Ernst Toller’s Eine Jugend in Deutschland and the German Avant-Garde

Abstract

Abstract Ernst Toller’s Eine Jugend in Deutschland (1933) provides a critical introspection on the German avant-garde. How did Toller and his contemporaries define themselves against artistic and political traditions? What aesthetic and societal innovations did they envision—and how did those visions go wrong? Most importantly, how did previous generations continue to determine the contours of the Expressionist art and leftist activism that made Toller so emblematic of the German avant-garde? Even as he distanced himself from the previous generation, Toller was also fundamentally shaped by its writers and political theorists. Rather than the generational conflict often used to characterize this period, Toller’s book bespeaks a complex mediation. The disillusionment and criticality of his generation, with respect to the previous one, resides in a relationship of enmeshment rather than rupture.