[page 1]

Robert F. Gross (1, 2)

Figuring Guilt:
Wolfgang Borchert’s Outside the Door
and Carl Zuckmayer’s
The Song in the Fiery Furnace

Two of the most popular new plays to appear on the German stage in the decade immediately following the end of the Second World War drew heavily on the nonrealistic conventions and forms so beloved by their Expressionist predecessors in the period before the War. Wolfgang Borchert’s first and only play, (he died the day before its stage premiere in 1947), Outside the Door (Draussen vor der Tur), revives the form of the Expressionist Stationendrama to tell the story of a German soldier’s return home from the Russian front. Carl Zuckmayer, whose 1946 The Devil’s General quickly became one of the most popular and controversial dramatic treatments of the Third Reich, turned away from the realism that had distinguished his earlier plays and toward religious typology and allegory in his 1950 The Song in the Fiery Furnace (Der Gesang im Feuerofen). Both Outside the Door and The Song in the Fiery Furnace utilize nonrealistic techniques from Expressionist drama to generalize the plights of their characters, and place their specific dilemmas against a broader horizon of values. Most importantly, however, both plays manifest a clear unease with how to deal with questions of moral responsibility in the wake of the War. Borchert creates a world in which alienation runs throughout all the characters, and the locus of guilt is so diffuse as to be universal and undifferentiated. Zuckmayer tries to balance a sense of common responsibility with the presence of a scapegoat who serves as an allegorical bearer of evil. Neither of these strategies, however, prove to be dramatically satisfying responses to the experience of the World War; in both, the Holocaust is ignored. These plays function by configuring experience in such general terms that specific historical and ethical questions can be skirted by playwrights and their audiences. It is perhaps precisely because of these evasions that the plays were so successful when first performed and yet have vanished so quickly from the standard repertory and the canon of modem German drama.

Borchert’s Draussen vor der Tür makes strong claims for the typicality of the experience it presents in a prose poem that begins the play: [page 2]

A man comes home to Germany. And there he sits through a rather astonishing piece of film. He has to pinch his arm continually during the performance, because he doesn’t know whether he is waking or sleeping. But then he notices to the right and the left of him other people all living through the same experience. So he thinks all this must really be the truth. Yes, at the very end when he’s standing in the street again with an empty stomach and cold feet, he realizes that it was a perfectly ordinary, everyday film. About a man who comes to Germany, one of many. (3)

Borchert draws his imagery from modern technology. His protagonist is not set apart from the other characters, but is virtually indistinguishable from them. He, like the rest of them, watches the movie about a man who is virtually indistinguishable from him. Borchert does not have to admonish his audience to accept his protagonist as part of itself; the world of the prologue is solely peopled with characters like the protagonist. There is no moral differentiation here. There is even the implication that there is no morally purposeful action here. One undergoes one’s life, both as the figure projected on the movie screen and the spectator in the movie house, rather than shape it through purposeful action. The rift in Outside the Door is not the existence of isolated instances of evil in an otherwise good universe, but an ontological fissure that runs through all the characters: all are outside the door.

In the early scenes of the play, we learn that Borchert’s protagonist, Beckmann, is literally an outsider. He returned from the Russian front to find that his wife had taken a lover in his lengthy absence. As a result, he is homeless. The pathos of his situation seems simple and obvious at first. But we then see him go home with a woman who takes care of him after his unsuccessful suicide attempt, to find her husband returning from the Russian front. Now the tables are turned, and the agony is intensified by Beckmann’s discovery that the woman’s husband, an amputee, owes his handicap to Beckmann. As a result of the War everyone is displaced. Beckmann goes to his parent’s home to find they have committed suicide. He finds the General he served under, a figure of death incarnate, has become a streetsweeper. He even meets God, a pathetic old man who admits he can do nothing for humanity, and describes himself as “the God no one believes in any more.” (4) If God, the figure of absolute presence, is exiled to the outside, there is no longer any inside, any center.

