http://contramundum.net/theater-symptoms/
The world seems very different from when I began the translation. We are in the fifth month of a global pandemic and the streets of the world are reeling from the sparks begun by a popular uprising against police brutality against people of color in America. The world may be on the brink of revolutions, counter-revolutions, and any number of possible totalitarian regime changes. Many people are clamoring for a dismantling of not only the vicious and militaristic roots of American racism, but also for the canceling of the artifacts of the European-American cultural tradition, insisting that the great books so many of us have treasured are irretrievably implicated in the current evils.
In some ways, it seems a strange time to give birth to a book of translations by a dead white European male, consisting in great part of a lament on the state of cultural decline in 1920's Germany, Austro-Hungary, and France as diagnosed through "symptoms" visible in its theater. Except that Musil's plays and reviews and diagnostic essays on the state of theater are actually more important now than ever. Reading about the artistic controversies of the inter-war period (the Weimar Republic in Germany), amid the rise of that century's competing totalitarianisms, we experience the atmosphere where Fascism and Stalinism took root; the Great Depression that contributed to the rise of these movements hangs over our heads today as we await with trepidation the economic repercussions of the Covid-19 shut down; it is chilling to realize that many of the actors, directors, and playwrights mentioned in the texts would, over the next two decades, be either exiled, in hiding, murdered in concentration camps or by Soviet purges. Or else they would become collaborators of one or the other deadly regime. The 2020s are haunted by the 1920's and its subsequent horrific decades.
So what does this have to do with theater, art, "culture"? Aren't those things frivolous? Bourgeois? Something for the "privileged"?
For Musil, whose intelligence was a sort of seismograph of cultural and social tremors, art had an essential role to play in the shaping of society, a role that he felt had been largely neglected in the wake of spreading commodification, advertising, and the cheapening of what was swiftly becoming no longer culture, but a "culture industry". Art--theater in this case--was not entertainment, not distraction, but a force of existential shattering, a shattering that would open up its audience to new ways of looking at and being in the world, an aesthetic and ethical experience that would change not only one's individual life, but all of society. What is important here (among many things that are important here) is the difference between Musil's vision of art and theater as culturally effective and the vision of a more didactically political theater practitioner like Bertolt Brecht, whose "Epic Theater" did, however, share some of the qualities of Musil's ideal theater. (Musil, for example, anticipated Brecht's concept of the Verfremdungseffekt, by employing radical techniques of disjunction and surprise in his plays, breaking the illusion of the theater frame, and in general, by his belief in art as a transformative social force).
The important difference here is that while both Musil and Brecht worked to destabilize the status quo and expose the absurdities of modern life and the hypocrisies of capitalism and commodification, Brecht did this in service to a new ideology (Marxism); while Musil tore away the veil of assurance without providing a new ideology to replace the old discredited ones; Musil's destabilized world is a fact of life; Brecht's is a stage on the road to a new order. Musil takes away our false security and leaves us with a radical existential uncertainty. And this radical existential uncertainty is the realm of aesthetic experience and of ethics. A realm increasingly misunderstood and increasingly endangered today by ideological convictions of all stripes.
