The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Guest performance at the Court Theater, Weimar

The person who first explained the greatness of Shakespeare's dramas from the fact that their poet was an actor had a happy, illuminating idea. It is less important that this poet practiced the art of acting professionally than that he was, by his very nature, an actor. It is part of the essence of such a nature that it can, with complete denial of its own personality, immerse itself in other characters. The actor renounces being himself. He is given the opportunity to speak out of other beings. And the more malleable, the more transformable he is, the more of an actor he is. It has a deeply symbolic meaning that we know next to nothing about Shakespeare as a person. What is he to us as a person? He does not speak to us as a person; he speaks to us in roles. He is the true chameleon. He speaks to us as Hamlet, as Lear, as Othello. Shakespeare plays theater, even when he writes plays. He no longer feels what is going on in his soul when he creates the characters in his plays. Because Shakespeare was only an actor, his plays can only be performed by real actors. It will always be the sign of an actor's deficiency if his art fails in Shakespeare's dramas.

These thoughts crossed my mind last Sunday when I saw Mr. Wüllner's Othello. I couldn't shake off a certain impatience throughout the performance. I wanted to see Othello and all I saw all evening was Mr. Wüllner. I wanted to understand how Othello could gradually fall into this terrible rage of jealousy, and I only got to know the feelings that dominate Mr. Wüllner when he looks at Othello. Mr. Wüllner has not the power of self-expression which makes the true actor. At every moment he lets us see to the bottom of his own being.

Do not be unfair to Mr. Wüllner. His art is no small one. He has a great command of his means of expression, he is a master of the nuances of acting. There are many things to praise. But it is annoying when you see such art applied where the main point is missed.

Mr. Wüllner used to be a learned philologist. I think I recognize the scholar in the actor. The scholar lacks the ability to slip into the unknown; he only observes it, he usually just ponders it. And Mr. Wüllner did not play Othello, he played about Othello. He played what he pondered about Othello. But what does the audience care what Mr. Wüllner feels about Othello, no matter how vividly it is felt. I would rather see Mr. Wüllner's feelings and thoughts about the character of Othello set down in a literary work than acted on the stage. I have no doubt that such a work would be interesting. But I am not interested in interesting doctrines on the stage. They don't seem interesting there. It was therefore boring and tiring to watch Mr. Wüllner's Othello to the end. To portray a character in such a way that he stands there as if from a single mould, that the spectator has the feeling with every word, with every gesture, with every step, that all this must be so: this, it seems, Mr. Wüllner cannot do. With every detail one has the feeling that it could be different without changing anything as a whole. Mr. Wüllner offered a mosaic of acting nuances, not a uniform character. His art lacks style. It seems mannered. It represents the flip side of good acting. It denies everything that makes good actors great. Mr. Wüllner cannot eradicate the "doctor" in himself.

On October 2, 1895, the Marie Seebach Foundation was opened in Weimar. The founder created a friendly home for sixteen German stage artists who had become unfit for their profession due to old age or illness. In doing so, she realized a wonderful idea within the limits imposed by the circumstances. Compared to the large number of German stage performers, however, the cause has a modest reputation. It can only be regarded as a fortunate and very grateful suggestion. However, the founder has understood how to set an example that is truly worthy of imitation. If imitation were to take place in abundance and if the same sure sense of what meets the needs were always demonstrated as with Marie Seebach, then an important social issue for German stage artists would indeed be solved.

Guest performance at the Neues Theater, Berlin

The Italians currently call Ermete Zacconi their greatest actor. For a few days now, we have been seeing him every day at the Neues Theater in Berlin. Before that, he did a guest performance at the Carl Theater in Vienna. The news we received about this guest performance from Vienna bordered on the unbelievable. Not since Duse had thrilled the art community in the city on the Danube had anything similar been experienced there. People fell into a delirium when they saw Zacconi. Eight days ago, a Viennese theater critic wrote in this magazine that for weeks, while Zacconi was with them, the theater-goers of Vienna were preoccupied with the question: what is the secret of the great actor? Now we have also seen him here in Berlin. His first role was that of Oswald in the "Ghosts". The message of the Viennese delirium had so little effect on the Berliners that on the third day of his guest performance, when he played Oswald for the third time, Zacconi produced himself in front of empty benches. And there was absolutely no sign of any excitement about the question: what is the secret of the great actor? And I must confess that I, too, cannot quite understand the excitement in Vienna. Zacconi has taught me only one thing. When the art of acting emancipates itself from drama and appears obtrusive and self-important to us, it becomes repulsive. We want the actor to carry out the poet's intentions. We call an actor great when he succeeds in bringing the poet's intentions to the stage in the purest, most unadulterated way. This is the secret of the great actor for anyone of understanding. There is no other. Zacconi has not given us the slightest explanation of this problem. Basically, his art has nothing to do with this kind of acting. It is ridiculous to argue about whether Zacconi is a great actor in the sense that he aspires to be. He is not interested in poetry. He has become acquainted with Ibsen's drama "Ghosts". He has seen that there is a paralytic in it. Now he plays the course of the paralysis in a masterly way. The way in which he portrays the development of this illness in all its phases is of indescribable perfection. Probably nothing better can be created on stage in this direction. He portrays paralysis in ideal perfection, just as Goethe portrays the type of the noble woman in Iphigenia. He elevates a clinical image to a work of art. 'But Ibsen's drama is none of Zacconi's business. Zacconi is indifferent to what happens in this drama apart from Oswald going mad. The whole plot could go differently than Ibsen portrays it: Zacconi would play everything the way he plays it after all, if only one thing were certain, that Oswald is a paralytic. One could become angry when one sees how the intrusive art of the comedian deals with great poetry. But you don't get angry. And that is the strange thing about Zacconi. His art is again so great that you are drawn into its spell. It is so great that one forgives even his acts of violence towards poets. One says to oneself: Ibsen's Oswald is not portrayed by Zacconi. But what Zacconi portrays is interesting in every turn. You follow every word, every gesture, every movement with the most rapt attention. You say to yourself, if an actor can do something so important, let's enjoy him for once, even if he moves in the wrong direction. Zacconi is also forgiven for appearing in the worst possible plays. Where we are not interested in the poet, we are genuinely interested in the actor.

