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German Expressionism and 
the Messianism of a Generation
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150 Internationale Forschungen zur
Allgemeinen und
Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft
Begründet von Alberto Martino und in Verbindung mit
Francis Claudon (Université Paris-Est Créteil Val de Marne) – Rüdiger Görner 
(Queen Mary, University of London) – Achim Hölter (Universität Wien) – 
Klaus Ley (Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz) – John A. McCarthy 
(Vanderbilt University) – Alfred Noe (Universität Wien) – Manfred Pfister 
(Freie Universität Berlin) – Sven H. Rossel (Universität Wien)
herausgegeben von
Norbert Bachleitner
(Universität Wien)
Redaktion: Paul Ferstl und Rudolf Pölzer
Anschrift der Redaktion:
Institut für Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft, Sensengasse 3A , A-1090 Wien
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 Lisa Marie Anderson 
Amsterdam - New York, NY 2011
German Expressionism and 
the Messianism of a Generation
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Cover Image: Schmidt-Rottluff, Karl (1884-1976)© ARS, NY. Christ, 1918. 
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Die Reihe “Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden 
Literaturwissenschaft” wird ab dem Jahr 2005 gemeinsam von Editions Rodopi, 
Amsterdam – New York und dem Weidler Buchverlag, Berlin herausgegeben. 
Die Veröffentlichungen in deutscher Sprache erscheinen im Weidler Buchverlag, 
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From 2005 onward, the series “Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen 
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ISBN: 978-90-420-3352-8
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 Table of Contents 
 
Notes on the Text 7 
Acknowledgements 8 
Introduction - Expressionism as a “Literature of Redemption” 9 
Chapter 1 - Jewish Messianism and the Philosophy of the 
 Expressionist Era 31 
Chapter 2 - The Hebrew Scriptures and Jewish Messianism in 
 Expressionist Literature 53 
 Eden/Paradise 54 
 The Flood 58 
 Sacrifice 60 
 The Promised Land 67 
 Prophecy 68 
 Die Gemeinschaft: Communal Suffering and Striving 70 
 Conclusions 78 
Chapter 3 - The ‘Judeo-Christian’ Dialectic in the Expressionist Era 81 
Chapter 4 - Birth and Rebirth in Christianity and Expressionism 93 
 Introduction 93 
 Jesus, Zarathustra, and the New Man 94 
 Messianic Nativities in Expressionist Drama 100 
 The Holy Family and the Birth of the Redeemer-child 101 
 The Birth of the New Man and the Rebirth of Humanity 117 
Chapter 5 - The Mission and Passion of Expressionist Messianism 123 
 Introduction 123 
 The Messianic Mission of Expressionism and Its Drama 124 
 The Passion of the Messiah in Expressionist Drama 132 
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6 German Expressionist Drama and the Messianism of a Generation 
 The Eucharist & The Last Supper 132 
 Judas & Jesus: The Betrayal 135 
 The Crucifixion 138 
 The Resurrection 141 
 Conclusions 149 
Chapter 6 - The Culmination of Expressionist Messianism: Apocalypse 151 
 Introduction 151 
 The Apocalypticism of the Expressionist Generation 153 
 Apocalypse in Expressionist Drama 160 
 Apocalyptic Rhetoric 160 
 Trumpets 162 
 Birth Pangs 162 
 The Bride of the Messiah 164 
 Babylon, the Whore 167 
 The Apocalypse of War and Revolution 170 
Conclusion - Expressionism as Literature of the Unredeemed 179 
Bibliography 189 
Index 203 
 
 
 
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Notes on the Text 
 
 
Unless otherwise indicated in a footnote, translations from the German are 
my own. I have used reputable translations of primary and some secondary 
works where they are available, with the following exception. Since Ernst 
Barlach, Georg Kaiser, Ernst Toller, and Franz Werfel are the four authors 
most sustainedly in focus here, and since only some of their work is available 
in English, in this book I have translated from their works myself. 
 All biblical quotations come from the New Revised Standard Version. 
Only in a very few cases have slight but necessary alterations been made, in 
order to better approximate the German translation with which the authors in 
question were working. 
 Ellipses appearing in brackets are my own; all others are included in the 
original text. 
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Acknowledgements 
 
 
I am grateful to the administrations of the University of Pennsylvania, Duke 
University, and Hunter College (City University of New York) for affording 
me the time and flexibility to complete this project, and to the faculty of all 
three institutions for their vision, guidance, and feedback. Special thanks are 
due in this regard to Frank Trommler, Simon Richter, and Annette Kym. For 
their painstaking and extremely helpful comments on earlier drafts, I am 
greatly indebted to Peter Linneman, Catriona MacLeod, and John McCarthy. 
 The research for this book was supported by a fellowship from the School 
of Arts & Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania, and by awards from the 
Research Foundation of CUNY. Much of the research was conducted at the 
Deutsches Literaturarchiv in Marbach, Germany; I am grateful for access to 
the archive and to its staff for their assistance. 
 Nothing that requires inspiration and encouragement happens without 
Eddis Miller, for whom I am ever thankful. 
 This book is dedicated to my family. I am truly grateful to them for the 
support that has made all my endeavors possible, and for planting the seeds 
that became this work. 
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Introduction - Expressionism as a “Literature of Redemption” 
 
 
It is already perhaps a matter of record that we are not in fact living in the 
post-religious age some believed we had successfully established. Main-
stream media tell us this, scholars and critics agree,1 and even the most cur-
sory survey of global political events would seem to confirm it. Art and lit-
erature, too - whether “modern,” “postmodern,” or “contemporary” - present 
us resiliently with an abundance of religious themes, with a structure depend-
ent so heavily on, of all things, redemption. Surely we are intrigued but also 
somewhat surprised by this. How else do we explain the recent spate of inter-est, particularly among scholars of the humanities, in the messianic? Even if 
we allow the uncontroversial thesis that messianism is a pivotal force in a 
number of religious traditions, and thus an abiding theme in the cultures that 
those traditions shape, perhaps even in human experience - that alone does 
not account for the way that messianic tensions are impelling so much new 
work on religion and politics,2 nor for the recent cluster of conferences and 
publications devoted explicitly to messianism. In the last five years, at least 
three international conferences have produced collections on the place of the 
messianic within intellectual history.3 In all cases, the work of twentieth-
century German-language thinkers has provided a (if not the) guiding force. 
Partly by way of theorists such as Jacques Derrida and Giorgio Agamben, the 
writings of Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, Martin Buber, 
Martin Heidegger, Georg Lukács, Franz Rosenzweig, and Gershom Scholem 
have assumed a place at the very heart of contemporary discourse on the 
messianic. 
 The remarkably concentrated concern with messianism in the German-
language philosophy of the early twentieth century coincides with the rise 
and fall of a highly messianic strain in the art and literature of the same pe-
riod and region. This strain was thematized in earnest beginning in 1959, a 
 
1 See for example John Gray, Black Mass. Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia 
(New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2007), pp. 2-3, and Mark Lilla, The Stillborn God. 
Religion, Politics, and the Modern West (New York: Knopf, 2007), pp. 3-4. 
2 For example, the four-centuries-long debate about religion and politics that Lilla traces was 
ignited, he writes, by a distaste for politically motivated “messianic passions,” and ended 
with the development of “a modern political theology” that “would revive the messianic im-
pulse in Western life.” Lilla, pp. 9-10. 
3 Messianism, Apocalypse, Redemption: 20th-Century German Thought, ed. by Wayne Cris-
taudo and Wendy Baker (Hindmarsh: Australian Theological Forum, 2006); On the Out-
look: Figures of the Messianic, ed. by Thomas Crombez and Katrien Vloeberghs (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2007); Messianism and Politics. Kabbalah, Benjamin, 
Agamben, ed. by Vivian Liska and others (Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann, 2008). 
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10 German Expressionist Drama and the Messianism of a Generation 
year in which two important anthologies of German Expressionism (roughly 
1910-1925) appeared: an updated edition of Menschheitsdämmerung (Dawn 
of Humanity, 1919), a collection of poetry edited by Kurt Pinthus; and Schrei 
und Bekenntnis (Scream and Confession), a collection of dramas edited by 
Karl Otten. In respective introductory texts written with the benefit of four 
decades’ hindsight, the editors stressed the messianic hopes that had come to 
dominate the Expressionist period.4 That same year, Walter H. Sokel coined 
the term “Messianic Expressionism” to describe the shift that had occurred in 
“the visionary quality of Expressionism to the social and political sphere,” 
such that the “visualization of subconscious or existential states became the 
vision of social renewal.” Messianic Expressionism, Sokel determined, had 
ventured primarily toward “inner regeneration through outer revolt.”5 
 The structure of the phrase “Messianic Expressionism” demonstrates 
Sokel’s delimitation of the term to one “phase which characterized the 
movement especially near the end of the First World War.”6 Other literary 
historians, too, have used the same term to designate a limited segment of 
Expressionism, to the specific exclusion of writers like Gottfried Benn, Carl 
Sternheim, or Georg Trakl.7 Even as Silvio Vietta and Hans-Georg Kemper 
attempt to rescue Expressionism from the reductionist view of Lukács, for 
example, they sometimes appear to think equally reductively about the mes-
sianic in Expressionism, wanting to hold “verkümmerte Emotionalität und 
Religiosität” (stunted emotionality and religiosity) in absolute contradistinc-
tion to the critical reflection that characterizes other Expressionist texts con-
cerned with the religious.8 But as the literature of the Expressionist period 
demonstrates, there are numerous ways of conceiving the messianic - one 
need think only of a rather non-Expressionist member of that generation, 
Franz Kafka.9 While any reading of the messianic in Expressionism (includ-
ing my own) clearly owes a great deal to Sokel and to Vietta and Kemper,10 I 
 
4 Menschheitsdämmerung. Ein Dokument des Expressionismus, ed. by Kurt Pinthus (Ham-
burg: Rowohlt, 1959), p. 14. Karl Otten, Schrei und Bekenntnis. Expressionistisches Theater 
(Darmstadt: Luchterhand, 1959), p. 21. 
5 Walter H. Sokel, The Writer in Extremis. Expressionism in Twentieth-Century German 
Literature (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1959), pp. 162-63. 
6 Sokel, Writer, p. 162. 
7 See Silvio Vietta and Hans-Georg Kemper, Expressionismus, 6th edn (Munich: Wilhelm 
Fink, 1997), p. 192. 
8 Vietta and Kemper, pp. 187, 193. 
9 One particularly clear analysis of Kafka’s messianism is found in Michael Löwy, Redemp-
tion and Utopia. Jewish Libertarian Thought in Central Europe. A Study in Elective Affinity, 
trans. by Hope Heaney (London: Athlone Press, 1992), pp. 71-94. 
10 Later foundational references to the messianic in Expressionism are found in: Adolf Klar-
mann, ‘Expressionism in German Literature. A Retrospect of a Half Century’, MLQ, 26 
(1965), 62-92 (p. 70); Frank Trommler, ‘Intellektuelle - Sozialisten - Expressionisten. Zum 
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 Introduction 11 
maintain: (1) that what is messianic about Expressionism is not always char-
acterized by a turn outward to the socio-political, but sometimes involves 
processes strictly internal to the artist or the human being; (2) that the struc-
ture and content of the messianic is not limited to one subset of Expressionist 
literature but in fact pervades the cultural products of the time; and thus (3) 
that Expressionism’s reconfiguring of Jewish and Christian messianism is not 
an isolated segment of an isolated movement, but represents instead a par-
ticular constellation within Modernist reworkings of the sacred. In keeping 
with these claims, and in an attempt to open terminology as well as concep-
tions of both messianism and Expressionism, I adopt the term “Expressionist 
Messianism” in this study (as opposed to “Messianic Expressionism”), since 
it is not the case that one branch of Expressionism was messianic, but rather 
that Expressionism as a whole demonstrates one configuration of messianism 
in the modern era.11 
 A fuller establishment of what Expressionist Messianism means must be 
preceded by an at least preliminary definition of its component parts. Here 
already real difficulties arise. Dissension persists as to what German Expres-
sionism was, when and why it began and ended, and who its adherents were. 
Some have seemed to dispute that there ever was a coherent movement based 
on Expressionism.12 Benn, one of the best-known Expressionist writers, 
would ask decades later: “Expressiv – was ist nun das und was ist der Ex-
pressionismus? Gab es ihn überhaupt?” (Expressive – what is that anyway, 
 
Thema Literatur und Politik um 1900’, in Views and Reviews of Modern German Literature. 
Festschrift for Adolf D. Klarmann, ed. by Karl S. Weimar (Munich: Delp, 1974), pp. 84-91 
(p. 90); Ulrich Weisstein, ‘German Literary Expressionism: An Anatomy’, The German 
Quarterly, 54 (1981),262-83 (p. 267). 
11 To my knowledge, no book-length study has been devoted specifically to the messianic in 
Expressionism. For articles on messianism in specific Expressionist authors, see: W.G. Se-
bald, ‘Zum Thema Messianismus im Werk Döblins’, Neophilologus, 59 (1975), 421-34; Mi-
chael Ossar, ‘Die jüdische messianische Tradition und Ernst Tollers Wandlung’, in Im Zei-
chen Hiobs: Jüdische Schriftsteller und deutsche Literatur im 20. Jahrhundert, ed. by Gun-
ter E. Grimm and Hans-Peter Bayerdörfer (Königstein: Athenäum, 1985), pp. 293-308. 
While other article-length studies of German culture have been concerned with messianism, 
most pick up more or less where Expressionism leaves off and/or are far more concerned 
with the socio-political than with the literary. See Clemens Sedmak, ‘Das Messianische’, in 
Die Bibel in der deutschsprachigen Literatur des 20. Jahrhunderts, ed. by Heinrich Schmi-
dinger, 2 vols (Mainz: Matthias Grünewald, 1999), I, pp. 403-32; Klaus Schreiner, ‘Messia-
nism in the Political Culture of the Weimar Republic’, in Toward the Millennium. Messianic 
Expectations from the Bible to Waco, ed. by Peter Schäfer and Mark Cohen (Leiden: Brill, 
1998), pp. 311-62. 
12 See Georg Lukács, ‘Es geht um den Realismus’, in Essays über Realismus (Neuwied: Luch-
terhand, 1971), pp. 313-43 (p. 313). 
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12 German Expressionist Drama and the Messianism of a Generation 
and what is Expressionism? Did it even exist?)13 Adding to the difficulty is 
the fact that many of the authors who proudly embraced the Expressionist 
label did so only briefly, later evolving out of Expressionism’s youthful 
Sturm und Drang into their own brands of classicism, such as New Objectiv-
ity. And other writers commonly ascribed to Expressionism voiced disdain 
for or at least distanced themselves from it at the time. 
 These issues notwithstanding, criticism and scholarship continue to speak, 
where not of a movement, at least of an Expressionist generation that shaped 
the literature and arts of the 1910s and early 1920s in German-speaking 
Europe,14 and continue also to seek new ways of understanding the unity that 
the term Expressionism implies.15 The present study is a part of that enter-
prise, an attempt to refine our conception of Expressionism itself. In carrying 
out this attempt, I adhere to the extent possible to Douglas Kellner’s dual 
assertions that while Expressionism cannot be simply or essentially defined, 
this fact does not warrant “agnosticism” about Expressionism “as an artistic 
movement […] with specific artistic-ideological tendencies and politico-
cultural effects.”16 It is by directing sustained focus to one such tendency - to 
the development of a messianic ethos, as well as to the broader intellectual 
context of that development - that this study contributes to ongoing discus-
sions about the nature of Expressionism. 
 Of course, the pursuit of an adequate definition of Expressionism must pass 
through not only ex post facto observations like Benn’s, but also reflections 
on the movement from the period itself. Walter Rheiner, a leading member of 
the late-Expressionist Gruppe 1917, recognized the problem of defining Ex-
pressionism in 1919, writing that the term had come to exceed its initial strict 
opposition to Impressionism, addressing now “nicht mehr so sehr ein tech-
nisches oder Formproblem, sondern vielmehr eine Weltanschauung [...], eine 
erkenntnistheoretische, metaphysische, ethische Geisteshaltung” (no longer a 
 
13 Gottfried Benn, ‘Einleitung’, in Lyrik des expressionistischen Jahrzehnts. Von den Wegbe-
reitern bis zum Dada, ed. by Max Niedermayer and Marguerite Schlüter, 7th edn (Munich: 
Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1979), pp. 5-16 (p. 6). 
14 See for example Benn, p. 15. Benn’s analysis of his “Generation” within the context of an 
Expressionist decade, lasting from 1910 to 1920 (p. 6), is somewhat misleading, since “the 
beginnings of Expressionism can be traced back to before 1910, while its gradual decline 
reached well into the twenties.” Wolfgang Paulsen, ‘Form and Content in German Expres-
sionist Literature’, The Massachusetts Review, 21 (1980), 137-56 (p. 137). For this reason, 
the texts examined in this study are not limited to the period 1910-1920. 
15 For a detailed overview of early attempts toward such an understanding, see Weisstein, 
which also includes an essential bibliography. 
16 Douglas Kellner, ‘Expressionism and Rebellion’, in Passion and Rebellion. The Expression-
ist Heritage, ed. by Stephen Eric Bronner and Douglas Kellner (New York: Universe, 1983), 
pp. 3-39 (p. 6). 
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 Introduction 13 
technical or formal problem so much as a worldview […], an epistemologi-
cal, metaphysical, ethical mentality).17 The French-German Expressionist 
Iwan Goll echoed this sentiment two years later, calling Expressionism the 
designation of an attitude (Gesinnung) rather than an artistic configuration.18 
If the turn from Impressionism to Expressionism was, in the end, more about 
worldview than form, then this turn was seen as one primarily toward the 
metaphysical, as demonstrated by the theater critic Max Herrmann-Neiße in 
1919: 
 
Aber den Menschen begann wieder ein höher Göttliches zu bedrängen [...]. Ein Jenseits 
trennte sich immer sichtbarer wieder vom Diesseits [...]. Nichts war mehr vorher zu 
bestimmen oder eindeutig zu erkennen, jeder irdische Wert wechselte unter dem 
Scheinwerfer des überirdisch Idealen, statt erprobter Funktion waren die Ereignisse des 
Lebens nun phantastische Geschicke geworden, die jedesmal wieder völlig zu Ende er-
duldet sein wollten und deren Endergebnis, nicht vorherzusagen, irgendwo im Unerfüll-
baren liegt. Dieser Lebensstimmung geistiger Unruhe entspricht ein Unbefriedigtblei-
ben in der Kunst.19 
(But something higher, something divine began to beset the human again […]. An oth-
erworld was once again distinguished, more and more perceptibly, from the here and 
now […]. Nothing could be predetermined or conclusively recognized any more; every 
natural sign was altered in the spotlight of the supernatural, the ideal; the events of life 
had now become not proven functions but visionary fates, which were all to be suffered 
patiently to the end, and whose unforeseeable result lies somewhere in the Unrealizable. 
This mood of spiritual turbulence corresponds to an enduring discontentment in the 
arts.) 
 
Herrmann-Neiße’s claims illustrate that the turn to Expressionism was not 
just vaguely metaphysical, but more specifically messianic, with a generation 
of artists defining itself by its forbearance through severe unrest, in pursuit of 
an end both ecstatically envisioned and ultimately unknowable. 
 This admittedly simplistic characterization of the messianic belies the 
difficulty of determining what messianism might mean - a task to which de-
fining Expressionism certainly pales in comparison. One might begin with 
Scholem, perhaps the primary western theoretician of messianism, who 
writes of a “Vorstellung vom Inhalt der Erlösung als eines am Ende der 
Geschichte oder gar jenseits von ihr stehenden öffentlichen, die Gesamtheit 
und nicht den einzelnen betreffenden Vorgangs” (notion of the content of 
 
17 Walter Rheiner, ‘Expressionismus und Schauspiel’, Die neue Schaubühne, 1 (1919), 14-17 
(p. 15). 
18 Iwan Goll, ‘Der Expressionismus stirbt’, Zenit, 1 (1921), 8-9 (p. 8). See also Weisstein’s 
argument for “the existence of diverse Expressionisms loosely linked by a common Weltge-
fühl” (p. 267). 
19 Max Herrmann-Neiße, ‘Entzweiung und Magie’, Die neue Schaubühne, 1 (1919), 33-36 (p. 
34). 
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14 German Expressionist Drama and the Messianism of a Generation 
redemption as a public occurrence, which takes place at the end of history or 
even beyond it, affecting the collectivity and not the individual).20 Though 
not expressly phrased as such, these principles provide the groundwork for a 
definition, since the messianic tradition in Judaism - with its focus on public, 
collective redemption in or beyond history - lays the foundation also for the 
other figurations of messianism to be discussed here: Christian messianism, 
and the Expressionists’ own brand of messianic expectation. Of course, these 
other figurations will come to differ substantially from Jewish messianism. 
Scholem’s emphasis on the public nature of redemption in the Jewish tradi-
tion, for example, stems from what he sees as Christianity’s internalization of 
redemption as a private, invisible event.21 
 Since Scholem’s object of study, religious messianism, does not exhaust 
the possibilities of messianic thinking, particularly in the twentieth century, 
his must be accompanied here by other, more versatile models of messianism. 
The model put forth by Gert Mattenklott is premised upon the nonexistence 
of a uniform messianism, and posits instead a “charakteristisch[e] Konstella-
tion […], in der ästhetische und religiöse Einbildungskraft zueinander und 
diese beiden wiederum zur Politik stehen” (characteristic constellation […], 
in which aesthetic and religious imagination stand in relation to each other, 
and then also to politics).22 Derrida, true to form, pries the question open 
even further, identifying a “messianic dimension” that “belongs properly to 
no Abrahamic religion.” In fact, this “general structure of experience” - as an 
“opening to the future or to the coming of the other as the advent of justice,” 
to “[p]ossibilities that both open and can always interrupt history” - is so het-
erogeneous to messianism as we know it that Derrida assigns it a separate 
name: “messianicity.”23 
 The impossibility, by now apparent, of defining absolutely a category as 
rich and vast as messianism notwithstanding, we can cobble together, from 
the multiple perspectives of these authorities and their biblical sources, the 
following. Messianism encompasses diverse visions or imaginings of a col-
 
20 Gershom Scholem, ‘Die Krise der Tradition im jüdischen Messianismus’, in Judaica 3 
(Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1970), pp. 152-97 (p. 154). All translations from this essay are 
from ‘The Crisis of Tradition in Jewish Messianism’, in The Messianic Idea in Judaism and 
Other Essays on Jewish Spirituality (New York: Schocken Books, 1971), pp. 49-77. 
21 See Gershom Scholem, ‘Zum Verständnis der messianischen Idee im Judentum’, in Judaica 
1 (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1968), pp. 7-74 (p. 7). 
22 Gert Mattenklott, ‘Mythologie Messianismus Macht’, in Messianismus zwischen Mythos und 
Macht. Jüdisches Denken in der europäischen Geistesgeschichte, ed. by Eveline Goodman-
Thau and Wolfdietrich Schmied-Kowarzik (Berlin: Akademie, 1994), pp. 179-96 (p. 179). 
23 Jacques Derrida, ‘Faith and Knowledge: the Two Sources of “Religion” at the Limits of 
Reason Alone’, trans. by Samuel Weber, in Religion, ed. by Jacques Derrida and Gianni 
Vattimo (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), pp. 1-78 (pp. 17-18). 
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 Introduction 15 
lective redemption that will take place either in or beyond history, but will in 
either case represent a grave interruption of history as we know and experi-
ence it. This imagined redemption often takes the form of justice, which is to 
say that the righteous will be saved and the unrighteous punished. This re-
demption may be expected to come from the aesthetic, religious, or political 
realm, or more often, from some combination of the three. This redemption is 
expected to fall somewhere along a scale from public to private. Finally, as 
the etymology of the word indicates, the redemption envisioned in messian-
ism is provided by an anointed (the literal meaning of the Hebrew ha-
mashi’ah) Messiah-figure. Though aimed at the collective, the messianic thus 
depends on a very specific elevation: either of a person, to the status of king, 
priest, prophet, or savior (the Hebrew title originally designated the first three 
roles, with that of a spiritual savior added later, primarily through Christian 
use of the Greek Χριστός); or of an idea, such as socialism or communism, 
that is expected within a community to bring liberation and salvation.24 
 The elements of this composite working definition yield a faithful like-
ness of the Expressionist ethos. Diverse though the Expressionists’ projec-
tions of the future were, they generally shared both a visionary quality and an 
orientation toward some momentous rupture in the continuum of experience - 
whether the private experience of a paradigmatic individual, or the public, 
historical experience of a vast community (perhaps even the entire human 
community). Like other communities living in an intense desire for and ex-
pectation of redemption, the Expressionists were either unwilling or unable to 
disentangle their aesthetic, religious, and political concerns. For many, the 
possibility of redemption through aesthetic innovations went hand in hand 
with revolutionary actions in the political arena.25 Moreover, the search for 
saviors spanned most all realms of private and public life in the 1920s, from 
science to entertainment, even to “Körperkultur.”26 Messianism, then, became 
 
24 Underscoring that the entity onto which messianic expectation is projected is not always a 
person, Derrida writes of “straining forward toward the event of him who/that which is com-
ing.” Jacques Derrida, ‘Marx & Sons’, trans. by G.M. Goshgarian, in Ghostly Demarcations. 
A Symposium on Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx, ed. by Michael Sprinker (London: 
Verso, 2008), pp. 213-69 (p. 248). Italics mine. 
25 See Christine Holste, Der Forte-Kreis (1910-1915). Rekonstruktion eines utopischen Ver-
suchs (Stuttgart: M&P Verlag für Wissenschaft und Forschung, 1992), pp. 8-9. 
26 Martin Roth and Klaus Vogel, ‘Vorwort’, in Der neue Mensch. Obsessionen des 20. Jahr-
hunderts, ed. by Nicola Lepp, Martin Roth, and Klaus Vogel (Ostfildern-Ruit: Cantz, 1999), 
pp. 6-8 (p. 7). That messianic desire was a powerful force in the German academy, as well, 
is evidenced in Max Weber’s celebrated lecture “Wissenschaft als Beruf” (“Science as a 
Vocation,” 1917), which warns that prophets and demagogues have no place in the univer-
sity, even if the youth of the day are especially inclined to identify the professor as “einen 
Führer und nicht: einen Lehrer” (a leader rather than a teacher). Weber admonishes that 
“wenn ein Prophet oder ein Heiland […] nicht da ist oder wenn seiner Verkündigung nicht 
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16 German Expressionist Drama and the Messianism of a Generation 
for the Expressionist generation not a discrete phenomenon so much as an 
all-encompassing economy of desire, an existential condition in which the 
only present certainty was the expectation of a radically different future. 
 The question remains as to why the Expressionists would be drawn spe-
cifically to such a mode of being and thinking. The answer begins with their 
conviction that society had reached such a desperate state as to require a full-
scale redemption. Anyone who has studied the early twentieth century will be 
aware of the anxiety, contempt, and despair expressed by most intellectuals 
and artists at the corrupted state of bourgeois society in Wilhelminian Ger-
many, at the falloutfrom urbanization, industrialization, and mechanization,27 
at the failure of numerous revolutionary impulses, and at the devastation and 
dehumanization of the First World War. This situation of suffering and injus-
tice, only seemingly hopeless, actually led quite readily into an ardent desire 
for redemption. Thus, though their literary works are often marked by diag-
nostic social criticism and historical pessimism, Expressionist authors also 
sought to spread their own expectant visions of redemption. 
 While these visions drew heavily from the messianic traditions of Juda-
ism and Christianity, the Expressionists attempted to secularize the messianic 
by substituting their own modern ideologies of redemption for those of or-
ganized religion. Rejecting much of the dogma of Judaism and Christianity, 
Expressionists like Kurt Hiller called instead “für ein diesseitiges Himmel-
reich, für die Schöpfung eines seligen Seins im Realen; im Handgreiflichen, 
Räumlichen, Endlichen; für das Reich Gottes auf Erden” (for a secularistic 
kingdom of heaven; for the creation of a blessed existence in the real, in the 
tangible, spatial, finite; for the kingdom of God on earth).28 Earlier chiliastic 
movements had been deficient in their patient quietism; the call now went out 
 
mehr geglaubt wird, dann werden Sie ihn ganz gewiß nicht dadurch auf die Erde zwingen, 
daß Tausende von Professoren als staatlich besoldete oder privilegierte kleine Propheten in 
ihren Hörsälen ihm seine Rolle abzunehmen versuchen” (if a prophet or a savior […] is not 
present, or if his message is no longer believed in, then you will certainly not compel him to 
appear on this earth by having thousands of professors, as privileged hirelings of the state, 
attempt as petty prophets in their lecture-rooms to take over his role). Max Weber, Gesamt-
ausgabe, ed. by Horst Baier and others. (Tübingen: Mohr-Siebeck, 1984- ), I.17: Wissen-
schaft als Beruf, 1917/1919; Politik als Beruf, 1919, ed. by Wolfgang J. Mommsen and o-
thers (1992), pp. 97, 101, 105. Translation from Essays in Sociology, ed. and trans. by H.H. 
Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946). 
27 See especially Angela Jurkat, Apokalypse: Endzeitstimmung in Kunst und Literatur des 
Expressionismus (Alfter: Verlag und Datenbank für Geisteswissenschaften, 1993), pp. 48-
50. 
28 Kurt Hiller, ‘Überlegungen zur Eschatologie und Methodologie des Aktivismus’, Das Ziel. 
Jahrbücher für geistige Politik, 3 (1919), 195-217 (p. 196). 
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 Introduction 17 
to reject both forbearance (Dulden) and suffering (Leiden) “um der gefor-
derten Tat willen” (for the sake of required action).29 
 Again and again, however, the Expressionists encoded their avowedly 
secular project in the religious idiom. Their attempts to replace Jewish and 
Christian doctrines with a new path to a new kind of redemption mobilized so 
frequently the structures (messianism), language (prophecy, proclamation), 
and motifs (paradise, sacrifice, nativity, rebirth, resurrection, apocalypse) of 
Judeo-Christianity that their project often reads more like a resacralization 
than a secularization. It is helpful to recall that Expressionism existed, as 
Richard Murphy has stressed, in an “anomic or post-sacred state” in which 
“traditional orienting values” had been stripped of their power. Murphy accu-
rately identifies the Expressionists’ response to this state as a “call for a res-
urrection or recreation of a moral universe,” “a struggle to establish a certain 
spiritual vision of the world over and against a dehumanized and desacralized 
reality.”30 To be sure, the Expressionists embraced neither the spiritual vision 
nor the traditional morality of Judaism or Christianity. They sought to re-
shape significantly the redemptory paths already available within religious 
orthodoxy, aspiring in large measure toward an earthly redemption provided 
by humans in the here and now. Their motivic and linguistic choices make it 
irrefutable, however, that the messianic spirit animating their project could 
not break fully free from its religious sources. The almost omnipresent con-
frontation between secularization and resacralization is one of the defining 
characteristics of Expressionist Messianism, and makes it an especially rich 
case of the negotiation between sacred and secular in the modern era. 
 The messianic desire of the Expressionist generation is articulated in a 
plurality of its texts, from all possible genres, and by many of its members, 
both famous and lesser known. Common to many such articulations is a faith 
specifically in new forms of aesthetic expression, and thus of relation to the 
divine, as a means to salvation. In his essay “Über das Geistige in der Kunst” 
(“Concerning the Spiritual in Art,” 1910) Wassily Kandinsky wrote of an 
emerging movement which would be “[ein] Erlösungsklang zu manchem 
verzweifelten in Finsternis und Nacht gehüllten Herzen […] eine Hand, die 
zeigt und Hilfe bietet” (a sounding of redemption for many despairing hearts 
now wrapped in the darkness of night […], a hand that points the way and 
offers relief).31 Corresponding imagery supports Bloch’s claim, written dur-
 
29 Rudolf Leonhard, ‘Literarischer Aktivismus’, in Theorie des Expressionismus, ed. by Otto 
F. Best (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1976), pp. 135-39 (p. 137). 
30 Richard Murphy, ‘The Poetics of Hysteria: Expressionist Drama and the Melodramatic 
Imagination’, Germanisch-Romanische Monatsschrift, 40 (1990), 156-70 (pp. 158-62). 
31 Wassily Kandinsky, Über das Geistige in der Kunst, 6th edn (Bern: Benteli-Verlag, 1959), p. 
43. 
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18 German Expressionist Drama and the Messianism of a Generation 
ing the same era in his philosophical reflections about music, that works of 
art may become “ein Abglanz, ein Stern der Antizipation und ein Trostgesang 
auf dem Heimweg durch Dunklheit” (a dim reflection, a star of anticipation 
and a song of solace on the way home through the dark).32 
 Many Expressionist writers likewise believed that their creations could 
facilitate a new and redemptive reality. This belief is evident, for example, in 
the title of Pinthus’ anthology, Menschheitsdämmerung, which can signify 
either the dawning or the twilight of humanity. Given the mood and subject 
matter of the poems, it certainly intends both, implying a dialectical reality 
dominated by a temporal structure which is both eschatological (the end for 
humanity) and millenarian (the advent of a new humanity). The 23 poets rep-
resented in the anthology operated, Pinthus wrote unapologetically, “aus fa-
natischem Glauben an einen Neubeginn in den Künsten, im Leben des 
Einzelnen und in der menschlichen Gemeinschaft” (from their fanatical belief 
in a new beginning in the arts, in the life of the individual and in the human 
community).33 One of the poets who best illustrates this belief is Johannes R. 
Becher, whose poem “Verfall” (“Decay”), a catalog of images of burials and 
decomposing bodies, concludes with an extended image of expectant hope: 
“Einmal werde ich am Wege stehn, / Versonnen, im Anschaun einer großen 
Stadt. / Umronnen von goldener Winde Wehn. / Licht fällt durch der Wolken 
Flucht matt. / Verzückte Gestalten, in Weiß gehüllt… / Meine Hände rühren / 
An Himmel, golderfüllt, / Sich öffnend gleich Wundertüren” (One day I will 
stand on the path, / lost in my gaze upon a great city. / Golden winds wafting 
around me. / Light falls faintly through the fleeing clouds. / Rapturous fig-
ures, wrapped in white… / My hands stir / toward heaven, filled with gold, / 
opening itself like miraculousdoors). This enthusiastic expectancy is, moreo-
ver, an impatient and apocalyptic one: “Wann erscheinest du, ewiger Tag? / 
Oder hat es noch Zeit? / Wann ertönest du, schallendes Horn, / Schrei du der 
Meerflut schwer? / Aus Dickicht, Moorgrund / Grab und Dorn / Rufend die 
Schläfer her?” (When will you appear, eternal day? / Or must we wait? / 
When will you resound, clangorous horn, / you arduous cry of the tides? / 
From thicket, moor, grave, and thorn / calling the slumberers forth?)34 By 
way of an answer Becher indicates in another poem, “Vorbereitung” (“Prepa-
ration”), that it is the role of the poet to fulfill this messianic longing, to 
awaken the slumberers, as it were. Becher’s poet “reißt das Volk auf mit ge-
 
32 Ernst Bloch, Geist der Utopie. Bearbeitete Neuauflage der zweiten Fassung von 1923 
(Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1964), p. 151. All translations from all editions of Geist der 
Utopie are from The Spirit of Utopia, trans. by Anthony A. Nassar (Stanford: Stanford Uni-
versity Press, 2000). 
33 Menschheitsdämmerung, p. 14. 
34 Ibid., pp. 40-42. 
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 Introduction 19 
hackten Sätzen” (reawakens the people with his hacked up sentences) - a ref-
erence to one of the stylistic idiosyncrasies of Expressionist literature - and 
fashions “Die Neue Welt / (-- eine solche: die alte, die mystische, die Welt 
der Qual austilgend --) […] Paradies setzt ein” (The New World / like this: 
blotting out the old, the mystical, the world of anguish. […] Paradise be-
gins).35 
 With the hope of redemption planted firmly in the realm of literature and 
the arts, the artists and writers of the Expressionist generation were able to be 
elevated, or in some cases to elevate themselves, rather facilely to a messi-
anic status. Kandinsky was hailed as a “Prophet der Wiedergeburt” (prophet 
of rebirth).36 The critic Willi Handl published an essay praising the recent 
“Dichtungen der Erlösung” (“Literature of Redemption”) in 1920,37 the same 
year in which the anonymous essay “Die kommende Dichtung” (“The Litera-
ture to Come”) proclaimed: “Neue Dichtung ist Tat. Golgatha ihr Gleichnis. 
Schmerzlich kostet sie die Bitternis aller Leidenstationen um der Erfüllung 
willen” (New poetry is action. Golgotha its allegory. Painfully it tastes the 
bitterness of each station of the Passion, for fulfillment’s sake).38 In the main, 
critics who did accept Expressionism as a movement were prompted to char-
acterize it as spiritual rather than artistic, as “geistiges Geschehen, das […] 
welt- und menschenändernd in Leben und Kosmos griff” (a spiritual event 
that […] reached into life and the cosmos, altering the world and humanity 
itself).39 Hence the perception of Expressionism over the years as a veritable 
Dichterkult. 
 Concern with the messianic is evidenced in the visual art of the Expres-
sionist period, as well. Writing in 1920, the critic Rudolf Friedmann-Brook 
noted that recent exhibitions had been filled “fast bis zum Bersten mit re-
ligiöser Sehnsucht […] mit immer der selben Kreuzigung, Mutter Gottes und 
Selbstporträts mit dem Kreuz auf der Stirn” (almost to the point of overflow-
ing with religious desire […], with always the same Crucifixion, the mother 
of God, and self-portraits with a cross on one’s forehead).40 Themes of re-
demption, rebirth, deification, and apocalypse are indeed recurrent in the 
 
35 Menschheitsdämmerung, p. 213. For a reading of this poem as “a poignant case in point” of 
the Expressionists’ “aestheticization of politics,” see Rainer Rumold, The Janus Face of the 
German Avant-Garde. From Expressionism toward Postmodernism (Evanston: Northwest-
ern University Press, 2002), p. 23. 
36 Quoted in Holste, p. 113. 
37 Willi Handl, ‘Dichtungen der Erlösung’, Freie deutsche Bühne, 23 (1920), 538-43. 
38 ‘Die kommende Dichtung’, Romantik, 3 (1920), 8-10 (pp. 9-10). 
39 Richard Blunck, Der Impuls des Expressionismus (Hamburg: A. Harms, 1921), p. 7. 
40 Rudolf Friedmann-Brook, ‘Kunst und Religion’, Freie deutsche Bühne, 2 (1920), 115-17 (p. 
115). 
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20 German Expressionist Drama and the Messianism of a Generation 
work of Max Beckmann, Otto Dix, Ludwig Meidner, Heinrich Vogeler, and 
others.41 
 Within Expressionist lyric, the messianic identity established in the previ-
ously cited Becher poems echoes throughout those of Kurt Heynicke, 
Wilhelm Klemm, Ernst Wilhelm Lotz, Ernst Stadler, and Franz Werfel.42 
Equally concerned with issues of the messianic is the prose of Benn, Alfred 
Döblin, and Leonhard Frank, for example.43 
 This study, however, employs primarily dramatic literature to examine the 
messianism of the Expressionist generation. This is because, in a word, the 
stage was the optimal forum for the proselytization of Expressionism’s play-
wright visionaries, for their incitement of audiences to action. A number of 
contemporaneous sources bear this out. In 1919, Hugo Zehder wrote of the 
theater as a rostrum from which the playwright could establish a new human 
community.44 The Expressionist playwright Ernst Toller enthused in an essay 
“Zur Revolution der Bühne” (“On the Revolution of the Stage,” 1923): “Was 
wir träumen, ist die große Gemeinschaft zwischen Bühne und Publikum, die 
Gemeinschaft des Lebensgefühls, des Weltgefühls, die Gemeinsamkeit der 
Idee, das beziehungsträchtige Mit-Einander von Hörern und Spielern, die 
glühende Einheit aller Wirkenden” (Our dream is a great community between 
stage and audience; a community of attitudes toward life and the world; a 
community of ideas; a cooperation, pregnant with connections, between lis-
teners and actors; a glowing unity of all involved).45 And in an intriguing 
contact point between genres, the actor himself became a messianic figure in 
a poem written in 1916-1917 by Walter Hasenclever and dedicated to the 
famous actor Ernst Deutsch, who starred in the Expressionist plays of Hasen-
clever and many others. Addressing the actor directly, Hasenclever writes: 
“Das Morgenrot von Städten / Tropft aus der Wunde deiner Leidenschaft. 
[…] Du wirst das Hymnische des Geistes retten, / Der deinen Körper durch 
 
41 See for example Dietrich Schubert, Max Beckmann. Auferstehung und Erscheinung der 
Toten (Worms: Werner’sche Verlagsgesellschaft, 1985). 
42 See Vietta and Kemper, pp. 188-94. For more recent scholarship on the poetry of German 
Expressionism, see the contributions of Francis Michael Sharp, James Rolleston, and Klaus 
Weissenberger in A Companion to the Literature of German Expressionism, ed. by Neil H. 
Donahue (Rochester: Camden House, 2005). 
43 For the prose of Expressionism, see: Erich von Kahler, ‘Die Prosa des Expressionismus’, in 
Der deutsche Expressionismus: Formen und Gestalten, ed. by Hans Steffen (Göttingen: 
Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1965), pp. 157-78; Augustinus P. Dierick, German Expressionist 
Prose. Theory and Practice (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987); and the contribu-
tions of Sokel and Rhys W. Williams in A Companion to the Literature of German Expres-
sionism. 
44 Hugo Zehder, ‘Zeit, Theater und Dichter’, Die neue Schaubühne, 1 (1919), 1-3 (p. 3). 
45 Ernst Toller, Gesammelte Werke, ed. by John M. Spalek and Wolfgang Frühwald, 5 vols 
(Munich: Carl Hanser, 1978), I, pp. 113-14. 
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 Introduction 21 
das Wort erschafft” (The red dawning of cities / drips from the wound of y-
our passion. […] You will save the hymn within the spirit / that creates your 
body from the Word).46 
 Theorists of genre have validated these Expressionist sentimentsabout the 
uniqueness of drama, contrasting its communality with the individual appeal 
of poems and novels, and noting moreover that “German drama has blos-
somed in times of crisis.”47 Analyses of drama’s prominence during Expres-
sionism have foregrounded the desperation and impatience of audiences liv-
ing through the tumult of war and revolution.48 A direct theatrical appeal to 
the public seemed the best way to capitalize upon communal experience and 
thus the longing for a new kind of community. 
 While the Expressionists’ aspirations toward a sweeping transformation 
of their society demanded the broadest possible forms of public address, they 
often chose to portray an individual character’s transformation, which, once 
enacted on the stage, could serve as a paradigm for the audience and the pub-
lic at large. The prolific Expressionist playwright Georg Kaiser outlined the 
kind of multiplication effect required by this approach in a 1928 interview, 
claiming, “was mir geschieht […] kann von der selben Kraft jedem anderen 
neben mir geschehen. Dann wird aus Einem: zehn, aus Zehn: zehntausend 
und schließlich eine unendliche Versammlung von Kreaturen im Geiste” 
(what happens to me […] can, by the same power, happen to anyone next to 
me. Then one becomes ten, and those ten become ten thousand and, eventu-
ally, an unending assemblage of creatures in the spirit).49 To be sure, this 
approach itself reveals a kind of messiah complex, shared by a number of 
Kaiser’s contemporaries, in which protagonists serve not only their audi-
ences, as models of the path to salvation, but their authors as well, as vision-
ary and prophetic mouthpieces. 
 The dramatic subgenres that were popular during Expressionism call at-
tention to the employment of the stage at that time for quasi-religious pur-
poses. The station play (Stationendrama), adapted from medieval drama by 
way of August Strindberg, carries a kind of messianism in its form - a rather 
teleological succession of scenes modeled on Christianity’s Stations of the 
Cross - as well as in its content, as a quest for renewal or redemption drives 
 
46 Menschheitsdämmerung, p. 134. 
47 Ernst Schürer, ‘Provocation and Proclamation, Vision and Imagery: Expressionist Drama 
between German Idealism and Modernity’, in A Companion to the Literature of German 
Expressionism, pp. 231-54 (p. 232). 
48 See for example Otten, p. 8. Otten further presents evidence, in the form of printing records, 
of a turn in public reading habits during Expressionism from prose to drama. 
49 Georg Kaiser, Werke, ed. by Walther Huder, (Frankfurt a.M.: Propyläen, 1971-1972), IV: 
Filme, Romane, Erzählungen, Aufsätze, Gedichte (1971), p. 599. 
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22 German Expressionist Drama and the Messianism of a Generation 
characters on from one station to the next. The proclamation play 
(Verkündigungsdrama) borrows equally from biblical models, particularly 
the language in which its central and world-changing message is proclaimed; 
it is in these pieces that Expressionist playwrights established their reputation 
as prophets addressing their communities. The nature of their protagonists’ 
experiences - their deaths and their rebirths - filled the Expressionist stage 
further with martyr plays (Märtyrerdrama) and conversion plays (Wand-
lungsdrama).50 The stage thus became a pulpit in which the dramatist could, 
often via a mouthpiece protagonist, assume a priestly stance, with the audi-
ence functioning as a congregation of believers or even a band of disciples. 
Contemporary commentators noted that playwrights had come to occupy the 
roles of prophet, confessor, or “Führer im Religiös-Metaphysischen” (leader 
in religio-metaphysical matters).51 
 While a messianic spirit shapes the work of most Expressionist dramatists 
to at least some degree, my analysis will focus on four: Ernst Barlach, Georg 
Kaiser, Ernst Toller, and Franz Werfel. While their contemporaries Becher, 
Hasenclever, Oskar Kokoschka, Paul Kornfeld, and Ludwig Rubiner, for ex-
ample, could easily be included as well, these four playwrights constitute a 
particularly representative cross-section with which to argue for the centrality 
of the messianic in Expressionism. There are a number of bases for this 
claim. 
 First, all four of these playwrights also worked in genres or media other 
than drama, and thus contributed to the ethos of Expressionism in numerous 
ways (an especially important factor in light of this study’s necessarily lim-
ited focus). Kaiser and Toller both wrote programmatic texts on Expression-
ism, as well as some poetry. It is for his poetry that Werfel is best known as 
an Expressionist, though his post-Expressionist novels would also receive a 
great deal of critical attention. And Barlach’s fame came primarily from his 
sculptures and drawings rather than from his plays.52 All four also wrote 
prose pieces of a more or less autobiographical nature, which will be exam-
ined here to the extent that they illuminate questions raised in their dramatic 
work. 
 
