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THE GERMAN DRAMA
HERMANN SUDERMANN
IT
has been said that military conquest gen
erally goes hand in hand with the decline
of creative genius, with the retrogression
of culture. I believe this is not a mere
assertion. The history of the human race re
peatedly demonstrates that whenever a nation
achieved great military success, it invariably in
volved the decline of art, of literature, of the
drama; in short, of culture in the deepest and
finest sense. This has been particularly borne out
by Germany after its military triumph in the
Franco-Prussian War.
For almost twenty years after that war, the
country of poets and thinkers remained, intellectu
ally, a veritable desert, barren of ideas. Young
Germany had to go for its intellectual food to
France, Daudet, Maupassant, and Zola; or to
Russia Tolstoy, Turgenev, and Dostoyevski ;
finally also to Ibsen and Strindberg. Nothing
thrived in Germany during that period, except a
sickening patriotism and sentimental romanticism,
perniciously misleading the people and giving
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