1
The pantheon of the revolt - where is it?
You can find it easily, even if you don't know where to look. For due to our magical anniversary rituals - abracadabra: "create one, two, many Vietnams of our memory" - a pantheon for the '68 revolt is being erected everywhere. Not as one central edifice, but, in keeping with its historical self-conception, fragmented, here, there and everywhere. Scattered across all countries in which someone feels called upon to build a monument for the revolt, this pantheon, despite the inscription "Dedicated to the Year of Nineteen-Sixty-Eight", is topped by a statue showing its founders in their heroic or repentant or superior "I-always-knew-everything-anyway"-pose.
Needless to say, these are monuments in the classical sense; that is, 'historic documents', mausoleums made out of paper, revolution-origami, produced at home rather than created on the street. The material out of which they are built is easily flammable, just as the topic demands. The words, however, are spoken for eternity, even if their import is just as fractured as the 'movement' had been in those days.
'L'imagination au pouvoir' - what was once a rallying cry has now, on its 'long march through the institutions', finally arrived in reality: in fantastical memoirs, retrospectives and analyses. When one looks at how invariably serious these are, one nearly wants to believe that an epochal event is being commemorated here.
As it seems, every generation has to have something to tell, has to make up a story for itself, its story. Only he who, afterwards, has something to tell knows that he really had lived in the first place: his narration of the story proves it. Now, it is a fact about the generation of '68 in the comfortable "Free West" that, compared to the generations of '45 and '89 at least, nothing particularly striking ever happened to them. And the revolt was a purely Western phenomenon, nourished by this extreme lack of events to which no youth can resign itself (particularly not once it has reached old age). Thus can we explain a modest part of the immodest and mythological vehemence with which these events are described by the reminiscent. What was singularly, vitally important for oneself has to be affirmed in its singularity and importance for everyone else, too. I was part of it, therefore I am.
N.B. Not part of it were our neighbours in the East. Poland in 1968? If it's noticed at all, it's hastily framed in the global context and thereby done with. Anti-Semitism? Ah yes, and what about Palestine?! The CSSR in 1968? Regrettable, sure, though, on the other hand, Dubcek - the danger of counterrevolution - well, in that light Moscow somehow isn't... The fighter for the utopia of the Not-Yet has nothing in common with the fighter against the reality of the Still-So or the Yet-Again.
2
"Posterity shall not weave any wreaths for the mime"; well, in that case he'll just have to do weave one for himself, and soon enough - that is, whilst he's still alive. The mime's head is grey, the laurel, however, ever green, and, even in its dusty state, can still be used, leaf for leaf, to season a celebratory soup.
Were they playing theatre, those actors of yesteryear? Yes, street-theatre, with all the (bloody) earnestness of play, without a script, without dramaturgy, and moreover (perhaps also: therefore?) without consequences and without success.
N.B. Where the play, for a short moment, really turned serious, the protagonists no longer came from the Department for Performing Arts, but rather from the sector of "Organised Workers"; those did envisage clear and concrete goals, namely higher salaries, and they striked till they got them. In Italy, for example, a whopping 18 % in one go - that's what you call a success (a success that, in its own right, did not lack consequences, at least not for the Italian economy, which had to think back to and struggle with this for a while to come...)
3
Who is it who tried to play revolution there?
The bourgeoisie's sons and daughters, who else - for who else would have been able to free up enough free-time to free not only themselves, but all of society and the whole world, too? That, however, was only possible because the universities at that time, without anybody having noticed, were spaces of freedom, which didn't even have to be fought for, but which, rather, were available, even for 'struggles' and 'group struggles' and 'grassroots struggles' of all kinds. This freedom was simply there for the taking - take it and you have it. And it was all for free - you didn't even have to pay for it, neither with your head nor with your career. As the biographies of our anniversary-biographers clearly show, they could comfortably catch up on their careers after the world revolution, whichever country they happened to hail from.
This was an academic cockaigne without limits on how many semesters you could stay enrolled and a 'pressure to perform' which one could - and did - successfully resist, ideologically as well as practically, whilst doing 'the right thing' politically. Economic pressures were unknown, for a child of the bourgeoisie had the requisite money - be it from the hard-working (and therefore mildly ridiculed or furiously detested) parents, or from the generous (and therefore mildly ridiculed or furiously detested) state. The sole condition: that the student had successfully concluded his bourgeois school career, which, as is well-known, was easier for bourgeois children, even dim ones, than for the children of workers, even bright ones. So it was, and so it still is today, even fourty years later. And that's not because the 'system' has won: an abstract system does not exist - only people exist who form the system and carry it and protect it and use it. Rather, it is because those who, once upon a time, had rebelled have now turned into just these people. It is they who won, just as every new generation wins against the old generation, with or without a 'revolution'. They themselves, in their fourties, began to constitute the system which, in their twenties, they had aimed to defeat. And at the age of sixty they even defend the system in the name of their children and their hopes for their children's careers. Slowly but surely, the '68ers are starting to justify their adopted nom de guerre altogether peacefully: because, lustily, they are approaching 68 years of age.
4
When the bourgeois youth played revolution, which means did it employ?
Bourgeois ones, obviously: others these bourgeois children did not know, others they did not master. And the traditional bourgeois form of representation and protest, with which the Third Estate demonstrated its demands for itself as well as its demands for a better world, was the theatre. Born into a democracy (alright, into a slave state, but the existence of an army of exploited worker drones has been the - ideally tacit - foundation even of the most modern republic for two and a half millennia, irrespective of whether those Helots live in your own country or have been outsourced to another part of the world; only the democrat's dominion over his worker drones makes it possible for him to be a democrat and to cultivate his virtues of freedom and equality and fraternity amongst his peers) and raised by absolutism, theatre was forcibly passed down to its historic successors. The theatre remains a space for the bourgeois public - and, if you prefer: t h e public space to the extent that actual decision making procedures were becoming ever more complex and invisible.
A substitute for the public? Yes: the theatre represents the public, just as representative democracy need re-presentation, that is, the make-belief of the making-appear.
Theatre, until today, also provides a substitute for the public; conversely, the parliament, the state's stage, makes use of the full arsenal of theatrical means for the public presentation of politics. This arsenal of theatrical means exposes to expression and view what - far from theatre and public - has already been decided in the parliament's committees and corridors. A professional performance, which is not to say that politicians always also are g o o d actors.
To confuse politics for theatre thus suggests itself easily to the state's public: after all, this confusion is continually being suggested to the public.
Even those 'Children of May 68', the new public of the state, have succumbed to the confusion. You cannot blame them for it: after all, they were amateurs. And so their theatre, too, was amateur theatre.
If you ponder the 'protests' of that time as theatre, then their failure becomes clear for structural reasons, as it were: where there is revolution, there can be no theatre, and where there is theatre, there can be no revolution.
For theatre is the medium of legitimation. Because it feeds itself from the arsenal of the existing, its goal is the preservation of the existing arsenals; because it interprets societal reality, including power realities, it affirms them; because it shows man and destiny, it implies an existential As-Is. The theatrical act cannot lead to post-theatrical action, for its goal is concluded in itself: when the story reached its end, so does the performance. And in the best case - that is, in the case of artistic success - all appeals to emotion and understanding are sublated in the perceived happiness of perfection, in the experience of the fulfilled form.
This no reconciliation with reality. But it makes reality bearable. And that's why, politically speaking, theatre is always affirmative.
5
The engineers of society - stupid, after all, they were not - always knew this. And hence they were enemies of the theatre, like the godfather of all social planners, Plato.
However, it turned out that the reality of the unwashed humanoid always remains an obstacle to the realisation even of the cleanest plan (which is why every prescriptive social theory works best without humans: hence the tendency, inherent to all these systems, to the in-humane).
This led to the cunning attempt of taking account of the base needs of man (in this case: the need for entertainment); but to do so only in order to redirect them towards a higher goal, by making art subservient to the plan. Which brings us to the educative, and finally also: to the revolutionary, anti-bourgeois theatre.
After all?!
But no. For the Platonic idea of eradicating theatre was as unsuccesful as the Leninist idea of making theatre subservient. On the one hand because no philosopher ever came to rule anywhere, and the powerful were too wise, too sly or too indifferent to take their subjects' toy away (the Cromwells of the Western world always remain but a short episode, which serves them quite right). And on the other hand because the theatre of the Russian 'Red Spring' in the early 1920s never managed to - and never wanted to - deny its close kinship with international art movements before and during World War I. Whether Symbolism, Futurism, Dadaism, Cubism, Suprematism, Cubo-Suprematism: the theatre of the revolution, too, remained a play of forms. And this theatre passed on Ibsen and Maeterlinck, Gozzi and Chekhov, Wilde and Scribe, Racine and E.T.A. Hoffman, Shakespeare, farces and operettas - but precisely in a 'revolutionary' manner, anew, whether 'autonomous', 'synthetic', or 'biomechanical' and, no surprises there, with great success on touring performances in other European countries hungry for theatrical sensations. But the artists' assumption that communism might be accompanied by the unleashing of artistic freedoms turned out to be a serious misunderstanding of the Bolshevik conception of art. "From everyone according to his skills to everyone according to his needs"? In that case just anybody would be able to come along. Lenin ran out of time before he could enlighten artists that the time for chaos was used up, that they now needed to follow the party line. Stalin did that. And finished off Formalism, and soon after that he finished of the Formalists, too. Soviet art was kicked into the service of the state. Never had representative art been more petit-bourgeois.
