Tragedy's Endurance: Performances of Greek Tragedies and Cultural Identity in Germany since 1800 (Classical Presences) 9780199651634, 0199651639

Table of contents :
Cover
Tragedy’s Endurance: Performances of Greek Tragedies and Cultural Identity in Germany since 1800
Copyright
Acknowledgements
Contents
List of Illustrations
Prologue
Introduction: Philhellenism and Theatromania
1: Only with Beauty Man Shall Play: Goethe´s Production of Ion in Weimar (1802)
2: After the Institutionalization of Bildung: The Potsdam Antigone of 1841
3: Wagner´s Gesamtkunstwerk and Nietzsche´s Vision of Ancient Greek Theatre
4: A Culture in Crisis: Max Reinhardt´s Productions of Greek Tragedies (1903-1919)
Sophocles´/Hofmannsthal´s Electra: Greek maenad or modern hysteric?
Greek tragedies in the circus: Max Reinhardt´s Theatre of the Five Thousand
The occupation of the space by the masses
The creation and impact of atmosphere
Dynamic and energetic movements through the space
Theatre for the Republic: From Reinhardt to Jessner
5: Hailing a Racial Kinship: Performances of Greek Tragedies during the Third Reich
Resurrecting ancient Greece in Nazi Germany: The Oresteia as part of the Olympic Games in 1936
Ancient tragedies in times of war: The case of Antigone
6: Of Guilt and Archetypes: Post-War Productions of Greek Tragedies in the 1940s and 1950s
Oedipus and the question of collective guilt
Brecht´s Antigone as a model for epic theatre
In search of the `universal human´: Gustav Rudolf Sellner´s productions of Greek tragedies in the 1950s
7: Inventing New Forms of Political Theatre
Linking Greek with other `naive´ cultures: Benno Besson´s Oedipus Tyrant
Lehrstücke on the imminent disintegration of the state
Topicalizing the tragedies of ancient Greece: Hans Neuenfels´ Medea (1976) and Christoph Nel´s Antigone (1978) in Frankfurt
Medea and women´s emancipation
Antigone in an entertainment and consumer culture
8: On the Origins of Theatre and its Link to the Past: The Schaubühne´s Antiquity Projects of 1974 and 1980
Antiquity Project I: Peter Stein´s Exercises for Actors and Klaus Michael Grüber´s The Bacchae
Antiquity Project II: Peter Stein´s Oresteia: Reflections on the historical process
9: Choric Theatre: Between Tragic Experience and Participatory Democracy
The re-birth of tragedy out of the chorus
Choric protests and a peaceful revolution
Towards the utopia of a participatory democracy
Epilogue: The Return of Dionysus: From Festive Performance to Global Spectacle
Bibliography
I. Greek tragedies
II. Other works cited
III. Reviews and programme notes cited
IV. Online references
V. Films
Index

Citation preview

CLASSICAL PRESENCES General Editors LORNA HARDWICK

J A ME S I . P OR T E R

CLASSICAL PRESENCES Attempts to receive the texts, images, and material culture of ancient Greece and Rome inevitably run the risk of appropriating the past in order to authenticate the present. Exploring the ways in which the classical past has been mapped over the centuries allows us to trace the avowal and disavowal of values and identities, old and new. Classical Presences brings the latest scholarship to bear on the contexts, theory, and practice of such use, and abuse, of the classical past.

Tragedy’s Endurance Performances of Greek Tragedies and Cultural Identity in Germany since 1800

Erika Fischer-Lichte

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Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Erika Fischer-Lichte 2017 The moral rights of the author have been asserted First Edition published in 2017 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2016953555 ISBN 978–0–19–965163–4 Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.

Acknowledgements It is an open secret that it takes more than an author to publish a book. This book could certainly not have happened without the commitment and hard work of a number of people, to whom I would like to express my deepest gratitude here. First, I would like to thank Hilary O’Shea, Lorna Hardwick, and Jim Porter at Oxford University Press for their firm belief in this book from the beginning, and Charlotte Loveridge, Georgina Leighton, and Lisa Eaton for accompanying its genesis. I am also indebted to Saskya Iris Jain for her critical reading and sharp comments throughout the process of writing, as well as for editing the manuscript for an English readership with unrelenting care, expertise, and eye for detail. I would also like to thank Stephen Barber, whose generous, insightful comments and thoughtful inputs on different sections of this book only added to it. It is also thanks to him that this book bears the wonderfully multifaceted title of Tragedy’s Endurance. Dorith Budich gave untiring assistance by supervising the research and editorial process, and managing the procurement of rights and permissions for the images and for certain quotations used in this book. The entire team of our student editorial assistants provided invaluable support. In particular, I would like to thank Kristina Sommerfeld for her meticulous and persevering archival research and thorough work in formatting the manuscript, and for so painstakingly compiling the index. I would also like to thank Helene Röhnsch for her diligence in locating bibliographical data. My thanks are also due to Sara Kneer for locating the images and to Ursula Schinke for typing the manuscript. Without this dynamic and dedicated assistance on several levels this book would not have seen the light of day, and I am sincerely grateful for all the help I have received.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The following previously published texts of the author have been excerpted, adapted, and expanded in this book for the chapters mentioned below: (1) ‘Politicizing Antigone’, in S. E. Wilmer and Audrone Zukauskaite (eds), Interrogating Antigone in Postmodern Philosophy and Criticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 329–52. • Chapter 2: Potsdam Antigone • Chapter 5: Antigone by Stroux 1940 • Chapter 7: Antigone by Nel 1978 (2) ‘Resurrecting Ancient Greece in Nazi Germany—The Oresteia as Part of the Olympic Games in 1936’, in Martin Revermann and Peter Wilson (eds), Performance, Iconography, Reception: Studies in Honour of Oliver Taplin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 484–98. • Chapter 5 (3) ‘Prologue’ and ‘Chapter Two: Reinventing a People’s Theatre’, in Erika Fischer-Lichte, Theatre, Sacrifice, Ritual: Exploring Forms of Political Theatre (London and New York: Routledge, 2005), 1–14, 46–68. Reproduced with permission from Taylor & Francis. • Chapter 4: Reinhardt’s Electra (4) ‘Chapter Eight: The Bacchae—Dismembering the Text’, in Erika Fischer-Lichte, Theatre, Sacrifice, Ritual: Exploring Forms of Political Theatre (London and New York: Routledge, 2005), 229–39. Reproduced with permission from Taylor & Francis. • Chapter 8 (5) ‘Chapter Nine: The Re-Birth of Tragedy out of the Chorus’, in Erika Fischer-Lichte, Theatre, Sacrifice, Ritual: Exploring Forms of Political Theatre (London and New York: Routledge, 2005), 240–52. Reproduced with permission from Taylor & Francis. • Chapter 9 (6) ‘Chapter Four: On the Strangeness and Inaccessibility of the Past’, in Erika Fischer-Lichte, Dionysus Resurrected: Performances of Euripides’ The Bacchae in a Globalizing World (Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell, 2014), 93–114. • Chapter 8 (7) ‘Thinking about the Origins of Theatre in the 1970s’, in Edith Hall, Fiona Macintosh, and Amanda Wrigley (eds), Dionysus since

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

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69: Greek Tragedy at the Dawn of the Third Millennium (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 329–60. • Chapter 8 (8) ‘Three Plays’, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, translated by Alfred Schwarz (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1966), 76, 126, 138, 139. Reproduced with the permission of Wayne State University Press. • Chapter 4

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Contents List of Illustrations

xi

Prologue

1

Introduction: Philhellenism and Theatromania

7

1. Only with Beauty Man Shall Play: Goethe’s Production of Ion in Weimar (1802)

19

2. After the Institutionalization of Bildung: The Potsdam Antigone of 1841

45

3. Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk and Nietzsche’s Vision of Ancient Greek Theatre

69

4. A Culture in Crisis: Max Reinhardt’s Productions of Greek Tragedies (1903–1919)

91

Sophocles’/Hofmannsthal’s Electra: Greek maenad or modern hysteric? Greek tragedies in the circus: Max Reinhardt’s Theatre of the Five Thousand The occupation of the space by the masses The creation and impact of atmosphere Dynamic and energetic movements through the space Theatre for the Republic: From Reinhardt to Jessner

107 113 115 121 126

5. Hailing a Racial Kinship: Performances of Greek Tragedies during the Third Reich

143

Resurrecting ancient Greece in Nazi Germany: The Oresteia as part of the Olympic Games in 1936 Ancient tragedies in times of war: The case of Antigone

6. Of Guilt and Archetypes: Post-War Productions of Greek Tragedies in the 1940s and 1950s Oedipus and the question of collective guilt Brecht’s Antigone as a model for epic theatre In search of the ‘universal human’: Gustav Rudolf Sellner’s productions of Greek tragedies in the 1950s

7. Inventing New Forms of Political Theatre

Linking Greek with other ‘naive’ cultures: Benno Besson’s Oedipus Tyrant Lehrstücke on the imminent disintegration of the state

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148 166 183 187 194 203 221 228 237

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CONTENTS

Topicalizing the tragedies of ancient Greece: Hans Neuenfels’ Medea (1976) and Christoph Nel’s Antigone (1978) in Frankfurt Medea and women’s emancipation Antigone in an entertainment and consumer culture

248 249 256

8. On the Origins of Theatre and its Link to the Past: The Schaubühne’s Antiquity Projects of 1974 and 1980

269

Antiquity Project I: Peter Stein’s Exercises for Actors and Klaus Michael Grüber’s The Bacchae Antiquity Project II: Peter Stein’s Oresteia: Reflections on the historical process

9. Choric Theatre: Between Tragic Experience and Participatory Democracy The re-birth of tragedy out of the chorus Choric protests and a peaceful revolution Towards the utopia of a participatory democracy

Epilogue: The Return of Dionysus: From Festive Performance to Global Spectacle Bibliography I. II. III. IV. V.

Greek tragedies Other works cited Reviews and programme notes cited Online references Films

Index

269 294 313 315 327 332 347 365 365 366 381 390 390 391

List of Illustrations 1.1 Apollo Belvedere (Museo Pio Clementino, Cortile Ottagone).

31

Photographer: © Marie-Lan Nguyen, from Wikimedia Commons, public domain.

1.2 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Euripides’ Ion (Weimar, 1802); coloured depiction of the ancient costumes from Ion at the Hoftheater in Weimar.

32

Published in Journal des Luxus und der Moden, ed. Carl Bertuch, from © Klassik Stiftung Weimar, Herzogin Anna Amalia Bibliothek.

2.1 Potsdam, Neues Palais, Theater, The Court Theatre.

56

Photography: Oberhofmarschallamt/Verwaltung der Staatlichen Schlösser und Gärten (1927–1945), from © Stiftung Preußische Schlösser und Gärten Berlin-Brandenburg.

4.1 Max Reinhardt: Sophocles’ Electra (adapted by Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Kleines Theater Berlin, 30 October 1903); Gertrud Eysoldt as Electra.

105

Photography: Hofatelier Elvira, Munich, from © Institut für Theaterwissenschaft, Freie Universität Berlin, Theaterhistorische Sammlung Walter Unruh.

4.2 Max Reinhardt: Sophocles’ Oedipus the King (adapted by Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Circus Schumann Berlin, 7 November 1910); opening scene: Oedipus (Paul Wegener) and the people imploring him; to his left is Creon (Eduard von Winterstein) with his arms raised.

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Photographer: Zander & Labisch, from © Institut für Theaterwissenschaft, Freie Universität Berlin, Theaterhistorische Sammlung Walter Unruh.

4.3 Max Reinhardt: Aeschylus’ Oresteia Part II: Sacrifice for the Dead (Circus Schumann Berlin, 13 October 1911); Josef Klein as Aegisthus, Anna Feldhammer as Clytemnestra, and the Chorus.

120

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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Photographer: Zander & Labisch, from © Institut für Theaterwissenschaft, Freie Universität Berlin, Theaterhistorische Sammlung Walter Unruh.

4.4 Max Reinhardt: Sophocles’ Oedipus the King (adapted by Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Circus Schumann Berlin, 7 November 1910); Paul Wegener as Oedipus, Friedrich Kühne as the Messenger from Corinth, and Wilhelm Diegelmann as the Shepherd.

124

Photographer: Zander & Labisch, from © Institut für Theaterwissenschaft, Freie Universität Berlin, Theaterhistorische Sammlung Walter Unruh.

4.5 Max Reinhardt: Aeschylus’ Oresteia Part III: The Eumenides (Musikfesthalle Munich, 31 August 1911); Else Heims as Athena and Alexander Moissi as Orestes.

129

Photographer: unknown, from © Deutsches Theatermuseum München, Inv. No.: II 43161.

4.6 Leopold Jessner: Sophocles’ Oedipus, Part II: Oedipus at Colonus (Parts I & II: Oedipus the King and Oedipus at Colonus; Staatliches Schauspielhaus Berlin, 4 January 1929); Lothar Müthel as Theseus, Lotte Lenya as Ismene, Fritz Kortner as Oedipus, and Eleonore von Mendelssohn as Antigone; stage design by Heinz Poelzig.

139

Photographer: Josef Schmidt from © Institut für Theaterwissenschaft, Freie Universität Berlin.

5.1 Lothar Müthel: Aeschylus’ Oresteia Part I: Agamemnon (Staatliches Schauspielhaus at Gendarmenmarkt, 3 August 1936); Agamemnon’s homecoming: Clytemnestra (Hermine Körner) receives Agamemnon (Friedrich Kayßler) as Cassandra (Maria Koppenhöfer) looks on.

157

Photographer: Josef Schmidt, from © Institut für Theaterwissenschaft, Freie Universität Berlin.

5.2 Lothar Müthel: Aeschylus’ Oresteia Part II: The Libation Bearers (Staatliches Schauspielhaus at Gendarmenmarkt, 3 August 1936); Orestes (Hannsgeorg Laubenthal) at Agamemnon’s tomb and the chorus of women. Photographer: Josef Schmidt, from © Institut für Theaterwissenschaft, Freie Universität Berlin.

157

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

5.3 Lothar Müthel: Aeschylus’ Oresteia Part III: The Eumenides (Staatliches Schauspielhaus at Gendarmenmarkt, 3 August 1936); Athena (Hilde Weißner) in front of her gigantic statue and the Erinyes at her feet; stage design by Traugott Müller.

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158

Photographer: Rosemarie Clausen, from Institut für Theaterwissenschaft, Freie Universität Berlin, © Clausen Estate.

5.4 Karl Heinz Stroux: Sophocles’ Antigone (Staatstheater at Gendarmenmarkt Berlin, 3 September 1940); Marianne Hoppe as Antigone, Paul Bildt as the Guard, and Walter Franck as Creon.

174

Photographer: Willy Saeger, from Institut für Theaterwissenschaft, Freie Universität Berlin, © Deutsches Theatermuseum München.

6.1 Karl Heinz Stroux: Sophocles’ Oedipus the King (Deutsches Theater Berlin, 22 December 1946); Gustaf Gründgens as Oedipus, Gerda Müller as Jocasta, and Walter Werner as the Messenger.

192

Photographer: Willy Saeger, from © Deutsches Theatermuseum München, Archiv Willy Saeger.

6.2 Karl Heinz Stroux: Sophocles’ Oedipus the King (Deutsches Theater Berlin, 22 December 1946); Gerda Müller as Jocasta and Gustaf Gründgens as Oedipus.

192

Photographer: Willy Saeger, from © Deutsches Theatermuseum München, Archiv Willy Saeger.

6.3 Bertolt Brecht and Caspar Neher: The Antigone of Sophocles (adapted for the stage by Brecht, Stadttheater Chur, 15 February 1948); the chorus with the masks on poles; stage design by Caspar Neher. Photographer: Ruth Berlau, from Akademie der Künste, Berlin, Bertolt Brecht Archive, Theaterdokumentation 318/302, © by Ruth Berlau/Hoffmann.

6.4 Bertolt Brecht and Caspar Neher: The Antigone of Sophocles (adapted for the stage by Brecht, Stadttheater Chur,

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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

15 February 1948); Antigone (Helene Weigel) in front of Creon (Hans Gaugler).

201

Photographer: Ruth Berlau, from Akademie der Künste, Berlin, Bertolt Brecht Archive, Theaterdokumentation 318/321, © by Ruth Berlau/Hoffmann

6.5 Gustav Rudolf Sellner: Sophocles’ Oedipus the King (Staatstheater Darmstadt, 18 September 1952); the stage (designed by Franz Mertz) and the chorus with the masks on poles.

210

Photographer: Pit (Peter) Ludwig, from © Universitätsund Landesbibliothek Darmstadt, Theatersammlung, archive of Pit Ludwig.

6.6 Gustav Rudolf Sellner: Sophocles’ Oedipus the King (Staatstheater Darmstadt, 18 September 1952); Max Noack as Oedipus and Siegfried Wischnewski as Tiresias.

212

Photographer: Pit (Peter) Ludwig, from © Universitäts- und Landesbibliothek Darmstadt, Theatersammlung, archive of Pit Ludwig.

7.1 Benno Besson: Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrant (Deutsches Theater Berlin, 31 January 1967); Creon (Dieter Franke) and Oedipus (Fred Düren) with the chorus; stage design by Horst Sagert.

231

Photographer: Willy Saeger, from © Deutsches Theatermuseum München, Archiv Willy Saeger.

7.2 Benno Besson: Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrant (Deutsches Theater Berlin, 31 January 1967); Creon (Dieter Franke) and Oedipus (Fred Düren) as if preparing to wrestle.

235

Photographer: Willy Saeger, from © Deutsches Theatermuseum München, Archiv Willy Saeger.

7.3 The Living Theatre Group: Brecht’s The Antigone of Sophocles (Stadttheater Krefeld, 19 February 1967); the masking of Creon (Julian Beck); from left to right: Sandy van der Linden, Steve Thomson, Julian Beck (Creon), William Shari (Tiresias), Pamela Badyk, and Cal Barber. Photographer: © Ute Klophaus, from The Living Theatre Archive, Yale Collection of American

239

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

xv

Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

7.4 The Living Theatre Group: Brecht’s The Antigone of Sophocles (Stadttheater Krefeld, 19 February 1967); Brothers of Lachmyia chorus: ‘As when below us on the Pontian sea . . . ’.

240

Photographer: © Ute Klophaus, from The Living Theatre Archive, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

7.5 Hansgünther Heyme: The Oedipus of Sophocles (Parts I & II: Oedipus the King and Oedipus at Colonus; Schauspiel Cologne, 12 September 1968); the stage and the chorus; stage design by Frank Schultes.

242

Photographer: Stefan Odry, reproduced with permission of the Theaterwissenschaftliche Sammlung, University of Cologne/Germany, © Stefan Odry.

7.6 Hansgünther Heyme: The Oedipus of Sophocles (Parts I & II: Oedipus the King and Oedipus at Colonus; Schauspiel Cologne, 12 September 1968); Karl-Heinz Pelser as Oedipus.

243

Photographer: Stefan Odry, reproduced with permission of the Theaterwissenschaftliche Sammlung, University of Cologne/Germany, © Stefan Odry.

7.7 Hans Neuenfels: Euripides’ Medea (Schauspiel Frankfurt, 27 September 1976); Medea (Elisabeth Trissenaar) as an outlaw, lying in the dirt in front of the city, and her sons (Jakob Steinbrenner and Günter Milius).

251

Photographer: Mara Eggert, from Deutsches Theatermuseum München, Archiv Mara Eggert, © Foto Mara Eggert.

7.8 Hans Neuenfels: Euripides’ Medea (Schauspiel Frankfurt, 27 September 1976); Medea (Elisabeth Trissenaar) negotiating her future with Creon (Alwin-Michael Rueffer). Photographer: Mara Eggert, from Deutsches Theatermuseum München, Archiv Mara Eggert, © Foto Mara Eggert.

252

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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

7.9 Hans Neuenfels: Euripides’ Medea (Schauspiel Frankfurt, 27 September 1976); Medea (Elisabeth Trissenaar) confronting Jason (Ulrich Pleitgen) with her two sons before she kills her children.

254

Photographer: Mara Eggert, from Deutsches Theatermuseum München, Archiv Mara Eggert, © Foto Mara Eggert.

7.10 Christoph Nel: Sophocles’ Antigone (Schauspiel Frankfurt, Premiere: 4 November 1978); the ‘substitute chorus’ (Wolf-Dieter Tropf, Karin Werner, Burghart Klaußner, Rolf Mautz, René Peier, and Hannes Granzer).

261

Photographer: Mara Eggert, from Deutsches Theatermuseum München, Archiv Mara Eggert, © Foto Mara Eggert.

7.11 Christoph Nel: Sophocles’ Antigone (Schauspiel Frankfurt, Premiere: 4 November 1978); Creon (Alexander Wagner) dressed as a hippie.

264

Photographer: Mara Eggert, from Deutsches Theatermuseum München, Archiv Mara Eggert, © Foto Mara Eggert.

7.12 Christoph Nel: Sophocles’ Antigone (Schauspiel Frankfurt, Premiere: 4 November 1978); Antigone (Rotraut de Neve), about to die, dressed up as a party girl by the chorus.

266

Photographer: Mara Eggert, from Deutsches Theatermuseum München, Archiv Mara Eggert, © Foto Mara Eggert.

8.1 Antiquity Project: Peter Stein: Exercises for Actors (Schaubühne at Hallesches Ufer at the Philips Pavilion on the trade fair grounds in Berlin, 6 February 1974); stage design by Karl-Ernst Herrmann.

273

Photographer: © Helga Kneidl, from Deutsches Theatermuseum München, Archiv Helga Kneidl.

8.2 Antiquity Project: Peter Stein: Exercises for Actors (Schaubühne at Hallesches Ufer at the Philips Pavilion on the trade fair grounds in Berlin, Premiere: 6 February 1974); the hunt; stage design by Karl-Ernst Herrmann.

276

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

xvii

Photographer: © Helga Kneidl, from Deutsches Theatermuseum München, Archiv Helga Kneidl.

8.3 Antiquity Project: Klaus Michael Grüber: The Bacchae (Schaubühne at Hallesches Ufer at the Philips Pavilion on the trade fair grounds in Berlin, 7 February 1974); Dionysus (Michael König) on the stretcher and the chorus of Bacchae just returning from the Berlin night; stage design by Gilles Aillaud, Eduardo Arroyo.

281

Photographer: © Helga Kneidl, from Deutsches Theatermuseum München, Archiv Helga Kneidl.

8.4 Antiquity Project: Klaus Michael Grüber: The Bacchae (Schaubühne at Hallesches Ufer at the Philips Pavilion on the trade fair grounds in Berlin, 7 February 1974); Bruno Ganz as Pentheus and the chorus.

283

Photographer: © Helga Kneidl, from Deutsches Theatermuseum München, Archiv Helga Kneidl.

8.5 Antiquity Project: Klaus Michael Grüber: The Bacchae (Schaubühne at Hallesches Ufer at the Philips Pavilion on the trade fair grounds in Berlin, 7 February 1974); the final scene: Agave (Edith Clever) and Cadmus (Peter Fitz) before they start sewing together the pieces of clothes lying on the tray.

289

Photographer: © Helga Kneidl, from Deutsches Theatermuseum München, Archiv Helga Kneidl.

8.6 Peter Stein: Antiquity Project II: Aeschylus’ Oresteia Part I: Agamemnon (Schaubühne Berlin, 1980); Clytemnestra (Edith Clever) pointing her sword at the slain bodies of Agamemnon (Gunter Berger) and Cassandra (Elke Petri).

298

Photographer: © Ruth Walz, archive of Ruth Walz.

8.7 Peter Stein: Antiquity Project II: Aeschylus’ Oresteia Part III: The Eumenides (Schaubühne Berlin, 1980); Athena (Jutta Lampe) sailing in on a swing above the heads of the spectators. Photographer: © Ruth Walz, archive of Ruth Walz.

8.8 Peter Stein: Antiquity Project II: Aeschylus’ Oresteia Part I: Agamemnon (Schaubühne Berlin, 1980); auditory space: the

299

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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

chorus of old men assembling around their table in the auditorium while Clytemnestra (Edith Clever) appears in the opening of the stage to listen to the Messenger (Roland Schäfer).

300

Photographer: © Ruth Walz, archive of Ruth Walz.

8.9 Peter Stein: Antiquity Project II: Aeschylus’ Oresteia Part III: The Eumenides (Schaubühne Berlin, 1980); visual space: Athena (Jutta Lampe), Apollo (Peter Simonischek), and Orestes (Udo Samel) with the citizens on the stage as the chorus of the Erinyes marches in.

302

Photographer: © Ruth Walz, archive of Ruth Walz.

8.10 Peter Stein: Antiquity Project II: Aeschylus’ Oresteia Part III: The Eumenides (Schaubühne Berlin, 1980); Athena (Jutta Lampe) watches the citizens (Werner Rehm, Peter Fitz, and Gunter Berger) prepare the purple cloth with which to tie up the Erinyes.

303

Photographer: © Ruth Walz, archive of Ruth Walz.

9.1 Einar Schleef: Die Mütter (Euripides’ The Suppliant Women and Aeschylus’ Seven Against Thebes; Schauspiel Frankfurt, 23 February 1986); the stage and the choruses.

316

Photographer: Inge Rambow, from Akademie der Künste, Berlin, Einar Schleef Archive, © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016.

9.2 Einar Schleef: Die Mütter (Euripides’ The Suppliant Women and Aeschylus’ Seven Against Thebes; Schauspiel Frankfurt, 23 February 1986); the mothers’ lament led by King Adrastus (Günther Vetter).

318

Photographer: Andreas Pohlmann, © Andreas Pohlmann—Munich.

9.3 Einar Schleef: Die Mütter (Euripides’ The Suppliant Women and Aeschylus’ Seven Against Thebes; Schauspiel Frankfurt, 23 February 1986); the chorus of virgins demanding access to the stage in front of the iron curtain.

320

Photographer: Claus Gretter, © Claus Gretter.

9.4 Volker Lösch: Aeschylus’ Oresteia Part II: The Libation Bearers (Staatsschauspiel Dresden, 31 October 2003); the chorus seduces Orestes (Thomas Eisen) into murdering his mother.

340

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

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Photographer: Hans-Ludwig Boehme, archive of the Sächsische Staatstheater, Staatsoper Dresden, and Staatsschauspiel Dresden, © HL Boehme.

9.5 Volker Lösch: Aeschylus’ Oresteia Part II: The Libation Bearers (Staatsschauspiel Dresden, 31 October 2003); the judges with Athena (Annedore Bauer) in the middle and the stilettos in boxes, which they will force on the Erinyes standing behind them, still wearing boots.

340

Photographer: Hans-Ludwig Boehme, archive of the Sächsische Staatstheater, Staatsoper Dresden, and Staatsschauspiel Dresden, © HL Boehme.

9.6 Claudia Bosse/theatercombinat: Aeschylus’ The Persians (Geneva, Théâtre du Grütli, 2006); chorus and spectators mingling.

344

Photographer: Régis Golay, from © theatercombinat.

10.1 Troubleyn/Jan Fabre: Mount Olympus: To Glorify the Cult of Tragedy (Troubleyn, Antwerpen, June 2015); Pietro Quadrino strikes a classical, ‘Winckelmannian’ pose (the same that the unearthed Tiresias adopted in Grüber’s The Bacchae) while Lies Vandewege as a female priest decorates his phallus with laurel leaves as she sings Wagner’s ‘Mild und Leise’.

361

Photographer: Wonge Bergmann, from © Wonge Bergmann.

10.2 Troubleyn/Jan Fabre: Mount Olympus: To Glorify the Cult of Tragedy (Troubleyn, Antwerpen, June 2015); Dionysus (Andrew Van Ostade) in the final scene in which sexuality, lust, madness, and catharsis come together and are displayed in an all-encompassing festival.

363

Photographer: Wonge Bergmann, from © Wonge Bergmann.

The publisher and the author apologize for any errors or omissions in the above list. If contacted they will be pleased to rectify these at the earliest opportunity.

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Prologue German Philhellenism or Graecophilia is a well-known phenomenon. It spread among young intellectuals from the middle of the eighteenth century onwards and by the nineteenth century had grown into a characteristic feature of the German Bildungsbürgertum, the educated middle class. Despite undergoing a number of transformations, it remained constitutive of their cultural identity until the 1950s and in some respects even until the 1970s. Scholars of several disciplines have researched this phenomenon by covering a wide range of issues and addressing it from a variety of perspectives. The first book-length study on the subject, Eliza Marian Butler’s The Tyranny of Greece over Germany, appeared in 1935 and was the only treatise in this field until the 1970s, when Philhellenism began to enter the research agenda of the related disciplines. Butler’s study was written as a response to Hitler’s seizure of power and appeared at the peak of another Winckelmann renaissance in Germany in the 1930s, epitomized by the preparations for the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin. Butler sought an explanation for Hitler’s aestheticization of politics in the cultural tradition of Philhellenism, to which Hitler subscribed wholeheartedly. The book deals at great length with German poets and philosophers who had fallen under the spell of the ancient Greeks, such as Winckelmann, Goethe, Schiller, Hölderlin, Heine, Nietzsche, and Stefan George. Butler’s focus lies not so much in examining what they did with the Greek material but ‘what the Greeks made [out] of them’ (Butler 1958: 7). She proceeds from the assumption that German Philhellenism is closely related to the Germans’ ‘hopeless passion for the absolute’. She characterizes them as ‘unique . . . in the ardour with which they pursue ideas and attempt to transform them into realities’ and identifies a link between this ‘dangerous idealism’ and all ‘their great achievements, their catastrophic failures, their tragic political history’ (ibid. 3). By taking a largely psychological approach to

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the selected poets and philosophers, Butler underpins her argument that at the beginning of the twentieth century these men were transformed into ‘national heroes’ and ‘supermen, many of them in the clutches of a daimon’, concluding that ‘during the last few years [they were mythologized] into prophets and fore-runners of Adolf Hitler’ (ibid. 333). Butler’s book was much criticized for its psychological approach—and not only in Germany, where it appeared in an abridged translation in 1948. Even if the shortcomings of her study cannot be overlooked from today’s perspective on German Philhellenism, it must nonetheless be credited with being the very first to discuss German Graecophilia within the larger context of German cultural history from 1755—marking the publication of Winckelmann’s Gedanken über die Nachahmung der griechischen Werke in der Malerei und Bildhauerkunst (‘Reflections on the Imitation of Greek Masterpieces in Painting and Sculpture’, published in English in 1765 with the title Reflections on the Painting and Sculpture of the Greeks)—until the first years of the Third Reich. Martin Bernal addresses the subject of German Philhellenism within a very different context. In his much discussed—and highly controversial— seminal study Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization (1987), he discusses and criticizes the replacement of what he calls the ‘Ancient model’ of the origin of Greek culture with the ‘Aryan model’. While the first model draws on the writings of ancient authors and their reflections on the origins and formation of ancient Greek culture, the latter results from a process of ‘the Fabrication of Ancient Greece’ between 1785 and 1885 as initiated by German scholars of Altertumswissenschaften (Classics) in the 1790s and later (1830–60) taken up by their British counterparts. Bernal debates German Philhellenism in the context of the establishment of Altertumswissenschaften (ancient philosophy, archaeology, ancient history, and art history), arguing that its rise resulted from the political situation following the French Revolution. He states that it ‘was seen by its promoters as a “third way” between reaction and revolution’ (Bernal 1987: 282). Consequently, its related educational institutions became ‘pillars of 19th-century Prussian and German social order’ (ibid. 282), particularly for the Bildungsbürgertum. Bernal further relates the rise of Altertumswissenschaften to the search for origins, which peaked in the nineteenth century and excluded the very idea of mixture and diversity while hailing that of ‘purity’. The objective was to refute the Ancient model, which indicated Egyptian and

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Phoenician influences and even colonization, in order firmly to establish Greek culture as the origin and epitome of its European counterpart. Historical references, for example, that ‘the Dorian kings of Classical and Hellenistic times . . . believed themselves to be descended from Egyptians and Phoenicians’ (ibid. 21), had to be swept under the Aryan rug. At the core of Altertumswissenschaften lay the ‘image of the divine Greek, both artistic and philosophical’, which is why the Greeks had to be ‘integrated with their native soil’ and needed to be seen as ‘pure’. Bernal continues: ‘Thus, the Ancient Model, with its multiple invasions and frequent cultural borrowings and the implicit consequences of racial and linguistic mixture, became increasingly intolerable. It is only within this political and social context that one can understand the attack . . . on the overwhelming ancient authority of the Ancient Model’ (ibid. 282). Thus, according to Bernal, German Philhellenism of the nineteenth century was strongly linked to the contemporaneous rise of racism. With the increasing perception of Egyptians and Phoenicians as ‘racially inferior’, the idea that the Greeks had been ‘civilized’ by them (according to the Greek legends) had to be dismissed and the Aryan model promoted in its place. During the 19th and 20th centuries the German cult of, and identification with, the Dorians and Lakonians continued to rise until it reached its climax in the Third Reich. By the end of the 19th century some völkische (populist, nationalist) writers saw the Dorians as pure-blooded Aryans from the north, possibly even from Germany, and they were certainly seen as very close to the Germans in their Aryan blood and character. (Ibid. 293)

For Bernal, the predominance of German Philhellenism and, in particular, of Altertumswissenschaften, explains the rejection of the Ancient model at the end of the eighteenth and in the early nineteenth century, and the persistence of the Aryan model that the German Altertumswissenschaften introduced as a replacement. He makes a compelling case for the reinstatement of the Ancient model, albeit in a revised form. While also dealing with Altertumswissenschaften, Suzanne L. Marchand’s study Down from Olympus: Archaeology and Philhellenism in Germany, 1750–1970 (1996) has a different focus. It emphasizes the social functions of institutional attachments to the Greek ideal via the history of classical archaeology. Marchand criticizes ‘innumerable writers’ who ‘have already described the particularities of [German] Graecophiles’

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for not having recognized ‘the debts they owed to the elitist culture of academic neoclassicism’. Accordingly, the author makes it her task to examine the ways in which individuals such as these were members of what might be loosely termed a ‘cultural interest group’, which sought to defend and preserve the waning social and intellectual credibility of Graecophilia. Philhellenism as an institutionally generated and preserved cultural trope, rather than as a personal passion, lies at the heart of the analysis. (Marchand 1996: p. xix)

Marchand’s study is not a history of archaeology in terms of delineating and documenting the development of different methods, fields of application, and their results. She proceeds from ‘the linkages forged in the post-Napoleonic period between Graecophile aesthetics, specialized scholarship, and state power’. The history of classical archaeology is examined as an ‘ideal arena in which to observe and document the series of clashes between neohumanist Bildung, “disinterested” Wissenschaft, and German nationalism in the last two centuries’ (ibid., p. xxi). By retracing the history of classical archaeology in Germany from the shaping of a cultural obsession, in particular through the work of J. J. Winckelmann (1717–68), the Altertumswissenschaftler F. A. Wolf (1759–1824), and the neohumanist and Prussian bureaucrat Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835), to the end of Philhellenism in the aftermath of the cultural revolution of the 1960s, Marchand’s study offers a complex and comprehensive picture of the interactions of different cultural agents and the intertwining of diverse cultural fields in the context of institutionalized Philhellenism. These three scholarly works should suffice to demonstrate the wide range and diversity of the studies already conducted on German Philhellenism. At the same time, it seems surprising that there has so far been no study on the relationship between the history of the Bildungsbürgertum, whose cultural identity was to a large extent shaped by Philhellenism, as demonstrated by Marchand, and the history of performances of Greek tragedies, which began in the German-speaking countries in around 1800.1 This is all the more surprising as the Bildungsbürgertum

1

This is not to say that no histories of the reception of Greek drama on the modern stage have been written. In 1991 the philologist Hellmut Flashar wrote the—to my knowledge— first comprehensive study of Greek drama on the modern stage. Entitled Inszenierung der Antike: Das griechische Drama auf der Bühne, it covered productions from 1585 (Oedipus the King, presented on the occasion of the inauguration of the Teatro Olimpico in Vicenza)

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formed the core of theatre audiences from the middle of the eighteenth century onwards. We can therefore assume that the Bildungsbürgertum’s Philhellenism and its theatromania came together in their love for performances of Greek tragedy. It is this encounter that lies at the heart of my book. I will examine how performances of Greek tragedies contributed to the emergence, stabilization, and transformation of the Bildungsbürgertum’s cultural identity, which was largely determined by Philhellenism, and what role they played in this context. I do not intend to cover the complete history of performances of Greek tragedies in the Germanspeaking countries—partly because this would fill thousands of pages if we talk about the twentieth century alone. Rather, my focus lies on performances that either introduced a new theatre aesthetics or a new image of ancient Greece, or did both. This is because a theatre aesthetics that was once radical and then became conventionalized, or a widespread traditional image of ancient Greece used on stage, would not result in any changes of an already given cultural identity but would merely affirm it. For the purposes of my study, however, I shall focus on the truly transformative moments as well as on the cultural dynamics involved. In this context, it will be important to consider the overall political situation of the 200 years between the French Revolution and the peaceful revolution in the German Democratic Republic in 1989, which resulted in the unification of the two German states, both founded in 1949 in the aftermath of the Second World War and at the beginning of the cold war. What was/is the purpose and role of performances of Greek tragedies in such a political climate? Did they help to bring about changes or did they result from changes that were already happening? Were the performances seen to be welcoming, opposing, or even negating these changes? In short, this study attempts to understand tragedy’s endurance on German stages during the last 200 years. It will hopefully

to 1990. Although his focus lies on the German-speaking countries, the book spans all of Europe and also discusses performances in Japan, China, and Indonesia. The main reference point of the study is the translation used in each case and the faithfulness of the production to the text. It appeared in 1991 (the second edition, which included productions dating up to 2007, was published in 2009)—that is, more than a decade before Edith Hall’s and Fiona Macintosh’s seminal study Greek Tragedy and the British Theatre 1660–1914 (2005). Unlike Flashar’s study, Hall and Macintosh’s book not only traces the chronology but proceeds from a particular question, problem, or hypothesis in each chapter.

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supply answers to these questions by shedding some light on the underexplored relationship between the Philhellenism and the theatromania of the German Bildungsbürgertum, which has been brought into a sharper focus in performances of ancient Greek tragedies since the beginning of the nineteenth century.

Introduction Philhellenism and Theatromania

Sending forth my soul in quest of Greece (J. W. v. Goethe, Iphigenia in Tauris, v. 12)

Although it is impossible to identify a particular date to mark the beginning of Philhellenism and theatromania—two of the characteristic features of the German Bildungsbürgertum or educated middle class of the nineteenth century—the year 1755 nevertheless stands out. That year, Johann Joachim Winckelmann’s treatise Reflections on the Painting and Sculpture of the Greeks was published, and would soon come to be seen as the cornerstone and foundational document of Philhellenism. The same year, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s first domestic tragedy (bürgerliches Trauerspiel), Miß Sara Sampson, premiered. It was first performed by the Ackermann troupe in Frankfurt on the Oder on 10 July 1755. In a letter to J. W. L. Gleim dated 25 July 1755, K. W. Ramler reported on the unusually powerful effect of the play: ‘Herr Lessing’s tragedy was performed in Frankfurt and for three and a half hours the audience sat weeping, silent as statues’ (Schüddekopf 1907: 206). Even if these two events at first glance appear to have been entirely unrelated, they did share a common root and motivation: to banish Frenchified German court culture once and for all. By the middle of the eighteenth century, French was the language generally spoken at the courts of the over 300 German states. Theatre performances were staged by French companies (and opera performances by Italian opera societies). Courtly life was still modelled on Louis XIV’s court. The Prussian King Frederick II (the Great), for instance, despised the ‘barbaric’ German language and did not admit any German companies to his court. If he allowed Germans to work

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for him, he offered them a drastically reduced salary. In 1765, a few years before his death, Winckelmann applied for the position of royal librarian at the Prussian court and asked for 2,000 thalers on the advice of a friend in Berlin. He received the following reply from the King: ‘For a German one thousand thalers will do’ (Justi 1956: 349). In this context, Winckelmann’s treatise and the first performance of Lessing’s Miß Sara Sampson were clearly both part of a drive to document, proclaim, and spread the new values advocated by the rising middle class: the ‘noble simplicity’ and ‘quiet greatness’ (Winckelmann [1755] 1885, quoted in Trevelyan 1981: 44), which Winckelmann attributed to the Greek masterpieces that were meant to replace the ‘French’ baroque and rococo bombast so prevalent at the German courts. Lessing’s play advocated the family values of a gentle father and his virtuous daughter along with the ideal of ‘natural behaviour’ as the true values of the middle class, thus setting up a sharp contrast between the ‘coldness’, depravity, and artificiality of the noblemen at the courts and this new ‘wholesome’ lifestyle of the bourgeoisie. However, even if Winckelmann and Lessing saw eye to eye in their rejection of the values embodied by the German courts, they were fighting on different fronts, so to speak. Winckelmann focused on the cult of beauty, which he felt could not be achieved only by imitating nature: ‘Connoisseurs and imitators of the Greek masterpieces find in them not only nature at its most beautiful but something larger than nature, that is to say certain ideal forms of beauty’ (Winckelmann 1885: 9).1 He concludes that ‘the beauty of the Greek statues [is] discovered with less difficulty than those of Nature’ (Winckelmann 1765: 4), for it is ‘not so diffused, but more harmoniously united’, which therefore makes it ‘more affecting’ (ibid. 17). In order to be able to appreciate the absolutely beautiful, the ‘imitati[on of] the ancient’ thus comes before the study of ‘Nature’ (ibid. 21). From this it follows that ‘there is but one way for the moderns to become great, and perhaps unequalled; I mean, by imitating the ancients’ (ibid. 2). 1 Since the original published translations of certain German texts, for example, Fusseli’s translation here of Winckelmann, misinterpreted the German and were thus found to be somewhat inadequate in parts, at times I decided to make small changes to rectify this situation. Should readers find that certain quotations in this book diverge from their published versions, this is why. For this particular quotation, however, I have decided to use my own translation from the German, as I found certain keywords missing in Fusseli’s version.

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Lessing, meanwhile, emphasized the capacity of theatre to reinforce emotionality in the audience. For him this applied particularly to what he described as the first and original feeling of humanity—empathy. In a letter to Nicolai from November 1756 Lessing explains: The meaning of tragedy is this: it should develop our ability to feel empathy. It should make us so empathetic that the most tragic character of all times and among all people overtakes our emotions. . . . The man of empathy is the most perfect man; among all social virtues, among all kinds of generosity, he is the most outstanding. A person who can make us feel such empathy, therefore, makes us more perfect and more virtuous, and the tragedy which moves us also makes us thus—or, it moves us in order to be able to make us thus. (Lessing 1973: iv. 159–65, at 163)

Although driven by the same motivation, directed against a shared enemy and striving for a similar goal—that is, the perfection of human beings—Philhellenism and theatromania took two different paths. Philhellenism was devoted to the cult of beauty that could be found only in the past golden age of ancient Greece—a beauty to which the middle class of the time did not have any access in their everyday lives. Theatre, on the other hand, was to address this everyday life—that is, the problems faced by members of the middle class and the difficulties they overcame by realizing their own constitutive principles—family values as well as the human ability to feel empathy. Philhellenism’s cult of beauty around the Greek masterpieces and the theatre’s focus on new values to cope with the middle class’s daily hardships can thus be regarded as two sides of the same coin. Over subsequent decades their relationship would undergo a number of transformations, which at first glance appear to underline their differences. However, both ultimately strove to develop, integrate, and realize a new ideal—that of Bildung. This term is usually translated as ‘self-cultivation’ (Bruford 1975) and, as we shall see in the following chapters, the concept gradually came to signify the development or unfolding of an individual’s full potential. There is no equivalent in English to capture the idea of Bildung. Perhaps the terms ‘cultural development’ and ‘cultural education’ come closest. In the United Kingdom, from the 1930s onwards writers such as Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall, and, most formatively, George Orwell emphasized the importance of ‘cultural development’, especially for people without a university education. However, this marks an important

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difference. In Germany, Bildung was meant as a lifelong process of developing one’s own potential, in this case to be realized by the bourgeoisie, the educated middle class, in order to prevent a revolution (cf. Chapter 1, pp. 23–6). Later on—that is, after the founding of the nation state in 1871—the ideal of Bildung was transferred to people without higher education, in particular the working class. The first step to Bildung was the ‘discovery’ of Shakespeare. In his speech ‘Shakespeare: A Tribute’, held in the autumn of 1771, Goethe declared: ‘I, who mean everything to myself! Everything I know, I know only through myself! Thus exclaim those who have self-awareness’ (Goethe 1983–8: iii. 163–5, at 163). These words describe the core of the Sturm und Drang (Storm and Stress) movement as well as the way its followers saw themselves. The new movement was formed as a critique and radicalization of the Enlightenment and manifested itself explosively in the relatively short period from 1771 to 1776. It was led by a group of young middle-class intellectuals who strove to liberate themselves from their oppressive backgrounds in order to live as free poets. This new generation of middle-class intellectuals no longer believed in adopting middle-class morals and values that stood in opposition to the courtly lifestyle. Instead, they discovered a new awareness of the unique nature and originality of their own individual selves as something that transcended social class. Unique individuality replaced the middle-class family as the most important reference point. The ‘discovery’ of the individual occurred alongside that of Shakespeare. As Goethe explains in his ‘Tribute’: The first page I read made me a slave to Shakespeare for life. And when I had finished reading the first drama, I stood there like a man blind from birth to whom a magic hand has all at once given light. I realized and felt intensely that my life was infinitely expanded. Everything seemed new to me, unfamiliar, and the unaccustomed light hurt my eyes. . . . I struggled free—and knew for the first time that I had hands and feet. (Goethe 1983–8: iii: 163–4)

Goethe describes his encounter with Shakespeare as the restoration and liberation of his self. The confrontation with Shakespeare led to a new self-understanding, creating the demand for a new kind of theatre. The theatre director Friedrich Ludwig Schröder (1744–1816) was the only one who consistently worked towards staging works by members of the new Sturm und Drang movement. Although he produced nearly all

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of the movement’s most important plays in Hamburg, his success was limited, as audiences did not warm to these new characters. Even Schröder’s 1774 production of Goethe’s Götz von Berlichingen shortly after the premiere by the Koch troupe in Berlin (17 April 1774) was a financial disaster. While the play was extraordinarily successful with the elite readership, thus helping the Sturm und Drang movement to gather such momentum, this new type of autonomous, unfettered individual remained foreign to the general theatre-going public. This was also evident in the reception of Shakespeare. Between 1776 and 1780, Schröder produced Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, King Lear, Richard II, Henry IV, The Merchant of Venice, and Measure for Measure. He based his productions on the prose translations by Christoph Martin Wieland (1762–6) and Johann Joachim Eschenburg (1775–7), which he thoroughly reworked—for example, by cutting entire acts and replacing them with short summaries. Moreover, Schröder felt that these plays should all have a happy ending. Not only was it out of the question that Hamlet, Laertes, Othello, Desdemona, Cordelia, or Lear should die; they all had to participate in a general reconciliation at the end. Still, while Schröder’s production of Hamlet was a sweeping success, the audience was deeply shocked by Othello: ‘Faint followed upon faint . . . The doors of the boxes opened and shut, they either left or, if necessary, were carried out and, according to eye-witness accounts, the unfortunate miscarriage of this or that well-known Hamburg lady was the result of seeing and hearing this dreadful tragedy’ (Schütze 1794: 454). The Hamburg audience of that era—not unlike its London counterpart— could not have tolerated the ‘true’ Shakespeare on stage. The general audience challenged the middle-class intellectuals’ new Leitbild. Goethe’s judgement from his ‘Tribute’ speech seems accurately to represent the attitude of his contemporaries: And how can our century dare judge Nature? How should we know Nature, we who from childhood have felt in ourselves and seen in others nothing but restraint and artificiality? . . . [Shakespeare] guides us through the entire world, yet we pampered novices cry out at the sight of a grasshopper: ‘Master, it’s going to eat us alive!’ (Goethe 1983–8: iii. 165)

Nonetheless, the productions that followed Othello—The Merchant of Venice, King Lear, and Measure for Measure—were keenly received. Even if the young intellectuals’ new Leitbild was not unanimously accepted, at

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least it was not vehemently rejected. It seems that to a certain extent some spectators were willing to discuss it. Here, theatre served as a public forum in which the different members of the middle class had the possibility of negotiating and maybe even coming to an agreement on which values to cherish. Schütze writes in his Hamburgische TheaterGeschichte (History of the Hamburg Theatre, 1794): The audience showed an unprecedented enthusiasm for its theatre, which was never more justified. This was due, not least, to a certain, not inconsiderable group of friends of the theatre, who formed an audience within the audience, a status in statu, a stall within the stalls and who, no matter what one may otherwise remember, considerably encouraged theatre, art, and the improvement of taste. This group was increasingly composed of connoisseurs and dilettantes but also fervent admirers of theatre, including lawyers, learned and simple craftsmen who, nonetheless, had broadened their horizons through travel and reading beyond the mere status of merchants. They came together for the daily visit to the theatre, to give their vote before and after the performances, to provide applause and condemnation during the plays, to promote morals and order in the theatre. Generally, they occupied the front rows in the stalls, and it seemed as if this privilege of seating was given to them willingly, in silent agreement, so that those visitors in the stalls who did not belong to the club often offered their own seats up to those members of the club who arrived late. These self-appointed men set the tone and applauded good new plays or single, well-performed scenes, or even well-spoken speeches; they demanded quiet, order, and silence when unjustified praise, spiteful censure, or any kind of improper comments were voiced in the audience, regardless of whether it came from the boxes or from the gallery. We cannot remember that this self-appointed prerogative of the few to the disadvantage of the rest of the audience was ever abused. No one seemed to object when, as we remember the situation, a voice from such a club piped up that a certain play was a good one and so on. (Schütze 1794: 398–9)

This description strongly suggests that a Bildungsbürgertum was already in the process of coming into being. By the end of the 1770s, the new theatre that introduced the Leitbild of the autonomous individual and was at least partly accepted by the largely middle-class audience became the subject of a new genre of novel—the Bildungsroman. Two of its most prominent examples are Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters theatralische Sendung (Wilhelm Meister’s Theatrical Calling, written 1777–84 and first published in 1911) and Karl Philipp Moritz’ Anton Reiser (vols i–iv published 1785–90; cf. Moritz 1996). Here the protagonists join the theatre, playing various parts including

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that of Hamlet (Wilhelm Meister), which forms an essential prerequisite for them to acquire and deepen their Bildung. In a later version of Goethe’s novel, Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, vols i–viii, first published 1795–6), Wilhelm states: To speak it in a word, the cultivation of my individual self, here as I am, has from my youth upwards been constantly though dimly my wish and my purpose . . . but in Germany, a universal and, if I may say so, personal, cultivation is beyond the reach of any one except a nobleman. A burgher may acquire merit; by excessive efforts he may even educate his mind; but his personal qualities are lost, or worse than lost, let him struggle as he will . . . If the nobleman, merely by his personal carriage, offers all that can be asked of him, the burgher by his personal carriage offers nothing, and can offer nothing . . . The former does and makes, the latter but effects and procures; he must cultivate some single gifts in order to be useful; and it is beforehand settled, that, in his manner of existence, there is no harmony, and can be none, since he is bound to make himself of use in one department, and so has to relinquish all the others. Perhaps the reason for this difference is not the usurpation of the nobles, and the submission of the burghers, but the constitution of society itself. (Goethe 1901: 12–14)

The theatromania of young intellectuals from the 1770s onwards can thus be explained as the hope and expectation that theatre would grant citizens that lacking sense of harmony and aid them in the process of cultivating themselves in order to enhance their Bildung. While Goethe was still working on his initial version of Wilhelm Meister, he also wrote his first ‘classical’ play, which would come to be regarded as a product of Philhellenism and revered as the epitome of a new Humanism—Iphigenia in Tauris (final version 1787). The first version was completed in March 1779. It premiered on 6 April 1779 on the stage of an amateur theatre at the Weimar Court in Ettersburg. The lead role of Iphigenia was played by Corona Schröter, a professional actress, while Goethe took the part of Orestes and Prince Constantine that of Pylades; the latter was later replaced by Duke Karl August. Despite the obvious reference, Goethe’s play is not an adaptation of Euripides’ Iphigenia in Tauris. In Goethe’s version, Iphigenia has succeeded to do away with the practice of sacrificing strangers on the altar of Artemis and convinced King Thoas that this is in his peoples’ best interest. It is only when Iphigenia, still hoping to return home at some point, refuses to marry him that Thoas reintroduces the sacrifices.

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The final solution is not brought about by the dea ex machina Athena but by Iphigenia’s decision to adhere to the truth and by her faith in Thoas’ willingness to fulfil his promise: I know you’ll keep your word: You swore if ever Chance of return to kin and home were granted Me, to let me go; and now it has. (Goethe 1993: 137)

In the same way as she opposed the Scythians’ violence against strangers, Iphigenia also rejects the Greek strategy of ‘artful words’ (ibid. 126) that manipulates, deceives, and seeks to outsmart others. Instead, she chooses the ‘unexampled action’ of speaking the truth. Who has the right to unexampled action? Men alone? They clutch the impossible To great heroic hearts . . . . . . . . Now my heart Rises and falls with a bold undertaking. I shall not escape severe reproach, Nor deep misfortune either, should I fail. Still I leave it in your hands, and if You truly are as you are praised, then show it, Gods, by your support, and glorify Through me the truth. Yes, Sire, hear what I say: A secret chain of guile is being forged. (Ibid. 135–6)

Owing to Iphigenia’s faith in Thoas’s unspoilt human nature, her ‘unexampled action’ succeeds in transforming their relationship into one between equals who fully trust each other’s humanity. This condition later also applies to both foreigners, particularly to Orestes. Those who fought put their swords away and peaceful talks begin, in the course of which all remaining issues (as to where the idol should remain) are settled to everyone’s satisfaction and laid to rest. In the end a forgiving departure takes place. IPHIGENIA: . . .

Farewell! Oh, look at us; and in return Grant me a kindly word of parting. For then the wind will swell the sails more gently, And from our eyes as we take leave the tears

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Will flow less painfully. Farewell! Give me In pledge of lasting friendship your right hand. THOAS: Farewell! (Ibid. 143)

The dramatic characters of the play are now no longer ‘of the same husk and corn as we are’,2 as Lessing envisioned it, but idealized figures who act as symbols of the human species (Lessing [1767–9] 1972: 385). The often quoted passage from Goethe’s letter to Charlotte von Stein (dated 6 March 1779) clearly points to the gap between the ideal nature of his drama and the social reality of his time: ‘My play is making no progress here; it’s devilish; the King of Tauris has to speak as if no stocking-weaver in Apolda were starving’ (Goethe 1957: 89). The idealization of the characters was partly achieved with recourse to Greek mythology. Moreover, Goethe transformed what was intended as the individualizing prose of the first (1779) and the third version (1781) into careful, highly polished iambics, which eliminated any individual differentiation. This linguistic abstraction and de-individualization greatly contributes to the process of idealization. It should come as no surprise then that Goethe completed the final revision of his play during his stay in Rome (1786). Unlike their British and French counterparts, German Philhellenists, such as Winckelmann, Goethe, or Humboldt, never set foot on Greek soil. The closest they came was Rome. Here they found not only copies of the Greek masterpieces but also many originals. In Rome, Goethe succeeded in perfectly imbuing his play with ‘noble simplicity’ and ‘quiet greatness’, the essential qualities of the Greek masterpieces according to Winckelmann. One might assume that here Philhellenism and theatromania finally joined forces, but this was not the case. The last version of Iphigenia in Tauris was published in 1787. It premiered only much later, on 7 January 1800, at the invitation of the Emperor Franz II in Vienna. The next performance took place in Weimar on 15 May 1802—that is, five months after Goethe’s production of Ion (see Chapter 1). Schiller, who directed the play, made a number of changes to it. Both performances were received respectfully but had little commercial success—the happy marriage of 2 Although there exists a published English translation of Lessing’s Hamburgische Dramaturgie, I am using a literal translation from the German here, because I feel that it captures his tone and imagery better.

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Philhellenism and theatre did not take place. More than twenty years later, Goethe, in conversation with Eckermann, reflected on this failure: I really had the notion once that it was possible to form a German drama. Nay, I even fancied that I myself could contribute to it, and lay some foundation stones for such an edifice. I wrote my Iphigenia and my Tasso and thought, with a childish hope, that thus it might be brought about. But there was no emotion or excitement—all remained as it was before . . . actors were wanting to represent such pieces with life and spirit, and a public was wanting to hear and receive them with sympathy. (Goethe 1935: 99, 27 March 1825)

‘Noble simplicity’, ‘quiet greatness’, and the cult of beauty were meant to contribute to the Bildung of the audience, but they were not well received by the spectators. Neither Iphigenia nor Orestes nor Thoas inspired empathy in the audiences. They appeared to be far removed from their everyday lives and disappointed their expectations from the theatre. In his poem ‘The Gods of Greece’ (1788) Schiller praises ancient Greece as a time in which ‘nothing was holy but the beautiful’—a stark contrast to contemporary life as it was usually portrayed on stage: That time the happy world was guided, Ye Gods, by your indulgent hand, When over happy men presided Fair beings born of Fable-land, Ah! what another age existed When your mysterious rites were paid, When garlands for thy shrines were twisted, Venus, enchanting Cyprian maid. (Schiller 1901: 72)3

Gone forever, this beautiful world could be revived in poetry but not, it seems, on the stage. Goethe’s Iphigenia respected the conventions of the modern stage but neglected to take into consideration the taste and expectations of the audience. As a result, it was not successful. What, then, prompted the trend to stage Greek tragedies? Modern viewers could directly access Greek sculptures by their very materiality, form, and shape, even if they were taken out of their original contexts and perceived very differently from the way the ancient Greeks might have done. Yet viewers would assume that their encounter with 3

I will be referring to two different published translations of Schiller’s work in this book, depending on which seemed more consistent with the original German.

INTRODUCTION

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such Greek masterpieces was a first-hand experience of ancient Greek culture, allowing them to draw relevant conclusions about it. Those who studied the Greek language and could read the Greek tragedies would not only enjoy and admire their poetic and other qualities but also confidently make assumptions about ancient Greek culture. They could ignore the theatrical conventions of ancient Greek theatre when passing judgement on the plays. But what happened when a Greek tragedy was performed on a modern stage? The Greek stage conventions, as far as they were known at the turn of the eighteenth to the nineteenth century, were strange enough. What to make of the fact that their performances were part of a festival? How to deal with the chorus? What about the deus/dea ex machina? And, although all the violent and cruel actions were only narrated and never performed on stage, how could one possibly reconcile them with the modern audiences’ morality? How could these plays contribute to the audience’s Bildung? Since all performances come into being through the interaction of actors and spectators (cf. Fischer-Lichte 2008), this encounter must allow for the spectators to develop their potential. How could this be achieved by performances of Greek tragedies? In his conversation with Eckermann, Goethe not only blamed the spectators for their lack of sympathy for his classical plays, but mainly held the actors responsible for their failure ‘to perform these plays with vigour and spirit’. If this holds true for Goethe’s Iphigenia, it would apply even more to the staging of Greek tragedies. Theatre would have to be reformed in order to bring together Philhellenism and performances of Greek tragedy. When in January 1791 Goethe took over the directorship of the Weimar Court Theatre, he transformed it into an experimental stage and attempted to formulate a new theatre aesthetics that would allow the productive application of the principles of ancient Greek art to modern theatre and thus contribute to the audience’s Bildung. One might assume that such an experimental theatre would have opened up the possibility to develop and test this novel aesthetics, and determine whether it allowed for or maybe even nurtured a happy marriage of Philhellenism and theatromania. If it was indeed imaginable at that time, the Weimar Theatre would have been the only suitable place for this to happen. However, as we shall see, even here the performance of a Greek tragedy, which did, in fact, take place, was met with scepticism, if not hostility.

1 Only with Beauty Man Shall Play Goethe’s Production of Ion in Weimar (1802)

It is no coincidence that Goethe took over as director of the Weimar Court Theatre less than one and a half years after the French Revolution and that he began rewriting his novel Wilhelm Meister during the year 1791. While his theatre reform aimed at creating performances as autonomous works of art—as against imitations of natural or social realities— Goethe, as mentioned in the Introduction, reformulated his concept of Bildung in Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship. The new theatre aesthetics and the concept of Bildung were not only related but, in fact, interdependent. Goethe did not welcome the French Revolution. It seems likely that he intended his concept of the autonomy of art and the promotion of Bildung, which he felt granted individuals the possibility to develop their full potential, to function as a force against revolution. In Goethe’s view, a theatre aesthetics aiming to mirror social reality by confronting the spectators with their own world and causing them to identify and empathize with the dramatic characters would fail to achieve these objectives. During his stay in Rome he had the opportunity to witness non-realistic theatre forms, which clearly prioritized the manner of representation over content. In his essay ‘Frauenrollen auf dem römischen Theater durch Männer gespielt’ (‘Men Playing Female Roles on the Roman Stage’),1 published in the journal Teutscher Merkur in

1

This text has not yet been published in an English translation. For the sake of readability I have chosen to use only my English translation (given here in parentheses)

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1788, Goethe underlines: ‘the pleasure lay in watching not the thing itself but its imitation, to be entertained not by nature but by art . . . ’ (Goethe 1887–1919 (Weimarer Ausgabe, hereafter WA), part I, xlvii. 267–74, at 274). As its first principle Goethe identified a performance’s ability to direct the spectators’ attention to its artistic essence. The second principle determined that all elements of a performance should harmonize perfectly, thus creating an artistic whole. Speaking on opera in his dialogue ‘Über Wahrheit und Wahrscheinlichkeit der Kunstwerke’ (‘On Realism in Art’, 1798), Goethe argues as follows: ‘if the opera is good it becomes its own micro-world in which everything follows certain laws—a world which must be experienced on its own terms’ (Goethe 1983–8: iii. 74–8, at 76). An opera performance—like all artistic performances—does not correspond to any ‘other product of nature’. The performance constructs its own aesthetic reality, which can therefore be judged only according to its own aesthetic principles but not by taking recourse to another reality. The performance as a work of art is independent of nature and thus autonomous. For this to happen, however, spectators must be prevented from identifying with the dramatic characters and from feeling empathy. This would require a new art of acting that would do away with any kind of realistic–psychological representation. In the first years of his directorship, Goethe formulated his ‘Rules for Actors’.2 The overall guideline defined the principal relationship between actors and spectators: ‘the actor must always remember that he is there for the sake of the spectators’ (ibid. 216–24, at 218, }38). Diderot’s fourth wall, which Lessing popularized, had to be abolished. Actors were no longer supposed to interact with each other as in everyday life: [}39] Therefore actors should not, from a sense of misunderstood realism, play to one another as if no third party were present. They should never act in complete profile nor with their backs to the audience. . . . [}40] The actor ought also to take particular care never to speak [their lines] upstage but always toward[s] the audience. . . . (Ibid. 219) of the original German title when it appears again in this book. However, only the German title appears in the bibliography. 2 This essay is entitled ‘On Acting’ in the published translation of Goethe’s Collected Works, from which I am quoting here. However, for reasons of precision and clarity, I much prefer the literal translation of the German title, ‘Rules for Actors’, and have decided to use it instead. The text, however, is quoted from the published translation.

ONLY WITH BEAUTY MAN SHALL PLAY

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When rehearsing for their roles, the actors must keep in mind that the stage has its own laws, which differ from those guiding everyday behaviour: [}35] Above all, the actor must remember that he should not only imitate nature but also present it in an idealized way. That is to say, in his presentation he must unite reality and beauty. (Ibid. 218)

With ‘all aspects of the performance’ forming a whole that is ‘in harmony’, a new figure emerges in the theatre: the director (ibid. 75, ‘On Realism in Art’). The performance turns into a carefully devised production, an ‘artwork’ created by the director as artist. Goethe led his own rehearsals. According to the actor Pius Alexander Wolff, who thought of himself as Goethe’s student, their purpose and goal was to rehearse together long enough that all elements are comfortably and securely interwoven and every hole is filled, every actor is so familiar with his own and the other roles that . . . he knows their lines; until everything . . . moves just like an opera, according to tempos chosen for specific reasons and feelings, while all moments still appear unconstrained. (Quoted in Flemming 1949: 109)

Goethe took recourse to the ‘Briefe über die gegenwärtige französische tragische Bühne’ (‘Letters on the Contemporary French Tragic Stage’),3 which Wilhelm von Humboldt sent him from Paris in August 1799, to formulate his ‘Rules for Actors’ and his principles of directing. Goethe found the ‘Letters’ so useful that he compiled them into an essay for the journal Propyläen. As he wrote to Humboldt, they also helped him conceptualize this theatre reform: ‘This essay, which came very much at the right time, has had a great impact on myself and Schiller, and brought into a sharp focus our understanding of French theatre’ (WA, part IV, xiv. 207–10, at 209, 28 October 1799). In his ‘Letters’, Humboldt makes a fundamental distinction between the French and the German art of acting: The German actor . . . merely continues the work of the poet, albeit in his own way; the subject matter, the feeling, the expression are his first, often only, consideration. The French actor links the poet’s work to the talent of a musician

3 This text has not yet been published in an English translation. For the sake of readability I have chosen to use only my English translation (given here in parentheses) of the original German title when it appears again in this book. However, only the German title appears in the bibliography.

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and painter, which also means he is less pronounced with his character’s expression and does not leave as deep an impression. (Humboldt [1800] 1965: 802)

Humboldt explains that ‘we place too little importance on this true brilliance of art’ by making the argument ‘that our senses are not sufficiently trained, our ear is not musical, our eye not painterly enough’ (ibid. 804). Concerning the German theatre, he concludes that ‘the set design, the costumes, and, particularly, the shaping of the body should be handled with more care if the art of acting was to be based on some kind of training’ (ibid. 808). He encourages the German actor ‘not to separate the poetic from the painterly in his art’, for he must consider that ‘in some way, no other art is as close to the art of acting as dance’ (ibid. 809). Since it is the actor’s duty to ‘idealize’ (ibid. 811), which applies to all artists, he can learn a lot from dance. The ‘Letters’ supported Goethe’s opinion that music and painting are the guiding principles of a production, which explains why he emphasizes the importance of the set design in his ‘Rules for Actors’. It provides the background for ‘the picture’, the ‘bare tableau in which the actor supplies the living figure’ (Goethe 1983–8: iii. 223, }83). The actor will fit in the tableau harmoniously only if his costume and his movements allow it. Goethe emphasized colour for the costumes, in relation both to the decoration as well as to its symbolic meaning according to his own ‘Farbenlehre’ (‘Theory of Colours’4). With respect to the actors’ movements, Goethe took great care that they were picturesque as well as symbolic. The actor Eduard Genast stated: It was highly irritating to him when, without the action requiring it, two or even three or four people stood close together on one or the other side, or in the centre in front of the prompter’s box, thus allowing empty spaces to emerge in the overall picture; then he assigned exact positions and determined the distance from one to the other person by counting steps. He wanted a three-dimensional picture within this frame and claimed that even two people could achieve this through correct positioning, which would soothe the eye. (Genast 1862: 87)

4 While an English translation of Goethe’s ‘Farbenlehre’ does exist—Goethe, Theory of Colours, trans. Charles Lock Eastlake (London: John Murray, [1810], 1840)—I found the translation to be rather inadequate and full of errors, and so have decided to use my own translation. However, for easier readability, I will continue to use only the English title, ‘Theory of Colours’, from now on, even though the quotations are based on the German version published in WA (part II, i). For the sake of completeness, the English translation is listed in the Bibliography.

ONLY WITH BEAUTY MAN SHALL PLAY

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This new theatre aesthetics that hailed the performance as an autonomous work of art was the prerequisite for creating a new repertoire that also, indeed primarily, comprised plays avoiding the topic of middle-class everyday life. Goethe put on stage plays by Plautus, Terence, Shakespeare, Calderón, Corneille, Molière, Racine, Goldoni, Gozzi, Voltaire, and Lessing, as well as his own and Schiller’s plays, Mozart’s operas, and ancient tragedies—Euripides’ Ion (August Wilhelm Schlegel’s adaptation of 1802) and Sophocles’ Antigone (Friedrich Rochlitz’s adaptation of 1809). With this repertoire, Goethe realized a programme that he much later described in the following, now famous, words to Eckermann: ‘National literature is now a rather meaningless term; the epoch of world literature is at hand, and everyone must strive to hasten its approach’ (Goethe 1935: 165–6, 31 January 1827). The theatre was to cease being a moral institution for the middle class, depicting the daily lives of the spectators, and was instead to allow them to develop their own potential, giving rise to the question of how this could be achieved with a performance conceived as an autonomous work of art. Friedrich Schiller addressed this question in his On the Aesthetic Education of Man: In a Series of Letters (1795) (Schiller 2012), following which, in 1796, Goethe persuaded him to aid his efforts to develop a new theatre aesthetics. The Letters, in fact, proved to be crucial to the enterprise. Schiller, contrary to Goethe, had welcomed and embraced the French Revolution. The revolutionaries, in turn, celebrated him as the poet of freedom. They even granted Monsieur ‘Giller’ honorary citizenship of the Republic. However, Schiller was deeply shocked when the revolution turned into a reign of terror. He changed the final verses of his poem ‘The Gods of Greece’ so that it now ended with the words: ‘Ah, that which gains immortal life in Song | To mortal life must perish!’ (Schiller 1852: 280), which confirmed that the beauty of ancient Greece was lost and gone forever. He also embarked on a search for how to secure the freedom of the individual and the state without violence and terror. Wilhelm Meister’s individual solution failed to satisfy Schiller. He was convinced that without a new political order the individual’s chance of unfolding their full potential was limited. Citizens would be able to realize this goal only if the state permitted them to do so. However, ‘because the State is to be an organization which is formed by itself and for itself, it can really become such only insofar as the parts have been severally attuned to the idea of the whole’ (Schiller 2012: 33, Fourth Letter).

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This interdependence between individual/personal and political freedom raises the question of priorities. Schiller answered it in favour of the individual: ‘I hope to convince you . . . that we must indeed, if we are to solve that political problem in practice, follow the path of aesthetics, since it is through Beauty that we arrive at Freedom’ (ibid. 27, Second Letter). Instead of a political revolution Schiller advocated an aesthetic education. It is noteworthy that he identifies beauty—the key term with regard to ancient Greece—as the prerequisite for political freedom. Yet he did not prescribe a return to the Greeks. Rather, Schiller’s argument, based on his idea of history as an ongoing civilizing process, runs as follows: So long as man is pure—not, of course, crude—nature, he functions as an undivided sensuous unity and as a unifying whole. Sense and reason, passive and active faculties, are not separated in their activities, still less do they stand in conflict with one another. His perceptions are not the formless play of chance, his thoughts not the empty play of the faculty of representation; the former proceed out of the law of necessity, the latter out of actuality. (Schiller [1795] 1984: 111)

Schiller is here describing the age in which Greek culture developed, where man was ‘raising his individuality to the level of the [species]’ (Schiller 2012: 26, Second Letter),5 ‘and in which Man in time can be made to coincide with Man in idea’ (ibid. 31–2, Fourth Letter). The process of civilization, however, rendered a ‘more rigorous dissociation of ranks and occupations’ (ibid. 39, Sixth Letter) necessary and thus split up human nature . . . That zoophyte character of the Greek States, where every individual enjoyed an independent life and, when need arose, could become a whole in himself, now gave place to an ingenious piece of machinery, in which out of the botching together of a vast number of lifeless parts a collective mechanical life results. State and Church, law and customs, were now torn asunder; enjoyment was separated from labour, means from ends, effort from reward. Eternally chained to only one single little fragment of the whole, Man himself grew to be only a fragment; with the monotonous noise the wheel he drives everlastingly in his ears, he never develops the harmony of his being, and instead of imprinting humanity upon his nature he becomes merely the imprint of his occupation, of his science. (ibid. 38–40, Sixth Letter)

5

Since the original published translations of certain German texts, for example, Snell’s translation here of Schiller, misinterpreted the German and was thus found to be somewhat inadequate in parts, at times I decided to make small changes to rectify this situation. Should readers find that certain quotations in this book diverge from their published versions, this is why.

ONLY WITH BEAUTY MAN SHALL PLAY

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According to Schiller’s three-stage model of history, this process follows a certain historical necessity for the species as a whole to develop further. Even the Greeks could not have maintained the level once reached ‘and if they wanted to advance to a higher state of development they were, like ourselves, obliged to surrender the wholeness of their being and pursue truth along separate roads’ (ibid. 43, Sixth Letter). According to Schiller, the fragmentary development of modern man, which Goethe deplored, particularly with respect to the bourgeoisie, is an inevitable result of the civilizing process, which drives man to unfold his full potential. By the end of the eighteenth century, however, this process was so developed that the mental trauma to which it exposed the individual became unbearable; man is no longer prepared to tolerate that which he once accepted as inevitable fate: ‘men have awoken from their long lethargy and selfdeception, and by an impressive majority they are demanding the restitution of their inalienable rights’ (ibid. 34, Fifth Letter). Schiller saw his age as a time of transition, indeed as a turning point within this process, identifying the main goal of all human activity at the time to restore to each individual their right freely to unfold their own personality. But can Man really be destined to neglect himself for any end what[so]ever? Should Nature be able, by her designs, to rob us of a completeness which reason prescribes to us be hers? It must be false that the cultivation of individual powers necessitates the sacrifice of their totality; or however much the law of Nature did have that tendency, we must be at liberty to restore by means of a higher Art this wholeness in our nature which Art has destroyed. (Ibid. 45, Sixth Letter)

According to Schiller, this would be possible only through autonomous works of art and not by way of a revolution, since citizens would not be able to realize their potential unless they received an aesthetic education. Schiller attributes a fundamental function to art in general and to theatre in particular: to restore wholeness and totality, lost to mankind in this historical–social reality. Art is seen as essentially playful, which keeps in balance the laws of nature and the laws of reason that usually fight each other: ‘Man shall only play with Beauty, and he shall play only with Beauty. . . . Man plays only when he is in the full sense of the word a man, and he is only wholly Man when he is playing’ (ibid. 80, Fifteenth Letter). This quotation reveals why art is capable of fulfilling this function only when it is autonomous. The symbolic work of art alone is able sensually to represent ethical reasoning and in this way open up the possibility to

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the spectators to cultivate ‘the whole of our sensuous and intellectual powers in the fullest possible harmony’ (ibid. 99, Twentieth Letter) in the aesthetic distance of their reception process. Reasons given in the philosophy of history thus justify the autonomy of art, which constitutes the only guarantee of bringing about the third stage of human history, when free individuals interact in a free state. Goethe’s new theatre aesthetics, advocated by Schiller from 1796 onwards, was supposed to enable such an aesthetic education. It ‘openly and earnestly [declared] war on naturalism in art’ (Schiller 1962: 7), as Schiller later wrote in the preface to his tragedy The Bride of Messina, which was entitled ‘On the Use of the Chorus in Tragedy’ (1803). The resulting artistic means required a completely new attitude of reception from the spectators. Dramatic characters, who speak in verse and are not ‘real beings . . . but ideal personages and representatives of their class’, do not allow the spectators to identify and empathize with them. Moreover, Schiller recommended reviving an element that was constitutive of ancient Greek theatre but unimaginable on the modern illusionistic stage—the chorus. Coming ‘between the passions’ of the dramatic characters ‘with its calming observations’, the chorus ensures a certain aesthetic distance between the spectators and the dramatic action on stage: For the spectator’s feelings must retain their freedom even amid the most vehement passion; they must not be the victim of impressions, but rather they must come away serene and clear from the agitations sustained. What common judgment finds objectionable in the chorus, namely, that it dispels the illusion and shatters the emotional power of the effects, is just what serves as its highest recommendation. For it is precisely this blind power of passions that the true artist avoids, it is precisely this illusion that he scorns to arouse. (Schiller 1962: 10–11, preface to The Bride of Messina)

Schiller here expressly stated the implications of this new theatre aesthetics: it could realize its aims by taking recourse to Greek theatre with its mythological characters and its anti-illusionist stage conventions. Finally, the time had come to reconcile theatre and Philhellenism in a performance of a Greek tragedy. Weimar seemed a particularly suitable and promising place for such an undertaking, given that at the time it was already widely referred to as the ‘German Athens’ (cf. Der Freimüthige oder Berlinische Zeitung für gebildete unbefangene Leser, 4 January 1803, quoted in Fambach 1958: 608–10, at 610).

ONLY WITH BEAUTY MAN SHALL PLAY

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Goethe’s production of Euripides’ Ion premiered at the Weimar Court Theatre on 2 January 1802, in a much criticized adaptation by August Wilhelm Schlegel. It was common at the time to adapt plays from different eras and cultures—that is, Weltliteratur—in order to make them more accessible to the spectators. Taking into consideration the moral ideas and norms of the Weimar audience, Schiller, for instance, replaced the porter’s scene in Macbeth (1800), which he found obscene and insulting, with a devout song. For similar reasons, Goethe later reworked Romeo and Juliet (1812) so extensively that a literary scholar of the 1950s described his version as an ‘amazing travesty’ (Bruford 1950: 319). Goethe explained his method in a letter to Caroline von Wolzogen: The maxim I have followed was to concentrate on all that is interesting and bring it into harmony, since, according to his genius, his age and his audience Shakespeare was able, even forced, to put together much disharmonious clamour in order to appease the theatre genius of his time. (WA, part IV, xxii. 244–7, at 246–7, 28 January 1812)

Such adaptations were usually well received. Schiller’s adaptation of Gozzi’s Turandot (1802—that is, the same year as Ion), in particular, was a big success. Schiller penned new riddles for each performance, enabling him to incorporate the many suggestions he received from enthusiastic spectators. Goethe’s method succeeded equally well in mediating a foreign culture to the Weimar audience or at least in making them receptive to it. Following his production of Calderón’s The Constant Prince, he wrote to Sartorius: ‘This time . . . we have revived a play, written nearly two hundred years ago under rather different skies and for a rather differently educated audience, with so much vitality that it seems to have come straight out of the oven’ (WA, part IV, xxii. 27–30, at 29, 4 February 1811). Yet these adaptations did not aim to localize and familiarize the play completely to avoid the spectators feeling perfectly at home in its world. As Goethe explains in the essay ‘Das “Weimarische Hoftheater” ’ (The Weimar Court Theatre, 1802),6 written in response to the two first performances of Ion: 6 This text has not yet been published in an English translation. For the sake of readability I have chosen to use only my English translation (given here in parentheses) of the original German title when it appears again in this book. However, only the German title appears in the Bibliography.

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the spectator should learn to perceive that not every play is like a coat which must be tailored precisely according to his own current needs, shape, and size. We should not think of satisfying our actual spiritual, emotional, and sensual needs in the theatre, but we should instead see ourselves as travellers who visit foreign places and lands, to which we travel for the sake of learning and delight, and where we do not find all those comforts which we have at home to shape our own individual needs. (WA, part I, xl. 72–85, at 82)

Schlegel’s adaptation of Ion turned the play into a ‘foreign land’ for Weimar audiences, even as some scholars of Altertumswissenschaften and other ardent Philhellenists criticized it for not remaining more faithful to Euripides, which would have meant an even more ‘foreignizing’ effect owing to the sacred nature of the texts of the ancient Greek poets. Others criticized it for what they saw as a ‘shamelessness’7 that was absent in Euripides’ original. The focus of my analysis, however, will be not the adaptation but the aesthetic means applied by Goethe in his staging. It is a well-documented fact that Goethe invested more time and effort in the production of Ion than in any of his other productions that preceded it. It seems that he considered the first production of a Greek play a touchstone of his and Schiller’s ideas on performance as an autonomous work of art with the capacity to accomplish aesthetic education in Schiller’s sense and thus to contribute to the Bildung of the spectators. In his Tag- und Jahreshefte of the year 1802 Goethe begins his entry on Ion with the sentence: ‘Stage and spectators have already achieved a high degree of Bildung’ (quoted in Fambach 1958: 611, emphasis added). This underlines that, without this ‘high degree of Bildung’ of actors and spectators, a production such as Ion could not have been conceivable in the first place. At the same time, it implies that

7 I will not go into whether we are here dealing with an adaptation or with a ‘new original play’, as A. W. Schlegel himself called it. This was one of the main topics of the heated debate triggered by the performance. It is generally difficult to draw a clear line between an adaptation and a new play that uses another one as its source material. I have labelled Goethe’s Iphigenia in Tauris as a new play because, in fact, it raises completely different questions and problems from Euripides’ play. Schlegel stated that he wanted ‘to correct’ Euripides but still dealt with the same problems set by him. Schlegel’s main ‘correction’,—that is, the substitution of the dea ex machina Athena by the deus ex machina Apollo, who quite openly addresses his love affair with Creusa—was deemed even more ‘shameless’ and shocking than Euripides’ solution by most critics and commentators, who refused to accept this as an improvement. Cf. Fambach (1958: 564–650), and Reichard (1987), which present and discuss a wealth of material.

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the performances of Ion, ‘expertly given with greatest care’ (quoted in ibid.), were able further to raise their level of Bildung. What artistic means did Goethe employ to realize this goal with his first production of a Greek tragedy? It is striking that he did not use a chorus, which is missing in Schlegel’s version, with Goethe also deciding against reintroducing it. This is all the more surprising since, as Schiller wrote one year later, the chorus could be regarded as one of the most effective means to shift the spectators’ reception from empathy to aesthetic distance. Instead, Goethe took recourse to another convention of ancient Greek theatre that would have a similar distancing effect—masks. In Ion, the two elderly men, Xuthus (played by Heinrich Vohs) and Phorbas (Jacob Graff), wore masks that, unlike those used in antiquity, did not cover the whole face but left the eyes, mouth, and parts of the cheeks visible. Goethe had been experimenting with masks for a while. In the essay already quoted of 1802, ‘The Weimar Court Theatre’, he elaborates on his experiments and the results: Following such exercises and tests we had come far enough by the beginning of the century to dare give performances that use masks in smaller or larger numbers. The first was Paläophron and Neoterpe, and the effect of this performance presented on a private stage was so positive that we immediately wanted to stage The Brothers . . . (WA, part I, xl. 75)

Goethe wrote Paläophron and Neoterpe in order to conduct his first experiments with masks in this context. Terence’s The Brothers, which premiered on 20 October 1801, was a big success and launched a whole series of performances. The masks worn by the two elderly men in Ion thus were a continuation of the experiment by extending it to a Greek tragedy while restricting it to just a single group of dramatic characters. The descriptions found in the many commentaries (mostly letters) and reviews allow for the conclusion that Goethe was guided by the principles of the picturesque and of musicality in his staging, striving for an overall harmony between all the elements employed. Caroline Schlegel—a partial observer perhaps, as this was still a year before she would divorce her husband, August Wilhelm Schlegel, the author of Ion—praises it for being ‘the most perfect performance . . . I ever saw in this theatre, which was justifiably famous for its harmonious composition’ (letter to A. W. Schlegel, 4 January 1802, quoted in Fambach 1958: 572). A more reliable witness, the

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philosopher Schelling—who would marry Caroline in 1803—states: ‘I don't remember ever having had the pleasure of experiencing such a harmonious vision in the theatre’ (ibid. 579). The principle of the picturesque guided the costumes and attitudes as well as the constellation and movements of the actors. It seems that the aim was to create beautiful pictures, which at the same time adopted and conveyed symbolic meanings. There was even a kind of open reference to Winckelmann’s ideal of Greek beauty made at the beginning and the end. In the opening scene, the actress Caroline Jagemann as Ion stood in the open doorway of the temple and posed as Apollo Belvedere, remaining thus for several minutes. The pose was repeated at the end by Apollo, played by Friedrich Hayde. This not only highlighted the relationship between father (Apollo) and son (Ion) but also framed the performance by referring to one of the most famous Greek masterpieces. In his Geschichte der Kunst des Altertums (History of Ancient Art, 1763–1768) Winckelmann states: ‘The statue of Apollo is the highest ideal of art among all surviving ancient masterpieces’ (Winckelmann 1825: 221). The statue left a deep impression on him: ‘I forget all else over the sight of this marvel of art and I myself adopt an exalted stance in order to gaze at it with dignity’ (ibid. 223). Goethe saw the Apollo Belvedere in the Vatican during his stay in Rome (see Illustration 1.1), and his response was somewhat similar: ‘and this is how Apollo Belvedere took me away from reality’ (WA, part I, xxx. 212). Ion’s and Apollo’s respective initial and final poses are often mentioned in letters by various spectators. This framing clearly appealed to the Philhellenists present in the theatre and contextualized the performance programmatically. Caroline Schlegel described the movements of the actresses—of Caroline Jagemann as Ion and of Friederike Vohs as Creusa—as ‘graceful’. Yet the actor constellations are mentioned and praised even more often than the movements. Not only Goethe himself emphasized that ‘the eye travelled pleasantly over the groups’ arranged as ‘living tableaux . . . From this perspective one can flatter oneself to have offered an almost perfect presentation’ (WA, part I, xl. 77–8). Even Karl August Böttiger wrote in his overall critical review, which was never published owing to Goethe’s interventions: One . . . would . . . have felt true pleasure at what was presented to the eager eye through a whole series of delicate groupings and tableaux. How exalting and thrilling for example was, through the contrast between the quiet stillness and the

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Illustration 1.1 Apollo Belvedere (Museo Pio Clementino, Cortile Ottagone).

quickest movement, the appearance of the Pythia in the Fourth Act above at the hall of the temple (the mass of light from within was perfectly calculated to illuminate the entering person) and her calm attention to the stormy passion of Creusa stage front across from her. Here the entire chorus was compressed into a single still and yet highly engaged figure. (Quoted in Fambach 1958: 619)

Beyond the reference to the picturesque nature of the arrangement, the association of the Pythia to the chorus in this passage is quite remarkable, as it suggests an attempt to relate Goethe’s production and his particular staging devices directly to the stage conventions of ancient Greek theatre. Regarding the picturesque, the costumes were of paramount importance. Goethe favoured costumes in the Greek style without insisting on exact copies of ancient models. As Böttiger writes: ‘All the costumes bespoke a deep and favourable study of the ancients . . . Only wool and what comes close to it, draped in the old, classical style’ (quoted in Fambach 1958: 620). Moreover, he praises ‘the immensely thorough

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Illustration 1.2 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Euripides’ Ion; coloured depiction of the ancient costumes from Ion at the Hoftheater in Weimar (colorirte Darstellung der antiken Costumes im Ion auf dem Hoftheater in Weimar).

and laudable study of the drapery, the painterly play of which pointed to the angles, and instructions of a great master’ (ibid.). The costumes—in conjunction with the actors’ poses and bearing—were evidently meant to evoke the idea of Greekness or even of Greek statues. Goethe’s ‘Theory of Colours’ determined the shades used. They were described in an article published anonymously by Caroline Schlegel in the Zeitung für die elegante Welt (Journal for the Elegant World, 2 (1802), 49–53, quoted in Fambach 1958: 584–6).8 Since her description matches that of others as well as the sketches of the five characters Xuthus, Creusa, Ion, the Pythia, and Phorbas by the painter Friedrich Tieck, both seem to be reliable sources (see Illustration 1.2). Ion and Apollo wore coats of a pure light red, which stood out as they were draped over a white tunic. The red of the coat appeared in its ‘light, diluted state’, leaving an impression of ‘grace and charm’ (WA, part II, i.

