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Max: A Play – A Political Satire Play Script About the Confusion of Youthful Activists and Believers in Gradual Reform
A play that satirizes the political confusions of both youthful activists and middle-aged believers in gradual reform. Translated by A. Leslie Willson and Ralph Manheim. A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book.
128 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1970
19 people want to read
About the author
Günter Grass
305 books1,839 followersNovels, notably
The Tin Drum
(1959) and
Dog Years
(1963), of German writer Günter Wilhelm Grass, who won the Nobel Prize of 1999 for literature, concern the political and social climate of Germany during and after World War II.
This novelist, poet, playwright, illustrator, graphic artist, and sculptor since 1945 lived in West Germany but in his fiction frequently returned to the Danzig of his childhood. He always identified as a Kashubian.
He is best known for his first novel, The Tin Drum (1959), a key text in European magic realism. He named this style “broadened reality.” “Cat and Mouse” (1961) and Dog Years (1963) also succeeded in the period. These three novels make up his “Danzig trilogy.”
Helene Grass (née Knoff, 1898 - 1954), a Roman Catholic of Kashubian-Polish origin, bore Günter Grass to Willy Grass (1899 - 1979), a Protestant ethnic German. Parents reared Grass as a Catholic. The family lived in an apartment, attached to its grocery store in Danzig-Langfuhr (now Gdańsk-Wrzeszcz). He has one sister, born in 1930.
Grass attended the Danzig gymnasium Conradinum. He volunteered for submarine service with the Kriegsmarine "to get out of the confinement he felt as a teenager in his parents' house" which he considered - in a very negative way - civic Catholic lower middle class. In 1943 he became a Luftwaffenhelfer, then he was drafted into the Reichsarbeitsdienst, and in November 1944, shortly after his seventeenth birthday, into the Waffen-Schutzstaffel. The seventeen-year-old Grass saw combat with the 10th Schutzstaffel panzer division Frundsberg from February 1945 until he was wounded on 20 April 1945 and sent to an American prisoner of war camp.
In 1946 and 1947, he worked in a mine and received an education of a stonemason. For many years, he studied sculpture and graphics, first at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf and then at the Universität der Künste Berlin. He also worked as an author and traveled frequently. He married in 1954 and from 1960 lived in Berlin as well as part-time in Schleswig-Holstein. Divorced in 1978, he remarried in 1979. From 1983 to 1986 he held the presidency of the Berlin Akademie der Künste (Berlin Academy of Arts).
During the German unification process in 1989 he argued for separation of the two states, because he thought a unified Germany would resume its past aggression. He moved to the northern German city of Lübeck in 1995. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1999. In 2006, Grass caused controversy with his disclosure of his Waffen-Schutzstaffel service during the final months of World War II, which he had kept a secret until publishing his memoir that year. He died of complications of lung infection on 13th of April, 2015 at a Lübeck hospital. He was 87.
This novelist, poet, playwright, illustrator, graphic artist, and sculptor since 1945 lived in West Germany but in his fiction frequently returned to the Danzig of his childhood. He always identified as a Kashubian.
He is best known for his first novel, The Tin Drum (1959), a key text in European magic realism. He named this style “broadened reality.” “Cat and Mouse” (1961) and Dog Years (1963) also succeeded in the period. These three novels make up his “Danzig trilogy.”
Helene Grass (née Knoff, 1898 - 1954), a Roman Catholic of Kashubian-Polish origin, bore Günter Grass to Willy Grass (1899 - 1979), a Protestant ethnic German. Parents reared Grass as a Catholic. The family lived in an apartment, attached to its grocery store in Danzig-Langfuhr (now Gdańsk-Wrzeszcz). He has one sister, born in 1930.
Grass attended the Danzig gymnasium Conradinum. He volunteered for submarine service with the Kriegsmarine "to get out of the confinement he felt as a teenager in his parents' house" which he considered - in a very negative way - civic Catholic lower middle class. In 1943 he became a Luftwaffenhelfer, then he was drafted into the Reichsarbeitsdienst, and in November 1944, shortly after his seventeenth birthday, into the Waffen-Schutzstaffel. The seventeen-year-old Grass saw combat with the 10th Schutzstaffel panzer division Frundsberg from February 1945 until he was wounded on 20 April 1945 and sent to an American prisoner of war camp.
In 1946 and 1947, he worked in a mine and received an education of a stonemason. For many years, he studied sculpture and graphics, first at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf and then at the Universität der Künste Berlin. He also worked as an author and traveled frequently. He married in 1954 and from 1960 lived in Berlin as well as part-time in Schleswig-Holstein. Divorced in 1978, he remarried in 1979. From 1983 to 1986 he held the presidency of the Berlin Akademie der Künste (Berlin Academy of Arts).
