The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Play in five acts by Georg Hirschfeld
Performance at the Deutsches Theater, Berlin

The artist depicts things and events as they appear to him through his temperament. I had to think of this idea of Zola's when I went home after the performance of Georg Hirschfeld's new drama, "Agnes Jordan". Hirschfeld wants to portray the fate of several people in five pictures. The delicately sensitive, education-loving Agnes Sommer has been well fed with the writings of the classics and carefully nurtured with wise teachings by her uncle, the idealistic Adolf Krebs. This uncle was born for higher things. He wanted to be a musician. Circumstances have made him a merchant. He suffers from a misguided life. Every step he takes takes him backwards instead of forwards. The poet sensibly gives him the name Cancer. He has no luck with his educational experiments either. Despite her education, she falls for the crude Gustav Jordan, who reads nothing but bawdy novels and the "Vossische Zeitung". Georg Hirschfeld describes how these two people lived together in 1865, the year of their marriage, in 1873, 1882 and finally in 1896. However, he did not pick these four widely separated years out of a period of 31 years at random. For in the first, we learn how a ruthless egotist is tender in his way with the woman he has won. The year 1873 gives him the opportunity to let all his brutality shine. Good Uncle Krebs is on the verge of bankruptcy and wants the money back that he lent his clean-cut nephew to start a bourgeois existence. He is therefore showered with the most exquisite cruelties. In 1882, the marital relationship between Agnes and Gustav Jordan had grown to such an extent that the tender-hearted wife ran away from her husband and could only be persuaded to return to his house because their eldest son was seriously ill and needed his mother. In 1896, the woman, brutalized for three decades, experiences the good fortune that her son unites with her friend's daughter. In my opinion, however, Hirschfeld could have chosen any other year from the period mentioned and depicted the fate of his couple in that year. For the events mentioned are of far too little interest to us after the conflict in the first act. We become increasingly tired and finally no longer want to follow along. My feeling does not demand a plot rich in details; but it wants a need to be satisfied which the poet himself has aroused. If I ask someone a question that he has aroused in me through his speech, I want a clear answer that deals only with the subject of my question. If he then answers me all sorts of things that have hardly anything to do with my question, I become unwilling. And Hirschfeld arouses a question in me. After the first act, I want to know how the relationship between the two people whose character he has indicated must develop. All I learn is that Gustav Jordan treats his wife roughly and makes love to every maid who comes into the house. I expect a decision in the fifth act. Something should happen that could be a sufficient answer to the question. Instead, people talk about the new age, the new people and the new art. I know of few dramas whose fifth act is as superfluous as that of "Agnes Jordan". Agnes has had to put up with her husband's brutal instincts for 31 years; she will continue to do so. Everything that Uncle Adolf has planted in her soul has gradually withered; her death will mean little. For she has been dying for 31 years. The difference between complete annihilation and the life she leads in 1897 is the smallest imaginable. The way she is slowly dying is as uncomfortable as when a flame slowly diminishes because there is no more oil. We would rather extinguish such a flame before we see it die so slowly.

Such a slow dying away may often occur in life. And for a subtle observer, the details of such dying will certainly be attractive objects of observation. Hirschfeld is such a fine observer. But he is merely an observer. He has no desire to do violence to things. When he sees an event, he accepts it and presents it as it is. And it seems to him a sin to leave out any indifferent detail that confronts him. That is why he is not a dramatist. Such a man takes up a conflict in life and develops it as his temperament, his personal inclination demands. He switches gears with the event in an autocratic manner. He shows how he conceives the context of events. He has little respect for common reality. A playwright would have placed Gustav and Agnes in situations in which their opposing characters clash wildly. His temperament would have led him to do so. Because this is my view, that is why I remembered Zola's aforementioned performance after the performance of "Agnes Jordan". Hirschfeld does not depict things as they appear when they are seen through a temperament, but as they appear when they are seen through a complete lack of temperament. This poet is a smooth mirror that reproduces everything that is placed in front of its surface unchanged. The images he creates are clean and clear, but they lack any magic of personality. The events in the Jordan family are depicted as if through an artificial apparatus. Hirschfeld provides documents for the cultural historian, but not a work of art. What matters to him is fidelity in the reproduction of what he has observed, but not artistic design. I can imagine that under certain circumstances such a faithful depiction can also attract me. But in the first act of Hirschfeld's work all the preparations are made for a drama of which we then see nothing. The poet owes us this drama. Water is certainly a good drink, but if someone invites us to a bottle of good wine and then serves us water, let him see how he gets on with us. We will not put up with such treatment.

In these lines, I don't want to contribute to the old and eternally young school bickering about idealism and naturalism. But I must say that I find it an indelicacy against me as a spectator when someone expects me to observe the pure, unadulterated truth of nature in all its details between the three artificial walls of the stage. In the stage space I have artificial conditions before me. Life in all its fullness does not enter there. If the illusion of life is nevertheless to be created before me, the missing element must be added by a personality, the poet, of his own accord. Marionettes are lifeless. Nevertheless, I like to watch their play when the director of a puppet show has good ideas. I want to hear what the playwright's spirit creates from the stage. A personality should speak to me, not an observer of life without temperament, to whom things say nothing special that he could reveal to me in his work.

Much more interesting to me than Hirschfeld's drama were the actors who performed it. The performance is an artistic achievement of a high order. Emanuel Reicher once wrote to Hermann Bahr: "We no longer want to play effective scenes, but whole characters, with the whole conglomerate of upper, lower and secondary characteristics that are attached to them ... We want to be nothing other than people who, through the simple natural sound of human language, convey from within themselves the feelings of the characters to be portrayed, regardless of whether the organ is beautiful and melodious, whether the gesture is graceful, whether this or that fits into this or that subject, but whether it is compatible with the simplicity of nature and whether it shows the audience the image of a whole person." What he demands of himself with these words: in his portrayal of Gustav Jordan, he has fulfilled it with every word, with every look, with every expression, with every movement. All the upper, lower and secondary characteristics of the crude, selfish, philistine journeyman were expressed. Everything is convincing. One has the feeling in every detail that of all the possible ways of expressing Jordan's character traits, the one that Emanuel Reicher has found is the very best. And the basic trait of this personality is grasped and realized by the actor in such a way that there is never the slightest suggestion that it could be anything else. Agnes Sorma, who portrays all the characteristics of Agnes Jordan, from the loving devotion to the higher goods of the spiritual life and the inner, fine feeling of gratitude towards Uncle Adolf, ennobled by the most tender naivety, to the noble, proud attitude towards the man and the touching surrender to her fate, stands by her side with stylish, poetic truth and great artistry. Hermann Müller's performance is not on a par with these two actors, as he portrays Uncle Krebs too one-sidedly as a snivelling man depressed by his fate. If this character is to be convincing, a touch of active idealism must be added - at least quietly - to his nature. You have to see that he has a sympathetic goal in mind as he moves forward: then you can mourn with him over his involuntary backward step.

Comedy in four acts by Rudolf Stratz
Performance at the Königliches Schauspielhaus, Berlin

Erna Textor acts as the "new woman" for as long as she can remember, Greek and Latin phrases bubble from her lips and, in order to study chemistry, commercial and exchange law, she has moved to a small university town in southern Germany. She has inherited an aniline factory from her father and not only wants to be able to keep an eye on the chemists who work in her factory, but also to collect the money she earns from aniline production with understanding. She defends the equal rights of men and women with insight and almost feminine eloquence. She demands admission to the lecture halls from a college consisting of pedantic, narrow-minded professors of comedy and is unhappy that the youngest, smartest professor, who even appears in a lieutenant's uniform, is the fiercest opponent of her admission to university studies. She has been betrothed by her father, who is of course dead at the beginning of the play, to a boring man called Matthias Leineweber, just to be unsympathetic enough. None of this concerns us. For we know as soon as the first words have been spoken that Erna will no longer be the "new woman" at the end of the play, but will sink into the arms of the professor in the officer's uniform, who closes the gates of the university to her, as a bride. However, Rudolf Stratz is not allowed to tell us this as soon as the curtain rises. Otherwise there would be no comedy. But he must hint at it. That is what dramatic technique demands. The fact that we see through these hints from the outset is probably due to our naivety. We are so inclined to assume that comedies end with marriages. Why should Rudolf Stratz, of all people, depart from this custom? Between the events that make up the main plot, students drink beer, sing songs, go to the cramming floor and skip classes. In German comedies, the students naturally drink, play truant and cram even more than in reality. This is the result of the cursed idealism in art, which wants to put everything in an ideal light. In the time that Erna Textor doesn't fill with clever speeches and the students don't fill with drinking beer, professors' wives talk stupid things. An eminent private scholar drinks so much wine that he takes an overcoat for a man, and his wife hides his boots so that he can't go to the pub. Also, a young lady with backfish manners, who is a dentist by profession, teaches a daft student about the ideals of life and the benefits of work.

Excellent actors play in the "comedy". Miss Poppe makes the impossible role of Erna almost possible; Mr. Keßler plays the professor in his officer's uniform to perfection. Mr. Vollmer portrays the private scholar and drunkard with such art that we forget the character created by Stratz, and Mrs. Conrad as the dentist cannot be praised enough. The "Lustspiel" is a runaway hit, but because of the excellent performance, once you have gotten into it, you have to see it through to the end.

