| Sensuous 'Provocations' and the
Struggle between 'Anything Goes' and the 'Surviving Ossified Past'
They say that very much “like Shakespeare,”
Peter Zadek (a stage director, rather than a playwright) “sought to blend
popular theater” with intellectual substance, or “lofty intellectual aims…”(1)
Is this an apt way of summing up his achievement? And perhaps, at the same
time, a hidden or open critique? From a certain point of view, which we
share, a “Shakespearean” understanding of popular theater is indeed desirable,
and it is something very different from the fetishization of the spectacular,
and from the imbecility inscribed in the dominant trends of ‘mass culture’
as we know it in specific forms in various Western societies today. Shakespeare
did not try to “popularize;” he was down to earth and reflective at
the same time. He was himself, and at the same time a representative of
a time of change. Raising problems. And showing, concretely, in the flesh,
the bizarre or grotesque or comic ways of the world that England was, at
his time. It certainly forbade any aesthetic strategy whereby he might
have his actors talk “above the heads” (and the ability to understand)
of an “ordinary” urban audience. He did raise relevant social and political
problems but he did so in a sensuous way, and in a way that would incite
his audience to interact, during the performance, showing approval, jeering.
commenting in other ways, as the situation, the fictional one that was
visible, tangible on stage, and that of England, of the "world" referred
to implicitly or explicitly, must have prompted them to do.
Today, in the Western world, the
audience is condemned, very much, to passivity, at least in so far as it
is expected to watch silently, refraining from loud comments, from shouted
observations, from hearty or fear-stricken laughter occasionied by the
humor or terror of a situation presented on stage. Exception are rare:
perhaps they could be found in the performances of Nitsch or Muehl,
perhaps in some stagings of Artaud's theater of cruelty. Also, Brecht's
plays, his concept and staging of a new 'epic theater' proved different;
here, the audience, is expected to get (thoughtfully, and even dialectially)
involved; the same expectation is directed at the actors. Passive reception
is anathema to Brechtians; but what appears to some as intellectualism,
to others as a reasonable preference of rationality over emotionality,
did not exactly encourage a loud and naive response by the viewer; the
activity that is expected of him is to take place in his brain while he
watches; it is hoped that the new questions faced, the new thoughts thought,
will continue to occupy him afterwards, and it is to inform his práxis
after he has left the theatre building.
Still, Brecht learned quite a bit
from Shakespeare, though transforming it in a way adequate to the specific
needs of his epoch. At least this is how he himself and certain critics
saw it. Brecht also appreciated vaudeville theater, and other forms of
popular entertainment. They were materialist, down-to-earth, rooted in
everday life, at the same time comic, humorous, sensual, sometimes grotesque.
Some of these traits, though intellectualized, abstracted, stripped down
to the naked bones, so to speak, entered his plays. It would be wrong to
say they are devoid of humor, of the sarcastic, the grotesque, the sensuous,
of emotions. But these never gain the upper hand: they are servant maids
of reason, of a quest: the quest to challenge the conventional presuppositions
of an audience whose curiosity must be awakened, whose certainties must
be shattered by posing problem, devising situations. Impassés, in
fact, that amount to disturbing questions. Today, of course, the answers
are seen as "predictable" by so many critics and especially those who have
gone through years of gauchisme as students but who have turned to the
right as more or less successful academics. Still, it is easy to take as
predictable what is only superficially perceived. Certain impassés,
certain contradictions persist in today's world, having found no rational
practical answer. And the number of those kept in ignorance and made infantile
on purpose is certainly on the rise, rather than receding. But this, apparently,
does not concern an elitist, saturated clientele of theater-goers. If they
are bored, they are bored. And they are bored easily by what has been served
to them too often, without answering their specific, subjectively
perceived 'needs.'
There was a time when I thought
that Zadek was not "un-influenced" by Brechtian motives though not slavishly
a Brechtian aesthetics; that, in his own way, he probably attempted to
move in similar direction – but did, I asked, did the historical situation,
despite the leeway it offered to anyone willing to breach certain aesthetical
conventions, allow him to go far enough? And how far, I asked, did he want
to go? Today, perhaps, I have to admit that from the beginning he sought
to conceive, to develop, to experiment with his own theater, that he had
his own vision of how creative, challenging dramatic art should be.
