How German Is it: Vorticism, Nationalism, and the Paradox of Aesthetic Self-Definition

68

I N J U N E 2 0 1 0 the journalist John Crace published a parody of Wyndham

Lewis’s novel Tarr for his newspaper column “Digested Classics” in the

English newspaper The Guardian . This was perhaps only the second time

since Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s original Futurist manifesto appeared

on the front page of Le Figaro on February 20, 1909 that a work of the

early-twentieth-century avant-garde featured prominently in a main-

stream newspaper. Not surprisingly, it consisted of a combination of

direct satiric hits and interpretive missteps. Crace describes Lewis’s self-

destructive character, the Prussian art student Otto Kreisler, as saying, “I

am an Artist; this means I never actually do any Art as I spend too long

talking about it. I am also a German Artist which means even if I did cre-

ate Art it wouldn’t be any good.” This is a fair enough lampoon of Lewis’s

treatment of both artistic ego and the excesses of nineteenth-century

German Romanticism. But Crace’s parody also reports, as Kreisler pre-

pares to rape Bertha, “Bertha found herself lying semi-naked on the

chaise-longue, posing for Kreisler as he attempted his matchstick repre-

sentation of her in the fi nest tradition of German vorticism.” 1

C H A P T E R F O U R

H O W G E R M A N I S I T: V O RT I C I S M , N AT I O N A L I S M , A N D T H E PA R A D O X O F A E S T H E T I C S E L F - D E F I N I T I O N

S C O T T W . K L E I N

05_ScottWKlein230213OUS_C04.indd 6805_ScottWKlein230213OUS_C04.indd 68 6/28/2013 5:22:30 PM6/28/2013 5:22:30 PM

How German Is It 69

This last phrase is puzzling, for no such tradition of “German vor-

ticism” exists. Moreover, within Tarr , as Crace’s fi rst phrase suggests,

German art is often held in withering contempt. But is this completely

true of Germanic art and culture in Tarr , let alone the foundational doc-

uments of the Vorticist movement found in Blast ? Certainly Lewis and

many of his characters treat the actual Germanic art objects found in

Tarr with the same status accorded to Bertha’s Normandy jars, as knick-

knacks that represent a middle-brow and even decadent taste — and one

should include under this rubric Austrian and German Swiss art (as did

most Englishmen of the period), such as the paintings by Arnold Böcklin

and Max Klinger that hang in Bertha’s apartment. Yet in Tarr , Lewis goes

out of his way to provide a plausible aesthetic trajectory for the failed

artist Kreisler, whom he presents as a resident for some time of Munich.

Myths of Kreisler’s Bavarian fecundity are all the rage in the cafés of

Paris, and he has spent time perfecting his threatening fi xed stare,

we are told in Lewis’s 1928 revision of the novel, at Munich’s famous

Luitpold café. 2 Kreisler’s association with Munich and Bavaria is initially

puzzling given that Lewis insists throughout Tarr on Kreisler’s Prussian

heritage, including naming him Otto, after the militaristic Bismarck. The

reason for the contradiction becomes clearer, however, if one assumes

that Kreisler moved to Munich to study painting. Before World War

I Munich was the center for art training in Germany, the home fi rst for

the German academic tradition and, later, for the more radical offshoots

of the early twentieth century. From 1896 onwards, Munich was the

site of the fi rst artistic “secessions” of the German-speaking world, as

well as the home of such arts magazines as Jugend and Simplicissimus ,

which were arguably in their way as satiric and anti-traditionalist as the

Vorticist journal Blast . 3

How should one interpret Kreisler’s association with German art

training? Moreover, given his self-destructive trajectory in Lewis’s

novel—and in many ways Kreisler’s character can be read also as a

direct attack on Futurist principles—how should one interpret other

more positive, or at least ambivalent, references to German ideas and

culture in Tarr and Blast ? Lewis’s treatment of Germany in Blast , in

implicit company with that of his fellow Vorticists, is an exemplary

example of how Vorticism developed the idea of national art on a series

of enabling paradoxes: the questionable metaphysical grounding of

national identity, the desirability of identifi cation yet distance between

groups of national artists, and the tension between the desire to cre-

ate an explicitly national art against the desire to help to establish a

future art that could represent all of Northern Europe. Certainly the

philosophic framework of Tarr —arguably the only Vorticist novel—is

German, despite the French setting of the novel. Lewis refers sparingly

throughout to French thought beyond Michel de Montaigne and Jean-

Jacques Rousseau. There are no references to philosophers such as Henri

Bergson, whose L’Evolution créatrice appeared in 1907, or Georges Sorel,


70 S C O T T W . K L E I N

whose Réfl exions sur la violence was fi rst published in 1908, when the

events of Tarr probably take place. Instead, Tarr sees the world through

the thought of Immanuel Kant, Arthur Schopenhauer, and Friedrich

Nietzsche (this last through a usually critical lens), while the novel is

rife with allusions to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. 4 As has long been

recognized, German thought and culture is central to the novel, for as

Tarr tells us on its fi rst page, “Germany occupies a sensible apartment

on the second fl oor” of its Paris. 5

This image of German culture as a secondary and nested aspect of

French culture—at fi rst glance surprisingly “sensible” compared to the

Romantic excesses decried elsewhere in the novel—suggests at one

remove the Vorticist ambivalence to matters German particularly in

Blast , whose manifestos routinely straddle the line between then-com-

mon nationalist derogation and an ambivalent respect for at least some

aspects of Germanic art and culture. In the manifesto “Our Vortex,”

for instance, Lewis states of the Vorticist’s ignoring of aesthetic rules,

“We have no Verbotens.” 6 Here Lewis juxtaposes Vorticism’s desire

for a liberational aesthetics against the stereotypical Germanic world,

which he signals as literally and linguistically forbidding by importing

a single foreign term. Nor does German culture at large escape signifi -

cant condemnation, through satire and historical reduction. The sec-

ond preliminary manifesto states that one problem with England is its

“heavy stagnant pools of Saxon blood” ( B1, 32): where Germany may

own a “sensible apartment” within French culture in Tarr circa 1908,

by 1914 its presence within Anglo-Saxon culture becomes a kind of

inherited contagion. Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, in his own Vortex mani-

festo, conversely emphasizes the Germanic presence as purely military

among the more productive aesthetic vortices of cultural history: “The

Germanic barbarians were verily whirled,” he writes, “by the myste-

rious need of acquiring new arable lands. They moved restlessly, like

strong oxen stampeding” ( B1 , 156).

Gaudier’s imagery assigns a counter-Vortex to the German world.

They achieve their own “Vortex” of militaristic self-determination.

Where Gaudier registers other cultures’ aesthetic will through capital

letters, such as the biblical “THE HAMITE VORTEX” ( B1 , 155) and the

“SEMITIC VORTEX” ( B1 , 156), the “whirling” of the German barbarian

is an apparent act of will that actually represents an imposition of rhetor-

ically externalized forces. They are whirled as though from without, by

a Lebensraum that in fact comes from within. This “whirling”—in terms

of the manifestos, a typical mark of approbation—becomes in turn an

image of the animalistic stampeding of cattle, of violent movement for-

ward. This imagery of a Germanic people as a negative “vortex” of ener-

gies transformed into straight-ahead destruction, a tornado rather than

a dynamo, was in 1914 England a fairly typical vision of German politics

and culture. All things Germanic were expected to be condemned prima

facie , and where anti-German sentiment had practical effects even on


How German Is It 71

the commercial landscape of London. William Wees notes, for instance,

that Lewis had planned in the second issue of Blast to “bless” the Vienna

café in Oxford Street, where Lewis had fi rst caught sight of Pound, but

that the café had to close as a result of wartime anti-German sentiment

before that issue appeared in July 1915. 7 Lewis also refers to London’s

Bechstein Hall in the manifesto “Futurism, Magic and Life,” a concert

venue that had been founded by C. Bechstein Pianofortefabrik, a major

German manufacturer of pianos, but which was seized during the war

as enemy property, and has been known ever since as Wigmore Hall

( B1 , 135). 8

However, in the second issue of Blast , and rather daringly for war-

time, Lewis differentiates between a rejection of Germany’s contem-

porary politics and militaristic culture and rejection of its history and

aesthetics. Lewis particularly comes to the defense of the world of non-

conformist German art and thought. In the opening editorial of Blast 2 he

writes, “Offi cial Germany stands for something intellectual, and that is

Traditional Poetry and the Romantic Spirit. But unoffi cial Germany has

done more for the movement that this paper was founded to propagate,

and for all branches of contemporary activity in Science and Art, than

any other country. It would be the absurdest ingratitude on the part of

artists to forget this” ( B2 , 5). In this context, “unoffi cial Germany” is

almost certainly the world of the Expressionists, the German painters

who clustered from 1905 fi rst around the group Die Brücke (The Bridge)

in Dresden and then Berlin, and later the artists of Der Blaue Reiter (The

Blue Rider), who were led by Russian émigré Wassily Kandinsky and

Franz Marc in Munich from 1911 to 1914, and who published the Blau

Reiter almanac in 1912. Paul Edwards has noted Vorticism’s affi liations

with the Expressionist artists. He also notes, however, that historiog-

raphies of Anglophone modernism have been reluctant to recognize

that genealogy. 9 Those studies that have made claims for interconnec-

tions between the movements tend either to overstate the case, relegate

Expressionism to a purely literary movement, or to be available only in

scholarly venues diffi cult to access. 10

Why this general gap in the historiography of Vorticism, despite

Vorticism’s long-standing contextualization within Cubism, Futurism,

and even Fauvism? After all, in approving of the Italian painter Giocomo

Balla, Lewis refers to him as “not a ‘Futurist’ in the Automobilist sense.

He is a rather violent and geometrical sort of Expressionist” ( B1 , 143–

144). This lacuna may partly be blamed on the politics of the age, and

on later-twentieth-century echoes of anti-German distaste, which

dated in Britain from as early as the time of Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

Specifi c prejudice against Germanic art in the English-speaking world

predated the politics of the two World Wars. German art of the early-

twentieth-century period was largely unknown in the United Kingdom

and the United States. In 1903 in the United States Kuno Francke, a

professor of German literature at Harvard, helped found the Harvard



Germanic Museum—now known as the Busch-Reisinger Museum—

particularly to attempt to redress the hierarchical dominance of the

Italian tradition among American art collectors. Despite his inclusion

of a Russian group alongside French and English artists, Roger Fry did

not include any German artists in his Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition

of late 1912. 11

Two cases, one implicit in Tarr and one explicit in Blast, specifi cally

illustrate the diffi culties implicit in the Vorticist attraction to and partial

rejection of the modern schools of German art. In the nominal prewar

Parisian setting of the novel, the German artist Ernst Vokt refers to a

show in Berlin by saying, “Our compatriots improve.” 12 Although this

reference is nonspecifi c, Lewis appears to take the painting of Ernest

Ludwig Kirchner, one of the founders of Die Brücke —or at least paint-

ings like it—as the model for the German art produced in the novel.

The narrator describes one of Vokt’s paintings, for instance, as portray-

ing “dashing ladies in large hats” and memorably describes Vokt’s aes-

thetic technique: “he fl ung a man or woman on to nine feet of canvas

and pummeled them on it for a couple of hours” and notes how the

sitters “forgave him for making them comparatively ‘ugly.’” 13 Such a

description sounds a good deal, for one instance, like Kirschner’s paint-

ing Five Women on the Street (1913), which portrays fi ve Berlin prosti-

tutes in large plumed hats, delineated in lurid blues and greens, and

arrayed sideways in compressed and almost two-dimensional space.

When Kreisler prepares for his rape of Bertha by painting her in a state

of semi-undress, Lewis appears to take as Kreisler’s aesthetic model

Expressionist paintings of young girls in garrets such as Kirchner’s

Marcella (1909–1910), which shows a young nude girl sitting on a

bolster, or, the painting that appears to be one of Kirchner’s sources,

Edvard Munch’s earlier Puberty (1894–1895), which portrays a younger

woman, casting an ominous shadow behind, sitting as modestly as she

can in her nakedness, covering her genitals with elongated arms. In

his parody of Tarr , Crace refers to Kreisler’s “matchstick representation

of Bertha.” He appears to understand Kreisler as a Germanic experi-

mentalist of the Expressionist school. Despite Lewis’s repeated refer-

ences to Bertha’s fl eshiness, Kreisler implicitly portrays his model in a

state of erotic emaciation. His outrageous statement to Bertha—“Your

arms are like bananas!” 14 —makes visual sense in the context of such

paintings as Kirchner’s and Munch’s, with their propensities for garish

unblended colors, eroticism charged with morbid anxiety, and models

with impossibly distended limbs.

