Anarchism in the Dramas of Ernst Toller by Michael Ossar (review)

570 Book Reviews brilliant analyses of'"The Later Pirandello." This hint ofbrilliance occurs, for example. in her excellent definition of"myth" and description ofthe way that Pirandello used it in Lazzaro, La Nuova Colonia, and I Giganti della Montagna. Ragusa's is a valuable and original contribution to PirandeIlian studies. She has avoided all the clich6s of illusion/reality, multiplicity/disintegration of the personality, fixitylfluidity. about which other scholars have sunk their readers in pools ofblack ink. I must repeat, however. that it would be good if scholars would devote themselves not only to studies on PirandelIo, but to a return to the originals, with accurate and faithful translations. Olga Ragusa herself points several paths along which future Pirandellians may go. JOHN B. REY. CHESTNUT HILL COLLEGE MICHAEL OSSAR. Anarchism in the Dranws ofErnst Toller. Albany: State University of New York Press [980. pp. xiii, [94. Between a preface which quotes Erich Miihsam's "all art is necessarily anarchist" (some would contend that all art is, or up to a certain time was, estabJishment, although art can be many things to many men), and a conclusion which states that Toller's theme was "the recognition of this desperate fact, that all human ingenuity is irrelevant to making the world better than it ever was ... ," Michael Ossar elaborates on the anarchist elements in Ernst Toller's earlier dramas. Ossar begins his study with four background chapters. Chapter [ ("I was a Gennan") is a condensation of Toller's autobiography with an important quotation at the end showing how unfree Germans were under Hitler. Chapter 2, "Toller and his Critics," which presents such eminent scholars and historians as John Spalek, Jost Hennand, Ernst NieJdsch, W.A. Willibrand, and Martin Reso, among others, announces the purpose of the study: to examine, in Jost Hermand's words, Toller's "third way, a way neither bourgeois nor proletarian." "Anarchism: The Historical Tradition" (Chapter 3) cites a host of thinkers, among them Tolstoy, Gandhi, Kropotkin, Martin Buber, Enrico Malatesta, Shaw, Godwin, Shelley and Proudhon, with whom Toller shared the idea ofa malevolent God, an idea which gave rise to Toller's famous J'accuse in Masse-Mensch - not, I might add, an entirely unbiblical idea (see Isaiah 45:7). Biblical too is the idea of the "New Mao," perhaps in many ways different in its twentieth-century Expressionist concept but nevertheless leading to the same goal: sainthood, a point also recognized by Max Weber. Chapter 4, "Gennan Heirs to European Anarchism," examines Toller's affinity to Gustav Landauer's "mystical anarchism "; to Martin Buber, who "referred to himself as a mystical and religious socialist"; to Kropotkin's "anarchism-communism" influential on Toller through Landauer's translations of Kropotkin's works - and to Kropotkin's and Landauer's idea of Volk in the sense of the medieval church community , but romanticized the way Kropotkin romanticized and generalized about the past and the Middle Ages very much like his compatriot Solzhenitsyn. InChapters 5 through 9, Ossar discusses in some detail five ofToller's plays, one play per chapter, each play analysed in tenns of a different aspect of "anarchism." The chapter on Die Wandlung, for example, is subtitled "Anarchism and the New Man.". Book Reviews 571 would have preferred the play's usual translation of The Transformation to Transfiguration , but I admit that the latter title points as no other to the deeply religious spirit of the drama (although that is not given much attention by Ossar). Alfred Kerr called Masse-Mensch "very Christian," the mood it created "almost religious," its dialogue "almost an oratorio." One could say the same about Die Wandlung. Martin Reso also calls Toller's work "religious," and Toller himself said that the political poet is "always a religious poet,somehow," In the chapter that follows, "Masse Mensch: Anarchism and Communism," the title of the drama is used throughout without a hyphen (although I think it should be a dash to indicate the antithesis between the two that ToUer intended to convey; see Ossar. p. 166, tn. 5. but compare his rendering on p. 79 with Toller's original). Also, I am not so sure that, as Ossar asserts, "[The] Husband, too, is edified by...