Afterword and Aftermath

Expressionism, as this study describes it, had a short intellectual run. To begin with, many of its protagonists—Michelstaedter, Trakl, Schiele, Campana, Slataper, Marc, and Boine—were already dead or mad by 1918. But another, even more decisive intervention occurred with World War I. Between 1914 and 1918 everything that thinkers had been bemoaning in 1910—the deficiency of being, the failure of rational and ethical rhetoric, the tragedy of all efforts at self-determination, the battles of each against all—received such living confirmation that all prior, theoretical treatments of these issues could only pale. In the light of this unprecedented crisis in Europe, the ruminations of 1910 appeared merely to prefigure their own historical futility.

There were also internal reasons why the theoretical dynamics of 1910 were not destined to develop. Nothing much could be built upon them; they were not "useful" to the social, political, and economic needs of postwar countries. Michelstaedter's persuasion and Buber's direction offered no concrete directives for action, no functional models or systems, no idioms for practical behavior. They were utopian reflections on the homeless experience of a here and now. Lukács's goodness and Kandinsky's spirit were equally incapable of furnishing motivations to worldly behavior. They confused all distinctions between truth and error, the real and the apparent, the depths and the surface of things.

The European mind welcomes contradiction just so long as its terms can be resolved into a productive new position, a new form of conso-

nance, as it were—a third "revelation" beyond the opposition of the original two. And this is precisely what does not happen with the dissonant arts of 1910. The contradictions they embody, to adapt the words of the Marxist Lukács, are devoid of "dynamic, developmental significance." The antagonisms simply "coexist, unresolved," allowing for no dialectical advancement (Lukács 1955: 482). The discoveries of 1910 establish no basis for social or intellectual progress. They mark merely the end of a certain way of thinking, and perhaps most loudly in their call for new beginnings. Michelstaedter's Persuasion and Rhetoric and Schoenberg's atonal harmonies, to take two examples, resolve only on this: to reject the very thirst for resolution. They are tenacious polemics against the world and its modes of self-understanding. To make matters worse, in their formal contortions these works enact the same dissonance that is their theme, supplying no solution to the tensions by which they are spurred. This is why Michelstaedter's suicide seems so coherent: a consequence of pushing contradictions to their deadly extreme. This is also why Schoenberg soon decides to abandon his expressionist atonalities. He could proceed no further along this path (Schoenberg 1926, 1941). What he needed was a new method of composition, discovered in the twelve-tone row, which could order the dissonances he had set free. The musical compositions of 1908–1913 destroyed one rhetoric without yielding another. The problem with free atonality, Schoenberg claimed, was that its dissonances still tended toward tonal harmony, even if they resisted the pull; and this suspension cried out for resolution.

As for the other figures of this study, Slataper and Marc lost their lives, with a large portion of their generation, in the war. Boine, always in poor health, died in 1917. Trakl and Campana struggled against the limits of comprehension straight through to the end (1915 in the first case, 1918 in the second, when Campana is interned in a mental asylum). Rilke has already outgrown the tense aesthetics of expressionism by the second part of the Notebooks . From 1911 to 1926, in the Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus, he carves out an interior, virtually posthumous space for poetic intuition on the margins of historical practice. Schiele pays the price for disregarding public opinion with imprisonment in 1912, and is inducted into the war in 1915. The chastening effect of both events makes him redirect his energies to new experiments in painting. Treating individuals and landscapes in the manner of still lifes, with intricate visual detail, his melancholy large canvases of 1917 and 1918 share little with his small, quick, bitter improvisations in

pencil and watercolor from before the war. Kokoschka, too, outgrows his fiery youth, replacing his provocative and scandalous visions of 1910 with more subdued and subtle sorts of soulscape, including panoramas whose features are harmoniously interrelated.

Even Kandinsky gives up his intense, transitional style of the Munich years. At the onset of World War I he returns home to Russia, where he seeks common ground between his own aesthetic and the avant-garde movements of futurism, constructivism, and suprematism. He is not successful, unless, of course, one considers the extent to which his own style changes. Moving back to Germany in 1921, he joins the technical, analytic Bauhaus school in Weimar and seeks to give his spiritualistic leanings new practical functions. As the years go by, his art becomes increasingly programmatic, even dogmatic, bold in its figuration of geometric abstraction. Not suspended as once between two worlds, it loses its tentative nature. In his canvases of the twenties and thirties, flat and sharp shapes take precedence over effluent color, systematic arrangements over indomitable strife. Above all, the passionate and dynamic process in which his early abstractions compelled the viewer to participate (in Kandinsky's own version of "structive art," conscious of its own nature as becoming, of vision as a striving to see, and of understanding as an offshoot of misunderstanding) is replaced by a light, utopian mechanics.

