134. “The New Century”

A tragedy by Otto Borngräber with a foreword by Ernst Haeckel
Review and subsequent critique of the performance at the Altes Theater, Leipzig

It is a risk that Otto Borngräber has taken with his Giordano Bruno tragedy. He will - I fear - experience many disappointments. I wish I were wrong. But I doubt that our time will have the impartiality to follow the intentions of this playwright. We live in an era of small perspectives. And Otto Borngräber has dramatized a man with the greatest possible perspective. Despite the celebrations that were held in February of this year in honor of Giordano Bruno, despite the dithyrambic articles that have been written about him, I do not believe that the audience for this "superman of a different kind", as Ernst Haeckel calls him in his preface to the drama, is a particularly large one. For I cannot believe in the inner truth of this Giordano Bruno cult. One experiences symptoms that are too characteristic of the petty way of thinking of our time. I confess that it is downright depressing for me to observe one of these symptoms now in the fight against Ernst Haeckel's recently published book "Die Welträtsel". How often does one have the opportunity to perceive the joy creeping out of the most hidden corners of the souls of our contemporaries at the attacks that could be heard from the theological side against Haeckel's struggle for the new world view. A church historian in Halle, Loofs, no doubt believes that he has taken the cake among the opponents of Haeckel with his brochure "Anti-Haeckel", which has now appeared in several editions. He has found that some chapters in Haeckel's book violate ideas that church history has currently formed about the connection between certain facts. In the chapters in question, Haeckel based himself on the book by an English agnostic, Stewart Ross, which was published in German under the title "Jehovas gesammelte Werke". This book is little known in Germany. Most readers of Haeckel will only have learned of his existence from the "Welträtseln". This was also the case for Loofs. In his "AntiHaeckel", he has now subjected it to a critique from the point of view of today's "enlightened" Protestant church historian. This criticism is devastating. What today's biblical criticism, historical research into the Gospels and other church-historical sources have established as "facts", Ross has gravely sinned against. Loofs cannot do enough in his condemnation of the book. He calls it a book of shame, inspired by ignorance of church history and a blasphemous way of thinking. Unfortunately, one can now see that he has made an impression on a large circle of educated people with his judgment. One can hear it repeated ad nauseam that Haeckel was "fooled" by the writing of the English ignoramus.

All these judgments from the mouths of "educated people" prove only one thing to me. There is something uncomfortable about Haeckel's world view. Out of vague feelings, they prefer the old Christian dogma to the modern view of nature. But this view has too good a reason for it to be easy to fight against it. The facts on which Haeckel relies speak too clearly. One forgives oneself too much if one openly closes oneself off against this world view. This does not prevent one from feeling a deep sense of satisfaction when a theologian comes along and proves Haeckel's dilettantism in church history. One is in a position to pass a negative judgment on the new world view, as it were from behind. One does not openly confront the monism of the great natural scientist. That would require courage. You don't have that. But you can make up your own mind: a man like Ernst Haeckel, who falls so naively for the ignorance of Stewart Ross, cannot shake us deeply in our ideas. Loofs himself does not hold back with a similar judgment. He even removes Haeckel from the list of serious scientific researchers because he relies on a book that is supposedly as "unscientific" as Ross's.

But take a look at this book. Anyone who reads it without bias will - I dare say - not be astonished enough at the deep inner untruthfulness of Loofs' criticism. For, according to this, he must absolutely believe that he is looking at the writing of a frivolous man who is not interested in truth, but in mocking convictions that are sacred to millions of people. Instead, he is presented with the book of a profound man, whose every sentence makes you feel a tremendous struggle for the truth, who has obviously been through crises of the soul of which people like Loofs have no idea in the comfortable cushion of their church history. A holy zeal for human welfare and human happiness has inspired a personality here to speak out in anger against traditional prejudices, which he considers to be a human misfortune. We are not dealing with a reckless denier, but with an indignant man who wields the scourge because he believes the truth to be distorted by Pharisees.

I need the background of this fact to justify, by a remarkable symptom, the doubts I have expressed above as to the receptivity of the public to Borngräber's tragedy. I can only say once again: I hope that I am thoroughly mistaken and that what Haeckel says at the end of his preface will come true: "We can only express the heartfelt wish that this great tragedy, which is completely in tune with our times, may not only find a wide readership as an ennobling and exciting book, but may also find the appreciation and effect it surely deserves by being performed soon on a larger German stage."

I do not believe that the drama will find mercy before the judgment seat of those aesthetes who have become entrenched in their views over the last two decades. Those who consider the dramatic technique of the "moderns" to be the only possible one will not pass a particularly favorable judgment on "The New Century". Borngräber's technique, with its tendency towards decorative beauty and stylization, will not stand up to either the naturalistic or the symbolist-romantic forum of recent years. Anyone who goes deeper, however, will enjoy this stylization, which dramatizes a Renaissance hero with undisguised pleasure in Renaissance-like forms. I believe I recognize in Borngräber a poet who has kept his taste away from the sympathies and antipathies of the day. For his artistic form he presupposes an audience whose delight in the beauty of form has not been entirely lost in the inclinations of contemporary taste. I do not mean to say that I am an unreserved lover of drama in an aesthetic sense. I do not think that Borngräber is already a master of the style he has chosen. But all this seems to me to take a back seat to the great worldview perspective that is expressed in the work. It will not be a question of whether Borngräber has delivered an impeccable tragedy to the aesthetic judges of this or that direction, but whether there is a tendency for the great world view, of which the martyr burned in Rome three centuries ago is the first representative, to be transferred from an elite of spiritual fighters to a larger crowd.

Whoever is capable of feeling with Bruno's world perspective can alone have a feeling for the tragic violence that expresses itself in this personality. This tragedy lies in the relationship that Bruno's personality has to the upheaval of the world view brought about by men like Copernicus and Galileo. Copernicus and Galileo provided the building blocks for the world view that has been developed over the last few centuries. Bruno was one of those who, with a far-sighted vision of the future, outlined the effects that Copernicus' and Galileo's ideas would have on the view of human nature. He spoke truths for which only the first actual germs were present. He did so at a time when these germs did not yet have the capacity to grow into a world view. Borngräber subtly contrasts Galileo's figure with Bruno's. Galileo is not a tragic personality, although he is indisputably the one to whom we owe more than Bruno when we look at the building blocks that make up our world view. I can completely imagine Bruno out of the development of the spirit in the last centuries. Even without his having anticipated at the turn of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the thoughts that fill me today, they could still be exactly the same as they are. The same is not the case with Galileo. Without Galileo there would be no Newton, without Newton there would be no Lyell and Darwin, and without Lyell and Darwin there would be no modern scientific world view. Without Giordano Bruno there would be none of this. Galileo did not go beyond what his physical foundation absolutely compelled him to do; Bruno proclaimed things that a personality with Galileo's mindset can only claim for himself today. Therein lies Bruno's profound tragedy.

While reading Borngräber's book, I couldn't help but think of a lone fighter of our time, the brave Eugen Reichel. He has placed a personality from the sixteenth century before our eyes, in whom we find the tragedy realized in a completely different sense, for which Borngräber presents Giordano Bruno as a representative. According to Reichel's conviction, a man died in 1586 who viewed the world as we do today and whose memory has so far been completely erased from the memory of mankind.

