Die Finsternis und ihr Eigentum (1915)

The story explores whether a father’s “bad genes” are passed on to his son, or whether upbringing and a good social environment can change the nature and character of the descendants of evil. The prelude lays out the situation: Georg Stubensand has murdered the profoundly kind Professor Victor Cassan. It seems that a curse has thereby been laid upon him and the generations that follow him. From then on, however, everyone joins forces to try to break the power of evil that entered the family through the father and threatens to pass to his descendants—in Stubensand’s case, his son Johannes Ohnesorg. His father, Georg, is German, and his mother is Slavic. The son has a high degree of intelligence, enabling him to control the base instincts he has inherited, which might one day break through. Thanks to his upbringing, Johannes becomes an outstanding student and joins a dueling fraternity. He advances rapidly in his career, earns a doctorate, and becomes a professor. Eventually, Johannes makes a name for himself as a philosopher. Upbringing has thus won a point over the theory of heredity: thanks to a different upbringing, the father’s evil could not take hold in the son’s character. Care was taken from the outset to veil Johannes’s childhood in a shroud of forgetfulness. He and everyone else were kept from learning even the slightest information about his origins. To overcome even the father’s abhorrent crime, the murderer’s son eventually marries Klärchen Cassen, the victim’s daughter. And so the story’s guiding principle is embodied—a principle that ultimately gave the story its title: “Whoever wishes to wrest from darkness what belongs to it must be as strong as darkness itself; they must cast off every prejudice, every aversion, every hatred. Only three things may dwell within them: justice, truth, and love.”