SOURCE: Wells, G. A. “Ethical Absolutism, Hebbel and Judith.” New German Studies 12, no. 2 (summer 1984): 95-106.

[In the following essay, Wells discusses ethical issues in Judith.]

What is meant by saying that moral rules are either absolute or relative? An illustration will help. Suppose that a man has sought refuge in my house knowing that the police are seeking to arrest him on a capital charge. Suppose further that I know he is innocent, yet that circumstantial evidence is likely to lead to his conviction and execution if he is arrested. If a policeman then calls, and asks me whether I know where the man is, my reply may depend on the relative weighting I give to three obvious moral rules, the first two of which conflict with the third:

1) That maximum cooperation must be given to the authorities who enforce the law.

2) That the truth must be told.

3) That a fellow human being in danger must be assisted.

When one or other of these rules is said to be absolute, what is meant is that it must always, in these or any other circumstances, be given priority over others which conflict with it. On the other hand, when all ethical rules are said to be relative, the meaning is that there is no moral rule which can invariably be given this priority.

Insistence on absolute standards is often defended by appeal to Kant, who wrote contemptuously of the kind of grocer who merely on prudential grounds does not cheat children, instead of being honest without regard to any consequences. But Kant is in fact in no better position than this grocer. Kant argues that, to act ethically, we must be able to will that the rule we are acting on should be followed by all other people. If, for instance, a man makes it a rule to seek revenge for every injury, he yet cannot—so Kant says—will that everyone else should do so. But why not? Only because that would mean that others would always be taking revenge on each other and on him. When he pays his debts he can, however, says Kant, will that everyone else should follow this course. Now this is plainly an explanation of moral law in terms of utility; and Schopenhauer was able to quote a number of passages where Kant in effect concedes this: e.g. ‘that I cannot will that there should be a universal law permitting lying, because people would then no longer believe me or would pay me back with the same coin’.¹

Kant pretends to dispense with utility, and argues that a homicidal maniac must be told the truth, even if this guides him to one of his chosen victims, because the principle ‘Thou shalt not lie’ is an absolute that must be upheld irrespective of consequences.² Close study of real human situations has made some less prone to such rigorism. Macaulay, for instance, said, apropos of the situation in England in 1687:

A nation may be placed in such a situation that the majority must either impose disabilities or submit to them, and that what would, under ordinary circumstances, be justly condemned as persecution, may fall within the bounds of legitimate self defence.³

I take this to mean that political measures draw their virtue or viciousness from the circumstances of the time, and that to say that tolerance is always and in every circumstance a good, and intolerance an evil, is to base political justice on an unconditional imperative as elusive as that on which Kant professed to base individual morality.

How difficult those questions are can be seen not merely from Kant's adherence to utility while professing to repudiate it, but also from the absolutism which sometimes informs the arguments of professed utilitarians. They know that it is vain to tell men that they must calculate the future effects, throughout all eternity, of their actions; and so they would fain show that certain simple maxims may be relied on always to produce desirable effects. Thus J. S. Mill, in his On Liberty, would like to show that licence to express any views is always ultimately beneficial. This he could not show, even if he made it plausible. But because he wants a general rule that can be applied without continual reference to the fundamental utilitarian principle, a rule of action that need not involve laborious investigation of probable consequences, he tries to prove too much. All he is really entitled to say is that, on the whole, or on the average, freedom of expression is more helpful to society than hurtful.

Fundamental questions concerning ethical behaviour are raised in Hebbel's Judith. He believed—according to his preface to Maria Magdalena—that it is the function of drama to show the relation of individuals and societies to ‘die Idee’, by which he here means ‘das alles bedingende sittliche Zentrum, das wir im Weltorganismus schon seiner Selbsterhaltung wegen annehmen müssen’. If, he says in Mein Wort über das Drama, an individual transgresses against this ‘Idee’, against these ethical principles which are to be accepted as absolutes, then the ‘Idee’ will ‘take satisfaction’ in his destruction. His Judith voices a similar view, saying, when she learns that Holofernes tramples down all others: ‘Die Natur … wird den zweiten Mann nicht erschaffen, oder nur darum, damit er den ersten vertilge’ (Act Two).