Four-act comedy by Benno Jacobson. Music by Gustav Steffens
Performance at the Goethe Theater, Berlin

On November 20, I had the choice of either going to the Residenztheater to see the play "Dorina" by Rovetta or enjoying the "Gebrüder Währenpfennig" at the Goethe-Theater. As a member of the German Goethe Society and a former employee of the Goethe Archive in Weimar, I naturally decided to go to the Goethe Theater. One always likes to see a healthy farce; and the Goethe Theater will only bring the very best in the field of farce, I thought to myself. But that's where I got off to a good start - this prejudice against the name Goethe made for an extremely boring evening. The "idea" of the "Währenpfennig brothers" would still work. The one miserly brother, who wears old-fashioned clothes and only drinks wheat beer, and the other, who swims in champagne and is a cheerful bon vivant of the latest style in every other respect, are not at all bad contrasting figures. I can understand why two such different natures should clash. But the stale jokes that appear within this framework, the witless allusions to all sorts of contemporary things are tiresome, even soporific, because of their blandness. And the ending is the most unbelievable thing I have ever seen in the theater. The older brother has sworn enmity against the younger brother because the latter has called him a simple merchant. So the older brother says: the simple merchant will never speak a word to you again. But the brothers must be reconciled. So the older brother becomes a councillor of commerce. Now he is no longer a simple merchant. It's not against his oath if he talks to his brother again. There is a Kalau after all.

Comedy in three acts by Max Bernstein
Performance at the Deutsches Theater, Berlin

A noble spirit with honest artistic aspirations has revived the fine comedy idea of Moreto, Calderon's contemporary. The girl who is called to rule a nation and who wants to establish a realm of virtue in place of the realm of evil passions forms the center of Moreto's "Donna Diana". Such a girl is also the subject of Max Bernstein's "Girl's Dream". In both plays, the natural instincts within the girl's soul triumph over the notions of virtue caused by a false education, which are conceived as coldness in the face of the passion of love. The girl wants to remain a virgin, but in the end she sails into the sea of love with fervor. With all the means of a refined dramatic technician, Moreto lays his problem bare and develops it with the compelling necessity and with all the criss-crossing and cross-curves that are characteristic of nature when it brings forth one of its creatures and allows it to grow. Max Bernstein intelligently constructs his drama with the transparent clarity of the clairvoyant, all too clairvoyant psychologist. With him, imagination always lags a few steps behind reason. Bernstein knows all the details of the girl's soul. He is a psychologist. However, he is not a completely unbiased observer of the individual being, which defies any general formula, but a dogmatist who has formed certain general concepts and gives them form. The feelings Bernstein puts into his Leonor of Aragon are abstract, general thoughts about the girl's heart. We have before us a general concept, not a living individuality. You don't understand why this individual case has to be the way it is. During the performance I could not escape the feeling that there is no compelling necessity in all these events. It is all arbitrary. And the verses are also arbitrary. Nowhere could I feel that verse is the natural way in which the poet must express himself.

What the poet lacks in the art of individualization is replaced by the leading actors in the performance of the Deutsches Theater. Agnes Sorma brings the abstract idea of the Princess of Aragon to life so perfectly that we truly believe we have an individual being before us. And Josef Kainz speaks Bernstein's verses in such a way that we forget their unnaturalness. Guido Thielscher plays a master of ceremonies as a small masterpiece of acting art.

Drama in three acts by Philipp Langmann
Performance at the Lessing Theater, Berlin

A few weeks ago, Philipp Langmann was criticized by none other than the officials of a Brno accident insurance company. They were checking whether he knew how to add horizontal and vertical number sequences correctly. Because Philipp Langmann served them for a monthly fee of seventy guilders. Today, Philipp Langmann is the darling of Berlin and Viennese theater audiences. His "Bartel Turaser" was performed at the same time in the Vienna Volkstheater and the Berlin Lessing-Theater; and in both cities the audience is aware that it has seen the work of a great poet. Here in Berlin, if a critic grumbles and utters a word of censure against the work, he may hear the worst things. He may have sinned up to now, however much opposition and grumbling he has to object to. You can forget that. But if he has something against the "Bartel Turaser", then he is simply labeled a brash guy.

This is a nice touch in the not always pleasant physiognomy of our theater audience. It's nice to be able to overlook major flaws alongside major merits. You have to if you want to praise Philipp Langmann's drama unreservedly. After all, the play is only a change to the future. But those who do not accept the change unconditionally have a poor understanding of the future. Philipp Langmann is a solvent playwright. He will strip away the tendentious morality he proclaims to us, the dramatic clumsiness that occurs in his work; and he will continue to develop the fine view he is able to cast into people's souls.

