Performing Unification: History and Nation in German Theater after 1989

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Acknowledgments Most of the research that has gone into Performing Unification was made possible by grants from the GermanAmerican Fulbright Commission and the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD). Fulbright and DAAD enabled me, at different stages of the project, to live in Berlin, devote months to archives, and see hundreds of performances. I profoundly appreciate the two years they gave me to explore the city, its histories and futures—a rare and precious amount of time to devote simply to searching, sharing, watching, and thinking. While in Berlin, I had an academic home at the Freie UniversitГ¤t thanks to Prof. Dr. Bettina Brandl-Risi and Prof. Dr. Erika Fischer-Lichte. They provided aid both in the grant proposal process and by steering my research. I am also grateful to the InterArt Studies research training group for many stimulating presentations and conversations. Dr. James Harding and Dr. David Barnett both met with me in Berlin and shared advice, on this project and on academic life. Dr. Shane Boyle, Dr. Brandon Woolf, and Dr. Jack Davis, whom I met in Berlin, all read and provided feedback on nascent chapters. Prof. Dr. Hans-Thies Lehmann offered tea as well as his thoughts on the project. Dr. Christel Weiler gave guidance, as did Dr. Elmar Engels, who even took me along on a backstage tour of the SchaubГјhne. Without the assistance of Sabine Zolchow and Konstanze Mach-Meyerhofer I never would have found my way through the tremendous holdings of the Akademie der KГјnste Archive. The assiduous efforts of them and their colleagues at the AdK have preserved documentation of many of the most important German performances of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Individual theaters in Berlin opened their archives and offered assistance to me, granting access to videos, programs, scripts, and other materials:Page viii → the VolksbГјhne am RosaLuxemburg-Platz, the Maxim Gorki Theater (especially longtime dramaturg Sylvia Marquardt), the Deutsches Theater, and Ballhaus Naunynstrasse. Alexander Weigel, dramaturg at the Deutsches Theater in the 1980s and 1990s, who worked often with Heiner MГјller, gave me insight into MГјller’s goals and their production process. Rimini Protokoll and She She Pop shared with me vital materials, including videos and sound recordings. This project grew from ideas developed at the Yale School of Drama, where Prof. Jim Leverett interrogated me on the history of German drama, Dr. Paul Walsh encouraged me to always keep writing, and Dr. Catherine Sheehy provided lively countenance. Dr. Elinor Fuchs sits to this day on my shoulder urging me to think better by writing clear, concise sentences. I owe her a debt that cannot be repaid, only passed to the next generation. Any limpid prose has her to thank; all faults you find remain my own. Dr. Joseph Roach and the Interdisciplinary Performance Studies group at Yale introduced me to new ideas and scholars, shaping in particular how I thought about the city of Berlin in relation to its art. Over the years of this project’s gestation, I have presented research and ideas at conferences of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education, Performance Studies International, the German Studies Association, the American Comparative Literature Association, and the American Society for Theatre Research. Many thanks to the numerous interlocutors in our community who have asked questions, probed arguments, and shared their thoughts. My time with fellow young scholars at the Mellon School for Theatre and Performance Research was invaluable. Dr. Freddie Rokem read nascent pages and gave much-needed feedback. I believe a first book owes special tribute to the early professors and mentors who inspired its author. Dr. Sieglinde Lug, Dr. Roscoe Hill, and Dr. Kim Morgan guided me through numerous independent studies (a commitment on their part I am only now beginning to understand) and encouraged me to study abroad in Berlin for the first time. It is the youthful cross-pollination they enabled while I was at the University of Denver between German, philosophy, and theater that I hope bears fruit in this study. Since fall 2014, I have made my happy home at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio. The College of Fine Arts, Interim Dean Elizabeth Sayrs, Prof. Michael Lincoln, Carma West, and the Ohio University Research Council made it possible to print many of the images you see here. Dr. Neil Bernstein provided constructive notes on the sections of the book I wrote in Athens. Without Dr. William Condee’s mentorship I would have become lost

in my Page ix →early years as an assistant professor, like a high school freshman searching in vain for his locker, never mind his first classroom. An early version of chapter 6 first appeared in Theatre Journal 67.1 (March 2015): 63–82. Its argument was strengthened and clarified thanks to editor Dr. Ric Knowles and the anonymous reviewers. LeAnn Fields at the University of Michigan Press has steered this book through the many stages of publication with alacrity. The two anonymous reviewers gave valuable comments, and I am thankful for their generous readings of the book and their careful notes. Cory Tamler’s keen eye for indecipherable phrases and illdefined concepts helped me prepare a successful proposal and improve the book’s prologue. It is with the determined support and guidance of my mother and father, Jennifer Erickson Cornish and Richard Cornish, that I made the long journey that resulted in these pages. When I was ill, you were there, no matter the distance and language, and I dedicate this book to you. My loud and raucous family, brothers and cousins and aunts and uncles and grandparents, are my great love, every one an inspiration. Jude and Penny were my constant companions as I wrote; with them, my feet were warm. My wife, Rachel Cornish, has listened to me recite every word of this book several times, and in her patience, love, and constancy I am most humbly hers.

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Prologue Berlin, Alexanderplatz Berlin/Alexanderplatz, November 4, 1989 Wearing a long coat and clutching a piece of paper, Heiner MГјller stands on a podium in front of at least five hundred thousand demonstrators in Alexanderplatz, the heart of East Berlin, underneath the looming television tower erected in 1969 as a symbol of socialist power and innovation. In his early years as a playwright, MГјller wrote LehrstГјcke (teaching/learning plays) including Der LohndrГјcker (The Scab) in 1957 and Der Bau (The Construction Site) in 1964, which critically examine the beginnings of the German Democratic Republic (GDR). Now, at this rally to reform the GDR, he calls for “independent unions”1 to represent the interests of workers without interference from the party of real existing socialism. With a scratchy voice and in a halting rhythm that makes his speech sound like a poem, MГјller concludes the short political address with a “personal note”: “If the government should step down in the next week, then we can dance at demonstrations.”2 This rally had its origins in mid-October at a meeting at the Deutsches Theater, during a break from rehearsals of Hamlet/Maschine (Hamlet/Machine, a combination of Shakespeare’s Hamlet with MГјller’s text Hamletmaschine), directed by MГјller. Theater artists from around East Berlin, led by Ulrich MГјhe, Hamlet in MГјller’s production, met to plan what would become the largest demonstration in the history of the GDR. It preceded, by just five days, the fall of the “antifascist protection wall” fencing off East from West. With rehearsals for Hamlet/Maschine beginning in August of that year, and opening on March 24, 1990, after the Communist state party Page 2 →lost free parliamentary elections, MГјller’s production bridged the collapse of the GDR. Created for East German spectators, Hamlet/Maschine premiered to an audience comprising mostly Westerners, who now traveled easily across the border. Anecdotally, an actress at another theater in Berlin, the Maxim Gorki, asked to describe the differences between these audiences, noted that an auditorium full of Wessis, as the Westerners were commonly and somewhat disparagingly called, smelled different than Ossis, or Easterners. Wessis wore perfume and cologne. Fig. 1. Tens of thousands of protesters, led by artists, march down Karl-Liebknecht-Strasse in East Berlin on November 4, 1989, behind them the Berlin Cathedral Church and the Fernsehturm (television tower). (Photograph: Thomas Lehmann, courtesy of the Bundesarchiv [German Federal Archives].) Back in Alexanderplatz on November 4, MГјller is just one of many speakers, most of them creative artists. Several prominent actors take the podium, including Ulrich MГјhe. The writer Christa Wolf, later criticized for not resisting the repressive government openly enough, ends her address with an invocation of the most common slogan of 1989: “We are the people [das Volk]! A simple observation, and one we won’t forget.”3 As 1989 turned into 1990, this chant became, “We are one people [ein Volk].” But now, before the fall of the Wall, before the bankruptcy and corruption of the East German government became impossible to ignore, before the Volk Page 3 →actually had an opportunity to express its voice through an election, these speakers call for reorganization, not revolution or unification: the development of democratic socialism, as Deutsches Theater actor Jan Josef Liefers demands.4 MГјller, with his “personal note,” is the only speaker to openly imagine dancing on the grave of the monopolistic, aptly named Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschland (SED), or Socialist Unity Party. As the demonstrations became revolutionary, a democratic socialist party did not take the SED’s place, as MГјller and the other artists had hoped. The Volk gave a governing majority to West German chancellor Helmut Kohl’s conservative party, and the states of the former GDR joined the Federal Republic of Germany on October 4, 1990: “We are one people.”

In and around Alexanderplatz after 1990, small and large changes took place as a new ideology replaced the old. Trains at this transportation hub began to run all the way through the city; Soviet-style buildings came down; streets and plazas and parks were rechristened; major shopping centers selling expensive perfumes opened; museums damaged during World War II were finally renovated.

Berlin/Alexanderplatz, June 13, 2011 On a late spring day almost twenty-one years after the November 4 demonstration, I walk through this transformed Alexanderplatz. Still, not all has changed. Leaving the subway station, I see ghosts of GDR-era monuments as I walk past an AmpelmГ¤nnchen, the little traffic light man with his jaunty hat, and toward the Fernsehturm (television tower)—both Berlin emblems now replicated on countless T-shirts, coffee mugs, and other tourist knickknacks available for purchase in all parts of the city. During the afternoon of June 13, I do not hurry past the scars of history in Berlin that refuse to entirely fade, or that the city’s residents refuse to allow to heal, on my way to somewhere else. I walk directly into a piece of that history, the Fernsehturm, or more specifically what feels like an abandoned commercial area on the second floor of the tower’s base. Here, the theatrical collective Rimini Protokoll (Helgard Haug, Stefan Kaegi, and Daniel Wetzel) has set up the headquarters for 50 Aktenkilometer: Ein begehbares Stasi HГ¶rspiel (50 Kilometers of Dossiers: A Walkable Stasi Audio-Play).5 Assigned a smartphone and set of headphones, I walk back out into Alexanderplatz as my phone plays the sounds of the GDR “Dynamo” march, the pounding anthem of the East German security agencies’ sports club.6 Page 4 → Fig. 2. A participant in Rimini Protokoll’s 50 Aktenkilometer (50 Kilometers of Dossiers) in 2011 at the Neptune Fountain near Alexanderplatz, listening to Hans-Dieter SchГјtt, former chief editor of the communist youth newspaper Junge Welt; the dome of the Berlin Cathedral is visible in the background. (Photograph: Dorothea Tuch.) Page 5 →For the next three and a half hours I listen to recordings of events in 1989 as they happened, large demonstrations as well as personal affairs; Stasi officials (Ministry of State Security secret police) speak, as do informers, dissidents, and other GDR citizens. In addition to recordings made in 1989, Rimini Protokoll includes later recollections, individuals discussing their experiences twenty years ago. My Android cell phone uses GPS to track me, and when I arrive at certain locations, marked by orange circles on the phone’s map, the phone plays a report that lasts between one and ten minutes. Sometimes I pause and listen, following the occasional instructions, for example: walk into the Radisson Hotel, formerly the Palasthotel, act like a normal guest, sit down by the bar, look around inconspicuously. Are you being watched?7 A flaneur, I sometimes just walk on, out of one circle and on toward another. Rimini Protokoll spreads roughly 120 of these orange circles throughout the center of the former East Berlin: 120 stories pulled from memories and the archives of the Stasi, files saved by activists in 1990. The memories and documents Rimini Protokoll has collected give voice to people who marched in crowds of thousands, were harassed by secret police, or just stood back and watched—and also those who collaborated with the Stasi, or were Stasi members themselves. Rimini Protokoll humanizes people often written as the “heroes” and “villains” of this history. And with their “walkable audio-play,” Haug, Kaegi, and Wetzel also give agency to their audience members, to those of us who walk the renamed streets of the politically united city, carving our own paths through the history of Berlin. In 50 Aktenkilometer, Rimini Protokoll seeks to contribute not only to what Germans remember from the time period just before the fall of the Berlin Wall, adding voices of both Stasi informants and protestors not generally included in histories, but also, and just as importantly, to how memory happens in Germany. While walking through the landscape of Berlin, participants experience with their bodies a multiplicity of stories, which cannot all be fully heard. Rimini Protokoll embraces many contributing voices—the collective made no transcript of the recordings—while compelling its audience to select and to interpret. Reflecting back to us the history of the GDR generally and November 4, 1989, particularly in the transformed Alexanderplatz, 50 Aktenkilometer asks Germans to reconsider the goals and

consequences of the demonstration, as well as their perceptions of the people who contributed to it and feared it or even fought against it. And the experience asks participants to reconsider Berlin, its citizens’ places in their united (or perhaps better: uniting) city and nation politically, personally, and ethically. Page 6 →* * * Theater artists stood on podiums and helped to create the events of 1989, events that became definitional for German nationhood and identity. And as early as Heiner MГјller’s production of Hamlet/Maschine in March 1990, directors and playwrights created plays and productions that reexamined how those events have been narrated. In their structures, and to a less important extent their content, these plays and productions challenged the myths that lurk behind terms like Die Wende (“the reversal,” German shorthand for 1989–90) and reunification, terms that imply a change, in 1989, in the direction of German history, and a reconstitution of the original German nation. (Throughout this book, as I discuss in detail later, I use “unification” instead of “reunification” to reflect the fact that the post-1989 German nation does not much resemble—in constitution or borders—Otto von Bismarck’s unified nation, founded in 1871.) For the past twenty years, theater artists, up to and including Rimini Protokoll, have incorporated material from 1989–90 into plays and performances in order to question written histories, adding stories and perspectives and offering their own interpretations. After 1990, many artists, including Heiner MГјller and Rimini Protokoll, as well as Western playwright Botho Strauss8 and Eastern director Frank Castorf, represented the history of unification. Like their forebears, such as Friedrich Schiller, who wrote history plays at a time when a united “German nation” was a dream, these artists used the past to reimagine their collective national future. Dramaturgy became historical writing and historiography. On the first page of his study The Search for Normality: National Identity and Historical Consciousness in Germany since 1800, historian Stefan Berger listed Strauss and Castorf as two key intellectuals who have “contributed to what is one of the most hotly debated public issues in Germany today”:9 the renationalization of German identity. Although these plays and performances have never been studied as a group, and some have never been written about in English at all, they reflected and challenged representations of unification in other media as well as museums, with significant consequences for German identity as it emerged and developed from 1989–90. Too often, critics of historical drama debate whether or not the events related by the playwright actually happened as the playwright describes them.10 Scholars criticize Goethe for killing off GГ¶tz von Berlichingen as a young man11 and attack Schiller for over- (or under-) emphasizing the role of astrology in Wallenstein.12 In rushing to judge whether a play is factual enough to count as a historical drama, we forget the obvious distinction betweenPage 7 → history and drama, pointed out already by Aristotle in the Poetics: the historian’s responsibility is to relate what happened, the playwright’s task to relate “such things as might or could happen in accordance with probability or necessity.” Poetry, for Aristotle, “deals with general truths, history with specific events.”13 I am not interested in playwrights as historians. Factual analyses of plays must remain shallow, missing general truths to isolate this or that detail. A play is not a textbook—though a textbook is a kind of play. As we continue, we will see how, in their narratives of what happened, historians rely on dramatic structures, and how theater artists, in their representations of the past, think historically. For this study I will not focus primarily on whether or not a play or performance accurately represented the events of unification, except when departures from the facts are relevant to a larger analysis. Rather, I am interested in theater works that created a “historical world,” as Herbert Lindenberger put it,14 or relied on a “historical imagination,” to cite Roger Bechtel.15 The works I study here engaged in philosophy of history, actively considering how to use past events and materials to tell and make meanings. In Performing Unification, we will see that historiography is dramaturgy and dramaturgy is historiography. It is no accident that the major elements of dramaturgy, as defined by Aristotle in Poetics, are also key components of historiography: peripeteia (reversal), anagnorisis (recognition or resolution), and pathos (suffering). We will watch as historians, and later museums and memorials, dramatize the German past, and as playwrights and directors

rearrange that drama, allowing audiences to see the past anew. I show how West and East German artists, of older and younger generations, as well as first- and second-generation Turkish-Germans, have used theater to advance revisionist views of unification, making interventions in the content and structure of German history in meaningfully different ways. Theater has been used to imagine and challenge German identity since long before the nation existed. Intellectuals and aristocrats sought to engender national consciousness for at least two centuries before the 1871 unification under Bismarck, working to represent through performance a “German” language, ethnicity, culture, character, myth, and especially history. Chapter 1 of Performing Unification surveys German-language history plays and national myth-making in the theater from the proto-Germanic “Arminius” plays of the Baroque period, through Friedrich Schiller, Heinrich von Kleist, and Bertolt Brecht, and up to the documentary theater movement of the 1960s. Once we have grounded ourselves with this survey, we can turn again to post-1989 Germany. In chapter 2, “Unification as Drama,” I analyze how political rhetoric, historical writing, and myths changed in the early Page 8 →1990s: German history was suddenly understood as a comedy, a series of dramatic reversals resolving in the marriage of East and West. Expanding Hayden White’s influential argument in Metahistory, we will see that history is often written using dramatic structure, and, in examining G. W. F. Hegel’s philosophy of history, we can come to grasp how the comedic structure of German history, as conceived after 1989, is rooted in Hegelian historiography. The connections between Aristotelian structure and Hegelian historiography help us understand, as we will see, how and why some directors turned against dramatic theater, in which clear, whole stories stand in for the real past. Even before legal unification in 1990, writers from West Germany, including Botho Strauss and Rolf Hochhuth, two of the most prominent postwar German playwrights, composed plays as counternarratives to the official accounts legitimizing unification. In chapter 3, I look at West German plays of the 1990s, as well as important productions of them. Disturbed by the process of unification in East Germany, Strauss, Hochhuth, and other playwrights revised Aristotelian dramaturgy, with its reversals and recognition, inverting the official rhetoric of the marriage of East and West. Their representations of the events of 1989 take the form of tragedy. Before shifting to the postunification period in chapter 4, I discuss the allegorical theater of the GDR, in which artists used myths and history to indirectly convey political messages to audiences (while hiding those messages from government functionaries). But in the early days after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Eastern directors Frank Castorf at the VolksbГјhne and Heiner MГјller at the Deutsches Theater worked against their contemporary moment, trying to address unification without letting their productions become allegories. In Castorf’s RГ¤uber (The Robbers, an adaptation of Friedrich Schiller’s play) and MГјller’s Hamlet/Maschine, unification became historical. Continuing past the unification period in chapter 5, I show how MГјller and Castorf, as well as Einar Schleef, radicalized these early antiallegorical techniques. They created productions that challenged not just the narrative elements of most historians, but narrative itself, becoming political through their mode of representation. Engaging with Hans-Thies Lehmann’s theory of “postdramatic theater,” the argument that some theater productions so disrupt storytelling that they can no longer be understood as representational, I again connect dramaturgy with historiography. Postdramatic theater is in part, I argue, an attempt to combat Hegel, and to challenge the legitimacy of nationalism—any nationalism—through structure. In the 2000s, a younger generation used elements of, but also changed Page 9 →fundamentally, documentary theater in order to explore the collective memory and historiography of the unification period. In contrast to the narratives of German unification contained in Berlin’s museums and memorials, individuals and groups including Rimini Protokoll, Hans-Werner Kroesinger, and She She Pop encouraged a critical attitude toward the past, citing and satirizing the aesthetics of archives and museums. Drawing on Robin Bernstein’s theory of “scriptive things” in Racial Innocence, chapter 6 interrogates Diana Taylor’s distinction, in The Archive and the Repertoire, between the objects and texts of history and the embodied practices of memory:

theater performs both. For the epilogue of Performing Unification, I turn to the invisible others who took part in the events of postwar Germany but are not remembered or included in histories of the period: immigrants, especially Turkish, who by 1989 had been in Germany for two generations without becoming “German.” Examining “postmigrant” productions—created by and for Germans with immigrant backgrounds—at the Ballhaus Naunynstrasse and Maxim Gorki Theater, I discuss how Nurkan Erpulat and Hakan SavaЕџ Mican reexamine unification and reconfigure German history plays. Declaring they belong, Erpulat and Mican write their immigrant stories into German history—illustrating how theater artists are still performing unification to reimagine their national identity. This is a book about the contemporary German theater, covering the most important artists and movements. By focusing on performances of unification, one of the major obsessions of the post-1989 theater, we can learn how artists understand and reject national identity—and, more broadly, how history in general can be performed. We can better appreciate how the theater, in its structures and its live gestures, on pages, stages, and streets, helps us to more clearly see the past and the effect it has on us, our relationships with others in our communities, and our futures. While the productions I discuss belong to the distinctly postunification German sphere, the methods I use and the questions I raise about history and memory apply more generally to other national and cultural contexts, from postcommunist Eastern Europe to postdictatorship South America. Within Germany we will concentrate our attention (though not exclusively) on Berlin—a synecdoche for the divided Germanys and the troubles of unification, as well as a cultural center of Europe—and gain thereby the ability to examine specific instances of performance with rigor and care. But before we delve into all of these performances, we should pause for a moment to clarify the events of 1989 and 1990. Relying on primary sources Page 10 →from the period as well as standard histories, I try to remain concrete in my descriptions, and to point out how narrative techniques have influenced our understanding of unification. After this concise chronicle, we will, working again to be as objective as possible, assess unification’s consequences: for individuals, government, and the theater systems of East and West.

From Peaceful Revolution to Unification: East and West Germany in 1989–90 The final period of the GDR’s disintegration could be said to have begun in May 1989.16 I qualify this statement because at the time no one saw May as the beginning of the GDR’s end: not the leaders of the East, who were arranging to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of their nation, nor the leaders of the West, who were completely unprepared to handle a failed state on—and soon within—their boundaries (even as late as November 8). But on May 2, Hungary opened its borders to Austria, enabling GDR citizens to escape to the West by traveling east. Many began doing so, cutting through unguarded barbed wire and sometimes selling pieces of it as souvenirs. Still, on May 7 the future of the GDR felt secure: an election gave 98.85 percent of the vote to the state party, the SED. This obvious electoral fraud had the effect of helping to unify various opposition groups. Protestors like Frank Pfeifer, who gave several interviews in 50 Aktenkilometer, started to assemble regularly in Berlin and Leipzig, demonstrating against the results of the election and for increased freedom of travel. By September, the protests in Leipzig, held every Monday, were attracting thousands of people demanding democratic reforms; perhaps as many as twenty thousand marched on October 2. Two major positions were taken by GDR dissidents: reform the socialist state, or take it down. Meanwhile, hundreds of people began to gather in the Federal Republic of Germany’s embassies in East Berlin, Budapest, and Prague—seeking another way around the Wall. Thousands, and then tens of thousands, of people successfully fled the GDR in October; trains had to be commissioned to bring the refugees from Eastern bloc countries to the FRG, where Westerners greeted them enthusiastically. Facing swelling instability, GDR political leaders wavered between threatening Tiananmen Square–style

crackdowns and offering perestroika-style compromises. On October 7, General Secretary Erich Honecker, who had led the GDR for about fifteen years, celebrated its fortieth anniversary Page 11 →at the Palast der Republik, the center of the GDR government, an enormous concrete box with bronzed glass windows that stood, until its demolition in 2006, in the classical center of Prussian Berlin. The day after the anniversary, Honecker signed an order for police and troops to use “all forms of violence” against protestors, which did not come to pass thanks to negotiations between local leaders and the protestors. By October 18, it was apparent that Honecker did not have enough political support to maintain his rule, and the Central Committee of the SED replaced him with Egon Krenz—whose name, which rhymes with the German word Grenze, meaning barrier or border, soon appeared on many punning protest signs. In his television address following the decision, Krenz—who, not coincidentally, directed the May electoral fraud—acknowledged the frustrations of the protestors and the refugees fleeing his nation like a “bleeding artery,” announcing: “With today’s conference, we will set into motion a reversal [Wende].”17 Before long, hundreds of thousands of people were in the streets, not only in Leipzig and East Berlin, but also in Dresden and Halle and small cities across the GDR. By this point over two hundred thousand people had fled the East for the West. As we know, artists met at the Deutsches Theater Berlin to prepare for what would become the November 4 demonstration. The headline in the West Berlin newspaper taz for November 5 reads, “Berlin Alexanderplatz: History Is Made.”18 On November 9 at 7:07 p.m., a press secretary by the name of GГјnter Schabowski announced that visas for travel to the West would be available to all GDR citizens. But confusion in the press conference—in response to a reporter’s question about when travel restrictions would be lifted, he answered: “It takes effect, as far as I knowВ .В .В . immediately, without delay”19—sent thousands of people to border crossings in Berlin. Unable to get information from the central government, soldiers began letting the gathering masses through to West Berlin without documentation. Several hours later, people were climbing over the Berlin Wall from East to West and West to East, ignoring crossings altogether, and physically tearing down the great symbol of division. This initial celebratory evening is the subject of Botho Strauss’s Schlusschor (Final Chorus, 1991), and Western playwright Klaus Pohl included an interview with the accidentally historic Schabowski in Wartesaal Deutschland Stimmenreich (Waiting Room Germany, 1995)—I juxtapose the styles and structures of these two plays in chapter 3. The FRG quickly decided to greet border-crossing GDR citizens with BegrГјssungsgeld (one hundred deutsche marks of “welcome money”) so that they could buy goods, and allowed them to travel on public transport for free. Page 12 →Amid the celebrations, political developments happened in quick succession. Demonstrations in the East only increased, while protesters expanded the scope of their demands. The GDR’s population fled, its economy was revealed to be bankrupt, and its currency quickly lost value. Two days after the fall of the Wall, the West German tabloid Bild printed the headline: “вЂWe are the people,’ they cry today—вЂWe are one people,’ they’ll cry tomorrow!”20 In East Berlin, a crowd confiscated the Stasi archives, saving documents from impending destruction and preserving them for later personal and scholarly research—enabling 50 Aktenkilometer twenty years later. On November 28, Chancellor Kohl presented an ambitious ten-point program for unification to the West German parliament, utterly inconceivable a mere month earlier, laying out a plan that would ultimately be followed. From November 28 on, unification proceeded under the leadership of Kohl and other world leaders; protestors no longer had control.21 Against Kohl’s efforts, a skeptical Europe, Soviet Union, and United States tried to slow down the process. And some opposition groups, including the leaders of the November 4 protest, pushed for a “third way”: democratic socialism in an independent East. But it was clear by late January that the GDR, with much larger debts than had been officially reported and an average of two thousand citizens leaving every day, was unsustainable as a nation. The GDR did not even have leaders capable of negotiating its own surrender. Unification would be happening, and happening under Kohl’s terms. The question became one of how and not if, as acknowledged by Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. Negotiators for the “Two Plus Four” nations debated how to limit the power of a unified Germany, and, in trying to do so, laid the foundations of what became the European Union and the euro currency. When Kohl met with Gorbachev in mid-February, the latter gave

Germany the freedom to decide its future. The first free elections in the GDR took place on March 18, with a large number of parties involved, and with many advertisements paid for by political organizations from the FRG. Artists at the Deutsches Theater wrote Kohl an open letter, published in the taz, which summarizes the feelings of many on the East German left leading up to March 18: “How could these be free elections when they are being bought by money from the FRG? ”22 The Alliance for Germany, a coalition backed by Chancellor Kohl’s Christian Democrats, easily won a majority of the vote, giving swift unification a clear mandate and shocking left-leaning intellectuals East and West. There would be no “third way” and no rewritten Western constitution. (The FRG “Basic Law” was originally written under Allied forces sponsorship as temporary,Page 13 → a placeholder until unification, which, in 1949, was presumed to be immanent.) The election definitively relegated to the political sidelines the opposition groups that had led the protest movement. The currency union, in which the GDR adopted the Western deutsche mark, came in July; Kohl had begun preparing for the transition in early February, well before the election. West German goods quickly appeared in the East, but at high prices. Long-standing food subsidies for GDR citizens were cut, even as prices increased and wages in the East remained far below those in the West. West Germans rushed into the GDR to buy cheap property, but overall investment was much lower than predicted. Unemployment, all but nonexistent in the GDR before 1990, had already begun to rise in February, and picked up pace going into the summer. Throughout this period, Chancellor Kohl invariably referred in his speeches to the myth of the postwar Wirtschaftswunder, or economic miracle: that the FRG had built renewed affluence on top of the ruins of World War II, thanks to hard work and the Western social market economy. He made promises of a similar transformation in the East, guaranteeing a prosperous future for the citizens of the GDR with the deutsche mark. “We will soon succeed in transforming Mecklenburg-Vorpommern and Saxony-Anhalt, Brandenburg, Saxony, and Thuringia into flourishing landscapes where it is worthwhile to live and work,”23 Kohl famously prophesized. Official unification took place on October 3, 1990, less than one year after the opening of the GDR border. The Federal Republic absorbed the GDR. The Basic Law of the FRG extended into the GDR’s territory, which became five new federal states, while West and East Berlin combined jurisdictions to form a sixth new state. East German laws disappeared, including “on demand” abortion, which did not become legal until years later. October 3 is now celebrated every year as “Tag der deutschen Einheit,” the Day of German Unification. For the most part, Germans enjoy their public holiday, but ignore its meaning.

Consequences of Unification The collapse of the GDR quickly led to vastly expanded freedoms of speech and movement for East Germans, along with increased spending power and choices.24 But the hurried pace of the unification process also led to widespread economic chaos in the former East. Transforming the centrally planned GDR into a market economy had more serious consequences than Page 14 →envisioned by Chancellor Kohl; the Eastern landscape did not quickly bloom. In 1990, before unification, the East German parliament created a new agency to privatize East German state-owned businesses, called the Treuhandanstalt, or Treuhand for short, a trust agency, in the financial sense of the word “trust.” The agency immediately came under heavy condemnation as huge numbers of employees lost their jobs during the sell-off—over half of the total GDR workforce in the final tally, taking into account early retirement and underemployment.25 Rather than restructuring businesses, as initially planned, the Treuhand emphasized quick privatization and potential profitability, contributing to the feeling among East Germans that their country was being occupied. Western entrepreneurs bought enterprises formerly “owned” by workers, who could not gather enough capital to purchase the factories they had worked in all their lives. The only real outbreak of violence after unification occurred in reaction to the Treuhand. In 1991, the president of the agency, Detlev Rohwedder, was assassinated in his living room by a sniper. (It is suspected, but has never been proven, that responsibility for the act lies with the Red Army Faction, the radical Western leftwing terrorist group.) In his play Wessis in Weimar (Westerners in Weimar, 1993), Rolf Hochhuth, a Westerner

himself, used documents to condemn the Treuhand’s actions as a colonization of the East. Questioning the uniqueness of the postunification period, Einer Schleef, who grew up in the GDR, directed the controversial premiere of Wessis in Weimar, flattening history and connecting monarchy, fascism, communism, and capitalism. Examining Hochhuth’s play in chapter 3 and Schleef’s production in chapter 5, I illustrate how different structures can generate profoundly different meanings. The early 1990s did not bring stability to the former East. Women found themselves particularly squeezed, as the disappearance of childcare subsidizes forced them to choose between working and staying home with their children. There was a surge in xenophobic, neo-Nazi sentiment. Many Easterners felt like second-class citizens in a new nation owned by the West, their cultural and social identity under threat. And in fact politicians and regular citizens in the West agreed that, as historian Stefan Berger observes, “very little of the GDR could usefully be integrated into the reunited country.В .В .В . Therefore, a full-scale colonisation of the GDR by the old FRG was seen as beneficial. This included destroying any form of identification with the GDR.” Importantly, Berger continues, the GDR’s “historiography was demolished, its historians dismissed, its historical museums redesigned to fit the old Federal Republic’s self-definitions.”26 Some East Germans reacted Page 15 →by holding on even tighter to symbols and memorabilia of the GDR, like products no longer being manufactured (an example of Ostalgie, or nostalgia for the former East), and by asserting their otherness from the FRG. In many of his grotesque productions, as I discuss in chapter 5, Frank Castorf viciously satirized both Ostalgie and attempts by Westerners to obliterate the unique culture of the East. In addition to shocking cultural and economic changes, the East also had to confront the legacy of the Stasi, which had recruited many “unofficial collaborators” among the citizenry, leading, postunification, to repeated “outings” of everyday spies. Politicians, artists, and writers (including Christa Wolf and Heiner MГјller) came under suspicion, sometimes justified, sometimes not. Resentment after unification was not limited to the East. To buttress the outdated, inefficient, and crumbling economic structures in the new states, Westerners paid a so-called solidarity tax, which many eventually came to resent. Summarizing postunification sentiments, German studies scholars Godfrey Carr and Georgina Paul write that “the Westerners felt that their cousins from the east wanted all the benefits of the hard work of the postwar years without making any effort.”27 These sentiments have not disappeared, and can be heard in rhetoric calling for more austerity in Greece. Much change came to state-supported theaters both West and East, though it didn’t seem like it would at first. Funding the performing arts had been a major priority of the East German government: the GDR had far more theaters per capita than the FRG, especially children’s and puppet theaters, even if the repertoires were somewhat limited (either officially or de facto). The Unification Treaty attempted to preserve East German cultural institutions, at least ostensibly. The opening of Clause 35 reads: (1) In the years of division, culture and the arts—despite different paths of development taken by the two states in Germany—formed one of the foundations for the continuing unity of the German nation. They have an indispensable contribution to make in their own right as the Germans cement their unity in a single state on the road to European unification.В .В .В . (2) The cultural substance in the territory specified in Article 3 of this Treaty [the “new,” Eastern states] shall not suffer any damage.28 But, as Carr and Paul note, “The terms of the Agreement involved value judgments with regard to the culture of the former GDR, implying the recognition of cultural activity in the socialist state only to the extent that this Page 16 →was seen as being part of the heritage of the German nation as a whole.”29 And the treaty promised only that the “Culture Fund” to support theaters, museums, and artists in the former East Germany would continue until 1994. Even before 1994, many theaters, especially those in small towns in the former East, were forced to shut down for lack of funding. Theater institutions in Berlin were hit especially hard by changes in financial support, causing much upset and transformation—another reason to focus in this book on the capital city. Once the site of cultural competition,

with extra funding pouring in to support the arts, Berlin quickly came to be perceived as a money pit by the German parliament. The Berlin Senate put state-funded theaters and operas on notice: all of them would receive less support; some of them would be shut down. The Maxim Gorki Theater, in East Berlin, revamped its repertoire and attracted enough spectators to avoid the expected ax. But the Staatlichen Schauspielbühnen Berlin at the Schillertheater in the West, the largest company in Germany at the time, closed in 1993, despite a significant protest movement. Several spaces were privatized, including the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm, the longtime home of the Berliner Ensemble, which now rents the building. Struggles over arts funding continue today. Initially greeted with celebration, the unification of East and West soon angered many: a 1995 poll found that 83 percent of Germans wished that unification had not taken place.30 Although there was no longer an actual physical division, many Germans began referring to the Mauer im Kopf, or “the wall in people’s heads, ” referencing the psychological separation still felt by many Germans in the 1990s, even the 2000s. The long history of the Mauer im Kopf, which still resists demolition, is the subject of the collective She She Pop in their performance Schubladen (Drawers, 2012)—examined with 50 Aktenkilometer in chapter 6—which staged a conversation between women who grew up in the West and others who grew up in the East. As they danced to songs particular to the capitalist West or the communist East, She She Pop asked: how can Germans move forward without a common past?

Performing Unification An extraordinary caesura in German history and identity, the unification process of 1989–90 is a focal point of contention for scholars from many different fields. What do these events mean politically and culturally, how Page 17 →should they be placed in the larger story of German and European history, and how have they been represented in museums, onstage, in film, and in fiction? What happens when divided cultures, with antithetical histories, join together—with one of these cultures absorbed into the other’s political system? Film has been one of the primary mediums through which artists have represented unification. Already in 1990, Christoph Schlingensief—who went on to make many extraordinary theater productions, especially at the VolksbГјhne Berlin—was directing Das deutsche Kettensagen Massaker: Die erste Stunde der Wiedervereinigung (The German Chainsaw Massacre: The First Hour of Reunification), a lively and bloody horror-satire loosely about East Germans being turned into sausage by a West German family. Stilles Land (Silent Country), released in 1992 and directed by Andreas Dresen, followed a provincial GDR theater company making Waiting for Godot as the GDR dissolves, while Wim Wenders created a sequel to Der Himmel Гјber Berlin (Wings of Desire, 1987) with In weiter Ferne, so nah! (Faraway, So Close!, 1993). In the 1995 television movie Nikolaikirche (Nikolai Church), adapted from the novel by Erich Loest, director Frank Beyer depicted a family, torn between the Stasi and the protest movement, gathering in a Leipzig church as the GDR collapsed. Also in 1995, Margarethe von Trotta made division and unification a romantic tale in Das Versprechen (The Promise). Ostalgie appeared at almost the moment the GDR disappeared, and Wolfgang Becker’s 2003 film Goodbye, Lenin! both epitomizes and satirizes this nostalgia for the former East, as a young man tries to convince his mother, who was in a coma during the Wende, that the GDR still exists. Sabine Hake also notes a kind of Westalgie in films like Verschwende deine Jugend (Play It Loud!, 2003, adapted from a novel by JГјrgen Teipel): “nostalgia for the prosperous, comfortable, and self-contained West during the Cold War era.”31 A truly vast amount of literary material has been written about the 1989–90 time period. Frank Thomas Grub, in his comprehensive 2003 book “Wende” und “Einheit” im Spiegel der deutschsprachigen Literatur (“Reversal” and “Unification” in the Mirror of German-Language Literature), writes: The scope of publications from the Wende time period and about the Wende is enormous and has become barely manageable. It comprises nonfiction and documentation, encompasses anthologies of more or less polemical texts and Who’s Who–style reference books with satirical backgrounds, and includes high-culture novels, poems, and plays, as well as diaries and journalism and essays.32

Page 18 →Writers domestically and internationally acknowledged as the most important of their time have contributed widely discussed novels: GГјnter Grass, with Ein weites Feld (Too Far Afield, 1995); Crista Wolf, with Medea: Stimmen (Medea: Voices, 1996); Ingo Schulz, with Simple Storys: Ein Roman aus der ostdeutschen Provinz (Simple Stories: A Novel from the East German Provinces, 1998); and Thomas BrГјssig, with Helden wie wir (Heroes Like Us, 1995); to name just a few. (Helden wie wir was also made, in 1999, into a film.) The secondary, critical literature has followed—though, Grub points out, relatively few monographs have been produced, as scholars have mostly avoided trying to put together wide-ranging studies.33 In order to include a comprehensive bibliography of primary and secondary material, Grub published a companion volume to “Wende” und “Einheit” that includes every example he could collect.34 “Wende” und “Einheit” appeared in 2003; thirteen years later, as I write, I imagine a task like Grub’s to be nearly impossible, at least without algorithmic help. A wide range of scholars have addressed film and literature that represent unification. In Literature and German Reunification, Stephen Brockmann asks (focusing on prose novels): “What is the location of the German nation for German writers?”35 He sees “literature as a privileged sphere for reflection on German identity, ”36 and concludes that unification “opened a path to an almost forgotten cultural past; but it had done so in a way that made the connections between the German past and the German present as problematic, and paradoxical, as ever.”37 Hake, at the end of her comprehensive book German National Cinema, likewise argues that the political and social results of unification resulted in a “renewed interest in the question of nation and national identity” that “confirmed both the presentness of the past and the disappearance of that past into media-produced images and narratives.”38 And, similar to Berger, she finds that after unification “the constitutive elements of history are once again reassessed and reconfigured in the difficult act of working through the past, but this time as part of an alternately feared or desired normalisation of history.”39 John E. Davidson focuses on memory, examining “cinematic texts to see whether attention to how feature films вЂcome to terms’ formally in their spatial and chromatic components help us get a better understanding ofВ .В .В . grey areas of memory.”40 Examining Nikolaikirche and Das Versprechen in particular, Kristie A. Foell argues that “German unification finds its commensurate expression in melodrama,” thanks to the form’s “concern for revolution” and “tendency towards black-and-white” morality.41 SГ©an Allan focuses on popular films and describes as a subgenre “unification comedy,” which, he argues, has helped Page 19 →normalize German-German relations; he cites Goodbye, Lenin! in particular.42 And Laura Bradley, focusing on Stilles Land, finds in realist drama a “renunciation of melodrama”43 and “an elegy for a tranquility that has now been lost.”44 Leonie Naughton, on the other hand, argues for a plurality of genres in films that represent unification: melodrama, romantic comedy, farce, horror, and even musical.45 Performing Unification addresses many of the questions of German national identity, genre, historiography, and memory raised by these scholars, but with a focus on plays and performances and on form. While the scholars cited above discuss genre in detail, here I focus on how forms create meaning and how they connect to historiography. I strive to balance comprehensive overviews of the state of theater and theater-making with indepth analyses of particular works in order to contribute to our understanding of post-1989 Germany specifically, and theater and performance in general. Although the artists in this study play or played key roles as intellectuals in the German public sphere, their work has been examined only on a limited scale. As an American who has lived in Berlin, my status as both outsider and insider can contribute to knowledge of the theater in Germany after unification. Living in Germany on and off for two years, and speaking the language fluently, has helped me to understand the cultural intricacies of the nation and its theater. At the same time, I am a foreigner in Germany, and I can see aspects of the culture that locals have become inured and blind to. I know the history of unification, can identify how the events have been shaped into a plot, and show how that plot repeats itself in performances in museums, on the streets of Berlin, and in the theater. Postunification Germany, a place and time of tremendous change, offers an opportunity to examine how theater can shape and contest national consciousness through performances of history. The influence of theater on German identity was still strongly felt in the 1990s. As Carl Weber wrote in 1991, “Theatre in Germany was always an important factor when it came to shaping the nation’s vision of itself.В .В .В . German theatre has

always attracted or generated writers who regard the stage as a place of national discourse and a tool of historical change.”46 All of the artists discussed in Performing Unification faced questions of national heritage in their plays and productions: how does unification fit into the history of the German nation, and just how much did post-1990 Germany inherit from the old Germanys? Let us turn to these old Germanys, then, the Germanys before Germany. How did they perform themselves?

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1. History and Nation in German Drama before 1989 Intellectuals and aristocrats sought to engender national consciousness in German-speaking provinces for at least two centuries before 1871, using language, ethnicity, culture, geography, character, myth, and history—what Anthony D. Smith in Nationalism and Modernism, his highly regarded survey of theories of nationalism, describes as a “perennialist” or “organic” concept of the nation. Smith contrasts perennialism to modernism in national theory: generally preceding modernist theory, which understands nations as consciously constructed, perennialism conceives them as immemorial and ancestral, rooted in a homeland, and popular and of the people. For perennialists, belonging to a nation means holding common values with that community.1 Smith adds that “nationalists themselvesВ .В .В . have wanted to have things both ways: seeing the nation as organic and rooted in history and territory, but at the same time as created and engineered by nationalist elites.”2 German elites may have promoted the “German nation” as perennial, but they also sought to construct it—especially through historical drama and its sister, the national theater movement. In the particularly interesting Friedens Sieg (Victory of Peace), a 1642 play by linguist Justus Georg Schottelius,3 the historical-mythic Germanic general Arminius, scourge of Roman invaders, appears as a ghost, his pure Germanness spotlighting the adulterated character of seventeenth-century Germans. Arminius (also known in German as “Hermann”) received little attention in the few historical sources that mentioned him, mostly Tacitus in Germania (98 CE). But German playwrights beginning with Schottelius Page 22 →made much use of this vague information.4 Christopher B. Krebs describes the first production of Friedens Sieg in A Most Dangerous Book (2011), his intellectual history of Tacitus’s Germania: On the stage, Bolderian, a contemporaneous German, enters.В .В .В . Neat and groomed (with two plumes to his hat, puffy sleeves, knee-high boots, and a sword for ornament), he speaks the language of the day. German, it seems, is the syntax, but French, mostly, the words. Arminius, hardly able to comprehend, sighs disheartenedly. How the “majestic, proper, pure, and abundant mother tongue” has been subjected to the slavish existence of a “bastard”—bastardized not only by French but also Italian and Latin words! Had he fought the Romans in vain after all? Even more enraging, Bolderian dared to mock him and his companion King Henry I for their rough appearance: beards, braids, sizable swords, horned helmets, and fur coats.5 Friedens Sieg clearly contrasts the foppish Francophile Bolderian, unfit to maintain (much less revive) the German nation, with his forefather Arminius, who epitomizes the primitivist adjectives Tacitus used to describe the northern tribes featured in Germania: “simple, brave, loyal, pure, just, and honorable.”6 In representing the distinction between Bolderian and Arminius on the stage, Schottelius began to define what a German should look, sound, and act like, attempting to newly inscribe classic Germanic values in his corrupted age. Baroque dramatists like Andreas Gryphius and Daniel Casper von Lohenstein drew on the past to create their Trauerspiele (tragedies) around the same time as Schotellius’s Friedens Sieg, and Gotthold Ephraim Lessing did much during the Enlightenment to advance the cause of a particularly German drama, including with his allegorical history play Nathan der Weise (Nathan the Wise, 1779), which he finished at the end of his life. Lessing had a prominent role (though not as influential as he would have liked) at the first civic theater that stylized itself as “national,” in Hamburg. In his historical study Theater and Nation in Eighteenth-Century Germany (2007), Michael J. Sosulski shows how the German national theaters “were conceived in the spirit of the Enlightenment as educational institutions, and certainly an important part of the intended education was how to be(have as) a nation. Theater emerged as an ideal space in which to imagine the nation.”7 The lack of a German national consciousness spurred intellectuals and aristocrats to establish the Hamburg National Theater (1776), the Page 23 →Mannheim National Theater (1777), and the Berlin National Theater (1786), among others. Expressly didactic in purpose, these national theaters tried to stage a repertory of “high culture”8 Germanlanguage drama. Unpopular—audiences at the time preferred Italian operas, translated French and English plays, and traveling entertainers—the national theaters all folded after only a couple of years.

Peter HyГ¶ng connects new views of history with the national theater movement. In Die Sterne, die Zensur und das Vaterland (The Stars, the Censor, and the Fatherland, 2003), HyГ¶ng argues that during the Enlightenment Germans began to conceive of history as singular, progressive, and universal, as opposed to the sum of various chronological recordings of facts.9 This intellectual movement manifested itself in a desire, for Johann Gottfried Herder and other early nationalists, to discover and write a specifically German history. In this way, HyГ¶ng writes, “The historical discourse became the necessary by-product of the national-discourse.”10 The theater developed into the ideal location to advance both discourses, taking on “the function of the stimulating catalyst, as well as the convenient synthesizer of these two discourses.”11 And, HyГ¶ng continues, “Nowhere were these different discourses as tied together as in the historical or patriotic dramas.”12 As eighteenth-century poet Christoph Martin Wieland wrote in the third of his Letters to a Young Poet: “German history, German heroes, a German scene, German characters, morals and customs would be something completely new on German stages.”13 Wieland described his (and others’) hopes that through these new plays, the public would “perceive of itself as a nation, .В .В .В because audiences could see their вЂown history’ represented.”14 Smith explains this idea in Nationalism and Modernism: “Historical exempla virtutis may also serve the purposes of nationalist moralists, teaching the heroic virtues of вЂour ancestors.’”15 Some elites, like Wieland, shaped their versions of the past to “mark out a unique shared destiny” for their nation, as Smith puts it.16 Benedict Anderson influentially defined the nation as “an imagined political community—and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign.”17 His argument can help us understand the nationalist German history play. In part, for Anderson, the imagining of communities happens through the promotion of “a deep, horizontal comradeship” within the nation, but also by imposing “finite, if elastic boundaries, beyond which lie other nations.”18 Thus, many early German history plays depict a specifically German history or character (as in the Arminius/Hermann plays), while also including characters whose non-Germanness is their main feature (such Page 24 →as Bolderian in Friedens Sieg). Anderson linked imagination with the creative act of representation (specifically discussing novels); as Smith writes in his analysis of Imagined Communities, Anderson theorized the nation as “a cultural artefact portrayed/narrated by other cultural artefacts.”19 Aesthetic theorists like Wieland called on artists to imagine a German nation by writing history plays, while also trying to limit productions of the non-German plays that dominated stages. This is certainly not to say that theater alone eventually created the German nation, or that a nation is merely a cultural representation; political scientists have ascribed the rise of nationalism to a variety of conditions, including industrialization, the spread of capitalism, and ethnic consciousness.20 But theater clearly aided the development of cultural affinity among German-speakers, while also helping to establish borders between the German and the not-German, defining this nascent nation positively and negatively simultaneously, in a process that continued long after Bismarck united German-speaking lands. (As Nietzsche quipped in Beyond Good and Evil: “It is characteristic of the Germans that the question вЂwhat is German?’ never dies out among them.”)21 Friedrich Schiller wrote his famous 1784 essay “The Stage Considered as a Moral Institution” amid increasing advocacy for German national theaters and national consciousness. In the essay, he explicitly argued that through careful cultivation and the dramatization of national subjects, and through “the establishment of a national theatre: then we would become a nation.”22 The movement that began in the seventeenth century to represent historic German subjects in the theater gained momentum in the eighteenth century with the plays of Schiller and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Oddly, it was difficult for Schiller and Goethe to write German history plays for precisely the reason those plays were felt to be so needed: there really wasn’t a German national history—in fact, Herbert Lindenberger noted that “both writers felt the lack of appropriate German materials for their plays.”23 Thus we see fewer German history plays from them than perhaps we might expect, and Schiller especially wrote plays about nationalism, but set elsewhere. Goethe’s first play to use historical sources broke strongly from Enlightenment principles with the wild experimentation of the Sturm und Drang movement: GГ¶tz von Berlichingen mit der eisernen Hand (GГ¶tz von Berlichingen with the Iron Hand, 1773).24 In the Sturm und Drang, tempestuous Shakespearean dramaturgy triumphed over stiff French neoclassicism, and history neither progressed according to universal principles nor served as a Page 25 →source of moral lessons—though the past does contribute to the German national

imaginary. With the memoirs of the Holy Roman Empire knight GГ¶tz (ca. 1480–1562) as his source, Goethe created a medieval world that condemned his own decadent present and idolized a past still connected to “Germanic” values like military duty, honor, and friendship. Structurally, Goethe revolted against French literary rules and French civilization, packing his play with locations and characters while spreading out the action over time. In the style of Shakespeare’s chronicles, short scenes anarchically jump forward in time and from place to place, and do not proceed out of or into one another—a structure of “and then,” as opposed to “because this, then that.” This was a new style for the Germans, influenced by Shakespeare. In Goethe’s play, GГ¶tz’s individual ego collides with the world around him: his attempts to impose his ideals on the world fail tragically when he is betrayed first by an old friend, then by a new emperor, and finally by the peasants who recruited him to lead them in the Peasants’ War (1524–25). Importantly, GГ¶tz is a German hero. In act 3, healthily drinking and carousing among friends, GГ¶tz imagines a Germany ruled by good princes and native values, free and independent but protected by and protecting the Holy Roman Empire: days will be filled with hunting, brotherhood, and battles against outsiders like the Turks and French.25 His enemies, in contrast, are either not German or deny their Germanness. At the bishop of Bamberg’s court, for example, a doctor of laws, Olearius, has Latinized his proper German name (similar to the non-German Germans of Friedens Sieg). GГ¶tz ends with its hero’s death, not of old age, like the historical GГ¶tz, but rather almost spontaneously. His heart simply breaks at the sight of dishonest princes and sycophants of the court triumphing: “The time of betrayal is coming.В .В .В . The worthless ones will rule with deceit, and the noble man will fall into their nets.В .В .В . Heavenly breezes—Freedom! Freedom! (He dies).”26 The only escape from this troubled future, with its roots in GГ¶tz’s defeat, would be a return to medieval values. In an 1774 speech on GГ¶tz, Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz directly addressed this theme of returning Germany to the old values, juxtaposing Goethe’s play to bubbly French drama, which pleases but leaves no lasting impression: “I now admonish and beg you, let us not lay this book from our hand unused right after the first reading, let us first weigh the character of this German man of old with heated soul, and if we find it good, make it our own, so that we may again become Germans, from which we’ve deviatedPage 26 → so far, so far.”27 The historical German whom Goethe represents must serve as the model for contemporary, lesser Germans. Lenz even wanted people to perform the play—and through the enactment become more like the main character. While writing Egmont (begun in 1774, finished in 1787), Goethe transitioned away from the chaotic Sturm und Drang of GГ¶tz. Set in Brussels around 1567–68, at the inception of the Dutch War of Independence that would last until the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, Egmont is also the study of a hero. Unlike GГ¶tz, though, Egmont’s plot proceeds more logically, constructed around a much tighter time and space, driven by a conspiracy on the part of the Herzog von Alba to consolidate the power of the Spanish throne in the Netherlands. Although he set Egmont in a historical situation, Goethe wanted to explore universal values, and he avoided establishing a specific setting in the dialogue. When a character reads a letter out loud in act 5, stage directions instruct the actor to speak the date unclearly, so that the audience cannot understand.28 And rather than extolling specifically German virtues, in Egmont Goethe condemned people who cannot understand their own history, and thus cannot take action against tyranny. The citizen Vansen declares: “You don’t look into these traditions as you should, into history, into the rights of a regent! That’s why the Spaniards have been able to catch you in their net.”29 Egmont culminates in a moment of transcendence, but one that ignores its and Goethe’s era: to victorious music (Beethoven wrote a composition for the play in 1801), Egmont is led to his execution, delivering an ode against tyranny and for freedom, and declaring himself as an example: “I die for freedom; the goal for which I lived and fought I now attain, in suffering as a sacrifice.”30 Like Goethe, Schiller began his career as a Sturm und Dranger. But while writing Don Carlos, Schiller became a historian—he actually paused in the middle of the play, at act 3, scene 7, to do research, and the love intrigue of the first three acts became a study of political power when he finished the play three years later. After Don Carlos, Schiller went on to write the greatest series of history plays after Shakespeare: the Wallenstein trilogy (1799), Maria Stuart (1800), Die Jungfrau von Orleans (The Maid of Orleans, 1801), and Wilhelm Tell (1804).31

Importantly, Schiller wrote all of these history plays after the French Revolution had degenerated into the Terror (1793–94). The Enlightenment had failed, but so too had the blood-and-fire revolution of the Sturm und Drang: reason and irrationality, taken to extremes, had been found to lead to anarchy; harmony and order needed to be restored. Schiller composed Page 27 →his later plays after a period away from the theater, in which he carried out major historical studies, including on the Thirty Years’ War (the subject of Wallenstein), while also writing philosophical essays exploring aesthetics and Kantian themes like transcendental ethics. He applied the lessons of the French Revolution, the theory of his critical writing, and his historical research when subsequently writing history plays. All four major history plays represent crucial turning points in the history of Germany and Europe, and the later three render a sense of historical progress through their plots. For Schiller, historical writing should lay out the principles governing the development of human society, and his historiography teaches its spectators or readers how to reach freedom,32 while also, in the case of Wilhelm Tell, imagining a future united nation for the new citizens it attempts to create. Reversals in the direction of action occur within the structure of Schiller’s plays, mirroring historical turning points, and leading to recognition scenes, in which characters come to understand their situation, and the reader or audience comes to understand a teleological, directional historical process. Information from offstage leads to the reversals, and characters must make decisions that change not only the action of the plays, but the history of their nations. The historical process is, however, maddeningly opaque in the earlier Wallenstein. This trilogy of Wallensteins Lager (Wallenstein’s Camp), Die Piccolomini (The Piccolomini), and Wallensteins Tod (Wallenstein’s Death) takes place during a crucial turning point in the Thirty Years’ War, a moment that could have ended fighting early and established peace in Europe. As Wallenstein struggles to decide whether to join Sweden against his own Holy Roman Empire, events spiral out of control, limiting his freedom of action.33 Reversals happen to Wallenstein—like the capture of his exploratory emissary by the Swedes. In his final speech, Wallenstein, obsessed throughout the trilogy with trying to predict the future, recognizes that he cannot understand the intertwining of choice and fate that has trapped him in his rebellion. “If I had known before what now has happened, / That it would rob me of my dearest friend—/ Perhaps, I had done otherwise—perhaps / Had not—But what should we spare now?”34 In an early essay, Hegel strongly criticized the ending of Wallenstein, with its pile of bodies and lack of transcendence, for its meaninglessness—“Everything is destroyed, the kingdom of nothingness and death is victorious”35—a critique that Lydia Moland links to Hegel’s belief in historical progress in his mature philosophy of history.36 Wallenstein is all collisions (Catholic versus Protestant, individual versus emperor) without synthesis; the dialectical process is Page 28 →incomplete. The future imagined by Schiller in Wallenstein is one of possibly endless war, the troops of the Holy Roman Empire having taken everything from the now-dead Prince Wallenstein. The community represented by Schiller in Wallenstein, the foot soldiers and canteen women of Wallensteins Lager as well as the generals of the latter two plays, originates from all over Europe, with intergroup rivalries contributing to the discord and betrayals that plague the warring sides (Holy Roman Empire, Spain, Wallenstein, and Sweden). “This is the scum of every nation,”37 Wallenstein says in act 1 of Wallensteins Tod. We see disunity most markedly in the Germans, who identify themselves by their various principalities, and never as “German.” One of the tragedies in this trilogy—in stark contrast to the world of Wilhelm Tell, as we will see—is the failure of the community to act as a community. Typical German historiography writes the Thirty Years’ War as an epic fragmentation and destruction of German lands, which retarded the development of German nationhood;38 in Wallenstein, fragmentation and destruction are both cause and effect of the war. Wallenstein is a tragedy: as we will see in tragic history plays postunification, Wallenstein ends with greater division than it began. Without an understanding of the historic process, there can be no unity; without unity, peace cannot be achieved. In Maria Stuart, Die Jungfrau von Orleans, and Wilhelm Tell, however, historical progress is possible, with divisions resolving into unity and transcendence—even as Mary Stuart and Joan die. In the fourth act of Maria Stuart, Burleigh brings Queen Elizabeth a letter that reveals Mary’s plotting—from this moment, the play marches toward Mary’s execution. When Mary receives news of the

sentence at the beginning of the fifth act, she achieves Schillerian freedom, an individual transcendence. A similar movement occurs in Die Jungfrau von Orleans, as Joan liberates herself and France in a moment of simultaneous death and freedom, and in Wilhelm Tell, when Tell and his fellow citizens rise up to defend themselves and their land in an anti–French Revolution grounded in conservative individualism. Maria Stuart and Die Jungfrau von Orleans touch on issues of national subjects, but both focus more on the potentialities of individual freedom as expressed in history. Wilhelm Tell, on the other hand, helped to establish a foundation myth for the nation of Switzerland—and it does so by imagining a strong, cohesive community. The most openly nationalistic of Schiller’s history plays, Wilhelm Tell shows how the despotism of a foreign empire forces a group of citizens in Switzerland, led by Tell, into a much-debated, Page 29 →legitimate rebellion against the Hapsburg monarchy. When Tell acts and kills the tyrannical governor Gessler, he does so only after deep deliberation39 and with the backing of the Swiss confederation;40 after the assassination, peasants together take down the prisons that had unlawfully held them captive. Wilhelm Tell imagines the future of Switzerland (and implicitly Germany) as a sovereign, protodemocratic nation-state. Die Jungfrau von Orleans, Maria Stuart, and Wilhelm Tell are not proper tragedies: though Joan and Mary die, they transcend this world through their deaths. We must imagine the world in which such transcendence is made possible for everyone; in Wilhelm Tell, that society is clearly presented: just, national (with clear borders), and united. Through the structure of these three plays, Schiller makes an argument that history serves the cause of human freedom. This Schillerian dramaturgy served as a model for many later playwrights, who used it and diverged from it in order to make their own arguments about history. The nationalism of Wilhelm Tell seems to have a parallel in Heinrich von Kleist’s two historical dramas: both Die Hermannsschlacht (The Battle of Hermann, 1809) and Prinz Friedrich von Homburg (The Prince of Homburg, 1810) have been interpreted and produced as jingoistic German propaganda.41 Written during Napoleon’s occupation of many German-speaking states, which reached all the way into Kleist’s home of Prussia in the north, and as Kleist’s essays became increasingly nationalistic,42 these plays easily lend themselves to such a reading. In fact, for numerous Romantic theorists (with whom Kleist had many connections), history, nation, and the stage were inextricably linked. Both of Kleist’s plays refer back to central moments of German heroism: Hermannsschlacht represents the triumph of Hermann (Arminius) over Roman occupiers in 9 CE; Homburg takes place before and after the Battle of Fehrbellin between Prussia and Swedish invaders. Hermannsschlacht—with its main character’s long history of being used as a rallying cry for Germany, in plays like Friedens Sieg—lends itself especially to nationalist treatment. Its epigraph mourns the German fatherland (as well as the fact that the play had not been performed),43 and Hermann’s rhetorical defenses of Germany are eminently quotable: “All this spawn, which infiltrated itself into the body of Germania like a swarm of insects, must immediately die by the sword of revenge.”44 To secure his victory against the Romans, Hermann brings together the divided Germanic tribes, executing the one leader who refuses to join his confederation. Both Hermannsschlacht and Homburg end with the Germans victorious, united, renewed, and calling for the complete destruction of their foes. Hermann rallies his troops Page 30 →by shouting that they will march “to Rome itself, to courageously break it open!”45 And in Prinz von Homburg, the Prussian army, united again after a near rebellion, closes the play with a collective cry: “Grind into the dust all foes of Brandenburg!”46 But Hermannsschlacht and Homburg contain deep ambiguities. The wild, numerous reversals of Homburg create a dreamlike atmosphere, Schillerian dramaturgy gone out of control, undercutting the militant Prussian moralizing on law and order. In the Prince’s last line, he asks (for at least the tenth time): “Is this a dream?”47 Just before that line, the play indicates that “All” hail “the victor in the Battle of Fehrbellin!”48 Homburg had fainted, however, and clearly does not speak with the “All.” So does he say the very final line (“Grind into the dustВ .В .В .”), recapturing his Prussian spirit? Or does he instead come to a recognition that he cannot know the truth, cannot objectively reconcile the noumenal and the phenomenal—an anxiety of Kleist’s, who wrote about what we now call his “Kant Crisis” in a famous letter to his fiancГ© Wilhelmina?49 Such skepticism would be incompatible with the Prussian military culture supposedly championed in Homburg.

A disturbing lack of correspondence between appearance and being (Schein and Sein in German) also pervades Hermannsschlacht, though this play more closely follows a classic Aristotelian structure than Homburg—reversals of fortune in act 5, followed by a recognition scene and suffering. Hermann repeatedly uses other characters’ naive belief that Sein should match Schein against them, exploiting the slipperiness of language to set traps, allowing, for example, his foes to believe he agrees with their understanding of the word “freedom.” Various forms of words such as Wahn (illusion) and List (deceit) appear frequently in the text, as the characters strive to understand the true meaning of Hermann’s words and actions, only to discover they have failed. Hermann’s wife sings of a boy deceived by the reflection of the moon in a bucket of water;50 after discovering Hermann’s treachery; the Roman general Varus bemoans the German’s misleading appearance: “O Hermann! Hermann! How can someone have blond hair and blue eyes and still be as false as a Carthaginian?”51 This is not a world in which the honorable and pure emerge victorious. Hermann serves only himself and his own power; he lays the plots and mostly lets others make brave speeches about Germany.52 He is the most brutal barbarian in a brutal, barbaric world: he tricks his wife into murdering her Roman suitor (she feeds the legionnaire to a hungry bear); he orders an unarmed captive to be executed; and he orders the public slaughter of a fellow soldier who questions “Germany.” In fact, the word “Germany” is perhaps the most slippery word in the play, meaning Page 31 →whatever Hermann wants it to. In the final action of Hermannsschlacht, we can clearly understand why Hermann calls upon the emotions of nationalism, as he asks the condemned soldier: “So you question where and when Germania came into being? .В .В .В Now you will quickly understand what I meant by it: Lead him away and cut off his head!”53 Germany has become a means of acquiring great personal power—Kleist’s dedication perhaps takes on a double meaning, as (conceivably) the poet cannot sing his fatherland’s praises because there is nothing to praise. After Kleist, influential German history plays no longer even ambiguously represented past events in order to inspire nationalist feelings. Instead, playwrights like Georg BГјchner, Gerhart Hauptmann, Bertolt Brecht, and Peter Weiss questioned prevailing narratives, disclosed disunity and inequality past and present, and exposed suppressed events—sometimes refusing, sometimes redefining German nationalism. These playwrights rejected the conventions and implications of Schiller’s history plays, while also at times incorporating some aspects of them, creating different forms to address their needs. If Kleist implicitly used a Schillerian classicism to create potentially counter-Schiller plays, BГјchner in Dantons Tod (Danton’s Death, 1835) did so explicitly. In a letter to his family on July 28, 1835, as he was drafting Danton, BГјchner wrote of his methods and influences: “In one word, I think highly of Goethe or Shakespeare, but very little of Schiller.”54 Dantons Tod is foremost a history of the French Revolution, not a means of demonstrating transcendental ideals in history. In the same letter, BГјchner claimed that “the dramatic poet is, in my eyes, nothing more than a writer of history, but is superior to the latter in that he creates the history for the second time.”55 Elaborating, he wrote that the playwright “brings an era into life instead of giving a dry narration.”56 In fact, “His highest mission is to come as near as possible to history as it actually happened.”57 To that end, BГјchner relied not just on sources about the events of 1794, during the Committee on Public Safety’s Reign of Terror, but also used sources from these events, particularly public speeches, a method of playwriting that would become popular in the German documentary theater of the twentieth century. In contrast to Schiller, who wrote portraits of martyred heroes (like Joan of Arc and Mary Stuart), BГјchner did not want to create heroes out of Georg Danton and his other characters. Ultimately, BГјchner wrote in the July 28, 1835 letter, “The poet is no teacher of morals.”58 In the second scene of Danton, a drunken Souffleur (prompt-book keeper, similar to a stage manager) sets the tone of the play by making proclamations in elevated language—whilePage 32 → calling his wife a carcass and whore, begging lookers-on for a knife so that he can stab her. The Souffleur seeks with his rhetoric to represent himself as a hero (a new Brutus). But he reveals himself as ridiculous, trying to make his private quarrel into a public concern of historic proportions, and succeeding only in accidently inspiring a mob. So with the Souffleur, so also with the great Robespierre and his henchman St. Just, whose vendetta against Danton, expressed in high rhetoric, leads only to violence. Danton himself, a possible martyr figure in the mold of Mary Stuart, believes only in death and chaos. Indeed, he foresees his own execution, but, a self-declared lazy epicure, he does nothing about it.

