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“DIE REGIE DES LEBENS” Domestic Drama and the Sturm und Drang
Author(s) -
Mclnnes Edward
Publication year - 1977
Publication title -
orbis litterarum
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.109
H-Index - 8
eISSN - 1600-0730
pISSN - 0105-7510
DOI - 10.1111/j.1600-0730.1977.tb00726.x
Subject(s) - contingency , drama , power (physics) , action (physics) , epistemology , sociology , aesthetics , philosophy , literature , art , physics , quantum mechanics
In this essay I have examined the attempts of the playwrights of the Sturm und Drang to express their awareness of the determining power of society in dramatic terms and have tried to relate this awareness to their view of the dramatic action as a whole. In the plays of Lenz, Wagner and Klinger the conception of the crisis is analytical in a new and radical sense: it is seen as brought about by aims and responses which are imposed upon the characters by their social environment in ways which they themselves cannot understand or control. In their attempts to envisage the resolution of this crisis ‐ I have argued ‐ the dramatists are responding to a quite different kind of awareness. Here they are no longer attempting to show the working of definable social forces but to suggest the ultimately random nature of existence. the structural tensions in these plays reveal the conflict between opposing views of life, between an awareness of the individual's existence as governed by predictable social forces, on the one hand, and a sense of his dependence upon the sheer contingency of things in a purposeless world, on the other.