7. Wilhelm Jordan

On the occasion of his eightieth birthday

A magazine that wants to serve the world view of the present above all other things must record a feast day on February 8 [1899]. On this day, Wilhelm Jordan will be eighty years old. Those who follow the cult of "pure art" will find much to criticize about Jordan. The artistic composition of his works, and in particular the revival of the stave rhyme, cause some aesthetes to shrug their shoulders in a highly "noble" manner. We know these aesthetes who could not forgive him for singing that he wanted to "fill vessels again with a rushing stream of speech to the edge of antiquity and rejuvenate the wonderful, ancient way of German poetry after a thousand years". - But anyone who sees art as a link in the general development of culture must count Wilhelm Jordan among the best minds of the past century. He is one of those whose writings cannot be exhausted by contemporary man, because they always bring him something new. There is nothing within the intellectual interests of the present that Wilhelm Jordan did not regard as his personal affair. A great poet may be content to be at home in one part of the cultural life of the present. A leading spirit cannot. And Wilhelm Jordan is a leading spirit. But only for those who feel the magic that lies in the power of his ideas.

Few artists have been able to combine the perspective of the future with that of the past in such a generous way. Jordan was able to clothe the wisdom that will live on into the distant future in the guise of the ancient German heroic saga. The spirit of the modern scientific world view animates the figures of the old saga in his powerful poem "Nibelunge".

As a truly modern spirit, Wilhelm Jordan knew one thing: that the imagination of modern man cannot invent poetic fables on a grand scale. Our imagination works differently than that of our ancestors. The superhuman, which man conceives as that which lies beyond him, is today a shapeless idea, which is felt in the deepest depths with all the fervor with which our ancestors felt about their gods and heroes, but which can never again take on a plastic form. The artist of great style must therefore borrow the figures for modern ideas from the ancestors. But he can breathe the modern soul into these figures. And that is what Wilhelm Jordan did. He turned the old heroes into ideals of modern man. We can no longer feel the meaning that our ancestors gave them. But the figure is also vivid for us. Hagen, Siegfried, Kriemhild and Brunhild are human characters who as such are immortal. Only the spirit that their creators have given them within the world's gears has become alien to our imagination. But the things of this world cannot be exhausted. And all the meaning that we associate with them is only a part of the great spirit that they contain. It is possible to extract a new meaning from them from time to time.

Because Wilhelm Jordan himself is a bearer of the modern spirit. Hardly anyone could have expressed the modern consciousness better than he did with the words he spoke - with regard to Darwin:

He has made it clearer than anyone
Traced out and shown,
How and which thousand paths
Up which life soars,
I only all paths direction
From the poet's bird's eye view
Overlooks, he senses in them
Aim and plan in world-building.
How - that is his question
Strengthen, increase hunger, death?
Mine: - what further redeems
God in us from envy and need?

This is the modern belief: that it is not a God who made the world and created man, but that an image of God dwells in man's breast, capable of creating God himself. And Nietzsche's Übermensch is only the God who dwells within us and is to come to light.

He is ours: we would like to say of Wilhelm Jordan. We who do not believe in the God of the past, but who work for the God we want to create, just as the animal created man from itself.

And we, who are of one unbelief with him, bring him greetings on his birthday.