Im Takt der Liebe - Romantische Lovestorys (German Edition)

With essays by leading literary scholars, this volume presents the dynamic and volatile movement of the literature of German Expressionism: The energy of Expressionism also flooded into other forms: Combining highly focused, intrinsic analysis of individual works with comprehensive overviews of the extrinsic contexts in which they were created — and of the most up-to-date research — the essays draw the reader into the complexity of this period of rich artistic ferment.

Lisa Mauro Jacket image credit: Frans Masereel, Die Passion eines Menschen. The Companions may be read profitably by the reader with a general interest in the subject. For the benefit of student and scholar, quotations are provided in the original language. Except as permitted under current legislation, no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded, or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. German literature — 20th century — History and criticism.

Studies in German literature, linguistics, and culture Unnumbered PT This publication is printed on acid-free paper. Printed in the United States of America. Some images in the printed version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook. To view these images please refer to the printed version of this book. Donahue 1 Philosophical Background 1: Gray 39 Prose 2: The Cutting Edge of German Expressionism: Choric Consciousness in Expressionist Poetry: Provocation and Proclamation, Vision and Imagery: The Spirit of Expressionism ex machina: Edvard Munch, Portrait of Friedrich Nietzsche.

Caligari, poster design Ledl Bernhard. Genuine, poster design Josef Fenneker. Following page xiv Following page xiv Following page xiv Figures 1. From Masereel, Die Passion eines Menschen. From Masereel, My Book of Hours. From Masereel, Die Idee. From Masereel, Die Stadt.

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Especially in the United States, the term German Expressionism first calls to mind those arts, rather than the literature of the period, and that circumstance reflects in a very positive manner the increased general familiarity with the German contribution to artistic modernism in the early twentieth century. This volume relies to some degree, necessarily, upon that familiarity, while trying to underscore the interconnectedness of the arts in this period, their shared intellectual debts and sources, and their shared general aesthetics, as suggested by the introduction.

Though that very interconnectedness calls into question the notion of genre, as the one borrows from or emulates the other, genre still remains a useful organizing principle for tracking and understanding that interrelatedness. This volume thus traces a trajectory from the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche in its influence upon the Expressionist generation, and as literature itself; through the principal literary genres in a less common sequence of prose, poetry, and drama , to an interdisciplinary section that first addresses the gender politics of Expressionism, and then the visual genre of film that most visibly absorbed the narrative impulses, visual imaginary and experimental spirit from the literature of German Expressionism.

The sequence of the essays, arcing from philosophy to film, through the literary genres, would like to suggest both the centrality of the literature — the verbal artifacts related to Expressionism in this period — as well as the constant and necessary dialogue of each art with its others in this period, indeed the migration of elements of each art into the other, either under the Wagnerian rubric of Gesamtkunstwerk total work of art or more recently, of intermediality. Many years ago during my first trip to Europe in with a backpack, I became obsessed the work of Edvard Munch and on my peregrinations followed his work through the museums of Europe up to Scandinavia.

In addition, I would like to thank the contributors for their hard work, patience, and good spirits in response to my many queries and demands during the preparation of this volume, and of course, I would like to express my gratitude to the Editorial Director, Jim Walker, and all of the staff at Camden House for their continued support of this project over the years.

Verfall einer Familie Buddenbrooks: Gedichte The World Friend. Gedichte The Human Screams: Poetry Gottfried Benn, Gehirne: Novellas Johannes Becher, An Europa: Neue Gedichte To Europe: Caligari The Cabinet of Dr. Das Ringen eines Menschen The Transformation: Geschichte einer Verwirrung Gottfried Benn: It has been given a permanent, centrally located showcase for German painting and related arts of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, concentrating on the so-called Expressionist decade from to In the wake of the great exhibit of German Expressionist painting at the Guggenheim museum in entitled Expressionism: On the other hand, the Neue Galerie might also have appeared as a kind of cultural mausoleum, where Expressionism had been laid to rest in public view, safely inert and therefore a mute object of our curatorial propensities and distant historical curiosity.

But neither was the case: The installation of German Expressionism into the American landscape took place at a time when the financial euphoria and complacency of the boom years of the s had been shattered by a terrorist act and the prospect of war. That acute disorientation was compounded by the accelerating effects of urbanization and technological modernity, all of which heralded a new sense of shared humanity, of transnational issues, and of what is now called globalization.

Thus, instead of confirming the historical distance of early twentieth-century German and Austrian Expressionism from the present age, the Neue Galerie displays its essential proximity to life in early twenty-first-century America. As much as we look at them, the faces of German Expressionism look back at us. The Decline of a Family, The successive generations of that mercantile family led from robust individualism inspired by the Protestant work ethic to the dispirited sickliness of little Hanno, the sensitive but weak last representative of the family, in a long downward trajectory of familial and cultural enervation.

The professor falls in lust, if not love, with a nightclub torch singer, who comes to dominate, humiliate, and then, predictably, dump him. As Roy Allen has noted: Diederich Hessling is the prototype of the authoritarian philistine, a willing instrument of state power, and is also an expression of the soullessness of the imperial German state under Wilhelm II. As such, he is the very antithesis of the Expressionist. Both of these broad, panoramic critiques of German society by the Mann brothers, whether respectfully ironic in the case of Thomas or cuttingly satiric in the case of Heinrich, conformed stylistically to the model of nineteenth-century Realist-Naturalist writing, but serve here to frame the social and literary agenda of Expressionism, which was just beginning to emerge.

Herr Michael Fischer takes a walk outside the provincial city of Freiburg one evening, swinging his cane, with an odd twitch in his gait that suggests something explosive in his personality underneath the uniformity of his bourgeois attire. Together these works show a narrowing and deepening of focus on the principal object of Expressionist scorn and revolt: That sense of ferment was broadly atmospheric, part reaction to what was, part aspiration to what could be, coursing through German society outside its institutions as an excitement about the possibility of change, of questioning authority or convention, in society and in the arts.

Aufzeichnungen und Erinnerungen der Zeitgenossen Expressionism: Sketches and Recollections by Contemporaries, The atmosphere of subversive excitement was not centered in any one city, as was the French avant-garde in Paris where Expressionists were also active , but rather it spread throughout regional cities of Dresden, Munich, Leipzig, Prague, and Vienna, among others, and of course, most importantly of all, Berlin. That spirit of collective cultural renewal in aesthetic and political terms reverberates not only through the issues of these journals, but also through the numerous anthologies of the day: The unity in diversity of the movement, its sense of heady excitement, also derives from its intellectual origins and forbears.

Gesucht wurde ein postrationaler Dionysos. Der Mut zum eigenen Selbst und eigenen Erlebnis; Freud: Die zwischenmenschliche Problematik und Explosion [. Man sprach von Visionen. As quoted in Raabe, 38 [What was in the air? Above all van Gogh, Nietzsche, Freud too, and Wedekind. What was wanted was a post-rational Dionysos.

There was much talk of Visions.

Christmas Comes to Main Street

Raabe, , translation by Ritchie, modified by editor, 29 ] The generation of early Expressionists seized on figures from philosophy, psychology, painting, and drama who called into question the practices and conventions of prior generations, and who employed a hermeneutics of suspicion in order to get behind appearances, assumptions, conventions, and preconceptions in order to reach by different means other sources and other levels of expression.

The philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer had called the primary substratum of universal existence the Will, a level of existence that precedes and supersedes individual phenomena or rational cognition, and which could be known only as Idea through irrational intuition, through art that gives form to formlessness, and through the least verbal and representational art, namely music. Nietzsche played a definitive role in the agenda of the avant-garde. He was a central force in the impulse to radical critique and the revolt against positivism and materialism.

He was the major force behind its proclivity for Lebensphilosophie and its celebration of postEnlightenment, irrationalist modalities. These two genealogies or two separate, alternate receptions of Nietzsche predominated, respectively, in the two halves of the last century. Studies of Expressionism have learned from each. In the last twenty years, German modernism in general and Expressionism in particular have been investigated for the moments and manners in which they anticipated the heterogeneity and pluralism of postmodern thought.

Of course, the establishment of such a continuum runs the risk of overlooking specific and lesser known examples in favor of broad synthetic perspectives, but can also in turn allow greater historical differentiation in order to expand the field of historical inquiry anchored in particular texts. Such research by Andreas Huyssen and David Bathrick and the other contributors to their collection Modernity and the Text: Thus, whereas Expressionism had once largely disappeared from such contemporary discussions because of its inherent difficulties of definition, it can now return through that expanded field to the forefront of new historical inquiries into German modernity precisely for its heterogeneity of artistic and stylistic means, its varied intellectual sources, its social and political agendas — all in reaction to the belated onrush of modernity in Germany.

Expressionism figures as the extreme instance of the conceptual and practical dilemmas of German modernity. In other words, our perspective from the present allows new access to both of the Nietzschean sides of Expressionism, the analytical and the emotional, and the philosophical impetus in the early twentieth century to forge new modes of intensity.

In general, the central characteristic of Expressionism remains its intensity, noted repeatedly in the scholarship, which can perhaps best be understood as the degree of divergence from, if not antagonism to, prior modes of thinking and of artistic and social practice, also including in literature a tendency to short forms as a way of concentrating and condensing affects. Ein Beitrag zur Stilpsychologie Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, This work gave the nascent and inchoate tendency in the arts, later known as Expressionism, a justification in aesthetic terms, an ally in the academy where it was not otherwise accepted, and a genealogy in Western culture that legitimated its own radical and controversial forms as part of a tradition of abstract or nonrepresentational art.

For Worringer, the history of art alternates between the two world-feelings of empathy and abstraction: Piper, in Munich in see Manheim In painting, post-Impressionist predecessors such as Vincent van Gogh had provided the Expressionist generation with an exemplary, provocative style that used plummeting shifts in perspective, a palette of vivid, even garish colors, and heavy impasto on the canvas to lend to conventional still-life motifs a subjective, swirling intensity, suggestive of visceral anguish. That combination of palpable luminosity and darkness of mood in van Gogh or in the work of the Norwegian Edvard Munch or others such as Paul Gaugin and the Fauves in France and Paula Modersohn-Becker in Germany , anticipated the characteristic existential chiaroscuro of so much of Expressionist art, which was deeply at odds with reigning orthodoxies of academic art under Wilhelm II, whose tastes for banal, derivative, and didactic classicism in public art filtered through the German Royal Academy of Arts to dominate the art world and art market.

Such was the background against which Expressionist art emerged and forged its revolutionary Stil, a concept of artistic style imbued with existential imperatives and urgency, which was in that climate almost automatically offensive and subversive. Though these two groups shared general features of bright, antinaturalistic coloring and a reduction of the sort of draftsmanship and linear perspective that characterized academic art, the groups also represented in their differences the broad range of Expressionist art once it had been liberated from the constraints of official public taste and expectations.

The brilliance and breadth of Expressionist art is regularly on display in museums all over the world, such as the Neue Galerie see above , and has been described and chronicled by such scholars as Peter Selz, Donald Gordon, Stephanie Barron, Shulamith Behr, and Walter Dube, to name the authors of several now classic texts. The medium of painting itself took on a new vibrancy and immediacy that all other artistic mediums, whether in image or word, sought to emulate.

Thus, as in painting, a new consciousness of the medium gave rise to the experiments of the Modernist or Expressionist avant-garde in literature. Simple objects become vessels of revelation for him, but the traditional rhetoric that Chandos employs and abjures can only describe the desired affect, but not otherwise communicate the immediacy of his anguish or rapture.

In effect, the Chandos letter of gave poetic license to the Expressionist generation to explore new forms of expression in language, new means of organizing words or verbal particles on the page, in order to explode conventional narration and give fuller expression to spiritual longings. As a sharp rejection of social convention and its corresponding rhetorical forms, and as an attempt to inaugurate and embrace a whole new sense of artistic practice or style and get closer to an immediate and unfragmented experience of life, the Chandos letter is, apart from its sixteenth-century English dress-up, imbued with the spirit of early Expressionist primitivism.

Primitivism emerged as a means of calling into question the conventions both of pictorial representation and of bourgeois society. DONAHUE imperialist upbringing while most likely also reinforcing a strain of brutal sexism endemic to the avant-garde and Expressionism. While visibly present in the art of the period in the rejection of verisimilitude, the simple forms and awkward shapes, the heavy lines and disharmonious proportions, the term embraces a broad range of thematic elements in both art and literature: Primitivism provided a means for critique of society and liberation from convention: As an expression of critical modernism in the arts and of historical modernity, primitivism lies at the heart of German Expressionism, which thus stands in relation to German colonial practices in Africa and elsewhere.

The articulation of that relation constitutes a new dimension in research on Expressionism. Now the sheer accumulation of such revisions has brought about successive reassessments of Expressionism in relation to Modernism as the site of essential and complex confrontations with modernity.

Though the prose of this period has emerged to bridge the former divide between Modernism and Expressionism and to extend the range of the theoretical discussion or debate about Expressionism, the centerpiece of literary Expressionism remains lyric poetry. The short form of the poem begins at the point of intensity that Expressionist prose seeks to attain. DONAHUE shortcomings; he then, as a corrective measure, introduces some of the Expressionist poets not included in that epoch-making collection, thus providing an expanded portrait of the epoch in Expressionist poetry, and its immediate influence.

Likewise, in her essay, Barbara D. Both of these essays give a direction for necessary future archival and historical research. DoH, , as well as some of the most beautifully elegiac, stridently ecstatic and vividly vituperative. The art of political engagement and social activism, seen collectively, attempted to inspire and enact a transition from formal autonomy on the page to other forms of social discourse off the page, within a new social collectivity. In this respect the anthology as a genre becomes a blueprint for society as a collection of heterogeneous voices bound together in a common spirit.

In Wolkenfernen trommeln die Propeller. Die Seele schrumpft zu winzigen Komplexen. Tot ist die Kunst. Die Stunden kreisen schneller. So namenlos zerrissen, So ohne Stern, so daseinsarm im Wissen Wie du, will keine, keine mir erscheinen. Noch hob ihr Haupt so hoch niemals die Sphinx! MHD, 40 [Song and giant cities, dream-avalanches, Faded lands, poles without glory, The sinful women, perils and heroism, Spectral brewings, storm on iron rails. In cloudy distances the propellers drum. Books turn into witches. The soul shrinks to tiny complexes.

