924, Miihsam continued to agitate for anarchist and communist goals. In 1926, asked why he no ©

308 + CONCLUSION longer wrote theater criticism as he had before the war, he replied that the real dramas of the day were being enacted in

the rightist courtrooms of the Republic.” At the other end of the political spectrum, Georg Fuchs, too, had turned to political activism. Beginning in 1921, he played a major role in a conspiracy to separate Bavaria from the Republic, with the aid of French money and the arms of the numerous Freikorps groups that had congregated there. He believed this was necessary to protect Bavaria from the twin dangers emanating from Berlin—Bolshevism and capi-

talism—which he considered products of the “Berlin Jewracket and stockmarket-government [Berliner Judenwirtschaft und Bérsenregierung |.”* In February 1923 one of the coconspirators alerted authorities to the imminent plan to stage a putsch and establish a dictatorship in Bavaria, and

Fuchs was promptly arrested. After being tried for high treason in June, he was sentenced to twelve years in jail, five | of which he actually served. In 1933 he welcomed the Na-

tionalist Socialist victory. Eleven years later his greatest claim to theatrical fame, the Kinstlertheater, was destroyed in an Allied bombing raid, a response to the type of racist-

a imperialist war that Fuchs had advocated four decades earlier. The destruction of this historically significant theater was a trifling consequence of National Socialism. As early as

1934, the concentration camp of Oranienburg had witnessed the murder of Erich Mithsam, one of the first among the millions of victims that were to follow. In the light of these later developments, it is understand-

able that the Regency came to be known as “Munich’s golden years.” ‘The fact that future developments were so very much worse should not, however, deceive one into thinking that earlier conditions were positively splendid. The modernist playwrights and directors of prewar Munich lived in a generally hostile environment that threatened their financial well-being, their freedom of expression, and even their personal liberty. Life and limb were not at stake, but

months of imprisonment, years of impoverishment, and a | lifetime of frustration were very real possibilities. Yet these

Revolution of the Theater and Theaters of Revolution + 309

commercial and political aggravations also inspired artistic creativity: had tensions been absent, it is doubtful that so much theatrical innovation would have occurred. The first act of the drama of modernist theater had to be played on an

unsettled stage. |

APPENDIX

Patrons of Modernist [heater |

A ROUGH INDICATION of the social background of the most

active patrons of modernist theater in Munich can be gleaned from a breakdown of the membership of the Neuer Verein (1903-1914), a successor to the Akademisch-Dra-

matischer Verein that sponsored private performances of prohibited or commercially unprofitable modernist plays. Social background of identifiable members of the Neuer Verein

Number Percent

Occupation 1908 1913 1908 1913 Industrialist, businessman 40 23 22 15

Lawyer, judge 23 16 13 = 10

Painter, sculptor 23 12 13 ~~ 8

Physician Ib 8 8 5 Academic profession 14 15 #8 10

Publisher, bookseller, art dealer 14 15 #8 10

Writer 13 20 7 = 13 Independently wealthy (Rentier, Privatier) 13 9 7 6

| Banker, insurance executive 10 9 6 6 Military officer (reserve or retired) 6 5 3 3

Musician, actor 5 17 3 «11 Architect, engineer 4 7 2 4 Total 180 156 100 101

312 + APPENDIX

These figures were derived from the Neuer Verein’s ‘“Mitgliederliste: Stand vom 15. November 08” and “Mitgliederverzeichnis fiir 1913/14,” both in the Handschriften-

Abteilung der Stadtbibliothek Minchen. For 1908, 180 of _ 238 names (75 percent) could be identified; for 1913, 156 of 214 (73 percent). Occupation was determined through ref-

erence to the Munich Adressbuch of the appropriate year; these volumes indicated name, address, and occupation, which allowed correlation with the membership lists, where name and address were listed. ‘The occupation of the head of

the household was used for tallying: hence widows, wives whose husbands were not members, and children were entered under their husbands’ or fathers’ profession. Since spouses were counted as one, the actual membership was greater than indicated (273 for 1908, 251 for 1913).

| The figures are evidently biased toward the more established families and professions. Many of the 25 percent of the members not listed in the Adressbuch at the addresses on the membership lists were probably students subletting

rooms. |

Only 63 percent of the members in 1908 appeared again in 1913, since internal dissention in the Neuer Verein in 1909 led to many resignations. Despite this high turnover, the relative proportion of the occupations is remarkably constant.

