MASSE-MENSCH—MOB-MAN
Prophecy is a risky business in the theater, especially when prophecy
concerns itself with personalities rather than tendencies. I find it
very difficult to bring myself to say that the man who will become
the leader of the new forces in the Continental theater is Jürgen
Fehling, director of _Masse-Mensch_. And yet—on the basis of a single
production—the temptation to believe something of the kind is strong
indeed.
Fehling’s work is closely associated with two striking phenomena. One
is the Volksbühne, the workingman’s theatrical organization of Berlin,
which maintains the handsomest and best devised theater in the German
capital; and the other is the play which has been given there with such
uncommon success, _Masse-Mensch_, a strange and powerful tragedy of the
“social revolution of the twentieth century” written by a communist
leader, Ernst Toller.
[Illustration:
The first moment of Jessner’s _Richard III_. Gloucester, a grotesque,
twisted figure in black, stands silhouetted against a black curtain.
In contrast to this Richmond speaks the final lines of the play
dressed in white against a white curtain.
GLOUCESTER: Now is the winter of our discontent
Made glorious summer....
Between these two extremes of black on black and white on white the
play takes its course.
]
The Berlin Volksbühne is interesting enough in itself. As the
only organization that has been able to produce successfully this
expressionist tragedy of communism, its power and position seem
highly significant. This society of proletarian playgoers was founded
more than thirty years ago as a sprouting bed for naturalistic drama
and the social thesis-play. To-day it still cultivates the best in
Realism and in the social drama, but it looks condescendingly on the
thesis-play, and it gives the most completely artistic and successful
example to be seen in Germany of an expressionist play and an
expressionist production.
The Volksbühne has always had a double policy—that of buying out
performances of good plays and retailing the seats to its members for
much less than the box office prices, and that of producing plays
itself. It began with a few Sunday performances of both kinds, and
steadily grew in membership to the point where it buys all the Sunday
matinees at a number of theaters, has two playhouses of its own, the
Volksbühne and the Neues Volkstheater, and is organizing an opera
house, the Volksoper. One hundred and eighty thousand men and women
of the lower and lower-middle classes subscribed in 1922 for eight
productions, either at the society’s theaters or at the playhouses with
which it deals.
The Volksbühne itself is rather an extraordinary theater. Its striking
front, with the words _Die Kunst dem Volke_ upon its pediment, rises
across a street that cuts through the workingmen’s quarter of Berlin,
and, after a slight bend, crosses the Spree and becomes Unter den
Linden. From above its little triangle of park, the Volksbühne stares
ironically and, doubtless, a little proudly down the long street that
passes the hideous art galleries of the Prussian government, the
palaces once occupied by the Hohenzollerns, the State Opera, where
royalty turned its back upon Richard Strauss, and runs on to the
Brandenburger Tor of Imperial memories. The theater has the grimly
noble air of the best of German architecture. In its auditorium Oskar
Kaufmann has turned from the austerity of gray stone to the richness
of red mahogany. The working class audiences of the Volksbühne find
themselves seated, therefore, in the handsomest and doubtless the most
costly auditorium of Berlin when they come to see the play which might
almost be the story of their own defeat in the communist risings of
1919.
_Masse-Mensch_ itself is a play, half dream and half reality, in which
is pictured the conflict of _Masse_, the masses, against _Mensch_,
the individual, of violent revolution against passive strike. Its
drama pleads piteously for the sacredness of human life and the equal
guilt of the State or the revolution that takes it. Because it was
written by Ernst Toller, who, as he wrote it, lay in a Munich jail
serving a twenty-year sentence for his part as Minister of Justice
in the red rebellion which followed the assassination of Kurt Eisner
by the reactionaries, _Masse-Mensch_ is pretty generally taboo in
German theaters. In the first six months after its _première_ at the
Volksbühne (29th September, 1921) it was played about seventy times,
a very great number of performances in repertory. But upon its
production in Nuremberg riots interrupted the first performance, and it
was never repeated.
[Illustration:
_Richard III_: the final moment. White virtue triumphs.
RICHMOND: Now civil wounds are stopp’d, Peace lives again:
That she may long live here, God say Amen!
