The Rudolf Steiner Archive

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

O eternal is so lanck.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Some time ago, ¹ In these pages, I am reviewing the important book “Idole” by the Viennese writer Rosa Mayreder. This work of art describes the repulsive effect that a young girl experiences as a result of a world view that seeks to determine the relationship between men and women not according to the passions of the soul, but according to the rational, sober principle of racial improvement. According to such a view, the future generation should be decisive for the union of the sexes. In the “Idols”, Dr. Lamaris wants a man to marry only a woman who promises him healthy, strong offspring. The girl at the center of Mayreder's story abhors such a view of life, which puts all the needs of the human soul under the aspect of racial hygiene.

It is interesting that almost simultaneously with this story, another one with a similar theme appeared. In it, the main character is a woman who, through her life experience, has come to the point of view that Dr. Lamaris has formed from his scientific convictions. So we have the complete opposite of the woman that Rosa Mayreder has described.

Helene fell in love with a composer and married him because the storm of passion drove her to do so. She bore him a child, a sick, idiotic child unfit for life. The man soon became unfaithful to his wife with a Russian countess. He ended the broken relationship that his life had brought him to with suicide. The young widow initially lives in complete seclusion. All the ideas that form in her mind are influenced by the unhappy marriage and the existence of the idiot child. She becomes more and more convinced that a social system that fosters such idiotic beings is a reprehensible one. As long as she can believe that medical science will be able to bring the child to his senses, the widow still has some hope. But more and more, this hope is destroyed. And when, after some time, she finds the man who once loved her and whom she gave up for the sake of the composer, the terrible certainty dawns on her soul that the child is incurable, that never a spark of humanity will shine from its stupid, animal eyes. The man she left has preserved her love. She is about to marry for the second time. His attitude and world view can be a guarantee that she will find happiness in a new circle of life. Then she becomes the murderer of her child. She must consider the murder of her child as a duty. Because it can only be a good deed to remove from the world a creature that does not deserve to be called a human being. But for a loving man, marriage with a woman of such a life becomes impossible. He leaves his beloved and seeks oblivion in faraway Japan, where he finds a sphere of activity – far away from the place where he experienced that a woman to whom he is bound by so many ties of the soul is capable of such an abhorrent act.

Another man is contrasted with this young widow. He too feels strongly attracted to her. But he too breaks off all ties between himself and the woman he admires when he learns of her deed. His mind must even approve of this act. But his heart does not allow him to go through life with her.

If we compare Ernst Georgy's story with the much more artistically mature “Idols” by Rosa Mayreder, we see that both works reveal a characteristic symptom of our time. It is remarkable that in both cases a doctor is confronted by two women of such different natures. In the first case, the philosophy of life that makes the duty to one's offspring the guiding principle of one's life is represented by a man, and in his case it is the result of his scientific views. In the second case, the same philosophy is represented by a woman who has been led to it by her experiences.

There is something in the fundamental moral drives of our time that powerfully pushes us towards such a way of life. But there are undoubtedly elements in human nature that say a clear “No” to such views. The doctor, who by virtue of his education is most intimately involved with the physical aspects of life, is most easily led to this point of view. The woman who seeks the guiding principles of life in the depths of her emotional life will most easily be repelled by it. Life must be cruel to the woman if it leads her to it. Ernst Georgy describes such a cruel life. And the author also makes the character of the woman portrayed highly credible in terms of her actions. Through a merciless logic of facts, but also through a keenly developed inclination towards all that is well-formed, healthy and perfect, Helene becomes a child murderer. The forces in the human soul that contradict the ethical views that have developed in her are shown to us by Georgy in the very doctor whose humane character must turn away from this woman. These are the same forces that are at work in the girl of the “idols” and that cause her to recoil from Doctor Lamaris' principles.

It is clearly visible how, in our time, the eyes of all are truly opening to the contemplation of life. For hand in hand with such an unbiased view must go the perception of the opposites of existence. A relationship to the world, such as the Christian one, will seek an artificial reconciliation of these opposites. It builds an ideal realm of harmony above the real realm of opposites. But life does not take place in harmony, but in these opposites themselves. And anyone who wants to erect a harmonious ideal world as the superstructure of life, once and for all, is shrouding humanity in a deceptive fog. For life cannot overcome its contradictions at once; rather, it is itself a continuous, never-ending attempt at overcoming, and the contradictions always arise again and again, even when they seem to have been overcome.

In this sense, Ernst Georgy's story is a product of the new world view. Christianity and the ideal of humanity are pitted against a woman's view of the world, which is aimed at redeeming the world from everything that is incapable of living. Anyone who can gain an interest in this battle between two life-opposing forces that are deeply rooted in the essence of the modern soul will read the book with excitement.

• 1. Ernst Georgy: Die Erlöserin. Berlin 1898. In this issue we are also publishing a novella by the same author. Cf. column 306 [“Magazin für Literatur” No. 12, 24 March 1900].

I had come from a protest rally against the “Lex Heinze”. ¹ I had heard a series of speeches - excellent speeches - against this most savage outgrowth of a reactionary mindset. It is an extremely embarrassing feeling that a person who really lives in the questions and doubts of the present brings home from such gatherings. The judgments that are pronounced there are something so self-evident for such contemporary people that one always has the feeling that the men who speak there descend deeply by uttering such things. The intellectual paucity of the personalities who challenge these judgments is so great that one feels one's soul is being contaminated by dirt if one seriously refutes them. So it was after attending such a meeting that I picked up Carl Hauptmann's “Diary”. It was then that I realized how enormous the gulf is between the struggle that a repugnant current of the times forces upon us and the ideas and feelings that occupy our best minds when they are alone with themselves. For this book gives us an account of such ideas and feelings. One of those who pursue the great problems that bled Friedrich Nietzsche's noble soul dry is Carl Hauptmann. A book that exudes the rarified air of contemporary culture. Nothing seems more inappropriate to me than to write a “review” in the usual sense of the word about such a book. Any judgment about individual aspects, or even about the whole, must cease when the personality reveals itself to us from such depths of the soul. All one can do is to say what such a personality triggers in the reader's own soul. I will therefore say nothing about the book. However, I would like to share a few thoughts that often cross my mind and which I am particularly vividly reminded of after reading this “diary”. An elite of the educated is working today on a new design for our view of life, both in terms of science, religion and art. Everyone is doing their part. What emerges from this will determine our actions. The cultivation of knowledge, truth and artistic views can be the content of common endeavors. It will then automatically result in a common ethic in many things. Let everyone openly state what he knows, let him bring to the public plan what he has achieved; in short, let him express himself in every direction: then he will be more to the whole than if he pretends to be able to tell it how it should behave. Many of our contemporaries are finally tired of the talk about what we should and should not do. They demand insight into the workings of the world. If they have that, then they also know how to behave in the world they have recognized. And anyone who does not have this insight and yet approaches them with their good teachings for our actions is considered a moral sophist. Our task within humanity simply arises from our realization of the essence of the part of humanity to which we belong. For those who recognize the truth of these sentences, efforts aimed at a common ethic are considered unfashionable and backward.