Notes

o. Bibliography |

WAY Index

Abbreviations

BHSA/MInn Bayerisches Hauptstaatsarchiv

, Minchen, Allgemeine Abteilung, Ministerium des Innern |

BHSA/MJu Bayerisches Hauptstaatsarchiv Munchen, Allgemeine Abteilung,

, Ministerium der Justiz BHSA/MW1 Bayerisches Hauptstaatsarchiv Miinchen, Allgemeine Abteilung, Ministerium fiir Wirtschaft —

SAM/Pol. Dir. Staatsarchiv Munchen, Polizeidirektion

SAM/RA Staatsarchiv Munchen, Regierungsakten von Oberbayern

SAM/St. Anw. Staatsarchiv Miinchen, Staatsanwaltschaft Munchen I

SBM/HA Stadtbibliothek Miinchen, Handschrif-

ten-Abteilung |

Pol. Dir. Polizeidirektion Miinchen RO/KI Regierung von Oberbayern, Kammer

des Innern ,

MNN | Mitinchener Neueste Nachrichten

| MP Mitnchener Post

Sten. Ber./Landtag Stenographische Berichte tiber die Verhandlungen der bayerischen Kam-

| ‘Sten. | mer der Abgeordneten Ber./ Reichstag Stenographische Berichte tiber die Ver_ handlungen des deutschen Reichstags

Notes

Introduction « Modernism, Theater, Muntch 1. Jacques Barzun, Classic, Romantic, and Modern (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), p. 14.

2. Friedrich Nietzsche, Der Wille zur Macht, section 522. This phrase was used as the title of Fredric Jameson, The Prison-

House of Language: A Critical Account of Structuralism and Russian Formalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972).

3. Vhomas Mann, “Versuch iiber das Theater” (1908), in his Gesammelte Werke (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1974), 10, 49. 4. For an excellent and comprehensive introduction to modern theater and theatricality, see Oscar Brockett and Robert Findlay, Century of Innovation: A History of European and American Theatre and Drama since 1870 (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: PrenticeHall, 1973). Some of the theories behind modernist theatrical innovation are discussed in Joachim Fiebach, Von Craig bis Brecht:

Studien zu Ktinstlertheorien in der ersten Halfte des 20. Jahrhunderts (Berlin: Henschelverlag, 1977). 5. Marvin Carlson, The German Stage in the Nineteenth Cen-

tury (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1972), p. 203. For straightforward narrative accounts of modern theaters in Munich during the Regency, see Rainer Hartl, Aufbruch zur Moderne: Naturalistisches Theater in Miinchen (Munich: Kitzinger, 1976),

which covers the period 1890-1900; Rolf Wunneberg, Georg

Stollberg und das neuere Drama in Miinchen (Munich: M. |

Lehner, 1933); and Wolfgang Petzet, Theater: Die Mtinchner Kammerspiele, 1911-1972 (Munich: Kurt Desch, 1973), pp. 13-96. A chronological listing of theatrical events in Munich is provided in Hans Wagner, 200 Jahre Mtinchner Theaterchronik, 1750-1950 (Munich: Robert Lerche, 1958).

316 + NOTES TO PAGES 7-9 | 6. The prevalence of anarchist ideas among avant-garde artists in Europe is underscored in Theda Shapiro, Painters and Politics: The European Avant-Garde and Society, 1900-1925 (New York: Elsevier, 1976), passim; and Helmut Kreuzer, Die Boheme: Analyse und Dokumentation der intellektuellen Subkultur vom 19.

, Jahrhundert bis zur Gegenwart (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1971), pp. 301-326.

7. Three good accounts of Munich culture at the turn of the

| century, written in a “popular” style, are Hanns Arens, Unsterbliches Mtinchen (Munich: Bechtle, 1968); Siegfried Obermeier,

Miinchens goldene Jahre, 1871-1914 (Munich: Bertelsmann, 1976); and Manuel Gasser, ed., Mtinchen um 1900 (Bern: Hallwag, 1977). For more critical accounts, written for a scholarly au-

dience, see Karl Bosl, “Munchen, ‘Deutschlands heimliche Hauptstadt, ” Zeitschrift fiir bayerische Landesgeschichte, 30 , (1967): 298-313; Gerdi Huber, Das klassische Schwabing: Miinchen als Zentrum der intellektuellen Zeit- und Gesell-

