83. “Gertrud”

Drama by Johannes Schlaf
Performance by the Berlin Dramatic Society

It was a beautiful and important task that the Berliner Dramatische Gesellschaft set itself with the performance of Johannes Schlaf's new drama "Gertrud". The artistic style of this poet is expressed most perfectly in this work. It therefore displays all the merits and shortcomings of this style in the most pronounced way. I will talk about the drama and the performance in more detail in the next issue. For today, I will only mention the fact that the impression on the majority of the members of the company was strong and favorable.

Our modern literary critics never tire of claiming anew every day that naturalism has been overcome. And those who only a short time ago praised it as the only salvific gospel of the present are now singing its funeral dirge every hour. Gerhart Hauptmann is taking a different path, having created a work worthy of admiration for the purity with which the principle is translated into reality in "Florian Geyer" of the naturalistic movement. But the real prophet of the movement, the master of the successful student Gerhart, has remained true to the old flag as a playwright. He proved this with his latest creation "Gertrud". This dramatic poem is the mature fruit of naturalism - perhaps the most mature we have. All the merits and all the shortcomings of this style are expressed in it in the sharpest possible way. Drama should be a faithful reflection of life - that is what naturalism demands. The dramatic characters should not speak or do anything that real people in the time in which the drama is set would not do and speak. Gertrud" plays for an hour and a half. Not a word, not an action is perceived that would not be heard and seen in the "spacious room" in the seaside resort on Rügen, which is represented by the stage, if one could see through the walls into the real room. The deepest conflicts of the soul take place inside the characters as they speak and act. The actions and words spoken are only a faint indication of these conflicts. It is the same in real life. What do we learn about a person's character when we watch his goings-on for an hour and a half? Little or nothing at all. That is why playwrights have always sacrificed the immediate truth of nature. They have condensed into a short time what in reality is far apart. They let the characters say and do in a few hours what they actually speak and do over a long period of time. They want to give us the truth of a whole and therefore sacrifice the truth of the individual. It is true that in every word, in every action, the whole person is expressed. Once you have recognized the whole personality, you will find it in every single expression of life. But it is no less true that we do not recognize the whole man in every expression of life, that we cannot construct his whole being from every detail. The dramatists of the older school do not demand this of us. They present us with whole people and completed actions as if on a platter. Johannes Schlaf does it differently. He only presents the individual and leaves us to guess the whole. He makes greater demands on our powers of comprehension than other playwrights. We have to suspect everything deeper that underlies the drama. Just as we have to suspect it in reality if we do not observe people and events over long periods of time. We are expected to have a kind of vision. Just as life itself is only an indication of its sources, so is a drama by Johannes Schlaf. One could say that this is based on a misunderstanding of the nature of art. For it is supposed to depict in the outer image what in reality is only revealed to the spirit looking through the outer shell. I don't want to fight this point of view. Those who only want to see art that takes this standpoint may reject Johannes Schlaf. I cannot do that. For me, it is of the utmost interest to see how an artist who does not make himself a designer, but a faithful re-creator, reproduces a piece of reality. And this fidelity is of unspeakable perfection.

A tragedy rich in content cannot take place in an hour and a half. But a plot can take place that has an infinitely tragic background. And that is the case here. A woman with an unclear longing for something that she herself does not know, with needs that are unclear to her, is married to a complacent, well-behaved philistine who knows no longing, only contentment with his bourgeois life and who knows no needs that the most ordinary everyday life could not satisfy. The woman's nervous haste and restlessness is the necessary psychological-pathological result of her unsatisfied longing for life. No one around her understands her. The usual opinion that people have of their own kind is personified in the drama by Uncle Lorenz, a philistine who differs from Gertrud's husband only in the way that older and fatter people usually differ from him.

people usually differ from younger and leaner ones. In Albrecht Holm, an exceptional nature confronts Gertrude. A man who once absorbed European culture, but who later developed into a free, self-reliant person in simple, natural conditions in the far West. He cannot bear Europe because its complicated social conditions make people dependent and unfree in a thousand ways. He has found what Gertrude has only a vague longing for: complete freedom and detachment from oppressive circumstances. The sight of him has an infinitely distressing effect on her; she begs him to go away so that he does not constantly present her with a happiness that she must do without. He leaves, and she goes on living with her Philistine. This is not a drama, but a tragic conflict. A real dramatist would have sucked everything out of this conflict that could be sucked out of it. Johannes Schlaf is too chaste an artist for that. He presents the conflict delicately and with the kind of renunciation of noisy consequences that even nature does not love in the majority of cases.

The performing artists have been given a difficult task with this drama. They have solved them in a thankful way, as was possible under the given circumstances. Eduard von Winterstein, who so willingly and repeatedly placed his talents at the disposal of the Dramatische Gesellschaft, played the taciturn Holm with the restraint that one must demand from the actor of a man who conceals a soft interior in a harsh outer personality with little content. And Marie Frauendorfer tried to make the unclear nature of Gertrud, so difficult to grasp in words and gestures, comprehensible with all the means of her rich talent. She succeeded to a high degree.