9 - The Spirit of Expressionism ex machina: The Staging of Technology in Expressionist Drama

Summary

German Expressionism was a revolution in art, philosophy, literature, and spirit to regenerate the cultural, political, and social spheres stagnating beneath nationalist and authoritarian institutions and their representatives. Immanent, transformative energies and the future-directed spirit of man, according to Kurt Pinthus in “Rede für die Zukunft” (Speech for the Future, 1918), would reshape the world, for “die Wirklichkeit ist nicht außer uns, sondern in uns” (reality is not outside us, but rather within us; in Rothe, 126) Such calls for renewal and salvation were common within German political, social, artistic, and scientific circles, which were acutely aware of the unresolved existential, social, and political problems caused by Germany's accelerating industrialization in the late Wilhelminian period. Debates concerning “wholeness” and “spirit” preoccupied a society obsessed with the power and reach of scientific and capitalist enterprise, especially after 1914. The confrontation of “machine” and the “soul” resonated widely and encompassed a range of cultural meanings: For some it promised salvation and the transformation of the self that humanistic discourse had failed to provide; for others it became the source of human damnation. As the complete penetration of technology in modern life entered general consciousness, nineteenth-century faith in the progressive promise of technology, the supremacy of traditional elites, and the spiritual autonomy of the subject came under scrutiny and the metaphorical function of the machine in culture and society expanded.

Although many artists embraced technology as a revolutionizing tool for the stage, and as a symbol of freedom of movement in their private lives as avid car and airplane enthusiasts, especially in the prewar era (see Loquai, 76–94), the depiction of technology in modernist literature exhibited more generally the “schizophrene Haltung des modernen Menschen zur Technik überhaupt” (schizophrenic posture of modern man to technology in general; Daniels, 177) as artists struggled to come to terms with the contrary senses of liberation and subjugation by the machine on the one hand, and on the other the mastery it afforded while it threatened the mechanization of the human spirit.