For ten years I have lived in the neighborhood of Vienna. There are German critics who cannot forgive me this choice of a domicile. But I still ask them to approve it. On my part I promise them never to give in to the Capuan lassitude which, I might add, is nothing but a legend among the superficial. True, the productive man is here more isolated, the man resolved to reach a goal is here left more to his own resources, than elsewhere; but many stormy winds blow, and if the post which one has taken is rendered dangerous, one's vigilance is enhanced. I am thirty-eight years old and have a feeling that I am standing at the beginning of my career. But to reach the end one would need to be--immortal.
The virtuosity of the narrator Wassermann may have served as a model for his younger fellow-townsman Bernhard Kellermann (born at Fürth in 1879). He too is a seeker after new forms of expression for psychical reactions; but he presents himself to us from the very first as a purer nature of greater delicacy and lucidity. He introduces himself as a troubadour of narrative art in his first two novels Yester and Li, a Story of Longing (1904) and Ingeborg (1905). With unutterable tenderness and richness of tone he depicts in each of these two novels the love-longing of a solitary nature, the substance of which is trembling yearning, and the fulfilment of which is a fading dream. A solitary figure is the hero of the third novel, The Fool (1909), as well. It is a young clergyman who settles in a small Franconian town with the sole purpose of doing good. He visits those who are weary and heavy-laden; with pathetic faith in the goodness of humanity he sees in every man a brother, and finally he suffers the Saviour's fate of pining away and dying unrecognized for what he was. This is Kellermann's profoundest and best work, and it would deservedly be reproduced here if considerations of space did not compel the selection of a shorter narrative. As such a narrative God's Beloved (1911) suggested itself, the work of a later period. For about the year 1910 a clearly recognizable change takes place in Kellermann's work; he goes forth into the world, and sojourn abroad causes the gentle dreamer to awaken into an energetically aggressive, almost brutal man of action. The sentimental stories of the heart are followed by works of keen intuition, in which with compelling suggestiveness strange human communities are comprehended and presented in the characteristic atmosphere of their milieu. What we find in the insane asylum of God's Beloved we find also in the lives of Breton fisherfolk in the novel The Sea (1910); it is unadulterated primitive nature, which blends the roar of billows and the instinctive ingenuousness of the islanders into a mighty harmony.
If Kellermann's development should be taken as pointing the way for the German novel of the future, we should have to conclude that Heimatkunst has been supplanted by exotic art. Specialties are being cultivated, like that of the promising Willy Seidel (The Garden of Shuhan, Sakîje's Song) in Oriental themes. Interest is growing in the literature of travel, and the great publishers are already paying the traveling expenses of their authors, in order that they may see something of the world and write about it. This is the manner in which Hermann Hesse's Trip to India came into existence, and Kellermann has similarly published two books on Japan (A Promenade in Japan, 1911, Sassayo Yassal, 1913). The danger of this tendency lies in the confusion of poetic invention and journalistic report. Kellermann's most recent novel The Tunnel (1913), which sold inside of a few months to the number of a hundred thousand copies, cannot be regarded as a genuine work of art. It is not "the epic of iron and electricity, the Odyssey of modern engineering and capitalism" which it was perhaps intended to be, but a fantastic special article spun out into a moving-picture series of impressions of America and the possibilities of technical accomplishment. As such it is a great proof of talent. This we perhaps see most clearly if we compare it with Hauptmann's Atlantis; for we then perceive how much sharper are Kellermann's eyes and how much more takingly he knows how to reproduce the bustling confusion of the modern mart. But it is rather a caricature of the present than a Utopia of the future, and the idea of the novel is lost in the abundance of individual motifs. It is to be hoped that this alienation is not symptomatic in the development either of the gifted author or of German literature as a whole. National questions will in the coming years summon Germany from fantastic world problems back to consciousness of herself.
The technical possibility of the Atlantic tunnel, upon which Kellermann has founded his novel, is questioned by engineering experts. Nevertheless, the idea of the tunnel remains a symbol of the need which the continents of the earth feel, of overcoming the distances that separate them and of approaching and comprehending one another in ever closer commerce and mutually profitable exchange. Where technical means fail, the problem remains unrestricted for the human mind. The more each individual people gives full expression to its national character, the better will that world literature for which we strive succeed in contributing to a mutual understanding on the part of the several peoples. And when, as at present, the sea is lashed by frightful storms, a safe conduit must lead from one national spirit to the other--a conduit in the deep, which remains undisturbed by the waves of passion that agitate the surface.
HELEN E BÖHLAU
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[THE BALL OF CRYSTAL] (1903)
TRANSLATED BY A. I. DU P. COLEMAN, A. M.
Professor of English Literature, College of the City of New York
On the long, bare slope of the Ettersberg lay the buildings that marked the centre of an estate, not far from the Sperber property, but not, like it, embedded in swelling fields on the side of the steep road where the land lay broader and less precipitous. It lay nearer to the wooded mountainside, so that the farm-buildings could look down a little haughtily on those of the Sperber place--although there was really no reason for it, since the latter was not at all inferior either in extent or in great straw-thatched barns and stables or the stately dwelling-house.
The estate that lay nearer the woods belonged to an old soldier, Captain Rauchfuss, who, after a busy life in war and peace, had retired and come back to his native town a little stiff in the legs, to find a corner where he could live on his little pension in quietness.