I was curious about Zacconi as Kean. I told myself I was dealing with an actor who was nothing more than an actor, a comedian. In the silly play "Kean", Zacconi had to play a comedian. I thought that must be his best role. It will show what he can actually do. The actor as a human being, I thought, is what he will bring to the stage. What the comedian suffers and what joys he feels, that's what Zacconi will portray, I thought. And strange! It was precisely as Kean that I liked Zacconi the least. He doesn't portray the actor as a human being, but as an actor. Zacconi's Kean is not only acting when he plays Hamlet on stage; he is also acting when he talks to members of high society in the drawing room; he is also acting when he receives visits from his lovers in his dressing room. In Kean, Zacconi has revealed his nature. He has given his whole personality to the art of comedy. His individuality, his soul, has been absorbed into this art and has completely disappeared. He is no longer human at all; he is just a comedian. And he is a comedian in everything he brings to the stage. That's why we admire his tricks, but we are never moved, never enraptured. We try to figure out how he does this and that, but that's as far as our feelings towards him go. He does not depict human actions, but soulless images of these actions.

Zacconi's acting is an independent art. And an art that loses all justification in this independence. Poets could not write dramas for the stage if all actors played the way Zacconi plays. They would only have to write instructions for the actors. Ibsen should not have written his "Ghosts", but the general outline of a plot in which a paralytic appears. He should have left it to the brilliant actor to carry out this plot in detail. As long as playwrights create as they do at present, Zacconi's way makes no sense.

Guest performance in Berlin

If I were to describe in a few words the feeling I have when Adele Sandrock is on stage, I would have to say: I revel in the pleasure of mature, sweet beauty. I leave the theater in the harmonious mood that I usually only have when I have succeeded in completing a difficult work to my complete satisfaction. A soothing calm takes over my soul. Not a calm similar to that which comes from idleness, but a calm similar to that which comes from a properly completed life.

This was not always the case when I saw Adele Sandrock. Ten years ago, when she was just beginning to be regarded by the public as a great actress, I left her performances with a hot head and feverish nerves. Everything in me twitched when I saw her Eva, her Alexandra - in Richard Voss' plays - or even her Anna in Gunnar Heiberg's "King Midas". A great nature spoke from her. Everything one had in the way of vitality excited her. But back then you had to find peace through yourself. It gave you nothing to restore the torn harmony of your soul. There was always something missing that belonged to full beauty. It must also calm the waves it has stirred. Sandrock was once a stormy wind, now she has become a power that knows how to evenly distribute storm and calm. That is why I say her art has the hallmark of mature beauty that comes from harmony.

I believe that Adele Sandrock owes this to the fact that she came to the Burgtheater at the right time. Her style was mature, and in the Burgtheater she found a calm. Beauty blossomed there, but the warmth of passion and temperament had died in this beauty. The whole Burgtheater was like Charlotte Wolter. Adele Sandrock brought with her everything that Charlotte Wolter lacked, and with the manner of a genius she appropriated what she could learn from Wolter.

Now, at her Berlin guest performance, I found in Adele Sandrock all the traits that once made me feel hot, but everything is muted by the noble artistry that was always at home in the Burgtheater.

This was already clear to me on the first evening when she played Francillon. It became even clearer to me during the performance of "Mary Stuart". This Mary was all life and also all art. The innocent-guilty woman appeared in large, noble-beautiful features, in whom one could believe at any moment that a noble soul can submit to great misfortune.

And the following evening, this Christine in Schnitzler's brisk, genuinely dramatic, fragrantly beautiful insignificance "Liebelei". The Viennese girl with all the magic of loveliness that is so charming in the city on the Danube. I always had to ask myself: where have I seen this girl? She seemed like a good acquaintance to me. And yet again everything was played in the style of the Burgtheater. Immediately afterwards, the high-spirited, cynical exuberance of Anni in Schnitzler's "Abschiedssouper". The two roles are like black and white, and Sandrock didn't miss a note in either of them.

However, old memories came back most vividly when she played Eva. That was one of the roles in which she shone ten years ago. How differently she plays it now. A noble dignity always forces the erupting passion back into beautiful form. Adele Sandrock says today what she said ten years ago, but she has recast everything in the same way that Goethe recast his Iphigenia in Italy. Her passion is still the same as before, her warmth is still the same as before: but above the passion, above the warmth, stands the personality of the artist, who no longer allows herself to be subdued by the forces of her soul and is driven by them. Today she rules over them with playful power.

When Adele Sandrock recently made a guest appearance in Berlin, she published a short article in the Berliner Tageblatt in which she advocated the employment of female directors. The idea is certainly very appealing, and if one is generally in favor of opening up to women the professions to which prejudice and error have so far prevented them, then one can only applaud the proposal of the great Viennese actress. Nevertheless, one should not suppress reservations in this respect. The reasons put forward by Adele Sandrock are the main reason for this. In many cases, directing is a matter of arrangements that women take care of in real life. They should therefore - in Adele Sandrock's opinion - have more understanding than men when it comes to working out these arrangements on stage. One thing is not taken into account: It is another to do a thing in real life, another to imitate it in the field of art. This seems to be a fundamental error in Adele Sandrock's conception of art. Could not the male imagination be better suited than the female imagination to imitate those things on stage that women do in life? Of course, it cannot be denied that there will always be some women in the ranks of actresses who have a distinct talent for directing. They should not be deprived of the opportunity to use this talent. 'There will also be plays that definitely need a female hand. They will be those in which feminine feelings and views are in the foreground. In short, Adele Sandrock's suggestion will not be easy to reject. Incidentally, Berlin will soon get to know the advantages of a female director - the enterprising Nuscha Butze will not fail to add to the burden of direction in her "theater, which she takes off Lautenburg's shoulders, also that of the "Oberregie", with which her predecessor was also burdened.

