The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Stuttgart 1898, Fromanns Verlag

One of the most interesting developments in the intellectual evolution of recent decades has undoubtedly been the change in our appreciation of “ideals”. Unconditional veneration has given way to doubt. Today we perceive this veneration as prejudice and ask about the conditions in the human organization that cause us to turn our feelings to a field that in reality corresponds to nothing. Even the highest of ideals, the concept of God, has become questionable to us. In her novel “In the Struggle for God”, which touches on the deepest tasks of contemporary culture, Lou Andreas-Salome& said: “The highest of human creativity is that it is able to create beyond itself, looking upwards.” The education of past centuries has worked hard to prevent the realization that the world of ideals is a creation of man. This world was to have an untouchable existence alongside and above natural reality, and the spiritual struggles were presented as humanity's striving to find harmony between ideal and reality. Indeed, if a conflict between these two realms arose, the ideal was always given the right of way and reality was expected to become more and more like it. Schiller, for example, felt the greatest happiness in fleeing from common reality into the lofty, pure realm of ideals. This has now changed. Reality has proven itself the victor in our consciousness. We only understand the ideal insofar as we can find its roots in the pure and natural. If such roots cannot be found, then the ideal appears to us as a lie or as an idol that the human spirit invents because it has a tendency to seek satisfaction in the illusory sphere that it cannot find in direct life. Truth is more important to us today than anything else. We want to reveal it without reservation, even if it means destroying goods that have been considered sacred to mankind for centuries.

Women are making a major contribution to this revelation in our time. They have had to turn their minds away from the true nature of life for the longest time and have attached their feelings to goods that reveal themselves as a sham when viewed impartially. Two books that have just been published are proof that women have revelations to make to us from the depths of their being: Rosa Mayreder's “Idole” (Berlin 1899) and Adele Gerhard's “Beichte” (Berlin 1899). Anyone who delves into these two books will feel, above all, that important things are being said here, because the courage exists to express, without reservation, what is going on at the bottom of the female soul. And the second thing we feel is the insight we gain from these works into the lives of noble women who lead a hard, honest and energetic struggle in life. Rosa Mayreder told us about this struggle in her earlier collections of short stories, “Aus meiner Jugend” and “Übergänge”. The only way to describe what is expressed here is to say that the heroic confronts us in the special way that it must take on in the highly-intelligent woman of the present day. In the “Idols” the essence of love is revealed, with the clarity of the psychologist and with the sincerity of the bold seeker of truth. Rosa Mayreder has the gift of seeing the world in terms of its greatness. Her writing is like a psychological discovery. We follow everything she says with open ears, because we soon realize that only she can tell us what she says. Adele Gerhard is of a different nature. She has no great revelations to make. Anyone who has looked around in life will have experienced countless times what she is talking about. But we have probably never looked at these things with the same degree of attention as this woman does. We are less interested in what she sees, but in how she looks at it. Much more interesting than these little stories that we have encountered everywhere, in contrast to which - we cannot deny it - we suffer from a certain blasé attitude, is the author's attitude towards things. We imagine we see the author's eyes, which look at the world very differently from our own. A free soul who finds it difficult to be free stands before us. For Rosa Mayreder, telling the truth seems to be a form of salvation, for Adele Gerhard a form of martyrdom.

I would like to suggest how the psychology of the modern woman's soul is revealed in the two books in a second article.

II

Rosa Mayreder's “Idols” are the product of the sentiment expressed in the old saying: “Man's most excellent study is man.” The value of this book lies in the fact that it presents the inner life of woman from the point of view from which the philosopher would most like to view the whole world. This point of view has often been expressed in the words: “from the point of view of the eternal”. But it would be better to say: “from the point of view of the meaningful”. Rosa Mayreder's own life is the source of deep riddles for her. And the answers she seeks open up perspectives into the abysses of human nature. On every page it becomes clear that this is a woman who has used a significant amount of strength to come to terms with her own experiences. But who also possesses this strength. As a result, the work exudes a peculiar ethical atmosphere that bears witness to the seriousness and dignity of life.

The secret that lies in the sexual relationship is at the center. It is the relationship that becomes so puzzling to those who reflect on the relationship between individuality and the whole. What is it in the opposite sex that draws us to it, in order to seek in it the completion of our own being? Rosa Mayreder presents the attraction to the opposite sex in all its power; but at the same time she shows the element that intervenes between the souls of man and woman. At bottom, individuality cannot go beyond itself. There is something that opposes the assimilation of the alien soul. It is the image of the other that comes to life in our own being. What happens when the cool, sober observer of the world compares his idea of a man loved by a woman with the image that presents itself in the female psyche itself as the reason for her love? This love awakens in one man, and it does not stir in countless others. That cool observer knows nothing of the cause of this love. And he cannot know anything about it. For what the woman loves is not an object of cool observation; it is a being that is born out of her love, it is not the strange man, it is the idol, the image of this man. Gisa loves Dr. Lamaris. “When this man entered, yes, the moment I saw him for the first time, he seemed so strangely familiar to me, so familiar, as if I had known him for a long time. And after he had spoken to me for a few minutes, polite, meaningless words, like any young man addresses to any young girl, I suddenly got the impression that I was having a great time, that the whole company, which was standing and sitting around rather leathery, was animated as never before. And how different the real Dr. Lamaris was from the idol Gisas! What a contrast there was between the two natures in all the moments in which they met! The “idea” of a radiant inner life often returned later, but never in his presence. It could not tolerate contact with reality. Reality stared at him with hurtful impressions that “burrowed into my soul like pinpricks.”

Gisa's entire world of perception is rooted in the view that the right person relates to the world in a way that corresponds to the most fundamental inclinations of his or her nature. The doctor, on the other hand, views all relationships from a different perspective. A girl should be pious because it is the best way for her to adapt to life. Gisa says: “You are religious or irreligious because of an inner state; but not because you should or shouldn't. So what does it mean to say that a girl should be pious?” The doctor, however, says: “It means that it is not beneficial for a female psyche to do without the aids that religion provides.” “So religion from the point of view of soul diet, of psychic hygiene?” the girl replies. This point of view is hateful to her. “It makes everything flat and philistine!” Lamaris knows only one thing: ”Nevertheless, civilized humanity will have to learn, if it is not to fall into complete ruin, to look at life exclusively from this point of view; it will have to re-evaluate all emotions from this point of view. Love too, and love in the first place. For since it is love that usually decides the fate of future generations, it happens all too often that the union of two people based on a love affair is something positively outrageous. It is a sentimental aberration to present love as the most desirable basis for marriage. The illusory character of this affection makes those who are affected by it completely incapable of making their choice according to rational reasons, namely in the sense of racial improvement.” One sees a second idol. The woman, whose sexual instincts have become spiritualized into a love fantasy, places her fantasy image between herself and the man she seeks. The man with the culture of reason places an abstract cultural idea in the same place. The rest of the story shows that Lamaris also has a deep affection for Gisa. However, he does not follow this inclination. This is because he comes from a family that includes mentally deranged members, and he himself has a profession that particularly demands his intellect. The spirit that lives in his organism must not be allowed to unite with that of a girl who also strives for spiritualization. That is why he marries a healthy girl with little education. It is precisely his principle that “men who live strongly at the expense of the brain should marry women from spared social classes – for the sake of the offspring.” The best way to see how this idol relates to his real emotional life is to see that his wife bears a striking resemblance to Gisa. His mind sought Gisa; his intellect determines his life.

The magic of Rosa Mayreder's book lies in the way the poet knows how to place human experiences in the great context of the world. Her artistic intuition always leads her to see a detail within a whole in a way that allows us to perceive the depths of life. The truly noble soul must be recognized in this. This is how I would like to justify saying that Rosa Mayreder sees things with greatness. The way she captures the problem of love seems to me to be different from that of other poets. Usually, we are presented with the external manifestations of love; Rosa Mayreder goes to the essence of love, one might say to its “thing in itself”. The enlightenment she has given herself about her own heart has sharpened her view of humanity as such. In the history of the development of the mind, one will no longer be able to ignore the form that this artist has given to human experiences.

III

Adele Gerhard's tasks are different. The four sketches “Beichte”, “Gönnt mir goldene Tageshelle”,¹ “Ebbe” and “Der Ring an meinem Finger” show that her interest is not in the colorfulness of life, but in the contours. These short novellas seem like [charcoal drawings]. And the intellectual conscience of the woman gave birth to them. The tragedy of female love is expressed in them. It arises from the contradiction between the situation in which women find themselves by virtue of their nature and the demands that life experiences awaken in them. Love draws women to men; they become attached. They impose duties on them that undermine their individuality. The woman described in the last story is the most significant from this point of view. “I am constantly looking for a way out, but I can't find it. The nights torment me with their heavy, exciting dreams. The ring on my hand starts to pinch me. I look at my child, it grabs my hand: Mama stays with Johanne. I kiss it. But I am also here, something inside me calls urgently, and I want my right - my right, which you call wrong.” Women who had to enter into a relationship as much as they had to long for it after they had experienced it are portrayed here. The author is a woman who recognizes the profession of woman as a way of life and who constantly feels the barriers that limit this profession. Here, nature seems to be hostile to man as a demon.

The poignant nature of this thought arises from the fact that there is no way to resolve the contradiction that has been identified. Has nature assigned the role of eternal martyr to women? I see that in these novellas this contradiction appears as terrible and tragic as possible; but I do not see any indication that would allow us to hope for a solution. Schopenhauer's philosophy, applied to the consciousness of women, is brought to life in this little book. Rosa Mayreder seeks to reveal the essence of love; Adele Gerhard portrays the catastrophes of the love idol. The fact that both books appeared at almost the same time is characteristic of the culture of the time. The “Idols” seem like an explanation of “Confession”. Is it any wonder that the “idea of a radiant inner life” cannot tolerate contact with reality and that the “hurtful impressions” of this reality bore into the soul “like pinpricks”? Dr. Lamaris finds: “For since it is love that usually decides the fate of future generations, it happens all too often that the union of two people based on a love affair is something downright outrageous.” Adele Gerhard starts from the point of view that such principled views appear shallow and philistine to women before they are married, because they are completely dominated by their idols. After marriage, reality pushes the idol back in two ways. The idol, to which the female personality has become completely lost, is destroyed, and the right of one's own individuality asserts itself again; and the prospect of the next generation, which before could only be a matter of the mind, then, when this generation enters life, becomes a matter of the heart. The duties towards one's offspring are now not only demanded by reason, but felt by the heart. And women are faced with the necessity of sacrificing their individuality to a foreign entity once again.

Laura Marholm has claimed that the women's issue is essentially a men's issue. She claims that women are naturally drawn to men in order to fulfill their essence. Rosa Mayreder shows that this search is influenced by an idol, thereby putting the “men's issue” in its place. Adele Gerhard speaks of the tragedy that the idol of love leads to; and with that it would be clear that men are an unsatisfactory solution to the women's issue.

• 1. We published this sketch some time ago in the “Magazin für Literatur> [No. 38, 24.9.1898]

I

Since the publication of his poem “Sturm” in 1888, John Henry Mackay has been called the “first singer of anarchy”. In his book “Anarchisten” (1891), which describes the social currents of the late 19th century in a way that is more transparent, comprehensive and based on a deep knowledge of the cultural factors of our time than any other book, he emphasized that he was proud of this name. And he has every right to be proud of it. For through him, the world view that is capable of freeing man from the fetters that prejudice and violence have imposed on him for thousands of years has found its poetic expression. What it means that he has put his poetic power at the service of this world view can be seen from the words with which he introduces his “cultural portrait from the end of the century: The Anarchists”. “In no other area of social life is there such a hopeless confusion, such a naive superficiality, such a dangerous ignorance as in the area of anarchism. The mere uttering of the word is like waving a red flag - in blind rage, most people rush at it without taking the time to calmly examine and consider it.” The anarchist's conviction is nothing other than that one person cannot rule over the thoughts, desires and feelings of another, that only a state of communal life can be fruitful in which each person is able to determine the direction and goal of his or her own actions. Until now, everyone thought they knew what was good for everyone in the same way. And they wanted to organize community life in such a way that the “ideal of man” that they had in mind would be achieved. But how can Hinz know whether it is right for Kunz to realize the “ideal of man” that Hinzianism considers to be the “truly ideal”? Religion, the state, laws, duty, justice, etc. have come about because Hinz believed he had to tell Kunz how he – Kunz – could achieve his goal. Hinz has thought of everything for Kunz, except for one thing: that if Hinz shows Kunz the way to his happiness, he takes away from Kunz the opportunity to take care of his own happiness. But that is precisely what anarchism wants to do: to make Hinz realize that he will best take care of Kunz if he lets him be happy in Kunz's way, not Hinz's.

J. H. Mackay has given this view a beautiful expression in the poem “Anarchy” (on p. 444 of this collection):

Always reviled, cursed – never understood,
you have become the nightmare of this age —
They call it the dissolution of all order,
you are and struggle and never-ending murder.

O let them scream! - To them who never sought
To find the truth behind a word,
The true meaning of the word is also denied. They will remain blind among the blind.

But you, word, so clear, so strong, so pure,
That says everything I strive for restlessly,
I give you to the future! - It is yours,
When everyone finally awakens to themselves.

Will it come in the sun's rays? — In the roar of the storm?
I don't know - ... but it appears on earth! —
“I am an anarchist!” - ‘Why?’ - ”I do not
not rule, but also not be ruled!» —

It is sad that it has to happen: But it is necessary to say it again and again that true anarchism has nothing to do with the ridiculous behavior of those unfortunate and unclear fellows who seek to overcome the current social order by force. No, this “anarchism” is nothing more than the docile pupil of these same social institutions, which have always sought to make people understand their ideals of “religion, nationality, state, patriotism, law, duty, right, etc.” through inquisition, cannon and prison. The true anarchist is opposed to all measures of violence, even those that impudently claim the title of “anarchism.”

True anarchism wants the same opportunity for the free development of the personality. And there is no greater restriction of the personality than to try to teach it by force what it should be.

It is not my intention here to refute the objections of all the clever people who regard this avowal of the anarchists as a “pious belief” and point out that the whole of political economy demonstrates the refutation of this belief. Anarchism has a large body of literature that builds its economic foundation better than the advocates of state socialism or any other form of socialism are able to do for theirs. One need only read Tucker's excellent writings to be convinced of this.

But it is not the foundation of true anarchism that interests me here, but J.H. Mackay's position within it.

It is a stroke of luck of the first magnitude that this anarchistic world view has found a singer in Mackay. It may be left to future ages to judge what the enthusiastic and inspiring poems of this man have contributed to the world view of the future. But it behooves us to say that this man, who has undergone difficult and rare struggles to rise to the anarchist confession, should not be taken one-sidedly as a “poet”. John Henry Mackay is a cultural factor within the current development of the European intellectual life. And he has every right to say of the volume of his poems under discussion here: “More than once a sentimentality, a self-deception, an exuberance has elicited a smile from me as the pen went through the pages, changing a word here and there - but always only a single one on purpose - into another. But this volume represents a development, and for that very reason, arbitrary gaps should not be torn into its independently created structure, quite apart from the fact that it was the desire to give a complete picture of this development that this edition owes its existence to in the first place. Therefore, the stronger may try to hold the weaker or the one may fall with the other – in any case, the claim should appear fair to the discerning: that a whole person may demand to be taken as a whole.»

In a future essay, I will show to what extent this statement is justified, especially in the case of J. H. Mackay.

II

It is the energetic struggle of a strong personality that is expressed in J. H. Mackay's “Gesammelte Dichtungen”¹

We are confronted with the noble sensibilities of a man who can only be satisfied when he has reached the height of human existence, where he can feel his own worth as clearly as possible. The highest nobility of the human soul does not lie in a humble, devoted attitude. It lies in the proud awareness that one cannot place oneself high enough. People with such a consciousness feel the great responsibility that the personality has towards itself. They do not want to omit anything that is suitable for developing all the wealth of their talents. For them, human dignity consists in the fact that man must give himself his own value, his own meaning. Humble, devoted natures seek an ideal, a deity that they can worship and adore. For they feel, by their very nature, small and want greatness to be given to them from outside. They do not feel that man is only the pinnacle of nature when he makes himself into one. Their estimation of the world is not the highest. Those who choose a hero “to whom they work their way up the paths to Olympus” ultimately value existence as being of little worth. Those who feel the obligation to make the most of themselves so that their essence contributes to the general value of the world, value it more highly. This obligation is the source of the self-respect of noble natures. And it is also the source of their sensitivity to any foreign intervention in their own self. Their own self wants to be a world unto itself so that it can develop freely from within. Only from this sacred regard for one's own personality can the esteem for the foreign ego also arise. Those who want the possibility of free development for themselves cannot even think of interfering in the world of the foreign personality. And with that we have given the anarchism of noble natures. They strive for this world view out of inner, spiritual necessity.

