The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Comedy by Georg Hirschfeld
Performance at the Deutsches Theater, Berlin

Pauline König is the child of a selfish, domineering mother and a good-natured, hard-working, selfless father. This father is one of those men from whom marriage has taken away the last remnants of their zest for life, who have become quiet, acquiescent natures because they want domestic peace and can only have it if they submit to the domineering inclinations of their chosen wife. In the first years of their lives, children of such spouses absorb ideas that lead them to a certain contempt for life. They see in the parental home that not everyone gets his due share in life and that fate has no heart for people. It lets the good wither away and does not punish the bad. That life must therefore be met with defiance: that is the lesson which the children of such parents learn from their youthful impressions. Such children become good people because they have seen goodness in suffering - and one is so drawn to what one sees in suffering. But they become people who don't take life particularly hard because they learned about its injustice at an early age. Pauline König is one of these people. In her father, she got to know a person who didn't know how to organize his life. But the genuine humanity of his nature, a certain inner solidity, has passed from him to her. This father is employed on an estate. The count's lordship exploits his people, and the man has to toil all his life. But apart from that, these counts are nice people, and Pauline played with the children of the lordship as if they were her own kind. That's how she grew up. At the age of seventeen, she went to the city to support herself. Her mother's character was probably the main reason why she left home.

This Pauline König is at the center of Hirschfeld's new drama, which was performed for the first time at the Deutsches Theater on February 18. She is a servant at Sperling's. Walter Sperling is a painter. He leads a real bohemian life with his wife - and his child. Things are quite lively there, they owe the rent and probably other things too, but their hearts are in the right place. For example, when Mrs. Sanitätsrat Suhr approaches the Sperlings to inquire about her maid, who used to work in the painter's house and in whom she believes she has noticed a tendency towards dishonesty, she receives the answer: well, she wasn't honest, but she interested us "as a person". So Pauline is also interesting to the Sperlings as a person. And she is also interesting to the viewer of the drama. In her kitchen, the setting of the play, five lovers come and go: a horse-drawn train conductor, a tailor, a parcel letter carrier, a gym teacher and a metalworker. The first four she merely "oozes"; but we immediately realize that she is serious about the metalworker. She doesn't take life too seriously, which is why she sometimes goes a bit far with each of the lovers; and the good locksmith has every reason to be jealous of his raging love. Pauline plays the first role in a dance hall on the Hasenheide. All her lovers follow her there. The storm breaks in the third act. The art locksmith can no longer tolerate her being courted and entertained by others. The lovers fight, and the high authorities have to intervene in the form of the protector, a popular figure in modern government. The locksmith has just lost his head. Not only does he now fight with his rivals, he even appeals to Pauline's parents. They should set their daughter's head straight. Because he is sincere about her and cannot live without her. It is understandable that Pauline resents this. But it is precisely this extreme step that leads to understanding. The two now understand each other and become a couple. Hirschfeld has painted these two characters in the most delicate way. We have seen what life had to make of Pauline. It is understandable that she cannot quite comprehend the decidedly social-democratic attitude of the Schlosser when one knows that she had already become close to the Count's scions as a child. And the good understanding between her and her parents' lordship has remained. A son and a daughter of this lordship live in the Sperling house. They see Pauline, their old playmate, again; and this reunion is wonderful. These "counts" behave like human beings towards the simple maid. How could she understand the groom's grumbling, who sees only bloodsuckers and parasites in all people who do not belong to his class? But Pauline's and the locksmith's hearts are united by their views on life.

Georg Hirschfeld has always been a faithful observer of reality and a conscientious, all too conscientious portraitist. However great the significance of naturalistic reality poetry may be, it will never be the language in which truly great poets speak. For they have more to tell us than mere reality can say. The way they see, the character of their spirit speak from their works. With Hirschfeld, we have always noticed a certain reluctance to give his own imprint. We saw pure reality through his mind as if through a pane of glass. Now things have changed with him. In this latest comedy, he has also given something of his own character. We sense his personality. He no longer wants to depict people and events selflessly, so that they look at us as if he were not there; instead he shows us how he sees them. This time his work has a clear artistic structure. The material is treated in a genuinely comic manner. If Hirschfeld had lived in a time that was less sympathetic to the pure depiction of reality than today, he would only have been observed from this performance onwards. For it is only through it that the artist reveals himself in him. Only now does he draw together from reality those moments that interest us within the work of art and discard the ballast that is valuable to the observer of the world but indifferent to the aesthetically connoisseur. His conscientiousness towards natural reality has diminished, his sense of the artistic has become more refined. Else Lehmann gave an excellent acting performance as Pauline, as did Rudolf Rittner as the art locksmith. The tension that we are put in by these seemingly so alien and yet so attractive personalities, and their finding their way through their opposites, was shown to full advantage in the performance.

