The Revolution in German Theatre 1900-1933 (Routledge Revivals)

Michael Patterson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317217923
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Drama
• Index: Literature

First published in 1981, this book represents the first work in English to give a comprehensive account of the revolutionary developments in German theatre from the decline of Naturalism through the Expressionist upheaval to the political theatre of Piscator and Brecht. Early productions of Kaiser's From Morning till Midnight and Toller's Transfiguration are presented as examples of Expressionism. A thorough analysis of Piscator's Hoppla, Such is Life! And Brecht's Man show the similarities and differences in political theatre. In addition, elements of stage-craft are examined — illustrated with tabulated information, an extensive chronology, and photographs and designs of productions.

Part One

The Expressionist revolution in the German theatre

The uniformity and stupidity of mankind are so outrageous that only through outrages can they be dealt with. Let the new drama be outrageous.

Ivan Goll: ‘The super-drama’

1 • Origins of the revolution

Political and social background

With the help of your Emperor and of Richard Wagner you have made of the ‘German virtues’ an operatic display which no one in the world took seriously but yourselves. And behind this pretty humbug of operatic splendour you allowed your dark instincts, your servility and your swagger to proliferate.

Hermann Hesse (1919)

One evening in the spring of 1914 a young writer ‘with lean face and burning eyes’¹ rose to his feet in Kurt Hiller’s literary cabaret Das Gnu to give a reading of his first play, Der Sohn (The Son). Listening to this remarkable new piece by the twenty-three-year-old Walter Hasenclever, the audience could hardly have imagined that the revolution it foretold would be achieved within five years. The play describes the grotesque situation of a twenty-year-old youth who is kept prisoner by his whip-wielding father for failing to pass his school examinations. Eventually the Son rebels, and pulls a revolver on his father. The father drops dead from a heart-attack, and the Son steps over his father’s corpse into freedom.

Like the Son, Hasenclever’s generation felt itself imprisoned by the bourgeois society of Wilhelminian Germany; and four and a half years later the Father of the German People, Kaiser Wilhelm II, abdicated and fled into exile without a shot being fired at him. It was, to say the least, an unpredictable development. In the spring of 1914 the German Empire seemed to be built on rock-firm foundations. The Second Empire had been in existence for over forty years, still proud of the glorious victory over the French which had brought it into being. The nationalists’ dream of creating a united German nation (admittedly with the exclusion of Austria) had at last been realized, and the Reich now commanded almost universal allegiance. True, the liberal middle classes were critical of the authoritarian structure of the state, the socialists objected to its exploitative capitalism, and the Catholic Church was still nursing its wounds from Bismarck’s ‘Kulturkampf’. But the basis of the Imperial State remained virtually unchallenged. Even the Social Democratic Party (SPD), which was theoretically committed to the revolutionary ideology of Marx, had in practice become distinctly revisionist, allowing a gradualist policy of reform to weaken the will of the proletariat, a development later to be evidenced by the Party’s wholehearted support for the war. Thus the German bourgeois could sleep sound in his bed at night, secure in the knowledge that his Emperor was loved and respected and that, if the call came, even the grumbling workers would rise up in his defence.

Germany’s standing in the world seemed also assured. A century earlier it had been a jigsaw of 360 states and principalities, each with its own currency, its own system of weights and measures, and its own laws. Now in 1914 united Germany was a world power with its own colonies and a colossal navy second only to Britain’s. In sixty-five years the population had doubled: from 35 million in 1849 to 70 million in 1914. In response to rapid industrialization most of this increase had been in the cities, whose population had risen from i o million to 40 million, with the capital Berlin expanding from 400,000 to 2 million inhabitants.

The extraordinary growth in the industrial sector had increased the productive capacity of Germany eightfold in the first forty years of the Empire. By comparison, Britain’s capacity had merely doubled during the same period and France’s had trebled. Only the USA could boast a faster growth-rate. Germany’s steel industry was the most powerful in Europe, and its chemical and electrical industries dominated the world markets; for example, 85 per cent of the world’s requirements of synthetic dyes were supplied by German concerns.

Not only was this industrialization extremely rapid, but it was also highly centralized. The much more leisurely expansion of the British economy had produced 50,000 joint-stock companies by 1910, whereas German capital was concentrated in just 5,000. Within a single generation the Germans had seen the medieval one-man workshops and travelling journeymen eclipsed by huge concerns like Krupp’s of Essen (70,000 employees) and AEG of Berlin (30,000 employees). To sustain their power, the industrial magnates formed ‘cartels’ or price-fixing agreements within an industry, often by cynical recourse to an appeal to ‘Gemeinschaft’ (community) instead of ‘Gesellschaft’ (society), or, to put it more bluntly, to co-operative capitalism in place of competitive capitalism.

Assured of internal security and ever-increasing prosperity, Germany now sought the missing components in its bid to become a world power: foreign markets for its products, and influence in international affairs. It seemed unfair: a nation of such economic and cultural wealth was excluded from the great movements of history and was being treated like some parvenu shut out from an aristocratic club reserved for Britain, France and Russia. It seemed unfair, and Germany was going to make a fuss; it demanded ‘a place in the sun’. It was not that Germany was any more expansionist than the other European Great Powers; it was just that it was more aggressively so. It was a newcomer to the imperialist scene and so had been late in the grabbing of colonies; it had the geographical misfortune to be squeezed between France and Russia; its chief ally, Austria-Hungary, was crumbling from inner instability; and the potentially moderating influence of the liberal middle classes was confined to a virtually impotent Reichstag. Moreover, aggression towards foreign powers helped to cement unity at home, a case of ‘exporting the social question’, as one politician cynically observed.

