The German Cla.s.sics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries.
by Various.
THE CONTEMPORARY SHORT STORY
By Julius Petersen, Ph.D.
Professor of German Literature, University of Basel
TRANSLATED BY WILLIAM GUILD HOWARD
The last two volumes of this comprehensive publication are devoted to the living, the writers of the present who sow the seed from which shall grow the future of German letters. But who can speak of prophecy or prevision, at a moment when all who call themselves German are compelled to fight for their existence, and the future of German nationality as well as of German culture is hidden by the smoke of battle? To the four quarters of the globe the wild alarm _Germania est delenda_ is trumpeted as a so-called duty of human civilization; isolated Germany can respond only with her resolute _Victory or Death_.
What shall be the end? Shall this war of the nations, unparalleled in history, mean for Germany the destruction of all her material and spiritual possessions, as they were destroyed during the thirty years of horror in the seventeenth century? Or has Germany, thrown upon her own resources, attained to full consciousness of her strength, and now at last repaired the damage of that national calamity, which devastated her territory, subjected her to foreign domination, and continued to r.e.t.a.r.d her progress for two full centuries?
Who can foretell whether the heroism of a mighty time, whose dawn we see, is to give new inspiration to patriotic poetry for centuries to come, and beget a new generation of bards worthy to sing of arms and men? The spirit of self-sacrificing devotion which waged the Seven Years" War and the Wars of Liberation has returned to animate the Germany of today. Who knows, however, but that many a precious life will be sacrificed from which we hoped for great things even in our literature, and which now sheds its blood in a struggle for the warrior"s laurel wreath? For German poets have also heard the call to arms; and those who have not, like Ganghofer, despite his sixty years, and Dehmel with his fifty-one, joined the ranks of the volunteers, tune their lyres to Tyrtaean measures and enlist their pens in the service of their native land. Thus Gerhart Hauptmann, who only a year ago concluded his dramatic celebration of the centennial of German liberation with an apotheosis of peace, now comes forward with stirring war songs.
Is this still the people to which Goethe belonged? At a time when a common cause with Austria conjures up again the shade of the dear old Holy Roman Empire no other verse in _Faust_ seems so inept as that concerning the ugly political song. Today we should rather say "An unpolitical song, an ugly song;" for to the people that but a few weeks ago was mindful of naught but works of peace everything has become a matter of indifference except the burning question of the hour. Even though the longed-for peace should soon return, the year 1914 must leave a deep mark in the development of German literature. As yet we can only look back, not forward, from this milestone; and even in so doing we cannot escape from the present.
One thing the very first days of the war have made manifest: the physical and moral strength and the healthy marrow of the German people. Our literature, as the most faithful mirror of national life, has reflected in the past ten years this incorruptible healthfulness, and if we look somewhat farther back, we even see something resembling a process of convalescence. It was possible in 1903 for a novel _Jena or Sedan_ by Franz Adam Beyerlein to create a sensation. Written in the manner of Zola, the book, which, because of an alleged dry rot in the German army, prophesied mischance in the future, produced its effect not so much through an apparently objective but gloomy depiction of life in the garrisons, as through the nourishment that it gave to the torturing doubts which during the last decades of the nineteenth century grew rank as a fatalistic pessimism. The very principle of naturalism as a form of art, with its one-sided preference for disease, crime, and weakness, flourished on the offal of a materialistic philosophy of life, which viewed the vanity of existence with weary resignation. But this disease of the times was as little a specifically German malady as the naturalism imported from France and Russia was a genuine form of German art. Liberation from paralyzing lethargy was possible only through a realization of the fact that the real sources of national power were to be sought elsewhere. The soul of the German people, which in former centuries gave birth to mysticism and romanticism, is filled with a yearning for the infinite that cannot in the long run be contented with a materialistic philosophy; and the home of the German people, broad and fertile Germany, presents other pictures than a view of coal mines and swarming streets seen through the narrow s.p.a.ce between factory chimneys. As a reaction against naturalism there arose therefore a neo-romanticism, and as its national modification, an art of the native heath (_Heimatkunst_).
There is no contradiction between romanticism and _Heimatkunst_; for it was romanticism that in its time aroused the Germans to a real sense of what their native heath meant for them; neither is _Heimatkunst_ opposed to naturalism. In both _Heimatkunst_ and naturalism nature is the watchword, but with the difference that what for the one is the principle is for the other the subject of poetic representation.
Naturalism aimed to give the impression of inexorable fidelity to nature in the reproduction of the unhealthful and of that which strictly speaking was contrary to nature; _Heimatkunst_, on the other hand, had recourse to free and open nature as the unfailing fountain of health. When naturalism came to the fore it was customary to designate the opposing tendencies as idealism and realism; the contrast is better expressed by the terms optimism and pessimism. In the last ten years clear prevision of the tasks of the future and a sense of the duty of national training for these tasks, such as we admire in the Americans, has developed in Germany. A hopeful outlook fosters the joy of living; as this joy increases, a new love of nature and a new comprehension of her revelations develop; the old German pa.s.sion for roving revives; and delight in song and sport, in fresh air and sunshine, rejuvenates the whole people. Literature follows this national bent and its rallying cry becomes "Out of the atmosphere of the hospital and oppressive wretchedness, back to the life-giving sod which yields sustenance to every worker, out into the country, where there is a sufficiency for simple wants, where there is no strife between capital and labor, where the harshness of social distinctions vanishes and the feeling prevails of a common bond between man and his native heath as well as between man and man."