Dr. Raphael Löwenfeld, the meritorious director of the Berlin Schiller Theater, has just had the lecture "Volksbildung und Volksunterhaltung" (Popular Education and Popular Entertainment), which he gave on June 8, 1897 at the general assembly of the Gesellschaft für Verbreitung von Volksbildung in Halle a.S., published. He advocates working on the education of more classes of the people through popular theater with cheap admission prices and by organizing lecture evenings. The example of the Schiller Theater, whose activities Löwenfeld describes, illustrates how a popular theater should be conceived. The lecture evenings are intended to present individual artistic personalities to a larger audience. On such an evening, a characterization of a poet or sound artist should first be developed, and this should be followed by declamations or musical reproductions of individual creations by the artists concerned. It is to be hoped that the author's fine intentions will be well received. For one must agree with him when he considers art to be the best means for the further development of a mature person. Those who are no longer able to follow scientific debates after a hard day's work can very well refresh and enrich their minds with the creations of art. Löwenfeld rightly says: "Those who come from gainful employment, physically tired and mentally exhausted, need stimulation in the most appealing form... Not factual knowledge, not specialist training, but intellectual stimulation in the broadest sense is the task of popular education."

November 13, 1897 brings back an interesting memory. It was the centenary of the birth of the composer Gustav Reichardt, to whom we owe the song "Was ist des Deutschen Vaterland". After the wars of liberation, the song was sung in a different melody. It was not suitable to become popular. Reichardt's succeeded to the highest degree. It is said that the composer wrote down the melody in the old little chapel on the Schneekoppe during a hike.

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An essay by the Berlin court conductor F. Weingartner in the "Neue Deutsche Rundschau" is a true example of unclear thinking. After Weingartner has unreservedly vented his resentment towards the younger composers, their followers and praisers, he describes the "coming man" in music, the savior from the confusion caused by the young originalists. "At first I think of him as independent of all party politics and not concerned with it, because he stands above it; I think of him as neither narrow-mindedly Germanistic nor vapidly international, but as having an all-human feeling, because music is an all-human art; I think of him as being filled with an ardent, unbridled enthusiasm for what has been created by the great spirits of all times and nations, feeling an insurmountable aversion to mediocrity, with which he comes into contact through compulsion, at most once through his own good-naturedness. I imagine him without envy, because he is aware of his own high value and trusts in it, therefore far removed from any petty propaganda for his works, but, if necessary, thoroughly honest, even ruthless, and therefore not particularly popular in many places. I think of him as not fearfully closing himself off from life, but with a tendency towards loneliness - not hating people with exaggerated world-weariness, but despising their pettiness and narrow-mindedness, therefore choosing only exceptions for his closer contact. I imagine him to be not insensitive to success or failure, but not to be moved one step from his path by either, very indifferent to so-called public opinion, a republican in his political views in the sense of Beethoven. ... Feeling himself truly related only to the greatest geniuses, he nevertheless knows that he too is only a new link in the chain which they form together, and also knows that other great ones will follow him. So he too belongs to a direction, but one that hovers above the heads of mankind and flies over them." Does Mr. Weingartner really believe that nature will see fit to realize his fantasies? And if not, why is he writing down his ideal of the future musician? Incidentally, this ideal would be extremely useful for any creative work. If Badeni's successor had the qualities described by Weingartner, the confusion in Austria could give way to the most beautiful harmony. It is incomprehensible how a highly talented artist can please himself with such gimmicks of idle thinking.

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During these days, the newspapers have been publishing statistical reports on the repertoire of the past season on German stages. They showed that the most popular plays were the Blumenthal-Kadelburg company's "Im weißen Rößl" and "Hans Huckebein", while interest in classical performances had declined considerably. I have long been extremely suspicious of such statements. They say nothing at all. For they do not reveal what our audience is really interested in. We can see that the views of theater directors today no longer correspond to the tastes of the audience. The line-up of our miserable repertoire does not arise from the fact that our audience does not want anything better, but from the fact that the theater directors believe that people only want to see spicy trash. They only try to present something better, as Burckhard, for example, did in his afternoon performances at the Burgtheater in Vienna: the audience really finds itself. There is some truth in the saying: every theater director has the audience he deserves. Our appalling repertoire does not prove a decline in general taste, but only that our theater directors prefer to perform bad plays rather than good ones, and that they therefore attract the lovers of bad plays to the theater, while keeping the audience with better taste away from the theater. Classical performances, presented in a dignified manner, will always have an audience. If the theater directors want to be "poets" at the same time and want to sell their own works of art, then the evil is the greatest imaginable. It should become a kind of rule of decency for theater directors never to perform their own plays at their own institutions. Perhaps such a rule of decency demands some qualities that are not given to everyone; but every code of honor demands such a thing.

I don't see why theater directors should determine taste. In recent years they have shown themselves to be so prejudiced that you don't have to agree with them when they say: we can't put on anything better because no one else will go to the theater. They should try something else. Perhaps they will then have different experiences. I would even seriously advise many of them to stop writing plays.

Stage adaptation

Heinrich Jantsch, the director of the "Wiener Jantsch-Theater", who used to be a member of the Meiningen ensemble, has published a stage adaptation of "Wilhelm Tell" (Halle 1898). He explains that he wants to open a debate with his work about how plays can best be rehearsed. He provides a director's book containing all the instructions necessary for the actors in a play. This director's book should contain everything about a role that takes place while the performer is in front of the audience. One will certainly not be able to refrain from expressing serious reservations about such far-reaching instruction books. Performers who insist on their independence will rebel against such "drill". But consider that the author can hardly have the will to suppress legitimate independence. He wants to make a suggestion - nothing more! "If the performer of the role is intellectually higher than the one who made the 'remark', yes, if he believes he is only allowed to express his own opinion, no one will stop him. He grows beyond the remark, perhaps precisely because of this first suggestion. In any case, it has taken the place of nothing - something!"

