Part of the essence of the post-totalitarianism system is that it draws everyone into its sphere of power, not so that they may realize themselves as human beings, but so they may surrender their human identity in favour of the identity of the system, that is, so they may become agents of the system’s general automatism and servants of its self-determined goals, so they may participate in the common responsibility for it, so they may be pulled into and ensnared by it, like Faust and Mephistopheles.
Václav Havel1
Václav Havel’s superb essay, “The Power of the Powerless” (1979), quoted above, serves as a touchstone for this section. Like many of Havel’s early works, the essay circulated in “samizdat” form – manuscript handed underground rather than public print – in order to avoid the authorities. Not only was Havel a significant dramatist of this era, he symbolized resistance to the communist dictatorship that blanketed Eastern Europe during the period of the Cold War (1945–89). During his lifetime the Czechoslovakian Havel was imprisoned (1979–83) for his outspoken stance that inspired what was known as the Velvet Revolution (he would later become president of the country). As Europe witnessed the East German uprising of 1953 and the Hungarian uprising of 1956 (two large-scale acts of open resistance to Soviet domination), as well as the erection of the Berlin Wall in 1961, Havel spearheaded the Prague Spring of 1968, a resistance to communist suppression which proved to be another landmark movement for freedom. As 1968 demarcated the year of revolution throughout Europe more generally, the German novelist and essayist W.G. Sebald’s analysis of postwar German theatre could aptly apply to European theatre and drama as a whole: “From the mid-sixties onwards the context changed rapidly. The atrophied body [of the state theatre and culture] was rocked by the shock waves of the events of 1968, and it was out of these events and out of the changing consciousness of which they were manifestations that the most important new school of post-war German theatre was born.”2 From that point the Solidarity movement in Poland (Solidarność), led by Lech Walesa, gave impetus to the dissident movement. Though it took over two decades, the actions of dissidents in 1968 – led by Czech intellectuals, Polish labor unions, and Eastern European artists overall – resulted in the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989.
Prior to 1968, continental European drama – from the end of World War II to the late 1960s – was dominated by Soviet socialist realism. This style, which was inaugurated in 1934 by the Union of Soviet Writers as the official dramaturgical form of Soviet socialism, reached its theatrical apex during the 20-year postwar period.3 Aleksei Arbuzov’s The Promise (1965) exemplified this aesthetic and, despite its shortcomings (sentimentality and melodramatic love triangle), represents one of the best plays of this genre. It depicts a love story of three heroic Russian teens – Lika, Marat, and Leonidik – trapped in a cold-water flat during the German army’s besiege of Leningrad. The love story itself is secondary to the three characters’ socialist loyalties. They endure hardships of war and separation, while bonding in friendship as comrades in the fight for socialism. The play moves from 1942 in Act One, 1946 in Act Two, to New Year’s eve of 1959 in Act Three, demonstrating that despite the influence of love, these three ennobled figures suffer, reconnect, and renew their bonds within the competing romance. At the play’s conclusion, Leonidik leaves, knowing that he can no longer compete for Lika’s love (she loves Marat more). Her fondness for Leonidik remains, however, as she and Marat stand onstage together, looking out on the streets where Leonidik has just departed:
LIKA:
(quietly). He’s alone, out there in the streets.MARAT:
No – just don’t pity him, do you hear? Today everything has started for him from the beginning. (Passionately.) You must believe in him again. (Slight pause). Is living together going to be all that easy for us? (He falls silent, a little afraid, which Lika understands).LIKA:
No, no everything’s going to be all right … (Not loud). The sixties … I believe in them. They will bring happiness.MARAT:
They can’t fail to. Such hopes!LIKA:
Only, don’t be afraid to be happy … Don’t be afraid, my poor Marat!4
The play’s theme of socialist hope and promise, which pleased audiences during the postwar decades, soon disintegrated as revelations of Soviet repression surfaced. By the 1960s, Soviet socialist realism and other dramas supporting communism were challenged. Soviet ideology and with it Soviet socialist realism, Havel observes, “offers human beings an illusion of identity, of dignity, and of morality.” The sense of “hope” reported by Marat is an uplifting and pragmatic expression, but, as Havel makes clear, these remarks are at the same time “an apparently dignified way of legitimizing what is above, below, and on either side. It is directed towards people and towards God. It is the veil behind which human beings can hide their own ‘fallen existence,’ their trivialization, and their adaptation to the status quo.”5 The illusion of socialism’s collective unity as a means of well-being and improvement became a mechanism of maintaining the status quo and suppressing any deviance. By the late 1960s the promise of socialism had all but desiccated. What remained was a hollow shell – a utopian illusion built on false promises.
Simultaneously in Western Europe the spread of democracy also gave way to what Theodore White called the “common grayness” suffusing “all the men elevated to power in postwar Europe – drab prime ministers, cold, little police chiefs, pickled-faced economists with their dry statistics and bulging brief cases [which] have mumbled where once great men thundered.”6 Influenced by postwar British dramas such as John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger and Edward Bond’s Saved, Eastern and Western European dramas emerged dynamically as rebellions against capitalism as well as communism. The imposition of two political dogmas – Western capitalism and Eastern communism – upon central Europe gave rise to a feeling of absurdity. Martin Esslin explains that absurdism in Western Europe arose among playwrights seeking to “dramatize their sense of bewilderment at the collapse of values, the debasement of language, the isolation of Western man in a society which, with the collapse of religious as well as political ideologies, went on working and producing an abundance of goods, but without any sense of purpose or idealism.”7 This section will examine German playwrights Franz Xaver Kroetz, Heiner Müller, Botho Strauß, and Peter Handke, representing postwar trauma and assimilation; Polish dramatists Sławomir Mrożek and Tadeusz Kantor, representing a unique theatre of the absurd; and two diverse dramatists – the Italian socialist-satirist Dario Fo and the Czechoslovakian anti-Soviet dissident Havel – who have, in various ways, challenged the status quo of the Eastern post-totalitarian system on the one hand, and the Western drab “men in suits” on the other.8 Doubtless, to reduce the number of important dramatists during this period to a handful of playwrights is an oversimplification and a regrettable dismissal of many creative and productive European dramatists during the 1960s to the end of the century. Still, the eight playwrights selected here represent a broad cross-section of dramaturgical concepts and ideas that can, hopefully, illuminate the era’s influence on modern drama from a continental European perspective.
In the early plays (circa late 1960s, early 1970s) of West German dramatist Franz Xaver Kroetz, the stage is a barren landscape of hostility, violence, and despair populated by characters groping for ways to communicate. Using Bavarian dialect, Kroetz examines characters influenced by their Kleinbürger status – the lower social class struggling to exist. Kroetz was one of the most influential German dramatists of the 1970s; his plays stirred a nation that had accepted Western consumerism passively as a way of accepting defeat in World War II. Western Europe in general experienced what the French call “les trentes glorieuses,” the approximately 30-year period after World War II marked by rapid economic growth. Prior to that period Europe had experienced a succession of three historic catastrophes: World War I, worldwide depression in the 1930s, and World War II, adding up to a devastated private and public financial system. During the postwar era, the rebuilding process, especially in West Germany, instigated economic recovery on a vast scale. Supported by the United States, which saw West Germany as the Cold War battleground in its efforts to defeat communism, the capitalist governments showcased the region in juxtaposition to the struggling East German communist economy. The Marshall Plan was a massive rebuilding effort by the United States to bolster Western Europe, with many West Europeans exposed to, and profiting from, American-style consumerism.
