When the war was over (fresh)

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When the war was over is a drama by the Swiss writer Max Frisch from 1948. As early as 1947, Frisch wrote down an incident from post-war Germany in his diary that had been reported to him: To protect her husband who lived hidden in the cellar , one woman met regularly with a Red Army officer who was occupying her home. Despite the language barrier, the encounter between the Germans and the Russians resulted in mutual love. Frisch was fascinated by the peculiarity of the case and the successful overcoming of prejudices.

In July 1948, Frisch wrote a play from the episode, which was premiered on January 8, 1949 in the Zurich Schauspielhaus under the direction of Kurt Horwitz . Brigitte Horney took on the leading role . After a shared admission in Switzerland, the reactions in Germany were mostly positive. Since the mid-1950s, however, the play has rarely been performed and is now considered one of Max Frisch's weaker dramas. In 1962 he deleted the last act of the original three-act act because it did not continue the subject.

content

first act

Spring 1945: Agnes Anders, her husband Horst, their four-year-old son Martin and a friend named Gitta hide in the laundry room in the basement of their house. The house is occupied by the Red Army, and noise and shots can be heard over and over again. Agnes assures the doubting Horst, who has made his way home from a prisoner of war , that she still loves him after the two-year separation.

Yehuda Karp, a Jew from Warsaw who is an orderly in the service of the Red Army, enters the cellar to look for wine. When he discovers Agnes, he wants to lead her to the officers, but she asks for a delay. Meanwhile, Gitta, who has already been raped six times by Russian soldiers, flees with little Martin. Horst, who doesn't dare to leave the house in his captain's uniform, wants to get her an inconspicuous street suit. Agnes and Horst promise each other loyalty and death together if Agnes is violated. Then she goes upstairs.

Stepan Ivanov, a Russian colonel, defends Agnes against three other officers. Agnes tries to convince him that they are not enemies and should meet as humans. When Stepan just remains silent, she talks to him more and more desperately and even betrays her husband in the basement as a vote of confidence. But it turns out that Stepan cannot understand them at all. When Yehuda who had arrived translates, Agnes Stepan offers to meet him every evening when he sends the others out of the house and doesn't look for her in the basement.

Second act

Three weeks later, Horst and Agnes are still living in the laundry room. Agnes met Stepan every day and in the meantime fell in love with the Russian colonel. She lied to her husband Horst every evening about the nature of the meetings with Stepan. She can no longer bear this conflict and demands that Horst should not let her go anymore. But this confirms his trust in Agnes and sends her upstairs.

In the living room, Jehuda Karp talks to Halske, a pianist who was celebrated in the Third Reich and who now works as a piano tuner for the Russians. Halske feels like a victim of the circumstances and does not understand what a reproach can be made against him. After all, he only played the piano. Jehuda reports on the inhuman experiences he had to make in the Warsaw ghetto . When the German soldiers flooded the sewers and shot everyone who fled, he managed to escape from among all the dead on a hearse. Halske does not want to have anything to do with these events and refers to Captain Anders, who was in Warsaw.

Agnes and Stepan can hardly talk to each other at their meeting due to their lack of language skills, but they also understand each other without words. Agnes tells Stepan about her remorse towards Horst. He sings her the crime song. They are interrupted by Horst, who walks into the apartment wearing a street suit and asks when the occupiers will leave the house again. Jehuda steps in and reveals that Horst was in Warsaw. This defends himself that he only belonged to the Wehrmacht . Stepan leaves the house in disgust. There is a deep silence between Agnes and Horst, who stay behind.

Third act (deleted in 1962)

A year later, the Americans go in and out of Agnes and Horst's house, with whom Horst, who has quickly adapted to the new circumstances, does business. They're giving a party where Agnes is talking to Oliver, a young Quaker who is in love with her. She keeps coming back to the subject of the Warsaw Ghetto. You shouldn't live under the same roof with a criminal, otherwise you share your guilt. Agnes believes Stepan left her because she covered her husband despite his crimes.

Finally she learns from Horst that he was actually involved in the shootings in the ghetto. He also knew about her relationship with Stepan all along. After a final monologue to the audience, to live with open eyes as long as one could do it upright, no longer, Agnes throws herself into death.

shape

When the war was over originally consists of three acts , of which the final act was later deleted. The first two acts are divided into two images each. The self fresh as spectacle -ranked piece applies according Hellmuth Karasek as Frisch's "konventionellstes drama". Urs Bircher spoke of the form of a “politically committed, realistic theater of images”. Metaphor and symbol have withdrawn from realistic descriptions of everyday life, the language is no longer poetic, but sober and reporting. The soldiers of the Red Army talk in Russian, a German translation is included in the text, Yehuda speaks Yiddish , whereby Frisch emphasized in a staging instruction that this should not be replaced by so-called "Jüdeln" if the actor does not speak Yiddish, such as the characters are not allowed to become caricatures of clichés at all.

