ABSTRACT
As early as 1921 the young Alsatian Iwan Goll wrote an article entitled Expressionismus stirlt; in the following year Brecht’s Trommeln in der Nacht was performed in Munich. Certainly the rhetoric and bombast of German Expressionism faded. But expressionism is a complex phenomenon, and it is true to say that the three main tendencies that superseded it, dadaism, ‘Neue Sachlichkeit’ and surrealism were all unthinkable without it. The Nazis shared much in common with it. Goebbels’s novel stressed the need to ‘shape the outside world from within’; the experiments with the ‘Thingspiel’ were very close to certain manifestations of German Expressionist drama, as was the vast, theatrical staging of the rallies. The modernist techniques associated with early expressionism have become part of the stock-in-trade of modern writing, although it would seem that the frenzied pathos and the hyperbole are gone forever.
