The Rudolf Steiner Archive

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.

A masked play in four acts by Rudolf Lothar
Performance by the Viennese Deutsches Volkstheater at the Deutsches Theater, Berlin

Examining a "mask play" for its dramatic necessities like a serious drama seems to me to be on the same level as an anatomist examining a caricature for its anatomical correctness. I wouldn't say this if it weren't for the fact that critics who come to mind have behaved in this way towards Rudolf Lothar's "King Harlequin". Above all, one thing has become clear to me. We have here a drama in which humor lives in the very best sense of the word. Prince Bohemund returns to his parents' house after an absence of ten years. His arrival coincides with the hour of his father's death. His father was a terrible king to the kingdom. His brother Tancred was an even worse chancellor. The queen wept herself blind over the misfortune of her poor country. Nor can she expect anything good from Bohemund as her successor. He lacks any seriousness. He has only traveled the world to amuse himself. Instead of allies, he brings a troupe of actors with him. Harlequin copies the prince himself with great skill. When something goes wrong in the prince's gallant adventures, so that a beating is imminent, Harlequin has to put on the royal mask and take the beating instead of his master. Columbine, another member of the troupe, is supposed to pass the prince's time with her feminine charms. But Harlequin loves Columbine and is terribly jealous of his master. Just at the moment when the old king gives up the ghost, this jealousy leads Harlequin so far that he murders the prince. Now his skill in copying his master comes to his aid. He puts on the prince's mask, declares himself to be the prince and claims that he has killed Harlequin. So Harlequin becomes king. He, who is used to playing only on boards that mean the world, is supposed to play a role in the real world. And he can't manage that. He wants to be a real king. He comes up against Tancred's resistance, who sees the king as nothing more than the will-less fulfillment of the idea of kingship. It is not the king who should rule, no, this abstract idea should rule, and the person is indifferent. The actor can play people: His play rests on the belief that the people who serve as models for his characters are real people. Because he thinks he can maintain this belief when he enters reality, he is impossible in this reality. Tancred decides to have him assassinated in order to place a less-than-perfect royal scion on the throne. Harlequin returns to his life as an actor after he has shown the court the experiences he had during his days as king in a light-hearted play, once again disguised as Harlequin. The idea of kingship is filled out with the not fully sensual sprout.

This is not a bitter satire, but a humorous poem. The poet understands the necessities of life and describes them without pessimism; but he finds the humorous mood that alone makes it possible to get over the pessimism. Rudolf Lothar has happily avoided a pitfall. The obvious thing to say was: "A comedian can teach a king." Fritz Mauthner thinks this is better. Harlequin could have grown with his higher purposes; he, as a comedian, could have surpassed a Tancred in true wisdom and humanity. It seems to me that Lothar's basic dramatic idea is deeper. For Harlequin is not an impossible king because he is incapable of being king, but because he is capable. He does not fail because he could not teach a king, but because teaching is impossible.

The only possible mood that this thought can bear is the humorous one. A tragic outcome would be unbearable. Just think: Harlequin goes down because he wants to play king and can't! That would not be tragic, but ridiculous. But an actor who realizes that he can't be king because, as the representative of an abstract idea, he would have to give up the content of his personality, and who runs away when he realizes this: that seems humorous.

Whoever wants a tragedy instead of Lothar's drama wants a different drama. But such a person does not consider that Lothar's Harlequin is not taking on a mission, but a role. He believes that only on the stage is meaning the main thing. He must experience that this should also be the case in life. In the play he can tolerate meaning, but not in life. So away to the scene where meaning is in its place. Harlequin wants to mean something, if he only has to appear with the pretension of meaning something; but if he has to mean something with the pretension of being it, then meaning becomes unbearable for him.

Lothar's characters are as full of life as humorous figures can be. You can't do without exaggeration in such characters. But the exaggerations have to embody the idea in a meaningful way. We are happy to tolerate an enlarged nose in the drawing of a personality as soon as we are aware that this enlargement of the nose is a characteristic that we arrive at when we allow the characteristic that the enlargement of the nose serves as a sign of to come to the fore in our perception.

I have to say about the performance that I found Mr. Kramer splendid in the leading role (Harlequin), considering the difficulty of making the transition from a real Harlequin to an acted King comprehensible. Although I have seen Ms. Albach-Retty in roles that she plays better, I would like to give her full credit this time as well for her execution of the task, which gave the impression of being finely toned. I would also like to pass the best judgment on the direction; there was impeccable interplay and successful stage sets.

