96. “The Conqueror”

Tragedy in five acts by Max Halbe
Performance at the Lessing Theater, Berlin

I have always thought differently about Max Halbe than many others. What was almost universally admired about his "Youth" and his "Mother Earth", I consider to be an - albeit highly valuable - addition to his great poetic talent. But Halbe is, in my opinion, not merely the dramatist of the mood that flows towards us in "Jugend", of the feeling sprouting from the native soil that flows towards us in "Mutter Erde": Halbe is the poet to whom the deepest reasons of the human soul are accessible, which is at home in every time and place. A year ago, after the performance of "Mother Earth", I wrote: "I believe in Halbe's deep vision. I think that if he developed it, this deep vision, it would reach the remotest depths of the human soul." At the time, I thought I had an inkling of the nature of Halbe's artistic individuality. In my opinion, he belongs to the family of great poets who create individual figures, but in such a way that they point us at every moment to that which is eternal in human nature, which lives unchangingly through all times and spaces and which only finds a stronger expression within certain circumstances than in others. A great human conflict seizes the poet. He starts out from the innermost experience of the soul. Then he finds a place and time in which this inner experience can take on the best outer form.

This path of the true poet must also be half the path. Until now, he had only ever followed his very own path ruthlessly. In his "Conqueror" he has gone it. Max Halbe has only just found himself. When I got to know the drama, a great problem of the soul stood before my eyes. The woman's love problem. You can say what you like: a woman has an urge within her for a man of greatness, whom she can love because of his greatness. And if she thinks she has found this man, she is boundlessly selfish and would love to press this greatness with her arms against her rutting bosom and press it again and again and never let go, smothering the greatness in voluptuous kisses. And it must be a woman's real tragedy that when she is truly great, her arms are too weak to hold the greatness. The man escapes from the woman for the sake of the same quality for which she so ardently desires him. He wants to have the great, wide soul for himself because she is great and wide. But because she is big and wide, this soul, there is still room in her for ... other things. The Philistines will forgive me for writing it like this. The Philistines like to close their eyes to this eternal tragedy that intervenes between the great man and the great woman.

Max Halbe wrote this tragedy. Agnes, Lorenzo's wife, is the great woman who seeks the great man because she can only love him. And Lorenzo is the great man whom Agnes adores, but in whose soul there is still the seed for little Ninon, who also seeks the great man. And the great Agnes kills the little Ninon because the man's greatness becomes fatal to the woman for whose sake she loves him.

This is Halbe's problem. In order to portray people going through such conflicts, he needed the background of a time of which we have the idea that people in it had the courage to abandon themselves to their natural selfishness. The Renaissance is such a time. That is why Halbe wrote a Renaissance drama. If he had set his tragedy in the present day, we would have the feeling that people today would find the lies necessary to prevent the true feelings that lie dormant in the background from coming to the surface.

And Halbe has succeeded in breathing the souls of Renaissance men into the characters of his drama. They only need to step in front of us and speak a few words for us to know that we are dealing with people of unreserved egoism and with those who have the courage to display this egoism without cloaking it in an idealistic mantle.

In simple, artfully stylized lines, Halbe has drawn a plot in which the characters appear before our eyes as eternal experiences of the human soul. He has thus found his way to the original sources of dramatic poetry.

Half of the audience on October 29 was unable to follow the path that the poet had taken. This audience would have loved to have seen another moody idyll of his in the style of "Jugend". It no longer understands the poet who has found himself. And because the Berlin theater audience hardly has the worst manners an audience can have, it laughed at, mocked and ridiculed the "Conqueror". On October 29, there was a walkout at the Lessing Theater. But it wasn't Max Halbe's play that failed. No, the audience failed. Their understanding does not come close to the greatness of Halbe's ideas. The poet may console himself. When he was still undeveloped and threw "youth" at people, they understood him. Now that he has something more to say to them, they mock him. What did Goethe say when he was at the height of his art?

"There they praise my Faust,
And what still sunsten
In my writings roars,
In their favor;
The old Mick and Mack,
That makes them very happy;
It means the rag pack,
They wouldn't be any more!"

The reviews on Sunday morning were even worse than the audience on Saturday. In the city of intelligence, there wasn't a single critic who had any idea what Max Halbe wanted. From the impotent fascism of "Tante Voß" through the lukewarm bath of the Berliner Tageblatt to the crude invective of the Lokalanzeiger and the Kleine Journal, one could study all the nuances of critical incompetence. On October 30, one had to experience that there is not a single daily critic in Berlin who is up to the task of important poetry.

Halbe's poetry could not fail in the eyes of those who understand it; the public and critics were embarrassed. On Saturday, a crowd's lack of understanding and bad taste manifested itself in the worst manners, and on the following Sunday a ridiculous criticism put itself in the pillory.