The German Genius

by Peter Watson

  Not everyone shared this tendency toward silence. In his verteidigung der wölf (defense of the wolves; 1957), Hans Magnus Enzensberger became both the natural successor to Brecht (who had died the year before) and the leader of a school which adapted Brecht’s conviction that a poem should be an “object for use” (Gebrauchsgegenstand). Enzensberger’s work is characterized by anger and aggression and urges greater political awareness among his readers, the very opposite of the aim of Benn and Celan.37

  A DEFORMED REALITY

  On the other side of the Iron Curtain, inside the GDR, the early environment for poetry seemed encouraging once it had shaken free of its much-derided “tractor verses” (“Boy meets tractor” is how Adorno satirized it), and when J. R. Becher, a poet of no mean talent, was made first minister of culture in 1949.38 But he was soon displaced and it was in any case to reckon without Brecht himself who lost little time producing a series of snapshots (“Der Rauch” [Smoke], “Der Radwechsel” [Changing the Wheel], and “Böser Morgen” [Bad Morning]), a succession of unpalatable truths about life in the East. After Brecht’s death in 1956, Günter Kunert did his best to fill the gap, taking aim at the bureaucracy and, in doing so, helping to provoke a younger generation of poets at what was by now the J. R. Becher Institute for Literature in Leipzig.39 Volker Braun was (and is) the best of this school, his finest work juxtaposing the intense personal discomforts unique to the GDR alongside the avowed utopian assertions of the state. He was joined by Sarah Kirsch and Wolf Biermann.40

  In theory at least, the East German bureaucracy encouraged these voices, especially so in Erik Honecker’s notorious “no taboos” speech delivered in 1971. But the inherent tension could not be disguised for long, and in 1976 Biermann was, as mentioned earlier, expelled. His expulsion was too much for many people, and Günter Kunert, Reiner Kunze, and Sarah Kirsch all followed him west.41

  After that, the only way was up. The liberalization known as glasnost, in the 1980s, played a part, but so too did the new generation of poets “born into” socialism, who had very little expectation of the GDR as a form of utopia. For writers such as Heinz Czechowksi, Ernst Moritz Arndt, and Rainer Erb it was simply a deformed reality, and they plucked up the courage to say so. Wolfgang Emmerich went so far as to claim that “a major legacy” of the GDR would be its lyric poetry. This recalls Anna Akhmatova’s claim that the “lyrical wealth” of Russia could not be destroyed by the Stalinists.

  East and West German poets were in any case drawing closer together in the 1980s, both turning away from socialism (known in the GDR as Abscheid nehmen, or “taking leave of a disappearing world”) and both showing the traditional German anxiety about the relentless march of technology. Enzensberger stood out here too in his long narrative poem, “Der Untergang der Titanic” (The Sinking of the Titanic; 1978). Joachim Kaiser observed that in fact German literature had no need of reunification: “Its profound communality was never broken…only endangered.”42

  Amid the explosion of verse that erupted during and after the euphoria of the Wende of 1989 (a turning point that Peter Schneider thought was “intellectually comparable” to 1945), Volker Braun’s “Nachruf” (Obituary) stood out as a paradigm of the 1990s, mourning the dead utopian dreams of the GDR but, more than that, the lives who suffered for those ideals. “Obituary” formed a kind of brackets with “Inventory.”

  Reunification also saw the emergence of younger poets, many living in Berlin, such as Barbara Köhler and Durs Grünbein, whose Grauzone morgens (Grayzone in the Morning; 1988), was rapturously received, though Porzellan: Poem vom Untergang meiner Stadt (Porcelain: Poem on the Death of My City; 2005), about the firebombing of Dresden, received more mixed reviews. 43

  Bearing in mind where we started this chapter—with the Mitscherliches’ conclusions—this brief survey of postwar literature confirms that the realm of mourning has now been explored by German authors. Not necessarily in a way that will please everyone, but if outsiders are ever to understand modern Germans, it is to their imaginative writers that we must first turn. Modern German literature goes far beyond “elegant entertainment.”

