“Der Spiegelmensch” (The Mirror Man) by Franz Werfel

I

A true work of literature that moves in the world of human spiritual experiences must arouse the deepest interest today. This can be said for Franz Werfel's trilogy “Spiegelmensch” (Kurt Wolff Verlag, Munich).

The development of a human soul through three stages of world insight stands before what Goethe called the sensual-supernatural vision. Perhaps I can best convey what this vision presents through Werfel's writing by describing it freely. A person wants to leave the world in which life has placed him because he cannot truly be human in it. The way the world is, it stifles the essence of man, so he feels. It does not allow him to gain existence. He wants to enter a monastery. Those who already live their lives within this monastery, in order to develop the true one through being dead to the deceptive world, mean to him that he is taking on a heavy burden. He is advised not to take the leap into the unknown because he does not appear equal to the danger. He will not be dissuaded. He is told of three visions through which the human being works his way up to experiencing the spiritual world. He begins the path that leads from the first two stages to the third, on which the “spirit in man” reaches the “spiritual essence of the world” by beholding it.

In the first part of the trilogy, the soul's vision is transformed by the stimulus of external means (solitude, contemplation of one's own figure in the mirror, where it is physically similar, but spiritually dissimilar through the transformed gaze) in such a way that the seeker of the path learns to know that the world he has experienced so far is only a reflection of his own being. He comes to know what others do not know: that a person who does not undergo inner development believes that he has a world in front of him, but in fact he is only standing in front of a “mirror”. Behind the mirror is the world. What a person sees is only its own content, reflected back to him by the mirror. Man lives in deception about this mirror world as long as he does not learn to sense his own narrow human self as reality at least within the world of mirror images. 'Thamal, the pathfinder, is brought to this. From the mirror set up in his cell, his similarly unlike mirror image leaps towards the dreaming-waking as a real being. He is now “in himself”; but this “I-itself” is outside of him. In order to be himself, he first had to come to himself; but now this attained self leads him like an other.

In the second part of the trilogy, “One Thing After Another,” the Mirror Man, who is the Other and yet only truly himself, guides the Way-Seeker through the world in which he used to believe he really was, but in which he was only with his illusions. He meets again with those people with whom fate has brought him together; he undergoes experiences with them; but he experiences differently than before. He experiences like a human being who, in an increasing way, consciously sets his deeper soul content out of himself; his world becomes richer; the abyss between him and others ever wider. His consciousness condenses in experience. He becomes mature to become his own judge. He sees what must be judged in his soul. The new man, who can see the old, pronounces the death sentence on this old man, who could not see, but who has nevertheless acted so far.

In the third part, the Way-Seeker is again in solitude before the mirror, with the condensed consciousness of one who has wiped out his previous human self in self-righteousness. Around him are those in the midst of whom he wanted to be received. But the mirror is no longer a mirror. It has become a 'window'.

" Thamal (touches the mirror). Powerful magician's shake. In one fell swoop, the mirror has turned into a gigantic window. Raging daylight streams into the hall from all sides. Behind the window, a strongly moving, drunken world of colors and shapes, which for the spectator is supposed to signify that higher reality that is accessible only to the people on the stage. Monk: “Rise and see!” Thamal (turning away, dazzled): “The light! The light! I can never bear the bliss!” Monk (very solemnly):

Now you have awakened from the second life night
Tsar Schau of the morning reality
For behind you sank the mirror world,
Which confronts us with the grimace
Of one's own person in every being,
The world in which the fewest recover—
We all went through it, but what we saw
Was not what we thought we saw, what we loved.
For every being became our delusion,
We remained whole, but those victims wept. (Pause) We were once, all of us, such fools,
And here in an ancient night
the false self freed, the true self killed,
And finally lost our mirror image.
Now you too are born for the second time!
Your life nerve tenses anew and frees
From dull ambition, wild conflict.
You emerge from death, from uncertain suffering,
From everything that is cowardly and half and vague,
And learn with clear eyes to distinguish
The sick twilight from the pure day!

Thamal

(into the kaleidoscopically ever-changing landscape) I see - I see - I see! —

Abbot

(steps up to him) You are the youngest of the rebirth.
So take the office's golden belt here!
The head smokes dimly from human hours,
So you are still mostly connected to Maya.
First you have to

Then may you try to climb the rocky steps
of love, which have called you here
to finally find the last perfection
in sweet extinction and obliteration. (strong) Take then!

Thamal

(puts on the gold belt)

Abbot and monk

(bow before him)

The twenty-six monks remain seated, impassive and grinning benignly. The magical trilogy ends here.

II

A poem must be taken as a work of art. Werfel has great poetic power. Therefore, with The Mirror Man, one can begin by taking it as a work of art. But if one has done this with the very best of intentions from the outset, one is repeatedly thrown out of the artistic mood as one progresses. In the end, one would like to return to the poetry with the mood that one has gained from the twenty-six “unmoved, mildly grinning, cowering” monks, and take the whole thing humorously. But that is not possible either. The impermissible humor of caricatures arises, which, in their actions, forget that they are caricatures and play out realities.

But what does one want after all? One admonishes oneself: don't be a philistine, because Franz Werfel is a poet. One tries to grasp the “vivid images” of the poetry. Because the poet does provide such images, after all. But in the end, one is repeatedly confronted with bloodless abstractions that are clothed in human figures. One wants to enter into the poet's intuition – and at every turn one is urged to use one's intellect, which is supposed to symbolize and create a world that is not there. Construction of a house for which the building material is missing. Sketches that lack the germ of images. I am quite dissatisfied with myself. Because actually I am interested in this “mirror man”. But my interest is repeatedly dispelled by what I have described.