We follow the path of such a nature in J. H. Mackay's poetry. Only people with a deep soul and fine sensibilities follow this path. It is their nature to see everything in its true greatness. That is why they are also allowed to seek the greatness of their own self. It is true that proud natures usually grow out of a sentimental mood of youth. That they become effusive when they express their feelings towards things. And this sentimentality, this exuberance, is a feature of Mackay's youthful poetry in abundance. But it would be a sad state of affairs for a youth that could not be sentimental, not exuberant. For in such a disposition of mind it is announced that man will recognize the true meaning of things in his later development. He who does not see things in their romantic splendor in his youth will certainly not see them in their truth later. The great things in the world will only escape us if our soul's eye is not attuned to their greatness. But such a disposition leads people in their youth to see things in a more ideal light than they really radiate. And when we can feel with Mackay when he says: “I do not love this youth. It was not cheerful, not free enough, not open enough,” we feel no less his other words: ‘But I have respect for it, for its tireless struggle, its silent self-confidence and its lonely struggle.’ It is precisely the exuberance of youth that gives him the right to feel self-sufficient today. A self-confidence that does not arise from such a disposition inspires us with little confidence. Only those who feel the need to see the world as something lofty and worthy of veneration will have the strength to seek the valuable within themselves. A sober youth will develop into a maturity that underestimates things; an exuberant youth will develop into a true appreciation of the whole world.

This is how Mackay's later, self-liberated nature is foreshadowed in his youthful poetry. His descriptions of nature show his tendency to see things in the light of greatness. When he sings of Scotland's mountains in his first poem, “Children of the Highlands”, it sounds like a demand of the later life ideal:

Like a virgin untouched,
never seduced by love,
To give herself to a man
and to bow her head,
So proud and stiff, so powerfully strong,
Her noble limbs full of marrow,
And never faltering in her courage
In silent splendor Mull rests island.

A poem such as “Über allen Wipfeln” seems to us to have been inspired by a true piety that has the need to be everything to the world that it can be. The poet wrote it during a visit to Ilmenau, in memory of the feelings that Goethe's soul experienced in the same place:

Are these the paths? And you may walk them
Is that not great, unnameable happiness?
And do you not feel how the breath of these winds
carry you back to that distant time?
- You think - and silently you walk the old tracks;
A song hovers on your lips - a song!
You feel the melancholy, how it gently, gently
once surrounded him – and now surrounds you too.

Anyone who can feel the greatness and beauty of the world in this way also has the full right to speak the words that we encounter in Mackay's “Storm” (1888) in later years:

I lift myself up! - Above the others
Rises high and free my proud self!
How long has it taken - after how long a journey?
until I finally found myself!
Now I wander alone. The world seems different to me
The world since I no longer give myself to it:
No laughter laughs to me, and no weeping weeps to me,
I am no longer a “one” - only I am I!
I know nothing more today of that delusion,
the last that forced me into its yoke:
The flag that is called love fell from the tired hand
is called love. - You laugh? Crush me, then!

Anyone who has been able to appreciate the world will also respect the part of the world that he himself is allowed to work on, if it is worthy of appreciation: his own self.

The depth of Mackay's empathy with every human personality is demonstrated by the deeply moving poem “Helene”. It describes a man's love for a fallen girl. If you follow the human ego into such depths, you will also gain the certainty of finding it on the heights.

The only thing that is justified about the belief in God is the human feeling that is inherent in it, which strives for a saint. Only a person who has the need for holy, pious feelings also has the right to atheism. Anyone who denies God only because he does not have the urge for the holy, his atheism appears stale and superficial. One must be capable of being pious, according to one's disposition: then one may be content with the de-divinized world. For one has not simultaneously eradicated the greatness of the world with the divine. What great religious sentiment lies in Mackay's poem “Atheism”.

Perhaps when once the weary eyes break,
When the dark night of death descends,
That a prayer then my lips speak,
that never in life the mind had thought.

Perhaps that I depart with a lie
from a being that has only known truth,
When I suffer the last pains of life
in fear and night and madness bound.

Then my spirit succumbed; then my will broke!
Then reason fled! - But if I can,
Then the last cry, the shrill one, will still be heard,
Then the last beat of the heart will still proclaim:
“I never believed in a God above,
The liar or the fool only give us. I die – and I know of nothing to praise
Perhaps only one: that we live only once!"

We are born into a world that wants to sweep us away with its eternal waves. The thoughts and will of those who came before us live on in our blood. The ideas and power of those around us exert countless influences on us. In the midst of all the hustle and bustle around us, we become aware of our own selves. The more we manage to take the rudder of our life into our own hands, the freer we are. The man who presents us with his poems here strove for such self-liberation. And he considers it his good fortune that he has found himself:

O world, how far you are!
I am drawn over your mountains.
But time, the minion, holds me back.

O man, how small you are!
you can only lift yourself up high
When you have learned to live only for yourself.

O illusion, how great you are!
I never gave myself to you,
And I conquered the fate of silence.

My ego, you raise your head!
You were a child and became a warrior.
He who always believed in himself remains the victor!

This poem from the last part of the “Collected Poems” from the “Strong Year” expresses the attitude of a person who has found himself.

It is from such feelings that a deep resentment of a social order arises that seeks the salvation of the world in erecting all possible barriers around man. The poet Mackay wages war with such an order, the noblest, bloodless war, which fights only with the one weapon that brings people to recognize their true nature. For such a war is nourished by the belief that people free themselves to the extent that they feel the need for their freedom.

A dog is one that knows a master!
But we are not masters and we are not servants!
impudent insolence dares to call
another man, who has the same rights
as he once had in the cradle of life!
— Let everyone see if he can walk,
But no one should be so dog-like as to bend
His knee in fear of another man.

Let every man's forehead be raised equally high,
Whether it be poor or rich!
I will have my right, you may praise yours:
For me, for you, for all it is the same...

(Collected Poems, $. 445)

Mackay may be quiet when others call him a poet of tendency, because as an artist he expresses a world view. Whose whole personality is so intertwined with this world view as his, he expresses it like another person expresses the feeling of love that he feels. For whoever has fought for a world view expresses it as his own being. And truly, it is no less worthy to express humanity's deepest thoughts and feelings than the inclination towards women or the joy of the green forest and the singing of birds.

We see the creator of the great cultural painting “The Anarchists” growing in the volume before us. Those who want to get to know him, how he struggled to realize the ideas in which he sees the liberation of humanity, should reach for these “Collected Poems”. They will feel that clarity is born out of suffering and disappointment. But they will also see the great path of liberation that alone brings man the self-satisfaction that can establish his happiness.

• 1. . Unfortunately, the title of the book discussed here was omitted in the first part of this essay. I am adding it here: “Gesammelte Dichtungen von John Henry Mackay. Mit der Photogravure des Dichters” (Zurich and Leipzig, Karl Henckell & Co).

Until now,¹ he who sought a book on the literary development of Germany in the first half of this century, despite the many excellent achievements of others, had to resort to Georg Brandes' «Hauptströmungen der Literatur im neunzehnten Jahrhundert» (Main Currents of Literature in the 19th Century). For only here was the connection between literary phenomena and the whole of intellectual life presented by a strong personality who had a relationship to the ideas of the time, to the moving psychological and ethical forces. It is now safe to say that S. Lublinski's work “Literature and Society in the Nineteenth Century” changes this fact. We believe that this will become the book that satisfies all those who have previously only found what they were looking for in Brandes' work.

It was unfortunate in two respects that Brandes' work was decisive in the sense described. Even though the Danish literary historian has, in a rare way, placed himself in the [intellectual life] of Germany, he still takes his point of view from outside it. In the end, he describes as a Dane must. There is another, more important point. Brandes is a fine psychologist. But a psychologist who has been completely unaffected by the insights of modern scientific observation. For him, the mind is still a being in its own right. The soul has something ineffable about it. The piece of physiology that the new natural science has incorporated into psychology is missing from his work. He describes the leading figures as if they were purely spiritual beings. For example, he has given an incomparable account of the psychology of romanticism. But the Romantics have something shadowy, ethereal about them. Everything is motivated by the spiritual in itself. That is no longer possible today. Our psychological insight has gained consistency through natural science. Therefore, some things in Brandes' psychology seem to us like an arbitrary apergu. The view of the “eternal, iron laws” according to which the spirit of its existence must also complete circles is missing.

S. Lublinski is a modern, educated man. He relies on the insights provided by natural science and sociology. It is apparent everywhere that he represents the spirit of the departing century. One would certainly like to see more natural scientific knowledge. The educational element that has emerged from the solid German cultural development of the first half of the century is evident in the book, as is the approach that one gains from an insightful immersion in German philosophy. However, this was also present in the minds of such people as F. Th. Vischer, Carriere and Hettner. What was missing in their case was the influence that natural and social science can provide today. Lublinski has incorporated this influence into his approach. We would like to see this to an even greater extent. From some of the statements taken from the field of natural knowledge, it is clear that our author is not yet fully at home in the way of thinking of modern world view. But this is insignificant in view of the fact that he has a modern view of nature in his body.

In addition, the book is written by a man who has something to say about the things he writes about. We are interested in the author of the book, not just in the content of the work. This is what makes Lublinski's presentation a modern creation.

The special chapter “Literature and Society” grows out of the whole of cultural life. Nothing is missing that needs to be drawn upon to explain the activity of the leading minds on the one hand, the physiognomy of taste on the other. With fine tact, science, philosophy, politics, and social life are called upon to give the overall picture its external colors. Lublinski is a master at drawing upon illustrative examples. He seems particularly adept at citing facts that serve to substantiate the truths he expresses. For example, how vividly the German public is characterized by the position it took towards Kotzebue! How subtly Heine's idiosyncrasy is pointed out by a statement that this poet made to Adolf Stahr. And yet, as is the case with so many literary historians, the author's preliminary work does not intrude on us in an obtrusive manner. Lublinski has allowed the results of this preliminary work to mature and bear fruit before presenting them to us.

In contrast to the ingenious Brandes, we can apply the epithet ingenious to Lublinski. A sense of solidity runs through the work. The point of view is lofty, and yet it reads like a simple story. Such books are proof that we have once again reached the level of descriptive art that makes Gutzkow's literary-historical writings so delightful.

We have here a subtle observer and a courageous critic. It is by no means common to find these qualities united. One's own judgment is all too often clouded by devoted contemplation. Or contemplation suffers from the obstinacy of an often quite arbitrary aesthetic standpoint. The editors of literary history have achieved the most incredible things in these two directions, especially in our time. In Lublinski's work, the judgment arises from calm observation, and no prejudice can disturb his immersion in the facts.

Lublinski never allows the greatness of the personalities he portrays to overwhelm their individuality. He presents Kleist as the first great, perhaps the greatest, “poet that the nineteenth century produced in Germany”, but that does not prevent him from pointing out the poet's faults. A remark like this gives us a glimpse of how deeply Kleist's character was: “Kleist was undoubtedly the first pinnacle of Romanticism. He fulfilled almost all the requirements of the school: he unleashed the darkest, most mysterious forces of human nature, which he simultaneously subjected to the rigid constraints of a concise, chiseled art form with tremendous willpower. He was at the height of his age's education, he mastered Greek and Christian mythology, Hellenic and modern art forms, and in his greatest achievements he knew how to melt these fundamentally different elements into a new whole. However, there were certain limits to this path, and the cracks and chasms and contradictions that sometimes emerged could not be completely concealed, even by mysticism and the temporary destruction of the art form, because he, as a mystic and destroyer, kept himself completely away from the fog of clichés of a Zacharias Werner or the witty, scornful, playful high spirits of the other Romantics. He had not become a romantic out of weakness, out of a feminine desire for self-irony, but because terrible painful experiences had taught him to believe in the mysterious and in chaotic confusion.»

The author attempts to characterize the influence that the philosophical movement had on literary life at the beginning and in the first third of the century by providing, as it were, popular extracts from the philosophers' views. He undoubtedly also served the overall tendency of his book in this way. Nevertheless, the connoisseur of the history of world views cannot agree with these extracts. I believe that I have experience in these matters. I know that there is no philosophical truth that cannot be presented in a popular form, in a few short sentences, with a limited number of words. However, Lublinski's extracts hardly ever seem to me to correctly reflect the philosophers' train of thought. For example, in the case of Kant, he places the main emphasis on the fact that this thinker referred human knowledge to experience. The wise man from Königsberg is said to have taught the unknowability of the thing in itself only so that man would be satisfied with the investigation of this world and would not concern himself further with the hereafter. But it seems to me to be quite certain that Kant betrayed his main goal with the words: I sought to limit knowledge in order to make room for faith. He wanted to preserve people's belief in God and immortality; that is why he sought to prove that knowledge does not extend to the realm from which these otherworldly elements originate. Fichte's great way of thinking is also not characterized by Lublinski's sentences. I admit that the Romantics understood Fichte in the form reproduced here. But he himself would undoubtedly have objected to this interpretation. The Fichtean ego had to be misunderstood by the Romantics in order to form the basis of the so-called irony. I would make the same comment about Lublinski's presentation of Hegel. It is questionable to me whether it is permissible to present the views of a thinker in the form in which they are reflected by contemporaries with unclear vision. For it is precisely the way in which the genuine form can be transformed into a false image and function as such that is interesting and important in terms of cultural history. However, this way can only be understood if one is familiar with the genuine form.

I would also like to mention that Goethe is not given enough credit in the book. This makes Romanticism seem like a bolt from the blue. However, it is nothing more than the elaboration of an element of Goethe's view of the world. The distance from reality that Goethe experienced after his Italian journey fascinated some of his contemporaries. Goethe wanted to live in a higher world, above the everyday world. He sought the typical, because the common reality with its individualities did not seem to him to give the deeper truth of nature. What he sought, after he had passed through the full experience of reality, was what Romanticism wanted to achieve without such a prerequisite, through its irony based on mere arbitrariness. Goethe wanted to make himself at home in the higher lawfulness, because the everyday necessity was not enough for him. The Romantics confused lawlessness with the higher lawfulness. The whole of Romanticism is, at bottom, Schiller's misunderstood sentence, which he wrote to Goethe in connection with “Wilhelm Meister”: “Man is only completely human where he plays; and he only plays where he is human in the highest sense of the word.” The Romantics only adhered to the first part of this sentence. But first, man must rise through the highest culture to a level of education that makes his play appear as the highest seriousness. He must feel the necessity within himself, have realized it within himself, then he will playfully give birth to it again with freedom.

Goethe's position within literary life in the first third of the century is so outstanding that he must indeed take up more space than Lublinski allows him.

However, these exhibitions are not intended to minimize the value of the book. If the author succeeds in completing his task in the same way as he began it, that is, if he presents the last two-thirds of the century to us in as satisfying a manner as he has done with the first, then he will have created a work that can serve the widest circles in the best conceivable way.

Without doubt, however, the part that has been published so far can be seen as a significant addition to the history of literature, both in terms of the mastery of the material and the way it is treated.

• 1. «Am Ende des Jahrhunderts. A Review of 100 Years of Intellectual Development.» Vols. XII and XIII. S. Lublinski: «Literature and Society in the 19th Century». Berlin, Verlag Siegfried Cronbach

There is much ¹ debate today about scientific methods. It is often believed that fruitful scientific work is only possible if the methods are established. Those who are really concerned with the matter in any area of natural or spiritual life can gain very little from all the disputes about methods. Only a new observation, a new thought that sees things in a context that has been ignored until its appearance, can be truly fruitful. Every time I have come across a piece of work that has revealed remarkable aspects of a subject, I have observed how little the worker cares about the dispute over methods. But I have also always observed how utterly insignificant are the works of those whose authors tie themselves into the Spanish boots of a particular scientific method. But what is absolutely necessary in order to treat a field of natural or spiritual life fruitfully is a free, unbiased mind that sees things without being influenced by conventional judgments - I deliberately do not say prejudices - and one's own view of life. Only someone who has such a view of life is able to tell me something about a thing that I consider worth reading or listening to, if the things themselves are accessible to me. I will also read a travelogue of a country unknown to me by a person who is insignificant, as well as a report on a geological excursion that I cannot make myself. But if someone presents me with the development of “literature and society” in the nineteenth century, I demand that he interest me as a unique personality through the possession of a world and life view. With such an attitude, I approach a book like that of S. Lublinski, “Literature and Society in the Nineteenth Century.”² whose first and second parts I have already reviewed in this journal, and whose third and fourth parts I would like to discuss here. I have rarely put down a book on literary history with such satisfaction as this one. A subtle observer of intellectual events and an original thinker's physiognomy speaks to me.

