Chapter 5 - Prometheus Found

Summary

“Prometheus Found” moves back to the German sphere in order to contend with the discourse of the neuer Mensch (new human) developed in German Expressionism, a movement that explicitly rejected Impressionism and fin-de-siècle refinement. For Expressionists like Else Lasker-Schüler, dispensing with the bourgeois pieties they attributed to nineteenth-century liberalism required imagining new anthropological entities, new humans, much in the mold of the Nietzschean Übermensch. In the case of Lasker-Schüler, though, the “new human” became a means for modeling a Volk rather than a Mensch, and in particular, the Jewish Volk at a moment when Zionism was at apogee.