Munich and Theatrical Modernism: Politics, Playwriting, and Performance, 1890-1914 by Peter Jelavich (review)

378Comparative Drama Peter Jelavich. Munich and Theatrical Modernism: Politics, Playwriting, and Performance, 1890-1914. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985. Pp. xiv + 403. $27.50. When one thinks of the turn-of-the-century revolution that would shake the very foundation of Western theater, Munich does not immediately jump to mind. One thinks of Lugné-Poë, Maeterlinck, and Jarry in Paris, Stanislavsky and Gorky in Moscow, Reinhardt in BerUn, the Independent Stage Society in London, the theories of Appia and Craig— perhaps Fuchs and Wedekind in Munich. But Fuch's proto-Nazism and anti-semitism have understandably fostered a growing neglect of his work, and Wedekind is usually considered a transitional figure, a link between radical naturaUsm and symboUsm and a precursor of expressionism. In point of fact, except for Jarry and the crazed fringe of the Paris avant garde, the whole of the "new drama" is child's play compared to the daring and audacious work of Panizza, Wedekind, Kandinsky, Lautensack , and Mühsam in Munich. Peter Jelavich's illuminating Munich and Theatrical Modernism brings to the foreground many neglected dramatists and theater artists. This illuminating and important study also presents a microcosm of the birth of modernism and the all too recurrent attempts of the decent-minded middle class to muzzle creativity and gag Dionysus. If theorists like Appia and Craig were the field generals of the theatrical revolution, then writers like Panizza and Wedekind were the "street fighters." They battled not only hostile audiences and gun-shy producers, but politicians and petty bureaucrats intent on banning their work. Wedekind's Spring's Awakening (1891) and Oskar Panizza's little known The Council of Love (1894), with its open treatment of sexuality and attack upon the Church, let loose a tidal wave of vituperation on the playwrights and other artists in Munich. The extent of the controversy might be likened in our own time to the furor in England over Bond's Saved (1965) and Brenton's The Romans in Britain (1980), the former which toppled British stage censorship, the latter which sparked a campaign to try to reinstate it. Munich and Theatrical Modernism is a history of the politics of theater from the late days of naturalism to the birth of expressionism. Jelavich's extremely solid, well-written, and absorbing work brings to light much that has escaped the standard theater histories. His lively account documents a chapter in the struggle between high art and low art for domination of the culture. Many are familiar with the "high art" of Munich during this period: the Schauspielhaus which presented the "New Drama" (Hauptmann, Sudermann, Bj0rnson, Wilde, Ibsen, Maeterlinck ) by subsidizing them with heavy doses of French and German farces, and Fuch's Kunstlertheater. Of course, these are examined in detail by Jelavich, but the most interesting and important parts of the work are those which center on the more overlooked aspects of Munich theatrical life, most especially the influence and significance of "low art" to the modernist movement. It is very easy to look upon the modernist revolution as something decreed from "above," sprung Minerva-like from the heads of the great Reviews379 artists and their lofty, aesthetic visions, but in reality it was a revival of interest in low culture and popular art forms that was the galvanizing force. The avant garde and theatrical modernism were born in the gutter and the sewer. They were the bastard children of the subUterary tradition of "illegitimate" theater—the vulgar Hansworst in Germany, the renegade English theaters outlawed by Walpole in 1737, the commedia dell' arte, first assailed by the commedia erudita and finally replaced by the "scripted" comedy of Goldoni, and Paris' Boulevard du Temple (dubbed the "Boulevard of Crime") where Pixerecourt, Corneille of the Melodrama , reigned, which was razed by Napoleon III in 1862. One of these bastard offspring, treated at length by Jelavich in the book's most fascinating chapter, is the Cabaret theater. The Cabaret movement helped shape a whole generation of German dramatists and theater artists. (The continuity of this tradition in the last one hundred years is the subject of Joel Schechter's important Durov's Pig [Theatre Communication Group, 1985].) The German Cabaret tradition...