The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Peter Altenberg

A few weeks ago in Vienna, I came across the then recently published book "Ashantee" by Peter Altenberg. I knew this poet's first work, "Wie ich es sche". When it was published, there was jubilation among the young Viennese literati, as if a new land had been conquered for poetry. As if sounds had risen from the depths of the soul that had never been heard before. I could not quite understand the jubilation. I have often felt this way in recent years when I have heard that a mighty genius has arisen here or there. I often found old familiar tunes where the most unconditional originality was proclaimed. It was no different with Peter Altenberg. I found real poetry in "As I see it". About four-fifths of the book was indigestible for me; but the rest led me into depths of the soul that were not new to me, but into which I followed the artist with yearning love. He spoke of many common things, but he knew how to lend them a rare brilliance; the common becomes noble when it comes from his mouth. I thought I recognized a true poet in Peter Altenberg, but not one of the great ones. Peter Altenberg does not know how to sing about the depths of nature, the abysses, the great sufferings and joys of the human soul. What interests man most, who immerses himself in the eternal harmony of the world, seems to be alien to him. He poetically transfigures the petty, the insignificant that lives on the surface of things. He is unpalatable to philosophical natures. He has nothing to say to them. For them, what he is talking about does not even exist. For them it is the accidental, the worthless, which is none of their business. No light from the "eternal ideas" penetrates Altenberg's eyes. But the non-eternal, the accidental, shines in his hand like the "eternal ideas" in Plato's. You have to be in a good mood to enjoy Altenberg. You have to be in the mood to dally, to revel voluptuously in the pettiest, the most insignificant things. If you don't know what to do with your time, it's best to turn to his books. In such a mood, I also picked up his latest work "Ashantee". And once again found the little poet I had found in "As I see it". I indulged again in the voluptuous sensations that excite the insignificant, the surface of things. But these feelings did not seem to me to be entirely sincere. Altenberg sometimes deludes himself. When a very small thing fails to arouse any emotion in him, he becomes a comedian of the soul. He pretends to have feelings that he doesn't have. Because Altenberg is very flirtatious. And it is not only his coquetry that reminds us of the emotional world of the degenerate female nature. He has a decidedly feminine streak. Yes, I find an even greater flaw in him. He lacks the skeleton of the mind. He looks to me like a child born with crippled bones. He seems to believe that even the slightest thought disgraces the poet. Soon after reading Altenberg's book, I found an interesting essay by Hermann Bahr on poetry in the Viennese weekly Die Zeit. I can't help it, but I find everything Bahr writes interesting. He is not a critic like others. He doesn't go around the creations he talks about. He can crawl inside them with an enviable agility. And when he is inside, he often says things that are as enlightening about the works of art as Kepler's laws about the nature of the planets. I thought to myself that Hermann Bahr would also have something enlightening to say about Peter Altenberg. When I started reading his essay, I was quite ashamed. Bahr would like to be as successful as Peter Altenberg. "To be the darling of connoisseurs and so hated by people of mere intellect. Blessedly he walks along, much loved, and laughs at the stupid crowd of the "clever", who must not understand him, who must hate him; for he is the pure artist, who nowhere touches the region of mere intellect; the latter lacks the organs for him ..." Now I knew where I stood. I don't hate Peter Altenberg. But I did get the feeling that his critic would count me among the stupid crowd of "clever people" who "are not allowed to understand" Altenberg. In his essay, Hermann Bahr now wants to speak to the stupid "clever ones" or the "barbarians, as Barres called them, about Mr. Peter". And what does the critic tell the barbarians? That everyone in their youth raved about Posa and Max and later found in life that in reality, on the street, in the coffee house, there is no Posa and no Max. And that a drama whose characters are portrayed in a true-to-life way does not satisfy us. That we are not satisfied when we meet the laundress and the waiter we know from life on the stage. Reality needs to be idealized if it is to have an artistic effect, Hermann Bahr teaches us. But what do we have to do, he asks, since we don't find ideal figures like Götz or Posa in reality? Hermann Bahr said in a few words what the "stupid clever ones" should do to discover art: "Well, I know a teacher for them. All they have to do is go to our Mr. Peter. He has the good fortune to love people. He looks at every commis with his love, and so he can find Max and Posa in every coffee house. He has the great eye of eternal love. I could have told them that more briefly, I should have just said: he is a poet."

When I read that, I didn't feel quite like a barbarian again. On the contrary. Hermann Bahr has to say the most elementary truths, the most trivial things, in order to lift the "barbarians" up to Mr. Peter. One could speak of the most insignificant poets as Bahr does of Mr. Peter. But at the end of the essay, Bahr's true feelings come to the fore. "But he is not the naïve poet who cannot say mean things because under his gaze they are always immediately transformed into noble things. No, our Peter has often seen the common. Then the poet seems to sleep in him, he listens to people's vain speeches and looks at their earthly afflictions. There are pauses in his love. When it finally awakens, he cries out so blissfully, as if all mesquine things were suddenly transfigured under the ray of his goodness, and in their transfiguration he must always remember with wonder how poor they were just a moment ago. He has the peculiarity of never forgetting to Gretchen that she was a silly little washerwoman before his love awoke. He is a poet who constantly marvels at the fact that he is a poet. This endears him to us like a good child." That is the same opinion I have formed about Mr. Peter. The poet awakens in him when he sees the mesquine things shimmering in a beautiful light that emanates from their surface. But this beauty is accidental. One goes a step further, and the same thing that first shone like a crystal appears in its dull baseness. If Mr. Peter could see the truly eternal in the stupid little washerwoman and if she then appeared to him as Gretchen, he would have to forget the stupid little washerwoman completely. What distinguishes me from Hermann Bahr, then, is only that I cannot overlook the fact that in the "pure artist", Mr. Peter, he has no sense of the eternal in things, of the backbone of life. For once, I cannot give up the belief that one can be completely "clever" and still feel artistically, even create artistically. Why then does the "stupid crowd of clever people" sit devoutly in the theater while Gerhart Hauptmann's "Sunken Bell" is being played?

