Around 1900, progressive responses to the bourgeois conservatism of the nineteenth century coexist with anti-modern reaction against the symptoms of modern capitalism and industrialization. Both give rise to protests against the status quo and generate a plethora of demands for cultural and social reform, in which elements of ‘radicalism’ and ‘traditionalism’ are often hard to separate.

Exploring the concepts of modernity championed in the modernist avant-garde as well as in less formally experimental guises, the essays collected here provide insights into the artistic expressions of protest discourses of the era and into the imaginative constructions of alternative social worlds. The chapters cover a wide range of topics, from the programmatic visions of artists’ colonies to Expressionist poetry, and from women’s fiction to Dada. However, all of the analyses collected here focus on the relationship between socio-political concerns and the aesthetic strategies employed in the literature of protest. As a collection, they allow a better understanding of the plurality of possibilities of artistic engagement in the late Kaiserreich.

James A. VAN DYKE: Radical Art History and the Art of Social Protest in Imperial Germany · Matthew JEFFERIES: ‘No Great Wall, No Protective Tariffs for our Art, No Chauvinistic Deutschtümelei’? Carl Vinnen’s Ein Protest deutscher Künstler Revisited · Arne OFFERMANNS: Ernst Lissauer: Religious Poetry between Bourgeois Left Liberalism and völkisch-Reactionary Thought · Valentina DI ROSA: Der Friedrichshagener Kreis und die Neue Gemeinschaft: Experiment und Krise zweier Künstlerkolonien der frühen Moderne · László V. SZABÓ: Die Krisis der europäischen Kultur: Rudolf Pannwitz’s Reformist Thinking between Nietzsche and Heraclitus · Hans HAHN: Dada: ‘eine Candide gegen die Zeit’ oder der ‘Zentralrat der Weltrevolution’? · Joela JACOBS: ‘Verbrechen wider die Natur’: Oskar Panizza’s First Encounter with Censorship · Eva AXER: ‘Zwischen Alt und Neu’: Arno Holz’s Buch der Zeit and his Concept of ‘soziale Lyrik’ · Charlotte WOODFORD: Protest in Women’s Fiction around 1900: Maria Janitschek’s Short Stories and Hedwig Dohm’s Christa Ruland · Godela WEISS-SUSSEX: Reformprogrammatik und Romanästhetik: Ruth Bré, Gabriele Reuter und Grete Meisel-Hess · Catherine SMALE: ‘Erwachende Frauen’: Grief as Protest in Expressionist Women’s Poetry from the First World War