[In the following essay, Crosby considers some contemporary interpretations of Tasso, Iphigenie, and Faust on the German stage in order to “provide at least an outline of the current stage image of Goethe.”]

“As you know, the German stage lets
each one try what he may.”

—Goethe, Faust

The words of that ever-quotable pragmatist, the Theater Director of Faust, are if anything truer today than they were in Goethe's own time. After a postwar period of reconstruction, the German stage over the past two decades has once again become a proving ground for directorial innovation. Spawned from the political and social ferment of the 1960s, an impressive cadre of fresh directorial talent has succeeded in reviving the tradition of creative, interpretive direction associated with the names of Max Reinhardt and Bertold Brecht. Taking advantage of the temper of the times, which had mandated the reexamination of all traditional values, these artists have imposed their directorial egos not only on contemporary plays but on the traditional masterpieces of dramatic literature as well. Thus the “classics” of Shakespeare and Schiller, of Buchner, Kleist, and of course Goethe have been turned inside out, as it were, in an attempt to explore their relevance to our own times.¹ In reshaping these texts, the directors have inevitably also reshaped the perception of their authors, so that the current stage image of, say, Schiller and Goethe differs from what it was twenty, forty, or sixty years ago. Surely this is as it should be: one does not play Hamlet as it was performed in Shakespeare's time, or even in Goethe's; it would be considered bad taste to play the music of Franz Liszt the way Franz Liszt played the music of Franz Liszt; and even in Bayreuth, where the Holy Grail of tradition was so zealously guarded for decades, the operas of Richard Wagner may now be seen in controversial but resolutely contemporary interpretations.

Since the very flux of time itself reshapes the image, or perception, of every creative artist, be he painter, poet, or composer, it seems fair to examine just how the recreative artists—the conductors and soloists in the world of music for example, and the stage directors and actors in the theater—have responded to their interpretative mandates. In the case of Goethe, the sheer number of productions of his works on the German-language stage precludes a comprehensive discussion of the many interpretations—and reinterpretations—of his works in recent years. Although Goethe's major plays are limited in number, the broad compass of their themes, the variety of their forms, the power of the poet's dramatic conceptions and the often matchless language have assured these plays a place in the permanent repertoire of the German stage. This report on some recent stagings of three major dramas—Tasso, Iphigenie, and Faust—is offered in the hope that it will provide at least an outline of the current stage image of Goethe.

Although Goethe's current stage profile has been shaped by many hands, no single personality in the theater world has contributed more to its configuration than the director Peter Stein. In the year 1969, three years after Peter Zadek had “modernized” Schiller's Die Räuber by presenting the play as a sort of comic-strip version of an American Western, and two years after Stein himself had ventured a strictly nontraditional staging of Kabale und Liebe in Munich, the gifted young director evidently felt that it was Goethe's turn. Seizing upon Tasso, that inward, almost introverted play that is normally prized more by philologists than by playgoers, Stein and his Bremen ensemble offered a reinterpretation of this “classic” that shook the German theater “establishment”—and Goethe traditionalists—to the core. Looking back at the “legendary Bremen Tasso,” as it is often called, the student of the stage might not find the production to have been quite as revolutionary as the critical reaction at the time indicated; over the intervening thirteen years, after all, directors have shown us Hamlet leaping into bed with his mother, Othello chasing a nude Desdemona across the stage, Franz Moor urinating on his father, and the Prinz von Homburg standing stark naked in a potato field. To evaluate the impact of the Stein production, however, the critic of the 1980s need only recall the time when German professors were being hounded out of their lecture halls, collections for the Vietcong were being taken in the Munich Kammerspiele, and German youths—like their American counterparts—were sounding like that prescient baccalaureus in Faust II who urged the slaying of everyone over the age of thirty. In an era in which all traditional values were being reappraised, it was inevitable that even so venerable a “classic” as Tasso would be plumbed for its relevance to contemporary ideas and contemporary problems.

