132. “Freilicht”
Play in four acts by Georg Reicke
Performance at the Berliner Theater, Berlin
One of the most appealing phenomena of contemporary dramatic art is undoubtedly Georg Reicke's play "Freilicht", which was recently performed at the Berliner Theater. We are dealing here with a poetic personality whose merits can easily be overlooked. However, the more one lovingly immerses oneself in this creation, the more these merits appear before one's soul. The woman who is seized by the modern quest for personal liberation, who is therefore alienated from the circles in which she was born and brought up, and who has to carve out her own path in life through pain and privation: she has often been the subject of dramatic poetry. She is also the subject of Reicke's drama. But this poet has something over those who have dealt with the same subject matter. He is a more intimate observer. That is why he does not, like so many others, jump from observation to the tendentious intensification of the problem, the thesis. There is still much in women's souls today that resists the intellectual grasp of the idea of freedom. A long-standing cultural inheritance has laid sentiments on the foundation of this soul that cling like a lead weight to the bold idea of women's liberation. It is precisely those women who want to know nothing of such sentiments, who believe that they carry an absolute consciousness of freedom within them, who appear to the more discerning observer today like dishonest female poseurs. The deeply honest, true female characters have to struggle with a strong skepticism of feeling. A shattering tragedy of the heart is their perception of the full need for freedom. One must have very fine organs of observation in order to perceive the mental imponderables at work within such a woman, who strives towards freedom not out of program but out of her nature, out of the shackles forged by traditional social views. Georg Reicke has such organs of observation. Every trait in the characterization of his Cornelie Linde is psychological truth, and none is tendency.
It is very easy to observe that poets who want to be modern may represent new ideas, but that at the core of their being, in their actual attitude, they are no different from the philistines they mock. They are philistines of the new, just as the others are philistines of the traditional. Reicke is fundamentally different from such poets. There is not a trace of philistinism in him either. That is precisely why he faces things objectively, as a true artist. This is the reason why the man he contrasts with Cornelie, the painter Ragnar Andresen, has become such a splendid figure. A true confessor of freedom, a man for whom this confession is as natural as a physical driving force. You will have to look a long time before you find such a pose-less personality among modern dramatic types.
And just as true as these modern figures are those of a culture that has grown old. The privy councillor family from which Cornelie has grown out of, the lieutenant Botho Thaden, to whom she is engaged and from whom she breaks away in order to flee to her congenial Ragnar: everything is clearly true. Nowhere is there any other tendency than to make the characters of life appear comprehensible. Nowhere the false juxtaposition of the excellent new and the evil old. But everywhere the awareness that the new has naturally developed from the old, that this new must still bear the traits inherited from the old. Not just justification of the future, but also an understanding of the past.
Such characters are set in a plot that has nothing of the dramatic developments that are often made in this way and also nothing of the surprising scenic twists. This plot unfolds in the same way that life unfolds in a series of twists and turns. Almost every moment we have the feeling that everything could turn out differently. It is the same in life. Necessity certainly prevails everywhere, but it is precisely this necessity that is the faithful sister of chance. Afterwards we say to ourselves: everything had to turn out this way; beforehand we only have the perspective of countless future possibilities. This is present in Reicke's work in the form of a fine poetic artistry. There are no grotesque surprises in his drama, but there is also no embarrassing foresight of the outcome, which so often appears to us in poetry as an untruth of life.
Reicke's atmospheric painting is particularly appealing. With simple, discreet means, he presents us with the Munich painter's studio in which Cornelie breathes the air of freedom; and with equally simple means, he embodies the milieu of Berlin's secretive domesticity.
A free view of reality, unclouded by prejudice, confronts me in this poet. A gaze that grasps the exterior of life's processes just as vividly as the phenomena taking place within the human soul. We are dealing with a man who does not need bright colors, strong lights and shadows to say what he has to say. We are dealing with a connoisseur of the transitions in appearances. Georg Reicke is a realistic poet, at the same time with that trait of idealism that life itself has.