Peter Weiss - Jugend im Exil (German Edition)

Refusing to hold back his criticism of dogmatic fossilizations in the GDR and other socialist countries, he insisted on the nonconformist role of art. In and , Weiss participated again in the Russell tribunal. This public forum investigated war crimes that had been committed in the Vietnam War. In , he visited an exhibit of his works in Munich. He traveled to Paris in and in In , Weiss rejected honorary degrees from both East and West German universities.

On May 10, , Weiss died in Stockholm. In the year of his death, Weiss was honored with four literary awards: In and , exhibitions of his paintings were shown in Switzerland, Germany, and Sweden. Like the dramatist and novelist Hans Henny Jahnn, a major author of European modernism whose emphasis on sexuality and the body had a major impact on his work, Weiss found himself bewildered by a Cold War dilemma of reception mechanisms in both East and West Germany.

Some of his plays continue to enjoy international success. Weiss inspires readers and theater audiences to expose themselves to political and psychological questions without seeking refuge in conventional ways of fabricating easy answers. Notes 1 Raimund Hoffmann, Peter Weiss: Suhrkamp, , 32— Henschel, , Reclam, , Eine Dokumentation zur Retrospektive der Werk und Wirkung, edited by Rudolf Wolff Bonn: Bouvier, , — Lang, , 23— Band 2 Frankfurt a.

Suhrkamp, , — Hoffmann und Campe, , Dieses doppelte Gewicht der Verneinung [. In the German-speaking countries, it first appeared as a radio play in , before its first production, directed by Irimbert Ganser, took place in Vienna in He returns to the tower to overcome his fear of his past by reenacting it rather than by running away 4 from it In his prologue to the radio play version, Weiss highlights the necessity for Pablo to work through his traumatic past in a detached 5 manner to overcome it.

Pablo does not seek the rapture of a sudden dismissive break with his past. Instead, he employs the strategy of consciously approaching psychological constraints that had been imposed on him by a circus director, his wife, and a magician. Realizing the frailty of these characters that used to terrorize him, Pablo hopes to be capable of departing calmly this time. He applies for a position at the tower circus. The voice reassures Pablo of the unalterable fact of his inner freedom and encourages him to dis6 entangle himself from the rope 30— The magician is the only tower resident who does not seem to work at all.

He is also the only character who recognizes Pablo despite his pseudonym Niente. The magician also attempts to convince the protagonist that another escape is impossible or that, as he is 8 gloating, the key is outside But there are cracks and identity crises within the monolithic structure and the captivating organs of the tower prison.

Usually echoing and subservient to the magician, a dwarf experiences a momentary disorientation crisis during which he desperately approaches Pablo and asks him about his own identity and about the meaning of his surroundings in a 9 hoarse and whispering voice Formerly dominating figures of authority who used to paralyze Pablo with fear and isolation are subjected to aging and appear to be rather unthreatening, fragile, and ridiculous to their returning victim.

This idiosyncratic usage does have famous parallels and predecessors in twentieth-century German and Austrian literature. But is Pablo alive at the end of the play, does he hang himself, or does he drown like the permanent tower circus residents? The enigmatic voice of freedom has the last word in the play and slowly announces that the rope is hanging down from him like 12 an umbilical cord It remains an open question whether the comforting yet neutral voice announces that Pablo has mastered the art of escape by consciously exposing himself to the terror of his childhood 13 again.

Providing a quick and decisive answer to this question would require constructing yet another circus tower of forceful and impatient interpretation. Der Turm can, among other possible conclusions, be read as staging a metaphor for writing as a conscious return to suppressed and forgotten injuries. Integrating the psychological and the political and trying not to reduce the one to the other remains an open-ended project that Weiss pursued throughout his literary career.

One reading should not exclude its 15 alleged opposite. The drama simultaneously calls for and examines correlations between social protest and individual maturation. Written in , the drama Die Versicherung The Insurance was rejected by theaters in Sweden and Germany for many years. Hans Werner Henze, arguably the most prestigious contemporary German composer, had planned to compose an opera based on Die Versicherung and had already begun to write a libretto for the Olympic Games in Munich when the plan was dismissed by the 17 Olympic Games Committee.

Traum in zwei Phasen premiered in Darmstadt. In his reflections on the play from , Weiss highlights his openness for modifying the setting of Die Versicherung as well as the names of the characters and suggests the possibility of transporting the play into an 18 American context. Initially, Weiss had envisioned the integration of filmic components. In a commentary to the play, Weiss writes in Ich wollte einen vielschichtigen Eindruck hervorrufen: The storyline of this one-act play in nineteen scenes unfolds as a grotesque social satire on human helplessness, greed, cruelty, and the obsession to be overprotected.

The play begins with a celebration in the household of a successful model citizen who is responsible for maintaining law and order in his town. Throughout the play, Alfons suffers from intervals of convulsive crying and displays regressive behavior. Two insurance company representatives are among the guests.

It is no coincidence that Kafka worked for an insurance company and that Weiss directed a movie for an insurance company. All party guests wear exaggerated make-up, and their gestures and conversations are likewise forced and artificial. The party is staged as a celebration of helpless hypocrisy. When Alfons declares the meat buffet open and cuts out pieces with his pocketknife, the guests do not restrain themselves any longer and politely fight over the best parts of the food.

He is attacking one guest, Frau Burian, who lies unnoticed under the dinner table, bleeding and choking. Alfons even stamps on her hand when she reaches out for help, unable to speak. Offering medical assistance to Frau Burian in his private clinic, Dr. However, the free examination offer turns into an imprisonment.

Involuntary patients who protest too loudly, for example a casino owner, are thrown into a dungeon where they have to live with goats. In brief, wordless interludes of dreamlike scenes, first Alfons, and then Dr. But it is impossible to distinguish victims from aggressors clearly in this play. Most characters indulge in filling both complementary functions. Leo, an unemployed and egocentric young man with a strong sexual interest in married women, seizes all opportunities for material gain without hesitations. It is one of the paradoxical features of this play that the opportunistic Leo, who cynically humiliates women and who is responsible for the grotesque death of a husband, later acts as a revolutionary fighter for human rights.

Several characters play a mean trick on Alfons by stripping him of his identity. He is arrested by police officers who do not believe him when he declares that he is the chief of police. Only one girl, a shy worker in a textile shop, feels compassion and displays an impulse to help Alfons during his arrest. Die Versicherung is a burlesque with strong affinities to Kafka and Brecht. While neither reducible to a clearly definable message nor to a playful arrangement of intertextual correlations, the play can be read as a scenic exaggeration of complacent passivity.

In an age marked by a renewed fear of terrorism, Die Versicherung takes on an unexpectedly timely new dimension.

During the s and s, the play was performed in at least twenty different European cities. This burlesque play, announced by Weiss as a first attempt toward revitalizing the theatrical form of the show booth, experiments with stylistic elements borrowed from Japanese theater traditions and from 23 puppet plays.

As Weiss outlines in a comment on the play, the Punch play interested him as a way to display the aggressive and the horrible behind the mask of humor, while the Kabuki theater inspired him to experiment with the artificiality of movements and with estranging uses 24 of the voice. The storyline of this brief play in simple rhymes, which is not divided into acts or scenes, revolves around violence and cunning methods of survival. A family is visited by a stranger who threatens to stab all of them to death.

Weiss is not interested in portraying the family as mere victims. Instead, the play highlights their submissive opportunism. Not only the parents, but also the children, who act like adults, hypocritically try to please the robber. The children even pretend to want him as their new father The family promises the robber access to a treasure box that they allegedly possess and have hidden in a lake.

Each family member, except for the father, tries to survive at the cost of the others. The victims of this play, including the surviving children, are neither more likeable nor less wicked than the intruder who kills the father. Wie dem Herrn Mockinpott das Leiden ausgetrieben wird. Play in 27 11 Scenes was drafted in and completed in The play premiered in Hanover in under the direction of Horst Zankl.

In , the play was performed in Paris.

Schwerpunkt Österreich

Mockinpott can be read as a satirical rhyme version of the Hiob story in its mocking of passivity and obedience. Mockinpott complains about his seemingly undeserved misfortunes without ever questioning the societal order that he still takes for granted. In the opening scene, the protagonist finds himself in a prison cell. Since he is convinced that he has always been a good citizen, he is desperate about the apparent injustice. The guard accepts a bribe and gives Mockinpott access to legal help. Mockinpott even has to pay for his stay in prison, not only for his release.

At the end of the scene, two angels comment on Mockinpott. They maintain that he needs to go through a series of humiliating experiences and that he should not be spared any misfortune in order to understand his suffering 28 Returning home, he is not welcomed by a loving wife but kicked out of the house. His wife is not only blaming him for wasting money and betraying her, she has in the meantime invited a new lover into their home.

The two angels reiterate their litany of life29 threatening suffering Mockinpott visits his employer to report that he is back. The employer pretends not to recognize him, calls him a beggar, and kicks him out. Having lost both his home and his job, he meets Wurst again, who suggests that he visit a doctor. During their next conversational interlude in the open, Wurst urges Mockinpott to find the government administration.

When Mockinpott reports to government officials, most of whom are engaged in conversations about exquisite food and clothes, that he has been subjected to unjustified police violence, one official responds by thanking Mockinpott for illustrating the laudable fact that the police follow their orders to 30 ruthlessly suffocate any signs of rebellion He is benevolently dismissed with a mechanical staccato of political phrases on steadfastness, unity, and responsibility Repetitive fragments highlight the meaninglessness of political rhetoric.

The protagonist gives up his former role of an obedient inquirer. Angrily, he shouts that he has had enough of this game of 33 betrayal God, now a sad and broken man, leaves the stage. Mockinpott, who finally also manages to put his shoes on correctly, has been liberated by his own anger. The angels do not mock Mockinpott anymore. With his feet firmly on the ground and each shoe on the foot on which it belongs, Mockinpott is going his way, like a dancer or skater in joyful circles, while Wurst is asleep, snoring peacefully — It teaches the necessity of pro34 ductive and liberating anger.

