Phantasus book completed

The first substantial English translation of Arno Holz’s poetry is now ready for publication. It includes the complete 100-poem first edition of 1898-99, and a selection from the enlarged (and very different) second edition of 1916, where miniature gems have proliferated into multi-page pieces with enormously long lines .

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CONTENTS

Translator’s Introduction                                                                                        v

PHANTASUS first edition

• First Album (1998) – poems to         page 5
• Second Album (1999) – poems to      page 45

PHANTASUS second edition (1916) – a selection

• First Set: New poems in same style as the 1st edition       page 91
• Second Set: New poems with ultra-long lines     page 98
• Third Set: Much expanded versions of two 1st-edition poems    page 105

Background Notes    page 121

Afterword by Robert Wohlleben    page 125

To whet your appetite, here is my Introduction, followed by Robert Wohlleben’s Afterword.

INTRODUCTION (c) C D Godwin

Why, the reader asks, should I bother with a book of verse by a German poet of whom I’ve never heard? And one who formats his poems in such an eccentric way? A half-hour’s glance through the one hundred poems in Part One of this collection may already suggest an answer.

Perhaps your eye will skim over the shorter pieces, and be tempted at first to dismiss them as nothing much. Perhaps you’ll linger over a longer piece, and smile, or frown, or feel slight irritation at too many unfamiliar cultural references. (Don’t worry – the Endnotes are there to help.) Perhaps now and then you’ll be tempted to read out loud, using the typography, punctuation and line breaks as cues, and you’ll note how well the sense-units match your own natural phrasing and breathing.

So even your first quick skim may leave you with a sense that there’s more to explore and enjoy in these deceptively simple poems. Here I aim to provide enough background to help you appreciate what was revolutionary about the first edition of the Phantasus cycle, and how it relates both to the late 19^th century literary movement dubbed ‘Naturalism’, and the early 20^th century upheaval in the visual arts, theatre and literature labelled ‘Expressionism’.

A Philistine age

In the second half of the 19^th century, German literature was in a poor condition. Social, economic and political changes in the period before and after the founding of the German Empire in 1871 went largely ignored by a conservative, Philistine literary establishment, whose mental world was a pre-industrial idyll of rural and small-town life, often expressed in quasi-Wagnerian pseudo-Mediaeval novels and epics, and in a fossilised ‘lofty’ lyric style modelled on Classical forebears and fixated on Ancient Greece. For such writers, the aim of Art was Beauty, and ‘real life’ was too vulgar a topic for literature.

The ‘educated’ readership in Germany was not extensive. The post-unification ruling class brought together Ruhr ‘smokestack barons’ with the landed ‘cabbage Junkers’ of East Prussia – neither faction had much time for literature. The large portions of the upper and middle classes employed in Prussian military and civil service (which included the staff of schools and universities) depended for their careers on conformity with the state ideology of obedience and submission to authority. The semi-educated bourgeoisie, as the century advanced, could find plenty of reading matter in periodicals and almanacs promoting wholesome thoughts amid tales of adventure, piety and romance. For the growing urban proletariat, the literati had almost nothing to offer.

It is sadly remarkable how few writers from Germany in the century between Napoleon’s defeat in 1815 and the First World War are familiar to non-specialist Anglophone readers. While the preceding ages of Weimar Classicism (Goethe, Schiller) and Romanticism (Hölderlin, E.T.A. Hoffmann, Kleist, Schopenhauer) are still well represented in translations from mainstream English-language publishers, in later decades almost the only names to have a degree of international recognition today are those of the poet Heine, the playwright Büchner, the novelist Fontane, and the philosopher Nietzsche, with Thomas Mann’s first great novel Buddenbrooks arriving towards the end of this period. It is notable that Heine, Büchner and Nietzsche all spent much of their adult lives in exile outside Germany, as, later on, would Mann.

Arno Holz grew to adulthood in this dismaying cultural desert, and would devote his energies to revitalising the language and spirit of German literature in the face of a conservative critical establishment defending its cosy backward-looking world view.

Arno Holz’s life and career

Holz was born in 1863 in the sleepy little East Prussian town of Rastenburg, founded by Teutonic Knights in the 14^th century. (It is now the small town of Kętrzyn in eastern Poland, not far from what used to be the Prussian Königsberg of Kant, and is now Russian Kaliningrad.) His father kept an apothecary’s shop (see , and ), hence the family was of the middling non-landowning bourgeoisie.

In 1875 the family moved to Berlin. The timing was poor: the Gründerjahre – the Foundation Years of the unified Empire – had seen a period of speculative frenzy fuelled by massive war reparations from France’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71; there now followed a crash that brought on two decades of recession.