We have much more important things to do than to think about how we should relate to the old religions. Our whole life is in a state of transition because our old views no longer satisfy modern consciousness. We are once again suffering from the great questions of knowledge and the highest artistic problems. The old has become rotten. And when the great solution is found, which many people will be able to believe in for a time, when the new gospel is there, then, as always in such cases, the new moral code will also arise as a necessary consequence. New world views automatically give rise to new moral teachings. A new truth is always the creator of a new moral code. We have no need of popular educators who have much for our hearts but nothing for our heads. The heart follows the head if the latter has a certain direction.

In our time, with its predominantly practical, material tendencies, a certain slackness has crept in with regard to questions of knowledge. The lively interest in questions of knowledge and truth has died in many people. It is therefore convenient for them to be able to make themselves comfortable on the couch of a generally human moral doctrine. What they think about is not inhibited by the stereotyped morality. They do not know the torments of the thinker, nor those of the artist. At least not those who would like to work so hard today to improve our ethical culture. For those who have an ideal life within themselves, who want to move forward in the spiritual realm, the path must be clear and open, not blocked by moral prescriptions and measures of national education. To repeat a frequently used phrase, everyone must be able to find their own way to happiness. It is not only the ideas of moralization that spring from reactionary minds that stand in our way today, but also the moral endeavors of the so-called “liberals”.

Goethe said that he wanted to know nothing of liberal ideas, that only attitudes and feelings could be liberal. When I once quoted this view of the great poet to a sworn liberal, he was soon finished with his judgment: it was just one of the many weaknesses that Goethe had. To me, however, it seems like one of the many views that Goethe shared with all people who energetically engage in intellectual activity: the ruthless advocacy of what is recognized and seen through as true, which is also associated with the highest respect for the individuality of others. Only those who are something themselves can recognize others who are also something. The average person, who wants to be everything and therefore nothing, demands the same nonentities next to his own. Those who live according to a template also want to shape others according to it. That is why all people who have something to say are also interested in others. But those who actually have nothing to say speak of tolerance and liberalism. But they mean nothing more by it than that a general home should be created for everything insignificant and shallow. They should not count on those who have tasks in the world. For these it is hurtful to be expected to bow under the yoke of some generalization, whether it be a general artistic norm or a general morality. They want to be free, to have free movement of their individuality. The rejection of all norms is the very main feature of modern consciousness. Kant's principle: Live in such a way that the maxim of your actions can become generally valid, has been dismissed. In its place must come: Live in a way that best suits your inner being; live yourself out completely, without holding anything back. It is precisely when each individual gives the whole what only he can give, and no one else, that he does the most for it. Kant's principle, however, demands that everyone perform what they can do equally well. But a true human being is not interested in that. For a “free mind” of the present, who thinks in this sense, a book like that of Carl Hauptmann is an attractive reading, a book in which he should not believe, but through which he should look at a personality.

• 1. Carl Hauptmann: Aus meinem Tagebuch. Berlin 1900, S. Fischers Verlag.

“Be true to yourself” ¹ is an often-heard moral demand. It seems to be the same with it as with many other moral demands. They cannot stand up to the scrutinizing gaze of the psychologist. The human soul goes its own way, guided by the great eternal laws of the natural universe, like a flower growing without caring about ethics or moral ideas. One person remains “true to himself”. He is often called a person of character, of principles. The psychologist smiles at this. He knows that it is the rigidity of immutable laws, not free will, that makes people turn back at the threshold, where they could pass from the old to a new path of life. Another is criticized by moralists as being without character, fickle, without “inner support”. The psychologist smiles again. He is not interested in the bare fact of the change, it is not enough for him to know that “this person has become unfaithful to his nature”. He searches for the reasons that have caused the change.

In such research, what is called the “unity of consciousness” usually appears to us as a very questionable thing. Much more often than one would like to assume, the Faustian saying proves true: Two souls live in my breast! And it is not uncommon for there to be moments in life when these two souls wage their significant battles, the battles that imprint their mysterious signature on human existence. What we are is usually the result of such a battle. When I meet someone and let their face speak to me, I usually believe I see a double face. One bears the features of the existence that the person really lives, and hidden within these features, others peer out: a second physiognomy. It speaks of another self. Of one that the person has lost in the struggle of life, that he has fought down on the thresholds where the important existential battles take place. Or it may be that it has remained suppressed, that it speaks only as a faint memory of what man might have become. Often there is only a slight preponderance of one of the two forces over the other, on that threshold where one power pushes us forward into new areas or pushes us back into the old sphere of life. At this point, chance collides with eternal necessity. But it is in this clash that life lies. An eternal contradiction. It had to happen like this, says the adherent of absolute necessity. And who could deny him? And if it had happened differently, then this adherent of absolute necessity would have come along and shown that it had to happen like this. Everything has to happen as it happens. Everything can also turn out differently. The mystery of life can be understood, but existence does not give up its freedom for the sake of its comprehensibility. When man stands “on the threshold”, the eternal contradiction approaches him: chance, necessity, necessity that is chance. I hold in higher esteem the wisdom that honors “chance” than that which ponders an eternal providence. We could understand an eternal providence in every single one of its steps, if need be. Chance leaves something to our amazement. It alone lends life its mystery.

