various other incidents confirm Judith’s resolve to trick Holofernes, slay him, and free her people from the death-dealing siege. When she meets Holofernes, however, she is so taken by his stature that she is unable to carry out her plan. In fact, she reveals it to him, speaking as an equal to the avowed enemy of her people. Completely unable to understand her unique personality, Holofernes rapes her. The physical abuse (Hebbel had purposely prepared for it with the virgin-widow motif), but even more so the psychological shock of being reduced to a “thing,” together cause Judith to lose sight of her commission. When she beheads Holofernes in his sleep, she acts in personal revenge.

This switch of motives is taken by Judith as evidence that God has “dropped her,” a fate prefigured in a dream. She is deeply despondent. As the play ends, her people celebrate the rout of the leaderless enemy, but Judith hopes for death. Hebbel endowed Judith with exemplary attributes, in part based on his source—that is, with piety, charity toward the unfortunate, and so on—yet circumstances force her into actions and reactions that make her a guiltless victim in the evolution of the world.

The notion that the world evolves by a process in which a status quo or a thesis is challenged by an antithesis, implying a tragic struggle and the doom of those involved in it, but leading to a synthesis further on, is a Hegelian notion. When Hebbel first embraced this view and saw one purpose of drama to be the depiction of such evolutionary change, he did not know that Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel had preempted him. It is uncertain whether Hebbel arrived at the same view entirely on his own or unknowingly absorbed Hegelian thought through an intermediary in his wide-ranging autodidactic studies. At any rate, Hebbel enunciated his conviction that dramas ought to be set at historic turning points, as early as 1843 in “Mein Wort über das Drama,” and noted subsequently in his journal his surprise that some of his ideas matched those of Hegel.

Maria Magdalena

Just as in Judith, heathen polytheism and Judaic monotheism are the contending orders from which the characters derive their uniqueness, so in Maria Magdalena, Hebbel sets up an opposition between the older generation and the younger one. In modern terms it would be called a generation gap, but one that is not solely based on age difference. The title refers to the biblical Mary Magdalene, with the suggestion that Klara, the protagonist, is free of moral guilt. When her brother Karl is arrested on suspicion of theft, her father, Anton, a master cabinetmaker, swears that, should Klara also bring him shame, he will commit suicide. Klara’s fiancé, Leonhard, having learned that the expected dowry will not materialize, uses the arrest as a pretext to break the engagement. Klara, finding herself pregnant, begs Leonhard to reconsider, but he answers in cynical sophisms. Confiding in a childhood friend, a young man recently returned from college studies, Klara is told that no man will be able to overlook the fact that she is carrying someone else’s child. As she prepares to go to the well to drown herself, her brother returns, released from false arrest, but in his defiant mood (Karl wants to break with his father and go to sea) he fails to understand the thinly veiled allusions Klara makes to her death. Instead of stopping her, he even delivers the alibi she needs to make her suicide appear an accident; he asks for a glass of fresh water.

Lest it be argued that Klara, by having been intimate with her fiancé, assumes moral guilt or tragic guilt in the Aristotelian sense of “error of judgment,” it must be pointed out that without Karl’s false arrest, the entire chain of events leading inevitably to her death would not have been set in motion. As it is, Klara dies as a victim of a society with a long-established, inflexible moral code. The promise that a more tolerant society will evolve (the synthesis in the developmental process) is implicit in the final words of Klara’s childhood friend, addressed to Master Anton, and in the latter’s famous line which closes the play: “I don’t understand the world anymore!”

Herod and Marianne

Herod and Marianne, based on the accounts of the historian Flavius Josephus, is set in Jerusalem before the birth of Jesus. Again Hebbel makes symbolic use of the timing. There are clear implications in the play that, under Christianity, humankind will not merely serve as a means toward someone’s ends but will possess inherent value. Herod treats Marianne as if she has no purpose in life but to serve as his support; he behaves as if he owns her. The crisis between them, one of love and trust, is precipitated when intriguing parties groom Aristobulus, Marianne’s brother, as a rival for the kingship. Herod has him drowned in what passes as a swimming accident. Though Marianne knows what he has done and even understands the political necessity of the act, Herod never admits it to her for fear of losing her. To reassure himself of her love, he tells her of a woman who refused rescue from a burning building because her husband had just died. Failing in this attempt to move her to pledge suicide should he not return from an imminent battle, he “places her under the sword”—that is, he arranges for someone to kill her as soon as his death is confirmed. When she finds out what he has done, he assumes that she gained the knowledge at the price of adultery and has her sentenced to death. Through a confidant, Titus, an impartial Roman officer, Herod later learns why she refused to defend herself. Again, Hebbel depicts in Marianne a character free of a moral flaw. She is everything Herod wants in a wife, yet he is too egocentric to recognize it. Their tragedies are that circumstances confront them that neither can control, given their basic personalities. To use Hebbel’s terms, their individuation evokes tragedy.