In 1910 the greater part of the work of Buber, Lukács, and Wittgenstein still lies ahead of them. While the subject of the Tractatus as conceived between 1912 and 1914 is what can never be said in words, the embracing of this work by logical positivists builds Wittgenstein's fame as a philosopher of language. Even if he continues to exempt the most serious issues of life from its literal grasp, Wittgenstein ends his days as an ordinary language philosopher. By the twenties Buber is an existential theologian, interpreting all being as dialogue and that dialogue as fundamental to the Judaic tradition. Lukács converts to Marxism and denounces his earlier, more sensitive work, along with the modernist aesthetics to which it is tied, as a symptom of romantic capitalism. What might have come of the arts of 1910 had it not been for the shake-up of World War I is impossible to say; what is certain, however, is that they could not have continued much further along the lines they had taken.

Aspiring to be prophets of a more sophisticated consonance than any language could encompass, the artists and philosophers of 1910 became martyrs of the dissonance they themselves freed. The word

martyr comes from the Greek martirius : a person who bears witness, who confesses to the nature of a particular situation. It was, in the early twentieth century, a "pathos of truth" that made some people prefer to perish from their findings than to compromise them. "To avoid no reef," declares Blumenberg, "one day that will be called 'heroic nihilism'" (1979: 22). One could also call it revolutionary nihilism, envisioning the prerequisites for change, imagining that solutions might be found in the fallout of testimony itself. That was the "harmony" implicit in the dissonance. Yet this martyrdom was not enough. An entire generation had to repeat it, even if rarely with the same level of awareness, believing, most often, that their war efforts were serving a grand cause. The Great War was a travesty of the unanchored idealism of 1910, a nihilism without heroic dimension, a dashing of oneself on the reef merely out of fear of the open sea.

It now appears that one of the things most fully understood in 1910 was misunderstanding—the vastness of its depth and promise. And it is this misunderstanding which made the future then seem so uncertain. "The world," writes Marc in the prologue to the projected second volume of the Blue Rider, "is giving birth to a new epoch. There is just one question: has the moment yet come for us to detach ourselves from the Old World? Are we ready for a vita nuova ?" (quoted in Vezin 1992: 209). In this, the last tragic age of the West, few people were. If we look for "constructive" moments in the first decades of twentieth-century Europe, we are better advised to gaze past Marc to two developments on either side of the war's divide: the avant-garde energies unleashed in Paris in 1913 and the socialist revolution in Moscow, 1917. On these bases at least—in the relative independence of art from politics and of politics from art—things could still be built. Whether these two separate lines could ever be fully rejoined—and the dadaist events between them said no—is a question still with us today. "In France," Marc comments in 1910, "success follows on from the most daring experiments by the young, but for them taking risks derives from a tradition. With us, each risk is a desperate, chaotic experiment by a man who cannot master the language" (quoted in Vezin 1992: 104). The "tradition," in Paris and Moscow, was a conventional one. In the first case it consisted of a belief in the autonomy of art, in the second, of political activism. By contrast, the unmasterable language to which artists in Munich, Trieste, Vienna, and Budapest bore witness consisted of the imponderable means that were left once traditions and rhetoric appeared stripped of their cogency. This is why the idea of

producing a "transvaluation of all values" through art or politics was just as dubious as it was necessary in 1910: The divorce between these two spheres of activity had already been felt. By contrast, the inspiration of much postwar art in Europe was still predicated on the series of oppositions whose relations the artists of 1910 had hoped to alter: practice vs. theory, "real" vs. "rhetorical" orders of action, conscious vs. unconscious knowledge, pragmatic vs. utopian ideals. After the war these oppositions appeared more fundamental and extensive than any possible art, even an art purporting to encompass them. They were ontologically constitutive structures, delimiting the very scope of aesthetics. And this vitiated all dreams of a "new life" in and by means of art alone.

