ABSTRACT
In a sense it is possible to say that the literature of the period 1880-1958 begins with the bürgerliches Trauerspiel, in which for the first time in literature middle-class characters are depicted as capable of tragic emotion. This development continues practically without interruption; for even the characters of the classical period belong for the most part to the middle classes: Werther; Tasso, Wilhelm Meister, and Faust illumine essentially the same problems of artistic mentality as those of Thomas Mann’s fiction; the theme even of Schiller’s Don Carlos is that political Liberalism which ferments in the writings of Jung Deutschland, moves the hectic tides of Spielhagen’s novels, and is distorted in the com-munistically crazy preaching of universal brotherhood in the expressionism which followed the First Great War. In the main lines this literature of a century and a half is a gradual fading, culminating in the reductio ad absurdum of Thomas Mann’s Königliche Hoheit, of the glamour in which monarchs and nobles lived a charmed life, and a corresponding intensification of the mental life of men belonging to all classes of society.