His Gymnasium schooling no longer affordable, the 18 year old Holz became for a short time a journalist, and then decided to make his way as an independent writer, a course he maintained, with frequent financial stress, until his death in 1929. His first collection of verse entitled Klinginsherz! (Chime into the Heart, see ), published in 1883 when he was just 20, was in traditional lyric style; he soon disowned it. The much more substantial Das Buch der Zeit: Lieder eines Modernen (The Book of Time: Songs of a Modern) in 1886 posed a direct challenge to the literary establishment: ‘you believe poesie is just spring nights and shimmering flowers … you always sing one and the same melody!’ (p.28) The establishment, however, largely ignored the upstart poet, and declined to engage seriously with his arguments.

Spending some time in Paris, Holz discovered advocates of Naturalism in literature: Zola, the critic Hippolyte Taine, and Balzac, who in the Foreword to his novel-cycle the Comédie humaine stated his wish to present a ‘natural history of man’. Zola saw the novelist as one who is ‘an observer and experimenter’. Taine noted approvingly that the naturalist “dissects the octopus as readily as the elephant; he will as readily construct the doorman as the minister. For him, there is no garbage; (…) in his eyes a toad is worth as much as a butterfly.’ (cf. and its Endnote.). Returning to Berlin, Holz delved into advances in biology, astronomy and other natural sciences now being popularised. As well as expanding his imaginative reach with a much vaster view of time and space, his reading led him to form the seductive conjecture that Art too could be subject to natural laws. In his 1892 essay Die Kunst: Ihr Wesen und ihre Gesetze (Art: its essence and its laws) he set out his formula for a ‘law of Art’: Art = Nature – X, where X denotes the imperfections of both the human artist and the available means of reproduction. Many prefer to change the minus sign to a plus: they glorify the Artist, not Nature. Alfred Döblin clarifies Holz’s achievement:

Here you see the truly revolutionary attitude of Arno Holz. With all our Art, Holz says, we still cannot place ourselves alongside the truth of a product of Nature. If we only salvage a dust-mote of true real Nature in the work of art, then we have completed an enormous task, and no artist can do more and nothing greater can he undertake.

In the years around 1890 Holz collaborated with his friend Johannes Schlaf to extend to fiction and drama his ideas for renewing the language. They produced a trilogy of novellas (Papa Hamlet, 1889, fooling the critics for a while with their Nordic pseudonym Bjarne P Holmsen), and a play Die Familie Selicke (1890). Both works exemplified their new approach: to depict realities of daily life in the sounds and rhythms of ordinary speech, not excluding dialect and slang.

The Phantasus motif

Phantasos, son of Hypnos, god of sleep, is able in dreams to become earth, stones, water – whatever has no soul. He first appears in Das Buch der Zeit, which ends with a 13-part verse sequence titled Phantasus, depicting the starving poet in his urban slum attic, attentive to the crowded misery around him, but every night taking flight via poetry into memories and wild imaginings. He is the beloved of Aphrodite, the Prince of Samarkand, an eagle; his heart is the world’s heart, his Fatherland the whole of humanity. Starved into a pauper’s grave, the poet defiantly declares:

Already invisible processions draw near:
The greatest spirits of antiquity,
And over there with gentle wingbeats
The genius of immortality!

He later saw this Ur-Phantasus sequence (written in his early 20s) as his ‘epitaph’. It is remarkable how many aspects of his next 40 years are prefigured here: unyielding commitment to creativity even in penury; motifs of Nature (trees, birds, flowers, rain…); dreams; childhood memories; the social milieu of Berlin; exotic lands; space and time on cosmic and evolutionary scales; lakes and oceans; distant island-mirages… and yes, occasional tinges of self-pity. The only motif prominent in the Ur-Phantasus but almost missing from later versions is social concern for the life of the poor. (Possibly the rise by 1890 of the Social Democrats as the biggest vote-winners in Reichstag elections meant he could now let politicians speak for the underclass.)

The first edition of Phantasus

The 100 poems of the 1898-99 Phantasus albums, appearing in full in Part One for the first time in English, are distillations, exquisitely cut gemstones, moments of perception, memory, imagination captured in words and phrases whose impact comes from their very naturalness and simplicity, from the discipline with which the poetic sensibility selects and shapes and sets out on the page in a format as important for the sound-images as the words themselves.

Holz defended himself against critics who claimed he either had ‘no rhythm’ or was trying to ‘impose one rhythm on everything’ with a small example using poem :

Still hör ich zu; mein Herz vergeht.

Er singt,
was ich als Kind besass
und dann — vergessen.Outside my window
a bird is singing.

I stop and listen; my heart fades.

It sings
what I possessed as a child
and then – forgotten.