The defeat of Germany left its expressionists clamoring to reconstruct their moral and political landscape, charged as degenerates by the Right and the Left alike. Most Austrians, including some of the most venturesome, secretly bemoaned the passing of the grand chaos their empire seemed so miraculously to contain. The revolutionary intentions of artists in Italy were co-opted by fascism. In the newly formed Soviet Union, the attempt to assimilate the avant-garde arts into the political order was not successful at all. By the 1930s, in most of Europe, the idea of a vita nuova through the agency of art was laid to rest.

What came of the four expressionist traits in this scenario? The idea of dissonance as a vehicle for ethical and artistic expression was lost precisely through the limitless possibilities of form that art was soon to arrogate to itself. It was lost when art conceived of itself as a realm of unfettered and unaccountable creation, whether its new topics were the fallen worlds of the everyday and the "inartistic" (Marcel Duchamp), the futility of its aspirations (dadaism), or the promise of spontaneous, unconscious revelation (surrealism and abstract expressionism). Where these topics encountered no strong countervailing tendencies in the conscious mind, art no longer grappled in the same way with the struggles out of which it once had grown. At best it reflected a dissonance outside it (through a process best traced by Adorno), in its historical context. It no longer thematized dissonance as something which might take the form of a privileged language, perhaps even because the very notion of a privileged language was definitively lost. Here Lukács and Wittgenstein proved prophetic: one could no longer invoke criteria for the "beautiful" and the "good." And this meant

that other criteria came to take their place: imaginative conviction, visionary inspiration, the dictates of morality or will.

Before the Great War is out, German expressionists explicitly thrive on stridency, provocation, and imaginative violence. Yet the stridency tends to be formulaic. Disruptions of literary and pictorial syntax become commonplace, generating little tension among the elements so wrenched apart. One only has to contrast the lyrics of Trakl with those of many poets anthologized in Kurt Pinthus's The Twilight of Humanity (1919) to recognize the extent to which these poetic disruptions have grown ineloquent—and usually by seeking quite the opposite, or by imagining that eloquence can be achieved through the emotional immediacy of pure exclamations.

The musical situation in music is more complex. Here too, however, the dissonant aesthetic of 1910 is resolved through dodecaphonic composition, neoclassicism, and the efforts of Gebrauchsmusik ("music for use") to overcome the gaps between serious and light music. In each case dissonance is repositioned as a feature of larger and more complex contexts of resolution. It is less intrinsic than extrinsic to the search for moral/artistic harmony, a feature of the multilayered culture to which the musician brings such harmony. In its literalization of dissonance, expressionistic music comes to look like "the last attempt at self-justification undertaken by an individualism pushed to the point of absurdity" (Gutman 1929: 580).

In the light of these developments, what appears to be emancipatory in the arts of 1910 is not the larger, cultural scenario of dissonance that they help produce, even if this undoubtedly carries its own freedom; what appears to be emancipatory is the conflict between dissonance and consonance through which the scenario expands. Dissonance is not what is emancipated in the "emancipation of dissonance"; dissonance itself—the search for resolutions not found—bears the emancipatory charge. In other words, the phrase is to be read as a subjective rather than an objective genitive.

The second characteristic of 1910—that sense of a threatening and corrosive negativity at the very foundation of the vital process—is done in, as previously suggested, by the literal and material transformations it undergoes through the war. In the years following 1914–1918 it becomes impossible to reflect on negativity in the theoretical and metaphorical modes of 1910. The deficiency of being comes to mean primarily the destruction of millions of ordinary lives and secondarily the

daily small deaths of social exploitation. There is also a warning, in this and the next great war, about the dangers of obsessions with negativity, for both of them relied on polemics against the "sick" and the "sinful," the degenerate and the infectious, the corrosive and the deadly. What good, if any, could come from lucubrations about the infinite ways life lets us down?

However, what probably did not register in the years following 1910 was the way in which the distance from these seeming abominations had already been shortened. It did not register because the gravitation toward a coincidentia oppositorum in 1910 did not yield a new conceptual language, which was not found until Heidegger culled the full implications of Simmel's essay on death in Being and Time (1927). There the traditional conception of death was rejected, replaced by one seeing mortality as the horizon of all decisive acts, as an immanent feature of life which delimited the very terms of choice. In the thirties and forties existentialist philosophers elaborated this notion further explaining how liberty is always transcribed by its negative bounds.

