Dialogue on the New-Toners

Hermann Hesse

The Early Works of Hermann Hesse 第 46 冊 · Marchen Press

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Poetry”, "Discussion on New Sounds" but here “Dialogue on the New-Toners”) is a short Socratic dialogue that dissects the clash between Germany’s post-war literary avant-garde and a complacent, newly enriched bourgeois public. “Neutöner” (literally: ‘new sound makers’) was a term used in German in the 1910s and 1920s to describe radical avant-garde artists who deliberately sought to create ”new sounds.” — composers such as Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern in the “New Music” movement, but also young expressionist and Dadaist poets who rejected traditional forms, dismantled language, and experimented with completely new structures of sound, rhythm, and meaning. The term thus generally referred to representatives of artistic modernism who ostentatiously broke with traditional norms. This work was first printed as a three-part article in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung (11 – 13 January 1920). This essay has also ben called "Discussion on the New Times". It was later expanded and reissued later that year in the pamphlet "Blick ins Chaos. Drei Aufsätze" (Bern: Verlag Seldwyla, 1920), together with two Dostoevsky essays. This edition is a translation of the updated and expanded German version and is not based on T.S. Elliot's simplified translation from 1920. It aims to be faithful to the original. T.S. Elliot first published an English translation of it in the first issue of his magazine “The Criterion” in October 1922, under the title “On Recent German Poetry.” Eliot also read Hesse's “Blick ins Chaos” in German and quoted it in his work “The Waste Land.” He visited Hesse in Montagnola, Switzerland. Eliot was instrumental in having Hesse's works translated into English and republished. The dialogue’s emphasis on psychoanalysis and the war-induced collapse of inherited ideals resonated with intellectual currents Eliot wished to track. In the same inaugural issue Hesse bluntly identifies Freud’s “psychology of the unconscious” as a new foundation for art; Eliot, who elsewhere mocked Freudianism, nevertheless recognised its diagnostic power and wanted his review to register such continental debates. This work is a dialogue between two speakers. One is named Kebes – a prosperous war profiteer who loves safe, uplifting classics (Schiller, Geibel) and wants rules for judging the “crazy” young poets- and the other Theophilos – his hired cultural tutor, ironic, intellectually agile, half-sympathetic to the rebels. He exposes Kebes’s insecurities and moral blindness, mocking his wish to buy “culture” as he bought grain and hides. Theophilos explains that the “Neutöner” (expressionists, dadaists, early modernists) deliberately break syntax, discard articles, collage ads into poems, and embrace incomprehensibility to reject the authority Kebes venerates. After a generation devastated by war, they dismiss idealism, art’s moral mission, and stable “high” culture. Their anarchic forms serve as protest and self-therapy, prioritizing raw, unconscious symbols over public elegance. Hesse connects this avant-garde impulse to psychoanalysis: the writers unmask repressed drives and attack norms but skip reconciliation with humanity. Kebes, unself-questioning, achieves neither.

關於作者

Herman Hesse (1877-1962) navigated a life shaped by psychological turbulence that fundamentally transformed his literary vision following his pivotal encounter with Carl Jung's analytical psychology. After suffering a severe breakdown in 1916 amid his crumbling first marriage and the ravages of World War I, Hesse underwent intensive psychoanalysis with Jung's student J.B. Lang and later with Jung himself, sessions that would profoundly alter his creative trajectory. This Jungian influence became evident in his subsequent works, particularly "Demian" and "Steppenwolf," where the protagonist's journey toward individuation—Jung's concept of integrating the conscious and unconscious aspects of personality—emerges as a central theme. Hesse's correspondence with Jung continued for decades, their intellectual relationship deepening as Hesse increasingly incorporated Jungian archetypes, dream symbolism, and the notion of the shadow self into his narratives of spiritual seeking. The writer later acknowledged that Jung's therapeutic methods had not only rescued him from psychological collapse but had fundamentally reshaped his understanding of human consciousness, enabling him to transmute his personal suffering into the allegorical quests for wholeness that characterized his most enduring works.RetryClaude can make mistakes. Please double-check responses.