Dialectic and Time in The Condemned of Altona

DIALECTIC AND TIME IN THE CONDEMNED OF ALTONA THE STRUCTURE OF The Condemned of Altona by Jean-Paul Sartre may be defined spatially by the "downstairs," the Gerlach living room and Werner's office, and the "upstairs" where Frantz has sequestered himself. Temporally, there is on the one hand the tight, rigid time set by the German clock whose gongs begin the action of the play, and on the other an inner time regulated by subjective will and imagination rather than by clocks and watches. A first reading of the play might lead one to associate clock time with the downstairs and inner time with the upstairs and think of the two realms as having nothing in common. One might then be tempted to think of the action of the playas an oscillation between the two poles of the upstairs and the downstairs gradually mounting in tension as the play shifts, quite regularly, from one pole to the other between acts. The demarcation between the downstairs and the upstairs, however, is not clear-cut. The upstairs is partially linked to the downstairs through the door Leni uses. The downstairs is linked to the upstairs through the three "enormous" photographs of Frantz. There is also an intermingling of the two time schemes. The two flashbacks that take place in the living room make use of an inner time scale. And when in Act IV Johanna leaves her watch with Frantz, he marks time just as precisely as his father while waiting for her return. These preliminary observations indicate that Sartre has patterned this play along dialectical rather than polar lines of action. At the time that this play was first published, Sartre had been working on A Criticism of Dialectical Reason for three years. In the introduction to this work, Sartre rejects analytical rationalism, a philosophy which considers man and matter to be juxtaposed, with man, however, clearly superior to things, in favour of dialectical rationalism which is based on a recognition of the interrelationship between man and things. Insofar as theater is concerned, this preoccupation of Sartre is reflected in his criticism of the bourgeois theater which, he claims, has ignored the dialectical relationship between man and the world, and which has attempted to present man "as he is," as a fixed entity, an in-itself. Sartre claims that man can only be understood through his project; through an understanding 10 1969 The Condemned of Altona 11 of "what he wants, beginning with his future, with his most personal efforts to attain his ends."1 In The Condemned of Aitona~ the central focus of the play is on the relationship between Frantz and his "situation." This relationship , it seems to me, is developed in two parts. The first part describes the dialectical changes that occur between Frantz and his situation up to his sequestration. This covers a span of six years (1941-1947) and takes place prior to the opening of the play. The second represents the dialectical pattern of action in the present, that is, as the play progresses, and may be followed as the action shifts from the downstairs to the upstairs. The thematic focus of the play is clearly on Frantz' failure to establish an authentic project. "Man is only a situation," writes Sartre; "a worker is not free to think or to feel like a bourgeois; but in order that this situation should become a man, a whole man, it should be lived and left behind on the way to a particular aim."2 The initial situation that Frantz has to face is of course that into which he is born. This is represented in the play by the living room, the realm of ule vieux Hindenburg/' or ule grand bourgeois" as Sartre calls him. Frantz is made to face this situation, his first prise de conscience~ when he discovers that a concentration camp has been set up in the Altona grounds. Frantz is seventeen, an idealist, a "little prince." The concentration camp is the first "instant" in his life. It leads him to question his situation, to realize that a choice has to be made. One has to either interiorize, consciously "take over" the situation...