The Rudolf Steiner Archive

A cycle of one-act plays by Otto Erich Hartleben
Performance at the Lessing Theater, Berlin

Otto Erich Hartleben travels to Rome every year. I now understand that certain philistines have to visit a North Sea resort every year, but why Otto Erich has to go to Italy at the same time of year every year: that seemed to me to be worth asking the bearer of this peculiar habit before the last trip to Rome. I found a suitable hour for this question - and in this way I received an answer. Otto Erich told me that he had to go to Rome every year to escape the misery of life in Berlin. In this beautiful city one is a resident and therefore plagued by a thousand little things, day and night. I won't even conceal the fact that on this occasion he spoke of the trouble that his co-editorship of the "Magazin für Literatur" caused him. In short: in Berlin, one is forced to see the "small lines" that life draws. Otto Erich Hartleben wants to escape these small lines for a few weeks every year to see life in "big lines".

This is Otto Erich Hartleben. There is no pinnacle of observation that he could not stand on to look at life. But he looks for the most comfortable way to reach this pinnacle. There is an old saying that there is no royal road to mathematics. I suspect that Otto Erich will never bother with mathematics. I don't know of any depths of worldview that are not accessible to him. But he gets quite disgusting when it takes work to get to the depths. He knows the seriousness of life like no other, but he has the gift of taking this seriousness as lightly as possible. I have never met a person in whom I have found a noble Epicureanism as realized as in him. He is a man of pleasure, but the pleasures he seeks must have exquisite qualities. He is incapable of doing anything remotely reminiscent of the common.

Everything he does has greatness. And his greatness never gives the appearance of importance. He prefers to make a suitable joke when the others start to get pathetic and attach lead balls to their speeches so that they are taken seriously.

You have to know these characteristics of Otto Erich Hartleben to understand the first play in his cycle of one-act plays, "The Stranger". When I read it, I immediately remembered the "great lines" for the sake of which he goes to Rome every year. It's the eternal problem: a woman has loved one man, married another for some reason, can't bear it, and finds delayed happiness with the first one she loved. How this plays out in life is basically irrelevant. The depth lies in the relationships between people. And Hartleben has depicted these relationships in "broad strokes". Whether the people who want to "see" everything get their money's worth is also irrelevant. For these people, who ask what is "going on", the poet would of course have had to invent a "dramatic fable" with all kinds of interesting details and work them into three acts. But he didn't bother with these people. That's why he "disregarded all the details" and presented the main features of the story. Goethe, who wrote "Tasso", would have enjoyed the "Stranger".

From the performance I expected above all greatness and style. I found none of that. Theater was everything. But this little drama requires art. It would have been an honorary task for the Lessing Theatre to show what can be achieved through theater. A good performance of this one-act play could have silenced all the speeches of the opponents of modern theater for a while. I'm sorry, but I have to say it: when I read the drama, I felt greatness, the Hartleben greatness I described earlier. When I saw it, I felt no trace of this greatness. Everything was reduced to the smallest detail. I would have loved to run away.

The second one-act play, "Farewell to the Regiment", seems much less valuable to me than "The Stranger". I can take no particular interest in either the officer's wife, who has been married by the man so that he can pay his debts, or this man, whom she is cheating on with a regimental comrade. interest. The fact that in the end the affair is revealed, the officer is transferred to another garrison and killed by the seducer after the farewell dinner: all this is all the same to me. But I have nothing to say about that. What I do want to talk about is Hartleben's mastery of dramatic technique. Everything fits together perfectly here: you are swept along by the "how", even if the "what" is all the same to you.

I don't want to dwell on this weakest of the four one-act plays. It was followed by "Die sittliche Forderung". Rita Revera has escaped from Rudolstadt, which is under moral pressure, and has become a celebrated singer. She finds "Friedrich Stierwald, merchant, owner of the company C. W. Stierwald & Söhne in Rudolstadt". He wants to lead her back into the moral life of Rudolstadt. In his opinion, it had to: because one had to be moral in order for morality to exist. Incidentally, Alfred, my Kerr, says: "Weiland Paul Lindau made the same joke. He shouted: What would morality be for if you didn't have it?" But good Kerr: do you understand neither Lindau nor Hartleben? I really don't have time to tell you anything about the difference now. I'm just asking you: don't you know that Nietzsche would have been delighted by the "moral demand" and that he would have liked Paul Lindau ... - no further. Yes, I read your Berlin letters from Breslau and should actually know that you do not like Nietzsche.

I'm coming to the last one-act play, "The Lore". I have always found the story of the "torn button" so delightful that I think the publisher S. Fischer has made the most brilliant business with it and everyone knows it. So I won't tell you about it. I will only say this much: to see it dramatized on the stage is a rare pleasure. Here, what Otto Erich has in his power, the light, the everyday, has become art.

I should not praise my co-editor. That is why I have only highlighted the weaknesses of his four one-act plays.

Fairy tale play by Hermann Sudermann
Performance at the Deutsches Theater, Berlin

"I raise my head boldly to the threatening rocky mountains and to the raging torrent of water and to the crashing clouds swimming in a sea of fire and say: I am eternal and defy your power! Break all down upon me, and you earth and you heaven, mingle in wild tumult, and all you elements, - froth and rage and in wild battle tear apart the last little sun-dust of the body which I call mine: - my will alone with its firm plan shall hover boldly and coldly over the ruins of the universe; for I have seized my destiny, and it is more permanent than you; it is eternal, and I am eternal like it." Fichte uttered these sentences in a speech that dealt with the highest goals of the human spirit. Anyone who knows them can recall them when they get to know Sudermann's latest dramatic poem "The Three Heron Feathers". For the tragedy of man, who is driven as far away as possible from the proud consciousness expressed in these sentences by an unfortunate fate, affects us in this thoughtful drama in the shattering way that we always feel when the greatest problems of life are unrolled before us with the playwright's gripping means.

A Hamlet's nature, faced not only with the problem of avenging his criminally murdered father, but with the greater problem of coming to terms with life itself, in all its mysteriousness: that is Sudermann's main character, Prince Witte. Widwolf's nefarious deed has robbed him of his fathers' ancestral heritage, the Duchy of Gorhland. He seems equipped with all his gifts to acquire what he has inherited from his fathers. But like Hamlet's will, his is paralyzed. Fate itself prevents him from earning his freedom and life by having to conquer them every day. The reason for his tragedy is that this fate throws happiness at him without struggle, without striving. But such happiness can never be pious to man.

Prince Witte has gone to a people on a northern island, where a heron is worshipped as a divine being. He has captured three feathers from it. They can bring him the three stages of development of the happiness that can only be bestowed on man. But such happiness could only belong to transient life. The life with which death is inseparably linked. The life that becomes bitter when we think of death. Yes, whose only, futile meaning is death. Sudermann has given symbolic expression to death, which alone can shed light on such transient happiness in life, in "Begräbnisfrau". She interprets the prince's fate in terms of the three heron feathers. If he lets the first one burn in the fire, the woman who makes him happy appears to him as a misty figure in the clouds. If he burns the second, she will stand before him in a dream. He will hold her in his hands and yet strive in vain to possess her. And if the third finally becomes the nourishment of the flame, the woman who represents his happiness will die before his eyes.

Like the will that is paralyzed in the prince himself, his faithful servant Hans Lorbass stands beside him. He tries to lift him up again and again. He is the strength and the fire in Prince White's life. In the first scene of the drama, he reveals his entire life's destiny to us:

"For in every great work,
That is accomplished on earth,
Strength alone shall reign,
He alone shall reign who laughs,
Never shall sorrow reign,
Never he who foams at the mouth in anger,
Never he who needs women to slumber,
And least of all he who dreams,
Therefore how I sweat and steel him
To what he can become,
I sit firmly in his soul -
I, the fighter - I, the man."

Prince Witte embarks on the path of life marked out for him by fate with his servant Lorbass, whom he has found again after capturing the heron feathers. He goes to the court of the Amber Queen of Samland, who is a widow and has a six-year-old son. She wants to give her hand to whoever wins the tournament. Widwolf, who has usurped Witte's throne, meets the robbed man here. Although Witte does not win, the loyal Lorbass stands by his side and drives Widwolf and his men away. Nevertheless, the queen gives Witte her love. She is a woman full of kindness and devotion, but she must give her love away. She can only consider the one who has conquered her heart to be the victor, and that is Prince Witte. He becomes king, even though the Samland Queen's people have grave qualms of conscience because Witte has not won an honest victory - and even though he does not feel happy because he is not keeping and defending the throne for himself, but for the young king from his wife's first marriage. But fate, which decides on the happiness of transient life, has assigned this wife to the prince as his happiness. He cannot understand this fate. The wife he has been given remains a stranger to him, and his longing yearns for the supposed stranger who is to appear to him walking in the night when he burns the second heron feather. Lorbass sees his master gradually withering away at the queen's side. He therefore gives him the idea of burning the second heron feather. And when this becomes a flame, the Amber Queen, his wife, appears "walking in the night". Even now, he cannot recognize her as the wife destined for him. Instead, he sees her as a troublemaker. He thinks that by appearing, she has driven away the unknown woman out of jealousy, who should have appeared when the heron's feather was burned. At this moment, the deeply moving spirit of this drama takes effect from the stage: we do not understand a happiness that we receive effortlessly, as if by magic, as a gift; we can only recognize the happiness we have acquired as the happiness that is due to us. Sudermann conveys this general truth to us through a purely human motif. Witte cannot find the way to his wife's heart because his son, who does not bear the mark of his blood, stands between them. He even gives Lorbass a hint to get this son out of the way. The robber Widwolf appears for the second time to covet the queen. Witte is to fight for himself and his own. He believes he cannot do this as long as he is defending not his own throne, but that of his stepchild. When Lorbass gets to know the boy king in all his excellence, he cannot kill him. And Witte is also glad that this time the faithful servant has broken faith. With all the strength in him, he rushes against the enemy Widwolf and - now really conquers the kingdom, but - to renounce it and move on to seek the woman who is supposed to be destined for him by the firepower of the heron's feathers. He does not find her, of course, but returns fifteen years later to burn the third of the feathers in the presence of the Amber Queen. At this moment, the woman destined for him falls to her death. Only now, as his happiness escapes him, does he realize that it was meant for him. He dies after his wife. Death, in the form of the funeral wife, has had no trouble in capturing the two of them for himself, for it was easy for him to give them a fleeting happiness that neither of them can recognize as their own. He receives happiness as a gift and cannot recognize it because he does not conquer it; and she gives happiness away and cannot be happy about it because she gives it away indiscriminately.

There is no dead end in this Sudermann drama. One sits there and waits for each coming moment with rapt attention. Always the background to a great thought and always a captivating image on the stage. One has the feeling that a serious person wants to communicate with serious people about an important matter in life. Full of gratitude to have seen a piece of life in a poem, we leave the theater, which today is mostly devoid of ideology.

