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Discuss Expressionist Drama.

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Expressionism was a modernist movement of the 20th century. Its typical trade is to present the world solely from a subjective perspective, distorting it radically for emotional effect in order to evoke moods or ideas, Expressionist artist sought to express meaning or emotional experience rather than physical reality. Expressionism was developed as an avantee-garde style before the First World War. It remained popular during the Weimar Republic particularly in Berlin. The style extended to a wide range of the arts, including painting, literature, theatre, dance, film, music and architecture.

The turn is sometimes suggestive of emotional angst. In a general sense painters such as Matthias Grune Wald and El-Greco are sometimes termed expressionist, though in practice the term is applied to mainly to 20th century works. The expressionists emphasize on individual perspective has been characterized as a reaction to positivism and other artistic style such as naturalism and impressionism.

The term was invented by Czech art historian Antonin Matejeck in 1910 as the opposite of impressionism.

“Expressionism is usually associated with paintings, graphic works and other forms of artistic practice in Germany at the beginning of the 20th century that challenged academic traditions particularly the Die Brucke and Des Blake Raiter groups.

But even before him a French artist Julien August Herve organised an art exhibition in 1901 and described it as Expressionism, Originally Expressionism was regarded as a movement in art. In 1914 it came to be recognized as a literary movement, and in course of time it had caught on.

As a literary movement, Expressionism, as has been pointed out by Alex Preminger has sprung from a violent antirealism and is based on the refusal to imitate, repeat, reproduce what already exists. It turned toward the soul and the practitioners sought to capture its movements in their prearticulate purity. They were visionaries and irrationalists and poured their emotions ecstatically and with a pathos almost forgotten since the age of the storm and stress. In the expressionistic poems and plays, continues Preminger, expression always precedes and thus determines form-rhythm being far more important than harmony.

Expressionism, according to R. G. Haggar is a form of romantic art in which emotion or emotive elements, expressed through violent distortion and exaggeration, are taken to the point of excess. It is a characteristic of art which emerges and becomes dominant in times of spiritual and social stresss, arising from the anguish of the times.

Harry Shaw also emphasises that expressionism in modern literature is a deliberate distortion of reality. But he also suggests that the term has different meanings applied to different forms of artistic work. In painting and sculpture, for example, it involves techniques in which forms derived from nature are exaggerated or distorted and in which colours are intensified to express emotion. In drama, expressionism applies to a style of playwriting and production emphasising emotional content, the subjective reactions of characters, and symbolic or abstract representations of reality. In novels and short stories expressionism involves the presentation of an objective outer world through the intensified impressions and moods of characters. In poetry the movement is manifest in distortions of objects and by dislocation of generally accepted ideas of time and space.

Richard Johannes Sorge’s Begger is mentionable expressionist play, since it is the essence of self centred drama, pleading for a new technique in the theatre. The play under review shows the author’s teacher solicitude for mankind and, his firm belief in God’s mercy.

In Walter Hasenclevel’s The Son, the protagonist, revolts against the father, who refuses, to understand his point of view, his longings and aspirations. He describes his family, and thereby all families as ‘sulphurous torture chambers’. In their confrontation the son brings out his revolver, and the father in sheer fright dies of a stroke. Walter Hasenclever’s Humanity deals with a murdered man, who rises from the grave, contacts madmen, alcoholics, and prostitutes and is ultimately executed for murdering himself.

Oskar Kokoschka has leaped into fame his murderer. Hope of Women his principal theme is the struggle between the sexes. In this play knights and maidens speak incoherently and hysterically and rouse mutual antagonism, distrust and hatred. They ultimately kill each other.

Reinhard Goering has earned some reputation for his Sea Battle, in which seven sailors trapped in a ship, are presenting seven subjective standpoints, symbolising the different facets of man.

Franz Uterfel (1890-1945) is an expressionist whose dominant theme is universal brotherhood. He is pronouncedly antifascist and even antinationalist.