In such a universe, the Stationendrama can only be used ironically. When presence has been banished, there is no longer any telos to provide an end to the “stations” of the cross. Beckmann is urged to pursue a series of dramatic confrontations by a faceless character called “The Other,” who meets Beckmann’s agonies with optimistic platitudes, and urges him to [page 3] continue on with his travels. These further travels, however, only deepen Beckmann’s despair. Philosopher Emmanuel Levinas has discussed the “face” as a sign of the Other in its purest signification, (5) but Borchert’s faceless, impersonal, impassive Other is a travesty of human interaction. He keeps the drama going by moving Beckmann from encounter to encounter, postponing the protagonist’s suicide by pro-longing his discourse. Theoretically, the number of encounters in Outside the Door are purely arbitrary. Since they are reiterations of the same experience, in which each character is both displacing and displaced, the reiterations could be reduced to one or multiplied indefinitely. The play is ultimately a monad, in which nothing can be altered.

The Other unaccountably disappears near the end of the play, however, as Beckmann meets the God No One Believes In and the One-legged Man with whose wife Beckmann went home. It turns out that the One-legged Man was able to succeed at the suicide Beckmann bungled, and that he committed suicide because he saw his wife with another man--Beckmann. Each character becomes the object of displacement, but he/she incurs guilt insofar as he/she also inevitably displaces others. “We are murdered every day, and every day we commit a murder. And every day we ignore a murder.”(6) Each character suffers and is the cause of suffering in others. The tapping of the One-legged Man’s gait, its “teck-tock-teck-tock” (7) reminding Beckmann of his guilt, becomes indistinguishable from the ticking of a clock. The awareness of guilt becomes as fundamental to human existence as the awareness of time. The guilt that one incurs by survival becomes a fundamental constituent of existence. As Emmanuel Levinas has explained:

In society as it functions one cannot live without killing, or at least without taking the preliminary steps for the death of someone. Consequently, the important question of the meaning of being is not: why is there something rather than nothing--the Leibnizian question so much commented on by Heidegger--but: do I not kill by being? [...] Do I have the right to be? Is being in the world not taking the place of someone? (8)

Unlike Levinas, however, who has been able to both pose this question and develop an ethical response to it, Outside the Door shows Borchert paralyzed by this insight. Finding no answers within the world of the play, he finally has his protagonist passing through the fourth wall and speaking to his audience. In the absence of all the other characters, in the absence of the faceless Other who has urged Beckmann on, Beckmann tries to elicit a response from the audience: “Answer now! Why are you all so silent? Why? Will no one give an answer? Is there no answer? Is there no, no answer?”(9) The play ends by trying to initiate a response in the [page 4] audience, an action that might go beyond the isolation and angst presented in Borchert’s play. Rather than the faceless inauthentic dialogue of Borchert’s Other, the audience is challenged by Beckmann’s question. No longer is dialogue prolonged by platitudes, but by agonized questioning. The question holds forth a slim hope for another kind of dialogue--an authentic one, based on a common recognition of guilt. Borchert can only pose questions, not make statements. The certainty of statement has been undermined in the course of the play and the audience answer has become problematic. The audience is not allowed to be the platitudinous Other, but it has also been led to want an answer to the question the play has raised. After banishing moral differentiation, absolute presence, and telos from the presented world of his play, Borchert is left with the rhetorical ploy of trying to situate those values in the spectator. True to its Expressionist predecessors, Outside the Door is an intense and artful theatricalization of a soul in torment, but, unlike the best plays of Toiler, Barlach, and Hasenclever, it is unable to articulate an ethical vision, or suggest a course of action.

Far more traditional in his dramaturgy, Zuckmayer’s Song in the Fiery Furnace tries to integrate Expressionist devises with a realistic love tragedy. He prefaces the published edition of Der Gesang im Feuerofen with two items that appeared in the October 1948 Basler National-Zeitung. (10) The first tells of how a Louis C., in the employ of the Gestapo, betrayed a group of French Resistance fighters who were celebrating in a castle on Christmas Eve, 1943. As a result, they were burned to death there by the Gestapo. It was not until after the War that Louis C. was tried and sentenced to death for his act. It is this anecdote that suggested the plot for Der Gesang im Feuerofen. The other news item supplied the playwright with a dominant image and a thematic focus: Forty-four whales inexplicable beached themselves on the Florida coast, leading to their deaths. For Zuckmayer, a pantheist, this second item leads him to ask what is the place within the natural order for such apparently unnatural aberrations? What is it that leads life to turn against itself? Zuckmayer treats the horrible betrayal of Louis C. as a human example of the same sort that leads the whales to beach themselves.