It is precisely these two qualities that enable $. Lublinski to identify with a sure instinct the great, impersonal currents of the times that absorb and sweep away individualities, while at the same time assigning to these individualities themselves the right share in progressive historical development. How clearly this emerges in this book in the treatment of Börne, Gutzkow, Treitschke and others. Nowhere is the historical background from which it grows overlooked by prejudice for the rights of the individual; but nowhere is the individuality of the personalities lost sight of out of a preference for the necessary historical course of events. Lublinski owes the best that he is able to bring us through his book to this impartiality.

The very first chapter of the third volume, “Menzel, Börne and Goethe”, is a perfect example of what has been said. Wolfgang Menzel is sketched out with a few, but all the more characteristic strokes. “[...] Menzel was the first to apply the standard of the student fraternity to German intellectual history. At the same time, he was the first of the new generation to confront the old generation in a resolute ‘clear fighting position.’ The position of Menzel outlined in these sentences is characterized brilliantly. The traditional judgments about Ludwig Börne are put into perspective. Up to now, Börne's critical-aesthetic view has been presented as an outgrowth of his political views. Lublinski shows that the energetic, belligerent Frankfurter is an opponent of Goethe as an aesthete, that he is the founder of a new aesthetic. From this point of view, Börne's relationship with Jean Paul appears in a new light. “It has become a fable convene of literary history to attribute Börne's enthusiasm for Jean Paul entirely to the tiresome politics. Nothing could be more wrong or at least more one-sided.” No, it is the “intimate art” that Börne saw Jean Paul as the “prophet and revealer” of.

I am in a special position here vis-à-vis Lublinski. I do not even agree with him on the facts. I believe that the basis for Börne's entire work must be sought in the political impetus. However, “the political” must be understood in a much broader sense than is usually the case. Lublinski himself says: “Börne, in contrast to Heine, was a thoroughly social person, a born publicist, but not a born writer or even a poet. He only felt comfortable in the midst of the people and did not like to dissect and explore the soul of the masses, because he would then have had to take a superior position to them.” A mind that can be said to have such a view is a thoroughly political one. Nevertheless, Lublinski gains a thoroughly new and justified judgment of Börne by emphasizing the non-political. This enables him to reject the narrow-minded politics that were emphasized in Börne's attitude. I would like to go into this point in more detail, because it shows me how the thoughts of another can become meaningful to me even if I want to grasp them differently, provided that this other person views his subject from truly meaningful thoughts.

The judgments that Börne passed on Schiller's “Tell” and on King Claudius in Shakespeare's “Hamlet” are aptly cited by Zublinski. He rightly claims that there are deeper motives behind Börne's condemnation of Schiller's poetry than those cited by the author himself. It was not Tell's dishonesty towards the bailiff, nor the murder and treachery that led Börne to his harsh judgment; rather, it was the fact that Schiller created a hero in Tell who did not make the fate of the Swiss people his own and the driving force behind his actions, but who basically only represented his own personal interests. “He who has only enough strength to cope with himself is the strongest alone, but he who has a surplus of strength after self-control will also control others and become more powerful through association.” The same reason that led Schiller to create Tell not as a figure through whom the spirit of the Swiss people would work, but as a character with very general human interests, was the same reason that led Börne to condemn this character; for Börne's political pathos demanded not an individual, private personality, but a public, political one. And from this point of view, Hamlet was also repulsive to him. This man seemed to him to be rootless in his whole attitude within the social conditions that surround him. He seems to see neither right nor left, but only to know the impulses of his own soul. Börne himself preferred the villain Claudius, who is “not bad for his own sake alone”, who belongs to the type of Shakespearean villains that Börne describes as follows: “They form a species, they bear the mark of Cain on their foreheads, the title page of the book of sins of humanity, which is not responsible for the content that it indicates.” The general human nature that Goethe sought to achieve when he sought to reach the level of classicism, which Schiller followed him in: Börne had no sympathy for this. Goethe and Schiller ultimately felt it to be a falsification of general human nature when something adheres to it from the “accidental” influences of the immediate environment into which it is born. They therefore seek to lift their characters out of this randomness. Börne seems to have perceived this urge for a higher nature in man as a lack of interest in the actual suffering and joy that man encounters at every turn. And this perception probably stems from his political pathos, just as the Goethe-Schiller ideal of the general human being stems from an apolitical, purely aestheticizing pathos. There is a great difference between the attitude of Goethe, for whom the outbreak of the Paris July Revolution is an uninteresting event compared to the simultaneous dispute between two French naturalists about animal organization, which deeply moved him, and that of Börne, who feverishly devoured every news item that arrived from the Paris uprising in 1830. In contrast to this, I would not subscribe to Lublinski's statement ($. 43): “It is a strange coincidence that Börne, this Goethe-hater, was at the same time the first Goethe philistine in Germany, or, which is the same thing, the first philistine of humanity.”

Despite the fact that Lublinski's point of view for judging Börne is somewhat crazy, the overall characterization of this personality is clear, sharp and too accurate. I followed his characterization of Young Germany and Gutzkow with even greater sympathy. Here one has the feeling that Lublinski is describing a current of thought in which he is not only thoroughly at home, but intimately familiar. Gutzkow's very own individual essence is portrayed in just as characteristic strokes as his relationship to Hegel, Goethe and the political and social movements of his time. An excellent light is cast on the aesthete of Young Germany, Ludolf Wienbarg, and on Heinrich Laube as well.

Here Lublinski shows himself to be an historian of unusually fine tact. The subject he has chosen, “Literature and Society”, requires him to weigh up the effects of contemporary trends in the individual personalities in a sometimes quite subtle and dynamic way. He has now succeeded in characterizing in the most tactful way how Hegelianism, Goetheanism, historicism, romanticism and other currents of the time were perceived by the leading minds in the second third of the century.

To give just one example, Lublinski describes the influence of Hegelianism on Young Germany. “What seemed so terrible to the young people about Hegel's system was the master's stony tower, this mighty colossal pyramid, for which he used not ordinary stones, but historical ages, all peoples and people of the globe. A young person was confronted with the following: you belong to the nineteenth century, the last step of the pyramid... Luther lived in the sixteenth century, so he made the Reformation. The mysterious metaphysical law that built the tower had the reformer by the collar, and it was not his choice, it was not his personal matter of conscience to make the Reformation or not to make the Reformation.” What matters for Lublinski's task is not that this is a completely misleading view of Hegel's world view, but that it correctly reflects this view in the minds of the Young Germany. For only because this image lived in his mind was Gutzkow able to say, with regard to Hegel's ideas: “Did a concept or a great, noble, generous soul die in Cato? Was Philip II, was Robespierre without moral accountability? Was the world spirit the prompter of all the great words spoken by men? The prompter of Arria's non dolet, of Huss's sancta simplicitas, and even of that wistfully bitter saying with which a gladiator greeted the emperor: Caesar, moriturus te salutat? This philosophical schematism cheats humanity out of its exaltation.» Gutzkow may be thoroughly wrong in characterizing Hegel in this way: he does so because the creator of the “time novel” is working his way up in him, who longs for people who carry the spirit of their time as their temperament, as their passions, as their ethos, who want to be shaped by this spirit of the time, not comprehended by the great world idea. We find the social factors, the social milieu, in the effects when we study the individual soul of the personality. What takes place at the bottom of the individual soul is to a great extent a result of the power factors in the environment, in the political circumstances of the individual in question. To understand and shape people from the ethical, religious and social factors of the people: that was the tendency that worked its way up in Gutzkow. We recognize this tendency already in his first novel “Maha Guru”; we also find it in his “characterizations”. Lublinski says of Gutzkow's latter works: “He preferred to choose characters who were either strange and abnormal or at least living in strange circumstances, which he sought to capture in their innermost essence, faithfully, conscientiously and poetically. This essence was transferred to his style, which was also of a demonstrative and explanatory nature and here and there added the peacock feather of colorful punch lines... He never made a joke for the sake of a joke or with the intention of fighting and destroying; instead, the main thing was always to explain and illuminate a strange character in a purely objective way.” In another passage, Lublinski gives further reasons why the Young Germans were particularly successful with character sketches. “Of course, the Hegelian dialectic that they had been taught, this mental gymnastics that had been transformed into psychological insight, came to their aid. And since they were portraying public characters, the principle of the interaction between social conditions and the character of the individual personality arose quite naturally."

Lublinski continues in the same style of characterization, which is both astute and finely nuanced, in his descriptions of the 1840s, 1850s and 1860s. Readers with a more aesthetic disposition will notice the author's fleeting passing over purely artistic and aesthetic questions. Lublinski focuses more on the content of artistic phenomena than on form. This historian follows what is firmly rooted in the culture of the time, what is the expression of a characteristic stage of the zeitgeist, down to the finest ramifications; the purely artistic sometimes comes up a little short. I would not call that a criticism, but rather a virtue of the book. It seems to me much better for someone to do what they can do excellently according to their own individual abilities than to submit to some so-called “objective” methodology. It may seem strange to some that Lublinski says in the preface to the fourth volume: “A Ernst von Wildenbruch could be passed over here, where the interaction between literature and society is concerned, after I had already mentioned the most concise literary representative of the new Prussian Teutonism: Heinrich von Treitschke.” I find it perfectly justified that Lublinski should assert such a subjective maxim. What he had to say could be better illustrated by Treitschke than by Wildenbruch.

The chapter entitled “The Silver Age of German Literature” is also a masterpiece. He uses this term primarily for the time of Hebbel, Otto Ludwig and Keller. In the case of Hebbel, it is particularly striking how Lublinski is able to follow this poet into the grandiose dialectic of his imagination, how he is able to characterize the “high tragedy”, the “great form” of this powerfully struggling spirit. I would like to quote just one excellent passage from this characterization (IV, p. 23): “Hebbel had come to civilization and morality from the primeval forest as a first discoverer and lawmaker, as it were. He still felt the forces of nature boiling in his organism, while his eye read with delight and terror the flaming words of law on a stone tablet, behind which the brooding thought sensed cultural treasures that could not be found in the jungle. That was the rigid and elemental, if you will, the Nordic-Atavistic in his nature. For it happened to him, as it did to the North Germans in general, when they received the moral law as Christianity in ancient times. Hebbel also took the law into his innermost being, which began to split as the young cultural element came into violent conflict with ancient racial instincts. The consequences of such struggles are well known: mysticism, moral anguish, hair-splitting casuistry, tireless probing and pondering, demonic wrestling for a solution to the riddle of the world.»

The figures of Gustav Freytag, Julian Schmidt, Paul Heyse and Friedrich Spielhagen are explained in razor-sharp lines from the conditions of their time; at the same time, their significance is weighed with a sure sense. Lublinski also proves to be a good observer when he describes the influence of the emergence of the “new empire” and the spread of socialist propaganda on the development of literature and society.

The author is more reserved and sketchy in his description of the literary currents of the recent past and those that are still continuing today. He has a feeling for the uncertainty and incompleteness that is expressed in these currents. This prevents him from overestimating individual phenomena, in relation to which the judgment of other contemporaries becomes considerably questionable. “So far, it has not been possible to produce works of high art, monumental poetry that belong to world literature or even come close to the best creations of narrower German literature, as they were produced [in] the classical period or in the 1850s.” This is how Lublinski expresses his opinion of contemporary literature. Whether he is right or not, I will refrain from passing judgment. It would be pointless to discuss whether the author of this book has the necessary distance from the present that is doubtless to be granted to him in relation to older phenomena.

• 1. S. Lublinski: Literatur und Gesellschaft im neunzehnten Jahrhundert. Volume 3 and 4 (from the collection “Am Ende des Jahrhunderts”. Volume XVI and XVII) published by S. Cronbach in Berlin
• 2. To reinforce and illustrate what has been said here, an essay by $. Lublinski

Volumes XI1, XII, XVI and XVII of the collection «Am Ende des Jahrhunderts. Rückschau auf 100 Jahre geistiger Entwickelung.» Berlin, S. Cronbach

The author of this book has set himself an important task. He wants to present the literary phenomena of the nineteenth century in their context with social life. There is little preparatory work for such a task. Literary historians have so far regarded literature as a world in itself. They sought methods to create scientific order in this world. But they did not consider that this world is connected with the whole of social life. Lublinski is deeply convinced that only those who have an eye for the whole of life understand what is happening in the world of poetry. He traces the threads that connect literature with life, from economic phenomena on the one hand to philosophical currents of thought on the other. It must be admitted that Lublinski's attempt to treat the chapter “Literature and Society” as part of cultural history has been surprisingly successful. What is usually disturbing about works of this kind is that their authors have something individual to say only about one or the other, and that for the rest they lead us through broad areas in which we can only admire the skill with which they apply their “method” to a subject that is indifferent to them. One cannot absolve Georg Brandes, the ingenious interpreter of the literary “main currents of the nineteenth century”, of this fault. For example, he has said things about German Romanticism that only he could say in this way. But he has also applied the method, which reveals the psychology of Romanticism in a magnificent way, to “Young Germany”. There it fails. Lublinski cannot be accused of such a thing. He does not have such a one-sided, universal method. Because he regards literature as only one element of the whole of culture, he always finds the point from which a literary phenomenon can be viewed within the whole context of life. It can be said of him that he has a unique method for every phenomenon. For example, he does full justice to the individual personality when this really has the driving element in itself and in [its] individual development; and he then sheds the right light on the “milieu” when the personality is only the expression of certain trends of the times. The characterizations of Heinrich von Kleist, Heine, Friedrich Hebbel and the depictions of the milieu in the chapters “Intellectual Structure of Germany around 1800”, “The Audience”, “Tendencies of Young Germany”, “The Silver Age of German Literature” and “The Bourgeoisie” are particularly successful. A highlight of the entire work is the description of Gutzkow. It cannot be denied that many literary phenomena can only be seen in their true light if one follows the lines that Lublinski has indicated so far. It is in the nature of things that one can object to much in the book. One often has the feeling that a path has only just begun and that a considerable distance still needs to be covered if a reasonably certain result is to be achieved, where we now encounter a mere assumption. But that cannot be otherwise. Lublinski has set himself a task that probably cannot be fully solved even if three or four decades are spent on it. It is therefore all the more commendable that he has achieved what he has. We need books like this, which, while not conclusive, are highly stimulating. There are certainly many literary historians in Germany who have a broader knowledge than Lublinski; but there are few who have such a comprehensive education as he; and there is no one so far who would know how to combine all branches of the sociological structure in the sense of the modern scientific way of thinking as he does. Compare Lublinski's book with that of a mere aesthete, such as Rudolf von Gottschall's “Die deutsche Nationalliteratur des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts”. Gottschall also ventures beyond the realm of fine literature. But he is only interested in philosophical and, to a lesser extent, political currents; however, he is only interested in these to the extent that the aesthete speaks of them. The aesthetic judgment becomes sovereign in the intellectual organism of such personalities. For Lublinski, the aesthetic judgment is only a part of his overall evaluation of things. He is not only concerned with whether a work of art is significant or insignificant. For him, the real problem only begins at the moment when he has finished with the aesthetic value judgment. Then he asks himself: why was it possible for a significant work to be created in a certain period and by a certain personality? One would not be wrong to claim that Lublinski has significantly deepened the problems of literary history through his questioning.

Recently, Ludwig Jacobowski ¹ with his “Loki” a narrative poem that depicts in symbolic acts the heavy, hot struggles that take place at the bottom of every human soul that does not merge into the hustle and bustle of everyday life, but leads a deeper life. Those who immerse themselves in this “novel of a god” will be captivated by the poet's deep insight into the workings of the soul and his powerful sense of everything that shakes, elevates and plunges the human heart into abysses.