Franz Wörther

Karl Weiß-Schrattenthal, who succeeded in discovering Johanna Ambrosius three years ago, has just brought another "poet and thinker from the people" into the public eye. This time the discovered person is a Bavarian shoemaker, Franz Wörther. Anyone who had a sincere interest in the poetry of Ambrosius should also feel the same for this shoemaker. I have occasionally formed my opinion about the causes of such an interest. At the time, the poet and literary historian Karl Busse lashed out like a bull at those who had warm words for the East Prussian poet. I believe the reason for his behavior is that Busse was unable to find the right point of view from which the Lober of Ambrosius judged. Busse took a naïve standpoint and allowed the poems as such to have an immediate effect on him. The Lober did not do this. They looked at these creations as one looks at happy memories from childhood alongside the experiences of the day.

Whoever is involved in the spiritual life of the present can only take such an interest in the poetry of the simple woman. No one who naively enjoys Dehmel's or Hartleben's poems can be captivated by Ambrosius with the same immediacy. But just as the serious man likes to remember his childhood, the modern educated or over-educated also enjoys the natural tones of the folk poet. We enjoy the memories of childhood, even if they tell of incomprehensible and stupid things. We do not question their reasonableness. In the same way, we do not ask about the aesthetic form in which we encounter such true natural sensations as those of Ambrosius.

For the same reason, poets such as Rosegger, for example, have a far more significant effect on the educated than on the people. The people live in the feelings that such poets portray to them from morning to night; the educated have outgrown them; but they like to put themselves in their place, because the memory of them is sacred to them.

When the thirteen-year-old Franz Wörther lost his father in 1843, he was alone in the world, without a friend or patron. He could now not think of becoming a master builder, as his father had wanted; with his idealism in mind, he had to learn shoemaking. After his apprenticeship, he traveled through northern and central Germany. He then spent five years as a soldier. After completing his service, he returned to the shoemaking trade. Wörther went through struggles with his soul. Sometimes the thinker and poet wanted to despair when the shoemaker had to provide bread for himself and his seven children. But the "man of the people" accepted his fate with true philosophical composure. He said to himself: "I regard the poetic gift I have been given as a gift from heaven for the happiness I have been robbed of. The dark defiance of former times no longer took hold of me; I dallied, as it were, serenely and calmly through the cliffs of life on the muses' rosebands." In his own way, this nature poet drew strength and courage to live from his own soul. And even if his poetry is often just a stammer, he stammers sounds that come from the chest of a whole man. Wörther does not speak in the perfect forms of the artist; what he speaks is as appealing and captivating as the products of nature. The fact that he seeks forms of art that he has not mastered is disturbing, indeed often tempts him to express a true sentiment untruthfully: but the genuine original source can always be discovered.

But the poems are not the most important part of the little booklet that Schrattenthal has published. The wisdom sayings are of far greater interest. A true nature Nietzsche comes to us in Wörther. It is true that the natural thinker did not go as far as to revaluate the concepts of value he inherited; nor did he harbor any anti-Christian sentiments, but remained "pious" to this day. But he coined the ancestral concepts anew for himself; he gave them an individual form. A man who wrote the following thoughts on "freedom" deserves our greatest attention.

"Freedom is the alarm clock of passion and the moving force of execution, it is the cauldron of all freedom and exuberance. - It is the dream of the imprisoned and the terror of the prison guards. - Freedom is the highest bliss for corner-cutters and drifters and the political glue rod for social robins and bloodthirsty finches." Wörther gives a clear, understandable verdict in a transparent, simple form on the concept of "equality": "Equality is the longing of the ugly and the horror of the beautiful. It is the colorful, iridescent soap bubble of all social democratic phrases and the necessary embellishment of agitation speeches. - Equality is the dissolution of civilization and the return of humanity to its original state of the Stone Age and the pile dwellings with the uniform fashion of Adam and Eve. It is therefore the beginning of the end of all tailoring. - Equality is the tablecloth for the Cinderellas of destiny." A subtle sentiment is reflected in the sentence: "Envy even puts dirt in the hands of the child who secretly wants to throw at his playmate the colorful rag that his parents hang around his shoulders in monkey-like love."

And the saying: "A heart without gratitude is like a faded rose bush that holds only thorns for the wanderer" reveals that a noble disposition can also thrive on the cobbler's chair. The pride of an independent personality built on its own strength and dignity is also characteristic of our shoemaker. He finds that "the cowardly sycophancy of the rich man is called pride of status, his avarice is called economic calculation, while the profligacy of a man's lower mind is called worldly noblesse, and the lack of character of a rich man is called miserable sycophancy diplomatic statesmanship".

Franz Wörther currently lives in his birthplace of Kleinheubach am Main. He provided for his seven sons with his shoemaking skills. He was a valiant craftsman. Schrattenthal has shown that he was even more through the commendable publication of his intellectual products. Those who can only enjoy the book aesthetically will soon put it down; those who have a sense for the contemplation of a self-contained personality, perfect in its own way, will read it through from beginning to end. The coarse naturalness will refresh such a connoisseur, and the clumsiness in the artistic will not bother him much.

