Paul Ernst

• Born: March 7, 1866
• Birthplace: Elbingerode, Saxony (now in Germany)
• Died: May 13, 1933
• Place of death: St. Georgen, Austria

Other Literary Forms

During the early 1890’s, Paul Ernst was editor of the Marxist Berliner Volkstribüne (Berlin people’s tribune), but he left politics and journalism in 1896 to pursue a career as a poet, philosopher, and literary critic. He was a prolific writer. In addition to drama, he wrote poetry, a number of novels—as well as a popular autobiography—a large corpus of epic verse, numerous short stories, and hundreds of essays on economic, philosophical, and literary issues.

Achievements

Paul Ernst, like many thinkers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, was deeply troubled by the growing pessimism and cultural skepticism of his times. Worried that this spiritual malaise—in his eyes, the result of the dehumanizing effects of the modern industrial world—was draining Western civilization of its vital strength, Ernst felt compelled to take action. He turned first to politics. Soon disappointed by the failure of the German Social Democratic movement to effect any lasting change at the turn of the twentieth century, he then turned to theater. For him, drama—the “highest” form of all art—held the key to modern people’s spiritual rejuvenation because it, like all art, was in principle capable of rising above what he called the “tyrannies” of socioeconomic determination. Unlike other human institutions, drama thus enjoyed a certain autonomy, which, when cultivated, could present humanity with an inspiring vision of the ultimate value and freedom of the human spirit.

To this end, he strove to articulate a modern, “neoclassical,” form of drama that, contrary to the tastes of the time, harkened back to the strict form and structure of classical Greek drama to impart its timeless message about the heroic and idealistic human spirit. Because matters of plot and action were, however, ultimately subordinate to the dictates of refined form and dramatic conflict, Ernst’s exalted idealism failed to move audiences. Though inspired and noble in conception, Ernst’s dramas proved all too often to be little more than thinly veiled platforms for his personal crusade.

In an essay of 1916 written in honor of Ernst’s fiftieth birthday, the influential Hungarian literary critic and political philosopher Georg Lukács characterized Ernst as a great writer and thinker whose dramas were nevertheless doomed to be excluded from the canons of the literary establishment. Though Lukács was later to recant his praise of Ernst, these early remarks proved to be prophetic: With the exception of one brief period, Ernst’s dramatic works never enjoyed wide recognition. His talents, literary historians are quick to point out, were of a more philosophical than artistic nature. Indeed, Ernst was himself painfully aware of the crippling discrepancy between his theoretical program and his artistic production, and though he made repeated attempts to bridge the gap between theory and practice, he never really succeeded in translating his philosophical idealism into artistic creativity.

It is ironic that the only period in which Ernst’s drama enjoyed positive critical acclaim was posthumously, during the National Socialist era. This ill-fated recognition—Nazi purveyors of German cultural supremacy hailed him as the misunderstood prophet of the new German society—dealt his reputation the final deathblow. Except for a few literary historians who have sought to understand his relation to cultural and aesthetic revolutions of the early twentieth century, Ernst’s dramatic works have attracted little critical attention since the fall of the Third Reich.

Biography

In 1866, Paul Karl Friedrich Ernst was born in Elbingerode, a small town in the Harz Mountains of central Germany. The son of a miner who valued education and learning, the young Ernst was encouraged to pursue his early interests in literature and philosophy. These interests, combined with his generally brooding temperament, earned for him the nickname Philosopher from his schoolmates. In 1885, he began his university training at Göttingen and, complying with the wishes of his parents, took up the study of theology. In the following year, after a semester at Tübingen, he transferred to Berlin, where his interest in literature brought him into contact with Gerhart Hauptmann, Arno Holz, and Johannes Schlaf, the leading figures of the naturalist movement in Germany. Through his close association with these politically engaged writers, he developed an intense concern for the plight of the exploited working class, and shortly after his arrival in Berlin he joined the Social Democratic Party. Having abandoned theology to devote himself to the study of political science and economics, Ernst felt obliged to forgo the financial support of his parents. For the next twelve years, until he married into the financially secure von Berda family, he supported himself as a freelance journalist, writing emotionally charged essays on a wide range of subjects, from politics and social reform to literary criticism.

