"Contemporary Poetry"

East Berlin's Reds last week staged a new play at the Kammerspiel theater to explain the U.S. Written by Gustav von Wagenheim, a resident of Moscow for twelve years, it is called Auch in Amerika (In America Too), and dedicated "to Howard Fast and the youth of America who do not want war." The setting: a peaceful, lakeside American cottage inhabited by grandfather (wiped out by the big trusts), father (worried about his $125,000-a-year job), mother (worried about father) and son Larry (worried about everybody).

Larry is a "progressive student." He has found out that father is not only an atomic scientist but a warmonger with Ku Klux Klan connections. Sample dialogue:

Larry: What do you know of father's connections with General MacFarren?

Mother: That doesn't interest me.

Larry: Wouldn't it interest you that MacFarren has organized a secret Ku Klux group?

Mother: And you mean father is in it? My husband . . . he's a respectable person.

Larry (bitterly): That's the respectable person who, in the year 1950 after Christ, drums lies into you that we must start a war to gain world leadership.

Mother (hysterically): No war! There shall be no war!

Larry whips out a peace petition; mother signs. Not so father, a tough capitalist, who angrily refuses, threatens mother with Klan vengeance, shuts up only when Larry pulls a gun on him.

Auch in Amerika opened to a packed house. At every political punch line, rhythmic rehearsed applause thundered from one section of the audience. Next day the Communist press dutifully trotted out reviews, though the chore was almost too much for Berliner Zeitung Critic Hans Ulrich Eylau, who cautiously wrote he thought the play's denouement a little hard to take. Gulped Eylau: "This is not to be a critical final judgment. It is just the result of a first encounter with a play that in spite of all its shortcomings is ... an enrichment of our scanty stock of political contemporary poetry."

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