Zuckmayer’s ‘Creveaux’ (the Balser National-Zeitung ‘s “Louis C.” is explained into a surname that both evokes the French “cerver,” “to split,” as well as an argot word meaning “to die”) is set apart from the other characters as the source of all acts of betrayal and barbarism. He himself personifies the fundamental rift, or negative force, within creation that accounts for violence and hatred. As Hans Wagener points out, Creveaux is the only figure of absolute evil in all of Zuckmayer’s dramas. (11) He is an outcast, the illegitimate child of a woman in the mountains and an unknown father, born near the end of the First World War. “You don’t speak about such things easily,” repeats a towns-person, when asked about Creveaux’s ancestry (“Man spricht nicht gern darüber”). (12)

His mythic genealogy is much clearer than his biological one; in the first scene, he is compared to Judas; after the burning of the castle, he bears the mark of Cain on his [page 5] forehead. (13)

The biblical allusions in the play are not limited to the identification of Creveaux. The very title of the play is a clear allusion to the third chapter of Daniel, in which the young Israelites stand unharmed in the midst of King Nebuchadenezzar’s blazing furnace, and sing a canticle in praise of Yahweh. Zuckmayer prints some of the canticle at the end of the printed text of the play, although his Resistance characters sing the Te Deum as they are consumed. Such allusions serve to heighten the solemnity of the action, imply a Judeo-Christian scheme of values, and universalize the particular action reported in the newspaper to the level of yet another instance of transhistorical phenomenon.

But Zuckmayer goes beyond biblical allusions as a means of generalizing his action. In the play he departs from the realistic style and tradition of the Volkstuck that he had worked in since his first stage success in 1925, Der fröhliche Weinberg (The Happy Vineyard), and instead intersperses realistic scenes with scenes in free verse, in which angels, the spirits of the dead, and personifications of natural forces, such as frost, clouds, and wind, appear. The opening of the play, in which two angels bring Creveaux before the rest of the characters, living and dead, stresses from the first that the realistic scenes are to be viewed as evidence in a trial of Creveaux. This trial, however, is to be an unusual one. The question is not, “Is the defendant guilty?”; his guilt is assumed. The question is, “What is the place of the Guilty One in the universal order?” The First Angel asks the assembled cast:

The Captain may find forgiveness
Under the Cross, the executioner’s servant,
The murderer Barrabas, the poor thief,
The jeerer, the doubtful judge,
Then is there grace yet
For Judas?
Does an eye weep for him? (14)

If there is grace for Judas, then even negativity can be reconciled within the cosmic order.

It can only be reconciled, however, if the spectator, while watching the play, is able to recognize within him/herself the negativity of this character who has been set apart from the others:

When he is bad, do not say:
That was someone else. Do not say:
[page 6] That was another people. Never say:
That is the enemy. Always say:
That is I."(15)

Zuckmayer’s injunction falls on deaf ears, however, largely because he has so localized the evil in Creveaux that his expulsion from the world of the play seems an adequate symbolic and formal moral purgation. While the opening speeches of the play ask the audience to identify with Creveaux, the play that follows it melodramatically construes him as an Other whom we are led to reject. No opposition could be more exaggerated than the conflagration on Christmas Eve, where bride and groom, Frenchman and German, Communist and Roman Catholic all join in singing the Te Deum together in the castle, while Creveaux sinks in the snow outside, the mark of Cain on his brow and derided by the Gestapo agents he has helped. Plenitude of being lies within, even in the throes of death, while alienation and negation lie without. Despite Creveaux’s suffering and pathetic isolation, Zuckmayer has cast him as the Betrayer in what amounts to a 20th century miracle play, and the empathy is overwhelmingly drawn toward the martyrs.

In the final sequence of the play, the martyrs grow in power, as they merge with the forces of nature:

Great is the power of the dead.
They grow through the earth
With rootlike mesh, they blow
In all the winds, their actions
Know no time, their yesterday is tomorrow,
Their today is ever there, their day
Has neither beginning nor end. (16)

Creveaux, deserted and desolate, tormented by guilt, considers suicide, like Judas before him, but the spirits of those he has killed watch over him and save his life. About to throw himself into a crevasse, he hears the dead Sylvester playing his flute below. About to shoot himself, an angel, played by the same actress who played Michelle, a member of the Resistance, stays his hand. At length he reaches a hut in the mountains where “Mother Frost,” a character who is a symbol for both Creveaux’s mother and the natural order, as well as the double for a derelict earlier spurned by Creveaux, calms the desperate criminal, saying merely, “Come. It is [page 7] time.” (17) At these words, Creveaux stops fighting, lets his pistol fall, and allows himself to be led off to justice. Like the members of the Resistance, Creveaux learns to reconcile himself to what must be, the ‘amor fati’ so important to Zuckmayer’s work. (18) But he is allowed the ecstasy of plenitude experienced by the others. Mother Frost merely holds the coat Creveaux has shed and repeats “My child. My child. My child.”

