The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Drama in three acts by Philipp Langmann
Performance at the Lessing Theater, Berlin

A few weeks ago, Philipp Langmann was criticized by none other than the officials of a Brno accident insurance company. They were checking whether he knew how to add horizontal and vertical number sequences correctly. Because Philipp Langmann served them for a monthly fee of seventy guilders. Today, Philipp Langmann is the darling of Berlin and Viennese theater audiences. His "Bartel Turaser" was performed at the same time in the Vienna Volkstheater and the Berlin Lessing-Theater; and in both cities the audience is aware that it has seen the work of a great poet. Here in Berlin, if a critic grumbles and utters a word of censure against the work, he may hear the worst things. He may have sinned up to now, however much opposition and grumbling he has to object to. You can forget that. But if he has something against the "Bartel Turaser", then he is simply labeled a brash guy.

This is a nice touch in the not always pleasant physiognomy of our theater audience. It's nice to be able to overlook major flaws alongside major merits. You have to if you want to praise Philipp Langmann's drama unreservedly. After all, the play is only a change to the future. But those who do not accept the change unconditionally have a poor understanding of the future. Philipp Langmann is a solvent playwright. He will strip away the tendentious morality he proclaims to us, the dramatic clumsiness that occurs in his work; and he will continue to develop the fine view he is able to cast into people's souls.

The Bartel Turaser, who swears perjury in order to be able to provide bread for his sick child, and who then presents himself to the court as a perjurer when the death of his beloved child gives rise to a feeling of remorse: he is a character that only a true poet could create; but the way Langmann presents him is an arbitrarily constructed figure. The poet is less interested in showing how a person's feelings can be transformed than in ensuring that good triumphs in the end.

Langmann has something that must necessarily result in success with the audience. This audience is not at all averse to being informed about the abuses of our social order. But the matter must not go too far. The excitement about existing misfortune must not spoil the good supper that one wants to eat after the theater. And the audience is right. The stage is not a moral institution after all.

Langmann, like the audience, is caught in the middle between the full truth and the consolation of the "practical Christian" that the good Lord and a clear conscience will take care of everything. Is it really necessary to spoil people's appetite by telling them that poor people eat dogs to banish hunger? Langmann does not say such things. He doesn't say them because he doesn't feel them vividly enough. He is honest as an artist. He is no more indignant himself than he is when he shows it to his audience. His feelings are not extreme. He is a temperate sensitive person. His temperament does not exceed that of the masses. He only has the gift of effectively shaping what the masses feel. He does not disturb the sound sleep of the Philistines. But he is a poet who commands their respect. And rightly so. He forces a respect from them that does them honor.

A conference held on January 23, 1898 before the performance of "L'Intruse" (The Environs) at the Berlin Dramatic Society

People, who only know how to interpret what affects them in the usual, traditional way, felt nothing special when they first heard the language spoken by Maurice Maeterlinck seven years ago. They were unfamiliar with the world he was telling them about, and so his revelations from this world sounded strange to them. They attributed what came from a new way of feeling to a morbid, confused imagination.

But right from Maeterlinck's first appearance, there were a few fine connoisseurs in France and Germany who had a sense of the world from which the new prophet drew. These were the spirits with the beautiful ability to sense the great, even if they could not yet grasp it with complete clarity. They sensed that Maeterlinck was talking about things they had long had a dark longing to see. They did not know what they were longing for; they only knew that they were missing something. They did not realize what they were missing. And now, when Maeterlinck appeared, they realized that he was talking about what they were longing for. His words sounded familiar to them because they only had to ask their own souls about their meaning.

If these few enthusiasts had been asked at the time what words they would like to use to express Maeterlinck's essence, they would have fallen silent. A drunken enthusiasm had seized them, and they spoke of it in full-sounding words.

They, these drunken admirers, were the true Maeterlinck community. Because what he felt could not be communicated in words. Everything he wrote was there only to quietly hint at what lived in his soul. He could only give signs of what he felt; and through these signs he could not at first cause language to resonate, only people's minds.

Maeterlinck is not primarily an artist. The artistic means he uses are imperfect, almost childlike. Those who long for perfect art cannot derive any satisfaction from Maeterlinck's poetry. He has a religious nature. He believes that there are infinite depths to the human soul and that man can descend into these infinite depths. Then he finds within himself powers that enable him to embrace the great unknown, which all ages have worshipped as a divine.

Whoever awakens this soul force within himself, the most mundane things in life take on a mysterious, divine meaning.

