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Updated: May 27, 2025
This course was officially announced as a study of Bernard Shaw, Ibsen, Strindberg, Pinero, Hauptmann, Sudermann, Maeterlinck, D'Annunzio, and Rostand; but unofficially announced by Professor Frazer as an attempt to follow the spirit of to-day wherever it should be found in contemporary literature. Carl and the Turk were bewildered but staunchly enthusiastic disciples of the course.
At the very first we disagreed with the parents so amicably about Ibsen and Sudermann that I was almost sorry to have the son take our modern side of the controversy and declare himself an admirer of those authors with us.
And yet how much this poet and mystic owes to the French naturalistic movement of thirty odd years ago. It was Arno Holz and the young Hauptmann who stood the brunt of the battle in Germany for the new realism. Sudermann, too, joined in the fight, though later.
But in the nineteenth century, where does the American of sober intelligence, if Lincoln be omitted, find a match for Bismarck as a statesman, Heine as a wit and song-writer, Wagner, Brahms, and Beethoven as musicians, Goethe as a man of letters and poet, the still living influence of Lessing and Winckelmann as critics, Fichte as a scholarly patriot, Hegel and Kant as philosophers, von Humboldt, Liebig, Helmholtz, Bunsen, and Haeckel as scientists, Moltke and Roon as soldiers, Ranke and Mommsen as historians, Auerbach, Spielhagen, Sudermann, Freytag, "Fritz" Reuter, and Hauptmann as novelists and dramatists, Krupp and Borsig as manufacturers, and the Rothschilds as bankers?
No living playwright knows better how to arouse suspense than Sudermann, and he can't make us believe in his false theme, consequently his motivation in the last two acts is false and disappointing.
The honours were easily borne away by a pretty Viennese actress from the Volks Theatre there, Elsa Galafrés by name, whose methods are Gallic, whose personality is charming. Critical Berlin has taken her to itself, and her theatrical fortune is made. It may be confessed that her part, despite its artificiality, is one that any actress in the world would jump at. Sudermann is a conjurer.
Its picture of manners, its mundane environment, its epigrams and dramatic bravoura will make it welcome everywhere. Sudermann is still Klingsor, the evoker of artificial figures, not the poet who creates living men and women.
At the very first we disagreed with the parents so amicably about Ibsen and Sudermann that I was almost sorry to have the son take our modern side of the controversy and declare himself an admirer of those authors with us.
There is Hermann Sudermann, for example, the precise antipodes of Wedekind Sudermann, the inexhaustible bottle of the German theatre, the conjurer who imperturbably pours out any flavour, colour, or liquid you desire from his bottle; presto, here is Ibsen, or Dumas, or Hauptmann, or Sardou; comedy, satire, tragedy, farce, or the marionettes of the fashionable world!
We are daily attaining the latter through such authors as Sudermann and Elsa Gerusalem, who have enabled their readers to comprehend the so-called "fallen" woman through a skilful portrayal of the reaction of experience upon personality.
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