50 For foundational studies of Expressionism’s dramatic subgenres, see Manfred Durzak, Das 
expressionistische Drama (Munich: Nymphenburger Verlagshandlung, 1978), and Walter 
Hinck, Das moderne Drama in Deutschland. Vom expressionistischen zum dokumentari-
schen Theater (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1973). See also Vietta & Kemper, pp. 
187, 196-97. 
51 S.D. Gallwitz, Der neue Dichter und die Frau (Berlin: Herbig, 1927), pp. 10-11. 
52 For an interpretation of the messianic in Barlach’s sculpture, see Theodor Däubler, Der neue 
Standpunkt (Leipzig: Insel, 1919), pp. 104-107. 
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 Introduction 23 
 Second, while the early writings of Toller and Werfel epitomize the fiery 
passion of youth with which Expressionism is often equated, Barlach and 
Kaiser were older and more experienced in their craft when Expressionism 
broke onto the scene. Taken together, these four writers thus offer access to 
heterogeneities, both personal and stylistic, that are often overlooked in well-
meaning attempts to rescue Expressionism as a movement.53 That Kaiser, 
Toller, and Werfel, three of the most widely recognized literary Expression-
ists, would move on to post-Expressionist periods that included more sober 
reflections on redemption is also characteristic of their generation at large,54 
and further supports a model of Expressionism as an attitude or Weltan-
schauung subject to change and development. Barlach’s status as an Expres-
sionist, meanwhile, has been both contested and attributed to “the sake of 
convenience.”55 But the following chapters’ analysis of fundamental com-
monalities between Barlach and his contemporaries will call into question 
Barlach’s standing as a “Randerscheinung” (marginal figure) in Expression-
ism.56 And ultimately, this marginality, whether real or perceived, speaks all 
the more for inclusion of Barlach in a representative sample, given the defini-
tional difficulties of Expressionism and the desirability of a portrait that tran-
scends restrictive stereotypes about the period. 
 Third, and perhaps most importantly for the issue at hand, these play-
wrights approach questions of redemption and religion in diverse but related 
ways. The work of Toller and Werfel is informed (albeit vastly differently in 
each case) by their upbringing in Jewish families. In this study, chapter 2 in 
particular will read Toller’s work in the light of his German-Jewish identity, 
with assistance from reflections in his autobiography. The question of reli-
gious identity will be even more pervasive in Werfel’s work, which, because 
of his position between Judaism and Christianity,can serve as the basis for an 
analysis of the relationship between the faiths during the Expressionist pe-
 
53 Some heterogeneity within a movement does not, after all, discount it as a movement. The 
heterogeneity of Expressionism, and its underrepresentation in the relevant literature, is 
highlighted in Kellner, p. 6. 
54 For reflections on this later sobriety, see Lore B. Foltin and John M. Spalek, ‘Franz Werfel’s 
Essays: A Survey’, The German Quarterly, 42 (1969), 172-203 (p. 185), and John Milfull, 
‘Marginalität und Messianismus. Die Situation der deutsch-jüdischen Intellektuellen als Pa-
radigma für die Kulturkrise 1910-1920’, in Expressionismus und Kulturkrise, ed. by Bernd 
Hüppauf (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1983), pp. 147-57 (p. 156). 
55 Edson M. Chick, ‘Ernst Barlach’s “Der arme Vetter”: A Study’, MLR, 57 (1962), 373-84 (p. 
384). For a more accurate view of Barlach as an Expressionist, see Paulsen, ‘Form’, p. 140. 
56 Vietta and Kemper, p. 198. Barlach himself wrote that whether or not he belonged to the 
movement depended entirely on one’s view of Expressionism, and that he was not particu-
larly concerned with the question either way. See Ernst Barlach, Die Briefe, ed. by Friedrich 
Dross, 2 vols (Munich: R. Piper, 1968-1969), I: 1888-1924 (1968), pp. 613, 735. 
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24 German Expressionist Drama and the Messianism of a Generation 
riod, offered here in chapter 3. For Kaiser, educated in the Christian tradition, 
religion seems to have served primarily as an imperfect model for ethical 
action and the possibility of renewal - an important function of religious tra-
dition for many Expressionists. And the Protestant Barlach (who once admit-
ted to being a Christian primarily in name and by virtue of his parentage)57 is 
quite representative, particularly in his dramas, of Expressionism’s continual 
and rather ecumenical struggle to access God and Christ, or at least some 
kind of intensely metaphysical divinity and Messiah - another very good ar-
gument for his inclusion among literary Expressionists. 
 Fourth, the reception with which these playwrights met exemplifies a 
crucial aspect of Expressionist Messianism: the elevation of the artist to the 
status of prophet or even savior. Werfel was praised for his “[r]eligiöse Hin-
gabe und ethisches Bewusstsein, Gefühl und Erkenntnis einer verant-
wortlichen Menschheitssendung” (religious devotion, ethical consciousness, 
emotion, and responsible recognition of his mission to humanity).58 Contem-
poraries called Toller “ein ekstatisch Liebender, […] ein Wortführer der 
Menschen, in denen der Geist lebendig ist” (filled with ecstatic love, […] a 
spokesman for people in whom spirit is alive),59 “a gentle apostle filled with 
his mission.”60 In articulating the “Schrei und Seufzer der Kreatur nach Er-
lösung” (creature’s scream and sigh for redemption),61 Barlach became some-
thing of a miracle worker, possessed of “eine Heilkraft, vor der die Hysterie 
unseres Angst-Zeitalters zunichte wird” (a healing power that shatters the 
hysteria of our fearful era).62 And Kaiser was extolled for leading “seine 
Brüder und Schwestern [...] aus der Hölle des Un-Sinnes” (his brothers and 
sisters […] out of the hell of senselessness).63 
 In addition to the works of these four writers, an exhaustive account of 
the messianic in Expressionism would have to include plays like Fritz von 
Unruh’s Ein Geschlecht (A Family, 1917), Reinhard Goering’s Die Retter 
(The Saviors, 1919), Alfred Brust’s Die Schlachte der Heilande (The Battle 
of the Redeemers, 1920), Carl Einstein’s Die schlimme Botschaft (The Bad 
News, 1921), or Stefan Zweig’s Jeremias (Jeremiah, 1917), prose works like 
Curt Corrinth’s Potsdamer Platz (1919), as well as many of the poems col-
lected in Menschheitsdämmerung and elsewhere. Instead, the kind of ‘case 
 
57 See Barlach, Briefe, II, 337. 
58 Hans Berendt, ‘Franz Werfel’, Mitteilungen der literarhistorischen Gesellschaft Bonn, 11 
(1919/20), 107-54 (p. 109). 
59 Ernst Pinner, ‘Der Dichter Ernst Toller’, Der Jude, 8 (1924), 483-87 (p. 483). 
60 Quoted in Robert Bruce Elsasser, Ernst Toller and German Society: The Role of the Intellec-
tual as Critic, 1914-1939 (Ann Arbor: Dissertation, 1973), p. 218. 
61 Hans Ehrenberg, ‘Barlach. Bildner und Dichter’, Eckart, 5 (1929), 241-50 (p. 247). 
62 Klaus Lazarowicz, ‘Barlachs religiöse Existenz’, Eckart, 22 (1952/53), 126-34 (p. 127). 
63 Hugo Zehder, ‘Für Georg Kaiser’, Die neue Schaubühne, 2 (1920), 312. 
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 Introduction 25 
study’ of Expressionism executed here offers an analysis marked more by 
depth than by breadth, with messianism’s role in the movement established 
across the lives and work of four extremely illustrative representatives. Of 
course, the reading developed here of key dramas by Barlach, Kaiser, Toller, 
and Werfel is informed and illuminated by a number of other writers and 
texts. I will show a basic affinity between these playwrights and the philoso-
phers of messianism who were their contemporaries, including Bloch, Ben-
jamin, and Scholem. And I will invoke a number of essays and reviews from 
the intellectual journals that flourished during Expressionism, many of which 
are positively dominated by articulations of a messianic desire very similar to 
that found in the dramas themselves. 
 My reading of these dramas is informed primarily, however, by their in-
tertextual relationship with the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures. It is from 
these intertexts that the following chapters take their sequence and structure. 
Chapter 1 examines the roots, in and beyond Hebrew Scripture, of the messi-
anic tradition in Judaism, and traces the impact of that tradition on the phi-
losophy of the Expressionist era, with particular focus on Bloch and Benja-
min. The subsequent chapters attempt to draw closer connections than have 
been offered to date between the thriving intellectual discourse on messian-
ism in these decades and the contemporaneous literary employment of messi-
anic motifs64 - an attempt invited by the confluence of the underexplored role 
of messianism in Expressionism on the one hand, and a recent philosophical 
concern with messianism on the other. Chapter 2 analyzes the co-option of 
messianic motifs from the Hebrew canon in Expressionist drama, and begins 
to outline the figurations of messianism espoused there. A third chapter 
serves as a sort of transition between Jewish and Christian messianism, inter-
rogating the relationship between the two faiths during the Expressionist pe-
riod primarily through the example of Werfel and his reflections on the con-
version of Saul/Paul. The thematic focus of chapter 4 is the point at which 
Christianity takes up the messianic tradition in Judaism and diverges momen-
tously from it, namely the Nativity of Jesus as Messiah. Through the lan-
guage and imagery of the synoptic Gospels, this moment finds numerous 
reflections in Expressionist literature, giving familiar shape to the Expres-
sionists’ vision of human rebirth and renewal. Lingering over the Gospel ac-
counts, the fifth chapter concentrates on the mission and Passion of Jesus, 
themes which the Expressionists co-opted repeatedly in formulating and con-
veying their own redemptive missions. The sixth chapter reads the apocalyp-
tic literature of both Judaism and Christianity as a model for the Expression-
 
64 Löwy draws similar connections in the eighth chapter of Redemption and Utopia, though his 
focus is exclusively on Jewish writers. 
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26 German Expressionist Drama and the Messianism of a Generation 
ists’ attempts to make sense of their own catastrophic experiences by forging 
a new age from the apparent (and in many cases welcome) destruction of the 
present one. 
 While the Jewish and Christian scriptures are the most important inter-
texts of Expressionist Messianism, they do not, of course, represent the full 
extent of its heritage. Expressionist Messianism is in many respects a unique 
phenomenon (particularly given Expressionism’s status as “the last art 
movement in Germany to try with missionary zeal to change the status quo in 
life and art”65); but it is also part of a long literary and philosophical tradition. 
Vietta notes that the Expressionists’ belief in human renewal as a catalyst for 
political change is an articulated also (albeit in a vastly different tone) in 
Friedrich Schiller’s “Über naive und sentimentalische Dichtung” (“On Naïve 
and Sentimental Poetry,” 1795) and Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Men-
schen (On the Aesthetic Education of Man, 1795).66 Moreover, the poet-as-
prophet motif mobilized repeatedly by the Expressionists reaches at least as 
far back as German Romantics like Novalis and Friedrich Hölderlin.67 And 
the Expressionist turn to the theater as the most promising locus of renewal 
was, as Richard T. Gray has argued, at least partly a response to Friedrich 
Nietzsche’s “call for a rebirth of tragedy as a revolutionary artistic-cultural 
phenomenon,” which had in turn been informed by G. E. Lessing’s and 
Schiller’s work on drama.68 
 More than any other single thinker or writer, Nietzsche embodies the heri-
tage of Expressionist Messianism. He had appeared as the answer to the mes-
sianic desires of the previous generation, as recorded in the reflections of 
Harry Graf Kessler about the 1890s: 
 
Etwas sehr Großes, […] das Europa des achtzehnten Jahrhunderts und der Heiligen Al-
lianz, wurde alt und krank, neigte sich zum Sterben; und etwas Neues, Junges, Kräfti-
ges, noch Unvorstellbares kündigte sich an. […] In uns entstand ein geheimer Messia-
nismus. Die Wüste, die zu jedem Messias gehört, war in unseren Herzen; und plötzlich 
erschien über ihr wie ein Meteor Nietzsche.69 
(Something quite grand, […] the Europe of the eighteenth century and of the Holy Alli-
ance, grew old and sick, keeled over to die; something new, young, strong, and still 
unimaginable was ushered in. […] There arose in us a secret messianism. The desert 
 
65 Schürer, ‘Provocation’, p. 235. 
66 Vietta and Kemper, p. 200. 
67 On messianism in Hölderlin, see Robert Charlier, Heros und Messias. Hölderlins messiani-
sche Mythogenese und das jüdische Denken (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1999). 
68 Richard T. Gray, ‘Metaphysical Mimesis: Nietzsche’s Geburt der Tragödie and the Aesthet-
ics of Literary Expressionism’, in A Companion to the Literature of German Expressionism, 
pp. 39-65 (pp. 41-43). 
69 Harry Graf Kessler, Gesichter und Zeiten: Erinnerungen (Berlin: S. Fischer, 1962), p. 229. 
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 Introduction 27 
that belongs to every Messiah was in our hearts; and above that desert appeared, sud-
denly, like a meteor, Nietzsche.) 
 
Two decades later, Nietzsche would be for the Expressionists not the fulfill-
ment of their messianic longing, but one of its primary stimulators. 
 In his book The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany, Steven Aschheim notes 
the breadth of Nietzsche’s influence on Expressionism, from its visual arts to 
its literature, politics, and even architecture. Aschheim’s claim that most Ex-
pressionists were “either acknowledged Nietzscheans or Nietzscheans by 
osmosis”70 is borne out in Benn’s essay “Nietzsche nach fünfzig Jahren” 
(“Nietzsche after Fifty Years,” 1950). Benn writes: “Eigentlich hat alles, was 
meine Generation diskutierte, innerlich sich auseinanderdachte, man kann 
sagen: erlitt, man kann auch sagen: breittrat – alles das hatte sich bereits bei 
Nietzsche ausgesprochen und erschöpft, definitive Formulierung gefunden, 
alles Weitere war Exegese” (Actually, everything that my generation dis-
cussed and confronted in its inner thoughts - one could even say, everything 
we suffered and bandied about - had already been expressed completely, had 
found its definitive formulation, in Nietzsche; everything thereafter was exe-
gesis).71 The following chapters (particularly chapter 4) will offer evidence of 
Nietzsche’s impact on Expressionist drama in particular. 
 Writing about the Modernist avant-garde that included Expressionism, 
Aschheim identifies a “salvationist Nietzschean impulse” in which Nietzsche 
becomes the “champion of sweeping visions of cultural and political redemp-
tion.”72 The connection between Nietzsche’s work and the messianism of the 
Expressionists depended on a vast range of Nietzschean doctrines and proper-
ties, among which Gray lists (as particular influences on Expressionism) will 
to power, eternal recurrence, transvaluation and the critique of bourgeois mo-
rality, vitalism, the overman, and a style marked by lyricism and pathos. 
Through all these channels, Nietzsche shapes Expressionism’s “search for 
cultural redemption in the realm of aesthetic practice.”73 
 Such an understanding of redemption - as something to be achieved in 
culture via aesthetic means - depends on another Nietzschean doctrine, that of 
the death of God. The idea of redemption, after all, had to be wrested from 
the religious domain before it could be relocated to a new one as part of a 
cultural transvaluation. As avowed or de facto Nietzscheans, the Expression-
 
70 Steven E. Aschheim, The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany. 1890-1990 (Berkeley: University 
of California Press, 1992), p. 64. See also Kellner, p. 11. 
71 Gottfried Benn, Gesammelte Werke, ed. by Dieter Wellershoff (Wiesbaden: Limes, 1968), 
IV: Reden und Vorträge, p. 1046. 
72 Aschheim, p. 52. See also Theo Meyer, Nietzsche und die Kunst (Tübingen: Francke, 1993), 
p. 243. 
73 Gray, ‘Metaphysical’, pp. 39, 41. See also Kellner, pp. 8-9. 
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28 German Expressionist Drama and the Messianism of a Generation 
ists could not escape the death of God, and plainly inherited, even welcomed, 
the resultant loss of metaphysical certainty. How to square this fact with their 
consistent employment of language and motifs from the Jewish and Christian 
Scriptures? This question was posed even during the Expressionist period, 
with one commentator puzzling in 1919 over Expressionism’s religious ata-
vism, “denn: hatte nicht Nietzsche als größtes Verdienst dies gewonnen, daß 
er den Gott getötet hatte?” (for hadn’t Nietzsche attained this as his greatest 
merit, that he had killed God?)74 Why, then, the resilience of the religious 
within Expressionism? 
 The analysis offered in the following chapters will show that this apparent 
contradiction in Expressionism - the coexistence and perseverance of 
Nietzschean and Judeo-Christian influences - is actually more of a syncre-
tism. Ultimately, the Expressionists’ employment of both Nietzsche and re-
ligion had the same result: a resacralization where a secularization was to be 
expected (or was in fact attempted). That is, while most (though not all) Ex-
pressionists were more than happy to relinquish traditional notions of God, 
and to encourage their audiences to do so, they were, as we have already 
seen, all the more concerned with a wealth of metaphysical ideas, many of 
which continued to go by the name “God.” It is surely impossible, under al-
most any circumstances, to imagine Nietzsche approving of the Expression-
ists’ often ambiguous God-talk. All the same, it was to a large extent 
Nietzsche who had broughtthem to the anomic state in which they could pur-
sue God-substitutes at all. Aschheim has suggested that later generations re-
sponded to Nietzsche by “redirecting and regenerating the religious impulse 
rather than obliterating it”;75 this is certainly true for the Expressionists. 
 Of course, in their use of religious and even biblical language to support a 
secular project, the Expressionists found a model in Nietzsche himself, par-
ticularly in the book with which he exerted the most direct influence on them, 
Also sprach Zarathustra (Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 1883-1885). Zarathustra’s 
prophetic tone echoes throughout Expressionist Messianism, as the following 
chapters will show. Ironically, the Expressionists’ appropriation of 
Nietzschean and especially Zarathustrian rhetoric reinforced and further en-
abled their slippage from an allegedly non-religious project into a decidedly 
more sacral mode. Sternheim, ever the insightful satirist, encapsulates this 
slippage in his play Die Hose (The Bloomers, 1911) in which a Nietzsche 
 
74 Eckart von Sydow, ‘Das religiöse Bewußtsein des Expressionismus’, Neue Blätter für Kunst 
und Dichtung, 1 (1918/19), 193-94 (p. 193). 
75 Aschheim, p. 201. 
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 Introduction 29 
acolyte proclaims that his master “lehrt das Evangelium der Zeit” (teaches the 
gospel of our time).76 
 The Expressionists found complementary starting points in the Bible and 
in Nietzsche: whereas biblical models of redemption required a secularizing 
reworking, Nietzsche’s work seemed to offer a template of the desacraliza-
tion that would liberate the notion of redemption from its religious trappings. 
Their employment of both the biblical and the Nietzschean frameworks, 
however, would collapse into a resacralization that turned their own allegedly 
secular message into a new gospel of redemption. It is this disinclination to 
be pinned down definitively along a spectrum of sacred/secular that makes 
the ethos of German Expressionism such an elucidating case of modern mes-
sianic ideology. 
 
 
76 Carl Sternheim, Die Hose. Ein bürgerliches Lustspiel, 2nd edn (Leipzig: Insel Verlag, 1919), 
p. 86. 
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Chapter 1 – Jewish Messianism and the Philosophy of the 
Expressionist Era 
 
 
The roots of Expressionist Messianism go as far back as the Hebrew 
mashi’ah (“anointed” or “the Anointed King”), defined in the Encyclopaedia 
Judaica as “a charismatically endowed descendant of David who [...] would 
be raised up by God to break the yoke of the heathen and to reign over a re-
stored kingdom of Israel to which all the Jews of the Exile would return.”1 
Such a definition naturally belies the vast complexity of the messianic tradi-
tion in Judaism, a tradition that developed and changed significantly over the 
course of an intricate political history.2 To begin to work even schematically 
through this complexity, one must at the outset distinguish between belief in 
a personal Messiah and in ‘olam habba, an atemporal age that will succeed 
‘olam hazzeh, the age that lasts from creation until the end of the world. This 
differentiation itself can be difficult: the coming of the Messiah and the dawn 
of a messianic age often go hand in hand. Moreover, any putative line of de-
marcation between them has been blurred by history, particularly since Jew-
ish messianism is a primarily postbiblical phenomenon. While the Hebrew 
Scriptures certainly begin to outline the messianic character of Judaism, it is 
not until later that such diverse notions as the collapse of the historical con-
tinuum or the emergence of a perfected world converge with prophecies of 
the Lord’s judgment and the restoration of his kingdom.3 
 
1 ‘Messiah’, Encyclopaedia Judaica (Jerusalem: Encyclopaedia Judaica, 1971), p. 1407. For 
parallels in ancient Egypt and Babylon, see Lorenz Dürr, Ursprung und Ausbau der israeli-
tisch-jüdischen Heilandserwartung (Berlin: C.A. Schwetschke & Sohn, 1925), pp. 1-37. 
2 For a concise overview of the “fundamental messianic experience” of Judaism throughout 
its history, see Eveline Goodman-Thau, Zeitbruch: Zur messianischen Grunderfahrung in 
der jüdischen Tradition (Berlin: Akademie, 1995), pp. 10-13. 
3 See Scholem, ‘Krise’, p. 154. Consistent reference is made in this study to Scholem’s under-
standing of messianism, because I believe it most accurately reflects both the history of reli-
gious messianism in the western world and the messianic thinking that shaped the German 
intellectual discourse of the Expressionist era. Scholem was, after all, a witness to that era 
and a friend and collaborator of many of the writers discussed here. Moreover, I find 
Scholem’s conception of a messianism thoroughly interwoven with, indeed constituted by, a 
number of related concepts (eschatology, apocalypticism, utopianism) more convincing than 
studies that strive toward dogmatic differentiations between these concepts. See for example 
David Roberts, ‘“Menschheitsdämmerung”: Ideologie, Utopie, Eschatologie’, in Expression-
ismus und Kulturkrise, pp. 85-103, as well as the book from which it draws this sort of dif-
ferentiation, Wilhelm Kamlah, Utopie, Eschatologie, Geschichtsteleologie. Kritische Unter-
suchungen zum Ursprung und zum futurischen Denken der Neuzeit (Mannheim: Bibliogra-
phisches Institut, 1969). For a brief integrated study more in line with Scholem, which also 
incorporates the Christian tradition, secular literature, and the visual arts, see Wolfgang 
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32 German Expressionist Drama and the Messianism of a Generation 
 Though their seeds can be traced back much earlier, biblical expressions 
of a messianic idea seem to begin in the Second Book of Samuel, which in-
troduces God’s promise to David that he and his successors will have domin-
ion over the chosen people (7:10-13; cf. Psalm 132). When the rule of the 
Davidic line is broken, following the death of Solomon, the Prophetic books 
of Scripture turn to the reemergence of this dynasty. Thus Isaiah, for exam-
ple, speaks in the future tense about the properties of the Messiah (11:1-4; cf. 
Jeremiah 33). To these historical and prophetic seeds of the messianic idea is 
added the apocalypticism of the Book of Daniel, whose eschatological vi-
sions highlight the destruction that will precede the establishment of the mes-
sianic kingdom (see especially chapters 7-8). From this point on, according to 
Scholem, the messianic idea that originally developed in the chronicles and 
prophecies of the Scriptures will be inseparable from apocalypticism. The 
essence of this apocalypticism is its blending of disaster and ruination with 
utopian hope.4 It will be one of the primary tasks of this study to see how 
Central European thinkers and writers of the early twentieth century have 
reconciled the sheer shock and crisis of the apocalyptic experience with the 
utopian circumstances it is expected to bring about. 
 In the postbiblical period, the messianic idea evolved into an even more 
complex and multiform phenomenon. Its evolution is traceable to a number 
of historical events that fostered or perhaps necessitated messianic hope 
within the Jewish community: the destruction of the Temple, recurring strug-
gles with occupiers or political adversaries, and the experience of exile. 
Scholem maintains that Jewish messianism developed “fast ausschließlich 
unter den Bedingungendes Exils als einer primären Realität des jüdischen 
Lebens und der jüdischen Geschichte” (almost exclusively under the condi-
tions of exile as a primary reality of Jewish life and Jewish history).5 Political 
tribulations were often interpreted as the prophesied turning point in Jewish 
history precisely because the rulers of Syria and Rome, for example, had 
usurped the power of the Davidic line. The theology of such times was often 
messianically charged, so that individuals who led insurrections against oc-
cupying powers (e.g., Simon Bar Kochba in his struggle against Romaniza-
tion in Judea in the second century C.E.) were identified by some as the Mes-
siah. 
 
Braungart, ‘Apokalypse und Utopie’, in Poesie der Apokalypse, ed. by Gerhard R. Kaiser 
(Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1991), pp. 63-102. 
4 See Scholem, ‘Verständnis’, pp. 19-20. 
5 Scholem, ‘Verständnis’, p. 10. All translations from this essay are from ‘Toward an Under-
standing of the Messianic Idea in Judaism’, trans. by Michael A. Meyer, in The Messianic 
Idea in Judaism and Other Essays, pp. 1-36. 
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 Jewish Messianism and the Philosophy of the Expressionist Era 33 
 After the defeat of Bar Kochba’s revolt led to a dramatic decline in some 
Jewish communities in Palestine, such messianic movements became more 
localized, and were far more strongly resisted within rabbinic Judaism. Those 
who continued to try to bring about the arrival of the Messiah, rather than 
waiting for God to intervene, were seen as trying to ‘force the end.’6 It 
seemed easy enough to do so, because the Scriptures had not designated the 
Messiah’s identity, but had indicated his humanity (even if he did possess 
some supernatural qualities); this scriptural anonymity and humanity allowed 
for numerous claimants, throughout history, to the messianic role. While Je-
sus of Nazareth and Bar Kochba are the most familiar examples from ancient 
times, Rabbi Sabbatai Zvi was able to found a far-reaching messianic move-
ment as recently as the seventeenth century. It was the messianically charged 
Kabbala of the time, Scholem says, that allowed for Sabbatian theology.7 
While the differences between seventeenth-century Kabbala and early twen-
tieth-century German intellectual culture are naturally great, the mood of the 
Sabbatian movement can be seen as a forerunner of the Expressionist genera-
tion’s desire to break free from a sickened and sickening world - to force the 
end, as it were, so as to establish a new utopia. 
 On the whole, however, the messianic hopes of the post-Sabbatian era 
were far less personalized, directed instead at an age to come rather than an 
individual. More than the Messiah himself, the figure of these hopes was Tik-
kun, “a polysemic term for redemption (Erlösung), restoration, reparation, 
reformation and the recovery of lost harmony.”8 While all of these events are 
part of the messianic age frequently envisioned in Expressionism, its literary 
texts also evince the resilience of a more personalized messianism, as subse-
quent chapters will show. 
 Even this brief a history of Jewish messianism reveals three categories 
central to the present study, categories clearly delineated in Scholem’s “Zum 
Verständnis der messianischen Idee im Judentum” (“Toward an Understand-
ing of the Messianic Idea in Judaism,” 1959). Scholem examines in detail the 
“konservative, restaurative und utopische Kräfte” (conservative, restorative, 
and utopian forces) that make up both the messianic idea and rabbinic Juda-
ism. Jewish messianism works to conserve that which is endangered, not least 
by exile. Such conservatism implies also the hopeful, backward-looking im-
pulse to restore some prior state of affairs. But the messianic idea also con-
tains a set of forces turned forward toward a utopian future. Though tenden-
cies toward restoration and utopia stand in a perpetual dialectic, Scholem 
insists that they be taken together, since expectations for the future are 
 
6 See Scholem, ‘Krise’, p. 164. 
7 Ibid., p. 167. 
8 Löwy, Redemption, p. 2. 
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34 German Expressionist Drama and the Messianism of a Generation 
grounded in the celebrated past.9 The discourse on messianism that shaped 
intellectual life to such a large extent in Expressionist Europe was quite in 
line with Scholem’s dialectical past-future schema. One thinks of Karl 
Kraus’s maxim (famously cited by Benjamin) “Ursprung ist das Ziel” (Origin 
is the goal),10 or of Bloch’s “rückwärts gewandt[e] Utopie” (utopia turned 
toward the past).11 Even as the artists and philosophers of the early twentieth 
century struggled forward towards a utopian future, the restorative forces of 
Jewish messianism were never far from the public eye, especially given the 
central place of Zionism among the issues of the day. 
 Zionism was developing at this time along two oppositional tracks, with 
political Zionists setting as their goal the physical return to Palestine, while 
cultural Zionists focused on a renaissance of Jewish life in the Diaspora. It is 
in the philosophical debate between political and cultural Zionists (which 
reaches at least as far back as the 1860s) that we find the roots of the philoso-
phy that shaped Expressionist Messianism. On the side of political Zionism, 
Theodor Herzl’s programmatic book Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State, 
1896) had a profound influence on the early twentieth century, especially 
when a number of German Jews emigrated to Palestine in 1919. Herzl, in 
turn, admitted the enormous debt his work owed to the philosopher Moses 
Hess, who combined the ideals of socialism, Zionism and messianism in a 
way that would shape how the Expressionist generation viewed all three. 
 Writing in 1862 of a messianic age that had begun with Spinoza, flour-
ished in the French Revolution, and continued into his own time, Hess 
claimed that society was involved in “seinen letzten Rassen- und Klassen-
kampf” (its last race and class struggle).12 Just such an understanding of his-
tory was necessary before the Expressionist generation could go on to posit 
the proletariat as “the agent of the social salvation of mankind, the messianic 
class of world history.”13 In Hess’s symbiosis of messianism and socialism, 
both were identified as inherently Jewish concepts, such that their consum-
mation could only take place in a return to Palestine. Hess wrote: “So lange 
dieses Volk einen gemeinsamen Boden hatte, auf dem es seinen Geist frei 
 
9 Scholem, ‘Verständnis’, pp. 10-12. 
10 Karl Kraus, Werke, ed. by Heinrich Fischer (Munich: Kösel, 1955-1967), VII: Worte in 
Versen (1959), p. 59. For the centrality of this maxim in Benjamin’s thinking, see Richard 
Wolin, Walter Benjamin. An Aesthetic of Redemption (New York: Columbia, 1982), pp. 37-
43. 
11 Ernst Bloch, Gesamtausgabe der Werke, (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1959-1978), IV: Erb-
schaft dieser Zeit (1962), p. 140. 
12 Moses Hess, ‘Rom und Jerusalem, die letzte Nationalitätsfrage’, in Ausgewählte Schriften, 
ed. by Horst Lademacher (Köln: Melzer, 1962), pp. 272-73. 
13 Georg Lukács, ‘Bolshevism as a Moral Problem’, trans. by Judith Marcus-Tar, Social Re-
search 44 (1977), 416-24 (pp. 420-21). 
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 Jewish Messianism and the Philosophy of the Expressionist Era 35 
entwickeln konnte, verwirklichte es ihn in Institutionen und einer Literatur, 
welche für die Gesamtmenschheit die Bürgschaft ihrer Vollendung enthält” 
(As long as [the Jewish]nation had a common land upon which to develop its 
spirit freely, it realized that spirit in its institutions and in a literature that con-
tains the pledge of the perfection of all humankind). Hess’s Zionism taught 
that that same spirit could continue to develop only “auf dem Boden der 
Väter” (in the land of the fathers), and could moreover lead to new and more 
just legal and social conditions.14 
 The Zionists who rejected Hess’s model of Judaism and the call for a re-
turn to Palestine needed other ways to realize the link he had envisioned be-
tween messianism and socialism. The result was cultural Zionism (Kulturzi-
onismus), defined by Buber (one of its leading proponents) as a new unity 
arrived at via “gewandelte Selbsterkenntnis” (transformed self-knowledge).15 
Jewish individuals were to be transformed within their current communities, 
with emancipation and social reform there signaling the beginning of the 
messianic age. 
 The early champion of cultural Zionism, who would eventually influence 
the philosophers of the Expressionist age, was Hermann Cohen, best known 
for the Neo-Kantian school that gathered around him in Marburg. Like Hess, 
Cohen embraced socialism as an end to class suffering and injustice. Like 
later cultural Zionists such as Buber, he believed that the messianic promise 
demanded human activity rather than a patient, passive longing for the Mes-
siah’s arrival.16 But Cohen’s progressive and universalizing philosophy saw 
geographically based Zionism as a dangerous particularism. Cohen’s messi-
anism thus eschewed not only political Zionism, but also the restorative ele-
ment that Scholem insists is essential to messianism itself.17 Cohen’s utopia 
is situated entirely in the future, as it is the progress of human society (in a 
Neo-Kantian sense), via its collective efforts, that brings about the messianic 
age. The lack of a restorative impulse in Cohen’s messianism is accompanied 
moreover by a suppression of the eschatological, with the notion of a radical 
break in history fading behind the notion of continuous societal development; 
it is in this spirit that Cohen writes of “Messianismus als Ersatz der Escha-
tologie” (messianism as an ersatz for eschatology).18 
 
14 Hess, ‘Mein Messiasglaube’, in Jüdische Schriften, ed. by Theodor Zlocisti (Berlin: Louis 
Lamm, 1905), p. 6. 
15 Martin Buber, ‘Die Losung’, Der Jude, 1 (1916/17), 2. 
16 See Hermann Cohen, Jüdische Schriften, ed. by Bruno Strauss and others, 3 vols (Berlin: 
Schwetschke & Sohn, 1924), I: p. 32. 
17 See Scholem, ‘Verständnis’, p. 54. 
18 Hermann Cohen, Religion der Vernunft aus den Quellen des Judentums (Wiesbaden: Fou-
rier, 1978), p. 336. 
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36 German Expressionist Drama and the Messianism of a Generation 
 For Scholem, Jewish messianism is “in seinem Ursprung und Wesen, und 
das kann gar nicht stark genug betont werden, eine Katastrophentheorie” (in 
its origins and by its nature - this cannot be sufficiently emphasized - a theory 
of catastrophe).19 So it is clear that he is thinking of Cohen, among others, in 
discussing attempts by nineteenth- and early twentieth-century European 
Jews to disrupt the apocalyptic tradition, or even extract it altogether in the 
name of “eines geläuterten und rationalen Judentums” (a purified and rational 
Judaism).20 Such attempts, Scholem contends, led to the emergence of com-
peting messianisms: apocalyptic and rationalistic. The former interprets all of 
Scripture in the light of apocalypse, while the latter shies away from all ty-
pology and reads Scripture in its historical context. A rationalistic messian-
ism like Cohen’s is, for Scholem, an attempt “den Geltungsbereich des Mes-
sianischen soviel wie möglich einzuschränken […] für die oft genug von 
äußerer Gewalt erzwungenen Verteidigungen des jüdischen Standpunkts” (to 
restrict the valid scope of the Messianic as much as possible […] for the de-
fenses of the Jewish position which were often made necessary by the appli-
cation of external force).21 
 Others took issue with Cohen’s messianism as well, including his student 
Rosenzweig. Rosenzweig saw Cohen’s faith in progress as a betrayal of Jew-
ish messianism.22 Rosenzweig’s own main work, Der Stern der Erlösung 
(The Star of Redemption, 1921), explicitly rejected the “‘modern[e]’ Auffas-
sung des ‘Fortschritts’ in der Geschichte” (“modern” concept of “progress” in 
 
19 Scholem, ‘Verständnis’, p. 20. For Scholem himself as an apocalypticist, see Elisabeth Ha-
macher, ‘Von der Apokalypse zur Theologie im Aufschub. Überlegungen zu Gershom Scho-
lems Verhältnis zur Geschichte’, in Apokalypse und Erinnerung in der deutsch-jüdischen 
Kultur des frühen 20. Jahrhunderts, ed. by Jürgen Brokoff und Joachim Jacob (Göttingen: 
Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2002), pp. 59-74. 
20 Ibid., p. 22. Scholem will go on (pp. 51-53) to place the efforts of Cohen and his contempo-
raries within a broader genealogy of rationalization and universalization, leading from the 
Middle Ages and Maimonides to the Enlightenment, to later periods of assimilation. See 
also Scholem, ‘Reflections on Jewish Theology’, trans. by Gabriela Shalit, in On Jews and 
Judaism in Crisis. Selected Essays, ed. by Werner J. Dannhauser (New York: Schocken, 
1976), pp. 261-97 (pp. 285-86). 
21 Ibid., pp. 68-69. This is the very issue that Agamben says has necessitated his book The 
Time That Remains, which “proposes to restore Paul’s Letters to the status of the fundamen-
tal messianic text for the Western tradition.” Such restoration is necessary, Agamben writes, 
“since two thousand years of translation and commentary coinciding with the history of the 
Christian church have literally cancelled out the messianic, and the word Messiah itself, 
from Paul’s text. Not that one should conclude that there was something like a premeditated 
strategy of neutralizing messianism, but anti-messianic tendencies were doubtlessly operat-
ing within the Church as well as the Synagogue.” Giorgio Agamben, The Time That Re-
mains. A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans, trans. by Patricia Dailey (Stanford: Stan-
ford University Press, 2005), p. 1. 
22 See Löwy, Redemption, p. 59. 
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 Jewish Messianism and the Philosophy of the Expressionist Era 37 
history), so that “das ‘ideale Ziel’ vielleicht schon im nächsten, ja in diesem 
Augenblick erreicht werden könnte und müßte” (the “ideal goal” could and 
should be reached perhaps in the next moment, or even this very moment).23 
This more apocalyptically charged conception of time and history had been 
emerging among Rosenzweig’s contemporaries, as well, many of whom val-
orized rupture and revolution over the continuity of progress. Gustav Lan-
dauer wrote in his Aufruf zum Sozialismus (Call To Socialism, 1911) that 
belief in progress and development had led in fact toward regression and 
away from reversal and change (Umschwung).24 And Buber took great pains 
to establish his Zionistic notion of renewal as one essentially of crisis: “etwas 
Plötzliches und Ungeheures, durchaus nicht Fortsetzung und Verbesserung, 
sondern Umkehr und Umwandlung” (something sudden and immense - by no 
means a continuation or an improvement, but a return and a transforma-
tion).25 
 In sum, the apocalyptic moment was absolutely central to the discourse 
on messianism that developed during the Expressionist era. Its contributors 
took up the link Hess had developed between socialism and messianism, 
while leaving his fervor for emigration largely behind, much in the way that 
Cohen had. But they also reintegrated the moment of world-changing crisis, 
the fundamental break in history that Cohen, in his attempt to establishJuda-
ism as a religion of reason and progress, had left out. 
 Alongside these contributors to the philosophy of messianism that shaped 
the Expressionist era stand two thinkers far more influential in this regard: 
Bloch and Benjamin. For them, messianism was less a political (à la Herzl 
and Hess) or personal (à la Buber) matter than a pressing intellectual one in a 
time of crisis. While this crisis certainly predated the First World War, it was 
the apocalyptic experience of the war that finally made the need for cultural 
renewal so widely visible. Both Bloch and Benjamin opposed the war, but 
they also believed that it would bring about the defeat of Germany’s milita-
ristic society and thus play a role in a kind of cultural redemption. When this 
dream was not realized in postwar Europe, both men remained intensely con-
cerned with the redemption of culture, even after leaving Germany during the 
 
23 Franz Rosenzweig, Der Mensch und sein Werk. Gesammelte Schriften, ed. by Reinhold 
Mayer (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1976-1984), II: Der Stern der Erlösung (1976), pp. 252-53. 
Translation from The Star of Redemption, trans. by William W. Hallo (Notre Dame: Notre 
Dame University Press, 1985). 
24 Gustav Landauer, Aufruf zum Sozialismus, 2nd edn (Berlin: Paul Cassirer, 1919), pp. 108-
109. 
25 Martin Buber, ‘Die Erneuerung des Judentums’, in Drei Reden über das Judentum (Frank-
furt a.M.: Literarische Anstalt Rütten & Loening, 1911), pp. 59-102 (p. 61). Translation 
(slightly modified) from On Judaism, ed. by Nahum Glatzer, trans. by Eva Jospe (New 
York: Schocken Books, 1967). 
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38 German Expressionist Drama and the Messianism of a Generation 
Hitler era. It was this dark German history, and the question of salvation from 
it, that shaped both Bloch’s and Benjamin’s theories of messianism. 
 Geist der Utopie (The Spirit of Utopia), the primary work of Bloch’s early 
philosophy, was written in the midst of the war and first published in 1918 (a 
second, revised edition appearing in 1923). It was at once the primary phi-
losophical product of and influence on Expressionist Messianism, for the 
philosophy of the young Bloch and the art and literature of the Expressionists 
are cut from the same cloth. Reading at many points like an Expressionist 
text, The Spirit of Utopia shares, as Michael Löwy has argued, in Expression-
ism’s modernist awareness, cultural criticism, revolutionary bent, and, of 
course, utopianism.26 Moreover, in a 1960 essay on Bloch, Adorno called 
Blochian philosophy even after The Spirit of Utopia the philosophy of Ex-
pressionism. Bloch’s thought still conforms to Expressionism, Adorno could 
claim four decades later, “in der Idee, die verkrustete Oberfläche des Lebens 
zu durchbrechen” (in its idea of breaking through the encrusted surface of 
life), in its railing against “die Verdinglichung der Welt” (the reification of 
the world). Even Bloch’s later philosophy, Adorno maintained, is articulated 
in language that bears the hallmarks of Expressionism.27 
 