Then at the latest was the idea of an internationalist and avant-garde aesthetic of revolution discredited: its legitimizing foundations had vanished. As it actually existed in socialism, it had proven that it could endure nothing. That's why this art - blind, or dumb, or sentimental, or all of these together - was so difficult to endure, particularly in light of its persistent insistence that it was founded on just such an aesthetic of revolution. From then on an eerie, hollow sound emanated from underneath the stage boards ...
6
Unless this art really just pretended to be based on an aesthetic of revolution.
In that case it was clever and wise, but only as 'anti-bourgeois' and 'revolutionary' as the needs of a bourgeois audience would allow: for that audience goes to the theatre to receive a delivery of fear and terror - happily even from the anti-bourgeois bogeyman himself - but it does not want to take the delivered goods back home. Fear and terror remain in the theatre: in safety. The audience does not take any political insights home - goods that weren't ordered need not be picked up. What the audience does take home is the emotional surplus for which it paid the price of the ticket.
Which takes us past the political theatre of the sly Bertolt Brecht.
It never reached the 'Proletarian masses': 'masses' don't fit into the theatre - and neither are they welcome there. You just need to look at the buildings themselves, old or new: they do in fact reflect a class consciousness, just that it is not a proletarian one (this beautiful, patronising fiction of the cultured proletarian). The 'thinking worker' Brecht envisaged - bussed to the theatre in groups by his unitary trade union, and, after he has seen the pedagogical play, transported back from the bourgeois sanctuary to the reality of his working world - might have gained a single insight. Which is that his working world stands in a contradiction to the lessons taught to him in the theatre, which his teachers might be able to sublate artistically, but which he himself will never be able to overcome. In this way, the pedagogical theatre of revolution might unexpectedly, in spite of itself, have had an effect by aiding and abetting a revolt against the institutionalized revolution; a counterrevolutionary effect, that is. But this would be to give too much honour to this kind of art, which hopes to disperse the fruits grown on the tree of knowledge by chucking them into the stalls - and bypasses only the bitter fruit of introspection, the realisation of its very own contingency.
But honour to whom honour is due - to the inventor of epic theatre. That, however, is not a revolutionary invention of struggle, but rather an evolutionary invention of art, a further artistic possibility in the infinite arsenal of theatrical forms and forms of theatre. Whether Brecht believed the ideological superstructure? Whether he believed himself regarding it? Whether he believed that he owed it to himself to believe in it? What he did know, in any case, is that an effect can only be produced by aesthetic means. And these means he needed to record in all their minutia. Hence the model-books, the model-productions; hence, too, the attention to even the last detail, down to the spoon which Mother Courage is carrying in her coat pocket. But does this make sure that the effect remains political? Whoever stays in the traditions of means, whoever uses the theatrical form and its conventions, however modified they might be, can exclude however much he wants in theory: yet, the use of customary means will result in customary effects. And these are emotional. Emotional enlightenment, however (concerning societal contradictions, the historic inevitability of communism, the class struggle) is a contradiction in terms. A theatrical performance affects your emotions - but it will not have any effects. Should we believe the clever man's surprise, should we picture him grinning, or should we grin at him, when he writes: 'The world premiere of "Mother Courage and her Children" in Zurich during Hitler's war, with the extraordinary Therese Giehse in the lead, made it possible for the bourgeois press - and this despite the audience in the Züricher Schauspielhaus consisting mainly of antifascist and pacifist German refugees - to call it a Niobean tragedy and to talk about the vital forces of the dam. Thereby warned, the playwright undertook a few modifications for the Berlin production'. The class-struggling poet remains silent about the success of his little modifications - they did, in any case, not change anything about the success of Mother Courage across all the world's (obviously: bourgeois) stages; neither, needless to say, did they change anything about their message's non-success. Every effective performance of the play was the result of an effective attack on the emotions of the spectators. That attack led the audience to sympathy with Mother Courage, to the audience's being devastated about her and her children's lot, but not to a cold analysis of what she has done 'wrong' in the 'capitalist' Thirty Years War. What remains is the rather general insight that man, in and of himself, might be quite good, but that war, in and of itself, is bad. And so the author felt rather misunderstood.
As always in such cases among thespians, so also in this instance for Brecht: it was the fault of the press. But: the press not only belongs to the bourgeoisie, it is made by the bourgeoisie, its readers, too, are bourgeois, including the refugees, who returned, as soon as they could, from the bourgeois theatre in bourgeois Switzerland to their bourgeois positions in their bourgeois fatherlands.
And Brecht's theatre in East-Berlin?