The critics, Holz says, want to parse the (German) metre as ◡─◡─ (diDAH diDAH…) and assert that it might just as well be formatted as four lines, or two, or one. Not so, says Holz: the rhythm (3 =main stress, 1 = weak stress) should be

21 131 /3131 // 3213 – 1313 // 13 / 211313 /13 – 131)

The English, of course, can hardly match this pattern exactly, but the principle is maintained: 211 31 / 13131 // 13121 – 133 / 13 / 1223 113 / 13 – 131. The rhythm is the phrasing of natural unforced speech.

What of the Middle Axis? Holz reports that

I chose the at first glance somewhat unusual print format – lines of irregular length and invisible Middle Axis, which I had had in mind for several years (happily this has now become “modern”) – in order to indicate as accurately as possible the intended sound-image using typography as well.  … Alas, we have no better means at our disposal. The music must be made by whoever knows how to read such hieroglyphics.

As for the absence of rhymes, Holz declared that the first poet to rhyme “moon” with “June” was a genius; the thousandth, a cretin.

These poems are accessible to all (with the help, where needed, of notes on local cultural references). There is nothing here of the wilful exclusiveness and obscurity of the aesthetes gathered around Holz’s contemporary Stefan George.

Holz returns again and again to certain themes and motifs: lake-mirrors, secluded gardens, forgotten castles, larks and sunshine, childhood memories, flights of fancy … The common thread is the capturing of a moment in just as many words as are needed (but no more) to imprint an image and a mood on the reader. The urban environment of Berlin – heaving with new immigrants and a rising urban middle class – is caught in deft strokes. The anguish of the Ur-Phantasus poet is reflected too, in , , .

For a few years at this time Holz drew around him a small group of like-minded poets: the singing teacher Robert Reß (1871-1925), the piano teacher and composer Georg Stolzenberg (1857-1941), Rolf Wolfgang Martens (1868-1928), and Reinhard Piper (1879-1953). All produced slim volumes of Phantasus-like verse between 1898 and 1903 with the same publisher as Holz, causing them to be dubbed the ‘Regiment Sassenbach’. Two poems refer to them.[x]

Holz and the ‘Regiment’ were derided by the critical establishment as dilettantes, churning out childish verses that could all too easily be parodied. Once again, Holz’s efforts to reinvigorate a moribund tradition hit a brick wall. Yet within a decade a broader and more anarchic current of innovation would sweep through German culture: Expressionism, its artistic and cultural legacy still the subject of debate.[xi]

Phantasus 1916

Over the next decade Holz produced a volume of Baroque-flavoured verse (his only commercial success with poetry)[xii] and several plays. But the true focus of his efforts became clear only in 1916, when the Insel-Verlag brought out an enormous 3-kilogram folio-sized 335 page monster titled – Phantasus. Whatever has happened? The little first-edition gems have proliferated into a jungle of dense 𝕱𝖗𝖆𝖐𝖙𝖚𝖗 print (still on the Middle Axis), where one poem occupies 92 pages, another 63 pages, and one sentence takes up 144 lines! Here’s a breakdown of the contents –

• 45 poems identical to the first edition,
• 28 slightly longer versions of first-edition poems,
• 17 much longer versions of first-edition poems (differing in some cases as embryo to grown elephant),
• 41 completely new poems (including some similar in style to the first edition; several are included in Part Two).

Part Two of this volume also contains some of the longer poems, to give a flavour of the changed style and the elaboration of motifs.

Holz continued to revise and expand Phantasus. A mid-1920s edition of his works in ten volumes included seven separate volumes of Phantasus. In the 1960s Collected Works, Phantasus takes up over 1500 pages.

In an introduction to Phantasus published in 1922, Holz re-emphasised the centrality of the sound-picture: [xiii]

That already today there are people who, with no prior study, are capable of turning even the most complicated pieces of Phantasus – off the cuff, straight from the page – into well-formed colour-conjuring sounds, and who in consequence, while completely ignoring the smaller pieces which simply have no attraction for them, leap with joy and delight expressly onto the biggest pieces to root around and become enraptured in them … for this I have indisputable evidence. For example, when I heard of a complete stranger who had hauled the Giant-Phantasus through all the trenches and on quiet shell-free nights read aloud from it to his comrades, who told me of it, or of a young actor who in parallel manner visited the bluestocking salons of a distant province … These are, in distinction to musicians of tone, musicians of the word. They are few.[xiv]

Holz’s last years

When the Prussian Academy of Arts created a Section for Literature in 1926, Arno Holz was selected as one of the first members alongside mostly more conservative colleagues. This recognition came very late, and Holz was able to play little part in the Section’s activities. But his death in 1929 brought an official eulogy from Alfred Döblin, who celebrated his courage, humanity, and lifelong dedication to the reinvigoration of the German language. Döblin summed up Holz’s aims and achievement thus:

