# 54. “Mother Earth”

*Drama in five acts by Max Halbe  
Performance at the Deutsches Theater, Berlin*

Max Halbe has researched how lovers speak down to the ground. He knows them all, the eternally young feelings: the exultation of the blissful, drunken heart and the bitter pain of the unhappy heart. And he has tender, soft tones to sing of sweet soul secrets and lovely raptures. Nor does he lack the strength for the outcry of the tormented inner being, which yearns in vain for refreshment for its thirst for love, or which is deprived of the temporary pleasure granted by heartless fate.

When Max Halbe speaks this language of love's passion to us from the stage, he ingratiates himself into our hearts. His relationship with the audience is then itself a love affair. Unfortunately, this love affair is disturbed when he presents us with the great problems of humanity and the psychology of the rarer people who want to help solve these problems. There are people whose nature is easily revealed to the subtle observer, who pose no riddles to the inquiring eye. Halbe's artistry achieves such figures to perfection. Halbe is less fortunate with other natures, where the unsparing dissection of the soul's anatomy must give direction to the shaping power of the artist. I believe in Halbe's deep vision. I think that if he were to develop it, this deep vision, he would have to reach the remotest depths of the human soul. But that doesn't seem to appeal to him at all. I have always had this feeling towards Halbe's creations. His new drama "Mother Earth" has recently reinforced it in me. The work of art has made a strong impression on me, but more through the forces contained in the motifs, which the poet has not extracted, than through what he actually allows to play out before our eyes.

A talented young man is cast out of his father's house because the ideals of a young woman who wants to work for the freedom of her sex appeal to him more than the prospect of one day presiding over his ancestral estate with the woman his father has chosen for him and leading the kind of life that his father, grandfather and so on have led. He leaves his father and the girl he really loves to live in a cold marriage of convenience with the sober women's rights activist and to found a newspaper with her that fights against the enslavement of women. This friendship between Paul Warkentin and Hella Bernhardy, disguised as a marriage, lasted ten years before the former's father died. On this occasion, the "married couple" and a friend of the house, the Pole Dr. von Glyszinski, travel to the estate. This Pole plays a strange role. He fancies Hella like a pining lover; she uses him for secretarial duties and pushes him back like a rubber balloon when he tries to get too close to her. Paul is indifferent to him. He tolerates the rival because he considers him completely harmless given Hella's sexlessness. Hella and Paul are different natures. She lives in loud abstractions, her head is full of disembodied ideals. She talks like a book. She has inspired Paul with her ideas, but this enthusiasm does not go deep. He feels unhappy. Because the blood of full-blooded country people lives in him, his inner being remains hungry for the abstractions that his "wife" serves up to him. He lives his life like this for ten years. But when he returns home after his father's death, sees the splendors of his estate again and learns to appreciate them anew, and even finds the woman he once loved: that is when what he wanted to banish from himself, blinded by Hella, comes back to life. Paul wrests himself away from his temptress; Antoinette leaves her flat, stupidly good-natured, disgusting husband, whom she only followed because Paul spurned her. From now on, they both want to belong only to each other. They drink in the love they have been deprived of for years in lustful draughts.

A bold poet who knows how to bring together characters whose mutual relationship is of the greatest interest to every modern man has devised this material. It's just a pity that the characters are too little deepened to really arouse this interest. Hella is not the woman of whom we understand that by her nature she must stand up for the freedom of her sex. She is only a walking and talking program. Paul Warkentin has just as little body and soul. He acts not from strength, not from weakness, not from emotion, not from intellectual impulses: he first stands up for women's rights and then sinks into Antoinette's arms to return with her to Mother Earth, because the poet wants to show the two sides of human nature - the spiritualization that leads to weakness and the healthy originality - and bring them into conflict with each other. We would not be surprised for a moment if Paul were to return to the city with Hella after all. His actions flow so little from his character. It remains completely incomprehensible why Hella does not release her husband when she sees that he will not let go of Antoinette. Was she just fibbing about the idea of freedom? And what I find even more incomprehensible is that the two people, Paul and Antoinette, who find each other again after ten years, have to go to their deaths because Antoinette could not bear it if people said that the runaway wife lives with the runaway husband. The heroine of liberty, who peels her husband by the tail that the law hands her, and the loving woman who bows to brutal social prejudice, do not warm us.

Despite all this, Halbe's drama made a big impact on me. Even if it doesn't quite come to life, it still has a significant dramatic force. And even if the characters don't quite stand on their feet, there are conflicts playing out before our eyes that are deeply rooted in our time. We believe the poet, even if we don't believe his characters.

The portrayal could easily have filled in some of the gaps left by the poet. Only Else Lehmann gave a completely satisfactory performance as Antoinette. Rudolf Rittner did nothing to reconcile the two hostile souls living in Paul's chest, and Alwine Wiecke showed that she is a clever actress who knows how to use her resources as well with modern characters as she does with classical ones; but she is not ravishing here and there because she has too little temperament.