A Translation of "Ist Das Theater nicht mehr, was es war?" by Thomas Bernhard

Is the Theater Not What It Used to Be?

A Contribution to the Dearth

Theater critics and so-called theater critics have always and throughout their lives lived off the so-called dearth of theater as farmers and so-called country-folk [live off] the dearth of grain, and the farmers and so-called country-folk will also in the future and not only in the short term but also deep into the future history of all rational and irrational human thought [continue to live] off the lucrative notion that there is a prevailing dearth of grain, to exist like the theater-critics and so-called theater-critics off the notion that there is a prevailing dearth of theater, [or] more precisely a dearth of plays for the theater.  In the age of human rights, [quite] rightly!  For the theater-critics and the so-called theater critics are, like the farmers and the so-called country-folk, also human beings.  As we, the writers of plays for the theater, [as] we, in the age of human rights, are also human beings, we have no wish to forgo [the services of] either the farmers and the so-called country-folk, who seem to us in our credulousness to be vital [to our survival], or of the theater critics and so-called theater critics, who at the moment strike us as being no less vital [to our survival], because we know that we cannot forgo [their services], all these human beings or inhuman beings, [bur] quite simply human beings for all that, shall have our blessing.  They all bring their provisions to the breakfast table, even if every now and then during and after partaking of the products of the farmers and so-called country-folk and during and after partaking of the products of the theater critics and so-called theater critics we cannot [keep] our stomachs [from] turn[ing] in the course of the breakfast [meal] itself.  But whose products are truly impeccably fresh or even refreshing, and who among us is always and invariably an honest and genuinely appetizing purveyor[?]   The call for a health police force drones literally incessantly in our ears, and the hospitals are filled beyond capacity with the poisoning victims of the farmers and the so-called country-folk and of the theater critics and the so-called theater critics.  Everywhere from Flensburg to Bolzano it’s quite simply enough to make you puke!  In his day, [Alfred] Kerr wrote verbatim of a dearth of theater and of drama in the language of our literally potato-picking neighbors, which means that even by then, even by Kerr’s time, the theater, especially the (German) drama, was already no longer what it had once been, and Robert Musil (from Prague) [wrote] equally verbatim that “the dearth of drama today” (i.e., in Musil’s time) “is unprecedentedy dire,” and hence by Musil’s time [the dearth] must have already become quite dire, and hence Robert Musil also had the feeling (or the understanding?) that in his time the drama, let us assume the German [drama], was no longer what it had once been, and probably all the rest, [the] less famous, [the] less good theater critics and so-called critics, [although] possibly on the whole less disgusted by and less despairing over the whole [crowd]-stirring German drama than those two vain, heroic theater fanatics, felt exactly as Kerr and Musil did.  They all knew about the lucrativeness of this notion, and if they had then been still or at any rate for once literally and genuinely in full possession of their wits, they would have gone so far as to lay their notion of the dearth of dramas, which we calmly style a dramatic dearth, out on its deathbed.  But in fact the theater and especially the drama was, I believe, already by the time of the Greek tragedians no longer what it once had been, [that] even in their (the Greek tragedians) time a dearth reigned absolutely, that the dearth of drama prevailed before so much as a single head, a single brain got the idea (what an insane [idea!]) of writing a drama and putting on theatr[ical performances].  You, the farmers and the so-called country-folk between Flensburg and Bolzano have much more in common than a simple journalistically spoiled or a journalistically misshapen head can describe or allow to be conceived. 


Translation unauthorized but Copyright ©2014 by Douglas Robertson


Source: Der Wahrheit auf der Spur.  Reden, Leserbriefe, Interviews, Feuilletons.  Herausgegeben von  Wolfram Bayer, Raimund Fellingerund und Martin Huber [Stalking the Truth.  Speeches, Open Letters, Interviews, Newspaper Articles.  Edited by Wolfram Bayer et al.](Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2011).