What has ultimately resulted, then, is not a study of Michelstaedter so much as a symptomatology of the age to which he belonged, traced in a cross section of intellectual, artistic, and historical events. And this means that it is not a story of what happened in so much as of what some of these happenings expressed, an account preserving its own individual slant, perhaps in the manner of an expressionist protrait, which does not offer the objective characteristics of a face so much as an imaginative reinscription. Its concern is not "history," but a history of symbols.
Yet a history of symbols is history as it is traditionally read, constructed out of such critical years as or , great transoceanic voyages, world-changing technological inventions, revolutionary events like the fall of the Berlin Wall. Many real cities besides Berlin have been forcibly divided between two states without joining the annals of history, or turning into symbols. One is Michelstaedter's hometown of Gorizia, now split between Italy and the Republic of Slovenia, split before that with Yugoslavia, and in Austrian hands before see figs.
And in this city, as in countless others, people and thoughts have come and gone without leaving any trace in memory. For things are historical not merely by happening, but by finding a home in consciousness, in the manner of an Ottoman tower in Bosnia or the flag of Macedonia. This study intends precisely to create such a space in consciousness—for products of a moment. Accompanying this moment are also places—Trieste, Budapest, and Munich, overshadowed by strong memories of contemporary Paris and Moscow.
Accompanying the places are a host of "secondary" cultural figures, overshadowed by the more towering icons of Picasso, Einstein, Freud, and Lenin. What emerges from this twining of texts and strands of texts is a story of notes in the margins of better-known tales in the history of politics, economics, and psychology. It is an admittedly dissonant narrative: It sketches only a thumbnail of a complex cultural body, not the hand or the arm or the heart—a blossom, not the branch or the root. And as for the "trunk" that we sometimes believe underlies such a blossom—as if it were some fundamental, historical condition of which thinking and art are offshoots—it is no less symbolic an entity than what it might seem to produce, both constructed out of numberless processes, not one of which can be fully described, even where the blossom one attempts to understand is a single person or a single line of poetry.
There is simply too much to synthesize to describe such a "trunk," too much to coerce into intellectual order without adequate means, with no explanation for why just this blossom proved necessary or took the shape that it did. Here, thirst for the Why? Recognition of connections, crossings, and analogies in the What may be the only means we have of approaching the Why. The "blossoms" in this study are works of philosophy, sociology, painting, music, and poetry, as well as existential and ethical gestures like suicide and madness. If Michelstaedter remains the "proper noun" for this flourishing it is because—as philosopher, poet, painter, and moralist—he contains the greatest number of its features.
Its common noun is expressionism. In — a more decisive wave of expressionism is set into motion by Vasily Kandinsky and his associates in Munich. Still a third gets under way at the same moment in Berlin, centered around the journals Der. Sturm and Die Aktion. These journals draw Austrians as well into the expressionist fold, particularly Oskar Kokoschka, Arnold Schoenberg, and Egon Schiele, who had been operating independently in Vienna. A confluence of developments in painting, theater, and poetry, expressionism is thus traditionally considered indigenous to Germanic culture.
Rarely is it said to have practitioners in Italy, England, or France. There is another critical line, however, which maintains that expressionism is not a style of its own, but merely a label for the Germanic chapter of avant-garde art, whose innovations receive names such as fauvism, cubism, futurism, orphism, and vorticism elsewhere.
Still others claim quite the contrary, to the effect that expressionistic art has clear and distinct features, but that ultimately they overreach geographic, generic, and temporal boundaries, encompassing disciplines as different as philosophy, politics, and dance as well as artists as distant in time as Rabelais and Lucan. This, the most dominant direction in criticism today, is also the one that I will follow, seeking the tones of expressionism in a dissonant, international chorus—in Italy as well as Germany, in sociology as well as painting, in the logic of actions as well as arguments.
What exactly were the concerns of their work? And how different were these concerns from those of the poets and artists? Was it not Freud who spoke of psychoanalysis as aiming to unveil the "most intimate" of a person's secrets in and again in ? As based on the recognition of "psychic conflict"? As viewing civilization as the implacable enemy of the individual? When we inquire into such issues of intention and method, intersections between paths so different in direction become rather more clear. We need not broaden the definition of expressionism to trace these points of convergence.
On the contrary, we can narrow it down to a few salient traits. The expressionism at stake in is more theoretical than artistic in character. Concerned though it is with art, it thrusts its roots even more deeply into metaphysics, sociology, and ethics. As the term itself suggests, expressionism is interested in the nature, the function, and the credibility of human expression.
Artistic procedures always furnish some answer to these "other" types of issues: As I see it, expressionism is a paradoxical undertaking: It manifests both absolute faith and absolute disbelief in the most venerable preconceptions fueling the very project of artistic expression, including beauty, order, understanding, and truth.
