54. Comments on “From the German Soul”
It would undoubtedly be interesting to conduct a study at the turn of two centuries to determine how much the individual areas of intellectual work have contributed to the vast amount of folly that has been produced in the past century. It followed on from the Enlightenment. One thing seems certain: in such a statistics of folly, thinking about art and poetry would be at the top of the list, with a high percentage. One would not even have to take into account the printed nonsense that newspapers and magazines produce in this direction every week and every day. If we were to confine ourselves to what is being achieved in books and brochures in this field, we would still arrive at a fantastically high figure. When we read contemporary aesthetic and critical works, we often have the feeling that the concept of art and poetry has been lost altogether. What strange things we come across there...! The notions of naive creation, unconscious production, individuality, intuition and all the rest of it are encountered in a way that shows nothing more than that those who write them down have picked them up in some way or other and now toss them around like children with stones in a kaleidoscope. Scholarly treatises on art and poetry are no exception to this general rule. Good philologists, professors of literary history and other humanities, who consider it the height of dilettantism to proceed in an “unscientific” manner when trying to prove which of Wieland's ideas came from Goethe's —: when they start to talk about Goethe's “naive” way of creating, they prove nothing more than their own naivety. One need only read five lines of most aesthetic treatises and books to realize that their authors have not penetrated to the elements of those insights that can shed light on the essence of human creativity, on imagination, on intuition and the like. If, by chance, 98 percent of everything that has been written about Ibsen, Hauptmann and others over the last two decades were to be lost, nothing, absolutely nothing of real value would be lost to posterity. Despite the fact that everyone is talking about “psychology” today, the knowledge of the human soul is currently one of the most unknown things in the world. There is hardly anything about which there is such a boundless lack of knowledge as, for example, the nature of fantasy.
Under such circumstances, where should a judgment on the artistic, on the poetic value of the newer creations come from? Is it not natural that the concept of art, of poetry, should have been lost in this way?
In Jacobowski's collection “Aus deutscher Seele” (From the German Soul), a means is given to all those who wish to use it to find it again. In his “preface”, from which we have quoted the most important passages above, the editor himself has spoken about the tasks he has set himself with his collection. If he were to succeed in ousting the “bazaar goods of the popular songs” even to a small extent, then an unspeakable thing would have been done for folk culture. The day on which it could be said that the booklet “Aus deutscher Seele” is a serious rival to the Apollotheater, Wintergarten and so on would have to be counted among the greatest festive days of the century that has just begun. And no less the day on which the publisher's “secondary intention” could be shown to have been realized. For there should be no doubt that a poem like the one above, “Die schöne Hannele”, contains more poetry than the majority of volumes filled with so-called “modern lyric poetry.”
The editor has everything it takes to fulfill his task. First and foremost, he is one of the foremost poets of the present day. He has proven in his “Bright Days” that he has the source of true poetic creations within him. He is also an excellent connoisseur of the origins of poetry. He has shown this in a series of captivating studies. His research and reflections are directed towards the source of the folk imagination, the relationship it has to life and to the other forces of the folk soul. Essays such as the one he recently published in the “Gesellschaft” on the origins of the art of storytelling are exemplary. His thinking is focused on how the imagination develops. His approach to research offers completely different perspectives than the petty results of philological hair-splitting, which like to present their miniature fantasies as the results of exact scientific research.
It is often not easy to read collections of poetry in one go. Here it is a pleasure. This is because Jacobowski has a first-rate compositional talent for putting together individual intellectual creations. The “general table of contents” printed at the beginning of the collection shows that artistic sense has prevailed in the compilation. Nothing follows arbitrarily, everything is in necessary connection. The totality of the national soul, the sum of human feeling in all circumstances of life, is revealed. And it is revealed in such a way that the inner harmony of national life finds expression. The series opens with songs that owe their origin to the highest, most joyful affirmation of life, and closes with songs about death. The entire content of the national soul lies between these two poles. The individual chapters are: Happy love, avoiding and parting, unhappy love, marriage, from a pious soul, festival verses, riddles and rhyming jokes, ballads, historical and cultural-historical songs, soldier songs, songs of the estates and tribes, hunting and animal life, nature life, folk wisdom, drunkenness poetry, humor, about dying, about death. The beginning and end of such a collection could not be more convincing than by placing the verses that are completely carried by the urge to live:
God willing, I would be a white swan!
I would soar over mountain and deep valley,
over the wild sea,
So that all my friends would not know
Where I would end up!
and to this the saying is added, which reflects with the deepest wisdom the “eternity” in the naive perception:
O eternal is so lanck.
How does the artificially constructed concept of “individuality” look, behind which the wisdom of our contemporaries triples along like a little girl, when viewed in the light that radiates from such poetry as is communicated in this book. Does the poem “Das schöne Hannele” express individuality less than the many poetic somersaults of our art poets? Those who are always talking about “individuality” today should remember that anyone who has delved into the deepest depths of their individuality has found something in common with all people. What does it mean to understand an artist? It means nothing other than finding their individuality in ourselves. How do we understand Shakespeare? Simply by the fact that we all have a secret Shakespeare within us. To understand Shakespeare is to discover the secret Shakespeare within oneself. Shakespeare's individuality is in our individuality. The fact that someone is an individual does not exclude the possibility that the universal will reveal itself to him. Life is like climbing a mountain. Our paths may be different. But at the top of the mountain we meet; and in the end we all enjoy the same view of the common, unified harmony of the world. One need not become a follower of those who preach the banal average man. But those who believe that each of us is locked up in our own individual snail shell, and that we must preserve our individuality, do not know that there is only one world for all those who look out of their snail shells. It is wisely arranged in nature that one can approach the summit on countless paths, on which the glories of the world are revealed to us; but it is equally wise that there is only one such summit.