I have to ask, here where this artist and fighter lies, what was he fighting for and what was his capability. His role was, is and will be: to introduce into Germany a breach with a rotten and inauthentic tradition …. In this necessary battle and in his contribution to it he is a model, and a parallel phenomenon to those flag-bearers of the 18^th century, of Lessing, the Enlightenment philosopher and guide. He initiated a breach with a hollow tradition and was the first and strongest in Germany to declare himself for the present day and the big city. He rose up against turbid imitation, second-hand things, against the hymnic, fake Orpheistic, against haughty esotericism, and although he had soon to be the most esoteric of all, it was here and among us that he was at his strongest. He stepped forward in opposition to the artificial language of Geibel[xv] and George, and urged attention to the natural speech of the people and its melody. He had to be radical, for despite their hollowness those others remained strong in the face of every assault, because they were in league with Tradition and a bad moribund ideal of Education.[xvi]

I was led to Holz by Döblin’s funeral oration – one unjustly neglected great German writer doing justice to another. If you have been interested enough to read this far, and to explore the poems that follow, then I invite you to visit my website to discover more about Döblin and the writers he admired: 

https://beyond-alexanderplatz.com

C D Godwin       July 2020

 A review of German school texts in the 1950s (!) concluded that a visitor from space would assume that Germany was still ”a purely agrarian country, a country of peasants and citizens who putter about in coddled domesticity, and who for centuries have known nothing of war, revolution, chaos.” R Minder,‘Deutsche und Französische Lesebücher‘ (German and French readers), in A Döblin (ed): Minotaurus: Dichtung unter der Hufen von Staat und Industrie (Literature under the heel of state and industry), Wiesbaden, 1953, p.83.

Compare 19^th century France: Hugo, Dumas père et fils, Balzac, Maupassant, Merimée, Stendhal, Flaubert, Zola, Baudelaire, Huysmans, Mallarmé, Verlaine, Rimbaud … And the Russians: Pushkin, Lermontov, Gogol, Turgenev, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Chekhov …

References in square brackets are to the individually numbered poems.

Quote from Taine’s essay ‘On Style’ in The Living Age, May 1, 1928, pp. 803-805.

Alfred Döblin: ‘From the Old to a New Naturalism: Academy Lecture on Arno Holz’, Das Tage-Buch (1930).

Holz and Schlaf also produced a comical illustrated volume of doggerel called Der geschundene Pegasus (Pegasus ill-used), in which they lampoon their own poetical lives in the style of Wilhelm Busch.

Holz: Revolution der Lyrik (Revolution in the Lyric)1898, p.81.

Ibid., p.29.

The periodical edited by George between 1892 and 1919, Blätter für die Kunst (Pages for Art), declared on its front page that it was intended exclusively for a closed circle of readers.

[x] Robert Wohlleben, who in 2013 edited a combined volume of these poets, has more to say in his Afterword.

[xi] Notably, few Expressionist writers followed Holz’s example. Alfred Döblin (whose linguistically innovative 1915 novel The Three Leaps of Wang Lun was ignored by his former comrades around the journal Der Sturm) lambasted the Expressionists for turning ‘words into mere sounds and noises, steer verbal art onto the cliff of music.’ Berlin Börsen-Courier, 24 December 1927.

[xii] Lieder auf einer alten Laute (Songs on an old lute) 1903, expanded as Dafnis: lyrisches Porträt aus dem 17. Jahrhundert (Dafnis: lyrical portrait from the 17^th century). 1904.

[xiii] Arno Holz: Phantasus. Zur Einführung (Phantasus: an introduction): Berlin 1922, p.40.

[xiv] Phantasus reading circles persisted into the post-WW2 era. Tucked into my secondhand copy of the 1916 edition was a package of papers from a retired academic frustrated by the difficulties of locating other works by Holz which might be of help in preparing his readings. (I passed the package on to the Holz archive at the Berlin City Libraries.)

[xv] Emanuel Geibel (1815-84): popular writer and lyricist.

[xvi] Alfred Döblin: ‘In Celebration of Arno Holz’. Die Literarische Welt 45 (1929).

AFTERWORD  (c) Robert Wohlleben,
translated by C. D. Godwin

A poet’s transformations

Every decent human on attaining the age of 18 makes verses. I was one, and made a few. But then this “youthful ailment” which in others no doubt mostly occurs in acute form, with me soon became alarmingly chronic. I suffered for years. And everything revolved for me around this one imperative, I was as obsessed as a mediaeval flagellant with his notion of penitence: verses, verses, verses!

