3 - “Away from Berlin” and Literature in Jena: Helene Voigt-Diederichs

Summary

A scribbling female is not the ideal image

for a woman who writes, as far as I am concerned!

But still and all, still and all …

—Helene Voigt (1895)

Los von Berlin” and “Entdeckung der Provinz”: these essay titles by Friedrich Lienhard, Peter Rosegger, and Hermann Bahr became the popular slogans, Away from Berlin and Discovery of the Provinces. They describe a movement that occurred in the literary criticism of Germany and Austria at the turn of the century promoting regional literature and earthy peasant values. Appearing in 1890 and exerting considerable influence among educated Germans, the first publication in this vein was Julius Langbehn's Rembrandt als Erzieher (Rembrandt as Educator). The inner circle of this movement's theoreticians—including Ernst Wachler, Adolf Bartels, Friedrich Lienhard, Heinrich Sohnrey, and Carl Muth—polemicized against urban culture in general on behalf of a völkisch, regionally subdivided literary culture. As Ernst Wachler put it in a polemic of 1897: “We are not asking for a decorative art of artistic moods; we are asking for a powerful folk-art for the nation; undaunted, filled with fervor and greatness, with dignified themes, borne by the unity of our regions, on the soil of our landscapes, shot through with the daring of an authentically German character.”

Vilified by its detractors as “reactionary in the worst sense of the word,” and celebrated by its advocates as a “movement of national awakening,” the so-called Heimatkunst aimed at improving national art by pushing out foreign and otherwise supposedly alienating influences. To its protagonists, naturalism was too French and Judaism, apart from being denigrated as urban and cosmopolitan, was identified with décadence, socialism, and intellectualism. “If the artist hopes to recover his frayed link to the people,” declared Wachler, “then he must not, like some soulless lathe operator, isolate himself in the urban tumult, indifferently turning out jobs locked up in his workroom; rather he must, whether wandering or settled, immerse himself thoughtfully and with feeling among the people [Volksgemeinschaft] and create his art from within and as a member of the community.” While Diederichs's efforts in a similar vein can be seen as loosely belonging to this trend toward reform and regeneration, the Heimatkunst theoreticians were incomparably more exclusionary, conservative, and nationalistic.