Postwar Theater: A Crowded Vacuum
by FRIEDRICH LUFT
1
THE Gormans expect more of their theater than other people. Theater, in Germany, does not mean a place of casual entertainment, good fun after a good dinner, an informal social gathering or simply a pleasant setting for a couple of amusing or bemusing hours. The German goes to his theater in the mood of one who goes to church.
Sheer entertainment, an innocent laugh, easy relaxation– the German will go along with these things up to a point, but it almost seems as if he sellers from bad conscience if the play offers nothing but light fun and diversion. For him, the theater always has had a “cultural mission”; he wants to get something to take home. It is significant that Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, Goethe’s great pedagogic novel, is set in the sphere of the theater, and it is through the life of the stage that the books hero fulfills his human destiny. In this country the theater is taken very, very seriously.
Thus it is understandable that every town of more than twenty or thirty thousand inhabitants makes a point of having its own theater. Western Germany, with a territory approximately the size of Texas, possesses about 250 legitimate theaters, whose stages are operated every evening ten months of the year.
These theaters are heavily subsidized by the municipal authorities. Without much grumbling, the citizens will vote millions of marks toward their support; for the theater here functions more like a form of adult education —a kind of living museum of the drama — than a luxury business to be entrusted to the profit instincts of entrepreneurs. Of private theaters, that is, those operated as commercial ventures, there are only about a dozen left in all of Western Germany. These turn out run-ofthe-mill entertainment. They are not harried by the quest for eternal glory.
A glance at the repertory of a typical municipal theater will reveal a policy which draws from every era and area of playwriting. In Göttingen you will find Aeschylus on the program, together with Shakespeare, Pirandello, O’Neill, Shaw, Lope de Vega, Sartre, Chekhov, Strindberg, and Samuel Rockett. A similar range might be found during a season in Düsscldorf, Munich, Darmstadt, BadenBaden, Constance, Bremen, Kiel, or Aachen.
The German theater is decentralized. We do not have the kind of situation where there are perhaps twenty houses open in New York, or London, and only one or two in Pittsburgh, or Birmingham. Ever since the princes of the eighteenth-century German miniature states began vying with each other to emulate the example set by the French kings in Paris and adorned their little capitals with theaters, our provincial cities have had permanent repertory companies. And because these centers are scattered through the land, seldom farther apart from one another than, say, 50 or 100 miles, even a small-town boy will have the opportunity to see the largest and best part of world dramatic literature presented on the living stage. Any evening, outside one of our city theaters, you will see a row of busses that have brought in people from the countryside who take season tickets to attend regularly. Yet in some ways the appearance is misleading. Our theaters are crowded, to be sure — no manager need worry about an audience. The problem is rather the opposite: the public’s interest is so strong that most theaters are no longer large enough.
This theater boom extends even to July and August, when the city houses are closed for vacation. A wave of summer festivals has swept over the country: under the open sky, against the background of romantic ruins, before the walls of medieval cities, in castles and spas, near important tourist centers, special productions are scheduled. Activity in the theater arts has reached the point where some of our great actors and actresses, the German ‘’stars,” have endangered their health, and directors who once used to stay in one place a year at a time now hardly ever sleep anywhere but on the train.
Inevitably, in all this rush and bustle, there is much that is not first-rate. But the intense stimulation has also produced a wealth of talent, and at times an amazing level of interpretation. Let me mention a few outstanding achievements: in Berlin, the survival of a cosmopolitan theatrical tradition; in Hamburg, the perfectionist theater of Gustav Gründgens; in Göttingen, the master hand of director Heinz Hilpert: in Munich, Hans Schweikert and Fritz Kortner —t wo high and contrasting talents; in Düsseldorf, the robust vitality of Karlheinz Stroux; in Darmstadt, the choreographic modernism of a Gustav Sellner. The roll of honor of local stage directors could be continued for a page. This is the positive side of the picture — the part easy to praise. But to come to the heart of the matter, we must weigh presentation against basic creativity, and honestly admit that the new work of our playwrights does not measure up to the skill and talent of our directors and actors. The interpreter has become more important than that which he has to interpret.
2
BETWEEN the two wars, the German theater was famous for its experiments with scenic design and staging. Men such as Erwin Piscator and Leopold Jessner revolutionized our concepts of dramatic presentation. Today, apart from Sellner in Darmstadt and the late Bertolt Brecht in East Berlin, design and staging are, by and large, more conservative. One notable exception, however, is Wieland Wagner, grandson of the composer, who has restaged the productions of the Bayreuth Festival, denuding the stage of all the old Wagnerian props and creating a new type of background for the music drama with lighting effects and highly stylized group movement. His streamlined Meistersinger of the past summer horrified some of the older generation but was praised by most of the critics.
During the past ten years the German theater has lived largely on importations. The United States has contributed Miller and Williams, Kingsley and Wouk, O’Neill and Faulkner—all widely represented on the German stage. France has sent us Anouilh, Sartre, Giraudoux, Beckett, and Claudel —all to be found on the program of almost every important German theater — and England has given us Fry and Eliot, Whiting and Ustinov.
