Vercors

New Zealand Listener, Volume 13, Issue 328, 5 October 1945, Page 9

Vercors

TATION 3YA took its turn last Sunday with the NBS recording of Vercor’s "The Silence of the Sea." Although another Viewsreel commentator has already dealt with it, I make no apology for bringing \it forward once more; for it seems important that we should understand the implications of this work, written under the Occupation at a time when most Frenchmen were concerned rather with their own sufferings or with violent resistance and the emotions associated with it. The point is that this play is not so much a study of the deception and ultimate disillusionment of a "good German" by the Nazi system as an exposure of the corruption and fatal weakness of even the good German of to-day. Werner von Ebrennac’ represents much of the best in German culture, His love for France is genuine; but he cannot see that the initial act of violence, in which he has taken part believing that it will bring about the marriage of France and Germany, has made it impossible that that marriage should differ from a rape, Furthermore, it makes his whole idealistic position false, His parable of Beauty and the Beast is the sentimentalisation of ‘an act of violence, and his whole attitude to France, sympathetic and admiring, is that of the conquering male withthe streak of self-abasement that makes him present himself as the suppliant barbarian. France, the real civilisation, can wait in silence while he

destroys himself. This is no expression of hatred for Germany in the ordinary sense; but it is important to realise that the meaning of this grave and merciless work is that there can be no place for Germany, as at present constituted, in European civilisation.