The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Chapter XXV

[ 1 ] A free "Dramatic Society" was associated with the magazine circle. It was not as closely associated with it as the "Freie literarische Gesellschaft"; but the same personalities were on the board as in this society; and I was immediately elected to it when I came to Berlin.

[ 2 ] The task of this society was to stage dramas that were not initially performed by the theaters due to their particular character, their being out of the usual taste and the like. It was no easy task for the board to cope with the many dramatic attempts by the "misjudged".

[ 3 ] The performances were organized in such a way that for each individual case an ensemble of actors was brought together from artists who had worked at various theatres. These were then used in morning performances on a rented stage or one provided free of charge by the management. The stage artists proved to be very willing to make sacrifices for this company, as it was not in a position to pay appropriate compensation due to its limited financial resources. But actors and theater directors at the time had no internal objections to performing works that were out of the ordinary. They just said that it couldn't be done in front of an ordinary audience in evening performances, because every theater would damage itself financially. The audience was simply not mature enough for the theaters to serve art alone.

[ 4 ] The activity connected with this dramatic society turned out to be one that suited me to a high degree. Especially the part that had to do with staging the plays. I took part in the rehearsals together with Otto Erich Hartleben. We felt that we were the actual directors. We designed the plays for the stage. This art in particular shows that all theorizing and dogmatizing is of no use if it does not emerge from a living sense of art that intuitively grasps what is generally stylish in the individual. The avoidance of the general rule is to be fully striven for. Everything that one is able to "do" in such a field must arise in the moment from a sure sense of style for the gesture, the arrangement of the scene. And what one then does, without any intellectual consideration, out of the feeling of style that is activated, has a beneficial effect on all the artists involved, whereas they feel that their inner freedom is impaired by a direction that comes from the intellect.

[ 5 ] I had to look back on the experiences I made in this field with much satisfaction in the time that followed.

[ 6 ] The first drama we performed in this way was Maurice Maeterlinck's "The Uninvited" (l'intruse). Otto Erich Hartleben had provided the translation. At the time, Maeterlinck was regarded by the aestheticists as the playwright who could bring the invisible, which lies between the coarser events of life, on stage before the suspecting spectator's soul. Maeterlinck made such use of what is otherwise called "events" in drama, of the way in which the dialog proceeds, that the things to be foreshadowed have a symbolic effect. It was this symbolizing quality that attracted many a taste at the time that had been repelled by the naturalism that preceded it. All those who sought "spirit" but did not want any forms of expression in which a "spiritual world" was directly revealed found satisfaction in a symbolism that used a language that did not express itself in a naturalistic way, but which only referred to a spiritual realm insofar as it manifested itself in a mystical, foreboding, indeterminately blurred manner. The less one could "clearly say" what lay behind the suggestive symbols, the more enchanted some became by them.

[ 7 ] I did not feel comfortable with this spiritual flickering. But it was still appealing to be involved in directing a drama like "The Uninvited". For it is precisely this kind of symbolism that requires a particularly high degree of stage direction, which is oriented in the way I have just described.

[ 8 ] And in addition, I had the task of introducing the performance with a short introductory speech (Conférence). At that time, this method, which was practiced in France, was also adopted in Germany for individual dramas. Not in the ordinary theater, of course, but in such undertakings as those in the direction of the "Dramatische Gesellschaft". This did not happen before every performance of this society, but rarely, when it was considered necessary to introduce the audience to an artistic intention that was unfamiliar to them. I found the task of this short stage speech satisfying for the reason that it gave me the opportunity to allow a mood to prevail in the speech that radiated from my own spirit. And that was dear to me in a human environment that otherwise had no ear for the spirit.

[ 9 ] Being inside the life of dramatic art was a very important thing for me at the time. I therefore wrote the theater reviews of the "Magazin" myself. I also had my own particular view of such "reviews", which, however, met with little understanding. I thought it unnecessary for an individual to make "judgments" about a drama and its performance. Such judgements as are usually made should actually be made by the audience alone.

[ 10 ] Whoever writes about a theatrical performance should allow the imaginary pictorial connections behind the drama to emerge before the reader in an artistic painting. In artistically formed thoughts, the reader should be presented with an idealized reinterpretation as the unconsciously living germ of his drama. For to me thoughts were never merely something through which one expresses the real in an abstract and intellectualistic way. I saw how artistic activity is possible in the formation of thoughts, as with colors, as in forms, as with stage means. And the person who writes about a theater performance should produce such a small work of thought art. But that such a thing should arise when a drama is presented to the audience seemed to me to be a necessary requirement of the life of art.

[ 11 ] Whether a drama is "good", "bad" or "mediocre" will become apparent from the tone and attitude of such a "thought-artwork". For this cannot be concealed in it, even if it is not said in a grossly judgmental way. What is an impossible artistic construction becomes vivid through thought-artistic reproduction. For although thoughts are presented there, they prove to be insubstantial if the work of art is not based on a true, living imagination.

[ 12 ] I wanted such a living interaction with living art in the "Magazin". This should have created something that did not make the weekly appear like something that theoretically discussed and judged art and intellectual life. It should be a link in this intellectual life, in this art itself.

[ 13 ] For everything that can be done for dramatic poetry through the art of thought is also possible for the art of acting. One can let arise in thought-fantasy what the art of directing puts into the stage setting; one can follow the actor in such a way, and let arise what lives in him, not criticizing, but "positively" representing. As a "writer", one then becomes a co-creator in the artistic life of the time, but not a "feared", "pitied" or even despised and hated "judge" standing in the corner. If this is carried out for all areas of art, then a literary-artistic journal will be inside in real life.