As a poet, Maeterlinck only wants to express what he sees as a religious man; the beauty of external form is unimportant to him, he wants his poems to reveal the marvelous and sublime in the world, the great, unknown powers that are hidden in things.

The home of the soul is in the divine, and when it finds this home, it suddenly comes to life and lives the deepest life that makes man a true man. An unspeakable change happens to the soul that has found its home. Like a slumbering genius, the divine power rests in the soul, and whoever awakens the genius, all things respond to him in a divine language. The most insignificant phenomena suddenly shine in a new light; they announce the eternal.

Mankind is constantly striving to put the divine genius within itself to sleep. Maeterlinck believes that we are living in a time in which people are approaching a great awakening of their souls. People are already beginning to turn away from the infinite refinement of the senses and reason that the last few centuries have brought us.

This refinement has extinguished the divine light in the depths of the soul. Our eyes today - whether armed with microscope and telescope or not - see things that no one could have imagined centuries ago; our minds conceive of connections that only a short time ago everyone would have relegated to the realm of fables if a fantastic mind had spoken of them. An infinity penetrates us through our senses, through our reason.

But both the senses and reason deprive things of the splendor of the divine. To the clear-sighted, divinely sensitive soul, nature with all its things and phenomena is also divine. But the senses stand between the divinity of nature and the divinity of the soul. They show us the world in an undivine way. We ask of all things: where do they come from? - and let our senses, our intellect, give us the answer. Maeterlinck sees a time approaching in which souls will allow things to affect them without the mediation of the senses and the intellect. He believes that the realm of the soul will expand daily. The soul will rise again to the surface of humanity and will approach things directly. Man will live a more real, a fuller life again when he no longer clings to the undivine, but feels a divine in the smallest things, in the rustling of leaves, in the voice of birds, indeed in every sound and in the most insignificant word spoken by the simple, naive mind.

Souls will need neither words nor deeds to understand each other when they have freed themselves from the sole dominion of the senses and the intellect. Not the meaningful word, not the powerful deed will form a bond from person to person, but the unspeakable, the inaudible will pass from soul to soul. What must forever remain a secret to words will become manifest life. People will be closer to their brothers because no mediator will come between the souls, and they will be closer to nature because no cover will conceal its revealed secrets.

They will understand the babble of the child, the language of animals, plants and all things more deeply and more subtly when they have discovered the home of the soul.

A period of humanity Maeterlinck longs for, such as the ancient Egyptians went through at a certain time or the Indians.

He feels unsatisfied by times in which intelligence and external beauty prevail. At such times, he lacks something that man desires; secret connections are cut off. When Maeterlinck sits in our theaters today, he feels as if he has been transported among barbarians. There he sees the betrayed husband who kills out of jealousy, there he sees the citizen fighting for his honor, he sees all the crude things that irritate the senses and set the mind in motion, but he does not see the wonderful divine that flows towards us every moment from everyday things.

Jacob Boehme and other mystics come to mind when one hears Maeterlinck express his basic feelings.

Kill the senses and the inner power of the soul will open up to you: this is his most secret belief. Only people of his kind can understand that Jacob Boehme did not need God approaching with thunder and lightning to recognize the mystery of the world, but that this dawned on him at the sight of a pewter bowl. The great mystic saw the truly divine in the most mundane object, as it were, with his eyes closed.

The significant word spoken by the blind grandfather in the drama we will see today is drawn from deep within the religious essence of Maeterlinck's soul. The blind man will see because his senses do not prevent him from looking into the mysteries of nature: this is what the poet says. Where the others, sitting around the table with the blind grandfather, perceive a faint hint, a simple nightingale's song, the sound of scythes, the falling of leaves, the mysterious power of death is revealed to the one whose eyes are closed, creeping up to take his daughter. The blind man calls out to the sighted: "You are blind if you do not perceive the uninvited guest who is slowly entering our house. He, who no longer sees, and the child, whose senses have not yet opened up to the world: they perceive what those who see and those who understand do not recognize. At the moment when the mother dies, the child, whose birth has brought her death, cries out for the first time.

Those who want to understand Maeterlinck must be able to renounce the sobriety of the senses and the intellect for a short time. There is nothing to grasp here with reason. And the usual artistic judgment must be silenced. Everything rests on feeling the great unknown in nature and saying to oneself that a prophet wants to proclaim the divine here, not unfold the dramatic in the usual sense.

