Einar wie Eva
Towards an Economy of the Feminine in Schleef’s Puntila
Günther Heeg
After the Zürich premiere of Herr Puntila und sein Knecht Matti [Mr. Puntila and His Man Matti] (), Brecht felt it imperative to warn that “[t]he actor playing Puntila must be careful not to let his vitality or charm [...] so win over the audience that they are no longer free to look at him critically” (Brecht :). At the same time, he called for a distinct revaluation of Matti by future directors and actors: “Matti must be so cast as to bring about a true bal- ance, i.e., so as to give him intellectually the upper hand” (). The compli- ance with Brecht’s suggestions didn’t work well for the piece because the expanded revaluation of the figure of Matti as a sovereign director and expo- nent of a superior consciousness defers the dialectic of master and slave (Hegel) that the text seeks to exhibit. When the phantasmic grandiosity (Größenselbst) of the servant prepares to assert itself as the orchestrator of the fabel, the “parable,” or of the “model” for instructing the spectator at the the- atre, it kills the movement that inheres in the text of the drama as well as in the text of the production. This movement is the text’s “labor.” Its center and inner drive is, as with Hegel, fear. Einar Schleef’s Puntila production at the Berliner Ensemble in sets the stalled dialectic of master and servant in motion again by making its inner center, the fear of death, the driving force in the staging. To do this, Schleef allied himself with Brecht’s text in opposition to Brecht the author and the- atre maker, who thought he knew it better. But all—even the discarded ver- sions of Puntila—are to be understood in their interplay as Brecht’s texts. The first unpublished script from December (BBA :–), in particular, is a treasure trove of stories and anecdotes, which in later tellings were dropped and painted over. Schleef’s archaeological dramaturgy doesn’t, for its part, make the mistake of hypostatizing the first script, but lays the versions like layers over one another so that they form reciprocal “inscriptions.” In them the movement of the text’s labor, suppressed in the finished work, can be experienced as a struggle. The following becomes visible: the opposition of master and servant is overlaid by the attraction and repulsion of the two men, who can’t let go of each other because each is the alter ego of the other; and, the dramaturgy of the sovereign directing of the servant underlies an ambiva-
The Drama Review , (T), Winter . Copyright © New York University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
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lent “dramaturgy of Besprechung [discussion].” On the one hand, besprechen [to discuss] leads to the seduction of one’s own point of view into the talk of an- other. But it also means the conjuring away of evil spirits—the exorcism of demons—which, in the dialogues of Mr. Puntila and His Man Matti, are un- doubtedly of a feminine nature. The longing for the alliance of soldierly men, which is the vanishing point of the dramaturgy of Besprechung, amounts to the exorcism of the feminine. Eva’s examination, usually lauded as the climax of Matti’s demonstrations as the sovereign director, is shown from the perspective of the play’s original ver- sion—which remains faithful to Eva—in its entire wretchedness: as ritual fe- male sacrifice that is meant to support a community of “weak” men. At the end of the interrogation, Puntila and Matti do, in fact without hesitation, meet in the disowning of the daughter and prospective wife because of her “unnatu- ralness.” The most rigid servile consciousness triumphs, articulated in the awaited answers to the examination, which Eva doesn’t know to give: eating herring till it comes out of her ears, darning socks, shutting up in front of the husband as proof of the feminine ability to empathize, and no balking whatso- ever at the master, who has the whip hand. Demand for total adaptation to the . Central to Einar circumstances, banning of every spontaneous movement, prohibition of Schleef’s Puntila wishes. No superior self-awareness of the servant is expressed throughout this production at the Berliner examination, rather one with its back to the wall. Matti knows that “[a]nyone Ensemble is an inordinately who keeps quiet and controls his passions can go a long way” (:); and, large round disc suspended “[t]en paces distance and no familiarities, or chaos sets in, that’s my inflexible in pale light—the table of rule” (), decrees Puntila: wise words dictated by fear enforced by the sacri- the Grail Society—around fice of the feminine in the interrogation ritual. In Eva, the suppressed “fear which Puntila (played by center” (Furchtzentrum) of the piece, an example must be established so that the Schleef) and his people as- fear of weakness and loss of self can be made to disappear behind the presump- semble in anticipation of tions of servile consciousness. salvation during the first part of the play. (Photo by Ute Eichel)
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The “praxis of the text” works against this disappearance. In the interplay of the two versions everything is laid out in the open: the mind-set in the concept of the sovereign directing and its undermining through a dramaturgy of discussion; the counter-concept of a male order and the withdrawal of its basis for validation by making visible the sacrifice on which it is founded. Nothing is definitively ruled out; the one doesn’t come to rest in the other. The textual analysis of the combined versions sets the unrest in motion in the corpse of Puntila, which is the precondition for its actual return to the theatre. Everything hinges on the productive unrest of the text not being brought to a standstill in the finished production. However, this would be the case if Eva’s objection to the male bonding and female sacrifice were merely pre- sented—if, for a change, a different fabel were narrated—instead of herself be- coming the driving force of representation. The classic medium of the epic theatre, the Gestus, is therefore, as we have seen, not suitable. For everything that evades meaning is removed from its images. In the seamless end product of what is represented, body, speech, and movement are subordinate to the abstraction of the meaning, the way concrete use value is subordinate to the abstraction of exchange value. The cut of abstraction into the actor’s body locks the feminine—that is to say, meaningless—articulation and autonomic movement out of the performance because it threatens to disturb the intelli- gible, clear, and observable theatrical representation of the fabel. Schleef re- sponds to this sacrifice of representation with a theatre form that brings the production process of representation back into that which is represented, and allows the violence of the abstraction of meaning that was integrated in the finished product of the representation to become visible and palpable. The re- lease of this violence reveals the scene of the performance, the battlefield of labor and fear. The theatrical medium in which this occurs is the ancient chorus tragedy. With its proximity to cult and ritual on one hand, and to oratory on the other, it is especially suited to work against the violent “transposition” of meaning in the visual conceptualization and instead to “translate” the movement of the text into scenic events. As a theatrical form, the chorus tragedy refers back to early forms of social interaction, presenting elementary relations between the indi- vidual and the community: the individual stepping out of the chorus, his oppo- sition and assertion against the group or against another individual, the clash that the doppelgänger threatens to expand into community-destroying civil war, and finally the expulsion of the scapegoat in the conciliatory sacrifice. For Schleef, who takes up this form of theatre, it isn’t about its historic re- construction, but its up-to-date adaptation through the excavation of its sub- merged tradition in German drama and theatre history. There, female sacrifice is strikingly often found to be involved as an archaic relic in the dramatic plot. An example is Wagner’s Parsifal, which for Schleef is the German model of the theatrical repetition of ritual: the community of the Knights of the Grail, their addiction to the drug of the Grail, the Last Supper; the threat to the community from the enemy within—in this case, in Amfortas’s wound in- flicted as a result of succumbing to the feminine; the redeemer Parsifal, who resists its temptation in the form of Kundry; the (self)sacrifice of the feminine, the death of Kundry. That this world of sacrifice and its sacral veiling is not completely foreign to Puntila, which was conceived as a folk piece and a comedy, is alone already evident in Puntila’s continual self-apotheosis through the reference to biblical prefigurations. The stylizations toward the abandoned savior in the garden of Gesthemane, toward the prodigal son and the heavenly betrothed, toward Moses on the Mount who glimpses the Promised Land, don’t allow them- selves to be reduced to mediums of comical contrast. Rather they point, sur-
