Arno Holz and Phantasus
The first version of Arno Holz’s poem cycle ‘Phantasus’, published in 1898-99, contains 101 short poems, each presenting a scene or incident from real life or the imagination, and each a little gem of concentrated meaning expressed in the rhythms of ordinary speech.
Introducing ‘Phantasus’
In the run-up to the anniversary of Holz’s birth on 26 April 1863, we shall be posting selections from the first version of Phantasus (1898-99), in English. To provide context for Holz’s place in the history of German literature in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, we offer here another appreciation of Holz by Alfred Doeblin. (See previous post for Doeblin’s funeral oration.)
Following Doeblin’s lecture are four poems from Phantasus, two from each of the two albums.
FROM THE OLD TO A NEW NATURALISM
Academy Lecture on Arno Holz
By Alfred Döblin
Das Tage-Buch (1930)
Translation © C. D. Godwin 2019
We know that Arno Holz appeared on the scene some decades ago with the Book of Time. Behind this book were powerful foreign influences and, in Germany, the worker movement. This volume of poems showed that the social ferment in Germany, the worker movement, had entered Literature’s field of vision. Later Holz gave a very negative verdict on this book, which we at once accept: it was merely a first step, revolutionary content, but old moribund form.
Holz quickly grasped the situation, and started to get to grips with the techniques of the Drama. We know that the few works of German Naturalism owe their existence to this reaching-through by Arno Holz. Holz formulated it quite precisely: “Art has a tendency to become Nature again. It becomes so in accordance with the conditions of reproduction and their manipulation.” I’ll express this in simple terms: Holz wants to provide a slice of proletarian existence, this proletarian existence is Nature, the conditions of reproduction are the current relationships of theatre and stage, directorial technique, technical resources, the author’s resources for literary expression. So if we want to press ahead and set the relationship of Art and Nature as a formula, according to the Naturalist Holz that formula reads: a work of Art equals Nature minus the technical resources of the author: A = N – X. Pay close attention to this formula: the stance of the Naturalistic artist towards Nature has never been more cogently and precisely expressed.
People love to say, without provisos and very proudly and less like men than like gods: the work of art does of course take a slice of Nature, but this is only significant as material for the artist, the important thing is exactly that X, the technical means of the author, of the artist and the artistic person taken in the round. Hence a work of Art = Nature plus Artist, A = N + X. This formulates the other pole for considering Art. Here you see the truly revolutionary attitude of Arno Holz. With all our Art, Holz says, we still cannot place ourselves al0ngside 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, according to him, completed an enormous task, and no artist can do more and nothing greater can he undertake.
I have no intention of criticising the Holz formula from this other pole – I recognise its productivity: the passionate seriousness before the truth of this hard world. The commendable stance of Arno Holz must be noted quite pointedly in the face of so much stale esotericism which – from the other pole – is today so widespread and in its obscurantism is more or less openly among the followers of, or even in the service of, the threatening cultural reaction. It will soon be necessary, it seems to me in relation to this danger, to write this Holzian formula in Gothic type and beat drums to it.
Holz saw that “the means of reproduction” of literature, i.e. language, finds itself in a desperate plight. No one can penetrate to Nature with such a moribund language, with such schematic lyrical poetry, with such a compulsion for meter and rhyming, and he even recognised so-called free rhythm as unfree; behind it the old barrel-organ was still grinding away. The bourgeois literature of the past had excavated these forms of language and formulae of language for their content, and held on to them via their epigones of second and third rank; the social ferment could not come to expression using these forms of language. Just as in society new masses were seeking new living-spaces, so the literature allied with them sought new spaces for thinking, including new spaces for language. Nature, expressing itself in sentences, had necessarily to penetrate into the formulae of Art. A poem was now to be understood in quite a new way. But because the new rhythm of expression was not understood, this form of the rhythmical and lyrical had often to assert itself against the charge of being prose, and being a poem only thanks to the good graces of the typesetter. I should point out that music in the last few decades has been battered by similar charges. But all renewal emerges from some “prose”.
We must now ask: what did Holz do with this refined and newly-won reproductive means of language, and how did he use it to lead the revolutionary movement of Nauralism, to what extent did a breakthrough to Nature succeed, whether social, political or physical? This is the decisive critical question, and if we as living people stand before the living person whose name we are prepared to revere as that of a standard bearer, then we recognise a specific situation.
