Büchner: A Revelation
By Stanley Kauffmann
About Georg Büchner, the astonishments never
cease. How could they? Whenever we turn back to the plays and the unfinished
novella, two miracles dazzle: the quality of the work and the brevity
of the life that produced it. Add the historical anguish: the fact --
certainly it can be called a fact -- that if his plays had become known
at the time they were written, the whole of nineteenth-century drama
would have been affected. The latter-day German critic Wilhelm Emrich
says: "Georg Büchner's writings already contain in condensed form all
of the fundamental compositional elements of our century's modern literature."
It is impossible to believe that Büchner's plays would have had no influence
on Ibsen and Strindberg and Hebbel and Zola if Danton's Death
had been visible. The legacy of those subsequent writers is rich enough,
yet it is not idle to assume that it might have been even richer.
Still another revelation swirls up out of Büchner.
Recently I re-read Danton's Death in connection with a seminar
in tragedy that I conducted. An aspect of the play, which I had known
but scanted, struck me forcibly -- the play's form. No play written
before it has quite the fierce fracture of traditional form in Danton's
Death. Büchner obviously had been influenced by Shakespeare: for
one instance, the intertwining of vulgar scenes (vulgar in two senses)
with those of major persons is pure Shakespeare. But throughout Danton's
Death I was conscious of something new, torrential, the play's
impact through the coursing structure itself.
Clearly Büchner, passionately humane, politically
insurgent, teeming with impatience, wanted the shape of his play to
fit his radical views of character and politics and history. Traditional
structure would have been inhibiting for a play that is a forerunner
philosophically of twentieth-century existentialism, that strips narcotic
idealism from public action, and that explodes Aristotelian injunctions.
Danton's Death is the first play to begin after its
climax. The protagonist's fate -- his execution by Robespierre's group
-- is as good as sealed before the play begins. The play might as well
be called Danton's Dying. He attempts to defend himself because
of the pressure of his friends; still, from the first moment of the
play, the matter is settled in his mind. He will die. Thus Büchner's
unconventional dramatic intent forced him to dispense with the classical
structures of his beloved Shakespeare and Goethe and to shape his play
in a manner as innovative and exploratory as his thought.
I suggest, then, that he wrote Danton's Death
as a film script. Yes, this was literally impossible in 1835. Film would
not arrive for another sixty years, and I don't imply that Büchner foresaw
its arrival. But the play depends on a pace, a rhythm of progress, a
stream of settings that we now associate with film and that seemed to
be in Büchner's grasp in advance. The nineteenth-century theater, as
A. Nicholas Vardac shows in Stage to Screen, was frantic to
flex its physical limitations, almost as if theater people and theater
public were demanding, without knowing what they were demanding, the
invention of film. Büchner, spurning the current theatrical practice,
overleaped it: he responded to an aesthetics that did not yet even exist.
Consider some details. The play doesn't begin.
These lives have been going on for some time: we simply join them. Scene
One doesn't start with establishment of time or place -- they will filter
through as we go -- but with the sense of our slipping into a set of
lives in progress. (Shakespeare sometimes does this, for instance, in
Othello.) For us today, this effect is less novel than it probably
was in the past. We recognize the method from many, many films, though
Büchner heightens the impact with the intrinsics of what we are joining.
He hardly gives us a chance to catch our breath as Danton in his first
speech wryly makes a bawdy joke and in his second speech lays his soul
open as easily as if he were unbuttoning his shirt. The play is not
one minute old before we are completely immersed in it. We who live
in a film-drenched world can recognize the process, here used for exceptional
purpose.
The pace of the play is almost breath-taking
-- paradoxically so because some scenes are deeply introspective, like
the one in which Danton deliberates about getting dressed. He is supposed
to hurry, to go to the tribunal and defend himself; still, he considers
the weary repetitiveness of dressing. Throughout the play, short and
long scenes, active and pensive, almost bump one another, depend for
their fullness on the very speed with which they do it. (Max Spalter
says: "Multiplicity of episode allows Büchner to make the content of
one scene footnote the content of another.") This approach makes the
usual method of scene-shifting seem ludicrous, which is all the more
wondrous because the theater practice of Büchner's day had nothing else
but that practice. The idea of the melding of scenes through changes
of lighting and focus, something utterly familiar in today's theater
-- and of course in film -- was rudimentary in a theater that did not
yet have or even conceive of electric lighting.
After Danton has been warned of his arrest, we
suddenly see him in the middle of a field, alone, thinking aloud. This
is not a shift of scene, it is a cut in a film. Later, Lucile Desmoulins
outside her husband's prison calls up to him at a high window. This
is followed immediately by a scene in that cell with Desmoulins looking
down at Lucile. This is not a change of theater setting: it is a cinematic
reverse shot.
Two films of Danton's Death have indeed
been made, both in Germany, a silent one in 1921, one with sound in
1931, but both are reported to have altered the original. Television
versions were done in Germany in 1963 and in Britain in 1978. (Andrzej
Wajda's Danton, 1982, was adapted from a different play.) I
have not seen any of the Büchner films, but what lingers in the mind
as prototypical for the play is, as I have read about them, Max Reinhardt's
productions. His first was in 1916, and the descriptions of his maneuverings
of the Paris mob are revelatory. A contemporary critic wrote:
Scenes would flash up for a second or two....The
last words of one scene were still being spoken when the first words
of the next would sound and the light change to it. The sound of singing,
the whistling of "The Marseillaise," the tramping of many feet, booing,
the echo of a speech being delivered, applause from out of the darkness.
A lamp-post lights up and the mob is seen hanging an aristocrat.
This, with magnificent appropriation, is sheer
cinematic montage, employed in the theater. Reinhardt had come to maturity
in a country that was rapidly becoming a world leader in film art, and
it seems reasonable to believe that the film culture swelling around
him made him especially perceptive of the cinematic elements and opportunities
in Danton's Death.
In any case, my own last reading of the play
disclosed more clearly than ever another aspect of Büchner's genius.
It enabled him to envision an art that did not yet exist and to put
it at the service of the theater.