of bloodshed that the French Revolution was exacting under the left-wing rule of the Jacobins. By killing Marat, she attempted to put a stop to the bloodshed. The real meat of the play, however, is not as much the murder of Marat as it is the latter’s ideological confrontation with the Marquis de Sade, who uses the play to stage an imaginary debate about the Revolution with an imaginary Marat. The debate is witnessed by M. Coulmier and his family, who are sitting on an elevated dais and who are the inner play’s audience. As such, they possess an affinity to the outer play’s audience—those in the theater itself, who are, by implication, asked to judge the winner of the Marat-Sade debate.

The philosophical-political confrontation of the two men is a clash of polar opposites, of radical social commitment and collective anarchism (Marat) versus extreme individualism, disillusionment with reality, and the desire to be left alone with private illusions (Sade). The two debate the nature of life and death, of justice and revolution, with Marat emerging as a precursor of Marx, and Sade as a pre-Freudian who is convinced that humankind is inherently selfish and incapable of establishing a society based on equality. A third position is espoused by Charlotte Corday and her Girondist lover, Duperret, who share the goals of Marat but who reject his methods. They idealistically desire freedom and equality but find bloodshed intolerable.

In the end, however, all positions seem to be canceled out because the play terminates in a most ambiguous manner. The asylum inmates surge forward in a violent outbreak, shouting senselessly as one of them screams, “When will you learn to take sides?” As the curtain falls, the marquis laughs cynically at the entire scene. Weiss does not take sides with this ending. The viewer is left with three positions, all of which have exponents in the play: the Marat thesis, which insists that violence is necessarily part of lasting social change because the empowered will never willingly divest themselves for the sake of the powerless; the Sade contention, which states that revolution and political violence simply serve as an outlet for base and dangerous human impulses, and that humankind is incapable of attaining the chimera of the classless society; and the third position, which acknowledges the human weakness described in the Sade thesis and therefore advocates the goals of Marat without violent means.

The diffidence and indecision suggested by the ending to Marat/Sade sparked much discussion and, in socialist countries especially, brought Weiss a good measure of criticism. To this point Weiss had been unable to espouse wholeheartedly a variety of political systems. In the year following the premiere of Marat/Sade, however, Weiss committed himself publicly to a political ideology and concern with the fate of the underprivileged, which his play associated with Marat. After several visits to the German Democratic Republic, Weiss published his Arbeitspunkte eines Autors in der geteilten Welt (1965), a polemic against capitalism, ideological neutrality, and detachment and in favor of socialism. It is therefore Marat and not Sade who was to have the last laugh, and Weiss’s work was soon to register the effect of his decision.

The Investigation

The premiere of The Investigation was held on October 19, 1965, simultaneously in some twenty theaters through Europe and, as this fact would imply, it had a tremendous impact. Erwin Piscator wrote in Die Zeit of the occasion that it was “a serious attempt to restore to the theater within a larger, supraregional framework its position as a moral institution.”

The Investigation, subtitled “an oratorio in eleven cantos,” deals with the theme of the Auschwitz concentration camp and its absolute horror. The play also reflects pointedly Weiss’s newfound Marxist perspective because, as Weiss stated, “it deals with the role of German big industry in exterminating the Jews; I want to brand capitalism, which benefited from the experiments of the gas chambers.” The material of the drama is, except for a few lines of the text, taken directly from testimony in the 1964 Frankfurt trial of former Auschwitz SS men. Each of the work’s eleven cantos possesses three parts, and the formal link to Dante’s La divina commedia (c. 1320; The Divine Comedy, 1802) is unmistakable. The titles of the cantos mirror the unrelieved degradation and inhumanity that the play examines: “The Loading Ramp,” “The Camp,” “The Swing,” “The Possibility of Survival,” “The End of Lili Tofler,” “S.S. Corporal Stark,” “The Black Wall,” “Phenol,” “The Bunker Block,” “Cyclone B,” and “The Fire Ovens.”

It has been estimated that four million human beings were murdered in the Auschwitz concentration camp between 1941 and 1945, and the absolute, incomprehensibly stupendous horror of this fact is beyond communication in words. For this reason, perhaps, Weiss consciously underdramatizes in The Investigation, making no attempt to shape his material dramatically. The material of the play is presented in the fashion of documentary theater. The dialogue is lifted from the actual testimony of the accused and the accusers in the Frankfurt trial. These accounts of Auschwitz procedures—the gas chambers, cremations, starvations, and wanton cruelties—create a terrifying picture, and a devastating indictment gradually forms. It forms, however, in an unemotional manner, reflecting the numbing of the senses, the dulling of human impulses that invaded the lives of both perpetrators and victims at Auschwitz. The defendants on trial in this play are not presented entirely unsympathetically. They were, they contend, only doing their duty, and they had little choice but to obey orders. The question implicitly raised, therefore, is whether they, like those who suffered and died, were not also victims of an ideological system.

