Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: Degeneration / by Max Nordau. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Provider: This material has been provided by King’s College London. The original may be consulted at King’s College London.
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![How does It happen that an artist, who applies his means with so fine a taste and with so skilful a calculation of the effect, can commit at the same time such naivetes as, for example, these stage-directions in Vor Sonnenaufgang : ' Frau Krause, at the moment of seating herself, remembers ['] that grace has not yet been said, and mechanically folds her hands though without otherwise controlling her malice.' ' It is the peasant Krause who, as always [1], is the last to leave the inn.* * He embraces her with the awkwardness of a gorilla,' etc. How is an actor to set to work by his awkwardness to 'make a spectator think precisely of a gorilla, or to show him that, ' as always,' he is the last to leave the inn ? More especially) how is it to be explained that this same Hauptmann, who has created Die Weber, should after this lofty composition have written the novels Der Apostel and Bahnwarter Thiel ?* Here we fall back into the lowest depths of Young-German incapacity. The idea is nonsensical and a plagiarism, the story has not a ray of truth, and the language (so original and lifelike, and so exactly rendering the lightest shades of thought when the author has recourse to patois) is commonplace and slipshod enough to make one weep. No words must be wasted on Der Apostel. A dreamer, manifestly touched by insanit}^ perambulates the streets of Zurich in the costume of an Oriental prophet, and is taken to be Christ by the crowd who worship him. This is the whole story. It is represented in such a way that we never know whether the narrative is telling what the Apostle dreamed or what really happened. His ideas and sentiments are an echo of Nietzsche. Zarathustra has incontestably got into Hanptmann's head, and left him no peace till he had himself produced a second infusion of this idiocy. The railway signalman, Thiel, has lost his wife at the birth of their first child. Constantly away from home on duty, he is obliged to marry again that his child may be cared for. The second wife, who soon gives her husband a child of her own, ill-treats the motherless one. In spite of Thiel's warnings, she one day leaves her stepchild on the rails un- tended, and it is crushed by a train. The signalman then murders his wife and her child with a hatchet in the most horrible manner at night, and is shut up in a lunatic asylum? as a furious madman. Let me quote just a few of his descrip- tions : ' In the obscurity . . . the signalman's hut was trans- formed into a chapel. A faded photograph of the dead woman on the table before him, his Psalm-book and Bible open, he read and sang alternately the whole night through, interrupted only by the trains tearing past at intervals, and fell into an * Gerhart Hauptmann, Ver Apostel, Bahnwarter Thiel, Novellistische Studien. Berlin, 1892.](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b21294355_0550.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
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