What a contrast with the German theater of the first three decades of this century which radiated its poetic impulse to the whole world! In those days Hauptmann, Hofmannsthal, Werfel, Sternheim, Bruckner, and Brecht — to mention only a few — turned the theater into an exciting and dangerous place with their themes, their language, their sheer sense of drama. But today, in so far as new original plays are concerned, the silence is absolute.
Our time does not speak to us from our stages. Proper and prim, the German theater is a re-creator which does not address our audiences with a voice of its own. It has become a kind of museum. Bravely and diligently it communicates the dramatic values of the past and of the rest of the world.
How can we explain this lack of vitality? It is almost impossible to adduce any very convincing reasons for it. Obviously, the vicious vacuum created by the anti-artistic spirit of the Nazi and war period has something to do with it. There has been no continuity of development. A severe break must be given time to heal. Then too, it is possible that most Germans approach the theater with expectations that are too high-minded and reverential. The poet of this century — a time of anguish and secret torment — cannot possibly provide his audience with the kind of answer it secretly longs for. It is not enough to show again the reflections of dissolution, the uncertainties of a world where established moral values have collapsed. Such themes do not satisfy spiritual hunger.
The isolation of Berlin has also been a depressing factor. Although, as we have seen, our theater was always decentralized, its real heart was Berlin. It was to Berlin that every career would tend; it was there, in the capital, that it was decided what was good and what was bad, what was talent and what was bluff. But now, effectively cut off from the rest of the country, Berlin has lost its metropolitan function—not only politically but also artistically. Success, even if attained in Berlin, remains only another local success. the metropolis, as a measure or standard, is lacking.
In the Eastern zone, under Soviet occupation, the theater is a long arm of politics (as, in another sense, it had also been under the Nazis). The program is dictated from above. Every production, even of the classics, must preach the party line, even if the meaning of a play has to be completely inverted to do so.
Until last year Bertolt Brecht, the great playwright who died in August 1956, had his own theater in East Berlin. It was never clear whether the authorities of the puppet government entirely approved of Brechts activities, but, because they wished to exploit his world-wide reputation, they gave him a fairly free hand and liberal financial backing. Thus he was able to carry on his experiments with “epic drama” and the “estrangement” style of direction under nearly ideal conditions. Brecht is the only German playwright whose fame has passed beyond the German frontiers in recent years. But the style of his pedagogical theater, the preconceived didactic method of his productions, trapped irremediably behind the spiritual bars of Marxist thinking, remains an isolated phenomenon, no matter how talented. It is not likely that he will have any successors.
Carl Zuckmayer (author of The Devil’s General and The Cold Light) has given the German stage some effective and colorful plays, but essentially they are antiquated in form and ephemeral in substance. He is the most popular native author among those who write for our theater today. His Katharina Knie has just been made into Germany’s first genuine “musical.”
Perhaps because opera and operetta, which flourish in every city, take its place, Germany has at present no close equivalent to the American musical show such as Oklahoma or My Fair Lady, but there is another indigenous, semi-theatrical form of entertainment which is extremely popular: the so-called cabaret. The cabaret is devoted to satire and humorous reflections on current events and human foibles. It does not pull any punches in lampooning our most august political figures in a program of skits, songs, dialogues, and impersonations of a very high artistic level. It is especially popular in West Berlin, to which residents of the Soviet sector cross over in droves for the pleasure of seeing their humorless regime ridiculed.
There is hardly anything else that can claim any merit beyond that of superficial effectiveness. Thus we are faced with a strange and fundamentally unnatural situation. The German theater, splendidly equipped externally, gifted with versatile interpretative faculties, courted by a mass audience of all ages, has not yet really found itself. The much touted German “Economic Miracle” has lavishly reconstructed most of our bombed-out theaters. It has provided legions of enthusiastic consumers, beyond even the fondest dreams of earlier days. But the innermost and decisive kernel is undernourished and has remained inactive. The “Miracle” has not touched it. The poetic word, the dramatic reflection of our time, the positive evaluation of the problems of the day, cannot be found anywhere. The heart of the theater barely beats, no matter how prosperous its external aspect may appear.
This in itself need not be a tragedy, many will say; every country has known periods of poetic drought. Is it not sufficient to keep up the precious instrument of the theater while we wait for new genius to appear? No harm is done — these people say — if the German theater, after the protracted period of nationalistic-egotistic narcissism which it suffered from 1933 to 1945, now feeds for a while on the classic past and the best foreign production. Perhaps they are right, but it seems to me that this period of waiting and borrowing is lasting suspiciously long. Can our writers justly claim that the days of Apocalypse are still too close to be converted objectively into drama? Should they not by now have reached a distance safe enough to enable them to deal with even the hottest subject?
The situation of the German theater seems to indicate that this country is prospering and flourishing in many external ways, that admirable work has been done wherever it was a matter of coming to grips with practical problems and of clearing away the ruins. But the great malaise of the mind, the feeling of a spiritual vacuum and exhaustion, persists.
Translated by Elisabeth M. Borgese