That, too, was the opposite of a model for the socialist revolution. A lavishly equipped theatre, a meticulously organised apparatus, season tickets, job security, the highest salaries, standard international royalties, no economic pressure. In short: the undisrupted continuation of the bourgeois theatrical model in the midst of actually existing socialism, under the very best conditions.
Where the very purchase of a theatre ticket establishes a contract regulated by the Civil Code, there can hardly be revolution inside the auditorium.
So even the institution of anti-bourgeois, anti-capitalist and of course anti-fascist theatre could not provide the necessary means for an anti-bourgeois, anti-capitalist and of course anti-fascist revolt (not to speak of a revolution).
7
Now one might object that it would be more just to review that glorious May, the fourtieth anniversary of which we are commemorating, (and which, in contrast to Brecht, fared rather badly in contemporary reviews, so that it too, like many other theatrical undertakings, can feel that it failed 'because of the press') as a piece of street theatre.
But to have success in the streets, a troupe of players needs credibility and experience of the streets - neither of which had been imparted to them in their lecture halls. Furthermore, you need a clear plot, understandable and attractive for Old and Young, Graduates and Special-Ed Students, Men and Women, Rich and Poor, i.e. for everyone - you could also say, for 'society'. Add to this a talent for improvisation, the means to attract people and to make them stay. And a lot of humour. What lacked was not only the latter, but also the ability to find and captivate an audience. Hardly a surprise, this, given that there were only two artistic means of articulation: the monologue, read, fixedly, off a sheet of paper, much too long and often - both semantically and acoustically - incomprehensible; and the chant (for which the latter was equally true).
A plot or a goal were not apparent; neither to random nor to captive audiences - and if plot or goal were apparent, then it was obvious that they were not in the audience's interest. There was no dialogue. This was not the way to enthuse the 'masses'. So they stayed away.
The actors, seminarians, had taken to the streets with a theory, rather than because they felt an urge to act. They took to the streets because they had read that power lies in the streets and that you only have to pick it up (if only they could find it...). The images they had in their head might have been images of street actions, historic or present - Trotzki enthusing the masses, Lenin as agitator, the storming of the Bastille, the storming of the Winter Palace, Ché holding a cigar or perhaps a gun, benign uncle Ho Chi Minh in front of flag-waving children, a waving Mao and his blue hat on a stage in front of an immense crowd of supporters: the world stage as an institution for moral revolution. Only: this wasn't the reality of their experiences; that reality lay in the lecture hall from which they came and in which their intellectual socialization had taken place. The icons of the revolution were available, one could parade them around the streets, but out there it was impossible to find the revolution itself. So you stand around a little stupidly (or march about). Hence the festive actors of May remained foreigners on the street-stage, hence they acted in such a displaced and wooden and helpless manner - and nurtured their tacit, secret desire to return to their academic interiors, or to conquer the stages of the enclosed auditoria. Hence, in other words, their desire to return to the state-theatrical institutions and productions which are only possible in interiors and auditoria, and by which they had been formed.
8
Revolution is the moment in which it takes place and is finished off. Afterwards, it has vanished: either 'as though it had never been', devoid of consequences once you've counted up its victims and dragged them away; or because it has become institutionalized (whilst the production of victims and their counting up and their dragging away is still going on). Revolution becomes static (one could also say: statist), a machine which preserves, propels and feeds itself.
Where there is society there are societal agreements, compacts - just as the state's stage necessitates if it is to function: conventions. And so society, by definition, is conventional; as conventional as the art of theatre which it created, and by which, in turn, it was re-created.
So: the revolution does not take place in the auditorium. But the theatre does.
What then was that which, fourty years ago, did not take place in the auditorium?
You shall recognise it for what it is by looking at its fruits.
When these 'events' bore artistic fruits, then they were aesthetic rather than revolutionary. Insofar as theatre is concerned even hyper-aesthetic fruits (shall we throw about names? Do let's throw them: Mnouchkine. Wilson. Stein): blissful, captivating art of the auditorium, what else.
And political consequences? Seriously: who finished off the Vietnam war? The answer: politics. Who 'processed' communism? The answer: economics. Fascism? The answer: the judiciary. Capitalism? The answer: well, no one. Carefully I say: the true history of the year '68 will be written when those who think of themselves as its protagonists are dead. In case that those who will still be alive then will think it worthwhile to write its history.
Preliminary conclusion: Those Revolution-Theatre-Actors, they neglected one thing and didn't act the other one out at all well.
How, after all, can you bring a freedom to the world of which you didn't even know that you had it?
Michael Wachsmann, Artistic Director of the Münchner Kammerspiele from 1986 to 2001, is one of Germany's premier translators of plays by Shakespeare, Euripides and many others.