The Blue Flower Program: Understanding Maxperanto

During the Nazi regime in the 1930s and 40s, it was not uncommon for Germans fleeing oppression to choose to stop speaking German altogether, in part out of shame, in part out of protest. The fictional Blue Flower character Max Baumann takes it a step further. He stops speaking real language altogether. His reasons include and go well beyond political protest. It is a form of art for him, something like painting, a form of expression, a method for getting beyond words.

The inspiration for Maxperanto comes from two primary sources. First is the enthusiasm at the turn of the twentieth century for the idealistic notion of one-world-one-people commonality, like Franz Marc and Wassilly Kandinsky’s “Blaue Reiter” art movement/manifesto and the invention of the experimental universal language of Esperanto by L. L. Zamenhof (aka: Doktoro Esperanto, or “Dr. Hopeful”) in 1887, two years before the story of The Blue Flower begins. Max Baumann is in effect a child of the Esperanto Generation.

Second, and more importantly, Dada poets, writers and performers experimented with the abstraction of language in the same way and for the same purpose visual artists experimented with the abstraction of imagery: to reveal the “meaning behind the thing.” Abstract artists break images down to their component parts: shape and color. To reveal the meaning behind the words—”truth”—Dada poets broke language down to its component parts: sounds and syllables. Language had betrayed their generation, destroyed many of them, and they were going to start from scratch. Think of today’s massive marketing, cable news and political spin, and the response provided by Stephen Colbert’s “truthiness” factor. For Max Baumann, the meaning of what is uttered and the emotion in the utterance is more important than the words that are spoken.

—Jim Bauer