The Rudolf Steiner Archive

51. Liliencron and Falke Evening

[ 1 ] Anyone who wants to know what the Trade Union Hall means to Berlin’s working class should go there on a Sunday evening. In the shelter, one witnesses life’s harshest struggle, where those cast out onto the streets by unemployment are offered a few meager hours of rest and refreshment. There are many different strata within the working class as well, and so the life in the shelter’s common room stands in stark contrast to the colorful bustle of those who, often surrounded by wives and children, spend the afternoon and evening engaging in lively conversation in the restaurant. This is certainly only an “elite” segment of the working class. For today, when the specter of hardship is knocking louder on the door than it has in a long time, the question of whether one should treat oneself to a small glass of beer after six days of hard work often requires very careful consideration. But let’s continue. On Sunday evening at the union hall, we are also dealing with an intellectual elite. Upstairs, in the spacious—though still rather unadorned—hall, an audience is packed shoulder to shoulder; at first glance, it is clear that they, too, belong to the working class. All the seats are already taken, and yet new guests keep arriving, for whom chairs are brought in with great difficulty. Perhaps twice as many visitors would have turned out if the room had been large enough. The men and women have come to listen to chamber music and, in addition, to immerse themselves in Germany’s latest poetry. The Workers’ Educational School has organized an evening of entertainment—a “Liliencron and Falke Evening,” as it has been somewhat imprecisely titled. The program begins with a performance of a Schumann concert piece, played excellently by the Waldemar Meyer Quartet. Then Dr. Rudolf Steiner, in an eloquent and clearly structured lecture, outlines the development of German lyric poetry since Goethe’s day, describing the “marzipan poetry” of Geidel and Baumbach, followed by the new poetry born of the people’s sufferings and meager joys—whose voice we have been hearing since the mid-1880s. In the lecture, as well as in the recitations and vocal pieces—which are superbly performed by Mr. and Mrs. Moest—we are then presented with a skillfully crafted portrait of the essence of the two poets in whose honor the evening is being held. The audience listens with rapt attention to both these lectures and the evocative sequence of musical pieces, drawn primarily from Schumann and Schubert.

[ 2 ] The admission price was fifty pfennigs, including coat check and program. That is little—very little—for the wealth of entertainment on offer, and yet quite a lot when one considers the earnings of a family man. And it seems to us that the working-class people gathered here in honor of Liliencron and Schubert have no reason to be ashamed before those bourgeois concertgoers for whom the cult of free tickets has become a mockery-ridden institution. Who in those circles can fathom what it takes in terms of mental resilience to prepare oneself to enjoy a chamber music program after six days of anxious toil at the workbench and vise? When the proponents of the current order can offer no other arguments against a socialist order of things, they resort to talking about the philistinism that they claim will spread under unbridled democracy. Now, thanks to the deplorable conditions in the elementary school system of the bourgeois state—and no less thanks to the social distress in which the people are deliberately kept—there is certainly still an extraordinary amount of work to be done before the proletariat has prepared itself to enjoy the highest intellectual treasures of our nation. But one should not underestimate the fact that the segments of the population—who, around the middle of the last century, knew scarcely any other joys than those offered in the haze of schnapps in the guild halls—now, under the educational influence of social democracy, feel capable of enjoying an evening such as the one organized by the Workers’ Educational School. Anyone who overlooks this development need not worry too much about the level of artistic appreciation in the state of the future.