Arno Holz Phantasus complete
The poet Arno Holz was born 156 years ago today, on 26 April 1863 in Rastenburg, East Prussia. We present here the first complete English translation of the first version of Holz’s poem cycle Phantasus, published in 1898-99, together with an introductory essay by Döblin. (We have already posted Döblin’s funeral oration for Holz, who died on 26 October 1929 in Berlin.)
UPDATE MAY 2020
A revised and corrected edition of the Phantasus translations will be posted on the website in early June 2020. Meanwhile, the download link to the first version is disabled.
I’ve updated the sample translations on the previous Holz posts, so please take a look!
PHANTASUS Parts One and Two: PDF download (2.2MB)
Döblin’s introduction to a forgotten poet
In 1951 Döblin selected and introduced a volume of Holz’s works, in a series called “The Missing and the Forgotten”. The shortened version of the essay below provides useful background for a reading of Phantasus.
Arno Holz: The Revolution of the Lyric:
Selected and introduced by Alfred Döblin
Translation © C. D. Godwin 2019
…
THE MAN AND HIS TASK
Arno Holz knew early on that he had a mission to accomplish in German letters. We shall see how this insight fell on him as a revelation, and how from that moment on he threw his whole life into theoretical toil, into combative writings, and in his own works, in order to serve his idea. Looking back, he wrote in his Word-art Set Free (1921):
I pass over the dogged arduous toil of decades, the ever-recurring battle taken up and waged by me against myself even more than against others, this self that would not have become happier exactly (in circumstances that I omit) to suffocate and ‘play out’ in the so to speak lowest, stuffiest darkest catacombs of contemporary know-nothingness and lack of interest; I begin not with a rambling set of references labelled ‘A’ but come at once to the energetic conclusion ‘Z’.
I have found: that all forms of word-art up till now, of whatever period, whatever culture rest, without exception, on caprice.
This caprice, acknowledged as such, has played out its historical role in development, and urged on us the concept and the challenge: necessity.
One marvels at the assurance and decisiveness of the tone. Without the stance expressed here, Holz would never have been in a position to conduct the heavy campaign that fell to him and to which he stepped up all the way through to his sixty-sixth year – without surrendering, without even flagging. Faith in the absolute rightness of his theses kept him strong.
I knew him in the last decade of his life and was often in his company. He was a slender, elastic, always youthful man, sober, clear and honourable, with a sharp eye for humour. He didn’t relish the spotlight.. He showed himself a good son of his adoptive city Berlin, in that he, the hardworking virtuous unflinching man, clothed himself in the grey garb of its practicality and anonymity.
THE FIELD OF BATTLE
What did it look like, this battlefield to which Holz betook himself – the migrant from East Prussia returning from Paris as a spritely young warrior? Berlin remained his permanent headquarters. And when after a few decades he quit the battleground, he was as fresh as at the beginning, and could have played the whole match again undaunted, unwearied.
Berlin after 1870-71, after Prussia’s victory and founding of the German Empire, was the imperial capital, and the Founder Years were off and away across the whole land. We know how Nietzsche (who only became famous much later and who took part in the war as an ambulance man) expressed himself on the Prussian-German victory, the sceptical questions he linked to this victory over France. Whatever the state of the culture, no one can deny the enormous vitality in the united (except for Austria) Empire. Mighty lords of industry flocked to the old ruling class, owners of great feudal estates east of the Elbe – smokestack barons sidling up to the country-squire ‘cabbage Junkers’. But meanwhile a strong middle class had already grown up long before: it was this class that courageously dared the failed revolution of 1848, and after its defeat went, banners waving, over to its opponents. But after 1848 another class, growing ever stronger, took over the role abdicated by the bourgeoisie: the workers, who absorbed Socialism and the concept of class struggle, who called themselves the Proletariat and who sent to the new Reichstag a swiftly growing opposition party. This period saw the growth of cities, and with it tension between the classes.
So what would it sound like, the title of the first volume of poems published by Holz at twenty years old, in 1883? You’d never guess. The slim volume, crowned with a prize by the Augsburg Schiller Foundation, was called Klinginsherz (a twee “chime into the heart”). But then Holz planted his feet firmly on Berlin soil, and his eyes opened. The air blows briskly here, people are sober, call a spade a spade, and here the intellectual birth of the man from Rastenburg takes place. He can allow himself a couple of trips away, to Holland, to Paris, where volumes of Emile Zola’s criticism fall into his hands.
