Documentary Drama: Form and Content

Documentary Drama: Form and Content Clas Zilliacus I The documentary drama of the sixties is often thought of as a mode indigenous to that decade. Statements to this effect are particularly frequent in West Germany, where the vogue of documentary playmaking was first discernible. In his prefatory comments to an anthology of texts from Theater heute, pub­ lished in 1970, Henning Rischbieter writes: “wie lange scheint das schon her! Wer denkt noch an Kipphardts Prozessmontage In der Sache J. Robert Oppenheimer, an Peter Weissens szenisches Konzentrat des Auschwitz-Prozesses unter dem Titel Die Ermittlung?”1 The documentary days of political drama are over: political commitment in the theatre has found other and better outlets, Rischbieter concludes. He confines his ob­ servations to the West German scene, where they may have greater claims to validity than elsewhere. Even so they are ques­ tionable. The documentary method may have lost the position it had in the mid-sixties, but experiences gained from it have undeniably helped to nourish quite recent developments, in Ger­ many and elsewhere. Discussion of the critical problem must begin with the ad­ mission that the term “documentary” is very imprecise. Rolf Hochhuth, hailed ever since Der Stellvertreter (1963) as a chief proponent of documentary drama, has consistently declined the honor.2 Erwin Piscator, who directed the first production of Der Stellvertreter, had used the term in the program as a bridge to his own documentaries in the twenties. Hochhuth is more re­ served: every dramatist who sets out to write an historical play has to study the relevant documents; “documentary drama” is a meaningless term, Hochhuth said in an interview with Martin Esslin. And, to Siegfried Melchinger: “Dokumentarisch kann 223 224 Comparative Drama nur ein Stück genannt werden, das keine [erfundenen] Szenen enthält.”3 Documentary drama neither began nor ended with the past decade. The reason why it was welcomed as something decisive­ ly original was twofold. (1) Conscientious adherence to the let­ ter of the material used was, to a much higher degree than be­ fore, regarded as a sine qua non. (2) It appeared to lack an un­ interrupted tradition. But its forebears can easily be traced. In Britain, for instance, Oh, What A Lovely War (1963), US (1966), and other, more researched creations, had been pre­ ceded during the Second World War by the work of the Abca Play Unit, financed by the War Office as a teaching instrument for the troops.4 Martin Duberman’s In White America, a 1963 off-Broadway premiere, received laudatory notices as a singular attempt to dramatize authentic and important historical docu­ ments. A quarter of a century earlier the Federal Theatre Project had carried out work in a similar manner in the reportorial theatre of the Living Newspaper, whose editions researched history as it occurred. The seminal documentaries, however, were written in Ger­ many: there the demands for a factual approach were felt with particular urgency. The situation demanded extreme sobriety in language and watchfulness against semantic dislocations of the Nazi era, and the recent past was heavy with themes and subject-matter that could neither be bypassed nor fictionalized. Die Bewältigung der Vergangenheit was the task at hand. A major obstacle before this could be begun was the interiorizing mood of the fifties: German literature of those years was mainly in search of a viable ethic, and pettier matters were post­ poned. Then, in the sixties, the legacies of Piscator and Brecht were interfused: multimedia staging of documents, and the no­ tion of theatre as a forensic activity. It was all there in the twenties, and the upsurge four decades later was merely, in the words of Jack D. Zipes, mending the circuit.5 Further back was Büchner, recognized as a predecessor both in his choice of an historical case as paradigm (Woyzeck) and in his incorporation of documented orations for credibility and historical specificity (Dantons Tod). Behind the Oppenheimer of Kipphardt was the Galileo of Brecht, just as Der aufhaltsame Aufstieg des Arturo Ui, besides having its referent in history, had borrowed its Cías Zilliacus 225 dramaturgy from the Elizabethan chronicle, the pedagogic docu­ mentary form of another era. n The...