Sudermann's Sieburth

THE MAD PROFESSOR--Hermann Sudermann (translated by Isabel Leighton and Otto P. Schinnerer)--Horace Liveright, 2 vols. ($5.00).

The Mad Professor is not the swift motivated story one might expect from so incisive a dramatist as Sudermann. Rather it is a leisurely commentary on German University life, with its Bismarckian politics, Junker fraternities, duels and drinking bouts -- everything, in. short, but intellectualism. To point the narrative Sudermann projects a philosophical genius into the stolid pussyfooting faculty, and predicates the dangerous futility of his in dependent thinking. That Professor Sieburth should have independent ideas strikes the faculty as bad enough, but that he should live his ideas is intolerable.

To fascinated students Sieburth had paraphrased Schopenhauer as "the World in Terms of Woman and Thought''; then proceeded to demonstrate the philosophy in person. His women he took indiscriminately from exclusive faculty circles or from the streets and brothels -- one died of despair, another married out of spite, and yet another, jealous, ruined his career. As for thought, Sieburth dissipated it in drunken orgies, then gave it up as futile; killed himself.

If the particular history of Sieburth, genius, is unconvincing. Sudermann's general thesis is none the less cogent. And his analysis of masculine reasoning, as op posed to feminine blind unreasoning, has an uncanny authenticity.

Son of a small-town brewer in East Prussia, Sudermann left school at the age of 14, was apprenticed to a chemist, turned up nevertheless at Immanuel Kant's university in Konigsberg. Sometime journalist in Berlin, he finally devoted himself exclusively to writing novels, and plays, provocative in their sociological significance -- Die Ehre, Es lebe das Leben. He died last November, aged 71.