Brecht-Dialog 1968: Politik auf dem Theater ed. by Werner Hecht (review)

1970 BOOK REVIEWS 229 Homographs present a problem, but not an insurmountable one. The concordance needs to be listed, proofread, edited, and reprinted in any event. Why then not simply rearrange or omit homographs during this post-editing phase? Thus "tin can" could be left in and "He can?" edited out. Instead, Reaver seems to have left out all uses of "can" and, inexplicably, included uses of "cannot." If the Q'Neill Concordance were the first computerized one ever produced, it might be forgiven most of its errors of ignorance. But consider that a half-dozen such works have appeared in the literary field alone and that much information on the techniques of concordance-making has appeared in the Newsletter of the Institute for Computer Research in the Humanities of New York University, in the journal, Computers and the Humanities~ and in Robert Jay Glickman and Gerrit Joseph Staalman, Manual for the Printing of Literary Texts by Computer (Toronto, 1966). And what of the price, $87.50 for three volumes of about 615 pages each? The recent Cornell concordance to Byron's Don Juan (one volume, 981 pages) is priced at $12.50. Why should the O'Neill Concordance cost seven times as much when it is, at best, only three times as large? Considering the expense ()f human effort and computer usage, why should anyone produce a concordance without including all of the plays, and if there is no good edition available, why produce a concordance at all? Yet, much of the effort that has gone into this work consisted of getting the plays onto punched cards. These could still. be augmented by the remainder of the plays, and all could be carefully proofread and corrected (capitalization codes could even be added, which would allow for upper and lower case printout). Such a corpus could be the base for a good edition of the plays and then of a sophisticated concordance. . But alas, An O'Neill Concordance is now enshrined in boards. The boards should be of pine. ROBERT S. WACHAL University of Iowa BRECHT-DIALOG 1968: POLITIK AUF DEM THEATER, ed. by Werner Hecht. Henschelverlag, East Berlin, 1968. 338 pp. $2.25. In celebration of the seventieth anniversary of Brecht's birth, a large and genuinely international Symposium was held in 1968 in East Berlin. Spread over one week, the Symposium included: eight productions of Brecht .plays. a lecture by Manfred Wekwerth and one by Werner Mittenzwei, and some six separate panel discussions. The book, Brecht-Dialog 1968 is basically, with some (perhaps not enough) editing, a transcript of the Symposium: proceedings. Werner Mittenzwei's lecture is a panegyric. In it, he says nothing that he has not said in print several times before. This approach was initially justifiable perhaps as the lecture was delivered to a fairly general audience. It is considerably less justified, however, in a printed version. The lecture of Manfred Wekwerth suffers in a similar way. The lecture is, as he himself admits (p. 45) far too long. Surely Hecht could have cut out almost two-thirds of the text for the printed version. In signal contrast to the above, several of the panel discussions have been edited with a splendid sense of the essential and the theatrical. At least three of the six discussions will be of enormous interest to readers of Modern Drama. Unfortunately, for those with only minimal expertise in German in general and Brecht studies in particular much of the sparJ<.le of the dialogue can all too easily be missed. 230 MODERN DRAMA September Often one must know the exact meaning of and history of the Eastern European critical vocabulary. Further, one should be as aware as possible of the personal friction that exists between (to give but two examples), Manfred Wekwerth (now Chief Director at the Berliner Ensemble) and Benno Besson (formerly connected with the Ensemble and now East Germany's most famous independent director), and the polite but strained relationship of Helene Weigel with the great (and often independent) East German critic, Ernst Schumacher. The confrontations (personal and literary) often make for highly entertaining and enlightening theater . Let me give some examples. Those familiar with the diatribes that were directed against Brecht and other Formalist heretics in the last year's of the Stalin period, will be astonished perhaps to discover that Formalism has been rechristened, goes now by the name of "Realism," and is now fully accepted. Probably because an edition of Meyerhold's work (with a scathing attack on the period of Stalinist aesthetics) was published in the Soviet Union in 1967, we find Manfred Wekwerth (p. 163) recommending the reading of Meyerhold, perhaps the greatest exponent ever of Formalism in the theater. Without a murmur, the East German audience accepts a. theater of archetypes , clowns, cabotinage, and athletes as "realistic theater." This interpretation of the much reviled term, "Realism," signifies for the cognoscenti that a former heresy has now become accepted dogma. Lest one should then imagine, however, that this change in East German vocabulary heralds a general loosening up of aesthetic/political control, it should also be noted that contributors to the same panel discussion overtly attack both the Living Theatre and the work of Grotowski. Quite astonishing in fact is an attack on the Living Theatre that is, at one and the same time, an attack on "demagoguery in the Capitalist countries." (p. 173) Needless to say, such an evaluation of the courageous and highly innovative work of the Living Theatre hardly seems fair. As important as the "new" aesthetic credo explicated above, is the barely concealed hostility between some of the participants in the various panel discussions. At one point Ernest Schumacher horrifies the representatives of the Berliner Ensemble by suggesting that the theater (in East Germany and elsewhere) has suffered "braindeath" and is being kept "alive" artificially. He suggests (and there is ample basis for this contention in the early volumes of Brecht's Schriften zum Theater), that film and television have a far greater potential for changing human consciousness than the rather old-fashioned medium, the stage. At this (p. 104), Helene Weigel leaps up from her seat in the auditorium and vigorously attacks Schumacher. It is obvious from the interchange that Helene Weigel is concerned with clinging to a theater of the past, while Schumacher, very daringly, is willing to contemplate a world in which the theater is out-dated. Roughly the same kind of antithesis is revealed in the debates between Benno Besson and Manfred Wekwerth . Wekwerth sees himself asa representative (like Helen Weigel) of the Berliner Ensemble, as the guardian of the holy flame. Besson, with at least as much claim to direct apostolic succession as Wekwerth, cleverly, consistently, covertly and imaginatively pokes fun at the high priests of the Ensemble. It is in the marvelous subtext of such exchanges that the main value of Brecht-Dialog 1968 lies. Read with care~ the book provides a panoramic and often highly entertaining view of various approaches to the unsettling presence that Brecht has remained in the contemporary tlleater. JOHN FUEGI University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee ...