| Should we feel pain? Is there meaningful pain? Is there useful pain after the advent of morphine, ether, and chloroform? Against the backdrop of medical progress between 1880 and 1945, German literary and philosophical discourses on pain and suffering, which proliferated in this time, addressed pain as the preferred vehicle for negotiating questions not simply about the vulnerability of the human body, but also about such diffuse but pressing issues as the status of subjective agency and the limits of human perfectibility. I investigate the affirmative discourse of pain in Friedrich Nietzsche, the German-Polish decadent author Stanislaw Przybyszewski, a group of Expressionist writers (Franz Werfel, Stefan Zweig, Leonhard Frank), and Ernst Junger, in all of whom, however different they are, the versatile language of pain is continuously employed in order to legitimize their strongly contrasting philosophical and poetological visions. I demonstrate how the affirmation of pain functions in relation to a keen sense of disappointment with regard to natural science. I conclude that affirming pain -- be it in the insistence on the indispensability of pain as a disciplinary instrument, or in the exploration of pain as the core of a decadent sensibility, or in the invocation of pain as an overpowering fate breaking into wellordered civilization -- is directly related to the rejection of progressivist ideology. Examining medical discourses as well, I argue that the language of pain permeated German culture because it proved remarkably effective for a far-reaching critique of materialistic-scientific thought. I show how "pain" functions as a multipurpose metaphor for authors straining for a meaning of suffering in an increasingly secularized world, thereby engendering their opposing narratives of transcendence. |