In intellectual history it signals the end of a Western, humanistic tradition, the termination, as it were, of its guiding objective. Indeed, in one reading, this simultaneous culmination and negation of a project to give form to universally comprehensible knowledge is precisely what enables so many of the theoretical and artistic changes that succeed this radical juncture: Nineteen ten belongs squarely to the first of the two or three phases into which the expressionist current is typically divided.
In this period, its theories and techniques are still fully in process of formation—more tentative than doctrinaire, more daring than programmatic. Art is still considered to be a vehicle for ethical and metaphysical research, not a proven methodology or style. With sympathies more anarchic than socialistic, expressionist thought has not yet assumed stable ideological direction. The prophets of the "New Man" have yet to finish mourning the old one. Agony, at this moment, is stronger than hope, and subjective isolation makes the "brotherhood of man" a still dubious notion.
More particularly, in four expressionist characteristics come clearly into view. The first is a battle between adversaries that seem incapable of resolving their differences: Whether in concept or form, each arises only in the presence of the other, and struggles in vain to break free. Expressionist art does not offer the centripetal visions of naturalistic or impressionistic works, not even the coherent compositions of cubism or futurism.
It heeds no written or unwritten rules about what it should represent or how to go about it. Instead it thrives on what Schoenberg calls the emancipation of dissonance: Of course this is not to say that expressionist works are not instantly recognizable. They are, but as the scene of a racked vision, of an articulated turmoil unprecedented in the. Matter, in expressionist painting, comes to exude an explosive and brutal power, cohesive and destructive at once, binding as well as loosening all natural relations.
Human surroundings undergo sudden and stunning convulsions, bursting with menacing, apocalyptic power. Obvious examples lie in Ludwig Meidner's Apocalyptic Landscapes of —, more subtle ones in the paintings of Kandinsky and Franz Marc. In fact, it is partially the mad and transcendent animation of this cosmic condition that makes it "expressionistic," as though the outside world willfully encroached on the space of all interpreting subjects, storming humanity with illegible intent.
And this is probably what Marc had in mind when he spoke of the "space and soul-shattering" intent of his paintings. In expressionism a dynamic and conflictual universe addresses a consternated subject, including the subject observing the work. Here spirit and object, essence and appearance, and many other metaphysical oppositions enter into such irresolvable contradictions that they signal the need for a radical revision of the understanding.
The second expressionistic characteristic involves virtual despair over the "negative" element in the contending pair: In fact, in a certain perspective the battle of opposites appears to represent disintegration pure and simple, especially in the light of the political realities to which artists find themselves responding. Recognizable in their lurid depiction of the nullifying dimensions of human existence, expressionist works do have their own subject after all: And this dwelling is indelibly marked by the ecstasy and suffering of the body.
Indeed, to find artists confronting the pressures of the flesh with such intensity one must return to the Gothic. In the classical, humanist harmony between body and soul has been all but broken. The body itself has become irremediably duplicitous. To the subjects of early twentieth-century monarchy the moral and economic structures of everyday life are as materiality to the inner life that it traps: No art of the time, including futurism, performs this assault more radically than expressionism.
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Moreover, its attack on these forces of cultural "rhetoric" is hardly an experiment in form. Rather, it is an. The investigation of mortality and disintegration, the resistance to social conventions, and the rebellion against the inadequacies of formal expression—these three reactions to a perceived negativity of being—all lead to the third expressionist move, the envisioned "solution" to this soulless, dehumanizing deficiency, identified with the discovery and liberation of subjective vitality.
At the end of King Edward's reign, as Woolf argues in this essay from the twenties, people suddenly became conscious of needs they never knew that they had. Up until , artists had considered the needs of human nature to be adequately reflected by the material and historical conditions in which it was rooted. But at the end of the first decade external situations appeared to have lost their revelatory power, their complicity, as it were, with inner intention. Scientists and philosophers began to wonder whether the most well-established truths were nothing more than matters of impression and mood, of perspective and judgment.
Positivism, realism, and naturalism appeared to have forsaken the subject they first intended to serve, but of which they had never really spoken: In one way or another, all expressionists seek to ferret out a naked human essence from under its lifeless qualities. They strive to give voice to what history has not endowed with words: Here all efforts are geared to the liberation of "soul," as though it were the seat of all living experience. And thus surface new.
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But more often than not, the project results in the "savior's" own self-immolation, and the savior ends up discovering that what is ostensibly "authentic" and "true" and "inner" never lies within the realm of the speakable, and may ultimately be just as rhetorical a construct as all it opposes. This ethical stance represents the fourth expressionist trait, bringing a romantic project to its final culmination and dissolution.
At the moment in time when artists make the most exasperated call for the inward turn, they also discover its dire and inevitable consequence: Indeed, the commitment to subjective experience in marks more of an end than a beginning of a tradition, which reaches an impasse at the very moment that it becomes most extreme, giving rise to the suspicion that all seemingly self-expressive persons are silenced by the idioms they use.
