While, on the whole, conditions in Germany were not favorable to the development of the drama during this period, prose fiction in the form of the novel and the short story flour ished all the more. Its chief representatives are Karl Gutzkow ((Die Ritter vom Geist'), Gustav Freytag ('Soil und Haben,) 'Die ver lorne Handschrift'), Gottfried Keller ((Der grime Heinrich,' Leute von Seldwyle), Theodor Storm, Paul Heyse, and the writers of village stories such as Jeremias Gotthelf, Ber thold Auerbach, Melchior Meyr, and their numerous followers. The most original of these novelists, a master of the first rank, whom Paul Heyse fittingly called the Shakespeare of the German novel, is the Swiss writer, Gottfried Keller (1819-90). Next to him in eminence ranks Theodor Storm (1817-88), a prose poet whose 'Novellen) or short stories, like those of Keller, present in its most consummate form a kind of story which seems unknown in Eng lish literature. The revival of the study of German antiquity, so eloquently advocated by the Romanticists as a means of national re generation, remained one of the most potent literary forces during the entire Century. Its influence can be seen in the effect of the col lections of old German folksongs by Clemens Brentano and A. von Arnim Knaben Wunderhorn,) 1808) and by Uhland ('Alte hock und niederdeutsche Volkslieder,' 1845), in the popularity of the translations of the old German poetry such as the (Nibelungenlied,' the (Gudrun,' and the songs of Walther von der Vogelweide, or of historical novels dealing with old German life such as W. Hauff's (Lichtenstein' (1826), V. Sheffel's (Ekkehard) (1862), and G. Freytag's grand prose epic, Ahnen) (1872-80), preceded by his classical his torical sketches, 'Bilder aus der deutschen Ver gangenheit' (1859-62). The most artistic and permanent expression of the movement aiming at a national regeneration by means of a renewal of the spirit of Germanic mythology and is to be found, however, in the music drama of Richard Wagner (1813 83). It is insignificant, therefore, that the first performance of the 'Ring der Nibelungen) 08761 in the Testspielhaus) at Bayreuth, a tew years after the establishment of the Ger man Empire, was considered by contemporaries as the festive dawn of a new era of German art.
The fulfilment of patriotic hones and wishes which the national rising of 1870 brought was, however, slow in manifesting itself in literature. Music, the plastic and graphic arts. and the natural sciences had taken the position which poetry had hitherto occupied in the German mind. Under the leadership of Bistnarck's towering personality, the very embodiment of elemental will power, a new spirit soon began, however, to pervade the nation, directing its energies from mere thinking and dreaming to a life of action and to a new sense of the con crete in every sphere of life. Filled with this new spirit and encouraged by certain foreign authors, such as Zola and Ibsen, a group of young men undertook during the eighties to re form German literature along the lines of nat uralism and to win back for it its lost prestige in the estimation of the nation. Much in this movement was abstract theorizing and fruitless esthetic experimentation of doctrinaires, whom Goethe would have called 'forced talents?) In their futile effort to vie with the method of exact science the real leaders of the movement found, however, a new way of observing reality and of reproducing what they considered 'gift.* This new literary technique, the only permanent contribution to literature of the movement, manifested itself first in the revival of lyric poetry, represented by such men as Arno Holz, Karl Henckel and especially by Detlef von Liliencron (1844-1909), the greatest poetic tal ent among these early impressionistic lyricists. It was, however, through the novel and the drama that the militant naturalists carried on their chief campaign. Stories such as Lilien
cron's (1893), W. von Po lenz's (1895), Hermann Suder mann's Sorge' (1887), Georg von Omp teda's 'Sylvester von Geyer' (1897), and Helene Bohlau's (Der Rangierbahnhof (1896) are some of the best specimens of the new realistic romance, to which also an older master, Theo dor Fontane (1819-98), contributed several of his maturest works ('Irrungen, Wirrungen,) 1888, Briest,) 1895). Yet it was in the field of the drama that the realistic movement created its most permanent values and won its greatest success. It was inaugurated with much noise by several dramas such as Holz Schlaf's 'Familie Selicke) (1890) and Ger hardt Hauptmann's 'Vor Sonnenaufgang) (1889) and (Die Weber' (1892) in which the young playwrights, all careful students of Ib sen, presented a photographit picture of social conditions as they saw them and as they agreed with the strong socialistic tendency of the times. The fact that many of these pictures ac centuated the ugly and gloomy aspect of life was due, however, not only to a dearer vision of reality and to strong socialistic sympathies, but also to the pessimistic mood which had enthralled the German mind for generations and had been the dominant note even in Wag ner's music drama. That the German spirit was liberated from this mood, that in place of senile pessimism it embraced a youthful opti mism, the will to live, to face the problems of the present and to love life, that the individual freed itself from the bonds of tradition and the uniformity of mass life and took courage to become what it was destined to be: a free personality striving continually toward the more perfect and beautiful life of a higher humanity, was the work of the poet-philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900). Much in • his aphor istic teachings, expressed in the most exquisite German prose, which becomes mannered only when it affects the language of the Sermon on the Mount, was exaggerated, misleading and transitory, but the influence of his chief work 'Also sprach Zarathustra' (1883-91), upon the literature and the intellectual life of Germany in general has been very great. A pathfinder and perhaps a prophet, who fell a victim to the inner struggles of a time of transition, his message produced above all a deep longing for new religious and ethical values and a revival of the idealism of the classical and romantic period. The return to the inborn idealism of the German mind without sacrificing the best attainments of the realistic movement can be seen in the career of Gerhardt Hauptman (b. 1862), Germany's greatest contemporary dramatist. It is noticeable already in the fairy drama 'Hannele's Himmelsfahrt> (1893) and becomes more pronounced in the subsequent plays 'Die versunkene Glocke> (1896), 'Michael 'Cramer> (1900), 'Der arme Heinrich' (1902), etc. The recovery of the domain of imagina tive freedom, the emancipation of personality and the reverence for beauty which the Neo Romantic revival of the last decades brought, are evident also in the new novel and in the new lyric of this latest period. While there is no genius of the depth and greatness of a Goethe and a Schiller, or even of a Novalis and Holderlin among the present writers, there is an abundance of eminent talent of which any country might be proud. The work of novelists like Thomas Mann ('Die Budden brooks,' 1901), Arthur Schn'tzler, Clara Viebig ((Die Wacht am Rhein,> 1902), Isolde Kurz ('Italienische Erzahlungen,> 1895), Hermann Hesse Camenzind,> 1904), and Ricarda Huch ('Ludolf Urslen,> 1893) and of lyricists like Richard Dahmel, Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Stefan George— to mention only a few representative names —bears witness to the weightiness of content and the finish of artistic workmanship at which the German literature of the present has arrived. .