Re: German Expressionism and Ernst Toller’s Masse-MenschGerman Expressionism was a movement which encompassed literature, theatre, art, dance, music and cinema yet the average student of theatre is most likely familiar with its drama only through the work of primarily Symbolist writers like Ibsen, Strindberg and Wedekind. It’s true that German writer Frank Wedekind’s Spring’s Awakening (1891) paved the way for many of the conventions of German Expressionism however it was only a precursor to the movement’s overt political nature and highly abstract qualities. I believe it’s a fair assumption that the specific movement of German Expressionist theatre has often been ignored or at least not given the appreciation it deserves due to some of its inherently polarizing political and philosophical qualities. I don’t have time to account for each and every play of the period so instead I will use what is probably the prime example of well-written, political, expressionist drama; Ernst Toller’s 1921 play Masse-Mensch or Man and the Masses. It is one of the standards of the movement and captures the essence of what German Expressionism as a whole was trying to achieve. By clarifying Toller’s personal philosophy and intentions and by helping the reader weave through some of the subtleties of Masse-Mensch I hope to help those interested in theatre better understand Expressionist drama as a whole.
For students of recent generations taking a theatre history course Expressionism is most likely a brief footnote comprised of vague imagery; macabre black & white skeletons, intangible dream imagery and intense, seemingly directionless emotion. But to fully understand the depth of its meaning you must first place it within its historical context, which is important in any study and even more so here. Renate Benson, author of German Expressionist Drama dates the birth of Expressionism in 1905 when artists in Paris and Germany began breaking from conventional forms in a radical way. Specifically in Dresden, Germany artists who called themselves Die Brucke or The Bridge hailed themselves, as “enemies of conventional bourgeois art, and as prophets and creators of new values” (Benson, 2) This new philosophical outlook affected all forms of art and was for the most part a reaction or signpost of the ever growing industrial war-machine (capitalism, for the most part) and the alienation of its working class citizens. In his introduction to German Expressionist Plays, editor Ernst Schurer explains that, “The expressionists saw the state (education and religion) as “servants of the dominant ideology, more interested in maintaining the status quo than in helping the downtrodden and disadvantaged, the tragic victims of industrialization and so called progress” (vii) It becomes clear very quickly that Expressionism was a direct product of one of the world’s most rapid periods of change following the industrial revolution and was very much a prophetic warning against man’s “irresponsible” wielding of power. Fueling the movement’s popularity and notoriety was the start of World War I in 1913, and then, as if inevitable, Expressionism came to an abrupt halt with Hitler’s rise to power in 1933, a time when many of its finest artists were forced into exile or killed for their anti-state views.
This ideology which was considered so “dangerous” did have a political face, but it was mostly out of personal associations with and sympathy to the socialist and communist causes. George Kaiser, for example, stayed out of the political arena and like him many other expressionists chose instead to seek out and develop their own “personal vision” of life, reality and existence. In general the common sentiment of Expressionists was heavily influenced by the psychological and philosophical work of Sigmund Freud and Friedrich Nietzsche who “extolled instinct above intellect” (Schurer, xii) This brief statement works to reiterate the overall goal of Expressionism. That is, in an effort to break free from and eliminate hollow social constructs, emotional prisons and mechanized existence a person should trust in their own deep rooted inherent goodness (which artists of this movement agreed upon as truth) to “regenerate” society and one day lead it to a utopian (or at least better) era in human history. To accomplish this theatre artists of the period tried through their writing, acting, direction and production to condense the human experience into its most basic form; expression. Almost all traditional theatrical elements are reduced to “visions” based on dreams, feeling and imagination which are to Expressionists “more meaningful than experience and reality” (Schurer, vii) Writers of the period achieved this by breaking language down to abstract short words and sentences which are supposed to enhance intensity and act as a sort of burst of feeling or stream of thought that Pinthus, in his 1919 anthology of Expressionist poems describes as an “ecstatic scream…for kindness, justice, comradeship…and love of man for man” (Pinthus, 25) The content of the play itself is filtered through one main character’s point of view that often represents the ideology of the writer himself. It’s a form of reality distorted by one person’s inward “ethical struggle” against oppressive outside forces. In these plays reality itself is dreamlike and often paralleled by a presentation of one’s deeper subconscious thought. In these productions the outside forces are depicted as larger than life, exaggerated through the use of masks and seen as the main character might subconsciously view them in a “real” world. To convey this surreal version of reality actors would present themselves in a fluid, “expanded”, kabuki-esque manner, which included the representative movements of individuals and groups through gestures, vocal expression and so forth, all of which is meant to convey an “extraordinary state of being” (Benson, 8)