Not only Holofernes, lacking in any sense of duty to God or man, but also the deeply religious Judith offends, in Hebbel's conception, against ‘die Idee’. In his diary he wrote that she finally realizes ‘daß sie über die Grenzen hinausgegangen ist’ (Tgb. 1872: 3.1.40). Although, as K. Ziegler has noted,⁴ she is not so much as mentioned in Act One of the play, none of the characters there having even heard of her, the two independent worlds which clash in this tragedy have it in common that both offend against ethical absolutes.

Judith's first words recount a dream in which she went to the Deity in response to his summons, only to find that ‘ich war zu schwer, er konnte mich nicht halten’. She regards this as an intimation of what her position vis-à-vis the Deity will be; for dreams, she says, signal ‘die Dinge, die kommen sollen’. She believes, then, that some god-inspired work will divorce her from God presumably by sullying her in some way. There follows her narrative of her unconsummated marriage. We gather from this account that her husband regarded her with a mixture of reverence, sympathy and horror (even loathing), and so had some intimation that she was (or was to become) both holy and horrible. This must reinforce the impression that she has gained from her dream; and both are meant as motivation for her realizing in Act Three that, if God is commanding her to kill Holofernes and so save His chosen people, she will have to sin in the process: ‘Der Weg zu meiner Tat geht durch die Sünde’. Fulfilling even this divinely appointed mission will nevertheless involve what she regards as an ethical transgression. Her early disgust that Ephraim ‘gehört zu denen, die sogar dann sündigen, wenn sie etwas Gutes tun wollen’ (Act Three) is calculated to draw attention to her own predicament.

Many commentators, noting how frustrating an unconsummated marriage must be—particularly for one who believes, as Judith does, that a woman's function in life is to bear children—have taken her account of her six months of marriage merely as an indication that she strongly desires the sexual experience she has hitherto been denied. And they have understood this as an additional motive which impels her towards Holofernes. M. Durzak goes so far as to say that the religious motive which she alleges is merely an unreal rationalization of her real (sexual) motive.⁵ Such interpretation ignores the fact that in so many of his plays Hebbel deliberately attributes a given action to multiple motives in order to avoid what he called simplifying human behaviour to the level of clockwork.⁶ Judith certainly feels attracted to Holofernes as a man of exceptional strength and valour, as is stressed elsewhere in the play. But the behaviour of her late husband and his whole attitude to her is narrated not so much because it suggests to us that she desires sexual fulfilment as because it suggests to her that there is something fundamentally amiss with her, that her beauty will kill the man who does finally enjoy it: ‘Meine Schönheit ist die der Tollkirsche; ihr Genuß bringt Wahnsinn und Tod’ (Act Two). This idea counts for as much in driving her to the enemy of her people as any attraction she, in spite of herself, feels for him.

In a well-known diary entry Hebbel reiterates the idea that, even when using a particular person as an instrument for achieving some purpose, the Deity is powerless to save that person from destruction if what he does at the Deity's behest offends against ‘die ewige Ordnung der Natur’ (Tgb. 1011, 7.3.38). W. Wittkowski has pointed out that what is meant by this ‘ewige Ordnung’ is ‘das Gefüge aller Werte und Gesetzlichkeiten. Gut und Böse stehen als unabhängig von Gott fest, objektiv und absolut’.⁷ One purpose of the crowd scene (III, 2) is to illustrate this idea that God cannot sustain someone who sins in serving Him. The dumb Daniel suddenly acquires the power of speech and apparently with the voice of God commands the people to stone his brother for counselling action contrary to God's will; but then relapses into his former dumbness, burdened by the guilt of fratricide.