A tragedy by Otto Borngräber with a foreword by Ernst Haeckel
Review and subsequent critique of the performance at the Altes Theater, Leipzig

It is a risk that Otto Borngräber has taken with his Giordano Bruno tragedy. He will - I fear - experience many disappointments. I wish I were wrong. But I doubt that our time will have the impartiality to follow the intentions of this playwright. We live in an era of small perspectives. And Otto Borngräber has dramatized a man with the greatest possible perspective. Despite the celebrations that were held in February of this year in honor of Giordano Bruno, despite the dithyrambic articles that have been written about him, I do not believe that the audience for this "superman of a different kind", as Ernst Haeckel calls him in his preface to the drama, is a particularly large one. For I cannot believe in the inner truth of this Giordano Bruno cult. One experiences symptoms that are too characteristic of the petty way of thinking of our time. I confess that it is downright depressing for me to observe one of these symptoms now in the fight against Ernst Haeckel's recently published book "Die Welträtsel". How often does one have the opportunity to perceive the joy creeping out of the most hidden corners of the souls of our contemporaries at the attacks that could be heard from the theological side against Haeckel's struggle for the new world view. A church historian in Halle, Loofs, no doubt believes that he has taken the cake among the opponents of Haeckel with his brochure "Anti-Haeckel", which has now appeared in several editions. He has found that some chapters in Haeckel's book violate ideas that church history has currently formed about the connection between certain facts. In the chapters in question, Haeckel based himself on the book by an English agnostic, Stewart Ross, which was published in German under the title "Jehovas gesammelte Werke". This book is little known in Germany. Most readers of Haeckel will only have learned of his existence from the "Welträtseln". This was also the case for Loofs. In his "AntiHaeckel", he has now subjected it to a critique from the point of view of today's "enlightened" Protestant church historian. This criticism is devastating. What today's biblical criticism, historical research into the Gospels and other church-historical sources have established as "facts", Ross has gravely sinned against. Loofs cannot do enough in his condemnation of the book. He calls it a book of shame, inspired by ignorance of church history and a blasphemous way of thinking. Unfortunately, one can now see that he has made an impression on a large circle of educated people with his judgment. One can hear it repeated ad nauseam that Haeckel was "fooled" by the writing of the English ignoramus.

All these judgments from the mouths of "educated people" prove only one thing to me. There is something uncomfortable about Haeckel's world view. Out of vague feelings, they prefer the old Christian dogma to the modern view of nature. But this view has too good a reason for it to be easy to fight against it. The facts on which Haeckel relies speak too clearly. One forgives oneself too much if one openly closes oneself off against this world view. This does not prevent one from feeling a deep sense of satisfaction when a theologian comes along and proves Haeckel's dilettantism in church history. One is in a position to pass a negative judgment on the new world view, as it were from behind. One does not openly confront the monism of the great natural scientist. That would require courage. You don't have that. But you can make up your own mind: a man like Ernst Haeckel, who falls so naively for the ignorance of Stewart Ross, cannot shake us deeply in our ideas. Loofs himself does not hold back with a similar judgment. He even removes Haeckel from the list of serious scientific researchers because he relies on a book that is supposedly as "unscientific" as Ross's.

But take a look at this book. Anyone who reads it without bias will - I dare say - not be astonished enough at the deep inner untruthfulness of Loofs' criticism. For, according to this, he must absolutely believe that he is looking at the writing of a frivolous man who is not interested in truth, but in mocking convictions that are sacred to millions of people. Instead, he is presented with the book of a profound man, whose every sentence makes you feel a tremendous struggle for the truth, who has obviously been through crises of the soul of which people like Loofs have no idea in the comfortable cushion of their church history. A holy zeal for human welfare and human happiness has inspired a personality here to speak out in anger against traditional prejudices, which he considers to be a human misfortune. We are not dealing with a reckless denier, but with an indignant man who wields the scourge because he believes the truth to be distorted by Pharisees.

I need the background of this fact to justify, by a remarkable symptom, the doubts I have expressed above as to the receptivity of the public to Borngräber's tragedy. I can only say once again: I hope that I am thoroughly mistaken and that what Haeckel says at the end of his preface will come true: "We can only express the heartfelt wish that this great tragedy, which is completely in tune with our times, may not only find a wide readership as an ennobling and exciting book, but may also find the appreciation and effect it surely deserves by being performed soon on a larger German stage."