Suhrkamp, , 7— Edition Gravis, , 32— Mursia, , Leben und Werk Stuttgart, Weimar: Metzler, , Morgenbuch, , Rowohlt, , Band V, edited by Gerhard Schuster Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, , Westdeutscher Verlag, , 9— Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, November 5, Suhrkamp, , 35— At times, however, his interpretive conclusions run the risk of becoming too stagnant and formulaic. Westdeutscher Verlag, , 25— Suhrkamp, , 89— Vom Kabuki-Theater die akrobatische Beherrschtheit der Bewegungen, das Unnaturalistische, die verfremdete Stimmenbehandlung [.

Westdeutscher Verlag, , 89— Die Ermittlung, Gesang vom Lusitanischen Popanz, and Viet Nam Diskurs I s, Peter Weiss invents a poignant auctorial job description that disregards conventional generic distinc1 tions between documentary and poetic works: Handbook for Concentration Camp 3 Design. In his essay Das Material und die Modelle: Notizen zum dokumentarischen Theater , Peter Weiss vehemently argues against any mystification of historical events.

But how can the Shoah be documented on stage or in any form of cultural production without reducing it to a commodity that is designed for convenient consumption? The reluctance to persecute Nazi criminals remains one of the most outrageous scandals of postwar German and Austrian history. The West German justice system did not investigate the Shoah until Having attended the trial in , Weiss wrote Die Ermittlung. Oratorio in 6 11 Cantos between and The play simultaneously premiered in East and West Berlin and in several other German cities in October While in East Berlin, politicians and artists recited the text, and Erwin Piscator directed the play in West Berlin, with music composed by Luigi Nono.

Peter Schulze-Rohr directed a film version of the play in The play soon was performed worldwide, for example on Broadway in , in Moscow, Buenos Aires, and Montevideo in , and in Tel Aviv in As productions in the United States and Italy in and spontaneous readings in Germany in have shown, the play is still widely performed throughout the world, partly in order to counter new occurrences of racist violence.

Heinrich Mann - Wikipedia

Weiss is interested in creating tensions between aesthetic form and thematic concern. In his preface to the play, Weiss rejects any aspiration to reconstruct the Auschwitz trial, an endeavor that in his view would be as impossible 11 as representing the camp on stage. Based on court transcripts from the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial from , the play includes eighteen defendants, who represent authentic persons and keep their real names, and nine nameless witnesses, who represent alternately the many anonymous 12 witnesses 8—9.

The drama reduces the use of adjectives to a minimum and produces 13 emotional responses by carefully arranging detailed descriptions of facts. As Walter Jens wrote in , Die Ermittlung, far from merely rendering raw documents, has to be recognized as a minutely stylized aesthetic 14 product, which operates with a wide register of rhetorical techniques.

The audience or reader is confronted with a drama that refuses to offer any conventional plot supplies or the convenient moral satisfaction of a Hollywood version. At the very end of the play, a defendant echoes the popular postwar ideology of selective memory and the widespread refusal of Germans to face their crimes. The story of the courage and death of an individual Shoah victim emerges.

• Perfect Specimen: Brietta.
• The Comte De Gabalis.
• Kimya Khatun (Rumis Daughter);

The trial gathers information about Lili Tofler, a secretary in the camp who had written a letter to a prisoner and who had been interrogated and subjected to physical and psychological torture before she was killed. Lili Tofler is the only victim whose personality is at least rudimentarily outlined when a witness char16 acterizes her as a woman who never lost her inner strength At times they ridicule the victims. As Weiss hints at in his play and accentuates in an open letter, some of the witnesses participated in the crimes and were 17 never persecuted.

Later in the same year, Karl Paryla directed the first German production in Berlin. The play was performed more than fifty times worldwide until the mids. Its most recent production was realized in Bochum in The Popanz drama criticizes Portuguese colonialism in Africa, more specifically in Angola. In , Salazar renamed the colonies that were from then on officially referred to as overseas provinces in order to preclude anticolo20 nial protest.

The military conflicts in Angola had not ended yet when 21 Weiss wrote the play. Postcolonial Angola is still torn by civil war today. Since only seven actors are filling all roles of the play, the question of how to signal a change of character becomes urgent. Weiss dismisses the use of masks or make-up in order to indicate the ethnic identity of a character.

Regardless of their skin color, Weiss requires the actors to 23 alternate between European and African characters The bogeyman, a large construction made of sheet metal whose clattering indicates that it is approaching a time of obsoleteness and replacement, utters monotonous sets of ideological phrases about morality, values, and the sanctification of power.

At times, he even transforms them into an aria —5; Similar to the focus on the character of Lili Tofler in Die Ermittlung, Weiss inserts concrete female figures, Juana and Ana, into the Gesang vom Lusitanischen Popanz, to prevent the theatrical documentation from becoming too abstract and depersonalized. Juana works as a housemaid in the home of a Portuguese couple who pride themselves on being 24 progressive and modern, all the while ordering Juana around In a monologue, Ana lists her daily duties in detail.