The sketches by Anselm Heine tell of the secrets “on the threshold” of life. The problem that speaks to us in all these stories is multifaceted. We are presented with the girl who, according to modern views, has the social freedom to choose her own path in life, but who is in conflict with the inherited feelings that social constraints have placed in her. We are told of the man who could be happy with the woman he loves if he could overcome the prejudice that a woman should not be the person who provides the material basis of life through her earnings. We meet a man who is to be drawn out of his life by overzealous friends and into the career of an artist, but who turns back “on the threshold” because his original nature breaks through. Ten stories with this problem confront us. Anselm Heine seeks with the finest psychological tact the thin threads on which “on the threshold” the important decisions hang. How aptly he describes the fate of girls who have been given freedom by the new social ideas, but who still feel dependent on their old inheritance: “They stand defenceless in the unfamiliar breath of life, until the modest beauty of their being is twisted and hardened into deformity. Longingly, they sneak past the outer walls of their prison, hoping that someone will take pity on them and let them back into their old life of unpretentiousness, but in vain, for they are compelled to freedom – by the new conscience of the others. The doors have been opened to them – now they are condemned to freedom. Yes, out. Relentlessly pushed out, even the tender ones who need dependence for their own good.»

The story of “Fräulein Bertha” is deeply moving. Here it is not a second self that makes it impossible for the first to cross “the threshold”; here it is physical nature that blocks the passage of the spiritual. Bertha is a born actress in the truest sense of the word. An ugly hump forces her to waste her genius, which was created for the art of the stage, on a miserable existence as a dramatic teacher. The fleeting acquaintance with an important actor, which took place under romantic circumstances, allows her to feel an indescribable happiness for a brief moment, a happiness that would have to accompany her throughout her entire existence if her beautiful soul were to dwell in a beautiful body. From her lips we hear the expression for her hotly desired and at the same time resigned feeling of happiness: “My days would have seeped away grey and monotonous, like those of a thousand others! But then came longing - and then came love - then came pain - and all of this together is happiness!” - She is a martyr of talent, a “heroine of renunciation”.

In Anselm Heine's style, the meaningfulness of the problems is fully realized. A meaningful simplicity characterizes this style and a calmness that shows that the author has come to terms with his questions and doubts. He faces them with the confident feeling of the owner who has long since passed the stages of appropriation. I would like to give just a small sample of this style. Franziska Grothus, who has crossed the threshold by having her music teacher arouse her passion for love to the point of frenzy, is portrayed in her being before the moment of great significance: “She is the daughter of a government official. Her parents had a house in the provinces where lawyers, officers and the occasional more worldly scholar would gather, so that it was easy for the daughters to find suitable partners in their own social circle. In the midst of this normal world, something abnormal had developed, namely Franziska's singing voice, which was a phenomenon in its beauty and richness. Her parents, who abhorred anything out of the ordinary, were long unable to bring themselves to fulfill the obligations that this uninvited gift from the fairy godmother imposed on them. Only when Franziska had turned twenty and still had not become engaged did they take her to the capital city, where she was to be educated, properly educated by a great authority who was not available in their own town. Whether the daughter would actually come out later could still be decided. In any case, she was entrusted to a respectable family boarding school and traveled daily to the idyllic cottage where Master Felix Viktor Grell lived with his small family."

Completely sweetly mature: this is the word I would like to apply to this style, and to Anselm Heine's entire narrative art in general. We are dealing with a distinguished artistic nature that allows us to see the storm of life only in the serene calm of poetic contemplation.

• 1. On the Threshold. Studies and Stories by Anselm Heine. Berlin. Verlag von Gebrüder Paetel 1900.

One of the most remarkable descriptions of the human soul was provided by the English poet Richard Jefferies, who died in 1887, in his book “The Story of My Heart”. How can I process all the impressions and experiences within me in such a way that the powers of my soul are constantly growing? How can I transform all the pains and joys of existence within me in such a way that the life of my spirit becomes ever richer? Jefferies spent most of his life pondering these questions. Anyone who follows Ludwig Jacobowski's career as a poet will find that a similar basic drive can be observed in it. From his first appearance, with the collection of poems “Aus bewegten Stunden” (1889), to his last works, “Loki. Roman eines Gottes” (1898) and “Leuchtende Tage. Neue Gedichte” (1900), a passionate struggle to increase his mental powers and to grow his inner life can be seen in his development. Goethe once said to Eckermann: “In poetry, only the truly great and pure is beneficial, which in turn stands like a second nature and either lifts us up to it or spurns us.” Jacobowski felt himself to be both lifted up and spurned when he published his first poems at the age of twenty. “Kontraste” (Contrasts) is the first subtitle of this collection. Dissonances resound from the depths of his soul; he anxiously measures his strength against the ideals he dreams of. He is not one of those personalities who, as mere observers, let world events affect them as if they were not involved themselves. From his very own personal destiny, the destiny of all humanity presents itself to him. The experiences of his mind become symbols of the great struggles that humanity fights to balance the contradictions of life.

From the pain and deprivation of his emotional world, Jacobowski grew the courage of his will, which led him to feel a special joy in overcoming life. In his novel “Werther, the Jew” (1892) and his drama “Diyab, the Fool” (1895), the poet presents us with the true stepchildren of existence. Leo Wolff, the Jewish student at the center of the novel's plot, and Diyab, the son of the sheikh, are in similar situations in life, but they have different strengths of willpower, which nature has given them. In Wolff's case, a delicate and sensitive heart is confronted with a weak will, while in Diyab's case it is confronted with a strong will. This makes the former the loser and the latter the winner. Ludwig Jacobowski's psychological powers of observation can only be properly appreciated if it is taken into account that his aim is to show the influence that life has on a person's will. Wolff can only contrast his idealistic sensibilities and his lofty mind with the world; he is crushed by its wheels. Diyab is a man of will. To the extent that his heart is wounded, his will gains strength.

Wolff suffers from his father's ethical views and the prejudices directed against the young Jew. His father's financial speculations cost the teacher of his son, whom he adores, his fortune. The passion that he feels for the teacher's wife makes Wolff a deceiver of his father's friend. At the same time, it has a destructive effect on his beautiful love affair with the child of the people, who seeks release from the torments that her affection for the student has brought her by voluntarily taking her own life. The young man's willpower is not strong enough to guide him through the opposing currents into which life has thrown him, through the confusion into which his passions have thrown him. A genuinely humane spirit alienates him from the people to whom natural ties bind him; at the same time, these natural ties weigh like a lead weight on his life. By birth and by his way of thinking, he is repelled by the world and forced to turn to himself; but in the isolation of his soul he does not find the energy to shape his relationship to life on his own.

What a strong will can achieve in this direction is shown by Jacobowski in “Diyab, the Fool”. The son of the sheik is an outcast because he was born of a white mother. He is exposed to the scorn of his entire environment. But he is not affected by this mockery. He is superior to those who mock him. They know nothing of his innermost self. He hides it from them and plays the fool. They may mock him in this mask. But his own self grows outside in the solitude where the palm trees stand. There he lies between the grasses deep in the forest, living only for himself. Out there he cultivates his strength to the point where he later becomes the savior of the entire tribe, when those who had insulted him shrink back from the enemy. The strong-willed man put on the mask of a fool in order to be master of his fate. Behind this mask, however, the personality matured that takes revenge for the shameful treatment that she and her mother had to endure, and that conquers the throne of the sheikh and the beloved through boldness and strength. The artistic execution is absolutely equal to the train of thought of the two works. Ludwig Jacobowski has an open mind and a broad understanding of the great questions of existence. He is not only able to depict the individual fates of individuals, but also to artistically portray the great interrelationships of cultural development. In “Werther, the Jew”, the experience of the young Jew also symbolically expresses a great historical phase of a people's development. The individual is the representative of a rejuvenating Judaism that is struggling to break free from the prejudices and inherited habits of a tribe and to develop a universal human world view. Jacobowski's symbolizing art is particularly evident in the individual stories in the collection “Satan laughed and other stories” (1898). The first sketch, “Satan laughed”, shows how God takes control of the earth from the devil by creating man, his servant, but how the devil still manages to secure his influence. He catches the woman in his nets. A few characteristic lines are used here to symbolically suggest the demonic powers that lie hidden in human sexuality. The short stories in this collection show how an artist can express life with just a few lines, if these lines are characteristic.

Jacobowski's symbolic style reached its zenith in his book “Loki. Roman eines Gottes” (Loki. A God's Novel). The poet personifies the two powers that wage an unceasing battle in every human breast in the form of the battling gods. Goodness, love, patience, gentleness and beauty are on one side; hatred and defiance on the other. Maeterlinck has said that man is in all his parts a mystical accomplice of higher divine beings. Jacobowski seeks these beings in the depths of human nature and describes the eternal struggle between them, the scene of which is our soul. Man has a power within him that does not allow him to rest. When he believes he has found peace, when he thinks he has brought order into his existence, then this power suddenly appears and disturbs peace and order, in order to replace the old with the new and to remind us that the true essence of the world can only exist in perpetual becoming. It is true that within peace and order, good human qualities flourish; but it is equally true that the old good must be destroyed from time to time. Thus the actual driving force of the world appears as evil, which drives good out of its possession. The creative appears as an unwelcome intruder into existence. Jacobowski has contrasted it with the figure of Loki in relation to the Asen. Far from Valhalla, an Asin gave birth to this god. Terrible apparitions announce his entry into the world to the other gods. We do not know the mother or the father. He is a child of the gods' sin. This child grows up in pain and deprivation. The goddesses mistreat him and give him glacial milk, wolf's foam and eagle meat to eat. This being, who has grown up in a sphere of suffering, has one thing that all the other gods do not have: wisdom. Loki sees the future of the other gods. In this course of the “Gods' novel”, the connection between suffering and knowledge is expressed in a symbolic way. The Aesir live in happiness. They do not concern themselves with the driving forces of the world. Only those who are in pain from these driving forces look at them. They think about the reasons for this pain. This opens their spiritual eyes. Loki becomes the destroyer of the realm of the gods. He ruthlessly destroys Balder, the personification of love. He must hate him, because the becoming must always be the enemy of the persisting, of the carefree enjoyment of the moment. And from the ruins of the old realm of Balder, a new one arises, not ruled by Loki, but by a new god of love, Balder's son. The deepest conceivable tragedy lies in the figure of Loki. He is the eternal destroyer, necessary for the good elements to be constantly renewed, the demon of misfortune that happiness needs in order to exist. The creator who is never allowed to enjoy the fruits of his labor, the hatred that is indispensable to the existence of love: that is Loki.

Jacobowski poetically depicts the eternal conflict of world events in this “novel of a god”. All our wisdom cannot solve this conflict. For it is precisely this conflict that sustains life. We are enmeshed in it with our whole being. We recognize that it is there, and we must bow to the fact. Jacobowski also expressed this in the character of Loki. He knows the fate of all the other gods; only his own is unknown to him. Wisdom may recognize the whole world; it cannot see itself through; it can only live itself out, as it is driven by its demons.

Jacobowski's last collection of poems, his “Leuchtende Tage” (Shining Days), appeared shortly after this novel. Between this work and the “Bewegte Stunden” there are two more volumes of poetry: “Funken” (1890) and “Aus Tag und Traum” (1895). These collections are a reflection of all the struggles that led the poet to the high vantage point from which he sang the eternal secrets of the world in “Loki.”

Jacobowski's poetry reveals a beautiful relationship between this poet and nature. He has the ability to find the poetic and meaningful in the simplest things and processes. Unlike so many contemporary poets, he does not believe that the valuable can only be found in the rare, in the remote charms of existence. He becomes aware of it with every step he takes through life. The most ordinary things take on a poetic form for him.