The hours move in swifter circles. So indescribably mutilated, So without star, so existentially poor in knowledge As you no other age seems to have been. Never before did the sphinx raise its head so high! DoH, 62—63 ] Like the newspapers that bombard modern consciousness and later all the more so with, successively, radio, television, and the Internet , the poem presents a catalog of images and phrases that characterize, along lines of dialectical opposition, the extreme situation of mankind in modernity: Art too has lost its mystery Tot ist die Kunst and its ability to resist those historical imperatives, which only allows for the acceleration of the whole process Die Stunden kreisen schneller.

The works of Wedekind beginning in the s and of Brecht beginning in , frame, chronologically and conceptually, the development of Expressionist drama as it evolved away from Naturalism to find new technical and rhetorical means of presenting, or rather emoting, the anguish of the individual within bourgeois society. This primitivist encounter of the sexes exploded the social nuance and delicacies of domestic drama, and of Viennese polite society. In that very literal way, Kokoschka tried to render rawly visible the visceral inner life of mankind.

As a result, his play serves as a prototype for three main types of Expressionist drama16 that overlap but can nevertheless be clearly distinguished. The first type most readily marks the transition from developments in the visual arts: This form of Geist or spiritual drama aims at the formal unification of elements on stage through rhythms of sound, color, language, movement in concord with the entranced audience.

Indeed, the concept of the Schrei marks the new poetics of performance that emerged in Expressionism based on the presence of the primal Self on stage, which entailed in turn new registers of voice and what David F.

Christmas Comes to Main Street (Briar Creek, #5) by Olivia Miles

Therefore, actors such as Werner Krauss, Fritz Kortner, and especially Ernst Deutsch became closely associated with Expressionist drama in this vein and famous for the moody and energetic physicality and vocality of their acting. Such intensity on stage no longer seemed like acting in any conventional sense. Ich-drama is not about the individual as much as about the idea mediated by that character.

Through heightened visual scenarios, this tension enacts the idea of the play, which is topical and thus in part depends on the historical circumstances outside the theater. Whereas Geist performance attempted a sort of transcendent spiritual communion with the audience in the theater, emblematic performance attempts to forge community beyond the individual in order to address and ultimately change society at large.

The stations of his journey get acted out in seven scenarios, as he moves from the provincial bank to his home, and then to a crowded velodrome, a cabaret, and a Salvation Army hall, where he ends up, disillusioned, shooting himself and dying in an Ecce Homo scene of crucifixion. The use of stunning backdrops and stark lighting collapses the three-dimensional space of the stage into a broken sequence that is, without transitions of virtually two-dimensional allegorical pictures or emblems. Like the Expressionist stage from Kokoschka on, film drew heavily upon painting to reduce or abstract the three-dimensional stage space of the acting and transform the actors into pictorial elements, as Lotte Eisner noted in her famous study The Haunted Screen: On his murderous outings, dressed all in black, the pallid sleepwalker Cesare played by Conrad Veidt , under the mind control of his master, Dr.

Caligari played by Werner Krauss , seems to merge with the shadows and lines of the townscape. Though the film image can isolate a powerful gesture, that gesture is inevitably divorced from the voice and presence that forcefully anchored the Schrei performance on stage, yet the graphic image exerts a different, equally powerful, even hypnotic, effect of its own, as thematized by the film itself, which invites the viewer to think through the relations of sight and seduction, vision and violence.

In many ways, as first suggested by Kurtz and explained here by Hake, early Weimar or Expressionist film absorbed, revised, refined, and ultimately tamed or domesticated the unruly visions of Expressionism, integrating them fully into society through the new technology of a mass medium, a process which extended also to poster advertisements for Expressionist films. As developed by Frans Masereel, the woodcut or graphic novel uses no words at all to develop its powerful narrative line: Though not a new form of visual technology like film, the woodcut novel offers a vivid counterpoint to both the visual dimension of prose narratives and to the narrative dimension of film in this period.

The strong lines of plot and picture in the graphic novel reinforce one another in a compact message of social critique and political protest against inequities in post-First-World-War German society. Of course, the single greatest confrontation with modernity by German artists took the form of the First World War —18 , which marked the chronological center of the Expressionist decade — The war decimated the ranks of Expressionist artists from Alfred Lichtenstein, Georg Trakl, Ernst Stadler, and August Stramm to Franz Marc and August Macke, and to survivors it marked the cataclysmic demise of an obsolete patriarchal and authoritarian society, clearing the ground for a potential renewal of general humanity after the flight from Germany of Kaiser Wilhelm II on November 9, and the proclamation of a republic with elections to come.

Nonetheless, the fusion, not to say confusion, of art and politics, produced a fascinating imbrication of the two in mediums from poetry to poster art to political discussion: The sense of renewal, the hope of Expressionism, then faded fast. His disappointment or despair about the failure of the collective Expressionist project of revitalizing art and culture resounds also in commentaries by such contemporaries as Wilhelm Hausenstein and Adolf Behne, among others Haxthausen , — In addition to the German defeat in war and the failure of the revolution, these critics were also demoralized by the ubiquitous commercialization of art under the rubric of Expressionism , which they saw as a sort of decorative decadence, along with the new artistic legitimacy and prestige of film.

Of course, their own increasingly tenuous economic status, as examined by Fritz K. A Study in the Rise of the Germanic Ideology He ignores any potential for critique in Expressionism and its forms verbal, visual, gestural as well as the totalizing and aesthetically conservative impulse of his own approach.

Josef Goebbels, the minister of propaganda, had once, like Hitler himself, had artistic ambitions though in literature, not painting and had even penned a novel, Michael unpublished in Germany; first published in English in To a large extent, the writers of German Expressionism and their works, literally the copies of their books, along with the audience for those texts, were destroyed by the Nazis.

The recovery and reissue of works of Expressionism has continued to the present, which reflects the fact that the literature of German Expressionism arose from and reflected upon the most critical periods of German cultural history in the twentieth century, before, during, and after the First World War, during the Weimar period, and in the immediate postwar period.

Also, David Kuhns, 28— Benn , along with some others I did not include G. Theory and Practice also provides numerous readings, organized thematically. Murphy simply ignores prior studies with the sort of close textual analysis he then calls for, but he does capably embed these familiar texts in the discursive fields or vocabularies of postmodern theory; what he does not do is open or broaden the field of literary interpretation in this period by introducing new works or authors into the discussion.

In a discussion of the Expressionist avant-garde, he addresses only prose and film, omitting all mention of drama or poetry. Its anti-intellectual intonations should not call into question its broad and deep intellectual roots and affinities; pathos marks the desire to overcome and reconfigure traditional modes of expression. Rowohlt, with illustrations by Georg Alexander Mathey.

Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag, , A Document of Expressionism, trans. Ratych, Ralph Ley, and Robert C. Camden House, and are designated by the abbreviation DoH and page number. Geist, Schrei and Ich performance. The categories overlap, but the emphasis differs in each. Kuhns likewise works with three categories that he calls Geist, Schrei and the emblematic mode. Politics and Art in Das Cabinet des Dr. Taschen, also emphasizes the dialectical, antithetical differentiation of the New Objectivity from Expressionism while remaining within the same artistic and even biographical lineage: Worringer in the s.