Kroetz, like many other German playwrights, was born into a generation who inherited a defiled and guilt-ridden national culture. Moreover, the epicenter of the Cold War was located in a divided Germany – what has often been referred to as the “schizophrenic era.” On one side capitalism proliferated; on the other was a paradigm of Soviet socialism. Amidst this ideological divide each side saturated their populations with ideological propaganda. West Germany in particular experienced a consumer craze for luxury items, especially televisions, clothes, and cars (television would play an especially important role for Kroetz, as we shall see). For Kroetz, the rising consumerism of Western democracy affected the psyche of the ordinary worker. Materialism – things – was often out of reach for the working class, who lived precariously through the ebb and flow of capitalism. Yet these proletarians hungered for the same possessions as the wealthy. Kroetz’s characters, Ursula Schregel notes, “work so they can buy something – on instalments: the colour television, a new car, a vacation.”9
For Kroetz, the working class – inarticulate, illiterate, protozoan, lumpen, and with limited vocabulary skills – struggle through their daily lives groping existentially for meaning through consumerism. Richard Blevins characterizes accurately the work of Kroetz in the following:
From 1968 to 1978 Franz Xaver Kroetz carefully constructed thirty-odd minutely detailed case studies of workers and their families whose lives and happiness are destroyed by what Kroetz regards as the materialistic competitiveness of capitalistic West German society. His first plays are shocking in their brutal explicitness, cruelty, and pessimism. The frustrated characters seem hopelessly trapped by ignorance and circumstances and incapable of any positive development. … In his recent plays his focus remains upon the lives and problems of contemporary West German working class citizens. However, whereas the first plays mirror the mutilated, wasted lives of people unable to cope with their environment, Kroetz’s later dramas contain characters capable of some positive development in dealing with the seemingly insurmountable economic and social problems confronting them.10
The characteristic inarticulateness is evident in the opening scene of Kroetz’s Michi’s Blood (Michis Blut, 1971), where Mary and Karl, the play’s only two characters, make arrangements for cohabitation:
MARY:
KARL:
MARY:
KARL:
MARY:
KARL:
MARY:
KARL:
MARY:
KARL:
MARY:
KARL:
MARY:
KARL:
MARY:
KARL:
There is a calculated disengagement of language, as if the words are private monologues spoken to another but completely misunderstood. According to Richard Gilman in his Introduction to Kroetz’s plays, “The clichés, the repetitions of banalities, the bromides all testify to the stricken nature of their speech, not so much its lack of expressiveness – that is obvious – as the entire absence of originality, the queer and terrifying sense it gives of not having been created by them but of having instead passed through them, as it were. It is as though their language has been come upon, picked up, scavenged from the grey stretches of a mechanical culture.”12 While true, this only tells half the story: Kroetz is examining the ways in which characters fail to communicate. Language fails to serve its purpose. In Farmyard (Stallerhof, 1970), for instance, four characters work on a barely solvent farm. In the beginning of Act Two, Sepp and Beppi are attending a small country fair. The mentally challenged Beppi is fascinated by the fair, while the older Sepp is slightly drunk.
SEPP:
BEPPI:
SEPP:
BEPPI:
SEPP:
BEPPI:
SEPP:
BEPPI:
SEPP:
BEPPI:
SEPP:
BEPPI:
SEPP:
BEPPI:
SEPP:
SEPP:
This slippage of language and the physically specific use of the body typify Kroetz’s depiction of the disengaged proletariat. It further demonstrates Kroetz’s language breakdown – characters are speechless, sufficed to exhort grunts, monosyllables, expletives, and fragmented sentences. Here Beppi’s rape by Sepp comes unexpectedly (at least from the perspective of a bourgeois audience), because Sepp’s inarticulateness and Beppi’s silence avoid expressing the desires, fears, or pain involved between the two characters. Language fails to express feeling; reading the exchanges above provides little if any semantic motivation. The shocking physicality and sudden connection between defecation and fornication is meant to displace bourgeois comfort and demonstrate linguist failure. In Ludwig Wittgenstein’s posthumous treatise, Philosophical Investigations, he asserts that language is a screen cutting understanding off from reality. He says that “If language is to be a means of communication there must be agreement not only in definitions but also (queer as this may sound) in judgments.” However, “the individual words of this language are to refer to what can only be known to the person speaking; to his immediate private sensations. So another person cannot understand the language.” Wittgenstein uses the word “pain” as an example. We can communicate the word “pain” but we cannot (Kant might say) know the thing-in-itself – the physical sensation of “pain” experiences by another. We might discern intentions, behavior, and phenomena, but language as a means of communication is rendered nil.13
Kroetz’s dialogue underscores the detachment of words and feelings. Instead of communication, Michelle Mattson observes that in Kroetz’s plays “the language of the figures reveals only defects and damage.”14 Kroetz maintains that in his early plays that “Language is dis-functional with my characters” [Die Sprache funktioniert bei meinen Figuren nicht].” Kroetz exemplified a group of playwrights (Martin Sperr, Wolfgang Bauer, and the filmmaker Rainer W. Fassbinder, among others) representing a “new realism” in European, especially German drama during the late 1960s and early 1970s. They rebelled against the “safe” (bourgeois) and commonplace realism of their predecessors, opting instead for stark, bold, and imaginative dramas that depicted ordinary lives manipulated by the machinery of capitalism. As Susan Cocalis notes, these playwrights, influenced by the radical student movements during the late 1960s and early 1970s, “demanded a form of political theater that would reflect the general interest of the times in the psychological mechanisms and behavioral patterns that contributed to authoritarian social structures.” By presenting scenes of fornication, masturbation, excretion, nudity, salaciousness, and extreme violence, Cocalis asserts, Kroetz amplifies the distortion functioning “in a microcosmic society,” yielding an “institutionalization in the greater social whole.”15 These radical playwrights were not, by and large, party-line communists; they were well aware of the crushing bureaucracy and oppressiveness of Soviet authority in the East. But nor did they conform or capitulate to Western consumerism and laissez-faire capitalism.
Language itself is obliterated in Kroetz’s play Request Concert (Wunschkonzert, 1970), where a single character, the middle-aged Fräulein Rauch, comes home and commits suicide. Nothing is said in the play (there is no dialogue), only detailed stage directions. Kroetz “directs” the opening action as follows: “On a normal workday Fräulein Rauch comes home at about 6:30 P. M. after work and after shopping. She enters the apartment house, checks her mail, finds only an advertisement, takes it, goes to her door, unlocks it, and steps in. She lays her shopping bag with her groceries and a newspaper on the table, sets her purse on a chair, hangs the advertisement on the sideboard, and locks the door.”16 The simple and mundane are offset by the depressed socioeconomic condition of the protagonist. What signifies the play is that nothing significant happens. The protagonist marches dutifully and lethargically through her daily routines, coming home from work, rifling through her mail, stocking groceries, preparing dinner, and paying special attention to hygiene. The very “routine-ness” calls attention to her having lived this same dull, repetitive, and uneventful existence before, and will go on living it until she dies. As she performs her daily chores she listens to banal music, yet the tunes provide her only mild comfort. The process of watching her creates a level of discomfort in the audience, suggesting that we have invaded a too private life; ironically, the play’s ordinariness amplifies the oppressive existence. The play bears a strong resemblance to Marsha Norman’s ’night, Mother written a decade later; both accentuate the ennui that overwhelms. In the end Fraülein Rauch commits suicide with a bottle of pills with the same level of routine and lack of enthusiasm demonstrated throughout the play.
Influenced by Brecht, whose left-wing politics Kroetz shares, Kroetz is even more influenced by Ödön von Horváth’s 1930 play, Tales from the Vienna Woods, and Georg Büchner’s 1830s folk play, Woyzeck. Both plays depict working-class life in stark reality. Kroetz was aware of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman and Edward Bond’s Saved (discussed earlier in this book) both of which he admired. Bond’s Saved, in particular, laid the groundwork in German theatre for antisocial characters to epitomize the dehumanization of working-class conditions. For Kroetz, like Bond, drama attempts to achieve naturalism without flatness, representing the working class without embellishment. This balance of folk drama and naturalism is hard to achieve, Christopher Innes notes, because an overemphasis on naturalism “can reduce the plays to slice-of-life flatness or uncritical gush, and it requires a high degree of stylization not unusually associated with the folk play.” Rather than Brecht’s obvious ideological template of distancing effects and specialized formalism (placards before each scene, music interruptions, and actors’ willful self-commentary) which calls attention to itself, Kroetz attempts to show the “process of exploitation from beneath the willful ignorance and sado-masochism of the victimized that perpetuates their subjection, rather than giving the ideological overview of a model-situation.” In contrast to Brechtian theatricalization to highlight oppression, Kroetz, following Horváth, “deals with characters in terms of their mental world and aims at his audience’s subjective awareness, their complicity through shared attitudes and idealistic self-deceptions, their recognition of the reflection of their own dehumanizing turns of phrase.”17 This explanation also serves Marsha Norman’s ’night, Mother, and the relationship between Request Concert and Norman’s play is undeniable.
Kroetz continues his examination of the lumpenproletariat in Men’s Business (Männersache, 1971). Martha, a butcher, and Otto, a steel construction worker, live together precariously. Otto is jealous of Martha’s independence. In this play Kroetz begins to transition to slightly more articulate characters, characters who seem more aware of their working-class conditions. Otto grows increasingly jealous of Martha’s dog and expresses it: in the final scene, Otto and Martha fight over a rifle; Martha shoots at Otto, missing; then shoots again, hitting him in the shoulder. Otto returns the favor, hitting her lethally. Men’s Business (or Men’s Affairs) went through several iterations, becoming Through the Leaves (Durch die Blätter in 1973), to A Man, a Dictionary (Ein Mann ein Wörterbuch in 1978), in order to suggest a less violent ending.
During the early to mid-1970s, Kroetz wrote a trilogy of plays – Oberösterreich (Upper Austria), Das Nest (The Nest), and Mensch Meier – in which his characters are even more aware and articulate of their economic condition. The Nest is an interesting play that begins with a television news broadcast reporting the censorship of Upper Austria. This self-referential commentary marks the connection of the two plays, both of which concern characters dealing with their work. Mensch Meier (1977, translated awkwardly as either Oh Man or The Human Family Meier) is Kroetz’s finest play.18 It avoids the obvious political-ideological message directly, humanizing assembly-line worker Otto, wife Martha, and teenage son Ludwig living their ordinary lives. The play’s title is also a commonplace expression that can be translated from Bavarian as “Oh for Crissake,” and the last name Meier is similar to “Jones” or “Smith” in English. The three characters are trapped in their lower-middle-class existence; Otto works at the local Munich BMW factory, Martha is a stay-at-home housewife who eventually leaves to find work as a saleswoman, and Ludwig is the 15-year-old son aimlessly looking for direction. He eventually becomes a mason’s apprentice. Kroetz examines the lower-middle class family under the pressure of socioeconomic conditions.
The play begins with what appears to be a home filled with “Gerburgenheit” – a German term meaning an abode of warmth, trust, harmony, and security. However, the conditions abruptly turn ominous. Early in the play, a scene titled “Coitus Interruptus,” Martha challenges Otto’s distanced and detached manner. Otto expresses his frustration at work, capturing the subtle alienation of the worker at the mercy of his nameless boss:
No, you got the wrong idea. What it is [my supervisor], he borrowed my ballpoint, it must have been two weeks ago, it cost me twenty-eight seventy. (Short pause). And forgot to give it back. (He turns over abruptly in bed. Pause). I been thinking about it for a long time already, how I could lead up to asking for it back without getting him angry. Whether I should just go in and say “Excuse me, Chief, but you borrowed a ballpoint off me, please could I have it back?” Or maybe not “please” just “you think I could get it back?” Then he might just smile and say “Sure, sorry about that.” (Laughs). Then just reach in his pocket … (Short pause). If he still got it!19
When Otto tells his wife Martha that his friend at the factory “Kuno Gruschke lost his job,” Martha replies, “Be glad it wasn’t you.” As Otto reveals the consequences at work, with many other layoffs, he says:
Everything just keeps rolling along just the same as if he [Kuno] never left. Just gone. Nothing slowed down, no problems. “Redisposition of Resources.” I’ve got two more screws to put in, a couple of other guys, too. Up ahead there’s a kid does the door handle, he’s new. Five of the nine were off my line. From farther up, don’t even know what he did. The foreman was already there with the new breakdowns. Five men, just like the earth opened up and swallowed them. (118)
Lack of work means lack of identity, something Otto fears. Martha tries to reassure him, emphasizing his youth. Since they fired the older workers and the foreigners, he’s apparently safe. “You’re right there, forty-two’s not old” (118).
Doubt, anxiety, and the crushing weight of uncertainty, however, race back into Otto’s psyche no matter how hard he tries to deny it. His job status lies precariously on the (assembly) line. Unable to feel comfortable merely as a worker (Arbeiter), Otto fantasizes his life as an airplane pilot. The life of leisure presented in the first act (we observe Otto making model airplanes as a hobby, and he reenacts/mimics a television interview where he is the subject because, in his fantasy, he is more than a mere worker but rather a master of long-distance flying) is now poised to terminate in the second as his internal, psychic pressure mounts. Louis Dupré maintains that “the balance between the division of labor required for the creation of leisure and a destructive fragmentation of life imposed by a ruthless pursuit of economic profit is precarious.”20 Objects – in this case the borrowed pen – takes on looming proportions for Otto.21 By Act Two the pressure mounts, his connection to the machinery of the assembly line growing more precarious. “Sometimes I feel like they’re switching me off,” he says to Martha (132). Like Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times, Otto becomes desensitized. Martha tries to calm him, but he inveighs against his dehumanizing job:
Right before the weekend they finally switch us off, like the electric typewriters, slip a cover over us so we don’t get dusty. Then we just sit there in the hall. Three-hundred and fifty men. If you got a chair, you sit on it, whatever, or sleep standing up like a horse. There’s this one guy in central control who takes over from the others and plugs all our brains into the same circuit, so inside our heads, we see ourselves driving home in our own car to our families and our kids, our nice apartment, where everything’s just fine and it’s the weekend, just like we’ve been looking forward to all week: and it keeps on going that way, because now we’re switching on to home we can switch on the TV. (132)
The impersonal condition Otto endures leads to his violent eruption. When his son Ludwig leaves home, Otto faces the fact that his relationship with his only offspring is nonexistent. Late one evening, as Otto and Martha silently watch television, Otto erupts; he destroys the home, chastises his family, and propels Martha, shocked and appalled by Otto’s behavior, into leaving for her own job. Ingeborg Walther insightfully observes that “Otto is not a victim of a ‘bad’ boss. The dramatic conflict is not the struggle of the individual against the system; rather, it is the individual’s perception and understanding of the system that is all-important.” Doubtlessly the tedium and routine of his job contributes to Otto’s alienation, but as Walther makes clear, the acute frustration “is heightened by the false perceptions of freedom, wealth and beauty which are themselves perpetuated by social myths and conventions.”22 Otto is saturated by an ideology of wealth and accumulation that is out of reach.
Richard Blevins refers to Otto as “a veritable Hamlet of the working class,” a man “resplendent with metaphors and symbolism as he reveals the repressed fears and fantasies of his alienated proletarian soul.”23 This is perhaps accurate, although Blevins romanticizes Otto. Otto’s repressed fury and mistreatment of his wife and son disengage our sympathies, and this is Kroetz’s point. We are not meant to feel sorry for Otto’s proletarian condition, but rather, in Brechtian fashion, we are meant to understand his social condition as resulting from ideology. The imposition of wealth and prosperity promulgated by Western capitalist ideology bears heavily on Otto, who is bombarded by images and myths of Western capitalism. According to Louis Althusser, the Marxist theory of history is defined by human societies, which “present themselves as totalities whose unity is constituted by a certain specific type of complexity, which introduces instances that … we can, very schematically, reduce to three: the economy, politics and ideology.” As a result, “ideology is as such an organic part of every social totality” (italics in original).24 For Althusser, and Kroetz, ideology develops as a system of images, representations, myths, and ideas conceived organically and that surface as a vital part of human social interactions. Humans respond to the demands of their conditions of existence that rely on certain unproven assumptions concerning their relation to society. What distinguishes societies is the use and formation of ideologies that are calculatedly arranged by the dominant class.
By the third act Otto, alone, repeats his monologue of self-interview, where he pretends to be on television. Now he borrows the structure of a popular American TV show of the 1950s and 1960s, “What’s My Line?,” where a panel tries to decipher the persona and the profession of a well-known individual (the panelists often wore masks if the subject was a celebrity). Asked for the first “clue” as to the subject’s identity, Otto says:
Mixing humor into his political message strengthens the play’s impact. Otto continues the self-interview by reporting that he works for “BMW and screws sixteen screws into the Model Five-Twenty-Five.”
YEP
Otto’s reference to “screw” or “screwing” carries the double entrendre of “being screwed” as well as the merging of human and tool (tool of the capitalist system). Otto epitomizes what Marx called the “alienated laborer,” where work “alienates nature from man.”25
Martha, meanwhile, has taken on her own sense of alienation and detachment, having left Otto, and is, by Act Three, living in a depressing rented room and enduring a dull job as a department store saleswoman. At the end of the play Martha and her son Ludwig try to assess their damaged lives. Ludwig (Ludi as he is affectionately called by his parents) comes to visit because he has been laid off for being too young. Martha, however, cannot take care of him:
MARTHA:
LUDWIG:
MARTHA:
LUDWIG:
MARTHA:
There is a poeticism in this play that reflects Kroetz’s complex creation of politics and lyricism. Unlike Brecht, who distanced his characters from empathy, Kroetz sheds a softer light on the conditions of the working class. His plays remain brutal, violent, and shocking, but they also contain scenes like the one above, where the sublime sense of fortune lies ambiguously on the shoulders of his characters. As Kroetz explains, “I see no contradiction between poetic and political [Politischem und Poetischem] expression”; his dramas are, rather, a “combination and dialectic.”26 The public sphere informs domestic life; work affects family; and the anxieties of public life cannot be discarded cavalierly in the privacy of the home. Denis Calandra notes in his Modern German Dramatists that “None of the pieces [in Kroetz’s plays] descend to the woodenness of formula of socialist realism,” but rather
deal more explicitly with connections between personal and family crisis and the larger pressures of society. Kroetz described as his “special literary problem” trying to create plausible working and lower class characters who have a future. The West German families in his plays, rather like their American counterparts in early Arthur Miller (whose work Kroetz admires), struggle to retain an emotional equilibrium and dignified sense for themselves under unrelenting social and economic pressures which they are hard-put to understand.27
Kroetz’s later works during the late 1970s and 1980s (Neither Fish Nor Fowl, for example) were less polemic, and Kroetz himself became a television actor at this time. But his fundamental premise remains in all his work: “What I want to show is spiritual numbness, the isolation on some people by the present system,” because, as he says elsewhere, “when people can’t dream anymore, then they can only die.”28
Playwright, poet, essayist, journalist, critic, and director, Heiner Müller (1929–95) was one of Germany’s most enigmatic and controversial playwrights from 1970 to his death in 1995. He lived his life amidst the unfolding of history, primarily World War II, the division of Germany, and its reunification. While deemed the heir apparent to Germany’s greatest modern playwright Bertolt Brecht, he wrote, unlike Brecht, dozens of plays that resist categorization or commercialization; their esoteric and obscurantist design can be summarized by Müller himself:
When I write I always feel the need to load people with so much that they don’t know what to take on first. … Not to introduce one thing after the other, which was still law for Brecht. Now you have to bring in as many factors as possible at the same time so that people are forced to make choices. That is, maybe they can’t even choose anymore, but they have to decide fast what they can assimilate first. It just doesn’t work any longer when you give them one piece of information and then tell them that the next one is coming, and so on. Today, I think, you can only work with inundation.29
Müller’s plays inundate spectators with multiple sense perceptions through dialogue, collage, mime, dance, music, masks – bombarding all these simultaneously with what he calls “synthetic fragments.”30 He states that he is “uninterested in answers and solutions” to drama and society; rather his concern is with “problems and conflicts.”31 His inchoate dramas reflect the postmodern collage of fragments, pieces and shards of Europe’s twentieth-century fraught history of socialist hopefulness and despair resulting from Stalinist totalitarianism. His ultimate theme in all his works, Müller scholar Eva Brenner contends, “is the horror of German history,” analyzing the “reoccurring failures of German history” as far back as the Peasant Wars of the sixteenth century, the aborted revolutions of 1848 and the Spartacist uprising of 1919, the nightmare of Nazism, and the collapse of communism in 1989. Throughout Müller’s work we are witness to the “uninterrupted chain of senseless and deadly war-games, an accumulation of slaughter, fratricide, and repression.”32
Müller’s importance to the international, postmodern avant-garde art scene cannot be overstated; his texts were performed globally as a representation of postmodernism in general and the crisis of Cold War politics specifically. Müller was born prior to the Nazi regime and was drafted briefly at the end of the war (he was too young to serve militarily but performed duties in the rear for the German Labor Force). He witnessed his father’s trial and beating by the Nazis for allegedly failing to serve the community; he lived in East Germany after the war; was invited, then banned, from the East German Writers Union for his early plays during the 1950s; and Müller experienced the full power of German intellectualism that arose at the end of the nineteenth century and flourished during the pre-Nazi era. In The Road to Serfdom, F.A. Hayek wrote in 1944 that
For over two hundred years, English ideas had spread eastward. The kingdom of freedom, which had already been established in England, seemed destined to spread all over the world. However, around 1870, the predominance of these ideas had perhaps reached its maximum expansion. From that moment on … England lost its intellectual leadership in the socio-political field, and became an importer of ideas. During the following sixty years [1870–1930], Germany constituted the center from which the ideas that were destined to govern the world in the twentieth century spread eastward and westward.33
For Müller and other German artists, the catastrophe of Nazism followed swiftly by a divided Germany and East German repression constituted a profound disappointment and skepticism – a sense that the intellectual ideas emanating from Germany had proven disastrous.
Heiner Müller began to receive international attention in the 1960s for his radical theatre texts. I use the term “text” rather than “play” deliberately because his plays are often indecipherable as “dramas” ordinarily containing traditional and familiar Aristotelian linearity, lucid plot lines, or characters based in Stanislavskian psychological motivation. Author of approximately 60 “texts” of theatre, the bulk of his work confronts the trauma of, and reaction to, violent political upheaval. His early works, such as The Scab (Die Lohndrücker, also translated as The Wage Squeezer, 1957), The Peasants (Die Bauern, 1957), Correction (Korrektur, 1958), Klettwitzer Report (Klettwitzer Bericht, 1958), and The Building Site (Der Bau, 1964), concern socialist reconstruction in East Germany and the problems of separating socialism in theory from socialism in action. His later plays (the ones he is most famous for), Hamletmachine (to be examined here), Medeaplay (Medeaspiel, 1974), Germania Death in Berlin (Germania Tod in Berlin, 1977), or The Task (Der Auftrag, 1979), among others, deal with historical questions and the effect of history on the present. But to call these “plays” is misleading: Jeanette Malkin has aptly called Müller’s texts “collages,” creating works of a “knowing postmodernist and one of the designers of a German postmodern theatre aesthetic. His (post-1960s) writings and stage directing give voice to an artist deeply committed to dislodging texts from contexts, events from their historical moorings, voice from character, and thus ungrounding any illusions of a fixed or restorable world.”34 Like Kroetz, Müller abhorred capitalism; but he also experienced an existential crisis of history – the failure of communism to transpire as utopia – reflecting on what Walter Benjamin often referred to as the vast destructive “wreckage upon wreckage” of history.35 “History stands still” in Müller’s plays, and with it, writes Helen Fehervary, “the oppressive weight of the past falls off, and their remains no life flesh for the cancer myth to feed on.”36
To consider this particular postmodern aesthetic is to go straight to the heart of a Nietzsche-like crisis of confidence in institutions, histories, or memories of the past. “There is no revolution without memory,”37 Müller wrote, emphasizing that collective forgetting dooms any effort toward social justice. For Müller, the overbearing weight of European history – with its destructive consequences – cannot be told adequately by presenting a sequence of theatrical events linked by a thematic through-line. Yet he is not a whimsical postmodernist; as he says, “I cannot keep politics out of the question of post-modernism.”38 In a sense the asymmetry between the destructive form of Müller’s dramaturgy – with its destabilizing sense of time, place, or action, its send-up of logic, and its deliberate opacity – permits audiences to build a new set of aesthetic standards. “I’m neither a Dope – nor a Hope – Dealer,”39 Müller says in response to questions about his dramaturgical strategy. While Müller was influenced by Brecht’s Marxist politics, he refused Brecht’s dramaturgy as outdated and too “didactic and entertaining.” Obscurantism was essential for Müller because he believed it was necessary for audiences to find their own answers and reject easily provided solutions by the playwright. Jonathan Kalb contends that “Müller redeemed Brecht’s notion of theater as a forum for examining history, for making the processes of history appear changeable. In an era saturated with information that spins an illusion of universal democratic zeal, Brecht’s genre of explicitly didactic drama grounded in datedly disruptive montage structures has lost even the limited ability to achieve Verfremdung (alienation – the making available of alternative choices in interpretation and action) that it once had.” Instead, “Müller’s reaction was to utilize the postmodern indefinite (rather than surrender to it as the majority of writers hyped as postmodern) as a new means of articulating and offering audience access to multiple meaning anchored at almost all times in specific historical inquiry.”40