Thus, self-mockingly, Arno Holz on his beginnings as a poet. With astonishing energy, Holz produced poem after poem: barely in his twenties he had published two volumes of verse, in content and form still utterly conventional. He justified them to a friend as

 …untendentious poems, or attempted poems, of a budding young poet whose highest ideals revolve around blue eyes, flagons of wine and suchlike folderol. A stage every young person must go through before his face grows serious.

Yet already the “literary revolution” was stirring inside Arno Holz, as he took a stand against the stock epigonal inventory and vocabulary of the currently popular lyric. In summer 1885 (Holz just 22) there appeared his virtuoso Das Buch der Zeit. Lieder eines Modernen (The Book of Time: Songs of a Modern): still conventional in form, yet in content rebelliously provocative. It applied rhyming vocabulary to depict the everyday, an innovation that set Holz apart from the typical lyric of the age. The 16-page poem “Ecce Homo!” for example offers as rhymes Kalabreserhut (Calabrian, or Republican, hat); Parlament; Druckerei (printshop); Grossstadt-Trottoir (metropolitan pavement); Gesundheits-Elixir (elixir of health); Broschüren (brochures), Mandat (mandate).

The poems aroused attention, but reactions were highly disparate. The poet Detlev von Liliencron – well-regarded by the “Naturalists”, fervent monarchist and Bismarck admirer – was both enthused and appalled, describing Holz as “an awful social democrat of reddest hue” but nevertheless “a poet of the first rank, absolutely the first.” One critic described the volume as “a swamp flower of pessimism”; the satirical magazine Kladderadatsch advised Holz to set up as a vinegar manufacturer. No publisher in Imperial Germany was bold enough to challenge Bismarck’s anti-socialist law, which threatened fines and imprisonment for “spreading dangerous social democracy”; so Das Buch der Zeit appeared in Zurich. A charge of indecency laid against a copy brought into the Empire was dropped when the authorities realised there were too few copies to worry about.

The germ of the “Middle Axis” Phantasus

Das Buch der Zeit concludes with 13 strophes titled “Phantasus”, each strophe having four eight-line verses. (Holz claimed he began to write these while still in his teens.) The name of a Greek god of dreams at first glance seems to announce an escapist dream sequence. But the first strophe lands us smack into hard reality:

Im Keller nistete die Ratte,
Parterre gabs Branntwein, Grog und Bier,
Und bis ins fünfte Stockwerk hatte
Das Vorstadtelend sein QuartierThe roof soared almost to the stars.
Thuds came from the backyard factory.
It was a proper tenement slum,
With hall- and hurdy-gurdy music!

Rats nested in the cellar,
Ground floor had brandy, grog and beer.
And all the way to the fifth floor
The borough’s misery had its abode.

It’s the milieu of a starving poet, reminiscent of Carl Spitzweg’s archetypal 1839 painting “The Poor Poet”. Grandiose ideas loom as a dream-flight from the attic, e.g.:

But always we are reminded by adjacent lines of the wretched conditions in which the poet (and his neighbours) live; or a pithy saying contradicts the dream-flights:

The programme of contrasts eventually becomes a vote against conditions of reality that cannot be dreamed away. Reality simply switches off the dreams:

Holz introduced the sequence as “the soul states of a young poet defeated by the triviality of his milieu, up there in Berlin N. in an attic room. Was it mere chance, or more than that?”

In the 1898-99 Phantasus Holz forsook the lachrymosity of the earlier “Phantasus”, to which it bore almost no resemblance. The starving poet was now a “cardboard prop, tucked away in the box room”, the earlier version merely “a premature self-portrait.”

Disappointed by the reception of Das Buch der Zeit, the ambitious activist decided to try his hand at prose. An attempted autobiography of childhood was abandoned (a Proust lost?); then in 1887 Holz made his way to Paris where he bought all seven volumes of Zola’s critical works, and delved into the novel and the role of the novelist as observer and experimenter; this led to collaboration with his friend Johannes Schlaf on three novellas published in 1889 as Papa Hamlet (under the pseudonym Bjarne P Holmsen, Nordic writers being fashionable in Germany at the time). They also collaborated on a play, premiered in 1890, Die Familie Selicke (The Selicke Family), depicting a dysfunctional middle-class Berlin family in naturalistic terms: one character even spoke authentic Berlin dialect.

The 1898-99 Phantasus

Meanwhile, as galloping industrial, technological, demographic and social changes transformed Berlin, Holz continued to experiment with poetry. Yet his approach was not to throw all tradition overboard:

You arrive at the principle of form not by turning previous findings on their head, but by freeing them from whatever is superfluous. … not a radical break, but a new phase of development from old roots!

