"Think what you are saying": Verbal Politics in the Early Plays Of Handke and Kroetz

"Think what you are saying": Verbal Politics in the Early Plays Of Handke and Kroetz JEANETTE R. MALKIN Peter Handke and Franz Xaver Kroetz have, as both will readily admit, very little in common.I If anything, they occupy opposite ends in the spectrum of contemporary German dramaturgy and, with each successive play, seem to move further apart. Handke's abstract subjectivity has in recent plays (such as Vber die Dor/er, [98I ) deepened into neaI mysticism. Kroetz, on the other hand , has moved from sub-proletarian naturalism to, more recently, an almost cinematic depiction of middle-class moral styles (as in Furchl und Hoffnung der BDR, [984). Handke is a private person, an individualist with an aversion to labels, systems, and political affiliations. ' His critical acclaim has always been greater than his popularity and some of his best writing has been done in the novel, rather than the dramatic genre. Kroetz is a highly prolific and populaI playwright (and actor). Much produced, often interviewed, he is outspoken, polemical, politically engaged, a one-time member and even spokesman of the German Communist PaIty (KPD). 3 It is perhaps the very dispaIity between these two contemporaIies (Handke was born in [942; Kroetz, [946), in their personal as well as their artistic styles, that has attracted interest - both academic and in the media' Handke himself seems to comment on Kroetz's dramatic language, to compaIe his own theatrical loquaciousness with Kroetz's stunted stage speech, when he has the tycoon Quitt, the protagonist of his [973 play Die Unvemiinftigen slerben aus (They are Dying Oul) say to his servant Hans: You're making fun of my language. I would much prefer 10 express myself inarticulately like the simple people in that play recently, do you remember? Then you would finally pity me ... They too wanted tenderness, a life togeth 7f , et cetera - they just can'1 express it, and that is why they rape and murder each other. Those who live in inhuman conditions represent the last humans on stage. 1 like that paradox.5 JEANETIE R. MALKIN Quitt has recognized the social protest sounded through the inarticulateness, ' even though he mocks the naive naturalism of its idiom. His own protest, and Handke's, will also adduce the link between language and power, the gap between language and self-knowledge. In probing the functidn and political implications of language as used in their early plays, plays written at the start of each man's career and in which - in both cases - their distinctive and very different styles, and their perhaps not so different thematic concerns, are most uncompromisingly and sharply portrayed, I will focus on Handke's first and best known full-length play: Kaspar (1968). As for Kroetz, I have chosen two plays written in his socalled "early" style, i.e. before his 1972 shift to an ideologically more explicit and dramatically less extreme style6 These plays are: StallerhoJ (Farmyard) , and its sequel Geisterbahn (Ghost Train) (1972). At first sight the differences between these two successful playwrights are impressive. The Austrian Handke has been identified with a formally difficult, analytical , anti-realistic type of theatre which - especially in his early Sprechstiicke and in Kaspar - revels in the abstract and philosophical. Kaspar is almost devoid of plot. Dominated by disembodied voices and vocal interactions, its obsessive dramatization of language often seems wilfully obscurantist and oriented towards linguistic and philosophical insights. The play contains only one character/clown who is created and destroyed on stage by those "voices" which force him to acquire and conform to normative social language: a sophisticated but difficult theatrical proposition. Handke's (no doubt ironically meant) admission that he "dwells in the ivory tower" (this is the title of his 1972 collection of essays: Ich bin ein Bewohner des Elfenbeinturms 7) reflects and seemed to confirm the accusations that he is a fannalist, an aesthetist, an introverted, solipsistic writer in the vein of Beckett, a writer who is socially "nicht engagiert" (uncommitted)8 The Bavarian Kroetz, on the other hand, is considered one of the initiators of the German "New Realism" of the '70S.9 His plays are concretely situated in a recognizable social milieu and present a...