131. “The Thousand-Year-Old Reich”

Drama in four acts by Max Halbe

Halbe's romantic drama "Youth" must make an embarrassing impression on anyone who has a pronounced sense of the lawful in all events. For an imbecile ensures the continuation of the constantly faltering plot; the same imbecile brings about the conflict and the catastrophe. Lawlessness and lawlessness, chance reigns; not the lawfulness that the human spirit constantly seeks in all things. It seems that the great question of the meaning of chance in the world is connected with Halbe's whole way of thinking. For in his latest drama, it is once again chance on which the dramatic events are built. This time, however, even the most energetic supporter of the idea of necessity cannot object to the motif of chance as the driving tragic force. For Halbe has found the right point in the human mind where the contemplation of the "eternal iron laws" and the reign of the most blind chance join hands to form that fatal alliance which causes the deepest conflicts of the soul. "The development of the whole world is a uniformly mechanical process in which we can nowhere discover aim and purpose; what we call organic life is a special consequence of biological conditions; neither in the development of the world's bodies nor in that of our organic earth's crust can a guiding purpose be detected; here everything is chance!" These words can be found in the book in which the greatest natural scientist of our time summarized his world view, Ernst Haeckel's "Welträtsel" (Bonn 1899). The human mind has been searching for the "guiding purpose" for thousands of years. The scientific view of the present places mechanical necessity where this spirit has assumed wise guidance to be. The healthy, free spirit will find its greatest satisfaction precisely in this "solution to the riddle of the world". In the weak mind, however, the clash of faith in the "wise world government" with the unfeeling mechanical order of nature will trigger the most disastrous tragic conflicts of the soul. Blessed are those whose devoutly pious minds are not disturbed by this clash with reality. Their thinking may not reach into those regions where Goethe felt so at ease when he perceived the eternal, iron consistency of nature, but they are still happy. Their souls experience an idyllic fate. Halbes Schmiedemeister in Marienwalde is not granted such a fate. He is one of those natures who want to recognize a deeper meaning in all things and who consider themselves to be exquisite spirits, heralds of salvation, because they believe that they have been given the gift of interpreting the deeper meaning of the world. Part of the inner tragedy of such a soul is that certain circles of imagination are pushed to the limit, where the doctor begins to speak of delusions. In the structure of the mind those forces are lacking which bring such ideas into harmony with the other elements of mental life. With a mental constitution as characterized here, if one immerses oneself in the teachings of John and is filled with the thought of a millennial kingdom of salvation, one becomes a man like the master blacksmith Drewfs in Halbe's drama; if one derives one's mental direction from the Greek spiritual life and from the philosophy of Schopenhauer, one becomes - Friedrich Nietzsche. In the former case, one declares that one is called to lead people to the resurrected Savior; in the latter, one makes oneself the proclaimer of the Dionysian doctrine of the "eternal return of all things".

Max Halbe has created a tragic character of this kind. Two worlds collide. That of external events and the reflection of these events in Drewf's head. A master blacksmith marries a woman who was the landowner's mistress. He suspects that she has remained so even after the marriage. A coincidence brought him together with the lord of the manor in a place where he could easily have taken revenge. They were both alone at an outpost. He was ready to fire. By chance, he himself was hit by an enemy bullet at that moment. Drewfs does not see a coincidence, but a wise coincidence. The Lord has given him a sign that he has been chosen for great things. It is another coincidence that his child dies. For Drewfs, this is another sign from God. He has shown that it is a child of sin, conceived by the lord of the manor in an adulterous bed. Drewfs feels like a prophet. He gathers followers around him whom he wants to lead to the resurrected Savior. And now there is nothing left for him but the morbid thought of his mission. His character takes on the character that the Zarathustra singer describes with the words: "Werder hart." His wife perishes miserably beside him. Her husband's belief that she has broken the marriage, and everything that is linked to this belief, drives her to suicide. But only the element that built everything up can completely destroy everything in Drewf's soul: chance. Lightning strikes his forge and destroys his possessions. The master blacksmith loses all stability. After the two terrible events, the suicide of his wife and the lightning strike, he calms the torment of his soul for a few hours with - schnapps; and then the madman voluntarily follows his wife to her death.