Performance at the Deutsches Theater, Berlin

When Goethe stood before the Greek works of art on his Italian journey, he said: "There is necessity, there is God." And explaining this statement, he wrote to his friends back home: "I have the suspicion that the Greeks proceeded in art according to the same laws that nature itself follows in its creations and that I am on the trail of." It is the realm of higher truth to which Goethe points when he writes these words. One must be able to go beyond the view of truth that recent years have often produced if one wants to understand these words of Goethe. Under the influence of this view, we are inclined to call everything truth that is provided by a faithful observation of all the details of things. Everything we see and hear, we also call true. And a depictor of truth is one who reproduces what he sees and hears in its entirety. When Goethe spoke of "truth" at the height of his conception of life, he had something else in mind. Not he who describes things in all their real breadth proclaims the truth. For behind this breadth, something is revealed to those who look deeper that is true in a different sense than the immediate reality. The individual human being, with all his special character traits, contains something within him that is more than the individual. For those who do not develop the organ within themselves to see this something, it is not there at all; just as color is not there for the color-blind. He sees reality only in various shades of gray.

For the colorblind, this grey world is not the real world. Likewise, for the spirit, which in Goethe's sense sees the higher nature within nature, the reality that spreads out in space and time is not the true reality. One can no more argue about the higher content of the world with those who see the truth only in spatial-temporal reality than with the color-blind about colors. Goethe and those who view the world in his sense call the higher world that of ideas. In the "Prologue in Heaven" he points to this higher world with the words: "And that which floats in fluctuating appearance is fixed with constant thought." Compared to the higher truth, the common reality is untrue. The individual real tree is untrue in relation to the idea of the tree, which the deeper-seeing person grasps in spiritual contemplation. It is only natural that the creations that stem from this higher view leave those who are blind to ideas cold. What is blind to ideas, however, is that naturalism in art which seeks to make it an image, a portrait of common, everyday reality. However, it must be expressly emphasized that the world of ideas does not refer to the monotonous, abstract world of the intellect, but to the world of intuition, which is full of life and content. If one finds the idea of man in the individual human being, one is not dealing with a meagre general idea, but with a content that is much richer, much fuller than that of everyday reality. Compared to Goethe's "Natural Daughter", the minds of people who cling to common reality remain cold. Fichte, on the other hand, who lived entirely in the world of higher reality, described this work, which others have called a "crystal ice palace", as Goethe's best creation.

Hugo von Hofmannsthal takes us to the land that spread out before Goethe's eyes when he said in front of the high works of art of the Greeks: there is necessity, there is God. Unlike Goethe, Hofmannsthal's view of art and reality does not appear to us as the fruit of a rich life experience. Rather, in complete naivety, reality strips itself of its ordinary, everyday qualities before his eyes and shows him its ideal, higher content. Hofmannsthal's creations therefore do not appear mature, not fully saturated. But his longing points him everywhere to the ideal land, and his brush does not paint things as they are in everyday life, but according to their inner, higher truth. Such are the characters and such are the events depicted by Hofmannsthal in the two dramas "Die Hochzeit der Sobeide" and "Der Abenteurer". They will appear as cool products to those who stick to common reality. As creations of a man to whom the inner truth of things is revealed, they appear to those who themselves feel something of this world. In the old man who takes home a young woman who loves not him but another and reveals this to him on their wedding night, the great traits of a general human being are reproduced. Everything accidental, which in common reality accompanies these great traits as tendrils and flourishes, has been removed. Perhaps no single person shows us the great lines of humanity in the way Hofmannsthal depicts them. But the individual human being awakens this image of the general human in us. This poet has a keen sense for everything that is not accidental. The process he describes cannot take place in the realm of everyday life in the generality that he depicts. But our intuition will always conjure up this process before our eyes when something similar only echoes in reality. The old man is a great nature. A nature that is as man is, of whom Goethe says: he is noble, helpful and good, for that alone distinguishes him from all beings we know. Moreover, man must complete his circles of existence according to eternal, iron laws. And it seems to this man to be an eternal, iron law: to release his beloved woman freely to wherever her love takes her. This is precisely what drives Sobeide to misfortune and death. She goes to her lover. He doesn't really love her. He was only playing with his love for her. She returns to her unloved husband and kills herself. - We also encounter the same motif in "The Adventurer". The woman who is deeply in love with the man who is only playing with her love. She has become an artist through love, he has become an adventurer through love play. Nothing individual clings to the figures. The eternal, which reveals itself in the accidental and temporal, is depicted.