26 See Michael Löwy, ‘Ernst Bloch and George Lukács Meet in Heidelberg’, in Yale Compan-
ion to Jewish Writing and Thought in German Culture 1096-1996, ed. by Sander L. Gilman 
and Jack Zipes (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), pp. 287-92 (pp. 289-90). 
27 Theodor W. Adorno, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. by Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhr-
kamp, 1970-1986), XI: Noten zur Literatur (1974), pp. 244-45. Translation from Notes to 
Literature, ed. by Rolf Tiedemann, trans. by Shierry Weber Nicholsen, 2 vols (New York: 
Columbia University Press, 1991-1992). For a more detailed discussion of the affinity be-
tween The Spirit of Utopia and Expressionist literature, as well as some differences between 
that literature and Bloch’s later philosophy, see Arno Münster, Utopie, Messianismus und 
Apokalypse im Frühwerk von Ernst Bloch (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1982), pp. 184-87. 
 It should be noted that, like most Expressionists, Bloch later showed some ambivalence 
toward the application of the label to himself. In a 1960 letter to his friend Hans Heinz Holz, 
he wrote: “Wieso ist Benjamin ein Expressionist? ja auch, wieso bin ich es, von einigen 
Verneigungen vor Franz Marc und was damit zusammenhängt abgesehen? Stilistisch? So 
schrieb ich schon, als es noch gar keine Expressionisten gab, als ich mindestens noch nie 
etwas von ihnen gehört hatte” (What makes Benjamin an Expressionist? For that matter, 
what makes me one, aside from a few nods to Franz Marc and related things? Stylistically? I 
was already writing that way before there were any Expressionists, or at least before I had 
heard anything about them). Quoted in Hans Heinz Holz, Logos spermatikos. Ernst Blochs 
Philosophie der unfertigen Welt (Darmstadt: Luchterhand, 1975), p. 53. Holz would likely 
take issue with Adorno’s characterization of Bloch’s Gesamtphilosophie; see Logos, pp. 62-
63. 
 If the persistence of something Expressionist in Bloch’s philosophy is somewhat controver-
sial, the persistence of the messianic in it, beyond The Spirit of Utopia, is not. This is not the 
place for an extended discussion of Bloch’s Thomas Münzer als Theologe der Revolution 
(Thomas Münzer as Theologian of the Revolution, 1921), but here too Bloch “hoped to con-
tribute to the future social revolution in Germany, which he perceived in messianic terms,” 
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 Jewish Messianism and the Philosophy of the Expressionist Era 39 
 The Spirit of Utopia defies simple description or summarization, as does 
the subject of the title, which is inherently universal: “alles Seiende hat 
seinen utopischen Stern im Blut” (everything that is has a utopian star in its 
blood).28 Bloch explores this spirit in connection with such diverse topics as 
drama, revolution, and Expressionist painting, among others. But his central 
focus is on music, philosophy, and the intersection of the two.29 Both are for 
Bloch not only utopian, but also innately messianic. Music is so by virtue of 
its “Kraft zur somnambulischen Offenbarung des innersten Wesens der Welt” 
(power to offer a somnambulic revelation of the world’s inmost essence). 
Bloch expounds later in the book upon the messianic nature of this particular 
revelation. Music, he writes, brings one into the “warme, tiefe, gotische Stube 
des Innern, die allein noch mitten in dem unklaren Dunkel leuchtet” (warm, 
deep Gothic sanctum which alone still shines in the uncertain darkness). Only 
the light shining from this sanctum can defeat the darkness of the current age, 
so that the sanctum itself will be “am jüngsten Morgen dasselbe wie das of-
fenbare Himmelsreich” (on the Morning of Judgment just the same as the 
revealed Kingdom of Heaven). Like music, philosophy too is innately messi-
anic, with the power “in der Welt, gegen die Welt und ihre bloße Tatsachen-
wahrheit die Spuren, die konzentrischen Promiskuitäten der Utopie zu 
suchen, zu beschleunigen, zu vollenden” (to find, to accelerate, to consum-
mate, in the world, against the world and its mere, factual truth, the traces, the 
concentric promiscuities of utopia).30 Music and philosophy come together, 
in their messianic particularities, as the foundation upon which Bloch builds 
his universal theory of utopia. But at the same time, they also stand in for all 
art and all reflection, as a foretaste of the messianic kingdom to come. For 
this reason, works of art should be interpreted “an der letztmöglichen 
Selbstbegegnung, am begriffenen Dunkel des gelebten Augenblicks, […] in 
der unkonstruierbaren, der absoluten Frage, im Wirproblem an sich selbst” 
(in the ultimate self-encounter, in the comprehended darkness of the livedmoment, […] in the inconstruable, absolute question, the problem of the We 
in itself).31 
 Selbstbegegnung and the Wirproblem will be important terms for our 
analysis, as they constitute a key link between Bloch’s philosophy and liter-
 
this time by paying tribute to the Russian Revolution as “the inheritor of the past heretical 
and millenarian movements” like that of Münzer. Löwy, ‘Heidelberg’, p. 290. 
28 Bloch, Werke, III: Geist der Utopie (1964), p. 217. 
29 For Bloch’s relationship to the music of Expressionism, see Tibor Kneif, ‘Ernst Bloch und 
der musikalische Expressionismus’, in Ernst Bloch zu ehren. Beiträge zu seinem Werk, ed. 
by Siegfried Unseld (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1965), pp. 277-326. 
30 Bloch, Werke, III, 195, 208, 260. 
31 Ibid., 13. 
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40 German Expressionist Drama and the Messianism of a Generation 
ary Expressionism. While the terms are certainly Bloch’s, their spirit perme-
ates and even necessitates poems like Heynicke’s “Volk” (“People”) or those 
collected in Werfel’s early volumes Der Weltfreund (The Friend of the 
World, 1911), Wir sind (We Are, 1913), and Einander (Each Other, 1915). 
Bloch and his literary contemporaries share an abiding concern for the Ich, as 
the subjectivity realized in the self-encounter, and for the Wir, as the inter-
subjectivity realized in a move “zur wirklichen religiösen Verbundenheit” 
(toward real religious affiliation).32 For Bloch and for the literary Expression-
ists, there is a task that follows from these concerns, as expounded in the 
opening passage of The Spirit of Utopia: “Ich bin. Wir sind. Das ist genug. 
Nun haben wir zu beginnen. In unsere Hände ist das Leben gegeben. Für sich 
selber ist es längst schon leer geworden. Es taumelt sinnlos hin und her, aber 
wir stehen fest” (I am. We are. That is enough. Now we have to begin. Life 
has been put in our hands. For itself it became empty already long ago. It 
pitches senselessly back and forth, but we stand firm).33 The remainder of 
Bloch’s introduction demonstrates that to stand firm in this way means to do 
so with a messianic desire that will not be abandoned in the face of prevailing 
societal and economic horrors but is in fact only strengthened by them. 
Standing firm, one is returned again and again to oneself, because “die Frage 
nach uns ist das einzige Problem, die Resultante aller Weltprobleme, und die 
Fassung dieses Selbst- und Wirproblems in allem, die weltdurchschwingende 
Eröffnung der Pforten der Heimkehr ist das letzthinnige Grundprinzip der 
utopischen Philosophie” (the question about us is the only problem, the resul-
tant of every world-problem, and to formulate this Self- and We-Problem in 
everything, the opening, reverberating through the world, of the gates of 
homecoming, is the ultimate basic principle of utopian philosophy).34 
Selbstbegegnung, then, means deeply processing one’s individual experiences 
in a mood of expectant desire turned toward the future, and in the context of a 
communal We. 
 For Bloch, true messianic desire implies an unwillingness to dwell en-
tirely within oneself and one’s own subjectivity (though many critics would 
go on to say that such an indulgent subjectivism was the downfall of many 
Expressionists35). Instead, Bloch posits his book as a turning point in the 
 
32 Bloch, Werke, III, 295. 
33 Ibid., 12. 
34 Ibid., 260. 
35 Expressionism scholar Wolfgang Paulsen is rather neutral in his assertion that “wohl zu 
keiner Zeit hat sich das schöpferische Ich so auf sich selbst zurückverwiesen” (in perhaps no 
other period did the creative self refer so often back to itself). Wolfgang Paulsen, Deutsche 
Literatur des Expressionismus, 2nd edn (Berlin: Weidler, 1998), p. 183. But other critics 
have been far less shy about denouncing “der extreme - an den Solipsismus grenzende - 
Subjektivismus” (a subjectivism that borders on solipsism) in Expressionism. Georg Lukács, 
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 Jewish Messianism and the Philosophy of the Expressionist Era 41 
course of subjective desire, the point at which it realizes its “unverlorene 
Erbe” (unlost heritage) and sets about its task. This task is “kein feiges Als 
Ob, kein wesensloser Überbau” (no cowardly “as if,” no pointless commen-
tary), but rather “das stets Gesuchte, die eine Ahnung, das eine Gewissen, das 
eine Heil; [es] hebt sich hervor aus unserem dennoch unzerrissenen Herzen, 
aus dem Tiefsten, Allerrealsten unseres Wachtraums” (the eternal goal, the 
one presentiment, the one conscience, the one salvation [that] rises from our 
hearts, unbroken in spite of everything, from the deepest part, that is, the 
realest part of our waking dream).36 The object of this waking dream is reso-
lute messianic force: Bloch will refer much later in the book to “die andau-
ernde Wachtraum-Konzentration auf ein reineres, höheres Leben, auf die 
Erlösung von Bosheit, Leere, Tod und Rätsel, auf die Gemeinschaft mit den 
Heiligen, auf die Wendung aller Dinge zum Paradies” (the constant concen-
tration of our waking dream on a purer, higher life, on a release from malice, 
emptiness, death and enigma, on communion with the saints, on all things 
turning into paradise). The waking dream examines itself “bis der Blick ge-
lungen ist: in die Seele, in das dritte Reich nach Stern und Götterhimmel” 
(until the gaze succeeds: into the soul, into the third kingdom after the stars 
and the heaven of the gods).37 In fact, the waking dream is one of the keys to 
the book as a whole, as its interpretation is for Bloch identical to the effectua-
tion of utopia. To create utopia is to turn one’s desire outward, to diverge 
radically from that which already exists. Bloch says of his generation: “das 
Rechte zu finden, um dessentwillen es sich ziemt zu leben, […] hauen wir die 
metaphysisch konstitutiven Wege, rufen was nicht ist, […] bauen uns ins 
Blaue hinein und suchen dort das Wahre, Wirkliche, wo das bloß Tatsäch-
liche verschwindet - incipit vita nova” (to find the right thing, for which it is 
worthy to live, […] we cut new, metaphysically constitutive paths, summon 
what is not, build into the blue […] and seek there the true, the real, where 
the merely factual disappears - incipit vita nova).38 
 Though the utopian desire that permeates Bloch’s book is conditioned by 
a present set of circumstances, he stresses that it is neither a newcomer to the 
historical scene nor a spontaneously willful creation ex nihilo, but conceived 
in direct relation to the messianic tradition. “[D]aß der Heiland lebt und 
wieder kommen will, dies ist nach wie vor unangreifbar verbürgt; aber er und 
 
‘Größe und Verfall des Expressionismus’, in Essays über Realismus (Neuwied: Luchter-
hand, 1971), pp. 109-49 (p. 144). All translations from this essay are from ‘Expressionism: 
its Significance and Decline’, in Essays on Realism, ed. Rodney Livingstone, transl. David 
Fernbach (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1980). 
36 Bloch, Werke, III, 13. Translation modified. 
37 Ibid., 216. 
38 Ibid., 13. 
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42 German Expressionist Drama and the Messianism of a Generation 
Gott selber haben […] die eigene Kraft, zu kommen, und scheinend zu 
wirken, eingebüßt” ([T]hat the Savior lives and wants to come again: this is 
then as now irrefutably vouchsafed to us; but He, and God Himself, like eve-
rything objective, have forfeited their own power of being able to come, and 
act visibly). Given this lossof direct, divine power, it is the task of the human 
being to seek out its own connection to God, and thus its salvation. Despite 
the crushing weight of God’s absence, humanity remains open, in all its ex-
pressive forms, to messianic time, even to the Apocalypse that will mark the 
end of this absence. Such an openness provides the ultimate link between all 
the separate strands of Bloch’s lengthy and variegated analysis, and this link 
in turn allows him to move even beyond music, beyond art, beyond philoso-
phy, to deem “die Seele, der Messias, die Apokalypse […] das Apriori aller 
Politik und Kultur” (the Soul, the Messiah, and the Apocalypse […] the a 
priori of all politics and culture). Most immediately, this kind of a priori rela-
tionship means that there is, for Bloch, something necessarily messianic in 
the very structure of political or artistic life. That structural relationship pro-
vides the motivation for human action, so that Bloch urges his readers “den 
Staat zur Begleitung der Brüdergemeinde zu zwingen und zuletzt das Korn 
der Selbstbegegnung zum fruchtbaren Erntefest der Apokalypse zu bringen” 
(to force the state to accompany our fraternal congregation, and finally to 
bring the grain of the self-encounter to the terrible harvest celebration of the 
Apocalypse).39 This, then, is the ultimate task not only of utopia, but also of 
an art or a politics that recognizes its own inherent messianism. 
 As indicated in the introductory chapter, what we are calling Expression-
ist Messianism consists not only in Expressionist texts themselves, but also in 
the reception of those texts, which often extended a messianic status to their 
authors; the fervor that followed the appearance of The Spirit of Utopia in 
1918 is a case in point. Bloch was praised for “die lichten Engelsräume seiner 
begnadeten Intuition, die aus der Nacht der Stunde sich bis zu den ersten auf-
gehellten Antlitzen des jüngsten Tages, dem Frühlicht und den singenden 
Morgenröten vom aufgedeckten Antlitz Gottes wölben” (the bright angelic 
rooms of his blessed intuition, vaulting out of the night of this hour up to the 
first illuminated sightings of the Last Judgment, up to the early light and 
singing dawns of the revealed countenance of God).40 The German-Jewish 
writer Margarete Susman, in a 1919 essay on Bloch in the Frankfurter Zei-
tung, wrote that the world would now be gripped, after Bloch’s book, by a 
new conscience with sweeping redemptory power.41 Herself an active writer 
 
39 Bloch, Werke, III, 203-204, 346. Translation modified. 
40 Walter Behrend, ‘Die Philosophie der Gottbeschwörung’, Saturn, 5 (1919/1920), 411-21 (p. 
416). 
41 Margarete Susman, ‘Geist der Utopie’, in Ernst Bloch zu ehren, pp. 383-94 (p. 387). 
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 Jewish Messianism and the Philosophy of the Expressionist Era 43 
during the Expressionist years, Susman further demonstrates in this essay 
Bloch’s impact on Expressionist style. Taking up the Selbstbegegnung and 
the Wirproblem, she writes: 
 
All unser Werk, unser Schaffen geht [den] Weg zu uns selbst. In jeder äußeren For-
mung, jedem Kunstwerk werfen wir uns selbst, die wir suchen, die wir noch nicht sind, 
voraus, halten uns darin von uns ab, um uns zu schauen. Aber alles Gestalthafte, Werk-
hafte ist gegenüber diesem letzten Wir noch vorläufig. So werden unsere Werke in die-
ser Zeit […] immer formfremder, immer unklassischer und unnaturalistischer zugleich, 
immer mehr wir selbst: unser eigenes fragendes, unruhiges Selbst. Dahin geht der Ex-
pressionismus.42 
(All our work, our creations, tread the path to ourselves. In every outward configura-
tion, in every work of art, we foreshadow ourselves, the ones we are seeking, the ones 
we have not yet become. We hold ourselves up that we might see ourselves. But every-
thing we create and form is only provisional against this final We. Thus, our works are 
becoming […] increasingly unformed, unclassical, and unnaturalistic - increasingly our-
selves: our own questioning, disquieted selves. This is the direction in which Expres-
sionism is going.) 
 
Indeed, many Expressionist writers were impacted by The Spirit of Utopia, 
receiving it even as a “rettende Tat” (redeeming act).43 In an article on 
Bloch’s book, the writer Friedrich Burschell - who tended generally toward 
programmatic pronouncements about the intellectual products of the time - 
called the philosopher (as opposed to the artist) “der Einzelne, der Bekannte, 
der Auserwählte und Berufene” (the One who is singled out, well-known, the 
chosen and called one). For Burschell, Bloch’s work was itself messianic, for 
it had sounded the hour “wo es sich entscheidet, ob die Menschen würdig 
sind, in die Zeit des kommenden Reiches einzutreten” (in which it will be 
decided whether humanity is worthy to enter into the time of the coming 
kingdom).44 
 The Spirit of Utopia shows a real affinity with literary Expressionism not 
only in the praise but also in the criticism it inspired. There is a striking paral-
lel, for instance, between Lukács’s pronouncement that Expressionism’s 
“außerordentliche Dürftigkeit des Inhalts […] steht in schreiendem Gegen-
satz zu der Prätention seines Vortrages, zu dem überspannten und über-
steigerten subjektiven Pathos seiner Darstellung” (extraordinary poverty of 
content stands in crying contrast to the pretension of its delivery, to the exag-
gerated and over-intense subjective emotionalism of its presentation),45 and 
 
42 Susman, p. 388. 
43 Ernst Blass, ‘Geist der Utopie’, Das junge Deutschland, 2 (1919), 63-67 (p. 64). 
44 Friedrich Burschell, ‘Der Geist der Utopie’, in Ernst Bloch zu ehren, pp. 375-81 (pp. 375-
76, 378). 
45 Lukács, ‘Größe’, p. 121. 
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44 German Expressionist Drama and the Messianism of a Generation 
the assessment that “Bloch’s central conception of utopia remained for all the 
bombast of its presentation remarkably empty of concrete content,” its “rest-
less plunder of past utopias and of non-harmonious art […] tamed and flat-
tened by a systematizing typology which does not even have the concreteness 
of historical chronology.”46 However, this lack of chronology springs primar-
ily from the fact that Bloch’s early utopianism, like much of the thought of 
the Expressionist era, is conditioned not by continuous historical time but by 
eruptive messianic time, a perspective which Bloch likely thought also justi-
fied his typological methods. But it goes without saying that such a perspec-
tive, along with the lack of content for which they were consistently chas-
tised, made it extremely difficult for the texts of Expressionism - philosophi-
cal or literary - to have any real or lasting impact on the course of political 
events. 
 If the young Bloch could be easily identified as an Expressionist philoso-
pher, his friend Benjamin could not. One might turn again to the judgment of 
Adorno, who, in a 1969 essay situating Benjamin “A l’écart de tous les cou-
rants,” stressed that Benjamin’s objectivism distinguished him markedly from 
Expressionism (a brief relationship with Hiller and his admiration of Paul 
Klee notwithstanding).47 Scholem, a close friend of Benjamin, confirms the 
distance at which Benjamin held himself from the Expressionists.48 And yet 
the place of the messianic in Benjamin’s writings, particularly on language 
and on history, continues to highlight thematic and structural correspon-
dences between philosophy and literature in the Expressionist era. 
 In the essay “Über Sprache überhaupt und über die Sprache des Men-
schen” (“On Language as Such and on the Language of Man,” 1916), Benja-
min highlights an inherent connection between the philosophyof language 
and the philosophy of religion. It is the concept of revelation (Offenbarung) 
that connects the two, because language is the site of struggle “des Aus-
gesprochenen und Aussprechlichen mit dem Unaussprechlichen und Unaus-
gesprochenen” (between what is expressed and expressible and what is inex-
pressible and unexpressed).49 But where does this conflict come from, and 
 
46 Michael Jones, ‘Expressionism and Philosophical Aesthetics: Bloch’s Geist der Utopie’, in 
Expressionism Reconsidered. Relationships and Affinities, ed. by Gertrud Bauer Pickar and 
Karl Eugene Webb (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1979), pp. 74-79 (p. 75). 
47 Theodor W. Adorno, Über Walter Benjamin. Aufsätze, Artikel, Briefe, ed. by Rolf Tiede-
mann, 2nd edn (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1990), p. 101. 
48 Gershom Scholem, Walter Benjamin. The Story of a Friendship, trans. by Harry Zohn 
(Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1981), pp. 65-66, 134. For Ben-
jamin as a staunch critic of Expressionism, see Rumold, pp. 110-17. 
49 Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. by Rolf Tiedemann & Hermann Schweppen-
häuser (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1974-1987), II: Aufsätze, Essays, Vorträge (1974), p. 
146. All translations from this essay are from ‘On Language as Such and on the Language of 
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 Jewish Messianism and the Philosophy of the Expressionist Era 45 
what might make the quest to resolve it a messianic one? Mankind first re-
ceived language, Benjamin says, from God after the Creation: “Gott ruhte, als 
er im Menschen sein Schöpferisches sich selbst überließ” (God rested when 
he had left his creative power to itself in man). Thus the very essence of hu-
manity is the language of the Creation.50 This “paradiesische Sprache” (para-
disiacal language), however, is shattered with the Fall of humankind. With 
the Fall, human language is introduced, and with it a new disunity between 
God and humans, since their prior unity had been bestowed in divine lan-
guage and known only that one language. Admitting that the Bible points to a 
later event (the construction of the tower of Babel in Genesis 11), Benjamin 
insists that the expulsion from Eden accounts for the multiplicity of human 
languages, for separation from the one word of God. It is with the Fall that 
language becomes mediated, words nothing more than signs. In the postlap-
sarian world, then, human language can only be “eingeschränkten und analy-
tischen Wesens” (limited and analytic [in nature]), can have no part any more 
in the “schaffend[e] Unendlichkeit des Gotteswortes” (creative infinity of the 
divine word). The analytic, thinking subject, for whom language is now noth-
ing but a means (Mittel), no longer has access to the “immanent[e] eigen[e] 
Magie” (immanent magic) of language as such.51 
 Having established the loss of linguistic unity with God and some of the 
immediate consequences of that loss, Benjamin moves on to the truly messi-
anic task (though he does not yet call it this) within his theory of language, 
namely the restoration of that unity in a utopian future.52 This desire for a 
restoration in the future - which recalls Scholem’s dialectical model of messi-
anism - is expressed, for Benjamin, throughout creation, on a continuum 
along which all language reaches toward God’s divine language, and thus 
toward the unity it has lost. The conclusion and résumé of Benjamin’s essay 
spells this out explicitly: 
 
Der Mensch teilt sich Gott durch den Namen mit, den er der Natur und seinesgleichen 
(im Eigennamen) gibt, und der Natur gibt er den Namen nach der Mitteilung, die er von 
ihr empfängt, denn auch die ganze Natur ist von einer namenlosen stummen Sprache 
durchzogen, dem Residuum des schaffenden Gotteswortes, welches im Menschen als 
erkennender Name und über dem Menschen als richtendes Urteil schwebend sich erhal-
 
Man’, trans. by Edmund Jephcott, in Selected Writings, ed. by Michael W. Jennings and 
others, (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1996-2002), I: 1913-1926, ed. by Marcus Bullock and 
Michael W. Jennings (1996), pp. 62-74. 
50 Benjamin, II, 149. For the Kabbalistic influences on this strand of Benjamin’s thinking 
about language, see Wolin, p. 40. 
51 Benjamin, II, 149-53. 
52 For Scholem’s influence on this paradigm in Benjamin, see Löwy, Redemption, pp. 99-100. 
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46 German Expressionist Drama and the Messianism of a Generation 
ten hat. […] Alle höhere Sprache ist Übersetzung der niederen, bis in der letzten Klar-
heit sich das Wort Gottes entfaltet, das die Einheit dieser Sprachbewegung ist.53 
(Man communicates himself to God through name, which he gives to nature and (in 
proper names) to his own kind; and to nature he gives names according to the commu-
nication that he receives from her, for all of nature, too, is imbued with a nameless, un-
spoken language, the residue of the creative word of God, which is preserved in man as 
the cognizing name and above man as the judgment suspended over him. […] All 
higher language is translation of lower ones, until in ultimate clarity the word of God 
unfolds, which is the unity of this movement made up of language.) 
 
The aim of the essay, then, is to demonstrate how all creation by its very na-
ture strives toward the divinity it has lost, precisely through the medium of its 
language. But it is more an inherent messianic desire Benjamin outlines here 
than the actual path along which particularly humans, via their language, 
might progress toward even the partial fulfillment of this desire. 
 That question would be taken up in “Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers” (“The 
Task of the Translator,” 1923), written five years later, and with far more 
direct reference to messianism this time. This later essay depends upon a 
number of ideas which Benjamin had introduced in “On Language,” includ-
ing the notion that the multiplicity of human languages is a direct result of the 
Fall and banishment from Eden, and that all language, with the exception of 
the divine language, is a translation of another. In individual languages, Ben-
jamin writes in the later essay, meaning is “in stetem Wandel begriffen, bis es 
aus der Harmonie all jener Arten des Meinens als die reine Sprache 
herauszutreten vermag” (in a constant state of flux - until it is able to emerge 
as the pure language from the harmony of all the various ways of meaning).54 
In bringing to light this continuous change, translation from one language 
into another allows the various languages to approach such an emergence into 
purity. 
 But there is an incalculable element in play here - and this is the crux of a 
Benjaminian understanding of messianism - for meaning remains hidden in 
the various languages as they grow “bis ans messianische Ende ihrer 
Geschichte” (until the messianic end of their history). This reference to a 
messianic end, always for Benjamin unknowable in some regard, underscores 
that this is not a question of human progress, of so many changes until at last 
we accomplish the task on our own. Our efforts, through language, to ap-
proach the restorative end are part of a larger process that also includes, from 
the human perspective, a very real helplessness. This is the first Benjaminian 
expression of the intractable paradox of the messianic. While translation - 
 
53 Benjamin, II, 157. 
54 Benjamin, IV: Aufsätze, Essays, Vorträge (1980), p. 14. All translations from this essay are 
from ‘The Task of the Translator’, trans. by Harry Zohn, in Selected Writings, I, pp. 253-63. 
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 Jewish Messianism and the Philosophy of the Expressionist Era 47 
and here one must keep in mind Benjamin’s broader notion of translation 
from “On Language,” extending beyond human languages to all of creation - 
contributes to “jenes heilige Wachstum der Sprachen” (the hallowed growth 
of languages), its contribution is only a provisional (vorläufige) one. Benja-
min admits that the task he assigns to translation, like most messianic tasks 
“scheint niemals lösbar” (seems to be insoluble); but it is also the best that 
humanity can hope for in any direct way. Translation strives toward “ein letz-
tes, endgültiges und entscheidendes Stadium aller Sprachfügung” (a final, 
conclusive, decisive stage of all linguistic creation), as the original “wächst 
[…] in einen gleichsam höheren und reineren Luftkreis der Sprache hinauf” 
(rises into a higher and purer linguistic air), where it points the way to “den 
vorbestimmten, versagten Versöhnungs- und Erfüllungsbereich der 
Sprachen” (the predestined, withheld realm of reconciliation and fulfillment 
of languages).55 That this realm is both predestined and withheld, both prom-
ised and held in abeyance, points up the paradox of the messianic. It is likely 
the case that Benjamin’s work on messianism outshines, and has outlasted, 
that of most of his contemporaries precisely because he keeps this paradox at 
the center of his project and consistently refuses to resolve it away. 
 The task of the translator is thus not an immediately, concretely realizable 
one. Benjamin formulates it, nonetheless, in the following ways. The transla-
tor integrates diverse languages by translating them toward (though not into) 
the word of God. Put differently, the translator’s task is this: “Jene reine 
Sprache, die in fremde gebannt ist, in der eigenen zu erlösen” (to release in 
his own language that pure language which is exiled among alien tongues).56 
Clearly, these reflections supplement the messianic view of language estab-
lished in the earlier essay, such that one can no longer be read without the 
other. 
 The Expressionist writers who were Benjamin’s contemporaries were 
criticized repeatedly for their naive belief that their texts themselves might be 
enough to point the way toward redemption, that the mere words they wrote 
and disseminated could inspire a revolutionary change in the course of his-
tory. It is true that the Expressionists were intensely attuned to the power of 
 
55 Benjamin, IV, 14-17. Translation modified. Zohn’s otherwise excellent translation renders 
“den vorbestimmten, versagten Versöhnungs- und Erfüllungsbereich der Sprachen” as “the 
predestined, hitherto inaccessible realm of reconciliation and fulfillment of languages” (p. 
257). I believe that withheld better approximates versagt in this context than does inaccessi-
ble. More importantly, Zohn’s hitherto is not present in the original, and as an addition un-
dermines the aporetic nature of this realm. In fact, Benjamin’s juxtaposition here of predes-
tination and withholding is absolutely unqualified - a fact upon which my argument de-
pends. 
56 Ibid., 16, 19. The verb erlösen certainly means ‘to release’ in this context, but carries simul-
taneous connotations of ‘to redeem.’ 
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48 German Expressionist Drama and the Messianism of a Generation 
language, and to the force of individual words, as evidenced by their often 
fragmented style with its short sentences, repetitive lexicon, and ubiquitous 
exclamation points. This style is, of course, nothing like Benjamin’s. But it 
does betray a conviction in the force of language, a force gravely lost and 
now to be reclaimed, which is not unrelated to Benjamin’s work from the 
same period. There is, however, a crucial distinction between Benjamin and 
his literary contemporaries in this regard. Richard Wolin writes that while 
works of art can be for Benjamin “prefigurements of reconciled life,” or can 
at least “yield affinities with a state of redeemed life, they nonetheless stop 
short of providing an ontological guarantee of this possibility.”57 It is fair to 
say that there was, for many writers of Expressionism, no such stopping 
short. 
 The Expressionists’ willing belief in such a redemptory possibility in lan-
guage (which is to say in literature) itself is partly a function of another belief 
they held: that they were living a radical turning point in history, an era of 
such degeneration and corruption that the only remaining possibility was a 
break in the historical continuum.58 This break, they further believed, would 
yield salvation in the form of a renewed individual and a redeemed society. 
These expectations too coincide in many respects with Benjamin, namely 
with his theory of history. Like Buber, Landauer, Rosenzweig, and many 
Expressionist writers, Benjamin too spurned rationalistic notions of progress 
in favor of a historical model that keeps open the possibility of messianic 
rupture.59 
 Situating Benjamin’s writings on history within the context of the Expres-
sionist period proves difficult. Certainly “Über den Begriff der Geschichte” 
(“On the Concept of History,” 1942), finished just a few months before his 
death in 1940, does not belong to the Expressionist era per se; its reflections 
are nonetheless germane to the Expressionist spirit. Indeed, the seeds of the 
theory set out there are found in the earlier “Theologisch-Politisches Frag-
ment” (“Theological-Political Fragment”). The executors of Benjamin’s es-
tate have differed as to when this text was composed (like “On the Concept 
of History,” it was published posthumously): Scholem believed it to be from 
the early 1920s, because of its resonance with Benjamin’s other work from 
this period; Adorno, based on the memory of a conversation with Benjamin, 
insisted upon a dating of 1937 or 1938. In either case, this puzzling text is the 
beginning of what would become “On the Concept of History.” 
 
57 Wolin, p. 21, 26. 
58 Scholem stresses the Talmudic principle that “der Messias komme nur in einem Zeitalter, 
das entweder ganz rein oder ganz schuldig und verworfen ist” (the Messiah will come only 
in an age which is either totally pure or totally guilty and corrupt). ‘Verständnis’, pp. 29-30. 
59 For the early seeds of this model in Benjamin’s thought, see Löwy, Redemption, pp. 97-99. 
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 Jewish Messianism and the Philosophy of the Expressionist Era 49 
 The Fragment begins with the same premise that figured so prominently 
in “The Task of the Translator” - that of an incalculable messianic end: “Erst 
der Messias selbst vollendet alles historische Geschehen, und zwar in dem 
Sinne, daß er dessen Beziehung auf das Messianische selbst erst erlöst, voll-
endet, schafft” (Only the Messiah himself completes all history, in the sense 
that he alone redeems, completes, creates its relation to the messianic). It is 
therefore impossible for history to exert full control over its own relationship 
to the messianic end, try as it might. This means that the messianic kingdom 
cannot be the goal of history, for there is a fundamental difference between a 
goal and an end (Ziel/Ende).60 Benjamin seems to be constructing a schema 
in which history cannot engage messianic time on its own terms. What then is 
the relationship of messianism to human existence? 
 Benjamin then introduces the two arrows (Pfeilrichtung) that would be-
come such a famous figure in his work. One, he says, designates “das Ziel, in 
welchem die Dynamis des Profanen wirkt” (the goal toward which the secu-
lar dynamic acts), the other “die Richtung der messianischenIntensität” (the 
direction of messianic intensity). These two arrows run counter to one an-
other; however, “wie eine Kraft durch ihren Weg eine andere auf ent-
gegengesetzt gerichtetem Wege zu befördern vermag, so auch die profane 
Ordnung des Profanen das Kommen des messianischen Reiches” (just as a 
force, by virtue of the path it is moving along, can augment another force on 
the opposite path, so the secular order - because of its nature as secular - 
promotes the coming of the Messianic Kingdom).61 Although history itself 
may not willfully have anything to do with the messianic, it does, by the very 
nature of its course, hasten the coming of the messianic end. 
 Yet none of this erases or even mitigates the incalculability of the messi-
anic itself. There is an end to be reached and even hastened (in an inevitable 
sort of way), but the timing and circumstances of that end remain a secret. 
The notion of this secrecy, though, is only taken up as such later, in the theses 
“On the Concept of History.” Here Benjamin writes that the past “führt einen 
heimlichen Index mit, durch den sie auf die Erlösung verwiesen wird” (car-
ries with it a secret index by which it is referred to redemption). While we are 
aware of this index, we cannot really know anything about it, by virtue of its 
secrecy. Benjamin describes that situation this way: “Dann ist uns wie jedem 
Geschlecht, das vor uns war, eine schwache messianische Kraft mitgegeben, 
an welche die Vergangenheit Anspruch hat” (Then, like every generation that 
preceded us, we have been endowed with a weak messianic power, a power 
 
60 Benjamin, II, 203. All translations from this essay are from ‘Theological-Political Frag-
ment’, trans. by Edmund Jephcott, in Selected Writings, III: 1935-1938, ed. by Howard 
Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (2002), pp. 305-306. 
61 Ibid., 203-204. 
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50 German Expressionist Drama and the Messianism of a Generation 
on which the past has a claim).62 In making secrecy the modifier of an index 
(itself a figure for clarity), weakness the modifier of power, Benjamin under-
scores again the paradox of any messianic thinking. 
 Just as the arrows running in opposite directions are the key figure in the 
Fragment, the notion of messianic time is embodied in “On the Concept of 
History” in the famous figure of the angel of history. The angel’s face, Ben-
jamin says, is turned toward the past, such that whereas humans see the future 
lying ahead, the angel sees “eine einzige Katastrophe, die unablässig Trüm-
mer auf Trümmer häuft und sie ihm vor die Füße schleudert” (one single ca-
tastrophe, which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it at his 
feet). Faced with this, the angel would like to usher in the messianic end, “die 
Toten wecken und das Zerschlagene zusammenfügen” (awaken the dead, and 
make whole what has been smashed).63 But he is prevented from doing so by 
a storm “vom Paradiese her, der sich in seinen Flügeln verfangen hat und so 
stark ist, daß der Engel sie nicht mehr schließen kann” (from Paradise [that] 
has got caught in his wings; it is so strong that the angel can no longer close 
them). This storm would seem at first to be identical to the incalculability we 
have been following, that which keeps history moving forward even when a 
rupture in the continuum seems imminent in the face of so much suffering. 
But in fact, Benjamin says that the storm driving the angel forward is “[d]as, 
was wir den Fortschritt nennen” ([w]hat we call progress).64 Are we now to 
understand that it is not divine incalculability that keeps the Messiah from 
appearing even when he would seem to be at hand, but instead the human and 
societal drive toward progress? If the secular order, in pursuing its course, 
hastens the coming of the messianic order at least somewhat (sheerly by vir-
tue of physics), as posited in the Fragment, then why does the pursuit of 
(secular, it may be assumed) progress prevent the coming of the messianic 
order, despite the will of the angel of history? 
 When the word progress reappears later in the theses, one gains more 
insight into what is meant by this word at the heart of Benjamin’s historical-
materialist critique.65 The concept of history his theses are pursuing proceeds, 
he says, from a political development (the Hitler-Stalin Pact) in which the 
 
62 Benjamin, I: Abhandlungen (1977), pp. 693-94. All translations from this essay taken from 
‘On the Concept of History’ trans. by Harry Zohn, in Selected Writings, IV: 1938-1940, ed. 
by Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (2002): pp. 389-400. On this weakness, see 
Agamben, pp. 97, 139-40. 
63 Benjamin, I, 697. For the imagery of brokenness made whole, see Scholem’s discussion of 
Tikkun, ‘Verständnis’, pp. 30-31. 
64 Ibid., 698. 
65 For the problematic nature of Benjamin’s relationship to historical materialism at this stage 
and in this text, see Ronald Beiner, ‘Walter Benjamin’s Philosophy of History’, Political 
Theory, 12 (1984), 423-34. 
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 Jewish Messianism and the Philosophy of the Expressionist Era 51 
“sture Fortschrittsglaube” (stubborn faith in progress) of the (Soviet) politi-
cians had led them to betray the cause and enable the Fascists. It was pro-
gress, as well, that had fostered the “Illusion, die Fabrikarbeit […] stelle eine 
politische Leistung dar” (the illusion that the factory work […] constituted a 
political achievement). Thus Benjamin insists that one weigh “die Rück-
schritte der Gesellschaft” (the retrogression of society) brought by any sup-
posed progression.66 
 In short, Benjamin’s problem with the notion of progress embodied in the 
politics of his time is that it implies a progression (Fortgang) through “eine 
homogene und leere Zeit” (a homogenous, empty time). The time of history, 
by contrast, “ist Gegenstand einer Konstruktion, deren Ort nicht die ho-
mogene und leere Zeit sondern die von Jetztzeit erfüllte bildet” (the subject 
of a construction whose site is not homogenous, empty time, but time filled 
full by now-time). And now-time is what subsumes, “als Modell der messi-
anischen in einer ungeheueren Abbreviatur die Geschichte der ganzen 
Menschheit” (as a model of messianic time, […] the entire history of man-
kind in a tremendous abbreviation). Thus the present, when liberated from the 
homogenizing lens of historicism, can be viewed as now-time “in welcher 
Splitter der messianischen eingesprengt sind” (shot through with splinters of 
messianic time).67 Benjamin’s view of history, unlike traditional historicism, 
insists that the power of the messianic now be retained as an integral part of 
the whole. Not only is this view more attuned to the possibility of revolution-
ary action and thus restoration of the historically oppressed (a central facet of 
Benjamin’s historical materialism), it is also more reflective of the messianic 
experience in Judaism (which might explain why so many of Benjamin’s 
Jewish contemporaries were beginning to think about history in remarkably 
similar ways). The theses end with Benjamin’s famous pronouncement that, 
for Jews, time projected toward the future has never been homogenous, 
empty time, because “in ihr war jede Sekunde die kleine Pforte, durch die der 
Messias treten konnte” (every second was the small gateway in time through 
which the Messiah might enter).68 Hopeful expectation is thus the gift of 
now-time, which makes room for the messianic. 
 The reading of Expressionist literature developed in the subsequent chap-
ters depends upon a conception of time and of history very much like the one 
put forth by Benjamin. Among the revolutionaries he references in this de-66 Benjamin, I, 698-99. Wolin notes that Benjamin’s actual plan for the theses was “a much 
more intricate and developed critique of the ideal of ‘progress’ in general - in both its 
Enlightenment and materialist variants” (p. 259). 
67 Ibid., 701-704. 
68 Ibid., 704. See also Agamben, p. 71. 
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52 German Expressionist Drama and the Messianism of a Generation 
velopment are those of the Spartacus League,69 whose cause was contempo-
rary with and taken up by many of the Expressionists (see chapter 6 of this 
study). Certainly the spirit of socialist revolution that helped to shape the 
Expressionist ethos is a part of what drives Benjamin’s critique. Most of all, 
though, Expressionism’s openness to the possibility of apocalypse and re-
demption at any moment resonates in the extreme with Benjamin’s concept of 
messianic history. As a result, the Expressionists bear a real affinity to Ben-
jamin’s angel of history. While others in society (bourgeois industrialists, for 
example) looked optimistically toward the future, Expressionist culture 
looked upon the ruins of the past, piled up into an unbearable present, and 
decided that the time had come to awaken the dead, to stop the ruins from 
piling up, and to begin a new age of restoration. 
 
 
 
69 See Benjamin, I, 700. 
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Chapter 2 – The Hebrew Scriptures and Jewish Messianism in 
Expressionist Literature 
 
RABBI ZADDOK. Es ist zu viel! […] 
Ich allein kann den stürzenden Berg nicht 
halten… 
DER HOHE PRIESTER. Oh, diese 
Schande! [...] warum lebe ich!? 
RABBI ZADDOK. Das will ich dir sa-
gen, Priester des Volks! Du lebst für den 
großen Tag morgen, wo du Gott mit Isra-
el versöhnen mußt. 
-- Franz Werfel, Paulus unter den Juden1 
 
RABBI ZADDOK. It is too much! […] I 
cannot hold back this crumbling moun-
tain alone… 
THE HIGH PRIEST. Oh, this shame! 
[…] why I am alive? 
RABBI ZADDOK. I will tell you that, 
Priest of the People! You are living for 
the great tomorrow, when you must rec-
oncile Israel with God. 
-- Franz Werfel, Paul Among the Jews 
 
 
Chronologically and often perspectivally aligned with the philosophical texts 
discussed in the previous chapter, the literature of German Expressionism 
likewise borrows from, comments on, and responds to the messianic tradition 
in Judaism. In examining such moments in Expressionist literature, this chap-
ter follows the model of canonization for the Hebrew Scriptures, or Tanakh: 
motifs with their source in the Torah are analyzed first, followed by those 
from the Nevi’im or Prophets, and then by those from the Ketuvim or Writ-
ings. 
 
 
 
 
 
1 Franz Werfel, Gesammelte Werke. Die Dramen, ed. by Adolf Klarmann (Frankfurt a.M.: S. 
Fischer, 1959), pp. 516-17. 
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54 German Expressionist Drama and the Messianism of a Generation 
Eden/Paradise 
 
If, as the philosophers of the Expressionist age posited, all of human history 
and experience takes place in messianic time, then the messianic itself begins 
with the origin story of Eden (even if the beginnings of messianism come 
much later in canonized Scripture). In Expressionist literature, Eden is a dual-
istic symbol both of a former ideal state of existence, and of the loss of that 
state when God drives humanity from the Garden, protecting its entrance 
with sword-bearing cherubim. Thus, as for Benjamin and other messianic 
thinkers, the Eden motif is for Expressionist writers an embodiment of the 
quest to overcome estrangement and restore unity with God (a word which 
often functions symbolically rather than literally within this structure). Here 
too a dialectical relationship exists between past and future, between restora-
tion and utopia. 
 Whether as a symbol of human-divine unity or as a specific mytho-
historical locus, Eden is commonly conflated with the notion of paradise. 
Paradise is the goal at the center of the Activist movement (Aktivismus), 
which is, depending on one’s perspective, either contemporaneous with, a 
branch of, or a faction of Expressionism.2 From the time Hiller co-founded 
the movement and its organ, Das Ziel: Jahrbücher für geistige Politik (The 
Goal: Yearbook for Intellectual Politics, 1916-1924), the Activists focused 
on political activity above all else. The titular goal of the journal was identi-
fied, in Hiller’s manifesto “Überlegungen zur Eschatologie und Methodolo-
gie des Aktivismus” (“Reflections on the Eschatology and Methodology of 
Activism,” 1919), as the establishment of an earthly paradise: 
 
Das Ziel war, das Ziel bleibt: leben im Paradiese. […] Adam will wieder in den Garten 
hinein. […] Das Paradies ist das endliche Symbol für einen unendlichen Gedanken […]. 
[Z]u allen Zeiten, im Schoß aller Völker haben Menschen gewirkt für ein diesseitiges 
Himmelreich, für die Schöpfung eines seligen Seins im Real; im Handgreiflichen, 
Räumlichen, Endlichen; für das Reich Gottes auf Erden.3 
(The goal was, the goal remains: to live in paradise. […] Adam wants to return to the 
Garden. […] Paradise is the finite symbol for an infinite idea […]. [A]t all times, in the 
bosom of all peoples, individuals have worked for an earthly kingdom of heaven; for the 
creation of a blessed existence in the real, in the tangible, spatial, finite; for the kingdom 
of God on earth.) 
 
2 For early seminal contributions to the debate between these perspectives, see Wolfgang 
Paulsen, Aktivismus und Expressionismus: Eine typologische Untersuchung (Bern: Gotthelf, 
1935) and Wolfgang Rothe, Der Aktivismus 1915-1920 (Munich: dtv, 1969). For later com-
mentary on the debate, see Juliana Habereder, Kurt Hiller und der literarische Aktivismus 
(Frankfurt a.M.: Peter Lang, 1981), pp. 21-31 and Seth Taylor, Left-Wing Nietzscheans. The 
Politics of German Expressionism 1910-1920 (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1990), pp. 61-62. 
3 Hiller, ‘Überlegungen’, pp. 195-96. 
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The Hebrew Scriptures and Jewish Messianism in Expressionist Literature 55 
Activism’s quest for an earthly paradise stands in direct contrast, according to 
Hiller, with other, more passive forms of messianic desire. He defines his 
model of utopian restoration through political activity vis-à-vis those who 
envision redemption as the result of aesthetic innovation. Paradise, Hiller 
warns, is unattainable without political activity. He directs biting sarcasm at 
those of his contemporaries who are unwilling to translate their longing into 
such activity: 
 
Also wir sollen abwarten. Stumme Hunde. Passivisch. Bis der Messias kommt. Der gro-
ße Gesetzgebende. Der Eine, in dessen Person durch Gottes Fügung höchster Geist und 
höchste Macht zusammenfließen. Wir sollen auf die Weltregierung vertrauen und der 
bauenden Menschenvernunft zum Verzicht auf Entfaltung jeder Aktivität raten, da 
menschliche Freiheit hier doch nichts vermag.4 
(So we should wait. Mute dogs. Passive. Until the Messiah comes. The great lawgiver. 
The One in whom, through God’s foreordination, the highest spirit and the highest 
power coalesce. We should trust in the governments of the world and advise our grow-
ing powers of reason against the development of all activity, since human freedom can 
do nothing in this regard.) 
 