During this period—from the late 1880’s to the early 1890’s—Ernst put political activism above everything else in his life because, as a confirmed Marxist, he believed that the revolutionary Social Democratic movement was capable of altering the socioeconomic structure and achieving social equality. Though he was drawn to great works of literature, especially the monumental works of Fyodor Dostoevski, he felt no compelling inner need to take up the literary pen himself. By the mid-1890’s, however, he began to realize that the social reform he sought was unattainable by political means. Bitterly disillusioned by the lack of progress made by the Social Democrats, indeed by political activism in general, he left politics for good in 1896, channeling his revolutionary zeal into literary production. Literature, he had come to believe, must strive to achieve that which is unattainable in the political arena.

Though his early one-act plays Lumpenbagasch and Im Chambre séparée won the praise of his naturalist contemporaries, Ernst harbored serious doubts about the ultimate success of the naturalist project, which, in focusing attention on the abject conditions of the downtrodden working class, was supposed to bring about social reform. These doubts crystallized in 1898 in his critique of naturalism found in the essay “Modern Drama.” Here Ernst begins to articulate ideas that form the mainstay of his neoclassical theory of drama. Naturalist drama, he argued, was doomed to failure because its dismal portrayal of modern humanity as a powerless victim of social and economic forces was, in the final analysis, too pessimistic. Humanity is more than a will-less product of its milieu, Ernst argued, because there is something noble and idealistic in individuals that will always struggle to resist the tyrannical forces of reality.

During the next five years—a period that he later described as a “veritable hell”—Ernst produced a series of theoretical tracts and a small amount of fiction—including his first novel, Der schmale Weg zum Gluck (published 1904)—but no drama. In 1903, he moved to Weimar, where he hoped to become the first director of a newly forming theater company. Though the proposed company did not materialize, Ernst found in Weimar support and encouragement from a small circle of like-minded neoclassicists (most notably Samuel Lublinski and Wilhelm von Scholz), and in that same year he completed his first neoclassical tragedy, Demetrios. The next few years found Ernst at the apex of his career as a dramatist. Within the span of three years, he produced, in addition to a large corpus of dramaturgical writings, no fewer than six dramas. The year 1905 seemed to Ernst to be particularly auspicious. Having accepted a position as chief artist-in-residence at the prestigious Düsseldorf Playhouse, Ernst believed that he and his movement were at long last on the verge of lasting success. This, however, did not prove to be the case; his hopes of making the Düsseldorf theater into a kind of center for neoclassicism, like his planned periodical, Form, were short-lived. Ernst’s high-minded theater project, like his dramas themselves, were met with a crushing indifference. Within a year of arriving in Düsseldorf, he returned, bitter and discouraged, to Weimar.

After his disappointing engagement in Düsseldorf, Ernst became increasingly cynical, conservative, and reclusive. Despite the repeated failure of his work, he nevertheless continued to write plays for another decade. By 1918, however, he was all but convinced that the true artist has no place in the modern world; having completed that year his last drama, he took leave of society and retired to Sonnenhof, his Bavarian country estate. There, he refocused his intellectual energies, and in 1918, as World War I was reaching its devastating end, he published his well-timed collections of essays, Der Zusammenbruch des deutschen Idealismus (the collapse of idealism) and Der Zusammenbruch des Marxismus (the collapse of Marxism). In these books, marked by a resentful spirit of resignation, he attempted to understand and then articulate why not only idealistic philosophy and literature but also Marxist political theory had failed to halt the destructive advance of European capitalism and the cultural-spiritual bankruptcy that, he thought, had followed in its wake.

In the final period of his life, Ernst devoted himself to prose, to autobiographical writing, and to the monumental task of creating three volumes of a verse epic. Shortly before his death in 1933, he returned to Germany from Austria, where he had been living since 1925, and was shocked by the new nationalistic regime that had begun to sing his praises. Sad and disoriented, he left Germany and died a few months later at his isolated castle in St. Georgen, Austria. In a sonnet composed in final days, he lamented: “The world is such, that I cannot live.”