The Bartel Turaser, who swears perjury in order to be able to provide bread for his sick child, and who then presents himself to the court as a perjurer when the death of his beloved child gives rise to a feeling of remorse: he is a character that only a true poet could create; but the way Langmann presents him is an arbitrarily constructed figure. The poet is less interested in showing how a person's feelings can be transformed than in ensuring that good triumphs in the end.

Langmann has something that must necessarily result in success with the audience. This audience is not at all averse to being informed about the abuses of our social order. But the matter must not go too far. The excitement about existing misfortune must not spoil the good supper that one wants to eat after the theater. And the audience is right. The stage is not a moral institution after all.

Langmann, like the audience, is caught in the middle between the full truth and the consolation of the "practical Christian" that the good Lord and a clear conscience will take care of everything. Is it really necessary to spoil people's appetite by telling them that poor people eat dogs to banish hunger? Langmann does not say such things. He doesn't say them because he doesn't feel them vividly enough. He is honest as an artist. He is no more indignant himself than he is when he shows it to his audience. His feelings are not extreme. He is a temperate sensitive person. His temperament does not exceed that of the masses. He only has the gift of effectively shaping what the masses feel. He does not disturb the sound sleep of the Philistines. But he is a poet who commands their respect. And rightly so. He forces a respect from them that does them honor.

A conference held on January 23, 1898 before the performance of "L'Intruse" (The Environs) at the Berlin Dramatic Society

People, who only know how to interpret what affects them in the usual, traditional way, felt nothing special when they first heard the language spoken by Maurice Maeterlinck seven years ago. They were unfamiliar with the world he was telling them about, and so his revelations from this world sounded strange to them. They attributed what came from a new way of feeling to a morbid, confused imagination.

But right from Maeterlinck's first appearance, there were a few fine connoisseurs in France and Germany who had a sense of the world from which the new prophet drew. These were the spirits with the beautiful ability to sense the great, even if they could not yet grasp it with complete clarity. They sensed that Maeterlinck was talking about things they had long had a dark longing to see. They did not know what they were longing for; they only knew that they were missing something. They did not realize what they were missing. And now, when Maeterlinck appeared, they realized that he was talking about what they were longing for. His words sounded familiar to them because they only had to ask their own souls about their meaning.

If these few enthusiasts had been asked at the time what words they would like to use to express Maeterlinck's essence, they would have fallen silent. A drunken enthusiasm had seized them, and they spoke of it in full-sounding words.

They, these drunken admirers, were the true Maeterlinck community. Because what he felt could not be communicated in words. Everything he wrote was there only to quietly hint at what lived in his soul. He could only give signs of what he felt; and through these signs he could not at first cause language to resonate, only people's minds.

Maeterlinck is not primarily an artist. The artistic means he uses are imperfect, almost childlike. Those who long for perfect art cannot derive any satisfaction from Maeterlinck's poetry. He has a religious nature. He believes that there are infinite depths to the human soul and that man can descend into these infinite depths. Then he finds within himself powers that enable him to embrace the great unknown, which all ages have worshipped as a divine.

Whoever awakens this soul force within himself, the most mundane things in life take on a mysterious, divine meaning.

As a poet, Maeterlinck only wants to express what he sees as a religious man; the beauty of external form is unimportant to him, he wants his poems to reveal the marvelous and sublime in the world, the great, unknown powers that are hidden in things.

The home of the soul is in the divine, and when it finds this home, it suddenly comes to life and lives the deepest life that makes man a true man. An unspeakable change happens to the soul that has found its home. Like a slumbering genius, the divine power rests in the soul, and whoever awakens the genius, all things respond to him in a divine language. The most insignificant phenomena suddenly shine in a new light; they announce the eternal.

Mankind is constantly striving to put the divine genius within itself to sleep. Maeterlinck believes that we are living in a time in which people are approaching a great awakening of their souls. People are already beginning to turn away from the infinite refinement of the senses and reason that the last few centuries have brought us.

This refinement has extinguished the divine light in the depths of the soul. Our eyes today - whether armed with microscope and telescope or not - see things that no one could have imagined centuries ago; our minds conceive of connections that only a short time ago everyone would have relegated to the realm of fables if a fantastic mind had spoken of them. An infinity penetrates us through our senses, through our reason.

But both the senses and reason deprive things of the splendor of the divine. To the clear-sighted, divinely sensitive soul, nature with all its things and phenomena is also divine. But the senses stand between the divinity of nature and the divinity of the soul. They show us the world in an undivine way. We ask of all things: where do they come from? - and let our senses, our intellect, give us the answer. Maeterlinck sees a time approaching in which souls will allow things to affect them without the mediation of the senses and the intellect. He believes that the realm of the soul will expand daily. The soul will rise again to the surface of humanity and will approach things directly. Man will live a more real, a fuller life again when he no longer clings to the undivine, but feels a divine in the smallest things, in the rustling of leaves, in the voice of birds, indeed in every sound and in the most insignificant word spoken by the simple, naive mind.

