From Painting into Literature: Carl Sternheim's Prose Style

Abstract

IN common with other features of his work, Carl Stemheim's idiosyncratic prose style has provoked violent critical disagreement. On the one hand his language has been denounced as arbitrary and mannered, on the other extolled as a vehicle ideally suited to his unique vision. Sternheim's contemporaries were quick to take sides: the reviewer of Das literarische Echo invited his readers to translate Ulrike 'aus dem geschwollenen Phrasendeutsch in normale Sa:tze',t while Kurt Pinthus enthused over 'die fast wissenschaftliche FormuHerung der'Tatsachen und Geschehnisse'.2 The renewed Sternheim debate of recent years has failed to advance the argument significantly. W. Wendler has attempted to show that Sternheim's language is ~ legitimate and consistent expression of his theoretical position, while W. G. Sebald has sought to prove that the much vaunted precision of Sternheim's language is illusory and conflicts with the author's avowed intention of portraying individuality.3 These apparep.t1y irreconcilable views stem in part from a misunderstanding of Stemheim's own statements about literary language, compounded by a failure to distinguish between basic assumptions which inform all his work and the more exotic theories which he developed during his phase of overt political commitment from 1918 to about 1923. Nor has it generally been appreciated that his linguistic experimentation was a response to a much broader and very fashionable scepticism about language in the first two decades of this century. Not only his perceptIon of the problem but also his attempts to resolve it by developing techniques analogous to those of the visual arts reflect prevailing tastes. The cross-fertilization of literature and painting has seldom been advocated so passionately or implemented so successfully as in the period of German Expressionism. The main philosophical impetus behind Sternheim's early reflections on literary language derived from his encounter, in 1906, with the neo-Kantian philosophy of the Baden school, particularly the writings of Heinrich Rickert. Rickert's main work, Die Grenzen der naturwissenschaftlichen Begriffsbildung,