It has been said that military conquest generally goes hand in hand with
the decline of creative genius, with the retrogression of culture. I
believe this is not a mere assertion. The history of the human race
repeatedly demonstrates that whenever a nation achieved great military
success, it invariably involved the decline of art, of literature, of
the drama; in short, of culture in the deepest and finest sense. This
has been particularly borne out by Germany after its military triumph in
the Franco-Prussian War.
For almost twenty years after that war, the country of poets and
thinkers remained, intellectually, a veritable desert, barren of ideas.
Young Germany had to go for its intellectual food to France,--Daudet,
Maupassant, and Zola; or to Russia--Tolstoy, Turgenev, and Dostoyevski;
finally also to Ibsen and Strindberg. Nothing thrived in Germany during
that period, except a sickening patriotism and sentimental romanticism,
perniciously misleading the people and giving them no adequate outlook
upon life and the social struggle. Perhaps that accounts for the popular
vogue of Hermann Sudermann: it may explain why he was received by the
young generation with open arms and acclaimed a great artist.
It is not my intention to discuss Hermann Sudermann as an artist or to
consider him from the point of view of the technic of the drama. I
intend to deal with him as the first German dramatist to treat social
topics and discuss the pressing questions of the day. From this point of
view Hermann Sudermann may be regarded as the pioneer of a new era in
the German drama. Primarily is this true of the three plays "Honor,"
"Magda," and "The Fires of St. John." In these dramas Hermann Sudermann,
while not delving deeply into the causes of the social conflicts,
nevertheless touches upon many vital subjects.
In "Honor" the author demolishes the superficial, sentimental conception
of "honor" that is a purely external manifestation, having no roots in
the life, the habits, or the customs of the people. He exposes the
stupidity of the notion that because a man looks askance at you, or
fails to pay respect to your uniform, you must challenge him to a duel
and shoot him dead. In this play Sudermann shows that the conception of
honor is nothing fixed or permanent, but that it varies with economic
and social status, different races, peoples and times holding different
ideas of it. With "Honor" Sudermann succeeded in undermining to a
considerable extent the stupid and ridiculous notion of the Germans
ruled by the rod and the Kaiser's coat.
But I particularly wish to consider "Magda," because, of all the plays
written by Hermann Sudermann, it is the most revolutionary and the least
national. It deals with a universal subject,--the awakening of woman. It
is revolutionary, not because Sudermann was the first to treat this
subject, for Ibsen had preceded him, but because in "Magda" he was the
first to raise the question of woman's right to motherhood with or
without the sanction of State and Church.