The only formal peculiarity of the piece are epic insertions in which the main character Agnes steps out of her role, the piece to a certain extent freezes, and she interrupts the plot with flashbacks , epic predictions or internal monologues . This stylistic device was compared with an ancient choir or interpreted as an alienation effect in the style of Bertolt Brecht's Epic Theater . Manfred Jurgensen saw in this trick the “dramaturgy of a unique makeshift” of an “epic artificially transformed into drama”, in which the subject matter dominated the stylistic means.

History of origin

Max Frisch rehearsing Biedermann and the arsonists in 1958

In the 1946–1949 diary , Frisch wrote a “case from the so-called Russian era” in 1947, which he had been told: In order to save her husband hidden in the basement, a woman had visited a Russian colonel every day. Despite the language barrier, they both fell in love. Eventually, however, the colonel was recalled and they never saw each other again. In a later entry he returned to the story and noted what fascinated him about it: “That he is an exception, a special one, a living contradiction of the rule, of prejudice. Everything human appears as something special. Overcoming prejudice; the only possible overcoming in love that does not make an image. In this particular case: made easier by the lack of a language. "

Another 15 episodes from the post-war period woven into the piece are based on reports that Frisch received on his trip to Germany in 1947, the events in the Warsaw ghetto on statements by Polish survivors and the reports of Jürgen Stroop . Initially conceived as a novella , Frisch finally set the material as a three-act play. The manuscript was available in July 1948. The first working titles were Ihr Morgen ist die Finsternis and Judith (based on the biblical Judith theme ). Frisch later changed the name of the main character to the speaking combination "Agnes Anders" and explained: "Agnes means innocence, purity", which is also to be understood in relation to her love for the Russian officer, which is the opposite of a sin.

When the war was over, it was premiered on January 8, 1949 in the Zurich Schauspielhaus under the direction of Kurt Horwitz . The stage design came from Caspar Neher . The main roles were taken on by Brigitte Horney , Walter Richter and Robert Freitag . In April 1949 the piece was staged for the first time in Germany as part of a culture week “Switzerland in Stuttgart”. Despite the great attention it received from the press, the major West German theaters raised "objective concerns" about the drama in the following months. It was finally performed in a German production for the first time on March 31, 1950 in the Baden-Baden Theater. Gabriele Reismüller , Alois Garg and Franz Andermann played under the direction of Hans Bauer .

Just a few days after the Swiss premiere, Frisch had noted in his diary regarding the theater reviews: "You can feel how happy they are that the third act failed - I couldn't have done them a bigger favor." Nevertheless, it lasted until 1962 before Frisch drew the conclusions from this and canceled the third act without further ado. He justified: "The author deleted the 3rd act in 1962 because it did not continue the topic, but merely dated it." He was too realistic and - in allusion to Carl Zuckmayer's Des Teufels General  - "zuckmayerize".

reception

premiere

Max Frisch noted in his diary at the premiere: “Small brawl in the foyer.” Before that, a loud whistle had been mixed with the strong applause from the premiere audience. The arguments about the play continued in the foyer, first verbally, then palpably, with a blow of a fist and a black eye from one viewer. Urs Bircher saw the incident as an indication of the explosive nature of the play at the time, with its criticism of the times and the questioning of contemporary prejudices. In any case, Carl Seelig commented in his review "how undemocratic and intolerant certain people still behave today".

The reception in the feature sections was divided. Elisabeth Brock-Sulzer spoke of a “beautiful, above all very playable piece”, while Alexander J. Seiler spoke of a “ hybrid between colportage and treatise ” that had “no other dimension than that of history”. Carl Seelig criticized the lack of drama and only spoke out in favor of the third act. Werner Weber rejected precisely this act , who at least praised the attempt: "We feel how big and how correctly it was planned, we grasp the places where the planning has taken shape". François Bondy drew the conclusion: “Frisch is perhaps the only Swiss who has felt the European catastrophe with such an intense response and a sense of renewal”.

