2. Ludwig Anzengruber

Died on December 10, 1889

Death snatched our two greatest spirits from us Germans in Austria in quick succession. First, Robert Hamerling, the poet of German idealism, who led us up to the heights of world-embracing thought, closed his eyes. A few days ago, he was followed by Ludwig Anzengruber, the great connoisseur and portrayer of the soul of our people.

Our immediate present is almost incapable of coming to a fair, all-round appreciation of both. Party struggle on the one hand, scholarly arrogance on the other are the obstacles that stand in the way of such an appreciation of their greatness. Insensitive to the genuinely artistic, the humanly great in the poet, the party only looks for catchwords in his works to make him one of their own. His writings are only valid to the extent that they are evidence for their party purposes. Contemporary scholarship, on the other hand, which by virtue of the position and task of its bearers should keep its gaze free and open for all that is great and beautiful, contributes less today than ever to the recognition of what the present is achieving that is significant. The most worthless intellectual products of centuries long past, which have never had any influence on humanity, are tracked down and processed in scholarly treatises and academic lectures, but the literature of the present is treated as if it were of no concern to the masters. It will probably be decades before literary historians approach Hamerling and Anzengruber, produce critical editions and write historical appraisals. These circles know nothing of the fact that scholarship actually has the task of helping contemporaries to understand the present, and that all knowledge of the past is only of value if it brings us closer to what is going on around us, touches us directly.

Then there is the mendacity of our daily press, which does not shy away from any shameful act when it wants to distort the image of a contemporary who was either not entirely to its liking or whose achievements go against the grain. We experienced this a few months ago with Hamerling, and now with Anzengruber. The reports about him in the Viennese daily papers testified to an ignorance of his life and his works and were full of deliberate distortions of his work as a person and as a poet. Our experience with Anzengruber was no better. What he really is, what he is for his people and for German poetry, to express this in a worthy manner, one felt absolutely no calling to do so. After all, his fiftieth birthday passed a few weeks ago without any of Vienna's leading daily newspapers running a literary feature on him.

This happens to the greatest sons of our nation! And Anzengruber was one of them. Gifted with an original, naive spirit and strong poetic talent, he conquered a whole new area of German literature. He is a poet of the people, but in the sense that he captures the soul of the people where it rises to the most important questions of humanity, where it is moved by those problems which, in their further development, have led to the most profound works of our generation. The question of right and wrong, of guilt and responsibility, of freedom and lack of freedom of the will, of existence and the goodness of God, insofar as they are reflected in the naïve mind of the common man and stir up the greatest passions in his heart, provoking the strongest conflicts, these are the things that underlie Anzengruber's works. The "Woe to you that you are a grandson" has never been treated more effectively by a classical poet than in Anzengruber's "Fourth Commandment". The fact that all law is a matter of human opinion and that there is no eternal, unchangeable natural law, a question that has occupied the deepest minds, is expressed in her own way by "old Liesl" in "Meineidbauer". How we are the play of fate, how we are dependent on the outside world, which plants the seeds of evil or good in us, so that human responsibility is in a bad way, is the view of "Vroni" as she contemplates her own life's destiny. This is the great thing about Anzengruber, that he portrays the "simple man" as the "whole man", everything human, lives itself out in him. The liberation of the human breast from traditional prejudices, the appeal to the voice of one's own reason, all this takes place in the man of the people no less than in the spirit that walks on the heights of humanity. Everything that takes place on the great plan of world history also spreads its waves into the popular mind. Our poet's works are the sharpest possible proof of this. The great world-historical upheaval that is currently taking place in the religious ideas of mankind has also taken hold of the people with power. Blind faith is giving way to a thinking grasp of the truth. Reason wants to take its place. This trend of the times, as it also appears in the lowest classes of the people, is so masterfully embodied in Anzengruber's "Kreuzelschreibern" and the "Pfarrer von Kirchfeld" that this alone ensures the value of these works for all time.

These poems have been interpreted as tendency poems, but they are by no means so, nor is Hamerling's "Homunculus". If the poet confronts reality and embodies it artistically, then one cannot speak of tendency. For that is his highest task. Anzengruber did not write to say: country clergy, peasants, become this or that, but to show: this is how they are, these country people of today. In him, a whole slice of human life has found its poetic transfiguration.

Goethe sees the poet's perfection in succeeding in bringing his characters to life in such a way that they compete with reality. Anzengruber fulfills this condition like few others. He does not copy reality anywhere, as the school of modern realistic perversity would have it, but he does create characters who, as they appear in the drama, could also exist directly. And that is the task of the true poet. Whatever figure we may take from him, everything is naturally possible, everything psychologically true; nowhere is there a single trait to be discovered that would contradict the nature of the person. Indeed, in the art of characterization Anzengruber is one of the most important dramatists of all time, and this art is precisely the basis of drama, especially modern drama. Here all events, all conflicts are only justified insofar as they flow from the human interior. Fate, which for the ancients was an external force, has been internalized, has become a consequence of the character's disposition. The drama of the present day shows us man insofar as he wants to be the master of his fate and insofar as he himself is the forger of his own happiness. Anzengruber allows everything that happens to follow entirely from the characters. Nothing is left out of this iron consistency, as he imagines it in the human soul. Once we have understood the people who appear, we have understood the entire course of a play. Nothing is sacrificed for the sake of a theatrical effect, a pleasantly touching course of action, etc., as the illusory greats of our dramatic daily literature do. Because of this trait, Anzengruber is a born dramatist. And he is also a dramatist as a storyteller. His great stories: "Der Sternsteinhof", "Einsam" etc., are full of dramatic power and depth; indeed, even his shorter stories are dominated by the same trait. Scholarly aesthetes may rack their brains as to what aesthetic template they can therefore place his prose under; indeed, they may even come to the conclusion that this prose is not significant at all because it does not preserve the character of pure epic representation; but we would like to enjoy the wonderful things that Anzengruber had to produce due to his peculiar nature, even if the traditional terms that could classify it do not apply.