Presentation on a lecture by Georg Fuchs on "New Style"

The first lecture evening of the Berlin "Freie Literarische Gesellschaft" was dedicated to an energetic, subtle defense of the "New Style" given by the art writer Georg Fuchs. He found beautiful, meaningful words to characterize the recently emerging striving to get away from the "professor's bakel", which until recently imposed a foreign style on German art that was unsuited to its own needs and sensibilities. "Until now, when people in the German Empire asked about the style of the noble house, the palace and the temple, a mighty atlas was opened up. In the styles of Empire, Rococo, Baroque, German and Italian Renaissance; Gothic, Romanesque, Norwegian, Byzantine, Moorish, Egyptian, Persian, Indian and Assyrian - this is how the wealthy German built from the end of the nineteenth century. With great erudition, he researched the architecture and applied arts of all times and peoples, imitating them with unwavering conscientiousness." It was of no use that the Germans occupied a high rank among the cultural nations in painting, that the greatest visual artist Arnold Böcklin was a German. The works of our masters did not find their way into German homes. They were collected in galleries and exhibitions. They were therefore unable to provide works that would decorate the German home in such a way that the decoration would be an expression of the needs and feelings of those who live in the decorated room. Only the harmony between the purpose associated with a room and the artistic decoration of the same can lead to an individual style. "The most artistic should also be the most practical, so that we use beauty to a certain extent, need it." Outstanding art connoisseurs advocate such demands with powerful words: Bode, Lessing, Lichtwark, Jessen, Brinckmann. And artists began to fulfill such demands. What H. E. v. Berlepsch, Eckmann, Obrist, Schwindrazheim, Werle, Köpping, Melchior Lechter and others created in this direction was described by Fuchs in an attractive manner. He emphasized the importance of the magazine "Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration", published by Alexander Koch in Darmstadt. It has placed itself at the service of the "New Style". Fuchs does not see salvation in artistic individualism, which consists of the artist living out his individuality in his work. "Our painters had no purpose, they were not commissioned to create here or there within a given whole, so the artists saw nothing more in their art than a means of expressing their individuality. Each did this in his own way, as uniquely as possible, indeed uniquely to the point of impossibility." But it is not this expression of individuality that is the ideal of art, but the creation of a national style. "The purpose of the object determines its construction, the construction determines its form, and the decoration is nothing more than a kind of 'final feeling' of the constructive form. ... All the great, still incalculable forces of the people, which for a long, long time have been kept away from living art, from the art of feeling, are stirring and want to enter the great stream of development that leads to what we need: the new style!" It is not for me to pass judgment on the justification of individualism and nationalism in art here, where I only have to report.

A series of interesting lecture and recitation evenings are planned for the coming winter. In addition, the board has decided to create a meeting place for the exchange of opinions in the field of literature and intellectual life in the "Freie Literarische Gesellschaft". To this end, cycles of lectures followed by discussions are to be organized. Initially, the undersigned and Dr. Flaischlen will give such lectures. The undersigned will begin with a series of six lectures on "The main currents in German literature from the middle of the century to the present". The lectures will be held at fortnightly intervals, always on a Tuesday. The first will take place on December 7.

Presentation of a lecture held on December 19, 1897 in the "Literary Society" in Leipzig

Dr. Rudolf Steiner spoke about "Goethe's world view and the present" at the "Literary Society". The topic is not new. Numerous philosophers and literary historians have dealt with it. But you can see how inexhaustible Goethe is, because there are always new sides to this topic, and Dr. Steiner's lecture in the large hall of the "Hötel de Pologne" offered an interesting picture of the intellectual life of the Weimar prince of poets. The speaker referred to Goethe's position on the dispute between the conservative Cuvier and the revolutionary Geoffroy de St.-Hilaire. Goethe suspected that this dispute would result in a whole revolution in people's views. The old way of thinking, according to which man was a being dependent on God and nature, fell, and he became the master of creation, who was alone with everything that lives and weaves around him. Goethe had already adopted this world view early on, but only a few people understood it. Our world view goes back to Parmenides. He was followed by Plato, whose doctrine of this world and the hereafter was further developed by Christianity. This doctrine still dominates contemporary philosophy, even revolutionary minds such as Baco of Verulam, Descartes and Kant, who are convinced of the necessity of faith. Goethe stands alone against them all. He emphasizes the unity of the spiritual and the sensual world. The path of nature leads from the plant through the animal world to man. Man is not gifted with anything supernatural, he is only the most highly organized product of nature. He is indeed the master of creation. In old age, however, Goethe returned to the old world view, as Part II of "Faust" shows us. Goethe's view, however, was taken up and expanded. Ludwig Feuerbach, who destroyed everything that had been valid until then, was followed by Max Stirner. It was then the great natural scientists of the modern age, namely Darwin, who rebuilt something new from the ruins and created the world view of the present. In his magnificent lecture, Redner followed on from a book he had published on the same subject.