Performances in Germany

When the piece was first performed in Germany in April 1949 in Stuttgart, Frisch described in his diary: "An icy silence at the beginning, we expected a scandal and were surprised by the opposite". The play received unexpected storms of applause, and the majority of the critics from twenty newspapers who had appeared gave a positive assessment. The world even spoke of Frisch's strongest play to date. For Der Spiegel , Frisch “didn't make it easy for the German audience. The adultery of a German, whose husband is wounded, with a uniformed Russian makes him uncomfortable. ”And yet the reviewer drew the conclusion of a“ fascinating performance ”.

When it came to the first German production in Baden-Baden the following year, Erich Kuby spoke of “admirable boldness and great poetic power”. For Wolfgang A. Peters the piece was "very effective and had an atmospheric urgency up to the final picture". According to Karl Korn , Frisch saw "the real tragedy of those years correctly and with an exact and fair distribution of the weights". Der Spiegel drew the “general balance sheet: contrary to all expectations, there was no opponent of the play. It was unanimously agreed that, despite all the uniforms, the play was not a political play. It's just about the human substance. "

As a result, when the war was over was still staged in various German cities. However, with decreasing topicality, so did interest in acting. Since the mid-1950s, it has only been performed occasionally on smaller stages, something which Frisch's shortening of the final act in 1962 did not change.

reviews

As early as July 1948, Bertolt Brecht Frisch wrote a letter in which he used the manuscript to review When the war was over. He criticized that through the play "the theater as an institution is expected to be considerably less than it was done by previous playwrights of your talent." Frisch had "not chosen the adequate form for his material, namely the so-called large form" through which the major aspects of the material are worked out and not only hinted at, and which, according to Brecht, also includes waving the fence post to point out social mechanisms.

In 1956, Joachim Kaiser judged that when the war was over , in addition to Frisch's first diary, it was “the most successful, most accurate and, in a very realistic way, harmonious work”. However, later reviews largely agreed that the implementation of the drama failed. For Volker Weidermann it was “certainly the weakest fresh drama from this time”, it was “too lyrical, too undecided, too vague and ultimately too little dramatic.” Hellmuth Karasek judged “that this drama embodies the boldness and purity of its design never quite catches up with the execution. ”For Michael Butler,“ When the war was over, there was a constant contradiction to itself. The disagreement is that Frisch just chose linguistic means to show the inadequacy of language as a communication model. ” Volker Hage criticized: “The weakness of the drama lies in the fact that it illustrates a thesis.” Jürgen H. Petersen saw the importance of the play primarily in the fact that “Frisch is the first time that the subject of portraits is at the center of a poetic text In this respect, Gerhard P. Knapp called the piece a “dramaturgical preliminary stage” to Andorra .

literature

Text output

  • Max Frisch: When the war was over . Schwabe, Basel 1949. (first edition)
  • Max Frisch: Pieces. Volume 1 . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1962. (first edition with deleted third act).
  • Max Frisch: When the war was over . In: Collected works in chronological order. Second volume . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1998, ISBN 3-518-06533-5 , pp. 229-276.

Secondary literature

  • Michael Butler: The paradox of the parable: On Max Frisch's “When the War Was Over” and “Count Öderland” . In: Gerhard P. Knapp (Ed.): Max Frisch. Aspects of the stage work . Peter Lang, Bern 1979, ISBN 3-261-03071-2 , pp. 177-194.
  • Heinz Gockel: Max Frisch. Drama and dramaturgy . Oldenbourg, Munich 1989, ISBN 3-486-88271-6 , pp. 33-38.
  • Manfred Jurgensen : Max Frisch. The dramas . Francke, Bern 1976, ISBN 3-7720-1160-8 , pp. 104-112.
  • Hellmuth Karasek : Max Frisch. Friedrich's playwright of the world theater volume 17 . Friedrich Verlag, Velber 1974, pp. 39-45.
  • Walter Schmitz : Max Frisch: The Work (1931–1961) . Studies on tradition and processing traditions. Peter Lang, Bern 1985, ISBN 3-261-05049-7 , pp. 178-184.

