424
PARTISAN REVIEW
these plays out of what we might call their' 'local" status, their pos–
sible existence as case histories .
For however specific the milieus of his characters may be, how–
ever identifiable they are according to our typologies of social organi–
zation, dramatically they exist as deputies (Kroetz's own word for
them) for all of us. They have particularly grave afflictions and employ
their own blind means of combatting them, but they stand the way
we do-the articulate, readers, writers, audiences-in the face of the
chasm between language and truth, self-awareness and fate, closer
to the extreme edge of course but not constituting a different species.
They speak, or struggle to speak, for us all.
Still, the judgment I have just offered is essentially an esthetic
one, and the theater is notoriously a place where esthetic reality has
a hard time making itself known. Our compulsion to construct moral
hierarchies among human beings has been given particular encourage–
ment in the theater-heroes and villains, the absolved and the con–
demned; it is one of the subtle bourgeois conventions of the stage at
which Chekhov, as he tells us, used to "swear fiercely. " And though
the phenomenon is scarcely confined
to
the theater, the medium is
especially disposed toward the corruption of a "virtue" such as pity
into a sense of superiority or, at best, into a mode of proper, civilized,
ineffectual response; you pity the sufferer, who remains in place for
your pity to exercise itself upon.
In the light of these things the crisis of conscience that overtook
Kroetz several years ago is far from surprising. A mistruster of the
theater, a man of strong leftward leanings, he had seen behind the
suffering of his characters an expropriation, a "stealing" of their
language, as he called it. He had seen politically, in other words, and
because, as he thought, "my pieces keep producing primarily apolit–
ical pity," he took certain steps to try to correct that. In 1973 he
joined the West German Communist Party, and though he has
claimed that he has experienced no pressure, that he has been en–
couraged to write in the "same way as before," the fact is that his
writing has changed drastically.
The first indication of this was his having written (a few months
before his formal entrance into the Party, but when he was well along
toward the decision) an unabashedly' 'agitprop" work called
Munch–
ner Kindt,
a play about the housing situation in Munich and the
