Masse-Mensch: the revolutionists’ meeting. On a broad flight of steps rising steeply from the footlights, men and women are grouped in an irregular lozenge, arbitrarily lit by sharp beams of light from the top and sides of the proscenium arch. A Fehling production designed by Strohbach.
Nothing like this voice, coming out of a darkness in which faces vaguely begin to hover, has been imagined, much less attempted, in our theater. The lights rise—or it would be more accurate to say, shoot down—upon the men and women workers standing in an irregular lozenge shape upon steep steps, which spread to the curtains at each side. Out of this crowd, in chorus and singly, come pleas for action, and visions of suffering which sweep the audience with emotion. The woman cries for a strike against war and against capital. Behind her rises The Nameless One, the bastard of War, to cry for armed revolt. His passion sweeps the masses, and the woman submits.
The fourth scene, another dream-picture, envisages her fears for the course of the revolution, her intuition that it will only breed a new violence, the violence of the proletariat. Below great, crooked, towering walls, guards hang over green lanterns. They sing ribald songs of their miseries. The Nameless One enters, and, standing in the middle, plays wildly on a concertina, while the guards and the condemned dance the dance of death about him. The sky lights up on a sudden in crimson, then pulses in and out; colors flood down over the moving figures in waves that throb with the music. Among the condemned is the husband of the woman. She tries to save him, as she would save all men from violence. Her pleas are useless. She stands with him before the firing squad as the curtain falls.
The fifth scene, the tremendous scene of the play and the production, is the rally at the workers’ headquarters in the face of defeat. The stage is again boxed in black. There are steps like the corner of a pyramid rising up to the right of the audience. Upon these steps gather the working people. You see a host, affrighted and cowering, in the twenty-four men and women who stagger upon the steps singing The Marseillaise. As they sway, locked together hand in hand, like men on a sinking ship, and the old song mounts up against the distant rattle of machine guns, the scene brings the cold sweat of desperate excitement to the audience that fills the Volksbühne, and to comfortable, purse-proud Americans as much as to men who have fought in the streets of Berlin. Suddenly there is a louder rattle of arms. The noise sweeps through the air. It drives into the souls of the huddling men and women. They collapse, go down, fall in a tangled heap. The curtains at the left loop up suddenly. There in the gap against the yellow sky stand the soldiers. They arrest the woman, the woman whom the rebels were about to condemn for her opposition to their slaughter.
Masse-Mensch: the rallying. A pyramid of steps slanting to the right of the stage. At its apex, a group of tense revolutionists sing The Marseillaise, the woman-heroine opposite them in the center. Suddenly machine-guns attack the meeting.
The sixth scene is a dream-picture of the woman in prison. There is a void, a misty, swimming emptiness. Upon a platform is the woman’s cell, a scarlet cage in which she can only kneel. About her stand guards, bankers, the ghosts of dead enemies. They accuse her. She answers. At last, out of the void rise the shapes of the masses, the imprisoned masses who have been betrayed by violence and by the woman who deserted them and cast her lot with violence. They move in a great circle of towering shadows that seem to hang in the emptiness of the sky, as they pass across the dome at the back of the stage. The guilt of the masses, the guilt of the individual, the guilt of the woman—they have filled the air with recrimination. The figures of the imprisoned masses stop suddenly in their round. They raise their arms. They cry: “We accuse!”
There is only the final scene left. It is in her cell. Again the black curtains; some narrow steps. The husband comes to bring her freedom. The Nameless One also, with a plan of escape through murdering the guards. She rejects both. She rejects the priest, accusing men of primeval sin. She goes to her death. And as she goes, two women prisoners sneak out into the light—to divide the clothes of this new Christ.
Schuldig! Guilty! Guilty! The word echoes through the play, echoes in the auditorium of the Volksbühne. All are guilty. All are sick with guilt. And none more than these sufferers in the slums of Berlin who must go to the theater to see in black curtains the picture of their guilt. The world goes through capitalism, debasing itself, driving terror, greed, cruelty into the place of love and understanding. It comes out in revolution, a corruption of the thing it cures. The Germans have been through capitalism with a vengeance, through materialism, through war, and through a revolution that blasted half the people and did not satisfy the rest. Here is the misery of capitalism, the misery of abortive revolution, the misery of defeat and black hunger. Berlin is in purgatory. And Berlin goes to Masse-Mensch. Before this play sit hundreds of quite ordinary men, who have only to hear some word shouted at them with the passion of this play, and they will leave the slow and loved routine of homes, and lie again behind sandbags on Unter den Linden. All this is a strange, terrible, and sweet thing to feel as you sit looking at the purgatory of those black curtains.
Toller and Fehling have made possible the realization of this intense situation between play and audience; Toller by writing straight at the heart of his public. His dialogue makes no pretense to the accidental rhythms of life. It speaks out plainly and simply and beautifully the passion of each character, the passions of the world. Fehling has driven Toller’s speeches just as directly at the public. He has made no pretense at actuality. He has put his actors forward as actors on an abstract stage; and you think of them only as living, intimate presences.