For about the first decade of its existence the Expressionist movement had yet to solidify a real set of goals or to truly define what their “new values” were. There was no particular call to action other than a general association with the left and an acceptance of their means to political revolution, which they assumed inevitably required violence. It was primarily this sort of lackluster acknowledgement of violence, undefined goals and ambiguity that allowed the Expressionist movement to come under blanket accusations of being either propagandists for a certain party, useless idealists or anarchists whose literature was seen as fuel for the leftist cause. However this was not totally the case, in its early years Expressionism was basically an artists melting pot of humanist ideals that questioned the rigid, accepted rules and norms of life, art, reality and the establishment. Their goal was to, through their art, act as a kind of wrench in the gears of established western life which would hopefully shake people out of apathy and acceptance of their fate. And so the movement remained pretty vague and open ended until around 1921 when Ernst Toller released his second play Masse-Mensch and began to question how Expressionists (or revolutionaries in general) could believe in the “inherent goodness of man” while also accepting a violent revolution that results in many deaths. He found this to be unacceptable but difficult to resolve. As we will see, many of Toller’s beliefs about this apparent contradiction developed during the time between 1917-1919 when he was heavily involved with Independent Socialist party leader Kurt Eisner and his attempts to set up a provisional government in Munich after the collapse of the German Empire. During that time he was an influential leader within the network; acted as a field commander in battles against loyalist armies and helped with organizing and inspiring the working class to strike through readings of his first play Die Wandlung. These activities, experiences and plays written prior to Masse-Mensch were overtly political and often rallying cries for a socialist cause but what’s more important is that they would serve as a catalyst and as a framework for his developing humanist ideology which culminated itself in the writing of Masse-Mensch. This work would finally force Expression to face the reality of what it was they were actually trying to get people to do and how this goal should “morally” be achieved.
Next I will discuss three main points of interest that many Toller scholars regard as leading to the shift in his personal ideology and focusing of Expressionist objectives. The first of these is the dual nature of discrimination he was exposed to as a child growing up in Prussia (now Poland). Samotschin, the town Toller grew up in, was run by a small Protestant German minority who held an elitist attitude toward the Catholic Poles. Toller’s family was in fact German, and well-to-do at that, but they were Jews and endured a certain level of second-class citizenry. In a way Toller experienced both worlds as a German bully and then as a persecuted Jew. In his autobiography he talks about this portion of his life and mentions overhearing another child’s nursemaid saying not to play with him because “that’s a Jew”. Michael Ossar, in his book Anarchism in the Dramas of Ernst Toller, talks about how early confrontations with discrimination lead to Toller’s outspoken denunciation of it, he says that “through his friendship with Stanislaus, the nightwatchman’s son, Toller began to observe the subtle and not-so-subtle process of the inculcation of prejudices between religions, between rich and poor, between nationalities.” (2) As we can see, even early in his life Toller recognized the unnecessary walls that divide people and was able to empathize each, as he would later. In his book on Toller, Michael Pittock gives a nice summary of the implications of these early experiences. He says,
Toller experienced, in all its force, the desire of the outsider to be identified with the dominant social group, and yet he was in a position to realize that such solidarity was destructive because it was purchased at the price of antagonism toward other men-a contradiction explored in his first play Die Wandlung (19)
The second moment of “revelation” that shaped Toller’s humanist views is also derived from a story he tells in his autobiography about one of the more horrific experiences in the first world war. While digging in the dirt with a pick axe he says that one of his swings landed straight into a human body buried beneath, tearing out entrails,
"A dead man is buried here…and suddenly…I grasped the simple truth which I had forgotten, which had lain dead and buried; humanity, community, the only things that really matter…at that moment I realize that I was blinded, willfully blinded; at that moment I knew at last that all the dead, French and German alike, were brothers, and that I am their brother too” (71)
Earlier in his autobiography Toller discusses his feelings of alienation from the dead, a psychological defense mechanism against being overwhelmed by the carnage. “I see the dead and yet I don’t see them…the dead [are unreal]…arousing horror but not compassion.”
The final experience that I believe strengthened Toller’s resolve to reevaluate revolutionary goals was in how his own brief experience as a revolutionary participant ended. In 1918 during his leadership of socialist troops Toller was, for the first time, faced with what it meant to be responsible for the fates of others, while also trying to stay true to his conscience. He believed in the cause but started to doubt the violent means by which they were to achieve it, and because of that knew he could be jeopardizing the situation,
"I hated violence and had sworn rather to endure it than engage in it. Should I now break this oath because the revolution was under attack? I had to do so. The workers had given me their confidence…Wouldn’t I be betraying their confidence if I now refused to defend them, or even called on them to renounce the use of force? I should have considered the possibility of bloody consequences before and not taken office." (118)
Partly responsibly for this sentiment was an instance where he refused an order to eliminate captured Loyalist officers, Toller said "no matter how brutal the laws of civil war may be…we are fighting for a more just world; we demand humaneness so we must be humane" (10)
If there was any belief left in whether he could handle the dirty work of political revolution it was washed away with the defeat of the Munich socialist cause in the summer of 1919 when loyalist troops overtook the city leading to the murders of many of his colleagues including Kurt Eisner and his own subsequent five year imprisonment. Renate Benson summarizes Toller’s disillusionment of this time saying, "it was this concern for the individual which prevented Toller from ever embracing completely the collectivism of an system, even that of Marxism to which he was sympathetic...he did not want masse [masses], he wanted mensch [men]" (13) Even until the end of his life in 1939 Toller recognized the inevitability of force to achieve revolution but now quickly parted himself ideologically and started vigorously, through his own means, to try and develop a vision of how to peacefully transform the world.
