422
PARTISAN REVIEW
themselves against the use of the stage as a source of what they con–
sider debilitating illusion; and, most significant for their creative
morale and imaginative independence, they have been freed-by acts
of will as well as by chronology-from the previous era of devastated
German consciousness.
This group of writers, to whom only for the sake of a convenient
identity we might give the collective name of "new realists," consti–
tutes I
think
the most vigorous and in some ways innovative movement
in the theater since the renaissance of the British stage which was
carried out ftfteen or twenty years ago in the early plays of Osborne,
Pinter, and Arden. The more pertinent comparison, though, is to
the appearance in Paris in the early fillies of what we have come to
call-at the cost of as much confusion as the term new realists is likely
to cause-"absurd" drama, the revelatory, unexampled plays of
Beckett, Ionesco, and others. For what these young German play–
wrights have been doing, Kroetz most forcefully among them, is the
same kind of life-giving work as that of their antipodal predecessors
in France: the extrication of the theater from its own assumptions,
from received wisdom and settled notions of what drama is and may
do.
These writers make up, that is to say, an avant-garde, but one
which neither proclaims itself as one nor bears the obvious distin–
guishing marks of such an enterprise. There ought to be nothing
surprising in this; it is outsiders who usually give avant-gardes their
name . And in regard to the signs by which they will be known, it is
one of the grand subtleties of culture that the truly newest forms
generally owe their animating principles to achievements reached
in the past and often appear to us as old, although with a strange,
unaccountable light flickering over their surfaces, the light of some–
thing newly seen.
In the case of these new German playwrights the debt is to the
old and for the most part underground tradition of the
Volkstucke,
or "folk play," which was not, as
its
name suggests, a work of naive
authorship, rising from some memorializing or celebratory impulse
among simple people, but the highly conscious creation of sophisti–
cated writers for the theater. Its chief characteristics are that it con–
cerns itself with the lives of common people and that it is written
either in dialect or in one or another kind of colloquial language, in
l