What Maeterlinck does not say, but only hints at, is what he actually wants to say.

He wants - according to his own admission - to awaken a completely different psychology than the ordinary one. In his opinion, this ordinary psychology has appropriated the beautiful name of the soul for endeavors that are only concerned with those phenomena of the soul that are closely related to matter. Maeterlinck wants to move people one degree higher. When we used to speak of all the mysterious things, of presentiments, of the treacherous impression that the first meeting of a person makes on us, of a decision made by an unknown, instinctive side of human nature, of inexplicable and yet existing sympathies and antipathies between people, these phenomena were easily passed by, only rarely did they arouse the interest of serious minds. One had no idea of the immeasurable force with which they weighed on life. One was only interested in the interplay of visible, pumping passions and external events.

Whoever seeks this familiar play of clumsy passions and external events that fall into the gross senses will remain unsatisfied with Maeterlinck.

Those to whom Maeterlinck is able to open the inner eye with which he himself sees will find in him the deeply religious personality who wants to proclaim to us in his own way the eternal powers in the world.

Drama by Maurice Maeterlinck. German by O.E. Hartleben
Second performance of the Berliner Dramatische Gesellschaft at the Residenz-Theater, Berlin

The characterization of Maeterlinck, which I tried to give in a conference preceding the performance of "The Uninvited", can be found at the beginning of this page. I would like to describe the performance as an outstanding theatrical event. It was the third time that this peculiar little drama had been seen on a German stage. Of the first two performances I know only eyewitness accounts. According to them, I must assume that on January 23 Maeterlinck's creation had the success it deserved for the first time in Germany.

I do not need to give a synopsis of the play because it appeared in Otto Erich Hartleben's excellent translation in No. 2 of this journal. This translation is a masterly one. In French, Maeterlinck's simple, everyday sentences have the effect of announcing great things as if they were self-evident. Simple German phrases had to be found to have the same effect. Hartleben has succeeded in this.

The drama will only be effective from the stage if it succeeds in creating the religious mood that emanates from it. If I can trust my perceptions, this was the case to a high degree last Sunday.

Otto Erich Hartleben has devoted himself to rehearsing the drama with dedicated zeal. At almost every rehearsal I witnessed the effort he made to bring about a worthy performance. I was also able to observe the work of Gustav Rickelt, the director of the Residenz Theater. He responded to the character of the play with a fine understanding and sought to bring it out in the performance.

When I speak of the performance, I must first and foremost remember Hans Pagay. He played the blind grandfather. In my opinion, he portrayed the sighted blind man with the solemnity that is characteristic of this character. In important places he hit the note, which must do more here than the sound of the word. In second place, I would like to mention Josephine Sorger, who already aroused interest in the first performance of the Dramatische Gesellschaft. She played Lux in Felix Dörmann's "Ledigen Leuten" with the kind of perfection that one only finds in actors who are said to have "stage blood". This time she played Ursula, one of the sisters sitting around the table with their blind grandfather. If I had to describe Josephine Sorger's talent in one word, I think the most descriptive would be: sympathetic. There is a lot of soul in her voice. And this soul had an atmospheric effect in her portrayal of Ursula. The father and uncle were played by Gustav Rickelt and Eugen Heiske. They went to great lengths. However, it is not easy to find the tone in which the everyday personalities have to speak in this mood-heavy play.

The sultry mood expressed in the play was worked out as well as was possible with the means available. One would have to approach the matter with the most modern, most perfect 'theater apparatus. The mysterious steps of death creeping closer and closer could then act as an allusion to the deep feelings that man has in the solemn hours of the soul, in which it immerses itself in that which has never become and will never pass away, in which time and space disappear and the weaving in the imperishable gains a blissful existence.

Drama by Gunnar Heiberg
Performance by the Berliner Dramatische Gesellschaft at the Residenz-Theater, Berlin

The "Uninvited" was followed by Gunnar Heiberg's "Balcony". I have a very special relationship with this poet. When I saw his "King Midas" in Vienna ten years ago, I was half crazy. I came out of the theater with an unlimited Heiberg crush. I couldn't go home, I sat down enthusiastically in the nearest pub, had a pen and ink handed to me and stammered words on the paper. - I wrote "The weather lights of a new era" on it. I gave them to a friend who edited a magazine - the kind that a hundred people, i.e. nobody, read. That's when they appeared. Then I went to my friends, all intelligent people. You have to go in there, I told them. They went in and laughed at me. They treated me like a child's head.

