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Abstract:

The article deals with the “New Objectivity”, a movement in German literature of the 1920s, and the discussions that unfolded around it among its contemporaries: writers, art critics, and cultural experts. The history of the emergence and establishment of this concept in the discourse of the era is presented, and the similarity of this phenomenon to “magic realism” as well as the differences from it are traced. The intensive search by contemporaries for both analogies and alternatives to the “New Objectivity” in the history of German literature (from Classicism to Expressionism), also shown in detail in the article, indicates that this movement, by its very name, paradoxically created an illusion of both novelty and revival of previous artistic phenomena. The poetics of the prose of the “New Objectivity” by such writers as A. Döblin, E. Kästner, I. Keun and others, analyzed in the article, allows us to consider this movement a phenomenon of German Modernism. Particular attention is paid to narration, the techniques of which (montage, changing points of view, etc.) enabled the writers, by subtly distorting the usual perspective and creating a quasi-documentary reality, to express the sense of anxiety inherent in the era.

Keywords: “New Objectivity”, “magic realism”, Weimar Republic, German Modernism, narration.