[In the following essay, Silz describes Bahnwärter Thiel as poised between Poetic Realism and Naturalism.]

With Gerhart Hauptmann's Novelle Bahnwärter Thiel we stand at the threshold of a new age in German literature, the period of “Naturalismus” that was to succeed “Poetischer Realismus.” The little story was written and published in 1887, the year in which Berlin saw the performances of the visiting Théâtre libre that were to lead two years later to the establishment of the “Freie Bühne” and the debut of its chief talent, the young dramatist Hauptmann who quickly came to be regarded as the leader of the new literary revolt.

Bahnwärter Thiel, however, precedes that year of committal. It is a Janus-faced work, with traits both of the era which is coming to a close and of the era which is about to open. This makes it especially meaningful and appropriate as a termination for our present series of studies. In Hauptmann's life, too, it comes out of the middle of a critical period of transition, the Erkner years (1885-1888) which Hauptmann himself in his Lebenserinnerungen entitles “Lebenswende.” It is Hauptmann's first narrative work, little regarde then or since because of the more sensational plays and longer stories that followed it; and yet it is a real masterpiece, and we can see in it already characteristic features of Hauptmann's style and of his Weltanschauung.

The young author of twenty-four, modestly conscious of being a beginner, entitled his tale a “novellistische Studie,” not a Novelle outright. But it is a genuine Novelle nevertheless, fulfilling an unusual number of the familiar requirements of this “Gattung.” It is brief (only thirty-seven pages in the standard edition) and limited in time, place, and action. It deals with only two, or at most three, adult persons. Strictly speaking, there is no evolution of character, as in the novel, but the revelation of a hitherto submerged side of character under the impact of crisis. There is a striking central event (the death of little Tobias), “eine sich ereignete, unerhörte Begebenheit” in Goethe's terms, and we are shown its effect on an already matured or “fertig” hero. There is a distinct “Wendepunkt” in the middle of the story: Thiel's first vision of his dead wife, which is the first mental objectivation of the feeling of guilt and unfaithfulness that eventuates in murder. An “Idee” summarizing the action could readily be compressed into a brief and arresting statement. There are a number of impressive “Leitmotive,” and one of these, Tobias's pathetic little brown cap, could qualify as a “Falke” in Heyse's sense. Certainly the story has the “scharfe Silhouette” stipulated by Heyse: its world, centered around a remote stretch of railroad-track and isolated by silent forest and solitude that encourage inward life, has a vivid and unique individuality. In this case, there is no “Rahmen” or frame; the author is “omniscient,” but his presence is never suggested; there is complete objectivity of report.

The nature of the Novelle … favors dramatic procedures, and in Bahnwärter Thiel also one can pick out dramatic passages, such as the scene of the accident, where the author resorts to the lively present tense, some dialogue, and virtual “stage-directions.”¹ In the weirdly “acted” brief scene on the tracks (41f.) we see only Thiel excitedly speaking and gesticulating, but are made vividly aware of the unseen “other one;” here, as in Kleist's Bettelweib von Locarno, one feels the hand of the dramatist. We are “present” at this scene, whereas Thiel's earlier vision came in a dream and was merely reported to us.

Yet, despite these occasional pseudo-dramatic interludes, the technique in Bahnwärter Thiel is decidedly epic. There is very little dialogue. Speech is often quoted, as in Kleist's Novellen, indirectly, in the subjunctive; the only direct speech of any considerable length is Lene's tirade against little Tobias (21f.). There is no “build-up” to scenes, but straightforward narrative procedure. Yet the story has a strongly propulsive action and intensification; it rises steadily, with “rest-periods” of description, to a climactic, explosive ending. The descriptive passages, for their part, are never allowed to become static or ends in themselves, but are integrated with the action, physical and above all psychological.

Throughout, Hauptmann maintains an even, epic tenor of factual report. His sentences are never very long, and are admirably clear and simple in structure. In climaxes of great emotional tension, like the account of the fatal accident, the sentences become even shorter, some consisting of three words, two words, even one word:

Er ist es.

Thiel spricht nicht. Sein Gesicht nimmt eine schmutzige Blässe an. Er lächelt wie abwesend; endlich beugt er sich; er fühlt die schlaffen, toten Gliedmassen schwer in seinen Armen; die rote Fahne wickelt sich darum.

Er geht.

Wohin?

“Zum Bahnarzt, zum Bahnarzt,” tönt es durcheinander.

“Wir nehmen ihn gleich mit,” ruft der Packmeister und macht in seinem Wagen aus Dienströcken und Büchern ein Lager zurecht. “Nun also?”

Thiel macht keine Anstalten, den Verunglückten loszulassen. Man drängt in ihn. Vergebens. Der Packmeister lässt eine Bahre aus dem Packwagen reichen und beordert einen Mann, dem Vater beizustehen.

Die Zeit ist kostbar. Die Pfeife des Zugführers trillert. Münzen regnen aus den Fenstern.

Lene gebärdet sich wie wahnsinnig (38).

An impressive device of style, but one that is not overused (as it may be said to have been, for example, in Bretano's Novelle), is that of the leitmotif. The great unbroken expanses of forest are thought of as a sea, and we hear of “ein schwarzgrünes, wellenwerfendes Meer” (20), “das schwarzgrüne Wipfelmeer” (26), or the forest surging “wie Meeresbrandung” in the tempest (28). The “Meldeglocke” that rings in the booth to announce the oncoming trains is heard repeatedly, and Thiel responds unfailingly; thus the motif contributes both to milieu and to characterization. The brown “Plüschmützchen” is emblematic of little Tobias and the mood of his one pathetic holiday; it becomes the fetish of the insane father, and the last, telling picture focuses our attention on this eloquent object.

Allied to the leitmotif is another device that might perhaps better be called correspondence or echoing, since it involves only two correspondent points and not a series. Thus we hear, early in the story, of a “Rehbock” that was run down by a train one winter night (15f.). Near the end of the story (44f.) a fine buck is shown leading his herd safely over the tracks that have just proved fatal to Tobias. Is an irony intended in the fact that Nature's creature heeds the danger-signal to which the child of Man did not respond?² Or are the two occurrences meant to show the same impersonal, now destructive now benevolent, operation of natural law that Abdias demonstrated? In any case, the “recall” has an artistic effect. The motif of “schwarzes Blut” on Tobias's lips (38) sets a pattern for Thiel's fell intent against Lene (41). In similar sinister fashion, the association “Eichhörnchen—der liebe Gott” (35), when it recurs, sets off a murderous reaction (43). On the way to the field, Thiel pushes the baby-carriage with an effort through the sand (33); on the sad return trip, it is Lene who does the same (45); the tragic events that the day has brought are thus tacitly signalized.

There is a striking use of sound-effects in the story; indeed, one would suspect it to be the work of a musically rather than sculpturally gifted writer. The account of the approach of the Breslau-Berlin express might be called a “Virtuosenstück” in this regard:

Durch die Geleise ging ein Vibrieren und Summen, ein rhythmisches Geklirr, ein dumpfes Getöse, das, lauter und lauter werdend, zuletzt den Hufschlägen eines heranbrausenden Reitergeschwaders nicht unähnlich war.

Ein Keuchen und Brausen schwoll stossweise fernher durch die Luft. Dann plötzlich zerriss die Stille. Ein rasendes Tosen und Toben erfüllte den Raum, die Geleise bogen sich, die Erde zitterte—ein starker Luftdruck—eine Wolke von Staub, Dampf und Qualm, und das schwarze, schnaubende Ungetüm war vorüber. So wie sie anwuchsen, starben nach und nach die Geräusche (26).

Or, again, the crescendo of the thunder, as it first awakens on the distant horizon and then draws nearer and increases, until its mighty voice fills the whole air and shakes the solid earth (29). There are passages of cacophony such as the braking and stopping of the work-train (44). On the other hand there are instances of verbal music that bear comparison with Storm's, especially in the alliteration on both vowels and consonants:

Die Kiefern bogen sich und rieben unheimlich knarrend und quietschend ihre Zweige aneinander. Einen Augenblick wurde der Mond sichtbar, wie er gleich einer blassgoldenen Schale zwischen den Wolken lag. In seinem Lichte sah man das Wühlen des Windes in den schwarzen Kronen der Kiefern. Die Blattgehänge der Birken am Bahndamm wehten und flatterten wie gespenstige Rosschweife. Darunter lagen die Linien der Geleise, welche, von Nässe glänzend, das blasse Mondlicht in einzelnen Flecken aufsogen (29).