[ 14 ] But one always has the same experience with such things. If you try to bring them to the attention of people who are active as writers, they either don't respond to them at all because they contradict their habits of thought and they don't want to break out of them. Or they listen and then say:

[ 15 ] Yes, that's the right thing to do; but I've always done it that way. They don't even notice the distinction between what you want and what they've "always done".

[ 16 ] Wer seine einsamen geistigen Wege gehen kann, den braucht das alles nicht seelisch zu berühren. Wer aber in einem geistigen Menschenzusammenhang arbeiten soll, der wird seelisch recht gründlich ergriffen von diesen Verhältnissen. Insbesondere dann, wenn seine innere Richtung eine so feste, mit ihm verwachsene ist, daß er in einem Wesentlichen nicht von ihr abgehen kann Weder von meinen Darstellungen im «Magazin», noch von denen meiner Vorträge konnte ich damals innerlich befriedigt sein. Nur, wer sie heute liest und glaubt, daß ich Materialismus hatte vertreten wollen, der irrt sich vollständig. Das habe ich niemals gewollt.

[ 17 ] You can also see this clearly from the essays and lecture excerpts I have written. You only have to contrast the individual materialistic-sounding passages with others in which I speak of the spiritual, of the eternal. Thus in the article: "A Viennese Poet". There I say of Peter Altenberg: "What interests man most, who immerses himself in the eternal harmony of the world, seems to be alien to him... No light from the eternal ideas penetrates Altenberg's eyes..." ("Magazin" of July 17, 1897). And that this "eternal harmony of the world" cannot be meant to be a mechanical-materialistic one becomes clear from statements such as those in the essay on Rudolf Heidenhain (dated November 6, 1897): "Our conception of nature clearly strives towards the goal of explaining the life of organisms according to the same laws by which the phenomena of inanimate nature must also be explained. Mechanical, physical and chemical laws are sought in the animal and plant body. The same kind of laws that govern a machine should also be at work in the organism, only in an infinitely complicated and difficult to recognize form. Nothing should be added to these laws to make the phenomenon we call life possible ... The mechanistic view of the phenomena of life is gaining more and more ground. But it will never satisfy those who are capable of taking a deeper look at natural processes... The naturalists of today are too cowardly in their thinking. When they run out of wisdom in their mechanical explanations, they say that the matter cannot be explained for us... Bold thinking rises to a higher way of looking at things. It tries to explain in higher terms what is not mechanical. All our scientific thinking falls short of our scientific experience. The scientific way of thinking is highly praised today. It is said that we live in a scientific age. But basically this scientific age is the poorest that history has to record. It is characterized by a clinging to mere facts and mechanical explanations. Life is never comprehended by this way of thinking, because such a comprehension requires a higher mode of conception than the explanation of a machine."

[ 18 ] Is it not completely self-evident that whoever speaks in this way of the explanation of "life" cannot think of "spirit" in the materialistic sense?

[ 19 ] But I often speak of the "spirit" "emerging" from the bosom of nature. What is meant by "spirit"? Everything that produces "culture" from human thinking, feeling and willing. To speak of a different "spirit" would have been completely pointless at the time. For no one would have understood me if I had said that what appears in man as spirit and in nature is based on something that is neither spirit nor nature, but the perfect unity of both. This unity: creative spirit, which brings matter to existence in its creation and is thereby at the same time matter, which presents itself entirely as spirit: this unity is understood through an idea that was as far removed as possible from the habits of thought at the time. Such an idea, however, would have had to be spoken of if the original states of the development of the earth and mankind and the spiritual and material powers still active in man himself today, which on the one hand form his body and on the other allow the living spiritual to emerge from him, through which he creates culture, were to be depicted in a spiritually appropriate manner. External nature, however, should have been discussed in such a way that in it the originally spiritual-material presents itself as extinct in the abstract laws of nature.

[ 20 ] All this could not be given.

[ 21 ] It could only be linked to scientific experience, not to scientific thinking. In this experience there was something that could place the world and man in front of his own soul full of light in the face of true, spirit-filled thinking. Something from which the spirit could be rediscovered that had been lost in traditionally held and believed beliefs. I wanted to bring the spirit-nature view out of the experience of nature. I wanted to speak of that which is to be found in the "here and now" as the spiritual-natural, as the essentially divine. For in the traditionally preserved confessions, this divine had become a "beyond" because the spirit of the "this world" was not recognized and was therefore separated from the perceptible world. It had become something that had been submerged into an ever-increasing darkness for human consciousness. It was not the rejection of the divine-spiritual, but rather the acceptance of it in the world, the invocation of it in the "here and now", that lay in such sentences as the one in one of the lectures for the "Freie literarische Gesellschaft": "I believe that natural science can give us back the consciousness of freedom in a more beautiful form than human beings have ever had. There are laws at work in our souls that are just as natural as those that drive the heavenly bodies around the sun. But these laws represent something that is higher than all other nature. This something is present nowhere else but in man. What flows from it, man is free in this. He rises above the rigid necessity of inorganic and organic lawfulness, obeys and follows only himself." (The last sentences are only underlined here, they were not yet in the "Magazin". For these sentences, see the "Magazin" of February 12, 1898.)