The performance in Berlin's Deutsches Theater was such that it can be described as a dramatic phenomenon of the first rank. Kainz as Prince Witte: one may give the highest praise; Teresina Geßner was an Amber Queen who made the soul tremble, and Nissen's Lorbass should be incorporated into German stage history as soon as possible. The Deutsches Theater has much to make up for after the utterly unsuccessful Cyrano performance; but it knows how to make up for it. And only where there are strong advantages does one make such mistakes as the one severely criticized here.

Performance of the "Verein für historisch-moderne Festspiele" at the Neues Theater, Berlin

Two Aristophanic comedies have been staged by the association of artists and writers, which is now organizing a "historical-modern festival" in Berlin. The "Birds" and the "Women's State". The "Birds" are considered to be the Greek mocker's most witty work, but also the most difficult to interpret. The poet speaks here more boldly than anywhere else about the relationship between humans and the gods. And this always creates very strange intellectual bubbles in the minds of interpreters and commentators. Especially when it comes to a poet whose greatness cannot be dismissed because of the famous asylum for those without judgment, called "consensus gentium" - consensus of all. Everyone wants to recognize that. And that is why he puts into such recognized greatness everything that, in his opinion, deserves recognition. A bad story happened to the writer of the "official playbill" of the "historical-modernists". This writer is one of the many Nietzsche followers. So he wrote about the content of "The Birds": "Two people have fled from Athens and the confusing hustle and bustle of life, end up in a lonely place among the bird world and establish an intermediate state with it, the so-called "Cloud Cuckoo Land", which has the purpose of thwarting the traffic between humans and gods through a kind of trade barrier. In a humorous way, the entire old world of gods and all superstitious religious systems within it are mocked by replacing them with a bird mythology. The gods are starved to death; and in the end, the human race, represented by the gods, takes over the world. The "thunderbolts of Zeus" are now in the hands of man himself, in the spirit of Friedrich Nietzsche's sentence: "All the gods are dead, now we want the superman to live." The comic gentleman who wrote these lines does not seem to have the slightest sense of humor, for he takes the man who appears at the end of the Aristophanic poem with the "thunderbolts of Zeus" seriously. In the spirit of Aristophanes, however, this "superman" cannot be understood in any other way than as the frog that wants to inflate itself until it is as big as an ox. This man is supposed to be an image of irresistible comedy, incredibly ridiculous in that he, the dwarf, stands before us with the attributes of the great god. A dwarf who strives with all his might to become a giant can be a tragic hero; a dwarf who stands up and says: "Behold, I am a giant" is simply ridiculous. And Aristophanes probably only wanted to portray the little man who stands up and thinks he is a god.

Let's take a look at the comedy. Two dissatisfied Athenians, Ratefreund and Hoffegut, emigrate from their city. It has gradually become a bit uncomfortable for them. If you think back to the time in which "The Birds" is set, this seems understandable. It was a time when the citizens of this city were constantly harassed by people who had a fine nose for anything "dangerous to the state". Alcibiades was active at the time. A capable but ambitious man. He wanted to increase Athens' power through major conquests in Sicily. There were opponents of this enterprise. The inhabitants of the city were divided into two camps. Mutual hostility between the parties led to a really uncomfortable situation. There may have been enough people who thought they could lead a more comfortable life abroad, in the manner of Ratefreund and Hoffegut. There must have been people in Athens who imagined salvation abroad in the most rosy colors. They were the right food for Aristophanes; natures like his see through people. He is not inclined to believe that people are better in one place than in another. The folly of his fellow citizens casts an irresistible spell over him. He feels too weak to improve the fools; but he feels all the stronger to ridicule them. And so he may have said to himself: You are fools in your hometown because you make your lives miserable. But once you are fools, you will do no better abroad. And so he wanted two emigrants to do something really stupid. It is the worldly wisdom of fools to grumble about everything that exists; why shouldn't Ratefreund and Hoffegut think of accusing the gods because they have arranged the world so badly that it is unpleasant for Ratefreund and Hoffegut in it. Modern discontent is somewhat tamer. It merely demands a different form of government. Ancient discontents want different gods. Ratefreund and Hoffegut enter the realm of the birds and want to turn them into gods. And now Aristophanes spins this idea out. As a real prankster, he describes the conditions in the newly emerging realm of birds and gods, called "Cloud Cuckoo Land". He unloads everything he has on his mind against human folly. And finally, he also depicts the unequal struggle in all its comedy that arises between the bird-human realm and the gods. Man even takes the basileia (dominion) from the realm of the gods and holds the lightning bolts of Zeus in his hand.

But this man has only pushed the gods from their thrones in his imagination.

The secret of comedy lies in the fact that a complete contradiction appears before us as real. For Aristophanes, it is such a contradiction that the small, weak man rebels against the gods. That is why he makes him appear with the attributes of the gods' power. One should laugh at the little man who appears to be a god.

The "women's state" follows the same recipe. The women disguise themselves as men and decide in the people's assembly that the rule of the state should fall into their hands. They want to realize all the ideals of human coexistence, from the community of goods to free love. By presenting this ideal to us as real, it is intended to make itself ridiculous.

Of all people, the humorist is perhaps the most difficult to understand. We know that there is a deep seriousness in the soul of the truly great humorist. But he cannot give proper expression to this seriousness. The humorist cannot shape what his longing senses. But everything he sees appears as a mockery of this seriousness. And he gives us the mockery. He keeps the seriousness to himself. So it is with Aristophanes. We sense that behind all his mockery lies a serious view of the world. We believe him that this world view gave him the right to mock Socrates. But what this world-view is, we do not know. We wonder in vain what Aristophanes thought about the old gods. Did he want to restore them or was he dreaming of a new worldview?

We must not forget that the Sophists were almost contemporaries of Aristophanes. And we don't really know much about the Sophists either. Did they want to ridicule their contemporaries because they had fallen away from the old good culture, or was a new culture dawning in the souls of these mockers?

But because we ourselves like to keep our seriousness to ourselves, we enjoy the mockers so much. If we only suspect that they are as serious about the world as we are, then we laugh heartily with them and are quite happy that they present us with something to laugh about.

There are few proofs of human power as powerful as laughter. We always feel a certain exaltation at what we can laugh at. Anyone who gets excited about the weaknesses of his fellow human beings is an unliberated person, because he suffers from these weaknesses. But he to whom these weaknesses appear as foolishness laughs and is therefore a free man. He no longer suffers. And Aristophanes appears to us as someone who laughs. He did more than anyone else to overcome the old world view. He showed us what it had become - and we could laugh at it.

The fact that they have reminded us of this great laughter should not be forgotten by the entrepreneurs of the "historical-modern festival".

Drama by Maurice Maeterlinck
Performance of the "Akademisch-literarischen Verein" at the Neues Theater, Berlin

It is Maeterlinck's belief that we know the least conceivable thing about a person if we only have ears for what he says and eyes for what he does, and not also the living sense of what is going on at the bottom of his soul and which can never find expression in words or deeds. In the soul of the beggar to whom I give alms in the street there may rest a wisdom greater than that which Plato or Fichte have expressed in eloquent words; and in the most commonplace action that takes place between two people, the great gigantic fate may conceal from the outward sense a tragedy more tremendous than that which takes place in Shakespeare's "Othello". To see a great, perhaps world-shattering event in the smallest, seemingly insignificant thing is a prominent characteristic of Maeterlinck's intellectual disposition. He is not a lover of clarity in words and deeds. Everything that is painted in strong colors is repugnant to him. For him, the indistinct, every faint allusion, every sound of everyday life already speaks a clear language. And because he hears a worldly wisdom in the sounds of a babbling child, he shies away from the clear speeches of philosophers. There is no need to touch with the whole hand when a gentle touch with the fingertips is enough. Maeterlinck, the playwright, touches things with his fingertips, just as Maeterlinck, the observer of the world, touches them. He gives us a few glimpses of people's lives that other playwrights would tell us about in the slightest detail.

In the drama "Pelleas and Melisande", events flit past us whose historical context remains completely obscure. We would ask in vain about the time and place of these events. Melisande is found by Golaud in a lonely place and brought to the castle of his grandfather, King Arkel, as his wife. Who is Melisande? Where does she come from? Where is the castle where Arkel rules? These are the questions that those for whom it seems important to satisfy the external senses might ask. For Maeterlinck, this does not seem important. It is enough for him to single out a few events from the otherwise indifferent mass of external events that reveal to us the relationships between the souls of the people we are dealing with. The entire court of King Arkel of Allemonde, with everything that belongs to a king and a court, is indifferent to what fate has in store for a few human souls. And fate walks quietly, very quietly, but all the more meaningfully through the halls of the lonely castle and through the mystically magical landscape in which this castle lies.

Fate walks through these rooms as a burden of misfortune. And in resignation, the people accept what it gives them. They do not act; they let the unknown forces rule. King Arkel is old. He has become a renunciate through life. He does not know happiness. The years are the only thing that has matured for him. We hear of a sick man, the father of Golaud and his brother Pelleas; we feel nothing more than the spiritual sick-room air that weighs on their souls. The sick man remains in the background. Golaud was married once before. There is a child from this marriage. We also hear nothing about Golaud's first marriage. Was it happy, was it unhappy? What effect did it have on Golaud's disposition? We only recognize that in the dullness of this castle alone a winter mood of the soul can flourish. And Golaud's soul is also filled with this mood. At his side, Melisande's soul must wither like a flower that needs the sun and is placed in a damp cellar. Golaud's brother Pelleas has all the more to say to this child of the sun. There is a deep communion of souls between them that does not express itself in ordinary words of love, and even less in the everyday actions of loving people. Anyone who only pays attention to the rough events of love can see nothing but childish play in Pelleas' and Melisande's love. But it is precisely a child, Golaud's son, who sees the mysterious seriousness behind the play and who becomes a traitor to Golaud. Golaud kills Pelleas and wounds Melisande because it is "customary" to kill out of jealousy. And Melisande withers and dies, the summer flower in the winter landscape. Maeterlinck is far removed from crude psychology, which is only concerned with processes of the soul with powerful external effects. What the inner sense feels is infinitely more valuable to him than the perceptions of the outer senses. And because, as a dramatist, he can only speak to the outer senses, he gives them as little as possible to perceive. Events of the greatest simplicity and indeterminacy should offer the inner sense the opportunity to see through them to the invisible, but therefore no less perceptible, tragedies of the soul. Our acting is not particularly suited to bringing Maeterlinck's spirit to the stage. Our artists translate the inner passion into an outer one. And today's performance has achieved something incomparable in the art of this translation. Vilma von Mayburg as Melisande and Adalbert Matkowsky as Golaud have characteristically portrayed everything that is external to Maeterlinck; they have been less successful in unlocking the inner meaning. But the character of the poetry is too sharply defined to be completely destroyed in the form of the acting.