Hiller consistently prioritizes “Geschichte machen” (making history) over 
“Gedichte machen” (making poems),5 since the renewal of the world is not a 
matter of “lyrische Träume” (lyrical dreams).6 Thus theActivists do not ask 
“ob das Himmelreich nahe sei, sondern bemühen wir uns, es herbeizuführen” 
(whether the kingdom of God is near; rather, we strive to effectuate it).7 It is 
not the case, however, that Activism’s striving has no place for literature and 
the arts; paradise is in fact, among other things, “die legitime Stätte der Küns-
te” (the legitimate locus of the arts). Hiller’s problem with the cultural prod-
ucts of his time is that they have a “gänzlich artistischen und garnicht poli-
tischen Effekt” (completely artistic and in no way political effect).8 
 The response to this charge came primarily from Werfel, who, in an open 
letter to Hiller published in 1917, decried Activism as a “Politisierung der 
Literatur” (politicization of literature). Assailing Hiller’s stated goal of a 
paradise on earth, Werfel argued that such a paradise is “erst durch ein Bünd-
nis mit dem bösen Geist der Erde möglich” (only possible in alliance with the 
unholy spirit of the earth). For him, the Activists were reducing redemption 
 
4 Hiller, ‘Überlegungen’, p. 205. 
5 Kurt Hiller, Die Weisheit der Langenweile. Eine Zeit- und Streitschrift, 2 vols (Leipzig: Kurt 
Wolff, 1913), I, p. 121. 
6 Hiller, ‘Überlegungen’, pp. 195, 210. 
7 Kurt Hiller, ‘Philosophie des Ziels (1915)’, in Verwirklichung des Geistes im Staat. Beiträge 
zu einem System des logokratischen Aktivismus (Leipzig: Ernst Oldenburg, 1925), pp. 25-51 
(p. 25). 
8 Ibid., pp. 34, 37. 
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56 German Expressionist Drama and the Messianism of a Generation 
to something “die außerhalb des Menschen sich vollzieht […] durch Organi-
sation, Volkswirtschaft, Politik usw.” (that takes place outside of the human 
being, […] through organization, economics, politics, etc.).9 This is not, for 
Werfel, the kind of redemption that restores humankind to an Edenic state. 
 Indeed, the paradise motif is aligned, in much Expressionist literature, not 
with political activity so much as with the messianic quest of the individual 
soul. Kaiser makes particularly extensive use of the motif, positing Eden as 
both a restorative utopian locus and a figure for the loss of human-divine 
unity. In the 1919 essay “Mythos,” Kaiser writes: 
 
Vom Fruchtbaum des Gartens Eden fällt die verbotene Frucht in die ungehorsam ver-
langenden Hände der ersten Menschen – und was nun geschieht, wird wie rasch über 
den ganzen Welthimmel auftürmende Gewitterwolke, aus der Blitz schlägt, furchtbar: 
Einheit ist zerschnitten – und das Menschenwesen in Trieb und Vernunft zweigeteilt.
10
 
(From the fruit-tree of the Garden of Eden, the forbidden fruit falls into the disobedient, 
demanding hands of the first humans – what happens here becomes (how quickly!) a 
storm-cloud looming in the skies above the whole world, tremendous lightning flashing 
from it: Unity is cut – and the human is split into instinct and reason.) 
 
Though without the explicit focus on language, Kaiser takes up much the 
same split that occupies Benjamin with respect to the Fall: in its separation 
from God, humanity is alienated from itself, as well, as a now differently 
thinking subject. Kaiser continues: “Buntem Paradiesbaum pflückt kecke 
Menschenhand Frucht aus - und sausender Engel verweist mit donnerndem 
Schwert in ewige Zerrüttung” (From the bright tree of Paradise the brash hu-
man hand picks fruit - and a rustling angel points the way, with a thundering 
sword, to eternal disruption).11 Kaiser’s dramatic work falls in line with the 
sentiment expressed here, engaging again and again the eternal nature of hu-
mankind’s estrangement, even while seeking to overcome it. 
 The Eden motif figures most prominently in the play Von morgens bis 
mitternachts (From Morn Till Midnight, 1916), which would become one of 
Kaiser’s most famous works. Like other Expressionist station plays, From 
Morn Till Midnight portrays the chain of events by which an individual es-
capes an unfulfilling existence and pursues a better life. The individual is in 
this case an unnamed cashier working in a provincial German bank. The bank 
seems to him a prison, and his home life is one of equal confinement: “Alte 
Mutter am Fenster. Töchter am Tisch stickend […]. Frau die Küche besor-
 
9 Franz Werfel, Gesammelte Werke. Zwischen Oben und Unten. Prosa, Tagebücher, Apho-
rismen, literarische Nachträge, ed. by Adolf Klarmann, 2nd edn (Munich: Langen Müller, 
1975), pp. 565, 567. 
10 Kaiser, Werke, IV, 555. 
11 Ibid., 555. 
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The Hebrew Scriptures and Jewish Messianism in Expressionist Literature 57 
gend. Von vier Wänden umbaut – Familienleben. […] Morgens Kaffee, mit-
tags Koteletts. Schlafkammer – Betten, hinein – hinaus” (My old mother at 
the window. Daughters stitching at the table […]. Wife tending to the 
kitchen. Surrounded by four walls – domesticity. […] Coffee in the morning, 
cutlets in the afternoon. Bedroom – beds, in – out). This existence brings 
thoughts of impending death: “Zuletzt – auf dem Rücken – steif und weiß. 
Der Tisch wird hier an die Wand gerückt – ein gelber Sarg streckt sich 
schräg” (In the end – on one’s back – stiff and pale. That table will be moved 
against the wall – a yellow coffin will be stretched out). Breaking free of this 
confinement, the cashier will feel himself emerging from a cemetery (Fried-
hof), out of a grave (Grabe).12 
 The cashier’s escape from his old life begins with the entrance of a 
woman into the bank where he works. An Italian traveling through Germany, 
she is defined by exoticism and eroticism, her furs, silks, and perfume draw-
ing great attention. When she makes an unsuccessful attempt to withdraw 
money from the bank, the cashier embezzles sixty-thousand marks from the 
coffers and takes it to her hotel room. There he learns what the money is for: 
the woman and her son, an art historian, want to buy Cranach’s famous paint-
ing of Adam and Eve in the Garden, which the art historian calls “zweifellos 
die erste und einzige erotische Figuration des ersten Menschenpaares […] im 
Paradies selbst […] und nicht nach der Verstoßung” (without doubt the first 
and only erotic figuration of the first human couple […] in Paradise itself 
[…] and not after the expulsion).13 Studying the image, which has now been 
established as utterly prelapsarian, the cashier experiences a powerful mo-
ment of identification. The statement that indicates this - “Ich bin im Bilde!” 
- operates on three levels of signification. The first is the level on which the 
cashier sees himself in the painting’s figuration of Adam, feeling his kinship 
with the first man who stands in for all men. The second depends on the 
idiomatic meaning of the German phrase, best rendered in English as “I get 
the picture” or “Now I see”; clearly this is a breakthrough station in the cash-
ier’s understanding of himself and his quest. Third, this use of “Bilde” (as 
opposed to Bild) evokes an association with the word used repeatedly in the 
Book of Genesis (1:27; 5:1; 9:6) to describe God’s creation of humans in his 
own image or likeness (ihm zum Bilde, zum Bilde Gottes, nach dem Bilde 
Gottes, zu seinem Bilde). Thus the cashier’s epiphanic identification with 
Adam is also an identification with God, one which spurs him on to recover 
himself as an image of God and to restore unity with God. 
 
12 Kaiser, Werke, I: Stücke, 1895-1917 (1971), pp. 486, 488. 
13 Kaiser, I, 475. For the dubiousness of the art historian’s interpretation of the painting, see 
H.J. Schueler, ‘The Symbolism of Paradise in Georg Kaiser’s Von morgens bis mitter-
nachts’, Neophilologus, 68 (1984), 98-104 (p. 99). 
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58 German Expressionist Drama and the Messianism of a Generation 
 As Adam, and in keeping with the characterization of the painting as an 
erotic figuration, the cashier believes that unity with God will be achieved 
through unity with Eve. The Eve-role is filled by the Italian woman standing 
beside him before the painting, as the cashier points out similarities between 
the woman in the painting and the woman in the flesh. The art historian’s 
interpretation now takes on even greater significance: in this painting, so 
unlike other stiff (steif) depictions of Adam and Eve, “zeigt sich ein deutscher 
Meister [Cranach] als Erotiker von südlichster, allersüdlichster Emphatik!” (a 
German master [Cranach] shows himself to be an amorist of most thoroughly 
southern emphaticness!) Indulging in the stereotypically southern erotic ap-
peal of the Italian woman, this staid, German cashier asks her to run away 
with him, but is rebuffed.14 
 In his identification with Adam, an example of what Bloch would call the 
Selbstbegegnung in light of which all art must be interpreted, the unnamed 
cashier represents humanity in its desperate quest to regain paradise. That he 
equates the Italian woman with Eve is unsurprising: it is she who has 
‘tempted’ him to his crime of theft, and she is the ‘first woman’ to figure in 
his pursuit of redemption. The cashier’s desire for erotic union with her is 
established also as a desire to reclaim prelapsarian union between God and 
humanity. Her rejection of this desire points up the extreme difficulty, per-
haps even impossibility, of recovering the harmony and unity of Eden. None-
theless, the cashier will continue in his quest, the subsequent stations of 
which will be examined here in the sections and chapters that follow. 
 
 
The Flood 
 
Toller closes his play Hinkemann (1923) with the words, “Jeder Tag kann das 
Paradies bringen, jede Nacht die Sintflut” (Each day can bring Paradise, each 
night the Flood),15 stressing the fact that in postlapsarian experience, para-
disal imagery can scarcely be separated from that of catastrophic destruction. 
Even as the descendants of Adam and Eve seek to reclaim Edenic perfection, 
they are aware that there can be no utopian restoration absent a destruction of 
the current order. According to a messianic conception of human history, the 
darkness and chaos of such destruction are not the polar opposite of Eden’s 
light and harmony, but instead a stage through which humankind must pass in 
order to reattain paradise. The Torah’s first major motif of such destruction is 
the Flood: according to Genesis, God regrets having created the humans who 
 
14 Kaiser, I, 475-80. 
15 Toller, Werke, II, 247. 
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The Hebrew Scriptures and Jewish Messianism in Expressionist Literature 59 
have grown so evil, and decides to purge them from the earth. Thus, though 
the destruction of the Flood is pre-apocalyptic in a strict chronological sense, 
it is apocalyptic in spirit and proportion, since it represents the obliteration of 
the old, corrupt order in the name of a new beginning for the earth. 
 The Flood narrative provides the basis for Barlach’s play Die Sündflut 
(The Flood, 1924). In the play as in the biblical account, God regrets having 
created humankind, which now lives no longer in his image (with the excep-
tion of Noah), but in a distorted and wicked state. Barlach gives Noah an ex-
tra-biblical counterpart in the character of Calan. Calan embodies the human 
callousness that engenders God’s regret; he thanks God for giving him 
“Augen, die Blut zu sehen nicht blendet, Ohren, in die kein Grausen eingeht, 
wenn blutende Kinder schreien” (eyes that are not blinded at the sight of 
blood, ears that experience no horror when bleeding children scream).16 
Noah, meanwhile, feels radically out of place in his corrupted time, and is 
thus quite preoccupied with time itself. In the conversation in which God tells 
him to build the ark, Noah laments: “Ach, die Zeit – wie lange Zeit verging 
seit früher […] – die Zeit – ach die Zeit ist auf flinken Füßen vorwärts 
gegangen, und ich, ich fliehe so gern zu verlorenen alten Tagen zurück” (Oh, 
the time – what a long time has passed […] – the time – oh, the time has gone 
forward on swift feet, and I, I flee so gladly back to the lost days of old). God 
shares Noah’s concern with the powerful progression of the time - “Die ver-
gangene Zeit hat mich vergessen, und ich habe sie verloren […]. Ja, die 
Zeiten sind andere geworden” (The time that has passed has forgotten me, 
and I have lost it […]. Yes, the times are different now) - as well as Noah’s 
longing for a restoration. God says that, with the Flood, “Ich finde mich 
zurück in meine Zeit, die vergangenen Tage finde ich wieder” (I will find my 
way back to my time; I will find again those days gone by).17 
 As the Flood approaches, the play’s concern with time becomes increas-
ingly prophetic and apocalyptic. Noah tells his sons: “Die Zeichen mehren 
sich, die Zeit reift” (The signs are increasing; the time is ripening).18 A num-
ber of characters then begin to repeat, almost obsessively, the phrase “die 
Zeit ist reif” (the time is ripe),19 i.e., for an interruption of the historical con-
tinuum. Having heard the gathering storms that will bring this interruption, 
Noah’s son Japhet highlights the apocalyptic nature of the event: “Es war wie 
eine Posaune, und die alte Zeit fiel um” (It was like a trumpet, and the old era 
was toppled). Once the destruction has set in, Calan’s servant details its grue-
 
16 Ernst Barlach, Das dichterische Werk, ed. by Walter Muschg and others (Munich: R. Piper, 
1956-1959), I: Die Dramen, ed. by Klaus Lazarowicz (1956), p. 323. 
17 Barlach, Werk, I, 345-49. 
18 Ibid., 362. 
19 Ibid., 367, 369, 373, 379. 
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60 German Expressionist Drama and the Messianism of a Generation 
some totality. Animals drift along in the floodwaters, “ihre Beine schlottern, 
und die Köpfe mit offenen Mäulern hängen fußwärts. […] Alles Fleisch, 
Mensch und Vieh, alles ist ohne Lust, ohne Laut, einzig meine Ohren tragen 
den Jammer des Tals in sich - alles Fleisch ist verdorben” (their legs tremble 
and their heads hang, open-mouthed, toward their feet. [...]. All flesh, man 
and beast, all is without energy, without sound; my ears alone bear the lament 
of the valley - all flesh is rotted). The Flood stands as an early model for an 
apocalyptic catastrophe in which God interrupts time and exacts justice. Bar-
lach’s Noah says: “Gottes Walten ist gerecht, aber seine Gewalt ist über die 
Kraft meiner Augen, sie ertragen nicht den Anblick seines Tuns” (God’s ac-
tions are just, but his oppression is above the strength of my eyes; they cannot 
bear the sight of his deed).20 
 
 
Sacrifice 
 
According to the Torah, the descendants of Noah who repopulated the earth 
after the Flood were given a number of laws by which to live, including those 
governing sacrifices to God. Sacrifices performed for the expiation of sin and 
guilt, in particular, fall in line with the biblical themes outlined above, in that 
they seek the human’s reconciliation to God. Such sacrifices involved cattle, 
sheep, goats, or birds, which were killed or dismembered and burned.21 
 Werfel’s play Bocksgesang (Goat Song, 1921) can be read as an extended 
study of the specific sacrifice performed on the Day of Atonement. Admit-
tedly, the play’s notion of sacrifice is not, on its face, a Jewish one, as the 
title indicates: Bocksgesang is a literal translation of the Greek τραγωδίā, so 
called eitherbecause the chorus (Werfel includes one in his dramatis perso-
nae) wore goat masks, or in reference to the role of Greek tragedy in offering 
sacrifice and worship to the gods. Werfel’s play refers to a number of tradi-
tions at once, as animal sacrifice constitutes an atonement ritual in ancient 
Judaism, in ancient Greek religion, and (via the Greeks) in ancient Eastern 
Orthodox Christianity. While the latter tradition will be the particular back-
drop for Goat Song, which takes place in a Slavonic territory (though at the 
beginning of the nineteenth century rather than in ancient times), the other 
traditions will be implicated strongly in Werfel’s thematization. 
 The play’s first plotline centers on the family of the wealthy landowner 
Gospodar (Slavonic: “lord”) Stevan Milič. He and his wife are hiding a 
 
20 Barlach, Werk, I, 364, 367, 382. 
21 See Christopher T. Begg, ‘Sacrifice’, in The Oxford Companion to the Bible, ed. by Bruce 
M. Metzger and Michael D. Coogan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 666-67. 
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The Hebrew Scriptures and Jewish Messianism in Expressionist Literature 61 
shameful secret: locked away on their property in a small heated stall, “der 
verbotene Ort der Furcht und des Wegschauens” (the forbidden place of fear 
and aversion), is their firstborn, a creature bearing both human and animal 
characteristics. The audience is never sure exactly what this beast looks like, 
as it never appears on the stage. Described as a “Halbmensch” (half-human) 
and a “mißlungenes Halbgeschöpf” (miscarried half-creature), it is said to 
walk sometimes on two legs and sometimes on four.22 When the couple’s 
other child, Mirko (who is fully human and does not know of his sibling), is 
ready to be married and inherit the family’s wealth, Stevan decides, after 
much agonizing, to kill his beastly son, for the sake of future generations. 
Stevan has referred, in sharing his decision with his wife, to the biblical story 
of Abraham and Isaac. Accordingly, the beast is spared from the slaughter, 
though not in the same manner as Isaac: it escapes its stall and runs free at the 
end of the first act.23 
 This event puts one in mind of the atonement sacrifice detailed in Leviti-
cus 16, in which a scapegoat is sent into the wilderness with the sins of the 
people upon it. Clearly this monstrous offspring represents to its parents their 
own uncleanness and iniquity. The crucial difference, of course, is that this 
scapegoat breaks free on its own rather than being purposely sent away. It 
thus has the potential to carry guilt and sin not away from the community, but 
directly into it. Moreover, the Jewish atonement sacrifice utilizes not one but 
two goats: the one not sent into the wilderness is presented as a sin offering to 
God, its fat burned on the altar.24 
 Goat Song’s second sacrificial goat is introduced in the second act, along 
with the second plotline. Gospodar Stevan’s community is faced with the 
politically difficult issue of its outsiders: the homeless poor; the artists; the 
wandering scholars; the gypsies; the Jews. The resistance of the landowners 
and elders to allow these pariahs to settle in their community makes for a 
clear allusion to the question of assimilation in Werfel’s Europe. Werfel’s 
own experience as a Jew living in Prague and Vienna is voiced by the out-
sider Teiterlik, who says to the town elders: “Der nicht mehr geschmeidige 
Mensch fühlt die Schmach der grinsenden Verbeugungen, und daß er an 
keinem christlichen Tisch sitzen darf” (He who is no longer assimilable must 
feel this disgrace, must bow with a grin on his face, may not sit at any Chris-
tian table). Together with other outcasts, Teiterlik pleads with the town elders 
for the right to some land, particularly since his parents had once owned land 
 
22 Werfel, Dramen, pp. 259-60, 264-65. 
23 Ibid., pp. 269-70. 
24 See Begg, p. 667. 
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62 German Expressionist Drama and the Messianism of a Generation 
in the region.25 Suddenly, Gospodar Stevan bursts onto the scene and berates 
the supplicants: 
 
Ihr Verfluchten! Habt ihr des Menschen Antlitz? Nein, nicht des Menschen Antlitz! Ha! 
Narben, Nase, Zahnluck, Glotzaug, Fuchsbart! Das Antlitz des […] böckischen Affen, 
sein Gesicht, das Gesicht, das verborgen bleiben soll! Da, da ist es ausgebrochen! Die 
Vorfahren bedeckten ihr Sündengeheimnis, aber nun ist es mit Tüchern nicht mehr zu 
erdrosseln und offenbar wird’s. O ihr Söhne der Blutschande, unter uns wollt ihr woh-
nen, denen das Land gehört, die es bebauen und betreuen? […] Auf zweien und vieren 
zwischen uns Aufrechten wollt ihr schreiten? Weg, weg! […] Kein Landloser zeige sich 
mehr am dritten Tag im Umkreis! […] In die Bergwerke, in die Häfen, in die Fremde! – 
Nur, daß ich wieder frei bin!26 
(You accursed people! Do you have the face of a human? No, not the face of a human! 
Ha! Scars, nose, missing teeth, bulging eyes, the beard of a fox! The face of the […] 
goat-like monkey, his face, the face that shall remain hidden!! There, there it escaped! 
The ancestors hid their sinful secret, but now it can no longer be strangled with cloths; it 
is revealed. Oh you sons of incest, you want to live among us, we who own and farm 
and oversee this land? […] On two and four legs you want to walk among us who walk 
upright? Away, away! […] Within three days, let no one who is without property show 
himself in this vicinity! […] To the mines, the harbors, abroad with you! – I don’t care, 
as long as I can be free again!) 
 
The would-be settlers become, collectively, the play’s second goat, as Stevan 
projects onto them quite seamlessly the characteristics of his own offspring, 
in a blatant attempt to expunge his own guilt and shame and retain his local 
power. But the banished pariahs clearly occupy the scapegoat role and not 
that of the sin offering, as they are to be sent away rather than presented to 
God or immolated. The role of the other sacrifice, the sin offering, remains 
vacant, and the beast’s status within the play is now further destabilized. 
 In the third act, the outcasts contemplate their plight in a tavern where 
they have gathered. Suddenly, the escaped creature appears to them. The 
stage goes dark so that the audience does not share the sight, at which the 
people are horrified. One of them, a student named Juvan, manages to subdue 
the beast off-stage. Returning to the scene, he immediately elevates the beast 
to a messiah for the outcasts’ cause, which grows now into an insurgency: 
“Die Stunde ist für uns gekommen. […] Fällig ist das Schicksal der Haben-
den! Denn zu uns gekommen ist er, der Entsprungene, Verdrängte…” (Our 
hour has come. […] It is time the rich met their fate! For the Escaped, Sup-
pressed One has come to us…).27 If the beastly creature is a scapegoat carry-
ing the sins of its family, it has brought them straight to those who would 
now exact revenge for those sins. 
 
25 Werfel, Dramen, p. 274. 
26 Ibid., pp. 277-78. 
27 Ibid., pp. 289-91. 
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The Hebrew Scriptures and Jewish Messianism in Expressionist Literature 63 
 The fourth act takes place inside an Eastern Orthodox church. As the in-
surgents make preparations there, they become increasingly drunk. Their es-
calating Dionysian frenzy, complete with hypnotic music and dance and the 
ecstatic cries of the chorus, may be read as a replacement for the solemn lit-
urgy with which Jews mark the Day of Atonement in the synagogue. The 
insurgents clamor nowin their desire to see the beast, which is hidden behind 
the iconostasis in the holy of holies (the inner sanctuary). Juvan proclaims to 
the crowd the messianic restoration that the beast will provide: 
 
Er ist die Rückkehr, er ist die Heimkehr! Aus dem Urwald der Nacht sind wir gebro-
chen, blinzelnd ins Tageslicht. In den Wald wollen wir rückkehren. [...] Er wird uns in 
die Nacht heimführen, wenn die Aufgabe getan ist, wenn nichts Gebautes mehr steht auf 
der Erde, wenn die Erblüge vernichtet, wenn die Rache an dem Menschen erfüllt ist, 
wenn der letzte Pflug im blutigen Erdloch verfault.28 
(He is the return, he is the return home! We have broken out of the ur-forest of night, 
blinking into the daylight. To the forest now we want to return. […] He will lead us 
home, into the night, when the task is accomplished, when nothing more stands built 
upon the earth, when the lie we inherited is destroyed, when revenge has been taken, 
when the last plow rots in its bloody burrow.) 
 
Those who have been scapegoated continue to embrace another scapegoat as 
the emblem for their cause. 
 In accordance with Juvan’s rhetoric of darkness and violence, the insur-
gency grows increasingly destructive. The “Jew Feiwel,” who had initially 
interpreted the uprising as the onset of the messianic age, the arrival of “die 
Zeit der Befreiung und der Gerechtigkeit” (the time of deliverance and jus-
tice), abandons this hope as the struggle deteriorates into a bloody free-for-
all: “Aber was hab ich sehn müssen? [...] Überall morden die Besoffenen, die 
Besessenen” (But what was I forced to see? […] The drunkards, possessed, 
are committing murders everywhere). Juvan berates Feiwel, claiming that 
Jews like him are the “niedrigste aller Menschen” (lowest of all people) be-
cause they do not understand bloodthirstiness (Blutdurst). “Und gerade de-
shalb habe ich mich bisher für den Auserwählten unter den Menschen gehal-
ten” (For just that reason have I considered myself among the chosen people), 
Feiwel says, responding to Juvan’s anti-Semitism by upholding the messianic 
principle of destruction not for its own sake, but for that of restoration.29 Fei-
 
28 Werfel, Dramen, pp. 293-97. 
29 Ibid., p. 293. While Feiwel meets with frequent anti-Semitism in the play, he may also be 
the victim of the latent anti-Semitism of the play. If Juvan’s band of pariahs is in fact meant 
to represent the Jews and other outsiders of Werfel’s society in their struggle for acceptance, 
then it is revealing that their insurrection deteriorates from a justified and noble cause into 
indiscriminate murderousness. Even the attempt made here to dissociate Jewishness from 
bloodthirstiness via the rational, principled messianism of Feiwel is undermined by the fact 
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64 German Expressionist Drama and the Messianism of a Generation 
wel’s insightful change of heart reflects that of Werfel’s generation during 
the First World War: many who had happily anticipated and welcomed it as a 
much-needed rupture in history were shattered by the reality of its brutality. 
Many Jews, in particular, had volunteered eagerly, in the hopes of proving 
their allegiance to Germany and becoming thus assimilated. These hopes 
were dashed, of course, as anti-Semitism remained strong in postwar Ger-
many, with the military defeat blamed in many quarters on the Jews.30 
 After the insurgents have murdered many landowners and burned their 
homes, Gospodar Stevan comes to the church to negotiate a peace with Ju-
van. If they will lay down their weapons, Stevan says, the insurgents will 
receive land and seeds for planting. Again Werfel seems to recall the Day of 
Atonement, as it is on that day that Israel’s exiles will be returned to their 
property (Leviticus 25:9-10). Stevan makes the additional demand that Juvan 
hand over the beast, whom he now acknowledges publicly as his son. Juvan 
replies with a stipulation of his own: the beast may be led back to its family, 
but only by Stanja, the bride of Mirko and the daughter of another wealthy 
landowner: “Sie kann euch retten” (She can save you). Horrified at the sug-
gestion, the community prepares to usher Stanja to safety. She, however, out-
defies even the defiant Juvan, agreeing to his terms and staring him down 
before kneeling on the altar. Fearing for Stanja’s life but unwilling to be out-
matched by her will, Juvan gives her a knife. She will use it, she says, only to 
free the beast and not to defend herself. Stanja now occupies the role of the 
second goat, presented at the altar as an offering for the sins of her bride-
groom’s family. Wearing her bridal clothes, she becomes a sacrificial virgin, 
as well, as Werfel continues to blend traditions. Whereas the high priest en-
ters the holy of holies during the Jewish atonement ritual, Stanja goes behind 
the iconostasis of the Orthodox church to meet the beast (off-stage) in the 
church’s inner sanctuary.31 
 Lunging now at Juvan in anger over his bride, Mirko falls on an insur-
gent’s poorly crafted weapon and dies. Carrying his dead son away, Stevan 
reveals that he has betrayed the insurgents in their negotiations: troops are 
already on their way to put down the rebellion. Before the crowd disperses, 
they hear a beastly cry from the inner sanctuary. Able now to see the high 
altar behind the iconostasis, the crowd witnesses the beast. The altar bursts 
 
that he conforms to Jewish stereotypes. For Feiwel as an opportunistic merchant, for exam-
ple, see Dramen, pp. 308-10. For a discussion of Werfel’s alleged anti-Semitism and Jewish 
self-hatred, see chapter 3 of this study. 
30 See Milfull, p. 154. 
31 Werfel, Dramen, pp. 298-300. 
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The Hebrew Scriptures and Jewish Messianism in Expressionist Literature 65 
into flames as the act comes to a close,32 suggesting the immolation of Stanja 
and the beastly creature. 
 In Jewish tradition, the Day of Atonement is also a day of God’s judg-
ment as to who will live and die;33 such judgments are revealed in the play’s 
final act. The village has been destroyed by fire; “eine kleine Welt ist unter-
gegangen” (a small world has perished). The audience learns that the beast 
escaped the church, ran into the burning forest, and died there. The comple-
tion, finally, of this offering has a cathartic impact on the beast’s parents. 
Gospodar Stevan is glad to be relieved of his shameful secret, despite the 
accompanying death and destruction. His wife concurs: “Aber nun er im 
brennenden Tod verschwunden ist, - wie leide ich - und bin dennoch erlöst” 
(But now that he has disappeared in a fiery death - how I suffer - and am yet 
redeemed). Stevan rejoices: “Ich bin neu, ganz neu!” (I am new, completely 
new!). Ready to begin a new life, the couple will take on a new child in 
Stanja, who has survived her encounter with the beast and refuses to return 
home to her own parents.34 
 The redemption the landowners feel, even with their property lost, is re-
flected in the reestablishment of the old order that favors them. The insur-
gents have lost more lives than they had taken: “Die Armen bezahlen dop-
pelt” (The poor pay doubly). The restoration of the old order, as opposed to 
the restoration of the oppressed envisioned during the insurrection, requires 
that Juvan be executed for his crime of rebellion. He admits, just before his 
death, the misguidedness of his passion, “etwas zu rächen, was ich niemals 
gekannt habe” (to avenge something I had never known), of his lust for sheer 
destruction.35 The play does not vilify Juvan, however, as he and the other 
slain insurgents become yet anothersin offering, sacrificed for the benefit 
and restoration of others. 
 The redemption and restoration the landowners enjoy is gravely under-
mined, however, at the end of the play. Earlier in the action the town physi-
cian, a rationalist drawn toward Voltaire rather than toward religion,36 has 
tried in vain to disabuse Gospodar Stevan of the superstition (Aberglaube) 
that his beastly son must be hidden, that the creature represents sin and guilt. 
Now at the close of the action, the physician notes that the insurgents fell 
prey to a similar superstition. But he tells Stevan: “Der Aberglaube jener Ar-
men ist gerechtfertigter als der Eure. Denn Not und Leiden wollen erlöst 
 
32 Werfel, Dramen, pp. 300-302. 
33 See Ben Zion Wacholder, ‘Day of Atonement’, in The Oxford Companion to the Bible, p. 
156. 
34 Werfel, Dramen, pp. 303-307. 
35 Ibid., pp. 303-304, 314. 
36 Ibid., p. 263. 
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66 German Expressionist Drama and the Messianism of a Generation 
werden, und leicht sehn sie in einer menschlichen Mißgeburt den Gott oder 
das Gegenteil” (But the superstition of the poor is more justified than yours. 
For want and suffering seek a redemption, and the poor can easily see God - 
or the opposite - in a human monstrosity).37 Even as they are severely pun-
ished for their violent acts, the poor and oppressed are excused for the ecstasy 
with which they worshipped the creature as their messiah. It was after all 
Stevan’s own superstition - his own need for a scapegoat - that had caused 
their desperation and thus their susceptibility. 
 The final lines of the play bring stronger evidence still that Stevan and his 
wife will enjoy only a temporary catharsis, as the sacrificial identity of their 
beastly son is destabilized once more: though he has died, he has not become 
a burnt offering as thought. A knacker passes by with the corpse he has re-
trieved. “Im verkohlten Wald lag’s da, […] kein Haar versengt. Ein Wun-
der!” (In the charred forest it lay there, […] not a hair singed. A miracle!) As 
the knacker moves on to dispose of the corpse, the mother laments that no 
trace remains of the beastly child whom she nonetheless loved. Stanja cor-
rects her adoptive mother, revealing as the curtain falls that she is carrying 
the beast’s child, having been impregnated on the altar.38 The willingly sacri-
ficed virgin exhibits now an equally proud willingness to bear a monstrous 
child. More importantly, the family’s sin and guilt will abide with them for at 
least another generation. 
 Though the two plays share a common dialectical structure of destruction 
and renewal, Goat Song offers a renewal far more fragile and temporary than 
that of Barlach’s Flood. As Werfel has added to the structure an explicit the-
matization of sacrifice and expiation, sin and guilt become pervasive issues 
here, perhaps even inescapable ones in the long term. Indeed Werfel had 
written in 1914 of “ein Tragisches, einen Bruch, eine Schuld (Erbsünde) in 
der Welt, woran alles teilhat” (a tragic element, a break, a guilt (original sin) 
in the world, in which everything has a part).39 Though this reflection leads 
him from Jewish into Christian doctrine (a development to which the next 
chapter is devoted), Werfel will continue to work in his plays through the 
notion of sacrifice and atonement in Judaism, as an integral part of the hu-
man’s attempt to be reconciled with God. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
37 Werfel, Dramen, p. 303. 
38 Ibid., p. 317. 
39 Ibid., p. 547. 
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The Hebrew Scriptures and Jewish Messianism in Expressionist Literature 67 
The Promised Land 
 
One of the Hebrew Bible’s most important symbols of messianic desire is the 
Promised Land. The promise alluded to is made by God to the patriarch 
Abraham in the Book of Genesis: “I shall maintain my covenant with you and 
your descendants after you […]. As a possession for all time I shall give you 
and your descendants after you the land in which you now are aliens, the 
whole of Canaan, and I shall be their God” (17:7-8). The promise is repeated 
throughout the Scriptures, with the referenced land identified again as Canaan 
in Exodus 6:4, Leviticus 14:34, Numbers 34:2, Deuteronomy 32:49, 1 
Chronicles 16:18, and Psalm 105:11. The fulfillment of this promise becomes 
a central identifying characteristic of the messianic age to come. 
 The Promised Land is a central motif in Kaiser’s From Morn Till Mid-
night. Like the Eden motif, it is introduced with reference to the Italian 
woman. Even after she has rejected his advances, the cashier continues to 
think about her. She has told him that she is from Tuscany (Toskana); trying 
now to remember this, he says: “Tos – Tos – der Schluß klingt wie Kanaan. 
Hol’ einen Atlas. Tos – Kanaan. Gibt es das? Ist es eine Insel? Ein Gebirge? 
Ein Sumpf?” (Tos – Tos – the end sounds like Canaan. Get an atlas. Tos – 
Canaan. Does that exist? Is it an island? A mountain? A swamp?)40 The cash-
ier’s subconscious perception of the woman as having come from a Promised 
Land, even one whose existence is uncertain and character murky, illustrates 
not only the hope he has placed in her, but also that he seeks the fulfillment 
of a divine promise, not merely an erotic encounter. Though the Italian 
woman has physically disappeared from the play by this point, she reappears 
in the cashier’s psyche as a symbol of the redemption he desires - in this case 
the redemption of a promise. 
 At a later station in his quest, the cashier finds another ‘Promised Land’ at 
a six-day bicycle race. Seeking there an experience that proves the worth of 
the stolen money, he uses some of it to endow an enormous prize for the ra-
cers. The cashier revels in the ecstasy of the crowd as they watch the now 
hugely lucrative race, observing at first a difference between the three tiers of 
spectators. In the good seats of the lower tier, “anscheinend das bessere Pub-
likum tut sich noch Zwang an” (apparently the better audience still restrains 
itself); the spectators in the middle tier show some excitement; those in the 
upper seats shout until they become a “Galerie der Leidenschaft” (gallery of 
passion). But as energy spreads throughout the arena after the cashier raises 
the prize amount once more, even the lower tier is drawn into the clamor: 
“Vorhänge hoch – Vorwände nieder. Menschheit. Freie Menschheit. Hoch 
 
40 Kaiser, Werke, I, 486. 
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68 German Expressionist Drama and the Messianism of a Generation 
und tief – Mensch. Keine Ringe – keine Schichten – keine Klassen” (Curtain 
raised – pretenses dropped. Humanity. Free humanity. Above and below – 
human. No tiers – no strata – no classes). Rejoicing as he watches this occur, 
the cashier says: “Posaunen schmettern und Mauern kieseln” (Trumpets blare 
and walls crumble).41 Here he cites Joshua 6:20, in which the walls of Jericho 
crumble after the ceremonial sounding of trumpets. The taking of Jericho 
represented a major victory in the Israelites’ conquest of Canaan, so that Kai-
ser alludes again to the Promised Land, this time not as unity between man 
and woman, but as an ecstatic human community freed from class con-
straints. It is no longer a single person, but the kind of fraternal congregation 
(Brüdergemeinde) envisioned by Bloch as well,42 that represents to the cash-
ier the redemption he seeks. 
 Notable in both of Kaiser’s Promised Land scenarios, however, is another 
feature stressed by Bloch: the absence of the divinity who might deliver upon 
the promise. It is thecashier’s task to seek out this absent God, to seek out his 
own redemption. Throughout the play, he will be frustrated in this task. The 
first frustration comes via the Italian woman’s rejection. Though the cashier 
then believes to have found the Promised Land at the bicycle race, it becomes 
clear that the crowd’s ecstasy is not of a spiritual nature and not in fact free 
from the constraints of capitalism. Quite to the contrary, it is material excess 
that drives the crowd into its frenzy. This realization spoils the cashier’s re-
joicing, leaving only Kaiser’s critique of a materialistic, class-driven society, 
and the resultant thwarting of his protagonist’s messianic desire. 
 
 
Prophecy 
 
The appearance of the Promised Land in the Book of Joshua marks a shift 
from the Torah to the prophetic books of the Jewish canon. Since prophecy is 
a phenomenon as central to the Christian as to the Jewish tradition, it will be 
encountered on some level in each of the following chapters. For current pur-
poses, however, the most relevant function of prophecy in the Hebrew Bible 
will be to foretell the coming of the Messiah and/or the messianic age. God 
commands the prophet Ezekiel, for example, to tell Israel of the restoration 
that will follow its exile: 
 
The Lord God has said: I am going to take the Israelites from their places of exile 
among the nations; I shall assemble them from every quarter and restore them to their 
own soil. I shall make them a single nation in the land, on the mountains of Israel, and 
 
41 Kaiser, Werke, I, 495-98. 
42 Bloch, Werke, III, 346. 
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The Hebrew Scriptures and Jewish Messianism in Expressionist Literature 69 
one king will be over them all. […] I shall make an everlasting covenant with them to 
ensure peace and prosperity. I shall greatly increase their numbers, and I shall put my 
sanctuary in their midst for all time (37:21-26). 
 
This passage evokes the royal identity of the Messiah, as well as some of the 
characteristics of the messianic age: homecoming, restoration, unity, prosper-
ity, peace, fruitfulness, nearness to God. 
 Expressionist writers made such extensive use of the prophecy they found 
modeled in Scripture that their particular brand of rhetoric is often indistin-
guishable from messianic prophecy. The proclamatory style of Expressionist 
literature, like that of the Prophetic books, almost always heralds the arrival 
of a new era, if not of redemption via a messiah figure. Thus, while it is true 
that Expressionist language laments its own insufficiency (in a Benjaminian 
sense), it also prophesies its own reclamation of power, as the new forms of 
human expression to which the Expressionists aspire represent for them also 
new forms of relation to the divine. 
 Prophetic speech sets the tone for the impending political conflict in Wer-
fel’s Goat Song. Before Juvan takes his place as the leader of the insurrec-
tion, he must be convinced to do so, in part by an old “Prophet” named Bo-
goboj. Juvan’s initial resistance to the role is, for Bogoboj, itself a fulfillment 
of prophecy: “Leer muß der Krug sein, in den sie ihre Milch füllen” (It must 
be empty, the jar into which they fill their milk) (the Book of Judges speaks 
of empty jars as tools of God’s work). Bogoboj continues to prophesy, both 
about Juvan’s mission and about the appearance of the beast that will embody 
that mission: “Ich fühle die heilige Wandlung. Bereitet euch! Betet! Ein Au-
genblick noch, und ihr werdet ihn sehn!” (I feel the sacred transformation. 
Prepare yourselves! Pray! One moment more and you will see him!)43 
 Even more overt in their employment of prophetic language are Expres-
sionism’s Verkündigungsdramen, whose heroes turgidly proclaim not only 
what is but also what is to come. This pattern is most prevalent in Toller’s 
work. His first published play, Die Wandlung (The Transformation, 1919) 
was begun in 1917 - “im dritten Jahr des Erdgemetzels” (in the third year of 
the global carnage)44 - and finished during his five-year imprisonment for 
taking part in the November Revolution. A quintessential proclamation play, 
The Transformation marked, according to then-renowned drama critic Her-
bert Ihering, the emergence of Expressionist theater from its experimental 
 
43 Werfel, Dramen, pp. 281-82, 301. 
44 Ernst Toller, ‘Bemerkungen zu meinem Drama “Die Wandlung”’, in Schöpferische Konfes-
sion, ed. by Kasimir Edschmid (Berlin: Erich Reiß, 1920), p. 46. 
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70 German Expressionist Drama and the Messianism of a Generation 
phase.45 The prophet-protagonist of this piece, Friedrich, serves as a mouth-
piece for Toller’s own youthful proclamations. 
 When Friedrich learns at the beginning of the play that volunteers are 
needed for fighting in the German colonies, he prophesies about the trans-
formation the fighting will bring: “Oh, der Kampf wird uns alle einen…Die 
große Zeit wird uns alle zu Großen gebären…Auferstehen wird deGeist, alle 
Kleinlichkeit wird er zerstören, alle lächerlichen, künstlichen Schranken nie-
derreißen…sich wieder offenbaren in seiner unendlichen Schönheit…” (Oh, 
the struggle will unite us all…The greatness of the time will make us all 
great…The spirit will be resurrected and will destroy all pettiness, will tear 
down all absurd, artificial barriers…will reveal itself again in its eternal 
beauty…).46 Like Werfel’s Goat Song, The Transformation thematizes the 
enthusiasm that gripped Toller and his contemporaries at the outbreak of 
World War I. Toller’s autobiography Eine Jugend in Deutschland (I Was A 
German, 1933) confirms his own belief at the time that the war would unite 
all Germans.47 Impacted by the spirit and ebullience of such prophecy, Toller, 
like his hero Friedrich, enlisted as quickly as he could. 
 
 
Die Gemeinschaft: Communal Suffering and Striving 
 
The hagiographic Writings that complete the Jewish canon tell the stories of 
those who remain strong in their faith, even in the face of intense suffering. 
Werfel writes: “Wir wissen aus der Hagiographie, daß die Gewährung der 
Gnade zumeist ausgewogen wird durch eine übermäßige Belastung durch 
Leid. Gibt es eine größere Leidensgeschichte als die Israels [...]?” (We know 
from hagiography that the granting of grace is usually balanced by an exces-
sive burden of suffering. Is there a greater story of suffering than that of Is-
rael […]?)48 In Werfel’s rumination as in the scriptural Writings, the focus 
remains upon the community as a whole, even when the sufferings of a repre-
sentative individual are recounted. As already witnessed in the Blochian Wir-
problem, for example, the Expressionist ethos adopts from Judaism an em-
phasis upon the communal nature of experience. 
 
45 See Erika Fischer-Lichte, Kurze Geschichte des deutschen Theaters (Tübingen: Francke, 
1993), p. 313. 
46 Toller, Werke, II, 20-21. 
47 See ibid., IV, 50. 
48 Werfel, Zwischen, p. 162. 
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The Hebrew Scriptures and Jewish Messianism in Expressionist Literature 71 
 Community (Gemeinschaft) was a vital category of Expressionist 
thought.49 In the midst of the revolutionary fervor that gripped postwar Ger-
many, Buber wrote of the people’s longing for Gemeinschaft - for a bond 
built by their common experience and striving toward a common goal. This 
longing was itself a form of messianic desire, as Gemeinschaft was for Buber 
both a requirement and a sign of God’s kingdom. This desire, moreover, was 
both shaped and strengthened by the continuingrise of Gemeinschaft’s per-
ceived opposite, Gesellschaft (society).50 In drawing out this contrast, Buber 
was also drawing on the thought of Ferdinand Tönnies, who had juxtaposed 
the organic coexistence of Gemeinschaft with the alienation of Gesellschaft, 
the latter setting against each other individuals living side-by-side in a world 
of increasing competition and industrialization.51 Tönnies’s thought had a 
strong impact across Germany’s anticapitalist movements,52 which included 
Expressionism. Among the Expressionists who learned firsthand from Tön-
nies was Toller,53 already by then a committed socialist and highly critical of 
Gesellschaft. The drive instead toward Gemeinschaft emerges again and 
again in Toller’s plays, whose heroes always represent, in their sufferings and 
fates, a community at large. 
 In the case of The Transformation’s Friedrich, the implied community is 
the Jewish one, as textual clues in the play, together with biographical paral-
lels between Toller and Friedrich, make clear. Toller’s autobiography fore-
grounds the issue of his Jewishness. As a child growing up in Samotschin (in 
present-day Poland), Toller was told by his friend Stanislaus that the Jews 
had crucified Jesus. The child Toller took this to heart: 
 
Ich laufe in die Scheune, verkrieche mich im Stroh und leide bitterlich. Ich kenne den 
Heiland, er hängt bei Stanislaus in der Stube, aus den Augen rinnen rote Tränen, das 
Herz trägt er offen auf der Brust, und es blutet, “Lasset die Kindlein zu mir kommen,” 
steht darunter. Wenn ich bei Stanislaus bin und niemand aufpaßt, gehe ich zum Heiland 
und bete. Bitte, lieber Heiland, verzeih mir, daß die Juden Dich totgeschlagen haben.54 
 
49 See Christoph Eykman, ‘Zur Sozialphilosophie des Expressionismus’, Zeitschrift für deut-
sche Philologie, 91 (1972), pp. 481-97 (p. 481-84). 
50 Martin Buber, ‘Gemeinschaft’, Neue Erde, 1 (1919), 6-8 (pp. 6, 8). For more on Buber’s 
conception of Gemeinschaft, see Hans Kohn, Martin Buber. Sein Werk und seine Zeit, 2nd 
edn (Köln: Joseph Melzer, 1961), pp. 186-200. 
51 See Ferdinand Tönnies, Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft. Grundbegriffe der reinen Soziologie 
(Leipzig: H. Buske, 1935). 
52 See Robert Sayre and Michael Löwy, ‘Figures of Romantic Anti-Capitalism’, New German 
Critique, 32 (1984), pp. 42-92 (pp. 73-74). 
53 See Wolfgang Rothe, Ernst Toller in Selbstzeugnissen und Bilddokumenten (Reinbek bei 
Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1983), p. 34. 
54 Toller, Werke, IV, 21. 
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72 German Expressionist Drama and the Messianism of a Generation 
(I run into the barn, hole up in the straw and suffer bitterly. I know the Savior; he hangs 
in Stanislaus’s room with red tears running from his eyes. He wears his heart open on 
his chest, and it is bleeding. Beneath it is printed, “Let the little children come unto me.” 
When I am at Stanislaus’s and no one is watching, I go to the Savior and pray. Please, 
dear Savior, forgive me, that the Jews killed you.) 
 
