5. Willibald Alexis

On the occasion of his hundredth birthday (June 29, 1898)

There are personalities who, when we look at them, we forget everything that is going on around them. They seem to draw all the strength for their existence from themselves. We ask about the peculiar nature of their souls if we want to understand the character of their deeds. The fact that they live in a period of time with quite specific cultural conditions is hardly more important to us than the fact that they breathe the air of a certain part of the world. These personalities appear like self-contained circles filled with their own content. I do not mean merely those spirits who are the leaders of world history, and whom Emerson calls the "representatives of the human race". People whose lives pass without a trace for mankind can also be natures built on their own.

In contrast to these characters, there are others whose actions and activities remind us of their surroundings, the age in which they live and often even the place where they were born. We are more interested in their relationship to their environment than in themselves. And if they belong to the past, then any individual interest in them ceases; we only see them as typical representatives of a certain era. That's how I feel about Willibald Alexis (Wilhelm Heinrich Häring).

His works were written between the third and seventh decade of our century. The world view that the most advanced minds profess today was only just emerging at that time. Ideas in which we are currently being educated were present in individual, particularly enlightened minds. The majority of educated people, however, grew up in a world of ideas that is alien to our present-day sensory life. And in the art and the conception of art of that time, this world of ideas that is alien to us lived on. At that time, people wanted an impersonal, objective art. The artist was supposed to create selflessly, with an expression of his personality. The more he stepped back behind his work, the more he was valued. It was not his subjective idiosyncrasies that people wanted to discover in his creation, but something objectively beautiful that was subject to eternal laws, free of any personal private inclination. Let us remember what Schopenhauer demands of the artist in the spirit of this view: he should "leave his interest, his will, his purpose, completely out of sight, thus completely divesting himself of his personality for a time in order to remain as a purely recognizing subject, a clear world-eye". Philosophers, who incidentally fought each other fiercely, were united in this basic view. Hegel, the man whom Schopenhauer hated like perhaps no other, would hardly have objected to the above sentence. And I have heard a follower of Herbart, Robert Zimmermann, who refuted Schopenhauer and Hegel with the ease so characteristic of philosophers, defend the same conception of art. They were all children of their time, the middle third of our century. And Willibald Alexis was an artist of that very time.

Alexis was so selfless that it almost borders on the psychologically impossible. You can't deny his essence any more than he did. In his history of "German Poetry of the Nineteenth Century", Karl Julius Schröer recounts a conversation he had with the poet. Alexis particularly emphasized his romantic natural disposition. Among other things, he said that as a boy he had heard a poem that began: "Hüll' O Sonne, deine Strahlen..." The meaning of this poem was unknown to him. But the sound of the words "Hüll' O" inspired him. Nevertheless, Alexis became a poet who was primarily interested in the objective representation of real conditions. And anyone looking for something in his works that points to his natural disposition as described above will search in vain. He tries to capture the sense of past times, he tries to be objectively faithful, he strives to suppress the original romantic trait. Alexis' relationship with Walter Scott has the character of a complete self-expression. Scott's manner has often been described as romantic. It always seems to me that this is like describing black as white because it is created when light is removed from it. Even the Brothers Grimm's objective immersion in the German past has been given the epithet romantic, because both the [Brothers] Grimm and the Romantics had a tendency to immerse themselves in the past of our people, and because both have a certain temporal connection. What matters, however, is not the burying in past times, but the tendency from which this burying emanates. And for the Romantics, this is the satisfaction of a tendency towards the mystical, the nebulous, which is met by the history of the past running into obscurity; for the Brothers Grimm, it is the endeavor to comprehend historical development in a clear, scientifically transparent manner. And just as clarity relates to mysticism, so Walter Scott relates to Romanticism. Walter Scott is crude in his grasp of past reality, strictly realistic. And if Willibald, who was born to be a Romantic, took Alexis Scott as his model, this could only happen by completely giving up his personality.

As if to prove this to us, Alexis published two novels in 1823 and 1827: "Walladmor, freely adapted from the English of Walter Scott" and "Castle Avalon, freely adapted from the English of Walter Scott". He imitated the Englishman's style in such a way that the works could have been mistaken for translations. This can only happen with a personality who gives up his own essence.

It was therefore as if Willibald Alexis had been created to artistically depict past times, their battles and victories, their personalities and their circumstances with historical fidelity. In "Cabanis" he depicts German life during the Seven Years' War in this way, in "Roland von Berlin" the battles between the city representatives of Berlin and the old nobility, in "Falscher Waldemar" the conditions of city and knightly life. In his later novels "Die Hosen des Herrn von Bredow", "Ruhe ist die erste Bürgerpflicht" and "Isegrimm", the same artistic attitude prevails.

Willibald Alexis thought like his time. The only thing he had ahead of his contemporaries was the power to create. That may be a lot, but one must not confuse such natures as he was with the truly productive spirits, who not only create what everyone feels, but who also have unique feelings.