August Strindberg and Modern German Drama

Abstract

WHILE Henrik Ibsen's influence on the generation of German dramatists of the last decades of the nineteenth century is a matter of common knowledge, August Strindberg's contribution to more modern writers of drama in Germany is practically unknown in America. Even those critics who have attempted to interpret recent European drama to an English-speaking public, however well informed they are as to the nature and extent of Ibsen's influence, give an inadequate and distorted picture of Strindberg. They make, at best, but a superficial estimate of his dramas, whose aims they either misunderstand or misinterpret. In Germany, on the other hand, critical opinion is clarifying and seems ready to assign to Strindberg the same position of importance for the German drama of the first decades of the twentieth century that Ibsen occupied in the years immediately preceding 1900. It seems by no means premature, then, to make a plea in our country for a better understanding of the work of this outstanding Scandinavian genius. Naturally, this brief sketch can scarcely expect to do justice to the most tragic figure in modern European literature and the greatest dramatist of his generation. It hopes, however, to make clear that August Strindberg must not be represented merely as an imitator of Ibsen, nor simply as one of the many forerunners of the naturalistic movement, but as a highly original genius, who became one of the main foreign influences on the German drama of expressionism. When a literary manual publishes the commonplace comment that modern German drama was formed by Kleist and Biichner, Grabbe and Hebbel, Ibsen and Hauptmann, Strindberg and Wedekind, we are struck by the fact that four of these dramatists, Ibsen, Hauptmann, Kleist, and Hebbel, have attracted international attention, sometimes even out of proportion to their actual accomplishment, whereas the other four, Strindberg, Wedekind, Biichner, and Grabbe, have aroused little, or at least only belated, interest outside their own country. In the case of Strindberg, numerous circumstances have stood in his way both at home and abroad. Prejudice, arising from the unfortunate conditions of his distraught life and his inconstant and contradictory character, still blinds many of his