Wallenstein cannot make a choice because he does not want to limit his freedom to act; Danton cannot act because he sees the choices as meaningless. BГјchner reflected this meaninglessness through the structure of Danton, with scattered scenes and little plot or character development, apart from Robespierre and St. Just’s machinations. When the message comes to Danton that he will in fact be executed, he merely sighs at this reversal, which is hardly a reversal of fortune for a man who began the play by comparing love to the grave. In Historical Drama, Lindenberger argued that “when Danton, shortly before the end, voices the insight вЂThe world is chaos. Nothingness is the world-god yet to be born,’ he is simply articulating a notion that the play has been demonstrating all along.”59 To expand on Lindenberger’s thought, this recognition scene—including Danton’s last lines, quoted by Lindenberger above—merely repeats what Danton has recognized all along: the historical process, as reflected by BГјchner in his representation of the events of the French Revolution, is chaos, its sound and fury signifying nothing. Gerhart Hauptmann’s Die Weber (The Weavers, 1892), like Danton an important influence on the later documentary theater movement, uses the methods of naturalism to dramatize an 1844 revolt in the Prussian province of Silesia (present-day Poland). In Die Weber, Hauptmann created an intricate historic environment—including detailed sets and accurate local dialects—that the audience could study, observing how poverty leads to moral deprivation. Hauptmann focused his play on an ensemble of characters, rather than a main protagonist or two, and especially on the “flat-chested, coughing, shabby”60 weavers, as well as on a couple of middle-class and wealthy figures. Rather than its plot developing through reversals, Die Weber circles its central predicament (the poverty of the weavers), building thematically. Along with the almost choral cast, this thematic circling gives the play’s structure a panoramic feel. In its emblematic conclusion—referencedPage 33 → by Heiner MГјller at the end of the historical play Germania Tod in Berlin (Germania Death in Berlin, 1956 /1971)—an elderly, disabled man who opposes rebellion, placing his hope instead in heaven and the judgment of God, is accidently shot through the window of his hut by soldiers trying to break up a mob. Old Hilse becomes a martyr to the cause of the weavers—but not a transcendent, Schillerian martyr. The tableau of Old Hilse’s famished family bending over his prone body conveys a clear moral: the weavers’ situation must change, somehow without violence. The first of the history plays discussed here to be written after Germany became a unified nation-state under Bismarck in 1871, Die Weber must no longer imagine a future German nation. But set before unification, Hauptmann’s play asks what has changed since the disunity of 1844, and finds shockingly little—after all, there had again been unrest among Silesian weavers in 1891. Political unification had not led to social unification, much less equality. Some surveys of German historical drama simply end here,61 or continue only to criticize Bertolt Brecht’s work and other twentieth-century plays as unhistorical.62 But though many of Brecht’s plays that take place “in the past” are parable-like LehrstГјcke (such as Die Horatier und die Kuratier [The Horatians and the Curiatians, 1933–34]), or have little to no historic content or context (Die Dreigroschenoper [The Threepenny Opera, 1928]), he did in fact write several completed plays set in detailed historical worlds: Leben des Galilei (Life of Galileo, 1937–39/43); Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder (Mother Courage and Her Children, 1938–39/41); and Die Tage der Commune (Days of the Commune, 1948–49/56).63 The charge that Brecht did not write history plays arises in large part from the plays’ microhistoriography; Brecht mostly, with the exception of Galileo, focused on fictional proletarian characters, as opposed to factual world-historical figures like Mary Stuart or Joan of Arc. But this is exactly in line with Brecht’s aesthetics and politics—of course he directed attention at Mother Courage, a working-class individual, over her contemporary Wallenstein, a general. In “On Epic Dramatic Art” (1940, unpublished during his life), he asserted that “the individualВ .В .В . also has a history that is subject to change. What happens to him may be of historical importance.”64 In the epic theater, individuals “are taken as seriously as the Napoleons of earlier times.”65 All three of the listed history plays set their characters in specific historical worlds, using stage directions, which begin each scene and are often included as placards in productions; marginal characters based on historical figures; and historical events as plot points. For the Berliner Ensemble premiere of Commune, for example, the meticulous program contained Page 34 →much information on the events and figures of the Paris Commune66—emphasizing the play’s basis in factual, recorded past. And though more fictional than the other two plays, even Mutter Courage includes aspects that point toward its historicity, especially in scene 6, as a

placard informs the audience: “Before the city of Ingolstadt in Bavaria Mother Courage is present at the funeral of the fallen commander, Tilly”67—a reference to the historical person Johann Tserclaes, Count of Tilly. Interestingly, criticized himself for being unhistorical, Brecht theorized his epic theater and the Verfremdung effect as a more historical alternative to the prevailing realism of his day, developing the concept of “historicization.” As Brecht kept his theory (like his plays) under constant revision, it is helpful to trace the development of the concept of historicization throughout his career. In the essay “Verfremdung Effects in Chinese Acting” (1936), Brecht wrote that the bourgeois theater portrays events as timeless and inevitable: though the milieu or setting might change (presumably for the purposes of spectacle), the characters never do. In contrast, the V-effect “was principally designed to historicize the incidents portrayed.”68 Although generally understood as simply setting the events of a production in another time and place so that the audience can more readily analyze what happens, Brecht used the term “historicize” more specifically in this essay and later. Here, he wrote that in his productions, people will be a function of their milieu, and their milieu a function of them. This “breaking up of the environment into relationships between people”69 corresponds for Brecht to a historical way of thinking. In other words, audiences should be able to understand how the characters’ specific times and places shape those characters’ decisions, and thereby learn how to act in their own time and place. Addressing acting in his 1934 poem “Speech to Danish Working-Class Actors on the Art of Observation,” Brecht asked that the actor “imagine all that is going on around you, all those struggles / Picturing them just like historical incidents / For this is how you should go on to portray them on the stage.”70 In other words, actors should imagine their own circumstances as historical, comparing them with other historical events, in order to help the audience understand how to intervene in their own world. A few years later, Brecht took up this idea again, in “Short Organon for the Theatre” (1948): “The вЂhistorical conditions’ must not of course be construed (nor will they be constructed) as mysterious powers (behind the scenes); on the contrary, they are created and maintained by people (and are altered by them): they are constituted by people’s actions.”71 By the time Brecht was working on the “Short Organon,” he was connecting historicization to a dialectical materialistPage 35 → concept of history.72 The idea that the historical process must be reconceived to center on the decisions of individuals was argued quite strongly also by Marx, as a key component of the materialist method outlined in his and Engels’s critique of post-Hegelian historiography in The German Ideology (1846): “The first premise of all human history is, of course, the existence of living human individuals.В .В .В . The writing of history must always set out from these natural bases and their modification in the course of history through the action of men.”73 Similarly, in the “Short Organon,” Brecht wrote that at the same time that historicization allows the actor to create a specific character, the “historicizing depiction” will also “indicate traces of other movements and features all around the fully worked-out character.”74 So even as Brecht worked to show the function of historical conditions, he still wanted to draw transhistorical (Marxist inflected) connections—and show actions as anything but inevitable. Brecht’s definitions of “historicization” can help us understand why he chose to represent the past. More than just contributing to the overall V-effect, these plays historicize the events Brecht portrayed to show how historical conditions contribute to—but do not determine—the characters’ choices and the action in the plays. Mother Courage, while unable to recognize her own decisions in regards to her business and family as part of a historical process (the Thirty Years’ War), does reflect on the socially constructed motivations of the soldiers around her: “The Chief [Tilly] had his troubles lately, I hear. There was unrest in the Second Regiment because he didn’t pay ’em. He said it was a war of religion and they must fight it free of charge.”75 In Die Tage der Commune, members of the Paris Commune desperately appeal to the soldiers (drawn from the country peasantry) who attack them in the last scene, posting a banner above their barricade: “You are workers like us.”76 Religion and class have historically been manipulated by those in power in order to maintain their power and divide the proletariat against itself. The Thirty Years’ War and the Paris Commune provide specific examples of how this happened. Brecht’s dramaturgy is open, signaling that the terrible consequences of the plays (the

destruction Courage’s family, the downfall of the Paris Commune, Galileo’s recantation and exile) did not have to happen as they happened—a break from Schiller, and from the determinist historiography in the model of Marx that governed Brecht’s larger world-historical view. For example, Galileo comes to a recognition of responsibility in his final scene: “Given this unique situation, if one man had put up a fight it might have had tremendous repercussions. Had I stood firm the scientists could have developed something like the doctors’ Hippocratic oath, a Page 36 →vow to use their knowledge exclusively for mankind’s benefit.”77 In the series of scenes that precede this recognition, Brecht shows us the opportunities Galileo missed through Galileo’s fear of pain and need for the pleasures of food—and asks his audiences in the newly born nuclear age not to miss their own opportunity for responsible scientific progress. The epic theater structure that Brecht used in Galilei and Mutter Courage allowed him to create this open dramaturgy. Brecht’s epic historiography rejects the importance of Schillerian turning points and replaces the unified structure of classical dramaturgy with one in which each scene shifts widely between times and places. Thus, his plays depict key moments of individual choice across the lives of the main characters, and the repercussions of those choices on wider social circumstances. Rather than one moment of crisis, Brecht’s plays contain many, in most of the individual scenes. An example occurs in scene 6 of Mutter Courage, as well as in the ending of the play. Most historians of the Thirty Years’ War (including Schiller) have written the death of Tilly as a significant turning point in the war.78 Mother Courage refuses this narrative structure, and the play counters it with microhistoriography. In her opening monologue of scene 6, Courage interweaves a description of a historical event with an inventory of her goods: “Too bad about the commander in chief—twenty-two pairs those socks—he fell by accident, they say.”79 Her concern, and Brecht’s as well, is for the material circumstances of her condition, not for the lives and deaths of the generals who supposedly drive history. When the Chaplin tries to focus Courage’s attention on Tilly’s funeral—“Now they’ll be burying the commander in chief. This is a historic moment”—she reminds the audience that the key for her story lies elsewhere: “What I call a historic moment is them bashing my daughter over the eye. She’s half wrecked already, won’t get no husband no, and her so crazy about kids.”80 The audience watches Courage fail because of her inability to rise above her material conditions not once, but over and over; and unlike in Galilei, the play denies her a recognition scene. In the twelfth and final scene, as Courage pushes her cart and gets back to business following the soldiers, leaving her dead daughter Kattrin to be buried by locals, Brecht leaves to the audience the recognition of the social and historical circumstances that led her to continue pushing her cart. Paris Commune differs from the epic dramaturgy of Galilei and Mutter Courage with its tight focus on the sixty days the Commune lasted. In fact, this play (one of Brecht’s last) is more properly tragic than epic. The reversals that bring on the final crisis even come by messenger (reports that Thiers is moving on Paris), a trope familiar from the classical, neoclassical, and well-made play structures Brecht often set up as his straw men. In the recognition Page 37 →scene, which develops out of the major reversal, Council Delegate Langevin criticizes the Commune’s avoidance of violent force, as well as its idealism, represented in the bill of rights drawn up in the Council, which ultimately restricted their choices. “Is the freedom to lie a guaranteed freedom also?,” he asks, questioning the fifth right guaranteeing free speech. “And in Number 6 do we permit the election of deceivers? By a people confused by their schools, their church, their press and their politicians?” He continues, “We should have put only one point on the statues: our right to life!”81 Die Tage der Commune allows no space for redemption in the slaughter that closes the play, leaving every protagonist dead. It is the task of the audience to keep the play from fully becoming a tragedy. In the eleventh scene, just before Thiers’s invasion, Deleschulze (based on Charles Deleschulze, a journalist and supporter of the Commune) gives a speech to the Council that foresees the Commune’s violent suppression—but also the possibility of its lasting influence: “Citizens, should our enemy succeed in turning Paris into a grave it will at least never be the grave of our ideas.”82 And in the final moment of the penultimate scene, the dying GeneviГЁve whispers: “Long live theВ .В .В . She falls.”83 This is a vision of the future. The audience must make sure that the ideas of the Commune do not suffer the characters’ fate, must complete GeneviГЁve’s last sentence. Written in 1948, at a moment of high tension between the communist East and the capitalist West, Die Tage der Commune warns about the perils of democracy in a society in which the citizens

have been deceived by their schools, churches, press, and politicians. First the utopian socialist state, and then a bill of rights. If violence is threatened against the socialist state, bloodshed must be met with bloodshed. Langevin closes his speech by calmly addressing his audience: “In this struggle the hands not bloodstained are the hands chopped off.”84 More than the other two plays, Commune imagines a nation, though not a united one, by building a dialectic of failed revolutions and envisioning the future success of a militarily strong, nondemocratic German Democratic Republic, officially founded in 1949 against West Germany, and prepared to violently counter the capitalist aristocrats pushing for its destruction. Brecht’s practical work in the theater also illustrates how his plays and theories engaged with history and historiography. His notes on his 1947–48 Santa Monica production of Life of Galileo starring Charles Laughton capture his approach in applying historicization to design: Caspar Neher and Brecht agreed that “the set should not make the audience believe that they are in a medieval Italian room or the Vatican.”85 But, at the same time, the background “should show the historical setting in an imaginative and artistically appealing way.”86 This can be achieved, Brecht proposed, “if the scenery Page 38 →is not itself colourful, but complements the actors’ costumes by enhancing the roundness of the figures, by giving a two-dimensional impression even if it contains three-dimensional elements.”87 In the “Courage Modelbook,” about the 1949 production at the Deutsches Theater Berlin, Brecht wrote that “we used the famous model devised during the war for the Zurich Schauspielhaus by Teo Otto. The model used a permanent framework of huge screens, made out of such materials as one would expect to find in the military encampments of the seventeenth century: tenting, wooden posts lashed together with ropes, etc.”88 Again, the point was not to convince the audience that they were being taken back into the seventeenth century, nor did Brecht intend to awe them with costume dramas. As Brecht stated shortly after the quote above: “Stage machinery provided enough elements of illusion to create a more perfect representation of certain natural elements, but not so much as to make the audience feel that they were no longer in a theatre.”89 To mention just one more production, in describing Brecht’s adaptation of Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz’s Der Hofmeister (The Tutor, 1774) in 1950, David Barnett writes: “The production was elaborate in its attention to detail as a way of giving eighteenth-century Prussia a particularity and peculiarity that the audience could compare to its own experience of the present.”90 Across all three productions, we can see how the V-effect and historicization worked in concert to help the audience notice transhistorical connections and the transience, the alterability of any particular historical period. The history play genre had great importance in the GDR, as the young nation sought to legitimize itself in part through new interpretations of the past. In addition to Brecht, heralded writers including Peter Hacks, Heiner MГјller, and Friedrich Wolf chose to live in the GDR and write plays with Marxist historical structure and content to help create the conditions of communism. The next generation of playwrights, raised in the GDR, including Christoph Hein and Volker Braun, took a far more critical attitude in their plays, but also wrote allegorically in order to avoid censorship and potential expatriation. The dramaturgy of history plays written in the GDR is closely related to postunification theater, so I discuss plays by MГјller, Hein, and Braun, and the various levels of censorship they faced, in detail in chapter 4, “Allegory and Antiallegory in the Ost.” In the years following World War II, playwrights and directors in West Germany began promoting a style of theater first developed by Erwin Piscator in the 1920s: documentary drama. These artists helped to reclaim theater in the name of political education and action in West Germany, generally Page 39 →avoided or ignored during the postwar Wirtschaftswunder, or economic miracle.91 German theater scholar and critic Thomas Irmer defines the mode of documentary theater concisely: “Historical documents are treated as the principal material for the stage; characters are seen as authentic protagonists from history; and quite often the forms of investigation—trial or factual reconstruction—are employed to confront the audience with the content.”92 One of the first popular examples of documentary theater in the 1960s was Rolf Hochhuth’s Der Stellvertreter (The Deputy, 1963), directed by Piscator himself for the premiere. It caused much controversy through its representations of Pope Pius XII and Auschwitz, exposing the hidden fact of the Catholic Church’s inaction during the Holocaust. With Die Ermittlung (The Investigation, 1965), which premiered simultaneously in twelve theaters in

West and East Germany (with one production directed by Piscator), Peter Weiss brought the horrifying testimony from the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials (1963–65) to greater public attention. Although highly and obviously aestheticized—subtitled an “Oratorio in 11 Cantos,” in verse and with much symmetry in characters and structure—Die Ermittlung refuses Schiller’s historiography. Weiss wrote one long scene of suffering, with no reversals and no recognition (and certainly no Schillerian transcendence). Through the suffering, Die Ermittlung reveals the destructive side of the Enlightenment project, which led to the factories of the concentration camps, as well as the duplicitous legal language used by the accused to evade responsibility. At the same time, Die Ermittlung relies on the idea of objective truth, which can be discovered and represented; in the introduction to the play, Weiss wrote that the testimony included in Die Ermittlung “should contain nothing beyond facts.”93 In his landmark 1968 essay “Notes on the Contemporary Theatre,” Weiss elaborated: “Documentary theatre abstains from any kind of invention, it adopts authentic material and presents it on the stage without any modification of its content, but with definite formal modification.”94 Weiss and other documentary playwrights desired the thing-in-itself, building dramas solely out of archival materials, which they hoped would allow them to avoid the delusions and propaganda of the Nazi period. These plays work against German postwar memory, which allowed an abdication of individual accountability, in order to create a history that ascribes general complicity for the Holocaust to all members of the German nation, along with a responsibility for preserving that history and preventing future episodes of genocide. With this genealogy of history plays in mind, we can now return to 1989–90, and examine how historians and politicians dramatized the German past.

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2. Unification as Drama Historiography after Unification Since 1990, historians have struggled over how to interpret the events surrounding unification in relation to other major events in the German past: their decisions about structuring pre-1989 German history have large implications on how they tell stories of 1989–90, which actors they emphasize, and how they imagine the future of the united German nation. My primary guide through German historiography was Stefan Berger’s comprehensive book The Search for Normality: National Identity and Historical Consciousness in Germany since 1800, a thoroughly annotated overview.1 Let’s begin just prior to November 9, 1989, to see how much historiography changed with unification, and how quickly. West German historians, like everybody else, did not foresee the collapse of the GDR. Acceptance of the continuing division of Germany contributed generally to a “more critical national historiography which argued that the Bismarckian nation-state had been an unfortunate episode and did not provide traditions to build the future on.”2 Karl Dietrich Bracher, among others, ascribed to the theory that German history between 1871 and 1945 was a Sonderweg (special path), describing Germany’s slow evolution into a nation-state as abnormal in comparison to other European nations, culminating in Nazism. Bracher, as late as May 1989, portrayed 1945 as a “decisive break with hyper-nationalism; West Germany turned to the democratic traditions of the West.” This led him to reject “a collective national identity [В .В .В .В ] as it would endanger the Federal Republic’s Western orientation.”3 He also Page 41 →noted that “the glorification of national history has largely vanished from school textbooks,”4 showing the practical impact of the Sonderweg theory on West German citizens. It is important to emphasize that there was no consensus about German national identity at the time. In the so-called Historikerstreit (historians’ dispute) of the late 1980s, historians publicly debated the renationalization of German identity. Conservatives like Ernst Nolte called for an end of VergangenheitsbewГ¤ltigung, the process of coming to terms with the Nazi past and genocide, events they saw as not unique to Germany, thoroughly expunged from German society, and impeding the development of a national consciousness that would allow Germany to take its proper place on the world stage.5 The GDR had its own debates about why Germany had so long failed to become a (socialist) nation, debating the concept deutsche Misere, a corollary to the Sonderweg theory. Translated as “German misery” or “German wretchedness,” deutsche Misere is especially important for understanding Brecht’s relationship to historiography. In the Historisch-kritisches WГ¶rterbuch des Marxismus (Historical-Critical Dictionary of Marxism), Helmut Peitsch defined deutsche Misere, influentially used by Friedrich Engels and systematically described by GyГ¶rgy LukГЎcs, as describing “a configuration of motifs” and comprising “peculiarities in German history in comparison to English or French, a paradoxical relationship of inferiority and superiority.”6 The roots of deutsche Misere were traced to the failures in the Peasants’ War (1524–25) and the revolutions of 1848 to establish communistic societies. From the beginning, deutsche Misere was connected more to literature than historical study: Engels first used the concept in a book review, and other socialist critics used it in despairing how the great German culture and scholarship did not seem to be preparing Germany for a proletarian revolution (thus superiority with inferiority). After the founding of the GDR, the SED moved to purge the idea of deutsche Misere and its pessimistic view of history.7 In its place, Berger writes, the SED encouraged “the search for positive progressive traditions in German national history.”8 Brecht had echoed Engels’s use of the concept in a 1939 article,9 but he followed the SED in shifting his views on deutsche Misere. In 1950, during the Berliner Ensemble’s first season, Brecht historicized Lenz’s Der Hofmeister (described briefly in the previous chapter), which is set during the Peasants’ War, in order to show how deutsche Misere could be overcome.10 But, against the SED, Brecht defended artistic use of deutsche Misere. In 1953, for example, Hanns Eisler’s libretto for the opera Johann Faustus came under attack for its depiction of deutsche Misere, which Page 42 →some felt could undermine “the historical legitimacy of the SED regime,” according to Tom Kuhn and Steve Giles.11 In an

essay, Brecht wrote: We must assume unconditionally the truth of this sentence: “A conception which only sees Misere in German history and where the people as a creative potential are absent, is not true” (ND [Neues Deutschland]). However, the creative powers of the people are not absent from Eisler’s Faustus, they are peasants of the great Peasants’ War led on by MГјnzer. Faustus’s creativity is broken because he deserts them. And anyone who, like Eisler, talks of deutsche Misere in order to combat it, himself belongs to the creative forces, to those who make it impermissible to talk of German history as nothing but Misere.12 In the early 1970s, the officially teleological Marxist-Leninist historiography of the GDR “began to shift away from the ideological restrictions prescribed by the SED,”13 according to Berger. By the 1980s, GDR history expanded in terms of subjects to include Luther, Frederick the Great, and even Bismarck, a move in part to reclaim these figures for the GDR: “Historical references to the national heritage legitimated concepts of the вЂsocialist German nation,’” Berger writes.14 This nationalization of GDR historiography was an effort, as German-American historian Georg Iggers wrote, “to integrate traditions of the military, of state authority, and of national identity into the historical consciousness of a socialist society.”15 In sum, Berger’s book shows that East German historians “contributed to official efforts by the SED leadership to invent a socialist nation.”16 Following November 9, 1989, histories of German unification progressed in roughly three phases. First came the immediate reports, which recounted the events chronologically. Then key figures published their memoirs, especially major politicians—Chancellor Kohl, Egon Krenz, who briefly led the GDR in 1989, and President George H. W. Bush, among others—attempting to define their place in history. Some participants in the protest movement did the same, recounting their memories in more individually focused stories. Most recently, beginning in about 1999, and motivated in part by publishers and authors seeking to take advantage of the ten- and twentyyear anniversaries of the fall of the Berlin Wall, historians have sought to analyze the events from a wider perspective, to ask why they happened, and to place them in the larger contexts of German or European history.17 Unification quickly transformed German historiography. As historian Peter Bender noted: “The years 1989/90 form a caesura for the historian as Page 43 →well. It does not matter what his politics are. He simply cannot ignore the question of what the unexpected unification of Germany means for our concept of the history of past decades.”18 The public intellectual and philosopher JГјrgen Habermas addressed the implications of various structures of German history in detail in his “Replies to a Bundestag Investigative Commission,” excerpted from his appearance at the German parliament on May 4, 1994: This controversy about how to punctuate contemporary German history has flared up anew since unification. Someone who sees the period 1914 to 1989 as a uniform era, whether as an era of ideologies, of a world civil war, or of totalitarianism, will ascribe a different status to the Nazi period than will someone who sees—from a German perspective—the period between 1871 and 1945 as a nationalistic phase, with the victorious march of the democratic constitutional state beginning only after 1945. A different interpretation will produce other ruptures and turning points. For example, anyone who accepts the claim that German history follows a “special path” [Sonderweg], and turns it on its head, arguing that the Federal Republic of 1945 to 1989 was a more or less pathological interim period, is free to trivialize the turning point of 1945 into an “antifacist reformation” and, instead, to understand 1989 as the break that “finishes off the raison d’être of old Federated States,” thus opening the way to a return to the alignments of the Bismarck Reich. But, on the other hand, whoever takes the fall of the Weimar Republic as the turning point—and has an interest in a democratic culture—will draw less hope from the re-acquired “national state normality” of 1990 than from the level of political civilization that had by then been reached in the old Federal Republic.19 In other words, depending on how a historian structures the past, unification can be seen as the final turning point

in an inevitable march to the democratic constitutional state; an opening to return to the expansionist Germany of Bismarck; relatedly, as a cause for concern that Germany, in seeking to be “normal,” could again become a threat in Europe; or as less important than the development of democratic political structures in the Federal Republic, which will be maintained with the addition of the new, Eastern states. We can understand why historian Mary Fulbrook has described “identify the real break”20 as a favorite game of German historians. Page 44 →The first of these stories, which writes unification teleologically as the decisive turning point in a historical process that has resulted in a democratic Germany, is essentially Hegelian in form. As described concisely in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Hegel regards history as an intelligible process moving towards a specific condition—the realization of human freedom.В .В .В . He constructs specific moments as вЂworld-historical’ events that were in the process of bringing about the final, full stage of history and human freedom.”21 Berger observes that after unification “Hegel’s hypostasis of the state as the incarnation of historical right” became “hugely influential.”22 For some historians, German unification is a “world-historical” event, perhaps even the ultimate world-historical event: the full culmination of human freedom.23 In the teleological narrative of German history, 1945 could have been such a turning point toward normalization of the German nation—but division prevented that from happening. Instead, the reversal came in 1989. It is no coincidence that Wende, the word many Germans use as shorthand for the collapse of the German Democratic Republic and subsequent national unification, means “turning point” or “reversal.” Use of the term Wende implies that 1989–90 was a reversal in the historical process, and this narrative structure contributes to the myth that beginning on November 9, 1989, Germany finally became one nation of its citizens. Historians of Germany who used this teleological narrative also saturated their studies in nationalist sentiment. Berger addresses the post-1989 rise of nationalist historiographies in The Search for Normality: Reunification of Germany in October 1990 convinced some historians that a re-evaluation of the role of the nation in German history was in the cards. They now attributed a new “normality” to the nation in their writings. This new national rhetoric also found expression in the search for new national symbols. It became prominent in the context of political efforts to whip up national sentiment after November 1989. The national debate in Germany brought, amongst other things, frequent calls for a paradigm change in German historiography from society to nation.24 In referring to the unified Germany as “normal,” historians made an argument that Germany had finally developed into a Western nation like Great Britain, after the aberrations of the nineteenth (pre-Bismarck) and twentieth centuries, with the GDR seen as the continuation of the totalitarianPage 45 → Nazi period.25 And as “normal,” Germany no longer had to apologize for the Holocaust, essentially having come to terms with it. So historians turned to the past to find new symbols for the neoliberal nation, working both to legitimate the unification process and to develop national identity within Germany.26 Not surprisingly, Chancellor Kohl takes a central role in these historians’ books on unification—a role he himself consciously embraced, both during the process and retrospectively in his memoir, Ich wollte Deutschlands Einheit (I Wanted Germany’s Unity, 1996). For prominent historian Andreas RГ¶dder in Deutschland einig Vaterland (Germany One Fatherland, 2009), “West German chancellor Helmut Kohl was able to take over and steer this event of world history to its successful conclusion. By stressing that вЂeverything happened differently than people had thought’ (p. 11), RГ¶dder highlights all the more clearly the significance of Kohl as someone who could read the signs of the times and act accordingly.”27 East German demonstrators, on the other hand, receive limited emphasis here. More extreme conservative historians such as Michael StГјrmer (an adviser to Kohl in the 1980s), though marginal in the profession, draw on this same historiography, but link “reunified” Germany more strongly with nineteenth-century Prussia, and call for a revival of Prussian values in order to develop a stronger national consciousness in the populace.28 (They are also sometimes Nazi apologists, arguing that Hitler was merely

responding as best he could to the tremendous threat of communism from Stalin’s Soviet Union.) This rightwing historiography trivializes 1945 as less than a break, with 1945–89 as an interim period, and unification as a return to a Prussia-centered nation. One main reaction to nationalist historiography also emphasizes 1989, but by understanding the fall of the Weimar Republic as a key turning point in twentieth-century German history, foresees much danger in a united Germany.29 In other words, some have feared that the hopes of conservative historians—the development a strong national consciousness—would result in a dangerous, expansionist, destabilizing state in the middle of Europe. Prime Minister Margret Thatcher, dreading exactly this, met with Anglophone historians of Germany in March 1990 to discuss the prospects of unification.30 Generally, left-leaning historians have countered nationalist historiography by critically examining myths of Prussia, “arguing for a plurality of methods and viewpoints,”31 as Berger does, and expanding the perspective of their research. “Comparative history and the further internationalisation Page 46 →and Europeanisation of German historiography have been portrayed as the best safeguards against once again getting bound up in one’s own national history,”32 Berger writes. Such historians study the events of 1989–90 from a variety of perspectives, not just that of Kohl, and amid the larger Eastern European “velvet revolution” context, as part of a movement toward European integration. In doing so, they deemphasize 1989 as a turning point, instead seeking to stress the democratic structures and Western orientation of the Federal Republic, as Habermas does with his calls for a patriotism that lies not in a narrative, mythic history but rather in respect for and pride in the Federal Republic’s 1949-ratified Grundgesetz, or Basic Law, the constitution of Germany. For some Eastern opposition groups and Western intellectuals farther on the left, unification represents yet another missed opportunity in German history. “German history reached its turning-point and failed to turn,”33 historian A. J. P. Taylor wrote of the German revolutions of 1848, and the Left saw 1989–90 in similar terms: as yet another moment when a true socialist state could have been established, but wasn’t. Other examples include the sixteenth-century Peasants’ War,34 a war against the landowning aristocracy; the Spartacist uprising, the workers’ revolt of 1919; and the Stalinist establishment of the GDR in 1949.35 After 1989, the eastward expansion of neoliberalism, caused in no small part by economic crisis in the Soviet bloc, inverted Marx’s predicted communist revolution. This socialist historiography also posits Kohl as the main actor after November 9, but sees him as coopting the force developed by protesters to radically different ends than those imagined by the protestors. As Mary Fulbrook puts it in her history of Germany since 1918: “The logic of the capitalist economy—in an ironic vindication of the materialistic determination of history—appeared to be having the last word.”36 In the United States and England, German unification has usually been placed in the broad context of the “endgame of the Cold War,” as Kristina Spohr observes in a 2000 review of historical literature addressing the unification process in Germany.37 In other words, instead of being seen as a turning point in just German history, unification is seen as a turning point in Western civilization. Here, Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history” thesis warrants particular attention. Essentially, in The End of History and the Last Man (as well as in an earlier essay) Fukuyama argues that the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe completed the last major conflict over the best way of organizing human society. “Mankind’s ideological evolution,”38 Page 47 →Fukuyama says, began with the development of the scientific method39 and has achieved its fullest expression in capitalist, liberal democracy. The book is far more complex and theoretical than my watered-down summary would imply, but it often was taken at the face value of its provocative title, which seems to express a sentiment that important events would stop occurring. The phrase “the End of History,” Fukuyama clarified in a later essay, is not a statement about the is, but about the ought: for a variety of theoretical reasons, liberal democracy and free markets constitute the best regime, or more precisely the best of the available alternative ways of organizing human society.В .В .В . Liberal democracy most fully (though not completely) satisfies the most basic human longings.40

Fukuyama, a political scientist and not a historian, hopes for a universal History, coherent and directional, leading most of humanity to liberal democracy, and sees macro empirical evidence for this in the twentieth century41—while many critics and promoters read the thesis as a linear, teleological historiography about the inevitable collapse of communism and subsequent capitalist hegemony.42

Emplotting History Turning to Hayden White’s influential Metahistory (1973), we can see how the various historiographic approaches to the German past can be analyzed in narrative or dramaturgical terms. White shows how a historical work is “a verbal structure in the form of a narrative prose discourse that purports to be a model, or icon, of past structures and processes in the interest of explaining what they were by representing them.”43 In other words, as he puts it earlier, “The historian performs an essentially poetic act.”44 During this process, historians arrange events in temporal order, and “then the chronicle is organized into a story by the further arrangement of the events into the components of a вЂspectacle’ or process of happening.”45 Examining nineteenth-century historians and philosophers of history (including Hegel, Ranke, Marx, and Nietzsche), White finds four archetypes of emplotment in historical writing, drawing on Northrop Frye’s classification of plot structures in Anatomy of Criticism: comedy, tragedy, romance, and satire.46 We can see, following White, that a conservative teleological historiographyPage 48 → plots German history as a series of tragedies, most prominently World War II, now resolved into a comedy: historians conceived of unification as the final turning point of an inevitable march to the democratic constitutional state. In other words, to use the terms of Greek dramaturgy, the sparagmos of the severed East and West led to peripeteia and anagnorisis in 1989–90, history reaching its goal in democratic capitalism, with free markets for East Germany and all of Europe. It is no accident that German history would be structured as a drama with episodes of tragedy, but ultimately revealed as comedy. For we find in Hegel, who influenced the historical Right and Left so strongly, and whose writings on phenomenology and spirit Fukuyama followed closely in his thesis, an outline of exactly this dramatic historiography. First let us consider Hegel’s view of history, which I paraphrased above using the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Here I rely primarily on Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of World History: Introduction, Reason in History,47 with Dennis O’Brien’s Hegel on Reason and History: A Contemporary Interpretation (1975) to guide me. In the Reason in History lectures, given between 1822 and 1831 and first published posthumously in 1837, Hegel laid out a relatively straightforward account of history. He understood history as “both the events and the narration of eventsВ .В .В . (both Geschehen and Geschichte)В .В .В .В ; a common inner principle brings them forth together.”48 For Hegel, history is both a product of reason and also comprehensible through reason (Vernunft).49 History develops through reason and spirit (Geist) toward the social form that would most perfectly allow for substantial human freedom (substanzielle Freiheit). In the lectures, Hegel examined a large-scale succession of civilizations. He found the first form of spirit in Asia, with the emergence of self-consciousness in the struggle between the state and the family; the second in Greece, the origin of individuality and thus also subjective freedom; and the third in the Roman Empire, in which the universal state subsumed but recognized individuals.50 Each civilization was imperfect, unable to achieve substantial freedom and beset in its collapse with barbarism.51 But they mark stages in the dialectical development through reason of world history. In the forward movement of history, Hegel argued, “world historical” individuals push the action of history forward: the final “state of the world is not yet fully known, and the aim is to give it reality. This is the object of world-historical individualsВ .В .В . the first to formulate the desires of their fellows explicitly.”52 He identified Alexander, Caesar, and Napoleon as examples of such figures. “This is the goal of world history,” Hegel wrote in conclusion: Page 49 →The spirit must create for itself a nature and world to conform with its own nature, so that the subject may discover its own concept of spirit in this second nature, in this reality which the concept of the spirit has produced; and in this objective reality, it becomes conscious of its subjective freedom and rationality. Such is the progress of the Idea in general; and this must be our ultimate point of view in history. The more detailed process whereby the Idea is realized is history proper; and that work still remains to be done in it is a purely empirical matter. In our study of world history, we

have to cover more circumstantially that long route which we have just surveyed in outline, the path which history follows in realizing its aim.53

History for Hegel has as its aim reconciliation (VersГ¶hnung) in concrete freedom, despite moments of great barbarity. Hegel saw evidence for this thesis both a priori, understandable through reason, the necessary outcome of spirit becoming conscious of itself as freedom develops, and a posteriori, in the broad outline of the Asian, Greek, and Roman civilizations he identified, though he left detailed empirical research to historians. O’Brien sums up Hegel’s view this way: “To compress Hegel’s whole story of history into the briefest compass: once belief in free individuals arises in human society, this belief inevitably determines a certain line of action leading to the realization of that belief in the political structure.”54 The narrative structures in Hegel’s view of history are dramatic, with individual tragedies resolving in the comedy of Spirit. Here, my argument closely follows Hayden White’s in Metahistory.55 In The Philosophy of Fine Art, Hegel wrote of drama: “What we haveВ .В .В . before us are definite ends individualized in living personalities and situations pregnant with conflictВ .В .В . which has nonetheless to work out its tranquil resolution.”56 White argued that for Hegel, dramatic action “has precisely the same formal characteristics as historical action.”57 In the Poetics, Aristotle argued that drama, the root of which is the Greek word for doing, is the representation through acting of men in action;58 for Hegel, historical writing is the representation in prose of “world historical” men in action, using dramatic structures: conflict and resolution. The philosopher of history should represent spirit in action—“Der Geist handelt [the Spirit acts],”59 White quotes Hegel. The rhetorical and argumentative links between Hegel and Aristotle may not be coincidental; Hegel relied on Aristotle throughout his philosophy, and in Hegel on Reason and History O’Brien asserts of Hegel’s teleology that “the Aristotelian framework is the basic structure which governs the course of his argument.”60 Page 50 →In Reason in History, Hegel, White argues, plotted the histories of Greece and Rome in the form of tragedy: “The life of every people or nation is, like the life of every heroic individual in history, a Tragedy. And the appropriate mode of its emplotment, the apprehension of it as a historical reality, is that of the Tragic Drama.”61 “In fact,” White continues, Hegel emplotted the histories of all the civilizational forms that he discerned in world history in Tragic terms. And in his Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences and the Lectures on Aesthetics, he provided justification for this mode of emplotment as the highest kind of reflective historiography. In his Philosophy of History, however, he simply applied this mode of figuring the process of origination, rise, dissolution, and death to individual civilizations. He did not try to justify the Tragic mode of emplotment but simply presupposed it.62 Considered in full, however, Hegel viewed history as comic. Examining Reason in History and the Phenomenology of Spirit, White argues, we can see how the discrete tragic defeats of great men and great civilizations in fact develop through spirit toward its aim in comic resolution—VersГ¶hnung, to use Hegel’s word. White writes that comedy “represents an affirmation [for Hegel] of the needs of life and its rights against the Tragic insight that all things existing in time are doomed to destruction.”63 White argues that Hegel’s ultimate purpose as a philosopher of history was “to justify the transition from the comprehension of the Tragic nature of every specific civilization to the Comic apprehension of the unfolding drama of the whole of history.”64 To put it another way, the unfolding of consciousness of freedom and spirit occurs through a dialectic process, in which the flaw of one phase of consciousness leads to the failure and dissolution of great men and great civilizations (tragedy), and then to a more adequate, though still contradictory, phase. History as a whole is kind of a station drama, a series of tragedies as reason and spirit develop. According to White, “Hegel asked us to regard ourselves as actors in a drama which, although its actual end is unknowable, displays the order and continuity of a well-wrought play or a dialectical argument.”65 The search for full self-consciousness is not

impossible or chimerical. “Since reason initiates the process, it could not have embarked on an вЂirrational’ task,”66 O’Brien argues. For White, this “therefore gives us good reasons for believing that the resolution of this drama not only will not be meaningless but will not even be Tragic.”67 It will be comic. The pathos and sparagmos of division is followed by the Page 51 →peripeteia of November 9 and the anagnorisis or VersГ¶hnung of unification. And this is precisely the resolution or reconciliation many German historians and politicians found on November 9, 1989. “In Comedy,” White writes, “hope is held out for the temporary triumph of man over his world by the prospect of occasional reconciliations.В .В .В . Such reconciliations are symbolized in the festive occasions, usually marriages, which the comic writer traditionally uses to terminate his dramatic accounts of change and transformation.”68 The opposing forces of East and West came together to form the new FRG, celebrated in the enormous festival on top of the Berlin Wall on November 9. Afterward, the new, transformed German society, to quote White out of context, “is represented as being purer, saner, and healthier as a result of the conflict among seemingly inalterably opposed elements in the world; these elements are revealed to be, in the long run, harmonizable with one another, unified, at one with themselves and others.”69 The comedic mode was further emphasized by the metaphor of marriage that emerged during the unification process and by Kohl’s “blooming landscape” rhetoric, which together imagine German history as resolving with a fecund wedding and the reordering of society to the benefit of all. (More on these metaphors soon.) And as Frye says of the comic mode: “We are simply given to understand that the newly married couple will live happily ever after, or that at any rate they will get along in a relatively unhumorous and clear-sighted manner.”70 The comedic mode drives the more expansionist minded historiographies of StГјrmer and other right-wing conservatives, with a heavier emphasis on the “winter” of 1945–89 and the possibilities of a new “spring.” If history for Hegel “is a search for a solution to the internal dilemma of political life,” as O’Brien argues, then, for those politicians who drew their historiography from him, the “search for a resolution of the conflict between the rulers and the ruled, the state and the citizen”71 had been found in their contemporary Germany. Hegel’s comedy had been achieved. The main alternative to comedic historiography came from those who saw unified Germany as a threat to Europe, or as the failure of Germans (once again) to create a functioning socialist state. “In Tragedy,” White writes, “there are no festive occasions, except false or illusory ones”—a perfect encapsulation of the history of unification from such points of view, which found in the festival of November 9 only the illusion of reconciliation. “Rather,” continues White, “there are intimations of states of division among men more terrible than that which incited the tragic agon at the beginning of the drama.”72 The histories of unification written by leftleaning historians and former opposition leaders often took the form of tragedy: Page 52 →1989 was yet another turning point or reversal in German history that failed to lead to reconciliation. The divisions after unification in 1990 were just as bad, if not worse, than those before. The deutsche Misere and its implied hopelessness, thought to have been banished by the founding of the GDR, returned. As might be expected from people drawing implicitly or explicitly on Marx, these histories are also essentially Hegelian—but rather than finding in unified Germany the final resolution of the conflict between state and citizen, they argued that the historical process must continue. As we continue in Performing Unification, we will see how works of theater that represent the past also rely on historiography, make truth claims about structures of history, and offer readings of the process and product of German unification. In the 1990s and 2000s, playwrights and directors created works that inverted or opposed the two main modes of postunification historiography, the comic and tragic—which are inherently dramatic and lend themselves to theatrical storytelling. By revising and complicating the structure of Aristotelian/Hegelian dramatic elements, theater artists could challenge the narratives of historians and politicians, which often sought to legitimize nationalism. West German playwrights, for example, created counternarratives to Kohl’s comedy: the plot of Botho Strauss’s Schlusschor gets stuck in pathos, refusing peripeteia and anagnorisis, as we will see in the upcoming chapter. Other artists utilized elements of the two additional historical emplotments, as described by White in Metahistory: romance and satire.

The Romance is fundamentally a drama of self-identification symbolized by the hero’s transcendence of the world of experience, his victory over it, and his final liberation from it.В .В .В . It is a drama of the triumph of good over evil, of virtue over vice, of light over darkness, and the ultimate transcendence of man over the world in which he was imprisoned by the Fall.73 Earlier German history plays often relied on this emplotment, especially those of Friedrich Schiller: his heroes (Saint Joan, Mary Stuart, and Wilhelm Tell) transcend the “world of experience,” the world in which man was imprisoned by the Fall. And the archetype of satire “is the precise opposite of this Romantic drama of redemption; it is, in fact, a drama of diremption, a drama dominated by the apprehension that man is ultimately a captive of the world rather than its master.”74 Moreover, White adds later, “Satire presupposes the ultimate inadequacy of the visions of the world dramatically Page 53 →represented in the genres of Romance, Comedy, and Tragedy alike,” with an “awareness of its own inadequacy as an image of reality.”75 Satiric emplotment, with its resistance to closure, has much in common with the “postdramatic” theatrical structures described by Hans-Thies Lehmann. Lehmann actually touches on historiography in Postdramatic Theatre, while sketching out differences between the dramatic theater and what he calls the postdramatic. In defining these two terms, Lehmann argues that dramatic theater, typified by artists from the ancient Greeks to Brecht, strives for “the formation of illusion” and the construction of a “fictive cosmos.”76 Theater with drama relies on text and uses mimesis to stage a story (just as history with drama relies on text and uses mimesis to narrate a story). But following Beckett, theater and drama separated, becoming nonsynonymous. Theater after drama—“the unfolding and blossoming of a potential of disintegration, dismantling and deconstruction”77 always already within drama—emphasizes performance, using a palette of stylistic traits to disrupt illusion and the fictive cosmos, privileging “more presence than representation, more shared than communicated experience, more process than product, more manifestation than signification, more energetic impulse than information.”78 Postdramatic theater abjures teleology and structures like comedy and tragedy. In his examples of postdramatic praxis, Lehmann highlights performances created by Robert Wilson and Elizabeth LeCompte, among many others. Echoing White, Lehmann points out in a short section of Postdramatic Theatre titled “Drama, History and Meaning” that “historians have time and again taken recourse to the metaphors of drama, tragedy and comedy to describe the sense and inner unity of historical processes.”79 He argues that this linking of history to drama “almost inevitably introduces teleology, pointing towards a finally meaningful perspective—reconciliation in idealist aesthetics, historical progress in Marxist historiography.”80 And, reinforcing the connection between history and drama, playwrights like Schiller have written history plays that, with their dramatic structure, give history a knowable inner unity, a process developing toward a final cause. To write history in dramatic form is to write history as teleological and Hegelian, to impose or imply a design and purpose on the past. In the next section of Postdramatic Theatre (on Aristotle), Lehmann links drama to the controlled and surveyable flow of time81—the same feeling that historians work to create in their studies of the past. The dramatic theater is closely aligned with Hegelian teleological historiography—as are both the tragic and comic narratives of German unification. Page 54 →“Conversely,” Lehmann comments as almost a side-thought, “authors like Samuel Beckett and Heiner MГјller avoided the dramatic form not least of all because of its implied teleology of history.”82 In chapter 5, I explore this idea at length. Lehmann shows that the fate inherent in Hegelian teleology—its potential for disintegration—is fatal to teleology, opening up the possibility of a nondramatic form “accepting that which is impure and alien to sense/meaning”:83 the real bodies of the actors, a plurality of truths, and the impossibility of reconciliation in history or drama, even the resolution of tragedy. Using the postdramatic form, East German directors created performances that critiqued not only the content of postunification stories, but also the form used to tell those stories, both idealist and Marxist. Disrupting the comic and tragic narratives of unification, productions by Heiner MГјller, Frank Castorf, and Einar Schleef emphasized the grotesque (the misshapen instead of the unified), as well as a dissonant multiplicity of stories, while never adding up to a totalizing narrative.

History or Memory?

It could be argued that the postdramatic turn of East German artists represents less a historiographic move than a transition from historical representation to the performance of memory—similar to the argument of Jeanette R. Malkin in Memory Theater and Postmodern Drama (1999), with her emphasis on memory over history. To be clear on terminology, by history, I mean written records of past events of national importance, which follow “the established practices of historical scholarliness, for example, the practices of source criticism, logical argument, and allowing for the possibility of checking, criticizing, and revising its truth-claims,”84 to quote Stefan Berger on the historian’s task. A historian collects traces from the past, evidence in stones, objects, words, and biological material, working to “reconstruct” the past in text, as Paul Connerton writes in How Societies Remember.85 Scholars consider memory to be more individual, subjective, and mimetic. I do not deal here with the memories of specific individuals, but rather collective memory, by which I mean “representations collective, publicly available symbols and meanings about the past,” to quote Jeffrey Olick on Maurice Halbwachs.86 Collective memory can include history books, but memory need not be subject to checking, criticizing, and revising by experts. Scholars have divided history and memory into binaries: the archive of documents and objects curated and formed into coherent narratives about large Page 55 →collectives of people, versus oral stories and gestures, often cyclical in pattern, which can sustain small group identities. Or to put it more simply, the written versus the bodily. French historian Pierre Nora, in proposing a new method of studying the past based on surveying environments of memory (milieu de mГ©moire, oral and gestural traditions), makes the distinction between history and memory thus: Memory is life, borne by living societies founded in its name. It remains in permanent evolution, open to the dialectic of remembering and forgetting, unconscious of its successive deformations, vulnerable to manipulation and appropriation, susceptible to being long dormant and periodically revived. History, on the other hand, is the reconstruction, always problematic and incomplete, of what is no longer. Memory is a perpetually actual phenomenon, a bond tying us to the eternal present; history is a representation of the past.87 A bit later in the essay, Nora writes that “memory takes root in the concrete, in spaces, gestures, images, and objects; history binds itself strictly to temporal continuities, to progressions and to relations between things.”88 Nora hopes that by studying environments of memory—which he opposes to the contemporary obsession with sites of memory (lieux de mГ©moire: museums, archives, monuments)—we will be able to overcome the condition of modernity, which confines memory to history (to the archive), reinforcing established power structures and losing the “unviolated” (and unmediated) memory of “primitive” societies.89 Although Diana Taylor argues against the binary Nora creates with history and memory in her book The Archive and the Repertoire,90 she does make a similar comparison between the “the archive of supposedly enduring materials (i.e., texts, documents, buildings, bones) and the so-called ephemeral repertoire of embodied practice /knowledge (i.e., spoken language, dance, sports, ritual).”91 Her definition of repertoire overlaps with Nora’s definition of memory above: unwritten and always in evolution. Taylor, moreover, hopes to recover the study of the repertoire (which she roughly equates with Nora’s theory of the lost environments of memory). The repertoire, Taylor argues, allows for the enacting of “embodied memory”92 through “embodied practice/knowledge,”93 thereby transmitting memory and social identity between generations—while opening space for subverting the power structures sustained by the archive.94 Page 56 →For Malkin, “postmodernism” has resulted in “a shift in the way we remember, and hence in the way culture, and for our purposes, the theater, represents and reenacts remembering.”95 Although Malkin does not explicitly address questions of history versus memory, her descriptions of a move away from the “coherent, progressing narratives of experienced life”96 imply a transition in postmodern theater to memory from history (as defined by Nora) and the archive (Taylor). Malkin argues that “postmodern” playwrights like Heiner MГјller, Thomas Bernhard, and Suzan-Lori Parks are preoccupied “with questions of memory, both in terms of their thematic attention to remembered (or repressed) pasts, and in terms of the

plays’ вЂmemoried’ structures: structures of repetition, conflation, regression, echoing, overlap, and simultaneity.”97 Lehmann echoes Malkin here when he says that Polish director Tadeusz Kantor’s work “exhibits the temporal structure of memory, repetition and the confrontation with loss and death.”98 These “memoried” structures described by Malkin have much in common with the theater of East German artists post-1989; it is no accident that Malkin includes an entire chapter on MГјller. And using Taylor, Frank Castorf’s productions, discussed in the fifth chapter, could be seen to use GDR ephemera (like songs and pledges) and FRG characters (like Chancellor Kohl) to embody collective memories of the former East and satirize Western stories of unification—and ultimately, as Malkin says, “to engage (and occasionally enrage) the memoried consciousness of its audience.”99 As politicians and historians archived documents and wrote histories of 1989–90, East German artists intervened by reviving and manipulating living memory, for and with their audiences, in order to stabilize their group identity.100 We will take up questions of history and memory in depth in chapter 6, when we return to Rimini Protokoll’s 50 Aktenkilometer to discuss how archives and museums can be performed—how, in other words, Rimini Protokoll and other theatrical collectives productively draw on both archive and repertoire. Still, though some artists in this study undeniably participate in the politics and aesthetics of memory, historiography remains of vital importance to an understanding of all.

Myths and Metaphors of Unification Now that we understand the history and historiography of unification, as well as the tradition of German history plays and the similarities between Page 57 →dramaturgy and historiography, it is almost time to turn to examining postunification theater. But we have one more aspect of German unification that we must first explore: the ways in which the events of unification became myths, and how unification was imagined through metaphors. Twenty years after the establishment of a united Federal Republic, Herfried MГјnkler sounded a call to arms, or more properly a call to nationalism, with his book Die Deutschen und ihre Mythen (The Germans and Their Myths, 2009). “Compared with its European neighbors or the United States, the Federal Republic of Germany is to a large extent a myth-free zone—at least when it comes to political creation and orientation myths.”101 A political scientist (popular with the political ruling class, including the current chancellor, Angela Merkel),102 MГјnkler expressed concern that without such myths the FRG wouldn’t be able to act in times of national crisis: “Above all, when drastic reforms become necessary or fresh political soil must be tilled, such narratives take on great meaning. Myths can promise that the challenges that must be mastered can in fact be handled, because they were successfully mastered back then.”103 In examining German national myths from Faust to the fall of the Berlin Wall, Die Deutschen und ihre Mythen contributes to the loud German debate about a supposed crisis of national identity, as defined by nationalist scholars and politicians, a debate that became especially clamorous as the Federal Republic sought to redefine itself after absorbing the new Eastern states. (The crisis of national identity, of course, predates the unification of 1871, as we found in chapter 1.) And as intimated by MГјnkler, origin narratives often have their roots in historic events. Prussia, which unified Germany in the nineteenth century, has provided one source of myths, explicitly promoted by politicians. To name just one example that Berger cites, “In 1991 the coffins of Friedrich Wilhelm and Friedrich [two important early kings of Prussia] were taken to Potsdam with great pomp to be reburied in a midnight ceremony attended by, amongst others, Chancellor Helmut Kohl.”104 And by a slim majority, parliament decided to return the capital of the Federal Republic to Berlin, the historic capital of Prussia, linking the new Germany to Bismarck and the Hohenzollern dynasty (of which Friedrich Wilhelm and Friedrich were members, and which ruled post-1871 Germany). One of the most obvious sources for German national myths, of course, could come from the events of 1989–90. And the words used to describe these events in German—Wende (turning point or reversal) and

Wiedervereinigung (reunification)—actively contribute to postunification national mythmaking. Page 58 →Germans from the former GDR have two reasons to object to the word Wende. As we recall, the first use of Wende to describe 1989105 actually came from Egon Krenz, when he temporarily took over the GDR following Honecker’s resignation on October 18, announcing: “With today’s conference, we will set into motion a reversal [Wende].”106 Of course, the GDR establishment imagined a much more moderate turn than the opposition groups, who continued their protests. During the November 4 demonstration, Christa Wolf confronted Krenz: I have my difficulties with the word Wende. I see there a sailboat. The captain calls, “Ready about [Klar zur Wende, literally clear to turn]” because the wind has switched directions or is blowing in his face. And the team ducks as the boom sweeps across the boat. But is this image still accurate? Is it accurate in these daily, propulsively changing circumstances? I would speak of a “revolutionary reformation.” Revolutions come out from underneath, under and over switch places in the value system, and this change turns the socialist society upside down from head to foot.107 Later, Wende came to signify the turning point in German history that actually did turn. In other words, use of the word Wende implies 1989–90 as a reversal in the historical process, ushering in the final stage in the march toward “normal” nationhood for Germany. This narrative structure supports the myth that beginning on November 9, 1989, Germany finally became one nation of its citizens—after repeated failed attempts in the Reformation-era Peasants’ War, the 1848 revolutions, and the separate founding of the GDR and FRG. Some East Germans, especially in the protest movement, opposed the word Wende because it has an implicitly passive tone, assigning them no agency in the process, and positing their former nation as a pawn in history.108 The terms Vereinigung (unification) and Wiedervereinigung (reunification), though used interchangeably in German and in English-language histories since 1989,109 have vividly different meanings, interpreting German history in different ways. As Spohr notes in her book review, “вЂReunification’ suggests that the German state that had existed before the Second World War and that was divided after 1945 was being brought back together.”110 So using the word “reunification” at the very least indicates the user imagines in post1989 Germany a return to the Bismarck-led empire or the Weimar Republic—either as a “normal” state this time, or as a possible reanimated aggressor in the middle Page 59 →of Europe. Wiedervereinigung also connects the new Federal Republic with the Prussian myths of the first unified German nation. For these reasons the historian Andreas RГ¶dder subtitled his 2009 book Deutschland einig Vaterland (Germany One Fatherland) as Die Geschichte der Wiedervereinigung (The History of Reunification). With his title, RГ¶dder immediately established a unified German fatherland as the end result of a historical process; in the book itself, he developed “a Hegelian plot with great narrative tenacity and industriousness: it is the story of how politicians and their governments took hold of the Weltgeist [world spirit] and achieved, miraculously, the synthesis of world history,”111 as one reviewer put it. Given the connotations of the word Wiedervereinigung, as Spohr notes, the FRG was careful to officially use “the phrase вЂre-establishing Germany’s unity’ (Wiederherstellung der deutschen Einheit) or вЂGerman unification.’”112 This phrasing worked to temper fears of resurgent German expansionism, pointing out “clearly the difference between pre-war Germany and the smaller post-Cold War Germany.”113 Perhaps the most prevalent metaphor of unification was the “marriage” of West and East. Egon Bahr, a West German politician who helped design Ostpolitik, the normalization of relations between the FRG and GDR in the 1970s, provides a clear example of how the metaphor was used. In a December 1990 article analyzing the recently united Germany’s prospects, he wrote: “To use a metaphor, we, the Germans in the East and the Germans in the West, have come together, not without affection, in an indissoluble marriage, with the possibility of belated love. The wedding ceremony was really beautiful, but now we have to get acquainted.”114 Analyzing Bahr’s use of the metaphor, scholar Reinhold Grimm wrote that “he should also have added

that it was a very lopsided wedding as well: namely, that of a rich—hence, powerful and dominating groom—and a poor—hence, weak and submissive—bride.”115 German theater scholar Katrin Sieg described the gender dynamics of the “unification as marriage” rhetoric in a 1993 article: “The casting of East and West in the roles of opposite-sex-partners, a rhetorical device shared by interlocutors across the ideological spectrum, constructs the momentum of unification as heterosexual desire, and the destination of the couple, naturally, as matrimony.”116 In the early stages of unification, the feminine GDR was imagined as a “virgin” market. But later, “Disappointment over the GDR as a despoiled and tainted love object produced the image of the whore.”117 Broadcast live around the world, photographs and videos of jubilant men and women swinging hammers against the graffitied concrete of the Berlin Page 60 →Wall became iconic, keys to the “peaceful revolution” myth of German unification. The idea of a peaceful revolution implicitly contrasts the regime changes of 1989 (including the “velvet revolution” in Czechoslovakia) with other major historical revolutions, such as 1789 France and Mao’s China, with their utopianism and terrible violence.118 This myth has its roots in the nonviolent demonstrations in Berlin and Leipzig, and its crown in November 9, as “regular people” (the Volk of protestors’ signs) worked together spontaneously to take apart the symbol of German division. In place of the guillotine, this myth is crystallized by images of people dancing on the Berlin Wall. It soon found its way into political rhetoric, as Kohl included in his campaign promises of March 1990 the statement that the “peaceful revolution of the Germans which has been admired throughout the world cannot be called into question.”119 Chancellor Kohl’s “blooming landscapes” speech was an attempt to create a new myth by referencing the established myth of the Wirtschaftswunder: to convince Germany that an economic boom was possible in the East because it had happened in the West after World War II.120 It of course was also easily disproven, as the economy of the East did not bud, much less bloom with the introduction of liberal capitalism. In fact, none of these stories became the kind of myth that MГјnkler hoped for in Die Deutschen und ihre Mythen: “political creation and orientation myths” for the Federal Republic. Many scholars have noticed that the events surrounding unification, the protests and the fall of the Wall, for example, never developed into a day of national celebration or remembrance, much less an official holiday. In part, this was a consequence of the unfortunate historical coincidences of the date November 9 itself (Kristallnacht began on November 9, to give just one example).121 In addition, MГјnkler argued, Chancellor Kohl wanted to form an alternative myth around the day of legal unification, a story in which he would be at the center.122 And, of course, West German citizens were merely observers during the fall of the Wall, celebrants but not revolutionaries, and thus could not make the story theirs.123 Habermas made a similar argument in “Replies to a Bundestag Investigative Commission,” but taking the perspective of East Germans: “The historical achievement of the Citizens’ Rights movement in the GDR eludes the national consciousness,” he testified. “That is one reason why the people in eastern Germany, feeling violated by a process of unification that in many ways deprives them of their dignity, are turning backward—and cling to old identities instead of making their own contribution to democracy a source of selfconfidence.”124 Page 61 →Left-liberal historians saw their role in debates surrounding these political myths, contra MГјnkler, as critical: “that of destroying, not creating myths and legends,” as Berger puts it, maintaining “their distance from attempts to renationalise German historical consciousness.”125 Playwrights and directors in our study, though differing in their forms and methods, used theater to revise historical understanding of the unification period, attacking and inverting nationalist dramaturgies and myths. Their critical attitude takes us directly to West Berlin in the early 1990s, where playwrights represented unification as a tragedy.

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3. Western Playwrights and Counternarratives of Unification West Berlin: From Island to United City When we imagine the Berlin Wall, we tend to picture it as imprisoning the East. But in actuality, the Berlin section of the Wall surrounded and enclosed West Berlin, creating an island1 of capitalism and democracy in the middle of the GDR. Visitors could get there most easily by plane, dropping in out of the sky; otherwise, they arrived in West Berlin after surreal drives through the East German countryside. Life on the island could feel detached and lonely, and residents had to be bribed to move there with “welcome money.” In competition with the Eastern sector, the West German government poured subsidies into the city. Through the 1970s and 1980s, Berlin’s theaters and opera houses became bloated, producing extraordinarily expensive works with designs that labored to outdo previous spectacles. Ensembles grew large and unwieldy. Then after unification, the island of West Berlin lost its unique status and a series of cuts greatly reduced its cultural subsidies over the course of the next decade. In the early 1990s climate of economic reductions, subsidized theaters east and west felt enormous pressure to prove themselves worthy of governmental support. Not all theater companies in the West survived. The Freie VolksbГјhne quickly foundered in 1990—it had already been undergoing a tough leadership change before unification—and had its subsidies cut after the 1991–92 season. Most famously, the Staatliche SchauspielbГјhnen Berlin, located primarily at the Schiller Theater, shut down in 1993 despite Page 63 →large public demonstrations. Strangely enough, audience attendance actually increased in the West during the 1990–91 season,2 and the SchaubГјhne, the surviving large state-subsided theater, managed quite well throughout the 1990s. Working under a rather loose governing structure, the SchaubГјhne brought in noted directors who created well-regarded productions, including Luc Bondy’s staging of Botho Strauss’s Schlusschor in 1992, discussed below. Outside Berlin, there were no notable unification-related changes in the Western theater. West German theater artists entered the conversation about the Wende more with plays than performances, and did so immediately following unification, with attention on the subject falling off greatly after 1994. In staging these plays, directors did not deviate from the original texts—atypical for German theater, in which directors often radically alter plays. Western theaters were controlled by directors including Claus Peymann and Dieter Dorn, who made inspired productions in the late 1960s and early 1970s but then became aesthetically conservative. Critic Michael Merschmeier could write in 1987 that “not one of these three large theatres [the Staatliche SchauspielbГјhnen, Freie VolksbГјhne, and SchaubГјhne] sees itself as a city theatre with the unique obligation of being a scene or tribunal for Berlin’s present or past.”3 In 1991, Carl Weber argued that theater in the West was stagnant, citing the opinion of critics.4 In fact, there hadn’t been a major theater controversy in the West since Rainer Werner Fassbinder ignited enormous debate in 1976 with the attempt to direct the premiere of his play Der MГјll, die Stadt und der Tod (Garbage, the City, and Death) in Frankfurt. The play’s grotesque portrayal of German society in general, and a Jewish financier in particular, met with significant public resistance, and the production was canceled. The play never premiered in Fassbinder’s lifetime (he died in 1982); a 1984 production also ended up being withdrawn when a Jewish community group occupied the stage of the Frankfurt SchaubГјhne. For all of these practical reasons, productions were not how Western theater artists made noise. They wrote plays. It is also true that German unification did not result in ontological changes in the Federal Republic—Westerners were witnesses to the unification process less than participants. Previously unknown political forms took control in the East almost overnight, and artists developed aesthetic forms in response, as I argue when discussing Eastern directors in the next chapter. It makes sense that Western artists wrote texts in response to unification: they relied on forms they knew, and they had never had reason to doubt the efficacy of the published word, freedom of speech, or—in the absencePage 64 → of propaganda—the capability of language to express meaning clearly. In fact, intellectuals in the West relied on debates that happened through text, mostly in newspapers, to shape and influence the public sphere—something that was impossible in the East. The historian’s debate in the West

in the 1980s for example, in which scholars sought to shape German identity through the nation’s relation to the Holocaust, took place mostly in the pages of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and the SГјddeutsche Zeitung. The plays I discuss here, and the productions of them, show evidence that West German theater artists felt that the written word could accurately and enduringly document the past: the playwrights entered debates over unification by transcribing oral interviews and adapting newspaper articles into drama, creating lasting histories of the unification period. The written word—lucid, free, influential, and archivable—was a natural choice for Western theater artists as they sought to confront what they viewed as the abuses and follies of the unification process. From the very beginning of that process, Western playwrights reacted to the mythologizing and rhetoric of the Wende with much suspicion, condemning the results of unification as they unfolded. With the island of Berlin now well connected to the former East Germany, they set out to explore what was happening over there—and wrote loud and even furious protests of the unification process. Well-known writers including Botho Strauss, Rolf Hochhuth, and Klaus Pohl, born and raised in the FRG, wrote plays as counternarratives to the official accounts legitimizing unification, working within the West German cultural and political system in order to criticize the effect of that system on citizens of the former GDR. Critics recognized the plays they wrote about unification as some of the most important of their time. And although it went virtually ignored and unproduced, Elfriede MГјller’s play sheds additional light on how Western writers reacted to and represented the history of German unification, and I include it in this chapter with plays by the three writers above. These four playwrights incorporated the central myths, images, and oratorical devices of Chancellor Kohl and others into their dramaturgy in order to destabilize the Hegelian shaping of the unification story. In this chapter, I look at plays written shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall, examining how they make interventions in the myths of the blooming landscape, the Wende, and history as comedy, attempting to shape what should be remembered and how those memories would affect the future. In Western plays, unification becomes a tragedy. Page 65 →

Unification Plays An actress and playwright, Elfriede Müller spent the months following November 9, 1989, in what she described as WestEastBerlin.5 Drawing on her experiences there, she wrote Goldener Oktober (Golden October), which received its only production at the small Landestheater Tübingen in 1991. Müller first received notice as a playwright for Die Bergarbeiterin (The Miner) in 1989, a partially autobiographical Zeitstück, or recent history play, about farmers in the Saarland state in far western Germany, where she was born in 1956. Her fourth play, Goldener Oktober—the title alludes to the October revolutions in Russia (1917) and the GDR (1989)—was one of the first responses by a playwright to the fall of the Berlin Wall. Set in October 1990 (as legal unification took effect) on “a drafty stage,”6 this now mostly forgotten play unfolds a history of the Wende in the landscape of the former Todesstreifen (death strip) in Berlin, the border zone used by GDR police to prevent refugees from fleeing the country. Here a collection of forlorn Westerners and Easterners gather in a bar, their attempts at romance and dialogue disastrous. Goldener Oktober presents the commercialization of individuals, bodies, and emotions that followed the introduction of capitalism into the border zone. One character announces in act 1, sarcastically, “Wir sind das Volk.”7 Another revises this famous slogan in act 2: “Wir sind das Geld” (We are the money).8 Although generally praised by critics and published in Theater heute, the play’s reliance on what became the clichéd characters, metaphors, and images of the Wende period limited directors’ interest in staging it. But in its revision of the myths of the “blooming landscape” and unification as a comic marriage, and as an early example of how Western playwrights told the story of unification, Goldener Oktober merits attention in this study. Botho Strauss is one of the giants of West German playwriting. Born in 1944, he emerged as a writer after the student movement of the late 1960s with a series of farcical plays, beginning with the straightforward Molièrestyle comedy Die Hypochonder (The Hypochondriacs) in 1972. He went on to write a series of plays—including Gross und Klein (Big and Little, 1978), Kalldewey, Farce (1981), and Der Park (The Park, 1983)—that mix

elements of ancient and modern mythology with comedy and formal experimentation. Critics, especially Leslie A. Adelson, termed this style “new subjectivity”9 for Strauss’s treatment of post-student movement Germany, focused more on the concerns of individuals than on wider social and economic problems. Page 66 →With Schlusschor, Strauss turned away from individual subjectivity, addressing instead German national history as it was being created in the media and in people’s minds. In three acts, Strauss tells the story of unification three different ways. Set in the first moments of the Wende, as the Berlin Wall opened on November 9, Schlusschor captures dissonant moments in the history of a fractured people through the three superficially unrelated acts. The first act depicts a chorus fighting among themselves as they pose for a photograph; the second follows a man as he falls helplessly and unrequitedly in love, then shoots himself during a party; and in the third, a group of people at a bar in West Berlin react indifferently to the news that the Wall has come down. In each act, a group of people ignore a messenger, who reports to them about Germany and unification. Instead of showing people seizing the opportunity presented by this possible reversal in history, each act ends in violence—the last a bloody scene of dismemberment set to the final chorus of Beethoven’s setting of Schiller’s “Ode to Joy,” the unofficial anthem of united Germany, which declares that “all people will become brothers.”10 Schlusschor proved popular among audiences and theaters alike, with at least twelve productions in the early 1990s.11 The world premiere, directed by Dieter Dorn at the MГјnchener Kammerspiele in 1991, was invited to the prestigious Theatertreffen festival in Berlin. The following year, a production directed by Luc Bondy, who has worked extensively with Strauss throughout the years, opened at the Berlin SchaubГјhne am Lehniner Platz12 and was also invited to the Theatertreffen. Critics surveyed by Theater heute named it one of the top two new plays of 1991.13 The oldest of this group of Western playwrights, Rolf Hochhuth (born in 1931), experienced World War II firsthand as a child in Eschwege, a small town in central Germany. Staying in West Germany after the war, he worked at a publishing house until the sensational release of his 1963 play Der Stellvertreter (The Deputy), about Pope Pius XII’s complicity in the Holocaust. Along with later plays such as Peter Weiss’s Die Ermittlung (The Investigation) (1965), Der Stellvertreter helped to establish the documentary theater form, which Hochhuth and Weiss wielded to force West Germans to confront their collective guilt and the guilt of specific individuals for the murder of more than six million Jews. Written by Hochhuth during the process of legal unification, Wessis in Weimar (Westerners in Weimar, 1993) savagely documents the extraordinary public frustrations in the East with unification. Wessis, subtitled Szenen aus einem besetzten Land (Scenes from an Occupied Country),14 protests the ethics and legality of selling Eastern state-owned businesses and ending some Page 67 →welfare benefits there. In a prologue and nine scenes, Hochhuth uses actual events as sources to create a panorama of unification: the assassination of a West German public official (prologue); apple trees needlessly cut down, destroying a community (scene 1); humble demonstrators confronting a government minister about the FRG’s failure to return property confiscated by the GDR (scene 5); and the incineration of her ancestral home by a young, unemployed reporter when the FRG refuses to give it back to her family (scene 9). Named one of the best new plays in 1993 by Theater heute’s survey of critics,15 Wessis in Weimar tried to change the future for Eastern Germany by illustrating the crimes and cruelties that occurred there after the euphoria of November 9. One year after Wessis premiered, the writer and director Klaus Pohl also undertook a documentary project about the new Eastern states. For a three-part series of essays published in the weekly magazine Der Spiegel,16 he traveled through the former East interviewing people about the GDR and unification. He asked the same basic question to everybody he met: What do you love about Germany? And then he let them talk as they told stories about “how reunification and the collapse of the GDR changed their lives.”17 One year later, Pohl returned to the videotapes he had made and, adding interviews from Westerners, transformed them into Wartesaal Deutschland Stimmenreich (Waiting Room Germany), a series of thirty-two monologues from twenty-eight “characters,” personal histories of protest, unification, and the aftermath. Subtitled Eine Studie Гјber den Charakter der Deutschen (A Study of the German Character), it premiered in a production also directed by Pohl at

the Deutsches Theater Berlin in October 1995. Writing on the production, influential critic Franz Wille asserted that Wartesaal was “the most important play about our land and its people since unification.”18 Pohl was born in 1952 in the West German town of Rothenburg ob der Tauber, and moved to West Berlin as a young adult to study theater. He acted and gradually moved into playwriting, focusing on the dreams and difficulties of people in small towns in plays including Das alte Land (The Old Country, 1984), set in 1946 in a northern German village contending with an influx of refugees. After unification, Pohl moved to New York City. There he first dramatized German unification with the fictional Karate-Billi kehrt zurГјck (Karate-Billi Returns, 1991) in which a former world-class decathlete, banned from his sport by the GDR, returns after the Wende to his small town in the East, populated by the people who betrayed him. Wartesaal was widely produced throughout Germany, equally in the new Eastern as well as the old Western states, with a total of 170 performances by Page 68 →fourteen different theaters, though the productions were not well attended.19 Scholar Dag Kemser speculates that artistic directors must have been fond of the play and hoped to influence audiences—it lingered in the repertories of theaters longer than other plays with similarly low attendance figures.20 Several other plays by Western playwrights also represented unification, in addition to Karate-Billi kehrt zurГјck. After Schlusschor, Strauss wrote Das Gleichgewicht (The Balance, 1993), set in Berlin and documenting the personal anxieties, frustrations, and disorientations of the early 1990s. The playwright Franz Xaver Kroetz wrote Ich bin das Volk (I am the People) in his signature VolkstГјck, or folk-play, style (1994), and Herbert Achternbusch wrote a farcical play that could perhaps be described as “non” or postdramatic, Auf verlorenem Posten (Lost Causes, 1989–90). With the exception of Karate-Billi, none of these plays was at all successful or influential, and while Karate-Billi could fit into this chapter, I have left it aside to focus on Pohl’s more interesting Wartesaal. In the 2000s, several scholars analyzed plays written during and just after the unification period, most prominently Birgit Haas in Modern German Political Drama (2003) and Theater der Wende—Wendetheater (Theater of the Reversal—Reversal Theater, 2004), and Dag Kemser in ZeitstГјcke zur deutschen Wiedervereinigung (Period Plays of German Reunification, 2006). But these critics miss the primary connection between the plays of Western playwrights: the way these texts revise the myths of the unification period, turning dramaturgy into historiography and inverting the comedy narrative of German history.

