21. “Homunculus”

Modern epic in 10 cantos by Robert Hamerling¹

A. Richter, Hamburg and Leipzig 1888

Hamerling's peculiarity lies in the happy combination of a rich imagination with a profound understanding of things. As a result, he seems to be the most competent poetic portrayer of those historical epochs in which the turning points of human development occurred. His profundity allows him to find the driving forces, the jumping-off points in history everywhere, and his magnificent imagination embodies them in a wealth of figures in which the entire content of their time is reflected and which are nevertheless full of individual life. Hamerling mostly depicts times in which a high level of culture is passed on to a declining generation that is no longer able to cope with the tasks set for it at the educational level reached by its ancestors. In such times, man is unable to grasp the fullness of the spirit he is confronted with, and it therefore becomes a distortion within him: the culture that has reached its zenith turns into its opposite and consumes itself. The poet shows this in "Ahasuerus" for Roman culture, in "Aspasia" for Greek culture; in "King of Sion" and in "Danton and Robespierre" his basic idea is quite the same. His latest epic "Homunculus" is also based on the same idea. It depicts the caricature that our modern culture becomes when we imagine it following the path it has taken to its ultimate consequences. Homunculus is the representative of modern man. Nothing else is so characteristic of him as the complete lack of what is called individuality. That source of ever-fresh life that allows us to constantly draw something new from within ourselves, so that our mind and spirit appear to be endowed with a certain self-grounded depth that never completely gives itself away, is completely lost to modern man. A distinct individuality is not something manageable, for no matter how many expressions of life we have become acquainted with, it is not possible for us to piece together such a picture of it that we could predict the sum of its further activity. Every subsequent action always receives a new impulse from the depths of the being, which shows us new sides of it. This distinguishes individuality from mechanism, which is only the result of the interaction of its constituent parts. If we know these, we also know the limits within which its work is enclosed. The life of modern man is now becoming more and more machine-like. Education, social forms, professional life, everything works to drive out of man what we would like to call individual life, the soul. He becomes more and more a product of the circumstances that affect him. This soulless, unindividual human being, heightened to the point of caricature, is Hamerling's homunculus. Created chemically in a retort, he lacks any possibility of further development beyond the limits that the master of science has determined for him through the substances added to the mixture. This human mechanism runs through all stages of modern life. In it all the perversities of it appear carried to extremes and thus in their inner hollowness. He undertakes everything possible. However, he never strives to create anything truly positive, but only to use the products of nature and the human spirit for his own entirely futile undertakings in order to gain honor, prestige and power. He first tried to do so by founding a large, modern-style newspaper. By taking all the excesses of modern journalism to the extreme, he seems to achieve his purpose best. But his profession was no longer enough for him when he saw a new era of "economic boom" approaching. He becomes a founder and thus a trillionaire. With superior humor, the poet illustrates how the whole world lies in the dust in front of the lowly money and pays homage to it. A great crash throws Munkel down from the heights he has climbed and he is forced to seek a new and adventurous path in life. He succeeds in raising the treasure of the Nibelungs, which is only possible for a fatherless man, and in forming a union with Lurley, the mermaid, who joins the soulless man as a soulless woman, a type of genuine, modern female unnature. They establish a realm of unnature in Eldorado. All concepts of the natural are turned upside down. Everyone will enjoy reading the magnificent description of the life of the party in this state abortion. After this "foundation" also fails, Munkel throws himself into educating those apes, who have remained at the ape stage in the humanization of this race and who, in his opinion, must be much more uncorrupted than their degenerate offspring, to become human beings and to create a new state with them. This empire also suffers from the same flaw as all other undertakings of the homunculus. The ape has become outwardly human, it even lives in the forms of the state, but again the soul is missing. The apes are mechanisms, as is their state. Everything must therefore finally reveal itself in its impossibility. Munkel soon longs for a new satisfaction of his thirst for action. He seeks it by preaching to the Jews about emigrating to Palestine and founding a new Jewish kingdom. He leads the procession and becomes King of the Jews in Jerusalem. But the Jews need Europe, and Europe needs the Jews. And so, after proving themselves completely incapable of leading their own empire, they return to Europe. Homunculus, their king, is crucified first. In this song, Hamerling confronts both the Jews and the anti-Semites with the superior objectivity of a wise man. Of course, it is here that one is most likely to misjudge this objectivity. The greatest short-sightedness, however, is when, as has happened so often, over-sensitive Jews regard an unbiased assessment of the circumstances as a mistake. But one has no right to immediately accuse those who do not expressly emphasize their partisanship for the Jews of taking a stand against them. Homunculus, the shamefully abandoned man, is rescued with the help of Ahazver and reappears in Europe to put the theoretical views of pessimism into practice. A congress is convened with the aim of persuading all beings to put an end to existence in one day by a unanimous decision. Agreement is reached, and the pessimists' highest ideal seems close to realization thanks to Munkel's genius. April 1st is to be the day of the end, everything goes well. Then, at the decisive moment, the kiss of a pair of lovers is heard, and everything is thwarted again. Homunculus finally realizes that there is nothing more to be done with this depraved race, so he builds an airship and sets off into the infinite universe. A bolt of lightning strikes the craft, and so Homunculus, clinging to the remains of it, floats in infinite space with Lurley, whom he has always found again after she has repeatedly passed through him, a play of cosmic forces, sometimes attracted by this world body, sometimes repelled by that. He cannot die, he becomes a play of the elements of which he is composed like a machine. The soulless human being cannot become happy. Our happiness only comes from our own self. Only a deep, substantial inner being can give satisfaction. Anyone who does not have one has not truly come into being in the higher human sense. Where this primal source is missing, life appears to be an odyssey without goal or purpose. What has taken a beginning in that characterized higher sense can calmly depart again when its task has been fulfilled. Homunculus, however, cannot die, for it is never truly born. A mere mechanism knows neither birth nor death. That is why it will float in space forever.

