The mystic lyric strain of Rainer Maria Rilke could produce
no school in the strict sense of the term. His peculiarly personal
talent, so delicate and yet so hardy, is due to an aristocratic
refinement of the nervous system, to an extreme sensibility which
seems to employ almost supernatural organs of perception and
vibrates like an Aeolian harp at the faintest breath (Buck der
Bilder; Stundenbuch; Neue Gedichte).
A single plaintive cord inspired and still vibrates in the poems left by Georg Trakl, a poet who was an Austrian officer, and who, in a state of mental derangement, took his own life during the war. Apart from these, Rilke's lyric strain has found affinities only among women writers. The insatiable longing of erotic mysticism sustains the sensuous and super-sensuous poetry of Else Lasker-Schiiler, who exorcised the wretchedness of her Berlin Bohemian life by the conception of an imaginary biblical East redolent of myrrh and pomegranate. She is the wistful child of nature, who dances like Salome, serves like Ruth, and is ever and again waiting with the Song of Songs for the advent of the bridegroom (Gesichte; Mein W under).
The lyric verse of Princess Mechthild Lichnowsky, governed as it is by stricter methods of construction as regards form, must likewise be described as essentially religious. In the main, the religious element has become spiritualized; it no longer devotes itself to legend and mythology. Alfred Mombert calls himself a " spirit of ethereal piety " (einen aetherfrommen Geist). His too incorporeal and shadowless song is an ecstatic soaring above the world to the stars (Dcr Sonne-Geisl; Aeon}. The more robust Theodor Daubler, who has a great following outside Germany as well as in it, sings, in the great pathetic rhapsody of his Nordlicht, the man born of the light, the Aryan whom the North perfects. Mombert and Daubler are forerunners of the Expressionists; their bearing is hierophantic.
The real Expressionists who aim at ethical activism present themselves as a numerous party notwithstanding their individual differences. They are united in one task at which they all seem to labour simultaneously. Tireless conspirators and literary sappers, they receive their orders from the future and acknowledge no master in even the most recent past; although Richard Dehmel is really the giant who carries their world on his mighty shoulders. It was only at rare intervals that Dehmel was a pure lyric poet, for he insisted too systematically upon symbolical significance; but it was he who developed modern German lyric poetry out of Naturalism, who once more gave it warmth, intellectual vigour, significance and dignity. The full tones of social grievance and arraignment were being sounded in 1921 by the talented Franz Werfel; but he is also a man of a metaphysical cast who in suffering and acting seeks deliverance from the ego. His poetry rolls on like a never-ceasing flood which tears hills and rocks along with it. Werfel represents love in the guise of wrath even of wrath against himself and as instinct with a moral power which warrants a somewhat persistent expression of strong feeling (Wir sind; Gerichtstag; Spiegelmensch). Akin to him in moral sentiment are Georg Heym, Kurt Heyneke, Alfred Wolffenstein and Paul Zech. They are all denizens of the great city; they sing the proletariat, the factory, suffering, vice, crime, and also the horrors of war, which many of these revolutionary spirits had anticipated by presentiment. A method of greater artistry is followed by Ernst Stadler, an Alsatian who fell in the war. His volume of poems, Der Anbruch, shows a choice type of technical skill and a passion for nobility of form. Another victim of the war, a man of riper years, was Max Dauthendey, who died of homesickness on the island of Java a quiet South German, who, after hesitating shyly on the brink, was hurled into literature by the eagerness of Dehmel. Dauthendey still maintained the old link with nature that is found in the fairy tale, the pantheistic kinship with all that grows on the earth, with the sense of wonder that inspires earlier German lyric poetry (Das Lusamgdrtlein; Die ewige Hochzeit). Like Dauthendey, Oskar Lorke is a lyric poet whose verse is free from all " tendency " and who is entirely absorbed in his own moods, abandoning himself completely to the spirit of the moment.
It was by something of an accident that Ernst Lissauer ac-
quired the reputation of a ferocious poet by his Hassgesang auf England (" The Hymn of Hate ") His later volume of poems, Der inwendige Weg, manifests a great depth of intense feeling and a strength which is derived from the earth but attains the form which fashions thought.
A great deal of recent German verse, particularly that which was written during the war and the revolution, is dispersed in magazines. A small volume, Arbeiterdichtung, contains a collec- tion of the finest and most popular poems in which men of the people like Karl Broger, Max Barthels and Heinrich Lersch rallied to their country in her hour of need.
///. The Drama. The German declines to regard his theatre as a matter of convention; he asks from the stage a comprehen- sive conception of life and from the dramatist a highly personal confession of that which is in him. The German stage has sub- mitted to all impulses that had any significance, whether they came from Tolstoi, Ibsen, Maeterlinck, Strindberg or Bernard Shaw. It has thus become at once the battlefield and the home of all the greatest innovators. The development from Naturalism through Symbolism to Expressionism kept the stage in a constant ferment which was attended by the passionate interest of the public and by a very alert criticism. Leading managers, like Otto Brahm, Max Reinhardt, Leopold Fessner and many others, courageously adopted those tendencies which in their general aspects represent the transition from reality to idealism, from nature to style, and which, naturally, have also influenced the actor's art in the sense of the new tasks which they set him. Gerhart Hauptmann, Germany's greatest imaginative writer, experienced during 1910-21 a proud renaissance of his earlier works; it was recognized late in the day that those works of his which had been described as naturalistic were not confined to the " art of milieu," and that they retained the freshness of youth by virtue of their essential form. During these years Hauptmann showed himself to be occupied with a transforma- tion of the gods, with the clarification of ethical ideas from their mythological representations. Far away from his Silesian home and from German soil, he found the subject of his new plays, Der weisse Heiland and Inipodhi, in Mexican history and in the collision between Christianity and paganism during the epoch of the conquistadores. His brother, Carl Hauptmann, who was a man of high intellect but without the same poetic power of fashioning his work, followed a parallel path to Symbolism and to the literary drama (Stildrama). Hermann Sudermann, whom short-sighted critics used to place on a level with Gerhart Hauptmann, now merely satisfies the daily demands of the stage by his technical ability.
Gerhart Hauptmann's naturalist successors, the North Ger- mans, Max Halbe, Georg Hirschfeld, Otto Erich Hartleben, and the South Germans, Ludwig Thoma and Josef Ruederer, had either died or fallen silent. Moreover Thoma's literary impor- tance rested less upon his popular comedies than upon his ex- cellent satires, written, partly in Bavarian dialect, against reaction in Church and State (Lausbubengeschichten; Peter Schlemihl; Brief e eines bayrischen Abgeordneten) . His dramatic campaigns against clericalism were continued by Heinrich Lautensack who died young (Das Gelilbde; Die Pfarrhauskom- odie). August Stramm, who was killed in the war, made a hope- less attempt to let mere atmosphere instead of the spoken word influence the audience; he thus effected a reductio ad absurdum of Naturalism and brought it almost to the verge of Expressionism.
The Suabian Hermann Essig attempted to give Naturalism a substratum of the fairy-tale element, but he lacked the dialec- tical energy which inevitably turns modern drama into an in- tellectual process. Fairy tales, legends and especially Bible stories were frequently employed. The Rhinelander, Wilhelm Schmidt of Bonn, held the stage for some time by presenting unpretentious dramatic versions of the story of the Prodigal Son and the mediaeval legend of the Graf von Glcichen.
Austrian dramatic art, which had still been flourishing in the year 1900, fled into past phases of civilization, especially the rococo and renaissance periods, and dallied with dreams and raptures in clever masquerades. Hugo von Hofmannsthal never