Maximilian Harden wanted to introduce the performance with a conference. External circumstances made it necessary that he could only say what he had to say after the performance. He spoke many a good word. At many moments today he reminded me of the time when I expected the very best from his great abilities for his future as a writer. His talents seemed to make him an author who, out of a strong temperament, could hold up a mirror to contemporary phenomena and exert the magic of personal greatness. He was brought down by journalism, which for him was associated with a cult of Bismarck that disturbed his individual sensibilities and the strange cult of mass instincts that followed from it. Today, under these influences, his forms of judgment have become too coarse to characterize such fine spirits as Maeterlinck. But one still notices something of his better dispositions in him. Basically, he has no inner relationship to the coarse web of concepts that his journalistic activity has imposed on him. And in order to assert himself within it, he has to resort to posturing. He would not need it. He is strong enough to give himself away. A university professor accuses Harden of infamy, and the latter dismisses the attacker - at least to any unbiased person - in such a way that the youthful figure, who at first appeared so brave, appears in a comical and even different light. Many a publicist, who has succeeded better in hiding somewhat bitter things behind the scenes, has today been able to convince himself from the upright man that intellectual abilities are not a worthless commodity after all.

Comedy by Georg Hirschfeld
Performance at the Deutsches Theater, Berlin

Pauline König is the child of a selfish, domineering mother and a good-natured, hard-working, selfless father. This father is one of those men from whom marriage has taken away the last remnants of their zest for life, who have become quiet, acquiescent natures because they want domestic peace and can only have it if they submit to the domineering inclinations of their chosen wife. In the first years of their lives, children of such spouses absorb ideas that lead them to a certain contempt for life. They see in the parental home that not everyone gets his due share in life and that fate has no heart for people. It lets the good wither away and does not punish the bad. That life must therefore be met with defiance: that is the lesson which the children of such parents learn from their youthful impressions. Such children become good people because they have seen goodness in suffering - and one is so drawn to what one sees in suffering. But they become people who don't take life particularly hard because they learned about its injustice at an early age. Pauline König is one of these people. In her father, she got to know a person who didn't know how to organize his life. But the genuine humanity of his nature, a certain inner solidity, has passed from him to her. This father is employed on an estate. The count's lordship exploits his people, and the man has to toil all his life. But apart from that, these counts are nice people, and Pauline played with the children of the lordship as if they were her own kind. That's how she grew up. At the age of seventeen, she went to the city to support herself. Her mother's character was probably the main reason why she left home.

This Pauline König is at the center of Hirschfeld's new drama, which was performed for the first time at the Deutsches Theater on February 18. She is a servant at Sperling's. Walter Sperling is a painter. He leads a real bohemian life with his wife - and his child. Things are quite lively there, they owe the rent and probably other things too, but their hearts are in the right place. For example, when Mrs. Sanitätsrat Suhr approaches the Sperlings to inquire about her maid, who used to work in the painter's house and in whom she believes she has noticed a tendency towards dishonesty, she receives the answer: well, she wasn't honest, but she interested us "as a person". So Pauline is also interesting to the Sperlings as a person. And she is also interesting to the viewer of the drama. In her kitchen, the setting of the play, five lovers come and go: a horse-drawn train conductor, a tailor, a parcel letter carrier, a gym teacher and a metalworker. The first four she merely "oozes"; but we immediately realize that she is serious about the metalworker. She doesn't take life too seriously, which is why she sometimes goes a bit far with each of the lovers; and the good locksmith has every reason to be jealous of his raging love. Pauline plays the first role in a dance hall on the Hasenheide. All her lovers follow her there. The storm breaks in the third act. The art locksmith can no longer tolerate her being courted and entertained by others. The lovers fight, and the high authorities have to intervene in the form of the protector, a popular figure in modern government. The locksmith has just lost his head. Not only does he now fight with his rivals, he even appeals to Pauline's parents. They should set their daughter's head straight. Because he is sincere about her and cannot live without her. It is understandable that Pauline resents this. But it is precisely this extreme step that leads to understanding. The two now understand each other and become a couple. Hirschfeld has painted these two characters in the most delicate way. We have seen what life had to make of Pauline. It is understandable that she cannot quite comprehend the decidedly social-democratic attitude of the Schlosser when one knows that she had already become close to the Count's scions as a child. And the good understanding between her and her parents' lordship has remained. A son and a daughter of this lordship live in the Sperling house. They see Pauline, their old playmate, again; and this reunion is wonderful. These "counts" behave like human beings towards the simple maid. How could she understand the groom's grumbling, who sees only bloodsuckers and parasites in all people who do not belong to his class? But Pauline's and the locksmith's hearts are united by their views on life.