Analysis

Paul Ernst’s dramatic work falls into three major periods: his early, naturalistic period; his late, redemption drama period; and his middle, neoclassical period, for which he is best known. Though his work underwent significant changes in theme and style, one aspect remained constant throughout his career: All his dramas depict humanity struggling for freedom—and, ultimately, ethical ideals—in an overpowering world of rigid necessities. In his early naturalistic plays Lumpenbagasch and Im Chambre séparée, which attempted to reflect in the crassest terms the sordid milieu of the degenerate and oppressed lower class, these necessities are manifest in the theme of social determinism. In the plays of his middle and late periods, beginning with his first neoclassical tragedy, Demetrios, Ernst moved from the explicitly social sphere to, in his view, the higher and more universally valid realm of fate. By reactivating and modernizing the classical Greek notion of an incomprehensible fate, which he saw as analogous to the bewilderingly complex and unintelligible socioeconomic forces at play in the modern industrial world, Ernst attempted to create dramatic situations that would reawaken people’s ethical and idealistic spirit.

With the exception of five one-act plays written during his early period, all of Ernst’s eighteen dramas are set in either a historical or a mythical past. This distance from the realities of the present, Ernst believed, was a necessary condition for presenting “eternally” valid dramatic conflict. In thereby avoiding the relativism of the naturalist milieu drama and the self-indulgent excesses of fin de siècle impressionism, Ernst hoped to free his drama from temporal and subjective limitations so that he could concentrate on what he called the objective “requirements of form.” For Ernst, successful drama—that is, drama capable of countering the pessimism of the times and of extolling the inherent value and dignity of humanity’s struggle for existence—could be produced only by an artist who willingly submitted to certain timeless principles. His five-act tragedy Demetrios, written in 1903 and 1904, was his first attempt to put into practice the universally valid principles of dramatic construction that he had painstakingly elaborated in his theoretical writings of the preceding six years. Demetrios is written in a somber and refined blank verse, a form that he perfected in his later work, but this stylistic virtuosity was perhaps unsuited to the turbulent crisis years of the early twentieth century.

The tragedy Demetrios is the closest Ernst ever came to putting his neoclassical theory into practice. In viewing the protagonist’s struggle with insurmountable sociopolitical forces—his inexorable fate—the audience was supposed to be inspired by his valiant but tragic demise. In Canossa, however, written only four years later, Ernst had already begun to deviate from his strict neoclassical theory of tragedy, and though the hero also suffers a defeat at the hands of political intrigue, the outcome of the play is less tragic: The malevolent antagonist, who is transformed by his opponent’s demise, promises to change his evil ways in the end. Written four years after Canossa, Ariadne auf Naxos—his most popular drama—marks the turning point in his career. No longer a tragedy, this redemption play ends with a—quite literally—deus ex machina resolution, in which the heros are rewarded for their suffering. Ernst’s missionary zeal and creative energy waned after Ariadne auf Naxos. Nevertheless, one of Ernst’s (dubiously) best-known works, the redemption drama Preussengeist, was written during this last period of productivity.

Though Ernst’s move from tragedy to redemption drama demonstrates an attempt to loosen his rigid neoclassical stance to convey his message about humanity’s ethical-idealistic being, he never succeeded in making the necessary connection with audiences. His overly formalistic conception of drama invariably yielded one-dimensional characters and improbable situations, which far too clearly bore the stamp of his abstract notions and thus failed to elicit the sympathy of the public. This failure was compounded by Ernst’s unabashed intellectual elitism, which effectively prevented the playwright from taking into account the pragmatic considerations of public reception. Rather than addressing the real needs and expectations of his audience, he became increasingly cynical, ultimately blaming the failure of his works on the modern public’s general ignorance and increasing preoccupation with the material concerns of daily life.

