Europe’s long nineteenth century came to a bloody and ignoble end in the trenches of the so-called Great War. The apocalyptic effects of this four-year conflagration reverberated throughout the continent (and the globe), but were perhaps felt most acutely in Germany and Austria, where millions of soldiers died in loyal service to empires that by war’s end had ceased to exist. Beyond extinguishing polities, the war upended the entire philosophical, moral, and aesthetic traditions that had underpinned German and Austrian society. From Thomas Mann to Walter Benjamin to Ludwig Wittgenstein, German-language thinkers, writers, and artists pioneered new forms, to explore new themes, in the attempt to make sense of the horrifying problems of the war and its aftermath—creating, in the process, a corpus that proved foundational for intellectual and artistic modernity. How can we understand the German cultural response to the First World War, in all its political, aesthetic, and methodological diversity? Why did certain themes in particular—from the collapse of metaphysical values, to the uncertainty of historical progress, to the (in)ability of language to communicate experience—come to predominate in German-language art, philosophy, and literature? And to what extent do these same problems, and the responses they elicited, figure in our literary and artistic consciousness today?
This course explores the intellectual, psychological, and cultural reactions of German and Austrian writers to the First World War and its aftermath. Students will examine literary and intellectual production across a variety of discourses and genres, from wartime propaganda pieces to firsthand accounts of life in the trenches, political essays, psychoanalytic interpretations, literary theory, poetry, drama, and short stories and novels. Readings and excerpts will come from a wide variety of authors including Friedrich Nietzsche, Thomas Mann, Sigmund Freud, Walter Benjamin, Karl Kraus, Robert Musil, Hermann Broch, and more. Our aim will be not to discover a single, sense-making narrative but rather to piece together a literary and intellectual mosaic from the fragments of a world and culture contending with its own ongoing self-destruction.