This final image of the play, a Pieta for Judas, almost answers the question put forth by the Angel at the play’s beginning; is there a grace for Judas? The answer is ‘yes,’ but that affirmation is qualified. There is a tear for Judas, but the Pieta is not complete. The son does not rest in his mother’s arms. The son goes off to retribution, while a mere sign of him, his coat, stays behind with his mother. For all of his desire to reincorporate Creveaux within the natural order (and the mother has been the dominant symbol of the natural order since the play’s beginning, see 135, 136), the figure has become such a scapegoat that he must be punished, must be refused the embrace of primal unity that the play reiterates is open to all. Creveaux is to be embraced and rejected, is to be identified with by the audience and seen as fundamentally different--a character predestined for destruction from the start. Der Gesang im Feuerofen is caught between a ritual of reconciliation and Calvinist tragedy. The rift in Being that Creveaux embodies cannot be mended, and the character splits at the end into two characters, the criminal led off to justice and the lamented son.

Zuckmayer blunts the question of moral responsibility by reconfiguring the news report of the original into a romantic tragedy of scorned love. Creveaux betrays the members of the Resistance not for political reasons, but because he cannot bear the fact that Sylvaine does not love him. The opposition is no longer between Nazis and the French Resistance, but between the Source of Evil and the Good. This vision of the Good includes all those in the burning castle; Catholic and Communist, French Resistance fighter and German soldier. Within that community, ideological difference is abolished. Just as Borchert tars all his characters with a common guilt, Zuckmayer absolves his martyrs in a final vision of beatitude. Zuckmayer’s movement toward universality, however, not only ignores the ideological differences suggested by the source story, but seems oblivious to the ‘fiery furnaces’ of the Third Reich’s concentration camps as well. Indeed, Zuckmayer’s play can be seen as a complete displacement of Holocaust imagery for a postwar German audience. By making the society in the furnace his ‘image of humanity,”(19) he is able to recuperate this deeply disturbing imagery to the tradition of German Enlightenment; the denouement of Lessing’s Nathan the Wise can be seen to resonate in Zuckmayer’s drama, but at the cost of historical amnesia.

In both The Song in the Fiery Furnace and Outside the Door, evil is configured as a state of being lost, an existence cut off from its origin. For Zuckmayer, it is expressed through the figure of Creveaux; for Borchert, it comes to encompass his entire dramatis personae. Paul Ricoeur has explicated this understanding of “evil as straying” as it appears in the Hebrew Bible [page 8] through the term shagah, and comments on the particularly modern resonances of this image: “it forecasts the more modern symbols of alienation and dereliction; the interruption of dialogue, having become a situation makes man a being alien to his ontological place.” (20)

Borchert is left stupefied by his vision of this alienation; Zuckmayer tries to contain it. Ultimately, both of these dramas are more about the alienation that came in the wake of the War than about moral responsibility during it. They reflect, more than anything else, a common desire to re-establish social ties and regain a sense of community. It would not be until the 1960s that the plays of Max Frisch (Andorra), Rolf Hochhuth (The Deputy), and Peter Weiss (The Investigation) could attempt dramatic explorations of issues that Zuckmayer and Borchert were unable to confront.

Works Cited

Borchert,Wolfgang, Draussen vor der Tür und Ausgewähite Erzählungen. Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1956.

Engelsing-Malek, Ingeborg. ‘Amor Fan’ in Zuckmayer‘s Dramen. Konstanz: Rosgarten Verlag, 1960.

Glade, Henry “Der Gesang im Feuerofen--Zuckmayer’s Humanitätsideal.” Blätter der Carl-Zuckmayer-Gesellschafi. 6 (1 Mai, 1980) 88-94.

Levinas, Emmanuel. Ethics and Infinity: Conversations with Philippe Nemo. Trans.. Richard A. Cohen. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1985.

Mews, Siegfried. Carl Zuckmayer. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1981.

Ricoeur, Paul. The Symbolism of Evil. Trans. Emerson Buchanan: Boston: Beacon Press, 1967.