]
To the significance of the play itself and the proletarian organization
which flings it in the face of a Germany where monarchists and
republicans, socialists and communists, State and cabals, murder with
almost equal recklessness, must be added a truly remarkable type and
quality of production. It bears a certain relation to the work of
Jessner at the State Schauspielhaus, where, by the way, Fehling is now
to be employed. It is absolutely free of Realism and representation—as
all expressionist production must be. It reduces setting to less than
symbol, to what is hardly more than a convenient platform for the
actor. It uses light arbitrarily.
_Masse-Mensch_ is a piece in seven scenes. The first, third, fifth and
seventh are actual; the others are dream-pictures. In the first scene
Toller’s stage directions call for “The rear room of a workingman’s
meeting hall. On the white-washed walls, portraits of leaders of the
people and photographs of union delegates. In the center a heavy table,
at which a woman and two workmen are seated.” The stage directions for
the second scene, or first dream-picture, read: “Indicated: The hall of
a stock exchange. At the desk, a clerk; about him, bankers and brokers.”
The playwright felt keenly the possibilities of the modern,
subjective methods of productions, or he would not have used the word,
“indicated.” He did not feel them clearly enough, however, to risk more
than their application to the dream-pictures. But, taking “Indicated”
as a key-word, Fehling has boldly ventured to apply abstract and
expressionist methods to the whole of this thoroughly expressionist
play. In the first scene, for instance, as you see it at the
Volksbühne, there is no hall, there is no desk, there are no portraits.
There is nothing but a deep box of high black curtains, and in the
center a very low, broad platform. Upon this platform, spotted out
with three shafts of light, are the two men and the woman in the taut
attitudes of wrestlers as they clasp hands, the woman in the middle.
For the dream scene, the stage is again in black curtains, but those at
the rear are occasionally opened to show a clerk on an impossibly high
stool, writing on an impossibly high desk, almost in silhouette against
the yellow-lighted dome. A few steps lead down into the darkness of the
front stage. Fehling and his stage designer, Hans Strohbach, pursue the
same general method in the succeeding scenes. The “real” episodes are
set in black curtains and with steps of one sort or another; they are
lit by obvious beams of light, and they are given no more color than
shows in the woman’s severe blue dress and one glimpse of the yellow
dome. The dream-pictures are more elaborately staged, though they seem
quite bare by the standard of our productions. The curious part is
that the scenes of reality are more expressionistic, considering
their purpose, than the dream-pictures. Reality is made of nothing but
abstract plastic shapes, harsh, and harshly lit. Dreamland is sometimes
painted and shaped in the slightly decorative spirit of Expressionism,
and it is lit with beauty and atmosphere.
[Illustration:
_Masse-Mensch_: dream-picture. A courtyard. Towering dark walls lean
inward; a green night sky; guards with lanterns seated on the floor at
either side. A man stands in the center playing a concertina.
]
The effective arrangement of Strohbach’s scenes, and the powerful use
which Fehling makes of them stamp the physical side of this production
with distinction. Spiritually it is even more distinguished because of
the rightness of vision with which Fehling interprets the play, and the
brilliance with which he handles, not only the individual acting, but
a chorus of united voices, which speaks through many scenes with an
extraordinary clarity and emotion.
From the beginning of the first scene the actors strike the note of
intensity and conviction, both as players and as characters, which
they are to carry through the whole performance. Mary Dietrich, once
of Reinhardt’s company, plays superbly the woman protagonist of the
strike and of humanity. From the moment when her husband comes to her
in the name of love to ask her to give up the leadership of the strike,
which will begin next day, Dietrich drives with such furious precision
at the meaning of this woman that she stands out immediately as a sort
of Christ-figure. In the beginning she must give up all; she must
leave home and love, to follow her call. In the end she must go to the
scaffold rejecting all means of escape. It is one of the distinctions
of this play, as well as of Dietrich’s playing, that this reference to
Christ is so beautiful and so sure, yet so reticent.
The second scene, the dream-picture of a stock exchange, is a
foreboding and dread satire. The bankers and brokers bid up human souls
in the war that is under way, and make plans for an international
corporation, which, posing as a founder of homes for convalescent
soldiers, will open brothels for the troops. The woman appears in
her dream, and makes a vain appeal to the humanity of these men. The
bankers hear only the announcement of a mine accident and plan a
benefit dance, beginning with a fox-trot by the brokers around the
stage.