: schaftskritik an der Wende des 19. zum 20. Jahrhunderts (Munich: Miscellanea Bavarica Monacensia, 1973); Ludwig Schneider,

Die populdére Kritik an Staat und Gesellschaft in Mtinchen (1886-1914): Ein Beitrag zur Vorgeschichte der Mitinchener Revolution von 1918/1919 (Munich: Miscellanea Bavarica Monacensia, 1975); Peg Weiss, Kandinsky in Munich: The Formative

Jugendstil Years (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979); Thomas Willey, “Thomas Mann’s Munich,” in Gerald Chapple and Hans Schulte, eds., The Turn of the Century: German Literature and Art, 1890-1915 (Bonn: Bouvier, 1981), pp. 477-491; , Peter Jelavich, “Munich as Cultural Center: Politics and the Arts,” in Kandinsky in Munich: 1896-1914 (New York: The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1982), pp. 17-26; Robert Eben Sackett, Popular Entertainment, Class, and Politics in Munich, 1900-1923 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982); and especially the works of Robin Lenman: “Censorship and Society in

, Munich 1886-1914” (Ph.D. diss., Oxford University, 1975); “Pol-_ itics and Culture: The State and the Avant-Garde in Munich 1886-1914,” in Richard Evans, ed., Society and Politics in Wilhel-

| mine Germany (London: Croom Helm, 1978), pp. 90-111; and “A Community in Transition: Painters in Munich, 1886-1924,”

Central European History, 15 (1982): 3-33. |

NOTES TO PAGES 12-14 °* 317 1 + Munich in 1890 1. The administration of Montgelas is discussed in Max Spindler, ed., Handbuch der bayertschen Geschichte (Munich: C.

H. Beck, 1967-1975), 4, 38-60.

2. For political developments in Bavaria during the 1860s and |

the rise of the Patriotenpartet, see ibid., pp. 261-269, 298-303; and

Christa Stache, Buargerlicher Liberalismus und katholischer Konservatismus 1n Bayern, 1867-1871 (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1981).

_ 3. Bavaria’s position within the federal structure of the new Reich is described in Spindler, Handbuch, 4, 283-293.

4. For internal political developments in Bavaria under the Reich, see ibid., 4, 283-386; Karl Bosl, “Gesellschaft und Politik in Bayern vor dem Ende der Monarchie,” Zeitschrift fiir bayerische Landesgeschichte, 28 (1965): 1-31; Dietrich Thranhardt, Wahlen

und politische Strukturen in Bayern, 1848-1953 (Disseldortf: Droste, 1973), pp. 39-122; Wolfgang Zorn, ‘“‘Parlament, Gesellschaft und Regierung in Bayern, 1870-1918,” in Gerhard A. Ritter, ed., Gesellschaft, Parlament und Regierung: Zur Geschichte

des Parlamentarismus in Deutschland (Diisseldorf: Droste, 1974), pp. 299-315; and especially Karl Mockl, Die Prinzregentenzeit: Gesellschaft und Politik wahrend der Ara des Prinzre-

genten Luitpold in Bayern (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1972). _ Church-state relations during the Prinzregentenzeit are discussed , in Hans-Michael Korner, Staat und Kirche in Bayern, 1886-1918 (Mainz: Matthias-Griinewald-Verlag, 1977). A most interesting account of changing religious and political attitudes among the general population may be found in Werner Blessing, Staat und Kirche in der Gesellschaft: Institutionelle Autoritat und mentaler Wandel in Bayern wahrend des 19. Jahrhunderts (GO6ttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1982). For a recent study on liberalism in the Reich as a whole, see James Sheehan, German Liberalism in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978). The Center Party is the subject of Ronald J. Ross, Beleaguered Tower: The Dilemma of Political Catholicism in Wilhel-

mine Germany (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1976); and John Zeender, The German Center Party, 1890-1906 (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1976). See also the important regional study by David Blackbourn, Class, Religion and Local Politics in Wilhelmine Germany: The Centre

318 + NOTES TO PAGES 1I14-!19Q | Party in Wiirttemberg before 1914 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980).

5. The Kulturkampf in Bavaria is summarized in Spindler, Handbuch, 4, 321-329.

6. Two fine introductions to the social and political aspirations of classicism are Alan Menhennet, Order and Freedom: German Literature and Society, 1720-1805 (New York: Basic Books, 1973); and T. J. Reed, The Classical Centre: Goethe and Weimar 1775-1832 (London: Croom Helm, 1980).

