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URSULA BRUMM
Ernst Barlach are performed, but then they are virtually ancients.
The one exception is Brecht, still almost contemporary and played
in East Berlin, by his Berlin Ensemble, in exemplary, authentic
productions, still based in part on Brecht's originals. After his
death, the Berlin Ensemble staged his satire,
The R esistable Rise of
Arturo
Ui,-Ui being a blend of Hitler and AI Capone-in dis–
turbingly impressive fashion. Other German-speaking exceptions
are the Swiss writers, Duerrenmatt and Max Frisch, but neither
East nor West Germany has provided the many promoters
with a new dramatist. And this is a country that is so fond of the
theater and so full of theaters, in a country whose every city has
one or more publicly subsidized stages virtually crying out for plays!
True, we are not living in a heyday of German literature, but
several respectable novels and volumes of poetry have been pub–
lished since the war-and yet, there is no play that is worth dis–
cussing except
Outside the Door
by Wolfgang Borchert who died,
still young, in 1947. The fact is that Germany not only has no good
playwrights, but unlike America, she has not even effective ones.
What are the reasons? Probably not only the psychological
passivity and inhibitedness of modem man-which Beckett, lonesco,
and Adamov have shown to be by no means lacking in dramatic
material. Instinctive dramatic talents (Brecht was the last example)
rarely bother with subtle psychological insights, and even more
rarely with the latest discoveries of academic psychology. Great
playwrights have gotten along with run-of-the-mill psychology,
while ersatz playwrights mull over psychoanalytical case histories.
Here I would like to introduce a very simple idea into the
discussion of modem drama, or the lack of it: that the elementary
endowment of a dramatist must contain some indispensable dose
of opinion, opinion about the nature of man, his destiny, and his
fate. All of this sounds very humdrum, but it includes the courage
to make fundamental choices of principle: is man strong or weak,
free or predestined, good, bad, or both? Sophocles believed that
man was strong-"Nothing is mightier than man"; and
hybris,
the
sin of Greek heroes, is an offense of strength. Brecht thought of
man as "not smart enough for this life"-to him, man is weak, a
poor wretch; when he is on top, he kicks others; when he is down,
he gets kicked. Beckett thinks that man is done for, and dramatizes