For the first full review of the concept of inner emigration in English, along with essays on the circumstances of individual writers, see the collection Flight of Fantasy: Donahue and Doris Kirchner New York: UMI Research Press, Anz, Thomas, and Michael Stark, eds. Manifeste und Dokumente zur deutschen Literatur, — The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany, — U of California P, The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Germany.

The Vagaries of its Reception in America. The Third Wisconsin Workshop, ed. Jost Hermand und Reinhold Grimm, 89— The Case of Emil Nolde. The UP of New England, The Necessity of Form, — The Art of the Great Disorder, — The Pennsylvania State UP, Einakter und kleine Dramen des Expressionismus. U of Toronto P, Abstraction in Modern German Prose. U of Michigan P, Penn State Press, Donahue, Neil, and Doris Kirchner, eds. New York and London: Bebuquin, oder die Dilettanten des Wunders.

Le Terrain Vague, Fascism, Aesthetics, and Culture. Rainer Rumold and O. Huyssen, Andreas, and David Bathrick, eds. Modernity and the Text: Revisions of German Modernism. The Path to Expressionist Drama. The Expressionist Heritage, ed. Stephen Eric Bronner and Douglas Kellner, — Bergin, ; New York: From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of German Film.

Princeton UP, , The Actor and the Stage. New Haven and London: Zur Entstehung eines kunsthistorischen Stil- und Periodenbegriffes. Introduction to Prosa des Expressionismus. Modernism, Expressionism, and the Problem of Postmodernity. U of Nebraska P, Modernism and Its Enemies in Imperial Germany. Belknap P of Harvard U, Contemporary Theory of Expressionism. Ein Dokument des Expressionismus. Ernst Rowohlt, ; Hamburg: Conard, Ralph Ley, and Joanna M. Aufzeichnungen und Erinnerungen der Zeitgenossen.

The Era of German Expressionism. San Diego State UP, Decline of the German Mandarins: The German Academic Community, — Affinity of the Tribal and Modern. Museum of Modern Art, Janus Face of the German Avant-garde: From Expressionism to Postmodernism. Materialien zu einer marxistischen Realismuskonzeption. Berichte, Texte, Bilder einer Zeit. The Writer in Extremis: Expressionism in Twentieth-Century German Literature. Anthology of German Expressionist Drama: A Prelude to the Absurd. Cornell UP, , The Politics of Cultural Despair: A Study in the Rise of the Germanic Ideology.

The Look of Things: Poetry and Vision around Chapel Hill and London: The U of North Carolina P, Savage Intellects, Modern Lives. The U of Chicago P, Nietzsches Kulturkritik, Expressionismus und literarische Moderne. The Concept of Expressionism: Ein Beitrag zur Stilpsychologie. A Contribution to the Psychology of Style. Form in Gothic, later reprinted as Form Problems of the Gothic.

Schriften zum Kunstproblem, 86— Reprinted in Fragen und Gegenfragen: Schriften zum Kunstproblem, — Expressionismus — Literatur und Kunst, — Eine Ausstellung des deutschen Literaturarchivs im Schiller-Nationalmuseum vom 8. Mai bis 31 Oktober Expressionism would lose all its definition and distinctness if we sought to conceive it apart from these notions indebted to Nietzsche. Even if we allow for a modicum of rhetorical overstatement in this remark, we cannot help but come away with the view of Nietzsche as an intellectual giant whom the Expressionists adopted as the flag-bearer of their movement.

This assertion is confirmed by the formative impact Nietzsche had on the intellectual profiles of most of the leading spokespeople of the Expressionist generation. Nietzsche also figures prominently in the intellectual biography of Franz Pfemfert, the publisher of the influential Expressionist journal Die Aktion, who used this publication to disseminate texts both by and about Nietzsche Martens, 46— Most important, perhaps, is the fact that Nietzsche and his works were heralded by both the vitalistic-Dionysian line of Expressionist thinkers and the politically activist strain of Expressionism.

Thus we might go so far as to claim that to the extent that Expressionism is a unitary phenomenon and has a unified nucleus at all, this nucleus is constituted by the thought and the person of Friedrich Nietzsche. The reasons for the limitation to this work are manifold: First, Nietzsche himself clearly affirmed the significance this text assumed in his intellectual genesis when he republished it towards the end of his philosophical career, in spite of the sometimes scathing critique to which he subjected this piece of intellectual juvenilia in the foreword to this new edition.

This continued significance of Geburt is corroborated by the fact that Nietzsche himself came back to this book repeatedly throughout his life, deliberating on its central ideas — especially the dichotomy between the Apollinian and Dionysian approaches to art — and its place in his intellectual development see especially Ecce Homo, KSA 6: Nietzsche himself confirms the persistence of this Freudian slip when he writes in Ecce Homo that he has repeatedly seen his work cited under this skewed title KSA 6: However, he is not satisfied with simply using abstract logic to demonstrate his claims — as is often the case in philosophical aesthetics — but instead wants to bring this point concretely before the eyes of his readers by presenting them with a historical example.

In other words, the examination of Greek tragedy, its emergence and decline, and the role of the Apollinian and Dionysian principles in this historical development — the substance, in short, of the first twelve sections of Geburt — serve merely as a demonstrative example of this larger argument about the nature of aesthetics as such, which is the true focus of this text.

This is the same status, I will argue, that we can accord to the aesthetic practice of literary Expressionism: This metaphysical mimesis is a program, I will claim, that the Expressionists adopt from Nietzsche. His very valorization of drama, and of tragedy in particular, as the highest literary form takes its cue from the thought of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, whom Nietzsche greatly admired,12 and Schiller, who devoted many essays not only to general problems of aesthetics, but specifically to the theater as a social institution.

To be sure, Nietzsche explicitly rejects the moralizing component in the dramatic theories of these predecessors, but in so doing he is simply following the lead already inaugurated by Schopenhauer 2: Similarly, Lessing and Schiller have already outlined conceptions of drama as the most effective literary form, allowing it to be deployed for the transformation of cultural and political institutions.

But Nietzsche goes on to argue that the Schillerian distinction is not broad enough to encompass all the artistic manifestations he has in mind. This empirical world, for Schopenhauer, is hence a world of semblance, a secondary product of the will. For Schopenhauer, all art is indeed structured in terms of mimetic representation Welt als Wille und Vorstellung 1: Schopenhauer thus re-evaluates traditional aesthetic theory, based on the Aristotelian concept of mimesis, by asserting that art is not the mimetic representation of the phenomenal world, but rather of the Platonic ideas that underlie the objects that constitute the sphere of phenomenal appearances 1: These ideas themselves are immediate objectifications of the will 1: However, as we know, Schopenhauer interprets music as an exception even to this general rule governing the arts; music does not copy Platonic ideas, as do the other arts, rather it is a copy of the will itself 1: In other words, Schopenhauer differentiates three possible modes of representational mimesis for art that stand in a clear hierarchy.

