New essays examining the complex period of rich artistic ferment that was German literary Expressionism. More than any other avant-garde movement, German Expressionism captures the aesthetic revolution of 20th-century modernity in all its contrasts and conflicts. In continuous eruptions from 1905 to 1925, Expressionism upset reigningpractices in the arts, most vividly in painting and the visual arts. In the literature, a heady intellectualism combined with dramatic gesture, graphic visions, exuberant emotions and urgent proclamations to forge forceful stylesof verbal expression. Expressionism introduced into art both visual and verbal a shockingly new intensity with many facets and many faces. This volume presents the literature of German Expressionism, which is far less known in the English-speaking world, with essays by leading scholars on Expressionism's philosophical origins, its thematic preoccupations, and its divergent stylistic manifestations by writers whose common bond is intensity and whose lineson the page read like the gouges of a woodcut: Georg Kaiser, Walter Hasenclever, and Ernst Toller in drama; Gottfried Benn, Georg Heym, Else Lasker-Schuler, and Georg Trakl in poetry; Alfred Doeblin, Carl Einstein, and Carl Sternheim in prose, to name just a few. Against the background of the journals, exhibitions, and anthologies, the cafe meeting places and public life of Expressionism, the volume's highly focused, intrinsic analyses of texts and comprehensive overviews of extrinsic contexts (and of the most up-to-date research) shows the fervor and complexity of the period and its effulgent literary formations. Neil H. Donahue is Professor of German and Comparative Literature at Hofstra University.

During the Nazi era many German writers chose, or were forced into, exile. Many others stayed and, after the end of this period, claimed to have retreated into "Inner Emigration". The nature of this kind of emigration and the underlying motives of these writers have been hotly debated to this day. Though the reception of Inner Emigration has often been confounded by disputes over the term itself, the issue is ultimately not a matter of nomenclature, but of more far-reaching issues of literary evaluation, moral discernment and the writing of history. This volume presents, for the first time, to an English-speaking readership the complexity of Inner Emigration through the analysis of problematic individual cases of writers who, under constant pressure from a watchful dictatorship to conform and to collaborate, were caught between conscience and compromise.

During the Nazi era many German writers chose, or were forced into, exile. Many others stayed and, after the end of this period, claimed to have retreated into "Inner Emigration". The nature of this kind of emigration and the underlying motives of these writers have been hotly debated to this day. Though the reception of Inner Emigration has often been confounded by disputes over the term itself, the issue is ultimately not a matter of nomenclature, but of more far-reaching issues of literary evaluation, moral discernment and the writing of history. This volume presents, for the first time, to an English-speaking readership the complexity of Inner Emigration through the analysis of problematic individual cases of writers who, under constant pressure from a watchful dictatorship to conform and to collaborate, were caught between conscience and compromise.

New view of the prominent German poet, with new research on his activities during the Nazi period and his pre-1945 poetry. Karl Krolow (1915-1999) was one of the most prominent German poets of the second half of the twentieth century. The sharply distinct phases of Krolow's work reflect the phases of German postwar poetry in general, giving his work arepresentative stature for the period; and his production as one of Germany's leading poetry critics is almost as impressive. Yet his poetry, despite its prominence, its stylistic facility, and his prolific output, has surprisingly not received sustained critical attention. This study locates for the first time the hidden thread that runs through Krolow's work: his uneasy relationship to the recent German past. During the entire period of Germany's gradual and often painful "coming to terms" with the Nazi regime, the war, and the Holocaust, Krolow engaged his technical virtuosity as a poet in a stunning avoidance of historical content, both Germany's and his own. He never addressed publicly his own activities in the Third Reich and during the war: this study fills in that gap and examines for the first time, with new historical research and documentation, his life during the Nazi period and his literary production before 1945, a body of work that has never before received any critical evaluation or even acknowledgment. With this new foundation, Neil Donahue presents Krolow's career from a wholly new perspective and provides a new foundation for future consideration of his work and of postwar German poetry in general. In so doing, Donahue presents in sum, but overturns, decades of Krolow criticism which, begun on a false footing, missed the real historical depth in his poems: the depth of avoidance. Neil H. Donahue is professor of German and Comparative Literature at Hofstra University.

Invisible Cathedrals places Wilhelm Worringer in the foreground of discussions of Expressionism and German Modernism for the first time. These essays not only reveal the complexities of his individual works, such as Abstraction and Empathy (1908) and Form Problems of the Gothic (1911), they also examine his lesser-known books and essays of the post-World War I years, the 1920s, and beyond.

Invisible Cathedrals offers both a basic introduction to Worringer's writings and their broad influence, and a profound and detailed revisionist analysis of his significance in German and European Modernism. It also provides the most comprehensive bibliography to date of his own work and of the scattered criticism devoted to Worringer in different disciplines.

Worringer's works were provocative, widely read, and often reprinted and were highly influential among artists and writers in Germany. As a result, they both raised suspicion in his own academic discipline of art history and excited discussion in other diverse fields, such as literary and social theory, psychology, and film theory. Worringer emerges here not solely as a scholarly commentator on the history of art, but also as an activist scholar who engaged his historical criticism of other periods directly in the production of culture in his own time.

Contributors are Magdalena Bushart, Neil H. Donahue, Charles W. Haxthausen, Michael W. Jennings, Joseph Masheck, Geoffrey Waite, and Joanna E. Ziegler.