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German Modernism emerged from turn-of-the-century Aestheticism. Like European Modernism as a whole, German Modernism was in fact a cluster of different literary movements, including Expressionism, Neue Sachlichkeit (“New Objectivity”), and Dada. Of these, Expressionism is the best known and most important. Beginning about 1910 and reaching its culmination during World War I, Expressionism was a powerful response to the chaos and suffering of modern life. Georg Trakl, Georg Heym, and Gottfried Benn created terrifying images of war, urban life, oppression, and illness in their lyric poetry, and, although Trakl expressed a visionary mysticism in his battlefield scenes, Heym and Benn ...(100 of 17485 words)