Georg Hirschfeld has always been a faithful observer of reality and a conscientious, all too conscientious portraitist. However great the significance of naturalistic reality poetry may be, it will never be the language in which truly great poets speak. For they have more to tell us than mere reality can say. The way they see, the character of their spirit speak from their works. With Hirschfeld, we have always noticed a certain reluctance to give his own imprint. We saw pure reality through his mind as if through a pane of glass. Now things have changed with him. In this latest comedy, he has also given something of his own character. We sense his personality. He no longer wants to depict people and events selflessly, so that they look at us as if he were not there; instead he shows us how he sees them. This time his work has a clear artistic structure. The material is treated in a genuinely comic manner. If Hirschfeld had lived in a time that was less sympathetic to the pure depiction of reality than today, he would only have been observed from this performance onwards. For it is only through it that the artist reveals himself in him. Only now does he draw together from reality those moments that interest us within the work of art and discard the ballast that is valuable to the observer of the world but indifferent to the aesthetically connoisseur. His conscientiousness towards natural reality has diminished, his sense of the artistic has become more refined. Else Lehmann gave an excellent acting performance as Pauline, as did Rudolf Rittner as the art locksmith. The tension that we are put in by these seemingly so alien and yet so attractive personalities, and their finding their way through their opposites, was shown to full advantage in the performance.

Performance at the Deutsches Theater, Berlin

When Goethe stood before the Greek works of art on his Italian journey, he said: "There is necessity, there is God." And explaining this statement, he wrote to his friends back home: "I have the suspicion that the Greeks proceeded in art according to the same laws that nature itself follows in its creations and that I am on the trail of." It is the realm of higher truth to which Goethe points when he writes these words. One must be able to go beyond the view of truth that recent years have often produced if one wants to understand these words of Goethe. Under the influence of this view, we are inclined to call everything truth that is provided by a faithful observation of all the details of things. Everything we see and hear, we also call true. And a depictor of truth is one who reproduces what he sees and hears in its entirety. When Goethe spoke of "truth" at the height of his conception of life, he had something else in mind. Not he who describes things in all their real breadth proclaims the truth. For behind this breadth, something is revealed to those who look deeper that is true in a different sense than the immediate reality. The individual human being, with all his special character traits, contains something within him that is more than the individual. For those who do not develop the organ within themselves to see this something, it is not there at all; just as color is not there for the color-blind. He sees reality only in various shades of gray.

For the colorblind, this grey world is not the real world. Likewise, for the spirit, which in Goethe's sense sees the higher nature within nature, the reality that spreads out in space and time is not the true reality. One can no more argue about the higher content of the world with those who see the truth only in spatial-temporal reality than with the color-blind about colors. Goethe and those who view the world in his sense call the higher world that of ideas. In the "Prologue in Heaven" he points to this higher world with the words: "And that which floats in fluctuating appearance is fixed with constant thought." Compared to the higher truth, the common reality is untrue. The individual real tree is untrue in relation to the idea of the tree, which the deeper-seeing person grasps in spiritual contemplation. It is only natural that the creations that stem from this higher view leave those who are blind to ideas cold. What is blind to ideas, however, is that naturalism in art which seeks to make it an image, a portrait of common, everyday reality. However, it must be expressly emphasized that the world of ideas does not refer to the monotonous, abstract world of the intellect, but to the world of intuition, which is full of life and content. If one finds the idea of man in the individual human being, one is not dealing with a meagre general idea, but with a content that is much richer, much fuller than that of everyday reality. Compared to Goethe's "Natural Daughter", the minds of people who cling to common reality remain cold. Fichte, on the other hand, who lived entirely in the world of higher reality, described this work, which others have called a "crystal ice palace", as Goethe's best creation.

Hugo von Hofmannsthal takes us to the land that spread out before Goethe's eyes when he said in front of the high works of art of the Greeks: there is necessity, there is God. Unlike Goethe, Hofmannsthal's view of art and reality does not appear to us as the fruit of a rich life experience. Rather, in complete naivety, reality strips itself of its ordinary, everyday qualities before his eyes and shows him its ideal, higher content. Hofmannsthal's creations therefore do not appear mature, not fully saturated. But his longing points him everywhere to the ideal land, and his brush does not paint things as they are in everyday life, but according to their inner, higher truth. Such are the characters and such are the events depicted by Hofmannsthal in the two dramas "Die Hochzeit der Sobeide" and "Der Abenteurer". They will appear as cool products to those who stick to common reality. As creations of a man to whom the inner truth of things is revealed, they appear to those who themselves feel something of this world. In the old man who takes home a young woman who loves not him but another and reveals this to him on their wedding night, the great traits of a general human being are reproduced. Everything accidental, which in common reality accompanies these great traits as tendrils and flourishes, has been removed. Perhaps no single person shows us the great lines of humanity in the way Hofmannsthal depicts them. But the individual human being awakens this image of the general human in us. This poet has a keen sense for everything that is not accidental. The process he describes cannot take place in the realm of everyday life in the generality that he depicts. But our intuition will always conjure up this process before our eyes when something similar only echoes in reality. The old man is a great nature. A nature that is as man is, of whom Goethe says: he is noble, helpful and good, for that alone distinguishes him from all beings we know. Moreover, man must complete his circles of existence according to eternal, iron laws. And it seems to this man to be an eternal, iron law: to release his beloved woman freely to wherever her love takes her. This is precisely what drives Sobeide to misfortune and death. She goes to her lover. He doesn't really love her. He was only playing with his love for her. She returns to her unloved husband and kills herself. - We also encounter the same motif in "The Adventurer". The woman who is deeply in love with the man who is only playing with her love. She has become an artist through love, he has become an adventurer through love play. Nothing individual clings to the figures. The eternal, which reveals itself in the accidental and temporal, is depicted.

In the place where naturalism, which makes the temporal, the common reality the sole truth, has reached its highest stage of dramatic development, these dramas of higher truth could not come into their own. The German Theater can perform the "Fuhrmann Henschel" to perfection, but not these dramas, which do not contain anything that is portrayed with incomparable grandeur in the naturalistic dramas.