It is in Act Five of the play that ethical absolutism is unambiguously obtruded. Judith has earlier said, in the spirit of her patriarchal society, that woman's natural function is to bear children. And in III, 2 murder—the reference is to the killing of his brother ordered by Daniel—was said to be ‘gegen die Natur’ and hence ‘gegen Gott’. In V, 1 Mirza brings these two points together in criticism of the deed she sees Judith about to perpetrate: ‘Ein Weib soll Männer gebären, nimmermehr soll sie Männer töten’. Mirza is thus made the spokesman of an ethical precept which she considers binding even in the Jews' present desperate situation, and the infringement of which under any circumstances constitutes (in the phrase Hebbel used in his diary) ‘über die Grenzen hinausgehen’. Hence, when Judith has done the deed and appeals to Mirza to say that her act is no ‘Greul’, that she has not ‘gefrevelt’, Mirza keeps a hostile silence; whereupon Judith answers her own question by claiming that her deed is no crime but a ‘Heldentat’. But she has to admit that what drove her to it was not the desire to serve God—a motive which she had lost from sight—but burning indignation at Holofernes' outrage of her.

Wittkowski argues that Judith feels remorse because she has committed murder at all, not because she murdered in order to avenge a personal injury instead of in order to serve God: ‘Judith leidet unter der Tat, nicht unter den Motiven’. He admits, however, that Hebbel had to represent her as impelled to the deed by motives other than service to God so as to make her final sense of annihilation plausible. Had she done the deed purely because God ordered her to it, she might have felt tainted as a murderess, but could hardly have felt this taint as so crushing a burden that it outweighed the merit of her obedience to God's command.⁸ As things are, having confessed to impurity of motive, having admitted that she was not thinking of ‘das Elend meines Volks’ and that ‘nichts trieb mich, als der Gedanke an mich selbst’, she adds: ‘Jetzt’—i.e. because she acted on an impure motive—‘muß ich meine Tat allein tragen, und sie zermalmt mich’. The ‘allein’ implies that, had her motive been disinterested service to God and to her people, then she could have shared the burden of guilt with them. This in turn implies that, even had her motives been thus impeccable, she would nevertheless have felt some guilt at infringing the ethical absolute ‘Thou shalt not kill’.

That she should feel such scruples—scruples that are independent of her motives—in murdering a ruthless murderer whose declared intention is to annihilate the whole nation to which she belongs is not altogether implausible. Westermarck has given a great deal of evidence to show that moral ideas are based on instinctive tendencies to approve or disapprove certain acts,⁹ and it is surely this emotional origin which gives many moral maxims a paramountcy and inspires the feeling that they must be obeyed even when obedience to them is inconvenient or painful. It is recognition of such paramountcy, acceptance of the moral maxim as a categorical imperative, that makes the moral absolutist reject utilitarianism.

One must, however, admit that, as Hebbel's Holofernes is an egoist to the point of caricature, the utilitarian grounds—not to mention the religious ones—which Judith has for disposing of him are so strong and so obvious that her scruples on absolutist grounds are somewhat unexpected. In fact the principal weakness of this play lies—as Hebbel later readily conceded¹⁰—in the grotesque exaggeration of everything about Holofernes. Even his redeeming characteristic of fearlessness is indicated in the manner of a boy's adventure magazine. It is reported that, on riding up to a precipice from which his companion recoiled in fright, he ‘wagt den grausamen Sprung’ across—not because their path lay in that direction, but merely because he thought he saw water on the other side. When he found that there was in fact none, he leaped back with the laconic comment: ‘Verschlafen wir den Durst’ and was asleep within seconds (III, 2). One can see why F. T. Vischer called him ‘ein aufgeblasener Frosch’.¹¹ Again, Holofernes declares: ‘Jäger haben mich als einen derben Buben in der Löwenhöhle aufgelesen, eine Löwin hat mich gesäugt’ (Act Four). Hebbel presumably means this to indicate that Holofernes—unlike Judith, who owes ideas important for her behaviour to the Jewish society in which she has grown up—is unconditioned by any human background. When Nestroy's Holofernes declares: ‘da is in ganz Wien, will ich sagen in ganz Assyrien, keiner, der mir's Wasser reicht’, this particular piece of ‘Verwienerung’¹² cannot but remind us that the character here parodied is in no way specifically Assyrian; whereas Judith's belief that she is, or may be, the Deity's chosen vessel is a reflection of what her fellow-citizens are shown to believe in III, 2. This distinction between the two principals is an important one; but Hebbel's method of indicating it is, in the case of Holofernes, grotesque. Furthermore, as Holofernes is reluctant to accept any ideas except his own, his character has to be drawn largely by monologues, none of which includes anything as interesting as deliberation—he is never sufficiently hesitant to have to weigh alternatives—but which merely illustrate his self-confidence and self-assertiveness at length. When in Act One he is on stage with others, his will to power is shown by the way he dominates the conversation. Yet towards the end of the Act, Hebbel has to make him fall silent so that he (and we) can be told facts essential to the exposition about the Jews who are opposing him. In the first Act of Herodes und Mariamne Hebbel likewise has both to draw the character of an egoist and also convey details of the situation facing him. But there he succeeds in doing both simultaneously and does not represent his hero as at first all talk and then all silence.