Now Jacobowski has followed up this creation with his “New Poems”*. Through them we can look into the depths of his own soul, into the experiences of his inner life, into everything that has lifted him up to the high vantage point from which he surveys the world and its mysteries in “Loki”. The great, free worldview that we encounter in the novel is deeply rooted in the poet's nature. Two character traits are inherent in this nature, which, in their harmonious interaction, always determine the significant personality: a fine, receptive sense for all the individual things that confront us in life, and a mind that grasps the great connections between the details in their true significance. We owe the fresh, rich colors that shine out at us from Jacobowski's poems to his receptive senses; and it is through his mind that the poet always points out to us what “holds the world together at its core”. In the “Shining Days” we never miss the great view of the essence of the world that lies behind the eternal flow of appearances. Rather, these poems constantly direct our feelings and our imagination towards this essence. One always has the feeling that this poet draws from the eternal source from which the best content of life flows to us.

For those whose spirit is directed in such a way, life is not easy. For every step means a test for them. The world has many secrets to reveal to them. But nature does not give anything away voluntarily. It wrings everything from us in a hard struggle. It paves the way to every goal with suffering and deprivation. But the essence to which it ultimately always leads us is that which satisfies the heart and mind. The mists of existence dissolve; and the sun of life smiles upon us. The true artist shows us this sun. Because it is the sun that, as a spiritual bond, causes the connection of things. All genuine art is therefore “cheerful”. And a sunny cheerfulness, a cheerfulness born out of the difficult struggle of life: these are the things that flow from Jacobowski's poems to us.

Oh, our shining days
Shine like eternal stars.
As a consolation for future lamentation
They glow from a golden distance.

Don't cry because they're gone!
Smile because they have been!
And even if the days are gloomy,
our stars will redeem them!

Jacobowski introduces the collection with this poem, as if with an artistic gospel, and he ends it with the confession:

Sinking arms,
folded hands,
Around me the warm,
land illuminated;
Eyelashes closed
In the flattering light,
flowing around
The brown face.

Stand in the sun
that I fade away...
Wistfulness becomes bliss,
And bliss becomes woe!
If only I had grace
And kindness and pleasure,
To bathe in the glow
The darkest breast! ...

Shining days,
Now you sink slowly!
Alas, without complaint
I look after you.
Secret glow,
That so surrounds me,
Shines forever
The blooming world!

The liberating keynote that resounds throughout the book is expressed in these verses. However powerful the individual experiences may be that inspire the poet, his mind always pushes him towards the heights of existence, towards those bright regions for which the transience of everyday life is only a metaphor. Just as every individual experience becomes a symbol of the eternal ideas of world events for the philosopher, so for the true lyricist every individual feeling, every particular mood becomes a symbol of the entire fate of the soul. And Jacobowski is a true lyricist in this highest sense. See how in the following verses ($. 56) a single feeling comes to life in a universal one.

Brown twigs protrude from a white vase
And drag heavily on the densely filled lilac.
Bright green leaves push through
through the brown branches. The wind gently brushes the blossoms,
A scent runs up and down in shivers.
The whole room drinks itself full of lilac,
And even the soul feels the blossoms softly.

Once I was so happy in my heart
suck sweets from lilac stems. —
Oh, I do it again and make children's eyes
And feel the youth in the sap of the blossom!

This diversion of the individual experience into the general is a fundamental trait of Jacobowski's personality. It works in him like a natural process of life in the human organism. He does not seek depth anywhere, he does not strive beyond the individual. This lives in his soul in an immediate way, as the individual plant appears before us as a representative of its entire species. One need only compare his poetry with that of Richard Dehmel to grasp the immediacy of his universal feelings. In Dehmel's work, the path from the individual experience to the great world connections always leads through the idea, through abstraction. In Jacobowski's work, this is not necessary. For he feels universally. He does not need the world of imagination to rise to the primal facts of the soul; every experience of the soul has for him the character of the eternally significant.

This trait in Jacobowski is inextricably linked to another, without which greatness in the human soul is not possible. This is the feeling for the great, simple lines in the world. Everything great in the world is simple; and if someone does not feel the simple greatness of the simple, but seeks the significant in the strange, in the so-called secrets of existence, this only proves that he has lost the sense of the great that meets us at every moment of life. The sins of some modern poets, who seek salvation in random, remote moods because they lack a sense of the simple, the “simple-minded”, are far removed from Jacobowski. Just as in a folk song, an everyday event can trigger a gigantic strength of feeling, so in Jacobowski's work a simple event becomes great because he transports it into the sphere of his mind. It is the simplest thing in the world; and at the same time it is one of the deepest experiences that can happen to a person, as is shown in the poem “The Old Woman” (p. 207):

The old woman

I

I have an old woman,
She lives right next to heaven,
For it is exactly ninety steps,
And children on it, a real muddle.

In her little room, clean and bright
The loud echo of the streets resounds. And slowly night falls in
Darkening on the masses of houses.

The full moon climbs over the roof,
the stars shine in a circle,
The wall clock ticks only slowly...
We sit there motionless and silent.

II

What do I have in common with the old woman?
I don't know exactly.
It can't be her coffee,
she puts too much milk in it,
I only love her baked apples,
She cooks them for me in the oven."
What do I have in common with the old woman?
That makes a narrow grave far away. There she laid her hopes,
A slim, blonde maiden. She went through life quietly,
And thought of one and that was me. And no one else realized
That she was the sweetness of my life. When I feel life is confused and rough,
Then I climb up to the old woman.
For her modest little chamber
Holds my soul's blossom within.
And when I come to her, I feel pain. And only when I leave her!

The following lines will describe the outstanding place that Jacobowski occupies among contemporary poets and present the character of his lyrical creations in detail.

II

Looking back on the “Shining Days” as a whole, after enjoying the individual poems, a unified, self-contained work of art stands before the soul. All the lyrical creations form a stylish harmony. The circle of human soul life passes before us. The feelings that are aroused in us by the sublimity and perfection of the whole world, the relationship of the soul to the world, human nature in various forms, the joys and sorrows of love, the pain and happiness of knowledge, the social conditions and their repercussions on the human mind, the mysterious paths of fate: all these elements of the life organism find expression. Nothing is alien to the personality that lives itself out in this book; it is at home on the heights and in the depths of existence. And one has the feeling that in this personality every feeling is given the right measure, the right degree. None pushes itself forward at the expense of the others. A harmonious universality, radiating from the central interests of life, is Jacobowski's essence. And his feelings are driven by these interests in life with a warmth and strength that have a personal and immediate effect in the most beautiful sense of the word. What moves all of humanity becomes, in a truly lyrical way, a matter of its own for this poet. We do not need to put ourselves in the place of a single individual in order to understand his creations; he guides us to our own inner selves. He expresses in his own way what moves us all. He has the magic wand to strike poetic sparks from life everywhere, and therefore does not need to look for peculiarities. Sentimentalism is as foreign to him as delicate sensitivity is his own; he is not a dreamer, but a powerful grabber. A rare confidence in his spiritual direction, a sure, firm feeling of the fruitfulness of his striving speaks from his poems. There is something pithy and delicate at the same time in his nature; he is like a tree that is exposed to strong storms, but is firmly rooted in the ground. He knows that he can abandon himself to life, to the everyday, because he finds treasures everywhere, even on the most trodden paths.

Compare Jacobowski with contemporary poets of note. How many believe that they will only find what is valuable if they search for the shells and extract rare, precious pearls from them. Jacobowski is not looking for shiny pearls; the seed that he reaches for, the common flower at the edge of the meadow, is enough for him. If one wants to name contemporary poets who, after having delighted us with his “Shining Days”, now stand with him in the front row, then only two names will come to mind: Detlev von Liliencron and Otto Erich Hartleben. The differences between the three poets are, however, great. And it is difficult for us to assess them when they are still in the prime of their lives, still stirring up new feelings in us every day. We can only give a provisional and very subjective judgment. Otto Erich Hartleben, the lyricist, seems to me like Goethe's description of the artist in “Winckelmann”. With his admirable taste and his cult of beauty, he communicates something to us that flows over us like ancient art. In this respect, he stands so much alone that we would rather isolate him than compare him. Detlev von Liliencron is the lyrical master of detail. His eye sees every thing in the light of the eternal. But his mind knows nothing of this eternity; that is why he tells us nothing about it. With Liliencron, it is as if we had to hear a second voice if we are to understand the coherence of his images. We must have a kind of second sight with this poet: then we will see what he gives us in the light of the eternally meaningful. Jacobowski has this second sight himself. And with it he achieves something that only poets achieve who create from a worldview, and what I must regard as the hallmark of the true poet: that the philosopher must call him a “brother poet” and at the same time that the simplest mind finds itself in him. The simplest nature and the highest spirit that can be drawn from this nature are one and the same.

Jacobowski's poetry will pass the highest test there is for a poet: to be equally appealing to the man who goes to work in the morning and can only use the festive moments on Sundays to let the serene realm of art work its magic on him, and to the true philosopher who is on familiar terms with the eternal riddles of existence. Like the philosopher, Jacobowski is a world thinker. See how he translates the great idea of Indian wisdom, that everything in the world is only an illusion and therefore need not touch us, into a very individual feeling:

“It's nothing! Just walk past the world!”

This strange word does not set my heart free.
How gladly would I pass by the world,
But, alas, the world does not pass me by!

For even if I stand in hiding like children,
fearfully turned away from the dance of the days, —
They drag me out of the corner by force,
And each one presses pain into my hand.

In a poem like this, the highest wisdom seems like the most charming naivety; the three most monumental forms of the soul reveal their innermost relationship: the childlike, the artistic and the philosophical.

Because Jacobowski unites these three forms in the most original way, I believe that as a poet he surpasses his contemporary Dehmel. He is a complete poet; Dehmel is half poet and half thinker. And two such halves make as little of a whole as a half lens and a half bean. In Dehmel's work, you will look in vain for a poem as simple as the following, which could almost serve as a motto for many of the greatest philosophical creations:

Soul, tell me, what are you struggling for?
“I am of the earth, but I long to be of heaven!"
Soul, you only achieve night and death?
“A morning red glows over nights!"

In a beautiful psychological study in “Pan” (1898, 3rd [issue, 4th year]), the brilliant Lou Andreas-Salome hit the nail on the head when she said: “In our time, many, and not the worst, turn away from the whole outer life and even despise it as a mere occasion for personal activity and self-realization, because they feel themselves hemmed in and robbed of their individual existence by the entire cultural conditions in which we live. [...] There is a search and longing for solitude in the most advanced people, in all those who carry something within themselves that cannot be born on the market, in all those who carry hope and future within themselves and secretly fear that these could be desecrated. They know full well that the great works that stride across the earth with brazen steps of victory and ringing music, century after century, arise from full contact with the full breadth and depth of real life, but until then – they also know this – many other, quieter works must precede them in white robes, with shy buds in their hair, and testify that there are human souls that are festively dressed and willing and ready for a new beauty in their lives.” On the other hand, it is safe to say that in the future, people with white robes and shy buds in their hair will be interesting symptoms of the end of the nineteenth century, people who will be studied for their peculiarity, but that the real signature of this period will be the spirits with healthy senses, with developed blossoms in their hair, who love fresh colors and not the pale, sickly white. We count Jacobowski among them.

Our healthy thinking has given rise to Darwinism and all its consequences in the second half of the century; on the paths along which this healthy thinking and healthy feeling walks, we also meet poets like Jacobowski. Alienated from the world, lost in aesthetic and philosophic-mystical quirks, we encounter poets with white robes and shy buds in their hair. Artificial poetic forms are of little value, as are bizarre, ingenious ideas. Both, however, always arise in times of powerful spiritual struggle. However, they never appear in the case of strong, original, independent minds, but rather in the case of weak, dependent minds that cannot produce original content from their souls, that have to extract everything from themselves with pliers and pumps, but that would still like to participate. Such minds are not equal to the demands and tasks of the time. They do not know any simple, straightforward answers to the questions that are buzzing around us. That is why they seek the abstruse, the sophisticated. The profound connoisseur of the workings of nature, Galileo, spoke the wise words that the true is not hard and difficult, but simple and easy, and that in all its works nature uses the closest, simplest and easiest means. Only the mind that knows how to use the simplest and easiest means, just like nature, truly lives in harmony with nature. Jacobowski appears as such a mind among the host of contemporary poets. Dehmels' artificial forms and artificial feelings seem like a departure from natural simplicity.

III

What a mistake it is for individual contemporaries to seek the salvation of poetry in formlessness and to believe that the “old” forms have been used up is best shown by contrasting the creations of these enthusiasts of formlessness with poems such as those of Jacobowski. The philosopher Simmel has written an interesting essay about a follower of formlessness, Paul Ernst. According to Simmel, this formlessness represents progress in that the artist no longer seeks the higher, the divine in art through artificialization, through the manipulation of immediate natural phenomena, but rather sees a divine significance in every experience that takes place before our senses, a significance that deserves to be captured in this immediacy. On the basis of such views, poetry that is nothing more than prose divided into verses is considered “modern” today. Those who hold such views live in the mistaken belief that the “old” forms are something that the artist arbitrarily adds to the phenomena of nature from his subjective essence. He does not realize what Goethe repeatedly explained in the most illuminating way, that the external course of events is only one side of natural existence, the surface, and that for those who look deeper, higher laws of form are expressed in nature itself, which they recreate in their artistic forms. There is a “higher nature” in nature. What Goethe has the Lord say to the angels in “Faust”: “But you, the true sons of the gods, rejoice in the living, rich beauty! That which is becoming, which eternally works and lives, embrace with the love of gentle boundaries, and what floats in a wavering appearance, fasten with lasting thoughts,” expresses the artist's mission. Only the “shaky appearance” presents itself in formlessness; the eternal becoming is full of form; it is inwardly, through its essence, bound to form. The rejection of form is nothing more than an expression of the inability to see the “higher nature” in nature, to find the subjective, stylish expression for its innermost harmony. In the face of all such aberrations of the time, Jacobowski, out of an inner necessity of his artistic sensibility, takes the safe path of the artist. One can see what he achieves with the proven “old” forms in a poem like “The Four Robbers”, which forms the conclusion of “Shining Days”. In this legend, simple simplicity is combined with symbolic allusions to the deep connections of world events and with a noble, closed form. What I said at the beginning of this essay about Jacobowski's poetry, that this poet draws from the eternal source from which the best content of life comes, is the reason why he stands out as such a pleasing, refreshing poet from other fellow poets. These others, however, only know derived sources. They are driven by a purpose in life that is unable to fulfill them. At best, they see branches and shoots, but they are unable to penetrate to the fertile, constructive elements of the life organism. Only those who direct their gaze to these fertile beings will find life's higher justification. When it is so often said that spiritual greatness leads to loneliness, one must reply that the proud, necessary loneliness that arises from the feeling of the eternal in the world has nothing to do with the accidental loneliness that arises from someone withdrawing into some isolated corner of existence. If he sees nothing in this corner but “what lives in a fluctuating appearance”, then his report cannot captivate us, even though he speaks of things that are hidden from the everyday eye. The cultural content of the world is not enriched by adding isolated phenomena to the old stock, but by leading the eternal becoming to a new stage of development. The way in which an artist who is capable of such things relates to life phenomena that appear new and “modern” in his time is evident in the part of “Leuchtende Tage” entitled “Großstadt” (Big City). Here, a spirit speaks of the social life of our day that does not see it in the perspective of the moment, but rather in the perspective that arises from the contemplation of the great laws of the world. The singers of social passions and conflicts often see only a few steps ahead. The light that falls on contemporary phenomena when they are placed in the context of a world view is what gives our feelings about these phenomena the right nuance. Modern big-city life, for example, is given such a nuance in Jacobowski's poem “Summer Evening”:

Summer evening. —
The air is soft and warm;
a distant scent from a garden,
The wide expanses of the sky are still pale,
here and there pale traces of stars;
On the street, the crack of whips and noise,
boys who are infatuated with young girls;
Children play with hoops in front of the doors,
coachmen knock their pipes;
knights on steeds, who are thinking of love,
honestly endeavor to win the favor of the ladies on bicycles, ...
And all the soft, warm air,
And from gardens a stray scent.

The poet experiences a “modern” situation; he portrays it in the context of the whole world. We do not see the city scene in isolation, but in such a way that the rest of the world plays into it. In this sense, “The Soldier, Scenes from the Big City” is a truly modern creation, in which the fate of a person transplanted from the countryside to the big city is described. Moving images pass before our soul, and from them we see the suffering of a man who is caught in the snares of eternal, gigantic fate, with the part of unreason that is in the world, and crushed. A poem like this teaches us how much a person's attitude, such as Jacobowski's, can deepen their feelings about modern life:

The mother once carried vegetables,
And when the cherry harvest came,
Then dear Liese stole for me,
as much as her little apron could hold.
How we feasted in the fields and meadows!

Mother sits in front of her baskets;
Now she is old, but happy in her mind,
So she boasts to her neighbor:
“My girl can't go wrong,
For she knows how to earn
And still puts something aside for later!"

I gave her a present yesterday
And recognized her face at once.
I stood in silence in the crowd,
until her Rembrandt feathers faded
In the street bustle slowly faded.

I couldn't move from the spot,
Her gaze burned into me.

IV

Jacobowski's ability to see the deeper connections of existence in the individual experience makes it possible for him to also poetically shape what reveals itself to us in life as chance, as blind necessity. In such poetic creation, the senseless approximation then appears as the expression of a meaningful guidance in world events. The kind of poetry that arises from such a view is usually called symbolist. A versatile nature like Jacobowski's will always push towards the symbolic representation of certain experiences. The serious play of the imagination will seek eternal laws even where they do not impose themselves in reality. But it is precisely this universality that prevents symbolism from being exaggerated in a one-sided way. For the harmonious personality always feels more or less what Goethe felt when he saw the Greek works of art in Italy: that the true artist proceeds according to the same laws as nature itself when creating its creatures. When the imagination of such a poet works symbolically, it does not do so in the obtrusive way in which many contemporary symbolists would like to force their subjective and arbitrary ideas on us as revelations, but with that spiritual chastity that allows nature itself to speak in the symbol, without distorting or contorting the inner truth of its expressions. In this beautiful sense, Jacobowski's “Frau Sorge” is a symbolizing poem:

A couple walks through the evening light,
he is a blacksmith's apprentice, she is a seamstress.

"Rosel, when we both pull a cart,
It's twice the joy and half the effort!"

And she leans wearily against her beloved;
A tear now and then runs down her cheek.

"Rosel, stop crying for your daily bread;
If it was enough for one, it's enough for two!"

He took her in his arms, asked no more questions,
caressed her warm, glowing face...

Gradually the light faded and they walked far

A woman sat down in the same place,

Looked with a gray gaze, raised her withered hand,

Threatened with the crutch, murmured and vanished...

The couple strode into the city,
Mrs. Worry was already sitting in the middle of her little room.

Jacobowski's imagination has a similar symbolic effect on the phenomena of nature. This is also evident in his prose stories. It appears so enchanting in his “Loki”. The spiritual in him grows out of the natural, as it were; it reflects its soul-stirring power back onto nature and receives from it a firm basis in reality. In the “Shining Days”, this trait is particularly evident in the section “Sun”. I will quote the poem “Shining”:

Just now, when the sun is shining,
my darling is walking across the field;
A glow passes over the field,
Catches itself, as if it were meant for her,
shining in her blonde hair.

Just now, when my sweetheart is running
over the blooming field,
Where her laughter falls down,
the stalks glisten like dewdrops,
The flowers glisten in the grass.

Just now, when the golden trace
Brightly glows in my eyes,
I see only blessings, only love, only happiness,
I see only a single glow
over the blossoming world.

And the poem “Maienblüten” seems to me like a bond that nature and the soul form in the imagination – in the best sense of a symbolist inspiration of nature:

Bear it silently when from the branches,
From the overfilled branches,
flowers blow into the pious hair,
And gently bend over,
So in thirst, lean over,
lips to lips
. See, a sweet and wondrous tremor
runs through the rows of leaves,
All the blossoms that they scatter,
they scatter blessings on you and me.

If we let the various currents of modern poetry pass us by, we are sure to encounter many a magnificent blossom. But we see only too often that beauty in the individual must be paid for with one-sidedness. It is harmonious universality that makes Jacobowski significant. He knows no poetic dogma; he knows life, and his interests end where life ends.

• 1. Not«Leuchtende Tage». New poems (1896-1898) by Ludwig Jacobowski. J. C. C. Bruns Verlag, Minden in Westf.

Born on January 21, 1868. Died on December 2, 1900

Preface to Grimm's Fairy Tales

This issue has to be launched with a sad preface. Ludwig Jacobowski, who founded the wonderful enterprise “German Poets in Selection for the People”, is no longer with us. Death took him from his promising plans on December 2, 1900. This booklet is one of his legacies. The publication of the “Fairy Tales” is one of his last works. The name of the poet Ludwig Jacobowski, the creator of the novels “Werther, the Jew” and “Loki”, and the poems “Leuchtende Tage” will always have a place of honor in German literary history. But these creations are only a part of Jacobowski's achievements. His love of the people, his zeal to care for the spiritual needs of broad sections of society, led him to work that stands alone. From his earliest youth, one of his favorite pastimes was to immerse himself in the spirit of the people. He constantly pondered and researched how the people think and write. Hand in hand with this pursuit went his efforts to make the great treasures of poetry accessible to the people. He collected the best contemporary poetry and published it in a booklet entitled “New Songs by the Best New Poets for the People”. He then set about giving the German poets to the people. A booklet entitled “Goethe” and a second entitled “Heine” have already been published. This fairy tale booklet is the third. Many wonderful things were to follow. The people responded to the laborious undertaking with the most beautiful reward. The ten-pfennig booklets were distributed everywhere. And Ludwig Jacobowski received signs of the most grateful recognition from all sides. He experienced the great joy of finding full understanding for his deed. The letters that expressed to him the benefit he had provided to those whose means did not allow for large expenditures on books arrived at his home daily. He achieved more than he had hoped. He had built on the ideal attitude of the people; and it has been shown that he found a secure foundation. - The enterprise will be continued in his spirit.

It would undoubtedly be interesting to conduct a study at the turn of two centuries to determine how much the individual areas of intellectual work have contributed to the vast amount of folly that has been produced in the past century. It followed on from the Enlightenment. One thing seems certain: in such a statistics of folly, thinking about art and poetry would be at the top of the list, with a high percentage. One would not even have to take into account the printed nonsense that newspapers and magazines produce in this direction every week and every day. If we were to confine ourselves to what is being achieved in books and brochures in this field, we would still arrive at a fantastically high figure. When we read contemporary aesthetic and critical works, we often have the feeling that the concept of art and poetry has been lost altogether. What strange things we come across there...! The notions of naive creation, unconscious production, individuality, intuition and all the rest of it are encountered in a way that shows nothing more than that those who write them down have picked them up in some way or other and now toss them around like children with stones in a kaleidoscope. Scholarly treatises on art and poetry are no exception to this general rule. Good philologists, professors of literary history and other humanities, who consider it the height of dilettantism to proceed in an “unscientific” manner when trying to prove which of Wieland's ideas came from Goethe's —: when they start to talk about Goethe's “naive” way of creating, they prove nothing more than their own naivety. One need only read five lines of most aesthetic treatises and books to realize that their authors have not penetrated to the elements of those insights that can shed light on the essence of human creativity, on imagination, on intuition and the like. If, by chance, 98 percent of everything that has been written about Ibsen, Hauptmann and others over the last two decades were to be lost, nothing, absolutely nothing of real value would be lost to posterity. Despite the fact that everyone is talking about “psychology” today, the knowledge of the human soul is currently one of the most unknown things in the world. There is hardly anything about which there is such a boundless lack of knowledge as, for example, the nature of fantasy.

Under such circumstances, where should a judgment on the artistic, on the poetic value of the newer creations come from? Is it not natural that the concept of art, of poetry, should have been lost in this way?

In Jacobowski's collection “Aus deutscher Seele” (From the German Soul), a means is given to all those who wish to use it to find it again. In his “preface”, from which we have quoted the most important passages above, the editor himself has spoken about the tasks he has set himself with his collection. If he were to succeed in ousting the “bazaar goods of the popular songs” even to a small extent, then an unspeakable thing would have been done for folk culture. The day on which it could be said that the booklet “Aus deutscher Seele” is a serious rival to the Apollotheater, Wintergarten and so on would have to be counted among the greatest festive days of the century that has just begun. And no less the day on which the publisher's “secondary intention” could be shown to have been realized. For there should be no doubt that a poem like the one above, “Die schöne Hannele”, contains more poetry than the majority of volumes filled with so-called “modern lyric poetry.”

The editor has everything it takes to fulfill his task. First and foremost, he is one of the foremost poets of the present day. He has proven in his “Bright Days” that he has the source of true poetic creations within him. He is also an excellent connoisseur of the origins of poetry. He has shown this in a series of captivating studies. His research and reflections are directed towards the source of the folk imagination, the relationship it has to life and to the other forces of the folk soul. Essays such as the one he recently published in the “Gesellschaft” on the origins of the art of storytelling are exemplary. His thinking is focused on how the imagination develops. His approach to research offers completely different perspectives than the petty results of philological hair-splitting, which like to present their miniature fantasies as the results of exact scientific research.

It is often not easy to read collections of poetry in one go. Here it is a pleasure. This is because Jacobowski has a first-rate compositional talent for putting together individual intellectual creations. The “general table of contents” printed at the beginning of the collection shows that artistic sense has prevailed in the compilation. Nothing follows arbitrarily, everything is in necessary connection. The totality of the national soul, the sum of human feeling in all circumstances of life, is revealed. And it is revealed in such a way that the inner harmony of national life finds expression. The series opens with songs that owe their origin to the highest, most joyful affirmation of life, and closes with songs about death. The entire content of the national soul lies between these two poles. The individual chapters are: Happy love, avoiding and parting, unhappy love, marriage, from a pious soul, festival verses, riddles and rhyming jokes, ballads, historical and cultural-historical songs, soldier songs, songs of the estates and tribes, hunting and animal life, nature life, folk wisdom, drunkenness poetry, humor, about dying, about death. The beginning and end of such a collection could not be more convincing than by placing the verses that are completely carried by the urge to live:

God willing, I would be a white swan!
I would soar over mountain and deep valley,
over the wild sea,
So that all my friends would not know
Where I would end up!

and to this the saying is added, which reflects with the deepest wisdom the “eternity” in the naive perception:

O eternal is so lanck.

How does the artificially constructed concept of “individuality” look, behind which the wisdom of our contemporaries triples along like a little girl, when viewed in the light that radiates from such poetry as is communicated in this book. Does the poem “Das schöne Hannele” express individuality less than the many poetic somersaults of our art poets? Those who are always talking about “individuality” today should remember that anyone who has delved into the deepest depths of their individuality has found something in common with all people. What does it mean to understand an artist? It means nothing other than finding their individuality in ourselves. How do we understand Shakespeare? Simply by the fact that we all have a secret Shakespeare within us. To understand Shakespeare is to discover the secret Shakespeare within oneself. Shakespeare's individuality is in our individuality. The fact that someone is an individual does not exclude the possibility that the universal will reveal itself to him. Life is like climbing a mountain. Our paths may be different. But at the top of the mountain we meet; and in the end we all enjoy the same view of the common, unified harmony of the world. One need not become a follower of those who preach the banal average man. But those who believe that each of us is locked up in our own individual snail shell, and that we must preserve our individuality, do not know that there is only one world for all those who look out of their snail shells. It is wisely arranged in nature that one can approach the summit on countless paths, on which the glories of the world are revealed to us; but it is equally wise that there is only one such summit.

I recently heard a witty writer say: when a book by one of the latest writers appears today, I read one from the good old days to console myself. This may sound paradoxical at first; it may be inspired by a prejudice against everything new. Nevertheless, there are many things that even those who are sympathetic to the new suggest a practice that is not inappropriately described by the above sentence. Three books have appeared in the last few months that are characteristic symptoms of our times: “The New God”, a look at the coming century by Julius Hart, “The Modern Soul” by Max Messer and “The Revolution of Lyric Poetry” by Arno Holz. It may be ventured to assert that it is advantageous for the critic of these three intellectual achievements to delve into an older work in the same field after each of them. After Hart's “New God”, one should read Friedrich Theodor Vischer's “Kritische Gänge”, for example; after Messer's “Moderne Seele”, one could read Moriz Carriere's not even very old treatise on Christ in the Light of Modern Science; and after Arno Holz's bold statements, the chapter on lyric poetry in Max Schaßler's “Ästhetik” would not be bad. Comparisons of this kind will lead you to some surprising insights.

Julius Hart is undoubtedly a true philosopher. Those who read his book will gain more from it than from a dozen thick tomes written by the official representatives of philosophical science currently occupying university chairs. And they will also have the pleasure of receiving significant insights delivered in an enchanting lyrical diction. Compared to Vischer's great monumental trains of thought, however, Hart's ideas seem like miniature philosophies. And there is something else. In Hart's work, the emphasis on the importance of his ideas is almost annoying on every page. “In short, my work is an attempt to establish a new worldview,” Hart said in Hans Land's “New Century”. And he lets us know this throughout his book. Vischer never said anything like that. And yet, what greater perspectives, what depth does the older thinker have compared to the newer one! With Vischer, one has the feeling that a giant of the mind is speaking, who in each of his works gives a few mighty chunks from an immense abundance. We sense something inexhaustible in the personality that is being lived out. With Hart, we have the feeling of a very respectable thinker, but we do not suspect much more than he says. Yes, he stretches and expands the few thoughts he has, not only writing them down, but writing them down again, then again in a slightly different form, and then he summarizes the whole thing and underlines it three times. This will be proven in the following. Max Messer is a religiously feeling nature. One of those who are forced to seek a path into the depths of knowledge for themselves. One would have to have a heart of stone not to be moved by reading his “Modern Soul”. The intellectual innocence that reigns in it is touching, as is the naive awkwardness. One often has the feeling that a child is playing with the most fragile tasks of knowledge; and one worries that the delicate vessels of thought that it holds in its trembling hands will not slip out of its hands. One would like to give the young author the aforementioned Carriere book as a friendly gesture, so that some strength might enter his mind. And despite all the youth that is expressed in such works, there is also something in them that reminds one of old minds. There is too much criticism and rejection in the intellectual achievements of the present. The old ideas of idealism and materialism, mind and matter, good and evil, etc.; Messer says that peace can only return to the mind if reason, which has rationalized everything, is shown its limits. There was something more cheerful, more youthful in the minds that worked away at the opposites of spirit and matter, good and evil, to see how far they could get with it, and also in those who preferred to use their reason rather than criticize it. With Arno Holz, it is now a peculiar case. What he says in his writing “Revolution of Lyric” is as indisputable as the truths of elementary geometry. I have followed what has been objected to him from various sides. I always had the feeling that his opponents were roughly on the same level as someone who is fighting against someone who puts forward the Pythagorean theorem in a new formula. To put it bluntly: Holz's logic is so tightly knit, so clear, that a hundred professors and three hundred lecturers could hold fifty conferences and they would search in vain for a fallacy. And yet: there is something annoying about these explanations, something that makes the schoolmasterly thoughts of old Schaßler more pleasant than this cutting logic. Holz likes to refer to Lessing, indeed he says in the “preface” to his book: “Since Lessing, Germany has had no more critics. It had no Taine and has no Brandes. The gentlemen today are only reviewers.” There is indeed something of Lessing's spirit in Holzen's expositions. Anyone who really takes Lessing on today will perhaps be no less annoyed by Laocoon than by Holzen's “Revolution of Lyric Poetry”. Here, the three symptomatic books will be discussed in more detail.

