61. Clara Viebig: “The Women's Village”

What one¹ missed in the last two novels by Clara Viebig, “Dilettanten des Lebens” and “Es lebe die Kunst”, namely after one had learned to appreciate her had come to appreciate her in her two excellent dramas “Barbara Holzer” and “Pharisäer”: the art of vivid characterization - it is brilliantly on display again in her latest story “Das Weiberdorf”*. An eye that finds the rough lines of reality sharply in things and uses them with a certain comfortable breadth to create a sketch that is not very elaborate but still captures the essence. It seems to be an art that is too rough to capture the characters of differentiated people, but that is able to discern the basic characteristics of their nature, especially in undifferentiated beings. In the village of Eifelschmitt, the women are alone for almost the whole year. Only at Christmas and around the feast of St. Peter and St. Paul do the men come home from the Rhineland factory towns, where they seek the income that they cannot find in their poor homeland. Apart from a few old men, immature boys and the pastor, the only other male member of the human race in the village is Peter Miffert, known as “Pittchen”. Peter does not want to go out into the world, because “why” should he toil and trouble himself. He wants to have his pleasures in this world, because he will not be put off with the promise of another, better one. So many women and one man! There is plenty of opportunity for the most natural instincts to break out, and the undifferentiated life of the instincts rages and rages. The reader himself lives through a thick atmosphere of sultry sensuality, like poor Peter Miffert. There are scenes in which the depiction of the vivid triumphs. “Pittchen” has to become a counterfeiter in order to survive in the strange Amazon state. A piece of human savagery appears before our eyes. Below good and evil, passions wage a natural battle here. And with noble naivety, in innocent nakedness, they are portrayed, the stormy passions, with a force that with every outstretch puts a plastic shape

Brave Laura Marholm! You can laugh! Each of the wild women in Eifelschmitt is living proof of your much-maligned theory: a woman's content is a man. Your theory is proven by the experiment, this magic potion of the modern worldview. And Clara Viebig is a masterful delineator of this experiment, which the cultural development of the present has itself employed.

While poor Peter is dragged away by the constable to atone for the counterfeiting that the woman drove him to, it comes from all the women's throats: “There he is!” The menfolk are returning home. “There were not many more women, there was only one woman left - the woman. She suddenly turned, forgetting everything, and rushed towards the man in a frenzy!”

But I do not want to accuse the interesting book of the slightest tendency-mongering. No, truly not. This naive story is not written from a theory. It emerged from the pure, heartfelt joy of nature and people. And this unpretentious joy is shared with the reader on every page. An open eye and a cheerful mind, not a refined artistry, speak to us. It is told by someone who is not bothered by the rarified air of the mind, which causes us such severe breathing difficulties every hour of the day.