In my lecture "On the Literary Revolution in the Middle of the Nineteenth Century", which took place on December 8 [1897] in the Berlin "Freie Litterarische Gesellschaft", I said the following: "In this century, a radical change in the view of the world and of life has taken place; the whole religious emotional life of a part of European humanity has become different from that of the past centuries. Such an intensive change of views has not occurred for a long time in the development of world history. The world view of humility, which is filled with the feeling of dependence on higher, supernatural powers, has been replaced by the world view of pride, which is based on the awareness that man is a free, independent being, that he should be the master of his own destiny. Ludwig Feuerbach expressed it with clear, sharp words that all ideas of higher powers are products of human thought, that the revelation of God is nothing other than the revelation, the self-development of the human being. Self-conscious man thus places himself at the head of creation; he now knows that he can only direct himself and that in earlier epochs of world history he placed the thoughts of his own soul, according to which he directs himself, above himself as higher powers. Those people into whose emotional life such thoughts have passed are alien to the people of the first half of the century, even those who are among the greatest. The tone of feeling in the writings of such great men is like the sound of a foreign language to them. But even today there are only a few who are imbued with the new sentiments. They are opposed by the great masses and also by a multitude of important spirits whose souls are still dominated by the old feelings. We contemporary people - I said - can hardly communicate with these people of the "old feelings. The words from their mouths have a completely different meaning than ours."

The next day, a report in the "Frankfurter Zeitung" about the trial of Bruno Wille, the well-known representative of a modern liberal world view, who gave speeches in Vienna and Graz about the "religion of joy" and was therefore charged with disturbing existing religions, provided me with confirmation of my assertions. Wille contrasted the "religion of affliction" with the "religion of joy" in his own way, which I do not want to make mine exactly. The religion of tribulation makes this world an inferior world, a vale of tears. The religion of joy offers people the opportunity to draw happiness and salvation from this world and to do without the prospect of an afterlife. It is the contrast in feelings that matters when we speak of the old and new worldviews. How one comes to terms with the dogmas is only a consequence of the contrast in feelings.

Only those who feel in the sense of the old dogma can recognize the old dogma. The dogma is only there to put the content of feeling into thoughts, into words.

Two people faced each other in the Graz trial against Bruno Wille. A man with the old feelings, the judge, and a young man, a student, the witness Schmauz, who had grown up in the new feelings.

The following dialog took place:

Chairman: Did Wille negate the concept of God?

Witness: That has been repeatedly criticized by Catholic theologians. Even St. Thomas, whom Pope Leo XIII presented as a great philosopher of the Catholic Church, did extensive research on this matter.

Chairman: And when ten thousand people have done research, the dogma must not be shaken.

Witness: The dogma is fixed, but it is subject to constant further development and research. Nothing can be prescribed that contradicts reason ...

Chairman: Anything can be prescribed! Do you consider the teachings of Wille to be unbelief?

Witness: Every Catholic must adhere to science!

Chairman (to the clerk): I ask that this statement be recorded. (To the Court): I state that I and the witness do not understand each other, and I therefore abandon the interrogation.

This statement by the president of the Graz court is symptomatic of our times. There are two opposing worlds of feeling that cannot understand each other. Arrogant as I am, I don't want to play with these ideas after all. The lack of understanding is not based on mutuality. We already understand others. We can think our way into them, just as we can think our way into Plato's and Aristotle's contemporaries. We understand the reactionaries. But they don't understand us. And we are even arrogant enough to believe that progress is based on them gradually learning to understand us. We are even much more tolerant than they are. Just try if we have so little respect for personal opinions that we would think of putting someone in prison for being Catholic or Protestant Orthodox. We do not count prison among the tools of logic.

But we can be forgiven for one thing. Sometimes the clash between the old and new worldviews makes us smile. Sometimes that's the only way we can express ourselves. That's why the "laughing lady" in the Graz trial is a personality I want to take seriously.

I quote sentences from the Frankfurter Zeitung: "The presiding judge then explained that it was clear from Will's statements that he did not believe in hell at all, but also that he did not believe in a God who could punish. The defense counsel then asked the main witness for the prosecution, police commissioner Papez, how he imagined hell.

President: The witness does not need to answer that, because that is in any case a completely subjective view.

Police Commissioner Papez points out what the Catechism and the Bible teach about hell. Here the president interrupts him with the following words:

"I notice a lady in the audience who likes to laugh all the time; in any case, this is disturbing and inappropriate; I must ask you to refrain from this; we have a very serious hearing here and not at all the purpose of entertaining ourselves."

The theory of the comic is not yet complete. We don't really know what the opposites must be that make the human laugh muscles twitch. The lady's laughter can be judged either way. Perhaps it was trivialities that aroused the lady's laughter muscles. Or was the lady supposed to have a symbolic meaning? Nietzsche says: Truth is a woman. The "laughing philosophy" in the gallery. That wouldn't be a bad title for a book that a serious joker could write. World history could have the quirk of wanting to express itself through a lady just when it wants to laugh. After all, world history is still supposed to be the world court. But world history is clever. It knows that it can't use us, serious men, when it wants to laugh. We are too pathetic for it. That's where the ladies come in. It's easier for them to laugh. One lady said to me after my lecture: "Why get so excited about things that every sensible person today thinks like you?" Yes, ladies like that live on the "blissful islands", where you don't know how difficult the battle for the new world view will be for us.

Stuttgart 1898, Fromanns Verlag

Anyone writing a book about Goethe today must be careful not to do anything unnecessary. We know far too much about Goethe. But we know little about the depths of his being. For Goethe was a man whose feelings and passions were intimately connected to his world view. Goethe could only be happy insofar as the deepest secrets of the world were revealed to him. Anyone who does not understand this should never pick up a pen to write a word about Goethe. Robert Saitschick has done so, without even having the slightest idea of the connection between Goethe's world view and his nature. That is why his book “Goethe's Character” is the most miserable, wretched piece of work in the whole of Goethe literature. Such Goethe admirers must be told: “Hands off” an object that is as foreign to you as anything can be. I was outraged by this book because of its great phraseology and the [pretentiousness] with which it appears.