Demetrios

Inspired by a conversation with Wilhelm von Scholz, Ernst decided to take on the difficult Demetrios theme, which had defeated in the preceding century such renowned German dramatists as Friedrich Hebbel and Friedrich Schiller. Therefore, after a series of no fewer than fifteen failed attempts—if the playwright can be taken at his word—he finally succeeded in writing a classical drama whose tragic but idealistic hero was to serve weak-kneed modern human beings as a paragon of strength and ethical virtue. Culling from Hebbel’s fragment the story of the rise and fall of a pretender to the Russian throne, Ernst removed his drama from seventeenth century historical Russia to the mythical past of ancient Sparta.

Demetrios begins with a love triangle in which the slave Pytheus, hopelessly in love with his master’s daughter, kills her arrogantly aristocratic suitor. For this crime he must pay with his life. As Pytheus is about to be crucified, however, it is discovered that he has always worn the token of Apollo, a royal insignia. Pytheus, it turns out, is really Demetrios, the only surviving heir to the throne. His noble identity is then confirmed by Tritäa, the slave woman who reared him. She claims that, in the confusion of an insurrection through which the tyrant Nabis ascended to the throne, she had mistakenly saved the noble child instead of her own. Believing now that he is the rightful king, Demetrios, with the support of the Spartan nobility, overthrows Nabis and becomes the new ruler of the city-state. His reign, however, is neither long nor secure: He is forced by political realities to be as tyrannical as his predecessor, and unrest begins to mount among his subjects. To make matters worse, Demetrios now learns from Tritäa that he is really the former king’s illegitimate son and that she is, after all, his real mother. Half slave and half king, Demetrios-Pytheus stands tragically between two worlds—he is at once both tyrant and victim. Unable to conceal his illegitimacy from his plotting enemies, he is publicly accused of deception and given an ultimatum: Kill Tritäa, thereby proving that she is not his real mother or be killed. In noble exasperation, he cries out, “I am Pytheus, son of a slave,” and is struck down by a man who a short time before had helped him gain the throne. By confessing his humble slave side, he signs his own death warrant, but in so doing he also reveals that his true nobility is of spirit and not of birth. True to Ernstian theory, Demetrios-Pytheus is a hero who stands at the crossing of two divergent but inescapable necessities; in choosing one, he is destroyed by the other. Nevertheless, although Pytheus the individual must perish, his idealism lives on.

From a formal standpoint, the Demetrios tragedy is almost flawlessly executed. The work is a unified structure in which every scene contributes with near mathematical precision to the inevitable and necessary tragic outcome. Yet because the characters are more like functional parts of a fugue than real-life people of flesh and blood, their actions seem wooden and contrived. Rather than identifying with Demetrios and then being uplifted by his doomed yet heroic struggle with fate, Ernst’s audience, like the reader today, remained unmoved. One cannot help but wonder how such an impossible predicament and truly dismal outcome—Ernst’s noble intentions notwithstanding—could ever have been expected to impart a sense of joy and optimism.

Canossa

The theme of the helplessly isolated ruler at the mercy of political intrigue is taken up again in Ernst’s monumental and highly symmetrical tragedy Canossa. This time Ernst turns to the medieval power struggle between Pope Gregor VII and the German emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, Heinrich IV. Juxtaposing two men and two realms, the settings of the first four acts alternate between Rome and Germany. All action culminates in the fifth act when, on Christmas Day in 1077, the two men meet face to face at Canossa.

In the first act, the audience learns that Gregor, born Hildebrand, never aspired to the papacy and that he once actually vowed to the German emperor never to become pope. To remain a monk, however, is not to be his fate. Forced by the absence of any clerical leader capable of saving the papacy from the evils of secular power looming in Germany, Gregor breaks his vow and becomes pope. Like the character Demetrios-Pytheus in Ernst’s first tragedy, he is forced by political expediency to compromise his convictions and rule with an iron hand. When visiting their pious son, his parents are horrified to discover that the evil world has forced Gregor to commit perjury and murder to carry out his holy mission.

