EN
The paper intends to show the disillusion of exotic projections onto the South Seas by Bertold Brecht and Robert Műller, as well as similarities and differences in how Carl Einstein and Gottfried Benn deal with Lucien Lévy-Bruhl ś idea of mystical participation in their writings. Brecht ś early piece of work Tahiti is a metaphor of escapism. Later on in the 1920s the trend towards this motif of the South Seas became a target of satire. Robert Műller ś novella Das Inselmädchen tells us about the failure of trying to understand genuinely the archaic world of the South Seas. Einstein emphasizes the autonomy of primitive art and tries to interpret ethnographically its sculptures. Benn uses linguistics material of scientific books about the South Seas to evoke the transcendent “you” that has been lost in modernism.