Despite its esoteric and inchoate nature, Hamletmachine (1977) is written using the principles of a five-act drama. The nine-page text is organized around five “acts” or scenes that correspond to Shakespeare’s play. There are only two characters – Hamlet and Ophelia – both of whom seem detached from events; both wander through a Cold War landscape of Stalinist repression on one side and capitalistic avarice on the other. While Hamlet and Ophelia fail to interact – the third act being the exception – they make reference to each other in each of their acts (Hamlet is in the first and fourth scene, Ophelia in the second and fifth). “For thirty years Hamlet was a real obsession for me,” Müller contends, “so I tried to destroy him by writing a short text, Hamletmachine. German history was another obsession and I tried to destroy this obsession, this whole complex.”41 Hamlet’s first appearance at the play’s opening, a scene titled “Family Scrapbook,” begins with “I was Hamlet.”42 The importance of the past tense characterizes the protagonist’s reflective nature; Hamlet continues, saying, “I stood at the shore and talked with the surf BLABLA, the ruins of Europe in back of me” (53). As Hamlet’s monologue unfolds we find him detached, aloof, standing outside as an observer. He argues that it was better he wasn’t born:
Here comes the ghost who made me, the ax still in his skull. Keep your hat on, I know you’ve got one hole too many. I would my mother had one less when you were still of flesh: I would have been spared myself. Women should be sewed up – a world without mothers. We could butcher each other in peace and quiet, and with some confidence, if life gets too long for us or our throats too tight for our screams. (53–4)
The play’s templating of Shakespeare’s Hamlet tragedy serves as a metaphor for the catastrophes of Europe – the ruins during and after World War II, but more than that, the ruination of Germany as a paradigm of European cultural history – and the failure of the intellectual (i.e., Hamlet) to act effectively. Around the time Müller wrote Hamletmachine he also wrote another play, Germania Death in Berlin (1976). In the production program for this show he expressed his ideas about German intellectual history: “There is no dramatic literature as rich in fragment as German literature. It has to do with the fragmentary nature of our (theatre) history, with the constant rupture of ties between literature, theatre, and audience (society) which results from it.” Similarly German politics and history, being a nation at the time divided and culturally at war – not so much militarily as in propaganda and ideas – between East and West. Müller then adds: “The need of yesterday is the virtue of today; the fragmentation of a process emphasizes its procedural character, stops the production being lost in the product, in commercialism, makes the depiction a laboratory, in which the audience can co-produce. I do not believe a story with ‘hands and feet’ (the plot in the classical sense) can cope with reality.”43 The co-creation of reality – essentially the co-creation of truth – between performance and audience means for Müller the grasping of the whole, observing how events hang together, and not letting appearances (the merely outlined illusion) deceive. When the audience is allowed to interpret individually, and not told what reality is, a level of empowerment is provided to the spectator.
Müller uses Shakespeare’s Hamlet as a postmodern palimpsest – a stone onto which he reinscribes yet keeps much of the original (in spirit, if not in letter). Hamlet is a play concerned with the impossible yet unavoidable necessity of discovering a moral relationship to action. Müller builds on this concept, adding the specter of history to Hamlet’s quandary. Hamlet is the quintessential intellectual caught between action and thought; doubt and resolve; and impulse and reason. As a result, action is nullified by alternative possibilities – all of which seem ineffectual. This is why the play was so appealing to Nietzsche. Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy contends that all our actions are vetted by veils of illusion; these illusions eventuate in the destruction by knowledge. Once we see truth’s cruelty – that action is futile – our ability to commit to action is obliterated. Hamlet is, for Nietzsche, the paradigm of this inactive person: he has seen the horrid truth through the vision of his father’s ghost and this leads to his ineffectuality. Everything becomes nothingness because of his newly endowed self-doubt: nothing his father has done, nothing to be done to avenge his death, nothing in his love for Ophelia, and nothing in persuading his mother the evil she has embraced in marrying a murderer. Nietzsche’s Dionysiac man is personified in Hamlet: “both have gazed into the true essence of things, they have acquired knowledge and they find action repulsive, for their actions can do nothing to change the eternal presence of things; they regard it as laughable or shameful that they should be expected to set to rights a world so out of joint. Knowledge kills action. … [It] is not reflection, it is true knowledge, insight into the terrible truth, which outweighs every motive for action.”44
This is evident in Hamletmachine. Müller writes that in this play “there is no historical substance for real dialogue, it turned into separate monologues of Hamlet and Ophelia,” yielding a “self-critique of the intellectual.” Ultimately the play is “the description of a petrified hope, an effort to articulate a despair so It can be left behind. It certainly is a ‘terminal point,’ I can’t continue this way.”45 In “Act Four,” Hamlet steps out of character, saying “I’m not Hamlet. I don’t take part anymore. My words have nothing to tell me anymore. My thoughts suck the blood out of my images. My drama doesn’t happen anymore” (56). Hamlet is, in Müller’s words, “a montage of quotations – a collage of texts.”46 It is also rife with violent images and deeds: Hamlet rapes his mother, cross-dresses in Ophelia’s clothes, and says in the end, “I force open my sealed flesh. I want to dwell in my veins, in the marrow of my bones, in the maze of my skull. I retreat into my entrails. I take my seat in my shit, in my blood” (57). Hamlet in this play is merely a continuation of his ineffectual father. Erika Fischer-Lichte contends that Hamlet withdraws into solipsism:
Neither Hamlet’s distance as narrator, nor his command of literature, nor his insight into the essence of history and the need to bring it to a standstill, nor even his reflection on the possibility of refusing to do the deed of violence demanded of him have prevented him from taking on the role prescribed for him and identifying himself with his father. The intellectual has proved himself incapable of breaking through the endless chain of violence: with the rape of his mother he adds one more link to the chain and thus guarantees its continuity.47
According to Jonathan Kalb, Hamletmachine, one of Müller’s most frequently produced plays, is the “idea of identity crisis.” Its “substantial literary reputation” also carried the “notoriety as a sort of dramatic practical joke: a playscript conceived for ‘open’ use by those who don’t believe in the viability of plays anymore, as well as a metaphorical examination of the crisis of the Marxist intellectual written by an intellectual who wishes it known that he may be neither Marxist nor in crisis.”48 Hamletmachine is also a play of mourning; in this case, the loss of a utopian dream amidst the rubble of European intellectualism. Müller creates a palimpsestuous work layered consciously upon Shakespeare’s Hamlet, which is a work of a fallen hero’s idealism. In his book Hamlet in His Modern Guises, Alexander Walsh contends that Hamlet’s modernism – and modernism as a whole – is reflected in Hamlet’s youth and in “the loss of some priority.”49 Because of his “disappointment,” Hamlet is the ultimate prevaricator, equivocator, and procrastinator; for Müller, he represents contemporary Europe, fashionably pessimistic and nihilistic. For Müller’s protagonist, there is no hope of change, no striving toward self-determination, and no inkling of an escape from endless doom – only an isolated inveighing, almost puerile screed against literary sterility, ineffectual politics, and intellectual impotence. Like Beckett’s Endgame, Müller’s “hero” is trapped in an existential knot; but unlike Endgame, and closer to German expressionism, Hamlet unleashes blood-curdling invectives against authoritarianism. This Hamlet is a burnt-out misanthrope, empowered only by his own ennui. He gazes at the world of willful exploitation and ineffectuality to confront power, acknowledging merely the fact that the powerful and the powerless negate each other to the point where they are indistinguishable. Hamlet has lost all hope of ever dismantling this stand-off, nor does he know whether he should even take sides.50
Yet Müller counters Hamlet with Ophelia, the ultimate oppressed woman. For Ophelia has little time or use for self-indulgent musings or existential reflection. She has been raped and pillaged, and her plight leaves her in a state of survival. In her final scene, she is encased in gauze by two men in white smocks, tying her to a wheelchair. Ophelia embraces the role of “Electra,” saying:
This is Electra speaking. In the heart of darkness. Under the sun of torture. To the capitals of the world. In the name of the victim. I eject all the sperm I have received. I turn the milk of my breasts into lethal poison. I take back the world I gave birth to. … Long live hate and contempt, rebellion and death. (58)
Ophelia has, unlike Hamlet, embraced the violence. Her expressionistic cry picks up the mantle of resistance dropped by Hamlet. Hamlet and Ophelia are two sides of the same coin: if Hamletmachine is a conflict between the past ghosts and the present attempt to move forward, it is also “a battle between drama and theatre,” literature and performance, writes Kirk Williams, where the battle between “the dead literary fathers and their theatrical progeny, here imagined as Hamlet, the melancholic actor/son, and Ophelia, the victimize revolutionary/daughter.”51 The conflict between drama as literary text and performance as an ephemeral event is enacted in director Robert Wilson’s well-known 1986 production of the play, where Ophelia was played by three women simultaneously (one remained in s swivel chair throughout the play). The separation allowed audiences to view various perspectives; in Andy Warhol postmodern-like design, Wilson emphasized a triptych (he also used three actors for Hamlet), giving a choral structure rather than a subjectivist point of view. There was now a “chorus” of voices.
Hamlet and Ophelia represent two ideals of history. The former represents the continuity of orthodox Marxism (or at least the mourning of its failures) and teleological progress halted by the ineffectuality of Western intellectualism to create utopia; Hamlet, rejecting his position as avenger, realizes the failure of political engagement. The latter is the female representative of victim who hasn’t the luxury of self-indulgence. This dialectic between Hamlet and Ophelia is, according to Arlene Akiko Teraoka, “two sets of ideologies: the figure Hamlet belongs to a drama based upon rational discourse which unfolds as an inescapable and undeviating movement towards a logical end; Ophelia, on the other hand, representing the hitherto suppressed, dark forces of the heart, is associated with an Artaudian theater myth which appeals directly to the senses.” This coincides with two views of history: the former an Enlightenment-Hegelian model of “continuity and ineluctable progress,” the latter “the Benjaminian understanding of a radically discontinuous time in which the present can be charged with, and can avenge and redeem at any moment, the catastrophic suffering of the past.”52 While thoughtful, I find this view a bit romantic and problematic: Ophelia is just as much a destructive force as Hamlet in this play; and while Ophelia is oppressed for being a woman (suffering that Hamlet lacks), she embraces similar nihilism and cynicism as her lover Hamlet.
In her nuanced analysis of Ophelia, Magda Romanska compares Hamlet and Ophelia in the play as symbols of a masculine/feminine dichotomy as they represent the German nation. If, as Romanska contends, “Hamlet’s identity crisis is a crisis of masculinity defined by national identity and destroyed by the split of that identity (with the post-war separation of East and West),” in Ophelia “Müller creates an image of femininity that’s victimized by its own impossibilities: she is a vision of radical feminism that cannot help but to eat its own tail.” Ophelia is not so much a character as she is a symbol incorporating Ophelia, Electra, and a representative of “revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg, the terrorist Ulrike Meinhoff, and the Charles Manson follower Susan Atkins,” as well as a personal symbol of the playwright’s dead wife. Ultimately, Ophelia is a bundle of contradictory icons, someone who reclaims “the position of woman as mother, without whom the world/the man would not exist,” and simultaneously she rejects her stereotypical role as mother by refusing to “reproduce the world over and over again, like a machine.”53
Müller’s works (along with those of the dramatist Thomas Bernhart, playwright and film director Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and the two playwrights to be examined next, Botho Strauß and Peter Handke) belong squarely in the German tradition of a Schopenhauer-influenced discourse, emerging in the nineteenth century, dubbed the mal du siècle, with its emphasis on spiritual malaise, ennui, and disillusionment. These dramatists are politically and culturally disappointed, believing that the exemplary achievements of modernism such as the French Revolution and the advances of technology (televisions in particular – a visual sign of mendacity in nearly all of their plays) achieve a negative impact. Technology and consumerism combine to dull the mind and instigate inertia. The pitched battle between capitalism and communism played out in a divided Germany, with West German capitalism (supported by the United States), flaunted its materialism. (Walking through Berlin in 1989 I witnessed billboards of consumer goods directly angled to be seen over the Berlin Wall by East Germans in the hopes that they might desire these goods that were unavailable under communism.) These playwrights are deeply distressed by the entrepreneurialism of the bourgeoisie and the industrialization of mass society. Neither communism nor capitalism has succeeded in negating cultural entropy and vapidity; instead, a rebarbative consumerism filled the void, while communism provided little more than slogans and ideology.
In his rejection of history as a paradigm on how to endure the present, Julie Klassen argues that Müller “attacks the linear view of history, a view that presupposes progressive improvement of the human condition guided by reason. His plays take to task the theory and practice of the Enlightenment for establishing the worship of logical powers so firmly in the German tradition, to the detriment … of the subjective, non-logical aspects of human nature evident in emotions, fantasy, dreams, intuition, and instinct.”54 Müller would take an important position in the German literary and political scene; even after the collapse of communism and the Berlin Wall he remained President of the East German Academy of Arts.55 He would continue to write oppositional plays that defined commercialization and simplistic understanding until his death in 1995.56 Like the next two playwrights, Müller embraced a postmodern skepticism toward traditional politics.
In his major opus, Being and Time (Sein und Zeit, 1927), the philosopher Martin Heidegger argued that Western metaphysics, dominated by subjective consciousness detached from the world of time and space, created a narrow and ill-defined state of being and meaning for the world. Metaphysics, according to Heidegger, nullified existential experience and canceled knowledge-of-the-world; it strayed from the question of what Heidegger repeatedly calls “being in the world.” Heidegger’s goal was to establish a “fundamental ontology,” in the “existential analytic of Dasein,”57 one in which being was dependent on “Dasein” – translated literally as “being there,” or “being-in-the-world.” The world is dense, opaque, and often unintelligible; but it is not in the “mind”; it is rather, for Heidegger, in finitude that our being discloses itself. We exist in time and our temporality is inextricably connected to our being. Humans are in this world, he says, and because of this we bear responsibility for our actions and relations in being in this world. Dasein, according to Heidegger, “is an entity which does not just occur among other entities. Rather it is ontically distinguished by the fact that, in its very Being, that Being is an issue for it.”58 Because we are literally “thrown into existence” into the world, we are, according to Heidegger, what we make of our possibilities and existence. Every aspect of existence derives from the preexisting world of people being with another through interaction and interpersonalization; Heidegger maintains that there are no distinct subjectivities divorced from the phenomenal world of interaction. Our intersubjectivity defines our subjective selves. Unlike Descartes, for whom individual subjectivities contribute separate spheres of knowledge and self-defined reason to bear on the world (Cogito, ergo sum, “I think, therefore I am”), or Kant, for whom individual transcendental idealism means we intuit knowledge even if we can never grasp the ding-an-sich, the “thing-in-itself,” for Heidegger our temporal intersubjectivity is the sole means of understanding. “I am one of many beings in this world, living in a fluid, temporal, spatial, and protean state – therefore I am,” Heidegger might reply to Descartes. For Heidegger Dasein means a mode of existence not in the mind (pure consciousness) but in situ, drawing on the particular time and place, giving rise to the notion that our existence is contingent, and this contingency serves as a focal point of being. According to Rolf Wiggershaus, “In place of pure consciousness with which Kant and Husserl were concerned, concrete human existence appeared, ‘thrown’ into the world. This existence, like pure consciousness, was concerned with the highest matters but had loaded them with vital significance.”59 Heidegger, perhaps more than anyone, established the ground rules for postwar existentialism.
Existentialism’s “being-ness” or Dasein became de rigueur in postwar Germany, as playwrights grappled with the problems of guilt, consumerism, and identity. Like Kroetz and Müller, Botho Strauß (1944– ) and Peter Handke (1942– ) wrote dramas of existential angst, where the unspoken but ever present backdrop of Nazism’s recent history, the rise of capitalist consumerism in the West, and a sense of split identity in a divided Germany saturated the zeitgeist. What distinguishes these two dramatists is their mutual interest in human interaction, making them convincing subjects for human “being-in-the-world.” They were both influenced by the literary movement dubbed New Subjectivity, a term used by Linda DeMeritt to characterize a decade of German literature that marks a shift in emphasis “from an engagement intending societal revolution to an interest in the subject and personal problems. The authors of the seventies begin to produce a literature which deals with topics considered banal and trivial just a short time before. Love, emotion, marriage and divorce, death or illness, and personal crisis are central themes which take place within the apartments, offices, and daily routines of the individual.”60 Moreover, they seem to grasp Heidegger’s concept of beings thrown into existence struggling to find an authenticity amidst artifice.