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. The empty stage, liter- prisingly throughout, at a hidden dimension that is particular to tragedy. From ally a chorus space for the ora et labora: the chorus of the crest of tragedy, the tragic hero Puntila sees his imminent downfall, which he hopes to elude through the sacrifice of the feminine. The new order, Puntila’s servants kneels in which his servant sets up on his behalf through this sacrifice, is no longer that silent devotion. Eva (Jutta Hofmann), dressed in white of the old “sinful” Puntila. The “redemption,” which the tragedy is meant to avoid, tends toward catastrophe. as a bride, opens the scene Schleef’s scenic arrangement makes transparent the unadmitted closeness of of seduction, “A Conversa- tion about Crabs” (“Ein Puntila to tragedy in that he lays the Parsifal model underneath it: central to the production is an inordinately large round disc, suspended in pale light— Gespräch über Krebse”). the table of the Grail Society—around which Puntila and his people are as- (Photo by Ute Eichel) sembled in anticipation of salvation during the entire first part of the play, which consists of four scenes. In the beginning, Eva is sitting downstage in the dark, excluded from the community; but by the end of the second part of her examination, she is on that very table as the sacrifice of the gathering. Be- tween both ritual arrangements of the scenes, the stage is empty: a space smoothly paneled with light wood—the Finnish home built in the interior of the proscenium—with a square entrance out of the floor to the top of the prompt box. Brightly lit in the middle, between the columns of the stage por- tal, it resembles an altar. Behind it a “chorus” with a row of seats opens to the back wall, literally the space for the formation of military men, for the rituals of punishment and the carrying out of the ora et labora, for procession, seduc- tion, and midsummer night’s Dionysium. The latter are naturally excesses, of which the community can only be purified by a substitute sacrifice. Despite the citation of sacred and cultic places, rules, and events, Schleef’s theatre is not about resacralization. True, it draws its fear-inspiring, shattering power from the original elements of theatrical representation, such as en- trance, opposition, grouping, and confrontation, through which the violence of community-forming rituals exerted influence. But it doesn’t have the in-
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tention of presenting this violence as sacrosanct. Rather, it deciphers it as the violence, which inheres in coherent and consistent representation. The cho- rus, the core of Schleef’s theatre, is always present on the stage as the group of individuals who work together and as the community that collaborates. The terror that lies in between is the terror of the rehearsal. Its drill—no quirk of Schleef’s, rather the ingredient of every performance form—doesn’t disappear in the finished art product, but is preserved in the production. That it is essen- tially the staging of rehearsal work can be seen in the performance of the di- rector/actor. The one who plays Puntila, Schleef, is actually at the same time the director—relentless tamer, considerate principal and orchestrator—who leads the others, brings them forward, sends them downstage and whistles them back, pulls the strings and gives the commands. But it doesn’t have to do with the distanced display of a “play within a play” that is simply con- cerned with reflection. The spectator is seized by an intensification of articula- tion, an emphatic and excessive pressure that resolutely exceeds the borders of conventional expression in which the violent formation of the individual and the group can be felt. In the process, the excess of the violent preparation points to the excessive fear that the work could fail, that the unruliness of the feminine could break down the effort of creating. This fear is confronted with the mediums of repetition and overacting—signs of the effort required to eliminate and overcome that which cannot be formed and regulated in the process of performance. Schleef doesn’t let it come to this. Consequently, the staging renounces the finished form of theatrical representation that has been common in Europe since the th century. More as rehearsal, less as embodied representation, Schleef’s theatre is first and foremost oratorio. Following Brecht’s dramaturgy of Besprechung, the concerto form of the oratorio disrupts the sanctioned vio- lence that is built into cult and ritual as well as the “art as religion” of visualized performance. In the oratorio of Puntila, the language—its flow and rhythm, its tone and musicality—seizes the often naked body in its natural state prior to the refinement and synchronization of its expressive bearers into a meaningful form. But in the unfinished and unformed, in the splitting up of bodies, lan- guage, and image, the feminine—excluded or domesticated into grace—re- turns. It makes itself known in a multiple displacement of the positions and constellations that we are otherwise accustomed to seeing on the stage. The work of displacement in the Schleefian oratorio is first pushed forward through the dislocation and depersonalization of the voices. The linguistic
