The Ibsen Phenomenon

Ibsen and World Literature
by Brian Johnston

IV. The German Speaking World

Ibsen divided his long exile from Norway between Germany and Italy and the German-speaking world has frequently proved most receptive to his drama. Many of the most perceptive interpretations of Ibsen have emerged from writers such as Rainer Maria Rilke, Hugo von Hoffmansthal, Thomas Mann and Sigmund Freud. Germany has been the site of the most notable productions of the plays. During his stay in Munich in 1876 the city’s Hoftheater staged The Vikings at Helgeland, followed by staging of The Pretenders the same year by the Duke of Saxe-Meiningen’s prestigious theatre company. Ibsen was invited to the performance by the Duke and honored. The Duke’s company performed A Doll House (1884) Ghosts (in 1886) - the production was banned from performing in Berlin - and An Enemy of the People (1888). The prestige of these Meiningen productions and the immense care and resources lavished upon them, contrasts strongly with the equally devoted but materially impoverished productions and unfavorable receptions the plays received in England and France. The ban on the public performance of Ghosts by the Berlin authorities prompted two young men of the German theatre, Paul Schlenther and Otto Brahm, in 1889,to found a private theater club, the Freie Bühne modeled after the Théâtre Libre in Paris. Ghosts was the opening production.

One of the most sensitive and imaginative responses to Ibsen was Hugo von Hoffmannsthal’s ‘Die Menschen in Ibsen’s Dramen’ (‘The People in Ibsen’s Drama’) published as early as 1891.

Hoffmannsthal dwelt in particular on Ibsen’s dramatic portraiture that provided fascinating variants ‘‘of a very rich, very modern and very precisely observed human type:

…it is called Julian the Apostate, Hjalmar Ekdal, Peer Gynt, Lyngstrand, Dr. Helmer,(sic) Dr. Brendel,(sic) Dr. Rank; or Hedda, Ellida, Nora. It is by no means a simple being – indeed it is very complicated; it speaks a nervous, clipped prose, without pathos, and not always wholly intelligible; it takes itself ironically, it reflects about itself and copies itself. It is a continually varying product of its moods and of its own criticism of these moods.36 Living lives of diminished possibilities, of ‘‘depressing, yellow-grey, mean circumstances…they long to be away.’’37

While focusing primarily on The Lady from the Sea where these conditions are particularly evident, Hoffmannsthal sees these as characteristic of Ibsen’s characters in general. They are frustrated artists, filled with secret yearnings, who wish to make their lives into works of art.

‘‘They have much in common with the Emperor Nero and Don Quixote; for they also wish to transpose fiction into life, irrespective of whether it is their own invention or adopted by them…they believe in the infinite capacity for the miraculous in man: they believe in the creative, transfiguring, ennobling power of pain.’’38

It is impossible to do justice to Hoffannsthal’s essay in this summary: in 1891, it was precociously perceptive and still one of the best introductions to the imaginative nature of Ibsen’s art. To Rainer Maria Rilke, a performance at Antoine’s Théâtre Libre in 1906 of The Wild Duck was the revelation

‘‘…of a new poet, whom we shall approach by many roads now that I know one of them. And again, someone who is misunderstood in the midst of fame. Someone quite different from what one hears.’’39

In The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge Rilke addresses Ibsen in terms similar to those used by James Joyce:

‘‘Loneliest of men, holding aloof from them all, how quickly they have caught up with you because of your fame. A little while they were against you body and soul; and now they treat you as their equal. And they pull your words around with them in the cages of their presumption, and exhibit them in the streets, and tease them a little, from a safe distance. All your terrifying wild beasts’’40

Rilke hails Ibsen as ‘‘a revealer, a timelessly tragic poet…who desperately sought equivalents in the visible world for what you had seen inside’’41

German drama's long interfusion with philosophy had informed its dramatic theory and practice, from Lessing, through Schiller, Goethe, Kleist and Hebbel.  This prepared German criticism for a better understanding of the multilayered drama, deriving in part from this tradition, that Ibsen created in modernist terms. His influence upon German literature and drama, in turn, has been immense even where, as in the case of Bertolt Brecht, Ibsen's was the ‘Aristotelian’ drama Brecht was concerned to repudiate and replace with an ‘Epic theatre’. Brecht was to rely on the public for a serious modern drama that came into being through the minority or little theatre movement formed to a great extent to put on Ibsen’s plays and deriving from his example. The debates and controversies these plays provoked gave rise to an increasingly informed critical discourse and to a minority public newly aware of the important position drama could hold in modern culture.

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36 Hugo von Hoffmansthal, ‘Die Menschen in Ibsens Dramen’ translalted by
Carla Hvistendahl and James McFarlane, Henrik Ibsen: A Critgical Anthology, 133.
37 Ibid. 134
38 Ibid. 136
39 Rainer Maria Rilke, Selected Letters 1902–1926 trans. R.F.C. Hull (London: Quartet Books, 1998) 93–94
40 Stephen Mitchell, Ed. and trans..The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke. (New York: Vintage, 1989)
41 Ibid. 102