Her workday usually lasts from five in the morning until after midnight —9. When Ana, a maid in Angola who is six months pregnant, asks for permission to go home after twelve hours, her employers call the police and accuse her of disobedience. The police take Ana away from her family. She is relocated and detained, and her husband is unable to attain any information about her whereabouts. At the end of the first act, a sympathetic chorus offers to help Ana, who has lost her baby in the meantime due to the violent treatment by the military regime — Another woman, a nameless laborer on a cotton plantation who, like Ana, has been torn from her family, describes her life and despair in a monologue.

Her husband was taken away and forced to work in asbestos mines, her teenage sons were subjected to forced labor in fish factories, and her daughters disappeared. The systematic strategy of separating families demanded that no family member was informed about the fate of the others — The second act continues to criticize colonial crimes against humanity. When a group of fathers requests that a new school be built, they are rounded up at night by troops and transported away on 26 trucks A chorus that consists of everybody on stage announces that a carefully planned liberation is near ; Peter Stein, who directed the play in Munich in the same year, temporarily lost his job because he attempted to collect donations for the Viet Cong after the performance.

Only about a dozen performances were given in subsequent years. Before it addresses U. Having been occupied by French colonial troops in the nineteenth century, Vietnamese armies successfully ended French and Japanese occupation after a long liberation war, which lasted from to , when Vietnam was divided.

Despite their technologically much more advanced military machinery, which not only heavily bombed the whole country for years, but which also committed war crimes against civilians, the United States lost the war. In , Vietnam was reunited. Weiss is not the only playwright who wrote a drama about the Vietnam wars while they were still continuing. In his introductory remarks to Viet Nam Diskurs, Weiss insists on dramaturgic simplicity and argues that a display of exoticism in costume, stage design, and instrumentation would be counterproductive.

Continuing a feature of his previous documentary plays, he demands that the actors have numbers instead of names and that stage 30 effects be used sparsely Two poetic folk songs, or rather two versions of the same song about a rice field, which is compared to a pregnant woman, echo each other across different temporal layers of the play. They negotiate the desirability and fragility of nonviolence. In the second scene, a chorus instructs workers about the art of careful harvesting and demands respect for the anthropomorphized rice field. The song emphasizes the duty to 32 nourish the fields and to keep them free of brutality The gentleness and respect toward nature that is expressed in this song also connotes ethical values such as dignity and a sense of codependence between man, woman, and nature.

The precariousness of beauty is highlighted by the emphasis on compassion that nourishes the bond between a rice field and a pregnant woman.

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Toward the end of the play, however, the song is significantly revised and has shifted its focus to the necessity to fight 33 back at any given moment, even while carefully harvesting rice These unassuming words, in their laconic simplicity, formulate a warning and a conviction that carry an immense weight. Throughout the final part of the play, choruses express a continued realistic assessment of American military power.

However, often a chorus nevertheless calls for courageous optimism and small yet efficient countermeasures — Another passage points toward the future. Suhrkamp, , See Chistoph Weiss, Auschwitz in der geteilten Welt. Westdeutscher Verlag, , — Reclam, , — Arno Schmidt Stiftung im Haffmans Verlag, , 6—9. Lawrence Hill, , 15— In January , celebrities and politicians joined for a public reading of Die Ermittlung in Potsdam.

• An Introduction to the Works of Peter Weiss (Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture).
• Borges And The Eternal Orang-Utans!
• The Which? Doctor!

Zur Struktur des Dokumentartheaters Frankfurt a. Die Ermittlung Frankfurt a. Suhrkamp, , 92— German version in Rapporte 2 Frankfurt a. Suhrkamp, , 45— Warum sitzen sie nicht auf der Anklagebank? Droschl, ; first edition: Gesang vom Lusitanischen Popanz. U of Rochester P, Nur in ihrer Spielweise nehmen sie Stellung zu den Konflikten. All following excerpts and quotations from this play refer to the following edition: These plays examine to what degree economic and political systems can obliterate the dignity of the individual as well as creative thought.

Inmates at the prison of Volterra have performed the play from to in various 2 cities throughout Italy. The boundaries between levels of theatrical reality that are both superimposed on and conflict with one another remain porous and permeable throughout the play. We are thrown into abysmal disorientation of reflecting theatrical mirrors. Actors play prisoners and mentally ill patients who are allowed to enact a play about the French Revolution.

Marquis de Sade — , imprisoned at Charenton, a mental institution that also served as a prison for political opponents, is allowed to direct some of his plays. This dramaturgical scenario is based on historical documents. However, the historical Sade never wrote or directed a play about the end of Jean Paul Marat — Therefore, there is a historical link between the two protagonists. The audience of this hospital theater is also part of the play within and beyond the play, as are the guards of the mental institution, its director and his family, and ultimately the real audiences.

Apart from Sade and Marat, whose philosophical disputes on inertia and change provide the core of the play, the character of the inmate who plays the most radical protagonist of the play, the former priest Jacques Roux — , inhabits, and endeavors to extend, a precarious place of freedom, even though he is constantly confined by a strait jacket.

