The Drama of Revolt: A Critical Study of Georg Büchner by Maurice B. Benn, and: Brecht the Dramatist by Ronald Gray (review)

REVIEWS Maurice B. Benn. The Drama of Revolt: A Critical Study of Georg Buchner. New York and London: Cambridge University Press, 1976. Pp. viii + 321. $21.00. Ronald Gray. Brecht the Dramatist. New York and London: Cambridge University Press, 1976. Pp. 232. $15.95, cloth. $5.95, paper. One of the principal preoccupations of the modem theater has been its struggle to shape political convictions into the necessities of dramatic structure. Treading a thin line between aesthetics and propaganda, the “engaged” playwright translates philosophy into feeling by making political questions moral and ethical ones as well. In an age in which traditional tragedy appears sentimental in comparison with genocide, the real energy of modernism in the theater directs itself toward respon­ sibility in place of sympathy. Here theater offers us not catharsis, but self-realization; the true life of the new drama can be found on the street or on the barricades as often as on the stage. The play’s the thing to catch the conscience of the audience, not the king. It is not surprising, then, that critics since the Second World War have focused so heavily on Brecht and Büchner as the originators of politicized dramatic structure. Born in an age of Romanticism, Büchner, Germany’s “clandestine genius,” imagined in Danton’s Death and Woyzeck those horrors and anxieties which have become thé realities of our own times. Expanding upon Robert Brustein’s illuminating concept of the “theater of revolt,” Maurice Benn sees Büchner as a rebel who was simultaneously an artist in revolt from the past. In The Drama of Revolt Professor Benn is interested in providing us with the scholarly apparatus given far too swift a glance in Brustein’s more impressionistic thematic study. The result is a solid addition to the Anglica Germanica Series published by Cambridge University Press and a useful tool for the specialist in German drama. Benn has been unusually conscientious in tracing the growth and development of the young Büchner’s political, metaphysical, and aesthetic rebellions. Each personalized revolution is assigned a chapter of its own, and though one cannot fail to admire the scrupulous attention of a firstrate scholar, the evaluations here are too frequently ponderous and almost exclusively academic. Büchner was far more adept at being a playwright than he was at being a philosopher or a politician; though it is worth­ while to develop the correspondences between Büchner and the major European thought of his era, such study can only serve to point out his limitations rather than his considerable talents. Büchner was a far more spontaneous artist than Benn’s careful analysis would seem to imply: 347 348 Comparative Drama Danton’s Death was written at most in five weeks when the playwright was only 21. How this precocious work can possibly be what Professor Benn characterizes as a “product of long gestation” remains a mystery, as does his statement about the “inevitability of choice” concerning Biichner’s selection of the French Revolution as the background for his first major play. Despite such peculiar lapses in his text, Benn’s new book contains valuable discussions of the three plays and the novella Lenz which comprise the central Büchner canon. Here Benn is at his critical best, pointing out the crucial relationships between Büchner’s political revolt and the stylistic one he orchestrated in his drama. Basing Danton’s Death on primary sources and real events and thus foreshadowing the rise of documentary drama in the twentieth century, Büchner developed a new kind of telegraphic dialogue replacing the blank verse of the worn-out historical drama he found in Schiller, Kleist, and Grillparzer. Büchner also cast his new work in “a series of independent scenes of impression­ istic realism, each having its justification in itself, and only secondarily as a component part of the action.” Here the guillotine is the same unifying symbol that the wagon was later to become in Brecht’s Mother Courage. Benn’s chapter on Danton’s Death is, therefore, impressive, for it seizes the immediacy of Büchner’s dramaturgy while never overloading it with the philosophical encumbrances burdening his earlier...