109. “Pauline”

Comedy by Georg Hirschfeld
Performance at the Deutsches Theater, Berlin

Pauline König is the child of a selfish, domineering mother and a good-natured, hard-working, selfless father. This father is one of those men from whom marriage has taken away the last remnants of their zest for life, who have become quiet, acquiescent natures because they want domestic peace and can only have it if they submit to the domineering inclinations of their chosen wife. In the first years of their lives, children of such spouses absorb ideas that lead them to a certain contempt for life. They see in the parental home that not everyone gets his due share in life and that fate has no heart for people. It lets the good wither away and does not punish the bad. That life must therefore be met with defiance: that is the lesson which the children of such parents learn from their youthful impressions. Such children become good people because they have seen goodness in suffering - and one is so drawn to what one sees in suffering. But they become people who don't take life particularly hard because they learned about its injustice at an early age. Pauline König is one of these people. In her father, she got to know a person who didn't know how to organize his life. But the genuine humanity of his nature, a certain inner solidity, has passed from him to her. This father is employed on an estate. The count's lordship exploits his people, and the man has to toil all his life. But apart from that, these counts are nice people, and Pauline played with the children of the lordship as if they were her own kind. That's how she grew up. At the age of seventeen, she went to the city to support herself. Her mother's character was probably the main reason why she left home.

This Pauline König is at the center of Hirschfeld's new drama, which was performed for the first time at the Deutsches Theater on February 18. She is a servant at Sperling's. Walter Sperling is a painter. He leads a real bohemian life with his wife - and his child. Things are quite lively there, they owe the rent and probably other things too, but their hearts are in the right place. For example, when Mrs. Sanitätsrat Suhr approaches the Sperlings to inquire about her maid, who used to work in the painter's house and in whom she believes she has noticed a tendency towards dishonesty, she receives the answer: well, she wasn't honest, but she interested us "as a person". So Pauline is also interesting to the Sperlings as a person. And she is also interesting to the viewer of the drama. In her kitchen, the setting of the play, five lovers come and go: a horse-drawn train conductor, a tailor, a parcel letter carrier, a gym teacher and a metalworker. The first four she merely "oozes"; but we immediately realize that she is serious about the metalworker. She doesn't take life too seriously, which is why she sometimes goes a bit far with each of the lovers; and the good locksmith has every reason to be jealous of his raging love. Pauline plays the first role in a dance hall on the Hasenheide. All her lovers follow her there. The storm breaks in the third act. The art locksmith can no longer tolerate her being courted and entertained by others. The lovers fight, and the high authorities have to intervene in the form of the protector, a popular figure in modern government. The locksmith has just lost his head. Not only does he now fight with his rivals, he even appeals to Pauline's parents. They should set their daughter's head straight. Because he is sincere about her and cannot live without her. It is understandable that Pauline resents this. But it is precisely this extreme step that leads to understanding. The two now understand each other and become a couple. Hirschfeld has painted these two characters in the most delicate way. We have seen what life had to make of Pauline. It is understandable that she cannot quite comprehend the decidedly social-democratic attitude of the Schlosser when one knows that she had already become close to the Count's scions as a child. And the good understanding between her and her parents' lordship has remained. A son and a daughter of this lordship live in the Sperling house. They see Pauline, their old playmate, again; and this reunion is wonderful. These "counts" behave like human beings towards the simple maid. How could she understand the groom's grumbling, who sees only bloodsuckers and parasites in all people who do not belong to his class? But Pauline's and the locksmith's hearts are united by their views on life.

Georg Hirschfeld has always been a faithful observer of reality and a conscientious, all too conscientious portraitist. However great the significance of naturalistic reality poetry may be, it will never be the language in which truly great poets speak. For they have more to tell us than mere reality can say. The way they see, the character of their spirit speak from their works. With Hirschfeld, we have always noticed a certain reluctance to give his own imprint. We saw pure reality through his mind as if through a pane of glass. Now things have changed with him. In this latest comedy, he has also given something of his own character. We sense his personality. He no longer wants to depict people and events selflessly, so that they look at us as if he were not there; instead he shows us how he sees them. This time his work has a clear artistic structure. The material is treated in a genuinely comic manner. If Hirschfeld had lived in a time that was less sympathetic to the pure depiction of reality than today, he would only have been observed from this performance onwards. For it is only through it that the artist reveals himself in him. Only now does he draw together from reality those moments that interest us within the work of art and discard the ballast that is valuable to the observer of the world but indifferent to the aesthetically connoisseur. His conscientiousness towards natural reality has diminished, his sense of the artistic has become more refined. Else Lehmann gave an excellent acting performance as Pauline, as did Rudolf Rittner as the art locksmith. The tension that we are put in by these seemingly so alien and yet so attractive personalities, and their finding their way through their opposites, was shown to full advantage in the performance.