But even these relations between absurdity and meaning, imprisonment and freedom, did not captivate the popular imagination, leading death to be again abstracted from the realms of theoretical awareness and consigned to the obtuseness of act: to concentration camps, to hospitals and mass murder, to the gerontological quarantine of states for retirement. When not courted directly, as in Nazism and Stalinism—not to mention dozens of genocidal platforms straight through to our time—the phenomenon of death was simply repressed. One thought one was eradicating death by abolishing its symptoms: depression and chronic unhappiness, useless metaphysical reflections, the wrinkles of flab and age—all matters of increasing taboo as the century progressed.

As for the question of soul, or rather the question of the articulation of soul, many postwar artists continued happily to assume that they were expressing deep and unique aspects of their personality in art. Ironically, this occurred during the same decades in which social and psychological theorists of every sort argued that, in a world of practical, commodified relationships such notions as self-knowledge and self-expression were hopelessly anachronistic. Our century has developed a more complex understanding than ever before of the homo politicus, of human enmeshment in ideological and economic apparatuses which makes the very project of self-determination chimerical. There has been no interior to express for quite some time, assuming that there ever was—but only things, endowed with their own, inher-

ent logic. This turn from the internal to the external was already recognized in the twenties, when the literature of New Objectivity tried to offset the confessional impulses of expressionist aesthetics by reflecting on their sociohistorical underpinnings. It was also in the twenties that the prophetic and still untapped document of a post-subjective age was begun, and this by a man who had himself outgrown expressionism: Musil's The Man Without Qualities . Although expressionism had dramatized the end of subjectivity, our century has seen subjectivist ideologies chronically reborn as though such a death never occurred.

The ethical vocabulary that thinkers tried to weaken in 1910 was also strengthened in subsequent years. Dissonance, as Schoenberg described it in the Theory of Harmony , was essentially a more distant form of consonance, a less than obvious affinity between dissimilarities. To emancipate dissonance was ultimately to unmask the limitations of rigid, categorical thinking. Both during and after the war moral and ideological oppositions rather flourished as rarely before. Visions of what was required for both souls and nations became monolithically either/or. Forced consonance in Germany, Italy, and Russia—efforts, so to speak, at social unitarianism—responded to the ethnic and social dissonances that had helped cause the war.

To war-weary minds intent on rebuilding their projects, new forms of facile idealism were largely welcome: liberationist doctrines of libido, as central to the roaring twenties as to psychoanalysis; faith in the surreal and the unconscious; impassioned defenses of socialism no less than returns to Catholicism. The ultimate opposition again came down to the difference between "spiritual values" and pragmatism. But even this difference probably only covered over an interest the two factions shared: the desire for a functional system, for instruments by which to definitively cleave the good from the bad. The implicit hope of an ethics of misunderstanding was not fulfilled.

Where does this bring us today, in the decade that completes the century's frame? If the beginning of the century reaps the consequences of a tragically dichotomous intellectual history, the end seems to aspire to the opposite: the ideal of a resistance-free world, the multiplication of opportunities for limitless distraction, unending crusades for empowerment and ease. Do we share anything whatsoever with expressionists today? Is not our world the antithesis of theirs?

While artists in 1910 hoped their work would uncover a "truly living reality," today we see art as just another species of business, as a lucrative production of entertainment. Even when art has greater

ambitions than this, it cannot easily dispense with parody, pastiche, or didactic morality. Today the difference between persuasion and rhetoric cannot even be thought. The "pathos of truth" has been replaced by the thirst for the happy ending. We want the answers without asking the questions, envisioning an abolition of all obstacles to desire through a consonance of wills or a Balkanization of interests and groups. Materialism, as the expressionists feared, has become the only sure measure of knowledge, and pragmatics the most reliable criterion of value. It is hardly an age for a thinker.