One could call Bahnwärter Thiel the earliest Novelle of Naturalism, and adduce enough evidence from it to justify this classification. After these naturalistic elements had been extracted, however, there would be enough others left to make out a case for Bahnwärter Thiel as a work of Poetic Realism. The milieu of much of the story is typical of Naturalism. The picture of the “Arbeiterkolonie” on the Spree outside Berlin,³ and the “close-up” of Thiel's own dwelling and his home life with its daily routine and its marital “scenes,” all presented in factual, unvarnished detail, belongs to Naturalism, which preferred to emphasize the sordid and depressing aspects of lower-class life. Nothing of beauty or poetry is shown here, but a dull, unrelieved vulgarity. The hopelessness of Thiel's situation, the lack of “horizon” or mental resource, are characteristic of the atmosphere of Naturalism.

Furthermore, it may be thought indicative of the naturalistic trend in the story that, though the essential action is inward, it is set in a social matrix. We are constantly kept aware of a public, though this is, characteristically, anonymous and not even represented by typical individuals. There is a running commentary of public opinion, which is for the most part treated with light satire, as being based on very superficial evidence. “Wie die Leute meinten,” Thiel's first wife was not at all suitable for him—because of the difference in their physiques (11). “Wie die Leute versicherten,” Thiel was unaffected by her death—for were not his brass buttons as brightly polished, his red hair as sleeked, as ever (11)? “Die Leute,” again on surface evidence, approve of his second choice: Lene is thought an ideal partner for him (12). Later, to be sure, the opinion of the neighborhood becomes more critical of her. “Die Leute” also censure Thiel for devoting so much time to the dirty brats (Rotznasen) of the settlement (19). Afte the accident to Tobias, Lene, whose callousness and hostility to the boy really caused his death, gets credit with the train passengers as “die arme, arme Mutter” (38), simply because of the way she “takes on,” while the dazed and silent Thiel is comparatively unnoticed. At the end, the neighbors (“man”) discover the frightful denouement, and its effect on them is reflected to us.

All the people in the story belong to the working class. We are not yet dealing with city “Proletariat,” however; Thiel's neighbors are not factory workers, but fishermen and outdoor laborers. The author, to be sure, speaks of the collection of twenty houses (with a store in one room of one of them) as a “Dorf,” but it is little better than a suburban slum, and we are conscious of the nearby metropolis, to which Thiel is finally transported. Nature itself is effete here, without the vigor of the true countryside; we see the river in the background, flowing sluggishly, black and glassy between scantily-leaved poplars (19). We get a glimpse of the village street, with the storekeeper's mangy dog lying in the middle of it and a crow flapping overhead with raucous cries (21). We see Thiel's little cottage, with its low cracked ceilings and narrow steep stairs. As we approach it, we are likely to hear the strident voice of Lene, the former “Kuhmagd,” raised in vituperation. Coarse, burly, sensual, brutally passionate, domineering, and quarrelsome, she is a drastic contrast to Thiel's first wife, Minna, the quiet, frail, and spiritual.⁴

Lene climaxes a flood of vilification of her little stepson by spitting at the child (22). Her excitement in this scene brings out her voluptuous physical charms before her husband's spellbound eyes: we see “das Tier” in its full flush. We see her again spading the potato-patch, stopping only to nurse her child, with panting, sweat-dripping breast (34). Our last view is of her lying in her blood, her skull crushed, her face unrecognizable, butchered with the kitchen hatchet (47).

Of equally unsparing naturalism is the portrait of little Tobias, with his overgrown head and spindling limbs, his yellowish-red hair and chalky complexion and bloodless lips; in his bed, pestered with flies, or eating plaster out of cracks in the wall—a pitiable and at the same time repellent figure of an undernourished, abused, and almost cretinous child. Hauptmann does not spare us the details of the fatal accident: Tobias being tossed about between the wheels, the train grinding to a stop, the commotion and outcry, and finally a close-up picture of the horribly mangled and twisted little body on the stretcher.

This is “naturalistic” writing, no doubt of it. But Hauptmann was not only a Naturalist, and it may be questioned whether he was ever a very “consistent” one. “Konsequenter Naturalismus” calls for an undiscriminating and total “Wiedergabe” or reproduction of life, with no intrusion of the author's subjectivity and no factor of artistic selection. Naturalism of this “purity” is of course only theoretically possible. No real poet has ever been able to eliminate his artistic individuality from his work, and Naturalism itself could not dispense with selection; only it was resolved to select the sordid in human life, to the denial of every poetic element—and thus misrepresented the world quite as badly as did the most supernal idealists.

