Arno Holz

Arno Hermann Oscar Alfred Holz (26 April 1863 – October 1929) was a German naturalist poet and dramatist. He is best known for his poetry collection Phantasus (1898). He was nominated for a Nobel prize in literature nine times.

Life and Works

Holz was born in Rastenburg, East Prussia (now Kętrzyn, Poland), the son of pharmacist Hermann Holz and Franziska née Werner. The family moved to Berlin in 1875. After his schooling, Holz worked in 1881 as a journalist but chose a living as a freelance writer. He was beset with financial difficulties for much of his life. He established contacts with the Berlin naturalist club Durch where he met famed writer Gerhart Hauptmann. In 1885 his poetry collection, Buch der Zeit (book of time) won the Schiller Prize. Around this time, Holz was fascinated by Darwinism.

From 1888 onward Holz lived and worked together with translator and writer Johannes Schlaf. Together they developed a theory of "consistent naturalism" in their programmatic text, Art: its Nature and its Laws, wherein they aimed to provide art an exact description and incorporated colloquial elements. They tried, in their description, to eliminate subjectivity from art, to the extent it was scientifically possible, summarized in Holz's formula,

Art = Nature − x

where x is the materials needed to produce art. Ideally, art is to be as close to nature as possible, and it is the artist's responsibility to minimize x in this formula. Holz and Schlaf attempted to apply the theoretical postulate of "consistent naturalism" in their joint works, Papa Hamlet and Die Familie Selicke, plays published under the pseudonym Bjarne P. Holmsen (premiered 1890 in Berlin and Madeburg). The demand that art should be an accurate reproduction of reality lead to new experimental modes of expression – for example, the "second by second style" (German: Sekundenstil) in which social deprivation is described in exact minute detail in real time. Reception of Papa Hamlet was quite varied. Most critics deplored it, but others, including Theodor Fontane, found it contained high artistic value.