The optimistic faith in the future of the German people furnishes the foundation also for the consciousness of a great unity to which all branches of the German stock have now awakened, and which is the second important element in the* present state of things. German history testifies to more than a thousand years of inner and outer disunion.
The present war is almost the first in which Germans have not to array themselves against Germans; this time there is left only the common pain and the common bitterness that a people of kindred blood takes the field against Germany. But all the German tribes and nations feel themselves to be one people--indeed, the sense of membership proclaims itself in the form of sympathy beyond political boundaries "as far as the German tongue is heard." However little political influence may be attached to this fact, its cultural significance is not to be underestimated; for a common language forms today a stronger bond than the sense of racial consanguinity, and this bond is most of all strengthened by the common possession of a literature.
It has been hardly more than a hundred years that the Germans could be said to possess a national literature. Even the literature of the eighteenth century was ill-starred by the partisan strife between the Saxons and the Swiss, a strife which had its origin more particularly in irreconcilable differences of language. Permanent peace was concluded at Weimar without any feeling that the supremacy of this spiritual centre was tyranny. Even in his old age Goethe showed the keenest interest in all local and dialectical literature, and romanticism reinforced the sense for every ancient trait of national individuality. United Germany has no need of an academy to fix the canons of usage; on the contrary, it recognizes in the variety of local and dialectical peculiarities a source of wealth which would be impaired by any normalization, and the drying up of which would threaten literature with sterility. Cultivated Germany is not an anarchy, but a federation of many small states, with a much more democratic const.i.tution than such a unified state as France, of which state Paris is the monarch. The influence of Prussia, mostly misunderstood abroad, is confined to military and civil administration; in questions of art and culture, but above all in literature, every attempt to enforce uniformity meets with the most stubborn resistance.
The turn of the century witnessed, it is true, an ominous a.s.sumption of authority on the part of the imperial capital in the domain of literature, and especially the drama; but it was not so much Berlin as the great city as such. The diseases of superculture, impotent estheticism, the restless spirit of commercialism, and social conflicts are of the same kind in Berlin and Vienna as in Paris, London, and New York. Naturalism, which seized upon these themes, was international, as was socialism, which hailed this movement as its own. With the opposition against naturalism and with the new gospel of _Heimatkunst_ the revolt against the international, against the literature of city life in general, and particularly against the sn.o.bbish literary clique in Berlin was complete. As early as 1901 the gospel of "Away from Berlin!" was thus fervently preached by a champion of _Heimatkunst_, the Alsatian Fritz Lienhard:
You writers are all of you entirely out of touch with the German family, with the spirit of the German people throughout the length and breadth of the empire. You no longer survey with comprehensive vision and open-mindedness the manifold regions of our country and the multifarious callings of our people; you no longer feel yourselves to be addressing the millions of good people whose mother tongue you speak, indeed, the best people of your day and generation; you do not dream of disciplining yourselves to be men and heroes, or of striving to be at one with the widely ramified nation and the still more widespread spirit of humanity. Aimlessly yielding to your artistic whims, crotchets, and triflings, you make "interesting works of art"
out of your own immaturity, you are satisfied with an audience composed of an infinitesimal fraction of our people, a fraction, moreover, which, things being as they are, consists chiefly of the _parvenus_ residing in Berlin W. This is the public which--more is the pity--dominates the picture galleries, the concert halls, and the theatres of Berlin, and from Berlin affects to set the standard of taste for the empire so far, it must be added, as the empire at large concerns itself at all with this meticulous literature. Religion is a private matter, declares Social Democracy. We might plaintively add that literature is a parlor matter, the special affair of Berlin....
Our literature does not throb with the heart-beats of the national soul. And he who seriously, patriotically, out of the abundance of his heart and the richness of his mind, and out of a lively sense of community with the myriads of German-speaking men and women seeks entrance into the world of letters, he faces in painful amazement the dilemma: People or literature? Human being or artist? Personality or artifice?
These utterances might be taken as a reckless abandonment of artistry in favor of the national, but commonplace; and in fact, _Heimatkunst_, when a.s.similated to folklore, as it was in this gospel, did run the risk of an uninspired monotony. Such writers as Sohnrey and Frenssen have not altogether escaped the danger. Only the synthesis of form and content, only creation conscious of racial peculiarity but obedient to severe esthetic discipline, can keep in the path of fruitful progress.
The intimate connection of man with his native soil presents a modern artistic problem which can be solved neither by the experimental method, according to which naturalism investigated the _milieu_ as a causal factor, nor by the amateurishly descriptive processes of idyllic poetasters and local favorites, but must be intuitively grasped by the penetrating eye of a real seer.