He had, of course, to work under
different circumstances; without the prospective working class or at least
anti-fascist and anti-monarchist public that Brecht sought to speak to
in the final years of the Weimar Republic. Or the real working-class public
that the pioneer of contemporary epic theater hoped to find, and sometimes
found, in the now defunct GDR. Zadek could only address, primarily, a bourgeois
and petty-bourgeois public, and this during and, since 1989, in the aftermath
of the Cold War. His, to my mind, most astonishing development of new forms
(if not, as some would say, gimmicks and provocative outrages) occured
in the early 1970s; an often leftish, but aethetically aware student public
was added, by a policy of affordable tickets, to his more saturated public;
for Zadek, it may have been another reason to try himself in the old game
invented by dadaists, surrealists and others - the game of épater
la bourgeoisie, shocking the bourgeoisie.(2)
But May 1968 was only very recent history; in Germany, the government of
Willy Brandt, formed by social-democrats and so-called Linksliberale (progressive
or "left liberals") had ended an era of post-war restaurative, conservative
dominance; the psycho-social climate in the West German republic was changing
and many younger members of the bourgeois, sick of the fascist past of
their parents and grandparents, was changing with it. So in a way
the typical theater audience was divided; the older generation could still
be provoked; the younger one enjoyed provocations. If the provocations
had taken the form of preaching (which they didn't), Zadek would have,
in a way, preached to the partly saved and the saved.
But what were the subtexts of his
choice of authors and plays, of his breaches of aesthetic and "moral" conventions,
of his provocations, in short? It would be wrong to dismiss the fact that
the late nineteen-sixties were the time of the hippies in California, of
the spread of LSD and marijuana among the young (especially, university
students), of attempted sexual revolution (symbolized by Kommune One, and
more aptly, by a renewed reception of the writings of Wilhelm Reich). Even
among "dogmatic left-wing students" (as they would be called by their anarcho-spontaneist
friends), so-called free love, that is to say, changing sexual partners,
and a very obvious concern with what was called "the emancipation of the
individual" were in the forefront, overriding in practice other, more theoretical
concerns (with "revolution"). I believe that Zadek was at the time a
theater director who was still deeply aware of the traumatizing Nazi genocide
but also of the rigid "character armour" that was socio-psychologically
prevalent among the older generation that had been deeply and often eagerly
infected by Nazism. To him, and not only to him, that was a generation
which continued, in the post-war era, to embrace cleanliness, intolerance,
law and order, xenophobia, racism and the officially preached ideology
of naive "anti-communism". Deep down in him, a fear may have existed, a
fear shared by such thinkers and authors as Alfred Andersch, an 'anti-ideological'
writer of the new post-WWII generation that included Boell, Grass, and
others, and a man who made clear that his determination to be a political
author grew from his awareness that a resurgence of fascism was not impossible.(3)
The same was, more less, true of Jean Amery, who wrote of the possibility
that "the Rightists" will find again the support of the "masses."(4)
I think that it was, in part at
least, as a consequence of his fears or forebodings that Zadek was choosing
his path, his tendency, his orientation as a director.(5)
In other words, my hypothesis is that through his work as a theater director,
Zadek pre-consciouly or consciously tried to subvert what he must have
taken to be the socio-psychological foundation of fascism, the "authoritarian
character." Insofar as he, like others, may not have been able or
willing to preclude any resurgence of fascism (albeit in a new guise)
in Germany, it seems to have been paramount to him to support and
strengthen, by way of his intervention in the theater, exactly those
socio-cultural tendencies that "freed" (many people thought) the individual,
including the diverse attempts to shatter "rigid" sexual auto- and
hetero-images and just as rigid sexual "mores." He could do so by borrowing
from the past - the commedia dell'arte where it allowed grotesque sexual
allusions; Shakespearean theater where it was still semi-medieval, and
in that sense far from the Philistine "modern" inhibitions of the
petty-bourgeoisie and even the morally petty-bourgeoisified sectors of
the bourgeoisie (especially the Lutheran and Calvinist ones).
Is this at the root of what his
prude, conservative critics but also certain "Orthodox" Marxists branded
as decadent if not obscene at the time when reviewing the performance
of plays he had chosen to stage?(6)
Chosen to stage, we noticed, in a way that freely if not shockingly turned
against what in Germany they call Texttreue, faithful"respect
for the [unaltered, unedited] text." Was it true that as a rule, he turned
against the prevailing current by again and again violating the text of
dramas quite frivolous, in order to make them suit his ends and respond
to the 'social need' of, above all, sexual liberation that he perceived?
Or did it remain the exception? And did not other themes, other problems
come into the forefront, as well?
At any rate, I have the impression
that the daring breaches of theatrical conventions, the formal risks incurred
by Zadek as a stage director had exactly the purpose of suggesting
that he was creating “popular theater” – theater that was not “abstractly
intellectual,” not “dull” (as some might have said) and “didactic, but
“thrilling” and “speaking to the senses.” But in this way, very much
like all or most other stage directors in Western societies today, he was
still creating theater for a theater-going public in a Western country
in the 20th century, that is to say, for a minority. As suggested already
above, it was not necessarily an entirely bourgeois (and petit-bourgeois)
public. But certainly a minority of people who, for diverse reasons, would
attend theatrical performances. Which, "quite naturally," the "realists"
will say, leaves out (and thus fails to speak to) exactly that majority
which is formed by people who never or hardly ever do. In other words,
Zadek was willy-nilly creating “popular” theater that was performed not
for “the people” – the “masses,” the broad spectrum of “ordinary folk”
(as Shakespeare did, at least in the urban context which, at the time,
provided the main audience for theater troupes), but for a small, though
certainly heterogenous, part of the “people.” Some of them might
be genuinely interested in theater as an art form; others might be interested
in the social event that every performance, especially when staged by a
renowned ensemble and a “top-ranking” director, happens to become: a fetishized
event, dearly paid for, in terms of the ticket price, the clothes perhaps
bought for this special occasion, the dinner enjoyed in a (sometimes expensive)
restaurant after the show is over, in order to be with people of like standing
and exchange sentiments, impressions, clever or not so clever thoughts
about the events. Of course such motivations might overlap or “interfere”
with each other. It is clear that such theater-goers (not all of them being
necessarily educated, or even “erudite”) would tend to behave, during a
performance. But is also clear that booing and other signs of disagreement,
of being frustrated, shocked, or scandalized belonged, as an integral part,
to typical Zadek performances: the shocking visual element, the moment
of scandal that would irritate the more conservative or narrow-minded among
his public was seldom lacking. Yes, it is probably true: Zadek may have
cherished this success which was the sucess of somebody who was ready,
as I have pointed out already, to shock and “provoke the bourgeoisie.”
The bourgeoisie – especially the grande bourgeoisie – of course can take
a lot of visual ‘scandal’ (especially if it is sexually colored). But,
if we take a specific example, no one can deny that it hardly existed in
Bochum when Zadek experienced his break-through as a top-notch theater
director, a daring experimenter. So we may ask: Wasn’t it, after
all, the upper middle class, the more saturated layer of the petit-bourgeoisie
that reacted in the desired manner; showing a certain reaction of the voyeur,
of a person who sways between eagerness to see the ‘forbidden’ and a readiness
to display ‘shock’ and ‘aversion’? Of course the student public, at the
time (and these were the 1970s), must have witnessed such aversion gleefully
or scornfully, or perhaps, highly amused. No doubt, in a provincial
‘center’ like Bochum, a town where the mining industry had gone down the
drain and the car industry had been unable to fill the gap, where workers
and the unemployed formed the majority of citizens but would hardly be
found among the public seated in the Schauspielhaus, the typical public
of ‘respectable’ people, on the one hand, and youthful people (mostly students
and young university teachers), on the other, must have been polarized.
Sufficient proof that such an aesthetic strategy occasioned a “prise de
conscience” (Bewusstwerdung)? And if so, what did those Zadek "reached"
by his aesthetic strategy and his choice of plays become conscious of?
At this point it may be useful to
recall that for Antonio Gramsci, the “grande intellectuel’ expressed the
philosophy of the dominant classes in its most refined form, high above
the average thought of his times, but certainly in a way which would not
aim at a fundamental change, an attempt to overthrow or replace the social
order and the dominant systems of thoughts which express it and correspond
to it.
To be intellectually fascinating
can be part of an aesthetic credo; it can turn thoughts and thought processes
presented on stage into a “culinary” aesthetic experience but not
much more. In that sense, ther intellectually intriguing might well go
hand in hand with what is visually intriguing and thus, “culinary.” The
intellectual challenge can, of course, go further than that. What
the playwright had to say, in addressing “his public,” and what the stage
director, in cooperation with “his” ensemble, translates into movements,
gestures, words spoken, can be of major importance, both relying on and
subsuming the physical presence of actors, their acting, the visual and
auditory impact of it.
As I noted briefly further above,
repeating a well-known fact, Brecht aimed at insight produced in
both actors and public. He aimed at the unleashing of thought processes.
And the ‘entertainment’, the enjoyment or Vergnuegen produced by the performance
was to be, above all, the aesthetical ‘Vergnuegen’ of comprehension effected
in the mind of the viewer who was also a listener and a thinking person.
His comprehension, basically, was due to his active reception of a play.
And therefore, to his own thought activity.
It is significant that Zadek apparently
felt more attracted to Heiner Mueller than to Brecht, and more to Shakespeare
(as he saw him) than to either of them.
The difference between Heiner Mueller,
a ‘disciple’ of sorts, of Brecht, and Brecht, is obviously rooted in their
different attitude towards the ‘emotional’ impact plays may have. Mueller
obviously opted for a position that relates both to Artaud and to
Brecht. The sub-conscious interacts with reason; montage matters.
The (almost?) uncontrolled surge of emotions, the violence of visual
images, thrown into the imaginary world conjured up by the actors involved
with a Heiner Mueller text, push aside calm reflection; they make impossible
any distanced viewing; they subject the thread of reason (never, a red
thread, but a muddled yarn) to the unsettling impact of word cascades and
theatrical confrontations that we are expected to take as the trace of
our contemporary history written with blood. The contingency, and the barbarous
quality of history are what we are to “re-experience” on stage (and thus,
to see, feel, and “think”, as a collective theater public). There is no
pretension as to a logic or goal of history, or a privileged “subject”
of historical “progress.” The idea itself, of progress, seems to have been
discarded. History is a monstrous reality. And so is man? A monster? “Hell”
– that’s “the Others”?
We can see here that Heiner Mueller
(even though ostensibly, in his private conversations, he would show a
limited “critical solidarity” with his country, the G.D.R., even in the
mid-1980, shortly before its collapse) was not only clothed in black clothes
– his thoughts were deeply black, his sarcasm, his scepticism full of undertones
that were connected with the experience of a specific social reality. First
of all, of course, that of post-Stalinist “real socialism” (“the
perversion of an old human dream”, as Robert Kramer used to say about it).
But also, and ever more so, it was the dark shadow of the Cold War, of
the nuclear nightmare hovering above us that turned him pessimist. And
the desperation that sprang from his percerption of the slick and highly
effective globalization under way which prompted him to quip that the citizens
of India "would have to drink a lot of Coca Cola" before they would be
fed up with the Western consumerist model and the mirage of an American
way of life.(7)
Brecht had been, to a large extent,
a playwright of the 1930s, of a period, that is, that had seen revolutions
go on in Mexico (1910), in China (1911), in Russia (1917), that had seen
revolutionary social struggles go on in Bavaria, Bremen, Berlin, in Hungary,
in Torino, that was confronted with the Spanish civil war, that experienced
a revolutionary upsurge in India and even more so in China, that saw other,
less openly waged but still very relevant struggles going on in the U.S.
and in Latin American societies. His intervention as a playwright aimed
at a concrete public, at the subaltern classes. At the working class, as
he was hoping to strenghten its impulse to act consciously, as a historic
subject, a protagonist of a fight for a new, more just, more democratic
society.
If it makes sense to speak of ‘conjunctures
politiques,’ it it possible to say that (despite the rise of Fascism in
Europe) Brecht has been, very largely, the playright of an ascending ‘conjuncture
politique’ while Heiner Mueller has been the writer of a ‘downturn,’ of
a ‘time of disillusionment’ – at least from the point of view of the hoped
for emancipation of the working class. His plays subvert, and question
emancipative hopes, rather than providing calm and rational arguments for
emancipative action. In that sense, they also sever the link between theatrical
production and social práxis that was a central objective
which Brecht was again and again committed to turn into a factual reality.
As both aesthetic and intellectual
endeavours, Mueller’s plays end up being a sophisticated entertainment
for quite a different public than Brecht had in mind. Heiner Mueller, a
critic of both ‘real socialism’ and globalized capitalism, ends up creating
feelings of impassés; he ends up producing despair; he is not speaking
for action, and if we are not content to just feel the nightmares
and dead-end alleys supposedly in front of us, we may arrive at reflection,
rather than action.
Does it situate such theater in
the idealist camp, the camp of pure thought and pure aesthetic sensations,
the camp that defies the unity of theory and practice so important to Brecht
and others like him?
