Elective Afinities Between "Café", by Mário de Andrade, and "Masse Mensch", by Ernst Toller

Abstract

This work aims to present a productive dialogue between Mário de Andrade’s choral opera Café, written between 1933 and 1942, and Ernst Toller’s 1919 Expressionist play Masse Mensch based on dialectical historical materialism. This article starts from the perspective of the primacy of the work of art for literary analysis, mobilizing theoretical and critical issues to make the works talk, assessing how the aesthetic formalization of social issues in each context takes place and valuing the mediation between art and society. The result of this was the meeting of formal touch points between the two objects, for example that the aesthetic renewal of the dramatic text and the scene are articulated with the transformations and new forms of social organization in Brazil and Germany.