Not merely the subject, but also the seer is native to the spot. The true poet will always be found to know most intimately the land of his birth and the men of his race. If he confined himself to these, he would be a narrow specialist. If, on the other hand, he represents other characters in less familiar setting, he will still envisage them in the manner to which he is born, and in language, style, and all the forms of apperception he will reveal the temperament and the nature of his stock. As the specifically German novel, taken by and large, is distinguished by national traits from the Russian, French, or American, even when it has been modified by influences from many sides, so the novel of each separate German tribe and nation has kept its peculiarity within the range of the general membership, one with another. The whole const.i.tutes an orchestra of manifold instruments, each with its own _timbre_, and yet all in tune and harmony, and no one superfluous. The detection of the individual instruments is possible, if we attentively a.n.a.lyze. The present centrifugal tendency of German literature has strongly developed such a sense for the detection of differences.
Recently the attempt has been made to group the entire history of German literature from the most ancient times according to racial stocks and regions, an experiment that would scarcely have been made if the literary circ.u.mstances of the present had not especially invited it.
Literature in Low German has had from time immemorial its sharply defined character, which harmonizes with the North German landscape.
Broad expanses of dead-level heath, great gray-brown moorlands, meadows intersected by glittering ca.n.a.ls, a boundless horizon which gives the eye a sense of freedom and independence, the blue atmosphere of the sea which contributes something metaphysical to the humdrum of existence--on this soil a grave race flourishes, of quick conscience and serious life. The old saying _Frisia non cantat_ marks the lack of exuberance and of the spirit of revelry. But shy reticence finds compensation in good-natured humor. Unenthusiastic but substantial realism, speculative meditation, and a certain didactic tone make the Low German country the home of the fable and the great epic. That such a great dramatist as Hebbel was also a scion of this stock seems almost exceptional. The stubborn peasant family-stocks, the urban culture of the Hanseatic cities, and the scattered seats of the n.o.bility, even as far east as the Russian Baltic provinces, bear witness to the development of a uniform temperament in spite of all the differences of social environment. We can, then, on the basis of common Low German characteristics form a great group of writers: writers from the Baltic provinces, the upper-cla.s.s life of which has been treated by Eduard von Keyserling, while need and struggle have been described by Frances Kulpe and Karl Worms; the West Prussians, represented by Max Halbe; the Pomeranians (Georg Engel), the Mecklenburgers (Max Dreyer), the Hanseatics (Gustav Falke, Thomas Mann, Otto Ernst), the Schleswig-Holsteiners (Timm Kroger, Charlotte Niese, Gustav Frenssen, Othmar Enking, Helene Voigt-Diederichs), the Hanoverians (Diedrich Speckmann, Heinrich Sohnrey, Karl Sohle), the Westphalians (Hermann Wette, Walther Schulte vom Bruhl).
Along the banks of the Rhine, on the other hand, there dwells in the same lat.i.tude a more vivacious people, whose mischievous cheerfulness and easy-going philosophy of life are manifestations of their Frankish blood. It is striking that hardly one of the most prominent Rhenish writers of the present (Clara Viebig, Joseph Lauff, Rudolf Herzog, Wilhelm Schafer, Wilhelm Schmidtbonn, Herbert Eulenberg) has failed to try his hand at the drama. In Middle Germany emotions are more deep-seated and more responsive; people are more sentimental, more soft-hearted, more talkative, more visionary, have a finer sense of form, but a more conventional manner of speech. In this charming region of forests and mountains, to which the population is warmly attached and in which it finds protection, there is abundant occupation for a tender heart and a lively imagination. Middle Germany is the home of mysticism and romanticism, and this fact is apparent in the authors of the present day: the Silesians (Karl and Gerhart Hauptmann, Hermann Stehr, Paul Keller), the Misnians (Max Geissler, Kurt Martens), the Thuringians (Helene Bohlau, Marthe Renate Fischer, Wilhelm Arminius), the Hessians (Wilhelm Speck), the Franconians (Wilhelm Weigand, Bernhard Kellerman), and the inhabitants of the Palatinate (Anna Croissant-Rust).
Fondness for music is especially prominent in the stocks in which there has been an infusion of Slavic elements. In Upper Germany, accordingly, a sharp line is to be drawn between the Bavaro-Austrian and the Alemannic group. In Austria the capacity for sensuous enjoyment and a certain indolence are combined with a tendency toward sanguine but short-lived enthusiasms. A soft, southern air blows about the heights of Styria as well as over Vienna and its environs, and in the works of the writers of these regions (Wilhelm Fischer-Graz, Rudolf Hans Bartsch) everything is resolved into a lyrical mood and a melody of words. Similarly in the case of writers of southern Tirol (Hans von Hoffensthal, Richard Huldschiner), whereas on the northern slope of the Alps a race of men made of sterner stuff is reared (Rudolf Greinz, Karl Schonherr). In Bavaria, finally, people are even more rough and ready and lyrical sentimentality yields to a pugnacious propensity to ridicule, which gives satirical seasoning to the works of the genuinely Bavarian writers Ludwig Thoma and Joseph Ruederer.
