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 constitution 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 assumption 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 snobbish 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 assimilated 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 constitutes 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 analyze. 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 circumstances 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 canals, 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 nobility, 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-class life of which has been treated by Eduard von Keyserling, while need and struggle have been described by Frances Külpe 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 Kröger, Charlotte Niese, Gustav Frenssen, Othmar Enking, Helene Voigt-Diederichs), the Hanoverians (Diedrich Speckmann, Heinrich Sohnrey, Karl Söhle), the Westphalians (Hermann Wette, Walther Schulte vom Brühl).
Along the banks of the Rhine, on the other hand, there dwells in the same latitude 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 Schäfer, 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 Böhlau, 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 Schönherr). 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 Gött, 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 Möschlin) disdains either, to be in the truest sense a popular poet and an educator of the people.