BERLIN LETTER
333
and if it is seasoned, perhaps, with more acute wit and more daring
metaphors.
Metropolitan man, says a modem myth, is rootless. But the
man who almost perished with his city, and who then laboriously
but successfuly survived with it, is clearly not rootless. The Berliner
is connected with his city because he derives a personal importance
and distinction from his share in its fate and troubles and also, of
course, from his part in its resurrection from rubble and ruins. The
fact that Berlin is not a city in the usual amorphous sense of the
word, but a city-state with well-defined frontiers and its own gov–
ernment consolidates this sense of belonging. There is really only
one class, the mobile class of the writers, which (with some praise–
worthy exceptions such as Brecht and Benn, both dead now) has
secretly but conspicuously decamped from Berlin-though in the
last few weeks three important writers-Gunter Grass, Max Frisch,
and Ingeborg Bachmann-have decided to move to Berlin. Another
of the few promising writers loyal to Berlin is Wolfdietrich
Schnurre, the poet and satirist whose surrealistically distorted
"chronicle,"
The Fate of Our City,
was published this fall.
So,
with cultural life here essentially devoid of local literary
production, the center of gravity has shifted to the theater and to
music. Here, too, many of the active impulses seem to be connected
with a kind of sublimated instinct of self-preservation: one wants
to maintain a tradition which has become legendary, the tradition
of the Mad, Golden Twenties that are constantly used as a spur
and held up as a standard of value. To stop emulating the twenties
would mean artistic surrender. Today it goes without saying that
the high level of achievement of those hectic and creatively ex–
plosive years is reached by only a fraction: no more than two or
three per cent in the literary field, but possibly some thirty per
cent in the theater. Which is a great deal, for according to the
participants, now scattered all over the globe, such an abundance
of exciting theater has never again been achieved anywhere. Some
of the mainstays of those days have returned: Fritz Kortner-whose
memoirs, set in Vienna, Berlin, and New York, have just been
published-staged a brilliant production of
The Robbers
which
turned out to be a stirring analysis of evil, for the Schiller bicen–
tennial. And Elisabeth Bergner, directed by Jerome Kilty in
his