The sluggish Alemannians, on the contrary, lack the vivacity of the Bavaro-Austrian stock. On the monotonous heights of the Swabian plateau are developed such brusque individualism, tenacious self-will, peculiar humor inclined to self-depreciation, soaring fantasy, and (withal there is no lack of comprehension for the ideas of domesticity) such a predilection for adventures abroad as we find in the Swabian narrators Emil Strauss, Hermann Hesse, Ludwig Finckh, and Heinrich Lilienfein.
Didacticism, present in all Alemannic prose and poetry, finds more popular forms among the story-writers of the Black Forest of Baden (Heinrich Hansjakob, Hermine Villinger, Emil Gott, Hermann Burte), while in the local character of the Alsatians, the source of Hermann Stegemann"s novels, good-natured practical joking is more at home. As the rough Alpine country demands the utmost of human industry, so in the realm of art it has developed a sympathy with practical, efficient life, which, disinclined to all speculation (for Spitteler stands well-nigh alone in this matter), is rather under the sway of pedagogical interests. In Switzerland literature is most indissolubly bound up with the life of the whole people, and a gay art for art"s sake cannot thrive. Here are to be found true farmer-authors, such as Alfred Huggenberger, who still guides the plow across his fields, or poets who have risen from the ranks of handicraftsmen, such as Jakob Schaffner, or those who prosecute their literary avocation side by side with the business of a restaurateur, like Ernst Zahn. And no other of the compatriots of Pestalozzi (J. C. Heer, Heinrich Federer, Meinrad Lienert, Felix Moschlin) disdains either, to be in the truest sense a popular poet and an educator of the people.
By virtue of the inexhaustible riches which the _Heimatkunst_ brought to light, the defiant rejection of the literature of the great cities has been rightly recognized as no mere theoretical programme. The novel of urban life, such as flourished in Berlin, Vienna, and Munich at the close of the last century, is today antiquated and has lost its savor.
And it is significant that the Berlin novel of the last few years, for example Georg Hermann"s _Jettchen Gebert_ (1906) or the two most recent works of Clara Viebig, prefers for its scene of action the Berlin of the seventies, which, as yet free from the modern German "South Sea Bubble," preserved for the inordinately growing city its old established local character.
An account of German narrative writing of the present time is a kind of ethnography of the German stocks and regions. The names above-mentioned, selected without prejudice and also without arbitrariness, ought to be represented here each with a specimen. In part, these authors have been represented in the preceding volumes. The necessary limits of this volume permit consideration of only a dozen.
The varieties of language and style which distinguish them one from another cannot fail to be somewhat obscured in a translation; nevertheless, the six pairs which we have arrayed according to racial affiliation and age are well adapted to give an impression of the manifoldness of German narrative prose at the beginning of the twentieth century.
In the first place we mention two women, Helene Bohlau and Clara Viebig. Both have pa.s.sed through the naturalistic school--for the former, indeed, naturalism marked only a period of transition; for the latter it meant conversion to a creed to which she has remained faithful.
The cradle of Helene Bohlau stood on cla.s.sic ground. Exactly one hundred years after Schiller, in November, 1859, she was born in Weimar, the daughter of a publisher whose name has become known chiefly in connection with the great Weimar edition of Goethe"s complete works.
Her grandmother, "Grammie" as the children called the old lady, took to her heart the shy and timid girl and revealed to her from the recollections of her own youth the glory that once was and that still gleamed as a memory within the dim and narrow confines of the Thuringian capital city. Out of the anecdotes that the grandmother told, the book grew which first made the name of the auth.o.r.ess famous, _Tales of the Councillor"s Girls_ (_Ratsmadelgeschichten_, 1888). "In the midst of the great German Empire," the book begins, "lies a little city famed far and wide, Weimar in Thuringia. When my grandmother was a child there ruled over this country a very wise and good prince who because of his goodness and wisdom had prevailed upon great poets then living to come and dwell in his city. And because he was so exceedingly wise and was so beloved and honored by all, poets and scholars came from all sides, lived in the prince"s city, and wrote there such splendid works that the whole world marveled. Even today what these men thought and wrote is the most beautiful thing that we know, and it will remain so for a long, long time to come. About these men everything conceivable has been often told and accurately described, and people will talk of them centuries hence. But by their side there dwelt in the city in those days many men of whom nowadays no more mention is made.
They too experienced joys and sorrows; they too had their day, felt deeply, were glad and sad, and had hearts like the others."
