During the twentieth century, classical studies and education were characterized by a marked decline in the teaching of the ancient languages, in particular Greek, and by the conservative stance of many practitioners, which led to close relations to those in power, both under the rule of the Kaiser and under the National Socialists. As a consequence, those secondary schools that taught classics were often criticized for being remote from the real world and for having a submissive attitude. This attitude is also evident in the last attempt so far to derive guiding principles for society from antiquity: the ‘‘Third Humanism’’ founded by Werner Jaeger (1888-1961). Mainly a reaction to Germany’s defeat in World War I, to the November Revolution and democracy, it bore quasi-religious traits and was directed - in contrast to neohumanism - toward the state, not the individual.
The ideology of National Socialism represented a low point despite the fact that overall it saw itself less indebted to antiquity than did Italian fascism. Nevertheless its leading exponents - foremost among them Hitler himself - appealed to Sparta and Rome, interpreted classical history according to their theory of race, and aimed for heroic-monumental state architecture. After 1945 classical traditions were seen in close relationship to Christianity (‘‘Abendlandideologie’’ [Ideology of the occident]) as part of how West Germany understood itself politically, while they did not assume any direct ideological role in the German Democratic Republic.
Still Greek and Roman times remained important in the twentieth century. Significant research continued to take place in philology, archaeology, and ancient history. Numerous translations and editions of texts prove that antiquity remained of interest to many readers. Philosophers of many different schools (from Edmund Husserl [1859-1938] and Martin Heidegger [1889-1976] to Ernst Bloch [1885-1977], Max Horckheimer [1895-1973], and Theodor W. Adorno [1903-69]) engaged with questions raised by Greek philosophy, mythology, and literature. When founding psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) reached back to the ancient myths (‘‘Oedipus complex’’), and the arts, first and foremost, were characterized much more by classical motifs than in the nineteenth century. The dominant mode was a critical and questioning approach to the models, following Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud: influenced by their own experiences of extreme crises, many writers, painters, sculptors, and composers viewed antiquity as a time of incredible social and political tensions. They stressed the harshness of ancient myths, questioned conflicts from a psychological perspective, and understood antiquity less in an ‘‘Apollonian’’ than in a ‘‘Dionysian’’ fashion. It was no longer a single author, work, genre, or period that was crucial for the reception of antiquity, but the received subject matters were seen as a freely available reservoir of motifs, a trend that had begun since the Romantic period. Linked to the general tendency for art to become more political, Rome again assumed a larger role despite the primacy of Greece.
The newly awakened interest in antiquity started with the postnaturalistic literature of the turn of the century. In drama Gerhart Hauptmann (1862-1946), Frank Wedekind (1864-1918), and Hugo von Hofmannsthal (1874-1929) played a part; in lyric, besides Hofmannsthal, Stefan George (1868-1933) and Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926); and in prose writing, Heinrich and Thomas Mann (1871-1950 and 1875-1955, respectively). In his travelog Griechischer FrUhling (Greek spring) and his drama Der Bogen des Odysseus (The bow of Odysseus), Hauptmann turned his attention toward the darker aspects of antiquity. His late Atrides tetralogy still reflected, in its ever-present engagement with Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and Goethe, the experiences of World War II. Wedekind portrayed human sexuality as an elemental force destroying societal norms in Erdgeist (Earth spirit) and Die Biichse der Pandora (Pandora’s box); in Heracles he showed a suffering and disappointed hero. Hofmannsthal’s Electra virtually offers an exemplary psychological interpretation of myth reaching back to, and turning away from, Sophocles, Goethe, and Shakespeare. With Odipus und die Sphinx (Oedipus and the Sphinx), Ariadne auf Naxos (Ariadne on Naxos), and Die agyptische Helena (The Egyptian Helena), he likewise turned toward a subtle and sensitive exploration of the dark recesses and undercurrents of the soul. While George employed a fair amount of pathos and force in his attempts to see classical norms valued, Rilke reenacted human liminal experiences in a very moving way in poems such as Alcestis or Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes. He also sought to suspend the tragic nature of life, love, and art in the ‘‘Raum der Ruhmung’’ (Room of glorifying) in the Sonetten an Orpheus (Sonnets to Orpheus). In his novel Die Gottinnen (The goddesses), Heinrich Mann celebrated ‘‘die grofie heidnische Sinn-lichkeit’’ (the great pagan sensuality) by means of the mythological roles of Diana, Minerva, and Venus. His novella Die Ruckkehr vom Hades (The return from Hades) reflected the precarious relationship of the artist and his public. Thomas Mann’s novella Der Tod in Venedig (Death in Venice) narrates a modern journey to Hades. In it, hints of Plato’s thoughts on love and beauty move from an atmosphere of a classicism echoing antiquity to Dionysian intoxication, ending in chaos and barbarism. Reminiscences of antiquity also pervade his novels Der Zauberberg (The magic mountain), Joseph und seine Briider (Joseph and his brothers), and Doktor Faustus.
