59. “The Strongest”

Play by Carlot Gottfried Reuling
Performance at the Schiller Theater, Berlin

If I met the pastor Johannes Küster, whose fate Carlot Gottfried Reuling dramatized, in life, I would not seek his company. I would be indifferent to him. He is a weakling, a man who wants to, but cannot want to. He puts up with everything. He became engaged to Sophie Walz when he was young. The girl gave him the means to study. Her influential, pious relatives got him a pastorate. He has an interest in science. He dabbles with natural objects. Reuling would have us believe that he feels unhappy as a pastor. But we don't believe it. His interest in knowledge is not intense enough. If he had studied science, he would want something else. He has no iron in his blood. He would like to part with his bride, whom he no longer likes after being engaged to her for many years. Because he loves his cousin, the clever Frieda Bügler, who understands him. She talks so cleverly and is so well-behaved that she is almost disgusting. Sophie forcefully reminds him of the duty he has to her. She has given him the money for his education because she wanted to marry him. She makes it clear to him how unmanly it is to turn his back on her because his love belongs to someone else. He obeys dutifully. Duty is the stronger thing. She wins. He renounces the good, clever Frieda and enters into a forced marriage with Sophie. But he takes revenge. He takes revenge, as schoolboys are wont to do. He accompanies the corpse of a suicidal woman to her grave, even though this contradicts the feelings of his bride and her relatives. Just wait, I want to show you some nice things. I'll do what annoys you. Why did you just want to marry me?

It is well known that a woman sacrifices much to help her beloved, that her love does not shy away from any sacrifice. That this woman forces him to marry her the moment she sees her lover's affection for her extinguished, I think is nonsense. Such facts awaken pride in the woman. She says to herself: no, I will not possess you without your affection. If a woman acts in a different way, this way is none of our business. It arouses disgust in reality; and we reject it when it confronts us in poetry.

I know what the learned and unlearned aesthetes of the present day will say. Pure art, they say, is not concerned with whether we like a personality or a process or not. It has to depict what happens, not what we would like to happen. Such a view of art alone is soft, feminine. Pure art is a woman. And if it does not allow itself to be fertilized by a world view, by the emotional life that hates and loves, then it becomes an old maid. Carlot Gottfried Reuling's art is an old maid. There is no masculine trait in this poet's work. It would have been manly if he had allowed Johannes Küster to make the decision to give up Sophie. All prejudices should not concern him. His renunciation is feminine; a strong assertion of his will, a devotion to his passion, to his goals, would have been masculine. This has nothing to do with pure art, but pure art does not make it so. The work of art must not remain untouched by our sympathies and antipathies. Why should we allow ourselves to be offered in the theater what is uninteresting to us in life?

But basically they are good Christians and philistines, these poets of Reuling's ilk. The ruthless will, the strong ability is not to their liking. Obeying their duty is more important to them than asserting their personality. Renunciation is their watchword. They see piety in obedience. And they want piety. Piety is good to them; they call the indulgence of their own personality evil, reprehensible. And they cross themselves before the word egoism. What good is it that Reuling is a real poet? That he has serious, artistic intentions, if his view of life is repugnant to us? If we always have the feeling that everything in his drama should have turned out differently? The drama "Das Stärkere" reflects a weak, mathearted view of life. The poet lacks the courage to act, to strive for his own goals. That is why his hero also lacks it. And where Reuling draws energy, as in Sophie, he draws it wrongly. He makes her want the opposite of what she should want according to a healthy psychological view. This drama is a play by a philistine and for philistines. Anyone who is not a philistine will feel bored by it.