The third scene is the labor meeting at which a decision is to be taken
on action to stop the making of munitions and end the war. Here again,
Fehling throws the author’s realistic stage directions overboard (much,
be it said, to the author’s pleasure). Instead of a hall, there is
again blackness, emptiness. Out of the emptiness speaks a marvelous
choral voice, the voice of the masses, measured, vibrant, intense:
Wir ewig eingekeilt
In Schluchten steiler Häuser.
Wir preisgegeben
Der Mechanik höhnischer Systeme.
Wir antlitzlos in Nacht der Tränen.
Wir ewig losgelöst von Müttern,
Aus Tiefen der Fabriken rufen wir:
Wann werden Liebe wir leben?
Wann werden Werk wir wirken?
Wann wird Erlösung uns?
[Illustration:
_Masse-Mensch_: the revolutionists’ meeting. On a broad flight of
steps rising steeply from the footlights, men and women are grouped in
an irregular lozenge, arbitrarily lit by sharp beams of light from the
top and sides of the proscenium arch. A Fehling production designed by
Strohbach.
]
Nothing like this voice, coming out of a darkness in which faces
vaguely begin to hover, has been imagined, much less attempted, in our
theater. The lights rise—or it would be more accurate to say, shoot
down—upon the men and women workers standing in an irregular lozenge
shape upon steep steps, which spread to the curtains at each side. Out
of this crowd, in chorus and singly, come pleas for action, and visions
of suffering which sweep the audience with emotion. The woman cries for
a strike against war and against capital. Behind her rises The Nameless
One, the bastard of War, to cry for armed revolt. His passion sweeps
the masses, and the woman submits.
The fourth scene, another dream-picture, envisages her fears for the
course of the revolution, her intuition that it will only breed a
new violence, the violence of the proletariat. Below great, crooked,
towering walls, guards hang over green lanterns. They sing ribald
songs of their miseries. The Nameless One enters, and, standing in
the middle, plays wildly on a concertina, while the guards and the
condemned dance the dance of death about him. The sky lights up on a
sudden in crimson, then pulses in and out; colors flood down over the
moving figures in waves that throb with the music. Among the condemned
is the husband of the woman. She tries to save him, as she would save
all men from violence. Her pleas are useless. She stands with him
before the firing squad as the curtain falls.
The fifth scene, the tremendous scene of the play and the production,
is the rally at the workers’ headquarters in the face of defeat. The
stage is again boxed in black. There are steps like the corner of
a pyramid rising up to the right of the audience. Upon these steps
gather the working people. You see a host, affrighted and cowering,
in the twenty-four men and women who stagger upon the steps singing
_The Marseillaise_. As they sway, locked together hand in hand,
like men on a sinking ship, and the old song mounts up against the
distant rattle of machine guns, the scene brings the cold sweat of
desperate excitement to the audience that fills the Volksbühne, and to
comfortable, purse-proud Americans as much as to men who have fought in
the streets of Berlin. Suddenly there is a louder rattle of arms. The
noise sweeps through the air. It drives into the souls of the huddling
men and women. They collapse, go down, fall in a tangled heap. The
curtains at the left loop up suddenly. There in the gap against the
yellow sky stand the soldiers. They arrest the woman, the woman whom
the rebels were about to condemn for her opposition to their slaughter.
[Illustration:
_Masse-Mensch_: the rallying. A pyramid of steps slanting to the right
of the stage. At its apex, a group of tense revolutionists sing _The
Marseillaise_, the woman-heroine opposite them in the center. Suddenly
machine-guns attack the meeting.
]
The sixth scene is a dream-picture of the woman in prison. There is a
void, a misty, swimming emptiness. Upon a platform is the woman’s
cell, a scarlet cage in which she can only kneel. About her stand
guards, bankers, the ghosts of dead enemies. They accuse her. She
answers. At last, out of the void rise the shapes of the masses, the
imprisoned masses who have been betrayed by violence and by the woman
who deserted them and cast her lot with violence. They move in a great
circle of towering shadows that seem to hang in the emptiness of the
sky, as they pass across the dome at the back of the stage. The guilt
of the masses, the guilt of the individual, the guilt of the woman—they
have filled the air with recrimination. The figures of the imprisoned
masses stop suddenly in their round. They raise their arms. They cry:
“We accuse!”
