ABSTRACT
The founding of the Reich, accompanied by the culmination of the growth of modern capitalist industrial production, including the emergence of centralised businesses and major banks, also saw at last the coming-of-age of a working class. This new class sought to gain increasing influence on political, social and literary life through its diverse organisational forms. Despite all these efforts, however, the literature of the period remained an entirely middle-class one, even where it took on anti-middle-class attributes. Artistic creativity was to some extent ‘exiled’ from mainstream official cultural life in this period. Meanwhile, individual authors took refuge in Innerlichkeit, the inner spiritual world, and the stylisation of artistic and poetic creative processes into an act of quasiconsecration: the contrast being sought between ‘art and life’, ‘the self and the world’. The explanation often put forward for all these symptoms is that during the course of the century the middle class was in the process of shedding its former ideals of progress, based on an optimism of Reason, and entering into a ‘phase of stagnation or decadence’.
