German Theatre in the Late 1990s
Moray McGowan visits Legoland and Golgotha, Death Valley Junction and The Dust of Brandenburg in a subjective sketchbook of new German drama.

The German theatrical landscape, despite the cuts of the 1990s and sustained controversies about the purposes of state-funded culture, remains highly subsidised and densely planted with public theatres and ensembles, whatever professional Jeremiahs (typically, directors defending their subsidies) might say. Coverage in the quality press and the three main theatre monthlies, Theater heute, Die deutsche Bühne and Theater der Zeit (with further journals specialising in Austrian and Swiss theatre), remains extensive. The theatres and their directors, eager to catch the critics’ eye, are hungry for premieres, so most of the 350 or so new German plays listed in the annual Dramenlexikon get produced at least once, though too often only once in the case of less well-known writers.

Thus a brief article on German drama of the last couple of years, faced with some 700 plays, can only sketch some themes and forms, and point to some lesser known but distinctive playwrights and works. Space constraints mean several major names must go unconsidered, as do works already translated into English. All plays undated here are from 1998-2000; English translations are mine.

Many established dramatists lost ground in the 1990s. Changed realities and expectations after unification were interpreted by some critics as ‘the end of post-war literature’ (Frank Schirrmacher) and its moral stances towards the past. Perhaps for this reason, perhaps because of developments towards ‘post-dramatic’ theatre (Hans-Thies Lehmann), plays offering historical models and strongly argued political positions became less common in the 1990s. Among the older generation, Tankred Dorst remains an unusually prolific and quietly successful exception to this. His Große Szene am Fluß (Grand Scene on the River; Suhrkamp) is an ambitious fable weaving East-West German tensions and images of the Balkan and other wars into a serious and convincing moral drama. Rolf Hochhuth in contrast has struggled since his brief return to the public eye with Wessis in Weimar (Rowohlt) in 1992. Hitlers Dr Faust (Rowohlt) traces the career of Hermann Oberth, the rocket scientist who inspired Wernher von Braun. The cloth-eared dialogue obsessively trumpets the would-be dialectic point that Hitler’s anti-semitism saved the world by driving out Germany’s best scientists. Unsurprisingly, younger dramatists, and indeed audiences, are sceptical about this kind of ‘thesis play’.

Christoph Hein, whose Ritter der Tafelrunde (Knights of the Round Table; Aufbau) was the most famous play of the Wende, has lately seemed to be repeating himself. In Acht und Bann (Banished; Aufbau), for example, returns to the Round Table, ten years after its demise, for a comic parable of the toppled re-establishing themselves under new political identities. Volker Braun, too, though awarded the Büchner Prize in 2000, found it difficult to sustain his pre-1989 presence. His unfashionable return to a political parable from antiquity in Limes. Mark Aurel (Boundary wall. Marcus Aurelius; henschel) explores the ossification of a state defending its borders against incursors whilst succumbing to chaos and corruption within, governed by an elite shorn of ideals.

While historical models may be rare among younger generations of dramatists, historical references are not; German history is too dominant, indeed too crushing a force in the contemporary imagination. The treatment may be conventionally chronological as in Michael Wildenhain’s Der deutsche Zwilling (The German Twin; henschel): Germany from the 1940s to the 1990s as family saga. Others though follow Heiner Müller and Braun in a more complex representation of the past’s interpenetration with the present. Lothar Trolle’s novemberszenen (November Scenes; henschel) draws on Alfred Döblin’s novel of the November 1918 revolution and poetically layers the immediate and remembered, real and imagined. Dreamlike scenes project figures from 1918 into contemporary Berlin, and a monologue by Rosa Luxembourg contrasts her negative reality with her longings for harmony and community. Trolle’s plays are demanding and often diffuse; but their awareness of drama’s possibilities beyond the reproduction of social experience makes them highly rewarding.