There is only the final scene left. It is in her cell. Again the black
curtains; some narrow steps. The husband comes to bring her freedom.
The Nameless One also, with a plan of escape through murdering the
guards. She rejects both. She rejects the priest, accusing men of
primeval sin. She goes to her death. And as she goes, two women
prisoners sneak out into the light—to divide the clothes of this new
Christ.
_Schuldig!_ Guilty! Guilty! The word echoes through the play, echoes
in the auditorium of the Volksbühne. All are guilty. All are sick with
guilt. And none more than these sufferers in the slums of Berlin who
must go to the theater to see in black curtains the picture of their
guilt. The world goes through capitalism, debasing itself, driving
terror, greed, cruelty into the place of love and understanding.
It comes out in revolution, a corruption of the thing it cures.
The Germans have been through capitalism with a vengeance, through
materialism, through war, and through a revolution that blasted
half the people and did not satisfy the rest. Here is the misery
of capitalism, the misery of abortive revolution, the misery of
defeat and black hunger. Berlin is in purgatory. And Berlin goes to
_Masse-Mensch_. Before this play sit hundreds of quite ordinary men,
who have only to hear some word shouted at them with the passion of
this play, and they will leave the slow and loved routine of homes, and
lie again behind sandbags on Unter den Linden. All this is a strange,
terrible, and sweet thing to feel as you sit looking at the purgatory
of those black curtains.
Toller and Fehling have made possible the realization of this intense
situation between play and audience; Toller by writing straight at the
heart of his public. His dialogue makes no pretense to the accidental
rhythms of life. It speaks out plainly and simply and beautifully the
passion of each character, the passions of the world. Fehling has
driven Toller’s speeches just as directly at the public. He has made
no pretense at actuality. He has put his actors forward as actors on
an abstract stage; and you think of them only as living, intimate
presences.
[Illustration:
_Masse-Mensch_: the machine-guns. The black curtains at the back are
thrown open. Soldiers and officers are seen enveloped in a thin haze
of smoke. The group shrinks back and falls together.
]
Comparison between Fehling and Jessner is inevitable. They are both
working upon the newest problem of production, the problem of escaping
from Realism to reality and to the theater. They both throw overboard
every shred of actuality that stands in the way of inner emotional
truth. Technically, Fehling is as insistent as Jessner on the abstract,
the formal production as the means of giving the actor and his emotion
vividly and completely to the audience. Fehling realizes as keenly as
Jessner does how different playing-levels can help him in deploying
and emphasizing his actors. He does not, like Jessner, use the same
levels throughout a play. He creates new plastics as he needs them. His
production is formal in principle, but he does not rely upon a stage
of certain permanent forms. His lighting is abstract, like Jessner’s,
paying no attention at all to actuality; but it is not so free or so
wilful in changes. The lights make a definite pattern in each scene and
stick to it throughout. The only sharp exception is the scene of the
dance of the condemned. Fehling does not try to make his lighting a
running gloss to the words of the play.
Fehling may be much over-praised by the emotion of _Masse-Mensch_;
perhaps there is a something in the passion of the play which lights up
these players and these playgoers of the Volksbühne, and brings forth
a unique and unwilled emotion. But there seem to be certain qualities
in this production which stamp the director as a man of imagination
and power. Certainly Fehling has a large and healthful simpleness. He
isn’t finicking over rudimentary explanations with lights and shadows
and primary colors. He isn’t missing the quality of the play in an
endeavor to create a thing of a single startling or novel tone. He is
certainly winning from his actors a spiritual coöperation finer than
any that we saw in Germany. He is unmistakably one of the leaders along
new paths—a sure and challenging force.
[Illustration:
_Masse-Mensch_: A woman dressed in blue in a dream-prison of twisted
scarlet bars, surrounded by motionless dark figures. Behind, gigantic
spectral shadow-shapes march across a faintly luminous void.
]