LETTER FROM GERMANY
381
age
in the Soviet Sector of Berlin at a time, during the Blockade, when
most West-Berliners hesitated to patronize East-Berlin establishments;
yet the audience was mainly middle-class and from the Western Sectors.
The "proletariat" of East Berlin, if it patronizes the theater at all, still
prefers, it seems, the corny productions of
The Dollar Princess
or of
Der Zigeunerbaron
for which Puhlmann's theater in a northern indus–
trial suburb is famous, and has not yet acquired a taste for the "Lum–
penproletariat" romanticism of, say, Brecht's
Dreigroschenoper.
The survival of Brecht's dramatic style, which has undergone but
minor changes in the past twenty years, is indeed symptomatic of the
crisis of the entire German literary and artistic avantgarde. Whether
in literature,
in
painting or in music, Germany seems to have emerged
from the Third Reich, much as the survivors emerged, according to
David Rousset, from the concentration camps, with exactly the same
ideas as before. Germany has thus snapped right back, in the arts, to
where it stood in 1933. A few recent trends in French painting have
however influenced the work of some younger German artists in Berlin
and Munich. Paul Strecker, for instance, lived in Paris until 1944 and
belonged there to the same group as Eugene Berman, Christian Berard
and Pavel Tchelitcheff; he now lives in Berlin and designs scenery and
costumes, for theatrical productions,
in
a manner that reveals an aware–
ness of Berard's work of recent years. The drawings and painting of
Heinz Troeckes and Mac Zimmermann, two of the new Berlin "Sur–
realist group," similarly add, to elements derived from Klee, Max
Ernst and the earlier work of Chirico, some newer ideas, perhaps derived
only from photographs, which suggest an acquaintance with recent
works of Matta or Brauner.
The most important German musical production since 1945 has
probably been that of
Abraxas,
a ballet by Werner Egk on a Faust
theme derived from Heinrich Heine's note-books. Originally produced in
the summer of 1948 in Munich, where it was subsequently banned by
the clerical Bavarian government as indecent on account of its infernal
Black Mass or Sabbath scene,
Abraxas
was then produced again, last
fall, in more liberal Western Berlin, where it was very successful. I
happened to attend both first nights. In Munich, the costumes and
scenery were crudely and derivatively modern, full of arty reminiscences
of Velasquez, of Cocteau's
La Belle et la Bete
and of Breughel's
Battle of
Lent and of Mardi Gras
scattered throughout the various scenes. In
Berlin, costumes, sets and production were frankly old-fashioned, almost
in the style of a turn-of-the century production of
Samson and Delilah .
The choreography, whether in Munich or in Berlin, was lamentable:
