Between Pathos and Its Atrophy

Reinhart Meyer-Kalkus Between Pathos and its Atrophy The Art of Elocution in Germany After 1945 1. The Topos of the Fading of Pathos After 1945 In ancient rhetoric, “pathos” was regarded as the vehement emotion that ora- tors or actors could evoke in listeners and viewers. With this meaning, the term entered into modern rhetorics and poetologies including and up to Les- sing and Goethe. Not until the 1920s did it experience a fundamental change, in that its semantics were narrowed to the pejorative aspects, to false pathos. Today, if we speak in German of “pathos” or “pathetic,” we generally mean an exaggeration of expression, stilted sublimity, embarrassing emphasis, or even kitsch.1 Apparently, this semantic shift corresponds to deep changes in social be- havior and taste since the end of World War I. “Not only the silent film, but also the theater and today’s style of living avoid what is specifically pathetic wherever they can,” wrote the language psychologist Karl Bühler in 1934 in his Ausdruckstheorie (theory of expression). One avoided everything “that is brought forth as expressive as an end in itself and is thus separated from per- 1 Cf. Reinhart Meyer-Kalkus, Art. “Pathos,” in: Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, Vol. VI, Basel 1989, pp. 193–199. 1 Passions in Context II (1/2011) tinent action and from objectively depicting speech. Avoids it and prefers to reveal how one feels between the lines.”2 Thus speaks a member of the generation of the twenties’ “Neue Sachlich- keit” (New Objectivity) who prizes the art of indirect intimation, irony, and refined gestural and sign language.3 Of course, Bühler didn’t think that politicians’ speeches would have to eschew all pathos in the future. It merely had to be sought with other verbal, gestural, and argumentative means of expression to achieve its purpose. In certain situations, a game of glances and ges- tures, quoting a statistic, or reading aloud a list of names could have a more rousing effect than any direct emotional expression or appeal. Similar thoughts are found in other authors of the 1920s, for example Rob- ert Musil and Bertolt Brecht. Once, after Brecht heard an “old-style reciter” who had charged “all the words with mood, a kind of program (‘stuffed words in applesauce’),” he wrote, “I propound declamation in an open, non- pastoral tone with the avoidance of sonorous cadences, crescendos, and tremolos.”4 Brecht and other contemporaries5 are allergic to the traditional “Schiller tone” that dominated in the theater and in school recitation exercis- es in imperial Germany and that had penetrated public speaking from the pulpit, on the ceremonial stage, and in political meetings: that strained- 2 Karl Bühler, Ausdruckstheorie. Das System an der Geschichte aufgezeigt (1933), 2nd unrevised ed., Stuttgart 1968, p. 50. 3 Here, Bühler agrees with T. S. Eliot, for example, who advised depicting feelings indirect- ly by means of an “objective correlative,” cf. T. S. Eliot, Selected Prose, ed. John Hayward, London 1953, p. 107 f. 4 Thus Brecht in a note from the year 1942, in: Bertolt Brecht, “Deklamation und Kommen- tar,” in: Über Lyrik, eds. Elisabeth Hauptmann and Rosemarie Hill, Frankfurt am Main 1964, p. 124. Cf. also Bertolt Brecht: “Kontrolle des ‘Bühnentemperaments’ und Reinigung der Bühnensprache,” in: Gesammelte Werke, Vol. 16, Frankfurt am Main 1967, p. 747. 5 Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus speaks at one point of “the swollen pathos of an epoch of art coming to its end” (Thomas Mann, Dr. Faustus, Frankfurt am Main 1967, p. 425). Thomas Mann calls instead for “precision” and “boldness,” so that the “language serious- ly [achieves] feeling and life.” Thomas Mann: Doktor Faustus. Die Entstehung des Doktor Faustus, Frankfurt am Main 1967, p. 443. 2 Reinhard Meyer-Kalkus: Between Pathos and its Atrophy emphatic and over-articulated diction of stage High German.6 For Brecht, pathos is almost synonymous with the “sonorous cadences, crescendos, and tremolos” of stage declamation in the tradition of the Schiller tone.7 This tone modulates all speaking a few intervals higher, into the seemingly nobler, more genteel, more meaningful registers. It is this legacy of idealistic pathos, so fateful in the German tradition, that claims to be the badge of higher dig- nity, truth, and authenticity and yet can most easily be imitated and repro- duced. When such speech and the educationally idealistic stances underlying it square off, the use of the terms “pathos” and “pathetic” is gradually re- duced to their negative aspects, to false pathos.8 After 1945, this turn away from pathos led to the pan-German topos of the atrophy of pathos in the elocutionary arts. As the scholar of German litera- ture and journalist Jens Bisky recently wrote: The pathos of higher elocutionary art, like the will to overwhelm, have fallen into disrepute because of the demagogues’ speeches