In the place where naturalism, which makes the temporal, the common reality the sole truth, has reached its highest stage of dramatic development, these dramas of higher truth could not come into their own. The German Theater can perform the "Fuhrmann Henschel" to perfection, but not these dramas, which do not contain anything that is portrayed with incomparable grandeur in the naturalistic dramas.

Comedy by Otto Erich Hartleben

In a well-known "fundamental" work on pedagogy, the following sentence can be found: "The ways of education and its means must be based on the goal that the educator is to achieve, on the ideal of man that is set before him. Alongside this goal, alongside this ideal, the educator can take into account the individual character of the pupil. With one person the ideal will be achieved in this way, with another in that." Otto Erich Hartleben structured his main pedagogical work "Marriage Education" according to this educational postulate. The ideal in question is a person who fits into a proper. Philistine marriage. The paths that education must take in order to achieve this goal, which seems necessary to every Philistine heart, are different. They must depend on education, class, wealth, sex and other given conditions. Hartleben picks out two cases from the wide variety: Hermann Günther, the son of a rich middle-class family, and Meta Hübcke, a poor bookkeeper. Hermann is brought up by his mother. And when she can no longer cope on her own, she calls Hermann's uncle for help. The son of a landlady's landlady, a bourgeois commis, takes over Meta's marriage preparation. Hermann is not only destined for a "good middle-class" marriage in the book of fate; the actual companion of his later days, Bella König, also appears on the scene from time to time. She is already impeccably educated for marriage. Her natural dispositions have made this easy. She only seems to be there to serve the psychologists as an example of stupidity. Hermann always runs away when this Bella arrives. He must therefore be brought up to marry her. According to correct pedagogical principles, he must first get to know life, which in this case means womanhood, before he gets on board the little ship that Bella is steering. That's what mother Günther thinks. To this end, she gives the young man one hundred and fifty marks a month in pocket money. But the boy is up to mischief. He has too much of the morality in him that the Philistines call philistine. He flirts with Meta Hübcke. And he has feelings for her. Günther's mother finds out that he doesn't even pay the rent for his mistress. That's bad, says the mother's heart. The boy has to be taken out of the habit. He must be given an extra fifty marks a month so that he no longer falls in love with such girls but pays their rent. But a "good middle-class" mother can't teach her son everything that goes with that. And the father is dead. So she calls the father's brother. He has the right educational maxims. He is a man and can speak German with Hermann. He does that too. And he makes things really educational. He teaches by example. That's easy for him. Hermann has also had a fling with the parlor maid. That doesn't suit Günther's mother either. The house must be kept clean. The mother sends the girl away. Hermann decides to have an affair with her outside the house. This makes sense to his uncle, and he goes along to the rendezvous. There will be company. The uncle doesn't just want to watch. This is the way Hermann is brought up to marry. Meta, however, seeks to educate the Commis. The relationship with Hermann does not suit him any more than it suits Günther's mother. Commis and the noble lady basically mean the same thing. Meta must have a lover who gives her money. Mother Günther, of course, with the proviso that it's not too much. The Commis thinks differently. Because he wants to marry Meta himself one day. To do so, she first has to get a lot of money from a lover. Hermann is therefore not suitable. Someone else must come along. The bourgeois Kommis forges letters to lure Hermann away from Meta. Then he brings her a solvent man. In this way he wants to educate her to marry himself. Will he succeed? That is not stated in Hartleben's comedy.

You can see that Otto Erich Hartleben understands the Philistines; and he has the humor to portray them. I did not specify the content of the comedy. I wanted to characterize the impulse from which it seems to me to have emerged.