Souls will need neither words nor deeds to understand each other when they have freed themselves from the sole dominion of the senses and the intellect. Not the meaningful word, not the powerful deed will form a bond from person to person, but the unspeakable, the inaudible will pass from soul to soul. What must forever remain a secret to words will become manifest life. People will be closer to their brothers because no mediator will come between the souls, and they will be closer to nature because no cover will conceal its revealed secrets.

They will understand the babble of the child, the language of animals, plants and all things more deeply and more subtly when they have discovered the home of the soul.

A period of humanity Maeterlinck longs for, such as the ancient Egyptians went through at a certain time or the Indians.

He feels unsatisfied by times in which intelligence and external beauty prevail. At such times, he lacks something that man desires; secret connections are cut off. When Maeterlinck sits in our theaters today, he feels as if he has been transported among barbarians. There he sees the betrayed husband who kills out of jealousy, there he sees the citizen fighting for his honor, he sees all the crude things that irritate the senses and set the mind in motion, but he does not see the wonderful divine that flows towards us every moment from everyday things.

Jacob Boehme and other mystics come to mind when one hears Maeterlinck express his basic feelings.

Kill the senses and the inner power of the soul will open up to you: this is his most secret belief. Only people of his kind can understand that Jacob Boehme did not need God approaching with thunder and lightning to recognize the mystery of the world, but that this dawned on him at the sight of a pewter bowl. The great mystic saw the truly divine in the most mundane object, as it were, with his eyes closed.

The significant word spoken by the blind grandfather in the drama we will see today is drawn from deep within the religious essence of Maeterlinck's soul. The blind man will see because his senses do not prevent him from looking into the mysteries of nature: this is what the poet says. Where the others, sitting around the table with the blind grandfather, perceive a faint hint, a simple nightingale's song, the sound of scythes, the falling of leaves, the mysterious power of death is revealed to the one whose eyes are closed, creeping up to take his daughter. The blind man calls out to the sighted: "You are blind if you do not perceive the uninvited guest who is slowly entering our house. He, who no longer sees, and the child, whose senses have not yet opened up to the world: they perceive what those who see and those who understand do not recognize. At the moment when the mother dies, the child, whose birth has brought her death, cries out for the first time.

Those who want to understand Maeterlinck must be able to renounce the sobriety of the senses and the intellect for a short time. There is nothing to grasp here with reason. And the usual artistic judgment must be silenced. Everything rests on feeling the great unknown in nature and saying to oneself that a prophet wants to proclaim the divine here, not unfold the dramatic in the usual sense.

What Maeterlinck does not say, but only hints at, is what he actually wants to say.

He wants - according to his own admission - to awaken a completely different psychology than the ordinary one. In his opinion, this ordinary psychology has appropriated the beautiful name of the soul for endeavors that are only concerned with those phenomena of the soul that are closely related to matter. Maeterlinck wants to move people one degree higher. When we used to speak of all the mysterious things, of presentiments, of the treacherous impression that the first meeting of a person makes on us, of a decision made by an unknown, instinctive side of human nature, of inexplicable and yet existing sympathies and antipathies between people, these phenomena were easily passed by, only rarely did they arouse the interest of serious minds. One had no idea of the immeasurable force with which they weighed on life. One was only interested in the interplay of visible, pumping passions and external events.

Whoever seeks this familiar play of clumsy passions and external events that fall into the gross senses will remain unsatisfied with Maeterlinck.

Those to whom Maeterlinck is able to open the inner eye with which he himself sees will find in him the deeply religious personality who wants to proclaim to us in his own way the eternal powers in the world.

Drama by Maurice Maeterlinck. German by O.E. Hartleben
Second performance of the Berliner Dramatische Gesellschaft at the Residenz-Theater, Berlin

The characterization of Maeterlinck, which I tried to give in a conference preceding the performance of "The Uninvited", can be found at the beginning of this page. I would like to describe the performance as an outstanding theatrical event. It was the third time that this peculiar little drama had been seen on a German stage. Of the first two performances I know only eyewitness accounts. According to them, I must assume that on January 23 Maeterlinck's creation had the success it deserved for the first time in Germany.

I do not need to give a synopsis of the play because it appeared in Otto Erich Hartleben's excellent translation in No. 2 of this journal. This translation is a masterly one. In French, Maeterlinck's simple, everyday sentences have the effect of announcing great things as if they were self-evident. Simple German phrases had to be found to have the same effect. Hartleben has succeeded in this.

The drama will only be effective from the stage if it succeeds in creating the religious mood that emanates from it. If I can trust my perceptions, this was the case to a high degree last Sunday.

