The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Play on jokes and rants with five interruptions by Gerhart Hauptmann
Performance at the Deutsches Theater, Berlin

"Schluck und Jau." This much-disputed "Spiel zu Scherz und Schimpf" by Gerhart Hauptmann, which has just been published by S.Fischers Verlag (Berlin) and performed at the Deutsches Theater, will be discussed in the next issue of this magazine. Our judgment differs so much from what has been heard so far, pro and con, that we can only hope to be heard when the agitated tempers have calmed down somewhat.

"And do not take this coarse little piece for more than an unconcerned whim child," says the prologue speaker, who is "a hunter with the hip horn, through a divided curtain of green cloth, as it were, in front of the hunting party, to whom, as is assumed, the following piece is played in the banqueting hall of a hunting lodge." I believe that such a clear expression of his intentions must be respected in a poet. One would be wrong to expect a profound philosophy of life from a play written for the above purpose. What poet would waste such a philosophy if he thought of a "hunting party" as spectators and, moreover, had his prologue speaker address them thus: "Let it please you, dear hunters, that sometimes this curtain opens and reveals something to you - and then closes. Let your eyes glide over it, if you do not prefer to look into the cup." As a spectator, I am therefore entitled to put my own brain aside for once and to insert that of a member of a princely hunting party into my cranial cavity. I have the interests, thoughts and opinions of Prince Jon Rand, and it is very well calculated for my understanding when Karl, my "thinking" comrade, shares his philosophy of life with me. Jau, the drunkard, has been awakened from his intoxication in a princely bed; he has been dressed in princely clothes and then told that he is a prince and not a walking rascal. Charles undertakes this maneuver to amuse his prince. He then instructs him:

"Take this dress off him, this colorful embroidered one,
So he slips into the rags again,
Which now tied into a small bundle
The castellan keeps. Dress remains dress after all! His is a little more flimsy,
But just and fitted to his body.
And since it is from the same witness
Like dreams - his as good as ours, Jon!
And we are no closer to the things that surround us here
Are no closer than dreams, and
No closer than the stranger Jau -
So he rescues from our junk heaven
Much less than we into his realm
Of lowliness. How? What, are we more
? More than naked sparrows? More than this Jau? I do not think so! What we really are,
Is little more than what it really is -:
And our best happiness is soap bubbles.
We form them with our heart's breath
And swarm after them in the blue air,
Until they burst: and so does he.
He will be free in the future as before,
To pursue such eternal arts."

The ancient wisdom that the differences between people are based only on appearances, that something completely new is revealed to us as the essence of man when we awaken from the dream of life for a while, something that is in every man, be he prince or beggar - this not exactly profound but nevertheless true wisdom is presented here as it fits into the brain of a man like Karl. And the type of person who takes such things, which others have long since relegated to the category of the most banal matters of course, seriously and expresses them with importance, is wonderfully met. We know him, the count, who recites a few trivialities from a catechism on Indian philosophy with an expression as if he had gone to school with Buddha himself. This philosophizing salon hero of Gerhart Hauptmann's is excellently designed. Nietzscheanism has also found such philosophizing counts today. I knew one myself who always carried around the small edition of "Zarathustra" in a cute little booklet in his trouser pockets. In the other pocket, the count's thinker carried an equally well-equipped small edition of the Bible. He seemed to be of the opinion that the teachings of the "Book of Books" could be perfectly confirmed by the sayings of Zarathustra and that Nietzsche was only mistaken if he thought he was an anti-Christian philosopher. Why should it not give Karl, who is the child of such a mind, a terrible pleasure to make it clear to his comrade that it is only the veil of Maja that lets us find a difference between beggar and king, and that a beggar, if he is only put in the position of being king for a day, will play his part just as well as the born prince?

Hauptmann, however, seems to lack the humor that would be necessary to pull off the whole farce. He is a contemplative nature. He lays souls bare in a wonderful way. The two ragamuffins Schluck and Jau, with their riff-raff philosophy and servile lifestyle, are wonderfully drawn. Hauptmann's psychological subtlety is evident in every stroke with which he characterizes these two types. As a result, the beginning and end of the play are excellently done: the scene that shows us the two drunken rags on the green plan in front of the castle, and the other, at the end, that shows them after they have passed their adventures in the castle and have been thrown back onto the street.

The situation is different with what lies in between. This is where a dramatic cartoonist should have developed his art. Hauptmann's talent fails in this area. The irresistible comedy, which alone would be appropriate here, is probably not his thing. The actual farce therefore appears dull and colorless. Shakespearean style was the aim. But it is only half achieved everywhere. This also indicates what seems to be questionable about this play. It does not reveal any of its character. One is reminded of so much without feeling fully compensated by what is new in invention and treatment. We would have preferred less Shakespeare and more Hauptmann.

I apologize that I did not quite succeed in engaging a princely hunting party brain, but that my own asserted itself so obtrusively.

A German comedy by Otto Ernst
Performance at the Königliches Schauspielhaus, Berlin

A significant success of this comedy was reported from several places. Here at the Königliches Schauspielhaus it has also achieved such a success. Otto Ernst has met the mood of the vast majority of the theater audience in the most alarming way. What could be more plausible for this audience than that his thinking, feelings and intentions are excellent, uniquely and solely socially acceptable, and that only ridiculous, silly intellectuals can find fault with the solid attitude of the true bourgeoisie. The young doctor Hermann Kröger belongs to such a solid bourgeois family. His father is a philistine of the type often found in official positions. These people are so "normal" in spirit that they need little, and they have crossed the line where imbecility begins. Once they have crossed this line, they are retired. The mother is accordingly. She loves her children like "good" women love their children, and she provides the meals. Hermann Kröger has become a capable doctor; he has even already discovered his "bacillus". His younger brother is still at grammar school. He wants to be an "individuality". We learn of the way in which he strives to become one, that he consists of strolling and carousing, because those who "oxen" are for him the "far too many", the average people. During his student days, Hermann Kröger got to know a real Nietzsche giger, Erich, who was just living it up. This kind of silly person doesn't just exist among the "youth of today". They are people who have nothing to do, know nothing and don't want to learn anything - in fact, they are quite inferior. They pick up some philosophical phrases that are in themselves quite indifferent to them, but which are supposed to make their hollow skulls appear to be filled with deep knowledge. Among the people they meet in life are also those who fall for them. Hermann Kröger is taken in by Erich. He is in danger of being converted to superhumanity by a raghead. However, he is cured at the right time and enters the harbor of a proper, good marriage. In recent years, the word "comedy" has taken on a new meaning. In Otto Ernst's play, its good old meaning has been restored. What else is going on in the play serves the main tendency: the "solid" philistinism is a splendid world view in comparison to the folly of a part of modern youth draped in Nietzschean and Stirnerian phrases. There is not much to this tendency. It is banal. But there is no reason to criticize comedy for the sake of this tendency. However, the dramatic realization should lift the trivial content into a better sphere. The style here is no better than that of "War in Peace", "Rape of the Sabines" and so on. The characterization is of that hurtful kind which paints the colors by which we are to understand the peculiarities of the characters in thick complexes; the events follow each other as if there were no such thing as a logic of facts. It is true that we can do without this in comedy, but then there is only one means of transforming the impossible into something instantly enjoyable for our imagination: wit. It was not at the poet's side when he wrote the comedy.