While collective group history may offer no counterimages for interiority, interiority is also forced to admit that this history still governs everything it can do and say. Subjectivity has no voice but that which speaks by contorting the same terms it wishes to escape. The avant-garde arts of France and England do not explicitly face up to this problem. They sidestep the project of individual "persuasion" and celebrate instead the incoherent and aleatory rule of rhetoric, as though in it the subject might discover a means of deeper self-certainty. The Italian, Germanic, and Slavic expressionists, by contrast, still cling to the project and its accompanying problem, reassessing persuasion to be at best an intermediate condition between the transcendence of "soul" and its historical oppression.
Such a condition is as visible in Emil Nolde's paintings anticipating the emaciated victims of wars that have not yet occurred as in the outright rejection of material reality by Kandinsky. These artists of an era where human nature changes by recognizing that it is already and inevitably changed by living discover that if "expression of self" is not to degenerate into a nostalgic fantasy it must consist of an immanent transformation of the constrictions to which it is destined.
Here the resolution of Rilke's protagonist in The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge —"to be the heavy heart of all that is indistinguishable"—remains the only true ethos of art: And thus the project of self-realization is thrown back on. The fourth expressionist trait circles back to the first, revealing that an ethics has always spurred its dissonant, expressionist aesthetic—an ethics of misunderstanding, where no eloquence can be achieved except in its absence and no expression can be more than a form for pregnant but impregnable contents.
At the end of his treatise on harmony Arnold Schoenberg makes a wry but revealing admission: Mit mir nur rat ich, red ich zu dir In speaking with you, I am merely deliberating with myself. This entire Theory of Harmony , completed on July 1, , is presented as though it were nothing more than an internal conversation. This "teacher" is a pupil pursuing his own instruction, perhaps grappling with problems that do not even allow for a solution. If he voices his uncertainties publicly, it is certainly not in order to persuade anyone.
It is to put others in a similar situation. His method, he notes, is like shaking a box to get three tubes of differing diameters to rest inside each other. One does it in the belief that "movement alone can succeed where deliberation fails. What goes for the teacher also goes for the artist.
In Schoenberg's own phrase, the music he composes in the years surrounding the Theory of Harmony "emancipates dissonance" from the rule of consonance Schoenberg , Consonance, a pleasing resolution of clashing tones, is like comfort. It avoids movement; it "does not take up the search. This type of art—and all good art, in Schoenberg's view—plays out an unfinished, intellectual quest. Aiming only "to make things clear to himself,". Here there is no intention of "provoking" an audience with such dissonant compositions, as many might think. The artist simply "comes to terms with himself and the public listens; for the people know: What Schoenberg describes in the Theory of Harmony is a singularly unsettled new art of the prewar years: Its newness consists in the manifestation of a plight, the transcription of a quandary.
Similar claims are advanced by other artists in the years that Schoenberg turned from classical harmonic structures to atonality. The harmony of the age, writes Vasily Kandinsky, can only be one of "opposites and contradictions. Wilhelm Worringer, the art historian, generalizes the same principle to art of all ages: Macke's, Worringer's, and Kandinsky's statements are not descriptions of the timeless nature of art, even if they are meant as such.
They are fruits of a moment, deductions and generalizations on the basis of a contemporary, historical scenario. Other artists and thinkers offer comparable accounts at nearly the same time. Antitheses and contradictions are that which art brings into harmony Kandinsky ; the imagination lives on antithesis Worringer ; art results from tension Macke. And these tense, antithetical foundations involve a whole world of experience—political as well as.
The "cold romanticism" of Paul Klee entails a "concept of contraries, embracing the entire Universe, in which out of their action one upon the other all creativity arises" Comte The theories and art of Piet Mondrian are grounded in "a system of opposites such as male-female, light-dark, mind-matter" Tuchman Before the Great War a call is sounded for art to speak of unity by way of difference or not speak at all.
Why such a call? Why such dissonance in music? Such jarring and clashing forms in painting? Such dark and unreconciled tragedies in plays, novels, and poetry? Do they have counterparts in the social and institutional realms? And what might be "emancipating" about this ordering of disorder? As Aristotle explained it, Why? While art always responds to historical conditions, it also aims to reveal something these conditions themselves do not express. In the process it complicates the understanding with which we started, redefining our sense of the "causes" by the nature of its response.
When we identify circumstances and experiences that help nourish a creative act, we have only offered the first turn in a circle, a circle not completed until we return to those experiences with the new understanding that is provided by the act in question. And this changes our initial view, starting the circle all over. No understanding of circumstances "determining" a work of art is of much use unless it is directly determined by the work itself. And this gives us as many understandings as there are readings. At this moment the question Why?
What are the issues that a work strives to define? And how are they formed by the terms in which they are said? Here the question Why? At this point one turns to the relations, hoping that their Why? To many keen minds in Europe, experience in appears racked by contradiction. The continent stands on the brink of the First World War.