Impacted by such anti-Semitism, the young Toller decided: “Ich möchte kein 
Jude sein. Ich möchte nicht, daß die Kinder hinter mir herlaufen und ‘Jude’ 
rufen” (I don’t want to be a Jew. I don’t want the children to chase me and 
yell ‘Jew’).55 The mature Toller, in turn, reflects on how these experiences 
have affected his decisions, especially his fervor to fight in the First World 
War: 
 
Ich denke [...] an meinen leidenschaftlichen Wunsch, durch den Einsatz meines Lebens 
zu beweisen, daß ich Deutscher sei, nichts als Deutscher. Aus dem Feld hatte ich dem 
Gericht geschrieben, es möge mich aus den Listen der jüdischen Gemeinschaft strei-
chen. War alles umsonst? Oder habe ich mich geirrt? Liebe ich nicht dieses Land [...]? 
[...] Aber bin ich nicht auch Jude? Gehöre ich nicht zu jenem Volk, das seit Jahrtausen-
den verfolgt, gejagt, gemartert, gemordet wird, dessen Propheten den Ruf nach Gerech-
tigkeit in die Welt schrieen, den die Elenden und Bedrückten aufnahmen und weitertru-
gen für alle Zeiten, dessen Tapferste sich nicht beugten und eher starben, als sich untreu 
zu werden?56 
(I think […] of my ardent desire to prove, by staking my life, that I am a German, noth-
ing other than a German. From the front I had written to the authorities, asking that my 
name be stricken from the registers of the Jewish community. Was it all for nothing? Or 
was I mistaken? Don’t I love this country […]? […] But am I not also a Jew? Do I not 
belong to that race which for millennia has been persecuted, hunted, martyred, and mur-
dered, whose prophets shouted into the world the call for justice, which the woeful and 
oppressed took up and carried forward for all times, a race, the bravest of whom did not 
yield and preferred death to unfaithfulness?) 
 
The tension between his Jewish and German identities followed Toller 
throughout his life, from his childhood experiences of anti-Semitism, to his 
volunteer war service, to the tragic moment in German history at which he 
finishes his autobiography. Just as Toller stresses that his Jewishness is not 
merely a personal issue, but attains and retains significance primarily because 
of the historical sufferings of his ancestors, his concern with Jewish history 
and identity operates on a supra-personal level in his dramas, as well. 
 In The Transformation, Toller uses the extra-biblical figure of Ahasver, 
the Wandering Jew, to link Friedrich’s societal estrangement to his Jewish-
ness. Friedrich’s identification with Ahasver is evoked during the Christmas 
season. Admiring the lights on a neighbor’s Christmas tree, Friedrich thinks 
 
55 Toller, Werke, IV, 21. 
56 Ibid., 227. 
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The Hebrew Scriptures and Jewish Messianism in Expressionist Literature 73 
of his own exclusion from the scene: “Ausgestoßner taumle ich von einem 
Ufer zum andern. […] Wie Er, Ahasver [...] meinen großen Bruder, Ihn, den 
ewig Heimatlosen…” (A pariah, I stagger from one shore to another. […] 
Like Him, Ahasver […] my big brother, Him, the eternally homeless…).57 
 Friedrich sees an opportunity for inclusion when he volunteers in the mili-
tary. But the other soldiers treat Friedrich like a foreigner.58 Only after he is 
taken prisoner and then rescued does Friedrich see a glimmer of the accep-
tance for which he is fighting. An officer comes to his hospital bed and tells 
him: “Das Vaterland weiß Ihre Dienste zu schätzen. Es sendet Ihnen durch 
mich das Kreuz. Fremder waren Sie unserm Volk, nun haben Sie sich Bür-
gerrechte erworben” (The Fatherland appreciates your services. It is sending 
you, through me, the Cross. You were a stranger to our people, but now you 
have earned the rights of citizenship). Eagerly accepting this military but also 
Christian symbol,59 Friedrich effectively relinquishes his Jewish identity (as 
Toller did from the front) for the sake of belonging to the Fatherland and the 
communal cause. 
 Like Toller, however, Friedrich comes to doubt the validity of this com-
munity, based as it is upon the cruelties of war: “Durch zehntausend Tote 
gehöre ich zu ihnen. [...] Ist das Befreiung?” (Through ten thousand dead I 
belong to them. […] Is that deliverance?) Friedrich’s own prophecies now 
haunt him, as he is still without the inclusion he seeks. His disillusionment 
culminates in a self-state that is the direct opposite of the one in which he 
enlisted, as he renounces the Fatherland and fully embraces his identification 
with Ahasver: “Kann ein Vaterland, das das verlangt, göttlich sein? Wert 
seine Seele dafür zu opfern? Nein, tausendmal nein. Lieber will ich wandern, 
ruhelos wandern, mit dir Ahasver!” (Can a Fatherland that demands such 
things be godly? Be worthsacrificing one’s soul for? No, a thousand times 
no. I would rather wander, wander restlessly with you, Ahasver!)60 
 
57 Toller, Werke, II, 17. 
58 Ibid., 21, 24. Michael P. Steinberg analyzes this pervasive Jewish experience in wartime 
Germany: “[N]ationalist ideology is defined precisely as a radical exclusionism posing as a 
radical inclusionism. The idea of the pure nation is always a phantom, and thus always based 
on the purging of some aspect of the real. Thus the same nationalist solidarity that fueled the 
war effort also fueled the final blow to the claims of symbiosis. The agitated nationalism of 
1914-18 proved to be the agent at once of solidarity and exclusion.” Michael P. Steinberg, 
‘Walter Benjamin writes the essays “Critique of Violence” and “The Task of the Transla-
tor”’, in Yale Companion to Jewish Writing and Thought in German Culture 1096-1996, ed. 
by Sander L. Gilman and Jack Zipes (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), pp. 401-11 
(p. 401). 
59 Toller, Werke, II, 29. 
60 Ibid., 29, 39. 
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74 German Expressionist Drama and the Messianism of a Generation 
 Friedrich considers the metaphorical wandering of suicide, but his sister 
changes his mind with a life-changing message of divine love and human 
community. Friedrich decides: “Meine Augen schauen den Weg. / Ich will 
ihn wandern, Schwester, / Allein, und doch mit dir, / Allein, und doch mit 
allen, / Wissend um den Menschen” (My eyes see the path. / I will wander 
along it, sister. / Alone, and yet with you. / Alone, and yet with everyone, / 
aware of the people).61 The hero is saved by his Selbstbegegnung, by his me-
diation between the Selbstproblem and the Wirproblem - by his realization 
that though he wanders alone, his sufferings are not individual but part of a 
communal path. He is resolved to share this path with humanity, possessed of 
divine spirit. In the immediate aftermath of a radically life-altering war, Tol-
ler writes a redemption for his first hero and for his shaken audience. This 
redemption takes the form of a resolve to share the task of living with others, 
even in the face of estrangement. This resolve is only possible following the 
recognition and acceptance of suffering as a communal experience. 
 Toller’s next drama, Masse Mensch (Masses and Man, 1920), also written 
in prison, thematizes another community as such, this time one working more 
explicitly together toward the realization of a messianic goal. Masses and 
Man is both station play and proclamation play. Its protagonist is listed in the 
cast of characters as “Sonja Irene L.”62 Toller writes briefly in his autobiog-
raphy of an encounter with a Sonja Lerch, at a worker’s strike during the No-
vember Revolution.63 His attempts to achieve the goals of the Revolution 
with a minimum of violence and bloodshed are reflected in the speeches of 
this historically based heroine, who also attains a certain everywoman status 
in the play. She is referred to throughout only as The Woman, and apotheo-
sized at the end: “Ich lebe ewig. […] Von Kreis zu Kreis, / Von Wende zu 
Wende, / Und einst werde ich / Reiner, / Schuldloser, / Menschheit / Sein” (I 
live eternally. […] From cycle to cycle, / from turn to turn, / and one day I 
will be / more pure / more innocent / humanity / being). Her numerous proc-
lamations throughout the play establish Toller’s positive vision of the masses: 
“Masse soll Volk in Liebe sein. / Masse soll Gemeinschaft sein. / Gemein-
schaft ist nicht Rache. / Gemeinschaft zerstört das Fundament des Unrechts. / 
Gemeinschaft pflanzt die Wälder der Gerechtigkeit” (The masses should be a 
people of love. / The masses should be community. / Community is not re-
venge. / Community destroys the foundation of injustice. / Community plants 
the forests of justice).64 
 
61 Toller, Werke, II, 39-40. 
62 Ibid., 66. 
63 Toller, Werke, IV, 89. 
64 Toller, Werke, II, 95, 110. 
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The Hebrew Scriptures and Jewish Messianism in Expressionist Literature 75 
 Equally as important as the focus on love and justice here is the rejection 
of revenge. By dint of his involvement in the war and the revolution that fol-
lowed, Toller is, like Werfel in Goat Song, cognizant of the dark side of the 
mass mentality, acutely aware that there is a difference between a mass and a 
community. The notion of the vengeful mass is embodied in the play by the 
Woman’s antagonist, called “Der Namenlose” (The Nameless One). When 
first confronted by him, the heroine is desperately baffled, wondering 
whether he is a murderer (Mörder) or a savior (Heiland). He answers only 
that he is the masses (Masse!)65 What is perceived as a messianic community 
can in fact be that, but the Woman’s instinct reveals that it might also be a 
destructive, murderous mass. Eventually the Woman comes to a confident 
conclusion about the Nameless One: “Du bist nicht Befreiung, / Du bist nicht 
Erlösung. / Doch weiß ich, wer du bist. [...] Dein Vater der hieß: Krieg. [...] 
Ihr mordet für die Menschheit, / Wie sie Verblendete für ihren Staat gemor-
det. / Und einige glaubten gar / Durch ihren Staat, ihr Vaterland, / Die Erde 
zu erlösen” (You are not deliverance, / you are not redemption. / But I know 
who you are. […] Your father was called War. […] You and he murder for 
humankind, / just as blinded humankind murdered for its country. / And some 
even believed / they were redeeming the earth / through their country, their 
Fatherland). Toller attempts to master here his blind willingness to go to bat-
tle for his country, his susceptibility to the messianic ideology that had en-
abled the war efforts. He now rejects this ideology with the words his heroine 
continues to speak to the Nameless One: “Nicht Fackel düsterer Gewalt weist 
uns den Weg. […] Wenn Schicksal dich in diese Zeit gestoßen, / Und dir die 
Macht verheißt: / Zu vergewaltigen, die verzweifelt / Dich ersehnen wie den 
neuen Heiland, / So weiß ich: dieses Schicksal haßt den Menschen. [...] Du 
liebst die Menschen nicht” (It is not the torch of grim violence that shows us 
the way. […] If fate has prodded you into this era, / and power tells you / to 
rape the desperate ones / who long for you as the new savior, / then I know: 
this fate hates the people).66 Toller recounts in these lines the brutal crushing 
of a desperate generation’s messianic hopes. 
 The Woman and the Nameless One parry once more, the latter represent-
ing now the masses as he praises the cause and the glory to come. The 
Woman responds that humans are more important than causes and should not 
be sacrificed. Toller juxtaposes here two strains of the messianic in the poli-
tics of his time, differentiating the Masse from the Wir. He has become pain-
fully acquainted with the danger of the former, which sacrifices anything, 
including human life, in the name of a future based upon a predetermined 
 
65 Toller, Werke, II, 96. 
66 Ibid., 108-109. 
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76 German Expressionist Drama and the Messianism of a Generation 
ideal. The latter, however, replaces that ideal per se with a focus on human 
sanctity. The Nameless One condemns the Woman for her strategy, articulat-
ing the criticism directed at pacifist revolutionaries like Toller: “Du aber ver-
rätst die Masse, du verrätst die Sache. / Denn heute gilts sich zu entscheiden. 
/ Wer schwankt, sich nicht entscheiden kann […] Ist Feind” (But you betray 
the masses; you betray the cause. / For today is the day of decision. / Who-
ever hesitates, whoever cannot decide,[…] is the enemy).67 Thus Masses and 
Man demonstrates not only Toller’s abiding faith in community, love, and 
justice as powerful forces toward the establishment of a utopian society, but 
also his wariness of an equally messianic but more vengeful, destructive 
revolutionary spirit. 
 The struggle for revolutionary action without murderous overhastiness is 
the theme of the next play Toller wrote from prison, Die Maschinenstürmer 
(The Machine Wreckers, 1922). The characters and action are based loosely 
on the English Luddite revolt. Here the communal ideal is preached by the 
character Jimmy Cobbett, who returns at the beginning of the action to his 
hometown of Nottingham, having been away organizing workers in other 
parts of England. Bringing the cause now to Nottingham’s poor and exploited 
weavers, Jimmy finds that they are already implementing a revolt. Currently 
on strike, they plan to destroy the factory’s new machinery. Jimmy tries to 
convince the weavers to unionize instead, telling them that the enemy is not 
the demon they have made the machinery out to be, but the illusion under 
which they are laboring. “Was ist euch Arbeit? Habt ihr wirklich als freie 
Menschen gewebt?” (What is work to you? Have you really been weaving as 
free men?) Though they are not currently living in community (Gemein-
schaft), abiding inside the weavers, Jimmy says, is a “Traum vom Land der 
Gerechtigkeit…vom Land der werkverbundenen Gemeinden… […] vom 
Land der schaffenden, freudigen Werkarbeit…” (dream of a land of jus-
tice…of a land of communities united in their work… […] of a land of crea-
tive, happy work…). Jimmy urges the weavers to replace a Gesellschaft of 
“Ich und Ich und Ich” (I and I and I) with the Gemeinschaft of “Welt und Wir 
und Du und Ich” (World and We and You and I!)68 Gemeinschaft offers new 
life as an empowered Wir, as well as the realization of messianic justice. 
 While the workers hoist Jimmy onto their shoulders, the weaver John 
Wible reflects the resistance of Toller’s society to visionaries like himself and 
the Activists: “Diese einfältigen Tölpel wollen auf Erden herschen und wol-
len ein Paradies erkämpfen. Narren mögen daran glauben! Ich nicht!” (These 
simple dolts want to reign on earth and fight for paradise. Let fools believe in 
 
67 Toller, Werke, II, 109-10. 
68 Ibid., 142-43. 
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The Hebrew Scriptures and Jewish Messianism in Expressionist Literature 77 
that! I don’t!) Wible argues to Jimmy for a better course of action: to attack 
the strikebreakers who have taken the weavers’ places at the machines. Jim-
my replies: “Sinnlose Tat ist Rausch der Feigen und der Toren!” (Senseless 
action is the drug of cowards and fools!)69 Played out here again is the debate 
between the immediate, violent action of the masses and the careful, princi-
pled action of community. 
 The gradual decrescendo of proclamations about action and community in 
Toller’s work after The Machine Wreckers has led critics to dissociate his 
later plays from an early messianic ‘phase.’ Hinkemann, in which the title 
character returns castrated and dehumanized from the war, is frequently read 
as a departure from Expressionism’s messianic period, if not as the end of its 
belief in redemption.70 The less dogmatically restrictive reading of Expres-
sionist Messianism put forth here allows a different interpretation, in which 
the ecstatic proclamations of Toller’s earlier mouthpiece-heroes are replaced, 
in Hinkemann, by the subtler but still powerful musings of characters who 
appear only briefly. One such exchange returns Toller to the notion of Jewish 
suffering as explicitly messianic. As two Polish Jews cross the stage, one 
laments the suffering they have encountered. The second responds: “Wir sind 
das auserwählte Volk! […] Auserwählt fir Leiden! Was fir ä gute Gnade hat 
uns gegeben Gott!” (We are the chosen people! […] Chosen for suffering! 
What great mercy God has given us!) His sarcasm is then rejoined by an old 
woman who passes by, expressing her hope in “den neuen Messias” (the new 
Messiah): “Die Morgenröte geht auf. Das verheißene Zionsreich ist nahe. [...] 
Mich schrecken die Plagen dieser Welt nicht. Ich habe sie gekostet bis zur 
Neige. O meine Seele dürstet nach Erlösung” (The dawn is rising. The prom-
ised kingdom of Zion is near. […] The plagues of this world do not frighten 
me. I have drunk them to the dregs. Oh, my soul thirsts for redemption).71 
Albeit no longer by a mouthpiece hero, Jewish suffering is interpreted here 
not only as a communal phenomenon, but also as a precursor to the messianic 
age. Even if the displacement of voice can be taken to indicate a growing 
pessimism or resignation in Toller’s writing, such a passage cannot be brack-
eted out of Expressionism’s concern with the messianic, with the possibility 
of redemption in an era of such intense and widespread suffering. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
69 Toller, Werke, II, 144, 148. 
70 See Vietta and Kemper, p. 207. 
71 Toller, Werke, II, 231. 
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78 German Expressionist Drama and the Messianism of a Generation 
Conclusions 
 
Two models of messianic thinking begin to take shape in the texts examined 
here. One, like Buber’s “active messianism,”72 seeks redemption within hu-
man activity, eschewing a desire that waits passively for God to send his 
Messiah. This is the spirit in which Activists like Hiller argued for political 
effort as a means to redemption, particularly over against the more aestheti-
cally focused efforts of many literary Expressionists. The plays of Toller, 
however, reflect quite strongly the ideals of Activism, as well as the convic-
tion that it falls to humans to provide their own redemption. While his pro-
tagonists Friedrich, Sonja Irene L., and Jimmy Cobbett will function as hu-
man messiah figures, they become such by virtue of a redemption they have 
effected within themselves. Spurning his initial fervor for the war as a release 
from his estrangement, Friedrich finds redemption in his own path that seeks 
God, and rejoices that he is rooted in himself. He is a model of the self-
encounter that enables one to live in true community with others. The human 
community gains in importance when Sonja contrasts it, as the provider of 
messianic justice, with her nameless antagonist’s glorification of supposedly 
salvific doctrines, including that of war. Preaching a similar ideal of justice 
via community, Jimmy suggests that the enemy, like redemption from it, lies 
within the human being itself: rather than destroying a supposed demon like 
industrial machinery, the human being must, through the self-encounter, 
overcome its misconception of its own condition. These three heroes, then, 
do not seek to provide redemption for others in any direct, vicarious sense, 
but rather to inspire others to redeem themselves. What comes to the fore 
here is the notion that redemption is endogenous to the human, and may be 
achieved via a transformed understanding of the Selbstproblem and the Wir-
problem. 
 Other Expressionist characters are more than content to seek redemption 
instead from an other, from something outside themselves. Kaiser’s cashier 
begins his quest with a failed attempt at erotic union as a means to union with 
God; subsequent chapters will analyze the other entities upon which he pro-
jects his messianic desire. Barlach’s Noah looks rather helplessly to God 
alone to redeem him from estrangement in his utterly corrupted age. And in 
Werfel’s Goat Song, numerous figures are made to serve the redemption of 
others, even if imperfectly. While Werfel argues elsewhere, contra the Activ-
ists and other Jewish thinkers like Scholem,that redemption does not take 
place outside the human being itself (i.e., through public political efforts), the 
very notion of sacrifice that drives his play exhibits a belief that the human 
 
72 See Löwy, Redemption, pp. 52, 55. 
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The Hebrew Scriptures and Jewish Messianism in Expressionist Literature 79 
soul cannot provide its own redemption without the aid of other entities - 
those who are sacrificed, and the deities to whom they are sacrificed. The 
scapegoat ritual, after all, “reveals the sacrificial cult’s inability to achieve 
complete atonement by itself.”73 Thus, although Werfel accuses Hiller’s Ac-
tivism of externalizing the appearance of redemption to political organiza-
tions, in his own model of the human’s inescapable original sin, the facilita-
tion of redemption is primarily exogenous to the human. 
 The next chapter will continue to trace the tension between Werfel and 
the Activists, and all of the subsequent chapters will be concerned with the 
fundamental question Expressionism seems to be raising: Is redemption en-
dogenous or exogenous to the human being? That is, does the subject of mes-
sianic desire identify in itself, or in another, the fulfillment of that desire? 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
73 Philip Stern, ‘Azazel’, in The Oxford Companion to the Bible, p. 69. 
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Chapter 3 – The ‘Judeo-Christian’ Dialectic in the Expressionist 
Era 
 
 
A difficulty that arises throughout this study is the impossibility of identify-
ing many messianic themes as either ‘Jewish’ or ‘Christian’ in source, as the 
texts of Christianity are at once an adoption of and a departure from Hebrew 
Scripture. In Jean-François Lyotard’s analysis, the New Testament both “at-
taches itself to and disattaches itself from the old.”1 With respect to the mes-
sianic, we can say that its particular conception of time and history is central 
to both Judaism and Christianity, and is accompanied in both traditions by a 
strong apocalypticism. Despite these connections, however, messianism re-
mains the crux of the friction between Judaism and Christianity,2 as the 
Christian faith is grounded in an identification of the Messiah which Judaism 
rejects. Lyotard’s observation that the hyphen in the term Judeo-Christian is 
a “dialectical” one, that it “disunites what it unites,”3 carries particular rele-
vance, then, for the question of messianism. 
 In taking up this question, the thinkers of the Expressionist generation 
ascribe great significance to the relationship between Judaism and Christian-
ity. Pages and pages of the journals of the period are devoted to this relation-
ship, some highlighting a Judeo-Christian link, others radical differences be-
tween the two faiths. Undisputed in these pages is the pervasive presence of 
Christianity in the literary tradition to which these texts belong. Toller takes 
this presence so far as to claim that, because every European has been ex-
posed to Christian ideas at every turn, Christianity inhabits “jedes eu-
ropäische Kunstwerk, ob es gleich sich antichristlich nennt” (every European 
work of art, even if it calls itself anti-Christian).4 
 Given the central place of messianism in the thought of the Expressionist 
era, it is only natural that, within the broader discourse on Christian influ-
ence, a more specific question was posed (by writers of both Jewish and 
Christian backgrounds) as to the place of Jesus in the history of the faiths, as 
well as in contemporary notions of redemption. One sees this particularly in a 
special issue of Buber’s periodical Der Jude, from the 1925/26 volume, de-
voted to the topic of Judaism and Christianity. Here the author and religious 
scholar Friedrich Thieberger echoes Toller’s observation, arguing that the 
 
1 Jean-François Lyotard and Eberhard Gruber, The Hyphen: Between Judaism and Christian-
ity, trans. by Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 
1999), p. 15. 
2 See Scholem, ‘Verständnis’, p. 7. 
3 Lyotard and Gruber, pp. 14-15. 
4 Toller, Werke, I, 116. 
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82 German Expressionist Drama and the Messianism of a Generation 
“geistige Lebensrealität Europas […] hat den absoluten Wert der christlichen 
Idee zum Axiom erhoben” (spiritual life-reality of Europe […] has raised the 
absolute value of the Christian idea to an axiom). Thieberger decries one par-
ticular result of this development: “Selbst in jüdischen Kreisen ist es Mode 
geworden, Jesus für den Erfüller der prophetischen Andeutungen zu halten!” 
(Even in Jewish circles, it has become fashionable to take Jesus for the ful-
filler of prophetic foretellings!)5 Those at whom this remark is aimed must 
include Werfel, whose writings repeatedly expressed belief in the messi-
ahship of Jesus. Raised and educated in the Jewish community in Prague, 
Werfel would later write: “Mein mystischer, und ich kann wohl sagen 
katholischer Glaube ist das Knochengerüst meiner Gedichte und meines 
epischen und dramatischen Schaffens” (My mystic, and I dare say Catholic 
faith is the skeleton of my poems and my epic and dramatic work).6 Given his 
position between the two traditions and his frank articulations of a unique 
personal theology, Werfel’s views became a lightning rod for the discussion 
of the Jewish-Christian relationship in the Expressionist period. 
 We can begin to trace Werfel’s position in this discussion by recalling his 
strong resistance (expressed in an open letter to Hiller; see chapter 2) to the 
Activists’ claim that the messianic kingdom would be best effectuated by 
political activity. In the open letter, published under the title “Die christliche 
Sendung” (“The Christian Mission,” 1917), Werfel employs his understand-
ing of Christianity to denounce Hiller’s Activism, impugning its demand that 
each person “möge aus seiner Vereinsamung heraustreten, die Arbeit an 
seiner Seele (die egozentrische, gemeine und herzlose Arbeit ist) unterbre-
chen und sich bis zum letzten Funken von Kraft und Zeit dem Werke der 
sozialen Verbesserung weihen” (step out of his isolation, suspend his work 
on his own soul (which is egocentric, mean, and heartless work), and devote 
every last spark of his power and time to the work of social improvement). 
Activism represents for Werfel the rejection of all “Leidenschaft […] zu 
hohen Dingen, zur Kunst und zu jeglicher individuellen Vollendung” (pas-
sion […] for higher things like art and individual accomplishment), in favor 
of political activity. In making such misguided demands, the Activist be-
comes analogous, for Werfel, to Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor (from The 
Brothers Karamazov), whose faith is in “das irdische, räumliche Paradies, das 
durch weise Herrschaft und vollkommene Gesetzgebung erreichbar ist” (an 
earthly, spatial paradise attainable through wise governance and consummate 
legislation). Like the Grand Inquisitor’s, the Activist’s faith is in “die Erlö-
sung, die außerhalb des Menschen sich vollzieht […] durch Organisation, 
 
5 Friedrich Thieberger, ‘Der jüdische Erlösungsgedanke’, Der Jude, 9 (1925/26), 51-57 (p. 
51). 
6 Werfel, Zwischen, p. 614. 
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The ‘Judeo-Christian’ Dialectic in the Expressionist Era 83 
Volkswirtschaft, Politik usw.” (a redemption accomplished outside of the 
human being, […] through organization, economics, politics, etc.). Most cru-
cially, Werfel recalls that the Grand Inquisitor misses the forest for the trees, 
as it were, and has Christ imprisoned because the Second Coming interrupts 
the messianically conceived process of securing political power and thereby 
true utopian happiness for society.7 It is likely this very critique that had 
drawn Werfel so strongly to Dostoevsky, as both men resisted adamantly any 
doctrine of a paradise on earth attainable through efforts in the sociopolitical 
arena. 
 By Werfel’s lights, Activism is inimical not only to the core of Christian 
messianism, but also to art. Activism treats art, Werfel writes, as “ein 
lügnerisches Opiat, […] denn er lähmt die Seele, verwirrt sie und bläht sie zu 
einem Überselbst auf” (a mendacious opiate, […] for it lames the soul, con-
fuses it, and causes it to swell into an über-self). Here is Werfel’s central 
problem with Activism, its denial of the self in favor of the community. The 
uniqueness of Christianity, Werfel says, is its affirmation of “das Ich bis ins 
letzte” (the self to the very end). Thus Werfel defends against Hiller’s accusa-
tion of the egocentricity of his generation’s would-be saviors, by embracing 
that label and its facilitation of true redemption: perfecting the self is the path 
to redemption, for the self is the reality that stands opposed to the abstrac-
tions in which the politics of Activism places its faith. It is, for Werfel, the 
mission of Christianity, “den Menschen immer wieder unerbittlich zur Re-
alität zurückzuführen” (to lead mankind again and again, relentlessly, back to 
reality). In this respect, the mission of Werfel’s title intersects “durchaus mit 
der Sendung der Poesie” (completely with the mission of literature).8 
 Hiller and the Activists found support against Werfel’s criticisms from a 
number of quarters, including Max Brod, who published two relevant essays 
in Der Jude in 1916 and 1917. The first appeared before Werfel’s open letter, 
and bemoaned Werfel’s “rein passives Verhältnis zu Gott […] sein negatives 
zur Gesellschaft” (purely passive relationship to God […], his negative rela-
tionship to society). For Brod, messianism and the salvation of the world 
constitute “das innerste Ethos des Judentums” (the inmost ethos of Judaism). 
But like Hiller, he thinks that the egocentric posturing of too many Jewish 
writers of his generation “nimmt immer noch das eigene Ich zu wichtig, 
heftet die Augen zu wenig auf die ungeheure Aufgabe draußen, außerhalb des 
Ich, geht mehr auf Selbsterlösung aus” (still takes itself too seriously, and 
sets its sights too rarely upon the tremendous tasks outside it, focusing more 
 
7 Werfel, Zwischen, pp. 565-67. 
8 Ibid., pp. 569-70. 
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84 German Expressionist Drama and the Messianism of a Generation 
so upon self-redemption).9 Thus Werfel’s open letter, with its focus on the 
rightfully egocentric perfection of the self, should be read not only as a cri-
tique of the Activist movement as such, but as a response to Brod’s criticism, 
as well. 
 The second relevant Brod piece is a direct response to Werfel’s open let-
ter. It links general misconceptions about messianism to another, inherently 
related problem of the time, “eine neue Gnosis oder ein Neuchristentum un-
serer jungen jüdischen Literaten” (a new gnosis or a new Christianity among 
our young Jewish littérateurs). Brod reads Werfel’s letter as emblematic of 
“die neuchristlich-jüdischen, heute noch diffusen Tendierungen unserer 
Jugend” (the still diffuse new-Christian-Jewish tendencies of our youth).10 He 
has read Werfel well enough to castigate his egocentricity as particularly 
Christian: 
 
Indem der Christ sein Ich erlöst, sich selbst in den Zustand möglichster Vollkommen-
heit bringt, glaubt er alles getan zu haben, was zur Herbeiführung dieses Zustandes nö-
tig und möglich ist. In diesem Sinne ist also die christliche Gemeinschaft ein Beisam-
mensein lauter einsamer, nur mit dem eigenen Seelenheil beschäftigter Menschen.11 
(Inasmuch as the Christian redeems his own self, brings himself into a condition of the 
highest possible perfection, he believes to have done everything necessary and possible 
for the causation of this condition. In this sense, then, the Christian community is a col-
lection of people who are merely solitary and only concerned with their own salvation.) 
 
While Brod will take issue with Hiller’s methods - “Zusammenschluß der 
Geistigen zu einer Art neuer Partei oder gar Nation, statt Vergeistigung der 
schon bestehenden […] Nationen durch ihre Führer” (a coalition of intellec-
tuals as a sort of new party or even nation, rather than a spiritualization of the 
already existing […] nations through their leaders), he unequivocally defends 
Hiller’s ultimate goal against Werfel’s criticisms. Brod’s cardinal concern 
about Werfel’s open letter, however, is the support he expects it to find 
among young European Jews. He concludes: “Es ist hohe Zeit, mit unserer 
Gemeinschaft Ernst zu machen” (It is high time we got serious about our 
community).12 
 
9 Max Brod, ‘Unsere Literaten und die Gemeinschaft’, Der Jude, 1 (1916/17), 457-64 (pp. 
461, 464). 
10 Max Brod, ‘Franz Werfels christliche Sendung’, Der Jude, 1 (1916/17), 717-24 (p. 717). 
11 Brod, ‘Werfels’, p. 721. 
12 Ibid., pp. 720, 723. The final plea echoes the words with which Buber had initiated Der 
Jude: “Wer überhaupt mit seinem Dasein auf der Erde Ernst machen will, muß mit seinem 
Verhältnis zur Gemeinschaft Ernst machen: indem er sich verantwortlich fühlt” (Whoever 
wants to get serious about his existence on this earth at all must get serious about his relati-
onship to the community: by feeling his own responsibility). Buber, ‘Losung’, p. 2. 
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The ‘Judeo-Christian’ Dialectic in the Expressionist Era 85 
 Both Werfel’s critique and Brod’s defense of the Activist spirit rest upon 
Jewish and Christian notions of redemption, such that their essayistic dia-
logue opposes the self-affirmation and self-improvement of Christian messi-
anism to the community-building of Jewish messianism. The debate would 
continue in the journals of the Expressionist period, with Christianity serving 
for some as “einen Weg jüdischen Geistes durch die Völker der Erde” (a path 
for Jewish spirit through the peoples of the earth),13 for others as a divergence 
from that path.14 A contrast would be repeatedly drawn between Christian 
and Jewish configurations of messianism, the goal of the former being indi-
vidual salvation, that of the latter an earthly justice accomplished by the ac-
tivity of humans as “Genossen Gottes am Werk der Schöpfung” (companions 
of God in the work of creation).15 
 Even if the (primarily Jewish) focus upon political activism and commu-
nity-building posits redemption as something that takes place beyond the 
individual soul, this model of redemption is also, as we observed in the pre-
vious chapter, endogenous to the human. That is, for writers like Hiller, Brod, 
and Toller, messianism is not about looking to or waiting for a savior, but 
about the human activity that creates justice in the world. Though Werfel 
calls this an externalization of redemption, he does not adequately acknowl-
edge that his own model depends to an even greater degree upon the provi-
sion of redemption from outside sources: from scapegoats like the ones found 
in Goat Song, and (if we take him at his word) from Christianity’s ostensibly 
ultimate scapegoat,Jesus. Some external intervention is required before the 
human soul can be redeemed by the divine and then perfected. 
 While there has been great speculation as to whether or not Werfel was 
baptized on his deathbed, he refused baptism throughout his life.16 This re-
peated refusal was necessitated by Werfel’s understanding of the Jewish-
Christian relationship, a rather singular one laid out in the section of his The-
ologumena (1944) titled “Von Christus und Israel” (“On Christ and Israel”). 
Werfel writes there: “Selbst für einen Juden, der Jesum Christum für den 
wahrhaftigen, in der Geschichte realisierten Messias und sogar für Gottes 
Sohn hält, ist Taufe und Übertritt nicht adäquat. Ihm eignet eine durchaus 
verschiedene Stellung zu dem Christusereignis [...]. Der Jude ist durch Taufe 
 
13 Gustav Landauer, ‘Christlich und christlich, jüdisch und jüdisch’, Der Jude, 1 (1916/17), 
851-52 (p. 852). 
14 Max Brod, ‘Christlich und christlich, jüdisch und jüdisch’, Der Jude, 2 (1917/18), 209. 
15 Max Dienemann, ‘Frömmigkeit im Judentum und Christentum’, Der Jude, 9 (1925/26), 30-
40 (p. 40). 
16 See Peter Stefan Jungk, Franz Werfel. Eine Lebensgeschichte (Frankfurt a.M.: S. Fischer, 
1987), pp. 342-43. For Werfel’s identification as a Jew, see Jungk, pp. 59, 307, as well as 
Gunter Grimm, ‘Ein hartnäckiger Wanderer. Zur Rolle des Judentums im Werk Franz Wer-
fels’, in Im Zeichen Hiobs, pp. 258-79, especially p. 273. 
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86 German Expressionist Drama and the Messianism of a Generation 
und Glaube allein nicht ‘heilbar’” (Even for a Jew who holds Jesus Christ to 
be the true Messiah realized in history, and even God’s son, baptism and 
conversion are inadequate. His is an entirely different position toward the 
Christ-event […]. The Jew is not “curable” through baptism and faith 
alone).17 Official conversion from Judaism to Christianity, through baptism, 
is for Werfel not only inadequate, but in fact an abrogation of the Jewish role 
vis-à-vis Jesus, namely to be “das unverwüstliche Zeugnis [seiner] Wahrheit 
im Fleische” (the everlasting witness of [his] truth in the flesh). Without this 
witness, Werfel says, “das verfolgt und gegeißelt durch die ganzen Welt geht, 
sänke Christus zu einem bloßen Mythos hinab, gleich dem Apoll oder Diony-
sos” (which wanders persecuted and scourged through the whole world, 
Christ would be reduced to a mere myth, like Apollo or Dionysus). The na-
tion of Israel has precluded this reduction by its antagonism, “damit das 
Heilsdrama der verschmähten Gottheit [...] in Zeit und Wirklichkeit vor sich 
gehen konnte” (so that the drama of salvation of the despised deity […] could 
unfold in time and in reality). In other words: “Damit hat die Vorsehung Got-
tes Israel geradezu verurteilt, Gott selbst zu verwerfen, zum Heile der ganzen 
Welt” (God’s providence actually condemned Israel to reject God himself, 
for the salvation of the whole world). Thus the Jew who would be baptized 
deserts not only the Jewish community past and present, but Christ as well.18 
 In conformity with a long tradition of Christian exegesis, Werfel draws a 
typological connection between the Fall of Adam and the rejection of Jesus 
by Israel: 
 
Jeder Jude aller Arten Epochen hat als Glied des überzeitlichen Judentums Jesum Chris-
tum verkannt, die von Gott gereichte Hand der Erlösung ausgeschlagen, dadurch das 
endgültige Weltheil verschoben und als zweiter Adam das Paradies, das schon vor der 
Türe stand, neuerdings verspielt. Genau aber wie Adam seine Weltgeschichte als Buße 
tragen muß, so kann dem Juden für das Nichterkennen und Verwerfen des Messias seine 
jüdische Weltgeschichte nicht erlassen werden.19 
(Every Jew in every era, as a member of Judaism, which is beyond time, has failed to 
recognize Jesus Christ, has brushed aside the hand of redemption that God outstretched, 
thereby delaying the final salvation of the world and losing again, as a second Adam, 
the Paradise that stood at his door. But just as Adam must carry the history of the world 
as his penance, so the Jew cannot be absolved of the Jewish history of the world, be-
cause of his non-recognition and rejection of the Messiah.) 
 
 
17 Werfel, Zwischen, pp. 150-51. My translation of heilbar is based on its root verb, heilen, 
meaning to cure, heal, treat, or remedy. But other connotations are also present, as the noun 
Heil signifies salvation, the adjective heil healthiness or safety. 
18 Ibid., pp. 150-52, 155. 
19 Ibid., p. 151. 
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The ‘Judeo-Christian’ Dialectic in the Expressionist Era 87 
Like Adam, Israel is not eternally damned. Werfel holds instead the rather 
conciliatory belief that the covenant of salvation will be fulfilled at the end of 
time, when Israel will be “der positive Kronzeuge im letzten Prozeß jenseits 
der Geschichte […], wenn die unendliche Vater- und Sohnesliebe Gottes sich 
endgültig offenbart, denn die Verheißung an Abraham ist nicht aufgehoben” 
(the positive state’s witness in the last trial beyond history […], when God’s 
unending Father-and-Son-love will be finally revealed, for the promise to 
Abraham is still valid).20 
 The tragic nature of the Jewish-Christian relationship lies, for Werfel, not 
in the Jews’ rejection of Jesus’s messiahship, but in their misunderstanding 
and misinterpretation of their role in the piece. The function of the Messiah’s 
impending return, then, is to correct this misinterpretation: “Messias ist Der, 
welcher da kommt, um Israel vor sich selbst und der Welt richtig zu interpre-
tieren” (Messiah is He who comes to interpret Israel correctly before itself 
and before the world). This reinterpretation and clarification will coincide 
with the beginning of “der ‘Olom,’ der Aeon der Erlösung” (the olom, the age 
of redemption).21 
 It will by now go without saying that the Theologumena met with harsh 
criticism, and that Werfel was chastised repeatedly for his Jewish self-hatred, 
for unapologetically putting forth “ideas a modern Catholic author would 
hesitate to express openly, apprehensive of the charge of anti-Semitism.”22 
Werfel’s biographer Peter Stephan Jungk is careful to disclaim self-hatred as 
the central category of Werfel’s Jewishness. Nor was it an outright rejection, 
Jungk says, that played this role, so much as “eine als unproblematische emp-
fundene Gleichgültigkeit” (an indifference that he himself did not see as a 
problem). Among the contributing factors to this apathy, Jungk names that 
Werfel had only loose connections with Judaism, had not been in a syna-
gogue since his childhood, and was surrounded by predominantly Christian 
writers, musicians, and artists.23 
 Werfel dictated his Theologumena from his sickbed in 1944, drawing on 
notebooks dating as far back as 1914. While it is thus difficult to account 
definitively for the chronological development of Werfel’s thought about the 
Jewish-Christian relationship, Jungk finds sentences that would be incorpo-
 
20 Werfel, Zwischen, p. 160. A very similar theology is proclaimed by the character F.W. in 
Star of the Unborn, one of the last things Werfel wrote before his death in 1945. 
21 Ibid., pp. 150, 154. 
22 Henry Rubin, ‘Franz Werfel’s Self-Hatred’, Contemporary Jewish Record, 8 (April 1945), 
pp. 183-91 (p. 190). 
23 Jungk, p. 59. All translations from this biography are from Franz Werfel. A Life in Prague, 
Vienna and Hollywood, trans. by Anselm Hollo (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1990). 
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88 German Expressionist Drama and the Messianismof a Generation 
rated word for word into “On Christ and Israel” in a sketchbook from 1936.24 
This is a full decade after the appearance of Paulus unter den Juden (Paul 
Among the Jews, 1926), the last of Werfel’s dramas that could arguably be 
called Expressionist.25 Yet the theology of the essay already finds clear con-
cretization in the play. 
 Paul Among the Jews takes place against the backdrop of heightened 
messianic expectations: those of the Jews during the political tension of the 
Roman occupation, and those of the early Christians who believe Jesus’s re-
turn to be imminent. When the Jerusalem community is beset by violence, 
one rabbi interprets the persecution as the “Geburtswehen des Messias!” 
(birth pangs of the Messiah!)26 This concept, taken primarily from kabbalistic 
literature, highlights the apocalyptic core of a messianism in which the glori-
ous birth of redemption is possible only once great pain and ruin have been 
endured (much more will be said about it in later chapters). 
 Tensions between Romans and Jews are compounded, in the play, by 
divisions among the Jews themselves. The High Priest is troubled especially 
by a group of “Ketzer, die einen Gehenkten als König Messias anbeten” 
(heretics who worship an executed man as King Messiah). Among them is 
the Jewish scholar and teacher Schaul. Returning home as “Paulus” after a 
long absence, he has thrown his community into upheaval. He speaks of him-
self as a “neue Schöpfung” (new creation) (see 2 Corinthians 5:17) and is, as 
a result, on a supra-personal mission: “Die ganze Welt glaubt, sie sei Saulus 
und weiß nicht, daß sie Paulus ist” (The whole world believes it is Saul, and 
doesn’t know that it is Paul).27 
 To an extent, Paul’s mission coincides with that of Jesus’s disciples. 
Awed and impressed that they were with Jesus while he was on earth, Paul 
asks Simon Peter and Jacob when the Messiah will return. Simon Peter ans-
wers: “Ehe noch unser Geschlecht den Tod geschmeckt hat. Bis der Tem-
pelgreuel erfüllt ist, wie es verkünden Gesetz und Propheten. Wir werden es 
leiblich erleben” (Before our generation has tasted death. When the atrocity 
of the temple has been fulfilled, as the law and the prophets proclaim. We 
will live to see it in the flesh). Like the disciples, Paul lives in the expectation 
that his generation will witness the Second Coming. But the newly conten-
 
24 See Jungk, pp. 307, 326-27. 
25 While Werfel began to distance himself from dramatic Expressionism as early as 1920 (see 
Jungk, p. 129), his plays would continue to bear the unmistakable hallmarks of the move-
ment for many years. The Expressionist spirit that animates Paul Among the Jews is encap-
sulated in Paul’s characterization of himself as “ein Angstschrei um die Menschen” (cry of 
fear for the people). Werfel, Dramen, p. 491. 
26 Werfel, Dramen, p. 520. 
27 Ibid., pp. 473, 490-91. 
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The ‘Judeo-Christian’ Dialectic in the Expressionist Era 89 
tious issue of the authority of Jewish law separates him from Jesus’s other 
followers. Whereas Paul declares Jesus to be “über dem Gesetz” (above the 
law), Jacob holds Jesus to be “der Messias des Gesetzes” (the Messiah of the 
law). Jacob and Simon Peter even attribute eschatological significance to 
Paul’s disobedience: “Die Dämonen des Antichristus sind los. [...] Unruhe 
hat [Paulus] über uns gebracht, die wir schon so ruhig waren im Messias. [...] 
Dies ist das Zeichen. Das Ende naht und die Wiederkunft des Herrn” (The 
demons of the Antichrist are loose. […] [Paul] has brought trouble for us, 
when we had been so peaceful in the Messiah. […] This is the sign. The end 
is near, and the return of the Lord).28 
 The two forms of messianic expectation - Jewish and nascently Christian 
- that set the mood of the play share important characteristics. Personal, po-
litical, and theological upheaval are all interpreted as harbingers of the im-
pending messianic age and the (re)appearance of the Messiah. But Werfel’s 
focus is on the tension that arises at this particular moment in history, as the 
beginning of Paul’s ministry asks what role the Torah plays for followers of 
Jesus. Since the question is significant for both believers and non-believers in 
Jesus’s messiahship, Werfel poses it in a series of encounters between Paul 
and his former teacher, Rabbi Gamaliel (see Acts 22:3). 
 In the first encounter, it is a matter of verb tense that separates the two 
men. Paul proclaims: “Das Gesetz ist erfüllt und die Liebe gekommen!” (The 
law is fulfilled and love has come!) Gamaliel corrects him: “Die Liebe wird 
kommen” (Love will come). Paul is undeterred: “Sie ist unter uns gewesen. 
[...] Nun ist die Thora ungültig, denn eine neue Welt hebt an. Israel aber hat 
seinen Messias getötet” (Love was among us. […] Now the Torah is invalid, 
for a new world begins. But Israel has killed its Messiah).29 Gamaliel is 
overwhelmed by the change in Paul, and does not respond further to his 
claims until the two meet again on Yom Kippur, in an encounter of attempted 
propitiation and reconciliation, both personal and theological. There are ini-
tial signs that this reconciliation will occur: Gamaliel believes that Jesus was 
crucified unjustly, and even suggests that Paul will lead “den Rabbi Jeho-
schua von Nazareth zurück zu Israel” (the rabbi Jeshua of Nazareth back to 
Israel). But the differences between Gamaliel’s and Paul’s respective under-
standings of Jesus make such reconciliation impossible. For Paul, Jesus is an 
all-encompassing transformation that has accomplished the goal of messian-
ism itself, the establishment of God’s kingdom on earth. Gamaliel cannot 
agree and retains his faith in the law, in which alone he finds “das Reich Got-
tes und unsre Freiheit, es zu vollenden!” (the kingdom of God and our free-
 