Strauß’s signature drama, Big and Little (Gross und Klein, 1979), is an existential study of the life of Lotte Kotte, a Candide-like character of enormous neediness and angst. She’s a graphic artist, former physical therapist, divorced, who wanders in and out of scenes almost marginally, as if her existence is as a minor character in her own play. The play, about three hours long, unfolds through ten scenes, each of which, as Denis Calandra notes, is “peopled with characters out of touch with their inner selves.”61 This is evident in a scene where Lotte meets a character named Guitar Player. Lotte had been talking to herself (something she does often in the play), when the Guitar Player enters without his instrument. She asks him his name; he says (perhaps sarcastically) “Sören Kierkegaard.”62 The implication is that she confronts the source of her alienation (the author of many books on the subject). Alienation for Lotte arises when her goals, norms, and definitive objectives appear irrelevant or even horrid to her. To the extent that her goals in life remain part of her ritual even as they are eviscerated of meaning undergirds her aimlessness and rootlessness. Her work, marriage, love life, and even her ability to conduct “small talk” have been stripped away, leaving a raw wound and self-effacement:
GUITAR PLAYER:
LOTTE:
GUITAR PLAYER:
LOTTE:
Low self-esteem and lack of self-confidence are merely the surface manifestations of Lotte’s condition: she personifies an “in-between-ness,” an unstable, fickle, vain, and variable self that tries to enter into a self-perception that is interwoven by doubt and confusion. Her “being-in-the-world” is fraught with the existential question posed by Heidegger. “Dasein,” he denotes, “always understands itself in terms of its existence – in terms of a possibility of itself: to be itself or not itself.” As a result, the “question of existence never gets straightened out except through existing itself.”63
In an exemplary scene capturing Lotte’s state of mind, Strauß titles the scene “Big and Little.” It occurs in front of a glass door in an apartment house where Lotte converses through an intercom with her former classmate and friend, Niedschlager. The visual force of her isolation is made evident by the fact that she is conducting a lengthy dialogue with an intercom against a glass door. The intercom symbolizes her detachment from humanity and the glass her transparency. Throughout the scene people come and go; she enters then exits only to talk again to her friend; and the scene transitions to the next, titled “Way Station,” where Lotte lives in a telephone booth on the edge of a rural highway. Though the space is “comfortably furnished” with sundry objects, the space itself depicts her loneliness. The scene is a monologue in which she writes to her estranged husband, Paul.
As the play proceeds, Lotte goes deeper into isolation. By the seventh scene, “Wrong Number,” Lotte, her face smeared with mascara, talks to a chair:
Are you listening? Chair!
Wake up! Lazy old thing!
Just you and me, we’re still sitting tight.
You’re on the ground, I’m on you.
The turn of events has just rolled over us, you say?
There’s no reason at all to let yourself go, you!
A person has to always want something!
The clock has to always strike something! (145)
By the end of the play Lotte’s sense of self-worth has dissipated. She meets a Man who says to her, “You could look halfway decent. You have an occupation, you could help. There’s no reason to let yourself go.” But all she can say is “I’m one of the righteous … God has come back” (173). By the last scene she wanders self-effacingly into a doctor’s office where she is told to “Please leave.” All she can muster for a reply is “Yes” (180), becoming a nettlesome quack and insignificant fifth wheel. The door closes on a person of no consequence – yet we have observed her “meaninglessness” intended to evoke unalloyed compassion.
According to Leslie Adelson, Strauß is paradigmatic of this existential movement emphasizing nonentities, with his work being praised “for its sensitive depiction of subjective anguish and isolation, while condemned by others for its nihilistic, self-indulgent emphasis on the private torment of the individual.”64 Strauß is certainly both: in his plays, films, and novels he foregrounds isolation copiously, intuitively, and painfully (though there are multiple moments of gallows humor), while his characters are indeed self-indulgent. Mostly his characters are drenched in “dread,” the uncanny feeling of being afraid of nothing at all. They often exist in their silent subjectivity, trapped in an inertia of self-deprecation and ennui.
If Strauß’s characters are muted and stymied, the Austrian dramatist Peter Handke’s characters experience their existential anxiety garrulously. “Small talk” enlarged, analyzed, and dissected describes his dramas; turgid language with little if any stage direction or action teases out the way in which language is excessive yet ineffective. In one of Peter Handke’s earliest plays, Offending the Audience (or, Abuse of the Audience, Publikumsbeschimpfung, 1966), a single monologue is distributed to four actors; but what sets this play apart is how it challenges assumed audience expectations. “What is the theatre’s is not rendered unto the theatre here,” the speaker says; “Here you don’t receive your due. Your curiosity is not satisfied. No spark will leap across from us to you. You will not be electrified.”65 The play calls into question the routines of drama, with its naturalism, symbolism, plot, etc., typifying many experimental dramas of the 1960s and 1970s: plays that challenged audiences to divest themselves of their usual habits of theatre-going. Handke wants to disintegrate the curtain between audience and actor, intending theatre to be “a playing space that opens up the spectator’s as yet undiscovered interval playing spaces, a means to make the consciousness of the individual not broader but more precise, a means of sensitizing, stimulating, provoking reaction, a means of touching the world.”66 Handke, like other German dramatists in the 1960s and 1970s, owed much to Bertolt Brecht’s far-reaching influence. However, like his peers he would find fault with Brecht, the dramatist known for his radical attack on bourgeois theatre. For Handke, Brecht deserves credit for creating space for contradictory thinking onstage, where audiences can observe alternative views and possibly discover new and innovative ways to change society. But ultimately Brecht, Handke says, relied on conventional ideas of “entertainment” and his solutions on behalf of social justice seemed irrevocably fixated on Marxism. “What upsets me is not that it is a Marxist solution which is specified, but that it is specified as a solution in a play.” The theatre’s relevance, he insists, “is determined by the extent to which everything that is serious, important, unequivocal, and conclusive outside the theatre become play; and therefore unequivocation, commitment and so no become irretrievably played out in the theatre precisely because of the fatal limitations of the scope.”67
For Handke, drama is an artificial activity where realism is merely one of many artificial templates. Audiences need to understand that theatre’s use of dialogue, interaction, and relationships have blocked our ability to separate the real from the insincere. The realistic method is unnatural, he says, because over time and “through familiarity” it came to “seem natural.”68 According to Handke, Offending the Audience resulted from his resistance to theatrical convention:
On one occasion I arrived at the theater too late, and while I waited in the foyer, I heard, behind the closed doors, the actors acting reality: what they were performing I didn’t understand, but I heard the tense, quiet, irritated, casually spoken, muffled, mocking, subdued, reflective, soundless sounds; that was good enough, but it hasn’t been sufficiently provoking for me to be able to deduce my aversion to the theater from it alone. I have an aversion, that is clear; I had aversions before I wrote the play Offending the Audience, and I tried to put something rational, words, in the place of aversions precisely by writing the play.69
By nullifying the conventions of theatre – plot, action, relationships, and realistic representationalism, Handke attempts to focus on language: how words are used, deployed, made, and what sounds they evoke. He refers to the play as “speak-ins” (Sprechstücke), where the world is defined by words, not pictures; oral, not visual; sound, not space; and it demands an audience willing to forego prior conceptions of dramatic narrative.
Richard Gilman has noted that there is a significant relationship between Handke’s dramatic works and the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein’s notion of language and words used as a “toolbox.” Although Handke, Gilman says, has rejected “all questions about Wittgenstein, there’s no doubt that he has read and pondered his fellow Austrian, but even if he hadn’t the pressures, enticements, and directions were in the air to be succumbed to and followed.”70 Wittgenstein insists that “Language disguises the thought,” the consequence of which means that “Most propositions and questions, that have been written about philosophical matters, are not false, but senseless. We cannot, therefore, answer questions of this kind at all, but only state their senselessness.”71
Handke uses similar techniques in Kaspar (1968), his first full-length play. Kaspar is based on a famous 16-year-old mentally challenged boy from Nuremberg who, in 1828, appeared to the town apparently having been raised in the woods isolated from human contact. The figure of Kaspar symbolized for many the foreigner or outcast from society seeing to reintegrate; Handke seizes the metaphor of the speechless to show how language is taught and manipulated. Handke defines the play as showing how “someone can be made to speak through speaking. The play could also be called speech torture.”72 The inexpressible pain Kasper experiences in trying to conform to language is shown in Kaspar’s first line: “I want to be someone like somebody else was once” (62). Confusion, longing, and anguish permeate the play; throughout Kasper ruminates about words, language, and how they might signify things. “Words and things” (72), he says, and launches into a philosophy about language. For Handke, the play demonstrates how language exercises its authoritative power by the play’s “Prompters,” figures who bully, coax, torture, control, and manipulate Kaspar as he attempts to navigate the terrain of words. The Prompters are offstage voices that can be construed as Kaspar’s super-ego, parental tutors instilling language into his mind in order to socialize/normalize him. In this play, James Hamilton observes,
all teaching is coercive insistence and one’s language is never one’s own. This pairing of coercive insistence and a kind of dispossession is presented graphically in the play’s most striking images: the visual image of the puppet-like Kaspar with the frozen mask that at first does not appear to be a mask, and the auditory image of the Prompter’s voices sounding as though they were produced by the use of “technical media.”