Wagener, Hans. Carl Zuckmayer. München: Beck, 1983.

Wellwarth, George E. and Michael Benedikt, Postwar German Theater: An Anthology of Plays. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1968.

Zuckmayer, Carl. “Der Gesang im Feuerofen,” Gesammelte Werke IV. Berlin: Fischer Verlag, 1960.

Endnotes

1. Dr. Robert F. Gross is Professor of Theatre at Hobart and Williams Colleges.
2. An earlier version of this paper under the title, “Two Kinds of Otherness: Zuckmayer’s Der Gesang im Feurerofen and Borchert’s Draussen vor der Tür,” was presented at the ATHE convention.
3. Wellwarth, George E. , and Michael Benedikt. Postwar German Theatre: An Anthology of Plays. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1968. 53. “Em Mann kommt nach Deutschland. Und da eriebt er einen ganz tollen Film. Er muss sich während der Vorstellung mehrmals in den arm keifen, denn er weiss nicht, ob er wacht oder traumt. Aber dann seiht er, dass es rechts und links neben ihm noch mehr Leute gibt, die all dasseibe erieben. Und er denkt, dass es dann doch wohl die Wahrheit sein muss. Ja, un ails er dan am Schlusse steht, merkt er, dass es eigentlich nur em ganz alltaglicher Film war, em ganz alitaglicher Film. Von einer Mann, der nach Deutschland kommt, einer von denen.”
4. Wellwarth and Benedikt, “Auch Gott steht draussen, und keiner macht ihm mehr eine Tür auf’ 97.
5. Levinas, Emmanuel. Ethics and Infinity: Conversations with Philippe Netno. Trans. R. A. Cohen. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1985. 85-87.
6. Wellwarth and Benedikt, “Wir werden jeden Tag ermordet und jeden Tag begehen wird einen Mord. Wir gehen jeden Tag an einem Mord vorbei,” 111.
7. Borchert, Wolfgang. Draussen vor der Tur undAusgewahite Erzahlunger Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1956. 51-53.
8. Levinas, 120, 121.
9. Wellwarth and Benedikt: “Gebt doch Antwort! Warum schweigt ihr denn? Warum? Gibt denn keiner eine Antwort? Gibt keiner Antort??? Gibt denn keiner, keiner Antwort???” 118.
10. Zuckmayer published the play in two versions. One reflects the original production in Gottingen; the other, the Hamburg production that took place ten days later. The revisions are few, and I have followed the earlier version for this paper. On the revisions, see Siegfried Mews, Carl Zuckmayer. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1981. 94.
11. Wagener, Hans. Carl Zuckmayer Munchen: Beck, 1983. 109.
12. Zuckmayer, Carl. “Der Gesang im Feuerofen,” Gesammelte Werke IV.  Berlin: Fischer Verlag, 1960. 243.
13. Zuckmayer, 243.
14. “Der Hauptmann unterm Kreuze
    Mag Verzeihung finden, der Schinderknecht,
    Der Mörder Barrabas, der arme Schächter, ja
    Der Spotter, der Zweifelsrichter.
    Doc gibt es Gnade noch/Für Judas?
    Weint noch um ihn em Auge?” Zuckmayer, 135.
15. “Und wenn sie böse ist, sagt nicht:
    Das waren andre. Sagt nicht:
    Das war ein andres Volk. Sprech nie:
    Das ist der Feind. Sprecht immer:
    Das bin ich.” Zuckmayer, 138-139.
16. “Gross is die Macht der Toten.
    Sie durchwachsen die Erde
    Mit wurzelhaften Geflecht, sie wehn in allen Winden, ihr Wirken
    Kennt keine Zeit, ihr Gestern is Morgen,
    Ihr Heute ist Immerdar, ihr Tag hat nicht Anfang noch Ende.” Zuckmayer, 244.
17. “Komm, Es ist Zeit.”
18. Engelsing-Malek, Ingeborg. ‘Amor Fati’ in Zuckmayer’sDramen.  Konstanz: Rosgarten Verlag, 1960. 120-137.
19. Glade, Henry. “Der Gesang in Feuerofen--Zuckmayer’s Humanitätsideal.” Blatter der Carl-Zuckmayer-Gesellschaft, 6 (1 Mai, 1980) 8 8-94.
20. Ricoeur, Paul. The Symbolism of Evil. Trans. E. Buchanan. Boston: Beacon Press, 1967. 73.