The great world perspective that is Jacobowski's own also gives him the right view for the poetic representation of social conditions. The poets who seek their material in this area often see only a few steps ahead. Jacobowski's descriptions of big-city life and modern social phenomena grow out of the foundations of a more comprehensive worldview. In this sense, “Der Soldat, Szenen aus der Großstadt” (The Soldier, Scenes from the Big City) is a truly modern creation, in which the experiences of a person are described who is transplanted from the countryside to the big city and is destroyed there by fate. A legend, “The Four Robbers”, expresses a significant moral content in a simple form. This poetry speaks for Jacobowski's healthy imagination, which points everywhere to the ideal forces that hold “the world together at its core”, and yet never leaves the realm of fresh, immediate naturalness.

The collection of short stories by Franz Ferdinand Heitmüller, “Tampete” (Berlin S. Fischers Verlag 1899), published some time ago ¹ contains an artistic pearl. It is the novella “Tampete” that gave the volume its name. A mood poet of great narrative and characterization power has created this small work of art. “Tampete“, this Lower Saxony peasant dance, this German tarantella, lives on in this spirited style; the figures stand before us with deepened passion, like people who are not living out their own lives, but a demonic force that possesses them.”

In his recently published volume, Heitmüller has once again given us such a pearl: the novella “Als der Sommer kam”. This time, however, it is not as if a wild nature were speaking from the soul of a human being; this time it is a soul itself that is presented to us in its most intimate destiny, in lonely struggles: a soul that returns to itself from the alienation into which the world has brought it, that grows from smallness to greatness. Eugenie's child has grown up in the hands of strangers. But she herself must be seen as the virgin girl in her social environment. Only in this way can it be imagined that Arthur, her fiancé, who as a public prosecutor has “obligations to society”, will marry her. So Eugenie lives a life of pretense in the city, in the hope that one day she will be able to live a life of pretense at Arthur's side. Her child, however, whom she has hardly seen, lives far away from her, condemned to be disowned by its mother for the rest of its life. An illness of this child calls the mother to it. She hopes - a fatal illness, because with the child, what Arthur is repeatedly concerned about would be eliminated. A mother's soul, completely subjugated by the violence of social conditions, comes to her child, who is so foreign to her that she mistakes him for a stranger at first. And this mother's soul finds all the motherly love she needs at the sickbed, and with this love she finds herself, as a liberated, as an overcomer and victor. She describes this victory to the doctor of the country town, with whom she has become friends during the child's illness; she talks about how she has become free in the rural solitude, and how she now wants to carry this freedom into the city, where people can never understand such things, but where she wants to defy the lack of understanding. “The fact that I am here among people who are more or less indifferent to me and who are of no concern to me, that I am here, in a strange environment, so to speak, confessing my child, is not so bad after all. But there, in my usual sphere, which is no longer to be mine, it means something. Do you think I want to hide here and be secretive with my happiness? No, I want to proclaim it loudly, to shout it out so that everyone can hear it: look, this is me – the real me – and if they spit at me and I still remain in the calm equilibrium of proud love, then you see, only then do I have a right to myself and to the child whose mother I want to be. I want to be free of people and their rules, and that is why I have to go back to them.»

Heitmüller depicts the complete transformation of a human spirit. And he does so on fifty-two pages that are not too densely printed. But he does so with full inner truth. The poet has clearly encountered a problem that speaks to him in a rare way. He has mastered the entire psychology of this problem. And this psychology is worked out from a mood that is fully in harmony with it. Heitmüller knows how to stylishly interweave the girl's process of liberation with her life in nature. “She had rented a few rooms, far out in a somewhat dilapidated country house on the mountain. She had always seen it with its white-painted walls shining from afar. Like a hope. When she discovered a glass-covered veranda at the back of the house, which led to a spacious garden with old shady trees, she quickly came to an agreement with the owner. - And so they lived their quiet, regular lives... And very slowly, as the germs and budding buds stirred and stretched within her, dreamlike, unconscious, diverse, every day, every hour, ever stronger, swelling, a drunken confusion, until her white soul stood in a thousand glowing blossoms: - very slowly and hesitantly, the ground of the child's soul also began to green and to cover itself with the first shy colorful flowers. And on this soft ground her dreaming love wandered, pulling up the weeds everywhere or breaking a flower that had unfolded overnight, greedily inhaling its weak scent – shyly, trembling, dazed. Here and there she bent and cut back the overhanging branches, she drove away the shadow and let in the light, so that the other many buds that were peeping out everywhere from the light green lawn could also develop and unfold in full strength. And the light came from everywhere, for love has a hundred busy hands that never tire of bending aside leaf after leaf so that the sun can shine through...» This is how someone who has the finest sensitivity to the wonderful harmony that exists between the life of nature and the struggling human soul describes it. Who has a lively feeling for how deeply symbolically the human mind's desire for freedom is silently hinted at in the creations of the outside world, and how in the human heart the growth and blossoming, the germination and budding of nature is transformed into the language of the spirit.

I am less satisfied with the first novella in the book: “The Treasure in Heaven”. What Heitmüller achieved so perfectly in “When Summer Came” was to find the right style for his subject: in this novella, he has probably gone wrong. This farmer, who is so clumsily and comically deceived by Resi, the farmer's daughter, is a magnificent character, but he should be drawn with a sharp sense of humor, and we should not have the impression that the lines, which as caricatures we might well like, are being offered to us with complete seriousness. The poet does indeed make attempts at a humorous style throughout. However, it seems to me that the tone of humor does not really venture out. And so we have to accept that Resi deceives the Gaisdorffer farmer, that his deceased daughter writes him letters from heaven asking for loans, that the farmer believes this and really gives his money to help his daughter in heaven find her bridegroom. But Resi, the good girl, wants to use the money to buy herself a very earthly bridegroom, Wastl. The “pious girl” even manages to persuade the farmer that her and Wastl's little offspring is actually the Gaisdorffer farmer's grandchild. Crescence, the deceased daughter, who is still so in need of money in death, brought her the child. The farmer finally marries the “pious girl” with the child that fell from heaven. Wastl goes out into the big wide world, falls in love with someone else, and not without first spending the money that Resi has swindled from the farmer for heavenly purposes.