It should not be forgotten that in countless cases there will not be enough time to formulate such an opinion. A book like the one Jantsch has in mind must not, of course, be the result of random ideas. It must be the result of a long experience. And then it will serve even the most cradled and talented actor excellently. It must contain what has stood the test of time. "Such a director's book need not be the work of a single person, just as our most beautiful scenery is often created with the help of many actors. Don't complain about the drill that seems to grow out of such a scenario, it is a thousand times better than chaos; it declares war on thoughtlessness on stage." Some of Jantsch's introductory remarks will be reproduced here to characterize the tendency and nature of the proposal.

"The smaller the role, the more necessary the comment and explanation, not only with regard to the external but also the internal design. - Let's take the much-maligned servant roles, one of which is not even mentioned on Lessing's playbill for "Emilia Galotti". - We are at the pleasure palace Dosalo, the prince together with Emilia. Then the prince's mistress, Countess Orsina, intervenes, whom no one had suspected. - A servant delivers this terrifying news with the words:

"The countess is just arriving."

The prince: "The countess? What kind of countess?"

Servant: "Orsina."

The catastrophe of the play germinates in this servant's role! - This slick journeyman, who has grown up in the sins of his master, loses all sense and reason at the news that the Countess has just arrived. - For him, for the prince, for everyone in the castle, she was "the Countess! not Countess Orsina, not the Countess. - In the servant's imagination, there is only one count and one countess at this moment, and this count is the prince himself.

Does the director of the middle stages have time to make these - so necessary - comments? Will he - if he gives them - be thanked by the actor in the role of the servant, who - otherwise a highly esteemed member of the chorus - is reluctant to be "trained"? - In the choir rehearsal he is used to the dressing down, in the play it would be humiliation - so great is the misjudgment. - If the note is written in his role, then it's easier, otherwise the member is not a disavowed enemy of role-reading - which should also happen.

"That's how I recognize my Pappenheimer." The word owes its immortal ridicule to the poor devils who appear in audience with Wallenstein dressed in cardboard armor as the ten cuirassiers of Pappenheim. - As long as the play had been performed before, it was the Meininger who made the cuirassier scene what it is. - There was no laughter! Why should there be? A bit of drill and the audience takes us seriously.

The great value Schiller - the eminent stage practitioner - placed on the role of the servant is demonstrated by the fact that he repeatedly put announcements in the mouths of the heroes themselves. Thus in "Wallenstein" after the monologue "If it were possible". - The Swedish colonel is to be reported. The page enters.

Wallenstein to the page: "The Swedish colonel? Is it him? Well, here he comes!" In Wallenstein we have the example that the message:

"Ten cuirassiers

From Pappenheim demand you in the name

To speak in the name

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Carl Heine, the director of the theater performances organized by the "Leipziger Literarische Gesellschaft", put together an ensemble with which he gave performances of Ibsen's works in various German cities. On the occasion of the Vienna guest performance of this ensemble, Dr. Heine has now developed the aims and character of his "Ibsen Theatre" in an interesting essay in the weekly magazine "Zeit", the main points of which I think are worth mentioning here.

Heine starts from the conviction that Ibsen is the best school for an ensemble striving for St]. He quite rightly emphasizes that Ibsen is a blessing for actors because they are forced to play not roles and theatrical templates but life types and individualities in his plays. If you want to cast one of Ibsen's later plays - this is not yet the case with the earlier plays - you cannot possibly stick to the old subjects: the bon vivant, the character player, the sedate lover, the chaperone and so on; in Heine's ensemble, the roles of Rank, Aslaksen, Wholesaler Werle, the Stranger, Rosmer and Jörgen Tesmann are all in one hand, as are those of Brendel, Dr. Stockmann, Brack, Hjørgen Tesmann. Stockmann, Brack, Hjalmar Ekdal, Oswald, Günther and Gabriel Borkmann. Such a lack of expertise forces the actor to stick to individual life, to observation, not to the custom and tradition of the theater.

Directing the dialog in Ibsen's dramas also requires a special art. Heine believes that facial expressions and gestures are less important than in older drama. He uses them only as an aid and as sparingly as possible. On the other hand, he attaches great importance to grouping. The position of the characters in relation to each other, their following each other, their fleeing, the elimination of a character and their closer or further distance from the main troupe form, in his opinion, a large part of what is called mood. Only by striking in this direction that which corresponds to the poet's intentions can the illusion be created which is necessary for the audience to properly absorb an Ibsen drama. The difficulty lies in the fact that in almost every work by this poet different means of this kind must be used, because each of these works has its own style. That style which is demanded by the content. Only those who know how to arrange all the details of the stage direction in such a way that they come together, as required by the individual character of an Ibsen play, can stage such a play in an artistic manner. "Ibsen forms a preliminary school for this ideal requirement. Not two of his dramas have the same style. Just compare "Nora", "Enemy of the People", "Rosmersholm>, "Hedda Gabler" and "John Gabriel Borkmann". But each of his dramas has its own, strictly defined form, which becomes more artistic, purer and clearer from drama to drama... Thus Ibsen is also a teacher for the actor in that he leads him from the simpler tasks to the most artistic; and just as in Ibsen's social dramas the men seek truth, the women freedom, so in Ibsen's drama is the school for the actor which can mature him to the ultimate goals of art, to the goals to which art of every age has aspired: to freedom and truth."

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In numbers 11 and 14 of this magazine, we spoke of the plan to found an Alsatian theater and of the objectives pursued by this foundation. This plan is now approaching its realization. An association has been formed to found the Alsatian Theater. Its chairman is Dr. Julius Greber, the author of the dramatic morality play "Lucie" - which has been banned by the censors -, then the young painter and poet Gustav Stoskopf, as well as Mr. Hauß, editor and newly elected member of the Reichstag, Bastian, the author of Alsatian folk plays, and Horsch.