Individual evidence

  1. Hellmuth Karasek: Max Frisch , p. 57.
  2. Urs Bircher: From the slow growth of an anger: Max Frisch 1911–1955 . Limmat, Zurich 1997, ISBN 3-85791-286-3 , pp. 168-169.
  3. Max Frisch: On the production of “When the war was over” . In: Collected works in chronological order. Second volume , p. 277.
  4. So by Eduard Stäuble and Hans Bänziger, cf. Manfred Jurgensen: Max Frisch. The Dramas , p. 108.
  5. Manfred Jurgensen: Max Frisch. The Dramas , pp. 104, 106, 111.
  6. ^ Max Frisch: Diary 1946–1949 . In: Collected works in chronological order. Second volume , pp. 530-532.
  7. ^ Max Frisch: Diary 1946–1949 . In: Collected works in chronological order. Second volume , p. 536.
  8. Max Frisch: epilogue to "When the war was over" . In: Collected works in chronological order. Second volume , p. 280.
  9. ^ A b Walter Schmitz: Max Frisch: Das Werk (1931–1961) , p. 179.
  10. Max Frisch: Collected works in chronological order. Second volume , p. 766.
  11. Max Frisch: epilogue to "When the war was over" . In: Collected works in chronological order. Second volume , p. 279.
  12. ^ A b Max Frisch: Diary 1946–1949 . In: Collected works in chronological order. Second volume , p. 637.
  13. a b Wolfgang A. Peters: When the war was over . In: Die Zeit , No. 14/1950.
  14. Hellmuth Karasek: Max Frisch , p. 100.
  15. ^ Max Frisch: Diary 1946–1949 . In: Collected works in chronological order. Second volume , p. 639.
  16. Max Frisch: Collected works in chronological order. Second volume , p. 767.
  17. A fresh sequel to a play . In: Volksrecht January 1949. Reprint in Luis Bolliger (Ed.): Now: max fresh . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2001, ISBN 3-518-39734-6 , p. 44.
  18. a b c Urs Bircher: From the slow growth of an anger: Max Frisch 1911–1955 , p. 171.
  19. Quoted from: Hellmuth Karasek: Max Frisch , p. 45.
  20. Werner Weber : Max Frisch: "When the war was over" . In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung of January 10, 1949. Quoted from: Sonja Rüegg: I don't hate Switzerland, I hate mendacity. The image of Switzerland in Max Frisch's works “Graf Öderland”, “Stiller” and “achtung: die Schweiz” and its contemporary criticism . Chronos, Zurich 1998, ISBN 978-3-905312-72-0 , p. 422.
  21. ^ François Bondy : Notes on Max Frisch's new drama . In: Die Weltwoche of January 14, 1949. Reprinted in: Luis Bolliger (Ed.): Now: max frisch , p. 46.
  22. ^ Max Frisch: Diary 1946–1949 . In: Collected works in chronological order. Second volume , p. 644.
  23. Urs Bircher: From the slow growth of an anger: Max Frisch 1911–1955 . Limmat, Zurich 1997, ISBN 3-85791-286-3 , pp. 172, 267.
  24. Small hinterland . In: Der Spiegel . No. 18 , 1949, pp. 25 ( online ).
  25. Erich Kuby : "When the war was over" in Baden-Baden. In: Süddeutsche Zeitung of April 22, 1950. Reprinted in: Luis Bolliger (Ed.): Now: max frisch , p. 54.
  26. Karl Korn : When the war was over . In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of May 24, 1950. Reprinted in: Luis Bolliger (Ed.): Now: max frisch , p. 55.
  27. Uniforms mean nothing . In: Der Spiegel . No. 14 , 1950, pp. 37-38 ( online ).
  28. Urs Bircher: From the slow growth of an anger: Max Frisch 1911–1955 , p. 266.
  29. ^ Letter from Bertolt Brecht to Max Frisch. Reprinted in: Luis Bolliger (ed.): Now: max frisch , pp. 48–49.
  30. Joachim Kaiser : Öderländische meditations . In: Frankfurter Hefte 11, 1956, p. 392.
  31. Volker Weidermann : Max Frisch. His life, his books . Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne 2010, ISBN 978-3-462-04227-6 , pp. 152–153.
  32. Hellmuth Karasek: Max Frisch , p. 45.
  33. Michael Butler: The Paradox of the Parable: On Max Frisch's “When the War Was Over” and “Count Öderland” , p. 183.
  34. Volker Hage : Max Frisch . Rowohlt, Reinbek 1997, ISBN 3-499-50616-5 , p. 47.
  35. Jürgen H. Petersen: Max Frisch . Metzler, Stuttgart 2002, ISBN 3-476-13173-4 , p. 62.
  36. ^ Gerhard P. Knapp, Mona Knapp: Max Frisch: Andorra . Diesterweg, Frankfurt am Main 1998, ISBN 3-425-06071-6 , p. 11.