70. Karl Frenzel
On his seventieth birthday
On December 6, Karl Frenzel celebrated his seventieth birthday. I don't like to publish the usual birthday articles on days like this. But I also don't like to keep quiet when my feelings want to speak out. I am not the right person to write a monograph or even a brief, accurate characterization of Karl Frenzel. Nevertheless, I believe that at the present moment I should offer Karl Frenzel the birthday greeting of this organ in the "Magazin für Literatur". He has grown together with the literary development of Germany like few others. We younger people have a very special relationship with writers like him. We have learned a great deal from them. We owe them the greatest gratitude. We feel that. And yet we cannot follow in their footsteps. We are their wayward sons. The fathers scold us. We love them, but we do not obey them. We are naughty and deserve the rod according to them. But we hope that our fathers will see that we will become something after all. I would also like to wish Karl Frenzel that he may be allowed to enjoy us. That may take a long time. But that he will still experience it, that is precisely what I wish for him.
I have benefited enormously from Frenzel's essays. I was often pleased with the directional critic. This joy was always mixed with something like envy. But envy is not the right word. But there is no better one. The critics of his generation knew what they wanted from an early age. They have "principles" that they apply to everything. We present-day people live from today to tomorrow. What we believe today, we will have overcome tomorrow. And what we said yesterday, we hardly understand today. Frenzel's contemporaries were settled people who had a fixed point of view from which they did not deviate one step to the right or left. We jump from point of view to point of view. We are seekers, doubters, questioners. They had a certain certainty. They knew the right path in art, in philosophy, in science, in politics. They were able to classify every new talent. We can't do all that. We hardly know any more whether a new book we read is important or not. We look at every talent from all sides, and then we usually know nothing at all. We have fallen into a real anarchy. We each have a different opinion about our greatest contemporaries.
Even when we are united in our admiration for a contemporary, we argue. One looks for meaning in this, the other in that.
I still remember how I looked up to Friedrich Theodor Vischer as a young man. Each of his sentences drilled into my soul like an arrow. And now I read him with completely different feelings. He only interests me now, but he no longer warms me. He has become a stranger to me.
Some may find it irreverent that I am offering these words as a birthday greeting to the septuagenarian. But there is something that unites us in that we understand each other: that is mutual sincerity. We want to be true to each other. We don't want to delude ourselves with phrases. We want to tell our fathers that we honor them, that they inspire the highest respect in us. But we also want to tell them that we want to go other ways. Piety is certainly a virtue, but it sucks the strength out of people. And we need the strength because we see new tasks ahead of us.
It was a beautiful time when Karl Frenzel was working; a time full of mature ideas, full of perfect art. Those with whom he experienced his manhood were self-contained, harmonious natures. They were also happier than we are because of this. They expected more from their ideals than we do from ours. They derived more happiness from these ideals. They were greater idealists. We are as afraid of ideals as we are of deceptive illusions. We no longer utter the soothing words: the idea must triumph!