7. Friedrich Schiller, “Uber die asthetische Erziehung des Menschen in einer Reihe von Briefen” (1795), in Schillers Werke, Nationalausgabe (Weimar: Hermann Bihlaus Nachfolger, 1962), 20, 312.

8. The citations in this paragraph are from Schiller, “Was kann eine gute stehende Schaubiihne eigentlich wirken?” (1784),

ibid., pp. 87-100. The role of the stage in enlightened German thought is discussed in T. J. Reed, “Theatre, Enlightenment and Nation: A German Problem,” Forum for Modern Language Stud-

ies, 14 (1978): 143-164. | 9. Schiller, “Uber die asthetische Erziehung,” p. 333.

10. The political reception of Schiller is documented in Norbert Oellers, Schiller—Zeitgenosse aller Epochen, 2 vols. (Frankfurt am Main: Athenaum, 1970; and Munich: C. H. Beck, 1976). A most eloquent twentieth-century statement of the democratic core

of classicism is Georg Lukacs, Goethe und seine Zeit (Bern: A. Francke, 1947). 11. Schiller, “Uber die asthetische Erziehung,” p. 332. 12. For the concept of “affirmative culture” in nineteenth-cen-

tury Germany, see Herbert Marcuse, “Uber den affirmativen Charakter der Kultur” (1937), in his Kultur und Gesellschaft (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1973), 1, 56-101. For a survey of recent literature on the social and political implications of neoclas-

, sical schooling in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, see Lenore O’Boyle, ‘Education and Social Structure: The Humanist

, Tradition Reexamined,” Internationales Archiv ftir Sozialgeschichte der deutschen Literatur, 1 (1976): 246-257. The reception of classicism and idealism by the German middle classes in the nineteenth century and the use of classical education for illiberal ends are the subjects of Hans Speier, “Zur Soziologie der birgerlichen Intelligenz in Deutschland” (1929), in Gert Mattenklott and Klaus Scherpe, eds., Positionen der literarischen In-

NOTES TO PAGES 19-20 °: 319 telligenz zwischen birgerlicher Reaktion und Imperialismus (Kronburg: Scriptor, 1973), pp. 9-24; Fritz Stern, “The Political Consequences of the Unpolitical German,” in The Failure of Illib-

eralism: Essays on the Political Culture of Modern Germany (New York: Knopf, 1972), pp. 3-25; Walter Jens, ‘“The Classical

Tradition in Germany: Grandeur and Decay,” in E. J. Feuchtwanger, ed., Upheaval and Continuity: A Century of German History (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1973), pp. 67-82; Michael Naumann, “Bildung und Gehorsam: Zur Asthetischen Ideologie des Bildungsbirgertums,” in Klaus Vondung, ed.,

Das wilhelminische Bildungsbiirgertum (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1975), pp. 34-52; Konrad Jarausch, Students, —

| Society and Politics in Imperial Germany: The Rise of Academic Illiberalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982); and James Albisetti, Secondary School Reform in Imperial Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983).

13. The Munich Hof- und Nationaltheater is described in Winfried Nerdinger, ed., Klassizismus in Bayern, Schwaben

und Franken: Architektur-Zeichnungen, 1775-1825 (Munich: Miinchner Stadtmuseum, 1980), pp. 252-278; and Oswald Hederer, “Karl von Fischers Nationaltheater in Miinchen,” in Hubert Glaser, ed., Krone und Verfassung: Konig Max I. Joseph und der neue Staat: Beitrdge zur bayerischen Geschichte und Kunst,

1799-1825 (Munich: Hirmer/Piper, 1980), pp. 395-402. | 14. Spindler, Handbuch, 4, 962-963. In terms of primary education, Bavaria lagged behind other German states: see W. R. Lee, “Bastardy and the Socioeconomic Structure of South Germany,”

Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 7 (1977): 415. 15. Cited in Eugen Franz, Mtinchen als deutsche Kulturstadt im 19. Jahrhundert (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1936), p. 68.

16. The Kulturpolittk of Ludwig I is discussed in Michael Doeberl, Entwicklungsgeschichte Bayerns (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1931), 3, 32-72; and Max Spindler, “Konig Ludwig I. als Bau-

herr,” in Erbe und Verpflichtung: Aufsdtze und Vortrdge zur bayerischen Geschichte (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1966), pp. 322-338. See also Oswald Hederer, Die Ludwigstrasse in Munchen (Munich: Eher, 1942). For an account of the Bavarians in Greece, see Wolf Seidl, Bayern in Griechenland (Munich: Siddeutscher Verlag, 1965). I am referring in the text to the classic if rather quirky

book by E. M. Butler, The Tyranny of Greece over Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1935).