Heitmüller's skill at drawing simple, undifferentiated people, which we know from “Tampete”, is also evident here. None of these characters, except for the Gaisdorffer farmer himself, has suffered from the mistake of style.

I again place the last novella of the collection, “Abt David”, much higher. Here Heitmüller, the sympathetic poet of mood, lives out fully. Therefore, we are happy to overlook the fact that the idea of the story remains too pale, too abstract. David von Winkelsheim is a real abbot from the turn of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. With a priestly attitude in which Catholic principles have become completely habitual, he combines a fine sense of art. He decorates his monastery with treasures of beauty, where praying and reading the mass are only done out of old tradition, but precisely and dutifully. With delicate sensitivity, the poet depicts how a general trend of the times is reflected in a small corner of the world. His abbot reflects the attitude of many Catholic priests of the time in which the novella is set. The worldly desires and passions that must be silenced in the soul of a priest take the form of artistic longing in David. And in a meaningful contrast to the abbot stands his brother, the man of the world of that time, who brings the adventurous Johanna, the artist in men's clothing, to him so that she can decorate the monastery with works of art. The abbot sees in Johanna only the artist, but the brother loves her as a woman. And when she finds death in the floods of the Rhine, the full contrast between the natures of the two brothers is revealed. Wolf von Winkelsheim – that is David's brother's name – describes this contrast: “At the time when she lost her father so suddenly in Florence, when she had to return home alone, she may well have had the adventurous idea. Dressed as a man, she could better protect herself from the dangers of the streets and the menfolk. But I know all about that, and the morning we broke in here, it was clear to me that there was a woman in those trousers. But I went along with the pious deception – of course! To finally get rid of my promise to give him the paintings. The brother got what he wanted too, he has his pictures, and his “Herr Johannes” lives on with him and can never die. But I have lost “Frau Johanna” - I paid too much for the pictures.” The poet brings this anecdote to life in such a way that he depicts it as it comes alive in him during a stay in the old monastery, which was secularized around 1529, while he rummages through the archives. In the drawing of the monastery and the nature in which it is set, we encounter Heitmüller's beautiful atmospheric painting again. Those with a sense for genuine poetic novella will follow Heitmüller's stories with heartfelt joy.

• 1. Franz Ferdinand Heitmüller: Der Schatz im Himmel. Novelle. Berlin S. Fischers Verlag, 1900.

Erected by Eugen Reichel in Memory of Gottsched

I

A book ¹ to stir up the minds lies before us. Eugen Reichel has undertaken to redraw the picture of his East Prussian compatriot Gottsched. He considers the image that the world has created of this man to be a distorted one. “The Germans think they know Gottsched; they imagine that they have judged him exhaustively when they repeat what his opponents and their short-sighted or frivolous epigones have said, namely that he was a schoolmaster who, although he may have striven for the good with inadequate strength , but a narrow-minded, conceited schoolmaster who was completely out of touch with life, art and poetry and who knew how to talk eloquently about literature when we still had no literature of our own.» With the boldest courage of thought, Reichel contrasts this judgment with his own, that Gottsched was “not only not a narrow-minded schoolmaster, but rather a thinker and poet who was at the height of life, far ahead of his contemporaries, who were floundering far below him in powerlessness and intellectual narrow-mindedness; a revolutionary in all areas of intellectual life, a courageous fighter, equipped with the sharpest intellectual weapons, against the rigid, dead formalism that prevailed around him in art and literature, in the pulpits and lecture halls, in the schools and intellectual salons; a bold, far-sighted representative of free thought, free research and free speech.» As you can see, this is a re-evaluation on a grand scale!

From: “Ludwig Jacobowski in the Light of Life”

A deep insight into human nature prompted Ludwig Feuerbach to make the significant statement: “God is the manifest inner being, the expressed self of man, the confession of his innermost thoughts, the public confession of his love”. It is the trait in the human soul that this sentence describes that led Ludwig Jacobowski to write the “Novel of a God” when he wanted to portray the dark forces that rule at the bottom of the mind. In doing so, he set himself a task that naturalistic art is bound to fail in. All the individual actions, moods and thoughts of a person seem to point to a struggle in his soul that accompanies him from the moment he becomes conscious until his death. No matter what course the individual events that bring a person to life take, the fundamental struggle always arises anew. It is impossible to depict this struggle in all its magnitude, in its overwhelming scope, if one limits oneself to the reproduction of real facts and real human characters. One would then only be able to show symptoms of this struggle. A personality like Ludwig Jacobowski had to feel this way. For him, it was a matter of constantly deepening his inner life. He wanted to descend into the deepest pits of his own inner being. There he had to encounter the two fundamental forces of the mind that pull people back and forth and mysteriously determine their fate. The one force contains: kindness, love, patience, benevolence, beauty, the other: hatred, hostility, savagery, ugliness, resentment. Anyone who is honest with themselves must admit that there is something of all these elements within them. And the course of world history shows a demonic war that these forces wage, as they emerge from the breast of the individual and guide the destinies of people and nations. The imagination of the poet must go beyond reality if it is to depict the eternal struggle of these powers. From the Nordic pantheon, Ludwig Jacobowski took the superhuman figures he needed to portray the primal demons of the human soul. But the characters that the Nordic sagas had invested in their deities were no more than a starting point for him. He freely developed them in such a way that he could say how modern man feels about the primal struggle that is hinted at.

Balder, the mildness and beauty that has become a god, and Loki, the friend of destruction, are the mythological figures through which Jacobowski was able to express his thoughts poetically. Their fates within the Nordic world of gods became the “apparent inner self” in his novel, the “expressed self of man”. One must point out two main characteristics of Jacobowski as a person if one wants to understand why he was so successful as a poet in his “Loki”: one, the power of plastic creation, and the other, an enchanting lyrical swing. To a great extent, the poet has solved the task of creating mere soul forces so that they do not appear as shadowy allegories, but rather as vivid personalities. This fact is understandable when one knows that these powers of the soul truly detached themselves from his inner being like independent personalities, like demonic entities, and always accompanied him. They played such a role in his life that he felt them like figures that guided him, with whom he held dialogues, and even with whom he fought. And this struggle was so intense that it confused all his feelings, that it stirred up all his passions. The latter circumstance explains the subjective element with which he describes and which naturally sought a lyrical form of expression.