"Can a man not be an individual and a mass-man at one and the same time?…As an individual a man will strive for his own ideals, even at the expense of the rest of the world. As a mass-man, social impulses sweep him towards his goal, even though his ideals have been abandoned. The problem seemed to me insoluble…I sought to solve it. It was the conflict that inspired my play Masse-Mensch" (78)
His paradox; how does an individual preserve himself and what he believes while trying to do the will of the masses? Through the character of “The Woman” also known as Sonia Irene, Toller takes us along a journey through his political and moral predicament hoping to find a solution in its telling. The five years of political imprisonment following the Munich revolution were probably the most artistically prolific of Toller’s life. During this time he published a number of poem collections and screenplays, the majority of his popular plays; Die Wandlung, Hinkemman Machine-Wreckers and his most important work Masse-Mensch. As I mentioned earlier I believe that Masse-Mensch provides some of the best examples of what both Toller and German Expressionism was trying to achieve at their core. Next I will briefly discuss how, through this play, Toller answered some of the difficult questions that arose from Expressionist philosophy and from what he experienced in his own life. By looking at the play’s structure; how Toller treats opposing viewpoints within the play and the kind of transformations that characters go through, I can hopefully further show that Toller’s work is truly that of an open minded humanitarian with no intention of reaffirming political agendas, but work that is interested in asking the question how we achieve peace peacefully.
The play Masse-Mensch tells the story of a politically charged woman who is often referred to as Sonia Irene L. by sources outside the play itself, though I’ve never seen anyone explain where exactly that comes from. It’s only mentioned that there was at some point a real female revolutionary of the same name. Anyway, in the story she is depicted as someone who’s respected within a group of revolutionaries and acts as a sort of rallying voice, and later, a voice of conscience. At first she has an almost monolithic quality in that she seems very clear and straight forward about the strike against the factory that must happen now. She speaks of the task at hand in a very lofty and epic manner, like a singular voice of reassurance to the people she speaks to. The beginning of this plays seems as if it will head in the same direction as Die Wandlung, as mostly a relatively straightforward pep rally, but as we will see it quickly deviates and Toller presents his main character with a series of obstacles that force her to question her initial enthusiasm that parallel his own struggles. The first of these is the appearance of her husband who works for (and is still loyal to) the state. He shows up at the meeting place and tells The Woman that she is jeopardizing their way of life by associating with the left and tells her to come home now, which she does (for the last time). The purpose of her husband’s interference isn’t merely to cause some drama by making her choose one or the other, what it does is reveal that she actually has a part, and understands both worlds; the privileged and the downtrodden. By going home with her husband she admits in part that she’s an outsider and becomes alienated from the others. In the next part she is back with her comrades and continues to call for a peaceful strike against the factories, but then her next obstacle comes along, a person called “Nameless One” who steps out from the crowd begins to question her. He basically calls her out, saying that she is naïve to think that anything but glorious battle can change their situation. “Masses are fate” the Nameless One tells her, to which she slowly repeats “masses…are…fate“, reluctantly following the mass course of action and betraying her conscience. In the next scene we learn that many revolutionaries have been slaughtered in this battle but still nameless one calls for their persistence as a necessary sacrifice. Later, the meeting place is found by troops and the revolutionaries inside, as well as The Woman, are put in prison.
