Captain, my Captain

Köpenick's memorial to its Captain

Picture this.  In 1906 a man named Wilhelm Voigt, a life-long petty criminal, was released from his latest term of imprisonment.  Now in his late fifties he’s had enough of his former life.  He wants to go straight.  He wants a job.  He wants a place to live.  But Wilhelm Voigt is invisible.  He has no identity papers.  Without identity papers he cannot get a residence permit.  Without a residence permit he cannot get a job.  Without a job he cannot get a residence permit, and so on in an endless vortex.  He is lost, a little like the Flying Dutchman, seemingly doomed forever to be tossed around on waves of bureaucratic idiocy. 

In one final attempt to break to break the bars of the prison outside prison, he dons a military uniform, that of a captain.  As if by magic he ceases to be invisible.  The clothes have made the man.  He orders some passing troops to fall in, marching them to the town hall, hoping to trace his missing papers.   

On the way he stops at the police station, there ordering the officers to ‘care for law and order’ by preventing all telephone calls to the capital for the next hour.  In the town hall both the mayor and the treasurer are arrested for ‘crooked bookkeeping’.  The Captain orders the safe to be opened.  When the mayor asks for a warrant he points to the bayonets of his soldiers, saying ‘These are my authority’, a line in any other country in the world that would have exposed him as a fake.  The safe is opened and the mayor relieved of a fairly large amount of cash.  A receipt is provided, of course.  After all, this is a society built of paper. 

I know this seems like a fairy story but it really happened.  You may very well have guessed where from the name of the Captain.  Yes, this is Germany, the Germany of Kaiser Bill, Prussia, to be precise, a place obsessed with uniforms and tied tight in regulations, a place where to hear is to obey, a place where everyone only obeys orders.  The little drama took place in the town of Köpenick to the east of Berlin, from which Voigt was ever after known as the Captain of Köpenick. 

He was caught and faced another lengthy term in prison.  But his exploit captured the imagination of a people not generally noted for their sense of humour.  Bit by bit he was transformed in to a German version of Robin Hood, and as such he is still celebrated today.  Even the Kaiser was amused, later pardoning Voigt as an ‘amiable scoundrel.’  But Bill was not a subtle man; the irony and absurdity of the incident and all that it told of the Second Reich was lost on him.  He was pleased, rather, by the obvious reverence that a military uniform carried among the people at large.

A quarter of a century later Carl Zuckmayer, a playwright, wrote Der Hauptmann von Köpenick – The Captain of Köpenick -, a satire based on the incident.  First performed in Berlin in 1931, it was a commentary on contemporary society as much as the past, a commentary and a warning.  Two years later it was banned and Zuckmayer went into exile.  The Kaiser, unsubtle or not, had a sense of humor.  Hitler had none.

The Captain of Köpenick is a play not that well-known outside Germany.  I don’t suppose there is any great surprise in this, in that the humour does not travel that well, or German humor, to say the least, tends to be a little bit on the heavy side.  But it has made one of its rare foreign excursions to London’s National Theatre, which is where I saw it at the weekend. 

In a new English language version by Ron Hutchison and directed by Adrian Noble, it stars Anthony Sher as the eponymous anti-hero.  It was a commendable performance, just as I have come to expect from Sher, an actor of range and depth.  Here he could embrace comedy and pathos with equal ease, as he was transformed from a real nobody into a fake somebody, the talented Herr Voigt! 

Set in the National’s Olivier Theatre, the play made good use of all the technical wizardry at the director’s fingertips, allowing for rapid scene changes, including some wonderful expressionist-cum-cubist Berlin cityscapes in the style of The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari. 

The Captain of Köpenick is as relevant today as it was when first performed.  The continual flow of bureaucratic absurdity from Brussels is sufficient proof of that.  I could only wish that it had been handled with greater skill.  I found Hutchison’s updated version irksome and silly at points rather than funny, descending now and again into outright vulgarity.  More than that, Zuckmayer’s message is obvious enough, the satire biting enough, without the need for the continual reminders, and certainly without the need for the climatic “hysterical Dance of Death.”

This is a play, as I wrote above, that does not travel well.  It might have travelled better with a little more discipline, a little less reverence and a lot less Teutonic stodge!  Still, Sher, along with some of the supporting cast, makes the experience all worthwhile.  If you are in London, and minded to go, the Captain will be goose-stepping around until 4 April. 

Bring me the head of Danton

I was twenty-one when I read Dantons Tod (Danton’s Death), the same age when Georg Büchner wrote it. I only picked it up in an attempt to improve my German but quickly realised that this was something exceptional, an extraordinary play by an extraordinary writer, who died aged only twenty-three in February 1837. Dantons Tod, set during the most climatic and turbulent period of the French Revolution, was the only one of his plays to be published during his lifetime, though in a heavily censored version. Even then, such were the radical themes it touched on, it had to wait until 1902 before it was premiered in his native Germany.

Yes, I’ve read the play, and I loved what I read though I had never seen it performed – until now. London’s National Theatre is currently staging a new production by Michael Grandage, scheduled to run until mid-October. Given that this is the first performance of the play since 1982, four years before I was born, it was clearly an opportunity that I could not miss, though Howard Benton's adaptation has involved some radical pruning, reducing Büchner’s original quite considerably. Nevertheless, it’s still a fairly intense two hours of political drama, without intervals, I should warn you.

In its publicity the National has described Danton’s Death as “the greatest political tragedy ever written.” There is an element of hyperbole here, in that such plays as Julius Caesar and Macbeth stand in the same pantheon, but it’s one that I’m not uncomfortable with. It has a sweep, a romantic and tragic grandeur that in some ways exceeds Shakespeare, looking forward to the great political and ideological contests of the modern age. That’s the first thing that struck me when I read it – how modern if felt.

The play is about a struggle, a struggle of ideas and a struggle of personalities. Toby Stephens plays Georges Danton, in some ways the Lenin of the French Revolution. But unlike Lenin Danton was no puritan; life was for living, and living was to enjoy the good things of life, no matter how they happen to come to one.

The action opens in the spring of 1794, in the midst of the Reign of Terror. Danton has had enough: he wants the bloodshed to stop; it no longer serves any useful purpose, so far as he is concerned. He is also a haunted man, haunted by the prospect of his own death at the hands of the revolutionary purists, haunted by his own bloody past, which included responsibility for the September Massacres of 1792.

The purists are troubled by no such qualms of conscience. Headed by Maximilian Robespierre, played by Elliot Levy, and his protégé Louis Antoine Saint-Just, played by Alec Newman, they believe that Terror is the road to virtue. They are pure and ascetic as Danton is corrupt and venal, but it is the pure and the ascetic who are responsible for so much of the horror and unhappiness of life, these monsters of the idea, as the play effectively demonstrates.

Stephens was good as Danton, though there were points when I felt that he was walking, like a child, in the shoes of a much bigger man, a measure perhaps of the French Revolutionary than the English actor. I simply do not see his Danton as the “Titan of the Revolution”, a title accorded to him by Thomas Carlyle.

Levy was good as the priggish and fastidious Robespierre, the one historical figure for whom I retain a particular loathing, but not nearly as good as Newman in the part of Saint-Just, as chilly a fanatic who ever lived, in many ways the real agent of the Terror, with none of the self-doubt of his mentor.

For me it’s a sign of Büchner’s genius that the play manages to convey so much on so many levels. Yes, it’s about a struggle of political ideas and practices, but there is also the psychological struggle between the main protagonists, intensely played out at points.

There is also something dreadfully frustrating about the character of Danton that he manages to convey, a man of action no longer capable of action, a man seduced by overweening confidence in his own importance, his own indispensability, all this overlaid by a fatalist surrender to an inevitable destiny. Danton made history, but as he himself puts it, history has “a way of biting you on the arse.” Büchner understood that, when it comes to the greater drama, human actions, the actions of any given individual, inevitably reach the point of irrelevance. Here Danton is at the point of personal and historical irrelevance.

I have no hesitation in saying that this is a play of more than historical interest, a play with a relevant contemporary message. In a sense we continue to live in the age of Saint-Just, the age of the fanatic, from Pol Pot to the Taliban, those who would drown life in purity and virtue, no matter the cost. Oh, I should add that the guillotining at the end is chilling realistic; so either avert your eyes…or bring your knitting needles.

On the Edge

Printing of Ernst Jünger’s novel “On the Marble Cliffs” (Auf den Marmorklippen ) was stopped in 1940, though existing editions were not withdrawn, supposedly for its subliminal anti-Nazi message. To be perfectly honest I think the message of this little novel can be overstated, and Jünger himself never made any direct claim of the kind. Indeed, I would go so far as to say that the book reflects the character of the author in more ways than he might have cared to allow. It is detached, abstract and coldly intellectual; a work of aristocratic condescension; of a man who would never soil his hands in the dirty business of politics.

For each and every contemporary analogy, On the Marble Cliffs is balanced, and more than balanced, by forms of Teutonic mysticism; of Blut und Boden images and ideas that would just as easily have been appreciated and understood by the likes of Alfred Rosenberg. In the end the message is one of despair, of vindictive despair; that the humane values are not worth preserving. The book, for all of its lyricism and beauty, is cold and inert; the work of a man who merely watched while others acted. As much as I admire Jünger, and I do admire him, in the end his intellectual detachment comes dangerously close to an absence of true moral courage