Performance at the Lessing Theater, Berlin

Leo Hirschfeld has made the fate of a dramatic poet the subject of a comedy. It must be admitted that the task he has set himself is as interesting as its satisfying realization is difficult. Heinrich Ritter begins as an idealist. He does not want to obey any demands other than those of art. As long as he keeps his ideals within a circle of coffee house brethren, he can preserve them. As soon as he steps out of this circle, a gentle breeze blows them away. Ritter has just completed a drama. One of the coffeehouse brothers thinks the ending is particularly great. That's something completely new. Others have done it before. But this ending!!! The editor of the Tagespost, Dr. Ottomar Mark, is a powerful man. He has influence over the management of the Residenztheater. With his help, Ritter hopes to bring the play to the stage. But this editor has a different artistic attitude to the coffee house brothers. He finds the ending impossible, everything else excellent. He wants to stand up for the play if Ritter cuts the ending. The brave poet, who wrote the play because of this ending, is initially reluctant. But when Mathilde Halm, the hopeful member of the Residenztheater, makes it clear to him that he should give in first in order to get to the top, he also gives in. Later, when he reaches the top, he will also have the power to realize his ideals. The great success comes. The "poet" reaches the top. But the ideals also go to hell. You have to keep the power you have gained. You can only do that if you continue to be at the will of the public. - Ritter's "artistic" idealism also threatened to undermine his bourgeois position. His family regarded him as a disgrace. He could gain a lucrative position through his uncle, the court lawyer Dr. Vinzenz Lechner. He is even offered the hand of his cousin. As long as he is an "idealist", he rejects everything that comes from this bourgeois side. Once he is on top, he wins the uncle's respect as well as the cousin's hand. - A lot could be done artificially with this problem. Imagine the coffee house circle in which Ritter lives, consisting of truly idealistic people, and imagine that Leo Hirschfeld had portrayed his hero as thoroughly idealistic but weak-minded, and motivated his case psychologically. The pain of the idealistic friends over the fallen man could give the whole plot a highly sympathetic background. But there is none of this to be found in this comedy. The coffee house brothers are stultified individuals. Their judgment of Ritter's talent leaves us cold. We do not know what is real about any of these people. Just as little as we know what is in Ritter himself and what is perishing. The development from idealist to flatterer of the public appears to be characterized in an entirely external way. The friends show no particular pain, but drink the good cognac that Ritter, as a wealthy man, can afford with relish. Yes, if the plot, which is insignificant in itself, were elevated by a particularly humorous portrayal! Then one would forget the "what" above the "how". But there can be no question of that either. Hirschfeld actually offends our aesthetic sensibilities in that as a dramatist he adopts a position towards the audience and art to which his hero sinks. Everything in comedy is calculated for effect. The development of a character is nothing, the momentary theatrical wit is everything.

The performance was entirely in keeping with this quality of comedy. Only Ferdinand Bonn tried to turn Heinrich Ritter into a real person. The character he gave is not that of the poet at all, but a much more elevated one. Josef Jarno struck a better tone, underlining every joke, playing in the style of a buffoon, and thus actually hitting the style of the play. All the worse for the comedy.

Performance at the Deutsches Theater, Berlin

Arthur Schnitzler has awakened the same feeling in me with all his creations: he neatly peels away everything that lies on the surface from the processes of life and leaves the content hidden beneath this surface. What he brings can only ever interest me because of this content; but this poet has no eye for this content itself. I had this feeling in particular with his new cycle of one-act plays.

The play "The Companion" presents a professor who has just lost his wife. Friends express their usual sympathy. A woman appears, demanding letters from the estate of the deceased. What is written in these letters is to remain a secret for the professor. But he believes he has long known what these letters bear witness to. The deceased wife was the mistress of his assistant. He has come to terms with this fact. It had seemed natural to him that he could only enjoy a brief happiness with a woman twenty years his junior. She was made to be a lover, not a companion, as he would have needed one. In his opinion, the two went their separate ways. But when the assistant appears at the professor's house after the funeral, it turns out that the truth is quite different from what the husband had suspected. This assistant had been in love with another woman for two years and had long since chosen her as his wife. So he did not treat the deceased as his mistress, no, as his prostitute. The professor would have accepted a love affair between the two, because it seemed natural to him. He would even have released the woman if the lovers had found the courage to demand it. But what is now revealed fills him with disgust and he shows the low-minded man the door. From conversations between the professor, the friend of the deceased and the assistant, we learn everything that has happened over the course of many years. These conversations are only the conclusion of a longer series of facts. The friend says that precisely because the professor has learned the full truth, he can now regain his peace. He now knows how little he possessed the woman who has just died. Now that she had passed away, he was no longer under the pressure of an unnatural marriage, and he did not need to mourn the death of the woman who had always been a stranger to him, who had only died in this house by chance. But what precedes this conclusion is, according to what we learn, not at all dramatic. For years a woman betrays her husband with another. In the end she even knows that the other is planning to marry someone else. The professor suspects something, but does nothing. And the seducer lives the life that touches him more deeply, outside the scene of the action. As atmospheric as Schnitzler knows how to make the conversations, nothing is gripping. The whole thing leaves you indifferent, because the facts are not based on any events that could evoke a deeper interest on their own.