Blooming Landscapes? One of the earliest and most obvious changes to Berlin came when the Wall disappeared, replaced by a long fissure of empty open space, where only days before soldiers with guns stood watch. For a short while, it became a no-man’s land populated by outcasts. But as a no-man’s land in the middle of a great city, it was also a lawless Wild West ripe for exploitation, inspiring a gold rush: the edge of the map, terra incognita, inspiring both terror and greed. The overuse of metaphors here is intentional: this shape-shifting space became what its beholder wanted it to be, a blank screen for the projection of the bloated fears and desires that swelled up during 1990—a process that extended to the land of the former East in its entirety, which had been simultaneously polluted and underutilized under communism. The land in the Page 69 →East became an imaginary, best described as unheimlich, an uncanny space, eerie and even somewhat sinister. Both Elfriede MГјller and Rolf Hochhuth turned to the space where the Wall and the Todesstreifen had run in order to revise the blooming-landscapes myth promoted by Chancellor Kohl. In the fifth scene of Wessis in Weimar, Hochhuth details how the Federal Republic initially promised to return the land where the Wall had stood to the people who had owned it before the GDR seized the border zone—and he shows how the FRG reneged on its promise, selling the highly valuable real estate to private developers. Hochhuth begins the scene with excerpts from several newspapers about real estate along the Wall, which he develops into a fictional scene in which citizens of the former East confront the federal minister of justice. Standing on the steps of a judicial building and addressing the people below her, the minister speaks in a blizzard of incomprehensible

legalistic babble (quoted from an actual letter written by the minister at the time): Article 19 of the Unification Treaty reads that appraisals of the virtue and substance of earlier sovereign acts of acceding territory cannot draw upon the basic policies from the hitherto existing coverage of the constitution, to which also belong the principles of international law. (Superior Court of Justice, Judgment from April 13, 1992).21 Wessis in Weimar shows real-estate decisions being made out of concern for money, not justice. The protester Trumpf responds to the minister: “These properties are worth billions today: / forty-three kilometers of the 155-kilometer wall run through Berlin!”22 Instead of giving individuals an opportunity to rejuvenate their ancestral land, the FRG simply confirmed the GDR’s seizure of it. Speaking in a folksy Berlin accent, an elderly woman named Frau Schlucker points out this hypocrisy: “When you uphold the Wall’s вЂdefense’ function, / you legitimatize the violent-state’s / robbery of the property / and its premise in building this Wall. / With this ruling you’ve proved the horrifying arbitrariness of / your FDP membership.”23 For Frau Schlucker and her compatriots, capitalism—the Free Democrat Party, or FDP, promotes libertarian free-market principles—has replaced communism in tyrannically reigning over the Volk. In Wessis in Weimar, capitalists from the West raze landscapes throughout the East. Hochhuth represents the destruction of apple orchards in the first scene of the play, titled “The Apple Trees.” Pushed to bankruptcy by a series of unlucky business decisions just before 1989, the former members Page 70 →of a collectivized orchard in Potsdam hear rumors that they can get more money (still very little, but enough to survive) from chopping down their trees than they earn by keeping them, even though the fruit had always been profitable. The scene opens in a deliberate echo of the end of Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard (1904): we see “a cherry orchard in the cold sun, the oft-changing April light shining naturally and beautiful on the stage.”24 Before we see this, however, we already hear the noise of “very loud chainsaws.”25 The orchards here will be cut down in order to build condos—but Hochhuth essentially reverses Chekhov’s scenario: in Wessis, lazy aristocrats buy out the productive proletariat, keeping them in poverty. As the farmer Schorsch explains at the end of the scene: “Even if one of us had the courage to do so, / it would not help us anymore to say loudly / that, after all, Honecker and his fat cats / did not flatten our blooming countryside, / but rather the damn Westerners.”26 While the curtain falls, the stage directions indicate that the audience hears the sounds of Western chainsaws again, and a “magnificent blooming treetop falls.”27 Capitalists make barren the once fertile landscape. Hochhuth’s view of Western colonization of the Eastern countryside is even starker in scene 6, “Philemon and Baucis,” titled after two characters in act 5 of Goethe’s Faust II (1832). Goethe’s characters try to stay on their family land even as Faust develops it. But Faust ruins their waterfront property by damming the sea and then accidently burns down their house, killing them. “He is godless,” Baucis exclaims in Faust II, a line quoted by Hochhuth: “He desires / Our little house and grove of trees. / This puffed-up neighbor of ours / Says we must do what he says.”28 Goethe adapted his characters from mythological Greek figures (also named Philemon and Baucis) who serve food to the disguised gods Zeus and Hermes and are rewarded for their charity: in the myth, Philemon and Baucis die in the same moment and transform into entwined oak and linden trees.29 Because of an unfortunate decision to sell farmland just before unification—they would have gotten far more for it at Western prices—Hochhuth’s characters Herbert and KГ¤the are ruined financially and cannot afford to stay in their house in the countryside near Leipzig. But they won’t leave. In the opening stage directions, Hochhuth quotes newspaper reports on a series of suicides in Saxony—1,435 in 199130—and the scene shows, openly mimicking the style of Gerhart Hauptmann,31 how people could decide to commit suicide. As decent and honorable as the Greek Philemon and Baucis, and as stalwart as Goethe’s characters, the couple responds to Page 71 →colonization by dying together; they would rather hang from the window overlooking their land than live in a dreary urban apartment. The countryside of the East in Wessis in Weimar does not thrive and become fecund: it is colonized, its orchards are destroyed, and its people are dying off. Hochhuth’s inversion of the “blooming landscapes” myth is

a classic example of Brechtian historicization: Hochhuth breaks up “the environment into relationships between people.”32 We watch individuals make choices, learning how we might take action to limit the capitalist rape of East Germany. The results are no different in Elfriede MГјller’s Goldener Oktober, which uses the landscape of Berlin and especially the former death strip as setting, structural device, and metonym for the greater East Germany. MГјller divided Goldener Oktober into two parts, each with three scenes labeled “Streifen” (strips); the action takes place within these strips, becoming deadly by the end. In an interview in Theater heute, MГјller described Goldener Oktober’s plot: “The deformed from the East and West meet one another over an abyss full of corpses.”33 The death strip in Goldener Oktober approximates a deadly chasm, the negative of the Berlin Wall that once stood there—and the opposite of a mountain full of gold, as several of the more avaricious characters imagine the space. In another interview, MГјller said that she intended the play as an archaeology of Berlin.34 Delving into the abyss of the death strip, Goldener Oktober disinters the vampires, the murderers, the corpses, and the many lost souls of Berlin in October 1990. As figures from the East and West meet each other in a bar called the New Moscow, in the former border zone, the landscape of the play propels their journey down. Black-market entrepreneurs from West Berlin see much opportunity in the death strip. Letty, one such capitalist, announces in the first scene: “Like a mangy coyote, the land behind the fallen Wall stands and howls a new melody: (Plays [a guitar].) Give me honey. Give me milk! I’ll drink them with you.”35 But this “land of milk and honey” proves far more difficult to exploit than Letty imagines. By the end of the play, he acknowledges that “an Ossi will remain an Ossi.”36 In other words, Letty knows that he cannot make money from the intractable communists, who don’t desire to buy much and don’t have anything to spend anyway. Most importantly, the potentially fruitful romantic relationships in this landscape degenerate into division and murder, as I discuss later in this chapter. A stage is the only location in the death strip where the relationship between East and West can be honestly debated and discussed: the performancePage 72 → area of the bar, where the characters gather. Here, the Wall lives on as a “Pseudo-Wall”37 in front of which the character Silke Schnee from the working-class East Berlin neighborhood of Pankow sings and dances erotically. Soon the setting for her show moves to the opulent Western department store KaDeWe. The kitsch of the scene satirizes the “journey” supposedly available now to Easterners; it turns out that Silke has never even seen the lakes of West Berlin and can only “shop” at KaDeWe by shoplifting. The cabaret troupe that repeatedly takes the stage throughout the play, the Plastic Bomber Boys,38 tells truths from within their performances, generally through insults. The first song by the band can be taken as mere entertainment, mocking the already-appearing nostalgia of East Germans for clearly inferior GDR products: “I love my Trabi, / and could not care less about BMW.”39 As the play continues, they become increasingly cynical, contemptuous of their Western spectators. And they satirize themselves as well, calling themselves WendehГ¤lse, the mocking name given to Easterners who quickly became capitalists after the fall of the Wall.40 “Society needs the Wendehals, / where there’s an ass I’ll crawl into it.”41 They insult both West and East in their final song, crooning: “No one could find the heart, / it had already emigrated / when the West performed an autopsy / on the forty-year-old corpse.”42 In the landscape of Goldener Oktober, the truth cannot be found offstage, where the rebuilding of unification should be occurring, but only in the theater, as the Plastic Bomber Boys make use of double meanings and entertainment to expose real feelings and real problems ignored by the other characters.

Die Wende? The dramaturgical trope of the reversal became a vital historiographic and political technique in telling the story of German unification: history had changed directions, like a ship tacking toward happy shores. But Western playwrights reversed the myth of the comedic reversal. In Wessis in Weimar, German unification serves as the inciting incident for the suffering of the play, as in Goldener Oktober and in the individual stories of Wartesaal, while in Schlusschor the fall of the Berlin Wall happens during the play and does not reverse the action.

The Wende in Wessis in Weimar serves as a reversal of fortunes, as characters living comfortably before the action of the play lose their property and even their lives while each scene unfolds. With the Wende occurring before Page 73 →the play begins, Hochhuth takes a late point of attack that allows him to show the effects of the West German government’s massive privatization in the East. The hotel housekeeper in scene 2 describes how privatization works: “So this is the result of the Wende: The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung owns the grandest hotel in Weimar, / the вЂHotel Russicher Hof,’ and a newspaper / and a press. But the citizens of Weimar, we don’t own even a single brick / of any factory!”43 Scene 6, “Philemon and Baucus,” begins in pathos—“There’s no water in the well—I believe / this is the first time that’s happened in 350 years, / since the village was founded!”44—and ends with suicide. Wessis consists, essentially, of a prologue followed by nine scenes of Eastern suffering, all precipitated by the instigating reversal of the Wende. Most of the stories Klaus Pohl collected in Wartesaal Deutschland Stimmenreich focus on November 9, 1989, as a caesura in the lives of the storytellers, an interruption that shifted their futures. Instead of reversals that lead to recognition and imply historical progress, however, these caesuras create a sense of division or divorce. And rather than focusing on the major events and powerful figures generally central to historical accounts of German unification, Pohl wrote a microhistoriographic play, presenting the monologues of regular people, from mayors and doctors to taxi drivers, a soccer fan, and a now homeless roofer. The first monologue in the published text, from the Head of a Ministerial Division, begins the play—its very first lines—with the description of a reversal: “Everything changed for me, / for all intents and purposes.”45 Her memory of the break or interruption of unification now shapes how she narrates her life: her story cannot begin without beginning at November 9, at the point of before and after, when she lost her job as a research scientist and became a bureaucrat. Almost invariably, the figures in Wartesaal tell their stories around sudden reversals, mostly with November 9 as pivot. Trying to capture the momentousness of what happened that day, the Press Secretary says: “It’s as if the Japanese were to march into West Germany and say, / tomorrow you have to be Japanese!”46 Life has transformed to such a degree in the East, according to the Head of a Ministerial Division, that Easterners feel they have “emigrated / without going anywhere!”47 The Business Executive notes that “reunification can no longer be reversed.”48 The ship has permanently shifted course. But was the switch in direction for the good? Most strikingly, we see in Wartesaal how the caesura of November 9 altered the relationships of families and whole communities, particularly those from the former East. The Head of a Ministerial Division’s husband left her family: “It got to the point where I had the feeling: / Society is falling apart! Page 74 →/ The relationship is falling apart!”49 The microcosm of her family is reflected in the macrocosm of society; each crumbles after “everything changed.” For the Professor, an East German academic, November 9 was “a radical change, / also personally,”50 which resulted in the breaking apart of his family: “вЂIt’s not working any more,’ she said.”51 Almost as a side-thought, while discussing the social safety nets of the GDR and the new FRG, the Local Reporter also mentions that unification led to his divorce: “I am separated from my family. / I see them only every couple of months. / But those are just the repercussions of this history.”52 The Taxi Driver waited for thirteen years after escaping to the West to see his old Eastern girlfriend. But their story does not end with reunion in 1989, as was so often imagined in the public consciousness: “I cannot call her, / I cannot visit her. / She doesn’t want that.”53 The stories that Pohl chronicled here invert the “marriage” myth of the Wende: instead of bringing people together, November 9 tore them apart. They mark their lives around the caesura of unification because it led to division, not resolution and reconciliation. These are the repercussions of history on individual lives. Fig. 3. Eva Weissborn (playing the CDU Politician), Margit Bendokat (the Worker), and Rolf Ludwig (the Painter) in Wartsaal Deutschland Stimmenreich (Waiting Room Germany), written and directed by Klaus Pohl, at the Deutsches Theater Berlin. (Photograph: ullstein bild—Will / Granger, NYC.) Of course, the Wende in Wartesaal did not just affect the lives of families. Page 75 →The mayor of a small East German town complains, “In Herzgerode, we got absolutely nothing / from the Wende / except, with much struggle, / an Aldi grocery store.”54 The Soccer Fan notes that before 1989 “we didn’t have any

homeless people in the East. / But beginning with the fall of the Wall, / since November 9, 1989, / when the Wall fell for all intents and purposes, / homelessness has gotten much worse.”55 The Homeless Roofer sums up the situation, as perceived by many of the figures in Wartesaal: “If reunification hadn’t come, / I have the feeling, / things would have gone much better, everything would have / continued without friction.”56 Whether or not this is true, it is certainly how many of the figures in Wartesaal tell their stories: comfort replaced by confusion. Although the Wende represents reversals for most of the figures in Wartesaal, history just kept muddling along after 1989 for others. The Berlin Taxi Driver contends that, in fact, not much of a reversal occurred at all: “In my factory the party secretary is no longer / the party secretary; instead he’s / the deputy director.”57 The people in power stayed in power; only their titles are new. The Taxi Driver continues in his thick Berliner dialect, “Nah. You know. Basically nothing changed. Only the social system.”58 That’s his entire monologue: basically nothing changed. The Engineer states this same idea in the previous monologue: “There were certain people who had money before, and with the money—whether party money or from somewhere else! —they’ve done a great deal and saved it up and now they’re back on top.”59 Capitalism replaced communism, but the systems weren’t that different after all. The Car Mechanic more or less agrees: “Meh. / The landscape is still there exactly the same as it was earlier.”60 Botho Strauss created a Wende definitively without reversals: the structure of Schlusschor depicts, three times in three acts, the inability and failure of November 9 to change German history and the German people. A messenger figure who reappears in each act shouting “Deutschland!” repeatedly brings new information to the onstage characters in Schlusschor. In the first act, this man twice cuts into the noise of the chorus, as they pose for a photographer to take their picture. But his is only one voice, and the conversation does not go in a different direction after his announcement, but continues, as fractured as ever: “Serious! Worry! Caution! Germany! Kneel! Downward!”61 In the act’s denouement, the chorus rebels against their photographer, who they feel is doing a bad job. The stage lights go out: “Darkness. Quiet, choral singing with many voices. When it is light again, all that remains of the photographer is a bundle of clothes and his shoes on the floor.”62 The chorus has murdered him. Strangely, the scene does not Page 76 →change. Instead, the chorus recruits a woman passing by to take the place of the photographer and continues its mild, endless bickering—“Look slightly under the camera. Look at my knees”63—until the lights gradually dim and the scene ends as it began. The shouting figure returns in the second act to once again simply cry “Deutschland,”64 amid the chaos of a party this time. The main figure in the scene, an architect named Lorenz, in love with the woman holding the party, asks the Shouter: “Why are you doing that?”65 And the Shouter responds, “I need to get a bit of air. I have to hold things in when I’m inside the room.”66 In other words, one cannot talk about Germany in polite society. “As of this moment,” Lorenz remarks, “The republic is decaying.”67 Later in the scene, the Woman with the Hat attacks the Shouter, who is relating some boring story he had read in a newspaper. “Don’t you feel the very deep human possibility in this minute? Do you understand what a moment that could have been?”68 In this society, they’ve “missed and lost”69 moments of possibility. Lorenz lets his few encounters with his love interest in the scene pass him by as well; no romantic comedy, the second act ends with Lorenz shooting and killing himself. In the third act, the Shouter finally has an opportunity to deliver his full message. Entering the cafГ© that is the setting of the act, he yells “Deutschland” and then reports to the onstage characters the news of the opening of the Berlin Wall—bringing with him people from the GDR. After his cry of “Deutschland,” he paraphrases Goethe’s historical essay Campaign in France 1792,70 saying: “This is history, I’m telling you, here and today, I’m telling you, Valmy, I’m telling you, Goethe! And this time we’re in it.” He then cries out: “The borders have been opened! The Wall is falling! The EastВ .В .В . the East is free!”71 But even while we hear news of the jubilation outside, the action onstage does not switch directions. One character memorializes the moment by closing his book and announcing: “On page 440! I’ve folded a historical dog-ear.”72 This is West German society for Strauss: content with books, averse to taking action. Like the previous two acts, the third act also ends with violence, as a character rips apart an eagle with her bare hands, even as the peaceable strains of Beethoven’s final chorus play. The cafГ© society onstage never

changes. Both of the early productions of Schlusschor accentuated the Western story of the play. Dieter Dorn created a particularly Western viewpoint for his 1991 production of Schlusschor at the MГјnchener Kammerspiele. For the first act, the chorus stood on large white marble steps, each member dressed in black clothes appropriate for middle-class Westerners, each outfit matchingPage 77 → but unique—dresses, tuxedos, suits paired with various ties. The characters of the second act wore bourgeois clothing and much gold, specific to a Western milieu, as did the characters in the third. Critic Michael Merschmeier wrote that Dorn’s production emphasized a “laboratory atmosphere, in which you could observe the German character under a knife and dissect it and its equivocating proxies.”73 Dorn’s Schlusschor examined the passivity of FRG citizens. Fig. 4. Celebrating the fall of the Berlin Wall—with Swetlana SchГ¶nfeld and Uwe Kokisch seated at the table—in the third act of Botho Strauss’s Schlusschor (Final Chorus) at the SchaubГјhne Berlin, directed by Luc Bondy. (Photograph: ullstein bild—Binder / Granger, NYC.) Luc Bondy ended his production of Schlusschor at the SchaubГјhne in Berlin with the conclusion of the first act, as the chorus discovers a woman to take the place of the first photographer. In other words, the chorus introduced and ended the production, unlike in Strauss’s text. Bondy reintegrated the actors into their original choral roles, drawing specific connections between the characters throughout the play. For example, figures who argue over a memory during the first act became Anita and her mother (who argue about the memory of Anita’s father during the third act), and then returned to their original roles in the chorus. Bondy’s production brought the three Page 78 →acts close together, not only revealing the similarities between the stories and figures, but going so far as to make them into three methods of approaching the same moment. The fragmentation of the German people, their inability to find common purpose except in destruction, was the overriding theme, emphasized by Bondy through repetition and circularity. In a play representing a society broken but beginning to fix itself, new information can reverse the onstage action, as in Schiller’s Wilhelm Tell. But in Schlusschor, we see a series of failed reversals. The shouting man’s news of unification and calls for a common German identity do not shift the action of any of the three acts. Three potential reversals and recognitions pass by in Strauss’s depiction of unification, none of which are seized upon by the characters. In the historiography of Schlusschor, unification does not indicate a reversal in the direction of German history, an attainment of self-knowledge, or a recognition of common bonds on the part of the German people. Strauss was no progressive in the early 1990s, worried about the citizens of the GDR and apprehensive about spreading capitalism. In his 1993 essay “Anschwellender Bocksgesang” (“Goat Song Rising”),74 which became infamous because of opaque language that some interpreted as advocating the forgetting of the Holocaust, Strauss explicitly addressed issues in contemporary Germany. He assailed materialism, the media, and the loss of a mythic past. Gregory H. Wolf, in his introduction to the first English translation of “Anschwellender Bocksgesang,” wrote that through the essay Strauss made an argument that Western society eradicates and destroys history and memory, which allow for “meaningful communication,” “in favor of all-encompassing consumerism and materialism.”75 This materialism can be seen especially in the media, or the “ghosts of infotainment”76 as Strauss called them in his essay. History has been lost to consumerism, and modernity will shatter: it is “a culture shock that will not strike the savage, but the savagely forgetful.”77 Strauss wrote that he wanted to encourage a new conservatism, which would seek to give legitimacy to outsiders and restore “collective memory.”78 The characters in Schlusschor cannot move forward and seize the opportunities presented by unification because they cannot properly remember history. Members of the chorus in the first act disagree on facts from their own pasts, as when F13 and F6 flounder in their attempts to locate events in time through associations with their personal lives. “F13: It was shortly before the war. And the war was over fifty years ago. F6: But mother, we were only in the West much later.”79 Similarly, Lorenz can only remember one traumatic encounter with his

love interest, preventing him from pursuingPage 79 → her successfully, and Anita in the third act misremembers the history of her father—she thinks that he was executed by the Nazis for plotting against Hitler, but a historian character in the cafГ© claims that it was actually for sleeping with the wives of other officers, something Anita refuses to acknowledge: “Don’t say another word. I’ll slice up that mug with this shard of glass! ”80 None of them can or want to remember properly, nor do they have access to a collective Germany memory. They cannot act together; Strauss calls the chorus a Schar (crowd)—this chorus is never more than a loose collection of individual figures. They speak in short, incomplete sentences, a kind of staccato language: “F4: Why not now? M11: Not yet. M14: Heads up! F1: Je poseВ .В .В .”81 They refuse to trust each other: “I don’t believe that what you’re saying is true.”82 They speak over and on top of one another: “F4: Why do you say that? F6: In front of all these peopleВ .В .В . F4: I want to know—M11: I’m thinking about it.”83 The groups in the second and third acts are also crowds. Instead of being able to draw on a collective memory to make collective decisions, the figures in Schlusschor are distracted by images, the ghosts of infotainment. In the first act, the crowd has the impression that something terribly important is happening around them: that is why they want their picture taken. The photographer reminds them that “to be is to be seen,”84 and when M8 discovers that his face is hidden by another group member, he worries that “for all intents and purposes, I won’t have been here today.”85 The title of the second act, “Lorenz vor dem Spiegel (Aus der Welt des Versehens)” (“Lorenz in front of the Mirror [From the World of Mis-seeing]”) plays with the word Versehen, meaning oversight or error. In the act, the figures orbit around a mirror. Speaking out of turn and to no one in particular, the Man with the Cigar muscles his way toward the mirror, saying, “I need to see myself this moment, full length, otherwise I will not believe it.”86 The figures in the Schar desire their photograph to be taken because they believe that a photograph of them on this particular day will not only prove that they were there, but actually be more real (carry a greater sense of authenticity) than having been physically present. The Man with the Cigar, who gazes longingly into the mirror, prefers images and representations to reality. Through Schlusschor and “Anschwellender Bocksgesang,” Strauss makes an argument that Germany, and in particular West German politicians, television, and tabloids, preferred the images and signs of change—the festival of November 9—to change itself. The Schar is caught up in creating the iconography of the Wende, but they fail to notice that it did not happen, that there is in fact no turning point in the play—or in German history. Page 80 →

Comedy or Tragedy? Comedic historiographies, Hayden White argued, end with “the prospect of occasional reconciliations. . . . Such reconciliations are symbolized in the festive occasions which the comic writer traditionally uses to terminate his dramatic accounts of change and transformation.”87 In tragedy, however, “There are no festive occasions, except false or illusory ones.”88 These four Western playwrights do not use reversals to create a comedic story of unification. They show the festival of November 9 as false and illusory, and they structure their plays, and thus the history of unification, as tragedies. When the plays end, to quote White again, “There are intimations of states of division among men more terrible than that which incited the tragic agon at the beginning of the drama.”89 Schlusschor ends with a rather remarkable scene. The café of the third act dissolves around Anita. “Scraps of Beethoven’s final chorus”90 can be heard from the celebrations on the street, and Anita finds herself in a zoo, standing in front of a golden eagle. Reflections of fireworks can be seen on the back wall. She releases the eagle, which she expects will fly away. It doesn’t move. After a brief blackout, during which the eagle lands on her arm, she attacks it: “Castrated chimera! Where is your double? You nerveless coat of arms! Paralyzed arrival! Puppet of horror!”91 She continues: “You could nourish me, instead of making me crooked, could lead me, instead of plucking me like a goose. . . . You flying hunk of ore. Old and gray and powerless.”92 After another light change: “Anita stands in feathers up to her calves, with a bloody face, the bird’s talon in her drooping hand.”93 She mutters “Forest,”94 and Schlusschor ends.

Strauss’s play concludes in sparagmos, the dismemberment of tragedy. In tearing apart an eagle, Anita is also tearing apart a primary symbol of Germany. The double-headed eagle symbolized the Holy Roman Empire. Variations of the eagle stood on the crests of Prussia, the Weimar Republic, and Nazi Germany—and today one is a symbol for the Federal Republic. When Anita calls the eagle a “castrated chimera,” a “nerveless coat of arms,” and a “puppet of horror,” she is referring also to Germany. An enormous metal eagle hangs over the contemporary German parliament; iron double-headed Prussian eagles line a famous bridge on Friedrichstrasse, in central Berlin. For Anita, these powerful symbols have become mere metal. The eagle symbol cannot lead the German people. That Anita dismembers the eagle directly contradicts the central and most important image of Germany in 1991, when Schlusschor premiered: Page 81 →reconciliation in unification. In the first two acts of Schlusschor, there are intimations of celebration, but both acts end in violence. In the third, we can hear the party from inside the cafГ©. That festival never arrives onstage; though opportunities for reversal present themselves, the action of the play does not change directions, and thus the party cannot break out. Any hints at festivity in Schlusschor are false or illusory. And the division at the end of the play is much more terrible than the divided chorus at the beginning. This is an essentially conservative historiography. Strauss dramatizes the failure of Germany to achieve a collective memory and identity—signs of unity, like the eagle, fail to represent common ideals or a common past. But unlike conservative historians following 1989, Strauss does not try to legitimize unification or the united nation. Schlusschor mourns the inherent divisions in Germany, the inability of its citizens to act, its failures to remember the past properly. As Dorn and Bondy represented in their productions, this is a specifically Western problem—and thus a problem that could not be solved by unification. Birgit Haas argues in Modern German Political Drama that the numerous missed connections between Lorenz and his love interest Delia in the second act of Schlusschor refer to “the failed communication between East and West,”95 with Lorenz as a bumbling and self-conscious Wessi, and Delia as the proud and hostile East German. But the failed relationship of Lorenz and Delia, the divided Schar of a chorus, and the dismembered eagle that ends the play all reference rather failed communication within the West, divisions that had nothing to with the Wall and thus could not be bridged by unification. In “Anschwellender Bocksgesang,” Strauss wrote that the inability to properly remember history in the West led to its inability to communicate. To read the history of Germany as comedy is to pretend that unification solved the only major flaw that had existed: the East-West division. The dramaturgy of Schlusschor, with its three failed reversals and final sparagmos, restructures the historiography of the German nation as tragedy, showing that unification could not solve the inherent flaws of the West, which was unable to take advantage of the reversal presented by November 9. The documentary interviews of Pohl’s Wartesaal also emphasize the false nature of the November 9 festivities, and expose the divisions that opened up after that day of supposed reconciliation. The final story collected in Wartesaal, from the Actor, sums up the overall historiography created by Pohl. The Actor begins by saying, “Uh, / this is private.”96 His is not public history—but by presenting it in this play and on the stage, Pohl made an Page 82 →argument that this actor’s story, and the many “small” stories of individual suffering largely ignored in written histories of major events and powerful politicians, ought to be part of the public history of the unification period. When the Berlin Wall came down, the Actor (an East German) had alcohol poisoning and was in the hospital: “I stopped drinking alcohol on this day, / on November 9,”97 he says, and he didn’t even hear about the accidental opening of the borders. “It’s such a coincidence, / that on this day, / when I had to quit drinking, / the Wall fell, / and when I woke up I was / twice over a new, / twice over a new man.”98 Wartesaal does not rule out the possibility of transformation. This positive reversal, this new life for the Actor, occurs simultaneously but separately from November 9. It is a coincidence. He, as an individual, transformed his life; history did not do it for him. Ultimately Pohl’s microhistoriography creates room for both tragedy and reconciliation, though in the play itself there are few stories like the Actor’s, and many more of divorce or division, the stories generally ignored in the early 1990s. The focus of the play’s dramaturgy is on individuals, on bringing their private memories, which people told Pohl orally, into the public history. Wartesaal Deutschland Stimmenreich: breaking down this title, one finds the word Reich, or empire, modified by Stimmen, or voices. And reich here actually has

a second connotation, if one reads it as an adjective instead of a noun, meaning rich or wealthy. Germany, an empire rich with voices. History is generally understood as written texts chronicling events of great significance for a nation. Wartesaal makes an argument with its historiography that the private stories of individual citizens must be understood as chronicles of events of great significance for the German nation. If a nation is imagined through its past, then Wartesaal suggests that in fact the German nation is, or ought to be, a collection of its citizens’ voices. Elfriede MГјller’s Goldener Oktober is an unambiguous antimarriage play, a brutal and thorough revision of the prevailing marriage-narrative of unification. Using marriage as a metaphor for unification entangles politics and economics with love and procreation, and in Goldener Oktober the result of that category confusion is perhaps predictable: broken relationships, murder, and (dramaturgically) tragedy. In the death strip, money has displaced love, and one can purchase land, black-market goods, and women from the former East. Silke, the singer and entertainer, must fight off offers from the bar’s clientele of money for sex. And one of the characters, the Lady, is a prostitute from the former East. Of course, she’s not the only one in the bar who is selling out. As she asks: “Who doesn’t sell himself?”99 Harry, a Western entrepreneur and barfly, answers in the affirmative: “All of us have our faults.”100 Page 83 →Romance cannot get traction in Berlin’s landscape of death and economic struggle. In fact, characters that could populate the plot of a comedy instead turn Goldener Oktober into a tragedy. The Detective, an older man past his prime—he would be the braggart soldier of Italian commedia dell’arte and Shakespeare—picks up Silke at the bar and takes her out into the street, where he tries to seduce her with offers of money, goods, and dreams fulfilled. The Detective wants to sell his apartment and take Silke, who has never been to Wannsee, a lake in West Berlin, around the world. “You don’t know what a folk festival in India looks like.”101 He fails because she wants his offer to “come from the heart,”102 but as a Westerner he can only see her as another commodity. “I can imagine you in everything. Mink coat and dress-up costume. Sportswear and cocktail dress. In baby linens and Lacoste shirt. You will be my only luxury in the great flood of goods.”103 In the end, unable to possess her, the Detective turns Silke into an actual object, strangling her to death on an empty street in the no-man’s land, a sexual murder suggestive of Frank Wedekind’s “Lulu” plays (1895 and 1904)—an attack on the feminine that refuses to conform to an image projected by a man. A dreamer and a performer like Lulu, Silke could have represented hope for the East’s future; the Detective should have been a mere blocking device keeping her from her true love. But the West, with its wild material desires and its belief that objects can bring happiness, destroys the East (as the necessity of money helps bring about Lulu’s inevitable murder). Silke is never offered a potential partner. The final scene of Goldener Oktober plays out over her corpse, which nobody notices. If Goldener Oktober were a romantic comedy, the couple Leo and Nena would be our young lovers, our innamorati. Both are from the former East, but Nena has family from the West, namely her Uncle (as he is named), and she tries to convert to the new capitalist system, while Leo hangs on stubbornly to his Eastern identity. The corpulent capitalist Uncle plays blocking figure to the future represented in Nena and Leo’s relationship. Failing to turn Leo into a Westerner—“I’m still the same man. An obstinate Easterner, ”104 Leo says—Uncle attempts to drive Nena away from Leo. He needn’t have tried. The young couple breaks up all on their own. Nena says, “The Wall was long ago sent in pieces to Japan and America, on and over the ocean. We’re the only one’s still hanging on to it.”105 As they part, Leo asks Nena, “Do you love me?”106 She answers, “Yes, but just not here.”107 The hope represented in the potential children of Leo and Nena, who would be neither West nor East but both, withers with the end of their relationship, which cannot blossom in uniting Berlin. Page 84 →Early on in the play, the Uncle sings, “The whole country is marrying lickety-split.”108 Goldener Oktober structures unification as a tragedy or a horror show (the Detective compares himself to Peter Lorre), ending with a failed courtship and a murder, the inverse of the marriage metaphor. True: unification here, which is the inciting incident of the play, occurring a couple of months before the onstage action, represents a turning point for German history. But this turning point is a kind of hamartia, a failure or an error, leading inevitably to tragedy, and concluding without the possibility of reconciliation or healing. MГјller digs up corpses

in her archaeology of Berlin 1990, but except in the satiric performances of the Plastic Bomber Boys—who are chased offstage for describing the crappy situation truthfully—there is no recognition of what led to the tragedy, only additional suffering. In the historiography of Goldener Oktober, there can be no future for the united Germany. Of the four plays discussed here, Rolf Hochhuth’s Wessis in Weimar most directly relies on the classic dramaturgy of tragedy. As I argued above, unification functions as the inciting incident for the play, and in the scenes themselves Hochhuth shows the suffering of Easterners in part by enlisting the characters and dramaturgy of other tragic plays. Hochhuth built the “Philemon and Baucis” scene not just from Goethe’s Faust II, but also from Hauptmann’s historical drama Die Weber. By repeating Die Weber, Wessis shows connections between the situation in the former East and tragedies by Hauptmann, Goethe, Chekhov, and Schiller. Once again in Germany, we see the wretched circumstances that preceded the Silesian revolt. German tragedies of the past are repeating themselves in the present, most dangerously the 1930s: the name “Hitler” appears in the play thirty-one times and “Nazi” an additional twenty-three times. Wessis ends in conflagration: an Eastern woman destroys her ancestral home because the Western government will not give it back to her family. There are no intimations of possible reconciliation between East and West; in fact, the play implies that divisions between Easterners and Westerners have actually grown greater. The future Wessis imagines is grim: unless we intervene, violence will spread.

Consequences of a Tragic Unification As counternarratives of unification, these plays by Strauss, MГјller, Hochhuth, and Pohl show evidence of goals similar to those of German left-leaning historians after 1990, as described by Stefan Berger in his study of German Page 85 →historiography: “destroying, not creating myths and legends,”109 maintaining “distance from attempts to renationalize German historical consciousness.”110 None of the plays contributes to “the inner unification of Germany,”111 which conservative historian JГјrgen Kocka called for after 1989. Strauss alone among the Western playwrights did “encourage national views of history,”112 to quote Martin Sabrow on post-1989 historiography, through Schlusschor and in his essay. Strauss’s Schlusschor may have a tragic view of unification, but the tragedy here is the inability of Germany to act as a nation. In the counterhistoriographies of the four plays the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe and the unification of East with West Germany does not settle the long dialectical journey toward “the best of the available alternative ways of organizing human society,” to quote Francis Fukuyama.113 Dramas provide an ideal form for addressing and revising the narratives at work in the rhetoric of Hegel, Fukuyama, Kohl, and German historians, based as they are on a dramatic understanding of historiography. Perhaps this is one reason why directors stuck so close to the original texts in their productions, instead of rupturing them in manners typical of German Regietheater: the forms of the plays are essential to their functions. By restructuring unification as the final act in a tragedy, the plays show that in fact the Hegelian historical process must continue. Pohl’s microhistorical approach in Wartesaal rejects the nation-state as the subject of history, focusing on continuing transformations in individuals’ lives. In Goldener Oktober, liberal democracy corrupts individuals in the ultimate free-market zone of the death strip, leading people to confuse economics and love. Ideological conflicts have hardly been settled in Wessis: they burst into violence because the “liberal democracy” of the FRG fails in the East. The society depicted in Schlusschor is just as divided as it ever was—not only on East-West lines, but more importantly fractured within the West. Unification is not a solution. Through their tragic and micro historiographies, Western plays in the 1990s expose the inner divisions of Germany during their time. The nation imagined in these four dramas has nothing to celebrate. It has been united illegitimately, based on a misunderstanding, or even a false understanding, of the German past. By focusing on tragedy, the plays—prescient for the early 1990s—call attention to the work that still needed to be done before the German people, much less the nation, could be united. History must continue, and the divisions within the liberal-democratic capitalist state demonstrate that it is perhaps not the best regime, and certainly not the final.

By using the dramatic form to depict history, these Western playwrights still show a faith in the possibility that history has a comprehensible direction,Page 86 → and will continue toward an end. As I argue in the next two chapters, analyzing the postdramatic performances of Eastern directors, to write history as dramatic is to write it as teleological. Although these plays structure German unification tragically, their dramatic forms, including the microform of Pohl, require that history be logical. Tragic historiography implies the eventual possibility of comedy. Flaws in society and misinterpretations of history lead to the tragedies of Schlusschor, Wessis, Goldener Oktober, and Wartesaal. These flaws and misinterpretations, once properly understood, could be corrected—the divisions in society could potentially be healed, or at least recognized and managed. As dramas, they imagine, perhaps even hope for, the possibility of a different future for the German people.

Page 87 →

4. Allegory and Antiallegory in the Ost Censorship and Allegory in the GDR Theater When Heiner MГјller spoke to protestors on November 4, 1989, in Alexanderplatz, he was taking a break from rehearsals of Hamlet/Maschine (Hamlet/Machine) at the Deutsches Theater, a mile and a half to the west. Just north of Alexanderplatz, Frank Castorf was preparing to produce an adaptation of Die RГ¤uber (The Robbers) by Friedrich Schiller, while many of his actors participated in the demonstration. It was a striking moment, one that, as we have seen, was later written as a key turning point in German history, the nation tacking toward national normality. Amid the turmoil, MГјller and Castorf were creating historical productions, addressing contemporary events by representing them as already part of the past, entangling the process of unification in the history of Germany. But critics and audiences struggled to understand Hamlet/Maschine and Die RГ¤uber, reading them as straightforward allegories for unification. In this chapter, we explore Hamlet/Maschine and Die RГ¤uber, two of the most important German theater productions of the 1980s and 1990s. We will begin by seeking to understand the role of allegory in the GDR, before moving to study the productions themselves, which entangled unification in past events. Analyzing the representations of history in Hamlet/Maschine and Die RГ¤uber, we can see how artists in the East reacted to their loss of identity, while also gaining a better appreciation for how theater changed after unification, and why. Two key aspects governed the existence of theater in the GDR: censorship and the official mission of art to help promote and support the socialistPage 88 → state. In the theater before 1989, artists tried to avoid the former, while still addressing the latter productively, critically, and historically. From the founding of the state, political leaders in the GDR took theater quite seriously: seeing its potential to be didactic and nation-building and also to become a threat to political stability. Leaders of the SED, Carl Weber writes, “devoted much time and energy to [the theater’s] guidance and control. They also appear to have regarded its relative freedom as essential for its credibility.”1 The Berliner Ensemble was a key cultural export and international marketing tool in the 1950s and 1960s, particularly with their tour of Brecht’s famous production of his own Mutter Courage (1949), a historical drama that demonstrated the deficiencies of capitalism and the need for socialism. In practice, approval of theater productions took place at the local level, where officials encouraged self-censorship and tried to avoid banning works outright. But they did sometimes close productions, especially when it came to portrayals of the GDR and its history. In 1962, party functionaries denounced the premiere of Peter Hacks’s play Die Sorgen und die Macht (Anxieties and Power) at the Deutsches Theater, and soon shut the production down because of its equivocal portrayal of the founding of the GDR. As Laura Bradley writes, officials could quickly lose control of live performance, with audiences “laughing together at truths that the authorities would prefer to remain unacknowledged. This potential for a spontaneous, communal response is threatening to any regime that seeks to atomize dissent.”2 Until the 1970s, the GDR had major problems with legitimacy, struggling to achieve international recognition, establish diplomatic posts, and participate in athletic competitions, so historians were given the task of establishing a basis for the GDR in the past of the German-speaking peoples. As historian Georg Iggers wrote, politicians and historians in East Germany worked “to integrate traditions of the military, of state authority, and of national identity into the historical consciousness of a socialist society.”3 Some dramatists, like the historians, supported this project by rereading history to find examples of early proletarian revolts. In addition to Brecht’s Die Tage der Commune (Days of the Commune), an excellent example can be found in Thomas MГјnzer (1952) by Friedrich Wolf, set during the Peasants’ War of 1524–25. Propelled by increasing class consciousness, the play follows MГјnzer, a historical figure, as he progresses from pacifism to necessary violent revolution. Anticipating the GDR, the student StГјbner sings at the beginning: “I was born too early, / Yes, where I’m going to today, / my happiness would only come tomorrow, / if I had the empire.”4 MГјnzer sings this song at the end of the play on his way to the executioner’s block. He finishes the Page 89 →verse with an especially Marxist twist: “I couldn’t understand it today, / the iron must go through fire / in order to be forged.”5

Heiner MГјller was from the start of his career obsessed with the German past. His early history plays took up the foundational years of the GDR and were thus far more controversial than Thomas MГјnzer, including Der LohndrГјcker (The Scab, 1957), Die Umsiedlerin (The Resettler Woman, 1961), and Der Bau (The Construction Site, 1964). MГјller used many techniques of historicization, focusing on regular individuals as opposed to political leaders and showing how the characters’ pasts shaped their decisions and thus influenced the formation of the GDR. These plays follow a generally dialectical structure, and none takes a highly critical stance of the GDR. But they depart from the content of official GDR historiography, showing the GDR at its interception as being far from the ideal communist state, and questioning just how innocent of Nazi crimes citizens of the GDR actually were. In Der Bau, Schlee, an engineer, becomes pregnant, but her lover feels married to the GDR and abandons her and his child. At the end of the play, she says, “We will have children who will themselves have children, one generation creating the next, the future will be made in our image, communism good or bad, as we made it, us and us, you know it.”6 This beginning hardly represents a good start, and MГјller strongly implies through the play that the future being made had already been corrupted, depicting petty crime as the only way to get things done in a deadly bureaucracy. Critical of the past and pessimistic about the future, his plays did not fit the GDR’s cultural project. Following the opening of Die Umsiedlerin in 1961, MГјller was stricken from the roles of the writers’ union, leaving him blacklisted until 1973. Der Bau did not premiere in the GDR until 1980. During a period of cultural liberalization introduced by Erich Honecker in the 1970s, MГјller was allowed to work again in the theater, and began experimenting with forms of dramatic writing that MГјller called “synthetic fragment[s].”7 These plays intervene in GDR historiography through structure as well as content; Jonathan Kalb describes the form as “an intensification of Brecht’s pastiche structure.”8 In Zement (Cement, 1972, premiere in 1973 at the Berliner Ensemble), fragments of the labors of Heracles interrupt a story about trying and failing to develop communism in the early Soviet Union. The interruptions refract the events of the main story through mythology into MГјller’s present. Distancing his subject from the GDR and allegorizing it through Heracles, MГјller could address contemporary circumstances without raising too much ire. More radical wrestling with history can be seen in Germania Tod in BerlinPage 90 → (Germania Death in Berlin), which MГјller began writing as fragments in 1956 and completed in 1971. Here, MГјller weaves in and out of German history, connecting the failed revolution in 1918 with World War II, the founding of the GDR, the Prussian past, and Stalin, while depicting Hitler and Goebbels as grotesque lovers; Germania herself makes an appearance. The end of the play reimagines the end of Gerhart Hauptmann’s Die Weber, with Old Hilse dying of cancer while dreaming of meeting Rosa Luxemburg, who lies to him about the triumph of communism. Several other plays from this time, including Die Schlacht (The Battle, 1951/74), Mauser (1970), and Die Hamletmaschine (Hamletmachine, 1977) also included historical themes. MГјller could write such texts, but he could not have them printed without cuts, nor, for the most part, were they produced in the GDR. With the shocking and much-protested expatriation of political folk singer Wolf Biermann in 1976, Honecker’s brief period of liberalization was understood as over, and many theater artists left the GDR. A performance culture emerged that emphasized classics over new plays. Even potentially allegorical interpretations of classics were strongly discouraged, as Laura Bradley discusses in regards to productions of Faust I at the Deutsches Theater and Aeschylus’s Sieben gegen Theben (Seven against Thebes) at the Berliner Ensemble, both of which were censored.9 By the 1980s, many of Heiner MГјller’s early plays came to be included with works by Brecht, Shakespeare, and Goethe on the list of classics. Frank Castorf, a young director fresh out of Humboldt University, born in 1951 and raised in the East Berlin neighborhood Prenzlauer Berg, took advantage of the status of MГјller and other classic authors, along with decentralized censorship, to stage a series of aesthetically radical productions in the small cities of Anklam and Karl-Marx-Stadt (now Chemnitz). Fighting constantly with local officials, his productions sometimes shut down after, and even before, the premiere, Castorf applied the dramaturgical techniques of banned plays such as Germania Tod in Berlin to classics including Othello (1982, Vorpommersche LandesbГјhne Anklam); Henrik Ibsen’s Doll’s House (1985, Anklam); and Ibsen’s Enemy of the People (1988, Karl-Marx-Stadt).

For his production of MГјller’s Der Auftrag (The Mission, 1983, Anklam),10 set on a simple black-box stage with peeling wallpaper and paint, Castorf cut and rearranged an already fragmented plot about three revolutionaries in Haiti during the time of the French Revolution. Actors played figures across genders, slipped out of their roles, and repeated lines. Martin Linzer, the editor of Theater der Zeit, who traveled to Anklam to review Der Auftrag, understood the production as highly political, though without a didactic Page 91 →message, arguing that Castorf’s version of MГјller’s play took the “activation of historical consciousness as its mission, and the open conclusion as a task for the public to think the history to its end and into today.”11 Leaving a production to the interpretation of the audience would become one of Castorf’s signatures, developed in part out of necessity in a society that would have jailed or expatriated him for being too on-point with a message. Still, the allegory at the end of Castorf’s Der Auftrag is clear. Horst-GГјnter Marx as Debuisson walks out the back door of the theater and into the dark night of Anklam, climbing into a waiting car, its headlights shining into the eyes of the spectators. Critic Robin Detje described this gesture as a gestus, a theatrical expression of a “yearning for political opening.”12 Castorf may have avoided serious consequences for this gesture, among others in the production, but the managing director of the theater in Anklam wanted him out. (Workers’ rights in the GDR were so strong that Castorf couldn’t actually be fired.) Castorf’s production of Brecht’s Trommeln in der Nacht (Drums in the Night, 1984) was closed before opening night, and the artists and critics who traveled from Berlin to see it were not allowed to watch the final dress. His next MГјller project, Der Bau in Karl-Marx-Stadt (1986),13 remixed MГјller’s play over five and half hours. The production began with a radio report of Yuri Gagarin’s spaceflight, clearly setting Der Bau in 1961—along with the building of the Wall. But Castorf also included brief excerpts of other moments in time: a speech from BГјchner’s Danton’s Death, excerpts from Der Auftrag, and a Vladimir Mayakovski poem. For an extended sequence, a radio played “Little Red Rooster” by the Rolling Stones, a song released in 1961 a few months after Gagarin’s spaceflight, but de facto banned in the GDR until the 1980s. Influenced strongly by Robert Wilson, MГјller’s plays in the 1980s broke open in similar ways as Castorf’s adaptation of Der Bau—an adaptation that MГјller officially sanctioned. In Quartett (1980–81), a reworking of the Marquis de Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom, a couple finds pleasure in radical identity play while revolution surges outside the room. And Wolokolamsker Chaussee (Volokolamsk Highway, in five parts, written between 1984 and 1986) reimagines the history of the GDR as a frozen landscape with a road running through it, connecting East Germany and the Soviet Union. It begins in part 1 with Russian soldiers in World War II, Berlin two thousand miles in front of them, Moscow only 120 miles behind them, and ends in part 5 with a war orphan emigrating from the GDR and deserting his adopted father, a party official. Both plays also became important for Castorf’s work, reappearing, as excerpts, in his productions over the next thirty years. Page 92 →MГјller also began directing in the 1980s, producing his play Der Auftrag with his wife and codirector Ginka Tscholakowa (VolksbГјhne Berlin, 1980), Macbeth in his own translation (VolksbГјhne Berlin, 1983), and a production of his Der LohndrГјcker in 1988 at the Deutsches Theater.14 Der LohndrГјcker, the first of three productions MГјller would direct at the Deutsches Theater between 1988 and 1991, also included his short plays Der Horatier (The Horatian) and part 4 of Wolokolamsker Chaussee, titled Kentauren (Centaurs). Together, these texts explored the flawed formation of the GDR, dooming its later development, in part owing to willful ignorance of its citizens’ Nazi pasts, and in part to the workers’ refusal to cooperate under the communist system. In a video of a performance,15 the audience laughs at the many in-jokes, such as references to early defections to West Germany—exactly the allegorical potential of live performance that officials feared, but no longer had the power to control by 1988. Castorf and MГјller both used allegory as a political tool in their productions in the 1980s, but it was one tool among many: their works did not become one-to-one allegories of the contemporary. They wanted the productions to remain open, not didactic, for reasons both aesthetic and practical, being working artists in the GDR. Typical of Castorf’s work during the 1980s is his later comment that “Enemy of the People was naturally a paraphrase of the GDR, which I did not intend. I did not want to make a cabaret of the GDR, but rather to provoke people with anticommunism.”16

Instead of being primarily allegorical, these works by Castorf and MГјller undermined the German Democratic Republic by restructuring the already fragile official historiography of the nation. The productions introduced interruptions into that history, showing how problems at the nation’s founding—the conflicts between former Nazis and communists newly released from concentration camps, for example—infected its entire development. Using allegory, and myths and stories that insiders could read as having meaning beyond the explicit, these plays and productions displayed the communist utopia as nowhere to be found, not today and not in the future. But the structural interventions they made are quite clear, which is why until the late 1980s MГјller’s plays about German history were kept from the stages of the GDR, and why Castorf’s work was suppressed, allowed only in the provinces. Although Castorf and MГјller did not rely exclusively on allegory, by the late 1980s audiences in the GDR had been trained in reading productions as allegorical, and two of the most successful plays at the time were patently allegorical. Volker Braun’s Die Гњbergangsgesellschaft (Society in Transition, 1987) Page 93 →and Christoph Hein’s Die Ritter der Tafelrunde (Knights of the Round Table, 1989) reflect, through stories of other places and people, the dreary hopelessness, the generational struggles, and the frustrations of life in the GDR as it approached its fortieth anniversary. Die Гњbergangsgesellschaft refers in its title to the Marxist economic theory that the “real existing socialism” and “dictatorship of the proletariat” in the GDR would slowly transform into true communism. Braun’s “comedy” takes place in the GDR, on an old estate with “a murky, reeking river”17 behind it, but the play also adapts Chekhov’s The Three Sisters, with Braun’s characters as versions Chekhov’s Olga, Masha, and Irina. Using the milieu of a crumbling society from pre-Soviet Russia, on the verge of tremendous change, Braun was able to represent how the GDR had destroyed its citizen’s initiative, leaving them with vague dreams of going somewhere else, while also implying that the GDR itself needed a real transformation. After premiering in the West German city Bremen in 1987, Die Гњbergangsgesellschaft opened at the Maxim Gorki Theater under the direction of Thomas Langhoff in 1988.18 In this hugely successful production—one of three invited to the Theatertreffen from the GDR in 1989, also including MГјller’s Der LohndrГјcker, the first time the GDR allowed productions to be invited to the prestigious West German festival—Langhoff made Braun’s references to the GDR more explicit. While he kept his production in a mostly generic space, the malaise of life in the GDR infected every gesture, every word. In the end, the three sisters stood on the edge of the stage as the house behind them burned. Their uncle lay dead in his chair. They faced the future with complete uncertainty. Hein’s Die Ritter der Tafelrunde represents the GDR less explicitly, but his allegory is also much more thorough. The Knights of the Round Table may not be one-to-one stand-ins for the GDR (though critics did speculate that Arthur was meant to represent Honecker), but the situation is clear: the elder generation has hunted an impossible utopia, the Holy Grail, sacrificing friends, wives, and children in the process. Now the knights have become old and are sustained only by their belief in the Grail, even if they now know it won’t be found in their lifetime. Many of them have died or become pessimistic about the search. The younger generation must take over, but Arthur’s son Mordred (Artus and Mordret in German) cannot imagine doing so: he was born cynical and depressed, has never believed in the Grail, does not want to inherit his father’s empire. Sir Kay (Keie), an older knight, explains the situation: “We sacrificed ourselves for a future that no one wants.”19 They may have peace, but it is a peace, as Parsifal says, of “the petty-minded.”20 Die Ritter ends with less hope than it begins. Arthur says, Page 94 →“I am afraid, Mordred, that you will cause much destruction,” and Mordred replies, “Yes, father.”21 The play premiered, in Dresden, on April 12, 1989, and spoke directly, through the myth of Arthur, to the young protestors who took to the streets in May to show their anger at the faked elections. Still, as clear as the allegory is, the theater critic for Neues Deutschland (the GDR party organ) still stubbornly misread it, writing that the production was a socialist piece about the struggle for happiness and peace.22

Battling Allegory during Unification Both Castorf and Müller happened to be working on productions around November 9, 1989, and both productions premiered during the early stages of the unification process. To write that Müller’s Hamlet /Maschine23 and Castorf’s Die Räuber24 unfolded in a period of turmoil would be an understatement; to

say that the dissolving of the communist state affected the productions’ dramaturgies would be obvious. By examining these two productions, we can see how MГјller and Castorf reacted to the crisis, to the new freedom to say whatever they wanted, and to the emerging, triumphant capitalist historiography of Germany. Hamlet/Maschine ran for forty performances and closed in late 1993; it is perhaps the most discussed of MГјller’s work as a director. David Barnett has considered the production twice, in his 1998 book Literature versus Theatre and in a 2006 essay titled “Resisting the Revolution.” His detailed history describes the production and the circumstances that jolted its rehearsals, arguing that as the crisis outside the theater grew, MГјller sought to prevent a reading of his production as simply an allegory for those events—to avoid “fatal topicality,”25 a doom MГјller always worried about when directing and translating Shakespeare. Barnett argues that MГјller succeeded: “MГјller left the audience with a question mark that played with the realities of the theatre, not of the new Germany.”26 Although Barnett acknowledges MГјller’s many implicit and explicit references to the crisis and German history, he claims that the revolution in the streets of East Berlin affected MГјller’s production mainly by pushing him to battle allegory. The title of Barnett’s article sums up his thesis: MГјller wanted his production to resist the revolution. Barnett adds an interesting remark in the article, which he does not elaborate upon, commenting that the “production seemed to be working with historical processes in the abstract.”27 MГјller’s play with historical processesPage 95 → supplies, in fact, the key to understanding the relationship in Hamlet/Maschine between contemporary crisis and German history. Not coincidently, Castorf was also uninterested in creating an allegory of 1989–90, and he developed tactics in Die RГ¤uber similar to MГјller’s. In an interview conducted at the time, included in the production material archived at the Akademie der KГјnste Berlin, Castorf insisted that “the idea of producing Die RГ¤uber came from the VolksbГјhne a year and a half ago, and it has not altered significantly since the fall of 1989.”28 He repeatedly referred to the production as a fairy tale, “formed from an alternative reality,”29 a timeless story that can fit many different situations. “With Die RГ¤uber, I do not want a false sense of the present day, but rather an authentic un-contemporaneity. One must reflect on this story through psychology, history, and the artificial.”30 These purported intentions did not prevent contemporaneous critics from reading Die RГ¤uber solely through the circumstances of the end of the GDR, nor has it prevented scholars from doing so subsequently. The famously conservative critic Gerhard Stadelmeier of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung wrote of the production that “it’s as if Gregor Gysi and the Party of Democratic Socialism held by proxy an enormous, apocalyptic requiem during the clearance sale of the GDR.”31 Benjamin Henrichs titled his review in Die Zeit “Deutsche Demokratische RГ¤uber” (“German Democratic Robbers”), punning on the German name for East Germany (Deutsche Demokratische Republik), and he complained that Castorf “produces Die RГ¤uber for us as a miserable swan song to the disappearing Eastern republic.”32 Robin Detje saw Die RГ¤uber positively as “a wild essay on reunification.”33 German scholar Marek Podlasiak made the same argument as Detje,34 and a reporter for Cosmopolitan described Castorf’s intent as “a kind of requiem to the collapsed GDR.”35 But critics and scholars have failed to see the “un-contemporaneity” of Die RГ¤uber, the relationship to history and historical processes shared by Castorf and MГјller. MГјller and Castorf both worked to avoid simply reenacting the events already occurring on the streets; their productions attempted to understand and counter what were for them the problems of unification, including Chancellor Kohl’s power grab and the erasure of GDR culture. So they historicized German unification in their productions, approaching the events of 1989–90 through the past and through plays that have long held deep resonance for German nationalists, representing and demonstrating the full complexity of the GDR and the events that led to its collapse. Let’s Page 96 →take a moment to understand each production individually before we examine how both entangled history and allegory.

Hamlet/Maschine Hamlet/Maschine was the second of three productions that Müller directed at the Deutsches Theater between 1988 and 1991, a series that critic Martin Linzer called Müller’s “Trilogy of Upheaval.”36 After the

popular success of Der LohndrГјcker in 1988, the artistic leadership of the theater asked MГјller to direct another production, and he chose Hamlet in his own translation, a play he had long wanted to produce, along with his own text Hamletmaschine, which had never before been allowed for production in the GDR. Shakespeare’s play holds deep significance for Germans; August Wilhelm Schlegel revered and translated the play, and Albert Knapp and Ferdinand Freiligrath each wrote poems that include the line “Deutschland ist Hamlet” (“Germany is Hamlet,” in 1842 and 1844 respectively). As the poems imply, Hamlet has long been considered a kind of national play for Germany.37 Rehearsals for Hamlet/Maschine began in late August 1989, and notes held at the Akademie der KГјnste Archive in Berlin show that MГјller and the actors initially sought to understand Shakespeare’s characters and themes through the lens of the GDR. “Laertes is the GDR citizen in Paris,”38 suggests one note (August 30, 1989); another reads that Hamlet, Rosencrantz, and Guildenstern “were old buddies together in the Free German Youth,”39 the GDR equivalent of the Boy Scouts (August 31, 1989). On the morning of November 9, the company discussed the contemporary relevance of the “To be or not to be” speech. But the events that evening forced changes in the direction of the production. When the artistic team finally met again after the fall of the Wall, on November 17, MГјller’s tone had shifted. The notes quote MГјller as saying “any вЂGDR translation’ would be death; there is no GDR to quote or estrange anymore”40 (November 17, 1989). Still, he did not eliminate references to the GDR or the increasingly unstable situation in the East. MГјller continued to compare GDR politicians and Shakespeare’s characters (on November 24, 1989), and more importantly he still sought to understand Hamlet through Germany’s history: a note records him saying that the politics of the play are similar to that of VergangenheitsbewГ¤ltigung, the struggle to come to terms with the past in Germany after the horrors of the Holocaust (on November 17, 1989). Premiering six days after the first free elections in the GDR, in which Page 97 →a coalition backed by Chancellor Kohl won a clear majority, Hamlet/Maschine opened in a nation-state that had in all practical terms ceased to exist: any dreams that the GDR could attempt to remake itself as a democratic socialist state had dissolved. Hamlet/Maschine ran eight hours, with several intermissions, beginning at four in the afternoon and ending at midnight. MГјller left the text almost entirely intact, with a few changes: he replaced Fortinbras’s final speech with the poem “Elegy of Fortinbras” by Polish writer Zbigniew Herbert,41 and cut Hamlet’s speech to the actors—which he felt had been used in the German theater as a cudgel against any Shakespearean performance style that wasn’t realistic and psychological. Instead, MГјller wanted to develop a new performance style, implementing a more extreme version of Brecht’s V-effect to avoid all identification between actor and character, instead bringing the actor closer to the text itself.42 Over the production’s long duration, the set of Hamlet/Maschine, designed by Erich Wonder, transformed from a kind of ice age in the first four acts, with an enormous reflective cube of what looked like slowly melting ice at the back wall and cool blue-toned lighting, to a Renaissance room that became a subway station, before finally concluding in a desert in the final act, the stage covered with sand and punctuated by golden tablets that perhaps marked the locations of characters’ graves. This movement referenced contemporary fears about the hole in the ozone layer setting off unbalanced weather patterns. But the implications go deeper. The set’s mutations gave the production a sense of foreboding and of covering wide, even geologic time. Watching the changes, one got a sense that this production could not be about a specific moment, but rather contained a larger historical overview. MГјller said once in an interview that if people do not remember history, the past might return “in the old fashioned way, as a nightmare, Hamlet’s ghost.”43 The mise-en-scГЁne echoed the ghosts surrounding its audiences, ghosts that were affecting the present, and perhaps returning as nightmares. The machine of the production got under way with the sound of clanking chains and gears, followed by Horatio’s voice, his lines taken from the end of the Q2 version of act 1, scene 1: “In the most high and palmy state of Rome, / A little ere the mightiest Julius fell, / The graves stood tenantless, and the sheeted dead / Did squeak and gibber in the Roman streets” (1.1.106.5–106.9). Following these lines, the sound of crowds and of a voice speaking in Russian began to play, the name Stalin noticeably recurring. As the production script

indicates, this recording came from radio broadcasts of Stalin’s funeral. During the funerary sounds, a tall, shadowy, and almost naked ghost-figure slowly crossed the stage, carrying a long sword. Page 98 →So Hamlet/Maschine began not only during an “ice age” but also under the star of Stalin, one among numerous ghosts of the German past climbing out of their graves. MГјller indicated in many rehearsal notes and in several interviews that he associated the ghost of Hamlet’s father strongly with Stalin, the father of the German Democratic Republic who presided over its miscreation and haunted it throughout its forty-year existence. The Ghost, of course, also haunts Hamlet throughout Shakespeare’s play—and the sounds of Stalin’s funeral accompany all of the Ghost’s appearances in Hamlet/Maschine. As for Hamlet, MГјller called him a young intellectual,44 associating the character with the artists and literati who led pre–November 9 protests. This textual connection to contemporary events was emphasized further by the actor playing Hamlet, Ulrich MГјhe, who, as described in the prologue, helped organize demonstrations leading up to the fall of the Berlin Wall, as well as protests against the role of West German political parties in the GDR elections of March 1990. Shakespeare’s Hamlet struggles to restore the old state of his father, which has disappeared, to destroy its corrupt successor in the murderer-stepfather Claudius, and (conceivably) to embrace the possibilities for the future signified by Fortinbras. So, in one straightforward allegorical reading of MГјller’s production, Stalin refuses to stay in the past, a corrupt and dying GDR troubles the present, and an invading West Germany threatens but perhaps provides hope for the future of our Eastern intellectual. This is the allegory MГјller both encouraged through the signs of the production and feared would overshadow the performance. Other references to capitalism, communism, and German history appeared throughout Hamlet/Maschine. Act 3 took place in front of a Renaissance facade, which transformed into the present by becoming what looked like a subway station. As Hamlet questioned a soldier of Fortinbras’s army (act 4, scene 4 in Shakespeare), the image of an enormous World War II–era bomber covered the back of the stage, suggesting both the threat and possible liberation brought by an invading army, and reminding audiences of the postwar division of Germany by the Allies. The costumes in the production, consistent for each character but not generally indicative of a specific time or place, invoked men of commerce throughout history, from Polonius as seventeenth-century burgher to Fortinbras as contemporary banker in black suit and tie during the final scene. MГјller’s Fortinbras also carried a briefcase and wore a golden mask, standing against a golden background. In notes and interviews archived in the production documents, MГјller associated Fortinbras with Deutsche Bank, the major West German bank that symbolized capitalism for the East. Page 99 → Fig. 5. From left to right, JГ¶rg Gudzuhn and Ulrich MГјhe as the Actor Playing Hamlet and Dagmar Manzel as Ophelia/Electra in the Hamletmaschine (Hamletmachine) section of Heiner MГјller’s Hamlet/Maschine (Hamlet/Machine, Deutsches Theater, 1990). Hamletmaschine created a caesura in Hamlet and set the course for the final tragedy of Shakespeare’s play. (Photograph: David Baltzer / bildbuehne.) Page 100 →So rather than just an allegory for the recent past, the production gave audiences the sense that many events from the past and present coexisted, outside the chronology of history. As Hamlet/Maschine progressed, the characters who died refused to stay buried. Polonius, Ophelia, and Hamlet all returned and walked the stage after their deaths, haunting the desert of the final act; the Ghost of Hamlet’s father never really returned to hell. This feel of the production as greater and wider than written chronology was reinforced in its key scene: the interruption of Hamlet by MГјller’s own Hamletmaschine text just after the second intermission, between act 4, scene 4, when Hamlet encounters a captain of Fortinbras’s army, and scene 5, Ophelia’s flowers song. Critics at the time and since, including Barnett, and even MГјller himself, judged the inclusion of Hamletmaschine as unnecessary after November 9, only required before that as an assertion of artistic freedom in the GDR45—the play had never been performed in the East because it draws equivalences between the self-serving ideologies of capitalism and communism, and critiques the Soviet reinvasion of Hungary in 1956. But the disruption of Hamletmaschine in Hamlet did in fact have a purpose when we consider historiography, reinforcing the disruptions of history in Hamlet/Maschine. MГјller’s text divided Hamlet/Maschine just as

Hamletmaschine itself divides between before and after the Hungarian Revolution: energetic revolution followed by entropy and death. Marking Hamlet’s time away from the court while sailing to and from England, Hamletmaschine created a caesura in Hamlet and set the course for the final tragedy of Shakespeare’s play. The text of Hamletmaschine, which MГјller started working on in the 1950s and finished in 1976, follows the figure of an intellectual Hamlet, who opens the play with “the ruins of Europe in back”46 of him. Terrified during the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, Hamlet declares October to be “just the worst time of the year for a revolution”47 and finds himself unable to act, even to the extent that Hamlet does: “I’m not Hamlet. I don’t take part any more.”48 In “Pest in Buda / Battle for Greenland,” the Actor Playing Hamlet curses the ideological straitjackets of both communism and capitalism. The latter gives him Coca-Cola and televisions, and turns him into a computer / data bank; the former crushes the possibility of revolution with tanks, and replaces it with empty slogans, including Marx’s famous declaration that “the main point is to overthrow all existing conditions.”49 Following the entropy of the ice age at the end of the fourth scene of Hamletmaschine, all human energy having leaked out into space, the fifth and final scene abandons crumbling, masculine Europe, all ideologies having destroyed each other. The rage-filled feminine Ophelia/Electra provides the Page 101 →only hope, speaking in “the heart of darkness,” the third world: “Under the sun of torture. To the Capitals of the world. In the name of the victims.”50 Already expressing deep disappointment in the possibility of socialist revolution, Hamletmaschine, and especially “Pest in Buda / Battle for Greenland,” gained increased resonance in early 1990. “After an appropriate period, the uprising follows the toppling of the monument. My drama, if it still would happen, would happen in the time of the uprising,”51 the Actor Playing Hamlet declares in the text. Could his drama take place in 1989? No. Hamlet still cannot act. “My drama didn’t happen,”52 the Actor Playing Hamlet says—as a text originally about the Hungarian Revolution questioned the effectiveness of the 1989 protests. In the specific context of early 1990, using Hamletmaschine in the production of Hamlet reinforced divisions between capitalism and communism, as well as between East and West, and emphasized the failure of both ideologies. When “Ophelia” spoke the final lines, she walked around the edges of a box (light projected from above onto the stage) without stopping, stuck in routine, unable to break out and effect change. And then Hamlet/Maschine moved on to the insane Ophelia, singing her song of flowers. No hope could be found here. Through the insertion of Hamletmaschine, MГјller enlivened Hamlet/Maschine to transhistorical connections between Hungary in 1956 and Germany in 1989, adding layers of resonance to a production that became a historiography of crushed and co-opted revolutions. The past kept reemerging in Hamlet/Maschine, and Hamletmaschine interrupted louder than any other ghost. In 1989, the graves of Germany stood tenantless, and the sheeted dead did squeak and gibber in the Berlin streets.

Die RГ¤uber Die RГ¤uber premiered during a two-day festival in the VolksbГјhne building, amid performances by local amateur theater troupes, bands, and artists. Attendees came costumed as RГ¤uberliner—a portmanteau of “robber” and “Berliner.” An event more than a performance, Die RГ¤uber appeared to be trying to extend itself beyond the theater, to generate communities of attendees (RГ¤uberliners) who would disseminate anarchic, revolutionary values in the uneasy atmosphere of 1990. Designer Bert Neumann described his set and costumes as reflecting “the everyday aesthetics of the GDR.”53 The VolksbГјhne itself promoted the twohour, forty-minute production, which radically cut Schiller’s text and added several outside sources, as an Page 102 →artistic protest against the unification process. A flier for Die RГ¤uber printed after October 3, 1990 (official unification) asked: “The play goes onВ .В .В . but how?”54 and advertised a special October 7 performance to commemorate the key participation of the VolksbГјhne company in organizing the November 4, 1989, demonstration. The flier connected audiences of Die RГ¤uber to the 1989 protestors—and implied that “the game must go on” with continuing demonstrations, now against the FRG. And yet Schiller’s 1781 play, with its story of two brothers searching for freedom and power, destroying themselves and their family in the process, is a tragedy of revolutionary action. Though proclaimed an honorary citizen of the French Republic in recognition of Die RГ¤uber, Schiller famously opposed the French Revolution,

watching with horror as it disintegrated into naked murder. Karl, the leader of a robber band in Die RГ¤uber, rebels against his society and commits extraordinary crimes, incited by his sublimely evil brother Franz, who treacherously convinces him that their father has disinherited Karl. In the final moment of the play, Karl declares his repentance just before turning himself over to the law, an act that will surely result in his execution. Oh, fool that I was, to suppose that I could make the world a fairer place through terror, and uphold the cause of justice through lawlessness. I called it revenge and right—I took it upon myself, O Providence, to smooth the jagged edges of your sword and make good your partiality—but—oh, childish vanity—here I stand at the limit of a life of horror, and see now with weeping and gnashing of teeth, that two men such as I would destroy the whole moral order of creation.55 With its fraternal strife and shattered countryside, Die RГ¤uber almost cries out for unity. “Oh, if only Arminius’s spirit still glowed in the ashes!,” Karl shouts in the first scene—referring to the Roman Empire–era general so important to early nationalist playwrights in Germany. He continues: “Give me an army of fellows like me to command, and I’ll turn Germany into a republic that will make Rome and Sparta look like nunneries.”56 Certainly, an army led by Karl would be disastrous. But his failure calls attention to his inadequacies: only an honorable, strong, and youthful man, more restrained than Karl, his emotions and reason both under command, could achieve true freedom and remake Germany. This play is no model for anarchy and revolution. And neither is Castorf’s production, despite the promotional material Page 103 →and critical response. Neumann followed the description of his design’s “everyday aesthetic of the GDR” with a parenthetical comment that he intended the aesthetic as “irritation through memory,”57 an observation echoed by Castorf in interviews58 but generally ignored by critics. Shifting between historical reference points without acknowledging purposes, Die RГ¤uber irritated by bringing memories of Germany onto the stage—and ended with the destruction of the whole moral order of creation in a way Karl could only imagine. The first major point of rupture in Castorf’s adaptation came when the robbers—a motley group of aging men dressed in costumes that looked as if they had been stolen from homeless pirates—began to whisper and then chant a song by Ton Steine Scherben, a West German rock band notorious for its left-wing lyrics. They built to a climax: “Freedom is our goal,” they screamed into the audience, “The only thing we’re missing is solidarity.”59 These lyrics became a kind of leitmotif, reoccurring at several critical points during the performance. After the song, the audience clapped. But Karl undercut the celebratory atmosphere, muttering: “Yeah. But what should we do?”60 Look at where “solidarity” has gotten us so far, he remarked. Spiegelburg became angry and shouted at the other robbers, pointing at the audience: “Vote! Vote for nothing! You have nothing to vote for! Look, there they are all together, what you have to vote for! Look! That there is what you can vote for.”61 This moment of confrontation quickly gave way to quiet reflection, as Karl climbed back up the ramp and onto the stage. Without missing a beat, he began reading an old copy of Neues Deutschland. “Mushroom growth meager—And already there are victims. A bad mushroom year so far—judges Karl Marx City mushroom expert Helma Niemitz according to preliminary findings.”62 A quiet rendition of “Moorsoldaten” (“Peat Bog Soldiers”) followed the discussion on mushrooms in Karl Marx City. Written by communist internees in a Nazi concentration camp, and adapted by Hanns Eisler and Ernst Busch, “Moorsoldaten” became a national hymn in the GDR and was used as a protest song across Europe. This music recalled the GDR, invoking feelings of rebellion, demanding protest. In addition to “Moorsoldaten” and the recurring Ton Steine Scherben, Amalia (Karl’s lover, whom Franz attempts to seduce, played here by Cornelia Schmaus) sang Brecht and Eisler’s “Einheitsfrontlied” (“United Front Song”) as Franz pushed her offstage. Characters rocked out to the Rolling Stones songs “Sympathy for the Devil” and “Back Street Girl.” And the robbers sang propaganda dedicated to the Volkspolizei, representing and satirizing the Eastern national police.

Page 104 →In a striking direct address in the next scene, Henry HГјbchen, playing Franz, got fed up with the audience and broke from his role. He addressed them with an extended, partially improvised harangue. You guys just need to work for once. Right? And stop whining. Really. Up! Get up off your asses! Get going! What’s wrong? Forty years of opportunistic snoring, and now you want to have everything! So what, it’s true! Really! Forty years here snoring around, and then you want to have everything! [Addressing someone in the first row.] No, I don’t mean you personally. You’re self-reliant. But the other idiots! Yeah, hahahaha. You make me want to puke. You drivers of Western cars.63 During some performances, the audience did in fact sometimes get off their asses and yell back at him: “What is this shit! You need to learn your role,” only to be attacked more viciously by HГјbchen.64 Actors fell out, or better leapt out, of their roles repeatedly in Die RГ¤uber, a tactic Castorf cultivated even more in later productions. They provoked, irritated, and estranged the audience, producing distance between the actors and their characters, but also generating dissonance among the various stories and messages being told onstage. Castorf displaced the hierarchy of text over performance—direct address had as much authority as the fictional world of Schiller’s play. At the beginning of the two final and most shockingly disjointed scenes of Castorf’s Die RГ¤uber, one of the robbers, Roller, was hanged in retribution for acts committed by the merry band of criminals. After disappearing into the rafters while glitter sprinkled from the ceiling, Roller reappeared, covered in blood. The other robbers pulled pieces of flesh off his body and chewed on them, while Roller shouted lines from the book of Revelation. The group danced; an actress took off her shirt; the robbers stripped off their own clothes and chased her. Quickly, they pulled on East German Volkspolizei uniforms and sang, “We will be protectors of the homeland / We the Volkspolizei.”65 As Karl shouted, “Death or freedom,”66 the entire scene ran again backward until the robbers took off their Volkspolizei uniforms. They crawled into an enormous pot far upstage, and Old Moor appeared and gave birth to a doll, which the actors tore apart as Amalia intoned more lines from Revelation. Three actresses, called the Three Trudys in the program, sat on the edge of the raised stage and recited a passage from Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit on servants and masters, as a fourth actress voiced Page 105 →an especially perverse passage from the Marquis de Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom. Castorf chose neither passage randomly. Will to power is a central theme of Schiller’s play, and Franz, like de Sade, takes Enlightenment principles of rationality and aristocratic rule to the extreme. But here the play concluded with these two themes, and the production did not imagine a future beyond such struggles and horrors. Fire crept across the backstage. Ton Steine Scherben played for the last time. Blackout. Castorf’s RГ¤uber ended before the third act of Schiller’s five-act play. Fig. 6. Silver tinsel falls on the robber ensemble in Frank Castorf’s adaptation of Friedrich Schiller’s Die RГ¤uber (The Robbers, 1990) at the VolksbГјhne Berlin. Screaming up to the heavens after their compatriot Roller is hanged, they watch his body disappear into the rafters. (Photograph: David Baltzer / bildbuehne.) Marek Podlasiak read the action at the end of the production as an allegory: The theatrical robbers—the GDR citizens—were no longer revolutionaries and their leader Karl stepped up as antihero. The goal of the robber band was in fact freedom, but they let themselves be tempted by Old Moor, who represented the Western consumer society. This was shown symbolically through an enormous pot, in which Old Moor lived. The robbers disappeared into this cooking pot, and the brothers Karl and Franz sat, perplexed, on its lid.67 Page 106 →But in telling this story, which he felt was encapsulated by the line “Freedom is our goal / the only thing we’re missing is solidarity,”68 Podlasiak ignored the multitude of conflicting images, gestures, texts, and messages in Castorf’s production. The figures in these two scenes could be read as characters from Schiller’s play; as East German punks; as secret or open members of the GDR government; as weary, deadbeat, postunification Easterners; as philosophers or sadistic perverts; or even as fairy-tale figures. Castorf

made no attempt to reconcile or explain the various stories he told, which glanced by so quickly they could barely be noted. Moments of clarity, like the Ton Steine Scherben song, immediately gave way to questions: Okay, but what do we do now? Castorf certainly drew on the events of 1989–90 in his production, but he surrounded citations of those events with references to the concentration camps of World War II, the decadence of the French Revolution, and West German protest music. As in Müller’s production, the ghosts of the German past refused to stay buried in Die Räuber: when the robbers first appeared, they crawled out of holes in the floor, as if emerging nightly from their graves to haunt the present. Roller cannot be killed: he’s dead already, or was never alive, or refuses to be interred. Castorf’s Räuber exhumed but did not model GDR values, much less nostalgically yearn for the communist nation’s return. After almost three hours of protest, the figures in this Räuber failed to finish Schiller’s play. Their irritating, anarchic performance ended with open questions. Revolutionary action had only led back to masters and servants—and fire.

Allegory Entangled MГјller clearly did not want his Hamlet/Maschine to be read as a simple allegory of the GDR, reducing the entire production to the Ghost as Stalin, Fortinbras as Western capitalism, and Hamlet as a young GDR intellectual undecided about how to negotiate the two systems represented by those figures. Castorf’s Die RГ¤uber troubled a “German Democratic Robbers” reading. Literary and aesthetic references throughout the productions ruled out the simplistic unification allegories that both directors sought to avoid. Rather than a one-to-one allegory, which would have simplified the productions and the crisis in East Germany, the effect of Hamlet/Maschine and Die RГ¤uber was of “historicization,” or better an extreme post-Marxist revision of Brecht’s concept. As I described in chapter 1, Brecht explained historicization by asking that the actor “Imagine all that is going Page 107 →on around you, all those struggles / Picturing them just like historical incidents / For this is how you should go on to portray them on the stage.”69 To facilitate understanding of how humans shape supposedly inevitable processes, Brecht wanted his theater to show how historical processes function in specific circumstances, while encouraging the audience to draw transhistorical connections. Similar to Brecht’s method, MГјller and Castorf portrayed the events of 1989–90 as if they were already “historical” by placing them amid a field of history that included Stalin, World War II, and failed socialist revolutions, while adapting plays that had been read as stories of German unity (Deutschland ist Hamlet) to show discord and division through content and structure. But where Brecht used historicization to clarify forces of history, MГјller’s and Castorf’s post-GDR productions could not address our understanding of the past or future so optimistically, instead knotting together, complicating, and piling up figures, images, and texts from different times. Against Brecht’s aesthetics of Enlightenment, MГјller and Castorf used historicization as a part of their aesthetics of entanglement, to paraphrase Helen Fehervary on MГјller’s plays,70 and accumulation, the skyward growing wreckage upon wreckage helplessly observed by Walter Benjamin’s angel of history. We can see MГјller’s entangled historicization most clearly in his use of his Hamletmaschine text in the production. MГјller quoted Benjamin often, and his conception of the historian’s task drew much from the German philosopher and critic, in particular the “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” The unnamed figure’s opening lines in Hamletmaschine echo Benjamin’s angel, with his face to the ever-growing wreckage of the past, blown into the future by the storm of progress. MГјhe repeated these lines from Hamletmaschine several times in Hamlet/Maschine, during both the Shakespeare and the MГјller sections, once while the funeral of Stalin played. In the historiography of Hamlet/Maschine, ghosts do not disappear into the past, but rather coexist in the present of German unification, interrupting it as the corrupted ideology of capitalism defeated the crumbling ideology of communism. The process of history, for MГјller, was one of accumulation rather than progress, our contemporary reality always haunted by the dead we must walk on. Dissimilar from historicization in Brecht’s plays and productions, Hamlet/Maschine demanded remembrance, not intervention.

In a radio interview conducted a few months after the premiere of Hamlet/Maschine, MГјller discussed a visit he had made to Munich. “I read on the headquarters of Deutsche Bank in Munich a few years agoВ .В .В . the most brutal sentence that I’ve read in a long time: вЂMarkets emerge from Ideas.’ Page 108 →That’s the conclusion of this play.В .В .В . [Fortinbras] is not a blockhead, but rather he has gold on his mind.”71 This was the reality of the new Germany, driven by money instead of the dream of socialism, a reality MГјller placed in a historicized landscape. MГјller wrote to his collaborator Robert Wilson: “There is no revolution without a memory.”72 And, as we saw above, MГјller worried that the past might return “in the old fashioned way, as a nightmare, Hamlet’s ghost.”73 Hamlet/Maschine asked that we watch and remember the collective accumulation of the failures and murders of the past and present. MГјller threw German unification onto the rubble of history: the audience watched Hamlet speaking blah-blah, framed by the ruins of Europe, with the wreckage of the GDR now heaped on top, the future unknown. Castorf used historicization with similar methods of Benjaminian accumulation, and the final two scenes of Die RГ¤uber were nothing if not entangled, with coexistent and quickly shifting signs of various historical periods. MГјller told one story in Hamlet, but opened Shakespeare to multiple meanings by rendering Hamlet in a landscape of history and incorporating Hamletmaschine. Castorf told many, many different stories in Die RГ¤uber. For Brecht, characters should “contain something of the rough sketches that indicate traces of other movements and features all around the fully worked-out character.”74 Castorf took Brecht’s idea to the extreme: the actors simultaneously carry (or quickly transition among) strong signs of various historical periods, from Schiller to the French Revolution to the GDR. In Die RГ¤uber, meaning itself became occluded, undecidable—we could not read how the characters’ specific time and place shaped their decisions. In fact, at times we couldn’t even see characters onstage, just the actors. That the production cannot be reduced to Ostalgie is obvious if we understand Castorf’s variation on Brecht’s historicization. Still, the historicization in Die RГ¤uber did not create a sense of timelessness and inevitability—inevitability being what Brecht criticized in the bourgeois theater’s representations of history. By the final moment of the production, the robber band, Karl, Franz, and the actors had worn themselves out. They did not, could not, achieve resolution. In Schiller, Franz strangles himself to death with a golden cord, symbol of the power he had just achieved, smelling the sulfur of hell, while Karl leaves to hand himself over to justice following a scene of recognition. Schiller’s Karl can at least imagine the restoration of order. Castorf’s production died out, with the robber band creeping into the giant pot, which Karl and Franz then sat on, together, while a large wall shut, cutting them off from view, leaving the audience with Hegel and de Sade—no sense of recognition or of the possible Page 109 →restoration of order. But in depicting weariness, the production did not endorse it. Rather, Castorf’s RГ¤uber showed how the purposeless, violent rebellion of these robbers led quickly to apathy and the destruction of freedom—much as in Schiller. These results are neither timeless nor inevitable. Schiller “transferred this play into the sixteenth century, to the time of Maximilian, because he was of the opinion that these figures and incidents were contemporary, contemporary to Friedrich’s Prussian era,”75 Castorf said in an interview. He continued: That is actually an interesting censorship, to make a contemporary play into a past episode. No, for me it is already something phenomenal, that something that is for us a preposterous story, a fairy tale or whatever, happened in the German forests or cities. Here comes something that simply repeats, I would say. That is Germany in 1990 or ten years earlier.76 That a central story of Schiller’s Die RГ¤uber—a rebellious grab for freedom leading to destruction and exhaustion—repeated itself in 1990 (or ten years before) was the true catastrophe for Castorf, not the passing of the GDR, a significance lost when the production is read as an allegory of the present day. Castorf, along with MГјller and Einar Schleef, would, after the gale winds of 1989 had subsided, further pursue the idea that a continuation of the past—not the break from it—was the true crisis of German unification. They developed even more extreme tactics of historical dissonance, as we will see as we continue.

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5. Eastern Directors and Postdramatic Historiography East Berlin: A Postunification Geography Speaking at the German parliament in 1994 to address the “controversy about how to punctuate contemporary German history” that had “flared up anew since unification,”1 JГјrgen Habermas assumed that German history could only be written as a narrative, with moments of crisis and, perhaps, resolution. The question for Habermas and other philosophers, historians, and politicians was how to identify “the real break” (to paraphrase Mary Fulbrook).2 What is the story of German history? In a 1996 interview, Frank Castorf was asked if contemporary crises could be resolved. He responded incredulously. Crisis? The present has been prepared through the thousand-year-long development of hegemony—man over women, rich over poor, free over unfree, the so-called civilized over the socalled uncivilized. Everything that came before us was practice for the present that we now have. That is insane continuity, not crisis.3 Crises are essential to narrative structure: they are turning points, the moments in which the action changes, tacking toward destruction and death or marriage and procreation. We would expect Frank Castorf—an Ossi who so clung to that identity that he stacked the letters O-S-T (east) on the roof of his theater building—to see unification as a crisis, the devastation of East Germany. And yet he denied it, with prejudice. Page 111 →What is a history without crises? A historiography of insane continuity? To find out, we will examine the dramaturgy of productions by three directors from the GDR: Frank Castorf, Heiner MГјller, and Einar Schleef, the last of whom we have not yet encountered. Having teased out the teleology of Aristotelian dramaturgy and connected that teleology to Hegelian historiography, we are now able to understand the historical structures of postdramatic theater: performances that break asunder stories and confuse representation. Castorf, MГјller, and Schleef staged postdramatic histories and unimagined the German nation, an imaginary that, they showed, had perpetuated—was perpetuating—continuous violence. They conjured ghosts of revolutions past in order to engage with the events of 1989–90 not as unique but as a return, as grotesque continuity. But before we throw ourselves into the productions themselves, we should map the geography of East Berlin after unification. Much changed rapidly, and the changes had important repercussions on the kind of theater being made. Despite an influx of Western spectators, attendance crashed at East Berlin theaters following 1989. The new government cut subsidies, and ticket prices had to rise to make up for the loss of funding, depressing attendance among suddenly very poor East Germans.4 Shortly after unification, the Theater im Palast collapsed, becoming the first major East German theater to close. Theaters throughout the former East felt significant pressure to restructure and attract audiences. Located just north of the central Friedrichstrasse train station, a major border crossing in divided Berlin, the Berliner Ensemble found itself in a prime site to negotiate the transition to a unified FRG in the early 1990s. After a harsh political fight, the Berlin Senate replaced Barbara Brecht-Schall, Bertolt Brecht’s daughter and heir, as leader of the theater and turned the Ensemble into a private corporation—albeit one that has continued to receive government subsidies. Unorthodoxly, instead of appointing one Intendant, or managing artistic director, to take her place, the Senate appointed a team of prominent directors from the West and East, several of whom had worked with Brecht early in their careers: Heiner MГјller (East), Peter Zadek (West), Matthias Langhoff (East and West), Eva Mattes (West), and Peter Palitzsch (East). These artists, brought together perhaps in the hope that they

would build a unified East-West theater,5 had differing and often opposed aesthetic and organizational visions, especially Zadek and MГјller, who attacked one another publicly. In the 1990s, the Berliner Ensemble became one of the central nodes (geographically, managerially, and artistically) in the Page 112 →confrontation over remembering the GDR, especially with Einar Schleef’s controversial 1993 premiere production of Hochhuth’s Wessis in Weimar, an emblem of postunification struggles over both the how and what of German historical memory. Einar Schleef was born in 1944 in Sangerhausen, in what became East Germany, and died in Berlin in 2001, relatively young, of a heart attack. Raised in the GDR, Schleef began his career as a theater designer in East Berlin, but in 1976 the government canceled a production he was working on and he decided to defect. The GDR became a primary topic for Schleef, along with the German twentieth century in general. His two-part novel Gertrude, published in 1980 and 1984, illustrates his personal and national obsessions: in the book, Schleef fictionalized the life of his mother, who was born into the German empire, came of age in the Weimar Republic, married and bore children under Hitler, and grew old in the German Democratic Republic, watching both her sons flee West. Gertrude is a life in five Germanys. In his productions, Schleef was known especially for his use of choruses, even their whispers threateningly loud. In the forward to his memoir-like essay collection Droge Faust Parsifal (Drugs Faust Percival, 1997), Schleef described the classical chorus: “a terrifying image: figures ganging up, standing densely one by the other, searching for protection, even as they aggressively push themselves away, as if the closeness of the others is fouling the air. So the group is itself in danger, and gives in to any assault, hastily accepting a necessary sacrificial victim, pushing it out of the group in order to buy their own freedom.”6 In one particularly riveting example, Schleef directed SportstГјck (Sports Play, 1998), by Elfriede Jelinek, the Nobel Prize–winning Austrian playwright, as a choral play. More than forty men and women in simple white clothes and black boots, standing on risers so that each individual was visible in the chorus, performed calisthenics and chanted their lines, a sharp intake of breath after each pause to indicate that the chant would begin anew. The individual and the group battle, each rejecting and absorbing the other. Schleef’s Wessis in Weimar nearly did not open. Hochhuth attended a dress rehearsal and asked the Berliner Ensemble management to shut down the production. Heiner MГјller had engaged Schleef to direct, a provocative choice given Schleef’s reputation for taking on plays with experimental dramaturgies, such as SportstГјck, and for adding choruses and outside sources to classical plays, such as in his collage version of Faust (Bockenheimer Depot Frankfurt, 1990). As we have seen, Hochhuth’s Wessis in Weimar is a series of Page 113 →tragedies that work together to inspire audiences or readers to action against the capitalist colonization of East Germany. We observe individuals making choices in the specific circumstances of 1990, allowing us to see how we can intervene in the historical process. But Hochhuth objected, in a statement printed on the back of the cast list handed out to audiences, that Schleef mixed outside plays and songs with Hochhuth’s scenes, and that Schleef “shows choruses instead of individuals.”7 The specific tragedies of 1990 merged into a field of history, correspondence instead cause and effect, as the individual becomes chorus, which “belongs to the stage-landscape, is itself landscape,”8 Schleef wrote. In many ways, Hochhuth and Schleef were fighting over the legacy of Brecht after the collapse of communism. Hochhuth’s Wessis uses Brechtian historicization to attack myths of unification and illustrate the depredation of the East, and, importantly, to increase the political efficacy of his play. Schleef’s Wessis, as we will see, is post-Brechtian. Although directors often lay ruin to plays in the German theater, it is highly unusual for a play to receive such treatment in its premiere production. A compromise with Hochhuth was finally reached: each attendee of the premiere received a print copy of Wessis in Weimar, allowing them access to the original. As we continue, we will explore Schleef’s field of history, the dramaturgy he created for his version of Wessis, so antithetical to that of Hochhuth’s play, and investigate the politics behind Schleef’s formal experimentation. Only a few blocks north of the Berliner Ensemble, the Deutsches Theater underwent a relatively smooth transition

from GDR to Federal Republic, including a leadership changeover. With probably the strongest ensemble of actors in Germany, the Deutsches Theater was well prepared to weather unification, and it was never considered to be in danger of closure, with Thomas Langhoff quietly and surely taking over as Intendant in 1991 from his long-serving predecessor, Dieter Mann. Mauser, the final production of Heiner MГјller’s “Trilogy of Upheaval,” opened in 1991 at the Deutsches Theater, before MГјller moved on to the Berliner Ensemble, where he would spend most of the rest of his career until his death from throat cancer in 1995. Mauser took its name from its central text, MГјller’s own Mauser (1970), a LehrstГјck modeled on and responding to Brecht’s Massnahme (The Measures Taken, also translated as The Decision, 1930), presenting the audience with the trial of an executioner who had worked to establish communism in Russia during the 1918 Red Terror. The executioner and his predecessor failed because of their humanity: one Page 114 →stopped being able to kill, the other killed too much. Both can be easily replaced. The evening actually opened with MГјller’s short text Herakles 2 oder Die Hydra (Heracles 2, or The Hydra), a prose meditation on Heracles’s second task, followed by Mauser and then MГјller’s 1981 play Quartett, which takes place, we are told, in a “drawing room before the French Revolution. / Air raid shelter after World War III.”9 Another Heracles text, Herakles 13 (1991), and Wolokolamsker Chausee V: Der Findling (The Foundling, 1987), in which a son tells of abandoning his adoptive father, a Communist Party official, to escape to the West, concluded the production. Considered in total, Mauser moved between the Russian Revolution (Mauser), the French Revolution (Quartett), and the end phase of socialism in East Germany (Der Findling), while also drawing on myths that stand outside of time. A poem taken from an interview MГјller gave and published in the Mauser program lays out the evening’s agenda: “What one needs is the future / and not the eternity of the moment. / You must disinter the dead, over and over, / Only from them can you create the future.”10 Intendant Albert Hetterle at the Maxim Gorki Theater—which was established in 1952 to promote the development of communism, and played to power from its location on the important East Berlin artery Unter den Linden—quickly introduced a repertoire of contemporary playwrights, hoping to attract new audiences. He needed to: the Gorki was put on notice that it would be closed otherwise. GDR mainstay playwrights Rudi Strahl, Maxim Gorki, and Michail Schatrow—the last actually only allowed during glasnost—gave way to formerly unproduced domestic and foreign playwrights including Caryl Churchill, George Tabori, Albert Camus, Arthur Miller, Edward Albee, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and EugГЁne Ionesco, as well as the previously frowned-upon Polish writers Slawomir Mrozek and Tadeusz Rosewicz,11 both of whom addressed the legacy of Stalin critically. With popular successes including Volker Braun’s Гњbergangsgesellschaft, which stayed in the repertoire into the early 1990s, and a 1990 production of Tabori’s Mein Kampf (My Struggle), the Gorki was able to avoid the expected chopping block. Moving farther east, we encounter the VolksbГјhne, a fifteen-minute walk north of Alexanderplatz. Built in 1914 as a theater for the Volk, specifically the workers of Berlin, with early productions directed by Max Reinhardt and Erwin Piscator, the VolksbГјhne decayed artistically in the 1980s under Intendant Fritz RГ¶del, mounting few important productions. When the Berlin Senate terminated RГ¶del’s contract in 1990 and installed an interim leadership team, many thought that the VolksbГјhne would be closed. With the theater in disarray, actors began leaving the ensemble. Page 115 →Into this void, during the transitory period of 1990, stepped Frank Castorf. After the success of Die RГ¤uber, the Berlin Senate named Castorf to the post of Intendant in July 1991, and he immediately began to wrap his new theater in an oppositional identity. In his first press release, distributed before he even officially took up his post, Castorf announced that the theater would now be called the VolksbГјhne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz and dedicated his first season to the communist revolutionary Luxemburg, memorializing her while also protesting plans to rename the square where the VolksbГјhne is located. This first season, in 1992–93, was outlandishly ambitious. The VolksbГјhne premiered three productions in the opening month of the season, beginning on October 7 (the forty-first anniversary of the establishment of the GDR) and ending on November 9 (the first anniversary of the fall of the Wall). Castorf himself directed adaptations of King Lear and Arnolt Bronnen’s 1925 expressionist play Rheinische Rebellen (Rhineland Rebels). The season included productions by Andreas

Kriegenburg, a young Easterner, and now one of the most prominent directors in Germany, Christoph Schlingensief, working in theater for the first time, and Swiss director Christoph Marthaler, maker of somnambulant music theater. Much of the first season drew on German history, as I discuss later in this chapter, most prominently Rheinische Rebellen and Clockwork Orange (which premiered in June). In addition to mainstage productions, Castorf transformed the VolksbГјhne into a neighborhood gathering spot, with regular concerts, readings, debates, and movie screenings in small spaces scattered throughout the building. He became “a local hero,” as Robin Detje wrote in a 2005 article, “using the debris of the GDR ideology to fuel his performances while wildly attacking the new Western regime.”12 To cite just one striking example of Castorf’s reappropriation of GDR detritus: programs for the first season were printed on paper manufactured in the East. As Castorf’s career at the VolksbГјhne has progressed—he will be replaced as Intendant beginning with the 2017–18 season, after a remarkable twenty-five years—he has developed an aesthetic that combines physical comedy and Aristophanic satire with historical representation and misrepresentation: “Tweety Bird in the porn shop of German history,”13 to quote Detje’s memorable phrase. Castorf has called the VolksbГјhne building a “Stalinist-fascistic architectural form, with marble steps laid from in 1954, the leftovers of the Reich Chancellery.”14 His productions did, and still do, resemble Berlin and the VolksbГјhne building: ugly creatures cobbled together from the remains of German history. By the mid-1990s, Castorf had established a VolksbГјhne-specific performance style, creating productions including a reworking of Page 116 →Carl Zuckmayer’s Des Teufels General (The Devil’s General, 1996) and Golden fliesst der Stahl / Wolokolamsker Chaussee (The Steel Pours out Golden / Volokolamsk Highway, 1996), an adaptation of plays by Karl GrГјnberg and Heiner MГјller. Speaking sometimes less than 10 percent of the original text in these productions, Castorf’s actors oscillated between styles, performing above all their own virtuosity and their limits as human performers.15 Hegel and the Marquis de Sade were two favorite sources of outside material, both used in Die RГ¤uber; excerpts, sometimes just snippets, from Heiner MГјller’s plays and poems show up in almost all Castorf productions. He interjects parabases, the direct address of ancient Greek comedy, in which actors speak to the audience in the voice of the playwright; indecently caricatures political figures, especially Chancellor Kohl; and adds many, many songs, from historical political hymns to rock and roll, especially the Rolling Stones. The actors in his ensemble have become well known to audiences from many VolksbГјhne productions, asserting their individuality and humanity against rigid formulas and texts of all sorts, falling out of roles, berating audiences, slipping on banana peels. With their manic energy, they filled the cavernous VolksbГјhne stage, often designed by Bert Neumann (West German), whose sets for Castorf were, as Klaus van den Berg describes them, “playground[s] п¬Ѓlled with found materials, presented as unп¬Ѓnished, disorderly, disjointed, and open spaces that contain, like a rebus, counter visions to the visible world.”16 Critics often saw mere anarchy in the VolksbГјhne overperformances, and Castorf’s historical devices have yet to be adequately analyzed. Robin Detje and Marvin Carlson both mention Castorf’s productions as requiems for the GDR,17 but do not expand upon their broad statements, other than to catalog his Eastern citations. Worse, Castorf’s style has been misread by scholars as simple nostalgia: an “attempt to reassure East Germans,” as Gert Reifarth puts it, “who to this day make up the bulk of the VolksbГјhne’s audience, of the continuing presence of their former country through providing a condensed reminiscence of their immediate past.”18 Reifarth argues that in Castorf’s work, the “GDR is called upon as a place of escape from the present all-German misery, a mechanism which serves not only to keep alive the old country, but invites the audience to choose it over the new.”19 Against these simplistic characterizations, I focus here on how Castorf created a grotesque historical imaginary by combining contrasting material from the past in a comic and horrifying manner. The transition from GDR to FRG in East Berlin affected theaters not only financially, with lower subsidies and threats of closure, but also politically. Page 117 →In his postunification “Notes on the German Theatre Crisis, ” David Ashley Hughes writes that “from the standpoint of former GDR theatre critics in particular, the German вЂtheatre crisis’ was not only an economic disaster, it also sucked the political lifeblood from domestic theatre.”20 After unification, a broad spectrum of critics and artists argued that theater in Germany

was no longer functioning as a mirror to society, but rather catering either to middle-class commercial tastes or to purely aesthetic sensibilities, as Hughes shows in his essay.21 Nationwide theater scandals, such as those around Hacks’s Die Sorgen und die Macht or Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Der MГјll, die Stadt und der Tod, did not occur in the 1990s. In 1992, MГјller disparaged the Theatertreffen festival for not inviting “any productions that directly tackled social reality,”22 for failing, in other words, to reward political confrontation. Thomas Langhoff, a freelance director in the East and Intendant of the Deutsches Theater from 1991 to 2001, said of former GDR citizens that “now the public wants only to forget everything from the past, repress it, become citizens of the Federal Republic as quickly as possible and not stand out any longer.”23 Examining repertories from the 1990s throughout the former East, but outside Berlin, Thomas Irmer found that theaters had staged very few plays that explicitly tangled with “the вЂtragedy of socialism’”24 and had mostly avoided “large historico-philosophical interpretations.”25 Still, there were in fact several directors and theaters outside Berlin that engaged with politics and the postsocialist environment, particularly Christoph Schroth, who produced his “Zonenrand-Ermutigung” (literally border-zone encouragement) festivals in Cottbus, weekend-long celebrations in which as many as sixteen productions would be performed in every corner of the Cottbus Staatstheater.26 Schroth arranged his final Zonenrand-Ermutigung festival, in 2003, around the theme “Utopian?!,” a reference to the GDR and its afterlives.27 Michael Funke’s Hermannsschlacht in Frankfurt an der Oder (1999); the Freie Kammerspiele Magdeburg, with its focus on contemporary plays from Eastern Europe; and the Staatsschauspiel Dresden, which staged Christoph Hein’s Randow (and performed the premiere production of Hein’s Die Ritter der Tafelrunde well into the 1990s), are just a few other examples.28 In this chapter, we will continue to explore how dramaturgy and historiography can become political, focusing on directors from the former East working primarily in Berlin. But it can be difficult to see anything related to history in the productions of Einar Schleef, Heiner MГјller, and Frank Castorf. Critics and scholars have often noticed only chaos. So we will begin with a test case: Castorf’s Golden fliesst der Stahl / WolokolamskerPage 118 → Chaussee. Does this radical adaptation of a communist classic actually create a historical world? Having settled that question resolutely in the affirmative, we can continue on, and investigate the historiography of postdramatic theater. Choosing the most iconic and influential productions by East German directors—Schleef’s Wessis in Weimar, MГјller’s Mauser, and Castorf’s Golden/Wolokolamsker and Teufels General, as well as a few others in passing—we will examine how a radicalized Verfremdung effect, satire and the grotesque, and landscape dramaturgy collectively create postdramatic historiography. Finally, then, we can turn to politics. Why did Schleef, MГјller, and Castorf turn against narrative entirely in their postunification historical productions?

Dada or History? In his collection of materials from the Dada movement, Mel Gordon writes that while “the Dadas exhibited and staged creations and performances of all kinds, these were generally viewed as provocations, childish pranks, or the aesthetic critiques of madmen.”29 Gordon’s description also comes close to the language of essays on Castorf. American critic Chris Salter comments: “Castorf himself continues to ravage the canon with frenetic collage productions assembled from the shattered pieces of world theatre history, punctuated with pounding rock-and-roll, food-and-drink slapstick and a physical energy seldom seen on talking-head German stages.”30 The seductive imagery and action in productions by Müller, Castorf, and Schleef—their provocations, pranks, and mad aesthetic critiques—tended to draw appreciative critics into long, descriptive lists. Critics who disliked the productions, on the other hand, often belittled them as nostalgic.31 But to write off their productions as Dada is to miss how Müller, Castorf, and Schleef engaged with the structures and meanings of history plays by writers from Schiller to Brecht, reimagining how history could be written in the uniting Germany of the 1990s. Dada is an art of “absolute negativity, of complete and willful derision against a world destroying itself,”32 according to Gordon. In a world spinning out of control, Müller, Castorf, and Schleef drew on, but did not destroy, past forms of dramatic historiography, and in the end offered a positive alternative to drama. A close reading of Castorf’s Golden/Wolokolamsker can show how historical structures can in fact be seen in postdramatic productions.

Page 119 →Castorf made the German past the primary focus of his work for three productions that premiered between April 1994 and October 1996, announced as a “Trilogie der deutschen Alltagsgeschichte” (“Trilogy of Everyday German History”), with Golden fliesst der Stahl / Wolokolamsker Chaussee by Karl GrГјnberg and Heiner MГјller as the second part.33 GrГјnberg’s Golden fliesst der Stahl, which premiered in 1950 at the Berliner Ensemble and was not particularly successful,34 works dramaturgically as a combination mystery thriller and socialist propaganda piece. At an important steel factory in the rebuilding GDR of 1949, an engineer has disappeared, and his wife insists he did not defect to the West but rather was murdered; while solving the crime (the engineer’s gold tooth in a piece of steel proves he was pushed into the works), she also discovers a saboteur, who is rehabilitated into society at the end of the play. The factory runs more smoothly than ever before and can contribute to the building of the GDR. GrГјnberg, born in 1891, a communist writer from a young age, projects the GDR into a productive future. It is a romantic comedy with a communist twist: ending with a productive factory instead of marriage. Castorf’s version of the play, which premiered in April 1996, was set in a sparely furnished room, designed by Neumann. A long table center stage dominated the scene, with an old typewriter and wash basin on top, and ten simple stools lined up behind the table. A photo of Stalin hung on the wall behind the table, beyond which could be seen a painting of a steel factory in black and white on a backdrop. Entering as a group with neutral gestures and expressions, their faces painted white with large red dots on their cheeks, the actors performed in different styles during the production that followed, breaking open the play and adding more dramaturgies: detective thriller; Hollywood romance; dance in the style of John Travolta and Uma Thurman in Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction;35 exaggerated expressionist “fight to the death”;36 high socialist realism; and the wild corporality and individuality that marks Castorf’s house style. In mixing performance styles, Castorf infected GrГјnberg’s comedy with satire, especially in expanding one character (Mother Schreivogel) into an Aristophanic chorus of three blond women in pink dresses, collectively called SchreivГ¶gel in the program (literally “screaming birds,” and also German for a suborder of bird species). In Aristophanes’s The Birds, two dreamers lead a chorus of birds in building a utopia in the sky called “Cloudcuckooland”—here, Castorf’s SchreivГ¶gel disturbed the Cloudcuckooland of GrГјnberg’s idealized GDR. The three SchreivГ¶gel spoke Berliner dialect, were natives Page 120 →of East Berlin, in other words, and sometimes inhabited roles in GrГјnberg’s play, sometimes sang, and sometimes just caused mayhem. Following a discussion about the Sachsenhausen concentration camp that resolved with a declaration that the GDR could end malevolent German nationalism, the SchreivГ¶gel walked over to a banana on the floor and, one after the other, purposefully slipped on it (a gesture repeated in several Castorf productions). Later, the SchreivГ¶gel led the ensemble in an Aristophanic parabasis, breaking away from the plot of the play to directly address the audience. Castorf’s chorus sang “Arbeitscheue Ostler” (“Work-Shy Easterner”), a 1995 song by East German punk band Fluchtweg: “I am a work-shy Easterner / And it’s not embarrassing /В .В .В . You too can be an Easterner.”37 Even East German opposition to Western integration, which could result in simply avoiding work and living off the welfare state, came under attack by the SchreivГ¶gel. In addition to extratextual choral parabases, excerpts of MГјller’s Wolokolamsker Chaussee sprang up out of GrГјnberg’s play like poltergeists, inhabiting the bodies of different actors each time. MГјller wrote Wolokolamsker Chaussee between 1984 and 1986, and used it himself as material for his productions Der LohndrГјcker in 1988 and Mauser in 1991 (among others). A historical play in five episodes, Wolokolamsker Chaussee—the title refers to the road leading west from Moscow, a frequent battle site—traces the GDR from its founding after World War II to failed, late-1980s distopia. MГјller’s language is stark and often brutal, with short lines arranged as free verse, and the play repeatedly stages clashes between individuals and ideologies in the second half of twentieth century, resulting in death and disability (psychological and physical) for individuals ground beneath the wheels of political systems. In the first scene of Castorf’s adaptation, Minna—a factory worker, played by Heide Kipp—laughed crazily at the awkward joke of another character, and from her laughter emerged an excerpt from part 1 of Wolokolamsker: “We lay between Moscow and Berlin / A forest behind us a river before our eyes / two -

thousand kilometers from Berlin.”38 Soon the other actors drowned her out by singing the folk song “Das Wandern ist des MГјllers Lust” (“The Miller Likes to Ramble”). Kurt Naumann burst forth from his role as Kolasius, the local union leader, with a passage from part 1 of Wolokolamsker about German soldiers, who “leapt out of the graves and dove / back into their graves and again leapt / out like puppets on string.”39 The other actors placed him on a table and hammered at his body, singing “Build, build, build, / Free German Youth, build! / For a better future we are raising up the homeland!”40 Later, an actor in a devil costume screamed in a Page 121 →Saxony accent: “PROGRESS,”41 (referring to the title of a socialist newspaper, as well as the general historical movement). In the final moment of Castorf’s production, as GrГјnberg’s characters went into ecstasies over the production of steel—“This will become bread!,”42 one shouts—Joachim Tomaschewsky (a famous GDR actor, especially from detective films) took a chair to the center of the stage and quietly spoke in monotone verse adapted from part 4 of Wolokolamsker: “What comes out when a desk / fucks a desk / desks desks desks.”43 “My desk and I,” he continued, turning and speaking directly at the audience, “Who owns whom now.В .В .В . What’s cracking in our wood? Is there a worm in there? / Help.”44 Castorf staged a battle between MГјller and GrГјnberg over the memory of the GDR’s origins, interrupting the idealized golden age of GrГјnberg’s play with MГјller’s images of the GDR’s genesis as an ill-conceived stillbirth, insisting that there was always a worm in the wood. What I have described so far should not be interpreted as a series of unconnected historical and textual references. It is true that in Golden/Wolokolamsker, Castorf created a production that, as reflected in its title, mixed unlike texts and performance styles: early-GDR mythmaking with late-GDR skepticism, socialist realism with rock and roll. But Castorf’s style served a specific historiographic function. With excess bodily functions—Bodo KrГ¤mer picked his nose and flicked the snot at the audience, and Naumann peed in a sink—and the clash of human consciousness with inanimate objects, the production could best be described as grotesque: simultaneously laughable and physically disturbing, to paraphrase Michael Thompson.45 GrГјnberg and the GDR tried to make people into productive machines, integrating them as fully as possible in the factory. Now capitalism was turning the former Easterners into consumption machines—“My desk and I, who owns whom now,” Tomaschewsky says in the final speech. A spectacle of capitalist and communist ideologies, the production was comically horrifying. Castorf used the grotesque and Aristophanic devices to satirize the mechanization of the human inherent in capitalist and communist systems, and emphasized humanity (especially bodies) instead. Structurally, he took a historical play about the building of the GDR, a detective-style socialist thriller that imagines a productive future for communism in the structure of comedic historiography, and used eruptions of other texts and performance styles to satirize the original dramaturgy. And the fractured historiography Castorf created with Golden /Wolokolamsker also disrupted the dramaturgy of unification, connecting the building of the GDR in the 1950s to the recent establishment of capitalism in the former East. What has changed? “Work-shyPage 122 → Easterners” have only succeeded in exchanging the communist drive to produce for the capitalist desire to consume. There is no “PROGRESS” in Saxony (a state in the former GDR), only desks and desks and desks. By juxtaposing seemingly unlike texts, images, and performance styles, Golden/Wolokolamsker built a historiography that showed the disastrous post–World War II beginnings for East Germany being repeated in the 1990s. Unification, in Golden/Wolokolamsker, is a continuation of the past rather than a break from it. The production asserted the right of the individual body against ideological systems, but it did not try to imagine a future.

Toward a Postdramatic Historiography So Golden/Wolokolamsker was historical. And when we step back, we can also see that it was postdramatic: destroying any sense of a fictive cosmos, emphasizing “more presence than representation, more shared than communicated experience, more process than product, more manifestation than signification, more energetic impulse than information.”46 But how can we understand postdramatic historiography? And why do we see it so often in the productions of East German directors in the 1990s? As we know now, there is a close connection between drama and historical teleology. Teleology makes the study

of the past into a search for design and resolution; in the twentieth century, teleological historians generally imagined communism or liberal capitalism as that end. In Postdramatic Theatre, Lehmann pointed out that linking history to drama “almost inevitably introduces teleology, pointing toward a finally meaningful perspective—reconciliation in idealist aesthetics, historical progress in Marxist historiography.”47 For Schleef, MГјller, and Castorf, any attempt to critically address stories of unification within the dramatic, narrative form would have been inherently teleological, and thus flawed—shoehorned into the inadequate space of ideological design. The GDR had failed; that much was clear to them. But the FRG did not provide “a solution to the internal dilemma of political life” or, in other words, “a resolution of the conflict between the rulers and the ruled, the state and the citizen,” to quote Dennis O’Brien from Hegel on Reason and History. Such a resolution would not even be desirable. And if dramatic form is teleological, revising narratives of comedy as tragedy ends up still implying the possibility of eventual resolution, either Marxist or capitalist. A different idiom had to be found: non-Hegelian, non-Aristotelian, rejecting the possibility of eventual reconciliation or resolution. Page 123 →In Postdramatic Theatre, Lehmann argues that there is a contradiction at the heart of drama, citing Christoph Menke’s reading of Hegel in TragГ¶die im Sittlichen: Gerechtigkeit und Freiheit nach Hegel (Tragedy of Morals: Justice and Freedom after Hegel, 1996): In Hegel’s understanding, the experience of “fate” forms the kernel of the drama. This, however, is an “ethical” experience: something eludes the control of ethical volition, throwing a “contingency” into the dramatic play—and thereby into the play of the Spirit. This is fatal for the ethical concept. This contingency or “plurality,” appearing in the divine as much as among humans, destroys any possibility of ultimate reconciliation. What marks the dramatic is rupture that it tries to mend scantily in order to maintain the “truth” of reconciliation through art, “casts everything aside which in appearance does not conform to the true concept and only through this purification brings about the ideal.”48 In other words, the fate of teleology is fatal to teleology, creating tension by necessarily excluding the real that drama is meant to represent. This fact about teleology, inherent in all drama, opens up the possibility of a nondramatic form. “If there is anything the classical ideal lacks,” Lehmann finds, “it is the possibility of accepting that which is impure and alien to sense/meaning.”49 A form that does accept that which is alien to meaning must not inescapably become Dada. Postdramatic theater is not meaningless. It emphasizes the ruptures rigorously sublimated in the dramatic theater: the real bodies of the actors, the plurality of truths, and the ultimate impossibility of reconciliation, either tragic or comic. So from drama emerges the postdramatic, “the unfolding and blossoming of a potential of disintegration, dismantling and deconstruction within drama itself”50—and, I am arguing, the unfolding of a potential for disintegration within Hegelian historiography, which relies on drama to structure the past. For Eastern directors, exploiting the tensions inherent in dramatic historiography allowed not only a critique of the content of postunification stories, but also a critique of the form used to tell those stories. It is my assertion that the postdramatic, as a formal category, can actually be better conceptualized by considering the interrelation of dramatic and historical structures. One major objection to Postdramatic Theatre has been that the concept does not clearly distinguish the turn-of-the-century avant-garde and postdramatic theater.51 Robert Wilson was, after all, considered by Page 124 →many to be the ultimate surrealist. He may work against “the formation of illusion” and the construction of a “fictive cosmos”52 in his productions. But so did surrealists, Dada performers, and the futurists. The “palette of stylistic traits”53 Lehmann identifies in his examples have mostly been used before. How do they add up to something different in postdramatic theater? To begin, we must understand that in his argument, Lehmann was responding in large part to his mentor Peter Szondi’s thesis in Theory of the Modern Drama. Szondi, who began his book with Hegel’s statement in Logic that “the only true works of art are those whose content and form prove to be completely identical, ”54 historicized theater history as predramatic, dramatic, and epic. Drama began in the Renaissance and continued until it faced a crisis in modernity, followed by a series of unsatisfactory attempts by Ibsen, Strindberg, Chekhov, and others to reconcile the content of modernity with the form of the classic drama. Brecht, among

others, created an epic form to allow for nonlinear representation of time and the “epic I,” sharing structural characteristics with the novel.55 Expanding on Theory of the Modern Drama, Lehmann argues that the epic theater of Brecht was in fact still dramatic. Like Szondi, Lehmann defines his concept of postdramatic theater against Aristotle’s definitions of drama as the whole and complete imitation of men in action, but Lehmann argues that the epic form did in fact still follow the “Aristotelian tradition of the dramaturgy of time,” and that it “pursued not least of all this aim: to prevent the appearance of time as time.”56 Although narrative in Brecht’s epic theater is episodic and sometimes nonlinear, his productions and plays were still whole and complete in their creation of fictive worlds—and still decidedly Hegelian in their historiography. Postdramatic theater, on the other hand, is essentially post-Hegelian, with the central definition by Lehmann of the concept coming in his two sections on Hegel.57 Although Lehmann strongly emphasizes the “whole and complete” aspect of the definition of drama, the key to postdramatic theater is not just the dismantling of the fictive onstage cosmos. This is a necessary component, but it had been done before. The key to understanding postdramatic theater, I am arguing, is to examine how it creates meaning and social critique through the “blossoming of a potential of disintegration” within imitations of people in action. Hegel’s theories of drama and history are deeply intertwined: different methods of representing people in action. So the concept of postdramatic theater, essentially post-Hegelian, becomes especially clear when we examine historiography. Lehmann, as I quoted in chapter 2, notes as an aside that “authors like Samuel Beckett and Heiner Page 125 →MГјller avoided the dramatic form not least of all because of its implied teleology of history.”58 Their aversion to drama due to its historical teleology is actually central to understanding the category of postdramatic theater. The productions of MГјller, Castorf, and Schleef, in responding to the paradoxical condition of postunification Germany, can help elucidate the essential similarities between the theater of Wilson and the Wooster Group (for example), the essential differences between the postdramatic and the historical avant-garde, and the political potentialities of the postdramatic as against the dramatic form. I should note that my understanding of tragedy—a particular dramatic structure, as outlined throughout this study—is different from Lehmann’s concept in his recent book Tragedy and Dramatic Theatre (published in German in 2014 and in English in 2016). Lehmann argues that tragedy is a “motif,”59 a “theme, ”60 and a “phenomenon strictly tied to the theatre.”61 It is about the audience, “those who witness, ”62 because for Lehmann tragedy is an aesthetic experience. Importantly, the tragic experience “is not simply a matter of reflection; it is also a pause in reflection”63 That pause is essential for Lehmann: “Aesthetic experience, in order to qualify as tragic, requires a single or repeated вЂcaesura’—an interruption that, in modalities that vary by circumstance, opens the artistic phenomenon to what it has excluded.”64 Tragedy “must interrupt art itself.”65 Importantly, the caesura in the aesthetic experience can only happen in live theater, not on the page: “Tragic experience is tied to the theatre,” not necessarily dramatic theater, but all theater “that is corporal, scenic, musical, auditory and visual—in space and time.”66 In fact, it would be fair to say that Lehmann’s main purpose in writing the book is to assert the possibility of tragedy today, particularly in postdramatic theater. Tragedy and Dramatic Theatre makes an important intervention, helping us to see tragic experience in a new, productive way. But tragedy has almost always been defined by its form, in analyses of performances as well as playtexts. It would be a mistake to abandon that intellectual and practical history of tragedy. For, as we have seen, in the 1990s and 2000s, German historians, politicians, and artists perceived, wrote, and performed unification through the structures of comedy and tragedy—not incidentally but because of the Aristotelian and Hegelian dramatic-historiographic foundations of comedy and tragedy. And East German directors rebelled against these forms, creating a postdramatic historiography. So what makes productions by Castorf, MГјller, and Schleef postdramatic? How do they unfold on their stages the potential of disintegration inherent Page 126 →in drama and Hegelian history? Instead of representing the past, Castorf, MГјller, and Schleef mixed facts (the names of people, the dates of events, documentary films, texts) with borderline fictions (puppet representations of public figures, adapted representations of past events, fictional

figures in historic circumstances), pure fictions (myths, inaccurate portrayals of the founding of the GDR and FRG), and interruptions of the performance by real life (parabases, contemporaneous controversies). We can see the process of this intermixing in the way the directors radicalized Brecht’s Verfremdung effect, satirized representations of German unification, and imaged history as a landscape, with many events visible simultaneously.

Radical Verfremdung Effect and Historicization Brecht’s epic theatre was less a break from the classical dramaturgical tradition than a “renewal and completion”67 of it, as Lehmann argued, and as we saw in examining Die Tage der Kommune and Mutter Courage. The Verfremdung effect techniques that Brecht developed did not so much disrupt and disorder his stories as help the stories be understood. If the Verfremdung effect became too intrusive and the story disintegrated, then audiences couldn’t grasp how to intervene in the process of history. In the previous chapter, I discussed how Castorf and MГјller adapted Brechtian historicization, placing recent events in dialogue with German history. Where Brecht wanted to clarify the forces of history as part of his Hegelian project, in order that we might intervene in the present as Marxists, Castorf and MГјller entangled historical events so that we might see a lack of progress. These entanglements only became more extreme in the 1990s as they radicalized the V-effect. In Castorf’s 1996 adaptation of Carl Zuckmayer’s Des Teufels General,68 Corinna Harfouch, playing the actress Olivia, suddenly screamed out that she was late for a production at the Berliner Ensemble, ran off the stage, and did not return. With its constant disruptions and irruptions, Castorf’s Teufels General was not a production of Zuckmayer’s play of the same title: it was a production about Zuckmayer’s play, how the play shaped postwar West German identity, the dangerous ideologies the play promotes through content and historiography, and what it meant to place the text onto the bodies of these particular actors at the VolksbГјhne. Zuckmayer wrote Des Teufels General from exile in America in 1945, inspired by a newspaper report of the death of World War I flying ace and Luftwaffe general Ernst Udet, Page 127 →with whom Zuckmayer had been acquainted before the war. The devil’s general is General Harras, who loves his nation and helps command the Luftwaffe, but has nothing against Germany’s Jews. In the course of the play, Harras learns about Nazi atrocities and plots to save a Jewish friend from the concentration camps. The main conflict in the play comes from the sabotaging of planes under Harras’s control; one plane crashes, killing Harras’s good friend Eilers. The other conflict comes from Harras’s love for the young actress Diddo Geiss, with whom he cannot have a relationship because of the war. Harras discovers that his friend Oderbruch, an engineer, is a member of the resistance movement, and is the saboteur. The play ends with Harras committing suicide by flying one of the damaged planes, submitting himself to eternal justice: he says that he’s been the “Devil’s General on earth too long.”69 Oderbruch (who damaged the Luftwaffe planes) describes the suicide flight and lays out the play’s moral judgment: Harras had to submit to “the uncompromising ruling law to which spirit, nature, and life are subservient. When it is fulfilled—it is called freedom.”70 The play concludes with this moment of apotheosis, familiar from Schiller’s historical dramas. Zuckmayer’s play portrays history as larger than the individual, a process that Harras can react to but not control. Enormously successful, the play was performed more than three thousand times in the American and British sectors of Germany between its 1946 premiere in ZГјrich and 1950.71 It was made into a film in 1955, starring Curd JГјrgens in the title role, and it remained popular in West Germany during and after the Cold War. In fact, Teufels General was Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s favorite play.72 Its historiography is, however, insidious. As Mariatte C. Denman argues in her article “Nostalgia for a Better Germany,” Teufels General actually undermines the only individual who attempts to stand astride history, and thereby suspects that resistance to Hitler was un-German. And the ending is ambiguous, offering no true way to intervene in history, foreseeing the dishonor and possibly the necessity of occupation and slow rebirth. The ambiguities of Zuckmayer’s play, and especially its representation of the historical processes at work on the individual during the war, allowed West German audiences, as Denman points out, “to remember the glories of the time, to mourn the loss of these values, to yearn for a nostalgic sense of Germanness, and to find confirmation of their personal disapproval of the

Nazi regime and the Allies.”73 During the economic boom of the 1960s, Harras came to embody “the ideals popularly associated with West German national character.”74 In dramatic history, Harras is a new iteration of Arminius. Page 128 →Castorf’s production disrupts the story, signs, and structure of Zuckmayer’s play. Corinna Harfouch, familiar to audiences as a GDR film star and Berliner Ensemble actress, played General Harras, and longtime VolksbГјhne actress Sophie Rois played Dr. Schmidt-Lausitz, a friend of Harras’s. Men played many of the female roles, with VolksbГјhne star Bernhard SchГјtz as the ditzy woman PГјtzchen and Hendrik Arnst as Olivia Geiss, aunt to Harras’s beloved Diddo. In the second act, SchГјtz moved into the role of Harras, while Harfouch played Olivia, and most of the other roles reverted to their original genders. Zuckmayer eroticized the air force throughout the play, especially in the person of Harras, a man’s man and flying ace attractive to women in his starched uniform. In Castorf’s production, Harras became an abstract idea or floating symbol, not a man. In a similar way as cross-dressing men point at the gestures, clothing, and styles of speech that allow women to express power through sexuality, Harfouch’s body in the general’s masculine-inscribed uniform, and her imitation of the stomping, shouting, power-mad general, made obvious Zuckmayer’s methods of representing German national character. Rather than inspiring a yearning “for a nostalgic sense of Germanness,” to quote Denman, Harfouch drew attention to the similarities between the seductive masculinity of General Harras and that of the Nazis. As for the text of the play, Castorf cut the entire third act. There is no resolution. Without the final act, the play cannot build toward tragedy; there can be no cathartic release of mourning for Harras and all he represents, no imagination of a future in which Harras’s character could reestablish itself. Castorf skipped from the end of the second act, with Harras under threat, to the end of the play, which depicts Harras’s suicide. Joachim Tomaschewsky, familiar from the conclusion of Golden fliesst der Stahl, delivered the final dialogue of Zuckmayer’s play as a speech. Here Castorf for the first and only time allowed the text to control the stage, framing its dramatic qualities and the charisma of an actor speaking persuasively from center stage. “Because if he wins, Harras,” Tomaschewsky almost shouted, “if Hitler wins this war, then Germany is lost. Then the world is lost.”75 Tomaschewsky as Oderbruch then ordered a “state funeral”76 for Harras. Straightforward and disconnected from the rest of the production, Tomaschewsky’s performance made the Schillerian sublime of Zuckmayer’s original visible without succumbing to it. Castorf showed how the original dramatic teleology could function and could be performed. His production demonstrated how theater imagines a nation. But by using a radicalized V-effect—in the casting and acting, and in tearing apart and decontextualizing Zuckmayer’s text—CastorfPage 129 → made it possible for the audience to read the latent Nazism in the characters, the content, and most importantly the structure of the play. A Federal Republic that relies on this story to create a common past and future after unification would be fatally flawed, unable to escape its fascist heritage. Einar Schleef so estranged his audience from Hochhuth’s play in Wessis in Weimar77 that the original stories disintegrated, overloaded with outside texts, songs, images, and actions. Wessis began with a single voice in the crowd. In the first performance, Schleef himself spoke the opening lines from the balcony of the auditorium,78 quoting from act 2 of Goethe’s Faust II: Gate and door I find open! That lets me finally hope that I, a living person, will no longer atrophy and corrupt into mold, dying from life itself. These walls, outside and inside, fall into ruins, bringing you down in their collapse. And if we do not escape, they will fall and crush us. I am bolder than anyone, but no one will force me further. But what do I learn today! I have not been here for so many years.79 Isolated, recontextualized in the Berliner Ensemble of 1993, and personalized through a slight but meaningful variation from the third-person reflexive pronoun sich of Goethe to the first-person ich and second-person dich (see the note 79 for exactly where and how the meaning changes), these words set the tone for what followed. The Wall has come down, doors have been opened, and we must come to understand new opportunities in a landscape of ruins. Brecht drew attention to the process of representation within the representation, but he still maintained the representation in order to tell his stories and promote his ideology. In his adaptation of Wessis, Schleef drew

attention to methods of historical dramatic storytelling, using excerpts by Schiller, Goethe, Brecht, and of course Hochhuth, fracturing Hochhuth’s neat stories of the unification process. Schleef emphasized repeating themes in history instead of the process-based historiography inherent in stories like Hochhuth’s. In their officer uniforms, and with their group movement and speech, the male chorus in Wessis did not represent historical criminals of a specific time and place. Many critics read them as Nazis, which Schleef condemned as ignorant of history.80 They wore uniforms that indicated German armies generally, including Nazi, GDR, and FRG. The men’s chorus stood in for the larger German society both past and present, displaying the violent tendencies of a culture across time. This is radical Brechtian historicization, and one without a particular ideological project, though still asking for active spectatorship. Page 130 →Schleef (as well as Castorf and MГјller) left his audiences in an ambiguous place, challenging them to engage critically with how history has been told, without offering a firm idea of what that history might be.

Satire and the Grotesque After the initial widespread joy at the fall of the Berlin Wall had dissipated, the grotesque nature of unified Berlin began to reveal itself, becoming a striking synecdoche for the nation as a joined but divided whole, with capitalist West and communist East unnaturally fused together. Theater artists noticed Berlin’s jumbled form. In a 1993 interview Castorf said that he wanted to “work only in Berlin, because here you are most able to see the artificial, screwed-together nature of these German halves, which do not belong together.”81 Ugly mixtures have long been a hallmark of the grotesque; in the opening of Ars Poetica, Horace, reflecting on bad art, wrote: “Suppose a painter decided to set a human head / on a horse’s neck, and to cover the body with coloured feathers, / combining limbs so that the top of a lovely woman / came to a horrid end in the tail of a deep-black fish— / when invited to view the piece, my friends, could you stifle your laughter?”82 Definitions of the grotesque since have typically included the aspects Horace described here: contrasting elements that cause a viewer or reader to perceive “the co-presence of the laughable and something which is incompatible with the laughable,”83 according to Philip Thomson in The Grotesque. In his book The Grotesque in Art and Literature, one of the first to grapple with the term across time and forms, Wolfgang Kayser defined the grotesque as the expression of the estranged or alienated world, i.e. the familiar world is seen from a perspective which suddenly renders it strange (and, presumably, this strangeness may be either comic or terrifying, or both). The grotesque is a game with the absurd, in the sense that the grotesque artist plays, half laughingly, half horrified, with the deep absurdities of existence.84 Thomson found the most basic definition of the grotesque to be “the unresolved clash of incompatibles in work and response,”85 with the abnormal, often physical, as a secondary presence. East German theater artists, especially Castorf, could not hold back their laughter and revulsion at Berlin. Robin Detje noticed in his article “Castorf in Never-Ever Land” that Page 131 →“Castorf has created a revival of commedia dell’arte for the petty bourgeoisie.”86 In describing the repeated bits of pratfalls, wordplay, and practical jokes performed by VolksbГјhne actors, Detje fails to see any purpose to them: “Their lazzi are not political; they are ornamental.”87 But Castorf’s lazzi are decidedly political. The grotesque in Castorf’s productions—his pointing out the “mole here and there as broad as a trencher,”88 as Jonathan Swift would say—is Aristophanic, satirizing the ruling elite. Often it takes the form of bodily democracy: the powerful are shown as embarrassingly biological and mortal. Let’s look at, for example, what we might call “the lazzo of the East German and the banana.” In Castorf’s adaptation of Arnolt Bronnen’s expressionist play Rheinische Rebellen (1992),89 a man in a bowler hat ate a banana with gusto, licked the peel, dropped it, and then slipped on it, over and over, as he tried to run across the stage to his wife. Later in the production, commercials for bananas blared on a television. The SchreivГ¶gel in Golden /Wolokolamsker purposefully slipped on a banana peel, virtuosically tumbling to the ground repeatedly. The lazzo of the banana is a comment on unification: East Germans infamously lusted for bananas after the fall of the Wall,

as the fruit had not been available to everyday consumers under communism. In the lazzo of the banana, a man ignores the present for the sake of an idealized future (full of bananas!) being sold to him on television. Man and object clash, and man falls subject to the immutable law of gravity. In Castorf’s satire, we see the silly desire of the East for this foreign fruit, and the greed of the West in selling it to the Easterner. Shit and piss, inevitable products of our bodies, infamously make recurring appearances on Castorf’s stages. At the end of his adaptation of Anthony Burgess’s classic antiauthoritarian Clockwork Orange,90 which premiered in the same season as Rheinische Rebellen, police in full riot gear stormed the stage and crapped in their pants as Chancellor Kohl spoke on a TV. The actors tossed around a life-size headless doll in the image of the chancellor, the figure of great power over the East becoming ridiculous. Meanwhile, though the authoritative Western police forces looked like perfect robot warriors in their riot gear, the actors played them as juvenile boymen who couldn’t control their bowels. Castorf made much use of Aristophanic parabasis in his works of the 1990s, as he had in Die RГ¤uber. An extended series of parabases fractured the end of Clockwork Orange. In this production, the actor Robert HungerBГјhler told the audience that “the ideal, the last political refinement that existed in Europe—that of November 4—broke down under the folksy ressentiment instinct. Never again on earth will such enormous jubilation and Page 132 →raucous enthusiasm be heard.”91 (Ressentiment is Nietzsche’s term for the hostility and resentment of the inferior toward their betters.) The original director’s script of Clockwork Orange at the Akademie der KГјnste indicates that Hunger-BГјhler was initially meant to say June 17 instead of November 4, the former being a reference to the brutally repressed workers’ uprising of 1953 in the GDR.92 Many socialist intellectuals argue that June 17, 1953, was a moment in which the GDR could have become a true communist state run by and for the workers. Here, Hunger-BГјhler indicated a similar status for November 4, a moment of possibility (the last moment of possibility?) destroyed by Nietzschean ressentiment, the Volk rising up but crushing itself through its self-hating bitterness. As Hunger-BГјhler spoke, Silvia Rieger danced around wearing an advertisement sandwich board with “RosaLuxemburg-Platz” on one side and “Horst-Wessel-Platz” on the other. At the time, Westerners were trying to return the square to its old, pre-GDR name of Horst-Wessel-Platz. (Horst Wessel, it bears mentioning, was a Nazi activist who became a martyr when he was murdered in 1930.) Herbert Fritsch (playing Alex) addressed the audience with an improvised speech on the Volk’s “desire to become petit bourgeois.”93 He was interrupted however by a bombardment of water balloons from the catwalks above, and he broke from his role to attack Castorf: “Hey, don’t hit me. I’m talking for a moment to the director. This is pissing me off, you ass. I have to perform again tomorrow. I’m killing myself here. This is a role I’m playing. Now I’m totally out of it.”94 In this scene, Castorf attacked the Ossi desire to integrate into the capitalist West, trading their socialist pasts for lives as petit bourgeois. But he also satirized the way the West forced that integration through nomenclature, hoping that if you renamed the streets, you could remake the people. Throughout Germany’s history, the powerful have rechristened Berlin’s streets after themselves, over and over again, like Rieger spinning in her sandwich board. Castorf stands athwart history here and shouts: “Stop! We are who we were.” At the same time, he made fun of himself and his class, throwing water balloons at Fritsch while the actor tried to deliver Castorf’s message about the petit bourgeois death wish. The anger of the Eastern artistic elite about the regular GDR citizen’s ressentiment is itself a form of ressentiment. In other words, Castorf satirized everybody, himself included. At the end of a section on Heiner MГјller in Tragedy and Dramatic Theatre, Lehmann notes that “MГјller’s texts alternate between tragic and sarcastic registers, Trauerspiel, the grotesque and farce.” He then quotes MГјller’s Wolokolamsker Chaussee III: Das Duell (The Duel), a text about the failed Page 134 →worker-led uprising against the GDR government on June 17, 1953: “In the belly of tragedy lurks farce, a virus from the future. When it bursts the mask [Larve], blood flows instead of sawdust.”95 Wolokolamsker Chaussee III does not appear in Mauser. (MГјller did, however, include it in his 1993 production Duell Traktor Fatzer [Duel Tractor Fatzer] at the Berliner Ensemble.) But Quartett, one of the central texts in MГјller’s Mauser production, perfectly illustrates how farce and the grotesque can burst from the belly of tragedy. After the first intermission of Mauser, Dagmar Manzel as Merteuil, in a sparkling ball gown, and JГ¶rg Gudzuhn as

Valmont, wearing a puffy lace collar and flaming red wig, his face painted like a clown, faced each other across the long Deutsches Theater stage. During the climax of the tragedy of the French Revolution, they traded sexually charged insults, laughing at their obscenity. Growing desperate in his flirtation, Gudzuhn/Valmont grabbed at Manzel/Merteuil, losing his jacket and tearing open his shirt to expose his bony chest, drawing dashes on it to make a crosshair. “You don’t have to tell me, Marchioness, that the wine was poisoned,” Gudzuhn /Valmont said. “I wish I could watch you die as I watch myself now. By the way, I am still pleased with myself. This can masturbate even with the maggots. I hope my performance didn’t bore you.” Manzel /Merteuil answered: “Death of a whore.”96 Page 133 → Fig. 7. Background: Silvia Rieger, as Alexandrowa, in a sandwich board that reads “Horst-Wessel-Platz” on the visible side and “Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz” on the other. At the table: Robert Hunger-BГјhler as Alexander. In the foreground: Herbert Fritsch as Alex. The image illustrates some of the madness of Frank Castorf’s Clockwork Orange (VolksbГјhne Berlin, 1993). (Photograph: David Baltzer / bildbuehne.)

Landscape Dramaturgy Nine women, in dresses the colors of the German flag, appeared at the back of the dark and bare proscenium stage after the opening of Schleef’s Wessis in Weimar. The bare brick wall of the Berliner Ensemble visible behind them, they sang “HГ¶re Kind vom Schwabenland,” (“Listen Child of Swabia”): “Our German language is / the same all over.”97 Originally a GDR children’s song about unifying Germany (Swabia was in the FRG), “HГ¶re Kind” became an ambiguous postunification plea for togetherness in the new context of 1993. As the chorus of women walked slowly downstage, another chorus of men in military uniforms emerged behind them, and the production shifted to the penultimate scene of Schiller’s late Sturm und Drang play Kabale und Liebe (Intrigue and Love, 1784), in which Ferdinand poisons his love Luise, tricked by his father’s minion Wurm into believing that she has been unfaithful. The men read the part of Ferdinand and the women read Louise, a German couple whose courtship becomes a murder-suicide. From hope to death: the possible future of the GDR and the FRG, represented through Page 135 →a communist song and a play important for the Sturm und Drang. Other scenes that followed epitomized certain German historical periods, including performances of Brecht’s poem “Wer aber ist die Partie” (“But Who Is the Party”) and the Kaiserreich song “Heil dem Geschlecht” (“Salute the Dynasty”). And some scenes directly represented the past or German myths, including excerpts from Schiller’s Die RГ¤uber and Maria Stuart, as well as from Goethe’s Faust I and II. The effect is historically dissonant, each scene reflecting a different period, style, tone, and ideology, but with thematic or imagistic leitmotifs that connected the disparate scenes, particularly feuding families and soldiers from different eras wearing the same uniform. Where Hochhuth’s Wessis in Weimar structures history as chronological, Schleef’s production asked his audience to observe and scrutinize the history the play represents as if it were a scene from nature, a field apprehensible all at once. In Schleef’s Wessis in Weimar, history does not move forward through reversals and recognition, but is composed of events always in relation to each other. It may seem out of context to paraphrase the early twentieth-century American Gertrude Stein when discussing late twentieth-century Germany. But we can see “landscape theater” in Schleef’s and MГјller’s productions, a concept that Elinor Fuchs and Lehmann98 argued can be traced back to Stein’s essays. In her essay “Plays,” Stein wrote that a play should not be a story but rather a landscape. “The landscape has its formation,” Stein wrote, and “after all a play has to have formation and be in relation one thing to the other thingВ .В .В . not moving but being always in relation, the trees to the hills the hills to fields the trees to each other.”99 As Fuchs showed in The Death of Character, Thornton Wilder attempted to understand Stein’s “landscape play” by describing it as “a thing held in view the whole time.”100 Fuchs argued that “it seems evident that Stein uses вЂlandscape’ as a metaphor for a phenomenological spectatorship of theater, a settled-back scanning or noting, not necessarily of natural scene, but of any pattern of language, gesture and design as if it were a natural scene.”101 Or, in the case of the productions I discuss here,

a settled back-scanning of a pattern of history. Wilder’s quote neatly encapsulates the conceptual framework and the ethical conditions of the “landscape historiography” of Schleef’s and MГјller’s productions: history is something that should be held in view the whole time. In discussing landscape theater in The Death of Character, Fuchs connects Stein and the contemplative “static theater” of Maurice Maeterlinck102 to contemporary theater works that “have non-linear spatial structures, and are concerned not with individual character or temporal progression but with a Page 136 →total state or condition, and also draw important moments of imagery from natural landscape.”103 Prominent among these artists is Robert Wilson, who staged MГјller’s short text Explosion of a Memory / Description of a Picture in 1986 as a prologue to Alcetis at the American Repertory Theatre. In fact, Fuchs argues that the idea of landscape theater “may have formed an early basis for collaboration between Wilson and MГјller.”104 We can see how nonlinear development in the theater of Wilson and MГјller reflects not just a lack of interest in temporal progression, but is at least sometimes actually a historiographic goal. MГјller wrote Bildbeschreibung (translated as Explosion of a Memory / Description of a Picture, 1984)—sans characters, speech prefixes, dialogue, or scene breaks—for Robert Wilson. The English title of the playtext hints at its radical restructuring of how the past can and should be viewed: the explosion of the personal past onto a canvas, where it becomes an image. In this selection from Explosion / Description, the dead and buried upset the landscape: “The fluttering fingers of the stranger knitted the steel mesh round the low mountain range from which only one paper-white peak protrudes, still unprotected, the mesh protection against rock slides triggered by the wanderings of the dead, underground.”105 To cite one more example, Wilson’s Einstein on the Beach (first produced in 1976) encouraged a “scanning” mode of historical sight in its overview of the twentieth century: images of creeping trains and spaceships, Einstein himself, and references to the relativity principle both through words and images. Time melts into space in Einstein on the Beach and Bildbeschreibung. Lehmann connected the landscape metaphor of spectatorship to the dramaturgy of postdramatic theater: “Instead of following a play because of вЂnervous’—we may as well translate this as вЂdramatic’—tension, one ought to contemplate what was happening onstage as one would otherwise contemplate a park or a landscape.”106 The dramaturgy of postdramatic theater, at least in those works that artists build out of materials from the past, encourages a phenomenological spectatorship of history. Landscape historiography becomes especially clear when we compare Hochhuth’s linear play to Schleef’s postdramatic production of it. In Hochhuth’s play, dramatic tension builds as each scene develops toward an outrage, and as each outrage leads to a greater outrage, until the audience (in theory at least) storms out of the theater to protest in the streets. Hochhuth’s dramaturgy is teleological, demonstrating causes and effects. It illustrates specific political, social, and economic problems using specific characters, and shows how those problems came to be in the specific time and place of unifying Germany. In the Brechtian sense, we can clearly see how we should Page 137 →intervene in the process represented in the play, and Hochhuth calls on us to do so. One of the characters, in dialogue, addresses Hochhuth’s readers: Unfortunately, / what you say about our sheep-mentality / is not entirely untrue. It must be genetic, because now, in freedom, / we allow the Westerners to do to us all sorts of ignominies, / with the exception of the murder / of the Treuhand president, assuming Easterners are behind it.107 Intervention in the historical process is not only possible in the dramaturgy of Hochhuth’s play, it is ethically obligatory. We ought not be sheep. Schleef’s production of the same text shows unification (represented most directly in the excerpts from Hochhuth) always in relation to other events and figures in German history. A nineteenth-century Yiddish song follows Hochhuth’s “A Brotherly Brawl in Germany”;108 a selection from Bach’s Saint Matthew Passion comes between an excerpt from Nietzsche’s Die frГ¶hliche Wissenschaft (The Gay Science) on parliamentarianism—read by Martin Wuttke as he steals shoes from corpses—and a patriotic GDR children’s song. Notably, the only “document” collected by Hochhuth that Schleef included in his production was the minister of justice’s letter, which Schleef put in the mouth of a universalized Goddess of

Justice. The songs, play excerpts, and philosophical quotes are specific references, but the quick transitions between them and the lack of contextualization ask that observers notice relationships, rather than think about specific political and social circumstances. The uniforms the men wear display a resemblance between superficially different armed forces, becoming, as we saw earlier, a synecdoche for German society. Schleef’s production stressed the continuity between past and present violent tendencies in the German culture and Kultur. So with his field of history, Schleef emphasized correspondences over causes and effects. In attacking Schleef’s production, a critic for the hard-left Neues Deutschland focused on exactly this point: “Schleef dissolved the German tragedy of the present into an abstract German suffering-passion.”109 It is true. Schleef moved entirely away from representing events. His was a cultural, an aesthetic historiography. Goethe, Schiller, Nietzsche, Bach, Brecht, and Hochhuth are all connected to and help us understand the German Bruder- und Schwesterzwist (sibling strife). This landscape structure, along with the absence of clear victims and criminals (roles that are obvious in Hochhuth’s play), gave spectators the freedom to draw their own personal connections to German history and culture and Page 138 →come to their own conclusions. The audience had to rely on their individual memories—of World War II, the GDR, and unification, and also of the performance itself—to understand their experiences of Wessis. This mode of historical perception has ethical consequences. In encouraging the audience to scan German history as if it were a landscape painting, the historiography of Schleef’s production gave them opportunities to notice patterns, among them patterns of violence and aggression, the ways in which impulses to unify have been accompanied by impulses to tear one another apart. Fig. 8. The men’s chorus, in military coats and boots, and women’s chorus, in striped dresses the colors of the German flag, dance together in Einar Schleef’s production of Rolf Hochhuth’s Wessis in Weimar (Westerners in Weimar, 1993) at the Berliner Ensemble. (Photograph: Ute Schendel.) Similarly, the revolutions in MГјller’s Mauser—France 1789, Russia 1918, Germany 1989—exist relative to one another like the trees, birds, and mountains of landscapes. The unit set, by Greek designer Jannis Kounellis, abstractly echoed two major images of the German twentieth century: a (Berlin) wall, angled to a point far upstage; and a smokestack, center, on a turntable, surrounded by train tracks (Auschwitz). Both served as playing spaces, but were also far enough upstage to function as portentous background. Time meant to be read chronologically collapsed into space that had to be scanned and kept in view at all moments. Page 139 →For the prologue to Mauser, which set the ground rules for the production, MГјller chose Herakles 2. Hermann Beyer, sitting on top of the wall, described Heracles attempting his second task, searching for the hydra in a forest. As he spoke, five men in black trench coats slowly pushed across the stage what the production script calls a “revolutionary handcart loaded with busts of Lenin.”110 The audience watched Beyer through smokestacks and through the busts of Lenin, the space thick with signs of history. In Herakles 2, Heracles searches for the hydra in a forest, and quickly becomes lost in time and space: “In the first days and nights, or was it only hours, how could he measure time without the sky.”111 Eventually Heracles recognizes that “the forest was the animal, it had long been the forest he had believed he had been crossing through which was the animalВ .В .В .В , the track he was following was his own blood, from which the forest, which was the animal, since when, how much blood does a man have, took its samples.”112 Like Heracles, we cannot calculate time chronologically in the forest of German history; in order to escape, we must shift our perspective, scanning time as if it were space. Heracles only finds his enemy and refinds himself when he stops looking at the individual trees and starts looking at the forest. We too become lost in space and time when we examine only individual monsters, instead of looking for larger monstrous forces in the entire landscape. Schleef’s and MГјller’s postunification productions presented a continuous German past and rejected teleological time, as in Stein. But they also adapted the “continuous present”113 found in Stein and Wilson. While Stein, according to Lehmann, “emancipates the clause from the sentence, the word from the clause, the phonetic from the semantic potential and the sound from the cohesion of meaning,”114 Schleef and MГјller

emancipated action from cause and effect, and events from the cohesion of meaning. In their landscapes, singular narrative history expanded into multiplicity, fluctuating with changes in perspective and focus, while German symbols and myths become visible as symbols and myths due to their proximity to each other. Audiences for Mauser watched figures moving in a landscape that included Auschwitz, the Berlin Wall, and the failed German revolution of 1918. The teleological historiographies of dramatic theater limit a reader, who gets lost in individual events. The landscape historiographies of the postdramatic theater open an observer to correspondence. It might be objected that postdramatic historiography encourages a cynical and circular view of history, in which the human participants are doomed to repeat horrors in an endless cycle. But, as we will see as we continue, postdramatic historiography is deeply engaged politically. It shows that the Page 140 →past is incomplete and always disappearing, that history must be continually reexamined by present observers. And, in these productions, postdramatic historiography directly challenged the closed histories of the 1990s, which used narratives of the past to define the nation’s present and future. In exposing and exploding the role of the past in the German nationalist imaginary, Castorf, MГјller, and Schleef encouraged a multichronic vision of the landscape of the present.

Unimagining the Nation In the Passagenwerk (Arcades Project, 1927–40), Walter Benjamin argued that “the concept of progress must be grounded in the idea of catastrophe. That things are вЂstatus quo’ is the catastrophe. It is not an everpresent possibility but what in each case is given [das jeweils Gegebene].”115 Always influenced by Benjamin, Heiner MГјller included this quote in the program for his Mauser at the Deutsches Theater. The catastrophe is not the crisis of unification; the catastrophe is that Germany continues to “progress.” Frank Castorf spoke to exactly this point in the interview we began this chapter with: “Everything that came before us was practice for the present that we now have. That is insane continuity, not crisis.”116 To quote Lehmann on Heiner MГјller again: “If the hope for dialectics is extinguished, the virus of farce will destroy the same tragedy from which it has drawn its sustenance.”117 Such was the situation for MГјller in Berlin in 1991, after the final death of the GDR, the hope for dialectics seemingly extinguished—and it explains why tragedy was impossible for all three East German directors, even tragedy as understood through Lehmann’s definition. Through their dramaturgy, the productions discussed in this chapter demonstrated the continuity of failed turning points in German history much more effectively than written history could. The production Mauser moved from a reflection on history generally (in Herakles 2), to the October 1917 Russian revolution (the play Mauser), the French Revolution (Quartett), and the end phase of socialism in East Germany (Der Findling and Herakles 13). In these periods of “revolution,” Mauser found a lack of peripeteia. Quartett, after all, takes place both before the French Revolution and after World War III. The same actors portrayed figures that never quite formed into characters, and actions took place in front of the same unit set. Rather than inciting change, the revolutions MГјller depicted destroyed their own children. In the final section of Mauser, MГјller interwove Der Findling with Page 141 →Herakles 13, a monologue MГјller adapted from the final messenger report of Euripides’s Herakles. A row of jackets now hung over the unit set as the ensemble of actors performed the roles together. Caught in a hallucination, Herakles murders his children in Herakles 13. Here, Hermann Beyer repeatedly pushed the other actors to their knees and hit them over the head with a book, causing them to fall on their faces before standing up again to repeat the ritual. Eventually the exercises became exhausting. As the Herakles 13 monologue reached its bloody conclusion, JГ¶rg Gudzuhn sang, “The Party, the Party, it is always right”118 and pinned a medal on Beyer’s chest. The GDR is Heracles, destroying the future by murdering its children. In Der Findling, a party functionary reports on the “antirevolutionary” activities of his adopted son, forcing the young man to flee west. After Gudzuhn’s song, Petra Hartung read a speech for the disintegrated GDR: “FORGOTTEN AND FORGOTTEN AND FORGOTTEN / The ThГ¤lmann song The partisans / from Amur and the people hear the signals / The red bandana drenched by Stalin’s victim / And the torn blue shirt for the dead man / fallen at the Wall Stalin’s memorial / For Rosa Luxemburg.”119 Fig. 9. In the final scene of Heiner MГјller’s production Mauser, at the Deutsches Theater Berlin in 1991, jackets hang from the rafters as the ensemble performs MГјller’s text Herakles 13. (Photograph: Wolfhard

Theile / drama-berlin.de.) In Mauser, the end of the GDR and the unification of Germany are Page 142 →ghosted by Stalin, Rosa Luxemburg, and the French Revolution. These events and individuals—world-historical in the Hegelian sense—existed in the production not as chronological history, in which they would generally function as turning points, leading toward a capitalist or a communist state, depending on one’s perspective. MГјller instead placed them in a landscape, encapsulated by the image of “the dead man / fallen at the Wall Stalin’s memorial / For Rosa Luxemburg.” These were all moments of insane continuity, not crisis. Remember the poem published in the Mauser program? “What one needs is the future / and not the eternity of the moment. / You must disinter the dead, over and over, / Only from them can you create the future.” Mauser was an antinarrative of unification, presenting overlapping images from the German past, disinterring events and figures nationalists would rather forget. It was not just a nonnarrative form, but actually worked to unmake the narratives that had congealed around unification. In Mauser, MГјller presented not a final truth but a series of destructive ideological wars over what truth is. It ended with a striking image of death. In the final moment, MГјller himself (a recording) read from Brecht’s Lesebuch fГјr StГ¤dtebewohner (Reader for City Dwellers, 1927): “You must still learn the ABCs. / The ABCs mean: / They will finish you off. // Only do not think about what you have to say: / You will not be asked. / There are enough eaters. / What is needed here is ground meat. // But that should / not discourage you!”120 As MГјller’s voice echoed in the auditorium, four bodies fell from the ceiling, hanging by the hands, the waist, the foot, and the neck. They swayed in the air for a moment, dark shadows against the white wall. The deaths are not a resolution to the play, but a continuation of what had been happening throughout: the destruction of individuals at the hands of ideological systems. But that should not discourage you; if you see and acknowledge the piles of wreckage in the past, perhaps you can move forward with an eye to where you’re headed. The lack of peripeteia is a key structural feature of postdramatic historiography. Schleef set Wessis in Weimar in the blank space of the stage, moving fluidly and without comment between time periods, which provided material for the production without settling into legible representations of specific events or individuals. Golden /Wolokolamsker shifted between different origin myths of the GDR, while also incorporating MГјller’s reflection on its end—as in Wessis, no framing device indicated transitions for the audience. And with its integration of the present into the past, Des Teufels General examined the genesis of the Federal Republic in the ashes of Nazi Page 143 →Germany, finding the nationalism of the Nazis in the origins of the newly expanded FRG. But continuity does not equal equivalence. These are distinct moments, and the directors displayed them as such. The continuity in this historiography is a status quo of revolutionary opportunity failing to develop into utopian revolution. Benjamin defines his “basic historical concepts” in Passagenwerk a few paragraphs after the catastrophe passage quoted above: “Catastrophe—to have missed the opportunity. Critical moment—the status quo threatens to be preserved. Progress—the first revolutionary measure taken.”121 The 1990s were a critical moment, with the status quo of the FRG threatening to be preserved. And continuity, not crisis, haunted Berlin. Where historians write German history as a drama with moments of crisis, Castorf, MГјller, and Schleef saw history repeating not just twice but many times—opening to audiences the possibility of difference, politics emerging from structure rather than ideological content. Historiographies that rely on peripeteia, on identifying the key turning points in history, create dramas out of unification These dramas promote ideological points of view, in particular conservative ideologies—projecting the German nation forward—growing ever stronger. Even leftist intellectuals, who like these directors view historical writing as an artificial construct,122 tried to incorporate unification into a German history of “failed turning points.” But they also accepted some renationalization of German historical consciousness as inevitable,123 trying to claim this process for the Left, and advancing, for example, as Habermas did, a notion of constitutional patriotism, whereby citizens would identify with their nation’s laws rather than feeling themselves connected through ethnicity. Ultimately, the Left also legitimized the German nation.

If a nation is an imagined community, “a cultural artefact portrayed/narrated by other cultural artefacts, ”124 Castorf, Müller, and Schleef disturbed the German community with extreme Verfremdung effects that turned performances into antinarrative cultural artifacts. Satire sees only incompleteness and inadequacy, mocking all stories; landscapes of history do not accommodate development. In abjuring the historiography of Hegel, postdramatic productions disputed the notion that a nation-state could be a solution. Nonteleological, satire does not search the past in order to find a process guided by a knowable Spirit and does not accommodate dialectics, but rather looks for correspondences. There is no German nation. Only a landscape dominated by terrifying ghosts.

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6. Performing Archives and Museums in the Freie Szene Along Bernauer Strasse For a time in Berlin, I lived in southern Prenzlauer Berg, a short walk from Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz and the VolksbГјhne. Leaving my apartment, I would haul my bicycle out from the basement and ride it across town to the Akademie der KГјnste Archive, in the neighborhood of Mitte between the Nordbahnhof and Hauptbahnhof train stations. In the archive I watched videocassette recordings of the productions I discussed in the previous chapters and read meticulously kept notes collected from rehearsals. So I spent my days buried in the past, living, it almost felt like, in 1989 and 1990 with Heiner MГјller and others. What’s more, on my way to the archive I rode—or took the bus on the many cold, damp days—past Mauerpark, an anarchic open space where the Wall once stood, and then along Bernauer Strasse, a former dividing line between East and West, and site of the Berlin Wall Memorial. Berlin, we know, is a city of many times, and seldom did I feel this more than while commuting to the archive. On nice mornings, I would pause in my commute to explore Bernauer Strasse. The Berlin Wall Memorial (GedenkstГ¤tte Berliner Mauer) is a linear park, almost reminiscent of a bike trail, a concrete path winding through well-tended green lawns. But these lawns are punctured by twelve-foot rusted poles representing the Wall, short steel columns displaying small screens with news videos from 1961–89, and a section of the actual Wall with re-created death strip. The nearly Page 145 →one-mile-long path is episodically narrative, beginning on its eastern end with stories of people who attempted to escape, and moving through areas dedicated to the destruction of Berlin by the militarized border, the building of the Wall, and finally, on the memorial’s western end, everyday life along the Wall. Giant images are plastered on the sides of some of the buildings abutting the park, including the iconic photo of a GDR soldier jumping over barbed wire on August 15, 1961, defecting to the West three days after the border was closed. Fig. 10. Visitors at a section of the Berlin Wall Memorial along Bernauer Strasse, where tall steel polls stand in for the concrete wall and a green lawn marks the death strip. On the building behind the park, a photograph from 1961, the year a barrier was first erected between East and West Berlin, shows people fleeing the GDR by crawling out of a window in a building on the border zone. (Photograph: J. Hohmuth, courtesy of the Berlin Wall Foundation.) This memorial is one of many in Berlin erected after 1990 by the united city. One can be somewhat cynical about this memory boom, which draws tourists and their euros to a city that certainly isn’t attracting anybody for its climate or beaches. But there is also a genuine need on the part of the city, its citizens and government, to build up sites of memory (lieux de mГ©moire, in Nora’s phrase) that could help it, and its visitors, avoid repeating the many horrors that have transpired there. The memorials are a sometimes startling mix of guilt, greed, calm beauty, and historical information. Page 146 →And as we will see in this chapter, the ways in which the history of unification—and thus that of Germany at large—have been written in Berlin’s museums and memorials impose narratives on visitors, despite, or really because they invite you to play with them, influencing behavior in ways visitors are not fully aware of. In this chapter, I examine three recent productions from the German theater that deal directly with unification in theme and content. We will find that performance can draw on the attributes we assign to both history and memory to encourage a critical attitude toward the past, with individuals encountering objects in museums and archives, as well as the layers of memory in streets, as “scriptive things”1 to be engaged and improvised with. I use the productions to reflect on, and at times revise, ideas first presented by Diana Taylor and Robin Bernstein, as well as the key scholars they drew on. We began this book in Alexanderplatz, walking through the bustling public square with protestors in 1989, and then again, guided by Rimini Protokoll, twenty years later for 50 Aktenkilometer. Now we return to 50

Aktenkilometer, to examine the production more closely in its context: a much-changed, commercialized Berlin, with a memory industry of which the Berlin Wall Memorial is only one example.

Documentary Theater in the Freie Szene The events that led to the unification of West and East Germany in 1990 have been represented and commemorated in many ways since 2000: in movies, including the humorous and nostalgic Good Bye, Lenin! (2003), which delights in re-creating the material objects of life in the GDR; at historical sites like Bernauer Strasse; and in museums, such as the DDR Museum, where you can pretend to drive that good-old communist clunker, the Trabant. 50 Aktenkilometer is one of several theatrical experiments in the past ten years by independent German theater artists, located primarily in Berlin, who explore the collective memory and historiography of the unification period by citing or satirizing the aesthetics of archives and museums. Among other examples that I have had the opportunity to see, the collective She She Pop arranged a conversation between themselves, from the West, and women born in the former East for Schubladen (Drawers, 2011), exchanging memories about growing up in the divided Germanys, and growing older in the united nation. Director HansWerner Kroesinger examined the historiography of the Berlin Wall in Vermauern (To Wall Up, 2009): amid a clutter Page 147 →of photographs and objects, Kroesinger staged a 1961 discussion between Nikita Khrushchev (leader of the Soviet Union from 1958 to 1964) and Walter Ulbricht (who led the GDR from 1950 to 1971), just before the building of the Berlin Wall. RenГ© Pollesch satirized the 2006 Stasi film The Lives of Others in his production LВґAffaire Martin! Occupe-toi de Sophie! Par la fenГЄtre, Caroline! Le mariage de Spengler. Christine est en avance (also 2006, at the VolksbГјhne Berlin). And andcompany&Co., another collective, staged their first of several history obsessed productions with little red (play): “herstory” (2006), a fragmentary piece in which a time-traveler questions former and future communists about the end of history, creating a “documentary fairy-tale” and “an archive for utopias, lost and found.”2 Not coincidentally, all but one of the productions I have listed come from the freie Szene (with the exception LВґAffaire Martin! by Pollesch). In the “independent theater scene,” artists, often working in a range of media and across disciplines, apply for grants to fund individual projects, which they tour to festivals and theaters like Hebbel am Ufer in Berlin, with no long-term support guaranteed. It is a response, in part, to the structures of the Stadts- and Staatstheater, city- and state-supported theaters with mostly guaranteed budgets and fixed ensembles, where, some argue, stability can come at the cost of innovation. In the freie Szene, artists, often working in collectives, have the freedom to imagine new ways of creating, rehearsing, and producing performance. The freie Szene allows participant-driven, smartphone-enabled historical tours of the former East Berlin, as well as collectively created conversations between amateur performers, with no playtexts to rely on. Artists can do months of original historical research during the rehearsal process, while incorporating that process (of rehearsal and research) into the final performance.3 Many of these freie Szene productions, most obviously 50 Aktenkilometer, demonstrate some of the ways in which, over the past ten years, German theater artists have been creating what could be a called a “documentary theater of the digital age,” transforming the documentary form with alternative dramaturgies, contemporary technologies, and moral ambiguity. These works, such as the ones I described briefly above, are related to German documentary theater, but also sharply break from that movement. Needing to establish the objective veracity of the Holocaust, documentary theater in the 1960s relied upon a belief that truth can be discovered and represented. Peter Weiss and other documentary playwrights desired the thing-in-itself, building dramas solely out of archival materials, which they hoped would allow them to avoid the delusions and propaganda of the Nazi period. For Page 148 →artists such as Weiss, documents equaled objective facts, and facts equaled authentic historical reconstruction, a relief from the fakery of the media, politicians, and theatrical representation. The documentary artists today, though we should be cautious in calling them that, share with Piscator, Weiss, and playwright Rolf Hochhuth a common interest in archival research and in bringing startling materials that document the past onto stage and into public view. But rather than accepting the universal truth of such materials, artists today explore the representation and storytelling inherent in presenting historical documents. They

interrogate how actors, primary source material, and various media can work together to create a feeling of “truth” and how audiences perceive and relate to different methods of presentation. As Thomas Irmer wrote, in an essay on German documentary theater since the 1990s, “The audience has to be engaged in relating and deciphering history from the broken pieces forming the collaged scenes to understand a discourse constructed of associations between long past and contemporary history, with no clear cause-and-effect relations specified—the way it is in reality.”4 Irmer lays out a solid introduction to “documentary” projects in Germany in the 2000s, and one does notice in them many omens of documentary theater—some combination of real historical documents, personal stories, and amateur performers. And as Irmer points out, the productions are structured in ways that force audience members to grapple on their own with making meaning. But the methods of the artists and groups I have listed differ so sharply from those of Weiss and Hochhuth, who made dramas with clear characters, narratives, and ideological ends, that one should not draw a direct line of influence, as Irmer does.5 Watching or participating, we must grapple with how historical artifacts generate a feeling of authority in our interactions with them, and we must sort out information from the scrambled buzz of live performance, objects, and recorded media. If documentary theater brings the methods of museums and history books into the theater, these freie Szene productions bring performance into museums and historical research. In this chapter I build off of Irmer, analyzing three projects in depth in order to explore the potential of performance to shape identity. Hans-Werner Kroesinger’s Vermauern engaged with history and memory through its material and museum-like setting, while She She Pop built an archive of personal memories in Schubladen, and Rimini Protokoll in 50 Aktenkilometer asked participants to embody the past. These groups created performances that fostered critical methods of interacting with history and memory; before we examine their productions, therefore, we should tour the Berlin Wall Page 149 →Memorial along with three important museums, helping us to understand how visitors to and residents of Berlin typically encounter the past.

Curating and Memorializing Unification Similar to historians, museum curators rely on evidence to tell coherent narratives about history; they reconstruct the past and make it material for visitors, shaping collective memory. As cultural historians Liedeke Plate and Anneke Smelik argue in “Technologies of Memory in the Arts: An Introduction,” museums have “served to construct and preserve the nation’s cultural memory through rituals of canonization”6 since the nineteenth century. Objects in museums conjure the past and make us feel close to it; unlike everyday objects, artifacts cast what can be described as “auras,” emanating a sensation of direct connection to the past, an impression that cannot be created by reproductions or representations. In the past twenty years or so, museums have invited more visitor participation, trying to avoid imposing overriding nationalist narratives while maintaining exhibits arranged around artifacts. Silke Arnold-de Simine, a memory theorist and German studies scholar, argues that this new “genre of the memory museum”—interactive exhibits focusing on everyday lives—“adopt[s] a mode of representation that has so far been the domain of art, and specifically literature.”7 I agree with this statement, but with a caveat. The mode of representation in memory museums relies upon narratives told through objects, dioramas, and text while requiring that visitors complete the loop of meaning by actively engaging with the exhibits, imaginatively projecting themselves into the stories of characters. With props, sets, and scripts, and asking for participatory performance, memory museums are much closer to theater than literature. At the first examination, it can seem that memory museums thereby avoid the problems of traditional history museums, but the stories told there still often add up to nationalist narratives. And by placing artifacts in dioramas with invitations for interaction, memory museums actually intensify the aura of objects, the feeling of being close, or even present, to the absent past. “Such an aesthetical creation of (almost) perfect dream worlds ends by paralyzing the critical faculties of visitors,” Stefan Berger argues. “They either go down memory lane (if they belong to an older generation) or they find themselves enthralled by a kind of time machine which allows them the illusion of participating in past events.”8 In Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood (2011), Page 150 →Robin Bernstein lays out a method of examining some objects as things,9 helping us “to understand how a nonagential artifact, in its historical context, prompted or invited—scripted—actions of humans who were agential and not infrequently resistant.”10 When museums ask us to engage with an artifact, placing it on a kind of a stage that evokes its

historical context, they script our behavior. We perform the museum’s historical narrative, and we thereby feel that we have gained a personal experience with the past, even though we are not aware of the process at work and lack agency in it. Through both the auratic presence of their artifacts and the mode of participation they invite, memory museums encourage identification over critical engagement. As Arnold-de Simine contends: “What has been described as the global вЂmemory boom’ means that representations of the past do not aim first and foremost to further knowledge, but more importantly to generate a sense of belonging to a past that requires emotional investment and identification, sometimes to an extent that suggests imaginative reliving of events.”11 This is especially true of performative memory museums and memorials. A number of important museums and memorials in Berlin shape collective memory with their content and structure. The Berlin Wall Memorial especially relies upon “imaginative reliving.” It invites visitors to personally experience the intimidation and inhumanity of the Wall, which looms above you along Bernauer Strasse like a ghost, its absence made liminally present by the tall rusted-red poles. We can symbolically cross the border—the spaces between the poles are expressly porous, allowing visitors to consciously move between East and West. Windows in a wall give us glimpses of the images and stories of men and women murdered trying to escape the GDR, asking us to imagine ourselves as victims of repression and isolation. Authenticity—the fact the memorial is on the site of the Wall, and that it preserves artifacts and fortifications—is central to the memorial’s goal of producing an emotional response from visitors. In fact, GГјnter Schlusche, the chief of planning the Berlin Wall Memorial, wrote in an essay that “the main objective of the memorial site is to link historical events with the authentic location.В .В .В . The authentic remains and traces of the border fortifications are extremely important and have to be protected, preserved and presented according to conservation principles.”12 The memorial asks us to participate in the memory-maintenance process, to keep the Wall alive, almost as a physical presence, for the generations that did not experience it personally. But there are no positive stories or representations of the GDR whatsoever at the Berlin Wall Memorial.13 Page 151 →Loudly designed, every inch of its labyrinthine space covered with objects and images, the privately run Checkpoint Charlie Museum also exploits its location at a milieu de mГ©moire—the former “Checkpoint Charlie” crossing on Friedrichstrasse between West and East Berlin—in order to generate profits. Aggressively pro-Western and anachronistically Cold War–era, the museum celebrates capitalism in its historical narratives, which hyperbolically stress the villainy of the GDR, and in its very structure: funneling visitors out through the gift shop, where you can buy fake fragments of the Wall as well as chocolate bars wrapped in famous images of it. The DDR Museum in Berlin, also privately owned, functions in a similar way, though less crassly and from the opposite point of view, selling experiences of the GDR. The “true nature of life in the DDR”14 at the DDR Museum includes the smell of a GDR living room, along with a restaurant serving Eastern bloc cuisine. By showcasing material objects and fetishizing their design, the DDR Museum commercializes the communist GDR retrospectively, creating a historiography of the former East that emphasizes the lamps, telephones, chairs, and automobiles that were the backdrop of everyday private life. (Not incidentally, the DDR Museum manages to do a much better job at branding, marketing, and selling East German products than the GDR was ever able to.) Meanwhile, the souvenir shop offers many of the same items available at the Checkpoint Charlie Museum, with the added bonus of coffee mugs displaying the DDR Museum logo and the words “Geschichte zum Trinken,” or “History to Drink.” You literally consume your way through the past at Checkpoint Charlie and the DDR Museum. Not far down Unter den Linden from the DDR Museum, the German Historical Museum has served the German military as well as official national identity interests for three centuries. Its building, called the “Zeughaus,” is an avatar of Germans’ ambiguous pride and shame in their heritage. After unification, Chancellor Helmut Kohl pushed for what would eventually become a district of museums, Museum Island, focused on displaying objects from the past in order “to ameliorate that national trauma, to вЂmaster’ the past and promote a positive understanding of German identity,”15 according to Karen Till, in The New Berlin, her study of postunification Berlin geography.

The permanent exhibit German History in Images and Artifacts at the German Historical Museum marks 1945–89 as a distinct period in German history, a caesura labeled by the museum as “The Divided Germany.” But this section actually deemphasizes German-German differences. With a fence between Eastern and Western sections, the museum displays objects that Page 152 →conjure everyday life, comparing household items such as blenders, irons, and televisions—and including, most prominently, the iconic cars from the East, the Trabant, and the West, a Volkswagen Beetle. On the Eastern side, we see displays on sports, women’s rights, and opposition groups, including a cell from a Stasi prison; on the Western side, we see displays on sports, women’s rights, and the late-1960s student demonstrations. In other words, the exhibit finds similarities in the differences, with the East as a kind of less accomplished and politically repressive echo of the West. Eventually the paths merge into a small exhibit on unification, displaying protesters’ signs from 1989, including an especially prominent “Wir sind ein Volk” poster in the shape of Germany, with Berlin symbolized by a heart. “The Divided Germany” projects “a utopian national whole that harmoniously integrates regional diversity,” as Barbara Kirschenblatt-Gimblett writes of the ways museums imagine identity.16 Despite the lack of planning for unification in the 1980s—the GDR and the FRG had long since settled into coexistence—and despite the cultural and economic differences between the “old” and “new” BundeslГ¤nder (federal states) that endure even today, the German Historical Museum writes the unification process as finished before it began. While the museum does not assert that the GDR was simply totalitarian, what is forgotten there—namely the desire for a “third way” and ambiguous feelings from East and West regarding unification both before and after—is as important as what is remembered. In their overall effect, the German Historical Museum, Checkpoint Charlie Museum, Berlin Wall Memorial, and even the DDR Museum create narratives of political history and everyday life from 1945–89 that emphasize a movement toward free-market capitalism. They reify their objects and foster a consumptive relationship to the past, encouraging identification through “imaginative reliving.” The museums echo postunification historiography as written by conservative historians, fostering an increased consciousness of national identity by emphasizing the similarities between individual lives in East and West Germany (“We were never that different”), as well as legitimizing the latter’s political and economic structures against those of the East. The German citizen imagined through the exhibits and the memorial sees him- or herself first and foremost as German; has knowledge of the atrocities committed by Germans, especially the Holocaust and the Berlin Wall; understands the GDR as totalitarian and the FRG as the best possible nation of Germans; and remembers the East through the Wall.17 Page 153 →

A Museum inside a Theater: Vermauern In a cramped and dusty-feeling room, the black-box space of the Maxim Gorki Theater, simple wooden tables were laid out with dioramas: letters, photographs, maps, statistics, and objects, such as a model of the Brandenburg Gate. With its references to the Berlin Wall and its amateurish feel, the space evoked the Checkpoint Charlie Museum, but after wandering through the exhibit, I sat in a bank of seats.18 Soon, two women entered and, businesslike in simple brown and purple dresses and high heels, cordoned off the audience from the displays. One cleared her throat and flipped open the folder she was carrying: “Transcript of a conversation between Comrade N. S. Khrushchev and Comrade W. Ulbricht on August 1, 1961.”19 Walking just past the cavernous German Historical Museum on Unter den Linden, the audience visited this small studio to watch Kroesinger’s Vermauern. His hourlong staging of a conversation between Khrushchev and Ulbricht from just before the building of the Berlin Wall, excerpted from a previously unknown transcript, premiered in 2009. Spare and direct in its performance style and aesthetics, Vermauern added depth to our understanding of the economic and political forces at work in the summer of 1961, while intervening in the collective memory of the Berlin Wall. Born in Bonn (the West German capital) in 1962, Kroesinger apprenticed with Heiner Müller—crossing between West and East Berlin regularly just before November 9, 1989—and his work often shows the influence of Müller, as well as of Andrzej Wirth and Hans-Thies Lehmann, two of his teachers at the Giessen Institute for

Applied Theater Studies. Irmer focuses primarily on Kroesinger in his essay on new German documentary theater and argues that “for Kroesinger, the question is not just the document or what is presented as documentary in theater; it is also the ways in which audiences relate to documents in different media.”20 Irmer connects Kroesinger’s “emphasis on the problematic nature of history (as incomplete, symbolic, and abstract in theater)” to the influence of MГјller, and writes that this “understanding of history, as viewed through the events of the past, calls into question the means by which those events are represented.”21 For example, in one of Kroesinger’s early productions, Q&A—Questions and Answers, which premiered in 1996, Kroesinger examined the Adolf Eichmann trial by separating, into three different rooms, video of the proceedings, sound from them, and actors re-creating them, allowing the audience to think through both the trial and the way it was shown in the news media (television and radio) and in the theater. Page 154 →Kroesinger focused his attention in Vermauern on how museums mediate the past. Judica Albrecht and Ana Kerezovic spoke the dialogue, translated for this production, with little emotion and without identifying with their characters. Rather than representing Khrushchev and Ulbricht through clothing and gesture, the actresses simply referenced them by setting up portrait photographs of the men. Occasionally, they used objects on the tables to illustrate a subject—moving around matchboxes as tanks, for example, or piling up potatoes as the two men discuss problems with crop production in East Germany. “I will begin with an explanation of our economic situation,” Ulbricht addressed Khrushchev. (The actresses switched roles for each performance.) “For two months no one could buy potatoes. The reason is that we had a bad harvest last year, and this year the weather was wet, so the potatoes have rotted in the land. This had absolutely nothing to do with the incorporation of privately owned farms into cooperative societies.”22 The men’s blunt conversation laid bare the everyday considerations of creating “real existing socialism” in Germany with a nonideological practicality that surprised the critics who wrote about the production.23 The men’s chief concerns lay with the generally low agricultural production in East Germany and the nation’s inability to buy resources like steel in order to keep its factories running efficiently. “We are suffering enormous losses through the border-crossers (the people who live in the GDR and work in West Berlin) and through deserters of the republic,” Ulbricht complains. “That’s why we cannot fulfill a part of the plan.”24 Engineers especially were fleeing the GDR, making the building of a communist state much more difficult. In order to solve problems arising due to the “enormous losses,” Khrushchev and Ulbricht repeatedly turned to the concept of building an “iron ring”25 around West Berlin. Again, they addressed how this could happen with the utmost practicality. Khrushchev was the de facto leader of all Eastern Europe, and he took a clear lead in the discussion: Before the introduction of the new border system, you should explain absolutely nothing, as that would only increase desertion and lead to traffic jams. This must be done in the same way that we implemented the monetary exchange. We will allow you one or two weeks’ time so that you can prepare yourselves economically. Then you should call in parliament and share the following communique: “As of tomorrow posts will be constructed and crossings forbidden. Those who want to pass through will only be able to do so with the permission of particular GDR public authorities.”26 Fig. 11. Judica Albrecht plays with toy Trabants—the iconic East German automobile—on a map of Berlin, while Ana Kerezovic reads aloud the August 1, 1961, conversation of N. S. Khrushchev and W. Ulbricht in HansWerner Kroesinger’s Vermauern (To Wall Up, 2009) at the Maxim Gorki Theater. (Photograph: Bettina Stöß.) Page 155 →Ulbricht, whose nation was dependent on the Soviet Union but did boast the strongest of the weak economies in communist Europe, revealed that preparations for this contingency were already under way: “We have a specific plan. The houses that have exits to West Berlin will be walled up. On other spots we will erect barbed-wire barriers. The barbed wire has already been delivered.”27 Albrecht and Kerezovic set up a diorama of the Berlin Wall: cigarette boxes that ring a large map of Berlin that covered one of the wooden tables. Loud

music periodically interrupted the dialogue, and the actresses sang along with (even danced a bit to) communist classics, including “Die Partei hat immer Recht” (“The Party Is Always Correct”). The conversation between the two leaders closed with a brief consideration of how Western governments could react to their unilateral closing of borders, and a decision to put off that discussion until their next talk. The actresses read the final words of the document: “The conversation lasted two hours and fifteen minutes. Transcription: (signature) (V. Kopletzew).”28 They shut their binders, pushed a toy Trabant—the iconic East German automobile—through the cigarette-box wall, and exited. Page 156 →After the production ended, the audience left the theater by passing through the tables and had an opportunity to examine the collection up close: the stage became a museum, both to the Berlin Wall and the performance that had just taken place. On the night I attended, many audience members stayed and browsed around. We had a chance to examine the materials of the production, picking up corncobs and model boats and studying photographs of President Kennedy and of people killed attempting to escape the East. Through charts that listed escapees and timelines that described the stages in the building of the Wall, we learned (or relearned) its history. On one level, the overall effect of Vermauern was of rather straightforward historical research. The history of the Berlin Wall that it contributes to, arguing that Soviet and East German leaders locked down borders to the West primarily out of economic concerns rather than ideological principles, is not atypical;29 historian Mary Fulbrook told exactly that story in A Concise History of Germany (2004),30 a summation of her more wide-ranging studies. With Vermauern, Kroesinger added to the archive of evidence that supports chronological, nationally focused accounts of the origins of the Berlin Wall by focusing on the motivations of the powerful elite responsible for having it built. This is the written history. But what collective memories of the building of the Wall did German audience members bring with them to a performance of Vermauern? Under the influence of Nora, Г‰tienne FranГ§ois and Hagen Schulze edited an enormous, three-part collection titled Deutsche Erinnerungsorte (German MemoryPlaces) to create a repository of collective memories connected to locations throughout Germany. The entry on the Wall in Deutsche Erinnerungsorte (written by historian Edgar Wolfrum) jumps right to the early morning of August 1961. Of the motivations of Khrushchev and Ulbricht, Wolfrum wrote only that “a week before, in Moscow, the party heads of the Warsaw Pact states agreed to the construction of the Wall, giving in to the pressure of Walter Ulbricht.”31 Wolfrum’s forgetfulness is reflected in the museums and memorials in Berlin, which do not address the motivations for building the Wall, emphasizing instead the victims who were killed trying to go over or under it. History makes clear the origins of the Wall as a barbed-wire, realpolitik border; German collective memory focuses on the Wall as it appeared after 1975, a tall concrete barrier with watchtowers and death strip. As he has done in many productions, Kroesinger used Vermauern to encourage a critical collective memory: a memory aware of the effects of mediating technologies and approaching the past analytically, especially as represented in museums. Vermauern framed its own theatricality, the field Page 157 →of representations it used to tell its stories. The casting (of women to read the words of men) and the acting style (deliberate and nonempathetic) both served to clearly distinguish the historical figures from the artists quoting them. When the actresses set up dusty portraits of Khrushchev and Ulbricht, they made their intentions clear: they spoke in the place of, but did not epitomize, the two men. The “breaks” for communist song and dancing, set off strongly against the reading of the text, self-consciously placed the realpolitik dialogue in a cultural context, a mix of propaganda and popular culture. The songs, from pre- and post-1961, asked us to put the Wall’s construction in dialogue with its later effect and imaginary, as well as its eventual demolition. The German Historical Museum presents objects in such a way as to emphasize their historical aura. In Vermauern, the props looked make-do and handcrafted, including the toy Trabant and the cigarette-box Wall. We could see how auracreation functions while touring the museum stage after the production, but without succumbing to it. Kroesinger intended the objects on his set to signal toward the past, but as obvious fakes laid out in the open instead of behind glass, we saw that they were props—representations of the past instead of artifacts.

Not overawed by the objects before us, we could better analyze the text and the way that Kroesinger presented it: a classic example of Bertolt Brecht’s Verfremdung effect, through which everyday emotions, objects, experiences, and stories appear newly strange and thus open to examination. In Vermauern, Kroesinger extended the V-effect beyond the theater and into the museum, focusing attention on specific historical conditions and the specific motivations and choices of individual people.

An Archive in the Streets: 50 Aktenkilometer In the years since Haug, Kaegi, and Wetzel founded Rimini Protokoll in 2000, the team has often raised questions about global and local citizenship in a liminal zone between theater and theatrical experience, making performance political through representational mode as well as explicit thematization. Their oeuvre includes staged productions that use amateur performers, radio plays, city tours, lectures, and unclassifiable one-on-one experiences. Let us return to Alexanderplatz, where participants gathered for Rimini Protokoll’s genrebending 50 Aktenkilometer.32 I strolled through the landscape of 2011 Berlin as my whispering headphones conjured 1989. The program for the piece, a large poster with a map and list of every recording, helpfully Page 158 →included a time-crossing legend of street names that the Berlin Senate has changed over the years in order to scrub the East of communist nomenclature, a guide for outsiders like myself: Dimitroff-Strasse became Danziger-Strasse and Marx-Engels-Platz became Schlossplatz. Sitting on a bench near the thirteenth-century Marienkirche, I listened to actor Axel Wandtke, who was engaged at the VolksbГјhne in 1989, as he asked me to observe the people walking by on Karl-Liebknecht-Strasse. He recalled what I might have seen before 1990: “perhaps a group of children, with white shirts and blue neck scarves, with a bit of red at the end, Young Pioneers, ThГ¤lmann Pioneers [the GDR equivalent of the Boy Scouts].В .В .В . And then a division of Russian soldiers could walk by.В .В .В . A member of the People’s Police, your friend and helper.” He remarked that “you could identify the Westerners back then. They were just more colorful.”33 I looked around. Almost everybody was dressed colorfully. The yesterday summoned by 50 Aktenkilometer included November 4, 1989, and the protests that led up to it, but not from the perspective of MГјller or Wolf, the people on the dais. Moving northeast of the Alexanderplatz train station, I listened to a man read protesters’ posters to a Stasi administrator over the telephone: “Bring vote-cheats before the People’s Court,” he reported one sign as demanding, while the agent sighed, “Oh boy.”34 Walking into an orange circle near the World Clock (a GDR landmark just east of the station), I heard activist Frank Pfeifer recollect his trouble differentiating the plainclothes Stasi from actual demonstrators: “You really couldn’t tell who had come to demonstrate, and who to impede the demonstration.”35 The police broke up one protest that Pfeifer was participating in and chased him through Alexanderplatz. In several locations spread out around Alex, scratchy recordings played of individuals calling Stasi headquarters to report planned protests or the movements of demonstrators, including “five hundred to a thousand with things and shouting headed toward the Palast der Republik” on October 10, 1989.36 On November 4, more than five hundred thousand protesters would march by this now-deconstructed government and civic building. The experience of 50 Aktenkilometer complicated narratives of the GDR that seek to remember crimes but forget joys, such as a young girl eating ice cream in the same building that houses her country’s government.37 But it also troubled narratives that may nostalgically delight in GDR kitsch (Ostalgie) while avoiding discussing the dangers of living in the East, such as a young man arrested after meeting his Western male lover at one of the nicest hotels in East Berlin. Haug, Kaegi, and Wetzel put the people on their stages Page 159 →or in their radio plays in charge of their own stories. The recorded figures in 50 Aktenkilometer did not become characters, much less stereotypes; they are individuals with complicated relationships with their former nation, not representatives or representations of “the dissident” or “the informant.” In opening up the Stasi archives, Rimini Protokoll made material generally difficult and time-consuming to access easily available. In fact, after its premier, 50 Aktenkilometer became downloadable as a free Android app. And it brought the Stasi material into the landscape where the stories take place, allowing for reflection on everyday life in a historical city and on the situatedness of memory, its close connections with space and with the present. So, initially, 50 Aktenkilometer appeared to exploit Nora’s ideas to the fullest, bringing history out of the archive to be reexperienced in space as memories. With 50 Aktenkilometer, Rimini Protokoll allowed participants to

experience the multidimensionality of time in Berlin while walking through the city: rejuvenating old memories; adding to what is remembered; and attaching those memories to spaces, images, and objects, even to the gestures you make upon direction. To paraphrase Rebecca Schneider in Performing Remains, this experience disrupts the present with the past, and also the past with the present,38 by projecting memories onto the landscape of today, a process that must inevitably change those memories, overlaying them with contemporary interests, fears, and goals. I can no longer casually walk past the Radisson without remembering it as the Palasthotel, site of a young man’s betrayal at the hands of an ex-lover, a betrayal that landed the man in prison.39 And I will always remember the Palasthotel for becoming a Radisson. Upon closer examination, however, we can see how 50 Aktenkilometer also expanded on Nora’s thinking. It is helpful here to return to Diana Taylor and her argument that the repertoire allows for the enacting of “embodied memory”40 through “embodied practice/knowledge,”41 communicating social identity across generations and allowing for the subversion of power structures that are sustained by the archive.42 As examples of the repertoire, she included “spoken language, dance, sports, and ritual,” and opposed them to archival objects: “texts, documents, buildings, bones.”43 But in asking participants to reexperience Berlin and reenact the gestures of dissidents and informants, Rimini Protokoll actually did not fight against the archive as a space that reinforces power structures; instead, it used digital technologies to interweave the archive and the repertoire. Taylor, in “Save As,” wrote that “digital technologies constitute yet another system of transmission that is rapidly complicating Western systems of knowledge, raising new issues around presence, temporality, Page 160 →space, embodiment, sociability, and memory (usually associated with the repertoire) and those of copyright, authority, history, and preservation (linked to the archive).” She continued by arguing that “the embodied, the archival, and the digital overlap and work together and mutually construct each other.”44 50 Aktenkilometer illustrates how theater and performance artists can productively explore and challenge the digital/repertoire/archive dynamic. To begin with, Rimini Protokoll actually contributed to the Stasi archive, adding interviews and increasing knowledge of what the archive contains (which is far, far more than what Rimini Protokoll was able to use). This is a symbiotic relationship, repertoire and archive actively reinforcing each other. Taylor asserted that the “repertoire requires presence,”45 but 50 Aktenkilometer shows how the archive also requires presence. By presence, Taylor means that “people participate in the production and reproduction of knowledge by вЂbeing there,’ being a part of the transmission.”46 This is exactly how Rimini Protokoll approached the archive: it must be explored, cataloged, transmitted, even digitized—not just by “experts,” but also by the “experts of the everyday” that Rimini Protokoll makes the subject of many of its pieces—the everyday citizens of Germany. And if history attaches itself to events, as Nora claims, then 50 Aktenkilometer must be seen as contributing to both memory and history. Many of the recordings came from specific demonstrations, already hugely important in written histories of the period, and also from personal actions, which the walkable audio-play insisted should be included. Meanwhile, the audio-play itself was archived, in particular through the smartphone app, which preserves 50 Aktenkilometer for future embodied interactions while also allowing Rimini Protokoll to continue adding to the stories. And a website47 archives the audio-play without the walking, giving people the opportunity to hear and rehear stories without having to be on the streets of Berlin, not so much displacing live bodies as encouraging those who have not visited the lieu de mГ©moire to do so. The archived website also enables further interaction and thought after the embodied experience. In “Save As,” Taylor expressed unease about online archives, and for good reason. She pointed out that the “objects in the digital archive require, rather than resist, the вЂchange over time’ I associated with the traditional archive. But вЂcopy’ as a form of transmission also differentiates the archival from the digital—and most profoundly from the repertoire.”48 Rimini Protokoll showed the potential—not the promise, only the potential—of online archives to promote forms of transmission more similar to mimesis and performance than the exact reproduction of the digital. Page 161 →

Drawers Full of Memories: She She Pop’s Schubladen

Founded in 1998, She She Pop is a collective composed of six women and one man—Johanna Freiburg, Fanni Halmburger, Lisa Lucassen, Mieke Matzke, Ilia Papatheodorou, Berit Stumpf, and Sebastian Bark—who met as students at the Giessen Institute. In early productions such as She She Pop: Live (2000), the members essentially staged themselves, engaging in open dialogue with the audience through the form of an all-female public-speaking contest. In their best-received production to date, Testament (2010), they brought their fathers on the stage, using Shakespeare’s King Lear as background material to explore their own relationships and father-daughter relationships in general. Schubladen, performed by a rotating cast and in the performance I attended49 by Freiburg and Paptheodorou, along with guests Annett GrГ¶schner, Alexandra Lachmann, Wenke Seemann, and Nina Tecklenburg, was a departure from She She Pop’s usual methods in a couple of ways. For one, the group had never before explored an explicitly national topic such as German unification; and, with the exception of Testament, they do not generally bring in outsiders. In this case, the outsiders were Easterners, as all members of She She Pop are from the West. Together, they collectively created Schubladen through rehearsals, sharing objects from their past and using those objects to incite dialogue. She She Pop arranged the performance thematically and roughly chronologically, and the production worked as a freewheeling conversation. As the audience filed into the theater, six women were pulling drawers, on wheels, onto the forestage and arranging the objects within the drawers: diaries, letters, photos, books, and music records, like the everyday history collected at the DDR Museum, some of it also in drawers. Here each drawer was unique, individual. The women moved upstage and sat on rolling chairs, arranged at three tables with two to a table. The Easterner GrГ¶schner—a well-regarded author, GrГ¶schner here was a middle-aged badass in a black Adidas jacket, a burgundy leather skirt, and tall brown boots—stood to announce that she would show us a picture from her drawer. As Johanna Freiburg moved to stand next to her, GrГ¶schner told us a story, her story, speaking in clear, direct statements, almost cautiously: On an August day in 1961, a young girl stands at the ticket window in the main train station in Magdeburg. She wants to go to Leverkussen [from East to West Germany]. Her train is to travel through Berlin. Page 162 →The train to Berlin leaves in five minutes. At the last possible moment, a young man enters the station holding twenty-five roses.В .В .В . He gives the roses to the woman with this sentence: “Please stay. I want to marry you.” The young woman is embarrassed; everyone is starring at her. She asks for some time to think. The train to Berlin leaves without her. The next morning, the young man receives unexpected help from the government: the border crossings in Berlin had been closed, barbed wire rolled out, and, finally, the Wall was built. This year my parents will celebrate their golden wedding anniversary. I may be crazy, Johanna, but I believe I owe my existence to the Wall.50 Tecklenburg, full of wild energy and representing the Western experience, followed GrГ¶schner immediately, describing her mother taking her to be baptized. As a sentimental pop song from the 1980s crooned (“Lieben ohne Leiden” [“Love without Pain”], by Udo and Jenny JГјrgens), the women rolled downstage to gather some objects from their boxes, picking carefully, and, having brought them back to their tables, began using the objects to remember their pasts and explain their personal histories to their partners. The indulgence of Tecklenburg’s Western mother, who stayed overnight with her daughter in the hospital when the girl had her tonsils taken out, was compared to the hardness of Lachmann’s Eastern mother, who left her daughter by herself in a hospital room described as a cage. To illustrate their dialogue, Tecklenburg and Lachmann held up and read quotes from parenting books from their childhood. The discussions that followed these, all inspired by the memory-objects the women brought, revolved around themes including “Capitalism” and “Love and Sex,” as two scenes are titled on the DVD. Often, the partner of the person speaking stopped the story to ask her interlocutor to define particular terms: “What is social success to you?” “Can you explain what a communist is?” They described their first impressions of each other, often harsh, and played for each other songs that meant something important to them at a particular time. The performance felt like it was building toward November 9, 1989, when the Berlin Wall came down. Arriving at that date, the women left their tables and walked to the front of the stage, standing shoulder to shoulder

to tell of their experiences during the late-night opening of the Wall. All and all, this was a typical East/West Auseinandersetzung, or back-and-forth conversation, though a couple of the moments came across as Page 163 →genuinely fresh. The women found a shared point of reference in the great East German figure skater Katarina Witt, who won two gold medals in the 1980s, and punctuated the common childhood memory by replicating her 1988 Carmen routine in a dance staged on rolling chairs, as the Romantic music from Georges Bizet’s opera played. Fig. 12. Nina Tecklenburg and Peggy MГ¤dler perform East German figure skater Katarina Witt’s 1988 Carmen routine in She She Pop’s Schubladen (2011). (Photograph: Barbara Braun / drama-berlin.de.) Schubladen became more unique when the production continued past the fall of the Berlin Wall, some scenes under the theme of the “End of the Federal Republic”—the end of pre-1989 West Germany, acknowledging rarely recognized changes that occurred in the West. The women discussed continued struggles and individual triumphs, their postmodern East German intellectual groups and lesbian bike gangs. Moving into the present, the women took turns asking each other to raise their hands and identify themselves according to various labels: “Do you think of yourself as a German? As an East German? As a woman? As a mother? As a feminist? As the child of workers? As a leftist? As neoliberal? As a heterosexual? As avant-garde? ” Various numbers of women raised their hands, sometimes to contradictory labels: their identities are not fixed by their pasts in East or West Germany, but it was also clear that those pasts, Page 164 →pulled around in the wheeled boxes, do influence their present lives. Tension built during this questioning; becoming frustrated with each other, they asked: “Do you have any idea what it is like to be [in my particular circumstance].” Their voices began to overlap and became indecipherable, conversation cut off by the refusal of individuals to listen to others, or to believe that anyone could understand their own uniquely difficult situation. Eventually the women calmed down, returned to their tables, and began the discussion anew, quietly, as the lights dimmed. The parallel to extreme identity politics was clear, and in its place She She Pop substituted empathy and the search for shared experiences, like watching Kati Witt, in order to enable communication. We might expect Schubladen, a live experience between an audience and nonperformers telling their authentic stories, to feel far more intimate than the dead objects collected in a museum. We heard personal stories; sometimes the women even read from their diaries. A reviewer for the online theater journal Nachtkritik wrote of being privy to “the drawers in which completely real memories are preserved.”51 The women made themselves vulnerable, and did so enthusiastically. They were quite likable, avatars through which audience members could project their own journey from the 1970s to today, or learn about the previous generation’s struggles and triumphs against the background of major change. And yet She She Pop refused to allow us to feel too close. Much was not being said and shown. Fights did not break out, nor did the women engage in any real disagreements, only occasionally lightheartedly teasing one another. The women repeatedly began anecdotes by announcing that they had brought a picture with them—but we in the audience did not get to see any of the photographs. These announcements, as well as the requests to stop and clarify terms, echoed the rehearsal process, giving the production the feel of being constructed in front of us, of being at least partially improvised (which in fact it was). She She Pop called attention to the mediation at work onstage, the framing of the theater that we might forget in leaning forward into the intimate onstage dialogue. They also added an additional frame, filming each other from time to time as they interviewed one another. The camera zoomed in on individual faces, which were then projected against a screen on the back wall, and we got a sense that we were not as close to them as we perhaps thought, a moment that worked against the intimate presence of the women. In one section of the performance, an Eastern woman read from a GDR-era children’s book on disguise, to be used in case of warfare between East and West, and said she felt she had to disguise herself when Page 165 →outside her home—while a Westerner, reading from her diary, responded that she always felt disguised within her home. There was a strong sense that as personal and confidential as the stories felt, the women were still disguising themselves, could not but disguise themselves when going onstage. We

watched them as they used to watch each other before the Wall came down: across a border, as if from atop viewing towers, through binoculars. And they were not just foreign to us, they were foreign to their own pasts as well. Gröschner talked about burning all of her poems in 1982—and then how, in 2005, she found them again, in her Stasi file. “My existence reappeared to me as treasonous,”52 she said. In a gesture of loosening the hold of the past from their lives, the women ended Schubladen by sweeping the objects they had gathered, the detritus of the past, off the tables and onto the floor, where, I imagined, they would gather dust until they became necessary again. And they turned to interview each other one last time: “How many Easterners do you have in your phone’s contact list? One? Is that me? Of course.” The events of 1989 hardly brought the two Germanys together. As the stage became dark, they continued chatting, their voices dropping so that we knew the conversation would continue offstage—that we were to continue talking across our divides as well.