8 This text has not yet been published in an English translation. For the sake of readability I have chosen to only use my English translation (given here in parentheses) of the original German title when it appears again in this book. However, only the German title appears in the Bibliography.

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319). Creusa was dressed in a blue coat worn over a white dress richly draped over her left arm. The shade of blue suggested a degree of passivity and expressed a ‘gentle and yearning sensation’ (ibid. 314). Xuthus’ costume brought together two colours. As Caroline Schlegel describes it in her article, he wore ‘a yellowish, knee-length shift, [and] a red coat with golden ornamentation that closely followed a genuinely ancient design’ (quoted in Fambach 1958: 585). The crimson of the coat symbolized ‘the majesty’ (WA, part II, i. 357). According to Goethe, the juxtaposition of crimson and yellow suggested ‘something one-sided yet cheerful and magnificent. You could see the two ends of the active side next to each other’ (ibid. 327). As these explanations suggest, the colours of the costumes, on the one hand, served to characterize the dramatic personae. On the other, they underlined the particular relationships between them. Creusa and Xuthus appear at the beginning as opposites, who in the course of the performance are reconciled by Ion. His pure red dress between the blue and the crimson contributed to a ‘true calm’ and an ‘ideal satisfaction’ (ibid. 318).9 Thus, the beautiful and the symbolic met and even coincided in the Greek costumes. Towards the end of the performance, the picturesque was once again emphasized with the entrance of Apollo, when, as Böttiger describes it, ‘with the help of a highly simple and for this reason magnificent mechanism, two clouds suddenly gathered around the temple hall, out of which the god stepped on to a base against a flaming, transparent backdrop, his glory shining celestially at us all’ (quoted in Fambach 1958: 619). And this god, in all his glory, struck the pose of Apollo Belvedere. The principle of musicality was crucial for the declamation. Caroline Schlegel in her letter to her husband as well as in her anonymous article in the Journal for the Elegant World underlines that the actors spoke the iambic and anapaestic verses very well and without any wrong emphases: There was a very musical exactness, of which one knows little when it comes to the naturalism and the republicanism at other theatres. What can easily spill over into Mannerism, and sometimes really does, was so well conducted this time that it appeared to be wholly free of Mannerism and marked the achievement of a new stage. (Quoted in Fambach 1958: 585)

9

Cf. the lengthy quotations and descriptions in Georg Reichard (1987: esp. 176–7).

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We can conclude that the actors succeeded in realizing Goethe’s idea of declamation as expressed in his ‘Rules for Actors’: ‘[}20] One could call declamation a kind of music in prose, for it has in fact much in common with music’ (Goethe 1983–8: iii. 217). The declamation was supposed to turn into music at certain points. The composer Johann Friedrich Reichardt had agreed to set Ion’s hymn to music. Unfortunately, he finished the piece so late that his composition arrived at Weimar only a day before the premiere. However, the actress Caroline Jagemann made up for it by speaking her lines beautifully, more musically than declamatory, which I think was right. The metre came to the fore and was accompanied by single beats on the fortepiano, which were taken from the score that had just arrived, while she appeared to be playing a lyre. (Letter from Caroline Schlegel to A. W. Schlegel, 4 January 1802, quoted in Fambach 1958: 574)

In the next performance, the hymn was indeed sung. Reichardt underlined that he took great care to have the melody sung in a manner closely reflecting the metre: While carefully paying attention to the metre, heavy for music, I tried to make it as pleasant for the voice as possible; but the way the melody now stands, it must also be sung, or rather forcefully declaimed, even without all the shifts in length and cuts and without any melodious additions. (Letter from Reichardt to J. W. v. Goethe, 22 December 1801, quoted in Reichardt 1925: 208–9)

It is clear from this quotation that it was planned right from the beginning to blur the boundaries between declamation and music. All of these descriptions of the performance suggest that Goethe’s production of Ion did, in fact, achieve a happy marriage of Philhellenism and theatre. A Greek tragedy, albeit adapted, was performed. Devices from ancient Greek theatre such as masks were used. The costumes evoked paintings from well-known Greek vases; some poses—in particular that of Ion at the beginning and of Apollo at the end—were reminiscent of the most renowned masterpiece of ancient sculpture, popularized first by Winckelmann and many others after him who had the privilege to encounter it in Rome. The theatrical devices used generally followed the principles of the picturesque and of musicality, and were able to unite the beautiful and the symbolic. The production was not meant as a revival of

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Greek theatre. Rather, its new aesthetics was intended to re-create modern theatre as an autonomous art, the goal of which was not to imitate social or natural reality but to bring forth a new reality of its own—a reality that affects the senses through its beauty and encourages, indeed demands, contemplation owing to its symbolic meanings. We might even go one step further to conclude that this happy marriage of Philhellenism and theatre realized Schiller’s idea of an aesthetic education as well as Goethe’s idea of Bildung. Engaging the senses and stimulating contemplation would have allowed the spectators to play with the idea of the beautiful—thus achieving a human ideal— and to unfold their own potential. In this way, the autonomy of art would have fulfilled its purpose. However, the documents on the reception of the performance tell another story: the production was a complete failure, which was partly due to the ‘shamelessness’ of the adaptation. An enraged Karoline Herder wrote to Karl Ludwig von Knebel: ‘A more shameless, impudent, corrupting play (than “Ion”) has never been staged’ (6 January 1802, quoted in Fambach 1958: 579). The editor of the Journal des Luxus und der Moden, Carl Bertuch, who attended the premiere in the company of his wife and daughter, elaborates: Since the audience was not just aesthetic here but one whose morality, at least seemingly so, must be protected publicly, many of the explicit parts of “Ion” caused a tremendous unrest among our chaste women and girls. (Letter to L. v. Seckendorf, 12 March 1802, quoted in Bertuch 1955: 304)

Even after ten years of Goethe’s experimental work at the theatre, parts of the Weimar audience still insisted on defining theatre as a moral institution. They vehemently refused to receive and judge a performance according to purely aesthetic criteria and so resisted regarding it as an autonomous work of art. Their displeasure was directed not only at the adaptation but mostly at Goethe’s staging devices, which appalled Karoline Herder: The newest law of theatre that now reigns and becomes more shameless and impertinent day by day considers dramatic art to be representation and declamation only. The content of the play is either entirely subordinate or disregarded in relation to the spectators. We are supposed to sit in the audience like wooden puppets and watch and listen to the declamations of the wooden puppets on stage, until we leave feeling drab and empty. (Letter to J. W. L. Gleim, 1 March 1802, quoted in J. G. Herder 1861–2: 301)

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Herder’s wish to identify with the dramatic characters and to feel empathy for them was thwarted, while the focus on the beauty of the stage actions and its design left her ‘empty’, failing to arouse any thoughts on their possible symbolic meanings. It seems that she was not the only one who did not know what to make of this performance. A few days later, Herder wrote the letter just quoted to Karl Ludwig von Knebel. In it, she also refers to the students and professors of Jena University, who regularly attended the performances at the Weimar Court Theatre: ‘Jena was again ordered to attend and applaud. Fewer people attended the second performance. They do not want to attempt a third time because the house might stay completely empty’ (letter from 6 January 1802, quoted in Fambach 1958: 579). Granted that Herder’s outrage might have led her to exaggerate, it is obvious that the performance was not met with the enthusiasm and aesthetic appreciation Goethe had anticipated. His response to the criticism from different sides underlines that his production of Ion was intended as the fulfilment of his new theatre aesthetics aiming at Bildung. Even after this failure, Goethe continued to fight for its recognition—partly by applying authoritarian means. As already mentioned, he prevented the publication of Böttiger’s review, although it was already in print. He threatened the editor of the Journal des Luxus und der Moden, Carl Bertuch, that, should he publish the review, Goethe would ask the Duke for his own dismissal as director of the theatre. He even went so far as to deliver an ultimatum: Bertuch would have to let him know by 4 p.m. that same day. In order to make it impossible for Böttiger to have the review published elsewhere, say in the journal Merkur, he even sent a pre-emptive note to its editor, Christoph Martin Wieland, imploring him to refuse its publication. While the review tore apart the adaptation, it was generally even in favour of Goethe’s production with the exception of some ironic remarks about it. Yet Goethe went even further. He ensured that the reviews in the Journal for the Elegant World came exclusively from Schlegel’s close circle of friends. The issue following the performance published—mostly anonymous—letters that praised both the play and its staging. Furthermore, Goethe himself entered the debate publicly with his essay entitled ‘The Weimar Court Theatre’. In his letter to Bertuch, he had also declared that from now on only he would contribute articles on the performances of the Weimar Court Theatre. It is a clear case

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of censorship made possible by Goethe’s position and his numerous connections. In his essay, already quoted, Goethe openly flattered his Weimar audience by stating that he knew they were capable of a reception that demanded a certain aesthetic distance: One can show the audience no greater respect than by not treating them as mere rabble. Such crowds rush to the theatre unprepared, demanding anything that can be instantly digested, they want to look, be amazed, laugh, and cry and they force the theatre directors, who are more or less dependent on them, to descend to their own level. On the one hand, they expect too much from theatre, and on the other, they destroy it. We are fortunate that we can assume that our audience, particularly if we include those from Jena, brings more than just their ticket money with them and that those for whom the first careful performance remained somewhat dark and indigestible, are nonetheless interested in allowing themselves to learn more and to get acquainted with the intention by a second visit. It is only because our situation allows us to present performances enjoyable for an élite audience that we can be in a position to work towards those productions which eventually will please all. (WA, part I, xl. 78–9)

The subsequent performances of Ion in July and August, first in Lauchstädt (29 July and 9 August) and then in Rudolstadt (24 August), took place after this article had been published. That summer the small theatre in Lauchstädt had reopened after extensive renovations. It usually served as the summer stage of the Weimar Court Theatre. Lauchstädt was a health resort popular with the ruling families of the principalities and dukedoms of Saxony and Thuringia, noble families from the same region, government officials from Merseburg, professors from Halle and Leipzig, and other elite families. In the summers Lauchstädt was visited by approximately 200 such families. Goethe found them to be a particularly receptive audience. ‘There we had a select audience, who would have nothing but what was excellent; so we always returned thoroughly practised in the best plays, and could repeat all our summer performances in the winter’ (Goethe 1935: 132). Goethe used the reopening to publicize his artistic programme with the help of a prologue entitled ‘Was wir bringen’ (‘What We Offer’). In it, the god Mercury informs the audience that the actions and events on stage were not meant literally—and therefore, morally— but rather symbolically. The prologue also expressly states the purpose of such a symbolic theatre: ‘That, while watching and absorbing, we all

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together | Might stride confidently towards a higher Bildung’ (WA, part I, xiii. 37–88: 73). It goes on: And does not Bildung gain from acting, that fantastic Godhead with a hundred arms offering an unending myriad of rich means? (Ibid.)

This prologue prepared the spectators for what to expect from and how to respond to performances such as Ion. The two performances of Ion in Lauchstädt were, in fact, received more favourably than in Weimar but not well enough to justify another Weimar performance. The last performance took place in Lauchstädt the following summer, on 6 August 1803. The heated discussions in letters and journals following the performances of Ion raise a number of questions. Was the production an important moment in the process of enabling the spectators to develop their full potential? In what ways did the play and its production relate to the cultural identity of the educated middle class? Did it demonstrate that theatre—as an autonomous art form—could achieve comparable results to a revolution but without the concomitant terror and violence? The production was an experiment that was carried out under ‘laboratory conditions’. The director, in realizing his ideas on acting, had a welltrained ensemble at his disposal. He had the means to have new sets and costumes made. Goethe, keeping all elements under tight control, clearly thought that this also applied to the spectators and their behaviour. He demanded a concentrated, attentive, quiet, and absolutely disciplined attitude while watching the play. Watching from his seat in the middle of the first row, he was even known to discipline audience members if they behaved in ways he deemed inappropriate. When spectators laughed at unforeseen moments, he would openly reprimand them. Yet he had to relinquish control in this case, since audience members frequently expressed their disapproval openly. Since most spectators did not decide to see the performance a second time to gain a better understanding, it is unlikely that they received the performance as a chance to develop their own potential. Even the Philhellenists among the spectators seem to have been offended by the adaptation. Most audience members clearly did not want to give aesthetic judgements but preferred to identify with and feel empathy for the dramatic characters.

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These documents suggest that the performance did not positively contribute to their cultural identity. It is much more likely that they received it as a negation of or even as an assault on their cultural identity, which was still more determined by family values and the ideal of naturalness than by Goethe’s concept of Bildung or Schiller’s idea of an aesthetic education. The Weimar Court Theatre, in contrast to Hamburg’s theatre as characterized by Schütze, turned out not to promote a public sphere in which the bourgeoisie’s different values, their self-understanding, and cultural identity could be negotiated. Rather, made evident in the case of Ion, it proved to be an authoritarian institution with the help of which the director tried to force his ideas on the audience. The theatre critic Garlieb Merkel, who usually reviewed performances of the Berlin National Theatre, where different groups of audiences had to come to terms with each other without the director interfering, mocked Goethe’s actions. In his Briefe an ein Frauenzimmer über die wichtigsten Produkte der schönen Literatur (Letters to a Woman on the Most Important Products of Literature, 1802), he refers to Goethe’s essay on ‘The Weimar Court Theatre’: The director of the Weimar Theatre released a grand manifesto in the March issue of the Journal des Luxus und der Moden on how the German nation was to think of said theatre in future . . . All this presumptuous writing might lead one to think that, according to the director in question, Weimar didn’t even have an audience in which people who gather in the theatre are allowed to have their own taste or even express their opinion but only exist so that the aforementioned director can experiment with how this or that manner of play would affect them:—roughly in the same way in which they tested the effect of music on elephants in Paris. The above-mentioned manifesto says: ‘We owe thanks to that critic who, with the help of this example (Ion), once again makes clear to us in how far we can and should follow the ancients.’ . . . If the ‘we’ refers to theatre directors, they can and should follow the directors of Athens and Rome insofar as they shouldn’t see themselves as greatly enlightened custodians of the audience, who win pedagogical merit and experiment with it; rather, they should remember that they actually are in the service of the audience; that they must therefore, should they wish to refine public taste, refrain from behaving arrogantly, or haughtily and instead seek advice from the spirit of the audience, elevating it only gradually and in a pleasant fashion; what they should not do is stage plays that fail to interest audiences and then forbid all expressions of disapproval. (Quoted in Fambach 1958: 596–7)

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The production of Ion thus did not release any liberating impulses in the spectators. Moreover, Goethe abused his special position in the state to repress any public criticism. An article in the journal Der Freimüthige, probably written by Garlieb Merkel and August von Kotzebue (it appeared anonymously), retraces the whole story of this repression in detail and sharply criticizes Goethe’s way of dealing with the public. The article concludes: This is a fact which, sadly, we can corroborate. It is easy to believe that only one voice spoke out about it in Weimar, and that even the numerous admirers of Herr von Göthe shook their heads in disapproval. Certain otherwise loyal subjects, who would surely like to see the day the princedom of Weimar becomes a mighty kingdom, hoped that this time the limits of Herr von Göthe’s interdict would not extend too far. (4 January 1803, quoted in Fambach 1958: 610)

Goethe evidently never came to the conclusion that it was also, if not primarily, his authoritarian and repressive approach that prevented theatre as an autonomous art from realizing the liberation of the individual. In his Tag- und Jahresheften (1802) he concludes his entry on Ion by expressly justifying his intervention: ‘it was not yet established as a principle to allow anyone to destroy in the same state, the same city what others had built up shortly beforehand’ (quoted in Fambach 1958: 611). The idea that theatre as an autonomous art would be able to achieve the liberation of the individual without any violence—or repression— and therefore would render a revolution unnecessary had thus been disproved by Goethe himself. On the other hand, Goethe had underestimated the ‘foreignness’ of Greek tragedy, which might somehow be ‘digested’ despite the enormous historical distance when read as a text in private. The theatre, however, is a contemporary institution. What happens on stage happens in that moment and does not speak to an individual only but to an assembled audience. It is therefore not surprising that in the aftermath of Ion the question was raised whether adaptations of Greek tragedies could carve a place for themselves on the modern stage. The self-confessed Philhellenist Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803) was convinced that the new century, the nineteenth, would bring about Bildung and a new humanist age. After having seen Ion, he wrote an article on the ‘Verpflanzung der Griechischen Tragödie auf unserer

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Bühne’10 (‘Transplanting Greek Tragedies on to our Stage’), in which he vehemently rejected all attempts to perform Greek tragedies on the modern stage. In his view, the female characters of Greek tragedy were particularly unsuited for it: The Greek customs are not like ours, especially in terms of the relationship between the genders. Sophocles, after his famous response about Euripides, brought women on stage as they should be, Euripides as they were. But to be or not to be: we don’t want women, debased to a certain extent, blemished in such and such ways, practising such and such wickedness, in tragic theatre (And it speaks to our honour that we are disgusted by them); we don’t want to witness the weaker sex in an ugliness of decision or memory, which strangles all empathy. If you then bring before our eyes women who mix poisons, are struck with rabies and vengefulness, are dishonoured, etc., add to that a disgusting aftertaste of a cultivated lust and say with a free voice: those are Greek women!—: such a disgrace, whatever name you give it with false dignity, can elicit in the pure and noble people of both sexes nothing but the old monk’s saying: ‘Is that Greek? Then it won’t be read!’ (Graeca sunt, non legunter). (J. G. Herder 1804: 366)

Despite Goethe’s efforts to reconcile Philhellenism and theatromania in his production of Ion, many merely saw it as evidence that such a union would never work. While ‘imitat[ion of] the ancients’ was much lauded in the fine arts, particularly in sculpture, it was widely rejected with regard to the theatre. The foreignness—for Goethe a necessary prerequisite for enabling aesthetic distance—was mostly seen as an insurmountable obstacle, even by intellectuals. Philhellenism was nurtured by Altertumswissenschaften and centred on the remains of Greek art and on literature, which was to be read in the original. It seemingly did not need performances of Greek tragedies. Still, the fact that a Greek tragedy had been performed, albeit in a ‘scandalous’ adaptation, and that the production presented a new theatre aesthetics and stirred a lively discussion, set the possibility of performing Greek tragedies on modern stages on the agenda not only of the Philhellenists but also of a greater public. I would like to conclude this chapter by relating the production of Ion to still another context. As we have seen, Goethe developed his concept of Bildung and his ideas on the role that theatre as autonomous art had to play in it as a response to the French Revolution, as did Schiller in his reflections on the aesthetic education of man. At the same time, another 10

Published after his death in Der Freimüthige oder Ernst und Scherz, 92, 8 May 1804, 366–7.

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discussion on Greek tragedy emerged, also as a response to the French Revolution. Between 1792 and 1807 a flood of publications appeared trying to make sense of the seeming contradiction that, on the one hand, Greek tragedy is deeply rooted in the time and space of its origin—that is, in antiquity—but, on the other, is able to speak to the citizens of the modern world. The philosophy of tragedy and the tragic, which emerged out of this discussion, is fundamentally different from the French Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes fought at the end of the seventeenth century, and other comparisons between ancient and modern art and literature, including Winckelmann’s, as it is based on the modern understanding of cultural difference. The most important protagonists of this discussion were Schiller, Schelling, the brothers Friedrich and August Wilhelm Schlegel, Hegel, and Hölderlin.11 Here is neither the place nor the space to deal with this philosophy at great length or to study it in detail (as done by Most 2000, Schmidt 2001, Szondi 2002, Eagleton 2003, Krell 2005, Leonhardt 2012, Young 2013, Billings 2014, and others). It is relevant in our context because of the common ground from which its development proceeded. Despite the great differences between its leading figures, they all agreed on the importance of Greek tragedy for their time not as an ideal to be followed, but as an object of reflection that would help to define one’s own position in the historical process. While, in the eighteenth century, tragedy was held in high esteem insofar as it was able to trigger strong emotions, the philosophy of tragedy as developed around 1800 proceeds from ‘the assumption that tragedy presents a form of meaning, a way of making sense of the world’ (Billings 2014: 226). By reflecting on tragedy as a meaningful representation of the historical process, the reader becomes aware of the historical distance, the ‘foreignness’ of the tragedy, and acquires the ability to define his own position.

11 Among their writings, shaping the discussion, were Schiller’s essays ‘On the Art of Tragedy’ (1792) and ‘On the Sublime: Towards the Further Development of Some Kantian Ideas’ (1793) (in Schiller 1993: 1–21, 22–44); F. Schelling, ‘Philosophical Letters on Dogmatism and Criticism’ (Schelling [1795] 1980: 156–96) and Philosophy of Art ([1802–5] 1989); F. Schlegel, ‘On the Study of Greek Poetry’ ([1795–7] 2001); A. W. Schlegel’s Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature, first held in Jena (1798), later in Berlin (1801–3), and finally in Vienna (1808) (in Schlegel 1846); Hegel’s essay on ‘Natural Law’ ([1802–3] 1975) and his Phenomenology of Mind ([1807] 1967); and Friedrich Hölderlin’s ‘Notes to Oedipus’ and ‘Notes to Antigone’ ([1804] 2001: 63–8; 113–18).

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It is obvious that Goethe was striving for such a result with his production of Ion. But what might have worked for a philosophically inclined reader failed with the audiences in the theatre—not only because of its different medial conditions but, more importantly, because the majority of the audience had other expectations and demands when seeing a play staged: they wanted to identify and get emotionally involved. The new art of spectating, which such a ‘philosophical theatre’ would require, did not hold sway.

2 After the Institutionalization of Bildung The Potsdam Antigone of 1841

Why not have two trains go back and forth to bear the extraordinary rush? Why open but a single window at the ticket counter when close to a thousand people are demanding tickets at the same time? The broken glass of the window certainly represented the lesser ill here. (Königlich privilegirte Berlinische Zeitung, 8 November 1841)

This complaint against the Berlin–Potsdam Railway Company published in a Berlin newspaper in November 1841 makes one wonder what kind of an extraordinary event was taking place at the time to attract thousands of Berliners. It might come as a surprise to most readers, then, that this chaos was due to the opening night of the Court Theatre’s production of Sophocles’ Antigone at the New Palace in Potsdam on 28 October 1841, to which only invited guests were admitted. Given the failure of Goethe’s Ion—and his no more successful production of Antigone in 1809—the question arises as to why a performance of a Greek tragedy was suddenly perceived as such an unmissable sensation. The fact is that, within this time span of almost forty years following the Napoleonic Wars, the situation had changed decisively, rendering three new tendencies particularly relevant: (1) the Prussian school reforms introduced by Wilhelm von Humboldt in 1808 made Philhellenism constitutive of the cultural identity of the Bildungsbürgertum; (2) Philhellenism merged with nationalism as a response to the French occupation, and (3) the emergence of historicism led to a new appreciation in the Bildungsbürger’s consciousness of the particular

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contexts of ancient Greek art. They formed the basis and prerequisite for the success of Greek tragedies on the modern stage. The Napoleonic Wars ravaged most of the German states and abolished the existing political order. At the Battle of Austerlitz (2 December 1805) Napoleon defeated Austria, which lost huge parts of its territory and had to pay enormous reparations. The following summer, he merged the previously conquered southern German states, which up to then had been members of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, into the Confederation of the Rhine and acted as their ‘protector’. He forced the Emperor in Vienna to resign and declare the end of the Empire (6 August 1806). Thus the only institution that had bound together the different sovereign German states for almost 1,000 years ceased to exist. In 1813, in his speech ‘Zu brüderlichem Andenken Wielands’ (‘In Brotherly Memory of Wieland’) Goethe reminded the assembled audience that ‘the German Reich’s constitution, which contained so many states, therein resembled that of the Greeks’ (WA, part I, xxxvi. 311–46, at 311). Two months after the dissolution of the Empire Napoleon defeated Prussia in the battle of Jena and Auerstedt. The situation created in the German states by the Napoleonic Wars left its imprint on Philhellenism as advocated by many of its intellectuals. Via the Prussian school and university reforms realized by Wilhelm von Humboldt following the defeat and later on adopted by other German states, Philhellenism became institutionalized and constitutive of the cultural identity of the Bildungsbürgertum. Another consequence was the linkage of Philhellenism to the emerging nationalism. While before the Napoleonic Wars patriotism had not usually extended beyond the borders of one’s state, the invasion of Napoleon’s troops and the abolition of the Reich gave rise to a pan-German nationalism. The established stereotype that associated the French with the Romans and the tendency of German Philhellenists to identify with the Greeks in this situation led to a fusion of Philhellenism and nationalism. Both developments are important in our context. With regard to the Potsdam Antigone production of 1841, my focus will be on the situation in Prussia. The defeat had exposed the organizational backwardness and inefficiency of almost all of the Prussian social institutions. As a consequence, far-reaching reforms were introduced between 1806 and 1812. Carl August Freiherr von Hardenberg (1750–1822) and Karl Freiherr vom Stein (1757–1831) acted as the driving forces behind this movement. The

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government and the administration were fully restructured, the peasants liberated, a limited form of citizenship granted to Jews, which, however, still excluded access to the civil service and the officers’ corps. Corporal punishment in the army was made illegal and membership of the officers’ corps, which up to then was open only to noblemen, was extended to the middle class. A new department for educational and ecclesiastical affairs was established within the Interior Ministry (regarding the reforms, cf. Nipperdey 1996: 21–54). The position of its director was offered to Wilhelm von Humboldt. Humboldt was a persistent promoter of the idea of Bildung (cf. Bruford 1975: 1–28) and an ardent Philhellenist. A friend of Goethe’s and Schiller’s, Humboldt was also an admirer of Winckelmann, particularly during his years in Rome as Prussian ambassador to the Holy See from 1802 to 1808. After his return to Prussia, Humboldt became engaged in the process of reform and agreed to act as head of the new department. He used his position to remodel the entire school system, basing the education of the sons of the upper middle class on his idea and ideal of Bildung. He did away with the old Latin schools and their drills, and introduced the Gymnasium. This type of school was not meant to train students in particular skills in order to prepare them for a profession but would instead present them with the prospect of acquiring Bildung, which he understood as the unfolding of each student’s full potential (the Gymnasium accepted only boys; this new ideal of Bildung was clearly deemed unsuitable for girls!). Since Humboldt did not believe that this could be accomplished by teaching a particular curriculum, the question arose as to how the Gymnasium would enable Bildung. He decided that the curriculum should be compatible with the idea of purposelessness—that is, being not a means to an end but an end in itself. Humboldt believed that language is the form through which human beings encounter and appropriate the world. In his essay ‘Latium und Hellas, oder Betrachtungen über das klassische Altherthum’ (‘Latium and Hellas, or Observations on Classical Antiquity’, 1806), Humboldt argues that the key to understanding all cultural aspects of a people as well as their national character lies in the study of their language. [Language] is at once a convenient means to grasp character, a mediator between the fact and the idea, and since it is formed from general, or at least dimly perceived, principles and is usually also formed from pre-existing prejudices,

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it offers not only a means to compare many nations, but also a means to trace the influence of one [nation] on another. (Quoted in an English translation in Marchand 1996: 30)

In Humboldt’s view the Greek language was unsurpassed in all these respects. It became the most important subject along with mathematics, which required the faculty of formal ‘purposeless’ thinking. No matter what profession a student would choose, he was educated to do what he would do for its own sake. This seemed to be the only path leading to true Bildung. As Marchand states: ‘Humboldt infused the school system with his generation’s commitment to Zwecklosigkeit, Innerlichkeit, and Wissenschaftlichkeit (nonpurposiveness, inwardness, and scholarliness)’ (ibid.). The reforms had far-reaching consequences, for only those who passed the Abitur, the final examination of the Gymnasium, which included extremely difficult translations of Greek texts, were admitted to university. Whoever wanted to join the civil service, become a teacher, lawyer, physician, or other free professional had to pass the Abitur. That is to say, that the Bildungsbürgertum recruited its members from the graduates of the Gymnasium. Around 1810, these comprised no more than 1 per cent of the population (cf. R. S. Turner 1980; Nipperdey 1996: 43–50; Schäfer 2009: 92–130, esp. 104). In this sense, the Gymnasium brought forth the Bildungsbürgertum as a particular social class that defined its cultural identity in relation to ancient Greek culture. Moreover, Humboldt designed and founded the radically new and different University of Berlin in 1810. Two innovations stand out. First, the philosophical faculty (spanning not only philosophy, philology, and its related disciplines, but also the natural sciences) was elevated above the more ‘practical’ faculties of medicine, law, and theology. The natural sciences, while part of the philosophical faculty, were subordinated to the humanities in order to minimize the risk that they would follow mindless empiricism (cf. R. S. Turner 1971: 152). Humboldt made Altertumswissenschaften, particularly classical philology, the focus of the new university, bringing to Berlin the best scholars, among them F. A. Wolf. Secondly, Berlin University was set up as a seminar university or Arbeitsuniversität— that is, the students would not just listen to lectures but gather in small groups for seminars, where they would discuss problems with the professor and each other, realizing the new ideal of the unity of research and

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teaching. Here, future Gymnasium teachers studied philology, even though the way they later transported their specialized text-interpretative skills and their study of grammar into the classroom did not always succeed in providing Bildung in Humboldt’s sense. ‘Not surprisingly, then, by the 1840s, the neohumanists were suffering from the same sort of attack on their lifeless, drill-oriented lessons that they had launched against the Latin schools of the eighteenth century’ (Marchand 1996: 31). Bildung increasingly deviated from the ideal of developing an individual’s potential to focus instead on the ‘possession’ of specific knowledge—for instance, that of the Greek language, its literature, and history, as well as on a certain acquaintance with the arts—music, literature, painting, theatre— giving rise to a Bildungs-canon. This was not yet the case when the Greek independence movement began in 1821. It was met with great enthusiasm in the German states— particularly among the Bildungsbürgertum but also by many others. The Greek struggle against the Ottoman Empire was likened to the German fight against Napoleon just a few years earlier, which had resulted in the liberation from Napoleonic rule but had not brought about democratization. Austria’s Count Clemens von Metternich was the main driving force behind the restorative tendencies re-established and championed at the Congress of Vienna of 1815. Against this background the Greek struggle for freedom, their fatherland, and the Christian faith enthused many Bildungsbürger. The Greeks were celebrated on university campuses, with the students proclaiming their support. As early as June 1821 young people in many German cities volunteered to join the Greek cause. Again it was Metternich who counteracted. He urged the other German states to prohibit not only the recruitment of volunteers but also fundraising for the Greeks and even public expression of support. Although this campaign proved largely successful, pro-Greek associations and publications were tolerated in the south-western states, and even in Prussia informal fundraising groups included government servants such as Wilhelm von Humboldt and field marshal Neidhardt von Gneisenau (cf. Hauser 1990; Marchand 1996: 32). However, Metternich’s fear that the Greek struggle for independence would reignite nationalist tendencies and even awaken or strengthen republicanism and democratic claims did not materialize. After the Greeks had gained independence as per the London Protocol of 3 February 1830, and especially after Otto I, the second son of Ludwig I of Bavaria, that great

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admirer and lover of Greek culture, ascended the Greek throne in 1832,1 the Philhellenism of the Bildungsbürgertum lost its political significance. Many Altertumswissenschaftler at the universities, which were watched with suspicion by the state officials, had backed the Greek cause, first openly and, following Metternich’s intervention, in smaller circles. Similarly, the Gymnasiums were believed to be the breeding ground for republicanism and pantheism. While scholars returned to their research in the 1830s, the curriculum of the Gymnasium was amended in 1837 to reduce the influence of Greek in an attempt to revive—at least to a certain extent—the old Latin schools with their drills. Another phenomenon is of great importance in this context: historicism. It was developed from the beginning of the nineteenth century onwards, first at the universities and later in the arts. It advocates that a past epoch should not be judged with those criteria determining one’s own time but instead proposes that it must be understood on the basis of acknowledging its fundamental difference and foreignness. The world is no longer seen as a system but as history. That is to say that human actions and institutions, ways of life and values, are bound to their historical time, resulting from an ongoing process of becoming and passing. As such, history serves as justification for norms and values, and even as foundation for individual and collective identities (cf. Nipperdey 1996: 441–71). This understanding of history led to a new approach in dealing with artworks and objects from the past. While in the princely Kunst- und Wunderkammer the most diverse works and objects from different eras and cultures were exhibited side by side in order to stimulate amazement in the beholder, they were now transferred to museums. Whereas the first art museum in Germany, the Fridericianum in Kassel, had already opened in 1779, the establishment of new museums peaked in the 1820s and 1830s: the Glyptothek in Munich (1816–30), the Großherzogliche Museum in Darmstadt (1820–4), the Alte Museum in Berlin (1823–30), and the Alte Pinakothek in Munich (1824–36). Most of the museums were built in the ‘Greek style’—that is, as temples of art. The order observed in the exhibitions was historical—beginning with Egyptian 1 In 1832, England, France, and Russia had agreed to name Prince Otto of Bavaria—who was still underage—as their candidate for the Greek throne after Prince Leopold of SachsenCoburg-Gotha withdrew his consent to serve as the future Greek king.

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art, followed by ancient Greek, Roman, and medieval art, and so on. Thus, the beholder was encouraged to trace the historical development in order to understand the individual works. The museum visitors largely, though not exclusively, hailed from the Bildungsbürgertum, as did concert and theatre audiences, and the reading public. While at the Gymnasium the sons of the Bildungsbürgertum learned to understand and appreciate no longer just the ‘universal’ beauty of ancient Greek texts but also their historical distance, peculiarity, and ‘otherness’, visitors at the museums experienced the historical peculiarity of the exhibits and their historical differences from each other by following the given order of the display. What at first glance appeared foreign became understandable when judged on the grounds of its particular historical context. This acceptance of ‘foreignness’ triggered a new debate on the performability of Greek tragedies on modern stages. The philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) discussed it at great length in his Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Arts (1820–9) held at Berlin University, where he had been teaching since 1818. He praised Greek tragedies for their ability to provide deep satisfaction to their readers, arguing that, paradoxically, this was because they were written not to be read but to be performed. He continued: What bans them from the theatre today depends less on their dramatic organization . . . than on the national presuppositions and circumstances on which their subject-matter is frequently based and in which we cannot now feel at home because it is so foreign to our modern way of looking at things. (Hegel 1975: 1183)

Arguing from a historicist perspective, Hegel considered the historical distance between ancient Athens and modern Europe too big to make a modern performance of a Greek tragedy productive. Karl Leberecht Immermann (1796–1840), who later became the director of the Düsseldorf Theatre (1834–7), came to a similar conclusion in his essay from the 1820s, ‘Über den rasenden Ajax des Sophokles’ (‘On the Raging Ajax of Sophocles’, 1826), in which he also proceeded from historicism: ‘Every art form, including the tragedy, is a unique occurrence because it is anchored in its historical moment, and determined in form and essence by the character of the people as well as by the individual circumstances around its creation’ (Immermann 1971: 557). The classicist August Böckh (1785–1867), a disciple of F. A. Wolf and professor at Berlin

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University, on the other hand, regarded the historical distance in Greek tragedy as an important prerequisite for a successful modern performance. Böckh was the academic adviser for the 1841 production of Antigone in Potsdam, and in his essay ‘Über die Darstellung der Antigone’ (‘On the Representation of Antigone’, 1842) he responded to the argument of foreignness: We would like to raise the question as to whether the motives of many theatre plays and especially operas, which are still popular, aren’t just as strange to us as Sophocles’ Antigone. That one should have the ability to relate to these motives and other aspects of the peculiarity of the people and the era in which the play is set is certainly a prerequisite for enjoying any dramatic work of art that is not taken from the radius of our immediate surroundings. (Cited in Böckh, Toelken, and Förster 1842: 73–97: 76)

The foreignness of tragedy that in Goethe’s theatre served as a prerequisite for enabling the spectator to experience aesthetic distance here appears as a historical gap not meant to be bridged with the help of an appropriating adaptation but instead opening up the possibility for understanding the other on the basis of historical knowledge. In summary, almost forty years after Goethe’s production of Ion, the conditions for putting a Greek tragedy on stage had fundamentally changed. Although the argument concerning its foreignness was still valid, it could no longer serve as a generic justification for neglecting Greek plays. First, the Gymnasium had by that time raised a new generation of Bildungsbürger familiar with the Greek language, its poetry, culture, and history, who regarded this knowledge as constitutive of their own cultural identity that set them apart from other social classes and milieus. Secondly, the ultimately successful revolt of the Greeks against the Ottoman Empire, which was deemed comparable to the fight of the Germans against the Napoleonic occupation, and the fact that the son of the Bavarian king was put on the Greek throne, had once more highlighted the ‘kinship’ between the Greeks and the Germans. Thirdly, historicism, not only as a method explored and applied in historical disciplines but as a general attitude of intellectuals and the educated middle class towards the past, allowed for a new kind of encounter with something ‘foreign’ from a long-gone era on the contemporary stage. Aesthetic education thus had to be complemented by a historical education. It was neither an artist—as in the case of Goethe’s production of Ion— nor an Altertumswissenschaftler—that is, a philologist or historian—who

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came up with the idea to stage a Greek tragedy in Prussia. Rather, it was the king himself. In 1840, Friedrich Wilhelm IV, after his father’s forty-three-year reign, ascended the throne at the age of 45. He was determined to introduce a new era in Prussia, allowing more political liberalism and increasing the freedom of the press. Intellectuals previously persecuted for their liberal attitudes were awarded professorships at the Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin. These included the brothers Grimm, professors of German language and literature, and the philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling. Equal rights were granted to Jews, who, under the reign of Friedrich Wilhelm III, had still been denied access to the civil service and the officers’ corps. A general amnesty was also granted to all victims of the Prussian reaction. The new king wanted to settle old conflicts and reconcile with all those whom his father had oppressed. He aspired to be popular and loved by his people. One must not conclude, however, that he was truly liberalminded. He was, in fact, a patriarchal Christian ruler, who believed in the divine right of kings, social ranks, and a religious state. When, as a consequence of the democratic–national revolution of 1848, Friedrich Wilhelm IV was elected emperor of a new German nation state by the majority of the assembly, he declined the crown, unwilling to accept it from anyone but the assembly of ruling German princes as had been the custom in the Holy Roman Empire (cf. Nipperdey 1996: 350–5, 586–7). However, in the first years of his reign he presented himself as an artloving, scholarly Philhellenist determined to create and spread a new image of the Prussian state. Part of this mission was the newly inaugurated king’s wish to have a series of Greek tragedies staged. He had engaged the romantic poet Ludwig Tieck, at the time almost 70 years of age, as the royal Vorleser. Tieck was famous for his recitations before invited audiences, mostly of plays, and it was in this capacity that the Royal Court employed him. After consulting with him, the king appointed Tieck as supervisor for the project of staging Greek tragedies. It is not certain who came up with the idea of putting on Antigone—Tieck or the king. Hegel, in his Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Arts and even earlier in his Phenomenology of Mind (1807), had praised Antigone as the epitome of the tragic, arguing that two claims of equal right collided in it—that of the family, embodied by a woman, Antigone, and that of the state, embodied by a man, Creon. Since it was impossible to elevate one above the other, their collision

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resulted in unavoidable catastrophe. Since the king was opposed to Hegel’s conception of a new Prussia built on an intelligentsia of government officials and ultimately amounting to a transfiguration, even glorification, of the state, it is hard to believe that he suggested Antigone because of Hegel’s praise—assuming that he did so at all. There are good reasons to doubt it: How sensitive the king was to the text and what kind of political message he may have hoped it would give to the court audience are difficult questions to answer. The Mendelssohn–Tieck Antigone did originate with the king’s own attraction to Sophocles’ tragedy. What is the place of the person and moral intransigence of Antigone with the tastes and forms of a royal entertainment? (Steinberg 1991: 146)

Tieck, on the other hand, tended towards a Christian understanding of the tragedy, wherein he compared Antigone to Mary Magdalene removing Christ from the Cross. Eduard Devrient (1801–77), who played the part of Haemon in the production, stated that ‘Tieck proposed the “Antigone” of Sophocles for the experiment, as being nearer in feeling to modern Christian associations than any other’ (Devrient [1869] 1972: 224). Yet the available documents on the production do not allow us to determine which particular reading of the play was intended. However, most of the reports and reviews justify the assumption that the sympathy of the spectators lay with Antigone, even if the Creon actor (Moritz Rott) played him with the dignified bearing of the stern ruler who is unrelenting in matters of law and order and the well-being of the city; but he equally succeeded in playing the failed autocrat who accuses himself with loud wails and admits that he is nothing. (Förster, ‘Preface’, in Böckh, Toelken, and Förster 1842: pp. i–xvii, at xii)

Antigone (Auguste Crelinger), who ‘was excellent and passionate and yet not without feminine appeal, maintaining a delicate measure of the repulsive attitude towards her sister’ (Böckh, in ibid. 86), seems to have won over the spectators in the end. In any case, the performance of a Greek tragedy can be regarded as a political statement by the newly inaugurated king, implicitly declaring Philhellenism a sort of ‘state religion’. It was meant as a sensational, epoch-defining event demonstrating that Prussia was in a position to revive ancient Greece. In fact, in My Recollections of Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy,

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and his Letters to Me (1869), Eduard Devrient wrote about it: ‘It produced a very great sensation. The deep impression that the revival of an ancient tragedy could produce in our theatrical life promised to become an influence’ (Devrient 1972: 230). The production of Antigone was the first in the German states strictly to follow the principles of historicism, particularly in the historian Johann Gustav Droysen’s sense: ‘We do not want withered pasts to revive, but their great and immortal qualities are to be seized, permeated, and returned to reality with a new and unpredictable effect by the freshest and liveliest of spirits; not a Babel of dead debris but a pantheon of the past should constitute our presence’ (Droysen 1894: 148). With regard to the mise en scène, this meant taking recourse to academic knowledge on performances in ancient Greece without being obliged to adopt each and every known aspect. Instead of one of the usual appropriated versions, a literal and unabridged translation was used. It was penned in 1839 by Johann Jakob Christian Donner, who even maintained the original metre.2 Nevertheless, there was some criticism regarding certain expressions. It was also the first ever systematic cooperation in a German-speaking country between artists and scholars from the Altertumswissenschaften, with August Böckh, professor of Greek philology, serving as philological adviser to the production. The attempt to approximate the performance to conditions in ancient Athens wherever this made sense explains the choice of the Court Theatre at the New Palace as venue (see Illustration 2.1): it was equipped with an amphitheatre, which was remodelled and redesigned for this production on the basis of the principles laid down by the architect and archaeologist Hans Christian Genelli in Das Theater zu Athen (The Theatre in Athens) in 1818. Although the Greek Archaeological Society’s first excavations of the Dionysus theatre dated back to 1839, nothing had been discovered that might have challenged Genelli’s concept at the time of the preparations for the Potsdam production. However, following the performance, the archaeologist Ernst Heinrich Toelken from the

2 I am not going to discuss here whether literal translations are possible at all. Suffice it to say that, at the time of the Potsdam production, it was the firm belief of translators and all those who used their translations that it was so.

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Illustration 2.1 Potsdam, Neues Palais, Theater, The Court Theatre.

University of Berlin raised some objections to Genelli’s concept, as he believed he had discovered some incongruities with the deliberations of the Roman architect Vitruvius, who was still considered the undisputed authority in questions of ancient theatre architecture. According to Genelli’s plans, the stage, without a curtain, was raised 5 feet above the orchestra, guaranteeing an unrestricted view from all seats in the auditorium. Stage and orchestra were linked by a huge staircase. The thymele, the altar of Dionysus, was placed at the centre of the orchestra; it was used to hide the prompter and occasionally became part of the performance area. Antigone, for instance, sought refuge there. The entrances and exits (the parodoi) were found on both sides of the proscenium arch. Located centrally at the back of the stage was the palace of the King of Thebes. At the end of the performance, its great gates opened to reveal the dead Eurydice—which seems to have had an overwhelming effect on the spectators. The actors’ performance space extended from the stage into the orchestra, while the chorus, consisting of fifteen members (played by members of the Berlin Court Opera) and a chorus leader, remained within it.

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The fact that the costume design remained faithful to archaeological knowledge was no surprise. Goethe had used similar costumes in Ion and Antigone, and by the end of the eighteenth century it had become customary to use period costumes. What comes as more of a surprise here is that the ancient convention of the chorus was introduced. Of course, Schiller had advocated its introduction as a means to create aesthetic distance. In his production of Antigone, Goethe had included a chorus but it did not speak—let alone sing—the verses together. Rather, individual members recited them. Potsdam, however, followed another model. The performance of Oedipus the King, held on the occasion of the opening of the Teatro Olimpico in Vicenza in 1585, was the first, and for over 200 years the only, performance of a Greek tragedy on a public stage in modern times for which music had been composed for the chorus songs, in this case by Andrea Gabrieli. For the chorus in the Potsdam Antigone the songs as well as the epirrhematic scenes were set to music as well, in this case by Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, who was asked to come to Berlin to do so. He had caused a sensation some years earlier through his revival of Bach’s St Matthew Passion at the Singakademie in Berlin (1829). Setting the chorus songs to music posed a great challenge to Mendelssohn. He was obliged meticulously to follow Donner’s translation, including the metre of the verses, which frequently changed in the middle of a song. In a letter to Ferdinand David dated 21 October 1841—that is, a week before opening night—Mendelssohn wrote: As such, it was a splendid task, and I worked on it with sincere pleasure. But it was strange to observe how much remains unchanged in art; the voices of all these choruses are still so genuinely musical and yet so unique that no composer could ask for more. The German words (we have Donner’s translation) gave me and the singers great trouble . . . we chose the best voices from the choir and the best soloists. . . . the one reading we have had so far affected me more profoundly than I would have ever dreamed . . . All parts where Creon and Antigone speak verse and counter-verse are melodramatic, and the chorus responds with song. Also wherever we have trimetres, the chorus leader speaks the words written for the chorus. (Mendelssohn-Bartholdy 1972: 168–9)

While composing the music, Mendelssohn often discussed the philological problems he encountered with August Böckh, who lived in the same building and whom he inspired to embark on a translation of his own. As this quotation suggests, Mendelssohn was not entirely happy

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with Donner’s translation. He repeatedly consulted the original text and worked hard to adapt the music to it. In a letter to Droysen, his former tutor, he wrote some weeks after the first performance: the wonderful, natural, original verse made a more overwhelming impression than I had ever dreamed possible. It gave me a boundless joy, which I will never forget. The more or less jolting words do not inspire concern; but the mood and the verse rhythms are everywhere so truly musical, that one need not think about the individual words but rather compose only for those moods and rhythms— and the chorus is finished. Even today one could hope for no richer task than these multifaceted choral moods: victory and daybreak [i.e. Mendelssohn’s chorus no. 1], peaceful reflection [no. 2], melancholia [no. 3], love [no. 4, first part], mourning [no. 4, second part], Bacchus’ song [no. 6] and the earnest warning at the end [no. 7]—what more could one want? (Letter to J. G. Droysen, 2 December 1841, quoted in an English translation in Steinberg 1991: 149)

The outcome of Mendelssohn’s efforts was something completely novel in German theatre: it was neither opera nor melodramatic music nor the usual music for dramatic theatre (Schauspielmusik). The overwhelming effect the performance exerted on the spectators seems to have been primarily due to Mendelssohn’s music and its interplay with the space and the acting. Droysen, who attended two later performances at the Royal Theatre in Berlin, wrote about the music in his review: they are strange yet coherent sounds through which he (the composer) speaks to us; not ancient music, but the impression of ancient music, as he must have thought of it. Yes, and more; that first scene between Antigone and the sister, in such an unusual setting, with such an alien sound of verses, with that harshness of motif, that rock-steady determination,—and at first she leaves us rather cold; we see the process without truly finding our way into it; we find it somewhat interesting to see a classical play for a change,—and then the singing chorus enters and instantly the sound of the music makes us feel at home, we return to familiar grounds, to familiar sensations, we grow warm and warmer; the next scene has us better prepared, receptive beyond ourselves; the next song of the chorus has made us feel utterly at home in this new, ideal world; we are tightly gripped by the high and higher soaring violence of the merciless struggle; our dry gaze filled with dread sees the weighty catastrophe approaching, which is, blow for blow, followed by the most atrocious fulfilments. (Droysen 1894: 148–9, 25 April 1842)

Such an effect was possible only because the actors adopted a particular ‘classical’ acting style befitting the music. ‘Modern sentimentality,

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hollow gestures, and unnecessary swagger expressed through mouth, hand, and foot were avoided completely’ (Förster, in Böckh, Toelken, and Förster 1842: p. xii). The reviews, both by Altertumswissenschaftler and theatre critics, almost unanimously praised the actors for that style. Among them, Auguste Crelinger as Antigone stood out. The critics agreed that she left ‘the most splendid impression and completely conveyed the dignified character in her fight against fate, but always in the classical style and never compromising the noble standard, even at the most emotional moment’ (Anon., Berlinische Nachrichten von Staats- und gelehrten Sachen, 15 April 1842). Her performance was characterized as ‘spirited, and equally heroic and elegiac’ (Anon., Berlinische Nachrichten von Staats- und gelehrten Sachen, 30 October 1841), but never ‘unfeminine’ (Böckh, in Böckh, Toelken, and Förster 1842: 86). Regarding Bertha Stich’s performance of Ismene, all critics emphasized her ‘tenderness’ (ibid. 86–7) and ‘gentler feminine nature’ (Anon., Königlich privilegirte Berlinische Zeitung, 30 October 1841). Eduard Devrient as Haemon came across as a real ‘Greek youth; his body trained on the sports ground as well as in the palaestra, the free bearing of his entire being was that of a son of the King of Thebes’ (Förster, in Böckh, Toelken, and Förster 1842: pp. xiii–iv); and as Eurydice Amalie Wolf, who in Goethe’s 1809 production of Antigone had played the lead role, ‘yet again lived up to the distinguished Weimar school in which she was trained’ (ibid., p. xii). These descriptions and characterizations are somewhat of the classical style favoured by Goethe, albeit with more emphasis placed on ‘passion’. Here it was not only tolerated but praised as highly appropriate. Even the movements in and through the space followed this style—the goal not being to form a beautiful tableau in Goethe’s sense but to underline the three-dimensionality of the relatively small space, as can be gathered from this description of the beginning: following Mendelssohn’s overture Antigone stood alone at the small altar in front of the pillars in the background. Ismene steps out through the entrance to the audience’s left. . . . At the end of this scene Antigone takes a jug shaped in the ancient style from the above-mentioned altar, places it on her head, and descends first the steps from the skene to the other stage and then down to the orchestra, after which she disappears through the orchestra’s entrance to the left of the audience. The chorus now ascends through the orchestra’s entrance to the

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audience’s right, circling the thymele with measured steps, then stands singing first on the one and then on the other side, so that system and countersystem, verse and anti-verse are facing each other. (Friedrich Wilhelm Wickenhagen, Both’s Bühnen-Repertoir des Auslandes, 13/103 (1845), 1905)

This interplay of music, spoken words, acting, and spatial movement created a new classical style that was able to transfer the Greek tragedy ‘from the limited circle of bookish study to the freely accessible ground of living artistic perception’ (Devrient 1967: 310). In this sense, the performance redefined the relationship between past and present. It turned the stage into a place where the distant past could be remembered, albeit not ‘as it had actually taken place’ (Ranke) but in a transformed state. All those involved in the production were deeply aware of the historical and cultural distance to ancient Greece and its theatrical conventions and devices, rendering a revival of its tragedies impossible in terms of a comprehensive imitation. As Eduard Devrient put it some years later in his Geschichte der deutschen Schauspielkunst (A History of the German Art of Acting, 1848–74): this practical attempt proved so fruitful precisely because it did not aspire to an archaeological imitation of what scholars thought they knew about the performances in Athens. Instead, it was and had to be an experiment in modern acting as it would be impossible to return to ancient conventions and conceive the choruses according to the poor musical means of antiquity. (Devrient 1967: 310–11)

The staging of Antigone was an appropriation of a tragedy from a distant past but on its own terms—that is, maintaining its ‘foreignness’ and ‘distance’ but emphasizing those elements that might make it meaningful for today’s audiences. The production not only redefined the relationship between past and present but also that between actors and spectators. Droysen, in particular, tried to capture the effect by analysing and describing it in more detail: the overall impression is unexpected and strange enough to invalidate the known trivialities of art appreciation; magnificent, torrential enough to profoundly stir the heart and engage it lastingly. . . . an atmosphere of festivity, self-oblivion, and devotion permeates the auditorium. We want to gladly welcome this devotion in the known interest of art: it had all but disappeared from our theatre practice, indeed our entire perception of art. If instead of feeling we only judge or gaze through the glasses of another’s judgements, never forgetting ourselves and

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allowing our dear mundane I to fall silent before the manifestations of the genius . . . then art, defenseless against virtuosity and art appreciation, is in a bad place; art loses its sanctity, its foundation, its right . . . (Droysen 1894: 146–7)

Remarkably, Droysen draws attention to the atmosphere that spread in the space and enveloped the spectators. An atmosphere is nothing we can see, hear, smell, taste, or touch. Still, it is sensed physically and involves most of the senses. The spectators are never opposed to an atmosphere. Rather, they are immersed in it; the sounds, the rhythms, and the light invade their bodies. Droysen stresses that the spectators acted not as critical or bored observers—seemingly the predominant spectatorial attitude of the time—but as involved participants who underwent the experience of detachment from their familiar environments, habits, and even themselves. In other words, they shared the experience of liminality (cf. Fischer-Lichte 2008: 114–20, 174–90). The terms Droysen chose to characterize this particular atmosphere—‘festivity’, ‘self-oblivion’, ‘devotion’—refer to the distant past and the performances of ancient Greece in another respect. As was well known already around 1800 and in much more detail by the 1840s, performances in antiquity took place as part of festivals devoted to the god Dionysus. A festival is by definition an event that enables the participants to enter a ‘threshold’ scenario that allows for the experience of liminality: They leave their everyday lives behind and undergo the most diverse new experiences for the duration of the festival. One of these experiences is likely to be that of communitas, communality. Those who enter the festival space as individuals here experience themselves as members of a community—of the polis. Droysen, unable to attend the premiere of Antigone because of a trip to Kiel, but having attended two of its performances at the Royal Theatre in Berlin, implicitly refers to the conditions around performances in Athens in the very first sentence of his review: ‘The Antigone must not be a merely masterly and brilliant court festival, an artistic pleasure for the small, select circle of the highly cultured [Hochgebildete]. The work is intended for the public theatre, for the whole public.’ He continues: ‘the city is full of talk about the piece’, the music, the play (Droysen 1894: 146, quoted in an English translation in Steinberg 1991: 149). One can hardly overlook that ‘city’, no doubt referring to Berlin in this context, at the same time alludes to Athens. Performing a Greek tragedy with recourse

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to ancient Greece thus meant that ‘something meaningful is in the offing, it’s already in the process of becoming’ (ibid.). The performance of Antigone should therefore be seen not merely as a sign but as an actual vehicle for the transformation that Prussia was undergoing—perhaps even alongside other German states. What kind of a transformation would it be? Several years later Devrient still called the performance of Antigone an epoch-making event. Droysen as a spectator and Devrient as one of the actors had sensed the response of the ordinary, ‘normal’ theatregoers in the performance at the Royal Theatre. While only Hochgebildete, the highly cultured élite, including almost all Altertumswissenschaftler of Berlin University and, as many critics noted, only very few women, had taken part in the Potsdam performance, the situation was very different when the production moved to the Royal Theatre. Alongside—male and female—members of the Bildungsbürgertum, other milieus of the bourgeoisie co-constituted the regular theatre crowd, ranging from the rich, landowning class, the Besitzbürgertum, to craftsmen. In Berlin it was more of a cross section of society that assembled in the theatre. As such, the success with the Berlin crowds who flocked to see the six performances staged there is to be interpreted differently from that in Potsdam before its audience of—largely male—scholars and other prominent guests. One might even argue that theatre here took on a new function: it served as an institution offering Bildung to citizens outside the Bildungsbürgertum whose sons were not admitted to the Gymnasium. Moreover, the Bildung to be acquired here was also open to women. Insofar as Bildung relied on knowledge of antiquity and an aesthetic education, it could extend beyond the Bildungsbürgertum and become accessible to other classes and milieus of society, thus giving shape to the project of national Bildung. Theatre was here accorded a function similar to that of the newly founded museums. Gustav Friedrich Waagen, who in 1830 would be appointed director of the Altes Museum, had described its purpose two years previously: ‘The first and foremost purpose of a museum is to promote the nation’s intellectual Bildung through intuitions of the beautiful’ (quoted in Forssman and Iwers 1990: 25). Thus, national Bildung was supposed to unite Philhellenic, aesthetic, and historical competence. In light of this, the argument that the production of Antigone was intended to aid this project does not seem too far-fetched. It is

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underpinned by the fact that it was meant as the first in a series of performances of Greek tragedies, and was indeed followed by a number of others. In 1843, Euripides’ Medea premiered at the Royal Theatre in Berlin, with the music composed by Carl Gottfried Wilhelm Taubert; in 1845, Oedipus at Colonus was performed at the Court Theatre at the New Palace in Potsdam, for which Mendelssohn again wrote the music; after the latter’s death in 1847, Euripides’ Hippolytos premiered in 1851 with a score by Adolf Schulz. Antigone remained in the repertoire with sixty-two mostly sold-out performances by 1882, and none of the later Greek productions could match its success: Medea was performed six times (in Potsdam and Berlin), Oedipus at Colonus only three times, although the reviews in the daily journals were rather favourable. The premiere of Hippolytos—again only for invited guests—was unable to enthuse critics and other spectators, but it was still shown two more times within the following four days before largely empty houses. If indeed they were part of the project to contribute to national Bildung in Prussia, they were clearly not very successful. All productions following Antigone failed to attract, much less enthuse, larger audiences. Even Antigone, while highly popular with audiences, received some criticism, not only by certain Altertumswissenschaftler who were of the opinion that the production ought to adhere strictly to all known details on ancient Greek theatre that they had helped uncover. It was also caricatured by the journalist Adolf Glaßbrenner—known by his pseudonym Brennglas (meaning burning glass or lens). In his comedy Antigone in Berlin, published in his journal Berlin wie es ist und—trinkt (‘Berlin as it Is and—Drinks’)3 in 1842, he pokes fun at the concept of Bildung as indissolubly linked to Philhellenism and so implicitly ridicules the project of achieving national Bildung by staging Greek tragedies. The comedy takes place in the theatre where Antigone is being performed. Spectators, characters of the tragedy as well as actors—such as Ms Crelinger—appear on stage. The audience consists mainly of craftsmen, including a book printer, a bookbinder, a plumber, a locksmith, and a linen weaver. Among them is also a philologist who falls asleep every now and then during the performance but cries out ‘Divine! Divine!’ whenever he wakes up. The audience also includes a few Bildungsbürger, The title is a pun: the word ‘ist’ sounds the same as the word ‘isst’, which means ‘eats’, so it could also be read as ‘Berlin as it Eats and—Drinks’. 3

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who pretend to understand everything but are unable to explain anything in detail. The main characters are the pensioner Buffey and his son Wilhelm. Before the play begins, the craftsmen discuss whether to pronounce ‘Antigone’ with emphasis on the third or the fourth syllable—and the pensioner Buffey admonishes his son in his thick Berlin dialect, Pay attention, when the curtain rises you better acquaint yourself with antiquity, so that you become a useful human being, foolish boy! Because now man must know all this, or he’ll be left behind. (Glaßbrenner 1846: 8)

Bildung, once conceived not as a means to an end but as the unfolding of one’s potential and the epitome of purposelessness enhanced through the study of ancient Greece, is here described as the path to becoming a ‘useful’ person, the prerequisite for securing a better job and for achieving a higher social standing. Yet this criticism is clearly directed not towards the Antigone production itself but towards the vulgarization of the concept of Bildung and of Philhellenism. Glaßbrenner’s comedy was much discussed and relished in Berlin. The success of Antigone in Potsdam/Berlin led to a series of performances of that play and of other Greek tragedies outside Prussia and even Germany. Yet Antigone was always performed with Mendelssohn’s music—for example, in Leipzig (1842), Dresden (1844), and Munich (1851). In Dresden and Munich Oedipus at Colonus with Mendelssohn’s music and Oedipus the King with Lachner’s music were also performed. Munich was a special case. King Ludwig I, who reigned from 1825 to 1848 (and died in 1868), had become an ardent Philhellenist following his journey to Italy in the winter of 1804–5. Wherever he encountered a Greek masterpiece, be it the Elgin Marbles in London in the summer of 1814, or the temple at Paestum in 1817, he wrote verses praising their beauty. Dreaming to turn Munich into Isar-Athen (Athens on the Isar), he purchased Greek works of art wherever possible. In 1814 he commissioned the architect Leo von Klenze, another zealous Philhellenist, to design a building for his collection—the Glyptothek. Ludwig praised it with the verses: She rises, an ideal, glorified In the Greek skies’ deep blue Full of dignity, in noble virtue, And Hellas lives again. (Quoted in Wünsche 1995: 27)

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In 1825, even before he had ascended the throne, he succeeded in persuading his father, King Maximilian I, who regarded his son’s Graecomania as an eccentricity that was not worth spending money on, to send an expedition headed by the Bavarian Colonel von Heideck to Greece in order to support the Greeks’ fight, thus disregarding Count von Metternich’s wishes. Just before von Heideck left, Ludwig handed him some verses as an encouraging message to the leaders of the revolt. After Maximilian had died at the end of that year and Ludwig had become king, he even sent a Bavarian corps led by von Heideck to Greece, and spent substantial amounts of money on the Greek cause. His second son, Otto, was crowned King of Greece in 1832, and in 1834 Ludwig sent von Klenze to Athens to assist in the passing of a new law for the protection of monuments and to oversee their restoration. Despite his Graecomania, which far surpassed even that of Friedrich Wilhelm IV’s Philhellenism, Ludwig I never had a Greek tragedy staged. The first production of a Greek tragedy in Munich, in this case of Antigone, took place three years after his abdication in favour of his oldest son Maximilian on the occasion of the latter’s birthday on 28 November 1851. In Potsdam, the tragedy had been performed approximately six years before the revolution of March 1848. In a diary entry of 28 October 1841, Varnhagen von Ense comments on an article in the Staatszeitung reporting the forced retirement of a member of parliament for the political speeches he gave on a tour through the north of Germany: ‘Are folks not supposed to love this liberally minded representative of the people? Doesn’t one want to tolerate such a noble, natural relationship or his opinions?’ He goes on to mention that, on that same night, Antigone was performed for the king and his guests, revealing the terrible consequences one invites when one turns the natural into a crime—But they, the mighty, they laugh, and when they cry later, we cry with them!—If only we could raise our voices, if only we had a lectern and a stage, a free press! (Karl August Varnhagen von Ense 1863: 359, 28 October 1841)

Thus, Varnhagen von Ense relates the performance of Antigone specifically to the political situation prevalent in the 1840s, considering it a threat to the powerful, who in complete and arrogant disregard of its contents nonetheless dare to commission it.

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When Antigone was staged by Franz von Dingelstedt in Munich in the aftermath of the revolution, it was meant to commemorate the Philhellenism of the former king, Ludwig I. The choice of stage designer in Leo von Klenze attests to this. He made not only the palace at the back but the whole stage resemble a Greek temple. The stage extended into the auditorium, and its opening was lined by Doric columns: four marble pillars on each side supporting an architrave adorned by a frieze. As the reviews suggest, it was the first time that a production in Munich enjoyed a comparable success, with the stage design and the entire performance leaving a deep impression on the spectators. Neither the production of Oedipus the King (28 November 1852), once again on the occasion of the king’s birthday, nor that of Oedipus at Colonus (19 January 1854) made a similar impact. Although Dingelstedt had intended to present the three tragedies as a loose trilogy, as announced in the programme notes to Oedipus the King, this plan never materialized (cf. Boetius 2005: 294-6). In Prussia as in Bavaria the performances of Antigone first took place as a court festival of sorts: in Berlin it was commissioned by and in Munich presented in honour of the respective king. The ticketed performances after both premieres turned out to be crowd-pullers not only within the Bildungsbürgertum but beyond it as well. This would support the argument that here the endeavour to promote national Bildung by merging it with Philhellenism was realized by performing ancient Greek tragedies. However, the question remains as to why this worked only in the case of Antigone but not for other Greek productions. This question becomes even more pressing when we consider the success of Antigone productions with Mendelssohn’s music outside the German states. Antigone was met with enthusiasm at the Paris Odéon (1843) and even proved a sensation when it was produced in London in early 1845. ‘The Potsdam Antigone and its imitations were billed everywhere as the first ever attempts to resuscitate this ancient play on the modern stages of Europe and America, and attracted “learned and unlearned alike” ’ (Hall and Macintosh 2005: 321).4 The British ambassador to Greece had very likely seen a performance of Antigone in Drury

4

Regarding the Antigone at Drury Lane in London, Dublin, and New York, see Hall and Macintosh (2005: 321–49).

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Lane, and in 1850 demanded that Antigone be performed with Mendelssohn’s music in Athens. He even reprimanded the Greek government for not having considered such an enterprise before. The wife of the Prussian envoy argued along the same lines. However, it was not before 17 December 1867 that Antigone was staged at the Herodes Atticus Theatre. The performance took place on the occasion of King George’s wedding to Olga Konstantinova and meticulously followed the model of the Potsdam Antigone. While we can assume that in Prussia as in Bavaria Antigone was meant to spread Philhellenism beyond the Bildungsbürgertum in order to contribute to national Bildung, this assumption by no means applied to its ‘re-enactments’ abroad. In Greece, as a matter of fact, the performance helped to forge a new national identity, affirming the thesis of continuity from ancient to modern Greece. But what about Antigone’s success in Paris, London, and New York? And why was this the only production of a Greek tragedy that caused such a sensation in multiple German states? By developing a new classical style, the Potsdam Antigone established a new theatre aesthetics. On the one hand, it followed the demands of historicism, which nonetheless still permitted the omission of certain alienating elements such as masks—which Goethe had introduced precisely in order to create aesthetic distance. On the other, the singing chorus, for example, observed ancient stage conventions while Mendelssohn’s music also brought in a contemporary feature that stirred emotions and made the audiences feel at home in this distant, foreign world of the tragedy. The music made the foreign palpable. This new aesthetics caused a sensation the first time it was encountered—as in the Potsdam Antigone or in its re-enactments in other places. When it was later applied to productions of other Greek tragedies, this novelty factor had worn off. However, it clearly proved so effective overall that it remained the norm for all Greek tragedies staged until the end of the nineteenth century, setting the standards and establishing the criteria to perform and judge them. When critics wrote about Max Reinhardt’s Electra in 1903, they still applied these criteria and therefore mostly condemned it (see Chapter 4). This theatre aesthetics matched Winckelmann’s ideal image of Greece by performing ‘noble simplicity’ and ‘quiet greatness’ (Winckelmann [1755] 1885, quoted in Trevelyan 1981: 44) through the particular interplay between the space, the acting, and, most prominently, the

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music. When this new aesthetics was realized for the first time in the Potsdam Antigone, it made a powerful impact not only because of its novelty but also because the prevailing image of ancient Greece based on its ‘masterpieces’ here overlapped with the theatrical demands of transferring the principles of historicism onto the stage without turning theatre into a museum or a university. The long-awaited union of Philhellenism and theatre had finally taken place.

3 Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk and Nietzsche’s Vision of Ancient Greek Theatre As the previous chapter demonstrates, performances of Greek tragedies prior to the end of the nineteenth century neither introduced a new theatre aesthetics nor did they mould a new image of ancient Greece. They followed the ‘classical style’ exemplified by the Potsdam Antigone and continued to adhere to a rather Winckelmannian image of Greek antiquity. In light of this, it would seem logical to jump straight to the beginning of the twentieth century and Max Reinhardt’s productions of Electra (1903), Oedipus the King (1910–11), and the Oresteia (1911–12), in which he experimented with new aesthetic means and, at least in the latter two cases, created a completely novel aesthetics of popular theatre—his Theatre of the Five Thousand. However, this would omit two phenomena crucial to our context—Richard Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk developed in the first Bayreuth Festival of 1876, where the complete Ring cycle premiered, and Friedrich Nietzsche’s treatise The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music, which appeared in 1872. Neither Wagner nor Nietzsche made any attempt to adapt Greek tragedy to the ideal of ‘noble simplicity’ and ‘quiet greatness’, which Winckelmann derived from the Greek masterpieces. Instead, they took tragedy itself as the new paradigm of Greek culture to set completely different standards. The framework of a festival pointed back to the fact that in Athens tragedies had been performed in a similar fashion, albeit devoted to Dionysus, while The Ring also drew heavily on the Oresteia. The Birth of Tragedy focused on the dancing and singing tragic chorus in a state of Dionysian ecstasy. Moreover, in his recourse to ancient Greece, Wagner was not addressing the Bildungsbürgertum or making any attempt to

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affirm its cultural identity. Rather, he strove to create a theatre for the people. The concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk and Nietzsche’s vision of the origin of ancient Greek theatre thus appear truly revolutionary. In fact, Wagner developed his ideas of a new theatre in revolutionary times. In 1848, revolutionary movements sprang up all over Europe. In the German states the revolution broke out in March 1848. Initially, the demand for a new social order, including democratization, was given special emphasis. Only a minority wanted to do away with the monarchy altogether. The majority raised their voices in favour of a constitutional monarchy. In many German states the government met these demands surprisingly quickly. New constitutions were formulated. However, soon it became evident that the demands were much more elaborate. After the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire, the German states had been connected only through a rather loose federation. The desire among the people to be united in a nation state grew steadily. The revolution addressed this desire and turned it into a demand. Thus, it pursued two goals that went hand in hand: the democratization of the social and political order, and the foundation of a nation state. Delegates were elected in the different states to constitute a national assembly. It was held at Paulskirche (St Paul’s Church) in Frankfurt on the Main—that is, in the very city where for hundreds of years the Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire had been elected by the ruling princes. The assembly voted for Friedrich Wilhelm IV of Prussia as Emperor of the German nation state that was to be newly founded. As already mentioned, he declined, so that the idea of a nation state had yet to materialize (cf. Wehler 1987: 66–779; Nipperdey 1996: 527–98). In May 1849—that is, during this period—a revolt broke out in Dresden that aimed to get the constitution of the envisioned nation state, the Reichsverfassung—or whatever had been written of it by that point—sanctioned. Wagner, a friend of the socialist August Röckel’s (1814–76), and associated with Georg Herwegh (1817–75) and Mikhail Bakunin (1814–76), participated in the battle on the barricades built by the architect Gottfried Semper (1803–79). He walked through the artillery fire of the Prussians, who were quick to help the Saxons, and distributed manifestos. Wagner saw the revolution as the beginning of and preparation for a similar shakedown in the theatre, which in his view was long overdue. Since 1843 he had been working at the Dresden Court Theatre’s

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orchestra as Royal Saxon Conductor. He had carried out important reforms of the repertoire—the focus now lay on Weber’s and Gluck’s operas (regarding his productions of Gluck’s operas, see Goldhill 2011: 112–16). Moreover, he staged the premieres of his own operas Rienzi (1842), The Flying Dutchman (1843), and Tannhäuser (1845). In 1848, the year of the revolution, Wagner submitted to the Court Theatre’s administration a reformatory pamphlet entitled ‘Entwurf zur Organisation eines deutschen Nationaltheaters für das Königreich Sachsen’ (‘Draft for the Organization of a German National Theatre for the Kingdom of Saxony’). It did not provoke any response. The revolt was put down. Wagner was a wanted man and had to go into exile. He still believed in the revolution as the conditio sine qua non for a similar upheaval in the theatre. From his exile in Zurich he wrote to his friend Theodor Uhlig in Dresden (12 November 1851): I can think of a performance only after the revolution, only the revolution can bring me artists and listeners, the next revolution must necessarily put an end to the entire miserable state of our theatre: they must and will all collapse, this is inevitable. From the rubble I will then assemble what I need: that is when I will find what I need. I shall erect a theatre on the banks of the Rhine, and issue invitations to a great dramatic festival. After a year’s preparation, I shall produce my complete work in a series of four days. With this, I will reveal to the people of the revolution the meaning of this revolution in its noblest sense. That audience will understand me; the current one cannot. (Wagner 1890: 137–41, at 140)1

Wagner’s vision of a new aesthetics thus cannot be separated from the political. Both go together, and Wagner directly refers to the performances of tragedies in ancient Athens striving for similar conditions to make this point: This people, streaming in its thousands from the State-assembly, from the Agora, from land, from sea, from camps, from distant parts—filled with its thirty thousand heads the amphitheatre. To see the most pregnant of all tragedies, the ‘Prometheus’, came they; in this Titanic masterpiece to see the image of themselves, to read the riddle of their own actions, to fuse their own being and their own communion with that of their god; and thus in noblest, stillest peace to live

1

Since the original published translations of certain German texts—e.g. Shedlock’s translation here of Wagner—misinterpreted the German and was thus found to be somewhat inadequate in parts, I have at times decided to make small changes to rectify this situation. Should readers find that certain quotations in this book diverge from their published versions, this is why.

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again the life which a brief space of time before, they had lived in restless activity and accentuated individuality. . . . For in the tragedy he found himself again— nay, found the noblest characteristics of the whole nation . . . (‘Art and Revolution’, in Wagner 1892–9: i. 30–65, at 34)

However, ‘we do not wish to revert to Greekdom’ (ibid. i. 54), as he writes in ‘Art and Revolution’ (1849), ‘only Revolution, not slavish Restoration, can give us back that highest Artwork’ (ibid.). In this essay, as in the two following ones, ‘The Artwork of the Future’ (1849) (ibid. i. 69–213) and ‘Opera and Drama’ (1851) (ibid. ii: 1–396), Wagner justifies the necessity of a new theatre by taking recourse to a three-stage model of history, which Schiller and Karl Marx also adhered to. Wagner, like Schiller before him, considered the Greek polis the ideal state of the past. For in it, as was a commonly held opinion, every individual was able to elevate him or herself to the human species. Accordingly, even ‘the public art of the Greeks, which reached its zenith in their Tragedy, was the expression of the deepest and the noblest principles of the people’s consciousness . . . ’ (ibid. i. 47). Tragedy is therefore to be regarded as ‘the perfect artwork’. On the one hand, as ‘free and lovely public life’ (ibid. i. 53), it is the expression of individual and public consciousness. On the other, ‘man . . . in his entirety’ manifests himself in it, emerging from the ‘most intimate’2 union of the ‘corporeal man’, the ‘emotional man’, and the ‘man of understanding’ (ibid. i. 93). These three aspects of a human being corresponded to his ‘three chief artistic faculties’ that are brought forth as ‘the arts of Dance, of Tone, and Poetry’. Greek tragedy as the undissolved union of these ‘three primeval sisters’ (ibid. i. 95) therefore represented the perfect expression of humanness. This union enabled each single art form to unfold ‘its highest faculty’ (ibid. i. 104). Thus, Greek tragedy, ‘the great unitarian Artwork of Greece’ (ibid. i. 52), realizes a socio–political as well as an anthropological and an aesthetic ideal. The dissolution of the Athenian polis resulted in the dissolution of this ideal: the individual and the state fell apart. The result was an expansion of the state’s power, on the one hand, and increasing privatization, division of labour, and specialization, on the other, so that man was degraded to a ‘mere instrument to an end which lay outside himself ’ (ibid. i. 57). Consequently, ‘man . . . in his entirety’ was torn apart into 2

Since Ellis seems at times to leave out and/or misconstrue Wagner’s original German texts, I have adapted some of his quotations.

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the corporeal, the emotional, and the rational man. The same happened to the corresponding art forms—dance, music, and poetry. It is true that each branch was able to develop its highest faculty, leaving no room for improvement: ‘Today no isolated art can invent any new thing more; and that not only plastic art, but no less the arts of dance, instrumental music, and poetry’ (‘The Artisthood of the Future’, in ibid. viii. 343–61, at 361). They had all become sterile. As a result, according to Wagner, the claims of the individual and those of the state opposed each other on stage. The individual, instead of being an end to himself, had turned into an instrument through his overspecialization and ‘art, as it now fills the entire civilized world’, had degenerated to a mere commodity: ‘Its true essence is Industry; its ethical aim, the gaining of gold; its aesthetic purpose, the entertainment of those whose time hangs heavily on their hands’ (ibid. i. 42). Under such conditions it seemed impossible to restore the wholeness of man through the union of the corporeal, the emotional, and the rational, as well as of the individual’s and the state’s claims—or the Gesamtkunstwerk. There were two feasible paths that could lead to radical change: ‘Revolution’ (ibid. i. 53) or ‘revolutionary’ art (ibid. i. 52). While a revolution would alter the socio-political conditions in order to bring about change, revolutionary art would proceed from the reunion of these separated branches of art. However, both paths would lead to the same final result. Since Wagner was working in the aftermath of a failed revolution, he figured that the chances of a successful one to follow soon were rather slim. Not unlike Schiller half a century earlier, he chose the second alternative—revolutionary art, which, however, he intended to push much further. It was supposed to bring about the ‘United Artwork of the Future’ (ibid. i. 190) and return its lost totality. Somewhat similar to the ‘United Artwork of the Greeks’, it would have to manifest a sociopolitical as well as an anthropological dimension. As revolutionary art, however, it would have to privilege the aesthetic aspect. The great United Artwork, which must gather up each branch of art to use it as a means, and in some sense to undo it for the common aim of all, for the unconditioned, absolute portrayal of perfected human nature—this great United Artwork . . . [does not appear] as depending on the arbitrary purpose of some human unit, but can only conceive it as the common work of the Mankind of the Future. (Ibid. i. 88)

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This ‘common work’ was supposed to be accomplished not merely through the collaboration of the participating artists—poets, composers, painters, architects, musicians, singers, actors, and dancers. The spectators were also to take part in its creation by adopting a new art of spectatorship, as neither the sentimental identification of the bourgeois theatre of illusion nor the facile enjoyment of the prevalent entertainment theatre seemed appropriate to the Gesamtkunstwerk. It demanded concentration and participation. Wagner had already envisaged a new kind of spectator in his early Dresden pamphlet on a national theatre: ‘This interest of the public’s must be active, energetic—not slack and superficially attracted’ (‘Plan of Organization of a German National Theatre for the Kingdom of Saxony’, in ibid. vii. 319–60, at 335). The Gesamtkunstwerk calls for active spectators. They should transcend their roles as ‘organically involved witnesses’ (ibid. ii. 337) to become ‘necessary sharers in the creation of the artwork’ (ibid. ii. 331). For the Gesamtkunstwerk can be completed only via the spectator, through his emotions stimulated by ‘that ideal illusion that wraps us as it were in a hazy longing, in a dream of something true that we have never experienced ourselves’3 (‘A Glance at the German Operatic Stage of To-day’, in ibid. v. 263–84, at 284). This claim was indeed revolutionary. It not only meant that the requisite active participation of the spectators would work as a means to unfold their own potential—that is, further their Bildung. It also points to the political dimension implied by the idea of Bildung, which is mostly overlooked. The performance of the Gesamtkunstwerk ultimately aims to realize a socio-political utopia. As ‘witnesses’ and ‘necessary sharers’, the spectators represent the ‘free and lovely public life’, which in the sociopolitical reality can be achieved only by way of a revolution. Through their active participation in the Gesamtkunstwerk, the audience, until then a motley assembly of bored, identical, egotistical private persons, would be ‘redeemed’ as a community of a representative public sphere with creative individuals: ‘Genius no longer will stand isolated, but all will have part in it, the Genius will be an associate one’ (ibid. viii. 353).

3 Here, too, the original published translation of Wagner diverged too far from the original German. For the sake of accuracy, I have therefore tweaked it in order to achieve a more literal translation.

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To achieve this goal, the Gesamtkunstwerk takes recourse to two factors constitutive of Greek tragedy—first, myth, and, secondly, performance as part of a festival. In ‘Opera and Drama’ Wagner argues that myth is the basic material of Greek tragedy. Through its own imaginative power, the community ‘becomes in Mythos, the creator of Art’ (ibid. ii. 155). In order to revive this faculty inherent to myths in modern times, Wagner establishes a particular relationship between myth and music. Without the myth, the Gesamtkunstwerk is unthinkable. For ‘conscious individuality’ (ibid. ii. 195), which emerges as a result of the union of the corporeal, the emotional, and the rational man, cannot be represented by a historical or a fictional subject matter, but by myth alone. Because of the ‘influence of a State which has put everything into a regulation livery’ (ibid. ii. 61), in the historical and current reality, individuality can only be conceived but no longer experienced and therefore also not represented. ‘The incomparable thing about the Mythos’, by contrast, ‘is that it is true for all time, and its content, how close so ever its compression, is inexhaustible throughout the ages’ (ibid. ii. 191). It focuses on ‘the essence of the Individuality’ (ibid. ii. 191), ‘whose content’ therefore is ‘the purest essence of humanity’ (ibid. ii. 190). Music, in turn, enables the rebirth of the myth (cf. Lévi-Strauss 1969). For it is the ‘mother-element . . . from whose womb . . . Word and Word-speech’ (Wagner 1892–9: ii. 235) have sprung. Wagner accordingly defines ‘the infinitely potent orchestra’ (‘Actors and Singers’, in ibid. v. 157–228, at 198) as the ‘mother-womb of Ideal Drama’ (ibid. v. 199). Regarding this function, it is to be understood as the immediate successor to the Greek orchestra, which was ‘the magic tripod, the fruitful mother-womb of the Ideal Drama . . . link between the public and the stage . . . mediator of the ideality of the play’ (ibid. v. 195). The orchestra thus can be regarded as substitute for the chorus performing in the orchestra of antiquity. When Gottfried Semper designed a Festspielhaus for the performances of Wagner’s music dramas in Munich, he considered this function of the orchestra: Because Wagner wanted two things: firstly, a centrally located orchestra at the same spot as in ancient Greek theatres, where of course it served somewhat different purposes, and, secondly, the largest possible separation of the ideal stage from the reality represented by the auditorium. This would be achieved by

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shifting the spectators’ judgement of scale by hiding the orchestra as well as the lower edge of the stage. (Semper 1906: 43, 14 October 1865)

Through these means, the orchestra enabled the myth’s communitybuilding faculties and, at the same time, allowed the spectators to experience ‘a hazy longing, in a dream of something true that we have never experienced ourselves’ (ibid. v. 284). Moreover, the transformation of the ancient chorus into the modern orchestra in a way prefigured Nietzsche’s idea of the birth of tragedy out of the spirit of music. The decision to have his music dramas performed at/as a festival proved to be consequential in terms of both aspects. Wagner’s criticism of the commodification of performances meant that their arbitrary reproducibility had to be replaced with the uniqueness of the event— theatre had to be turned into a festival taking place only once a year as had been the custom in ancient Athens. In his essay ‘Zukunftsmusik’ (‘Music of the Future’, in ibid. iii. 293–346), Wagner, searching for a ‘prototype’ for his idea, draws this connection: ‘I found it in the theatre of ancient Athens, where its walls were thrown open on none but special, sacred feast-days, where the taste of Art was coupled with the celebration of a religious rite’ (ibid. iii. 306). In order to celebrate this festival, the people have to leave the big cities and assemble at a very special place— for instance, on the meadows at the banks of the river Rhine and even there, in a ‘provisional theatre’, which should be ‘erected, as simple as possible, perchance of mere timber, and calculated solely for the artistic fitness of its interior’ (‘Preface to the “Ring” ’, in ibid. iii. 274–83, at 273). Here, the participants would be received as guests and not as paying clients. That alone would enable the spectators to adopt an active receptive attitude, that alone would anticipate for the festive community the utopia of a ‘free and lovely public life’ (ibid. i. 53). These writings set the standard for the first festival in 1876, which ultimately took place not on the banks of the Rhine but in Bayreuth. The choice of place, even in this case, seems to have pointed the way. For, as Wagner wrote in the ‘Introduction to First Number of the Bayreuther Blätter’ in 1878: ‘In Germany, it is always the “nook”, and not the large capital, that has been in truth productive’ (ibid. vi. 22–7, at 25). When the first Bayreuth Festival took place, the political situation had changed decisively compared to the days of the 1848–9 revolution. Back then and even later, Wagner had displayed nationalistic leanings along

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with many of his contemporaries not only in the German states. The different ethnic groups that still constituted the Habsburg Empire fought for nation states of their own. Even in France, a centuries-old nation state, many citizens expressed a rather aggressive nationalism under Napoleon III. Yet Wagner had resisted the temptations to put his festival in the service of a chauvinistic Germandom, widespread in the days of the Franco-German War and during the resulting foundation of the German nation state in 1871. It is true that, on 12 December 1870, Wagner said to Cosima that he would need, ‘an emperor for the art [work]4 of the future’ (Cosima Wagner 1978–80: i. 307). However, when the foundation stone for his Festival House was laid on 22 May 1872, Wagner rejected any links to national history. It may be true that he wanted ‘to found for the Germans a Theatre of their own’ (‘The FestivalPlayhouse at Bayreuth’, in Wagner 1892–9: v. 320–40, at 324). But this was not meant to be a ‘national theatre’, since, he explains, ‘I have no authority to accept that title. Where is the “nation,” to erect itself its theatre?’ (ibid. v. 326). A link to the revolution, which had informed Wagner’s thinking earlier, was less relevant by that point than ever before. Wagner attempted to escape this dilemma by comparing his Festival House to a ‘temple’, a comparison that proved to be problematic in other respects. The Festival was devoted to the performance of the entire Ring cycle, which again pointed back to the Great Dionysia in Athens. As has been observed and demonstrated to varying degrees for over a century, The Ring is in many ways modelled on Aeschylus’ Oresteia (Braschowanoff 1910; Wilson 1919; Schadewaldt ([1970] 1999); Ewans 1982; Lloyd-Jones 1982: 126–42; Magee 2000: 83–101; Goldhill 2011: 125–50). In the fourth essay of his Untimely Meditations, ‘Richard Wagner in Bayreuth’ (1875–6), Nietzsche already speaks of ‘such approximations between Aeschylus and Richard Wagner that one is reminded almost palpably of the very relative nature of all concepts of time . . . we experience phenomena which are so peculiar they would hang in the air incomprehensible to us if we could not look back over a tremendous space of time

4 The German word Kunstwerk, a key word for Wagner and used here in the original German quotation, means ‘artwork’, not ‘art’ (Kunst). However, in the published translation of Cosima Wagner’s Diaries, the translator appears to have left out that crucial second part of the word, which I have therefore inserted.

