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BOOK REVIEWS as them - were flawed and thus failed to live up to a paradigm of integrity that Beckett established. In an apt summation, Kalb ends with a chapter on "MUlier as Proteus," which explores the strikingly different interpretations the author discovered in nine productions of Quartet, a play about the assumption of masks and the inhabitation/exploitation of others. It is there that Kalb is at his best: His incisive analysis of performance, teasing out the details of acting and directorial choices, captures the essence of each of these productions. Whenever the author attempts to second-guess what motivated MUlier in making particular artistic choices, readers unfamiliar with the events that shaped cultural and political life in post-World War" Germany will easily arrive at erroneous conclusions. Kalb seems guided by a perception that the divided Gennany he visited before and during reunification was more or less still representative of the country's society and culture throughout the long years of the Cold War. His deductions often betray a lack of historical awareness that is unfortunately quite pervasive in academic theatre studies. Mtil1er's writings responded in intricate fashion to the twists and turns of history, at least as much as to the particular writers and theatrical paradigms that Kalb is at pains to establish as the models MUlier emulated. He frequently misconstrues events that touch upon MUlier's work; and the factual information he provides is not always reliable. (A detailed discussion would, unfortunately, exceed the prescribed length of this review.) All this understood, however, Kalb's well-illustrated book makes an interesting contribution to the study of a major figure of twentieth-century theatre. There remains the need to respond to the author's continued attack of the three volumes of MUlier's texts in English published by PAJ Books. MUlier invited me to do these translations, and they received his express approval. Kalb claims that, partly because of his choice of translator, "MUlier has been neglected in the land of his friend and collaborator Robert Wilson." His assertion makes it mandatory to set the record straight: During the past fourteen years MUlier, in my versions, has been by far the most frequently produced contemporary German playwright in the U.S. and Canada, and a number of these productions were staged by Wilson. Kalb includes in the book excerpts from Muller's writings in his own translation; they reveal that he is not particularly familiar with German idioms, especially those spoken in the former East Germany. Multilayered meanings often escape him - as did many of the more complex aspects of Heiner MUlier's life and work. CAR L WEBER, STANFORD UNIVE RS ITY RICHARD BODEK. Proletarian PO/formance in Weimar Berlin: Agitprop, Chorus , and Brecht. Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1997· Pp. 184. $54.95. In Proletarian PO/formance in Weimar Berlin: Agitprop, Chorus, and Brecht, Book Reviews 293 historian Richard Bodek takes the reader on an exciting and unusual journey to Weimar Berlin. This is not the "Golden Twenties" Berlin of cabaret, variety , operettas, and film, but Berlin the gritty working-class city. Bodek gives us a close-up view not only of its poverty, unemployment, and crowded living conditions but also of how the working class and its political parties, the social democrats (SPD) and the communists (KPD), used culture - music and theatre in particular - as a weapon to raise the political consciousness of the masses. The conventional view of the culture of Weimar Germany tends to separate the high culture of the bourgeoisie and the ruling classes from the low culture of the masses or the working class. BOOek strives to bridge that separation by using the theoretical framework of New Historicism. Drawing on Clifford Geertz and Anton Kaes in particular, Bodek attempts a study of cultural expressions that deal with texts as well as with the social conditions in which these texts were produced. The book, especially the first chapter, gives an excellent background of the conditions of the working class in Weimar Berlin and is a valuable companion for anyone teaching the literature and culture of Weimar Gennany. In subsequent chapters BOOek presents three different expressions of working class culture in the late...

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