t Weimar without any feeling that the supremacy of this
spiritual centre was tyranny. Even in his old age Goethe showed the
keenest interest in all local and dialectical literature, and
romanticism reinforced the sense for every ancient trait of national
individuality. United Germany has no need of an academy to fix the
canons of usage; on the contrary, it recognizes in the variety of local
and dialectical peculiarities a source of wealth which would be
impaired by any normalization, and the drying up of which would
threaten literature with sterility. Cultivated Germany is not an
anarchy, but a federation of many small states, with a much more
democratic constitution than such a unified state as France, of which
state Paris is the monarch. The influence of Prussia, mostly
misunderstood abroad, is confined to military and civil administration;
in questions of art and culture, but above all in literature, every
attempt to enforce uniformity meets with the most stubborn resistance.

The turn of the century witnessed, it is true, an ominous assumption of
authority on the part of the imperial capital in the domain of
literature, and especially the drama; but it was not so much Berlin as
the great city as such. The diseases of superculture, impotent
estheticism, the restless spirit of commercialism, and social conflicts
are of the same kind in Berlin and Vienna as in Paris, London, and New
York. Naturalism, which seized upon these themes, was international, as
was socialism, which hailed this movement as its own. With the
opposition against naturalism and with the new gospel of _Heimatkunst_
the revolt against the international, against the literature of city
life in general, and particularly against the snobbish literary clique
in Berlin was complete. As early as 1901 the gospel of "Away from
Berlin!" was thus fervently preached by a champion of _Heimatkunst_,
the Alsatian Fritz Lienhard:

You writers are all of you entirely out of touch with the German
family, with the spirit of the German people throughout the length and
breadth of the empire. You no longer survey with comprehensive vision
and open-mindedness the manifold regions of our country and the
multifarious callings of our people; you no longer feel yourselves to
be addressing the millions of good people whose mother tongue you
speak, indeed, the best people of your day and generation; you do not
dream of disciplining yourselves to be men and heroes, or of strivin