. “Midsummer Night’s Dionysium” in Puntila: Having dissolved the en- gagement of his daughter with the Attaché, Puntila conducts Eva to the feast of the maids and servants. Berliner Ensemble, . (Photo by Ute Eichel)
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meaning that is fixed through character and fabel is released in that the attach- ment of the text to specific dramatis personae is suspended. When in the first scene “Puntila finds a human being,” and in the climbing of Mount Hatelma Schleef speaks the texts of Puntila and Matti, the ground is pulled out from under the usual interpretation of master and servant. The dispersing of the text of “The Hiring Fair” among anonymous voices that cannot be identified as characters allows the individual lines of the political-economic discourse to appear in a new light, without ideological filtering. Secondly, this displacement is accompanied by the dissolving of the intona- tion Gestus, which fixes the meaning of the spoken statement through the guiding of the voice. In the unhindered flow of speech, colored and structured only through tone and rhythm, it is henceforth difficult to hit on binding statements. Thirdly, the accompanying semantic uncertainty undergoes an ad- ditional intensification through the exchange of vocal gender roles. Matti’s ghost story resounds through little girl’s voices; the lawyer, judge, and attaché run through all voice levels from bass to soprano during the praise of the Finn- ish summer night; text passages in which Puntila chastizes Matti are taken over by the female voices of Fina, Laina, and Hanna. The firmly outlined, self-as- sured superstition is shown to be subverted by the feminine. In the sublime Grail Society, the fortress of male control—“the word of a Tavastland farmer stands forever, everyone knows that” ()—is intruded upon by the female chorus right at the beginning; they are always lying in wait to bring the lan- guage to the edge of meaning and beyond, in laughter, whispering, talking at once, screeching and screaming, to avenge for the injury of the feminine in the process of representation. The threatened revenge is expressed through the voices of the men by a fundamental disturbance, which they can only master with difficulty. Not very flexibly—and not very convincingly—the male chorus tries to oppress the fe- male chorus through the repeated didactic recitation of a drummed-in state- ment: “Oh Tavastland, blessed art thou! With thy sky, thy lakes, thy people, and thy forests” (). The individual has an even harder time of it: in the im- provised speech duels with Eva (Jutta Hofmann)—the “actual battle for recog- nition”—Puntila (Einar Schleef) is on shaky ground, leading in part to the cracking of his voice, in part to speechlessness. Basically, excessive screaming is meant to assert the masculine ego against its own doubt about the outcome of the self-assertion. But the fear of powerlessness and downfall of the ego is lodged in the screamed self-assertion. The cry for recognition becomes the cry for help, with the knowledge that help won’t come and that downfall is inevi- table. Masculine consciousness, the consciousness that the servant assumes, which frowns upon and denies fear, considering it effeminate, resonates through feminine pathos: subjection, suffering, passivity. It derives its power from consenting to fear. The economy of the feminine—an economy of being in acquiescence, in cooperation with fear—directs itself against the working out and reconditioning of that consent. “But he who wishes to acquiesce, must stick to the poor” it says in the Badener Lehrstück vom Einverständnis [Baden Lehrstück on Consent]; poverty here is understood as renunciation of the crutches of self-assertion. In the knowledge of the eminent meaning, that the “gender chapter” for Brecht is the “fear center” not just in the Fatzer frag- ment, could be added “but he who wishes to acquiesce, must stick to fear.” A theatre that makes this acquiescence to fear the determining foundation of its own economy of representation seems to me to do greater justice to Brecht’s intention than his later self-stylized, toned-down theatre, the epic theatre of the director who determines meaning. In fact, Schleef ’s Puntila production allows no line of interpretation, no “red thread” to be established that would not be disrupted by the intervention