The author of the article "Theater und Kunst in den Reichslanden" (No. 14 of this journal) has already pointed out that political tendencies were not intended with the new foundation, but that only the desire to see Alsatian folk life on the stage was decisive. The association's statutes are also drafted with this in mind.

Eight novelties are to be performed next winter. Alexander Hessler, the former director of the Stadttheater (Strasbourg), has been appointed artistic director of the new theater company. He is said to have a keen, sure artistic sense and a good eye for judging artistic forces.

If one considers the tremendous success of the popular performances of the people of Schliersee everywhere, one can open up the best prospects for the future to undertakings such as the Alsatian folk theater. Such ventures are very much in line with a remarkable trend of our time. Our art is becoming more and more international in character. Language is almost the only element that still reminds us that art grows out of the soil of nationality. Folkloric and even regional ways of thinking, viewing and feeling are disappearing more and more from the materials of our artistic achievements. And the term "good Europeans" is by no means a mere phrase today. Today, we understand the Parisian mores shown to us from the stage almost as well as those of our home town. In addition to this one extreme direction, however, there is another. Just as we cherish our youthful experiences, we cherish the folkloric idiosyncrasies that are, so to speak, the nation's childhood memories. And the more cosmopolitan culture in general leads us away from them, the more we like to return to them "here and there". Indeed, watching the Schlierseer play today seems like a memory of our youth; a memory of our youth is the content of the plays they perform for us, and a memory of our youth is above all the level of art that we can observe in them.

I would like to see undertakings similar to the Alsatian Theater spring up in various parts of Germany. Perhaps they are the only means of saving the individualities of the countryside for a while longer, which are being mercilessly swept away by the cosmopolitan tide of the times. In the end, however, cosmopolitanism will remain the winner.

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What actually is "theater"? Hermann Bahr raises this question in issue 200 of Die Zeit. "A poet's play fails, and it is then said that it is unfortunately not "theater" after all. Or we see a crude person dominating the stage with bad things of a mean kind, and the excuse is that he knows what "theater" is. So what is this "theater"? Nobody wants to answer that. Everyone senses that there are things that are not "theatrical" and others that are, but that's all they seem to know. It is claimed: you can't say it, you have to feel it. So we always go round and round in the same circle. When asked what it must be like to be effective in the theater, we are told that it must be theatrical, and when asked what is theatrical, we are told: what is effective in the theater. So we can't get out of the circle."

I am somewhat puzzled by these statements from a man who has always pretended in recent times that he has finally found the key that opens the door to the theatrical. Hermann Bahr was once a terrible striker and rager. He could not do enough in his condemnation of the "theatrical". The pure demands of art were paramount to him. I don't think he thought about it very long ago: what is effective in the theater? What is theatrical? He thought about: what does "modernity" demand of dramatic technique? Then he persecuted everything that violated this "modern" technique in the worst possible way. And if Mr. von Schönthan or Mr. Oskar Blumenthal had come to him back then and told him: your "modernism" is all very well, but it doesn't work in the theater, he would have scolded them for being miserable doers and driven them - albeit only critically - out of the temple of art.

In recent years, Hermann Bahr has become tamer. He has explained this himself.

Marco Brociner had a play performed in Vienna last autumn that was not "art" at all, but only "theater"; Hermann Bahr wrote: "When I was still a striker and a rager, I hated Mr. Marco Brociner's plays. They are what you call "unliterary", and that was terrible for me back then. I was a lonely person back then, such a solitary and independent person who didn't recognize anything and didn't want to submit, but let his mind and taste rule. Now I am more modest; it has become difficult for me, but I have gradually realized that there are other people in the world. They want to live too, but the young man can't understand that. Today I say to myself: I have my taste, other people have a different one; whoever writes what I like is my author, but the others want their authors too, that's just cheap..."

Not only in the essay he wrote about Marco Brociner, but also in quite a few other omissions, Hermann Bahr says that he thinks more modestly today than he once did when he was a "striker and a rager".

The fact that one has to make concessions, this principle of all true philistines, was happily discovered by Hermann Bahr as the last word of wisdom for the time being. He repeated it over and over again in the last issues of "Die Zeit". "The man has learned to obey, he renounces himself, he knows that he is not alone; - he has another passion; he wants to help, wants to work. He feels that the world is not there to be his means, but that he is there for it, to become its servant."

But why am I writing here about Hermann Bahr's latest transformation? Why am I trying to find out what the path is from "Stürmer und Wüterich" to half court councillor?

Only because today, the "half court councillor" raises questions that the "striker and poor rake" would once have described as highly superfluous.

Yes, probably superfluous. And the rest of us, who cannot make up our minds to take the leap into the semi-hierarchical, know how to distinguish between the "theatrical" that crude people bring to the theater with bad things, and the "theatrical" that is genuine and good poetry despite all its "theatricality". A real playwright creates in a theatrical way because his imagination works in a theatrical way.

And if the question is put to us today: "What is theatrical?", we simply laugh. Shakespeare already knew this, and Hermann Bahr would have known it too if he hadn't been on his way from "Stürmer und Wüterich" to tame court councillor.

But that's the way it is: you have to unlearn a lot when you have come so far that you realize what Hermann Bahr realized: "He who has measured his strength and recognizes where he should step with it is immune, nothing can happen to him anymore: because he has become necessary. Becoming necessary, finding your place, knowing your role, that's all."

*

The lawyer Paul Jonas spoke about the current state of theater censorship in Berlin in one of the latest issues of the "Nation" (October 1898). He emphasizes that this current state of affairs has grown into a calamity, and that conditions in this area are hardly better than in the neighbouring Tsarist empire.

As in so many other cases, the guardians of public order are also served by decades-old police regulations when handling the censorship pen. Playwrights writing in the present day are judged according to regulations from July 10, 1851. The High Administrative Court recognized that the censorship pen must pass over matters that "only indicate a remote possibility that the performance of a play could lead to a disturbance of public order", and that this pointed instrument may only be used if there is a "real imminent danger" in prospect. Nevertheless, the pen in question from Hauptmann's "Florian Geyer" found it necessary to destroy the following sentences:

"Eat the plague all clerical servants."

