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No. 11.
Vienna, 18 March 1898.
2nd Year.

Problematic Natures.

By Dr. Friedemann (Berlin).

When the Prussian Crown, in unremitting struggles, had broken the power of the Diets of the nobility and had assigned to the nobility the position of a servant of its King, it drew occasionally into the service of the State officials of the burgher class as well. Frederick the Great had already, in the Seven Years' War, brought commoners into the posts of officers, but upon the conclusion of peace they were obliged to take their leave. Even after the Wars of Liberation they were admitted only in isolated instances, and had to content themselves with the less distinguished posts in the hussar and artillery regiments. The administration remained as good as closed to them.

The country was impoverished; every stirring towards freedom was stifled in the germ; the slightest exertion of individualism was punished with heavy sentences of fortress imprisonment.

Spielhagen, in his "Problematic Natures," portrays the men who were bound to arise under such conditions. The inward craving for freedom, brought to ripeness by modern ideas, made the burgher class feel as intolerable the chains which it had hitherto borne with a matter-of-course equanimity.

A fearful nervousness took possession of the educated. One wished to labour at the common good, but one could not; one wished to create, and one was bidden to resign oneself.

Thus there arose men who squandered their strength upon nullities, who in the hopeless struggle against the superior power fell out, despairing, with themselves and with the world, only to close a mistaken course of life at last by a bullet, or, if fortune were favourable, in honest combat upon the barricade.

We Jews have similar times to endure. Ever since, for so many, the philosophy of silent suffering had been lost together with religion, ever since existence was no longer conceived as a time of trial, men began to take their share in the freshly pulsing life of the community at large. One wished to fight alongside others, to suffer alongside them, to become a part of the great whole.

The Jew wished to be man among men, a thing so long denied him; he wished to be able to impart to others also all that he felt within himself of the urge to create. So long as the capitalistic epoch endured, during which the money of the Jews was needed, this striving was tolerated. But then came the recoil.

In social and in political life the Jew became a pariah once more, and saw walls of brass rise up about him. His will to act, the categorical imperative of duty living within him to take part in the great work of humanity, was derided and repulsed with that brutality which stamps anti-Semitism as an enduring blot upon the life of the European peoples.

The weaker characters seized upon the last anchor of rescue, upon baptism. The stronger, however, consumed themselves in impotent struggle with the superior power.

What torment, what despair the eternally repulsed man feels, what nervousness lays hold of the honest-willed man who, in return for his good will, is derided by the mob as the scum of mankind — that only the Jew knows.

I remember the feelings with which, as a boy on the way to school, I heard myself reviled by my schoolfellows as a "Jew" — the feeling of furious powerlessness in the face of the superior force, the shame and the burning sense of wounded honour. Such a thing is not forgotten.

Such feelings animated Disraeli when he wrote his "Vivian Grey," his "Contarini Fleming." Whoever has read the description of the latter's bloody schoolboy fights on account of anti-Semitic attacks knows with what hatred youthful souls are poisoned.

"I set upon him again; he fought, but he was as a serpent against a tiger. My blows fell with the precision of a machine; his bloody face was not to be recognised. I believe that he was appalled at my frenzied countenance... I did not cease to work upon his head until my fist seemed to be entering his brain, and after ten rounds he fell over, quite blind. He could not come to his feet again in time. I sprang forward and set my feet upon his breast. 'Strike me no more,' he cried faintly. 'Beg pardon,' I shouted. 'Never,' he answered. I raised my arm. Some wished to interpose. 'Away,' I cried, 'away.' I seized the fallen leader, dragged him out at the door like Achilles the dead Hector. At the end of the way was a dunghill. Upon that I hurled his body."

The same feeling leads the fourteen-year-old Ferdinand Lassalle to utter in his diary the hope of soon being grown, that he might avenge in blood the bloodbath of Damascus.