60. “Agnes Jordan”

Play in five acts by Georg Hirschfeld
Performance at the Deutsches Theater, Berlin

The artist depicts things and events as they appear to him through his temperament. I had to think of this idea of Zola's when I went home after the performance of Georg Hirschfeld's new drama, "Agnes Jordan". Hirschfeld wants to portray the fate of several people in five pictures. The delicately sensitive, education-loving Agnes Sommer has been well fed with the writings of the classics and carefully nurtured with wise teachings by her uncle, the idealistic Adolf Krebs. This uncle was born for higher things. He wanted to be a musician. Circumstances have made him a merchant. He suffers from a misguided life. Every step he takes takes him backwards instead of forwards. The poet sensibly gives him the name Cancer. He has no luck with his educational experiments either. Despite her education, she falls for the crude Gustav Jordan, who reads nothing but bawdy novels and the "Vossische Zeitung". Georg Hirschfeld describes how these two people lived together in 1865, the year of their marriage, in 1873, 1882 and finally in 1896. However, he did not pick these four widely separated years out of a period of 31 years at random. For in the first, we learn how a ruthless egotist is tender in his way with the woman he has won. The year 1873 gives him the opportunity to let all his brutality shine. Good Uncle Krebs is on the verge of bankruptcy and wants the money back that he lent his clean-cut nephew to start a bourgeois existence. He is therefore showered with the most exquisite cruelties. In 1882, the marital relationship between Agnes and Gustav Jordan had grown to such an extent that the tender-hearted wife ran away from her husband and could only be persuaded to return to his house because their eldest son was seriously ill and needed his mother. In 1896, the woman, brutalized for three decades, experiences the good fortune that her son unites with her friend's daughter. In my opinion, however, Hirschfeld could have chosen any other year from the period mentioned and depicted the fate of his couple in that year. For the events mentioned are of far too little interest to us after the conflict in the first act. We become increasingly tired and finally no longer want to follow along. My feeling does not demand a plot rich in details; but it wants a need to be satisfied which the poet himself has aroused. If I ask someone a question that he has aroused in me through his speech, I want a clear answer that deals only with the subject of my question. If he then answers me all sorts of things that have hardly anything to do with my question, I become unwilling. And Hirschfeld arouses a question in me. After the first act, I want to know how the relationship between the two people whose character he has indicated must develop. All I learn is that Gustav Jordan treats his wife roughly and makes love to every maid who comes into the house. I expect a decision in the fifth act. Something should happen that could be a sufficient answer to the question. Instead, people talk about the new age, the new people and the new art. I know of few dramas whose fifth act is as superfluous as that of "Agnes Jordan". Agnes has had to put up with her husband's brutal instincts for 31 years; she will continue to do so. Everything that Uncle Adolf has planted in her soul has gradually withered; her death will mean little. For she has been dying for 31 years. The difference between complete annihilation and the life she leads in 1897 is the smallest imaginable. The way she is slowly dying is as uncomfortable as when a flame slowly diminishes because there is no more oil. We would rather extinguish such a flame before we see it die so slowly.

Such a slow dying away may often occur in life. And for a subtle observer, the details of such dying will certainly be attractive objects of observation. Hirschfeld is such a fine observer. But he is merely an observer. He has no desire to do violence to things. When he sees an event, he accepts it and presents it as it is. And it seems to him a sin to leave out any indifferent detail that confronts him. That is why he is not a dramatist. Such a man takes up a conflict in life and develops it as his temperament, his personal inclination demands. He switches gears with the event in an autocratic manner. He shows how he conceives the context of events. He has little respect for common reality. A playwright would have placed Gustav and Agnes in situations in which their opposing characters clash wildly. His temperament would have led him to do so. Because this is my view, that is why I remembered Zola's aforementioned performance after the performance of "Agnes Jordan". Hirschfeld does not depict things as they appear when they are seen through a temperament, but as they appear when they are seen through a complete lack of temperament. This poet is a smooth mirror that reproduces everything that is placed in front of its surface unchanged. The images he creates are clean and clear, but they lack any magic of personality. The events in the Jordan family are depicted as if through an artificial apparatus. Hirschfeld provides documents for the cultural historian, but not a work of art. What matters to him is fidelity in the reproduction of what he has observed, but not artistic design. I can imagine that under certain circumstances such a faithful depiction can also attract me. But in the first act of Hirschfeld's work all the preparations are made for a drama of which we then see nothing. The poet owes us this drama. Water is certainly a good drink, but if someone invites us to a bottle of good wine and then serves us water, let him see how he gets on with us. We will not put up with such treatment.

In these lines, I don't want to contribute to the old and eternally young school bickering about idealism and naturalism. But I must say that I find it an indelicacy against me as a spectator when someone expects me to observe the pure, unadulterated truth of nature in all its details between the three artificial walls of the stage. In the stage space I have artificial conditions before me. Life in all its fullness does not enter there. If the illusion of life is nevertheless to be created before me, the missing element must be added by a personality, the poet, of his own accord. Marionettes are lifeless. Nevertheless, I like to watch their play when the director of a puppet show has good ideas. I want to hear what the playwright's spirit creates from the stage. A personality should speak to me, not an observer of life without temperament, to whom things say nothing special that he could reveal to me in his work.

Much more interesting to me than Hirschfeld's drama were the actors who performed it. The performance is an artistic achievement of a high order. Emanuel Reicher once wrote to Hermann Bahr: "We no longer want to play effective scenes, but whole characters, with the whole conglomerate of upper, lower and secondary characteristics that are attached to them ... We want to be nothing other than people who, through the simple natural sound of human language, convey from within themselves the feelings of the characters to be portrayed, regardless of whether the organ is beautiful and melodious, whether the gesture is graceful, whether this or that fits into this or that subject, but whether it is compatible with the simplicity of nature and whether it shows the audience the image of a whole person." What he demands of himself with these words: in his portrayal of Gustav Jordan, he has fulfilled it with every word, with every look, with every expression, with every movement. All the upper, lower and secondary characteristics of the crude, selfish, philistine journeyman were expressed. Everything is convincing. One has the feeling in every detail that of all the possible ways of expressing Jordan's character traits, the one that Emanuel Reicher has found is the very best. And the basic trait of this personality is grasped and realized by the actor in such a way that there is never the slightest suggestion that it could be anything else. Agnes Sorma, who portrays all the characteristics of Agnes Jordan, from the loving devotion to the higher goods of the spiritual life and the inner, fine feeling of gratitude towards Uncle Adolf, ennobled by the most tender naivety, to the noble, proud attitude towards the man and the touching surrender to her fate, stands by her side with stylish, poetic truth and great artistry. Hermann Müller's performance is not on a par with these two actors, as he portrays Uncle Krebs too one-sidedly as a snivelling man depressed by his fate. If this character is to be convincing, a touch of active idealism must be added - at least quietly - to his nature. You have to see that he has a sympathetic goal in mind as he moves forward: then you can mourn with him over his involuntary backward step.