28 Werfel, Dramen, pp. 491, 507. 
29 Ibid., p. 501. 
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90 German Expressionist Drama and the Messianism of a Generation 
dom to accomplish it!) For a brief moment, Werfel’s debate with Brod and 
the Activists creeps into the play, as Gamaliel advances the premise that hu-
mans can, without the literal and accomplished arrival of the Messiah, effec-
tuate the messianic kingdom. Paul’s refusal (which mirrors Werfel’s own) to 
accept this premise leads to Gamaliel’s change of heart about Jesus: “Mag er 
ein heiliger Prophet gewesen sein, ich nenne ihn Feind” (Even if he was a 
holy prophet, I call him my enemy).30 
 The seeds of Werfel’s Theologumena are here. Despite initial inclinations 
toward Jesus and Paul, Gamaliel must, as a representative of Judaism, fulfill 
his role by rejecting Jesus outright. Just as Werfel will discuss the tragic na-
ture of this role in his later essay, the results of this scene within the play are 
tragic. The scapegoat for the Yom Kippur ritual does not run away as it 
should, returning instead to the temple with the unexpiated sins of the people; 
the inability to escape sin takes much the same form it did in Goat Song. A 
number of Jews die, including Gamaliel. The scene even waxes apocalyptic: 
the Roman Emperor, understood to be an Antimessiah, erects his statue in the 
temple, a gross violation of Jewish law and a sign that the Messiah too will 
now appear.31 
 In an “Argument” published as an appendix to the play, Werfel says that 
it portrays “der entscheidende Augenblick, in dem das Christentum sich 
loslöst von seiner Mutterwelt [...] die große tragische Stunde des Judentums” 
(the decisive moment in which Christianity looses itself from its mother-
world […], the great tragic hour of Judaism). He identifies Israel as the pro-
tagonist of the play.32 These statements are, atthe very least, the nucleus of 
the personal theology Werfel would later put forth more directly. As for the 
play, its theology depends absolutely on the title character, even if he is not 
considered the protagonist, as an embodiment of both continuation and rup-
ture. Paul represents an enduring link between the Judaism that he, like Wer-
fel, refused to renounce and the Christianity he founded; but he personifies 
also, even more so than Jesus, a momentous break in the history of religious 
thought. For Werfel as for many others, Paul is (to return to Lyotard’s analy-
sis) the figure who “traces” the Judeo-Christian hyphen.33 The Paul figure 
 
30 Werfel, Dramen, pp. 527-30. 
31 See ibid., pp. 483, 562. 
32 Ibid., Dramen, pp. 558-59. 
33 Lyotard and Gruber, p. 15. Other contemporary philosophers have also interrogated, with 
sustained focus, just this kind of Paul, from Alain Badiou in Saint Paul: The Foundation of 
Universalism to Agamben in The Time That Remains. An interesting development in this 
philosophical preoccupation with Paul is Jean-Luc Nancy’s recent turn instead to James as a 
figure for thinking “Judeo-Christianities” and “messianisms.” Jean-Luc Nancy, Dis-
Enclosure: The Deconstruction of Christianity, trans. by Bettina Bergo and others (New 
York: Fordham University Press, 2007), pp. 42-60 (p. 46). 
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The ‘Judeo-Christian’ Dialectic in the Expressionist Era 91 
thus highlights the dialectical position of messianic identity, at the heart of 
the division between Judaism and Christianity, the historical rupture between 
them, but also at the heart of their convergence and the blurring of their 
boundaries. 
 The often contentious dialogue in this period about the Jewish-Christian 
relationship opens up even further our conception of Expressionist Messian-
ism, underscoring that there is not one such phenomenon; in fact a number of 
messianisms exist within the movement, broadly defined. The thinkers of this 
generation varied not only in their conception of redemption as endogenous 
or exogenous, respectively, to the human, but also in the arenas into which 
they projected that redemption (aesthetic, political, religious). Surveying the 
messianisms of Expressionism, we can say that some adhered to religious 
orthodoxy, while others were largely atheistic. Some were more politically 
conservative than others. What they all shared, and often argued about 
amongst themselves, was a sustained concern with human redemption, and an 
intense desire to locate and ultimately access the source of that redemption. 
As Werfel’s work has begun to show, this desire was encoded not only in the 
idiom of Jewish messianism, but in that of the Christian Bible as well, to 
which the following chapters turn. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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Chapter 4 – Birth and Rebirth in Christianity and Expressionism 
 
Unschuld ist das Kind und Vergessen, ein 
Neubeginnen, ein Spiel, ein aus sich rol-
lendes Rad, eine erste Bewegung, ein hei-
liges Ja-sagen. 
-- Friedrich Nietzsche, Also sprach Zara-
thustra1 
 
The child is innocence and forgetting, a 
new beginning, a game, a self-propelled 
wheel, a first movement, a sacred “Yes.” 
-- Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke 
Zarathustra 
 
 
Introduction 
 
If Eden is Christianity’s first origin story, shared with Judaism, the Nativity is 
its second and unique one. The birth of Jesus represents not only the earthly 
arrival of the Messiah, but in fact the beginning of a new phase of messianic 
time, as the Gospels of Matthew and Luke take great pains to show. Matthew 
begins with a genealogy tracing Jesus’s ancestry back to the Davidic line 
from which the Messiah is expected to come, and even back to the covenant 
made with Abraham. Matthew and Luke both have angels refer to Jesus’s 
messiahship even before his birth. While Luke’s angel uses the language of 
Jewish messianism to proclaim Jesus’s royalty - “The Lord God will give 
him the throne of his ancestor David, and he will be king over Israel for ever” 
(1:32-33) - Matthew’s angel introduces in earnest the theme of spiritual sal-
vation: Jesus “will save his people from their sins” (1:21). The angel who 
speaks later in Luke’s Gospel, in its Nativity account proper, is even more 
explicit: “Today there has been born to you in the city of David a deliverer – 
the Messiah, the Lord” (2:11).2 
 
1 Friedrich Nietzsche, Werke. Kritische Gesamtausgabe, ed. by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino 
Montinari (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter & Co, 1967- ), VI.1: Also sprach Zarathustra, ed. by 
Giorgio Colli and others (1968), p. 27. All translations from this book are from Thus Spoke 
Zarathustra. A Book For All And None, trans. by Walter Kaufmann (New York: Penguin, 
1966). 
2 While the more familiar translation is likely Christ the Lord, this translation restores the 
language of the Greek Testament to its messianic context. Thus Agamben, for example, 
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94 German Expressionist Drama and the Messianism of a Generation 
 These angelic announcements of Jesus’s birth will be echoed in Expres-
sionist Messianism, as will the heralding of this birth as a miraculous event 
(in Jesus’s case inasmuch as he is born to a virgin impregnated by the Holy 
Spirit). But it is primarily the suprapersonal significance of the Nativity story 
that animates the Expressionists’ co-option of it, namely the belief that this 
individual birth sets off a chain of events resulting in the spiritual rebirth, and 
hence redemption, of humanity itself. Paul speaks of the salvation that oc-
curred with Jesus’s birth (Titus 3:4), and teaches that “if anyone is in Christ, 
there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has 
become new!” (2 Corinthians 5:17).3 Drawing on this paradigm, Expression-
ism, in its “Erneuerungspathos” (pathos of renewal),4 mobilizes the theme of 
birth to signify the rebirth of an adult or a community, as well. Infancy, and 
even before it the embryonic, or the very promise of annunciation, represents 
for the Expressionists a threshold in the economy of messianic desire. The 
unborn or newborn child becomes in this economy a figure of ahistoricality, 
the sign of a pregnant time or situation, of a utopian (re)beginning.5 In this 
sense it is significant that the German Entbindung refers to childbirth but also 
more literally to ‘unbonding,’ to being freed from bonds. The English deliv-
ery carries both connotations, as well, of course, but Entbindung has also 
been used to refer specifically to absolution from sin.6 We will see it meaning 
all these things within Expressionist Messianism. 
 
 
Jesus, Zarathustra, and the New Man 
 
Expressionist Messianism adopts from Christian thought both the functioning 
of the birth of a redeemer-child as an axis upon which history turns, as well 
 
stresses the importance of reading Χριςτοσ not as a “proper name,” but as “the Greek trans-
lation of the Hebrew term mashiah, ‘the anointed,’ that is, the Messiah.” Agamben, p. 15. 
3 A character in one of Barlach’s plays cites the final phrase verbatim from the Luther transla-
tion. See Werk, I, 178. 
4 Expressionismus. Manifeste und Dokumente zur deutschen Literatur 1910-1920, ed. by 
Thomas Anz and MichaelStark (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1982), p. 130. This pathos is evinced, 
for example, in the titles of numerous literary journals of the period: Der neue Daemon, Die 
neue Jugend, Das neue Pathos, Die neue Erde. 
5 In addition to the texts of Christianity, the literature of German Romanticism likely served 
as a model for the Expressionist thematization of infancy and childhood. See Hansgeorg 
Kind, Das Kind in der Ideologie und der Dichtung der deutschen Romantik (Dresden: Dit-
tert, 1936), as well as Hans-Heino Ewers, Kindheit als poetische Daseinsform. Studien zur 
Entstehung der romantischen Kindheitsutopie im 18. Jahrhundert (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 
1989). 
6 Deutsches Wörterbuch, ed. by Jacob Grimm and Wilhelm Grimm and others (Leipzig: S. 
Hirzel, 1854-1960). 
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Birth and Rebirth in Christianity and Expressionism 95 
as the broader notion of spiritual rebirth as ultimate renewal and thus redemp-
tion. Particularly the latter concept was of great concern in both the theology 
and the philosophy that influenced the Expressionist era. 
 The Christian theologian with the closest ties to Expressionism was Karl 
Barth. Among his early writings, his exegesis of Paul’s letter to the Romans 
has been called “ein Dokument des theologischen Expressionismus, voll apo-
kalyptischer Ahnungen und radikaler Skepsis” (a document of theological 
Expressionism, full of apocalyptic premonitions and radical skepticism).7 Der 
Römerbrief (The Epistle to the Romans, 1919) uses Expressionist language to 
outline Barth’s theology of crisis (Krisentheologie), a theology necessitated 
in large part by the catastrophic event of World War I. As Christoph 
Schwöbel has shown, the instrumentalization of theology for the war cause 
brought theology itself into question for Barth, and this questioning led di-
rectly to his commentary on Paul’s letter.8 Barth is thus aligned with his liter-
ary contemporaries in his break with his own predecessors and his rejection 
of German militarism. 
 In his sermons, Barth called the war a “Gerichtszeit” (time of judgment) 
and part of the “Offenbarung des Menschen” (revelation of the human be-
ing).9 He makes the same claim in the Epistle to the Romans, writing that 
God can “durch den Höllenlärm eines Weltkrieges seinen Namen auf Erden 
verkündigen lassen” (cause his name to be proclaimed on earth even through 
the pandemonium of a world war). Barth finds not only an immediate pur-
pose for the war but also a hope beyond it (the same one identified by many 
Expressionists), a new beginning for the world: “Denn die Welt und 
Menschheit, die jetzt ist, ist tatsächlich in das Chaos, in das Nichts zurück-
gekehrt, der Gewalt des Todes verfallen. Eine neue Welt muß anbrechen, 
wenn die Wahrheit und Güte Gottes […] zu Ehren kommen sollen” (For this 
world, and the humanity that exists now, have truly returned to chaos, to 
nothingness, have fallen to the power of death. A new world must begin if the 
truth and goodness of God […] are to be honored).10 
 In Barth’s view, the harbinger of this new world is the New Man (der 
neue Mensch), a figure with whom his literary contemporaries were also in-
 
7 Christina Ujma, Ernst Blochs Konstruktion der Moderne aus Messianismus und Marxismus. 
Erörterungen mit Berücksichtigung von Lukács und Benjamin (Stuttgart: M&P Verlag für 
Wissenschaft und Forschung, 1995), p. 76. 
8 Christoph Schwöbel, ‘Theology’, in The Cambridge Companion to Karl Barth, ed. by John 
Webster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 17-36 (pp. 19-20). 
9 Jochen Fähler, Der Ausbruch des 1. Weltkrieges in Karl Barths Predigten 1913-1915 (Bern: 
Peter Lang, 1979), pp. 5-6. 
10 Karl Barth, Der Römerbrief (Erste Fassung 1919), ed. by Hermann Schmidt (Zürich: Theo-
logischer Verlag, 1985), pp. 378, 300. 
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96 German Expressionist Drama and the Messianism of a Generation 
tensely concerned.11 Far more strictly than they, Barth identifies Jesus, the 
antithesis of Adam, as the paradigmatic New Man representing “der Anfang 
einer neuen Menschheit und Welt” (the beginning of a new humanity and a 
new world). Since this renewal of humanity is identical to “das positive Ziel 
der messianischen Rettungstat” (the positive goal of the messianic act of sal-
vation), that goal is now within reach.12 Thus, Barth’s chronicle of this cru-
cial hour in salvation history functions as a literal wake-up call - “jetzt ist es 
in der Ordnung, nicht mehr zu schlafen” (now it is fitting not to sleep any-
more) - and highlights themes common to the Expressionists’ own parenesis: 
community, justice, potency.13 
 While Barth’s theology resonates in many ways with Expressionist ideo-
logy, its relative adherence to Christian dogma makes the parallel an imper-
fect one. For Barth, it is the messianic act of Jesus that enables human re-
creation; only Jesus makes room for any kind of new humanity. Many of the 
Expressionists, by contrast, sought a secular model of regeneration, in which 
the messianic act could be performed by unaided humans. They found such a 
model in Nietzsche, particularly in his Thus Spoke Zarathustra. While 
Barth’s Epistle to the Romans quotes the claim of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra 
that the earth shall become a place of recovery (Genesung) and hope (Hoff-
nung),14 what one might call Nietzsche’s own ‘theology of crisis’ differs 
quite radically from Barth’s, in its positing of the Übermensch as the para-
digm for a new humanity. 
 At the heart of the overman Zarathustra teaches is, as David B. Allison 
stresses, the potential for “self-transformation […] and a fully truthful under-
standing of the human condition.”15 It is immediately evident why the writers 
of the Expressionist generation were intensely drawn to this figure. They 
seem to have taken many of Zarathustra’s challenges quite literally: “[W]irf 
den Helden in deiner Seele nicht weg! Halte heilig diese höchste Hoffnung!” 
([D]o not throw away the hero in your soul! Hold holy this highest hope!) 
When it became their highest hope that a messianic hero would arise from out 
of their own souls, many Expressionists took up as well Zarathustra’s criti-
 
11 Though a literal translation of “der neue Mensch” yields “the new human” or “the new hu-
man being,” the standard translation in scholarship on Expressionism is “the New Man.” Is-
sues of gender with respect to Expressionism’s vision of human renewal will be taken up be-
low, particularly as they relate to Expressionist Messianism. 
12 Barth, pp. 301, 196, 525. 
13 Ibid., pp. 525-26. 
14 Ibid., p. 328. Aschheim notes that, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, “a 
number of Protestants found the Nietzschean language of regeneration and life-affirmation 
particularly appealing.” See Aschheim, pp. 203-12 (pp. 203-204). 
15 David B. Allison, Reading the New Nietzsche (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001), 
p. 119. 
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Birth and Rebirth in Christianity and Expressionism 97 
cism of Christian soteriology: “Der, welchen sie Erlöser nennen, schlug sie in 
Banden: -- In Banden falscher Werthe und Wahn-Worte! Ach dass einer sie 
noch von ihrem Erlöser erlöste!” (He whom they call Redeemer has put them 
in fetters: in fetters of false values and delusive words. Would that someone 
would yet redeem them from their Redeemer!) From this displacement of 
Jesus followed the Expressionists’ focus on an earthly rather than a heavenly 
messianic kingdom, which was also inspired by Zarathustra’s words: 
“[B]leibt der Erde treu und glaubt Denen nicht, welche euch von über-
irdischenHoffnungen reden! […] Ich liebe Die, welche nicht erst hinter den 
Sternen einen Grund suchen, unterzugehen und Opfer zu sein: sondern die 
sich der Erde opfern, dass die Erde einst des Übermenschen werde” 
([R]emain faithful to the earth, and do not believe those who speak to you of 
otherworldly hopes! […] I love those who do not first seek behind the stars 
for a reason to go under and be a sacrifice, but who sacrifice themselves for 
the earth, that the earth may some day become the overman’s).16 Upon such 
sentiments rested the Expressionists’ literary formation of their own over-
men-heroes. The speech patterns of these heroes are widely adopted from 
Zarathustra; their prophetic and proclamatory rhetoric echoes, like Zarathus-
tra’s and often ironically, both the prophetic books of Hebrew Scripture and 
the Christian Gospels. 
 Zarathustra and the overman he taught loomed large over a number of 
Expressionist writers. Goll’s call, in 1919, for the Überdrama17 is certainly a 
response to the Nietzschean text. Reinhard Johannes Sorge wrote a dramatic 
sketch entitled “Zarathustra. Eine Impression” (1911). And Georg Heym’s 
journals document his desire, “mein Leben nun umzugestalten, um ein Pfeil 
zum Übermenschen zu werden” (to reshape my life so that I might become an 
arrow pointing toward the overman).18 
 There is ample evidence that the four playwrights in question here were 
greatly impacted by Nietzsche and his Zarathustra. Toller notes in his autobi-
ography that he read Nietzsche while at university,19 and the voluntarism at 
the heart of his revolutionary politics is certainly at least partly Zarathustrian 
in origin. His drama The Transformation, as we will see, conforms to 
Nietzsche’s reflections on labor and childbirth as a symbol of holy affirma-
tion and creation. 
 Though Werfel becomes critical of Nietzsche in his post-Expressionist 
years, he writes of a powerful experience with Ecce Homo (which was not 
published until 1908, as the first sparks of German Expressionism were be-
 
16 Nietzsche, VI.1, 9, 11, 50, 113. 
17 Iwan Goll, ‘Das Überdrama’, Die neue Schaubühne, 1 (1919), 265-67. 
18 Quoted (in German) in Aschheim, p. 66, n. 55. 
19 See Toller, Werke, IV, 43. 
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98 German Expressionist Drama and the Messianism of a Generation 
ginning to spread).20 He engaged in discussions of Nietzsche with Kafka and 
Brod, and compared Der Gerichtstag (The Last Judgment, 1919), a collection 
of his Expressionist poetry, to Thus Spoke Zarathustra.21 One of Werfel’s 
plays in particular, as we will see, both embraces Zarathustrian ideals and 
demonstrates how Nietzsche’s valorization of sexuality animated the Expres-
sionists’ rebuke of conventional morality. 
 Barlach, for his part, is concerned with the particular Zarathustrian maxim 
that proclaims, “wenn es Götter gäbe, wie hielte ich’s aus, kein Gott zu sein! 
Also giebt es keine Götter” (if there were gods, how could I endure not to be a 
god! Hence there are no gods).22 Barlach takes considerable license para-
phrasing these words in a 1916 diary entry, in which he ponders the meaning 
of Christian existence: 
 
Das ganze Verlangen nach dem Geist, der Sinn des Gottwollens und Gottsuchens, hat 
aber einen Sinn. Den (grob gesagt): selbst Gott zu werden, nämlich Gott zu begreifen, 
zu fühlen wie er, seine Erhabenheit zu teilen, ihn zu “schauen,” und wäre es nur das Ei-
ne: den Sinn der Welt, des Menschdaseins richtig zu lernen. […] damit begnügt sich der 
Christ: Gottes “Herrlichkeit zu schauen,” die Welt zu begreifen wie “ER,” zu erfahren: 
so und so ist dies und das und Alles zu deuten. Nietzsche: “Wenn es einen Gott gäbe, 
wie könntest du es ertragen, keiner zu sein. Also bist du ein Gott!”23 
(But all our longing for the spirit, the meaning of our desire for and search for God, has 
one purpose. Namely, to put it crudely, ourselves to become God, to understand God, to 
feel as he does, to share in his transcendence, to “see” him. Or perhaps it is just this one 
thing: to learn truly the meaning of the world and of human existence. […] [T]his is 
enough for the Christian: “to see the glory” of God, to understand the world as “HE” 
does, to experience: this and that and everything should be interpreted in this way. 
Nietzsche: “If there were a God, how could you endure it, not to be a god. Hence you 
are a god!”) 
 
The Christian lives in restless pursuit of the insight that interprets the world 
correctly through a share in divine knowledge. Clearly, this puts Barlach in 
mind of the struggle to recreate oneself in a movement toward the overman 
(which Zarathustra discusses in the same section from which Barlach draws), 
and of Zarathustra’s claim to superior insight and knowledge. But a signifi-
cant disparity emerges between Zarathustra’s starting point and that of Bar-
lach. The entire Barlach passage is concerned with the human’s reaching for 
God, which contradicts utterly the context of the Zarathustrian line he cites. 
In this passage, Zarathustra says that God is only a conjecture (Muthmaas-
sung), and should be replaced in the “schaffender Wille” (creative will) by 
 
20 Werfel, Zwischen, p. 270. For the departure of multiple Expressionists from their 
Nietzschean roots, see Aschheim, pp. 70-71. 
21 See Jungk, pp. 47, 97. 
22 Nietzsche, VI.1, 106. 
23 Barlach, Werk, III, 321. 
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Birth and Rebirth in Christianity and Expressionism 99 
the overman, since one could create the overman in the future but could never 
create God.24 This replacement will not do for Barlach’s more metaphysically 
oriented project, which is why he must reverse, whether knowingly on paper 
or only in a faulty memory, the final words of the maxim. He and Zarathustra 
each seem to have resolved the problem of not being equal to a god, but their 
respective paths to that resolution are disparate. While Zarathustra extricates 
himself from inferiority by denying the existence of gods, Barlach’s Christian 
elevates himself to god-like status through his search for God. We will see in 
the next chapter how this same maxim helps Barlach to fashion one of his 
most popular dramatic heroes. There too it will be instructive to observe the 
functioning of Zarathustra’s influence even in a context where God’s exis-
tence is not relinquished. 
 Of the four playwrights in focus in this study, Kaiser is certainly the most 
deeply and thoroughly impacted by Nietzsche’s work.25 This impact is well 
evidenced in his correspondence. His letters tell of “Wiedererwachenstagen” 
(days of reawakening) on which Nietzsche “gaukelt, tanzt” (juggles and 
dances) in his soul. He writes of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra as a gift to “seiner 
damals unwürdigen Gegenwart” (his then unworthy age). And passing by the 
Swiss town where he knows Nietzsche to have gone walking, Kaiser reflects, 
that he too, though slightly less so than Nietzsche, is “nicht von dieser Welt” 
(not of this world).26 As for Kaiser’s dramatic work, it is shaped by Nietzsche 
in ways that will be in focus in this and the next chapter. In something of the 
reverse of Werfel’s development, Kaiser seems to have begun from a place of 
some skepticism where Nietzsche was concerned (G.C. Tunstall even speaks 
of an “original antipathy”), and developed gradually into a confirmed emula-
tor. Tunstall has shown that the turn toward Nietzsche coincides with the be-
ginning of Kaiser’s Expressionist period (he had already written quite a num-
ber of pre-Expressionist dramas), and was likely sparked by the publication 
of Ecce Homo in 1908.27 Certainly, Kaiser’s admiration for Nietzsche crystal-
lized around the notion of a transvalued future based on a new humanity.24 Nietzsche, VI.1, 105. 
25 For a brief overview of Kaiser’s engagement with Nietzsche’s work, see Herbert W. Rei-
chert, Friedrich Nietzsche’s Impact on Modern German Literature (Chapel Hill: University 
of North Carolina Press, 1975), pp. 51-52. See also Richard C. Helt, ‘Georg Kaiser’s 
“Rezeption” of Friedrich Nietzsche’, Orbis Litterarum, 38 (1983), 215-34. 
26 Georg Kaiser, Briefe, ed. by Gesa M. Valk (Frankfurt a.M.: Propyläen, 1980), pp. 44, 974, 
619. Much more will be said in the next chapter about Kaiser’s claim of otherworldliness. 
For Kaiser’s modeling of numerous autobiographical remarks on Nietzsche’s texts, see G.C. 
Tunstall, ‘Autobiography and Mythogenesis: The Case of Georg Kaiser and Nietzsche’s 
Ecce Homo’, German Life and Letters, 37 (1984), 105-11. 
27 G.C. Tunstall, ‘The Turning Point in Georg Kaiser’s Attitude Toward Friedrich Nietzsche’, 
Nietzsche-Studien, 14 (1985), 314-36 (pp. 314-15). Tunstall also analyzes what he sees as a 
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100 German Expressionist Drama and the Messianism of a Generation 
 Despite Nietzsche’s rejection of traditional religious morality, his impact 
on Expressionist form and content neither discounts nor outweighs the impact 
of Jewish and Christian thought. Instead, Expressionism presents us with a 
Jewish-Christian-Nietzschean syncretism, of which Kaiser is perhaps the 
strongest representative. His notion of rebirth (to return to the thematic focus 
of this chapter) finds its “dual origins [...] in Judeo-Christian messianism and 
in Nietzsche’s Übermensch.”28 His style fuses “Zarathustra-pathos and the 
simplicity of the Luther Bible.”29 Indeed, as Kaiser and his contemporaries 
create in their New Man characters a hybrid of messiah and overman, they 
attempt to modernize and secularize the Christ figure in a post-Nietzschean 
time.30 
 Thomas Anz notes that, as a phenomenon observed across the cultural 
spectrum, the New Man became a “Leerformel, die sich mit Sehnsüchten und 
Wunschträumen aller Art ausfüllen ließ” (an empty formula that could be 
filled with all kinds of desires and pipe dreams).31 The ecstatic visions with 
which Expressionist playwrights, for their part, filled this emptiness were 
intended to spread a new worldview, in that characters on the stage would 
show audiences how to live out a spiritual rebirth and thus a redemption. 
 
 
Messianic Nativities in Expressionist Drama 
 
In the Expressionist ethos as in the Christian tradition, the birth of a messiah 
figure represents more broadly the dawning of renewal and redemption for 
humankind. The new life so adamantly pursued in the first decades of the 
twentieth century is frequently symbolized in images of birth and rebirth, 
images which become a central structuring device for Expressionist texts. By 
no means is this phenomenon limited to the four authors in focus here. The 
poetry of Manfred Hausmann and Gottfried Koelwel, for example, is infused 
with imagery of rebirth. The ideal of spiritual rebirth motivates von Unruh’s 
war dramas. And in his novel Der Erlöser-Kaiser: Erzählung aus Deutsch-
 
rejection and parodic treatment particularly of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra in these pre-
Expressionist dramas; see pp. 315-30. 
28 Audrone B. Willeke, Georg Kaiser and the Critics: A Profile of Expressionism’s Leading 
Playwright (Columbia: Camden House, 1995), p. 54. 
29 Five Plays. Georg Kaiser, ed. by James M. Ritchie (London: Calder and Boyars, 1971), p. 8. 
30 Without focusing on the messianic per se, Walter Riedel sketches this attempt in the plays of 
Kaiser and especially Sorge in Der neue Mensch. Mythos und Wirklichkeit (Bonn: H. Bou-
vier 1970), pp. 9-44; see also his chapter on Toller’s conception of the New Man. For more 
on Nietzsche’s impact on Expressionism more broadly, see James Rolleston, ‘Nietzsche, 
Expressionism and Modern Poetics’, Nietzsche Studien, 9 (1980), 285-301. 
31 Thomas Anz, Literatur des Expressionismus (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2002), p. 44. 
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Birth and Rebirth in Christianity and Expressionism 101 
lands Zukunft und von seiner Wiedergeburt (The Redeemer-Emperor: A Story 
from Germany’s Future and of its Rebirth, 1923), Adolf Reinecke, one of the 
best known authors of National Socialism, draws on ideologies of rebirth in 
his racist critique of the Weimar Republic. 
 Among the four playwrights in focus here, one observes two different 
schemata with respect to birth and rebirth: one in which the birth of a re-
deemer-child is an event of messianic significance, offering redemption to 
others; and one in which an adult seeking salvation finds rebirth as the New 
Man. Both figurations of the motif are established in an idiom that is primar-
ily that of the New Testament, with elements of Nietzschean thought incorpo-
rated as well. 
 
 
The Holy Family and the Birth of the Redeemer-child 
 
The thematic link established in Expressionism between global renewal and 
infancy or childhood is part of a broader zeitgeist. Das Jahrhundert des 
Kindes (The Century of the Child, 1900), by the Swedish educational re-
former Ellen Key, was soon translated into German, and would enjoy im-
mense popularity among “allen Eltern, die hoffen, im neuen Jahrhundert den 
neuen Menschen zu bilden” (all parents who hope to raise the new human 
being in the new century).32 Expressionist authors, themselves often identi-
fied as a youth movement,33 seized upon this kind of ideology. That they spe-
cifically associated birth and childhood with the Christ-child, moreover, is 
evidenced in three ways: by their adoption of Gospel scenes and portrayal of 
a human-divine infant within a consciously constructed Holy Family constel-
lation; by their employment of Pauline soteriology to apply the birth of the 
Savior to the rebirth of humankind; and by their mobilization of the tradition 
of an Antichrist, to bring their Christ-child figures into sharper relief. 
 The cast of characters in Barlach’s mystery play Der Findling (The 
Foundling, 1922) is starving and otherwise suffering under the rule of “der 
rote Kaiser” (the Red Emperor), who has decreed that the Messiah be born 
among his subjects: “Schafft unseren Heiland, Weiber, zur Welt” (Women, 
bring our Savior into the world).34 The decree is reminiscent of Zarathustra’s 
urging: “Auf, ihr Frauen, […] Eure Hoffnung heisse: ‘möge ich den Über-
 
32 Ellen Key, Das Jahrhundert des Kindes. Studien (Weinheim: Beltz, 1992), p. 6. 
33 See Anz, p. 31. 
34 Barlach, Werk, I, 272. For the child as a symbol of redemption in Barlach, see Heinrich 
Engel, ‘Das Kind als Symbol im Werke Barlachs’, Jahrbuch der Ernst Barlach Gesellschaft, 
1967/68, 25-53. See also Jochen Richter, Die Konzeption des “Neuen Menschen” in Ernst 
Barlachs dramatischem Schaffen (New York: Peter Lang, 1992). 
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102 German Expressionist Drama and the Messianism of a Generation 
menschen gebären!’” (Go to it, women […]! Let your hope be: May I give 
birth to the overman!)35 These texts introduce a key theme in the Expression-
ist treatment of renewal and redemption: woman’s responsibility to provide 
these things primarily through childbearing. 
 Shortly after the decree is read in public, a character called Steinklopfer 
(the Stone-Breaker) announces the arrival of the “Balg des Heils” (brat of 
salvation), revealing to the community a baby boy abandoned by its poor and 
hungry parents. The terribly deformed infant has facial hair, a bloody horn, 
bowels protruding from its body, and worms eating at its flesh.36The found-
ling is thus identified not as a savior but as an Antichrist-child, established 
since medieval literature as the foul offspring of devil and woman.37 This 
identification is bolstered by a perversion of the biblical scene in which a 
pregnant Mary meets her also pregnant cousin Elizabeth. Whereas Elizabeth 
feels her unborn child rejoice at Mary’s, and thus Jesus’s, presence (Luke 
1:44), the sight of the grotesque foundling causes a pregnant woman in Bar-
lach’s play to exclaim: “Mein armes Kind im Leib ist bis zu Tod erschrocken. 
Ein Teufel hat es angeschaut” (The poor child in my womb is frightened to 
death. It has seen a devil).38 
 That the community is casting the foundling into an Antichristic role is 
confirmed in their attempt to make a scapegoat of the baby, whose deformity 
is attributed to the terror (Schreck), poverty (Not), and sin (Sünde) of the 
times. They call for a ritualistic infanticide: “ersäuft das Elend mit dem 
Elendskind” (drown wretchedness with this wretched child). But a prophet 
tells the crowd that the foundling is their own offspring - “Euer aller Schuld, 
euer aller Schande” (the guilt of you all, the shame of you all) - and encour-
ages them instead: “Erstickt seine Erbärmlichkeit in euch selber, […] Seid so 
gerecht, daß euch das Kind nicht gleicht” (Suffocate its wretchedness in 
yourselves, […] be just so that the child does not resemble you). The Stone-
Breaker adds that only when these wretched people symbolically drown 
themselves, “darf die Welt sich wieder aufwärts wälzen, darf einen neuen 
Anfang wagen” (can the world waltz forward again and venture toward a new 
beginning).39 
 The subsequent acts of The Foundling trace the quest for this new begin-
ning in the world, which will be effected not by the people’s self-
 
35 Nietzsche, VI.1, 81. 
36 Barlach, Werk, I, 273-74. 
37 See for example Andrew Gow, ‘(En)gendering Evil: Sinful Conceptions of the Antichrist in 
the Middle Ages and the Reformation’, Journal of Millennial Studies, (Summer 1999), 1-13 
(p. 4). 
38 Barlach, Werk, I, 273. 
39 Ibid., 273-74, 281. 
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Birth and Rebirth in Christianity and Expressionism 103 
transformation, but by the transformation of the scapegoated infant from An-
tichrist to Christ-child. This transformation will depend on the assembly of a 
‘Holy Family’ around the child. The Joseph role is filled by a character 
named Thomas, who takes a more pious attitude toward redemption than 
does the rest of his community. Thomas is a poor and hungry wanderer like 
the rest of the characters; yet he indicates that the night he has just spent in a 
stable (a direct allusion to the Nativity) has mystically dissolved the suffering 
of his empty stomach. He can thus declare himself reborn: “Thomas der An-
dere ist geboren, Thomas der Neue wird sein” (Thomas the Other is born, 
Thomas the New will now be).40 The spirit of Thomas’s renewal recalls 
Paul’s exhortation to “lay aside the old human nature” and “put on the new 
nature created in God’s likeness” (Ephesians 4:22-24), as well as his praise of 
those who have “discarded the old human nature and the conduct that goes 
with it, and have put on the new nature” (Colossians 3:9-10). 
 Thomas’s conversion brings him to the Marian character Elise. Having 
seen in Elise his own “Himmelspforte” (gateway to heaven), Thomas speaks 
to her in words that recall the Red Emperor’s Zarathustrian decree, determin-
ing the essence of woman in her responsibility to bear a savior: “Quellen 
müssen fließen, Gnadenwellen sich ergießen – aus dir! [...] Der Gang, der 
Guß, das Geschehen der Gnade geht durch dich, [...] du wirst vielleicht Mut-
ter eines Gottes werden” (Springs must flow, waves of mercy must pour 
themselves out – from you! […] The path, the gush, the event of mercy goes 
through you, […] you may become the mother of a god). Eventually, Elise is 
convinced by Thomas’s vision of a sort of Holy Family, with himself as a 
man reborn and Elise as the mother of a divinity, and she adds to it the found-
ling child which they adopt: “Er soll unser erster Sohn heißen” (He shall be 
called our first son). Thomas encourages her, “lege deine Mädchenhände auf 
ihn und nimm ihn in deine Mutterarme” (lay your virginal hands upon him 
and take him into your maternal arms).41 Elise and Thomas slip effortlessly 
into the roles of Mary and Joseph, Elise becoming a virginal mother, Thomas 
the child’s adoptive father. 
 With this, the infant suddenly sheds its grotesque body, growing beautiful 
and even beginning to glow. The hope and faith of Thomas and Elise have 
turned a deformed creature, a symbol of wretchedness, into a Christ-child. 
Not only does this apotheosis close the Holy Family circle, it further provides 
salvation for the desperate community. The Stone-Breaker heralds the mirac-
le of the foundling’s transformation as an axis upon which all of salvation 
history is turning: “Grade als ging und schwang die Welt um ein Pünktlein 
 
40 Barlach, Werk, I, 281-83, 299. 
41 Ibid., 290, 299, 316. 
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104 German Expressionist Drama and the Messianism of a Generation 
und wälzte sich rückwärts wider ihre alte Weise [...] seht, da wurde Böses 
gut, seht, da hat sich Leere voll gemacht, da ist krank gesund geworden, 
seht!” (Just as if the world were moving and turning around a tiny point and 
waltzing backwards against its old ways […]; behold, evil became good; be-
hold, emptiness has been made full; behold, sick has become healthy; be-
hold!)42 
 The birth of a savior is thematically prevalent as well in Werfel’s dra-
matic work.43 Die Mittagsgöttin (The Midday-Goddess, 1919) is the first of 
Werfel’s plays to demonstrate this in a sustained way. The title points up two 
important influences on the play’s composition, only one of which has been 
widely recognized in the relevant literature, namely events from Werfel’s 
own life. A letter from Werfel to his then lover (later wife) Alma Mahler-
Gropius identifies her as the basis for the titular goddess, praising her: “Du 
Mittags-Mitternacht!” (You midday-midnight!);44 the action of the play will 
mirror the events of their relationship and Werfel’s reflections about them. 
Whether the play’s title follows from the adoption of “midday-midnight” as a 
designation for Alma or vice-versa, the phrase recalls a passage in which 
Nietzsche’s Zarathustra heralds “der grosse Mittag, da der Mensch auf der 
Mitte seiner Bahn steht zwischen Thier und Übermensch und seinen Weg 
zum Abende als seine höchste Hoffnung feiert: denn es ist der Weg zu einem 
neuen Morgen” (the great noon when man stands in the middle of his way 
between beast and overman and celebrates his way to the evening as his 
highest hope: for it is the way to a new morning). This is exactly the path that 
the play’s protagonist, Laurentin, will take. His progression from a midday 
crossroads, through a dark and painful night, to a morning of rebirth will en-
able him to overcome his former self in the sense in which Zarathustra con-
tinues: “Alsda wird sich der Untergehende selber segnen, dass er ein 
Hinübergehender sei; und die Sonne seiner Erkenntnis wird ihm im Mittage 
stehn” (Then will he who goes under bless himself for being one who goes 
over and beyond; and the sun of his knowledge will stand at high noon for 
him).45 Laurentin’s self-overcoming will in fact be based on knowledge 
which is primarily sexual, as intimated in Zarathustra’s phallic language. 
 Laurentin is in many respects a typical Expressionist protagonist. A vaga-
bond, he has grown tired of his existence and seeks a transformation. His 
redemption begins when, at midday, he meets Mara, a womanwith 
 
42 Barlach, Werk, I, 316. 
43 See Elizabeth Grunbaum Sands, Die Gestalt des Kindes in den Werken Franz Werfels (Ann 
Arbor: UMI, 1956). 
44 Quoted in Jungk, p. 375. 
45 Nietzsche, VI.1, 98. Zarathustra’s final words in the book invoke the “grosser Mittag” 
(great noon) which is rising (VI.1, 404). 
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Birth and Rebirth in Christianity and Expressionism 105 
“allmächtiges Atmen” (almighty breath) and “gelben Lichtes Schwebe” (an 
air of golden light). “Mara!” he cries. “In deinem Namen ist viel A” (In your 
name, so much A).46 This letter and sound that represents beginning is found 
equally, of course, in Alma, to whom Werfel writes: “In meinem Zauberstück 
nenn ich Dich Mara. Dir fehlt dort das I zur Maria, der spitze Laut der ewi-
gen Jungfrau” (In my magical play I call you Mara. There, the ‘I’ is missing 
from Maria, that sharp sound of the eternal virgin).47 Mara/Alma is venerated 
as rather the opposite of a virgin, as an embodiment of what Nietzsche, in his 
Götzen-Dämmerung (Twilight of the Idols, 1889), called the “dionysisch[e] 
Mysterien” (Dionysian mysteries) of sexuality. For the Greeks, Nietzsche 
says, these mysteries vouchsafed “[d]as ewige Leben, die ewige Wiederkehr 
des Lebens; die Zukunft in der Vergangenheit verheissen und geweiht; das 
triumphirende Ja zum Leben über Tod und Wandel hinaus; das wahre Leben 
als das Gesammt-Fortleben durch die Zeugung” ([e]ternal life, the eternal 
return of life; the future promised and hallowed in the past; the triumphant 
Yes to life beyond all death and change; true life as the over-all continuation 
of life through procreation).48 Mara will become Laurentin’s guarantee of just 
these things, so that Werfel even writes to Alma, of The Midday-Goddess: 
“Du bist dort ein heidnisches Urprinzip” (There you are a pagan Ur-
principle).49 
 Of course, the desire to elevate Mara/Alma to a principle has the effect of 
mystifying her and reducing her personhood, an effect which calls to mind 
another of Zarathustra’s proclamations: “Alles am Weibe ist ein Räthsel, und 
Alles am Weibe hat Eine Lösung: sie heisst Schwangerschaft” (Everything 
about woman is a riddle, and everything about woman has one solution: that 
is pregnancy).50 Indeed, Mara’s only role in the play is to become impreg-
nated and bear the child who will redeem its father. Laurentin and Mara thus 
repeat the Holy Family constellation set up in Barlach’s The Foundling, but 
with an additional layer of biblical significance. Laurentin’s initial lament is 
that of Adam before the creation of woman: “Ich sehne mich aus meinem Ur-
Allein” (I long to escape this primal aloneness). Mara becomes a partner to 
him, and tells him that their union will be complete with the birth of their 
child: “Doch sieh, der Gott, [...] / Er wird geboren in die Welt als Kind” (Be-
 
46 Werfel, Dramen, pp. 93-95. 
47 Quoted in Jungk, p. 375. 
48 Nietzsche, VI.3, 153. All translations from Götzen-Dämmerung are from ‘Twilight of the 
Idols’, in The Portable Nietzsche, ed. and trans. by Walter Kaufmann (New York: Penguin, 
1982), pp. 463-563. 
49 Quoted in Jungk, p. 375. 
50 Nietzsche, VI.1, 80. 
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106 German Expressionist Drama and the Messianism of a Generation 
hold, God, [...] / He will be born into the world as a child).51 The Adam/Eve 
pairing intermingles with a Joseph/Mary pairing, as Mara expects to give 
birth to God incarnate. 
 Unlike The Foundling’s Thomas (and his biblical model Joseph), and in 
keeping with the Dionysian principle, Laurentin is party to the conception of 
Mara’s child, an event which is for him a kind of death. Mara “nimmt ihn in 
ihren Mantel auf” (takes him into her cloak); he asks: “Wie heißt dieses seli-
ge Grab?” (What is this blessed tomb?)52 He refers here not only to la petite 
mort, but also to the figurative death that must precede his figurative resur-
rection (or, in Nietzschean terms, the return, affirmation, and continuation of 
his life) through the birth of his child. It now being night, Mara urges Lauren-
tin to sleep, telling him: “Der Kampf bricht los / Um unser Heil. Wir aber 
müssen ruhn / Und warten” (The struggle begins / for our salvation. / But we 
must rest / and wait).53 While he sleeps, undergoing a figurative death experi-
ence, she remains wakeful and watchful, out of concern for their unborn 
child. 
 Alma, the widow of Gustav Mahler, was remarried to the architect Walter 
Gropius when her relationship with Werfel began. When she became preg-
nant in 1919, she believed the child to be Werfel’s. While Werfel was visiting 
her late in the pregnancy, she suffered a hemorrhage. After running to find a 
doctor, Werfel left Alma’s home and stayed away, so as not to arouse suspi-
cion of their affair. His diary tells of days spent suffering, waiting for news of 
the health of his lover and child.54 This separation is clearly represented in 
Laurentin’s figurative death experience and in Mara’s waiting, which is at 
once fearful and brave. 
 As the end of her waiting draws near, Mara announces in the night: “Es 
pocht ein Kind, geboren zu werden. [...] Es wird vollbracht” (A child strug-
gles to be born. […] It is done). Though the words recall Christ’s Passion, it 
is not a Christ-child who appears, but an Antichrist-child remarkably remi-
niscent of that in Barlach’s The Foundling. A knacker pushes a cart across 
the stage and, according to Werfel’s stage directions, “reißt einen blutig 
mißgestaltenen Fötus aus dem Wagen und hält ihn Mara entgegen” (tears a 
bloody, misshapen fetus from the cart and holds it towards Mara). He chal-
 
