Das Moderne Drama in Deutschland by Walter Hinck (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 353 would have us believe that the period between 1941 and 1946 is the single one when Anouilh "examined the problem of heroic man facing life," in three plays and one fragment. The facts are that in the same period, Anouilh showed the same preoccupation in another two plays at least: L 'Hermine and La Sauvage; then in the fifties he did so again in L 'Alouette and Becket. Furthermore, for Anouilh any man who makes his stand against the erosion of life is heroic, even the old buffoon General Saint-pe. In chapter five, the plot summaries, oscillating between paraphrases of plot line and interpretations of plots, are often needlessly misleading. For example, Ardele can hardly be labelled a farce since it encompasses the suicide of two human beings driven to despair by their relatives' cannibalism. Then there is a baffling statement about Antigone which is beyond any possible explanation: "Creon is eloquently portrayed with the tyrant being a wealthy collector of bindings. Here he speaks of several of Hitler's sentimen ts." Where in Anouilh's play Creon "collects bindings" is a riddle one cannot solve. As to Hitler, all one can offer as clarification is that the public chose to see in Creon a spokesman for the Vichy government, severely supervised by a Nazi commission. Finally, Mrs. Kelly warns us that certain annotations are "original," while others are "based" on information found in sources she lists further on. Yet several annotations are verbatim reproductions of material found in Dissertation Abstracts and other critical works - with no acknowledgements of sources given, a serious breach of protocol not to be given as an example to researchers, assuredly. As to the book layout, the index of critics, which for an unknown reason does not list authors of full length studies, seems quite superfluous, while there is no index of the plays and one has to leaf through 68 pages of entries to find a particular play. In conclusion, Mrs. Kelly's annotated bibliography on Jean Anouilh can be of some value for its large number of entries in a single volume. However, the librarian and the drama studen t must bear in mind that it is actually a selected bibliography to be used as only one source of information among others. MARGUERITE ARCHER Herbert H. Lehman College of the City University of New York DAS MODERNE DRAMA IN DEUTSCHLAND, by Walter Hinck. Gottingen: Vandenhoeck Ruprecht, 1973, 241 pp. Already well-known in Germany for his books, Die Dramaturgie des spaten Brecht, and Die deutsche Ballade von Burger bis Brecht, Walter Hinck, Professor of German at Cologne, has attempted in his latest book to survey all major developments in the German drama since circa 1910 almost to the present. He succeeds admirably in his basic purpose. As might be expected of a scholar well versed in the history of German drama prior to 1910 and thoroughly conversant with major developments in the drama in other countries, Professor Hinck begins his study with an 354 BOOK REVIEWS attempt to place the modern German drama in its complex historical context. With a clear sense of purpose, Walter Hinck distances himself from the late Peter Szondi's Theorie des modernen Dramas (1956) with its purely literary and purely theoretical bias and insists instead that a consideration of the dramatic mode must not be a purely literary exercise but must take into account the stage history of any given play. Following Brecht's oft-repeated dictum that dramatic works first achieve aesthetic completeness when they are staged, Hinck convincingly argues that the treatment of plays simply as a literary mode is aesthetically unsound. Of equal importance is Hinck's insistence on viewing the whole of German drama rather than viewing West German, Swiss, and Austrian drama with favor and treating East German drama with either ignorance or contempt, a practice too often followed by West German critics with remnants of a Cold War mentality. Much to Professor Hinck's credit, he is consistently able to treat the drama of the two Germanies with equal and exemplary fairness. Measured against Mr. Hinck's objective, stated in the first paragraph of his book, an objective...