I do not believe that the drama will find mercy before the judgment seat of those aesthetes who have become entrenched in their views over the last two decades. Those who consider the dramatic technique of the "moderns" to be the only possible one will not pass a particularly favorable judgment on "The New Century". Borngräber's technique, with its tendency towards decorative beauty and stylization, will not stand up to either the naturalistic or the symbolist-romantic forum of recent years. Anyone who goes deeper, however, will enjoy this stylization, which dramatizes a Renaissance hero with undisguised pleasure in Renaissance-like forms. I believe I recognize in Borngräber a poet who has kept his taste away from the sympathies and antipathies of the day. For his artistic form he presupposes an audience whose delight in the beauty of form has not been entirely lost in the inclinations of contemporary taste. I do not mean to say that I am an unreserved lover of drama in an aesthetic sense. I do not think that Borngräber is already a master of the style he has chosen. But all this seems to me to take a back seat to the great worldview perspective that is expressed in the work. It will not be a question of whether Borngräber has delivered an impeccable tragedy to the aesthetic judges of this or that direction, but whether there is a tendency for the great world view, of which the martyr burned in Rome three centuries ago is the first representative, to be transferred from an elite of spiritual fighters to a larger crowd.

Whoever is capable of feeling with Bruno's world perspective can alone have a feeling for the tragic violence that expresses itself in this personality. This tragedy lies in the relationship that Bruno's personality has to the upheaval of the world view brought about by men like Copernicus and Galileo. Copernicus and Galileo provided the building blocks for the world view that has been developed over the last few centuries. Bruno was one of those who, with a far-sighted vision of the future, outlined the effects that Copernicus' and Galileo's ideas would have on the view of human nature. He spoke truths for which only the first actual germs were present. He did so at a time when these germs did not yet have the capacity to grow into a world view. Borngräber subtly contrasts Galileo's figure with Bruno's. Galileo is not a tragic personality, although he is indisputably the one to whom we owe more than Bruno when we look at the building blocks that make up our world view. I can completely imagine Bruno out of the development of the spirit in the last centuries. Even without his having anticipated at the turn of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the thoughts that fill me today, they could still be exactly the same as they are. The same is not the case with Galileo. Without Galileo there would be no Newton, without Newton there would be no Lyell and Darwin, and without Lyell and Darwin there would be no modern scientific world view. Without Giordano Bruno there would be none of this. Galileo did not go beyond what his physical foundation absolutely compelled him to do; Bruno proclaimed things that a personality with Galileo's mindset can only claim for himself today. Therein lies Bruno's profound tragedy.

While reading Borngräber's book, I couldn't help but think of a lone fighter of our time, the brave Eugen Reichel. He has placed a personality from the sixteenth century before our eyes, in whom we find the tragedy realized in a completely different sense, for which Borngräber presents Giordano Bruno as a representative. According to Reichel's conviction, a man died in 1586 who viewed the world as we do today and whose memory has so far been completely erased from the memory of mankind.

Reichel is of the opinion that Shakespeare's plays and Baco of Verulam's "Novum organon" reveal a powerful, brilliant personality to those who look deeper, who is equally great as a poet and thinker, but who has died in oblivion without being understood by the rest of the world. Just as Shakespeare's dramas lie before us, they are not the work of their original genius creator, but rather the result of mutilation, amateurish additions and reworking of his legacy. Likewise, the "Novum organon" in the form in which it has come down to us is a work in which two spirits can be sensed: an original, Copernican view of nature, who at the end of the sixteenth century was already living in the world view whose construction was completed by the three that followed, and a bungling scholastic. Baco of Verulam was this bungling personality. He appropriated the legacy of the forgotten genius, "reworked" it in the manner indicated, handed over the philosophical under his name, the dramatic under the name of the Stratford actor Shakespeare to his fellow and posterity. Today I am still unable to form a judgment on this great question to which Reichel has given his energies. Suppose one could agree with Reichel: then, in the sixteenth-century genius he sees behind the works of Bacon and Shakespeare, a figure of the deepest tragedy is revealed to us. From a Bruno tragedy translated into the immeasurable. Bruno killed a hostile power. His work could not destroy it. Aware that his enemies were more afraid of this work than he was of their judgment, he departed from life. The lack of judgment of his contemporaries destroyed the work of the English genius; it not only killed him physically, it killed him spiritually. Eugen Reichel dramatized this tragedy in broad strokes in his "Meisterkrone". Unlike Borngräber, he did not poetically depict a real, historical event, but based it on a symbolic plot. This undoubtedly broadens the perspective for those who are able to feel the tragedy of the personality in question. Borngräber's work does bring the tragic problem in question closer to a wider audience.