Jacques Roux comes closest to succeeding in breaking through the multiple transparent walls of silencing, censorship, and historicized distances that the play installs. They attempt to open the confinements of theatrical containment. Corday is played by a somnambulist patient who 5 throughout the drama is guided and combed by two nurses Sade never interrupts Roux. Sade is not surprised at all. His work of art has gained force and has provoked the control mechanism to unfold its brutality.

The male nurses function as guards who try to domesticate their inmates with violence, while the female nurses sing a litany to lull the excited and unruly patients into a more 6 passive mood Sade postulates the cruel indifference of nature towards any form of violence, from murder and torture to the possible complete eradication of mankind. Damiens had attempted to assassinate the French king Louis XV and was slowly tortured to death in Sade maintains his view that everything is transient, and this skeptical perspective makes it impossible for him to divide the world with any certainty into what he perceives as the outdated and illusionary static categories of good and evil: In scene 18, he denounces all patri10 otism and nationalism as a mask and an excuse for excessive violence.

Jacques Roux interrupts the play with impromptu speeches, or maybe Sade has instructed him to perform these seemingly spontaneous declamations. Many patients gather around Roux when he condemns warfare and patriotism: It can be argued that the violence of the nurses and guards was also calculated by Sade since the reactions of the institutional authorities were predictable.

In scene 21, Corday acts as a dominatrix who lashes Sade during his reflections on the horror of violence that he was not able to prevent in his function as a judge during the French Revolution. These experiences lead Sade to the conclusion that any participation in political events equals a corrupt alliance with sanctioned killings.

He longs for a radical retreat from society and for his death. He wishes to become unidentifiable: People in his life who have hurt, ridiculed, and rejected him appear as ghosts. One by one, from his teacher and his parents to the philosopher and playwright Voltaire and the scientist Lavoisier, everybody who has deprived him of respect as a human being, as a writer, or as a physicist comments on him and expresses his or her contempt — At the end of the first scene of act two, Sade gives a laconic yet compassionate prognosis of the reception history of Marat: Standing on a chair and watching his production dissolve in this tumultuous manner, or perhaps enjoying his production of dissolution, Sade is laughing triumphantly In interviews, he advocated an interpretive openness towards the play and insisted that possible forms 15 of dramatic realizations were inexhaustible.

Stalin banished and persecuted Trotsky and eventually had him killed in Mexican exile in Weiss wrote this play as an undogmatic contribution to the Lenin year, the hundredth birthday of the leader of the Russian Revolution. The introductory stage directions suggest that the sequence of fifteen scenes written in prose, which at times disregard chronological 17 order, should take place in a swift and surprising manner The first scene begins with Trotsky sitting at a table and working on a manuscript, a pen in his hand.

Wissen nicht mal, wie man eine Maschine bedient. Liest ein Arbeiter [. Machajski warns him that the bureaucracy and hierarchy of a party will become a goal in itself and corrupt the revolutionary ideals by perpetuating the exploitation of the many by a selfappointed elite. For a while, Weiss, who used to be heavily courted by the socialist regimes, became a persona non grata. The third scene goes back in time to London in Trotsky visits Lenin in his temporary British exile to discuss strategies of toppling the Russian aristocracy. Lenin repeatedly presses his hands against his temples, indicating his health problems.

Lenin takes an imaginary walk through London with Trotsky. They listen in while soldiers and workers talk about colonial wars. Differences between Lenin and Trotsky emerge in the fourth scene, which takes place in Brussels at a secret convention in The scene is introduced as an event that Lenin and Trotsky remember together and narrate to each other. The secret discussions emerge from their sharing of mutual memories of the meeting. They talk about not only their initially opposing strategic views on centralizing the party, but about excluding members who do not understand the necessity of strict discipline and hierarchical authority.

Trotsky is initially opposed to the party split that Lenin favors. Lenin calls the Mensheviks useless and trapped in a petty bourgeois mentality. Scene 5 depicts demonstrations and declamations by Trotsky and others in and ends with a brief trial and the sentencing of Trotsky. Together with his wife Natalja Sedowa and his friends Parvus and Deutsch, he tries to make sense of the past events and attempts to find the strength to concentrate on future projects. But there is also room to think about literature.

Commedia, diktiert von bestimmten Klasseninteressen. Doch weil Auseinandersetzung mit seiner Zeit, Schilderung psychologischer Entwicklung, Gedankenverbindung mit uns herstellt. War zum Tod durchs Feuer verurteilt. Ball calls for the useful enjoyment of an alliance of Lenin and Trotsky with his dada group: Sonst werden unsre Revolutionen im Sand versickern. Die neue Kunst ist Leben.

Wo sollen die Grenzen gesetzt werden? Wer bestimmt den Punkt, an dem die Einmischung beginnt? Ending the sharp debate on principles and gently moving to a more personal level, Trotsky tries to persuade Lenin to abandon his asceticism and to enjoy music or at least fresh air. He shares the memory of his overwhelming first encounter with theater as part of his persuasive lobbying for more creative cultural enjoyment. This memory, first evoked in order to remind his comrade of the necessity of art as a mode of survival, also makes Trotsky silently reflect on the self-critical unspoken question about what has come out of sight in the years of class warfare: Was hab ich gesehn?

