Politics and Poetry: Peter Handke's They Are Dying Out

Politics and Poetry: Peter Handke's They Are Dying Out JUNE SCHLUETER In 1974, a year after its publication, They Are Dying Out was produced at Zurich's Theatre am Neumarkt and Berlin's Schaubuhne am Halleschen Ufer. The Schaubuhne, like Frankfurt's Theater am Turm, favored politically involved plays with a leftist orientation,' and three years earlier it had shown considerable hesitation with respect to The Ride AcrossLake Constance. There was no such hesitation with They Are Dying Out, however, which Horst Zankl (who directed both the Zurich and the Berlin productions) undertook without reservation, apparently feeling its anti-capitalistic message was clear. When the Yale Repertory Theatre produced They Are Dying Outin 1979, the play was billed as a "biting, wry comment on the cult of mass marketing and its creators,'" with translator Michael Roloff and director Carl Weber "Americanizing " the production to reflect the special embarrassments of our home-grown consumerism. To be sure, Mr. Quit! (be he the original "Hermann" or the Americanized "Oscar") is by anyone's definition an unconscionable capitalist, who manipulates his colleagues into a position of vulnerability in order to destroy them. And the group of entrepreneurs who gather in his home are unrelenting in their criticism of free enterprise, committing themselves to deception and dissembling while acknowledging that they are cigar-smoking monsters in the public eye. Nowhere in Handke's work is politics so prominent as in They Are Dying Out, yet no critic has satisfactorily accounted for this play's political ideology. Rainer Nagele and Renate Voris, for example, compare the play with Brecht's didactic St. Joa1l ofthe Stockyards but conclude that Handke's repudiation of capitalistic practices is ambivalent.3 And Manfred Mixner carefully examines the political framework of the play but denies the existence of any direct political message.4 The fact is that the play is simply not convincing politically, and one is left with the feeling that QUitt's suicide, effected through successive smashings of his head against a massive stone, is something other than - or 340 JUNE SCHLUETER more than - his disillusionment with life in a capitalistic society. Politics may indeed offer an entry point for the play, but once one gets beneath the surface texture, he finds himself in a skillfully-wrought playworld which has as much to do with alienation as with capitalism, and more to do with aesthetics than with either. Beneath its political mask, They Are Dying Out is a dramatized continuation of the aesthetic dialogue which informs all of Handke's work, and particularly of the growing feeling of loss first suggested in his novel Shorl LeIter, Long Farewell. Like the hero of Short Letter, Long Farewell, Quilt is a man in search of self. Quitt has invested much time, effort, and capital in building not only an empire but an image, yet he is not content; though seldom given to displays ofemotion, Quilt admits he is a lonely man and, in the play's opening scene, rejects the suggestion of his servant, Hans, to be reasonable. Quilt the businessman suspects there is more to him than his profeseional pose, and he resolves to prove to Hans - and to himself - that his feelings are "useful." The entrepreneur becomes preoccupied to the point ofobsession with finding the self beneath the camouflage of his businessman's life. In a conversation with Paula Tax, the one female entrepreneur among them, he pleads, "if you look at me now, please become aware of me for once and not my causes,"5then begs, "Do I have to bang my head against the floor to make you ask about me?" (p. 202). He tells the story ofhow the eggman came to the door at the same time each week and how he wanted to scream, '''Can't you be someone else for once?''' (p. 200); and he delights in listening to Kilb relate an event of his (Quilt's) recent past, commenting, "It's beautiful to hear a story about oneself' (p. 174), a remark suggesting that he is looking for verification ofhis existence. He tells of how some young boys once saw him step out of his house and tauntingly cried out, " ... I...