Moving into the Eighties: The German Theatre a Decade after the Breakthrough

Moving into the Eighties: The German Theatre aDecade after the Breakthrough PETER STENBERG If the term "the zero hour" ("Stunde Null") is legitimate as a description of the state of German literature at the end of the war, then most so surely for the theatre. In 1945 almost halfof the 200 German theatres lay in ruins and only the Zuricher Schauspielhaus had any continuous connection to the pre-Nazi German stage. All other German-language theatres had been isolated from the rest of world drama for ten years. While prose writers and poets could continue to write and publish in exile, dramatists were basically cut off from their means of communication, the quality of Brecht's exile plays (if not their production) remaining the exception which proves the rule. The establishment of the Bundesrepublik almost five years after Stunde Null and the priority given by it to the reestablishment of the German theatre resulted in a major effort being spent on the rebuilding of the theatres, a massive project which was concluded as late as the early seventies. Thirty years have now passed since the founding of the Bundesrepublik and thirty-five since Stunde Null. A generation has grown up in that time and experienced a most dramatic cultural metamorphosis. Children who were fifteen at the end of the war, and are thus untainted by the guilt of the war their parents could not escape, are now fifty , and this post-war generation has had sufficient time to develop a theatrical world ofits own to fill the theatres it has so conscientiously rebuilt. It is a good time to draw conclusions about the relative success of the effort, an effort whose economic fulfillment in many ways symbolizes the tremendous financial growth of the Bundesrepublik. In addition, the start of a new decade offers a good opportunity to pass judgement on the playwrights of the generation, to determine whether they have successfully portrayed a period of extraordinary social change in which the complete dominance of the war has been replaced by the ever-increasing problems of a materialistic consumerism and the subsequent loss of the spiritual and familial strengths which had previously been central to the German communal structure. Itis perhaps not surprising that the only two dramatists to emerge with lasting 394 PETER STENBERG works in the decade and a half after the war were both Swiss, who had experienced the devastation of their German neighbours from a position of relative security and almost complete isolation: Max Frisch and Friedrich Diirrenmatt. The enduring success ofthe black comedies ofDiirrenmatt and the parables of Frisch is not remotely approached by any plays of the fifties and early sixties of the rest of the German-speaking world, a contrast strikingly shown by the state of the current repertoire of its theatres. With the clear exceptions ofFrisch and Diirrenmatt, there are no German-language dramatists from the immediate post-war years who receive anything more than the odd performance in today's theatres, a fact which means of course that the Bundesrepublik does not produce any of its own wOijS from the years of hectic rebuilding and immediate stock-taking.' Playwrights who were most performed in the years from 1956- 62 (Karl Wittlinger leads the statistics before Frisch, Diirrenmatt and Hochwiilder) scarcely survive the sixties and disappear from the repertoire of the seventies.2 One of the reasons for this lapse would surely seem to be the sudden and exciting appearance in the mid-sixties of a group of German-language playwrights who seemed destined to place the contemporary German theatre in the vanguard of world drama for the foreseeable future. Suddenly, in a period of only five years, the German theatre experienced an extraordinary series of spectacularly successful plays, plays which were immediately translated into the other Western languages and produced in the major theatres of Europe and North America. Adding to the promise of continued successful production from the authors of these works was the fact that they represented a cross-section of the immediate German past, from the soldier in the German army (Giinter Grass) through the Jewish exile (the Swedish citizen Peter Weiss) to the Austrian born in the midst...