Julius Hart is of the opinion that the century just ended was the great dying century of Renaissance culture, which once took the place of the medieval and which swayed restlessly back and forth between all possible opposites without reaching a satisfactory worldview. “Since the dawn of the modern era, in the entire course of Renaissance culture, the contrasts of becoming and passing away have never been more clearly evident than in this last century. They clash harshly with each other, and if in the intellectual life of the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the last great unities are always revealed, our time is characterized precisely by its fragmentation and disunity. All forces are separating and striving apart. And thus this century proves to be a true century of great change; a decisive break is taking place between two worlds, as was last the case between the world of the Christian Middle Ages and the rebirth of Greco-Roman antiquity. Just as the entire content of the purely theological and theocratic man's view of the world, his thoughts and feelings, disintegrated before the new way of seeing, so the intellectual world of the Renaissance is also disintegrating before our eyes. We recognize all kinds of half-measures and incompleteness, we see contradictions that are destroying it.» («Der neue Gott», $. 26.) Hart thus feels dissatisfied when looking back on the century. He sees nothing but idols that have misled people. “Altruistic morality culminates in the sentence: Do not oppress, do not rape, do not rule! The Stirnerian egoist says: Do not let yourself be ruled, oppressed or raped. Whether you follow one or the other advice... the result for you and for the world will be exactly the same. Leave the dead words and look at the matter.» («The New God», p. 295.) But how, dear Mr. Hart, if the words you speak of do indeed point to things, and it is only because you do not see the things that the words are dead to you. You are making things a little too easy for yourself. You explain, not in a concise manner, but nevertheless not with very meaningful words: “Altruistic and egoistic morality are in full combat readiness. Each wants to eradicate the other. The philosophy of egoism teaches us with a raised finger that every altruistic act is only seemingly for the sake of the other, but in truth only for the satisfaction of one's own ego. Of course - of course! But with exactly the same right, every act of egoism can also be interpreted and recognized as an altruistic act! That should reveal the true relationship to you clearly enough. There are no contradictions at all. Egoism is altruism, altruism is egoism.” But don't you realize, Mr. Hart, what a terrible philosophy you are pursuing? Let me show you your way of thinking in another area, and you will see how you are sinning. Imagine that someone said that bees and flies both come from a common original insect that developed differently in one case and in the other. If you disregard the special characteristics of the bee and those of the fly, they are the same; they are insects: The bee is a fly; the fly is a bee. No, my critic of modern man, you cannot dissolve everything into a gray, undifferentiated sauce and then decree: “All the great and eternal opposites that have torn and splintered your thinking, feeling and believing – all of them – are in truth nothing but great and eternal identities.” Progressive civilization has differentiated things and phenomena from one another; it has worked out clear concepts through which it wants to come to an understanding of processes and beings. Selfless action has been analyzed psychologically, and so has egoistic action, and differences have been established. And since all things are in a necessary relationship, the relationship between egoism and selflessness has also been examined. A trace of egoism was found in the most selfless act, and a trace of selflessness in the most egoistic act; just as one finds something of the fly in the bee and something of the bee in the fly. It is quite certain that one cannot get on with distinguishing, with setting up opposites alone; one must seek the related in the phenomena. But first you have to have the details in clear outline before you, then you can go for their common ground. It is necessary to shine the light of knowledge on everything. Daylight is the element of knowledge. You, Mr. Hart, spread a night-time darkness over all opposites. Don't you know that all cows are black at night? You say, “World and I. They are only two different words for one and the same being.” No, my dear fellow, they are two words for two quite different beings, each of which must be considered in itself, and then their relationship, their real relation, must be sought. But you do not think of anything right with the words, and therefore everything blurs into an indefinite primeval soup. No, you rush too quickly over the ideas that have been generated over the centuries; you let the content slip away and keep the empty word shells in your hand, and then you stand there and declare: “Nothing is more barren than a fight for concepts.” Of course, if the concepts were the insubstantial things that you understand by them, then you would be right. Those who see nothing in “world and I” but themselves may always throw them together. But there are others who look out into the world of manifoldness that lies spread out before the senses, and which we try to comprehend by thinking; then they look into themselves and perceive something to which they say “I”; and then the great question comes to their mind: what is the relationship between this “I” and that world? You, Mr. Hart, are making yourself quite comfortable. “You see one and the same thing eternally from two opposite sides.” Oh no: we see two things: a world that surrounds us and an I. And we do not want to dogmatize away the difference between the two with talk, but we want to delve into both things in order to find the real, the actual unity in them. Selfless and egoistic actions are not the same. They are based on completely different emotional foundations of the soul. There is certainly a higher unity between them, just as there is a higher unity between a bee and a fly. I would like to quote a word from Hegel, Mr. Hart, which you do not seem to be familiar with. This man calls a way of thinking in which “everything is the same, good and evil alike” a way of thinking in the worst sense, which should not be spoken of among those who recognize, but “only a barbaric way of thinking can make use of ideas”. Hegel sought to clearly elaborate the ideas of freedom, justice, duty, beauty, truth, etc., so that each of them stands before us in a vivid, meaningful way. He sought to place them before our spiritual eye, as flowers and animals stand before our physical eye. And then he sought to bring the whole diversity of our mind's ideas into a whole - to organize the thoughts so that they appear to us as a great harmony in which each individual has its full validity in its place. Thus the individual flowers, the individual animals of reality also stand side by side, organizing themselves into a harmonious whole and totality. What does Julius Hart do? He explains about us people of the nineteenth century: “How have we allowed ourselves to be intoxicated by the sound of lofty words, such as freedom, equality, beauty, truth, concepts that dissolve into mist and smoke when you try to grasp and hold them, to translate them into sensuality and action, and to order life according to them?” No, dearest, that is your fault. You should not have allowed yourself to be intoxicated by the sound of lofty words. You should have delved deeper into the differentiated content that the thinkers of the nineteenth century gave to these words. It is painful to see how someone first turns the great minds of the century into miniature pictures of his own imagination and then holds a terrible judgment over this century. What a pygmy of a mind Julius Hart makes of Max Stirner! The latter has shone a bright torch into a region of which this interpreter seems to have no idea. Into a realm that neither our senses nor our abstract thinking can penetrate. He has shed light on a realm where we do not merely perceive the highest that exists for man with our senses, nor merely think it in terms of concepts, but where we experience it directly and individually. In the world of our ego, the essence of things becomes clear to us because we are immersed in a thing here. Schopenhauer also had a presentiment of this. That is why he did not seek the I of things in sensual perception or in thinking, but in what we experience within ourselves. However, he made a mistake at the next step. He tried to express this essence through an abstract, general concept. He said that this essence was the will. How much higher is Stirner's thinking than the “I”? He knew that this essence cannot be reached by any thinking, cannot be expressed by any name. He knew that it can only be experienced. All thinking only leads to the point where the experience of the inner must begin. It points to the I; but it does not express it. Julius Hart knows nothing about this, because he dismisses Stirner with words like: “The ego that he had in mind is ultimately still the wretched ego of crude and naive realism, wrapped in the darkest delusion of knowledge, which in the philosophy of the super human philosophy as Caliban, lusting after Prospero's magic cloak; but behind him rises a synthesis, more sensed than clearly recognized, of the purely ideal, absolute ego of Fichte and the real one-ego of Buddha and Christ. Stirner still does not fully understand the true nature of the ego, but he does sense its greatness, and he therefore pours a wealth of the deepest and most powerful truths over his readers. But the reader must go through the confused world of the “unique” with a very clear head and make the distinction between the concepts himself, which Stirner has not given. Although the word “I” appears a few times on every page, Stirner never approaches a firm and clear investigation of the concept and therefore often confuses the images that make it up.” It is not like that. Hart demands a clear investigation of the concept of the “I” and thus proves that he has no idea what Stirner is talking about. No name can name the “I”, no concept can express it, no image can depict it; all that can be done is to point to it. And when Stirner uses the word “I” a few times “on every page”, he is always referring to an inner experience. Hart cannot live this out and wants an idea, a concept, a notion. It is strange: in so many places in his book, Julius Hart warns us not to overestimate words and concepts, but to stick to things. And with Stirner, he has the opportunity to find words that are only intended to point to a thing. And here he wants words, concepts. But Hart doesn't want to know anything about the concrete, seen, experienced self in everyone's inner being; he dreams of an abstract “world self”, which is the idealized copy of the human individual self. He cannot therefore understand Stirner, just as he cannot understand Hegel, because he dreams of a grey, contentless unity, whereas Hegel strives for a manifoldness full of content. Julius Hart believes he is criticizing the century. He criticizes nothing more than the man that the century has made of Julius Hart. The century cannot be blamed for the fact that so little of its content could flow into Julius Hart.

I now turn to the evidence that the “new worldview” that Julius Hart wants to “found” contains nothing, absolutely nothing, but elements from the worldviews of the past that he dismisses as outdated – no new idea, no new nuance of feeling, no new image of the imagination.

In the “New God” we encounter nothing but very old, well-known gods, and we are constantly amazed that Julius Hart should rediscover what had long been discovered.

The sentiments from which Julius Hart's “New God” is written are reminiscent of the inner life of Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, whose world view Goethe felt repelled by, just as he was attracted to his personality. However, what can be explained in Jacobi's case by the intellectual state of his age can be attributed to a lack of philosophical imagination in Julius Hart. Jacobi saw the things that he felt to be the highest and most valuable destroyed by the progress of intellectual knowledge. The divine truths, the religious ideas could not exist in the face of the intellectual formation that occurred in the Age of Enlightenment in such a way that its results could not be doubted. To the intellect, all world events appeared to be the work of a cold, sober, mathematical necessity. What had previously been considered the work of a personal, divine will was now seen to be entirely governed by eternal, iron laws, which, as Goethe said, not even a deity could change. In the past, people had asked: what did the infinite wisdom, the creative deity, want when they wanted to explain a single thing, a single fact of nature? In Jacobi's time, reason viewed the phenomena of the world as a mathematical problem. According to this view, everything is necessarily connected like the limbs of such a problem. Jacobi had no objection to this rationalization. It was clear to him that reflection cannot lead to a different view of things. But his feelings would not let him rest. These needed the old God and the world order established by him. Therefore, he explains: as long as we look at the world, the mind has every right to search for eternal, iron laws; but before the fundamental truths, before the knowledge of the divine, this mind must stop; here, feeling, faith, comes into its own. We gain knowledge of nature through the mind. And there is no other view of nature than that which is derived from intellectual knowledge. But while it is true that correct knowledge of nature can be attained in this way, it is never possible to reach the highest, divine truths in this way. It was Jacobi's principle that Goethe encountered with the greatest antipathy. He had renounced all faith in the best days of his life; he recognized knowledge of nature as the only source of truth; but he strove to penetrate to the highest truths precisely from this knowledge. For him it was clear that everything that a bygone age had gained through supernatural revelation, and that Jacobi wanted to gain through faith, must result solely from a deepening of the eternal life of nature. He characterized his opposition to Jacobi aptly in a letter to him: “God has punished you with metaphysics and put a thorn in your flesh, while he has blessed me with physics... I adhere to the atheist's (Spinoza's) worship of God and leave you with everything that you call and may call religion. You believe in God; I see.” The man who said this felt the ability within himself to arrive at truths and ideas from the contemplation of nature that satisfy the human capacity for knowledge just as much as it has been satisfied by the divine truths of revelation. However, in order to gain such truths, something was needed that Jacobi completely lacked. It was the gift of being able to form vivid, colorful ideas about the things and phenomena of nature. Anyone who, when thinking about nature, could only come up with abstractions that were empty of content, arid and bloodless, would feel dissatisfied with their knowledge of nature and, in order to escape this dissatisfaction, would have to resort to the old beliefs. This was the case with Jacobi. However, Goethe had the ability to form a knowledge of nature that could compete with the beliefs in terms of content. When he reflected on the nature of plants, he found this essence in the primeval plant. This is not an empty, abstract concept. It is, as Goethe himself put it, a sensual-supernatural image. It is full of life and color, like every single perceptible thing. In Goethe's contemplation of nature, it was not just the abstracting intellect, the bloodless thinking, that prevailed, but the imagination. This is why Heinroth, in his anthropology of Goethe's thinking, was able to express the view that this was “objective thinking”. In doing so, he wanted to point out that this thinking does not separate itself from objects: that the objects, the views, are intimately interwoven with thinking, that Goethe's thinking is a viewing, his viewing a thinking. With such thinking, the contrast between abstract knowledge and sensory perception, between faith and idea, between science and art was overcome. This world view and the scientific thinking of the nineteenth century belong together. And the researcher who undoubtedly has the best judgment on the tasks of the natural sciences, on the nature of the scientific age, Ernst Haeckel, repeatedly emphasizes that we have to honor Goethe as one of the co-founders of the modern world view. The true form of the Goethean world view simply does not exist for Julius Hart. And he criticizes the nineteenth century, at the beginning of which this Goethean view is placed, for only producing critical minds that dissected and tore apart, that tore down; and he expects the future to produce creators, faithful souls, builders. And he wants to “found” this constructive worldview with his “new god”. Anyone who delves just a little into Goethe's way of thinking will find everything that Julius Hart presents as small and insignificant to be great and significant. The nineteenth century contains a culture that is eminently constructive; it has brought together a great deal, a great deal indeed, for this construction. Julius Hart takes a big mouthful and tells us that we have left behind us a purely Alexandrian century, a century of abstract knowledge, of erudition. And then he takes the same approach and announces a few general statements that are to form the basis for the culture of the coming century, for the “new god”. If Hart understood just a little of Goethe, if he understood the scientific worldview, he would have to find his general statements infinitely trivial, as truths that, in the light of Goethe's worldview, appear self-evident. No, Mr. Hart, what you want is nothing new; it is something that will be achieved when the best content of the culture of the nineteenth century experiences a natural continuation. For the small minds, which are in the majority, and which parrot “Ignorabimus” because they do not know how to achieve satisfaction through the paths of knowledge of the nineteenth century, Goethe and those who thought like him in his youth have pondered in vain. But if someone can only see these little minds, then he should not stand up and trumpet himself as the founder of a new worldview that has long since been established. What Julius Hart knows about the “new worldview” is just enough for him to sit down and study Goethe's worldview. He is prepared enough to achieve some success in such a study. But at such a preparatory stage, to “found” a new world view! You must be told, Mr. Hart, that there are many who could found world views like the one you found; but they are prevented from doing so only by the fact that they have learned a little more than you and therefore know that your world view has long been founded.

Julius Hart's inner life is organized like Jacobi's. The contemporary thinker differs from Goethe's contemporary in only one respect. Hart has a definite longing for the world view that was expressed through the objective thinking developed in Goethe. He just does not have the ability, the intellectual imagination, to take a single step into this world view himself. He is only aware of abstract, bloodless intellectual concepts, not of meaningful, sensual-supernatural archetypes of things. He is just as opposed to the abstract world of the intellect as Jacobi is. There is no new nuance in these perceptions. And because he only longs for the world of vision that Goethe speaks of, and cannot create in it, he does not add any new ideas to the old ones through which humanity has so far understood the world. He does not have a thinker's imagination. We therefore look in vain in his book for something like Goethe's imaginative images: the primeval plant, the primeval animal, the primeval phenomenon are.

The final chapter of the book “The Last God” is the unclear confrontation of a person who has an inkling of what “objective thinking” is, but lacks any clear idea of it, and above all completely lacks the awareness that in Goethe's thinking that which he seeks in vain comes into being. Julius Hart wants to overcome the “last god”. He understands this god to be the idea of cause and effect. “Why? The word with its question mark is the great pride of our human spirit. The hunger for the why has led us from victory to victory, from discovery to discovery, from invention to invention, from insight to insight for thousands of years. We have torn all the gods down from their clouds and mists; in the eternal questions of why, they have grown so pale and decrepit that they now only creep through the living world like shadows. Only the god of why remained eternally young and new, he drank the blood of the others and became ever more powerful and strong, until he sat down on the throne as sole ruler in our time... To every why there is a why, and therefore the great causality must appear as the great ruler of the universe. It gives us the weapons in our hands by which we make ourselves masters over other people, by proving to them that we are in the right, ... by virtue of reasons.»

This description of the principle of causality is based on a genuine yearning. “Objective thinking”, “looking” is absorbed in the context of the world of appearances and seeks to recognize it through the senses and through the imagination of thought. This looking remains within the world of appearances, because when it considers things in their proper relationship, it finds in them their essence, everything it seeks. The question of “why” is still a remnant of that old world view that wanted to derive the essence of phenomena from something that lies behind these phenomena. The reason should explain a thing according to its origin, just as the world, according to its origin, should be explained from God. Those who have truly overcome the old worldview of the intellect do not see the ultimate wisdom in reducing all questions to the “why?” but rather see things and their relationships as they present themselves to their senses and their imaginative thoughts. A hint of this can be found in the words of Julius Hart: “You can only look at your world and not prove it. You can prove nothing – nothing. All knowledge is only a direct look. And understanding and reason are only the epitome of your sensory organs. Their knowledge does not extend further than your senses. There lie the boundaries of your humanity.” All that Hart darkly suspects, Goethe clearly presented when he uttered the sentence: ”The highest would be to understand that all factual is already theory. The blue of the sky reveals to us the basic law of color phenomena. Do not seek anything behind the phenomena; they themselves are the lesson.” Goethe contrasted his theory of colors, which adheres to the factual, which is already theory, with Newton's, which deals with the misunderstood concept of causality; and Goethe contrasted his view of the original plant with Linnaeus's view of reason. Goethe viewed the world from the standpoint that Julius Hart stammers towards. Julius Hart dreams of a world view in which “I and the world” no longer stand opposed to each other, but appear in a higher unity. Goethe treated the world of color processes from the standpoint of such a world view. Julius Hart repays him with the words: “The conviction of Goethe and all healthy people appears under the rays of Kant's eye as an Indian conception and is nothing but the impudent, uncritical assertion of a completely naive, crude realism that asserts something that cannot be proven.” I do not like to do it, but I have to speak in your own words, Mr. Hart. Your conviction is, in contrast to Goethe's world view, a “bold, uncritical assertion of a completely naive person” who has taken a few steps into a world view and who belittles the genius that has developed it to a certain perfection because he does not understand it.