Otto Erich Hartleben has devoted himself to rehearsing the drama with dedicated zeal. At almost every rehearsal I witnessed the effort he made to bring about a worthy performance. I was also able to observe the work of Gustav Rickelt, the director of the Residenz Theater. He responded to the character of the play with a fine understanding and sought to bring it out in the performance.

When I speak of the performance, I must first and foremost remember Hans Pagay. He played the blind grandfather. In my opinion, he portrayed the sighted blind man with the solemnity that is characteristic of this character. In important places he hit the note, which must do more here than the sound of the word. In second place, I would like to mention Josephine Sorger, who already aroused interest in the first performance of the Dramatische Gesellschaft. She played Lux in Felix Dörmann's "Ledigen Leuten" with the kind of perfection that one only finds in actors who are said to have "stage blood". This time she played Ursula, one of the sisters sitting around the table with their blind grandfather. If I had to describe Josephine Sorger's talent in one word, I think the most descriptive would be: sympathetic. There is a lot of soul in her voice. And this soul had an atmospheric effect in her portrayal of Ursula. The father and uncle were played by Gustav Rickelt and Eugen Heiske. They went to great lengths. However, it is not easy to find the tone in which the everyday personalities have to speak in this mood-heavy play.

The sultry mood expressed in the play was worked out as well as was possible with the means available. One would have to approach the matter with the most modern, most perfect 'theater apparatus. The mysterious steps of death creeping closer and closer could then act as an allusion to the deep feelings that man has in the solemn hours of the soul, in which it immerses itself in that which has never become and will never pass away, in which time and space disappear and the weaving in the imperishable gains a blissful existence.

Drama by Gunnar Heiberg
Performance by the Berliner Dramatische Gesellschaft at the Residenz-Theater, Berlin

The "Uninvited" was followed by Gunnar Heiberg's "Balcony". I have a very special relationship with this poet. When I saw his "King Midas" in Vienna ten years ago, I was half crazy. I came out of the theater with an unlimited Heiberg crush. I couldn't go home, I sat down enthusiastically in the nearest pub, had a pen and ink handed to me and stammered words on the paper. - I wrote "The weather lights of a new era" on it. I gave them to a friend who edited a magazine - the kind that a hundred people, i.e. nobody, read. That's when they appeared. Then I went to my friends, all intelligent people. You have to go in there, I told them. They went in and laughed at me. They treated me like a child's head.

I've grown older since then. But the derisive laughter that could be heard continuously last Sunday while the "Balcony" was being played had something hurtful for me. For me, Heiberg is a poet for whom I forgive his vices for the sake of his virtues.

There is Julie, the woman who can love brilliantly and wants to be loved, and who, through the sincerity of her need for love, becomes a cynic in the sense that Nietzsche wants cynicism to be understood. She is married to Reßmann, the disgusting man. With Abel, the scholar, the enthusiast who serves humanity, she cheats on the old disgusting man, Reßmann. When he surprises her with her lover, she introduces Abel as the buyer of the house she owns together with Reßmann. One of the features of this house is the balcony, which is cracked. Reßmann wants to show the buyer all the details of the house. He tramples on the cracked balcony to give him an idea of its strength. The balcony collapses and the disgusted man splits his skull. The lovers are rid of the disgusting husband. Julie and Abel thank the Creator for their freedom with folded hands. That is perhaps crude - if you only want truths for the well-meaning. Why did she marry this Reßmann if she detests him so much? - ask the well-meaning. Perhaps they are right. But rights are as cheap as blackberries.

Abel is a scholar. He works for humanity. He lectures them so that they may become perfect. But his relationship with the love-thirsty Julie grows cold. She is happy with him. But only until the man comes whose passion overwhelms her. A man who has retained his physical strength alongside his spirituality. She cheats on the second man with him. And he behaves impeccably as a deceived philosopher. He resigns himself to his fate. What is the fact that he has lost the heart of his beloved wife compared to the fact that we all have to die one day - that means parting, not only from a beloved wife, but from all the joys of existence?

Smart people have figured out that the drama is a satire on love, and still other smart people think it's a parody of Ibsen's and Björnson's dramatic style. For my part, they may be right. I see in the play a piece of life that takes place between people who follow their hearts. They don't play any more comedy than this imperfect life needs, but this necessary play with all the cynicism it can't do without.

Hans Pagay played Reßmann, the disgusting character, to great effect. During rehearsals, he didn't want to believe that he was going to smash his head because he wanted to portray the balcony to the house buyer as firmly as possible. Through his acting, he also seems to have suggested this opinion to the audience.

