60. Anselm Heine: “On the Threshold”

“Be true to yourself”¹ is an often-heard moral demand. It seems to be the same with it as with many other moral demands. They cannot stand up to the scrutinizing gaze of the psychologist. The human soul goes its own way, guided by the great eternal laws of the natural universe, like a flower growing without caring about ethics or moral ideas. One person remains “true to himself”. He is often called a person of character, of principles. The psychologist smiles at this. He knows that it is the rigidity of immutable laws, not free will, that makes people turn back at the threshold, where they could pass from the old to a new path of life. Another is criticized by moralists as being without character, fickle, without “inner support”. The psychologist smiles again. He is not interested in the bare fact of the change, it is not enough for him to know that “this person has become unfaithful to his nature”. He searches for the reasons that have caused the change.

In such research, what is called the “unity of consciousness” usually appears to us as a very questionable thing. Much more often than one would like to assume, the Faustian saying proves true: Two souls live in my breast! And it is not uncommon for there to be moments in life when these two souls wage their significant battles, the battles that imprint their mysterious signature on human existence. What we are is usually the result of such a battle. When I meet someone and let their face speak to me, I usually believe I see a double face. One bears the features of the existence that the person really lives, and hidden within these features, others peer out: a second physiognomy. It speaks of another self. Of one that the person has lost in the struggle of life, that he has fought down on the thresholds where the important existential battles take place. Or it may be that it has remained suppressed, that it speaks only as a faint memory of what man might have become. Often there is only a slight preponderance of one of the two forces over the other, on that threshold where one power pushes us forward into new areas or pushes us back into the old sphere of life. At this point, chance collides with eternal necessity. But it is in this clash that life lies. An eternal contradiction. It had to happen like this, says the adherent of absolute necessity. And who could deny him? And if it had happened differently, then this adherent of absolute necessity would have come along and shown that it had to happen like this. Everything has to happen as it happens. Everything can also turn out differently. The mystery of life can be understood, but existence does not give up its freedom for the sake of its comprehensibility. When man stands “on the threshold”, the eternal contradiction approaches him: chance, necessity, necessity that is chance. I hold in higher esteem the wisdom that honors “chance” than that which ponders an eternal providence. We could understand an eternal providence in every single one of its steps, if need be. Chance leaves something to our amazement. It alone lends life its mystery.

The sketches by Anselm Heine tell of the secrets “on the threshold” of life. The problem that speaks to us in all these stories is multifaceted. We are presented with the girl who, according to modern views, has the social freedom to choose her own path in life, but who is in conflict with the inherited feelings that social constraints have placed in her. We are told of the man who could be happy with the woman he loves if he could overcome the prejudice that a woman should not be the person who provides the material basis of life through her earnings. We meet a man who is to be drawn out of his life by overzealous friends and into the career of an artist, but who turns back “on the threshold” because his original nature breaks through. Ten stories with this problem confront us. Anselm Heine seeks with the finest psychological tact the thin threads on which “on the threshold” the important decisions hang. How aptly he describes the fate of girls who have been given freedom by the new social ideas, but who still feel dependent on their old inheritance: “They stand defenceless in the unfamiliar breath of life, until the modest beauty of their being is twisted and hardened into deformity. Longingly, they sneak past the outer walls of their prison, hoping that someone will take pity on them and let them back into their old life of unpretentiousness, but in vain, for they are compelled to freedom – by the new conscience of the others. The doors have been opened to them – now they are condemned to freedom. Yes, out. Relentlessly pushed out, even the tender ones who need dependence for their own good.»

The story of “Fräulein Bertha” is deeply moving. Here it is not a second self that makes it impossible for the first to cross “the threshold”; here it is physical nature that blocks the passage of the spiritual. Bertha is a born actress in the truest sense of the word. An ugly hump forces her to waste her genius, which was created for the art of the stage, on a miserable existence as a dramatic teacher. The fleeting acquaintance with an important actor, which took place under romantic circumstances, allows her to feel an indescribable happiness for a brief moment, a happiness that would have to accompany her throughout her entire existence if her beautiful soul were to dwell in a beautiful body. From her lips we hear the expression for her hotly desired and at the same time resigned feeling of happiness: “My days would have seeped away grey and monotonous, like those of a thousand others! But then came longing - and then came love - then came pain - and all of this together is happiness!” - She is a martyr of talent, a “heroine of renunciation”.

In Anselm Heine's style, the meaningfulness of the problems is fully realized. A meaningful simplicity characterizes this style and a calmness that shows that the author has come to terms with his questions and doubts. He faces them with the confident feeling of the owner who has long since passed the stages of appropriation. I would like to give just a small sample of this style. Franziska Grothus, who has crossed the threshold by having her music teacher arouse her passion for love to the point of frenzy, is portrayed in her being before the moment of great significance: “She is the daughter of a government official. Her parents had a house in the provinces where lawyers, officers and the occasional more worldly scholar would gather, so that it was easy for the daughters to find suitable partners in their own social circle. In the midst of this normal world, something abnormal had developed, namely Franziska's singing voice, which was a phenomenon in its beauty and richness. Her parents, who abhorred anything out of the ordinary, were long unable to bring themselves to fulfill the obligations that this uninvited gift from the fairy godmother imposed on them. Only when Franziska had turned twenty and still had not become engaged did they take her to the capital city, where she was to be educated, properly educated by a great authority who was not available in their own town. Whether the daughter would actually come out later could still be decided. In any case, she was entrusted to a respectable family boarding school and traveled daily to the idyllic cottage where Master Felix Viktor Grell lived with his small family."

Completely sweetly mature: this is the word I would like to apply to this style, and to Anselm Heine's entire narrative art in general. We are dealing with a distinguished artistic nature that allows us to see the storm of life only in the serene calm of poetic contemplation.