Play in four acts by Georg Reicke
Performance at the Berliner Theater, Berlin

One of the most appealing phenomena of contemporary dramatic art is undoubtedly Georg Reicke's play "Freilicht", which was recently performed at the Berliner Theater. We are dealing here with a poetic personality whose merits can easily be overlooked. However, the more one lovingly immerses oneself in this creation, the more these merits appear before one's soul. The woman who is seized by the modern quest for personal liberation, who is therefore alienated from the circles in which she was born and brought up, and who has to carve out her own path in life through pain and privation: she has often been the subject of dramatic poetry. She is also the subject of Reicke's drama. But this poet has something over those who have dealt with the same subject matter. He is a more intimate observer. That is why he does not, like so many others, jump from observation to the tendentious intensification of the problem, the thesis. There is still much in women's souls today that resists the intellectual grasp of the idea of freedom. A long-standing cultural inheritance has laid sentiments on the foundation of this soul that cling like a lead weight to the bold idea of women's liberation. It is precisely those women who want to know nothing of such sentiments, who believe that they carry an absolute consciousness of freedom within them, who appear to the more discerning observer today like dishonest female poseurs. The deeply honest, true female characters have to struggle with a strong skepticism of feeling. A shattering tragedy of the heart is their perception of the full need for freedom. One must have very fine organs of observation in order to perceive the mental imponderables at work within such a woman, who strives towards freedom not out of program but out of her nature, out of the shackles forged by traditional social views. Georg Reicke has such organs of observation. Every trait in the characterization of his Cornelie Linde is psychological truth, and none is tendency.

It is very easy to observe that poets who want to be modern may represent new ideas, but that at the core of their being, in their actual attitude, they are no different from the philistines they mock. They are philistines of the new, just as the others are philistines of the traditional. Reicke is fundamentally different from such poets. There is not a trace of philistinism in him either. That is precisely why he faces things objectively, as a true artist. This is the reason why the man he contrasts with Cornelie, the painter Ragnar Andresen, has become such a splendid figure. A true confessor of freedom, a man for whom this confession is as natural as a physical driving force. You will have to look a long time before you find such a pose-less personality among modern dramatic types.

And just as true as these modern figures are those of a culture that has grown old. The privy councillor family from which Cornelie has grown out of, the lieutenant Botho Thaden, to whom she is engaged and from whom she breaks away in order to flee to her congenial Ragnar: everything is clearly true. Nowhere is there any other tendency than to make the characters of life appear comprehensible. Nowhere the false juxtaposition of the excellent new and the evil old. But everywhere the awareness that the new has naturally developed from the old, that this new must still bear the traits inherited from the old. Not just justification of the future, but also an understanding of the past.

Such characters are set in a plot that has nothing of the dramatic developments that are often made in this way and also nothing of the surprising scenic twists. This plot unfolds in the same way that life unfolds in a series of twists and turns. Almost every moment we have the feeling that everything could turn out differently. It is the same in life. Necessity certainly prevails everywhere, but it is precisely this necessity that is the faithful sister of chance. Afterwards we say to ourselves: everything had to turn out this way; beforehand we only have the perspective of countless future possibilities. This is present in Reicke's work in the form of a fine poetic artistry. There are no grotesque surprises in his drama, but there is also no embarrassing foresight of the outcome, which so often appears to us in poetry as an untruth of life.

Reicke's atmospheric painting is particularly appealing. With simple, discreet means, he presents us with the Munich painter's studio in which Cornelie breathes the air of freedom; and with equally simple means, he embodies the milieu of Berlin's secretive domesticity.

A free view of reality, unclouded by prejudice, confronts me in this poet. A gaze that grasps the exterior of life's processes just as vividly as the phenomena taking place within the human soul. We are dealing with a man who does not need bright colors, strong lights and shadows to say what he has to say. We are dealing with a connoisseur of the transitions in appearances. Georg Reicke is a realistic poet, at the same time with that trait of idealism that life itself has.

A masked play in four acts by Rudolf Lothar
Performance by the Viennese Deutsches Volkstheater at the Deutsches Theater, Berlin

Examining a "mask play" for its dramatic necessities like a serious drama seems to me to be on the same level as an anatomist examining a caricature for its anatomical correctness. I wouldn't say this if it weren't for the fact that critics who come to mind have behaved in this way towards Rudolf Lothar's "King Harlequin". Above all, one thing has become clear to me. We have here a drama in which humor lives in the very best sense of the word. Prince Bohemund returns to his parents' house after an absence of ten years. His arrival coincides with the hour of his father's death. His father was a terrible king to the kingdom. His brother Tancred was an even worse chancellor. The queen wept herself blind over the misfortune of her poor country. Nor can she expect anything good from Bohemund as her successor. He lacks any seriousness. He has only traveled the world to amuse himself. Instead of allies, he brings a troupe of actors with him. Harlequin copies the prince himself with great skill. When something goes wrong in the prince's gallant adventures, so that a beating is imminent, Harlequin has to put on the royal mask and take the beating instead of his master. Columbine, another member of the troupe, is supposed to pass the prince's time with her feminine charms. But Harlequin loves Columbine and is terribly jealous of his master. Just at the moment when the old king gives up the ghost, this jealousy leads Harlequin so far that he murders the prince. Now his skill in copying his master comes to his aid. He puts on the prince's mask, declares himself to be the prince and claims that he has killed Harlequin. So Harlequin becomes king. He, who is used to playing only on boards that mean the world, is supposed to play a role in the real world. And he can't manage that. He wants to be a real king. He comes up against Tancred's resistance, who sees the king as nothing more than the will-less fulfillment of the idea of kingship. It is not the king who should rule, no, this abstract idea should rule, and the person is indifferent. The actor can play people: His play rests on the belief that the people who serve as models for his characters are real people. Because he thinks he can maintain this belief when he enters reality, he is impossible in this reality. Tancred decides to have him assassinated in order to place a less-than-perfect royal scion on the throne. Harlequin returns to his life as an actor after he has shown the court the experiences he had during his days as king in a light-hearted play, once again disguised as Harlequin. The idea of kingship is filled out with the not fully sensual sprout.

This is not a bitter satire, but a humorous poem. The poet understands the necessities of life and describes them without pessimism; but he finds the humorous mood that alone makes it possible to get over the pessimism. Rudolf Lothar has happily avoided a pitfall. The obvious thing to say was: "A comedian can teach a king." Fritz Mauthner thinks this is better. Harlequin could have grown with his higher purposes; he, as a comedian, could have surpassed a Tancred in true wisdom and humanity. It seems to me that Lothar's basic dramatic idea is deeper. For Harlequin is not an impossible king because he is incapable of being king, but because he is capable. He does not fail because he could not teach a king, but because teaching is impossible.

The only possible mood that this thought can bear is the humorous one. A tragic outcome would be unbearable. Just think: Harlequin goes down because he wants to play king and can't! That would not be tragic, but ridiculous. But an actor who realizes that he can't be king because, as the representative of an abstract idea, he would have to give up the content of his personality, and who runs away when he realizes this: that seems humorous.

Whoever wants a tragedy instead of Lothar's drama wants a different drama. But such a person does not consider that Lothar's Harlequin is not taking on a mission, but a role. He believes that only on the stage is meaning the main thing. He must experience that this should also be the case in life. In the play he can tolerate meaning, but not in life. So away to the scene where meaning is in its place. Harlequin wants to mean something, if he only has to appear with the pretension of meaning something; but if he has to mean something with the pretension of being it, then meaning becomes unbearable for him.

Lothar's characters are as full of life as humorous figures can be. You can't do without exaggeration in such characters. But the exaggerations have to embody the idea in a meaningful way. We are happy to tolerate an enlarged nose in the drawing of a personality as soon as we are aware that this enlargement of the nose is a characteristic that we arrive at when we allow the characteristic that the enlargement of the nose serves as a sign of to come to the fore in our perception.

I have to say about the performance that I found Mr. Kramer splendid in the leading role (Harlequin), considering the difficulty of making the transition from a real Harlequin to an acted King comprehensible. Although I have seen Ms. Albach-Retty in roles that she plays better, I would like to give her full credit this time as well for her execution of the task, which gave the impression of being finely toned. I would also like to pass the best judgment on the direction; there was impeccable interplay and successful stage sets.

A tragedy by Otto Borngräber with a foreword by Ernst Haeckel
Review and subsequent critique of the performance at the Altes Theater, Leipzig

It is a risk that Otto Borngräber has taken with his Giordano Bruno tragedy. He will - I fear - experience many disappointments. I wish I were wrong. But I doubt that our time will have the impartiality to follow the intentions of this playwright. We live in an era of small perspectives. And Otto Borngräber has dramatized a man with the greatest possible perspective. Despite the celebrations that were held in February of this year in honor of Giordano Bruno, despite the dithyrambic articles that have been written about him, I do not believe that the audience for this "superman of a different kind", as Ernst Haeckel calls him in his preface to the drama, is a particularly large one. For I cannot believe in the inner truth of this Giordano Bruno cult. One experiences symptoms that are too characteristic of the petty way of thinking of our time. I confess that it is downright depressing for me to observe one of these symptoms now in the fight against Ernst Haeckel's recently published book "Die Welträtsel". How often does one have the opportunity to perceive the joy creeping out of the most hidden corners of the souls of our contemporaries at the attacks that could be heard from the theological side against Haeckel's struggle for the new world view. A church historian in Halle, Loofs, no doubt believes that he has taken the cake among the opponents of Haeckel with his brochure "Anti-Haeckel", which has now appeared in several editions. He has found that some chapters in Haeckel's book violate ideas that church history has currently formed about the connection between certain facts. In the chapters in question, Haeckel based himself on the book by an English agnostic, Stewart Ross, which was published in German under the title "Jehovas gesammelte Werke". This book is little known in Germany. Most readers of Haeckel will only have learned of his existence from the "Welträtseln". This was also the case for Loofs. In his "AntiHaeckel", he has now subjected it to a critique from the point of view of today's "enlightened" Protestant church historian. This criticism is devastating. What today's biblical criticism, historical research into the Gospels and other church-historical sources have established as "facts", Ross has gravely sinned against. Loofs cannot do enough in his condemnation of the book. He calls it a book of shame, inspired by ignorance of church history and a blasphemous way of thinking. Unfortunately, one can now see that he has made an impression on a large circle of educated people with his judgment. One can hear it repeated ad nauseam that Haeckel was "fooled" by the writing of the English ignoramus.

All these judgments from the mouths of "educated people" prove only one thing to me. There is something uncomfortable about Haeckel's world view. Out of vague feelings, they prefer the old Christian dogma to the modern view of nature. But this view has too good a reason for it to be easy to fight against it. The facts on which Haeckel relies speak too clearly. One forgives oneself too much if one openly closes oneself off against this world view. This does not prevent one from feeling a deep sense of satisfaction when a theologian comes along and proves Haeckel's dilettantism in church history. One is in a position to pass a negative judgment on the new world view, as it were from behind. One does not openly confront the monism of the great natural scientist. That would require courage. You don't have that. But you can make up your own mind: a man like Ernst Haeckel, who falls so naively for the ignorance of Stewart Ross, cannot shake us deeply in our ideas. Loofs himself does not hold back with a similar judgment. He even removes Haeckel from the list of serious scientific researchers because he relies on a book that is supposedly as "unscientific" as Ross's.

But take a look at this book. Anyone who reads it without bias will - I dare say - not be astonished enough at the deep inner untruthfulness of Loofs' criticism. For, according to this, he must absolutely believe that he is looking at the writing of a frivolous man who is not interested in truth, but in mocking convictions that are sacred to millions of people. Instead, he is presented with the book of a profound man, whose every sentence makes you feel a tremendous struggle for the truth, who has obviously been through crises of the soul of which people like Loofs have no idea in the comfortable cushion of their church history. A holy zeal for human welfare and human happiness has inspired a personality here to speak out in anger against traditional prejudices, which he considers to be a human misfortune. We are not dealing with a reckless denier, but with an indignant man who wields the scourge because he believes the truth to be distorted by Pharisees.

I need the background of this fact to justify, by a remarkable symptom, the doubts I have expressed above as to the receptivity of the public to Borngräber's tragedy. I can only say once again: I hope that I am thoroughly mistaken and that what Haeckel says at the end of his preface will come true: "We can only express the heartfelt wish that this great tragedy, which is completely in tune with our times, may not only find a wide readership as an ennobling and exciting book, but may also find the appreciation and effect it surely deserves by being performed soon on a larger German stage."