The cynical, sincere woman was played by Mila Steinheil with all the subtlety that this role requires. I think people will be talking about this actress for a long time to come. She has an acting power whose limits cannot yet be imagined. She has found her way into the role of Julie, so that one believes the rarest things about her. Not everything came out on Sunday. How could the artists not become self-conscious when people were laughing incessantly down there in the stalls! But at the dress rehearsal, we were all serious, in a very peaceful mood: she played a Julie that we will never forget.

Willy Froböse played Antonio, the third, with whom Julie cheats on the second, 'Abel. One can imagine that someone else, whose individuality is better suited to this role, would bring it out better. But Froböse has achieved something that is at least worthy of recognition. The fact that the audience's laughter muscles were irritated to the highest degree during his performance was detrimental to him. Hermann Böttcher played Abel. I don't think he did justice to the role. It doesn't suit him.

Neither the effort that Otto Erich Hartleben nor Gustav Rickelt had put into the preparation received the reward they deserved. Everything was drowned in laughter.

They sat for days and prepared a serious play, and in reality they had prepared an illusion.

A tragedy by Hermann Sudermann
Performance at the Deutsches Theater, Berlin

Yesterday, the play for which the Berlin authorities have made such an involuntary advertisement went on stage at the Deutsches Theater: Sudermann's "Johannes". It is not often that a theatrical event is awaited with such curiosity as yesterday's performance. After my first impression, I would like to be reserved in my judgment of the drama. Especially as the whole performance suffered from the influence of an indisposition of the main actor (Josef Kainz as Johannes). Only this much seems certain to me: the powerful, confident mastery of everything that is effective on stage, which we always admired in Sudermann, is also evident in this play. But the action remains stuck in the theatrical, in the outwardly scenic; the dramatic in the higher sense of the word is missing. There is no dramatic linking and development of events at all. I will come back to the play in the next issue, when I have read it and seen it again. Because I don't want to be unfair to Sudermann's latest achievement.

The story of John the Baptist is the prelude to the powerful drama that unfolds in the life of the founder of the Christian religion. We have no other interest in the personality of the Baptist than that of the immature herald of the one who was to come. "Repent, the kingdom of heaven is at hand," said John to the Jews. He did not know what this kingdom of heaven would bring. He was never more than "the voice of a preacher in the wilderness", who prepared the way for the Lord and "made his paths straight". He was an instrument in the hand of God to prepare his children for the teacher of love. He did not yet understand anything of the Savior's mind. He had no idea that those who walk in guilt must be forgiven because love is more powerful than wrath. He did not foresee that Jesus would want to save sinners, he believed: "The axe is already laid to the root of the trees. Therefore, whatever tree does not bear good fruit will be cut down and thrown into the fire." He thought of Jesus: "He has his shovel in his hand, he will sweep the floor and gather the wheat into his barn, but he will burn up the chaff with everlasting fire." This is how a Jewish rabbi imagined the Redeemer.

The man who stammeringly proclaims what a dark premonition shows him in a false light is not a tragic personality. The meaning of the legend of John is that God's purposes are wise and that the Creator of the world uses his children as guides even where they do not know which paths they are taking. Next to this meaning, everything else we are told about John pales into insignificance. The fact that the Baptist was killed by the wrath of Herodias is a feature of the legend that we could do without. This death seems like a coincidence. It has no connection with what interests us about the figure of John.

Huß is a figure who lends himself to tragedy, not Johannes. The forerunner of a reformer only appears tragic if he comes too early and perishes because the time is not yet ripe for his goals. John, however, is himself immature for the goals he serves. He is therefore actually an uninteresting personality. As a human being, we are completely indifferent to him.

But it would be possible to turn John into a figure that arouses our interest. Whoever wants to do this must completely transform the personality of which legend and history speak. He must present us with a John who does not speak of the one who is to come, but who believes that he already has the good news; who is imbued with his mission as the Messiah. Such a John must be equipped with the awareness that he fulfills what the time expects. And then he must be confronted by the greater, the true fulfiller. John would now have to see that he was an erring man. This John would have to perish from self-knowledge. From the awareness of his immaturity. We would then be just against him, who is unjust against himself, because he is only a forerunner, not a fulfiller. We would say to ourselves that ripe fruit does not immediately fall from the tree.

Sudermann did not draw such a John. He has essentially dramatized the familiar figure of John. The necessary consequence is that his John depicts a series of episodes from the time of the Jewish people that precede the appearance of the Messiah. Successive events take place in the course of which the Rabbi John appears again and again. These events are depicted with the great art that we have long learned to appreciate in Sudermann. But what we should expect from the whole structure of the drama is missing. We cannot be more interested in the John of this drama than in the legendary John. He comes, talks, leaves, comes back, rejects Salome's lecherous courtship as a moral man and is finally beheaded. All this happens alongside many other things. There is no necessary connection between this other and John. There is nothing in the figure of the Baptist that pushes the one event towards the other. There is no dramatic tension.

