112. Hugo von Hofmannsthal

Performance at the Deutsches Theater, Berlin

When Goethe stood before the Greek works of art on his Italian journey, he said: "There is necessity, there is God." And explaining this statement, he wrote to his friends back home: "I have the suspicion that the Greeks proceeded in art according to the same laws that nature itself follows in its creations and that I am on the trail of." It is the realm of higher truth to which Goethe points when he writes these words. One must be able to go beyond the view of truth that recent years have often produced if one wants to understand these words of Goethe. Under the influence of this view, we are inclined to call everything truth that is provided by a faithful observation of all the details of things. Everything we see and hear, we also call true. And a depictor of truth is one who reproduces what he sees and hears in its entirety. When Goethe spoke of "truth" at the height of his conception of life, he had something else in mind. Not he who describes things in all their real breadth proclaims the truth. For behind this breadth, something is revealed to those who look deeper that is true in a different sense than the immediate reality. The individual human being, with all his special character traits, contains something within him that is more than the individual. For those who do not develop the organ within themselves to see this something, it is not there at all; just as color is not there for the color-blind. He sees reality only in various shades of gray.

For the colorblind, this grey world is not the real world. Likewise, for the spirit, which in Goethe's sense sees the higher nature within nature, the reality that spreads out in space and time is not the true reality. One can no more argue about the higher content of the world with those who see the truth only in spatial-temporal reality than with the color-blind about colors. Goethe and those who view the world in his sense call the higher world that of ideas. In the "Prologue in Heaven" he points to this higher world with the words: "And that which floats in fluctuating appearance is fixed with constant thought." Compared to the higher truth, the common reality is untrue. The individual real tree is untrue in relation to the idea of the tree, which the deeper-seeing person grasps in spiritual contemplation. It is only natural that the creations that stem from this higher view leave those who are blind to ideas cold. What is blind to ideas, however, is that naturalism in art which seeks to make it an image, a portrait of common, everyday reality. However, it must be expressly emphasized that the world of ideas does not refer to the monotonous, abstract world of the intellect, but to the world of intuition, which is full of life and content. If one finds the idea of man in the individual human being, one is not dealing with a meagre general idea, but with a content that is much richer, much fuller than that of everyday reality. Compared to Goethe's "Natural Daughter", the minds of people who cling to common reality remain cold. Fichte, on the other hand, who lived entirely in the world of higher reality, described this work, which others have called a "crystal ice palace", as Goethe's best creation.

Hugo von Hofmannsthal takes us to the land that spread out before Goethe's eyes when he said in front of the high works of art of the Greeks: there is necessity, there is God. Unlike Goethe, Hofmannsthal's view of art and reality does not appear to us as the fruit of a rich life experience. Rather, in complete naivety, reality strips itself of its ordinary, everyday qualities before his eyes and shows him its ideal, higher content. Hofmannsthal's creations therefore do not appear mature, not fully saturated. But his longing points him everywhere to the ideal land, and his brush does not paint things as they are in everyday life, but according to their inner, higher truth. Such are the characters and such are the events depicted by Hofmannsthal in the two dramas "Die Hochzeit der Sobeide" and "Der Abenteurer". They will appear as cool products to those who stick to common reality. As creations of a man to whom the inner truth of things is revealed, they appear to those who themselves feel something of this world. In the old man who takes home a young woman who loves not him but another and reveals this to him on their wedding night, the great traits of a general human being are reproduced. Everything accidental, which in common reality accompanies these great traits as tendrils and flourishes, has been removed. Perhaps no single person shows us the great lines of humanity in the way Hofmannsthal depicts them. But the individual human being awakens this image of the general human in us. This poet has a keen sense for everything that is not accidental. The process he describes cannot take place in the realm of everyday life in the generality that he depicts. But our intuition will always conjure up this process before our eyes when something similar only echoes in reality. The old man is a great nature. A nature that is as man is, of whom Goethe says: he is noble, helpful and good, for that alone distinguishes him from all beings we know. Moreover, man must complete his circles of existence according to eternal, iron laws. And it seems to this man to be an eternal, iron law: to release his beloved woman freely to wherever her love takes her. This is precisely what drives Sobeide to misfortune and death. She goes to her lover. He doesn't really love her. He was only playing with his love for her. She returns to her unloved husband and kills herself. - We also encounter the same motif in "The Adventurer". The woman who is deeply in love with the man who is only playing with her love. She has become an artist through love, he has become an adventurer through love play. Nothing individual clings to the figures. The eternal, which reveals itself in the accidental and temporal, is depicted.

In the place where naturalism, which makes the temporal, the common reality the sole truth, has reached its highest stage of dramatic development, these dramas of higher truth could not come into their own. The German Theater can perform the "Fuhrmann Henschel" to perfection, but not these dramas, which do not contain anything that is portrayed with incomparable grandeur in the naturalistic dramas.