Expressionism referred back to antiquity more strongly than some theoretical pronouncements would lead one to expect: thus in the poems of Georg Heym (1887-1912) and Ywan Goll (1891-1950), in the antimilitaristic plays Die Troerinnen (The Trojan women) by Franz Werfel (1890-1945) and Antigone by Walter Hasenclever (1890-1940), in Hans Henny Jahnn’s (1894-1959) Medea, which combined both antiracism and social criticism with basic instincts and archaic behaviors, and in a number of pieces by Georg Kaiser (1878-1945). References to antiquity pervade the prose writings of Franz Kafka (1883-1924), partly under the surface, such as the labyrinth - and Oedipus-motifs, partly in new deconstructive interpretations that alter and remove the heroic (in Das Schweigen der Sirenen [The silence of the sirens], Prometheus, Poseidon). This is also true in the works of Albert Ehrenstein (1886-1950) and Gottfried Benn (1886-1956). Benn began as a ‘‘diony-sischer Rauschkunstler’’ (Dionysian intoxication-artist) under the influence of Nietzsche, but later identified himself more with the artist Orpheus, advocated an Apollonian-intellectualizing view of antiquity, and emphasized the tragic content of the ancient myths. Immediately following the establishment of the Nazi dictatorship, he proclaimed his allegiance to a total state founded on violence, terror, and leadership in his essay Dorische Welt (The Doric world), using Sparta as an example.
Antifascist authors who were active primarily during the Weimar Republic and the years of exile became radicalized in their social and political pronouncements, focusing particularly on Roman antiquity - for instance in OOdon von Horvarth’s (1901-38) comedy Pompeji, in Lion Feuchtwanger’s (1884-1957) novels Der judische Krieg (The Jewish war) and Der falsche Nero (The false Nero), or in Hermann Broch’s (1886-1951) novel Der Tod des Vergil (The death of Virgil). Broch used the figure of the Roman poet and his relations with Augustus to deal with issues such as the meaning and value of art and its relationship to politics, from the experiences of fascism and exile. He debated fundamental questions concerning the antagonism of truth and beauty or of glory and insignificance, and he reflected on the responsibility of the creative individual who can be both revered as a bringer of salvation and manipulated by power.
Among the ‘‘left’’-leaning writers of the first half of the twentieth century, Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956) was the one who showed the most engagement with classical motifs. He reinterpreted traditional history and mythology in a distancing and nonheroic manner (Berichtigungen alter Mythen [Corrections of old myths], Die Geschafte des Herrn Julius Cdsar [The affairs of Mr. Julius Caesar], Das Verhor des Lukullus [The trial of Lucullus]). Yet he also showed the exemplary nature of classical events for social behavior today (Die Horatier und die Kuriatier [The Horatii and the Curiatii], Briefe iiber Gelesenes [Letters on what has been read], Coriolanus [after Shakespeare]), and proved his sympathy for personalities of the ancient world in a simple and unaffected way (Der Schuh des Empedokles [The shoe of Empedocles], Der verwundete Sokrates [The wounded Socrates]). With Die Antigone des Sophokles. Nach der Holderlinschen tibersetzung (The Antigone of Sophocles. After the Translation by Holderlin), Brecht
Figure 12.2 Bertolt Brecht at the dress rehearsal of his play The Antigone of Sophocles in Chur (Switzerland, February 15, 1948), with Helene Weigel as Antigone and Hans Gaugler as Creon. Photo by Ruth Berlau, reproduced with permission of Hilda Hoffman. Bertolt-Brecht-Archiv, Berlin
Gave the impetus for the reception of antiquity in the following decades in a number of ways: in the visible role of the dramatic, in the close affinity to the genre of adaptations, in the sociocritical emphasis, the politicization, and ‘‘Durchrationalisierung’’ (thorough rationalization) of the material, in the nuanced relationship between continuation and contrast, and not least also in the appreciation of Holderlin.
