... "Ah, what is one to say! Necessity, the fight for bread, the consciousness of one's social insignificance.... Ah, why do you make me recall it all! I had to make my own way.... My faulty education; the reading of silly novels; the mistakes of one's youth; my first rich ....a While my mother...." She highs. a man crossed my path....an old man general.... Understand, Valdemar, what a sacrifice it was on my part-what a self-abnegation....I could not do otherwise. It benefited my family, it enabled me to travel, to do good to others....But how I suffered; how unbearably degrading the general's embraces were, though-to do him justice he was ever a good fighter.... There were moments-horrible moments....But I was sustained by the thought that, any day, this old man would die-and then.... Then my real life would begin! I would live as I wished: give my life to love, be happy! timid love-affair.... "And the struggle against my environment! Ah, that was indeed horrible! And the doubts, the agony of one's lack of faith in life, in onesself.... Ah, Valdemar.... You are a writer, a psychologist....You know women.. You can understand....What a misfortune that I was born so temperamental ....I looked for happiness. I thirsted to become a great, a noble nature! noble nature! Yes-in that only would my happiness lie...." She subsides, a trifle obscurely, but none the less pathetically.... A pause. "How wonderful you are," the writer mutters, kissing her hand, no higher than the wrist. "You are divine but I embrace not you but all human misery, all human sufferingDo you remember Dostoievski's Raskolnikov? He, too, embraced humanity with this-this wide compassion.... "Ah, Valdemar.... What I needed. was why be falsely modest!-what was-why every uncommon nature needs: Fame, glitter, all the beauty and richness of life!....I lived awaiting something extraordinary....something not the common lot of woman....And then-Then . And I did find love, Valdemar.... Heaven knows I did...." The beautiful lady fans herself agitatedly. Her face takes on a dreary, a melancholy expression. "And then-The old man died! He left me money, I am independent as a bird....Now I could begin to live, n'est pas, Valdemar .... Happiness knocks at my door, I have only to take it.... "But no! I am destined not to, it seems! Valdemar, listen, I implore you! Wouldn't it appear as if the time had come for me to give myself to the man I love and who loves me to become his friend, his ideal, his inspiration!....But see! See how damnably this life is fashioned, how wretched the world is, Valdemar!....And how miserable I am-miserable is not the word! No sooner does the rich old man die— no sooner am I ready to embrace true love and happiness-than my path is again obstructed....Again happiness must escape me! If you but knew what misery it is...." Ernst Toller---A Product of the New Age THE By AARON SCHAFFER HE Grosses Schauspielhaus in Berlin is a grotesquely-shaped structure of hideous red brick situated just off the Karlstrasse, a shabby street in a district rendered even more than usually shabby by the heaps of stones and dirt that bear witness to the construction of a subway down the Friedrichstrasse to the other side of the Spree. The edifice, which originally housed a circus and was converted into a theatre by Reinhardt, is high in the centre and sloping at both ends, the only aperture in the front wall being a single low entrance-way, so that the whole resembles a Cyclops whose eye is placed far down in a tremendous forehead, or, more prosaically, one of the red barns which decorate American landscapes. The interior of the theatre is almost as unusual as is its exterior. The seats of the pit, instead of extending in tiers down to the very front of the stage, are grouped in such a manner as to leave a vast semi-elliptical space open before a stage which, in itself, is of no mean proportions. Above the pit is an immense balcony, divided into three sections, which gives, in the rear, upon a spacious,, though scarcely ornate, lobby. In this thoroughly apposite setting, there was presented, during the early summer of 1922, Die Maschinenstürmer, by Ernst Toller, a proletarian drama that merits attention, both for itself and for its author, as a product of the new age. Die Maschinenstürmer* was written, as we learn from a statement on the flyleaf, in the winter of 1920-21, in the fortress-prison of Niederschönfeld, where its author, Ernst Toller, had been incarcerated during the German revolution of 1919, and where, as a matter of fact, he was still languishing in July of 1922. The title-page gives us further information as to the play, for we are there told that it is "a drama of the time of the Luddite movement in Englandin five acts and a prologue." For the benefit of those to whom the Luddite movement is only, if even, a name, the author states that the time of the play is about 1815 and the locality Nottingham. The persons of the drama are all English-lords, manufacturers, laborers and their families-and the play is dedicated to "the English comrades," of whom two-a female weaver in Lancashire and a "brother-participant in the struggle"-are specifically mentioned. The ensemble is a drama which is thoroughly popular (in the literally etymological sense of the word) and which was presented each night, paradoxically enough, before throngs of typical members of the bourgeoisie, who paid fifty marks and up for their seats, peacefully swilled their beer and ate their "Schinkenbrödchen" during the entr'actes, and only occasionally interrupted the course of the performance to applaud a more than usually bold tirade against presentday civilization. Die Maschinenstürmer is a bitter attack upon twentieth-century capitalism, *Die Maschinensturner Ausgabe für das grosee Schauspeilhaus, Berlin, E. P. Tal & Co., 1922. very thinly veiled in the garb of a pseudo-historical drama revolving about the events consequent upon the introduction of machinery into the weaving mills of Nottingham. The story of the play may be here summed up. In a very short prologue, we are admitted to a session of the House of Lords in Westminster Palace, where a governmental bill inflicting the punishment of death upon all who wantonly practice sabotage (the use of the term here is a conscious anachronism) upon