BERLIN LETTER
117
this discovery. Unless I misunderstand Mr. Gore Vidal and his
witty philippic against "too much love" and "democracy, which
is too much with us," in last fall's issue of
Partisan Review,
his
prescription for American drama is less love and more blows, truth
rather than wishful thinking. In our countries, the collapse of
ideologies-in themselves very inadequate substitutes for opinion–
has made people afraid to judge. One can write novels, especially
vf the non-naturalistic variety, without coming to a fundamental
decision about man, but if you put
him
on stage as an active
character, you must know about him and judge him. A dread of
such judgments seems to prevail in democratic as well as in post–
totalitarian society. In the first, you dare, at most, to put yourself
above your neighbor financially, but not in intelligence and judg–
ment; in the second, the experience of man's being enmeshed in
the wheels of an evil state machinery makes it difficult to come to
a decision about human nature.
But drama is a judgment of man, and the German drama in
particular is still governed by Schiller's dictum that the stage is
"a moral institution." In this sense, the obscene and blasphemous
Jean Genet is not only a true dramatist but a true moralist, albeit
an infernally black one. He is not playing the coy parlor game of
epater les bourgeois;
he condemns man with the wrath of a Puritan
preacher of perdition. Man is evil, and his so-called morality, along
with its derivative institutions-church, justice, state, army-is a
mere pretext for satisfying his base and sadistic lusts; the whole
world is a whorehouse. Incidentally, Genet is also a strange fellow
traveler of Puritanism in his desire to unmask the solemn symbols
by which man seeks to prove the sanctity of church, law, and state
to himself.
It is amazing that Germany, after Nazism and war, has
brought forth no dramatist who wants to show us that man is evil.
A
few well-meaning plays have been written about this period, but
their characters seem rather like puppets. Not one of the resist–
ance plays completely avoids the danger of degenerating into a
political crime thriller along the old cops-and-robbers line. At last,
however, an extraordinary war film has been brought off. Bern–
hard Wicki, known from Kautner's
The Last Bridge,
has, in his
debut as a director, used a cast of young amateurs. His film,
The