Despite the title’s echo of Prussian history, Braun’s Der Staub von Brandenburg (The Dust of Brandenburg; henschel) has a different focus, being one among the many post-Wende plays about chronic unemployment and the loss of human dignity, particularly, of course, in the East. Unemployed and robbed of hope, Braun’s heroine transforms a drunken accident into a brave confrontation with a skinhead gang. Socially rejected since the economic collapse of the GDR, she now becomes a celebrity, until, with the revelation of the truth, public interest vanishes as rapidly as it had arisen, and her brief attempt to steer her destiny founders. Thematically related, but stylistically more reminiscent of the grotesque logic of Dürrenmatt, is Heiko Buhr’s Ausstand (Stoppage; Suhrkamp), winner in 1999 of the Heinz-Dürr prize, currently the best-funded award for new drama. A redundant bookkeeper leads a gang of his fellow unemployed in a campaign of revenge. Beyond its narrow meaning of ‘strike’, the German title implies wider social dysfunctionality: robbing loyal citizens of work and respect generates anarchy and disorder.

These plays are part of a wider pattern of response to the post-unification experience of social anomie that has affected East Germany especially intensely, bringing family breakdown, drug abuse, racism and Neo-Nazi violence in their wake. This is real and relevant to contemporary life, yet dramas which address it need to do more than recycle Edward Bond’s now nearly forty-year-old Saved. Too many rely on one-dimensional realist language and are often only distinguishable by their degree of plot ingenuity or dramatic economy. One recent title exemplifies the genre: Dirk Dobbrow’s Legoland (Suhrkamp), whose tersely unsentimental tone captures the diminished lives of the disaffected young who meet on the roof of a grim East German tower block.

With Deutsche Sprache, schwere Sprache (Difficult Language, German; Suhrkamp), Einar Schleef has completed a trilogy of snapshots from the GDR provinces, brilliant comic vehicles for a remarkable trio of actresses at the Schwerin theatre. Totentrompeten (Death’s Trumpets; Suhrkamp 1995) - the title referring to poisonous mushrooms but also to the doomed GDR - showed three cantankerous old women forced into companionship; Drei Alte tanzen Tango (Three Old Ladies Dance the Tango; Suhrkamp 1997) observed them during its collapse. The third play brings Schleef’s trio into the post-Wende ex-GDR.

In Oliver Bukowski’s grim farces about the entrepreneurial dreams of the small-town and rural losers from unification, his characters struggle to mount the bandwagon but are failures to the last. Gäste (Guests; Kiepenheuer), though labelled ‘tragedy’ and ending, in fact, in black tragicomedy, is peopled by all the figures and plot devices of the comic ‘Volksstück’. A hotelier couple dream of success amidst a community desperately hoping for survival, but the villagers’ vulgarity and grotesque eagerness sabotage every attempt at sophistication. Thus the first and only guest is greeted, Hawaiian style, with garlands of blutwurst. Overall, this is one of the most entertaining of an otherwise samey genre of comedies of small businesses foundering in the bleak post-unification climate in the East. Like Bukowski, Christian Martin roots post-unification themes in a specific geographical and linguistic region. In Formel Einzz (Formula Wunn; henschel), described as ‘ein stück volk’, would-be racing driver Franz’s dreams are crushed like his mutilated face and he returns to the Vogtland, a region experiencing all unification’s problems but none of its benefits.

Throughout the 1990s, German dramatists struggled for forms in which to address Neo-Nazism and racist violence. Most settle for well-meaning but simplistic moral stances and social or psychological realism. Moreover, some of the noteworthy exceptions seem highly problematic in other respects. Klaus Chatten posits links between fascism, gay male sado-masochism and the violence of the state, in a play both more subtle and more nightmarish than its title suggests: Deutschland ruft. Ein pornographisches Märchen von Gut und Böse (Germany calls. A pornographic fairytale of Good and Evil; Kiepenheuer). Chatten insists (following Adorno?) that any engagement with fascism must be revolting and indigestible, since any work whose aesthetic makes the representation of fascism pleasurable, would, whatever its superficial moral stance, betray the victims. But the play neither explains nor challenges its own apparent reduction of Nazism to sado-masochistic rituals.

Elfriede Jelinek’s Sportstück (Sport play; Rowohlt) takes sport as both allegory and concrete expression of the human propensity for fascism. Its structure highlights the tension between the body as reified object and the body as part of a choral collective, both recurrent elements in contemporary drama. In Das Lebewohl (The Farewell; Berlin), part of Jelinek’s trilogy of rapid responses to the Jörg Haider phenomenon, the intensification of Haider’s own verbal manner into an artificial language, half-familiar, half-alien, generates a creepily disturbing banality.

