The German Genius

itself,” that to cull beauty in such circumstances cannot be wholly appropriate, that the accumulation of images, of experiences, is as much an aspect of war as the vivid—short, intense—flashes and explosions of metaphor or simile.
    “Im Granatloch” (In a Shellhole) tells about life in a temporary trench, which ends:
    Was sang Ninette?…Leichtes, Südliches.—Weinen will ich, dass ich lagere in Mord und Stürmen, im blauen Raketenmeer, im Sausen des Windes,
Unter lärmenden Nachthimmeln, in grünen Wassern voll Schnecken und roten Würmern, in Erwartung des Todes, faul und gross; im Sterbeschrei der Pferde,
Im Sterbeschrei der Menschen, ich hörte Dunkle rufen aus Dunkelm, Hängend in Drähten: so singen Vögel, die sterben wollen, einsam, vertrauert, in Frühlingsjahren.
Und, über dem Rheine, weit, das schwerbestürmende, eines vaterlosen Kindes…
     
    (What was it Ninette used to sing?…Something gay, something southern.—I could cry that I am lying here amid murder and assaults, in a blue sea of rockets, in the wind’s sighing, beneath turbulent night skies, in green waters full of snails and red worms, awaiting death, putrid and swollen, amid the dying screams of horses, amid the dying screams of men, I heard them, calling out of the dark, hanging in the wire; thus do birds sing who are ready to die, lonely, pining away, in the spring of their lives. And beyond the Rhine, far away, somebody opened a creaking door, and from the opening came prayer, the overwhelming prayer of a fatherless child…) 12
     
    Nothing chauvinist here, nothing about German “Kultur” and its alleged superiority. The overall tone is by no means bitter, but rather elegiac at the pity of it all.
    Both Bertolt Brecht and Karl Kraus wrote bitter antiwar and savagely satirical poems toward the end of the hostilities. They were not always successful: satire, especially in such a context, risked being seen as “un-German.”
    Not only poets died. August Macke, the Blaue Reiter painter, was shot as the German forces advanced into France; Franz Marc was killed at Verdun; Max Planck lost one son (another, Erwin, was executed in 1945 for his part in the resistance against Hitler), as did the painter Käthe Kollwitz (she also lost her grandson in World War II); Oscar Kokoschka was wounded, and Albert Einstein ostracized. The mathematician and philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein was interned in a Campo Concentramento in northern Italy, from where he sent Bertrand Russell the manuscript of his recently completed work, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus .
     
     
    The war produced many intellectual and cultural ramifications. Some of them took years to reveal themselves, but not all.
    In film, although Germany had a strong industry in 1914, it was still dominated by output from abroad, France, America, and Italy in particular. At the outbreak of war, the importation of foreign films was stopped. Cinema audiences rose in the war—the combination of entertainment and newsreels proving irresistible, though film equipment was so bulky then that real action footage was rare and fiction films about war gradually took over. Documentaries were often more subtle, such as Ernst Lubitsch’s film about the entry of women into male professions.
    Theater was more lively, and more critical. Georg Kaiser’s Gas I was not set anywhere specific, but its plot, pitting the manufacturer, who wants to cease production, against the military and industrial chiefs, who want ever-greater quantities turned out, was close to the bone. Ernst Toller, who had fought at Verdun and suffered a breakdown, wrote Die Wandlung ( The Transformation ), about the metamorphosis of an enthusiastic volunteer into an artist who leads an uprising (as Toller himself did in the Bavarian Soviet), and he also came too close to current events: his play could not be produced for some months. (Although it did appear late in 1919, while its author was still in prison—where the play had been written—serving a sentence for treason, for his part in the uprising.)
    But it is Karl Kraus’s Die letzten Tage der Menschheit ( The Last Days of Mankind ) that demands most attention. Written between 1915, when the first segment was published, and 1922, it featured a large cast, innumerable dialects, and it brilliantly and bitterly exposed the mendacities of the authorities, the dishonest jingoism of the media, in a world where all authority had broken down. Kraus’s target, for which he often