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and connect with their Greek counterparts’ (Nietzsche 1983: 208–9). From Wagner’s autobiography we can conclude that he not only was an ardent Philhellenist from his childhood onwards but also that the Oresteia made a lasting impression on him. Although his Greek was not good enough to read the tragedy in the original, the German translation by Droysen left its mark: For the first time I now mastered Aeschylus with real feeling and understanding. Droysen’s eloquent commentaries in particular helped to bring before my imagination the intoxicating effect of the production of an Athenian tragedy, so that I could see the Oresteia with my mind’s eye, as though it were actually being performed, and its effect upon me was indescribable. Nothing, however, could equal the sublime emotion with which the Agamemnon trilogy inspired me, and to the last word of the Eumenides I lived in an atmosphere so far removed from the present day that I have never since been really able to reconcile myself with modern literature. My ideas about the whole significance of the drama and of the theatre were, without a doubt, moulded by these impressions. (Wagner 1911: 415)

If we understand autobiography as a particular genre of self-fashioning, this quotation leaves no doubt that Wagner wanted his readers to see him as having fallen under the spell of Aeschylus and to understand that Aeschylus inspired him to create a new theatre—music drama— the performance of which did not merely form part of a festival but constituted it. This is not the right place to analyse the similarities and differences between the Oresteia and The Ring in detail (the most detailed comparison can be found in Ewans 1982). Let it suffice to point out the most important differences. While the Oresteia trilogy was followed by a satyr play, Das Rheingold, which bears a certain resemblance to a satyr play, serves as a prelude to the trilogy. It also forms the basis and point of departure for the trilogy—as do the events taking place in Euripides’ Iphigenia in Aulis for those in the Oresteia (in fact, in her seminal production of the Oresteia in 1990, Ariane Mnouchkine used Iphigenia in Aulis as a kind of prelude to the trilogy). The ending, which is not reconciliatory, displays another decisive difference. As Goldhill has emphasized, this difference is expressly marked by an analogy. The lonely Brünnhilde marches to her death and to the destruction of Valhalla accompanied by a torch, thus recalling ‘the end of the Oresteia, though there is a procession of women to the centre of the city, the

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Acropolis, Athena’s house, celebrating the potential of the city as a source of order and control’ (Goldhill 2011: 129). Such differences underline that via his Gesamtkunstwerk Wagner did ‘not wish to revert to Greekdom’ (Wagner 1892–9: i. 54), but instead responded to the problems arising from the process of modernization.5 To what extent did the first Bayreuth Festival achieve Wagner’s aims? The socio-political utopia of a ‘free and lovely public life’ (ibid. i. 53) failed to materialize. The financial scheme meant to ensure that tickets would not be for sale had collapsed. In fact, had the Bavarian King Ludwig II not stepped in at the very last moment with a sum of 100,000 thalers, the entire enterprise would have come to nothing. The tickets were very expensive, so that only the wealthy could afford them. Ultimately, it was not the ‘people’ who flocked to the Festival but the rich and the powerful— emperors and kings, princes and dukes, big landowners, industrialists and bankers, as well as the cream of the Bildungsbürgertum—a minority in this crowd. Even if some spectators were able to meet Wagner’s standards for a new art of spectatorship, there were certainly others he dismissed as ‘holidaying idlers’, whom he despised and flatly rejected as spectators (letter dated 7 November 1871, sent from Lucerne to an unknown addressee, quoted from Lucas 1973: 88). Under these conditions, the great democratic festival to which Wagner had intended to invite the friends of his art, particularly ‘Germania’s ablest sons’ (Wagner 1892–9: ii. 299), could not take place. However, the Festival House itself lived up to Wagner’s expectations. It was successfully built for a democratic festive assembly. The close to 2000 seats followed the model of an ancient—democratic—theatre. Its design adhered to Gottfried Semper’s plans for a Festival House in Munich as planned by Ludwig II in 1865–6, though Otto Brückwald acted as Wagner’s executive architect. Moreover, the House was equipped with electrical lighting, so that the auditorium could be completely darkened for the first time in German theatre history. It was no longer possible to observe other spectators or give in to similar distractions. This led to greater equality among spectators in the Festival House and also encouraged them to focus their attention completely on the stage. 5 In his much-admired production of The Ring in Bayreuth in 1976 (performed until 1980), Patrice Chéreau emphasized this connection when relating the tetralogy to contemporary capitalism and Karl Marx’s Capital.

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Wagner had planned the productions to serve as models. His emphasis was on the work with the actor-singers. He wanted them to relate their singing and their movements in a way that they responded to each other without being repetitive. It is difficult to judge how successful he was in this respect. However, Camille Saint-Saëns wrote on the performance in Bayreuth und der Ring des Nibelungen (1876): The apron, that smooth transition from auditorium to stage, disappears even more because the singers almost never approach it. They usually remain at the level of the second backdrop, where they are brightly illuminated by the festoon lamps and the footlights, and so draw the entire attention to themselves when the auditorium is completely darkened. . . . The staged illusion . . . undoubtedly benefits greatly from this. (Saint-Saëns 1903: 103)

Since the actor-singers did not destroy the illusion, one might conclude that their acting was not counterproductive either. The mechanics also worked hard on creating special effects—for example, for the fire magic in The Valkyrie or the rainbow bridge leading to Valhalla. Saint-Saëns wrote about the fire magic: The god rams his spear into the earth, the flame rises and wraps around the rock on which Brünnhilde lies sleeping in full armour. The Loge-motif spreads with the speed of fire and grows and swells to a sea of flames. The violins whir, the harps gush, the bells ring. The Valkyrie closes with a magical painting, the sounds and colours of which equally dazzle ears and eyes. (Ibid. 95)

The scene seems to have had an overwhelming effect—despite the deficiencies of the set design. The set and the costumes seem to have caused a number of problems. Wagner did not want to work with a conventional scenic artist. However, his negotiations with Arnold Böcklin and Hans Makart failed. After further disasters, he ultimately had to fall back on the very conventional stage designers Max and Gotthold Brückner of Coburg. Their workshop supplied theatres all over Germany and even Europe with ready-made designs from a catalogue. Finally, Wagner ended up with exactly the type of set design he despised. The costumes were not much better. Wagner entrusted the Berlin professor Carl Emil Doepler with their design. On 17 December 1874 he wrote to him: I believe I am justified in regarding the task as a fertile field . . . According to my opinion, any artist who wished to appropriate the sketches I gave him, and make them his own, would find a unique field, not only for the intelligent compilation, but for his inventive fancy as well . . . (Wagner 1912: 187–8)

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Clearly, Wagner did not want any kind of historical or realistic costumes. However, Doepler designed the costumes on the basis of thorough archaeological research conducted at the Germanisches Museum in Nuremberg and at exhibitions of Nordic antiquities. Cosima wrote in her diary that the historical realism of the costumes ruined everything. Wagner was upset about the solutions offered. Even years later, in 1881, he complained about ‘designs developed as if to stand alone in order to be gazed at haphazardly as in a panorama’. He would have preferred the set to be ‘no more than a silently enabling background and environment to enhance a characteristically dramatic situation’ (letter to Ludwig II, 17 May 1881, quoted in Mack 1976: 49). The set and costumes in the style of Meininger historicism and realism did not match but rather distorted Wagner’s idea. His utterance to Cosima sounds resolute: ‘Having created the invisible orchestra, I now feel like inventing the invisible theater!’ (Cosima Wagner 1978–80: ii. 154). A suitable stage designer appeared only after Wagner’s death. Adolphe Appia (1862–1928), who had seen Wagner’s production of Parsifal in Bayreuth in 1882, worked on sketches for a possible stage design for The Ring ten years later. He submitted them to Cosima, who refused to change anything about Wagner’s production. However, Appia’s sketches would have solved the problems Wagner never overcame in his lifetime (cf. Appia 1983–91: i. 95–302, ii. 3–300). The first complete production of The Ring did not meet the criteria for an exemplary or model production, and Wagner was quite aware of that. Uncompromisingly, he stated that this was the last time ‘we performed the “Ring of the Nibelung” here in the old fashion, and I don’t see where this would lead. I only see that we don’t have to make up for much . . . rather we must strive for something completely different’ (from a speech by Richard Wagner at the Bayreuth Patrons’ Association, quoted from Wagner 1886: 207). The outcome of the first festival—and not only in financial terms—was not very encouraging, to say the least. It fulfilled neither its communitybuilding democratic ambition nor the ambition of the model production. And yet it left a lasting impression on certain more sensitive, receptive spectators, which would become manifest in the future. The composer Pyotr I. Tchaikovsky (1840–93) wrote in his ‘Erinnerungen an Bayreuth’ (‘Memories of Bayreuth’, 1876): I must say that everyone who believes in the civilizational power of art will take a very refreshing impression of Bayreuth away with them in light of this great

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artistic endeavour, which will constitute a milestone in the history of art due to its inherent value and its effect . . . What is certain . . . is that something occurred in Bayreuth of which our grandchildren and great-grandchildren will still speak. (Tchaikovsky 1976: 41)

As emphasized here, the first Bayreuth Festival already revealed hints of its enormous future-oriented potential. To summarize the most important aspects in our context. The first, no doubt, is the idea of a festival derived from the performance conditions in Athens and characterized by the separation from everyday life, thus allowing for a liminal experience. This liminal experience is directed not only towards the destabilization or affirmation of an individual’s identity but also towards the coming-into-being of a community. Since theatre here constitutes the festival, it takes over a new function otherwise fulfilled by rites of passage—the function of building a community within the destabilizing process of modernization. It is small wonder that Louis Napoleon Parker, in launching the pageant movement in Britain in 1905, stated that he was deeply indebted to Wagner for inspiring the creation of this new genre that was meant ‘to kill’ the ‘modernising spirit’ (Parker 1905: 143). In his autobiography (1928) Parker reports that he missed only a single performance in Bayreuth. With regard to his first pageant, The Sherborne Pageant, commemorating the 1,200th anniversary of the town in 1905, he expressly mentions Wagner’s influence in uniting the people in a communal experience and in his use of indigenous material. For spectators hailing from the Bildungsbürgertum, theatre as festival meant enlarging the concept of Bildung to include a new dimension. It no longer aspired only to unfold an individual’s potential; this potential was now also to entail the capability of forming a community. This, in a way, posed a challenge to the cultural identity of the Bildungsbürger and their understanding of Bildung. The festival was intended to reconcile individual and community, thus transforming the ancient Greek model according to these new conditions brought forth by the process of modernization. In defining the performance of The Ring as a festival, Wagner established a tradition that would be continued by Max Reinhardt with his performances of Oedipus the King and the Oresteia, by the British and American Pageant Movement, and by the mass spectacles of the early Soviet Union (cf. Fischer-Lichte 2005). While Wagner argued in line

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with Schiller’s On the Aesthetic Education of Man in his anthropological model of reuniting the corporeal, the emotional, and the rational man, his idea of uniting individuals in a community via the festival points forward to the twentieth century. Second, by taking recourse to Greek tragedy as the union of poetry, music, and dance, Wagner creates a completely new form of theatre— music drama. While the Florentine Camerata introduced the singing chorus by inventing opera as a ‘revival’ of Greek tragedy, Wagner replaced the chorus with the orchestra, which had far-reaching consequences for the aesthetics of his theatre. Though Mendelssohn created a new kind of music when adapting the chorus songs, Wagner’s replacement strove for a completely new theatrical genre—the Gesamtkunstwerk of the future. It demanded a new art of spectatorship opposed to that prevalent at the time. Its affinity to the receptive attitude in Antigone, which Droysen described as ‘festivity, self-oblivion, and devotion’, is striking.6 Yet the possibility of a festival that required most attendees to undertake a long and troublesome journey, as well as the complete darkening of the auditorium, which had been impossible before the invention of electric light, and especially the hidden orchestra, endorsed this attitude in an unprecedented manner. Moreover, Wagner introduced myth as the subject of his music drama. For, in myth, ‘all the creative energy of the people contributes towards a sensuous realization (as yet unpremeditated) of the broadest groups of the most manifold phenomena, and in

6

Wagner knew about the Potsdam Antigone and had attended the Dresden production (12 April 1844), indeed had probably even conducted the orchestra (cf. Flashar 1991: 106 and n. 65). He denounced Mendelssohn’s music in ‘Opera and Drama’, dismissing the choruses as ‘a clumsy artistic fib’ (Wagner 1892–9: ii. 150). Whether this judgement was due to Wagner’s conviction at the time that an adequate performance of a Greek tragedy was impossible or whether it resulted from his anti-Semitism is hard to say. In his abominable anti-Semitic pamphlet, ‘Judaism in Music’ (1850, republished 1869; in Wagner 1892–9: iii. 75–122), he writes on Mendelssohn: ‘He has shewn us that a Jew may have the amplest store of specific talents, may own the finest and most varied culture, the highest and the tenderest sense of honour—yet without all these pre-eminences helping him, were it but one single time, to call forth in us that deep, that heart-searching effect which we await from art . . . ’ (ibid. iii. 93–4). This statement is falsified by the evident impact that Mendelssohn’s music had on the audience of Antigone, and that Droysen confirmed. It seems likely that his condemnation of Mendelssohn’s music derived from his anti-Semitism. In any case, during his time in Dresden he had several of Mendelssohn’s works performed—e.g. the ‘Scottish Symphony’ and the ‘Psalm 42’ in 1848.

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the most concentrated form’ (Wagner 1892–9: ii. 154). Third, in citing the Festival of Dionysus in Athens and the union of poetry, music, and dance as the constitutive factors of tragedy, and by selecting Aeschylus instead of Sophocles and Euripides, Wagner anticipated an image of ancient Greece that was not only far removed from that of Winckelmann and his subscribers, but pointed forward to Nietzsche’s vision.7 As Nietzsche had already noticed in ‘Richard Wagner in Bayreuth’ (1876), Wagner’s new theatre aesthetics, while derived from his idea of the Greek Gesamtkunstwerk, posed a challenge to the cultural identity of the Bildungsbürgertum. Nietzsche deems the ‘structure of education’, which had been meant to enable Bildung thirty years earlier, now to be in a ‘rotten’ state (Nietzsche 1983: 195–254, at 211). He concludes that the realization of Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk for the time being had just one enemy: ‘those “cultivated people” for whom the word “Bayreuth” signifies one of their most shattering defeats’ (ibid.). Although Wagner was a professing Philhellenist, although The Ring drew heavily on the Oresteia, and although the Gesamtkunstwerk of the future resulted from a transformation of the Greek Gesamtkunstwerk, the first Bayreuth Festival was attended by a minority of Bildungsbürger—and not only because most of them could not afford the expensive tickets. At the time, the majority did not subscribe to Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk. Even Wagner’s recourse to Nordic mythology—the myths of ‘the people’ that might have enthused the Bildungsbürger given that Philhellenism and nationalism went hand in hand after the foundation of the German nation state—did not work for them. If they related The Ring to Greek tragedy at all, they regarded it as a distortion, even a sacrilege, of it. French wagnérisme, in a way, preceded the Wagneromania of the German Bildungsbürger by some decades. In their majority, they regarded the Bayreuth Festival of 1876 not as their own in terms of affirming their cultural identity but as a high society event. The response of the majority of the Bildungsbürger to the first Bayreuth Festival is comparable to that of the philologists—and other Bildungsbürger—to Nietzsche’s treatise The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music (1872). This should come as no surprise when we 7 This did not mean that Wagner did not admire their work. In ‘Opera and Drama’ he quite extensively deals with Antigone and celebrates it as the expression of the ‘purest essence of humanity’ (Wagner 1892–9: ii. 190).

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consider the special relationship between the two. In fact, Nietzsche at that time8 regarded Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk as the rebirth of tragedy under the conditions set by the modernizing process. Moreover, the treatise sketches a completely novel—then very provocative and controversial—picture of ancient Greek tragedy, as far removed from the Winckelmannian image of ancient Greek masterpieces as possible. In the ‘Preface to Richard Wagner’, Nietzsche declares that his book deals with ‘an aesthetic problem’ (Nietzsche 1967: 31) that is to be taken very seriously. For ‘art represents the highest task and the truly metaphysical activity of this life, in the sense of that man to whom, as my sublime predecessor on this path, I wish to dedicate this essay’ (ibid.). From the very beginning, Nietzsche makes it clear that his treatise is not primarily concerned with the problem of the origins of Greek tragedy,

8 As is well known, soon after the Bayreuth Festival, Nietzsche broke the spell Richard Wagner had cast on him at their first meeting at Wagner’s country house Tribschen near Lucerne on Pentecost 1869. Wagner enjoyed Nietzsche’s company because he felt the latter understood him and his strivings perfectly. Their friendship remained extraordinarily close until the laying of the foundation stone of the Bayreuth Festival House on 22 May 1872— Wagner’s 59th birthday. Their friendship, even if not always as close and harmonious, continued until the first Bayreuth Festival, to which ‘Richard Wagner in Bayreuth’ testifies. Shortly after that Nietzsche ‘healed’ himself from the ‘sickness’ Wagner (Nietzsche 1967: 155). In the preface to the second edition of his treatise, which appeared with an altered title—The Birth of Tragedy, Or: Hellenism and Pessimism (1886)—he confesses that he had ‘spoiled the grandiose Greek problem . . . by introducing the most modern problems!’ (Nietzsche 1967: 24). A few years later, in ‘The Case of Wagner: A Musician’s Problem’ (1888) and ‘Nietzsche Contra Wagner: The Brief of a Psychologist’ (1889), he accuses him of being ‘décadent’, ‘une névrose’ (‘The Case of Wagner’ and ‘Nietzsche Contra Wagner’, in Nietzsche 1924: 1–51, at 73, and 53–82, at 13; Nietzsche 1967: 166) and his music of stimulating worn-out nerves. It is interesting to see what kind of vocabulary he uses here. Around the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century—i.e. between the late 1880s and the First World War—the discourse in the arts, humanities, and medicine was dominated by ‘the nerves’ and all kinds of ‘nervous diseases’. In order to find ‘relief ’, Nietzsche places Wagner in this context. Moreover, he accuses him of being histrionic, even a virtuoso, who plays to the masses, and thus confirms the theatrokratia, the supremacy of the theatre over all the other arts. He denounces theatre as ‘always only something secondary, something made cruder, something twisted tendentiously, mendaciously, for the sake of the masses’ (Nietzsche 1967: 182). Since, meanwhile, Wagner’s music drama and the Bayreuth Festival had become successful, even popular, it is clear: ‘This is precisely what is proved by the case of Wagner: he won the crowd, he corrupted taste, he spoiled even our taste for opera!’ (ibid. 183). Nietzsche’s attempt to get even with or rid himself of Wagner is important with regard to Nietzsche and his later writings. In our context, however, it is irrelevant, since it does not change the close relationship between The Birth of Tragedy and Wagner’s concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk.

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which one might expect considering the long years of its creation. Nineteenth-century scholars were obsessed with the search for origins. The question of the origin of theatre—which at that time meant European theatre or, more precisely, ancient Greek theatre—featured prominently in the classics. Philologists and archaeologists alike pursued it thoroughly and with great enthusiasm. As already mentioned in Chapter 2, the Greek Archaeological Society started excavating the Theatre of Dionysus in Athens in 1839, and there was an enormous sense of anticipation and excitement surrounding the results. Not only the scientific community but also the larger public, in particular the Bildungsbürgertum, eagerly awaited each new study dealing with the origins of ancient Greek theatre and greedily devoured every new publication on the subject. In 1869, Nietzsche had been offered a chair in classical philology at Basle University. The title of his book—The Birth of Tragedy—and the general fascination with the question of origins prevalent at the time might have led one to think that it addressed this particular concern—the origin of ancient Greek tragic theatre. It was thus read through that lens and therefore shocked the classics establishment. It did not qualify its author for the chair in philosophy, as he had hoped; instead it cost him his reputation as a philologist and all his students at Basle University (except for one student of law and one of German literature). What was so scandalous about this book, which, according to its author, dealt with a serious aesthetic problem? Nietzsche defined this problem as the relationship between two tendencies that are first conceived as separate art worlds—dream and intoxication or ecstasy. Between these two physiological states exists a contrast similar to that between the Apollonian and the Dionysian. While the Apollonian is the principio individuationis, the Dionysian acts as a unifying principle: not only is the union between man and man reaffirmed, but nature which has become alienated, hostile, or subjugated, celebrates once more her reconciliation with her lost son, man . . . . Now, with the gospel of universal harmony, each one feels himself not only united, reconciled, and fused with his neighbor, but as one with him, as if the veil of māyā had been torn aside and were now merely fluttering in tatters before the mysterious primordial unity. In song and in dance man expresses himself as a member of a higher community; he has forgotten how to walk and speak and is on the way toward flying into the air, dancing. . . . He is no longer an artist, he has become a work of art: in

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these paroxysms of intoxication the artistic power of all nature reveals itself to the highest gratification of the primordial unity. (Nietzsche 1967: 37)

According to Nietzsche, the fine arts—to which Winckelmann refers— and Homer’s epics are determined by the Apollonian, whereas he defines music as a Dionysian art. In tragedy, however, both opposing principles are united. So, the ‘real goal’ of Nietzsche’s enquiry is ‘directed toward knowledge of the Dionysian–Apollonian genius and its art product, or at least towards some feeling for and understanding of this mystery of union’ (ibid. 44). In order to achieve this goal, he ‘must call it, of the origin of Greek tragedy’ (ibid. 56). While the idea of tragedy’s cominginto-being out of these two principles harmonizing or fighting each other by itself seemed scandalous, the explanation of its origin was even more sacrilegious in the eyes of the Bildungsbürger of the second half of the nineteenth century. For Nietzsche stated that ancient Greek theatre originated in the Dionysian principle, which manifested itself through and was enacted by a chorus of satyrs, the original dithyrambic chorus. Such magic transformation is the presupposition of all dramatic art. In this magic transformation the Dionysian reveler sees himself as a satyr, and as a satyr, in turn, he sees the god, which means that in his metamorphosis he beholds another vision outside himself, as the Apollonian complement of his own state. With this new vision the drama is complete. In the light of this insight we must understand Greek tragedy as the Dionysian chorus which ever anew discharges itself in an Apollonian world of images. Thus the chorus parts with which tragedy is interlaced are, as it were, the womb that gave birth to the so-called dialogue . . . The chorus of the Greek tragedy, the symbol of the whole excited Dionysian throng, is thus fully explained by our conception. (Ibid. 64)

In our context, this quotation is particularly telling in two respects. On the one hand, the idea of the singing and dancing Dionysian chorus of intoxicated satyrs, a community that dissolved the boundaries separating individuals, was a symbolic slap in the face of the prevailing cult of the individual. Moreover, it proved particularly irritating to those who assumed Greek tragedy was ruled by an Apollonian serenity. In both respects, Nietzsche stated the exact opposite. On the other, the affinity to Wagner’s ideas about the orchestra replacing the chorus is striking. While Wagner defined the orchestra as the womb giving birth to the ideal drama, Nietzsche described the choric sections as a womb to bring forth the dialogue. Moreover, Nietzsche’s emphasis on the singing, the

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dancing, and the resulting intoxication recalls Wagner’s unity of poetry, dance, and music, and the particular state into which this transports the spectators. Another aspect further highlights the affinity and, at the same time, a fundamental difference between Nietzsche and Wagner. In Wagner’s music dramas, often a person, most frequently a woman, sacrifices herself in order to ‘redeem’ a man. However, this type of sacrifice is very different from the one where Nietzsche locates the origin of tragedy. The tradition is undisputed that Greek tragedy in its earliest form had for its sole theme the sufferings of Dionysus . . . all the celebrated figures of the Greek stage—Prometheus, Oedipus, etc.—are mere masks of this original hero . . . the hero is the suffering Dionysus of the Mysteries, the god experiencing in himself the agonies of individuation . . . Thus it is intimated that this dismemberment, the properly Dionysian suffering, is like a transformation into air, water, earth, and fire, that we are therefore to regard the state of individuation as the origin and primal cause of all suffering, as something objectionable in itself. (Ibid. 73)

Nietzsche here connects the origin of Greek theatre to a very particular ritual—that of dismemberment. A sacrilege of the highest order, this idea was unacceptable to the philologists of the time as well as to other Bildungsbürger because it contradicted their cherished image of ancient Greece. Over the next two decades, however, Wagner’s ideas of a Gesamtkunstwerk, his music dramas, and the Bayreuth Festival became increasingly popular with the Bildungsbürgertum in Germany as well as in other European countries, giving rise to new images of ancient Greece that challenged the dominant, idealized version of before. In the 1890s, specifically between 1890 and 1894, the classical philologist Erwin Rohde, a close friend of Nietzsche’s, published his book Psyche. Rohde here takes up issues dealt with in Nietzsche’s essay and provides a number of philological arguments to back up Nietzsche’s vision. In Britain, the anthropologist James G. Frazer argued in The Golden Bough (which first appeared in 1890) that rituals of death and resurrection, and of dismemberment, can be found in all cultures and are universal rites. Jane Ellen Harrison, a classics scholar and the leading spirit of the so-called Cambridge Ritualists, set out to prove that ancient Greek theatre—tragic and comic—originated in such a ritual. In Themis: A Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion (1912), she tried to offer evidence in support of her claim that there was a pre-Dionysian ritual

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in which the Spring Demon (eniautos daimōn) was worshipped. An ancient ur-ritual of this kind seemed to explain why similar patterns of a deity undergoing dismemberment, death, and resurrection that corresponded to the annual cycle of seasons could be found in many different religions, as, for example, the gods Osiris, Tamuz, Adonis, Orpheus, and Persephone. Accordingly, the Dionysian ritual was an offshoot of the ancient sacrificial one dedicated to the Spring Demon. The dithyramb (hymn to Dionysus) was created in the Dionysian ritual and tragedy developed from dithyrambic poetry. Thus, ancient Greek theatre originated in an ancient sacrificial ritual, that of the eniautos daimōn. While Rohde’s book was largely received favourably with only isolated critical voices, Harrison’s theory was much discussed, challenged, and refuted. However, both works were taken seriously and not dismissed outright, as had been the case with Nietzsche’s book. The dominant image of ancient Greece was challenged not only with regard to the origin of Greek theatre. Between 1877 and 1886, the historian Jacob Burckhardt, Nietzsche’s colleague at Basle University, regularly gave lectures on Greek cultural history. Already in the 1860s, if not earlier, he had developed his first ideas on the subject and continued to work on it until 1892. Burckhardt’s nephew Jacob Oeri edited the four volumes of Griechische Kulturgeschichte (History of Greek Culture) between 1898 and 1902, relying on lecture transcripts and notes. Instead of adhering to the idealized image, almost unanimously followed since the times of Winckelmann, and presenting the democratic model state, Burckhardt dealt with the inexorable power of the state and its often destructive effects on the individual—that is, by exercising enormous political and social pressure on the people. While Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, a renowned philologist at Berlin University but not a historian, uncompromisingly dismissed the work, stating that this book ‘has no place in academia’ (Aeschylus 1901: 7), Robert von Pöhlman, professor of ancient history at the University of Munich, praised it as an overdue correction of the canonized image of Greece, as, for example, painted by Ernst Curtius in Griechische Geschichte (The History of Greece) of 1857–67 (for the English translation, see Curtius 1871–4). In all these cases, the displacement of the traditional image of Greek theatre and of its state, the polis, which went hand in hand with a challenge to the Bildungsbürgertum’s cultural identity, was spearheaded

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by members of that particular class. Classicists and professors of philology, archaeology, and history sketched this new picture, relying on scientific methods that were acknowledged as such by the community— even if this did not ensure that the results were generally accepted. As we shall see, this new image informed theatre on several levels from the beginning of the twentieth century onwards, mostly, of course, with regard to productions of Greek tragedy. Wagner’s music drama—including his prose writings, which helped him develop the idea—and, in particular, the first Bayreuth Festival, the Gesamtkunstwerk of the future, as well as Nietzsche’s essay, The Birth of Tragedy, can therefore be regarded as a turning point in the history of the relationship between Philhellenism and theatromania that is so crucial for the cultural identity of the Bildungsbürgertum. A new image of Greek culture emerged that bore no resemblance whatsoever to Winckelmann’s ‘noble simplicity’ and ‘quiet greatness’; it gave rise to a new theatre aesthetics that drew heavily on what was known of or imagined to be part of the aesthetics of ancient Greek tragic theatre, while transforming it in decisive aspects. This new situation raises several questions. How did theatre take up this challenge in stagings of Greek tragedies? How did the spectators respond to the new aesthetics and/or this new image of ancient Greece? And, finally, what impact did this have on the cultural identity of the Bildungsbürgertum? These questions will guide our investigations in the next chapter.

4 A Culture in Crisis Max Reinhardt’s Productions of Greek Tragedies (1903–1919)

After the Reichsgründung, the foundation of the new nation state, the process of modernization continued at an even more rapid pace than before. Among other factors, the large sums of French reparations following the war of 1870–1 enabled the unprecedented economic boom of the so-called Gründerzeit (‘era of excessive building and speculation after the foundation of the Reich’) and led to an all-encompassing process of industrialization that Great Britain and France had already undergone at a much slower rate in the first half of the nineteenth century. In Germany, a period of swift and extensive urbanization followed. While in 1800 170,000 people lived in Berlin, in 1900 that number had swelled to 2.4 million. In 1800, 12 per cent of the population in the German states lived in towns and cities; by 1910 it was almost half the population of the Reich—49 per cent. These rapid and dramatic changes went hand in hand with two momentous developments, one political and the other cultural. The first referred to nationalism. The Reichsgründung, and, in its aftermath, the emergence of a proletariat as a consequence of industrialization and urbanization, led to a new understanding of nationalism. Up to the Reichsgründung, nationalism and democratization were, so to speak, two sides of the same coin, both directed against an authoritarian state. Now, nationalism began to be defined in increasingly conservative terms. By the end of the nineteenth century, it was used as a kind of bulwark against any attempt to change the status quo. Anyone who demanded more freedom and equality for the ‘lower classes’, the newly emerged proletariat, or who championed some kind of cosmopolitanism, was denounced as anti-national and as a betrayer of national interests.

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The cultural developments resulting from industrialization and urbanization radically altered all spheres of life, including domestic and working conditions, leisure time, the arts, and even the sciences— nothing remained untouched. Knowledge, habits, beliefs, and values all were affected. These changes responded to two divergent trends. On the one hand, the idea of individualism spread to the extent that, as the French sociologist Emile Durkheim put it in his Division of Labour in Society (1898), ‘the individual becomes the object of a sort of religion’ (Durkheim 1933: 172). On the other hand, increasing industrialization and urbanization brought with it anonymous masses that grew on a daily basis. This persistent and intensifying opposition threatened to undermine and break apart society, giving rise to the need to find new forms of integration and social bonding. Many experienced this situation not only as a challenge but as a threat and a loss—as a deep cultural crisis, the notorious Kulturkrise of around 1900. One of the various strategies to overcome this crisis was once again to take recourse to ancient Greece—albeit different strands of it. The Lebensreform (life reform) movement proclaimed the body’s liberation from the constraints and pressures arising from a conventional yet artificial sense of shame, on the one hand, and the similarly ‘unnatural’ living conditions imposed by urbanization and industrialization, on the other. The body was to return to its ‘natural’ state, as depicted and expressed in ancient Greek statues. What Winckelmann had hailed as the ideal human body now came to be regarded as the ‘natural’ one, a state that could be regained only by thoroughly reforming one’s entire way of life, encompassing nutrition, hygiene, clothing, housing, sexuality, and leisure activities. Prerequisites for recultivating the natural body included vegetarian food and abstinence from alcohol and nicotine, as well as special health and hygiene routines—such as bathing, taking showers, indulging in massages, engaging in gymnastics and sports, and wearing loose clothes that would not restrict the wearer. The newly liberated body then had to be set in motion. The motto ‘movement in the open air’ was taken particularly seriously by the many outdoor and nudity movements. The new ideal of the natural naked body moving in the fresh air and sunlight referred to both genders. It was proclaimed as a revival and re-creation of the Greeks. While the proponents of the Lebensreform movement rejected antiquity as the Bildungsideal preached

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by the Gymnasiums and universities, they turned to Greek antiquity as a cultural ideal, drawing heavily on Nietzsche and his concept of life. ‘Self-cultivation’ was now understood as the cultivation of the body (cf. Wolbert 2001; Sünderhauf 2004: 139–239). Interestingly, this did not just apply to the German Lebensreform movement. It also formed the credo of the international modern dance movement. The dancer Isadora Duncan (1878–1927) wrote in her essay The Dance of the Future (1903): ‘Therefore dancing naked upon the earth I naturally fall into Greek positions, for Greek positions are only earth positions’ (Duncan 1903: 18). During his affair with her, the theatre reformer Edward Gordon Craig (1872–1966) wrote about the impact her dance had on German audiences: It would be impossible to grasp the effect Isadora’s performances had in Germany. During this period she was unquestionably the dancer of that epoch. There has never been anything like it since Taglioni, and since Isadora there hasn’t been anyone else, and I doubt whether Isadora was ever more herself than during those years from 1905 to 1910! (Cited in Niehaus 1981: 40–1)

It is not surprising that at the turn of the century this new, modern dance became a paradigm for understanding the body. The beautiful body was celebrated—not as the classical ideal of scholars but as the epitome of life, as Alexander von Gleichen-Rußwurm, the great-great-grandson of Schiller, put it: Antiquity is blossoming life, regardless of what textbooks tried to turn it into: its message is the right to enjoy the richest sensual and sensory life [Sinnenleben]. The world of the Greek gods was not frosty and grey, as museums and grammarians would have us believe, but sensual, succulent, and full of a germinating energy. . . . To really come close to the philosophy, the poetry, and the visual arts of ancient times we are allowed to and should be more naive than the experts, because that is the only way to find the calm sources of beauty that are watched over by nymphs. (Gleichen-Rußwurm 1908: 270, emphasis added)

The re-creation of one’s body according to the Greek model was hailed by the Lebensreform movement and its supporters as one remedy against the Kulturkrise. Another was the ‘revival’ of the ancient festival. In the light of the modern interpretation of the Athenian Festival of the Great Dionysia in Wagner’s writings and of his Festival in Bayreuth, theatre as a whole was redefined as a festival. At the turn of the century two essays were published that highlighted this idea—first, ‘Die Schaubühne—ein

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Fest des Lebens’ (‘The Schaubühne—a Festival of Life’) by Georg Fuchs (1899) and, secondly, Feste des Lebens und der Kunst (Festivals of Life and Art) by Peter Behrens (1900). Fuchs (1868–1949) was a theoretician who would later take over as director of Munich’s Künstlertheater (built by Max Littmann in 1908) and found the Volksfestspiele (Festival of the People) there. Behrens (1868–1940) was a painter and an architect. In 1899 he became a member of Darmstadt’s Künstlerkolonie (a neighbourhood of Darmstadt where only artists resided in houses they had mostly designed themselves); from 1907 onwards he would serve as artistic advisor for the Allgemeine Elektricitäts-Gesellschaft (AEG) in Berlin. He was a pioneer in the field of industrial design, attracting artists such as Walter Gropius, Le Corbusier, and Mies van der Rohe, who all worked in his office. When in 1901 the exhibition Dokumente deutscher Kunst (Documents of German Art) opened in the Künstlerkolonie, Fuchs and Behrens used the opportunity to realize their idea of theatre as a festival by staging Fuchs’s festive play Das Zeichen (The Sign) out of doors and in the midst of the assembled community. Both agreed not only on the general notion of theatre as a festival but also on some of the details resulting from it, such as the abolition of the apron stage, the creation of new performance spaces, and a new kind of acting that was rhythmically based on dance. Despite their consensus, it is evident that each of them defined a festival differently. Behrens saw it as ‘a symbol of our energy surplus’ and as a ‘celebration of our culture’ (Behrens 1900: 11). Contemporary culture is created by labour. Art, festival, and everyday life are based on the same principles: functionality, beauty, and rhythm. While on the basis of these principles culture is created as a unity of art and life, the festival represents this unity and, thus, allows the participants to become aware of their own contributions to the creation of culture. The ‘energy surplus’— of a material and mental nature—acquired and accumulated by everyday culture is consumed in the festival. In this manner, theatre as a festival celebrates culture as the unity of art and life and transforms all participants into ‘co-artists’. Fuchs, however, highlighted another aspect. A professed follower of Nietzsche, he, too, understood ‘individuation as the source and origin of all suffering’ and regarded festivals as a means to break ‘the spell of individuation’ to restore the lost ‘oneness’ (Nietzsche 1993: 52). Theatre as a festival therefore served the purpose of satisfying an ‘orgiastic desire

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for the enhancement of life’. However, it is impossible for us to experience its ‘fulfilment’ as individuals, for it is brought about by the ‘strange thrill that overcomes us when we feel ourselves to be part of a crowd, a crowd that is moved along uniformly. . . . that much is certain: a tremor grips us as soon as we experience ourselves passionately with others, innumerable others, as an enormous unity, as a mass’ (Fuchs 1909: 4–6). Accordingly, Fuchs defines dance and acting as rhythmic movements of the human body through a space, carried out with the creative urge to express an emotion through the means of one’s own body, and with the intention to gleefully satisfy the urge to trigger the same or similar vibrations in other people and thus to transport them into the same or a similar state of rapture. (Fuchs 1906: 13)

Fuchs focuses on the community-building potential of festivals as the means to overcome the Kulturkrise, defining community as a dynamic crowd—an ecstatic mass. Despite their differences, both Behrens and Fuchs emphasized the transformative power of festivals—that is, their ritualistic aspects. They recognized that, when theatre turned into a festival, it would be endowed with a particular transformative force. In summary, ancient Greek phenomena once again served as reference points in the search for new forms of integration and social bonding; they were adapted to the times with the help of new ideas, particularly Nietzsche’s philosophy. While referring to Winckelmann’s notion of Greek statues, this led to a new understanding of the human body as well as a redefinition of theatre as festival. Both these developments proved to be momentous with regard to Max Reinhardt’s productions of the Greek tragedies Electra (1903), Oedipus the King (1910–11), and the Oresteia (1911–12). Like Fuchs, Reinhardt proceeded from the assumption that theatre’s ‘original meaning’ was for it to unfold as ‘a festive play’ (cited in Kahane 1928: 119), as he explained in 1902 in a conversation with friends and colleagues, which took place at the famous Café Monopol in Berlin at a late hour. He even sketched the plan for a Festspielhaus, citing the Greeks: detached from everyday life, a theatre of light and sanctity, in the spirit of the Greeks . . . in the form of an amphitheatre, no curtain, no backdrop, maybe even no props . . . just the pure effect of the actor’s personality . . . the actor amidst the audience and the audience itself, now a people, drawn into it, itself a part of the action, of the play. (Cited in ibid. 120)

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Reinhardt’s idea of the Festspielhaus as an amphitheatre as well as of the audience as ‘a people’ recalls some of Wagner’s key notions. Reinhardt envisioned a popular theatre, one that would address not only the Bildungsbürgertum but also ‘the people’: ‘The so-called “good” audience is in reality the worst. Benumbed, worldly people. Inattentive, blasé, used to being the centre of attention. . . . Only the balcony is responsive’ (cited in Adler 1964: 43). This is not to say that the Bildungsbürgertum was excluded from or avoided his theatre. On the contrary—Reinhardt became their ‘darling’, and they celebrated most of his productions, often attending one repeatedly to allow themselves to be enchanted again and again. Reinhardt’s 1905 production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Neues Theater, for example, ran for many years. Reinhardt’s productions of classical plays proved particularly popular, even though— or perhaps because—he abolished the principles of historicism: ‘The classics must be performed in a new way, they must be performed as if they had been written by playwrights of today, as if their works were alive today. . . . New life will arise out of the classics, today’ (cited in Kahane 1928: 118–19). Well aware of the tension between historicity and topicality when staging classical plays, Reinhardt developed new strategies and means allowing his spectators completely new and so far unexplored modes of perception and experience in his productions—modes that were strongly related to contemporary life in the modern metropolis. Moreover, quite in line with the Lebensreform movement focusing on the ‘natural body’, Reinhardt worked with devices that directed the spectator’s attention to the performers’ bodies—to the individual bodies of the protagonists as well as to the masses of bodies in the case of the chorus and sometimes even to their own bodies.

Sophocles’/Hofmannsthal’s Electra: Greek maenad or modern hysteric? Here, the world has stopped, the breath of mankind skips a beat. A woman, entirely drained and hollowed out with suffering and all the veils which otherwise tradition, friendly custom, and shame draw around us are torn to shreds. A naked body reduced to its last. Thrown out in the night. Become hateful . . . Screams from some primitive past, footsteps of wild beasts, a look of eternal chaos in the eyes. Horrible, say the people, shuddering. (Bahr 1907: 276)

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With these words the playwright and critic Hermann Bahr attempted to convey the peculiar impact on the spectators of Gertrud Eysoldt’s acting, which proved to be epoch-making. Max Reinhardt’s production of Sophocles’ Electra, adapted by Hugo von Hofmannsthal, premiered on 30 October 1903 at the Kleines Theater in Berlin, with Eysoldt playing the lead role.1 Since the opening of the 1902–3 season at the Kleines Theater, Eysoldt had played Henriette in Strindberg’s Ecstasy, Salome in Oscar Wilde’s eponymous play, Lulu in Frank Wedekind’s Earth Spirit, and Nastja in Maxim Gorky’s The Lower Depths. In all these productions, she both enchanted and shocked audiences and critics alike by an intense display of corporeality that seemed to express and create something that had never been expressed or created on stage before, something that until then had evaded any kind of language, or conventional, standardized, formalized movements, gestures, postures, or attitudes. It was after having seen Gertrud Eysoldt as Nastja during the Kleines Theater’s Vienna tour that Hugo von Hofmannsthal promised at a breakfast with Reinhardt and Eysoldt a few days later to rewrite Sophocles’ Electra for both of them. The performance—which lasted about one and a half hours—and Eysoldt’s acting, in particular, seemed to have deeply affected the audience. One critic reported that at the end the spectators were ‘numb for a few moments from sheer nervous exhaustion’, remaining completely still before ‘they gave the poet and the actors a standing ovation’ (dt., Vorwärts, 1 November 1903). From Bahr’s and this critic’s descriptions of the audience’s response, we can conclude that the production revealed two fascinating, indeed sensational, novelties—Eysoldt’s use of her body to achieve a style of acting that had not been witnessed on German stages thus far, and the extraordinary impact on the spectators that transported them into a very particular state. The two novelties refer to a new understanding of the human body and of the relationship between actors and spectators. It is hard to deduce from Bahr’s words alone what characterized Eysoldt’s performance of Electra. He does not describe her bodily postures, gestures, facial expressions, how she modulated her voice while speaking, or any other concrete aspects of her physicality on stage. 1

Clytemnestra was played by Rosa Bertens, Chrysothemis by Lucie Höflich, and Orestes by Adolf Edgar Licho.

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Rather, he recounts his experience of connecting with a dimension otherwise forgotten, obscured, and inaccessible: ‘Screams from some primitive past, footsteps of wild beasts, a look of eternal chaos in the eyes.’ What Bahr seeks to describe in words seems to evade verbal expression, though it becomes clear that Eysoldt had ventured into an unknown arena from which others retreated ‘shuddering’. Neither Bahr nor other critics at the premiere provide many precise or concrete descriptions, which conveys the impression that they did not possess adequate vocabulary to give a clear account of what they perceived. Above all, the critics emphasize the sense of excess and the enormous intensity in her acting, with which, as one critic noted, Eysoldt violated the prevalent norms—that is, the ‘classical style’ of ‘strength’, ‘dignity’, and a ‘sonorous tone of voice’, particularly with regard to performances of Greek tragedies. Instead, the critics found ‘nervousness’, ‘unrestrained passion’, and ‘hoarse roaring’ (Fritz Engel, Berliner Tageblatt, 30 October 1903). Those who felt repelled claimed that the boundaries between the ‘healthy’ and the ‘abnormal’ or ‘pathological’ were transgressed. According to several critics, the ‘screams and the fidgets, the exaggeration of the dreadful, distortion, and degeneration all along the line’ (Richard Nordhausen (n.d.), unidentified review), and the ‘passion growing into absurdity’ were ‘only to be explained by recurring to the pathological’ (H.E., Freisinnige Zeitung, 3 November 1903). Accordingly, they dismissed Eysoldt’s movements as ‘unbearable’, without ‘measure’ and ‘restraint’, and interpreted her transgression into the ‘pathological’ (Paul Goldmann (n.d.), unidentified review) as signifying the dissolution of the self. How far the critics differed in their assessment of this sense of excess is highlighted by their contrasting judgements on the ‘nameless dance’ at the end of the performance, in which Electra collapses and dies. Goldmann deemed it perverse and was deeply shocked by it: ‘The final scene, in which Electra dances in the yard as if her mother’s blood went to her head like wine, belongs to the most abominable I have ever seen on stage.’ Another critic, however, merely expressed his considerable astonishment: The final scenes in which she ran up and down before the gate like an excitable guard dog, then watched the gate in a convulsive crucifix pose and, finally, in a grotesque-dreadful dance acted out her wild excitement at the success of the deed, belonged to the most peculiar of the art of acting I have ever witnessed. (A.K. [probably Alfred Kerr], Vossische Zeitung, 31 October 1903)

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A third critic regarded Eysoldt’s dance as the artistic climax of her performance: ‘No one will ever be able to imitate the way she stared into space in visionary rapture, her head thrown back’ (dt., Vorwärts, 1 November 1903). These comments suggest that some of Gertrud Eysoldt’s movement patterns related to specific contexts pertinent at the time—for example, the antiquity debate and the discussion of hysteria, particularly with regard to the body bent backwards. In his book Psyche (1893), Erwin Rohde took up Nietzsche’s idea of the Dionysiac with reference to the dances of the maenads: It was in frantic, whirling, headlong eddies and dance-circles that these inspired companies danced over the mountain slopes. They were mostly women who whirled round in these circular dances till the point of exhaustion was reached . . . Their hair was allowed to float in the wind; they carried snakes sacred to Sabazios in their hands and brandished daggers or else thyrsus-wands . . . (Rohde 1925: 257)

On vase paintings the maenad is depicted as here described by Rohde. Moreover, we see her dancing barefoot, the upper part of her body bent backwards with her head thrown back. This coincides with Gertrud Eysoldt’s pose in her ‘nameless dance’—the same pose that the dancer Isadora Duncan would soon make famous. It pointed back to the Nietzschean vision of Greece, was adopted by some artists and intellectuals, and disseminated by the Lebensreform movement while remaining controversial with the majority of the Bildungsbürgertum— although Fuchs, in his essay entitled ‘Der Tanz’ (‘The Dance’) writes that the ‘highest cultivated’ section of society had meanwhile also learned to enjoy ‘the appearance of the perfectly developed human body and its movements’ (Fuchs 1906: 6). The pose also invoked the arc en cercle, the body’s curve at the climax of a hysteria attack identified by Jean-Martin Charcot (1825–93), physician at the Salpêtrière in Paris. At the end of the nineteenth century, hysteria was regarded as an illness almost exclusively affecting women. However, even Charcot admitted that hysteric ecstasy was not characterized by any features that distinguished it from other forms of ecstasy (cf. Charcot and Richer 1988: 31). Strikingly enough, the critics in their reviews frequently used expressions such as ‘nervous exhaustion’, ‘nervousness’, ‘nerves lashed’, and ‘pathological’, hinting at signs of hysteria on the part of the actress or of some of the spectators.

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For the contemporary audience at the Kleines Theater, the two reference points—Nietzsche’s notion of Greek tragedy, and Charcot’s and Freud’s ideas on hysteria—would have been obvious. Both imply a loss of self,2 attributable either to the ecstasies of ancient Greece as a ‘primitive past’ or to a nervous disease. Both were seen as equally alarming. However, judging from the critics’ remarks, the performance was a huge success with the audience, who ‘gave the poet and the actors a standing ovation’ after being ‘numb for a few moments from sheer nervous exhaustion’ (dt., Vorwärts, 1 November 1903). So what exactly happened to the spectators, who mostly belonged to the Bildungsbürgertum, during the performance? Eysoldt’s use of her body not only alluded to maenads or hysteria. It also generally directed the spectators’ attention to her phenomenal body. The critics who lauded Eysoldt’s acting particularly emphasized the contrast between her tiny, delicate body and the enormous power of her passionate, forceful movements. ‘In the lead, Gertrud Eysoldt who played Electra with the eerie impulsiveness of a fanatical revenge demon: simply in the bare contrast between her tiny physical stature and the great power of her temperament’ (W.T., Neue Hamburger Zeitung, 1 November 1903). This power also came to the fore in acts of violence that Eysoldt performed on her own body, exerting itself through ‘chopped, hurried movements’ (dt., Vorwärts, 1 November 1903), ‘convulsive spasms’ (unidentified review from the archives of the Theatre Museum Cologne), and other fierce movements, ‘which were taken to the highest level of ecstasy from the very first scene’ (Engel 1903).

2 While Hofmannsthal was working on his adaptation of Electra, he stated in a letter to Ernst Hladny that he had read Rohde’s Psyche and Sigmund Freud’s and Josef Breuer’s Studies in Hysteria (1895). Cf. Hofmannsthal (1937: 384, quoted in Riley 2008: 243, in her translation). Hofmannsthal expressly connected Electra to Nietzsche’s idea of the erasure of individuation in Dionysiac ecstasy when stating: ‘My three ancient plays [Alcestis, Electra, and Pentheus] all deal with the disintegration of the idea of the individual. In Electra the individual disintegrates empirically when the substance of the individual’s life is blasted from within, just as water freezing in an earthen jug cracks the jug apart. Electra is no longer Electra, precisely because she has utterly devoted herself to being Electra. The individual can only continue to exist, and this in a shadowy form, where a compromise is met between commonality and individuality’ (Hofmannsthal 1979: 461; translation quoted in Riley 2008: 243). That is to say, individualism driven to its utmost limits results in the loss of the self—i.e. in de-individuation.

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Whether the critics condemned Eysoldt’s performance as a transgression verging on the pathological and as an aberration from the current image of Greek culture, or whether they celebrated it as a significant artistic innovation, their reviews all concluded that her acting created the impression of a suffering, tortured body—Electra’s—but also, if not foremost, one that was inflicting violence on itself. Thus, it is not surprising that no illusion was created for the spectators. The stage–audience and actor–spectator relationship changed significantly, which most critics noted, though they seemed to have great difficulty in describing and defining the change clearly. They all agreed that the performance had an extraordinary and in many respects absolutely unique impact on the spectators—notwithstanding the fact that they differed immensely in their assessment of it. They repeatedly reference dreams in order to characterize more precisely the particular modality of the performance’s impact: ‘The events stormed past us like a dream fantasy created by Maeterlinck, a single uninterrupted Furioso which began with the first scene and increased in power until the very end’ (J.S., Hannoverscher Courier, 1 November 1903). The mention of dreams pointed to the impossibility of following the stage events by interpreting and rationalizing them, while the simile also conveyed an idea of the strange and new impact of the performance: ‘What happens to Electra is enacted like a terrible dream with its wildly alternating and flickering images’ (Engel 1903)—images that could not be grasped. Rather, they triggered ‘emotional associations of compelling power’ (unidentified review from the archive of the Theatre Museum Cologne), suggesting that the events were not to be analysed intellectually but to be experienced: ‘In all, an atmosphere which is impossible to describe briefly in these lines. One has to have felt it’ (W.T. 1903). Since the perception of the dramatic character and of the actress’s body was often blurred, the stage events were experienced not as an illusion of a fictional world but as a ‘tortuous reality’ (Anon., Berliner Morgenpost, 1 November 1903) that affected the spectators’ senses and strained their nerves. ‘It raves, storms, and whimpers incessantly. One watches the raging like the fight of wild beasts in a cage, with nerves lashed’ (dt., Vorwärts, 1 November 1903). This is also the reason some critics dismissed the impact as inartistic: ‘The shock . . . was certainly enormous, but not remotely artistic and as worthless as the excitement of the audience at the circus’ (Freisinnige

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Zeitung, 1 November 1903). The reviews confirm that the performance first and foremost affected the bodies of the spectators—that is, their senses and nerves—a feeling strongly reminiscent of Nietzsche’s accusation in The Case of Wagner (1888) and ‘Nietzsche Contra Wagner’ (1889) against the composer, in which he declared Wagner to be ‘décadent’, ‘une névrose’ (Nietzsche 1924: 73, 13; 1967: 166), as his music stimulated worn-out nerves (cf. Chapter 3, note 8). This echoes the complaints against Electra: ‘The effects of the art are exclusively created by physiological stimulation and are a long way from having any value’ (Julius Hart (n.d.), unidentified review). Usually, the focus on the dramatic character and the sharp boundary between actors and spectators established by the apron stage—the Fourth Wall—allows for the creation of illusion in the theatre. Gertrud Eysoldt’s acting transgressed even that boundary: ‘Then, however, it was the nervous force of Eysoldt, which one sensed, literally, gliding over the apron stage and reaching for the throats of the listeners’ (Bahr 1907: 277). Evidently, it was suggestion, not illusion, that was at work here. The spectators were ‘fixed to their seats by a basilisk-glance, by hypnotic magic powers’ (Anon., Berliner Morgenzeitung, 1 November 1903). It seems that the performance spellbound them in a way that rendered them incapable of distancing themselves from its immediate impact, which whipped up their nerves and, at the same time, completely wore them out. Caught in this ‘hypnotic’ state, they were able to disengage only by ‘freely breathing again’ (J.L., Berliner Börsen-Courier, 31 October 1903) following the frenetic applause at the end of the performance, after first remaining silently seated and ‘numb’. It seems that it was not only the actress but also the spectators who suffered a loss of self. According to beliefs and studies prevalent at the time, being transposed into a hypnotic state implied a dissolution of the self and a loss of one’s free will, which was synonymous with a loss of individuality and personality (cf. Gauld 1992; Didi-Huberman 2003). The actress thus underwent a process of transformation alongside the spectators over the course of the performance, which implied a temporary annulment of the principle of individuation and the emergence of a community through an ecstatic and hypnotic state. This does not entirely correspond to Nietzsche’s characterization of the dancing and singing community of satyrs in ancient Greek theatre, but it is comparable nonetheless. Such a community, however, was not stable or long-lasting—it disintegrated the

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moment its ‘members’ awakened from their ‘hypnotic’ or ‘ecstatic’ state— that is, it was an ‘aesthetic community’. For a bourgeois audience exalting the individual, it seemed rather extraordinary that a community, however temporary, could emerge over the course of a theatre performance. It is even more surprising considering that this was a community based on a shared experience and not on common beliefs, values, or interests. Moreover, this was a performance that dealt with the subject of sacrifice on different levels. Electra addresses the topic almost from the start. Every night, at the hour of Agamemnon’s death, she conjures up his ghost and promises him a great sacrificial feast. It will claim the lives of Clytemnestra and Aegisthus, as well as of Agamemnon’s horses and dogs, and will be celebrated with a wild, ecstatic dance: From the stars all time comes rushing down, so will the blood from a hundred throats rush down upon your grave! As from upturned jugs it will flow from the shackled murderers, and roundabout like marble jugs will be the naked bodies of all their helpers, of men and women, and in one flood, in a swelling stream, their life’s life will rush out of them . . . . . and we, your blood, your son Orestes and your daughters, we three, when all this is done and purple tents have been raised by the haze of the blood which the sun sucks upward to itself, then we, your blood, will dance around your grave: and above the dead men I will lift my knee... (Hofmannsthal 1966: 76)

When Clytemnestra asks Electra for the appropriate sacrificial ritual to free her of the nightmares that torture her every night, Electra suggests that Clytemnestra herself should be the sacrificial animal that has to be hunted and slaughtered in order to placate Agamemnon’s ghost and release her of the nightmares. After Orestes has done the deed, killing Clytemnestra and Aegisthus, and after all those who hated Aegisthus have killed his followers, a great feast ensues: CHRYSOTHEMIS . . . all

who live are spattered with blood and have wounds themselves, and yet their faces

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beam, they all embrace— . . . and shout for joy, a thousand torches have been lit . . . . (Ibid. 138)

And Electra starts her promised dance. Electra comes striding down from the doorsill. She has thrown back her head like a maenad. She flings her knees up high, she stretches her arms out wide, it is a nameless dance in which she strides forward. CHRYSOTHEMIS . . . Electra! ELECTRA

stops, looks at her fixedly Be silent and dance. All must approach! Here join behind me! I bear the burden of happiness, and I dance before you. For him who is happy as we, it behoves him to do only this: to be silent and dance!

She takes a few more steps of the tensest triumph and collapses. (Ibid. 139)

Two sacrifices are performed over the course of the tragedy: that of Clytemnestra and Aegisthus to mitigate Agamemnon’s ghost, and Electra’s final self-sacrifice, by which she completes the sequence of all ‘I have | had to sacrifice to my father’ (ibid. 126). The focus on the sacrifice once again invokes Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy as well as the theories on sacrificial ritual by Frazer and the Cambridge Ritualists. In his book The Rites of Passage, published in 1909—six years after the first performance of Electra—the French– Dutch anthropologist Arnold van Gennep (1875–1957) undertook a detailed examination of sacrificial rituals and other kinds of rites of passage. He proceeded from the notion of boundaries. The transgression of a marked, visible spatial boundary served him as model for all forms of passage. To transgress a boundary always entails a risk—for the individual concerned as well as for the whole community. In order to minimize the risk and secure a safe passage, particular rituals must be performed. Van Gennep found that all such rituals—which he termed rites of passage— follow the same scheme, which consists of three phases: (1) the separation phase, in which those who are about to undergo a transformation are alienated from their everyday life and social milieu; (2) the threshold or transformation phase, in which the people concerned are transposed betwixt and between all possible realms, which allows for completely

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new and partly disturbing experiences—the phase that the anthropologist Victor Turner (1969: 95) would call ‘liminal’ in the 1960s and (3) the integration phase, in which the newly transformed are reintegrated into society and socially accepted in their new status. Electra, in fact, is transgressing boundaries—she lives in a state of ‘betwixt and between’—that is, a liminal state, enabling all kinds of transformations. It is the final sacrifice—of herself—that brings about the change in her status: deep in her ecstasy she enters the kingdom of the dead, joining Agamemnon. Thus, the whole play can be understood as the threshold phase of a rite of passage, bringing about a series of transformations via the loss of self and the end of individuation. This also applies to the performance, which not only represents Electra’s sacrifices but performs one of them: the self-sacrifice of the actress Gertrud Eysoldt (see Illustration 4.1). After first reading the play, which Hugo von Hofmannsthal sent to her at the theatre, Eysoldt responded to it in a letter dated 9 September 1903, saying that the pain and agony of the reading felt to her like a loss of self:

Illustration 4.1 Max Reinhardt: Sophocles’ Electra; Gertrud Eysoldt as Electra.

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This evening I brought Electra home and read it through. I am broken by it— I suffer—I cry out against this extreme violence—I am afraid of my own strength—of this torment, which awaits me. I think I could only play her once. I feel the need to escape from myself. (Cited in Fiedler 1996: 9)

Eysoldt revived this experience of reading the play through her acting. The violence done to her as she read was repeated in the acts of violence she performed on her own body as Electra. By transgressing the boundary between the representation of the character and her phenomenal body, Eysoldt sacrificed her own physical integrity. Her ‘chopped hurried movements’, her ‘convulsive spasms’, her gestures and movements, ‘which were taken to the highest level of ecstasy from the very first scene’, her ‘screams from some primitive past’, her ‘footsteps of wild beasts’, and her ‘look of eternal chaos in the eyes’ did not leave her phenomenal body untouched and unchanged. She sacrificed its integrity for the sake of the impact of the performance. And it was this sacrifice that transposed the spectators into a hypnotic state, one of ‘betwixt and between’—a liminal state. The frenetic applause and standing ovations marked the beginning of their passage from the threshold or transformation phase back to social life. Thus Eysoldt transgressed yet another boundary in her performance— that separating theatre from ritual. The ritual of the actress’s self-sacrifice allowed the spectators to join Eysoldt in her state of liminality. However, an important difference remained. Usually, the transformation marks a change in status that outlives the ritual process—in the integration phase the community accepts those who undergo the ritual with their new status. Here, each spectator would have had to decide for him or herself whether the changes he or she experienced in the performance were to have an enduring impact or not. Moreover, these changes were not contingent on the community’s acceptance. Yet, by participating in the performance, spectators were able to enter a liminal state, a state between reality and fiction, between being Greek and being modern, between dreaming and being awake; to undergo new, mystifying, and highly disturbing experiences that tortured their nerves and senses. The frenetic applause at the end nonetheless suggests that they enjoyed the experiences they underwent while being in this state. If some critics voiced reservations about the production and even condemned it for not being in line with ‘the classical style’, others openly called it a huge success (F.E., Berliner Tageblatt, 31 October 1903; P.S., Berliner

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Lokalanzeiger, 31 October 1903; Vorwärts, 1 November 1903). It seems that the majority of the spectators were spellbound by the new aesthetics as well as the fresh perspective on ancient Greece that related it to their own contemporary situation and self-understanding. The Kulturkrise of around 1900 demanded a redefinition of the Bildungsbürgertum’s cultural identity but without severing the identification with the Greeks. Reinhardt’s production of Electra, and particularly Gertrud Eysoldt’s acting, succeeded with the small, mostly elite audience of the Kleines Theater because it enabled them to do precisely that—to maintain ancient Greece as an essential reference point for their own cultural identity within their particular social milieu and, at the same time, to acknowledge and confront the diverse psychological and cultural problems resulting from the ongoing process of modernization. The combination of the new aesthetics with the by then not so new image of ancient Greece opened up this very possibility for the members of the Bildungsbürgertum.

Greek tragedies in the circus: Max Reinhardt’s Theatre of the Five Thousand With his later productions of Greek tragedies Reinhardt realized his vision of theatre as festival housed in an amphitheatre-like building and of the audience as ‘the people’—similar to the Greek Dionysia in Athens. He embarked on doing so a few years after he had outlined his plans in the conversation at Café Monopol in 1902—first in Munich at the Musikfesthalle (Music Festival Hall) on the Theresienhöhe and later at the Circus Schumann in Berlin. Since the turn of the century, Georg Fuchs had also propagated the idea of Volksfestspiele, of a theatre festival for the people who, because of the exorbitant prices of theatre tickets, were excluded ‘from the most artistically significant and pioneering performances’. It was to be a theatre ‘for those workers, craftsmen, and employees who are open to art and reaching for the sky’ as well as for the ‘broad masses of professionals’ (Fuchs 1911: 78–9). When Fuchs organized the first Munich Volksfestspiele in 1909, he asked Reinhardt to collaborate with him. Reinhardt seized the opportunity to create his Theatre of the Five Thousand, a theatre for the masses. This theatre sought to attract ‘large sections of the population as visitors, the very people who today, for economic reasons, are unable to attend’. He

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declared that, ‘if thousands upon thousands were to unlock the sealed doors, theatre would again become a social factor in this day and age’ (Reinhardt 1910–11, quoted in Fetting 1975: 331). The music festival hall was rebuilt in such a way to include an arena stage. Reinhardt staged Sophocles’ Oedipus the King there in 1910 and Aeschylus’ Oresteia in 1911. In Berlin, the circus ring created an arena stage reminiscent of a Greek amphitheatre. It was supposed fundamentally to change the relationship between actors and spectators. For Reinhardt was convinced that the best theatre is not only performed on stage. Actually, the most important players are sitting in the auditorium . . . The moment when the one who creates receives at the same time and the receiver becomes the one who creates is when the precious and incomparable secret of theatre is born. (Cited in Fetting 1973: 61)

Such a moment occurred in Electra, though it concerned a rather small and homogeneous group of spectators. The performances of Oedipus and the Oresteia in Munich as well as in Berlin attracted a much more heterogeneous audience. As most reviewers on Oedipus’ opening night and later performances at Berlin’s Circus Schumann reported, the spectators came from all social classes and strata. School classes and students attended, as did union workers, ladies and gentlemen from the elegant west of the city, scholars, members of parliament and of the imperial family with their entourage, which almost every review mentions. Members of the workers’ theatre organization, the Volksbühne, could purchase their tickets at special rates. This indeed was a people’s theatre as far as the attendance of all social groups and classes was concerned. If we keep in mind that the ritual aspects of festivals are related to community, first destabilizing and finally reaffirming its collective identity, the question arises whether and to what extent the performances of Oedipus and the Oresteia might have brought about the integration and social bonding necessary to soften the tension between the growing individualism and the daily expanding anonymous masses that were all assembled for the performance. Did the productions succeed in uniting their heterogeneous spectators into a community, however temporary, helping them to overcome the Kulturkrise through a sense of communality and belonging? We will have to return to this question later. We can only guess why Reinhardt chose Oedipus the King and the Oresteia. One reason might have been that he was very well acquainted

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with these two tragedies. At the age of 26 and 27, Reinhardt had acted in productions of Oedipus the King and the Oresteia—as well as of Antigone—directed by Hans Oberländer and premiered in 1900. All three had been initiated by the Akademischer Verein für Kunst und Literatur (Academic Association for Art and Literature) in Berlin. In Oedipus (as in Antigone) he played Creon as ‘a bitter, grumpy old man, who practises his prophetic powers reluctantly but not without an air of eerie grandeur’ (Anon., Vossische Zeitung, 1 March 1900), and in the Oresteia he was the third chorus leader. The productions used Ulrich von WilamowitzMoellendorff ’s translations. However, Reinhardt asked Hofmannsthal to translate Oedipus for him and commissioned a new translation of the Oresteia from the philologist Karl Vollmoeller, with whom he began a longstanding collaboration. In a conversation with Hofmannsthal he expressed his ‘boredom with the rigid [gipsern] character of the existing translations and adaptations’ (letter from Hofmannsthal to Ernst Hladny, cited in Flashar 1989: 681). Since Oberländer’s productions— as well as all those following his model3—used the ‘classical style’, one might assume that Reinhardt chose these two tragedies in order to create a counter-model. It is also conceivable that Reinhardt sought to relate his Oedipus the King to a French production that in the nineteenth century had won international acclaim thanks to its lead actor. Jean Mounet-Sully 3 Only twelve days after the premiere of the Oresteia at the Theater des Westens in Berlin, the trilogy opened in Vienna, also based on Wilamowitz-Moellendorff ’s translation (6 December 1900). Whereas the Berlin performance was organized by an academic association, here it took place at ‘the holiest of holy’ sites of theatre—the Burgtheater, directed by Paul Schlenther. The Berlin and the Vienna productions both used music—the first composed by M. von Schillings, the latter by Charles Villiers Stanford and G. Romberg. Paul Schlenther’s Burgtheater instructions were used for a production of the Oresteia in Athens in 1903. The music, the stage design, and the costumes followed the Viennese model, a mixture of the ‘classical style’ and realism. The philologist Georgios Sotiriadis translated the text into demotiki not from the ancient Greek original but from the German version. The performance thus took a clear stand in the battle raging over the official language of the new Greek state. It was an issue of national identity whether an artificial language—katharevousa, which aimed to purify the modern language, bringing it closer to ancient Greek—or the modern language, demotiki, should be chosen. (The debate was not resolved until 1976, after the military dictatorship had come to an end and demotiki was recognized as the official Greek language.) The use of demotiki in the Oresteia in 1903 ‘provoked violent public demonstrations of university students and enraged citizens who feared for the integrity of Greece’s classical heritage. Three citizens died in the confrontation of the mob with the police in this flare-up of fanaticism over the fate of classical culture’ (Kitromilides 2003: 49).

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(1841–1916) played Oedipus first in Paris, later at the ancient theatre at Orleans and the Roman Theatre at Orange, and finally on extended guest tours throughout Europe. It seems to me that Reinhardt’s international guest tours with his Oedipus alluded to this other production (see p. 125). However, this is merely conjecture, as is the attempt to relate Reinhardt’s choice of the Oresteia to Wagner’s praise of the tragedy and to his Ring, which was hailed as its modern counterpart. The content of the tragedies would also have played a key role in Reinhardt’s choice, as both deal with matters of identity—an acutely topical issue at that time. In Oedipus the King an individual’s identity is at stake, while the trilogy of the Oresteia explores the passage from clan identity to political identity (that is, an identity that refers to the polis, the city). In both tragedies the problem of identity is closely related to the topic of sacrifice. Oedipus acts as a kind of scapegoat (following Frazer’s model); the crimes of patricide and incest he unknowingly committed have brought a miasma over the city and infected it with the plague. In order to cleanse the city and return it to a healthy state, he has to be sacrificed. In the trilogy of the Oresteia, the clan identity of the members of the house of Atreus is confirmed through sacrifice. Agamemnon sacrifices his daughter Iphigenia on the altar of Artemis to guarantee fair winds for the journey of the Greek army to Troy; to avenge her daughter’s death, Clytemnestra kills Agamemnon in the bath with an axe when he returns from Troy; Cassandra is addressed as sacrificial animal by the chorus: ‘how can you, serene | walk to the altar like a driven ox of God?’ (Aeschylus 2013a: Agamemnon, v. 1297–8), and, finally, Orestes sacrifices his mother in compliance with Apollo’s demand to avenge his father’s death. Vollmoeller translated the title of the second part of the trilogy, usually rendered as The Libation Bearers, as Sacrifice for the Dead. In contrast, in the third part of the trilogy, The Eumenides (which was performed in Munich but omitted in Berlin), the political identity of the Athenians is brought forth and strengthened through an act of agreement by which the Athenians, following the order of Athena, established their legal system. However, it is difficult to judge from the reviews whether and to what extent this aspect was highlighted. Most critics4 expressed their disapproval 4

The reviews to which I refer here are mainly of the Berlin performances, though I have included some relating to the Munich performances.

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that neither the production of Oedipus (translation by Hugo von Hofmannsthal) nor the Oresteia (translation by Karl Vollmoeller) one year later accurately represented what they considered to be the tragedy’s meanings.5 Even though not all critics went so far as to state that Reinhardt proceeded ‘from the principle that the director is everything, the poet nothing’ (Paul Goldmann, Neue Freie Presse, 8 November 1910), they all questioned the production’s faithfulness to the text and complained—as some had already done with Electra—that the performance affected the ‘senses’ and the ‘nerves’ of the spectators more than their ‘souls’. Nonetheless, they all admitted that the impact of the performance was ‘powerful’ and that this was due to particular ‘modern scenic devices’ (Julius Keller, Berliner Lokal-Anzeiger, 8 November 1910) that Reinhardt had developed and employed. What were these ‘modern scenic devices’? What did they refer to? What impact did they have? Before dealing with these questions in detail, we must first look at the particular space of the performance, the Circus Schumann. At the beginning of the twentieth century, circuses were usually not wandering companies but firmly established institutions in big cities. Their programmes often veered into theatre, as Max Martersteig complains: ‘In the circus, equilibrists, animal trainers, and clowns serve an ambitious imagination: through parades, pantomimes, and ballets, those sorts of exhibitions became the norm that rivalled the pomp of the metropolitan opera stages and satisfied sensual needs to an alarming extent’ (Martersteig 1904: 631). The circus had become an institution of popular entertainment, making use of genres and materials ‘belonging’ to the theatre. It was located in buildings that could be used either for a circus (with an arena) or as a theatre (with a stage). These were usually big enough to house between 1,500 and 5,000 people. The Circus Schumann in Berlin was equipped with 5,000 seats. Circus shows were meant for and attracted the masses. When Reinhardt staged Greek tragedies that were almost ‘sacred’ to the Bildungsbürgertum in a circus— that is, the place where the masses assembled to be entertained—this could be regarded as a ‘sacrilege’. In doing so, however, he not only

5 The cast in Oedipus the King included Paul Wegener (Oedipus), Tilla Durieux (Jocasta), Eduard von Winterstein (Creon), and Josef Wörz (Tiresias). Mary Dietrich (Electra), Anna Feldhammer (Clytemnestra), and Alexander Moissi (Orestes) were part of the cast of the Oresteia.

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appealed to highly diverse strata of society, as the composition of the audience suggests, but also collapsed the dichotomy of elitist and popular culture. The reviews suggest that most of the devices Reinhardt employed had to do with establishing a new relationship between actors and spectators. They refer either to the particular use of the space—the circus ring—or to the performers’ bodies. In Oedipus the King (stage design by Franz Geiger, costumes by Ernst Stern),6 the arena at the side of the stables was dominated by a huge entrance with a flight of steps leading up to a palace building. The circus ring remained empty. An enclosure, which had been added to it, held two altars with ‘sacrificial flames’ (J.L. 1910). The close to 5,000 spectators were seated all around the circus ring in an arrangement resembling an amphitheatre. A reddish-brown cloth was attached beneath the roof and stretched across the entire huge space of the circus, covering the ring as well as the auditorium. The beginning of the performance was announced by long drawn-out fanfares. Blue light falls in the ring that has become the orchestra: bell-like sounds clang, swell, voices moan, becoming louder, surging, and the people of Thebes swarm in through the central entrance opposite the built-up stage. Running, stampeding, with raised arms, calling, wailing; the space is filled with hundreds of them and their bare arms stretch to the sky. (Norbert Falk, Berliner Zeitung am Mittag, 8 November 1910)

The opening already reveals the dominant devices of the performance as a whole: (1) the occupation of the space by the masses; (2) the way a particular atmosphere functions; (3) the dynamic and energetic bodies moving through the entire space. The methods with which Reinhardt sought to implement ‘the idea of a total communion of stage and auditorium’ (Emil Faktor, Berliner BörsenCourier, 29 November 1919) had been developed in his earlier productions

6 Harry Count Kessler, a good friend of Reinhardt’s and Hofmannsthal’s, suggested that Edward Gordon Craig do the entire stage design for Oedipus. He even wrote a corresponding letter to Craig: ‘Dear Craig, I am delighted to be able to ask you to do some staging for Hofmannsthal & Reinhardt. Reinhardt is going to produce Hofmannsthal’s adaptation of Oedipus Rex in Munich this summer, and we wish you to undertake the entire staging (scenery, costumes and, if you desire, also the lighting and movements)’ (17 April 1910). Craig declined rather coolly. There had been in the past some other plans for a collaboration between Reinhardt and Craig, which also never materialized. Kessler’s letter is reprinted in Kessler (1987).

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but also by other representatives of the avant-garde (such as Appia’s and Craig’s stairs). They were partially derived from forms of popular culture, not only the circus, but also sports, cinema, and political assemblies. It was precisely to this popularity that certain critics objected.

The occupation of the space by the masses Confused and irritated, even partly outraged, all critics remarked on the fact that the chorus consisted not of a mere fifteen members but of considerably more and was further enlarged by hundreds of extras. They not only moved and acted in the orchestra—that is, the ring— overcrowding it but at least still neatly separated from the spectators; they also occupied the space otherwise ‘reserved’ for the spectators. They entered passing through the spectators; they even acted among them. They were everywhere; they occupied the whole space (see Illustration 4.2). In the Oresteia, where Reinhardt also used this device, the critic Alfred Klaar felt utterly uncomfortable because of the division of the action into the space in front, between, beneath, and behind us, the eternal exertion to change our viewpoint, the actors flooding into the auditorium so that the figures in their glittering costumes, wigs, and make-up jostle against our bodies, the dialogues held across great distances, the sudden confusing shouts from all corners and directions of the house which startle us—it all helps to distract; it does not help create the illusion but tears it apart instead. (Alfred Klaar, Vossische Zeitung, 4 October 1911)

Illustration 4.2 Max Reinhardt: Sophocles’ Oedipus the King; opening scene: Oedipus (Paul Wegener) and the people imploring him; to his left is Creon (Eduard von Winterstein) with his arms raised.

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The critic not only felt uncomfortable because as a spectator he had to change the position of his body if he wanted to see and hear what was going on in the space, but also because the performers moved among the spectators. They even occupied the space of the auditorium and, thus, ‘jostled against’ the spectators’ bodies—that is, they did not respect the boundaries separating one individual from another. The occupation of the whole space by the performers, on the other hand, erased the difference between performers and spectators. They drew the spectators into the action and made it difficult to distinguish between actors and spectators. Together they formed a single mass. This point is also made by another critic. He first mentions the presence of Prince August Wilhelm and Prince Oskar—two ‘outstanding’ individuals—and then continues: But the individual has no impact here. In this half light, only the crowd has an impact. One begins to understand what ‘the public’ means. This is what Reinhardt needs . . . He believes the crowd is everything, subject and object. He rewards five thousand spectators by presenting a company of seemingly ten thousand. He presents the masses to the masses. He shows them themselves in the exaggerated form of passion and costume. (Fritz Engel, Berliner Tageblatt, 8 November 1910)

It is not surprising, then, that one critic wrote in dismay: The true act of violence done unto Sophocles by Hofmannsthal is the democratization of the tragedy. He turns it into a revolutionary drama. The dark masses of the people of Thebes, represented in Sophocles by a modest chorus of old men, comes to life in Hofmannsthal. (Karl Frenzel, Deutsche Rundschau, 147 (1911), 462)

The masses came alive because they moved in a huge space, blurring the boundaries between actors and spectators and making a particular impact possible: ‘For the first time we felt the meaning of a tragic mass effect in this mighty space that holds 5,000 spectators, and what resonance Greek tragedy can draw from the width and height of a space’ (Friedrich Düsel, Westermanns Monatshefte, 55 (1911), 610). The masses, spectators and performers alike, assembled in the circus and rendered a distinction impossible, which was experienced as highly disturbing by some critics and perhaps by other Bildungsbürger as well. However, a bond of sorts was established between both groups that left its imprint on all of them.

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The creation and impact of atmosphere The description of the performance’s opening scene in the previous section lists a number of elements that created a particular atmosphere: the blue light, the sound of the fanfare, the bell-like sounds, the moaning voices, the particular rhythm of different noises as well as the movements of the performers. As we learn from the reviews, some of the recurring elements affecting the spectators in the performance included constant changes in the lighting (blue, violet, green, greyish, reddish-brown, bright like sunlight, and so on), the orchestration of music and sounds, the changing rhythm of movements, sounds, and music. By the time Reinhardt produced Oedipus, he was already famous for the ways in which he created and used atmosphere, as attested by the reviews of all of his productions. It was not only the use of light, colour, music, sounds, and the rhythm of movements that contributed to the atmosphere but often smell, too. His famous production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1905) caused a sensation because it used a revolving stage covered in fresh moss that emanated a bewitching fragrance in the space and gave the spectators an intense physical sense of the presence of the forest. Reinhardt applied this sophisticated use of atmosphere—something he had developed over the previous ten years—to Oedipus as well as to the Oresteia. Whether this created ‘a magical effect’ (E.v.B., Berliner BörsenCourier, 8 November 1910) and ‘wild excitement’ (Keller 1910), as in Oedipus, or a ‘barbaric’ atmosphere, which was ‘circus-like in the most vulgar sense’, as in the Oresteia when Agamemnon made an entrance to the clamour of circus music, with ‘four snorting, stamping’—and, one is tempted to add, stinking—‘horses’ (Jacobsohn 1912: 51);7 it seems that in every case it was the particular atmosphere that succeeded in engaging the spectators and leaving a strong impact on them. As the philosopher Gernot Böhme explains, a particular atmosphere is not bound to a space, although it does permeate it. Atmosphere belongs neither to the objects or people who seem to radiate it, nor to those who enter the space and sense it physically. In a theatre space, atmosphere is 7 The critic is evidently not aware that Reinhardt was not the first to use real horses in this scene. In Schlenther’s production of the Oresteia in Vienna in 1900, Agamemnon’s carriage was drawn by two white horses. To minimize the sound of their hooves, the floor was covered with mats.

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usually the first element to seize the spectators and open them to a particular experience of that space. This experience cannot be explained by referring to single elements in or of the space. For it is not single elements that create an atmosphere but the interplay of all these elements together. Böhme (1995: 33) defines atmosphere as ‘spaces that are “tinted” by the presence of objects, humans or environmental constellations . . . They are spheres of a presence of something, of its reality in space.’ Böhme goes on to argue that atmosphere is not something that exists by itself in a vacuum, but quite the opposite. It is something that emanates and is created by things, by people, and the constellations that happen between them. Atmosphere is not conceived as something objective, as a quality that belongs to objects; and yet atmosphere is object-like because it articulates the spheres of its presence. Nor is atmosphere something wholly subjective, moods experienced by someone. And yet it is subjective, or belongs to the subjective because it can be felt as a physical presence by the spectator and this sensation is, at the same time, a physical self-discovery of the subject in space. (Ibid. 33–4)

In our context, this description and definition of atmosphere seems particularly interesting for two reasons. On the one hand, Böhme defines atmosphere as ‘spheres of presence’. That is to say that objects and humans perceived as part of an atmosphere—as objects from which the atmosphere seems to emanate—demand the perceiving person’s attention with great intensity. They cannot be ignored. They make their presence conspicuous and impose their presence on the perception of others. On the other hand, Böhme locates atmosphere neither in the objects that seem to radiate it nor in the subjects who sense it physically but rather in the space between and around them as well as both at the same time. That is to say, it is the atmosphere that binds performers and spectators together; atmosphere can be regarded as an immersive environment of sorts, which results from and surrounds them both at the same time. This means that a certain transformational potential inheres within atmosphere. We learn that the atmosphere created in Oedipus the King but also in the Oresteia had a very special quality. The elements contributing to atmosphere, such as the sounds, voices, music, movements, rhythm, smells, colours, and light—in this case, not only of the spotlights but also of the flickering flames of the open fire on the two altars as well as the torches held by a group of half-naked young men as they ‘raced like savages through the orchestra up and down the steps to the palace’

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(Siegfried Jacobsohn, Die Schaubühne, 17 November 1910: 1177)—all have two things in common: first, they have a strong physical impact on those perceiving them and, second, they are all transitory and ephemeral. These elements affect the senses and the nerves of the spectators. Sounds, voices, or music, for instance, not only surround the perceiving subjects but they also, in a way, invade their bodies, where the sounds begin to resonate and trigger similar vibrations. Particular sounds are even able to cause physical pain, which can be clearly localized. The listeners can protect themselves against sound only by blocking their ears. Usually they are exposed to them without defence. At the same time, the body’s boundaries are transgressed. When the sounds, voices, or music turn the bodies of the listeners/spectators into resonance chambers, cause physical pain, give them the shivers or the sensation of butterflies in their stomach, then the listeners do not hear them as something that reaches their ear externally; rather, they sense them as a procedure unfolding within their bodies, which sometimes arouses a kind of ‘oceanic’ feeling. Through the sounds, the atmosphere invades the spectator’s body and opens it up to reception (cf. Poizat 1992). Comparable, if not more powerful, is the impact of smells. They invade the whole space and the bodies of all present. It is impossible to escape them. In the words of Georg Simmel: When we smell something, we draw this or that impression deeply into the centre of our being, assimilate it intimately, as it were, through the vital process of breathing, which is not possible for any other sense to do of an object—unless we eat it. That we smell the atmosphere of someone else is the most intimate perception of him; he permeates our insides in gas form. (Simmel 1923: 490)

The person who smells will be viscerally affected by the subject or object emanating the scent. There is no defence against it. Smells are an essential component or ingredient of atmosphere, enabling it to extend across space, between actors and spectators, to surround and penetrate the spectators. A smell not only makes the object from which it emanates appear present to the spectators in a particularly intense way, but also allows the spectators to feel their own physical presence acutely. By using elements that emanate strong smells, such as the torches, the fire on the altars, or the horses (in the Oresteia), Reinhardt fully exploited such possibilities. Lighting is another factor contributing enormously to the creation of atmosphere. Although Reinhardt did not have access to a computerized

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lighting board—as Robert Wilson does today—he pushed the technical possibilities of his time to its limits and changed the colour, tone, shadow, and focus of the spotlights. With each change in the lighting, the atmosphere changed. The spectrum ranged from dreary, cold, depressing, or eerie to cheerful or festive, with all possibilities and nuances in between. Particularly powerful were shifts from colours sensed as cold to those perceived as warm. The warmth, in particular, was emphasized by the fire on the altars and the torches. Even if only those sitting close to the arena could sense the warmth of the fire, it also evoked the impression of warmth in the others who could only see it. In this context, it must be considered that we not only perceive light through our eyes but also receive it through our skin. It penetrates the skin and enters the body. All human organisms respond to light sensitively. If spectators are exposed to frequent changes in the light, as was the case here, their condition and overall feeling will also become altered accordingly. The experience will not necessarily be felt consciously, nor can it be controlled. Their inclination to let themselves be drawn into the atmosphere, however, is increased considerably. All these elements were related to each other through rhythm. It is rhythm that unites the sounds, voices, music, and movements of the bodies, objects, and the light. The reviews often mention ‘the rhythmic effects’ (Anon., Vossische Zeitung, 8 November 1910). Even if rhythm is not used to induce ecstatic states, as Georg Fuchs would have it, it usually affects the organism perceiving it. This is not surprising, considering the fact that rhythm is a principle given in the human body. It is not only our heartbeat, blood circulation, or breathing that follows its own rhythm; we also execute bodily movements such as walking, running, dancing, swimming, or writing in a rhythmical way and make rhythmical sounds when speaking, singing, laughing, or weeping. Even those movements that are created within our body without us being able to perceive them are carried out rhythmically. The human body is, in fact, rhythmically tuned. This is why we are particularly capable of perceiving rhythm and of resonating or vibrating with it. Performances that organize and structure their timing through rhythm—as Reinhardt’s productions did—bring together different ‘rhythmical systems’: that of the performance and that of the spectators, the latter being different for each and every spectator. The performance is carried out as a mutual resonance between

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the rhythm of the actors and spectators and, in this sense, as a physical interaction between the two, opening up a transformational potential and allowing for the formation of a community. The effect was particularly powerful because the one-and-a-half-hour performance of Oedipus was not interrupted by an intermission. All the elements listed and discussed here, such as the different sounds, voices, music, smells, colours of light, and rhythm would also have carried a symbolic meaning, which, however, does not seem to have been universally identified by all people present at the performance. Rather, those elements dominated whose meanings remained vague, such as the sound of the fanfare, the fire on the altar, or the torches. They could be associated with a number of different, even partly overlapping, meanings.8 It was the atmospheric effect of the elements in question that prevailed against the symbolic meanings that might have been attributed to them in terms of a particular tradition, ideology, religion, world view, or political system. Even the actors’ voices were not used exclusively to produce shared linguistic meanings. As one critic complains, Reinhardt did not work with voice to create an intellectual effect, but rather to create acoustic waves, which are a significant part of the modern register of atmosphere. The chorus thus must produce all kinds of sounds imaginable: muttering, gasping, screaming, or sobbing. And even when the chorus speaks, it is not the sense of the words that is important but the sound. (Goldmann 1910)

The special atmosphere was largely due to the desemanticization of language addressed by the critic, which implied a shift in focus away from the meaning of the spoken word and towards the particular sounds and timbres that emphasized the physical presence of the voice and its

8 Fire, for example, was a traditional element of European festive culture. Since the French Revolution, which inaugurated the first modern political festival, fire has been a permanent element of festivals. In early nineteenth century Germany, the so-called sacred flame served as a somewhat ambivalent symbol of a vague idea of the Germanic, in particular for patriotically oriented male choirs, gymnastic clubs (Turnvereine), and shooting clubs (Schützenvereine). Later on, student fraternities made frequent use of the symbolism of fire. The flickering flame represented the victory either of light over darkness, of day over night, or of spring over winter. However, it was never used as a clear or unambiguous symbol. See Mosse (1977).

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Illustration 4.3 Max Reinhardt: Aeschylus’ Oresteia Part II: Sacrifice for the Dead; Josef Klein as Aegisthus, Anna Feldhammer as Clytemnestra, and the Chorus.

speaker. It seems that, even with regard to language, its common meanings receded against the atmospheric value of the individual voice or the harmony or lack thereof of the different voices ringing out simultaneously. This desemanticization, in turn, generated a multitude of possible meanings, which might have been attributed to the spoken words by different spectators. Atmosphere, which envelops everyone within a space, contributes to the coming-into-being of a community exclusively through performative means. It might be called an aesthetic or theatrical community, since it is not based on common beliefs, shared ideologies, or even shared meanings. The atmosphere does not force the spectators into a common confession; instead it allows for a shared experience, which does not necessarily dissolve the identity of the participants but neither can it be perceived as something stable. Rather, it renders the self fluid, making it undergo transformations through these experiences. It seems that the community presented and represented on stage was conceived and displayed in this way. At no time did the individual vanish completely or dissolve into the chorus; they remained individuals who, as such, became members of a community (see Illustration 4.3):

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The people push and shove each other, they crowd together, separate. They move as a unit and yet at the same time stand out from one another; each individual remains himself—one in red, one in green, one with a bare chest, and yet he is also one piece of the whole. He belongs to the ‘people’. I have never seen such a thing happen in a scene before. (Engel 1910)

Following this description, other critics emphasized that individual voices could clearly be distinguished, one whispering, while another mumbled and a third screamed the same sentence. While atmosphere cannot create a collective identity, it does significantly contribute to the emergence of a community.

Dynamic and energetic movements through the space In many reviews, performances of Oedipus the King and the Oresteia were characterized in kinetic terms—as one critic put it, ‘as something in movement, something explosive, something whipped by the wind, like a tornado, becoming fire’ (Engel 1910). This impression largely resulted from the dynamic and energetic bodies moving in and through space, dominating the performance. Most of the reviews suggest that there was a permanent commotion from the very beginning until the end: Oedipus has barely found refuge in the palace when the spectacle breaks out. Torch-bearers hunt the arena . . . leap up the steps, disappear into the Palace. At the same time, the muffled sound of a drum, slowly getting louder, is heard. The Palace doors open. Ten maidens burst onto the scene. They moan and sob; they twist and turn as if wracked with cramps. Some race down the steps (the speed with which they accomplish this down the steep steps is amazing, worthy of the circus in which they perform) . . . .And now on top of that, the five or six hundred members of the chorus storm into the arena, running chaotically with wild gestures and bursting in with inarticulate shouting. (Goldmann 1910)

It was, however, these rapid, literally breathtaking movements that some critics felt were unsuitable for a Greek tragedy. Fiercely objecting to the ‘naked runners who, holding torches in their hands, race like savages through the orchestra up and down the steps to the palace’, the critic Siegfried Jacobsohn complained that it was not historically accurate. He came to the conclusion that it was ‘a sorry waste of energy to try and convey an approximation of ancient Greek theatre in a circus ring’ (Jacobsohn 1910: 1178). (He was clearly ignoring the fact that Reinhardt had not intended this.) After Reinhardt’s London production of Oedipus

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the King, a similar discussion arose there. Gilbert Murray, who had translated the play, referred to this scene in order to challenge the criticism that the production was not Greek: Professor Reinhardt was frankly pre-Hellenic (as is the Oedipus story itself), partly Cretan and Mycenaean, partly Oriental, partly—to my great admiration— merely savage. The half-naked torch-bearers with loin-cloths and long black hair made my heart leap with joy. There was real early Greece about them, not the Greece of the schoolroom or the conventional art-studio. (Cited in Styan 1982: 85)

Murray obviously saw the image of Greece as elaborated by the Cambridge Ritualists come to life in the performance. But what was at stake here was not the question of how Greek or un-Greek the performance was. The stance taken by another critic seems more appropriate: ‘Was it the spirit of modern times that revealed itself in the wild, breath-stopping charge of the masses? Not a hint of classical Hellenism. It was the wild passion of today’ (E.v.B., Neue Preussische Kreuz Zeitung Berlin, 8 November 1910). However, the movement of the masses also served another purpose: they even set the spectators in motion. Alfred Klaar criticized ‘the division of action into the space in front, between, beneath, and behind us, which forced us to keep changing our viewpoint’ and ‘tears the illusion apart’. Jacobsohn felt equally shocked: Didn’t the man who built the Kammerspiele to bring us together notice how this circus achieves the opposite effect? Our poor eyes, tortured by spotlights, confronted with five entrances and exits for the actors, are forced to shift restlessly from one to the next. We have to try and distinguish the heads of the spectators from those of the extras who act in the midst of the audience. (Siegfried Jacobsohn, Vossische Zeitung, 14 October 1911)

What Klaar, Jacobsohn, and other critics lamented was that they were forced out of the complete immobility of their bodies familiar to them from the proscenium stage. The performance not only impacted on the senses and nerves of the spectators, as had already been the case with Electra, but it also set their bodies in motion. The permanently moving bodies of the performers triggered not only physiological and affective but also energetic and motor impulses in the spectators, who constantly had to twist and turn, crane their necks, and allow their eyes to wander. Spectating

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became a physical activity no longer restricted to the eyes and ears but involving the entire body, which could even be touched by the bodies of the performers who ‘jostled against’ it. On the one hand, this activity directed the attention of the spectators towards their own bodies. They became very aware of the physical—physiological, affective, energetic, and motor—impulses triggered by the process of looking on. They did not follow the actions of the performers merely in their imagination but participated in them physically. They became involved at a bodily level, and this established a bond between the performers and the spectators as well as among the latter. On the other hand, this physical activity helped to individualize the spectators. Since they did not carry out their movements in unison, their perceptions would have differed, at times only slightly and other times substantially. That is to say, the spectators did not all perceive the same things at the same time. While one spectator turned to see what was going on behind her, another might have let his eyes wander over the whole auditorium to locate the entrance of all the extras, while a third focused his attention on the actors in the arena. In the end, each spectator perceived something different and, in this sense, participated in a unique performance. The mode of perception brought forth in the theatre approximated that prevalent in the modern metropolis, which requires citizens to move through crowds while perceiving other things and differently so from the rest of the masses. The spectator became part of a community but still remained an individual. In the performance it was not only the ‘masses’ who were constantly moving but also the protagonists, albeit in a different manner. They seemed to avoid any kind of monumental attitude or static pose so often associated with Greek tragedy. Even during quieter moments, in the blocking of the actors and their attitude, there remained a sense of movement (see Illustration 4.4). Most of the time, however, the actors were in rapid motion. Some critics deemed this inappropriate, as it distracted the spectators’ attention from the meaning of the lines spoken and instead directed their focus to the actor’s phenomenal body, thus providing ‘hordes of spectators who grew up at bull fights’ with ‘thrilling entertainment’: When Orestes is about to kill his mother, it is more than sufficient to dash after her out of the palace door, hold her at the doorway and push her back into the palace when the exchange of dialogue is finished. Here, he chases her down the

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Illustration 4.4 Max Reinhardt: Sophocles’ Oedipus the King; Paul Wegener as Oedipus, Friedrich Kühne as the Messenger from Corinth, and Wilhelm Diegelmann as the Shepherd. steps into the circus ring, fights with her there and finally drags her, painfully slowly, up the steps. It is terrible. (Jacobsohn 1912: 49)

Notwithstanding such criticism, even Siegfried Jacobsohn had to admit that in the Oresteia Tilla Durieux’s performance as Cassandra was as strong as it was in Oedipus the King as Jocasta or as that of Paul Wegener as Oedipus. It seems then that these permanently moving, dynamic, and energetic bodies both incorporated and realized the new body culture ideal of the liberated body in motion developing at the turn of the century. This is certainly true. However, this is not the only remarkable aspect of the particular use of the body by the actors playing the protagonists or the chorus or other group formations such as the half-naked runners. They used their bodies in order to dominate and occupy the space and, in doing so, they demanded the full attention of the spectators, forcing them to direct their attention to their—the actors’—bodies, not so much as ‘signs’ of a dramatic character but to their emanating energy. This energy circulated in the space and infected the spectators, establishing a bond between actors and spectators as well as among the spectators. The energy accumulated and generated by the spectators in the course of the performance was released at the end in the standing ovations they gave the performers.

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This energy also greatly contributed to the formation of a particular kind of community—a temporary aesthetic or theatrical one that does not outlive the performance. This raises the question as to whether this is the only conceivable kind of community in modern heterogeneous societies and whether, in the case of such societies, a community can come into existence only if the idea of a collective identity that is valid and binding for every member is abandoned. This might be one of the reasons for the huge success of Reinhardt’s production of Oedipus the King on its tour through Europe, which took it to London, Stockholm, Moscow, St Petersburg, Vienna, Budapest, and Brussels, among other places. In some cities, such as Budapest, Moscow, and London, he restaged it with local actors and amateurs (for the chorus). Reinhardt’s production was an overwhelming box office success wherever he staged it. Evidently, the particular kind of community brought forth by the performance highlighted and, at the same time, satisfied certain needs felt not only in Germany but in various other pre-war European societies.9 This is not to say that the community that came into being as a result of the particular devices applied over the course of the performance lasted for its entire duration nor that every spectator underwent a communal experience—it seems to have been a matter of pride for most critics that they resisted it. However, Reinhardt’s performances of the Theatre of the Five Thousand, a new people’s theatre, responded to the Kulturkrise by allowing such a community to emerge—a community consisting of diverse social strata and groups, comprising Bildungsbürger ‘worshipping’ individualism and the Greeks as well as workers thought to be part of the ‘anonymous masses’ and used to being entertained in a circus. Although Reinhardt always argued that his theatre was not political, an assessment largely shared by his contemporaries, the manner in which it

9 The Oedipus production had a particular and enduring effect in St Petersburg. In the spring of 1918, i.e. after the October Revolution, it was restaged at the venue of the Chinizelli Circus, where it had been performed in 1911. The restaging was initiated by Yuri Yurev, the lead actor of the Alexandrinsky Theatre. The original set of the 1911 performances was still intact. Yurev asked Aleksander Granovsky, a Reinhardt disciple who had just returned from Berlin, to direct the revival. Yurev played the part of Oedipus, while Granovsky directed the chorus, so fundamental to the Reinhardt production, and the mass scenes. The revival proved to be as huge a success as the original, attracting in its week-long run spectators hailing from all social classes. In a way, this revival can be regarded as a forerunner to the series of mass spectacles that began in St Petersburg the following year, in the spring of 1919 (cf. Fischer-Lichte 2005: 97–121).

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enabled a communal experience between diverse individuals gave it an undeniable political dimension. This can also be said of the way in which the new division of space allowed, indeed at times even forced, spectators to participate in the performance. Membership was not obligatory in this theatrical community but neither did it permit exclusion by others. It could not demand commitment to a prescribed form, and it could not impose sanctions on deviants or defectors. The community that came into being during the performance of Oedipus the King could be described as a utopian community—a ‘Vorschein’ (pre-appearance; Ernst Bloch) of a potentially desired society of the future. Regarding the Bildungsbürger, Oedipus as well as the Oresteia not only allowed them to maintain ancient Greece as a reference point for their cultural identity and to connect it to modern life in the big city, as had already been the case with Electra. Moreover, they could see the performances as a project to expand the masses’ knowledge of Greek tragedy, thus contributing to their Bildung. Reinhardt’s productions of Greek tragedies in the Circus Schumann made ancient Greece accessible to all social strata. It became a constitutive element of Volksbildung, the people’s Bildung, and therefore a shared national Bildung. As in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars and, particularly, during the Greeks’ struggle for independence, Philhellenism and nationalism once more went hand in hand, although—or maybe because—both had changed. Lastly, the performances counteracted the Bildungsbürgertum’s fear of the masses. Not only did both groups form a temporary community during the performance; the first also encountered the latter through their individual members (see pp. 120–3). This way the performances achieved what they represented. They unfolded a transformative power that brought about a bond of sorts between those present in the same space and instilled in them a sense of belonging—even if only temporarily. This aspect also contributes to the political dimension of the performances.

Theatre for the Republic: From Reinhardt to Jessner After the end of the First World War, with people all over Europe mourning the millions of dead and facing a shattered society, Reinhardt hoped that it would still be possible to realize his vision of a new people’s

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theatre. In 1919 the architect Hans Poelzig converted the Circus Schumann into Reinhardt’s Großes Schauspielhaus. The new theatre was inaugurated by a performance of the Oresteia on 28 November 1919. Reinhardt’s achievement to build his own venue for his new Theatre of the Five Thousand, a people’s theatre, was compared by a critic to Wagner’s endeavour: ‘Only Richard Wagner in Bayreuth created something similar, under different circumstances’ (Fritz Engel, Berliner Tageblatt, 29 November 1919). The political conditions had changed completely. The emperor had abdicated and a republic had come into being—the Weimar Republic (the first constitutive national assembly took place at Weimar’s theatre—that is, Goethe’s theatre). In this situation a people’s theatre seemed to be the most desirable approach. On the occasion of the opening of the Großes Schauspielhaus, the Deutsches Theater published a booklet in which playwrights, stage designers, and dramaturges, who had collaborated with Reinhardt, summarized the most important arguments in the debate on a new people’s theatre that had been raging since the turn of the century (Romain Rolland’s influential book Le Théâtre du peuple appeared in 1903; see Rolland 2003). The preface was written by Reinhardt’s dramaturge Heinz Herald. He emphasized that, in the arena, theatre will ‘shift from being a matter concerning a few to one concerning the masses’, for an audience was to be assembled here ‘which derives from all classes’ and would ‘comprise the masses who, up to now, have been strangers to theatre’ (Herald 1920: 11). Karl Vollmoeller, who adapted the Oresteia for Reinhardt’s purposes, praised the arena theatre as today’s public meeting place . . . That which the depoliticizing of our nation by the imperial regime has hindered for fifty years is now possible today: to unite the theatrical space of thousands into a community of citizens who participate, who are swept along and who sweep others along with them. (Cited in ibid. 21)

Reinhardt’s theatre was supposed to be an essentially democratic institution, enabling all its citizens to participate and become actors. Similarly, the Expressionist poet Kurt Pinthus celebrated the arena theatre as the only possible path, not only towards a ‘future people’s theatre’, but also towards ‘the future of mankind’ (cited in ibid. 44). It can only be ‘generated organically . . . out of the shared desire of “the people” . . . the shared, enthusiastic will of a humanity renewing itself ’. It ‘can only be a theatre for the masses, into which the shattered remains

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of the old society will finally also flow’ (cited in ibid. 44–5). The new people’s theatre evidently was conceived here as a revolutionary theatre, which was not to contribute solely to a new society but to a ‘humanity renewing itself ’ (cited in ibid. 44). For up to now, theatre has been left far behind other human developments because it maintained its representative buildings and those designed for entertainment from a long-since sunken social class. . . . The people’s theatre has an enormous task to fulfil . . . Theatre has regained the meaning which the people have always accorded to it. Theatre is merging art, faith, and politics. It is theatre for all. (Cited in ibid. 54)

These are not statements made with reference to Reinhardt’s previous productions at the Circus Schumann. Rather, they express the hopes and expectations linked to the newly inaugurated Großes Schauspielhaus and the somewhat divergent ideas of its particular mission. If we look at the reviews of the revival of the Oresteia at the Großes Schauspielhaus, we can only guess whether the new people’s theatre, enthusiastically invoked and celebrated in the booklet, stood any chance of materializing even under the new political conditions. If we read the description of the audience’s composition, it is rather disillusioning to learn about the relation between them before the beginning of the performance: The image of a community of thousands was wonderful and heart-rending. Perhaps all the more heart-rending for the intellectual German citizen, because the spatial unity of the masses reawakened his yearning for an inner sense of belonging. Can we be one people? Here sits Herr Scheidemann, over there privy councillor Herr Roethe, there is Hauptmann’s Goethe-like head, over there Dr Cohn waves to a comrade. But Scheidemann looks past Roethe and Cohn passes Hauptmann with only a shrug of the shoulders. Even outside the work environment there is no feeling of unity. There is no nation on earth, which so lacks a feeling of community and the war has consumed us even more . . . So we have the greatest people’s theatre, but no people. (Stefan Grossmann, Vossische Zeitung, 29–30 December 1919)10 10 Philipp Scheidemann was a member of the Social Democratic Party. On 9 November 1918, he proclaimed Germany a republic. In February 1919, President Ebert appointed him the parliament’s president. Scheidemann resigned in June 1919 in protest against the Treaty of Versailles. Gustav Roethe was a distinguished professor of German literature at Berlin University who propagated nationalist views on literature and science. Gerhart Hauptmann was a German writer, playwright, and poet who wrote the first German naturalist plays. In 1913, on the occasion of the hundredth anniversary of the beginning of the revolt against Napoleon, Reinhardt had staged his Festspiel in deutschen Reimen in Breslau. Dr Cohn was a union leader.

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Illustration 4.5 Max Reinhardt: Aeschylus’ Oresteia Part III: The Eumenides; Else Heims as Athena and Alexander Moissi as Orestes.

Was it conceivable under these conditions that a performance of the Oresteia could unite these individuals and the ‘masses’ in a community, however temporary? This time, Reinhardt had included the third part of the trilogy, The Eumenides. Contrary to what one might have expected against the backdrop of a newly democratic society, the final voting scene and its result as a binding consequence, followed by the transformation of the Erinyes into the Eumenides, did not feature as a highlight. It would have made sense especially in Berlin, which was still in a state of siege—that is, haunted by its Erinyes. In fact, these scenes were not shown at all, with the third part cut rather short (see Illustration 4.5). Orestes (Alexander Moissi) rushes away, darkness falls, and in an open scene the revolving stage mysteriously transforms the set design. When the lights come on again, the middle section of the palace has vanished; a tall, broad staircase leads steeply up towards the invisible—to the realm of Apollo. Orestes is lying on the front steps: in the orchestra the Eumenides [sic]11 crouch feebly, like dark mounds of earth. The fight over Orestes begins, they moan as they slowly creep up on their victim, 11

At this point in the play they are still the Erinyes, not the Eumenides.

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who lies there whimpering: but Apollo remains the victor. His word, echoing from the height of the stairs . . . releases him here from the curse, without Athena or the Areopagus, the Eumenides retreat, and with a finale of a purer humanity the tragedy comes to an end. (Paul Fechter, Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, 29 November 1919)

While the Oresteia of 1911–12, with its restriction to the first two parts, showed a rather archaic Greece founded on the principle of violence and counter-violence, as well as on sacrifice, albeit with certain contemporary elements to it, this new version that included the third part painted another picture. When the performance ended with Orestes’ words: ‘Hail, Apollo, and you, the people of the city’, this could be understood as an invocation of Apollo to counteract Dionysus. The trilogy could thus be interpreted as a battle between the Dionysiac and the Apollonian principles. While the first two parts appeared to invoke the Dionysiac principle, which reigned almost exclusively through the large dynamic masses, moving ecstatically through the space, the ending focused on Apollo, who establishes a new order that will also be respected by ‘the masses’, here addressed as ‘the people of the city’. The atonement of Orestes and the reconciliation between him—that is, the individual—and the masses, the people of the city, are brought about by a god rather than by human activity. It is impossible to say whether this can be regarded as a judgement on the situation in the new republic. In any case, it was left to the performance to transform this gathering of hostile or merely indifferent individuals into a community and to generate, for as long as the performance lasted, this communal feeling that they so lacked in their social lives. The production was a huge success, attested to not only in the critics’ descriptions of the standing ovations for the director and the actors. The statistics further corroborate it: during the season of 1919–20—that is, in the following seven months—the production was staged a whopping seventy-three times, with each performance sold out.12 Reinhardt’s ambition to overcome the Kulturkrise before the war and the lack of any ‘feeling of unity’ after it was clearly not restricted to the 12

As usual in Reinhardt’s successful productions, each role was played by at least two actors. In the programme for different performances, the following actors are listed for the main roles: Clytemnestra: Agnes Straub, Maria Kromer, Auguste Pünkösdy; Agamemnon: Walter Redlich, Gustav Czimeg, Werner Kraus; Cassandra: Else Heims, Lia Rosen; Orestes: Alexander Moissi, Ernst Deutsch; Electra: Maria Fein, Margarethe Christians, Ilse Cabanis.

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liberation and celebration of the ‘natural’ body. Moreover, it was realized as the possibility of a community and sense of belonging among and between actors and spectators, whereby the latter came from highly diverse backgrounds and milieus. The enormous success, particularly of Oedipus the King before the war and of the Oresteia after it, suggests that the temporary aesthetic or theatrical community that came into being in the course of the performance satisfied a deeply felt need and desire in the people. It comes as no surprise, then, that the particular redefinition of theatre as festival achieved by Reinhardt’s Theatre of the Five Thousand was taken up later—for instance, by performances held by the different kinds of workers’ festivals in the Weimar Republic and even by the Thingspiel movement during the first years of the National Socialist regime (1933–6). Similar mass spectacles were also staged in other European countries and even in the United States. The mass spectacles of the newborn Soviet Union at the beginning of the 1920s (cf. note 9), the restaging of medieval passion plays in front of the Notre Dame in Paris (for example, Arnould Gréban’s Le Vrai Mystère de la passion of the 1930s); the Swiss mass spectacles, which were based on traditional eighteenth-century folk festivals and took place at historically important locations as part of the ‘spiritual and intellectual defence of our country’ (geistige Landesverteidigung); or the Zionist pageants of the United States of America (1933–46) all serve as examples here for making ample use of the artistic devices Reinhardt had developed in his Theatre of the Five Thousand.13 However, in all of these cases, these devices were not used primarily to create aesthetic or theatrical communities. Rather, they were meant to encourage and reinforce specific ideological, religious, or political communities—that is, collective identities—that already existed before the beginning of the performance and would outlast it. Their underlying ideologies, religions, or political world views adhered to generally strict regulatory mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion, notably absent from Reinhardt’s theatrical communities, which did not hinge on collective identities. Reinhardt expanded his idea of theatre as festival by striving to establish a series of regular performances—in this respect comparable 13

Reinhardt himself staged one of the Zionist pageants—The Eternal Road—in New York in 1937. See Fischer-Lichte (2005: 159–204, particularly 169–85).

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to Bayreuth. Together with Hofmannsthal and Richard Strauss, he founded the Salzburg Festival, which was meant for the people of the region. It opened in the summer of 1920 with a performance of Everyman (Hofmannsthal’s version), performed each year to this day at the Salzburg Festival on the square in front of the Salzburg Cathedral. That same year Reinhardt resigned from his directorship of the Berlin theatres. (In 1925, inaugurating the convention of the Communist Party, Erwin Piscator would stage his political revue Trotz alledem! (In Spite of Everything!) at the Großes Schauspielhaus.) While the Theatre of the Five Thousand had been conceived as a festival in a modern city for ‘the people’ suffering from the conditions of the modernizing process, the Salzburg Festival initially was meant to be rooted in that particular region and the adjacent ones. After the first few years, however, it decayed into a fashionable event for the upper classes—which Wagner’s Bayreuth Festival had been from the very beginning. It is not surprising that Reinhardt left Berlin and went to Vienna. For in Berlin—as generally in the Weimar Republic—the war and its political consequences had brought about a fundamental change regarding theatre and its cultural, social, and political functions. Theatre became openly and deeply politicized. This holds true not only for the proletarian mass spectacles performed as part of the Union Festivals or on the occasion of the International Workers’ Olympic Games (which first took place in Frankfurt on the Main in 1925). It also applies to Erwin Piscator’s ‘Proletarian Theatre’, which was declared to serve the class conflict and not art, and to his political revues, Revue Roter Rummel (Red Riot Revue, 1924) and Trotz alledem! (In Spite of Everything!, 1925), as well as to his productions at the Volksbühne (1924–7) and those staged at his own Piscator Theatre, such as Hoppla, wir leben! (Hoppla, We’re Alive!, 3 September 1927), Rasputin, die Romanovs, der Krieg und das Volk (Rasputin, the Romanovs, the War and the People that Rose against them, 12 November 1927), Die Abenteuer des braven Soldaten Schwejk (The Adventures of the Good Soldier Schwejk, 23 January 1928), or Der Kaufmann von Berlin (The Merchant of Berlin, 1929). Piscator developed a completely new theatre aesthetics, which he called ‘epic theatre’ (the term, in fact, was coined by Piscator, even if Brecht claimed it for his own theatre from 1926 onwards). As a result of Piscator’s political revues, which were commissioned by the Communist Party (which later disapproved of them), a number of so-called agitprop groups sprang up and

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took recourse to the revue and cabaret genre to engage in political propaganda. These included, for example, ‘Das Rote Sprachrohr’ (‘The Red Megaphone’), ‘Die Roten Raketen’ (‘The Red Rockets’), ‘Die Roten Blusen’ (‘The Red Blouses’), ‘Die Galgenvögel’ (‘The Rogues’), ‘Kolonne links’ (‘Column Left’), and many others. The 1927 guest tour of the Soviet agitprop group ‘Die Blauen Blusen’ (‘The Blue Blouses’) triggered a new wave of such groups. Though in a different register, Brecht’s productions of his own plays, such as Leben Eduards des Zweiten von England (The Life of Edward the Second of England, Kammerspiele Munich, 18 March 1924), Mann ist Mann (Man Equals Man, Volksbühne Berlin, 4 January 1928), and Dreigroschenoper (The Threepenny Opera, Theater am Schiffbauerdamm Berlin, 31 August 1928), must, of course, also be regarded as political theatre addressing the social issues and problems of the Weimar Republic. Besides these expressly political performances, new theatre aesthetics were created to respond to different strands of contemporary life, such as the Expressionist movement or Bauhaus theatre. The Expressionists concurred with many representatives of political theatre in that they deemed contemporary bourgeois culture to be utterly rotten; however, they proclaimed the advent of a ‘new man’ who would not be a member of a collective but would reconcile the individual with the community and, therefore, bring about a new bourgeois culture (comparable, in a way, to Schiller’s idea of the aesthetic education of man). While bourgeois culture had caused the ‘twilight of humanity’, they spread their mythical vision of a ‘spring’ in which the human being would be reborn.14 The Bauhaus theatre, initiated by Walter Gropius, supported by Paul Klee and led by Lothar Schreyer (1886–1966) from 1921 and by Oskar Schlemmer from 1923 onwards, was founded and understood as a kind of laboratory, as Gropius outlined it in their programme: We are exploring the individual problems of space, the body, movement, light, colour, and sound. We constitute the movement of the organic and the mechanic body, the sounds of speech and music, and build the stage and the figures. The conscious use of the laws of mechanics, optics, and acoustics is key for our stage composition. (Gropius [1922] 1975: 72)

Regarding the widespread use of the metaphor of ‘spring’ in the discourse before, during, and after the war, cf. Eksteins (1990). 14

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The political theatre of Piscator and of the different agitprop groups, on the one hand, and the Bauhaus theatre, on the other, mark the two extremes of the broad spectrum covered by the different theatre forms in the Weimar Republic. Whether they saw their work as propaganda for a political movement or as research on the conditions of theatre guided by scientific principles, they all agreed that theatre’s aim and purpose were not to promote Bildung but to deal with issues and problems arising from contemporary life in the republic. Performing Greek tragedies clearly was not the focus of their interest. The few productions that did happen remained rather marginal.15 They did not bring about a new aesthetics—with one notable exception. This was Leopold Jessner’s production of Oedipus (4 January 1929) at the Staatliches Schauspielhaus Berlin. It comprised Oedipus the King and Oedipus at Colonus and lasted for two and a half hours with an intermission of fifteen minutes between the two tragedies (adaptation by Heinz Lipmann). In 1919, Jessner (1878–1945) had become the first chief director of the Staatliches Schauspielhaus, the former Royal Theatre. His appointment caused an outburst of hostility and rage in conservative circles, since Jessner was Jewish and a Social Democrat. Albert Patry, engaged by the Schauspielhaus as one of its directors, commented in the Berliner Tageblatt (14 December 1919): We had already . . . been told repeatedly that in anti-Semitic circles the most severe anger was being expressed over the view that with Herr Jessner’s appointment as director of the Staatliches Schauspielhaus now the ‘last Christian’ directorship had disappeared from Berlin, and that certain circles had vowed to demonstrate against this through all means possible! (Cited in Rühle 1988: i. 190)

It is not surprising that Jessner’s first production—Schiller’s Wilhelm Tell (12 December 1919)—caused an uproar among audiences. Albert 15 This applies to the productions at the Hessisches Staatstheater Darmstadt of Oedipus the King (26 April 1922) and Antigone (9 December 1923), which both used Hölderlin’s translations. While very beautiful and highly poetic, they are also rather dark and difficult to understand. Johannes Tralow, who had lived in Egypt for five years as a young man, where he penned his Osmanische Tetralogie (a Turkish history from the thirteenth to the seventeenth centuries), and between 1919 and 1933 led several theatres, staged the Oresteia, first in Cologne (6 February 1920) and later in Frankfurt on the Main (10 October 1923). He did so in open opposition to the Bildungstheater as well as to the idea of theatre as festival. The Frankfurt production was shown several times. Tralow published his version in 1920, and in 1926 it appeared in its fourth edition, which suggests that the production was not unsuccessful and that the book was a real hit (cf. Flashar 1991: 155–7).

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Bassermann, who played Tell, retaliated by threatening to ‘throw out the hired goons’, which silenced the troublemakers. In fact, the uproar was due not to the aesthetics as much as to the political prejudices, although the production’s aesthetic was surprisingly novel. Jessner was convinced that the ‘poetic oeuvre at hand’ is to be regarded by the director as ‘the material of his work’. Since the stage follows its own laws, which are remarkably different from those of writing, the director must ‘first dissolve the already completed work of poetic art into its individual components in order to create the stage version out of the new arrangement of these parts’. Instead of staging ‘the fable of the classical work of art’, there follows the necessity of ‘approaching the work through the dominant idea and to proceed with the realization of the whole from there’: the abridgement of the text, the ‘balancing of the scene’, or the selection of the scenic devices (Jessner, in Fetting 1979: 172). Jessner identified the ‘cry for freedom’ of a people enslaved by tyranny as the ‘dominant idea’ in Wilhelm Tell. The purpose of the production was its expression. The stage design (by Emil Pirchan) was abstract—no mountains, no lake, no huts. It consisted of a system of stairs, black curtains at the sides, and a cyclorama at the back. The lighting created the particular atmosphere indicative of each place. The system of stairs allowed for the most diverse movements, positions, and configurations. The colours of the costumes were symbolic—Tell (Bassermann) wore white and Geßler (Fritz Kortner) red clothes. The acting struck the critics—and probably the spectators, too—as completely novel and overwhelming. This applies in particular to Kortner’s performance as Geßler. Julius Bab describes his first entrance: Behind the scene we still hear the pursuing, raging voice shaking with fury and filled with blood: ‘Drive them apart!’ And something terrible, chillingly paralysing faces us from within. Then, however, he steps forward like a red, piercing flame, broad, heavy, and yet erect from the quivering tension . . . (Bab 1926: 138)

Full of enthusiasm, Siegfried Jacobsohn writes: And new life blossoms from the ruins. Blossoms? It explodes, shoots out beyond all limits with lecherous, tropical splendour as soon as Fritz Kortner turns the cowardly tyrant into a hideously laughing goblin. No hissing sentence escapes the toad-like mouth of this fairy tale figure without flickering, sulphurous flames. It is worth seeing how the riding crop beneath his hand turns into a dagger, a sword, a whip in his fist. (Jacobsohn, cited in Rühle 1988: i. 192)

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It is rather telling that the opening line in this excerpt also appears as the first sentence in Alfred Kerr’s review: ‘And new life blossoms from the ruins’ (Alfred Kerr, Berliner Tageblatt, 13 December 1919, cited in Rühle 1988: i. 193). The production marked the creation of a new theatre aesthetics, based on a style introduced by productions of Expressionistic plays from 1916 onwards16 but going far beyond what had been accomplished so far. When, almost ten years later, Jessner staged Oedipus with Fritz Kortner as the lead, he still relied on some of the principles underlying his first production at the Staatliches Schauspielhaus. However, applying the ‘dominant idea’ guideline to a Greek tragedy can be regarded as a novelty. Certain new phenomena emerged that are worth examining in our context. This was noticed by almost all the critics, although their evaluation of the production differed greatly: Herbert Ihering, whose judgement generally characterizes him as a critic with a refined sense of style and regard for innovation on the stage (he was a supporter of Brecht), recognized

16 The first productions of Expressionist plays took place while the war was still raging: Walter Hasenclever’s Der Sohn (The Son) in Dresden (1916), Oskar Kokoschka’s one-act plays Mörder Hoffnung der Frauen (Murderer, Hope of Women), Hiob (Job), and Der Brennende Dornbusch (The Burning Bush) at the same theatre one year later, Reinhard Sorge’s Der Bettler (The Beggar), staged by Max Reinhardt on an experimental stage at the Deutsches Theater as inaugural performance for members of the newly founded society ‘Das junge Deutschland’ (‘Young Germany’), which aimed to have more contemporary plays staged (premiere 23 December 1917), followed by Reinhardt’s production of Reinhard Goering’s Die Seeschlacht (Naval Battle). The critic Herbert Ihering deemed the performance of Werner Krauß, who played the part of the fourth sailor, as an anticipation of the Expressionistic style: ‘Words became gestures, words became the body. Krauß performed with such intense concentration that it was as if his senses had been switched around: he saw sound and heard movement’ (Ihering 1922: 63). Three weeks later Richard Weichert’s production of The Son premiered in Mannheim. The director used all scenic devices in order to express what in his view was the core idea of the play—‘the drama of the spiritual awakening unfolding in the heart of the son’ (Weichert 1918: 66): an almost empty stage, delineated by black curtains with the white contours of doors and windows, a novel use of lighting that focused not only on certain figures but also on single parts of the body, an expressive, hurling manner of speaking and ecstatic movements. The son was present on stage throughout the performance. Three months before the premiere of Wilhelm Tell, Karl Heinz Martin staged Ernst Toller’s Die Wandlung (Transformation) at the Tribüne Berlin (30 September 1919), about which Ihering wrote: ‘In Ernst Toller’s play Expressionism in the theatre for the first time was not experiment but fulfilment’ (Der Tag, Berlin, 2 October 1919, cited in Rühle 1988: i. 158). However, Jessner’s production of Wilhelm Tell was the first time that an Expressionistic theatre aesthetic was applied to the production of a canonical play and developed accordingly.

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that here ‘a performance was coming into being that consisted of old and new components’ (Ihering 1961: 375). He identifies as the main problem that the production has to deal with ‘the uncertainty with which we nowadays face a poetic world rooted specifically in the cultic, in the unity of religious, governmental, and human considerations’ (ibid. 374–5). One way to overcome this dilemma, he suggests, is to rework it into an opera: Stravinsky, together with his poet Jean Cocteau, had the courage to stage the tragedy Oedipus Rex in Latin like an ancient liturgy, like a closed, tragic scene of sacrifice, which a speaker interrupts and explains. The speaker is the only link between the action and the audience; he demonstrates an epic–dramatic sequence. It is the paradoxical and yet shockingly magnificent attempt to bring closer a distant world not by humanizing or reducing the distance but through a process of ‘freezing’ (‘Einfrostung’, a word used by Stravinsky), of increasing the distance. (Ibid. 375)

As Ihering recognizes, this approach is not conducive to dramatic theatre. He sees in Jessner’s production the attempt to find a new form for the ‘blending of human proximity and intellectual distance’ (ibid.), which, in his view, is Jessner’s goal. While Jessner did not succeed in developing a completely new form, he used established and innovative approaches side by side. The space, designed by Hans Poelzig (who rebuilt the Circus Schumann into the Große Schauspielhaus), no doubt belonged to an established one. Reminiscent of Jessner’s stairs—one of his trademarks, this time in the form of a huge royal castle in the Mycenaean style—an ‘inhabited sepulchre’ (Paul Wiegler, Berliner Zeitung am Mittag, 5 January 1929, cited in Rühle 1988: ii. 922), as one critic described it, it was structured by a tangle of entrances and stairs. Ihering lists a number of other elements that were old, among them ‘the entirely superfluous and pompous battle painting in Oedipus at Colonus’ (Ihering 1961: 376)—which another critic praised: ‘In front of a projected night sky with soaring thunderclouds an army marched to the stomping rhythm of Antheil’s music, soldiers with the small round shields and lances of Greek vase paintings’ (Wiegler 1929, cited in Rühle 1988: ii. 924). However, beside the many elements Ihering classed as ‘old’, he identified numerous others as new and exciting: But there are moments in this performance that should be developed further, wonderful moments, for which everyone ought to see this Oedipus, wonderful

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moments belonging to the most powerful and the simplest contemporary theatre. Those are moments in which Jessner found an unperturbed stillness and strength that is not stylized or stiff. An almost explanatory representation and unfolding of actions when Oedipus and Jocasta face each other . . . Stimulation through simplicity, drama through the juxtaposition of actions, unnerving through its stillness. Here Jessner and Kortner have for the first time found a way to go beyond the beginnings of their collaboration. Here discretion is not understatement, an outburst is not an explosion. Here is a beginning. Kortner manages to unnerve through his matter-of-fact tone. . . . An evening that offers much that is old and uncertain but is also full of potential. Jessner finally once again raises questions for discussion: for this he must be praised. (Ihering 1961: 376–7, emphasis added)

These novelties, cuttingly identified by Ihering, were also noticed by others. They reminded Felix Hollaender of ‘a matter-of-fact newspaper report on a sensational trial. The individual actions and facts are rendered as soberly as it perhaps corresponds to today’s taste—the effect is more cerebral than celebratory—which means it is intellectual and excludes any ceremonious force’ (Felix Hollaender, 8-Uhr-Abendblatt, 5 January 1929, cited in Rühle 1988: ii. 921). The same critic grants Kortner that he remains loyal to his director in that he also restricts his performance to this sober rationality, very much in control, emotions initially suppressed, so that they spill out with a furious passion only in those grand moments of catastrophe . . . In this strange, often bewildering mixture of corrosive reason and overflowing emotion lie the charm and the strength of this actor. (Ibid. 922)

This ‘strange’ mixture was even characteristic of Oedipus’ behaviour towards his daughters (see Illustration 4.6). Another critic felt slightly alienated by the ‘intensely spare gestures’ (Wilhelm Westecker, Berliner Börsen-Zeitung, 5 January 1929, cited in Rühle 1988: ii. 924). Comparing the reviews of Kortner’s performance in Wilhelm Tell with those on Oedipus highlights the decisive difference in the style of acting. Whether these novelties are criticized as aberrations or as inappropriate, or praised for pointing to the future, the wording in all of these cases is—albeit mostly unintentionally—reminiscent of Bertolt Brecht’s theories on theatre and his directorial style. Like Ihering, Brecht also focuses on these novelties. In his short note ‘Latest Stage: “Oedipus” ’ (1 February 1929, in Brecht 2015: 43–5, at 44), he gives an account of the state of the arts with regard to the development of theatre in the Weimar Republic.

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Illustration 4.6 Leopold Jessner: Sophocles’ Oedipus, Part II: Oedipus at Colonus; Lothar Müthel as Theseus, Lotte Lenya as Ismene, Fritz Kortner as Oedipus, and Eleonore von Mendelssohn as Antigone; stage design by Heinz Poelzig.

He distinguishes two trends—one dealing with aspects pertaining to subject matter (Stoff ) as initiated by Piscator, and the other addressing the question of form.17 While the first had reached a dead end, ‘the most significant advance of the year was the attempt to master the great form. Latest stage: Oedipus’ (ibid.). Brecht defines ‘great form’ as an ‘epic’ one: ‘It must report. It does not need to believe that one can understand our world through empathy, and it does not need to intend this either. The subject matter is vast, our dramatic writing must take this into account’ (ibid.). This did indeed happen in Jessner’s Oedipus. This production must therefore be regarded as ‘the latest stage’ in the contemporary development of a ‘great form’: Important aspects: 1. The great form. 2. The techniques in the second half (Oedipus at Colonus), where a story is told with great theatrical effect. Here, 17 This is a typically Brechtian simplification. For Piscator, proceeding from the question of how to deal with a certain subject matter on stage, invented new forms and, thus, created a new aesthetics. We might, in fact, assess his epic theatre as such a ‘great form’ (große Form).

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words, which till now have been notorious for being lyrical, become theatrically effective. Here the ‘experience’, if it comes from anywhere, comes from the philosophical realm. (Ibid. 44–5)

Jessner’s Oedipus thus points to and indeed anticipates the future of theatre, reflected also in Brecht’s statement in his opening paragraph: ‘The future of the theatre is a philosophical one’ (ibid. 43). Using Greek tragedy as his material, Jessner, according to Brecht and Ihering, succeeds not only in creating ‘a great form’ but also in turning theatre into a philosophical institution. The performance of Greek tragedy here fulfilled a completely new purpose, albeit blurred by the use of ‘old’ devices, as lamented by Ihering. As the reviews reveal, the spectators celebrated Kortner and Jessner. They also once applauded a particular scene: the battle scene, which Ihering had criticized as dated, even if he admitted that it had an unusually strong impact. Largely, the audiences seem to have appreciated this new way of staging a Greek tragedy in the epic style. Whether and in what respect Brecht would return to it when he staged Antigone in Chur, Switzerland, in 1948 remains to be seen (cf. Chapter 6, pp. 194–203). What conclusions can we draw from the success of this production? Did the new staging and acting devices open up a new perspective on and access to ancient Greek tragedy? The majority of the spectators at the Staatliches Schauspielhaus belonged to the Bildungsbürgertum. The fact that they applauded during the battle scene feeds the suspicion that the spectators recognized in it familiar images of ancient Greece. On the other hand, the Bildungsbürger, just like everyone else, had undergone the experience of war. They also went to see Piscator’s productions in his own theatres, applauding his new aesthetics, and Brecht’s productions of The Threepenny Opera, which was a huge success. It is very likely that those Bildungsbürger who did not adhere to conservative views were quite open to novelties in a production of a Greek tragedy. New Objectivity (Neue Sachlichkeit) was their credo, too. These were the same people who loved Bauhaus designs. Jessner’s production of Oedipus, and particularly Kortner’s acting, would have affirmed and renewed their relationship to ancient Greece and especially Greek tragedy rather than destabilizing it. This is not to say that Philhellenism diminished, let alone vanished, in the 1920s—on the contrary. Ancient Greece—be it classical or archaic— continued to figure as a constant reference point in debates on the fine

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arts, on archaeology, or on literature—for instance, in the circle of the poet Stefan George (1868–1933) and his cult of the ‘young man’ (Jüngling), as well as in racial and nationalistic discourses (cf. Marchand 1996: 302–40; Sünderhauf 2004: 139–294). Jessner’s production took another stance. He presented Greece as remote and alien in some ways, to be kept at a certain distance in order to reflect on it without spontaneously identifying with it. In this respect, it counteracted the discourses cited above, which still hailed ancient Greece as a model—albeit defined by everyone in their own way according to their artistic and political leanings and Weltanschauungen. With the exception of Jessner’s production of Oedipus, theatre in the Weimar Republic did not take part in this discourse, nor did it take a stance towards it by putting Greek tragedies on stage. It mostly addressed the burning issues of the time by staging contemporary plays or adapting post-Shakespeare canonical dramas. It saw itself as ‘topical’. Jessner did not stage another Greek tragedy. However, he continued to develop the ‘explanatory representation and unfolding of actions’ with his productions of other canonical plays, such as Shakespeare’s King John (3 May 1929) and Schiller’s Don Carlos (2 November 1929). Alfred Kerr referred to this style not as epic but as pertaining to a New Objectivity. Tired of the malicious and hateful attacks from the conservatives, Jessner resigned from his position at the Staatliches Schauspielhaus in January 1930. In all the thirteen productions he would still stage at the Staatliches Schauspielhaus until 1933, he continued to develop and refine his epic devices.

5 Hailing a Racial Kinship Performances of Greek Tragedies during the Third Reich

When the National Socialists seized power in Germany on 30 January 1933, they were quick to take control of all political and politically relevant social institutions. They were also eager to strengthen their hold over all cultural institutions relating to Bildung, such as universities, schools, art institutions, or theatres. The school curricula were altered to shift their focus to ‘modern’ subjects such as biology, geography, physical education, recent history, and literature, which at the Gymnasiums meant reducing the study of the classics. All subjects, including the classics, had to adhere strictly to the idea of Aryan supremacy and racial purity (cf. Fritsch 1989: 146). Many chief directors and dramaturges at the theatres were dismissed and replaced by card-carrying National Socialists. On 3 February 1933, Hanns Johst, the author of Hitler’s favourite play, Schlageter, was appointed dramaturge at the Staatstheater Berlin. A few days later, on 12 February, Franz Ulbrich was named its chief director. He had until then served in the same position at the Weimar Nationaltheater. Just one year earlier he had invited Hitler to the premiere of his production of Giovacchino Forzano’s play on Napoleon entitled A Hundred Days, which was inspired by Benito Mussolini’s rise to power. This is just one example of how rapidly changes were introduced and realized. Moreover, the Nazis devised a completely new form of theatre—the Thingspiel (Thing play). In a speech to German chief directors of 8 May 1933, Joseph Goebbels, the newly appointed Reich Minister of Propaganda, developed and explained the idea of a new people’s theatre: The National Socialists will reunite people and stage. We will create a theatre of fifty thousand and hundred thousand; we will draw even the last Volk comrade

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into the magic of dramatic art and enthuse them again and again for the great substance of our national lives. (Cited in Stommer 1985: 31)

It is surely no coincidence that the expression ‘theatre of fifty thousand and hundred thousand’ recalls the term Reinhardt coined for his new people’s theatre: the ‘Theatre of the Five Thousand’. The Thing plays were meant to replace it. In fact, Goebbels wanted Reinhardt to join the Thing play movement. Reinhardt had left Germany after his last Berlin production, Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s Salzburger Großes Welttheater (Salzburg Great World Theatre), which premiered on 1 March 1933 at the Deutsches Theater. The actor Werner Krauß was dispatched to offer him ‘honorary Aryan status’ and to talk him into returning. Reinhardt declined. On 16 June 1933, he sent a long letter from Oxford to the German government, in which he declared that his theatres belonged to ‘the national property of Germany’. He concludes: ‘If owing to the given circumstances I draw the only possible conclusion and leave my possessions to the state, I also with a clear conscience maintain the conviction that I can thus pay off the debt of gratitude for my long and happy years in Germany’ (Reinhardt 1989: 277). He felt that an era had come to an end. In 1935, Goebbels asked Edward Gordon Craig, who was leaving for Moscow, to try and persuade Erwin Piscator to return to Germany and realize his concept of a political theatre within the framework of the Thing play movement. Piscator also responded with ‘No!’ Although Goebbel’s publicity campaign subsequently proclaimed a total break with Reinhardt’s new people’s theatre and with Piscator’s political theatre, he was well aware of the continuity that linked the Thing play movement to both (see p. 153). On 7 April 1933, the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service (‘Gesetz zur Wiederherstellung des Berufsbeamtentums’) was issued. It legalized, indeed called for, the dismissal of all Jews, Communists, and other political opponents from all state institutions—the socalled Säuberung (cleansing or purification). Many scholars and artists left Germany or did not return from abroad. Among them were directors, actors, and critics who have figured prominently in the previous chapters, such as Max Reinhardt, Leopold Jessner, Erwin Piscator, Bertolt Brecht, Alfred Kerr, Heinz Herald, Albert Bassermann, Tilla Durieux, Ernst Deutsch, Fritz Kortner, and Alexander Moissi. One might assume that these sudden, comprehensive changes following the seizure of power, which deeply affected all institutions of Bildung,

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would have caused an outcry, if not an uproar, among the Bildungsbürger. But this was not the case, especially as far as their conservative majority was concerned. On the contrary—there was an upsurge of enthusiasm, hope, and expectation, not only among National Socialists but also among most of the patriotic Bildungsbürger. Euphoria spread to the extent that it even seduced an intellectual and poet of the stature of Gottfried Benn, who announced in a speech held in May 1933 that the moment had arrived when history was about to mutate and breed its own people—words he deeply regretted by the end of 1934 (Benn 1962). There were a number of people even among the Bildungsbürger who regarded the months following the change of power as the eagerly awaited national revolution. How could this have happened? The conservative Bildungsbürger did not feel at home in the Weimar Republic. While it is true that the Gymnasium maintained its prestigious position, the educational system became increasingly fragmented. The government never passed a nationwide education law, so that by the 1920s as many as seventy different types of secondary schools existed. While the exclusive privilege of Gymnasium graduates to enter university had already been abolished in 1900, so that even students of the Oberrealschule and the Realgymnasium were admitted, this right was further extended to a variety of secondary schools in the 1920s (cf. Chapter 2, pp. 47–8). Moreover, Prussia launched a reform of the curriculum, focusing on cultural core areas such as German language, history, religion, and geography. Although Greek and Latin were still taught, it became possible and quite popular to read the classical authors in their German translations. It is small wonder that conservative Bildungsbürger did not agree with these reforms. Regarding theatre, they strongly disliked the politicization and the different kinds of aesthetic experiments that had taken place during the Weimar Republic. Since they constantly complained about the increasing materialism and cultural decline of the time, it seems consistent that they hoped the power seizure would bring about changes that in their view were for the better. Moreover, many of them had latent or even blatant anti-Semitic leanings, as became evident in their campaign against Jessner. They saw no need to protest against the Säuberung. To their great pleasure, the newly appointed chief directors of the theatres, who were National Socialists and also highly incompetent, had already been dismissed by 1934 and replaced by renowned artists.

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Gustaf Gründgens (1899–1963) took over the Staatliches Schauspielhaus at Gendarmenmarkt and Heinz Hilpert (1890–1967) Reinhardt’s Deutsches Theater. In addition to certain National Socialist plays that they were obliged to stage, they mostly mounted classical plays— Shakespeare, Goethe, Schiller, Kleist, and so on—including modern classics by writers such as Ibsen or Hauptmann, always proclaiming that they were ‘faithful’ to the text. These theatres met the highest artistic demands, thus completely reconciling the Bildungsbürger to the new political climate. Moreover, it soon became well known that Hitler was an ardent Philhellenist. Already in his propagandist book Mein Kampf he had constantly referred to the Greeks not only as a cultural model but also as ‘racial kin’. In his first indicative speech on cultural politics after the seizure of power on the occasion of the Reichskulturtag in Nuremberg in early September of 1933, he outlined the programme for National Socialist art by taking recourse to the Greeks: Since it is better to imitate something good than to produce something new badly, the available intuitive creations of these peoples can undoubtedly fulfil their educational and guiding mission today as a stylistic example. In the same way that the Nordic spirit experiences its conscious resurrection, it will have to solve the cultural tasks of our time with equal clarity and therefore with aesthetic beauty, just as its racial forebears overcame the problems they faced. (Quoted in Hitler 1934: 11; for Hitler’s relationship to antiquity, cf. Demandt 2001 and Spotts 2002)

For any Bildungsbürger the first sentence recalled Winckelmann’s statement in Reflections on the Painting and Sculpture of the Greeks: ‘There is but one way for the moderns to become great, and perhaps unequalled; I mean, by imitating the ancients’ (Winckelmann 1765: 2). It was also evident that by ‘racial forebears’ Hitler was referring to the ancient Greeks.1 His zealous Philhellenism, his constant invocation of ‘beauty’

1

Hitler strongly disliked the ancestral glorification of the Germanic tribes and the excavations of their prehistoric sites, funded by Himmler. Speer recorded him saying: ‘Why do we call the whole world’s attention to the fact that we have no past? It isn’t enough that the Romans were erecting great buildings when our forefathers were still living in mud huts; now Himmler is starting to dig up these villages of mud huts and enthusing over every potsherd and stone axe he finds. All we prove by that is that we were still throwing stone hatchets and crouching around open fires when Greece and Rome had already reached the highest stage of culture. We really should do our best to keep quiet

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and of the nation of culture that must create beautiful works, and last but not least the enormous sums of money that he invested in cultural institutions, including the German Archaeological Institutes in Athens and Rome, convinced many Bildungsbürger—particularly the conservatives among them—that he would restore and defend their own values; that he not only shared their cultural identity but epitomized it. One might conclude, then, that performances of Greek tragedies flourished during the Third Reich. However, statistics reveal that their share in the repertoires of the theatres increased only marginally compared to the Weimar Republic. Yet an important difference remains: performances of Greek tragedies during the Third Reich took place in particular contexts that endowed them with a previously unsurpassed weight and significance. This holds true for Lothar Müthel’s production of the Oresteia as part of the opening celebration of the Olympic Games in Berlin in 1936, as well as for the many wartime productions of Greek tragedies: Oedipus the King in Schwerin (1939), Darmstadt (1940), Leipzig, Aachen, Chemnitz (all in 1941—that is, the year of the campaign against Greece), and Brandenburg (1943); the Oresteia in Frankfurt on the Main (1941) and Kassel (1942); Electra in Munich, Guben, Göttingen, Düren (1941), and again in Munich (1943); and Women of Trachis in Düren (1944; cf. Flashar 1991: 164–74). While productions of Schiller’s Wilhelm Tell—the play that Jessner had characterized as the ‘cry for freedom’ of a people enslaved—were prohibited in 1941, sixteen productions of Antigone were mounted between 1939 and the closure of all theatres in the Reich on 1 September 1944. As the war raged on, millions of people lost their lives on the battlefields, while millions of Jews all over Europe were deported to concentration camps and murdered. As many German cities were being bombed, leading to the deaths of thousands of civilians, on German stages Antigone uttered the words: ‘Not to join in hating, but to join in loving, is my nature’ (Sophocles 2014: Antigone, v. 523). This begs for an explanation. In search of it, we will examine more closely the staging of the Oresteia at the opening of the Olympic Games as well as the first production of Antigone after the outbreak of the war, which inaugurated the 1940–1 season at the Staatliches Schauspielhaus in Berlin. about this past. Instead Himmler makes a great fuss about it all. The present-day Romans must be having a laugh at these revelations’ (Speer 1970: 94).

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Resurrecting ancient Greece in Nazi Germany: The Oresteia as part of the Olympic Games in 1936 On 3 August 1936, Lothar Müthel’s production of Aeschylus’ Oresteia premiered as a festive performance at the Staatliches Schauspielhaus at Gendarmenmarkt in Berlin. Its audience consisted exclusively of invited guests. Among them, the Berliner Zeitung am Mittag listed Prime Minister Generaloberst Göring and his wife, the ministers of the Reich Dr Frick, Dr Goebbels, Generalfeldmarschall von Blomberg, Freiherr von Neurath, Darré, Schacht, and Schwerin-Krosigk, mostly accompanied by their wives. In addition, the members of the International Olympic Committee were present. Moreover, many German as well as foreign dignitaries from politics, cultural life, economics, and sports were among the guests. The president of the Reichsbank, Dr Schacht, was accompanied by the governor of the Bank of France, Labeyrie. Other guests of the festive performance included the ministers of the Reich Rust, Eltz von Rübenach and Seldte, Reichsführer SS Himmler, the Reichsjugendführer Baldur von Schirach, the Reichsstatthalter Ritter von Epp and Meyer, the Bavarian Prime Minister Siebert, the secretaries of state Lammers, Meißner, Funk, Pfundtner, and Krohn. The corps diplomatique was represented by the ambassadors of France, England, Poland, Turkey, Japan, Chile, Brasil, and the Soviet Union, by legates of Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Argentina, Romania, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Uruguay, Haiti, Peru, Latvia, Hungary, Switzerland, and Yugoslavia as well as by the chargés d’affaires of all the other countries participating in the Olympic Games. (Anon., Berliner Zeitung am Mittag, 4 August 1936)

This list was also published in other newspapers (such as the Berliner Morgenpost, Völkischer Beobachter, Der Angriff) and indicates the enormous importance accorded to the performance by the National Socialist regime. The production of the Oresteia was no doubt meant to support the implicit claim of the Berlin Olympic Games—that is, that Nazi Germany be regarded as the legitimate heir of and actual successor to ancient Greece by an international audience. Müthel’s production of the Oresteia can be properly judged and evaluated only within this context of the Olympic Games, which bestowed on the performance a particular political topicality without requiring any corresponding changes in the text or the staging devices. I will therefore begin by establishing the context of the performance before describing and discussing the production in more detail.

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The National Socialists were initially opposed to the idea of hosting the Olympic Games in Berlin (a decision made years earlier), because they did not believe in any kind of internationalism. Yet they soon understood that the Games would grant them a unique opportunity to sketch a particularly favourable picture of Nazi Germany to be sold to an international audience. They decided fully to exploit the particular relationship between ancient Olympia and Germany, as established by Ernst Curtius. By the end of the eighteenth century, texts dealing with the agônes olympikoi were already much discussed among advocates of a bourgeois physical education in Germany. Even earlier, Winckelmann had planned an archaeological expedition to Olympia, but his untimely death in 1768 terminated the project. British and French archaeologists instead began the first excavations in Olympia around 1800. In 1820, Lord Stanhope mapped its topography and Albert Blouet excavated parts of the Temple of Zeus in 1828–9 and transferred fragments of the Heracles metopes to the Louvre. In 1875, Ernst Curtius systematically began to unearth Olympia. A year earlier he had come to an agreement with the Greek government. While the German side would bear all costs and leave all finds to Greece (a novel provision at a time when most archaeologists felt entitled to take artefacts home), the Greek side granted the Germans exclusive excavation rights in Olympia. Curtius succeeded in bringing Olympia to the attention of a broader public. Between 1875 and 1881, the German government contributed to the popularization of Olympia by publishing annual reports on the various finds by Curtius and his team. Consequently, Curtius’s own reports were eagerly awaited when they finally appeared between 1890 and 1897. Curtius’s findings were taken into account for the design of the Reichssportfeld, the site of the Olympic Games. It was decided to replicate the topography of ancient Olympia in many respects, thus reviving ancient Olympia in Berlin. The Hall of Langemarck was placed on the site where the Temple of Zeus would have stood. In this hall, the ‘Youth of Langemarck’ was worshipped. During the First World War a group of very young Germans had walked straight into enemy artillery fire at Langemarck singing the German national anthem despite the enemy’s overwhelming superiority. From this derived the myth of the ‘Youth of Langemarck’, celebrating the self-sacrifice of young people for their fatherland. Soil from Langemarck was buried—indeed enshrined—

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under the floor of the hall. The hall was meant as a place for the cult of the dead preparing another German youth for its sacrifice in the war to come. Thus, the replica of the topography of ancient Olympia set the tone for the Olympic Games in Berlin and introduced the theme of sacrifice (cf. Alkemeyer 1996). The monumental statues adorning the Reichssportfeld openly alluded to Greek sculptures, referring, among others, to the statues of Apollo from the Zeus Temple in Olympia. Photographs of these figures, taken by Richard Hamann in 1921, featured prominently in the Special Exhibition mounted at the Kunstverein Frankfurt on the occasion of the Olympic Games—Olympia und der deutsche Geist (Olympia and the German Spirit). Spread over six large rooms, the Berlin exhibition, Die Bildwerke von Olympia: Sonderausstellung der Sammlung für Gipsabgüsse in der Universität (The Sculptures of Olympia: Special Exhibition from the Collection of Plaster Casts of the University) presented 115 plaster casts of the findings made during the excavation in Olympia (cf. Stürmer and Wrede 1998: 33). The two exhibitions served to underline the special relationship between Olympia and Germany, particularly Berlin. It was further emphasized by a new element added to the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games, which up to that point had been designed by Pierre de Coubertin. The Olympic flame, first ignited on a tower erected for this special purpose during the opening ceremony of the 1928 Games in Amsterdam, was now lit in the sacred precinct of ancient Olympia by a group of virgins, choreographed by Leni Riefenstahl. Runners in a relay race brought it into the stadium in Berlin. Festivals were celebrated wherever the torch was handed over to a new runner. The last one ignited the Olympic flame in a so-called sacrificial bowl, a tripod bowl, reminiscent of the cauldron in which the sacrificial meal was prepared at the altar of Zeus in ancient Olympia. On the one hand, the torch relay was intended to symbolize a bond between ancient Olympia and Berlin as its modern incarnation. On the other hand, it was meant to point to the particular relationship between Germany and Olympia established by Curtius and his excavations. And finally—if not foremost—the torch relay sought to proclaim Nazi Germany as the genuine heir of ancient Greece. This idea is also suggested by the opening of Leni Riefenstahl’s films on the Olympic Games of 1936, Olympia: Fest der Völker and Olympia:

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Fest der Schönheit (Olympia Part I: Festival of the Nations and Part II: Festival of Beauty). The prologue of Part I goes on for eight minutes, making it one of the longest sequences in the film. It begins with shots of a landscape of ruins, difficult to recognize because of the foggy clouds drifting through it. Eventually, the Acropolis appears out of the mist, revealing statues of gods and heroes. Finally, Myron’s Discobolos comes into view—Hitler’s favourite statue. In 1938, the Glyptothek in Munich purchased a Roman marble copy of it. In his opening speech at the Große Deutsche Kunstausstellung (Great German Art Exhibition) in Munich, Hitler described it as the ideal of physical beauty (Domarus 1992: 1124–7). Gradually, it comes to life by transforming into the German decathlete Huber. Riefenstahl here demonstratively establishes the genealogy of the body of a German sportsman, satisfying all ancient criteria, in the Greek heroes. Whether the athletes and spectators, particularly those from abroad, did, in fact, accord such meanings to the torch relay is somewhat doubtful. Be that as it may, watching the last runner bring the torch into the stadium and ignite the Olympic flame in the ‘sacrificial bowl’ placed at the so-called Marathon Gate was evidently experienced as a powerful moment, not just symbolizing but actually establishing a bodily, living bond between ancient and modern Olympia. The lighting of the flame caused an outburst of emotion—similar to that experienced during the opening ceremonies of future Olympic Games. A new element had been introduced at the Olympic Games in Los Angeles in 1932—a pageant of scenes from the history of the United States, which served the process of nation-building for the American athletes and spectators. In general, the pageant marked a shift from the conventionally solemn atmosphere of the opening ceremony to the more festive, joyful mood of the Games to follow. In Berlin, the opening ceremony ended instead with a Festspiel or festive play by Carl Orff entitled Olympic Youth. First, it highlighted the carefree and happy life of children by focusing on romantic aspects such as boys assembled around a campfire, playing the guitar and singing. It then presented two opposing groups of warriors, the leaders of which met in an agon. This was followed by a so-called weapon-dance by Harald Kreutzberg and the former Kurt Jooss disciple Werner Stammer, which ended with the symbolic death of both agon leaders. The agon was preceded by the following words of the speaker:

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The holy meaning of all play is the highest achievement for the Fatherland. The highest commandment of the Fatherland in need: sacrificial death.

Lastly, a lament for the dead, choreographed by Mary Wigman, was performed. In accordance with Coubertin’s wishes, the lament was followed by the last movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, including Schiller’s ‘Ode an die Freude’ (‘Ode to Joy’): ‘Seid umschlungen, Millionen . . . ’ (‘Be embraced, ye millions . . . ’). Thousands of torches— a sea of fire—were ignited on the upper rails of the stadium to the tune of the symphony and before the background of the night sky. Flak spotlights formed a cathedral of light. The experience undoubtedly made many participants shudder and thus aroused particular emotions in the masses present. Instead of moving away from the solemn atmosphere of the opening ceremony as the pageant in Los Angeles had done, the Festspiel emphasized and reinforced it. It linked the subject of the agon, which anticipated the agones olympikoi of the next day, with the theme of sacrifice and thus pointed back to the Olympic flame ignited in the ‘sacrificial bowl’ as well as to the Hall of Langemarck, where the youth who sacrificed themselves for the ‘fatherland’ were worshipped. Moreover, Berlin was clearly marked as modern Olympia. The site of the Olympic Games in Berlin was not only linked to ancient Olympia by a living bond but even claimed to resurrect it. In this context, one might have expected the opening night of the Oresteia to be scheduled for the following evening. Instead, on 2 August, Eberhard Wolfgang Möller’s Thing play Das Frankenburger Würfelspiel (The Frankenburg Game of Dice) was performed on the Dietrich Eckart Stage adjacent to the Reichssportfeld. The Dietrich Eckart Stage was built as a Thing site, an open-air theatre largely modelled on ancient Greek theatres but emphasizing the vertical axis. Ludwig Moshamer, architect of several Thing sites, described the architecture and the possible effects of such sites in the journal Die Bauwelt (1935) as follows: On the one hand, the site for the Thing plays has a ranked auditorium crisscrossed with broad aisles running from side to side and from top to bottom. On

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the other hand, it has a performance area layered like a terrace, with different areas—front, middle, upstage, and side—linked to each other by steps. These performance terraces reflect the pattern of the aisles in the auditorium and together they create an architectonic whole, in which there is no separation. The performers and the chorus can pour out into the performance areas from among the spectators; alternatively, the play can be carried by the performers into the audience so that the spiritual tension of the spectator rises towards a feeling of total communion with the play and full participation. (Cited in Eicher, Panse, and Rischbieter 2000: 37)

Undoubtedly, the architecture of the Thing sites was also inspired by the spatial arrangements developed by Max Reinhardt for the Circus Schumann, where he had staged Oedipus the King (1911) and the Oresteia (1912). Thing plays are choric plays performed by the masses for the masses (cf. Fischer-Lichte 2005: 46–68). The Volk community that they presented to the masses and that would ideally be composed of the actors and the spectators proved to be a largely self-organized and selforganizing community without a leader. The government that had initially hailed the movement by the end of 1935 prohibited the use of speaking choruses, its main artistic device, because it was derived from communist mass spectacles. However, it did not suppress the Thing play movement but allowed it to survive as a dim flame that was supposed to blaze up one last time before slowly dying away. Such a final highlight was planned for the Olympic Games: a Thing play was to be performed based on the idea that Nazi theatre in Germany followed Greek models, which they could even rival; that the Thing play movement could be regarded as a modern version of ancient Greek tragic theatre. The Thing play—officially no longer called that for reasons I shall explain later— commissioned by Goebbels for the Olympic Games differed from those performed earlier in that it did not deal with recent German history from the First World War to the seizure of power by the Nazis. Instead, it was a play set during the Peasants’ War of 1524–5. The play re-enacted this historic event as a tribunal against the Emperor, his advisors, Maximilian of Bavaria and Count Herbersdorf, who are accused and found guilty of having abused ‘the trust of the people, | the honesty of the peasants, and the courage of their leaders’ (Möller 1974: 341). Apparently, the critics from the foreign press clearly understood the organizer’s claim of having created a new theatre, even if the spectators from abroad judged it differently. The Nieuwe Rotterdamsche Courant

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highly praised the spatial and acoustic effects made possible by the particular architecture of the site and this form of choric theatre; however, ultimately, the critic deemed the play a failure: ‘The art contained within the play is not new, and that which is new, is not art’ (cited in Eichberg et al. 1977: 51). The Le Temps reviewer considered the plot too static but was also impressed by the spatial and acoustic effects, concluding that, ‘despite its weaknesses, the play is a success for it shows the readiness of the audience to accept new forms of art’ (cited in ibid. 52). The English critic and scholar of German literature Geoffrey Evans was enthusiastic about the performance: It is impossible to give an idea in words of the effectiveness of the staging. Those who have seen our Tattoos know the peculiar emotional effect that is evoked by sheer magnitude, mass movement, flooding colour and reverberating sound. . . . For in it for the first time all these means were welded together into a dramatic and artistic whole. That is why I see in this piece the seeds of something new. (Evans 1938: 196)

It is difficult to assess whether the spectators and critics from abroad also recognized that the new element they had discovered in the Thing play was meant to refer back to ancient Greek theatre. Even if they did not, the foreign guests might have become aware of the dramaturgy underlying the succession of the three performances of choric theatre on three successive nights—the Festspiel Olympic Youth at the end of the opening ceremony within the stadium, the Thing play The Frankenburg Game of Dice at the Dietrich Eckart Stage adjacent to the Reichssportfeld, and the ancient Greek trilogy Oresteia at the Staatliches Schauspielhaus at Gendarmenmarkt. The first performance, openly referring to the agones olympikoi, introduced the subject of sacrifice for the fatherland, thus vaguely connecting sports with violence and patriotic death. This allowed the Nazis to introduce an ideology dear to them, represented in the Hall of Langemarck, under the banner of Olympism. The second performance focused on unjust German rulers from the past facing tribunal in the form of choric theatre on a stage invoking ancient Greek theatre spaces. The political statement made by the unambiguous condemnation of these rulers went hand in hand with the ‘invention’ of a new theatrical form derived from the ancient Greeks. The third performance, this one of a Greek tragedy—the ur-form of choric theatre and originally performed

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in an open-air amphitheatre—brought the spectators back to a traditional theatre building and unmistakably referred to ancient Greek theatre in the choice of the play. The link between the three performances seems apparent, but it was also explicitly stated in the programme notes of the Oresteia, where the Dionysus Theatre in Athens was depicted alongside the Dietrich Eckart Stage; photographs of Greek sculptures of the archaic and early classical period featured next to those of the monumental sculptures on the Reichssportfeld (programme notes to Lothar Müthel (1936) Aeschylus’ Oresteia, Staatliches Schauspielhaus at Gendarmenmarkt, Berlin, season 1935–6). On the other hand, the trilogy suggested a definite continuity between the German Empire, the times of Curtius and Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, and the Third Reich. In the programme notes, Wilamowitz-Moellendorff ’s speech on the occasion of ‘His Majesty the Emperor’s and the King’s birthday celebration’ in 1898, which was entitled ‘Volk, Staat, Sprache’ (‘People, State, Language’), was reprinted with the title ‘German Confession by Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff ’: We, as German men and citizens of the German Empire, considering the whole and not a single party or social class, will look not without satisfaction and with the confidence of a healthy national strength at what has been achieved so far and at what is still to come . . . New life demands new forms. New strata and classes of society, in the healthy feeling of their own strength and significance, demand a proper place . . . For we see life’s spiritual reflection, art, struggle in an honest and ardent endeavour to make appear the Today, the only living thing as opposed to what is eternally of Yesterday, to make appear the Eternal that has never come into being, as opposed to the banality of everyday life. (Wilamowitz-Moellendorff 1901: 19–20)

This relationship was further strengthened by using WilamowitzMoellendorff ’s translation of the Oresteia for the performance. It was penned in protest of Nietzsche’s vision of ancient Greece. It even introduced numerous Christian terms such as ‘sin’, ‘hell’, or the exclamation ‘God in Heaven’, and in this way ‘Christianized’ the—as Nietzsche would have it—Dionysian tragedy, thus making it palatable for the audiences of his time. It does seem rather strange that Lothar Müthel used Wilamowitz’s translation. As the reviews suggest, his staging of the first two parts of the Oresteia conveyed the image of an archaic, savage, and bloody Greece

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much more in line with Nietzsche’s vision. He made only slight changes to the translation by removing many of the Christian terms and other expressions that sounded too dated or slanted.2 It seems, then, that the primary reason for using Wilamowitz’s translation grew from the need to construe a certain kind of continuity between the pre-war German Empire and the Third Reich. However, Müthel’s changes and cuts do not suggest any ideological or political statement.3 In this sense, the critics seemed to have been right in praising the production as having remained true to the text. The stage was designed by Traugott Müller. He did not try to imitate the conditions of a Greek amphitheatre but instead relied on the possibilities offered by this very spacious box set stage. For the first part, Agamemnon, he erected a monumental palace, which could be reached by climbing a few steps (see Illustration 5.1). In the second part, The Libation Bearers, the huge tomb of Agamemnon dominated the stage (see Illustration 5.2). The third part, The Eumenides, was performed in front of a two-storey columned structure divided by a gigantic statue of the goddess Athena (see Illustration 5.3). Its pedestal rose so high that the actors barely reached its upper edge and the spectators in the upper galleries could see no more of the goddess than her feet and the hemline of her robe. The stage design was generally appreciated or even praised by the critics, although some argued that Agamemnon’s palace in the first part was ‘too Periclean’ (Karl-Heinz Ruppel, Kölnische Zeitung, 396–7, 7 August 1936). The music, which was considered ‘austerely primitive’ by one critic (Otto Ernst Hesse, Berliner Zeitung, 187, 5 August

2 The version of the text that Müthel used can be found in the archives of the Institut für Theaterwissenschaft of the Freie Universität Berlin. All the changes to the text are in Müthel’s handwriting. 3 This is not to say that Müthel (1896–1965) did not share the National Socialist ideology. He very much did. Müthel had joined the National Socialist Party in May 1933. One year earlier, in an article in Der Montag (6 June 1932), he had already declared himself an ardent National Socialist but at the same time stated that his National Socialism did not differ greatly from what he called Stalin’s National Socialism (accordingly, he emphasized his good collaborations with the communist actor Hans Otto, who was later murdered by the Gestapo). But, while there can be no doubt about Müthel’s own National Socialist leanings, it seems that, as far as his production of the Oresteia is concerned, it was not so much his own political convictions but the whole context that gave it its particular meaning. Müthel’s post-war career is revealing: in 1947 he was denazified (entnazifiziert) and appointed chief director of the Nationaltheater Weimar, where he worked until 1950. From 1951 to 1956 he served as chief director at the Schauspiel Frankfurt.

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Illustration 5.1 Lothar Müthel: Aeschylus’ Oresteia Part I: Agamemnon; Agamemnon’s homecoming: Clytemnestra (Hermine Körner) receives Agamemnon (Friedrich Kayßler) as Cassandra (Maria Koppenhöfer) looks on.

Illustration 5.2 Lothar Müthel: Aeschylus’ Oresteia Part II: The Libation Bearers; Orestes (Hannsgeorg Laubenthal) at Agamemnon’s tomb and the chorus of women.

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Illustration 5.3 Lothar Müthel: Aeschylus’ Oresteia Part III: The Eumenides; Athena (Hilde Weißner) in front of her gigantic statue and the Erinyes at her feet; stage design by Traugott Müller.

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1936), was composed by Mark Lothar. It seems that most critics deemed it appropriate to the staging. Judging by the reviews, Müthel placed particular emphasis on the shift brought about by Athena. While in earlier Oresteia productions The Eumenides had been ruthlessly shortened or omitted entirely—as was prominently the case in Reinhardt’s production of 1912—Müthel made almost no cuts to the play. It seems that at the centre of his interest lay the sudden shift away from the principle of revenge and counter-revenge linked to the curse affecting the house of Atreus and towards the principle of the polis, which investigates the motives of the deed, evaluates the arguments, and adheres to the result of a voting process. The emphasis on this shift seems to have been suggested most strongly by the particular intensity of the actors’ play, especially that of Hermine Körner as Clytemnestra, Friedrich Kayßler as Agamemnon, Maria Koppenhöfer as Cassandra, and Hannsgeorg Laubenthal as Orestes. The critic Ruppel writes: The first two parts . . . emphasize the archaic through a force that captivates, frightens, and deeply stirs the spectators. Müthel does not shy away from Dionysian ecstasy. When Cassandra runs across the steps of the Atrides’ palace in the ecstasy of prophecy, sniffing blood like an animal; when Clytemnestra, stained with blood, holding up the murderous axe in her hand, transgresses the threshold; when Orestes drags her up the steps while she screams horribly out of fear of death, and then himself is whipped into madness by the rising goddesses of revenge—then the elemental effects of a passionate theatre are achieved in which at the same time the shudders of a religious emotion tremble. Müthel stages the end of the heroic era. The terror of the end of the world accompanies it. (Ruppel 1936)

All critics agree on the enormous impact that the first two parts had on the spectators, differing only in the details they choose to describe. Several critics use the term ‘Dionysian’ in order to capture their particular quality. Accordingly, the transition from the second to the third part is characterized as ‘the passage from the Dionysian to the Apollonian, from mythos to history, from the lineage to the state’ (Anon., Münchner Neueste Nachrichten, 214, 6 August 1936). The critics disagree in their evaluation of the third part. Ruppel (1936) continues his review with a sharp critique that seems to be directed more at the tragedy than at the director: The scene of Orestes’ atonement before the Areopagus, which is summoned by Athena, lacks this elemental effect. Instead of mythical proceedings we witness a

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historic custom (the voting with voting stones). Instead of a ritual conjuring up of a spirit, as was the case with the sacrifice at Agamemnon’s tomb, we see a representative ceremony. Instead of passions, arguments fight. Even here one admires the organization of language, the structure of the choruses of the Eumenides, the bouncing tension in speech, and response of the argument between Apollo and Athena on the one hand and the revenge demons on the other. Müthel’s sensibility for diction, his faculty for a lively rhythmical organization of language . . . is quite astonishing. It is not his fault when the end of the ‘Oresteia’ leaves behind the first two parts in terms of immediate effect.

Not all critics agree with Ruppel in their assessment of the third part. The critic of the Düsseldorf newspaper Der Mittag, for instance, writes: The style of the first two parts is justified only by the final part, which, quite rightly, is entitled ‘The Reconciliation’. The Erinyes are not driven to a naturalism, which might stimulate fear. However, before the great, festive solution in the Parthenon one senses Attica to be great and filled with festivity. (Anon., Der Mittag, 5 August 1936)

This critic seems to feel that the passage from the Dionysian to the Apollonian, from the ‘darkness’ of the first two parts to the light of the third, from the atrocities there to the rational arguments here, from the curse on the house of Atreus to the ‘festival’ of the democratic vote in the polis, was performed successfully in the production. If we agree with the critics in their judgement that the emphasis lay on the passage, it becomes difficult to discover any links between the production and National Socialist ideology. However, given the context of the production, it is apparent how the Nazis could have monopolized it. This is demonstrated and explained by several reviewers, particularly in those newspapers that were owned by or close to the Nazis. Kuno Feldner of the newspaper Deutsches Wollen (23 August 1936) declared: ‘Ancient drama today is not alien to us. While at the turn of the century it was a colourless educational experience, today it is a vivid, living experience. We know and honour the power of blood so that an Orestes and an Oedipus from the distant past have become close to us.’ Friedrich Märker, the critic of the Münchner Zeitung (11 August 1936), elucidates the parallels between Aeschylus’ and his own time: ‘The Oresteia is born out of the clash of two Weltanschauungen. In it, there lives the enormous tension that always shakes the earth when the old is doomed to fall and something new is born—as we experience it today.’ And the anonymous critic of the newspaper Germania (Berlin, 6 August 1936) stresses how

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true Müthel’s production is to the text because it succeeds in depicting these ‘changing times’ from ‘the law of revenge’ to the new doctrine that the ruler and the leader of the community even stand above the bonds of blood and that the duty of loyalty between husband and wife matters as much as the bond of blood between mother and son. Almost nowhere in antiquity does the yearning for redemption through a new ethics come to the fore so strongly and with such depth of emotion . . . In the monumental course of the Oresteia we see the roots of many a problem that occupied the thoughts and feelings of so many great minds in later centuries. The battle between light and darkness, between law and violence, the tragic clash of duties, the rootedness of the great work of art in the spirit of a people and in its religion. . . . Here, in the immediate bonding to the divine and völkisches working of fate lies the mystery and the uninterrupted effect of the tragedy.

The review abounds in National Socialist terminology aimed at demonstrating the topicality of Aeschylus’ Oresteia and its staging by Müthel in the early days of the Third Reich. By staging the transition from the Dionysian to the Apollonian, from an ‘archaic’ to a ‘classical’ Greece, Müthel’s production brought forth the possibility of being understood and interpreted as a representation of the Zeitenwende (‘changing times’) brought about by the Nazis. Müthel’s production of the Oresteia could therefore be read as a portrayal of Germany’s ‘rise’ from the bloody battlefields of the First World War, the ‘betrayal’ through the Versailles treaty and the ‘darkness’ of the Weimar Republic, to the ‘light’ brought about by the National Socialists’ seizure of power. This exactly corresponded to the (hi)story as told by many Thing plays. Most prominent among them was Richard Euringer’s Deutsche Passion 1933 (German Passion 1933), which served as a model for most Thing plays written between 1933 and 1935. These plays referred quite unambiguously to the pattern of Christ’s torture and death, his descent into hell, and his resurrection. Accordingly, the seizure of power by the Nazis was interpreted in these plays as the resurrection of the German nation (Fischer-Lichte 2005: 122–6). Against this backdrop it is remarkable that many reviews establish a connection between Müthel’s production and the Thing plays. This holds true in particular when discussing his work with the chorus. Müthel was quite experienced in staging choric theatre. He staged not only Schiller’s The Bride of Messina (1803), in which Schiller reintroduced the chorus to modern tragedy in order ‘to declare war . . . on naturalism’, as he

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explained in the foreword to its publication (Schiller 1962: 7). Müthel also staged a Thing play. In June 1935, the Thing site Heiligenberg near Heidelberg was inaugurated in celebration of the summer solstice. Kurt Heynicke’s Thing play Der Weg ins Reich (Path to the Reich) was performed there on the occasion of the Heidelberg Reichsfestspiele in July the same year. Lothar Müthel directed the performance. His work was praised not only by theatre critics of different newspapers but also by Wolf Braumüller, a Thing play expert from the Rosenberg faction that fundamentally opposed the Thing play movement as too Christian and too Catholic. He judged that, for the first time since the National Socialist revolution, a truly pioneering attempt and venture towards the future shape of the Thing play has taken place at the Thing site at Heiligenberg. The performance marks an attempt at a declaration of belief in a certain Weltanschauung. It has been carried out successfully and has made a lasting impression. (Wolf Braumüller, Deutsche Bühnenkorrespondenz (1935), 2)

In addition to the idea of Zeitenwende that Müthel focused on in his production of the Oresteia, his work with the chorus stressed a certain relationship with the Thing play. Many critics explicitly related Müthel’s chorus to that of The Frankenburg Game of Dice. The critic of the Münchner Neueste Nachrichten opens his comments on the chorus in the Oresteia by referring to the Thing play performance of the night before: Never before after returning home from the living experience at the Dietrich Eckart Stage did we grasp so fully how the dynamics of this tragedy explode the frame of a box set stage. But it was just admirable how Müthel nonetheless forced an event of such dimensions into the narrow given space without minimizing its full force and impact. The most difficult task was the inclusion of the chorus into this frame. For the chorus is not only the Dionysian mirror of what is happening. However, it is also not simply to be understood as the eternal voice of the people as is the case in The Frankenburg Game of Dice. Müthel left it its double role of action and reflection on the stage and in the interruptions of the action performed in front of the curtain. The stylized creation and dissolving of groups created an image of the strongest possible force which deeply inscribed itself into memory. (Anon., Münchner Neueste Nachrichten, 1936)

With the exception of one or two critics, all others praise Müthel’s work with the chorus, which they see not just as one possible way of dealing with a choric theatre but as an experiment leading to an altogether new choric theatre. This aspect becomes clear in many reviews.

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The critic of the Münchner Zeitung, Friedrich Märker, begins his review with a reflection on the present-day significance of choric theatre: The problem of the chorus today, in the highest sense, affects our time. For in the new drama, which is meant to express the thoughts and living experiences of the Third Reich, the chorus will play the decisive role. This became obvious just the other day when The Frankenburg Game of Dice was performed. The choice of the Staatliches Schauspielhaus to present to the Olympic guests Aeschylus’ Oresteia as a festive performance surely results not just from the rather superficial reason that the Oresteia as well as the idea of the Olympic Games originates in Greece. (Märker, 1936)

It is striking, then, that some critics discuss the Oresteia production in terms of its possible contribution to the creation of a ‘new’ German national theatre. They argue that, ‘for us, Greek theatre and its tragedies today are no longer a mere educational resource or even philological object. In our striving for a national theatre and drama we understand them in some sense according to the motto: exempla docent’ (Anon., Berliner Börsenzeitung, 5 August 1936). In this context, the production of the Oresteia is once again related to the Thing play movement.4 The newspaper Die Tat states that, ‘in our struggle for a German national theatre that affects our time, Greek tragedy plays an important role. One has only to be reminded of the Dietrich Eckart Stage, which in its architecture is closely modelled on Greek theatre’ (Anon., Die Tat, n.d. 1936). It seems that Lothar Müthel’s production of the Oresteia and the performance of The Frankenburg Game of Dice can be regarded as two sides of the same coin. They both contributed to the proclaimed birth of a new German national theatre out of the spirit of ancient Greece. Also at stake here was a particular image and idea of ancient Greek culture, suitable for being employed in the service of National Socialist propaganda. This is suggested by the repeated proclamation of a close affinity, even kinship, between the Hellenic and the German spirit. 4 However, the Thing play label was no longer used by then. It was expressly avoided by stating that the newly erected open-air theatres had in recent years been ‘mistakenly’ designated Thing sites. After the Olympic Games, the status of Reichswichtigkeit (importance to the Reich), which guaranteed substantial state subsidies, was revoked from the Thing play movement. As early as October 1935, it was decreed that the moniker Thing should no longer be used. ‘Thing site’ was to be replaced with the term open-air theatre. The Thing play movement had fallen out of favour with the regime because it enabled selforganized communities. In its place, Greek tragedy with its heroes was hailed and discussed as the model for a new heroic drama (see pp. 167–8).

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In many reviews, Athena is labelled the ‘Nordic goddess’; moreover, the success of the performance was traced back to this kinship. The critic of the Westfälische Landeszeitung writes: Lothar Müthel’s directing succeeded so astonishingly in bringing the old Hellenic cultic play so close to us that one forgot its separation by many centuries. In his manner of directing he realized a perfect empathy with the Hellenic spirit and therefore came closer to the essence that connects us eternally to the ancient Greek despite our separation in time because of our spiritual and racial kinship. (Anon., Westfälische Landeszeitung, Dortmund, 6 August 1936)

And another critic describes the aim of Müthel’s production by saying that ‘not only the ancient Greek world is supposed to emerge in the German form, but also the deep kinship of our Nordic spirit with that of the ancient Greeks is to reveal itself. No other Greek tragic poet is more Nordic in his deepest being than Aeschylus’ (Anon., National-Zeitung Essen, 6 August 1936, and Anon., Schleswiger Nachrichten, Schleswig, 10 August 1936). As stated in these reviews, the claimed kinship between the Greeks and the Germans was no longer regarded as a spiritual one alone, as postulated by Winckelmann, Humboldt, or Goethe, but also, if not foremost, as a racial one—a blood relationship. This idea, dear to Hitler and other National Socialists, took recourse to a line of thought that originated in the nineteenth century. Once similarities between Indo-Iranian (Sanskrit) and European languages had been discovered in the eighteenth century, the search for a common ur-language began, which was called Indo-Germanic or Aryan (Sir William Jones) and was supposedly spoken by an Aryan ur-people. The theory was based on the assumption that in the second millennium BC Aryan tribes migrated from the shores of the Baltic Sea to Greece, where they destroyed the Mycenaean Minoan palace culture and settled down (cf. Rawson 1969: 306–43; Mosse 1978: 32–45; Drews 1989; Hutton 1999: 260–305). Linking this idea to Gobineau’s and H. S. Chamberlain’s idea of racial differences and Aryan supremacy, the undisputed ideal that the Greeks represented for the Germans suggested itself. It was only on the basis of the proclaimed Rassegemeinschaft (‘racial community’, a term coined by Hitler) between the Greeks and the Germans that the achievements of the first could be adequately acknowledged by the latter and be made productive for their own aims.

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As the reviews suggest, Müthel’s production allowed this to happen— making the spectators aware of their racial kinship with the Greeks and of their obligations arising from it. Those critics who adhered to National Socialist ideology undoubtedly received the performance in this vein. The question, however, is not whether Müthel directed the Oresteia in a way that the spectators reached similar conclusions. Neither the version of the text used by the director, nor the descriptions of staging devices and of the acting in the reviews, nor any remarks on the spectators’ behaviour would justify such a view. Regarding the latter, we are told only that the spectators were ‘enthusiastic’ (Anon., Westfälische Landeszeitung, 1936); that ‘the necessary relationship between stage and auditorium established itself immediately’ (Anon., Berliner Tageblatt, 5 August 1936); that, ‘when the curtain came down the spectators, deeply affected, maintained silence for a while before breaking the spell which had enveloped their hearts at this great event’ (Anon., Westfälische Zeitung, Bielefeld, 7 August 1936); and that the spectators gave the actors and the director standing ovations. Whether they had similar interpretative notions to those articulated in the quoted reviews cannot be determined. It seems futile to examine whether the director adapted the Oresteia to promote National Socialist ideology or whether this was achieved more subtly through staging devices and the acting. The context in which it was performed suggested strategies of this sort. That of the Olympic Games was defined by the design of the Reichssportfeld as a topographical replica of ancient Olympia. The igniting of the Olympic flame in the sacred precinct of Olympia, the opening ceremony with the Festspiel Olympic Youth, and the festive performance of The Frankenburg Game of Dice—each of these elements set the stage for a particular reception of the Oresteia. Its performance and the elements already described were intended as special ‘revivals’ of ancient Greek culture in Berlin that, in sum, aimed at presenting Nazi Germany as the genuine heir of and actual successor to ancient Greece. The addressees consisted both of the international audience and the German public, particularly the Bildungsbürger, who were thus able to reconcile their identification with ancient Greek culture with National Socialist ideology. There can be no doubt that Lothar Müthel’s production of the Oresteia—‘truthful to the text’ as it may have been—played an important part in this mission.

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After the Olympic Games had come to an end, the German Archaeological Institute in Athens once again launched excavations in Olympia, generously funded by the German government, as Hitler had decreed at the start of the event. The excavations continued until 1943.

Ancient tragedies in times of war: The case of Antigone Only a few months after the end of the Olympic Games, steps were taken to prepare the population for the war to come, even if some of these actions may at first glance seem unrelated to that goal. The first one, important in our context, is the abolition of art criticism. This measure was to bring about and guarantee a certain uniformity of criticism of works of art and theatre performances—a blow directed against the more critical part of the Bildungsbürgertum—but was also, and perhaps primarily, an invitation to those segments of society that traditionally stayed away from the theatre. The Nazi Volksunterhaltungseinrichtung (Volks Entertainment Organization) Kraft durch Freude (Strength through Joy) changed this. The second relates more obviously to the matter of war in that it demanded a new, heroic drama celebrating the idea of sacrifice—this also pointed back to the cult of sacrifice epitomized in the Hall of Langemarck. On the occasion of the third anniversary of Kraft durch Freude and of the Reichskulturkammer (27 November 1936), Goebbels announced in his speech that all art criticism would be prohibited from that point on. As one newspaper stated the following day: From today onwards, art criticism as we know it . . . will be replaced by art reports; the place of the critic will be taken by the art editor. Art reports are not meant to judge but to describe and thus to honour the effort. They are meant to give the audience the chance to form their own opinion. . . . Art editors alone can in future discuss artistic achievements, and they will engage in this activity with integrity of heart and following the ethos of National Socialism. (Berliner Tageblatt, 28 November 1936)

While free criticism had already been de facto abolished owing to continuous intimidation since the seizure of power until the Olympic Games—it was impossible, for example, to tear a production to pieces or publish a passionate counterargument—this order meant the end of any kind of critical approach. This has serious consequences for our study.

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While descriptions by newspaper ‘critics’ may still be more or less reliable, in particular when most of them agree on particular aspects, all of their judgements—explicit or implicit, aesthetic, moral, and so on—have to be taken with a grain of salt. Even more important in our context is the second measure. Not only was the status of Reichswichtigkeit (‘importance to the Reich’) revoked from the Thing play movement (cf. note 4) in 1937, but a new dramatic form was conceptualized—the heroic drama. That same year the Reichsdramaturg Rainer Schlösser published his essay ‘Das Unsterbliche Gespräch über das Tragische: Dramaturgie als Gesetzwerk nordischer Kultur’ (‘The Immortal Conversation on the Tragic: Dramaturgy as the Law of Nordic Culture’). In it he defines the tragic and, in particular, ‘guiltless . . . tragedy’ as the expression of a ‘specifically Nordic’ ‘natural, fundamental attitude’, which in his view Sophocles’ tragedies realized in an exemplary manner: The silence of God imposes the tragic height . . . to determine on your own the attitude to be adopted. . . . Oedipus . . . bears . . . the responsibility, which the Gods can no longer bear, on his own human shoulders. . . . He demonstrates the highest possible freedom of humanity by speaking and executing the verdict himself. (Schlösser 1937: 7)

Instead of discussing the question of guilt, Schlösser focuses on selfsacrifice and the corresponding tragic attitude. He finds the heroic in man’s relationship to fate, ‘which elevates human beings even as it crushes them’ (ibid. 8). The task of the proclaimed heroic drama would be to create a new form to express this idea of the tragic. A few such dramas were in fact written and even performed, as, for instance, Eberhard W. Möller’s drama on Struensee Der Sturz des Ministers (The Overthrow of the Minister) and Der Untergang Karthagos (The Downfall of Carthage), which premiered on 25 April 1937 in Leipzig and on 23 October 1938 in Hamburg respectively—that is, half a year after the so-called Wiedervereinigung Österreichs mit dem Deutschen Reich (Reunification of Austria with the German Reich), enthusiastically welcomed by the majority of people on both sides of the border. Yet these plays remained marginal, in terms not only of quantity but also of quality. Not a single one of them was performed on the stages of Berlin. The Anschluss (annexation) of Austria was the prelude to the war, which was to be fought and won by a united, strong Germany. However,

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since the proclaimed heroic drama, which aimed to propagate noble death for the fatherland, failed to flourish, its ur-form Greek tragedy took its place. From January 1939 onwards, Greek tragedies were performed all over the Reich, with the first production staged at the Staatstheater in Schwerin, where Oedipus premiered on 4 January 1939. Even the first Antigone production was mounted before the outbreak of the war—it premiered on 2 June 1939 in Darmstadt. As already mentioned, Antigone proved to be the most popular tragedy. It was performed in Berlin (Staatstheater at Gendarmenmarkt, 3 September 1940), Vienna (Burgtheater, 1 October 1940), Frankfurt on the Main (Schauspiel Frankfurt, 18 April 1941), Düren (10 October 1941), Duisburg (23 November 1941), Essen (Städtische Bühnen, 7 December 1941), Saarbrücken (Gautheater Westmark, 3 April 1942), Königsberg (9 February 1942), Leipzig (Opernhaus, 8 November 1942), Dessau (8 November 1942), Memel (Stadttheater, 24 March 1943), Gera (Preußisches Theater, 4 April 1943), Göttingen (20 January 1944), and Stuttgart (23 January 1944). Each production ran for a prolonged period of time, so that during the war a total of approximately 150 performances of Antigone were shown all over the Reich. Theatre spectators were constantly reminded of the war—a small leaflet enclosed in the programme notes to the Antigone production at the Staatliches Schauspielhaus, for example, calls on the spectators to ‘Remain calm in the case of air raid sirens! The interruption of the performance will be announced from the stage in time. Leave the auditorium in an orderly fashion and find your air-raid shelter at the cloakroom and the adjoining rooms’ (programme notes to Karl Heinz Stroux (1940), Sophocles’ Antigone, Staatstheater at Gendarmenmarkt, Berlin, season 1940–1). The critic of the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung wrote in his review: The Staatstheater deserves even more praise for opening its season with Sophocles at the beginning of the second year of the war; when some hours later the spectator sits at the table in the cellar accompanied by flak concerts while English planes whizz over the residential areas, he will feel doubly grateful for having once again been transferred into the timeless space of great poetry for a few hours. (Bruno E. Werner, Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, 420, 4 September 1940, ‘Wednesday Evening’)

Yet the choice of Antigone comes as a surprise, as it had begun to serve as a code of sorts for the intellectual resistance against the Nazi regime.

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However, the simple fact that Antigone was put on stage does not necessarily imply that it served as an act of resistance even in times of war. This critic obviously found the performance transferred him ‘into the timeless space of great poetry for a few hours’. Or, given the ban on theatre criticism, can this sentence be read as implying a certain resistance? We shall never know but will return to this later. Since the plans for the upcoming season had to be authorized by the Reichstheaterkammer and the Reichskulturkammer, the chief director of the theatre had to submit them well ahead of time. Regarding Antigone at the Staatstheater, no documents could be found concerning this matter. We must, therefore, assume that all the institutions involved, particularly Hermann Göring, who supervised the Staatstheater, agreed on Gründgens’s choice of Antigone. At the beginning of the year, when the plans were submitted for approval, there was still the expectation that the war would end soon. Poland, Denmark, and Norway were occupied. Other ‘successes’ were being anticipated. On 10 May 1940, German troops invaded the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg, and attacked France. On 14 June, Paris was taken without a fight and, on 22 June, France surrendered. On 6 July 1940, the victorious army marched into Berlin, on streets strewn with flowers. On 19 July, Hitler was celebrated as the great victor at the Krolloper in Berlin (cf. Lohse 2006: 152–3). From the point of view of Hitler and his camarilla, the current situation thus looked quite favourable at the time of Antigone’s premiere at the Staatstheater on 3 September 1940, followed on 1 October 1940 by the opening night of Lothar Müthel’s production of the same tragedy at the Burgtheater in Vienna (cf. ibid. 163–79). In such a situation even performances of Antigone might not make those in power feel threatened. However, we must not forget that the next time this tragedy was staged was after the occupation of Greece, and it continued to be staged until many German cities lay in ruins and the closure of all theatres in the Reich was decreed as a result. The proclaimed racial kinship between Greeks and Germans as well as the understanding of Greek tragedy as the ur-form of the urgently needed heroic drama did not allow for a ban on Greek tragedies. Therefore, the question as to how it was possible to stage Greek tragedies and particularly Antigone during the war does not arise. Instead, we must ask how the productions responded to the situation, which constantly changed over those five years.

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Antigone was the most popular Greek tragedy with the Bildungsbürgertum since the days of Hegel’s writing on Antigone and the legendary Tieck/Mendelssohn production in Potsdam with its re-enactments all over Germany. It was read and discussed in Gymnasiums as well as in various debating circles. Many knew the text or at least the second chorus song by heart: ‘Many are the terrible things, and nothing | More terrible than man!’ (Sophocles 2014: Antigone, v. 332–3), Antigone’s most famous words, ‘Not to join in hating, but to join in loving, is my nature’ (v. 523), and her last long passages beginning: Oh tomb! Oh bridal chamber! Oh deep-dug, Ever-guarded home, to which I go— To those who are my own people, the greatest number of whom, in death, Phersephassa has received. (v. 891–4)

The question to ask in taking a closer look at the production of the Staatstheater Berlin is what it offered the Bildungsbürger. Did it emphasize or diminish the political dimension of the tragedy? Did it magnify its topicality or its timelessness—as the critic just quoted suggested? Did it reaffirm the—already destabilized—cultural identity of the Bildungsbürger or contribute to its further destabilization? We must consider that by that point even the more conservative among them were no longer enthusiastic about Hitler and National Socialism. By the time the euphemistically named Reichskristallnacht (literally ‘Crystal Night’, today also known as the Night of Broken Glass or Pogrom Night) took place on 9 November 1938, which saw Jewish citizens being brutally beaten up on the streets and their shops and other properties demolished, their attitude had changed. Generally, even those with anti-Semitic leanings did not approve of such behaviour. They had witnessed a mob in action and wanted to dissociate themselves from it. To be forced into a Volksgemeinschaft (Volks community) controlled by this mob was not compatible with their self-understanding or with their traditional cultural identity. In this context, going to the theatre meant continuing one’s habits and affirming one’s own values, even if Kraft durch Freude also invited to the theatre those people who were part of the despised mob. The performances were mostly sold out no matter what was shown. However, the fact that a Greek tragedy was

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performed appealed to the Bildungsbürger. In any case, they felt at home in the theatres. The question, then, is in what respects the production took this into consideration and how it addressed them in particular. The performance took place in the very same space where the Tieck/ Mendelssohn production had been shown several times up to 1886—the former Royal Theatre. By the time it was performed for the last time, the classical style invented and popularized by it had already become outdated. Photographs of Marianne Hoppe as Antigone in the 1940 production of Karl Heinz Stroux (1908–85), however, suggest that here the classical style was revived once again. She resembles the statues of classical Greece depicted in the programme notes, specifically because her white dress was ‘draped like [that of] the girls on the Porch of the Caryatids’ (Karl Korn, Das Reich, 8 September 1940), which was among the buildings shown in it. She wore very light, almost marble-white make-up that underlined her similarity to a classical Greek statue: ‘Her appearance is that of the Greek ideal, marble, suffused by purple blood’ (Florian Kienzl, Das-12-Uhr-Blatt, 5 September 1940). This last critic even chose the following slogan as the subheading of his review: ‘ “Antigone” in strictly classical form’. However, the descriptions of the performance in the reviews along with other sources—such as the sketches for the stage, photographs, or utterances by Eva Stroux, the director’s widow5—suggest a different conclusion. If the epithet ‘classical style’ is to be applied at all, it was certainly a ‘new’ classical style. For the mentioned sources suggest the idea that the mise en scène pivoted on oppositional, indeed dialectic, elements that appeared to the spectators as distant, foreign, strange, or even exotic, on the one hand, and familiar and habitual, on the other hand. Stroux used Roman Woerner’s translation of the tragedy. This was a fairly new translation with certain poetic qualities. It had the advantage of being clear and easily comprehensible—especially in comparison with Hölderlin’s translation used by Lothar Müthel in Vienna during the same season, which is dark, hermetic, and at times barely intelligible. The choice of Woerner’s translation seems to suggest the intention of facilitating the comprehension of this complex tragedy, thus rendering it as transparent as possible. 5

I received this information from my student, Jessica Hoffmann, who interviewed Eva Stroux for her master’s thesis in 2008.

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This dialectic of darkness and transparency also dominated the stage space (designed by Traugott Müller). As can be gathered from sketches and a photograph, the space was structured by pillars that extended to the ceiling of the proscenium. At the back, some staggered passages led to a huge gate made of rocks that allowed light to flood in. Thus, the set conveyed an impression of enormous depth. On the right side, the statue of a Greek god stood in a niche with arms raised and a dark cloth falling from his left shoulder, covering the lower parts of his body. Many critics identified him as Dionysus (some likened the statue to Zeus). Standing on a high pedestal, the statue rose as high as the pillars. Because of its monumentality, some critics felt unable to recognize the stage space as a representation of classical Greece (to which the temples and statues depicted in the programme notes undoubtedly referred). They rather located it in archaic Greek or Egyptian culture. One critic believed himself to be confronted with a ‘cyclopean palace courtyard’, which ‘breathes the spirit of pre-Hellenic culture with its ashlars’ (Carl Weichardt, Berliner Morgenpost, 4 September 1940). Another described the stage as he perceived it when the curtain rose as ‘antiquity filled with gloomy majesty. It is a Hellas of primeval times with massive grey-brown pillars and truly cyclopean walls’ (Felix A. Dargel, Nachtausgabe, 4 September 1940). A third felt that the stage did not awaken ‘Attic grandeur, but almost Egyptian oppression’ (Richard Biedrzynski, Völkischer Beobachter, Norddeutsche Ausgabe, 6 September 1940). The dominating impressions seem to be of darkness, monumentality, and foreignness. The space remained unchanged throughout the performance; there was no intermission. However, the scenes did change. This effect was brought about through the lighting. Although the spectators thought they were seeing monumental pillars, those were, in fact, widths of cloth that became transparent when lit from behind. As such, the seemingly monumental space gradually became transparent. In this way, for instance, ‘showing the heavy pillars and gloomy walls as an X-ray image gives the Theban palace . . . a strange charm, transparent, dreamlike, and unreal: stunning but mysterious’ (ibid.). The lighting was also used to make the statue of the god, supposedly Dionysus, disappear and then magically reappear. Thus, the impression of monumentality and foreignness was replaced by an impression of transparency and a dreamlike and unreal clarity.

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A comparable dialectic characterized the chorus. It consisted of eight male members. On the one hand, the chorus was highly individualized. Most of the time, the single stanzas of a song and sometimes even whole sentences were not spoken by all members of the chorus in unison, but only by some. Mostly, the text was split among the members, sometimes with repetitions of one sentence or expression by different members, not only in a different voice but also in a different tone, pitch, intonation, or rhythm. Thus, the chorus formed a particular community within which the individual members remained recognizable as such. This was—to use Nietzsche’s expression—the Apollonian side of the chorus. The Dionysian side took over in the chorus’s ecstatic movements. ‘He dances a wild, frenzied dance of the Bacchae to the sound of cymbals in honour of the dark god of love and lust, Dionysus’ (Korn 1940). As can be gathered from this quotation, the music (composed by Mark Lothar) played an important part in this production, even if the songs of the chorus were not composed in their entirety. Rather, the music accompanied the chorus. It was neither ‘melodic–lyrical nor melodic– dramatic music, but merely a composition that provides flavour and atmosphere’ (Fred Hamel, Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, 7 September 1940). The composition used not only cymbals but also a tamtoui, an oriental gong, and a newly invented instrument called the melodium, an electric instrument similar to a celesta. This instrument offered a great wealth of new timbres as they are brought forth only by electric sound production. We have fantastical high sounds, then infinitely long, soaring vibrati resembling the delicate, tremulous voices of an organ with different levels. Lothar employs this method of broad soaring and floating melodic lines, which are reminiscent of a distant ‘aulos’, the ancient Greek double pipe. But even this is not seen in archaic terms; rather, Lothar’s music achieves its highly individualistic character by reinforcing the music with dull rhythms of the percussion and deep gong-like and bell-like undulant harmonies, which even polyphonically overlap with various such melodic voices from time to time. This music achieves its suggestiveness because—in contrast to exterior tone painting—it is saturated with affect. Nothing could illustrate this better than the contrast between the choruses of Eros and Dionysus, whose poetic visions are each very effectively deepened and enhanced through the music with these sparing sounds. (Hamel 1940)

Thus, the music Lothar composed for the chorus was also determined by such a dialectic between the archaic, foreign, Dionysian, and the familiar,

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even modern, Apollonian. By creating distinct atmospheres and using very special rhythms, the music also had a physical effect on the spectators, as will be elaborated later. This was the dialectic that characterized the frame within which Antigone and Creon appeared and acted. According to the critics, they were presented as antagonists from the very beginning. As already described, Antigone (Marianne Hoppe) resembled a classical Greek statue. Creon, in contrast, was dressed in a red robe and black cape with a gold-embroidered belt—a costume characterized by the critic of the Völkischer Beobachter—that is, the Nazi newspaper—as a ‘red satrap garb’, identifying Creon as an oriental ruler. Creon was played by Walter Franck, an actor famous for his representations of villains. Casting him as Creon would have awakened certain expectations and prejudices in those spectators who had seen him in such roles. Antigone and Creon could thus immediately be recognized as opposites, and this polarity was emphasized and even strengthened by the ‘oppositional acting styles of the two protagonists’ (Franz Köppen, Berliner Börsenzeitung, 4 September 1940) (see Illustration 5.4).

Illustration 5.4 Karl Heinz Stroux: Sophocles’ Antigone; Marianne Hoppe as Antigone, Paul Bildt as the Guard, and Walter Franck as Creon.

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Marianne Hoppe played Antigone as ‘a virginal priestess who sacrifices herself . . . from the beginning she seems to emanate a cool hint of the tomb that the tyrant encloses her in’. She was received as ‘a moving statue of mask-like beauty, her gaze mostly fixed into the void’ (Anon., Nachrichten aus dem deutschen Kulturleben, 1940). Her face, however, ‘seemed to be ecstatically marked more than once’ (Franz Götke, Westen, 4 September 1940). In accordance with her appearance and movements, her way of speaking was praised for its ‘convincing monumentality and wonderfully crafted clarity and beauty of verse treatment’ (Korn 1940). It comes as no surprise that one critic felt himself ‘succumbing to the image of Greek theatre: to hear judgements of fate through the mouth of the mask’ (Biedrzynski 1940). In contrast, Walter Franck played Creon as ‘a figure filled with passion . . . with a quick temper’ (Werner 1940). ‘The entire range of human emotions and expressions: greatness, strength, harshness, fury, hatred, ridicule, fear, and contrition—they are linked to each other through subtle transitions to create a compelling character sketch that unites ancient grandeur and thorough individual animation in an exemplary manner’ (Anon., Nachrichten aus dem deutschen Kulturleben, 1940). Another critic, in line with the previously cited reviews, describes Creon as ‘a great achievement of Walter Franck, with quick glances giving away his fear, taking in the people, easily lapsing into the screams of the hot-tempered, fervent as are only those who are doing wrong as he justifies his position to his son’ (Weichardt 1940). While the acting of both protagonists was stylized, it seems that towards the end of the performance it came much closer to realism, which allowed for empathy. As far as Antigone is concerned, her voice changed. ‘Resigned, her voice . . . trembled gently as she stepped through the dark gate towards her end’ (Götke 1940), ‘there was something almost childish and innocent about her doleful farewell from life’ (Korn 1940), so that, in the end, she ‘inspired sympathy with every word’ (Paul Kersten, Berliner Lokalanzeiger, 4 September 1940). Something similar happened with Creon, who was described as ‘ultimately shattering in his collapse’ (Otto Ernst Hesse, Berliner Zeitung am Mittag, 4 September 1940). Evidently, as the majority of the critics perceived and received it, the mise en scène sided with Antigone against Creon. This had also been the case in the Potsdam Antigone, which, however, presented Creon as a dignified ruler. Here, as one critic described it, Creon was to be regarded

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as ‘representative of the principle of the state’ (Köppen 1940), implying a clear bias towards Antigone which, with the war raging, could have provoked a ban on the production. However, the production justified the bias by applying a clever strategy. Only Antigone and those around her were addressed and presented as Greeks, while Creon was turned into an oriental ruler and barbarian, as many critics emphasized. They spoke about his ‘brutal autocracy based on violence and blazing vengefulness’, described him as ‘a villain, more Asian than Greek’ (Korn 1940), and an ‘almost Cretan–Egyptian tyrant’ (Hesse 1940), emphasizing his ‘hot-tempered nature that springs from a torrid, almost oriental mind’ (Werner 1940). He was a ‘Greek ruler of primeval times’ (Dargel 1940), if he was to be regarded as Greek at all. It seems that only such a representation of Creon made the mise en scène acceptable to the Nazis. Even the critic of the Völkischer Beobachter seemed willing to side with this Antigone. While admitting that ‘in his heart Sophocles clearly does not side with the tyrants but with nature, which is embodied by the unfaltering sense of justice of woman’, he deems it necessary to state authoritatively: ‘The tragedy thus does not correspond to the standards of the sacrosanct idea of the state’ (Biedrzynski 1940). Only the critic of the Berliner Börsenzeitung criticizes the production with respect to its representation of Creon and explains that Creon’s prohibition of Polynices’ burial ‘is a measure taken in the interest of state security’, which ‘constitutes a political necessity’. Antigone, therefore, ‘is in her piety and through her action rebelling against the dictate of the reason of the state, against the reality of which she has nothing to show other than abstract concepts’ (Köppen 1940). It seems that the critic of the Berliner Zeitung am Mittag had similar doubts about the production: ‘his decree . . . certainly speaks to our current sentiments.’ However, he concedes that ‘Sophocles does not quite stand by this’ (Hesse 1940). That is to say, the production is ‘true’ to the text and the intentions of the author, even if it does not satisfy contemporary expectations. However, this critic tries to assimilate the tragedy by addressing Antigone’s ‘loyalty to her blood relations’, while another critic does the same by stating that her rebellious action extends only to her ‘clan’ (Kienzl 1940). This use of National Socialist vocabulary perhaps described an attempt to keep the production on safe ground. Yet the following review excerpt in the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung suggests that the production ultimately transgressed that ground:

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Hegel’s interpretation of the tragedy as the conflict between individual and state, which has since become the cheapest cliché, has long been replaced by other approaches. The poet’s heart beats for Antigone, and if one seeks a meaning beyond the flow of the inhumane tides of fate, it can only be that the hubris of the king’s reason of the state leads him to violate the eternally higher laws whose keeper is Antigone. (Werner 1940)

The excerpt highlights the political explosiveness of the production. It is true that it referred to the topos of racial kinship between the Greeks and the Germans by making Antigone Greek—a Greek woman killed by an oriental ruler, thus turning the stereotype of the Aryan male and the Oriental female on its head. Moreover, the production focused on the central question of the tragedy—that of guilt, which Schlösser wanted to have excluded from the idea of the tragic—and answered it by unambiguously siding with Antigone. This is not to say that the production represented Antigone as a familiar figure by showing her as a contemporary with whom the spectators could identify and empathize. Rather, by making Marianne Hoppe resemble a Greek statue, the audience was kept at a certain distance, which, however, did not necessarily exclude or alienate the spectators. Many reviews state that the spectators were ‘deeply moved’ or expressed ‘profound emotionality’; the reviews mention that the standing ovations given to the actors and the director followed a long period of silence at the end, during which the audience seemingly had to break the spell that the performance had cast on them. The atmosphere and rhythm of the performance greatly contributed to this spell. The atmosphere was brought about by the dialectic of darkness and light, as well as by the music, which aroused strong emotions. In general, as already mentioned in the previous chapter, atmospheres are sensed physically; the spectator is not confronted with them or kept at a distance, but enveloped by and immersed in them. Atmospheres are sensed by the whole body and not just by the single sensory organs. The same holds true for rhythm. The rhythms of music, language, and movement are not just heard or seen but sensed physically. Rhythm affects the bodies of the spectators by attuning them to it. In this way, atmosphere and rhythm transferred the spectators into a particular state that was far removed from their everyday lives with all their pressing concerns, allowing them to enter a state of liminality and enabling a deeper involvement with an ethical problem of the greatest relevance. This state of ‘profound

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emotionality’, of liminality, should thus be regarded not as escapism but as one of the rare chances not only to experience the painfully torturous consequences of this problem physically, but, even more importantly, to discuss it intellectually afterwards. To allow for such an experience was indeed a political act, even if it did not lead to any acts of open resistance. Keeping the prohibition of criticism in mind, the discussion in the newspapers on the mise en scène siding with Antigone is remarkable. The National Socialist critics clearly state that this was against ‘the sacrosanct idea of the state’ and that Creon’s decree ‘certainly speaks to our current sentiments’—that is, that Creon is right. Quite unlike Hegel, who accords to both sides the same right, resulting in the tragic collision, they even concede that Sophocles himself sided with Antigone. And, since Sophocles’ tragedies were exemplary models for the new heroic dramas, as Schlösser had explained, this settled the dispute. However, the matter seemed important enough to the critics to underline that, while the production might be ‘faithful’ to the text, its message contradicted the ruling ideology. This allows for the assumption that they read the stance taken by the production as a political act but still felt the need to cloud this. Was this effect accomplished by creating a new ‘classical style’? And did this style specifically address the Bildungsbürger? In my view the label ‘classical’ does not do justice to the style of the production. As described, its main feature was the creation of opposites, with the passages between them being blurred. The world of Antigone was presented as ‘classical’ in terms of her appearance; the transparency of the stage space, however, gave it a dreamlike, unreal aura—the classical world as it may appear to the Bildungsbürger in their dreams, not as part of a historical reality. On the other hand, Creon’s world was characterized by the sort of monumental architecture belonging to an archaic time, which, however, became transparent when Antigone entered it. One could read this style as a commentary on the relationship between the actual world of the National Socialist regime and the war provoked by them, and the world of antiquity so often invoked by the Nazis and, particularly, by Hitler. This classical Greece seemed mysterious and appeared as a transparent dream, swallowed at the end by the huge abyss of monumental architecture. Instead of labelling these oppositional elements a classical style, one might more appropriately describe

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it as an attempt to stage and thus to let the spectators/Bildungsbürger physically experience the disappearance of their image of Greece, not only in Greece’s monumentalization as realized in Nazi sculpture and architecture, but, first and foremost, in the abyss of the Nazi regime. From this perspective, they witnessed the disappearance of their own cultural identity in the reality brought forth by the Nazis. This, of course, is speculation, as there are no documents that could back up this assumption. However, the gratitude expressed by the critic of the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung ‘for having once again been transferred into the timeless space of great poetry for a few hours’ (Werner 1940) may speak to it. On 28 October 1940, Mussolini launched his attack on Greece, which was not successful. Since this did not suit Hitler’s plans, he made a failed attempt to have Greece side with the Axis Powers. On 6 April 1941, the German attack on Greece began, followed by Greece’s surrender on 21 April. Athens was occupied by German troops on 27 April 1941. The goings-on in Berlin at that time seem rather bizarre. On 8 April 1941, Goebbels wrote in his diary: With the Führer. He also admires the courage of the Greeks in particular. Perhaps there is still a touch of the old Hellenic strain in them. . . . The Führer forbids the bombing of Athens. This is right and noble of him. . . . He greatly regrets having to fight the Greeks. (Goebbels 1983: 304)

Moreover, almost immediately after the invasion of Athens, Merkblätter für die deutschen Soldaten an den geschichtlichen Stätten Griechenlands und Afrikas (Pamphlets for the German soldiers at the historic sites of Greece and Africa), produced by the DAI, the German Archaeological Institute in Athens, were handed out to soldiers of all ranks to enable them to appreciate the ancient works of art: In handing out the pamphlets, the main impulse was to immediately give the troops something to hold on to in order to channel that moment of initial enthusiasm brought about by the German victory into an appreciation for the great legacy of antiquity. Merely ten days after the troops entered, the first pamphlet ‘The City of Athens’ (No. 2) was handed out on 7 May 1941, on the day of the grand parade Pamphlet No. 1 (Acropolis) and 3 (Eleusis). (Cited in Sünderhauf 2004: 349–50)

The tone of immense pride in such efficiency in these lines is striking.

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On the day of the invasion, Hitler wrote a letter to Arno Breker’s Greek wife: Dear Mrs Breker, I have been thinking of you a lot lately and regretting the political entanglements with Greece. You cannot imagine how difficult it was for me to fight against your home country. It was the hardest battle that the German Wehrmacht had to face in this war so far. Your brothers fought like the heroes of ancient Hellas and, with you in mind, following the cessation of military action, I gave the order to immediately return all soldiers to their families in freedom, with the exception of the officers’ corps, whose political stance towards Germany raises certain questions. (Breker 1972: 183)

Nevertheless, neither the pamphlets, nor Hitler’s seemingly empathetic words to the wife of his favourite sculptor, prevented the atrocities committed during the German occupation of Greece. The attack on Greece and its occupation were followed by a number of productions of Greek tragedies in the Reich. In the post-invasion months of the year 1941, Oedipus the King was staged in Leipzig, Aachen, and Chemnitz; the Oresteia in Frankfurt on the Main; Electra in Munich, Göttingen, Guben, and Düren; and Antigone in Frankfurt on the Main, Düren, Duisburg, and Essen. The Frankfurt production opened on 26 April, a day before Athens was occupied. Almost all the critics mention the campaign in Greece. The critic of the Rhein- und NaheZeitung Burgen am Rhein—that is, of a very provincial newspaper— relates Creon’s fall to Greece’s refusal of Hitler’s offer to change sides: The sudden fall of the King . . . into the abyss of the hereafter, is it not comparable to that of the former leaders of the Greek state, who blindly insisted on preconceived attitudes and thereby made their entire people vulnerable to collapse! These parallels were obvious: was this the reason why so many hundreds followed the course of the tragedy with utmost suspense—or was it due to the lively form of the directorial effort . . . ? (Cited in Lohse 2006: 185)

It is rather unlikely that the production, which had been planned a year before and rehearsed prior to the German invasion, suggested such an idea or that the audience followed a similar line of thought. In any case, one might jump to the conclusion that the campaign against Greece gave rise to the numerous productions of Antigone and other Greek tragedies. However, even after the defeat and surrender of the German army at Stalingrad, Greek tragedies continued to be staged: Oedipus the King, Electra, and Ajax in Munich—the so-called capital of the National

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Socialist movement—The Women of Trachis in Düren in 1944 (!), and Antigone in Memel, Gera, Göttingen, and Stuttgart—the last two also in 1944. We do not know much about the productions except that most performances were sold out. Following 20 July 1944—that is the day Stauffenberg made the failed attempt on Hitler’s life—Goebbels, the newly appointed Reichsbevollmächtigter für den totalen Kriegseinsatz (Reich Plenipotentiary for Total War), announced the closure of all theatres effective from 1 September 1944. Their artistic, technical, and administrative members were put to work in the defence industry or sent to the front—all except for the so-called Wotan reserve. It consisted of ten singers who, until the very end of the war, were exempt from military service in order to be available for a performance of Wagner’s The Master-Singers of Nuremberg as part of the planned National Socialist celebration of the Endsieg, the final victory. But why, after having continued performing for five full seasons during the war, did the theatres have to be closed at all? Goebbels’s declaration came close to an act of desperation, implicitly admitting that the ‘final victory’ was ultimately nothing but an illusion.

6 Of Guilt and Archetypes Post-War Productions of Greek Tragedies in the 1940s and 1950s

By the end of the Second World War, the former German Reich lay in ruins. Most of the survivors had lost their homes, either through air raids or as refugees from the eastern parts of the former Reich, and were now facing starvation. The forced labourers took the opposite route. Carried off from their homes in Eastern Europe by the Nazis and put to work in the defence industry and in agriculture, most of them severely malnourished from the start, they now tried to make their way back home. With each day, new information about the atrocities committed by the Germans during the war, particularly in the concentration camps, emerged and spread. No one could any longer claim not to have known of the murder of six million Jews. Their own misery could not come close to the suffering they had caused or had helped cause. This situation was well known in Switzerland, especially at the Zurich Schauspielhaus, where many German directors and actors had found refuge. It gave rise to the assumption that a permanent theatre scene would not be possible in Germany for a long time. Two days before the end of the war, on 6 May 1945, the director Leonard Steckel expressed these concerns in his ‘Notizen zum ideellen Neuaufbau des Theaterwesens im freien Deutschland’ (‘Notes on the Ideal Reconstruction of the Theatre in a Free Germany’): In all likelihood, there will be no permanent theatres in Germany during the initial post-war period. Guest performances by touring troupes, partly organized and sent around by the occupying forces, will perform in towns on improvised stages. . . . the administration and censor board of the occupying forces will hopefully recognize that theatre is a strong voice for the democratic concept of

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statehood . . . after which, in the not too distant future, a curtain will rise somewhere between the rubble, and a theatre festival will inaugurate a new, free season. (Cited in Daiber 1976: 8)

In August 1945, the director Leopold Lindtberg continued these reflections: A single, pressing problem is at the heart of the process of building culture: education. The moral duty of theatre has never been more meaningful. . . . We can’t even say: now the curtain will rise again. Once the theatres start staging again, there will be no curtains. . . . We will literally have to make a virtue of necessity. (Cited in ibid. 9)

Taking into account that many theatre buildings were anyway completely destroyed and most of the remaining ones severely damaged, such considerations seem highly appropriate. However, it was not long before the first theatre performances took place. The critic Friedrich Luft, speaking every Sunday at the Radio in the American Sector in Berlin (Drahtfunk im amerikanischen Sektor (DIAS)) about theatre activities, began his report on the first Sunday in February 1946 as follows: Yesterday I had the opportunity to drive . . . through the entire breadth of the city. It was ghostly. We are used to the rubble of our surroundings, on our way to work, of our neighbourhood. But yesterday I suddenly realized how little of Berlin is still standing. I asked myself whether we are just fooling ourselves. I drove past an advertising column, on which were pasted countless announcements for plays, operas, concerts. Later I saw in the ad section of the newspaper: there are almost 200 places staging theatre. Really. Everywhere. In all parts of the city. . . . Two opera houses are permanently performing—what city in the world still has that? Isn’t this an unhealthy boom of art—isn’t it more important to be doing something tangible—isn’t the urge to step before a stage and into the movie theatres reckless and frivolous? No, art is not Sunday entertainment . . . Art is necessary, especially now in this time of adversity . . . Blessed be the hours that allow us to think, that show us ideas, that open up the world to us and lead out of our small, dusty everyday routine into the world. (Luft 1961: 9–10)

This state of the arts described by Luft with regard to Berlin ultimately applied to all four zones. Be it in the big cities, the small towns, or even in the countryside, theatre performances took place everywhere—staged by professionals and amateurs alike. In Mainz, for instance, a group of young Catholic men founded their own company, the ‘Bardo-Gilde’, as early as in September 1945. Their first performance was a staging of Max Mell’s The Apostle Play, which they presented not only in Mainz but also

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in the countryside for a staggering total of over 400 performances (Dombrowski, Kraus, and Schramm 1965: 134). Even in the prisoner-of-war camps theatre groups were founded by professionals and amateurs. The company ‘The Optimists’, for instance, was founded in the autumn of 1945 in Camp Bretzenheim/Nahe. It was granted permission by the commander of the camp to tour to the adjacent villages and towns (cf. Schuster 1987). Generally, then, it was for a rather short period that the Germans had to survive without theatre. That period was the shortest in Berlin. The Soviet Colonel-General Bersarin, in his first order to the people of Berlin from 28 April 1945, allowed theatre performances that ended by 9 p.m. He knew the Berlin theatre scene fairly well. In the 1930s, he had served as the Russian military attaché in Berlin, holding a season ticket for the Deutsches Theater. On 16 May 1945, the Soviet Military Administration in Germany issued an order expanding this permission into a general call to take up theatre performances. On 27 May 1945, the first theatre performance took place in liberated Berlin—the farce Der Raub der Sabinerinnen (The Abduction of the Sabine Women) by Franz and Paul von Schönthan, an old production of the Staatstheater, now presented at the Renaissance Theater. On 26 June 1945, a full week before the American, British, and French troops arrived in Berlin, the Deutsches Theater was reopened with a performance of Schiller’s The Parasite, staged by Karl Heinz Stroux in the winter of 1942–3 at the Staatstheater, which had been completely destroyed in the war. However, the official opening of the Deutsches Theater was celebrated on 2 September 1945 with a new production of Lessing’s Nathan the Wise in a production by Fritz Wisten. He had been an actor, director, and, finally, the chief director of the theatre of the Jüdischer Kulturbund (Jewish Cultural Association) in Berlin from 1933 to 1941, and after its dissolution had been deported to the concentration camp at Sachsenhausen (regarding the Kulturbund, see Rovit 2012). Paul Wegener, who had played Reinhardt’s Oedipus thirty-five years previously, took the lead role. All the occupying powers pushed for their own plays to be staged, although this never became a leading dictum of their cultural politics. The Americans, particularly eager to use theatre for their re-education programme, put together a list of sixty American plays to be staged. The British seemed content with a list of fifteen. More than half of the sixty American ones were Broadway comedies, boulevard plays, burlesques,

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and other shallow entertainment pieces, more or less of the same register as The Abduction of the Sabine Women. The list featured no plays that implied any form of social criticism. Moreover, the Americans compiled a second list, enumerating those plays that seemed to them inappropriate, even counterproductive, with regard to their re-education programme: ‘Considering the present mental and psychological status of Germans many plays have to be avoided which under normal circumstances are musts of a good repertory.’ This statement is followed by some notable examples, structured into thirteen points. The first is the most interesting in our context: ‘1. All plays accepting the blind mastery of fate that inescapably leads to destruction and self-destruction, as the Greek classics or f.i. Schiller’s Braut von Messina [The Bride of Messina]’ (cited in Lange 1980: 321–2). The list also included Schiller’s Wilhelm Tell, which, according to Jessner, is to be understood as ‘the cry for freedom of an oppressed people’ and was banned by the Nazis in 1941. Here, the concern was that it might encourage resistance against the occupying powers. Yet among the first plays to be performed in the four zones were Greek tragedies. The sequence once again began with Antigone. It premiered in Cologne on 15 September 1945 and was performed twelve more times. It was followed by a production in Hamburg that premiered on 15 February 1946 and had a total run of thirty-nine performances. This one was staged by Heinrich Koch, who, in the last months before the theatres were shut down, had worked in Hanover, where Gustav Rudolf Sellner (cf. p. 207) was chief director. As can be gathered from a letter written by the actress Maria Wimmer to the classicist Bruno Snell on 26 October 1943, there had been a plan to stage Antigone in the autumn of 1943— that is, after the summer of disastrous air raids that had destroyed huge parts of Hamburg. According to this letter, it was planned not as a regular performance at the Schauspielhaus but as an initiative by actors from different Hamburg theatres to signal an act of resistance (cf. Lohse 1995: 75). The plan did not materialize, and so was taken up again under different conditions after the war. As per the earlier plan, Hölderlin’s translation was used. While the Nazis had monopolized Hölderlin as the poet of ‘the “fatherlandish” ’ (the Vaterländische, in the sense of the patriotic), his translation was now regarded as the only possible way to transfer the Greek words into the present time: ‘The way Hölderlin transforms the words . . . transforms the entire work.’ The production

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did intend ‘to conjure the turmoil, the political, the republican, the revolutionary, which Hölderlin always saw in Antigone’, as the dramaturge of the Hamburg Schauspielhaus, Ludwig Benninghoff, wrote in Die Welt (29 March 1946, cited in Flashar 2009: 177). The stage was designed by Caspar Neher, who would do the same for Brecht’s production of Antigone two years later, which I will also discuss in this chapter. He created an abstract space marked in the background by walls covered with light cloth and arranged in rectangles. There was no curtain. In his diary, Neher wrote: ‘the curtainless stage is a delight . . . the curtain, it seems to me, belongs to a bygone era’ (11 February 1946, Caspar Neher, Diaries 1941–9, unpublished, Österreichisches Theatermuseum; quoted in Greisenegger-Georgila and Jans 1995: 19). Maria Wimmer played the part of Antigone and Werner Hinz that of Creon. Hinz’s performance reminded one critic of the ‘horrifying experience of an idolatrous state power under which we suffered for twelve years’ (M. Rabe, Die Zeit, 21 February 1946, cited in Lohse 1995: 75). Creon was dressed in a ‘vermilion coat and trousers’, in a ‘costume of tantalizing symbolism’, ‘old Persian’—that is, as a tyrant. Maria Wimmer wore a white ‘Greek archaic’ costume, and with a ‘sculpted posture’ she performed ‘passionately with a strong emotional expression’ (René Drommert, Neue Hamburger Presse, 19 February 1946, cited in Lohse 1995: 76). This description in some respects recalls Stroux’s Antigone production of 1940 (cf. Chapter 5, p. 174), nurturing the suspicion that the critics had to take great care back then when writing in defence, let alone praise, of the production.

Oedipus and the question of collective guilt Soon Antigone was replaced with Oedipus the King (regarding the following, cf. Lohse and Ohde 1983–4). April 1946 saw the beginning of a series of productions of this tragedy that continued until the early 1950s. Of particular interest here are those that were mounted, or at least rehearsed, before the foundation of the Federal Republic of Germany on 23 May 1949. The first production premiered on 21 April 1946 in Weimar (directed by Paul Smolny), followed by Karl Heinz Stroux’s production at the Deutsches Theater Berlin on 22 December 1946, starring Gustaf Gründgens as Oedipus and Wolfgang Langhoff as Creon (it premiered on Gründgens’ forty-seventh birthday). When

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Gründgens left Berlin to take over as chief director of the Düsseldorf Schauspielhaus, he opened the 1947–8 season with this production. On 31 May 1949 Oedipus the King premiered in Hamburg (directed by Wolfgang von Stas; with Vasa Hochmann as Oedipus)—that is, one week after the creation of the Federal Republic (BRD/FRG). That of the German Democratic Republic (DDR/GDR) followed on 7 October 1949. We cannot ascertain from the reviews that these productions, which had a great impact on audiences, established a new theatre aesthetics or introduced a new image of ancient Greece. There was much talk after the war about the so-called zero hour (Stunde Null), signifying a completely new beginning and a clean slate, a concept particularly popular with people who had been members of the party during the Third Reich and/ or had profited from the Nazi regime. However, there was no zero hour—at least with regard to theatre. It is true that there were changes in the repertoire, but beyond that the directors and actors simply continued their work. The only immediate change to the theatre aesthetics had economic reasons—there were no more monumental stage designs, not just for ideological purposes but primarily because no one could afford them. The Oedipus productions of the first post-war years are not interesting to us for suggesting a new image of Greece or/and creating a new theatre aesthetics. This would happen only later, with Brecht’s Antigone in Chur (Switzerland) in 1948 and Sellner’s productions of Greek tragedies in Darmstadt in the 1950s (see p. 207 ff.). Rather, they served a very particular purpose: they offered the opportunity to confront the spectators with the question of guilt and to discuss it without directly addressing the Third Reich and each individual’s role in it—the very question that, according to the former Reich dramaturge Schlösser, should be excluded from the discussion of tragedy and the tragic (cf. Chapter 5, p. 167). At the Potsdam Conference (17 July–2 August 1945), the three powers drew up a ‘Protocol of Proceedings’ that summarized the resolutions to be passed. There it is stated: To convince the German people that they have suffered a total military defeat and that they cannot escape responsibility for what they have brought upon themselves, since their own ruthless warfare and the fanatical Nazi resistance have destroyed the German economy and made chaos and suffering inevitable. (‘Article II A 3 (ii)’, The Berlin (Potsdam) Conference, 17 July–2 August 1945, (a) Protocol of the Proceedings, 1 August 1945)

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This paragraph takes a clear stance regarding the question of responsibility and even of guilt. The re-education programme, in which theatre was supposed to play a major role, resulted from it. The catalogue of plays recommended and rejected has to be read in this context, although the wisdom of these choices seems questionable. From this paragraph followed not only the Nuremberg Trials of 1945–6 against the war criminals but also the necessity of the denazification of other Nazis. In the Soviet zone it had already been completed by the autumn of 1946. In the three western zones, which became the Trizone on 8 April 1949, the process was much slower. Following the outbreak of the cold war around July 1947, the realization of the Marshall Plan, and, in particular, after the Berlin blockade of 1948–9, anti-communism outweighed anti-fascism. Under these circumstances, many members of the old elite seemed ‘useful’ in the effort to reconstruct the bombed-out cities and ruined industry, and could once again act as decision-makers in politics and the economy. In 1948, the Americans declared that the denazification had been concluded. In 1949, laws were issued in all states of the Federal Republic to regulate the end of denazification. In the first post-war years, however, the issue of culpability was crucial. In his essay Die Schuldfrage (The Question of German Guilt), the philosopher Karl Jaspers introduced the distinction between individual and collective guilt (cf. Jaspers [1946] 2000), reasoning that, while the first was related to personal responsibility and was therefore subject to the criminal law in force, the latter assumed the moral responsibility of a collective—for instance, of a people. Proponents of this idea argued that not only those individuals who had committed the crimes and atrocities of the Nazis were guilty and should therefore be convicted under criminal law. Rather, all those who had helped the Nazis seize power—by electing them, for example—should be obliged to accept the moral responsibility for anything that followed from Hitler’s Weltanschauung, which would have been well known to them. Even if the majority of the people had not committed crimes that would subject them to criminal law and, in this sense, were not culpable, many could be held responsible in terms of their collective guilt. The reviews on the Oedipus productions suggest that the question of guilt was, in fact, the key to the popularity of this tragedy in the first postwar years. They do not include many details about the productions or on

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the audience’s responses—except for general characterizations such as ‘moved silence’ or ‘puzzled silence’—both of which might also be quite telling. Instead, at least half of each review—sometimes even considerably more—is devoted to a discussion of the tragedy, with a clear focus on the question of guilt. While most critics highlight the temporal distance between the tragedy and their own present, they nonetheless admit the impact it had on contemporary spectators. The critic Walter Lennig from the newspaper Sonntag asserts that Oedipus is not content merely being an instrument of the god: ‘He shatters and does penance as if all atrocities are his own doing’ (Sonntag, 5 January 1947, quoted in Lohse and Ohde 1983–4: 189). This is why Oedipus—especially as played by Gründgens—has remained ‘so alive in the theatre and for us . . . Oedipus has an immediate effect on the educated and the uneducated’. Lennig does not deem the play to belong only to the Bildungsbürgertum for it to affirm its cultural identity but rather as addressing everybody with its message that one must ‘respect the gods . . . and at the same time act as if you yourself are responsible for your own fate’ (ibid.). Thus, the critic argues against the idea of ‘accepting the blind mastery of fate that inescapably leads to destruction and self-destruction’. Should the German spectator identify with Oedipus, he has to atone for what happened ‘as if all atrocities are his own doing’, thus underlining the idea of collective guilt. This seems to also be the opinion of Walther Karsch, critic and co-editor of the Berlin Tagesspiegel. He begins his review with a general interpretation of the tragedy. In it ‘Moira zooms past people, renders the innocent guilty . . . tricks those who try to hide, because fate (what is ordained, not only in the broad strokes, which would be feasible, but down to every little thing) is “inescapable” ’ (Tagesspiegel, 24 December 1946, quoted in Lohse and Ohde 1983–4: 193). After a long discussion of Oedipus’ actions and behavior, he concludes: ‘Certainly—and yet: if this fate is to be forced on us as inescapable, then we are allowed to ask whether it really was inescapable. It wasn’t, it wasn’t, it wasn’t . . . ’ (emphasis added). What is Karsch talking about? About Oedipus and his fate or about the Germans and what they did or let happen during the Third Reich? Or about the consequences for Germany, i.e. their current situation? And, since ‘this Oedipus could be a child of our century’ (ibid.), the question of guilt, individual and collective, must be addressed.

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We do not know whether the majority of the spectators experienced the performance along the same lines. Even if some critics dismissed the tragedy as rooted in antiquity and therefore irrelevant to contemporary audiences, this must not be taken at face value. It may just as well have been a strategy to maintain a certain distance in order not to confront this crucial question. Wolfgang Harich, who had been teaching Marxism at Berlin University since 1946, took a very different stance towards the tragedy. He begins by asking in the Tägliche Rundschau (24 December 1946): ‘if the freedom to decide rather than the mystery of an oracle constitutes the tragic condition for us, then what is it about this ancient play that still . . . casts its spell on us?’ He answers his question by emphasizing a democratic tendency in the play: ‘nothing but political duty concerning the prosperity and adversity of the people drives . . . Oedipus to tirelessly pursue himself, to rigorously unveil the secret of his origin, his skills, his misdeeds’ (quoted in Lohse and Ohde 1983–4: 190). Whether such an idea was realized by the production and, in particular, by Gründgens’s acting, is impossible to say. The critic Lennig describes the first scene as follows: The opening scene is theatrically the strongest: the plague-afflicted people of Thebes beg for salvation. The grey, sighing figures in front of the palace in the grey light of dawn and Oedipus, hesitant and anguished, walking among them— this image created an atmosphere from the very first moment that carried the tragedy like a strong wave. (Sonntag, 5 January 1947, quoted in ibid. 192)

This could be interpreted as a democratic impulse. Gründgens played Oedipus using the ‘cool sharpness of linguistic means’, and ‘mostly spoke more to our brains rather than our hearts’ (Walther Karsch, Tagesspiegel, 24 December 1946, quoted in ibid. 193). This changed when the Messenger from Corinth told Oedipus that his—putative—father had died. At this moment Gründgens presented a man overflowing with joy. For this would mean that the prophecy had not come true (see Illustration 6.1). But all the greater was the despair Gründgens displayed when finally Oedipus realized what he had done (see Illustration 6.2): Over the course of this collapse into the clarity of desperation Gründgens hurls himself onto the floor. His disintegration takes place without form or measure. He staggers into the background and returns blinded. Now he is a demonic ghost, like Goya’s, burdened with a grey cloth pile . . . lemur-like, Hecate, goddess of the underworld. (Paul Wiegler, Nachtexpress, 23 December 1946, quoted in ibid.)

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Illustration 6.1 Karl Heinz Stroux: Sophocles’ Oedipus the King; Gustaf Gründgens as Oedipus, Gerda Müller as Jocasta, and Walter Werner as the Messenger.

Illustration 6.2 Karl Heinz Stroux: Sophocles’ Oedipus the King; Gerda Müller as Jocasta and Gustaf Gründgens as Oedipus.

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The critics’ responses to the Hamburg production of Oedipus, despite the changes to the overall set-up already mentioned, in some respects read as if their authors were dealing with the same production. Rudolf Stobbe, critic of the Hamburger Echo, a newspaper close to the Social Democratic Party, makes a distinction between the Bildungserlebnis (educational experience)—a term with a long-standing tradition—and the question of whether this tragedy is adequate for ‘our time’. He dismisses the concept of fate and instead focuses on Oedipus’ suffering, which he links to the most recent experiences of the spectators: ‘Guiltily, guiltlessly we have experienced too much grief not to understand Oedipus’ torment, the weight of which makes him reel. This, beyond the educational experience, is the true meeting point with our present time’ (Hamburger Echo, June 1949, quoted in ibid. 195, emphasis added). As Walther Karsch had done two years earlier in his review, Stobbe here also replaced Oedipus with the collective we. The first words of this paragraph thus implicitly refer to Hegel’s statement in the Aesthetics: ‘But in considering all these tragic conflicts we must above all reject the false idea that they have anything to do with guilt or innocence. The tragic heroes are just as much innocent as guilty’ (Hegel 1975: 1214). The collective we is thus able to accept its collective guilt, but only on the condition that they are considered guiltlessly guilty. Intentionally or not, these performances of Oedipus the King during the first post-war years helped theatregoers, who mostly belonged to the Bildungsbürgertum, to come to terms with the relapse into barbarism in the Third Reich and with the part they had played in it—even if they themselves did not commit any crimes subject to criminal law. Oedipus spoke to those who had become ‘guiltlessly guilty’, which in most cases meant those who had heard, seen, and otherwise witnessed what was going on without interfering or resisting, even if only out of fear for themselves and their families. It might well be the case that the performances of Oedipus the King more easily reconciled them to the idea of their collective guilt. This raises the question of whether and to what extent this idea would be incorporated into the cultural identity of the Bildungsbürgertum and of how Philhellenism would be related to it. In the first postwar years, performances of Oedipus helped make this notion of collective guilt acceptable, albeit if only in terms of being ‘guiltlessly guilty’. In the years to follow—that is, the 1950s and even the early 1960s— Fascism and the concomitant idea of collective guilt were dealt with very

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differently in West and East Germany. In both cases, however, the discussion included performances of Greek tragedies. In the Federal Republic, Gustav Rudolf Sellner’s productions of Greek tragedies in Darmstadt can be regarded as exemplary for this relationship during this timespan. They will be discussed at some length later in the chapter. In the GDR Greek tragedies were performed only rarely in the 1950s, and my focus here will be on Brecht’s Antigone, staged in Chur, Switzerland, in 1948. The Antigone model book afterwards put together by Brecht, Caspar Neher, and the photographer Ruth Berlau on the basis of materials from their production not only proved to be of utmost importance for later productions1 but also helped bring about a new attitude towards the classics along with a related theatre aesthetics.

Brecht’s Antigone as a model for epic theatre Brecht returned to Europe from his exile in late 1947, chased out of the United States by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). Prevented from entering Germany by the Allies, he proceeded to Zurich to wait for permission to travel to Berlin. He ran into his old friend Hans Curjel, who had become chief director at the theatre of the small Swiss town of Chur. Curjel offered him the possibility of staging a production there. Brecht agreed, and, together with another old friend, Caspar Neher, who would do the stage design, Brecht set to work on mounting The Antigone of Sophocles (Brecht 2003). It premiered on 15 February 1948—Brecht’s first production in his native language after the long years of exile. His wife Helene Weigel played the part of Antigone—her first opportunity to appear on stage since their return. Although not many people saw the production—it was shown only a few times to half empty houses and once in Zurich—it is of utmost importance in our context, and for good reason. First, it points back to Jessner’s Oedipus production. In his short note entitled ‘Latest Stage: “Oedipus” ’ Brecht had stated that ‘the future of the theatre is a philosophical one’ (Brecht 2015: 43) and had linked Jessner’s efforts to create

1 Hecht (1988: 302–5) lists approximately fifty performances for the period between 1948 and 1986, among them a huge number of studio or university productions. In the early 1950s, there were only two—one in Greiz (1951) and one in Eisenach (1952).

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‘a great form’,2 an ‘epic form’, to this future of theatre. Helene Weigel’s acting style in playing the maid who announces Clytemnestra’s death in particular epitomized this new form. In ‘Dialog über Schauspielkunst’ (‘Dialogue on Acting’, 17 February 1929) Brecht addresses her as ‘an actress of this new sort’, who, announced the death of her mistress by proclaiming ‘dead, dead’ in a completely emotionless, piercing voice, her cry of ‘Jocasta is dead’ was devoid of any sorrow, but pronounced so firmly and inexorably that the bare fact of her mistress’s death created a more powerful impression at that precise moment than could have been generated by any grief of her own. (Brecht 2015: 45–8, at 47)

Secondly, Brecht for the first time realized ‘the future of theatre [as being] philosophical’ in the production of Antigone. While he was working on the production, he was also busy finishing his ‘Short Organon for the Theatre’ (Brecht 2015: 229–61), in which he concisely summarized his lengthy reflections on the theatre of the future, which up until then he had developed in his philosophical dialogue ‘Der Messingkauf ’ (‘Buying Brass’, finished in 1951 but never completed, Brecht 2014: 1–96). Brecht’s attempts to put his theory of a theatre for the scientific age into as brief and precise words as possible and his efforts to formulate and realize a corresponding aesthetics in his Antigone production thus cross-pollinated each other. Thirdly and finally, the Antigone model book, a result of the cooperation between Brecht, Neher, and the photographer Ruth Berlau, had an impact on productions of Greek tragedy in the GDR and the Federal Republic in the 1960s. Among them are Benno Besson’s epoch-making production of Oedipus Tyrant at the Deutsches Theater Berlin in 1967, and Claus Peymann’s productions of the Antigone model at the Schaubühne am Halleschen Ufer Berlin in 1965 and at the Theater am Turm in Frankfurt on the Main in 1966.3 Last but not least, the Living Theatre in Krefeld, having left the USA under the threat of imprisonment, used the Antigone model book in 1967.

2

The translation has been adapted for the sake of precision and clarity and might therefore diverge from the version published in English. 3 Peymann would go on to become chief director of the theatre in Bochum (1979–86) and later of the Burgtheater in Vienna (1986–99), after which he took on the chief directorship of the Berlin Ensemble.

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Brecht’s Antigone therefore points not only back to the theatre of the late Weimar Republic but also forward to the new theatre forms that would emerge in the 1960s in the GDR as well as in West Germany, like a hinge linking the latter to the former and revealing a genealogy of political theatre that was developed in productions of Greek tragedies beginning in the Weimar Republic and extending until today—as will be explained later. The production resulted from a close collaboration between Brecht and Neher. It was most likely Neher who had suggested working from Hölderlin’s translation for the reasons Ludwig Benninghoff mentions in the Hamburg production of Antigone in 1946. Although Brecht changed it in decisive ways, he made no attempt to render it more easily understandable—on the contrary. He introduced even more ‘darkness’. This suited his aim to keep the tragedy at a certain distance fairly well. The changes he made enabled it to address the ideology of National Socialism. The changes concerned the content rather than the structure of the tragedy (cf. Fuegi 1972: 63–80). Instead of the battle over the throne of Thebes between Eteocles and Polynices, Brecht introduced a war of aggression against Argos, instigated by the usurper and tyrant Creon, in which both die—Eteocles on the battlefield and Polynices at the hands of Creon after his attempt to desert. The war is fought over the ore mines of Argos; its goal is rich booty. The guardian announcing Antigone’s deed to Creon does not address him as king but as ‘my fuehrer’. The tide-turning Battle of Stalingrad is refought at Argos, and in the end Creon wants his own downfall to coincide with that of the entire polis, of Thebes. So now Thebes falls. And let it fall, let it with me, let it be finished And there for the vultures. That is my wish now. (Brecht 2003: 50)

The allusion and resemblance to Hitler are obvious, as is the similarity of Antigone to Count von Stauffenberg. She is no proletarian, no outsider, but belongs to the ruling family, as even the chorus of Theban Elders remarks: ‘But she also once | Ate of the bread that was baked | In the stony dark’ (ibid. 37). In order to reinforce the relationship between the tragedy and the war initiated by Hitler’s Germany, Brecht added a

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prelude set in Berlin in 1945. Two sisters find their brother hanged as a deserter; one wants to take him down despite the prohibition and the risk of being hanged herself. While Brecht later denied any parallels and also wrote another prelude for the performance in Greiz (1951), they are evident even without Creon and Antigone figuring as substitutes for Hitler and Stauffenberg. Instead of rewriting Antigone as a contemporary play, as others had done, Brecht preferred to pass his interpretation off as The Antigone of Sophocles. This created an estrangement effect (Verfremdungseffekt) on two levels. The inclusion of Nazi ideology distanced the audience from the Greek tragedy and demanded a new reading and understanding of the latter. It rendered it unfamiliar and unknown—something to be rediscovered. At the same time, it also alienated the spectators from this ideology, dismantling and exposing it while probing why and how it could have worked, and also offering an explanation. Of particular interest in our context is the status of the chorus in terms of content as well as from the viewpoint of the new aesthetics realized here. The chorus of the Elders retains the odes in which they reflect on the nature of human beings: ‘Monstrous, a lot. But nothing | More monstrous than man’ (ibid. 17). They offer advice to Creon in order to prevent him from acting rashly. On the other hand, they celebrate the ‘victory big in booty’ (ibid. 12) that has brought them new riches. And, finally, they remain with Creon when his downfall comes: ‘But we | Even now all follow him still and the way | Is down’ (ibid. 51). Is it too far-fetched to regard them as a caricature of the Bildungsbürgertum, Brecht’s own social milieu, having passed the Gymnasium and mastered Latin and Greek to a degree that enabled him to correct some of the mistakes in Hölderlin’s translation? This would turn his version of the tragedy into a bitter accusation, charging the Bildungsbürgertum with a relapse into barbarism despite their constant talk of humanism—of their collective guilt without allowing for the variant of being ‘guiltlessly guilty’. This would explain why Brecht’s Antigone model was not performed in West Germany until the early 1960s, when a new generation rose against their parents and confronted them with their guilt. The chorus also provides some productive starting points regarding this new aesthetics. In their ‘Foreword to the Antigone-Model’ Brecht and Neher write: ‘Greek dramaturgy uses certain forms of alienation, notably interventions by the chorus, to try and rescue some of that freedom of

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calculation which Schiller is uncertain how to ensure’ (ibid. 203–10, at 204–5). This is an interesting statement for at least two reasons: The first is Brecht’s argument that ancient Greek tragedy already enables the Verfremdung4 he is striving for, particularly through the chorus, which interrupts the actions and allows the spectators a certain freedom to reflect and distance themselves. The chorus therefore appears as a foundational element for the new aesthetics. The second interesting point is Brecht’s mention of Schiller, which, rather surprisingly, distorts Schiller’s ideas on the chorus. For, as elaborated in Chapter 1, Schiller introduced the chorus in his tragedy The Bride of Messina, because ‘it bring[s] calm into action . . . For the spectator’s feelings must retain their freedom even amid the most vehement passion.’ He goes on to explain: What common judgement finds objectionable in the chorus, namely, that it dispels the illusion and shatters the emotional power of the effects, is just what serves as its highest recommendation . . . The chorus, by holding the parts separate and by intervening between the passions with its calming observations, gives us back our freedom, which would otherwise be lost in the storm of emotional agitation. (Schiller 1962: 10–11)

Schiller considered the chorus one of the most effective means for the spectator to maintain an aesthetic distance. Goethe intended to achieve this for his audiences in his production of Ion by introducing a whole set of new staging devices concerning the stage space, the costumes, the experiments with masks, the declamation, the gestures, and the choreography of movements in the space and the blocking. This aesthetic distance was thought necessary to enable a new art of spectating— preventing the spectators from completely immersing themselves in the illusion and identifying with the dramatic characters, feeling empathy with them and being emotionally overwhelmed. If we keep this in mind, it appears as if Brecht was continuing the fight Goethe and Schiller had begun to ‘wage war on naturalism’, even if they did not succeed because of the spectators’ resistance rooted in their deep desire to get lost in the illusion. Brecht, as Goethe and Schiller had done before him, strove for a new art of spectating, and, like them, he

4

Unlike the translated quotation from Brecht’s Antigone model book, I have chosen to use the word ‘estrangement’ instead of ‘alienation’ to translate the term Verfremdung.

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attempted to realize it by taking recourse to ancient Greek theatre and staging a Greek tragedy. In light of this, it is rather surprising that he dismisses the obvious similarities between his and their experiments, acknowledging which would by no means minimize his own innovations, even if only because of the different historical epochs, conditions, and situations they were working in. Neher’s stage design for a curtainless stage as well as his sketches for the blocking, specific configurations, and the masks were decisive for the production. Brecht and Neher themselves describe the stage in their preface: the actors, waiting for their cues, sat on benches in front of a semi-circular backdrop on which reddened rush was pasted. In the middle of the backdrop there was an opening through which the actors could leave the stage when their part was finished. Four posts, with horse skulls hanging from them, demarcated the performance area. The stage was brightly lit the entire time. Other items on stage included a record player placed in the opening; stage right a large square iron gong hung on a scaffold; and stage left a rack with masks set on poles, which were used by the four chorus members to cover their faces during the long choral odes (see Illustration 6.3). Creon’s laurel wreath also hung from the rack and beside it were a bowl of millet and an earthen amphora, which served as offerings for Antigone’s

Illustration 6.3 Bertolt Brecht and Caspar Neher: The Antigone of Sophocles; the chorus with the masks on poles; stage design by Caspar Neher.

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‘sacrificial death’. The simple costumes of the men were made of sackcloth (Sackleinwand), and those of the women of cotton. Antigone’s and Ismene’s were grey, while Creon’s and Haemon’s featured red leather inserts. Blocking was done in accordance with Neher’s sketches, as described earlier. The movements and gestures of the actors were rather stylized, including the dance steps of the chorus celebrating the alleged victory in a bacchanal. To help the actors ‘demonstrate’ the figures instead of embodying them, they were given mnemonic devices (‘bridge verses’) during the rehearsals, which narrated the actions they were going to perform in the third person: Before stepping into the acting area for the first time Helene Weigel said (and in subsequent rehearsals heard the prompter saying): But Antigone went, King Oedipus’ child, with her pitcher Gathering dust to cover the body of dead Polynices Which the wrathful tyrant had thrown to the dogs and the vultures. The actress playing Ismene, before entering, said: To her, gathering dust, there appeared her sister Ismene. Before verse I Weigel said: Bitterly the gatherer mourned the fate that had come to her brothers. And so on. (Brecht 2003: 208)

The acting style was to a great extent determined by objects. After Antigone had been arrested, a huge board was fastened to her back with openings for her hands, so that she could not move them (see Illustration 6.4). Carrying the board turns Antigone into a centre of unrest because it realizes her reactions and actions on a physically large scale. During her attacks on the Elders (421) and on Creon (455, after Creon’s conviction almost makes her collapse) she must on the one hand carry the board, but on the other the momentum of the board drives her: the board seems to become lighter through her battle. (Brecht 1989–97: xxv. 104)

Thus, every movement or gesture draws the spectators’ attention to itself—that is, to the mode in which it is performed. This is meant to become most obvious in Antigone’s walk to her death: Just like everything else, Weigel enacted Antigone’s walk to her death as if it were something famous, both as a historical occurrence and as a scenic display, indeed, she performed it almost as if her own performance in this scene were famous.

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Illustration 6.4 Bertolt Brecht and Caspar Neher: The Antigone of Sophocles; Antigone (Helene Weigel) in front of Creon (Hans Gaugler). Question: What is the purpose of such a performance on her part? Answer: To draw the highest degree of attention to this occurrence and its portrayal by exhibiting her actions in an exemplary manner. (Ibid. 132)

The pictures and the accompanying texts in the model book suggest that an epic theatre in the sense of a philosophical theatre was indeed realized here: The spectators were not invited to empathize and lose themselves in an illusion; rather, the techniques used were exhibited nakedly, so that the spectator could delight in their professional application as well as in the beauty of the objects. The method of estrangement (Verfremdung) allowed for an aesthetic distance that would open up the possibility to reflect on the reasons, background, motivation, and so on of the actions, and, thus, on the performance’s political implications. But did this really happen in the performances in Chur and Zurich? The chief director of the theatre summarizes his impression as follows: The impression left by the performance was strong even for Chur’s sceptical critics. . . . In Chur, the educated expressed their silent opposition to the intellectual and optical hardness that confronted them on the stage, so that the few performances took place before empty seats. But the pupils of the Gymnasium in Chur and of the nearby school of Schiers grasped the profundity and artistic reality of this strange theatre event during a school performance. (Cited in Hecht 1988: 193)

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The critics expressed different, partly even contradictory, opinions on the production. However, almost all remarked on the ‘parallel to the last World War’ (Be., Neue Bündner Zeitung, 18 February 1948, cited in ibid. 195–8) and, accordingly, addressed the question of guilt regarding the people of Thebes. They also understood and conceded that ‘Brecht’s “Antigone” indeed shows us new directions in the performing arts’ (Andreas Brügger, Bündner Tageblatt, 18–19 February 1948, cited in ibid. 198–202). One critic even praised Brecht for having managed ‘to stage his play as the purest form of epic theatre, a form kindling an undeniable, tense interest in the spectators even while turning them into distanced observers’ (Neue Zürcher Nachrichten, 16 March 1948, cited in ibid. 207–9). He characterized the performance as ‘a theatre event sustained by its great consistency’ that left a ‘deep impression’ on the spectator. The classicist Bruno Snell similarly deemed it ‘a performance that casts a strong spell on the listeners’ (Die Tat, Zurich, 19 February 1948, cited in ibid. 205–7), while the first critic concluded that ‘Brecht’s “Antigone”, despite certain merits, ultimately does not leave the deep impression of a pure artwork’. However, even Snell asks: ‘after all, doesn’t a pure humanity emanate from the ancient Antigone, which draws its strength from certain conceptions prevalent then while at the same time transcending them?’ It seems that the critics generally had some difficulties in reconciling their own image of ancient Greece and their reading of Antigone with Brecht’s/Neher’s production, even if they clearly understood the underlying intentions and the resulting innovative aesthetics. The Swiss Bildungsbürger, the ‘educated’ spectators Curjel is addressing, however, felt uncomfortable. Not as well informed as the critics, they were unable to appreciate the aesthetic or to relate to the changes in the content. The charge of complicity directed towards the German Bildungsbürger did not apply to them; it was not their guilt that was being dealt with. According to Curjel, then, most of them disapproved of the production as they failed to recognize ‘their’ Antigone and their image of ancient Greece. How might spectators in Berlin, Hamburg, Düsseldorf, Cologne, or Munich have responded? We will never know for sure. In any case, the production would have caused an uproar—condemned or, perhaps, lauded. It addressed the question of collective guilt head-on, much more so than the productions of Oedipus did in the same years. And, unlike the spectators in Chur, here they would have had to face the

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question of their own guilt. Whether the new aesthetics could have brought about the requisite degree of Verfremdung/estrangement to enable them to have some distance and reflect on it is rather unlikely. What is certain is that it would not have gone virtually unnoticed, as was the case in Switzerland. Had it not been for the model book, the production would have soon been marginalized, if not completely forgotten. Yet the fact that the following ten years saw only two restagings in the GDR and none in the Federal Republic is rather telling. Despite the utterly different political conditions in the two German states in the 1950s, Brecht’s Antigone was not popular in either. Why this was the case in West Germany will become clear in our discussion of Sellner’s productions of Greek tragedies in Darmstadt (for the reasons concerning the GDR, see Chapter 7).

In search of the ‘universal human’: Gustav Rudolf Sellner’s productions of Greek tragedies in the 1950s There is a remarkable phrase in one of the reviews of Sellner’s production of Oedipus the King in Darmstadt in 1952. As if in passing, the critic mentions the ‘almost forgotten shadows of the most recent past’ (H.G., Rheinische Post, 24 September 1952). How is that possible? Merely seven years had passed since the end of the war, and only four since the founding of the Federal Republic. At the time when the critic was writing his review, many German war prisoners were still being held in Soviet camps—where they were to stay until 1955, when Chancellor Adenauer visited Moscow. What had happened that the experience of the war and the question of collective guilt that had dominated the theatre and public discourse during the first post-war years already seemed outdated? The 1950s marked a decade replete with contradictions in the Federal Republic. On the one hand, the modernizing process progressed at an unprecedented scale and pace. On the other, old forms of life and traditional values prevailed. Founded as a parliamentary democracy, the Federal Republic could build on the forward-thinking traditions of the Weimar Republic. However, the conservative parties held sway from the first elections onwards. Chancellor Adenauer remained unchallenged until the early 1960s. This, no doubt, was largely due to the economic

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boom. The so-called Wirtschaftswunder, the ‘economic miracle’, is almost legendary today. It not only allowed for an astonishingly fast reconstruction of the industry and of cities, both of which had been destroyed, but also facilitated the integration of the twelve million refugees and expellees from the eastern parts of the former Reich. The Wirtschaftswunder brought forth numerous forms of consumerism and new lifestyles spanning fashion, design, music, and dance, and, last but not least, marked the rise of commercial tourism. People began to travel—mostly in their own cars—not only within Germany but also abroad—some heading for the sunny beaches of bella Italia, others—mostly Bildungsbürger—fulfilling their dream of visiting Rome, the Eternal City, in the footsteps of Winckelmann, Goethe, and Humboldt. However, these decisive changes were not pervasive enough to undo the persistence of certain patriarchal, even authoritarian, values observed in families, schools, universities, and other institutions. While women had become part of the workforce in the first post-war years in order to get the economy going, once the men returned from the prisoner-of-war camps, it was assumed that they would again be the sole breadwinners of the family while the women transformed back into housewives in charge only of their husbands, children, and households. Until the 1970s, married women needed their husband’s consent if they wanted to work outside of their home. The patriarchal order within the family was not challenged, just as the authority of teachers in schools was not questioned. In general, people did not care much about politics. Instead of a future utopia, they believed in the prevailing economic boom promising a better material life. At the same time, they took recourse to the ‘universal’ and ‘eternal’ values of humaneness determining their inner lives, which did not demand a particular action or behaviour here and now. This remarkable, odd mixture of modernizing and persisting forces was accompanied by a tacit agreement not to speak of the Third Reich, of National Socialism, of the war, and the Holocaust—indeed, of individual or collective guilt. Repressed and excluded from private discussion and public discourse, these subjects were anathema to the German people in the 1950s. Under these circumstances, performances of Greek tragedies had to serve different purposes from those of the early post-war years— purposes that, as we shall see, yet again called for a new theatre aesthetics, which Gustav Rudolf Sellner (1905–90) devised during his ten years as

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chief director of the Hessische Landestheater in Darmstadt. Half a century earlier, at the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century, Darmstadt had been the site for another innovation when artists such as Georg Fuchs and Peter Behrens proclaimed the festival to be the novel form of theatre and hailed a corresponding new theatre aesthetics. With the foundation of the Federal Republic, Berlin, no longer the capital, lost its position as the centre of German theatre life. Moreover, since autonomy in all cultural matters, including schools, universities, theatres, museums, and so on—that is, all institutions of Bildung—was granted to the states, they competed with each other for the most remarkable theatre. Instead of a single hub, in the capital, there were now multiple, shifting centres of theatrical activity. Sellner’s years of involvement at the Hessische Landestheater turned Darmstadt from a provincial town into one such centre, as had happened before the founding of a nation state in Weimar (through Goethe) and Meiningen (through Duke Georg II of Saxony-Meiningen) in the nineteenth century, and shortly thereafter in Bayreuth (through Wagner). In Sellner’s case, this was mainly due to his productions of Greek tragedies. No other stage director of the 1950s could rival Sellner in terms of the quantity and quality of these productions—he staged eleven of them between 1948 and 1962.5 After Sellner had left Darmstadt to take up the post of chief director at the Deutsche Oper in (West) Berlin, the critics praised especially these earlier productions. Ernst Wendt emphasized that, of all contemporary German directors, Sellner was ‘most familiar with antiquity’. He had succeeded in ‘reacquainting us with the tragedies of Sophocles and Aeschylus by distancing us from them more radically with each production’ (Wendt 1962: 32). Seven years later, at the end of the 1960s, Urs Jenny still stated: ‘We don’t have a tradition and convention of staging ancient tragedies—except for Sellner’ (Jenny 1969).

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The Persians in Kiel, 1948; Antigone in Essen, 1950; The Oresteia in Hamburg, 1951; in Darmstadt, Sellner’s series of productions of Greek tragedies began in 1951 with Alcestis, followed by Oedipus the King (1952), Electra (1956), Antigone (1957), and Ezra Pound’s version of Women of Trachis (1959). In Vienna, he staged Oedipus the King (1960), Antigone (1961), and Electra (1962), preceded by two Greek productions in Göttingen, still during the war, namely Electra (1940) and The Persians (1941), and followed by two more in Salzburg in 1965 (Oedipus the King and Oedipus at Colonus), and one in Athens at the Herodes Atticus Theatre in 1966 (Oedipus the King).

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Sellner was among those who would use the metaphor of the zero hour to refer to the end of the war. He continued to employ it up to the years 1961–2 in his correspondence with the critic Werner Wien (cf. Sellner and Wien 1962: 19, 20). While the metaphor suggests a radically new beginning, there was an obvious continuity in Sellner’s work. He began his theatre career in 1924, working as an actor, dramaturge, and director, moving from Gotha to Coburg, and from there on to Oldenburg. In 1932, he staged Die Endlose Straße (The Endless Road), a war drama celebrating the sacrifice for the fatherland, in Oldenburg, a Nazi stronghold since 1929, as well as Flieg, roter Adler von Tirol (Soar, Red Eagle of Tyrol), a play about the ‘harassment and rape of the German people’ (cited in Lohse 1995: 85). After the Nazis had seized power, Sellner staged Schlageter on the occasion of Hitler’s birthday. When Alfred Rosenberg wanted to inaugurate the ‘Northern German cult site Stedingsehre’ (ibid.) near Oldenburg with the Thing play De Stedinge (The People of Steding) by August Hinrichs in July 1935, it was staged by Sellner (Wolf 2011: 155). The performance was repeated twice, in May 1936 and 1937. It is small wonder then that Sellner’s denazification was not completed before 1948 (for Sellner’s work before 1945, cf. Lohse 1995: 83–90, and Wolf 2011). From Oldenburg, Sellner moved to Göttingen, where he staged Greek tragedies for the first time. As a result of his work there, he published a short essay of five pages entitled ‘Der Spielleiter’ (‘The Director’), in which, after polemicizing against naturalistic, psychological theatre, he develops a programme for educating the actor of the future. He asserts that the actor ‘must increasingly throw off the fetters of the private I . . . in order to be receptive to the currents from the magical realm of poetry and to allow them to flow through him without hesitation’. It is the director’s task to train the actor in developing this faculty, so that the actor of the future may move against the sphere of individualistic theatre and sense the purest completion on stage in an orchestral manner, while seeing himself as an instrument of the poetry: one could describe him as a kind of instrumental actor. (Sellner, Wille und Macht, 1942: 3–7, cited in Lohse 1995: 83)

Two lines of thought can be discerned from this argument. The first points to the National Socialist ideology propagating subordination under the Führer and the Volk as a whole. Sellner was no doubt expressing

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his agreement with it when writing: ‘The subordinating moment of our time radiates outward and in music, too, eliminates the power of the individual standpoint’ (ibid.). The other points forward to Sellner’s directorial work in the 1950s, as we shall see—that is, instead of a zero hour, his evolution as a director must be seen as an ongoing process. As a further consequence of his Greek productions, Sellner hired the psychotherapist Margarethe Mhe during the 1942–3 season. This comes as a surprise, because psychotherapy, even the school of C. G. Jung, was anathema to Nazi Germany. She was hired with the harmless designation of respiratory therapist and was meant to base her work with the actors on Jung’s teaching of archetypes. When in 1943 Sellner became chief director of the theatre in Hanover, he opened a theatre school in the Castle of Celle (the former residence of the erstwhile ruling princes, who would later become the royal family of England). He appointed Margarethe Mhe and Heinrich Koch, one of the directors at the theatre in Hanover, as directors of the school. The students had to perform on a rather small carpet, ‘the carpet of transformation’, one of Koch’s inventions. No text was used: ‘The play they “performed” as poetry from the depths of dreams’ (Sellner, cited in Lohse 1995: 89). It was supposed to strip the individual of his or her personality traits in order to replace them with the archetypal. Sellner would continue his collaboration with Mhe in Darmstadt, although it proved less successful there than he had hoped. Evidently, the aesthetics Sellner would develop through his post-war stagings of Greek tragedies, particularly in Darmstadt, was first partially articulated in his productions of Electra and The Persians in Göttingen before the end of the war. In Sellner’s self-fashioning correspondence with Wien he locates the starting point even earlier: ‘It was . . . not initially an encounter with Attic tragedy but with the Aegean region as our cradle . . . The circle of Epidauros, that mysterious circle inserted into the scene, that was my first fascination with ancient tragedy’ (Sellner and Wien 1962: 26). Sellner calls this circle the Spielinsel—the Isle of Play—as he had encountered it not only in Epidaurus but also when staging De Stedinge. There a stream separated the village, which served as backdrop to the scene, from the spectators. We can here identify three ideas that evolved in Sellner’s work of the 1930s and 1940s, and remained fundamental for his productions of Greek tragedies in the 1950s, although their realization changed decisively. First was the idea of space functioning as an isle of play, allowing for a

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transformation to occur and for archetypes to appear. The second concerned the actor, who was to abolish all aspects of realistic–psychological acting in order to become an ‘instrumental actor’. The third referred to the poetry of the play, which required a new way of speaking. Clearly, Brecht and Sellner are to be regarded as antipodes—one striving for a political–philosophical theatre, the other for a ritualistic– anthropological one. Still, they were alike in their quest for ‘a great form’. Polemicizing against the realistic–psychological theatre of illusion, they sought out new spaces and ways of acting—of moving and speaking. They sometimes even came up with similar solutions—masks on poles, for instance, which Brecht used for the chorus in Antigone and Sellner in Oedipus the King. However, their respective quest was motivated by completely different convictions and aims, and led them down divergent paths. While Brecht’s theatre dealt with particular historical, social, and political situations, and the different kinds of human behaviour found within them, Sellner was concerned with the universal and timeless human. In his correspondence with Wien, Sellner, proceeding from the situation after the war, retrospectively explains: What could be more important now than once again to take up the search for the essence of man, the search for the lost idea of man? I was looking for the spell, the magic formula. If anywhere, I hoped, I would find it in ancient tragedy. . . . Searching for the incantatory formula I chanced upon ceremony and ritual . . . through which this unique material is formed and elevated to universality. (Sellner and Wien 1962: 27)

Sellner’s new theatre aesthetics based on these three fundamental ideas was meant to conjure up the ‘essence’ of human beings and make that which is regarded as ‘universally human’ appear. He found two partners capable of creating the necessary prerequisites for its development—the stage designer Franz Mertz (1897–1966), and the classicist and translator Wolfgang Schadewaldt (1900–74). While Mertz built an innovative isle of play, Schadewaldt’s translations introduced a new treatment of language, in particular with regard to the choral odes. Judging from the reviews, this new theatre aesthetics fully came to fruition in Sellner’s production of Oedipus the King, which premiered on 18 September 1952 at the Orangerie (the theatre was destroyed). Almost all reviews describe the stage space and chorus at great length. Mertz had created an abstract space. The isle of play was a white oval,

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gently slanting upwards at the rims so that its centre appeared to yield to gravity, allowing for a special kind of movement. It was overshadowed by a white, semi-circular double pillar. Instead of being joined by a capital, it merged into a strange oval curve that reminded some critics of the huge horns of an ur-animal (cf. Klinger 1971–4: 403) and others of an abstract temple. In any case, it was regarded as an ‘axis of totality’ (Karl Korn, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 23 September 1952). The space did not indicate a particular place or specific historical time. In fact, it did not even suggest a particular time of day—the lighting did not change at all throughout the performance’s 1 hour and 45 minutes (no intermission). In this capacity, the set design corresponded to Sellner’s much cherished idea of the ‘universal human’ and that of the fundamental condition humaine, as the critic Karl Korn remarked. However, because of its abstract and bare aesthetic, some critics also perceived it as ‘modern’, indeed as the epitome of modernness. In this respect, Mertz’s stage could be related to the abstract paintings that became so popular in the Federal Republic of the 1950s, quite unlike other European countries. The core of buyers did not belong to the traditional Bildungsbürgertum but comprised chemists, electrical engineers, and insurance and production managers—that is, people who actively accelerated the process of modernization (cf. Warnke 1985: 209–22). Sellner’s stage space appeared ambiguous, even contradictory. It evoked archetypes and the universal conditio humana and, through the same means, conveyed a sense of modernity. Almost all critics mention three features concerning the chorus— its manner of speaking, its movements, and the use of masks (see Illustration 6.5). Schadewaldt’s new translation was remarkable for replicating the syntax of the Greek original in the German language. Sellner used it without making any cuts or changes. However, he treated the choral odes like fugues. The eight chorus members divided the odes so that some lines were spoken in unison (A), some by the first half chorus (B), some by the other half (C), and some by a single speaker (D). The third ode may serve as an example here. In Schadewaldt’s translation its first passage reads as follows: Oh were my part to practise holy purity In all words and deeds, above which exist Laws, exalted, born in heavenly Ether, for Olympus Alone is their father, and no mortal human being

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Illustration 6.5 Gustav Rudolf Sellner: Sophocles’ Oedipus the King; the stage (designed by Franz Mertz) and the chorus with the masks on poles. Created them and they will never Be put to sleep by neglect. Great is God within them and doesn’t age.6 6

The German original reads: O wär mein Teil, heilige Reinheit üben In Wort und Werken allen, darüber Gesetze Bestehn, hochwandelnde, im himmlischen Äther geborene, denen der Olympos Vater allein ist, und nicht sterblich Menschenwesen Hat sie hervorgebracht und niemals schläfert Vergessen sie ein. Groß ist In ihnen Gott und altert nicht.

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Although the sequence of words, which follows the Greek syntax, is rather unusual, the passage makes sense. As a fugue, it sounded like this: A C B A D C

Oh were my part to practise were my part to practise holy purity in all words and deeds were my part to practise holy purity in all words and deeds above which exist laws exalted born in heavenly ether

B for Olympus alone is their father, and no mortal C born in heavenly ether, for Olympus alone is their father B human being created them C will never B never A be put to sleep by neglect. Great is God within them and doesn’t age. (Sellner and Wien 1962: 66–8)

The ode was partially accompanied by music by Herbert Fries: ‘Sparse chords, at times as if torn from a cithara, single notes, drumbeats, which quickly accelerate in the crucial scene, as if Fate herself was coming over with immutable, death-dealing steps’ (Max Geisenheiner, Darmstädter Tageblatt, 20 September 1952). It is hard to imagine that the odes spoken in this manner were intelligible. However, most of the critics praise the chorus. Korn calls the ‘text as fugue . . . a shocking discovery’. Regarding the chorus, he comes to the conclusion: Take the linguistic form of the chorus . . . which ranged from concentrated force to a single timid voice; take the chorus’s masks carried on sticks, in addition to its first deeply staggered composition as a circular group, then standing in line, coupled with first rigid, then loosened, and then again surprisingly fast, closed movements, and you find: the chorus as the dramatic partner of the whole. And ultimately the insight that it was once the true bearer of the action. (Korn 1952)

Other critics emphasize the ‘exact, precise rhythmic movements’ (Heiner Ruths, Rhein-Neckar-Zeitung, 26 September 1952) and describe the ‘movement as dance’ (Paul Hübner, Die Neue Zeitung, 23 September 1952). All agree on the appropriateness of the masks on poles, which the chorus members hold before their faces when silent. As soon as they

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Illustration 6.6 Gustav Rudolf Sellner: Sophocles’ Oedipus the King; Max Noack as Oedipus and Siegfried Wischnewski as Tiresias.

speak, they swing them aside and wield them like lances, dashing ‘across the stage around the pillar once the horrifying truth emerged that Oedipus had unknowingly slain his father, had unknowingly married his own mother’ (Geisenheiner 1952). The artificiality of the chorus is further underlined by the white make-up on their faces and hands as well as by the white wigs resembling marble. The chorus members wore plain, long black dresses that also covered their arms. The reviews and archival photographs suggest that the chorus was intended to remind the audience of ancient Greek theatre through its mere existence. The marble-like wigs and masks on poles only cited ancient theatre while at the same time distancing the chorus from it. The outward appearance, movements, and way of speaking of the chorus members were unlikely to lead a spectator to (mis-)take them for an imitation of an ancient chorus. Rather, the chorus enacted a particular aesthetic phenomenon that foregrounded a certain ritualistic dimension, which was supposed to work on the spectators’ ‘subconscious’. The fact that there were only three male actors—alongside the actress Ellen Daub, who played Jocasta—serves as another reference to ancient

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Greek theatre. Except for the Oedipus actor (Max Noack), the two others each had to play three different parts: Siegfried Wischnewski that of the Priest, Tiresias, and the old Shepherd, and Claus Hofer that of Creon, the Man from Corinth, and the Servant. Most of the critics commented on this device, remarking, on the one hand, that it kept stage illusionism in check. On the other, they found the purpose of the respective dramatic figures reflected in each trio of roles. While the first set of figures fulfilled the function of unmasking, the second all belonged to ‘the undisturbed order of the ordinary, secured world’ (Korn 1952). Some critics underline that this production was not about the revival of ancient Greek theatre but about taking a stand with regard to what they either call the conditio humana (ibid.) or the ‘archetypal problem of [the] . . . inner core . . . of modern man’ (Heinz Friedrich, Das ganze Deutschland, 27 September 1952). It is telling that the critics, on the one hand, address ‘modern man’ and, on the other, relate him to an ‘archetypal problem’ or even to an unchanging conditio humana. But what about the third building block of this new aesthetics besides the space and the chorus—the ‘instrumental actor’? With regard to the chorus and the rendering of the verses as a fugue, one could possibly see Sellner’s early demand ‘to be receptive to the currents from the magical realm of poetry and to allow them to flow through him without hesitation’ (Sellner, cited in Lohse 1995: 83) realized. Yet it is hard to say more about the acting styles of the protagonists in particular. The reviews reveal nothing specific. We merely come to know that ‘Oedipus crying out in horror: “I . . . oh!” pierced the listeners’ hearts like a sword’ (Geisenheiner 1952). This moment is analysed by another critic from a psychological angle: ‘After all that we’ve been through ourselves and still go through, such an excess of sorrow can no longer be performed flamboyantly; even Oedipus’ pain is not untamed, it condenses into a monstrous cry, an arm flung up into the air’ (Rosemarie Heyd, Frankfurter Nachtausgaben, 22 September 1952). Strangely enough, this critic explains the rejection of a realistic–psychological approach to the performative expression of extreme suffering by taking recourse to ‘all that we’ve been through ourselves and still go through’. She thus establishes a connection between the spectators and Oedipus, as the critics had done with regard to the Oedipus productions of the first post-war years. Here, however, it is not the question of guilt that is addressed but that of one’s own suffering.

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The following review conveys another detail: The final scene, in which Oedipus submits to the law, is unforgettable: Creon has taken away his children. With his stick the blind man traces a circle one last time, but the stick no longer touches the children. Oedipus is alone. It will be a while before we see this scene—and not just it—performed again with such intensity and greatness. (Friedrich 1952)

About Jocasta we learn only that she was ‘archaically grand’ (ibid.), and was ‘relaxed and knew how to make the moment of dreadful comprehension shatteringly clear’ (Korn 1952). This scarcity of material makes it impossible to draw any definitive conclusions about the style of acting employed here. The only thing we can determine with certainty is the lack of a realistic–psychological approach to acting. These descriptions may create the impression that the production’s abstract space, its dance-like choreography, musical, fugal speech, and rejection of all realism and psychology by following a ‘canon of sparseness’ (Hübner 1952) must have distanced the spectators and left them rather cold. However, this does not seem to have been the case. The reviews convey a different picture; they speak of ‘profound emotion’ (Heyd 1952), ‘shock’ (Ruths 1952), and ‘poignancy’ (Korn 1952), which could probably be sensed among the spectators. At the end of the performance the question always arises how to give expression to these feelings. In theatre, it is customary to do so by applauding. In this case, however, some spectators at least deemed this inappropriate. The reviews offer different versions of what transpired. One states that the audience was ‘so overwhelmed by the force of the play’s language that nobody could raise their hands to applaud’ (Ruths 1952). Another critic, not quite as radical, confirms this: ‘When the curtain had fallen, you squeezed the hand of someone who had been sitting silently at the end of the row of seats, because they, too, were unable to applaud’ (Geisenheiner 1952). Yet another review reports that one spectator demanded silence ‘when there was tentative applause’ (Willy Werner Gotty, Abendpost, 22 September 1952). A fourth critic sarcastically comments on this: ‘Until now it was only among the consecration fanatics of Bayreuth that giving thanks by clapping your hands was undesirable. Was a religious act disturbed in Darmstadt? I don’t think so’ (Anon., Frankfurter Rundschau, 22 September 1952). How can we explain the tentative applause, the reluctance to clap, even the demand for silence? The critic Karl Korn’s interpretation of

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the performance could provide a clue. Referring back to Stroux’s Oedipus, he writes: When Gründgens performed the same play . . . at Berlin’s Max-ReinhardtTheater in 1946, everyone thought that they must highlight the political topicality of the feelings of guilt we were enduring. That was not wrong but lacked sufficient depth. The Oedipus of 1952 contains a new, far more threatening warning: the unmasking of a seemingly safe existence, the dreadful determination with which man is led from the order of a self-constructed security to the order of suffering hidden at the base. (Korn 1952)

It is highly likely that what Korn here discusses with regard to the ‘human being’, the spectators, in fact, related to themselves. This is reinforced by the review of another critic who writes that in the performance ‘the demonic forces arose that shaped the fate of the human being whom one just witnessed on stage and who nevertheless was no more than a mirror image of one’s own inner life, a kindred spirit’ (Geisenheiner 1952). The critic here refers to the inwardness, the ‘inner life’, of the spectators, which, despite the materialism of the Wirtschaftswunder, was deemed a safe refuge for the so-called universal values of humaneness. Since these values refer to the ‘unmasking of a seemingly safe existence’, the question becomes one about the very meaning of life. This, in turn, makes it conceivable why the performance, though not a ‘religious act’ per se, had some quasi-religious undertones for some spectators, probably triggered by Sellner’s ritualistic forms. As already stated, this was not an attempt to revive ancient Greek theatre. Rather, the particular forms—or the ‘great form’—and the new aesthetics Sellner had found spoke to the spectators, because both addressed their yearning for universal values and their belief in the ‘human being as such’, but without affirming it. It left them dumbstruck, faced with the question of the meaning of life without being supplied with any answers. In this respect, it was the realization of the ‘great form’ that, according to some spectators, turned the theatre into a temple of sorts, where it seemed inappropriate to applaud possible insights into the unanswerability of whether life had any meaning at all. While in the case of Brecht’s Antigone the aesthetic merged with the political, in Sellner’s Oedipus the aesthetic bordered on the religious—or, at least, on the metaphysical. It brought to mind not only Heidegger’s notion of Geworfensein (thrownness), as already introduced in Being and Time (first published in 1927), but also, if not primarily, the ideas of French

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existentialism, particularly those of Sartre and Camus. Sartre’s major philosophical work, Being and Nothingness, appeared in German in 1952, having been presented to the German intellectual and bildungsbürgerlich public in the weekly journal Die Zeit as early as 1946. Camus’s important essay ‘The Myth of Sisyphus’ had been available in German since 1950 (cf. Camus 1995). These texts were widely read and discussed. Even if spectators were not familiar with these philosophers, the question raised by the performance pointed them in a similar direction. We can say with some certainty now that Sellner’s production of Oedipus spoke to the spectators—for the most part hailing from the Bildungsbürgertum—because its aesthetics successfully united ambiguous, indeed contradictory, elements. As a production of a Greek tragedy, it assuaged the Bildungsbürger’s appetite for traditional Philhellenism. By performing it without any changes or cuts to the text, it corresponded to their demand for textual ‘authenticity’—for which, as we have seen, neither Reinhardt nor Jessner had cared. In these respects, the production appealed to their conventional cultural identity, which had been challenged by National Socialist ideology, the war, and the fact that the Holocaust had been allowed to happen. It thus served as a restorative tendency that was widespread in society, in particular among the bourgeoisie. On the other hand, the production radically broke with prevailing stage conventions. It was ‘modern’ by adhering to a ‘canon of sparseness’, which determined the abstract space, the choreographed movements, the fugal speech patterns of the chorus, and the music, as well as the rejection of a realistic–psychological acting style. Its modernity corresponded not only to abstract painting but also to tendencies in the other arts, such as design and architecture.7 7 Regarding the ‘canon of sparseness’, Wieland Wagner’s productions in Bayreuth in the 1950s can be compared to Sellner’s aesthetics. In his Ring of the Nibelung of 1953, he employed the ‘magic circle’ and the ‘isle of play’, so characteristic of Sellner’s productions of Greek tragedies. The costumes were comparable to those in Sellner’s Oedipus. However, while Sellner’s aesthetics did not claim to convey a historically accurate image of ancient Greece but referred to its tragedy as a storehouse of archetypes, Wagner wished to re-create an idealized Greece in order to attribute the quality of a storehouse of archetypes to The Ring and thereby intentionally depoliticizing it—i.e. ‘cleansing’ Bayreuth from its ‘pollution’ through its addiction to Hitler (cf. Goldhill 2011: 145–50). Approximately ten years after this Ring production, between 1962 and 1964, he invited the classicist Schadewaldt—whose translations Sellner had used—to deliver a series of lectures at Bayreuth. The first dealt with

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However, its attitude towards the human condition was ambiguous. In the 1950s, there was ample talk of ‘universal values’ and of the human being in philosophy, literature, and art theory, and, above all, in newspaper feuilletons. This kind of generalization nurtured the dominant tendency to negate individual responsibility for what had happened in the past, which had indeed undermined and abolished ‘universal values’ and overshadowed the idea of the human being. By relating to them, the production nourished a traditional restorative manner of thinking. However, by addressing the question of the meaning of life and leaving it unanswered, even emphasizing that it cannot be answered, the production exerted a deeply confusing effect. Instead of reassuring the spectators that there was a larger, albeit hidden, meaning to it all, it left them deeply disconcerted, at a loss. In the 1950s, the Bildungsbürgertum expected and demanded that ‘their’ theatre affirm their cultural identity, which mostly happened through productions of the classics following neither a completely traditional nor a particularly bold or innovative style, instead retaining tried-and-tested approaches, and adding moderately modern devices here and there. This sometimes endowed theatre with an almost ‘sacred aura’. The aesthetics of Sellner’s Oedipus, by contrast, seems to have deeply unsettled the cultural identity of at least some spectators, without opening up a clear possibility for reaffirmation or a new cultural identity to take its place. The performance seems to have left them in a state of in-betweenness, of radical liminality. This would explain the lack of or tentative applause and even the demand for silence. The performance was definitely not a religious act or a ritual, but it certainly had ritualistic elements. While this might have rendered the spectators receptive to future transformations, we cannot say whether this was intended by the director or not. ‘Richard Wagner and the Greeks’ (1962) and the second with ‘The Ring of the Nibelung and Aeschylus’ Prometheus’ (1963). The third, entitled ‘Supplement’, returned to the subject of the first in order to define in more precise terms Wagner’s relationship to the Greeks. The final lecture, ‘The Original Structure of Greek Tragedy and its Earliest Development in Aeschylus’, was drafted but never delivered. After the 1950s, Wieland Wagner clearly felt the need to justify his staging strategies by adding a philological justification for relating his grandfather to the Greeks (cf. Chapter 3, p. 71 ff.). After Wieland Wagner’s death in 1966, the theatre journal Theater heute initiated a debate on his legacy. The first three lectures were published as part of a general discussion on his aesthetics in its October 1967 issue. Regarding the English translation of the first lecture and a commentary by John Deathridge, see Schadewaldt (1999) and Deathridge (1999).

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Sellner’s Oedipus production did not create a new image of ancient Greece. It referred neither to the Winckelmannian nor to the Nietzschean image of it, nor to that of the classicists, despite his cooperation with Schadewaldt. It was not even an ideal Greece as the embodiment of humanness. Greek tragedy was not interesting to him as a historical document, idealized or not. Rather, it fascinated him as poetry, which he read for its meditations on the human being and because it served him as a reservoir of archetypes. ‘Unmasking’ and conveying them required a special performance aesthetics, which Sellner realized in his production of Oedipus the King. It is curious to note here, by the way, that the premiere took place as a festive performance, preceding, and opening the 1952 sequence of the annual Darmstädter Gespräche, remarkably devoted that year to the subject Mensch und Technik (Man and Technology). The aesthetics Sellner developed in Oedipus largely remained the dominant aesthetics of his Darmstadt years, with certain changes, additions, or cuts when applied to stagings of plays other than Greek tragedies. One decisive change, again with a Greek tragedy, occurred at the end of the 1950s with the staging of The Women of Trachis in Ezra Pound’s version, translated into German by Eva Hesse. As Sellner writes to Wien, he found in Pound’s adaptation ‘a new place of language’: The language has broken the sound barrier of aesthetics. It is built from the material of the present—without any additions . . . Its epithets are short but not sparse, they reveal a shocking precision . . . It never escapes into inexactitude—its pathos is the rigorously aimed lightning, its poetry lies in rhythms and the absolute worth of words, which seems carefully balanced. (Sellner and Wien 1962: 107)

He is fascinated with Pound’s refusal to ‘stand by the abyss to conjure up what is timeless and valid—he digs and finds the present. He is not looking for an incantatory formula, he knows and preaches that there is none’ (ibid.). Sellner feels inspired to change his aesthetics accordingly. The critic Georg Hensel, who had regarded Oedipus as a beginning but not as a conclusion—‘the culmination remained absent’ (Anon., Darmstädter Echo, 20 September 1952)—writes enthusiastically about The Women of Trachis: The director G. R. Sellner has managed to overcome his long-standing efforts around antiquity and staged Sophocles as a realist . . . Heracles, too, wears the

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tragic mask—a full mask (like Deianeira during her final appearance, sensing that the love charm is a deadly poison)—as long as he is nothing more than the suffering object of the verdict of fate: a man in agony, screaming for revenge, raging in his ignorance. He takes off the mask when he recognizes and understands the fated verdict: ‘Come at it that way, my boy, what | SPLENDOUR, | IT ALL COHERES.’ This is the highlight of the performance. (Georg Hensel, Darmstädter Echo, 14 December 1959)8

This time, the audience broke into an ‘unusually long applause after a poignant pause’ (ibid.).9 In staging The Women of Trachis, Sellner reached the conclusion that ‘the incantatory formula disappears when that which is conjured (i.e. the archetypal) is “on the surface”, and that the magical space loses its magic (i.e. the pull of the taboo) when the magical itself steps visibly into the light and into the action’ (Sellner and Wien 1962: 121). Be that as it may, the production did mark a turning point in Sellner’s theatre aesthetics. While in this case the changes in Sellner’s aesthetics were motivated by the language in Pound’s adaptation, other changes took shape in Vienna during his stagings of Oedipus the King (1960), Antigone (1961), and Electra (1962). It was the sculptor Fritz Wotruba who had built the spaces for them. They functioned independently as sculptures—or, as Sellner put it, as ‘activated environments of play’ (ibid. 124). They allowed him to abandon ‘certain scenic simplifications . . . which all too often lead back to mystification’ (ibid. 125). Wotruba’s spaces led Sellner to recognize ‘the danger of a placeless stage: a non-committal space turns into increasingly safe, increasingly effective secret-mongering’ (ibid.). In June 1966, Sellner’s Viennese Oedipus the King was presented in Athens. A press conference gave Sellner the opportunity to explain his ideas on Greek tragedy. The newspaper Eleftheria quoted the following statement of his:

8

Citation from Women of Trachis by Ezra Pound, from SOPHOKLES/WOMEN OF TRACHIS, copyright © 1957 by Ezra Pound. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. 9 Ezra Pound was present at the premiere. He not only ‘repeatedly shook the hands of the actors’ (Hensel), but also declared that he had ‘experienced some very beautiful moments’, as his translator Eva Hesse reports. It was, he continued, ‘a joyous evening’ for him. In light of this, it is interesting to note that he had not attended the premiere of his play in New York.

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The truth and the life inherent in these texts position them much closer to contemporary theatre compared to the romantic creations of the past centuries. . . . The Germans, the Austrians and the German-speaking Swiss regard tragedy as part of their national heritage, as do the Greeks. (Sellner, in Eleftheria, 17 June 1966)

The same newspaper also published a review by the critic Iro D. Lambrou. She polemicized not only against the ‘abstract art’ of Wotruba’s stage design but against the production as a whole, declaring it to be ‘hermetically sealed’ and ‘a heartless indictment that chains people to their irrevocable and irreconcilable positions’. She accuses Sellner of having ‘ignored the interpretative goals and restricted his interpretation to the nightmarish world of absolute catastrophe. Götzendämmerung!’ (22 June 1966).10 Whether or not the production was successful with the audiences remains impossible to ascertain. However, returning to Sellner’s own statements, it seems obvious that the 1950s with their special conditions had come to an end. The aesthetics developed for the staging of Greek tragedies during that time no longer seemed adequate. Interestingly, Sellner once again arrived at the changes he felt were necessary through his work on Greek tragedies— even if it was Pound’s language or Wotruba’s spaces that inspired him to do so. In any case, these productions could be described as the swan song of the long decade of the 1950s. In the Federal Republic, it came to its irrevocable end with Adenauer’s resignation in 1963.

10 This review was entitled ‘A Teutonic Oedipus’. It was published in the Greek language and subsequently translated into German by Natascha Siouzouli. The English translation is based on the German one.

7 Inventing New Forms of Political Theatre In 1962, Erwin Piscator (1893–1966) was appointed Chief Director of the Freie Volksbühne Berlin.1 In the 1920s he had staged a number of productions at the Volksbühne, introducing film to theatre performances for the very first time (cf. Chapter 4, pp. 132–3). This led to his dismissal, because he took a clear political stance in favour of the communist cause with his new dramaturgy and aesthetics. In the 1930s, Piscator travelled to the Soviet Union, where, during the Great Theatre Festival in Moscow of 1935, Edward Gordon Craig conveyed to him Goebbels’s message asking him to get involved in the Thing play movement (cf. Chapter 5, p. 144), which he declined. Later Piscator emigrated to Paris and from there to the USA. In New York, he first taught at the New School of Social Research before founding his Dramatic Workshop, which was attended, among others, by Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, and Judith Malina. He returned to Europe in 1951 and mounted productions at different theatres in the Federal Republic, the Netherlands, and Sweden. His appointment at the Freie

1 The Freie Volksbühne was founded in 1890 to stage theatre performances for the members of the working class. Set up as a private association in order to circumvent censorship, which had prevented performances of Ibsen’s Ghosts and other naturalistic plays from taking place, it followed the model of the Freie Bühne, founded in Berlin by Otto Brahm and others one year earlier. The Freie Volksbühne attracted a great number of workers. It opened its own theatre in Berlin in 1913: the Volksbühne am Bülowplatz (today’s Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz). After the Nazis had seized power, the Freie Volksbühne ceased to exist as an independent organization. What remained of it was integrated into the Reichsverband Deutsche Bühne e.V., and its theatre building was expropriated. After the Second World War, the Freie Volksbühne was re-established in West and East Berlin. In West Berlin, a new theatre was built for it on Schaperstraße, opening in 1963. Today, it serves as the venue for the Theatertreffen and the Berlin Festspiele.

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Volksbühne finally—and much too late—granted him the position he deserved and which he had hoped for in vain for so many years. Piscator opened his first season as Chief Director in 1962–3—still temporarily housed in the Theater am Kurfürstendamm—with a production of Gerhart Hauptmann’s tetralogy Die Atriden (The Atrides)2 as part of a theatre festival held in honour of the 100th anniversary of the poet’s birthday (15 November 1862). Hauptmann had written the tetralogy between 1940 and 1944, and it had never before been staged in its entirety. The last part, Iphigenie in Delphi, which Hauptmann had written first, premiered at the Staatliches Schauspielhaus Berlin in 1941, directed by Jürgen Fehling. The first part, Iphigenie in Aulis, was first put on stage by Lothar Müthel at Vienna’s Burgtheater in 1943. The two other parts, Agamemnons Tod (Agamemnon’s Death) and Elektra (Electra) were shown at the Deutsches Theater Berlin after the war in 1947, staged by H. W. Litten. Piscator presented all four plays in one night in a performance that lasted close to four hours. Piscator staged Hauptmann’s tetralogy in order to make a clear statement at the beginning of his directorship in West Berlin—a statement concerning the ‘loud’ silence on the Third Reich, the war, and the Holocaust. Strategically, this was a highly intelligent choice. The audience at the Volksbühne no longer comprised only workers, but also members of the middle class and even of the Bildungsbürgertum. Celebrating the hundredth anniversary of the birthday of the creator of the most important naturalistic plays shown at the Freie Volksbühne in its early years by staging his adaptation of Greek tragedies was a way to appeal to all these diverse spectators, regardless of their social status and background. At the same time, staging the tetralogy as an anti-fascist play confronted them with the very subject they had consistently and successfully blocked out from their collective memory for more than a decade. In the programme notes, Piscator states that Hauptmann wrote the ‘Atrides’ in an act of inner liberation as a coded indictment of the Nazi regime . . . Just exchange the Greeks for Germans and Hellas for Germany: it

2 This text has not yet been published in an English translation. For the sake of readability I have chosen to use only my English translation (given here in parentheses) of the original German title if it appears again in this book. However, only the German title appears in the Bibliography.

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takes no further demonstration to recognize that we have a very clear stance here. How could one utter the word ‘barbarism’ in the Third Reich without being reminded of that of the Nazis? (Programme notes to Erwin Piscator (1962), Hauptmann’s Atrides Tetralogy, Theater am Kurfürstendamm, Haus der Freien Volksbühne Berlin, season 1962–3, No. 1: 2)

While the Nazis and Hitler in particular had promoted the identification of the Germans with the Greek people of antiquity and of Germany with an idealized ancient Greece, the spectators were here asked to relate the barbaric people of the Third Reich to those of mythical Greece. While in the first post-war years the question of collective guilt was addressed through performances of Oedipus, judged to be ‘guiltlessly guilty’, the suppressed past returned to the stage after more than fifteen years of forgetting and silence via Hauptmann’s adaptation of Greek tragedies that challenged the audience to remember. As Piscator writes: If the composition of the fate of the Atrides by Gerhart Hauptmann is to be seen as a metaphor for the fate of Germany . . . the final (which was written first!) play remains problematic for an interpretation referring to that time. For the completion, absolution, and redemption of guilt (which Hauptmann still deemed possible in 1940, before complete terror set in)—this has yet to happen in Germany. Delphi, the place where guilt, if one really concedes it, might be atoned, is not located in Germany . . . not yet at least . . . In a country that has failed to learn from the horrors of the last war, this is a warning cry: to remember, so that the world might become better. (Ibid.)

With that last sentence Piscator takes up Hauptmann’s statement: ‘People remember too little; this is why it seems futile to hope that things might become better over the next hundred years’ (10 December 1943, quoted in the programme notes to Piscator (1962)). In order to challenge the audience to remember and to allow the suppressed to emerge, Piscator not only substantially abridged the four plays but also added a clear marker at the beginning of the performance to serve as a clue for the spectators: The drone of bomb squadrons. Dive bombers howl. Aerial mines explode. All recorded.—Accompanied by an image of Dresden in ruins and the projection of Hauptmann’s lament for the bombed city. Spotlights find writings in the dark, which are set up on both sides of the stage like a political–biographical chronology: Summer 1940 ‘Iphigenia in Delphi’, France capitulates. Autumn 1942 ‘Agamemnon’s Death’, Stalingrad. Spring 1943 ninth draft of ‘Iphigenia in Aulis’, total war, German cities bombed. Autumn 1944 ‘Electra’, allied troops on the Rhine. Then the curtain rises. (Rolf Michaelis, Theater heute, 11 (1962), 24)

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The stage was designed by Franz Mertz, who had turned out to be the ideal stage designer for Sellner’s attempt to uncover universal human values in Greek tragedies. The abstract stage in Piscator’s production enabled the spectators to link the actions of archaic, mythic times to their own recent past. As many reviews report, the spectators left the auditorium silently during the intermission, and applauded the actors and the director for a long time at the end, including loud calls of ‘bravo’ when Piscator appeared on the stage. One critic declared this ‘the most jubilant celebration of the festival’ and asked ‘Does the Volksbühne now really have a new future?’ (Herbert Pfeiffer, Morgenpost, 9 October 1962). Even if some critics complained that Piscator not only ‘misunderstood’ the dramatist but even ‘misrepresented’ him, and that his politicization of the tetralogy was unfounded and meant a repetition of the ‘blunder of the twenties’ (Friedrich Luft, Die Welt, 8 October 1962), the production retrospectively marks the beginning of a new political theatre—the documentary approach meant to discuss recent German history. It was followed by Piscator’s productions of Hochhuth’s Der Stellvertreter (The Deputy), addressing the attitude of the Vatican and particularly that of Pope Pius XII towards the persecution of the Jews by the Nazis, and, later on, by his production of Peter Weiss’s Die Ermittlung (The Investigation, 1965), based on the first Auschwitz trial in Frankfurt on the Main between 1963 and 1965. In any case, Piscator’s production of The Atrides initiated a public discussion on recent German history. Moreover, his new documentary style paved the way for developing a new theatre aesthetics for putting Greek tragedies on stage as political theatre (and also influenced the student movement, which began shortly thereafter and came to a head in 1968). The first attempts were Claus Peymann’s productions of Brecht’s Antigone at the Schaubühne Berlin (1965) and the Theater am Turm in Frankfurt on the Main (1966). The year 1966 saw a number of productions of Greek tragedies experimenting with new aesthetic means in order to politicize their performances. Hans Gaugler, Brecht’s Creon in Chur, gave the chorus a new role and function by setting it in motion and turning it into the protagonist in his production of The Persians in Tübingen. Hansgünther Heyme in his Antigone production in Wiesbaden painted the actors’ faces and gave them shoes with exaggerated heels, emphasizing the social status of the dramatic figures: the protagonists walked around in excessively high heels; those of the

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chorus were considerably lower and those of the messenger lower still. Moreover, it was a clearly marked theatrical—and distancing—device, which was, however, received by some critics as an allusion to the ancient cothurnus. Kurt Hübner, in his Antigone production in Bremen, positioned the sixteen chorus members all over the auditorium, in the stalls as well as on the balcony. Individually or in groups, they not only addressed but also contradicted each other and the protagonists on stage, who in turn responded by calling out to individual chorus members in the auditorium, thus including the spectators surrounding the chorus members. Even if these productions by themselves did not yet amount to a new political aesthetics, they must be regarded as a first step in that direction. The year before Piscator took over as Chief Director of the Volksbühne in West Berlin, an event took place that decisively changed the political situation in Germany, indeed in all of Europe. On 13 August 1961 a wall was erected, separating the GDR from the Federal Republic, and West from East Berlin—the so-called antifaschistischer Schutzwall (Anti-Fascist Protection Rampart). Mobility between the two German states was henceforth impossible. Berliners, who had heretofore visited each other’s theatres, were no longer permitted to travel between the two parts of the city. Passport holders from the Federal Republic—that is, non-Berliners—were still permitted to enter the eastern part of the city with a particular visa that entailed exchanging 25 Deutschmark for 25 East Marks. They were thus able to visit theatre performances in the East but had to be sure to return to the West before midnight or the East German police would detain them at the border. Since this book explores the relationship of performances of Greek tragedies to the cultural identity of the German Bildungsbürger since 1800, it does not seem necessary—at least at first glance—to consider productions from the GDR. Officially, the Bildungsbürgertum had been abolished in the GDR, and, even if a few Bildungsbürger were still around, East German theatre claimed to address not them but the working class. Moreover, almost no performances of Greek tragedies took place until the beginning of the 1960s, besides the two re-productions of Brecht’s Antigone mentioned earlier. However, in 1963, the Piraikon Theatre Athens came to the GDR to show two of its productions of Greek tragedies in Berlin and Gera— Sophocles’ Electra and Euripides’ Medea, both staged by Dimitrios

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Rondiris, one of the most prominent and successful Greek theatre directors at the time. Both productions were staged in the ‘classical’ style and strove for a revival of ancient Greek theatre, while the acting followed a psychological–tragic principle. They were very well received by audiences in the GDR, but did not leave an imprint on its theatre scene. It was an attempt at an ‘ancient’ habitus and ‘ancient’ composition and therefore only offered something very general. That is why the characterizations also had a merely civic, humanist appearance and showed the tragedy of ‘the human being’, ‘the woman’. It was a nice encounter, similar to the experience in a museum, which one would hate to miss—but this was not contemporary theatre. (Trilse 1975: 77)

In West Berlin, where Rondiris’s Electra had been presented at the Berlin Festival Weeks (part of the Berlin Festspiele) of 1962, it was regarded as the ‘undisputed highlight’. Its ‘elemental success with the audience’ was due not only to the great actress Aspasia Papathanassiou playing Electra, but also, if not primarily, to the ‘modern approach to language of D. Rondiris, whose achievement cannot be praised highly enough’ (Walter Kaul, Der Kurier, 8 October 1962). It is noteworthy that this praise of Rondiris served as an introduction to the critic’s harsh and uncompromising condemnation of Piscator’s The Atrides. In the context of the GDR, however, the performances of the Greeks were received as old-fashioned Bildungstheater, albeit of a high quality, which might seem appropriate in the ‘motherland of ancient art’ (Trilse 1975: 76) but felt irrelevant and out of place here, where theatre had to contribute to the establishment of a socialist society by following the doctrine of socialist realism. Since the government of the GDR defined and perceived its state as anti-fascist, with no place for former fascists who had committed the crimes, it saw no reason to address the question of guilt. This also explains why Brecht’s Antigone was rarely restaged: the focus at the time was not on the fascist past but on the socialist future. Establishing a ‘socialist National Theatre’ was named as the goal of the Seven-Year Plan at the first Conference of Dramatic Theatre held in Leipzig from 22 to 24 January 1960. It was to be achieved through ‘socialist community work’, which was defined as the ‘tenets of socialist life’, and needed to mould itself on the classics: ‘The ideal of a beautiful community of human beings, which has been imagined especially in the

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classical works, will become a reality in our socialist society.’ In any case, the classics had to be protected against ‘convention, subjectivist interpretation, inadmissible modernizations, simplifications, and falsifications’ (Anon., Theater der Zeit, 4 (1960), 47–52). At the second conference in Bitterfeld (24–25 April 1964), Walter Ulbricht announced that the party alone should lead and guide all social processes, including those in the arts. In his view, the ideals he listed had already been partially achieved by the classics but not yet by contemporary socialist writers: ‘Nurturing our classical heritage is a key element of socialist culture in our republic. The problem is reconciling the humanist classical culture of Weimar with the Bitterfeld approach’ (Ulbricht, quoted in Hasche, Schölling, and Fiebach 1994: 50). One year later, at the Eleventh Plenum of the Central Committee of the Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands (SED) in December 1965, a complaint was lodged against GDR theatres and the growing trend of staging Western plays, even if they were of ‘considerable quality’, as, for instance, The Deputy and The Investigation, since ‘the development of socialist drama is not progressing fast enough’ (quoted in ibid. 56). In other words, existing socialist plays were deemed out of line with the party’s guidelines and principles. This situation might have fuelled the discussion on classical heritage, focusing on Weimar, but at least it did not exclude the Greek classics. Accordingly, the two ancient Greek plays that were staged in the GDR in the 1960s—Aristophanes’ The Peace (in an adaptation by Peter Hacks, 1962) and Sophocles’ Oedipus the King as Oedipus Tyrann (Oedipus Tyrant, 1967), both staged by Benno Besson (1922–2006) at the Deutsches Theater—were addressed not to the Bildungsbürger but to ‘the people’. They were a huge success. The Peace was performed over 300 times. Both productions were invited to London and Italy but were not granted government permission to travel. Even the invitation of Oedipus Tyrant to the Berlin Theatertreffen was officially declined. However, theatre critics, theatre and classics scholars, theatre artists, and many others, mostly hailing from the Bildungsbürgertum and possessing a West German or other foreign passport, went to the Deutsches Theater to see the production there. It was praised not only in Germany but all over Europe as a milestone in the history of staging Greek tragedy. The accolades were not primarily due to the somewhat lengthy new interpretation in the programme notes but first and foremost to its unique theatrical means and decisively novel aesthetics, which can be

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seen as political in itself. I am including it in our discussion because of the enormous impact of this production not only on the GDR, but also on the Federal Republic and other European countries.

Linking Greek with other ‘naive’ cultures: Benno Besson’s Oedipus Tyrant There’s someone sitting on stage and beating an African drum with his hands. When the chorus members articulate their emotions physically, they move as if in a sluggish, rhythmically reduced African dance. The full masks are reminiscent of the ornaments of totem poles, of masks from Asian theatre, of African dance masks. Oedipus’ costume evokes a Buddhist monk, Jocasta’s an Indian Squaw, Tiresias’—who even appears on stilts—a fantastically bedecked shaman, while the costumes of the chorus members— white linen rags tied over a grey fabric resembling cotton wool—call to mind the dress of Tibetan monks. (Ernst Wendt, Theater heute, 3 (1967), 22)

Almost all reviews and essays on Benno Besson’s Oedipus Tyrant, which premiered at the Deutsches Theater in East Berlin (GDR) on 31 January 1967,3 contain similar remarks highlighting the rejection of a Winckelmannian antiquity of ‘noble simplicity’ and ‘quiet greatness’ (Winckelmann [1755] 1885, quoted in Trevelyan 1981: 44) in favour of an archaic world, not, however, Nietzsche’s vision of a Dionysian chorus but ‘seemingly exotic elements that the early cultures of many people have in common’ (Kranz 1990: 122). Why did Besson assemble elements reminiscent of such highly diverse cultures? Was he striving for a Brechtian estrangement effect? Besson did, indeed, have very close ties to Brecht. Born in the Frenchspeaking part of Switzerland and maintaining his Swiss citizenship, Besson had been working at the Berlin Ensemble since 1949. He was hired as an actor and as an assistant to the director but began directing plays in 1952. After Brecht’s death, he left the Berlin Ensemble and worked as director in Rostock, Stuttgart, Frankfurt (the last two in the 3 Of all the productions referred to in this book, this is the first one that I saw myself. Besides my own memory, I am taking recourse to additional material—the programme notes, a number of reviews by critics from the GDR and the Federal Republic, and an audio recording of the performance.

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Federal Republic), and at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin. Here, he served as main director from the 1962–3 season, marking his arrival with the celebrated production of The Peace. By no means a faithful Brecht disciple despite their many years of working together, Besson had already developed his own style in his very first production at the Berlin Ensemble (cf. André Müller, Deutsche Volkszeitung Düsseldorf, 31 March 1967; Besson 1990). While the collection of ‘exotic elements’ exhibited on Oedipus’ stage might have had an estranging effect, it was certainly not limited to it. Rather, when other elements in the production such as the stage design or the consistent use of the literal German translation of the name Oedipus—Schwellfuß (‘swollen foot’)—are considered, the idea emerges that the Thebes shown here is a tribal society. The stage, designed by Horst Sagert, who also made the sketches for the costumes, was brightly lit from the beginning until the very end, as was the auditorium. At the back, the stage came to an end with a huge white cyclorama. The front of the stage was extended so that it almost touched the first row. ‘The performance unfolds brightly—that is, publicly. The spectators are drawn into the action, they are the city that Oedipus or Creon, Jocasta or the chorus repeatedly address, seeking applause or sympathy, comfort or judgement’ (Müller 1967). The spectators thus became a part of the play and were challenged to take a stand themselves. In front of the cyclorama, three tents had been erected on an elevated surface, the middle one somewhat larger: Oedipus’ palace. A few steps led from the tents to the stage level, where Oedipus’ throne, a stool with legs ending in what resembled lion paws, stood in the middle on a rather small platform. There were benches for the ten chorus members on either side of the steps. This stage did not evoke a classical or even an archaic Greece but suggested the nomadic life of peripatetic tribal societies living in temporary structures. This impression was reinforced at the very beginning, when ‘the priest hangs a blood-stained cloth over the post in front of Oedipus’ house, a white cloth with large, dark blood stains, disgustingly crusty blackish red. Was a sacrificial animal slaughtered on it, or did a man die of the plague on it?’ (Helmut Ullrich, Neue Zeit, 3 February 1967). The consistent use of the name Schwellfuß for Oedipus further enhanced this impression by incessantly reminding the spectators of his bound feet, the sign of his disgrace, which he turns into a sign of

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superiority in this production. Each time Oedipus (Fred Düren) walked down the steps of his palace, he raised the hem of his white robe on both sides in order to show off this sign—his beautifully adorned swollen feet—at which the chorus members knelt down and averted their eyes. Oedipus uses them as a fetish of sorts or, as some critics described them, as a totem. The ceremonial, even ritualistic, presentation of the swollen feet and his renaming as Schwellfuß greatly contributed to the understanding that we were dealing with a tribal society here. The programme notes entitled ‘Instead of an Introduction’ quote an excerpt from Karl Marx’s ‘Introduction to a Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy’. Marx here talks about the oddity of why Greek art and literature, while created in the ‘childhood of mankind’, are still relished in his own times. He explains: A man cannot become a child again, or he becomes childish. But doesn’t he enjoy the child’s naiveté, and mustn’t he strive to reproduce its truth on a higher level himself? Doesn’t the special character of every epoch come alive in its true nature in the nature of its children? Why shouldn’t the historical childhood of humanity, in which it attained its most beautiful development, exert an eternal charm as a stage that will never recur? There are unruly children and precocious children. Many of the ancient peoples belong to this category. The Greeks were normal children. The charm of their art for us does not contradict the undeveloped stage of society on which it grew. Rather it is its result and is inseparably connected with the fact that the immature social conditions in which it arose and in which alone it could arise can never recur. (Marx, [1857/8] 1976: 44–5)

This statement seems a very apt introduction for the production, for it addresses two strands of thought—the idea of the childhood of mankind and that of the ‘less mature, social forms’ (ibid. 34) related to it. Both can be read as fundamental arguments underlying the production and justifying the representation of a tribal society on stage. Two lines of argument emerge here, which, though related to each other, still point in different directions. While one refers to a completely novel image and understanding of ancient Greece, the other deals with the relationship between individual and community, not just in tribal but also in modern and, particularly, in socialist societies. The new image of ancient Greece is brought about by assembling elements from or alluding to different cultures. Most critics noticed and commented on these elements. They related the stage design to a ‘nomadic culture’ (Heinz Luwdig Schneider, Handelsblatt Düsseldorf,

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Illustration 7.1 Benno Besson: Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrant; Creon (Dieter Franke) and Oedipus (Fred Düren) with the chorus; stage design by Horst Sagert.

23 January 1967, preview) or a ‘nomadic settlement’ (Wendt 1967), or describe it as ‘archaic and primitive decorative elements of a grand, expressive beauty’ (Eike Middell, Sächsisches Tageblatt Dresden, 9 February 1967). Another critic writes in summary: ‘The consciously sparse, peculiar cloth and leather architecture of the stage design was also meant to invoke prehistory, not as a historically concrete milieu but as a theatrical setting’ (Rolf Dieter Eichler, Nationalzeitung, 4 February 1967). Of course, the masks are also mentioned in this context (see Illustration 7.1). Not a single review makes the connection to the Greek convention of masks; rather there is just a reference to that of ‘African and Oceanic’—or Asian— ‘models’ (Müller 1967). The same association is mentioned with regard to the music and the dance of the chorus (cf. Wendt 1967: 22). This was clearly the intended effect. For the programme notes state: ‘Besides music the performance utilizes similar forms, which an African actor helped us develop. Lively elements from a naïve culture make it easier to render the naïve culture of the Greeks in a lively manner’ (programme notes to

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Benno Besson (1967) Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrant, Deutsches Theater DT Staatstheater in East Berlin (GDR), season 1966–7, No. 3). Referring also to Marx’s statement of the ‘naivety of the child’, the sweeping designation of African and other cultures as ‘naive’ of course is steeped in the sort of patronizing and condescending rhetoric that was still widespread at that time, as are many expressions in the reviews relating to the ‘foreign’ elements, as in the following case: ‘With the help of aesthetic means, Besson . . . traces “child-like societies” back to where they still exist—in African and Asian cultures—and sees them in strong contrast to our and the spectators’ own culture, which has outgrown childhood’ (Wendt 1967: 22). However, dismissing this fifty-year-old and now certainly in many ways dated production and the debate around it from the viewpoint of today’s understanding of the complex networks and subtle languages of racial politics, the processes of othering, and the postcolonial discourse risks missing the groundbreaking novelty of its approach with regard to ancient Greece. For the first time, this once revered and idealized Greece, which was regarded as a universal model and the epitome of European civilization—its cradle, so to speak—was placed on the same level as nonEuropean cultures. On the one hand, this was meant to create a distance from ancient Greece and expose it as alien, strange, and foreign. On the other, it robbed ancient Greece of its singularity, its unquestionable, exceptional status that had been accorded to it by all European nations— regardless of whether the image was moulded in the ‘Winckelmannian’ or the ‘Nietzschean’ school of thought. Besson achieved in this production what almost twenty years later Bernal would strive to accomplish in his scholarship when questioning the Aryan model of the origin of Greek culture and championing the reinstatement of the Ancient one that favoured the ‘Afro-Asiatic roots of classical civilization’ (cf. Prologue). In Oedipus Tyrant, Greek, African, and Asiatic cultures were presented not only as being on a par with each other but as though they had been mixed from the very beginning—that is, that African and Asian elements formed a constitutive part of the Greek culture depicted here. All of them served equally as examples of ‘the childhood of mankind’. The second line of argument proceeds from Marx’s notion of ‘less mature, social forms’, which the production conceptualized as a tribal society in crisis, threatening the unity of the community and their leader. Heiner Müller’s version of Hölderlin’s translation already accentuated

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this thought, and it was further stressed by a number of scenic devices. When Besson asked Heiner Müller (1929–95) to work on Hölderlin’s translation, Müller—between 1962 and 1965—had already penned two adaptations of Greek tragedies, Philoctetes and Heracles 5. Philoctetes was published in the West German theatre journal Theater heute in August 1965 and premiered at the Munich Kammerspiele in 1968, staged by Hans Lietzau. It was neither published nor staged in the GDR until 1977. Heracles 5 premiered in 1974 at the Schiller-Theater in West Berlin, followed by a production at the Volksbühne in East Berlin that same year. While Philoctetes and Heracles 5 were adaptations that transformed the original text in decisive ways, this was not the case with Oedipus Tyrant. The main deviations from Hölderlin’s translation were using the name Schwellfuß and exchanging the royal title in favour of ‘tyrant’ (which is closer to the Greek τύραννος but with an important shift in its meaning). Most of the changes, except for adaptations to certain rhythmic patterns, served the purpose of putting emphasis on the second line of argument. For one, they were meant firmly to establish Schwellfuß’s self-accorded sense of superiority over other people. Müller added one line, for instance, in his reply to the first choral ode: after Schwellfuß has rebuked the people of Thebes for not searching for the murderer of their king, their ‘best man’, and before he admits that his reign and marriage are due to the former king’s death, he states: ‘Now God’s hand is involved and I am that hand’ (Müller 2004: 16).4 In his final address to the chorus he goes even further than identifying himself with God’s hand by distinguishing himself from all other human beings. Hölderlin’s sentence ‘For sweet | Is a dwelling place of thought away from evils’ (Hölderlin 2001: Oedipus the King, 15–62, at 58) in Müller’s version reads ‘sweet it is to live | Where thought resides, far away from everything’ (Müller 2004: 50).5 Schwellfuß here dissociates himself from the community in order to live alone with his intellect.

The original German reads: ‘Jetzt mischt der Gott die Hand ein und ich bin die’ (Müller 2004: 16). 5 The original German reads: ‘Denn süß ist es | Wo der Gedanke wohnt, entfernt von Übeln’ (Hölderlin [1804] 1994: 843) and ‘süß ist zu wohnen | wo der Gedanke wohnt, entfernt von allem (Müller 2004: 50). 4

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The whole scenic arrangement reinforced this message. At the end, Schwellfuß, separated from the others, stood stage front on a small platform, very erect, shoulders and head pushed back. He stands there in a body-hugging yellow garment that brings to mind cilices and the robes of Buddhist monks, stands there in self-stylization—the mask with the dark eye sockets dripping with yellow and blue colour is reminiscent of a skull— and slowly he lets his arms sink with which he only just embraced . . . his children. And the chorus walks off to the sides, commenting unsparingly on this ‘statuesque image’ of Oedipus, the deposed, now useless ruler, in two verses: ‘sweet it is to live | Where thought resides, far away from everything.’ (Wendt 1967: 22)

In fact, the last lines of the chorus—‘You citizens of the land of Thebes, see this Oedipus | Who solved famous riddles, who was mightier than all’ (Müller 2004: 54)—are omitted. Oedipus, who detached himself from the community through words and deeds, is in the end abandoned by that very community, exposed to the gaze and judgement of the ‘citizens’— that is, that of the audience in the theatre. It was not just the programme notes, the quotation from Marx and the retelling of Oedipus’ story, which stresses the link to tribal societies and their particular laws, that reinforced the two lines of argument just outlined. Rather, it was the performance’s new aesthetics developed by Besson and his team—its new ‘great form’—that enabled their realization. This form is by no means realistic. There is nothing ‘natural’ about it. Everything is ‘artificial’, albeit very physical, indeed sensual—very vivid. The scenic means serve to emphasize and enrich the attitudes of the dramatic figures. The relationship between Schwellfuß (Fred Düren) and Creon (Dieter Franke), for instance, is mirrored in their basic stance suggesting attack and defence—both stand in the position of wrestlers, knees slightly bent, bodies leaning forward, both arms hovering with palms open (see Illustration 7.2). Similarly, when Jocasta (Lissy Tempelhof ) tells Schwellfuß that her child is dead, she holds him in her arms like a mother cradling her child, while ‘Oedipus himself resembles a boy more than a monarch, his arms half raised, his hands hanging limply’ (Anon., Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 29 January 1967, preview). All actors perform sluggish and exaggerated gestures as they move. Every now and then, they freeze in images of breathtaking beauty and expressiveness. They preserve their fundamental

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Illustration 7.2 Benno Besson: Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrant; Creon (Dieter Franke) and Oedipus (Fred Düren) as if preparing to wrestle.

attitudes for extended stretches of time. Language, too, is used in very particular ways, highlighting certain words or caesuras. This principle of aestheticization applied to the chorus in particular: The chorus . . . bunches together on the stage at that moment of intense emotional excitement, begins to sway collectively and chant the verses in a rising and falling pitch in an almost monotonous spoken singsong—accompanied by a hand-played drum and drawn-out notes on the flute. The ‘bunch’ of chorus members dissolves periodically and their movements—bodies swaying from the hips or bent backwards—go over into dance. (Wendt 1967: 21)

While this acting style did not promote empathy, it did have a rather strong physical impact. A critic from the Federal Republic, who went to see the production twice, sensed a certain irritation among the audience but stated that, ‘even among those who felt disturbed, their respect and fascination for the mental exertion and artistic achievement, which can be found on German stages maybe once a year, prevailed’ (Wendt 1967: 22). A critic from East Berlin observed the audience’s focus on the opening night, which ‘attests . . . to the willingness to contribute mentally’ (Günther Bellmann,

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Berliner Zeitung am Abend, 3 February 1967). Ernst Schumacher, Professor of Theatre Studies at the Humboldt University in East Berlin and critic for the Berliner Zeitung, noted the intense applause at the end of the premiere and concluded: ‘Even if the production will not enjoy the same broad appeal as “Peace”, it will still, because of its powerful, expressive clarity, bold innovations and the courage to give up conventions, provide fruitful stimulation for other adaptations of classical Greek tragedies’ (Ernst Schumacher, Berliner Zeitung, 3 February 1967). Schumacher’s assessment turned out to be correct—although it predominantly applied to the theatre of the Federal Republic. Besson’s production was not only well received by the audiences and critics of the GDR and their West German counterparts; it was unanimously deemed a highly innovative and even ingenious approach to Greek tragedy that opened up new perspectives for artists and scholars alike. Besides its novel aesthetics distinct from the socialist realism prevalent in the GDR, its ‘ideological message’ made it unassailable: the individual who separates from the community is doomed to fail. However, keeping in mind the doctrine of the Second Bitterfeld Conference from three years earlier, Oedipus’ fall that follows from a crisis in a tribal society can also be read as a symbol of the contemporary situation in the GDR, where the unity of the party and the people is threatened by the party’s claim to control all processes in society. Not surprisingly, none of the reviews published in GDR journals or newspapers makes this analogy. For the critics, scholars, and other Bildungsbürger from the Federal Republic, the most challenging aspect of the production and particularly of its innovative aesthetics was the equation of the ancient Greeks with Africans and Asians—that is, with non-European ‘primitive’ cultures, at the time usually perceived through the lens of otherness and racial inferiority. While at the time of the Potsdam Antigone Greek tragedy, too, had still appeared foreign, with Mendelssohn’s music serving to draw the spectators in, Greek tragedy had become the ‘property’ of the Bildungsbürger over the decades that followed, which contributed to the shaping of their cultural identity in different ways. Even Sellner’s productions, which caused some anxiety by removing Greek tragedy from the expectations of the Bildungsbürger and transplanting it into an abstract space featuring ritualistic actions, ultimately affirmed their identity through the search for archetypes and universal values. Besson’s production, however, radically questioned it. Ancient Greece bled into African and Asian cultures, with

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which the spectators would not have been very familiar, and all three were shown to be equally strange and foreign. Accepting this meant reevaluating their relationship to ancient Greece. Be it the relationship between individual and community or the blending of Greek with Asian and African cultures, both of these statements manifested themselves through the production’s particular aesthetics, which merged with the political. In fact, the aesthetic turned out to be inherently political. It was only in this sense that Besson’s Oedipus Tyrant ‘revived’ ancient Greek theatre. For, as he explained, ‘the theatre of antiquity is deeply political. It has to do with the polis, Greek theatre cannot be separated from the polis’ (quoted in Irmer and Schmidt 2003: 47). Besson thus created a new form of political theatre that was based on and inextricable from its particular aesthetics.

Lehrstücke on the imminent disintegration of the state In 1966, the government of the Federal Republic was formed by a so-called Grand Coalition between the two main parties represented in parliament—the Christian Democrats (CDU) and the Social Democrats (SPD)—and led by the Christian Democrat Kurt Georg Kiesinger, who had been a member of the National Socialist Party in the Third Reich, where he had served as a judge. The opposition was reduced to a few parliamentarians from the Liberal Party (FDP). Many democratically minded citizens reacted strongly to this situation, which led to the emergence and spread of an extra-parliamentary opposition. It partly merged with the student movement. The student movement pursued a number of goals, including changes in the hierarchical university system, for which the slogan went ‘Unter den Talaren Muff von 1000 Jahren’ (‘Under the professors’ gowns, the mustiness of a thousand years’)—the ‘thousand years’ here referred not only to the long academic tradition but, first and foremost, to the Thousand Year Reich of the Nazis and the Nazi past of a number of professors. They attacked their parents’ generation for not having resisted the Nazis and their crimes or for having committed such crimes themselves. They fought former Nazis in state positions. Moreover, the students protested against the Vietnam War and all forms of imperialism, hailing the protagonists of the liberation movements in the so-called

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Third World as their heroes, including Che Guevara, Fidel Castro, and, in particular, the leader of the Vietnam revolution and founder of the Vietnam Communist Party, Ho Chi Minh. They marched through the streets, rhythmically chanting his name: ‘Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh, Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh’. They invented new forms of political protest and action. On the other hand, the students propagated and experimented with new lifestyles that included collective living in so-called communes instead of the traditional family structure or renting a room from a landlady or in a university dormitory. They proclaimed and practised sexual liberation. Wilhelm Reich became the most popular author among them. The cultural changes performed here could be subsumed under the term ‘cultural revolution’, as coined by the philosopher Herbert Marcuse at the time: the phrase, in the West, first suggests that ideological developments are ahead of developments at the base of society: cultural revolution but not (yet) political and economic revolution. While, in the arts, in literature and music, in communication, in the mores and fashions, changes have occurred which suggest a new experience, a radical transformation of values, the social structure and its political expressions seem to remain basically unchanged, or at least to lag behind the cultural changes. But ‘Cultural Revolution’ also suggests that the radical opposition today involves in a new sense the entire realm beyond that of the material needs—nay, that it aims at a total transformation of the entire traditional culture. (Marcuse 1972: 79)

For the students, hailing largely from the Bildungsbürgertum, this meant a total break with the traditional cultural identity of their parents. This is not to say that they abandoned theatre or even Greek tragedy in particular. Rather, they used both for their own purposes. Starting in 1962, for instance, Claus Peymann for many years toured to different student theatre festivals all over Europe with a student production of Brecht’s Antigone. In 1967, The Living Theatre Group sought refuge in the Federal Republic. They had left the United States in order to escape another arrest. The group had been founded in 1947 by Julian Beck and Judith Malina, the latter having studied at Piscator’s Workshop in New York. The Chief Director of the municipal theatre in Krefeld provided them with the necessary rehearsal space for finishing their project of staging Brecht’s Antigone, on which they had already been working.

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Illustration 7.3 The Living Theatre Group: Brecht’s The Antigone of Sophocles; the masking of Creon (Julian Beck); from left to right: Sandy van der Linden, Steve Thomson, Julian Beck (Creon), William Shari (Tiresias), Pamela Badyk, and Cal Barber.

It premiered in Krefeld in February 1967. While most of the critics voiced certain reservations even as they acknowledged the new aesthetic approach, the production was particularly popular with young people (see Illustration 7.3). The group performed on an empty stage that was as brightly illuminated as the auditorium. The two sections were linked to each other via two stairs and a bridge. The actors wore their everyday clothes. Judith Malina played the part of Antigone, Julian Beck that of Creon (he would play Tiresias in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s film Edipo Re of the same year). With the exception of Malina, all others formed a collective, from which individual actors stepped forward to enact their role, after which they returned to the cluster. The acting was largely characterized by an excessive physicality expressed through screams, shouts, and shrieks of all kinds. Julian Beck as Creon appeared as a ‘limping devil’ (Gerd Vielhaber, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 4 March 1967)—he was demon and shaman at the same time. He and his followers mimed tearing out the intestines and genitals of their enemies, proceeding from the stage to the auditorium and so ‘threatening’ some of the spectators. Violence and cruelty were unleashed to the extent that the

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Illustration 7.4 The Living Theatre Group: Brecht’s The Antigone of Sophocles; Brothers of Lachmyia chorus: ‘As when below us on the Pontian sea . . . ’.

spectators were transferred into a ‘no man’s land’, becoming ‘speechless’ and ‘deaf-mute’ (Vielhaber 1967) (see Illustration 7.4). In his Antigone adaptation of 1948 in Chur, Brecht chose the most artistic means to distance himself from the barbarity that he wanted to show. The Living Theatre identifies with it. It practises an exorcist approach. Does its excessive acting style not lead it to lose itself . . . to the violence it meant to expel? (Henning Rischbieter, Theater heute, 4 (1967), 36)

The term ‘exorcism’ is used by a number of critics to describe the acting and the actions on stage. They read the excessive enactment of violence as an attempt to exorcize the ‘demon’ of violence. This not only applied to the political climate in the USA after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in November 1963. It also resonated with the young people in Germany, for whom the relationship between the generations was determined by the violence done to them by their elders—the old fascists holding on to power as well as all those claiming authority over them because of their age and social status. In this respect, the exorcism on stage was performed on their behalf, too.6 6

Regarding a more detailed discussion of the performance, see Biner (1968), Jacquot (1970: 217–45), Silvestro (1971), Innes (1981), Tytell (1995), and Aronson (2000).

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The experience of violence became even more relevant in the following months. On 2 June 1967, during the Shah of Persia’s visit to Berlin, students of the Free University organized a large-scale demonstration against his dictatorial reign. They were confronted by a huge number of policemen, who tried to control the crowd and push the protesters back. In this tense situation, one student, who had done nothing to provoke the police, was shot dead. We know today that the fatal bullet was fired by a policeman working for the Stasi, the Secret Service of the GDR. He was taken to court but was acquitted of all charges. This caused an uproar among young people and marked the beginning of the student rebellion led by Rudi Dutschke—who less than a year later survived an attempt on his life, suffering from its consequences until his untimely death on Christmas Eve of 1979. Thus, the students experienced violence as the sole means of the authorities to defend the status quo and, in turn, as the only ‘language’ they would understand. The Republic was on the verge of disintegrating. Such was the situation when Hansgünther Heyme (b. 1935) moved from Wiesbaden to Cologne. In the 1950s he had served as assistant to Erwin Piscator—for example, for Piscator’s production of Schiller’s Die Räuber (The Robbers) in Mannheim in 1957. He referred to Piscator as his teacher without regarding himself as a faithful disciple. As far as I am aware, Heyme is the only German director to have staged all Greek tragedies handed down to us—and some of them several times—over the fifty years since the 1960s. Clearly, it was the manifestation of a lifelong fascination with Greek tragedy that brought forth this number of new directorial styles and performance aesthetics, which for obvious reasons cannot all be considered here. At the centre of our discussion will be Heyme’s inaugural production in Cologne, comprising Oedipus the King and Oedipus at Colonus. He gave it the title Der Ödipus des Sophokles (The Oedipus of Sophocles), which seems to be an analogy to Brecht’s The Antigone of Sophocles. The production premiered on 12 September 1968 and took four hours. In the reviews, the terms Lehrstück (didactic play) or Denkmodell (paradigm) recur frequently. The production was not topical per se, yet it can be seen as a parable about the political situation in the Federal Republic of the late 1960s. Instead of an apparent topicality, there was an emphasis on the play’s Greekness and on the theatricality of the elements employed. The stage

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Illustration 7.5 Hansgünther Heyme: The Oedipus of Sophocles; the stage and the chorus; stage design by Frank Schultes.

(designed by Frank Schultes) was closed off at the rear and the two sides by scaffolding that sloped upwards in steps, resembling a trapezoidal amphitheatre (see Illustration 7.5). All three sides had a slightly elevated opening for the entrances and exits of the actors. The opening in the rear was closed by a curtain, which in Oedipus the King was painted with red and golden emblems to signify Oedipus’ palace entrance, and featured light green plant-like structures in Oedipus at Colonus to indicate the grove of the Eumenides. In both parts the stage level was brightly illuminated, but in Oedipus the King it contrasted against a dark background, so that the radiant structure of the scaffolding stood out. The opposite was the case in Oedipus at Colonus, where the scaffolding appeared as an almost floating silhouette against the light background (cf. here, and with the following, Volker Canaris, Theater heute, 10 (1968), 10). The stage space resembled a theatre within a theatre—a trapezoid Greek theatre from classical times set within the box set stage of a German municipal theatre. Another element reminiscent—but not imitative—of ancient Greek theatre was the masks (see Illustration 7.6). The costume designer Ricarda

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Illustration 7.6 Hansgünther Heyme: The Oedipus of Sophocles; Karl-Heinz Pelser as Oedipus.

Poppy-Dressler, who had earlier worked at the Berlin Ensemble, moulded them using plaster casts of the actors’ faces, so that they preserved a certain individuality. Unlike Besson’s masks, these did not reference Asian, African, or even Greek masks, but merely cited the Greek convention of masks while transposing them into contemporary times. The same applies to the allusion to the post-classical cothurnus. The actors wore shoes with a thick, stiff sole that only allowed for wooden, somewhat alienating, movements such as Oedipus’ limping, Jocasta’s artificial striding, Tiresias’ ritualized dancing, or the shuffling of the old men of the chorus—each mirroring a character trait of the dramatic figures. The stage space, the masks, and the stylized movements on the elevated shoes constantly reminded the spectators of ancient Greek theatre without creating the illusion of it. The permanent reference served the purpose of emphasizing the model-like character of the proceedings shown. They aided the construction of a Denkmodell that was to be applied to the question of power—that is, to the question of how it is attained, used, and

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abused. Three scenic means employed to deal with these questions stand out, especially those related to (1) the plague, (2) religion, and (3) the relationship between the ruler and the people. There were continuous references to the plague throughout the performance, which began with members of the chorus carrying corpses wrapped in white cloth, piling them on top of each other, and covering them with more cloth and branches. White smoke rose from sacrificial bowls, laments could be heard alongside the sound of wooden rattles. The pile of corpses remained on the stage until the end of the first tragedy. It served as a constant reminder of the continuing deaths that had plunged the city into a crisis and challenged its ruler. It was made very clear that the crisis could not be overcome with the help of religion or religious practices. Heyme made crucial cuts to the text (translation by Wolfgang Schadewaldt) regarding religious aspects. Tiresias, the only person linked to the cultic, to oracles, and religion, was characterized as a grotesque figure, a magician and sorcerer, pursuing his own vested interests. The production condemned religion as reactionary and presented it as the reason for why Oedipus was prevented from continuing on his path in solving the riddle of the sphinx. Instead, the focus was placed on the relationship between the king and the people. Oedipus does not use his power in favour of the people: It’s key how Heyme politicizes Oedipus [Karl-Heinz Pelser]—significantly, by privatizing him . . . That king is still in power, for now. His origins and the circumstances in the city undermine his reign from the very beginning. He senses this and escapes into a frenzy of egocentrism. This is how Pelser represents the quest for truth: again and again, haughtily, arrogantly, at times whimpering like a coward, he orbits that one thing: ‘Me’. And even in the pain of his blinding he still savours his own suffering, the monstrosity of his fate. (Canaris 1968: 14)

The chorus represented the people, and its attitude towards the ruler changed over the course of the performance. In the first part the members of the chorus submitted to and ingratiated themselves with him, playing the role of humble subjects. Yet they were aware of their own power—for instance, when they demanded help by pointing out that it was disastrous for a king to rule over an empty city, or when they stopped the fight between Oedipus and Creon by aggressively redirecting his attention to their own troubles. In the second part, however, they completely subjugated themselves to Theseus’ rule, embodied by his escort.

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The chorus was not presented and did not act as a uniform mass. Rather, each member displayed an individual attitude, so that the collective was composed of distinct individuals who nonetheless shared common interests. Their songs, accompanied by a kettledrum in the first and by a flute and a tabor in the second part, were danced and grew out of a collective movement. In general, the relationship between the ruler and the people was determined by the extent of the ruler’s power, even if in the first part the people displayed a certain awareness of their own leverage. In this respect, Oedipus acted consistently by refusing to relinquish his authority even in the second part, instead using the promised, miraculous blessings of his tomb to remain in power until his death. Heyme has developed an extremely transparent arrangement for ‘Colonus’. He lets Pelser settle down in the middle of the stage in the beginning—and he doesn’t budge from that centre: everything revolves around him, the chorus and daughters, Creon and Theseus are shown in their functionality in relation to him; be it when he first fumbles gently for his daughters, then imperiously grabs and pulls them towards him; be it when he gropes for Creon’s stick, drags it over in order to curse at him; be it that he summons Theseus so that he can bless him. And the chorus, too, repeatedly gathers around Oedipus at the centre—and even when he is surrounded by the chorus members and compelled to narrate his fate, even then Pelser’s Oedipus, wallowing in the memory of his fate, remains the centre of attention. At the end he stands up, strides into the grove unaided in order to die. Pelser shows this as the final self-construction of the figure, as his final, staged departure. (Canaris 1968: 14)

If the production referenced one particular historical situation, it was that which occurred shortly before the downfall of the city state of Athens, when, surrounded by armed guards on the hill of Colonus, the people voted to abolish democracy and reinstate a dictatorial reign in 404 BCE—that is, two years after Sophocles’ death. However, an analogy to the political situation in the Federal Republic seems obvious, given that at the time there was widespread extra-parliamentary opposition to the Grand Coalition and its plans to pass an Emergency Powers Act that would suspend certain fundamental democratic rights. I find it strange that this parallel is not pointed out in any of the numerous reviews I went through. There were other allusions and analogies to the present of that time, although it is impossible to assemble them into one coherent picture. While in the post-war Oedipus productions Oedipus appeared as

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‘guiltlessly guilty’, the dimensions of the crimes committed could no longer be denied following the Auschwitz trials. Pelser’s Oedipus dealt with this question by exposing the ‘banality of evil’ (Hannah Arendt) of putting his petty ego at the centre of the city. The piled-up corpses brought to mind the plague but also the concentration camps. The old Oedipus clinging to the power he enjoys over the others might have alluded to the old men who ruled the Federal Republic until the beginning of the 1960s, some of them even former Nazis, who were largely responsible for the continuation of a patriarchal, authoritarian society that exerted violence, especially on its younger members in particular. Such analogies seem apparent from today’s perspective, especially if one accepts the characterization of the production as a Lehrstück or Denkmodell. What happens on stage can, under certain conditions, apply to the political reality. However, while Brecht’s Antigone made some analogies explicit by introducing the prelude or by addressing Creon as ‘my fuehrer’, and Piscator did so through his introductory slides/films in The Atrides, Heyme avoided such self-explanatory means. Although most critics understood that the production constituted political theatre, many focused on and praised his aesthetic means, including the stage, the masks, and the pile of corpses. However, with the exception of Volker Canaris, whom I have quoted at great length, they almost unanimously criticized Heyme for the textual cuts and, even more so, for his interpretation of the tragedy. They complained that, ‘instead of a disturbing drama of humanity’, he had presented them with ‘a partly grotesque, satirical-Roman Lehrstück’ (Anon., Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger, 18 September 1968). While they were willing to grant Heyme the ‘scepticism of his anti-authoritarian and rebellious intellectual youth’, they chided him for ‘not taking the tragedy seriously’ (Vielhaber 1967). It seems that the spectators’ responses were similar. Most reviews report that the audience followed the proceedings on stage with intense concentration, and although some left during the intermission, at the end the remaining majority applauded vigorously albeit briefly—applause that grew in intensity after isolated boos came from the rear of the stalls. If we take the critics as representatives of the Bildungsbürgertum, we can reach a twofold conclusion. On the one hand, it seems that they still regarded Greek tragedies as ‘sacred texts’ that could not be reduced to the status of a mere workable material but had to be taken—and staged—‘as

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they stand’, even if that resulted in different interpretations. In this respect, Greek tragedies still clearly formed a constitutive part of their Bildung and cultural identity. On the other hand, there is a surprising lack of demand for one particular reading or performance aesthetics for staging the tragedy. The Bildungsbürger seemed to be open to experiments and new staging styles and techniques. Interestingly, the renegotiation of the Bildungsbürgertum’s cultural identity that began in the middle of the 1960s went hand in hand with a resurgence of productions of Greek tragedies. One critic comments on this, beginning his review with the following reflections: Ancient plays have become modern once again. The theatres are performing Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes. This trend set in a few years ago and is growing. Why this is happening is hard to say, even though everyone seems to have a theory. . . . The fact remains: the productions of ancient plays currently tell us more about the general direction of theatre than, say, Shakespeare productions, especially in those places that are not blindly following a new fashion. (André Müller, Deutsche Volkszeitung Düsseldorf, 11 October 1968)

In retrospect, this does not come as a major surprise. The Bildungsbürgertum, too, experienced the late 1960s as a time of political, social, and cultural upheaval, involving some deeply threatening changes. A small group of activists from within the Extra-Parliamentary Opposition (APO) formed their own splinter group in 1968 and became known as the Baader-Meinhof Gang. Among others, it comprised the students Andreas Baader and Gudrun Ensslin, as well as the journalist Ulrike Meinhof—all raised in the Bildungsbürgertum. Later, in 1970, they became the Red Army Faction (RAF) terrorist movement, first targeting large department stores with arson attacks, then carrying out bank robberies and kidnapping known figures from the world of business and finance, publicly humiliating, and then killing them. In this volatile situation most Bildungsbürger felt the need to renegotiate their cultural identity. They did so once again by taking recourse to Greek tragedy and innovative approaches to staging them, even if these productions were not always easy to stomach and often challenged their preconceived notions. We can assume, then, that, even if the audiences of Heyme’s Oedipus of Sophocles largely rejected its interpretation, its particular aesthetics and format as Denkmodell might have encouraged them to re-evaluate the political reality of the Federal Republic and to demand ‘more’ democracy.

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Topicalizing the tragedies of ancient Greece: Hans Neuenfels’ Medea (1976) and Christoph Nel’s Antigone (1978) in Frankfurt The demand for more democracy was, in fact, voiced and heard. The Social Democrats won the elections of 1969. They formed a government together with the liberal party, with Willy Brandt as Chancellor. An immigrant to Norway during the Third Reich and denounced by supporters of the right wing as a traitor of the fatherland, he had become the leader of a democratic government. This marked the beginning of wideranging reforms. Brandt developed his new Ostpolitik (eastern policy), which changed the relationship between the Federal Republic and the GDR, the Soviet Union, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and other communist states. At the domestic level, Social Democratic policies envisioned changes to all institutions of Bildung and social welfare, among others. It was as if a fresh air was blowing through the country, breathing a desire for a radical new beginning into the people. In the city of Frankfurt, also ruled by the Social Democrats, the Council promoted the democratization of art institutions. On 13 July 1970, the City Council and the members of the municipal theatres reached an ‘agreement on the increased co-determination of artistic concerns at the municipal theatres of Frankfurt on the Main’. The agreement was meant to make the process of artistic planning ‘more transparent and efficient . . . through the consideration of mutual suggestions and concerns’, and aimed ‘to mobilize all artistic reserves’.7 An artistic board was authorized to get involved in all important questions, particularly concerning repertoire and engagements, and to give advice regarding ‘changes in the structure of the theatre, its selection of the artistic director and in putting together artistic and technical committees’. The agreement was amended after the first two years in view of the experiences made until then. Even more authority was granted to the company. In August 1972 the position of Generalintendant (Chief Artistic Director) of opera and theatre was abolished. The theatre was instead led by a board of three directors—the director Peter Palitzsch, the

Cited in ‘Mitbestimmungstheater’ (accessed 21 June 2016). 7

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stage designer Klaus Gelhaar, and the actor Peter Danzeisen, who was elected by the company’s plenary assembly. Peter Palitzsch (1918–2004) had begun his career as a dramaturge at the Volksbühne in Dresden. Brecht then invited him to his newly founded Berlin Ensemble, where he served as his assistant and as dramaturge until 1956, when he began directing. When the wall was erected, he was working in Ulm, preparing the West German premiere of Brecht’s Der Prozeß der Jeanne d’Arc zu Rouen 1431 (The Trial of Jeanne d’Arc at Rouen, 1431, after a radio play by Anna Seghers). The production premiered on 1 September 1961. Palitzsch did not return to the GDR. From 1972 onwards, Palitzsch worked in Frankfurt as a primus inter pares alongside his two co-directors, firmly believing that this ‘model of co-determination’ represented the future structure of all theatres. However, only two years later, the critic of the Frankfurter Rundschau, Peter Iden, blamed the theatre for precipitating its own deep crisis, with the critic Benjamin Henrichs replying in Die Zeit that it was still ahead of most other theatres, which in his opinion had not even noticed their crises and continued as before. The experiment continued and Palitzsch’s contract was extended until 1980. During this period, a number of productions were mounted that caused a political scandal, albeit for very different reasons. Among them were two productions of Greek tragedies—Hans Neuenfels’ Medea (1976) and Christoph Nel’s Antigone (1978).8

Medea and women’s emancipation The Medea of Neuenfels (b. 1941) was undeniably the more controversial of the two productions. Broadly speaking, it dealt with women’s right to self-determination. This was a hot topic in the Federal Republic during the 1970s. Two of the main issues that were under discussion, and passionately so, were women’s control of their own bodies and equality between husbands and wives. With the slogan ‘My body is mine’, women

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I saw both performances and remember them fairly well. However, as almost forty years have passed since then, I have consulted the programme notes, reviews, and, in the case of Antigone, a few recorded scenes from a television broadcast, Theater im Vergleich, which compares the different Antigone productions invited to the Theatertreffen in May 1979. There is no recording of Medea.

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demanded the right to legal abortion. In 1971, the journal Der Stern launched a campaign entitled ‘We have aborted’, featuring on its cover the photographs of over a hundred women who had terminated their pregnancies. In 1972, a new law was passed legalizing abortion until the twelfth week of a pregnancy. The Christian Democrats protested. They went to the Federal Constitutional Court and succeeded in having the legislation repealed in 1974. Spousal equality was just as contested. While the first suggestions on how to realize it were voiced in 1970, it took another six years for parliament to pass a corresponding law on 14 June 1976—that is, just before the rehearsals for Medea began—which, however, did not come into effect until 1 July 1977. Up until then the situation of women was captured more or less accurately in Medea’s words to the chorus: Of all living, sentient creatures, women are the most unfortunate. We must save and save to raise a dowry; then the man that agrees to marry us becomes master of our bodies . . . : (Euripides (2008), Medea, v. 230–4)

At her first appearance, Medea summarizes this situation of being permanently denied the right to self-determination with the words ‘Ich arme Sau’ (‘Poor bitch’). The world shown on stage was indeed a man’s world (see Illustration 7.7). The spectators did not face the stage (designed by Karl Kneidl). It was closed off by a red curtain. Instead, huge oak planks extended out into the auditorium from the apron, spanning the first eight rows, so that the scenes took place amid the audience. The spectators were directly addressed and were expected to participate: the list of characters and their actors included ‘The Corinthians’ to be played by ‘The audience’. The only prop on the planks was a door, which Jason brought with him for his entrances. Nothing suggested Greece—neither the space nor the costumes. Although not wearing their everyday clothes, the actors were dressed in contemporary outfits that revealed something about each character and/or her/his situation. Medea (Elisabeth Trissenaar) wore a black petticoat periodically supplemented by a white woollen jacket. Jason (Ulrich Pleitgen) was dressed in sportswear but with his torso squeezed into a corset. The two children were naked except for boxer

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Illustration 7.7 Hans Neuenfels: Euripides’ Medea; Medea (Elisabeth Trissenaar) as an outlaw, lying in the dirt in front of the city, and her sons (Jakob Steinbrenner and Günter Milius).

shorts. The costumes clearly indicated contemporary fashion without being ‘realistic’ in any way. The world of the men was defined by their dramatic entrances and their permanent and insatiable craving for power, glory, and potency. Creon’s first appearance was announced by his Schreckensmaschine (terror machine): six large Great Danes, howling and barking, led on leashes by specially trained handlers. All the men were obsessed with sex and eager to prove their virility. After the impotent Athenian King Aegeus’ encounter with Medea, his penis visibly swells to tremendous proportions—a big stick in his trousers. When Creon stubbornly rejects Medea’s plea to stay one more day, she manages to change his mind by offering him one of her sons, by whom Creon was aroused and whom he then penetrates (see Illustration 7.8).

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Illustration 7.8 Hans Neuenfels: Euripides’ Medea; Medea (Elisabeth Trissenaar) negotiating her future with Creon (Alwin-Michael Rueffer).

The appearance of the Messenger reporting the death of Creusa and Creon is similarly effective, and hailed by one critic as the performance’s ‘highlight in terms of interpretation and acting’: He is naked, donning a top hat and a large, black cardboard penis. The murders have aroused him, this rebellion of Medea against the reign of the penis. In this overexposed arousal he reports the event to the audience, bent by his lechery as he moves from one end of the stage to the other, where he castrates himself. The conflict, which only this production has read in Euripides’ text, was ‘solved’ in a bloody manner. (Henning Rischbieter, Theater heute, 12 (1976), 12)

Another critic calls this scene where the Messenger ‘crosses the stage with his body bleeding’ ‘a symbol of ubiquitously destroyed manliness’ and praises the director for his ‘neurotically sharpened hunch for the terrible relationship between the sexes’. All these men are afraid of Medea, ‘the suffering woman, who, abandoned by her treacherous

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husband in front of the gates of Corinth, fights back and sustains substantial injuries in the course of it. The topic being “Poor bitch” ’ (Günther Rühle, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (1976)). The chorus was reduced to one woman—‘the friend’ (Christian Bruhn)—‘a bitchy, prattling lady with a parasol, nosy, somewhat promiscuous, capable of participating intermittently—the peculiarly precarious nature of the deliberations and interjections of the chorus are literally “embodied”, and of course also simplified, in that one figure’ (Rischbieter 1976: 11). She held a mask in her hand, which she raised to her face whenever she did not want to listen to Medea’s words or be confronted with reality. The undisputable star of the evening was Elisabeth Trissenaar as Medea, ‘a fury, a great lover, just as the tightly strung arc of the play, of which one forgets that it is one, demands it’ (Gerhard Zwerenz, Konkret, November 1976). Medea came across as a loving and caring mother when, following the penetration of her son by Creon, she took the child in her arms and covered him with a blanket, and appeared as a witch, a demon of vengeance, when she placed at Jason’s door the corpses of the two boys she had slaughtered (see Illustration 7.9). Her final scene left many at a loss: she transferred the two corpses into a box and, pulling it behind her while blood dripped from it, she sang a song as she exited. The audience’s response was a mixture of enthusiasm and anger. The Frankfurt critics wrote devastating reviews. The production was excluded from season tickets, yet people flocked to see it. All performances were sold out. Spontaneous discussions broke out among the audience after every single performance. Moreover, 800 people showed up for a public discussion on a Sunday morning, 14 November 1976. After three hours—from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m.—many stayed on to continue the discussion in the lobby until 4 p.m. without a break. Almost all feuilletons of the major newspapers and journals took up the discussion, which lasted several months. Over eighty articles on Medea were published. The critic Hellmuth Karasek summarized the response in the journal Der Spiegel: ‘People are having heated discussions about a play that is more than a hundred times as old as they are, and debating the fate of Medea as if she was their very own neighbor—not the worst effect theatre can have’ (Hellmuth Karasek, Der Spiegel, 48 (22 November 1976), 202).

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Illustration 7.9 Hans Neuenfels: Euripides’ Medea; Medea (Elisabeth Trissenaar) confronting Jason (Ulrich Pleitgen) with her two sons before she kills her children.

It was evidently impossible in this case for the spectators to ‘enjoy’ the production of a Greek tragedy as part of their Bildungsgut (the possession of their Bildung). Rather, the confrontation with a current and burning issue was at stake here, which called on every audience member to take a stance. Discussing the particular aesthetics of the production entailed examining the relationship between men and women, and debating women’s right to self-determination. It was, in fact, the very specific aesthetics conceptualized by Hans Neuenfels and his crew that enthused or enraged spectators and critics—an aesthetics that seemed to have

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nothing to do with ancient Greece, even though the whole team travelled to the Greek island of Mykonos to be inspired by the landscape as part of their preparations. The programme notes did contain an essay by Ernst Bornemann excerpted from his book, Das Patriarchat (Patriarchy, 1975), in which he explains at great length the love of Greek men for boys, and the importance of a ‘beautiful bottom’, thus underpinning the scene in which Creon penetrates one of Medea’s sons (programme notes to Hans Neuenfels (1976), Euripides’ Medea, Schauspiel Frankfurt, season 1976–7, No. 41). However, despite certain experimental precedents, the aesthetics of Medea was still far removed from what most Bildungsbürger, both critics and other spectators, expected from a production of a Greek tragedy. In this respect, Neuenfels’s production marked another turning point in the history of staging Greek tragedy in Germany, announcing the arrival of new attitudes and leanings among the Bildungsbürgertum, which were still controversial at that point. This is what caused the scandal. The Head of Cultural Affairs of Nuremberg, Hermann Glaser, explained the scandal as a ‘cultural political Lehrstück’ in the theatre journal Theater heute (1 (1977), 23). In his essay, he proceeds from the fact that, despite the devastating critique, the production was sold out every night even six months after its premiere, fiercely applauded, and even celebrated by the majority of the spectators. Glaser agrees with this majority that the success of the production was based on its ‘complexity’ and its stunning aesthetics, which opened up a fresh perspective on a very familiar tragedy by linking it to the burning issues of the day; he identifies as one of the reasons for the scandal the arrogance and selfrighteousness of the critics coupled with a newly emerging attitude among the spectators to emancipate themselves from the judgement of the critics. He summarizes the arguments put forward in the discussion as follows: • criticism should not insist on raising subjective points but offer generally ‘useful’ information; • it shouldn’t just state its judgements but rationally justify them; not just present conclusions but also reveal the trains of thought behind them; • it should abandon its patronizing attitude towards the reader reinforced by the aura of high-handed authority; this is merely mystification— evidenced by the frequent contradictions found in critical assessments. (Glaser 1977: 23)

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The critics’ self-assigned role as the voice of the bildungsbürgerlich audience, passing unanimous aesthetic judgements, was clearly no longer desired by the majority of the spectators. Rather, criticism was demystified as the subjective, unfounded opinion of certain individuals, with which in this case only those few would have agreed who felt shocked by the production—an opinion that, however, did not say anything about the performance but ‘merely . . . exposed the usual neuroticized bourgeois understanding of art’ (ibid. 26). We can, therefore, see the ‘scandal’ as a symptom of a far-reaching transformation within the Bildungsbürgertum. While the Frankfurt critics and a small part of the audience perceived Medea as a slap in their face, as a negation of their core values and an attack on their cultural identity, the majority of the spectators, supported by a minority of the critics, deemed Medea an ‘anti-authoritarian, anti-patriarchal, and therefore emancipatory play’ (ibid.) that encouraged them to liberate themselves from the self-appointed guardianship of the critics and their ‘self-incurred immaturity’ (Kant [1784] 1991: 54). They asserted their right to Bildung, defined as the unfolding of their potential, not only in making their own aesthetic judgements but also in doing so with reference to particular topical issues raised in a production of a Greek tragedy echoing the motto tua res agitur (‘this concerns you’). The concept of Bildung was here redefined in an important way. It no longer tried to follow an idealized or any other prescribed image of ancient Greece but proclaimed the right to use Greek tragedies—among other classics—as material and a vehicle through which to develop creatively new ideas and images of contemporary society as well as a new self-understanding. Here, the model of co-determination of the Schauspiel Frankfurt had brought forth a production that encouraged the spectators to assert the right to self-determination—a right denied to the tragedy’s protagonist by its particular social and political conditions. As Glaser writes: ‘Medea’s inhuman jealousy is an indirect expression of the obsession with manliness, which is as effective on its victims as on its producers. Were Medea to grab her children and leave, to a different future, a different country, she would be truly emancipated’ (Glaser 1977: 26).

Antigone in an entertainment and consumer culture The optimism following the inauguration of the social–liberal government in 1969; the efforts to increase co-determination in different

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spheres of society as well as self-determination; the opening-up of the Gymnasium and the universities to those heretofore denied access; the development of a new welfare system—all these changes were just one side of the 1970s in the Federal Republic. The other was the already mentioned terrorist movements, which haunted the country and of which the most influential was the Red Army Faction (RAF). In their view, the Federal Republic of the 1970s was still a patriarchal, even fascist society, with former Nazis holding key positions, and the government supporting the USA in its aggression against Vietnam and exporting weapons to African dictators. In June 1972, the leaders of the RAF, Andreas Baader, Ulrike Meinhof, Gudrun Ensslin, Holger Meins, and Jan-Carl Raspe, were arrested. They were kept in solitary confinement at the newly constructed high-security prison Stammheim near Stuttgart. Their trial began almost three years later, in May 1975, after Holger Meins had died on hunger strike in November 1974. On 9 May 1976, Ulrike Meinhof was found dead in her cell. It was announced that she had hanged herself, which many citizens deemed to be highly unlikely. The trial continued, but on 7 April 1977, Siegfried Buback, the Federal Prosecutor and driving force behind the trial, his bodyguard, and his driver were shot dead by two RAF members. On 28 April 1977, the three remaining defendants were found guilty of several murders, attempted murders, and of forming a terrorist organization. They were sentenced to life imprisonment. This triggered a new series of violence and murder known as the ‘German Autumn’. In July 1977, Jürgen Ponto, the director of the Dresdner Bank, was shot dead. On 5 September of that year, Hanns Martin Schleyer, President of the German Employers’ Association and a former member of the National Socialist Party who had served in the SS, was kidnapped. He was shot and killed on 18 October. On 13 October, a Lufthansa flight from Palma de Mallorca to Frankfurt was hijacked by four members (in 1970, Baader, Ensslin, and Meinhof had gone to Jordan to train with the Palestine Liberation Organization in the West Bank and Gaza) and flown to Mogadishu, Somalia. On 18 October it was stormed by an elite unit of the German federal police, the GSG 9. The hijackers were shot. That night, Baader and Ensslin were found dead in their cells—Baader shot in the back of his head and Ensslin hanged. Raspe and Irmgard Möller, another RAF inmate at Stammheim, were taken to the hospital.

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Raspe had been shot in the head and died the next day. Möller survived the several stab wounds in her chest. It was once again announced that the injuries and deaths were (attempted) suicides. However, a number of questions concerning this statement remain unanswered.9 The burial of Baader, Ensslin, and Raspe at the Stuttgart Domhalden Cemetery took place under extremely tight security. More than 1,000 policemen were deployed, some on horseback. A number of mourners attended the event with their faces hidden, afraid to be seen and suspected of sympathizing with terrorists. The burial had a rather strange prelude: While those who had apparently died for the state [i.e. those killed by the RAF] had received a ceremonial state funeral, the representatives of the authorities wanted to deny the outcasts a specific burial site, even if they could not in all seriousness deny them a funeral. (Henriette Beese, Theater heute, special issue: Theater 1979: 52)

The mayor of Stuttgart finally put an end to this unworthy spectacle by ordering the burial to take place at the Domhalden Cemetery. The film Deutschland im Herbst (Germany in Autumn), released in March 1978, tried to capture the atmosphere in the country after the alleged suicides of Baader, Ensslin, and Raspe, and the murder of Hanns Martin Schleyer. Written by Heinrich Böll and directed by several directors, including Volker Schlöndorff, Rainer Werner Fassbinder (who had also been present at the discussion on Medea at the Schauspiel Frankfurt on 14 November 1976), and Alexander Kluge, it includes images from the burial. Another part of the film was conceived as a satire: the members of the radio board convene to discuss whether a recording of an Antigone production should be approved for broadcast, since in their opinion this was a play about ‘terrorist women’. Other objections include that a 2,500-year-old dialogue between representatives of divine and human rights contradicting each other might be overwhelming for a contemporary audience. Meanwhile, at the theatres, everyone seemed to agree that this was the hour of Antigone. The first production premiered in April 1978, notably in Stuttgart, followed by productions in Frankfurt, Bremen, and Berlin.

For an overview of these events, see ‘Red Army Faction’ (accessed 17 June 2016). 9

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The last three productions were invited to the Theatertreffen in Berlin in May 1979, where the ten most remarkable productions of the 1978–9 season were presented. As some critics emphasize, however, by that time they no longer directly referenced the current situation. Rather, Antigone was perceived as ‘quite a strange piece’, which is underscored by ‘Hölderlin’s language’ (Helmut Schödel, Die Zeit, 16, 13 April 1979), whose translation all of them used. My focus will be on the Frankfurt production, which premiered on 4 November 1978. The programme notes showed a photograph of the burial at the Stuttgart cemetery, featuring the police on foot and on horseback. The middle of the front page displayed a crouching Rotraut de Neve as Antigone, who represented a kind of central axis dividing the page into two halves. Below her was printed the following excerpt from Hölderlin’s Hyperion: You grant the state too much power. It shall not demand what it cannot force. What is given by love and the mind cannot be forced. Leave that untouched by the state, or take away its law and expose it! Good heavens! He who wants to turn the state into a school of manners knows not his sin. At least by trying to turn the state into man’s heaven, he has made it hell. (Programme notes to Christoph Nel (1978), Sophocles’ Antigone, Schauspiel Frankfurt, season 1978–9)

The following quote from Ulrike Meinhof was printed upside down and in a much smaller font above the axis: Protest means to say that such and such does not suit me. Resistance means to see to it that whatever does not suit me no longer occurs . . . The line between verbal protest and physical resistance was first transgressed at the protests against the assault on Rudi Dutschke during the Easter holidays. Let us acknowledge: Those who condemn the throwing of stones and arson by politically powerful entities but not the . . . bombs dropped on Vietnam, the terror in Persia, and the torture in South Africa . . . their argumentations are hypocritical. (Ibid.)

The programme notes (amounting to a whopping 178 pages) thus created the expectation that the production would openly relate to the Baader-Meinhof Gang, the RAF, their actions, and their fate. However, the dramaturge, Urs Troller, polemicized in the same booklet against those who proclaimed that Antigone was a play for this particular time, lamenting that, from satire to Lehrstück, the tragedy was currently being made to fit any context. The dramaturge’s deliberations countered such

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expectations, and so it ultimately came as no surprise that there were no direct allusions to this topic. It was merely established as a backdrop against which the spectators could see the performance. A huge square box with an opening towards the auditorium was installed on the stage (designed by Erich Wonder). Its walls and ceiling were made of black cloth. The box’s base was level but set half a metre above the stage floor. A much smaller cube was suspended from the top front right corner of the box. It was covered with a pale cloth and emitted a diffuse white, grey, and blue light. A bar 5 or even 6 metres in length and equipped with a number of spotlights had been placed between the box and the footlights. Its motion was similar to that of the hand on a clock or a windshield wiper. Pivoting centre-stage, the bar rose to a vertical and then swung to the right and down again at the beginning of the performance. Its glaring spotlights blinded the spectators, so that they encountered the opening scene with dazzled, veiled eyes. The course of the performance was structured by the bar’s movements, first from left to right, and then back after the next scene, and so on. The experience of having one’s eyes penetrated and blinded by light after each scene was unique and almost painful, leaving a physical imprint on the spectators that significantly influenced their perception of and response to the performance. With every flash of the lights, they felt disoriented and destabilized in their position as spectators, making many of them openly aggressive. Moreover, as one critic remarked, the light bar functioned as a time machine of sorts: It can simply erase the scene from ancient Greece and make scenes from Germany appear in its place, it can wipe those away too and bring back the scene from back then. Wonder’s magic wand is a time machine and also a lighting machine. It can illuminate the stage lying on its side, from its back, so that the stage’s front half remains bright while the rear half sinks into darkness. Nel can thus simply make entire scenes or individual people on stage disappear at will. That way, many ‘Antigone’ scenes in Frankfurt remained half obscured or invisible. (Schödel 1979)

This principle unfolded its huge potential to impact on the spectators over the course of the performance. In this production, the first scene was not the encounter between Antigone and Ismene. Instead, after the light bar had sunk and the spectators regained sight, they beheld six figures standing at the front edge inside the box in the grey-blue semi-darkness, moving rhythmically

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Illustration 7.10 Christoph Nel: Sophocles’ Antigone; the ‘substitute chorus’ (Wolf-Dieter Tropf, Karin Werner, Burghart Klaußner, Rolf Mautz, René Peier, and Hannes Granzer).

while softly warbling the popular hit song ‘Wenn ich vergnügt bin, dann muß ich singen . . . ’ (‘When I am merry I must sing . . . ’): a rocker, dressed in leather and wearing sunglasses; a tourist in shorts, a shortsleeved safari shirt, and a sun hat with a ribbon; a carnival officer (from Cologne, judging by his dialect) dressed in a tuxedo with a pin on his chest and a jester hat on his head; two comedians or clowns, one with a black jacket featuring stuffed, swinging arms fastened to his hips and knees, and the other dressed in a yellow, padded suit; and, finally, a female stripper with long blond hair wearing a glittering dress, a transparent cape, and ostrich feathers (see Illustration 7.10). The further course of the performance soon established these six figures as a replacement for the chorus: clichéd, banal representatives of today’s mass consumer and leisure culture, entertaining people by fooling around in the most trivial, cheap, and partly even vile manner, thus sucking every last ounce of substance from any topic. Many spectators protested each time these figures occupied the space, openly displaying their outrage by loudly and repeatedly shouting comments or even by leaving the auditorium, slamming the door on their way out.

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After the light bar had turned back to the left, the spectators became aware of Antigone and Ismene crouching in the dim light emanating from a green office lamp on the floor centre-stage. Both were dressed in modern black (Antigone) and pink (Ismene) petticoats and wore white make-up; Antigone (Rotraut de Neve) had long black hair, Ismene’s (Lore Stefanek) was reddish-blond. They huddled together, with Antigone embracing Ismene. At this point, Antigone began to speak the first verses of the tragedy. The words were very poetic, condensed, hermetic, and difficult, if not impossible, to understand. However, the particular physicality of the women’s acting conveyed the content of the dialogue: Antigone’s insistence, reinforced by her posture, attitude, and movement of her head, and Ismene’s refusal, reflected in her putting on a clinging, pink dress, pulling up the zip, and leaving Antigone behind with small but determined stilettoed steps. The sequence of the two scenes, separated by the shifting light bar and the spectators’ temporary blindness, juxtaposed the banal with the sublime. Whereas the trivial entertainment and dirty jokes of the substitute chorus were easy to consume, albeit with revulsion and outrage, the sublime aspects of the action and language mostly remained far removed from the comprehension of the spectators. Its inaccessibility was underlined by the many textual cuts and abridgements. Hölderlin’s translation, often incomprehensible to begin with, was used only in fragments, so that it became even harder to follow. Most of the chorus songs were cut and the rest were read out from a script in the light of the green office lamp placed on the floor. They were read by Rotraut de Neve and Claire Kaiser, a fragile, elderly actress with a soft, high-pitched voice, who also played the part of Eurydice. Thus, the sublime quality of Sophocles’/ Hölderlin’s language seemed to be repressed and reduced to a kind of residue, while the triviality and filth of the entertainment and consumer culture dominated. By that point at the latest, the question arose as to why Hölderlin’s sophisticated and demanding translation was used at all, given that even the slightest possibility of understanding it was counteracted by its brutal truncation. Yet it made perfect sense. In his notes to his translation of Antigone, Hölderlin focuses on the process of epochal change taking place in the tragedy. He understands it as a process of social transition:

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The rational form here developing tragically is political, indeed republican, because between Creon and Antigone, the formal and the anti-formal, the balance is held too equally. This is most apparent towards the end when Creon is almost manhandled by his servants. (Hölderlin 2001: 113–18, at 118)

According to Hölderlin, Creon’s hierarchical order is replaced by Antigone’s egalitarian one in the play. Antigone continues to infect Creon’s servants with the idea of an egalitarian order even after her death, so that they address him as an equal, if not as an inferior: ‘You need not wish. Nobody mortal | Can have release from his determined fate’ (Hölderlin 2001: Antigone, 69–112, at 112). The old order is destroyed and a new one is about to appear. The Frankfurt production of Antigone does indeed deal with a process of epochal change. However, while for Hölderlin the tragedy marked the change from a hierarchical to an egalitarian order, in this production the shift was from an order constituted by values that are worth defending, especially by the individual, to an order that is completely egalitarian in its loss of all such values and determined by the radically equalizing force of an all-encompassing entertainment industry. The spectators refused to accept this order as their own. They felt challenged to take a clear stance. They called out ‘Stop it!’ when the jokes became too dirty and openly sided with Antigone. A few scenes after an exchange of dirty jokes between the two clowns, when Rotraut de Neve, crouching on the floor, enacts Antigone’s death walk with only her upper body in the stage light, a crippled figure reduced to its voice, the two chorus clowns sneak up to the edge of the stage to tentatively, fearfully at first, but then cheekily and impudently drop their last dirty joke on her. Antigone’s response: ‘Oh city, and from the city | You men of plenty’, upon which Antigone is met with frenetic endorsement from the auditorium. (Gerhard Stadelmaier, Stuttgarter Zeitung, 7 November 1978)

Up until the intermission, the trivial and the sublime were clearly separated from each other by the shifting light bar. However, even before the intermission there were certain moments that seemed to suggest that the trivial was encroaching on the sublime. The guard who reported Antigone’s attempt to bury her brother Polynices to Creon (Alexander Wagner) was played by the tourist carrying a tape recorder blasting a vapid pop song. Creon himself initially resembled a hippie with long black hair, black trousers, and a black vest, his chest and arms exposed

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Illustration 7.11 Christoph Nel: Sophocles’ Antigone; Creon (Alexander Wagner) dressed as a hippie.

(see Illustration 7.11). The marked movements of his arms and his hoarse shouting defined his portrayal of the despotic ruler. However, when he slapped Antigone and she in turn spat on him, it would scarcely have occurred to the spectators that this represented a battle between two principles of equal right. Rather, it seemed that two private individuals, both desperate and sad instead of tyrannic (Creon) or heroic (Antigone), were fighting each other. Their conflict could hardly be regarded as political. After the intermission, the substitute chorus directly intervened in the scenes of the tragedy. It was the chorus that ultimately killed Antigone by

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violently forcing her to conform to their standards: ‘Only her head and shoulders are visible, separated from the rest of the body through the dense black above the stage floor, her lament is that of one who has already lost her body, chalky white is smeared on her face, she raises her bound hands into the light’ (Henning Rischbieter, Theater heute, 1 (1979), 40). The six figures of the substitute chorus, after having yet again repeated one of their dirty jokes, dashed over to, stripped, and pursued her when she tried to escape, forcing a skintight yellow cocktail dress on her body along with pantyhose, high-heeled shoes, and loud make-up. They hung a handbag on her wrist and, linking arms with her, dragged her into their dance as they sang: ‘When I am merry I must sing . . . ’. Finally, they left Antigone alone on stage facing a mirror, in which she recognized the strange, estranged—dead—figure she had become (see Illustration 7.12). Earlier, Creon had shaved himself with the help of the same mirror before getting a haircut and changing into a light striped linen suit with a waistcoat and tie. Now he appeared before the chorus looking ‘broken, with dead Antigone’s skirt and blouse wrapped around him, the crown from the theatre’s costume shop askew on his head, the pain bends him at the hip, he is crying’ (Rischbieter 1979: 40). At the end of the last scene, the news of Haemon’s and Eurydice’s death was delivered by a member of the substitute chorus—the clown in the black jacket. The chorus acted embarrassed, and the ‘messenger’ himself writhed on the floor—whether in pain or with laughter was hard to say. Finally, the grinning chorus took their seats on a bench stage left at the back. Among them sat Creon. The performance ended with a final shift of the light bar to the other side. Although there were some strongly critical voices with regard to this production, too, it seemed to make sense to most critics. Even Peter Iden, who had torn the Medea production apart, clearly feeling generally disgusted but not formulating any arguments, here conceded that the concept of the substitute chorus was meaningful: Against the great power of Creon and against the great death, which Antigone is condemned and willing to die, Nel places the day-to-day killing of emotions, the enervating and yet already habitual indifference of the “zeitgeist” compared to the growing problems of the era, the inhumanity of it. (Peter Iden, Frankfurter Rundschau, 6 November 1978)

Greek tragedy was confronted with a contemporary German society described as an entertainment and consumer culture bursting with

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Illustration 7.12 Christoph Nel: Sophocles’ Antigone; Antigone (Rotraut de Neve), about to die, dressed up as a party girl by the chorus.

banality and shallowness and devoid of any sense of the tragic—no matter whether concerning ancient Greek tragedy or the fate of Baader, Ensslin, Meinhof, and Raspe. It was a devastating critique of contemporary society, which some spectators either did not understand or refused to accept by protesting against the substitute chorus that was meant to represent it—including the audience. Instead, they sided with Antigone, a figure from a foreign and distant world that was far removed from their own and could not be incorporated into it. That ancient world emerged only in fragments taken out of

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their context, which were ultimately unintelligible. As incoherent shreds, the remains of the tragedy not only failed to affirm a particular cultural identity but also questioned the entire idea that Greek tragedy could in any way relate to the cultural identity of the contemporary Bildungsbürger. After all, what kind of a cultural identity could be possible within the glaring superficiality of a mass consumer and entertainment culture? While Medea was received as a call to challenge the patriarchal order of society and to fight for self-determination, Antigone diagnosed society only to reach the conclusion that all such fights were doomed to fail, drowned in the flood of shallowness that swept over any attempt to resist. Whereas in Medea the production of a Greek tragedy served the cause of emancipation by catalysing a new cultural identity, Antigone used fragments from a Greek tragedy to reveal that the contemporary cultural identity, even of a bildungsbürgerlich spectator, was no longer related to ancient Greek culture in any way. However, both productions can be regarded as two sides of the same coin. For they challenged the spectators to rethink, re-evaluate, and reshape their own cultural identities. By the end of the 1970s, it was no longer assumed that performances of Greek tragedies would always affirm the Bildungsbürger’s cultural identity. The new forms of political theatre invented and developed by the productions discussed in this chapter served a variety of purposes. However, they all fundamentally questioned the presupposed identification of the Bildungsbürger with ancient Greece. While this may not have always been their main focus, it was an important side effect—all the more so since Greek tragedies would continue to be put on stage in the years to come, often marking the creation of a new performance aesthetics. This raises the question of what artistic, cultural, social, and political purposes such aesthetics serve, which I will discuss in Chapter 9. In Chapter 8 we will return to the 1970s—namely, to the two antiquity projects at the Schaubühne at Hallesches Ufer in Berlin in 1974 and 1980, which pursued a rather different path and agenda from the Frankfurt productions.

8 On the Origins of Theatre and its Link to the Past The Schaubühne’s Antiquity Projects of 1974 and 1980 Antiquity Project I: Peter Stein’s Exercises for Actors and Klaus Michael Grüber’s The Bacchae The Frankfurter Rundschau featured a stage photograph on page 1 —otherwise reserved for Brandt, Kissinger, or Castro, but hardly ever for anything to do with theatre. In the Süddeutsche Zeitung, the critic Reinhard Baumgart asked for one week to mull things over: It would be impossible to decide anything ‘overnight’ after such a ‘theatre evening that defied comparison’. Friedrich Luft in his Welt review enquired half a dozen times with consternation and in parentheses ‘Why?’. And in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung Günther Rühle summed up the dichotomy within the ambitious Antiquity undertaking as follows: ‘The achievement is outstanding, albeit dubious.’ (Hellmuth Karasek, Der Spiegel, 8 (1974), 110–12, at 110)

With these words, Hellmuth Karasek, the theatre critic of the leftist weekly journal Der Spiegel, summarized the major newspapers’ responses to the Schaubühne’s first Antikenprojekt (Antiquity Project) at Hallesches Ufer Berlin. It consisted of two performances: Übungen für Schauspieler (Exercises for Actors) by Peter Stein on the first evening, followed by a production of Euripides’ The Bacchae by Klaus Michael Grüber one day later. The sense of surprise and even shock or amazement discernable in the summary given at the beginning of this chapter

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was probably—at least to a certain extent—due to the Schaubühne’s image as a ‘socialist theatre’ that prioritized the ‘social value’ and social relevance of the ‘achieved results’ (Peter Iden, Frankfurter Rundschau, 11 February 1974) of its artistic work. The Schaubühne was widely recognized as a political theatre. Founded in 1962 by Jürgen Schitthelm, Dieter Sturm, and others, it was first housed in a multipurpose hall belonging to the Arbeiterwohlfahrt (Workers’ Welfare Association) in Kreuzberg. It was there that Claus Peymann staged Brecht’s Antigone model in 1965, largely following the model book. The production was well received critically—the critic of the Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger even called it ‘the exception’ among the otherwise rather dull repertoire of the Berlin stages (Wilhelm Unger, Kölner StadtAnzeiger, 6 October 1965)—and was met with ‘roaring applause’ (Herbert Pfeiffer, Berliner Morgenpost, 30 September 1965) from the audiences. In 1970 a group of directors, actors, and playwrights, who had already collaborated in Bremen and some even before that in Ulm, joined the Schaubühne. Among them were the actresses Jutta Lampe and Edith Clever (who had played Antigone in Kurt Hübner’s production in Bremen in 1966) and the actors Bruno Ganz (who had played the messenger in that production) and Michael König, as well as the directors Peter Stein and Klaus Michael Grüber. In 1968, Stein (b. 1937) had directed Peter Weiss’s Viet Nam Diskurs (Vietnam-Discourse) at the Munich Kammerspiele, where he had started his career as an assistant to the director Fritz Kortner. On the first night, Stein and his actors descended from the stage into the auditorium and lobby after the applause had died down and asked for donations for the Vietcong. This triggered an enormous scandal, and Stein had to leave the Kammerspiele. The Schaubühne was organized as a collective, not only practising codetermination even before the Schauspiel Frankfurt started to do so, but also paying all its members the same salary. The first production was mounted by the new members in 1970—Brecht’s/Gorky’s Die Mutter (The Mother) with Therese Giehse in the lead role. Staged by a director’s collective consisting of Peter Stein, Frank-Patrick Steckel, and Wolfgang Schwiedrzik, the production caused an uproar among Berlin’s Christian Democrats. They even went so far as to demand the cancellation of the state subsidies granted to this private theatre. Some denounced the Schaubühne as a ‘communist cell’ and claimed that all members underwent ‘training in Marxism-Leninism’ on a regular basis. These instances

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give an impression of the Schaubühne’s image in the early 1970s, which was reinforced by the following productions—Enzensberger’s Das Verhör von Habana (The Havana Enquiry, 1971), Vishnevsky’s Optimistische Tragödie (An Optimistic Tragedy, 1972), and Marieluise Fleißer Fegefeuer in Ingolstadt (Purgatory in Ingolstadt, 1973), all directed by Peter Stein. The Antiquity Project, however, deviated from this image, which led to the critics’ confusion. Moreover, Stein had developed an approach critical of ideology in his productions of the classics that traced back allegedly timeless conflicts to their historical circumstances. This was first apparent in his staging of Schiller’s Cabal and Love (1967) in Bremen and, in particular, in his production of Goethe’s Torquato Tasso (Bremen 1969). He continued his explorations of the specific conditions underlying and guiding the history of bourgeois society in his productions of Ibsen’s Peer Gynt (1971) and Kleist’s Prince Friedrich of Homburg (1972) at the Schaubühne. With the Schaubühne’s image as a ‘socialist theatre’, on the one hand, and Stein’s interest in the history of bourgeois society, on the other, the question arises why he even attempted an Antiquity Project at all, given that he was neither interested in a topicalization of Greek tragedy—as was the case shortly thereafter in Frankfurt—nor pursuing a purely academic interest in the historical conditions of the genesis of ancient Greek theatre. Yet the enterprise makes perfect sense when viewed through the lens of this study. As we have seen, one of the conditions for the history of bourgeois society in Germany, largely dominated by the Bildungsbürgertum, was its identification with ancient Greece and, in particular, its love and admiration for Greek tragedy that formed an important aspect of its cultural identity. The latter had already been questioned and destabilized by productions of Greek tragedies in the 1960s and especially in the late 1970s. Considering the Schaubühne’s proclivity for fundamental and thorough analysis, it seems that they thought the time had come to examine the very possibility of Greek tragedy as a defining factor or even cornerstone of the Bildungsbürgertum’s cultural identity. This gives rise to another question: why did the Schaubühne choose The Bacchae to tackle this issue over, say, Antigone, Oedipus, Medea, or Electra, to name the most frequently performed Greek tragedies? At the beginning of the 1970s, The Bacchae had almost no performance record at all in Germany. To my knowledge, there had been two productions of the

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tragedy in 1973—the year the Schaubühne embarked on its first Antiquity Project—which were the very first to take place on a German-speaking stage. Hansgünther Heyme mounted an Antiquity Project in Cologne for which he staged The Bacchae together with Aristophanes’ The Frogs, presenting Dionysus as a comic figure in the first play and as an outand-out clown in the second. The project was his greatest success up to that point. Luca Ronconi, in his production in Vienna, staged The Bacchae as ‘theatre within theatre’, setting it during the Renaissance and the rediscovery of antiquity. Both productions tried to explain the tragedy and make it more accessible. The Schaubühne took a very different approach. The team began the project by travelling to Greece during the summer vacations and extensively studying the literature on ancient Greek theatre, mythology, and rituals. They began their own historical research by visiting particular sites of interest and reviewing the research results of philologists, anthropologists, archaeologists, historians, and others relevant to their project. Excerpts from the most important works consulted were assembled in the voluminous programme notes, which amounted to eighty pages (programme notes to the Schaubühne (1974), Antiquity Project, Peter Stein, Exercises for Actors, and Klaus Michael Grüber, The Bacchae, Schaubühne at Hallesches Ufer at the Philips Pavilion on the trade fair grounds in Berlin, season 1973–4, No. 9). At the beginning of the 1970s, a number of books were published that deal at great length with ancient Greek rituals as well as with the ritual aspects of tragedy, putting particular emphasis on The Bacchae. Among them are Walter Burkert’s study Homo Necans: The Anthropology of Ancient Greek Sacrificial Ritual and Myth, which appeared in 1972 (English translation 1983), René Girard’s Violence and the Sacred, published the same year (English translation 1977), and Jan Kott’s The Eating of the Gods: An Interpretation of Greek Tragedy (Polish 1970, English 1973; cf. Fischer-Lichte 2014b: 12–19). The programme notes contain some rather lengthy excerpts from Burkert and Kott as well as from Eric Dodds’s writings on The Bacchae, to which Kott refers. Moreover, Arnold van Gennep’s The Rites of Passage (1909) is cited alongside George Thomson’s Aeschylus and Athens (1946), which elaborates the close link between the development of the tragedy and that of the polis of Athens, as well as Gilbert Murray’s book, Euripides and his Age (1913). The list of works consulted suggests that the artists wanted to focus on

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Illustration 8.1 Antiquity Project: Peter Stein: Exercises for Actors; stage design by Karl-Ernst Herrmann.

the relationship between tragedy and ritual, on the one hand, and on tragedy and the polis, on the other—that is, on the place and function of tragedy at this particular historical moment. As a result of their research they reached the conclusion that The Bacchae could not be presented to an audience without an introduction. The first night, presenting Exercises for Actors, was intended as such a prelude. It was decided not to stage the play at the small Schaubühne building at Hallesches Ufer but instead to create a set for the performance inside a huge exhibition hall at the Berlin fairgrounds, the Philips Pavilion, where the latest technological developments were showcased during the trade fair. Karl-Ernst Herrmann designed the stage for Exercises for Actors. The floor of the hall, sloping inwards slightly on three sides, was covered in soil (see Illustration 8.1). Wherever the soil had accumulated, it was covered with wooden planks—the seats for the spectators. Flowing white sheets of cloth hung from the walls. This created a unique space that barely separated the actors from the spectators. Before entering the space, the spectators could watch the actors not apply but remove their make-up from behind a glass pane. The performance lasted for three

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hours. A huge clock, reminiscent of a railway station, hung from the ceiling in the hall. Every five minutes the voice of Bruno Ganz (who played Pentheus on the second night) announced the time over a loudspeaker (standard procedure before the beginning of a performance, albeit usually meant only for the actors). The actors, dressed in white blouses and wide dark trousers, entered the hall one by one; they spread out in the space, adopting a relaxed posture, keeping their heads inclined slightly towards the floor. At eight o’clock the signal to begin sounded. Exercises consisted of six parts: ‘Beginnings’, ‘The Hunt’, and ‘The Sacrifice’ were followed by an intermission, which featured a satyr play. An initiation rite of sorts was performed after the intermission. The evening concluded with Prometheus’ response (v. 436–506) to a stasimon of the chorus (v. 397–435) from the Aeschylean Prometheus Bound (Aeschylus 2013b). The titles of the three parts before the intermission as well as the initiation rite after it recalled Burkert’s book Homo Necans, which had been published the year before the Schaubühne began their preparations for the Antiquity Project. In it, the Swiss philologist and anthropologist connects the sacrifice with the hunt and the meal on which the hunters feast after a successful expedition. Burkert had identified three parts of the sacrifice: the beginning (which consisted of cleansing rites, putting on new clothes, self-decoration, often sexual abstinence, forming a procession, and all the procedures right up to the killing of the sacrificial animal); the killing of the animal and its dismemberment (sparagmos); the burning of the bones on the altar, and the shared meal of meat (omophagia). The titles used by the Schaubühne— ‘Beginnings’, ‘The Hunt’, ‘The Sacrifice’—drew heavily on this theory. Later in the book, Burkert delves further into Greek initiation rites, to which the corresponding part of the Exercises also alluded. In adopting these very specific headings, Exercises for Actors directly referred to the most up-to-date theory on Greek sacrificial rituals. At eight o’clock the beginning of the performance was signalled and the actors started to move about. They walked deliberately, breathing slowly, moving their limbs, and reaching out with their hands. Certain movements or patterns were repeated: the breathing led to sounds, which turned into screaming (for a specific description, see Gerd Jäger, Theater heute, 15/3 (1974)). The exercises seemed to emphasize the differences between the actors. While one actor walked in an elegant and refined manner, another was more clumsy, and so on.

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‘Beginnings’ was an ambiguous piece. On an obvious level, it simply marked the beginning of the performance. However, as the beginning of an Antiquity Project it implied much more. It could be interpreted as the beginning of theatre itself, in that the human body has always constituted the primary material of theatre. Human bodies are involved wherever theatre exists. A performance is created out of the particular possibilities offered by the body. It therefore seems to follow that the beginning of the Antiquity Project was a meditation on the birth of theatre out of the human body. The second part, ‘The Hunt’, began with the separation of the three protagonists from the community of actors, which was reminiscent of the separation of the actor from the chorus in Greek theatre and of the further development of theatre: Aeschylus is said to have introduced the second actor and Sophocles the third (Aristotle (2002), Poetics 4, 1449ª). As such, ancient Greek theatre never featured more than three actors. In Berlin, the three actors took on the parts of the hunters and the victim. The hunters (Otto Sander and Peter Fitz) were dressed in long, pale rubber coats, which made a creaking sound with every movement, and wore large dark hats and sunglasses. They looked as if they had stepped out of a spaghetti western. The victim (Heinrich Giskes) looked as if he were half-human and half-beast—a mythical figure. He had a huge beetle’s shell buckled to his torso, covering his chest and belly (see Illustration 8.2). The hunt was thus rooted in archaic as well as modern culture. The hunted figure, genuinely exhausted, finally fell into a mud hole. Tracking down the victim not only alluded to Burkert’s theory of sacrifice and of the function of the hunt; it also pointed to one of the main subjects of theatre (and later film) from the age of the Greeks until the present day. In the third part, ‘The Sacrifice’, the actors brought in a sculpture made from animal skulls and bones. They wound woollen threads around it, recalling Burkert’s description of how the horns of the sacrificial animal were wrapped in bandages. The actors danced around the sculpture; they explored different ways of creating a collective body from their individual bodies—for example, by experimenting with complicated rhythms. While Burkert granted the sacrifice the power to strengthen or renew the communal bond between the different members of a society, it clearly did not serve this function here. Rather, the focus in ‘The Sacrifice’ lay on bringing forth a collective body through rhythm. Generally speaking, Burkert’s descriptions were used or at least

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Illustration 8.2 Antiquity Project: Peter Stein: Exercises for Actors; the hunt; stage design by Karl-Ernst Herrmann.

alluded to without, however, explicitly referring to his or any other explanation. The second and third parts were as ambiguous as ‘Beginnings’. Perhaps they referred to Burkert’s ideas on how hunting and sacrifice were related to each other. They may also be seen as a tentative statement concerning the origin of Greek theatre or as a precursor to the second night, the performance of The Bacchae, in particular the tracking-down and dismemberment of Pentheus. During the intermission the spectators were sent out into the snow-covered winter garden, where a satyr with a huge phallus leapt about among several bonfires. Meanwhile, a dividing wall was set up inside the hall. After the intermission the actors and spectators were grouped by gender—an initiation rite of sorts. Three actors from each group were undressed, beaten, buried, excavated, smeared with slime, and their faces painted to resemble masks. Actions—such as the unearthing of bodies covered in slime—were performed that would be picked up again in The Bacchae the following evening. They had to relearn how to perceive and how to move. Finally, they were reincorporated into the community. This part could easily be associated not only with Burkert but also with Thomson’s theory on the origin of theatre, in particular initiation rites.

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It seems, then, that Exercises for Actors did indeed reflect on the beginnings of theatre, suggesting different kinds of rituals—of sacrifice or initiation, for instance—as its possible origin, and on the human body as the main material and fundamental condition of theatre. Exercises did not, however, attempt to provide evidence to support particular claims. Instead, it opened up different possibilities by putting emphasis on the performing human body moving through space and uttering sounds, for example, while enacting ritual patterns such as those in ‘The Hunt’, ‘The Sacrifice’, and the initiation rites. Language was not introduced until the final part. Previously, the actors had employed their voices only to scream and produce different kinds of sounds. Now the male and female spectators were reunited. They were pushed through a narrow opening into another part of the hall, where Prometheus (Eberhard Feik) was tied to one of the walls. Two actors were in the process of covering him in plaster. As Prometheus began stammering the first words of the evening, delivering the monologue already referred to, his body gradually disappeared underneath layers of plaster. When he spoke his last sentence, ‘all human arts come from Prometheus’ (Prometheus Bound, v. 506), only his mouth remained visible and the words were once again reduced to stammers. This part was no less ambiguous than the previous ones, yet it did introduce a material that in European theatre is as fundamental as the human body—language—and the exercises turned to probing that medium: the actor attempted different kinds of vocal deliveries (melodrama, ridicule, exaggeration, and so on). Nonetheless, language was shown to be not complementary to, but in conflict with, the body insofar as, the more language developed, the more the body vanished. However, once the body was ‘gone’, language deteriorated back into stammers and ultimately ceased to exist as well, highlighting the complicated relationship between body and language in theatre. Language emerged out of a body ‘bound’ and incapable of moving; it separated itself from the body (just as the texts of Greek plays handed down to us are detached, as disembodied language, from the original performance from which they derive). But without a body, language in theatre seems to disintegrate—it makes sense only as embodied language. Disconnected from the body, language is unable to constitute theatre. By reflecting on the origins of theatre, on its possible roots in different kinds of rituals as well as on its primary materials, bodies and language, the piece ended up reflecting on

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the particular relationship between body and language in the theatre (and perhaps even between performance and text). On the other hand, the words spoken anticipated the next evening: . . . but hear what troubles there were among mortals, how I found them mindless but made them intelligent and masters of their minds. . . . . . For humans in the beginning had eyes but saw to no purpose; they had ears but did not hear. Like the shapes of dreams they dragged through their long lives and muddled everything haphazardly. They did not know how to build brick houses to face the sun; nor how to work in wood. They lived beneath the earth like swarming ants, in sunless caves. For them there was no secure token for telling winter or flowering spring, nor summer with its crops; and all they did they did without intelligent calculation until I showed them the rising of the stars, and the settings, hard to observe. And I invented numbers for them, preeminent among all skills. and the combining of written letters as a means of remembering all things, the Muses' mother, skilled in craft. . . . (Prometheus Bound, v. 442–62)

In the minutes of the preparations for the project (excerpts of which were included in the programme notes), Prometheus’ perspective on his own achievements is harshly criticized as ‘the “scornful review”, the break with the past and the final stipulation of one’s own beginning’ (programme notes to the Schaubühne 1974, Antiquity Project). Such a ‘rational’ and ‘enlightened’ view is also characteristic of Pentheus. Prometheus’ words can thus be understood as a suitable introduction to the performance on the following night. In retrospect, they can also be regarded as a description of the spectators’ state during the performance of The Bacchae, reflected in the reviews. For the spectators ‘saw | to no purpose; they had ears but did not hear. | Like the shapes of dreams they dragged through their long lives’ (v. 447–9). Peter Stein’s statements in Exercises for Actors on the origins of theatre or on the relationship between body and language were not explicit. He opened up different perspectives on these issues without favouring any particular solution.

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Moreover, by instructing the actors to perform strange actions such as those in the second, third, and fifth parts, and by exposing the alien nature of these actions, he intimated that, whatever the origins of Greek theatre may be, they are inaccessible and, in the end, incomprehensible. While contemporary classicists and anthropologists tried to explain the origins of Greek theatre by referring to pieces of evidence from different contexts and putting them together as in a puzzle in order to tell a consistent story and explain ‘the birth of theatre’, Exercises for Actors denied such a possibility. It referenced the very same evidence but demonstrated that the attempt to assemble it into a coherent picture was misguided. The pieces of evidence remained fragments removed from their contexts, transformed in particular ways without claiming to restore them to a complete body of knowledge. The performance negated the claim that we possess this knowledge about ancient Greek theatre and its origins. What we had at our disposal were mere bits and pieces that did not speak as a pars pro toto but were transformed by the lens through which we looked at them, so that it was left to us to put them back together in whichever way we saw fit in order to make sense of them—by no means leading to its original, authentic, or ‘true’ form. Even in this respect, the first night proved to be a meaningful introduction to Grüber’s production of The Bacchae. Klaus Michael Grüber (1941–2008) had been working as assistant to the director Giorgio Strehler at the Piccolo Teatro di Milano since 1962. His first production was Brecht’s Il processo di Giovanna d’Arco a Rouen—1431 (The Trial of Joan of Arc at Rouen, 1431), which was published in Italian in 1967. In Bremen he staged Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1969) and at the Schaubühne Ödön von Horvath’s Geschichten aus dem Wienerwald (Tales from the Vienna Woods, 1972). Stein and Grüber were very different. While Stein, for instance, usually rehearsed for many months, Grüber’s rehearsals rarely took longer than six weeks. Stein worked extensively on the text even before the rehearsals began, while Grüber decided on cuts and changes together with the actors during the rehearsal process. They stood in opposition to but also complemented each other in many respects. Together, they served as the defining directors of the Schaubühne for years. As Karasek’s summary of the critics’ responses to Grüber’s The Bacchae suggests, they found it difficult ‘to read the production’ they were ‘faced with’ (Günther Rühle, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung,

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11 February 1974), or to decipher or make sense of it as they watched. Instead, it confronted them with dreamlike images, which never tell a story but simply unfold, which are entirely unrealistic but still deal with reality, in which one is at once actor and spectator. The opening images already show . . . that Grüber ‘makes’ theatre by ‘destroying’ several predominant expectations we have of theatre . . . Here, nothing is ‘narrated’ or whittled down to its essence or restricted to some ‘realistic’ minutiae of representations; no ‘Spielfreude’ (joy of performing) is going to arise . . . (Reinhard Baumgart, Süddeutsche Zeitung, 49 (16–17 February 1974))

In my analysis of the performance I shall proceed from these enigmatic images in order to answer the question of how they affected the spectators with regard to their understanding of ancient Greek culture and their own cultural identity rooted in it. Gilles Aillaud and Eduardo Arroyo were the artists who redesigned the exhibition hall for the four-hour performance of The Bacchae. A huge white-planked area marked the stage. It was flanked on two sides by the spectators seated at right angles to each other. The back wall had four openings. On the left, a road-sweeping machine was parked and manned by workers in yellow plastic suits, their faces covered by fencing masks of sorts; in the middle were two openings—one, a hatch, was closed, and the other, a door, stood open to reveal a man dressed in a tuxedo, drinking a glass of champagne and watching the arena. Later on, he would reappear in a white summer suit. On the right, two horses were positioned behind a glass pane. A ventilator hung from the ceiling and fluorescent lights lit the hall brightly. The space had a cold, sterile, ‘clinical’ atmosphere, as many critics described it, keeping the spectators at a distance and alienating them (see Illustration 8.3). Excerpts from Stravinsky’s Apollon musagète then filled the space. One of the masked workers in yellow pushed a stretcher onto the stage through the open middle door. On it lay Dionysus (Michael König) holding a woman’s shoe of a dark colour in his hand. He was naked except for a thong, which made his penis appear artificial. All male figures in the performance were dressed in this way and thus recalled ancient Greek statues. A dark stripe, reminiscent perhaps of Zeus’ lightning, ran down the right side of Dionysus’ body down to his toes. When the stretcher came to a halt, light from a dark lampshade, which was lowered from the ceiling, illuminated the god. Dionysus began the prologue stammering, searching for the word ‘I’. He giggled, babbled

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Illustration 8.3 Antiquity Project: Klaus Michael Grüber: The Bacchae; Dionysus (Michael König) on the stretcher and the chorus of Bacchae just returning from the Berlin night; stage design by Gilles Aillaud, Eduardo Arroyo.

incomprehensibly, caressed the shoe, and then began to speak. While delivering the line ‘the tomb of my mother’ (Euripides (2016), Bacchae, v. 5), he flung the shoe away as if in a fit of madness and, almost instantly and accompanied by wild, imbecilic gestures, directed his attendant to bring it back. Clutching the shoe with both hands he continued his monologue, partly in German, partly in ancient Greek. The act of speaking the words ‘Thebes must learn its lesson, like it or not’ (v. 39) seemed to trigger convulsive spasms in his body that made the stretcher topple, depositing Dionysus on the floor. At the line ‘So I must teach this Pentheus, teach all of Thebes, | what kind of god I am’ (v. 48), Dionysus stood up, gathered the different parts of the stretcher and put it together again. He climbed back on, ending his prologue by repeating the first line ‘I am the god, Dionysus. Dionysus, son of Zeus’ (v. 1) while caressing the shoe. What are we to make of such an image? Was this a hospital? A madhouse? Was the man on the stretcher a shoe fetishist, fantasizing about being Dionysus? And why was he brought onto the stage to the tune of Apollon musagète? Each of the elements evoked different associations, but they did not complement each other in ways that allowed for

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a coherent attribution of meaning. The image could be experienced but not interpreted. It remained an enigma. After Dionysus’ final words, the right wall opened to reveal a group of women stepping in from the Berlin night, all similarly and yet very distinctively dressed in black cloaks or capes over white blouses, skirts, or dresses. They remained standing there for a moment before walking onto the stage. Behind them, the wall closed again. Cymbals and bells sounded. Slowly, bringing to mind a dreamlike state, they moved barefoot through the space, forming a circle around the stretcher. Then they separated in different directions. One of the women—the chorus leader—sat down on the floor in front of the stretcher, slowly speaking the lines of the first chorus song. The others inspected the room, poked at the ventilator and the walls that surrounded the stage, turned off the fluorescent lights, and began to tear out the planks from the floor. This last act brought to light a mass of wool, and they began to weave a woollen net from the stretcher all across the space, thus recalling parts of the ‘Sacrifice’ from the preceding night. One of the women went to a huge pipe at the wall and turned a wheel. Grain poured onto the floor. She picked up a pestle and began to pound the grain. Others threw clumps of soil, lettuce, and grapes stored beneath the planks. A bust of Dionysus was lifted from the bed of salad, cleaned, and placed on the back of the stretcher, which Dionysus had vacated in the meantime. Salad, grapes, wool, and grain were arranged on the stretcher around the bust, thus turning it into an altar with offerings to the god. A fire was started in an earthen pit. Finally, from the steaming mud, the women unearthed the elderly Cadmus (Peter Fitz) and Tiresias (Otto Sander), completely covered in slime. This was strongly reminiscent of the ‘initiation’ scene and the mud hole into which the hunted mythical animal had stumbled during the preceding night. Moreover, what at first glance appeared to be slime later turned out to be the remains of plaster, another allusion to the Exercises. The two men evoked plaster casts of Greek statues—a plaster antiquity. This association was strengthened by Tiresias, who struck a ‘classical’ pose on a bench at the wall before the left opening, lying down with one leg stretched out, the other bent at the knee, one forearm resting on the bench, the other raised, bent at the elbow. He remained in this pose for quite a while—until joining Cadmus in another pose for the journey to the Cithaeron mountains.

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While the chorus leader finished the song to the sound of a soft percussion, the other women assembled around the stretcher as if it were an altar before which they were performing a rite of sacrifice and worshiping the god. The appearance of the bacchants in this sterile, cold space resembled the intrusion of something long forgotten and repressed. They unearthed elements of nature, such as soil, mud, and fire, dug out products of cultivation, such as grain, grapes, salad, and wool, as well as objects from the past—a bronze bust of the god Dionysus and figures from a plaster antiquity. The women performed all their activities with great precision and thoroughness, as if following a strict pattern. It marked the intrusion of a world of mystery, unknown to the spectators and allowing only for fragmentary recognition even as it enchanted them. Pentheus’ (Bruno Ganz) entrance, too, was enigmatic. Stark naked, his left arm was covered in a layer of plaster—corresponding to and clashing with the black line on the right side of Dionysus’ body (see Illustration 8.4). He entered the stage through the same opening as Dionysus had on his stretcher. His entrance was accompanied by the low sounds of a different

Illustration 8.4 Antiquity Project: Klaus Michael Grüber: The Bacchae; Bruno Ganz as Pentheus and the chorus.

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kind of music. He crossed the stage, passed the stretcher, and then stopped. His first words were not from the play but were excerpts from Wittgenstein’s diaries—more precisely, the entries for 31 May 1915 and 8 July 1916: One cannot achieve any more by using names in describing the world than by means of the general description of the world! Could one then manage without names? Surely not. Names are necessary for an assertion that this thing possesses that property and so on. They link the propositional form with quite definite objects. And if the general description of the world is like a stencil of the world, the names pin it to the world so that the world is wholly covered by it. (Wittgenstein 1961: 53e) I can make myself independent of fate. There are two godheads: the world and my independent I. I am either happy or unhappy, that is all. It can be said: good or evil do not exist. A man who is happy must have no fear. Not even in face of death. Only a man who lives not in time but in the present is happy. For life in the present there is no death. Death is not an event in life. It is not a fact of the world. If by eternity is understood not infinite temporal duration but non-temporality, then it can be said that a man lives eternally if he lives in the present. (Wittgenstein 1961: 74e–75e)

How did Wittgenstein’s deliberations on names, death, and eternity relate to Pentheus? Why was he introduced in this way? Some of the sentences reflect Pentheus’ attitude towards the world, as in ‘I can make myself independent of fate’ or ‘There are two godheads: the world and my independent I’. At the same time, Wittgenstein’s words link Pentheus to our world without actually transferring him into it. Other images related to him, however, were not as ambiguous. When Pentheus gave the order to demolish Tiresias’ place, the road-sweeping machine drove onto the stage and swept away the ‘filth’ created by the bacchants. The yellow figures replaced the boards and turned the fluorescent lights back on. Since the women lay immobile on the ground, the road-sweeping machine had to avoid them. After that, the bacchants slowly began to move again. They tried to create a portmanteau from the words ‘Pentheus’ and ‘hubris’, and completed verbal exercises with Greek terms such as orgiazein, ‘to perform a sacred act’.

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The image of the road-sweeping machine cleaning the stage and the act of switching the fluorescent lights back on could undeniably be taken as an interpretation of Pentheus as a man of law, order, and reason. On the other hand, the bacchants interpreted it as an act of hubris. Here a hermeneutic approach seemed possible, something that turned out to be the exception rather than the rule in this production. Regarding these first images described here, one might be tempted to explain them by taking recourse to Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialektik der Aufklärung (Dialectic of Enlightenment, [1969] English 1972; cf. Kreuder 2002: 131–44). However, even such an interpretation leaves many questions open, not only those posed by the critics at the time but also the one guiding this study. As the performance continued, the audience was presented with many other striking and enigmatic images, which, superimposed on each other, intersected with and cut through the linear succession of the dialogues and choral passages. Before the first encounter between Dionysus and Pentheus, the latter demarcated a space by the wall and on the floor with adhesive tape, as if marking his territory. The music of Apollon musagète softly swelled up. Pentheus stepped into his ‘territory’ and contemplated the long shadow cast by his body. Dionysus appeared, unnoticed by Pentheus, who slowly squatted down so that his shadow diminished. Then he knelt, leant forward, and placed his head on his knees, making the shadow vanish. Dionysus approached very slowly, stepped behind him, and cast a long shadow over him. Pentheus, noticing it, got to his feet and turned around to confront Dionysus, who gave him a long, intimate kiss, seized his arm, and stroked it. Pentheus put this arm on Dionysus’ buttock and gently caressed it, then sought out Dionysus’ penis and continued the caress there. It was a very intimate moment, both figures almost melting into one and recalling Girard’s idea that Dionysus and Pentheus represent each other’s ‘monstrous doubles’ (Girard 1977: 160). All of a sudden, Pentheus slapped Dionysus hard in the face, stepped back, and hurried away, putting a substantial distance between them. Dionysus opened his arms on either side, casting a huge shadow, then squatted down and placed the woman’s shoe he had been holding the whole time on the floor. This homoerotic encounter between Pentheus and Dionysus foreshadowed Pentheus’ transformation into a bacchant. This transformation

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took place on an empty stage deserted by all except Dionysus and Pentheus. The chorus members had disappeared into the audience or behind a side wall, with only their heads visible at the top. From there they could also watch the scene unfolding on stage as spectators. Dionysus was seated in the lit hatch when Pentheus entered through the door. He wore a long black dress partly covered by a short light fur, imitating and reversing the clothes of the bacchants. After Dionysus had helped him with his make-up, Pentheus took some tentative dance steps, striking the pose of a maenad found on Greek vases—a pose that one of the bacchants had struck during the last chorus song, reminiscent of Gertrud Eysoldt’s deadly dance at the end of Electra. (In the programme notes there is a picture of the so-called Pronomos Krater showing a Dionysian thiasus performing these movements.) Dionysus dropped the woman’s shoe. Pentheus slipped it on and with another tentative dance step approached the place where the horses stood. Dionysus, who until that point had also acted as a kind of spectator to Pentheus’ transformation, helped him mount one of the horses. And while the bacchants took turns speaking the lines of the chorus song ‘Run to the mountains, swift hounds of madness! | Find the revels of daughters . . . ’ (v. 978–1021, at 978–9), Dionysus led the horse with Pentheus on its back in a circle around the horses’ area, which was lit by a warm light. This continued until the bacchants had ended their song. For a substantial period of time the spectators saw nothing but this image on stage—except for the two or three heads peeking over the wall. It was this image that became deeply imprinted on the audience’s perception and memory. Both images—the homoerotic encounter and Pentheus’ ride to the Cithaeron mountains—evoked a wealth of associations, memories, and emotions. However, they denied a hermeneutic approach to the performance with reference to the dramatic text of the tragedy. They were captivating but did not contribute to a clear understanding or fixed reading of what was going on. Rather, they once more raised the question dominating the production: ‘Why?’ The same applied to the two messenger reports. The herdsman (Heinrich Giskes) was enshrouded in a mythical air. Fur sprouted from the skin on his right shoulder. His feet were also furry and prominently hooved. Was he one of the satyrs whose chorus, according to Nietzsche, can be regarded as the origin of tragic theatre? He was accompanied by two leashed dogs, one black, one white—the colours of the bacchants.

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They could be seen as reminders of Actaeon’s dismemberment, foreshadowing the transformation of the bacchants into such dogs. The messenger occasionally fed the dogs raw meat while speaking. When he quoted Agave’s call ‘Hounds that run with me, we are hunted now! | Follow me! Follow me’ (v. 731–2), Pentheus went down on his knees and, resembling a four-legged animal, approached the black dog, which instantly barked at him. Pentheus crouched beside the messenger and snapped at the piece of flesh that the herdsman held in his hand. He tore it with his teeth like a dog, hurling it around so that it slapped his cheeks before the black dog snatched it from him and devoured it. At the end of his report, the herdsman ate a piece of the raw meat himself before feeding the rest to one of the dogs. Was Pentheus enacting what the messenger was telling him about the actions of the bacchants? Was he embodying the hounds that tore apart his cousin Actaeon? Or was he himself anticipating what would later happen to him? This scene could also hint at the inescapable kinship between a man of law and order and the beast in all of us, in that the danger is always lurking for a rational human being to degenerate into an animal. As can be seen from these suggestions, they are associations triggered by the scene rather than a scholarly interpretation. The second messenger’s (Günter Hacker) report was even more puzzling. He entered through the middle opening, where he remained standing until he left the stage in the same manner as he had arrived, long after finishing his report. He was accompanied by all the laughing bacchants, so that Agave spoke her address to the city (v. 1202–14) on an empty stage before her encounter with Cadmus. During the messenger’s report the man from the beginning had taken up position in the horses’ area. Now dressed in a trench coat and black trousers, wearing a dark hat and sunglasses, he brought to mind the two hunters from the previous night. The bacchants were spread out all over the space, most of them standing, one sitting on the floor, another leaning against the wall. They were positioned to create the impression of a picture painted according to the central perspective principle. They formed two uneven diagonal lines that ran from the front of the stage to the middle opening, thus fixing the messenger as the centre of attention. The messenger reported the events in the Cithaeron mountains, which culminated in Pentheus’ dismemberment, all the while remaining almost motionless as brownish-yellow slime dripped from his naked body,

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probably a reference to the initiation scene from the Exercises. He spoke excruciatingly slowly and in a somewhat singsong tone of voice. Not once did he change his position—only his face was grimacing and one could see how his chest rose and fell with every breath. When he repeated Dionysus’ words ‘Women, I bring you the man who mocked me, | denied my sacred mysteries, | the man who mocks you now’ (v. 1079–81), he drew out the vowels to an extent that was almost unbearable and physically painful for the listeners. It took him more than half an hour to deliver his report, which was accompanied by a very low music playing on an organ or harmonium. After having told the story of the killing he erupted in long screams, ‘alalah, alalah . . . ’, punctuated by the organ, which was now clearly audible. The critic Volker Canaris regarded this scene as an example of how Grüber turned shared time, one of the two fundamental categories for theatre to happen, into an object of his staging process: This report is lengthy, seemingly endless—the length, the passage of time, is made to be experienced through an elementary materialization in the scenic situation. The body of the actor is covered in a mud-like mass, which slowly slides off him. A temporal process becomes visible through the spectator’s consciousness of monotony, i.e. of stasis, and, at the same time, of change, as in movement. Something abstract is made concrete scenically. Simultaneously, the situation provides additional decipherments: of a concrete narrative nature, for example— the messenger emerges from the muddy ground of pre-civilizational wilderness; or of an emblematic-symbolic nature—the slow creation of human consciousness takes place through this report—a process of releasing language out of a bodily materiality. (Volker Canaris, Theater heute, special issue: Theater 1974: 34)

Among others, one might add the relationship to the first night to Canaris’ list of possible interpretations. There, during the final part, the speaking body increasingly disappeared behind the plaster with which it was covered, while here the speaking body covered in slime gradually reappeared during the process of speaking and as the slime dripped down. Moreover, this scene revealed a reflection on painting and opera. The scene was composed as in a painting. The spectators were confronted with it for a very long time, so that they could contemplate many of its elements. On the other hand, the report was delivered as a kind of aria in a melodrama, accompanied by music, even though it was not always audible. While the vocal delivery in some instances recalled Prometheus’ way of speaking in the Exercises, the composition as a

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whole—that is, the relationship between the visual and aural components—recalled a seventeenth-century opera performance by alluding to its staging conventions: the virtuoso at the center, displaying his marvellous skills of vocal delivery, framed by the chorus, watching and admiring his art along with the other spectators. Similar to or perhaps even more than the image of the ride to the Cithaeron mountains, this extensive, tortuous yet fascinating scene not only imprinted itself on the spectators’ perception and memory but also made them aware of the act of watching as witnessing. The performance ended as it began—enigmatically. This time, however, Dionysus did not reappear on stage. Cadmus and Agave, still holding Pentheus’ head, sat down on two chairs before a silver tray on which the ‘the rest of my poor son’ (v. 1298), ripped to pieces, lay piled up: stand-up collar, white gloves, white sleeves, white handkerchief, and a pair of grey patent leather shoes with shoe trees—all items of clothing that the man in the tuxedo, the contemporary spectator of the scene, had worn in the beginning. Agave was wrapped in bloody bandages and Cadmus was naked, his body partly covered in plaster (see Illustration 8.5).

Illustration 8.5 Antiquity Project: Klaus Michael Grüber: The Bacchae; the final scene: Agave (Edith Clever) and Cadmus (Peter Fitz) before they start sewing together the pieces of clothes lying on the tray.

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One of the yellow figures took Pentheus’ head from Agave and replaced it with the stand-up collar from the tray. Gradually, the light dimmed. The same lamp that had been lowered from the ceiling over Dionysus on the stretcher in the first scene was once again brought down, now shedding light on Agave and Cadmus for the recognition scene. While delivering the lines from ‘I feel something in my head is clearing’ (v. 1270) through to ‘Dionysus has destroyed us all’ (v. 1296), Agave, motionless, stared at the stand-up collar in her hand. After the recognition she slowly raised her legs, rolled sideways off the chair, and crawled to the left opening from which she had appeared. For a long time, only her sighs, sobs, and screams could be heard, resembling those of a wild beast in deepest agony. When Agave finally reappeared at the left opening, she was clothed in a white dress with a beige cloak or blanket draped over it. Cadmus approached her, covered himself with a blanket, and together they returned to the chairs. The light in all the openings went out. While Agave spoke the lines, alternating between German and Greek and beginning with the sentence ‘Father, you see how changed my fortunes are . . . ’ (v. 1329), which she repeated as her final words, Cadmus took a glove from the tray and began to sew. After Agave’s last words, string music swelled up. When it died down, both sat silently in the cone of light shining down from the lamp, sewing together the pieces from the tray without ever coming to an end. This finale did not answer any of the previous questions posed by the performance but only raised new ones. Why was Pentheus’ head replaced by a stand-up collar? And why were the pieces of Pentheus’ dismembered body represented by the pieces of the suit worn by the man in the tuxedo drinking a glass of champagne and watching the stage as well as parts of the auditorium—the same person who, dressed differently from but still to be identified as the spectators’ contemporary, was also present at the messenger’s report on Pentheus’ death? Why did Dionysus not reappear in the end, explaining once more the reasons for what had happened? Why did Agave alternate between German and ancient Greek at that moment? These and related questions can hardly be answered by referring to the tragedy’s text. I have provided an abundance of examples of scenes from the performance in order to substantiate my argument that as a whole it is to be regarded as a chain of enigmatic images. In order to deal with them in a productive way, I will group the questions they raised into

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three sets of problems concerning (1) the relationship between text and performance; (2) the concept of theatre underlying the production; and (3) the relationship of theatre to the past. The keyword for all three aspects is sparagmos: something seemingly whole is torn apart, raising the question of how the scattered pieces can be restored to the former—or a new—wholeness. The first question had already been raised by the last part of the Exercises for Actors by exploring the relationship between language and body as well as between text and performance, but without presenting a particular result. Grüber took it in another direction. As others had done before him, he abridged the text of the tragedy. However, he used not only one translation—that by Wolfgang Schadewaldt—but seven others in addition, and incorporated excerpts from the original Greek text as well as from other texts, such as Wittgenstein’s diaries. The production did not focus on or try to justify such a ‘rewriting’ of the text by bringing forth and articulating any kind of message. Rather, a wholly new kind of relationship between the textual excerpts and the spoken words, the bodies, actions, objects, and images on stage was established, one that did not allow for a linear or mutual explanation, interpretation, or clarification. The sparagmos of the text did not result in the restoration of the old or a new wholeness or in a ‘common meal’ that would bind together all those participating in a community. Rather, the production revolved around fragments, each of which enabled the spectators to complete the picture in their own imagination while denying the possibility of uniting the individual pieces into one meaningful whole. In this manner the production realized a completely new concept of theatre—a theatre of images—radical at that time. Grüber here turned the so-called Regietheater (director’s theatre) into a spectator’s theatre. The enigmatic images liberated the spectators from the demand to decipher any messages. The images were self-referential in a very peculiar manner. From the point of view of the spectator, they were arranged in a completely haphazard and unpredictable manner, relating neither to the text nor to the preceding or following images. The sudden, seemingly unmotivated appearance of an image drew the attention of the spectators towards it alone; they focused on the particular bodies, movements, objects, and sounds before or around them. Through the very nature of these images the spectators’ perception adopted a certain quality. The images excluded the possibility of other ulterior meanings, purposes,

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or contexts. Perception was performed as a contemplation of the image for its own sake. In this contemplative mode of perception, free of any intention, the perceived image presented itself to the spectator in a way that seemed to reveal its innermost ‘mystery’—it had nothing to do with the text and was different for every single spectator. Paradoxically, however, the same images had the opposite effect after a while. They triggered, almost explosively so, the most diverse memories, fantasies, and associations in the spectators and aroused various physiological, emotional, energetic, and motoric responses. Neither the text nor the dramatic characters could be credited with the outcome of this process; rather, it was the encounter of the individual spectators with their own imagination. Of course, in retrospect, each of the images could be interpreted differently. The first image, for instance, could be read and explained in terms of Foucault’s impressive studies on The Birth of the Clinic (1963, English 1973), Mental Illness and Psychology (1954, English 1976), and Madness and Civilization (1961, English 1965). In order to deal with Pentheus’ first appearance one could delve into Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations (1953) and discuss the relationship between theatre and theory—both terms rooted in the Greek word θέα (théa) meaning ‘show’. How does theatre reflect on itself through theatrical means? Does it need ‘names’ or even concepts? Each image, particularly in retrospect, seemed to invite the spectator to engage in such kinds of investigations and enquiries. Each was able to set in motion an endless process of interpretation without allowing for an unambiguous, consistent reading that could be logically related to that of the other images. Of course, such a thought process could have been set in motion while the performance was going on, especially due to the long duration of some of these images. However, serious reflection could begin only afterwards. This mode of perception greatly contributed to the individualization of the spectators. However, it did not isolate them from each other. Rather, they all shared certain experiences triggered by the images—experiences that bore the potential to transform. The experiences were caused by the particular attitude towards the past revealed by the images, thus developing an idea Stein introduced in Exercises for Actors. Both parts of the Antiquity Project, and in particular The Bacchae, could be experienced as a meditation on the fundamental strangeness and inaccessibility of the distant past—be it archaic or

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classical Greek culture. Grüber’s production demonstrated in an impressive way that the theatrical elements meant to represent the past were primarily related to our own world and told us more about ourselves and our present than about former times. On the contemporary stage, a revival of the ancient Greek world will always be impossible. What remains are only fragments—play texts torn out of their original contexts—which cannot convey their original meaning. They are distant and alien, and therefore it is not possible to stage them as if they were contemporary plays—as, for instance, Reinhardt had proclaimed. This insight, which was deepened by the enigmatic images, was conveyed with a particular intensity in the final image. Instead of having Cadmus put the fragments and pieces of Pentheus’ dismembered body back together, Grüber created the image of a never-ending process of sewing together the bits and pieces of the contemporary spectator’s clothes. I read this image as a commentary on the process of staging Greek texts where the textual ‘body’ had to be dismembered in the process. It was accessible not as a whole but only as individual components. It would be a delusion to think that the performance could ever render the text on stage. The performance could be no more than an endless sewing-together of the pieces of a contemporary spectator’s clothes. Even sacrificing the text-body would not redeem us or admit us into the paradise of an unmediated understanding of ancient Greek tragedy. By performing a sacrificial ritual on the text, the production of a Greek tragedy at best would allow us to reflect on our fundamental distance from it and perhaps insert some fragments of it into our present theatre and contemporary culture. It cannot accomplish a return to any origins—whatever those might have been. They are gone and lost for ever. The idea of the cultural identity of the Bildungsbürger derived from Greek culture hence was not simply undermined—as in Exercises for Actors—but shattered to its very core. The Bacchae performed a sparagmos of the cultural identity of the Bildungsbürgertum to which the majority of the spectators belonged. It was dismembered and any attempt to mend it—to sew the pieces back together—would create nothing but a patchwork consisting of fragments from our own contemporary world. Therefore, the first Antiquity Project of the Schaubühne and, in particular, Grüber’s Bacchae marked a turning point in the history of the relationship between the cultural identity of the Bildungsbürger and performances of Greek tragedies. In fact, it would change dramatically

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from that point onwards, as we have already seen in our discussion of the two Frankfurt productions. This change marked a point of no return. The Bildungsbürger could not claim Greek tragedy as their property any more—as it was no longer possible for theatres in the Federal Republic to mount Greek tragedies in order to affirm the Bildungsbürger’s former convenient but fictitious cultural identity. The Bacchae challenged its audiences to reflect on the issue of identity, both cultural and individual, and on its foundations. As such, our study could end here, for Grüber’s production revealed that the cultural identity of the Bildungsbürger, as far as its relationship to ancient Greece was concerned, was built on false assumptions. However, this as well as the Frankfurt productions did not merely destabilize it but also brought forth a new aesthetics that enabled them to take on new functions regarding the political and social situation—that is, to redefine the relationship between theatre and politics as well as between theatre and society. Concerning the Schaubühne, the question arises as to why it mounted another Antiquity Project six years later—Peter Stein’s Oresteia, which lasted nine whole hours. And why did they take recourse to the only surviving trilogy, among the oldest extant tragedies, while the first Antiquity Project dealt with the supposed ritualistic ‘origins’ of theatre via one of the youngest ancient Greek tragedies known to us? Finally, how was the second Antiquity Project related to the first? What was its purpose, having severed the bond with the myth of ancient Greece and, in particular, with Greek tragedy as a defining factor of the Bildungsbürgertum’s cultural identity? The second part of this chapter will address these and related questions.

Antiquity Project II: Peter Stein’s Oresteia: Reflections on the historical process The Oresteia premiered on 18 October 1980 at the small theatre of the Schaubühne at Hallesches Ufer. It was the venue’s last production. A few weeks later, the new home of the Schaubühne—a former cinema built by the architect Erich Mendelsohn at Lehniner Platz in 1927–8 and redesigned by Jürgen Sawade—was inaugurated. The Oresteia thus marked the end of an era. (Four years later, Peter Stein left the Schaubühne as its Chief Director but continued to stage plays there.)

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The preparations for Antiquity Project II were even more extensive than those for the first one. They took almost a year. Once again, a bulk of literature on ancient Greek history, mythology, rituals, theatre, and philosophy was consulted. Different translations as well as a number of commentaries on the trilogy were examined. Using primarily the commentaries by Fraenkel, Groeneboom, Rose, Denniston, Page, and Thomson, and the translations of Mazon, Untersteiner, Lloyd-Jones, Droysen, Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, Buschor, Werner, Ebener, and some recommendations by Karl Reinhardt, Peter Stein created a new translation, which then underwent several changes following suggestions by actors during the rehearsal process (cf. Stein 1997: 7–9). A booklet with this translation replaced the programme notes. This time, the company deemed it necessary to prepare the spectators, too. Half a year before the premiere a series of preparatory workshops led by Peter Stein and supported by some of the actors began. As Stein explained in the second workshop (attended by the critic of the Frankfurter Rundschau, Peter Iden), this step was meant to ascertain what associations were triggered by names such as Apollo or Athena. Among his own associations he mentioned ‘Pizzeria Apoll’ and Athena as the trademark of the French automobile manufacturer Citroën. He clearly wanted to begin on a lowbrow note, further reflected in the tone of his question: ‘What do you even make of a theatre rummaging around in this old junk?’ (see Iden, Frankfurter Rundschau, 21 May 1980a). It seems evident that Stein did not believe his audience had undergone any kind of ‘classical’ Bildung and thus needed a crash course in ancient Greek culture, which included, for instance, a reading and discussion of Hesiod’s cosmogony as part of the workshop. The workshops were partly meant to remedy the ‘shortcomings’ of those spectators who had not attended a grammar school (Gymnasium), where not only Latin but also Greek is taught. Stein’s praise of the Gymnasium seemed to echo the view predominant in the nineteenth century, as did his polemical confrontation of the Greek terms ‘democracy and politics’ with the Latin ‘justice (the law)’ and ‘republic’ when asking the rhetorical question as to who would not prefer the Greek over the Latin words. The other focus of the workshops was a reflection and discussion on problems relating to the text—that is, its construction, genealogy, and translation. The substance of the workshops might lead one to conclude that Stein considered two aspects to be of major importance to ensure the appropriate

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reception of the production—a solid knowledge of ancient Greek culture and an understanding of the problems linked to the translation of the text. To some extent, this recalls the Potsdam Antigone, where a classicist served as advisor to the director to make sure that the latest research on ancient Greek culture and theatre was taken into consideration, which was also known to the majority of the spectators or at least conveyed to them by the production. Moreover, an unabridged and ‘faithful’ translation of the text was used in the Potsdam Antigone and, or at least so it seemed, in Stein’s production, too. Was the second Antiquity Project based on a revival of historicism? And was it meant to educate its audiences in a now absent classical learning, thus transforming them back into Bildungsbürger in the traditional sense? Taking into consideration the achievements of the first Antiquity Project, this seems rather unlikely. As the analysis will show, the recourse to ancient Greek culture and theatre as well as Stein’s translation served completely different ends. At the heart of the project were reflections on history, specifically that of European theatre, as well as on the introduction of the constitutional state based on the rule of law. It is true that there were allusions to or indeed quotations from the theatrical conventions and religious customs of ancient Greece. To begin with, the nine-hour duration and the performance of an entire trilogy alluded to the Dionysus Festival in Athens. The festive character of the event was underlined by providing food and drink. Each spectator was handed a voucher, valid for one food item and one non-alcoholic beverage to be redeemed during one of the two hour-long intermissions. The auditorium (design by Karl-Ernst Herrmann) alluded to the Theatre of Dionysus in Athens: It gradually sloped up to the back wall in low, feltcovered steps on which approximately 400 spectators—instead of the 14,000 in Athens—sat uncomfortably, leaving a broad passage leading from the door at the back left side to the stage for the entrance of actors. Besides such allusions to conventions of ancient Greek theatre, the production featured archaeological reconstructions of objects and actions. The rituals in the second tragedy, The Libation Bearers, were performed with the greatest possible precision in accordance with the latest research on the topic—the offering of flour presented by the servants on the platform, or the libations of wine and milk which Electra (Tina Engel) poured over Agamemnon’s tomb. Each action was clearly recognizable and describable, although the meaning of each remained

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obscure. Athena (Jutta Lampe) in the Eumenides, too, looked exactly as if she had just climbed down from an ancient pedestal or out of a vase painting. However, none of these allusions or quotations could be mistaken as an attempt to convey a historically accurate or ‘true’ picture of ancient Greece. Rather, they served a different purpose in the context of the reflection on history—and on theatre’s different views on it—which was performed over the course of the trilogy. In some respects, Stein continued and transformed the reflections on the origin of theatre out of rituals in the Exercises for Actors six years earlier, complementing them by thoughts on the introduction of the rule of law. In this context, the spatial arrangement is of paramount significance. The stage and the auditorium seemed to be clearly separated from each other. The stage was raised to a level considerably higher than that of all or most of the auditorium. However, five steps led from the auditorium to the stage at the centre of the platform. During the first two parts of the trilogy, Agamemnon (subtitled Der Schlächter wird geschlachtet—The Butcher is Butchered) and The Libation Bearers (subtitled Der Befreier wird wahnsinnig—The Liberator Turns Mad), the stage was barely used. It was enclosed by a gigantic wall made of black panels. A large door in the middle of this ‘iron curtain’ was left open a crack, for instance, to allow Clytemnestra to come out in order to talk to the citizens of Argos from the platform. At the end of both parts, however, it was wide open to allow the ekkukléma—another quotation from Greek stage conventions—to be rolled out. A ‘tableau’ was created on it summarizing the two plays’ subtitles: Clytemnestra (Edith Clever), legs astride, could be seen wearing a blood-stained white blouse and pointing a huge sword dripping with blood at the slain bodies of Agamemnon (Gunter Berger) and Cassandra (Elke Petri) (see Illustration 8.6). Orestes (Udo Samel), wearing a similar shirt, stood bent over the remains of Clytemnestra and Aegisthus (Peter Fitz), one hand bearing a sword also dripping with blood, the other holding an olive branch. It was not until the intermission preceding the third part, The Eumenides (subtitled Die Vampire segnen die Stadt—The Vampires Bless the City), that the black wall was first spray-painted white (the temple of Apollo) and then removed over the course of the performance. The stage, now linked to the auditorium via several flights of five stairs each, was from this point onwards used by the protagonists: Athena (Jutta Lampe),

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Illustration 8.6 Peter Stein: Antiquity Project II: Aeschylus’ Oresteia Part I: Agamemnon; Clytemnestra (Edith Clever) pointing her sword at the slain bodies of Agamemnon (Gunter Berger) and Cassandra (Elke Petri).

who floated in above the heads of the spectators to reach the stage on a swing of sorts (see Illustration 8.7); Apollo (Peter Simonischek), who rode down to it in an elevator; Orestes; the citizens of Athens, who served as judges sitting at a long, narrow table; and the Erinyes. During the first two parts the auditorium had been kept more or less dark. Light entered from time to time only through the open upper left doors and at both sides in the front, sending bright rays through the darkness. At times light emanated only from the dim glow of the torches that the chorus of old men used as they shuffled through the auditorium. In the third part, however, the stage was brightly lit. The closed stage of the first and second parts meant that the auditorium became the performance space. At the centre of the sloping felt steps for the spectators stood a table reserved for the chorus of the old men, the citizens of Argos, dressed in grey, worn-out coats and matching hats— that is, in modern dress. They assembled there again and again from the various places to which they had spread out throughout the auditorium, among the spectators. In the second part, Agamemnon’s tomb was erected on the same spot, where Electra (Tina Engel) and her servants,

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Illustration 8.7 Peter Stein: Antiquity Project II: Aeschylus’ Oresteia Part III: The Eumenides; Athena (Jutta Lampe) sailing in on a swing above the heads of the spectators.

dressed in black garments and headscarves to resemble wailers in rural parts of Greece, poured their libations. In the third part, too, the auditorium was used on occasion by various actors, but this was the exception rather than the rule. The Erinyes, for example, advanced in formation to the stage through the auditorium, and, after Orestes had been acquitted, he departed through the auditorium, shaking hands with various spectators as if thanking them personally for his acquittal. This changing spatial use referred to shifts within the relationship between the auditory (auditorium) and the visual space (theatron). The almost total darkness of the first two parts was designed primarily as an auditory space (see Illustration 8.8). Human voices could be heard articulating strange sounds—in a manner similar to the figures in the Exercises for Actors in the ‘hunt’ section years before. The old men, for example, produced an insistent murmur with their lips closed, which gradually turned into a whimpering, whistling sound. The ololugmos (ritual ululation) serves as another example here—a screaming, singing, humming sound produced by a fluttering voice and falsetto, similar to crickets chirping or to the call of a bird. Most of the time, however, the voices articulated verbal sounds. Words emerged from the darkness,

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Illustration 8.8 Peter Stein: Antiquity Project II: Aeschylus’ Oresteia Part I: Agamemnon; auditory space: the chorus of old men assembling around their table in the auditorium while Clytemnestra (Edith Clever) appears in the opening of the stage to listen to the Messenger (Roland Schäfer).

creating a disembodied language. This arrangement recalls the last part of the Exercises, where the body disappeared as language materialized, and language deteriorated into stammering once the body was no longer visible. Here, the relationship between language and body was defined differently, although not in such an extreme or pronounced way. The way in which the words emerged from the almost invisible bodies was rather remarkable. One of the old men murmured a sentence, which the others, scattered across the space, repeated, varying its volume, pitch, and tempo. The thus ‘orchestrated’ sentences of the chorus reached the ears of the spectators from various directions. Somewhere, a Greek word was heard, complementing and contrasting with the German. The German words and sentences following it appeared to be vain attempts to find adequate translations for a Greek term—a device somewhat reminiscent of the chorus in Grüber’s Bacchae. Other meanings emerged through these strange sounds. In the auditory space, sound and meaning were directly related to one another. The particular materiality of the voices articulating verbal sounds coupled with the specific tonal quality of the language created new meanings through the juxtaposition of different

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sounds. Audiences were thereby made aware of the difficulty of finding adequate German translations of Greek terms. It was not just the chorus that addressed this issue of how to deal with language. The whole production focused on it. In constantly discovering new vocal–verbal variations, the fragile interdependency of sound and meaning was permanently tested, realized, and brought to the listeners’ attention. Nonetheless, as all critics emphasized, the story of the trilogy was told with the greatest possible clarity in this production. Stein’s translation comes into play here. It not only took into account current research and previous translations but, compared to the latter, is immediately striking for its great length—which resulted in the unusually long duration of the production. Stein refused to make a decision in favour of any one of all the possible translated versions. Instead, he incorporated the full spectrum. This meant the creation of a translation that, although it tells the old story with impressive clarity, nonetheless continually points to the difficulties in attributing meaning to it today. Stein’s philological precision, manifested in his decision not to dismiss a variant that current research mentioned as a possible alternative, did not lead to a ‘faithful’ translation but rather questioned the entire undertaking in principle. Each variant sounded different; each sound evoked another meaning. The production did not convey any ‘original’ meanings of the ancient and distant story, or one particular present-day meaning. Rather, it reflected on the deeply problematic relationship between historicity and topicality underlying the theatrical process when using an ancient foreign text as material. That is to say, not only did the allusions to and quotations from ancient Greek elements remain fragments that could not convey an unambiguous, clear meaning or form a consistent whole. The translation, too, was not presented as ‘faithful’ to the original but negated the very possibility of faithfulness. In both cases, the emphasis lay on ancient Greece’s inaccessibility. In this respect, the second Antiquity Project built on the first. In other respects the two diverged, partly even significantly. The auditory space of the first two parts of the trilogy can be described as a verbal space (Sprachraum). When the wall was removed and the stage became visible in the third part, the visual and auditory spaces achieved equality. At this point, the play shifted from the auditorium to the stage that, brightly lit, offered a clear focal point for the spectator’s gaze

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Illustration 8.9 Peter Stein: Antiquity Project II: Aeschylus’ Oresteia Part III: The Eumenides; visual space: Athena (Jutta Lampe), Apollo (Peter Simonischek), and Orestes (Udo Samel) with the citizens on the stage as the chorus of the Erinyes marches in.

(see Illustration 8.9). The entrance of the gods—Apollo in an elevator, Athena on a swing—appeared comical, so that some critics were reminded of Offenbach and his operettas (cf. Wolfgang Ignée, Stuttgarter Zeitung, 21 October 1980; Hellmuth Karasek, Der Spiegel, 10, 20 October 1980, 211–14; Rolf Michaelis, Die Zeit, 24 October 1980). This set a new tone, even if the Erinyes, panting monsters with claws donning silvery black outfits, were perceived as shocking and offputting. The language, however, became even more ambiguous. Now the actions and images on stage frequently served the purpose of commenting on the spoken words or emphasizing particular aspects of their meaning. For instance, after Athena (v. 885, 968) had succeeded in convincing the Erinyes to settle down in Athens as Eumenides by appealing to Peitho, the goddess of persuasion, the citizens of Athens accompanied them down the steps leading from the stage to chairs placed between the flights of stairs. They tied the same purple garments around the Erinyes on which Clytemnestra had persuaded Agamemnon to tread when he entered the palace (see Illustration 8.10). They were bound so tightly that they could not move. The action on stage was a

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Illustration 8.10 Peter Stein: Antiquity Project II: Aeschylus’ Oresteia Part III: The Eumenides; Athena (Jutta Lampe) watches the citizens (Werner Rehm, Peter Fitz, and Gunter Berger) prepare the purple cloth with which to tie up the Erinyes.

comment on the notion of persuasion, as well as on its content, for the German word einwickeln, which best describes what the citizens did to the Erinyes, is twofold. It means ‘to wrap’ as well as ‘to talk someone into something’ or ‘to trick someone’. Athena persuading the Erinyes thus spanned the different meanings of einwickeln, the consequences of which were enacted on stage. This involved a pun on another German word, einbinden, which means ‘to bind’ or ‘to bandage’ but also ‘to include’. Athena promised the Erinyes that she would include them in the community of Athens and in the polis. The citizens of Athens who ‘bound’ and ‘bandaged’ them, however, activated another semantic potential of the term. The Einbindung of the Eumenides also entailed their incapacitation and paralysis. While the tableaux at the end of the first and second parts could be read as illustrations of the subtitles, here the tableau with the Eumenides tied up in purple cloth and in the foundation of the polis revealed that the subtitle, The Vampires Bless the City, was no more than a myth—it did not correspond to the reality on stage. At the end of the performance the visual space superimposed itself on the auditory space.

