Musik und Film im Schweigen. Intermediale Sprachkritik in Gustav Landauers Melodrama Nach Jahren (1900)

Abstract

The article introduces the reader to a hardly known side of the German-Jewish thinker, anarchist, politician, and dramaturge Gustav Landauer (1870–1919): his literary works and how they can be read as poetic expressions of his skepticism of language and as an innovative contribution to the language crisis of the German fin de siècle. It discusses the poetic instruments Landauer employs for his critique of language—silence, intertextuality, and intermediality—on the example of his unpublished text Nach Jahren (1900). This “Melodrama,” a term to denote a genre that combines text and music and to be distinguished from the English “melodrama,” is not only the most advanced literary expression of Landauer's skepticism, it also anticipates thoughts later unfolded in his magnum opus Skepsis und Mystik (1903). Music, which could be a gateway for Jews to enter German bourgeois culture, is given the stage where language fails to express emotions, sexuality, or ideas that violate the moral standards of the time. Landauer introduces the then still young film or motion pictures as an additional medium, thereby creating a plurimedia Melodrama. His vision to project a stage background produced with a kinetograph is ahead of the technical development of stage equipment at that time.