But there was a Poetic Realist left in Hauptmann. Indeed, one might say that in all periods of his life he betrays, like Goethe, a latent Romanticism. And one can prove both assertions by reference to Bahnwärter Thiel. The action in this story is chiefly an inner, psychological action, as it is in Ludwig's Zwischen Himmel und Erde; its “reality” is essentially that of the mind. It is significant that the most violent happening, the brutal murder of Lene and her infant, after being fully motivated psychologically, is not offered to our view as an act, but only in its results. The starkly sensual love between Thiel and Lene is strongly suggested, but not depicted, as outright Naturalism would have demanded. And the diction of all the persons in the story is kept above the low level of their actual speech.

The things of Nature, too, are not seen materially, but as they affect the mind. The forest is not a source of livelihood or timber; it has no social or economic value at all, but a personal, poetic, religious one. When the din of Man and his machine has died away, Nature resumes its ancient solitary reign: “das alte heil'ge Schweigen schlug über dem Waldwinkel zusammen” (26)—this is the language of Romanticism.

And Man's machine itself, the train, is to some extent poeticized and given symbolical value. The railroads when they first appeared seemed to late-Romanticists like Justinus Kerner an abomination, ringing the knell of all poetry in life. Here, a half-century later, they have become productive of poetic “Stimmung” and wonder. Details of this railroad world are sharply seen and recorded, even to the number of bolts in a section of rail (36) or the items of equipment in the crossing-tender's shed. The phenomena of perspective, as they appear in the patterns of the right-of-way or in the oncoming and receding of a fast train; the “lag” in the sound that follows the white steam-puff of the whistle; the various noises of wheels and brakes and crunching gravel—all these are specific and exact.

And yet the account is shot through with imaginative comparisons: the floods of fog recoil from the embankment like a surf; the rails are strands in a vast iron net or, again, fiery snakes in the sunset red; the telegraph poles give forth mysterious chords, and the wires are like the web of some gigantic spider. The “panting” of a work-train locomotive slowing to a stop is like the heavy, agonized breathing of a sick giant. One can think, for contrast, of what a later realist would have made of “the tracks” as a scene of squalor and crime. But Hauptmann frames his stage with “Wald”—the very word, with all its connotations, cannot be fully rendered by an English one—and trains and tracks and telegraph poles are still things of much mystery and poetry, set in Nature.

The importance attached in this story to “Beruf” or calling is another trait characteristic of Poetic Realism. It appears in the very name of the hero; it is a part of his personality. More important than the external trappings of uniform and cartridge pouch and red flag are the qualities of character that fit Thiel for his work: his neatness, orderliness, and punctuality, symbolized by his old-fashioned but accurate watch and by the signal-bell to which he responds even under the most trying circumstances. Thiel does not yet typify the modern employee nor a class-conscious proletariat nor organized labor. He has still something of the loyal retainer of an earlier age. He belongs with Ludwig's forester Ulrich or slater Apollonius, men whose heart is in their work, and to whom “Beruf” has much of its old, full meaning of work to which one is called.

Thiel lives in two separate worlds. His actual “Wohnung” in the river “colony” is for sleeping and eating and the gratification of sex; but his spiritual home is the little booth on the lonely stretch of track, an island of inwardness and “Erhebung” set in a vast dark-green sea of forest. Nowhere else is Hauptmann's heritage from Romanticism so evident as in his use of the “Wald,” even to the old magical word “Waldeinsamkeit” (24), which takes us straight back to Tieck and Eichendorff.

Throughout the story, the Nature-background is kept in view. There is a rich variety of “Naturstimmungen,” and these moods of Nature are related to the states of mind of the persons, especially the hero. This linking of man with his natural out-of-doors setting is a persistence of Poetic Realism, quite different from the metropolitan milieu of which Naturalism became so fond. With its glorious sunrises and sunsets, Nature draws Thiel's soul out into infinite spaces; and then again with its winter storms it shuts him in to plumb the equally infinite depths of his soul and rise to mystic heights of ecstasy and vision. A stormy night with lightning and wind-tossed trees forms a background and parallel to his inner upheaval. A radiant morning that follows, with floods of sunlight and the sleepy dripping of dew from the leaves, helps to assuage his sense of guilt and impending tragedy. After the frightful accident, Nature itself seems paralyzed with horror: “Es ist still ringsum geworden, totenstill; schwarz und heiss ruhen die Geleise auf dem blendenden Kies. Der Mittag hat die Winde erstickt, und regungslos wie aus Stein steht der Forst” (39).