Reichel is of the opinion that Shakespeare's plays and Baco of Verulam's "Novum organon" reveal a powerful, brilliant personality to those who look deeper, who is equally great as a poet and thinker, but who has died in oblivion without being understood by the rest of the world. Just as Shakespeare's dramas lie before us, they are not the work of their original genius creator, but rather the result of mutilation, amateurish additions and reworking of his legacy. Likewise, the "Novum organon" in the form in which it has come down to us is a work in which two spirits can be sensed: an original, Copernican view of nature, who at the end of the sixteenth century was already living in the world view whose construction was completed by the three that followed, and a bungling scholastic. Baco of Verulam was this bungling personality. He appropriated the legacy of the forgotten genius, "reworked" it in the manner indicated, handed over the philosophical under his name, the dramatic under the name of the Stratford actor Shakespeare to his fellow and posterity. Today I am still unable to form a judgment on this great question to which Reichel has given his energies. Suppose one could agree with Reichel: then, in the sixteenth-century genius he sees behind the works of Bacon and Shakespeare, a figure of the deepest tragedy is revealed to us. From a Bruno tragedy translated into the immeasurable. Bruno killed a hostile power. His work could not destroy it. Aware that his enemies were more afraid of this work than he was of their judgment, he departed from life. The lack of judgment of his contemporaries destroyed the work of the English genius; it not only killed him physically, it killed him spiritually. Eugen Reichel dramatized this tragedy in broad strokes in his "Meisterkrone". Unlike Borngräber, he did not poetically depict a real, historical event, but based it on a symbolic plot. This undoubtedly broadens the perspective for those who are able to feel the tragedy of the personality in question. Borngräber's work does bring the tragic problem in question closer to a wider audience.

Borngräber's drama is soon to be performed in Leipzig by a circle of friends of the work. May it be followed by others, and may our theaters (in Berlin) soon make the effort to open their doors to the Bruno tragedy. They can then fulfill a beautiful task in the great struggle for the "new faith". "The tremendous struggle between 'the old and the new faith', between church religion and spiritual religion, between spiritual bondage and spiritual freedom, which is just now ushering in 'the new century', confronts us grippingly in Borngräber's poetry" (E. Haeckel in the foreword). Worthy performances of this drama could make a significant contribution to the understanding of this struggle. If the stage is to give a picture of the world, it must not exclude itself from the highest thing there is for people in this world, from spiritual needs.

We experienced a beautiful festive evening in Leipzig on July 7, 1900 with the performance of Otto Borngräber's Giordano tragedy "The New Century". I will return in the next issue to the successful performance, which brought us an outstanding performance by the Dresden court actor Paul Wiecke (as Giordano Bruno).

It was a wonderful celebration of the monistic world view that we attended on July 7 at the Altes Theater in Leipzig. What I have to say about Otto Borngräber's drama can be found in this weekly magazine. It was no easy task that the Dresden court actors Paul Wiecke and Alice Politz undertook with the artists of the Weimar Theater. But it was all the more rewarding. The solution can be described as a successful one for the time being. The great figure of Giordano Bruno, who appears as a symbol of a world view confident of victory, which has taken up the fight against darkness and the blind belief in revelation, was given a worthy portrayal by Paul Wiecke. Otto Borngräber and all those who represent his cause can welcome with gratitude the fact that their hero has found this portrayer. Paul Wiecke appears all the more significant the more important the tasks he is given. He found the right tone for the middle ground that had to be maintained here, between realism, which as an artistic companion necessarily belongs to the monistic world view, and that monumental art which is aware that through it a world view is expressed on which the stamp of the eternally effective is imprinted. The weight of this world view was exquisitely expressed in Paul Wiecke's noble and measured playing. The tones that the artist was able to strike were both heart-warming and majestic. Alice Politz's portrayal of the noble Venetian lady, who embraces the new teaching with a devoted soul, was excellent. The drama and the circumstances under which the performance took place probably posed no small challenges for the director. The director Grube from the Weimar Court Theater masterfully mastered these difficulties. He deserves special thanks from those who enjoyed the festive performance without reservation. Space does not permit us to mention more than a few names of others who have rendered outstanding services to the good cause. - We single out Mr. Krähe (Thomaso Campanella), Mr. Berger (Jesuit Lorini), Mr. Franke (bookseller Ciotto), Mr. Niemeyer (Protestant jailer and Perrucci). The Leipzig student body has rendered outstanding services to the presentation of the folk scenes. We left the theater with full satisfaction and only realized something of the merits that some had earned "behind the scenes" at the after-party. Of course, the fleeting evening did not give us a full insight. But we would still like to remember one man: Burgs, whose satisfied expression at the post-performance celebration did not completely erase the worry lines that the previous days' preparatory work had caused him. The proceeds of the performance are intended for the benefit of the writers' home in Jena.