I do not believe that the drama will find mercy before the judgment seat of those aesthetes who have become entrenched in their views over the last two decades. Those who consider the dramatic technique of the "moderns" to be the only possible one will not pass a particularly favorable judgment on "The New Century". Borngräber's technique, with its tendency towards decorative beauty and stylization, will not stand up to either the naturalistic or the symbolist-romantic forum of recent years. Anyone who goes deeper, however, will enjoy this stylization, which dramatizes a Renaissance hero with undisguised pleasure in Renaissance-like forms. I believe I recognize in Borngräber a poet who has kept his taste away from the sympathies and antipathies of the day. For his artistic form he presupposes an audience whose delight in the beauty of form has not been entirely lost in the inclinations of contemporary taste. I do not mean to say that I am an unreserved lover of drama in an aesthetic sense. I do not think that Borngräber is already a master of the style he has chosen. But all this seems to me to take a back seat to the great worldview perspective that is expressed in the work. It will not be a question of whether Borngräber has delivered an impeccable tragedy to the aesthetic judges of this or that direction, but whether there is a tendency for the great world view, of which the martyr burned in Rome three centuries ago is the first representative, to be transferred from an elite of spiritual fighters to a larger crowd.

Whoever is capable of feeling with Bruno's world perspective can alone have a feeling for the tragic violence that expresses itself in this personality. This tragedy lies in the relationship that Bruno's personality has to the upheaval of the world view brought about by men like Copernicus and Galileo. Copernicus and Galileo provided the building blocks for the world view that has been developed over the last few centuries. Bruno was one of those who, with a far-sighted vision of the future, outlined the effects that Copernicus' and Galileo's ideas would have on the view of human nature. He spoke truths for which only the first actual germs were present. He did so at a time when these germs did not yet have the capacity to grow into a world view. Borngräber subtly contrasts Galileo's figure with Bruno's. Galileo is not a tragic personality, although he is indisputably the one to whom we owe more than Bruno when we look at the building blocks that make up our world view. I can completely imagine Bruno out of the development of the spirit in the last centuries. Even without his having anticipated at the turn of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the thoughts that fill me today, they could still be exactly the same as they are. The same is not the case with Galileo. Without Galileo there would be no Newton, without Newton there would be no Lyell and Darwin, and without Lyell and Darwin there would be no modern scientific world view. Without Giordano Bruno there would be none of this. Galileo did not go beyond what his physical foundation absolutely compelled him to do; Bruno proclaimed things that a personality with Galileo's mindset can only claim for himself today. Therein lies Bruno's profound tragedy.

While reading Borngräber's book, I couldn't help but think of a lone fighter of our time, the brave Eugen Reichel. He has placed a personality from the sixteenth century before our eyes, in whom we find the tragedy realized in a completely different sense, for which Borngräber presents Giordano Bruno as a representative. According to Reichel's conviction, a man died in 1586 who viewed the world as we do today and whose memory has so far been completely erased from the memory of mankind.

Reichel is of the opinion that Shakespeare's plays and Baco of Verulam's "Novum organon" reveal a powerful, brilliant personality to those who look deeper, who is equally great as a poet and thinker, but who has died in oblivion without being understood by the rest of the world. Just as Shakespeare's dramas lie before us, they are not the work of their original genius creator, but rather the result of mutilation, amateurish additions and reworking of his legacy. Likewise, the "Novum organon" in the form in which it has come down to us is a work in which two spirits can be sensed: an original, Copernican view of nature, who at the end of the sixteenth century was already living in the world view whose construction was completed by the three that followed, and a bungling scholastic. Baco of Verulam was this bungling personality. He appropriated the legacy of the forgotten genius, "reworked" it in the manner indicated, handed over the philosophical under his name, the dramatic under the name of the Stratford actor Shakespeare to his fellow and posterity. Today I am still unable to form a judgment on this great question to which Reichel has given his energies. Suppose one could agree with Reichel: then, in the sixteenth-century genius he sees behind the works of Bacon and Shakespeare, a figure of the deepest tragedy is revealed to us. From a Bruno tragedy translated into the immeasurable. Bruno killed a hostile power. His work could not destroy it. Aware that his enemies were more afraid of this work than he was of their judgment, he departed from life. The lack of judgment of his contemporaries destroyed the work of the English genius; it not only killed him physically, it killed him spiritually. Eugen Reichel dramatized this tragedy in broad strokes in his "Meisterkrone". Unlike Borngräber, he did not poetically depict a real, historical event, but based it on a symbolic plot. This undoubtedly broadens the perspective for those who are able to feel the tragedy of the personality in question. Borngräber's work does bring the tragic problem in question closer to a wider audience.

Borngräber's drama is soon to be performed in Leipzig by a circle of friends of the work. May it be followed by others, and may our theaters (in Berlin) soon make the effort to open their doors to the Bruno tragedy. They can then fulfill a beautiful task in the great struggle for the "new faith". "The tremendous struggle between 'the old and the new faith', between church religion and spiritual religion, between spiritual bondage and spiritual freedom, which is just now ushering in 'the new century', confronts us grippingly in Borngräber's poetry" (E. Haeckel in the foreword). Worthy performances of this drama could make a significant contribution to the understanding of this struggle. If the stage is to give a picture of the world, it must not exclude itself from the highest thing there is for people in this world, from spiritual needs.

We experienced a beautiful festive evening in Leipzig on July 7, 1900 with the performance of Otto Borngräber's Giordano tragedy "The New Century". I will return in the next issue to the successful performance, which brought us an outstanding performance by the Dresden court actor Paul Wiecke (as Giordano Bruno).

It was a wonderful celebration of the monistic world view that we attended on July 7 at the Altes Theater in Leipzig. What I have to say about Otto Borngräber's drama can be found in this weekly magazine. It was no easy task that the Dresden court actors Paul Wiecke and Alice Politz undertook with the artists of the Weimar Theater. But it was all the more rewarding. The solution can be described as a successful one for the time being. The great figure of Giordano Bruno, who appears as a symbol of a world view confident of victory, which has taken up the fight against darkness and the blind belief in revelation, was given a worthy portrayal by Paul Wiecke. Otto Borngräber and all those who represent his cause can welcome with gratitude the fact that their hero has found this portrayer. Paul Wiecke appears all the more significant the more important the tasks he is given. He found the right tone for the middle ground that had to be maintained here, between realism, which as an artistic companion necessarily belongs to the monistic world view, and that monumental art which is aware that through it a world view is expressed on which the stamp of the eternally effective is imprinted. The weight of this world view was exquisitely expressed in Paul Wiecke's noble and measured playing. The tones that the artist was able to strike were both heart-warming and majestic. Alice Politz's portrayal of the noble Venetian lady, who embraces the new teaching with a devoted soul, was excellent. The drama and the circumstances under which the performance took place probably posed no small challenges for the director. The director Grube from the Weimar Court Theater masterfully mastered these difficulties. He deserves special thanks from those who enjoyed the festive performance without reservation. Space does not permit us to mention more than a few names of others who have rendered outstanding services to the good cause. - We single out Mr. Krähe (Thomaso Campanella), Mr. Berger (Jesuit Lorini), Mr. Franke (bookseller Ciotto), Mr. Niemeyer (Protestant jailer and Perrucci). The Leipzig student body has rendered outstanding services to the presentation of the folk scenes. We left the theater with full satisfaction and only realized something of the merits that some had earned "behind the scenes" at the after-party. Of course, the fleeting evening did not give us a full insight. But we would still like to remember one man: Burgs, whose satisfied expression at the post-performance celebration did not completely erase the worry lines that the previous days' preparatory work had caused him. The proceeds of the performance are intended for the benefit of the writers' home in Jena.

With respect to our Burgtheater art
Performance at the Burgtheater, Vienna

As gratifying as it generally is when the management of our Burgtheater remembers from time to time that an art institute of the first rank has the duty to present the works of its greatest poets to the German people, we cannot congratulate them on the revival of "The Maccabees". We do not fail to recognize that we are dealing here with the creation of a true and genuine poet, we know that traces of a tremendous talent are evident everywhere: but as a drama the "Maccabees" are weak, and on the stage they do not make a real impact. It is characteristic of Otto Ludwig's character that he wanted to turn a material into a drama that could not be more unfavorable for this purpose. The spiritual direction of Judaism is inaccessible to actual tragedy. The religious Jew has no ideas or ideals. He lives for a God who remains an inanimate, thoughtless abstraction to him. The Jew lacks all understanding for the real world of the immediate present, from which the tragic conflicts and actions arise. This is why Otto Ludwig, for all his masterly characterization, which we have to admire in his "Maccabees", was unable to deepen a single figure into a truly captivating tragedy. He was even less able to depict a dramatic development and plot. These are only possible where the spiritual nature, the world of ideas intervene directly in reality, where man also loves what he strives for, where he is passionately devoted to what he recognizes and reveres as the highest. The Jew fights for a God whom he does not know, whom he does not love. He does not act; he obeys slavishly. The life turned towards the unknown Jehovah and alien to reality therefore also causes interest in the latter to die. And so there is a lack of the richness of life that the drama needs. Every dramatic motif is soon worn out, for it loses its significance when it has fulfilled its task of glorifying Jehovah: it must be replaced by a new one. With this, however, all organic development comes to an end. A monotonous, inconsistent basic idea dominates the whole, next to which the real events appear arbitrary, without inner coherence. This was the case with Otto Ludwig's "Maccabees". The plot is disjointed, arbitrary, without an inner organic structure. New motifs have to be conjured up again and again in order to continue the stalled development. We first see how Leah, the wife of the Jewish priest Mattathias, is insatiably ambitious to bring the service of Jehovah into the hands of her descendants and how this ambition completely dominates her. Of her seven sons, Judah is a kind of hero who devotes his whole being to saving the glory of God's name against the Syrians who oppress the Jews and want to force them into paganism. Eleazar, his brother, his mother's particular favorite, is an ambitious striver who goes over to the Syrians in order to gain prestige and power through them. This seems to create a tragic conflict. But since it is not enough, the poet has to introduce a completely new moment into the plot later on. Judah, who fights successfully against the enemies and appears as the champion of the Jewish spirit, is confronted by the fanatical Jehoiakim, who knows only the de-spiritualized letter and disturbs the former's circles by preventing the Jews from fighting on the Sabbath. Everything that has been achieved is called into question again. Again we have the beginnings of a dramatic entanglement: but again it proves too weak to lead to an end. First a party hostile to the Maccabees must arise, which betrays the Jews to the Syrians and, in order to arouse faith in the Syrian king, snatches the children from Leah to hand them over to the enemies. After suffering many hardships, Leah appears before King Antiochus to plead for the freedom of her children. The king gives her the choice of either having them renounce the faith of their fathers or consigning them to death by fire. After a harrowing battle of the soul, the mother decides on the latter. This is how the plot actually begins three times, and we always lose all interest in the thread that continues from the beginning. A whole series of weaknesses in the play could also be mentioned. Mattathias' death, which drags on for an entire act, seems boring, the appearance of the Roman Aemilius Barbus seems far-fetched, the scene between Judah and his wife in the fourth act, where he addresses her as the "little rose of Saron", even tasteless.

Although the play is weak enough as a drama, the individual characters are at times masterfully drawn and offer the actors ample opportunity to show off their skills and, in particular, their artistic conception. We do not want to neglect to look at the artists involved. Above all, Ms. Wolter deserves the honor of the evening. Her Lea is a masterpiece; and what captivated us in the play was to a large extent the interest in the performance of this artist. In her whole being, in her figure, voice, manner of speaking, indeed in every gesture, Ms. Wolter has something of the idealized art of acting. She makes a powerful impression on anyone with taste, and would do so even if she refrained from such naturalistic amusements as drinking to fortify herself before appearing before Antiochus. She reminds us of her coquetry in Götz, which does not enhance her noble play. Even if Lea does not appear as elaborate as Stuart or Orsina, we must still count her among the best we have ever seen at the Burgtheater. The scene where she is tied to a tree by the enemy party so that she does not follow her children and the scene before Antiochus are magnificent in every respect.

With regard to Roberts as Judah, we cannot join the chorus of Viennese critics. It has always seemed incomprehensible to us what Speidel and the critics who follow him find in this actor. We can never be interested in the intellectual working through of the roles, which does not lead to anything more than a mannered portrayal that lacks all style. So we didn't get any impression of his Judah either. He sought his effect through a special development of the vocal means, which failed to materialize because he ultimately lacked the strength. Mr. Wagner's Eleazar was played without understanding. Nowhere could one find that he was touched by Otto Ludwig's deep spirit. The turnaround at the end, where he goes into himself and yet seeks death with the brothers, was without the necessary psychological deepening of the portrayal. We did not dislike Jojakim Schreiners, just as we generally find that this actor receives too little critical attention. Devrient is not quite up to the role of Antiochus. This time Baumeister was very insignificant as Aemilius Barbus. We have never seen this brilliant actor so bad. It was almost incomprehensible.

At the end, we have to ask a few questions: why didn't Mr. Krastel play Judah, who seems more suitable for this role than any of his colleagues? Why wasn't Mr. Reimers given the role of Eleazar? Why did the setting up of the idol at the end of the second act have to be turned into a ridiculous caricature by the production?

