The New Storm and Stress in Germany

It was in 1840 that Georg Gervinus, the greatest of German literary historians, wrote the memorable words, “Our literature has had its day; and if German life is not to come to a standstill, we must force our best talents, now drifting about aimlessly, into political and industrial channels.” The last fifty years have been a living proof of the prophetic insight manifested in these words. For nearly two generations the vital energy of the German people has been consumed in the struggle for national greatness and material prosperity; and literature, instead of opening new paths of thought and feeling, has been lagging behind, keeping at a respectful distance from events the rapid succession and colossal proportions of which have made all Europe hold its breath.

At present we are witnessing another turning of the tide. With German unity accomplished, with German industry and commerce successfully established in the world’s market, with German science setting the methods of research to all other nations, the ideals of the inner life are once more beginning to assert themselves, and it is clear that there is going to be once more a German literature.

In more ways than one, the intellectual situation of to-day resembles the intellectual situation during the seventies and eighties of the last century. The Storm and Stress agitation, which then was at its height, was the composite result of a number of movements, distinct from each other in temper and immediate purpose, but at one in their ultimate aim of widening the scope of individual life to its fullest extent, of raising man to the stature of his true self. Richardson and Rousseau, Diderot and Ossian, combined to produce The Sorrows of Werther and The Robbers. Pietism and rationalism, sentimentality and self-portrayal, the yearning for nature and the striving for freedom, all rushed together into one surging whirlpool of revolt against the existing social and political order.

To-day, as a hundred and twenty years ago, the leading note of German literature is revolt. In the eighteenth century this revolt meant the ascendency of the middle classes over a hereditary aristocracy which had ceased to be an aristocracy of the spirit; to-day it means the ascendency of the working classes over a bourgeoisie which has ceased to be the representative of the whole people. It means now no less than it meant then an upward movement in the development of the race, another phase in the gradual extension of human dignity and self-respect; it means a further step toward the final reconciliation of individualism and collectivism.

To-day, as a hundred and twenty years ago, the names of the men who first gave life to the new literature are not the names of Germans: the modern Rousseau is Tolstóy, and the modern Diderot is Ibsen. But to-day happens what happened then: the foreign pioneers are quickly being succeeded by German writers of originality and power; and if, perhaps, no Goethe or Schiller has as yet come forth, the nearly simultaneous appearance of such works as Sudermann’s Heimat and Hauptmann’s Die Weber augurs well indeed for the future of the German drama.

Heimat is one of those literary thunderclouds which are charged with the social and intellectual electricity of a whole age. As a piece of dramatic workmanship it offers little that is new or particularly striking. A father who disowns his daughter; a daughter who, in years of waywardness and misery, finds her larger self; her return to the old home; the renewal of the conflict between father and daughter; and the ruin of both, — physically of the one, morally of the other, — this is a familiar, not to say well-worn theme. What makes this simple domestic tragedy so significant for us, what sends such a thrill of sympathy through our hearts as we see the mutual grinding down of these characters, sterling in themselves, but incompatible with each other, is the feeling that here we have a true poetic symbol of the great gulf existing in modern German society.

What an extraordinary sight it is, this modern Germany! On the one hand, Bismarck, — whether in office or out; on the other, Bebel. On the one hand, the ruling minority, wonderfully organized, full of intellectual and moral vigor, proud, honest, loyal, patriotic, but hemmed in by prejudice, and devoid of larger sympathies; on the other, the millions of the majority, equally well organized, influential as a political body, but socially held down, restless, rebellious, inspired with the vague ideal of a broader and fuller humanity. On the one hand, a past secure in glorious achievements; on the other, a future teeming with extravagant hopes. On the one hand, service; on the other, personality. On the one hand, an almost religious belief in the sacredness of hereditary sovereignty; on the other, an equally fervent zeal for the emancipation of the individual. And what is most remarkable of all, both conservatives and radicals, both monarchists and social-democrats, inevitably drifting toward the same final goal of a new corporate consciousness, which shall embrace both authority and freedom.

These are the contrasts which clash together in the modest home of the retired Major Schwartze; this is the struggle which subverts its peace. This is the ideal of the future which illumines its downfall. For it is impossible to think that characters of such rugged nobility and inner healthiness as this imperious major and his rebellious daughter should be entirely annihilated. They may be crushed as individuals, but they will live as principles. And the end of their conflict will be mutual understanding and toleration as the basis of a new and happier home.

No such hope seems to be held out in Gerhart Hauptmann’s Weavers. Here we see nothing but destruction, through five breathless acts one protracted agony of death.

Never has the modern proletariat and its inevitable doom been more vividly represented than in this drama. Here Zola might learn true truthfulness. Without a false accent, without a single touch of rhetoric, without the slightest approach to the sensational, the misery of these Silesian weavers is unfolded before us in all its mute horror, only now and then interrupted by a stammering outcry. In the beginning even this is absent: only an endless variety of ever new forms of physical and mental suffering, of degradation, brooding hopelessness, suppressed scorn, pitiful yet sublime resignation to the Lord’s will, tender but helpless sympathy with each other’s burdens, and above all, hunger, hunger, hunger. Among these people, nearly benumbed with starvation, there appears a figure which to them must have the effect of a supernatural vision: one of their own kin, well fed and well clad, and with ten thalers in his pocket! He has just come back from Berlin, having finished his military service. At home he was considered a good-for-nothing, but he has made a splendid soldier, has been a model of discipline and a favorite with his officers. He is the first to see the degradation of his people in all its nakedness, and the model soldier turns into a revolutionary agitator. And now we see the wildfire spreading. A super-human frenzy seizes the dried-up, half-crazed brains. Like a “dies irœ, dies illa,” there wells up and streams from house to house, from village to village, a mighty song of despair and revenge. It is as though the elements themselves had risen in their chaotic power, as though the days of giant struggles had returned. As a matter of fact, it is the death struggle of the proletariat. A few violent convulsions, a few mad onslaughts with stone and pickaxe, then the sound of marching battalions, of musketry volleys, a last rattle in the throat, and all is quiet.