  THEATER AS CULTURE, NOT ENTERTAINMENT

  In the realm of theater—to include opera and dance—the names of Brecht, Piscator, Reinhardt, Laban, and Jooss led the world up to and across World War II. Immediately after the war, Piscator interested himself in a new form of theater that was to resonate across Europe, especially in Britain in, for example, the works of David Hare. Notable examples of this “documentary theater” were Rolf Hochhuth’s Der Stellvertreter (The Deputy; 1963), which tackled the unfortunate role of Pope Pius XII in doing next to nothing to stop the Holocaust, and Die Juristen (The Lawyers; 1979), which heaped such odium on Hans Filbinger, the prime minister of Baden-Württemberg, that he was forced to resign.

  Whereas Piscator had been the equal of Brecht in the Weimar years and was more successful than him in the United States, in Germany it was Brecht who developed a clear edge. As both a playwright and director of the Berliner Ensemble from 1949 until his death in 1956, Brecht’s innovative stagecraft was so powerful as to be felt right across Europe. His often austere sets distilled the drama, reinforced by his concept of Verfremdung (alienation), an attempt to make the familiar unfamiliar, so audiences experienced alienation, and were not simply passive onlookers.

  But Brecht’s was by no means the only tradition. The most notable alternative was the theater of “ordinary people.” Known as the Volksstück (“people’s play,” following Lessing), it concentrated on postwar German working-class life, the main authors being Martin Sperr (1944–2002), Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1945–82), and Botho Strauss (b. 1944).44 Nor can we ignore the tradition of Büchner and Wedekind, of Max Reinhardt and Fritz Lang—experimentation and spectacle of a type that is almost unthinkable outside Germany.45 Outstanding among these plays are Peter Weiss’s overwhelming drama located in a lunatic asylum but depicting events of the French Revolution, Die Verfolgung und Ermordung Jean Paul Marats durch die Schauspielgruppe des Hospizes zu Charenton unter Anleitung des Herrn de Sade (The Persecution and Assassination of Jean Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade, usually known simply as Marat/Sade; 1964). The genre survives in Heiner Müller’s seven-and-a-half hour Hamlet-Maschine, produced at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin in 1990.

  Since then, German-language theater has boasted two innovative playwrights difficult to categorize other than to say that they exhibit late Expressionist tendencies and other modernist influences, first identified by the critics Marcel Reich-Ranicki and Helmut Heissenbüttel. The Swiss Friedrich Dürrenmatt (1921–90) is best known for Der Besuch alten Dame (translated as The Visit; 1955), which Michael Patterson and Michael Huxley say is the most widely performed postwar drama in Germany. The main character is a wealthy woman, much face-lifted, who visits her hometown to seek revenge on the boy—now an old man—who had seduced her and denied he was the father of her child, when they were both young.

  Since Dürrenmatt’s death in 1990, his mantle has been taken over by Peter Handke. He had already made his mark in the 1960s with the Sprechstücke (speak-ins) Publikumsbeschimpfung (Offending the Audience) and Selbstbezichtigung (Self-Accusation), which presented an empty stage in plays without apparent plot, characterization, or (at times) dialogue. Handke’s reservations about language link German theater to philosophy—Wittgenstein, for example—and find final form (thus far) in his play Die Stunde da wir nichts von einander wußten (The Hour We Knew Nothing of Each Other; 1992). The play is set in a town square in which, for one hour and forty-five minutes, two dozen actors playing close to 400 roles pass across the space, but nobody speaks.46 The director Peter Stein has also been creating waves.

  Just as Dürrenmatt’s The Visit is the most-performed German play since World War II, so Kurt Jooss’s Der grüne Tisch (The Green Table) is the most-performed dance-drama, apparently “staged by more dance companies than any other
work in the modern repertoire.”47 Jooss died in 1979 and since then his pupil Pina Bausch (1940–2009) developed what she and others call Tanztheater. Building on the tradition of Rudolf Laban (1879–1958) in Munich, John Cranko (1927–73) in Stuttgart, and Mary Wigman (1883–1973) in Berlin, it is a mixture of narrative, expressionism, and sheer sensuality.48 Her breakthrough came in 1971 with a commission from the Wuppertal Theater for Aktionen für Tänzer (Actions for Dancers), followed by a series of works that quickly became modern classics, the best being Café Müller, in which the chairs that virtually fill the stage are moved around at breakneck speed: only very fit, highly coordinated dancers could perform this piece without catastrophe.

  Which underlines the fact that, again as Patterson and Huxley point out, theater by and large represents “culture” rather than “entertainment” in Germany. There is no equivalent to “show-business” in the German language, and there is no equivalent of Broadway in German theater, though there are some theaters—Boulevardtheater—that specialize in comedies. In Germany theater audiences by and large expect a range of serious high-culture plays reflecting the European heritage. This requires subsidies that far outweigh those available elsewhere. The figures provided by Patterson and Huxley show that state and municipal subsidies to German theaters at the turn of the twenty-first century stood at roughly seven times the amount of public funding the United States provides for all the arts, while the Berlin Opera House alone receives almost as much as the British Arts Council spends on all the theaters it supports. German theaters tend to stand in their own grounds and the interiors are more elaborate and the productions more ambitious, as a result of which the role of the theater in the cultural life of Germany has been more important than it has elsewhere.

  In East Germany, in the 1980s, as with poetry, theater became a debating chamber for politics, albeit at one remove, via coded references, as mentioned in the previous section.49 In fact, in the 1980s only the churches and the theaters provided a space for political debate.

  “THE SECOND FLOWERING OF GERMAN FILM”

  In film, as with the novel and poetry, the landscape of “rubble” was an early theme (Roberto Rossellini’s Germania anno zero, 1947) but this was not a genre that flourished. More successful was Wolfgang Staudte’s Die Mörder sind unter uns (The Murderers Are Among Us; 1946), in which a traumatized doctor tries to come to terms with the war and at the same time to bring his former commanding officer to justice.

  In East Germany filmmaking was controlled by the party, with DEFA (Deutsche Film-Aktiengesellschaft), maintaining a virtual monopoly over production (not so different from the UFA during the Nazi era). The early films often had capitalism in their sights, though other genres included the “anti-fascist film,” the doctrinal film, to promote the image of the ruling SED party (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands), with a lot of money also going into children’s films (likewise a form of indoctrination). The former UFA studios, in Potsdam-Babelsberg, were now used by DEFA; their most memorable anti-Nazi film was Sterne (Stars; 1959) in which an infantryman falls in love with a Jewish woman who is about to be sent to Auschwitz.

  Then there was the Gegenwartsfilm, which was a deliberate throwback to the “proletarian films” of the Weimar Republic. In such productions as Slatan Dudow’s Unser täglich Brot (Our Daily Bread; 1949), directors tried to show the real conditions existing in East Germany, but they were overtaken by events, in particular the Hungarian uprising in 1956, after which stricter censorship was introduced, until the closing of the border, in 1961, when topical issues were again allowed. Konrad Wolf’s Der geteilte Himmel (The Divided Heaven; 1964), based on a novel by Christa Wolf, looked at the division of Germany from an Eastern point of view and stimulated mildly critical films by younger directors, examining such themes as the conflict between the generations and corruption in the legal system. This relative freedom came to an end again with the Eleventh Plenum of the Central Committee of the SED in 1965, as a result of which no less than half a year’s production was binned.50 These so-called Verbotsfilme (forbidden films) were vivid evidence that a new generation had become critical of the old. Matters changed yet again after Erich Honecker’s notorious speech in 1971, already referred to, in which he condemned taboos in the arts. One immediate consequence was Heiner Carow’s Der Legende von Paul und Paula (The Legend of Paul and Paula; 1972), a big success, based on the popular novel by Ulrich Plenzdorf. This explored a couple’s search for individual happiness within the East German system, in the process introducing sexuality as a means of achieving freedom and modernity. Frank Beyer’s Jakob der Lügner (Jacob the Liar; 1974), also based on a novel, told the story of a Jew in wartime who pretends he has a radio and makes up the “news” for his friends to keep their spirits high. It was the only DEFA film nominated for an Academy Award.51

  In West Germany, though “rubble” films were also produced immediately after the war, the Germans’ own work was overwhelmed by a flood of American films, usually dubbed. Otherwise, the period was characterized by Heimatfilme—safe, escapist romances that raised no ghosts.

