An Anthology of German Expressionist Drama ed. by Walter H. Sokel (review)

BOOK REVIEWS A.N ANTHOLOGY OF GERMAN EXPRESSIONIST DRAMA., edited by Walter H. Sokel (Anchor Books), Doubleday &:: Company, Inc., Garden City, New York, 1968, 867 pp. Price $1.45. ' Open this volume at page three and you are confronted with what seems to be the latest fiery credo from. the pages of the Evergreen Review: I know that life can have only a moral purpose: Intensity, the roaming fire of intensity, the burstings, splittings, explosions of intensity. • . • I know for us are left only catastrophes, conflagrations, explosions, leaps from high towers, light, violent laying about oneself, the cries of runners gone amuck.. • • Who are our comrades? Prostitutes, poets, sub-proletarians, collectors of lost objects, thieves on favorable occasions, idlers, lovers in the middle of embrace, religious lunatics, drunks, chain smokers, the unemployed, gluttons, jailbirds, burglars, critics, somnivolents, rabble. And, at certain moments, all the women in the world. We are the scum, the offal, the despised. We are the holy mob. • •. We believe in a single moment's eternal fulfillment. • • . The moral force of destruction alone can make us happy. • • • Our catastrophes alone give us life. The quotation, however, is from Ludwig Rubiner's essay written in 1917, "Man in the Center," one of four essays which Professor Walter H. Sokel of Columbia University reprints as background for his survey of German expressionist drama. Rubiner's hard, gem-like flamboyance belongs to another conflagration, that which sought to raze bourgeois moral, social, political, ethical, and artistic conventions in Germany during the first quarter of this century. Spawned by Romantic Sturm und Drang and by Strindberg, Rimbaud, and Dostoevski, the spiritual kinsmen of the expressionists were cubists, futurists, surrealists, Joyce, Kafka, and the masters of the silent film. Among the major stylistic characteristics of German expressionism which Professor Sokel notes are its intensified subjectivism and theatricality , its experimentation with and distortion of the conventions of verisimili-, tude, and its revolt against both the well-made play and the "language-centered" classical drama. Professor Sokel subtitles his anthology "a prelude to the absurd" and the documents and plays he assembles (many of which he translated witb his wife) together with bis lucid, comprehensive introduction amply demonstrate his thesis. Concentrating c:>n those e:x:pressionist plays which attend Godot and the sense of tragic fatalism implicit in the theater of the absurd rather than those which berald Lefty as the hope of social meliorism, Professor Sokel has assembled a collection of plays generally unfamiliar to American readers and largely uneven in quality but all worth the attention of students of dramatic literature. If we consider the plays in ascending order of merit, we find at the bottom of the ladder Reinhard Sorge's "The Beggar," a naive, bathetic, and rhetorically banal treatment of the uncanny spiritual affinity which often exists between the lover, the lunatic, and the poet. The shrill lyricism and sentimental attitudinizing of this play, characteristic of German expressionism at its most inept, is highlighted by the Sokels' stilted translation which often sounds like W. C. Fields ("Desist!") at his most sham-pompous. They and the proofreaders at Doubleday are to be forgiven for having nodded over this piece which offers us, on page 71, 335 336 MODERN DRAMA December the word "matricide" when "infanticide" is dearly intended. Not to be forgiven, however, is the presentation of the play in truncated form. With its last two acts deleted "because the substance of the play is contained in the first three acts" and presented with a note by Professor Sokel on how it all comes out we wonder if it is possible that the professor equates dramatic "substance" with "story." Vying with "The Beggar" for last place, is Walter Hasenclaver's "Humanity ," a morality play composed, like the scenario for a silent film, of brief scenes in which hysterical type-characters (little more than animated slogans) speak captions and hurl exclamations at one another while performing surrealistic feats. Almost as tiresome are two short plays by Kokoschka, "Murderer the Women's Hope" and "Job," in which the surrealistic high jinks, interesting enough in their own right and as foreshadowings of the amusement-park excitements of the modern "happening," are mythically inflated...