Buchner

Richard Calvocoressi

Georg Buchner Julian Hilton (Macmillan Modern Dramatists £10, £2.95)

'n a radio broadcast recently on Goethe, George Steiner remarked that German studies were, on the whole, in a state of decline in the English-speaking world. At- tempts to reintroduce Goethe to the British public this year, the 150th anniversary of his death, may well prove as inconsequen- tial in the long term' as they did in 1949, Goethe's bicentenary, which coincided with a more general move after the war to im- prove the image of German culture abroad. Shakespeare has been part of every German child's education since Lessing first made him available in the orginal some 200 years ago. Except for the Werther fanaticism of the 1780s, and the more considered admira- tion of Carlyle, the Romantics, Arnold and a handful of other 19th-century writers, in this country Goethe has always remained at best a name.

This ignorance of, or resistance to, things German in our society is not confined to the world of humanist literature and ideas. Ger- man art, for example, is notoriously under- represented in our major public collections. Art-historical studies had to wait until the beginning of the 1970s for a course on Ger- man Romanticism to be established at the Courtauld Institute, only to find it discon- tinued later in the decade. German Expres- sionism, with its rejection of naturalism, its revelation of dark, irrational forces and its emotional intensity, has always been something of an embarrassment to English taste. The causes of this — partly historical, partly psychological — are too complex to rehearse here. But there are signs that, with a more objective critical attitude brought by the generation educated since the war, the situation is changing.

Nowhere is this change more apparent than in the theatre, and in the Expressionist theatre in particular. Brecht has been popular for some time now, usually for political reasons, but it is only in the last 10 years or so that other less didactic but equally influential German playwrights of the first third of the 20th century, such as Wedekind and von Horvath, have had their works translated and performed on the English stage in ways which accentuate their modernity — their frankness in dealing with uncomfortable sexual, psychological and social truths, for example. Several Expres- sionist authors drew strength from the Ger-

man Romantic tradition of von Kleist (whose tragedy The Prince of Homburg is receiving its first London production), HOlderlin and Buchner, writers whom in

certain cases they rescued from obscurity. The personal fate of each was often in- separable from his work, an important part of the myth: Kleist's suicide, Holderlin's madness, BtIchner's death from typhus in 1837 at the age of 23, a political exile.

Wedekind especially was one of Buchner's strongest champions: he once stated that without Buchner's Woyzeck his own play Spring Awakening would not have been written. Berg set plays by both authors to music during the Weimar period.

his opera Wozzeck — the misspelling originated in the first edition of Btichner's

collected works (1879), itself based on manuscripts — was given its first perfor- mance in Berlin in 1925 and probably helped confirm Btichner's status as a classic of the German theatre.

In his study of Btichner's brief but in- tense creative life, Julian Hilton claims that `in the mid 1920s . . . Buchner had become so dominant that young writers began to protest that his reputation was stifling theirs'. Mr Hilton's concluding chapter is an interesting discussion of Buchner's in- fluence in and outside Germany, and of the works inspired by him, such as Werner Her-

zog's curiously unconvincing film of Woyzeck released in 1979. Before the war, and certainly during republican Weimar, it was Buchner's radical political views which attracted most attention, interest being focussed primarily on Danton's Death.

This play, epic in scope and of obvious ap- peal to the likes of Brecht, received the full Max Reinhardt treatment in Berlin in 1916 — a production which, Mr Hilton believes, was responsible for the way directors and actors approached the text for the next 20

years. It was not until the 1950s that the private, `poetic' aspects of Danton were recognised and given their proper due, at the same time as Woyzeck, with its power- ful depiction of a fragmented, alienating and violent world, came increasingly to be regarded as Buchner's masterpiece.

More than either Danton or Bilchner's lesser known comedy Leonce and Lena, Woyzeck's lack of any clear narrative struc- ture shows how profoundly anti-classical its

author was. Btichner's manuscript in- dicated no final scenic arrangement which, as Mr Hilton points out, makes it difficult to summarise the plot (the term is perhaps

irrelevant) and even harder to decide the order of scenes. Woyzeck abounds in con-

tradictions, arguably part of its message, but Mr Hilton's analysis of the various in- terpretations of the play helps illuminate some of the problems. Buchner based

Woyzeck on an actual case which ten years previously had been something of a cause celebre in the debate about criminal respon- sibility; his father's library contained material relating to it and it is likely that the conflicting medical reports of the murderer

Woyzeck's sanity would have been read by Buchner, who had been a brilliant medical student, with considerable interest.

Early in his book Mr Hilton warns that a complete understanding of BUchner is not Possible without a rudimentary knowledge of Germany's political history, language and literature. The great merit of his study Is that he fills in the necessary background in some detail, demonstrating how BUchner fits into a politically dissenting dramatic tradition deeply opposed to the neo- classical rules and concerned to speak in ac- cessible, everyday prose. One of his models here was Lessing whom Goethe praised for his 'themes . . . truly drawn from life.' Defending Danton's Death against accusa- tions of immorality, Buchner maintained that the 'dramatic poet . . . must not be more or less moral than history itself . . . I can't turn Danton and the bandits of the Revolution into heroes of virtue!' It is pro- bably these qualities of realism, toughness and honesty — BtIchner's refusal to prefer any kind of ideological explanation of history above his pessimistic belief in an in- evitable natural law — which engage the sympathies of audiences today.