At the top of this hierarchy stands music, which, as the least mediate form of representation, provides a direct copy of the will itself 1: GRAY ontic level equal to that of the phenomenal world itself. Dionysian artists are thus the most authentic artists in the sense that they imitate in their own creative process that primordial creative act by which the phenomenal world itself is born. This is what Nietzsche means when he writes in Geburt that Dionysian artists are no longer merely artists as creators of works of art, but actually become works of art themselves 30 , or when he argues that the creative act of the genius must fuse with that primordial act of creativity out of which the world itself originarily issued 47— For Expressionism, by contrast, Huebner comes up with a formula that sounds on the face of it like a contradiction, or at least like a paradox: In this formulation Huebner has implicitly elided the basic distinction between idealism and realism.

And this, in fact, is the point: But, the Expressionists might justifiably retort, anticipating a phrase popularized in the United States during the s, What is reality? First, it presents an early formulation, from within the camp of Marxist thinkers, of what in the thought of Theodor Adorno will blossom into a full-fledged suspicion of all totalizing worldviews as totalitarian constructions. He no longer seeks anything in its totality, a totality that also includes all the natural cruelty of things. Taking as his point of departure the widespread sense of malaise commonly associated with the advent of modern culture, Nietzsche offers a critical analysis of the causes of this discontent.

The malaise of modernity is thus symptomatic of the collapse, for Nietzsche, of the scientific worldview: Ist Wissenschaftlichkeit vielleicht nur eine Furcht und Ausflucht vor dem Pessimismus? Eine feine Notwehr gegen — die Wahrheit? Und, moralisch geredet, etwas wie Feig- und Falschheit? Is reverence for science perhaps nothing but fear of and flight from pessimism? A refined defense mechanism against — truth? And, moralistically speaking, something like faintheartedness and falsehood? Science is revealed as a deception on the same order as that pursued by any purely Apollinian art: And Nietzsche believes the malaise of modernism derives from the fact that his contemporaries have generally recognized the limits of rational thought but nonetheless refuse to admit or embrace these limits.

An art that practices metaphysical mimesis, such as Attic tragedy, becomes an antidote to the deceptions of Apollinian or Socratic culture, a machete that both cuts through the veil of ideological self- deception and offers a form of non-deceptive, non-ideological consolation. The Expressionists would embrace this view of art as an instrument of cultural and ideological critique.

Both, in fact, are clear in their assertion that the will only appears in diverse — but differentially evaluated — forms of semblance. At any rate, when he transfers these artistic drives from nature to the mediating function of the artist, Nietzsche leaves no doubt that in both instances the principle of mimesis is at work: GRAY Dionysian artist of intoxication, or, finally — as is the case, for example, in Greek tragedy — simultaneously an intoxicating dream-artist; Nietzsche thus argues that all art is mimetic, but that one can distinguish three subcategories of mimetic art, one purely Apollinian, one purely Dionysian, and one that melds and intermingles these two, for which Greek tragedy stands as the historical model.

Even at this early stage in his treatise Nietzsche then goes on to provide a first glimpse into how he imagines this interaction occurring in the Attic tragedy he will valorize as the pinnacle of art. The tragic artist is, first and foremost, a Dionysian artist. We note also, confirming a point made above, how the Dionysian artist himself, in his own being, becomes a mimetic representation of this metaphysical ground: But after this wholly Dionysian encounter with the world and its deepest reality, something absolutely non-Dionysian must occur: We recognize once more, then, that Nietzsche frames his arguments as a contribution to the much broader context of aesthetic theory in general, specifically as a redefinition of the applicability of mimesis.

When he shifts from the aesthetic to a more psychological or existential explanation of the interaction between the Apollinian and Dionysian principles of art, Nietzsche proposes a relationship of fundamental interdependence between the horror of Dionysian reality and the concomitant necessity for the redemptive semblance invoked by the Apollinian dream world. We understand in this context precisely what Nietzsche means when he claims that the world — that is, empirical reality and existence — is only justified as an aesthetic phenomenon Geburt 17, 47, Thus in the self-criticism appended to Geburt he unequivocally states: This should not lead one to believe, however, that all semblance, all illusion is by definition good.

On the contrary, the escapism of absolute semblance is precisely what Nietzsche lambastes in Wilhelminian Germany, with its reliance on the deception of science and the fanciful illusionism of its art, represented in Geburt by the genre of classical opera — GRAY good and bad mimesis. On the contrary, it is Dionysian mimesis of the existential horror of the will as filtered through the transfiguring second-order mimesis of Apollinian image that Nietzsche holds up as the high-water mark of artistic achievement, as exemplified for him in Attic tragedy.

And yet in this regard it does not represent a world that is arbitrarily fantasized into the space between heaven and earth; rather, it is a world whose reality and credibility are equal to those that the believing Hellene attributed to Mt. Olympus and all its occupants. The world of tragedy, by contrast, is a creative imitation that exists on the same order of ontic reality as does the world of phenomenal existence itself, and once again Nietzsche turns to the metaphor of the Olympian gods to exemplify this concept.

He goes on to extrapolate from this comment a general maxim about the reality and truth of the poetic world. The contrast between this authentic truth of nature and the cultural mendacity that poses as the sole form of reality is similar to that between the eternal core of things, the thing in itself, and the totality of the phenomenal world. Thus mimesis in Nietzsche takes on positive connotations when it is related either directly to the representation of this metaphysical core, as in the case of music, or when mimesis functions as a palliative that makes this tragic recognition palatable, rather than providing ideological escape from this ultimate tragic insight.

This new dithyramb represents a kind of program music that alienates musical art from its true mission, the direct mimetic representation of the will, by recasting it as the imitator of the phenomenal world. This limitation to mimesis of the phenomenal world of appearances, to the semblance of semblance is, for Nietzsche, the very definition of degeneracy in art, especially in music. In some of his unpublished notes for Geburt Nietzsche is much more lucid on this point. But just as Nietzsche, as we have seen, distinguished different levels of mimetic representation to which he attributed varied values, here he delineates two basic categories of phenomena: One type reveals itself to us in the form of sensations of pleasure and displeasure and accompanies as a never absent thoroughbass all the other ideational expressions.

In other words, feelings of pleasure and displeasure are universal sensations, and as such they are those forms of ideation that link us most closely with the pre-individual ground of existence. Universality, in short, becomes the measure of authenticity because it points to that realm of experience — the Dionysian — that antedates the principium individuationis, the fragmentation of originary oneness into the manifoldness of distinct individuals.

What is perhaps most significant about the cited passage, however, is that immediately after identifying these two genres of ideation, Nietzsche shifts to the manner of their representation, concentrating initially on the way they express themselves in language. This constitutes, as it were, the music of speech. From here it is but a short step to the pathos, attention to rhythm and meter, and emotionality of Expressionist literary language. The mimetic object of such speech is not the logos, not the conceptual realm of ideation, but the sub-conceptual, psychological domain of primordial emotions.

Or, put another way, why, and in what sense, is music the origin of tragic art and myth? Only because these allegorical images are born of music itself does their semblance contain a dimension of authenticity: Indeed, as Nietzsche explains a few pages later, this allegorical representation itself retains the mimetic capacity inherent in music. Denn der Mythus will als ein einziges Exempel einer ins Unendliche hinein starrenden Allgemeinheit und Wahrheit anschaulich empfunden werden. Genuinely Dionysian music presents itself to us as just such a universal mirror of the world will; the visual phenomenon refracted in this mirror immediately expands for our emotions into the replica of an eternal truth.

