Expressionism owed much to Georg Büchner. As Paul Celan suggested in his speech ‘The Merdian’ (1960), part of Büchner's attraction may well have come from the general questions about literature he raised. Büchner's play Danton's Death (1835) in particular, a tragedy depicting an activist's disillusionment with the French Revolution, found a sympathetic reader in Celan. Drawing our attention to the apparently benign character Lucile – Celan calls her ‘die Kunstblinde’ (the one incapable of seeing art) – he quoted the peculiar retort this character utters in the midst of a heated discussion about aesthetics and political revolution: ‘Long live the King!’ This seemingly misplaced and reactionary outcry, Celan contended, can be read as ‘a counterstatement … that severs the “wire,” that refuses to bow before the “loiterers and parade horses of history.” It is an act of freedom.’ A singular patch within the play, it fractures and at once defines its literary context, momentarily spinning a referential web that surges in all directions. This web makes the reader in turn somewhat of a ‘Kunstblinde’. Where and when indeed do such political citations topple from the literary language game into that of politics and vice versa? Are we not all at some stage blind to literature, taking it for something else?

Similar questions surface upon reading Paul van Ostaijen. Poet, prose writer, art critic and political commentator, Van Ostaijen was almost single-handedly responsible for the breakthrough of expressionism in Flanders, the predominantly Dutch-speaking part of Belgium. Like many experimental modernists coming from cultural and linguistic minorities, including the unparalleled Hugh MacDiarmid in Scotland and the extravagant Catalan experimenter Salvat-Papasseit, Van Ostaijen never left any doubt about the local geopolitical stakes invested in his work.