Through most of the play you can see some of the obvious parallels to Toller’s own experiences that I mentioned earlier, questions of conscience vs. action, but what’s special about this particular play is that he answers his question from a different point of view. Instead of simply asking how a person persuades the masses to resist violence and simply seeing the issue as black and white, us versus them, Toller views all men as one. Opposing groups are actually a mass of men misguided by one purpose or another, in this case hatred, greed and revenge. In one part of the play the revolutionaries capture loyalist soldiers and The Nameless One cries for revenge, saying that they must be killed because they kill us, they taught us to kill. As the prisoners are being lined up to be shot The Woman stands in front of them, protesting. Nameless One calls her treasonous and asks why she does this, to which she replies “I shield mankind!” Here, the Woman makes it very clear that her goals are larger than the immediate change and retribution of the masses, she is trying to achieve a complete peace that the masses just don’t understand and reject. Not only does The Woman confront the anger that defiles the revolution but also confronts the system, the greed and distorted thinking of the elite. In one of the last scenes The Woman’s husband, who represents the opposition, visits her in her prison cell. He is there once again trying to get her see “reason”, to which she harshly rejects and chastises the system to which he is slave, a system that wages meaningless wars based on greed, but interestingly in her final line to him says “give me your hand beloved of my blood, for I have overcome myself, myself and you” as if rejecting his choices but not him as a person. After he leaves a final visitor, The Nameless, comes along and offers her a way about by killing the guard. As her husband was the last attempt at the system to draw her back in, this is the part of the revolution that asks her to compromise, but she refuses and accepts her impending death, saying to him “I shall become cleaner, more guiltless, I shall become mankind.”
Toller’s philosophy comes to a “fruition” of sorts in this last scene as he finally strips The Woman of the harmful aspects her associations; greed and revenge. In this prison condition her comrades are gone, her husband is gone but she is still a part of them, however, she has now somehow transcended them, she is an individual who now declares herself as mankind. In the final part of Masse-Mensch after The Woman has been taken away to be killed two female prisoners enter the cell and begin rummaging through what little has been left behind. Suddenly they hear the gunshots of the firing line outside and fall to their knees sobbing. The final two lines of the play are them, in succession, saying “sister, why do we do such things?” There is a lot of complex philosophy in here that I still haven’t really grasped, but in this final moment of the play I believe Ernst Toller has reconciled that real peace can only be achieved by eliminating the collective “will of the masses” that absorbs and dehumanizes people, regardless of the group’s original intentions. He seems to call for a collective consciousness of humanity made up of individuals who are transformed, rejecting completely the idea that their own life is more or less valuable than other, rejecting violence and greed, and thus are willing to transform the world one person at a time, however long it may take. And Toller illustrates this through the apparent self-reflection that The Woman’s own transformation and sacrifice caused.
Works CitedBenson, Renate. German Expressionist Drama Ernst Toller and Georg Kaiser. London: Macmillan Press, 1984.
Gruber, Helmut. “The Political-Ethical Mission of German Expressionism.” The German Quarterly. 40.2 (1967): 186-203. Jstor. Milner Lib., Illinois State U. 14 April. 2008.
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Lamb, Stephen. “Hero or Villain? Notes on the Reception of Ernst Toller in the GDR.” The German Quarterly. 59.3 (1986): 375-386. Jstor. Milner Lib., Illinois State U. 14 April. 2008. .
Lob, L. “German Expressionist Theatre: The Actor and Stage.” The Modern Language Review. No volume or issue number, 1 January 2004 (date of publication). Academic Search Premier. EBSCO. Milner Lib., Illinois State U. 25 Apr. 2008 .
Ossar, Michael. Anarchism in the dramas of Ernst Toller. Albany: State University Press, 1980
Pinthus, K., ed. The Twilight of Humanity. Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1959.
Pittock, Malcolm. Ernst Toller. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1979.
Schurer, Ernst, ed. German Expressionist Plays. New York: Continuum Publishing Company, 1997.
Spalek, John, M. “Ernst Toller: The Need for a New Estimate.” The German Quarterly. 39.4 (1966): 581-598. Jstor. Milner Lib., Illinois State U. 14 April. 2008. .
Toller, Ernst., Crankshaw, Edward, Trans. I Was a German. New York: William Marrow, 1934.
Willebrand, W.A. “Ernst Toller’s Ideological Skepticism.” The German Quarterly. 19.3 (1946): 181-186. Jstor. Milner Lib., Illinois State U. 14 April. 2008. .
Released in early 1992 as promotion for the film and an effort to get children interested in the dynamics of the realty industry, Glengarry GlenRoss: The Game had little or nothing to do with the actual movie, keeping in tradition with other movie based games for the NES such as Batman and Back to the Future.
The object of the game was fairly simple but featured extremely pointless, overlong, monotonous cutscenes of exposition by Alan Arkin which take away from the already slow game play... all of which takes place in an office (much like the film). Level one starts off with an overhead view of your character walking through the office in Zelda fashion collecting and uncovering contact cards of varying values; 1, 2 or three being the most valuable. At the bottom of the screen is a time limit that counts down to Blake's arrival. If you don't have enough contact card value (or even if you do) level 2 begins and you must start frantically collecting more contacts while simultaneously avoiding the dreaded brass balls which Blake hurls at you much like Bowser at the end of every level in Super Mario Bros. From here it starts to feel a lot like Duck Hunt in that there is no limit to the amount of points you can rack up before you lose. There is however one kid in Japan who claims to have reached level 3, he said that it has ninjas.
