Expressionism

Expressionism arose in Europe in the late

nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as a
response
to bourgeois complacency and the increasing
mechanization and urbanization of society. At
their most popular between 1910 and 1925, just
before and just after World War I, expressionist
writers distorted objective features of the sensory
world using Symbolism and dream-like elements
in their works illustrating alienating and often
emotionally overwhelmed sensibilities. Painters
such as Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin, and
Edvard Munch helped to lay the foundation for
Expressionismin their use of distorted figures and
vibrant color schemes to depict raw and
powerfully emotional states of mind. Munch’s The
Scream (1894), for e xample, a lithograph
depicting a figure with a contorted face screaming
in horror, epitomized the tone of much
expressionist art. In literature, German philosopher
Friedrich
Nietzsche emphasized cultivating individual
willpower and transcending conventional notions
of
reasoning and morality. His Thus Spake
Zarathustra (1885), a philosophic prose poem
about
the ‘‘New Man,’’ had a profound influence on
expressionist thought. In France, symbolist poets
such as Arthur Rimbaud and Charles Baudelaire
wrote visionary poems exploring dark and ecstatic
emotional landscapes. In Germany in the
twentieth century, poets such as Georg Trakl and
Gottfried Benn practiced
what became known as Expressionism by
abandoning meter, narrative, and
conventionalsyntax, instead organizing their poems
around symbolic imagery. In fiction, Franz Kafka
embodied expressionist themes and styles in stories
such as The Metamorphosis (1915), which tells of
a traveling salesman who wakes to find himself
transformed into a giant insect. Expressionist
dramatists include Georg Kaiser, Frank
Wedekind, Ernst Toller, and August Strindberg,
often referred to as the ‘‘Father of
Expressionism.’’In the early 1930s, the Nazi
regime, which considered the movement decadent,
banned its practitioners from publishing their
work or producing their plays.
REPRESENTATIVE AUTHORS
Federico Garcı´a Lorca (1898–1936)

Garcı´a Lorca was homosexual and had many

relationships with other men, most of them
ending badly, which contributed to the young
man’s depression. From 1930 to 1936, Garcı´a
Lorca was director of a student theater company
that toured rural Spain and performed classic
works with modern interpretations. During this
time, he wrote his expressionistic play, Blood
Wedding (1933). Civil war broke out in Spain in
July of 1936; Garcı´a Lorca was arrested and shot
by the Nationalist militia on August 19, 1936, for
unknown reasons. Critic Denis Mac- Shane, like
others, suspects it was for his leftist
politics and homosexuality. His body was dumped
in an unmarked grave.
Franz Kafka (1883–1924)

Like many of the expressionists, Kafka

wasinfluenced by Nietzsche and Strindberg. His
writings, primarily novels and stories, depict an
absurdist view of the world, which he describes in
paradoxically lucid terms. In the use of symbols
and types, his stories often resemble parables. Like
Gregor Samsa, the protagonist of The
Metamorphosis, Kafka’s characters often find
themselves in the midst of an incomprehensible
world, consumed with guilt and alienated

froMmthose they love. The Trial, for example, a

novel unfinished at the time of Kafka’s death,

concerns a bank clerk who is arrested but never

told the charges. He futilely attempts to negotiate

a Byzantine legal system to find the answer, but

never does, and is finally killed ‘‘like a dog.’’ In

modern times, the term ‘‘Kafkaesque’’ is usedas an

adjective suggesting something possessing a

complex, inscrutable, or bizarre quality.

Georg Kaiser (1878–1945)

Widely acknowledged as the leader of the
expressionist movement in theater In plays such as
The Citizens of Calais (1917) and From Morn to
Midnight (1917), Kaiser juxtaposed fantasy and
reality, used rapidly shifting scenes, and gave his
characters generic names to underscore their
symbolic and universal significance. Kaiser’s plays
typically feature a questing protagonist who
searches everywhere for meaning but finds none.
These characters often commit suicide. Kaiser’s
famous trilogy of plays—Coral (1917), Gas I
(1918), and Gas 2 (1920)—are as relevant in the
early 2000s as they were in the 1920s in their
indictment of mindless and mechanized labor and
the selfishness of big business.
Kaiser’s influence on the development of European
drama cannot be overstated. Along
with Strindberg and Toller, he changed the
direction of twentieth-century drama by opening
it to other dramatic possibilities. Critics consider
Kaiser and Bertolt Brecht, who also used
expressionist techniques, the two leading German
playwrights of the twentieth century. Kaiser’s
plays were banned when the Nazis came to power
in 1933. At the beginning of World War II, the
writer fled to Switzerland, where he died of an
embolism on June 4, 1945.

Eugene O’Neill (1888–195

. Family dysfunction became a staple theme of his

plays and is a recurring theme of expressionist
theater. He is the firstAmerican playwright to
have won the award. Literary historians point to
his 1920 play, The Emperor Jones as an example
of American expressionist theater, as well as The
Great God Brown (1926). In these plays, O’Neill
uses ghosts, music, lighting, and stage sets to
externalize the inner life of his characters. Other
O’Neill plays include Desire under the Elms
(1924), The Iceman Cometh (1939), and Long
Day’s Journey into Night (1939–1941).

August Strindberg (1849–1912)

Often referred to by literary historians as the
‘‘Father of Expressionism,’’ A novelist and essayist
as well
as a playwright, Strindberg had his first play
produced when he was 21. However, for much of
his
life he struggled financially, working as a librarian,
newsletter editor, tutor, and journalist.His
controversial
ideas often landed him in trouble, and in 1884 he
was tried—yet acquitted—for blasphemy
for stories he wrote that belittled women and
criticized conventional religious practices. Toward
the end of his life, Strindberg achieved critical as
well as financial success, and his plays were
performed
throughout Europe. In 1912, he was awarded the
‘‘anti-Nobel Prize’’ in recognition for
the way in which his writing challenged
conventions and authority
REPRESENTATIVE WRITERS

Blood Wedding

The Citizens of Calais

The Emperor Jones

A Dream Play
Strindberg’s 1901 A Dream Play foreshadows
many expressionist techniques and themes in its
presentation of the unconscious. The plot concerns
the daughter of an Indian god who adopts
human form and discovers, through encounters
with symbolic characters, the meaninglessness of
human existence. With the obvious exception that
the protagonist is female, the action parallels the
story of Christ’s life. The play itself—presented in
sixteen scenes that flash backward and forward in
time—takes the form of a dream with symbols
such as a growing castle, a chrysanthemum, and a
shawl signifying aspects of the dreamer’s life such
as the imprisoned or struggling soul and the
accumulation of human pain. The characters are
also symbolic. Victoria, for example, represents the
ideal, yet unattainable, woman. The play has
become a staple of European theater and
continued
to be performed into the early 2000s

THEMES

THEMES
Regeneration
The defining event of the expressionist movement
is WorldWar I. After the war, much expressionist

writing portrayed the attempt to forge a new

future for Germany.Writing from this time
champions
the birth of the ‘‘New Man,’’ the ‘‘new vision,’’ and
the ‘‘new society.’’ Toller’s play The
Transformation typifies one strain of early
postwar expressionist drama, as it shows how one
man’s spiritual renewal is linked to his country’s
regeneration. Written as a stationendrama, The
Transformation follows the central character’s
spiritual progress through a series of episodes,
connected only through the character’s experience.
The protagonist, Friedrich, a young Jewish
sculptor, transforms himself from an alienated
and
wandering artist into a friend of the proletariat
who finally finds a cause to believe in and die for.
At the end of the play, Friedrich implores the
masses to create a society based upon compassion
and justice, and to throw off the yoke of capitalist
oppression.

Human Condition
Expressionist literature is defined by protagonists
and speakers who passionately seek meaning
in their lives. They often discover that the life they
have been living is a sham, and through a sign or
circumstance, or dint of sheer will, attempt to
change their lot. Kaiser’s dramas,
for example, feature protagonists who struggle to
make difficult choices in recapturing a sense
of authenticity

Sexuality
Part of the expressionist drive to represent truth
involved tackling what expressionists saw as the
hypocrisy of society’s attitude towards sex and
sexuality. Strindberg, Reinhard, and especially
Wedekind all explicitly addressed the ways in
which society sapped humanity’s life force by
either ignoring or repressing the sexual drive. More
than any other expressionist, Wedekind,
who derived many of his ideas from Strindberg
and Nietzsche, attacked bourgeois morality in
his dramas. In Spring’s Awakening, he represents
institutions such as the German school system as
agents of deceit and mindless evil in their
attempts to keep students ignorant of their own
sexuality.

Alienation
Before World War I, the alienation portrayed in
expressionist literature was often related to the
family and society in more general, some might
say adolescent, ways. After the war, alienation
was more directly related to the state. For
example, Kafka’s protagonists, such as Gregor
Samsa, are ostracized by their families becausethey
do not conform to familial expectations.
Most expressionist writers came from middleclass
families who embodied the very hypocrisy
they sought to expose in their writing. Later
dramatists such as Kaiser and Toller wrote
about the alienation experienced by workers
STYLE

STYLE
Abstraction
For expressionists, abstraction is the distillation of
reality into its essence. Expressionists are not
interested in presenting the world as human
beings might see it or apprehend it through any
of the senses, but rather as they emotionally and
psychologically experience it. In drama, abstraction
means that a play is conceptual rather than
concrete, and it means that plots and characters
are frequently symbolic and allegorical. For
instance, a character might simply be called
‘‘Father,’’ as in Strindberg’s play The Father, or
‘‘Cashier,’’ rather than, say, Mrs. Jones, as in a
realistic play. The idea is to show the universality
of human experience rather than its particularity.
Monologue
Monologues are speeches by a single person, and
they are especially prevalent in expressionist
theater.
Partly, this is due to the didactic nature of much
expressionist theater, and partly it is
because Expressionism often champions the
individual and his vision of the world. When
characters speak to themselves, which they often
do in expressionist plays, the monologues
are called soliloquies. Strindberg, Kaiser, and Toller
all made extensive use of monologues
and soliloquies in their plays.
Genre
Many expressionists had the idea that art could
not be separated into categories such as plays,
poetry, or fiction. Instead, they experimented with
mixing genres. Plays often contained dance,
music, and sets that resembled art galleries, and
characters would periodically launch into verse.
Expressionists such as Wassily Kandinsky, a
painter, poet, and dramatist, practiced this form
of ‘‘total art’’ in productions such as The Yellow
Sound, in which he uses color, music, and
characters
with names such as ‘‘Five Giants,’’ ‘‘Indistinct
Creatures,’’ and ‘‘People in Tights’’ to abstractly
represent the human condition.