The German Genius

than that, the lives who suffered for those ideals. “Obituary” formed a kind of brackets with “Inventory.”
    Reunification also saw the emergence of younger poets, many living in Berlin, such as Barbara Köhler and Durs Grünbein, whose Grauzone morgens (Grayzone in the Morning; 1988), was rapturously received, though Porzellan: Poem vom Untergang meiner Stadt (Porcelain: Poem on the Death of My City; 2005), about the firebombing of Dresden, received more mixed reviews. 43
    Bearing in mind where we started this chapter—with the Mitscherliches’ conclusions—this brief survey of postwar literature confirms that the realm of mourning has now been explored by German authors. Not necessarily in a way that will please everyone, but if outsiders are ever to understand modern Germans, it is to their imaginative writers that we must first turn. Modern German literature goes far beyond “elegant entertainment.”
    T HEATER AS C ULTURE , N OT E NTERTAINMENT
     
    In the realm of theater—to include opera and dance—the names of Brecht, Piscator, Reinhardt, Laban, and Jooss led the world up to and across World War II. Immediately after the war, Piscator interested himself in a new form of theater that was to resonate across Europe, especially in Britain in, for example, the works of David Hare. Notable examples of this “documentary theater” were Rolf Hochhuth’s Der Stellvertreter ( The Deputy ; 1963), which tackled the unfortunate role of Pope Pius XII in doing next to nothing to stop the Holocaust, and Die Juristen ( The Lawyers ; 1979), which heaped such odium on Hans Filbinger, the prime minister of Baden-Württemberg, that he was forced to resign.
    Whereas Piscator had been the equal of Brecht in the Weimar years and was more successful than him in the United States, in Germany it was Brecht who developed a clear edge. As both a playwright and director of the Berliner Ensemble from 1949 until his death in 1956, Brecht’s innovative stagecraft was so powerful as to be felt right across Europe. His often austere sets distilled the drama, reinforced by his concept of Verfremdung (alienation), an attempt to make the familiar unfamiliar, so audiences experienced alienation, and were not simply passive onlookers.
    But Brecht’s was by no means the only tradition. The most notable alternative was the theater of “ordinary people.” Known as the Volksstück (“people’s play,” following Lessing), it concentrated on postwar German working-class life, the main authors being Martin Sperr (1944–2002), Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1945–82), and Botho Strauss (b. 1944). 44 Nor can we ignore the tradition of Büchner and Wedekind, of Max Reinhardt and Fritz Lang—experimentation and spectacle of a type that is almost unthinkable outside Germany. 45 Outstanding among these plays are Peter Weiss’s overwhelming drama located in a lunatic asylum but depicting events of the French Revolution, Die Verfolgung und Ermordung Jean Paul Marats durch die Schauspielgruppe des Hospizes zu Charenton unter Anleitung des Herrn de Sade ( The Persecution and Assassination of Jean Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade , usually known simply as Marat/Sade ; 1964). The genre survives in Heiner Müller’s seven-and-a-half hour Hamlet-Maschine , produced at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin in 1990.
    Since then, German-language theater has boasted two innovative playwrights difficult to categorize other than to say that they exhibit late Expressionist tendencies and other modernist influences, first identified by the critics Marcel Reich-Ranicki and Helmut Heissenbüttel. The Swiss Friedrich Dürrenmatt (1921–90) is best known for Der Besuch alten Dame (translated as The Visit ; 1955), which Michael Patterson and Michael Huxley say is the most widely performed postwar drama in Germany. The main character is a wealthy woman, much face-lifted, who visits her hometown to seek revenge on the boy—now an old man—who had seduced her and denied he was the father of her child, when they were both young.
    Since Dürrenmatt’s death in 1990, his mantle has been taken over by Peter Handke. He had already made his mark in the 1960s with the Sprechstücke (speak-ins) Publikumsbeschimpfung ( Offending the Audience ) and Selbstbezichtigung ( Self-Accusation ), which presented an empty stage in plays without apparent plot, characterization, or (at times) dialogue.