The second one-act play "The Green Cockatoo" made even less of an impression on me. In a Parisian dive at the time of the revolution, down-and-out actors and sensationalist aristocrats gather every evening. On the evening we are shown the Bastille is stormed. The ex-comedians perform scenes of crime with the worst pathos, and the nobles get the creeps. Henri, one of the actors, has just married L&ocardie. He wants to portray how he killed the Duke of Cadignan because his wife was in love with him. He then learns that this infidelity is based on truth. The Duke arrives at the tavern at just the right time, and Henri really does kill him. As gripping as this may be for an audience with an eye for external theatrical effects, the whole thing is nothing but high jinks; it is reminiscent of shows that serve low taste and is boring in detail.

The best of the three one-act plays is "Paracelsus". The adventurous and mysterious 16th century personality uses hypnotism to carry out a prank in the house of an armourer. He suggests to the wife of the coarse, clumsy master craftsman that she must tell the truth for an afternoon. The husband then learns all sorts of edifying things about the heart of his "faithfully guarded" wife. Although the drawing of the characters is interesting and the process is not without a certain background, it seems to me to be nothing more than an extract of what can be said about Paracelsus and hypnotism in a salon conversation and accompanied by not exactly deep wit.

Drama in three acts by Max Dreyer
Performance at the Deutsches Theater, Berlin

Shortly before this performance [Schnitzler evening], the Deutsches Theater staged a drama in three acts by Max Dreyer: "Hans". A scholar lives with his daughter on an island in the North Sea. He is the director of a biological institute. The daughter has become a learned girl at her father's side. She microscopes and makes scientific discoveries like a German professor. It is not clear who is smarter: the father or the daughter. A former boarding school colleague comes to visit their friend from their girlhood. The father falls in love with this friend. The daughter is displeased to see that someone is coming between her and her father. Scholarship has also driven all sense of natural feeling out of Hans - as the scholar calls his daughter Johanna. A former officer and now a painter loves Hans. She treats him rather disgustingly. He would accept the fact that she does not praise his paintings. But he cannot tolerate the tone in which she does so. The father's relationship with his girlfriend becomes particularly repugnant to Hans when she learns that this girl has had a child out of wedlock. But the father loves the girl and is loved again. To ensure that everything goes well, Hans suddenly discovers her heart. She falls in ardent love with the painter. Now she can understand everything. Even her father's love. An arbitrary development of plots and constructed characters. Template characters and a dull plot that is based on traditional prejudices.

Comedy in three acts by Clara Viebig
Review on the occasion of the premiere in Bremen

Clara Viebig has created a real contemporary drama with her "Pharisees". Everything in it is contemporary. The characters have certainly grown out of the social milieu of the present; the subject matter with its harrowing conflicts is taken in this form entirely from life, which belongs to the dying cultural currents of the present; and the author's artistic sensibility and manner of representation is just as contemporary, combining the finest feeling for dramatic movement with a penetrating gift of observation, and a stylish talent for composition with sharp, realistic characterization of the characters and events.

