Fadren:

Swedish, The Father, naturalistic tragedy, expresses a recurrent theme in some Strindberg Naturalism: Laws and culture may influence the dynamics of men and women within their various social contracts.  The play uncovers the inevitable struggle for legacy and power between the sexes.

 

Froken Julie:

Swedish, Miss Julie, naturalistic play set on Midsummer's Eve & day, on the estate of a Swedish count; Miss Julie is drawn to a well-travelled & read senior servant, a valet named Jean; most of the dialogue occurs in the kitchen, where Jean's fiancée, a servant named Christine, cooks and sometimes sleeps while Jean and Miss Julie talk.  The theme of Darwinism is explicitly stated in the play’s preface & had a significant influence on Strindberg during his naturalistic period; Miss Julie and Jean, as vying against each other in an evolutionary "life and death" battle for a survival of the fittest.  Julie is the last of a dying aristocratic breed, she characterizes the modern woman; Jean represents one who is clambering upwards, fitter to thrive , more adaptable in terms of the "life roles" he can take on.

 

Strindberg (his religious works):

During the 1890s he spent significant time abroad engaged in scientific experiments & studies of the occult.  His "Inferno crisis", a series of psychotic attacks 1894 to 1896, led to his hospitalization & return to Sweden.  Under the influence of Swedenborg his mental health improved & he resolved to become "the Zola of the Occult".  By 1898 he had fully recovered his sanity & began a new creative phase with his phantasmagorical plays (which Spengler refers to as “religious works”).  These began in 1898 with To Damascus.  In 1902 he authored A Dream Play, a radical attempt to dramatize the unconscious mind by the abolition of conventional dramatic time & space and the splitting, doubling, merging, and multiplication of its characters.  It would be an important precursor to both expressionism & surrealism.  In 1907 he began to pioneer a new form, the chamber play, with The Ghost Sonata.  A 3 act play it was performed with a small cast & practically no sets or costumes in a small space.  His final “religious work” was The Great Highway (written 1909), a dream-play of spiritual pilgrimage similar to his earlier To Damascus.

and see chapter I, page 24

 

Ibsen (his symbolic works):

Symbolism was a late 19th century poetry & art movement with roots in French, Russia & Belgium, seeking to represent absolute truths symbolically through metaphorical images & language, a  reaction against naturalism & realism.  Ibsen, in his later works (after 1882) moved away from realistic drama to tackle questions of a psychological & subconscious nature.  Symbols began to gain prominence.  His symbolist plays were The Wild Duck (1884), Rosmersholm (1886), The Lady from the Sea (1888), Hedda Gabler ( 1890) & When We Dead Awaken (1899).  These works became important parts of the French symbolist repertoire & he was identified with the symbolist struggle to express libertarian ideas, aestheticism & modern beauty.  Staging was also an important symbolist technique.  Ghosts, The Wild Duck, Hedda Gabler, A Doll's House, The Lady from the Sea, Rosmersholm & An Enemy of the People were all staged in the early 1890s & part of the reason Ibsen was perceived as a symbolist was the staging, which used vagueness & suggestiveness to reach a higher spiritual meanings; psychological elements are emphasized with this approach.

 

John Gabriel Borkman:

a symbolist play & Ibsen’s penultimate work, possibly based on an incident he might have recorded from an earlier period in his life (1851): the attempted suicide of an army officer accused of embezzlement.  John Gabriel Borkman has just served an 8 years sentence for embezzlement.  He, Mrs. Borkman & her twin sister fight over young Erhart Borkman's future.  The play continues Ibsen’s naturalism and the social commentary of his middle period but the final act suggests a new phase which will be brought to fruition in his final symbolic work When We Dead Awaken.

 

Ubermensch:

Nietzsche introduces the Ubermensch in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, i written & published between 1883 & 1885; in 1896, Alexander Tille made the first English translation of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, rendering Übermensch as "Beyond-Man". 