If Julius Hart could understand Goethe, he would have to take a similar position to the one I take in my book “Goethe's Weltanschauung”. In this book, I have shown that Goethe 'founded' the world view that Julius Hart now wants to make himself the superfluous founder of. Anyone who understands Goethe can only see Hart's book as a bottomless arrogance, arising from ignorance of what has been achieved so far in the great questions of world view.

Rarely, perhaps never, have I written a review with such a heavy heart as this one. I value Julius Hart as one of the most outstanding poets of our time. The poet also comes to the fore in “The New God”. The book is a model of excellence in terms of presentation and style. I am very fond of Julius Hart personally. I may well confess that I would have been happy, and not for one reason, if I had been able to deliver a review of this book that was in every respect approving and appreciative. But unfortunately I must consider the book to be harmful. It can only envelop those in a vain self-satisfaction who do not have the ability to reach the heights of thought where the questions that come into consideration here may be discussed. It can only strengthen their feeling that something can really be done with such lightly-dressed chains of thought as Hart's. To the regret of all those who appreciate Julius Hart, it must be said that he unfortunately does not know the limits of his abilities. I maintain my claim that a true philosopher's spirit lives in Julius Hart. But he has not developed this spirit to the point where he could really contribute to the construction of a worldview. It is not acceptable to criticize things that one does not know. Julius Hart is guilty of contradicting his own assertions. He himself says: “The Ptolemaic system was a truth, a correct combination of many correct views. However, the human mind gained even richer and different ideas, and Ptolemy's truth was transformed into that of Copernicus. Do you think that this Copernican truth is the last and final truth? It is only the truth of today, and astronomy already possesses knowledge today that cannot be reconciled with it and points to a new truth for the future.” It was with this sentence in mind that I thought about the ‘New God’ before I read it. I believed that old truths would be overcome by Julius Hart and replaced by richer, different ones. Instead, I find a critique of old, richer truths, and then – old, poorer ones in their place. I put down the book by the young Max Messer, “The Modern Soul”, with a feeling of unease. It seems to me that a person is speaking here whose heart is not understood by his head and whose head is not understood by his heart. We encounter many people in the present who are like this. It is difficult to communicate with them. They are incapable of absorbing and mentally processing that which could restore the inner harmony of their soul forces. What they complain about is that our culture is to a large extent a culture of the head, of bright, clear, conscious thinking. They never tire of emphasizing the dark side of the culture of the head, of conscious rationality, and of pointing out the advantages of the unconscious, of elementary instincts. The clear thinker who wants to use reason to gain insight into the secrets of existence is a sign of decline and decadence to them. They praise the powers of the soul that work darkly and instinctively. When they encounter a personality who does not walk in the elements of crystal-clear ideas, but who produces dark and ambiguous thoughts, possibly wrapped in a mystical garment, then they are happy to join him. I see almost all of Nietzsche's followers in the crowd of modern souls that I describe. If this following could clearly visualize Nietzsche's thoughts, which they do not understand, they would flee from the prophet, whom they sing hymns to in their ignorance, in a stormy manner.

It is an incontrovertible fact that the development of the human spirit consists in the gradual progression from unconscious, instinctive states of the soul to conscious states. And the person who is able to illuminate his drives and instincts with the torch of consciousness becomes not poorer but richer. Say it over and over again: compared to instinct, compared to the rich unconscious, the bare, bloodless, colorless thought appears empty and poor. You are wrong. It is because you cannot see the richness of the world of ideas. In the thought that appears in clear consciousness there is a content richer and more colorful than in all instinctive, unconscious elements. You only have to see this content. You feel cold when natural scientists present you with the abstract laws of stones, plants and animals. Your blood runs cold when the philosopher shares his pure ideas of reason about the secrets of the world with you. On the other hand, you feel good when you can indulge in an unconscious feeling, in a mystical dream. You don't want to get out of your emotional indulgence. “Silent music is the music of the being, of the unconscious, the soul of 'dead' things. It does not sound to the conscious. It is heard by the heart, not by the mind. All its heavenly melodies and voices sound to children and women, as well as to Christian men, as people who have overcome consciousness and become unconscious! (“The Modern Soul”, p. 70.)

Before me stands the bust of a man who lived entirely in the realm of conscious ideas. His features speak to me of the blissful rapture of the spirit that ruled in the light. He saw all things in their full, fresh colors because he let the light of the idea fall on them. He only smiled at the sentimentalists who believe that they must lose their enthusiasm and warmth for the phenomena of the world when they rise to clear insight. He smiled at the weak-minded who need darkness in order to be able to feel with the universal soul of the world. Before me stands the bust of Hegel.

No, thinkers are not colder, more sober natures than mystical dreamers. They are only braver, stronger. They have the courage to face the riddle of the world in broad daylight.

They do not have your fear, which prevents you from raising to consciousness what lives in your instincts, in your unconscious. You do not know the warmth that thought radiates, because you do not have the courage, the strength, to face it with your eyes open. You are too cowardly to be happy in the world of consciousness. Or too childish to bear the light of day in a manly way. Max Messer's “Modern Soul” is an unmanly book. It was created out of a fear of clarity. The human spirit was born out of obscurity. It has struggled to achieve clarity. But it must now find its way back to obscurity. This is its content. “The intention of Christ and those who preach about the superhuman was to show all people the path of suffering, to make it easier for them, and to lead all people back to unconscious being through consciousness.” (“The Modern Soul,” p. 62.)

Mankind will not take this path. It will not allow itself to be held back in its progress towards ever more conscious states. But it will increasingly gain the strength to derive the same satisfaction from consciousness as the undeveloped person derives from the unconscious.

Trembling, with shaky legs, Max Messer stands before the world picture that spreads out before him in the light of knowledge. He would like the soothing twilight to spread over it. But it would be better if he practiced mental gymnastics, strengthened his nerves so that he would no longer tremble, so that he would learn to stand bravely upright in the bright light of day.

Then he will also learn to understand me when I tell him: it is better to speak than to be silent; and nature does not allow the youth to mature into a man so that he looks back in sorrow at the ideals of lost youth.

Books of the day's brightness are above all to be valued. But one can also take pleasure in books from the dawn. Our contemporaries, however, like to walk in the twilight after they have dozed through the day. Our present knowledge of nature is the day. Max Messer dozes through it; he half-closes his eyes to it. He cannot bear it. One would like to call out to him: Wake up! Then continue writing, just as honestly as you are now, as a dozer.

I called Arno Holz's “Revolution of Lyric Poetry” an annoying book, although I consider all the claims made by the author in it to be as incontestable as the propositions of elementary geometry. I must emphasize from the outset that in my judgment I completely separate the latest phase of Holz's lyric poetry from what Holz argues theoretically about lyric poetry. I am very impressed by Holz's latest lyrical creations – not all of them, but many of them. And I must confess that I admire a poetic power that dispenses with the traditional, significant means of form, that spurns everything except the “last, lowest formal principle” of lyric poetry, and that expresses such greatness within this simple, final formal principle. I find it perfectly understandable that a personality with such a strong inner life can feel disgusted by the ever-recurring old forms.

But Holz's theory seems like Spanish boots, in which his own poetry is constricted, and in which he basically wants to constrict all poetry. He has come forward with this Spanish boot theory. The venerable German critics, with their extraordinary artistic understanding, have tried to show that the Spanish boots are bad. Holz now had an easy game. He has written his “Revolution of Lyric Poetry” and shows his attackers that his Spanish boots are flawless, that the critics' exhibitions are foolish, that they understand nothing about boots. It is sad to see the enormous amount of foolishness that has been brought forward to refute Holz's theory. But he has made perfect Spanish boots; and there is nothing wrong with them. Let us take a closer look at Holz's theory. Our old lyric poetry expresses feelings and ideas. This expression has certain forms. These forms are added to the expression; they have nothing to do with it. If I want to express that I am standing in the forest, that there is peace all around, that the birds are silent, and that I will soon go to rest, I can do so in the way that Goethe did in his famous poem “Über allen Gipfeln ist Ruh”. But there is no doubt that the rhythm and verse structure are something other than the content expressed. Something that could also be different. This form cannot therefore be essential to lyrical creation. The essential is not this external form, but the inner rhythm of what is expressed. If we strip away everything that poetry has added over time to what is essential to it, what remains is Holz's definition of an original lyric: “which renounces all music through words as an end in itself and which, purely formally, is carried only by a rhythm that lives only through what struggles to express itself through it.” Anyone who objects to this definition simply does not know what is original about poetry and what is derived from it. If a poet remains with this original form of poetry, that is his business. The critic has only to understand him, not to patronize him.

However correctly the original form of lyric poetry may be defined by Holz, it must not be tied to reality like a Spanish boot. The forms of lyric poetry to date are irrelevant to it. Yes. So it is nonsense to demand that it be recognized as something permanent, as essential to all lyric poetry. What follows from this? That it can be replaced by new forms. But not that they should be discarded and replaced by nothing at all. My skirt is unimportant to me. I can take it off. Holz is undoubtedly right so far. And it was stupid of his critics to want to forbid him to take off an old skirt. But does that mean that Holz has to go around completely naked? I think that when you take off an old coat, you put on a new one. It will be the same with the development of poetry. The old forms will fall away and new ones will take their place. Holz has taken the old poetry off its clothes. He leaves the poor thing wandering around without a covering. The critics come and explain: this naked poetry is false. Of course, he has an easy job of it. For it is simply nonsense to call the naked one false. But it is a defect that wood cannot find new clothes for the old ones. In reality, things do not expose themselves purely with their essence; they clothe themselves with all kinds of unessential things. Wood has only done half the work. It has separated the essential from the inessential; but it has not been able to find a new inessential. The new lyric will contain not only the essential but also the inessential, new forms. It would be like tying it into Spanish boots if one wanted to restrict it to the essential.

When nature progressed from the ape to the human race, it created a new form of mammal. Man has many things that are not essential to him as a mammal. But nature did not go back from the ape to the original mammal in order to develop further. Holz does this, which is contrary to nature. He wants to develop lyric poetry. That is his right. But he goes back to the original form of lyric poetry. Nature would never do such a thing. That is why his view of development is misleading. And his theory, despite its incontrovertibility, is an annoying one. All theory is annoying, which, although correct, is incontrovertible, but which, narrow-minded, resists any expansion. It cannot be refuted because it is true. But there is another truth besides its truth. And the annoying thing is the denial of this expansion of truth. Holz had to expand his definition of original lyric poetry, which, purely formally, is carried by a rhythm that only lives through what it expresses, to the following: the new lyric poetry will retain only the rhythm of the old, which lies in the expression, but will seek a new, insignificant form that, like the old forms, presents a certain music through words as an end in itself, in addition to the expression.

I have described the three books discussed as symptoms of certain intellectual currents of our time. These currents can be characterized by describing their proponents as superfluous reformers and revolutionaries. What they do is based on the fact that they have not sufficiently familiarized themselves with what intellectual culture has achieved so far. If Julins Hart had 370

lived in the world view of the Goethe era, he would not have “founded” his world view. He certainly would not have talked so much about the overthrow of the God of “causality” if he had considered that Schiller, by considering Goethe's points of view, had come to the conclusion much more perfectly than is possible from his world view: “In terms of its relation, it is the eternal endeavor of rationalism to ask about the causality of phenomena and to connect everything qua cause and effect; again, this is very commendable and necessary for science, but it is also highly detrimental due to its one-sidedness. I am referring here to your essay itself, which excellently criticizes this misuse, which the causal determination of phenomena causes.” Schiller expressed this view on January 19, 1798. Julius Hart expressed it much more imperfectly a century later. And now he wants to give the impression that he is reforming the world view.

Max Messer has not yet had the time to familiarize himself with the world of thought of the nineteenth century. He therefore knows nothing of the satisfaction that can flow from such a familiarization for the modern soul. He should say to himself: the world of thought lies before me; I must see what it can offer to man. That is too difficult for him. He cannot really keep up. He would like it to be just as easy to immerse oneself in the educational content of the time as it was in earlier, more primitive cultural periods. He conjures up a theory out of his personal inability and writes a book about it. The time has too many conscious thought elements in it. It must become more unconscious again. If Max Messer had entered the spiritual world of consciousness and immersed himself in it, he would have written a different book. He would not have asked himself: how can we get out of consciousness to achieve satisfaction? But rather: how is it possible to achieve this satisfaction within the world of consciousness?

Arno Holz seized upon the idea that spiritual life is also subject to the law of development and applied it to the evolution of lyric poetry. But he has grasped it too fleetingly. According to the idea of evolution, the development of mammals has progressed beyond apes to humans. Holz acts as if humans had not replaced apes, but rather primal mammals. Poetry will certainly shed its previous forms and reveal itself in new forms at a higher level of development. But it cannot become primal poetry in the course of development.

This is what I have to say against Arno Holz's theory. I am not fighting it. I am simply arguing that it needs to be expanded. I see Holz, the poet of today, differently. The biogenetic law of development says that every higher species of organism passes through the stages in a shortened form in the embryonic state, which its ancestors have gone through as species over long periods of time. Poetry certainly develops into a higher form. Before its birth, it passes through the earlier forms in a kind of embryonic development in a new form. Holzen's poetry is a poetry embryo at a very early stage. He should not persuade himself and us that it is a fully developed child. He should admit that his embryo must develop further.

Then we will understand him and - be able to wait. But if he wants to talk us into accepting his embryo as a fully developed being, then the midwives of criticism - he despises the gentlemen as “reviewers” - should make him aware that he is dealing with a miscarriage.

What should not all be reconciled, balanced, reconciled! We have suffered long enough from this tolerance and leniency, we have imagined to our heart's content that we would not be so disunited at heart and that we only needed to come to an understanding, and we have spent the noble time with useless attempts at unification and concordats. But the fanatic is right: “How does Belial get along with Christ?” The pious zealot never let up for a moment in his vigorous fight against the stormy spirit of the new age, and knew no other goal than its “extermination”. Just as the Emperor of the Heavenly Empire only thinks of “exterminating” his enemies, the English, so he also wanted to know of no other battle than a decisive one to the death. We used to let him rage and rave and saw nothing in him but a ridiculous fanatic. Were we right to do so? As long as the rabble-rouser always loses his cause before the healthy common sense of the people, even if the reasonable person does not rebuke him in particular, we could confidently leave the judgment of the excommunicators to that sense and also followed this confidence in general. But our forbearance lulled us into a dangerous slumber. The bluster did us no harm, but behind the bluster was the believer and with him the whole host of the God-fearing, and - what was the worst and strangest thing of all - we ourselves were behind it too. We were, it is true, very liberal philosophers and thought nothing of thinking: thinking was everything in everything. But what about faith? Should it give way to thinking? Far be it! The freedom of thought and knowledge in all its honor, but no hostility could be assumed between faith and knowledge! The content of faith and that of knowledge is one and the same content, and anyone who violates faith does not understand himself and is not a true philosopher! Did not Hegel himself make it the “purpose of his religious-philosophical lectures to reconcile reason with religion” (Phil. d. Rel. II, 355); and should we, his disciples, want to take something away from faith? Far be it from us! Know, you faithful hearts, that we are completely in agreement with you in the content of faith, and that we have only set ourselves the beautiful task of defending your faith, which is so misunderstood and challenged. Or do you still doubt it? See how we justify ourselves before you, read our conciliatory writings on “Faith and Knowledge” and on “The Piety of Philosophy towards the Christian Religion” and a dozen similar ones, and you will have no more doubts against your best friends!

Thus the good-hearted, peaceful philosopher threw himself into the arms of faith. Who is so pure of this sin that he could pick up the first stone against the poor philosophical sinner? The somnambulistic sleep period full of self-deception and deception was so common, the urge and drive for reconciliation so universal, that only a few remained free of it, and these few perhaps without true justification. This was the era of peace in diplomacy. Nowhere was there real enmity, and yet everywhere there was a striving to outsmart and outdo one another, to provoke and to compensate, to talk and talk, a sugary peacefulness and a friendly mistrust, as diplomacy of that time, that subtle art of disguising the seriousness of one's intentions with superficial banter, has been able to find such phenomena of self-deception and deception a thousand times over in all areas. “Peace at any price” or rather “equilibrium and compatibility at any price” was the paltry heart's desire of these diplomats. This would be the place to sing a song about this diplomacy, which has made our whole life so energyless that we still stagger around in a drowsy trust in those skilled magnetizers who lulled our and their own reason, if it were not - forbidden.