At the performance of Gunnar Heiberg's “King Midas”
at the Deutsches Volkstheater, Vienna

What we did not dare to hope for after the experiences we had with the Deutsches Volkstheater in the first six months of its existence has now come true. We owe this institute a theatrical event the likes of which we have not seen in Vienna for a long time. On April 22, "King Midas" by Gunnar Heiberg was performed for the first time. We don't know what influence we have to thank for this, but it would be interesting to find out. For in view of the boundless lack of understanding with which the Viennese critics have received this "play", in view of their almost touching ignorance as to what is actually at stake here, we cannot but confess that we long to know who among the leading factors of the German people was able to recognize that for all Heiberg's dramatic ineptitude, for all the imperfection in the drawing of the characters, the weather light of a completely new age can already be felt in the work. The majority of our educated people seem to have just enough intellectual power to understand Ibsen, the last offshoot of a culture in decline. But this power is no longer sufficient to follow the man who makes the first - albeit still somewhat feeble - attempt to give artistic expression to a new moral world order. What is the message that Ibsen proclaims to the world? For the most part, none other than that of the contradiction between our reality and moral ideas, the impossibility of organizing life according to them. But what he regards as such "moral ideas" are those of an old, worn-out culture, they are the "old iron of morality" and are therefore often outcast from life by necessity. Only the immature youth and those older people who have never understood that in our classical period the moral content of life of an outdated time has found a residue-free artistic expression that cannot be surpassed, only these two groups of educated people could fall prey to that unholy cult of Ibsen, which is nothing but the result of the most blatant lack of education. Ibsen recognized that there is a terrible disproportion between real life and moral values, but he lacked the insight that the fermenting society of our day can no longer be measured by the ethical standards of the past, but is facing a transformation of the entire moral world order. "Good and evil" in the traditional sense are outdated concepts that are in urgent need of "re-evaluation". The question now is: what do we have to adhere to in such a "re-evaluation"? There can only be one answer: life itself. And thus we have recognized that moral value judgments must be based on life and not, as Ibsen would have it, life must be based on moral value judgments. A moral principle becomes a disastrous force the moment it stands in the way of the flourishing development of life. This is the basic idea of Heiberg's play. A young widow, Mrs. Holm, has received from her husband on his deathbed the confession that he was never unfaithful to her, not in deed, not in thought. This thought has been the happiness of her life since her husband's death. All her happiness came from it. But that confession was a lie. No one knows it but the editor Rarmseth, to whom a woman who was once a maid in Holm's house confessed that Holm had once had sexual relations with her. The editor Rarmseth appears as a representative of virtue in the form of the truth, the unvarnished, purely factual truth. And he acquaints Mrs. Holm with the true state of affairs. This drives her mad and she is lost to life. Thus the "truth" has destroyed a life that could have owed its happiness to a "blissful error". If critics believe that Heiberg's drama is nothing more than a polemic against

Ibsen, this is only a small fraction of the truth. The play is the first act of a new era, the first blow to the often rotten edifice of morality. Viennese critics have once again shown that they are completely incapable of judging what is better without prejudice. For once, a large coin - albeit poorly minted - has been issued, and the critical small change of our journalists was not enough to redeem it. On this occasion we cannot fail to make special mention of the actress playing Mrs. Holm, Miss Sandrock. The way in which she takes on and portrays the role, quite apart from anything else, is a sight to behold. She captivates our interest anew with every nuance. Whoever has seen her in "King Midas" will hardly doubt that we have in her a rising star of the first magnitude. No less interesting is Mr. Mitterwurzer as Ramseth. It takes a special artistry to play the indomitable nature of this man with unity. One believes from moment to moment that it must break now, this unyieldingness that sees disaster after disaster emerge from the fanaticism of truth. But Ramseth remains "true" until he has driven the poor victim of his "truth" out of his mind. Mitterwurzer is particularly adept at making this inflexibility clear to us.

"There is nothing more terrible than active ignorance." This is one of Goethe's sayings in prose. If it is correct - and it seems to me that it is - then I would like to use it as a legal title when I find the way in which the gentlemen of the pen are currently "active" and "terrible" for the most part. I recently read a dramatic work by Hermann Sudermann called "Heimat", which I have also seen on the stages, which today almost only represent the half-world. The author has also written a good play, "Sodoms Ende", and a rather bad one, "Die Ehre". Although the latter is undramatic, it finally contains conflicts that are taken from deep-rooted damage to our social life. The shy leather-wearing philistine, who still realizes that Eugen Richter is not the right representative of the people after all, sees with wistful delight the made-up dolls that stand for figures of life, which his liberal nose could bump into twenty times without understanding the wretched situation of such people. That is why "The Honor" is given often and everywhere. "Sodom's End" contains a deeper, celestial conflict. That is why a man who has read a lot about protective tariffs and free trade does not understand it, and - the play is rarely performed. But "Heimat" was trumpeted as a play of epoch-making importance by the all-knowing masters of the feuilleton. All "active ignorance", perhaps better said: uneducated and therefore purely arbitrary taste. When the gentlemen say that at present it is not at all important that our plays should satisfy the educated who have educated their taste; it is rather important to offer something to the people, to those people who have never had time and opportunity to cultivate their taste, such a word may be acceptable when it comes to "Die Ehre"; but it is superficial in comparison with "Heimat". Here we are dealing with social classes to whom one must make higher demands. To present a woman like Magda as the antithesis of the old, rusty philistinism is to produce half-measures that can only mislead. The woman who really suffers under the pressure of circumstances, because the free development of her talents is made impossible, would hardly want to have anything to do with the higher circus wisdom of a Magda. This Magda is untrue from head to toe, because she wants us to believe that the standpoint of modern femininity can only be achieved through brutality.

I am surprised that so few critical eyes have noticed the untruth of this play. Because it really wouldn't have been that difficult this time. But there is an "active ignorance" that knows very little about what a human heart can and cannot experience.

More and more, our criticism is losing the great trait that comes from real knowledge of the world and a competent 'will', and the public's taste is sinking ever deeper. We must not be unclear about the fact that criticism has a great influence on the education of the public. This is much more the case in artistic matters than in those where the judgment of the intellect is more important. If someone makes a wrong intellectual judgment, I will be able to dissuade him from his error in a relatively short time by making the truth palpable to him. The same is not true of the judgment of taste. That is the product of a longer educational process. I will not easily convince anyone of the falsity of Sudermann's figures if he has been reading in his favorite newspaper for a long time that this is what the "new poet" must do. In particular, it will be difficult to put something better in the place of inveterate trivialities.

I have only said all this here to characterize the slippery slope that "active ignorance" has taken us down. We will only return to a healthy state of affairs when the critic who knows nothing and judges everything is replaced by someone who approaches the intellectual products of his contemporaries on the basis of a well-established view of life and the world. Today, instead of a competent but constantly evolving view of things, we find arbitrary art and science recipes based on nothing; journalistic recruits use their clumsy shooting sticks as critical marshal batons.

Under such conditions, it is no wonder that criticism is usually completely unfruitful for the productive spirit, and that an understanding of the value of contemporary literary products is virtually an impossibility. I am convinced that a literary product of real value is rarely judged in completely opposite ways by two people who are based on a purified view of life. Today, a book is declared by one person to be a European event, while the other considers it to be the product of the purest folly. Such judgments may well stem from subjective arbitrariness, but not from a true knowledge of the subject and a deeper understanding of the world.

In the face of such circumstances, one would not like to pin one's judgment of contemporary literary products to the letterpress printer's material. Not much comes of it. Sometimes, however, one has to say something about this or that, especially if it is of such a typical nature as the little booklet about which I now want to say a few words. I am referring to Richard Specht's little dramatic sketch "Sündentraum". I was interested in this little book. Its author had a thought:

"Everyone sins, even if only in dreams,
Sin has room in every heart,
For there is only one thing that drives life
Only one thing that remains constant in change,
To chase the happiness that always sprays out,
To fan the flame that burns out in the night."