  There are two views about the effect of American film on Germany. One is that they trivialized German culture but another is that Germans willingly embraced American culture as a means of breaking with the Nazi past.52

  In fact, so weak was the (West) German film industry at this time that, in 1961, at the Berlin Film Festival, the Federal Film prize was not awarded. This gesture seems to have had some effect and only a year later, at the Oberhausen Short Film Festival, a group of twenty-six young directors signed the founding document of Das neue Kino, the New German Cinema. Known as the Oberhausen Manifesto, the document resulted in an organization to subsidize new films by young directors, the Kuratorium junger deutscher Film. But in practice it wasn’t until the late 1960s and 1970s that German film experienced its real renaissance and, like most renaissances, this had to do with a constellation of genuine “stars” maturing at much the same time.

  In 1968, Werner Herzog released his first feature, Lebenszeichen (Signs of Life), the first in a series of works inhabited by bizarre loners and outcasts but redeemed with caustic humor. Herzog’s films seek to show, he says, “ecstatic truth” rather than the “accountant’s truth” of cinéma verité. They explore solitude, inner states, “inner landscapes”—Caspar David Friedrich is a favorite artist. “Tourism is a sin,” says Herzog and the twentieth century a “catastrophic mistake.” His loathing of “technological civilization” is reminiscent of Heidegger’s, though he lives in—and loves—Los Angeles for its “collective dreams.”53

  At much the same time, Rainer Werner Fassbinder produced his trilogy of gangster movies, also examining the inner worlds of loneliness and isolation (Liebe ist kälter als Tod [Love Is Colder than Death] introduced Hanna Schygulla to the world). Herzog and Fassbinder were quickly followed in 1970 by Wim Wenders and his celebrated road movies, also inhabited by rootless, haunted loners, most notably Summer in the City.54

  Directors such as Fassbinder, Alexander Kluge, Margarethe von Trotha, Volker Schlöndorff, and Reinhard Hauff were by no means blind to the evils of National Socialism but, like Martin Walser, they preferred to deal with late twentieth-century issues such as immigrant workers (Fassbinder’s Angst essen Seele auf [Fear Eats the Soul; 1974]), and terrorism (the collective film Deutschland im Herbst [Germany in Autumn], and Reinhard Hauff’s Messer im Kopf [Knife in the Head], both 1978). The division of Germany was left largely unexplored by this generation of directors, though Hans Jürgen Syberberg did confront Nazism, in the four-part Hitler, ein Film aus Deutschland (Hitler, a Film from Germany; 1977).55

  Government support for the film industry fell away in the 1980s, but talent had begun to flow. This period saw the release of Edgar Reitz’s Heimat, 1984, an eleven-part chronicle of life in the fictional Hunsrück village of Schabbach, which was well received when shown on television both in Germany and elsewhere, and Wim Wenders’s Der Himmel über Berlin (Wings of De
sire; 1987). Partly written by Peter Handke, this tells the story of two angels—unseen to everyone but children—who wander through Berlin listening to everyday people and their problems. It won a prize at the Cannes Film Festival. The 1980s were also the years of several very good documentaries, notably Hartmut Bitomsky’s VW-Complex, and a raft of films by new women directors among whom Margarethe von Trotha was prominent.

  The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 stimulated the production of many films, the most unexpected of which was the reunification comedy, inaugurated by Helmut Dietl’s Schtonk!, 1992, a satire on the “Hitler Diaries” fiasco, and Christoph Schlingensief’s Das deutsche Kettensägen Massaker (The German Chainsaw Massacre; 1990), a vicious parody of consumerist culture, in which a mad Wessi family seeks out Ossis and, using chainsaws and axes, turns them into sausages. In Good-Bye, Lenin! (2003), Christiane, who has lived a near-normal life in East Germany, suffers a heart attack and goes into a coma on the very day that the first big antigovernment protest occurs in October 1989. She doesn’t regain consciousness for several months, by which time the GDR is about to disappear. The doctors warn that any shock might kill her, so her children are forced to pretend—hilariously—that East Germany still exists. They bring back the old furniture, which they had in the meantime replaced, and concoct “broadcasts” that “explain” some of the changes (the government has generously allowed Wessis to flee east, as refugees from capitalist imperialism). In Das Leben der Anderen (The Lives of Others), written and directed by Florian Henckel, which won the Oscar for Best Foreign Film in 2007, a Stasi officer gradually loses sympathy with the regime he is part of. Though he tries to help some of the people he has under surveillance, he can do nothing to prevent the various levels of corruption from combining to produce a tragedy that ends with the suicide of a woman he has himself, inadvertently, helped to trap.