39. German Drama of the 19th Century

Dr. Siegismund Friedmann, professor at the R. Academia Scientifico-Letteraria in Milan, has set himself the task of presenting the history of German drama according to Schiller. The translation of his book by Ludwig Weber has just been published (first volume. Leizpig 1900). We are dealing with a literary phenomenon that can be described as a remarkable achievement in terms of its design and execution. Anyone who needs a guide to orient themselves in German dramatic literature after Schiller and Goethe can find a reliable and highly stimulating one in this book. But even those who already have a mature independent judgment will be interested in Friedmann's arguments. A man of energetic, fine artistic sensibility speaks to us. The playwrights Heinrich von Kleist, Christian Dietrich Grabbe, Christian Friedrich Hebbel, Otto Ludwig and Franz Grillparzer are described from a high vantage point. Friedmann has succeeded admirably in creating individualized literary portraits of these personalities. He has the gift of being able to go into the characteristics of the individual spirit and gain a coherent picture of him without falling into the bad habit of many modern characterizers who try to characterize the personality through all sorts of trivialities of their bourgeois existence. We get to know an aesthetic critic and a historical observer. The one does not detract from the other. A thorough knowledge of German literary-historical achievements lends the book an extraordinary solidity. And it is particularly pleasing that the author is not a pompous scholar, but a free, urbane observer. A just appreciation of such a work can only be made by those who are able to judge the wealth of studies that must precede it in order to arrive at such freedom of judgment. What is the fault of so many books on literary history, that their authors overwhelm us with a mass of unprocessed material, is completely avoided here. Friedmann gives the results without repelling us by presenting the studies.

The author finds the key points everywhere to lead us into the soul of the personalities he describes. Characterizations such as that of Kleist's "Penthesilea" or Hebbel's "Gyges and his Ring" are masterpieces. Kleist's figure, hovering on the border between pathological eccentricity and philosophical depth as if over an abyss, Hebbel's austere psychologist's art, Otto Ludwig's brooding genius, Grillparzer's classicism, which is not free of a certain philistrosity: they all come into their own and are vividly portrayed.

I would like to emphasize that Friedmann has a real feeling for how much of a genial personality belongs to its time and how much must be extracted from the basis of its individuality. Literary historians are particularly guilty in this respect. Some only depict "trends" and make the personalities within these trends appear like puppet figures pulled by the strings of the zeitgeist, while others more or less completely overlook what a personality owes to his time. No literary-historical method can prevent us from falling into one or the other error. Only a correct sense of tact can decide what is original and individual in a spirit and what is merely a result of the time in which he lived. And Friedmann in particular must be certified as possessing this tact. He does not allow his judgment to be impaired by a method that is fixed from the outset. In each individual case, his method is a result of the matter at hand.

Kleist portrayed the two poles of femininity in the two characters Penthesilea and Käthchen von Heilbronn. He personified the woman "as powerful in sacrifice, in devotion as the man in action and accomplishment, in his Käthchen von Heilbronn". In Penthesilea, the moral, as it were, is: "the explanation and condemnation of that inhuman, fabulous state in which women have expelled men from their community, it is the condemnation of the woman who wants to break through the very narrow boundaries - according to the ideas of Rousseau and Kleist - that are imposed on her by nature". Friedmann now tactfully points to the philosophical origin of this opposition, on the one hand without blurring Kleist's individuality, on the other hand without dissolving the richness of content of the individualized poetic figures into abstract schemes. "The opposite of such a character, Penthesilea, whom he himself described as the "negative pole opposite the positive pole Käthchen> - according to the dark philosophy of his friend Müller, who at this very time (1808) was setting up the system of opposites - had to perish, for she stood not only outside of nature, but also beyond the inner morality of things."

Friedmann knows how to shed light on historical phenomena with striking, brief remarks. When discussing the terrible shock that the prospect of imminent death causes in the Prince of Homburg, for example, he says: "This is a reaction from the physical side, for immediately afterwards the noble moments of his nature prevail again over the rebellious sensual impulses, and the prince shows himself in all his moral strength, in the splendor of his magnanimity. Through this momentary physical weakness, the poet teaches us to better appreciate the self-sacrifice that the hero will later make, and to admire him even more in his proud and moral greatness. He has deprived him of the marble coldness which the heroes of the theater have possessed since classical antiquity." This is as good a description of a character as it is of an artistic phenomenon. In order to characterize Friedmann's horizon, the breadth of which makes his book an interesting one, I would like to cite the sentence in which he assigns Kleist his position in world literature: "It is through the individual-psychological that Kleist's characters differ from the typical ideal figures of the classical school. This was felt by his contemporaries, and they felt repelled by his works precisely because of this, so that they never gave them the applause they deserved. But we, who are becoming more and more familiar with the artistic direction he has taken through the works of Ibsen, Björnson and contemporary theater in general, cannot withhold our admiration from them, precisely because of this new direction."