SOURCE: "Politics and Poetry: Peter Handke's They Are Dying Out" in Modern Drama, Vol. XXIII, No. 4, January, 1981, pp. 339-45.

In the following essay, Schlueter argues that Peter Handke's play They Are Dying Out is more an aesthetic statement than a political one.

In 1974, a year after its publication, They Are Dying Out was produced at Zürich's Theatre am Neumarkt and Berlin's Schaubühne am Halleschen Ufer. The Schaubühne, like Frankfurt's Theater am Turm, favored politically involved plays with a leftist orientation,¹ and three years earlier it had shown considerable hesitation with respect to The Ride Across Lake Constance. There was no such hesitation with They Are Dying Out, however, which Horst Zankl (who directed both the Zürich and the Berlin productions) undertook without reservation, apparently feeling its anti-capitalistic message was clear. When the Yale Repertory Theatre produced They Are Dying Out in 1979, the play was...