But maybe I still haven't grasped the whole thing at all. So let's start again with a fresh approach and a different – what do you call it today? – “attitude”. Of course, that means going through all the tastelessness, triviality and worse again, through the unmagical second part of the “magical” trilogy. But anyone who takes umbrage at such things today is just an incorrigible philistine. Therefore, I prefer to say that if the seeker Thamal is a fellow who, in his own way, already experiences maya as tasteless and somewhat unclean, why should the playwright be prevented from dragging him through tastelessness when he tumbles out of the “one” of maya around the “other” of spirit-reality?

So let's start again. There are so many “magicians” and “mystics” and even “occultists” walking around in the world today who, with their all-too-human soul tissues, love the maya quite rudely, but who, rolling their eyes and twisting their chins, chatter about the exalted “paths of knowledge” for male and female dreamers, on which one climbs up to such dizzying heights that one's thoughts become dizzy. Could Werfel not have wanted to caricature one of these occultists? As an artist, he would have been right to depict such an abstraction, which only becomes concrete if observed, as a caricature that, for better or worse, must occasionally break out of its role. But then it is incomprehensible why the other people, who – from the Maya point of view – are perfectly good citizens and must remain in this unstable equilibrium between the abstract and the human. If Thamal falls over artistically every few moments, why do the others, who don't make a face, have to tumble and then get up with a shout of “Stand up and be seen”? It doesn't seem to work, even with the best will in the world. Even if you “tune in” with a satirical and humorous mind, Thamal's surroundings are disturbing.

And what about Thamal himself! If he is to be taken satirically? Then he could only be a caricature of the “magician”. But caricature or not, this Thamal “walks” through three parts of a trilogy and stands on his head. Even magical coquetry has had enough.

Thamal stands on the head of the intellectual allegory. And this is seriously modeled on what is described in mystical guides as the “path of human development”; so Thamal cannot be taken as a satirical-humorous figure after all. As such, he would have to wander his path through the world on his two maya legs and reach the end as a pseudo-magician. He would then have to carry the allegory as a sham structure headwards; in the poem, however, he is placed on the allegory, which uses his head as a point of support.

It seems entirely justified that one should experiment with the “mirror man” as to how he is actually to be taken. Should unconditional admirers of him be found, they will say: he just doesn't know what matters, trying it this way and that. He just didn't understand the poem.

But let me reply: however this poetry is to be taken, a serious understanding of the spiritual world has not flowed into the artistic design of the persons and actions. And that is precisely what I wanted to illustrate by showing that one can think about the “mirror man” from different angles. One is stimulated to do so because all kinds of contrived ideas want to pass themselves off as works of art. If the poetic power of creation – which I admit to some extent everywhere – had not been completely atrophied by intellectual construction, one would not feel drawn to the “ifs” and “maybes” of the reasoning mind.

One might even be tempted to rewrite the whole poem by reversing the order of events. Thamal could look through the “window” first. A person without any mystical development does this. He has not yet found his true self. He takes the world he sees as reality. He then imagines a being, similar or dissimilar to him, entering through the “window” and initially incomprehensible to him. It leads him through the second part of the trilogy, “One by One”. He feels increasingly drawn to this being; in the end, he enters into it completely. He has thus found his true self. But this carries the spiritual world within it, and it transforms the “window” into a “mirror” that now reveals truth, because it shows what is an image as an image, while the true human being does not look at his being and with it the essence of the world through the window, but experiences it in front of the mirror. For those who develop in this direction, what is seen is Maya, whether it is seen in reflection in the mirror or directly through the window.

The actual spiritual development of the human being takes place on completely different paths than the one presented in this trilogy. It has a beginning and - not an end, but a continuation that is carried by inner necessity. And this is the necessity of an experience that can be shaped, that can become a work of art. But anyone who merely comes to the thought of this experience is subject to the fate of the thought. No context of thought coincides so completely with the experience that one could not also make the thought-symbol of the end that of the beginning, and vice versa.

And finally, in “Spiegelmenschen,” the “mirror” at the beginning is more of a “window” than the “window” at the end, which is really only a “mirror.” The scenic note reads: “Behind the window a world of colors and forms in intense motion, drunk, which is to signify for the spectator that higher reality that is accessible only to the persons on the stage.” It may be that Thamal sees through the meaning of this world of colors and forms, drunk. If it reveals a higher world to him, then the “mirror” can do so as well, holding its own countenance out to him.

I hope that this description is not interpreted as a “disparaging critique”. What I have written here is inspired by Werfel's poetry. This poet's artistic power is significant. It is estimable that he has immersed himself in the element of the spiritual development of the soul with this poetic power. But when the modern man approaches the spiritual and his life, then he becomes a conceptualizer, a symbolist, an allegorist. But in this way the spirit dies. Thought is the corpse of the appearing spirit. Humanity needed intellectualism to achieve intuitive life in freedom, which can only be alive in the inanimate spirit, in the conceptual spirit. But art needs the living spirit. When Homer speaks of the 'muse', it is not just a figure of speech. Klopstock still spoke of the 'immortal soul'. Goethe did not express it in words, but anyone who is familiar with his experience knows how he felt about it. A work of literature that penetrates into the spiritual realm needs experience in the spirit. This must come about if culture is to rise from its present dead center. What I have said does not contradict the fact that Werfel has indeed done much to further this ascent. I could only fully express my agreement with “The Mirror Man” through my objections.