see something resembling
a process of convalescence. It was possible in 1903 for a novel _Jena
or Sedan_ by Franz Adam Beyerlein to create a sensation. Written in the
manner of Zola, the book, which, because of an alleged dry rot in the
German army, prophesied mischance in the future, produced its effect
not so much through an apparently objective but gloomy depiction of
life in the garrisons, as through the nourishment that it gave to the
torturing doubts which during the last decades of the nineteenth
century grew rank as a fatalistic pessimism. The very principle of
naturalism as a form of art, with its one-sided preference for disease,
crime, and weakness, flourished on the offal of a materialistic
philosophy of life, which viewed the vanity of existence with weary
resignation. But this disease of the times was as little a specifically
German malady as the naturalism imported from France and Russia was a
genuine form of German art. Liberation from paralyzing lethargy was
possible only through a realization of the fact that the real sources
of national power were to be sought elsewhere. The soul of the German
people, which in former centuries gave birth to mysticism and
romanticism, is filled with a yearning for the infinite that cannot
in the long run be contented with a materialistic philosophy; and the
home of the German people, broad and fertile Germany, presents other
pictures than a view of coal mines and swarming streets seen through
the narrow space between factory chimneys. As a reaction against
naturalism there arose therefore a neo-romanticism, and as its national
modification, an art of the native heath (_Heimatkunst_).

There is no contradiction between romanticism and _Heimatkunst_; for it
was romanticism that in its time aroused the Germans to a real sense of
what their native heath meant for them; neither is _Heimatkunst_
opposed to naturalism. In both _Heimatkunst_ and naturalism nature is
the watchword, but with the difference that what for the one is the
principle is for the other the subject of poetic representation.
Naturalism aimed to give the impression of inexorable fidelity to
nature in the reproduction of the unhealthful and of that which
strictly speaking was contrary to nature; _Heimatkunst_, on the other
hand, had recourse to free and open nature as the unfailing fountain of
health. When naturalism came to the fore it was customary to designate
the opposing tendencies as idealism and rea