For the desolate scene of the work-train returning with Tobias's body a fit stage-setting is briefly indicated: “Ein kaltes Zwielicht lag über der Gegend” (43). As the stretcher with the unconscious Thiel is carried through the woods, the reddish moon pales to a funeral lamp, giving the faces of the little company a cadaverous cast, and its pallid light is swallowed up in the dark basins of the clearings (45). Sometimes a nature-scene is interpolated as “relief” after a scene of violence. Thus, after Thiel's second vision of Minna, which ends with the compulsive idea of a savage murder, we read: “Ein sanfter Abendhauch strich leis und nachhaltig über den Forst, und rosaflammiges Wolkengelock hing über dem westlichen Himmel” (41f.). Or, just before the catastrophe, there is a delicate picture of springtime Nature that might have come out of the late-Romantic world of Storm's Immensee: “Stücke blauen Himmels schienen auf den Boden des Haines herabgesunken, so wunderbar dicht standen kleine, blaue Blüten darauf. Farbigen Wimpeln gleich flatterten und gaukelten die Schmetterlinge lautlos zwischen dem leuchtenden Weiss der Stämme, indes durch die zart grünen Blätterwolken der Birkenkronen ein sanftes Rieseln ging” (35).

To the field of modern realism, on the other hand, belong the many small details of everyday living that characterize the hero in his outward appearance and demeanor, and the psychological finesse with which his inner life is exposed. Thiel is an orderly and dutiful man, slow, given to routine and set habits—for years the various things he carries in his pockets have been laid out on his dresser in a fixed order, and go back in that order (20). He has an animal-like patience and a childlike good-nature, a big and muscular frame, and coarse-cut features that nevertheless reflect “soul.” He is a person of “mystische Neigungen,” which are fostered by the isolation of his place of work and the uneventful monotony of his outward existence. With this religious-mystical bent is linked a sensitive, if inarticulate, feeling for Nature and a musical sense: listening raptly to the mysterious harmonies that issue from the telegraph poles, he can fancy himself in church, or in Heaven (35).

Outer events appear to make little impression on Thiel; he seems to possess infinite inner compensations: “Die Aussenwelt schien ihm wenig anhaben zu können: es war, als trüge er etwas in sich, wodurch er alles Böse, was sie ihm antat, reichlich mit Gutem aufgewogen erhielt” (13). His powers of expression are extremely limited; things that do affect him, without outward sign, tend to “go down” and accumulate, and erupt later. He has something of the monumental simplicity and quietness of Brentano's Anna Margaret, and his slow, deep speech and “leiser, kühler Ton” (13) remind us of hers.

He reminds us also of another Common Man a half-century earlier, Büchner's Woyzeck, the most unheroic hero in the German drama up to his time. Both are simple, not to say simpleminded, faithful, “kinderlieb,” inarticulate, concealing profound spiritual depths beneath a usually tranquil surface; easy-going, slow to suspicion and wrath, but finally capable of murderous violence against the women who have failed them. Lene also bears some resemblance to Woyzeck's Marie: a strapping, sensual woman, but one with a conscience and a capacity for acute contrition. Büchner, like Hauptmann, regards both these humble folk with deep compassion, though this feeling is not obtruded upon the narrative itself. It is interesting to recall that Hauptmann was one of the first “discoverers” of Büchner; just a few weeks after completing Bahnwärter Thiel he lectured on Büchner to the “Durch” literary club in Berlin, and he seems to have recognized Büchner as a literary forebear.⁵

Thiel exemplifies Faust's “zwei Seelen:” his consciousness is the battleground of man's spiritual and sensual natures, of sacred and profane love. He is a man placed in a sort of Grillparzerian triangle between two women of opposite types: one sickly, delicate, spiritual; the other robust, coarse, sensual. The two sides of his own nature correspond and respond to these two women: his pious, mystical, compassionate spirit to Minna; his brute strength and phlegma and primitive sensuality to Lene. Minna dies in childbirth, leaving a continuation of her being in Tobias—for Thiel's relation to both is spiritual: they call forth his pity, devotion, and tenderness divorced from sex in the ordinary sense.

