The next Rixdorf Editions title is Papa Hamlet by Arno Holz and Johannes Schlaf, due out in October. Originally published in 1889, it is a work that rewards examination from numerous different perspectives – as a mirror to the authors’ bohemian subculture, as a premonition of Postmodernism, or as an example of the surprisingly rich tradition of pseudo-translation. But let’s start by zooming out with some literary history context and examining Holz and Schlaf’s works as key examples of Naturalism. In particular, I want to show the transformation that the movement underwent as it arrived in Germany, a process in which Papa Hamlet was pivotal.

Naturalism is frequently misunderstood. First, the term is often used interchangeably with Realism, the movement from which it emerged (and in truth the demarcations are at times unclear). Second, the designation of ‘Naturalism’, referring to a particular style in a specific period, is also sometimes mistaken for small-‘n’ naturalism, as applied to means of expression – acting styles, filmmaking, visual arts – which appear to forego artifice. And third, the reception of specifically German Naturalism is dominated by a handful of works, particularly the heavy-handed dramas of Gerhart Hauptmann, which belie the richness and experimentation of the wider movement.

For much of the second half of the 19th century, Realism was the predominant form of serious literature in Germany (and much of the rest of Europe). After the 1848 pan-European revolts, Realist writers like Theodor Fontane, Gottfried Keller and Adalbert Stifter rejected explicitly political concerns and the tempestuous subjectivity of Romanticism in favour of works which depicted life with a degree of impartiality. But there were limits; writers tended to stick to the bourgeois milieu of their readers, reluctant to shock them with psychological extremes, sexual license or the lives of the underclass.

Industrialisation and in particular urbanisation, which pressed different societal groups into confronting proximity, made it harder to overlook shocking disparities in living conditions, the ways in which both nature and nurture influenced character and social standing, or the rapidly changing status of women. Beginning around 1880, European writers otherwise classed as Realists – such as Émile Zola, Fyodor Dostoevsky and Henrik Ibsen – started admitting these vexed elements into their writing. This new engagement with uncomfortable realities, partly inspired by the objectivity inherent in the study of natural sciences, was termed ‘Naturalism’.

German writer Arno Holz followed these foreign developments avidly, but he came to feel that even the panoramic social novels of Émile Zola didn’t go far enough. He distilled his conception of literature into a succinct formula: art = nature - x, and he believed that the nearer x was to zero the better. That is, creative works should reflect reality as closely as possible. He was intent on capturing real lives, and especially human speech patterns, with all their repetition, disruption and hesitation, with coarse, colloquial forms, and with the distinct regional dialects and sociolects which persisted in unified Germany. The minute attention to speech patterns reflected the influence of emerging mechanical recording devices. In contrast to Realist writers, who often kept their characters on mute during whole pages filled with descriptive text, Holz believed dialogue was the engine of literature.

Along with Johannes Schlaf, Gerhart Hauptmann, John Henry Mackay and brothers Julius and Heinrich Hart, Holz was a member of the Berlin literary group ‘Durch!’ (Through!). It was a name that reflected the dynamism of the age. Their 1886 manifesto contained statements like ‘Our highest artistic ideal is no longer antiquity, but modernity’ and ‘Modern writing should depict people with flesh and blood with all their passions in pitiless truth.’ But for the members of Durch!, these ideas went beyond the page, and they experimented with new forms of living, forming Berlin’s first major bohemian community. There was considerable cross-over between Naturalism and anarchist groups, as well as early advocates for gay rights. The movement also found an outpost in Munich, where Michael Georg Conrad established the influential journal Die Gesellschaft (Society) and the literary group ‘Society for Modern Living’ to further Naturalist ideals.

