56. “Das Tschaperl”
Drama in four acts by Hermann Bahr
Performance at the Lessing Theater, Berlin
As he always does, in the most charming, amiable pose I can imagine, Hermann Bahr told the Vienna newspaper "Die Zeit" a few weeks ago: "These days I have been reading an old book of mine, "Die gute Schule", my first novel. I had to make the corrections for the second edition, which will be published in the fall, and I had a strange experience. Was that supposed to have been me once? Is that how I once felt, how I once spoke? It's not yet eight years since I wrote it, in the winter of '89 to '90, while traveling through Spain and Morocco. And I was supposed to have been like that then? So completely different from today, incomprehensible to myself after barely eight years? How is that possible? I ask myself this and I don't know whether I should be ashamed of how I was back then or quietly regret that I am no longer like that." What eyes he would have to make, the good Hermann Bahr, if he wanted to read even older books of his! He should read the little book in which he "destroyed" Mr Schäffle, the loquacious national economist, in the year 86, or his first drama, in which the "heroine" delivers a never-ending programmatic speech on the nature of social democracy.
No, Hermann Bahr was never that bored of serving up the same confession to his friends for a whole year. He must consider it a sin to serve the same God today as he did yesterday. That does not seem polite to him in the face of the other gods, who also want their revelations to be proclaimed with fiery tongues. To be honest: I think Hermann Bahr has too much spirit, too agile a spirit, to be able to live long on one conviction, on one way of creating. Someone else would have allowed the ideas of the Schäffle booklet to grow inside him and would probably have become a second Lassalle. But that was not suitable for Bahr. He is too much of a bon vivant for that. To be a Lassalle! What for? One would have to thirst for action. But action takes time. You have to be patient until you can carry them out. What should such a lively spirit as Bahr's do during the long wait? It bores him to act. He just wants to enjoy. He doesn't want to do what Lassalle did. He just wants to see what it's like to live like Lassalle. Then he has had enough of this kind of spirit. That's what Bahr always did. He tried naturalism, then he tried symbolism, and now he's in the process of letting himself go while eating up the wisdom of old Goethe. In March of this year, he wrote: "We regard serving Goethe as the highest thing; we would like a ray of his light to fall on us."
I explain this inclination towards the old Goethe in Bahr's case as follows. He did not used to see something that is present in things: the eternal, the necessary. He only saw the accidental, the everyday, the passing. That is why everything Goethe said about the eternal, the imperishable, remained an empty phrase to him. One day, Bahr's mind was opened to this eternity. Then he also found it in Goethe. Only now did he learn to appreciate the old man from Weimar.
But now everything seemed different to him than before. Once he had looked at people and things from all sides; he had discovered a subtle characteristic trait here, a hidden quality there and could not get enough of reproducing such details. Now he only sees the broad lines, the significant, the eternal, as he himself calls it. Once he placed all value on the psychological, on the dissection of the soul. Now he believes he recognizes that certain kinds of conflicts, of relationships between people are necessary, regardless of the individual nature of these people. The same thing can happen to a stupid person as to a clever one. In the case of Oedipus, it does not matter what his character is like, but only that he takes his mother as his wife. "How is Romeo so much different from Mercutio or Benvolio? Is he hotter, is he nobler, is he cleverer? No, but he is the one to whom it must happen with Juliet. We will never know more about him, but we don't need to."
This is how Bahr feels today. This is how he sees Goethe. And he creates from this point of view. His "Tschaperl" revealed that. There is a music critic, Alois Lampl, who talks and acts as stupidly as not even a critic is allowed to. There is his wife, who has suddenly become famous through the creation of an opera. When we see her like this and listen to her, she really is nothing more than a "Tschaperl". The expression can be applied to a person who always expects the opposite of what she should reasonably expect, who never achieves the slightest degree of independence because everything she wants to do slips past her. A certain anxiety is also part of being a "Tschaperl". But you can only have all these qualities in an amiable form. Of course, the tone poet Fanny Lampl should only be such a "Tschaperl" in the eyes of her husband. But if we listen to her, we can't get a better opinion of her state of mind than her husband.
But according to Bahr's current aesthetic conviction, none of this does any harm at all. Whether Fanny is stupid or clever, whether she makes speeches that are overflowing with wit or whether she is a real "Tschaperl": it doesn't matter. The main thing is that this must happen to her with Alois. That's all "we'll ever know about her, but we don't need to".
Old Goethe thought and felt a little differently. He was also interested in how Tasso thinks, talks and acts, not just what happens to him with Leonore. But Hermann Bahr did not want to become Goethe, even if he could. Just as he once did not want to become Lassalle, even if he could have. Goethe drew his attention to the eternal. And now he lives and shapes this eternity in his own way. And this way is interesting. Bahr depicts what can happen to people in Vienna in the most charming, witty way in "Tschaperl". Only in Vienna can what happens in "Tschaperl" happen. But in Vienna something like this is necessary. It is part of the "eternal" of Vienna. You just shouldn't think that people in Vienna are all as stupid as those on stage in the "Tschaperl". But what happens there affects the clever as well as the stupid in the city on the Danube. It wouldn't have been as easy to deal with clever people as with stupid ones. That's why Bahr did it with stupid people. That's a Viennese trait in him. Why make things more difficult than they need to be? Always take it easy!
Sometimes it looks as if Bahr is poking fun at Viennese culture. Lampl's father was once a respectable janitor. Bahr describes him: "Characteristic old Viennese figure, like the old Bauernfeld in recent years". It doesn't matter whether what happens happens to the old farmer's field or to a janitor, but this description of the person is a little too Viennese. It sounds like a native Berliner describing a Viennese.
It speaks volumes for the excellence of Bahr's comedy that the performance at the Lessing Theater was not a failure. Franz Schönfeld's Alois Lampl was not filled with the eternal or temporal aspects of Viennese life, and Jenny Groß's Fanny was neither a "Tschaperl" nor anything else significant. Adolf Klein as old Lampl was half farmer's field, half janitor. But both Bauernfeld and any Viennese janitor would be grateful for this portrait. It is clear that Bahr has allowed the Viennese spirit to flow into his play in abundance. After all, the Berlin conception has allowed as much of this spirit to evaporate as possible; but the Viennese spirit could not be killed off.
When he realized how he had changed in eight years, Bahr comforted himself with the words: "No, we have no regrets that we have become different. But we shouldn't be ashamed of how we were back then either. It was good after all, because it was necessary. We first had to try to find our own language; only then could we discover the eternal meaning of that old (Goethean) one. Today, of course, we smile that we zapped ourselves too much back then." Now there is only one thing to wish: that Bahr does not make himself too comfortable either with the original Viennese or with the old Goethe. Both are seductively sedate. Bahr must not be fixed with permanent thoughts. He must live in fluctuating appearance. A Bahr who remains the same? No, that's not possible!