RICHARD WILBUR
l'Homme .. . je suis tout homme et tout l'Homme, je suis Ie Siecle,
comme n'importe qui." With Frantz, we are all guilty from the opening
of the play of some undetermined crime, and find out only as the play
progresses and our past, the past of the century, accumulates on the
stage, just what it is of which we are guilty. When the play ends we
may
be
able to limit our own personal involvement in its guilt, but we
will not be able to exclude it; part of us goes with Frantz to his final
assertion of his guilt through self-destruction.
Les Sequestres d'Altona
is set in present-day Germany. The story,
to abbreviate (and necessarily mutilate) is that of a torturer who is
only now coming face to face with his guilt. Frantz, to hide from
his
past, has secluded himself on the family estate since war's end, seeing
no one, and living in a world of fantasy he has created himself. In this
fantasy world he absolves his own crimes by believing that the con–
quering Allies are perpetrating an even more horrendous crime: "the
systematic extermination of the German people." By a sort of moral
relativism, the Germans, in the face of this coming crime, are "innocent
before the enemy." Frantz denies that the German leaders alone should
be considered responsible for the Nazi crimes; for the people to deny
their leaders would be to admit the guilt did exist. Frantz denies the
guilt by hypothesizing the relatively greater guilt of the conquerors
(read: the Moslems) against which all that the G ermans (or: the
French in Algeria) had previously done would seem to have been in
the interest of legitimate self-defense. In the end, with the destruction
of his fantasy, Frantz finds that Germany in truth prospers and that
his crimes are unabsolved. He then realizes that, even though all he had
done in a futile search for personal freedom of action had been in the
illusory role of the man of power in which his father had created him,
still he has in his life committed one act for which the individual himself
must bear responsibility without possible redemption: the destruction of
the human existence of another through torture--"changing a man into
vermin
while he's still living."
This deliberate destruction of the human will of another is the one
action in the Sartrian ethic from which the individual cannot redeem
himself. Under any other circumstances the individual, once he accepts
the truth of his past, is able to assert his individual freedom and re–
create himself and his life. Thus, the murders of Orestes in
Les Mouches
are actions for which there is no meaning other than that which Orestes
himself gives to them. They are crimes if he chooses to feel guilt for
them; they are not crimes if he recognizes them as his past but refuses
