With Kott against Kott

Elizabethan kings and queens and their ancestors were not to be envied. Without an autonomous army superior to those of the other lords and earls, without a developed bureaucracy to control the empire, and without an effective police force for spontaneous intervention, they were shockingly powerless. Each dominion had to depend on events that lay only partly in their power: symbolic acts, like the grace of God; coalitions and intrigues with the opposing feudal barons; and shaky alliances with foreign countries who looked after their own interests. The support of their own subjects, as long as those subjects remained too poor and too hungry to plot a decent rebellion, was the least of their concerns. Due to dangerous conditions and the English weather, most days were passed in and around gloomy, raven-ridden castles. Only a select few of these people came to a peaceful end in their own beds.

In the early 1960s, a young Polish scholar of literature—veteran of the Warsaw Uprising and resident of a tightly controlled Soviet satellite that the rulers in Moscow regarded as notoriously unreliable compared to the efficiently run DDR—published a small collection of essays. Finding his present-day experiences reflected in Elizabethan history plays, Jan Kott titled his little book Shakespeare, Our Contemporary. The German title is more pointed, echoing a German theater magazine founded in 1960: Shakespeare Today.

Balanced at the core of Kott's argument was "the grand mechanism," in which power becomes an event governed by blind destiny—a wheel of history that grinds indiscriminately forward, or an escalator to nowhere. One climbs steadily upward until one receives the crown, only to fall quickly back down into the tower or even deeper still. Hoping for justice or compassion is futile; history marches resolutely down its bloody path of destruction. This philosophy of history borrows its dialectic from Hegel and its direction from the rolling heads of the damned: an Edward, a Henry, or a Richard, a Polish officer in World War II or a Communist Party leader attending the Warsaw Pact. Such a worldview makes everyday subjection in totalitarian states more tolerable and at least partly understandable. Working simultaneously from the same idea, Heiner Müller formed his own dramatic shelters of deindividualization a couple hundred kilometers farther west.

As often happens, it all began with an ending: the German occupation of Poland in 1939. Kott had just returned from a trip to Paris with his future wife when Hitler and Stalin began to divvy up his native country. In Lemberg that fall, he avoided—by a series of accidents—a Soviet deportation to Siberia. With quixotic determination and the luck of the draw he eluded death a half dozen times over the next six years— the last time in Warsaw during the uprising. He survived practically everything that could kill a man: Germans and Russians, bombs, deportation, starvation, sickness, combat, and even a death sentence from the party to which he belonged. One can read all about it in Still Alive. Most informative in these essays is not only what Kott tells, but how he tells: life as a contingent series of events that could run out—literally, end—at any moment; biography presented as permanently in question, barely controlled by the acting individual, a gambling by force.

One time he tells of a girl, M., whom he had met with her boyfriend one or two years before the Warsaw Uprising when he was holding improvised lectures on Marxism for the People's Army. The couple did not hold the laws of historical materialism in high regard; rather, they supported Polish patriotism, honor, and loyalty. A couple of weeks later, the two stopped coming: "Her boyfriend had been killed a week earlier at an action. M. did not leave her apartment. She remained in bed for days. In bed she wrote poems and slept with any boy who dropped by. Once or twice a month, she went to the nightly actions, which consisted of...