A Few Words about War and Theater

For me, sitting in a fine and peaceful office in central Berlin, the capital of reunited Germany, one of the wealthiest countries in the world, after fifty years of peace (following two lost world wars), this subject is completely theoretical. It will take me two hours and a bottle of wine. Thinking of people who just suffered a very strange kind of war and now have to deal with the consequences, writing under my conditions is clearly frivolous. I like frivolities, however, and also a bottle of wine. Let's begin with a thesis: theater and war have a lot in common. Both can break the rules of ordinary life within seconds, both are privileged places that let people behave in a way you and I never dared dream of. The counterargument lies at hand: theater is fiction, reality is real. That's trivial. But--the next triviality--are we respectable theater critics and artists in Novi Sad expected to do anything besides just talking about war in theater? Words about words about war? When is war on stage more than just fiction, when does talking come close to reality? And what--the next minor question--is the reality of war? Fortunately I've never had to know. Just learned from literature, cinema, and CNN.

Eric Hobsbawm, the English historian whose lifetime covers two world wars, recently called Kosovo the "first war of the twenty-first century." The first war, he said, with "consumer sovereignty." That means the politicians of the attacking side, NATO, believed "their people would not stand casualties." Churchill would certainly have swallowed his cigar at this notion, and Hitler, who from time to time did bite carpets, might have asked Stalin for asylum. This may be the greatest progress Western societies have made in the last fifty years: Happy all peoples that won't stand casualties. Consumer sovereignty, of course, just applies to aggressors. When high-tech weapons hit, any sovereignty turns into a bundle of burned flesh.

So in reality as well as in fiction the side of the victim is always the side of pity and compassion: certainly the best argument against waging war. But no war ever listened to moral arguments and human feelings, so when does fiction become completely idealistic and unrealistic? What distinguishes a tragedy on stage from any sentimental tearjerker? Let's change sides. What does consumer sovereignty mean to those characters who turn differences of opinion into matters of bombs and grenades, of blood and death? On the one hand, nothing has changed since the ancients: it doesn't matter if you are torn apart by a sword or some computer-guided uranium warhead. On the other hand, now there are no more heroes with their impressive fates, only well-trained specialists of destruction. What play can be written about jet pilots a safe 15,000 feet above ground? All they have to decide is whether some tiny spots are tanks or refugees. If they miss: collateral damage, bad luck. What dramatic potential lies in an operating team in an air-conditioned control room? Outbreaks of emotion about who spilled the coffee on the keyboard? Under these conditions Shakespeare would have been severely depressed. A history play about General Clark? Good joke. The progress in war technology seems not to be too profitable for theater.

Timothy Garton Ash, another English historian, uttered a simple truth in a dispute with Hobsbawm: "War changes everything." If war changes everything, what does theater change? Stupid question: nearly nothing. At least under conditions of consumer sovereignty, in a free and peaceful country. And that's, I suppose, where every true, liberal, and reasonable person wishes to live.

Franz Wille is an editor of Theater Heute.

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