In eastern Europe at that time stood the statues Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, casting their mighty shadows across the continent. To the north Ibsen was moralising, sharpening his gaze for the sicknesses of society. Amid this the music of Richard Wagner swelled and blared, heralding Wotanism and Nordic heathendom. In Germany there was Paul Heyse, the painter Makart, people marvelled at the so-called “epicists” Wilhelm Jordan and Robert Hamerling. Yes, across the sky of Literature, that so changeable expanse, stars of the third and fourth grade wheeled, comets. Lights that dazzled a moment ago very quickly blink out. Then we had the worldly and slightly risqué Heinz Tovote, the Baron Ompteda. They kept the educated bourgeoisie amused. There were truly strong figures, like Clara Viebig, who delivered solid nourishment for patriotic and triumphal sensibilities. Her books Das schlafende Heer (“The Sleeping Army”) and the Wacht am Rhein (“Watch on the Rhine”) were once widely read. We do not forget, and particularly in considering Arno Holz’s work cannot forget, the name of Theodore Fontane, the worldly-wise humorous storyteller, on whom time has so far inflicted little damage. His admirable work Vor dem Sturm (“Before the Storm”) appeared in 1878, and he created Effi Briest, Irrungen Wirrungen, and Der Stechlin.
When on 1 January 1885 Michael Georg Conrad[x] brought out a new magazine, he called it Die Gesellschaft (“Society”). It at once showed its teeth with its programme, which began:
Our society will strive to tend that authentic, natural German refinement which is rooted in the purity of its thought, in the strength of its sensibilities and in the integrity and openness of its language. It will counter that false refinement, so prized today, which has been nurtured by the soporific and stupefying ways of thinking and feeling in the higher nurseries, pedants blabbering about education, and hypocritical attitudes obsequious to the police.
At the end of the Eighties a medic, Dr Küster, founded a society under the vehement name “Durch!” (“Through!”)[xi] which was supposed to become a meeting place for young modern poets and writers. Names pop up, some of which we of today’s older generation knew personally: the brothers Hart,[xii] Leo Berg[xiii] and Bruno Wille.[xiv] They brought out an anthology to which Arno Holz and Johannes Schlaf also contributed. More even than Nietzsche, the name of Stirner[xv] was relevant here: he announced his gospel of Egoism in a book called Der Einzige and sein Eigentum (“The One and its properties”). Arno Holz was still writing verse, even after that sweet volume Klinginsherz. It was now to become a cycle, Phantasus, depicting in verse the spiritual state of a young poet who perishes from the triviality of his milieu, way up there in Berlin. Holz himself asks, in his book Die Kunst (“Art”): “Was it by chance or was it more than that? But with this Phantasus I was writing my own epitaph.” The first book to come out, in Zurich, “cleanly printed, with the title in red and on lovely, beautiful white paper” is Das Buch der Zeit. Lieder eines Modernen (“The Book of Time. Songs of a Modern”). Well-meaning criticism, he himself attests, trickled along behind it. The young poet was called a rival to Albert Traeger[xvi] and Julius Wolff.[xvii] Whereupon he tirelessly hammered out new verses, two hundred pages in four weeks, they slid smoothly from his hand, too smoothly. He called that little volume Unterm Heiligenschein. Ein Erbauungsbuch für meine Freunde. (“Beneath the Halo. A devotional for my friends”).
HE TAKES UP A STANCE
Then he’s had enough. He wants to go into prose, he’ll start his first novel. And now, as he writes, he has a revelation! He had written in connection with something or other: “In Holland müßten die Paradiesvögel entschieden schöner pfeifen und die Johannisbrotbäume noch viel, viel wilder wachsen”. (“In Holland the birds of paradise must have called more beautifully and the carob trees grown much, much more wildly.”) He reports how he read this and could not come away from it. He put down his pen. “And I repeated the words and I cradled myself in them and it sounded like music! There was absolutely nothing to fiddle with, nothing to quibble about.” The mysterious sequence of words captivated him. It was – his melody. But faced with this sentence he realised as well that as an artist he was still far from mastering his material. He saw himself placed before a task.