320 + NOTES TO PAGES 21-25 | 17. Cited in Doeberl, Entwicklungsgeschichte Bayerns, 3, 199. : 18. For an account of Heyse and his associates, see Michail

Bouvier, 1974). | | , Krausnick, Paul Heyse und der Miinchener Dichterkreis (Bonn:

19. Wagner’s politics are discussed in Maurice Boucher, Les

idées politiques de Richard Wagner (Paris: 1947); Theodor Adorno, Versuch tiber Wagner (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1952); Carl Schorske, “The Quest for the Grail: Wagner and Mor-

ris,’ in Kurt Wolff and Barrington Moore, eds., The Critical Spirit: Essays in Honor of Herbert Marcuse. (Boston: Beacon _ Press, 1968), pp. 216-232; Robert Gutman, Richard Wagner: The Man, his Mind, and his Music (New York: Harcourt Brace Jo-

vanovich, 1968); Winfried Schiler, Der Bayreuther Kreis von seiner Entstehung bis zum Ausgang der wilhelminischen Ara: Wagnerkult und Kulturreform 1m Getste védlkischer Weltanschauung (Minster: Aschendorff, 1971); and Martin Gregor-Del-

Hanser, 1973). | | - 20. For Ludwig’s relations with Wagner, see Doeberl, Entlin, Richard Wagner—Die Revolution als Oper (Munich: Carl

wicklungsgeschichte Bayerns, 3, 364-367; Rolf Linnenkamp, Die Schlosser und Projekte Ludwigs II. (Munich: Wilhelm Heyne, 1977); and Wilfrid Blunt, The Dream King: Ludwig II of Bavaria

| -(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973). 21. Ibsen’s conception of the individual’s relationship to society is discussed in Arnold Hauser, The Social History of Art

79-90.

(New York: Random House, n.d.), 4, 213-216; and Albert Soergel

and Curt Hohoff, Dichtung und Dichter der Zeit: Vom Naturalismus bis zur Gegenwart (Dusseldorf: August Bagel, 1964), 1,

22. For the anti-capitalist implications of the Ring, see the

works cited in note 19 above, as well as George Bernard Shaw, The

Perfect Wagnerite: A Study of the Niblung’s Ring (London: | Grant Richards, 1898). Shaw was also a propagandist for Ibsen: see The Quintessence of Ibsenism (London: Walter Scott, 1891). For a comparison of Wagner and Ibsen, see Eric Bentley, The

Playwright as Thinker: A Study of Drama in Modern Times (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1967), pp. 75-106.

23. See Karl von Perfall, Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der kénighchen Theater in Mtinchen (Munich: Piloty & Lohle,

| 1894), p. 5.

24. Ibsen’s years in Munich are described in Michael Dirrigl,

NOTES TO PAGES 25-31 ° 321 Residenz der Musen: Mtinchen—Magnet fiir Mustker, Dichter und Denker (Munich: Bruckmann, 1968), pp. 627-644. 25. Michael Georg Conrad, “Vom Biuchertisch,” Die Gesellschaft, 2/2 (1886): 185. The naturalist movements of Berlin and Munich are contrasted in Hans Miehle, ‘““Der Miinchener Pseudonaturalismus der achtziger Jahre” (Ph.D. diss., University of Munich, 1947); Hedwig Reisinger, Michael Georg Conrad: Ein Lebensbild mit besonderer Berticksichtigung seiner Tatigkeit als Kritiker (Wurzburg: Richard Mayr, 1939), pp. 85-89; and Richard Hamann and Jost Hermand, Naturalismus (Munich: Nymphenburger Verlag, 1972), pp. 238-243.

_ 26. The censored works were Spanisches und Roémisches (Breslau: Schottlaender, 1877), and Die letzten Pdpste: Ketzerbrief aus Rom (Breslau: Schottlaender, 1878). The life and work of Conrad are described in Reisinger, Conrad; see also Conrad’s reminiscences, Von Emile Zola bis Gerhart Hauptmann (Leipzig: Hermann Seemann Nachfolger, 1902). A short but sympathetic assessment of his views may be found in Theo Meyer, ed., _ _ Theorie des Naturalismus (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1973), pp. 4-10. 27. Conrad, Von Emile Zola, pp. 40-41, 51-52.