Max Stirner. His Life and Work. By John Henry Mackay

Berlin 1898, Schuster u. Löffler

“The Germans have forgotten their most daring and consistent thinker for so long and so completely that they have lost all right to the gift of his life.” The brave poet of the world view that is imbued with the spirit of this daring thinker, John Henry Mackay, utters these words on the first page of the book in which he describes Max Stirner's life. I believe that there are not many people today who would feel the bitterness of these words to be justified. But there are some people in the present day who must have the same feeling of pain when they think that Max Stirner's main work, “Der Einzige und sein Eigentum” (The Ego and Its Own), which was published in 1845, was completely forgotten in Germany for decades until it fell into the hands of Mackay, who was a kindred spirit of Stirner, in the British Museum in London in 1888 and experienced a revival through his tireless work. This feeling of pain must be present in those who spent their youth during the time when Stirner's book was forgotten. For it is not the same at what age one lets a book work on oneself. The effect that a work has on us in the mid-twenties cannot be aroused in us at a later age. And so many of us will feel it a great loss that the so-called Zeitgeist has deprived them of the “Der Einzige und sein Eigentum” at the right time. One of the greats of the present day would have felt this way if a malicious illness had not put an abrupt end to his work at the very moment when he was about to accomplish a spiritual act that would have joined Stirner's life's work in the most dignified way. I am referring to Friedrich Nietzsche. He would have written his “re-evaluation of all values” from the same way of thinking that flowed from Stirner's “Der Einzige”. And Friedrich Nietzsche probably never read a line of Stirner. In my opinion, Nietzsche would have felt at home in Stirner's world of ideas, as if in an element that needed his intellectual organization to bring it to joyful, fresh life. Instead, he had to move through Schopenhauer's way of looking at things, which only after painful disappointments allowed him to come to those ideas in which he could live alone. This was the fault of the spirit of the time in which he spent his youth, the spirit that greedily absorbed Schopenhauer's undignified doctrine of killing the will to live, and which had no inkling of the proud thinker who taught the joy of living because he had recognized that the life of the “unique” is the most valuable in the world and that it is a vain superstition if a person does not want to live for his own sake but for the sake of another. But how many such other entities has man created over the centuries, for which he wants to sacrifice himself! The individual wants to “sacrifice” himself for God, for the people, for all of humanity, and he sees the highest moral perfection in “selflessly” killing off all self-will and devotedly placing his life in the service of a higher being, a collective or an idea. Stirner counters these self-sacrificing people: “What should not all be my concern! Above all, the good cause, then the cause of God, the cause of humanity, truth, freedom, humanity, justice; furthermore, the cause of my people, my prince, my country; finally, the cause of the spirit and a thousand other causes. Only my cause shall never be my cause... Let us see how those who are working for the cause we are supposed to work for, devote ourselves to and get enthusiastic about...» Let us take just one example: the cause of humanity. “What is the situation,” says Stirner, “with the cause of humanity, which we are supposed to make our own? Is its cause that of someone else, and does humanity serve a higher cause? No, humanity only looks to itself, humanity only wants to promote humanity, humanity is its own cause. In order to develop, it lets peoples and individuals toil in its service, and when they have done what humanity needs, it throws them on the dung heap of history out of gratitude. Is the cause of humanity not a purely selfish cause?” From this insight, Stirner draws the lesson: ”... instead of serving another egoist whom I place above myself, I would rather be the egoist myself. I want to live like those whom people in their humble delusion strive to serve,” says Stirner. ‘Why should it be evil if I do what those do whom I make my masters?’

The most valuable idea that man could form for himself is certainly that of a being that has enough content within itself to be everything in itself, that can set itself a goal from within itself and follow only this goal of its own in complete self-sufficiency. This idea is an old one. People have always had it. But they have not thought that if they bring out everything that is in them, they themselves are beings that correspond to this idea. They have considered themselves unworthy, too weak to be such beings. That is why they have invented other beings that are more worthy of bearing a character that corresponds to this idea. Stirner calls on people, each and every one of them, to look at themselves to see that the essence that they imagine is above them lies within themselves. “If God, if humanity, as you assure us, has enough content within itself to be everything in everything, then I feel that I will lack even less of it, and that I will have no complaints about my 'emptiness'. I am not nothing in the sense of emptiness, but the creative nothing, the nothing from which I myself create everything as a creator.“ Stirner wants people to recognize that they are themselves that and represent that in life, which they only believe they have to worship and adore.”

Stirner represents the worldview of the proud, self-sufficient individual. Mackay summarizes it in the following sentences: “Stirner proclaims nothing more and nothing less than the declaration of the sovereignty of the individual, his incomparability and uniqueness. So far, we have only spoken of his rights and duties, and where they begin and end; but he speaks of being free from the former and powerful in the latter. We have to decide. And since we cannot return to the night, we must enter the day.“ And Mackay looks into the future of this day and says: ‘In place of our tired, tormented, self-tormenting race, there will be that proud, free race of the ’unique ones” to whom the future belongs."