Since unification, Germany as a whole has become much more aware of ‘Turbokapitalismus’, the remorseless return of free-market values. Urs Widmers Top Dogs (Verlag der Autoren), extracting poetic and dramatic energies from the realities and the vocabularies of downsizing and retraining, was the 1997 Mülheim festival prizewinner. The theme enters its next stage with Simone Schneider’s Springerin (Stand-in/Locum; Kiepenheuer), whose very title evokes the rootlessness of the dot.com age: the individual as chessboard knight and grasshopper, never gathering moss, let alone roots. Five women ride the Zeitgeist between filofax, cocaine and mobile phone, brood about start-ups, juggle career, love and psychic meltdown. Each carries the same red, white and blue striped plastic holdall as an emblem of migrancy. Schneider’s edgy language captures contemporary argot and mood without simply reproducing them, and when Susann, despairing of the mobile phone on which she hopelessly awaits her dead lover’s call, throws it into the sea, a moment of elegiac sadness is extracted from that scorned and banal contemporary object.

The performed and mediated nature of postmodern experience was given comic and, under its veneer of superficiality, surprisingly profound treatment in Rainald Goetz’s Jeff Koons (Suhrkamp), which won the Mülheim prize in 2000. Loss of reality in a media-saturated world shapes the themes and forms of Albert Ostermaier’s work too. His stage language blends contemporary argot with expressionism and Brechtian muscularity. Radio Noir (Suhrkamp) is a darkly aggressive aural experiment, The Making of B.- Movie (Suhrkamp) an accomplished satire of the culture industry. Heartcore (Suhrkamp) dramatises poetic snapshots of an edgy, urban world and the haunted landscapes of the American West. Death Valley Junction (Suhrkamp) is a tightly structured composition, inspired by the reality and dream landscapes of Death Valley and drawing motifs and quotations from Dante’s Inferno. Desmond, a mobile-phone-wielding everyman, descends into the ever more pitiless depths of Death Valley, never knowing the real from the nightmare. Life may well be a performance; but yours or someone else’s?

There are many other identifiable thematic landmarks in recent German drama, such as the Balkan conflict, refugee, minority and German-Jewish experience, or the retrospective re-examination of West German terrorism, presented as itself a family farce in Rinderwahnsinn (Mad Cow; Merlin), by the witty and prolific John von Düffel.

One remarkably distinctive dramatist to have emerged since the late 1990s is Werner Fritsch. The brutal physicality of peasant experience (his roots are in the rural Oberpfalz) is shot through with baroque melancholy, quasi-liturgical acts of resistance to the drift of language towards media-shaped banality. His alliterations and other literary effects seem mannered on the page, but on spoken delivery gain rhythmic force and convey dark visions of a brutalised world. Steinbruch (Quarry; Suhrkamp), written 1982 but only recently premiered, is the monologue of a Bundeswehr soldier, crazed by the violence of his calling. Aller Seelen (All Souls; Suhrkamp) invokes the betrayal of a group of partisans on the Slovenian border in 1943, their concentration camp life in 1944 and their bloody revenge in 1945. But in its ritual rhythms and nightmare versions of pastoral, in which corn stooks become dancing bridal pairs and then concentration camp inmates, the play breaks radically with the documentary and moralising tenor of so much post-war drama about Nazism. In Golgatha (Suhrkamp) a pastor who has brutally murdered his wife is imprisoned alongside two hardened criminals like Christ between the two thieves, and haunted simultaneously by his guilt and sense of saintliness. The play operates extensively with darkness, music and voices placed quadrophonically round the audience: an aural and visual experiment more than a rational treatment. Fritsch’s remarkable plays are explorations of the monstrous in the human, theatre not simply deploying religious images but theatre as a form of prayer, the last refuge of a metaphysics with the capacity to open the audience to ethical and ontological profundities. Thus his work moves between the shockingly, brutally bloody and pornographic and the profoundly spiritual. It is obscene, political and sacred all in one.

Moray McGowan is Professor of German at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland, and currently completing a book on German theatre and drama of the 1990s.