Such an evolutionary approach proved no more acceptable to the German literary world than a more revolutionary approach might have been. Reactions to the 1898-99 Phantasus were generally hostile, ranging from incomprehension to invective. One critic likened Holz’ poems to a literary purgative, and hoped the soft paper they were printed on would prove useful in every family privy! Others considered that just anybody could write in Holz’ new style, and “proved” this with lampoons.

The Middle Axis typography also aroused controversy: critics read deep significance (or nonsense) into what Holz admits he adopted initially simply as a “quirk”, but then justified thus:

 Say this line contains just one syllable. But the next line may have twenty or more. If I use left-justification, the eye is forced to take twice as long to scan the lines. On the principle of least effort etc.!

But the Middle Axis served primarily the sound-picture of the poems. Holz rejected the use of words-as-music as an end in itself (cf. Introduction, note 11.); what he sought was the “necessary rhythm”: “A lyric that … is carried, purely formally, simply by the rhythm which comes alive only by means of that which is struggling to come to expression through it.” Natural rhythm was the constant controlling factor as he sought “utmost simplicity” and “the most natural rhythm possible”[x].

Rhyme fell away, its banal over-use having become unhelpful to poets.

By now the formally more “standard” contents of Das Buch der Zeit had become accepted as virtuoso productions. But the public reacted unfavourably to the same poet’s unrhymed unmetrical Phantasus.

A lyrical world-picture

In the 1898-99 Phantasus, Arno Holz attempts to construct via lyrics a world-picture comprising succinctly sketched details of a stream of consciousness, test samples from flowing water, the reservoir of motifs being virtually without limit:

The new ‘world-picture’, for which almost all lyricists of this era strive, is not to be achieved by reverting to the archaic, but by an ever stronger splintering and faceting of all attainable complexes of knowledge and feeling, whether dreams, visions, instinctual impulses, concrete experiences, reminiscences, the scientific, the religious, even the everyday. The whole thing is a first attempt to lay bare the consciousness of all the varied realms of experience, in their unsorted juxta- and super-positions; corresponding at some distance to Freud’s attempts in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900).[xi]

Poem indicates how ideas come to the poet: “along past the wallpaper / off now on a wonderful trip to ancient lands.” Returning home is an escape from the pressures of the everyday, which the house door keeps at bay. The wallpaper is now a broad territory for thought-journeys … in a trance dimension. This 19-line poem becomes, in the 1916 Phantasus, a 92-page extravaganza of Holz assembled in the attic room with his fellow “Regiment Sassenbach” poets, where the mortared ceiling and crackling stove lead to “inspirations, phantasms, creations, enthusiasms, hallucinations, exaltations, notions, twitchings and brainstorms” tied to “causes, conditions, chances, impressions, influences, experiences and occurrences”. From the crackling rumbling squealing stove they perceive “deeds, / facts, / deals, affairs, happenings, events, occurrences, / executions, actions, operations, / tragedies, interludes, manoeuvres, procedures, / adventures.”

And Phantasus continued to grow. In 1899 Holz envisaged that, with luck, it would eventually comprise not just the hundred pieces he had just published, but a thousand similar pieces. Instead, he began revising those hundred along with a further 39 not yet published. Poem grew even beyond the 1916 version to cover an entire 382 page volume in the 1924-25 edition, and 468 pages in the posthumous edition of 1961-64, where it was subtitled “The Thousand and Second Tale”. Only three of the original 100 were left untouched: , and . New motifs were added, and the language proliferated very differently from the succinctness of the originals: piled-up near-synonyms; whole trains of superlatives; alliterations; neologisms; even some rhymes. How did Holz justify the change?

Between 1903 and 1911 almost his only income came from five dramas written (with Oskar Jerschke) purely for the stage. The tragedy Traumulus brought in 15,000 Mark in 1904, enough to furnish the family home in good middle-class style; royalties from the plays brought 45,000 Mark in 1913. But as Holz wrote to Maximilian Harden in 1903:

Why did I take up this new “business”? The realisation, which has only grown stronger each passing year, that Art in its sublimest noble meaning has no traction with the contemporary public. Least of all today, and in the theatre. But I cannot turn my back on the theatre, for I have to exist! Even if, maybe ten or twenty years later, simply to provide a home for my one and only Phantasus, into which I pour all the art that contemporaries spurn.[xii]

Holz managed to smuggle some Phantasus-style passages into the plays: poem comes from Ignoramibus, in which, Holz declares, he succeeded in forming lyric and drama into a unity.[xiii] The poem beginning “Somewhere in Indo-China” (poem in the 1916 Phantasus, expanded from little in the earlier edition) was described as:

nothing less and nothing more than a musical score, which should therefore be not read but performed. And if there is as yet no performer … one day he shall appear! I see him facing a darkened hall, walled in by heavy folded curtains, seated on a timeless curule chair of power, in a costume just as timeless, the changing expressions sharply illuminated and not only his word speaks, his tone, his voice, … the whole man, his slightest gesture, his minutest movements.[xiv]

The audience, he prophesied, would remain enraptured even as the lights went up.

