47. Also a Chapter on the “Critique of Modernity”

A large proportion of our contemporaries today are convinced that the style of intellectual life, as it found its last powerful expression in the work of the German classics, and as it still leads an albeit feeble existence in the attitudes and work of the epigones, must disappear from the scene and give way to a completely new way of life. The "old culture" is not described by younger, creative spirits as an aberration that must be abandoned, but rather as an educational ideal that has produced everything it could from within and from which new blossoms can no longer be obtained. The cry of the younger generation is that we must reorganize our entire intellectual life and replace the classical with the modern spirit. It is a great mistake on the part of the supporters of the "old direction" to simply ignore this cry or to present it as immature without examining it. Such an approach is misguided for the simple reason that in the intellectual field, no thing in the world can be measured by the yardstick applied to something completely alien, but only by the yardstick derived from the thing itself. It is almost comical when people who, in every sentence they write, show that their aesthetic powers of judgment are just sufficient to engage in philological syllabizing, speak disparagingly of a school whose representatives are far superior in spirit to those supposed judges of art from the classical school. Anyone who does not have the will to engage with the present should also spare himself his reflections on the intellectual creations of the past. Goethe, Schiller or Lessing can only be judged today by those who have risen to a free standpoint vis-à-vis the intellectual present. We therefore want to dispense with the standpoint of the "old school" when we begin to apply the critical probe to the basic tendencies of "modernity". We also note in advance that we will limit ourselves to characterizing the currents within German intellectual life in a sketchy manner.

The spirit that strives for a reorganization of all ways of life in the broadest sense within this field is Friedrich Nietzsche. The last two publications by Hermann Bahr (Die Überwindung des Naturalismus. Dresden 1891, E. Piersons Verlag, 323 p.) and Conrad Alberti (Natur und Kunst. Contributions to the investigation of their mutual relationship. Leipzig 1891, Wilhelm Friedrich), which provide the direct occasion for these lines, prove this by explicitly seeing in Friedrich Nietzsche's world view one of the main driving forces of the culture of the future. Nietzsche's main merit lies first and foremost in his having sharply defended the view that all the standards by which we measure what people do and produce are something that has come about historically, not something that is absolutely fixed for eternity. The values that we ascribe to people's actions today are not absolute, but only relatively correct, and they can be replaced by completely new ones when the time comes. And Nietzsche believes that this time has come, for he wanted to follow up his books, which constantly hover on the borderline between "madness and genius", with one on the "revaluation of all values". The derangement of the mind prevented this man from creating a work that would have been one of the strangest of all time. We have become tired of continuing to judge as we have done up to now, we must gain new moral views, that is Nietzsche's conviction. This weariness of the old, this belief that the principles and basic feelings of the old age are no longer sufficient for the spiritually striving human being, this initially quite indefinite desire to leave the historical paths and the longing for new forms of creation, this is the basic feature of the most recent literary endeavors in Germany. For those who want to familiarize themselves with the admittedly quite unclear aims of these efforts, the works of Bahr and Alberti mentioned above can be recommended as good guides. Hermann Bahr is without doubt the most important theorist of this young movement. Brilliantly inclined, somewhat reckless in his judgments, too quick to always be taken seriously, too deep-seeing to always be taken lightly, of a fabulous ease in production, of cynical impudence in superficial assessment of some spiritual elements that are too deep-seated for him, Hermann Bahr is the most important mind for us in general, insofar as we refer to the field of literature and aesthetics of the youngest Germany.

As little as anything in nature, so little are the processes in the spiritual life of mankind something stationary. Every cultural current is in a state of continuous development from the point at which it begins. The bearers of it are always seeking to deepen it, always seeking to bring new aspects of it to the surface. The sign of its inner solidity and value will be the fact that its truth and greatness are expressed more and more as its development progresses. However, contradictory and worthless directions are characterized by the fact that they lead themselves ad absurdum from within by further developing their own principle. Indeed, one can only truly refute a direction if one can show that it consumes itself in this way by strictly pursuing its starting points. Hermann Bahr has now gone through the possible stages of development of "modernism" with an almost nervous haste and, in his last book, has reached the point from which the absurdity of the whole direction must soon become clear to him.

The youngest Germany began by confronting the stencil-like art forms of a misunderstood classicism with the demand that one must once again penetrate oneself with real life, that one must depict what one has observed oneself, not what one has learned from one's ancestors. We want to depict life as we see it when we open our eyes, not as it appears to us when we look at it through the glasses we prepare for ourselves by immersing ourselves in the past. And above all else, we do not want to exclude any area of reality from artistic treatment. This initially led to the inclusion of new material in art. The deeper, working classes of the people had only played a subordinate role in art until recent times. This is where poetry and painting came from. The sufferings and joys of even the simplest man can be depicted artistically; the whole aesthetic ladder from the burlesque to the highly tragic is no less to be found in the working-class family than in the princely palace. This purely material expansion of art could naturally take place without breaking the mold of the old aesthetic. The material does not constitute the artistic, and the forms of art can remain the same whether they are filled with this or that material. But the fact that the representatives of the younger movement did not possess sufficient depth of education led to a fatal error right from the start. The man of the lower class represents a so-called individuality to a far lesser degree than the "educated" man. He is far more the mere result of education, occupation and living conditions than the socially superior man. This is precisely the aim of the workers' education associations, to create individualities from mere template people through education. So if you simply take a member of the fourth estate as he is today, you will realize that the center of personality, the source of the individual, is missing, that characterization from within is impossible, whereas derivation from the milieu becomes a necessity. The youngest Germany now saw this not merely as a particular consequence of the field of material it had chosen, but described it as a demand of the "new art" to characterize man no longer from the center of his being, but from the conditions of time and place, in short, from the milieu. This was the first stage of "modernism". However, this also indicates the position that Conrad Alberti's book takes. However, the author also makes a second mistake. He makes art quite unjustifiably dependent on the scientific conviction that prevails at any given time. He believes that art, which started from the individual, from the inner, should have approached its dissolution at the moment when psychology had "destroyed the old legend of man's free will". He attributes this achievement to the psychological world view founded by Wundt. But if anything is indisputable, it is the proposition that such an interference of theory, of reason, is the death of all true art. What a perversity lies in the endeavor to make art a means of expressing scientific propositions! Of all human endeavors, scientific activity must distance itself most of all from reality in order to do justice to its task. Science often arrives at its results indirectly through long detours. By investigating the laws of reality, science strips away precisely that which art must grasp directly: life in all its freshness. It is the tragic fate of "modernity" that in its enthusiasm for reality it went so far as to consider the most unreal as the most real. Conrad Alberti's book is thus at the first stage of the modern reality delusion, which demands reality but has no idea where reality actually lies. Compared to Hermann Bahr's "The Overcoming of Naturalism", Alberti's view must be considered antiquated. Hermann Bahr rejected this first stage of development precisely because he found that it did not reflect reality at all. He first sought redemption by transferring the factors from which he wanted to construct the human character from external nature to the inner, to the organism, to the nerves. Man is not the mere result of external conditions, but is such as is determined by the constitution of his nervous system. If you want to recognize and characterize a human being, then smash his skull, shred his brain, pull off his skin and expose his nerve cords, said the skinned Bahr at first. Hermann Bahr soon realized that there was very little to be gained from this view, and he continued on the journey that would finally give him the full picture of reality. And today he says: all old art showed reality as it passed through the human mind, as it was grasped and shaped by the imagination, i.e. it brought a derivative product of reality, not reality itself. We have to do it differently. We must create works that have the same effect on us as reality itself. The painter must not paint a surface in such a way that it produces the same effect in the viewer's imagination as the real surface, but it must influence my nervous system in exactly the same way as reality itself. Translated from the Bahrisch paradox into healthy German, however, this means that the products of art should not be products of art, but products of nature. Hermann Bahr may know what the artist is supposed to do in the world, but we do not. It would be better to let nature itself create the purely natural. For when it comes to shaping reality itself, I fear that the most ingenious artist will always be a bungler in the face of nature. Thus, the standpoint that Hermann Bahr's latest book reaches is one in which the "new art" reduces itself to absurdity by its own principles, by its basic demand for pure reality. If Hermann Bahr had wanted to write the self-irony of "modernism" with his interesting, witty work, he could not have begun and carried out this attempt any better. The author of this article hopes that he will soon be able to properly expand and substantiate the ideas contained in it in a short essay. This should present the main currents of contemporary intellectual life and their relationship to the past and a possible future.