Das Leben ein Spiel, die Welt ein Theater: Spielformen des Welttheaters in den dramatischen Werken Samuel Becketts und Thomas Bernhards by Tine Koch (review)

In her comparative analysis of Beckett’s and Bernhard’s dramatic works, Tine Koch bolsters her impressive critical acuity with constant reference to the mass of secondary literature that has accumulated around each of these writers’ oeuvres over the years. Early on in her short introduction, she indicates the fundamental paths of inquiry that have guided her through this thicket of critical opinion. One of these paths leads her to ask whether the title of the “Alpen-Beckett,” repeatedly bestowed on the Austrian for decades by critics, really captures the essence of this relationship. A second path—one directly reflected in the study’s title—leads further back into literary history and to an inquiry into the relevance that the topoi of the theatrum mundiand “das Leben als Spiel” has in the plays of each author. Finally, Koch points her inquiry to a less distant past and attempts to refine her comparative view by situating them in their individual relationships to the Theater of the Absurd.

The first order of business for this methodical scholar after the short introduction is a sketch of the essential comparative studies that have already contributed to and shaped the contemporary critical view of the relationship between these two influential writers. The dozen or so subsections following this sketch that round out the introductory chapter focus the reader on the paths of inquiry that the author has set for herself. In the long second chapter Koch focuses first on Beckett, then on Bernhard, abundantly illustrating her conceptual arguments with quotations from the relevant dramatic works and using pertinent secondary literature either as a foil or buttress for her own views. Her talent for expressive linguistic precision is in evidence throughout. Never satisfied with approximations nor cowed by apparent contradictions, she tirelessly refines her language to make the finest of distinctions. One of her more impressive linguistic—and critical—insights perhaps comes in her work with Bernhard’s label as the “Alpen-Beckett.” After long and complex argumentation involving citations from both writers’ dramatic works—as well as many from Bernhard’s novels—she is able to tease out the differences between the intentions of the theatrical world created by Beckett and Bernhard to the extent that “in zukünftigen Forschungsarbeiten [sollte] auf die Etikettierung verzichtet werden” (275). While Beckett’s figures place no demand on themselves nor their audience for any kind of contribution to changes in an “außerliterarischen Wirklichkeit” (274), those of Bernhard make indirect ethical, moral, and sociological demands on their audience; for Koch, this locates the plays of the Austrian closer to “political theater” (274) than to the Theater of the Absurd.

Because of the implications of easily made but misleading labels like “Alpen-Beckett” as well as her skill in making and supporting convincing distinctions, the last thing the reader would expect from her would be a counter-claim for a broad, encompassing term that suggested a closer comparative tie to another twentieth-century dramatist, Bertolt Brecht, for example. Although the early reception of Bernhard plays, she reminds us, did indeed rest on an implied tie to Brechtian theater, she omits any mention of an “AlpenBrecht” and opts instead for the descriptive phrase: “indirectly engaged theater” (“indirekt-engagiertes Theater,” 301–22). The key to the Austrian’s indirect political effect was his gift for irritating and provoking the members of his audiences with the outrageous practices and views hurled at them by the actors in his plays—those, for example, that celebrate the Nazi past and Himmler’s birthday in Vor dem Ruhestand. Such provocatory theatrics especially on the postwar Austrian stage—and not only on the stage—have served as a potential spark initiating a transformation of the viewers’ “emotional-affektive Involviertheit zur produktiven Ausseinandersetzung,” which Koch views as a kind of...