51 Werfel, Dramen, pp. 97-98. 
52 Ibid., p. 101. A scenic poem published by Alfred Günther in 1919 bears a striking resem-
blance to The Midday-Goddess in this respect. Its sole characters, Woman and Man, engage 
in an embrace which is followed by death, which is followed in turn by reconciliation and 
the birth of a divine child. See Alfred Günther, ‘Sternwende. Szenisches Gedicht’, Die neue 
Schaubühne, 1 (1919), 9-10. 
53 Werfel, Dramen, p. 104. 
54 See Jungk, pp. 96-101. 
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Birth and Rebirth in Christianity and Expressionism 107 
lenges her: “Sieh hier die große Zukunft! / Sieh aller Kinder Kind! / Sieh an 
den wahren Christus! / Den kotbeschmierten Klumpen, / Die ewige Mißge-
burt […] Und hoffe noch!” (See here the great future! / See the child of all 
children! / See the true Christ! / The lump smeared with dung, / the eternal 
monster […] and yet have hope!)55 While these words must spring in part 
from the fear that accompanied Alma’s hemorrhage, they also recall two bib-
lical traditions: that of the stillborn child (Hebrew nephel, Greek έκτρωμα) as 
a symbol of accursedness (see Numbers 12:12; Job 3:13-16; Psalm 58:8; Ec-
clesiastes 6:4-5; 1 Corinthians 15:8); and that of the appearance of the Anti-
christ. Jesus warns his disciples that, at “the end of the age […] many will 
come in my name, saying, ‘I am the Messiah!’ and they will lead many 
astray. […] this is but the beginning of the birth pangs. […] But the one who 
endures to the end will be saved.” These days, Jesus says, will be especially 
trying for pregnant women and new mothers. He then summarizes his warn-
ing to the faithful: “Then if anyone says to you, ‘Look, here is the Messiah!’ 
or ‘There he is!’ - do not believe it” (Matthew 24:3-23; cf. Mark 13:3-13). 
Read in the light of this intertext, the knacker’s words identify not the true 
Christ, as he claims, but the Antichrist. Mara’s hope andexpectancy are chal-
lenged by images of monstrousness and despair. 
 That both Barlach and Werfel include in their Holy Family scenes an An-
tichristic infant suggests an attempt on the part of Expressionism to bring its 
messianic infants into sharper relief. But it is also an instructive example of 
the grotesque, both in Expressionism and in literature more generally. If liter-
ary and artistic employment of the grotesque is, as Wolfgang Kayser has ar-
gued, “an attempt to invoke and subdue the demonic aspects of the world,”56 
then it is only natural that these aspects would be linked specifically to the 
Antichrist in dramas structured around redeemer-children, that they would 
have to be subdued before redemption can appear. Moreover, the grotesque is 
inherently compatible with messianic thinking, as it elicits feelings of “es-
trangement, and the incongruity which appears in the contradiction between 
new conditions or content and old forms.”57 
 Like Elise, Mara will persevere through her grotesque encounter with the 
Antichrist child and thus become a maternal heroine. The delivery of Mara’s 
child begins as a result of this encounter, recalling the New Testament rela-
tionship between birth pangs, the Antichrist, and the end times. As her labor 
progresses and her screams grow louder, the darkness of night gives way to 
 
55 Werfel, Dramen, p. 113. 
56 Wolfgang Kayser, The Grotesque in Art and Literature, trans. by Ulrich Weisstein (Glou-
cester, MA: Peter Smith, 1968), p. 188. 
57 Edson M. Chick, ‘Comic and Grotesque Elements in Ernst Barlach’, MLQ, 20 (1959), 173-
80 (p. 174). See also Kellner, p. 6. 
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108 German Expressionist Drama and the Messianism of a Generation 
morning and Laurentin reappears, emerging from his figurative death experi-
ence. This suggests that it is actually he to whom Mara gives new birth. He 
even shows outward signs that he has died and been physically reborn: the 
stage directions describe him as “blutig, zerrauft, gänzlich zerrissen und 
atemlos” (bloody, disheveled, completely tattered and breathless). He exc-
laims: “Wo bin ich hergekommen? / Durch endlose Urwaldnacht! [...] Dich 
nur gesucht, nur dich gesucht! / Die mir erschien, - unsterbliches Gesicht, - / 
Und nun zum Weib gestürzt ist” (Where have I come from? / Through the 
endless night of the primeval forest! […] Seeking you only, seeking only 
you! / Who appeared to me - immortal face - who collapses now into 
Woman).58 Laurentin cannot help but admit that his immortalization of Mara 
is in fact a mystification, as it “collapses” her into an embodiment of Woman 
as such. It is further an instrumentalization, as her labor pains facilitate not 
only or even primarily the birth of the child, but the spiritual rebirth of 
Laurentin. This would seem to return Werfel to Nietzsche’s reflections on the 
Greeks, for whom the act “der Zeugung, der Schwangerschaft, der Geburt 
erweckte die höchsten und feierlichsten Gefühle” (of procreation, of preg-
nancy, and of birth aroused the highest and most solemn feelings). Nietzsche 
continues: “In der Mysterienlehre ist der Schmerz heilig gesprochen: die 
‘Wehen der Gebärerin’ heiligen den Schmerz überhaupt, - alles Werden und 
Wachsen, alles Zukunft-Verbürgende bedingt den Schmerz” (In the doctrine 
of the mysteries, pain is pronounced holy: the pangs of the woman giving 
birth hallow all pain; all becoming and growing - all that guarantees a future - 
involves pain).59 While somewhat more palatable than Zarathustra’s claim 
that woman exists for the sake of pregnancy, this structure still serves to in-
strumentalize Mara’s pain for Laurentin’s process of development and 
growth. 
 When Mara’s labor pains intensify, Laurentin leaves her in order to seek 
help (as Werfel did during Alma’s complications). As Laurentin tries to con-
vince an old farmer and his wife to assist Mara, she suddenly appears before 
them, carrying a child in her arms. When Laurentin cries out Mara’s name, 
the old man says with surprise: “Mara - und nicht Marie!?” (Mara - and not 
Marie!?) The farmer’s wife makes a similar association, crying out: “Ich bin 
voll Schuld, o Frau, o blondes Kind!” (I am full of guilt, oh woman, oh blond 
child!) Laurentin, however, stresses the difference in this Madonna and child 
scene, underscoring Mara’s nonvirginity: “Farbig durchdrang ich deinen Mit-
tag, / Und schwand in deine Mitternacht. / Zerrissen, blutig, schmerzlich 
wacht ich auf / An fernem Ort, zur Morgennebelzeit. [...] Verwaschen fand 
 
58 Werfel, Dramen, pp. 114-15. 
59 Nietzsche, VI.3, 153. 
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Birth and Rebirth in Christianity and Expressionism 109 
ich meine Farben neu” (Colorfully I penetrated your midday / and disap-
peared into your midnight. / I awoke tattered, bloody, and in pain, / far away 
in the morning fog. […] Washed-out, I found my colors anew).60 
 Once their son had been born despite the complications, Werfel wrote to 
Alma: “…durch Dich nur werde ich wiedergeboren, süße heilige Mutter!” 
(Through you alone I am reborn, sweet holy mother!)61 Laurentin too is re-
generated by his child and its mother. Holding their glowing child, Mara tells 
Laurentin: “Nun bist du neu begonnen” (Now you have begun anew). “Nun 
hab ich eine Heimat” (Now I have a home),62 he rejoices, again echoing 
words that Werfel had written to Alma: “Du bist mir das, was ich in meiner 
Knabenzeit als Heimat fühlte” (You are to me what I felt as home when I was 
a boy).63 
 Such a happy domesticity, though, is far afield of Expressionism’s anti-
bourgeois ideals. In better keeping with those ideals (and with the fact that 
Werfel could not establish a home with his lover and newborn child), Mara 
disappears at the end of the play with the child on her arm, soaring above the 
stage in a final apotheosis. In her physical absence, Laurentin’s glorification 
and mystification of Mara now enables a chauvinism in which he rejoices in 
“die Sonnenblume der Frau, die durch meine Berührung zur zauberischen 
Laterne wurde” (woman’s sunflower, which, through my touch, became a 
magical lantern). He says further of this lantern: “Der Stern überirdischen 
Lichtes in ihr ist unsichtbar im Sonnenstrom des Mittags” (Its star of celestial 
light is invisible in the streaming sunlight of midday).64 The forced clustering 
of light metaphors recalls the words of Zarathustra as he glorifies the woman 
who would give birth to the overman: “Ein Spielzeug sei das Weib, rein und 
fein, dem Edelsteine gleich, bestrahlt von den Tugenden einer Welt, welche 
noch nicht da ist. Der Strahl eines Sternes glänze in eurer Liebe!” (Let 
woman be a plaything, pure and fine, like a gem, irradiated by the virtues of a 
world that has not yet arrived. Let the radiance of a star shine through your 
love!)65 Moreover, the fact that Laurentin has quite literally seen the light in 
Mara and their child leaves him with a new mission: “So muß ich denn für 
ewig die Nacht aufsuchen, [den Stern] zu erwecken! […] So kehre ich immer 
 
60 Werfel, Dramen, pp. 119, 121. 
61 Quoted in Jungk, p. 101. The child would develop hydroencephalitis at four months, and die 
six months later. For Goat Song as a play based on this experience, see Jungk, pp. 113-14, 
129-30, 142. There is an autobiographical parallel as well in Werfel’s dramatic trilogy The 
Mirror Man, in which the protagonist seduces and impregnates his friend’s wife, who gives 
birth to a sick child, only to have it die at a young age. See Werfel, Zwischen, pp. 253-56. 
62 Werfel, Dramen, pp. 119, 121. 
63 Quoted in Jungk, p. 98. 
64 Werfel, Dramen, pp. 129-30. 
65 Nietzsche, VI.1,81. 
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110 German Expressionist Drama and the Messianism of a Generation 
wieder in den mütterlichen Tod zurück, mein Licht höher zu wandeln” (Thus 
I must search eternally for night, in order to awaken [that star]! […] So I re-
turn again and again to maternal death, to turn my light higher).66 Laurentin’s 
future will consist, as the play has, of an alternation between darkness and 
light, death and rebirth, so that life may be eternally perpetuated in the Dio-
nysian sense. Laurentin’s decision mirrors the one that Zarathustra announces 
to the sun: “Dazu muss ich in die Tiefe steigen: wie du des Abends thust, 
wenn du hinter das Meer gehst und noch der Unterwelt Licht bringst, du ü-
berreiches Gestirn!” (For that I must descend to the depths, as you do in the 
evening when you go behind the sea and still bring light to the underworld, 
you overrich star).67 In spite of, or perhaps precisely because of, its rhetorical 
and symbolic excesses, The Midday-Goddess is a prime example of the 
Christian-Nietzschean syncretism in the Expressionist thematization of birth 
and rebirth. 
 The play also demonstrates the tensions that mark Expressionism with 
respect to sex and gender, or what has been called the “aggressively mascu-
linist stance of the movement”68 (whose adherents were, after all, primarily 
men, with women like Susman, Emmy Hennings, and even Else Lasker-
Schüler having remained more or less outside the Expressionist canon69). 
Whereas Barlach’s Elise is, with her whole community, a recipient of the 
salvation her child provides, Mara has no need of salvation herself, and plays 
a purely facilitative role vis-à-vis Laurentin. Thus Mara is characterized pri-
marily by her sexuality. Though she is not stigmatized for it, but rather valor-
ized, heroized, and even apotheosized, she is thereby mystified and collapsed 
into a principle. Moreover, her sexuality is ultimately instrumentalized in 
Laurentin’s quest; once his redemption has been effected, she and the child 
literally disappear. Their relationship reveals a commonly espoused binary of 
the time, woman being associated primarily with carnality and man with in-
tellect or spirituality. The feminist pioneer Hedwig Dohm had decried this 
kind of binary in a 1913 essay: “auswendig weiß ich Eure männischen Alt-
gläubigkeiten: Das Weib Natur – der Mann Kultur. Sie hat Instinkte, er die 
logische Vernunft. Er Gottsucher, sie Mannsucher. Er Kopf, sie Herz” (I 
know by heart your mannish orthodoxies: Woman as nature – man as culture. 
 
66 Werfel, Dramen, pp. 130, 132. 
67 Nietzsche, VI.1, 5. 
68 Barbara D. Wright, ‘Intimate Strangers: Women in German Expressionism’, in A Compan-
ion to the Literature of German Expressionism, pp. 287-319 (p. 289). 
69 See Marion Adams, ‘Der Expressionismus und die Krise der deutschen Frauenbewegung’, 
in Expressionismus und Kulturkrise, pp. 104-30. 
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Birth and Rebirth in Christianity and Expressionism 111 
She has instincts, he has logical reason. He seeks God, she seeks man. He is 
head, she is heart).70 
 It is of course not coincidental that The Midday-Goddess exemplifies so 
strongly both Expressionism’s Christian-Nietzschean syncretism and its as-
signment of women primarily to the maternal role; the one had a formative 
impact on the other. The Bible offers rough parallels of Nietzsche’s glorifica-
tion of procreation and instrumentalization of labor pains, as well as 
Zarathustra’s claims about pregnancy. In doling out Eve’s punishment for her 
sin, God says: “I will greatly increase your pangs in childbearing; in pain you 
shall bring forth children, yet your desire shall be for your husband, and he 
shall rule over you” (Genesis 3:16). And a pious acceptance of motherhood is 
exemplified by the Virgin Mary, who responds to the angel’s news of her 
surprising pregnancy: “I am the Lord’s servant; may it be as you have said” 
(Luke 1:38). At the same time, the Expressionists’ model of womanhood was 
likely reinforced, to some degree, by German feminists of the time, who, as 
Amy Hackett has shown, “wished to maintain, even to cultivate and exalt, 
traditional ‘feminine’ qualities - especially women’s maternal, nurturing ‘in-
stincts’ - as unique and valuable additions to culture.”71 
 In the later play Schweiger (1922), Werfel again posits the birth of a child 
as the salvation of its father. Intriguingly, this father figure, Franz Schweiger, 
is first paralleled not with the biblical Joseph but with Jesus himself. He has a 
mysterious religious quality about him, and his neighbor says of him: “Unser 
Herrgott, als er unter den Menschen war, hat akkurat solch ein Wesen g’habt, 
wie…und hat ihm gleich g’schaut” (Our Lord God, when he was among us, 
had just such a nature…and looked just like him). When the townspeople see 
him, she says, “da spürens’ was Höheres, wovor sie sich bekreuzigen möch-
ten” (they feel something higher and want to cross themselves). Later, when 
Schweiger rescues a group of schoolchildren from a burning boat, he be-
comes for them “schon der liebe Gott!” (the good Lord himself!)72 But 
Schweiger’s identification with Jesus begins to shift in the context of his rela-
tionship with his wife, Anna. While she agrees that her husband possesses 
something saintly and is “zu gut für diese Welt” (too good for this world), 
their relationship is troubled by just this vague and mysterious nature that 
Schweiger possesses. The first time he appears on stage, he is returning from 
 
70 Quoted (in German) in Wright, ‘“New Man”, Eternal Woman: Expressionist Responses to 
German Feminism’, The German Quarterly, 60 (1987), 582-99 (p. 591). For this binary as a 
pattern in Expressionism, see also pp. 587-88, 596-97, as well as Wright, ‘Intimate’, p. 291. 
71 Amy Hackett, ‘Feminism and Liberalism in Wilhelmine Germany, 1890-1918’, in Liberat-
ing Women’s History. Theoretical and Critical Essays, ed. by Berenice A. Carroll (Chicago: 
University of Illinois Press, 1976), pp. 127-36 (p. 127). 
72 Werfel, Dramen, pp. 325, 334, 363. 
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112 German Expressionist Drama and the Messianism of a Generation 
a trip, and does not know how long he has been gone or where he has been. 
His center in his confusion is Anna. In language recalling that of Lauren-
tin/Werfel to Mara/Alma, Schweiger calls Anna “mein Haus, meine höhere 
Mutter” (my house, my higher mother).73 Laurentin’s praise of Mara as the 
embodiment of Woman and Mother passes here into an outright conflation in 
which Anna becomes Schweiger’s mother as well as his wife.74 
 Having long suffered under repressed memory, an amnesia for which he 
cannot account, Schweiger sees his redemption in the news that Anna is 
pregnant: “Dein Kind ist meine Genesung, mein Schicksal! [...] Alle geheim-
nisvollen Gefahren [...], alles was gegen mich aus ist, wird er vernichten. [...] 
Dieses Kind erst vereinigt uns ganz. Mir ist leichter als je zumute. - Ich kann 
mich ausruhn!” (Your child is my recovery, my destiny! […] All the mysteri-
ous dangers […], everything that is set against me, he will destroy it all. […] 
This child alone unites us completely. I feel lighter than ever before. - I can 
rest!)75 But the mystery surrounding Schweiger will not remain repressed, 
and is now revealed within the action of the play. Years earlier, Schweiger 
(then called Forster) had fired upon a group of schoolchildren, killing one of 
them. He then underwent a “Vergessenheits-Kur” (forgetting-treatment) at 
the hands of a sinister professor, who gave him the new identity Schweiger(“silent one”) with which to begin a new life. Now the professor returns, re-
vealing Schweiger’s past. Werfel even ties Schweiger’s crime to the biblical 
figure with whom he is identified, noting that the shooting took place in a 
town called Sankt Josef.76 
 Repulsed by her husband’s crime, Anna seeks to escape Schweiger under 
the pretense of visiting her mother. Schweiger protests, in a regression that 
continues to project a maternal role onto his wife: “Meine Mutter bist du! Ich 
bin noch in dir! Du kannst jetzt nicht gehn…” (You are my mother! I am still 
in you! You can’t go now…) When she leaves nonetheless, Schweiger is left 
with only his neighbor for company, who knows nothing of his prior life and 
thus continues to worship him. Still holding out hope, Schweiger describes to 
 
73 Werfel, Dramen, pp. 325, 353, 337. 
74 There are unmistakable signs of an autobiographical connection here, as well: the repeated 
A in the name Anna; the first name of the title character; the fact that Alma, 11 years Wer-
fel’s senior, often referred to him as her man-child (Mannkind). On the final point, see 
Jungk, p. 117. 
75 Werfel, Dramen, p. 344. Schweiger’s assumption that the child is male recalls an entry in 
Werfel’s diary. Considering there whether he, and not Gropius, is the father of Alma’s child, 
Werfel writes: “[…] daß es ein Bub ist, sagt meinem Gefühl…Ja! Ich habe mir nicht vorstel-
len können, daß aus meinem Samen ein Mädchen kommt” (That it is a boy, makes me 
feel…Yes! I haven’t been able to imagine that a girl would come from my seed). Quoted in 
Jungk, p. 101. 
76 Ibid., pp. 354-55. 
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Birth and Rebirth in Christianity and Expressionism 113 
her the salvific role which Anna and their unborn child jointly occupy: “Eines 
Tags da hab ich sie ganz gefunden und angefangen zu leben. [...] Aber auf 
einmal war ich auf der Welt, als hätte mein Kind mir nach einem unfaßlichen 
Gesetz erst Leben gegeben. [...] Aber jetzt bin ich doch zu Haus, durch sie zu 
Haus!” (One day I just found her and began to live. […] And then suddenly I 
was there in the world, as if my child, according to some inconceivable law, 
had first given me life. […] But now I am at home, at home in them!)77 Just 
as the boundaries between Anna as wife and Anna as mother are blurred for 
Schweiger, so it is unclear to him whether he has given life to his child or 
vice-versa. 
 During Anna’s extended absence, Schweiger is visited by the minor char-
acter Cooperator Rotter, who has seen Schweiger, in a dream, “von der Got-
tes-Glorie umflossen, in der Klosterzelle knien” (surrounded by the glory of 
God, kneeling in a monastery cell). Rotter concludes that Schweiger is called 
to dwell in a different mother altogether: “Unsere heilige Kirche, die einzige 
übermoralische Mutter im Weltall, die Mutter aller Mütter, […] die heilige 
Mutter wartet auf Sie. [...] Franz Schweiger, Sie sind gerettet!” (Our holy 
church, the only supramoral mother in the universe, the mother of all moth-
ers, […] the holy mother waits for you. […] Franz Schweiger, you are sa-
ved!) Schweiger replies, “Ich bin gerettet […]! - Anders, als Sie glauben!” (I 
am saved […]! - But not as you think!)78 Schweiger then restates his notion 
of salvation through partnership and parenthood: 
 
Der Teufel ist die Einsamkeit! [...] Mein Wahnsinn war Einsamkeit, meine Tat war Ein-
samkeit! Jetzt aber bin ich nicht mehr einsam. Ich liebe. Ich bin gebunden. [...] Kann 
etwas anderes uns vor dem Teufel, vor der Einsamkeit retten? [...] Sie müssen an das 
Dogma glauben, daß Gott selbst ein Weib gebraucht hat, daß er es befruchte und von 
ihm geboren werde! Ich erlebe es. [...] Ein Kind wächst in ihr. Das ist so wunderbar.79 
(Loneliness is the devil! […] My madness was loneliness, my deed was loneliness! But 
now I am no longer lonely. I love. I am bound. […] Can anything else save us from the 
devil, from loneliness? […] You must believe in the doctrine that God himself needed a 
woman to be fruitful and give birth to his child! I am living that. […] A child grows in-
side her. That is so wonderful.) 
 
Like Laurentin (indeed like Adam and thus all men), Schweiger finds re-
demption from his isolation - and from the crime to which he believes that 
isolation drove him - in his wife and her child. The sacred role of woman as 
the bearer of life is again the facilitator of man’s redemption. 
 
77 Werfel, Dramen, pp. 358, 363. 
78 Ibid., pp. 371-72. 
79 Ibid., pp. 372-73. 
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114 German Expressionist Drama and the Messianism of a Generation 
 Once Schweiger has rejected the monastic life Rotter envisions for him, 
Anna returns. Schweiger rejoices in the mercy of this new beginning, telling 
her: 
 
Was ich im Wahnsinn verbrochen hatte, ich habe es gutmachen dürfen. Fühlst du auch, 
daß ich jetzt quitt bin!? – Jetzt, in diesem Augenblick, seit meiner Kindheit zum ersten-
mal, spüre ich wieder Freiheit, Freiheit!! – O du, meine Gnade, heut ist unser wirklicher 
Hochzeitstag. [...] Du Mutterbraut du! [...] Du bist mein Schutz vor dem Gräßlichen . . . 
[...] Die beiden Leben, durch die ich lebe, sind bei mir.80 
(My crime of madness, I have been able to redress it. Do you feel it too, that I am now 
free!? – Now, in this moment, for the first time since my childhood, I feel freedom 
again, freedom!! – Oh you, my mercy, today is our true wedding day. […] You mother-
bride! […] You are my protector from the dreadfulness […]. Both lives through which I 
live are now here with me.) 
 
Even as the term “mother-bride” highlights Schweiger’s conflation of Anna’s 
roles, she manages to disentangle them, telling Schweiger that she has termi-
nated her pregnancy. The words she uses to express her desperation are sig-
nificant: “Jesus Maria! Verstehst du mich denn noch immer nicht? [...] Das 
Kind ist fort. [...] Ein Kind von einem, der auf Kinder schießt! Was sollte das 
für ein Mensch werden!? Ein Balg, eine Mißgeburt, ein Krüppel, bestenfalls 
ein armer Verrückter…” (Jesus Maria! You still don’t understand me? […] 
The child is gone. […] A child from a man who shoots children! What kind 
of a person would that become!? A brat, a monster, a cripple, a poor crackpot 
at best...). Anna has envisioned, if not another Antichrist-child, then at least a 
monstrous one radically different to Schweiger’s vision of a redemptory in-
fant. Schweiger, for his part, still cannot relinquish this vision of a healthy, 
god-like child. Anna extricates and asserts herself again with the reply that it 
was her pregnancy to terminate. To Schweiger’s insistence that the child was 
their salvation, Anna counters that she never wanted the child and plans to 
leave Schweiger for good. Again he begs her, in whom he sees “meine süße 
Mutter” (my sweet mother), to reconsider, again unsuccessfully. His hopes 
for salvation now ultimately dashed with Anna’s departure, Schweiger 
throws himself out of the window. Concluding that she cannot leave her hus-
band after all, Anna returns only seconds too late, and is wracked with guilt 
over the body of her dying husband.81 
 While Schweiger’s familial role oscillates between that of father and 
child, Anna’s is even more problematic. She is in a very significant way an 
outlier among Expressionism’s women characters. She does not conform to 
the expectation that her primary purpose is to bear a (certainly male) re-
 
80 Werfel, Dramen, pp. 377-78. 
81 Ibid., pp. 378-83. 
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Birth and Rebirth in Christianity and Expressionism115 
deemer-child. Instead, she leaves her husband twice and chooses to terminate 
an unwanted pregnancy.82 Whereas Barlach’s Elise willingly and piously 
accepts the Marian role Thomas suggests for her in The Foundling, Anna 
Schweiger will not have that role foisted upon her. She becomes a counter-
figure for Stanja, the heroine of Werfel’s Goat Song, refusing to bear the 
child of a monstrous father. Moreover, Anna refuses to function as the 
mother to her regressive and self-infantilizing husband. Lost on her is Zara-
thustra’s urging: “Im ächten Manne ist ein Kind versteckt: das will spielen. 
Auf, ihr Fruaen, so entdeckt mir doch das Kind im Manne!” (In a real man a 
child is hidden - and wants to play. Go to it, women, discover the child in 
man!)83 
 On the whole, Anna Schweiger demystifies herself by shaking off the 
eternal feminine mantle, which carries with it in this particular period of liter-
ary history primarily the responsibility to birth a savior. While Schweiger 
retains some of the rhetorical excesses of The Midday-Goddess, the growing 
complexity of Werfel’s characters does seem to indicate his development as a 
dramatist. With respect to Anna, however, this development is almost entirely 
undone when she returns, repentant, in the final moment of the play. More-
over, her husband’s belief that she has denied him the redemption she held in 
her womb is ultimately validated by the fact that she is now too late to save 
his life. 
 The distinctions between the three plays examined here, The Foundling, 
The Midday-Goddess, and Schweiger, are significant. Barlach adopts rather 
directly Christian rhetoric and imagery from the Nativity accounts, the 
Pauline epistles, and the Antichrist tradition; Werfel alludes to all three 
sources while integrating Nietzschean principles as well. The foundling pro-
vides salvation for its community at large, including Elise; the disappearing 
Mara, depersonalized to the point of becoming a principle, has no need of the 
redemption with which she leaves Laurentin and which he now seeks to 
spread; Schweiger’s ultimately thwarted expectations, from which Anna 
seeks to liberate herself, never exceed his own redemption. While these dif-
ferences reveal a number of the nuances within Expressionist Messianism, 
the thread that connects all three dramas, the child as a promise of redemp-
tion, evinces an externally projected messianic desire, as those seeking re-
demption expect it to come from a party other than themselves (the characters 
in The Foundling even miss an opportunity to “drown their own wretched-
ness” before they are ultimately saved by the adopted child). This common 
expectation drives the multiple dramatic situations in which it falls to a 
 
82 For the Expressionists’ stance on abortion, see Wright, ‘“New Man”’, p. 594. 
83 Nietzsche, VI.1, 81. 
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116 German Expressionist Drama and the Messianism of a Generation 
woman to give birth, literally, to redemption: the Red Emperor’s decree that 
the women among his subjects bear a savior; Thomas’s glorification of 
Elise’s miraculous potential; Laurentin’s rebirth through his sexual experi-
ence of Mara and the birth of their child; Schweiger’s attempt to escape his 
trauma and loneliness through the love of Anna and their unborn child. This 
particular model of redemption, then, is not only exogenous to the individual 
but also thoroughly gendered. Its subject, almost exclusively male, objecti-
fies, depersonalizes, and mystifies both mother and child, blurring the very 
boundaries between these two projected sources of salvation: Thomas, 
Laurentin, and Schweiger seem unsure as to whether their salvation lies with 
their children, or with Elise, Mara, and Anna, respectively. 
 Kaiser’s dramatic work boasts similar heroines, influenced by a vision of 
the future clearly based on Nietzschean principles. In the play Die Ver-
suchung (The Temptation, 1917), the character Karla Axthelm enthuses that 
her unborn child will change and even purify the world.84 And the later play 
Gas (1918) ends with another young woman’s desire to bear a new kind of 
human.85 
 Toller, for his part, incorporates a veritable tableau of the Bethlehem Na-
tivity into The Transformation. While the action of the play consists primar-
ily of the transformation of its hero Friedrich, this direct plot line is inter-
spersed with thematically connected dream-like scenes, populated by un-
named characters masked with Friedrich’s face. In one such scene, Friedrich 
is depicted as a prisoner whose pregnant wife visits him in jail. Lamenting his 
inability to help his unborn child, the prisoner links his wife to the Virgin 
Mary, calling her “rein und unbefleckt” (pure and immaculate). As the pris-
oner dies with the words “Frau…Mutter…” (Woman … Mother …) on his 
lips, his widow is struck with labor pains. At this point the other prisoners 
leave their cells and gather around the laboring woman, who is bathed in 
light. The prisoners rejoice, venerating the woman as they behold her and her 
newborn child. The stage directions specify: “Die Decke wölbt sich zum un-
endlichen Himmel” (The ceiling arches to an unending heaven).86 
 By and large, however, Kaiser and Toller are less concerned with infant 
birth than are Barlach and Werfel, focusing instead on the self-transformation 
of an adult character into the paradigmatic New Man. 
 
 
 
 
 
84 Kaiser, Werke, I, 353-54. 
85 See Kaiser, Werke, II: Stücke 1918-1927 (1971), pp. 57-58. 
86 Toller, Werke, II, 45-46. 
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Birth and Rebirth in Christianity and Expressionism 117 
The Birth of the New Man and the Rebirth of Humanity 
 
Kaiser’s and Toller’s concern with the New Man represents an integral part 
of Expressionism’s quest for a redemption endogenous to the human. To this 
way of thinking, waiting for the birth of a miraculous child is far less effec-
tive than striving actively for one’s own spiritual rebirth. These playwrights 
were determined to create a new society by designing characters - adults re-
born by the power of their passionate visions - who would inspire audience 
members to transform themselves, as well. 
 The New Man’s search for a new existence is represented, in many pro-
grammatic declarations from the period, as a search for God. In a 1919 essay 
on contemporary drama, Herbert Kühn wrote: “Jetzt ist der Mensch erwacht, 
der neue Mensch, der Mensch der Gerechtigkeit, der Mensch der Liebe, der 
Mensch der Freiheit. [...] Wir suchen Gott. […] Wir leben ihn in uns, wir 
greifen ihn, sichtbar, erschaut, im Drama” (Now the human has awoken, the 
New Man, the man of justice, the man of love, the man of freedom. […] We 
are seeking God. […] We experience him in us; we grasp him, visibly 
glimpsed in our dramas).87 And yet Expressionism’s search for God was 
rarely content merely to await the arrival of redemption at God’s discretion. 
Expressionists espousing a more active, endogenous model of human re-
demption had concrete societal models, such as the “Neue Gemeinschaft” 
(New Community) established by the brothers Julius and Heinrich Hart 
around the turn of the twentieth century. This “Kolonie von Lebensre-
formern” (colony of life-reformers), which included Buber, Landauer, and 
Lasker-Schüler, was convinced of the human’s ability to effect its own salva-
tion,88 and combined the construct of the New Man with messianic tradition, 
calling on its members to bring about the messianic age rather than to dream 
of and await it. Introducing a collection of Flugschriften zur Begründung 
einer neuen Weltanschauung (Pamphlets for the Establishment of a New 
Worldview, 1900) in language that recallsthe Activist movement, the Hart 
brothers wrote: “Nicht länger gilt es nur zu dichten und zu träumen vom drit-
ten Reich, leben ist mehr denn dichten. Wenn wir wollen, ist die Erfüllung 
mitten unter uns, und so wahrhaftig wir wollen” (It is no longer enough to 
write and to dream of the third kingdom, for living is more than writing. If we 
desire it, fulfillment is in our midst, as real as we want it to be).89 
 
87 Herbert Kühn, ‘Das Wesen des Dramatischen’, Die neue Schaubühne, 1 (1919), 3-6 (p. 5). 
88 Dieter Bänsch, Else Lasker-Schüler. Zur Kritik eines etablierten Bildes (Stuttgart: Metzler, 
1971), p. 195. 
89 Das Reich der Erfüllung. Flugschriften zur Begründung einer neuen Weltanschauung, ed. 
by Heinrich and Julius Hart, 2 vols (Leipzig: Eugen Diederichs, 1900), I, p. 7. 
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118 German Expressionist Drama and the Messianism of a Generation 
 A number of Toller’s characters represent the New Man in the search for 
salvation, including Sonja Irene L. of Masses and Man, one of Expression-
ism’s very few woman protagonists.90 As this character demonstrates, the 
Expressionist principle of human renewal certainly included that of ‘woman-
kind.’ But just as the women of Expressionism’s Nativity dramas are more 
often and more strongly the facilitators than the recipients of redemption, the 
“neuer Mensch” characters who model redemption within Expressionist 
drama are, with only a very few exceptions, New Men.91 
 The character who most expressly experiences a messianic rebirth in Tol-
ler’s work is Friedrich, the hero of The Transformation. The concept of re-
birth is central to the drama; Toller notes that the action takes place “in Eu-
ropa vor Anbruch der Wiedergeburt” (in Europe before the beginning of the 
rebirth).92 Europe’s rebirth, then, will be catalyzed by that of Friedrich. We 
noted previously Friedrich’s eagerness to fight for his homeland in its colo-
nies, a fight during which he is taken prisoner and then saved. Lying in a 
military hospital, a crucifix above his bed, Friedrich asks the Red Cross nurse 
who tends to him: “Bist du die Mutter Gottes? [...] Du trägst das Kreuz…Das 
Kreuz ist an dich geheftet…Rotes Kreuz [...] Deine Hände streichen lind und 
fromm” (Are you the Mother of God? […] You wear the Cross…The Cross 
is attached to you…Red Cross […] Your hands caress sweetly and piously).93 
The iconography, reminiscent of a pietà, indicates Friedrich’s sense of rebirth 
in the care of a heavenly mother. As a result of this rebirth, he will turn from 
the war cause to that of peaceful revolution, mirroring Toller’s own conver-
 
90 Toller’s contemporary Sophie Dorothea Gallwitz (who published at the time under her first 
and middle initials) found this character to have been rather depersonalized despite Toller’s 
noble intentions: “Durch diese Frau wollte der Dichter Toller zu der Menschheit sprechen 
[…]. So füllte er seine Gedanken in sie hinein, unbekümmert, ob er ihr wirkliches, mensch-
liches Wesen dadurch in Stücke sprengte” (Through this woman, Toller wanted to speak as a 
writer to humanity […]. So he poured his thoughts into her, unconcerned with whether he 
was thereby blasting her true, human essence into pieces). Gallwitz, p. 65. 
91 It would be misleading, moreover, to refer to a character like Sonja Irene L. as a “New 
Woman,” since die neue Frau, a popular figure particularly during the 1920s in Central 
Europe, is not one subcategory of der neue Mensch, but another category entirely, often hav-
ing more to do with fashion and consumer culture than with political activity or spiritual re-
newal. See Gesa Kessemeier, Sportlich, sachlich, männlich. Das Bild der ‘Neuen Frau’ in 
den Zwanziger Jahren. Zur Konstruktion geschlechtsspezifischer Körperbilder in der Mode 
der Jahre 1920 bis 1929 (Cologne: Böhlau, 2003), as well as Wright, ‘The New Woman of 
the Twenties: Hoppla! That’s Life! and The Merry Vineyard’, in Playing for Stakes: Ger-
man-Language Drama in Social Context, ed. by Anna K. Kuhn and Barbara D. Wright (Ox-
ford: Berg, 1994), pp. 119-38. 
92 Toller, Werke, II, 12. 
93 Ibid., 28-29. 
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Birth and Rebirth in Christianity and Expressionism 119 
sion from war enthusiast to revolutionary pacifist, one that he hoped to ex-
tend to his audience. 
 But unlike Barlach and Werfel, Toller does not allow this Red Cross 
nurse to serve as the primary facilitator of Friedrich’s redemption. His rebirth 
must take place on a much broader scale, with the youth of the entire earth 
giving new birth to itself: “Nun öffnet sich, aus Weltenschoß geboren / Das 
hochgewölbte Tor der Menschheitskathedrale. / Die Jugend aller Völker 
schreitet flammend / Zum nachtgeahnten Schrein aus leuchtenden Kristall. 
[...] Du Jugend schreite, ewig dich gebärend, / Erstarrtes ewig du zerstörend, / 
So schaffe Leben gluterfüllt vom Geist” (Now born from the womb of the 
world, / the high arched doors of the human cathedral are opened. / The youth 
of all the nations walks, aflame, / toward a shrine of crystal gleaming in the 
night. […] Walk, youth, eternally giving birth to yourself, / eternally destroy-
ing the old. / Create life filled with glowing spirit). The old order is thus de-
stroyed in an eternal process, setting off the equally eternal process of rebirth 
for which humanity is essentially responsible to itself. Friedrich tells his own 
mother: “Fühlst du es nicht, wie die Erde […] ein einziger gewaltiger Schoß 
ward, der zuckt in Wehen. Denk an die Qual, da du mich gebären solltest, so 
wälzt sich heute die Erde…Zerrissener, blutiger Schoß, um neu zu gebären 
die Menschheit” (Don’t you feel it, how the earth […] became a single, great 
womb, wincing in its labor pains? Think of the agony when you bore me. 
That’s how the earth is moving today…A tattered, bloody womb, to give new 
birth to humanity).94 Here too the imagery of Expressionist Messianism reso-
nates strongly with Nietzsche’s reflections on childbirth and pain as eternal 
necessities: 
 
Damit es die Lust des Schaffens giebt, damit der Wille zum Leben sich ewig selbst be-
jaht, muss es auch ewig die ‘Qual der Gebärerin’ geben… […] [Hier] ist der tiefste In-
stinkt des Lebens, der zur Zukunft des Lebens, zur Ewigkeit des Lebens, religiös emp-
funden, - der Weg selbst zum Leben, die Zeugung, als der heilige Weg.95 
(That there may be the eternal joy of creating, that the will to life may eternally affirm 
itself, the agony of the woman giving birth must also be there eternally. […] Here the 
most profound instinct of life, that directed toward the future of life, the eternity of life, 
is experienced religiously - and the way to life, procreation, as the holy way.) 
 
For Toller as for Nietzsche, that which is holy and eternal is to be found not 
in the dogmas of orthodoxy, but in acts of creation and procreation, in the 
self-affirming will that looks always to the future. 
 Kaiser imagines the emergence of the New Man in similar terms of a per-
sonal rebirth extended to all humanity, as best witnessed in one of his most 
 
94 Toller, Werke, II, 51, 54. 
95 Nietzsche, VI.3, 153-54. 
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120 German Expressionist Drama and the Messianism of a Generation 
popular plays, Die Bürger von Calais (The Burghers of Calais, 1914). This 
historical drama uses as the backdrop for its messianic message the conflict 
of the Hundred Years’ War. When the British take control of the vital port 
city of Calais, the King of England demands that six citizens sacrifice them-
selves in orderto save their city. The first to volunteer is the play’s hero, Eus-
tache de Saint-Pierre, a literary Christ figure par excellence. Eustache’s paci-
fism is paralleled with that of Christ when he dissuades a fellow citizen from 
striking a British officer, recalling Jesus’s rebuke of a disciple who cuts off 
the ear of a Roman solider (Luke 22:49-51). Eustache’s willingness to sacri-
fice himself for the sake of his community is expressed in overtly Christian 
language, not only by Eustache himself, but also by the six additional citizens 
who volunteer “in die Spuren [s]einer Sohlen zu treten!” (to step in the tracks 
of [his] soles!)96 In a deviation from the historical material, this brings the 
total number of Kaiser’s volunteers to seven, one more than is required. The 
ensuing dramatic conflict as to which of the seven will be spared allows Kai-
ser to establish Eustache de Saint-Pierre as the New Man. Eustache suggests 
to his ‘disciples’ that the last of the seven to appear in the marketplace on the 
morning of the scheduled sacrifice will be spared. As the other six volunteers 
arrive and Eustache remains absent, the citizens of Calais believe they have 
been deceived, assuming that their leader has stayed away in order to save 
himself. 
 Instead, Eustache’s aged father appears in the marketplace bearing the 
corpse of his son, who has committed suicide in order to prevent any of the 
other six from betraying his fellow citizens and thus his mission. Eustache’s 
father heralds his dead son in highly messianic language which is at once 
biblical and Nietzschean: “Ich bin ein Becher - der überfließt [...] Mein Mund 
ist gefüllt - es fließt von ihm aus” (I am a cup - that overflows […] My mouth 
is full - words of him pour out).97 That this climactic scene is characterized 
more by the language of birth than of death underscores that Eustache’s death 
is significant only insofar as it represents the birth of the New Man. Eusta-
che’s father rejoices, “ich habe den neuen Menschen gesehen - in dieser 
Nacht ist er geboren!” (I have seen the New Man - he has been born this 
night!)98 Eustache’s act will instruct those he leaves behind in how to over-
come and redeem themselves. 
 
96 Kaiser, Werke, I, 540. 
97 Ibid., 575. See Psalms 23:5, as well as Zarathustra’s proclamations: “Segne den Becher, 
welcher überfliessen will” (Bless the cup that wants to overflow); “Ich liebe Den, dessen 
Seele übervoll ist, so dass er sich selber vergisst” (I love him whose soul is overfull so that 
he forgets himself). Nietzsche, VI.1, 6, 12. 
98 Kaiser, Werke I, 577. 
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Birth and Rebirth in Christianity and Expressionism 121 
 An English officer arrives on the scene and announces that a son has been 
born to the King of England. For this reason, the King will not take a life. 
Calais is saved even without the sacrifice. Thus the birth of the New Man, 
mirrored by the birth of the king’s son, offers a broader salvation literally as 
well. It is significant, however, that Kaiser’s focus is on the sacrificed man 
rather than the newborn child, who is treated extremely tangentially. The 
drama’s final tableau has the six surviving volunteers gathered around Eus-
tache’s body, “gebeugt an seinem Lager” (bowed over his lying-place).99 
While some have interpreted this tableau in relation to Jesus’s sacrificial 
death and subsequent Ascension100 (allusions which are certainly intended on 
some level), the scene is far more reminiscent of the adoration of Jesus at the 
Bethlehem Nativity, as onlookers bow over Eustache and show reverence for 
the birth of the New Man. 
 This is the second full Nativity tableau we have observed in Expressionist 
drama. For all Expressionism’s lofty rhetoric, there are times when redemp-
tion can only be portrayed by the absence of language. Murphy reads this as a 
potential response to the critics of Expressionism’s notorious excesses: 
“Where words also become inadequate for the expression of ineffable mean-
ings, then the inability to say the unspeakable leads to hyperbole, and to a 
lapse into voiceless gesture, tableau and other forms of what constitutes a 
kind of semiotic overloading […].”101 This was, in Kaiser’s case at least, a 
technique that resonated; the messianic intentions of The Burghers of Calais 
and its final tableau did not escape his audience. One review from 1919 
praises the final tableau’s representation of the “mystische Einswerdung des 
Heilandes von jener Welt mit dem neuen Menschen” (mystical unification of 
the otherworldly savior and the New Man).102 
 Within Expressionist Messianism, Toller’s Friedrich and Kaiser’s Eus-
tache de Saint-Pierre cooperate in a common mission of renewal and rebirth. 
Rather than looking beyond themselves for a messiah to save them, both con-
sider redemption to be an endogenous process or act. They embrace a rather 
Zarathustrian voluntarism, mobilizing their own heroic qualities to inspire a 
similar transformation in others’ lives, here and now on the earth. 
 
99 Kaiser, Werke, I, 578-79. 
100 See for example Eberhard Lämmert, ‘Der “neue Mensch” als Leiche im Licht. Georg Kai-
sers dramatische Planspiele’, in Avantgarde, Modernität, Katastrophe. Letteratura, Arte e 
Scienza fra Germania e Italia nel primo '900, ed. by Eberhard Lämmert and Giorgio Cusa-
telli (Firenze: Leo S. Olschki 1995), pp. 209-22 (p. 215), and Riedel, p. 26. 
101 Murphy, pp. 163-64. 
102 Fritz Neumann, ‘Die Bürger von Calais und ihr Dichter’, Die literarische Gesellschaft, 5 
(1919), 309-16 (pp. 315-16). 
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122 German Expressionist Drama and the Messianism of a Generation 
 Kaiser’s hero, however, is also a powerful demonstration of the en-
croachment, into this endogenous model of redemption, of an external projec-
tion of messianic desire. The particular act with which Eustache de Saint-
Pierre shows others the way is, of course, very much like the messianic act of 
Jesus, the act humans require, in the common interpretation, for the redemp-
tion they cannot effectuate themselves. Kaiser’s model of renewal is thus not 
all that different from Barth’s: in sacrificing himself, Eustache/Jesus demon-
strates the New Man by way of example, making regeneration possible for 
others. Eustache’s corpse even becomes an object of adoration for those he 
has saved. Kaiser’s Eustache is thus another example of Expressionism’s path 
from secularization into resacralization. Attempts to place the human being at 
the origin of its own salvation are attempts to secularize traditionally reli-
gious functions. In this case, the attempt to replace the title Messiah with that 
of Mensch fell back upon itself, in the elevation of a particular human far 
above those who find their redemption in him. 
 