This proud lady of the manor, brutal to all finer and natural feelings, yet bigoted and rigid in form, is a creature who shows reality in every move; her husband, the weakling, presents us with the true representative of a class approaching decay, a social class rotten in the foundations of the soul. Next to the two is a daughter, one of those creatures who have found truth and nobility of heart out of themselves in the midst of a fundamentally corrupt environment, who show that what is dying out of itself always creates seeds for the future. Opposite the three of them is Inspector Hobrecht, a capable, ambitious man, an honest, capable nature in the most beautiful sense. He manages the estate of the lazy, incompetent breadwinner, but he doesn't go to church. The landowner is extremely happy to have this excellent man on his estate. For if it were up to him alone, he would be too lazy to look for a new personality. But his wife. How can she tolerate a good, capable man on her estate who doesn't go to church! The daughter, however, wholeheartedly reciprocates the love that this man shows her. And as certain as it seems to both of them that the moment when the girl's parents find out about their love affair will also be the moment when they will try to destroy it with all their might, it is just as certain to them that they will never let themselves be separated. The great power of Clara Viebig's characterization comes to us in an old woman who "enjoys" the bread of mercy in the landowner's house. She used to be a housekeeper and is called "Aunt Fritzchen". She is blind, hard of hearing, God-fearing and superstitious. The little room she has been given is unhealthy. The pigsties are close by and the rats are daily guests of the old woman, who is thus rewarded for the faithful service she once rendered in her masters' house. The daughter of the house always tells the good woman the content of the sermon. The mistress, too, when she has a touch of particular generosity and kindness, allows herself to go into the dreadful little room and speak a few "kind" words to the old woman. This reign pretends to be "in the fear of the Lord". This old woman is painted with large, incredibly expressive colors and strokes. Her superstition brings the solution to the conflict. One always hears something at night, something sinister in the house, and "Aunt Fritzchen" cannot interpret this in any other way than that the "evil one" is up to mischief. The pious landowner's wife then calls in her friend of the house, the daft Pastor Hobrecht, to deal with the evil. But it turns out that the daughter of the house has a nightly encounter with the man of her heart. This nocturnal conjuring up of "evil" cost Aunt Fritzchen her life. She dies under the impression the event makes on her. This death scene has a profound effect and is poignantly true. For the hypocritical landowners, there is only one thing to do: cure the daughter of her delusion and avoid the scandal. To this end, the second daughter and her husband, the district administrator Dr. Wiegart, are summoned. This is the "right" man, who knows practical life, who knows how to protect professional honor and suppress anything that could cause public offense. He immediately finds what is right. The mad lover is put off with money; the mistress is made to believe that the man wanted nothing more than to take her into his bargain in order to acquire her property, and that he would let himself buy the fair beloved for a pittance. - And should the relationship have any consequences: well, the "Herr Landrat" is in the process of founding a foundling home in which many children of various origins can be accommodated. The landowner's household immediately agrees that his reputation and "honor" can be saved by this "clever" idea of Mr. Landrat; but the liar usually forgets one thing, that there are people for whom the truth is still something. And the honest administrator proves to be just as steadfast in his rejection of any Judas reward as his beloved is in her belief in his truthfulness and honor.

In a deeply moving way, the drama concludes with the two people finding their way out of hypocrisy and prejudice. The drama has the merit of true dramatic works of art: it bears the stamp of performability in every scene. It rises high above most contemporary dramatic productions. In Bremen it has now passed the acid test. Whether it will still be performed in Berlin and other major theaters this season will probably depend on whether there are theater directors who have the necessary initiative to say "yes" to a drama on their own initiative. Perhaps this requires a little more than knowing that authors who have previously "pulled" will continue to do so. But without such additional knowledge, our current state of theater will not be replaced by a new one, albeit a very desirable one.

Play on jokes and rants with five interruptions by Gerhart Hauptmann
Performance at the Deutsches Theater, Berlin

"Schluck und Jau." This much-disputed "Spiel zu Scherz und Schimpf" by Gerhart Hauptmann, which has just been published by S.Fischers Verlag (Berlin) and performed at the Deutsches Theater, will be discussed in the next issue of this magazine. Our judgment differs so much from what has been heard so far, pro and con, that we can only hope to be heard when the agitated tempers have calmed down somewhat.

"And do not take this coarse little piece for more than an unconcerned whim child," says the prologue speaker, who is "a hunter with the hip horn, through a divided curtain of green cloth, as it were, in front of the hunting party, to whom, as is assumed, the following piece is played in the banqueting hall of a hunting lodge." I believe that such a clear expression of his intentions must be respected in a poet. One would be wrong to expect a profound philosophy of life from a play written for the above purpose. What poet would waste such a philosophy if he thought of a "hunting party" as spectators and, moreover, had his prologue speaker address them thus: "Let it please you, dear hunters, that sometimes this curtain opens and reveals something to you - and then closes. Let your eyes glide over it, if you do not prefer to look into the cup." As a spectator, I am therefore entitled to put my own brain aside for once and to insert that of a member of a princely hunting party into my cranial cavity. I have the interests, thoughts and opinions of Prince Jon Rand, and it is very well calculated for my understanding when Karl, my "thinking" comrade, shares his philosophy of life with me. Jau, the drunkard, has been awakened from his intoxication in a princely bed; he has been dressed in princely clothes and then told that he is a prince and not a walking rascal. Charles undertakes this maneuver to amuse his prince. He then instructs him:

"Take this dress off him, this colorful embroidered one,
So he slips into the rags again,
Which now tied into a small bundle
The castellan keeps. Dress remains dress after all! His is a little more flimsy,
But just and fitted to his body.
And since it is from the same witness
Like dreams - his as good as ours, Jon!
And we are no closer to the things that surround us here
Are no closer than dreams, and
No closer than the stranger Jau -
So he rescues from our junk heaven
Much less than we into his realm
Of lowliness. How? What, are we more
? More than naked sparrows? More than this Jau? I do not think so! What we really are,
Is little more than what it really is -:
And our best happiness is soap bubbles.
We form them with our heart's breath
And swarm after them in the blue air,
Until they burst: and so does he.
He will be free in the future as before,
To pursue such eternal arts."