Among these mute, inglorious personages of the great time belong the daughters of Councillor Kirst in Wunsch Street, Rose and Mary, two wide-awake, mischievous la.s.sies who are the heroines of the book. Young Ernst von Schiller, the second son of the prematurely deceased poet, is their playmate; they make fun of August von Goethe as he goes a-wooing; they quarrel with the sour-visaged boor, Arthur Schopenhauer, as they go in and out of his mother"s house, the novelist"s; old Madam k.u.mmerfeld, a former actress who in her youth had as Juliet inspired the Leipsic student Goethe, is their teacher in the art of sewing as well as making a courtly bow--which latter accomplishment they have occasion to practise when one day in the park they almost knock down the corpulent Grand Duke by running against him, and are then treated by him to good things to eat. With his knowledge they slip into the theatre without tickets, and when they have witnessed a performance of _Ta.s.so_ at which Goethe is present, they are so impressed that they follow the poet as, wrapped in his cloak, he strides home in the darkness, and for a while they continue to stare up admiringly at his lighted windows. Nevertheless, at the next moment they scramble over the wall of the neighboring house and help themselves to the beautiful lilies which bloom in old Wieland"s garden. In these stories the historical personages, which with artistic discretion are kept in the background, const.i.tute after all only a decorative element; in the foreground happy youthfulness disports itself in its irresponsibility.
"O you poor young folks of today," exclaims the young Weimar auth.o.r.ess, "if you had any idea what riches, what abundance of life the young folks had at their command at the beginning of our century, you would bitterly complain, you would seem to yourselves deceived and defrauded, old from the cradle, forced into the straight-jackets of duty!"
A certain disgust with the colorless life of the philistine borough into which Weimar more and more degenerated after Goethe"s death may be read between the lines of this apostrophe. Repelled by the gloomy humdrum and filled with dreams of past greatness as well as with longing for a more abundant life in the future, the young writer felt the close confinement of her home town. In this state of mind she met the man who proved to be her fate. Since his first, unhappy marriage had been annulled according to Turkish, but not according to German law, she followed him to Constantinople, and Helene Bohlau became Madame Al Raschid Bey. The Orient furnished the German auth.o.r.ess with strikingly few motifs; but Munich, whither she later returned with her husband, became her second home. On the bank of the Isar lies the scene of her best novel, _The Switching Station_ (1895). In this book she is a disciple of naturalism, not merely in respect to the fidelity with which life in the art centre and the restless haste and nervous disorderliness in an artist"s family are depicted, but also in the use of symbolism after the manner of Zola: for the switching station, with its purposeless turmoil, its disquietude, its pulling and hauling, is a symbol for the noisy life in general, and in particular for the comfortless, hapless marriage in which a delicately organized artistic soul is worried to death. The fate of the woman who becomes the victim of a man is the theme of the succeeding novels, _A Mother"s Rights_ (1897) and _Half Beast_ (1899), in which Helene Bohlau enters the lists side by side with Gabriele Reuter and Marie Janitschek and other women as a pa.s.sionate champion of the rights of her ever oppressed s.e.x. From the point of view of literary art the immoderate formlessness of these partisan novels was an aberration; but meanwhile the writer has once more emanc.i.p.ated herself from such servitude to the cause. The finest understanding for feminine characters, all of which are children of her heart, cannot indeed compensate for imperfect comprehension of the masculine way of thinking. Strictly speaking, Helene Bohlau knows of only two sorts of feeling for men: hatred of the brutal beast and admiration for an ideal, which is born of longing to embrace a lofty, victorious personality. In real life she has found the fulfilment of her longing in her husband, the strange prophet who as half a Turk gathered about himself in Munich a queer circle of auditors for his mystical Oriental philosophy. To his memory she erected a dutiful monument in her last work _Isebies_ (1911), an apology for her own life, her longing, her seeking, and her salvation. But even in this work the finest and the clearest portion is the narrative of her childhood in Weimar. To the unique charm of her native town, which like Bethlehem in Judaea was small and also great, Helene Bohlau returned in other stories of Old Weimar written before her latest work appeared. To this series belongs _The Ball of Crystal_ (1903) with which our selections begin. Style and narrative art have matured; we have to do no longer with mere anecdote, as in the _Tales of the Councillor"s Girls_, but with a more concentrated plot; the character of the heroine, which is symbolized by the t.i.tle, is subjected to a more profound psychological diagnosis; but we are still taken with the same purity of heart as in the earlier narratives, and the quintessence of this book, as indeed of the entire literary personality of the auth.o.r.ess, may be found in the final words of the _Tales of the Councillor"s Girls_: "The kind, the imperturbable, who with gentle readiness take good or evil as it comes--they are the real heroes, not those who face life bristling like a porcupine. The only thing which can give our hearts peace and happiness on earth is good will toward men."
Clara Viebig is a less gentle nature. She is a poetess not so much of the heart and soul as of the impulsive temperament and the strong will.