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And in one perspective the war already bespeaks the dissonance whose unity the artists seek: The European frame of mind in the. Social ideology finds itself increasingly polarized between the Radical and the Conservative, the Left and the Right, Man and Woman, the Young and the Old. Psychoanalysis tells a story in which the conscious mind vies with its unconscious counterpart, the licit with the illicit impulses, the wishes with the needs, whose cooperation will never be less than strained.
The conflict, as the sociologists Max Weber and Georg Simmel argue, extends out from the self to its social relations. The health of the ego relies, psychologically as well as sociologically, partially on acceding to the demands of others, partially on resisting those same demands. Since the late nineteenth century, European thinkers had diagnosed two radically antithetical syndromes in both psyches and civilizations: Einaudi, ; R.
Macmillan, ; Modris Eksteins, Rites of Spring: Masters and Victims in Modernist Culture London: The Bourgeois Experience, Victoria to Freud, vol. Norton, , and c The Cultivation of Hatred: Norton, ; Eric J. Vintage, , and Nations and Nationalism Since Programme, Myth, Reality, 2d ed. Cambridge University Press, ; H. An Intellectual and Social History — Berkeley: Rosemary Morris New York: Continuum, ; William J. Macmillan, ; George L. Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology: Politics and Culture New York: Harvard University Press, By the early twentieth century, Lebensphilosophen life philosophers and pragmatists have reduced the conflict to a fundamental opposition between exuberant will and petrifying reason, or soul and spirit.
Phenomenologists and language philosophers have separated signs from their meanings, and apparently self-evident facts from values. All this plays a part in the dissonance artists felt called on to harmonize in Were these conflicts more "real" or more "tragic" than others in previous eras? For example, did the youth of Italy or Austria-Hungary suffer more deeply from sexual repression in than the youth of a century earlier, as has frequently been suggested? Whatever facts might answer such questions are not as important as the way these facts themselves are perceived. Repression, the process by which a psyche defends itself against an unacceptable impulse, was one of the new perceptions of the age.
Moral and psychological repression was no doubt even stronger in earlier ages; but it was not identified in that way before the turn of the twentieth century. Something similar applies to the notions of conflict, struggle, and tragedy. If tragedy relies on the perception—not the fact—that experience is hounded by painfully irreconcilable oppositions, then the years preceding the First World War were among the most tragic in Europe.
Miguel de Unamuno spoke on behalf not only of Spain but of the whole continent when he described The Tragic Sense of Life in Georg Simmel goes so far as to describe tragedy as fundamental not only to culture but to the organic unfolding of life in "The Metaphysics of Death" of and "On the Concept and the Tragedy of Culture" of It is of his own historical age that he is thinking when he notes that tragedy structures the modes of collective understanding in each "heroic age of decadence,".
The "profound ethical and ideological conflict [from which] tragedies draw their origins" has one of two consequences: This strife-ridden conception of human experience is hardly alleviated by the historical conditions into which many artists of this moment were born. In Austria-Hungary, to take one example, the situation was fairly complex.
When I think back to my schooling I have the feeling that it was a reflection of the whole history of Austria. Many peoples were joined together in the old Austrian Empire, each retaining its individuality, its particular aptitude. A real gathering of peoples. And every second master came from a different country, and had brought with him some unmistakable national element, a colouring in his voice, his manner, his way of thought. In this sense, school was a preparation for my later life, in which I became a wanderer.
How could issues such as dissonance, difference, and conflict not come to the fore when they were already experienced in the daily travails of cohabitation? The problems were endemic to multicultural states, faced with the task of managing the interests of their increasingly differentiated and self-conscious citizens. In , the particular year that Kokoschka recalls, a similar awareness arises across the Alps, where a group of young men found an eclectic Florentine weekly called La Voce. A forum on sexuality, politics, psychoanalysis, the arts, Catholicism, American pragmatism, and the urgency of collective moral direction, La Voce is bent on the "cultural renovation" of Italy.
What it concludes, however, is that renovation requires an "affirmation of peripheral identities against the central one" Asor Rosa If the tensions of cultural heterogeneity are stronger in Austria-Hungary than in other empires of Europe, it is because it incorporates so many peripheral identities in its dozens of ill-defined parts—like. Their symbol is the city of Trieste, harangued for capitulating to the Austrians by the futurist F. Marinetti in March, But Marinetti knew less about Trieste than his fellow Italian, Scipio Slataper, and it came as a surprise to many readers of La Voce that this author of the five "Letters on Trieste" was not as concerned with the political disenfranchisement of Italians in Trieste as with the city's own lack of identity.
The first of the letters carried its theme in its title: Italian, Germanic, and Slavic. Certainly a "Triestine type" has developed out of this comixture; with the blood of three races coursing through his veins, Slataper himself is a perfect example. Yet the intellectual task still facing Triestines is to make this confluence productive. They must now learn, explains Slataper, to "transform the harm of this contact into an advantage.
Extended beyond the borders of a single city, Triestine art means international art, not traceable to a pure and single root. Triestine art is one that would present the varied, irrepeatable contingencies of a complex place and time as productive, proper, and necessary. And this is in part the ambition of what we call modernism in art, as least the modernism of the early twentieth century, visible no less in the medieval recuperations of the poet Ezra Pound than in the Oceanic and African inspirations of French painters and sculptors.
The most explicitly internationalist art, however, took place not in Florence or Paris but in Munich, where Kandinsky had immigrated in and where, be-. We could dominate all of Nordic literature. But instead, indolent, we are overwhelmed by it. Or, stupid, we despise it. We must defend ourselves from the Slovenes: Our soul could be enlarged if it accepted them as new powers and used them to recondition and fortify its energy. Trieste does not yet know itself. Where else is life such a terrible torment of antithetical powers and self-exhausting longings, cruel struggles and renunciations?
Something that by sacrificing limpid life obtains its own anxious originality. One must sacrifice peace to express it" Slataper For background on Slataper in English see Cary and Adamson In fact, it was for their "unGermanness" that Kandinsky's group was condemned—and not only by the Nazi Degenerate Art exhibit of , but already in the critical polemics of — This, too, is the soil of art in Carlo Michelstaedter's family had emigrated to its vicinity from the German city of Michelstadt, near Darmstadt, in the s, upon hearing that the province offered working opportunities for Jews.
By the end of the nineteenth century, these Michelstaedters were firmly Italian, even if educated, like most citizens of the empire, primarily in German. Italian for themselves and Austrians for the state, they were primarily Jews for others. On such disinherited fringes of states, questions of identity are not a choice but a painful fatality. A full month passed before the Allies responded to Italian appeals for help. No doubt the delay could be attributed to the fact that, in part, Tito was an ally and Italy in part a vanquished power.
Whatever the explanation, Tito's claims to the territory took hold. No better way was found to settle the contentions between Italians and Slays than by running the national frontier right through the. Die Antwort auf den Protest. Stephanie Barron Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Biblioteca Statale Isontina, Nearly fifty years later, an iron barrier still separates one side of Gorizia from the other causing streets to come to dead-ends, as in former Berlin.
A fourth of one piazza is in Italy, three-fourths in a country later transformed, in , into the Republic of Slovenia. To walk from one side of town to another you must cross border patrol. And still, as in Michelstaedter's day, Italians and Slovenes inhabit both parts of the city, alongside rare Austrians who adorn their houses with photographs of the emperor Franz Joseph, deceased in Only the Jews are gone, Michelstaedter's eighty-nine-year-old mother and sister among them, deported by the Germans to Auschwitz in , the population reduced from nearly three hundred to fewer than ten.
To make the irony even more bitter, the cemetery of those Jews who embraced the Italian cause against Austria—the one where Michelstaedter and his family are buried—lies neither in Italy nor in Austria, but in a country that none of them knew. Here, too, the home of all is the home of none.
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Mitteleuropean scholarship has a name for this syndrome: It did not take Otto Weininger to posit this link, forging connections between Judaic experience and a spirit of indirection, opposition, and disintegration. The main steps had already been taken by the tradition to which he belonged. By the beginning of the twentieth century dozens of thinkers had associated Judaism with all that threatened firm cultural identity: At one point or another, historians of culture had laid the responsibility for such ills as rationalism, empiricism, and individualism all at the door of the Jews.
In the most extreme reading, the alleged propensity of Jews for speculative thinking was traceable to an inbred perversion. They were "anti-nature," instinctively opposed to the productive and self-evident forms of a natural life. In a milder reading,. By the number of Italians enrolled in all the schools of Gorizia was 2,, Slovenes, 3, Istituto per gli Incontri Culturali Mitteleuropei, On the once sizable Jewish population of Gorizia see Chiara Lesizza Budin, "La scuola ebraica goriziana dalle origini all'anno " and other articles in the collection Ha-tkiva', La speranza: Attraverso l'ebraisimo goriziano Gorizia: Edizioni della Laguna, It was a reaction to their forcible exclusion from the traditions and opportunities of the cultures they inhabited.
Judaism was a private, paradoxical creed, less grounded in ritual than Christianity. It encouraged its subjects to develop their reflective and analytical skills. Not fettered by the accumulated history of a Church, Jews were more likely to explore the paths of free thinking. Weininger gave metaphysical reasons for the Jewish type, not biological or historical ones.
The Jew, he declared, is essentially a "disbeliever," a person who believes in nothing. Judaism and nihilism are thus synonymous, inclining people to place their immediate and practical interests above all else. What happens, asks Weininger, when a person "has no ultimate goal, a foundation on which the psychologist's probe strikes with a definitive sound?
The psychic contents of the Jew are "all affected by a duality or plurality; from this ambiguity, duplicity, indeed multiplicity, he can never liberate himself" Weininger Bereaved of that "psychic simplicity" which flowers into unquestioning devotion to a spontaneous moral tradition obviously the Christian tradition , the Jew is a creature of masks, speculative in more senses than one: For critical reflections on the Jewish question, including the "self-hatred" they have so often appeared to embody, see Sander Gilman, Jewish Self-Hatred: Selected Papers on Group Dynamics, ed.
