always reverts to the atmosphere of his Baltic homeland and to the decadent race of the last scions of aristocratic houses (Abendliche Hauser; Fiirslinnen; Wellen). The German home- land school (a counterpart of the " Kailyard school " in Britain) was for a time the vehicle of a propaganda directed against literary centres in the great cities, but satisfied no one except the critics who had sworn allegiance to it. The Hamburg pastor Gustav Frenssen, who wrote the successful story of the peasant farmer Jorn Uhl, left as his successors in North Germany only the sensitive Tim Kroger and the more self-confident Hermann Lons. If the conception of an art of the homeland be applicable to Berlin, the elegiac sceptic Georg Hermann would deserve mention. With adaptive sympathy he turned to account in his Jettchen Gebert the popularity of the " Biedermeyer period " (1830 or thereabouts) and the characteristics of the Berlin Jewish milieu. Old Vienna supplies a better background than the younger capital of the German Reich. Arthur Schnitzler, in his novel Der Weg ins Freie, has brought out the tragic element in the life of the Jews of to-day with special reference to Austrian conditions. In his masterpiece, Casanovas letztes Abenteuer, he fashions the elegy of the advent of old age. More important and more fruitful than the self-conscious homeland school is that peculiar spirit and intimate life of a countryside which German literature has not only described in detail but has also warmed and fructified. In particular those quiet nooks of Suabia which are the homes of so many writers have produced an art of imagin- ative narrative characterized by tranquil contemplation. Emil Strauss's more important works belong to the preceding decade. Hermann Hesse experienced a second youth as a result of his familiarity with Dostoievsky and also under oriental influences (Peter Camcnzind; Klingsors letzter Sommer; Dcmiari).
The German Swiss, who are the nearest kinsmen of the Suabians, point to the increasing but not unchallenged fame of their veteran epic poet, Carl Spitteler. The tradition of their greatest imaginative writer, Gottfried Keller, is continued by Jacob Schaffner, who was originally a working shoemaker. If he had had greater power of concentration he might have become a master in his art. His best novel, though somewhat long drawn out, is Konrad Pilater, a genial, wise, and peculiarly German book, instinct with cosmopolitan sympathy. Albert Steffen, in his Bestimmung der Roheit, plunged deeply into mysticism; this novel is a kind of modern life of a saint, a dream of the expiation of the guilt of mankind by the divine power of the soul. The great religious novel of the period, Emanuel Quint, der Narr in Christo, was written by Gerhart Hauptmann. He used a legend of his Silesian homeland in order to tell the story of a vagabond who thinks himself Christ come back to earth. He collects like a chronicler the contradictory reports about this remarkable case, for which there was no psychological explanation. This enables him to describe in a masterly fashion the religious atmos- phere in which Messianic expectations and ecstatic visions are possible.
Hauptmann's Silesian countryman, Hermann Stehr, sets out by plunging his narrative art into the depths of mysticism; he is a visionary, with special organs of perception which find their way equally well in the fourth dimension (Geschichten aus dem Mandelhaus; Der Heiligenhof).
With somewhat rash enthusiasm Jacob Wassermann in his Christian Wahnschaffe sends out a scion of the modern plutocracy among the people, in order that, like a new St. Francis of Assisi, he may take upon himself all the sorrow and guilt of humanity. Wassermann exhibits a more trustworthy artistic instinct in his earlier novels, Die Geschichte der jungen Renate Fuchs, Caspar Hauser, and in two excellent collections of stories, Der goldene Spiegel and Drei Schwestern. His Franconian countryman, Bernhard Kellermann, whose talent is characterized by flexi- bility, accommodated himself, after the sensational success of his Tunnel, to the contemporary demand for thrilling situations with the verisimilitude of everyday life. Gustav Meyrinck acquired his sway over the public mainly by his fanciful novels Der Golem and Das grune Gesicht. Meyrinck made occultism and satanism popular; he is a most enterprising manager in respect
of his stage settings and the skilful tricks by which he blends daylight with dreams and the sensuous with the supersensuous.