of the Third Reich and have become marginalized by the triumphal march of radio and sound film. The postwar era speaks more soberly, even when articulating the murkiest thoughts, and more quotidianly, more tuned to the middle ranges.9 6 On the polemic against the Schiller tone, cf. Rudolf Blümner, “Schiller – aber die Schau- spielkunst” (1909/10), in: Rudolf Blümner, Ango Laina und andere Texte, eds. Karl Riha und Marcel Beyer, Munich 1993, pp. 146–150, pp. 149 f. 7 “The pathos in attitude and language that was appropriate to Schiller and the Shake- speare staged thanks to his period is detrimental to playwrights of our time. ... Genuine human tones are then seldom heard... “ Bertolt Brecht, Gesammelte Werke, Vol. 16, p. 747. Brecht recommends instead a realistic speech, shaped by dialects, as practiced by actress- es like Helene Weigel and Therese Giehse. 8 Already in 1944, the Swiss literary historian Emil Staiger could say that “pathos has long been frowned upon in many areas of art” (Cf. Emil Staiger, “Vom Pathos. Ein Beitrag zur Poetik,” in: Trivium 2/1944, pp. 77–92, here p. 77). If one asks actors why this is the case, the answer is, “Pathos is untrue; an honest actor does not permit himself to seem pathetic. One might want to make politics responsible for this. And of course we have every reason to be mistrustful of pathetic speeches in the public realm.” p. 77. 9 Jens Bisky, “Stimmen, wandelbar. Empfinden soll man im Bett, nicht auf der Bühne: Gus- tav Gründgens spricht,” in Süddeutsche Zeitung of 8 Oct. 2004, Literatur-Beilage, p. 49. 3 Passions in Context II (1/2011) This thesis has become common property, also in the humanities. The lin- guist Johannes Schwitalla tried to substantiate it with the example of the prosody of politicians’ speeches in the twentieth century.10 After the Nazi era, the style of public speeches in West Germany went through a fundamental change, “away from a pathetic toward a calm, objective, even private style of speaking.” With a problematic methodology, Schwitalla takes Hitler’s climac- tic style of speaking as his starting point and measuring stick. He says Hitler used “figures of climax with multiply repeated global intensifications through respectively higher levels of tone, greater volume, and increasing tempo to an absolute peak, upon which a sudden, great fall in tone and volume follows”11 – the prototype of an “ecstatic way of speaking.”12 In the speeches of postwar politicians like Konrad Adenauer, Theodor Heuss, Ernst Reuter, Erich Ollenhauer, Herbert Wehner, and Erich Benda, however, Schwitalla notes a fundamental change toward a subdued and more media- conscious style of speaking. He asserts that Roosevelt’s “fireside chats”, which were broadcast over the radio during World War II, were one of the things shaping speaking style.13 Schwitalla sums up: The historical tendency to casual and quiet speaking in the media has various causes. They lie in our society’s understanding of democracy; they lie in the skepticism, acquired through painful experience, toward big words and heroic tones; they lie in the technical amplification of the voice by means of loud- speakers, which render it unnecessary to speak loudly and at a high pitch to fill a vast room. And not least they lie in the media of radio and television Bisky compares sound recordings of Gustav Gründgens from the years before and after World War II. 10 Johannes Schwitalla: “Vom Sektenprediger- zum Plauderton. Beobachtungen zur Proso- die von Politikerreden vor und nach 1945,” in: Heinrich Löffler/Karlheinz Jakob/Bern- hard Kelle (eds.), Texttyp, Sprechergruppe, Kommunikationsbereich. Studien zur deutschen Sprache in Geschichte und Gegenwart, Berlin, New York 1994, 208–224. 11 Ibid., p. 209. 12 Ibid., p. 212. 13 Ibid., p. 215. 4 Reinhard Meyer-Kalkus: Between Pathos and its Atrophy themselves, which bring the politicians close to us when they speak, so that all exaggerating gestural and vocal expressions are distorted.14 However many of these observations are plausible, the conclusions about political rhetoric drawn from them do not seem sound. At election campaign rallies and other mass events and even in Germany’s parliament, the Bundes- tag, we hear again and again examples not only of emphatic, but also of pathetic-ecstatic speaking. We need not take recourse to the speeches of Franz- Josef Strauss, Herbert Wehner, or Willy Brandt; examples are also found in today’s generation of politicians. Certainly, we expect from a politician that “he maintains a ‘cool head’ even in difficult situations, speaks calmly and without recognizable strain, makes the audience laugh, and masters several modalities of speech from a restrained, thoughtful tone to urgent speaking.”15 But for combative situations, he must also master the pathetic, rousing regis- ter to emotionally fuse the listeners together and create a group resolved for joint action.

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