In Paris he stumbled on Zola’s critical writings – he found him, as a theorist, dependent on Taine.[xviii] He got to grips with these theories. He pondered two of Taine’s sayings: “Every artwork is a product of its milieu,” and another: “The essence of art does not consist in the exact reproduction of nature.” And Holz found: one of these sayings is hewn from granite, the other is made of wax. These sayings of Taine’s excited him enormously: he felt, like Nietzsche, that it was high time to take a hammer to that ancient idolatrous mystery calling itself “the philosophy of art”. And with that his wanderlust vanished.
He so immersed himself in Zola’s writings and thought processes that all he could do was return to Berlin and bury himself in Niederschönhausen[xix] and go on and go on thinking.
STAGES ALONG THE WAY
And there he undertook a radical action: he cleared old men like Aristotle, Winckelmann[xx] and Lessing from his desk and loaded it up with books by Mill, Comte, Spencer and the modern scientists. He dug down, let himself into them. And as he studied he heard ever more clearly the splashing of distant fountains.
What had he stumbled on? On “the greatest of all achievements: the recognition that everything happens in accordance with laws.” What he had found he formulated initially in a phrase that at first sounds banal: “It is a law that every law has a law.” Holz speaks as a Socialist: “Art is a partial condition of the prevailing total condition of society and is likewise subject to the great law-giver.” And what is the absolutely own-most law of Art? This is for him the question of all questions. He must draw a line between what is Art and what is not. At first he falls into sterile philosophising. Then a lucky accident (accident?) comes to his aid.
A boy somewhere outside has drawn a figure on a slate: Holz can’t make head or tail of it. The boy says: “It’s a sodger.” Holz is astonished, and in his enthusiasm gives him a few pennies. For this “sodger” is just what he needs; it resolves for him the fundamental problem of Art. Yes, through this boy he knows that the formless figure is meant to be a soldier. A fleeting glance tells him it’s a mere jumble of strokes and points. In the smears on the slate, however, lies the result of activity which never in the least brought forth a second soldier! But the boy is convinced. Now one can look aside from theories and draw the first conclusion, not à la Taine and Zola (“Art arises from the penetration of a nature by a temperament”), but as has become visible in this boy’s smeared opus: “Art is Nature minus X”, which admittedly does not lure anything from the woodwork. But the phrase calls for completion, and now reads: “Art has a tendency to become Nature again. It will do so in accordance with the prevailing conditions of reproduction.” This is what the boy’s smears taught.
Voilà, the sorcerer’s stone! Holz had come a big step forward. We’ll follow his progress.
Nature – but what is Nature, what does Holz mean here by the word “Nature”? The “That”, the object, the real object not distorted by any word or concept. It for sure does not mean photography. And when Paul Ernst,[xxi] as a student of Holz, complains of the tediousness of the toil that the new method brings with it – namely careful observation, in particular the pursuit and capture of spoken language – he shows a poor understanding. What is meant is the richness of Reality. Its riches must be won, conquered. Holz is soon minded to abandon his negative formula, his Law of Art (“Nature is Art minus X”) in favour of a positive formulation of his conception of Art. And now there occurs the word “the That”. It is simply Reality, the undistorted truth and its fullness.
What Holz has his eye on and takes aim at (in respect no less of himself than 0f others) is something known to every artist: snares are being laid for him. It is no exaggeration to assert that an absolute majority of all beginners remain tangled in the lines. Who sets them, what are they called, so we can alert the artists? They originate in the material he is handling. He thinks he can handle the material and demonstrate his art using the material, but – the material (he grasps this only slowly) is the poet himself; and language, the ostensible material, exerts its power over him.
We believe we are writing, and we are written. Strong hands may wrest for themselves, early in their career, an opening to a piece of the world, then they have the means, the technique, to move around in it – it’s already a great deal if they manage this – but by then it has become their style. Now they harvest, bring in with their technique whatever allows itself to be brought in from this region they have accessed.