What was the life of the man who wrote the gospel of the proud, self-aware human being? Mackay answers this question in his book “Max Stirner”. It was not easy to describe this life. For just as his work has been forgotten, so too has the story of Max Stirner been completely neglected by posterity. With infinite effort, Mackay had to piece together the details of this valuable life, which had been shrouded in darkness. The biographer questioned everyone he could think of who might know something about the missing person. Everything that had been preserved from the time in which Stirner lived had to be carefully examined. Mackay devoted ten years of hard work to the biography, a work that can only arise from the most intense desire for knowledge.

Max Stirner lived, as the herald of the sovereignty of the individual, at a time when all institutions were based on views that were opposed to his own. He went his own way, away from the hustle and bustle of his contemporaries. He was only able to maintain his independence by refraining from utilizing his labor and his mind in any official position. He lived as a true cultural gypsy; and he could only buy his freedom by foregoing what he could have earned in abundance if he had put his abilities to the service of his time. He could not integrate into any whole.

Everything we learn about Stirner shows him to be a man for whom any restriction of his freedom is like a terrible poison. Mackay was right to describe in detail the circle that Stirner counted among its members in the 1840s. It consisted of men who, each in his own way, were convinced that human views and institutions needed to be thoroughly improved, and who criticized the existing order in a ruthless manner. They called themselves the “Freien” (Free Men) and held their informal gatherings in Hippel's wine bar on Friedrichstraße. Bruno Bauer and his brothers, Ludwig Buhl and a large number of others who were actively involved in the intellectual movement of the time, could be found at Hippel's every evening. Mackay says of this circle: “Hardly ever in the history of a people - except at the time of the French Encyclopedists - has a circle of men come together that was so significant, so unique, so interesting, so radical and so unconcerned about any judgment as the ‘Freien’ (Free Men) at Hippel's in Berlin in the fourth decade of the century. It was a circle, perhaps not worthy, but also not unworthy of the man who was one of its most loyal members and its greatest adornment, a man through whom it has gained for posterity a significance and an interest that will carry the name of the “Free” with him into the memory of the future.” However, Stirner seems to have had little to say here. These “free people” had not yet penetrated to the idea of the free individual as it had developed in Stirner; but at least he found opponents here whose views were worth the most radical thinker of his time to deal with them.

It was in this circle that Stirner also found the woman with whom he was able to lead a marriage that corresponded to his views for several years: Marie Dähnhardt. This marriage was the cohabitation of two people who supported each other as far as each was able, and who otherwise went their own ways. And when, after two years, the cohabitation no longer suited the feelings of the spouses, they separated without rancor. The only work that Stirner gave us, “The Ego and Its Own,” was written during the years of this marriage. In it he laid down his entire world of thought. What he otherwise published are smaller essays that preceded his main work, and responses to the attacks that it has received. Mackay has just compiled these works in a small volume, “Max Stirner's Smaller Writings” (Berlin 1898, Schuster & Loeffler). I will speak of them in this journal soon. This will also provide an opportunity to say what needs to be said about the development of the man. The “History of Reaction” and the work “The National Economists of the French and English” are only a small part of Stirner's own work and do not enrich our understanding of his nature.

After the publication of his main work, Stirner led a life of complete seclusion, constantly struggling with the bitterest poverty; but a life that he bore with dignity and contentment, for he knew that anyone who does not want to be a citizen of his time must live like that.

The former literary councillor in Leipzig, Rudolf von Gottschall, introduces a new biweekly publication called “Das litterarische Echo” with an essay bearing the above title. It is certainly not my intention to make life difficult for the new venture, despite the fact that the aforementioned speaker has quite tastefully concluded the article with an attack on the existing literary magazines. He probably considers the “Magazin für Literatur” to be one of those literary journals that he describes as “a hodgepodge of opinions and standards”, “a playground for a criticism that strays in all directions of the compass”.

It is not easy to discern from Mr. von Gottschall's article what he wants. He complains that general, humanistic education is on the decline. He even complains that “the Latin essay has been eliminated from the schoolwork of the higher grammar school classes”. I can only read one thing from Mr. von Gottschall's essay: He laments the extinction of literary orators of the type of the unctuous Moriz Carriere and of – Mr. von Gottschall himself, who have reached the pinnacle of wisdom by acquiring a few scraps of Hegelian philosophy and aesthetics, and who have not participated in the great revolution of the minds that has taken place through the scientific way of thinking in the second half of this century. It is quite characteristic of Mr. von Gottschall that he says: “On the whole, the main bearers of literary education are the women.” He is, of course, referring to the education of women, which has adopted the characterized aesthetic verbiage and from which women who understand the spirit of the present turn away.

If Mr. von Gottschall were to edit a literary magazine today, it would contain only opinions that could have been written quite well in 1832. Just as one finds only such opinions in the tedious four volumes of “German National Literature in the Nineteenth Century.”

The way of thinking and feeling that is possible on the basis of the century's scientific achievements is not there for Mr. von Gottschall. He has no sense of educating young people in this way of thinking; rather, he would like the Latin essay to be reintroduced into the schoolwork of the higher grammar school classes.

Mr. von Gottschall is one of those lucky people who know everything. They can tell exactly what is artistically valuable and what is not. They know how to classify. So they will edit a magazine as follows: I accept everything that meets my aesthetic judgment. Because I am right and everyone else is wrong. My magazine must have a uniform character.

We others are not as fortunate as Mr. von Gottschall. We have formed our views and perceptions under the influence of scientific progress. We have not remained untouched by the fact that Darwin has reshaped all the perceptions and ideas that have been cultivated over the centuries, as Mr. von Gottschall has. But at the same time, we know that the new worldview can take on different forms in different minds. We do not have any stereotyped views like Mr. von Gottschall. We also accept the views of others. We know that there is a struggle for the existence of opinions.

