DECADENCE IN GERMAN LITERATURE.

The literature of Germany has always been more or less a closed book in England and among English-speaking people. Nor is this surprising, when one takes into consideration the totally inadequate translations—with notable exceptions of the masterpieces of German literature, and the comparatively few text-books which have been written upon the subject of that literature. Among the notable exceptions must, of course, be included some, at least, of the works of Goethe, Lessing, Schiller, and Heine, in poetry, criticism, and the drama; in philosophy, Schopenhauer, Kant, Fichte, Hegel, and other of the metaphysicians are fairly well represented; while in later days, the evolutionary theories of Haeckel have been familiarised in England mainly through the medium of the Rationalist Press. Mention should also be made of the interest evoked—largely as a result of the present war—by the gospel according to Nietzsche and various writers of a similar school of perverted thought, these typifying Germany's prevalent malady—a deadening rationalism, the fruits of chronic philosophy, or its German equivalent. Eclipsed as it has invariably been by the greater literatures of France and England, Germany has nevertheless provided in time past much that is imperishable; and only during the last decade or so has the note of decadence—especially in the realms of fiction and drama—sounded the death knell of all that is most worthy in German literature, which has now yielded pride of place to the pornographic and sexual inanities of the extreme realistic school. The literature of the German Middle Ages was inspired to a considerable extent by the English minstrel, the French jougleur, and the sagas of the old Norseman. However, none of these influences is noticeable in the primitively barbaric "Nibelungenlied," which has been described as the great national epic of the German peoples; neither were they an important factor in the lyric improvisations of the Minnesingers of the thirteenth century, or, somewhat later, in the less artificial compositions of the "Volkslied." But this period proved of brief duration; that great spiritual upheaval known as the Reformation came to pass; but, strangely enough, brought with it no masterpiece of literature, with the exception of Luther's Bible. The sturdy Reformer's other contributions to contemporary letters took the form of popular commentaries, which plainly reveal the unending struggle between an immovable faith and passion unsubdued— the old inevitable contest between light and darkness. Following on the Reformation, the Renaissance was just beginning to exercise a beneficent influence on literature, when the Thirty Years' War —which so seriously crippled the intellectual life of Germany in the first half of the seventeenth century—rendered practically null and void all her efforts to emulate the brilliant literary achievements of more favoured nations. In Germany, the eighteenth century was the age of a neo-classic movement, inaugurated, by Winkelmann and Lessing, and consummated in Weimar by Goethe and Schiller.  This was, indeed, the golden age of German literature, a classic calm broken only by the period of "Storm and Stress"—a crisis to which poets of all nationalities have ever been prone. Winkelmann possessed a native affinity, to the Hellenic spirit, just as Hegel, the philosopher of the absolute, or truth for all intellect, was the ripe product of modern Hellenism. Madame de Stael remarked of the author of "The History of Ancient Art": "There had been known before him (Winkelman) learned men who might be consulted like books; but no one had, if I may say so, made himself a pagan for the purpose of penetrating antiquity." Lessing, besides being a "Greek" classicist and a most profound critic, was Germany's first great dramatist—one upon whom the Elizabethan drama exercised a lasting influence. If Lessing and Winkelmann represented the neo-classic school, their complete antithesis may be found in Klopstock, the epic poet of "The Messiah," who stood out pre-eminently as the champion of German individualism. A characteristic creation of the "Storm and Stress" period was Burger, whose ballads, deftly modelled on Scotch and English originals acquired immense favour in the judgment of his contemporaries. He wrote prose, too—"The Adventures of Baron Munchausen," that immortal record of unrivalled mendacity. His disciple, Schlegel, the critical leader of the Romantic school, is perhaps best remembered as the fond Platonic friend of Madame de Stael. But "Storm and Stress" were to give place slowly to that maturer epoch which is directly associated with the climax of German classic achievement and its high priest, Goethe. "Werther" belongs to the earlier period —surely a very notable "first" novel, with its heroine of extraordinary aplomb, who having seen unmoved the body of the doleful hero

Borne before her on a shutter,
Like a well-conducted person,
Went on cutting bread and butter.

Who shall say that Werther's Charlotte is not admirably true to type? Though Goethe's fame outside the limits of his own country rests chiefly on such acclaimed masterpieces as, for instance, "Faust," "Iphigenia," and "Tasso," Carlyle declared that "Wilhelm Meister," the supreme novel of German classicism, comprised the deepest results of the poet's philosophy; though lesser critics have found the book marred for them by its frequent obscurity, and this despite its claims to be considered an "Odyssey of Culture." On the whole, the Weimar period, with Goethe and Schiller enthroned as the joint arbiters of classical idealism, is the pleasantest picture we possess of the intellectual life and development of Germany: one, at least, of the two great poets was successful in deducting a practical philosophy for ordinary, everyday use from the metaphysical system of Kant, so opposed in spirit to the mystical pantheism—the apotheosis of individualism—which distinguished the philosophy of Romanticism, as propounded by Fichte and Schelling.
The last really notable name in German literature is that of Heine—the supreme lyrical poet—whose supremacy, however, is rather in his manner than in his matter. "The magic of Heine's poetical form is incomparable," says Matthew Arnold. He was (we read) Goethe's successor as "a soldier in the war of liberation of humanity." But that humanity, it would appear, did not extend to England. Like a thorough paced German Heine hated England. In the days of his exile, he remarked: "I might settle in England, if it were not that I should find there two things, coal-smoke and Englishmen; I cannot abide either." Here we have a touch of the mocking, satirical spirit which has done much to counterbalance the esteem with which the world regards the poet's beautiful and rhythmic verse. After Heine's death, the Post Romantic School of "Young Germany" began to show itself in its true light, as essentially a surface literature, irretrievably doomed to decay. Ludwig Borne, like Heine a Jew, and like Goethe a native of Frankfort, became absorbed in the backwash of political journalism. Auerbach, the chronicler of Black Forest life, and Hoffmann, the later Romantic, a morbid distraught genius of the Poe order, are still read and appreciated—in Germany. But the Romanticism, so directly inspired by Scott, was dead beyond all hope of resuscitation.
In its place we find a sort of spurious realism, openly filched from the literatures of France and Russia: and the brutal modernity which discovered an outlet in Nietzsche and his disciples anti-traditional theories of the expediency of a criminal disregard of all moral obligations. Books in glorification of the militant spirit of a militantly docile people began to flood the Press. Able historians, like von Ranke and Mommsen were neglected for Treitschke and his school. World dominion was loudly proclaimed as Germany's inalienable heritage in the pulpit, in the lecture-room, and on the stage. Sudermann and Hauptmann infused into the national drama the realistic indiscretions of their own peculiar psychological vagaries. Germany's lyrical genius stooped to Hymns of Hate ! And never in any literature has fiction touched so low an ebb of sexual and erotic indecency as it has in Germany during the past few years of Prussian supremacy; in no other country in the world have the decadents attained to such popularity and power. In brief, the last decade of German literature has revealed most of those symptoms which might have been looked for in a nation brought up by a paternal Government in a soul deadening, consuming hatred of all other nations, and inoculated with the virus of an individual and national egotism as insane as it is unwarrantably arrogant and aggressive.

 The West Australian 21 October 1916, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article26994856