ModernGermanLiterature18801950

THE NOVEL OF EXPRESSIONISM 365

ian pattern of MusiPs Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften. Flake's most
personal novel is Montijo oder die Suche nach der Nation (1931), the
tale of a German Spaniard who opts for German culture. Flake
himself is a cosmopolitan who roams the wide world over for
scene and characters: his novels Roland(1922), Villa USA (1926),
etc., range from Alsace to Petersburg. He had begun with a de-
nunciation of the tyranny of the school: Freitagsktnd(i<)i$; in later
editions Eine Kindheif), but passed over to a strikingly masculine
handling of erotic problems in (particularly) Der gute Weg (1924):
the men, coldly calculating, dominate the women. Nem und Ja
(1920), with its scene in Zurich, has a curious interest for its por-
trait of the dadaist Hans Arp.

LEONHARD FRANK (1882- ), a Wiirzburg man, has been classed
as a Vulgarisator of expressionism', and he is at all events an easy
approach to the expressionist style, but only because he tells a
story which is plain and often exciting in spite of the tricks of
discontinuity of the new manner. The son of a journeyman car-
penter, he began as a factory worker, and in all his work he is on
the side of the proletariat, to him the salt of the earth. His first
success was Die ULauberbande (1914); it describes with uproarious
humour the escapades of a band of youths whose heads have been
turned by the Wild West stories of Karl May; sexual awakening
and Red Indian pranks make a brand of natural filth and Romantic
idiocy. In Die Ursache (1915), an attack on capital punishment, a
teacher is murdered by a former pupil in revenge for the damage
done to his character at school, which unfitted him for life. Der
Mensch ist gut (1917) constitutes in substance an anti-war tract,
ghastly in its exhibition of suffering, which was credited with
having very seriously weakened German morale on the home front;
it was one of the miracles of the war that, in spite of its message,
it found its way all over Germany. In Der Burger (1924) a human
soul is damaged by existing society ('die bestehende Seelenmord-Gesell-
schaftsordnung*}: a man is paralysed in youth by his father, his
teachers, and finally by the social community, for which he has
been unfitted by his training; he may, by conforming, accept the
conventional moulding, but he is then merely a standardized pro-
duct of the social machine, not a shaping spirit with the daring
zest of his own native originality. In Das Ochsenfurter Manner-
quartett (1927) we meet the old JLauberbande once again in Wxirz-
burg, middle-aged men now, impoverished by the war, and with