State of the Art: Alternative Theater in the GDR

State of the Art: Alternative Theater in the GDR PATRICIA ANNE SIMPSON Man hat den Antrag abgelehnt, Hess meine Traume sterben Das Glas d~s randvoll Hoffnung war, zersprang in tausend Scherben Das Glas das randvoll Hoffnung war, zersprang in tausend Scherben ("They rejected my application, let my dreams die. The cup of hopes has shattered, the cup of hope has shattered." From Stephan Krawczyk's "Griibellied" or "Meditation Blues.") Wir kleben aneinander in dieser toten Stadt. Uod wenn wit fallen, dano spiiren wit keinen Wind, dano sinken wir allmahlich ein in dumpfe Langweile. ("We're stuck to each other in this dead city. And ifwe ever fall. we don't even feel a wind, then we sink slowly into a mute boredom." From Freya Klier's Die Austeiblmg des Juan [The Exile ofJuan].) History and historical figures have always been legitimate topics for the GDR theater. Since the 1980s, GDR dramatists have begun to draw from history and myth as subjects for their plays with new perspectives. They now represent the Nazi past without the fear and trepidation of their colleagues in the West; and they bring the rehabilitated Prussian past to life with surprising canniness and irreverence (Claus Hammel's Die Preussen kammen [The Prussians are Coming]). This type of work demonstrates a sometimes laudable historical, social, and political consciousness while keeping within the expressed purpose of GDR theater - to edify each member of the audience and produce a better citizen. There are still innovative and contemporary stagings of the classics, and a new receptivity to the modem classics, such as Beckett and Pirandello. In addition, the West German - specifically Bavarian - playwright, Franz Xaver Kroetz, now has yet another receptive audience. But all these accomplishments 130 PATRICIA ANNE SIMPSON , - inroads into the past and future - continue to suppress certain conflicts of consciousness and conscience in daily life in the GDR. The result of this suppression, the sacrifice of the present for the sake of history, has led to a split in the GDR: the official and the alternative theater. The official theater in the GDR is closely watched, and not only by the general population. Theater der Zeit, the most prominent journal for the perfonmng arts, covers productions carefully and critically. The regular "state ofour theater'" article keeps track ofthe relative well-being ofnational theater, little known in the West except forthe work of Heiner MOller, perhaps the only contemporary East German playwright to achieve international acclaim. With a population of I7 million, the GDR has 68 official theaters, 200 smaller spaces, and more subsidized theater than any other country in the world (for its size and population). There is what the cultural mininster Hans-Joachim Hoffmann describes as a "symbiotic" relationship between the writers's union, the theater, and the producers.' The official theater belongs in the ranks of significant socialist institutions. Recently five plays written in the early 1980s, several of which appeared in Theater der Zeit,3 were submitted for a possible exchange with the United States. Each delivered a pedagogical message with a very heavy hand in keeping with a certain theory of theater. The themes, briefly summarized, include: a young girl who prostitutes herself to Western engineers to take revenge on her disapproving parents by buying a symbolic pair of Western jeans (Uwe Saeger, Flugversuch [Attempt to Fly]); a fairy-tale figure who refuses to remove his cap in the presence of the queen who first threatens to behead him, then marries him (Albert Wendt, Der Vogelkopp [The Bird Headj); a released prisoner who adjusts to and accepts the fate of the common man, a rebel against the system who resists then accepts the demands of military service because he cannot imagine an alternative world (Georg Seidel, Jochen Schanotte); two women, a liar and a thief, who meet in a sublet apartment, see the error 'of their ways, and separate (JOrgen Gross, Die Diebin und die Lugnerin [The Thief and the Liar]); and Werner Buhss's Die Festung [The Fortressl, an adaption from a Buzzati novel which questions a military ethos.4 The adaptation was aesthetically the most successful. These short synopses do not provide an overview of the drama produced in the...