"The priests do nothing with love, but pull the wool over their eyes."

"The Pope barters away Christianity, the German princes barter away the German imperial crown, but the German peasants do not barter away Protestant freedom!"

"If you want to keep your house clean, keep priests and monks out of it."

"The Rhine is commonly called the Pfaffengasse. But where clerics step on a ship, the ship's crew curse and cross themselves, because it is said that clerics bring disaster and ruin to the ship."

What an idea the official wielding the questionable pen must have of the consciousness and feelings of a theatergoer today! A man who can believe that the views of an educated man of the present day could be devastated by hearing the above words from the stage knows nothing of the life we lead today. The behavior described is likely to open the eyes of the widest circles to the gulf that exists between the ideas of the bureaucratic soul, educated in the tradition of the state, and the feelings of those circles that share in the progress of life.

According to the police ordinance of July 10, 1851, kissing appears to be one of the acts that "give rise to moral, safety, regulatory or trade police concerns". This is because a red police line once deleted the passage from Max Halbe's "Jugend":

"Annchen, you are so beautiful! So beautiful when you sit like that. (Grabs her arm.) I could forget everything. (Out of her mind.) Kiss me, kiss me!"

The banning of Sudermann's "Johannes" sheds a particularly harsh light on the police situation. It is a pity that the Higher Administrative Court did not reach a decision on this ban. As is well known, the play was released by an imperial decision. The police authorities had banned the performance because public representations of the biblical history of the Old and New Testaments were "absolutely inadmissible" according to the regulations. And in response to the objections made to this, the Chief President replied that "the presentation on stage of events from biblical history, and in particular from the life story of Jesus Christ, appears likely to offend the religious sensibilities of the listeners and spectators as well as the audience not attending the performances, to cause alarm among large groups of people and to cause disturbances to public order, the preservation of which is the office of the police". The order clearly shows that the official who issued it felt no obligation to first examine the content of the drama and ask himself: is it such that it could offend anyone's religious sensibilities? But this official obviously thinks that the mere fact of seeing the biblical characters on stage is enough to cause such an offense. He has not yet arrived at the modern conception of the theater. He knows nothing of the fact that art comes right next to religion in our perception. He says: every thing is profaned by stage representation. Modern feeling, however, says: it is ennobled by it. The bureaucratic sensibility drags prejudices along with it that the rest of life has been shedding for centuries.

The practical consequence of all this is that the artists and directors of art institutions always have to make the disgusting choice between two evils: either to make concessions to the bureaucratic "spirit" and appear pretty well-behaved on the outside while things are rumbling on the inside, or to constantly tangle with the police powers. If it had been up to the tendencies of the characterized spirit, then in the Cyrano performance of the "Deutsches Theater" a foolish monk should not have been called a "God's sheep" and Madame d'Athis' little fox should not have been given an enema. It was also considered reprehensible that the king's stomach clenching had been presented by the doctors as an insult to his majesty and that his sublime pulse had been restored.

The dispute that broke out between the police authorities and the Deutsches Theater over these lines may be discussed at another time. For this time, it was only a matter of contrasting the "spirit" of police power and the spirit of life in the present. The essay "Censorship Pranks" by Dr. P. Jonas provided a desirable starting point for this.

*

Adam Müller Guttenbrunn, the director of Vienna's new Kaiserjubiläums-Stadttheater, has just published Kleist's "Hermannsschlacht". The introduction he has written to the drama deals less with its artistic qualities than with Kleist's love for Austria. This love can be explained by the circumstances in which Kleist lived. At the time when Napoleon was humiliating the Germans, the manly actions of Emperor Franz and his commander, Archduke Carl, were an inspiring act. The reason why Müller-Guttenbrunn, in a preface to Kleist's "Hermannsschlacht", emphasizes everything that the poet said in praise of Austria in order to be able to call the drama "A poem on Austria" is probably that the new theater director needed a hymn to his fatherland for his temple of art built for the 50th anniversary.

*

In the important treatise "On the Use of the Chorus in Tragedy", which preceded his "The Bride of Messina", Schiller showed how deeply connected the question of the chorus is with ideas about the nature of dramatic art. No one is qualified to speak about idealism and realism in drama who has not fully clarified this question. In realistic or even naturalistic drama, the chorus is of course an absurdity. In stylized drama it is not. Stylized drama must incorporate symbols into its body. It will want to express things that cannot be expressed with the means that everyday life has for its expression. In drama, things often have to be said that cannot be put into the mouth of a single person.

Any attempt to describe the significance of the chorus in tragedy must therefore be welcomed with joy. One such attempt is the booklet by Dr. Friedrich Klein "Der Chor in den wichtigsten Tragödien der französischen Renaissance" (Erlangen and Leipzig 1897). The author has carefully studied the large number of "Poetics and verse doctrines in metrical and prosaic form" as well as the extensive commentaries on Aristotle's "Poetics", which "have been published in Italy and France since the middle of the sixteenth century", and on the basis of this study has provided excellent information on "the state of theoretical knowledge of the tragic chorus in the sixteenth century". These pages will provide a detailed examination of the work. [Has not been published.

*

Since there are still supposed to be people with a rabble-rousing attitude in some corner of the world, I would like to expressly note that the above essay ["Auch ein Kritiker" by L. Gutmann] was sent to me by a man whose name I have not yet known, and that I would consider it cowardice to reject it with regard to the rabble. I myself have no need to defend myself to Mr. Kerr. He calls me a critic to ball; I confess that I enjoy the idea of the "balling Kerr" as much as his observations, written in a learned Gigerl style, on the societies of western Berlin, his landlord and other important matters. I am only reprinting the above essay because it shows what dares to pose as a great man.