Specht puts these words into the mouth of "sin". From her mouth we would know what we humans actually are. I know a certain Tantalus. Richard Specht seems to have no little desire to portray him as the archetype of humanity. But the author knows how to console us about our Tantalus torments:

"You are a fool, will you pine for the eternal—
I'll teach you to fully enjoy, fully despise!"

I do not agree with this at all. For it is indeed clear to me that, according to the sound, despise rhymes with languish, but not that in reality it is compatible with fully enjoy. I would not reproach the poet for these things in a schoolmasterly way if his dramatic sketch did not contain a thoroughly symbolic plot with symbolic characters, and if sin did not remain the victor in the end; it ends the play, "glaringly exultant":

"Down - down - to the swamp - to the happiness of sin! -"

If this is supposed to be symbolic for us humans, then I have to say that I reply in good Nietzschean - or should that be Goethean - fashion: no matter how many ragged marks of sin people attach to me, I cover them with the cloak of pagan pride and claim my universal human right to heaven. Why into the "swamp"? Here lies the crux of the matter. Richard Specht is a poet of great talent who can do more than just write beautiful verses. He has something that hundreds of our writing contemporaries lack: the insight that there is something in the world besides front and back houses, besides philistine generals and emancipated singers, besides ragged artists and lascivious society ladies, in short, besides flesh and senses. But he only knows it because he has read about it in other people's books. For him, everything is a concept, nothing is experience. His problems are not acquired, but learned. He can do a lot, but he has experienced little. If he had equal perfection in both, I believe that he would write better than some of the younger writers who are highly praised today. I say this even though I know that the "Sinful Dream" leaves much to be desired, for I know that a single serious experience will turn Richard Specht into an important poet. He only has to experience it deeply and thoroughly, and not after the example of his compatriot Hermann Bahr. I have just read his latest novel "Beside Love". In it I find a piece of Viennese life described. I even know some of the things in this book very well. But reading it, I was vividly reminded of Allers' Bismarck pictures. Here and there, purely external sketches, without penetrating into the center of the characters. Bahr draws the Viennese mind, like everything the genius of Bismarck. I particularly regret the former. Bahr is a brilliant personality who can be credited with anything, but who is finally consumed by the most vain vanity. I am the last person who would like to hear Hermann Bahr speak in an unctuous idealistic tone; but there are more things on earth than he can dream of with his tails and floppy hat wisdom. The Parisian artist's curl suits the French child of the world quite well, but it doesn't turn the simple Linzer into a Frenchman. Hermann Bahr proved this to us in recent weeks when he traveled from one German "authority" to another to ask the gentlemen for their opinion on the Jews. In the eyes of the suave Hermann Bahr, I am probably only a German philosopher, but I would never have committed the "unworldly" act of asking all these gentlemen, because what they all say in this matter has been "known for a long time". I found little worldliness and much philistinism in the "European" Hermann. I would no more like to ask Adolf Wagner for his opinion on the Jews than I would ask Eugen Richter for his opinion on the Social Democrats, and I have never been to Russia or Spain. Hermann Bahr knows the world. But he knows it like Count Trast-Saarberg in Sudermann's "Honor": superficially and without sympathy. Trast loves with his imagination in the Orient, with his senses in the South, with his wallet in France and with his conscience in Germany. Ultimately, this means nothing other than that he has adopted the pose of the respective countrymen everywhere. He is a comedian, not an artist of life. His love is imitation, because there is no soul in it. Trast is the type of person for whom the world can only be taken ironically. But their irony is a child of their superficiality. Their humor is cynical. They believe they have an overview of the world and can be squeezed into one of their clumsy conceptual templates by any idealistic dolt.

The fact that we currently encounter people of Trast's character so often in life best characterizes our age as one of overripe education. Looking at life with a sense of humor is part of a high level of education. A rich imaginative and rational content are the preconditions of humor. One must first know a thing above which one rises, and which one then looks at indifferently from above. But after the justified humorists come the actors of humor who, although they do not know things, play the superior who can despise them. These are the humorists of smugness. They are useful for playing Trast roles on the world stage. But those who want to deal seriously with serious things limit their dealings with them to the coffee house and drawing room.

Play in three acts by J. V. Widmann
Performance at the court theater, Weimar

In his latest work, the play "Beyond Good and Evil", Joseph Viktor Widmann, to whom we owe many a novella worth reading and numerous intellectual feuilletons, has taken up the fight against the intellectual current of the present, whose followers see the dawn of a new moral world order in the views of Friedrich Nietzsche. In the Swiss mountains and under the skies of Italy, Nietzsche dreamed and thought of a revaluation of all moral values, of a morality of the future that would not be based on external authority but on man's proudest self-consciousness. Good and evil are not eternal concepts that have come to us through extra-human, supernatural revelation, but ideas that have formed within humanity in the course of time, and which only prejudice and bias can regard as insurmountable limits of morality. The morally strong, who has the strength to act according to his own new impulses, cannot allow himself to be limited by the moral concepts established by a generation of the past that was unaware of the ideas and needs of contemporary mankind. Man should not realize the ideals of his ancestors, but the goals and aspirations that arise within himself. He who lives only according to the ideas of others, however excellent they may be, is morally weak. He who is master of himself, who is able to determine his own standard of morality, is the morally strong, the virtuous. The ideal of the virtuous, the strong, is the unleashing of the individual's inherent impulses; the ideal of the morally weak is the exploration of the moral laws that are supposed to have been given to them from somewhere. The weak want to be humble and submit to the commandments given to them; the strong are proud and self-important, because they know for themselves what they should do. The present is not favorable to such views; for decades the man who expressed them in a wonderful way lived unnoticed. And now that his name is that of an apostle to many, both to those who have a judgment about it and to those who monkey with every fashion, he lives in spiritual derangement in Naumburg, with no memory of the time of his spiritual work.

