It shakes accepted values–disperses former glory–dismays age-long courage - Georg Kaiser's The Burghers of Calais

One last German-language play.  Last for now.  Georg Kaiser’s The Burghers of Calais (pub. 1914, perf. 1917) is, I am told, the signature Expressionist drama.  I do not know what Expressionism is, exactly, or to the extent that I do know, I cannot see the relationship between Kaiser’s play and Expressionist artists like Franz Marc and George Grosz.  Let’s not make this post about my ignorance, though.

The Burghers of Calais is inspired by one of Rodin’s most famous sculpture groups (here’s the plaster version at the Musée Rodin), itself inspired by an episode in Froissart’s Chronicles.  During the Hundred Years War the English besieged the port city of Calais.  Rather than sack the town, they demanded that six leading citizens surrender themselves while dressed in sack cloth and a noose.  The humiliation and presumably execution of the six, in exchange for safety.  Six leaders, including the city’s wealthiest merchant, volunteered for the sacrifice.  Rodin’s sculpture enacts their most pathetic moment, as they leave the city to their deaths.  Presumed, as I said, since the men were spared by the intervention of the Queen of England.

Kaiser takes advantage of the men’s humiliation in the play’s final act, where the public removal of their ornate garments and donning of the sack cloth and noose gains, as it is repeated, a ritual power that a much worse playwright could hardly damage.  But Kaiser has a stranger, ahistorical purpose.  He adds a number of ludicrous complications to the story – mainly that seven men volunteer when only six are needed – in order to test the meaning of the sacrifice.  Ordinary concepts of glory, honor, or duty are somehow insufficient, not meaningful enough.  The volunteers go through a scourging or purging process before their sacrifice, overcoming their fear of death and attachment to the world.  I think.

Thick smoke swirls about your heads and feet and shrouds the way before you.  Are you worthy to tread it?  To proceed to the final goal?  To do this deed–which becomes a crime–unless its doers are transformed?  Are you prepared–for this your new deed? –It shakes accepted values–disperses former glory–dismays age-long courage–muffles that which rang clear–blackens that which shone brightly–rejects that which was valid! –Are you the new men? (114-5)

That passage is just a scrap of a characteristic two-page monologue.  I picked it because the Nietzschean or visionary overtones are unusually clear.  New men, huh?

I do not know if the odd use of the dashes in the translation is straight from Kaiser or if the translators are attempting to recreate one of the many peculiar features of Kaiser’s anti-naturalistic text.  The play begins in crisis, at a high rhetorical pitch, and maintains the tone almost to the end – once the men have reached their apotheosis, the tension is allowed to relax.  I was reminded of the unrelenting intensity of a contemporary drama, Charles Péguy’s The Mystery of the Charity of Joan of Arc, with which Kaiser's play shares the theme of transcendent sacrifice.

I read the translation of J. M. Ritchie and Rex Last found in Kaiser’s Plays Volume One, 1985, John Calder.  An admirably modest blurb on the back cover says “This book was worth publishing”; I agree.  Kind of a low standard.

Oh yes, thanks to the Caroline and Lizzy for the poke in the ribs that was German Literature Month.

Coming up: weird German playwrights for German Literature Month

German Literature Month, so designated by Lizzy’s Literary Life and Beauty Is a Sleeping Cat, approaches.  At either link, you will find an orderly, well-defined schedule for the month.  My understanding is that it is should be followed only in spirit, although the schedules for the readalongs of Theodor Fontane’s Effi Briest and Heinrich Böll’s The Silent Angel might have more meaning.

I have written before, if I am not imagining it as the result of a wine and tobacco induced E. T. A. Hoffmann-style dream, about my bewilderment and irritation at the poor status in the English-reading world of pre-20th century German-language literature.  Goethe, a titan, the equivalent, in English terms, of Shakespeare, Johnson, and Wordsworth combined in a single person, shrivels down to the author of Faust (part I only) and the “autobiographical” Sorrows of Young Werther.  German poetry is hopeless, despite numerous fine translations; German fiction, the rich line of novellas, is too weird.  Theodor Fontane can be credited with bringing Flaubert into German, Frenchifying German fiction, so I hope many readers in the “too weird” crowd will enjoy Effi Briest a lot. The business with the crocodile and Chinese servant is still a little weird.

Weirdest of all, though, is the startling German dramatic tradition.  The strange and wonderful things one found on the German stage.  That stage might well be imaginary – I am thinking of Georg Büchner’s Woyzeck, “finished” (by his death) in 1837, published in 1879, performed in 1913.  Large parts of Faust seem unstageable, too, although they have all been staged.

My point here is actually to pin up my German Literature Month reading list, except that I have not really decided yet.  I will mess around with some of the late 19th century playwrights, that’s all I know, the three almost exact contemporaries – Gerhart Hauptmann, Arthur Schnitzler, and Frank Wedekind.  (Sorry – Wedekind’s first name must be Franz, not Frank.  Let me look that up.  Ah, his full name is Benjamin Franklin Wedekind.  Of course.)

Wedekind is most famous, I think, for Spring Awakening, which was recently bent into a Broadway musical, and the two Lulu plays.  Schnitzler’s best known play is Der Reigen / La Ronde.  Hauptmann won the Nobel Prize in 1912, but seems to now be the least known in English, meaning: the titles of his plays do not ring bells for me.

I am tempted, too, by some younger playwrights, like Hugo von Hofmannsthal, lively poet, librettist for the dreary Richard Strauss – someday I hope to be able to spell Hofmannsthal’s name correctly without looking it up.  Or I might try the Expressionist Georg Kaiser, author of Gas and also Gas II.  The titles alone attract my interest.  I’m not going to read all or even much of this in November, though.

This piece must be among the most ignorant I have ever written for Wuthering Expectations.  Speculative might be a kinder word.  Corrections, admonitions, and recommendations are most welcome.

Oh, there will also be some of this in November:

That’ll be fun, right?