The Scriptive Past Kroesinger, Rimini Protokoll, and She She Pop intervened in the how of memory, modeling and encouraging a critically engaged relationship to the past; they also added to the content of the archive, supplementing what is known. Their productions disturbed and complicated the structures of German history, making several different though connected interventions in post-1989 historiography, with its increased national consciousness. The pieces reconsidered the GDR, refusing to forget it or write it off as totalitarian and thus not worth examining. Vermauern illustrated the practical considerations behind the building of the Wall, while 50 Aktenkilometer and Schubladen showed the GDR as an important source of individuals’ memories and identities, a force in the physical and imagined landscape of contemporary Germany—present even in its absence. Rimini Protokoll also made a structural intervention in German historiography. Considered as a whole experience, 50 Aktenkilometer avoided becoming a narrative of macrohistorical turning points, with unification as the ultimate break. Some recordings, naturally, told stories of personal caesuras Page 166 →centering on the events of 1989–90. But many also found caesuras before fall of the Wall (especially in Stasi repression) or afterward (in the destruction of certain landmarks, for example). And others ignored the historiography of breaks altogether by relaying sounds of certain events without commentary or by telling anecdotes that developed thematically instead of chronologically. The experience was microhistoriographic, focusing primarily on small actors rather than national leaders—similar to the historiography told by Eastern activists, who wrote memoirs after 1990 about their personal experiences.53 50 Aktenkilometer did not, however, try to achieve the ideological ends of those activists, whose narratives show Western politicians, especially Chancellor Helmut Kohl, co-opting the force developed in demonstrations to ends not pursued by protestors—specifically, the absorption of the former East into the existing constitutional system of the West. She She Pop and Kroesinger did not make such a radical structural intervention, but neither did they follow typical historiography. In Schubladen, the fall of the Wall was marked off from the rest of the production, as three of the women walked to the edge of the stage and told their stories directly to the audience. The moment felt quotidian: the where-were-you-when story. Here, the performers did not need objects from their drawers. Paptheodorou, for example, told us that she was taking a history exam when the teacher stormed in shouting: “Today we write history! The Wall is down!”54 Wenke, a few years younger than the other women, revealed that she does not actually remember November 9, 1989, especially surprising since she is an Easterner. Unification is an important moment in these women’s divided and shared lives, but not the key moment for them personally—nor, importantly, dramaturgically. The year 1989 did not mark a reversal; the action of the production did not change course, and the women did not from that day forward recognize each other as sisters. The stories continued. Kroesinger introduced a knot into the current collective memory of the Wall, complicating our understanding of it and thus forcing us to reconsider the narratives we rely upon. Kroesinger also included signs in his production that could cause the audience to question his own intentions as creator of the piece—abjured in 1960s-era documentary theater. At one point in the dialogue Khrushchev appeared to lose patience and asked Ulbricht: “We’ve been discussing this question for three years. Perhaps the translator is doing a poor job?”55 In

emphasizing this line—it was played for a laugh the night I saw the production—Kroesinger highlighted the translation that took place to bring this conversation to us, a process necessitating interpretation and thus prone to errors. And at the end of the piece, when the actresses read Page 167 →that “the conversation lasted two hours and fifteen minutes,” they called our attention to the fact that the production had in fact lasted only one hour. The conversation had been not only translated, but also edited: we were missing something, but could not know what, at least not while still in the theater. Kroesinger did not take the authenticity of the document and his theatrical presentation of it for granted, treating them instead as methods of representing history that have been interpreted, and now must be constantly reinterpreted by the audience. Rimini Protokoll, Kroesinger, and She She Pop allowed their audiences and participants to develop their own narrative meanings, which brings me to their third intervention: that of individual agency. If we recall our examination of the museums and memorials in Berlin, we saw how objects in interactive exhibits script our behavior with them. Bernstein argues that “to describe elements of material culture as вЂscripting’ actions is not to suggest that things possess agency or that people lack it, but instead to propose that agency emerges through constant engagement with the stuff of our lives.”56 She compares “a scriptive thing,” including objects like dolls and handkerchiefs in her analysis, to “a playscript,” which “broadly structures a performance while allowing for agency and unleashing original, live variations that may not be individually predictable.”57 In the performances I have examined, objects became things, which audiences can use to improvise upon—not encouraged by the German Historical Museum, DDR Museum, Checkpoint Charlie Museum, and Berlin Wall Memorial. Similarly, Taylor wrote that the repertoire “allows for individual agency, ” requiring presence: “People participate in the production and reproduction of knowledge by вЂbeing there,’ being part of the transmission. As opposed to the supposedly stable objects in the archive, the actions that are the repertoire do not remain the same.”58 Vermauern, Schubladen, and 50 Aktenkilometer invited audiences and participants to approach history and memory, the written facts of the past and the past’s re-performance in the gestures of the contemporary, as open scripts that can be executed in different ways and with differing content to produce new meanings and interrogate old. Instead of approaching the archive, museum, and written history as stable, the productions showed all as contingent, as needing (if not requesting) our interaction and improvisation on those scripts, the same as memory. For the performances to be complete we had to explicitly engage with the content of the pieces and the structure of the past. If we did not animate the scripts they presented to us with our own original, live variations, then the performances failed. We had to be Page 168 →present. But, importantly, we must also be present to museums and archives to produce, reproduce, add to, resist, and deconstruct the knowledge transmitted there. We all have our own archives, drawers full of memory objects. We just don’t think of them as archives. She She Pop showed how the objects in our personal collections can work as scriptive things, which we can use to perform our own pasts. In Schubladen, we watched as the women engaged with the stuff of their lives to build their own narratives of the past—not written down or permanent, but constantly changing. There were several possible cast arrangements, and while the overall structure stayed the same on different evenings, the content (or “Textpool,” as Freiburg described it)59 varied depending on who was performing. For She She Pop, the process of encountering and using our scriptive things—of coming to a dynamic, ongoing understanding of our histories—matters much more than any definitive final product, like a history book or museum exhibit. And by keeping the objects and themselves at arm’s length from us, not allowing the audience to feel too intimate with the performers, She She Pop prevented their objects and bodies from becoming auratic. Rather than delegating responsibility for the past to museums and memorials—or performance groups—we must be present to our own archives. Vermauern avoided using documents, objects, and performance style to generate the feeling that its representation of the building of the Berlin Wall was the truth and thus closed to critical examination. This production displayed itself as the recollections of artists and researchers, not as an authentic repetition of the past. In straddling the space between performance, documentary presentation, and museum, Vermauern brought out the aesthetic aspects of all three modes of representing the past, training audiences to see how museums generate feelings of truth and how to see through this effect to the substance of the past. Kroesinger opened his audience to the process of

Khrushchev and Ulbricht making a series of choices—within the material circumstances of postwar communist East Germany—that led to the building of the Berlin Wall. And he opened his own process to show his techniques and research in representing the past. With 50 Aktenkilometer, participants carved their own path through this history of Berlin, trying on and discarding peoples’ stories like costumes. This was a disordered journey, without an imposed structure—and one that, with 120 stories spread out in a huge area, participants knew that they couldn’t experience in full. We had to decide what to listen to—and equally Page 169 →important, what not to listen to, what to forget, at least for now. Not interested in hearing about the inception of the GDR Museum, located on the Spree River across from the Berlin Cathedral? Just keep going down Karl-Liebknecht-Strasse, out of that bubble and toward a woman’s story about her daughter, a leading athlete.60 To be sure, the agency that Rimini Protokoll granted also allowed for ignorance: if you did not want to be confronted with stories that contradicted your wellestablished opinions, you could just walk away. But this ignorance was willful. Agency is the crux of the unique historiography of all three productions, even with their structural differences. Conservative historians reject the agency of individuals in their teleological narratives of unification; in “normalizing” German nationalism, they also reject contemporary responsibility for the extraordinary atrocities that Germans committed in the Holocaust. Leftist historians, on the other hand, deny their own agency, which they see as having been co-opted by more powerful actors, their revolution transformed into capitalist expansion. And the museums and memorials of Berlin subsume the agency of visitors, feeling interactive without inviting critical engagement. Kroesinger, She She Pop, and Rimini Protokoll granted agency to their audiences through their works’ content, describing the choices that individuals made, and through the works’ structures, which urged participants to interpret the scripts presented to them and find their own way through documents and memories. After Vermauern, 50 Aktenkilometer, Schubladen, or a number of the other German performance pieces from the 2000s that thematized the past, participants were better able to walk through the Bernauer Strasse Memorial, the German Historical Museum, the DDR Museum, and the Checkpoint Charlie Museum reading the scripts presented there as scripts. Through the performances, visitors came to see the past as a script around them in Berlin, requiring “constant engagement with the stuff of our lives,” as Bernstein writes. This agency requires personal responsibility for the past, present, and future experienced in museums and while walking through the streets. Exploring the museum stage of Vermauern, wandering the streets of the former East Berlin for 50 Aktenkilometer, and watching how drawers became performable archives in Schubladen, visitors and audiences trained to observe history and reinterpret memories in their everyday lives, and to see the scripts around them and interact with these scripts. They could better note teleologies at work, not simply reperforming gestures but instead improvising with scripts and resisting them if necessary. In performing their Page 170 →archives, these productions carved out space for everyday civic responsibility in Berlin and Germany—a space for the continuing embodied practice of past gestures, images, and landscapes and the archiving of documents and recordings. Rimini Protokoll, Kroesinger, and She She Pop made both memory and history necessary in preserving the past for future generations of actors responsible for their city and nation.

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Epilogue Hybridized History A Society in Transition During Perestroika, in 1988, East German playwright Volker Braun’s Die Гњbergangsgesellschaft (Society in Transition), first written in 1982, was finally allowed to premiere at the Maxim Gorki Theater. Thomas Langhoff set his production, which I briefly described in chapter 4, in a box-set living room, designed by Pieter Hein, containing little furniture, just an aging table and armchair. Tall, unused French doors in the back wall and a small globe downstage center promised freedom—somewhere else. The bland space invited audiences to read into the production their frustrations with the GDR, to find allegorical meanings in Braun and Langhoff’s stagnant society, filled with characters dreaming, hopelessly, of going somewhere else. One of the most remarkable hits of the late 1980s, Langhoff’s production ran for years, outliving its milieu and helping the Gorki, and Berliners, bridge the gap between GDR and unified Germany. Die Гњbergangsgesellschaft played again at the Maxim Gorki in winter 2013, under the direction of Thomas’s son Lukas Langhoff, husband to Shermin Langhoff, Intendantin of the Gorki since that fall—the first leader of a major German theater to have Turkish roots. The audience sat onstage, starring out into the auditorium at human-shaped burlap sacks (a reference to the 1988 production, which opened with the characters wrapped in plastic, like furniture abandoned with a little protection against dust). A tour group entered the Gorki: it’s 1991, the guide explained, and this eclectic group—a communistPage 172 → functionary, a TurkishGerman cowboy, some Western gawkers—want to see the old space before watching Die Гњbergangsgesellschaft, which they then enact themselves, with increasing difficulty. In a season deemed so successful that the Gorki was named Theater of the Year by the magazine Theater heute, this production of Die Гњbergangsgesellschaft left critics and audiences a bit bewildered. But the aesthetic politics of Shermin Langhoff’s Gorki, which made this production possible, are redefining the German theater and the future of the nation’s past. Although the 2014 Гњbergangsgesellschaft failed, it is a noteworthy attempt to update Braun’s play to speak to the new Germany, still in transition, but in very different ways than in 1988. In this epilogue, we investigate how theater artists have recently begun reimagining German history to include the immigrants who were there all along. I will still discuss questions of German identity after unification, but we will discover that unification itself has become less important for imagining that identity. After going back to the 1960s in order to understand the status of immigrants in Germany, especially Turkish immigrants, we will move into the present in order to see how artists with migrant backgrounds perform their stories into German history. Focusing on productions that represent, in some way, unification, we see how these artists are reconfiguring German history plays, and, in doing so, creating space for hyphenated and hybrid identities in the German nation. In terms of immigration, German society has been in transition since the 1960s. A heterogeneous nation prior to World War II, with many non-ethnic Germans within its border, Germany found itself as homogenous as it had ever been in 1945. Jews and Romani had been murdered or forcibly emigrated; areas that mixed Germans with Eastern Europeans were given over to Poland, Czechoslovakia, and the USSR; and the Allied powers compelled German-speaking peoples scattered across Eastern Europe to migrate west into the new German borders. This imaged homogeneity (for families could still trace their roots across Europe) did not last long: lacking men to staff its rejuvenated factories during the Wirtschaftswunder economic boom, West Germany began in the early 1960s to import large numbers of cheap Gastarbeiter, “guest workers” from Mediterranean countries, especially Turkey. Many additional groups of immigrants have arrived in Germany since that initial wave, almost all of whom were expected to migrate out someday, but many of whom stayed. Before and especially after the Vietnam War, tens of thousands of Vietnamese settled in East Germany, part of a communist worker-training program, not dissimilar

from its capitalist version in the West. Following unification and the fall of the Soviet Union, Russians Page 173 →settled in large numbers in Berlin. Israeli expats have been coming for years, as have Eastern European Jews, and some synagogues are again bustling. The opening of the Schengen Area, with twenty-six European Union member-states as of 2016, has allowed passport-free travel and enabled Europeans to work in the German economic powerhouse without visas, attracting Spaniards especially. With increasing instability in Africa, many asylum seekers fleeing repression have landed in Germany, occupying churches and public parks, looking for protection and jobs. By 2014, the most recent year for which data is available, 20.3 percent of all people in Germany had “migrant backgrounds,” meaning that they, their parents, or their grandparents were born outside of Germany; in Berlin, it’s 28.6 percent.1 Those numbers have surely risen. History books are quiet on this great migration, excepting some basics on the guest-worker program, and silent on the cultural and political contributions of immigrants. Stefan Berger mentions immigration only once in The Search for Normality, in the forward to the second edition, quoting Johannes Rau, president of Germany from 1999 to 2004, as “calling on historians to write history that would foster feelings of national identity under the conditions of a rapidly changing immigration society (Einwanderungsgesellschaft).”2 Mary Fulbrook only mentions Gastarbeiter in the context of the economy or right-wing extremism in her History of Germany, 1918–2000, and does not specifically discuss Turkish immigrants.3 FranГ§ois and Schulze do not include any words whatsoever on immigration in the monumental Deutsche Erinnerungsorte; their introduction mentions “young Turkish-Germans,” but only to exclude them from the scope of the study.4 By far the most popular book on immigrants has been former politician Thilo Sarrazin’s anti-Turkish screed Deutschland schafft sich ab (Germany Is Abolishing Itself, 2010). Typically, rather than addressing the role of immigrants in German society, politicians and historians such as Sarrazin, but also Hans-Ulrich Wehler, perhaps the most prominent postwar German historian, have bemoaned the seeming inability of immigrants, particularly Turkish, to integrate.5 Germans understand themselves as Germans today through their ethnicity, language, Christian religion, and cultural heritage. The children and now grandchildren of Turkish guest workers may have been born in Germany, but they are not BioDeutsch—vernacular for “organic,” meaning ethnically, German—and they often speak German with an accent, are Muslim, and are seen to lack an appreciation for, or even knowledge of, Bach, Goethe, Schiller, Beethoven, and Wagner, to name but a few important contributors Page 174 →to German Kultur. Until 2000, children born in Germany to non-German citizens were denied citizenship, and families were officially encouraged to return to their homelands; until 2014, such children could not receive a German passport without first forfeiting any other citizenship. It was widely recognized that this law was intended to exclude TurkishGermans. (As of 2015, children of immigrants must still prove that they grew up in Germany; it is not enough to have been born within the borders.) Legally and culturally, the German public viewed immigrants as migrants, as guests who would eventually leave, and often the immigrants themselves felt this way as well. Still, feelings about immigrants have been changing in the past ten years, and politicians have begun emphasizing the possibility (even desirability) of integration and permanent settlement, typically arguing that Germany needs to attract the brightest, most productive people from around the world. In 2015, Chancellor Angela Merkel referred to Germany for the first time as a “nation of immigrants.”6 Under these circumstances, it should perhaps be no surprise that historians have not written much about immigrants. And yet immigrants have lived in Germany in massive numbers since the early 1960s—for over fifty years now. Could they really have contributed so little to the nation? Theater, as we have established, has always held a uniquely central role in German culture and the German public sphere. And theater is being used today to incorporate the bodies and stories of immigrants into German history, as well as to promote new forms of hyphenated, even hybrid, German identity. On TV and in movies, actors with Turkish roots play the drug dealer, the wife beater, the headscarf-wearing outsider: roles reinforcing stereotypes, excluding Turkish-Germans from the public sphere. But onstage, or at least on some stages, it has become possible to be Turkish-German instead of just Turkish. Through performance, people with migrant backgrounds are challenging the belief that they have not participated in German history and culture. They are asserting their right to belong to, and participate in, German civil society.

When we watch actors with immigrant backgrounds perform their own stories in plays of their own devising, we gain access to memories that have not been told, are not included in collective memory or recorded as history in books. Through performance, those pasts have a chance to become legitimate, to contribute to national identity and public discourse. This is important, but not sufficient to engender hyphenated identity; to do that, the same actors must also have opportunities to perform in plays by Shakespeare, Schiller, Kleist, and Chekhov. By casting an Afro- or Turkish-GermanPage 175 → in a role not explicitly written for a racial other, directors can make clear how Bio-German bodies go unmarked and unremarked upon onstage—neutral, unsignifying in terms of race—including when those actors perform as Russian, English, or even, in blackface, as African.7 In other words, by performing in a play by Schiller, actors with Turkish roots can expose how German identity has been constructed through markers of ethnicity—while also asserting that Germanness can be imagined to include them, the non-Bio-Germans. And sometimes we see cross-ethnic casting and immigrant stories in the same production, as in the hugely successful VerrГјcktes Blut (Crazy Blood), which premiered at Ballhaus Naunynstrasse in fall 2010, created by Nurkan Erpulat and Jens Hillje, and directed by Erpulat.8 The audience watched, half in horror, as a teacher pointed a gun at her Turkish-German students, with their slang-inflected, accented German, forcing them to perform scenes from Schiller’s Die RГ¤uber (The Robbers) and Kabale und Liebe (Love and Intrigue). But we are getting a bit ahead of ourselves—let’s take a moment to understand how VerrГјcktes Blut came to be.

Turkish-German Theater Turkish-German theater—and arts and literature more generally—has not been much discussed by scholars or critics until recently. Erol Boran made a valuable contribution with a history of Turkish-German theater,9 but his dissertation was finished in 2004, and thus predates the revitalization of Ballhaus Naunynstrasse. In Writing Outside the Nation, Azade Seyhan analyzes Turkish-German literature within globalization and a broad array of immigrant literatures, in both Germany and the United States.10 Leslie Adelson sees “a broader Turkish turn in German literature [that] has been underway since roughly the 1970s,” which she relates to the “structural transformation” of the Wende “and its cultural consequences” on literature.11 Rather than using postcolonial studies or relating Turkish-German literature to general transnational movements, in The Turkish Turn in Contemporary German Literature Adelson asserts that Turkish-German literature must be understood in a specifically German context, and that this literature forms “a kind of cultural archive, where changing perceptions and phantasms of sociality are both tracked and imagined.”12 This “imaginative labor,” Adelson argues, “has been increasingly oriented toward a shared future history.”13 While I am unsure about her idea of a “cultural archive,” which she does not explore in Page 176 →detail, I build on Adelson and Seyhan by showing how performances of the past by immigrants structure German history and interact with the corpus of German history plays, helping to imagine a shared future. Until recently, Turkish-German artists have worked on the margins of the professional theater, with a few exceptions, one being the Turkish Ensemble at Peter Stein’s SchaubГјhne from 1979 to 1984. This ensemble is more an example of Turkish theater in Germany than of Turkish-German theater: they performed almost exclusively in Turkish. One of the first artists to make a major contribution to the theater profession was Emine Sevgi Г–zdamar, whose story and interests prefigure those of the younger artists now working at Ballhaus Naunynstrasse and the Maxim Gorki Theater. Г–zdamar migrated to Germany as a young woman under the guestworker program, but soon returned to Turkey to study theater—only to travel back to Germany to continue her studies and work in theater. Since that second immigration, in 1976, she has lived in Germany, writing a number of plays,14 directing, and acting. Now a highly regarded novelist, Г–zdamar fictionalized her experiences in the late 1970s in the book Seltsame Sterne starren zur Erde (Strange Stars Stare Down at Earth, 2003):15 a young woman leaves Turkey to escape political oppression and learn about Brechtian theater from Benno Besson (a famous director in real life). We follow the young woman as she crosses often between West Berlin and the East, where she works with Besson at the VolksbГјhne. The narrator, also named Emine, describes rehearsals and performances, which Г–zdamar actually attended, in gorgeous detail; her Turkishness marks her as an outsider, but an interesting one—she does not face any special discrimination—and it gives her unique access to both

Germanys. Seyhan, in Writing Outside the Nation, finds that Г–zdamar’s prose offers “a form of countermemory to official [Turkish] history.”16 But Г–zdamar writes in German, with stories mostly set either in Germany or between Turkey and Germany; it makes much more sense to see her works as adding to or countering German history. Despite the contributions of Г–zdamar and others, Turkish-Germans until recently stood mostly in the wings of the German theater scene. Actors, marked as different by their facial features and skin color, simply were not cast in canonical plays, while only occasional new plays written by immigrant authors, like those by Г–zdamar, were given premieres. This situation began to change in 2005, when Hebbel am Ufer Theater, a freie Szene production house, invited Shermin Langhoff (then directing films) to curate the first iteration of a festival called beyond belonging, intended specifically to present work by artists with migrant backgrounds. In 2006, Langhoff producedPage 177 → Schwarze Jungfrauen (Black Virgins), a striking new play that prepared the ground for the stories and storytelling she has produced since.17 In six royal-blue boxes, stacked three across, stood five young women, all in tight, beige-colored long underwear, though not skintight, not revealingly sexy. Top-lit, they wore bald caps and looked nearly identical but for their silhouettes and the fact that one was actually sitting, in a wheelchair. Through interwoven monologues, they told stories of being female and Muslim in Germany: of sexual and religious awakenings, primarily, of headscarves, prayer, love, disability, and conversion. Of hatred. In the final image, they gathered together in one box, united neo-Muslim outsiders; one stood a bit apart, isolated by her demands for violence. We encountered them as if they were aliens (sounds and images referenced Close Encounters of the Third Kind), and we could only guess what they will do next—there was not yet much of a future imagined here. Feridun ZaimoДџlu (a Turkish-German immigrant) and GГјnter Senkel (German) adapted Schwarze Jungfrauen from interviews, creating an aestheticized-documentary performance with director Neco Г‡elik (born in Germany to Turkish immigrants). Mixing reality and fiction, ZaimoДџlu and Senkel dramatized these outsiders, exposing their audiences to the stories of the quiet women in headscarves encountered in subway trains. Although set in the contemporary moment, not the past, the storytelling techniques and semidocumentary style of Schwarze Jungfrauen, as well as its insistence on seeing these alien women as German, influenced the performances that came next, when Langhoff took over her own theater.

Performing Hyphenated Identity at the Ballhaus Naunynstrasse As a curator and producer, Shermin Langhoff has been motivated by a feeling of the impossibility of TurkishGerman identity and by a desire to find common grounds (where everybody living in Germany can gather) as well as conflict zones (productive collisions within the nation).18 In 2006, following the success of beyond belonging, Langhoff became Intendantin of Ballhaus Naunynstrasse, a small space with an underground bar on Naunynstrasse in Kreuzberg, near the heart of a neighborhood that has been home to Turkish immigrants for decades. (It is now gentrifying rapidly.) Conceiving of the space as “postmigrant,” Langhoff supported artists with foreign backgrounds: people who have settled or were born in Germany, no longer just immigrants, but maybe not fully integrated either. Many productions at Ballhaus Naunynstrasse have investigated the TurkishGerman past, includingPage 178 → the Generation Trilogie (Generation Trilogy) by Lukas Langhoff, but three in particular can help us to understand how Turkish-German artists represent the past in general and unification in particular: Die SchwГ¤ne vom Schlachthof (The Swans from the Slaughterhouse, 2009), written and directed by Hakan SavaЕџ Mican;19 VerrГјcktes Blut, adapted from a French film by Erpulat and Hillje, and directed by Erpulat; and LГ¶ Bal Almanya (The German Ball, 2010), a musical play written by Erpulat and TunГ§ay KulaoДџlu, and also directed by Erpulat.20 Naunynstrasse ran near the western side of the Berlin Wall from 1961 to 1989, making it an undesirable and inexpensive neighborhood. It attracted poor outsiders, especially immigrants and artists. This dirty and ugly world was remembered by the old man in Mican’s Die SchwГ¤ne vom Schlachthof, played by Hendrik Arnst, longtime VolksbГјhne regular and favorite of Frank Castorf. A large man with a lopsided mouth and the beginnings of jowls, Arnst wore a white bathrobe in Die SchwГ¤ne: the man seemed to be a shut-in, an aged Turkish immigrant haunted by the past, in particular his memories of four Turkish boys who drowned in the Spree, the river that separated East and West Berlin. For this old man, it was not the division of Germany that refused to heal, but that open wound, the loss of those boys, boys who have been forgotten.

SchwГ¤ne opened as an interview with Arnst’s old man, never named, sitting on the edge of the stage, a steeply raked, forced-perspective white box, narrowing at its end, with three small doors on each side. Bluesy saxophone music washed over the scene, and the interview became a dream. “I want to talk about my dream, ” he told us. “I dream ofВ .В .В . ofВ .В .В . ofВ .В .В . four children, four swans as if in a fairy-tale film. Head of a child, body of a swan.”21 Out of his dream floated four stories, proceeding, with hazy transitions, one after another during the two-hour production, with all of the other roles played by four ensemble members: Henny Reents, Sesede Terziyan, Michael Wenzlaff, and Mehmet Yilmaz. We watched teenagers play around the Wall, hiding illicit drugs in it. A Kurdish woman, wearing a Star Wars T-shirt, studies communism in East Berlin—confetti falling all around her when the Wall comes down, though she does not celebrate. A girl from Marzahn, in the former East, marries a Turkish boy and converts to Islam. And a boy is forced to leave Turkey by his parents to earn money in Germany; after the fall of the Wall, he builds a doner kebab empire in the former East. The stories overlapped in time, and each circled around, or circled back to, the dead boys. Gradually it became clear that the old man was the father of one of these boys, who went into the Spree chasing a special ball he Page 179 →had just received for his birthday, and drowned while GDR border guards watched, refusing Western police access to the river. In each story in Die SchwГ¤ne, the Wall fell or had just fallen, changing the lives of the characters. But what actually transformed them were their experiences with migration, love, and loss amid foreignness. Fig. 13. Sesede Terziyan in Die SchwГ¤ne vom Schlachthof (The Swans from the Slaughterhouse, 2009), written and directed by Hakan SavaЕџ Mican at the Ballhaus Naunynstrasse Berlin. The confetti explodes—as offstage voices chant “Wir sind das Volk” (We are the people)—while Tarziyan’s character speaks about the fall of the Berlin Wall. She does not celebrate. (Photograph: Ute Langkafel.) Developed from interviews conducted by Mican with four people, Die SchwГ¤ne vom Schlachthof theatricalized facts and memories, bringing them onto the stage to be performed by and for the people to whom those facts and memories belong, allowing for some measure of reconciliation and catharsis in the audience. It was of the utmost importance to Mican and the Ballhaus Naunynstrasse that these stories got told. But they could not simply be told as such—documentary theater, as made in the 1960s, did not seem to work for Mican. And the contemporary, highly mediatized adaptations of documentary theater, those of Rimini Protokoll and Hans-Werner Kroesinger, were superfluous here, focused on representation and individual perception. Die SchwГ¤ne vom Schlachthof was, like Schwarze Jungfrauen, not Page 180 →purely documentary. The interviews fully became theater, both true and fiction. We will return to this theatricalized documentary style as we continue. VerrГјcktes Blut, an onion of a metatheatrical play, slyly inserted the bodies of Turkish-Germans into canonical German theater, and into German culture more generally. Although it did not represent unification, and its setting was contemporary, it deserves sustained attention here for its use of plays by Schiller, and because of its tremendous success (including being invited to the 2011 Theatertreffen). As the audience entered the theater, we watched actors in street clothes quietly prepare for the show. These actors were people, framed by the stage, but clearly not performing, or at least trying not to perform. Then, as the stage directions give it, “One after another walks to the front of the stage as an individual, and there they become Kanaken.”22 They made the gestures of Kanaken, an ethnic slur for Turkish people in Germany, hocking up loogies, flirting, fighting, loudly gossiping on their cell phones, grabbing their crotches. They seemed to be the worst of the worst, the teenagers you shy away from on the train platform while waiting for the subway, the teens who want you to shy away, making fun of you as you do. As the space became Sonia Kelich’s classroom, Frau Kelich trying to sit them down and shut them up, the students only acted worse, until a pistol fell out of one teen’s backpack, and Frau Kelich grabbed it and fired it into the air. They’ll at least respond to violence, these Kanaken. Die RГ¤uber (though set nominally in the past) and Kabale und Liebe, the plays Frau Kelich had the kids perform, are not history plays. But both of these energetic, borderline anarchic works have become central to the German canon, read in classrooms, always in repertory somewhere, and have from their premieres on been used to imagine German identity: Karl is an ur-German character, rebelling against everything and anything, yet insisting firmly

on basic morality (Judeo-Christian values crossed with a robber’s pure honor). We recall, from chapter 4, Frank Castorf’s choice of Die RГ¤uber for the VolksbГјhne in 1990, how he entangled Schiller’s play in centuries of German history, especially that of the GDR, to showcase how ferocious rebellion becomes purposeless violence and, eventually, dissipates into exhaustion. Ferdinand and Luise, the star-crossed lovers of Kabale und Liebe, similarly model Germanness. It is thus that we find Schiller’s plays at the center of VerrГјcktes Blut. Kelich introduced Die RГ¤uber by telling the kids that the play represents how “a young generation of German writers turn against the authority and tradition of the dying eighteenth century.”23 As we watched the teenagers, with their olive skin and Turkish features, step into these classic roles, roles Page 181 →many in the audience would have seen performed by the greatest German actors, they entered the cultural tradition, adding to it with their bodies, attaching to the roles their own stories of lust and crime. Die RГ¤uber is a Sturm und Drang play! Who besides these desperate outsiders, these young Sturm und Drangers, could better perform it today? Fig. 14. Sonja Kelich (played by Sesede Terziyan) points a gun at Hasan (Murat Dikenci), forcing the boy to read the role of Schweizer from Friedrich Schiller’s Die RГ¤uber (The Robbers). From the restaging at the Maxim Gorki Theater of VerrГјcktes Blut (Crazy Blood, 2010) by Nurkan Erpulat and Jens Hillje, directed by Erpulat. (Photograph: Thomas Aurin.) Structurally, VerrГјcktes Blut worked by building tension, and could almost be a horror movie, if the students died, one by one, or a melodrama, if it resolved the characters into happily integrated little Germans. Instead, it interrupted itself with caesuras in the action: the students and Kelich singing German folk songs, Volkslieder, including “Nun ade, du mein lieb Heimatland” (“Now Farewell, My Dear Homeland”). And VerrГјcktes Blut ended not in resolution but confusion, with a more directed, more threatening rebellion than the sophomoric defiance that began the performance. We learn that Frau Kelich is actually Turkish-German: she has so successfully integrated, including marrying a German, that neither the students nor the audience can read her as Turkish. This is dangerous: for Germans, who, despite their criticism of Turks being unable to integrate, fear that Turks could Page 182 →disappear into German society, infecting it with their “crazy blood”; and also for Frau Kelich, who has all but lost touch with her provenience, and was unable to meaningfully connect with her students. Then one of the students, a quiet loner, a loser, grabbed the gun from Kelich and pointed it at the audience, refusing to let us go, for he—the actor, now—feared that, with his Turkish features, he could only be cast as a petty gangster or Muslim rapist. He did not want the show to end. Quoting Franz Moor, the evil brother in Die RГ¤uber—without attribution: he had become the role—he shouted, “I must be the master, so that I can win by force what I cannot gain with love.”24 The lesson is over, Frau Kelich told us. The actors walked, slowly, to the front of the stage and sang a German lullaby. VerrГјcktes Blut left its audience with many questions but few answers: What makes a German? Can foreigners perform Germanness so well that they actually become German? Is there an inherent falsity, a lack of authenticity in this performance? Must they lose themselves, fully transform? Should they be expelled if they cannot? Ought this society be completely overturned, or does it contain room somewhere for hyphenated identity—for a Turkish-German Sonia Kelich? After using Schiller to directly examine the present situation of Turkish-Germans in VerrГјcktes Blut, Erpulat turned next to examining the entire fifty years of Turks in Germany in LГ¶ Bal Almanya. As Mican had done for Die SchwГ¤ne vom Schlachthof, Erpulat and his cowriter KulaoДџlu created a fictional world using real-life documents, though different kinds of documents, and to a far different effect. LГ¶ Bal Almanya was loosely based on Ettore Scola’s movie Le Bal (1983), which represents fifty years of French history through a ballroom in France. And Ballhaus Naunynstrasse began its life in 1863 as a dance hall. When the curtains opened on LГ¶ Bal Almanya, we saw a mock-up of its original, traditional ballroom: couples at small round tables, covered with white tablecloths; a baby grand in the back stage-right corner; paintings of Kaiser Wilhelm and the Alps on the walls. A small sign on the back wall indicated that the space was a Denkmal, a

protected historical building. The couples sat silently for several minutes, gazing at the audience, before one got up to lead them in a slow, choppy rendition of the sentimental folk song “Unrasiert und fern die Heimat” (“Unshaven and Far from Home”). Gradually the eight-person ensemble transformed the space. First, they brought in a couple of rugs and hung a small piece of Arabic calligraphy. Soon rugs covered the floor, the portrait of Kaiser Wilhelm was replaced by one of the Ayatollah, and the painting of the Alps came down to make room Page 183 →for a satellite dish, ubiquitous on buildings populated by migrants. Meanwhile, we watched satires of anti-immigrant nightmares, as when a hopeful blond woman tried to lead an integration course: one foreigner claimed to love jihad, two others had sex. Her questions, taken from actual immigration exams, were either completely obscure or utterly simple. No one answered them, or even attempted to. We also viewed scenes that pointed toward historical events: two women put the other six ensemble members through the health checks that were done on potential guest workers, examining teeth and grabbing crotches (thereby discovering that one applicant was a woman dressed as a man). When unification occurred, it came in the form of a man entering through the back wall to much celebration. He was given piles of stuff, including a handheld vacuum cleaner, while his celebrants chanted, “Wir sind das Volk.” At the fringes, another man swept the floor, an immigrant, who tried to participate in the festivities but was coolly, insistently pushed away. If this scene changed anything in the world of the production, it was not for the better: unification was quickly followed in LГ¶ Bal Almanya by the 1993 Solingen arson attack, in which four neo-Nazis burned the home of a Turkish family, killing five people and injuring fourteen more. Here, a survivor of the attack had a German flag ribbon stapled to her forehead as an award. After the stage became completely Turkish, with few remnants of the original Ballhaus besides the piano, LГ¶ Bal Almanya closed with a large group of people entering the stage through the skirts of one of the actresses, simulating the births of more and more Turkish-Germans. They danced and sang “Ich liebe Deutsche-land” (“I love Germany,” in a Turkish accent), wearing black shirts printed with red letters, “Almanci!” A pejorative Turkish word for Turks living in Germany25 (derived from “Alman,” German in Turkish), artists appropriated the word Almanci in the 2010s as a positive concept for people standing astride the two nations. Integration had occurred—but it was a hyphenated integration. The characters became Almanci. The only possible way forward, all three productions suggested, using documents, other German plays, and farce, is the way of the Almanci, who can laugh at the miscommunications and injuries of the past, remember the tragedies, and exist fluently as hyphenated Turkish-Germans. Having transformed Ballhaus Naunynstrasse into a vibrant space for postmigrant culture, in 2012 Shermin Langhoff stepped down from her leadership role there, and Mican, Erpulat, and other directors she nurtured moved to larger, state-funded theaters. As we will see, they were not separated long. Page 184 →

Hybrid History at the Maxim Gorki Theater From 2006 until 2013, the Maxim Gorki Theater was led by director Armin Petras as a space for coming to terms with memories of the GDR and for learning about the postindustrial, low-employment landscapes of the former East, especially Brandenburg, the state that surrounds Berlin. We may remember, for example, that Hans-Werner Kroesinger’s Vermauern premiered at the Gorki in 2009. Petras was not born in the GDR, but he was raised there, a child of rare eastern-moving immigrants. He studied directing in East Berlin before emigrating to the West in 1988, shortly after finishing his education. In addition to directing classical works, Petras writes plays under the pseudonym Fritz Kater, which he usually directs as well. His most notable plays, for their success and depictions of East Germany, have been zeit zu lieben zeit zu sterben (time to love time to die, Thalia Theater Hamburg, 2002) and Heaven (zu tristan) (Heaven [to tristan], Schauspiel Frankfurt, 2006). Taking a moment to discuss Petras, and his ways of representing history, we can better understand the transformation that came after he left the Gorki. Zeit zu lieben zeit zu sterben, which won the Mühlheimer Dramatikerpreis in 2003, begins with a chorus of

youths describing their memories of the GDR in the 1970s, slipping between past tense and present: sex, drugs, rock and roll, and, finally, work. In its third part, the play moves into the 1990s, after the fall of the Wall, but the characters—not specifically in the chorus in the first part, but seeming to draw on those collective memories—cannot seem to love, tearing each other apart slowly and mercilessly. Heaven (zu tristan) is a localized portrait, depicting the residents of a dying town in the former East. Its first scene consists only of this stage direction: “(On the stage there is a newly constructed house, which is slowly reassembled out of its ashes.)”26 The town, Wolfen, in Saxony-Anhalt, just north of Leipzig, is almost empty, its population reduced from forty thousand in 1990 to twenty-five thousand in 2005. The people who have stayed have been left behind, either unemployed or about to be laid off, needing to escape but mostly unable to, despairing, their lives and relationships caught in the same cycle of entropy as the town. Petras depicted similar stories in his productions of classic plays, including Prinz Friedrich von Homburg (which premiered at the Schauspiel Frankfurt in 2006 before moving to the Gorki).27 The Prince was played by Robert Kuchenbuch in a leather jacket, his head shaved, in the first scene drinking cheap beer from plastic bottles until he passed out (instead of drowsing in a pleasure garden, as in the original play). It was rainy and dark—the first Page 185 →couple of rows in the audience were given plastic sheeting to protect themselves, as much as possible, from the damp. And the Prince was hopeless and combustible, listening to radical-Right metal, speaking with a Brandenburg accent. An alienated Ossi, the man dreamed himself into Prince Homburg, fantasizing about Prussian glory, its hypermasculinity and nationalism. Petras left us wondering how this society produced such men and what they might be capable of. It shocked the German theater world when the Berlin Senate appointed Shermin Langhoff and Jens Hillje coIntendanten to take over from Petras beginning with the 2013–14 season. Granted, Langhoff had become somewhat prominent in steering the Ballhaus Naunynstrasse, and Hillje has been well known as a dramaturg at major theaters for some years, but the Spree, which separates Kreuzberg from Mitte, might as well be an ocean culturally. No one expected Langhoff to be selected for such a prominent position. Handed the keys to an empty, state-subsidized theater, Langhoff and Hillje were able to build a better-financed and more conspicuous postmigrant ensemble, one able speak to all of Berlin, even all of Germany, from its Prussian building on Unter den Linden. They hired strikingly young actors, diverse ethnically, with unusual last names—though only a couple were actually born outside Germany—but diverse also in gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, politics, and economic and social background. And they brought in, as ensemble members, directors who had started out with them at Ballhaus Naunynstrasse, namely Nurkan Erpulat and Hakan SavaЕџ Mican, as well as Yael Ronen, an Israeli living in Berlin, who, as we will see in a moment, makes multilingual, intercultural, semidocumentary dance theater. In their first two seasons (I write in summer 2015, at the end of the second season), Langhoff and Hillje have fashioned a theater committed to direct political talk and action, new plays, and the classics, especially Chekhov. But perhaps above all, the new Gorki is still obsessed with history. Just not necessarily German-German history. Many of their productions have represented and investigated the past, especially the recent European past: Angst Essen Seele auf (Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, 2014), an adaptation of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s film, about the romantic relationship between a young Turkish immigrant and an aging German widow, directed by Mican; Heiner MГјller’s Zement (Cement, 2015), a staging of the early, hungry days after the 1917 Russian Revolution, directed by Sebastian Baumgarten; Erpulat’s production of Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard (2013), set just before Zement at the end of the nineteenth Page 186 →century; Musa Dagh—Tage des Widerstands (Musa Dagh—Days of Resistance, 2015), created by Kroesinger to remember the Armenian genocide; and Die Гњbergangsgesellschaft—and this list doesn’t include the reopenings of VerrГјcktes Blut and Schwarze Jungfrauen in the larger Gorki space. Their most successful staging of the past—and the most critically acclaimed new production at the Gorki, period, invited to the 2015 Theatertreffen—has been Yael Ronen’s Common Ground.28 Ronen created this production about the Yugoslav wars with her ensemble, most of whom fled to Germany during the wars as

refugees. Using spare wooden boxes to craft the scenes, with a wall of televisions delivering direct reports from the past, and cavorting to a soundtrack of rollicking rock and roll, sung in many languages, the actors ran pell-mell through the history of the wars and their afterlives. The goal of the production was quite clear: to establish common ground, where all may stand together, even a woman whose father probably ran a concentration camp and another whose father probably died in the same camp. The actors actually traveled together to the former Yugoslavia during the production’s unusually long development period, and, through the movement of the evening, re-created their journey toward a much-contended, hard-won understanding. At the same time, carrying handheld microphones so that they could speak with the audience in a style mixing stand-up comedy and entertaining lecture, they performed the German identities they have grown into; Germany, at least sometimes, at its best, provides the space for dialogue. Common Ground advocated a pluralistic, welcoming conception of Germanness, with good-heartedness replacing accusation, camaraderie prevailing over antagonism. And like many of the Gorki’s productions, it raised questions about cultural coexistence without presuming to provide answers. The seven men and women who created Common Ground with Ronen are, with one exception, either too young to remember unification or were growing up outside of Germany when the Berlin Wall came down. Although only a few belong fully to the Gorki’s ensemble—Ronen needed to engage several actors from outside the ensemble in order to accommodate the production’s long prerehearsal period—it is fair to say that they reflect both the Gorki and much of its audience. I do not want to assert that the division and unification of Germany do not influence their understanding of the nation or their place within it, but, as Langhoff put it in an interview with Theater heute, after the magazine’s critics named the Gorki Theater of the Year for 2013–14, “It was clear that Petras’s focus on East-West stories had been, in some respects, fully told.”29 Instead, through their postmigrant productions, Page 187 →as well as in seminars and other events, they have been asking, as Langhoff put it in the same interview, “What are the common grounds in a society that is so different and diverse, and just no longer understandable through the opposition of the middle class and proletariat?”30 Indeed, as much as it is a German theater, the Maxim Gorki of Langhoff and Hillje is a European theater, telling stories of and for a uniting Europe instead of a uniting Germany. We can see this in their repertoire: stories of people coming to Germany from Russia, Turkey, the former Yugoslavia, and Africa. These are stories directed at a newly mobile European society, a Europe that decidedly includes Turkey (hugely controversial in Europe and Turkey), as well as newer immigrants and refugees from Africa. It is theater for a European society trying to understand how it has come together after the great wars of the twentieth century, while struggling to hold itself together amid the conflicts and potential conflagrations of the twenty-first. The new hybrids being performed at the Gorki are composed of many elements, in other words, not merely hyphenated Turkish-German or Afro-German, but born in one country, raised in another, now living in a third, and thinking about moving somewhere else. The complex identities in Common Ground are just the starting point. Ronen also directed an adaptation of Olga Grjasnowa’s biographical novel Der Russe ist einer, der Birken liebt (All Russians Love Birch Trees, 2013).31 The lead character in Der Russe was born Jewish in the USSR, immigrated to Germany at eleven, fell in love with a Turkish-German man, and then, at the end of the production, moved to Israel. More even than European, this is a global identity. In order to fully grasp how all of this identity-imagining happens on the stage, it is helpful to examine the forms and structures of these postmigrant productions. We have noticed, at this point, how almost every production we’ve looked at, beginning with Die SchwГ¤ne vom Schlachthof, could be described as “documentary.” In an essay published in 2011, Katrin Sieg described the early trend by artists at Ballhaus Naunynstrasse of making documentary theater. “I regard the collective autobiographies performed in recent Turkish German theater,” she writes, “as a renewed attempt to claim inclusion and participation through personal narratives that oppose the intensification of exclusion, marginalization, and heteronomy.”32 She builds on this argument later in the essay: “The new documentary theater champions the inclusion of migrants and minorities in European cosmopolitanism and positions these groups as the drivers of democratic iterations stalled by the quasi-national discourse of European community.”33 Yet throughout the essay she also expresses misgivings about the form, particularly its use Page 188 →by postmigrant artists: “Are Turkish

Germans, now eligible for naturalization (German citizenship), co-opted into the logic of mimesis, reproducing therefore the exclusions and hierarchies of the cosmopolitan, European transnation—and at whose expense? ”34 And, again: I wonder whether that particular dramatic form, organized around the autobiographical, humanist self, fully endowed with the capacity to reason among equals and persuade without recourse to violence, as cosmopolitan thinkers in the Enlightenment tradition have envisioned it, is actually able to register conditions of living under the contemporary structures of absolute sovereignty and bare life described by [Giorgio] Agamben.35 She prefers instead the postdramatic forms of Elfriede Jelinek, RenГ© Pollesch, and Caryl Churchill, and expresses hope, in the last sentence of the essay, that “provided there is money, the experiment will come.”36 One can assume that Sieg actually wrote her essay earlier than 2011, since the latest production she analyzes premiered in 2009. At that point, Ballhaus Naunynstrasse was still in its infancy as a postmigrant performance space, with Langhoff having led it for only one year. Still, even considering productions only made up to that point, such as Schwarze Jungfrauen, it is difficult to force the works into the box of realist documentary theater, as Sieg does. This isn’t just because they lack the stridency of the 1960s-era documentary theater, as well as the mediatization of its contemporary iteration, but because artists at Ballhaus Naunynstrasse and the Gorki invariably embed documents within richly aesthetic, theatricalized spaces. Postmigrant directors are not just creating productions that star hybrid characters. The forms of the works are also hybrids. Looking at the women of Schwarze Jungfrauen, in their tic-tac-toe box, clothing and hair scrubbed of individuality, you do not see real people. You see a theatrical echo of the real. Reflecting on how Die SchwГ¤ne vom Schlachthof and Common Ground were created using research and interviews, but were then developed into historical worlds, we realize that these are history plays: here, again, are Wallenstein, Die Weber, and Mutter Courage. The plays do not fit the style of realism and are not always even mimetic. Mican, Erpulat, and Ronan drew on many of the postdramatic tactics of the VolksbГјhne, especially a radicalization of the Verfremdung effect, as can be seen clearly at the end of VerrГјcktes Blut, with its confusion of the real and several layers of fiction. But we do not struggle with the complex historiography of Castorf or Schleef, which Page 189 →combats Hegelian teleology and disturbs national identity. Unlike Castorf, MГјller, and Schleef, postmigrant artists do in fact need to tell stories, with characters audiences can care about. It is important that the specifically TurkishGerman past, and Turkish-German contributions to German history, be remembered. This is why the fictionalized documentary form—the history play—fits their goals so well. As artists assert their right, and the right of many different ethnicities, to belong to and participate in German civil society, they are creating history plays that do exactly what early German drama did: performing and thereby legitimizing a particular German social imaginary. These postmigrant German history plays write a past deeply interconnected with Europe, and the world, in order to imagine a better, more hybridized German future, more accepting of its joints and bonds. By introducing hybridity and layers of hyphenation to the German national imaginary, the genre of the postmigrant history play creates conflict zones as well as common ground: with figures, such as Frau Kelich and the Slavic migrants in Common Ground, splintered and unwhole, made impossible by their society, reconcilable only in a future with new solidarities. In these stories, unification has not disappeared but is merely insufficient for addressing questions of who belongs. It is understood as one in a series of events that have led to the present, not a singularly important turning point, not a Wende. In fact, national stories in general are simply no longer definitional—and perhaps this is another reason why postdramatic historiography is not necessary here—at least not for the young people at the Gorki. Which brings us back, again, finally, to Volker Braun’s Die Гњbergangsgesellschaft, in the direction of Lukas Langhoff, son of Thomas, who made the famous 1988 production of the play. Rearranged around themes, this new Гњbergangsgesellschaft is difficult to follow and hard to parse: it felt consciously unfinished. The

characters, cast regardless of ethnicity, reflecting the Germany of today more than that of 1991, stare at us from the auditorium, observing us as if we were objects in a museum. Braun’s allegory of an impossible, dying GDR feels not just unnecessary, but superfluous today. Still, Langhoff’s attempt to restage it, not just after the revolution, but after the revolution was understood as no revolution at all, can tell us about how this postmigrant theater understands itself: as part of a nation reexamining its past and finding difference, strengthening a hybrid identity and, simultaneously, slowly giving up its nationalism in exchange for the even larger common, conflicted ground of Europe.

Fig. 15. On a barrier blocking access to the construction site of the new and old Berlin City Palace, posters advertise the opening of a new X-Men movie: Zukunft ist Vergangenheit (literally Future Is Past, though the movie’s English title is Days of Future Past). In the background: the Fernsehturm (television tower). (Photograph: courtesy of Schiller Design.) Page 190 →

Coda While riding my bike to the Maxim Gorki Theater, I turn onto Unter den Linden from Alexanderplatz. It is dark and drizzling, a typical March evening in Berlin. Cutting through the gloom are spotlights shining on the fence that separates the street from construction being done on the new Berliner Schloss—the Prussian imperial palace that, mostly destroyed by bombs during World War II, was torn down by a youthful GDR and turned into the Palast der Republik, itself torn down after unification. The spotlights illuminate a massive advertisement on the fence, used, I suppose, to help finance the rebuilding, an unaffordable boondoggle if there ever was one. The advertisement reads: “Zukunft Ist Vergangenheit.” Future is Past. This is the title of the latest X-Men film (released in English as Days of Future Past). I turn right, off Unter den Linden, and park my bike at the Gorki. Future is past indeed.

Page 191 →

Notes Prologue 1. “UnabhГ¤ngige Gewerkschaften.” Heiner MГјller, “Reden vom 4.11.1989—Heiner MГјller, ” http://www.dhm.de/ausstellungen/4november1989/mulr.html, archived at https://perma.cc/LL5GZ83T. All translations from German are mine unless otherwise noted. 2. “Wenn in der nГ¤chsten Woche die Regierung zurГјcktreten sollte, darf auf Demonstrationen getanzt werden.” MГјller, “Reden vom 4.11.1989.” 3. Christa Wolf, “Christa Wolf, Christoph Hein, and Steffi Spira at the Berlin Demonstration, 4 November 1989,” trans. Allison Brown and Belinda Cooper, in Uniting Germany: Documents and Debates, 1944–1993, ed. Konrad H. Jarausch and Volker Gransow (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 1994), 71. 4. Jan Josef Liefers, “Reden vom 4.11.1989—Jan Josef Liefers,” http://www.dhm.de/ausstellungen /4november1989/lief.html, archived at https://perma.cc/57EP-A6DZ 5. Rimini Protokoll (Helgard Haug, Stefan Kaegi, and Daniel Wetzel), 50 Aktenkilometer: Ein Begehbares Stasi-HГ¶rspiel, Hebel am Ufer Theater Berlin, June 13, 2011. The quotes below come from my personal notes taken on my tour. I supplemented these with recordings on the “Press CD” given to me by Rimini Protokoll, as well as with recordings freely available on the production’s website: http://dradioortung.de/50km.html. Citations refer to the names Rimini Protokoll gives to the recordings. 6. “Start / Ziel: Dynamo-Marsch.” 7. “Romanze im Palasthotel (RГ¶llig).” 8. In the main text of this book, the German letter “ß” has been replaced with “ss.” For example, “Strauß” has been transliterated “Strauss.” Letters in the notes have not been transliterated. 9. Stefan Berger, The Search for Normality: National Identity and Historical Consciousness in Germany since 1800, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2003), 1. Page 192 →10. Alan Menhennet does this repeatedly in The Historical Experience in German Drama (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2003). One of his criteria in evaluating history plays is that one must be able “to describe the effect of a dramatic action as вЂhistorical,’” as well as assess the actuality of events represented (3). 11. See Ingo Breuer, TheatrialitГ¤t und GedГ¤chtnis: Deutschsprachiges Geschichtsdrama seit Brecht (Cologne: BГ¶hlau Verlag, 2004), 12. 12. In her survey of critical writing on Schiller’s history plays, Kathy Saranpa documents many instances of scholars, especially in the nineteenth century, applying source-based historical standards to dramatic literature. Kathy Saranpa, Schiller’s “Wallenstein”, “Maria Stuart”, and “Die Jungfrau von Orleans”: The Critical Legacy (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2002). 13. Aristotle, On Poetry and Style, trans. G. M. A. Grube (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1989), 18. 14. “Rather than speak of a genre, I prefer the term вЂhistorical world,’ which implies not so much a particular structure or type of language as a body of materials which a writer approaches with certain recognizable attitudes.” Herbert Lindenberger, Historical Drama: The Relation of Literature and Reality (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1975), 99. 15. “The representation of history as history is always a conjurer’s trick, what we see on stage is only a prompt for an imaginative apprehension of something incommensurable with any attempt to represent it directly—the theatrical imagination used to excite the historical imagination.” Bechtel defines historical imagination as “the means by which we receive and represent the past, read and write it, see and shape it.” Roger Bechtel, Past Performance: American Theatre and the Historical Imagination (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2007), 20. 16. For this chronicle of the collapse of the GDR and subsequent unification, I relied on Mary Fulbrook’s History of Germany, 1918–2008: The Divided Nation (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009); Charles Maier’s Dissolution: The Crisis of Communism and the End of East Germany

(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997); and the DDR Journal zur Novemberrevolution: August bis Dezember 1989, 2nd ed. (Berlin: taz, 1990), as well as the DDR Journal zur Novemberrevolution Nr. 2: Die Wende der Wende Januar bis MГ¤rz 1990 (Berlin: taz, 1990). 17. “AderlaГџ,” “Mit der heutigen Tagung werden wir eine Wende einleiten.” DDR Journal zur Novemberrevolution, 53. 18. “Berlin Alexanderplatz: Geschichte wird gemacht.” DDR Journal zur Novemberrevolution, 71. 19. “Das tritt nach meiner KenntnisВ .В .В . ist das sofort, unverzГјglich.” Quoted in Hans-Hermann Hertle, Chronik des Mauerfalls: die dramatischen Ereignisse um den 9. November 1989 (Berlin: Christopher Links Verlag, 1996), 145. 20. “вЂWir sind das Volk’ rufen sie heute—вЂWir sind ein Volk’ rufen sie morgen!” Quoted in Vanessa Fischer, “Wir sind ein Volk: Die Geschichte eines deutschen Rufes,” Deutschland Radio Kultur, September 29, 2005, http://www.deutschlandradiokultur.de/wir-sind-einvolk.1001.de.html?dram:article_id=155887 21. Kristina Spohr, “German Unification: Between Official History, Academic Scholarship, and Political Memoirs,” Historical Journal 43.3 (2000): 886. Page 193 →22. “Was sollen das auГџerdem fГјr freie Wahlen sein, die mit dem Geld der Bundesrepublik erkauft werden?” Quoted in Robin Detje, Provokation aus Prinzip (Berlin: Henschel, 2002), 161. 23. Helmut Kohl, “Kohl’s Celebration of the Currency Union, July 1, 1990,” trans. Allison Brown and Belinda Cooper, in Jarausch and Gransow, Uniting Germany, 173. Emphasis added. Flourishing, blГјhend in German, is typically translated as “blooming.” 24. For my analysis of German unification, I drew on Maier’s Dissolution; Konrad H. Jarausch’s The Rush to German Unity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994); and Stefan Berger’s Search for Normality, as well as articles cited where applicable. 25. Jarausch, Rush to German Unity, 155. 26. Berger, Search for Normality, 154. 27. Godfrey Carr and Georgina Paul, “Unification and Its Aftermath: The Challenge of History,” in German Cultural Studies: An Introduction, ed. Rob Burns (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 334. 28. “The Unification Treaty, 31 August 1990,” in Jarausch and Gransow, Uniting Germany, 197. 29. Carr and Paul, “Unification and Its Aftermath,” 328. 30. Quoted in Maier, Dissolution, 334. 31. Sabine Hake, German National Cinema, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2008), 210. 32. “Die Bandbreite der Publikationen aus der Zeit der вЂWende’ und Гјber die вЂWende’ ist riesig und mittlerweile kaum noch Гјberschaubar. Sie reicht von SachbГјchern und Dokumentationen Гјber SammelbГ¤nde mit mehr oder weniger polemischen Texten, Personenlexika mit satirischem Hintergrund bis zum HГ¶henkammroman, -gedicht und -drama, vom Tagebuch Гјber die Reportage zum Essay.” Frank Thomas Grub, “Wende” und “Einheit” im Spiegel der deutschsprachigen Literatur: Ein Handbuch, vol. 1: Untersuchungen (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2003), 9. 33. Grub, Untersuchungen, 9. 34. Frank Thomas Grub, “Wende” und “Einheit” im Spiegel der deutschsprachigen Literatur: Ein Handbuch, vol. 2: Bibliographie (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2003). 35. Stephen Brockmann, Literature and German Reunification (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 11. 36. Brockmann, Literature and German Reunification, 20. 37. Brockmann, Literature and German Reunification, 136. 38. Hake, German National Cinema, 211. 39. Hake, German National Cinema, 211. 40. John E. Davidson, “Shades of Grey: Coming to Terms with German Film Since Unification,” in German Cinema since Unification, ed. David Clarke (London: Continuum, 2006), 43–44. 41. Kristie A. Foell, “History as Melodrama: German Division and Unification in Two Recent Films, ” in Textual Responses to German Unification: Processing Historical and Social Change in Literature and Film, ed. Carol Anne Costabile-Heming, Rachel J. Halverson, and Kristie A. Foell (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2001), 233.

42. SГ©an Allan, “Ostalgie, Fantasy and the Normalization of East-West Relations in Post-unification Comedy,” in Clarke, German Cinema since Unification, 105–6. Page 194 →43. Laura Bradley, “From Berlin to Prenzlau: Representations of GDR Theater in Film and Literature,” in The GDR Remembered, ed. Nick Hodgin and Caroline Pearce (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2011), 24. 44. Bradley, “From Berlin to Prenzlau, 22. 45. Leonie Naughton, That Was the Wild East: Film Culture, Unification, and the “New” Germany (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002), 102. 46. Carl Weber, “German Theatre: Between the Past and the Future,” PAJ 13.1 (January 1991): 57.

Chapter 1 1. See Anthony D. Smith, Nationalism and Modernism: A Critical Survey of Recent Theories of Nations and Nationalism (New York: Routledge, 1998), 21–24. 2. Smith, Nationalism and Modernism, 23. 3. Justus Georg Schottelius, Friedens Sieg, ed. Friedrich E. Koldewey (Halle: Max Niemeyer, 1900). 4. Friedens Sieg is one of several literary works from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries with Arminius/Hermann as a lead character. Others include Daniel Casper von Lohenstein’s novel GroГџmГјtiger Feldherr Arminius (Noble General Arminius, 1689–90); Johann Elias Schlegel’s play Hermann (1743); Justus MГ¶ser’s play Arminius (1749); and Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock’s plays Hermanns Schlacht (Hermann’s Battle, 1769), Hermann und die FГјrsten (Hermann and the Princes, 1784), and Hermanns Tod (Hermann’s Death, 1787). 5. Christopher B. Krebs, A Most Dangerous Book (New York: Norton, 2011), 129–30. 6. Krebs, A Most Dangerous Book, 20. 7. Michael J. Sosulski, Theater and Nation in Eighteenth-Century Germany (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 6. 8. Ernest Gellner’s term, in his Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983). He describes high culture as the shared medium of a literate public educated through a standardized infrastructure that inculcates common values and history (34–37). In the introduction to Gellner’s book, John Bruelly includes high culture as one of the aspects that contributed to the success of nationalism in Germany (xxviii). Theater can complement schools by educating adults, including the illiterate. 9. Peter HyГ¶ng, Die Sterne, die Zensur und das Vaterland: Geschichte und Theater im spГ¤ten 18. Jahrhundert (Cologne: BГ¶hlau, 2003), 1–6. 10. “Der Geschichtsdiskurs wird damit zum notwendigen Begleitprodukt des Nationaldiskurses.” HyГ¶ng, Die Sterne, 169. 11. “Sowohl die [Funktion] des stimulierenden Katalysators als auch die der geeigneten Synthese dieser beiden Diskurse.” HyГ¶ng, Die Sterne, 169. 12. “Nirgendwo aber werden die unterschiedlichen Diskurse so gebГјndelt wie in den historischen oder vaterlГ¤ndischen Dramen.” HyГ¶ng, Die Sterne, 174. 13. “Teutsche Geschichte, teutsche Helden, eine teutsche Szene, teutsche Charakter,Page 195 → Sitten und GebrГ¤uche waren etwas ganz Neues auf teutschen SchaubГјhnen.” Quoted in HyГ¶ng, Die Sterne, 174. 14. “Sich als Nation wahrzunehmen, .В .В .В weil das Publikum seine вЂeigene Geschichte’ dargestellt sah.” HyГ¶ng, Die Sterne, 176. 15. Smith, Nationalism and Modernism, 41. 16. Smith, Nationalism and Modernism, 43. 17. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (New York: Verso, 1991), 6. 18. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 7. 19. Smith, Nationalism and Modernism, 137. 20. See Smith, Nationalism and Modernism, 1–7. 21. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Walter Kaufmann, in Basic Writings of Nietzsche

(New York: Modern Library, 2000), 368. 22. Schiller, “The Stage Considered as a Moral Institution,” trans. Jane Bannard Greene, in Essays on German Theater, ed. Margaret Herzfeld-Sander (New York: Continuum, 1985), 31. Discussing “national spirit,” Schiller says that he means “opinions and tendencies which are common to the people of one nation and differ from those of other nationalities” (31). So Schiller meant something like the perennialist definition of nation, and less the statehood definition. 23. Lindenberger, Historical Drama, 8. 24. Interestingly, the premiere of GГ¶tz featured historically accurate costumes, in contrast to the normal practice at the time of only using contemporary costuming, and a full century before the Duke of SaxeMeiningen’s company popularized the practice with their tours beginning in 1874. See Breuer, TheatralitГ¤t und GedГ¤chtnis, 9. 25. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Goetz von Berlichingen with the Iron Hand, trans. Cyrus Hamlin, in The Collected Works, vol. 7: Early Verse Drama and Prose Plays, ed. Hamlin and Frank Ryder (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 54–55. 26. Goethe, Goetz von Berlichingen, 82. 27. Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz, “On GГ¶tz von Berlichingen,” trans. Timothy J. Chamberlain, in Eighteenth Century German Criticism, ed. Chamberlain (New York: Continuum, 1992), 195. 28. Goethe, Egmont, trans. F. J. Lamport, in Five German Tragedies (Baltimore: Penguin, 1969), 182. 29. Goethe, Egmont, 128. 30. Goethe, Egmont, 189. 31. I exclude here Die Braut von Messina (The Bride of Messina, 1803), which is relatively unread and not influential. 32. Schiller had a specific idea of the concept of freedom. In the essay “On the Sublime” (1803), Schiller used the concept to mean individuals fulfilling their entire Begriff (idea or concept), superior to or in harmony with the phenomenal world. Importantly, Schiller argued that in order to discover “the lofty daemonic [from the Greek for divine] freedom in his breast,” man must be “aided by art.” Friedrich Page 196 →Schiller, “NaГЇve and Sentimental Poetry” and “On the Sublime,” trans. Julius A. Elias (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1966), 202–3. 33. He rebels against his limited freedom: “What? I, no longer act as I might choose? / No longer turn back if I wanted? Must / The deed be done because I thought of it?” Friedrich Schiller, Wallenstein, trans. F. J. Lamport, in “The Robbers” and “Wallenstein” (London: Penguin, 1979), 328. 34. Schiller, Wallenstein, 462. 35. Quoted in Lydia Moland, “An Unrelieved Heart: Hegel, Tragedy, and Schiller’s Wallenstein, ” New German Critique 113, 38.2 (2011): 3. 36. Moland, “An Unrelieved Heart,” 4. 37. Schiller, Wallenstein, 334. 38. See Breuer, TheatralitГ¤t und GedГ¤chtnis, 111. 39. See act 4, scene 3, for example. 40. See act 4, scene 2. 41. See Rolf Busch, Imperialistische und faschistische Kleist-Rezeption, 1890–1945: eine ideologiekritische Untersuchung (Frankfurt am Main: Akademische Verlagsgesellschaft, 1974). 42. Rachel MagSchamrГЎin, “Introduction to The Battle of Hermann,” in The Battle of Hermann (WГјrzburg: Verlag KГ¶nigshausen & Neumann, 2008), xxiii. 43. “Woe, my Fatherland, woe to you! The lyre, to strum and praise you, is denied to me, your poet, faithful here in your bosom.” (“Wehe, mein Vaterland, dir! Die Leier, zum Ruhm dir, zu schlagen, / Ist, getreu dir im SchoГџ, mir deinem Dichter, verwehrt.”) Heinrich von Kleist, Hermannsschlacht, in SГ¤mtliche Werke und Briefe: ZweibГ¤ndige Ausgabe in einem Band, ed. Helmut Sembdner (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 2001), 533. 44. “Die ganze Brut, die in den Leib Germaniens / Sich eingefilzt, wie ein Insektenschwarm, / MuГџ durch das Schwert der Rache jetzo sterben.” Kleist, Hermannsschlacht, 593. 45. “Nach Rom selbst mutig aufzubrechen!” Kleist, Hermannsschlacht, 628. 46. “In Staub mit allen Feinden Brandenburgs!” Heinrich von Kleist, Prinz Friedrich von Homburg, in SГ¤mtliche Werke und Briefe, 709.

