The representation of a city in the lyrics of German expressionism

The article examines the representation of a city in the lyrics of German expressionism, the means of linguistic figurative representation of a city, which allows to see and comprehend the consequences of the industrialization of cities in the early twentieth century. The relevance of the study is dictated by the need to study the representation of a city as a key component in the linguistic worldview of the German expressionists. The goal is to find out what lexemes and with what literary devices of language the poets of expressionism expressed their attitude and vision of big cities. The material is the poems of German expressionism of 1910–1930 from the collection of poems “The Twilight of Humanity“ (German “Menschheitsdämmerung”) of 1919 year. 80 poems were studied, in particular the poems of Georg Geim, Georg Trakl, Alfred Deblin. The analysis is built according to the method of typological division of paradigms presented in the works of N.V. Pavlovich. To complete, the images of the city were identified in expressionist poetry on the basis of literary devices of language – comparisons, epithets, metaphors and determined the features of the participation of the lexem “city” as a component of figurative models. We came to the conclusion that the representation of a city in the lyrics of German expressionism associated with the lexemes “nature”, “color” and “destruction”, which shows the negative influence of the urban environment, the perception of city residents as an uncontrollable force like natural elements, and paradigms with flowers – this is a clear legacy of the original basis of expressionism – painting. Expressionists, whose vision was purely subjective, converged on many aspects of the urban image – the city is always painted in the same colors (black, gray and red), the poets shared the same feeling (fear) and were lost in metropolitan areas.