That is why we have to edit a magazine differently from the way Mr. von Gottschall wants. The editor represents his point of view with all the strength he is capable of. But he also allows other opinions to be heard. He is even proud to offer his readers a “playground for a critique that diverges in all directions of the compass”. He wants every opinion that is formed on sufficient premises to be represented. What Mr. Gottschall considers a disadvantage, I, for example, claim as an advantage.

I love freedom. I love it not only in the political sense, as I expressed it in my reply to J. H. Mackay's letter to me in issue 39, but also in the sense of the intellectual exchange that a magazine has to convey. And just as I am confident that people can thrive best in the sun of freedom in economic and ethical terms, I also believe that intellectual life fares best when opinions and views are allowed to battle it out in free development.

This is how I have done it since I have been editing the “Magazin [für Literatur]”, and this is how I will continue to do it, even if Mr. von Gottschall should contemptuously include this journal in the group of those that are a “playground” for “a criticism that strays in all directions of the compass”.

Maurice Maeterlinck is one of the most outstanding experiences of the modern soul. Those whose sympathies lie with the apostles of world worship, with Darwin and Haeckel, feel a deep satisfaction when the Ghent “mystic” tells them: “All our organs are the mystical accomplices of a higher being, and we have never known a human being, but always a soul.” And nothing prevents those who inwardly cheer the words of Zarathustra, the god-killer, from feeling secret pleasure when Maeterlinck speaks of the depths of the divine with religious devotion. Zarathustra says: “It was the sick and dying who despised the body and the earth and invented the heavenly and the redeeming drops of blood: but even these sweet and dark poisons they took from the body and the earth!” One can feel these words as a release from millennia of religious prejudice and yet listen with approving satisfaction when Maeterlinck says: “The gods from whom we come reveal themselves to us in a thousand ways; but this secret goodness, which has not been noticed and of which no one has spoken directly enough, is perhaps the purest sign of their eternal life. We do not know where it comes from. It is simply there, smiling on the threshold of our souls; and those in whom it smiles most deeply and most often will make us suffer day and night, if they wish, without our being able to love them any less."

Until recently, Maurice Maeterlinck seemed to be a riddle. The tone of the Christian mystics was thought to be discernible in his speeches; and the godless people of the modern scientific worldview could not resist the lure of these speeches. The power of the idea that man has developed from lower organisms according to thoroughly ungodly, purely natural laws and that only this earth, not a heavenly paradise, can be the source of our joys, did not protect them from the magical sound of Maeterlinck's words: “We may indeed already act like gods, and all our lives proceed under infinite certainties and infallibilities. But we are blind men playing with jewels along the streets; and the man who knocks at my door, the moment he greets me, gives out spiritual treasures as wonderful as those of the prince whom I have snatched from death."

Since Maeterlinck published his latest work, La sagesse et la destin&e (Paris, Librairie Charpentier) in October last year, it is no longer difficult to resolve the contradiction referred to above. In this book, we encounter a modern soul that has freed itself from the egg shells of mysticism. We believe we hear Zarathustra's wilful wisdom when Maeterlinck speaks to us: “The intellect and the will should become accustomed to living, like victorious soldiers, from what makes war on them.” And the confession of the reviled Max Stirner seems to speak anew from sentences like these: “But we are told: love your neighbour as yourself! But if you love yourself in a narrow-minded and sterile way, you will love your neighbor in the same way. Learn to love yourself in a broad-minded, healthy, wise and perfect way; that is less easy than you think. The selfishness of a strong and clear-sighted soul is of much more beneficial effect than all the devotion of a blind and weak soul. Before you can be there for others, you have to be there for yourself; and before you can give yourself away, you have to secure yourself. Be assured that the acquisition of a fraction of your self-awareness is ultimately worth more than the sacrifice of your entire unconsciousness.»

And Stirner, who sang the praises of egoism in “Der Einzige und sein Eigentum” (The Ego and Its Own), would have to stand in awe of the idol of modern mystics when he says: “The soul does not grow greater through sacrifice, but in growing greater it loses sight of sacrifice, just as the wanderer, when he climbs higher, loses sight of the flowers of the valley. Sacrifice is a beautiful sign of inner compassion; but one should never cultivate compassion for its own sake.” Or: ‘The power that shines in our hearts should above all shine for itself. Only at this price will it also shine for others; and however small the lamp may be, let no one give of the oil that nourishes it, let no one give of the light that crowns it!’

Two years ago, when Maeterlinck's “Tresor des Humbles” appeared, the modern pagans had nothing to say to the mystics, who called the ecstatic Belgian one of their own. Today, after the publication of “La sagesse et la destinde”, the mystics will be less jubilant.

This peculiar development of Maeterlinck's should be pointed out here, in connection with the excellent German edition of “The Treasure of the Humble”, which has just been published (by Eugen Diederich, Leipzig and Florence) under the title: “The Treasure of the Poor. Translated into German by Friedrich von Oppeln-Bronikowski.”

Today, modern free spirits read every sentence of this book differently than they did two years after its publication. At that time, they only had a vague feeling that this book would bring them a breath of fresh air, which, despite some adverse ingredients, would bring a fresh scent of fir trees.