Comedy by Otto Erich Hartleben

In a well-known "fundamental" work on pedagogy, the following sentence can be found: "The ways of education and its means must be based on the goal that the educator is to achieve, on the ideal of man that is set before him. Alongside this goal, alongside this ideal, the educator can take into account the individual character of the pupil. With one person the ideal will be achieved in this way, with another in that." Otto Erich Hartleben structured his main pedagogical work "Marriage Education" according to this educational postulate. The ideal in question is a person who fits into a proper. Philistine marriage. The paths that education must take in order to achieve this goal, which seems necessary to every Philistine heart, are different. They must depend on education, class, wealth, sex and other given conditions. Hartleben picks out two cases from the wide variety: Hermann Günther, the son of a rich middle-class family, and Meta Hübcke, a poor bookkeeper. Hermann is brought up by his mother. And when she can no longer cope on her own, she calls Hermann's uncle for help. The son of a landlady's landlady, a bourgeois commis, takes over Meta's marriage preparation. Hermann is not only destined for a "good middle-class" marriage in the book of fate; the actual companion of his later days, Bella König, also appears on the scene from time to time. She is already impeccably educated for marriage. Her natural dispositions have made this easy. She only seems to be there to serve the psychologists as an example of stupidity. Hermann always runs away when this Bella arrives. He must therefore be brought up to marry her. According to correct pedagogical principles, he must first get to know life, which in this case means womanhood, before he gets on board the little ship that Bella is steering. That's what mother Günther thinks. To this end, she gives the young man one hundred and fifty marks a month in pocket money. But the boy is up to mischief. He has too much of the morality in him that the Philistines call philistine. He flirts with Meta Hübcke. And he has feelings for her. Günther's mother finds out that he doesn't even pay the rent for his mistress. That's bad, says the mother's heart. The boy has to be taken out of the habit. He must be given an extra fifty marks a month so that he no longer falls in love with such girls but pays their rent. But a "good middle-class" mother can't teach her son everything that goes with that. And the father is dead. So she calls the father's brother. He has the right educational maxims. He is a man and can speak German with Hermann. He does that too. And he makes things really educational. He teaches by example. That's easy for him. Hermann has also had a fling with the parlor maid. That doesn't suit Günther's mother either. The house must be kept clean. The mother sends the girl away. Hermann decides to have an affair with her outside the house. This makes sense to his uncle, and he goes along to the rendezvous. There will be company. The uncle doesn't just want to watch. This is the way Hermann is brought up to marry. Meta, however, seeks to educate the Commis. The relationship with Hermann does not suit him any more than it suits Günther's mother. Commis and the noble lady basically mean the same thing. Meta must have a lover who gives her money. Mother Günther, of course, with the proviso that it's not too much. The Commis thinks differently. Because he wants to marry Meta himself one day. To do so, she first has to get a lot of money from a lover. Hermann is therefore not suitable. Someone else must come along. The bourgeois Kommis forges letters to lure Hermann away from Meta. Then he brings her a solvent man. In this way he wants to educate her to marry himself. Will he succeed? That is not stated in Hartleben's comedy.

You can see that Otto Erich Hartleben understands the Philistines; and he has the humor to portray them. I did not specify the content of the comedy. I wanted to characterize the impulse from which it seems to me to have emerged.

Performance at the Lessing Theater, Berlin

Leo Hirschfeld has made the fate of a dramatic poet the subject of a comedy. It must be admitted that the task he has set himself is as interesting as its satisfying realization is difficult. Heinrich Ritter begins as an idealist. He does not want to obey any demands other than those of art. As long as he keeps his ideals within a circle of coffee house brethren, he can preserve them. As soon as he steps out of this circle, a gentle breeze blows them away. Ritter has just completed a drama. One of the coffeehouse brothers thinks the ending is particularly great. That's something completely new. Others have done it before. But this ending!!! The editor of the Tagespost, Dr. Ottomar Mark, is a powerful man. He has influence over the management of the Residenztheater. With his help, Ritter hopes to bring the play to the stage. But this editor has a different artistic attitude to the coffee house brothers. He finds the ending impossible, everything else excellent. He wants to stand up for the play if Ritter cuts the ending. The brave poet, who wrote the play because of this ending, is initially reluctant. But when Mathilde Halm, the hopeful member of the Residenztheater, makes it clear to him that he should give in first in order to get to the top, he also gives in. Later, when he reaches the top, he will also have the power to realize his ideals. The great success comes. The "poet" reaches the top. But the ideals also go to hell. You have to keep the power you have gained. You can only do that if you continue to be at the will of the public. - Ritter's "artistic" idealism also threatened to undermine his bourgeois position. His family regarded him as a disgrace. He could gain a lucrative position through his uncle, the court lawyer Dr. Vinzenz Lechner. He is even offered the hand of his cousin. As long as he is an "idealist", he rejects everything that comes from this bourgeois side. Once he is on top, he wins the uncle's respect as well as the cousin's hand. - A lot could be done artificially with this problem. Imagine the coffee house circle in which Ritter lives, consisting of truly idealistic people, and imagine that Leo Hirschfeld had portrayed his hero as thoroughly idealistic but weak-minded, and motivated his case psychologically. The pain of the idealistic friends over the fallen man could give the whole plot a highly sympathetic background. But there is none of this to be found in this comedy. The coffee house brothers are stultified individuals. Their judgment of Ritter's talent leaves us cold. We do not know what is real about any of these people. Just as little as we know what is in Ritter himself and what is perishing. The development from idealist to flatterer of the public appears to be characterized in an entirely external way. The friends show no particular pain, but drink the good cognac that Ritter, as a wealthy man, can afford with relish. Yes, if the plot, which is insignificant in itself, were elevated by a particularly humorous portrayal! Then one would forget the "what" above the "how". But there can be no question of that either. Hirschfeld actually offends our aesthetic sensibilities in that as a dramatist he adopts a position towards the audience and art to which his hero sinks. Everything in comedy is calculated for effect. The development of a character is nothing, the momentary theatrical wit is everything.