Whoever comes thus far as an artist has arrived – and others too, in oday’s world and the world of posterity, can offer congratulations on the success. But it’s worse for later artists, and slowly also for the contemporary world. For this new view, this modern Reality, is tomorrow no longer sufficient. A shameful chapter. Our bread must grow ever anew in the field and must come freshly baked to our table, if it is to satisfy us. So almost every generation – not out of mischief and not out of some mere need for change – sees itself driven to formulate anew. It seems that everything has been said, but even when it has been said it must be formulated anew to suit the new situation. So the beginning writer does not at first notice that he is being written, instead of writing; but slowly his eyes open to the fact that he is heading towards a pseudo-reality. What instigates this piece of art that disguises from him the true Reality? The material: language.
From the same Paris where Arno Holz stumbled on Emile Zola’s critical writings and where his revolutionary genius for language received a powerful kick, from that same Paris the bourgeois son of the Rhineland Stefan George brought back a model that was on its last legs. He had found it in Mallarmé, and imported it. He took over a model and a stance and the philosophy that went with it: aesthetics. They both came back from Paris with their baggage, Stefan George, scion of the conservative, educated, aristocracy-bothering upper bourgeoisie, and Arno Holz, a man of the growing city, of the masses, of social reform, bearer of an authentic, original linguistic renewal.
THE ACKNOWLEDGED GOAL
Holz described his goal thus: “A poetry which denies the music of the word as an end in itself, and which is carried purely formally only by the rhythm that lives solely through the ‘That’ struggling for expression through him.” He scorns “paper language”. He finds that since the Renaissance, the path to Nature has no longer been followed. Listen to his argument against rhyme –
What is a rhyme for? The first poet – centuries ago! – to rhyme ‘love’ and ‘dove’, ‘heart’ and ‘part’, ‘moon’ and ‘June’[xxii] was a genius; the thousandth, a cretin. Our language is so poor in same-sounding words, so little does this ‘resource’ originate from it, that one doesn’t exaggerate too much in making a blind guess that seventy-five percent of the total available vocabulary is ruled out for this technique from the start. But if I am denied an expression, my art is at the same time denied the equivalent in Reality of that expression. Is it any surprise therefore that in logic the entire horizon of our lyrical poetry today appears seventy-five percent narrower than our Reality?
And what about verses? “Through every verse, even the loveliest, as soon as it is repeated the sound of the hidden barrel-organ can be heard … even in free verse.”
He discovers the mid-axis, the centred line. What is meant with the centred line? “I chose the centred line in order to indicate typographically the sound-pictures intended at that moment.” He calls the centred line the aural image, the primal image. These poems, from their inception, arise in their technique from language, from spoken language, not paper language. Their material is harvested from audibility. While older poetry was satisfied to conserve traces of music, to follow music (even when unaccompanied by music, the poem does not disown its bondage to music; the words must be suited to it, their own rhythm plays a secondary role), Holz gives to speech the primary place, and shapes the poems according to the laws of spoken language. Speech clads itself in its own material. Thus Holz comes to the centred line, which is to relay optically, i.e. typographically, the acoustic situation. For “eye and ear correspond to one another.”
…
At first he had acknowledged “Nature” as the goal of art, in that formula that worked like a dogma. This “Nature” rapidly became undistorted Reality, actuality; then the object of poetry in general; then its theme – as distinct from its falsifying form – and then what comes to him as the object, as the theme of poetry is everything that observation places before him, including what a sweeping imagination can bring.
“Reality” is now the realm of imagination, the realm of Phantasus. Who could have predicted it! The “Nature” of the materialists has played itself out, and the poet does what he has always done: he sings the world, its fullness, its indescribably large inventory.
…
A breakthrough was achieved in the realm of language. Holz is farther on than the Expressionist August Stramm.[xxiii] He has done better than the babbling Dadaists, who remain stuck in their approach and their still not sharply conceived proposition: “Out from the old forms of speech.”
But the “consistent Naturalist” – where has he landed up! He has not only purified and enriched the word-art of his age. He has pushed forward by a long way the frontiers of word-art and the extent of its dominion.
With a new word-art, with a language and in a form that he acknowledged as a necessity, he has tried to liberate Reality and true undistorted “Nature”. The manoeuvre to blow up the old basalt strata of language-art was successful. The result proved to be both bigger and otherwise than he had suspected. Had he really now abandoned Art and had he, a new Columbus, landed on the shores of authentic Nature?