*

A highly significant work for German dramaturgy has just been published: "Deutsche Bühnenaussprache. Results of the consultations on the balancing regulation of the German stage pronunciation, which took place from April 14 to 16, 1898 in the Apollosaale of the Königliches Schauspielhaus in Berlin. Published by Theodor Siebs on behalf of the commission (Berlin, Cologne, Leipzig 1898). - The "Dramaturgische Blätter" will soon publish a detailed report on this important publication. [The report has not been published}

*

In the work "Unser Wissen", which is published in Vienna, Richard Specht has published a particularly successful dramaturgical study under the title "Zehn Jahre Burgtheater". The only possible approach to the theater is characterized here with excellent words: "The play that the poet has completed at his desk can be a work of art - it is only a dramatic work of art from the moment it appears, in other words, from the moment it is able to make a complete artistic impression on the stage through the help of creative personalities other than the poet. It is obvious that this assistance is only possible when the work itself remains imperfect per se, when it leaves room for the artistic creations of others - the actors, the director, the musician, the painter. Those masterpieces of dramatic form whose vessel is completely filled by the soul of the poet and which leave no room for the artistic drive of others have hardly ever been done justice to by a stage performance. This is not because there is "too little" performing art, but because in such works the performing art is simply - too much. A play in which the personality of the poet predominates so immensely that it completely prevents the expression of the personality of the actor is a play which makes an equal or greater impression on the reader than on the listener. Thus the stage is rendered superfluous for such a play, which here cannot supplement but merely interfere, and thus such a drama is perhaps a nobler work of art, but certainly a bad play. The ideal of "good plays" in this sense will probably always remain "Hamlet".

This will have to be emphasized again and again in the face of so many attempts to misjudge the nature of the theater and to portray its significance within artistic life in a distorted light."

A second passage of the essay should be mentioned here, which views Burckhard's departure from the Viennese court theater from the point of view characterized by the above fundamental dramaturgical truth. Specht says of Burckhard: "He has brought literary life into the theater, but he has weakened the acting life. The stage, however, can only live primarily from the actor, and despite the successful attempts to help modern acting styles achieve a breakthrough, the actual fame of the Burgtheater - as a whole a wonderful ensemble and individually splendid people who are able to express themselves as actors - has declined considerably under him, if not been lost altogether. Nevertheless, it must be said that he himself learned so much during his time as director that Max Burckhard's name could have been mentioned when looking for the next capable director. But the bitterness and spitefulness of the too often justifiably angry and irritated artists would have been too great to be able to think of fruitful joint work, and this consideration alone had to be enough to make Burckhard's departure an irrevocable one."

The sinner Max Halbe in front of the forum of the archiepiscopal ordinariate in Freiburg im Breisgau

The following letter from the Archbishop of Freiburg: "Disparagement of the Catholic clergy by the theater" looks like a document that has been dormant in the archives for a long time. However, it was written in our day and refers to a dramatic work of art of our time.

"We have the honor to inform the Grand Ducal Ministry of Justice, Worship and Education:

In the second half of April, the "Youth" by Max Halbe was performed at the Court and National Theater in Mannheim. The Catholic press ("Neues Mannheimer Volksblatt, No.91 and 99) rightly took cause from this to protest in the strongest terms against such an abuse of the stage. In view of this public accusation against the Mannheim theater management of having "prepared and more than conceivably narrated an act of indecency in a Catholic rectory in all its details", we could not avoid the task of reviewing the play in question. To our great regret, we have to conclude that the performance of such a play is nothing other than a refined

is nothing other than a subtle and serious disparagement of the Catholic clergy, against which it is our duty to protest. We only want to emphasize that in the play a chaplain "comes to the coffee table in the Messornav, that neither of the two priests in the play has chosen his profession with the moral seriousness that the Church demands and his holiness prescribes, that the chaplain represents scandalous principles about the choice of profession, that on the one hand he behaves as an angry fanatic and yet on the other hand dances with a girl after obtaining the dispensation of the priest. At the end there is an "absolution", which is a degradation of the sacrament of penance. Considering the downright immoral character of the play, we believe that it is in the interests of public order and morality to take action against such abuse of a theater, and we urgently request that measures be taken to prevent it in the future. signed. Thomas. Keller." Should one regard such manifestations of the Catholic Church as a symptom of the growing self-confidence of the representatives of medieval views? Given the regressive nature of our "new course", such a view cannot be ruled out. Max Halbe will now, of course, "laudably submit" to Professor Schell's example and henceforth only represent the sentiments of the infallible Roman chair in his dramas.

*

Prof. Dr. Walter Simon, city councillor in Königsberg i. Pr., who is known in wide circles as a warm-hearted patron of the arts, announced a competition for ten thousand marks to win a new German folk opera for the German stage. This is probably one of the most gratifying manifestations of German interest in the arts for a long time. All German and German-Austrian composers may take part in the competition. Full-length operas which have not yet been performed and which deal with a German bourgeois subject, such as Goethe's "Hermann and Dorothea", are eligible. Material from more recent German or Prussian history, since Frederick the Great (for example Eleonore Prochaska), as well as freely invented material are also welcome. The works are to be sent postage paid in score, piano reduction and book to the chief director of the Leipzig City Theatres, Mr. Albert Goldberg, entrusted by the prize donor with the implementation of the competition, by July 1, 1901 at the latest, observing the usual regulations, about which the printed regulations of Prof. Dr. Walter Simon's competition provide more detailed information. These regulations will be sent to interested parties free of charge and postage upon written request by Mr. Goldberg, Leipzig, Neues Theater. The following gentlemen, who enjoy a well-established reputation in the theatrical world, have taken on the role of judges: Senior director Anton Fuchs, Munich, senior director Math.Schön, Karlsruhe, Großh. Hoftheater, senior director Hofrat Harlacher, Stuttgart, Kgl. Hoftheater, Hofkapellmeister Aug. Klughardt, Dessau, Herzogl. Hoftheater, Königl. Kapellmeister Prof. Mannstädt, Wiesbaden, Kgl. Theater, Prof. Arno Kleffel, Cologne, Stadttheater, and senior director Albert Goldberg, Leipzig, Stadttheater. It should be of particular value to the composers that the prize-winning opera will also be performed immediately at the Leipzig Stadttheater.