And it is precisely their rare satisfaction in listening to this stammering sage that the free spirits understand today. For these free spirits are often confused with shallow rationalistic minds, to whom the voice of the heart does not speak. They only allow reason and understanding to work within them, and therefore remain unaware of the freer impulses of the human soul, the instinctive impulses.

The free spirits are accused of being dry and rational. And they themselves are constantly afraid that the sober logic could kill the most valuable forces that unconsciously rule in the human soul.

But this fear is an unjust feeling of the human soul. It is true that the language of the mind is also that of common and banal people. But this language is no less the language of the deepest secrets of the existence of the world.

And the words that now express the everyday results of stock market speculation can, in the next moment, be the interpreters of profound truths.

And there is yet another. The friends of the modern scientific creed are often called materialists and are denied a sense of the divine. It is considered appalling when they see nothing in man, who is supposed to have been given existence by a God from heaven, but that he is “three-quarters a column of water and has inorganic salts in him,” which are more capable of influencing his existence than all the spiritual powers dreamed of.

Nietzsche, the evangelist of this world, the despiser of all divine things beyond this world, says: “The inorganic conditions us completely: water, air, soil, soil structure, electricity and so on. We are plants under such conditions.”

In all of us there is still something of the belief that we are degrading the world to something base and common when we strip it of the divine and see in it nothing but what we really perceive with our senses and our minds. We imagine that we are making man into an almost disgusting being when we admit to ourselves that he is made of the materials of this world, and that these materials also obey the laws of nature of this world.

But the natural, the earthly-ungodly, is not contemptible: only the erring human spirit has made it contemptible, because it has become accustomed through a long education to always only get into a devout mood when imagining something beyond. Our best minds are sick because they can no longer believe in the divine in the hereafter and yet cannot perceive the earthly-real as a substitute for the lost divine.

Nietzsche proclaimed the sanctity and divinity of this world in his “Zarathustra”. And Maeterlinck did the same in his “Tresor des Humbles”. Basically, both spirits are saying the same thing. Only Nietzsche emphasizes: All that is worthy of worship, all that is sacred: it is not a heaven and not an afterlife; it is an earth and a here and now. And man should not long for his heavenly paradise of bliss; rather, he should be the meaning of the earth. And Maeterlinck says: The ordinary, everyday is the only reality, but this reality is divine. “Here is John, pruning his trees, there is Peter, building his house, you, talking to me about the harvest, I, shaking your hand - but we are brought to a point where we touch the gods, and we are amazed at what we do.”

I

There are poetic tasks¹ that any naturalism must fail to fulfill. These are the ones that relate to the struggle of eternal powers in the human soul. This struggle represents the entire development of the human inner life, from birth to death. This struggle is not exhausted in individual actions, moods or events. May the individual events that life brings to man find this or that, tragic or joyful outcome: the fundamental struggle that the eternal fights in the human breast always arises anew. Naturalistic art can only depict the individual, self-contained circles of struggle. For only these belong to the world of reality. In order to depict the primal struggles, the imagination must go beyond this reality. It must depict in a higher, ideal sphere as complete what reality never brings to a conclusion. The philosopher can do this in ideas, the artist in pictures. At a certain level of civilization, poetic imagination depicts these eternal struggles in the soul in the form of mythological and legendary figures. This divine or legendary world is nothing other than an image of what goes on at the bottom of the human mind. If the poet wants to depict the reign of the eternal, he must detach it from the contingencies of human life, from the joys and sorrows of everyday life. His figures will still be human, but human beings stripped of the contingent.

Ludwig Jacobowski has set himself such a supreme artistic task in his latest work: “Loki. Roman eines Gottes” (Bruns Verlag, Minden i. W. 1899). Two powers are constantly fighting in every human breast, a hot, heavy, life-and-death struggle. The one contains: kindness, love, patience, friendliness, beauty; the other: hatred, enmity, anger, hostility and the element that, in its strength, always forgets the soft forms of beauty. The poetic spirit of an earlier cultural stage contrasted the two powers in the Nordic deities Balder and Loki. Ludwig Jacobowski has depicted them again in his novel. The ancient Nordic deities served him as models for his characters. But the characters that the Nordic saga placed in these deities are no more than a starting point for Jacobowski. For the powers fight differently in the modern soul than in that of prehistoric man. Modern man leads a more profound life than that of prehistoric man. The man of an earlier age imagined the forces that ruled within him to be similar to the forces of nature that he perceived with his senses in the outside world. For the modern man, these forces take on a more spiritual content. This change in man's consciousness of himself corresponds to the transformation that Jacobowski's imagination has carried out with the figures of the saga. Loki's battle against the gods in the Norse saga appears like a natural process, invented by the imagination that feeds on sensual reality. Jacobowski portrays him as a personification of what moves the modern human soul. The poet has thus deepened the saga. He has described a battle that arises from love. Balder and Loki love Nanna. But Balder loves as love itself loves; he loves with a passion that is free of selfishness. With the love that Goethe has in mind when he says: “No self-love, no self-interest lasts, before their coming they have shrunk away. We call it: being pious!” Loki loves like selfishness loves, which celebrates the festival of the highest self-indulgence in love. The modern poet depicts the eternal struggle between egoism and selflessness. It is the struggle that the modern soul fights out in all its depth; the struggle that forms the content of the conflicting world views of the present. Jacobowski views this struggle with the calm that comes from the objective imagination of the true poet. And from this objectivity, he has created a philosophical work of the first order. He has thus found a higher expression for the modern soul than his contemporaries, who are forever groping and experimenting, can find.