Introducing Arno Holz Phantasus

The German poet Arno Holz – still too little known even among German readers – is as good as entirely unknown to the English-reading world. My attempt to remedy this is almost complete: translations of all 100 poems in the first edition of Phantasus, together with a small selection from the much enlarged 1916 edition and a longish Introduction. The German Holz-scholar Robert Wohlleben has kindly agreed to provide additional background and commentary; his website https://fulgura.de is a treasure-chest of lively articles (in German) about fin de siècle Berlin culture.

I hope to post the full volume of Phantasus translations within the next few weeks. Meanwhile, to whet your appetite, here is the Introduction I wrote for that volume.

INTRODUCTION

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 one or other of the longer pieces, 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.

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. 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 respect for 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 German writers 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 the succeeding 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 hostile to encroachments on 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, when he was 12, the family moved to Berlin. The timing was poor: the Gründerjahre – the Foundation Years of the unified Empire – had seen a few years 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 constant 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 Buch der Zeit: Lieder eines Moderne (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!” The establishment, however, largely ignored the upstart poet, and declined to engage seriously with his arguments.

Spending some time in Paris, Holz discovered Balzac, Zola, the critic Hippolyte Taine, and their promotion of Naturalism in literature. Balzac, 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 deconstruct the doorman as the minister. For him, there is no garbage; (…) in his eyes a toad is worth as much as a butterfly.” (cf. III/17 in Part Two and its Endnote.)

Returning to Berlin, Holz delved deeply 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 as key, 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. Together 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 sometimes brutal scenes of daily life in the sounds and rhythms of ordinary speech, not excluding dialect and slang.

The Phantasus motif

Phantasos, a son of Hypnos the god of sleep, has the power in dreams to become earth, stones, water – whatever has no soul. He first appears in Holz’s poetry in the Buch der Zeit, which ends with a long 13-part sequence of verses titled Phantasus, depicting the poet starving in his urban slum attic, attentive to the crowded misery around him, but every night taking flight through poetry into memories and wild imaginings. He is the beloved of Aphrodite, he is the Prince of Samarkand, an eagle; his heart is the world’s heart, his Fatherland the whole of humanity. Dead of hunger, in 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 mid-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; the motifs of Nature (trees, birds, flowers, rain…); dreams; childhood memories; the social milieu of Berlin; exotic lands; space and time on a cosmic and evolutionary scale; 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 :

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 should be 21 131 /3131 // 3213 – 1313 // 13 / 211313 /13 – 131 (3 =main stress, 1 = weak stress). The English. of course, can hardly match this pattern exactly, but the principle is maintained: 321 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.

These poems are accessible to all (with the help, where needed, of notes explaining 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 a 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”. Holz’s poem indicates (with some self-mockery) how he helped shape up the drafts of these colleagues.

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 much broader and more anarchic current of innovation would sweep through German culture: Expressionism, its artistic and cultural legacy still the subject of much debate.[x]

Phantasus 1916

During the next decade Holz produced a volume of Baroque-flavoured verse (his only commercial success)[xi] and two further plays, neither of which had much success.[xii] 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; ten of these are included in Part Two).

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

The final version

Holz continued reworking and expanding Phantasus into the 1920s. 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.

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 more conservative colleagues. This recognition came very late in the day, and Holz was able to play little part in the Section’s activities. But his death in 1929 brought official eulogies from Döblin and others, who celebrated his courage, humanity, and lifelong dedication to reinvigorating 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[xiii] 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.[xiv]

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

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.

Buch der Zeit, p. 28.

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 (1898), p.81.

Ibid., p.29.

The (irregular) 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.

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

[x] Notably, few Expressionist writers followed Holz’s example. Alfred Döblin (whose 1915 Expressionist 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.

[xi] 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.

[xii] Sonnenfinsternis (Sun Darkness) 1908, Ignorabimus 1913.

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

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