47. “Ist es ein Traum?” Kleist, Prinz Friedrich von Homburg, 709. 48. “Dem Sieger in der Schlacht bei Fehrbellin!” Kleist, Prinz Friedrich von Homburg, 709. 49. Heinrich von Kleist, “An Wilhelmine von Zenge, 22. MГ¤rz 1801,” in SГ¤mtliche Werke und Briefe, 630–36. 50. Kleist, Hermannsschlacht, 554. 51. “O Hermann! Hermann! / So kann man blondes Haar und blaue Augen haben, / Und doch so falsch sein, wie ein Punier?” Kleist, Hermannsschlacht, 608. 52. As when he asks Winfried to rally the troops in act 5, scene 14. Kleist, Hermannsschlacht, 613. 53. “Fragst, wo und wann Germanien gewesen? /В .В .В . jetzt wirst du / Mich schnell begriefen, wie ich es gemeint: / FГјhrt ihn hinweg and werft das Haupt ihm nieder!” Kleist, Hermannsschlacht, 627–28. 54. “Mit einem Wort, ich halte viel auf Goethe oder Shakespeare, aber sehr wenig Page 197 →auf Schiller.” Georg BГјchner, Werke und Briefe (Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1988), 306. 55. “Der dramatische Dichter ist in meinen Augen nichts, als ein Geschichtsschreiber, steht aber Гјber Letzterem dadurch, daГџ er uns die Geschichte zum zweiten Mal erschafft.” BГјchner, Werke und Briefe, 305. 56. “Statt eine trockne ErzГ¤hlung zu geben, in das Leben einer Zeit hinein versetzt.” BГјchner, Werke und Briefe, 305. 57. “HГ¶chste Aufgabe ist, der Geschichte, wie sie sich wirklich begeben, so nahe als mГ¶glich zu kommen.” BГјchner, Werke und Briefe, 305. 58. “Der Dichter ist kein Lehrer der Moral.” BГјchner, Werke und Briefe, 306. 59. Lindenberger, Historical Drama, 75. 60. Gerhart Hauptmann, The Weavers, trans. Theodore H. Lustig, in Gerhart Hauptmann: Plays, ed. Reinhold Grimm and Caroline Molina Y. Vedia (New York: Continuum, 1994), 93. 61. Friedrich Sengle does this most famously, in the final line of his book Das historische Drama in Deutschland: “The special development of German history dramas, begun by the Shakespeare cult in Germany, ended with World War I.” (“Die durch Deutschlands Shakespeare-Kult eingeleitete Sonderentwicklung des deutschen Geschichtsdramas war mit dem ersten Weltkrieg abgeschlossen.”) Sengle, Das historische Drama in Deutschland: Geschichte eines literarischen Mythos (Stuttgart: J.B. Metzler, 1969), 249. 62. As Alan Menhennet does: “With Brechtian вЂHistorisierung,’ which submits all people and processes to examination from the point of view of socio-political вЂdevelopment,’ we are back with the Baroque concept that nothing can be distinguished as peculiarly вЂhistorical,’ since everything is. Marxist вЂhistoricality’ is achieved by stripping away much of the individuality of historical fact.” Menhennet, Historical Experience, 158. 63. Leben Eduards des Zweiten von England (The Life of Edward the Second of England, 1924) could be included on this list as well, but as it is a relatively close adaptation, comes early on in Brecht’s career, and was not highly influential, I have decided not to address it. 64. Bertolt Brecht, “On Epic Dramatic Art: Change” in Brecht on Theatre, ed. Marc Silberman, Steve Giles, and Tom Kuhn, trans. Jack Davis et al., 3rd ed. (London: Bloomsbury Methuen, 2015), 198. 65. Brecht, “On Epic Dramatic Art,” 198. 66. See Friedrich Ewen, Bertolt Brecht: His Life, His Art, His Times (New York: Carol, 1992), 463. 67. Bertolt Brecht, Mother Courage and Her Children, trans. John Willett, in Collected Plays, vol. 5 (London: Methuen, 2003), 73. Johann Tserclaes, Count of Tilly, led Dutch forces for the Holy Roman Empire during the Thirty Years’ War, and died in Ingolstadt of wounds received in a battle against the Swedish army in 1632. 68. Brecht, “Verfremdung Effects in Chinese Acting,” in Brecht on Theatre, 156. 69. Brecht, “Verfremdung Effects,” 157. 70. Bertolt Brecht, “Speech to Danish Working-Class Actors on the Art of Observation,”Page 198 → in Poems, 1913–1956, trans. and ed. John Willett and Ralph Manheim (London: Methuen, 1975), 237. 71. Bertolt Brecht, “Short Organon for the Theatre,” in Brecht on Theatre, 240. 72. See “Exile Years: Introduction to Part Two,” in Brecht on Theatre, 105. 73. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology, ed. C. J. Arthur (New York: International

Publishers, 1970), 42. 74. Brecht, “Short Organon,” 191. 75. Brecht, Mother Courage, 74. 76. Bertolt Brecht, Days of the Commune, trans. David Constantine, in Collected Plays, vol. 8 (London: Methuen, 2003), 122. 77. Bertolt Brecht, Life of Galileo, trans. John Willett, in Collected Plays, vol. 5, 101. 78. See Breuer, Theatralität und Gedächnis, 111. 79. Brecht, Mother Courage, 153. 80. Brecht, Mother Courage, 160. 81. Brecht, Days of the Commune, 110. 82. Brecht, Days of the Commune, 112. 83. Brecht, Days of the Commune, 125. 84. Brecht, Days of the Commune, 111. 85. Bertolt Brecht, “On Life of Galileo (1947–8) from Constructing a Role: Laughton’s Galileo, ” in Brecht on Performance, ed. Tom Kuhn, Steve Giles, and Marc Silberman, trans. Charlotte Ryland et al. (London: Bloomsbury Methuen, 2015), 157. 86. Brecht, “On Life of Galileo,” 157. 87. Brecht, “On Life of Galileo,” 157. 88. Bertolt Brecht, “On Mother Courage and Her Children (1949–51) from Courage Model 1949, ” in Brecht on Performance, 185. 89. Brecht, “On Mother Courage,” 186. 90. David Barnett, A History of the Berliner Ensemble (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 72. 91. See David Barnett, “Playwriting in the Contemporary German Theatre: Representation and Its Discontents, 1960–2006,” in A History of German Theatre, ed. Simon Williams and Maik Hamburger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 307. 92. Thomas Irmer, “A Search for New Realities: Documentary Theatre in Germany,” TDR 50.3 (2006): 17. 93. “Soll nicht anderes enthalten als Fakten.” Peter Weiss, Die Ermittlung: Oratorium in 11 Gesängen (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag, 1984), 7. 94. Peter Weiss, “Notes on the Contemporary Theatre,” trans. Joel Agee, in Essays on German Theatre, ed. Margaret Herzfeld-Sander (New York: Continuum, 2002), 294.

Chapter 2 1. I have also drawn on two large-scale reviews of multiple books: Spohr, “German Unification”; and Holger Nehring, “Book Review: Wir sind das Volk! Wir sind ein Volk! Geschichte der deutschen Wiedervereinigung; Deutschland einig Vaterland. Die Geschichte der Wiedervereinigung,” German History 29.2 (2011): 356–61. Page 199 →2. Berger, Search for Normality, 99. 3. Berger, Search for Normality, 98. 4. Berger, Search for Normality, 96. 5. Berger, Search for Normality, 92. 6. “Eine Konfiguration von Motiven,” “Besonderheiten der deutschen Geschichte im Vergleich zur englischen und franzГ¶sischen als widersprГјchliches VerhГ¤ltnis von Unterlegenheit und Гњberlegenheit gefaГџt haben.” Helmut Peitsch, “Deutsche Misere,” in Historisch-kritisches WГ¶rterbuch des Marxismus 2: Bank bis Dummheit in der Musik, ed. Wolfgang Fritz Haug (Hamburg: Argument-Verlag, 1995), 641. Article available for purchase online at http://www.inkrit.de/e_inkritpedia /e_maincode/doku.php?id=d:deutsche_misere 7. Peitsch, “Deutsche Misere,” 648. 8. Berger, Search for Normality, 47. 9. See John J. White and Ann White, Bertolt Brecht’s “Furcht und Elend des Dritten Reiches”: A German Exile Drama in the Struggle against Fascism (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2010), 100.

10. See Barnett, History of Berliner Ensemble, 67–73; and Roland Weber, Peter Hacks, Heiner MГјller und das antagonistische Drama des Sozialismus: Ein Streit im literarischen Feld der DDR (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015), 183. 11. Tom Kuhn and Steve Giles, “Note to вЂTheses on the Faustus Discussion,’” in Brecht on Art and Politics, ed. Kuhn and Giles (London: Methuen 2003), 330. 12. Bertolt Brecht, “Theses on the Faustus Discussion,” trans. Laura Bradley, Steve Giles, and Tom Kuhn, in Kuhn and Giles, Brecht on Art and Politics, 328. 13. Berger, Search for Normality, 93. 14. Berger, Search for Normality, 94. 15. Quoted in Berger, Search for Normality, 95. 16. Berger, Search for Normality, 95. 17. Spohr, “German Unification,” 872. 18. Quoted in Berger, Search for Normality, 5. 19. JГјrgen Habermas, “Replies to a Bundestag Investigative Commission,” trans. Steven Rendall, in A Berlin Republic: Writings on Germany (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997), 54. 20. Mary Fulbrook, A Concise History of Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 249. 21. Daniel Little, “Philosophy of History,” inВ The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2011 ed.), ed. Edward N. Zalta, http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2011/entries/history/ 22. Berger, Search for Normality, 8. 23. Francis Fukuyama’s famous “end of history” thesis, discussed below, influenced these thinkers. 24. Berger, Search for Normality, 198. 25. See Caroline Pearce, “An Unequal Balance? Memorializing Germany’s вЂDouble Past’ since 1990,” in Hodgin and Pearce, The GDR Remembered, 173. 26. Charles Maier notes that “even for social scientists who had continually emphasized the role of transnational developments—capitalism, modernization, Western liberal values—the nation beckoned warmly as a new unit of study. HistoriansPage 200 → who had earlier distrusted the narrative of the nationstate, who had sought to explain their country’s development in terms of persisting premodern class formations or rapid economic change, rediscovered the significance of national identity.” Maier, Dissolution, 335. 27. Nehring, “Book Review,” 356. 28. Berger, Search for Normality, 201. 29. The Maastricht Treaty, drafted in 1991, which formally established the European Union from the European Economic Community and led to the euro currency, was in part an attempt to address fears of a too-strong united Germany. 30. Berger, Search for Normality, 235. 31. Berger, Search for Normality, 217. 32. Berger, Search for Normality, 217. 33. A. J. P. Taylor, The Course of German History: A Survey of the Development of German History since 1815 (London: Routledge, 2001 [1945]), 71. 34. See Frederick Engels’s Der deutsche Bauernkrieg (Berlin: Dietz, 1989 [1850]). 35. Such as Wolfgang Mommsen, Matrin Sabrow, Christoph KleГџmann, and JГјrgen Kocka. See Berger, Search for Normality, 217–20. 36. Fulbrook, History of Germany, 1918–2008, 285. 37. Spohr, “German Unification,” 885. 38. Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Avon Books, 1992), xi. 39. Fukuyama, End of History, 68–69. 40. Francis Fukuyama, “Reflections on The End of History, Five Years Later,” in After History? Francis Fukuyama and His Critics, ed. Timothy Burns (London: Rowman and Littlefield, 1994), 341. 41. Fukuyama, End of History, 39–51. Fukuyama cites the GDR’s fall as empirical evidence in support of his argument: “The success of democracy in a wide variety of places and among many different peoples would suggest that the principles of liberty and equality on which they are based are not accidents or the results of ethnocentric prejudice, but are in fact discoveries about the nature of man as

man” (51). 42. See Joseph Joffe, “The Wall and the End of History,” Newsweek, November 10, 2009, http://www.newsweek.com/2009/11/05/the-wall-and-the-end-of-history.html, archived at https://perma.cc /Z826-AJCH 43. Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), 2. 44. White, Metahistory, x. 45. White, Metahistory, 5. 46. White, Metahistory, 7. 47. The provenance of these lectures is complicated. I am working from the H. B. Nisbet translation of the German edition by Johannes Hoffmeister: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History: Introduction: Reason in History, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980). The German text I cross-reference is Die Vernunft in der Geschichte, ed. Johannes Hoffmeister, 5th ed. (Hamburg: Verlag von Felix Meiner, 1955). For a full discussion of Page 201 →the sources of the text, see Dennis O’Brien, Hegel on Reason and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), 3–6. 48. Quoted from Phenomenology of Spirit in O’Brien, Hegel on Reason and History, 12. 49. O’Brien argues that Hegel identified reason—which could also be called self-consciousness and which emerged when humans gathered in states, resulting in struggles between rulers and ruled—“as the substance of history, its material, formal, efficient, and final cause, working itself from potentiality to actuality in the course of time.” Hegel on Reason and History, 159. 50. Hegel, Lectures, 196–209. 51. Hegel, Lectures, 207. 52. Hegel, Lectures, 84. 53. Hegel, Lectures, 208–9. 54. O’Brien, Hegel on Reason and History, 149. 55. White, Metahistory, “Hegel: The Poetics of History and the Way beyond Irony,” 81–131. 56. Quoted in White, Metahistory, 94. 57. White, Metahistory, 94. 58. Aristotle, On Poetry and Style, 1449b. 59. Quoted in White, Metahistory, 116. See also Hegel, Lectures, 58. 60. O’Brien, Hegel on Reason and History, 46. 61. White, Metahistory, 116. 62. White, Metahistory, 116. 63. White, Metahistory, 117. 64. White, Metahistory, 117. 65. White, Metahistory, 130. 66. O’Brien, Hegel on Reason and History, 162. 67. White, Metahistory, 130. 68. White, Metahistory, 9. 69. White, Metahistory, 9. Emphasis added. 70. Northrop Frye, The Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971), 169. 71. O’Brien, Hegel on Reason and History, 161. 72. White, Metahistory, 9. Emphasis added. 73. White, Metahistory, 8–9. 74. White, Metahistory, 9. 75. White, Metahistory, 10. 76. Hans-Thies Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, trans. Karen JГјrs-Munby (London: Routledge, 2006), 22. 77. Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, 44. 78. Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, 85. 79. Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, 39. 80. Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, 39. 81. Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, 40.

Page 202 →82. Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, 39. 83. Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, 43. 84. Berger, Search for Normality, xxi. 85. Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 13. 86. Jeffrey C. Olick, Politics of Regret: On Collective Memory and Historical Responsibility (New York: Routledge, 2007), 6. Olick is commenting on the contributions of Maurice Halbwachs to the field of collective memory studies. 87. Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History,” Representations 26 (Spring 1989): 7. 88. Nora, “Between Memory and History,” 8. 89. Nora, “Between Memory and History,” 7. 90. Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 21–22. 91. Taylor, Archive and Repertoire, 19. 92. Taylor, Archive and Repertoire, 20. 93. Taylor, Archive and Repertoire, 19. 94. Taylor discusses as an example the mock battles between Moors and Christians enacted in sixteenthcentury Mexico: “The embodied nature of the repertoireВ .В .В . grants these social actors the opportunity to rearrange characters in parodic and subversive ways.” Taylor, Archive and Repertoire, 31. 95. Jeanette R. Malkin, Memory-Theater and Postmodern Drama (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999), 4. 96. Malkin, Memory-Theater, 4. 97. Malkin, Memory-Theater, 1. 98. Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, 71. Lehmann does not elaborate on this comment about Kantor and memory. 99. Malkin, Memory-Theater, 3. 100. See Silke Arnold-de Simine, Memory Traces: 1989 and the Question of German Cultural Identity (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2005). 101. “Verglichen mit ihren europГ¤ischen Nachbarn oder den USA, ist die Bundesrepublik Deutschland eine weithin mythenfreie Zone—zumindest, wenn es um politische GrГјndungs- und Orientierungsmythen geht.” Herfried MГјnkler, Die Deutschen und ihre Mythen (Berlin: Rowohlt, 2009), 9. 102. See Nils Minkmar, “GemГјtliche Theorie,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, March 12, 2009, http://www.faz.net/-gf5–15bsn 103. “Vor allem, wennВ .В .В . einschneidende Reformen erforderlich werden oder politisches Neuland zu betreten ist, erlangen solche Narrative groГџe Bedeutung. Mythen versichern dann, dass die zu meisternden Aufgaben bewГ¤ltigt werden kГ¶nnen, weil das damals auch gelungen ist.” MГјnkler, Die Deutschen, 11. 104. Berger, The Search or Normality, 201. 105. Wende is not unusual in German political parlance, but it is also used specifically as shorthand for events of 1989–90. 106. DDR Journal zur Novemberrevolution, 53. Page 203 →107. “Mit dem Wort вЂWende’ habe ich meine Schwierigkeiten. Ich sehe da ein Segelboot. Der KapitГ¤n ruft: вЂKlar zur Wende?,’ weil der Wind sich gedreht hat oder ihm ins Gesicht blГ¤st. Und die Mannschaft duckt sich, wenn der Segelbaum Гјber das Boot fegt. Aber stimmt dieses Bild noch? Stimmt es noch in dieser tГ¤glichen vorwГ¤rtstreibenden Lage? Ich wГјrde von вЂrevolutionГ¤rer Erneuerung’ sprechen. Revolutionen gehen von unten aus, unten und oben wechseln ihre PlГ¤tze in dem Wertesystem, und dieser Wechsel stellt die sozialistische Gesellschaft vom Kopf auf die FГјГџe.” DDR Journal zur Novemberrevolution, 74–75. 108. See Jarausch and Gransow, “Introduction: The New Germany/Myths and Realities,” in Jarausch and Gransow, Uniting Germany, xvii–xxx. 109. Spohr, “German Unification,” 869. 110. Spohr, “German Unification,” 869. 111. Nehring, “Book Review.” 112. Spohr, “German Unification,” 869.

113. Spohr, “German Unification,” 869. 114. Egon Bahr, “Egon Bahr on Prospects for Unity, 14 December 1990,” in Jarausch and Gransow, Uniting Germany, 231. 115. Reinhold Grimm, “The Travails of the Plains: On Some Consequences of German Unification,” German Studies Review 15.1 (1992): 87. 116. Katrin Sieg, “The Revolution Has Been Televised: Reconfiguring History and Identity in Post-Wall Germany,” Theatre Journal 45.1 (1993), 39. 117. Sieg, “The Revolution Has Been Televised,” 39. 118. See Timothy Garton Ash, “Velvet Revolution: The Prospects,” New York Review of Books, December 3, 2009, http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2009/dec/03/velvet-revolution-the-prospects 119. Helmut Kohl, “Kohl’s Campaign Promises, March 1990,” in Jarausch and Gransow, Uniting Germany, 122. This phrase was also used in the opening of the May 1990 treaty on economic unity: “Owing to the fact that a peaceful and democratic revolution took place in the GDR in the autumn of 1989 . . .” “Treaty on the Creation of a Monetary, Economic, and Social Union, 18 March 1990, ” in Jarausch and Gransow, Uniting Germany, 154 (emphasis added). 120. Kohl, “Kohl’s Celebration,” 173. 121. Münkler, Die Deutschen, 478. 122. Münkler, Die Deutschen, 479. 123. Münkler, Die Deutschen, 479. 124. Habermas, “Replies,” 51. 125. Berger, Search for Normality, 217.

Chapter 3 1. I draw the “island” metaphor from Sabine Zolchow, “The Island of Berlin,” trans. Rebeccah Blum and Millay Hyatt, Theatre in the Berlin Republic, ed. Denise Varney (Bern: Peter Lang, 2008), 55–80. 2. Weber, “German Theatre,” 55. Page 204 →3. Quoted in Zolchow, “The Island of Berlin,” 59. 4. Zolchow, “The Island of Berlin,” 46. 5. Peter von Becker, “Zweimal Thriller, einmal Nachtrevue,” Theater heute 5 (1991): 14. 6. “Eine zugige BГјhne.” Elfriede MГјller, Goldener Oktober, in “Die Bergarbeiterinnen” und “Goldener Oktober” (Frankfurt am Main: Verlag der Autoren, 1992), 82. 7. MГјller, Goldener Oktober, 139. 8. MГјller, Goldener Oktober, 159. 9. Leslie A. Adelson, Crisis of Subjectivity: Botho Strauss’s Challenge to West German Prose of the 1970s (Amsterdam: Amsterdamer Publikationen zur Sprache und Literatur, 1984). 10. “Alle Menschen werden BrГјder.” Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, now the official anthem of the European Union, was played at the 2010 “Tag der deutschen Einheit” (German Unity Day) celebration—the twentieth anniversary of legal unification. 11. Grub, Untersuchungen, 492. All productions were well attended. 12. Botho StrauГџ, SchluГџchor, directed by Luc Bondy, SchaubГјhne am Lehniner Platz, Berlin, 1992. Zweite Deutsche Fernsehen, VHS. Freie UniversitГ¤t Institut fГјr Theaterwissenschaft Medienarchiv. 13. Dag Kemser, ZeitstГјcke zur deutschen Wiedervereinigung: Form—Inhalt—Wirkung (TГјbingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 2006), 236. 14. Rolf Hochhuth, Wessis in Weimar: Szenen aus einem Besetzten Land (Berlin: Verlag Volk und Welt, 1993). 15. Kemser, ZeitstГјcke zur deutschen Wiedervereinigung, 237. 16. Klaus Pohl, “Planet Germany: Der Dramatiker Klaus Pohl Гјber den Alltag in den neuen BundeslГ¤ndern—Teil 1: Berlin,” Der Spiegel 33 (1994): 96–110; Pohl, “Planet Germany: Der Dramatiker Klaus Pohl Гјber den Alltag in den neuen BundeslГ¤ndern—Teil 2: Von GГ¶rlitz bis Eisenach,” Der Spiegel 34 (1994): 96–111; Pohl, “Planet Germany: Der Dramatiker Klaus Pohl

Гјber den Alltag in den neuen BundeslГ¤ndern—Teil 3: Von Jena bis Lenzen,” Der Spiegel 35 (1995): 107–25. 17. “Wie die Wiedervereinigung und der Untergang der DDR ihr Leben verГ¤ndert haben.” Klaus Pohl, Wartesaal Deutschland Stimmenreich: Eine Studie Гјber den Charakter der Deutschen (Berlin: Rotbuch Verlag, 1999), 2. 18. “Das wichtigste StГјck Гјber unser Land und seine Leute seit der Vereinigung.” Franz Wille, “Vorhang auf fГјr Vorurteile,” Der Spiegel, October 30, 1995, http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/print/d9225426.html, archived at https://perma.cc/5Y2H-DWLK 19. Kemser, ZeitstГјcke zur deutschen Wiedervereinigung, 161. 20. Kemser, ZeitstГјcke zur deutschen Wiedervereinigung, 162. 21. “Art. 19 Einigungsvertrag geht davon aus, daГџ bei der Beurteilung der Wirksamkeit und Beachtlichkeit frГјherer Hoheitsakte im Beitrittsgebiet nicht die rechtstaatlichen GrundsГ¤tze aus dem bisherigen Geltungsbereich des Grundgesetzes, zu denen auch die Prinzipien des VГ¶lkerrechts gehГ¶ren, herangezogen werden kГ¶nnen (Kammergericht, Urteil vom 13. April 1992).” Hochhuth, Wessis in Weimar, 127. Page 205 →22. “Milliarden sind diese GrundstГјcke heute wert: / 43 der 155 Kilometer langen Mauer laufen durch Berlin!” Hochhuth, Wessis in Weimar, 134. 23. “Denn wenn Sie der Mauer Verteidijungsfunktion zujestehen, / also dem Jewaltstaat Lejitimation / beim Raub der JrundstГјcke, / der die Voraussetzung war, diese Mauer zu bauen: / so ist damit die schauderrejende Beliebigkeit / Ihrer FDP-Midgliedschaft erwiesen.” Hochhuth, Wessis in Weimar, 138. 24. “Einen Kirschgarten im sonnig kalten, oft wechselnden Aprillicht naturlistisch schГ¶n auf die BГјhne.” Hochhuth, Wessis in Weimar, 35. 25. “Sehr laute MotorsГ¤gerei.” Hochhuth, Wessis in Weimar, 36. 26. “HГ¤tt’ doch eener mal den Mut, helfen tГ¤t’s uns / zwar ooch nischt mehr, laut ze saachen, / dat immerhin nich der Honecker mit seine Bonzen / unser blГјhendes Land hier plattjemacht hat /—sondern die vafluchten Wessis.” Hochhuth, Wessis in Weimar, 48. Emphasis added; blГјhend, or blooming, echoes Kohl’s rhetoric. 27. “Herrlich blГјhende Baumkrone fГ¤llt.” Hochhuth, Wessis in Weimar, 49. Emphasis added. 28. Quoted in Hochhuth, Wessis in Weimar, 149. “Gottlos ist er, ihn gelГјstet / Unsre HГјtte, unser Hain; / Wie er sich als Nachbar brГјstet, / Soll man untertГ¤nig sein.” English translation: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust, Part II, trans. David Constantine (London: Penguin Classics, 2009), 222. 29. I cannot resist making one more connection here: Bertolt Brecht also adapted the myth of Philemon and Baucis in his play Der Gute Mensch von Sezuan (The Good Person of Szechwan, 1943). 30. Hochhuth, Wessis in Weimar, 150. 31. Hochhuth, Wessis in Weimar, 150. 32. Brecht, “Verfremdung Effects,” 157. 33. “Die Deformationen von Ost und West treffen sich Гјber einem Abgrund voller Leichen.” Elfriede MГјller, “Warum flutscht das alles so gut durch?,” Theater heute Jahrbuch (1995): 153. 34. Quoted in Birgit Haas, Modern German Political Drama, 1980–2000 (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2003), 102. 35. “Wie ein rГ¤udiger Kojote steht das Land hinter der gefallenen Mauer und jault eine neue Melodie: Spielt. Gebt mir Honig. Gebt mir Milch! Ich sauf mit.” MГјller, Goldener Oktober, 88. 36. “Ossi bleibt Ossi.” MГјller, Goldener Oktober, 148. Ossi is a pejorative for Easterner. 37. “Pseudo-Mauer.” MГјller, Goldener Oktober, 88. 38. “Plastic Bomber” is a nickname for the notorious East German Trabant car. 39. “Ich liebe meinen Trabi / Und pfeif auf BMW.” MГјller, Goldener Oktober, 84. 40. Literally wryneck birds, who supposedly frequently twist their heads to change their perspective; used more generally for people who quickly and radically modify their political leanings. 41. “Der Wendehals fehlt im Verein / Wo ist ein Arsch ich kriech hinein.” MГјller, Goldener Oktober, 147. 42. “Das Herz konnt keiner finden, / Es war schon emigriert, / Als man die 40jГ¤hrige Leich / Im Westen autopsiert.” MГјller, Goldener Oktober, 157. Page 206 →43. “Aber das ist nun die вЂWende’: / Der FAZ gehГ¶rt das vornehmste Hotel

Weimars, / drГјben der вЂRussische Hof,’ und eine Zeitung / und eine Druckerei, / doch uns BГјrgern von Weimar gehГ¶rt kein Backstein / an irgendeinem Betrieb!” Hochhuth, Wessis in Weimar, 55. 44. “Kein Wasser mehr im Brunnen—ich glaub’ / seit dreihundertfГјnfzig Jahren, seit das Dorf steht, / passiert das heut zum erstenmal!” Hochhuth, Wessis in Weimar, 155. 45. “FГјr mich hat sich alles verГ¤ndert / praktisch.” Pohl, Wartesaal, 9. 46. “Es ist so als wenn die Japaner jetzt in / Westdeutschland einmarschieren und wГјrden sagenВ .В .В . / Ab morgen japanisch!” Pohl, Wartesaal, 76. 47. “Emigriert / ohne auszuwandern!” Pohl, Wartesaal, 12. 48. “Die Wiedervereinigung ist nicht mehr rГјckfГјhrbar.” Pohl, Wartesaal, 77. 49. “Also wo ick so das GefГјhl hatte: / Die Gesellschaft geht in’ Arsch! / Die Beziehung geht in’ Arsch!” Pohl, Wartesaal, 10. 50. “Einen radikalen Wandel / auch persГ¶nlich.” Pohl, Wartesaal, 87. 51. “вЂEs geht nicht mehr,’ hat sie gesagt.” Pohl, Wartesaal, 92. 52. “Ick bin von meiner Familie getrennt. / Ick sehe die alle paar Monate mal. / Aber das sind eben die Auswirkungen dieser Geschichte.” Pohl, Wartesaal, 109. 53. “Ich kann sie nicht anrufen, / ich kann da nicht hingehen. / Das mГ¶chte sie nicht.” Pohl, Wartesaal, 60. 54. “Also wir haben in Harzgerode gar nichts / von der Wende abbekommen / auГџer mit Ach und Krach / ’n Aldi.” Pohl, Wartesaal, 119–20. 55. “Gabs beim bei uns im Osten keene Obdachlosen / aber es is es ist mit dem mit dem Fall der Mauer / seit 9. November 89 / wo die Mauer praktisch jefallen is / is det noch schlimmer jeworden.” Pohl, Wartesaal, 55. 56. “Wie die Wiedervereinigung net da war / hab ich det GefГјhl / es lief irgends viel besser so, ja, lief alles / kontinuierlich und reibungslos.” Pohl, Wartesaal, 122. 57. “In meinem Betrieb ist der ParteisekretГ¤r nun nicht mehr / ParteisekretГ¤r sondern jetzt ist er / stellvertretender Direktor.” Pohl, Wartesaal, 163. 58. “Nee. / Wissen Se. / Im Grunde hat sich nischt geГ¤ndert. / BloГџ das gesellschaftliche System.” Pohl, Wartesaal, 163. 59. “Es gibt eben solche, die hatten vorher das Geld, haben mit dem Geld—ob Parteigeld oder oder oder!—sehr viel gemacht und es zurГјckgelegt und die sind nun wieder oben.” Pohl, Wartesaal, 162. 60. “Naja. / Die Landschaft die ist ja genau so noch da wie frГјher.” Pohl, Wartesaal, 86. 61. “Ernst! Sorge! Umsicht! Deutschland! Knien! AbwГ¤rts!” Botho StrauГџ, SchluГџchor (Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1991), 29. Emphasis added. 62. “Dunkel. Leichter, mehrstimmiger Chorgesang. Wenn es wieder hell wird, liegen vom Fotografen nur noch ein BГјndel Kleider und die Schuhe auf dem Boden.” StrauГџ, SchluГџchor, 29. 63. “Blicken Sie leicht unter die Kamera. Blicken Sie auf mein Knie.” StrauГџ, SchluГџchor, 32. 64. StrauГџ, SchluГџchor, 50. Page 207 →65. “Warum tun Sie das?” StrauГџ, SchluГџchor, 50. 66. “Ich muГџ mir Luft machen. Drinnen heiГџt es an sich halten.” StrauГџ, SchluГџchor, 50. 67. “Ab nun verfГ¤llt die Republik.” StrauГџ, SchluГџchor, 50. 68. “FГјhlen Sie die ganze Tiefe des MenschenmГ¶glichen in dieser Minute? SpГјren Sie: welch ein Augenblick das hГ¤tte werden kГ¶nnen?” StrauГџ, SchluГџchor, 64. 69. “VerpaГџt, versГ¤umt.” StrauГџ, SchluГџchor64. 70. JГјrgen SchrГ¶der, Geschichtsdramen: Die “deutsche Misere”—von Goethes “GГ¶tz” bis Heiner MГјller’s “Germania”? (TГјbingen: Stauffenburg Verlag, 1994), 347. 71. “Das ist Geschichte, sag ich, hier und heute, sage ich, Valmy, sage ich, Goethe! Und diesemal sind wir dabei gewesen. Die Grenzen sind geГ¶ffnet! Die Mauer bricht! Der OstenВ .В .В . der Osten ist frei! ” StrauГџ, SchluГџchor, 86. 72. “Auf Seite vierhundertvierzig! Da mach ich mir ein historisches Eselsohr.” StrauГџ, SchluГџchor, 89. 73. “Labor-atmosphГ¤re, in der man das deutsche Wesen und seine handelnden Vertreter sezieren und unterm Messer beobachten konnte.” Michael Merschmeier, “вЂGuten Abend, wir sinken. Darf ich mich setzen?’ Glanz und Elend des Hauptstadttheaters: Kunst und Kasse, alte KГ¤mpen und neue

Stars. Ein Bericht zur Saisonhalbzeit in Berlin,” Theater heute 3 (1992), 13. 74. The title references ancient Greek tragedy; in Greek, “tragedy” can be translated literally as “goat song.” 75. Gregory H. Wolf, “Botho Strauss and Conservative Aesthetics: An Introduction to вЂGoat Song Rising,’” Southern Humanities Review 38.4 (2004): 321. 76. Botho StrauГџ, “Goat Song Rising,” trans. Thomas G. Ringmayr, Southern Humanities Review 38.4 (2004): 333. 77. StrauГџ, “Goat Song Rising,” 331. 78. StrauГџ, “Goat Song Rising,” 330. 79. “F13: Kurz nach dem Krieg war’s. Und der Krieg ist fГјnfzig Jahre her. F6: Aber Mutter, wir sind erst sehr viel spГ¤ter in den Westen.” StrauГџ, SchluГџchor, 16. 80. “Wagen Sie kein Wort mehr: ich reiГџe Ihnen die Scherbe durch die Visage!” StrauГџ, SchluГџchor, 94. 81. “F4: Warum nicht jetzt? M11: Jetzt noch nicht. M14: Kopf hoch!. F1: Je poseВ .В .В .” StrauГџ, SchluГџchor, 9. 82. “Ich glaube nicht, daГџ das wahr ist, was Sie da erzГ¤hlen.” StrauГџ, SchluГџchor, 11. 83. “F4: Warum sagst du das? F6: Vor allen LeutenВ .В .В . F4: Ich mГ¶chte wissen—M11: Ich denke darГјber nach” StrauГџ, SchluГџchor, 12. 84. “Sein ist Gesehenwerden.” StrauГџ, SchluГџchor, 28. 85. “DaГџ ich praktisch spГ¤ter einmal heute gar nicht dabei war.” StrauГџ, SchluГџchor, 29. 86. “Ich muss mich sehen jetzt, in voller Größe, sonst glaub ich’s nicht.” StrauГџ, SchluГџchor, 52. 87. White, Metahistory, 9. 88. White, Metahistory, 9. Page 208 →89. White, Metahistory, 9. Emphasis added. 90. “Fetzen aus Beethovens SchluГџchor von der StraГџe her.” StrauГџ, SchluГџchor, 94. 91. “Kastrierte ChimГ¤re! Wo ist dein Doppelbild? Schlappes Wappen! Erstarrte Ankunft! Puppe des Entsetzens!” StrauГџ, SchluГџchor, 96. 92. “Du kГ¶nntest mich nГ¤hren, statt zu krГ¶pfen, kГ¶nntest mich leiten, statt zu rupfen.В .В .В . Du fluggewordenes Erz. Alt und grau und machtlos.” StrauГџ, SchluГџchor, 97–98. 93. “Steht Anita bis zu den Waden in Federn, mit blutendem Gesicht, den abgeschnittenen Fang des Vogels in der herabhГ¤ngenden Hand.” StrauГџ, SchluГџchor, 98. 94. “Wald.” StrauГџ, SchluГџchor, 98. 95. Haas, Modern German Political Drama, 99. 96. “Äh / privat ist das.” Pohl, Wartesaal Deutschland Stimmenreich, 170. 97. “Ich aufgehГ¶rt habe Alkohol zu trinken an diesem Tag / am 9. November.” Pohl, Wartesaal Deutschland Stimmenreich, 170. 98. “Is son Zufall / daГџ an dem Tach / Г¤h / wo ich aufhГ¶ren muГџte / diese Mauer fiel / und ich aufwachte und war / zweimal ’n neuer / also war zweimal ’n neuer Mensch.” Pohl, Wartesaal Deutschland Stimmenreich, 170–71. 99. “Wer verkauft sich nicht?” MГјller, Goldener Oktober, 135. 100. “Wir haben alle unsere Macken.” MГјller, Goldener Oktober, 135. 101. “Sie wissen nicht, was ein indisches Volksfest ist.” MГјller, Goldener Oktober, 128. 102. “MuГџ von Herzen kommen.” MГјller, Goldener Oktober, 127. 103. “Ich kann Sie mir in allem vorstellen. Nerzmantel und StraГџenkostГјm. Sportswear und Cocktailkleid. In KinderwГ¤sche und Lacostehemdchen. Sie werden mein einziger Reichtum sein, in der groГџen Flut der Waren.” MГјller, Goldener Oktober, 149. 104. “Ich bin der alte Mensch geblieben. Ein bГ¤rbeiГџiger Ostler.” MГјller, Goldener Oktober, 154. 105. “Die Mauer ist schon lГ¤ngst StГјckchenweise in Japan, in Amerika, auf und davon Гјbers Meer. Nur wir kleben hier fest.” MГјller, Goldener Oktober, 155. 106. “Liebst du mich?” MГјller, Goldener Oktober, 153. 107. “Ja, aber doch nicht hier.” MГјller, Goldener Oktober, 153.

108. “Das ganze Land heiratet hopplahopp.” Müller, Goldener Oktober, 109. 109. Berger, Search for Normality, 217. 110. Berger, Search for Normality, 218. 111. Quoted in Berger, Search for Normality, 218. 112. Quoted in Berger, Search for Normality, 218. 113. Fukuyama, “Reflections,” 341.

Chapter 4 1. Weber, “German Theatre,” 48. 2. Laura Bradley, “East German Censorship: The Role of the Audience,” Theatre Page 209 →Journal 65.1 (2013): 39. See also Laura Bradley, Cooperation and Conflict: GDR Theatre Censorship, 1961–1989 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 2–3. 3. Quoted in Berger, Search for Normality, 95. 4. “Ich bin zu frГјh geboren, / Ja wo ich heut hinkumm, / Mein GlГјck kommt mir erst morgen, / HГ¤tt ich das Kaisertum.” Friedrich Wolf, Thomas MГјnzer, in Zwei Dramen aus dem Bauernkrieg (Berlin: Aufbau-Verlag, 1959), 97. Emphasis added. 5. “Ich kГ¶nnt’s nit greifen heuer, / Das Eisen muГџ durchs Feuer, / Soll es geschmiedet sein.” Wolf, Thomas MГјnzer, 218. 6. “Wir werden Kinder haben, die Kinder haben werden, eine Generation macht die nГ¤chste, die Zukunft uns aus dem Gesicht geschnitten, der Kommunismus gut oder schlecht, wie wir ihn gemacht haben, wir und wir, du weiГџt es.” Heiner MГјller, Der Bau, in Werke, vol. 3: Die StГјcke 1 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2000), 396. 7. See Jonathan Kalb, The Theater of Heiner MГјller, rev. ed. (New York: Proscenium, 2001), 153–57. 8. Kalb, Theater of Heiner MГјller, 154. 9. Bradley, Cooperation and Conflict, 75–112. 10. Heiner MГјller, Der Auftrag, directed by Frank Castorf, Vorpommersche LandesbГјhne Anklam, 1983. Videocassette (VHS). Akademie der KГјnste Archive Berlin, AVM Theater 33.8001. Documentation: AdK Berlin Heiner MГјller Archive 8115. 11. “Aktivierung von GeschichtsbewuГџtsein als Auftrag, der offene SchluГџ als Auftrag an das Publikum, die Geschichte zuende und ins Heute herein zu denken.” Martin Linzer, “Variante drei, Rezension von Der Auftrag in Anklam,” Theater der Zeit, September 1983, 50. 12. “Sehnsucht nach politischer Г–ffnung.” Detje, Provokation aus Prinzip, 98. 13. Heiner MГјller, Der Bau, directed by Frank Castorf, Theater Karl-Marx-Stadt, 1986. Videocassette (VHS). Akademie der KГјnste Archive Berlin, AVM Theater 33.8001 and 33.8002. Documentation: AdK Berlin Heiner MГјller Archive 8249. 14. For more on MГјller’s directing, see Stephen Suschke, MГјller macht Theater: Zehn Inszenierungen und ein Epilog (Berlin: Theater der Zeit, 2003); and Martin Linzer and Peter Ullrich, eds., Regie: Heiner MГјller. Material zu “Der LohndrГјcker” 1988, “Hamlet/Maschine” 1990, “Mauser” 1991 (Berlin: Zentrum fГјr Theaterdokumentation und -information, 1993). 15. Heiner MГјller, Der LohndrГјcker, directed by MГјller, Deutsches Theater Berlin, Akademie der KГјnste Archive Berlin. Videocassette (VHS). Akademe der KГјnste Archive Berlin, AVM 144a, b, and c. 16. “Der Volksfeind war natГјrlich wie eine Paraphrase auf die DDR, was ich aber nicht bezweckt hatte. Ich wollte doch kein DDR-Kabarett haben, sondern die Leute anti-kommunististisch herausfordern.” Frank Castorf, interview by Thomas Irmer, “Ja, ja, weiter im Zusammenbruch: Frank Castorf,” in Die BГјhnenrepublik: Theater in der DDR, ed. Irmer and Matthias Schmidt (Berlin: Alexander Verlag, 2003), 259. 17. “Ein trГјber dampfender FluГџ.” Volker Braun, Die Гњbergangsgesellschaft, in StГјcke 2 (Henschelverlag: Berlin 1989), 121. Page 210 →18. Volker Braun, Die Гњbergangsgesellschaft, directed by Thomas Langhoff, Maxim Gorki Theater Berlin, March 30 and 31, 1988. Videocassette (VHS), filmed for television by Zweite Deutsche Fernsehen. Akademie der KГјnste Archive Berlin, AVM 33.8680. Documentation: AdK Berlin

Inszenierungsdokumentation 571. 19. “Wir haben unser Leben fГјr eine Zukunft geopfert, die keiner haben will.” Christoph Hein, Die Ritter der Tafelrunde, in Die StГјcke (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2005), 366. 20. “Einen Frieden der KrГ¤merseelen.” Hein, Die Ritter der Tafelrunde, 373. 21. “ARTUS: Ich habe Angst, Mordret. Du wirst viel zerstГ¶ren. MORDRET: Ja, Vater.” Hein, Die Ritter der Tafelrunde, 407. 22. See “Parabel auf das Streben nach menschlicher Vervollkommnung,” Neues Deutschland, May 3, 1989, http://www.berliner-schauspielschule.de/tafelrunde.htm, archived at https://perma.cc/JP4E-JSW9 23. William Shakespeare and Heiner MГјller, Hamlet/Maschine, directed by MГјller, Deutsches Theater Berlin, March 1990. Videocassette (VHS). Akademie der KГјnste Archive Berlin, AVM Theater 33.8145ae / 33.8216a-e / 33.8711, 8712, 8713. Documentation: AdK Berlin Inszenierungsdokumentation 677a and b. Quotes from the production are taken from the video and the script, held in the documentation. All other quotes are from the documentation. The date of entry has been given when known. 24. Friedrich Schiller, Die RГ¤uber, directed by Frank Castorf, VolksbГјhne Theater Berlin, September 22, 1990. Videocassette (VHS). Akademie der KГјnste Archive Berlin, AVM Theater 33.8717 and 33.8049. Documentation: AdK Berlin Inszenierungsdokumentation 668. Quotes from the production are taken from the video and the script, held in the documentation. All other quotes are from the documentation. 25. David Barnett, “Resisting the Revolution: Heiner MГјller’s Hamlet/Machine at the Deutsches Theater, Berlin, March 1990,” Theatre Research International 31.2 (2006): 108. 26. David Barnett, Literature versus Theatre: Textual Problems and Theatrical Realization in the Later Plays of Heiner MГјller (Bern: Peter Lang, 1998), 109. 27. Barnett, Literature versus Theatre, 197. 28. “Der Gedanke, Die RГ¤uber zu machen, kam von den Leuten der VolksbГјhne schon vor eineinhalb Jahren, und der hat sich jetzt seit dem Herbst ’89 nicht so wesentlich geГ¤ndert.” 29. “Ein StГјck, das sich aus der Wieder-AktualitГ¤t oder der AktualitГ¤t eines MГ¤rchens herstellt.” 30. “Ich mГ¶chte in Bezug auf Die RГ¤uber keine falsche Gleichzeitigkeit, sondern eine echte Ungleichzeitigkeit. Diese Geschichte muГџ man aus der Psychologie Гјberlegen, aus der Historie, dem Artifiziellen.” 31. “Es ist, als hГ¤tten Gregor Gysi und die PDS ein groГџes apokalyptisches Requiem auf den вЂAusverkauf der DDR’ in Auftrag gegeben.” Gerhard Stadelmaier, “Das Geheul in der Nische: Letzte WeinkrГ¤mpfe des DDR-Theaters: Frank Castorf inszeniert Die RГ¤uber an der OstBerliner VolksbГјhne.” AdK Inszenierungsdokumentation 668. Page 211 →32. “Inszeniert uns Die RГ¤uber als tristen Abgesang auf die untergehende Ostrepublik.” Benjamin Henrichs, “Deutsche Demokratische RГ¤uber,” Die Zeit, September 28, 1990. AdK Inszenierungsdokumentation 668. 33. “Ein wilder Essay zur Wiedervereinigung.” Detje, Provokation aus Prinzip, 166. 34. See Marek Podlasiak, “Die Wende und ihre Folgen dargestellt von Castorfs VolksbГјhne,” in Engagierte Literatur in Wendezeiten, ed. Willi Huntemann et al. (WГјrzburg: Verlag KГ¶nigshausen & Neumann, 2003), 155. 35. “Es soll eine Art Requiem auf die zerfallene DDR werden.” Quoted in Detje, Provokation aus Prinzip, 160. 36. “Trilogie des Umbruchs.” Linzer and Ullrich, Regie: Heiner MГјller, 9. 37. See Roger Paulin, The Critical Reception of Shakespeare in Germany, 1682–1914 (New York: Georg Olms Verlag, 2003), 442–46. 38. “Laertes, der DDR-BГјrger in Paris.” 39. “Findet [Hamlet] Kontakt zu seinen alten Kumpels, waren zusammen in der FDJ.” 40. “Jede вЂDDR-Гњbersetzung’ wГ¤re der Tod; es gibt keine DDR mehr, die man zitieren kГ¶nnte oder irgendwie verfremden.” 41. Linzer and Ullrich, Regie: Heiner MГјller, 146. 42. Alexander Weigel, dramaturg for Hamlet/Maschine, in discussion with the author, April 4, 2011. 43. Heiner MГјller, interview by SylvГЁre Lotringer, “Introduction: 1. Walls,” in Germania, trans. Bernard and Caroline SchГјtze, ed. Sylvia Lotringer (New York: Semiotext[e], 1990), 24.

44. “Rundfunk-Sendung von Dieter Kranz im Berliner Rundfunk am 8.5.1990,” AdK Inszenierungsdokumentation 677a. 45. See Barnett, “Resisting the Revolution.” 46. Heiner MГјller, Hamlet-Machine, in Hamlet-Machine and Other Plays, ed. and trans. Carl Weber (New York: PAJ Publications, 1984), 53. 47. MГјller, Hamlet-Machine, 55. 48. MГјller, Hamlet-Machine, 56. 49. MГјller, Hamlet-Machine, 58. 50. MГјller, Hamlet-Machine, 58. 51. MГјller, Hamlet-Machine, 56. 52. MГјller, Hamlet-Machine, 56. 53. “DDR-AlltagsГ¤sthetik.” Bert Neumann, “Der autonome Raum (zum BГјhnenkonzept), Juli 1990.” Inszenierungsdokumentation 668. 54. “Das Spiel geht weiterВ .В .В . aber wie?” Akademie der KГјnste Archive Berlin, Sammlung Theater in der Wende 1751. 55. Friedrich Schiller, The Robbers, in “The Robbers” and “Wallenstein,” 109. 56. Schiller, The Robbers, 37. 57. “Irritation durch Erinnerung.” Bert Neumann, “Der autonome Raum,” AdK Inszenierungsdokumentation 668. 58. See Podlasiak, “Die Wende,” 155. Page 212 →59. “Denn die Freiheit ist unser Ziel / “Alles was uns fehlt ist die SOLIDARITГ„T.” 60. “Ja. Aber was tun?” 61. “Wahl! Nichts Wahl! Nichts habt ihr zu wГ¤hlen! Seht, da ist es beisammen, was ihr wГ¤hlen habt! Seht! Das da habt ihr zu wГ¤hlen.” 62. “Pilzwuchs spГ¤rlich—doch bereits Verletzte. Ein bisher schlechtes Pilzjahr—so urteilt die KarlMarx-StГ¤dter Bezirks-PilzsachverstГ¤ndige Helma Niemitz nach dem vorlГ¤ufigen Funde.” 63. “Ihr musst einfach mal arbeiten. Nicht? Und nicht jammern. Wirklich. Auf! Hebt den Arsch hoch! Na los! Na, was ist? Vierzig Jahre opportunistisch rumschnarchen, und jetzt alles haben wollen! Na ist doch wahr! Wirklich! Vierzig Jahre hier opportunistisch rumscharchen, und dann alles haben wollen! Nein, dich mein ich nicht. Du bist selbststГ¤ndig. Aber die anderen Flitzpiepen! Ja hahahaha. Zum Kotzen mit euch. Ihr Kadettfahrer, ihr.” 64. “Was soll der Mist! Lern du erst mal deine Rolle!” Quoted in Podlasiak, “Die Wende,” 155. 65. “Wir werden BeschГјtzer der Heimat sein / WIR, DIE VOLKSPOLIZEI.” 66. “Tod oder Freiheit!” 67. “Die theatralischen RГ¤uber—die DDR-BГјrger—waren keine RevolutionГ¤re mehr und ihr Hauptmann Karl trat als Anti-Held auf. Das Ziel der RГ¤uberbande war zwar Freiheit, aber sie lieГџen sich leicht von der Welt des alten Moor verlocken, der die westliche Konsumgesellschaft reprГ¤sentierte. Symbolisch wurde das durch einen riesigen Topf, in dem der alte Moor wohnte, gezeigt. In diesem Kochtopf verschwinden die RГ¤uber, auf dem Deckel sitzen ratlos beide BrГјder Karl und Franz.” Podlasiak, “Die Wende,” 155. 68. “Denn die Freiheit ist unser Ziel / Alles was uns fehlt ist die SOLIDARITГ„T.” 69. Brecht, “Speech to Danish Actors,” 237. 70. Helen Fehervary, “Enlightenment or Entanglement: History and Aesthetics in Bertolt Brecht and Heiner MГјller,” New German Critique 8 (Spring 1976): 96. 71. “Vor ein paar Jahren las ich am HauptgebГ¤ude der Deutschen Bank in MГјnchen den Gegenspruch, und das ist der brutalste Satz, den ich seit langem gelesen hab: вЂAus Ideen werden MГ¤rkte.’ Das ist dieser SchluГџ.В .В .В . [Fortinbras] hat kein Brett vor dem Kopf, sondern Gold vor dem Kopf.” “Rundfunk-Sendung von Dieter Kranz im Berliner Rundfunk am 8.5.1990,” AdK Berlin Inszenierungsdokumentation 677b. 72. Heiner MГјller, “A Letter to Robert Wilson,” in Explosion of a Memory, ed. and trans. Carl Weber (New York: PAJ Publications, 1989), 153. 73. MГјller, interview by Lotringer, “Introduction: 1. Walls,” 24.

74. Brecht, “Short Organon,” 240–41. 75. “Dieses StГјck in die Zeit des 16. Jahrhunderts, in die Zeit Maximilians, verlegt, weil er der Meinung war, diese Gestalten, diese VorgГ¤nge sind Gegenwart, Gegenwart von Friedrich, preuГџischen Zeitalters.” AdK Inszenierungsdokumentation 668. 76. “Das ist eigentlich eine interessante Zensur, aus dem GegenwartsstГјck eine vergangene Episode zu machen. Nein, fГјr mich ist es schon was PhГ¤nomenales, daГџ Page 213 →das, was fГјr uns eine RГ¤uberpistole, ein MГ¤rchen oder was auch immer, ist, sich in den deutschen WГ¤ldern oder StГ¤dten abgespielt hat. Hier kommt etwas, was sich einfach wiederholt, wГјrde ich sagen. Das ist Deutschland 1990 oder zehn Jahre zurГјck.” AdK Inszenierungsdokumentation 668.

Chapter 5 1. Habermas, “Replies,” 54. 2. Fulbrook, Concise History of Germany, 249. 3. “Krise? Die Gegenwart ist langfristig vorbereitet worden durch jahrtausendlange Entwicklung von Herrschaft—die MГ¤nner Гјber die Frauen, der Reichen Гјber die Armen, der Freien Гјber AbhГ¤ngige, der sogenannten Zivilisierten Гјber die sogenannten Nicht-Zivilisierten. Alles, was vor uns kam, waren EinГјbungen in die Gegenwart, die wir jetzt haben. Das ist wahnwitzige KontinuitГ¤t, nicht Krise.” Frank Castorf, interview by Hans-Dieter SchГјtt, “Krise? Wahnwitzige KontinuitГ¤t,” in Manifeste europГ¤ischen Theaters: Grotowski bis Schleef, ed. Joachim Fiebach (Berlin: Theater der Zeit, 2003), 447. 4. David Ashley Hughes, “Notes on the German Theatre Crisis,” TDR 51.4 (2007): 133. 5. Zolchow, “The Island of Berlin,” 74. 6. “Der antike Chor ist ein erschreckendes Bild: Figuren rotten sich zusammen, stehen dicht bei dicht, suchen Schutz beieinander, obwohl sie einander energisch ablehnen, so, als verpeste die NГ¤he des anderen Menschen einem die Luft. Damit ist die Gruppe in sich gefГ¤hrdet, sie wird jedem Angriff auf sich nachgeben, akzeptiert voreilig angstvoll ein notwendiges Opfer, stößt es aus, um sich freizukaufen.” Einar Schleef, Droge Faust Parsifal (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1997), 14. 7. “Er zeigt ChГ¶re statt Individuen.” Quoted in Wolfgang Behrens, Einar Schleef: Werk und Person (Berlin: Theater der Zeit, 2003), 160. 8. “Zur BГјhnenlandschaft gehГ¶rt, selbst Landschaft ist.” Schleef, Droge Faust Parsifal, 276. 9. Heiner MГјller, Quartet, in Hamletmachine and Other Texts for the Stage, ed. and trans. Carl Weber (New York: PAJ Publications, 1984), 106. 10. “Was man braucht, ist Zukunft / und nicht die Ewigkeit des Augenblicks. / Man muГџ die Toten ausgraben, wieder und wieder, / Denn nur aus ihnen kann man Zukunft beziehen.” Heiner MГјller, Mauser, directed by MГјller, Deutsches Theater Berlin.Videocassette (VHS). Akademie der KГјnste Archiv Berlin, AVM Theater 33.8278. Documentation: AdK Berlin Inszenierungsdokumentation 901. Quotes are taken from the video and documentation. 11. See Maxim Gorki Theater: 50 Jahre und kein Ende, ed. Julia Niehaus, Manfred MГ¶ckel, and Harald MГјller (Berlin: Theater der Zeit, 2002), 188–89. 12. Robin Detje, “Remembering Never-Ever Land: How Frank Castorf Reconquered Berlin’s VolksbГјhne Theater,” Theater 35.2 (2005): 13. 13. Detje, “Remembering Never-Ever Land,“ 5. 14. “Dieses stalinistisch-faschistische Architekturgebilde, dessen Marmorstufen Page 214 →1954 aus Resten der Reichskanzlei gesetzt wurden.” Castorf, quoted in Castorf, der EisenhГ¤ndler: Theater zwischen Kartoffelsalat und Stahlgewitter, ed. JГјrgen Balitzki (Berlin: Links, 1995), 98–99. 15. See Bettina Brandl-Risi, “The New Virtuosity: Outperforming and Imperfection on the German Stage,” Theater 37.1 (2007): 9–37. 16. Klaus van den Berg, “Contemporary German Scenography: Surging Images and Spaces for Action, ” Contemporary Theatre Review 18.1 (2008): 11. 17. Marvin Carlson, Theatre Is More Beautiful Than War (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2009), 99; and Detje, Castorf: Provokation aus Prinzip, 164. 18. Gert Reifarth, “Fostering Cultural Schizophrenia,” in Varney, Theatre in the Berlin Republic,

243. 19. Gert Reifarth, “Fostering Cultural Schizophrenia,” 245. 20. Hughes, “Notes,” 135. 21. See Hughes, “Notes,” 136–37. 22. Quoted in Hughes, “Notes,” 136–37. 23. Hughes, “Notes,” 136. 24. “Die вЂTragГ¶die des Sozialismus.’” Thomas Irmer, “Der einst scharfe Cocktail ist fast verdunstet. Spurensuche nach einem DDR-Theater der neunziger Jahre, ” in DDR-Literatur der neunziger Jahre, ed. Heinz Ludwig Arnold (Munich: Edition Text + Kritik, 2000), 152. 25. “GroГџe geschichtsphilosophische Deutungen.” Irmer, “Der einst scharfe Cocktail,“ 152. 26. Schroth also directed Wilhelm Tell at the Mecklenburgisches Staatstheater Schwerin in 1989; a play about justifiable tyrannicide, it caused huge debates in Berlin when it was performed there in October of that year. See Christopher Funke, “The Activist Legacy of Theater in the German Democratic Republic, ” Contemporary Theatre Review 4.2 (1995): 10. 27. Sandra Dassler, “Letzte Ermutigung am вЂZonenrand’ Theater-Spektakel mit Auktion,” Der Tagesspiegel, June 2, 2003, http://www.tagesspiegel.de/berlin/brandenburgi/letzte-ermutigung-amzonenrand-theater-spektakel-mit-auktion/419516.html 28. See Irmer, “Der einst scharfe Cocktail,” 151–52. 29. Mel Gordon, Dada Performance (New York: PAJ Publications, 2001), 7. 30. Chris Salter, “Castorf’s Rebellion at the VolksbГјhne,” American Theatre 12.7 (December 1995): 71. 31. See Reifarth, “Fostering Cultural Schizophrenia.” 32. Gordon, Dada Performance, 14. 33. Karl GrГјnberg and Heiner MГјller, Golden flieГџt der Stahl / Wolokolamsker Chaussee, directed by Frank Castorf, VolksbГјhne Berlin, April 20, 1996. Videocassette (VHS). Akademie der KГјnste Archive Berlin, AVM Theater 33.8504a and b. Documentation: AdK Berlin Inszenierungsdokumentation 666a and b. Quotes from the production are taken from the video and the script, held in the documentation. 34. See “Propoganda: Golden flieГџt der Stahl,” Der Spiegel 47 (November 22, Page 215 →1950), http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/print/d-44451394.html, archived at https://perma.cc/PCL2–6NY8 35. “Travolta-mäßig,” as the production script indicates about the twist two characters perform. 36. “Todeskampf.” 37. “Ich bin ein arbeitscheuer Ostler / Und das ist mir nicht peinlich /В .В .В . Auch du kannst Ostler sein.” 38. “Wir lagen zwischen Moskau und Berlin / Im RГјcken einen Wald ein FluГџ vor Augen / Zweitausend Kilometer weit Berlin.” 39. “Sprangen aus den GrГ¤ben tauchten / ZurГјck in ihre GrГ¤ben sprangen wieder / Auf aus den GrГ¤ben wie Puppen am Draht.” 40. “Bau auf, bau auf, bau auf, / Freie Deutsche Jugend, bau auf! / FГјr eine bess’re Zukunft richten wir die Heimat auf!” From the song “Jugend erwach!” (“Wake Up, Youths!”). 41. “FORTSCHRITT.” 42. “Das wird Brot!” 43. “Was kommt heraus wenn ein Schreibtisch einen / Schreibtisch fickt / Schreibtische Schreibtische Schreibtische.” 44. “Ich und mein Schreibtisch, Wer gehГ¶rt jetzt wem.В .В .В . Was knackt in unserm Holz Ist der Wurm drin / Hilfe.” 45. Michael Thompson, The Grotesque (London: Methuen Critical Idiom, 1972), 3. 46. Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, 85. 47. Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, 39. 48. Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, 43. 49. Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, 43. 50. Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, 44. 51. “What is the вЂpostdramatic’ post? Does it represent a millennial sea change, or is it simply a belated expression in theatre of antibourgeois impulses inaugurated by the classical avantgardes at the

beginning of the 20th century?” Elinor Fuchs, “Book Review: Postdramatic Theatre,” TDR 52.2 (2008): 181. 52. Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, 22. 53. Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, 86. 54. Peter Szondi, Theory of the Modern Drama: A Critical Edition, ed. Jochen Schulte-Sasse, trans. Michael Hays (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 4. 55. Szondi, Theory of Modern Drama, 6. 56. Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, 160. 57. Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, “Hegel 1: The Exclusion of the Real” and “Hegel 2: The Performance,” 42–45. 58. Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, 39. 59. Hans-Thies Lehmann, Tragedy and Dramatic Theatre, trans. Erik Butler (London: Routledge, 2016), 7. 60. Lehmann, Tragedy and Dramatic Theatre, 8. Page 216 →61. Lehmann, Tragedy and Dramatic Theatre, 9. 62. Lehmann, Tragedy and Dramatic Theatre, 10. 63. Lehmann, Tragedy and Dramatic Theatre, 10. 64. Lehmann, Tragedy and Dramatic Theatre, 140. 65. Lehmann, Tragedy and Dramatic Theatre, 404. 66. Lehmann, Tragedy and Dramatic Theatre, 424. 67. Lehmann, Tragedy and Dramatic Theatre, 33. 68. Carl Zuckmayer, Des Teufels General, directed by Frank Castorf, VolksbГјhne Berlin, 1997. Videocassette (VHS). Akademie der KГјnste Archive Berlin, AVM Theater 33.8488. Quotes from the production are taken from the video. 69. Carl Zuckmayer, The Devil’s General, trans. Ingrid Komar, in “The Devil’s General” and “Jekyll and Hyde”, ed. Volkmar Sander (New York: Continuum, 2005), 84. 70. Zuckmayer, The Devil’s General, 83. 71. Mariatte C. Denman, “Nostalgia for a Better Germany: Carl Zuckmayer’s Des Teufels General, ” German Quarterly 76.4 (2003): 370. 72. Brandl-Risi, “The New Virtuosity,” 21. 73. Denman, “Nostalgia for a Better Germany,” 378. 74. Denman, “Nostalgia for a Better Germany,” 372. 75. “Denn wenn er siegt, Harras,—wenn Hitler diesen Krieg gewinnt,—dann ist Deutschland verloren. Dann ist die Welt verloren.” 76. “StaatsbegrГ¤bnis.” 77. Rolf Hochhuth, Wessis in Weimar, directed by Einar Schleef, Berliner Ensemble, 1993. Videocassette (VHS). Akademie der KГјnste Archive Berlin, AVM Theater 33.3570. Documentation: AdK Berlin Einar Schleef Archive 1774. Quotes from the production are taken from the video and the script, held in the documentation. 78. The actor Martin Wuttke took this role after the premiere. 79. My own translation, attempting to be as literal as possible, not preserving the verse. “Tor und TГјre find ich offen! / Nun, da läßt sich endlich hoffen, / DaГџ nicht wie bisher im Moder / Der Lebendige wie ein Toter / Ich [in Goethe: sich] verkГјmmere, ich [in Goethe: sich] verderbe / Und am Leben selber sterbe. // Diese Mauern, diese WГ¤nde / Neigen, senken dich [in Goethe: sich] zum Ende / Und wenn wir nicht bald entweichen, / Wird uns Fall und Sturz erreichen. / Bin verwegen wie nicht einer; / Aber weiter bringt mich keiner. // Doch was soll ich heut erfahren! / Wars nicht hier vor so viel Jahren.” Without Schleef’s changes, in English the first three sentences read: “Gate and door I find open! That lets me finally hope that the building will no longer atrophy and corrupt into moldiness, dying from life itself. These walls, outside and inside, fall into ruins, collapsing on themselves.” Original German: Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Faust: Erster und zweiter Teil (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1999), 195–96. 80. In Droge Faust Parsifal, Schleef wrote: “That I decided for no other costume but the German military coat was a decision for German history, for my own history and for that of the theater in which my production was staged. That critics immediately decided that these were Nazi uniforms shows only that

critics from Page 217 →both East and West do not know or, as the case may be, do not want to recognize their own military and the military coat in German history, but rather simply want to relegate the military to the Nazis.В .В .В . Certainly the similarity of the GDR, FRG, and Nazi uniforms is nightmarish, and conveys an entirely different interpretation of German history than either German state propagandized” (“DaГџ ich mich dabei fГјr kein anderes KostГјm als den deutschen MilitГ¤rmantel entschied, war eine Entscheidung fГјr die deutsche Geschichte, fГјr meine eigene und fГјr die des Theaters, in dem meine Inszenierung die BГјhne betrat. DaГџ Kritiker in der Beurteilung dieses KleidungsstГјcks sofort auf Wehrmacht schlossen, zeigt nur, daГџ Kritiker aus Ost wie West weder ihr eigenes MilitГ¤r kennen bzw. gekannt haben wollen noch den MilitГ¤rmantel in der deutschen Vergangenheit, sondern MilitГ¤r einfach unter Nazi abbuchen.В .В .В . Sicher, die Г„hnlichkeit der Uniformen der Volksarmee, der Bundesswehr und der Wehrmacht ist beklemmend, drГјckt sich doch in diesem Zuschnitt eine vГ¶llig andere Interpretation deutscher Vergangenheit aus, als beide deutsche Staaten sie propagierten”). Schleef, Droge Faust Parsifal, 441. 81. “Nur in Berlin arbeiten, weil man hier das kГјnstlich Zusammengeschraubte dieser beiden nicht zusammengehГ¶rigen deutschen HГ¤lften am meisten merkt.” Frank Castorf, “Castorf Гјber Theater und Gesellschaft,” Jahrbuch Theater heute (1993): 80. 82. Horace, “The Art of Poetry,” trans. Niall Rudd, in Sources of Dramatic Theory, vol. 1, ed. Michael J. Sidnell (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 1991), 64. 83. Thompson, The Grotesque, 3. 84. Quoted in Thompson, The Grotesque, 18. 85. Thompson, The Grotesque, 27. 86. Detje, “Castorf in Never-Ever Land,” 16. 87. Detje, “Castorf in Never-Ever Land,” 16. 88. Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels into Several Remote Regions of the World (London: George Routledge and Sons, 1880), 133. 89. Arnolt Bronnen, Rheinische Rebellen, directed by Frank Castorf, VolksbГјhne Berlin, 1992. Videocassette (VHS). Akademie der KГјnste Archive Berlin, AVM Theater 33.8785. Documentation: AdK Berlin Sammlung Theater in der Wende 1746 and 1747. Quotes from the production are taken from the video and the script, held in the documentation. 90. Anthony Burgess, Clockwork Orange, trans. Bruno Max, directed by Frank Castorf, VolksbГјhne Berlin, October 20, 1995. Videocassette (VHS): Akademie der KГјnste Archive Berlin, AVM Theater 33.8369. Documentation: AdK Berlin Inszenierungsdokumentation 927. Quotes from the production are taken from the video and the script, held in the documentation. 91. “Das Ideal, die letzte politische Vornehmheit, die es in Europa gab, die des 4. November, brach unter den volkstГјmlichen Ressentiment-Instinkten zusammen—es wurde niemals auf Erden ein größerer Jubel, eine lГ¤rmenderer Begeisterung gehГ¶rt!” 92. AdK Berlin Inszenierungsdokumentation 927. 93. “Wunsch nach KleinbГјrgerlichkeit.” Page 218 →94. “Hey, nicht treffen bitte. Ich erzГ¤hl mal dem Regisseur. Es gibt echt minus Punkte du Arsch. Ich muss morgen auch wieder spielen. Ich perform hier mir einen ab. Es ist eine Rolle die ich hier spiele. Jetzt bin ich ganz aus.” 95. Quoted in Lehmann, Tragedy and Dramatic Theatre, 436. Brackets in the original. 96. MГјller, Quartet, 118. 97. “Unser deutsche Sprache ist / Гјberall dieselbe.” 98. See Elinor Fuchs, The Death of Character (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 92–107; and Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, 62–63 and 77–81. 99. Gertrude Stein, “Plays,” in Last Operas and Plays (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), xlvii. 100. Quoted in Fuchs, The Death of Character, 93. 101. Fuchs, The Death of Character, 94. In this section, I primarily draw on Fuchs’s elaboration of the landscape metaphor as a mode of spectatorship, rather than her argument that it also serves as a “pastoral vision of human-blending-into-nature” (97) in postmodern theater. 102. Fuchs, The Death of Character, 95.