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. The staging of rehearsal work: Schleef as Puntila in the middle of the scene leads the others forward, sends them downstage, and gives the commands. Downstage, the chorus of the brides of Puntila are accompanied by the chorus of “Mattis.” (Photo by Ute Eichel)
of the feminine, and this is what keeps the interpretive approaches and con- ceptions in motion. Schleef isn’t satisfied with reversing popular role interpre- tations—for example, condemning Matti as a member of the free corps. The dramatis persona of “Matti” that is taken back into the text describes not only the “Matti-chorus” of the military male order, but also the “Puntila-Matti” of Mount Hatelma or the “Matti as the seducer of Puntila.” Something similar happens with the brides: raised by Brecht to the “noblest characters in the play” (), with Schleef they lose the classical patina, and with their shriek- ing, their witch-like desire in ruin, their laughter, they are sooner reminiscent of Erinyes [Furies], ancient goddesses of vengeance in a modern form. Even when at the end they appear as red-tulle-adorned brides paired with the mili- tary men, it remains undecided whether and where this potential for ven- geance is finally situated. The men’s axes and the red “blood tongue” of the dresses betray an overshooting archaic power that is difficult to imagine as, in the long term, being brought to (fascistic) order. Finally, in Schleef’s production, the customary “left” interpretation of Puntila is not replaced with a gendered reading; the social conflict is not erased in favor of the gender conflict. Far more, the economy of the feminine that Schleef follows superimposes one on the other: the disowning of the daughter extends to the extermination of the hungry and therefore disruptive masses: “ polished off , of them, and that made it peaceful as paradise” (:). The feminine and the unsettling “red” highlight one another, like the social tension and gender tension in the “Ballad of the Forester and the Countess.” The fear center of the one in the other is articulated in the last stanza: “A lady fox loved a rooster one day./ ‘Oh handsome, I must be your bride’/ The evening was pleasant, but then came the dawn, came the dawn./ All of his feathers were spread far and wide” (). It is Schleef’s contribution that he not only takes up but also abandons himself to the reiteration of the feminine in the production process of repre- sentation, and so consents to the downfall of the director who determines meaning. He doesn’t want this to be understood as “going over to the side of women,” but as “necessary work, necessary contemplation [...] in order to en- able the survival of the endangered art form of the spoken and musical the- atres” (Schleef :). The stance that he thereby takes up is best described with an image, an image from the production: After the examination and dis- owning of Eva, the table of the Grail Society, the sacrificial disc with the sac-
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rificial offering, is slowly pulled upward and gradually tipped. When Eva, who has fastened herself on top of it with arms spread, can no longer hold on, she lets go and slides down onto Puntila, her father, who lays her over his shoul- der and, during the entire following scene, carries her, in a bent-over posi- tion, like a rolled-up carpet or precious cargo. An image between the Descent from the Cross and Burial, an image of consent and of labor: this image is im- posed in order for the production to escape the coffin and the grave. An im- age that shows both: Einar wie Eva. —translated by Marta Ulvaeus
Notes . The following article is the second part of my postdoctoral lecture on Einar Schleef’s production of Brecht’s Mr. Puntila and His Man Matti at the Berliner Ensemble. The first part appeared as “Herr und Knecht, Furcht und Arbeit, Mann und Weib: Einar Schleefs archäologische Lektüre von Brechts Puntila” (Heeg ) [Master and Servant, Fear and Labor, Husband and Wife: Einar Schleef’s Archaeological Reading of Brecht’s Puntila], which is summarized in this essay. . Compare the trial concerning “spontaneity” in The Measures Taken. . The sacrifice of the feminine in the process of representation underlies the presented but mostly veiled female sacrifice in Eva’s examination, which representational the- atre—also epic theatre—demands for the unambiguity of the intended