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Chapter 5 – The Mission and Passion of Expressionist 
Messianism 
 
Und alle Forderungen heutiger […] Men-
schen sind in den Evangelien auffindbar 
und dort verheißen. 
 -- Moritz Lederer, “Revolutionierung des 
Theaters”1 
 
And all the demands of modern […] man 
are traceable in the Gospels and promised 
there. 
-- Moritz Lederer, “Revolutionizing the 
Theater” 
 
 
Introduction 
 
While the Nativity is a momentous starting point in the development of 
Christian messianism, Jesus’s messiahship is constituted in the main by his 
life, death, and resurrection. His teachings and miracles constitute a messi-
anic mission, which then culminates in the Passion event. The literature that 
relays these stories about Jesus will provide Expressionist literature with a 
number of itshallmarks. 
 The momentousness with which Jesus’s messiahship is announced is imi-
tated throughout Expressionist literature. Expressionism has its own prophets, 
who, like John the Baptist, declare that “the kingdom of Heaven has come 
near” (Matthew 3:2). Jesus’s own proclamations about his messiahship de-
pend upon the Jewish tradition, according to which the Messiah is the 
anointed servant and messenger of God. Luke’s Gospel, for example, re-
counts Jesus’s recitation of prophecy in the temple. He reads from Isaiah 
(“‘The spirit of the Lord is upon me because he has anointed me; he has sent 
me to announce good news to the poor, to proclaim release for prisoners and 
recovery of sight for the blind; to let the broken victims go free, to proclaim 
the year of the Lord’s favor’”) and then tells the worshipers: “Today, in your 
hearing this text has come true” (4:18-21). 
 Moreover, a number of Expressionist writers identify with Jesus in their 
belief that they have been sent into their communities, often even into the 
world, to fulfill a holy mission. All of Jesus’s earthly work is inspired by his 
 
1 Moritz Lederer, ‘Revolutionierung des Theaters’, Der Revolutionär, 1 (1919), 21-24 (p. 23). 
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124 German Expressionist Drama and the Messianism of a Generation 
mission to “proclaim the good news of the kingdom of God” (Luke 4:43). 
Similarly, many Expressionists are motivated in their creations by their con-
fidence in their own vocations. In carrying out their own missions, they draw 
on Jesus’s teachings, which many believe have been corrupted by the church. 
 While Jesus’s mission lays the groundwork for his messiahship, it is the 
Passion that forms the basis of Christian soteriology, retroactively giving 
shape to the mission and to Christianity itself. Accordingly, Passion motifs, 
from the Last Supper through the Resurrection, are co-opted in a remarkable 
number of Expressionist dramas. Only rarely, however, is this co-option 
based on personal belief in Jesus’s messiahship. More frequently, it is meant 
to provide for the playwright and the audience an immediately and widely 
recognizable idiom in which to consider possible configurations of redemp-
tion as well as particular messiah figures. We will continue to observe here 
both the desire to secularize the messianic, by replacing Jesus with a fully 
human character, and the eventual resacralization of the structure instead. 
 
 
The Messianic Mission of Expressionism and Its Drama 
 
It is a sign of this resacralization that, though the Expressionists’ messianic 
hopes aim avowedly at an earthly rather than a heavenly fulfillment, they 
repeatedly emulate Jesus’s claim to be “not of this world.” Jesus uses these 
words to describe himself and his kingdom in John 8:23 and 18:36, respec-
tively. Heynicke, one of Expressionism’s leading poets, wrote in 1918: “Un-
ser Reich ist nicht von dieser Welt. Aber es soll auch auf dieser Erde herr-
schen” (Our kingdom is not of this world. But it shall reign on this earth).2 
The following year, Alfred Wolfenstein inaugurated his periodical Die Erhe-
bung (The Uprising) by detailing the characteristics of a messianic hero 
whose “Liebe ist nicht von dieser Welt” (love is not of this world).3 Written 
at about the same time, Paul Nikolaus’s essay “Das Theater als Erlösung” 
(“The Theater as Redemption”) insists: “Unser Reich ist nun einmal nicht 
von dieser Welt, unser Hirn erkennt keine Grenzen des Horizontes an, unser 
Herz kein Thermometer” (Our kingdom is not of this world; our brains rec-
ognize no limits of the horizon, our hearts no thermometer).4 
 
2 Kurt Heynicke, ‘Die Herrschaft des Geistes’, Der Freihafen. Blätter der Hamburger Kam-
merspiele, 1 (1918), 33. 
3 Alfred Wolfenstein, ‘Der menschliche Kämpfer’, Die Erhebung. Jahrbuch für neue Dich-
tung und Wertung, 1 (1919), 273-86 (p. 282). 
4 Paul Nikolaus, ‘Das Theater als Erlösung’, Der Freihafen. Blätter der Hamburger Kammer-
spiele, 2 (1919/20), 129-32 (p. 130). 
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 The Mission and Passion of Expressionist Messianism 125 
 Assertions of otherworldliness characterize Expressionist plays as well. 
Among Werfel’s earliest dramatic endeavors is the brief scene Die Versu-
chung: Ein Gespräch des Dichters mit dem Erzengel und Luzifer (The Temp-
tation: The Poet’s Dialogue with the Archangel and Lucifer, 1913). In it, the 
poet becomes the intermediary connecting God and the world - a function 
often attributed to Jesus. Thus the poet may profess, “die Gesetze des Men-
schen, auch seine Moralgesetze, sind nicht die meinigen, weil ich in Bezie-
hung zu ganz anderen, höheren Gewalten stehe” (the laws of man, even his 
moral laws, are not my own, since mine is a relationship to completely other, 
higher powers). An angel then tells him: “Nun weißt du ganz, daß dein Reich 
von dieser Welt nicht von dieser Welt ist. [...] Und in dieser Welt der Ge-
sandte, der Mittler, der Verschmähte zu sein, ist dein Schicksal. Kein Gesetz, 
keine Moral gilt für dich, denn du bist der unsrigen, der unendlichen Geister 
einer” (Now you know it fully, that your kingdom of this world is not of this 
world. […] And to be the messenger, the intercessor, the despised in this 
world, that is your fate. No laws, no morals apply to you, for you are one of 
us, one of the eternal spirits).5 In the model of Jesus, the poet becomes a hu-
man and yet superhuman intermediary between God and humanity, and bears 
both the privileges and public disdain that come with the role. Of course, this 
structure serves to sacralize the poet far more than its secularizes the Mes-
siah. 
 Werfel’s claim that the poet is above the laws and morals of society was 
made even more directly by Kaiser, when he became embroiled in a legal 
scandal in 1920. Charged with embezzlement for having pawned items from 
a rented villa, Kaiser told the court: “das Gesetz auf mich angewandt, muß 
schablonenhaft wirken, ich bin namenlos groß” (the law must be applied to 
me only loosely; I am unspeakably great). His called his arrest “ein nationales 
Unglück” (a national misfortune) and asserted: “Halbmast hätte man flaggen 
sollen” (Flags should have flown at half mast). Those who found Kaiser’s 
arrogance distasteful stressed how symptomatic it was of the posture the Ex-
pressionist generation had assumed; Kaiser became for them “das Sinnbild 
dieser Zeit: das große Maul” (the emblem of our time: the bigmouth), the 
mascot of “diesen talentierten Schwätzern, die von ihrer Sendung reden und 
sich für Führer halten” (these talented windbags who speak of their mission 
and consider themselves leaders).6 Others defended Kaiser in this affair pre-
cisely because they took him for the messianic visionary he claimed to be. 
Hugo Zehder contended that Kaiser’s contribution to society far outweighed 
 
5 Werfel, Dramen, pp. 28, 37, 39. 
6 Walter Weichardt, ‘Konfession’, Der Bücherwurm, 7 (1921), 13-14 (p. 14). 
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126 German Expressionist Drama and the Messianism of a Generation 
any infraction he might have committed, suggesting that there could thus be 
no question of true guilt.7 
 Jesus’s claims to otherworldliness are not the sole source of this hubris in 
Kaiser and other Expressionists. Here one encounters also the strong influ-
ence of what Aschheim calls “Nietzschean immoralism,” which is to say 
“Nietzsche’s elitist vision of the sublime if painful role of the isolated artist-
superman who in creating experienced what the herd would never know.”8 
When Kaiser rejoicesin the visions “meiner großartigen, überfüllten 
sausenden klingenden Einsamkeit” (of my magnificent, overflowing, sweep-
ing, clanging loneliness), and claims that “[m]ir sind Dinge aufgegangen - 
Sternenwelten, die noch niemand geahnt hat” ([t]hings have been revealed to 
me - starry worlds that none has yet conceived),9 it is hard not to hear as well 
Nietzsche’s words from the section of Ecce Homo subtitled “Warum ich so 
gute Bücher schreibe” (“Why I Write Such Good Books”): “Wer mir aber 
durch Höhe des Wollens verwandt ist, erlebt dabei wahre Ekstasen des 
Lernens: denn ich komme aus Höhen, die kein Vogel je erflog, ich kenne 
Abgründe, in die noch kein Fuss sich verirrt hat” (But whoever is related to 
me in the height of his aspirations will experience veritable ecstasies of learn-
ing; for I come from heights that no bird ever reached in its flight, I know 
abysses into which no foot ever strayed).10 
 Many Expressionists felt justified in assuming such lofty personae be-
cause of the lofty mission they espoused. Though each of the four authors in 
focus here conceives of this mission in different terms, it is in each instance 
expressed in religious, and specifically messianic, language. Kaiser’s literary 
mission is animated completely, he says, by a vision “das an sich Himmel 
und Erde […] schließt” (that takes unto itself […] heaven and earth), the vi-
sion of human renewal. Kaiser clearly saw himself as a conduit between 
heaven and earth; he writes in a later essay of faith like his as “der Dom, der 
seine Gründe tief im Erdreich hat und mit der Spitze in den Himmel stößt!” 
(the cathedral whose foundations are deep within the earthly kingdom, but 
whose spire thrusts into heaven!)11 
 Toller’s vision, though in many respects quite similar to Kaiser’s, is far 
more politically than aesthetically conceived, and thus imbued to a greater 
degree with the Christian doctrine of charity (Nächstenliebe). Toller’s 
 
7 Zehder, ‘Kaiser’, p. 312. 
8 Aschheim, p. 65. 
9 Quoted in Walther Huder, ‘“Jede Spur ist siebenfach ein Siegel”. Die späte Lyrik Georg 
Kaisers’, Akzente, 2 (1962), 130-43 (p. 141). 
10 Nietzsche, VI.3, 300. Translation from Ecce Homo, ed. and trans. by Walter Kaufmann 
(New York: Vintage, 1989). 
11 Kaiser, Werke, IV, 548-49, 571. 
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 The Mission and Passion of Expressionist Messianism 127 
“Leitsätze für einen kulturpolitischen Bund der Jugend in Deutschland” 
(“Guiding Principles for a Cultural-Political Youth Alliance in Germany,” 
1917), for example, profess that “Liebe zum Volk zwingt uns zum Handeln” 
(love for the people forces us to act). At the same time, Toller rejects the 
Christian valorization of poverty, advocating instead for the effacement of 
social suffering and the establishment of justice. Rejecting Christian typology 
altogether, in fact, Toller is less interested in the transforming the Old Adam 
than in giving him a new chance.12 Still, Toller’s mission is nothing less than 
holy, as demonstrated by the quasi-religious ecstasy of the hero in Masses 
and Man: “Das Werk! Welch heiliges Wort!” (The work! What a holy 
word!)13 
 The messianic missions of Werfel and Barlach, like the visions that in-
form them, are framed by a generally stricter adherence to religious princi-
ples. Werfel called his religious faith the skeleton of his writings.14 Among 
his contemporaries, Werfel evolved from a “Dichter, Prediger, Prophet” 
(poet, preacher, and prophet) into a veritable savior, taking “das Kreuz auf 
sich, bewußt und klar, daß er zum Sieg durchdringen werde” (the Cross upon 
himself in the full and clear knowledge of victory),15 and proceeding through 
his own Passion.16 
 Similarly, Barlach was hailed in his time as “einen Arzt im Geiste Jesu 
Christi […], Propheten und Wundertäter in der Ecclesia” (a physician in the 
spirit of Jesus Christ […], a prophet and miracle-worker in the Ecclesia).17 
The preponderance of the critical literature on Barlach, in fact, is informed by 
his search for, and struggle with, God.18 The fact that God has become 
bankrupt (Bankrott) leads Barlach to wonder: “[W]er formuliert den Men-
schen einen neuen Gott, einen, der nicht Bankrott machen kann? Wer macht 
die Menschen so groß, daß sie Gott, dem Glauben, gewachsen sind? […] Wer 
nimmt ihnen ihren ewigen Leib und verweist sie auf ihren Geist?” ([W]ho 
will formulate for the people a new God, one who cannot be bankrupted? 
 
12 Toller, Werke, I, 131, 140. 
13 Toller, Werke, II, 93. 
14 Werfel, Zwischen, p. 614. 
15 Ernst Jockers, ‘Franz Werfel als religiöser Dichter’, The Germanic Review, 2 (1927), 40-63 
(p. 56). 
16 Berendt, p. 121. 
17 Ehrenberg, pp. 249-50. 
18 See for example Jürgen Kross, ‘Ernst Barlach und das Drama der Gottsuche’, Areopag, 4 
(1969), 260-62; Georg Hensel, ‘Auferstehung’, Theater heute, 11 (1970), 11-12; Effi Horn, 
‘Das Damaskus in Mecklenburg erlebt’, Welt am Sonntag, 11 (17. March 1991), 58. For 
Barlach’s reaction to this interpretation of his work, see Johannes Schwartzkopff, ‘Ein Brief 
Ernst Barlachs über Glaube und Kirche’, Jahrbuch der Ernst Barlach Gesellschaft, 1968/69, 
3-11 (p. 10). 
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128 German Expressionist Drama and the Messianism of a Generation 
Who will make the people so great that they measure up to God, to faith? 
[…] Who will take from them their unending body and point them to their 
spirit?)19 Clearly, this is one of the primary aims of Barlach’s dramatic work. 
 The perception and/or self-perception of these playwrights as messiahs 
finds frequent articulation in the speeches of their dramatic heroes, who often 
serve as quite transparent mouthpieces for their authors. This tactic has in-
vited one of the most common criticisms of Expressionist dramatists, namely 
that the writer himself becomes the main character, from whose point of view 
alone all other dramatic elements are developed, such that all characters 
“werden […] formal zu bloßen Schattenrissen, die aber, infolge der Bühnen-
perspektive, den Anspruch erheben müssen, wirkliche Lebewesen zu sein” 
(become in their form mere silhouettes, who must however claim on the stage 
to be real living beings).20 However real or unreal, these characters are cre-
ated as they are for the express purpose of fulfilling a messianic mission. The 
ultimate goal of these playwrights’ creative decisions, after all, was the trans-
formation of the audience members, as Werfel admits: “Der Dramatiker muß 
dem Zuschauerraum geheimnisvoll schmeicheln. Er muß das Bewußtsein der 
Menschen jenseits des Souffleurkastens gottähnlicher machen, als das der 
Puppen diesseits von ihm. Er soll nicht nur die Szene dichten, sondern auch 
das Publikum” (The dramatist must secretly wheedle the auditorium. He must 
make the consciousness of the people beyond the prompter’s box more god-
like than that of the puppets before it. He should create not only the scene, 
but the audience as well).21 
 The mission of Expressionism’s heroic characters frequently begins, like 
that of Jesus, with messianic proclamations. We noted in chapter 2, with re-
spect to Werfel’s Goat Song, the prophecy of Bogoboj about the leadership of 
Juvan, as well as Juvan’s own turgid proclamations once he has accepted this 
role. In another of Werfel’s dramatic works, the trilogy Spiegelmensch (The 
Mirror Man, 1920), the protagonist Thamal trumpets his own greatness in a 
similar manner: “Mir ist noch manches vorbestimmt. / Mein Name klimmt, / 
[...] Zum Schnee der höchsten Spitze!” (I am destined for many things. / My 
name climbs / […] to the snows of the highest peak!) Thamal will later asso-
ciate this greatness specifically with messiahship, proclaiming:“Ich werde 
zum Erlöser” (I am becoming a savior).22 
 In a commentary on The Mirror Man, Werfel employs Nietzschean lan-
guage to establish Thamal as an “Übergangsmensch” who has freed himself 
from the herd (Herde). But Werfel also seeks to distinguish Thamal from 
 
19 Barlach, Werk, III, 42. 
20 Lukács, ‘Größe’, p. 141. 
21 Werfel, Zwischen, pp. 259-60. 
22 Werfel, Dramen, pp. 180, 190. 
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 The Mission and Passion of Expressionist Messianism 129 
other overman characters of his time. At the beginning, here, of a long transi-
tion away from some of the excesses of Expressionism, Werfel specifies in 
his commentary that Thamal’s imbalances (Unbalancen) - “[m]oralische 
Unlust, […] Durst nach Wert” ([m]oral disinclination and […] thirst for 
value) - make him seem “der typische Romantiker unserer Zeit” (the typical 
romantic of our time). All the same, Werfel refuses to consign Thamal utterly 
to the typical naiveté and vanity associated with such characters, using him 
instead to portray a still valuable craving for recognition (Geltungssucht) as 
“ein losgelöster bewußter Zwang” (an unchained conscious force).23 As late 
Expressionism begins to problematize and even satirize its own tradition,24 it 
employs the same Christian-Zarathustrian language and spirit one has come 
to associate with that tradition. That Mirror Man is by no means a complete 
break with that messianic spirit is demonstrated in Werfel’s final verdict, in 
the commentary, on Thamal: “Die letzte einzige Wahrheit dieses zeitgenös-
sischen Charakters […] ist: Die Sehnsucht” (The last unique truth of this con-
temporary character […] is: Desire). Quoting Thamal’s words from the play 
about his own desire - “Die in mir zehrt mit weinendster Gewalt, / Nach 
meiner gott-ursprünglichen Gestalt” (It gnaws at me with its sobbing force, / 
desire for my divine-primal form) - Werfel says with all the irrationalism of 
Expressionism that this “kategorisches, nicht mehr analysierbares Gefühl” 
(categorical, no longer analyzable feeling) enables Thamal’s ultimate tri-
umph.25 
 Beyond prophecy and proclamations about Expressionism’s messiah fig-
ures, the influence of the New Testament extends to the nature and ideals of 
these characters, as well. It has already been noted that the pacifism and self-
sacrifice of Kaiser’s Eustache de Saint-Pierre make him one of Expression-
ism’s most familiar Christ figures. Two lesser known but no less illuminating 
Christ figures are developed in Expressionist plays which are likewise based 
on historical conflicts. Jesus’s teaching about “the least of these” (Matthew 
25:34-46) is recalled in Toller’s The Machine Wreckers, in Jimmy Cobbett’s 
articulation of his socialist ideals: “Jeder ist schuldig, der weiß, daß ein Kind 
hungert und er hilft ihm nicht zu Brot” (Everyone is guilty who knows that a 
child is starving and does not give him bread). Jimmy’s brother Henry is the 
manager of the factory, which makes Henry, Jimmy says, responsible for 
“jeden, der friert, jeden, der verkommt, jeden, der kein Obdach hat und keine 
Bleibe, jeden, der nach Schönheit, nach Freiheit sich sehnt und in Schmutz 
 
23 Werfel, Zwischen, pp. 246-47. 
24 See Lothar Huber, ‘Franz Werfel’s Spiegelmensch. An Interpretation’, in Franz Werfel. An 
Austrian Writer Reassessed, ed. by Lothar Huber (Oxford: Berg Publishers Ltd., 1989), 65-
80 (p. 66). 
25 Werfel, Zwischen, p. 248. 
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130 German Expressionist Drama and the Messianism of a Generation 
leben muß” (every one who freezes, every one who comes down in the world, 
every one who is homeless and without shelter, every one who longs for 
beauty and freedom but must live in filth).26 Moreover, Jimmy speaks of uni-
onizing as a sacred liberation: 
 
O Brüder, wenn die Schaffenden von England / Abtrünnig werden ihrer heiligen Sen-
dung… / Die Schaffenden des Kontinents, die Schaffenden der Erde… / Sich nicht zur 
großen Menschheitstat vereinen… / Aufrichten Weltgemeinschaft allen Werkvolks… / 
Den Menschheitsbund der freien Völker… / Dann, Brüder, bleibt ihr Knechte bis ans 
Ende aller Tage!27 
(Oh brothers, if the workers of England / are not faithful to their holy mission… / the 
workers of the continent, the workers of the earth… / If they don’t unite in the great 
human action… / and build a world-community of all working people… / the human 
union of free people… / Then, brothers, you will remain slaves until the end of days!) 
 
His teaching and preaching notwithstanding, Jimmy is a reluctant Christ fig-
ure, encouraging the workers to focus their energies on the goal, and not on 
himself as a charismatic messenger. When the workers choose Jimmy as the 
leader of their movement, he responds: “Ein jeder dient dem Volk, ein jeder 
dient dem Werk, ein jeder Führer!” (Each one serves the people, each one 
serves the cause, each one is a leader!)28 Jimmy’s eschewal of the workers’ 
glorification of him recalls the text of Rubiner’s essay “Die Erneuerung” 
(“The Renewal,” 1918): “Es gibt keine Führer mehr. Auf kein fremdes Ein-
zelwesen hat man jemals mehr sich zu verlassen” (There are no leaders any-
more. One should not depend anymore on any external individual). Renewal, 
Rubiner says, “kommt aus dem Volk, wo es wirkendes Volk ist. [...] Wo die 
Masse ihre Aktion entfaltet, wird ein neuer Menschheitsbegriff aus der Vor-
stellung in die Wirklichkeit hinein gestaltet” (comes from the people as an 
active people. […] Where the masses deploy their activities, there a new con-
cept of humanity will be forged, out of our imaginations and into reality).29 
This is just the kind of socialist-messianist spirit that animates Jimmy Cob-
bett, and indeed most of Toller’s Christ figures. 
 Werfel’s play Juarez und Maximilian (1924) develops a very different 
kind of Christ figure, and points up the fact that Expressionism is not, politi-
cally speaking, an entirely homogenous phenomenon. The play reinterprets 
the struggle between Mexican President-in-exile Benito Juárez and Maximil-
ian von Habsburg, the Archduke of Austria who was proclaimed Emperor of 
Mexico in 1864. The drama was intended to lead Werfel farther away from 
 
26 Toller, Werke, II, 133-34. 
27 Ibid., 187. 
28 Ibid., II, 144. 
29 Ludwig Rubiner, ‘Die Erneuerung’, Das Forum, 3 (1918), 59-67 (p. 63). 
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 The Mission and Passion of Expressionist Messianism 131 
his Expressionist period and also into new political territory. The latter was 
accomplished in an extremely sympathetic portrait of Maximilian, a sign of 
Werfel’s departure from his earlier revolutionary tendencies and criticisms of 
the Hapsburg monarchy. But while Juarez and Maximilian diverges in style 
and subject matter from Werfel’s earlier plays, to read it as a successful break 
from Expressionism requires one to overlook its use of ecstatic, declamatory, 
and visionary language, as well as a characteristic employment of Christian 
messianism, to convey its ultimate message. 
 As Maximilian struggles to maintain sovereignty in Mexico, Werfel im-
bues him with motives born less of ambition and greed than of a Christian 
desire to eradicate the suffering and hatred created by a decades-long civil 
war. Maximilian’s political mission is justified on the grounds that the “le-
gitime Herrscher ist der Stellvertreter der weltlichen Liebe Gottes” (legiti-
mate monarch is the agent of the love of God on earth), and is articulated in 
Christian colonialist language: Maximilian wants to awaken (erwecken) the 
Mexicannatives in a “soziale Tat ohnegleichen” (social act without parallel). 
He enthuses that he “kann nicht bändigen, was aus mir will und wirklich 
werden: Das Neue, das Junge, das lang uns überdauern wird” (cannot restrain 
this new thing that wants to leap out of me and become fact, which will out-
live us by a long time).30 Thus Maximilian is established as Christ-like pri-
marily via his attempts at peaceful reconciliation. The drama’s praise of his 
ability to love Juarez is framed by the Christian commandment to love one’s 
enemy. Maximilian’s Feindesliebe is encapsulated in the inscription beneath 
his portrait: “Der Sinn der Feindschaft ist die Versöhnung” (Reconciliation is 
the purport of enmity). He speaks of “das Mysterium der christlichen 
Feindesliebe” (the mystery of Christian love of one’s enemies), and is identi-
fied with reconciliation and love to the point of declaring: “Nichts ist mir 
unbegreiflicher als Haß!” (Nothing is more incomprehensible to me than 
hate!) Maximilian’s Christ-like nature is further highlighted by the Magda-
lene figure Werfel places at his side, the Princess Salm, who exclaims: “Ich 
habe den Helden gefunden, an dessen Existenz ich den Glauben schon ver-
loren hatte. […] Sie haben meinem Leben Sinn und Inhalt gegeben” (I have 
found the hero in whose existence I had lost faith. […] You have given my 
life meaning and substance).31 With Maximilian’s execution in Mexico in 
1867, a historical fact cast in Werfel’s drama in terms of religious martyr-
dom, his identification with Christ is complete, his mission having culmi-
nated in a Passion-like event. 
 
 
30 Werfel, Dramen, pp. 414, 404-405. 
31 Ibid., pp. 393, 400, 434, 444-45. 
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132 German Expressionist Drama and the Messianism of a Generation 
The Passion of the Messiah in Expressionist Drama 
 
Motifs taken from the Gospel accounts of Jesus’s Passion pervade Expres-
sionist texts, structuring the messianic personae of characters (and often, by 
extension, authors) and contouring events that change the course of history 
by facilitating a widespread redemption. It bears repeating that Jesus is in-
tended here as a model not of God’s Son, but of the New Man who does not 
shirk the responsibility carried out in his sacrificial death. 
 
 
The Eucharist & The Last Supper 
 
Eucharist imagery serves as a structuring device for many scenes in Expres-
sionist drama, and drives much of Barlach’s The Foundling. The play’s Anti-
christic Nativity imagery (detailed in the previous chapter) is exceeded in 
grotesqueness by an extended portrayal of the Eucharist in cannibalistic 
terms. Barlach would have been well aware of the Reformers’ extreme 
charge that Catholics’ literal understanding of the communion elements ren-
dered them cannibals.32 His own interrogation, however, of the relationship 
between the Eucharist and cannibalism is certainly not polemical in this 
sense. Instead, he uses the theme of hunger, from which every character in 
the play suffers, as a stand-in for the sufferings of postwar Europe in general 
(which of course included hunger on a catastrophic scale). The resort to can-
nibalism thus becomes a metaphor for the utter desperation of a generation - a 
desperation that often led, in Barlach’s view, to ungodly perversions. Canni-
balism stands here for inhumanity as such, for the favoring of the body above 
the soul. Moreover, since The Foundling has as its ultimate theme the re-
newal and salvation of the world, its central cannibalistic ritual will be one 
that facilitates a messianic reversing of course. 
 In the same decree in which the Red Emperor calls for the birth of the 
Messiah, he also forbids his poverty-stricken subjects from resorting, in their 
hunger, to cannibalism. By the time his decree is read in public, the Red Em-
peror has been killed by the Stone-Breaker, who makes from the corpse a 
“menschliche Suppe” (human soup) and serves it to the hungry community, 
saying: “Empfange deinen Herrn und deinen Knecht!” (Receive your lord 
and servant!) The cannibalistic and pervertedly Eucharistic ritual in which the 
community engages has them ingesting the remains of a corrupt leader who 
has been brutally murdered, rather than willingly sacrificed for their sakes. 
 
32 See Maggie Kilgour, From Communion to Cannibalism. An Anatomy of Metaphors of In-
corporation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), pp. 79-85. 
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 The Mission and Passion of Expressionist Messianism 133 
What is more, this leader has already been characterized as an Antimessiah, 
by virtue of his blasphemous appropriation of Jesus’s claim to be “the Alpha 
and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end” (Revelation 
1:8; 22:13): “[I]ch bin das Ende, prahlt er, und der Anfang, protzt er, ich bin 
der Letzte, kreischt er, und der Erste, schreit er” (I am the End, he boasts, and 
the Beginning, he brags; I am the Last, he screeches, and the First, he 
shrieks).33 
 The function of this grotesque ritual is revealed when the death and inges-
tion of the Emperor is linked directly to the transformation of the foundling 
from a deformed monstrosity into a Christ-child. Cutting up the Emperor’s 
flesh on his cutting stone, the Stone-Breaker says: “Der Heilandskeim ist 
aufgebrochen, zerschlagen sind des roten Kaisers Knochen” (The Savior-seed 
has opened up; the bones of the Red Emperor are broken). The foundling is 
now identified in expressly messianic terms as “Die unschuldgroße Gnaden-
welle, / Die tausend Jahre ruhereichende Quelle” (the wave of mercy, great in 
innocence, / the source of a thousand-year peace),34 a reference to Christ’s 
millennial reign at the time of the last judgment (Revelation 20:1-6). The 
child can now be freed from the Antichrist/scapegoat role to which it had 
been consigned, a role the Emperor comes to inhabit instead. The threat of 
ritual infanticide is sublimated in a substitutive regicide.35 
 In performing the Eucharist ritual, Christians reenact the Passion sacrifice 
of their Messiah, the scapegoat36 for their sins, thus internalizing the salvation 
that sacrifice represents. The ritual performed by the members of Barlach’s 
community is likewise an enactment of their salvation, since it establishes the 
foundling as their own messianic figure. Here, however, the scapegoat who is 
cannibalized is a substitute not only for their sins, but also for another scape-
goat, in an apparent attempt to put messianic and anti-messianic identities 
more firmly into their proper places. The shifting of these identities high-
lights the evolution of the Antichrist notion, from its New Testament signifi-
 
33 Barlach, Werk, I, 270, 272-73, 285. 
34 Ibid., 296. 
35 On ritual infanticide and regicide, see René Girard, Violence and the Sacred, trans. by Pat-
rick Gregory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), pp. 74, 109-10. 
36 While the New Testament does not use the term scapegoat for Jesus, Girard argues convinc-
ingly that “the Gospels have a perfect substitute in the lamb of God,” which also “implies 
the substitution of one victim for all the others but replaces all the distasteful and loathsome 
connotations of the goat with the positive associations of the lamb,” thus connoting “more 
clearly the innocence of this victim, the injustice of the condemnation, and the causelessness 
of the hatred of which it is the object.” René Girard, The Scapegoat, trans. by Yvonne Frec-
cero (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), p. 117. 
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134 German Expressionist Drama and the Messianism of a Generation 
cation of a false teacher opposing Jesus, to a status which is by the early 
twentieth century unmistakably solidified as that of the Messiah’s double.37 
 Even in the absence of any cannibalistic connotation, the Eucharist’s em-
ployment of the material as a means toward spiritual edification and divine 
union makes it an apt motif for critiquing the hollowness of an unspiritual age 
- a critique in which the Expressionists, who valorized spirit (Geist) above all 
else, frequently engaged. Biblical references to bread and wine are usually 
accompanied by some spiritual significance: Jesus’s first miracle turns water 
into wine (John 2:1-11); Jesus calls himself “the bread of life” (John 6:35) 
and says that humans are “not to live on bread alone, but on every word that 
comes from the mouth of God” (Matthew 4:4). Expressionism, in turn, often 
thematizes the emptiness of the symbol in a material and hedonistic age. In 
the travesty of the Lord’s Prayer which Barlach incorporates into The Found-
ling, Jesus’s supplication for daily bread (Matthew 6:11), though absent on 
the literal level, becomes the sole focus: 
 
Hoher Heiland, der du bist der Herr meine hohlen Magens, / Gehäuft sei das Fett im 
Magerfleisch, / Dein Wille geschehe, daß ich lustig lebe im Himmel und auf Erden. / 
Führe uns fleißig zum Versuch guter Getränke / Und sende Erlösung uns von übler Ver-
dauung, / Denn dein ist der Bereich und die Kraft und die Herrlichkeit der ewigen Ge-
fräßigkeit. / In Teufels Namen.38 
(Exalted Savior, who art the Lord of my empty stomach: / Heaping be the fat in the 
meat. / Your will be done, that I may live merrily in heaven and on earth. / Lead us dili-
gently to try good drink, / and send us deliverance from bad digestion, / for thine is the 
province and the power and the glory of eternal gluttony. / In the devil’s name.)39 
 
In the absence of spiritual value that characterizes Barlach’s society, a 
sheerly material desire empties out and thus perverts sacred traditions. 
 It is not Eucharistic imagery but rather the Last Supper event as such that 
animates a climactic scene in Kaiser’s The Burghers of Calais. As the volun-
teers gather on the eve of their scheduled sacrifice (see chapter 4), the Christ 
figure Eustache tells them: “Wir sitzen um diesen Tisch – wir suchen das 
gleiche Ziel – der Willen ist einer – so teilen wir noch die gleiche Speise! [...] 
nun mundet uns derselbe Wein!” (We sit around this table – we seek the 
same goal – our will is one – thus we share the same food! […] now we taste 
the same wine). When another citizen of Calais intrudes upon the scene, Eus-
tache underscores the meal’s symbolic function as a unifying event for him 
and his ‘disciples’: “Du bist fremd zwischen uns – du hast das Mahl nicht am 
 
37 For monsters and antagonists as doubles, see Girard, Violence, pp. 160-67. 
38 Barlach, Werk, I, 278-79. 
39 A great deal of wordplay with the Vaterunser is lost in the translation. 
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 The Mission and Passion of Expressionist Messianism 135 
Tisch gegessen – du hast nicht mit uns getrunken” (You are a stranger among 
us – you have not eaten the meal at this table – you have not drunk with us).40 
 
 
Judas & Jesus: The Betrayal 
 
A second function of this Last Supper scene in The Burghers of Calais is to 
decide which of the seven volunteers will be spared, since only six are re-
quired. Eustache claims to have placed six blue marbles and one white one 
into a bowl; the one who draws the white marble will be excused from the 
sacrifice. With the tension mounting as the bowl is passed around the table, 
the audience is meant to recall the Apostles’ reaction to Jesus’s announce-
ment, at the Last Supper, that one of them would betray him. The volunteers 
anticipate learning who the Judas among them will be, since to escape the 
sacrifice will be, in effect, to betray the others. This is why Eustache has 
placed only blue marbles into the bowl; he is unwilling to consign to the Ju-
das-role anyone engaged in this sacred mission. No white marble drawn, Eus-
tache says that the last one to appear in the marketplace the following morn-
ing will be spared. As noted in the previous chapter, Eustache’s preemptive 
suicide prevents any of the other six volunteers from betraying the cause. 
 Judas’s betrayal serves as a catalyst for the Passion narrative, and is thus 
crucial for the Expressionists’ engagement with that narrative. Their Christ 
figures too must be betrayed, in order to bring into focus both the nobleness 
of their missions and the scorning of redemption in such a corrupted age. 
Kaiser in particular is intensely concerned with the Judas figure. One of his 
plays opens with a barker addressing the audience: “Seht den Judasfinger! / 
Er zählt die Münzen / aus eurer Überbeute / gestern – heute – morgen – – / 
der Judas rafft den Schatz, denn er verriet / sich selbst – / den Bruder aller 
Brüder!” (See the finger of Judas! / He counts the pieces of silver / from your 
excess spoils, / yesterday – today – tomorrow – – / Judas reaps the treasure, 
for he betrayed / himself – / the brother of all brothers!)41 Judas represents for 
Kaiser the presence in humanity as such of treachery and material greed. 
 It is these two qualities that lead to the ultimate frustration of the cashier’s 
quest in From Morn Till Midnight. They are embodied in a young woman 
who plays Judas to the cashier’s Jesus, serving as a pendant to the Eve with 
whom his quest began. The play’s final station (a structuring which itself 
recalls the Passion) takes place at a Salvation Army Hall, where the cashier 
stands up to give his testimony, to talk about his quest and the fruition in 
 
40 Kaiser, Werke, I, 551, 557. 
41 Kaiser, Werke, II, 192. 
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136 German Expressionist Drama and the Messianism of a Generation 
which he believes it now to be ending: “Ich bin seit diesem Vormittag auf der 
Suche. [...] Station hinter Station versank hinter meinem wandernden Rü-
cken. Dies war es nicht, das war es nicht, das nächste nicht [...]! Was ist es? 
Was ist es nun, das diesen vollen Einsatz lohnt? – – Dieser Saal! [...] Von 
diesen Bänken steigt es auf—dröhnt Erfüllung” (I have been searching since 
this morning. […] Station after station disappeared behind my roaming back. 
This wasn’t it, that wasn’t it, that either [...]! What is it? What is it that makes 
this mission worthwhile? – – This Hall! [...] Fulfillment is rising, roaring 
from these benches). The young woman (Mädchen der Heilsarmee) having 
pledged to stand by him, the cashier confesses his theft and condemns the 
stolen money as ultimately worthless: “Das Geld verhüllt das Echte – das 
Geld ist der armseligste Schwindel unter allem Betrug!” (Money veils what is 
real – money is the most paltry sham and fraud!)42 As the cashier throws the 
money disdainfully around the room, he is faced with his crucial misjudg-
ment of the Salvation Army members, as they fight each other to get their 
hands on it. 
 Still the cashier believes in the loyalty of the young woman; the unity he 
believes to have found with her fulfills his earlier desire for an Edenic rela-
tionship with the Italian woman. Again he refers to this relationship, telling 
the young woman: “Du stehst bei mir [...] Uralte Gärten aufgeschlossen. [...] 
Mädchen und Mann – ewige Beständigkeit. Mädchen und Mann – Fülle im 
Leeren. Mädchen und Mann – vollendeter Anfang” (You stand by me [...]. 
Ancient gardens opened. […] Woman and man – eternal constancy. Woman 
and man – fullness in the emptiness. Woman and man – completed begin-
ning).Interspersed among these musings, though, are words that identify the 
cashier, in a now familiar typology, with Jesus as well as with Adam.43 Just 
as the gardens are opened, so are the heavens, and a voice from above speaks 
the word “Wohlgefallen” (well pleased) - echoing the voice from heaven in 
which God speaks favor on his Son (Matthew 3:16-17, 17:5; Mark 1:11; 
Luke 3:22).44 The cashier feels as blessed as Christ himself in the compan-
ionship of this young woman. In a typology of her own, however, she turns in 
a flash from Eve into Judas, giving the cashier over to a guard and demanding 
a reward, since he is a wanted criminal. The typological connection depends 
 
42 Kaiser, Werke, I, 514-15. 
43 The cashier’s progression from Adam figure to Christ figure is supported in the structuring 
of the stations of the drama, which is subtitled “Stück in zwei Teilen” (“A Play in Two 
Parts”). 
44 Kaiser, Werke, I, 516. Cf. Schürer and Schueler, whose readings of the referent as Genesis 
2:18 and Genesis 3:8-9, respectively, are equally unsatisfactory. Von morgens bis mitter-
nachts. Erläuterungen und Dokumente, ed. by Ernst Schürer (Stuttgart: Philipp Reclam, 
1975), p. 42; Schueler, p. 102. 
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 The Mission and Passion of Expressionist Messianism 137 
on a well-worn, misogynistic identification of woman, from the time of the 
first woman, with weakness and sin. Each of the play’s Eve figures has now 
seduced the cashier, the second into a sense of security that is then betrayed 
by her treacherous nature. 
 Toller, too, fills a Judas role with a woman. In the play Hinkemann, the 
title character’s wife, Grete, is out with another man, Grosshahn, when she 
happens to pass by her husband and see the depths to which he has fallen: 
unable, as a disabled war veteran, to otherwise earn money, Hinkemann has 
been employed as an attraction in a carnival booth, biting the heads off of rats 
and mice. Grete feels immediate culpability for his desperation: “[I]ch ver-
kaufe meinen Mann…” (I am selling my husband…). When Grosshahn sur-
mises that Grete will be too disgusted to kiss her husband ever again, she 
responds with a reference to Judas’s public and treacherous kiss: “…hier an 
dieser Bude…vor aller Augen küsse ich ihn! Wie habe ich an dem Mann ge-
handelt!” (…here in this booth…for everyone to see, I kiss him! How I have 
treated this man!) Grete will later confess her crime, telling her husband: “Ich 
habe dich verraten für ein paar Silberlinge…” (I have betrayed you for a few 
pieces of silver…).45 
 Though the feminizing of the Judas role in both of these plays is telling, it 
should be noted that both Kaiser and Toller employ male Judas characters, as 
well. The character of John Wible, in Toller’s The Machine Wreckers, is not 
only the antagonist (see chapter 2) of the Christ figure Jimmy Cobbett, but 
also his betrayer. Wible’s hostility springs in part from his role as the weav-
ers’ unofficial leader before Jimmy’s return to Nottingham: “Kaum eine 
Stunde ist er da und reißt mir die Führung aus den Händen” (He’s hardly 
been here an hour and he’s ripped the leadership from my hands). In league 
with Jimmy’s brother Henry, who is concerned only for his position as fac-
tory manager, Wible develops a plan to betray Jimmy. Having told the fac-
tory owner that a communist “vom geheimen Gewerkschaftsbund […] hat die 
Arbeiter aufgewiegelt, sie sollen die Maschinen zerstören” (from a secret 
worker’s union […] has incited the workers to destroy the machines), when 
in fact Jimmy has done just the opposite, Wible convinces the weavers to 
disregard Jimmy’s pleas for patience in a long struggle, and to attack the ma-
chine as planned. By the time Jimmy learns of the attack and arrives at the 
factory to stop it, he is too late: the weavers have destroyed the machine in a 
violent and chaotic rage. Wible capitalizes on and prolongs this rage by con-
vincing the weavers that it is Jimmy who has betrayed them, since he is now 
outside their cause, and since his brother is the factory manager. The in-
flamed weavers call Jimmy a traitor and a “Teufelsknecht” (servant of the 
 
45 Toller, Werke, II, 210-11, 241. 
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138 German Expressionist Drama and the Messianism of a Generation 
devil), and Wible incites them to another brutal attack. Once Jimmy has been 
beaten to death, the workers return almost immediately to their senses, repen-
tant. Wible has fled the scene, and the weavers now recognize his role in the 
piece: “Verrät die eigenen Brüder für dreißig Silberlinge!” ([He] betrays his 
own brothers for thirty pieces of silver!)46 
 
 
The Crucifixion 
 
As the most universally recognized image with the Christian tradition, the 
Crucifixion is the one most frequently employed in art and literature drawing 
on that tradition. By casting the noble and voluntary death (often martyrdom) 
of a hero against the backdrop of Jesus’s sacrifice, Expressionist playwrights 
establish most forcefully the messianic personae that illuminate the nature of 
their heroes’ missions. 
 A particularly famous example is the death of the cashier in From Morn 
Till Midnight. Once the young woman has turned him in, he sees no alterna-
tive to suicide. Adopting the pose and language of Jesus in his words from 
the Cross, the cashier proclaims the death that concludes his mission: “Ich 
habe meine Kräfte gebraucht. Ich habe mich nicht geschont!” (I have used 
my energies. I have not spared myself!) Shooting himself, the cashier sinks, 
according to the precise stage directions, “mit ausgebreiteten Armen gegen 
das aufgenähte Kreuz des Vorhangs” (with outstretched arms against the 
cross sewn onto the curtain) behind him in the Salvation Army Hall. Much 
earlier in the play, the cashier has uttered a cryptic reference to the Place of 
the Skull (Schädelstätte); the nature of his own Golgotha is illuminated in 
this final scene. But the cashier’s dying words, “Ecce homo,”47 establish him 
not only as a Christ figure (recalling Pilate’s presentation of Jesus on the day 
of the Crucifixion; see John 19:5), but simultaneously as an overman (recall-
ing Nietzsche’s famous and recently published book), bolstering Expression-
ism’s Christian-Nietzschean syncretism. 
 At this point the stage falls completely dark. Close on the heels of the 
Ecce homo reference, this darkness seems to parallel that which followed 
Jesus’ death (Matthew 27:45; Mark 15:33; Luke 23:44). But the in the play’s 
final line, a guard attributes the darkness to a short circuit48 rather than a 
momentous event in salvation history. The cashier’s world thus continues, 
after his death, in its mundane assumptions and on its mundane course. The 
 
46 Toller, Werke, II, 144, 146, 186, 189. 
47 Kaiser, Werke, I, 486, 516-17. 
48 Ibid., 517. 
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 The Mission and Passion of Expressionist Messianism 139 
cashier is now a thwarted Christ figure, a failed striver toward the overman, 
who has not been able to liberate himself from - let alone to transform or re-
deem - his society. 
 The crucifixion scene that concludes From Morn Till Midnight has led 
interpreters to vastly divergent readings of the play. Some accept the cash-
ier’s quest as “a genuine Way of the Cross (Leidensweg)”;49 others take the 
circumstances of his demise to represent only a hopeful glimmer in a world 
of desperation;50 still others consider him damned as a result of “man’s sin of 
self-deification”51 (a sin that Kaiser of all people would be very unlikely to