The Novel in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

Literature, Popular Modernism and New Media in Hermann Hesse and Walter Benjamin

Abstract

The development of technical media in the first decades of the twentieth century in Germany encouraged not only avant-garde movements such as dada and expressionism but also more canonical writers to question the relationship between elite and popular culture, art and life, to reflect on the aesthetical specificity of each medium (radio, cinema, gramophone) and to consider the possibility of articulating a new artistic language which could engage the readers on various levels. Authors which showed interest in this phenomenon included – among others – Walter Benjamin, Bertolt Brecht, Thomas Mann, and Hermann Hesse. Hesse’s novel Der Steppenwolf (The Steppenwolf), which was published in 1927 and can be considered the most experimental work of the author and perhaps of the entire German fiction of that period (Thomas Mann compared it to Joyce’s Ulysses), shows how important the confrontation with the media was for the rise of the modern novel in Germany. In this article, on the one hand, we aim to demonstrate that Hesse’s interest in technical media such as cinema and radio had a decisive impact on Steppenwolf, not only in terms of content but also on an aesthetic and formal level. On the other hand, we argue that there is a connection (hitherto ignored by critics) between Hesse’s narrative experiment and that proposed by Walter Benjamin in Einbahnstraße (One-Way Street), published in 1928. Similarly to what happens in Hesse’s novel, Benjamin’s collection of aphoristic annotations uses the “immediate language” of newspapers, street advertising and illuminated signs which began to increasingly characterise Weimaran society in the 1920s and invited intellectuals – in a now inevitable “one-way” path – to refound the assumptions of literary activity on new social, communicative and performative bases.