Thiel's other nature comes to the fore in his second marriage. He justifies this, to be sure, as a step for Tobias's benefit; this is the only reason he gives the pastor, and it seems sanctioned by Minna's dying injunction (12); but one suspects a certain amount of rationalization in all this. At any rate, Thiel falls under Lene's physical spell, at times so completely that he is utterly unnerved and callously ignores Tobias's sufferings. Troubled in conscience by this apostasy, he then “compensates” by increased attention to Tobias (which intensifies Lene's jealous dislike of the child to the pitch of hatred) and by converting his lonely gate-tender's booth into a sort of chapel consecrated to the memory of Minna. He divides his time conscientiously between the living and the dead, thus fulfilling his obligations to both women and both sides of his nature. He keeps his worlds completely separate, withholding from Lene any knowledge of the number and location of his booth and keeping her, on one pretext or another, from ever accompanying him thither (14).

This arrangement functions successfully for a long while, and Thiel achieves a satisfactory equilibrium; only at certain times, when he “comes out of” an especially deep communion with the dead in his lonely devotions, does he feel disgust at his “other” life (15). The crisis, however, comes one evening when it dawns upon his slow-working brain that, because of necessary arrangements about a potato-patch, Lene will be invading his sanctuary in the woods and destroying the precarious balance of his mental and moral existence. At this instant, a thick black curtain of self-deception seems to be rent asunder, and he sees clearly what he has committed as it were in a two years' trance (28). Under the pressure of agonized repentance, he experiences a dream-vision in which his suppressed guilt-feelings take terrifying shape, dream and reality merging so convincingly that he all but stops a speeding train to keep the apparition of Minna from being run over.

The necessities of “real” life, represented by the potatoes which are such an indispensable staple for the poor, soon compel an adjustment, to be sure, and Thiel seems to accept the inevitable with a good grace, even going so far as to let Lene eat lunch with him in the sacred booth (36). But the psychological trauma, inflicted by this desecration of the past and vitiation of his conditions for normal existence, has of course not been overcome on a deeper level, and when Lene's carelessness causes the death of Tobias, the “other” world rises in a second and more compelling vision (41f.), and at its behest Thiel wreaks vengeance with a savageness in which there is a large amount of “displaced” consciousness of his own guilt and perfidy.

The psychological sequences which Hauptmann presents are extraordinarily lifelike and convincing. As a result of a surprise return home (he had forgotten his lunch), Thiel witnesses Lene's mistreatment of Tobias, previous signs of which he had “suppressed;” but, succumbing to Lene's physical and sexual power, he retreats in silent defeat. He loses himself in his duties at the tracks, in the contemplation of a magnificent sunset and the passing of a train. This defense of distraction wears thin, however—the more so as Nature's silent solemnity has stirred the deeper religious levels of his mind—and suddenly the name “Minna” comes up from below, as yet without conscious connection, to his lips. He succeeds in dropping it, while he absently sips his coffee and reads a scrap of newspaper he had picked up along the track. He begins to feel restless, thinks it is due to the heat in the booth, takes off his coat and vest, then decides to “do something” to get relief. He starts to spade up the garden patch, and the physical exertion proves soothing. But then apropos of this patch the thought arises that now Lene can no longer be prevented from coming out here, his carefully built up compensation will be lost and his guilt-feeling revived. Now he hates the patch he was so joyful over. Hastily, as though he had been committing a sacrilege, he pulls the spade out of the ground and puts it away. He is ready to fight some “invader” of his sanctuary; his muscles tense, he utters a defiant laugh; startled by this sound, he loses his train of thought, but finds it again—or it finds him, one might say, and holds him. Now in a flash he must recognize the reality of the domestic situation he has so long evaded, above all the plight of Tobias, that legacy from his earlier, better life; and he is wrung with pity, remorse, and a deep sense of shame over his long bondage (23-28).

In Thiel, Hauptmann has given a tragically impressive picture of a man seeking (in this case with no great mental resources) to reconcile two conflicting sides of his given nature, the needs of the spirit and the needs of the flesh. The balance which Thiel has for a space achieved, in his simple way, seems so insecure that one feels, had the fatal mishap to Tobias not occurred, some other crisis would surely have developed. The frightful “justice” which he wreaks on Lene and her child does not avail to redress Thiel's balance, for it is either the result or the contributory cause of the insanity which marks the final collapse of all effort.