Arno Holz first met Johannes Schlaf, then an unpublished writer, in the mid-1880s and in 1889 the pair issued the first German book to incorporate these new ideas: Papa Hamlet (although initially credited to ‘Bjarne P. Holmsen’, an invented Norwegian writer). It signalled the arrival of Naturalism in Germany, but arguably went even further than its foreign reference points. Its crudity, its fragmentary exposition and its exploration of the darkest human impulses shocked contemporaries, although some, such as Gerhart Hauptmann, saw its potential for opening up new means of expression. That same year Hauptmann dedicated his breakthrough play Vor Sonnenaufgang (Before Sunrise) to ‘Holmsen’; to circumvent censorship, it was performed for subscription-only audiences at the Freie Bühne, a theatre closely associated with the Naturalists. This was also the venue for the first production of Die Familie Selicke (The Selicke Family, 1890), Holz and Schlaf’s sole play, a radical break with dramatic convention which attracted praise from the likes of Theodor Fontane.

As well as censorship, the Naturalists’ frank treatment of subjects like crime, poverty and prostitution brought them enemies in high places – the highest office in the land, in fact. In 1894, when Berlin’s prestigious Deutsches Theater decided to stage Hauptmann’s Die Weber (The Weavers), a raw account of an uprising in Silesia, Kaiser Wilhelm II was so incensed that he cancelled his box at the theatre and ordered his coat of arms removed from the auditorium.

But what did these plays offer the people who did see them? Were they anything more than a vicarious opportunity for the bourgeoisie to peer into the lives of the underclass, to enjoy the frisson of slumming, to still their nostalgie de la boue? Did these works actually bring change to the lives of the people they depicted? These questions are at the heart of later criticism of the movement. Bertolt Brecht, for one, felt that the Naturalists had presented the squalor of the working class as immutable, a law of nature, something he described as ‘criminal’.

Hauptmann’s plays remain the most widely known examples of German Naturalism to this day, but they aren’t the whole story. The best Naturalist works were bursting with energy and invention, and Holz and Schlaf represented the capacity for vigorous experimentation that dwelt within the movement. As well as Papa Hamlet, their collaboration produced works like ‘The Paper Passion’ (included in our edition). Set in a Berlin tenement, its spoken sections – at times astonishingly vulgar – are largely in Berlinerisch, making it one of the first examples of serious literature rendered in the metrolect. In ‘The Paper Passion’ Holz and Schlaf’s radical rethinking of means extends to the very typesetting, with spoken passages printed in a larger font, descriptive text reduced to something like stage directions.

Naturalist writers like Richard Dehmel, Otto Julius Bierbaum and Anna Croissant-Rust fused previously discrete forms; witness the latter’s uncompromisingly alien 1893 title Prose Poems (included with our edition of Death). Her friend Oskar Panizza took Naturalism to the edge of rational thought – and beyond. Other Naturalist writers produced short, sharp sketches which defied categorisation, or collage-style narratives which mimicked the tumult of impressions offered by busy city streets. Among the innovative techniques that emerged from the movement was Sekundenstil (a term first coined in connection with Papa Hamlet), which rendered scenes in real-time analogue, second by second. Naturalist writers were dismantling the familiar infrastructure of literature and exploring the occluded recesses of the human psyche in ways we more readily associate with Modernism.

Naturally these radical, jagged works were no more welcome to conservative critics than Hauptmann’s dramas of proletarian misery. In any case the reign of Naturalism was relatively brief and non-exclusive. It ran in parallel with late Realism, and in 1891 – just two years after Papa Hamlet and Before Sunrise – writer and critic Hermann Bahr was already talking about ‘Overcoming Naturalism’, the title of one of his most famous essays. The movement was soon eclipsed by a complex set of inter-connected styles – Symbolism, Decadence, Neo-Romanticism – summarised in Germany under the French loan term ‘Fin de siècle’, with Expressionism looming beyond the horizon of the new century, waiting to claim the attentions of Germany’s avant-garde. In 1901 Wilhelm II gave a speech in which he took aim at ‘gutter art’, widely assumed to include Naturalism, but by then it was already history.

Papa Hamlet by Arno Holz & Johannes Schlaf (translated by James J. Conway) will be published in English for the first time on 18 October 2021. More information here.