For sure, in his poems and also in dramas he had presented something individual, new, that lay in that direction. But in addition to this we identify the following result: his principle, which operated as a ferment, namely to approach close to the “That” to penetrate through all the falsifying styles and the attitudes that overlay them, opened up a new possibility for words: the possibility of word-paintings, on a larger or smaller scale. … His compositions in Phantasus reach into the pictorial and the spatial. What Holz produced – we speak here only of his lyrical poetry – was idyllic, hymnal, images of exotic landscapes, figures of Greek gods, grotesques and burlesques that never wanted to end.
CADENZA
The external life of Arno Holz passed like that of a simple middle class citizen, a writer. He never stepped forward politically. He had some successes in the theatre. He never achieved an existence free of material cares. A few patents for children’s toys brought him some income for a time. When he visited me once in the Twenties at my apartment in the east, he had a thick volume under his arm. It was one of his own, a lovely edition of his works. He went around with it to well-off and well-disposed people, people interested in literature, and in the course of our conversation he divulged the addresses of members of this little class of people. When a Section for Literature was formed at the Academy of Arts in Berlin, he was, by a miracle, named alongside Hermann Sudermann,[xxiv] Gerhard Hauptmann etc. as one of the founding group. No one could assume affairs would run smoothly there, and when I later became a member of the Section, he had already long since withdrawn from active participation.
He was married; his wife Anita, his second wife, a much younger Argentinian, Anita Gewelke-Diaz, who brought into the marriage a daughter, the lovely Fee. From the first marriage he had three sons, one of whom fell in the First World War. Mrs Anita Holz, now in Baden-Baden, will not hold it against me if we include Arno Holz among the missing and the forgotten; but we must ask: forgotten by whom, missed by whom? Mrs Anita Holz has set down her memories of the poet in an MS: Arno Holz in Everyday Life. He died in his sixty-sixth year. The Academy of Arts in Berlin honoured the deceased.
Gründerjahre: economic boom 1870-71 to 1873, boosted by German unification and French war reparations.
Paul Heyse (1830-1914): popular writer, Nobel laureate 1910.
Hans Makart (1840-84): Viennese decorative artist.
Wilhelm Jordan (1819-1904): writer and nationalist politician; he wrote a Nibelung epic in alliterative verse.
Robert Hamerling (1830-89): Austrian poet.
Heinz Tovote (1864-1946): writer influenced by Maupassant.
George, Baron Ompteda (1863-1931): wrote light fiction, including novels on the decline of the aristocracy.
Clara Viebig (1860-1952): novelist of the Naturalism school.
Theodore Fontane (1819-98): wrote several novels of Berlin life in the late 19th century.
[x] Michael Georg Conrad (1846-1927): promoter of Naturalism; later a left-liberal politician. A Freemason.
[xi] “Durch!”: founded 1886 to promote Naturalism. It fell apart in 1889 due to differences about aims.
[xii] Brothers Hart: Heinrich (1855-1906) and Julius (1859-1930): critics and advocates of the new Naturalism.
[xiii] Leo Berg (1862-1908): critic, journalist; advocate of Naturalism, founder of the Freie Bühne (free theatre).
[xiv] Bruno Wille (1860-1928): politician; opponent of parties.
[xv] Max Stirner (1806-56): an uncompromising individualist, seen as a precursor to Nietzsche.
[xvi] Albert Traeger (1830-1912): politician (Progressive People’s Party) and poet.
[xvii] Julius Wolff (1834-1910): wrote verse epics derided as ‘bottle-glass poetry’ by Heyse.
[xviii] Hippolyte Taine (1828-93): important French critic and historian.
[xix] Niederschönhausen: suburb of villas and mansions in NE Berlin.
[xx] Eduard Winkelmann (1838-96): historian of early and medieval Germany.
[xxi] Paul Ernst (1866-1933): writer; after early association with Holz he adopted neo-Romanticism, then neo-Classicism.
[xxii] In the original, ‘Sonne/Wonne’ (sun/delight), ‘Herz/Schmerz’ (heart/pain), ‘Brust/Lust’ (breast/pleasure).
[xxiii] August Stramm (1874-1915): of the circle around Der Sturm. His Expressionist style influenced several writers, including Döblin. His war poetry (he was killed in September 1915) was admired.
[xxiv] Hermann Sudermann (1857-1928): playwright of some popular success, as well as run-ins with the censor.
