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Power and Spirit
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10273 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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12 / 1993 |
1,240 Words |
| Author
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Wes Blomster
Wes Blomster, a retired professor of German, is a freelance
writer living in Boulder, Colorado. |
MACHTSPIELE (Games of Powert)
Literatur und staatssicherheit im Fokus Prenzlauer Berg
(Literature and state security with an eye upon
Prenzlauer Berg)
Edited by Peter B?hig and Klaus Michael
Leipzig: Reclam, 1993
416 pp.
No problem, none in the world, is more tormenting than that of the artist and his human aspect.
The year was 1903, and Thomas Mann, speaking through his doppelganger Tonio Kroger, was agonizing over Richard Wagner, the unsavory individual whose mesmerizing music made him a supreme manifestation of the ambiguity of art.
Of course, Wagner's unappetizing side--his anti-Semitism, for example--was clearly visible to anyone willing to see it, even to Wagnerian in spite of himself Mann; it was up to the individual to choose, and, indeed, many loved the music while loathing the musician.
Later in the twentieth century, however, the intrusion of politics into art resulted in a more complicated situation. The list of writers both on the right and on the left who polished the boots of totalitarian power with the saliva of their words is now a matter of legend.
And yet the dream of absolute artistic integrity survives; in the past quarter century it was celebrated with seeming certainty in the many dissident movements that could no longer be put down completely by the tyrants whom the artists opposed.
In the final decade of the late East German state, it was the authors of East Berlin's Prenzlauer Berg who with amazingly courageous openness nourished the forces of resistance among their fellow citizens. In so doing, they gained admiration throughout the Western world.
Prenzlauer Berg, or "Prenzlberg" as it came to be abbreviated, was populated over a century ago by the proletariat of the rapidly industrializing German capital; the endless tenements of its treeless streets survived even the bombs of the Second World War to grow still shabbier through forty years of so-called socialism.
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