And, indeed, that was the main thrust of Stein's production: to draw a parallel between an effete, luxury-loving, caste-conscious Renaissance clique and Stein's own perception of the elitist, power-drunk capitalist society of today. To underscore the encapsulated artificiality of Belriguardo, Duke Alfons' stately pleasure dome, Stein had the stage covered with green cloth suggestive of a lush lawn; its boundaries were formed by transparent plastic curtains. Within this hothouse sphere of idle privilege moved deliberately devitalized impersonations of Duke Alfons, the two Leonores, Antonio and Tasso. Gliding about in ballet-like choreography, the players drifted in and out of the action as required by the plot; when not actually “onstage,” they hovered on the periphery of the action, which evolved out of a heavily cut text. In the midst of the action, of course, was Tasso himself, that neurasthenic, hypersensitive poet whom Goethe once called “an intensified Werther.” Stein's own description of Tasso, as one reads in his notes to the production,² was that of an “Emotional clown:” Stein, a committed Marxist, projected Tasso as a lap dog of the aristocracy who makes himself ridiculous by trying to adapt himself to ridiculous norms. Although Tasso was at one point costumed to resemble Tischbein's Goethe, he behaved more like a refugee from Thomas Mann's gallery of artist-misfits. Tripping over his own feet, his laurel wreath askew, Tasso was more of a Detlev Spinell than a Goethe redivivus. Even the famous metaphor which closes the play: “Thus the seaman finds himself firmly clinging to the very rock on which he was to founder,” was concretized in such a way as to underscore Tasso's total helplessness: the poet did not merely cling to Antonio—as the text suggests—but rather clambered up onto his shoulders, whereupon he was borne, kicking like a toddler, from the stage. Although a dispassionate observer might well find such a conclusion tragic, critics noted that Tasso's pathetic exit drew guffaws from the audience.³

Whether or not one agrees with Stein's interpretation of Tasso—and devotees of textual fidelity would find much to carp about—one cannot deny the impact of the production. For months German critics hardly discussed anything but the Bremen Tasso; Stein and his ensemble became famous beyond Germany's borders; and more than a decade would pass before another major staging of the play would be mounted. More important; Stein's production proved that even so remote and delicate a dramatic subject as Tasso was robust enough to survive an ideological transplantation into the twentieth century and that its basically static plot could, in the hands of a dedicated ensemble, be turned into arresting theater. Finally, Stein's iconoclastic approach to Tasso dissipated, at least temporarily, than nimbus of reverence which had come to surround Goethe's plays. Like Faust's old academic gown, Tasso had gathered a few cobwebs and moths over the decades; Peter Stein deserves credit for taking the play out of the closet—or more accurately the seminar room—giving it a good shake, and putting it back into circulation.

Like its companion in classicism, Goethe's Iphigenie is a drama which, one might think, would be more likely to thrive in the carefully controlled atmosphere of a graduate seminar than before the unsparing footlights of the stage; yet Iphigenie, like Tasso, has in recent years staked a claim to a life beyond the walls of academe and to a place in the standard repertoire. Among recent stagings, the acclaimed production at the Munich Kammerspiele (1981-1982) deserves close attention both on its artistic merits and because of its substantial contribution to Goethe's current stage image. Although the main outline of Dieter Dorn's staging had been well publicized in advance, neither the public nor the critics seem to have been prepared for what they experienced at the premiere in January 1981 a “new staging” that seemed more like a “nonstaging,” at least in the sense that the director had dispensed with most of the scenic-visual complements to a stage production. Defying tradition, Dorn confronted his public with a curtain which remained closed throughout the performance. Almost all the action took place on a small area of the stage apron, which was demarcated by a large white screen serving as a backdrop; a few raised platforms in front of this backdrop served as the only scenery. Missing from this sparse mise en scene, inevitably, were Diana's Temple and the Sacred Grove: they were present only in the text and in the imagination of the spectators. Costumes, as such, were dispensed with: the male actors wore nondescript street clothing; Iphigenie, a rather subdued hostess gown. Scene changes—the play was performed without act breaks or an intermission—were effected by means of “blackouts”: while the brightly illuminated white screen went dark for a few seconds, and the audience blinked in the darkness, the actors quickly rearranged themselves before the backdrop.

