Em Frente da Porta do Lado de Fora: Pedro Paiva

ROOFLESS, AMID RUINS... 

 

«There goes a man, in his body, as he suddenly falls…»[1]. This line from The Book of Falls, by poet Casimiro de Brito, could be the gist of how events unfold across Wolfgang Borchert's play The Man Outside[2], as well as across so many of his narratives. The oeuvre of this short-lived author is often seen as the epitome of Trümmerliteratur (lit. «rubble literature») of Germany's «Zero Hour» in the years following the Second World War. In it, the protagonist's situation - condition even - is always that which can be found in the title of another novel by a Portuguese author (Augusto Abelaira, who in turn gleans it from Raul Brandão's Memórias): Sem Tecto, entre Ruínas [Roofless, amid Ruins]. In Borchert's case, the ruins are in plain sight and the roof, aside from being absent, also refers to a frightening memory, whose presence is unable to nurture any possibility of a future. While the author's narrative work, namely in a book like The Dandelion[3], published a few months after his death in a hospital in Basel, still contains vestigial hope and faith in life, the play, written in his final days (and a paradigm for «rubble literature»), confronts us with a dead-end world (like the one we are awakening to today?). The hour in which this author of «Nothingness and Despoilment» writes is characterized by an identifiable historical void: the «zero hour» of 20th century German and European history, which was, at the time, already perceived as the century of all calamities.