He rejects any offer of aesthetic relief by pointing out that in his view, beauty is an unbearable perversion as long as there is suffering: Ich ertrag es nicht. The following last two scenes of the first act describe revolutionary actions in Russia. In a revealing passage in the ninth scene, which emphasizes their mutual respect and friendship, Lenin and Trotsky look back upon their many differences in terms of strategic viewpoints toward the realization of change. Trotsky emphasizes that their opposing views on revolutionary strategies have been fruitful challenges that were necessary for successful change: However, Lenin, who is aware that he will not live much longer, issues a warning to Trotsky concerning the coming fight for power within the Communist Party: Wir sind einander gewachsen.

Aber ich hab nur noch wenige Jahre. Die andern, sie werden dich nicht neben sich dulden, wenn ich nicht da bin. Deine Selbstsicherheit, deine Weltsicht, sie werden nur Hochmut, Eitelkeit drin sehn. Concrete times and places become fused components of nightmarish transitions. Petersburg and not far from the Finnish coast. In a discussion with his friend Blumkin and his son Lew Sedow, Trotsky rejects the idea of individual acts of terrorism as useless. In his view, only organized mass 22 terror is acceptable. At this point, Weiss inserts another chronological leap backwards.

All of a sudden, the audience witnesses a discussion between Lenin, Trotsky, Schljapnikow, and Aleksandra Kollontai from Schljapnikow and Kollontai argue for a truly democratic government with the participation of workers and warn against the bureaucratic fossilization of power structures in the newly established state. Lenin defends his rejection of these calls for a more lenient mode of administration by pointing at the still fragile state of the Soviet Union.

While he welcomes internal debates, in his view, everyone who carries polemical skepticism outside of the party, does irremediable damage to the revolution. Therefore, Lenin argues, he was right in stripping Schljapnikow of his party membership. Nameless seamen and workers also demand more democratic rights. It is now Trotsky who orders the Red Army to punish the workers who want to be active participants in the new society 66— Weiss has no interest in depicting Trotsky and Lenin as innocent victims. This and other scenes highlight that both of them favored violence and disregarded individual human freedom and life when they thought that the revolution was in danger.

Stalin will later denounce this view as counterrevolutionary internationalism. Asian, African American, Latin American, and European students discuss their respective strategic debates with Trotsky and offer a series of critical questions to him. A German student insists that a revolution that still keeps the mind under authoritative control is not only incomplete but betrays its own alleged purpose of liberation. Ihr habt zwar die Klassen abgeschafft. Sie, Genosse Trotzki, haben die Zwangsarbeit eingeleitet, die heute verwirklicht ist.

Heinrich Mann

From the stage background, a long scene from the Stalinist Moscow show trials emerges. As is the case throughout the play, discussions with befriended intellectuals, artists, and activists form the center of the drama. The French writer, whose works Weiss admired, visited Trotsky in his Mexican exile, and they co-authored a manifesto of surrealism. Trotsky, who is shown again in the position of concentrated reading and correcting, is killed with an ice axe, but the audience does not witness the murder.

The stage becomes dark and silent before the axe hits Trotsky. During the s, the drama was performed in approximately thirty cities, mainly in Germany, but also in Sweden , Hungary , England , and 26 Yugoslavia All three buildings can be described as what the singer calls his prison. This statement will be echoed by the singer in the very last verse of the play, this time directed to the audience, leaving it open to how far the prison is extending through time and space, and how its 29 perpetuation can be countered ; Hegel warns against the use of violence and advocates patience and a belief in the gradual education of mankind, which in his eyes is too immature to act by itself.

This rhetoric of justification of the current state of affairs and of restraint in the name of education will be echoed throughout the play by Fichte and Goethe, as well as by merchants and bankers. Hegel continues to lecture his roommates on the 30 necessity of patient education and slow evolution However, he displays a benevolent and relaxed mood when he indulges in sharing the latest good news from France, the murder of Marat. At the end of the scene, Hegel is standing aside. When one of the students, Hiller, is calling for a lifelong violent uprising, Hegel, having just taken a pinch of snuff, ends the scene with 32 an ironic sneeze Heinrich von Kalb, the father of the household, has spent time in America, where he was accompanying and fighting with George Washington and Lafayette.

Heinrich von Kalb proudly instructs his son about his experiences with and the desirability of slavery. Weiss ascribes an active political awareness to Fritz von Kalb, who goes on to juxtapose the violence that he suffers from his father and the violence that is inflicted on slaves and Native Americans. Fritz also observes that his mother, Charlotte von Kalb, experiences violent abuse and, suffering from her domestic constraints and from a cruel husband, is constantly weeping.

Only the intonation of 33 her weeping changes when the father leaves The only character in the play that does not censor her own expressions, she is unafraid to ridicule the male gender with sarcastic clarity: Disconcerted and speechless, he covers his face with his hands. One century before the Russian writer Aleksandra Kollontai — , Wilhelmine Kirms advocates free love. The scene ends with a versified discussion between the singer and commentator and two workers. In his view, he is a mere stranger who interrupts an important debate.