The reception of classical motifs in the literature of the late forties and early fifties is marked for the most part by the historical experiences of the war and postwar period: by terror and death, exile and return, conformity and opposition, a fresh start and disillusionment. At first elements of identification and affirmation predominate, as an echo of traditional ‘‘humanist’’ attitudes as well as an attempt to ‘‘appropriate’’ the classical ‘‘inheritance’’ for socialist purposes. Later, however, the critical-questioning approach clearly prevails. The increased literary interest in classical subject matters in general, and the critical interpretation of the traditional myths in particular, owe much to the reception of antiquity in French theater since the end of the twenties (Andre Gide, Jean Giraudoux, Jean Cocteau, Jean Anouilh, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus) and in the works of the American dramatist Eugene O’Neill and the writers of lyric and essays, the Englishman T. S. Eliot and the American Ezra Pound.
The work of the Swiss authors Max Frisch (1911-91) and Friedrich Durrenmatt (1921-90) is rooted in the postwar period. They employed the Odysseus - and Oedipus-motifs in the novels Stiller and Homo faber (Man the maker) and expressed a non-heroic view of history in the plays Romulus der Grofie (Romulus the great) and Der Stall des Augias (The stable of Augias). Heinrich Boll (1917-85) calls the militaristic interpretation of antiquity in German schools to account in his story Wanderer, kommst du nach Spa... (Wanderer, when you come to Spa...); Arno Schmidt (1914-79) has taken a critical attitude to classical myths and events, and transformed them into travesty, in a range of stories in the volumes Leviathan oder Die beste der Welten (Leviathan or the best ofworlds) and Kuhe in Halbtrauer (Cows in half mourning). While the reception of antiquity was generally in decline in West German literature after the fifties, it remained a constant presence in the work of the classical philologist Walter Jens (born 1923) from Tubingen. In the literature of the German Democratic Republic, classical influences became evident, first in the fifties, especially in lyric poetry. The use of traditional motifs in a positive, affirmative manner, which Johannes R. Becher (1891-1958) had been developing since the thirties and which he now continued in a fairly linear fashion, proved in the end to be less effective. In contrast, the early poems of Stephan Hermlin (1915-97) have elegiac and questioning traits, and the late lyrics and essays by Erich Arendt (1903-84) show a characteristic development from positive identification to distancing, a distancing that applies both to the classical heroes and to the socialist present (Odysseus’ Heimkehr [Odysseus’ return] and other poems from the cycle Aegdis [Aegean]). The rejection of history goes hand in hand with an endorsement of nature and art (Gesang der sieben Inseln [Song of the seven islands], Stunde Homer [Hour Homer]). Pensive reflections are also characteristic of Georg Maurer’s (1907-71) and Johannes Bobrowski’s (1917-65) lyric poetry, and Peter Huchel’s (1903-81) poems are characterized particularly by elegiac moments of resignation (Polybius, Der Garten des Theophrast [The garden of Theophrastus], Das Grab des Odysseus [The grave of Odysseus]).
