Besprechungen / Reviews J. M. R. Lenz: Remarks Concerning the Theatre. Anmerkungen übers Theater. German and English. Translated and with commentary by Norman R. Diffey and Hans-Günther Schwarz. German Texts in English Translation. Vol. 1. Munich: Iudicium, 2012. 95 pp. € 19,00. Early reviewers of Anmerkungen übers Theater who were taken aback by its associative organization and rhetoric of fits and starts could not have been surprised when, less than three years after it appeared, its author began drifting into mental illness. Today, of course, it is on every German MA reading list, and Lenz is hailed as a precursor of Grabbe, Büchner, Wedekind, and Brecht. Some see him, moreover, as a writer who sensed the winds of modernity like few others of his generation. Finally the essay is available in English, appearing as the first volume in a new series that is set to offer parallel editions of previously untranslated German texts. The 1774 Weygand edition appears on the recto pages together with the 66 footnotes that Hans-Günther Schwarz provided for the Reclam edition in 1976, and on the verso side is Norman R. Diffey and Schwarz’s English translation of the text and notes. An additional 73 notes, written especially for this edition, are provided at the end. The book begins with a concise introduction by Diffey and concludes with a provocative afterword by Schwarz, followed by a list of suggested readings. The translators do a fine job of conveying Lenz’s impromptu-sounding style and the playful tone he adopts with his imagined audience. A few sentences are slightly expanded so that the English is as clear as the German, and there are some changes in the punctuation, but very little is altered, and the quirkiness of the original comes right through. All this adds up to a short course on Lenz’s best-known essay, and its author in general, and the volume should be useful to a wide range of teachers and scholars, not just those working in Lenz and Sturm und Drang, but across the humanities. Perhaps most important, it will give non-readers of German a clearer understanding of the origins of modern epic theater. Lenz, who had read Mercier and Beaumarchais, realized that neoclassical theater could not illustrate real life and depict people in their full glory, as free and independent beings. But in Shakespeare (his translation of Love’s Labour’s Lost was published along with Anmerkungen übers Theater) he saw a path to a new kind of tragedy, the kind he thought his age deserved - one that ignored the Aristotelian unities and instead simply found its own adequate form; that subordinated plot to character; and that eschewed myth and ideals in favor of heightened attention to concrete life. If tragedy is to contain a truly compelling depiction of humanity, Lenz argues, then the plot must be «a series of actions which follow one another like bolts of lightning, support and lift each CG_45_2_s113-208_End.indd 199 14.07.15 20: 41 200 Besprechungen / Reviews other, and must flow together into one whole which eventually reveals no more, no less than the main character.» Taking this approach, he asserts, we should be able to write realistic plays in which «the hero is the key to his own fortunes» and not locked into a fate cast beforehand in heaven. The latter may have satisfied the ancients, he says, but now it’s time for us to see people determining their own lives, and this requires paying closer attention to the world. The playwright he envisions «takes his standpoint - and from there connects as he must» - a technique that requires not just workmanlike reproduction, but a new kind of mimesis, an active, intelligent penetration to the core of one’s subject. In this age when we no longer need to pay homage to the gods, artists should dare to act like gods themselves and strive to uncover the kinds of facts and connections that divine beings might see if they conducted an honest review of our situation here on earth. Lenz’s own plays («comedies,» not the character-driven tragedies he envisions in this essay) provide at least a partial answer to this call for a new theater: they reject tight architectonic structure in favor of a montage of scenes, of whatever number and length needed to tell the story. Of course, he never wrote a play that answered his own call for a hero who turned the whole machine of the play, but he did at least demonstrate how open form and close attention to one’s surroundings can create another kind of stage - one where we don’t see heroism, ideals, and traditional beauty, but virtually the opposite: passive characters crushed by sick societies and - often comically - by their own contradictions and poor choices. We might not be able to identify with these people, but as we now know because of writers like Lenz, a detached audience can often see things more clearly. What Lenz depicts is misery, and though he doesn’t lay the blame on one particular class, his anti-neoclassical approach helps us see things that were once easily overlooked. One of the best things about this book is that it shows Lenz to be not just a groundbreaking theorist of drama, but also a humanist warring against the regimented culture of his day. No other writer associated with Sturm und Drang painted such vivid pictures of stifled aspirations and suffocating determinism. In other work as well, like his review of Goethe’s Götz von Berlichingen, he saw that already when we are young, social forces can join with our biological urges to make us satisfied living like a cog in a machine, rotating, as he says, in place like all the other cogs. Likewise, in Anmerkungen übers Theater, where he famously admonishes, «Or are you afraid, gentlemen, of seeing a human being? » it is a question not just about the new kind of hero he wants to see on the stage, but about the human condition in general. As Schwarz and Diffey point out, Lenz felt that the spoken and unspoken rules of his culture were killing the human spirit, and they suggest that this essay is not just a manifesto for a new theater, but «a manifesto for a new kind of humanity» - and a text that points forward not just to Schiller but also to Nietzsche. «Overarching his theory as well as his writings, not only in theatre but also in the other genres,» Schwarz writes, «is a revolutionary concept of man as a ‹free-acting independent creature› - a concept which, interestingly enough, has yet to be realized» (93). The editors show how this essay is relevant for a whole spectrum of modern concerns. To cite one example: they compare and contrast Lenz and Georg Lukács with CG_45_2_s113-208_End.indd 200 14.07.15 20: 41