Widmann is directed against the spiritual seed of this man. If he had done it with Aristophanic comedy, if he had fought with wit and humor against the excesses of a school of thought he detested, no one of understanding would have thought of objecting to his tendency. If Nietzsche were mentally healthy, he himself would have turned against the baseless intellectual lumpenism that now often trails behind his abused banner and wants to live out its life in insignificance and insignificance, because that lies in his individuality. The fact that Widmann now places such an intellectual rag at the center of his drama makes it repugnant. Robert Pfeit is a professor of art history and is supposed to be a Nietzschean. Because of this attitude, he neglects his wife, who is far removed from Nietzschean pride, but whose moral worth surpasses Robert's, and throws herself away on the frivolous, frivolous young widow Viktorine v. Meerheim, who only turns her eyes to the professor because he is supposed to illegally obtain a doctorate for her foppish, limited and ignorant brother. The web into which the cunning woman has spun the weak-character follower of Nietsche's morality of the strong is to be completely pulled together at a masked ball, at which Pfeil wants to appear as Sigismondo Malatesta, Prince of Rimini, and Viktorine as Isotta degli Atti. These are figures from the Renaissance period to which Pfeil has devoted his studies and in whose purely arbitrary view of life he sees his Nietzschean ideals realized. Pfeil's wife is unhappy because of her husband's 'aberrations'. She therefore decides to stay away from the unfortunate ball at which Viktorine wants to crown her disastrous doings; indeed, she has already obtained poison from her brother Dr. Lossen's laboratory because she does not want to survive her husband's fall. As this brother, a traveling naturalist, surveys the situation, a saving thought occurs to him. He has found a substance in distant lands that lulls you into a gentle sleep. He mixes it with cigarette tobacco and lets the deceived Nietzschean smoke a suitably prepared cigarette as he prepares to go to the fateful masked ball. Of course, Pfeil now dreams the dream that cures him of all Nietzschean ills. His ideal people and their opponents are presented to him. Those who profess his doctrine are despicable tyrants, scoundrels or boors; the opponents of his doctrine are noble and good, angels in every respect. Divided into these two camps, we are presented with a disgusting, repulsive and boring picture of the court of Rimini in the form of a pickled dream. And when Robert Pfeil wakes up, behold, he has become a pious man; the dream has shown him the disgraceful deeds to which Nietzscheanism could still lead him. One need not be a follower of Nietzsche to be unpleasantly affected by Widmann's theatrical machinations. The writer of these lines knows the weaknesses and dangers of Nietzscheanism quite well, but it is contrary to his feelings to see J.V. Widmann fighting against Friedrich Nietzsche.

Now just a few words about the performance. Mr. Weiser played the main role, Professor Robert Pfeil, as well as a contradictory and unclear character can be played. If the portrayal was not that of a human being but that of a stereotyped theatrical character, the fault lay not with the actor but with the poet. Mr. Weiser deserves special recognition as director. The staging was brisk and tasteful. Mrs. Wiecke, the best-trained female force in local acting, as the professor's wife, sympathetically portrayed the representative of the humble, gentle, tolerant humanity that has to suffer under the evil Nietzscheanism; Mrs. Lindner-Orban, who as "Kluge Käthe" has already fought against Nietzsche once during this season in a splendid acting performance, this time found little opportunity to show off her skills. A character as marked as this Viktorine could not be given flesh and blood by the best actress. Also worthy of mention are Miss Schmittlein (maid in Pfeil's house), who I particularly liked in the first act, and Mr. Kökert, who played Viktorine's brother in the excellent way we have known him to play similar roles since we first saw him.

Comedy by Arno Holz
Performance at the Central Theater, Berlin

How short-sighted they all were who thought they saw the masters of dramatic art in Shakespeare, Schiller and Ibsen! They lacked the insight of Mr. Arno Holz, who finally discovered that there is a difference between the diction of Ibsen, the rhetoric of Schiller and the language of a Berlin laundress. Now we know: Shakespeare's and Schiller's language is the "obviously crude" language, the language of the theater; the language of the Berlin washerwoman is the language of life, the "secretly artistic" language. Arno Holz taught us this in the preface to his drama "Social Aristocrats". A few days ago, this work was performed at the Zentral-Theater. Through his discovery, Arno Holz became the reformer of dramatic style. He proclaimed himself one. The "Social Aristocrats" is the new work of art, which is to be "composed" in the "language of life", not in the clumsy theatrical language of Shakespeare and Schiller. Life should speak to us from the stage. This is why Holz draws a twenty-one-year-old imbecile whom no one could really meet in the milieu in which the poet places him, because precautionary relatives would have placed the mentally retarded man in an appropriate institution at a tender age. No, the distorted images brought to the stage have nothing to do with real life. Holz wants to portray contemporaries like portraits. But he removes everything from their personalities that constitutes their true purpose in life. Without becoming suspicious of these contemporaries, the following can be said:

There is a serious man who writes inspiring books, gives subtle lectures and works to educate the people in his way. The man has a pathetic exterior and gives childish mockery cause to laugh because he appears too prophetic. Holz only portrays what the Philistine sees of this personality, who cannot perceive the deep core. Another personality is presented in the drama, of whose main work a witty critic said a few years ago that it was the most thought-provoking book written in Germany in recent decades. This man knows the social trends of our time like few others; he embodies a striving for human liberation that gives each of his works a tone that sounds as if it comes from a world removed from all present-day reality. However, he hides his inner life behind stiff, often quite conventional manners. The pedant, who can only imagine that a man who loves freedom must also appear unrestrained, finds a contradiction between this man's external "behavior" and his views. In this case, too, Holz seems to see nothing but the stiff exterior, which is somewhat ridiculous to the small mind. One can be hostile to the opinions and aims of such a man; one can oppose them in the strongest terms; but one only needs to know them to find Mr. Holz's jokes dull and tasteless. Anyone who knows the personalities caricatured in the play can easily guess who is meant. If I have an acquaintance who I know wears a blue suit and habitually waves his cane in the air, I will recognize him by these outward appearances even if he approaches me from a distance and I am not aware of his facial features. If you want to portray people from their comic side in drama, then you have to do it with the art of Aristophanes, not with the small means of a clumsy caricaturist.

Arno Holz wants to bring the truth of life to the stage. But compared to his distorted images, the figures of Lindau, Schönthan and Blessed Benedix are true models of naturalistic representation. "Between the creation of a work of art in a style that is already given and the creation of such a style itself, there is not a difference of degree, but a difference of kind," philosophizes Arno Holz in the preface to "Social Aristocrats". However, there is no difference of kind, but really only a difference of degree between Holz's and Schönthan's drama. They both proceed according to the same recipe; only Holz has not yet reached Schönthan's stage dexterity. The sad image of an incompetent who wants to discover a new "secretly artistic" thing, but does not feel the essence of true art, stood before my soul as I watched Mr. Holz's drama. For this reason, however, I do not wish to deny that Arno Holz is one of those who have contributed much to the emergence of the truly new dramatic style of the present day. But works in this style have been given to us by others. In his dramatic work he has lagged behind those who, unlike him, were not guided by theoretical demands but by the individuality of their genius. The present day forms the organs of the artist differently from the time of Shakespeare or Schiller. That is why we have a "modernity", the justification for which can only be argued about by the decrepit aestheticians or the art critics who swear by "eternal rules". Among those who understand the meaning of the present, there can be no dispute about such things. But I must deny that something of this sense can be discovered in the "social aristocrats". One is not modern by calling Schiller's and Shakespeare's language "obviously crude". I do not believe that anyone can properly appreciate the essence of our modern style who is able to talk about Shakespeare like Holz.