But above all, we are only concerned here with the kind of diplomacy that seems destined to deal the final blow to a book whose advertisement was to be introduced by the above remarks.

“The Trumpet of the Last Judgment over Hegel the atheist and Antichrist. An ultimatum.”

A pamphlet of eleven pages has just been published under this title by Wiegand, the author of which is not difficult to identify for those who know his last literary achievements and, precisely from this, his scientific standpoint.¹ A delicious mystification of this book! A man of the most devout piety, whose heart is filled with resentment against the wicked horde of young Hegelians, goes back to the origin of the latter, to Hegel himself and his teacher, and finds - horror of horrors! - the whole revolutionary malice that now gushes forth from his vicious

in the hardened, hypocritical sinner, who had long been considered a stronghold and shield of the faith. Full of righteous anger, he tears the priestly vestments from his body, puts a paper cap painted with devils and flames on his shaven head, like the priests in Kostnitz did to Huss, and chases the “arch-heretic” through the streets of the astonished world. No one has yet revealed the philosophical Jacobin with such dauntless and comprehensive skill. It is unmistakably an excellent move on the part of the author to put the radical attack on Hegel into the mouth of a decided servant of God. These servants have the merit of never having allowed themselves to be blinded, but rather of having correctly sensed in Hegel their arch-enemy and the Antichrist of their Christ. Unlike those “well-meaning” people who did not want to spoil their faith or knowledge, they did not give in to gullible trust, but rather kept a close eye on the heretic with inquisitorial severity until they caught him. They did not allow themselves to be deceived – as the most stupid are usually the most cunning – and can therefore rightly claim to be the best experts on the “dangerous sides” of Hegel's system. “You know the archer, seek no other!” The wild animal knows very well that it has most to fear from man.

Hegel, who wanted to elevate the human spirit to the almighty spirit and did so, and who impressed upon his students the doctrine that no one should seek salvation outside of and above himself, but that he is his own savior and savior, never made it his particular calling to cut out of each of his students the egoism that resisted the liberation of the individual in a thousand different forms, and to wage a so-called “small war”. He was also criticized for this omission in the form of accusations that his system lacked all morality, which was probably intended to say that he lacked the beneficial paranesis and pedagogical fatherliness that form the pure heroes of youth. The man who has been given the task of overthrowing an entire world by building a new one that leaves no room for the old one should, like a schoolmaster, pursue the young people on all the secret paths of their malice and preach morality to them, or angrily shake the rotten huts and palaces that must sink anyway as soon as he throws the whole heaven down on them, along with all the well-fed Olympians! This is what the petty fears of creatures can only wish for, because they lack the courage to shake off the tangle of life from themselves, not the courageous human being, who only needs one word, the Logos, and in it has everything and creates everything from it. But because the mighty creator of the word, because the master, only occasionally omitted the details of the world, whose totality he had overthrown, because in his divine wrath over the whole he betrayed and felt less anger over this and that, because he hurled the god from his throne one, regardless of whether the whole host of angels with trumpets would then be scattered into nothingness: that is why details and this and that have risen again, and the disregarded angels are blowing their lungs out into the “trumpet of the last judgment”. So after the death of the “king”, a bustle arose among the “carts”. Hadn't the dear little angels been left behind? “The rascals are really too appetizing!” It would be wonderful to compare them to them. If only they would make themselves a little more worldly, a little more reasonable!

You sway back and forth, so lower yourselves,
Move your fair limbs a little more worldly;
Truly, you look quite beautiful in earnest.
But I would like to see you smile just once;
That would be an eternal delight to me. I mean like when lovers look,
A little tug at the mouth and it's done. I like you best, you tall fellow, you.
The priest's expression does not suit you at all,
So look at me a little lustfully!
You could also go more decently - naked,
The long pleated shirt is unseemly
They turn - to be seen from behind!
The rascals are quite too appetizing!

The desire for the positive took hold of those to whom the commandment of the world spirit was given to continue Hegel's work in detail, as he himself exhorted them to do, for example at the end of his History of Philosophy: “I wish that this History of Philosophy may contain a call for them to grasp the spirit of the time, which is natural in us, and to bring to light from its naturalness, that is, from its closedness and lifelessness, and - each in his own place - to bring it to light with consciousness.» For his part, however, as a philosopher, he refused to help the world out of its temporal plight. “How the temporal, empirical present finds its way out of its dilemma, how it shapes itself, is up to it, and is not the immediate practical concern of philosophy.” (Philosophy of Religion II. $. 356.) He spread the heavens of freedom over it and was now allowed to “leave it to it” whether it wanted to direct its sluggish gaze upwards and thus do its part. It was different with his disciples. They already belonged to this “empirical present, which has to find its way out of its conflict”, and had to help it, the first enlightened ones. But they “whined” and became diplomats and peace brokers. What Hegel had torn down in the main, they thought they could rebuild in detail; for he himself had not always declared himself against the individual and was often as obscure in detail as Christ. It is good to mumble in the dark: there is much that can be interpreted into it.

We are fortunate that the dark decade of diplomatic barbarism is over. It had its good points and was - inevitable. We first had to clarify ourselves and absorb the whole weakness of the old in us, in order to learn to despise it as our property and our own self quite energetically. From the mud bath of humiliation, in which we are defiled with the impurity of stability of every kind, we emerge strengthened and call out, revitalized: “The bond between you and us be torn! War to the death! Those who still want to negotiate diplomatically, who still want “peace at any price”, should beware of getting caught between the swords of the combatants and becoming a bloody victim of their “well-meaning” half-heartedness. The time of reconciliation and sophistry against others and ourselves is over.

The trumpeter sounds the full battle cry in his trumpet of the Last Judgment. It will still strike many a sleepy ear, where it will ring out but not awaken; many a person will still think that he can remain behind the front lines; many a person will still think that it is only useless noise being made, and that what is being issued as a war cry is actually a word of peace: but it will no longer help. When the world is at war with God, and the roaring thunder of battle breaks out against the Olympian himself and his hosts: then only the dead can sleep; the living take sides. We want no more mediation, no more conciliation, no more diplomatic “whining”; we want to be the godless, forehead to forehead with such God-fearing people, we want to let them know how we stand with each other. And herein, I repeat, in this decisiveness of enmity, the God-fearing zealots deserve precedence; they have never made friends out of a true instinct. The revelation of Hegel's arch-heresy could not have been introduced in a more skillful and just form than the author has done, by letting the faithful zealots sound the trumpet of the Last Judgment. They do not want a “comparison of equity”, they want a “war of extermination”. This right shall be theirs.

But what can the God-fearing find wrong with Hegel – and with this question we will enter the book itself? The God-fearing? Who threatens them more with destruction than the destroyer of fear? Yes, Hegel is the true herald and creator of courage, before which cowardly hearts tremble. Securi adversus homines, securi adversus Deos, is how Tacitus describes the ancient Germans. But their security against God had been lost in the loss of themselves, and the fear of God took root in their contrite hearts. They have finally found themselves again and conquered the shivers of fear; for they have found the word that henceforth can no longer be destroyed, that is eternal, even though they themselves may still struggle and fight against it until each one of them becomes aware of it. A truly German man - securus adversus Deum - has spoken the liberating word, the self-sufficiency, the autarchy of the free man. We have already been delivered from many kinds of fear and respect by the French, who first proclaimed the idea of freedom with world-historical emphasis, and have allowed it to sink into the nothingness of ridicule. But have they not reappeared with the hideous heads of the snake, and does not a hundredfold fear still darken the bold self-confidence? The salvation which the French brought us was as little thorough and unshakable as that which once came from Bohemia in the Hussite storm, giving the signal for the flames of the later German Reformation. The German alone and he alone demonstrates the world-historical calling of radicalism; only he alone is radical, and he alone is so – without wrong. No one is as inexorable and ruthless as he is; for he does not merely overthrow the existing world in order to remain standing himself; he overthrows – himself. Where the German outlines, there a god must fall and a world must perish. For the German, the destruction and crushing of the temporal is his eternity. Here there is no more fear or despair: he not only drives away the fear of ghosts and this or that kind of reverence, he exterminates all and every fear, reverence itself and the fear of God. Flee, you fearful souls, from the fear of God to the love of God, for which you do not even have a proper word in your language and consequently also in your national consciousness: he no longer suffers at your request, for he makes your God a corpse, and he thereby transforms your love into abhorrence.

In this sense, the “Trombone” also blares out, and contains the true tendency of the Hegelian system, with Old Testament formulas and sighs, so that “the modern doubts, transactions and anxious crusades, which are still based on the assumption that error and truth can be mediated, come to an end.” “Away,” cries the trombonist, filled with rage against all thought, ”away with this mediating rage, with this sentimental jelly, with this world of rogues and lies: only one thing is true, and when one and the other are put together, the other falls into nothingness of its own accord. Don't come to us with this anxious, worldly-wise timidity of the Schleiermacher school and positive philosophy; away with this stupidity, which only wants to mediate because it still loves error inwardly and does not have the courage to tear it out of its heart. Tear it out and throw it away, this double-tongued, to-and-fro-driving, flattering and mediating serpent's tongue; let your mouth, your heart and mind be sincere and one and pure, etc.” Away, then, with the tough and intellectually paralyzing, albeit ingenious diplomacy!

The trombonist, a true servant of God, as he should be, spurns his motionless God as surely as the Turk spurns his Allah, every support against the blasphemer Hegel, and also against the pious. This digression is dedicated to the preface, in which the “older Hegelians” are first greeted with the words: “they always had the word of reconciliation on their lips, but the poison of the adder was on their lips”. Now “the mirror of the system is to be held up to them, and they, Göschel, Henning, Gabler, Rosenkranz and so on, are obliged to answer, because they owe it to their - government. The time has come when further silence is a crime. A “philosophical school” has also formed, which wanted to create a “Christian and positive philosophy” and refute Hegel philosophically, but it also only loved its own ego, it has offended against the foundations of Christian truth, and in addition it has had as little success and effect among the faithful as among the unbelievers. When we complain and governments look for a doctor, has one of the positives found himself as a doctor, have the governments entrusted one of them with the cure? No! Other men are needed! A Krummacher, a Hävernick, Hengstenberg, a Harleß have had to stand before the breach! A third class of opponents of Hegel's philosophy, the Schleiermacherians, are finally also disavowed. “They themselves are still exposed to the temptations of evil, since they love to create the appearance that they themselves are philosophers. And yet they cannot even show the worldly envious people samples of these images. The word is for them: I know your works, that you are neither cold nor warm. Oh, that you were cold or warm! But because you are lukewarm, and neither cold nor warm, I will spew you out with my mouth.” The trumpeter recognizes their zeal for “church life”, but it is not “serious, thorough, comprehensive and zealous enough” for him, and they have also not opposed Bruno Bauer (the Protestant Church of Prussia and science) with anything that could refute his blasphemous claims (p. 30). Finally, Leos, the man who “first had the courage to speak out against this godless philosophy, to formally accuse it and to alert the Christian-minded governments to the urgent danger that this philosophy poses to the state, the church and all morality,” is remembered. 'But he too is criticized because he was not ruthless enough, and because his works are still “permeated with some worldly leaven”, which is proved to him with much sophistry. The conclusion, as is fitting, is psalm-like anathemas against the godless.

The “Introduction” now reveals the actual intention of the grim man. “The hour has come for the most evil, the proudest, the last enemy of the Lord to be brought to his knees. But this enemy is also the most dangerous. The French – the people of the Antichrist – had, with shameless public display, in broad daylight, in the market square, in the face of the sun, which had never seen such an outrage, and before the eyes of Christian Europe, pushed the Lord of Eternity down to nothingness, as they murdered the Anointed of God , they had committed idolatrous adultery with the harlot, Reason; but Europe, full of holy zeal, strangled the abomination and joined together in a holy league to bind the Antichrist in chains and to restore to the true Lord his eternal altars. Then came – no! – then was called, then cherished and cared for, then protected, honored and paid the enemy, whom one had defeated outside, in a man who was stronger than the French people, a man who restored the decrees of that hellish Convention to the force of law, gave them new and firmer foundations, and introduced them under the insinuating title of philosophy, which is particularly seductive to German youth. Hegel was appointed and made the center of the University of Berlin. - It was now no longer believed that the horde with which the Christian state has to contend in our day pursues a different principle and professes different doctrines than those established by the master of deception. It is true that the younger school is significantly different from the older one that the master collected: it has thrown away shame and all divine content, it fights openly and without restraint against state and church, it throws down the sign of the cross as it wants to shake the throne - all attitudes and hellish deeds that the older school did not seem capable of. But it seems only so, or it was perhaps only accidental bias and narrow-mindedness, if the earlier students did not rise to this diabolical energy: in principle and in the matter, that is, if we go back to the principle and the actual doctrine of the master, the later ones have not established anything new, they have rather only taken away the transparent veil in which the master sometimes wrapped his assertions and uncovered the nakedness of the system – shameless enough!

It would now be our task to examine the Hegelian system's accusation of the book's actual content in more detail. However, it is precisely in such a way that it must come to the reader's attention without being wasted and not getting bogged down in a review, and moreover we know of nothing else to criticize in it, except that the author's memory does not seem to have had access to all the useful passages of Hegel's works. Since, as announced on page 163, this work is to be followed by a second section that is to show “how Hegel, from the outset, allows religion to arise from the inner dialectic and development of self-consciousness as a special phenomenon » and in which at the same time «Hegel's hatred of religious and Christian art and his dissolution of all positive state laws will be presented»: so the opportunity is still completely open to make up for what has been missed. So the reader - and anyone who takes a lively interest in the issues of the day cannot afford to ignore this book - may be content with an overview of the 13 chapters. 1. The religious relationship as a substantial relationship. The trombonist claims that Hegel “has drawn a double veil over his work of destruction”, one of which consists of the fact that he speaks of God countless times and it almost always seems as if he understands by God that living God who was there before the world was and so on, and through a second veil he the appearance that religion is conceived in the form of the substantiality relationship and as dialectic, in which the individual spirit surrenders itself, sacrifices itself to the general, which as substance or - as it is still more often called - as absolute idea has power over it, abandons to it its particular individuality and thus unites itself with it. The more powerful minds (Strauss and so on) have given themselves up to this more dangerous semblance. “But,” it is finally said, “more dangerous than this semblance is the matter itself, which immediately confronts every knowledgeable and open eye, if it only makes a moderate effort: the conception of religion according to which the religious relationship is nothing is an inner relation of self-consciousness to itself, and all those powers which still seem to be distinguished from self-consciousness as substance or as absolute idea are nothing but its own moments, only objectivized in the religious conception. Hereafter the contents of the first chapter are evident. -2. The spectre of the world spirit. 3. Hatred against God. 4. Hatred against the existing. 5. Admiration of the French and contempt for the Germans. This does not contradict the praise we gave the Germans above, any more than the passage overlooked by the author, Geschichte der Philosophie III, p. 328. 6. Destruction of religion. 7. Hatred of Judaism. 8. Preference for the Greeks. 9. Hatred of the church. 10. Contempt for the Holy Scripture and sacred history. 11. Religion as a product of self-awareness. 12. Dissolution of Christianity. Hatred of thorough scholarship and writing in Latin. (A strange addition, as the trombonist thinks.)

The second section, for which the author is to be wished all the more help from his extensive memory, since he is not lacking in other talents, is to be discussed immediately after its publication and then perhaps some of the present one will be added.

Why, it may be asked, do we take this book so confidently for a masquerade? Because no God-fearing person can be as free and intelligent as the author is. “He who cannot have himself for the best is probably not one of the best!”

Published in: “Telegraph für Deutschland.” (Edited by Dr. Karl Gutzkow.) No. 6-8. Hamburg, January 1842, and signed on page 31 with the name “Stirner.”

• 1. What he motivates in the address to “his brothers in Christ”: “We will still remain in obscurity, so that it does not seem as if we were striving for a different honor than the heavenly crown. When the struggle, which we hope to soon end, is over, when the lie has received its punishment, then we will also greet them personally and embrace them warmly at the place of election."