100. “Die Befreiten”

A cycle of one-act plays by Otto Erich Hartleben
Performance at the Lessing Theater, Berlin

Otto Erich Hartleben travels to Rome every year. I now understand that certain philistines have to visit a North Sea resort every year, but why Otto Erich has to go to Italy at the same time of year every year: that seemed to me to be worth asking the bearer of this peculiar habit before the last trip to Rome. I found a suitable hour for this question - and in this way I received an answer. Otto Erich told me that he had to go to Rome every year to escape the misery of life in Berlin. In this beautiful city one is a resident and therefore plagued by a thousand little things, day and night. I won't even conceal the fact that on this occasion he spoke of the trouble that his co-editorship of the "Magazin für Literatur" caused him. In short: in Berlin, one is forced to see the "small lines" that life draws. Otto Erich Hartleben wants to escape these small lines for a few weeks every year to see life in "big lines".

This is Otto Erich Hartleben. There is no pinnacle of observation that he could not stand on to look at life. But he looks for the most comfortable way to reach this pinnacle. There is an old saying that there is no royal road to mathematics. I suspect that Otto Erich will never bother with mathematics. I don't know of any depths of worldview that are not accessible to him. But he gets quite disgusting when it takes work to get to the depths. He knows the seriousness of life like no other, but he has the gift of taking this seriousness as lightly as possible. I have never met a person in whom I have found a noble Epicureanism as realized as in him. He is a man of pleasure, but the pleasures he seeks must have exquisite qualities. He is incapable of doing anything remotely reminiscent of the common.

Everything he does has greatness. And his greatness never gives the appearance of importance. He prefers to make a suitable joke when the others start to get pathetic and attach lead balls to their speeches so that they are taken seriously.

You have to know these characteristics of Otto Erich Hartleben to understand the first play in his cycle of one-act plays, "The Stranger". When I read it, I immediately remembered the "great lines" for the sake of which he goes to Rome every year. It's the eternal problem: a woman has loved one man, married another for some reason, can't bear it, and finds delayed happiness with the first one she loved. How this plays out in life is basically irrelevant. The depth lies in the relationships between people. And Hartleben has depicted these relationships in "broad strokes". Whether the people who want to "see" everything get their money's worth is also irrelevant. For these people, who ask what is "going on", the poet would of course have had to invent a "dramatic fable" with all kinds of interesting details and work them into three acts. But he didn't bother with these people. That's why he "disregarded all the details" and presented the main features of the story. Goethe, who wrote "Tasso", would have enjoyed the "Stranger".

From the performance I expected above all greatness and style. I found none of that. Theater was everything. But this little drama requires art. It would have been an honorary task for the Lessing Theatre to show what can be achieved through theater. A good performance of this one-act play could have silenced all the speeches of the opponents of modern theater for a while. I'm sorry, but I have to say it: when I read the drama, I felt greatness, the Hartleben greatness I described earlier. When I saw it, I felt no trace of this greatness. Everything was reduced to the smallest detail. I would have loved to run away.

The second one-act play, "Farewell to the Regiment", seems much less valuable to me than "The Stranger". I can take no particular interest in either the officer's wife, who has been married by the man so that he can pay his debts, or this man, whom she is cheating on with a regimental comrade. interest. The fact that in the end the affair is revealed, the officer is transferred to another garrison and killed by the seducer after the farewell dinner: all this is all the same to me. But I have nothing to say about that. What I do want to talk about is Hartleben's mastery of dramatic technique. Everything fits together perfectly here: you are swept along by the "how", even if the "what" is all the same to you.

I don't want to dwell on this weakest of the four one-act plays. It was followed by "Die sittliche Forderung". Rita Revera has escaped from Rudolstadt, which is under moral pressure, and has become a celebrated singer. She finds "Friedrich Stierwald, merchant, owner of the company C. W. Stierwald & Söhne in Rudolstadt". He wants to lead her back into the moral life of Rudolstadt. In his opinion, it had to: because one had to be moral in order for morality to exist. Incidentally, Alfred, my Kerr, says: "Weiland Paul Lindau made the same joke. He shouted: What would morality be for if you didn't have it?" But good Kerr: do you understand neither Lindau nor Hartleben? I really don't have time to tell you anything about the difference now. I'm just asking you: don't you know that Nietzsche would have been delighted by the "moral demand" and that he would have liked Paul Lindau ... - no further. Yes, I read your Berlin letters from Breslau and should actually know that you do not like Nietzsche.

I'm coming to the last one-act play, "The Lore". I have always found the story of the "torn button" so delightful that I think the publisher S. Fischer has made the most brilliant business with it and everyone knows it. So I won't tell you about it. I will only say this much: to see it dramatized on the stage is a rare pleasure. Here, what Otto Erich has in his power, the light, the everyday, has become art.

I should not praise my co-editor. That is why I have only highlighted the weaknesses of his four one-act plays.