Martin Walser. The Development as Dramatist 1950–1970 by Anthony Edward Waine

Abstract

368 Comparative Drama Anthony Edward Waine. Martin Walser. The Development as Dramatist 1950-1970. Bonn: Bouvier Verlag, 1978. Pp. 394. DM 48. Martin Walser is one of a very small number of contemporary writers in German whose literary reputations derive almost equally from novels or novellas and dramas. Only the Austrians Peter Handke and Thomas Bernhard, together with Max Frisch and perhaps Günter Grass, are similarly at home in both genres. Walser has tended to alternate between writing prose and dramatic works, and it is therefore no coincidence that his two most recent works, Das Sauspiel (1975) and Ein fliehendes Pferd (1978), were drama and novella, respectively. These two works have been widely acclaimed by German critics, underlining the convic­ tion of many that Walser has earned his place beside the finest con­ temporary prose writers as well as the best playwrights. For this reason alone it is to be regretted that so few of his works have thus far been translated into English. Walser began his literary career, however, in still another genre. He got his start in the early 1950’s while still a student of literature and philosophy in Tübingen, as a writer and director of radio plays for Southwest German Radio. He ended his studies with a dissertation on Kafka, and it was this writer, together with Brecht and the philosopher Heidegger, who exerted the most influence on his early writings. Marxism and existentialism represent, in most ways, very different ways of view­ ing the world, the former tending to be more optimistic, public, and engaged, the latter more pessimistic, private, and passive. As writers, Brecht and Kafka are, of course, very different, so it should be no sur­ prise that Walser’s writings were marked by an intriguing and, in my opinion, very productive tension between the world views, styles, and themes of these two masters. This tension has remained with Walser, even though it gradually became Beckett, rather than Kafka, who has served as the model which stands in opposition to Brecht. The radio play (Hörspiel) is a far more significant literary form in the German-speaking world than in our own. Like several of his con­ temporaries, it was here that Walser tried out many of the themes, structural models, and dialogue styles which would appear in his stage plays. Only in 1957, after the success of his first novel Ehen in Philipps­ burg, did Walser quit the radio station and begin to devote himself full­ time to the larger literary forms. His efforts paid off richly in the acclaims he received for his second novel Halbzeit (1960), which was the first part of a trilogy including Das Einhorn (1966) and Der Sturz (1973). At the same time, however, that Walser was gaining a substantial repu­ tation as a novelist, he was also achieving recognition as a playwright. His first stage play, Der Abstecher, which drew heavily on the earlier radio plays, had its premiere in 1961 at the Munich Kammerspiele. Be­ tween that year and 1970, Walser wrote and had performed six additional plays for the theater. It is, as the title of Waine’s book indicates, Walser’s development as a dramatist from the early radio plays in the 1950’s through his seventh stage play in 1970, Ein Kinderspiel, which is the focus of this admirable study. Anthony Waine is a young British lecturer in German Studies at the Reviews 369 University of Lancaster. His book is, like many which are published by Bouvier, a slightly revised Ph.D. dissertation; yet, a few critical com­ ments I will make notwithstanding, his book is superior not only to most dissertations, but to most of those which are subsequently published. It is certainly one of the better dissertations published by Bouvier. The fact that he is at times a bit wordy and repetitious or that he has not completely erased a certain “dissertation style” detract only minimally from a well-written book. Waine’s thesis or starting point, stated in the foreword and evident throughout, is that Walser the dramatist deserves the same recognition and critical attention as artist as Walser the novelist. He contends that this has not...