As for the self-searching promoted by the first decade of the century, select members of society are paid small fortunes to instruct us on how to go about it, promising us moral and emotional improvement into the bargain. More often than not, however, we recommend such analysis to others, inviting them to reflect on how they might be responsible for our shortcomings. But all irony aside, the ideological differences between the first and the last decades of the century are subtended by dozens of serious changes in the fabric of socioeconomic experience; they are also based on only one vision of contemporary popular culture, exemplified above all by the United States. In Europe the situation is somewhat different, though even there we find the same fear of fear, the same chimerical conjunctions of moral complacency and social intolerance, the same blend of cultural homogenization and cries for local autonomy. In the final analysis, dissonance is just as characteristic of our time as it was of the prewar years, even if it is not always as self-conscious. The last decade of the century is not simply the antithesis of the first; it is a mirror image, an inverted reflection. The social unrest following the recent collapse of the Eastern bloc repeats the political disintegration of the Habsburg, Czarist, and Ottoman empires, the independence of once colonized peoples resuming a process thwarted by the balanced world powers of 1918–1989. One can only hope that the events of post-1989 will do more than parody those spurring the Great War, where insecurity about one's place among others led to new tactics of self-assertion. The mobility, interdependence, and rapid transformation of classes, races, and nations at the end of the century makes the identity-discourse of the beginning now smack of falseness. It makes the dissonances we would like to emancipate today (or make consonant with a rule?) seem artificially recreated. One must hope that what we appropriate from the early twentieth century is not merely its naive, "expressive" intent, but also its negative knowledge. One ideal of 1910—to the effect that a sense of

belonging might issue from precisely its lack, or that self-identification might be predicated on the crumbling of such counters of identification as groups and nations—might mitigate some opposite nostalgias.

In an article written for the Voce four years before the Great War, Slataper responded to the wishes of Italians to extend the borders of their country to encompass their brethren in Trieste and Trento. If one should aspire to anything, claimed Slataper, it was not to annexing the "Italian" parts of Austria-Hungary but rather to developing Italianity within them. Efforts to constitute identity, he thought, should precede the acceptance of such identity as a given. "We do not deny the importance of political borders," he wrote, "but we strongly feel that they do not contain the country." (Slataper, "L'irredentismo: Oggi," La Voce , December 12, 1910; quoted in Baroni 1975: 61). Before contemplating a takeover of those parts of the Habsburg empire where Italians existed, Slataper and other members of the Voce thought it necessary to note that others—for example the Slays—were also there, in Trieste, and could not just be imagined away. And this is hardly the kind of patriotism one has come to expect from a member of a disenfranchised minority.

Michelstaedter gives the issue a more ethical edge:

Non è la patria
il comodo giaciglio
per la cura e la noia e la stanchezza;
ma nel suo petto, ma pel suo periglio
chi ne voglia parlar
deve crearla.—

[One's country is not
a comfortable bed
for care and boredom and weariness;
but within one's breast, and, at personal risk,
whoever would speak about it
must create it.—]
(Michelstaedter 1987: 76)

Michelstaedter's poem is appropriately left untitled, for his homeland can have no name.

The antinationalistic positions of Slataper and Michelstaedter come close to defending what was later to be called the Verjudung (Judaization) of Europeans: a paradoxical condition of social and ideological dissonance in which positions could actually be assumed, where mortality, negativity, and loss were linked to morality, justice, and the

very constitution of vision. In Nietzschean terms, one would say that Übergang relies on Untergang , overcoming on being overcome. A similar perspective informs the post-sentimental expressionism of Kandinsky and Schoenberg, favoring the arts of abstraction, recombination, and nonfiguration over those of representation and moralization.

It is also reflected in the "antirhetorical" styles of Triestine writers in Michelstaedter's generation. Steeped in a practical and mercantile tradition, Triestines were not easily seduced by the artistic currents that swept over Europe. "There is, in fact," writes Baroni, "not one great Triestine writer who, despite all the efforts of critics, can be assigned to one or another of the numerous literary 'families' of the twentieth century" (1975: 57). The dwellers of the free port of Trieste, like Levantine merchants in Izmir and Alexandria, were too rooted in multicultural exchange to define its "identities" by reference to theories. They resisted the rhetoric diminishing the differences between human beings as well as the one formulating absolutely distinguishing traits. Rather they were more taken with the concrete complexities of the here and now. At the commercial crossroads of East and West, the inhabitants of Trieste were bound by productive, economic dependencies—obliged, as it were, to get along.

The spirit of Trieste was "as of the nature of the air" in Kandinsky's description, composed of foreign bodies. No doubt, the concept of individual identity was weakened by relativity; but it was also strengthened by relationship. Habitation meant cohabitation, belonging not being in powet majoritarianism mutual minoritarianism. Beneath all external conflict lay a deeper, internal conflict, which rhetoric and ideology try to hide. This is why we write, says Slataper in a letter "To Intelligent Young Italians" of 1909—not in order to express ourselves, but in order "to create internal clarity" (La Voce , August 26, 1909; quoted in Baroni 1975: 50).