Die Soldaten by Jakob Lenz: Talking About Stereotypes

Especially when reading literature from past epochs, there is the challenge of contextualizing instances in literature that reference offensive and harmful stereotypes, and acts of hostile and violent behavior towards minorities. I find it important to convey to students that the artistic and lexical vocabulary to deal with these issues was different than nowadays, and that viewpoints expressed by characters in the text are not necessarily those of the author. In Jakob Lenz's play The Soldiers, there is a scene featuring a Jewish character named Aaron. His home is entered at night by a group of soldiers, who climb into his bed and scare him deeply, only to play a prank at his expense on one of their own comrades. Aaron is not listed as a character in the beginning of the play, and does not feature hereon after. He also makes stereotypical utterances to mark him as “the Jew.” Students keenly observed that his character was a flat, offensive stereotype, not even listed as a character in the play. They objected strongly, and expressed their dislike with the author's artistic choice. I saw this as an opportunity to not only address these very important observations and reactions, but to also illuminate the aspect of social satire and critique present in Lenz's plays. While recognizing that the character of Aaron is indeed a stereotypical depiction of a Jewish person, we talked about how the play is named after the “soldiers,” and how they are characterized throughout as a violent and anti-social group. I brought up the historical context of the enlightenment, and in particular the so-called “Jewish question,” as well as the “Jewish enlightenment” (the haskalah), and how there was a beginning discourse addressing anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism, favoring the emancipation of Jews. We discussed the friendship between Gotthold Ephraim Lessing and Moses Mendelssohn. In that historical context, decoding the racist, sexist, and homophobic stereotypes on which the soldiers rely, such as the “greedy” and “horny” Jew (the soldiers were dressing up as women when they entered his nightly chamber) became a tool in pushing back against them. I also provided the students with an article in German addressing and analyzing this very scene, pointing out the ways in which Lenz can be read as an analysis of the social dynamics that lead to the violent socialization of the soldiers. We then talked about how in the past, theater directors and producers sometimes opted to leave this scene out, as not to appear as condoning anti-Semitism, and whether or not this was the best choice. On one hand, students had realized that Lenz was not affirming anti-Jewish clichés, but emphasizing how vile the soldiers were. Doing justice to that intention would be better than sanitizing the play to avoid any complications. On the other hand, they rightly felt that depicting Aaron as written in the play would not do justice to current sensitivities of audiences, nor to the intention of Lenz himself. One cannot simply portray this stereotype on a stage, but has to defamiliarize it, or otherwise expand this character to show a real individual, not a caricature. To that end, I gave students a creative prompt for one of their response papers, asking them to re-write the scene, for example with a monologue for Aaron alone, that could be staged instead of the original version. The following is a submission by a student, whose permission I obtained to include their work.

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