These references are circumstantial. Blast 1 , however, includes a

one-page review among Lewis’s “Vorteces [ sic ] and Notes” in which

he largely praises a display of German Expressionist woodcuts at the

Twenty-One Gallery, a display that shared gallery space with work by

fellow Vorticist artist Edward Wadsworth ( B1 , 136). Lewis mentions


How German Is It 73

work by several Expressionist

artists— Blau Reiter founders

Kandinsky and Marc, as well as

the lesser-known Hanns Bolz,

Walter Helbig, and Wilhelm

Morgner—and fi nds much to

praise in their graphic con-

tent. “Where the Germans

are best,” Lewis writes, “disci-

plined, blunt, thick and brutal,

with a black simple skeleton

of organic emotion—they best

qualify for this form of art” ( B1 ,

136). Such praise, of course, is

left-handed. Lewis fi nds the art

form intriguing but unambi-

tious, set apart from the main

lines of European art, a distance

that he emphasizes with a sim-

ile that points away both from

the visual arts and from Europe

itself. The woodcuts, he writes,

are like the “one-string fi ddle

of the African,” and he admits

to fi nding them “extraordi-

narily limited and exasperat-

ing.” But his declaration that

the woodcut is also “one the

greatest tests of fi neness” not

despite but because of it being

“rough and brutal,” partly transforms Gaudier’s image of the Germans

as “strong oxen stampeding” into an aesthetic virtue. The heavy black

lines of the woodcut—the “black simple skeleton”—provide a graphic

and even nationalist intensity that Lewis suggests, by the placement

of the review within the Blast manifestos, might be comparable to the

aims of Vorticism.

Most tellingly, in his pre-Vorticist and early Vorticist graphic work,

Lewis approaches facial geometry and anatomy in ways that are demon-

strably comparable to those works of the artists of Die Brücke . The blocky

portrayal of the head and use of heavy lines to delineate facial features

in Lewis’s Architect with Green Tie (1909) (Plate 5), for instance, resembles

the techniques of such Expressionist portraits as Head of a Woman (1916)

by Karl Schmitt-Roloff ( Fig . 4: 1 ). Lewis’s 1912 Courtship shares the rela-

tive relation of its two foregrounded fi gures, and its subject matter—a

pair of nudes walking in a landscape—with Kirchner’s Striding into the Sea

4:1. Karl Schmidt-Rottluff,

Fraukopf/Head of a Woman ,

1916. Woodcut on wove

paper. 25.7 x 18 cm. Private

Collection. © 2012 Artists

Rights Society (ARS),

New York / VG Bild-Kunst,

Bonn.



of the same year, despite its signifi cantly more

grotesque portrayal of the human body ( Fi g s . 4: 2

and 4: 3 ). These echoes of Expressionism in the

graphic works of Lewis’s formative years, make it

less surprising that the bulk of Blast suggests not

an attack on German art but rather a recogni-

tion of the ways in which it has, as Blast claims,

“done more for the movement that this paper

was founded to propagate . . . than any other

country.”

How should one read this combination of

covert adaptation and criticism, erasure and

denial? Can such divided responses be explained

as merely the political difference between 1908

and the politically fraught landscape of 1914 and

1915? It is helpful to recognize that there were

more examples of interchange between the early

English and French avant-gardes and Germany

than have been widely recognized. For instance,

the German architect Hermann Muthesius

worked in England from 1896 to 1903, and his book Das englische haus ,

published in Berlin in 1904, included forward-looking designs by archi-

tects of the English Arts and Crafts movement, such as Charles Rennie

Mackintosh. Muthesius’s research in England led to the founding of

the Deutscher Werkbund, a state-sponsored effort to integrate tradi-

tional crafts and industrial mass-production techniques. 15 William Wees

4:3. Ernst Ludwig Kirchner,

Striding into the Sea , 1912.

Oil on canvas. 149 x 195 cm

Stuttgart, Staatsgallerie.

4:2. Wyndham Lewis,

Courtship , 1912. Pen and ink,

chalk. 25.5 x 20.5 cm. Victoria

and Albert Museum. Credit

Line: Presented by the family

of the late Capt. Lionel Guy

Baker, in accordance with his

expressed wishes, Victoria and

Albert Museum. © By kind

permission of the Wyndham

Lewis Memorial Trust.


How German Is It 75

notes that a two-volume study of Post-Impressionists, Modern Art by

German art historian Julius Meier-Graefe, which appeared in English in

1908, shaped the rationale for the curation of Roger Fry’s 1910 show at

the Grafton Gallery, Manet and the Post-Impressionists , with its particular

emphasis on Cézanne, Van Gogh, and Gauguin. 16 T. E. Hulme, philoso-

pher and aesthetic fellow to the Vorticists, as early as 1906–1907 called

the opening of his “Cinders” “A Sketch of a New Weltanschauung,”

using a term from German philosophy to refer to the newly emerg-

ing Modernist worldview. He spent the winter of 1912–1913 in Berlin,

where he fi rst heard Wilhelm Worringer lecture on art, whose aesthetics

of abstraction and externalization supplanted Hulme’s previous interest

in Bergson and metaphysics. 17 The English journal The Egoist , where Tarr

was fi rst serialized, took its name from the philosophy of the German

Max Stirner. Art critics of the day routinely recognized German cities as

aesthetic centers equal in signifi cance to the art capitals of France and

the United States. Hulme wrote of Jacob Epstein, for instance, “I have

seen no work in Paris or Berlin which I can so unreservedly admire.” 18

And when in 1915 in The Egoist , Frank Denver wrote that the Vorticists

were “pioneers painting in the rear of Munich, Paris and New York,” his

listing of Munich fi rst among Vorticism’s avant-garde predecessors only

makes more curious the near-erasure of affi liations between forward-

looking German and English art. 19

None of this should surprise us, for Hulme was not the only thinker

in the Vorticist ambit with personal experience of Germany. Despite

a distaste even at the time for German culture, Gaudier lived in 1909

in Nuremburg and then in Munich, where he claimed to earn a living

faking Rembrandts. 20 Lewis studied in Munich during the fi rst half of

1906, and a letter from March 1906 attests to his passing time with

German soldiers in the very Luitpold Café where he later positions his

glaring Kreisler. 21 Edward Wadsworth studied engineering in Munich

at roughly the same time, from 1906 through Christmas 1907, and in

his spare time he attended the Knirr Art School—a mere four blocks

from Kandinsky’s home—where he learned the technique of wood-

cut, important to Germanic art since the late fi fteenth century and

Albrecht Dürer. 22 In this context it is diffi cult to look at the bold block

lettering of the manifesto of Die Brücke , published in 1906 ( Fig. 4:4 ),

the same year as Lewis’s and Wadsworth’s German sojourns, without

seeing it a model for the manifestos of Blast , its monolithic carved

Gothic giving way in the Vorticist journal to variably-set blocks of

sans-serif type.