28. M. G. Conrad, Das Recht, der Staat, und die Moderne

(Munich: M. Poessl, 1891), p. 13. , 29. M. G. Conrad, Deutsche Weckrufe! (Leipzig: Wilhelm

Friedrich, 1890), p. 141.

30. M. G. Conrad, “Zukunftstheater,”’ Die Gesellschaft, 3 (1887): 405; and Das Recht, p. 13. 31. M. G. Conrad, “Kunstwart und Lebenswart oder Der mo-

derne Hexenkessel,’ Moderne Blatter, no. 24 (12 September 1891), p. 2.

32. Conrad, Weckrufe, p. 47. This phrase is Conrad’s summary of the theme of his novel, Was die Isar rauscht (Munich, 1887), which described the commercialization of Munich’s cultural world following the death of Ludwig I. See also Conrad’s dire predictions in “Das Miinchener Kunstleben in Gefahr!,” Die Gesellschaft, 3 (1887): 155-157. Conrad later glorified Ludwig II in Majestat: Ein Kénigsroman (Berlin: Otto Jahnke, 1902).

33. M. G. Conrad, “Zur Einfiihrung,” Die Gesellschaft, 1 (1885): 1-2. For a short history of this journal, see Fritz Schlawe, Literarische Zeitschriften, Teil I; 1885-1910 (Stuttgart: Metzler, — 1965), pp. 19-22. The attacks of Conrad and his colleagues on

Heyse are discussed in Werner Striedieck, “Paul Heyse in der

322 + NOTES TO PAGES 31-36 , Kritik der ‘Gesellschaft,’ ”’ Germanic Review, 19 (1944): 197-221.

34. M. G. Conrad, “Professor Volkelt und der deutsche Rea-

lismus,” Die Gesellschaft, 6 (1890): 321. ,

133-167. 35. Conrad, “Zur Einfihrung,” p. 2. —

36. On Lutz and the Kulturkampf in Bavaria, see Spindler,

Handbuch, 4, 321-329, 351-354. The crisis of 1886 1s discussed

ibid., pp. 335-347; and in Mockl, Die Prinzregentenzeit, pp.

57851. |

37. See Conrad’s attacks on Catholic attempts to gain political

power, in Weckrufel, pp. 134-154. |

38. Conrad to Pol. Dir., 18 December 1890, in SAM/RA

39. See the police reports on these men, dated 21 December

1890, in SAM/Pol. Dir. 520. 40. Satzungen der Gesellschaft ftir modernes Leben (Munich: M. Poessl, 1891), p. 3.

41. MNN, no. 49, 31 January 1891; and report of 30 January | 1891 in SAM /Pol. Dir. 520.

42. See Augsburger Abendzeitung, Bayerischer Kurier, and MNN, no. 49, all of 31 January 1891. For the program of this and

, other public events of the Modern Life Society, see also Hartl, Aufbruch zur Moderne, pp. 45-49. 43. For Gumppenberg’s life, see his autobiography, Lebens-

: erinnerungen (Berlin: Eigenbrodler, 1929), as well as Karl-Wilhelm von Wintzingerode-Knorr, “Hanns von Gumppenbergs _ kiinstlerisches Werk” (Ph.D. diss., University of Munich, 1958), pp. 11-20. For the Thorwald affair, see Lebenserinnerungen, p. 128.

44, Ibid., p. 137; and citation from the comments of Steinbach,

a a self-portrait of the author, in Gumppenberg’s novel, Der finfte Prophet (Berlin: Verein fiir Deutsches Schriftthum, 1895), p. 44. 45. Hanns von Gumppenberg, “Bakteriologisches,’ Moderne Blatter, no. 1 (25 March 1891), pp. 1-3. 46. See Hamann and Hermand, Naturalismus, pp. 92-97. 47. Mtnchener Fremdenblatt, no. 99, 2 March 1891.

48. See the police reports and newspaper clippings from 3 March to 14 April in SAM/RA 57851 and SAM/Pol. Dir. 520; Hanns von Gumppenberg, “Uber kiinstlerische Behandlung religidser Stoffe,” Moderne Blatter, no. 2 (4 April 1891), pp. 2-5; and

his Lebenserinnerungen, pp. 161-163. 49. Miinchener Fremdenblatt, no. 133, 23 March 1891.

2.

NOTES TO PAGES 36-38