17 - The Powerlessness of Reason: The World War Erupts (1914)

Summary

IN THE WAKE OF THE SAVERNE episode Eisner clarified the historical basis for the Prussian soldateska's absolute impunity. The secret cabinet order of 1820, issued by Friedrich Wilhelm III to enforce Metternich's Carlsbad Decrees against liberal student nationalism, authorized military commanders to declare a state of siege, impose martial law, and act on their own initiative to reestablish order if, in their judgment, civil authorities were slow to quell unrest. Wilhelm II reiterated the directive to his general staff in March 1899. This single dictate then was the covert constitution of Prussian Germany, preempting the “utter shambles of inchoate statutes” that ostensibly defined the rights of the citizenry. Thus it was that on German soil a “boy in a lieutenant's tunic” could terrorize a town's populace and prompt his colonel, a “fanatic born of military inbreeding,” to follow suit. The conflicted bourgeoisie was ill disposed toward lasting protest, “for in the end the liberal citizen is himself a reserve lieutenant, and his son perhaps even a cadet officer too!” It all boded ill for Europe's peace.

On through the winter of 1914 Eisner's theater reviews for the Münchener Post were a mainstay of the paper's cultural offering. Constantly astute and incisive, the pieces stand out from those of his colleagues and roundly justify Hausenstein's judgment that “they were splendid.” Both the famous and the forgotten have here their monument. Karl Rößler's popular comedy Rösselsprung (Knight's Move), which the Munich Playhouse premiered on 17 January, Eisner panned as predictably formulaic, the vacuous fluff of “beautifully dressed ladies and elegant gentlemen in a loquacious state and decorative frame,” report of which struck him as more suited to the business page than the arts section. By contrast he commended the Royal Residence Theater's resurrection of Das vierte Gebot (The Fourth Commandment) by Ludwig Anzengruber, a profound work neglected in favor of box office successes that betrayed “the total wretchedness of the German theater, its direction, and its audience.” High praise was accorded the Chamber Players’ first German presentation of The Wolves by Romain Rolland, in Wilhelm Herzog's translation, on 4 March. Moved by public debate of the Dreyfus affair, Rolland had written the play in 1898 but set it in 1793 against the backdrop of the emergent Terror.