Borngräber's drama is soon to be performed in Leipzig by a circle of friends of the work. May it be followed by others, and may our theaters (in Berlin) soon make the effort to open their doors to the Bruno tragedy. They can then fulfill a beautiful task in the great struggle for the "new faith". "The tremendous struggle between 'the old and the new faith', between church religion and spiritual religion, between spiritual bondage and spiritual freedom, which is just now ushering in 'the new century', confronts us grippingly in Borngräber's poetry" (E. Haeckel in the foreword). Worthy performances of this drama could make a significant contribution to the understanding of this struggle. If the stage is to give a picture of the world, it must not exclude itself from the highest thing there is for people in this world, from spiritual needs.

We experienced a beautiful festive evening in Leipzig on July 7, 1900 with the performance of Otto Borngräber's Giordano tragedy "The New Century". I will return in the next issue to the successful performance, which brought us an outstanding performance by the Dresden court actor Paul Wiecke (as Giordano Bruno).

It was a wonderful celebration of the monistic world view that we attended on July 7 at the Altes Theater in Leipzig. What I have to say about Otto Borngräber's drama can be found in this weekly magazine. It was no easy task that the Dresden court actors Paul Wiecke and Alice Politz undertook with the artists of the Weimar Theater. But it was all the more rewarding. The solution can be described as a successful one for the time being. The great figure of Giordano Bruno, who appears as a symbol of a world view confident of victory, which has taken up the fight against darkness and the blind belief in revelation, was given a worthy portrayal by Paul Wiecke. Otto Borngräber and all those who represent his cause can welcome with gratitude the fact that their hero has found this portrayer. Paul Wiecke appears all the more significant the more important the tasks he is given. He found the right tone for the middle ground that had to be maintained here, between realism, which as an artistic companion necessarily belongs to the monistic world view, and that monumental art which is aware that through it a world view is expressed on which the stamp of the eternally effective is imprinted. The weight of this world view was exquisitely expressed in Paul Wiecke's noble and measured playing. The tones that the artist was able to strike were both heart-warming and majestic. Alice Politz's portrayal of the noble Venetian lady, who embraces the new teaching with a devoted soul, was excellent. The drama and the circumstances under which the performance took place probably posed no small challenges for the director. The director Grube from the Weimar Court Theater masterfully mastered these difficulties. He deserves special thanks from those who enjoyed the festive performance without reservation. Space does not permit us to mention more than a few names of others who have rendered outstanding services to the good cause. - We single out Mr. Krähe (Thomaso Campanella), Mr. Berger (Jesuit Lorini), Mr. Franke (bookseller Ciotto), Mr. Niemeyer (Protestant jailer and Perrucci). The Leipzig student body has rendered outstanding services to the presentation of the folk scenes. We left the theater with full satisfaction and only realized something of the merits that some had earned "behind the scenes" at the after-party. Of course, the fleeting evening did not give us a full insight. But we would still like to remember one man: Burgs, whose satisfied expression at the post-performance celebration did not completely erase the worry lines that the previous days' preparatory work had caused him. The proceeds of the performance are intended for the benefit of the writers' home in Jena.

We Germans are currently suffering from a serious cultural malady. We are the bearers of a high education; but this cannot bring itself to become the leader of public life. Instead of giving character to all our idealistic endeavors, shallowness and dilettantism are the leading forces everywhere. We have attained a view of art that no other nation has, but in the public cultivation of our art, in the management of our art institutes, in criticism, little of this view is noticeable. Our entire intellectual life today is therefore on a much lower level than it could be according to the dispositions of our people, according to its innate depth. Wherever we look, we find sad proof of these propositions. We could just as well apply them to every other branch of our present cultural endeavors, as we want to do this time to the cultivation of the drama in our Viennese theaters.

We have two theaters in Vienna that could serve a purely cultural and artistic purpose if they were to grasp their task properly: the Hofburgtheater and the new Deutsches Volkstheater. The other theaters can hardly be thought of in this way. For they have a difficult standing with their audiences. After all, the latter does not seek true artistic enjoyment, and if this is not there, the standard for the good also ceases. That's when the endeavor begins to produce plays with which one can earn as much as possible. The art institute ceases to be such an institution and becomes a company intent on making as much money as possible.

Our Burgtheater never needed to be such a theater; it should never have become the Deutsches Volkstheater. For there are still enough people in Vienna who have a sense of higher aims in art to fill two theaters every evening; it is only necessary not to make it impossible for them to enter these theaters. The Burgtheater and the Volkstheater, however, have managed to exclude the very audience for whom they are intended.