You know that the Naturalism spurred on by Holz in Germany fizzled out after about a decade. We must ask, in order to learn from this: what did this revolutionary advance beat back or nip in the bud, to what extent are the men who took part in the advance to blame for the defeat; for the social ferment in Germany did not abate after a mere decade, the worker movement that had managed to bring about Naturalism actually made a great surge. But in Germany it was like this: Naturalism was able to emerge with the social wave and the worker movement, the worker movement was able to give birth to Naturalism, but could not keep it alive. And secondly, the powerful German bourgeoisie, while it could not obstruct the birth of Naturalism, succeeded in slowly strangling it.
Why couldn’t the worker movement keep Naturalism in Germany alive?
Counter-question: who is the consumer of literature in Germany?
Answer: the educated bourgeoisie. Why only the educated bourgeoisie? Answer: because it has a monopoly on education. It can, notoriously, be alleged that the entirety of the higher German literature is written for not even ten or twenty percent of the German people. These are the people for whom literature from the classics onwards exists. For literature, the other eighty percent play the role of foreigners. And these eighty percent are foreigners to the extent that our literary books can’t even be translated into their language, for as everyone says, you can’t actually translate a book from German into French, yet ever and again the same strata of society, even those using different languages, exchange their works.
So it was at the turn of the 20th century, and it is much the same now. Terribly narrow is the basis of the entire German education, and the postwar period has shown that it is almost fatally small. The word of Nietzsche remains the truth among the intellectuals, who in Germany fly above the people like a flock of cranes. So at that time and today authors of the higher literature find no support among the masses, among eighty percent of the German population. They are isolated, and all in all serve only the refinement of an educated class. But the other side, Imperial Germany, the Germany of the military and officialdom, has absolutely no need of literature. It requires toil, subordination, obedience.
When these two fronts pushed forward against Naturalism, there followed at the beginning of the 20th century the complete shattering of Germany. Some authors swung to a freshly painted Romanticism; Individualism, the bane of the Germans, began to blossom again; world-weariness, mysticism spread, alongside harmless jollities. Bit by bit all that the revolution had achieved was given away again: the new content, and the new form. And here we shall sketch out what it was, during this shattering advance of a real intellectual reaction, that Arno Holz achieved.
Recall the formula for Art: Art is Nature minus X. A man who could formulate so radically and who also engaged with literature does not simply give up when he is defeated in battle. Holz, in the most idiosyncratic way, took part in the general retreat and in the most idiosyncratic way laid out a new Naturalistic front line. I would like to say that all of Arno Holz’s later work represents the hibernating form of Naturalism. It is an adaptation to the catastrophically unfavourable conditions. Holz did not go across, waving a flag, to the camp of the educated bourgeoisie. Substantial chunks of Naturalism were torn away from him, but he died with the broken flagpole in his hand.
What chinks were torn away, where did he yield, and why there? It would have been possible, even a necessity, for one who ascribed a hundred percent to this Naturalism to himself enter the rising working class. Holz would then have discovered that literature is something other than a thing in itself or a faculty at the university, but that it is a function of the nation’s body. He did not take that step, nor the other adjacent steps. Why not? See “monopoly of education”. He would have had to give up the whole of “literature” and he probably lacked the last bit of conviction to begin again from the bottom up.
So there he stood, the Naturalist, between the classes, and continued writing with the revolutionary means of production, for the bourgeoisie, which of course paid him no attention. He had to enter a hopeless isolation, for he did not want to give up and write dramas and lyrics on demand for the prosperous bourgeoisie. He realised: I shall be misjudged. He was not misjudged, he misjudged his position, he misjudged the strategic situation. I shall lay out what Holz did when the Laws of Trade were taken from him.
He said in his own words: “Nothing more serviceable could happen to me than the martyrdom of being misjudged: even if that had taught me the only thing without which nothing enduring can be created – contempt for the masses.” There you hear it! That is not Stefan George speaking, but the Naturalist Arno Holz. Thus did his misfortune cut away the most important ground of the Naturalists: alliance with Nature and rejection of aristocratic standpoints. The sad, utterly paradoxical reversal of Arno Holz is visible.
From this period there is characteristically no formula from Holz for his conception of Art, but we have his praxis. There we see ceaseless and hugely expansive toil in the fields of drama and poetry. In his intellectual productivity the isolated man was undefeated. But the plays no longer look out onto the world, don’t want to conquer new and important realities; for sure they don’t slide off into Romanticism, but they turn on individual problems, it’s a personal Holzian problematic and therefore actually a thematic of the earlier feud with the bourgeoisie.