While Goethe is leafing through a bundle of manuscripts, Schiller lectures on the education of human beings. The scene puts the emphasis on the fact that even he is afraid of the concrete consequences of his teachings and retreated to the same abstract humanistic ideology of patience and educational evolution that Goethe, Schiller, and Hegel have at their effortless disposal. When Fichte approaches the podium, the male and female workers leave 37 In the eighth scene of the second act, students burn books.

While the historical Fichte resigned from his position of university president in Berlin because he was the only faculty member who wanted to punish fraternities that harassed a Jewish student, and while he never was a racist or a militarist, he was nevertheless turned into a forefather of fascism both by the fascists and by some modern scholars.

The stage directions suggest that through fast movements and constant repositionings, as well as by using music that repeatedly seems to recede and come closer again, the whole scene should be reminiscent of a danse macabre A dance of death is also taking place in the form of a conversation between the merchants and bank owners who regret that there are no German colonies comparable to British and Dutch possessions overseas. They sugar their obsession for money with benevolent words of support for the arts and of gracious humanism and the necessity to educate and control peoples of other continents for their own good.

Weiss juxtaposes the elitist and hypocritical verbal exchanges of the owners of banks and of human beings on the one hand and brief and straightforward dialogues between workers who begin to wonder why they allow the aristocrats and mansion and park owners to be in charge while they easily outnumber them 40 on the other But the first act of the play does not end in intellectual sublimation of the existing order.

Schmid extends his critique to the United States and its 41 system of slavery Before the play begins, however, they engage in personal and political disputes. Schmid is characterized as a radical revolutionary who has become a volunteer soldier in the German fight against Napoleon, whom 42 he despises as the traitor of the revolution Hegel, on the other hand, defends Napoleon as a heroic figure comparable to Caesar and Alexander, as a lucid and pragmatic politician whose deeds are justified because he is inhabited by the world spirit.

Edited By Susanne Blumesberger and Jörg Thunecke

Schmid expresses his suspicion that Schelling and Hegel have turned into opportunistic conservatives who affirm the existing order of the state in order to achieve a tenured status at their universities. While he is facing political intrigues that are orchestrated by Hermokrates, a power hungry high priest, and other opponents, Empedocles retreats to Mt. Aetna and jumps into the volcano. Schelling expresses a thorough interest and sympathy with Empedocles, while Hegel dismisses his behavior as a sign and result of inexcusable political incompetence.

Hegel and Schelling react to the Empedocles rehearsal with varying degrees of rejection. Poetry, Schelling argues, is the only remaining realm where human beings are able to revolutionize their 45 personality Weiss puts the most concrete interpretive question into the mouth of the glazier Wagner, who asks how Empedocles and his small group of loyal followers can help the oppressed people when in fact without their help they would not be able to survive by themselves.

The playwright within the play uses the antagonistic configuration of his Empedocles drama in order to criticize his former friends by counting Hegel and other seemingly omniscient and saturated spectators among the self-congratulatory opportunists who first idolize and then persecute any Empedocles.

Rather than mourning the loss of clearly delineated guidelines or facial features of a resistance leader, they agree to read it as an opportunity to fill that absence with their own thoughts and lives. The final scene of the play echoes allusions to the Nazi dictatorship from the first act. This encounter is fictional. However, they retreated from him as soon as he displayed his first symptoms of mental imbalance. The play is, however, congruent with biographical data in describing Hegel and Schelling as intellectuals who abandon the enthusiastic radicalism of their youth in order to embark upon successful academic careers.

Eventually, they not only discontinue their communication with him, but even cease to talk about him. The encounter, invented by Weiss, serves to emphasize his belief in the complementary nature of exploratory writing and focused political projects. One production opened in Bremen, under the direction of Helm Bindseil, and the other in Krefeld, directed by Joachim 55 Fontheim.

Over the next two years, it was performed in a few other German cities as well as in Norway and Yugoslavia. Weiss emphasizes the use of the stage as a laboratory that allows the spectators to witness artistic psychosocial experiments. Immobilized by his own his lack of political awareness, K remains stuck between the distorting mir56 rors of an order whose stability he fails to question Weiss injects not only heavy doses of an anticapitalist impetus into the plot, but, as Kremer writes, he also adds the stubborn resistance of grotesque 58 animality.

Weiss and his wife, Gunilla Palmstierna-Weiss, also directed the drama, which premiered in Stockholm in One year later, the first German performance was directed by Roberto Ciulli in Berlin. The first American version was put on stage at Duke University in Today, this drama reads like a lucid critique of globalization and multinational companies.

Weiss wants to focus on the internal contradictions of people who desperately attempt to adapt 59 to or to liberate themselves from the rules of capitalist society. Only two characters in the play, Leni and the subversive painter Titorelli, keep their personalities from being split. K realizes too late that the com60 pany has turned his civil presence and humanistic ideals into their alibi. In the beginning scene of the first act, K is surprised by a grotesque nocturnal visit.

