This volume focuses specifically upon the literature of German Expressionism, rather than the arts of painting, sculpture, music, or even architecture. Especially in the United States, the term German Expressionism first calls to mind those arts, rather than the literature of the period, and that circumstance reflects in a very positive manner the increased general familiarity with the German contribution to artistic modernism in the early twentieth century. This volume relies to some degree, necessarily, upon that familiarity, while trying to underscore the interconnectedness of the arts in this period, their shared intellectual debts and sources, and their shared general aesthetics, as suggested by the introduction. Though that very interconnectedness calls into question the notion of genre, as the one borrows from or emulates the other, genre still remains a useful organizing principle for tracking and understanding that interrelatedness. This volume thus traces a trajectory from the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche in its influence upon the Expressionist generation, and as literature itself; through the principal literary genres (in a less common sequence of prose, poetry, and drama), to an interdisciplinary section that first addresses the gender politics of Expressionism, and then the visual genre (of film) that most visibly absorbed the narrative impulses, visual imaginary and experimental spirit from the literature of German Expressionism. The sequence of the essays, arcing from philosophy to film, through the literary genres, would like to suggest both the centrality of the literature — the verbal artifacts related to Expressionism in this period — as well as the constant and necessary dialogue of each art with its others in this period, indeed the migration of elements of each art into the other, either under the Wagnerian rubric of Gesamtkunstwerk (total work of art) or more recently, of intermediality.

Throughout the volume, the term Expressionism has been capitalized to indicate the specific historical phenomenon of that “movement” between the years 1905 and 1925, as opposed to any sort of general expressionistic (lower case) tendency in the arts before or after that period.

The movie poster illustrations for Caligari (design Ledl Bernhard) and Genuine (design Josef Fenneker) appear in this volume courtesy of Deutsche Kinemathek Berlin.

For their generous permission to reprint Edvard Munch's portrait of Friedrich Nietzsche (1906) I would like to thank the Thielska-Galleriet in Stockholm, Sweden, and Karin Meddings in particular.

No single thinker had a greater influence on the artists of the Expressionist generation than did Friedrich Nietzsche. Indeed, if one were to mentally subtract Nietzschean ideas and stylistic influences from the intellectual and aesthetic storehouse of Expressionism, what would remain would hardly be recognizable as the artistic and intellectual-historical configuration we know today as literary Expressionism. Will to power; transvaluation of values; a vitalistically defined conception of life; the Zarathustrian Übermensch as the new human being; dithyrambic lyric style; the new pathos; immoralism; eternal recurrence; a scathing critique of the world of the Wilhelminian Bildungsbürgertum (educated bourgeoisie) — for whom Nietzsche, in the first of his Unzeitgemäße Betrachtungen (Unfashionable Observations), coined the derogatory term “Bildungsphilister” (“cultural philistine”; KSA 1:165); and finally, the concept of the Dionysian as a glorified irrationalism and an existential will to embrace the horror of existence: Expressionism would lose all its definition and distinctness if we sought to conceive it apart from these notions indebted to Nietzsche. If we accept the testimony of Gottfried Benn, one of the few great Expressionist writers who lived long enough to look back on the era of Expressionism with historical hindsight, then Nietzsche truly was experienced, in Benn's memorable phrase, as “das größte Ausstrahlungsphänomen der Geistesgeschichte” (that phenomenon in intellectual history with the single most irradiative power; 1048), more influential even than Goethe, the Titan of German classicism. Indeed, Benn goes so far as to remark that everything that interested his generation was already articulated in Nietzsche's works, and that what he and his contemporaries produced was merely exegesis of Nietzsche's seminal ideas (1046). Even if we allow for a modicum of rhetorical overstatement in this remark, we cannot help but come away with the view of Nietzsche as an intellectual giant whom the Expressionists adopted as the flag-bearer of their movement. Indeed, as early as 1918 Eckart von Sydow called Nietzsche the “lodestar” of the Expressionist movement (quoted in Martens, 36). This assertion is confirmed by the formative impact Nietzsche had on the intellectual profiles of most of the leading spokes-people of the Expressionist generation.