Gertrud Weiss Lewin New York: Harper and Row, , —; Quirino Principe, ed. The Composer as Jew Oxford: It is typical of a Jewish spirit to understand someone else's work better than he understands it himself. Even the greatest of Jewish thinkers is only a talent. I think there is some truth in my idea that I really only think reproductively. I don't believe I have ever invented a line of thinking; on the contrary, it has always been given to me by someone else.
I have merely seized upon it immediately in a passion for my own activity of clarification. Can one take the case of Breuer and Freud as an example of Jewish reproductiveness? World Publishing Company, On Wittgenstein and Judaism see Steven S. Almost a century after the publication of Weininger's Sex and Character , the ambiguity, duplicity, "indeed multiplicity" that he would have liked to erase from human behavior have come to be seen as fundamental traits of modernist culture.
In fact, it is not by chance that today, at the end of the century, we search Central and Eastern Europe, the historical soil of this Jewish experience, for insight into our own postmodern future. The vanished Jew of Mitteleuropa is just the most dramatic casualty of a breakdown of political and psychological integrity that has marked the last hundred years. Others include the "mad" groups of wandering artists.
Karl Lueger, the anti-Semitic mayor of Vienna from to , made it clear how extensive the Jew-concept could be when he declared, "I decide who is a Jew" cited in Eksteins Authority defines even those it excludes, not just as dissonant to the rule, but as intrinsically anarchic. According to Schoenberg at least, the racial theories at the beginning of the century had more influence on Jews than Gentiles:. There were only small groups, among students mostly, which were subdued by them. And all the great Jewish thinkers, scientists, artists, writers and innovators.
And from my own experience I can tell you that the number of my Aryan pupils and followers was very much larger than I could have expected. Indeed, I personally found myself far more appreciated by Aryans than by Jews. The latter, deprived of their racial self-confidence, doubted a Jew's creative capacity more than the Aryans did. It was not possible, especially not for a Jew in public life, to ignore the fact that he was a Jew; nobody else was doing so, not the Gentiles and even less the Jews. You had the choice of being counted as insensitive, obtrusive and fresh; or of being oversensitive, shy and suffering from feelings of persecution.
And even if you managed somehow to conduct yourself so that nothing showed, it was impossible to remain completely untouched" cited in Ringer Nor is it to deny that a wide spectrum of differences separates Wittgenstein's Protestant upbringing from Buber's defense of the Hasidic tradition a spectrum actually crossed by Schoenberg: It is simply to say that the Jewish question loomed inevitably over each of these figures—in a sense as the question of all questions, for it epitomized the antagonism between convention and difference, normalcy and abnormalcy, consonance and dissonance, belief and unbelief that marked the whole era.
It pointed to the problem of ideological, psychological, and cultural disunity; but it also raised the suspicion that what lurked beneath such issues of unity and identity was a problem of indeterminate foundations, of personal and ontological non-knowledge. The rival allegiances of groups, a growing distance between individual and public spheres, a feeling that one's innermost identity was inadequately anchored to political and ideological institutions: In responding, however, it also reconstitutes the phenomenology, furnishing perspectives for reinterpreting and reassessing its nature.
Indeed, this feedback from interpretation to "originary" datum is what Schoenberg associates with the artistic process, thriving on displacing the expectations of audiences rather than on reaffirming received ideas. Few artists in are interested in articulating the "historical foundations" of their art. Such an operation could be performed just as well without any help from art. No artist in this study aims merely to reflect their social or political conditions where "aesthetic chaos" would mirror the reality of fractured experience.
That function can be performed by much lesser artists. If anything, the artistic "chaos" of seeks an order that is missing from historical experience: This, if anything, is the "final cause" of the antagonisms of Kandinsky's "harmony of contradiction," for example, envisions the possibility of more flexible interpretive acts than those mechanically refracting the world, ones decongealing these oppositions and allowing them to turn productive.
Years after the First World War, when Schoenberg hears a rumor that Kandinsky has become anti-Semitic, he addresses his onetime friend in the most unanswerable of terms. He notes that the real Kandinsky, the artist and genius of , the Kandinsky that Schoenberg loved, could not possibly have thought in such terms Schoenberg and Kandinsky To emancipate dissonance is not only to recognize, suffer, or reflect such dissonance. It is to make it the basis for a new type of art.
To borrow a phrase from Massimo Cacciari The suspicion that anarchy might be the only true ground for meaning confronts art, not with the liberty of license, but with the most stringent of formal tasks. Two years after Schoenberg's Theory of Harmony a restless bohemian called Dino Campana presents a comparable scenario for contemporary art. His own art of poetry is the fruit of travels by foot throughout Italy and Europe, each ending in a clash with the law and a forced return to his hometown of Maradi, north of Florence.
