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and stable to cling to resulted in a fit of despair which almost led to suicide.

His arrival in Germany this time took place at a most inopportune moment and under the most unfavorable conditions. If the author—so speaks the German enthusiastic Strindberg scholar, Hermann Esswein—like young Schillar had found a Weimar among us, that element in him which alone could have brought poise and calm into his life and thus cleansed his spirit of all inclinations to extremes, would undoubtedly have increased in strength and perhaps even conquered in the end.

“But Strindberg found no Weimar, only modem Berlin. He found no aesthetic-philosophic spiritual culture that could inspire confidence, but a roaring, seething chaos of efforts and onsets in every direction and all that childishly wild, shallow spirituality, void of perspective, which always foams up as soon as new fields are opened for materialistic culture or exploitation.”

Instead of finding the new syntheses which modern science had been able to produce during the latter decades, Strindberg at that time came across the fundamental preparatory works, a lot of details that had not as yet been systematically arranged. He only found the foundations, but no temples upon them, and it was this that so deeply embittered him, who came with all his strong religiosity prepared to embrace the new rationalism.

It was a new Red Room period which he passed through during this stay in Berlin. But it was entirely different from that period of his youth in which he fought