LITERATURA ALEM

Fin de sicle movements

Friedrich Nietzsche
Writing at the same time as the later realists and the naturalist writers but forming a
bridge to German Modernism, Friedrich Nietzsche developed a philosophy that
understood art as the result of a fundamental conflict between two opposing forces
the Apollonian, or the desire for Classical form and serenity, and the Dionysian, or the
ecstatic and quasi-religious search for liberation from formal constraints. His Die
Geburt der Tragdie aus dem Geiste der Musik (1872; The Birth of Tragedy) was a
significant influence on 20th-century literature and aesthetic theory. Nietzsches later
works combined cultural pessimism with a vitalistic philosophy that called for the
development of the superman, or titanic personality, capable of providing a new
and more forceful type of cultural leadership. Rejecting mediocrity, Nietzsche
believed that the ideal personality was in a constant state of development, affirming
its identity by continually enlarging its sphere of experience. Also sprach Zarathustra
(188385; Thus Spoke Zarathustra) and Jenseits von Gut und Bse (1886; Beyond
Good and Evil) proclaimed the new ideals. In these works, Nietzsche also questioned
the value of truth and knowledge, espousing the view that facts are precisely what
there is not, only interpretations. Nietzsches perspectivism, reflected in the
composition of some of his works as an assemblage of aphorisms and essays, and his
insistence that objectivity is a fiction provided an important basis for Modernist
presentations of reality.

Aestheticism / Dekadenz
In the final decades of the 19th century the literary scene was divided between
naturalism and its opposites, variously collected under terms such as Neoromanticism,
Impressionism, Jugendstil, and Decadence. Aestheticismthe belief that the work of
art need have no moral or political use beyond its existence as a beautiful object
may prove to be the most appropriate overarching term for this period. In a series of
essays written between 1890 and 1904, the Austrian critic and playwright Hermann
Bahr explained the unsettling effects of Impressionism, which appeared to dissolve
the boundaries of objects and make even the perceiving subject little more than a
fluctuating angle of vision. Hugo von Hofmannsthal presented a fictional analysis of
the Impressionist philosophy in his influential essay Ein Brief (1902; A Letter,
commonly known as Chandos-Brief, Eng. trans. The Lord Chandos Letter), a
fictive missive from Lord Chandos to Sir Francis Bacon. In the Letter, Chandos
describes an experience akin to sickness or paralysis. Language, he feels, has become
a depleted and meaningless medium. He feels himself pulled into a whirlpool of
words that have lost all coherence. At the end of the Letter, Chandos expresses his
longing for a new language that has no words as such, a language in which dumb
things will speak to me. Sometimes regarded as a personal testimony to the crisis of
language that accompanied the Aestheticist movement, Ein Brief is in fact a
diagnosis and critique of that crisis. It became a central document that initiated some
of the most important experiments of German literary Modernism.
A number of specialized periodicals, published in Berlin, Munich, Vienna, and
Prague, led to a wide dissemination of Aestheticist writing. Magazines such as Pan
and Die weissen Blatter (White Pages) welcomed short texts by young authors
experimenting with what was regarded at the time as the modern style; and the
annual Inselalmanach (Insel Yearbook) featured new writing by authors in the then-
Aestheticist Insel Publishing House. Stefan Georges early lyric poetry, together with
Hofmannsthals poems and lyrical dramas and Arthur Schnitzlers dramas and short
stories, set the tone for the Aestheticist movement in the 1890s. The influence of
French Symbolism is especially evident in the poetry of George and Hofmannsthal. A
novel by Thomas Mann, Buddenbrooks (1901; subtitled Verfall einer Famille, or
The Decline of a Family, Eng. trans. Buddenbrooks), links aesthetic decadence with
social and moral decline. Arthur Schopenhauers philosophy of the will and
Nietzsches cultural pessimism are important ingredients in Manns engagement with
Aestheticism. His early stories, for example Tonio Krger (1903) and the novella Der
Tod in Venedig (1912; Death in Venice), turn upon a simultaneous fascination with
and critique of the Aestheticist impulse. His preoccupation with the figure of the
artist, perennially longing to participate in the active and robust life of bourgeois
society but perennially condemned to decadence, illness, and an inability to cope with
practical realities, is a characteristic theme of Aestheticism. Rainer Maria Rilke and
Hermann Hesse also explore this problematic relation between the artist and real life.
Rilkes early poetry belongs to the Aestheticist movement, and even his later, more
boldly experimental works, Duineser Elegien (1923; Duino Elegies) and Sonette an
Orpheus (1923; Sonnets to Orpheus), bear clear traces of his Aestheticist origins. The
early stories of Franz Kafka also owe much to Aestheticism.