It is notable that engagement with antiquity during the second half of the twentieth century became a key characteristic of writers in the German Democratic Republic. It allowed them to create a poetry addressing fundamental concerns, to escape a narrow definition of realism, and to debate the issues of their own time without prejudice. Since about 1960 this literature has been influenced not only by fascism and war but also by the circumstances of the postwar period. Drama was the dominant genre at the beginning of this phase: the production of Peter Hacks’s (1928-2003) reworking of Aristophanes’ Frieden (Peace) in 1962 in Berlin was one of the most successful plays in German-speaking countries after 1945. With plays such as Amphitryon, Omphale, and Numa or later with the Die Viigel (Birds) (after Aristophanes), Senecas Tod (Death of Seneca), and Pandora (after Goethe), Hacks explored the tensions in the relationship between utopia and reality with the help of classical subject matters. For the most part he adopted a positive stance toward both literary tradition and socialist society. The works of Heiner Muller (1929-95), on the other hand, offer an example of a more critical approach to traditional subjects. In plays like Philoktet, Heracles5, Otdipus Tyrann (Oedipus tyrant) (after Sophocles), Der Horatier (The Horatian), and Zement (Cement) (after a novel by Fjodor Gladkow), Muller employed the ancient myths to portray the problems of the (mostly socialist) present - especially the conflicting interests of individuals and of society - in sharp focus. In lyric poetry, a differentiated engagement with traditional subject matters continued with authors such as Gtinter Kunert (born 1929), Karl Mickel (1935-2000), Heinz Czechowski (born 1935), and Volker Braun (born 1939) (who were also active in other genres). Over the last decades, these authors have been joined by Durs Grunbein (born 1962), whose interest lies mainly in Roman history, with his historical-philosophical perspective and sobering diction. Among writers of prose narrative, Franz Ftihmann (1922-84) and Christa Wolf (born 1929) should be mentioned. Fuhmann echoed the guilt and delusion of German soldiers in World War II in his story Konig Odipus (King Oedipus) and created an intelligent adaptation of Homeric epic (Das Holzerne Pferd [The wooden horse]). In his ‘‘mythological novel’’ Prometheus, and in a number of stories, he questioned the conflict between ‘‘Geist und Macht’’ (spirit/mind/intellect and power). In Kassan-dra, Christa Wolf challenged war and the politics of power, violence, and ideological manipulation - a challenge that means grappling with a patriarchal world and with the dangers of a one-sided rationalism, and that does not flinch in questioning the price to be paid for the progress of society and technology, and that repudiates all ‘‘heroism.’’ However, human interactions and the use of political power are discussed in even more fundamental and subtle ways in Medea. Stimmen (Medea. Voices). This work also reflects experiences since the collapse of the ‘‘socialist camp’’ in Europe and its return to the ‘‘Western World,’’ and enacts a radical turn away from the Euripidean version of Medea as child-murderer.
Since the seventies interest in classical subjects has also been renewed in the German literature of the Federal Republic of Germany, Austria, and Switzerland and in countries inhabited by German exiles. This work similarly tends to take a critical approach, as do Peter Weiss (1916-82) and Botho Straufi (born 1944) as well as the Austrian writers Christoph Ransmayr (born 1954) and Michael Kohlmeier (born 1949). Weiss’s novel
Die jAsthetik des Widerstands (The aesthetic of resistance) sets the antifascist resistance in the context of a process of two thousand years of social conflict. It poses the question of a radical ‘‘appropriation’’ of the artistic ‘‘inheritance’’ in order to resolve one’s own existential questions - the great frieze of the Pergamon altar and the interpretation of Heracles with all his duality play a significant role in this. Straufi lets the mythological appear among the everyday in a number of his pieces and offers an emphatically conservative reading of Homer in Ithaca. In Ransmayr’s novel Die letzte Welt (The last world), Ovid’s Metamorphoses virtually piece themselves together out of the life of the poet, who, victimized by a tyrant, has been exiled to Tomi, and out of the investigations of the narrator. Kohlmeier mixes divine and human action from stories related to the Homeric epics with a modern ambience in his Odysseus novels Telemach and Kalypso and leaves much room for irony and persiflage.
The reception of antiquity in other forms of art is more or less closely related to literature. In theater, there were the epoch-making productions of the Oresteia by Max Reinhardt (1873-1945) and of Oidipus by Leopold Jessner (1878-1945) during the Weimar Republic. In the eighties, Peter Stein’s (born 1937) staging of the Oresteia at the Berlin Schaubtihne, the Schwerin project ‘‘Entdeckungen ‘Antike’ ’’ (Discoveries ‘‘antiquity’’) by Christoph Schroth (born 1937), and the five Theater Festivals of Stendal stand out. The rendition of authentic classical plays (in translation), the staging of adaptations, and the production of modern plays on classical topics regularly form part of the play-lists and sometimes are in fact linked with each other.