It may not be too fanciful to think of Thiel as a sort of “gesteigerter Spielmann.” Both are fundamentally good men, dutiful, kind, patient, trusting, utterly simple, relatively defenseless, yet distinguished by an uncommonly strong and deep inner life. Both defend this inner life, to some extent successfully, against the assaults of the outside world. But with a difference: Thiel has gone all the way along the road on which Jakob has been able to reach a stopping-place. The delusion which helps to shield Jakob from reality has reached a pathological extreme in Thiel; “Wahn” has become “Wahnsinn.” One might say that Thiel's insanity constitutes the soul's retreat, in the face of unbearable torment, into its innermost fastness, from which there is no return, but also no expulsion. Thiel demonstrates in ultimate and desperate terms the superior reality of ideas over the “facts” of life which we observed in gentler form in the case of the poor fiddler.

The problem that has not become tragic for Jakob because of his very “Untüchtigkeit” and “Selbstbescheidung,” but that becomes destructive for Thiel, is the problem of sex. The obsession with this problem, and its disillusioned, not to say cynical treatment in Bahnwärter Thiel, is a mark of Naturalism and not of Poetic Realism. The “Problematik” of sex and marriage dominates the story, and in the last analysis it is sex as affliction, as a source of guilt and destruction, as it was to be represented, a few years after this, in the plays of Frank Wedekind.

Bahnwärter Thiel could be described as a kind of bitter allegory of Man persecuted by Woman. Thiel is tyrannized and enslaved no less by the continuing spiritual influence of his first wife than by the sensuality of the second. The spirit of the first mercilessly condemns his physical sexuality and mercilessly exacts murderous atonement: “black blood” for black blood. The body of the second seems to Thiel the very incarnation of sexual vitality, overpowering, enervating, inspiring in man a mixture of lust, fear, and resentment at subjugation. Between these two opposite types of woman, Thiel is ground to pieces as between an upper and a nether millstone. He achieves no full happiness with either, but only an overwhelming sense of guilt that drives him to murder and madness.

But to the two women, who destroy Thiel, sex likewise brings destruction. Each is cut off early by anguish and death as a result of her sexual nature, and the offspring of each perishes violently. All these sufferers are viewed by the young author with that compassion which was to become so characteristic of his subsequent work that Hauptmann has been called “der Dichter des Mitleids.”

Compassion is a saving grace left to an age that has lost hope and belief in an ultimate meaning in events. For Storm, too, death meant final annihilation. Yet man's end was heroic, and his work survived him, and perpetuated his name. Here, nothing survives. There is no “Ausblick,” no vista of a better future, no uplift or ennobling effect of tragedy, but only dumb brute suffering that terminates in dull, savage destruction. Here is a pessimism that outdoes even Grillparzer's. For the poor fiddler achieved a triumph of the spirit. He rose at the end to heroism, even in the conventional sense of the word, and he was assumed into Heaven: “der musiziert jetzt mit den lieben Engeln, die auch nicht viel besser sein können, als er.”⁶ Thiel's course is not upward, but downward, and a not merely material but mental deterioration. Jakob becomes a hero and a benefactor, Thiel a murderer and an inmate of an asylum for the criminally insane.

Der Schimmelreiter, for all its scepticism, still looks back to the great age of Idealism, with its faith in salient individuals and indestructible spiritual values; Hauke Haien is a great man with a mission, a brother to Kohlhaas. Bahnwärter Thiel, on the other hand, despite its residual Romanticism, looks out upon a new age of materialism, mass humanity, and social “conditions;” its hero is a “kleiner Mann” of no prominence or formidableness, whose end brings a shudder of pathos rather than the sharp, tonic thrill of high tragedy.

Though Bahnwärter Thiel was actually written shortly before Der Schimmelreiter, it impresses us as a decidedly more modern work. For one thing, it deals with a contemporary situation, Der Schimmelreiter with one of the eighteenth century. Storm's theme comes out of the mists of folk tradition; Hauptmann's might have come out of the morning's newspaper. Der Schimmelreiter concludes an epoch, Bahnwärter Thiel opens an epoch. The one is the last work of a man of seventy-one, the other the first work of a man of twenty-four;⁷ the one ends, the other begins, a long literary lifetime. Brentano's Kasperl und Annerl appeared in the year of Storm's birth, Bahnwärter Thiel just seventy years later; within that span, one may say, lies the achievement of Poetic Realism.

