44. Franz Servaes “Gärungen”

The novel “Gärungen”¹ comes from an author whom I must consider a typical man of letters of our time. I would like to count among this type those who have absorbed and processed the literary, historical, aesthetic, art historical and historical sciences in the form given to them by scholars with a purely humanistic education. The real soul of our contemporary education should be a philosophical worldview fertilized by the great scientific achievements of the century. But if you look around the lecture halls of the universities, you will find that the representatives of the above-mentioned sciences have been influenced by such a world view to a very limited extent. And the consequence of this is that contemporary literature, in which the content of these sciences is laid down, shows us a face in whose physiognomy our greatest contemporary ideas are not expressed.

Instead of these ideas of the time, however, all kinds of favorite ideas haunt this literature, which give a certain immature impression to those who have acquired the true education of the time. And the typical literary men of our time live in the world of these favorite ideas. I would like to point out these favorite ideas with just a few words. One of them is the so-called “unconscious”. People like to despise what has been created by clear, rational thinking and attach a higher value to what comes from the dark depths of the soul. Indistinct longings and immediate thoughts are considered the best; less appreciated is that which clear reason has worked on. What has been thought about the least is considered the noblest truth. This “unconscious” is also often referred to as “instinctive”. The cult that is currently being practiced with the “naive” also belongs to this category of ideas. Naive is supposed to be that which is based on the immediate, original impression and which is not clouded by certain concepts that stem from our advanced intellectual culture.

Now, a peculiar phenomenon emerges in the case of typical literary figures. They do not attack the unconscious and the naive out of an original urge, out of their inner nature. Rather, they strive towards it because they have been theoretically led to it. Therefore, they do not bring to light ideas that naive people who have not yet gone through the school of reason would come up with, but rather those that they, according to certain doctrinal principles, describe as unconscious and naive.

Their observation does not yield what the unbiased, naive eye sees, but what this eye sees after being presented with a certain pair of glasses: the glasses that are formed from the theory of unconsciousness and naivety. They do not simply observe at random, but they ask themselves with every glance at reality: how must I see in order to see the unconscious and the naive.

The result of such doctrinaire observation is the novel I want to talk about here. Not a single one of the characters is drawn from truly unbiased observation. It is apparent from every line that the author constantly forces himself to see things in a certain way. Servaes does not create like an artist who looks directly at things, but like someone who has acquired certain ideas about things through his education; and who wants to translate these ideas back into the form in which the real artist sees them directly.

It is striking that almost all the theoretical ideas that belong to the inventory of a contemporary writer are recorded on the 472 pages of the novel. And the characters are merely a means of expressing these ideas. That is why the figures lack any kind of plasticity. The main character, a private lecturer in psychology, appears like a person who has the deepest desire to develop everything that nature has put into him. However, he does this in such a way that he does not emphasize himself, but the idea of a person that seems right to him on the basis of his studies. He falls in love with three women in succession, the elements of whose characterization are taken not from life but from the pseudo-psychology of typical literature. And the friends with whom the good private lecturer strolls and drinks appear to the true psychologist, whose eyes have been sharpened by contemporary natural science, like ideas of Nietzsche, Paul Scheerbart, Peter Hille and others, dressed up in clothes.

In the broad sweep of the narrative, everything is unnaïve, everything is cut to size by reflection. Almost nothing is given to us that the author has not thought about. From Hume's philosophy, Nietzsche's superhumanism to the scent that a freshly bathed woman's body exudes, we learn everything.

In a different sense from that intended by Servaes, I would therefore like to describe his novel as “from the life of our time”. It is from the very small world of the present, in which a typical man of letters of our time lives. And this world is made of prejudices. The philosophical-scientific formation of time leads us, despite its rationality, to the true, immediate shape of the outside world. This literary psychology, however, has created certain templates of people who drag themselves from book to book. The Lucie that Servaes draws as the first lover of our psychologist is to a truly artistically designed being as the tradition-based Franz Moor is to the creation of an actor who draws from life.

The novel is an interesting phenomenon. One reads it with pleasure because of the wealth of ideas it contains, because of the charming, if somewhat naive, depictions of nature and people. But it is not the work of an artist, but rather the work of a highly educated man of letters.