But the more vociferously Germany asserted its strength, as in the two Moroccan crises of 1905 and 1911, the more it weakened its own position. By 1914 it had isolated itself completely, its displays of aggression having hastened the alliance of the other three great powers. Committed to an ever-expanding armaments programme, aggrieved by the unwillingness of the other imperialist powers to let it join in the expansionist game, convinced of its mission to bring civilization to the Slavic peoples to the East, Germany decided that war was inevitable. But it would not be Germany’s fault; Germany had sought to promote its imperialist ambitions without open conflict; if war came, it would be because the other imperialist aggressors wished it. It would, in fact, be a defensive war which all right-minded Germans would support. So in 1911, when August Bebel, the ageing Social Democrat leader, prophesied to the Reichstag the mass destruction of war, most of his listeners jeered with derision:²

Then there will be general mobilization in Europe and sixteen to eighteen million men, the flower of the manhood of different countries, will march against each other, armed with the finest weapons of destruction. How will it end? After this war there will be mass bankruptcy, mass poverty, mass unemployment, the great famine. … (Disagreement from the right.) You don’t believe me ? (Shout from the right: Things get better after every war!)

While the stability of the Empire and its economic and military power made it easy to dismiss prophets of doom like Bebel, there were admittedly unfortunate incidents which only slightly tarnished the self-image of an otherwise healthy society. There was, for instance, the regrettable fact that so many young people opted out of this society by taking their own lives. Suicide for a time assumed, if not epidemic, at least alarming proportions: in Prussia alone 11 o schoolboys committed suicide between 1883 and 1889 in response to the kind of conditions described in Wedekind’s Frühlings Erwachen (Spring Awakening, 1891). Then there was the Zabern incident. In this small Alsatian town in 1913 the local military commander arbitrarily arrested twenty-eight civilians. Almost the whole of Germany united in its condemnation of the action, and the Reichstag passed by 293 votes to 54 a vote of no confidence in the Chancellor Bethmann for defending the conduct of the military. But Bethmann remained in office and the commander was acquitted at his court-martial. It was clear that civil government was powerless before the military, and the capital levy for army expenditure continued to increase.

But it did not do for the bourgeois to be too disturbed by such things. Surely the Jugendbewegung (Youth Movement), which had been founded in 1897, would give healthy ideals to the young and preserve them from the few morbid and perverse characters like that Moritz Stiefel in Wedekind’s play. And even if the military were sometimes a little high-handed, well, a strong army was naturally indispensable to a strong state.

If the sleep of the bourgeois was, then, undisturbed, how did the young intellectual like Hasenclever respond to the world about him? In a word, he was alienated. Socially, he felt he did not belong to any particular class. For although his background was normally middle-class, he rejected its materialism and complacency, and yet his basic elitism, the value he placed on intellectual and aesthetic achievement, allowed him no more than a sentimental and unreal relationship with the proletariat.

Politically, too, he was homeless. As Roy Pascal points out:³

The theme of the famous publicist Werner Sombart’s articles in the prewar decade is that the intellectual, faced by a choice between conservative conformism and impotent opposition, can reasonably only decide to have nothing to do with politics.

If there was any attempt at involvement in politics, the resultant ideology was predictably high-flown and vague. Thus in 1911, when Franz Pfemfert founded his periodical Die Aktion, significantly subtitled Wochenschrift für Politik, Literatur and Kunst (Weekly Journal for Politics, Literature and Art – in that order), he justifiably castigated the SPD for its revisionist compromises with the state, but his paper hardly proposed alternative policies of any substance. Characteristic of the ill-defined political attitude of the intellectual who was to march under the banner of Expressionism, is the anarchic utterance by Erich Mühsam in the first issue of the periodical Revolution (1913):⁴

All Revolution is active, unique, sudden and uproots its causes. …

Some forms of Revolution: tyrannicide, deposition of a ruler, establishment of a religion, smashing ancient tablets (in convention and art), creating a work of art, the sexual act.

Some synonyms for Revolution: God, Life, Passion, Delirium, Chaos.

Let us be chaotic!

The alienation of the creative intellectual was not, of course, confined to Germany. It is significant that the function of the playwright in the theatre of the past was to celebrate the society in which he lived. There were naturally, at least from Aristophanes onwards, satirical attacks on aspects of contemporary society, but these tended to reinforce traditional social norms rather than to challenge them. Yet since the advent of Naturalism it had become an almost unquestioned assumption in the western world that the stage would be used as a platform from which to launch criticism or even abuse at the society which supports both the theatre and its playwrights. Indeed, modern plays which lack any critical stance towards social conditions will now be condemned by a majority of intellectuals.

The explanation of this radical change in the theatre’s conception of its own function must lie again in the sense of alienation experienced by those who work in it and write for it. With the decline of aristocratic patronage the artist discovered himself more and more at the mercy of market forces. While the artist of former times knew what would please his polis, his monarch, his church or his patron, the modern artist was selling his wares to an almost unknown customer, a formless middle-class mass, whose tastes, if one could grace them with that word, seemed to favour uncomplicated entertainment spiced with reassuring sentimentality. The artist faced a dilemma: he could either respond to the demands of the public and ‘go commercial’, or he could ‘preserve his integrity’ and work for the only person whose judgment he trusted totally – himself – in the hope that a like-minded minority would provide sufficient financial support and critical encouragement to permit him to survive. This minority, sharing the same sense of alienation as the artist, rallied to his support. Priding themselves on the ‘higher values’ instilled in them by their education and their own sensitivity, they could compensate for being economically at a disadvantage and socially uprooted by feeling superior to the bourgeoisie and joining with the artist in shocking and attacking them.

This analysis, simplified...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part One The Expressionist revolution in the German theatre
• Part Two The political revolution in the German theatre
• Notes
• Select bibliography
• Index