As you can see, Hamerling's profundity has succeeded in a marvelous way in reproaching time for its aberrations. Just as the basic idea is great and significant, so too is the individual part full of life. Here, too, Hamerling has remained the idealistic poet. His task is to draw the consequences of reality, to look beyond the accidental to the profound. Just as the truly great and dignified in the ideal only appears even more heightened, more dignified, so the bad and perverse in the idealistic poet becomes a caricature. Many will take offense at these distorted images; but they should not blame the poet, but the world from which he has drawn. Admittedly, our criticism is the furthest removed from this objective assessment of the work; it has dragged it down into the dispute between the parties and sought to distort the public's image of it in the most unbelievable way. We will talk about this critical attitude towards "Homunculus" in another article.

The behavior of our critics towards the "Homunculus" has once again shown that they are devoid of any desire for objectivity. Whether it finds the core point of a work, whether it puts the matter in the right light, is all the same to it; it is only interested in twisting a series of "witty" phrases to "amuse" its audience. For the most part, the latter does not ask whether the critic has made an accurate judgment or not, whether he is capable of selflessly immersing himself in a work; it only asks about the witty ingenuity that is the enemy of all positive criticism. This criticism never considers that it is completely unfruitful if it does not set itself the serious task of advancing the public's understanding of the times and their phenomena. The critic only wants to use the productive intellectual work of the true writer or artist as a footstool to make his own unfruitful personality widely known. Everywhere it is the lack of seriousness in the conception of their profession that must be held against contemporary criticism. The two Schlegels, for example, who always had great artistic principles and an important world view in the background when they made their judgments, were exemplary critics. Now, however, one leaves oneself entirely to subjective arbitrariness. It is only due to this circumstance that a critic today makes statements that are in blatant contradiction to those he made a few months ago. Where a serious view of art and the world supports individual judgments, such vacillation is inconceivable. For the most part, contemporary critics have not the slightest awareness of their responsibility before the forum of world history. In his song "Literarische Walpurgisnacht" (Literary Walpurgis Night), Hamerling has aptly depicted the unpleasant state of our contemporary literature, always remaining true to the poet's task, of course, whose depiction must remain uninfluenced by the tendencies and slogans of the parties. But what has criticism made of this "homunculus"? It has dragged him down into the dispute between the parties, and indeed into the most repugnant form of it, the racial struggle. It certainly cannot be denied that today Judaism still appears as a cohesive whole and as such has often intervened in the development of our present conditions, and in a way that was nothing less than favorable to Western cultural ideas. Judaism as such, however, has long since died out, has no justification within the modern life of nations, and the fact that it has nevertheless survived is a mistake of world history, the consequences of which could not fail to be felt. We do not mean here the forms of the Jewish religion alone, we mean above all the spirit of Judaism, the Jewish way of thinking. The unprejudiced would have thought that the best judges of the poetic form that Hamerling gave to the fact just mentioned were Jews. Jews, who have settled into the Western cultural process, should be the best to recognize the faults of a moral ideal that has been transplanted from ancient times into modern times and is completely useless here. The Jews themselves must first of all realize that all their special aspirations must be absorbed by the spirit of modern times. Instead, Hamerling's work has simply been presented as if it were the confession of faith of a partisan of anti-Semitism.

The poet has been accused of a point of view that he is unable to adopt due to the intellectual height on which he stands. We now understand quite well that someone whose name appears in the "Homunculus" in an unflattering context cannot come to an objective appreciation of the book. But when a major newspaper like the "Neue Freie Presse" has nothing more to say about the "Homunculus" than the tantrums of a necessarily biased person dressed up in bland jokes, then you really don't know whether to be annoyed by such frivolity or laugh at the impudence. Must there not simply be an intention to smell anti-Semitism in the objective presentation of the spirit of Judaism? There is a very specific formula for the form of anti-Semitism that, if one wants to use the dispensable word, is appropriate to Hamerling: He takes - like any unbiased person free of party fanaticism - the point of view towards Judaism that any Jew independent of the prejudices of his tribe and denomination can share. But no more is required of a mind that is as completely wedded to Western ideals as Hamerling. If the attitude of the "Neue Freie Presse" and similar papers towards the "homunculus" is reprehensible in the highest degree, it is no less unforgivable when anti-Semitic newspapers portray Hamerling as a comrade-in-arms of that party which, apart from its aptitude for rioting and making noise, has nothing characteristic but the complete lack of any thought. The supporters of this party have simply torn passages out of context in their newspapers in order to reinterpret them in their own way, which, as we know, is the main art of journalism. Hamerling has resolutely defended himself against such distortions of his latest work, first in a letter printed in the "Grazer Tagespost" and in the "Deutsche Zeitung", then in a poem in the "Schönen blauen Donau". We have endeavored here to contrast his point of view with the deliberately false interpretations of his contemporaries.

We cannot help but remember the opinion of some other critics, which is based on a complete misunderstanding of the relationship between poet and poetry. One asks: How must a person be at odds with himself and the world who allows himself to be carried away by the creation of such ugly images; how morbid must the mind of someone be who holds up such a mirror image to his time? In contrast, we would like to raise another question: How must a criticism have fallen out with the principles of all aesthetics if it diverts the judgment of a work as such to the poet's subjective feelings? It was a great word that Schiller once uttered to Goethe when the latter complained that he was accused of the immorality of some of his characters: If it can be shown that the immoral actions flow from your way of thinking and not from your characters, then this could be held against you, but not because you have failed before the Christian, but because you have failed before the aesthetic forum. One would think that such principles, which are irrefutable, would have long since become second nature to our critics. But if that were the case, they would have found that the figures of time that Hamerling created could not look any different than they do, because they have nothing to do with his way of thinking about time. But this is one of the main faults of our criticism, that it does not, following the example of science, want to incorporate the principles that once existed as permanent axioms. It is quite in the case of the scholars, who do not know the already existing principles of their science. We do not have a criticism that is completely at the height of its time, because what is currently called that is mostly nothing but critical dilettantism.