Faksimile

Text

box 34/4
m
31. I SideFluefte
93
Book Reviers
become fashionable in certain circles to sneer at him today, it should be pointed out
how painstakingly profound an art appears on every page of Schnitzler. Do the
young critics resent it that Schnitzler does not deal with the Great War and kindred
themes? To this criticism one need only reply that Der junge Medardus is ßlled with
war psychology of so convincing a character that it seems incredible this play was
written before 1014. Or is Schnitzler old-fashioned because he individualizes his
characters by giving them names instead of calling them “the husband, the wise,
the doctor'' as is customary in the modern drama? This objection can have little
weight because the mannerism of thus giving to the dramalis personde universal
signilicance is neither new in the history of literature nor without its own marked
limitations. Despite the fact that this Schnitzler play will probably not take its
place among the greatest the author has produced—I myself should place it beside
Zwischenspiel, below Liebelei and Der einsame Weg, but above Die Schwestern and
Komödie der Verführung—yet it is a delicate work of art from the pen of one ofthe
greatest contemporary dramatists, and deserves full recognition.
A. E. ZuckEk
UNIvERSITY OF MARYLAND
Virgil Moser, Frühnenhochdeutsche Grammatik I. Band. Lautlehre I. Hälfte: Or¬
thographie, Betonung, Stammsilbenvokale, Heidelberg, Winter, 1020.
Virgil Moser belongs with Karl von Bahder, Otto Clemen, Alfred Goetze, A.
Hauffen, and others to that small group of scholars who have devoted their lives to
the scientißc study of Early Modern High German. He believes in the method of
the Young Grammarians, represented by Paul Braune, Sievers, Kluge, Rehaghel,
Osthoff, who have lately been made the target of attack by a new school of
philologists under the leadership of thie Romance philologist, Karl Vossler of Munich,
the author of" Positivismus und Idealismus in der Sprachwissenschaft,“ and other
more pungent articles. Moser, howgver, calls himself also a disciple of Konrad
Burdach in as much as he believes with him that the problem of the creation of the
Modern High German literary language was not solved by one single individual,
however forceful and dominating a personality he might represent, in our case
Martin Luther of legendary language fame, but that it was due to the combined
influence of a great many factors at work, linguistic, religious, political, colonial, etc.,
as advocated as early as 1884 by Konrad Burdach in his habilitation lecture, Die
Einigung der neuhochdeutschen Schriftsprache,’ a most important piece of work
illustrating the more modern method of investigation for this puzzling probiem.
Konrad Burdach was looked upon by the adherents of the new school of
philologists as their patron saint, the idealistic scholar, while the Junggrammatiker
were dubbed materialists, or in Vossler’s idealistic language, Dachdecker um Osthoff,
roof layers arbund Osthoff. Burdach, however,jhas not been taken in completely by
this glorification of his ardent admirers; he has lately cut the cloth between them,
as they are no doubt over-shooting the mark.
Contrary to German custom Virgil Moser has never been connected in an
official way with a German university. He has lived in English fashion until recently
as a private scholar in Munich, in close touch indeed with the university and known
to all and consulted by all who were interested in sixteenth century studies, for
there is hardly a phase in the field of Early Modern High German to which Virgil
Moser has not in one form or another made valuable contributions. His outstanding
book was for a long time his Introduction tothe Early Modern High German Written
Dialects, which was published in 1000, but has been out of print since 1020.