Franz Xaver Kroetz: The Construction of a Political Aesthetic by Michelle M. Mattson (review)

Book Reviews general, personal worth or "character" is the primary determinant of public good. However, Hare's social interrogations,like Shaw's, are a dialectic process , a complex juxtaposition of conflicting points of view, most of which are compellingly argued. Hare has also inherited from Oxbridge the style and spirit of intellectual debate. His plays are not simply an exudation of "feelings" as Donesky supposes, accessing moral values through "passion and emotional sensitivity" (9). In his final critique of Skylight, Donesky refutes what he perceives to be Hare's "values," contending that the dedication of the young teacher to her illiterate students is in fact another manifestation of the "monopoly on cultural 'interest' .. of a mandarin elite, whereas the single-minded pursuit of money in which her former lover engages should be construed as meritorious. Donesky concludes that the "marketplace" should determine "cultural as well as financial wealth" so that a "wider spectrum" of "energies" may be harnessed (194). Fortunately, the British people thought otherwise, and ended eighteen years of Tory politics in May, 1997. ANNE F. NQTHOF, ATHABASCA UNIVERSITY MICHELLE M. MATISON. Franz Xaver Kroetz: The Constructjon of a Political Aesthetic. Oxford; Washington, DC: Berg 1996. pp. ix + 217. $38.95 Michelle Mattson's study of the contemporary Bavarian playwright F.x. Knietz covers some of the same territory as Ingeborg Walther's recent monograph, The Theater ofFranz Xaver Kroetz (1990), but her interpretations often differ from Walther's as she examines the plays in a more sophisticated theoretical context. Mattson is less interested in the inherent value of Kroetz's individual dramas or the correlation between his life and an in any immanent sense than she is in exploring what "pushed the dramatist to revise his.strategy as he sought to create an effective political aesthetic" (196). For that reason, she focuses on plays in which Kroetz revises his "construction of a political aesthetic" by reassessing the viability of the political subject and modifying his realistic style accordingly. After a general introduction establishing Kroetz's earliest dramas - the short, ultrarealistic, "critical folk-plays" - in the context of politically engaged German theater of the 1960s and early 1970s, she devotes individual chapters to the analysis of what she determines to be representative plays from the years 1972 through 199t: Oberosterreich, Dos Nest, Nicht Fisch nicht Fleisch, Bauern slerben, and the trilogy Zeitweh, De,. Dichter als Schwein, and Bauerntheater. Each of the chapters dedicated to a new phase in Kroetz's construction of a political aesthetic situates the relevant play(s) in a complex discursive context consisting of the following elements: (a) the cultural climate of 430 BOOK REVIEWS the BRD at the time the respective plays were conceived, which stresses factors that might have informed Kroetz's (re)definition of political agency or personal alienation at a given time (e.g., student movement, Communist Party, Marxism, APO, environmentalism, New Subjectivity, etc.); (b) the contemporary discussion on the nature of the political subject and the parameters of political agency; (c) the ongoing debate on the need for and nature of political theater as the evolving cultural context necessitated new strategies for aesthetic interventions; (d) the constant theoretical revaluation of realistic representational modes as an instrument of political change (e.g., the Brecht-Lukacs debate , Adorno, Benjamin, Wellershof's Kainer Realismusschule, the DrewsTimm debate, kitchen-sink realism, socialist realism, ultrarealism, fantastic realism ); and (e) how the above factors relate to changes in Kroetz's theoretical position vis-a-vis a political aesthetic and his subsequent experimentation with alternative formal and thematic strategies. Mattson's project is ambitious but she achieves her stated goals of both viewing Kroetz's specific, highly subjective , and idiosyncratic dramatic oeuvre as representative of certain cultural shifts during a particular period of post-war German theater and using his aesthetic experiments as a general model for exploring the possibilities and limitations of realism in shaping political consciousness. Without passing judgment on the inherent value of the plays she treats, Mattson concludes that there is an underlying political agenda in all ofKroetz's work since the early I 970s, even in cases where he publicly disavows this, provides bleak meditations on the bankruptcy of the'political subject, or...