Here, indeed, we have, from beginning to end, a picture of merciless ruin and disintegration. But is the drama, on that account, to be condemned as a work of art? Is not death the most important event of life? Is it not the surest pledge of eternity? In the whole history of art, is there a single poem or painting which preaches more emphatically the imperishableness of reason and justice than Holbein’s Dance of Death? Here there has indeed risen a new Holbein. Here we see Death, not as an abstract allegory, not in the livery of a well-paid, featureless undertaker; we see Death himself, the angel of wrath, the angel of God, the great fulfiller and redeemer; we see a whole generation sinking into the abyss. Can we be so dull as not to feel that what we have been witnessing is, in reality, not destruction, but the planting of the seeds of a new society?

It seems almost frivolous to mention in the same breath with such earnest and thoughtful works of art as Heimat and Die Weber a malicious though skillful satire which soon will have been forgotten. Only the circumstances which have produced it, and the stir which it at present is creating, give it an undeniable symptomatic importance, and make it a part of the new Storm and Stress.

Some months ago, Professor L. Quidde, one of the most talented of the younger German historians, a former Fellow of the Royal Prussian Institute for History at Rome, editor in chief of the highly respected Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft, published in a monthly of avowedly radical tendencies an article purporting to be an analysis of the character and life of Caligula, the successor of Tiberius. The sub-title of the essay, A Study on Imperial Insanity, did not necessarily suggest anything startling or unheard of; for it is a fact now almost universally accepted by historians that the atrocities and crimes of the Julian dynasty are largely attributable to hereditary madness. Nor was the tone of republican indignation at the frivolity and emptiness of court life which pervaded the article to be wondered at; for it is hard to see how any one could tell the story of Caligula’s life without republican indignation. What gave such a violent shock to the German reader, what at once exhausted the edition of the reprint, and has since necessitated edition after edition, was the discovery which forced itself from the very first page even upon the most unsuspecting, that the subject of this essay was not Caligula, but the reigning Emperor William II. of Germany.

Nothing could be cleverer than the way in which, at the very outset, we are flooded with a mass of facts, meaningless in themselves, but so curiously corresponding with recent events in the Hohenzollern family that we are henceforth prepared to accept any new analogy as additional evidence of the correctness of the preceding ones, until the closing paragraph, with its hypocritical eulogy of our own time, in which such monsters as Caligula would be absolutely impossible, appears to us as the most hollow mockery.

“Gaius Cæsar, better known by his surname Caligula,” — thus the story begins, — “was still very young, not yet fully matured, when he was unexpectedly called to the throne. Gloomy and uncanny were the circumstances of his succession, strange the earlier history of his house. Far from home, his father had succumbed to a cruel fate in the flower of his years; and there were many rumors afloat about the mysterious circumstances of his death. The people did not refrain from the most serious incriminations, and suspicion dared to approach even the immediate friends and advisers of the old Emperor. With Caligula’s father the nation had lost its favorite. With the army he had been united through many campaigns, in which he had borne the hardships of war together with the common soldier. His happy family life, blessed by a large number of children, his affable manner, his fondness for a harmless joke, had endeared him to the citizen as well. To be sure, so long as the old Emperor lived he had been doomed to inactivity in the most important questions of internal policy; but if he ever had come to the throne, freer and happier days would have followed, and the feeling of dull oppression which was weighing on the empire would have been taken from it. Thus the hope of a whole generation had sunk into the grave with Germanicus.

“From this idol of the nation there fell a reflex of popularity upon the son, who, however, grew up entirely dissimilar to his father, — perhaps more like his proud, impassioned mother, — and at the same time favored by the old Emperor, probably just because the latter saw in him the direct opposite of his father, with whom he had never been on friendly terms.”

Now there follows an account of the events which marked the accession to the throne of the young Emperor. The sudden dismissal of the “leading statesman;” the liberal beginnings of the new course; the early tokens of restlessness and arbitrariness in the Emperor; his vanity; his passion for theatrical display; his fondness for speechifying, in season and out; his tampering with social reforms; the gradually increasing symptoms of insanity; the extravagance of his yachts and palaces; the sudden mobilizations of certain regiments; the attempt at “rejuvenating the army;” his fantastic desire of creating a large navy and gaining control of the sea; his self-apotheosis; finally, open madness and bestiality, — these are the leading facts in the career of Professor Quidde’s Caligula. The whole satire is so transparent and direct that we should be at a loss to understand why the author so carefully wraps himself up in his scholarly domino, if we did not remember that, some years ago, the librarian of a public reading-room at Aachen was prosecuted on the charge of lese majesty because he had failed to remove from his shelves a number of the New York Puck containing a pictorial contribution to recent German history.

If Quidde’s pamphlet should have the effect not simply of exciting a morbid and cowardly curiosity, but of helping to arouse public opinion to such a pitch that similar prosecutions would henceforth be impossible; if it should help to sweep away the whole system of lese majesty indictments, one of the worst relics of Roman imperialism, it would have done a good service, its spiteful temper notwithstanding.

And what is to be the outcome of this whole movement? Will it, like the Storm and Stress of the eighteenth century, exhaust itself in a peaceful struggle for intellectual and moral freedom, or will it lead to a violent disruption of society? Let is hope that, if the latter should come to pass, literature will not forget that the ideal traditions of the past no less than the ideal demands of the future have been entrusted to her keeping, and that it is for her to give voice to the inner and abiding harmony which underlies the transient clamor and strife of the day.