“Immer schweb ich ums Haus herum:” How Cash Flow Spooks the Theatrical Household

The degeneration of Lenzian characters is often explained in conjunction with Lenz’s use of mechanical figures, exemplified in the famous passage from the essay on Goethe’s “Götz von Berlichingen mit der eisernen Hand.” Lenz offers this unhappy, inhumane image: “[W]as bleibt nun der Mensch noch anders als eine vorzüglich künstliche kleine Maschine, die in die große Maschine, die wir Welt, Weltbegebenheiten, Weltläufte nennen, besser oder schlimmer hineinpaßt” (IV: 223).¹

The dehumanizing mechanization of man becomes the mark of bad socialization, the characteristic of a flawed integration into the large, modern social machine. This mechanical man should then function as the figural basis for the analysis of the modern condition, an analysis which can be carried out in an analogy to classical drama. A metallic fate in machinery awaits the modern protagonist, who is merely a cog in the social machine. What Lenz called “eisernes Schicksal” in Greek tragedy robbed the classical individual of autonomy. “Da ein eisernes Schicksal die Handlungen der Alten bestimmte und regierte, so konnten sie als solche interessieren, ohne davon den Grund in der menschlichen Seele aufzusuchen und sichtbar zu machen. Wir aber hassen solche Handlungen, von denen wir die Ursache nicht einsehen, und nehmen keinen Teil daran” (I: 234).

This primal scene of the theater recalls a primal scene of theatricality that Rainer Nägele discusses in his essay “Puppet Play and Trauerspiel.” Nägele characterizes eighteenth-century intellectuals’ interest in inner workings with a softer metaphor than that of iron fate, but his observations on puppet-subjects stand to inform the machine-subjects populating the stage in the dramas of Lenz:

The stuffing of the puppet-subject, the Werg, is pre-textile waste of flax and hemp; it is etymologically identical with Werk (work). Until the eighteenth century Werk and Werg were interchangeable. But after that time, an interiorized notion of work as an expression of the innermost self posits it in radical opposition to Werg and Balg. As mere stuffing, Werg remains pure exteriority even when it is “inside,” because it is an unmetaphorized, untransfigured interior. It belongs to the same category as that which is mechanically memorized and can be learned through mechanical repetition.²

It is precisely in the more progressive aspects of Lenz’ dramatic work, its promotion of a rational social order subjected to natural laws, that traces of this Baroque puppet-subject might become visible in the modern mechanical subject.

Unlike the ceremonial and religious drama of classical Athens, according to Lenz in the passage about the “eisernes Schicksal,” modern drama should not only show the fates of its heroes, but elucidate the causes of their failures, because the modern audience requires “die Ursache.” One commentator lends the Lenzian complaint about iron fate a philosophy of history: the deus ex machina becomes a deus as machina, where the rational social order replaces the ancient divine order.³ This interpretation illuminates Lenz’ indebtedness to enlightened accounts of reasonable progress. In the techniques of the theater, there would be a history of social and intellectual improvement leading from ritual to superstition, from superstition to rationally explained allegory and depiction. Humanity finally intervenes in the divine sphere and creates legality. This intervention makes the theater, in particular, morally effective.

The substitution of reason for the religious motivations of antiquity should provide modern moral reflection with the religious force of the ancients, but this process of replacement also represents the fundamental modernization of virtue. “Je mehr sich aber unsere Vernunft sich entwickelt, (das geht bis ins Unendliche), desto mehr nimmt dieser moralische Glaube, der in der Tat mehr in den Empfindungen als in der Erkenntnis gegründet ist, ab und verwandelt sich in das Schauen, in eine Überzeugung der Vernunft” (III. 293 Lenz to Salzmann, Oct. 1772).

Drama does not consist, then, of religiously embedded Handeln, where a heroic individual participates in a divine economy (of faith, virtue, or grace). It also presents a world which moderns increasingly interpret according to rational laws. These laws, however, are either “natural” or moral...