Heinrich, on the other hand, knows nothing higher than his own egocentric needs and desires. He is a man without scruples who thrives on power. Hearing, in the second act, that the high-minded and influential monk Hildebrand has become pope, he sets out to depose the papal reformer. His plans, however, do not materialize, for as he is about to leave for Rome, the news breaks that righteous Gregor has excommunicated him. Deprived of the holy sanction of Rome, Heinrich’s once faithful dukes, wherein his real power lay, renounce their allegiance.

The scene is now set for the fifth act’s fateful confrontation at Canossa. Unfortunately, and to the detriment of the play, the audience must endure two more acts of melodramatic buildup before witnessing the inevitable and tragic conflict. Ernst, holding true to the tragedy’s balanced structural schema, artfully fills these two interim acts with intrigues and counter-intrigues. Even the secondary characters evince a symmetry in word and action.

The action of act five, though predictable in the main, does have an interesting twist. Heinrich is approaching Canossa. Not knowing that the emperor comes as a penitent to seek absolution from his ban, Gregor believes that he will have to submit to the secular ruler and therefore prepares to die a martyr. To his surprise, Heinrich appears wearing the hair shirt of a penitent. It is obvious to all involved that lust for power and not contrition motivates Heinrich’s action; an excommunicated emperor is a powerless ruler. Still, the pope is faced with a no-win situation; like Demetrios, he is caught between necessities. If he receives Heinrich’s confession and lifts the ban, as the law of the Church—the will of God—dictates, he will restore the emperor to his former power and, in effect, clear the way for Heinrich to carry out his evil plans. If he refuses to hear the confession, he, as God’s highest earthly representative, will fail to fulfill his God-ordained duty. After a lengthy and impassioned exchange with Heinrich, Gregor realizes that he has no choice but to accept the confession, which he does. Feeling forsaken both by God and by the world, Gregor shakes his fists at Heaven and curses: “Because I loved right and hated wrong, I must therefore, God, die in exile.” Seeing and hearing the utterly dejected pope curse God, Heinrich has a miraculous, if not improbable, change of heart: As the curtain falls, he promises to mend his ways, to forget himself, and to serve humankind. Far from convincing, Heinrich’s sudden and anticlimactic change, in stark contrast to the arrantly deceitful, scheming, and power-crazed character developed thus far, undermines the dramatic effect that has been building throughout the play. In view of Heinrich’s transformation, Gregor’s defeat loses its tragic impact; his work and suffering, it appears, have not been in vain. The play Canossa, therefore, ceases in the closing lines to be a tragedy. Sensing that spectators might not grasp the full implications of Gregor’s inspiring demise, Ernst seems to have deviated from his own theory of neoclassical tragedy to present the audience with a role model to follow.

Ariadne auf Naxos

Ernst’s first redemption drama, Ariadne auf Naxos, dramatizes the Greek mythological love story of Ariadne and Theseus. Shorter than his neoclassical tragedies, this three-act play is probably his most successful work; unlike his other dramas, it enjoyed an extended run—at the Kleines Theater unter den Linden in Berlin during World War I. Its success was attributable, in part at least, to the sense of hope that its decidedly positive outcome brought to war-weary German audiences.

Like Ernst’s tragedies, Ariadne auf Naxos is written in blank verse. Because it begins, true to its classical origins, in medias res, it presupposes a certain knowledge of Greek mythology. The play takes place on the beautiful Aegean island of Naxos, where Ariadne, the daughter of King Minos of Crete, has just arrived with Theseus, who had gone to Crete to destroy Minos’s monster, the Minotaur. Ariadne, who fell in love with Theseus while on Crete, helped him to slay the Minotaur and was thus forced to flee with her lover from the wrath of her tyrannical father.

Ernst, however, makes one slight but significant change in the story: To set up a potentially tragic sequence of events, he has Ariadne poison her father to save her lover. This fact she has managed to keep secret from her inflexibly idealistic Theseus, who, believing in the superiority of good over all evil in the world, believes that it is his calling to found a new, ethical society on the island of Naxos. The first act finds Ariadne tormented by guilt and the fear that righteous Theseus will discover her evil patricidal deed and cast her out. Mysteriously, in the midst of her despair, the god Dionysus appears and cryptically assures her that she, like all human beings, must suffer to live.