The ancient wisdom that the differences between people are based only on appearances, that something completely new is revealed to us as the essence of man when we awaken from the dream of life for a while, something that is in every man, be he prince or beggar - this not exactly profound but nevertheless true wisdom is presented here as it fits into the brain of a man like Karl. And the type of person who takes such things, which others have long since relegated to the category of the most banal matters of course, seriously and expresses them with importance, is wonderfully met. We know him, the count, who recites a few trivialities from a catechism on Indian philosophy with an expression as if he had gone to school with Buddha himself. This philosophizing salon hero of Gerhart Hauptmann's is excellently designed. Nietzscheanism has also found such philosophizing counts today. I knew one myself who always carried around the small edition of "Zarathustra" in a cute little booklet in his trouser pockets. In the other pocket, the count's thinker carried an equally well-equipped small edition of the Bible. He seemed to be of the opinion that the teachings of the "Book of Books" could be perfectly confirmed by the sayings of Zarathustra and that Nietzsche was only mistaken if he thought he was an anti-Christian philosopher. Why should it not give Karl, who is the child of such a mind, a terrible pleasure to make it clear to his comrade that it is only the veil of Maja that lets us find a difference between beggar and king, and that a beggar, if he is only put in the position of being king for a day, will play his part just as well as the born prince?

Hauptmann, however, seems to lack the humor that would be necessary to pull off the whole farce. He is a contemplative nature. He lays souls bare in a wonderful way. The two ragamuffins Schluck and Jau, with their riff-raff philosophy and servile lifestyle, are wonderfully drawn. Hauptmann's psychological subtlety is evident in every stroke with which he characterizes these two types. As a result, the beginning and end of the play are excellently done: the scene that shows us the two drunken rags on the green plan in front of the castle, and the other, at the end, that shows them after they have passed their adventures in the castle and have been thrown back onto the street.

The situation is different with what lies in between. This is where a dramatic cartoonist should have developed his art. Hauptmann's talent fails in this area. The irresistible comedy, which alone would be appropriate here, is probably not his thing. The actual farce therefore appears dull and colorless. Shakespearean style was the aim. But it is only half achieved everywhere. This also indicates what seems to be questionable about this play. It does not reveal any of its character. One is reminded of so much without feeling fully compensated by what is new in invention and treatment. We would have preferred less Shakespeare and more Hauptmann.

I apologize that I did not quite succeed in engaging a princely hunting party brain, but that my own asserted itself so obtrusively.

A German comedy by Otto Ernst
Performance at the Königliches Schauspielhaus, Berlin

A significant success of this comedy was reported from several places. Here at the Königliches Schauspielhaus it has also achieved such a success. Otto Ernst has met the mood of the vast majority of the theater audience in the most alarming way. What could be more plausible for this audience than that his thinking, feelings and intentions are excellent, uniquely and solely socially acceptable, and that only ridiculous, silly intellectuals can find fault with the solid attitude of the true bourgeoisie. The young doctor Hermann Kröger belongs to such a solid bourgeois family. His father is a philistine of the type often found in official positions. These people are so "normal" in spirit that they need little, and they have crossed the line where imbecility begins. Once they have crossed this line, they are retired. The mother is accordingly. She loves her children like "good" women love their children, and she provides the meals. Hermann Kröger has become a capable doctor; he has even already discovered his "bacillus". His younger brother is still at grammar school. He wants to be an "individuality". We learn of the way in which he strives to become one, that he consists of strolling and carousing, because those who "oxen" are for him the "far too many", the average people. During his student days, Hermann Kröger got to know a real Nietzsche giger, Erich, who was just living it up. This kind of silly person doesn't just exist among the "youth of today". They are people who have nothing to do, know nothing and don't want to learn anything - in fact, they are quite inferior. They pick up some philosophical phrases that are in themselves quite indifferent to them, but which are supposed to make their hollow skulls appear to be filled with deep knowledge. Among the people they meet in life are also those who fall for them. Hermann Kröger is taken in by Erich. He is in danger of being converted to superhumanity by a raghead. However, he is cured at the right time and enters the harbor of a proper, good marriage. In recent years, the word "comedy" has taken on a new meaning. In Otto Ernst's play, its good old meaning has been restored. What else is going on in the play serves the main tendency: the "solid" philistinism is a splendid world view in comparison to the folly of a part of modern youth draped in Nietzschean and Stirnerian phrases. There is not much to this tendency. It is banal. But there is no reason to criticize comedy for the sake of this tendency. However, the dramatic realization should lift the trivial content into a better sphere. The style here is no better than that of "War in Peace", "Rape of the Sabines" and so on. The characterization is of that hurtful kind which paints the colors by which we are to understand the peculiarities of the characters in thick complexes; the events follow each other as if there were no such thing as a logic of facts. It is true that we can do without this in comedy, but then there is only one means of transforming the impossible into something instantly enjoyable for our imagination: wit. It was not at the poet's side when he wrote the comedy.

