ABSTRACT
One of the key remarks of the century occurs in a very long novel which was begun in 1914 by an Irish writer who had yet to make a name. James Joyce was the writer, the novel was Ulysses, and the remark was all of 11 words long. Jones described the classic symptoms of nightmare as “agonizing dread, a sense of oppression or weight at the chest which alarmingly interferes with respiration, and a conviction of hopeless paralysis.” History as nightmare presides over just about all the best work of the Brucke group. The Night is not an objective statement, like Declaration of War. It is a symbolic statement: “history as nightmare” is everywhere present in it. The apocalypse, when it came, was better interpreted by the ferocious and elliptic methods of George Grosz, for one, in his Metropolis, 1917. But it is with Max Beckmann that the concept of history as nightmare found a new fulfillment.