In the second act, the inevitable happens; news of Minos’s murder reaches the shores of Naxos, and even as Theseus tries to cheer up his inexplicably disconsolate lover, a priest arrives bearing the fateful tidings. Just as Ariadne had feared, Theseus is incapable of understanding her deed, but before he can cast her aside, the priest informs the couple that the people of Naxos, believing Theseus to be her accomplice, are outraged by his apparent hypocrisy. Realizing now that their destinies have been united by the murder, Theseus resolves to defend her to the end, and as the second act closes, he goes off to confront the angry mob.

In the relatively short third act, Dionysus returns to redeem the hopelessly despairing Ariadne. In an exalted speech, Dionysus tells her that through her selfless suffering she has risen above the narrow good-versus-evil schema that enslaves ordinary mortals (Theseus being a prime example). Immediately before she is carried off by Dionysus into the shining heavens, delivered from all earthly care and woe, the mortally wounded and anguishing Theseus returns in the arms of the priest. Suddenly, in the presence of the divine, he sees the grander scheme of things and his incomprehensible and undeserved fate becomes clear to him. He realizes, as death approaches, that the true value of human existence lies not in specific moral precepts or lofty ideals but rather in humanity’s eternal suffering and striving for those ideals, be they right or wrong.

In the redemption drama Ariadne auf Naxos, a religious-metaphysical theme supplants the sociopolitical dimension of Ernst’s earlier plays. Though Aridane and Theseus, like Demetrios and Gregor, are victims of their inexorable fates, they are not tragic heroes. In the end, they are not so much destroyed by the necessities of the world (by equally destructive unavoidable choices) but transfigured by them. Rather than dying in despair, they are, as Ernst wished his audience to be, exalted by their quasi-mystical revelation.

Preussengeist

Ernst’s last dramatic work of note, Preussengeist, though not as overtly religious as Ariadne auf Naxos, carries a similar message about the value of sacrifice and suffering in life. Written at the outbreak of World War I, this redemption drama is unfortunately weakened by its at times excessively nationalistic tone. Set in mid-seventeenth century Prussia, the play is based on an incident from Frederick the Great’s youth. Wishing to escape an arranged marriage and the future responsibilities of the crown, Ernst’s eighteen-year-old protagonist, Crown Prince Friedrich, makes plans to flee the country with his friend, Lieutenant von Katte. Even though their plan is discovered before they can carry it out, Friedrich’s father, the king, views their intended flight as desertion and has them court-martialed. Von Katte is sentenced to death, while the king himself must determine the fate of his son. Having resolved to have Friedrich executed as well, the king changes his mind at the last minute when he sees the transformation that takes place in his son after he witnesses his friend’s execution. In the moment of truth, young Friedrich professes his revelation that his life belongs not to him but to the fatherland. Interpreting this as a sign from God, analogous to the biblical story of Abraham and Isaac, the king spares his son. As in Ariadne auf Naxos, tragedy is averted by invoking a higher, metaphysical order that stands above human law. Because duty, obedience, and fatherland are implicitly linked to divine providence in this play, it is easy to see why the National Socialists saw in Ernst the harbinger of the new German society.

Bibliography

Bucquet-Radczewski, Jutta. Die neuklassische Tragödie bei Paul Ernst (1900-1920). Würzburg, Germany: Königshausen & Neumann, 1993. An examination of the dramatic works of Ernst. In German. Bibliography.

Jelavich, Peter. “Paul Ernst.” In World Drama, compiled by Oscar G. Brocket and Mark Rape. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1984. A concise overview of the life and works of Ernst.

Pierson, Stanley. Marxist Intellectuals and the Working-Class Mentality in Germany, 1887-1912. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993. Contains a discussion of Ernst’s disillusionment with Marxism and subsequent pursuit of a better society through other means.