By charging prohibitively high prices and, in particular, by introducing the "Stammsitz" subscription, the Burgtheater has created an audience that usually has money, but not always an understanding of art. The most frivolous need for entertainment has taken the place of a sense of art. Don't misunderstand us! For we do not misjudge the very significant achievements of the Burgtheater in recent times. The artistic leadership has been entrusted to a man whose dramatic skill demands the respect of every discerning person. Every new performance is proof of this. Nor are we blind to the merits that this man has earned through new productions of classical plays such as "Gyges and his Ring", "The Jewess of Toledo" and "Lear". These were theater events of the first rank. The promised "Antigone" will be another one. Nor are we blind to the gain that the Burgtheater has made by the addition of a first-rate force to its artistic staff in Miss Reinhold. But the Burgtheater in Vienna has a completely different task than reviving old plays in masterly staged productions. The life of our Burgtheater should be intimately connected with the development of contemporary dramatic literature. But it has had little luck in promoting the latter. In recent years it has produced new plays that are almost completely worthless. "Cornelius Voss", "Wild Thieves", "The Fugitive", "The Wild Hunt" do not belong in this art institute. We say it with a heavy heart, but we must say it: they are a disgrace to it. Don't tell us that the present has nothing better. That is simply not true. A nation like Germany has something better the moment its first stages set a higher standard. If the Burgtheater understands how to create an art-loving audience, then the German writers will deliver good plays to this theater. However, as long as the educated mob spreads in the main seats and rejects every serious artistic direction, the management of the Burgtheater will be faced with a power that prevents it from solving true artistic tasks. This is what is important. Why is it almost impossible to stage a new tragedy today? Not because there is no audience for it, but because the audience that would enjoy it has been displaced by another audience that lacks any sense for it. Apart from the most superficial need for entertainment, this audience has at most a need for theatrical virtuosity. And so it happens that quite worthless plays are given if there are only rewarding roles in them, that is, roles in which the actor can shine with some special trick. We have had to go through this in "Wilddieben" and "Flüchtling" ad nauseam. But what is even worse, we recently had to witness the literary advisory board of our Burgtheater director proclaiming from the pulpit the most reprehensible of all artistic doctrines: that the value of a drama is determined solely by stage technique. This is a proposition that virtually means the death of all dramatic art. The dramatist is subject to quite different laws of art than the consideration of the accidental facilities of the stage. The dramatist must never subordinate himself to the stage, the poet to the actor, but always the latter to the former. Whatever is dramatically valuable, stagecraft has to create the means and means to bring it to performance. It is a sad sign of the times that doctrines such as Baron Berger's, which make a mockery of all healthy aesthetics, could meet with so much approval and cause such a stir.

Much less than the Burgtheater, however, does the Deutsches Volkstheater fulfill its task. After what has been promised, one could rightly expect from it the cultivation of that dramatic field which can provide the broader masses of the public, those masses who have no higher than ordinary school education, with a higher intellectual enjoyment. This audience would have been found gradually if it had been sought. In the beginning, of course, one would have had to refrain from "extracting" as much as possible from the theater. An artistic director with a permanent salary should have been placed at the helm and a capable director at his side. Instead, the theater was leased out and the director is dependent on putting on "profitable" plays. What did they start with? With "Ein Fleck auf die Ehr", the house was certainly worthily opened. But it would simply have been a scandal if Anzengruber had not been given the first word. What immediately followed was bad enough. We see "Maria and Magdalene" by Lindau, then "The Famous Woman" by Schönthan and Kadelburg. Performing these plays at the Volkstheater was unheard of. From the outset, they had created an audience that did not belong in this theater. "Die berühmte Frau" has the most frivolous and hurtful tendency imaginable. It simply ridicules all of a woman's spiritual life, even if it arises from a deep inner need. According to this play, a woman's task is only to cook, knit and bear children. The most reprehensible thing about it, however, is that the frivolity here lies in skillful, effective theatrical machinations that captivate the audience. It is no different with "Maria and Magdalene", even if we cannot accuse this work of being as harmful as the "Famous Woman".

Much, if not everything, was spoiled with this beginning. What we still experienced of some significance was the performance of "William Tell". But it was precisely this performance that showed how the artistic personnel were not at all up to the demands that had to be made. We are not foolish enough to want to compare this performance with the magnificent Tell performance at the Burgtheater, which is an artistic event of the first rank, especially due to Krastel's interpretation of the Tell role; but the Volkstheater did not do enough. Neither the scenic design nor the artistic presentation rose to the level of mediocrity. All that the Volkstheater did worth mentioning was a performance of the “Pfarrer von Kirchfeld". The rest: "Die Rantzau", "Der Hypochonder", "Der Strohmann", "Die Hochzeit von Valeni" were plays calculated precisely for the audience created by the performance of "Die Berühmten Frau".

Our theaters should only once have the courage to count on a certain audience, and one would see that it comes.