This severe pattern was broken only once, during the climactic scene in that Orestes is seized by the hallucinatory trance that purges him of guilt. This rite of exorcism took place amidst the audience, and members of the premiere public seated in the eighth row, left, of the orchestra were startled to find a descendant of Tantalus bustling down their row like a harried latecomer, scattering programs right and left and sending the paying guests scampering self-consciously to their feet. Although some might argue that it is alienating to have a scion of the House of Atreus haranguing the Furies from an aisle seat, one must admit that the intimacy engendered both by the physical proximity of the players and their normal dress made it seem almost natural to have a demigod as a seat neighbor.

Since Dieter Dorn set out to demythologize Goethe's text in this production, it was only consistent with his interpretation that the ending of the play lacked that dimension of conciliation and enlightenment so germane to Goethe's adaptation of the ancient drama. There was no sense of “annunciation,” of a “new order,” in King Thoas' “Lebt wohl!”—those famous words that bless the Greek captives on their way. The words were spoken grudgingly, chillingly, by a Thoas whose face was a frozen mask of bitterness. By setting a limit to the efficacy of Iphigenie's “pure humanity,” Dieter Dorn added a jarring dissonance to Goethe's harmonious conclusion. The image of Goethe that emerged from this production reflected that of Thoas, who in the final analysis has little to smile about: it was the image of a psychological realist unwilling to gloss over human frailties in the name of benign conciliation. Seeing a Thoas frozen in bitterness and disappointment, one somehow felt closer to him—and to Goethe—than ever before. If to forgive is divine, as Shakespeare instructs us, perhaps not to forgive is almost human—or may one say with Goethe, “devilishly human?”

Turning to Faust, one notes that after a strange hiatus from the stage—at least in West Germany—both Part I and Part II have had a high performance incidence over the past decade. Although no single production has captured the favor of critics and audiences as did the Gustav Gründgens' stagings of the late 1950s, there has been no dearth of competent and occasionally provocative performances of Goethe's most famous play. Following in the wake of Peter Stein's Tasso, directors have felt free to make drastic cuts in the text, to reorder dramatic sequences, to poke fun at Goethe, and to make the conclusion of the play a good deal less ambiguous than Goethe himself might have wished it to be. In 1976, at the hallowed Burgtheater in Vienna, a performance of Part I was mounted in which the Prolog im Himmel was merged with the Vorspiel auf dem Theater, Faust's monologues were cut to the bone, and the first scene of Part II was grafted on to the final scene—the “dungeon scene”—of Part I. In 1977 Claus Peymann directed a production of the complete Faust in which virtually the entire Second Part of the tragedy was treated as a gigantic masquerade, a colorful spectacle of theatrical effects. For a diametrically opposite interpretation, however, the theater-goer only had to wait a few months, that is until Hansgunther Heyme presented what one critic claimed was “the most complete Faust II ever staged”—a sobersided, virtually uncut version that took almost seven hours to perform over two successive evenings.⁴ The reasons for the resurgence of Faust productions still await definitive scholarly exegesis, but to judge by recent trends in West Germany, the sheer theatricality of Faust seems to be outweighing ideological considerations, at least for the moment: directors such as Peymann and Heyme, who yield nothing to Peter Stein as far as political commitment is concerned, have been remarkably restrained about imparting a political coloration to their Faust interpretations. For whatever reason, there is much truth in the critic Eo Plunien's witty observation: “It's ‘Fausting’ everywhere.”⁵