Lewis’s engagement with Expressionist technique is even clearer by

the second issue of Blast in 1915. In the drawing Before Antwerp that

appears as its cover, Lewis himself adopts the “blunt thick and bru-

tal” black lines of the Expressionist woodcut to signal the fi ght against

German political aggression. The heavily outlined triangular shapes of

4:4. Die Brücke manifesto,

1906. Woodcut. 15.2 x 7.5 cm.

Museum of Modern Art,

New York.



Before Antwerp ( Fig. 4:5 ), arrayed against one

another asymmetrically and diagonally as ele-

ments of background, are unmistakably similar

to those found in such Expressionist artworks

as Lyonel Feininger’s postwar Villa am Strande IV

(1918) ( Fig. 4:6 ).

This paradoxical attitude towards

Expressionism is consonant with Lewis’s various

criticisms of and accommodations with Cubism

and Futurism: a combination of aesthetic bor-

rowings and theoretical rejections, all proposed

within the self-knowing claim of the Vorticist

manifestos to raise paradox to a foundational

principle. It is also diffi cult at times to distinguish

between Lewis’s objections to an art movement

per se and his distaste for indifferent practitioners

of that art: that his Vokt and Kreisler are appar-

ently bad examples of German Expressionist art-

ists does not necessarily imply rejection of that

movement as a whole, any more than Lewis’s

character Lowndes—whom he describes as having “just enough money

to be a cubist” 23 —can be said to invalidate the work of a Pablo Picasso or

a Georges Braque. These confl icted attitudes toward German art become

yet more unstable when viewed in the larger context of Vorticism’s

claims for nationalism in art and national identity, ideas that transcend,

in many ways, the cultural politics of the immediately prewar era. That

such issues are crucial to Lewis has been well-recognized. Critics such

as Fredric Jameson and Paul Peppis have argued that national identi-

ties appear within Lewis’s texts—particularly Tarr— as both essentialist

and as constructed, both as nominally fi xed vectors of behavior and des-

tiny and as fl uid constructions that often collapse in the process of their

attempted articulation. 24

This is nowhere in Blast more notable than in the manifestos’ attempts

to defi ne Vorticism as a specifi cally English, London-based, art. Blast

announces itself as the “Review of the Great English Vortex,” alluding

perhaps to the implicitly nationalist ambitions of Ford Madox Ford’s

English Review and defi ning Vorticism as politically and aesthetically

English. The opening manifesto, “Long Live the Vortex!,” claims that

“great artists in England are always revolutionary” and hopes, tongue

in cheek, to establish both a Vorticist monarch and Prime Minister, ask-

ing, “DO YOU THINK LLOYD GEORGE HAS THE VORTEX IN HIM?”

( B1 , 7-8). Yet elsewhere the manifestos’ insistence on pure Englishness

is juxtaposed with or gives way to the sense of Vorticism as part of a

larger potential avant-garde of Northern Europe that could be opposed

to the Southern Europe represented by Futurism. Nation as tradition-

ally understood comes to grind rhetorically against region, a desire to

4:5. Wyndham Lewis,

Front Cover of Blast 2, War

Number: Before Antwerp

(London: John Lane, July

1915). Private Collection.

© By kind permission of the

Wyndham Lewis Memorial

Trust (a registered charity).


How German Is It 77

avoid, as one manifesto puts it,

the merely “Chauvinistic or pic-

turesquely patriotic” in urging

London artists to “once more

wear the ermine of the North”

( B1 , 34, 12).

This attention to “the North”

as a pan-national region is

explicit in Lewis’s experimental

play Enemy of the Stars . Here the

costumes—versions, perhaps,

of the ermine of the North—

are “CUT SOMEWHERE,

NOWADAYS, ON THE UPPER

BALTIC” ( B1 , 55). In a dream

the protagonist Arghol owns

two “texts in Finnish” ( B1 , 76),

and in disgust, he tries to send

his disciple Hanp off to Berlin. Blast presents, then, a northern Europe

that includes England as the source of a new and revitalizing rhetoric. 25

But it also presents a northern Europe that is a theoretical anti-Eng-

land as distinct from the anti-England of Italy, and here Lewis lumps

together Germany, Scandinavia, and Russia as places where the “intel-

lectual world has developed savagely in one direction—that of Life” ( B1 ,

132). And to add another turn to the screw, Enemy of the Stars features

a scene in which Arghol rejects the work of Max Stirner, throwing out

the window a copy of his then-infl uential work Der Einzige und sein

Eigenthum ( The Ego and its Own ). This scene appears to represent Arghol’s

rejection of German thought—as well as Lewis’s rejection of the Stirner-

inspired world of The Egoist— but it is arguably also the key to Arghol’s

self-destruction.

Is German thought and culture therefore enemy or kin? In rejecting

the degree to which his own thought mirrors German thought, Arghol

risks rejecting the very selfhood he has claimed that he established with-

out external infl uences. 26 But Lewis himself did not necessarily reject

such identifi cations. This may be seen in his response to a 1915 review

of the London Group Show in the London Times titled “Junkerism in

Art.” This unsigned review accuses Lewis, Wadsworth, and Roberts of

seeming in their art “to execute a kind of goosestep”—that is, to dem-

onstrate in their experimentation a kind of belligerent offense compa-

rable to that of the Prussian military machine. It continues, “Perhaps if

the Junkers could be induced to take to art, instead of disturbing the

peace of Europe, they would paint so and enjoy it.” 27 In Blast 2 Lewis

responds mordantly: “I do not mind being called a Prussian in the least.”