Judith could not expect her people to sympathize with her scruples over murdering someone who was determined to kill them all. And so she puts it to them that her guilt consists in having killed a man of exceptional greatness in order that they, little folk as they are, may survive:

Ich habe den ersten und letzten Mann der Erde getötet, damit du (zu dem einen) in Frieden deine Schafe weiden, du (zu einem zweiten) deinen Kohl pflanzen … kannst … Mich trieb's die Tat zu tun, an euch ist's, sie zu rechtfertigen! Werdet heilig und rein, dann kann ich sie verantworten!

This is no hypocrisy, as she did feel admiration for Holofernes, as well as hatred for his crimes, and had seen in him a man she could respect, even love. So her sense of guilt seems to be compound: she has done wrong in committing murder at all; she has done especial wrong in killing an outstanding individual; and thirdly she has done wrong because she was impelled to the deed by the motive of personal revenge. The first of these three elements is, as I have tried to show, not what one would expect from Judith in her circumstances, and so has been overlooked by most commentators, except Wittkowski, who stresses it to the exclusion of all other factors. L. Lütkehaus, commenting on his work, gives a juster summary: ‘Nur die Verbindung von Tat- und Motivschuldthese wird der Frage nach der Schuld Judiths gerecht’.¹³ He notes that Hebbel himself hinted as much when he added to the diary entry where he declared her deed an infringement of an inflexible ethical principle (‘sie ist über die Grenzen hinausgegangen’): ‘Sie hat mindestens das Rechte aus unrechten Gründen getan’.

Judith is finally determined not to bear Holofernes a son, not to carry, as Hebbel put it, ‘die Nemesis in ihrem eigenen Schoß’ (Mein Wort über das Drama)—a son, then, whose duty it would be to avenge the murder of his father, who would accept ‘das alte Diktum: Auge um Auge, Zahn um Zahn, Blut um Blut’ (ibid.) as an absolute, and who in doing so would fail in his like duty to observe the principle ‘Thou shalt not kill’. Judith's decision to die rather than give birth to Holofernes' son constitutes an abandonment of ethical absolutism, an awareness that two maxims which are both felt to be unconditionally compelling may conflict with each other. This awareness does not, however, amount to a rejection of all her religious beliefs, as some commentators have supposed.¹⁴ Her final words, to Mirza, are: ‘Bete zu Gott, daß mein Schoß unfruchtbar sei! Vielleicht ist er mir gnädig’. She would hardly thus instigate prayers to a deity in whom she has ceased to believe. Hebbel has, it is true, left the idealism of Weimar classicism far behind, but he was no atheist or nihilist,¹⁵ and it was not his intention to end his first play in such a way as to suggest such views.

It is of interest to note that the view that certain inflexible principles suffice to indicate what one ought to do in any situation is put in a very negative light in some of Hebbel's later plays. Meister Anton brings about the tragic catastrophe in Maria Magdalena by having a ready rule of thumb to distinguish right from wrong in any given case and by forcing on Klara the decisions he has reached from such premisses. Hebbel himself affirmed that the tragic outcome here depends on the inadequacy of such simple rules as guides in complex human situations: ‘Hier ist das Tragische … ganz einfach aus der bürgerlichen Welt selbst abgeleitet, aus ihrem zähen … Beharren auf den überlieferten patriarchalischen Anschauungen und ihrer Unfähigkeit, sich in verwickelten Lagen zu helfen’.¹⁶ In Hebbel's very last composition, Demetrius, the characters are not uninfluential bourgeoisie, but statesmen whose actions affect the lives of all their subjects. And the realist Mniczek points out that such persons cannot rely on ten inflexible commandments or on a catechism which allows only one answer to any question. He says to Demetrius:

