By Amelia von Ende
A period of transition in a nation's life is not the best foundation upon which to rear a new literature. The change of religious, moral, I social and political standards from their well-established and time-honored base to new and untried planes does not favor the development of minds, well-defined and well-balanced, and of characters, able to translate a clear purpose into consistent achievement.
Germany passed through such a change toward the end of the nineteenth century. The unification of the Empire with its era of material prosperity and progress strengthened the roots of national consciousness; the gospel of the superman with its absolute ego-cult stimulated individual self-assertion; the wave of altruism which swept across the world at the same time roused the slumbering sense of social responsibility. These three forces—national consciousness, individual self assertion, social responsibility—profoundly affected the character of the young generation growing up in the newly reestablished Empire. Embracing each of these principles in turn, theorizing about them, the young men and women of the time became unsettled. With the gradual realization of the seriousness of the underlying ideas grew the desire to experiment with them in life, to prove them by practice. In the attempt to live these new ideals the individual became involved in a conflict with the old conscience that no philosophy had yet been able to argue away, and the road out of this dilemma lay along the line of least resistance, which consisted in drifting with the changing tides. The result was the gradual evolution of a type of hero which modified the drama of the country. While the hero of old encountered and conquered obstacles mainly of external circumstance and complication, the hero of the present is the victim of doubts and moods rooted within himself, defeating his purpose and paralyzing his will.
The modern German drama deals with these conditions and characters. The writers whose creative instinct awoke in the seventies stood upon the firm ground of old traditions and were inspired by the optimism of the national renascence. The writers who responded to the same instinct in the eighties stood on the plane of a philosophy which had undermined the old traditions and conventions and had not yet crystallized into constructive principles that could safely guide the individual through life. Their souls wavered between self-realization and self-renunciation; their minds eagerly followed the example of Ibsen inquiring into individual motives and responsibilities, and their eyes were at the same time opened to the economic struggle of the masses which had roused the social conscience. A world unknown to the poets of the previous generation, or ignored by them, had come within the range of vision; it engaged not only the humanitarian's sympathy and the philosopher's speculation, but the artist's interest. It was studied for its scientific meaning and exploited for its esthetic possibilities.
The floodgates of a literature rich in stimulating ideas were opened and the new subject-matter demanded a new manner, a new style. The influence of Darwin was not lost upon the young generation. The significance of circumstance and environment in the making of man led to a minute painting of the milieu, of the external setting of each individual life at every moment of its existence in drama or fiction. The language of the characters became the language of their class in ordinary life. The action was immediately and directly transferred to the written page and became a record of unadorned reality. The cry for truth became one of the party cries of the period. Naturalistic fiction and naturalistic drama came into being.
Within the brief space of less than twenty-five years were born three men whose literary personalities represent this development of German drama. Ernst von Wildenbruch in the main held fast to the traditions of the past, which he treated in historical plays in the manner of a poet who had matured in the period of Germany's unification and was inspired with the consciousness of national renascence. Hermann Sudermann, who rose on the horizon just as the old traditions began to weaken, chose to ignore the past, took his cue from the social note of the present, but sought a compromise with the old forms and with the taste of the great mass of the people. Gerhart Hauptmann, the youngest of the three, discarded all precedent and built upon new foundations with new material in a new manner. By the success which he gained in spite of his uncompromising attitude, he became the leader of the young generation.
The intellectual atmosphere in the decade that witnessed the advent of Sudermann and Hauptmann was extraordinarily alive and stimulating and the drama was chosen by an amazing number of young aspirants to literary fame as the vehicle of the message they had for the world. The plays of the period suggest the fermentation going on in the young brains, the unsettling of old and the dawn of new creeds, religious, social and esthetic. The clash of two generations became one of the most popular themes. Cæsar Flaischlen, a Suabian, handled it most thoughtfully and effectively in Martin Lehnhardt. Though the author modestly called it "dramatic scenes," it was a play presenting with spirited rhythm a phase of the spiritual revolution and moral revaluation then taking place, and in the orthodox uncle and the radical nephew he created two figures full of real dramatic life. The well-to-do and well-satisfied middle-class with its somewhat shopworn ideals was a popular topic with these young men who lustily set about to demolish the Mosaic and other codes of life. Otto Erich Hartleben was hailed as the Juvenal of the society of his time, flaying it mercilessly in satirical comedies like Education for Marriage, The Moral Requirement, and Rose-Monday.
Whatever were the shortcomings of these young hot-spurs, there is no doubt that there were among them earnest seekers for new values of life and letters. Many were contented with pathetic seriousness and doubtful results to imitate their successful and popular model, Gerhart Hauptmann. Some made no attempt at concealing that they walked closely in the footsteps of their master. Nor did the critics of the new school esteem them any less for being followers and imitators rather than creators of independent merit. Among these youths, Georg Hirschfeld, a born Berliner, was the most promising. He was of a type abundant in every metropolis having an intense intellectual life: sensitive, impressionable, with an amazing talent for absorption and adaptation and a facile gift of language. The reception accorded to his drama. The Mothers (1896), which was frankly reminiscent of Sudermann's contrast between the front and the rear house and of Hauptmann's dialogue of real life, was so generous, that it gave the author, then barely twenty-three, a position quite out of proportion to his achievement. His efforts at following up the easily won success made him a pathetic figure in the drama of that decade. He experienced failure upon failure and has now, after the publication of some stories of varying merit and the stage success of a clever comedy directed against the esthetes—Mieze and Maria—once more dropped out of sight.
A far more robust figure came to the fore in Max Halbe, a West Prussian and an individuality deeply rooted in the soil of his forefathers. That soil and his close kinship with nature gave Halbe a firmer foundation than the shifting quicksands of metropolitan life offered. These were the premises upon which he set out to build. But he would not have been a child of his time had he not seen life through the temperament of his generation. With all his sturdy mental and moral fibre he could not withstand the torrential current of skepticism and revaluation that swept through the intellectual world and uprooted its spiritual mainstays. Though the action of his plays was based upon eternal conflicts of the human tragi-comedy—the irreconcilable contrast between two generations, between two orders of life, between love and duty—his characters are of the new type, his unheroic heroes are like the men he saw about him, reeds swayed by the breath of the Zeitgeist, and true to the naturalistic creed of his generation they were represented by him without any attempt at idealization.
Halbe made his debut in 1889 with the tragedy of a peasant parvenu. The play was fashioned according to old formulas, but of charming local color and with more than a touch of the new type in one of the characters. This was followed in 1890 by Free Love, the hero of which is one of those individuals unable to reconcile their convictions with their actions—a conflict which becomes a source of torture to themselves and those about them. The Ice-Floe (1892) was a powerful drama, in which the sudden thaw, destroying what has been, but bringing with it a breath of the spring and the new life to come, admirably symbolized the passing of the old order. But it was not until the following year, which saw the publication of his Youth, that Halbe attracted serious attention outside of the circles of that Young Germany which has become identified with the literary revolution. Youth was of a human significance and of an artistic calibre which could not well be ignored. This work presented the old theme of youth, love and sin in the provincial setting that he knew so well; the characters were taken from real life and portrayed with striking truthfulness. But over it all was the atmosphere of spring, of sunshine and blossoms and thundershowers that quicken the germs in the womb of the earth. This was suggested with a delicacy and a chastity rare in the literature of that period of storm and stress. Youth was the work of a true poet and would have been hailed as such even had the author been born into a period less generous in its bestowal of praise upon the works of the "coming men."