A Third Antike: Hans Henny Jahnn’s Medea and the Introduction of the “Sumerian” to Modern German Literature

Abstract

The German writer Hans Henny Jahnn’s 1926 tragedy Medea mounts the Euripidean plot against an archaic Babylonian universe, foregrounding the role of Medea’s sons against the motif of Gilgamesh and Enkidu. Recognized as an important expressionist dramatist, Jahnn’s most important contribution, this essay argues, remains unacknowledged: Medea represents an apex of German literary modernism, as it resolves a constellation of overlapping and often contradictory impulses in twentieth-century German drama by introducing a “third stream,” which might be called the “Sumerian,” to reconcile two opposing strains in German-language letters, viz., Barock, with its fascination with excess, violence, and bombast, and Klassik, with its concern with harmony, wholeness, and aestheticism.