Hasenclever's Humanity: An Expressionist Morality Play
- Hasenclever's Humanity:An Expressionist Morality Play
Stephen Stanton: Professor of English at the University of Michigan, Mr. Stanton has edited Camille and Other Plays and A Casebook on Candida. A former bibliographer for The Shaw Review, Professor Stanton has published several articles on George Bernard Shaw.
Footnotes
1. Humanity, trans. Walter H. and Jacqueline Sokel, in An Anthology of German Expressionist Drama: A Prelude to the Absurd, ed. W. H. Sokel (New York 1963). All quotations from the play are from this translation.
2. Scenes depicting the various stages of a central character's (i.e., modern man's) suffering; analogous to the fourteen "Stations of the Cross" from the judgment hall to Calvary in the martyrdom of Christ. The unity of the "Stations-dramen" depends upon the presence of the central figure in all, or most, of the scenes. The German Expressionist playwrights borrowed this dramatic technique from Strindberg's The Road to Damascus (1898), which drew upon medieval mystery and passion plays. See B. J. Kenworthy, Georg Kaiser (Oxford, England, 1957), pp. 24, 190, and passim.
3. In Noli me Tangere (1920), a play somewhat similar to Humanity, Georg Kaiser also condemns the inhumanity of the penal system. Furthermore, his Christ-like protagonist—a prisoner designated merely as "Number 16"—is betrayed to the prison guards by a Judas figure—another prisoner who has secretly observed him helping a doomed fellow prisoner to escape by swapping coats with him. Consciencestricken, the betrayer, like Judas, hangs himself. In Humanity, Alexander's betrayer, the old waiter, also hangs himself (V, 3) when he sees the man he has had arrested for murder led to the scaffold.
4. The Drama of Transition (Cincinnati, 1922), p. 297.
5. Studies from Ten Literatures (New York, 1925), p. 248.
6. Ibid., p. 249.
7. Modern Continental Playwrights (New York, 1931), p. 379.
8. Modern German Drama (New York, 1962), p. 133.
9. Introduction to An Anthology of German Expressionist Drama, pp. xx, xxi, and xxxi.
10. Ibid. p. xxxi.
11. In Scene 1, after he is called "a corpse" (mortal flesh) by the girl and "murderer" (sinner) by the youth, Alexander borrows the youth's coat (life, rejuvenation, rebirth) and says, "I am alive." The reader soon realizes that Alexander is the persecuted Christ figure, the ritually murdered one, resurected in this "Stationsdrama," and that he will be betrayed by a Judas figure (the old waiter in IV, 3).
12. Chandler, p. 378.
13. Georg Kaiser, The Coral, trans. Winifred Katzin, in Twenty-Five Modern Plays, ed. S. M. Tucker (New York, 1931), Act I, p. 100.
14. Mardi Valgemae, "O'Neill and German Expressionism," Modern Drama, X (September 1967), 119-120.
15. Sokel, introduction, p. xxxi.
16. Studies from Ten Literatures, p. 250.
17. Preface to The Immortals (Die Unsterblichen, 1920), trans. W. H. Sokel as "Two Superdramas," in An Anthology of German Expressionist Drama, pp. 9-11. Also trans. M. Esslin in his The Theatre of the Absurd (New York, 1961), pp. 268-269. "We have forgotten entirely that the stage is nothing but a magnifying glass . . . that the primary symbol of the theatre is the mask. The mask is rigid, unique, and impressive. It is unchangeable, inescapable; it is Fate. Every man wears his mask, wears what the ancients called his guilt. . . . In the mask lies a law, and this is the law of the drama. Non-reality becomes fact. . . . The new drama must have recourse to all technological props which are contemporary equivalents of the ancient mask. . . ." (Sokel, pp. 10-11.)
18. Expressionistisches Theater (Hamburg, 1948), pp. 218-219. The following excerpt is from Mardi Valgemae's translation in "O'Neill and German Expressionism," p. 121: "The mask is the outer veil of man. . . . Persona is another name for it. . . . The stage mask is a poetized emanation of the idea of being. . . ."
19. "Memoranda on Masks," in The American Spectator (November 1932, December 1932, January 1933). Reprinted in The Modern Theatre, ed. R. W. Corrigan (New York, 1964), pp. 1077-1080. The three plays are The Emperor Jones (1920), The Hairy Ape (1922), and The Great God Brown (1926). "The use of...