Classical (mostly mythical) subjects have become increasingly popular again in music, especially musical theater. Richard Strauss (1864-1948) is among the first. His operas Elektra, Ariadne auf Naxos (Ariadne on Naxos), and Die agyptische Helena (The Egyptian Helena) were created to the libretti of Hugo von Hofmannsthal. Later Walter Braunfels (1882-1954) composed Die VSgel (The birds, after Aristophanes), Egon Wellesz (1885-1974) Alkestis and Bacchantinnen (Bacchantes) (after Euripides), Ernst Krenek (1900-91) Orpheus und Eurydike, Das Leben des Orest (The life of Orestes), and Pallas Athene weint (Pallas Athena cries), and Rudolf Wagner-Regeny (1903-69) Prometheus. Heinz Rottger (1909-77) and Aribert Reimann (born 1936) adapted in Die Frauen von Troja (The women of Troy) and Troades works by Euripides and Franz Werfel, respectively. Paul Dessau (1894-1984) created the opera Das Verhor des Lukullus (The trial of Lucullus) after Brecht. Carl Orff (1895-1982) often set original Greek and Latin texts to music (like the Prometheus of Aeschylus, Sophocles’ Oedipus, the Catulli Carmina, or the medieval Carmina Burana); he chose Holderlin’s translation for his Antigone, after Sophocles. Rolf Liebermann (1910-99) wrote the operas Penelope and Freis-pruch fur Medea (Acquittal of Medea), Hans Werner Henze (born 1926) the ballet Orpheus. From the last decades we have the opera Odipus (after Sophocles and Heiner Muller), the cello concerto Styx und Lethe (Styx and Lethe) by Wolfgang Rihm (born 1952), and Kassandra. Starrend von Zeit und Helle (Cassandra. Rigid with time and brightness) and a Musiktheater in sechs Gedichten von Erich Arendt (Musical theater in six poems by Erich Arendt) by Peter Michael Hamel (born 1947). Then there are the operas Die Heimkehr des Odysseus (The return of Odysseus) and Omphale (after Hacks), a dramatic score to the Oedipus-tragedies of Sophocles, and musical renditions of Catullus by Siegfried Matthus (born 1934), as well as the operas Gastmahl oder IJber die Liebe (Banquet or on love) and Antigone oder Die Stadt (Antigone or the city) by Georg Katzer (born 1935).
The fine arts also utilized classical subjects. From the first half of the twentieth century the sculptor Gerhard Marcks (1889-1981) and the painter Max Beckmann (1884-1950) ought to be mentioned. Marcks engaged with classical myths during his whole life ( Orpheus-Mappe [Orpheus-portfolio], Odipus und Antigone, Gefesselter Prometheus [Prometheus bound]); Beckmann preferred to work on mythical subject matters during his exile in the 1940s (Mars und Venus, Perseus, Prometheus, Odysseus und Kalypso). Gustav Seitz (1906-66), Hans Arp (1888-1966), and Bernhard Heiliger (1915-99), among others, engaged with classical motifs on occasion during the second half of the century. The reception of classical antiquity flourished in the arts of the German Democratic Republic, as it did in its literature. It provides nothing less than the foundation for the work of the sculptor Wieland Forster (born 1930), who reflects painful experiences of the individual and society through the motif of the labyrinth and through figures like Daphne, Nike, and Marsyas, and for the painter Wolfgang Mattheuer (1927-2004), who repeatedly turned to the myths of Sisyphus and Icarus. Bernhard Heisig (born 1925), who also paid special attention to the figure of Icarus, and Werner Tubke (1929-2004) created further works illustrating this trend. Besides Icarus, Prometheus, the judgment of Paris, and Cassandra are favorite themes (on whose reception through the ages there have already been a number of exhibitions).
During the very times of crisis, of historical change and seeming distance from antiquity, subjects from the Greek and Roman past can serve as the focal point for topical debates by stimulating a turning away from conventional interpretations and an emphasis on ruptures and discontinuities. This is proof that the heritage of antiquity retains a life and influence beyond all monumentality and classicality.
FURTHER READING
On Goethe and the Greeks, see Trevelyan (1941); from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries, see Butler (1935); on the classical tradition in twentieth-century Germany, see Ziolkowski (1993). Much good material remains accessible only in German: see especially the collections edited by Baumbach (2000), Faber and Kytzler (1992), and Seidensticker and Vohler (2001), along with the books by Cancik (1998) and Riedel (1996, 2000, 2002). Much useful information is available in Cancik, Schneider, and Landfester (1996-2003), Der neue Pauly: EnzyklopOdie der Antike, whose last five volumes are devoted to the classical tradition, with a pronounced German slant. These volumes are being translated into English and published by E. J. Brill, with the first volume having been published in 2006.
This chapter has been translated by Kathrin Luddecke.
A Companion to the Classical Tradition Edited by Craig W. Kallendorf Copyright © 2007 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd
World History