One place it is “Fausting” is in the German Democratic Republic, where major stagings of both parts of Faust are so frequent as to make them unremarkable. In general Goethe's plays, taken as a whole, appear about as frequently on East German stages as they do in the Federal Republic; a recent survey of performances of German “classics” on the GDR stage over a five-year period found Goethe in a respectable third place after Schiller and Lessing, which is just about where one would expect to find him in a survey of West German theaters.⁶ Thanks to generous state support, and to almost unlimited rehearsal time, GDR directors can bend their minds and their talents to mounting lavish productions of Goethe's plays, even in theaters that by West German standards might be deemed provincial. The director Fritz Bennewitz, who staged a Faust production in New York in 1979, has directed three different productions of Faust in recent years at the Deutsches Nationaltheater in Weimar, including a production of the complete Faust drama in 1982. A few years earlier, the director Christoph Schroth tested the endurance of his ensemble—and of the public—by presenting both parts of Faust in one long evening, an enterprise that perhaps began the current trend toward marathon performances. Nor was length the sole innovation: Christoph Schroth not only called upon four different actors to portray Faust, but made a Mephista out of Mephisto by casting the devil as a woman—surely a new twist to the “eternal feminine!”

Remarkably enough, directors thus far seem to have been able to resist the politicization of Faust and other Goethe plays, despite the fact that the purse strings of the GDR stage are firmly held by a government that makes no secret of the fact that it regards the theater as an instrument for the propagation of socialist ideas.⁷ To be sure, Faust has yet to recite his Utopian soliloquy in Part II under the roseate glow of the hammer and sickle; the dike protecting his realm from the sea has not yet appeared as a prettified version of the Berlin Wall, and Mephisto has not tread the boards to date costumed as an evil Uncle Sam. Nevertheless, without compromising the textual integrity of Faust, the East German government, acting through its spokesmen both in the state-controlled press and in the theater hierarchy, has made it clear that it regards Goethe's masterpiece as a sort of showpiece of socialism, and that the frequent stagings of the play serve a political as well as an aesthetic purpose. The ideological thrust behind the Faust productions becomes clear when one reads both the handsome program brochures that accompany the productions and the critical reviews in the press. Program commentaries, for example, are heavily laced with quotations from the writings of Brecht, Adorno, and Lukács shaped to underscore the argument that Goethe's Faust represents the evolution not of Faust alone but of all mankind: Faust / Jedermann is seen striving against the confines of a benighted feudal-renaissance society, succumbing temporarily to the curse of capitalism—that is, the pact with the devil—and finally being liberated by a vision of socialist equality. The 1980 Yearbook of the Weimer National Theater supplies an excellent example of what one might call the “co-opting” of Goethe by the East German propaganda machine: emblazoned on the first page are excerpts from an address by General Secretary Erich Honeker in which he extols Goethe for his contribution to the cultural heritage of Weimar “because in Socialism the grand vision of a ‘free people on free soil’ has found realization through revolutionary deeds.”⁸ This famous line of verse in fact appears with Orwellian insistence in East German theater commentary; the obvious insinuation is that the quotation aptly describes the lot of the 17 million GDR citizens currently penned up behind the Iron Curtain.

No less politicized are the critical reviews of theater productions, including Faust productions, where expert analysis of a staging may have to compete with doctrinaire political observations. The literary editor of the newspaper Das Volk prefaced his critic's review of Bennewitz's recent Faust staging as follows: “What this production is about is humanistic responsibility in war and peace, plus social progress evolving out of our historical and revolutionary optimism.”⁹ The word “responsibility” was duly taken up by the reviewer himself, who noted approvingly that the production reflected a “high degree of social responsibility” and who admonished the public not to forget its own “responsibility.” Politics, like beauty, can sometimes be in the eye of the beholder, so one cannot quarrel with the reviewer when he claims that Wagner's visit to Faust's study in Part I reminded him “of Germany's fascist past,” since Gestapo visitations and interrogations often took place in the black of the night; but surely one may reject his pretentious comparison of Wagner with the late Dr. Robert Oppenheimer, an equation which made Faust's famulus a “mad scientist” who “in the climate of escalating rearmament in the USA” would be capable of manufacturing not only homunculi, but also weapons more fearsome than the H-bomb.¹⁰ Sorting through the propaganda, one can also find a few observations about the production itself, which was generally praised for its textual fidelity and the freshness of ideas Bennewitz brought to his current production.

