Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Ulrich Weisstein

Critical Essay by Ulrich Weisstein

SOURCE: Weisstein, Ulrich. “German Literary Expressionism: An Anatomy.” German Quarterly 54, no. 3 (May 1981): 262-83.

In the following essay, Weisstein describes some of the significant differences and dichotomies inherent in the various strands of German Expressionism.

I

Any attempt to analyze the most striking and characteristic features of a complex entity like Expressionism, which some regard as a typisch deutscher Gegenstand,¹ must be prefaced by some methodological observations. As I have come to realize after ploughing through the vast amount of scholarship on the subject, the crux of the matter is the use, or abuse, of criteria of selection and evaluation. The complexity and diffuseness of the phenomenon under consideration compel us to conduct our investigation with special rigor. Unfortunately, Expressionism in some important ways resembles international Symbolism more closely than it does, say, Naturalism or Futurism²—movements that can be rather narrowly circumscribed and reduced to a relatively small body...
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