Although it had powerful and worldwide reverberations, The Investigation was also criticized. The play’s rapid repetition, some critics contended, inundated and blunted the receptive ability of its audience. Too much horror, especially if dispassionately presented, ceases, after a time, to horrify. Whom, therefore, would the play convince? Still others felt that The Investigation was a powerful enough statement, but they noted that it added nothing aesthetically to its genre or to the literature of the Holocaust. A reviewer in the Times Literary Supplement of April 24, 1969, stated that “The Investigation virtually wrote itself,” and another critic in the New York Review of Books of November 3, 1966, acidly remarked that “If one were to want the transcript of the Frankfurt trials he would better be sent to the publication of them in book form . . . than to a rapid selection offered in a theater.”

Song of the Lusitanian Bogey

Criticism notwithstanding, both Marat/Sade and The Investigation were, by any definition, provocative and successful productions. It was at this point in Weiss’s dramatic career, however, that his shift to a Marxist and radically committed notion of literature (as an instrument of socialist education and as a catalyst to societal change) began to impinge somewhat on this success. Weiss’s next dramatic offering was a piece of agitprop called Song of the Lusitanian Bogey. This “political musical” in two acts is an indictment of the Portuguese colonial system in Angola and Mozambique from the time of the first Portuguese explorers until the Africans’ abortive revolt in March of 1961. Highlighted is the contrast between the wealth of the white imperialists and the parasitic European and American firms, and the destitution and humiliation of the Africans.

Vietnam Discourse

Another work with a similar concept is Weiss’s Vietnam Discourse, whose full title is even longer than that of Marat/Sade; it is Discourse of the Progress of the Prolonged War of Liberation in Viet Nam and the Events Leading Up to It as Illustration of the Necessity for Armed Resistance Against Oppression and on the Attempts of the United States of America to Destroy the Foundations of Revolution. This two-part documentary traces eleven stages in the historical development of Vietnam, beginning with 500 b.c.e. and continuing on through the French and U.S. presences in the country.

How Mister Mockingpott Was Cured of His Suffering

The publication of Vietnam Discourse coincided with the stage production of another piece by Weiss, a “drama for a clown” entitled How Mister Mockingpott Was Cured of His Suffering. The work differs from the above mentioned political dramas because it was written earlier, in 1963. It is, as its subtitle suggests, an admixture of slapstick and Kafka. Mr. Mockingpott is imprisoned without reason, released into a world stood on its head, and confronted by absurdity on every side. The play concludes with its Chaplinesque protagonist railing against God, who is portrayed as a cigar-smoking, indifferent businessman.

Trotsky in Exile

Trotsky in Exile, however, published in 1970, is another example of Weiss’s “theater of commitment.” The drama is based on historical documents, and although it is in Weiss’s words “a play about socialism for socialists,” it is decidedly anti-Soviet in its depiction of Leon Trotsky’s exile and later assassination. The essential conflict of the play is between international socialism as envisioned by Trotsky, and the nationalistic, brutal Communism practiced by Joseph Stalin. This standpoint opened the author to censure from socialist colleagues in the Soviet Union and its ideological satellites, but it was indicative both of independent thinking on the part of Weiss and of his sincerity as a Socialist. The work also prefigured Weiss’s next—and last—major dramatic work, Hölderlin, which, like Trotsky in Exile, was revisionist in eschewing one-sided dogmatics.

Hölderlin

The underlying central idea of Weiss’s Hölderlin was a new conception of the mad poet, namely as a revolutionary and direct precursor to Karl Marx. Just as Trotsky in Exile is a depiction of a political writer and man of action, so Hölderlin is a drama—almost a melodrama—of a creative writer who is socially committed. This presentation of Friedrich Hölderlin traces his progression to madness not as a personal problem but rather as the consequence of adhering to political convictions even if doing so means increasing isolation, self-imposed exile, and apparent insanity. The protagonist here is not the traditional Hölderlin of German letters, usually categorized as a fragile individual whose artistic visions and hopeless illusions finally pushed him over the brink. This Hölderlin is a revolutionary aesthetically and politically, and his enemies are his contemporaneous intellectual peers ( Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich Schiller), who refuse to dedicate themselves to the practical reification of a “humanity,” preferring instead simply to preach to people in their writing.

In the face of this artistic and political estrangement, Hölderlin’s eight scenes depict, in a language that in diction and orthography is patterned after the speech of the late eighteenth century, the protagonist’s deepening frustrations, the onslaught of hypersensitivity, and the retreat to a final and symbolic enclosure, the tower. Encircled by confusion and isolation, only the young Karl Marx is able, in the play’s dramatic final scene, to reach the now pathetic figure. Learning of Marx and seeing in him something of himself, Hölderlin attempts to shed his self-imposed paralysis and to act, to work for the revolution. He does so in vain, however, because he is by now incapable of throwing off the shackles of his catatonic self-imprisonment.

Soon after its Stuttgart premiere in 1971, Hölderlin became a stage success in both the East and the West, but it also came under heavy attack (especially in the West) for being historically inaccurate on several counts. This criticism may well explain why Weiss decided to abandon the dramatic genre and to spend the 1970’s working on his three-volume Die Ästhetik des Widerstands, a kind of fictive autobiography that functions both as monomaniac self-analysis and as essayistic confrontation with contemporary social and political phenomena. The first volume appeared in 1975, the last in 1981.