Civil tragedy

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The bourgeois tragedy is a theatrical genre that emerged in the 18th century in London and Paris. Denis Diderot called it genre sérieux . A German-language variant was developed by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing . The main characters come from the bourgeoisie or lower nobility and the play has a tragic ending. With this genre, an attempt was made at the end of the 18th century to create a bourgeois high culture that stood out from the popular theater events.

history

The expression "bourgeois tragedy" was an oxymoron at the time it was created . Tragedies took place in the world of the nobility and were intended mainly for court society, not for a bourgeois setting. There was only one noble tragedy and one civil comedy. As a copy of the tragedies for the "common people" there were the main and state actions . Citizens were fun people from the start , which was a nuisance for many. Bourgeois plays were mostly crude comedies , like the spectacles at the Parisian fairground theaters or the Hanswurstiaden by Josef Anton Stranitzky . The view was that the citizen could only appear as the main character in comedy, since he lacked the ability to experience tragic events (class clause ).

The bourgeois tragedy thus emerged in the course of the emancipation movement of the bourgeoisie, which thus created a platform for presentation and identification. His tragedy no longer unfolds in the world of an exemplary noble hero for humanity, but in the middle of society .

The term "bourgeois" is to be considered not only from a sociological, but also from an ethical point of view, since it is a community of beliefs that can include people from the lower nobility to the petty bourgeoisie, but who try to differentiate themselves from the high nobility by means of a pronounced moral code . - Individuals cannot come from a “good family”, but everyone can choose an exemplary way of life. The value of a bourgeois individual is not predetermined like that of the noble (nobility of birth), but only results from his praiseworthy behavior (nobility of virtue). It “has” no name of its own, but is, as it were, an actor who first has to make a name for himself. This resulted in the bourgeois upgrading of theater in the 18th century.

Paul Landois described his drama Silvie (Paris 1741) as "tragédie bourgeoise". Another forerunner of the bourgeois tragedy is George Lillo's "domestic tragedy" The London Merchant (London 1731). The pioneers of bourgeois drama, Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais and Denis Diderot , on the other hand, held back with the tragic ending, which was more reserved for opera or which quickly tended to shock or riot in the style of the emerging melodrama . From a conservative point of view, the tragic end signaled that drama belonged to the highest genre of theater, but to some innovators it did not seem constructive and optimistic enough. Most bourgeois dramas are therefore touching comedies , that is, plays with a serious plot and a happy ending. Above all, Diderot developed a theory of bourgeois drama ( Entretiens sur le fils naturel , 1757, Discours sur la poésie dramatique , 1758). However, his dramas were not as successful as those of Beaumarchais.

features

In terms of its subject matter, the German-language bourgeois tragedy is either about non-political family conflicts that do not affect social opposites as much as possible and rely on the unifying element of a "pure humanity" (cf. sensitivity ), or it is about the political struggle against oppression by the nobility, later also from the criticism of the emerging working class of the bourgeois value system.

The ancient mythological (or historical noble) main characters of the French classical period are turned into "simple" people in the bourgeois tragedy. The verse form that has been common in tragedy is seldom adopted in bourgeois tragedy. It is characteristically a contradiction to the regular drama . The Germanist Volker Klotz tried to describe the attitude towards classic models with the distinction between closed and open form in drama .

Examples

Most literary historians consider Lessing's Miss Sara Sampson (1755) to be the first German-language bourgeois tragedy. But other German-speaking authors also took on this task, such as Christian Martini ( Rhynsolt and Sapphira , 1755). Instead of politics, the public and history, Miss Sara Sampson has a private, human and familiar atmosphere in which nothing superhuman is to be found. Lessing is primarily concerned with the identification and compassion of the audience, which should lead to their moral improvement. Here the conflict of classes is hardly discussed at all, the action also takes place quite often in the private environment of aristocratic circles.

The conflict between bourgeoisie and aristocratic arbitrariness appears for the first time in Lessing's Emilia Galotti (1772) and finds the most linguistically and dramatically closed form in Schiller's Kabale und Liebe (1784).

With Friedrich Hebbel's Maria Magdalena (1844), the focus is on petty-bourgeois moral concepts and pedantic moral austerity with the resulting conflicts within the class. Ludwig Anzengruber's dramas apply this principle to a rural world. The naturalistic dramas by Gerhart Hauptmann or Henrik Ibsen reveal the lies of self-satisfied citizens.

It should not be overlooked that these literary tragedies only reached a narrow, educated audience. Since the end of the 18th century, new forms of tragedy or tragicomedy such as melodrama , the stirring piece and the great opera had an impact on the broader bourgeois audience . - The majority of the audience at the Alt-Wiener Volkstheater did not see it as a problem that the antics held a distorting mirror at them and thereby denied the bourgeoisie the dignity of serious fate. Johann Nestroy caricatured the bourgeois tragedy of the popular theater as a "sad farce" ( Der Talisman , 1840).

list

literature

  • Walter Benjamin : Origin of the German tragedy . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2000, ISBN 3-518-27825-8 (first edition 1928).
  • Richard Daunicht: The emergence of the bourgeois tragedy in Germany. de Gruyter, Berlin 1965, DNB 450877329 .
  • Peter Szondi : The theory of the bourgeois tragedy in the 18th century. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1973, ISBN 3-518-07615-9 .
  • Susanne Komfort-Hein: "Be who she is". The bourgeois tragedy about individuality . Centaurus, Pfaffenweiler 1995, ISBN 3-8255-0027-6 (also dissertation at the University of Tübingen 1993).
  • Wolfgang Pasche: The bourgeois drama Klett, Stuttgart 2005, ISBN 3-12-922607-9 .
  • Christian Rochow: The bourgeois tragedy. Reclam, Ditzingen 1999, ISBN 3-15-017617-4 .
  • Karl S. Guthke : The German bourgeois tragedy. Metzler, Stuttgart 2006, ISBN 3-476-16116-1 .
  • Franziska Schößler: Introduction to civil tragedy and social drama. Knowledge Buchges., Darmstadt 2003, ISBN 3-534-16270-6 .
  • Albert Meier / Heide Hollmer: daughters instead of princes. On the origin of the civil tragedy near Lessing. In: Kemper, Dirk (Ed.): Weltseitigkeit. In honor of Jörg-Ulrich Fechner. Paderborn 2014 (Series of publications by the Institute for Russian-German Literature and Cultural Relations at the RGGU Moscow. Volume 11), pp. 125–134.