It has been hardly more than a hundred years that the Germans could be said to possess a national literature. Even the literature of the eighteenth century was ill-starred by the partisan strife between the Saxons and the Swiss, a strife which had its origin more particularly in irreconcilable differences of language. Permanent peace was concluded at 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: