Herman Bahr's death in Munich on the 14th of January awakened many literary memories. A patriarch in the world of letters, Bahr's name had been identified with many of the thought-phases that had passed over Europe in the last fifty years. Though an unbeliever for the greater part of his life, Herman Bahr astonished his friends and associates by returning in later life to the faith of his lathers, as he had astonished them by accepting wholeheartedly the old Austrian regime after being a political innovator, even a socialist. His mind was a prism which had reflected the colours of many men's minds, a sort of kaleidoscope which recorded the passing pictures of his time, but with a certain and very marked stamp of his own. This is his special claim to interest.

Full of sympathy with the world in which he lived, a sympathy which never left him—for he remained a young writer in spite of his years—Bahr was always the man with his finger on the pulse of the times, who felt instinctively every change before it had declared itself; he was the literary barometer foretelling every variation in art and literature before such variations were observed by others. He called himself and was called by others the ‘man of tomorrow,’ and when he appeared as the man of yesterday it was because he saw in some distant yesterday an inevitable tomorrow.

An essayist, a novelist, a playwright, a wit, condensing into words the thought-fluids of his time, Bahr's mind changed with every passing year, until it moulded itself finally within the philosophy of the Catholic Church.