Gas I. [antikvár]

INTRODUCTIONThe changes in feeling and perception that began to take shape among the poets and painters at the turn of this century, culminating in the revolutionary drama of Germán expression-ism, can hardly be more effectively illustrated than by Georg Kaiser's Gas. Uncompromising in its break with the dramaturgicai conventions of the psychological play that had reached its perfection in the achievements of Ibsen, Kaiser's work is cast in a form carefully calculated to convey a modern issue: it is concerned not with the alternatives of individual behavior but with the collective experience of a morál crisis brought about by the consequences of contemporary economic and technological practices.It is not surprising that this theme should have been stated most bluntly by the Germán writers of the early twenties. A once vigorous and self-confident society found itself disintegrating in the wake of the defeat of 1918; and the subsequent turmoil of political upheaval and economic collapse created the climate for desperate outbursts of imaginative energy. Much of that expres-sionist literature is utópián: it devoted itself to a scrutiny of those humán resources that might help in the rebuilding of what had been destroyed, and it turnéd fervently and even angrily to an analysis of those forces that seemed most inimical to a better life. But where it advanced beyond a bittér denunci-ation of the past, it proclaimed an image of the humán being which, naive and unduly idealistic though it may seem, yet projected an order of society in which sentient and compassionate raan was to be the master and not the victim of his own aspirations.It is clear that so intense and radical a vision should excite,