If Zadek, as a “successful” and
“innovative” director, chose to be close to the position of Heiner Mueller
rather than that of Brecht (who, after all, was considered “dull” where
he was deemeed to be “merely didactic” and “interesting, against his very
own intention, where he was above all ‘poetic’ ”), this is explained just
in part by his fondness of Shakespeare – and the difference between Shakespeare
at his own time and Zadek in the last quarter of the 20th century
conversely throws much light on a director whose preference for the important
17 th century English playwright did not stop him from falling short of
Shakespeare's achievement. Let us not be mistaken – neither Heiner Mueller
nor Peter Zadek made themselves the intellectual of a “rising class,” as
Shakespeare had been in his time. Brecht, in a different way, had also
referred to Shakespeare: he had “actualized” or shifted Shakespearean figures
and themes into the context of 20th century capitalism, into the scenery
of its struggles and contradictions. His “lax” and thus creative ways of
using “intellectual property” lead to a re-usage of Shakespearean
material, for contemporary purposes, especially the purpose of shedding
light on class relations (and thus, directly or indirectly, on the
class struggle). Brecht's purpose never was never to “present Shakespeare’s
plays” – faithfully, as certain directors have tried to do, or by “modernizing”
them and making them “appealing” to a modern public, as Zadek did. But
Zadek, the director who became so well-known, for his very aptitude to
shock and to let his stagings appear as obscene, was not interested, above
all (or even exclusively), in aesthetics or in achieving a reputation as
innovative force in the German and European theater: Not unlike Brecht,
he had a goal, a purpose, a project, too. No, not the revolution. The emancipation,
the freeing of the individual from old psycho-social fetters, from reactionary
stereotypes, authoritarian mores. He was more optimistic, more positive
toward life, the living, the future than Heiner Mueller. Perhaps of necessity.
Perhaps in order to cope with and ward off the effects of a trauma, the
Nazi genocide. Whether he succeeded in achieving such a (admittedly hypothetical)
aim, is an open question. The "socio-culture" changed, in the late 1960s,
in the 70s. The supposed "sexual revolution" took its course (towards commercialization,
commodification, the trivial - and once again, the return to the prudish.)
Whether consciously desired by Zadek or not, his work as a director contributed
to the new, emerging "current" in West German society, strengthening it.
First of all and especially in the social layers among which Zadek found
his audience.
NOTES
(1) “Wie Shakespeare, in dessen Tradition er sich sah, suchte
er populaeres Theater mit hohem intellektuellen Anspruch zu verbinden”
[Like Shakespeare, in whose tradition he saw himself moving on, he tried
to merge popular theater and "lofty intellectual aims" (i.e. intellectual
seriosity)] - this was the way his achievement was summed up by the obituary-like
WDR 5 news that was reporting Peter Zadek’s death on July 30, 2009.
(2) To shock the bourgeoisie - this was something Zadek did from the
very start, as a theater director, even when it was at first only a student
ensemble performing Sweeney Agonistes by T.S. Eliot and Salomé
by
Oscar Wilde in the Old Vic Theater in London.. "L'actrice dansait pratiquement
nue, et à cette époque, à Londres, ce n'était
pas possible", racontait-il à Colette Godard pour
Le Monde, en
1996." (Fabienne Darge, "Peter Zadek / Metteur e scène allemand"
[obituary], in: Le Monde, 9-10 August 2009, p.17
(3) Alfred Andersch stated his point quite clearly: "Ich moechte mit
meiner Buechern Geschichte herstellen, [...] Geschichtsbewusstsein wecken
[...] weil ich schon wieder die Gefahr eines neuen Faschismus sehe." [I
want to produce history with my books,... consciousness of history... because
I already see again the danger of a new fascism.] (Quoted in a ZeitZeichen
transmission commemorating Alfred Andersch, broadcast on Feb. 21, 2010
by WDR5 - Cologne, Germany, a PBS-like public broadcasting station. Alfred
Andersch expressed this fear that a new fascism was not any longer impossible
in (then, of course West-) Germany in the context of the Berufsverbot
policy
because "society, once again, is divided in guards and guarded ones" (Waechter
und Bewachte). A prophetic utterance, given the increase in control or
surveillance of all activities of "private citizens" in the European Union
and the U.S., today.