During the German unification process in 1989 he argued for separation of the two states, because he thought a unified Germany would resume its past aggression. He moved to the northern German city of Lübeck in 1995. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1999. In 2006, Grass caused controversy with his disclosure of his Waffen-Schutzstaffel service during the final months of World War II, which he had kept a secret until publishing his memoir that year. He died of complications of lung infection on 13th of April, 2015 at a Lübeck hospital. He was 87.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
November 29, 2015
Freedom of choice and second helpings, that's what they mean by democracy.
Max: A Play is a stage adaptation of Grass' novel Local Anesthetic. I read the novel almost 20 years ago. The primary tension in the novel as well as the play is between generations, a pair of students and a pair of their teachers, separated by largely twenty years. One of the students wishes to protest the Vietnam War by incinerating his dog in a posh area of West Berlin. There was an echo and rippling vertigo while reading a second version of the events, one almost a generation or so after my initial encounter. Debate ensues about action, resistance and the folly of activism. Matters then appear quaint -- or at least sincere.
There is a fifth character, a dentist and like Lear's Fool - he has all the best lines. One of the teachers harbors a secret, she attempted to denounce a neighbor during WWII: she is plagued by this memory. It is fair to think that the author did as well.
Max: A Play is a stage adaptation of Grass' novel Local Anesthetic. I read the novel almost 20 years ago. The primary tension in the novel as well as the play is between generations, a pair of students and a pair of their teachers, separated by largely twenty years. One of the students wishes to protest the Vietnam War by incinerating his dog in a posh area of West Berlin. There was an echo and rippling vertigo while reading a second version of the events, one almost a generation or so after my initial encounter. Debate ensues about action, resistance and the folly of activism. Matters then appear quaint -- or at least sincere.
There is a fifth character, a dentist and like Lear's Fool - he has all the best lines. One of the teachers harbors a secret, she attempted to denounce a neighbor during WWII: she is plagued by this memory. It is fair to think that the author did as well.
September 20, 2016
Novelists are oftentimes horrid playwrights (see: Cormac McCarthy, DeLillo, et. al.), and this proves the rule. Still, it's a whole strudels' worth of fun. A satire of cooption and how easily the most ardent of convictions can be compromised. And it is actually funny, a rarity in any medium.
Keeper line: "You're right. That's what I've been thinking. That's why I want to burn my dog."
And that is pretty much the entire core of the play. Worse ways to spend an hour than with dentistry, sophistry, and canine immolation.
Keeper line: "You're right. That's what I've been thinking. That's why I want to burn my dog."
And that is pretty much the entire core of the play. Worse ways to spend an hour than with dentistry, sophistry, and canine immolation.
June 26, 2007
This is one of my Favorite plays.
There are 5 characters: two students (male and female), two professors (male and female), and a dentist (male).
Set in Germany during the turbulent era of Vietnam, when students and Academia in general were also protesting and organizing, the play follows a debate between the students and professors, with the dentist playing an unusual role of comic mediator, relating all of the nuances of life he comes across rather cosmically with, well, dentistry. The debate is over whether or not the male student should perform a particular act of protest. You see, the wealthy German society, women in particular, tended to sit around at outdoor cafes with their dogs, and drink tea or whatever, and didn't give a fuck about anything outside of their own little world. So the student decides, as a wake up call and protest of the use of napalm in the Vietnam war, that he thinks he should set his dog on fire in a public square that adjoins these popular outdoor cafes. These women, he argues, care more about their sweet little dogs than they do about any human beings in Vietnam, so maybe this act would bring some of the reality down home for them. Absurd? Definitely. Does he do it? I won't say. But the dialog, and the way the set is directed to be set up, so that there is a juxtaposition of often multiple scenes occurring simultaneously make this play one of the most interesting and hilarious plays I've ever read. I've never seen it performed, but hope to, someday.
There are 5 characters: two students (male and female), two professors (male and female), and a dentist (male).
Set in Germany during the turbulent era of Vietnam, when students and Academia in general were also protesting and organizing, the play follows a debate between the students and professors, with the dentist playing an unusual role of comic mediator, relating all of the nuances of life he comes across rather cosmically with, well, dentistry. The debate is over whether or not the male student should perform a particular act of protest. You see, the wealthy German society, women in particular, tended to sit around at outdoor cafes with their dogs, and drink tea or whatever, and didn't give a fuck about anything outside of their own little world. So the student decides, as a wake up call and protest of the use of napalm in the Vietnam war, that he thinks he should set his dog on fire in a public square that adjoins these popular outdoor cafes. These women, he argues, care more about their sweet little dogs than they do about any human beings in Vietnam, so maybe this act would bring some of the reality down home for them. Absurd? Definitely. Does he do it? I won't say. But the dialog, and the way the set is directed to be set up, so that there is a juxtaposition of often multiple scenes occurring simultaneously make this play one of the most interesting and hilarious plays I've ever read. I've never seen it performed, but hope to, someday.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews