Tankred Dorst

• Born: December 19, 1925
• Birthplace: Oberlind, Germany

Other Literary Forms

Although Tankred Dorst is known primarily as a dramatist, he has written essays and other prose works that he often used as springboards for his plays. In addition to serious drama, he has extensively written and produced plays for children and fables for grownups, some of which were performed in puppet theaters. Dorst is also known for his radio plays and scripts for television, and in the 1970’s and 1980’s, he distinguished himself in the German film industry by writing and directing motion pictures. Dorst has supplied libretti for several operas and ballets and translated several plays from the French and English. His 1962 article “Die Bühne ist der absolut Ort” (the stage is the unequivocal place) contains Dorst’s views of the theater, its role, its relationship to reality, and the theatrical devices he employs.

Achievements

At a time when only a handful of German dramatists were able to contribute anything original for the stage, Tankred Dorst—though inspired by already established German ( Bertolt Brecht) as well as by some foreign, especially French, models ( Jean Giraudoux, Jean Anouilh, and Eugène Ionesco)—appeared in the German theater as a fresh and independent voice endowed with an innate sense of theater and stage technique. Unflinchingly, Dorst persevered in cultivating his vision, often in face of critical or political pressure to “take sides,” especially in plays dealing with controversial figures or issues. That he was quite successful in his pursuit is demonstrated by prizes and awards received not only in Germany but also abroad. His theater debut, Gesellschaft im Herbst (autumn party), won for him the prize of the city of Mannheim (in 1959), which was followed by the Villa Massimo stipend for a sojourn in Rome. Other awards came almost yearly: the Gerhart Hauptmann Prize in 1964, the prize of the city of Munich in the same year and again in 1969, the prize of the city of Florence and the Theater Prize of Lisbon in 1970, the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts Prize for Literature in 1983, and the Royal Film Institute of Belgium’s L’Age d’Or award in 1984.

Biography

Tankred Dorst was born on December 19, 1925, in Oberlind near Sonneberg in Thuringia. His father was an engineer and manufacturer. As a teenager, Dorst became fascinated with the theater and dreamed of becoming a theater dramaturge. In 1942, as a seventeen-year-old high school student, he was drafted into the army. He was taken prisoner of war and placed in various English and American camps in Belgium, Great Britain, and the United States. Released in 1947, he finished his interrupted high school studies (Abitur) in 1950 and then studied literature, art history, and drama at the Universities of Bamberg and Munich, without getting a degree. After 1952, he resided in Munich.

Dorst went through his theater apprenticeship while working with a students’ puppet theater (Das kleine Spiel, the little play) in Schwabing, a bohemian section in Munich. He detailed his experiences there in a collection of essays, Geheimnis der Marionette (1957; the secret of the puppet), and in Auf kleiner Bühne: Versuche mit Marionetten (1959; on a small stage: experiments with puppets).

Soon, however, Dorst was acclaimed as a new talent in the German postwar theater, first gaining attention through a prize given by the city of Mannheim for his draft of Gesellschaft im Herbst and then by having the play produced almost simultaneously in several German theaters. Even more successful were his one-act plays: Freedom for Clemens, The Curve, and Great Tirade at the Town-Wall, all three performed in more than 150 theaters as well as translated into various languages. His new versions of some old plays (Ludwig Tieck’s Der gestiefelte Kater, 1797, pr. 1844; Puss-in-Boots, 1913-1914) and legends such as the old French love story of Aucassin and Nicolette (Die Mohrin) gave Dorst an opportunity to display his mastery of the stage by intermingling the most diverse theatrical techniques and devices, from play-within-a-play to masks and variety-show sketches and interludes. Die Mohrin (the Saracen girl) he also revised as a libretto for an opera.

In 1967, at the time of widespread student unrest in Germany and elsewhere, Dorst became a center of controversy with his new play, Toller: Szenen aus einer deutschen Revolution (Toller: scenes from a German revolution). Ernst Toller (1893-1939), a great German poet and dramatist of expressionism, took part in a short-lived but violent revolution at the end of World War I and was elected president of the Bavarian Soviet Republic, which was soon suppressed by the right-wing militarists. Condemned to prison for a relatively short term (unlike other revolutionaries, who were summarily executed), Toller, after the rise of the Nazis, became a refugee in the United States, where he committed suicide in 1939. Based partly on Toller’s autobiographical memoirs, Dorst portrays Toller as a sincere but muddle-headed idealist who plays a role of a revolutionary as if he were an actor on the stage; with such a leader, the revolution was bound to fail. The widow of another prominent revolutionary presented in the play accused Dorst of having falsified the facts to suit his theatrical idea, and students and the leftist press claimed that he had exposed to ridicule the whole concept of revolution. In spite of, or because of, the controversy, the play was staged by numerous theaters in Germany and abroad, and a version of it ran on German television. Dorst proved that he was not afraid to create social and political debate by creating other semidocumentary plays, among which Eiszeit (ice age) was just as contentious. It treats Knut Hamsun(1859-1952), Norwegian novelist and dramatist, the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature (1920), who, when Germans occupied Norway during World War II, sided with the collaborationist government of Vidkun Quisling and after the war was locked in an old people’s home.

In 1970, Dorst was invited to spend some time as a writer-in-residence at Oberlin College in Ohio, and in 1973 he lectured at universities in Australia and New Zealand. Starting in 1974, Dorst worked together with his life companion, Ursula Ehler, on a long history of an upper-class German family that is in part rooted in the experiences of his own family. This family chronicle yielded several self-contained plays as well as prose works, television dramas, and films.

In the 1970’s and 1980’s, Dorst achieved a considerable success as a film director, his films gaining honors at various festivals. He has been elected to a number of German academies and is a prominent member of the writers’ association, PEN. In 1990, Dorst was awarded the prestigious Büchner Prize. In 1994, he was conferred the title Dramatist of the Year by German drama critics.

Analysis

Tankred Dorst’s plays are distinguished above all by their craftsmanship and theatrical sensibility, which arise no doubt from Dorst’s early preoccupation with puppet theater and his conviction that the stage is an instrument through which a dramatist can filter his creative ideas. With his first performed play, Gesellschaft im Herbst, Dorst exhibited his talent for presenting not only the characters of his play but also the setting and situations in which they find themselves as a theatrical artifice. Only rarely does he allow “the truth of life” or “the tragic sense of disillusionment” to be sensed from behind the scrim that he intentionally places between his play and the audience. Although this first play may remind one of Jean Giraudoux’s La Folle de Chaillot (pr., pb. 1945; The Madwoman of Chaillot, 1947) in its effete, aristocratically seedy milieu as well as its burlesquing of the material greed of the aggressive commercial class, Dorst’s play fundamentally differs from the older model. His play seems to be concerned less with the conflict between old values and twentieth century avariciousness and barbarism than it is with the prevalent human tendency to prefer illusion to reality, the ease with which people are ready to believe in the most preposterous suggestions—in this case, that an enormous treasure lies buried in the foundations of a castle. Thus, from the very beginning, Dorst was less interested in psychological realism than in playing out universal themes by way of theatrical magic.

Dorst’s next performed dramas reiterate some of his basic ideas, which are expertly developed in three one-act plays that immediately followed. In Freedom for Clemens, he subtly manipulates the conceit that human beings can readily be convinced by others to accept the conditions of slavery as being those of freedom; in The Curve, the common assumption of social order and purpose in the world is quickly turned upside down to reveal a vision of frightening absurdity; and in Great Tirade at the Town-Wall, the authorities toy with ordinary citizens until they are reduced to ranters lamenting their fate with no one to hear them.