I've grown older since then. But the derisive laughter that could be heard continuously last Sunday while the "Balcony" was being played had something hurtful for me. For me, Heiberg is a poet for whom I forgive his vices for the sake of his virtues.

There is Julie, the woman who can love brilliantly and wants to be loved, and who, through the sincerity of her need for love, becomes a cynic in the sense that Nietzsche wants cynicism to be understood. She is married to Reßmann, the disgusting man. With Abel, the scholar, the enthusiast who serves humanity, she cheats on the old disgusting man, Reßmann. When he surprises her with her lover, she introduces Abel as the buyer of the house she owns together with Reßmann. One of the features of this house is the balcony, which is cracked. Reßmann wants to show the buyer all the details of the house. He tramples on the cracked balcony to give him an idea of its strength. The balcony collapses and the disgusted man splits his skull. The lovers are rid of the disgusting husband. Julie and Abel thank the Creator for their freedom with folded hands. That is perhaps crude - if you only want truths for the well-meaning. Why did she marry this Reßmann if she detests him so much? - ask the well-meaning. Perhaps they are right. But rights are as cheap as blackberries.

Abel is a scholar. He works for humanity. He lectures them so that they may become perfect. But his relationship with the love-thirsty Julie grows cold. She is happy with him. But only until the man comes whose passion overwhelms her. A man who has retained his physical strength alongside his spirituality. She cheats on the second man with him. And he behaves impeccably as a deceived philosopher. He resigns himself to his fate. What is the fact that he has lost the heart of his beloved wife compared to the fact that we all have to die one day - that means parting, not only from a beloved wife, but from all the joys of existence?

Smart people have figured out that the drama is a satire on love, and still other smart people think it's a parody of Ibsen's and Björnson's dramatic style. For my part, they may be right. I see in the play a piece of life that takes place between people who follow their hearts. They don't play any more comedy than this imperfect life needs, but this necessary play with all the cynicism it can't do without.

Hans Pagay played Reßmann, the disgusting character, to great effect. During rehearsals, he didn't want to believe that he was going to smash his head because he wanted to portray the balcony to the house buyer as firmly as possible. Through his acting, he also seems to have suggested this opinion to the audience.

The cynical, sincere woman was played by Mila Steinheil with all the subtlety that this role requires. I think people will be talking about this actress for a long time to come. She has an acting power whose limits cannot yet be imagined. She has found her way into the role of Julie, so that one believes the rarest things about her. Not everything came out on Sunday. How could the artists not become self-conscious when people were laughing incessantly down there in the stalls! But at the dress rehearsal, we were all serious, in a very peaceful mood: she played a Julie that we will never forget.

Willy Froböse played Antonio, the third, with whom Julie cheats on the second, 'Abel. One can imagine that someone else, whose individuality is better suited to this role, would bring it out better. But Froböse has achieved something that is at least worthy of recognition. The fact that the audience's laughter muscles were irritated to the highest degree during his performance was detrimental to him. Hermann Böttcher played Abel. I don't think he did justice to the role. It doesn't suit him.

Neither the effort that Otto Erich Hartleben nor Gustav Rickelt had put into the preparation received the reward they deserved. Everything was drowned in laughter.

They sat for days and prepared a serious play, and in reality they had prepared an illusion.

A tragedy by Hermann Sudermann
Performance at the Deutsches Theater, Berlin

Yesterday, the play for which the Berlin authorities have made such an involuntary advertisement went on stage at the Deutsches Theater: Sudermann's "Johannes". It is not often that a theatrical event is awaited with such curiosity as yesterday's performance. After my first impression, I would like to be reserved in my judgment of the drama. Especially as the whole performance suffered from the influence of an indisposition of the main actor (Josef Kainz as Johannes). Only this much seems certain to me: the powerful, confident mastery of everything that is effective on stage, which we always admired in Sudermann, is also evident in this play. But the action remains stuck in the theatrical, in the outwardly scenic; the dramatic in the higher sense of the word is missing. There is no dramatic linking and development of events at all. I will come back to the play in the next issue, when I have read it and seen it again. Because I don't want to be unfair to Sudermann's latest achievement.