factory machinery has passed its first reading and is up for its second and third readings. A very warm defense of the laboring classes, undertaken by one of the lords, is answered by another, who sees in poverty and starvation divinely appointed tools for keeping down the population (in accordance with the Malthusian theory, actually cited), and the bill passes its second reading with only one dissenting voice. In the first act of the play, which takes place in the poorer quarter of Nottingham, we learn that, as a result of a strike declared by the weavers as a pro ́test against the introduction of machinery into the factories, the condition of the laborers is wretched in the extreme -the men drinking and gaming to drown out their misery, and leaving their wives and children to utter starvation. A mob of workmen appears on the scene, and egged on by one John Wible, the leader of the extremists, hangs upon posts the effigies of two strikebreakers, amidst jeers and the repetition of three stanzas of an ominous song calling upon the laborers to do away with the tyrants and to demand work or death. The last stanza of the song merits quoting in full: Auf, auf, auf, und auf. Dem Feind ins Aug gesehen! Vorbei die Nacht, das Licht gewinnt, Das Mass ist voll, der Sand verrinnt, Der Richter sitzt, der Spruch beginnt, Wer wird bestehen? The band of strikers is joined by a laborer who calls himself Jimmy, who says that he is a native of Nottingham, who has been tramping England and the continent for years and that he has now returned in search of work. Though he at once counsels against the use of violence in the factories, Jimmy, because of his commanding personality, is admitted into the band of strikers. In the second act, it develops that Jimmy is a brother of Henry Cobbett, a former laborer who has worked himself up to the position of superintendent in the principal factory of Nottingham and is considered a traitor by the weavers. Open war is declared between the two brothers, and Jimmy is shown the door in his own home. We next meet an aged man, father-in-law of John Wible, who has gone insane as a consequence of the privations he has suffered, and who is obsessed with the desire of shooting God dead. During a meeting of laborers at the miserable hovel of John Wible, Jimmy and Wible stand out as the advocates, respectively, of patience and of violence. Whereas Wible deems the machine the weaver's enemy, Jimmy declares that it can be made his helper, and asserts as the basis of his theory: "Gemeinschaft soll führen, nicht der Mammon! Der Mensch soll führen, nicht die Maschine!" Wible, an utter coward at heart, knowing of the relationship of Jimmy and Henry Cobbett, goes, in the next act, to the factory-owner, and offers, for a consideration, to do away with Jimmy, whom he styles "ein fremdländischer Agitator aus London, ein Kommunist, einer vom geneimen Werk schaftsbund." Thereupon ensues a dramatic scene in which a group of povertystricken women assembles before the home of the factory-owner, and, amid shouts of "Wir wollen keine Maschine!" "Nieder die Maschine!" pleads in vain with the superintendent to come to the aid of the weavers. Despite an eloquent appeal, in the next act, addressed by Jimmy to the factory-owner to ameliorate the conditions of the laborers, the latter remains obdurate, and the weavers' plot to destroy the machine is secretely perfected. As Jimmy still continuous to preach patience, Wible easily inflames the other laborers against him. One of them, Ned Lud, argues that "die Arbeiter müssen zusammenstehen. Der einzelne ein Halm, den jeder Säuselwind zerknickt Als Masse sind wir mächtig nur." The concluding scene of the play is undoubtedly the most impressive. We are shown the interior of a factory, with a tremendous weaving-machine at which five-year-old children are toiling, and we are reminded, for grim realism, of the stokehold scene in "The Hairy Ape." Suddenly, the mob of strikers bursts in, hustles out the overseer and the children, and after several halfhearted attempts to put the machine out of commission, during which one of the laborers is crushed to death, finally succeeds in its purpose. At this point Jimmy, until now ignorant of the plot to destroy the machine, rushes in in an attempt to divert the strikers from their purpose, but he is greeted with hoots of derision and is struck down by Ned Lud. Mortally wounded, Jimmy prophesies that unless all the laborers of the entire world join to form a "Weltgemeinschaft allen Werkvolks," they will remain slaves to the end of time. In the meanwhile, the coward Wible, who has in formed the factory-owner of the exact hour of the attack upon the machine, has slipped off in time to escape the government militia which has come to arrest the strikers. The curtain falls upon Wible's insane old father-in-law, who, seeing Jimmy lying dead on the floor of the factory, thinks he has at last killed the son of God. As may be surmised from the foregoing resumé, Die Maschinenstürmer is a powerfully frank work-violent, utterly lacking in a sense of humor, bitterly raw in its realism and often crude in its symbolism, amorphous, inconclusive, yet withal not lacking in elements of greatness. The acting is almost always too stagy-one remembers regretfully the reserve of an Eva Le Gallienne in Liliom-and the effects are too evident. Naturally enough for a proletarian drama, the outstanding actor is not so much any one individual-although Jimmy stands head and shoulders above all the others—as the mob. It is for the comings, the assemblies, and the goings of the mob that the vast empty space in front of the stage is utilized, and this bit of "property" is handled very skillfully. The mob comes out upon the cleared space from an opening under the balcony, and its gestures are frequently accompanied by the very weird rendition, by an orchestra of a few ill-assorted instruments, of the air of the "Auf, auf" song, which runs through the whole as a sort of "leitmotif." But even the mob scenes are often clumsy; the group of women that cries "Down with the machine!" before the villa of the factoryowner acts with the automatism of a row of puppets or a horde of college freshmen responding to the motions of the cheer-leader. And, most glaring defect of all, the play is full of propaganda. |