The Second German Aftermath
By ELIZABETH WISKEMANN
AFTER the First World War the German reaction against it, and against the German regime which had waged it, was violent, but it was also violently creative. Amidst the misery and despair and the social upheavals of the time, young people and intellectuals of all ages sought to learn all that they could rather than to turn away. " Try everything, shirk nothing," was the !not dordre of that day. They plunged in because they wished to discover a meaning, and what they found impelled them or others to seek for new forms to express it. Kathe Kollwitz's drawings, although she belonged to an older generation, spoke the anguish of poverty, Georg Grosz derided vulgarity and vice, and the young Bertolt Brecht's Dreigroschenoper reproached society for its outcasts. Above all, a new architecture, inspired by Gropius and the Bauhaus group at Dessau, searched and found forms to express the aspirations of a Socialist industrial society. The new liberty was often licentious, yet the decadence of the 'twenties was simultaneously virile.
If Spengler foresaw the decline of the West, much was hoped from new life in the East ; in those days Paris and Moscow met in Berlin. If the political revolution in Germany was a sha,m, that in the arts, in literature, the theatre and cinema, was not. New vistas had opened ; possibilities were great. There was a sullen and profound resentment among those who cherished the traditions of other days ; the new activities were decried as foreign, anti-national, Jewish, but they went far to establish themselves.
An infinitely greater catastrophe than the 1914-18 war lies only five years behind us. It is probably too soon to make a comparison, and yet one is tempted all the time by what one sees in Germany to do so. In the Weimar days things were all too real, crudely so. Today the Germans seem like crippled shadows flitting among the ruins of their cities. (The over-fed rich on the one hand, and on the other the minority which has emerged undemoralised by the past, do not alter the general scene.) The longer one lives with these people the more one feels that they wish only to escape. While this state of mind persists there is no chance of any positive develop- ment, since genuine experimentation' is precluded. The new build- ing which one sees in Germany is singularly uninspired, following rather weakly in the Brown House tradition ; it is only fair to add that lack of time and money emphasise the lack of inspiration.
The theatre plays a much more important part in national life in Germany than in Britain. Every important town has at least one theatre supported by public funds and private theatres as well. One is safe in drawing some conclusions about the general state of mind by considering what plays are being produced. Of course they are not the choice of the public, but only what the theatre directors guess it to be. For some time now, but with unflagging persistence, from one end of Western Germany to the other, the plays of Sartre have been given. Indeed, the French neighbour seems to dominate the German stage today. If Sartre has a long lead, he is followed up by Anouilh, Giraudoux, Cocteau and Montherlant ; occasionally a visiting French company plays a classic. In Stuttgart a translation of Vercors' Le silence de la mer is being played. Perhaps it is easier to face reality through the clarifying eyes of the French.
A great many American plays are also being given. As for British plays, there is next to nothing—provided one has been trained by long experience to accept with a wry smile the German conviction that Shakespeare in German is part, and a very creditable part, of German literature. On the Diisseldorf stage, which an elderly Gustaf Grundgens has made into the most talked-of in Western Germany, he himself has been playing alternatively as Hamlet and as a leading character in The Winslow Boy. Quite recently Grundgens and Werner Kraus have played Hamlet and Lear respectively at the trade-union festival at Recklinghausen in the Ruhr.
Shakespeare apart, there is little in the way of German drama. Carl Zuckmayer is both fertile and popular, and there is an occa- sional Hauptmann or Georg Kaiser revival. The live wire is still— or again—Brecht, who is now fifty-two. He has written a good deal in the meantime—plays, poems, essays—and he has developed steadily. There is nothing escapist about what he writes, nor is it— as is most of the painting of the present—a pale reflection of things that happened a generation ago. Brecht produces, together with Viertel and Erich Engel, in the East Sector of Berlin, but their company has just been touring the British Zone with Brecht's plays, Mutter Courage and Herr Puntila and sein Knecht.
In Munich, which liked to be considered the German centre of the arts, the activities of Berlin were always regarded with a certain jealousy which can now be detected in comments upon Dusseldorf. These rivalries are embittered by the interferences of the Bavarian Kultusminister, Dr. Hundhammer, with the Munich stage ; his suppression of the Abraxas ballet (a Faustian theme with music by Werner Egk) caused some commotion. The revival of the Passion Play at Oberammergau is welcomed from all sides, though it is often whispered in one's ear that the only member of the cast who was not a Nazi in Hitler's day has been given the part of Judas.
While the cabarets are running short of jokes either against Nazis or denazifiers, nothing of much interest is happening in the film studios. This provides one of the most striking contrasts with the 'twenties. Music is still the favourite refuge of the nation, though even here the impoverishment of the educated classes restrains the rush to concert-halls. It is somehow characteristic that nineteenth- century Italian operas seem to prevail ; the Wagner family have found rich patrons to help them revive Bayreuth, but a certain embarrassment still induces reticence in the production of Hitler's favourite operas.
The two German writers who are perhaps most discussed are Ernst flinger and a new name, Stefan Andres. The first epitomises the conflict of the Germans with the world: His ruthless arrogance helped to exaggerate the conception of an elite into the terrible form which the Nazis gave it ; now he is left searching for fresh self-justification after the explosion of the, glories of war, and many hang on his lips since they are seeking the same thing. Andres, a younger man, expresses the Catholic reply.
It would be inadequate to attempt any sketch of the German state of mind in 1950 without a glance at the influence of philosophy which enjoys its traditional prestige. There is one philosopher in the public eye, and that is Martin Heidegger, who is peering through the now rapidly dissolving cloud of his Nazi associations in the past. Holzwege, Heidegger's latest book, claims that philosophy since Plato has put sued a road which was bound to lead to its own destruction, and that it can only reacquire significance by returning to objectivity. This satisfies the German grievance against leaders who have misled ; at the same time, Heidegger justifies the feeling that everything is meaningless with the possible exception of one's own existence. It is not, however, certain that Heidegger affects German thinking profoundly, for it is easy to give his Sein various meanings ; it is sometimes vaguely identified with .God. Though contempt is often expressed in Germany for what the French have made of existentialism, Sartre's more subjective inter- pretation is probably less difficult for Germans too.
While many German scientists preserve the rationalist claim to depend only upon experience and experiment, C. F. von Weizsacker, son of the former diplomat and a professor of physics at the physicists' headquarters at Gottingen, expounds a theological inter- pretation of the part played by chance in the universe. His last book, Die Geschiehte der Natur (1948), has exerted considerable influence. So also have the three post-war books of an older relative, Viktor von Weizsacker, a doctor of the psycho-somatic persuasion, who offers the rame moral from his own point of view.
The trend back to religious belief is strong, partly because this is the only belief left. Many have returned to the Catholic Church, while many are attracted by the so-called Caux movement for " moral rearmament " ; the latter embraces Catholics as well as Protestants, in spite of its repudiation in June by Cardinal Frings of Cologne. The‘ presence of a good many former Nazis in the Buchmanite ranks is perhaps due to a natural impulse to transfer their allegiance and responsibilities from the Fiihrer to the lieber Gott. Certainly a large number of the Germans of today desire above all to avoid political thinking. Many of them want to do more than to avoid it ; they long for politics to be wiped out. The best policy is to have no policy, they will say, since nothing begets nothing, which is better than false hope. Hitler was an active, a destructive nihilist ; he has left behind him the double nothingness of a passive nihilism. This is the measure of the tragedy.
Previous page