So we have works that, like Ignorabimus, are full of subtleties, works of a closed-in magnificence. And in the poetry: the title of the idiosyncratic rhythmic work unparalleled in German literature says it all: “Phantasus”. The standard-bearer for the conquest of Nature, in which the artist is only a minus in the equation of Art and Nature, he turns his head aside and says “Phantasus”. … A strange armistice follows. Half of reality is stuffed into this Phantasus, history, geography, literature – reality at one remove – and then Art, the craftsmanship of Art, gains the upper hand over this reality, in a monstrous fashion. We see a straightforwardly dialectical process. Holz’s language technique was shaped to serve the conquest of Nature. Now a muted literary reality is brought in, you can let yourself go and proliferate over it – this new language technique, the freest rhythms, the new tone, all discovered for Naturalism – and in front of us we have maybe, maybe, a formal Naturalism, but also l’art pour l’art! We’re at the opposite pole! And from “abstract” “absolute” art, Expressionism say, Holz is separated by only one triviality: he respects syntax.
This was a process that had to happen once Naturalism forsook nature, and that is what the hibernating form of Naturalism looks like.
As for Phantasus, an idiosyncratic mighty document, epic-lyrical, it proliferates in powerful images, it comes to linguistic record-breaking, the still autonomous style-technique is developed to the height of virtuosity, a thing to marvel at, to learn from, and often simple, moving and delightful things are strewn through it.
We assert: Arno Holz is the carrier, the standard-bearer, of the same literary movement that fought for access to reality under the name Naturalism and today approaches Nature in the form of political theatre, tendentious art. We recognise anew that literature belongs to the living People and its concerns. We see from Holz’s approach: an organic-functional relation-ship is urgently needed between the People and Literature, but it could not be established in the conditions of 1900. Two things are necessary: expand the education base by removing the educational monopoly, and for authors: turn to the broad mass of the People!
To pursue Naturalism in the true and exemplary manner of Arno Holz, what we need in Germany, where Literature has already reached a great height, is a lowering of the overall level of Literature. It must come out from the educational cage to which our literature of today keeps, in which it is seen by the broad masses as an attribute only of refined people. We must continue along Arno Holz’s interrupted path. Artists who now struggle for their economic existence should not complain of the times, but become aware of their new social tasks and offer intellectual aid! No emergency community of writers is needed, only a fundamental turn and action.
Arno Holz lived among us as a brave and exemplary man, his life and his work are important even there where life and work went underground in the sense of a full Naturalism. His battlecry, the battlecry of the Naturalists, is ours: Nature! Reality! Truth through all the resources of Art! For real life and a real People!
Buch der Zeit (1886) was Holz’s second book of poems, following the 1883 Klinginsherz. In it he still employed meter and rhyme.
Ignorabimus: tragic drama by Holz (1913), one of the wordiest plays in German.
FOUR POEMS FROM PHANTASUS
Between graves and grey hedges,
coat collar up, hands in pockets,
I stroll through the early March morning.
Dun grass, glinting puddles and black waste ground
as far as I can see.
In between,
deep in the middle of the white horizon
as if frozen,
a line of meadows.
I stand still.
Nowhere a sound. Nowhere stirring yet.
Only the air, the landscape.
And sunless, like the sky, is how I feel my heart!
Suddenly, a trill.
I stare into the clouds.
Overhead,
jubilant,
through light becoming ever brighter,
the first lark!
I lie between dark mirror-walls.
Green glimmering sea-stars,
eyes that bulge,
a huge ray opens its mouth wide.
One touch and they light up!
Through a red wall of coral a silver moonfish glides!
I lie and smoke my water-pipe.
Somewhere in Indo-China or thereabouts,
I must have sometime already been alive somehow.
A tiny percentage of me
was part to blame for Gautama Buddha being there one time,
and even today, at night, in dreams,
when I can’t keep such a good eye on him,
he drinks palm wine from rhinoceros horns.
On my sample bench
beneath the Schuster lamp,
the clumsy young giants lounge about with their abortions.
The lifeless little limbs dangle slack, the little eyes don’t turn –
a bunch of mandrakes!
Here I set a spine in place,
there I trepan a cranial vault,
with a thread of twine, artfully, I snip off a leg.
Then I take a pinch of snuff,
push up my black hornrimmed glasses and adjust the lamp.
So.
Now I dip into the dye-pot.
Pulcinella, who still looks too educated, gets a nose of liver sausage,
Colombina, not yet pretty enough, a little mouth of cinnabar,
a chirping angel-chick (but nothing helps) a mother-of-pearl botty!