The pattern is repeated dozens of times, even as far away as Argentina. And each time Campana is charged with mental alienation; finally he is committed to an asylum for the last fourteen years of his life 19 18— Orphic Songs Canti Orfici, , his only collection of poems, opens not by commemorating a lyrical experience, advancing a symbol, or evoking a love, but by describing a situation that Campana calls "The Night":. Archi enormemente vuoti di ponti sul flume impaludato in magre stagnazioni plumbee: Enormously empty arches of bridges over the river swamped in meager leaden stagnations: In this lurid conglomeration of images, everything contends with everything: Above the torrid and burnt out plains the hills are a "frigidarium.
The arches of the bridges are "enormously empty," constructed not of their stone, but of the spaces they frame. Two shapes can be made out in the dazzle of the dark scene, bound only by contrast: The first image is general and indistinct, the other magnified and detailed. From the soundless swamp a song emerges. Time, which typically runs, has come to a halt. The rest of this opening poem only confirms the pattern, elaborating a simile of paradox, a hallucinatory narrative of sensual and imaginative deviance. The second poem of the Orphic Songs , perhaps the earliest to be written, gives a name to this perplexing experience: Figuratively, she is a creature of the imagination, as inexplicable as she is unattainable.
In the field of genetics, a chimera is an organism possessing the tissues of two sexes or species. In each case she is a hybrid phenomenon, an anomalous event, a possibility as alluring as she is rare. Addressing his Chimera directly, Campana does not mask his confusion:. No attempt to identify this Chimera can diminish her sway over Campana's entire literary production. She names no living woman, no momentary sensation, no haunting vision of the poet—indeed, no identity at all—but rather historical experience pure and simple, experience that unhinges the witnessing mind, generating confusion in its agent.
In turn this agent—this poet—can find no significance but in articulating that same confusion. Like Schoenberg's dissonance, the Chimera names an art that emancipates the confusion built into experience, revealing it, transmitting it, making it appear to have its own order. Campana's poem is organized around one chronically repeated statement, "I do not know," as if to say, "I can give you nothing but the Chimera I see, sweet to my grief. Eliot, Eugenio Montale, and other poets of. Straining to understand the Chimera's poem, the nocturnal poet presents his bewilderment as the product of a specular world.
His benighted intelligence spirals into a battle between vitality and death, between darkness and stars. On the adolescent and virginal Queen lies a pallor of dead springs. A line of blood marks her bloodless face, signaling her lips. Her flaming hair is the single "living sign" of what is otherwise closer to a corpse.
The unknowable, chimerical poem announces an inextricable union of presence and absence in voluptuous pain, to the point where the poet cannot say whether this gruesomely lovely face ever appeared at all or whether he just felt it as a smile of "unknown distance. Some elements of Campana's style are familiar to us from French symbolist poetry, so much so that scholarly emphasis on this lineage has obscured a proper view of the more raw, "Teutonic," expressionistic dimensions of his verse.
Symbolism and expressionism are both interested in relations between things dissimilar on the surface, in the junctures and recesses implied by the very tying of meanings together, in the possibility of awakening some invisible world by means of different and unusual ties. Both stress the intellectual confusion between sensory and theoretical perception. The difference between the arts, however, lies in the nature of their respective achievements.
Symbolism valorizes consciousness at the very edge of perception. It suspects that there may be some unifying ground of signs and surface appearances. Expressionism is more concerned with the disorientation already at work in perceptual and conceptual understanding, the disjunction between "alternative" and "everyday" modes of vision. Where the earlier nineteenth-century poets discover invisible links among discordant phenomena, the later ones heighten the phenomenon of discord itself, suggesting that harmony can be discovered only in these structures of tension, not beyond or behind them.
Here artistic revelations of "another world" beyond the apparent one become all but impossible. The surfaces of perceptible experience fail to become symbols of intuitable wholes. Rather, these surfaces appear "unnaturally" natural, eluding the meanings one might like to assign them, while yielding no others. And this is the "demonic" dimension of expressionistic writing, entrusting itself to the space between the visible and the invisible, the natural and the transcendent, the "will" and the power.
An example lies in a story called "The Perfecting of a Love" Die Vollendung eine Liebe, , written during the short-lived expressionist phase of the Austrian writer Robert Musil. The task Musil sets himself in this masterpiece of expressionist prose—in this story "formed by disgust with storytelling," as he puts it Musil b: Most of this psychic externalization occurs through mind-stretching analogies between things pertaining to entirely different orders of being, as if to suggest that rational or discursive com-.
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There was something gay and light about it all, a dilation as when walls open out—something loosened and unburdened and full of tenderness. And from her own body too the gentle weight was now lifted, leaving in her ears a sensation as of melting snow, gradually passing over into a ceaseless, light, loose tinkling.
She felt as if with her husband she were living in the world as in a foaming sphere full of beads and bubbles and little feathery rustling clouds. As Musil explains it in a sketch for a foreword to Unions , the volume in which "The Perfecting of a Love" appeared, the objective of this writing is to penetrate to a deeper sphere of the psyche than one revealing honest characters to have "specks of rascality [and] rascals specks of honesty.