Phantasus makes the same absolute demand on the reader as for example Milton or Joyce, or in the German world Quirinus Kuhlmann[xv] and Arno Schmidt.[xvi] No wonder it was hard to build an audience: critics complained that “a poem should not be a dictionary”[xvii]; and “lyrical substance destroyed by piled-up details”[xviii]. The difficulties are understandable, for what reader is capable of imagining these texts spoken out loud? They would have to be “word-musicians”, and Holz says “those are rare.”[xix] The motif complex, too, is hard to bring into order. Holz considered the work the “autobiography of a mind”. The overarching theme is an implicit oscillation between the awareness of biographical realities and the boundless possibilities of mind-games. Hence the enormous range between the crude exhortations of an advertising pillar (poem in the 1916 edition), via impressionistic notation of moods, to the monumental cinematic imaginings of “Somewhere in Indo-China”, and the “Thousand and Second Tale”.

Phantasus is not to be judged by conventional and familiar concepts of literary taste or properties of the lyric genre. So one must venture into the unfamiliar and wrestle with new categories. Alfred Döblin was one of the few who came to an appreciative verdict:

We understand better what exists within these mammoth-images, the streaming rhythms, if we recall modern painting, non-objective, so-called abstract. Kandinski, say. With Kandinski you see bright expanses, colourful lines, and the whole swings into place as a composition, a together of colour-groups, of which it is not permitted to think or to ask: what’s it supposed to be? The painting of huge wide surfaces into a composition that the understanding cannot follow is the material parallel to Holz’ mammoth images.[xx]

The Regiment Sassenbach

Even before the 1898-99 Phantasus, Holz had gathered a small group of friends around him who wrote lyrics in his style and met regularly, always on a Wednesday in his attic study[xxi] to discuss them. Four published slim volumes at the same time as Phantasus, with the same publisher, Johann Sassenbach, hence the group’s nickname.[xxii] Poem “Onto my test bench” indicates how Holz and his friends went about critiquing each other’s efforts (under the “master’s” watchful eye/ ear of course).[xxiii]

Many “student pieces” bear comparison with poems by “the master”, e.g. Robert Reß[xxiv], depicting complex sensitivities around a child burial with a minimum of means:

Der Pastor spricht ein Gebet.

Kaum weint dir Mutter.

Schon im Gespräch über den nächsten Kegelabend
steckt der Vater am Kirchhofsthor
die Cigarre in Brand.

Jetzt steht die Wiege leer fürs Nächste.

The pastor recites a prayer. / The mother sheds hardly a tear. /
Already chatting about the next skittle evening / the father at the churchyard gate /
lights up his cigar. / The cradle lies empty for the next one.

This is no crude denunciation of the state’s mindless urging to “make babies”. Reß is rather pointing to a medical crisis: the high rate of infant deaths.[xxv] The parents’ apparent indifference indicates thorough habituation.

Rolf Wolfgang Martens, another member of the group, depicts the psychic deformation produced by socialisation:[xxvi]

Einst
war meine Seele ein Lämmchen.

Sie packten es,
schoren ihm gierig seinen weißen Flaum,
und auf sein rosiges Schnuffelschnäuzchen schlugen sie mit Knütteln.

Sein jämmerliches Weinen
rührte sie nicht.

Aus meinen Schwielen
wurden Schuppen.

Ich wuchs zum grünen Drachen mit langer Krokodilschnauze,
unter jedem Zahn eine Giftdrüse.

Ich beiße alle in den Bauch!

Sie weichen mir aus.

Ich bin böse, unchristlich und überhaupt ein Gemütsmensch.

Once / my soul was a little lamb. / They grabbed it, / greedily sheared its white fluff, /
and beat its dear pink little nosy-wosy with clubs. / They were unmoved by /
its woeful cries. / The calluses / became scales. / I grew to a green dragon with
a long crocodile snout, / a venom gland under every tooth. / I bite them all
in the belly! / I’m wicked, unchristian, and a thoroughgoing sentimentalist.

This reads as if written for the cabaret, as is the case with other “Holz School” lyrics. I surmise that the “Regiment Sassenbach” was stimulated by the first literary cabarets that began appearing in Berlin in 1897-98. What the critics judged to be banal or inadvertently comic in the productions of the “Holz School” was often ideal cabaret material, like this pointed paradoxical grotesquerie from Robert Reß:

Aus der Sofaecke
predigt mein alter Grosspapa.