Three men from his company, Franz and Willem, two workers who will later make swift careers and who will eventually literally watch him die like a dog in the final scene of the play, as well as the engineer Kaminer, let themselves into his room in the middle of the night to examine the disturbing noise that he has complained about. In the third scene, Frau Grubach, his landlady, helps K to get dressed, obviously a daily routine.

K eventually reveals the core of his discontent to Frau Grubach, his unsuccessful search for comprehensive explanations and for a clear understanding of everything, his longing for a free society in which 61 nothing and nobody is misunderstood At times, seemingly negligible stage directions turn out to foreshadow later events.

For example, when his landlady is binding his tie, K exposes his neck, and at the beginning of scene 4, everything that used 62 to be identifiable in the room is fading — In the fourth scene, K reiterates his need for a comprehensive knowledge of his surroundings. He confides to Rabensteiner, a career minded colleague who reminds him of the necessity of possessing expertise in the real estate market and global capital transactions, that a only a concrete and overarching order is the object of his desire: Grade das Gesicherte ist es, das mich unsicher macht.

Ich will die Ordnung! Aber eine andre Ordnung. She seemingly enjoys the fact that K is even more miserable. There is, however, a brief moment in the ninth scene when the two of them have a true exchange of thoughts about art, which K identifies as his tool to temporarily forget his helplessness because it points at something inherently different from what surrounds him in daily life. Having been relieved of his previous function, which included the handling of complaints, a task that he has pursued with fairness and sympathy and, in the eyes of the company, in an all too lenient way, K is promoted to a rather nebulous position.

With Leni, his new secretary who becomes a true friend and who does not follow her original order to report on K to the company, K visits several illegal political meetings. When K is wondering why so many people are attending the meetings, Leni responds that the lack of organizational predictability 63 forms the main point of attraction But the spark of spontaneous resistance does not glimmer for a long time in the play.

Scene 19, toward the end of the second act, provides contours of a state of mind that might enable one to disentangle oneself from the web of globalized greed and opportunism, which the play depicts as almost inescapable. In his reflections on his art and craft, the painter Titorelli refuses all nostalgic escapism and insists that being an artist means to do violence to life. According to Titorelli, art should not deliver any harmonious components for the sake of achieving soothing edification. When K and Leni tentatively ask him whether he creates clarity or beauty, Titorelli replies that purity is an illusion of consumers of art.

In his eyes, 64 his paintings embody dirt, blood, and feces Titorelli has also given up the myth of the inspired solitary artist. He frequently invites people from the street to participate in the production of his paintings, the messier the process of cooperation, he points out, the better. His vulnerability, which manifests itself in repeated emotional breakdowns, and his emphasized disillusionment about his craft and the world of which it is a part have led the painter Titorelli to a mental state of emptiness that allows him to survive in a rebellious niche.

He has created a minimal habitat of creative resistance for himself in which nothing is 65 predictable Titorelli is the only character in the play that dares to voice his opposition to corporate globalizers. He insists that his paintings are not for them but rather aimed against them 66 Throughout the rest of the play, Weiss parodizes rhetorical strategies of a powerful elite, which presents itself as immensely concerned about peace and human progress but cynically uses these terms as code words for war and the ruthless destruction of human values.

As the discussions of these plays show, Weiss was far from being a deconstructionist. He can be read as a modernist who still seeks lucidity and a recognizable nexus of mind and society. Der neue Prozess, his final play, puts the processes and procedures of obedience on trial and insists on the necessity to be rewritten by creatively receptive readers and audiences. Notes 1 All following excerpts and quotations from this play refer to the following edition: Drama in zwei Akten. Ihre Bewegungen sind die einer Somnambulen.

Ein paar Schwestern stellen sich vor den Patienten auf und singen eine Litanei zur Beruhigung. Westdeutscher Verlag, , 57— Zum Beispiel als sehr verhaltenes Kammerspiel. Ihr sprecht zwar vom Absterben des Staats. Aber das werdet ihr vergessen, wenn ihr erst mal euern Machtapparat habt. Fortschritt liegt in der Macht der Forscher, Rechner, Organisatoren.

Dieser Begriff hat viele von uns verwirrt. Wir wiesen den individuellen Terror ab. Wir haben versucht, diesen Staat lebendig, demokratisch zu machen. Wir konnten ihn nicht errichten ohne die zentralisierte Partei. Und jetzt hat sich die Maschine gegen uns gekehrt. During the s and later in American exile, Mann's literary popularity waned. The two novels sketched the life and importance of Henry IV of France and were acclaimed by his brother Thomas Mann, who spoke of the "great splendour and dynamic art" of the work. The plot, based on Europe's early modern history from a French perspective, anticipated the end of French—German enmity.

His second wife, Nelly Mann — , committed suicide in Los Angeles. Heinrich Mann died in Santa Monica, California , lonely and without much money, just months before he was to move to East Berlin to become president of the German Academy of Arts. His ashes were later taken to East Germany and were interred at the Dorotheenstadt cemetery in a grave of honor. Mann was portrayed by Alec Guinness in the television adaptation of Christopher Hampton 's play Tales from Hollywood.

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