A little deeper still, and people dissolve into futility. And it is for this reason that Musil constructs his floating network of concomitant images and values: Nevertheless, at the rare moments when the narrator does try to explain discursively or rationally the internal turmoil of his protagonist Claudine, we sense the extent to which her turbulence involves the dissociation of the realm of appearances from all ideal requirements of meaning. Latent in Claudine, notes the narrator, is an intuition that something is grotesquely inappropriate about the shapes that external experience assumes.
What struck her most as she gazed around her. It was like an expression that has remained on a face long after the emotion has gone. And oddly—as though a link had snapped in the silently unwinding chain of events and swiveled out of its true position, jutting out of its dimension—all the people and all the things grew rigid in the attitude of that chance moment, combining, squarely and solidly, to form another, abnormal order.
Only she herself went sliding on, her swaying senses outspread among these faces and things—sliding downwards—away.
What bothers Claudine is not simply that this aspect of things is arbitrary, but that it "persists," resisting the fluidity of temporal change. Chance forms seem to operate independently of all inner intention, holding onto things "as with claws. At moments like these all natural phenomena appear irremediably unnatural. And in contrast to the tenacity of this inessential objective world, the subjectivity of Claudine goes "sliding on.
Perceived reality is never estranged to this point in consonant, reciprocal, symbolist worlds. If there are any reciprocal relations in Musil's passage, they are only those of mutual and insoluble oppositions. Just as the appearance of a thing comes loose from its essence, so the moment becomes dissociated from eternity, the contingent from the necessary, the perception from thing perceived, the volatility of inner subjective life from the heavy immobility of objective fact. Expressionist writing does inherit the symbolistic tendency to transform the structure of everyday experience in such a way as to make meaning transcend all appearance; but this "meaning" is now far too transcendent to seize.
To make matters worse, such transcendence of meaning is never so autonomous or complete as to transubstantiate or cancel its natural point of departure the physical world. All that remains sure is the disjunction between an appearance or sign and its possible significance. Imaginative knowledge is impossible to extricate from its world of contorted forms. Expressionism finds its path between symbolism and the other aesthetic that it inherits: Just as expressionism naturalizes the domain of the symbol by tying it to everything it wishes to transcend, it also makes the natural symbolic.
Only now the natural is symbolic of no more than its own discordant, dynamic, and insufficiently expressive energy. Campana is only one point of transition. Each one of his images struggles to become a symbol, but few succeed. And when they do, they are forced. What is not forced—and this may have to do with Campana's own mental imbalance, the "natural logic" of his madness, as it were—is the reciprocal clash of these images, each striving to become a symbol, but also failing to receive cohesive, significant organization.
The expressionism of Campana also appears in the recurring and insuperable confrontation, in his verse, between a suffering ego and. The Tragedy of the Last German in Italy: The collection also ends with a colophon, a paraphrase of Walt Whitman: Campana explains from his asylum what he meant by the last German. He is the "idealistic and imperialistic" barbarian of the Middle Ages, who met his end in Italy through "moral purity.
Both images reinforce the collection's governing figure of the poet as a mythical Orpheus torn limb from limb by hysterical Maenads. Only a handful of prewar poets depict experience in such violent and conflictual terms—Georg Heym, Jakob van Hoddis, and Gottfried Benn among them. Everyone has spit on me since I was fourteen; I hope that somebody will finally want to run me through [ infilarmi ]. Know, though, that you will not be running through a sack of pus, but the supreme alchemist, who has created blood out of pain. In my hate for sacks of pus encased by futurism, I wish either to run through [others] or be run through" Campana Novecento, ; Mario Costanzo, Studi critici: Rebora, Boine, Sbarbaro, Campana Rome: Poetica e stilistica dei Canti Orfici Florence: Vallecchi, ; Teresa Fern, Dino Campana: L'infinito del sogno Roma: Dino Campana," Conversant Essays: Contemporary Poets on Poetry, ed.
Il progetto e l'opera Roma: Nostalgia e sublimazione nella tendenza al suicidio," Il Ponte 45, no. It is impossible to imagine a writer more sensitive to the spiritual indefiniteness resulting from two millennia of opposition between the sacred and the secular than Trakl. This poet charges his understanding with the elementary power of almost every antithesis with which European thinking has struggled from the start: In Trakl the conflicting pull of these forces has finally become unbearable.
Whatever one would like to keep separate here commingles incestuously, contaminating the nature of its other. Was it Trakl's own psyche, so frequently investigated by scholars and psychologists, that made him so prone to paradox? As a child he was pathologically shy, subject, like Michelstaedter, to fits of rage. To avoid having to face passengers in trains, he would travel standing in the aisles outside compartments.
He was given to sui-. The Broken World Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, Ridiculed by his family for writing poetry, Trakl grew increasingly introverted. His father was at best indifferent, at worst insensitive, to him and his five siblings. The Road Beyond Ruin.
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