The story of John the Baptist is the prelude to the powerful drama that unfolds in the life of the founder of the Christian religion. We have no other interest in the personality of the Baptist than that of the immature herald of the one who was to come. "Repent, the kingdom of heaven is at hand," said John to the Jews. He did not know what this kingdom of heaven would bring. He was never more than "the voice of a preacher in the wilderness", who prepared the way for the Lord and "made his paths straight". He was an instrument in the hand of God to prepare his children for the teacher of love. He did not yet understand anything of the Savior's mind. He had no idea that those who walk in guilt must be forgiven because love is more powerful than wrath. He did not foresee that Jesus would want to save sinners, he believed: "The axe is already laid to the root of the trees. Therefore, whatever tree does not bear good fruit will be cut down and thrown into the fire." He thought of Jesus: "He has his shovel in his hand, he will sweep the floor and gather the wheat into his barn, but he will burn up the chaff with everlasting fire." This is how a Jewish rabbi imagined the Redeemer.

The man who stammeringly proclaims what a dark premonition shows him in a false light is not a tragic personality. The meaning of the legend of John is that God's purposes are wise and that the Creator of the world uses his children as guides even where they do not know which paths they are taking. Next to this meaning, everything else we are told about John pales into insignificance. The fact that the Baptist was killed by the wrath of Herodias is a feature of the legend that we could do without. This death seems like a coincidence. It has no connection with what interests us about the figure of John.

Huß is a figure who lends himself to tragedy, not Johannes. The forerunner of a reformer only appears tragic if he comes too early and perishes because the time is not yet ripe for his goals. John, however, is himself immature for the goals he serves. He is therefore actually an uninteresting personality. As a human being, we are completely indifferent to him.

But it would be possible to turn John into a figure that arouses our interest. Whoever wants to do this must completely transform the personality of which legend and history speak. He must present us with a John who does not speak of the one who is to come, but who believes that he already has the good news; who is imbued with his mission as the Messiah. Such a John must be equipped with the awareness that he fulfills what the time expects. And then he must be confronted by the greater, the true fulfiller. John would now have to see that he was an erring man. This John would have to perish from self-knowledge. From the awareness of his immaturity. We would then be just against him, who is unjust against himself, because he is only a forerunner, not a fulfiller. We would say to ourselves that ripe fruit does not immediately fall from the tree.

Sudermann did not draw such a John. He has essentially dramatized the familiar figure of John. The necessary consequence is that his John depicts a series of episodes from the time of the Jewish people that precede the appearance of the Messiah. Successive events take place in the course of which the Rabbi John appears again and again. These events are depicted with the great art that we have long learned to appreciate in Sudermann. But what we should expect from the whole structure of the drama is missing. We cannot be more interested in the John of this drama than in the legendary John. He comes, talks, leaves, comes back, rejects Salome's lecherous courtship as a moral man and is finally beheaded. All this happens alongside many other things. There is no necessary connection between this other and John. There is nothing in the figure of the Baptist that pushes the one event towards the other. There is no dramatic tension.

All the people John encounters are more interesting than John himself.

Herodias, the sinner who has run away from her husband to marry his brother, Herod, is drawn with the most consummate mastery. Because she wants to rule, she has fled from the powerless Philip. Herod is weak and meek, but he is in a position that allows his wife to develop her nature as a ruler. A fine characterization is given in the words that the cynically proud woman hurls in Herod's face: "Do you take me for someone who comes to beg for a daily evening sacrifice of caresses? Look at me! Not the beloved, she is no more... Look at your mistress." And in the other: "What if you didn't hide the sinner from the people, but instead walked with her to the temple tomorrow with your head held high? Wouldn't it be a cheerful game if the high priest smiled at your brother's runaway wife with the same expression of the fatherly servant with which he once greeted the virtuous Mariamne (Herod's first, rejected wife)?"

Salome, the daughter of Herodias, is a small miracle of the dramatic art of individualization. She doesn't care what John preaches, she falls in love with the man. She woos him with all the strength of her awakening passion. And when he rejects her courtship, her love turns to raging hatred, so that she gladly makes her mother's will to corrupt the Baptist her own.

Herod himself, in his "cowardly weakness", is also excellently characterized. No less the individual types of the Jewish people. For me, Jehoshaphat, the cobbler who starves his wife and children to follow John, is a more interesting character than the Baptist himself. Eliakim, the wool merchant who always reads the law, and Pasur, the fruit merchant who regrets that he sells so little at the miserable Passover, are excellent characters. "He who trades in fruits and vegetables, neighbor, does not have it so easy to be a righteous man before the Lord. Your wool will last until Herod and his wife are gone."

Everything in this drama, apart from the main character, is significant and of great impact. The weakness with which John himself is shaped paralyzes everything.

