1. Readers and Critics

At this point, where we usually talk so often about books and those who write them, I would also like to say a few words about those who read them. The former is more convenient, however. A book is a self-contained whole and can be judged as such. The author is a certain individuality about whose significance we can form an opinion. In both cases, therefore, the object we are writing about is tangible. But if we want to write about the "readers", someone may object: "Readers in general" do not exist at all; the object to be discussed cannot be considered a specific one at all; we can only be dealing with a very nebulous idea. It must be admitted that the expression "So many minds, so many senses" is also fully applicable to the reading public. So my observations will not apply to Mr. Schulze in Oberholzhausen or to the Frau Müllerin in Alt-Gabelsberg. But I am not one of those people who believe that in order to have an opinion about something, one must first examine all the cases under consideration. You couldn't reach a verdict on anything until the end of time and put your reason out of action for the time being.

Whoever has eyes for a peculiarity prevailing in a certain time, a few characteristic phenomena are enough to notice it.

It is basically a general trait of our entire intellectual life, which is also expressed in the choice of what we prefer to read. Many of our contemporaries live with their nerves more than has been the case with any other sex.¹ They are not looking for opportunities for energetic will, not for satisfaction in high thoughts, not for the sublime regions of art in which Goethe's "Iphigenia" or "Tasso" hover, but for exciting impressions, for rare sensations. Schiller's words are still little understood: "The master's true artistic secret lies in overcoming the material through the form." Today, we revel in the impressions made by the raw material. We no longer look at the world with our minds, but with our nerves. It is not what the world reveals to our minds that we seek, but the "secrets" that we find in all kinds of hidden holes. We have no patience to wait until an impression has found its way into the brain, but we lurk to see what processes are taking place on the periphery of our body. The harmony of colors that the eye conveys is no longer interesting, but the excitement that the tickled optic nerve gets into is something you would love to observe.

This life with nerves is also reflected in our audience's choice of reading material. Today, people also read with nerves. What's in a book is less important than the excitement you get from all kinds of stylistic perfumes that don't belong to the subject matter. I love Nietzsche as much as anyone, but his effect on many people seems to me to be due not to the content of his thoughts, but to the mystical effects of his style, which owe their existence to a diseased nervous system. One does not read Nietzsche in order to follow him to the heights of his ideas, but to be excited by the stimuli of his style. Nor do I believe that Dostoyevsky owes his fame to the deep psychology of his characters, but to those "mysteries" that take effect before they reach the brain. A writer must be able to do two things if he wants to have a great effect today: he must lull the mind with narcotic agents and excite the body with all kinds of stimuli.

There are people who see progress in the fact that we have arrived at the art of "secret nerves" and who denounce all those who have not achieved such a culture of nerves as wretched philistines. There is no arguing with such people, because arguing involves judgment; and judgment is not in the nerves.

But where does the real evil lie? Does it lie in the writers who dominate the reading world today? Or is it the public, which is being steered along unnatural paths by a social motor? The answer to the former question is definitely no. Who wants to blame Dostoyevsky's psychological rummaging in his grandiose portrayal, the profound interpretations that Tolstoy gives to human life, for the way they are read by the public? Here, in the: How one reads today, that is where it lies. For those who objectively devote themselves to the problems presented, the artistic form of Zola will also take precedence over the sensual excitement of reading. However, our contemporaries at their advanced cultural level are just as concerned with this as their uneducated fellow human beings are with their robber novels and murder mysteries.

But the readers themselves are even less to be blamed than those they are guided by. A generation of critics has arisen who persuade the public that this is only the right, modern taste.

"True" is what art must be above all else, as one person says to another. These critics really believe that their worn-out copper coins of concepts are enough to put them in possession of what rightly deserves to be called truth. You don't learn such things in coffee houses. I have read them by the dozen, the books of the latest aesthetes, and I never tire of following their views day after day in the newspapers. Over and over again, I keep telling myself: The must must clarify itself. But the new ones are always joined by newer and newer ones that outdo their predecessors in obscurity and illiteracy. Today we can see that people who want to be intellectually productive have only traced German literature back to 1885. They often do so to the applause of the public, which again relies on the critics.

I am always amazed at the sufficiency with which these critics wield their pens. You have to forgive them for having no idea how much they might know, because no one can know what is beyond their horizon. But they must know, and they do know, that they have learned nothing. They know it because they do everything they can to keep better products away from the public. A higher level of education among readers would be dangerous for our critics. No one should realize that there are intellectual products that stand high above what the critic of his favorite newspaper is able to judge. That is why the silence system was invented. A book that becomes uncomfortable is simply put aside.

And this is a second cancer of our time: In this dependence of the public on the after-judgments of often quite inferior people. These judgments are often hair-raising, but they cling to a work like a label. As long as our public does not free itself from the hypnotic influence of the printed word and continues to believe that there must be some meaning in the ink, the evils just discussed will not be eliminated, and we will not have a true public opinion in intellectual matters. Only when the readers rise to the point of view where they listen to the writer because they want to measure and clarify their opinion against another, then the communication between writers and readers will be a satisfying one. The critic should be an advisor, a thought-provoker, not an authority.