»Junge!
Dass Du nie heiratest!«

Entfaltet eine rote Kinderwindel,
und schneuzt noch einen Placken Schnupftaback hinein.

Durch das Stübchen summen die Fliegen.[xxvii]

From his corner sofa / my old granddad preaches at me: /
“Boy! / Don’t you ever get married!” / He unfolds a red kid’s nappy /
and clears his nose of another snort of snuff / Flies buzz about the room.

The Holz School approach lives on, as in this 1970s verse from Ralf Thenior:[xxix]

And in 2015 a secondary school in Bayreuth set its pupils the task of recasting Holz’ Tiergarten poem for the modern day.[xxx] How well the cinematic mise en scène of the original guides the noting of all kinds of everyday perceptions:

Robert Wohlleben      September 2020

www.fulgura.de

See Acknowledgements for information on Robert Wohlleben. In response to my invitation Robert supplied a 7,000 word draft in German, extremely thorough with extensive footnotes, which I felt would overwhelm a new Anglophone readership. I am grateful to Robert for approving my much shorter adaptation into English.

Arno Holz: Die Kunst: Ihr Wesen und Ihre Gesetze (Art: its essence and its laws). Berlin 1891, p.10.

Letter to Max Trippenbach, 1 November 1884, in Holz, Briefe, Munich 1948, p.59.

Letter to H. Friedrichs, editor of a magazine of Domestic and Foreign Literature.

Holz, Briefe, p.63.

Arno Holz: Revolution der Lyrik. Berlin 1899, p.10.

Arno Holz: Die Blechschmiede (The tin-smithy), Dresden 1921 p.433.

Holz: Revolution… p.56.

Holz, Revolution… p.62

[x] Holz, Revolution… pages 24 and.29.

[xi] Jost Hermand, Introduction to the Johnson Reprint edition of the 1916 Phantasus, New York/London 1968, p.xxxvi-vii, see also p. xxix.

[xii] Letter in the Harden collection at the Bundesarchiv in Koblenz.

[xiii] The 1986 production of Ignorabimus by Luca Ronco in Prato lasted 12 hours. Holz himself had estimated five hours: no longer than Tristan.

[xiv] Arno Holz: Phantasus. Zur Einführung (Phantasus: an introduction): Berlin 1922, p.26.

[xv] Baroque mystic (1651-89), probably the only poet ever burned at the stake.

[xvi] Novelist (1914-79), described by a critic as “that rarest of rarities: an experimental writer who’s fun to read.”

[xvii] Berliner Börsenzeitung, 22 April 1917.

[xviii] Editor Gerhard Schultz’ view of the later versions; see the ‘mini-facsimile’ edition of Phantasus, Reclam 1968.

[xix] Introduction to Phantasus, Berlin 1922, p.40.

[xx] Alfred Döblin: Arno Holz: Die Revolution der Lyrik: Eine Einführung in sein Werk und eine Auswahl (Arno Holz: Revolution in the Lyric: an introduction to his work and a selection). Wiesbaden 1951, p.18-19.

[xxi] Berlin Wilmersdorf, Pariserstrasse 52, rear.

[xxii] The four slim volumes, together with a fifth published separately, are collected in Antreten zum Dichten! (Fall in for poetising!), edited with commentary by Robert Wohlleben. Leipzig: Reinecke & Vos, 2013.

[xxiii] The American SF writer Ursula Le Guin reports similar travails with a writer’s workshop: “An uneven lot of stories, … lots of good stuff, bogs of imitation, sloughs of despond, lightning flashes of brilliance, great ideas badly worked out, stale ideas beautifully imagined, stories with no ending, stories with adipose middles, stories that were all beginning.” Lee Harding (ed): The Altered I. New York: Berkley 1978.

[xxiv] Robert Reß: Farben (Colours). Berlin: Johann Sassenbach 1899, p.28.

[xxv] Berlin statistics: 1907: 17.7 per thousand infant deaths in the first year. 2007: 3.49 per thousand.

[xxvi] Rolf Wolfgang Martens: Befreite Flügel (Liberated wings). Berlin: Johann Sassenbach 1899, S. 17.

[xxvii] Robert Reß: Farben (Colours). Berlin: Johann Sassenbach 1899, p.47

[xxix] Ralf Thenior: Traurige Hurras (Sad hurrahs). München: AutorenEdition 1977, p.119.

[xxx] https://wwgbayreuth.wordpress.com/2015/07/22/arno-holz-im-thiergarten-und-einige-moderne-umdichtungen/. (Arno Holz in the Tiergarten and some modern variations).