Prologue: The Modern, the Province, and the Jena Paradigm

Summary

Truth is not only a daughter of time, but also of geographical space.

—Jacques Le Goff

IN “THE METROPOLIS AND MENTAL LIFE” (1903), Georg Simmel famously identifies the big city as modernism's characteristic setting. However, his explicit juxtaposition of urban modernism with small-town traditionalism also masks the complexity and nuanced layerings of the selfsame cultural history he is addressing. Many of European modernism's most influential experiments occurred far from any metropolitan center. They took place in towns such as Darmstadt and Weimar, Marseille and Lyon, Czernowitz and Trieste. This study explores turn-of-the-century modernism in one single such German setting: the small university city of Jena.

In this prologue I turn first to the concepts of modern, modernism, and modernity, which are difficult to define. Against that backdrop, I then proceed to take up the question of Germany's provincial centers of cultural creativity and progress. Imperial Germany lagged behind other European states in centralizing and concentrating the institutions of intellectual life that industrialization and the rise of mass markets had brought about elsewhere.

More strikingly than in France, England, or Russia—or even than in Austria and Spain—the German turn of the century saw centers of cultural life emerge in the provinces alongside those of its major cities.

The case of Jena will demonstrate how a unique concept of modernism arose in conscious competition with Berlin. My aim will be to develop an expanded understanding of the concept of modernism, one that embraces not only the metropolis but also the margins as significant sites of modernist experimentation and achievement.

The Modern

Modernism and modernity are malleable concepts. Talk of “modernism as social myth”2 or of “multiple modernities” can serve as an index to the failure of the “cultural and political program of modernity”3 that was developed in the West, above all by Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim, and Max Weber. For heuristic reasons this study will proceed from an understanding of the modern—apart from the conflicting idiosyncrasies that arise among different artists, critics, programs, secessions, and the like—and a view of modernism as an “abbreviation for an epoch” that was characterized by exceptional complexity.