Hence the East German stage image of Goethe is unclear, with its focus blurred by conflicting perspectives. On the stage itself, the familiar plays unfold with a textual fidelity that often exceeds that of West German productions; surrounding these texts, however, is a penumbra of propaganda which, in greater or lesser degree, lends its coloration to the plays themselves. As older directors such as Bennewitz are replaced by younger, less cosmopolitan and more ideologically oriented directors, the East German stage image of Goethe may well emerge in sharper focus, but not necessarily to the poet or to this poetic intentions.

Looking back on this turbulent decade, one may express the fervent hope that German directors on both sides of the Iron Curtain have, like Orestes, been purged of the furies of self-doubt, social guilt, and political cynicism. Yet had the author of the dictum “Die: then live again!” been witness to the arbitrary and even irreverent treatment of his dramas, his reaction might well have been marked by that spirit of tolerance and conciliation that informs his major works. Himself a man of the theater, to the core a passionate amateur actor, and a seasoned Regisseaur, Goethe well knew that there exists no infallible formula for conjuring up the magic of the theater, that short-lived triumph of illusion over reality. Skeptical of binding political dogmas, he probably would reject attempts to fit his multidimensional texts to the Procrustean bed of any given ideology; but his innate wisdom, fortified by the “wisdom of the Ages,” would surely console him that “this, too, shall pass.”

What future trends will bring to the interpretation of Goethe's dramas, how his image will be reflected from the German-language stage, is of course uncertain, but in looking ahead one might take heart from an observation by the late pianist Artur Schnabel, who once described the music of Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert as being “greater than it can be performed.” Surely plays such as Tasso, Iphigenie, and above all Faust constitute literature which is greater than it can ever be interpreted.

Notes

1. Among recent articles see: Ferdinand Piedmont, “Tendenzen moderner Schiller-Auffuhrungen” Jahrbuch der deutschen Schillergesellschaft, 21 (1977), pp. 247-273, and Donald H. Crosby, “The Fragmented Schiller: Welttheater or Regietheater?” Friedrich Schillerein Symposium, ed. Wolfgang Wittkowski (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1982), pp. 341-350.

2. In Goethe u.a.: Torquato Tasso. Regiebuch der Bremen Inszenierung, ed. Volker Canaris (Suhrkamp Verlag 1970), p. 135.

3. See the remarks by Joachim Kaiser and Hellmuth Karasek in Theater, 1969, p. 22.

4. Eo Plunien in Die Welt, May 28, 1977.

5. Ibid.

6. See Manfred Nössig, Die Schauspieltheater der DDR und das Erbe (Berlin: Akademieverlag, 1976).

7. For a comprehensive discussion of the East German theater see Herbert Lederer, “Theater in the German Democratic Republic,” in Perspectives and Personalities: Studies in Modern German Literature, Beiträge zur Neueren Literaturgeschichte, Third Series, vol. 37 (Heidelberg: Carl Winter Universitätsverlag, 1978), pp. 214-221. Professor Lederer has been most generous in sharing both his expertise and his substantial collection of theater materials with me, for which I express my gratitude.

8. In Klassik im Blickpunkt, Deutsches Nationaltheater Weimar, 1980.

9. Editorial in Das Volk, October 14, 1981.

10. Dr. Klaus Hammer, in Das Volk, October 14, 1981.