Agnes Bernauer

In Agnes Bernauer, the familiar elements of Hebbelian tragedy recur yet again. The play is set in the early fifteenth century in Germany at a time when the still powerful nobility began to feel the political ascendency of the bourgeoisie in the growing cities. Through skillful use of dialogue and action, Hebbel capitalizes on this thesis/antithesis relationship even before the main characters, Duke Ernst and Agnes, are introduced. In fact, the drama is unique in that the two opponents never meet face to face. After Duke Albrecht, the heir apparent, falls in love with and marries Agnes, a commoner, his father excludes him in favor of a nephew for the succession. When that nephew, a sickly boy, dies, Duke Ernst takes his passing as an oracle, an indication that God wants him to dissolve the mésalliance by executing Agnes, thus assuring Albrecht an unquestionable succession and avoiding civil war. In the dialogue, especially in a conversation between Duke Ernst and his counselor Preising, Hebbel establishes the salient facts: Agnes is innocent of any wrongdoing; to avoid general calamity, she must die nevertheless. Using traditional criteria, it might be said that Agnes’s fate is indeed pathetic but not tragic, precisely, because she lacks a tragic flaw in the Aristotelian sense. Hebbel rejected such a restriction, just as other dramatists disregarded Aristotle’s insistence on the unities of time, place, and action.

Gyges and His Ring

Gyges and His Ring, exhibiting masterful diction in blank verse, is considered Hebbel’s best play in purely poetic terms. Nevertheless, it seems to puzzle audiences and some critics because Gyges, the titular hero, is, on the surface at least, not a tragic figure; either Rhodope or Kandaules, and perhaps both of them, qualify for that designation. Indeed, Rhodope, the queen who clings to traditions, and King Kandaules, who sees no value in veils and rusty swords, represent thesis and antithesis in yet another clash between differing value systems. The basic plot, taken from Herodotus, has Kandaules arrange for his friend Gyges to see Rhodope, the most beautiful woman in the world, in her bedroom. When the queen, never before seen unveiled by any man but Kandaules, learns of this abuse, her upbringing demands atonement. In a carefully motivated plot development, Gyges slays Kandaules in a duel and consents to marry his widow. At the altar of Hestia, the goddess of fire, which in Rhodope’s words, “consumes what she cannot refine,” Rhodope, satisfied now that no one but her husbands saw her, commits suicide. The implication, especially in the final scene, is that Gyges as king will find the proper balance between tradition and innovation.

The Niebelungs

In The Niebelungs, a trilogy consisting of The Horned Siegfried, Siegfried’s Death, and Kriemhild’s Revenge, Hebbel created the most successful dramatic adaptation of the well-known German medieval epic, rivaled only (but in a different medium) by Richard Wagner’s operatic tetralogy Der Ring des Nibelungen (1852). Staying remarkably true to his source, Hebbel reshapes the epic description into dramatic action, leaves out retarding elements, and above all subtly provides a deeper, more psychologically convincing motivation for the actions of the major characters. In Siegfried’s Death, for example, while Hebbel employs all the circumstantial reasons—Brunhild’s oath, the threat to King Gunther’s honor, and so on—to lead up to Hagen’s murder of Siegfried, he has Kriemhild confront him with yet another reason: jealousy. In the epic, external motivations play on Hagen’s sense of feudal loyalty, while in Hebbel’s drama, Hagen’s actions arise out of a subconscious hate: the hatred of an ordinary man for a superman. (Hebbel himself used these terms in writing about the play to the literary historian Hermann Hettner.) Similarly, Kriemhild’s obtaining the fateful knowledge about Siegfried’s possession of Brunhild’s belt is revealed in Hebbel’s play through an oversight instead of vain boasting on her husband’s part.

In The Niebelungs as in Hebbel’s earlier plays, tragedy follows excessive self-assertion. This is true not only of Siegfried in Siegfried’s Death and of Kriemhild in Kriemhild’s Revenge but also of the supporting characters from Brunhild to Hagen. Kriemhild, originally gentle except in the provocation scene initiated by Brunhild, is still a passive character at the beginning of Kriemhild’s Revenge. A mourning widow, she asks only that Hagen be brought to justice, but when that is denied, she begins to seek revenge. She marries an unloved second husband, Etzel (Attila), to use him to effect her design, and in so doing, Kriemhild enters on the path to her own destruction.

Following his conviction that tragedy should show humanity at evolutionary turning points, Hebbel set the trilogy in a time of transition, the change from the age of Germanic mythology to Christianity. Not merely grafted onto the plot but made part of it in dialogue and action, the clash of conflicting worldviews helps delineate the characters. With intuitive empathy Hebbel grasped the inherent greatness of the epic that set it apart from others of its time. It does not differentiate between laudable hero and despicable enemy but draws both in somber neutrality. Placed by circumstance into attitudes of animosity, both accept their fate to the end. This stoic acceptance appealed to Hebbel, who observed: “Der Mensch hat freien Willen—d.h. er kann einwilligen ins Nothwendige.” (“Man does have free will—i.e., he can accept the necessary.”) Such was the worldview informing all Hebbel’s works.