 

Till Damascus:

Swedish, To Damascus (aka The Road to Damascus), trilogy of plays, first 2 parts written & published in 1898, premiered 1900, the 3rd in 1904; a dream-play of spiritual pilgrimage, a synthesis of a wide variety of myths, symbols & ideas with a profound spiritual analysis, using a new dramatic form; a complex play- the classical "unity of action" is replaced with a "unity of the self"; the dramatic structure of the first part utilises a circular, palindromic form of the Medieval "station drama in which the protagonist (The Stranger), on his way to an asylum, passes through 7 "stations;" then having reached the asylum, returns to each in reverse order, before arriving at his starting-point on a street corner;

 

the last phenomena:

Spengler is probably using this in Kant’s or Schopenhauer’s sense: “phenomenon” is what we can see or hear, sensation, perception but not the reality (which is hidden to us), the noumenon, or for Schopnehauer, the Will.

 

Weininger:

(1880- 1903) Austrian thinker resident in the Austro-Hungarian Empire; committed suicide age of 23.  His suicide (in the house where Beethoven had died) made him a cause célèbre & generated interest in his book of Sex and Character (1903).   Strindberg gave it a glowing review, claiming that it solved the hardest of all problems, the "woman problem".  The Russian philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev claimed that "after Nietzsche there was nothing already in this fleeting culture so remarkable."  He also Influenced Wittgenstein & James Joyce.

​

Geschlecht und Charakter:

German, Sex and Character, Weininger’s most famous & only work; he seeks to justify ethics, politics & aesthetics in metaphysics.  He embraces a neo-Kantian philosophy & develops his own neo-Kantian categories with the New Man.  He & his book became a fin-de-siècle sensation.  It was not this work however which raised Weininger to fame, it was his dramatic & symbolic death.  As well a reaction against the New Woman & feminism, it is replete with anti-Semitism, a sentiment which reflects Weininger’s love of Wagner.  Beside dismissing New Woman it also critiques the 19th century zeitgeist; he is critical of anarchism, the writing of western history (historical materialism), when history, life, and science no longer mean anything, apart from economics and technology, an age which no longer possesses even one great artist or philosopher; the age of the least originality..

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Man and Superman:

see above page 350, 371

 

Major Barbara

see above page 350, 372

 

Humbolt:

(1767-1835) Prussian philosopher, linguist, government functionary, diplomat; he made important contributions to the philosophy of language & ethno-linguistics.  As a privy councillor in the Prussian Interior Ministry, he reformed the education system according to humanist principles.  With Fichte he was a founder of the University of Berlin in 1809; he envisioned education as a means of realizing individual possibility rather than a way of drilling traditional ideas into youth to prepare them for established occupation or social roles.   As the architect of the Humboldtian education ideal he made major contributions to the development of liberalism & his educational model helped establish Liberal arts curriculum  & programmes in Prussia, the USA & japan.

 

Ethical Socialism (by Fichte, Hegel, and Humboldt):

the metaphysics of German idealism, born of Kant, taught by Fichte & Hegel, evolves into a materialistic form, as ethical Socialism, under the guise of the Young Hegelians, Feuerbach, Marx & Engels.

 

Epigoni:

the progeny of the Diadochi, who were the  rival generals, families & friends of Alexander the Great, who fought for control of his empire after 323 BC; these wars mark the beginning of the Hellenistic period.  It is this last aspect (the start of of the Hellenistic Age, Spengler’s Winter for the Apollonians) which is important in understanding this usage; he links Epigoni with the 20th century, which he clearly sees as “Winter”.

 

praxis:

the process by which a theory, lesson or skill is enacted, embodied, or realized; may also refer to the act of engaging, applying, exercising, realizing, or practicing ideas.

 

physiognomic:

the outward appearance of anything, taken as offering some insight into its character:

 

“problem”:

when used for drama, refers to a play which examines a specific social or political problem aiming to ignite public debate; originated in France in the late 19th cent, examples-Ibsen’s  A Doll's House (questioning the subordination of women in marriage), Shaw's Mrs Warren's Profession (1902), examining attitudes towards prostitution.  The word problem has a specific meaning for Spengler; it is derived from Civilization, it is mechanical, dead, the BECOME, as against the Cultural, organic, alive, BECOMING.  It is the object to be solved.