The place of the novel which educates or develops was taken by the romantic variety which preceded the expressionist type. Thomas Mann, who so successfully told the tale of the Budden- brooks, approximated to this type with his novel Konigliche Hoheit, somewhat of a fairy tale in its story of the marriage of an impoverished German prince with an intellectual dollar-princess. A far more powerful performance is his Der Tod in Venedig, the story of a writer who comes to a tragic end as the result of an abnormal but platonic passion. A very symptomatic episode of the years of the war was the keen literary feud between Thomas Mann, who is rooted in the German tradition, and his brother, Heinrich Mann, who, as a writer, looks for his inspiration to the south and, as a politician, to the western democracies. His great cycle of novels, Die Gottinnen, shows the influence of D'Annun- zio; the one which exhibits the greatest technical skill is Die kleine Stadt with its Italian climate, and its lifelike presentation of men of the south. His satirical study, Der Untertan, attacking the epoch of William II., has laid its justification open to chal- lenge by the coarsening effect of its bad taste. Heinrich Mann's extreme sensualism is a stage preceding Expressionism, which, if it were consistently employed, would inevitably destroy the art of story-telling, since, without the reproduction of the cir- cumstantial element and without connected representations of reality, that art must lose its substance. The natural consequence was that the novel recurred to past epochs of history or resorted to strange and remote scenes in order to get the desired distance from its subject. Alfred Doblin gave his Wallenstein the highly coloured background of the Thirty Years' War, and Max Brod laid the action of Tycho Brakes Weg zu Gott in approximately the same epoch of human progress.
Eduard Stucken, displaying as much knowledge as inventive ingenuity, dealt in Die weissen Cotter with the conquest of Mexico by Ferdinand Cortez and the reciprocal infliction of religious cruelties entailed by the collision of two civilizations. Casimir Edschmid, the theoretical champion of Expressionism, likewise delights in his somewhat violent novels in the sanguinary orgies of the age of the conquistadores. The more pacific Norbert Jaques takes a refuge in a melancholy Robinson Crusoe story, Piraths Insel, and in the tranquillity of the South Seas.
Narrative fiction in Germany frequently mingles with the feuilleton, the essay, the description of travel. Waldemar Bonsels, a writer of versatile talent, owes his early fame to his book of travel, Indienfahrt, and to his Menschenwege, frank confessions of a vagabond. Alfons Paquet in his sketches, Li oder der feme Osten, shows his penetrating knowledge of East Asia, while in his Parisian novel, Kamerad Flemming, he appears as a socialist with international sympathies. He is an emissary of that element in the German people which seeks its brethren throughout the whole world. At the head of this school of writers, who think in European rather than in national terms, is the Alsatian Rene Schickele, a journalist of merit, a lyrist, a writer of tales, a dramatist, and a man of uncommon intellectual elasticity. He regards Expressionism in an aspect transcending its literary significance and displaying it as above all an ethical movement, a manifestation of the will the good-will which by the fraternization of the creative minds of all nations would prepare the way for universal peace. (A. E.)
GERMAN SOUTH-WEST AFRICA (see n.886). This pro- tectorate was conquered in 1915 by South African forces under Gen. Botha, and German sovereignty over it was renounced in the Treaty of Versailles. The last ten years of German rule were notable in the economic sphere for the development of the mineral resources of the country, the increasing output of copper from the Otavi and Tsumeb mines, and the exploitation of the diamond-fields in the Luderitz Bay district.
Diamonds were first discovered in 1908 and led to an influx of Europeans, the number of whites in the country in 1913 be- ing 14,816, of whom 12,292 were German and 1,650 Kolonial- englander (mostly Dutch S. Africans). In 1915 the Germans numbered 15,298. The administration, which discouraged the