As a consequence, Kaspar “illuminates the connections among the sense of alienation from one’s language and … the absence of characters, and the sense that while there is no history here there is a kind of plot to the events of the play.”73
A critical scene occurs at the end of scene 17, where the Prompters have sufficiently badgered Kaspar to the point where he “tries with all his strength to produce a single sound” (69). In the next scene Kaspar is a mere shell, suffering from what Roman Jakobson calls aphasia, or “language of dissolution” – a living disconnect between words (what he says) and meaning.74 Kasper is reduced to single syllable words or clichés. The Prompters continue to dictate his speech, as well as what he should observe, hear, and attend to. “What upsets me is people’s estrangement from their own language,” Handke maintains in a pseudo-Marxist observation; “People who are estranged from their language and their speech are like the workers estranged from their products, who are also estranged from the world.”75 But the angst goes deeper than the political. For Handke, the influence of his mother’s suicide, described in his book A Sorrow beyond Dreams (Wunschloses Unglück, 1972), abounds in all his dramas.
Handke, moreover, is steeped in the counterculture movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s, a period where authority of any sort was deemed cruel, bullying, and out of touch with the zeitgeist. For him, the coercive force of language defines pain’s inexpressiveness; language cheapens the pain, provides it with a signifier that can never measure up to the signification. Kasper’s speechlessness serves for Handke as the ideal metaphor; once speech is instilled, Kasper loses the only independence he ever had. Handke, M. Read writes, uses the historical figure of Kasper “to demonstrate that the language to which Kasper is exposed is not the essential instrument for understanding the world, but, rather, that this language (as necessary as it is for orientation in the social world) involves a rationalised distortion of individual consciousness and its relations to the unconscious.” Modern experience of the world is “inextricably conjoined with a debased conceptual thought,” and this deception or inauthenticity decreases communication while pretending to enhance it. In Kasper, Read contends, “The linguistic behavior displayed is based upon functional language, a language which hinders authentic conceptual development, and militates against abstraction and mediation.”76 Read is mostly correct: language nullifies mediation; but for Handke language is abstraction and distraction; it obfuscates true communication and authenticity.
Handke’s next major work is The Rise across Lake Constance (Der Ritt über den Bodensee, 1971). Based on a poem by Gustav Schwab, it tells the story of a man who crossed the frozen Lake Constance and died from shock when he discovered what he had done. The title serves as a metaphor for the way we use language, skimming on “thin ice” as we engage in gibberish. The characters are named after well-known German silent film stars, such as Emil Jannings, Erich von Stroheim, and Heinrich George. The characters appear to be in an ordinary room, but their conversations belie a surreal phantasmagoria. At one point Jannings admonishes the other characters: “You’re not in a restaurant. You have nothing to say here. Please talk to each other only in whispers. If you must intrude here, at least take off your hats.”77 Handke makes clear in the author’s introduction to the play that the drama is a continuance of Kaspar, observing our quotidian life as we love, work, buy, and sell – a veritable potpourri of dialogue creating a “Free Play of Forces” (164) in our engagement with others. Christopher Innes contends that in The Ride across Lake Constance characters and audience “clutch at apparently objective details which lead only to ambiguities. They walk a thin ice of rationality, and their assumptions about ordered existence are constantly breaking under the emotional weight of their insecurities to precipitate them into the surreal depths of the subconscious. Concepts, on a basic level words, are shown to determine our perceptions.”78 In another exchange, the meaninglessness of communication and the failure of words suggest what the philosopher Wittgenstein might have construed: that words are merely how they are used, like a toolbox:
GEORGE:
PORTEN:
JANNINGS:
PORTEN:
JANNINGS:
PORTEN:
In this regard the play is a kind of linguistic choreo-poem, a dialogue (or dialectic) of dread and farce, small talk, shop talk, banal exchanges, misunderstandings, linguistic faux pas, adding up to nothing, at once appearing as a drawing room comedy and then instantly shifting gears to the theatre of the absurd. Michael Hays calls the play “the abyss of uncertainty which convention and habit help us bridge” which is simultaneously “the source of danger.” By enacting the “collapse of the rapport between linguistic/formal reality and real reality,” Hays says, “Handke allows us to recognize the former as a model of authority and our subjugation to that authority. This recognition comes to us, the audience, as we watch the characters in the play struggle to maintain a firm footing in ‘life’ and safety, thoughtlessly pass through the most common of daily experiences.”79 Because the characters are named after actors who repeat clichés to each other in a form of self-recursive feedback loop, the drama takes on a kind of mise en abyme – a hall of mirrors or play-within-a-play, what Rainer Nägele calls the “staging of everyday communicative situations and gestures.”80 Handke’s dramatist colleague Botho Strauß notes that in The Ride across Lake Constance,
The ride parallels the functioning of our grammar, of our system of coordinating perception and meaning, and of our linguistic and sentient powers of reason: it is only a provisional, permeable order, which, particularly when, as in Handke’s play, it becomes conscious of its own existence, is threatened by somnambulism, schizophrenia, and madness.81
Handke’s work might be construed as heavy-handed, bludgeoned by an anti-establishment pretentiousness and a disdain for audience comfort. While there is truth to this view, Handke artfully put his finger on the spirit of alienation and disengagement associated with his era. In his 1970 novel, The Goalkeeper’s Anxiety at a Penalty Kick (Die Angst des Tormanns beim Elfmeter), a detective story similar to Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment and which was made into a film by Wim Wenders in 1971, the protagonist, an unemployed laborer, begins the story as a bored soccer goalkeeper. We watch the intensity of the game on the other side of the field, while the main character observes passively, apathetically, and seemingly uninvolved in the game itself. Suddenly the ball whizzes past him for a score, and he rages against the referee. But the fact is that his own disengagement with proper defensive play caused the goal. This action, in many ways, summarizes Handke’s characters: alienated, disengaged, and finding futile their efforts to participate and succeed. In this sense Handke is searching for the truth in art in order to avoid the mundane and quotidian. The essence of art, Heidegger asserts, “is the setting-itself-into-work of truth. It is due to art’s poetic essence that, in the midst of being, art breaks open an open place, in whose openness, everything is other than usual.”82 Handke’s resistance to convention is a particular style germane to his times, but what endures is his insistence on burrowing into the truth beyond petty conversations and small talk.
The four German playwrights discussed above (as well as others) were paradigmatic of an emerging postmodernism in the 1970s that rebelled against, while simultaneously borrowing from, the antecedent modernism. They were all heavily influenced by Bertolt Brecht, but they also rebelled against Brecht’s intractable Marxism – understandably so because it was evident that Soviet-style socialism was failing miserably. As a result of their indebtedness and rebellion, the dramatists rummaged and sifted through the techniques of modern drama, borrowing what they felt useful and discarding the rest. Andreas Huyssen’s hypothesis about postmodernism contends that it “always has been in search of tradition while pretending to innovation.” This is, in my view, particularly true of the German dramatists. Huyssen adds that the “situation in the 1970s seems to be characterized by an ever wider dispersal and dissemination of artistic practices all working out of the ruins of the modernist edifice, raiding it for ideas, plundering its vocabulary and supplementing it with randomly chosen images and motifs from pre-modern and non-modern cultures as well as from contemporary mass culture.”83 The next group of dramatists build their plays from a radical avant-garde base: the Polish playwrights of the era had a rich history to establish their non-conformist dramas, contributing to their own dramaturgical history while simultaneously condemning Soviet oppression.