It is, in essence, a kind of synaesthetic metamorphosis, a transformation of what is manifest in rhythm, meter, and sound into the Apollinian sphere of the visual. It is difficult to imagine a more emphatic and powerful defense of the ultimate reality of allegorical portrayal. Apollinian image joins forces with Dionysian truth, individual example merges with universal meaning. But what is this symbolization of particular universality if not allegory? Subjectivism is only the proper word here if we identify it with that core level of experience below the sphere of the phenomenal that Nietzsche identifies with the Dionysian; it is, perhaps, subjective, but it is nonetheless, for Nietzsche and the Expressionists, a shared subjectivism.

The drive to discover a level of universal truth and reality below the everyday dimensions of the phenomenal world was one of the characteristic traits of the Expressionist artists. One began to dissolve the surrounding reality into irreality, and to penetrate beyond the realm of appearances to the essence; , Es wird so lange gesucht in seinem eigentlichsten Wesen, bis seine tiefere Form sich ergibt, bis das Haus aufsteht, das befreit ist von dem dumpfen Zwang der falschen Wirklichkeit.

It goes beyond this.

It is pursued in its most authentic essence until its more profound form comes to the fore, until a house emerges that is freed from the dull constraints of false reality. Decades before Husserl, Nietzsche emerged as the philosopher of what we might call a phenomenological aesthetics, an aesthetic theory that exploited the principle of representational mimesis as a revelatory strategy for the essence of existence. In the writers of German Expressionism he found these blood relatives, a group of artists with the analytical and retrospective abilities to grasp and apply the metaphysical mimesis he advocated in this first work of modern aesthetic theory.

Throughout this essay, translations from the German are my own. To my way of thinking, this conception underestimates the special enchantment Nietzsche held for the Expressionist writers. The same can be said for the scientific or Socratic worldview. For Benn Nietzsche is the greatest genius of the German language; Frantz Clement calls Nietzsche the first patheticist of modernism Hillebrand, ; Richard Dehmel and Heinrich Mann revere him as a linguistic innovator Hillebrand, , ; and Otto Flake calls him the master of the German language Hillebrand, Materialien zu einer marxistischen Realismuskonzeption, — Bronner, Stephen Eric, and Douglas Kellner.

Manifeste und Dokumente zur deutschen Literatur —, 42— A Nietzschean Current in Literary Modernism. Nietzsche und die deutsche Literatur. Nietzsche und die deutsche Literatur: Texte zur Nietzsche-Rezeption, — Manifeste und Dokumente zur deutschen Literatur, —, — Manifeste und Dokumente zur deutschen Literatur, —, 3— The Expressionist Heritage, 3— The Expressionist Heritage, — Nietzsche und die deutsche Literatur, 35— Nietzsche und die Kunst. In Kritische Studienausgabe, 1: Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari. In Anz and Stark, Expressionismus: Manifeste und Dokumente zur deutschen Literatur —, 55— The Invention of Dionysus: Nietzsche, Aesthetics and Modernity.

Benn, Heym, Van Hoddis and Liechtenstein. Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung. The Politics of German Expressionism, — Monographien und Texte zur Nietzsche-Forschung, vol. Vietta, Sylvio, and Hans-Georg Kemper. Manifeste und Dokumente zur deutschen Literatur —, — The question is not only vague and ambiguous, but exceptionally difficult to answer, because we do not have criteria that would provide us with the necessary information to correctly pose the question. Indeed, there exists a general, albeit somewhat tentative, consensus of scholarly opinion that the works of writers published in avant-garde periodicals between and the early s may be termed Expressionist.

However, these are purely external and accidental criteria, conveying little about the shared formal, stylistic, and thematic characteristics of these writers. Nevertheless, they do provide a point of departure for subsequent study. Perhaps the question can be posed in this way: What are the inherent or formal characteristics shared by the many writers whose works appeared in avantgarde periodicals, book series, and anthologies between and or that would entitle us to call them Expressionist?

Would a characterization that would allow a comparison to Romanticism or Naturalism be preferable? Despite the fact that in these much longer and betterresearched literary movements terminological ambiguity still persists indeed, over-generalization is intrinsic to any definition of genre , the terms Romanticism and Naturalism are nevertheless based upon far more concise and accepted criteria than the constant vacillation found in the term Expressionism. In this essay, the question of what criteria would be most suitable to define Expressionism will be addressed, specifically in respect to a single literary genre, namely, narrative prose.

SOKEL a poetics of narration that would enable us to devise a coherent theory of Expressionist prose. Among the writers of Expressionism there was little theoretical reflection. It is therefore much more difficult to assess the theory of Expressionism than that of Romanticism or Naturalism. The wellknown commentaries of Kasimir Edschmid, Paul Kornfeld, and Georg Kaiser, among others, have virtually nothing to say about formal, stylistic, and structural aspects of Expressionist literature.

In the years between and he had already contributed many concrete and important ideas about Expressionist prose, so much so that we may use it as the basis for an Expressionist theory of epic prose. It is impossible to speak of a single coherent theory of narrative prose in Expressionism. In short, we meet with a multiplicity of theoretical points of view, and thus we must investigate further to discover a common denominator shared by the various theories of Expressionist narrative prose. However, this also aptly illustrates an important difference in their theories of narrative.

Psychological motivation, circumstantial determination, and causality cannot be ascribed to the genre of epic, which is based upon description and naturalistic representation. The nouveau roman is mentioned in this connection to underscore the fact that the two most prominent Expressionists start out from entirely different theories of prose. This tradition also includes Naturalism and Futurism, as well as Kafka and the nouveau roman.

In his opinion, Naturalism employed a very specific narrative technique, namely, the technique of direct or unmediated representation: Daher lautet mein Urteil: Ganz nett, aber auch sehr klischeehaft.

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Much to my surprise this year, the Christmas spirit hit me very early so I have been happily inhaling all the Christmas-themed books I can fit into my schedule and I was really looking forward to this from the teasers about Kara in the previous book. The end result was mixed feelings for me and I'll tell you why. Kara Hastings knows what it's like to be considered a flake. After a history of being unable to stick with anything, the time has come for her to show Briar Creek that she's found someth Much to my surprise this year, the Christmas spirit hit me very early so I have been happily inhaling all the Christmas-themed books I can fit into my schedule and I was really looking forward to this from the teasers about Kara in the previous book.

After a history of being unable to stick with anything, the time has come for her to show Briar Creek that she's found something that she loves. As a bold step, she quit her job and poured her inheritance from her father into her new bakery and while it's a lot of work, she loves what she is building. But this holiday season is especially tough because of the memories of her father and also the fact that she's now the only single person among her coupled-up friends.

The last place Nate Griffin expects to find himself in during the holidays is Briar Creek, but there he is, coerced into spending time with his aunt. To his surprise, there is an upside - the town baker Kara and he finds himself wanting to get to know her better. Even though their first meeting was not the best, things could surely only get better. Kara was my favorite part of this book because she embodies everything to love about the season.

She had a dream and had the courage to bring it to life. She was determined to make a success of her dream and even in the face of skepticism from her family and friends, she just kept on which was admirable. Her pride in her accomplishments shone through and her love for her father was undeniable. Nate on the other hand was Ebenezer Scrooge come to life. He was annoying, period. He just didn't want to relax and enjoy himself. He may have had good intentions, but his delivery was bad and it doesn't really matter to me that he came around in the end.

It was too little, too late. I was actually so upset about him that my original review was a full out rant and it took some time to get a better perspective to write this one. I have enjoyed this series very much and while this wasn't the best for me, I think Kara and the town of Briar Creek made it worth reading. I received this book for free from the Publisher in exchange for an honest review.

This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review. Subscribe to my Newsletter on The Sassy Bookster. Like my page on Facebook. Aug 07, Arlena rated it it was amazing Shelves: Christmas Comes to Main Street Author: Mass Market Paperback Series: Briar Creek 5 Reviewed By: Well it seems like Kara is the last sister that is not engaged since now her sister Molly has come home saying she is getting married to Todd. What was up with that since it seems that a year ago they had Title: What was up with that since it seems that a year ago they had broken up.

Now we have Nate who has come to Briar Creek to be with is aunt during this Christmas holiday but he wasn't to happy being there. Now, why was that? After Kara and Nate meet due to bumping into each other will they be able to form a friendship that could possibly lead to a HEA? This was a very good story of how each one of these two people will have something that they need to 'prove,' This story was so edifying as we see how hard Kara worked in her bakery when all she wanted was to prove to not only to herself but to others that she could stick with 'running her own bakery.

Even with all of that Nate had not really celebrated Christmas holidays like forever. So, when he arrives and his aunt is so excited wanting to win this contest that will involve his help and since its only him there since he had sent his parents on a cruise Nate was left with no choice but to help her out with this contest because she wanted to win.

But then the tables will turn because after talking to Kara he even gets her involved in this Christmas contest. Now, how will that involve him? To find out you will just have to pick up the good series to see for yourself how well this author will bring it all out to the readers. The characters will involve quite a few family members[many from past series] that will make this read so well developed, portrayed and believable giving the reader quite a interesting Christmas read where one may even like to visit this place called Briar Creek.

This novel is the fifth in this series and I am not sure if is this is the last but this one was truly one amazing sweet heart-warming romantic reads. Thank you to NOR for giving me this read for my honest opinion. Sep 21, Monique rated it liked it Shelves: September 21, Star Rating: I've been meaning to give Olivia Miles' Briar Creek series a try for ages now so when I saw this on Netgalley I jumped at the chance to give it a whirl.

And I am so glad I did! Christmas Comes to Main Street is book 5 in the series so there is obviously a lot I have missed and sometimes I wondered how Kara came across in the oth Review written: Christmas Comes to Main Street is book 5 in the series so there is obviously a lot I have missed and sometimes I wondered how Kara came across in the other books.

I felt she was very sympathetic in her own book, but there were hints that she might have played fast and loose with friends in previous books, especially since she is supposedly the flibbertigibbet who can't settle down and stick with anything. If she was in those books, then she redeemed herself beautifully here. If she wasn't and she just felt like the screw up, then she grew out of that and proved something to herself. Either way, Kara was a fun and sweet character who was determined to succeed at her dream.

I liked her sass but also her fear, her struggles to deal with her Mom and her disappointment with love.

Nate had the more powerful character arc, I think, but it was a bit cliched. He had to learn to ease up, take time to smell the roses, and figure out it was not all about the money. In fairness, I totally got why he was all about the money - a lack of a sense of security because of his childhood. I think his views of his parents needed to be re-adjusted into adult thinking but I totally got the little boy in him resenting it all.

And I loved how his aunt manipulated him into coming to Briar Creek. I loved how Kara, Nate's aunt, and one heck of a contest reawakened the magic and wonder of the season for Nate. I thought Kara's entry into the competition was the coolest thing and so in keeping the the sense of holiday in the book. Overall, this is a frothy and sweet holiday confection yes, complete with peppermint, Nate and very enjoyable. Nov 28, Hannah rated it really liked it. The main focus was on the two main characters and what was happening with them with a few side notes from another character which is setting up for her own book.

This was an absolutely adorable book. I love books like this because it plays out in my head like a Hallmark Christmas movie. You have the typical grinch type character Nate and a Christmas angel Kara, opposites attract I love it. Kara is doing something she has dreamed of doing, she has set up a cookie bakery in town and is now trying to prove to the whole town, especially her own mother, that she is not a fickle and that she will stick with it. Her biggest fear is failing, not only because will she lose something near and dear to her but it will prove the town right.

In Kara desire to prove herself she has over working herself for the Christmas holiday, between the everyday workings she has special order gingerbread houses, cookies order for her mother's ballet recital, and a massive order of cookies for the food drive for the needy families in the area. Nate is only visiting Briar Creek because he felt guilty for sending his parents on a cruise when they had originally to visit his aunt.

His Aunt Maggie runs the inn and is getting on in the years Nate agreed to visit and help out around the inn. Coming from a poor background he worked hard to make a lot of money, he's also very good at what he does. Christmas was never a good memory for him and he grew up resentful because it was never a special time for him with his family. But the little town of Briar Creek and a certain cookie maker has him rethinking everything about his life. Overall, this is probably one of my top favorite Christmas novels for the year. It made me cry and fill my heart with joy.

It's a great story for getting in the Christmas spirit and for a lovely romance. Sep 21, Mona rated it it was amazing. First this is an amazing series. Love in a small town.

As Kara Hastings follows her dreams on opening her bakery Sugar and Spice, and she's confident in her baking skills. But she's also new to business ownership. She wants to succeed. Plus make her dad happy and proud. It was also for him after his passing she did this. It's just when she meets Nate Griffin he does something to her insides. He makes her mad, and he makes her feel special.

Nate Griffin First this is an amazing series. It soon turns out to be a lot more. Old feelings are brought up by his Aunt, and a beautiful women. They're from two different worlds. He let's one thing his aunt tells him about her keep her at an arms lengflength. Well that's until he knows the truth. He misjudged her and feels like a heal. It's Christmas time and so much going on in town. A contest held ever year which can help two women Nate cares so deeply for. Love, loss, dreams and goals. Money as they say can't buy love. Puts you in a Christmas mood every time. I fell for the characters instantly and devoured their story in just a few short hours.

Christmas Comes to Main Street is a light, sweet romance. It has very little drama and is just one of those books that can't help but make you feel good and put a smile on your face. And I enjoyed every second of it. Jul 29, Nelle rated it really liked it Shelves: I received a complimentary copy from the publisher and Netgalley for review.

I got this today and zipped through It! I loved Kara from the past story and was eager to see what happens with her. I love a feel good, Christmas Romance! This hit all the right spots for me! Aug 12, Heather andrews rated it it was amazing. So konnte ich mir das Dorf Briar Creek direkt vorstellen und kann es gar nicht fassen, dass dieser Ort nur erfunden sein soll. Ihre Charaktereigenschaften wie die Zielstrebigkeit und Ehrgeizigkeit, mit der sie ihren Laden neuerdings wert, vermitteln einen sehr positiven Eindruck von ihr.