But that age was now ended. Der Schimmelreiter is its last great monument in the Novelle, and Storm the last great literary exponent of its middle-class ideals: “Er steht an der Grenze und ist der Letzte der grossen deutschen bürgerlichen Literatur.”⁸ With the death of Gottfried Keller in 1890 the greatest of the Poetic Realists expires. Storm had died two years earlier; Meyer lived on eight years longer, but his productive powers were blighted after 1891. With the passing of these three supreme masters of its most successful embodiment—the Novelle—the great period of Poetic Realism comes to a close.

In other spheres, too, the year 1890 was a demarcation. In that year the self-confident young Emperor William II forced the retirement of the veteran statesman Bismarck, and launched Germany on the course that was to end in the disaster of two world wars. New forces were coming to the fore on the world's stage: imperialism, economic internationalism, socialism, big business, and a mechanization of life such as the writers of Poetic Realism could have had no conception of. In literature, a new era was inaugurated when in 1889 the “Neue freie Bühne” in Berlin presented Hauptmann's Vor Sonnenaufgang and Sudermann's Ehre. The “Bürgertum,” which had formed the social basis and the center of interest for Poetic Realism, was supplanted by the urban proletariat, whose misery writers sought to reproduce with photographic exactitude, in place of the artistic reflection of reality which was the ideal of Keller's generation. If the Poetic Realists seemed old-fashioned to the adherents of Naturalism, these in turn have become old-fashioned in the perspective of a half-century that has seen Neo-Romanticism, Impressionism, Neo-Classicism, Expressionism, Neue Sachlichkeit, Magischer Realismus, and other “waves of the future” recede into eddies of the past.

The achievement of Poetic Realism, for a time obscured by its successors, shone forth again with heightened lustre—not because there was any specific virtue in its poetic theory, but because of the excellence of many of its poetic productions. Great literature is made by poets, not by theorists (a poet is, etymologically, a “maker;” a theorist, a “viewer”). We divide the history of literature, for convenience, into periods and movements, and we treat it, for convenience, in such divisions, as has been done in the present book. But such procedures are only scaffolding, or fencing-off, to enable us to get close to what counts most: the individual artistic creation.

The supreme test of all poetry (“Dichtung” in the broad German sense) is its power to body forth new beings and their environing worlds, persons who were not before the inspired vision saw them and fixed them with the inexplicable magic of words, making them more real than the man who passes us in the street, for their reality is renewed, as the ordinary mortal's is not, each time those magical verbal symbols pass before the eyes of an imaginative reader or listener. If this creativity be the criterion of great literature, then the German Poetic Realists of the Novelle have added richly to its permanent store.

Notes

1. Gerhart Hauptmann, Gesammelte Werke in acht Bänden (Berlin: Fischer, 1921), V, 37-39. All subsequent references in the text are to pages of this volume.

2. Hauptmann uses irony elsewhere in the story, e.g., in the fact that Thiel, who has always been so scrupulous about lowering his gates (though hardly anyone ever passed over that remote crossing), must see his own child run over by a train; or that Lene, just before her death, is deeply changed for the better, yet the new woman, so to speak, is killed for the misdeeds of the old.

3. It is a “modern” feature of Hauptmann's story that he uses actual place-names of the vicinity of Berlin instead of the invented places of older fiction.

4. But Minna, too, is not idealized nor made especially attractive. Hauptmann gives the briefest, soberest “life” of her: she appears one Sunday with Thiel in church; another Sunday marries him, and shares his pew and hymn-book for two years, her delicate face a contrast to his; then one weekday the bell tolls for her, and the next Sunday Thiel is again alone in his pew (11).

5. Büchner's fragmentary narrative Lenz (1836) is a marvellous study in mental deterioration, far in advance of its times. Had it been completed, it would probably have been one of the great psychological Novellen of the century.

6. Grillparzer's Sämtliche Werke, Wien edition, Abt. I, vol. 13, p. 79.

7. Promethidenlos (1885) does not really count, as it was recalled after publication.

8. Georg von Lukács, Die Seele und die Formen, 165.