121. “The Trial Candidate”

Play in four acts by Max Dreyer
Performance at the Deutsches Theater, Berlin

Dr. Fritz Heitmann, the probationer, is assigned to teach science in the top class of a grammar school. He has made Darwinism the basis of his scientific way of thinking and also wants to educate his pupils in the spirit of this truth. He is also an honest man who hates untruth, even when it appears in the often popular form of white lies. Cowardice towards those who are higher or more powerful than us in the social body is the origin of this vice, he says to his pupil, who wants to have learned its justification in the religion lesson. It becomes difficult for the man to stay on the ground of truth. He arouses the wrath of Dr. v. Korff. The latter, a relative of the minister and a supporter of the "conviction" that religion should not be taken away from the people, prompts the principal of the school to bring the weed-sowing teacher to heel. He is in a difficult position. He is supposed to support his family, which his father, a wronged landowner, can no longer keep afloat. He also has a bride, whose hand he can only receive from her parents if he can offer his job as a teacher as an equivalent. He allows himself to be carried away by the promise to recant the "false teachings" he has presented to his pupils in a trial lesson and instead to plant genuine Christian revelatory truths in their souls. For this he was to be found worthy of the office of youth educator. But when he sees his students gathered around him and looks into their kind eyes, he realizes that they demand the truth and nothing else from him, and he confirms the points of view he represents before the ears of his superiors. The grateful students reward him with a serenade; the bride is lost to him. But he has remained an upright man.

This drama has been criticized for its "tendency". Dreyer can calm down about that. It can only happen on the part of those who dismiss the "Robbers" by the tendency poet Schiller from the standpoint of a "true" aesthetic. However, we do not want to go to the opposite extreme and place Dreyer's play too high in the rank of art because of its thoroughly sympathetic tendency. In the play, we are dealing with caricatures of characters and a caricatured plot. The "Rehearsal Candidate" is not a work that presupposes the truth of the portrayal. It is teeming with exaggerations and improbabilities. But we must emphasize to those who object to the play on the basis of this fact that caricature is a perfectly legitimate artistic style. If one does not overestimate the "rehearsal candidate", but regards it as an expression of the style transplanted to the stage, which finds no opponent in the quite artistically justified journals in the field of drawing, then one will do it justice.

Truth and probability are not fixed requirements for the drama. The drama poet may claim the same right that the political or other cartoonist has. Why should we blame the poet if he chooses the style that so often delights us in "Simplicissimus"?