                                                            Mein Fürst und Czar,
Gott Vater war Regent im Paradies
Und hatte einen einz'gen Untertan,
Und dennoch kam er mit dem Katechismus
Nicht aus …
.....Denkst du die deinen durch die zehn Gebote
Zu zügeln? Hoff' es nicht! Du hoffst umsonst.(17)

Demetrius believes that, even as Czar, he can follow simple maxims, such as absolute truthfulness, at whatever sacrifice to himself. Mniczek has to tell him that he can thus satisfy his own conscience only by contravening ‘größere Pflichten’ (l.1277); that he has no right to sacrifice himself if this entails the ruin of those who have honestly and conscientiously made themselves dependent on him:

Hast du den Mut, bloß um dich rein zu halten
Vom kleinsten Hauch, der Seelen trüben kann,
Die große Wechselrechnung durchzustreichen,
Die uns verknüpft, und Lieb' und Treu zu opfern,
Und glaubst du, daß du rein bleibst, wenn du's
                                                                                                                                                      tust?
Der Himmel selbst ruht auf gespaltnen Kräften,
Die ganze Welt auf Stoß und Gegenstoß;
Denkst du, der Mensch ist davon ausgenommen?
Pflicht gegen Pflicht, das ist auch sein Gesetz!

(IV, 10; lines 2985-93)

Demetrius finds this unanswerable (lines 3057-59). As at the end of Judith, it is irreconcilable conflict between supposedly absolute duties that leads to abandonment of the absolutist standpoint.

Notes

1. Quoted in Schopenhauer's Preisschrift über die Grundlage der Moral, paragraph 7.

2. See Kant's Über ein vermeintes Recht aus Menschenliebe zu lügen.

3. History of England (5 vol. edition), London, 1905, II, pp. 209-10.

4. Judith, in Das deutsche Drama. Interpretationen, ed. B. von Wiese, Düsseldorf, 1958, II, p. 106.

5. ‘Hebbels Judith. Deutungsprobleme und Deutung’, Hebbel Jahrbuch, 1971/2, p. 55.

6. On this, see my paper ‘Psychological Realism in Hebbel's Gyges und sein Ring’, German Life and Letters, vol. 38, no. 1 (October 1984).

7. ‘Hebbels Judith’, in Hebbel in neuer Sicht, ed. H. Kreuzer, 2nd ed., Stuttgart, 1969, p. 165.

8. ibid., p. 167.

9. The Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas, 2nd ed., London, 1912.

10. See Hebbel's letter to F. Bamberg of 6.3.49, in Hebbels Briefwechsel, edited by F. Bamberg, vol. 1, Berlin, 1890, p. 318.

11. Altes und Neues, Stuttgart, 1889, p. 5.

12. cf. J. R. P. McKenzie, ‘The Technique of Verwienerung in Nestroy's Judith und Holofernes’, New German Studies, 1 (1973), 119-32.

13. ‘Verdinglichung. Zu Hebbels Judith’, Hebbel Jahrbuch, 1970, p. 93.

14. e.g. Ziegler, art.cit., p. 118.

15. Hebbel wrote, while he was working on Judith, that he would retain his belief in God until he found a tree writing a poem or a dog painting a Madonna (Tgb. 1937). The evolutionist would reply that, however great the difference between man and other animals appears to be, it is possible to find in them forms of behaviour which, under certain conditions, might develop into human culture, and to show that such conditions may plausibly be supposed to have existed.

16. Letter to August Stich-Crelinger, 11.12.43, in Hebbels Briefwechsel, vol.cit., in note 10 above, p. 159.

17. Demetrius, IV, 1, lines 2304-11 in R. M. Werner's standard edition of the play (Hebbel, Sämtliche Werke, 1. Abteilung, 6. Bd., Berlin, 1904). Further line references will be to the lines as there numbered.