LXII Motifs of Cultural Eschatology in German Poetry from Naturalism to Expressionism

When Gottfried Keller in his poetic rejoinder to Justinus Kerner's romantic plaint extolled the world-transforming forces of technology, he expressed the dominant faith of his time in a possible synthesis of the spiritual and the utilitarian, of idealism and materialism. To use the vernacular: he did not doubt but that he could eat his cake and have it. To Kerner it was a bad dream that after the steamship and the locomotive the next step would be aviation, that in the future leaking airborne oil vats might sully the pure atmosphere, the last element to remain undefiled by man; he wished to lie in the grass and gaze up into the serene blue depths while yet he might. Keller replied that there was nothing to prevent such idyllic escape, but that he for one preferred to identify himself with the dynamism of the new “fire dragon.” In fact, was not only now the magic of Kerner's old parchments at last being transformed into reality by the forces of nature in the service of the human spirit? Were they not building for man a “brave new world?”