Mr. Dr. Erich Urban, our former music critic

A lively protest has been raised from respectable quarters against the way Dr. Erich Urban spoke here two weeks ago about Mrs. Carrefio and Mrs. Haasters. It was said that neither the sentence about Mrs. Carrefio's arms nor the one about Mrs. Haaster's marital love had any place in an art review. It seems that the indignation was also directed at me, the editor responsible for the magazine, who allowed such things to be printed in the paper. I owe the public an explanation. Dr. Erich Urban came to me some time ago and asked me to start his critical career in the "Magazin". I was reasonably pleased with the work he submitted for my consideration and, despite his youthfulness, I gave him a try. It went quite well at first. His reviews were not bad and met with some applause. This acclaim was the young man's undoing. It went to his head. It didn't make his reviews any better. Recently, I was forced to let the red pencil work on Mr. Urban's manuscripts in an unusual way. What would the complaining Mr. Bos and Mr. Woldemar Sacks say if they had seen what my red pencil has been doing over the last few weeks! Now one receives current reviews at the last moment before the end of a paper. You have to check them in a short time. My red pencil, which I usually use against Mr. Urban, failed in the criticized passages. I overlooked them. They therefore remained. I had already made the decision not to present Mr. Urban's reviews to the readers of the "Magazin" before the complaint reached me. The conclusion of the last review he wrote for us appears today.

Furthermore, I can only say that I regret having been mistaken about Mr. Erich Urban and that I am completely on the side of his accusers. Unfortunately, he has not been able to escape the influence of the critical nature that I have in mind in my editorial today, and which I strongly condemn. In his youthfulness, he has become an imitator of bad role models. There are enough of these role models. But these gentlemen are clever and know how to keep a sense of proportion. Mr. Urban did not understand such moderation. He did not merely imitate mistakes, but applied them in an enlarged form. He wanted to be quite amusing, and what he wrote with this intention became merely tactless.

But to those gentlemen who cannot forgive the fact that my red pencil slipped once, I wish that nothing worse ever happens to them in their lives.

For an announcement[1]

We intend to discontinue publication of the "Dramaturgische Blätter", a supplement to the "Magazin für Literatur", as of January 1, 1900. In doing so, we are responding to a very often expressed wish from the readers of this weekly publication. They were not sympathetic to a supplement dealing with the special issues of the stage and dramaturgy. When the current management founded the "Dramaturgische Blätter", they hoped that there would be a lively interest among stage members and others close to the theater in dealing with questions of their own art and its connection with other cultural tasks. Experience has not confirmed this, and the above "announcement" recently proves that the hopes cherished in this direction cannot count on fulfillment. It was not possible to achieve more active participation by members of the stage. However, publications such as the "Schiedsgerichtsverhandlungen des deutschen Bühnenvereins" (Arbitration Negotiations of the German Stage Association) put the patience of other readers to the test in the belief that they were serving a special class. These readers will prefer to see the space previously occupied by such pedantic-legal, lengthy and, for non-stage members, completely uninteresting discussions filled with things that belong to the field of literature and art.

1 I hereby inform the general public that our contractual relationship with the "Dramaturgische Blätter" has been terminated by me as of January 1, 1900.

The President of the German Stage Association: Count von Hochberg

I have been the editor of this magazine for more than three years. I took up my task in July 1897 with the best of expectations. My intention was, without any concession in any direction, to express a certain view of the world and of life and to serve contemporary art and public life in the spirit of this view. I was reluctant to use any other means to achieve my goals than the inner strength of this view itself, in whose value I believe and for which I will always devote my life. I was particularly reluctant to achieve an effect by gaining "sonorous" names that are well established with the public or by exploiting sensational events. It was my intention from the outset to stand up for the cause I represent within the framework of this magazine for as long as this is possible through its content alone. More important to me than "illustrious" names was to introduce newly emerging talents to the public, who in my opinion were justified; I attached particular importance to giving a voice to those who, as lone fighters with their views, had little prospect of expressing them elsewhere.

I can leave it to the unbiased readers of this magazine to judge the extent to which I have fulfilled my intentions. I have not lacked the approval of those whose judgment is of the highest value to me. The friends I have seen rise to my cause have been able to give me complete satisfaction over some of the hostility I have naturally received.

From the very beginning of my editorial work, I was under no illusion that my intentions could only be achieved through sacrifices of the most varied kind and, as the circumstances were, only through difficult struggles. I can say that for three years I willingly made these sacrifices and took on these battles for the sake of the cause. The approval of many an estimable personality has helped me to overcome many difficulties. Making these sacrifices any longer is beyond my strength.

The "Magazin für Literatur" was founded in the year of Goethe's death. More than anything else, the fact that it has maintained its existence to this day testifies to the importance of this existence. Under different management, it will continue to serve art, science and public life.

I am not handing over the reins with a light heart, because over the past three years I have become more attached to this magazine than I would like to say. It has been a matter close to my heart, but I am stepping down without bitterness. I am aware that I have worked in the way that was only possible for me. I carry within me the feeling that my goals have an inner justification and that I will continue to find ways and means to dedicate my life to them. May those who have become my friends through this magazine accept here the expression of my deepest gratitude. Through my editorship, an inner necessity has brought me together with many people from whom an external event, such as giving up this editorship, can no longer separate me.

The two gentlemen who are approaching the task of continuing this magazine with full, fresh energy are known to their readers through their proven collaborations. Johannes Gaulke, the subtle and energetic art writer and critic, and the no less esteemed writer and artist Franz Philips will take on this task. I place the leadership in their hands with the best wishes that they may be granted abundant success. I cannot, however, refrain from adding my heartfelt thanks to all the friends who have supported me and to the staff and friends of the "Magazin", as well as to S. Cronbach and his publishing house, who have met me with true understanding, interest in the cause and willingness to make sacrifices. The fact that the publishing house is being continued by this company gives me particular satisfaction.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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