The performance was entirely in keeping with this quality of comedy. Only Ferdinand Bonn tried to turn Heinrich Ritter into a real person. The character he gave is not that of the poet at all, but a much more elevated one. Josef Jarno struck a better tone, underlining every joke, playing in the style of a buffoon, and thus actually hitting the style of the play. All the worse for the comedy.

Performance at the Deutsches Theater, Berlin

Arthur Schnitzler has awakened the same feeling in me with all his creations: he neatly peels away everything that lies on the surface from the processes of life and leaves the content hidden beneath this surface. What he brings can only ever interest me because of this content; but this poet has no eye for this content itself. I had this feeling in particular with his new cycle of one-act plays.

The play "The Companion" presents a professor who has just lost his wife. Friends express their usual sympathy. A woman appears, demanding letters from the estate of the deceased. What is written in these letters is to remain a secret for the professor. But he believes he has long known what these letters bear witness to. The deceased wife was the mistress of his assistant. He has come to terms with this fact. It had seemed natural to him that he could only enjoy a brief happiness with a woman twenty years his junior. She was made to be a lover, not a companion, as he would have needed one. In his opinion, the two went their separate ways. But when the assistant appears at the professor's house after the funeral, it turns out that the truth is quite different from what the husband had suspected. This assistant had been in love with another woman for two years and had long since chosen her as his wife. So he did not treat the deceased as his mistress, no, as his prostitute. The professor would have accepted a love affair between the two, because it seemed natural to him. He would even have released the woman if the lovers had found the courage to demand it. But what is now revealed fills him with disgust and he shows the low-minded man the door. From conversations between the professor, the friend of the deceased and the assistant, we learn everything that has happened over the course of many years. These conversations are only the conclusion of a longer series of facts. The friend says that precisely because the professor has learned the full truth, he can now regain his peace. He now knows how little he possessed the woman who has just died. Now that she had passed away, he was no longer under the pressure of an unnatural marriage, and he did not need to mourn the death of the woman who had always been a stranger to him, who had only died in this house by chance. But what precedes this conclusion is, according to what we learn, not at all dramatic. For years a woman betrays her husband with another. In the end she even knows that the other is planning to marry someone else. The professor suspects something, but does nothing. And the seducer lives the life that touches him more deeply, outside the scene of the action. As atmospheric as Schnitzler knows how to make the conversations, nothing is gripping. The whole thing leaves you indifferent, because the facts are not based on any events that could evoke a deeper interest on their own.

The second one-act play "The Green Cockatoo" made even less of an impression on me. In a Parisian dive at the time of the revolution, down-and-out actors and sensationalist aristocrats gather every evening. On the evening we are shown the Bastille is stormed. The ex-comedians perform scenes of crime with the worst pathos, and the nobles get the creeps. Henri, one of the actors, has just married L&ocardie. He wants to portray how he killed the Duke of Cadignan because his wife was in love with him. He then learns that this infidelity is based on truth. The Duke arrives at the tavern at just the right time, and Henri really does kill him. As gripping as this may be for an audience with an eye for external theatrical effects, the whole thing is nothing but high jinks; it is reminiscent of shows that serve low taste and is boring in detail.

The best of the three one-act plays is "Paracelsus". The adventurous and mysterious 16th century personality uses hypnotism to carry out a prank in the house of an armourer. He suggests to the wife of the coarse, clumsy master craftsman that she must tell the truth for an afternoon. The husband then learns all sorts of edifying things about the heart of his "faithfully guarded" wife. Although the drawing of the characters is interesting and the process is not without a certain background, it seems to me to be nothing more than an extract of what can be said about Paracelsus and hypnotism in a salon conversation and accompanied by not exactly deep wit.

Drama in three acts by Max Dreyer
Performance at the Deutsches Theater, Berlin

Shortly before this performance [Schnitzler evening], the Deutsches Theater staged a drama in three acts by Max Dreyer: "Hans". A scholar lives with his daughter on an island in the North Sea. He is the director of a biological institute. The daughter has become a learned girl at her father's side. She microscopes and makes scientific discoveries like a German professor. It is not clear who is smarter: the father or the daughter. A former boarding school colleague comes to visit their friend from their girlhood. The father falls in love with this friend. The daughter is displeased to see that someone is coming between her and her father. Scholarship has also driven all sense of natural feeling out of Hans - as the scholar calls his daughter Johanna. A former officer and now a painter loves Hans. She treats him rather disgustingly. He would accept the fact that she does not praise his paintings. But he cannot tolerate the tone in which she does so. The father's relationship with his girlfriend becomes particularly repugnant to Hans when she learns that this girl has had a child out of wedlock. But the father loves the girl and is loved again. To ensure that everything goes well, Hans suddenly discovers her heart. She falls in ardent love with the painter. Now she can understand everything. Even her father's love. An arbitrary development of plots and constructed characters. Template characters and a dull plot that is based on traditional prejudices.