She has not pa.s.sed through any vacillating development, nor has naturalism been for her as for Helene Bohlau a mere preparatory school or transition stage; on the contrary, in all her work she has consistently remained a disciple of Zola and has not shrunk from any of the brutalities of his method. There is not much to tell about the personal life of this auth.o.r.ess. Born at Treves on the Moselle in 1860 as the daughter of an official in the civil service, she was taken when quite young to Dusseldorf on the Rhine, but pa.s.sed a part of her youth in eastern Germany, in Posen, the birthplace of her parents. After her father"s death she came to Berlin to study music; here she became a writer, and now she is living as the wife of her publisher in the suburb of Zehlendorf. Her spiritual experiences are perhaps most clearly set forth in the novel _Long Live Art_ (1899). The pa.s.sionate struggles of a young auth.o.r.ess for literary success lead after many disappointed hopes and many disillusionments to the attainment of genuine good fortune in art and in domestic life as well. On her native heath the despairing woman is cured of her despair--this typifies all the work of Clara Viebig, which reveals itself as pure _Heimatkunst_ in advance of the time when this label gained currency. To be sure, it is a triple home that Clara Viebig can call her own, the Rhine country, eastern Germany, and Berlin. As might be expected, the memories of childhood left the most lasting effect upon her. The Eifel, that bleak plateau between the Moselle and the Rhine, with its broad melancholy heaths and bald craters of extinct volcanoes, with its dark lakes and lonely forests, is the district with which she is most familiar. The hard-headed, moody, quick-tempered peasants, whose stubbornness befits the volcanic origin of their mountains, appear in her first collection of short stories, _Children of the Eifel_ (1897). In the Eifel is situated the _Women"s Village_ (1900), all the men of which seek their livelihood overseas, so that all the women swarm about the only man left at home, a cripple. The novel _John Miller_ (1903) treats the tragedy of a rich man of the Eifel who goes to ruin in pride and blind presumption; _The Cross in the Venn_ (1908) deals with the religious life of this district. The scene of the novel _The Watch on the Rhine_ (1902) is Dusseldorf, where the difficult process of amalgamation between Prussians and Rhinelanders, first accomplished in 1870, is ill.u.s.trated in the wedded life of a Prussian sergeant and the daughter of a Dusseldorf innkeeper. The struggle of racial incompatibilities which is here depicted with the most matter-of-fact objectivity, and which in a series of merry _genre_ pictures is brought to a happy conclusion, is carried in another work to a frightfully serious tragic ending. _The Sleeping Host_ (1904) takes us to the Prussian province of Posen and shows the effect of strife between German and Slavic elements, in the fate of Rhenish immigrants whose efforts to found a new home for themselves are brought to naught. A second novel of the eastern frontier, _Absolvo Te_ (1907), is inferior to the first, not in power of characterization, but in range of subject. Still a third work treats the problem of a difference between blood and rearing, _A Mother"s Son_ (1906). The novel traces the development of the son of a peasant woman of the Eifel who has been adopted by a Berlin family and in whom, in spite of careful education, the evil disposition of his father comes to the surface. In this artificial treatment of the theory of heredity Clara Viebig"s art does not appear to the best advantage; her forte is rather unbiased objectivity and penetrating observation of every-day life. The other novels having their scene in Berlin are distinguished for a keen sense for realities, as, for example, _The Daily Bread_ (1900), a treatment of the servant question which in the technique of Zola gives a panorama of the metropolis and of life in the lower strata. A rise above the level of naturalism may be noted in the fact that the last two novels of this author do not deal with the present but, like _The Watch on the Rhine_, revert to themes in the history of social development. _Those without the Gates_ (1910) depicts the fate of the suburbanites who are submerged in the gigantic organism of the growing city; the latest novel, _Iron in the Fire_ (1913), has for its subject the time from 1848 to 1866, the time of expectation; an old-fashioned Berlin smithy is the scene, the fire in the forge and the power behind the hammer are symbols of the growth of the nation. Only in the dim background does the figure of Bismarck appear, the smith who welded the parts of the empire into one; it is characteristic of Clara Viebig"s art that she allows great historical events to be mirrored only in the little world of the actors in her little drama, whereas Helene Bohlau grants to the historical figures of Old Weimar partic.i.p.ation at least in episodes. Clara Viebig can compa.s.s no great characters or persons of superior intelligence; even men she hardly shows otherwise than in their sensual brutality. She succeeds best with simple, vegetative natures of elemental instincts and eruptive pa.s.sions, like the women of the Eifel, whose life of hardship, unhappiness in love, and maternal sorrows she knows how to represent with telling power. From the collection ent.i.tled _Forces of Nature_ (1905) we have taken the story of a mother who for blind love of her son becomes an incendiary--a story which reveals in high degree the peculiar quality of this auth.o.r.ess. The scenes of Clara Viebig"s life and work are on a line running from west to east; the corresponding line for the following writers runs from north to south. Count Eduard Keyserling and Thomas Mann are both of North German extraction and have both settled in Munich; both are moreover very similar in their high esthetic culture and in a certain languid aristocracy of feeling and ironical reticence; and their literary models (d.i.c.kens, Thackeray, Balzac, Fontane) were the same.
Count Keyserling (born in 1858 at Pelsz-Paddernin in Curland) had the same experience as Fontane, in that he was late in developing his particular style in narrative composition. When in the eighties he made his first appearance in literary circles in Munich, he essayed very naturalistic novels; his first, _Rosa Herz_ (1885) deals with the fate of a poor victim of seduction. Thereupon followed a series of dramas (_Spring Sacrifice_, 1899, _Stupid Jack_, 1901, _Peter Hawel_, 1903) which in their delicate atmosphere, their finished technique, and the interest of their dialogue deserved more attention than they received.
Not until after the dawn of the new century did the author find his true vocation in the telling of tales of his home country. _Beata and Mamie_ (1903) and _Dumala_ (1908) are the great novels; _Muggy Days_ (1906) and _Gay Hearts_ (1909) are collections of short stories. All revolve in the sphere of the East German country gentry, in their white castles reflected in lakes, in their garden pavilions, and on the broad tracts of their hunting preserves. It is always the same people with whom we have to do: imperious counts who wish to be admired and to enjoy themselves, and whose life consists of hunting, gaming, adultery, duelling, and ultimate return to impeccable correctness in their peaceful homes. In this world, "hung with fine white curtains," there are women with the fine pallor of the old families, they also full of longing for freshly pulsating life. When, however, the yearned-for great experience finally knocks at their door, they draw back disappointed. Thus it was with young Countess Billy when she eloped with her Polish cousin.
It is not this writer"s business to preach new, revolutionary ideas and views. He narrates typical cases with the dignified reserve of the skeptical man of the world, who knows how to weave in everywhere the comments of a shrewd philosophy of life, who bridles pa.s.sion with strict self-control, and in the representation of the most tempestuous crises maintains sure mastery over expression and form. The writer himself may share with his creations their longing for fresh elemental power; but he is endowed with far too much of the traditional culture of his caste ever to allow himself any obstreperous accents. The words of one of his dramatic figures characterize his own art: "We no longer know how to underscore. Underscoring is in bad taste. Those people out there live on underscoring."
Longing for abundant pulsating life, and autumnal renunciation on the part of a decaying family, are also among the princ.i.p.al motifs in the work of Thomas Mann. "Life, revealing itself in eternal contrariness to the spirit and to art--not as a vision of b.l.o.o.d.y greatness and untamed beauty, not as something uncommon does it present itself to us uncommon people. On the contrary, the normal, proper, and lovely is the realm of our longing, is life in its seductive ba.n.a.lity! He is far from being an artist, whose last and deepest yearning is for the superrefined, the eccentric and satanical, who knows no longing for the innocent, the simple and living, for a little friendship, devotion, confidential familiarity, and human happiness--the furtive and consuming longing for the raptures of the common place!"
These sentiments of Mann"s Tonio Kroger might animate one of Keyserling"s characters, but Keyserling would never express them in such impulsive fashion. Mann is much more subjective than Keyserling.
In all the experiences of his characters he is mirrored himself, and all of his writings make and repeat one and the same confession as the foundation of his art, the solitude of the artist.
The cleft which separates two worlds is recognizable in his very parentage. Thomas Mann was born in Lubeck in 1875, the son of a merchant and senator of the ancient Hanseatic city; his mother is a Creole from South America. In his elder brother Heinrich Mann, perhaps a more ingenious, but a less finished writer, of the nervous, ardently pa.s.sionate, impressionistic sort, the exotic heritage has tended to predominate; in Thomas Mann the correctness of the austere Hanseatic city and her old traditions seems to be the strongest element. Because he cannot escape the exasperating incompatibility between citizen and artist, between the instinct for conformity and the will to be different, he fights this battle again and again, and bitter meditation upon it has given him the themes of his princ.i.p.al works.
Mann"s chief work, indubitably one of the best German novels of the last decades, is ent.i.tled _The Buddenbrooks_, _the Degeneration of a Family_ (1901). The book would perhaps never have been written without the example of Zola in _Les Rougon-Macquart_, but it is far from being a mere copy; for a much more personal conception of the subject and a tone of narration in which the finest irony is mingled raise it far above the arid level of the _roman experimental_. In four generations, whose representatives are placed before us with uncommon plasticity and lifelikeness, the decaying family slowly pa.s.ses across the stage. From generation to generation the robust, sober business sense is poisoned with a greater and greater infection of morbid feelings and hypersensitive nerves, until finally the vitality of the family goes out like a burnt-up candle.
The great novel was followed by a collection of short stories, _Tristan_ (1903), from which we have selected _Tonio Kroger_. A tragedy of the Renaissance, _Fiorenza_ (1905), develops the dualism between real life and artistic existence, between the proud joy of living and ascetic hostility to life, in two brothers of the house of Medici, Lorenzo and Girolamo, who are suitors for the hand of one and the same woman. The following novel, _His Royal Highness_ (1909), shows how a prince, educated in aloofness from life, is saved from a living death through love for an American heiress. Finally, there appeared only last year a masterpiece in the most exquisite style, the narrative _Death in Venice_ (1913). It is a heart-felt confession, taking as its theme the chilling apprehension of approaching old age and death. In the late-awakening impulse of love for a young boy there is here a generally misunderstood symbol of longing for life. The figure of the hero, Gustav Aschenbach, evidently furnishes a key to unlock many mysteries in the artistic work of the author:
He never knew the leisure, never the careless unconcern of youth. When in his thirty-fifth year he fell ill in Vienna, a keen observer once remarked about him in company, "You see, Aschenbach has always lived like this"--and he clenched his left fist--"never this way"--and he let his open hand dangle from the arm of his chair. That was indeed the case; and the moral valor about Aschenbach was that his const.i.tution was in no sense robust, and that though called to unremitting exertion, he was not really born to it.... With a strong will and tenacity comparable to that which had subdued his native province, he worked for years under the stress of one and the same task, and devoted to its proper accomplishment all of his strongest and best hours. He almost loved the enervating, daily-renewed combat between his tenacious, proud, and often tried willpower, and this ever-growing fatigue, which was his secret and which the product should in no wise betray by signs of exhaustion or indifference.