Human nature has within it both the element of selfless devotion and ruthless selfishness. The love of which Goethe says: “No self-love, no self-interest lasts, before its coming they have shrunk away, we call it being pious,” this love has to fight a difficult battle against selfishness, which also appropriates love, according to the words of Max Stirner: “I love people because love makes me happy.” I love because I feel good when I love. In human life, good is followed by evil as a necessary complement. Balder, the all-embracing love, the sun of existence, cannot exist without Loki, selfishness, darkness. Life must proceed in opposites.

It does not seem easy to portray Loki as a sympathetic character. Can one feel sympathy for selfishness, for the desire to destroy? Jacobowski was able to show Loki's character in a sympathetic light, because he knew that good is not only good, but also finite, limited in its goodness. However, the source of the world holds infinite possibilities. A Balder must not seize power. He may spread an immeasurable abundance of good; he must not settle permanently. He must give way to a subsequent Balder who brings new good. One may lament the downfall of good, for one must feel this downfall as an injustice. But this injustice must happen. A power is necessary that destroys good so that new good can arise. The new good needs the destroyer to come into being. Balder needs Loki. And Loki, like the best of gods, can lament that he has to kill Balder; but he kills him out of necessity, and in doing so prepares the way for Balder's son. This is the deeply tragic aspect that Jacobowski has brought out in the character of Loki. It is Loki's fate to be bad, so that new good can always enter the world.

Thus Jacobowski's “Loki” has grown out of a philosophical view of life. And just as a philosophical understanding of life cannot harm man in his full, all-round activity, so the “Novel of a God” is not impaired in its poetic value by the fact that it is steeped in a world of philosophical ideas. Robert Hamerling said of his “Ahasver”: “Overarching, towering, mysteriously spurring and driving, accelerating the crises, standing behind the striving and struggling individuals as the embodiment of the balancing general life – that is how I imagined the figure of Ahasver.” And this is how Jacobowski imagined the character of his Loki. The overarching, superior nature of the philosophical ideas gives the constantly plastic characters and the vividly described events of the poem the character of a higher reality, without robbing them of the ordinary one.

One night, the Ases are terrorized by a terrible dream. Things never seen before are happening in the sky. Odin, the father of the gods, is awakened from his sleep. He sees his wife Frigg's bed unoccupied. Black mist rises from the bed. When the Ase rises to look for his wife, she is lying there with drops of sweat on her forehead and breathing heavily, as if she had just returned from a long journey. The other Ase experience similar things. In the morning they share their strange experiences with each other. Only Urd, the goddess of fate, can know what the mysterious events mean. But she cannot be asked, for her mouth only speaks when she is not asked. Urd's messenger, the black mountain falcon, announces that an Aesir child has been born this night. The mother is an Aesir, but Urd does not know who. Nor does she know who the father is. The Aesir women should take turns in nursing the child. It should be called “Loki”. Thus a being is placed in the world of the gods, sprung from it itself, but as a child of sin, the sin of the gods.

High up in the north, far from Valhalla, this child of sin grows up. Frigg, Odin's wife, has made a bed for him in a hut. And every day an Asin has to go to the distant hut to look after the little god. When Frigg was with him for the first time, the child smiled sweetly. But the goddess beats the boy. He learns to forget how to laugh. All the Asinnen mistreat the uncomfortable offspring of the gods. He is fed with glacier milk, wolf's foam and eagle meat. He is to atone for his sinful origin. This origin has made him an enemy of the entire world of gods. Through their treatment, the Asinnen plant the hostile attitude in him.

Soon they no longer bother about the boy. An elven old woman, Sigyn, continues to care for him in a motherly way. He grows up under her protection. He becomes a strong, serious being. The Asinnen have driven all cheerfulness out of him. He has to work hard to gain food from the earth. This is a mystery to him, and he asks Sigyn whether all beings have to create the bread of life in the sweat of their brow. The old woman's reply encompasses the feelings of all those who are burdened and weighed down, the anxious question that the disinherited must ask themselves at all times: “O wise world of the Ases! Some walk above the air and the sun, reaching into the lovely air to the right and to the left and grasping firm fruits and heavy stalks. And the others crawl laboriously over chasms and cliffs; and their hands tear at the rough earth, empty and only moist from their own sweat.” The god of the disinherited must therefore become Loki, and his feelings towards the other Ases are those of the joyless life burdened with toil towards the effortless, joy-producing happiness.

Loki sets out to meet the beings of his own kind who live in the sun of happiness. When he enters their circle, it becomes clear that he possesses something that they all have to do without, something that the one burdened with pain has over the one who enjoys undeserved happiness: true, supreme wisdom. Loki knows the future of the other gods, which remains hidden from them.

The happy man lives in the eternal present. He enjoys the moment, and it is far from his mind to ponder the causes that bring him the happiness of the moment. The one who is pained by the wheels of the world's course asks about their eternal play. From these questions, he gains insight into the course of things. Wisdom is born out of pain and privation. It makes one strong and hard against carefree dullness. Goethe once called (according to “Riemers Mitteilungen”) “dullness” the “beautiful, magical veil that places nature and truth in a more secret light”, and in the poem “To Fate” he praises this “dullness” with the words: “You have met the right measure for us, wrapped us in pure dullness, so that we, filled with the power of life, hope in the lovely presence of the dear future.” But Goethe also found a guiding principle for the other side of life: “Only he who must conquer it daily deserves freedom as well as life” (“Faust”, Part 2). Loki's life had to be conquered by himself from the very beginning. The path to wisdom leads through pain. That is why he also robs those who walk it of selfless love. Those who have not earned their fate through pain can give themselves selflessly. Those who have acquired their own through pain are all too easily reminded of their own suffering by the carefree happy. This is the case with Loki. He does not know love that is born of dull happiness. This love, which comes from the realm of the gods' joy, lives in Balder. But even the connoisseur of pain cannot close his mind to the power of this love. He must recognize its value. Loki trembles before this love, which he must appreciate, despite the fact that fate has denied it to him. He must confront Balder as an enemy; but he can only do so with the bitter feeling that he is fighting something great. The wisdom that comes from pain must thus give birth to new pain.

