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motive (a technique very similar to Barbara Garson's in "MacBird").
It
is not so much a cherished image which is violated as history itself.
Since Hochhuth's purpose
is
moral, didactic, it seems only fair to
judge him on his own precepts. One
has
the right to ask whether it is
morally permissible for him to make any use he chooses of history, even
if one grants the nobleness of his purpose.
It is unfortunate that both Goebbels and Stalin subscribed
to
Hochhuth's theory of Churchill's guilt in the Sikorski Mfair. Could
this explain Hochhuth's reluctance to be confronted with German
sources, his boast that he used only Allied material? Why all the fuss?
Why didn't he use German sources as well?
And does not a far deeper error lie at the base of Hochhuth's
thinking? In attributing historical events exclusively to individuals, he
ignores the totality of those events, the complicated processes which led
up to them. This "subjectivizing" of history, while conceivably fruitful
for the dramatic process, is at best not very good history.
In an open letter to Rolf Hochhuth, Theodor Adorno wrote: "Every–
where events are personalized, anonymous connections that are no longer
comprehensible to the theoretically untrained mind and whose hellish
coldness are no longer endurable to the anxiety-ridden mind, are chalked
up to individuals, in order to rescue what one can of spontaneous action.
The realistic theater which you call for, and the absurd, may actually,
as seems to be the case with yourself, converge. But
in
order for this
to be successful, it takes a Guernica painting or Schonberg'S "Dber–
lebenden von Warschau" (Survivors of Warsaw). No traditional drama–
tic form based on actors with leading roles can do the job. The absurdity
of the Real presses in upon the form, shattering the realistic fac;ade."
Had Hochhuth, despite all theoretical objections, succeeded in
writing a gripping drama, one might be obliged to say, the more power
to him. Fortunately (unfortunately?) this is not the case.
For the play itself, Hochhuth obviously needed something concrete
on which to hang his treatise. But not only was his choice poor this
time, his dramatic talents failed him as well, and not the least of his
failures was a failure of language.
Seen in a broader light, the failure of
Soldaten,
finally, has
brought the crisis, latent in documentary theater from the start, to a
head. Even of Peter Weiss, its most successful exponent, it must be
said that he succeeds in spite of, rather
than
because of, the form. But
Soldaten
makes the point with finality: this is a dead-end road.
Betty Falkenberg