Sudermann does allow John to express where his life would have to lead if it were to have a dramatic effect, but he has not shaped him in the sense of his words: "Truly, the time of my downfall has come, when enemies sing my praises and friends blaspheme me. What do you want from me? My end must be solitude and silence in it." That he must fall silent because someone greater is speaking must be John's tragic fate.

Sudermann's "Johannes" has been performed in various places in Germany. I have followed the reviews and reports on these performances. A curious fact emerges. The recording was the most different imaginable in the various places. It would now be interesting to collect the different voices. This could provide invaluable material for a staristics of taste. The "Dramaturgische Blätter" is the place to collect such material. I would therefore like to ask all those who are in a position to contribute to such a collection of material to do so. The information will then be processed accordingly here.

Trauerspiel in five acts by Franz Grillparzer
Performance at the Schiller Theater, Berlin

I have never been able to join in the unconditional Grillparzer rapture. I have often asked myself why the characters in his dramas leave me cold, even though they are characterized with such a high degree of poetic power. In Goethe's Iphigenia, Tasso and Gretchen I have the feeling that the deepest elements of human souls are revealed, that I am looking into the hidden depths of human nature. In Grillparzer's Sappho, Medea, Phaon, Melitta, Ottokar, the actual soul remains lifeless in itself, and its qualities appear to me like garments put on the invisible soul. That there is such passion, such pain, such dignity and renunciation as I encounter in Sappho is clear; I do not see these qualities oozing out of Sappho's soul. Only once did Grillparzer succeed in showing the true nature of a soul with all its contradictions: in Rachel in the "Jewess of Toledo". In this figure, I do not see a sum, an aggregate of human qualities, as in Sappho; I see a real soul.

Recently, I felt all this again when I attended the performance of Grillparzer's first work, "Ahnfrau", at the Schiller Theater. The management of this theater has earned a merit through this performance. The drama is particularly important for the knowledge of Grillparzer, and for a long time it could not be seen in Berlin.

A rigid fate, bending all human strength and goodness under a blind, wisdom-less necessity, is the driving force behind the events of this drama. The members of the Borotin household could be heroes or saints; their work cannot be beneficial, for the ancestress has transgressed and her sin continues to affect her entire family. I do not believe that Grillparzer was dishonest when he made blind fate the driving force behind his work of art. He did not want to experiment as Schiller did with his "Bride of Messina". He was a weak, will-less nature. He did not have the strength to say to himself: be your own master. He felt under the pressure of circumstances over which he had no power. He does not boldly take the helm of life and sail recklessly forward; he lets himself be carried by the waves wherever they take him. Such a feeling of dependence can be embodied with poetic truth by the idea of fate. This idea no longer appears in his later works. But there was no change in his basic feelings. He has merely subordinated himself to the general modern consciousness, which has nothing to do with the idea of destiny. The more modern conception of the world did not spring from within him as his own; he let it wash over him. A great poet dwelt in a weak-willed personality. This seems to me to characterize the Grillparzer phenomenon.

On March 19, Berlin's Schiller Theater gave us a magnificent performance of Ibsen's "Brand". The deserving director of this institute, Raphael Löwenfeld, whom his audience unfortunately does not always follow with the right understanding, brought the Nordic Faust drama to a German stage for the first time. He based his performance on Passarge's translation. He has endeavored to shorten the poem to such an extent that it does not become a test of the audience's patience. Unabridged, it would play for six hours. Yesterday we only had to sit in the theater for three and a half. Nothing that was necessary to understand the whole was missing. The wonderfully irritating, the appealingly annoying main character of "Brand" stood before us. You could feel the futility of the struggle of a person who wants "all or nothing".

I would like to remember the performer of the Brand role. Yesterday evening was obviously an evening of honor for Eduard von Winterstein. I cannot say that he satisfied me. Nevertheless, I would like to praise him. If only he could decide to incorporate the excellent characterization, which he placed more in the body movements, into the speech itself! He spoke with fire, but with too even a fire. Even the lively pathos becomes monotonous when the modulation is missing.

Play by Paul Ernst
Performance by the Berlin Dramatic Society

Gabriel Finne's one-act play "The Owl", which was performed by the Dramatische Gesellschaft on March 27, draws rare, enigmatic moods of the soul with bold strokes. The plot is simple, almost everyday. A man has seduced his friend's wife and destroyed her happiness. The adulterer has also wreaked havoc in his own home. Because his kind, sweet wife is deeply troubled by her husband's infidelity. If such a story happened to ordinary everyday people, it would be of little interest. But here the seducer is a nature whose experiences are transformed into the most terrible confusions of the soul. The memories of sins committed are transformed into evil spirits in his delusional fantasy. The hallucinations of a man suffering from his guilt become dramatically figurative.

In the first part of his drama, Finne prepares us for the end in dramatic conversations full of the finest nuances of color. The delusion of the betrayed friend appears as the sinner's persecutor in the flesh. The mysterious owl calls in the lonely fjord regions have spoken to his conscience and transformed themselves into the avenging voice of the friend, who steps before him and will not rest until the criminal of friendship has himself put an end to his cursed existence.

The masterfully staged performance must have made a deep impression on the audience. Eduard von Winterstein portrayed the sinner torturing himself to death with all the power of his effective art and Elise Steinert excellently portrayed his wife in her subtle, often ingenious manner.

No less interesting was the short drama "Lumpenbagasch" by Paul Ernst, which followed on from "Eule". Rag milieu, rag mentality, rag fate cannot easily be brought to the stage more naturalistically than Ernst has done. Luise Kramer is an amiable, naïve village girl who follows her nature, which is precisely why she gives birth to an illegitimate child every now and then. The village mayor is a man concerned with the welfare of his community. Why shouldn't he couple the poor Kramer to the drunken rag Arendt, who can be happy if the community gives him twenty thalers for taking the mother of five to his home in the poorhouse, which consists of a worry chair. But to let the twenty thalers flow to the neighboring town where Arendt lives: the brave village mayor is not that stupid. The village tailor is to make the bridegroom a fine wedding suit for the aforementioned thalers, so that the money remains in the community. Under such circumstances, however, it seems better for the bride and groom to continue to provide for the procreation of mankind without the blessing of the village schoolmaster.

Paul Ernst proved to be an excellent characterizer. The village poor with many children, the alcoholic Arendt, who honestly fulfilled his military duties in 1870, the village schoolmaster and the tailor who takes care of the wedding decorations are all well drawn. Emma Sydow as the village pauper, Max Reinhardt as the schoolteacher, Seldeneck as the town pauper, drunkard and forced bridegroom all made notable contributions.

Drama by Johannes Schlaf
Performance by the Berlin Dramatic Society

It was a beautiful and important task that the Berliner Dramatische Gesellschaft set itself with the performance of Johannes Schlaf's new drama "Gertrud". The artistic style of this poet is expressed most perfectly in this work. It therefore displays all the merits and shortcomings of this style in the most pronounced way. I will talk about the drama and the performance in more detail in the next issue. For today, I will only mention the fact that the impression on the majority of the members of the company was strong and favorable.

Our modern literary critics never tire of claiming anew every day that naturalism has been overcome. And those who only a short time ago praised it as the only salvific gospel of the present are now singing its funeral dirge every hour. Gerhart Hauptmann is taking a different path, having created a work worthy of admiration for the purity with which the principle is translated into reality in "Florian Geyer" of the naturalistic movement. But the real prophet of the movement, the master of the successful student Gerhart, has remained true to the old flag as a playwright. He proved this with his latest creation "Gertrud". This dramatic poem is the mature fruit of naturalism - perhaps the most mature we have. All the merits and all the shortcomings of this style are expressed in it in the sharpest possible way. Drama should be a faithful reflection of life - that is what naturalism demands. The dramatic characters should not speak or do anything that real people in the time in which the drama is set would not do and speak. Gertrud" plays for an hour and a half. Not a word, not an action is perceived that would not be heard and seen in the "spacious room" in the seaside resort on Rügen, which is represented by the stage, if one could see through the walls into the real room. The deepest conflicts of the soul take place inside the characters as they speak and act. The actions and words spoken are only a faint indication of these conflicts. It is the same in real life. What do we learn about a person's character when we watch his goings-on for an hour and a half? Little or nothing at all. That is why playwrights have always sacrificed the immediate truth of nature. They have condensed into a short time what in reality is far apart. They let the characters say and do in a few hours what they actually speak and do over a long period of time. They want to give us the truth of a whole and therefore sacrifice the truth of the individual. It is true that in every word, in every action, the whole person is expressed. Once you have recognized the whole personality, you will find it in every single expression of life. But it is no less true that we do not recognize the whole man in every expression of life, that we cannot construct his whole being from every detail. The dramatists of the older school do not demand this of us. They present us with whole people and completed actions as if on a platter. Johannes Schlaf does it differently. He only presents the individual and leaves us to guess the whole. He makes greater demands on our powers of comprehension than other playwrights. We have to suspect everything deeper that underlies the drama. Just as we have to suspect it in reality if we do not observe people and events over long periods of time. We are expected to have a kind of vision. Just as life itself is only an indication of its sources, so is a drama by Johannes Schlaf. One could say that this is based on a misunderstanding of the nature of art. For it is supposed to depict in the outer image what in reality is only revealed to the spirit looking through the outer shell. I don't want to fight this point of view. Those who only want to see art that takes this standpoint may reject Johannes Schlaf. I cannot do that. For me, it is of the utmost interest to see how an artist who does not make himself a designer, but a faithful re-creator, reproduces a piece of reality. And this fidelity is of unspeakable perfection.

A tragedy rich in content cannot take place in an hour and a half. But a plot can take place that has an infinitely tragic background. And that is the case here. A woman with an unclear longing for something that she herself does not know, with needs that are unclear to her, is married to a complacent, well-behaved philistine who knows no longing, only contentment with his bourgeois life and who knows no needs that the most ordinary everyday life could not satisfy. The woman's nervous haste and restlessness is the necessary psychological-pathological result of her unsatisfied longing for life. No one around her understands her. The usual opinion that people have of their own kind is personified in the drama by Uncle Lorenz, a philistine who differs from Gertrud's husband only in the way that older and fatter people usually differ from him.

people usually differ from younger and leaner ones. In Albrecht Holm, an exceptional nature confronts Gertrude. A man who once absorbed European culture, but who later developed into a free, self-reliant person in simple, natural conditions in the far West. He cannot bear Europe because its complicated social conditions make people dependent and unfree in a thousand ways. He has found what Gertrude has only a vague longing for: complete freedom and detachment from oppressive circumstances. The sight of him has an infinitely distressing effect on her; she begs him to go away so that he does not constantly present her with a happiness that she must do without. He leaves, and she goes on living with her Philistine. This is not a drama, but a tragic conflict. A real dramatist would have sucked everything out of this conflict that could be sucked out of it. Johannes Schlaf is too chaste an artist for that. He presents the conflict delicately and with the kind of renunciation of noisy consequences that even nature does not love in the majority of cases.

The performing artists have been given a difficult task with this drama. They have solved them in a thankful way, as was possible under the given circumstances. Eduard von Winterstein, who so willingly and repeatedly placed his talents at the disposal of the Dramatische Gesellschaft, played the taciturn Holm with the restraint that one must demand from the actor of a man who conceals a soft interior in a harsh outer personality with little content. And Marie Frauendorfer tried to make the unclear nature of Gertrud, so difficult to grasp in words and gestures, comprehensible with all the means of her rich talent. She succeeded to a high degree.

A scene by Hugo von Hofmannsthal
Performance by the Freie Bühne, Berlin

The wise Pythagoras believed that the planets in celestial space produce a wonderful harmony through their movements, which one does not hear because one is accustomed to it. Imagine the ear suddenly opened to this music! How different the world would seem to us! What would happen in our soul if the sound of the planets had an effect on it! Such thoughts come to mind when confronted with Hugo von Hofmannsthal's art. He allows harmonies to emerge from things that surprise us, as if the planets were suddenly sounding together. He seems to me to be gifted with an infinitely delicate soul, with finely organized senses; and what he tells us about the world mostly escapes us because habit prevents us from hearing it. Hofmannsthal pays no attention to the coarser aspects of the world; the finer things are therefore revealed to his mind. He allows the prominent features in the phenomena that occupy people in ordinary life to recede; but he brings out the secret beauty that otherwise recedes. There is an infinitely endearing arbitrariness in his view of the world. In the "scene" referred to here, there is little of the rough, sharp lines with which playwrights usually depict life. Madonna Dianora awaits her lover; the man kills her because of her infidelity. This plot is poor and pale. But beneath the surface, as it were, it harbors a wealth of beauty. Hofmannsthal cuts away the surface and reveals the finest branches of inner beauty. His way of looking at things is like listening to a speaker and not listening to the meaning of the speech, not listening to the content of the words, but only to the sound of the voice and the music that lies in his language. It is understandable that this kind of performance cannot be perfectly realized with the means of our stagecraft. Despite the effort Louise Dumont put into the role of the Madonna Dianora, the Freie Bühne performance was therefore not very satisfying.