He suggests that the aesthetic taste of the actual Junkers had nothing

to do with forward-looking aesthetics. If the Junker could paint, Lewis

4:6. Lyonel Feininger, Villa am

Strande IV , 1918. Woodcut

Sheet: 32.2 x 37.8 cm. San

Francisco Museum of Modern

Art. © 2012 Artists Rights

Society (ARS), New York / VG

Bild-Kunst, Bonn.



claims, he would produce “fl orid and disreputable canvasses of nymphs

and dryads, or very sentimental ‘portraits of the Junker’s mother’ ”

( B2 , 78).

Taking these references in the aggregate, for Lewis and Blast

“Germany” is not monolithic. Its military politics must be considered

separately from its philosophy and its art, and the philosophy and art

must, in turn, be subdivided both temporarily and spatially: into those

aspects of the North that might bear fruit for a renewal of English aes-

thetics, against those aspects of nineteenth-century decadence that do

nothing so much as recapitulate the very excesses of the Victorianism—

the “portraits of the Junker’s mother”—that the Vorticists themselves

reject. Moreover, there are clear aesthetic and historical reasons for

Lewis’s partial twinning of nineteenth-century England with Germany.

Certainly German and English literature had been generally inter-

twined for more than a century. Goethe was inspired by Shakespeare,

and during the Romantic era German authors were fascinated by the

British Gothic and Ossian, as they would later become fascinated by

Hamlet . Walter Scott became a translator of Goethe, and in the mid-

nineteenth century Thomas Carlyle and George Eliot and her intel-

lectual circle turned to German philosophy and the Higher Criticism

for creative inspiration. 28 Unsurprisingly, these Germanic connections

became more strained in the era before World War I. In E. M. Forster’s

novel Howards End (1910), for instance, Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony

serves as a model of Romanticized British aesthetic response, yet by

the end a young Englishman is killed by a Prussian sword, as though

by the dead hand of the German past. 29 In Ford Madox Ford’s The Good

Soldier , an excerpt from which appears as “The Saddest Story” in Blast ,

the American Edward Dowell, in residence at the German spa of Bad

Nauheim, says of a day trip to a castle in Prussia “it is always disagree-

able to go into that country” ( B1 , 97)—as though Germany itself was

divided into two nations of South and North, one artistic, the other

militaristic. 30 The German lineage of the English royal family was an

historical fact—Queen Victoria’s husband was Albert of Saxe-Coburg-

Gotha—and this consanguinity was not forgotten in Britain. In James

Joyce’s short story “Ivy Day in the Committee Room,” one charac-

ter contemptuously dismissed Edward VII as a “foreign king” and a

“German monarch.” 31 In prewar English literature the “heavy stagnant

pools of Saxon blood” ( B1 , 32) that the Blast manifestos found embed-

ded in Anglo-Saxon culture ran too deep for erasure.

But what of the visual arts and the organization of artists along

national lines, where imagery and aesthetic affi liations are differently

charged than language with political and cultural meaning? Blast ’s

implicit dialog with modern German art coexists within this larger back-

drop of national consanguinity and rejection. The most open confron-

tation on the subject in Vorticism is apparently quite removed from

nationalist context per se, Lewis’s criticism of Kandinsky in “A Review


How German Is It 79

of Contemporary Art” in Blast 2 . Although the terms of Lewis’s disagree-

ments with Kandinsky are largely aesthetic—that is, about the validity

or desirability of a purely abstract art—Lewis also attempts to differen-

tiate himself from an artist and a national movement that might from

another angle appear perhaps too similar in motivation and manifesta-

tion to Vorticism. As Andrzej G ą siorek has suggested, Lewis’s rejection

of Kandinsky’s aesthetics apparently stems in part from an attempt to

put distance between himself and Edward Wadsworth, on whose insis-

tence excerpts from Kandinsky’s Inner Necessity had appeared in Blast

1 . 32 But such distance is also a defensive gesture against possible com-

monalities. As Ford Madox Ford noted, Vorticism shared the desire of

the European avant-gardes to dismantle in their art the Kantian idea

of the ding an sich : “They abolished not only the Illusion of the Subject,

but the Subject itself.” 33 This sounds a good deal like a description of

Kandinsky, and it underlines the degree to which both Kandinsky and

Lewis began by dismantling received ideas from Germanic aesthet-

ics. But the comparisons do not end there. Both Kandinsky and Lewis

organized their aesthetic movement around a clearly defi ned group of

like-minded artists. Both presented their aesthetic project in bold (and

short-lived) publications. Both presented their respective “secessions”

against an entrenched national art culture that favored realist aesthet-

ics as a refl ection of received industry, established politics, and the taste

of the wealthy and the powerful. Both were not only painters, but also

theorists and organizers, as well as voluminous writers. 34 Even within

the Vorticist group, Lewis and Kandinsky were mentioned in the same

ambits. Pound had already cited Kandinsky along with Picasso in his

“Vortex” as the mother and father, respectively, of Vorticism ( B1 , 153),

and to some eyes the two artists represented the yardsticks of the new

experimentation. In trying to position the qualities of Wadsworth’s 1914

work, The New Weekly wrote that it was “more severe in construction

than Kandinsky’s” but “more emotional in colour and form than those

of Mr. Wyndham Lewis.” 35

Moreover, where the manifestos of Blast owe something to the exam-

ple of the Die Brücke manifesto, the Blaue Reiter almanac contains a work

that seems a clear inspiration for Lewis’s attempt at a literary Vorticism.