103. Fuchs, The Death of Character, 96–97. 104. Fuchs, The Death of Character, 98. 105. Heiner MГјller, Description of a Picture/Explosion of a Memory, in Explosion of a Memory, 100. 106. Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, 63. 107. “Aber ganz falschВ .В .В . ist leider nicht, / was Sie sagen Гјber unsere Schaf-MentalitГ¤t: / Sie muГџ wohl angeboren sein, denn jetzt, in Freiheit, / lassen wir uns ja auch alle NiedertrГ¤chtigkeiten gefallen, / die ihr Wessis uns antut, wenn man absieht vom Mord / am Treuhand-PrГ¤sidenten, sofern der von Ossis kam.” Hochhuth, Wessis in Weimar, 237. 108. “Ein Bruderzwist in Deutschland.” Hochhuth, Wessis in Weimar, 173. 109. “Schleef [hat] die deutsche TragГ¶die der Gegenwart in einer abstrakten deutschen LeidensPassion aufgelГ¶st.” In “Religion statt AufklГ¤rung,” Neues Deutschland, February 13 and 14, 1993, http://www.berliner-schauspielschule.de/wessis.htm, archived at https://perma.cc/NFL3–5NSY 110. “Revolutionskarren mit LeninbГјsten beladen.” 111. “In den ersten Tagen und NГ¤chten, oder waren es nur Stunden, wie konnte er die Zeit messen ohne HimmelВ .В .В .” 112. “Der Wald war das Tier, lange schon war der Wald, den zu durchschreiten er geglaubt hatte, das Tier gewesenВ .В .В .В , die Spur, der er gefolgt war, sein eigenes Blut, von dem der Wald, der das Tier war, seit wann, wieviel Blut hat ein Mensch, seine Proben nahm.” 113. Quoted in Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, 63. 114. Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, 63. 115. Walter Benjamin, Arcades Project, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 473. 116. Castorf and SchГјtt, “Krise? Wahnwitzige KontinuitГ¤t,” 447. Page 219 →117. Lehmann, Tragedy and Dramatic Theatre, 436. 118. “Die Partei, Die Partei, die hat immer recht.” 119. “VERGESSEN UND VERGESSEN UND VERGESSEN / Das ThГ¤lmannlied Die Partisanen vom / Amur und VГ¶lker hГ¶rt die Signale / Das rote Halstuch naГџ vom Stalinopfer / Und das zerrissne Blauhemd fГјr den Toten / Gefallen an der Mauer Stalins Denkmal / FГјr Rosa Luxemburg.” The line “VГ¶lker hГ¶rt die Signale” quotes the chorus of “The International”; it is typically (less literally) translated as “This is the final struggle / let us group together and tomorrow.” 120. “Ihr mГјГџt das ABC noch lernen. / Das ABC heiГџt: / Man wird mit euch fertig werden. // Denkt nur nicht nach, was ihr zu sagen habt: / Ihr werdet nicht gefragt. / Die Esser sind vollzГ¤hlig / Was hier gebraucht wird, ist Hackfleisch. // Aber das soll euch / Nicht entmutigen!” 121. Benjamin, Arcades Project, 474. 122. Including Wolfgang Mommsen. See Berger, Search for Normality, 217. 123. Including Mommsen, Matrin Sabrow, Christoph KleГџmann, and JГјrgen Kocka. See Berger, Search for Normality, 218. 124. Smith, Nationalism and Modernism, 137.

Chapter 6 1. In this part of the argument, as will become clearer as we continue, I build off of Robin Bernstein’s theory of “scriptive things” in Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood and Race from Slavery to Civil Rights (New York: NYU Press, 2011). 2. andcompany&CO, little red (play): “herstory,” http://www.andco.de/index.php? context=project_detail&id=845, archived at https://perma.cc/AS67-KLCA 3. The historic differences between state theaters and the independent theater scene have been fading, with state theaters producing group-driven conceptual projects and independent groups working in state theaters. Two major examples are Matthias Lillenthal’s leadership of the Munich Kammerspiele, and the appointment of Chris Dercon as Indendant of the Volksbühne Berlin beginning fall 2017. For more, see Henning Fülle, Freies Theater: Die Modernisierung der deutschen Theaterlandschaft (1960–2010) (Berlin: Theater der Zeit, 2016); my introduction to Everything and Other Performance Texts from

Germany (forthcoming, Seagull Books); and Brandon Woolf’s upcoming book project on cultural policy and contemporary performance in Berlin. 4. Thomas Irmer, “A Search for New Realities: Documentary Theatre in Germany,” TDR 50.3 (2006): 23. 5. Irmer, “Search for New Realities,” 17. 6. Liedeke Plate and Anneke Smelik, eds., “Technologies of Memory in the Arts: An Introduction,” in Technologies of Memory in the Arts (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 4. 7. Silke Arnold-de Simine, “вЂThe Spirit of an Epoch Is Not Just Reflected in Pictures and Books, but Also in Pots and Frying Pans’: GDR Museums and Memories of Everyday Life,” in Hodgin and Pearce, The GDR Remembered, 99. Page 220 →8. Berger, Search for Normality, 207. 9. Bernstein defines objects vs. things thusly: “For a trained chefВ .В .В . a knife can never be an object: for such a person, each edge of a knife glitters individually with potential and stubbornness, with past, present, and future motions of slicing and chopping. The trained chef’s knife is therefore a thing with which a chef negotiates, while an amateur’s knife is an object to the extent that it is only a means to an end. If the amateur’s knife should slip and cut a finger, however, that knife suddenly becomes a thing that has leaped up and asserted itself, a thing that demands to be reckoned with. The difference between objects and things, then, is not essential but situational and subjective.” Bernstein, Racial Innocence, 72. 10. Bernstein, Racial Innocence, 8. 11. Arnold-de Simine, “Spirit of an Epoch,” 98. 12. GГјnter Schlusche, “Remapping the Wall: The Wall Memorial on Bernauer Strasse—from an Unloved Cold War Monument to a New Type of Memorial Site,” in Hodgin and Pearce, The GDR Remembered, 123. 13. Schlusche, who was also in charge of planning the Memorial to the Murdered Jews in Europe located in central Berlin, rhetorically runs together the Third Reich and the German Democratic Republic in his essay: “Because they were established earlier, memorial sites to the victims of National Socialism served as forerunners in this respect [including documentation and visitors’ centers], but the trend can also be noted with memorial sites to the second German dictatorship.” Schlusche, “Remapping the Wall,” 122. 14. http://www.ddr-museum.de/en, archived at https://perma.cc/2Y6Y-JGNX 15. Karen Till, New Berlin: Memory, Politics, Place (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), 7. 16. Barbara Kirschenblatt-Gimblett, Destination Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 20. 17. Many of the visitors are also tourists with little experience of these stories, who will imagine the German nation rather than imagine themselves as German citizens. Others, of course, are young Germans, born after 1989; they still experience the museums as contributing to German collective memory. 18. Vermauern, created and directed by Hans-Werner Kroesinger, Maxim Gorki Theater Studio, Berlin, December 18, 2010. My notes come from my experience of the production on December 18, 2010, and from a private copy of the script, acquired from the Maxim Gorki Theater archive. The page numbers in citations refer to this script. 19. “Niederschrift eines GesprГ¤chs des Genossen N.S. Chruschetschow mit Genossen W. Ulbricht am 1. August 1961.” Kroesinger, Vermauern, 1. 20. Irmer, “Search for New Realities,” 21. 21. Irmer, “Search for New Realities,” 22. 22. “Ich beginne mit der ErlГ¤uterung unserer wirtschaftlichen Lage. Zwei Monate lang gab es bei uns keine Kartoffeln zu kaufen.В .В .В . Es liegt daran, dass wir im vergangenen Jahr eine schlechte Ernte hatten und in diesem Jahr das Wetter feucht war, so dass die Kartoffeln in den Mieten verfault sind. Mit der Vergenossenschaftlichung hat das Гјberhaupt nichts zu tun.” Kroesinger, Vermauern, 4–5. Page 221 →23. Hartmut Krug, “It’s the Economy, Stupid! Vermauern—Hans-Werner Kroesinger lГ¤sst Moskauer Dokumente sprechen,” Nachtkritik, May 29, 2009, http://www.nachtkritik.de /index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=2898:vermauern-hans-werner-kroesinger-laesstmoskauer-dokumente-sprechen&catid=52:maxim-gorki-theater-berlin&Itemid=100476, archived at https://perma.cc/J45J-6H7F; see also Christine Wahl, “Vermauern tut gut,” Tagesspiegel, May 31,

2009, http://www.tagesspiegel.de/kultur/buehne-alt/maxim-gorki-theater-vermauern-tut-gut/1525528.html 24. “Wir erleiden groГџe Verluste durch die GrenzgГ¤nger (Personen, die in der DDR wohnen und in Westberlin arbeiten) und die Republikflucht. Deswegen kГ¶nnen wir einen Teil der Aufgaben nicht erfГјllen.” Kroesinger, Vermauern, 11. 25. “Eiserner Ring.” Kroesinger, Vermauern, 3, 4, 21. 26. “Vor EinfГјhrung des neuen Grenzregimes sollten Sie Гјberhaupt nichts erlГ¤utern, denn das wГјrde die Fluchtbewegung nur verstГ¤rken und kГ¶nnte zu Staus fГјhren. Das muss so gemacht werden, wie wir den Geldumtausch realisiert haben. Wir lassen euch jetzt ein, zwei Wochen Zeit, damit Ihr euch wirtschaftlich vorbereiten kГ¶nnt. Dann beruft ihr das Parlament ein und verkГјndet folgendes KommuniquГ©: вЂAb morgen werden Posten errichtet und die Durchfahrt verboten. Wer passieren will, kann das nur mit Erlaubnis bestimmter BehГ¶rden der DDR tun.” Kroesinger, Vermauern, 24. 27. “Wir haben einen bestimmten Plan. In den HГ¤usern, die AusgГ¤nge nach Westberlin haben, werden die vermauert. An anderen Stellen werden Stacheldrahthindernisse errichtet. Der Stacheldraht ist bereits angeliefert.” Kroesinger, Vermauern, 25. 28. “Das GesprГ¤ch dauerte zwei Stunden und 15 Minuten. Notiert: (Unterschrift) (V. Koptelzew).” Kroesinger, Vermauern, 28. 29. See also Gordon A. Craig’s review of historical studies of Berlin, “The Big Apfel”: “The Building of the Wall Solved an Urgent Problem and Helped to Stabilize the Eastern Regime for Almost Three Decades,” New York Review of Books, November 7, 1991, http://www.nybooks.com/articles /archives/1991/nov/07/the-big-apfel/ 30. Fulbrook, Concise History of Germany, 215–16. 31. “Eine Woche zuvor in Moskau die Parteispitzen der Warschauer-Pakt-Staaten dem Bau der Mauer zugestimmt und damit dem DrГ¤ngen Walter Ulbrichts nachgegeben hatten.” Edgar Wolfrum, “Die Mauer,” in Deutsche Erinnerungsorte, vol. 1, ed. Г‰tienne FranГ§ois and Hagen Schulze (Munich: Verlag C. H. Beck, 2001), 553. 32. Rimini Protokoll has continued experimenting with the form of the technology-enabled tour. In August 2013, the group premiered the critically lauded Situation Rooms, a “multiplayer video-piece” in which participants use iPads to explore the stories and environments of individuals connected in different ways to the weapons trade (a peace activist, factory workers, a child soldier, a refugee). 33. “Vielleicht eine Gruppe von Kindern, weiГџe Hemden, blaue HalstГјcher, am Ende rote, Jungpioniere, ThГ¤lmannpioniere.В .В .В . Und dann kГ¶nnt es auch sein, dass uns hier eine Abteilung russische Soldaten vorbeikommt.В .В .В . Volkspolizist, dein Freund und Helfer. Die Westleute kГ¶nnte man damals noch unterscheiden. Die waren eben bunter.” Rimini Protokoll, 50 Aktenkilometer, “Spaziergang rГјckwГ¤rts (Wandtke).” Page 222 →34. “A: WahlbetrГјger vors Volksgericht. B: Oh jeВ .В .В .” Rimini Protokoll, 50 Aktenkilometer, “Demo am Alex (ZOS).” 35. “Man kГ¶nnte also gar nicht so richtig absehen, wer war jetzt zum Demonstrieren gekommen und wer zum Verhindern der Demonstration.” Rimini Protokoll, 50 Aktenkilometer, “Protest und Brunnenflucht (Pfeifer).” 36. “FГјnf hundert bis tausend Person mit Dingen und schreien bewegen die sich im Richtung Palast der Republik.” Rimini Protokoll, 50 Aktenkilometer, “Demo Volkskammer (ZOS).” 37. Rimini Protokoll, 50 Aktenkilometer, “Das Loch der DDR (L.)” 38. Rebecca Schneider, Performing Remains (New York: Routledge, 2011), 15. 39. Rimini Protokoll, 50 Aktenkilometer, “Romanze Palasthotel (RГ¶llig).” 40. Taylor, Archive and Repertoire, 20. 41. Taylor, Archive and Repertoire, 19. 42. Taylor, Archive and Repertoire, 31. 43. Taylor, Archive and Repertoire, 19. 44. Diana Taylor, “Save As,” hemisphericinstitute.org/hemi/en/e-misferican-91/taylor, archived at https://perma.cc/E2ZM-Y6XM 45. Taylor, Archive and Repertoire, 20. 46. Taylor, Archive and Repertoire, 20. 47. Available at http://www.dradio-ortung.de/50km.html, archived at https://perma.cc/S7TH-P6F8

48. Taylor, “Save As.” 49. She She Pop, Schubladen, Hebbel am Ufer Theater 2 Berlin, January 6, 2014. My notes come from this performance as well as from a DVD that I obtained from She She Pop (filmed March 10, 2012, also in HAU 2). The casting was the same for the January 6, 2014, and March 10, 2012, performances. The citations that follow are from the DVD. 50. “An einem August Tag des Jahres 1961 steht eine junge Frau am Fahrkartenschalter des Magdeburger Hauptbahnhofs. Sie mГ¶chte nach Leverkusen.В .В .В . Der Weg dahin fГ¤hrt Гјber Berlin. Der Zug nach Berlin fГ¤hrt in fГјnf Minuten. Gerade noch rechtzeitig betritt ein junger Mann die Halle. Er hat 25 Rosen in der Hand.В .В .В . Er Гјbergibt die Rosen der Frau mit dem Satz: вЂBitte bleib. Ich mГ¶chte dich heiraten.’ Die junge Frau ist peinlich berГјhrt, zumal sie alle anstarren, sie erbittet sich Bedenkzeit. Der Zug nach Berlin fГ¤hrt ohne sie ab. Am nГ¤chsten Morgen bekommt der junge Mann unerwartete Hilfe vom Staat. Die Sektorengrenzen in Berlin werden geschlossen, Stacheldraht ausgerollt, schlieГџlich die Mauer gebaut. In diesem Jahr werden meine Eltern goldener Hochzeit haben. Ich kann mich irren, Johanna, aber ich denke, dass ich meine Existenz auch der Mauer verdanke.” 51. “Die SchubkГ¤sten, in denen ganz reale Erinnerungen aufbewahrt sind. ” Esther Slevogt, “ZonenГјbergreifende Frauenbilder,” Nachtkritik, March 8, 2012, http://www.nachtkritik.de /index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=6677:schubladen-she-she-pops-neuer-abend-ueberwest-und-ostfrauen-am-hau-berlin&catid=55:hau-berlin&Itemid=100190, archived at https://perma.cc /9DYM-569M Page 223 →52. “Meine Existenz kommt mir wie Verrat vor.” 53. See Spohr, “German Unification,” 872. 54. “Heute schreiben wir Geschichte! Die Mauer ist auf!” 55. “Wir reden doch seit drei Jahren Гјber diese frage. Vielleicht Гјbersetzt der Dolmetscher schlecht? ” Kroesinger, Vermauern, 16. 56. Bernstein, Racial Innocence, 12. 57. Bernstein, Racial Innocence, 12. 58. Taylor, Archive and Repertoire, 20. 59. In a postshow discussion, January 6, 2014. Hebbel am Ufer Theater 2. 60. Rimini Protokoll, 50 Aktenkilometer, “Meine Tochter, DDR-Leistungssport und die Stasi (L.)”

Epilogue 1. The Federal Office for Statistics defines persons with “migrant backgrounds” as consisting “of all persons who have immigrated into the territory of today’s Federal Republic of Germany after 1949, and of all foreigners born in Germany and all persons born in Germany who have at least one parent who immigrated into the country or was born as a foreigner in Germany.” https://www.destatis.de/EN /FactsFigures/SocietyState/Population/MigrationIntegration/PersonsMigrationBackground /MigrationBackgroundMethods.html. For German-wide statistics, see https://www.destatis.de/EN /FactsFigures/SocietyState/Population/Migration/Current.html. For Berlin, see https://www.statistik-berlinbrandenburg.de/Statistiken/statistik_OT.asp?Ptyp=600&Sageb=12041&creg=BBB&anzwer=10 2. Berger, Search for Normality, xiii. 3. Fulbrook, History of Germany, 1918–2008. 4. Étienne François and Hagen Schulze, “Einleitung,” in François and Schulze, Deutsche Erinnerungsorte, 22. 5. See Berger, Search for Normality, xiii. 6. “Merkel: Deutschland ist ein Einwanderungsland,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, June 1, 2015, http://www.faz.net/-gq5–84086 7. For analyses of blackfacing in Germany, see Matt Cornish, “Echt kein Brecht: Blackfacing ließe sich als Verfremdungseffekt nutzen—wenn der Rückgriff darauf reflektiert würde,” trans. LilianAstrid Geese, Theater der Zeit, October 2014, 22–23; and Katrin Sieg, “Race, Guilt and Innocence: Facing Blackfacing in Contemporary German Theater,” German Studies Review 38.1 (2015): 117–34. 8. Nurkan Erpulat and Jens Hillje. Verrücktes Blut. The script from September 14, 2010, is on file with the

author. I saw the production at Ballhaus NaunynstraГџe on December 15, 2010, and at the Maxim Gorki Theater on December 16, 2013. 9. Erol Boran, “Eine Geschichte des tГјrkisch-deutschen Theaters und Kabaretts,” PhD dissertation, Ohio State University, 2004. 10. Azade Seyhan, Writing Outside the Nation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001). 11. Leslie A. Adelson, The Turkish Turn in Contemporary German Literature: Toward a New Critical Grammar of Migration (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 15. Page 224 →12. Adelson, Turkish Turn, 15. 13. Adelson, Turkish Turn, 14. 14. See, for example, KaragГ¶z in Alamania (Turkish for Black Eye in Germany, but KaragГ¶z is also the name for a style of shadow puppetry; written in 1982 with a premiere in 1986), and KeloДџlan in Alamania (KeloДџlan in Germany, 1991). 15. Emine Sevgi Г–zdamar, Seltsame Sterne starren zur Erde (Cologne: Kiepenheuer and Witsch, 2003). 16. Seyhan, Writing Outside the Nation, 149. 17. I saw Schwarze Jungfrauen at the Maxim Gorki Theater on March 22, 2014. 18. Shermin Langhoff and Jens Hillje, interview by Theater heute, “Die Leute aus der letzten Bank,” Theater heute Jahrbuch 2014, 40. 19. Hakan SavaЕџ Mican, Die SchwГ¤ne vom Schlachthof, dir. Mican, Ballhaus NaunynstraГџe Berlin, November 2009, DVD on file with the author. 20. Nurkan Erpulat and TunГ§ay KulaoДџlu, LГ¶ Bal Almanya (The German Ball, 2010), dir. Erpulat, May 2010, DVD on file with the author. 21. “Ich mГ¶chte von meinem Traum erzГ¤hlen. Ich trГ¤ume vonВ .В .В . vonВ .В .В . vonВ .В .В . vier Kindern, vier SchwГ¤nen wie ein MГ¤rchenfilm. Kopf eines Kindes, KГ¶rper einer SchwГ¤ne.” Die SchwГ¤ne vom Schlachthof, written and directed by Hakan SavaЕџ Mican, Ballhaus NaunynstraГџe, Berlin, DVD. 22. “Einar nach dem anderen kommt als Privatperson an den vorderen BГјhnenrand, werden dort zu Kanaken.” Nurkan Erpulat and Jens Hillje, VerrГјcktes Blut, MS from September 14, 2010, on file with the author, 2. 23. “Eine junge Generation der deutschen Literatur wendet sich im ausgehenden 18. Jahrhundert gegen AutoritГ¤t und Tradition.” Erpulat and Hillje, VerrГјcktes Blut, 4. 24. “Herr muГџ ich sein, daГџ ich das mit Gewalt ertrotze, wozu mir die LiebenswГјrdigkeit gebricht.” Erpulat and Hillje, VerrГјcktes Blut, 61. 25. See Ећirin Manolya Sak, “AlmancД±!—Über Parallelwelten und Interessengruppen,” Deutsche Welle, October 26, 2012, http://blogs.dw.com/treffpunkt/2012/10/26/almanci-uber-parallelweltenund-interessengruppen/, archived at https://perma.cc/S8NC-KWZ4 26. “(Auf der bГјhne ein neubauhaus, das sich aus seiner asche langsam wieder zusammensetzt.)” Fritz Kater, Heaven (zu tristan) (Berlin: Henschel Schauspiel Verlag, 2007), 5. 27. I saw Prinze Friedrich von Homburg at the Maxim Gorki Theater on March 26, 2011. 28. I saw Common Ground at the Maxim Gorki Theater on May 11, 2014. 29. “Es war klar, dass Petras’ Fokus auf Ost-Westgeschichten in gewisser Weise auserzГ¤hlt war.” Langhoff and Hillje, “Die Leute aus der letzten Bank,” 40. 30. “Was sind die Common Grounds in einer Gesellschaft, die so ausdifferenziert und diversifiziert ist und eben nicht mehr Гјber den Gegensatz von BГјrgertum und Proletariat zu verstehen ist?” Langhoff and Hillje, “Die Leute aus der letzten Bank,” 40. 31. I saw Der Russe ist einer, der Burken liebt at the Maxim Gorki Theater on February 18, 2013. Page 225 →32. Katrin Sieg, “Class of 1989: Who Made Good and Who Dropped Out of German History? Postmigrant Documentary Theater in Berlin,” in The German Wall: Fallout in Europe, ed. Marc Silberman (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 171. 33. Sieg, “Class of 1989,” 180. 34. Sieg, “Class of 1989,” 173. 35. Sieg, “Class of 1989,” 180. 36. Sieg, “Class of 1989,” 181.

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Index 50 Aktenkilometer: Ein begehbares Stasi HГ¶rspiel (50 Kilometers of Dossiers: A Walkable Stasi Audio-Play; Rimini Protokoll): Alexanderplatz as performance space for, 3–5, 12, 146, 157–58; collective memory and, 146, 165; documentary theater techniques and, 147–48; history as script in, 167–69; Mauer im Kopf (“wall in people’s heads”) and, 16; Ostalgie in, 158–59; Stasi files utilized in, 3–5, 10, 12, 16, 56, 146–48, 157–60, 165–69 120 Days of Sodom (Sade), 91, 105 Adelson, Leslie A., 65, 175–76 Alexanderplatz (Berlin): 50 Aktenkilometer located in, 3–5, 12, 146, 157–58; demonstration (November 4, 1989) in, 1–3, 5, 11, 58, 87, 146, 158; postunification changes in, 3, 190 allegory: anti-allegory and, 94–95, 109; Castorf and, 90–92, 95, 105; communism and East German regime as subject of, 92–94; East German censorship evaded through, 38, 87; East German theatrical productions and, 90–96; Hamlet/Maschine and, 96–98, 100, 106; Mauser and, 141; MГјller and, 89, 92; Die Ritter der Tafelrunde and, 93–94; Die Гњbergangsgesellschaft and, 92–93, 171, 189 Anderson, Benedict, 23 “Anschwellender Bocksgesang” (“Goat Song Rising”; Strauss), 78–79, 81, 85 The Archive and the Repertoire (Diana Taylor), 9, 55, 159 Aristophanes, 115, 119 Aristotle, 6–8, 30, 49, 52, 111, 124 Arminius (also known as Hermann, ancient German general), 7, 21–24, 29, 102 Arnold-de Simine, Silke, 149–50 Der Auftrag (The Mission; MГјller), 90–92 Ballhaus Naunynstrasse (Berlin): documentary theater and, 187–88; Generation Trilogie and, 178; Langhoff (Shermin) at, 177–78, 183, 185, 188; LГ¶ Bal Almanya production (2007) at, 182–83; “postmigrant theater” and, 9, 177–78, 183, 188; Die SchwГ¤ne vom Schlachthof production (2009) at, 178–79, 182, 187–88; VerrГјcktes Blut production (2010) and, 175, 178, 180 Page 240 →Barnett, David, 38, 94, 100 Basic Law of FRG (1990), 12–13, 46 Der Bau (The Construction Site; MГјller), 1, 89, 91 Bechtel, Roger, 7, 192n15 Beckett, Samuel, 17, 54, 124–25 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 26, 66, 76, 80 Benjamin, Walter, 107–8, 140, 143

Berger, Stefan: on advantages of comparative history, 45–46; on ceremony commemorating Prussian emperors (1991), 57; on East German historiography, 41–42; Hegelian historiography and, 44; on historians and myths, 84–85; on immigration to Germany, 173; on museums’ interactive components, 149; The Search for Normality and, 6, 40, 44, 173; on unification’s strains in eastern Germany, 14; on the work of historians, 54, 61 Berlin: specific landmarks: as capital of postunification Germany, 57; as European cultural center, 9; freie Szene (independent theater scene) in, 147–49; “grotesque” nature of, 130; immigrant population in, 173; lieux de mГ©moire in, 145; multidimensionality of time in, 144, 159; postunification changes in, 3, 65, 68–69, 71, 111, 114–17, 144–45, 151, 157–59, 190; theater funding cuts’ impact on, 16. See also East Berlin; West Berlin Berliner Ensemble: Duell Traktor Fatzer production (1993) and, 134; Golden fliesst der Stahl production (1950) and, 119; Der Hofmeister production (1950) and, 41; MГјller and, 111–13; Mutter Courage production (1949) and, 88; postunification changes and, 111–13; Sieben gegen Theben production (1970s) and, 90; Theater am Schiffbauerdamm and, 16; Die Tage der Commune and, 33–34; Wessis in Weimar production (1993) and, 112–13, 129–30, 134, 138; Zement production (1973) and, 89 Berlin Wall: attempts to escape at, 144–45, 150, 156; Berlin Wall Memorial and, 144–45, 148–50, 152, 169; collective memory of, 156, 165–66; fall (November 9, 1989) of, 5, 8, 11–12, 42, 51, 59–60, 66, 96, 98, 130, 162, 166, 178–79; Goldener Oktober and, 71–72; Mauser and, 139; myths surrounding, 57, 59–60; Schlusschor and, 11, 66, 72, 75–77, 81; Schubladen and, 162–63, 166–68; Die SchwГ¤ne vom Schlachthof and, 178–79; Vermauern and, 146–47, 153–57, 165, 167; Wartesaal Deutschland Stimmenreich and, 11, 72–75, 81–82; Wessis in Weimar and, 69, 129 Bernauer Strasse (Berlin), 144–46, 150, 169 Bernstein, Robin, 9, 146, 150, 167, 169, 219n9 Bismarck, Otto von, 6–7, 24, 33, 42–43, 57–58 Bondy, Luc, 63, 66, 77–78, 81 Bradley, Laura, 19, 88, 90 Braun, Volker, 38, 92–93, 114, 171–72, 186, 189 Brecht, Bertolt: contested legacy in postcommunist era of, 113; on deutche Misere, 42; Die Dreigroschenoper and, 33; epic theater of, 124, 126; historicization and, 34–35, 37–38, 106–8, 113, 129; Der Hofmeister and, 38, 41; Die Horatier und die Kuratier and, 33; Leben des Galilei and, 33, 35–36; Lesebuch fГјr StГ¤dtebewohner and, 142; Massnahme and, 113; Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder and, 33–36, 38, 88; “On Epic Dramatic Art” and, 33; “Short Organon for the Theater” and, 34–35; “Speech to Danish Working-Class Actors on the Art of Observation” Page 241 →and, 34; Die Tage der Commune and, 33–37, 88; Trommeln in der Nacht and, 91; Verfremdung effect (V-effect) and, 34–35, 38, 126, 157; “Verfremdung Effects in Chinese Acting” and, 34; “Wer aber ist die Partie” and, 135 BГјchner, Georg, 31–32, 91 Castorf, Frank: allegory and, 90–92, 95, 105; anti-allegory and, 8, 94–95, 109; Arnst and, 178; biographical background of, 90; Der Auftrag adapted (1983) by, 90–91; Der Bau adapted (1986) by, 91; Clockwork Orange adapted (1992) by, 131–33; on continuity versus crisis, 110; Golden fliesst der Stahl / Wolokolamsker Chaussee adapted by, 116–22, 131, 142; grotesque in the theater of, 15, 54, 116, 121, 131; historicization and, 106–8, 126; Kohl represented by, 56, 116, 131; Luxemburg and, 115; Ostalgie and, 15; postdramatic theater and, 56, 111, 122, 124–26, 143; postmigrant artists compared to, 188–89; Die RГ¤uber adapted (1990) by, 6, 87, 94–95, 101–6, 108–9, 115–16, 131, 175, 180; Des Teufels General adapted (1996) by, 116, 126,

128–29, 142; Trommeln in der Nacht adapted (1984) by, 91; VolksbГјhne and, 95, 115–16 censorship, 38, 87–88, 90–92 Checkpoint Charlie Museum (Berlin), 151–53, 167, 169 Chekhov, Anton, 70, 93, 185 The Cherry Orchard (Chekhov), 70, 185 Clockwork Orange (Burgess), 115, 131–33 Cold War, 46–47, 127, 151 collective memory: 50 Aktenkilometer and, 146, 165; Berlin Wall and, 156, 165–66; definition of, 54; history compared to, 54–55; immigrant communities and, 174; lieux de mГ©moire and, 55; memorials and, 150; museums and, 149; postdramatic theater and, 54; postmodernism and, 56; Schlusschor and, 78–79, 81; zeit zu lieben zeit zu sterben and, 184 Common Ground (Ronen), 186–89 Connerton, Paul, 54 Dada, 118, 123–24 Dantons Tod (Danton’s Death; BГјchner), 31–32, 91 DDR Museum, 146, 151–52, 161, 167, 169 The Death of Character (Fuchs), 135 Detje, Robin, 91, 95, 115–16, 130–31 Deutsche Erinnerungsorte (German Memory-Places; Schulze), 156, 173 deutsche Misere (“German misery”) theory, 41–42, 52 Deutsches Theater (Berlin): East Berlin protests (November 4, 1990) and, 11; Faust I production (1970s) at, 90; German unification (1989-90) and, 12; Hamlet/Maschine production (1990) at, 1–2, 6, 8, 87, 96–100; Der LohndrГјcker production (1988) at, 92; Mauser production (1991) at, 113–14, 134, 140–41; Mutter Courage production (1949) at, 38; postunification changes at, 113; Die Sorgen und die Macht production shut down (1962) at, 88; Wartesaal Deutschland Stimmenreich production (1995) at, 67, 74 Deutschland schafft sich ab (Germany is Abolishing Itself; Sarrazin), 173 Die Deutschen und ihre Mythen (The Germans and Their Myths; MГјnkler), 57, 60 documentary theater: 50 Aktenkilometer as, 147–48; authentic material presented by, 39; Die Weber and, 32; Hochhuth and, 66–67, 148; The Holocaust and, 147; interrogation of source materials in, 148; Kroesinger and, 153, 179; postmigrant artists and, 187–88; in postwar West Germany, 38–39 Page 242 →Don Carlos (Schiller), 26 Dorn, Dieter, 63, 66, 76–77, 81 Droge Faust Parsifal (Drugs Faust Percival, Schleef), 112, 216n80

East Berlin: 50 Aktenkilometer and, 158, 169; Checkpoint Charlie and, 151; demonstrations (1989) in, 1–3, 5, 10–12, 58, 60, 87, 94, 98, 158; Fernsehturm television tower in, 1–3, 190; German unification (1989–90) and, 13, 16; Palasthotel in, 5, 159; Pankow neighborhood in, 72; postunification changes in, 111, 114–17; Schwäne vom Schlachthof and, 178 East Germany (GDR): 50 Aktenkilometer’s depiction of, 158; allegory and theatrical productions in, 90–96; arts and theater funding in, 15, 111; attempts to escape, 144–45, 150, 154, 156, 178–79; censorship in, 38, 87–88, 90–92 109; cultural liberalization (1970s) in, 89–90; demonstrations (1989) in, 1–3, 5, 10–12, 45, 58, 60, 87, 94, 98, 158; deutsche Misere theory and, 41, 52; elections (1989) in, 10–11, 94; elections (1990) in, 2–3, 12, 96–97; fortieth national anniversary celebration (1989), 10–11; German unification (1989–90) and, 12–16, 40, 59–60, 67, 69–75, 83, 85, 106–13, 116–17, 120, 131, 146; historical drama’s resonance in, 38; historiography and, 14, 42, 44–46, 48, 51–52, 58, 92, 122, 151; Mauser and, 141–42; Müller’s historical dramas depicting, 89; museums’ representations of, 151–52; Ostalgie (nostalgia) for, 3, 15, 17, 108, 158–59; Schubladen’s depictions of, 162–65; Stasi (secret police) in, 3–5, 10, 12, 15–17, 56, 146–48, 152, 157–60, 165–69; Vermauern and, 154, 168; workers’ rights in, 91; workers’ uprising (June 17, 1953) and, 132, 134. See also East Berlin Egmont (Goethe), 26 Einstein on the Beach (Wilson), 136 Eisler, Hanns, 41–42, 103 The End of History and the Last Man (Fukuyama), 46–47, 200n41 Engels, Friedrich, 35, 41 The Enlightenment: 22–23, 26, 39, 105, 107, 188 Die Ermittlung (The Investigation; Weiss), 39, 66 Erpulat, Nurkan: Langhoff (Shermin) and, 183, 185; Lö Bal Almanya and, 178, 182–83; Maxim Gorki Theater and, 185; postdramatic theater and, 188; Verrücktes Blut (2010) directed by, 175, 178, 181 Fassbinder, Rainer Werner, 63, 114, 117, 185 Faust I (Goethe), 90, 135 Faust II (Goethe), 70, 84, 129, 135 Federal Republic of Germany. See West Germany (FRG) Fernsehturm (Berlin television tower), 1–3, 190 freie Szene (independent theater scene), 147–49, 176 Freie Volksbühne, 62–63 French Revolution: Büchner’s representation of, 31–32; German unification (1989-90) compared to, 60; Mauser and, 138, 140, 142; Quartett and, 134, 140; Die Räuber and, 106, 108; Reign of Terror and, 26, 31; Schiller and, 26–28, 102 Friedens Sieg (Victory of Peace; Schottelius), 21–25, 29 Frye, Northrop, 47, 51 Fuchs, Elinor, 135–36

Fukuyama, Francis, 46–48, 85, 200n41 Fulbrook, Mary, 43, 46, 110, 156, 173 Galileo Galilei, 33, 35–37 Gastarbeiter (“guest workers”), 172–73, 183 Geist (“spirit;” Hegel), 48–49 Gellner, Ernest, 194n8 Page 243 →German Democratic Republic. See East Germany (GDR) German Historical Museum, 151–53, 157, 167, 169 Germania (Tacitus), 21–22 Germania Tod in Berlin (Germania Death in Berlin, MГјller), 33, 89–90 The German Ideology (Marx and Engels), 35 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von: BГјchner and, 31; Egmont and, 26; Faust I and, 90, 135; Faust II and, 70, 84, 129; German national identity and, 24–26; GГ¶tz von Berlichingen mit der eisernen Hand and, 6, 24–26, 195n24; Shakespeare and, 25 Goldener Oktober (Golden October; Elfriede MГјller), 65, 71–72, 82–86 Golden fliesst der Stahl / Wolokolamsker Chaussee (The Steel Pours out Golden / Volokolamsk Highway; Castorf adaptation of the plays of GrГјnberg and MГјller), 116–22, 131, 142 Goodbye, Lenin! (Becker), 17, 19 GГ¶tz von Berlichingen mit der eisernen Hand (GГ¶tz von Berlichingen with the Iron Hand; Goethe), 6, 24–26, 195n24 the grotesque: Berlin and, 130; Castorf and, 15, 54, 116, 121, 131; definition of, 130; MГјller and, 54, 132, 134; postdramatic theater and, 118; Schleef and, 54 Grub, Frank Thomas, 17–18 GrГјnberg, Karl, 116, 119–21 Grundgesetz. See Basic Law of FRG Haas, Birgit, 68, 81 Habermas, JГјrgen, 43, 46, 60, 110, 143 Hacks, Peter, 38, 88, 118 Hake, Sabine, 17–18 Hamburg National Theater, 22–23 Hamletmaschine (MГјller): 90, 94–95, 97–98, 100–101, 106-7. See also Hamlet/Maschine Hamlet/Maschine (MГјller’s 1990 production of Hamlet with Hamletmaschine): anti-allegory and, 96–98,

100, 106; Deutsches Theater and, 1–2, 6, 8, 87, 96–100; German unification and, 8, 94, 98, 107–8; historicization and, 89, 106–7, 126; historiography and, 100–101, 107; photo from, 99; set of, 97; Verfremdung effect and, 97; Western audience for, 2 Hauptmann, Gerhart, 31–33, 70, 84, 90 Hegel, G. W. F.: on art’s content and form, 124; civilizations analyzed by, 48; dialectic of, 27–28, 48, 50; on drama and fate, 123; Geist (“spirit”) and, 48–49; historiography and, 8, 27–28, 44, 48–54, 59, 85, 111, 124, 143, 189; Lectures on Aesthetics and, 50; Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, 48; Phenomenology of Spirit and, 50, 104, 108; The Philosophy of Fine Art and, 49; Reason in History and, 48, 50; Schiller’s Wallenstein and, 27; VersГ¶hnung (reconciliation) and, 49–51; Weltgeist (“world spirit”) and, 59; White on, 47, 49–50; on “world historical individuals,” 48–49 Hegel on Reason and History (O’Brien), 48–49, 122 Hein, Christoph, 38, 93–94, 117 Herakles 2 oder Die Hydra (Heracles 2, or The Hydra; MГјller), 114 Herakles 13 (MГјller), 114, 140–41 Die Hermannsschlacht (The Battle of Hermann; Kleist), 29–31, 117 Hillje, Jens, 175, 178, 181, 185, 187 historical drama: Aristotle and, 6–7; Brecht and, 33, 88; East Germany and, 38; German nationalism promoted through, 21; postmigrant theater and, 188–89; Schiller and, 6, 26–29, 31, 35–36, 52–53, 127; socialism promoted through, 88; teleology and, 27–28, 53, 86, 128, 139 Historical Drama (Lindenberger), 32 Page 244 →historicization: Brecht and, 34–35, 37–38, 106–8, 113, 129; Castorf’s Die RГ¤uber adaptation and, 106–8, 126; MГјller’s Hamlet/Maschine and, 89, 106–7, 126; Verfremdung effect and, 34, 38; Wessis in Weimar and, 71, 113 Historikerstreit (historians’ debate), 41, 64 historiography: Benjamin and, 143; Berlin Wall and, 146; Brecht and, 36–37; Cold War and, 46–47; “comedic mode” and, 48–52, 80; deutsche Misere (“German misery”) theory and, 41–42, 52; dramaturgy and, 7–8, 57; East Germany and, 14, 42, 44–46, 48, 51–52, 58, 92, 122, 151; The Enlightenment and, 23; Fukuyama and, 46–47, 85; German unification and, 39, 42–44, 48, 51–52, 56–57, 94, 152, 165–66, 169; Golden/Wolokolamsker and, 122; Hamlet/Maschine and, 100–101, 107; Hegel and, 8, 27–28, 44, 48–54, 59, 85, 111, 124, 143, 189; The Holocaust and, 45, 64, 92, 169; Kohl and, 45–46, 52, 85; landscape and, 135–36; Marx and, 35, 42, 46, 52–53; metaphors and, 53, 56–57, 59; myths confronted by, 61, 84–85; Peasants’ War and, 41, 46, 58; peripeteia and, 142–43; postdramatic historiography and, 117–19, 121–23, 139–40, 142–43; satiric mode and, 52–53; Schiller and, 27–28, 39; Schlusschor and, 78, 81, 85; Sonderweg (“special path”) theory and, 40–41, 43; Thirty Years’ War and, 28; tragic mode and, 51–52, 85–86; Des Teufels General and, 127–29; Wartesaal Deutschland Stimmenreich and, 82, 85; Weimar Republic and, 43, 45; Wessis in Weimar and, 137–38; West Germany and, 43, 46, 51, 58; White and, 47–53, 80 Hitler, Adolf, 45, 84, 90, 128 Hochhuth, Rolf: biographical background of, 66; documentary theater and, 66–67, 148; German unification in the plays of, 8, 64; Schleef and, 112–13; Der Stellvertreter and, 39, 66; Wessis in Weimar and, 14, 66–67,

69–73, 84, 112–13, 118, 129, 134–35, 136–38, 142 Der Hofmeister (The Tutor; Lenz), 38, 41 The Holocaust: “Anschwellender Bocksgesang” and, 78; documentary theater and, 147; The Enlightenment and, 39; Die Ermittlung and, 39, 66; Historikerstreit (historians’ debate) and, 64; historiography and, 45, 64, 92, 169; museums and, 152, 169; Die RГ¤uber and, 106; Der Stellvertreter and, 39, 66; Des Teufels General and, 127; VergangenheitsbewГ¤ltigung (coming to terms with the Nazi past) and, 41, 96 Holy Roman Empire, 25, 27–28, 80 Honecker, Erich: cultural liberalization introduced by, 89–90; East German anniversary celebrations (1989) and, 10–11; resignation of, 11, 58; Die Ritter der Tafelrunde and, 93; Wessis in Weimar depiction of, 70 How Societies Remember (Connerton), 54 Hungarian Revolution (1956), 100–101 Ibsen, Henrik, 90, 124 immigrants in Germany: African immigrants and, 174–75, 187; citizenship laws regarding, 174; Gastarbeiter (“guest workers”) and, 172–73, 182; public opinion regarding, 173–74; Russian immigrants and, 172–73; Schengen Area and, 173; Turkish immigrants and, 172–85, 187; Vietnamese immigrants and, 172 Irmer, Thomas, 39, 117, 148 Page 245 →Jelinek, Elfriede, 112, 188 Joan of Arc, 28–29, 31, 33, 52 Kabale und Liebe (Love and Intrigue; Schiller), 134, 175, 180 Kantor, Tadeusz, 56 Karate-Billi kehrt zurГјck (Karate-Billi Returns, Pohl), 67–68 Khrushchev, Nikita, 147, 153–57, 166–68 King Lear (Shakespeare), 115, 161 Kleist, Heinrich von, 29–31 Kohl, Helmut: “blooming landscapes” rhetoric of, 13, 51, 60, 69–71; Castorf’s dramatic representations of, 56, 116, 131; elections (1990) and, 97; German currency union (1990) and, 13; German unification (1989–90) and, 3, 12–14, 60, 95, 166; historiography and, 45–46, 52, 85; memoirs of, 42, 45; Museum Island district and, 151; myths of German unification and, 60; postunification theater depictions of, 64; Potsdam ceremony commemorating Prussian emperors (1991) and, 57; Des Teufels General and, 127 Krenz, Egon, 11, 42, 58 Kroesinger, Hans-Werner: biographical background of, 153; documentary theater and, 153, 179; MГјller and, 153; Musa Dagh—Tage des Widerstands and, 186; Q&A—Questions and Answers and, 153; Vermauern and, 146–48, 153–57, 165–69, 184 KulaoДџlu, TunГ§ay, 178, 182

landscape theater, 134–40 Langhoff, Lukas, 171, 178, 189 Langhoff, Shermin: Ballhaus Naunynstrasse and, 177–78, 183, 185, 188; Maxim Gorki Theater and, 171–72, 185–87; Schwarze Jungfrauen and, 176–77, 179, 186, 188 Langhoff, Thomas, 93, 113, 117, 171 Leben des Galilei (Life of Galileo, Brecht), 33, 35–36 Lehmann, Hans-Thies: on Hegel’s views of drama, 123; on Kantor, 56; Kroesinger and, 153; landscape theater and, 135; on drama and historiography, 53; on postdramatic theater and spectatorship, 136; postdramatic theory and, 8, 53–54; Szondi and, 124; on teleology and historical drama, 122; on tragedy, 125, 140 Leipzig, demonstrations (1989) in, 10–11, 60 Lenz, Jakob Michael Reinhold, 25–26, 38, 41 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 22 lieux de mГ©moire (sites of memory; Nora), 55, 145, 160 Lindenberger, Herbert, 7, 24, 32 Linzer, Martin, 90–91, 96 LГ¶ Bal Almanya (The German Ball; Erpulat and KulaoДџlu), 178, 182–83 Der LohndrГјcker (The Scab; MГјller), 1, 89, 92–93, 96, 120 Luxemburg, Rosa, 90, 115, 141–42 Malkin, Jeanette R., 54, 56 Maria Stuart (Schiller), 26, 28–29, 135 Marx, Karl, 35, 46–47, 52, 100 Mauser (MГјller): Benjamin and, 140; Berlin Wall and, 139; “continuous present” in, 139; Deutsches Theater production (1991) of, 113–14, 134, 140–41; East Germany allegory and, 141; French Revolution and, 138, 140, 142; Herakles 2 and, 139–40; Herakles 13 and, 141; nonnarrative form of, 142; photo from production of, 141; Quartett and, 134, 140; Russian Revolution depicted in, 113–14, 140; Stalin and, 141–42; Wolokolamsker Chaussee and, 120, 134 Page 246 →Maxim Gorki Theater (Berlin): diversity of actors at, 185; documentary theater and, 188; Langhoff (Shermin) and, 171–72, 185–87; Petras and, 184; “postmigrant” productions at, 9, 189; postunification changes at, 16, 114; Die Гњbergangsgesellschaft (1988) at, 93, 114, 171; Die Гњbergangsgesellschaft (2013) at, 171–72, 186; Vermauern production (2009) at, 153–56, 184; VerrГјcktes Blut production at, 181, 186 memorials: authenticity and, 150; Berlin Wall Memorial and, 144–45, 148–50, 152, 169; collective memory and, 150; interactive aspects of, 146, 150, 152, 167, 169; as lieux de mГ©moire, 55, 145. See also museums Merkel, Angela, 57, 174 Metahistory (White), 8, 47, 49–53

Mican, Hakan SavaЕџ: Langhoff (Shermin) and, 183, 185; Maxim Gorki Theater and, 185; postdramatic theater and, 188; Die SchwГ¤ne vom Schlachthof and, 178–79, 182, 187–88 MГјhe, Ulrich, 1–2, 98–99, 107 Der MГјll, die Stadt und der Tod (Garbage, the City, and Death; Fassbinder), 63, 117 MГјller, Elfriede, 65, 71–72, 82–86 MГјller, Heiner: Alexanderplatz demonstration (November 4, 1989) and, 1–3, 87; allegory and, 89, 92; antiallegory and, 8, 94–95; Der Auftrag and, 90–92; Benjamin and, 107, 140; Berliner Ensemble and, 111–13; Der Bau and, 1, 89, 91; Bildbeschreibung and, 136; “continuous present” in dramas of, 139; Germania Tod in Berlin and, 33, 89–90; Hamletmaschine and, 1–2, 90, 96, 99–101, 107–8; Hamlet /Maschine production (1990) and, 1–2, 6, 8, 87, 94, 96–101, 106–8; Kroesinger and, 153; landscape historiography and, 135; Der LohndrГјcker and, 1, 89, 92–93, 96, 120; Marxist historical structure and, 38; Mauser and, 90, 113–14, 118, 120, 134, 138–42; postdramatic theater and, 54, 56, 111, 122, 124–26, 140, 143; postmigrant artists compared to, 189; Quartett and, 91, 114, 134, 140; Die Schlacht and, 90; suspicions of Stasi collaboration regarding, 15; Die Umsiedlerin and, 89; Wilson and, 91; Wolokolamsker Chaussee and, 91–92, 114, 116, 119–22, 132, 134, 140–41; writers’ union blacklisting of, 89; Zement and, 89, 185 MГјnkler, Herfried, 57, 60–61 museums: authenticity emphasized at, 151–52, 157; Checkpoint Charlie Museum and, 151–53, 167, 169; collective memory and, 149; Culture Fund support for, 16; DDR Museum and, 146, 151–52, 161, 167, 169; German Historical Museum and, 151–53, 157, 167, 169; German unification represented at, 6, 9, 17; The Holocaust and, 152, 169; interactive aspects of, 146, 149–50, 152, 167, 169; as lieux de mГ©moire, 55; Museum Island district (Berlin) and, 151; postunification renovations of, 3, 14; teleological historiography at, 152. See also memorials Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder (Mother Courage and Her Children; Brecht), 33–36, 38 myths: Berlin Wall and, 57, 59–60; communism and, 92, 142; German unification and, 57–61, 64–65, 113; postdramatic theater and, 126; Prussia and, 57, 59 nationalism: European Union and, 189; German unification and, 41, 52, 57; historiography and, 45, 169; Page 247 →“imagined communities” and, 23–24; “perennialist” versus “organic” conceptions of, 21; postdramatic theater and, 8; premodern German efforts to promote, 21; Prinz Friedrich von Homburg and, 185; Romanticism and, 29; Des Teufels General and, 142–43; theater’s role in promoting, 24, 31 Nationalism and Modernism (Smith), 21, 23 Neumann, Bert, 101, 103, 116, 119 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 24, 47, 132, 137 Nora, Pierre, 55–56, 156, 159–60 “Notes on the Contemporary Theater” (Weiss), 39 O’Brien, Dennis, 48–51, 122, 201n49 “On the Sublime” (Schiller), 195n32 Ostalgie (nostalgia for East Germany): 50 Aktenkilometer and, 158–59; Castorf’s Die RГ¤uber and, 108; East Germans’ postunification identity and, 15; films depicting, 17; tourism and, 3

Г–zdamar, Emine Sevgi, 176 Passagenwerk (Arcades Project; Benjamin), 140, 143 Peasants’ War (1524–25): deutsche Misere theory and, 41; GГ¶tz von Berlichingen mit der eisernen Hand and, 25; historiography and, 41, 46, 58; Johann Faustus and, 42; Thomas MГјnzer and, 88 Petras, Armin, 184, 186 Phenomenology of Spirit (Hegel), 50, 104, 108 Piscator, Erwin, 38–39, 114, 148 Podlasiak, Marek, 95, 105–6 Poetics (Aristotle), 6–7, 49 Pohl, Klaus: biographical background of, 67; border crossings in theater of, 11; Karate-Billi kehrt zurГјck and, 67–68; Wartesaal Deutschland Stimmenreich and, 11, 67–68, 72–75, 81–82, 85–86 Pollesch, RenГ©, 147, 188 postdramatic theater: Beckett and, 53–54; collective memory and, 54; Dada and, 118, 123–24; definition of, 8, 53, 111; East German directors and, 54, 56, 122–23, 125; Golden/Wolokolamsker and, 116–19, 121–22, 131, 142; Hegel and, 124–25; landscape dramaturgy and, 118, 134–40; Lehmann on, 8, 53–54, 122, 124, 136; postmigrant artists and, 187–89; satire and, 118, 126; teleology and, 53–54, 122, 125, 139, 143; Verfremdung effect and, 118, 126, 143 Postdramatic Theater (Lehmann), 53, 122–25 postmigrant theater: Ballhaus Naunynstrasse and, 9, 177–78, 183, 188; documentary theater and, 187–88; Maxim Gorki Theater and, 9, 185-189; historical drama and, 188–89; postdramatic theater and, 187–89 postmodernism, 56 Prinz Friedrich von Homburg (The Prince of Homburg, Kleist), 29–30, 184–85 Prussia: Bismarck and, 57; double-headed eagle and, 80; historiography and, 45; Der Hofmeister and, 38; Kleist’s dramas and, 29–30; myths regarding, 57, 59 Quartett (MГјller), 91, 114, 134, 140 Racial Innocence (Bernstein), 9, 149–50 Die RГ¤uber (The Robbers; Schiller): allegorical interpretations of Castorf’s adaptation of, 95, 105; antiallegorical interpretations of Castorf’s adaptation of, 95, 106, 109; Arminius and, 102; Castorf’s adaptation (1990) of, 6, 87, 94–95, 101–6, 108–9, 115–16, 131, 175, 180; Page 248 →Die RГ¤uber (continued)French Revolution and, 106, 108; German unification and, 8, 103–7; historicization and, 106–8, 126; music in Castorf’s adaptation of, 103, 105–6; as revolutionary tragedy, 102, 109; Schleef’s adaptation of Wessis in Weimar (1993) and, 135; VerrГјcktes Blut and, 175, 180–82; VolksbГјhne production (1990) of, 101–5, 180 Reason in History (Hegel), 48, 50 revolutions of 1848, 41, 46, 58

Rheinische Rebellen (Rhineland Rebels; Bronnen), 115, 131 Rimini Protokoll (theatrical collective): 50 Aktenkilometer and, 3–5, 10, 12, 16, 56, 146–48, 157–60, 165–69; documentary theater emphasis of, 179; founding members of, 3, 157; Situation Rooms and, 221n32 Die Ritter der Tafelrunde (Knights of the Round Table; Hein), 93–94, 117 The Rolling Stones, 91, 103, 116 Ronen, Yael, 185–89 Sade, Marquis de, 91, 105, 108, 116 Sarrazin, Thilo, 173 satire: Aristophanes and, 115; Castorf’s Rheinische Rebellen adaptation and, 131; Golden fliesst der Stahl / Wolokolamsker Chaussee and, 119–21, 131; incompleteness and, 143; postdramatic theater and, 118, 126; White on, 52–53 Schabowski, GГјnter, 11 SchaubГјhne Theater (Berlin), 63, 66, 77–78, 176 Schiller, Friedrich: BГјchner and, 31; Don Carlos and, 26; French Revolution and, 26–28, 102; German national identity and, 24, 26, 28–29; historiography and, 27–28, 39; history plays and, 6, 26–29, 31, 35–36, 52–53, 127; Die Jungfrau von Orleans and, 26, 28–29; Kabale und Liebe and, 134, 175, 180; Maria Stuart and, 26, 28–29, 135; “Ode to Joy” and, 66; “On the Sublime” and, 195n32; teleology and, 27–28; Die RГ¤uber and, 87, 95, 101–6, 108–9, 116, 131, 135, 175, 180–82; VerrГјcktes Blut and, 175, 180–82; Wallenstein plays and, 6, 26–28, 32–33, 188; Wilhelm Tell and, 26–29, 52, 78 Schillertheater (Berlin), 16, 62 Schleef, Einar: anti-allegory and, 8; biographical background of, 112; “continuous present” in dramas of, 139; Droge Faust Parsifal and, 112, 216–17n80; Faust adaptation (1990) by, 112; Gertrude and, 112; Hochhuth and, 112–13; landscape historiography and, 135; on Nazi uniforms, 216–17n80; postdramatic theater and, 54, 111, 122, 124–26, 140, 143; postmigrant theater compared to work of, 188–89; SportstГјck adaptation directed by, 112; Wessis in Weimar adapted (1993) by, 14, 112–13, 118, 128–29, 134–38, 142 Schlingensief, Christoph, 17, 115 Schlusschor (Final Chorus, Strauss): Berlin Wall and unification in, 11, 66, 72, 75–77, 81; collective memory and, 78–79, 81; historiography and, 78, 81, 85; MГјnchener Kammerspiele production (1991) of, 76–77; pathos in, 52; photo from, 77; SchaubГјhne production (1992) of, 63, 77–78; tragic structure of, 85–86 Schottelius, Justus Georg, 21–22 Schroth, Christoph, 117, 214n26 Schubladen (Drawers, She Pop Pop): Berlin Wall’s role in, 162–63, 166–68; chronological arrangement of, 161; documentary theater and, 148; East/West Auseinandersetzung (back-and-forth conversation) in, 162–65; filmed components of, 164; history as open script in, 167–69; Mauer im Page 249 →Kopf (“wall in people’s heads”) and, 16; photo from production of, 163 Die SchwГ¤ne vom Schlachthof (The Swans from the Slaughterhouse; Mican), 178–79, 182, 187–88

Schwarze Jungfrauen (Black Virgins; Zaimoğlu and Senkel), 176–77, 179, 186, 188 Second World War. See World War II SED. See Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschland Seyhan, Azade, 175–76 Shakespeare, William: Büchner and, 31; Goethe and, 25; Hamlet and, 1, 94, 96–100, 107–8; King Lear and, 115, 161; She She Pop (performance collective): documentary theater techniques and, 148; founding of, 161; Mauer im Kopf (“wall in people’s heads”) and, 16; Schubladen and, 16, 146, 148, 161–69; West German origins of, 161 “Short Organon for the Theater” (Brecht), 34–35 Sieg, Katrin, 59, 187–88 sites of memory (lieux de mémoire; Nora), 55, 145, 160 Smith, Anthony D., 21 Socialist Unity Party. See Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschland Sonderweg (“special path”) theory, 40–41, 43 Die Sorgen und die Macht (Anxieties and Power; Hacks), 88, 117 Soviet Union: East German economy and, 155; fall of, 172–73; German unification and, 12; Müller’s depiction in Wolokolamsker Chausse of, 91; Müller’s depiction in Zement of, 89; World War II and, 45, 172 Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschland (Socialist Unity Party; SED): censorship and, 88; demonstrations (1989) against, 3; deutsche Misere theory opposed by, 41–42; elections (1989) and, 10; leadership changes (1989) in, 11 Spohr, Kristina, 46, 58–59 Staatlichen Schauspielbühnen Berlin, 16, 62–63 “The Stage Considered as a Moral Institution” (Schiller), 24 Stalin, Josef, 45, 97–98, 106–7, 114, 119, 141–42 Stasi (East German secret police): 50 Aktenkilometer play based on records of, 3–5, 10, 12, 16, 56, 146–48, 157–60, 165–69; attempts to destroy archives of, 5, 12; informants and collaborators with, 5, 12, 15; Leben der Anderen (The Lives of Others, 2006) and, 147; museum representations of, 152 Stein, Gertrude, 135–36, 139 Der Stellvertreter (The Deputy; Hochhuth), 39, 66 Strauss, Botho: “Anschwellender Bocksgesang” and, 78–79, 81, 85; biographical background of, 65; German unification in the plays of, 6, 8, 11, 64; Das Gleichgewicht and, 68; Schlusschor and, 11, 52, 63, 66, 72, 75–81, 85–86; Western society critiqued by, 78 Sturm und Drang dramas, 24–26, 134–35, 181

Szondi, Peter, 124 Tacitus, 21–22 Die Tage der Commune (Days of the Commune; Brecht), 33–37, 88 Taylor, Diana, 9, 55–56, 146, 159–60 teleology: Aristotelian dramaturgy and, 111; Benjamin on, 140; fate and, 123; Fukuyama’s historiography and, 47, 122; German unification historiography and, 44, 169; Hegelian historiography and, 44, 49, 53–54, 189; historical drama and, 27–28, 53, 86, 128, 139; Marxist Page 250 →teleology (continued)historiography and, 42, 46, 53; postdramatic theater and, 53–54, 122, 125, 139, 143; Schiller’s dramas and, 27–28; Wessis in Weimar and, 136 Terziyan, Sesede, 178–79, 181 Des Teufels General (The Devil’s General, Zuckmayer), 116, 126–29, 142–43 Theatertreffen festival, 66, 93, 117, 180, 186 “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (Benjamin), 107 Thirty Years’ War (1618–48), 27–28, 35–36 Thomas MГјnzer (Friedrich Wolf), 88–89 Tragedy and Dramatic Theater (Lehmann), 125–26, 132 Treuhandanstalt (German privatization agency), 14, 137 Turkish Ensemble (SchaubГјhne Theater), 176 Turkish Germans: as Gastarbeiter (“guest workers”), 172–73, 183; German citizenship laws and, 174, 188; German unification and, 7, 9; Kanaken (ethnic slur) and, 180; Solingen arson attack (1993) against, 183; theater productions by and about, 174–85, 187; in West Berlin, 178 Die Гњbergangsgesellschaft (Society in Transition; Braun), 92–93, 171–72, 186, 189 Ulbricht, Walter, 147, 153–57, 166–68 Unification Treaty (1990), 15–16, 69 Vereinigung (unification), 58-59 Verfremdung effect (V-effect): Brecht and, 34–35, 38, 126, 157; Castorf’s Des Teufels General adaptation and, 128–29; historicization and, 34, 38; MГјller’s Hamlet/Maschine and, 97; postdramatic theater and, 118, 126, 143; “Verfremdung Effects in Chinese Acting” (Brecht) and, 34; Vermauern and, 157; VerrГјcktes Blut and, 188 VergangenheitsbewГ¤ltigung (coming to terms with the Nazi past), 41, 96 Vermauern (To Wall Up; Kroesinger): casting of, 157; collective memory and, 165, 166; documentary theater techniques and, 148; history as open script in, 167–69; Khrushchev and Ulbricht conversation in, 146–47, 153–55, 157, 166–68; Maxim Gorki Theater production (2009) of, 153–56, 184; photo from production of, 155; set of, 157; stage as museum for, 155–56; Verfremdung effect and, 157

VerrГјcktes Blut (Crazy Blood; Erpulat and Hillje): Ballhaus Naunynstrasse production (2010) and, 175, 178, 180; cross-ethnic casting in, 175; Maxim Gorki Theater production of, 181, 186; “performing Germanness” in, 180–82; photo from Maxim Gorki Theater production of, 181; Schiller’s dramas featured in, 175, 180–82; Verfremdung effect and, 188 VersГ¶hnung (Hegel’s concept of reconciliation), 49–51 VolksbГјhne (Berlin): Berlin’s relationship with, 63, 114–15; Castorf and, 95, 115–16; Clockwork Orange (1993) produced at, 115, 131–33; Golden fliesst der Stahl / Wolokolamsker Chaussee produced (1996) at, 116; postdramatic theater and, 188; postunification changes at, 114–15; protests (November 4, 1989) and, 102; Die RГ¤uber (1990) at, 101–5, 180; Rheinische Rebellen (1992–93) produced at, 115; Des Teufels General produced (1996) at, 116, 126, 128 Wallenstein plays (Schiller), 6, 26–28, 32–33, 188 Wartesaal Deutschland Stimmenreich Page 251 →(Waiting Room Germany; Pohl): Berlin Wall’s fall and German unification in, 11, 72–75, 81–82; broad reach of, 67–68; Deutsches Theater production (1995) of, 67, 74; historiography and, 82, 85; monologue format of, 73, 81–82, 85; photo from production of, 74; tragic structure of, 85–86 Die Weber (The Weavers, Hauptmann), 32–33, 84, 90, 188 Weber, Carl, 19, 63, 88 Weimar Republic, 43, 45, 58, 80 Weiss, Peter, 31, 39, 66, 147–48 Wende (“the reversal”; German term for 1989-90 period): Grub on, 17–18; historiography and, 44; Krenz on, 11, 58; myths regarding, 57–58; “Turkish turn” in German literature and, 175 Wessis in Weimar (Hochhuth): “The Apple Trees” scene in, 69–70; Berlin Wall and, 69, 129; “blooming landscapes” references in, 70–71; “continuous present” in, 142; discontent with economic development in eastern Germany depicted in, 69–73, 85, 113; documentary theater techniques in, 66–67; dramaturgy of tragedy and, 84; Faust II (Goethe) and, 70, 84, 129; historicization and, 71, 113; historiography and, 137–38; Honecker depicted in, 70; landscape theater and, 135; music in Schleef’s adaptation (1993) of, 134–35; “Philemon and Baucis” scene in, 70–71, 73, 84; photo from production of, 138; Schleef’s adaptation (1993) of, 14, 112–13, 118, 128–29, 134–38, 142; suicide in, 70–71, 73; tragic structure of, 85–86; Treuhandanstalt criticized in, 14, 66–67 West Berlin: Berlin Wall’s enclosing of, 62, 155; Checkpoint Charlie and, 154; East Germans in, 11; German unification (1989-90) and, 13, 61–62; immigrant communities in, 178; KaDeWe department store in, 72; Naunynstrasse (street) in, 178 West Germany (FRG): arts and theater funding in, 15; BegrГјssungsgeld (“welcome money”) offered to East Germans by, 11; documentary drama in, 38–39; East German visitors to, 10–11; German unification (1989–90) and, 12–15, 40, 59–60, 63–64, 67, 69, 72–74, 83, 85, 122; historiography and, 43, 46, 51, 58; immigration to, 172; nationalism and, 143; Schubladen’s depictions of, 162–65; Sonderweg (“special path”) theory and, 40–41; Wirtschaftswunder (“economic miracle” of postwar era) in, 13, 39, 60, 172 White, Hayden: on comedy, 50–51, 53, 80; dramatic structure in history and, 8, 47, 49; on Hegel, 47, 49–50; on romance, 52–53; on satire, 52–53; on tragedy, 51, 53 Wiedervereinigung (reunification), 17, 57–59, 68

Wilhelm Tell (Schiller), 26–29, 52, 78 Wilson, Robert: “continuous present” in dramas of, 139; landscape theater and, 136; MГјller and, 91, 136; postdramatic theater and, 53, 125; surrealism and, 123–24 Wirtschaftswunder (“economic miracle” of postwar West Germany), 13, 39, 60, 172 Wolf, Christa, 2, 15, 18, 58, 158 Wolf, Friedrich, 38, 88–89 Wolokolamsker Chaussee (Volokolamsk Highway, MГјller): Castorf’s adaption of, 116–22, 131, 142; Wolokolamsker Chaussee V: Der Findling and, 114, 140–41; Wolokolamsker Chaussee I and, 91; Wolokolamsker Chaussee III: Das Duell and, 132, 134; Wolokolamsker Chaussee IV: Kentauren and, 92; World War II depicted in, 91, 120 Page 252 →World War II: Hamlet/Maschine and, 98; historiography and, 48; The Holocaust and, 39, 45, 64, 66, 78, 92, 106, 127, 147, 152, 169; physical destruction of Germany in, 3, 13, 190; Soviet Union and, 45, 172; Wolokolamsker Chaussee and, 91, 120 Zonenrand-Ermutigung festivals (Cottbus, Germany), 117 Zuckmayer, Carl, 116, 126–29, 142–43