Play in four acts by Georg Reicke
Performance at the Berliner Theater, Berlin

One of the most appealing phenomena of contemporary dramatic art is undoubtedly Georg Reicke's play "Freilicht", which was recently performed at the Berliner Theater. We are dealing here with a poetic personality whose merits can easily be overlooked. However, the more one lovingly immerses oneself in this creation, the more these merits appear before one's soul. The woman who is seized by the modern quest for personal liberation, who is therefore alienated from the circles in which she was born and brought up, and who has to carve out her own path in life through pain and privation: she has often been the subject of dramatic poetry. She is also the subject of Reicke's drama. But this poet has something over those who have dealt with the same subject matter. He is a more intimate observer. That is why he does not, like so many others, jump from observation to the tendentious intensification of the problem, the thesis. There is still much in women's souls today that resists the intellectual grasp of the idea of freedom. A long-standing cultural inheritance has laid sentiments on the foundation of this soul that cling like a lead weight to the bold idea of women's liberation. It is precisely those women who want to know nothing of such sentiments, who believe that they carry an absolute consciousness of freedom within them, who appear to the more discerning observer today like dishonest female poseurs. The deeply honest, true female characters have to struggle with a strong skepticism of feeling. A shattering tragedy of the heart is their perception of the full need for freedom. One must have very fine organs of observation in order to perceive the mental imponderables at work within such a woman, who strives towards freedom not out of program but out of her nature, out of the shackles forged by traditional social views. Georg Reicke has such organs of observation. Every trait in the characterization of his Cornelie Linde is psychological truth, and none is tendency.

It is very easy to observe that poets who want to be modern may represent new ideas, but that at the core of their being, in their actual attitude, they are no different from the philistines they mock. They are philistines of the new, just as the others are philistines of the traditional. Reicke is fundamentally different from such poets. There is not a trace of philistinism in him either. That is precisely why he faces things objectively, as a true artist. This is the reason why the man he contrasts with Cornelie, the painter Ragnar Andresen, has become such a splendid figure. A true confessor of freedom, a man for whom this confession is as natural as a physical driving force. You will have to look a long time before you find such a pose-less personality among modern dramatic types.

And just as true as these modern figures are those of a culture that has grown old. The privy councillor family from which Cornelie has grown out of, the lieutenant Botho Thaden, to whom she is engaged and from whom she breaks away in order to flee to her congenial Ragnar: everything is clearly true. Nowhere is there any other tendency than to make the characters of life appear comprehensible. Nowhere the false juxtaposition of the excellent new and the evil old. But everywhere the awareness that the new has naturally developed from the old, that this new must still bear the traits inherited from the old. Not just justification of the future, but also an understanding of the past.

Such characters are set in a plot that has nothing of the dramatic developments that are often made in this way and also nothing of the surprising scenic twists. This plot unfolds in the same way that life unfolds in a series of twists and turns. Almost every moment we have the feeling that everything could turn out differently. It is the same in life. Necessity certainly prevails everywhere, but it is precisely this necessity that is the faithful sister of chance. Afterwards we say to ourselves: everything had to turn out this way; beforehand we only have the perspective of countless future possibilities. This is present in Reicke's work in the form of a fine poetic artistry. There are no grotesque surprises in his drama, but there is also no embarrassing foresight of the outcome, which so often appears to us in poetry as an untruth of life.

Reicke's atmospheric painting is particularly appealing. With simple, discreet means, he presents us with the Munich painter's studio in which Cornelie breathes the air of freedom; and with equally simple means, he embodies the milieu of Berlin's secretive domesticity.

A free view of reality, unclouded by prejudice, confronts me in this poet. A gaze that grasps the exterior of life's processes just as vividly as the phenomena taking place within the human soul. We are dealing with a man who does not need bright colors, strong lights and shadows to say what he has to say. We are dealing with a connoisseur of the transitions in appearances. Georg Reicke is a realistic poet, at the same time with that trait of idealism that life itself has.