The sharp logic of the master blacksmith's tragedy of the soul is striking. We see the logical unfolding of a mental disposition. The same disposition that produces what can be described as religious madness, the intense inclination towards certain one-sided ideas and the shrinkage towards all other thoughts and feelings that should organically unite with them - this disposition ultimately leads to groundlessness. Halbes Schmiedemeister is by no means one of those great natures who have to place a harmonious spiritual nature at the service of an idea and who therefore still appear great, indeed even greater, in physical decline; no, he is one of those characters in whom an idea comes to the fore because they are too inferior in spirit to allow the whole harmony of the spirit to unfold. The moment this idea loses its convincing power for him, all that remains is spiritual weakness in the face of all other life. We know from the outset that this blacksmith cannot lead his little band of believers to a prosperous goal. Halbe has not set himself the task of portraying one of those strong personalities whose character is carried to the end by a great idea and who remain true to themselves even when they are ridiculed, mocked and stoned by the whole world; no, he has portrayed one of those weak natures into whose soul an idea penetrates like a fatal, destructive element in order to destroy this soul. It is not abundance of strength that makes such people prophets, but on the contrary: weakness.

From this point of view, anyone who allows the drama to affect them with an artistic sense will only find its dramatic structure highly accomplished. Throughout three acts, with strict necessity, the living out of a fixed idea in the head of a person, in constant intensification. And around the life of this fixed idea all the phenomena that it must logically bring with it. The characters among the religious fanatic's followers are delicately drawn. The subtle nuances of suggestion through which such a personality affects his fellow human beings are well illustrated. The journeyman blacksmith Jörgen, who has absorbed the modern form of compassionate religion, socialism, on his travels, provides an excellent contrast to the unworldly master blacksmith who sticks to the wording of the Gospel of John. The fact that the blacksmith's propaganda finally turns into a trivial pub scene and the man of God seeks to drown his fallen idols in alcohol seems to me to be quite stylish. The connoisseur of the human soul will not be able to deny that they are related mental dispositions: the one that drives the weak will and weak intellect into the fixed idea, and the other, not really different, that creates a desirable atmosphere for him in the fog of alcohol. This points to the inner truth that binds the first three acts of the "Millennial Kingdom" together with the fourth. It is precisely in the fourth act, which has been much criticized, that we see the actual breeding ground from which Drewf's religious madness grew: the inner lack of stability, the defect in his mental powers. This defect had to show itself with all its shady sides after the idea that stamped the man as something other than what he really was deep inside had left him. The small amount of spiritual power he possessed did not spread naturally through his organism; it became an artificial outgrowth of his brain. It is torn out of the ground, and what remains is a spiritually inferior man. This man had to reveal himself in the end. However, people who give birth to great ideas will not end up like this. But those who, through a break in their spirit, become the unhealthy bearers of such ideas will. There is no sharp boundary between the fixed idea of the madman and the fertile idea of the great genius, but a gradual, steady transition. This can be admitted without adopting the philistine point of view, which only wants to recognize a pathological phenomenon in genius.

There is no doubt that we currently have playwrights who do better than Halbe in terms of external scenic structure. But it is equally undoubted that Halbe is ahead of many of them through his familiarity with the great problems of existence. He has a heart for these problems, and he tries to trace their effect on the various human characters. One can see from his latest drama that he has experienced at first hand the mood into which we are plunged by the interaction of chance and law. He knows as a tragic mood what he portrays as the tragic fate of his master blacksmith Drewfs. This will always be the right relationship between the poet's personality and his creation. He will know the nature of the experiences he depicts from his own inner experience. This nature will become an individual entity in his individual creation. What is a partial experience for the dramatist becomes a whole destiny for the dramatic hero. I can definitely sense this connection between life and reality in Halbe's more important works. For me, this connection expresses the inner truth of his creations. He has often been criticized for his clumsy technique. This criticism could be heard again in relation to the "Millennial Kingdom". He lets things happen, they say, that will never happen in reality. Such things seem childish. Such is said, for example, of the lightning striking the blacksmith's house. It seems to me that every playwright who goes back to the deeper foundations of existence is in a position to make such improbabilities happen. Drama demands external events. For personalities that develop out of inner necessity, external experiences will always be more or less accidental. And I would find it unnatural if, in a drama in which the development of a spiritual disposition is important, the external events were wound up along the thread of a strict factual logic, as in a drama in which everything develops from the situations. What we call necessity in external events is in most cases nothing more than a created connection that has its origin in a certain belief in a moral necessity in world events. Basically, it is no more necessary and no more coincidental for Mary Stuart to meet Queen Elizabeth in the park than for lightning to strike master blacksmith Drewf's house. The greater or lesser probability that this lightning will strike this man's house is not a dramatic one, but at most a mathematical or statistical one. But anyone who includes a house in a fire insurance policy must reckon with a probability that need have nothing binding for the playwright. What is mathematically highly improbable can nevertheless appear dramatically stylish.