SOURCE: "Comic and Grotesque Elements in Ernst Barlach," in The Modern Language Quarterly, Vol. 20, No. 1, March, 1959, pp. 173-80.

In the following essay, Chick discusses Barlach's preoccupation with grotesque humor.

Wolfgang Kay ser's Das Groteske: Seine Gestaltung in Malerei und Dichtung,¹ to which this article is heavily in debt, makes only passing reference to Ernst Barlach the graphic artist, and leaves Barlach the dramatist unmentioned. Yet to judge only by the repeated use of the word grotesk in Paul Fechter's Ernst Barlach,² one need not look far in any direction to find grotesque elements. From the ridiculous, disgusting, early drawing entitled "Liebespaar"³—two, fat, smirking, walrus-like figures reclining on bulbous pillows that seem a part of their bodies, the male fondling the female's breast while she looks at him with dull expectancy—to the more horrifying "Gott Bauch" in Die Wandlungen Gottes (1922); from the eating of the horse in...