Let us not shut our eyes to it. In many respects, we witness
developments that surpass almost everything that Orwell was able to foresee:
a paranoid obsession with "security" among leading military and political
figures, a hysterical, yet professionally automatized effort to collect
data on almost everyone, prophylactically, including fingerprints,
iris scans, DNS material, individual smells attached to items taken from
persons. In many cases (such as in the case of journalists, critical
writers and artists, civil rights workers, environmentalists, leftists
and all sorts of dissidents), the data collecting and screening "machinery"
of the State and its diverse branches also ammasses data obtained through
phone tapping and control of e-mail traffic; in international communication
and when using the internet, every citizen is automatically a prophylactic
target. In addition, everyone of us is subjected to more and more widespread,
and soon perhaps omnipresent video surveillance in the streets, in
public buildings, in malls, supermarkets, in railway stations and airports
and hotels, in buses, tram cars, and trains. Also, let us not fail to mention
the tracking of changes of location by individuals based on registration
of mobile phone use (its time and location) but also thanks to toll gates,
license-plate scans on inter-state highways, etc. This again concerns everyone.
(In the Netherlands, this latter form of tracking our movements has already
been tied to the proposal to let car-driving street users pay for roa use
according to the number of miles driven.) Furthermore, let us point out
that parallel to their use in planes, we have begun to see the use of
black boxes in many new cars (a trend started in the U.S. and copied by
car-makers in Europe, with an astonishing option of present and potential
mis-use, including registration of words spoken on board, words that could
be transmitted to another listener, unnoticed by the speaker). The combined
effect of these measures, even though largely taken at random and without,
by and large, targeting specific individuals, amount to the construction
of the transparent citizen, "seen through" (or so the technocrats
will believe) by the instances of "Law and Order," by the old Leviathan,
the bureaucratic, turbo-capitalistically oriented State. The internet,
and the options of data collection about its users that it offers to private
corporations and the State, provides perhaps the most frightening potential
for the lasting destruction of a safe haven of the individual. And quickcams,
attached to computers, in conjunction with broadband internet access offer
Leviathan the perfect option to listen in to our conversations at home
while taking pictures without having to install little microphones and
mini-cameras, in the way that spies did in another, less "digital" age.
(4) Amery wrote in 1971, in the context of his critique of anarcho-spontaneist
forms of protest that included stone-throwing (usually in response
to unwarranted and often rough dissolution of peaceful protests by the
police, a fact ommitted by the right-wing yellow press which gleefully
highlighted the 'chaotic occurrences' in its frontpages), that "the Right
... is going to wave with the scarecrow of chaos and, you can bet on it,
they will find willing listeners in the democratically insufficiently educated
'masses' who care above all for quietness and order" (i.e. law and order).
He added, "I cannot rid myself of my fear that some day the 'conciousness-raisers'
[of the student-left] will recognize [...] that they were
the ones who created the false consciousness [of the Left
as a source of chaos] in the masses which fascism has always
known how to use with superior cleverness for its own purpose." The quoted
statement reads as follows, in German: "[Es] wird die Rechte [...]
mit der Vogelscheuche des Chaos winken und dabei, man verlasse sich darauf,
in Deutschland das Ohr der demokratisch unzulaenglich erzogenen, nur auf
Ruhe und Ordnung bedachten 'Massen' finden. Ich komme nicht los von der
Befuerchtung, es werden eines Tages die [linken, studentischen, vermeintlichen]
'Bewusstseinsbildner' zur schrecklichen Erkenntnis kommen, dass sie es
waren, die in den Massen jenes falsche Bewusstsein [naemlich das Bild der
Linken als Verursacher oder Ausloeser des Chaos] aufgebaut haben, welches
der Faschismus noch immer mit ueberlegenem Geschick seinen Zwecken dienstbar
gemacht hat." - Jean Amery, "Der Identitaetsverlust der Neuen Linken" (1969),
in: ibid., Widersprueche, Stuttgart Klett) 1971, p. 191.
(5) Or to put it more cooly, what was emotionally and intellectually
at the root of his choice was, in all likelihood, his analysis of the course
the "Bonn republic" had taken under Adenauer and Globke, under Heusinger
and the secret service professionals as well as the diplomats that were
serving the "new democracy" after having served already under Hitler so
bravely, so efficiently. It was a course that the next head of the republic,
Kiesinger, continued unashamedly, even when he was slapped, in view of
his Nazi past, by Beate Klarsfeld.
(6) Comments that certain scenes or elements which were not uncharacteristic
of the performances directed by Zadek were "obscene" would be uttered frequently
in the early 1970s, both in private, by theater-goers who sometimes spoke
of this with disgust, and of course in the provincial newspapers. Nudity
on the stage was still scandalous, and to highlight it in the way Zadek
might do, seemed pornographic to some. (See also footnote 2 on Zadek's
early beginnings as a director in London where he employed for the first
time nudity as a theatrical device.)
(7) Heiner Mueller, in a conversation in Aachen, shortly before the
demise of the GDR.
|