Dorst’s dramas, however, should not be reduced to a few overriding ideas, for this would deny his virtuosity, the skill with which he constructs his plays. The Countess de Villars-Brancas in Gesellschaft im Herbst appears at first to be easy prey for unscrupulous treasure diggers and other social vultures and hangers-on. Soon, however, she is revealed as a metaphor for an “autumn society” that has outlived its usefulness and is ready to decamp, but not before the rest of society’s dregs and their frenzied “dance around the Golden Calf” are exposed. In Freedom for Clemens, Dorst underscores the Everyman features of Clemens, who is imprisoned for an undisclosed transgression, by giving him and other actors in the play puppetlike movements. They are supposed, however, to possess the agility of jugglers and acrobats.

Although Dorst borrows from the French absurdist theater, the techniques employed in several of his plays hark back to the old Italian commedia dell’arte and beyond, including masks and plays-within-plays. The absence of seriousness on the surface of his plays is contradicted, however, by disturbing thoughts at their core. Thus in Freedom for Clemens, the question arises as to the meaning of freedom in general: If one is nestled comfortably in any one place, protected from viewing the outside world—like Clemens in his cell—and thus voluntarily relinquishing the freedom of often precarious commitment outside, preferring the safe containment within the four walls, is one then free or captive? Can one avoid seeing, by extension, parallel examples in the world at large? Is the word “freedom” merely a slogan to be placed on banners, a cliché without any deeper meaning?

The Curve

The grotesque one-act play The Curve is similarly disturbing. It presents two symbiotic brothers (one works with his hands, the other with his head, like Gogo and Didi in Samuel Beckett’s En attendant Godot, pb. 1952, pr. 1953; Waiting for Godot, 1954) who exist in an almost idyllic way at a dangerous bend in the road. They are creatures of ordinary, even cozy, domesticity who make their living from accidents that regularly happen at the curve. Their absurd profession—fashioning coffins for victims, burying them with proper ritual, repairing and then selling the victims’ cars—parodies respectable and industrious ways of making a living. The latest victim, a highly placed government official who ignored the brothers’ letters to him in reference to the dangerous curve, while appearing dead, suddenly recovers from the accident and pledges to remove the fatal hazard. At the prospect of losing their livelihood, the brothers murder the official and he is solemnly buried like the rest. The conditions whereby some people die and others benefit from their death are thus perpetuated. The farcical tone and the absurdity of the plot are underscored by the hypocritical rhetoric, the contrast between those who have “our best interests at heart,” on one hand, and the gruesomeness of the underlying reality, on the other.

Great Tirade at the Town-Wall

Great Tirade at the Town-Wall, which has as its source an ancient Chinese shadow play, immediately impresses the spectator with its simple but powerful setting, which recalls the Chinese costume plays by Bertolt Brecht. A fisher-woman beats against an enormous wall guarded by the imperial army, pleading that her soldier-husband be returned to her. Because he is dead, another soldier feigns to be her husband, and the imperial officers decide to have fun at the expense of the unfortunate woman. She is to prove that the man who claims to be the missing soldier is indeed her husband, for she is quite prepared—though knowing the truth—to take him as such. She fails, not because she cannot pretend, which she masterfully does, but because the passion with which she pursues her cause frightens the soldier away. Having lost, she laments her fate before the silent city wall.

Although some critics have seen in the play the metaphor of an ever-present barrier dividing those in power, who toy with other people’s lives, and the abject supplicants, who are always losers in their quest, other critics consider the central play-within-a-play representative of the perennial difficulty of establishing a mutual understanding between a man and a woman. The man flees from the all-embracing protectiveness of a strong, articulate woman to the more adventurous, albeit more dangerous, life of a soldier.

Toller

Dorst’s semidocumentary plays, based on politically engaged historical figures, made him a celebrated if controversial dramatist. Toller, as noted above, appeared at a critical point in the political and social life of Germany. After more than two decades of apparently acquiescing to the idea of “not shaking the boat,” accepting as normal the utter commercialization and even militarization of one Germany and the collectivization and Sovietization of the other, German young radicals clamored against all authority, proclaiming the necessity of wholesale social revolution. When Dorst branded Toller as a self-dramatizing idealist who plays roles from his own plays—notably Masse-Mensch (pr. 1920, pb. 1921; Masses and Man, 1924)—thus belying the bloody political as well as human reality of the revolution, that was more than the rebellious youth or liberal intellectual press could take. Students especially felt betrayed by a member of the intelligentsia from whom they would have expected support for their struggle for a more just society. When Dorst, in Toller, presented both sides of the uprising, showing the revolutionaries as well as the right-wing militarists to be contemptuous of human lives, the leftists charged that Dorst’s play had distorted the truth, advocating the bourgeois view of revolution as an aberration of normal social behavior.

Aside from its questionable political import, Toller succeeds as an effective though disconcerting spectacle: Scenes of political caucusing are placed against scenes of private life; impassioned humanitarian appeals against macabre scenes of anti-Semitic students masked with clownishly exaggerated Jewish noses chanting and dancing; and the servant girl’s indifference to her student lover’s attempt of raising her social conscience against executions and trials that in themselves mock justice and humanity. All these scenes, independently arranged in the Brechtian manner, dramatically reinforced with films, placards and oversized puppets, present a show of shattered dreams and painful nightmares.

Eiszeit

Dorst’s disdain for all preconceived political opinions and his disregard for the prevalent ideological pressure were made even more explicit in Eiszeit. The subject, a Quisling collaborator, was provocative, especially when the man in question was Knut Hamsun, an acknowledged giant of Norwegian and world literature. That there was no outright condemnation of the traitor was, to the majority, altogether appalling. Though Hamsun’s arrogance and contempt for democracy and his shameless recalcitrance and political perversity were in no way concealed in the play, there was at least a tinge of admiration for his “being true to himself,” for not yielding to this or that suggestion of what he should do or think. Dorst is interested in questions of morality, human decency, and integrity, but he loads the questions when he posits them in such a way that they appear somewhat blunted: Why, he asks, should a writer have deeper political insights than other citizens? Does literary fame have anything to do with a writer’s political and moral integrity? Eiszeit, however, is not as effective theater as Toller is. The young partisan, who is filled with hatred for the old writer and mopes around the old people’s home where Hamsun is kept under investigation, is supposed to be Hamsun’s antagonist and counterweight in the scale of social values and political morality. His enmity, however, is inadequately articulated, and his challenges in no way balance out the old man’s arguments; moreover, his suicide—an admission of defeat in the face of Hamsun’s fascinating impenetrability—is dramatically unconvincing. Ultimately, Dorst’s portrayal of Hamsun does not add much to the audience’s understanding of a man whose only regret is that he is now old and helpless, frozen in his “ice age.”

Der verbotene Garten

Another play that centers on a famous writer—one who, like Hamsun, evoked as much denunciation and ridicule as he did admiration—is Der verbotene Garten (the forbidden garden), which was first produced as a radio play and then, in 1984, as a stage drama. The work revolves around Gabriele D’Annunzio, the Italian poet, novelist, dramatist, and aviator. Physically unprepossessing, he cleverly cultivated his image as a great lover (his liaison with the famous actress Eleonora Duse was well publicized in his novel Il fuoco (1900; The Flame of Life, 1900) and a great national hero (based on his Fiume expedition in 1919). D’Annunzio’s “patriotic” exploits and his intimate friendship with Benito Mussolini contributed to the general rise of chauvinistic and fascistic sentiments in Italy after World War I.