All the people John encounters are more interesting than John himself.

Herodias, the sinner who has run away from her husband to marry his brother, Herod, is drawn with the most consummate mastery. Because she wants to rule, she has fled from the powerless Philip. Herod is weak and meek, but he is in a position that allows his wife to develop her nature as a ruler. A fine characterization is given in the words that the cynically proud woman hurls in Herod's face: "Do you take me for someone who comes to beg for a daily evening sacrifice of caresses? Look at me! Not the beloved, she is no more... Look at your mistress." And in the other: "What if you didn't hide the sinner from the people, but instead walked with her to the temple tomorrow with your head held high? Wouldn't it be a cheerful game if the high priest smiled at your brother's runaway wife with the same expression of the fatherly servant with which he once greeted the virtuous Mariamne (Herod's first, rejected wife)?"

Salome, the daughter of Herodias, is a small miracle of the dramatic art of individualization. She doesn't care what John preaches, she falls in love with the man. She woos him with all the strength of her awakening passion. And when he rejects her courtship, her love turns to raging hatred, so that she gladly makes her mother's will to corrupt the Baptist her own.

Herod himself, in his "cowardly weakness", is also excellently characterized. No less the individual types of the Jewish people. For me, Jehoshaphat, the cobbler who starves his wife and children to follow John, is a more interesting character than the Baptist himself. Eliakim, the wool merchant who always reads the law, and Pasur, the fruit merchant who regrets that he sells so little at the miserable Passover, are excellent characters. "He who trades in fruits and vegetables, neighbor, does not have it so easy to be a righteous man before the Lord. Your wool will last until Herod and his wife are gone."

Everything in this drama, apart from the main character, is significant and of great impact. The weakness with which John himself is shaped paralyzes everything.

Sudermann does allow John to express where his life would have to lead if it were to have a dramatic effect, but he has not shaped him in the sense of his words: "Truly, the time of my downfall has come, when enemies sing my praises and friends blaspheme me. What do you want from me? My end must be solitude and silence in it." That he must fall silent because someone greater is speaking must be John's tragic fate.

Sudermann's "Johannes" has been performed in various places in Germany. I have followed the reviews and reports on these performances. A curious fact emerges. The recording was the most different imaginable in the various places. It would now be interesting to collect the different voices. This could provide invaluable material for a staristics of taste. The "Dramaturgische Blätter" is the place to collect such material. I would therefore like to ask all those who are in a position to contribute to such a collection of material to do so. The information will then be processed accordingly here.

Trauerspiel in five acts by Franz Grillparzer
Performance at the Schiller Theater, Berlin

I have never been able to join in the unconditional Grillparzer rapture. I have often asked myself why the characters in his dramas leave me cold, even though they are characterized with such a high degree of poetic power. In Goethe's Iphigenia, Tasso and Gretchen I have the feeling that the deepest elements of human souls are revealed, that I am looking into the hidden depths of human nature. In Grillparzer's Sappho, Medea, Phaon, Melitta, Ottokar, the actual soul remains lifeless in itself, and its qualities appear to me like garments put on the invisible soul. That there is such passion, such pain, such dignity and renunciation as I encounter in Sappho is clear; I do not see these qualities oozing out of Sappho's soul. Only once did Grillparzer succeed in showing the true nature of a soul with all its contradictions: in Rachel in the "Jewess of Toledo". In this figure, I do not see a sum, an aggregate of human qualities, as in Sappho; I see a real soul.

Recently, I felt all this again when I attended the performance of Grillparzer's first work, "Ahnfrau", at the Schiller Theater. The management of this theater has earned a merit through this performance. The drama is particularly important for the knowledge of Grillparzer, and for a long time it could not be seen in Berlin.

A rigid fate, bending all human strength and goodness under a blind, wisdom-less necessity, is the driving force behind the events of this drama. The members of the Borotin household could be heroes or saints; their work cannot be beneficial, for the ancestress has transgressed and her sin continues to affect her entire family. I do not believe that Grillparzer was dishonest when he made blind fate the driving force behind his work of art. He did not want to experiment as Schiller did with his "Bride of Messina". He was a weak, will-less nature. He did not have the strength to say to himself: be your own master. He felt under the pressure of circumstances over which he had no power. He does not boldly take the helm of life and sail recklessly forward; he lets himself be carried by the waves wherever they take him. Such a feeling of dependence can be embodied with poetic truth by the idea of fate. This idea no longer appears in his later works. But there was no change in his basic feelings. He has merely subordinated himself to the general modern consciousness, which has nothing to do with the idea of destiny. The more modern conception of the world did not spring from within him as his own; he let it wash over him. A great poet dwelt in a weak-willed personality. This seems to me to characterize the Grillparzer phenomenon.