meaning. . Here I am assuming René Girard’s () perspective regarding ancient tragedy. . What is to be understood as tragic, in the sense of Oedipus, is not the downfall, but rather that the paths that are taken to hinder the downfall lead right into it; so, what is tragic is “the unity of rescue and annihilation” (Szondi :). Applied to the tragic constellation in Puntila: the effort to overcome the boundaries of individuation in the company of others demands precisely the sacrifice of that which has functioned as the precondition and drive toward their transgression. The male community, an intoxi- cated community, if it wants to be really constituted, needs the sacrifice of the femi- nine, even as self-sacrifice. . With Wagner, Parsifal too is a disguised tragedy, whose catastrophe is deliberately turned into redemption. The catastrophe is the new order, the male order, set up through Parsifal who, unlike Amfortas, has resisted the temptations of the feminine. The redemp- tion succeeds only through the doubling of the hero: Amfortas/Parsifal. Similarly, in Puntila the rigid, soldierly, Matti-sympathetic Puntila survives. Puntila, who yearns for the freedom from inhibition, for intoxication, and for conversation, is marginalized, and he hallucinates himself into his room in his Tavast homeland, conjuring the Great Mother. When Matti is away, he will withdraw, like Baal, into the (Finnish) woods to die. . The celebration of the archaic, of violence, or even of fascism—to mention familiar accu- sations resists historicizing at first sight, which is particularly evident in the costumes. The Greek robes of the nocturnal dance of love were sauna towels draped in the poses of a “strength-in-joy” aesthetic, which set in Puntila’s time the imaginary space of orgiastic freedom from inhibition. The military coats worn by the male chorus refer to the national protective corps [Schutzkorps] stressed in the text, in which the servants drilled during the Finnish civil war under the leadership of the landowners, just as the agricultural workers of Mecklenburg-Vorpommerns drilled in the prohibited free corps [Freikorps] of the Weimar Republic. When upon Matti’s closing verse, “The hour for taking leave has struck/ So, Puntila, I wish you luck” (), the chorus of servants wearing military coats and carrying axes and the chorus of the farm girls in draped red tulle stand gracefully downstage, it is clear in which camp the servile consciousness has arrived. . Compare the central concept of consent in the Lehrstücke and Lehrstück theory. . Compare the ghost of Surkkala, the actual opponent who never appears. With Brecht, his parting is a one-sided dialogue, text that was added to Puntila’s part, in which Puntila plays the part of Surkkala. With Schleef the text rings out as the whisper chorus in black. Surkkala, who doesn’t give Puntila his hand, is the ghostly other of Puntila, “a painful episode” (). . The rebellious energies in this production are much stronger, much more emphasized than the servile consciousness, which has been relocated to the right camp, close to fascism.
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. Schleef counts the “Red Carpet”—a “blood tongue,” which Clytemnestra rolls out for Agamemnon—among the essentials of theatre as such (:). . [Translator’s note: Willett’s translation takes poetic license; he strayed from the exact meaning so he could make it rhyme. Literally it translates as, “do you love me too?”]
References Brecht, Bertolt n.d. Bertolt Brecht Archive (BBA). Berlin. Mr. Puntila and His Man Matti: A People’s Play. Translated by John Willett. New York: Arcade Publishing. Girard, René Violence and the Sacred. Translated by Patrick Gregory. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Heeg, Günther “Herr und Knecht, Furcht und Arbeit, Mann und Weib. Einar Schleefs archäologische Lektüre von Brechts Puntila.” In drive b: Brecht , edited by Marc Silberman, –. Berlin: Theater der Zeit. Schleef, Einar Droge Faust Parsifal. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag. Szondi, Peter “Versuch über das Tragische.” In P.S. Schriften I, –. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag.
Günther Heeg received his PhD from the University of Stuttgart in . While a schoolteacher until , he also worked as dramaturg and director. He has published on painting and theatre, European theatre history, Brecht and the Berliner Ensemble, the theatre of Heiner Müller, and the director Einar Schleef. His habilitation, Das Phantasma der natürlichen Gestalt. Körper, Sprache und Bild im Theater des Jahrhunderts, is forthcoming from Stroemfeld Verlag.
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