Description

Around 1900, progressive responses to the bourgeois conservatism of the nineteenth century coexist with anti-modern capitalism and industrialization. Both give rise to protests against the status quo and generate a plethora of demands for cultural and social reform, in which elements of 'radicalism' and 'traditionalism' are often hard to separate. Exploring the concepts of modernity championed in the modernist avant-garde as well as in less formally experimental guises, the essays collected here provide insights into the artistic expressions of protest discourses of the era and into the imaginative constructions of alternative social worlds. The chapters cover a wide range of topics, from the programmatic visions of artists' colonies to Expressionist poetry, and from women's fiction to Dada. However, all the analyses collected here focus on the relationship between socio-political concerns and the aesthetic strategies employed in the literature of protest. As a collection, they allow a better understanding of the plurality of possibilities of artistic engagement in the late Kaiserreich.
 
Germanic Studies series, 100
ISBN 978-0-85457-241-0; 210 pp.; 17 January 2015
Published in conjunction with Iudicium Verlag, Munich
 

Table of contents

Godela Weiss-Sussex and Charlotte Woodford: Introduction
Modernity: Cultural Regeneration or Crisis?
James A. van Dyke: Radical Art History and the Art of Social Protest in Imperial Germany
Matthew Jefferies: 'No Great Wall, No Protective Tariffs for our Art, No Chauvinistic Deutschtümmelei'? Carl Vinnen's Ein Protest deutscher Künstler Revisited
Arne Offermanns: Ernst Lissauer: Religious Poetry between Bourgeois Left Liberalism and völkisch- Reactionary Thought
Valentina Di Rosa: Der Friedriechshagener Kreis und die Neue Germeinschaft: Experiment und Krise zweier Künstlerkolonien der frühen Moderne
Lászlo V. Szabó: Die Krisis der europäischen Kultur: Rudolf Pannwitz's Reformist Thinking between Nietzsche and Heraclitus
Hans Hahn: Dad: 'eine Candide gegen die Zeit' oder der 'Zentralrat der Weltrevolution'?
The Aesthetics of Protest and Reform
Joela Jacobs: 'Verbrechen wider die Natur': Oskar Panizza's First Encounter with Censorship
Eva Axer: 'Zwischen Alt und Neu': Arno Holz's Buch der Zeit and his Concept of 'soziale Lyrik'
Charlotte Woodford: Protest in Women's Fiction around 1900: Maria Janitschek's Short Stories and Hedwig Dohm's Christa Ruland
Godela Weiss-Sussex: Reformprogrammatik und Romanästhetik: Ruth Bré, Gabriele Reuter und Grete Meisel-Hess
Catherine Smale: 'Erwachende Frauen': Grief as Protest in Expressionist Women's Poetry from the First World War
Index