The Family Plays

In the late 1970’s, Dorst, in cooperation with Ehler, wrote a number of plays dealing with a German family that were in part based on autobiographical details. The comedy Auf dem Chimborazo (on the Chimborazo) and his subsequent plays Die Villa (the villa) and Heinrich: Oder, Die Schmerzen der Phantasie (Henry: or, the pain of fantasy), in addition to his prose and television works, represent various stages in a long family chronicle, which depicts a well-to-do German family caught in the historical upheaval and catastrophic events of the crucial years between the 1920’s and the 1950’s. The destiny of Germany is juxtaposed to the fortunes of the family members, each with different political as well as social loyalties, biases, hopes, and preconceptions. Although Dorst continued to avoid making any judgments, political or otherwise, the underlying tone of these plays is darker, and a sense of pessimistic disillusionment has crept in. The characters in the family chronicle cannot learn from their painful experience but continue clinging to their self-deluding images until they perish, which seemingly they must. The chance to begin anew, either on a personal or a national level, has been frittered away, often through stubborn foolishness and a false sense of pride.

Merlin

What remains is an individual as well as a national wasteland, as Dorst makes clear in the subtitle to his monumental Arthurian spectacle, Merlin. Merlin is the story of the modern world: the bankruptcy of all utopian ideals. Consisting of ninety-seven scenes covering 375 pages, Merlin is a kaleidoscope composed with most diverse elements: fairy tales and comic-strip-like scenes, myth and farce, bits of dialogue and colorful but loose episodes, history and legend. Merlin, the Celtic magician, is the central character and at the same time the master of ceremonies who puts into motion this spectacular vision. To give the play its proper cosmic significance, Dorst introjects a Faustian bet that concerns nothing less than the destiny of humankind. The outcome is never in doubt, as the subtitle indicates. The human beings will senselessly destroy themselves in a chimerical ideological battle and leave this earth a wasteland.

That Dorst would gravitate toward television and cinema seemed natural. His dramatic flair, his large theatrical visions, are perhaps constrained by the physical confines of the stage. In whatever medium Dorst chooses to create, however, he will continue to astound his audiences with his inventiveness and theatrical mastery.

Later Plays

Dorst’s later plays turned minimalist in terms of plot and language. He based his play Korbes on a Grimm fairy tale, using it to convey a feminist message against male bullying. Korbes mistreats his housekeeper to such a degree that she finally leaves him, although he has gone blind. Korbes’s daughter replaces the housekeeper, but his bullying becomes even worse than before. The play does not offer any redemption. As the curtain falls, the male protagonist is thrashing around with his stick, while his daughter avoids getting hit.

His Herr Paul is based on the slogan “Who lives, irritates.” The protagonist, Mr. Paul, does not want to irritate and lives a totally passive life in an old soap factory that Mr. Helm wants to renovate and convert into a coin-operated laundry. Helm and his business partner want to evict Mr. Paul from his residence, but their rantings are in vain. Mr. Paul’s passive aggressiveness wins out against modern enterprise.

Die Schattenlinie (the shadow line) deals with neonationalism and racism in modern Germany: The liberal protagonist Malthus is confronted by the fact that his son Jens has murdered a black man from Sierra Leone. Malthus defends his liberal philosophy that has been defeated by his own son. In Nach Jerusalem (travel to Jerusalem), a group of outcasts from society living in the basement of a hotel under construction show through their insane actions and demonstrations that they will reach their “New Jerusalem,” a place of redemption and happiness. Die Legende vom armen Heinrich (the legend of poor Henry) is an anachronistic reenactment of the legend of a medieval knight who is cured of leprosy by the love of a pure young girl. Although often dealing with issues of public concern, such as neo-nationalism and racism, Dorst’s late plays have become increasingly private and mystic in subject matter and dramatic representation.

Bibliography

Giles, Steve. “The Anxiety of Influence of Tankred Dorst’s Deutsche Stücke.” In A Radical Stage: Theatre in Germany in the 1970’s and 1980’s, edited by W. G. Sebald. New York: Berg, 1988. Deals with Dorst’s political commitment and the politicization of the West German stage in the 1970’s and 1980’s.

Hayman, Ronald, ed. The German Theater: A Symposium. New York: Barnes & Noble, 1975. Symposium proceedings dealing with German theater of the 1970’s.

Innes, Christopher D. Modern German Drama: A Study in Form. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1979. A monograph that devotes approximately eight pages to Tankred Dorst.