One of Kandinsky’s contributions is an experimental and scarcely stage-

able play called The Yellow Sound: A Stage Composition ( Der Gelbe Klang,

Eine Bühnenkomposition , 1909). A series of visual tableaux without con-

ventional plot or characters, The Yellow Sound consists largely of stage

directions written as narrative prose, and appeared printed in the alma-

nac, as does Enemy of the Stars in Blast, interspersed with works of graphic

art. Although Kandinsky’s play, as its title suggests, deals in a very un-

Vorticist Symbolist synesthesia, its formal properties as closet drama, its

emphasis on theater as an abstract mental construct where emblematic

characters (“giants”) pose against abstract landscapes, and its refusal

of dialog and clear narrative are clear precedents for Lewis’s Enemy of



the Stars . Moreover, many of the polemic statements in the Blaue Reiter

almanac could be transposed to Blast without change. In his essay “The

‘Savages’ of Germany,” Franz Marc writes: “In this time of great struggle

for a new art we fi ght like disorganized ‘savages’ against an old, estab-

lished power. . . .New ideas kill better than steel and destroy what was

thought to be indestructible.” Marc adds, as the Vorticist manifestos will

soon also claim for themselves in different words, “Scorn and stupidity

will be like roses in their path.” 36

The Vorticist response to German Expressionism, then, is multiva-

lent: partly aesthetic, partly nationalist, always paradoxical. Vorticism

tacitly welcomes into itself those graphic elements that might lead to

a new Northern art, but it strategically protests against the degree to

which dissident German art might have sounded some of the notes of

the Vorticist protest avant la lettre . 37 Vorticism implicitly lauds the ways

in which the artists of Die Brücke and Der Blaue Reiter react against the

Junkerism of German academic art, and is attracted to the increasing

geometrifi cation of the human fi gure in the works of the Die Brücke

group. It implicitly fi nds in the Blaue Reiter group a model for an avant-

garde artistic and literary collective that can stand as a Northern alter-

native to the Futurists, and who present themselves with stronger

philosophical justifi cation than did the Cubists. At one point in “The

Melodrama of Modernity,” indeed, Lewis suggests, “If Kandinsky had

found a better word than ‘Expressionist’ he might have supplied a useful

alternative” name for the new and still-unnamed English art movement

( B1 , 143). At the same time, however, Vorticism holds the Expressionist

solutions—for there is much graphic difference, say, between the works

of Kirchner and Kandinsky—up to the need for the proclamation of a

rhetorical difference in both aesthetics and politics. Like Arghol in Enemy

of the Stars , who faces a dream version of the philosopher Stirner and by

rejecting him is destroyed, Vorticism implicitly dreams of and rejects a

German art that is dangerous precisely because it provides too much a

mirror of its own concerns.

Is there a way around these multiple contradictions, where German

aesthetics both are and are not defi ned by the fi xed nationality of their ori-

gin, where Germany as a nation may be seen as both enemy and shadow

of England? Blast hints at a rhetorical approach to this puzzle of aesthetic

nationality in a most unlikely place, one of its most broadly comic pages

( B1 , 25) ( Fig. 4: 7 ). “BLESS the HAIRDRESSER,” proclaims the manifesto,

for “He attacks Mother Nature for a small fee,” and “He makes system-

atic mercenary war on this WILDNESS,” trimming “aimless and retrograde

growths into CLEAN ARCHED SHAPES and ANGULAR PLOTS.” Lewis’s

immediate and unlikely satiric subject is probably Karl Ludwig Nessler, also

known as Charles Nessler, a German barber who invented the permanent

wave in London in 1906, and who patented an electric permanent wave

machine in England in 1909. 38 But what follows complicates more gener-

ally Vorticism’s ideas about nationalism and the Germanic. “BLESS this


How German Is It 81

Hessian (or Silesian) EXPERT,” the manifesto continues, “correcting the

grotesque anachronisms of our physique.” Why “Hessian” and “Silesian”?

Firstly, because both the Hessians and Silesians were known as mercenary

troops. The Hessians participated in wars most notably in the eighteenth

century in America and Ireland. The Silesians were known as mercenaries

in the medieval and early modern period, particularly during the Polish-

Lithuanian-Teutonic War (1409–1411) and the Thirty Years War (1618–

1648). 39 As such, the hairdresser may be said to be “Hessian” or “Silesian”

insofar as he, too, is one who fi ghts for a fee. He is both German—at least a

metaphorical resident of one of the states that became part of the German

Empire in 1871—as well as an honorary Vorticist, for fi ve pages later Blast

will similarly claim of the Vorticists, “We are Primitive Mercenaries in the

Modern World” ( B1 , 30).

4:7. Wyndham Lewis,

Manifesto (Bless the

Hairdresser). Reproduced in

Blast 1 (London: John Lane,

1914), 25. Private Collection.



The designations “Hessian” and “Silesian” imply a particular set of

nationalist reconfi gurations. They are political emblems of the multi-

plicity of cultures that go into the creation of a modern unifi ed state,

as well as the shifting nature of national identities in a time of chang-

ing geopolitical boundaries. The “Hessians” of the eighteenth century

were not necessarily residents of Hesse: the term became a catch-all

to refer to soldiers for hire from any of a number of Germanic states. 40

And the most noteworthy aspect of the Hessians is that despite their

Germanic origins they worked, in fact, for the British, pay trumping

ideology—indeed, a quarter of the troops used by the British during

the American Revolutionary War were German soldiers for hire. While

the Silesians were similarly known as mercenaries, in the pre-World

War I context of Blast , it is equally important to note that Silesia as

a geopolitical entity was highly contested throughout its tumultuous

history. At various times it was under the rule of Bohemia or Poland,

had been seized by King Frederick the Great of Prussia in the War of

the Austrian Succession, and had only recently been included in uni-

fi ed Germany in 1871. Silesia was thus a political object lesson in the

shifting and unstable nature of political order and national identity—as

is the idea of the mercenary itself. For how can one be of, or part of,

a single nation when one fi ghts for the political gains of others, or

when one’s borders are constantly shifting, or even being splintered

into multiple national affi liations?

These allusions to Hessia and Silesia, however comic, underscore the

paradox of Germany, nationality, and aesthetics that runs like a leitmotiv

throughout Vorticism. In keeping with mainstream British culture of the

time, the Vorticists fi nd Germany a political and military threat—but

unlike mainstream British culture, they are unwilling to level all aspects

of German history, aesthetics, and politics into a totalized national

ethos that can be rejected prima facie, fi nding such reductions suspect.

Germany represents not only a rigid nationalist ethos but also a coali-

tion of Northern national traits—and political components—that shift

over time. These traits, moreover, can be co-opted and turned against

themselves. In Blast 2, in a dispatch written from the trenches shortly

before his death, Gaudier-Brzeska writes that to prove that his sense

of design has not changed by the war, he stole a Mauser rifl e from the

Germans, and fi nding that he “did not like” its “powerful IMAGE of

brutality,” he broke off the butt and carved it into a design that “ got

its effect (just as the gun had) FROM A VERY SIMPLE COMPOSITION

OF LINES AND PLANES” ( B2 , 34). German materials could be turned

into Vorticist art. When Lewis borrows German woodcutting tech-

niques for the cover of Blast 2 , he also turns German art against itself

in mercenary adaptation. Such transformations and adaptations of the

objects and signs of nationalism suggest that “nationalism” per se argu-

ably ceases to have any real metaphysical merits. Indeed, at one point

in Tarr , Lewis states of his English protagonist that by taking on certain


How German Is It 83

extrinsic character traits, Tarr “was more German than the Germans.” 41

That such national identities can be assumed rather than essential was

scarcely unfamiliar to the Vorticists, for Canadian-born Lewis attempted

to create a specifi cally English art with the American Ezra Pound and the

Frenchman Gaudier—who took on the name “Brzeska” from his Polish

companion—all the while positioning themselves in part against Wassily

Kandinsky, a Russian who led an art movement in Germany, an adopted

country of his own.

