128. “The Youth of Today”

A German comedy by Otto Ernst
Performance at the Königliches Schauspielhaus, Berlin

A significant success of this comedy was reported from several places. Here at the Königliches Schauspielhaus it has also achieved such a success. Otto Ernst has met the mood of the vast majority of the theater audience in the most alarming way. What could be more plausible for this audience than that his thinking, feelings and intentions are excellent, uniquely and solely socially acceptable, and that only ridiculous, silly intellectuals can find fault with the solid attitude of the true bourgeoisie. The young doctor Hermann Kröger belongs to such a solid bourgeois family. His father is a philistine of the type often found in official positions. These people are so "normal" in spirit that they need little, and they have crossed the line where imbecility begins. Once they have crossed this line, they are retired. The mother is accordingly. She loves her children like "good" women love their children, and she provides the meals. Hermann Kröger has become a capable doctor; he has even already discovered his "bacillus". His younger brother is still at grammar school. He wants to be an "individuality". We learn of the way in which he strives to become one, that he consists of strolling and carousing, because those who "oxen" are for him the "far too many", the average people. During his student days, Hermann Kröger got to know a real Nietzsche giger, Erich, who was just living it up. This kind of silly person doesn't just exist among the "youth of today". They are people who have nothing to do, know nothing and don't want to learn anything - in fact, they are quite inferior. They pick up some philosophical phrases that are in themselves quite indifferent to them, but which are supposed to make their hollow skulls appear to be filled with deep knowledge. Among the people they meet in life are also those who fall for them. Hermann Kröger is taken in by Erich. He is in danger of being converted to superhumanity by a raghead. However, he is cured at the right time and enters the harbor of a proper, good marriage. In recent years, the word "comedy" has taken on a new meaning. In Otto Ernst's play, its good old meaning has been restored. What else is going on in the play serves the main tendency: the "solid" philistinism is a splendid world view in comparison to the folly of a part of modern youth draped in Nietzschean and Stirnerian phrases. There is not much to this tendency. It is banal. But there is no reason to criticize comedy for the sake of this tendency. However, the dramatic realization should lift the trivial content into a better sphere. The style here is no better than that of "War in Peace", "Rape of the Sabines" and so on. The characterization is of that hurtful kind which paints the colors by which we are to understand the peculiarities of the characters in thick complexes; the events follow each other as if there were no such thing as a logic of facts. It is true that we can do without this in comedy, but then there is only one means of transforming the impossible into something instantly enjoyable for our imagination: wit. It was not at the poet's side when he wrote the comedy.