Why must the knowing Loki hate Balder, who lives in sweet ignorance but is full of love? Loki's wisdom ends before this question. For Loki's own fate is wrapped up in the answer to this question. And this fate of his is as unknown to him as it is to the other gods, but he sees through it with clairvoyance. What is destined for the other deities is open to his wisdom; what the dark powers have in store for him, this wisdom stops short of.

That is the fate of knowledge: it creates a new riddle by solving other riddles. But with happiness it robs us of our impartiality. That is why the happy believe that knowledge can only come from sin. Balder and Loki are always fighting in our soul. We could be completely happy if we were just pleasure-seekers. But then we would have no judgment of our happiness. We would have a joyful life, but one that would be like a dream. It is only through deprivation and misfortune that we learn what happiness is. But at the same time, they rob us of happiness along with insight.

It is a deep feature of Jacobowski's poetry that only two beings love Loki: Balder, the epitome of all happiness, and Sigyn, the elven old woman. Balder can do so because he does not know hatred, and Sigyn because she does not demand requited love. In the saga, Sigyn is a loving wife who naturally wants to be loved in return. In Jacobowski's poetry, she is a being who looks at the world and its happiness with sublime irony. She is equally distant from and close to Sigyn's hatred and love, because for her they are in the distance to which wisdom has pushed her. She is concerned that undeserved happiness should not become overpowering. That is why she cherishes and cares for the advocate of the disinherited in Loki.

The fight for a mere principle could not carry us away as Jacobowski's novel does. This fight would have to have something frosty about it if Loki were the opponent of the gods, just because he is supposed to represent the negating powers within the world plan. Loki does not fight alone for a general cause; he also fights for his own cause. Balder deprives him of the most beloved, the adored woman. And it is precisely from this personal misfortune of Loki that Balder's happiness springs. That Nanna becomes Balder's wife, not Loki's, completes the latter's happiness and thus that of the other Ases. “Nanna and Balder... These two names made the gods of Valhalla tremble with delight. Light came to light, sun to sun, and the love of the two shielded the glorious world of the gods from the fiends of darkness and the giants in icy Jötumheim better than enormous walls of rock and iron. Their name was like a shimmering breastplate and a deep-sounding shield. Misfortune struck against it, but the armor shone on, and the shield sounded deep, as if the blow had been struck with a light willow wand.»

The gods not only enjoy their undeserved luck, they have also stolen Loki's luck. This gives his opponents a personal coloration and personal right. The weaknesses in the lives and characters of the gods, the imperfections in the world they control: Loki uses everything to make life difficult for the Ases. “Loki's Pranks” describes the war of destruction that he wages against his divine enemies. Odin and Thor's way of life is thwarted by these pranks, so that divine omnipotence and strength must give way before the scorn that the wisdom disguised as cunning pours over them. Loki destroys the institutions in the human realm that the gods look upon with favor, indeed, on which they live: he does so with superior mockery. He protects the oppressed; he shakes the slaves from their stupor, so that the “holy”, the “divine” world order betrays its imperfection. The power of the gods over the children of earth is shattered by Loki's cleverness. He brings shame to the realm of the gods itself. Freya, the most beautiful of the Ases, loves the enemy of the Ases. It is precisely this love that Loki uses to bring the bitterest scorn upon Valhalla. He becomes the devil; he has Freya's love exposed by ugly dwarves.

The wildest of Loki's works is the destruction of Baldur and the realm in which only those people live who live according to Baldur's sense. It is the kingdom of a people “in which never a fist was raised against a foreign head, never a lewd word was attached to a maiden's footsteps, like dirty sand to wet heels, never a red gold ring or a brownish amber necklace awakened impure desire. There the stalks shot freely into the air, and clouds and winds, rain and sun, pressed to the mercy of being able to spread their abundance of blessings over Balders land. In the illuminated air, the noblemen strode along, their stately heads proudly raised, their golden locks cascading over their broad shoulders; and their wives walked beside them, their foreheads clear and calm, their gentleness softly illuminated by their eyes.” Loki brings ruin to this land. For everything that reminds people of Balder and his being is to be destroyed. Loki leads the people of the land, where hunger reigns, against the noblemen in Balders territory. The sons of Balders fall under the mighty blows of the oppressed. A dog is placed on Balders throne. “The noblemen bow their heads low before the snarling animal, one after the other, their faces white as linen in the field when the early sun licks over it. Then the women approach. The bright golden hair falls from their round heads and piles up next to the throne, then children again, wailing and weeping over the shame, and they rub their foreheads bloody on the ground out of shame."

With that, Loki has fulfilled his task. Balder and all that belongs to him has been overcome. The other Aesir have also followed Balder into the realm of the dead. But Loki cannot remain the victor. A youth steps out from among the sons of Balder, who are paying homage to the beast. The beast pushes itself down from the throne, glides to the ground and licks the youth's foot. Loki must confess: “Woe to you and to me. This is Balders son. The Lord and King!”... Far out Loki threw himself “into the field, so that his head struck against stones. But he did not pay attention to it. He cried incessantly: “This is Balders son! Balder is not dead! Balder lives, ... eternally like me ..., stronger than me ..., Balder, the sun son! ... Woe to me! ...

Thus the “Novel of a God” ends in the great mystery of the world, which encloses existence and becoming in a riddle. The creative is eternal. And the creative eternally produces its counterpart: destruction. We humans are enmeshed in this course of the world. We live the world's riddle. The creative is eternally right, and so is destruction. Balder and Loki belong together like creation and destruction. Creation is an usurper. But it is its fate that it must have destruction at its side. Balder needs Loki; and Loki must be evil so that new Balders can always arise in the eternal game of the world.

Jacobowski has built his poetry on the basis of great questions of world view. Through it, he has shown how deeply he himself has been gripped by the eternal riddles of existence. One must have seen the threatening abyss of life before one in order to have accomplished a rescue attempt such as the “Novel of a God.”