To clear a rhetorical space for a specifi cally English art, then, Lewis

and the other Vorticists rejected the similarities that might threaten

the construction of even a nuanced vision of political and aesthetic

opposition, while hinting that national characteristics may be both

rooted to time and place as well as capable of aesthetic fl ux. Unlike

Gaudier’s references to “Hamite” and “Semitic” vortexes in Blast —rem-

nants of the quasi-science of the nineteenth century that associated

nations with races—Lewis’s and the Blast manifestos’ overall treatment

of German culture paradoxically both appreciates and criticizes the

received aesthetic tradition from the time of Kant, and the need for

newer art to combat the inheritance of pseudo-Victorian Junkerism in

modes that were just potent enough as models to have to be resisted.

Critic and translator Charles Eastlake had noted in 1820, “the English

have the matter and the Germans have the mind of art.” Vorticism

accordingly attempted to claim some of the mind as well as the mat-

ter of art for England, all the while questioning the very idea of the

nation. 42 In claiming both abstract thought and quasi-abstract art for

themselves, Lewis, Gaudier, and Blast join identifi cation with rejec-

tion of Germany, even as they attempted to take on themselves the

joint roles of primitive mercenary and sophisticated aesthetician. This

treatment of Germany and “Germanness” acts as a touchstone for the

larger paradox that Vorticism strove to be an art of the self but also of

the group, of the nation but also of the region, of the state but also of

the quasi-stateless world of aesthetics. Where Blast embodies a rallying

cry in favor of national identity, it also wages a sophisticated critique

of the idea of separate nationhood. Blast states initially that Vorticism

would be an “art of the individuals.” Yet as one of the manifestos also

states, “No great ENGLISH Art need be ashamed to share some glory

with France, to-morrow it may be with Germany.” 43 Within those two

Vorticist extremes—of the proclamation of absolute selfhood and of the

inescapable yet ambiguous qualities of national identity—lies Lewis

and the Vorticists’ claim, with all of its irresolvable paradoxes, for the

possibility of a new Northern art.

N O T E S

1 . John Crace , “Digested Classics: Tarr by Wyndham Lewis,” The Guardian (London), June 4, 2010, http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/jun/04/tarr-wyndham- lewis-digested .



2 . See Wyndham Lewis , Tarr: The 1918 Version , ed. Paul O’Keeffe ( Santa Rosa : Black Sparrow Press , 1990 ), 94 , and Tarr (1928 version), ed. Scott W. Klein (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 2010), 230.

3 . Both journals—which lasted considerably longer then Blast— began in 1896; Jugend— the source of the term Jugendstil —ran until 1940, while Simplicissimus was published through 1967, with a hiatus from 1944 to 1954.

4 . See, for instance, Kreisler’s associations throughout with the Mephistopheles of Faust (1808–1831); the resemblance of Bertha and Kreisler’s baby to Bertha’s lover Tarr arguably owes its origin to a similar birth in Goethe’s novel Die Wahlverwandtschaften ( Elective Affi nities , 1809). In the 1928 version Lewis also shows Tarr’s familiarity with the vocabulary of such late German metaphysicians as Eduard von Hartmann and Ludwig Klages. See Lewis, Tarr (1928), 326 (note to 263).

5 . Lewis, Tarr (1918), 21. 6 . Wyndham Lewis, ed., Blast 1 (June 20, 1914), 148. Further references to the

two issues of Blast, including the “War Number” ( Blast 2 : July 1915), will appear in the text as B1 and B2 followed by page number.

7 . William C . Wees , Vorticism and the English Avant-Garde ( Toronto : University of Toronto Press , 1972 ), 47 .

8 . Edwin M . Good , Giraffes, Black Dragons, and Other Pianos: A Technological History from Cristofori to the Modern Concert Grand ( Stanford : Stanford University Press , 2001 ), 251 .

9 . See Paul Edwards , “‘You Must Speak With Two Tongues’: Wyndham Lewis’s Vorticist Aesthetics and Literature,” in BLAST: Vorticism 1914–1918, ed. Paul Edwards ( Aldershot : Ashgate , 2000) , 114.

10 . See Sheila Watson , Wyndham Lewis and Expressionism ( Waterloo, Ontario : MLR Editions Canada , 2003 ) , and Ulrich Weisstein’s essay, “Vorticism: Expressionism English Style,” in Expressionism as an International Literary Phenomenon , ed. Ulrich Weisstein (Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 1973). Andrew Causey touches upon Expressionism usefully in the conclusion of his “Jacob Epstein’s Rock Drill: man and machine,” in London, Modernism, and 1914 , ed. Michael J. K. Walsh (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 98.

11 . A useful census of both Post-Impressionist shows may be found in Samuel Hynes , The Edwardian Turn of Mind ( Princeton : Princeton University Press , 1968 ), 410 –41 7 .

12 . Lewis, Tarr (1918), 116. 13 . Ibid., 83. 14 . Ibid., 193. 15 . See John Lewis , Typography: Design and Practice ( New York : Taplinger Publishing

Company , 1978 ) . Lewis notes that one of the youngest leaders of the Werkbund was Walter Gropius, who later became the fi rst principal of the Bauhaus (33, 36).

16 . See Wees, Vorticism , 21. 17 . See ibid., 78, and The Collected Writings of T. E. Hulme , ed. Karen Csengeri

( Oxford : Clarendon Press , 1994 ), 7 18 . Hulme , “Modern Art III.—III. The London Group,” The New Age 14 , no. 21

(March 26, 1914 ): 661 –66 2 . Rpt. Csengari, 294–298. 19 . Frank Denver , “The London Group,” The Egoist 2 , no. 4 (April 1, 1915 ): 60 –6 1 . 20 . See Ezra Pound , Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir ( 1916 ) ( New York : New Directions ,

1970 ), 47 . 21 . The Letters of Wyndham Lewis , ed. W. K . Rose ( Norfolk : New Directions ,

1963 ), 28 –2 9 . 22 . Jonathan Black , Edward Wadsworth: Form, Feeling and Calculation: The Complete

Paintings and Drawings ( London : Philip Wilson Publishers , 2005 ), 12 . 23 . Lewis, Tarr (1918), 45. 24 . See Fredric Jameson , Fables of Aggression: Wyndham Lewis, The Modernist as Fascist

( Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London : University of California Press , 1979 ) , particu-larly 87–104, and Paul Peppis , Literature, Politics, and the English Avant-Garde: Nation and Empire, 1901–1918 ( Cambridge : Cambridge University Press , 2000 ) , particularly 133–161.


How German Is It 85

25 . Tarr quotes the French critic André Suarès on this topic: he claims to Anastasya, “Suarès fi nds a northern rhetoric of ideas in Ibsen . . . exactly similar to the word-rhetoric of the South” (Lewis, Tarr [1918], 234; the quotation paraphrases a passage from Suarès’s book Trois hommes, Pascal, Ibsen, Doestoïevski [1913]).

26 . For a fuller interpretation of this scene see Scott Klein , “The Experiment of Vorticist Drama: Wyndham Lewis and ‘Enemy of the Stars.’ ” Twentieth Century Literature 37 , no. 2 (Summer 1991 ): 225 – 239 .

27 . “Junkerism in Art: The London Group at the Goupil Gallery,” The Times of London , March 10, 1915 , 8 . Such accusations were not confi ned to the Vorticists: Mark Gertler and his Creation of Eve (1914), also displayed at the London Group exhibi-tion were labeled “made in Germany” and “called hunnishy indecent” by journalists (quoted by Sarah McDougall, “ ‘Something is happening there’: early British modern-ism, the Great War and the ‘Whitechapel Boys’,” in Walsh, London , 124).

28 . Scott translated Goethe’s Götz von Berlichingen in 1799; G. H. Lewes wrote a Life of Goethe in 1855. Thomas Carlyle described his sense of the German intellectual tradi-tion in Sartor Resartus (1833–1834): “Germany, learned, indefatigable, deep-thinking Germany comes to our aid. It is, after all, a blessing that, in these revolutionary times, there should be one country where abstract Thought can still take shelter” (Oxford World’s Classics, eds. Kerry McSweeney and Peter Sabor: Oxford University Press, 1987, 4). For a detailed treatment of the subject, see John R . Davis , The Victorians and Germany ( Bern : Peter Lang , 2007 ) .

29 . E. M . Forster , Howards End , ed. David Lodge (1910) ( Harmondsworth : Penguin Books , 2000 ), 26 –2 9 , 277 .

30 . See Ford Madox Ford , The Good Soldier (1915) ( Harmondsworth : Penguin , 1999 ) , 25. The excerpt in Blast appears under the name Ford Madox Hueffer.

31 . James Joyce, Dubliners (1914), introduction by Terence Brown (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1993), 118. The English royal house was of direct German ancestry from King George I, the Elector of Hanover, in 1714 through the reign of Victoria and Albert. Even the Victorian tradition of the Christmas tree was a German borrowing introduced to England by Albert.

32 . Andrzej G ą siorek , “The ‘Little Magazine’ as Weapon: BLAST 1914–15” (in The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines, Vol. 1: Britain and Ireland 1880–1955 [ Oxford : Oxford University Press , 2009 ], 290 – 313 ), 309 . See also G ą siorek’s analysis elsewhere in this volume.

33 . Ford Madox Ford , Thus to Revisit ( New York : E. P. Dutton and Company , 1921 ), 140 .

34 . The English-language volume of Kandinsky’s complete art criticism runs to over 900 pages. See Kandinsky: Complete Writings on Art , eds. Kenneth C. Lindsay and Peter Vergo (Boston: Da Capo Press, 1994).

35 . The New Weekly (June 20, 1914), quoted in Black, Edward Wadsworth, 23. 36 . See The Blaue Reiter Almanac (1912), eds. Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc ,

trans. Henning Falkenstein ( Boston : artWorks/MFA Publications , 2005 ), 207 –2 25 , 61 , 64 .

37 . Dietmarr Elgar notes this explicitly: “[The Expressionists] created a utopian counterworld that was the exact opposite of a society determined by the alienating processes of industry and governed by the political system of Kaiser Wilhelm II—the German equivalent of Victorianism” ( Expressionism: A Revolution in German Art [Köln: Taschen, 1998], 9).

38 . Nessler demonstrated his device for the fi rst time on October 8, 1906, at his salon at 245 Oxford Street. Like many other German emigrants in Britain, Nessler felt the need to move to America at the outset of the war rather than face internment as an alien. See Patrick Robertson , Robertson’s Book of Firsts: Who Did What for the First Time ( New York : Bloomsbury USA , 2011 ), 332 .

39 . Sven Ekdahl describes Silesia as “the main area for recruiting mercenaries for the [Teutonic] order” during this fi rst confl ict. “The Teutonic Order’s Mercenaries During the ‘Great War’ with Poland-Lithuania (1409–11),” in Mercenaries and Paid Men: The Mercenary Identity in the Middle Ages, ed. John France ( Leiden and Boston : Brill , 2008 ), 345 –3 61 , 351 .



40 . The Hessians were part of a long history of Germanic soldiers for hire; in clas-sical times, the Romans even hired one Germanic tribe to guard its borders against another. See David Shearer , Private Armies and Military Intervention ( Oxford : Oxford University Press , 1998 ), 13 .

41 . Lewis, Tarr (1928), 190. 42 . Quoted by Davis, Victorians , 228. Even Lewis’s passing claim that the Vorticist

should avoid the “Chauvinistic or picturesquely patriotic” ironizes Blast ’s claims for a “pure” Englishness. The word “chauvinism” owes its origins to France, deriving from the name of the mythical Napoleonic French soldier Nicolas Chauvin, noted for his excessive patriotism in such works as Théodore and Hippolyte Cogniard’s play La Cocarde tricolore (1831). Lewis’s use of the word rather than “jingoism” suggests the pan-Northernism at work even within received English vocabulary.

43 . Blast 1 , 7, 38.


How German Is it: Vorticism, Nationalism, and the Paradox of Aesthetic Self-Definition

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