Dies muss man sich bei einer Liebesgeschichte bzw. Die Autorin hat hier nicht das Rad neu erfunden, aber es definitiv in eine unterhaltsame, sehr romantische und etwas kitschige neue Geschichte verpackt. Alles in allem hat mir die Geschichte von Kara und Nate sehr gefallen. Nov 20, Wendy rated it really liked it Recommended to Wendy by: Having sunk all her inheritance into the Sugar and Spice Bakery, Kara is determined to make it a success and is irritated by the city slicker who not only isn't easily charmed by the ho In "Christmas Comes to Main Street" which I won through Goodreads Giveaways Olivia Miles blends the flavor of peppermint and cinnamon, Christmas cookies and holiday celebrations with a romance that begins when Nate Griffin bumps into Kara Hastings making her late for her delivery to Main Street Bed and Breakfast.

Having sunk all her inheritance into the Sugar and Spice Bakery, Kara is determined to make it a success and is irritated by the city slicker who not only isn't easily charmed by the holiday festivities in a town that loves the Christmas season but continually makes suggestions for improvements in her business. Both with competitive spirits Kara accepts Nate's dare, never expecting that he'll captivate her heart as she melts his firm resolve not to get caught up in the town's Christmas atmosphere.

Set in the small town Briar of Creek Olivia Mills sets the stage with the smells and sounds of Christmas, a season that Nate detests because of the pain of his childhood. In contrast Kara loves the holiday season even though it brings the remembrance of a loss in her past and especially after using her all her savings to open a business which she's struggling to make successful. The two clash when they meet, Nate thinking her inheritance has given her an opportunity not earned, and Kara seeing him as privileged with his MBA, luxury car and apartment in Boston. But as their chemistry sparks friendship quickly turns to the healing balm of love.

Love blooms in the spirit of a season that's celebrated with snowman building and Holiday Home Contests, a Winter Festival, ice skating and a Nutcracker ballet. With a touch of humor and Christmas magic intertwined, the story heats up as pain in his past mars the enjoyment Nate finds in the present with Kara, wanting to run back to Boston and bury himself in work. Compelling as emotions are aroused with a bitter confrontation and harsh words that break her heart Kara seeks solace in work, but yearns for the man who's leaving her behind.

Woven into this delightfully romantic story that keeps you enthralled from beginning to the end are subplots like her sister Maggie's faltering engagement and Maggie Griffin's scheme to bring Nate to live in Briar Creek. Intense at times with Kara's mother's criticism and doubt that she'll succeed and Nate's fight not to let the season, town or Kara undermine his plans for his future, the plot moves swiftly and smoothly to a charming conclusion.

Kara Hastings who's skipped from job to job over the years and invested all her inheritance into her business is the talented and creative baker who wants to win the Holiday House Contest so she'll be able to have a financial cushion that will enable her to hire staff to help her. A perfectionist with a stubborn streak Kara is tenacious and hardworking, falling for a man who's just as conscientious and driven to succeed in all he does.

Nate Griffin a management consultant visiting his energetic and spirited Aunt Maggie over Christmas is smart, charismatic and arrogant. Haunted by his family's poverty, solitary and bullied at school Nate a workaholic who seems smug, cocky and defensive shows a kind and caring side to Maggie and Kara.

I liked "Christmas Comes to Main Street" a well-developed and tender love story loaded with heart that you can't put down until finished. Dec 18, Petra Sch. Das ging mir dann doch ZU schnell. Daher vergebe ich 4,5 Sterne. Es ist, wie ich gelesen habe, der letzte Band aus Briar Creek B. Ich habe ihn sehr gerne gelesen und mich sofort in die Weihnachtswinterwelt und die Hauptfiguren Kara und Nate verliebt. Kara ist in B. Damit hat der Weihnachtsmuffel, der in In Boston lebt, nicht gerechnet, denn in dem idyllischen Ort B. Wird die Weihnachtzeit wahrhaftig gelebt.

Tja und ist da auch noch die zauberhafte Kara, die ihm in seinem Kopf rumschwirrt. Dec 06, Jessica rated it really liked it. Very sweet and romantic. Also, the perfect book to read in December to get you in the holiday spirit. I liked the details of Kara running a bakery, and how excited the town of Briar Creek gets about Christmas reminds me of Stars Hollow! This novel takes you back to a yesteryear in your life.

Often people cannot see the good in front of them for the shadows of the past encroach ing Come join t h e good people of Briar Creek as they enjoy the weeks leading up to Christmas Day. Jan 02, Cat Bryson rated it really liked it. Oct 03, OpenBookSociety. Christmas Comes to Main Street Series: Briar Creek 5 By: The mistletoe is out, and the gloves are off. Sure, running her own bakery is a little harder than she expected, but she can handle http: Really that is all I have to say.

Okay…for a book review, I know I will need to say more. Well, the cover of course. I am a sucker for Christmas romance novels, but this cover was just simple elegance. Sometimes the understated is all that is needed. And as I read the story, this became abundantly clear. The story was easy to read, with a good flow, superb characters and a resolution that made me smile.

We begin with Kara working in her bakery thinking the following thoughts…then scolding herself as this is her dream…she wanted this: So this could be big for the Main Street Bed and Breakfast! Due to a run in literally , Kara and Nate meet. Unfortunately, the cookies did not survive. But there were sparks and as we say, the rest is history. As Nate and Kara get to know each other, Nate convinces Kara that she should also enter the Holiday House Contest great marketing strategy — so Nate says. My question early on of course was, but Kara does not own a house to decorate?

She could decorate her bakery, but this might interfere with the running of said bakery. How she came up with a solution was just brilliant. The progression of their relationship was slow and steady the way I like it. Of course, there were a few hiccups along the way, and I waited on pins and needles to see if these hiccups could be overcome. I especially liked it when the non celebrating Nate slowly comes around with respect to decorating for the holidays. The following passage really surprised me and made me swoon for Nate!

You get to know each main character and supporting characters are introduced as the main characters in another book. This last installment has definitely gotten me in a holiday mood. If you like holiday romances, then this book is for you. I look forward to the future and reading more books by Olivia Miles. Aug 20, Andra Weis rated it it was amazing.

The story was easy to read, with a good flow, superb characters and http: Oct 03, books are love rated it really liked it. I feel for Nate at the beginning. He is lonely and he is stuck being haunted with his past.

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His past defined him in so many ways. It made him determined to rise above his circumstances and make a better life for himself and his parents. It also made him fear that at anytime everything could be taken from him. He worked more so he could feel safe and secure but no matter how much he had saved he never felt safe or secure. He had moments from his childhood that hurt his views on Christmas and he h I feel for Nate at the beginning.

He had moments from his childhood that hurt his views on Christmas and he had too much pride at times. Despite this Nate was a very kind and caring man. He was smart and wanted to do what was right for everyone. He did realize though that in some ways he was selfish about some things. His past made him want to forget things and that in turn had him ignore the holidays even if they make his mom happy. She was scared but not because of her childhood but because she had no safety net.

She was out to prove everyone wrong. She worked hard and wanted everything perfect. She undersold herself and her talents. She too was also lonely but her childhood did not have her feel the holidays were to be bah humbug no she was just so busy trying not to fail that she let life pass her by. That is until Nate. Nate had Kare get discombobulated. As he was as well. She thought at first that he was arrogant and looked down on her. She realized over time that it was him trying to help her not show her her failures. I think this came from how her mom was towards her.

Her mom seemed to be a kind woman but she did seem overcritical and opinionated. Her mom was one who had to see everything perfect and her way. It was Nate that encouraged her and showed her she could do it.