Thomas Mann resembles his hero in being comparatively unproductive; but it should be added at once that no one of his works fails to exhibit the utmost of artistic finish. Unrelaxing attention and indefatigable effort to attain artistic form are the heritage of his North German descent, of which he perhaps became fully conscious in South Germany, in the city of more easy-going habits of life. In _Buddenbrooks_ itself the difference between North and South plays an important part; Tonie, the youngest daughter of the house of Buddenbrook, is twice married, first to an unscrupulous speculator in Lubeck, the second time to a Munich dealer in hops, Aloysius Permaneder, who rescues her from the disgraceful position of a divorced woman. This deliriously portrayed beer-reeking philistine, whose informality and whose wild oaths horrify the prim Lubeckers no less than his good-hearted _naivete_ amuses them, marries Tonie Buddenbrook, retires from business on the strength of her dowry, and as an owner of real estate and a gentleman of leisure pa.s.ses the rest of his life in drinking beer morning and night, cutting coupons, and annually raising the rent of his tenants. Such a successful caricature splendidly embodies the stagnating spirit of the blissfully idyllic town which the metropolis of Bavaria has remained in spite of all its growth.
And yet, in no other German city is there so high a degree of artistic culture, and the odor of Munich beer seems to furnish a more favorable atmosphere for the creative artist than the _prestissimo_ of life in Berlin, which steels the nerves of the energetic, rushing man of business. There are two sides to everything: the motto of the indolent man of Munich, "Let me alone" (_Mei Rua will i ham_) gives to art that which it needs above all else, time, contemplativeness, freedom.
Nowhere can one so unrestrainedly cultivate one"s own style of life as there. And withal, artistic freedom of life accommodates itself remarkably well with the political narrowness of the country under Clerical rule. The Bavarian phlegmatic temperament craves constant stimulation; the political strife, in which there is no embittered fanaticism, but which in all good nature sways backward and forward, is an indispensable condition of the national life. Combativeness and the l.u.s.t of vituperation are in the blood of the Bavarian people; it is all one, whether we look for them in a riotous kirmess or in blunt ridicule, in the poetic improvisations of which the quick-witted peasants, being especially gifted in mimicry, are unsurpa.s.sed.
Bavaria is accordingly the particular home of German satire. The best German comic papers are published in Munich, and the most effective satirist of the present day is a Bavarian of the Bavarians, Ludwig Thoma. He is the son of a Head Forester and was born in 1867 at that Oberammergau where all the inhabitants every ten years dismiss the barber and let their long locks curl about their necks, in order to perform before the a.s.sembled mult.i.tude their Pa.s.sion Play, which is pleasing in the sight of G.o.d and profitable to them. Thoma not only grew up among peasants; later, as a lawyer in Dachau, he had abundant opportunity to become acquainted with their fondness for litigation, their avarice, and their cunning. Now he is merely an author. In winter he may be seen at Munich in company garb at first performances in the theatres; in summer, at Tegernsee he appears in the midst of his beloved peasants dressed in their costume, homespun jacket and leather breeches. In the same way his writings have two aspects, satire on society and tales of rustic life. In the comic paper _Simplicissimus_ he has often published political verses over the pseudonym Peter Schlemihl; some of his dramas also (_The Medal_, 1901, _The Branch Road_, 1902, _The First-cla.s.s Compartment_, 1910, _The Baby Farm_, 1913) a.s.sail with never-failing pungency the present governmental system in Bavaria; others (_Morality_, 1909, _Lottie"s Birthday_, 1911) are directed with more general and less delicate ridicule against all sorts of common place morality and the excrescences of moral reform.
Delicious are his stories of the little town, especially about the pranks that give expression to boyish impulses to incommode teachers, stern neighbors, and maiden aunts. These are told in the navely impudent language of the school-boy in _Tales of Bad Boys_ (1904) and the continuation of this book, _Aunt Frieda_ (1906). The philistine population of the little town, Bavarian administration of justice, scenes in the Munich street cars, and many another subject of that kind, Thoma humorously treats in _Judge Charlie_ (1900) and _Tales of the Little Town_ (1908), in the broad anecdotal style which he has made his own.
His other subject is peasant life. In this too he begins as a satirist, with his collection _Agricola_ (1897); and the manner in which he at first indulges in grotesque exaggeration of popular traits appears best perhaps in the introduction to the book, "adapted from Tacitus":