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Finally, the stage became an exclusively visual while the auditorium was turned back into an auditory space: a never-ending silent voting process was performed on stage as the audience began to applaud. The voting process continued until the last spectator had left. The voting process that took place before the ‘binding’ and ‘bandaging’ of the Erinyes was one of the very rare instances where Stein had changed the text. While in Aeschylus’ extant text the tie of votes determines the outcome of the voting process in favour of Orestes, Stein decided to steer a slightly different course. Accordingly, he rearranged Athena’s words: Mine shall this task be, to give judgement last; And this my vote to Orestes will I reckon. For of no mother was I born: in all, Save to be wedded, with whole heart I approve The male. I am strongly of the father’s side. Therefore a wife’s fate shall I less esteem, Who slew her husband, the master of her house. Orestes wins, even with equal votes. (Aeschylus 1922, The Eumenides, v. 734–41)

While in Aeschylus’ text these lines precede the verses 742–53, in which Athena, Orestes, the chorus leader, and Apollo make their last comments and Athena announces Orestes’ acquittal as a result of the tie, here a judge announced the draw, followed by Athena’s words as quoted. Thus her additional vote in favour of Orestes decides the outcome. Stein further added the line, ‘The accused has the benefit of the doubt’—that is, Athena appeals to a principle of law unknown in Athens, diminishing Apollo’s and her own justification of the patriarchal order. After Athena has pacified the Erinyes, transformed them into Eumenides now ‘integrated’ into the foundation of the city state, and departed herself, the ten judges, who were dressed in blue business suits with ties, began repeating the voting process, which concluded the performance. In a seemingly endless cycle, one man after another proceeded to the two ballot boxes, lowered one hand into the white box, the other into the black box, to release his stone invisibly and exit, only to repeat the process when his turn came again. This ending made the spectators feel rather uncomfortable. They clearly did not know whether and at what point to begin or to end their applause. The critics also expressed their concern about this final ambiguity. While some condemned it, others

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tried to restrict it to a single interpretation. Among the first was Henning Rischbieter, who wrote in Theater heute: What does it mean? An arrogant way to suppress the applause, which anyway can’t sufficiently honour the yearlong effort of the Schaubühne. An indication of the colourless daily grind that democracy, too, faces? Or its denunciation as a voting machine that scraps ideas and ideals? The handshaking Orestes on the one hand, the monotonously rotating voting citizens on the other—neither has the power of a sharp, stinging paradox that would also have made a good ending but merely presents the dullness of prevarications in opposite directions. The undertaking lacks decisiveness . . . (Henning Rischbieter, Theater heute, 1 (1981), 49)

Another critic understood this infinite process of voting as continuing ‘until today. The bourgeois legal order has been established’ (Ortrun Egelkraut, Spandauer Volksblatt, 21 October 1980). The same critic regarded the production as attempting ‘to approach the theatre of antiquity—as it might have been—from today’s perspective’, which sounds as if the production was indeed merely concerned with a historicist approach. This is in sync with the opinion of another critic, who deemed it a great example of Bildungstheater (H.W.L., Deutsche Gegenwart, 27 November 1980). A number of critics shared the opinion that the ending, in particular, made it clear ‘that with the ‘Oresteia’ we are at the beginning of European culture, the basis of which is legal security’ (Georg Hensel, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 20 October 1980). The critic of Die Zeit even titled his review ‘The birth of the state of law amidst blood rain’ (Michaelis 1980). Those critics who did not feel too puzzled by the ambiguity not only of the ending but of the entire production thus tried to identify its overall meaning. Only Peter Iden, who lacked even the slightest sympathy for Neuenfels’ Medea, took a productive approach to this undertaking: Peter Stein’s production of the ‘Oresteia’ of Aeschylus at Berlin’s Schaubühne is an attempt to find reason and justification, measure and form for artistic work and political attitudes today by taking recourse to the beginnings of theatre and of political thinking. The particularity of the performance lies in its avoidance to comment on the plot of the ancient tragedy and its immanent questions with immediate self-assurance. (Peter Iden, Frankfurter Rundschau, 21 October 1980b)

Yet, rather than proceeding according to this insight, Iden tries to reduce the production to three concepts, which in his view serve as its

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leitmotif—‘Tun—Leiden—Lernen’ (‘To Act—to Suffer—to Learn’)—and determine human life at all times, deeming it ‘universally’ valid: The fact that they belong together is the political hypothesis on which Stein insists—contrary to all curative doctrines that seductively paint a picture of the possibility of a pain-free life in a society without problems. This is one message: to act means to suffer. The other, just as controversial today, is this: Suffering is reduced through the acceptance of the necessity of an order, more precisely: a legal order that is binding for all members of a society and guarantees their freedom by limiting it. (Iden 1980b)

Narrowing the production down to these two ‘messages’, Iden comes to the conclusion that the Schaubühne, a former leftist theatre, ‘has arrived at a conservative position, which, however, must not be seen in the negative light of the term’s daily political usage’. In view of the ‘signs of decay or at least instability everywhere’, which he found to be endemic in the Federal Republic at the time, Iden regards this ‘conservative position’ as ‘a progressive achievement at this point’ (ibid.). Other critics challenged Iden’s standpoint, particularly those who, unlike Iden, did not give up but maintained their leftist position, such as Rischbieter. In his essay he sets out to refute Iden’s statement by taking recourse to elements from the production and the translation, reaching the following conclusion: ‘I do not believe in Iden’s message’ (Rischbieter 1981: 49). Another critic even calls Stein’s approach ‘bourgeois illiteracy’, which he contrasts with Aeschylus, who ‘doesn’t falsify a long obsolete order with a new gloss but [represents] the latest and better organization of society’. He even accuses ‘Stein’s agonizingly long theatre-historical period furniture’ of paralysing ‘the political imagination . . . in times of a scientifically proven but yet to be realized “dream of the golden age” ’ (Michael Ben, Deutsche Volkszeitung, 13 November 1980). As this rather short and by no means comprehensive synopsis of critical opinions—the twenty-six reviews I examined constitute but a small percentage of the total number—suggests, the production’s ambiguity allowed the critics and the other spectators to distil from the performance the most diverse, even contradictory, statements concerning its meaning, stand, and positioning on the political spectrum. However, most agreed that—despite or because of its ambiguities—it was an overwhelmingly impressive enterprise that brought forth a new theatre aesthetics. In order to investigate the relationship between the second and the first Antiquity Project of the Schaubühne, this ambiguity will serve as my

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starting point, as it was a consequence of the particular reflections on the historical process carried out via the performance. As we have seen, the references to ancient Greek theatrical conventions and ritual customs did not serve to revive them on today’s stage or to replicate ancient Greek culture and theatre in a ‘truthful’ way. Rather, they testified to the inaccessibility of the past. In addition, they constantly reminded the spectators of that past from which the trilogy, now performed in a different era and place, originated. These devices counteracted easy appropriation and topicalization and instead kept the spectators at a certain distance. As already stated, in this respect the second Antiquity Project continued and expanded the reflections of the first. With reference to the text, however, the second Antiquity Project took a different stance. It did not propose a dismemberment of the text—its sparagmos—as Grüber’s Bacchae had done. On the contrary, it even bolstered it by incorporating all the different variants of the consulted translations whenever this seemed justified to Stein. However, this did not mean that the status of a controlling authority was accorded to the text here. Rather, the text itself was thus shown in its ambiguity, which eschewed a single overarching meaning. Theatrical conventions and other customs of a past culture are in many respects unable to speak to us today to reveal their ‘original’ or ‘authentic’ use and meaning. The same applies to the text, especially when it is written in a long dead language. It cannot speak to us directly. The necessary translation therefore only increases its ambiguity if it seeks to avoid the trap of boiling it down to one of its possible meanings. And yet the text is one of the most important links to the past for the theatre. As Peter Stein explained almost twenty years later: It is the absurd miracle of European theatre that it creates dramatic texts which can be handed down and thus, even today, enable an actor to say: ‘I am Prometheus’. This is not possible in any other art. When today someone paints in the style of Piero della Francesca and states, I used paint made from eggshells, then it is, at best, a copy. The actor does not copy anything. He embodies the part, as it was embodied 2,500 years ago. Through the text that is handed down and in a rather adventurous way, he is able to make contact directly with something which happened 2,500 years ago. (Stein, quoted in von Becker 1997)

Even this ‘direct contact’, however, cannot appropriate the past but creates new ambiguities. That is to say a production can neither make

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the text speak for itself and so revive a past culture on stage, nor treat it as if it were a contemporary rendition as a means to deal with topical problems. This problem arises whenever a text from the distant past is used. It forms the conditio sine qua non for all such staging processes. The Oresteia highlights this basic condition. The production reflected on it and challenged the spectator to do the same. It used and emphasized the inevitable ambiguity as a means to expose the intricate relationship between its historicity and topicality. This raises the question as to how this was achieved and what was accomplished as a result of it. To find an answer, let us return to the sequence of the three parts. The first two parts took place in the auditorium, which was almost completely darkened—that is, it was a space that alluded to the Greek theatron, but, instead of imitating the sunshine that illuminated it, maintained the modern convention of an unlit auditorium. However, since the auditorium was used as the performance area, its darkness could also be related to the actions taking place. Two collectives were present—the audience and the chorus. Particularly during the first part, the members of the chorus spread out all over the auditorium and recited their lines from among the spectators. Both groups were associated with two different times—the mythical Argos and the present. The chorus of old men was identified as the citizens of Argos, wearing modern suits and hats, and using electric torches. They acted and spoke from among the audience and addressed them as citizens of Argos. Because of the darkness, the two collectives could not always be clearly distinguished from each other in this predominantly auditory space. In this regard, too, this was a collective, shared space. Those who committed or would commit the disastrous deeds and those who suffered from them—that is, Agamemnon, Clytemnestra, Orestes, Cassandra, and Electra—stepped out of it—for example, through the illuminated crack in the black panels. All were dressed in modern clothes rather than ancient costumes (with the exception of the goddess Athena!). All of them spoke in fluent, colloquial German, even if their words referred to ancient Greece. In the third part, the now open and brightly lit stage and the dark auditorium were seemingly separated from each other but linked by several flights of stairs. The sensory differences came into play and were highlighted here. While sound provides an intimate and more immediate sensory experience by invading the body of the listener, the

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eye requires and maintains a certain distance from what it perceives. Thus, the lit stage may have symbolized the passage from a matriarchal to a patriarchal order, and from the mythical time of revenge and counter-revenge—here originating in the alastor, the curse on the House of Atreus—to the historical time of the constitutional state and the concomitant inauguration of the rule of law. The latter literally marked an ‘enlightened’ space, where the motives of a deed are examined and arguments are weighed, albeit with some irony. The passage from one to the other was underlined by the dramatic figures’ mode of entry and exit: The goddess Athena sailed in over the heads of the spectators and the Erinyes, and took up position above them all. The god Apollo descended in an elevator from the fly gallery. Thus, the most ardent defendants of the patriarchal order came from a place far removed from the audience. The Erinyes made their entrance from the auditorium, the dark space of the two collectives, in accordance with their affiliations and, at the same time, underlining the peculiar position of the spectators—poised between the times, so to speak. Orestes exited through the auditorium, followed by a spotlight that singled him out along with each spectator whom he thanked for his acquittal. Here, Orestes and the spectators no longer appeared as members of collectives but as individuals testifying to the beginning of a new era. The spatial shift from dark auditorium to brightly lit stage mirrored the storyline, which culminated in the ‘birth’ of the constitutional state— that is, the rule of law, defined and guaranteed by a majority vote. Yet both spaces involved ambiguous words and actions. The ‘integration’ of the Erinyes as Eumenides in the basement of the city state and, even more so, the never-ending voting process were highly ambiguous, as reflected in the diverse critical interpretations. This ambiguity also applied to the relationship between historicity and topicality highlighted by the ending. For most critics, the first voting process referred to the historical event of setting up the Areopagus, the ‘birth of the rule of law’, as it was described in many reviews (notwithstanding the fact that in 461 BC— that is, three years before the performance of the Oresteia—the constitution was radically altered by limiting the mandate of the Areopagus. It was no longer permitted to deal with political affairs. Instead, its responsibilities were restricted to murder and attempted murder cases.) The second voting process at the end in turn raised questions concerning

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today’s democracy. Strangely enough, none of the reviews I read established a connection to the activities of the second generation of the Red Army Faction (RAF), which emerged after the key figures of the first had been arrested. In June 1979—that is, shortly before the rehearsals for the Oresteia began, the RAF made an attempt on the life of NATO’s Commander-in-Chief, Alexander M. Haig, who was lucky to escape. Against this backdrop, it would have made sense also to relate the Erinyes to the terrorists plaguing the country and to explain the voting process as an attempt to keep them ‘bound’. The ending could thus be seen as taking a stand against terrorism at that time, championing democratic principles, and warning against their neglect. However, in view of the extensive research conducted by the company on ancient Greek culture and the preparatory workshops held to familiarize audiences with it, such a topicalization perhaps seems too crude. Be that as it may, each ‘reading’ relating the production not only to the passage from mythical to historical time in Greece’s distant past, but also to the state of democracy in the Federal Republic at that point explains why the Schaubühne chose the Oresteia over Antigone as the more pertinent Greek tragedy. In this sense, the production can be regarded as political theatre. The aesthetic and the political dimension were interconnected in a novel way in this production, with a twofold effect: It expressly referred back to the time when the tragedy was first performed by emphasizing the inaccessibility and inscrutability of that era, despite the reconstruction of certain elements, while also, albeit more subtly, relating the plot of the trilogy to the present in which it was performed, yet without singling out one particular topical event, condition, discussion, and so on. The text played a special role in this context by enabling a ‘direct contact’ between past and present. Written in the past in a language now dead, it required translation to make it accessible to today’s audiences and provide a clear storyline. Owing to the production’s many ambiguities, however, there were no clear guidelines as to how to understand its action and viewpoints, and so on, so that it opened up the possibility for each and every spectator to make sense of it in his or her own way. While the question found in almost all reviews after The Bacchae six years earlier was ‘Why?’, the critics here felt confident in their understanding of the production, taking a clear stand for or against it because of their own interpretations. While Stein’s proceeding seemed conservative to some, others hailed it as progressive.

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From today’s viewpoint this appears as a highly intelligent and effective strategy to avoid the pitfalls of historicism, on the one hand, and unconditional topicalization, on the other. Whereas historicist or ostensibly historicist productions of Greek tragedies provided a fertile ground for the idealization and universalization of ancient Greece, topical productions tended completely to erase their distance and foreignness, justifying such an appropriation with the live nature of a theatre performance. Stein’s Oresteia not only evaded the risks entailed by both approaches. It also reflected the dynamic between past and present and challenged the spectators to undertake similar deliberations. In this sense, this was philosophical theatre, pointing back to Brecht’s Antigone and even to Goethe’s Ion. What Brecht found to be at least partially realized in Jessner’s Oedipus and tried to do in his Antigone, Stein achieved in the Oresteia. And, as Goethe strove to reflect on tragedy as a meaningful representation of the historical process in order to make the spectator aware of the historical distance and foreignness of the tragedy and to acquire the ability to define his own position, Stein’s production demanded that the spectator pondered the relationship between historicity and topicality to a comparable end. Readers might be surprised to find Stein mentioned in the context of having continued a project begun by Goethe’s Ion and further explored by Brecht’s Antigone. However, considering the different era and circumstances, the concept of a philosophical theatre must also be rethought and redefined. Despite Stein’s philological work on the text and his historical research on ancient Greek culture, the outcome can be labelled neither philological nor historical–archaeological theatre for the reasons explained. Rather, only philosophical theatre applies here, describing a theatre that reflects on the preconditions for coming-into-being through its own means and devices. In this sense, the philosophical theatre of Goethe’s Ion and Stein’s Oresteia marks the two historical moments after and before which productions of Greek tragedies were able to contribute to the cultural identity of the Bildungsbürgertum—even if Ion was conceived to contribute to the Bildung of its spectators. While Goethe’s Ion failed with its audiences, Stein’s Oresteia proved to be very successful—not only in Germany but also abroad. At the Schaubühne in Berlin, now located at Lehniner Platz, there were more than 100 performances until 1985. In these five years it was constantly reworked and developed further. It travelled to Stuttgart, Paris, Caracas,

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Warsaw, Rome, and Athens, where the last performances took place in 1985. It was staged indoors as well as in open-air theatres, as, for instance, in Caracas (1982), Ostia Antica (1984), and Athens. In 1993—that is, after the dissolution of the Soviet Union—Stein began work on a Russian version, which premiered at the Academic Theatre of the Russian Army in Moscow in 1994. The same year it was invited to Epidaurus. Despite the high artistic quality of both of Stein’s productions in general, two aspects made them particularly accessible to and successful with audiences in very different parts of the world. One is the clear and coherent narration of the story coupled with the many ambiguities that enabled a great variety of interpretative possibilities. The other was the performance’s exploration of the particular relationship between historicity and topicality to which spectators with different cultural backgrounds could respond differently. Instead of targeting the cultural identity of the German Bildungsbürgertum—which was already in a state of decline—Stein’s production addressed different audiences in different parts of the world. As had been the case with Reinhardt’s Oedipus seventy years earlier, Stein’s Oresteia went global.

9 Choric Theatre Between Tragic Experience and Participatory Democracy

Although performances of Greek tragedies had ceased to contribute to the cultural identity of the Bildungsbürger by the 1980s, they by no means disappeared from the German stages. Rather, as if a heavy burden had been lifted, the number of productions only increased.1 These productions pursued diverse artistic, social, and political agendas, sometimes forging a new theatre aesthetics in the process. As such, it would be worth examining them in another study. However—with the one notable exception of Einar Schleef ’s theatre (as we shall see)—they did not bring forth a new theatre form, as Reinhardt’s productions of Oedipus and the Oresteia did in initiating a new peoples’ theatre, the Theatre of the Five Thousand, which found its followers in the Soviet mass spectacles after the Revolution, in the celebrations of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) in the Weimar Republic (cf. Warstat 2005), in the Thing play movement of the Nazis as well as in Zionist pageants (cf. Fischer-Lichte 2005: 87–204)—that is, theatre forms that did not specifically address the Bildungsbürgertum.

1 The decade between the 1989–90 and the 1998–9 season saw an average of 23 new productions of Greek tragedies and of 406 performances being staged in Germany per season. The lowest rate can be found in the 1989–90 season with only 10 new productions and 164 performances. The highest was during the 1992–3 season with 39 new productions and 623 performances. In the first decade of the new millennium, the rate increased further with an average of 30 new productions and 538 performances. In the 2010–11 season the number of productions peaked at 39 with 706 performances. The annual percentage of Greek tragedies in the repertoires is between 2.0 and 2.5%. However, the critical response in newspapers and general public awareness conveys the impression that performances of Greek tragedies still play a much more important role.

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Performances of Greek tragedies were able to contribute to the cultural identity of the Bildungsbürgertum as long as they focused on the tragic hero or heroine—great individuals such as Oedipus, Antigone, Agamemnon, Electra, Orestes, Iphigenia, or Medea. Even if the chorus was prominent—as in Reinhardt’s or also in Stein’s productions—it was usually personalized in such a way that individual voices or even individuals could be identified; or it was a singing chorus, as in the Potsdam Antigone. A unified Sprechchor (speaking chorus) was not characteristic of performances of Greek tragedies—although some exceptions can be found. Rather, the unified Sprechchor was the trademark of performances that did not address the Bildungsbürgertum—as in most of the mass spectacles just mentioned. Moreover, Brecht used the speaking—as well as the singing—chorus extensively in order to take a stand for a collective and against the individualism that separated the citizens from society: ‘Man is not conceivable without human company . . . A collective is only viable from the moment that and for as long as the single lives of the individuals joined in it don’t matter’ (Brecht 1989–97: xxi. 401). In this manner Brecht turned the chorus into an important aesthetic means that highlighted the role of the collective (cf. Baur 1999: 51–74; Revermann 2013). In the Federal Republic, the unified Sprechchor was equated with a Nazi aesthetic. Productions of Greek tragedies therefore sought other solutions for the chorus, such as Sellner’s fugal speech or the reduction of the chorus to one person, as in Neuenfels’s Medea. Reintroducing a unified Sprechchor to productions of Greek tragedies seemed unthinkable, as did the creation of a new form—choric theatre—out of it. Yet this is what happened. With Einar Schleef ’s production of Die Mütter (The Mothers, 1986), a fusion of Euripides’ The Suppliant Women and Aeschylus’ Seven against Thebes, a choric theatre was created that was a far cry from the Nazi Volk community as well as from communist or socialist collectives. It marked the beginning of a series of experiments with choric theatre that have extended far into the new millennium and revealed it to be an influential form of political theatre, at times bordering on or even merging with new forms of political protest. The question arises why the chorus, a subject of detailed theoretical discourse during the first decades of the nineteenth century but mostly neglected as a deeply problematic element of Greek tragedies in terms of its staging, rose to such prominence from the late 1980s onwards,

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so much so that it gave rise to a new theatre form beyond productions of Greek tragedies while later impacting on them in remarkable ways. This final chapter will deal with this question by examining Schleef ’s production of The Mothers. This is not to say that the coming-into-being of choric theatre was exclusively due to this production or even to Schleef ’s entire oeuvre of choric theatre. Other factors also came into play and precipitated its emergence. However, Schleef ’s major role in this process cannot be denied and must be acknowledged accordingly.

The re-birth of tragedy out of the chorus Einar Schleef (1944–2001) grew up in the GDR and began his career as a stage director and designer there in the early 1970s. After studying stage design and painting—with Karl von Appen, Brecht’s stage designer, among others—he worked on his first productions together with B. K. Tragelehn at the Volksbühne (East Berlin) and at the Berlin Ensemble. While the first two, Katzgraben (1972) and Frühlings Erwachen (Spring Awakening, 1974), were already highly contested, the third one, Fräulein Julie (Miss Julie, 1975) was even cancelled. When in 1976 Schleef was granted permission to work in another country, he did not return to the GDR from his journey to Vienna. He pursued projects in Düsseldorf and Vienna without, however, completing them. Mainly, he worked as a painter and writer. After ten years of searching, he staged The Mothers at the Schauspiel Frankfurt in 1986 on invitation from the newly appointed Chief Director Günther Rühle, who before this had been the head of the feuilleton at the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and its leading theatre critic. It was his first production in the West, and Schleef ended up creating a new form of theatre, which he developed in all of his later productions until his untimely death in July 2001. In The Mothers he experimented for the first time with what would become his trademark: the chorus. Schleef conceived a unique space for his mise en scène. Except for the three back rows (for elderly or disabled people), all the seats in the auditorium were removed. The floor gradually slanted up to the back rows in shallow steps on which the spectators sat. From the stage a kind of catwalk, also sloping in steps, cut through the middle of the auditorium to the back wall, where it met with a second, narrow stage behind and above the remaining seats. The acting space was thus spread out in

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Illustration 9.1 Einar Schleef: Die Mütter; the stage and the choruses.

front of, behind, and through the midst of the spectators, so that they were often almost surrounded by the performers (see Illustration 9.1). The spatial arrangement was reminiscent of that in Stein’s Oresteia. The amphitheatric character of the space was reinforced by the lighting, with three tracks of blue, phosphorescent light cutting through it. Surprisingly, most critics failed to notice this. The same critics who had highly praised Stein’s Oresteia wrote devastating reviews of Schleef ’s production, competing with each other in their fury and disdain. As will be discussed later, this scorn was largely triggered by the particular way in which the choruses acted and were perceived. The performance featured three different choruses, all made up of women: the chorus of widows, dressed in black, who met Theseus (Martin Wuttke) holding axes in their hands; the chorus of virgins, dressed in white tulle in the first and in red in the second part; and the chorus of women, dressed in black overalls to resemble workers in an ammunition factory. The latter two occupied and dominated the space: the stage in front of the spectators; the catwalk, where, particularly during the second part, they ran up and down wearing black metalcapped boots; as well as the stage at the back—in some ways recalling the dynamic and energetic bodies in Reinhardt’s choruses that also occupied the whole space. The members of Reinhardt’s choruses, however, were

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intentionally individualized in terms of their costumes and movements. In The Mothers, the members of each chorus not only wore identical clothes but also moved their bodies to seemingly the same rhythm, performing the same movements, and speaking, whispering, shouting, roaring, howling, screaming, whimpering, and whining the same words in what appeared to be unison. Yet this did not mean that the chorus acted as a collective body, in which the individuality of the different chorus members dissolved and merged with the others. Rather, the chorus functioned as a permanent battleground between individuals, who wanted to join the community while maintaining their individual uniqueness, and the community, which strove for total incorporation of all its members and threatened those who insisted on their individuality with marginalization and alienation. Thus, a permanent tension existed in the chorus between the individual members and the community that they formed—a tension that caused an incessant flow within the chorus, a dynamic of transformation in terms of the individuals’ position in and relationship to the community. This tension never vanished. The chorus never transformed into a harmonious collective; rather, the tension only intensified. It made itself felt as an act of violence done to the individual by the community as well as to the community by the individual, over and over again. Although this tension was characteristic of all three choruses, they by no means all acted the same way. Rather, their power—also over the audience—grew over the course of the four-hour performance. The chorus of widows consisting of only seven women appeared rather weak at the beginning of the first part; they often knelt down and made their request to Theseus in a low voice. After having cleaned the stage floor on their knees, they sat down on benches at the back of the stage, speaking softly to themselves, and slowly falling asleep. This chorus, later joined by another consisting mainly of amateurs, some of them migrant women, culminated in the mothers’ lamentation after being allowed to bury their sons. Led by their king Adrastus, the twenty-five veiled, kneeling women clapped their hands rhythmically, shouting the Greek wails ‘Ai, ai! Io ai’ in a singing tone of voice and swinging their bodies accordingly. This went on for a seemingly endless duration: the lamentation could take up to forty minutes depending on the performance, during which they repeated the calls and sentences in different versions, partly rhythmically tuned, partly with increasing

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Illustration 9.2 Einar Schleef: Die Mütter; the mothers’ lament led by King Adrastus (Günther Vetter).

dissonance. The more ecstatic, vehement, and almost violent the lamentation became, the more some spectators ‘joined’ in by clapping hands and shouting commentaries. After the lamentation had finished, the women fell to the ground, and the audience applauded, frenetically yelling and bawling (see Illustration 9.2). As Dreyer (2014: 195–201) has convincingly demonstrated, the lamentation was choreographed in accordance with research from the first half of the twentieth century on ritual laments and the cult of the dead in ancient Greece, without, however, being intended as a re-enactment of such rituals. This mainly served two purposes. First, it interrupted the course of the narrative, making it difficult to follow and understand it, and functioned as a disruptive element regarding the order of representation. Second, the lamentation foregrounded the materiality of the voices and the excess they were able to bring forth as well as a particular aesthetic quality of the language as sounds ringing out in the space. This undermined the symbolic order of language. These two elements presumably triggered the different responses in the spectators. The lamentation of the chorus might have been received by some as violence done

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to them by the disruption of the order of representation and, most of all, by the force the women’s voices exerted over them. This violence became even more obvious in the second part whenever the chorus was confronted with another individual, such as Eteocles (Heinrich Giskes). The conflict between Eteocles and the women of Thebes was settled by a constant shift in position on the catwalk. The women lay on the steps while Eteocles stood upright above them, or Eteocles crouched while the women bent over him. The power struggle between the individual and the chorus was fought through the constant shifts in position and the varying force of the voices. When the women suddenly straightened and literally shouted Eteocles down solely by the strength of their voices, he fell to his knees and cowered. In the further course of the performance, the chorus of young women dressed in red tulle was joined by the chorus of the women dressed in black overalls, so that approximately fifty women, shouting ecstatically and trampling, dashed up and down the catwalk and over the small stage behind the spectators to surround the audience. For this part most of the stage was sealed off by an iron curtain. The chorus had to perform from either among or around the audience. At times the young women in red tulle also stood before the iron curtain, pummelling it with their fists as if demanding access to the stage (see Illustration 9.3). This spatial arrangement could be seen as a reversal of the arrangement in Stein’s Oresteia. While there the dark auditorium was used as a performance area in the first two parts, the stage being closed off most of the time, here the stage was accessible and utilized in the first part—most prominently for the lamentation—while in the second part the iron curtain remained closed. It was opened only at the end to reveal an empty stage. Forming a procession, the chorus walked down the steps of the catwalk and, rhythmically clapping their hands, their bodies swinging in winding dance-like movements, slowly advanced towards the stage. The women entered and took possession of it, their language and movements for the first time truly in unison. The finale seemed to be a fulfilment, the realization of a utopia. It was not the acquittal of a great individual or the inauguration of the rule of law that took place at the end but a harmonious dance of the chorus occupying the stage space. Schleef ’s treatment of the chorus refers back to Nietzsche. For Nietzsche the chorus constituted the origin of theatre and tragedy through the

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Illustration 9.3 Einar Schleef: Die Mütter; the chorus of virgins demanding access to the stage in front of the iron curtain.

incessant battle between two conflicting principles: that of individualization and that of its destruction or dismemberment. This is, in fact, what the choruses of The Mothers were all about. On the other hand, the production also recalled the ur-scene of all sacrifices as described by Girard. It seems that Schleef did draw on Girard’s work, as a passage on the chorus in his book Droge Faust Parzifal (Drug Faust Parsifal) suggests: The classical chorus presents a terrifying image: figures held tightly seek protection from each other while vehemently rejecting each other as if the proximity of another person might contaminate the air. This endangers the group itself, it will yield to any attack, precipitously and fearfully accept the idea of a necessary sacrifice, ostracise one member to buy its own freedom. Although the chorus is aware of its betrayal, it does not readjust its position, but rather places the victim in the position of someone who is clearly guilty. This is not just one aspect of the classical chorus but also a process which repeats itself every day. The enemy-chorus is made up not just of the millions of non-whites, perishing people, looters, and asylum-seekers, but also of alternative thinkers, especially those who speak our own language; they must be destroyed first at all cost. And yet, up to this day of reckoning, the classical constellation is alive; the chorus and the individual are still at war, the relationship of the individual to

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others who were previously isolated from each other continues to rumble, as does the relationship among them and as a whole against the chorus, which hopes to defeat them successfully. (Schleef 1997: 14)

Although Schleef ’s description of the situation at first glance follows the model of Girard’s ur-scene, he deviates from it in one important aspect: he does not judge or legitimize the violence of the chorus/community against the victim as cathartic, as serving the purpose of saving the community from its total destruction through mutual violence. Rather, he regards such violence as a permanently looming threat, which the community must always evade. For, on the one hand, it destroys an innocent victim and, on the other, it does not save the community from mutual violence among its members. The battle between individual and community is an ongoing, never-ending process. The tension that determines the relationship between individual and community cannot be made to disappear by collectively punishing one individual. In his view, the situation described by Schleef in the passage just quoted is characteristic not only of the classical chorus but also of modern societies—that is, of the post-industrial society of his time. As such it is not surprising that the permanent tension in The Mothers, which defined the relationship between individual and community, extended into the auditorium and also defined the relationship between actors and spectators. The spatial arrangement that allowed the actors to surround the spectators or to perform among them suggested the idea of a fundamental unity between actors and spectators, of a single—perhaps even harmonious—community made up of both groups. But this unity was permanently challenged, and the community collapsed again as soon as it emerged. This was partly due to the ambiguous spatial arrangement. The catwalk cut through the auditorium, unifying actors and spectators but also presenting a permanent threat of dismemberment in terms of the collective body of the audience, which it dissected. It also exposed the spectators to the chorus’s aggression when its members trampled up and down the steps overhead and shouted them down, so that the audience felt physically attacked and in turn responded either by retreating or with self-defence—as, for instance, by stomping, rhythmically clapping their hands, or even shouting comments. Here, too, a power struggle was unfolding between the chorus and the audience. The ecstatic chorus aimed to overwhelm the audience, to bring about a state of

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ecstasy that individual members of the audience opposed, either verbally or by leaving the auditorium. Others, however, seemed to succumb to the unification with the chorus out of either fear or pleasure. There were only rare moments when chorus and auditorium formed a harmonious community—moments of transition before pandemonium broke out again. Over the course of these battles and truces, the actors and spectators never performed any common actions, nor did it come about that members of one group physically attacked members of the other. Yet battles were indeed fought between actors and spectators, and, in spite of it, a community did briefly and occasionally come into being. No audience participation occurred in the sense of the happenings and other performance genres of the 1960s: the actors remained actors and the spectators remained spectators. Rather, what transpired between actors and spectators was due to the circulation of energy in the space. In this, rhythm played an enormous role. It was vital to the process of releasing, transferring, and exchanging energy between actors and spectators, to allow energy to circulate in the space. Such processes were triggered not only by the rhythmical movements of the actors but also by their speech. While it is true that energy circulating in a theatrical space can neither be seen nor heard, it can nevertheless be perceived. Rhythm is physical, a biological principle; it regulates our breathing as well as our heartbeat. In this sense, the human body is rhythmically tuned. That is why the human body is able to perceive rhythm as an external as well as an internal principle. We see certain movements and perceive them as rhythmical; we hear particular sequences of words, notes, or sounds, and perceive them as rhythmical. However, as an energetic principle, rhythm can have an impact only if it is sensed by the body—in the same way that our own bodily rhythms are sensed. In The Mothers, the energies released by the rhythmical movements and speech circulated among the actors and spectators; that is to say, they caused a mutual release and intensification of energy. Such energies might clash to give rise to a ‘battle’ between the chorus and the audience. Other times these energies harmonized to bring forth a momentary community of actors and spectators, from which individual spectators could nonetheless disengage. The path the energies would take could be neither planned nor predicted. It depended on the intensity of the energy summoned by the actors and accumulated in

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each performance as well as at each and every moment of the performance. It also depended on the individual spectators’ responsiveness to the energy circulating in the space, on their capability to sense it with their bodies, on their willingness to be affected by it and, in this way, to mobilize their own energetic potential. It also, among many other factors, depended on the relationship between responsive and less responsive spectators. Thus, the circulation of energy cannot be interpreted as a manipulative device—as some critics suggested; rather it can be experienced as an emerging phenomenon. The responsive spectators sensed the energy emanating from the chorus and transferred to them physically; they accepted it, and this caused more energy to emerge and be released. This energy in turn was sensed by and affected the actors and other spectators, and so on. It was the permanent circulation of energy that brought forth the performance as well as a possible community of actors and spectators. However, most critics perceived this energy as an assault and an act of violence on the part of the chorus. The production provoked a huge scandal. It was denounced as either fascist or communist. Peter Iden wrote in the Frankfurter Rundschau: Politically, the violent Schleef is an enemy of individuality, which he likes to modify with the critical attribute ‘splintered’ when speaking of the Federal Republic—instead, at least in the theatre, the masses are supposed to decide, hence the choruses. We don’t have to discuss this seriously, because Schleef ’s political thinking is so muddled—above all, Schleef ’s gigantic choruses are monumental decorative craftsmanship, at times supported by a Nazi party convention dramaturgy . . . It’s been a while since someone diverted from a theatre text so extravagantly and, not since Nazi theatre, so stupidly. (Peter Iden, Frankfurter Rundschau, 24 February 1986)

Michael Skasa contextualized the production as communist in the Süddeutsche Zeitung, complaining about ‘mothers’ who just slide around on their knees behind cleaning buckets, singing a song that nobody understands, how they produce sweat and artistic hardship, inculcated and so pitiful that it would be bearable at best at a ‘Spartakiad’, a youth sports festival. The working people honour their chairmen through rhythmic movements and rhythmic speech, to which they respond with rhythmic clapping. (Michael Skasa, Süddeutsche Zeitung, 24 February 1986)

Benjamin Henrichs, the influential critic of Die Zeit, gave his review the title ‘Stöhn heul kreisch blök krächz jaul stotter murmel’ (‘Sigh Cry

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Shriek Bleat Screech Yelp Stutter Mumble’), deeming the production unworthy of serious criticism and instead simply mocked it: If Einar Schleef were a theatre-besotted Greek teacher and Günther Rühle the director not of a major urban theatre but of a high school, everything would be fine. All the devoted participants would receive a handshake and an honorary certificate—and we would all go home smiling. (Benjamin Henrichs, Die Zeit, 28 February 1986)

Reading these reviews—all written by renowned critics and published in leading newspapers—today, one cannot help but wonder about this fierce and uncompromising condemnation of the production. Perhaps some kind of a defence mechanism against a traumatic experience was at work here? The Mothers was neither a revival of a fascist nor the ‘continuation’ of a communist aesthetics—let alone the brainchild of an obsessed but dilettantish teacher of the Greek language. Rather, this was the birth of a new tragic theatre that Schleef developed further in all of his future productions and that would soon be recognized and celebrated by critics and audiences alike—he was awarded the prestigious Kortner Prize in 1990 and the Mühlheim Dramatists’ Award in 1995. Yet it was at first vehemently rejected by the majority of the critics and spectators, who stayed away because of the devastating reviews. The production was discontinued after only eleven performances. Why and in what respects can The Mothers be understood as tragic theatre? And why did it offend critics and spectators alike to such an extent that they responded with so much aggression and verbal violence? The concept of the tragic is one of the most discussed and contested concepts in aesthetic theory. When a new discussion on tragedy emerged around 1800, a philosophy developed around it that spawned a number of different ideas on how to understand and explain the tragic (cf. Chapter 1, p. 42). This discussion is still going on today, albeit with less intensity. It is only in the new millennium that it has once again gained prominence in philosophy based on the argument that the present is defined by tragedy and the tragic (cf. Menke 2009). It would explode the framework of this study to illuminate this discussion in all of its complexity. Instead, I shall focus on two ideas of the tragic suggested by Schleef ’s production. When the critics dismissed The Mothers as a relapse into barbarism, they ignored the fact that it dealt with the conditio humana as a tragic

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condition and yet—in contrast to Girard—negated the need for sacrifice. In Schleef ’s theatre, individual and community cannot be conceived independently of each other. There is a continuous battle between the two, but it is a battle that can never be won. It must continue for ever— that is, as long as human society exists. As such, the conflict cannot be solved through the mechanism of sacrifice—that is by directing the violence of all towards one victim. Sacrifice cannot preserve the community. Society can exist only as a permanent conflict between individual and community. Such a conflict may be settled only temporarily—during those rare moments when there is harmony between all members of the community. But it is not sacrifice that brings about this harmony. It cannot be planned. It emerges unforeseeably and unpredictably as the result of the fortuitous uniting of energies that may disintegrate and clash the very next moment. Neither common beliefs, ideologies, or ideas, nor joint actions or shared experiences can bring forth a community. According to Schleef, it is an anthropological necessity that drives individuals to form a community while simultaneously striving to uphold their own individuality. One cannot happen without the other, although both are constantly threatened by the other. The ‘viable dialectic between solitude and being with others’ (Cooper 1970: 44) proclaimed and hailed in the utopian visions of community by certain performance groups in the 1970s does not exist (cf. Schechner 1973). Rather, this conflicting constellation is written into the human condition. If we regard this constellation as tragic—as Schleef no doubt did—the human condition is to be seen as tragic in itself. In The Mothers, there seems to be yet another understanding of the tragic at work. It refers to the relationship between body and language. One might assume that, since a shared rhythm generally served to synchronize bodily movements and the vocal recital of the choral passages, there was, if not harmony, at least a correspondence between body and language. Yet the shared rhythm functioned as the site and means of another battle. On the one hand, language tried to impose and inscribe its rhythm on the body, thus subordinating the latter to the symbolic order. On the other hand, the body rebelled against this attempt. It tried to force a rhythm onto language that often distorted the syntactical order, so that the sentences no longer made any sense and the symbolic order of language was destroyed. Neither came off as the winner in this battle; rather, there was a permanent oscillation between the symbolic

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order of language and the ecstasies of the body. While language tried to subjugate the ecstatic body to its symbolic order, the body strove to undermine and subvert the symbolic order of language by dissolving it in the maelstrom of its ecstasy. This battle between body and language was also reminiscent of Nietzsche’s ideas about the birth of tragedy. What was performed by the choruses might be seen as the battle between the Dionysian principle (embodied by the ecstatically dancing, running, and falling bodies) and the Apollonian one (embodied by the symbolic order of language). In the case of Schleef ’s choruses, the outcome of the battle was never predictable. The battle just went on for as long as the performance continued without generating a winner. That is to say, no balance between the Apollonian and the Dionysian principle was achieved. Often the ecstasies of the chorus and its excessive energy caused the symbolic order of language and of representation in general to crumble. In all such cases, the Dionysian principle outweighed the Apollonian. In my own understanding of the performance, this evoked a tragic experience for the spectators, which triggered diverse responses, including the urge to fight it by not allowing it to emerge fully and take hold of them. I have defined and explained aesthetic experience as liminal experience—that is, as an experience of ‘betwixt and between’ following from an act of transgression—elsewhere (Fischer-Lichte 2008). As a particular mode of aesthetic experience that demands further exploration, tragic experience as a liminal experience emerges by being momentarily overpowered by the ecstasies and the violence of the chorus, that is, the Dionysian principle, causing the dissolution of the self but without merging with the others—the chorus. The performers making up the chorus as well as the composite figure of the chorus remain strangers to the spectators (cf. Schleef 1997: 474). Nevertheless, the chorus forms the precondition for the spectators’ tragic experience. The aesthetics of the production bore the potential for this kind of tragic experience. Whether and to what extent spectators felt it is hard, if not impossible, to ascertain. It is not very likely that the aggressive responses of certain spectators arose out of a tragic experience. Rather, we can assume that they were caused by the threatening idea underlying the performance that it is not the individual but the collective that forms the conditio sine qua non for a

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tragedy to unfold, or, to be more precise, the special relationship between individual and collective as described. As members of the Bildungsbürgertum, most spectators and critics thought it possible or even necessary to define the individual without relating or indeed by opposing it to any kind of collective. Moreover, as far as male spectators were concerned, the powerful, ecstatic female choruses might have posed a threat to which they responded with aggressive refusal. The exact nature and scope of any tragic experience the spectators might have had thus remain an exercise in conjecture. With The Mothers, Einar Schleef laid the foundation for his tragic theatre based on the chorus. Without ever returning to Greek tragedy, he continued to develop this concept until his very last production Verratenes Volk (Betrayed People, performed at the Deutsches Theater Berlin in 2000), in which he appeared as Nietzsche and recited from Ecce Homo for forty-five minutes. Schleef turned to ancient Greek theatre and, in particular, to the chorus in order to establish a contemporary form of tragic theatre, which explored the complicated and ever-changing relationship between individual and community, language and body—a relationship that could achieve but a momentary state of harmony or even balance. This tragic theatre reborn out of the chorus was a theatre of violence that also targeted the spectators and hurt them physically and spiritually, yet while fiercely opposing the idea of sacrifice. Schleef did not resort to ancient Greek theatre in order to construct and convey a new image of Greek culture or theatre, to emphasize its fundamental strangeness and inaccessibility, or to topicalize it through references to current social and political problems. He resorted to it because he saw the chorus as the indispensable condition for tragic theatre. This was his goal. Unfortunately, he lived in a time in which all sense of the tragic had been lost. Schleef ’s tragic theatre anticipated the re-emergence of the philosophy of the tragic in the new millennium by many years.

Choric protests and a peaceful revolution At the beginning of the 1980s, a peace movement emerged in the GDR. Deeply concerned by the developments of the cold war and the accelerating arms race that threatened another war, the people formed a peace movement to try actively to thwart such a threat. Their activities

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included the Friedensgebete (Peace Prayers), held in the Nikolai Church in Leipzig from 20 September 1982 onwards, and the project ANTIKEEntdeckungen (Discoveries of ANTIQUITY), which the Mecklenburg Staatstheater in Schwerin pursued between 1982 and 1987. Its Chief Director Christoph Schroth described it as a ‘Theatre Festival in Praise of Peace’, for which he staged three Greek tragedies and one comedy to be performed on a single day between 5 p.m. and 11 p.m. It premiered on 5 December 1982. A gigantic sculpture of a horse with the word ANTIKE (ANTIQUITY) painted on it in bold letters was erected in front of the theatre. It brought to mind the Trojan Horse, which had enabled the victory of the Greeks. Here, it seemed that the necessity to fight for peace was being smuggled into the public awareness via the performance of these Greek plays and unnoticed by those in power. The three tragedies were Iphigenia in Aulis (Schiller’s version), The Trojan Women (Sartre’s adaptation), and Agamemnon (an adaptation of Gerhard Kelling’s translation). The comedy, concluding the evening, was The Acharnians by Aristophanes. The selection suggests a focus on the catastrophes of war and the desirability and resulting necessity of peace. The project was called ‘discoveries’ as knowledge on ancient Greece was scarce in the GDR. It was no longer taught at schools; even Benno Besson’s wildly successful productions of The Peace and Oedipus Tyrant had failed to trigger more productions of Greek plays, which remained more or less absent from the stages. The Schwerin project attracted young people in particular. They travelled to the city in huge numbers, where they camped in tents in order to participate in this extraordinary theatre festival in praise of peace. The premiere of this ‘tetralogy’ was preceded by a matinee featuring Christa Wolf reading from her novel Cassandra. In the afternoon Iphigenia in Aulis was performed. After the intermission, during which soup was served, the spectators had to split up to see either The Trojan Women or Agamemnon, according to the engraving on the spoons that they had been handed along with their soup: A or T. Both groups of spectators came together again for the final play of the evening, Aristophanes’ comedy (cf. Flashar 2009: 266–7). The project remained in the theatre’s repertoire until 1987. Referring back to a distant and forgotten past reduced the risk of censorship and banning. The production was allowed to travel to the Federal Republic (West Berlin, Wuppertal, Cologne, Essen,

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and Duisburg), France (Nancy), and Austria (Vienna), and The Trojan Women was even presented in Delphi and Athens. It seems that the East German Communist Party also envisaged this project as a Trojan horse to demonstrate to the world the peaceful intentions of the GDR as well as the high esteem in which it held the ‘cultural heritage’ of the Federal Republic and other Western countries. The project is of interest in our context because it was part of the efforts aimed at promoting peace and closely related to the Prayers for Peace that brought about the choric protests resulting in a peaceful revolution. As early as 1988, these prayers, often beginning at 5 p.m., were followed by a demonstration. From Monday, 4 September 1989, onwards they took place after each prayer and became known as the Monday demonstrations. While only 1,200 people participated on this first occasion, the number had risen to 10,000 by 2 October. On 9 October, it amounted to approximately 130,000 (cf. Opp 2011). It had grown as 7 October, the fourtieth anniversary of the GDR, approached. The police tried to disperse the crowds and put an end to the demonstration by arresting participants—on 11 September, eighty-nine were taken to prison. Soon Monday demonstrations began in other parts of the GDR, such as in Dresden, Halle, Karl-Marx-Stadt (today’s Chemnitz), Magdeburg, Plauen, Arnstadt, Rostock, Potsdam, and Schwerin. They formed protest choruses and chanted the slogans ‘Freiheit!’ (‘Freedom!’) and ‘Wir sind das Volk!’ (‘We are the people!’). In Dresden, for instance, 5,000 people assembled at the Main Station on 4 October 1989 expecting the arrival of four trains from Prague travelling onwards to the Federal Republic. The trains were carrying refugees from the GDR who had escaped to the West German Embassy in Prague and had been promised safe passage to the Federal Republic. When the police arrived to clear the station, the people refused to leave. Some threw stones at the policemen and trashed parts of the station. The police responded with water cannons, tear gas, and truncheons. By 8 October, 1,300 citizens had been arrested in Dresden, including many who had not even participated in the demonstration. The Monday demonstration that took place in Leipzig on 9 October 1989—that is, two days after the fourtieth anniversary celebrations— marked a turning point. Not only was it a mass demonstration of about 130,000 citizens; the main slogan had also changed. The protest chorus was now shouting ‘Wir sind ein Volk!’ (‘We are one people!’). As usual,

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the demonstration was preceded by a ‘prayer for peace’ held at several churches. This time it included the reading of an appeal to the people written by six prominent citizens, among them the conductor Kurt Masur. It ended with the words: ‘Wir bitten Sie dringend um Besonnenheit, damit der friedliche Dialog möglich wird’ (‘We urgently ask you to remain calm in order to enable a peaceful dialogue’). The people left the service with burning candles in their hands as a sign of their peaceful intentions. The police withdrew and did not interfere. Why they did so is still unclear. From that point onwards, the number of participants of the Monday demonstrations grew on a weekly basis. On 6 November—that is, three days before the opening of the Wall—it had increased to 500,000 (cf. Bahrmann and Links 1994: 32, 47). It is a remarkable coincidence that on 9 and 10 October the theatre of Chur in Switzerland gave two guest performances of Brecht’s Antigone at the Deutsches Theater in East Berlin. The production had been mounted in honour of Brecht’s first staging after his return from exile to Europe forty-one years earlier. The play was directed by Fritz Bennewitz from the theatre in Weimar. The actors hailed partly from Switzerland and partly from both German states. Antigone was played by Carmen-Maja Antoni from the Berlin Ensemble and Hans Gaugler, Brecht’s original Creon, who had later served as Chief Director of the theatre in Tübingen (see Chapter 6, p. 201 and Chapter 7, p. 224) and was now 76 years of age, took the part of the Messenger. While the production did not diligently follow the model book and deviated from it in many respects, it was still ‘epic theatre’ (Christine Lemke, Musik und Theater, 12, December–January 1989–90). Contrary to Brecht’s original production, this one was highly successful and was performed before full houses. It was also the focus of the ‘Brecht week’ in Chur that comprised an academic conference and many events related to Brecht. When the company arrived in East Berlin on 7 October, the city had been transformed into the stage for the anniversary celebrations, highlighting the combat effectiveness of the National People’s Army (Nationale Volksarmee (NVA)) with the help of never-ending convoys of tanks and rocket launchers parading the streets. This time, Brecht’s Antigone could unfold its huge political potential, as Felix Benesch, one of the actors, reports: ‘During the last rehearsals in the rooms of the Deutsches Theater we . . . finally began to sense that we were reciting charged and highly relevant lines’ (quoted in Anon., Bündner Zeitung,

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13 October 1989). This feeling only intensified during the performance. When Antigone addressed Creon with the words ‘Oh, many are missing | From this city since you took over’ (Brecht 2003: 211) or Haemon stated ‘the city is full of inner disaffection’ (Brecht 2003: 29), the audience responded with massive applause. Creon’s entrance was met with loud booing (cf. Flashar 2009: 278–9). The situation in the GDR and the local spectators had topicalized Brecht’s Antigone in ways neither the director nor the actors had intended. It is somewhat ironic that Brecht’s Antigone was performed on 9 October 1989 in the capital of the GDR, shortly after the celebrations of its fourtieth anniversary, though this was not the first Antigone production of the late 1980s. Between 1985 and 1989 eight productions of the tragedy were mounted in the GDR. It was a collective—that is, the people—who brought about the end of the GDR via the Monday demonstrations and their choric protests, as the slogans ‘Freiheit!’ (‘Freedom!’), ‘Wir sind das Volk!’ (‘We are the people!’), and ‘Wir sind ein Volk!’ (‘We are one people!’) suggest. It was a peaceful revolution that resulted in the reunification of the two German states. Two hundred years earlier, Goethe had hailed Bildung and Schiller aesthetic education as the German response to the French Revolution. Goethe placed his emphasis on creating the framework for individuals to develop their potential to the full. Schiller had in mind a political aim, a free state, but after the experience of post-revolutionary terror he was convinced that the individual human being was lost in the process of modernization and first had to be restored to wholeness and totality. This goal, he believed, could be achieved only through an aesthetic education: ‘I hope to convince you . . . that we must indeed, if we are to solve that political problem in practice, follow the path of aesthetics, since it is through Beauty that we arrive at freedom’ (Schiller 2012: 27, Second Letter; cf. Chapter 1, p. 24). At the end of the twentieth century and its monstrous demonstration that neither could Bildung or aesthetic education prevent a relapse into barbarism nor communism or socialism with their belief in collectivism bring about freedom, peace, and a just society, the Monday demonstrations saw the emergence of a new kind of collective that balanced the demands of individualism and collectivism. The participants advocated their cause—the right of the individual to self-determination as guaranteed by a constitutional democracy and the right of the people to be united in one nation state—peacefully and

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without resorting to violence. While comparable in its aim, the revolution of 1848–9, in which Richard Wagner had taken part, had failed, but the peaceful revolution, based on a type of collective that had nothing to do with the usual ‘socialist’ model, was successful. Moreover, the Monday demonstrations resulted in collectives that were based on a common agenda and open to anyone who shared it. Although they were initiated by a group of people, there was no drive to impose anything on others or to force others to join. It functioned on a voluntary basis. There were two groups of addressees. One was the general public, which was to be informed about its agenda either directly—on the streets—or through the media, in particular West German television, which broadcast details of the demonstrations. The second group was those in power—that is, the Party and its leader(s), who could bring about change if they wanted to. This constellation recalls the Greek chorus and brings to mind the citizens of Thebes assembling to call on Oedipus to liberate them from the plague. At the same time, they were addressing the citizens of Athens, who had gathered in the theatron. In this sense, the Monday demonstrations can be labelled protest choruses. These protest choruses relying on slogans summarizing their concerns and demands rather than on violent actions were able to trigger a process of change. It was not the—great or not so great—individuals but the people, the collective, the chorus, that initiated this decisive political shift. From today’s point of view, this has to be recognized as a historical caesura of utmost importance that effectively ended the cold war. In light of this it makes sense to focus on the protest chorus of the Monday demonstrations as another decisive factor in the (re-)introduction of the chorus as a protagonist on stage and of the experiments with different modes of choric theatre.

Towards the utopia of a participatory democracy Einar Schleef continued his work in Frankfurt on the Main until 1990—that is, at the same time that the Monday demonstrations grew out of the Peace Movement in the GDR. In these productions, which included Gerhart Hauptmann’s Vor Sonnenaufgang (Before Sunrise), his own play Die Schauspieler (The Actors), Lion Feuchtwanger’s

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Neunzehnhundertachtzehn (Nineteen Hundred and Eighteen), Goethe’s Ur-Götz and Faust, he cast an increasing number of migrants for the chorus. At the time, Frankfurt was among the cities with the highest percentage of ‘guest labourers’ and other migrants in the Federal Republic. The chorus thus confronted Frankfurt’s well-to-do citizens in the auditorium with a group of underprivileged, marginalized people. This added a political dimension to the confrontation between the chorus and the audience, as well as to the battle within the chorus, since it was composed of migrants from different countries. In some of the productions, such as in Neunzehnhundertachtzehn or Ur-Götz, the actors distributed tea or boiled potatoes to the spectators to have a shared meal with them, underlining the possibility of a community between both groups. When Rühle resigned as Chief Director of the Schauspiel Frankfurt at the end of the 1989–90 season, Schleef left Frankfurt. He staged Rolf Hochhuth’s new play Wessis in Weimar (West Germans in Weimar, 1993) at the Berlin Ensemble, now headed by Heiner Müller and Peter Zadek. The production was invited to the Berlin Theatertreffen along with two other productions of his—Oscar Wilde’s Salome from Düsseldorf (1997) and Elfriede Jelinek’s Sportstück (Sport’s Play, 1998) from the Burgtheater in Vienna. It had been Jelinek’s express wish to have Schleef as director, for the choric speech demanded by him allowed the language that no longer related to particular dramatic figures to ring out independently in the space, creating a particular soundscape as a fascinating poetic space. Schleef ’s work, once denounced as Nazi aesthetic, was by the end of the 1990s recognized as the work of a ‘genius’ (Elfriede Jelinek). Even Peter Iden, after witnessing Schleef read from Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo—later part of his production of Betrayed People—at the Akademietheater Vienna in March 2000, called it ‘a performance . . . probably unlike anything a theatre stage has ever seen before . . . an incomparable absurdity, shocking and captivating at the same time, numbing and deserving of our highest admiration as a rhetorical masterpiece’ (Peter Iden, Frankfurter Rundschau, 31 May 2000). By then choric theatre had become a widespread phenomenon. In fact, the theatre of the German-speaking countries of the 1990s can broadly be described as choric theatre. Some directors only occasionally created particular forms of choric theatre, as Robert Wilson did for his productions of Gertrude Stein’s Doctor Faustus Lights the Light and Saints and

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Singing (Hebbel Theater Berlin, 1992 and 1997 respectively), Jossi Wieler for his production of Elfriede Jelinek’s Wolken.Heim (Clouds.Home, Schauspielhaus Hamburg, 1993), or Volker Hesse for his production of Urs Widmer’s TOP DOGS (Theater am Neumarkt, Zurich, 1997). Others focused exclusively—or almost exclusively—on choric theatre, as was the case with Christoph Marthaler. Although, like Schleef ’s, these productions frequently cast marginalized groups as the chorus, they clearly differed from his insofar as they did not aim for a tragic theatre. As members of a late-capitalist, postindustrial society, the directors and ensembles involved in the productions radically criticized the concepts of individual and community. Christoph Marthaler’s productions often confront us with the everyday lives of common people. In his seminal production Murx den Europäer! Murx ihn! Murx ihn ab!2 (Snuff the European! Snuff him! Snuff him out!, 1993) at the Volksbühne at Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz in former East Berlin (led by Frank Castorf), which ran for over ten years, eleven rather ugly, partly even grotesque, and filthy figures performed identical everyday actions, such as sitting at a table, drinking tea, munching a cookie, going to the toilet, cracking a joke, and so on. They repeated this sequence endlessly, all the while following particular rhythmical patterns. They seemed more or less isolated or autistic in their inability to communicate with each other, spreading a mood of grotesque–comical dreariness coupled with an uncanny and at times nightmarish atmosphere. They did not seem like living individuals but resembled zombies in the guise of ordinary people—ghosts of themselves (Wiedergänger). This atmosphere suddenly changed when the figures came together to form a choir and strike up a song, as they did every now and then according to a particular rhythmic pattern. For instance, as a choir they sang the old hymns ‘Sicheres Deutschland, schläfst du noch’ (‘Germany at peace, are you sleeping still’, from the year 1650—that is, two years after the end of the Thirty Years War); ‘Wach auf, du deutsches Reich’ (‘Awake, Oh German Reich’); the romantic song ‘In einem kühlen Grunde’ (‘In a Cool Valley’ by Joseph von Eichendorff); ‘Danke’ (‘Thank you’), a song

2 The word Murx functions on various levels in German. As a verb, it means ‘to kill’; as a noun, it colloquially refers to professional mismanagement. Moreover, by spelling it with an ‘x’ instead of the correct ‘ks’, the word Murx also alludes to ‘Marx’.

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written and composed for a meeting of all Protestant churches, which took place the year before; they even sang Paul Lincke’s ‘Glühwürmchenidyll’ (‘Glow-Worm’s Paradise’) and the 1950s hit ‘Ich laß mir meinen Körper schwarz bepinseln’ (‘I Shall Paint my Body Black’). The singing changed the atmosphere completely. It allowed the audience to forget the wretchedness of the waiting-room-like space and the mean, venomous way the figures treated each other. The singing seemed to transport them and the spectators away from this revolting everyday life to create a wholesome and harmonious atmosphere that seemed to anticipate a utopia that would free everyone for good from the depressing vexations of a petty, paltry, everyday life. After the last note had died down completely, the figures departed. Once again an atmosphere of dolefulness filled the space and affected, partly even infected, the spectators. At no point did the singing bring about a community between the figures on stage. Rather, the choir served as a kind of surrogate for a community. It recalled those rare past occasions when such a community was not only feasible but had actually come to life. It was a melancholic memory, which evoked in the spectators similarly melancholic memories of a time when people were able to enjoy communal experiences. In the world of Murx, these times were long gone. It allowed neither individuals nor communities to come into being. And it was only a singing choir not a speaking chorus that was able at least momentarily to bring about such a utopia. TOP DOGS featured a completely different world—at least so it seemed at first glance. It dealt with unemployed top managers assembled in a socalled outplacement office. What unfolded in the performance was the grotesque attempt to recycle the top victims of capitalism back into the market, however slight the chance of success. In this scenario, the process of individualizing and de-individualizing the figures was nothing more than economic strategy applied to tailor them to the system. The choric scenes revealed the climax of the figures’ self-alienation. In the ‘Battle of Words’, consisting of ‘ready-mades’ taken from the language of economics and management, all figures simultaneously performed the same actions, and yet nothing they did made any sense at all. The scene began with a verbal and physical clash between former leading representatives of a ruthless competitive society trying to push each other out. It ended in chaos, out of which, mysteriously, a chorus of bodies emerged, transforming the aggressive management speech into a seductive marketing jargon

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and simulating ‘solidarity’ through harmonically flowing movements and a stylized choreography. In TOP DOGS, such performative actions betrayed the total selfalienation of all those participating. Even the image of a harmonious community at the end of the scene was delusive. It appeared to be nothing but a clever marketing strategy promising the consumer that the market will even fulfil his desire for solidarity, his yearning for a community and for communal experience. The fluidity and malleability of these men’s identities were presented as a necessary prerequisite for the individual to adapt perfectly to the ever-changing demands of late capitalism and to function well regardless of the place, position, or purpose required by the market. What might appear as a utopian vision of new forms of identity was here debased to a mere tool for the smooth functioning of the capitalist system in the era of globalization. Neither individuals nor communities exist in the world of TOP DOGS. What might appear to be an individual at first glance is only the transitory result of market strategies making that figure fit certain commercial demands. The ostensible community turns out to be a group of self-alienated conformists who care neither for each other nor for the surrogate fabricated to satisfy the perceived desire for communal experience. Although the spectators, seated on tall, moveable scaffolding, literally surrounded the actors, this spatial arrangement did not foster any kind of community building. Rather, it encouraged a cool, distant, and analytic gaze that was reinforced whenever the audience was moved around and thus provided with a new angle and perspective on the stage proceedings down below. On the whole, the choric theatre of the 1990s presented a searing critique of late capitalist, post-industrial societies. The market and the new media have no need for individuals—regardless of their particular identity—only for consumers and net surfers. Nor do they need any kind of community. The market’s purpose is best served by isolated conformists, by people who comply with the rules and demands without questioning them. According to the choric theatre of the 1990s, postindustrial societies seem to want to transform those individuals who have proved resistant to new trends into conforming consumers and netizens. Those who have dropped out of society for whatever reason are regarded not as victims, sacrificed on the altar of capitalism, globalization, and the worldwide exchange and de-privatization of information, but as losers

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who could have performed better but failed to do so purely through their own fault. The new collective of the protest choruses of the Monday demonstrations did not appear in these productions. However, they did enter the stage, albeit transformed, in productions of Greek tragedies at the beginning of the new millennium. The remaining part of this chapter will discuss two very different productions featuring the chorus as protagonist. The first is Volker Lösch’s Oresteia in Dresden in 2003 and the other Claudia Bosse’s and theatercombinat’s Les Perses d’Eschyles (The Persians of Aeschylus) in Geneva in 2006 (and in Braunschweig in 2008). The Oresteia was Volker Lösch’s (b. 1963) first production involving a chorus. As had been the case with Schleef, the chorus became his trademark, no matter what kind of play he put on stage. Lösch used Peter Stein’s translation and put Bernd Freytag, who had previously been a chorus member in Schleef ’s productions, in charge of training the chorus. Whereas Schleef ’s choruses consisted of professionals as well as amateurs, Lösch worked exclusively with amateur choruses in all his productions. Now that over ten years had passed since German reunification, the project proceeded from the experience that democracy was in deep crisis. As Lösch stated in an interview published in the programme notes, people no longer believed and trusted in democracy; they felt that they had no share in it, that their voices were not being heard, that fundamental human rights were constantly being violated and women discriminated against. The production, and the chorus in particular, was meant to give a voice to those who were or thought themselves to be marginalized and excluded. Participating in the chorus was meant to restore to them the sense of self-esteem that the political and economic system denied them: ‘The majority of these people have been rendered socially irrelevant. But in our work they are in demand, they are important’ (Lösch and Müller-Merten 2003–4: 12). Indeed, as one critic wrote, ‘the chorus is the protagonist of the “Oresteia” ’ (Nikolaus Merck, Theater der Zeit, 12 (2003), 38). Out of 250 applications, Lösch chose 15 men and 13 women, mostly elderly people, some unemployed, others pensioners. Young women later joined the female group, mostly during the third part, so that the choruses then comprised 33 individuals in total. These individuals were given agency and a voice not only as members of the chorus. During the two

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intermissions they could be seen on monitors and in the theatre’s foyers and corridors talking about their life after the end of the GDR, their hopes and disillusionment, and how they experienced democracy. Some of these statements were also printed in the programme notes, including a male chorus member’s thoughts: ‘Democracy does not mean justice but merely the subordination of a minority to the majority. And for me as a fifty-five-year old long-term unemployed man it means that the concerns of the unemployed are subordinated to those of the majority that has jobs’ (programme notes to Volker Lösch (2003), Aeschylus’ Oresteia, Staatsschauspiel Dresden, season 2003–4 (premiere on 31 October), 42). (In his later productions, Lösch would incorporate the chorus members’ statements and thoughts on their own lives into the text of the chorus.) Choric theatre was thus envisaged as participatory democracy in action. It does not come as a surprise that a Greek tragedy—especially the Oresteia, generally believed to address the coming-into-being of democracy—was chosen as the vehicle for this endeavour. In ancient Athens the chorus consisted exclusively of male citizens who volunteered as chorus members. They received a daily wage to compensate them for their regular employment during the training and rehearsals, which lasted several months. In the performance, the citizens as spectators in the theatron were confronted with citizens as chorus members in the orchestra. However, the performers wore masks that concealed their real identities as citizens and emphasized their fictional ones in the tragedy. In Dresden, citizens had applied to volunteer, though they were mostly either retired or unemployed. They were paid a lump sum for the five months of training and rehearsals, and received a modest honorarium for each performance. In this performance, too, the local citizens in the auditorium were confronted with a chorus of fellow-citizens on stage—a chorus that had a powerful effect. Through rhythmic movements and speech the chorus generated an enormous energy that circulated in the space and was transferred to the spectators. This was the case in Agamemnon, for instance, when the chorus of the elders, arms wrapped around the shoulders of their neighbours to form a kind of barrier, stomped from the back of the empty stage to its front to confront directly the spectators seated in the first rows. Almost all critics mention the special relationship between the chorus and the spectators. The chorus is described not only as the ‘protagonist’ but also as the ‘representative of the audience on stage’ (Merck 2003).

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Moreover, the prominence of the chorus is explained as ‘the citizens of Dresden squatting in the theatre’ (Gabriele Gorgas, Sächsische Zeitung, 3 November 2003). The effort to ‘give a voice to those . . . whose agency has been taken away, who consider themselves written off and pushed to the margins’ is commended (Erika Stephan, Theater heute, 12 (2003), 17). The stage is given to those who are not usually recognized publicly, from where they can confront the spectators as a powerful collective that makes itself visible and heard to the public, and demands its attention. The dynamic rhythmic movements and choric speech released an energy that forced itself on the spectators and in this way exerted power over them. In this respect, the chorus was utopian. Yet its fictional world and its actions within it were far from it: Where a quarter century earlier Peter Stein in his Berlin version had presented the implementation of democracy as a reasonable and at the same time constantly jeopardized solution, Lösch’s vision shows only a hopeless sequence of violence and deceit between gods and human beings, rulers and people, men and women. (Merck 2003: 38)

The choruses play a role in this cycle of violence and deceit. The chorus of the elders, for example, dressed in trousers and pullovers of different colours, openly display their contempt for Clytemnestra (Christine Hoppe) and women in general while behaving very differently towards Agamemnon (Daniel Minetti). They carry him and throw themselves on the ground to let him walk over them into the palace. The female chorus in the second part is similarly vicious. Armed with handbags and dressed in multicoloured blouses and ugly skirts, the women leave the choric formation one after the other to caress and kiss Orestes (Tim Grobe/ Thomas Eisen) in order to seduce him into murdering his mother (see Illustration 9.4). Once this has been accomplished, they drink coffee, eat cake, and gossip in a Saxon dialect. Lastly, the male chorus dressed in tuxedoes and acting as judges in the Eumenides trick the Erinyes. They pull off the women’s black martial boots and force them to put on stilettos, thus robbing them of their agency. ‘It is not justice or even the law but barely concealed violence that stands at the beginning of democracy. Cries of bravo and stomping feet. A great night in Dresden’ (Merck 2003: 39) (see Illustration 9.5).

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Illustration 9.4 Volker Lösch: Aeschylus’ Oresteia Part II: The Libation Bearers; the chorus seduces Orestes (Thomas Eisen) into murdering his mother.

Illustration 9.5 Volker Lösch: Aeschylus’ Oresteia Part II: The Libation Bearers; the judges with Athena (Annedore Bauer) in the middle and the stilettos in boxes, which they will force on the Erinyes standing behind them, still wearing boots.

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As the responses of the critics and the audience suggest, the ‘clear messages’ and Lösch’s goal of conveying the ‘political dimension of a collective which can be experienced physically and which stands in for the general public’ (Lösch 2010: 130) were well received and understood. Somewhat remarkably, however, no review puts forward the argument that the marginalized here are not only granted visibility and a voice, but are also exposed to the gaze of the spectators and, in this sense, exoticized. This confirms Lösch’s statement that ‘the formation of the chorus protects the lay actors who don’t have formal training. They are carried by a form that generates a tremendous force and emotionality that an individual cannot bring about. The multiplication of the individual opens up new horizons and associative spaces’ (ibid.). The statement, although referring to the chorus of sixteen Turkish women in Lösch’s Medea in Stuttgart four years later, also applies to the Oresteia. The powerful choric speech was not always performed in unison. Every now and then it happened that not all the chorus members began a sentence simultaneously after a caesura. This was not meant—or received—as a battle between the individual and the community, as had been the case in Einar Schleef ’s The Mothers, nor was it seen as an individualizing device, as per Stein’s Oresteia. Rather, this just occasionally happened to the amateur speakers. However, it was the physical formation of the chorus—as a circle, a frontline, or a crowd, for example—that protected individuals from being exposed as the weak link. On the other hand, such ‘dissonances’ could be seen as a characteristic of protest choruses, whose members share a common goal but do not strive for uniformity. The chorus focused on each member’s contribution to its collective actions and achievements. The citizens on stage, even if marginalized outside of their membership in the chorus, perhaps indirectly drew the attention of the citizens in the auditorium to the claim tua res agitur (‘this concerns you’). Whereas the beginning of democracy was not glorified but its shortcomings blatantly exposed, the possibilities it might create for the citizens were nonetheless demonstrated by the chorus. In a way, it enacted a form of participatory democracy, in which individuals assembled in powerful and fluid collectives that allowed them to act as co-creators. Owing to its constantly changing formations, the chorus in Lösch’s Oresteia resembled a swarm. One could even go so far as also to describe the new collectives formed during the Monday demonstrations as swarms. In contrast to the more or less fixed collectives that were

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institutions of sorts in the GDR, swarms do not require a strong identification with the whole. They do not have clear criteria regarding conformity, nor do they demand self-sacrifice for a common cause (cf. Kelly 1994). They also do not require a leader. The role of the leader can be filled by anyone for any short or longer period of time. Swarms do not come into being as permanent institutions but exist only for the duration of the shared initiative. The divergences between the individual rhythms of movement and voice risk dissolving a swarm only when they transgress a certain limit. Usually, swarms follow the principle of a decentralized rhythmical self-organization (cf. Granovetter 1973; Rheingold 2002). To a certain extent at least, this had already applied to the choruses in the Oresteia and became the guiding principle in Claudia Bosse’s/ theatercombinat’s production of The Persians. It premiered at the Théâtre du Grütli in Geneva in 2006 and was restaged with slight variations in Vienna that same year and in Braunschweig in 2008. It is no coincidence that Claudia Bosse (b. 1969) chose Geneva as the initial setting: In his Letter to Monsieur d’Alembert (1758) Jean-Jacques Rousseau passionately disputed d’Alembert’s suggestion that Geneva required a theatre in order to keep up with other European cities (cf. d’Alembert [1757] 2003). Rousseau’s main argument was that a theatre would threaten or perhaps even destroy the identity of Geneva’s inhabitants. He placed theatre in opposition to festivals in which the citizens turn themselves and their customs into spectacles meant for their own enjoyment (cf. Rousseau 1987). Referring to this argument, even if indirectly, theatercombinat envisioned staging the chorus of The Persians with 500 citizens of Geneva. The idea behind this was quite similar to that underlying Lösch’s choruses. Since representative democracy with its bureaucracy and non-transparent decision-making processes increasingly marginalized all citizens, the question arose of how to regain agency and to transform representative democracy into a participatory one. Accordingly, the production was announced as an experimental public opinion poll on modern democracy (cf. programme notes to Claudia Bosse and theatercombinat (2006), Aeschylus’ The Persians, Théâtre du Grütli, season 2006–7, 8). The spectators entered an empty space into which the members of the chorus flooded from all sides until they made up the majority, even if it was not 500 but only close to 200. In Braunschweig the chorus grew to 300. They were dressed in their everyday clothes and thus resembled

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the spectators. There was no spatial separation between the citizens who were acting as chorus members and those who had come as spectators. It was truly a shared space. Everyone was entitled to move freely through this space, mindful not to bump into or disrupt the members of the chorus or the other spectators. Since the members of the chorus often moved in groups, the spectators had to be careful not to prevent their performance or be pushed aside by them (see Illustration 9.6). The chorus members usually spoke their lines standing still in one spot but partly also while moving through the space in groups. The spectators thus were often in the midst of them and could change their perspective according to their own and the chorus’s movements. They could join a particular chorus group or maintain a certain distance— something that was not possible with regard to the chorus as a whole. Each chorus member as well as each spectator was in a position to gaze at others and to be gazed at by others. From time to time, individual members of the chorus formed groups that could very quickly disintegrate again, leading to the emergence of a different group and creating a remarkable spatial choreography. As one critic wrote: When a phalanx of maybe a hundred people moves towards one, the spectator . . . only has two choices: to stay put or flee. Those who stay put experience something similar to Moses at the Red Sea: the front divides as if by magic and one glides through it. The situation is very different when the chorus suddenly moves in reverse gear. Those spectators who do not move out of the way are regardlessly—quite literally so—swallowed by the mass and/or run over. (Wolfgang Behrens, nachtkritik, 7 June 2008)

This way, new formations constantly emerged, such as the chorus running hectically, as a crowd, scattered, fleeing, all chorus members lying prostrate on the ground, and so on. The audience members for their part had to decide whether to mingle with the chorus, to keep their distance—as far as this was possible—or even to attempt a confrontation. However, they were not always free to make that decision. In one of the last scenes, the 300 members of the chorus, walking in slow motion, herded the spectators together in a shrinking space, so that the latter might really have felt threatened. But, even in this situation, one alternative remained—some spectators switched sides, joining the first row of the chorus. The auditory and verbal spaces were shared alongside the physical space. Heiner Müller’s translation, which aims at reproducing the dark,

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Illustration 9.6 Claudia Bosse/theatercombinat: Aeschylus’ The Persians; chorus and spectators mingling.

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hermetic, and very poetic language of Aeschylus—was used in Braunschweig. The spoken text was rhythmically structured in a way that the German syntactic order was broken. All those present were thus mostly immersed in the soundscape, and it was this that affected their bodies rather than the intellectual grasp of a complex context. The tragedy became ‘a physical experience . . . so that we could participate in it on a bodily and sensory level. [The tragedy] virtually emerges from our midst, from our bourgeois mediocrity’ (Christine Dössel, Süddeutsche Zeitung, 16 June 2008). This critic attests to ‘the tremendous energy’ of the chorus, ‘which is impossible to escape’. For the lamentation at the end the spectators were offered the choice not only to join the chorus in its movements but also to bring forth the soundscape. Leaflets with the scores attached to strings were lowered from the ceiling, so that spectators could reach out for one. Or they could look over the shoulders of those chorus members who held the text in their hands. If they wanted, they could join the lament. The chorus and the spectators together formed a self-organized collective that did not exert pressure on its members but enabled everybody to include or exclude themselves as they wished. The process of selforganization largely followed the model of the swarm. It functioned as an ‘aesthetic Vor-Schein’ (Ernst Bloch) of a future participatory democracy. Today, Greek tragedies are no longer regarded as the property of the Bildungsbürgertum contributing to its cultural identity—not even by the Bildungsbürger themselves (in case they still exist) or by directors, dramaturges, and critics. This process went hand in hand with a shift in focus from the individual hero/heroine and his or her tragic fate to the chorus. The chorus increasingly revealed its productive and vast potential to address problems haunting contemporary democratic societies without erasing the historical distance or diminishing its affective power. Choric theatre exploits this capacity to the full. The chorus has taken on the role of the protagonist acting as a self-organizing and self-organized collective. This protagonist has a double, often ambiguous, identity. On the one hand, the chorus represents the elders of the city, the mourning women, the lamenting citizens, the Erinyes, and so on in the tragedy. On the other, it is composed of a group of citizens from the very city in which the production is being performed—frequently but not necessarily a marginalized group. The chorus is both at the same time. Thus, it mediates between the world of the tragedy—as well as ancient

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Athens—and that of the contemporary democratic society in which the performance is taking place. It allows the production to address certain problems of contemporary democracy, particularly new phenomena and processes that endanger such democratic principles as participation and result in the marginalization, even exclusion, of certain groups. Such productions are highly topical but, at the same time, always draw attention to the historical distance. Performances of Greek tragedies as choric theatre thus address the concerns of today’s democratic societies without letting audiences forget their original context.3

3 It is an interesting coincidence that in the 1990s and especially in the new millennium— i.e. at the time when choric theatre became a widespread, if not omnipresent, phenomenon on stages—the attention of many classicists also shifted to the chorus. It was granted a key position, not only in the theatrical space (cf. Camp 1992; Rehm 2002), but also regarding the affective impact on the spectators of its collective singing and dancing (cf. Macintosh 1997). Tragedy has increasingly been branded a choral genre (cf. Bierl 2010; Billings, Budelmann, and Macintosh 2013; Gagné and Govers Hopman 2013).

Epilogue The Return of Dionysus: From Festive Performance to Global Spectacle

At the heart of this study lies the question of why and how performances of Greek tragedies contributed to the shaping, stabilization, and destabilization of the cultural identity of the German Bildungsbürger. In the process, every now and then we were confronted with the—at first glance—rather surprising fact that those productions that proved to be the most successful in this respect were also received with enthusiasm by audiences beyond the German states. On the other hand, we examined, if only cursorily, productions of Greek tragedies from other countries that enjoyed successful guest tours in the German states—as was the case with Rondiris’s Electra. After the 1980s, that is, when most Bildungsbürger had ceased to relate productions of Greek tragedies to their own cultural identity, such productions from other European countries—as, for instance, Ariane Mnouchkine’s Les Atrides—as well as from nonEuropean countries—such as Suzuki’s The Trojan Women—continued to be celebrated by German audiences. This gives rise to two questions. First, how do we explain that productions of Greek tragedies that were key for the self-understanding of the German Bildungsbürger were successful with other European audiences, too? And, second, what was and is the cause for the fascination with productions of Greek tragedies from other—European and non-European—countries, mostly presented in the context of international festivals, for German audiences since the 1980s? The remaining pages of this study will serve as an attempt to find answers to these questions. Productions of Greek tragedies that were experienced as ‘festive’ proved to be particularly popular with audiences. This was the case, for instance, with the Potsdam Antigone, Reinhardt’s Oedipus, or, much

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later, Stein’s Oresteia. They not only recalled the Great Dionysia in Athens, where the tragedies had been performed for the first time. Through their novel aesthetics, they also addressed the burning issues of their own time—issues that challenged German as well as other European audiences. It is therefore small wonder that they were successful outside the German states (and later nation), too. In the case of the Potsdam Antigone, it was not the production itself that travelled to other countries. Rather, it served as a new model for staging Greek tragedies, overcoming the problem of their ‘foreignness’, on the one hand, and that of adapting them easily to one’s own taste on the other. The model of the Potsdam Antigone achieved just this. It realized the guiding principles of historicism, such as using a ‘faithful’, unabridged translation, historically accurate costumes, designs, and props, and, at the same time, minimized the foreignness of Greek tragedy by introducing a singing chorus that made the spectators ‘feel at home’ (Droysen). This model proved highly successful for productions of Antigone in Paris, London, and New York. Reinhardt’s Oedipus the King as the first realization of his Theatre of the Five Thousand through its very aesthetics dealt with a problem that threatened to undermine modern societies—the tension between ‘exceptional’ individuals, who made a cult of their personality, and the masses of labourers, the daily growing proletariat. This problem haunted not only Western European countries, including Austria–Hungary, but also Russia. Reinhardt’s production tackled the problem via its ‘festivity’, which allowed a community to come into being between actors and spectators as well as among the spectators who represented different social classes and milieus. The guest performances (from Berlin) as well as the restagings of the production (for example, in London) were extremely successful, not only, as the classicist Gilbert Murray raved, because they conveyed a new image of ancient Greece and thus re-evaluated the common European cultural heritage. Their success was also, if not primarily, due to the fact that they responded to one of the most challenging problems of the time, even if the solution they made possible could at best last only for the duration of the performance. The community-building faculty of the production was indeed in line with one of the main purposes of festivals—uniting individuals into a community. After the Second World War new theatre festivals were founded in many European cities and towns, as, for instance, in Edinburgh, Avignon,

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Epidaurus, and Recklinghausen. Initially, they were meant to confirm the local or national cultural identity by showcasing their respective cultural heritage—similar to the mission of the Salzburg Festival after its founding following the First World War. The festivals were meant to unfold a certain healing potential after the atrocities and the destruction of the war. They took place at what would have been perceived as sacred spaces, such as the Cour d’Honneur of the Papal Palace in Avignon and the amphitheatre in the holy precinct of Epidaurus. Jean Vilar at Avignon as well as Dimitrios Rondiris and Kostis Bastias in Epidaurus emphasized that the spectators were to come from all social classes and be united in a community through an act of communion. However, by 1980 at the latest the festivals had largely morphed into international events, so that the idea and nature of this community changed. Meanwhile, the International Theatre Institute (ITI) had also established the festival Theatre of the Nations, which was hosted by a city in a different country each year. When it was Hamburg’s turn in 1979, the Chief Director of the Deutsches Schauspielhaus and President of the ITI, Ivan Nagel, developed the idea to set up a similar international festival in the Federal Republic of Germany: the festival Theater der Welt (Theatre of the World), which would later become very prestigious, was founded under the auspices of the German ITI Centre. It has been taking place in a different German city every two or three—sometimes even four—years since 1981. At the same time, with the Bildungsbürgertum in the Federal Republic no longer regarding Greek tragedies as their property and their productions as a means to contribute to their cultural identity, existing festivals were internationalized and new ones founded that had an international outlook from the very beginning. From now on a lively traffic of performances began, including productions of Greek tragedies. Here, the festivals of Delphi and Epidaurus stand out. This is not to say that in the 1960s and 1970s no German production of Greek tragedies went abroad and no production from other countries travelled to the two German states. As already mentioned, Sellner’s Viennese version of Oedipus was shown in Athens in 1966, while Besson’s Oedipus was invited to London and Italy but denied permission to travel by the government. In 1962 Dimitrios Rondiris presented his productions of Sophocles’ Electra and Euripides’ Medea in East and West Berlin (here on the occasion of the Berlin Festival Weeks), and Karolos

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Koun’s Oedipus the King was shown at the festival Theatre of the Nations in Hamburg in 1979. However, this was just a prelude to what would happen after 1980. Peter Stein’s Oresteia was one of the most widely travelled productions of the decade and beyond (with the Russian restaging). It even toured outside of Europe via an invitation to Caracas. (The reasons for its success are explained in Chapter 8.) The productions of the Schwerin festival ANTIQUITY travelled not only to the Federal Republic but also to France, Austria, and Delphi (the latter only with the Trojan Women). Hansgünther Heyme’s productions of Greek tragedies had been repeatedly invited to Delphi since 1985, and the festival in Epidaurus showed not only Peter Stein’s Oresteia (1994) but also Matthias Langhoff ’s The Bacchae (1997), Anna Badora’s Antigone (2002, Düsseldorf Schauspielhaus), Karin Neuhäuser’s Oresteia (2007, Schauspiel Frankfurt), and Dimiter Gotscheff ’s The Persians (2009, Deutsches Theater Berlin), to name just a few examples. In the Federal Republic, the newly founded festival Theatre of the World became the most important site for guest performances of Greek tragedies from abroad. At the 1985 edition in Frankfurt on the Main Tadashi Suzuki’s Trojan Women and Clytemnestra (a reworking of different Greek tragedies) caused a sensation. Most of all, the Trojan Women and, in particular, the acting of Kayoko Shiraishi in the role of the Old Woman in her vision of Troy on the ruins of the Second World War, who then changed into Hecuba, was received as a revelation of sorts. Here, a German audience was confronted with a production of a Greek tragedy that did not originate in a European country—that is, without taking recourse to a common European cultural heritage. Although the performance drew heavily on elements from traditional Japanese theatre forms such as Noh and Kabuki, and on Suzuki’s special training methods deduced from them, it did not appear in the least ‘foreign’ to the German audiences. And, although it took only one hour, making a radical cut of the text necessary, the spectators, including the critics, celebrated it as one of the most gripping performances they had ever witnessed. This meant a turning point in several respects. The German Bildungsbürger, no longer claiming Greek tragedies as their property, were willing to acknowledge that they belonged as much to other European cultures and formed a common cultural heritage. In Suzuki’s case, however, this

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was a Japanese director who used Japanese actors trained according to principles underlying traditional Japanese theatre forms. Unlike shingeki, the modern Japanese spoken theatre introduced to Japan from Europe at the beginning of the twentieth century, the Trojan Women did not appear ‘European’ at all but was thoroughly Japanese. Yet it greatly affected the German spectators, almost casting a spell on them. This performance, taking place in the context of a festival, created a community not only among the German spectators but between the Japanese actors and the mostly German spectators. Having been a spectator at Suzuki’s production myself, it seems apt to me in retrospect to compare the impact of this Trojan Women to that of two performances that took place in Berlin approximately eighty years before—one being the first Japanese guest performance in Berlin and the other Reinhardt’s Electra. In 1902 Otojirō Kawakami and his wife Sada Yakko, belonging to the so-called shinpa school attempting to reform Kabuki, performed some traditional Kabuki plays in Berlin but changed them significantly to suit their notion of European taste. As in Paris, the critics in Berlin were enchanted by the acting style of Sada Yakko—in particular in her dying scenes—because in them ‘all the impact is directed at the senses’ and ‘only from here does the impression travel to the soul’ (review in Die Neue Rundschau, 1902: 112). Such descriptions evoked the very qualities that European reformers had been calling for concerning their theatre of the future and which the critics had, in fact, been emphasizing—usually disapprovingly—in Reinhardt’s productions. Interestingly, the critic of the newspaper Der Tag refers to this quality of the Japanese troupe as follows: It is ahead of us, beyond us, perhaps we are orienting ourselves toward it. This culture knows more than ours. We are looking into something of the future. We can learn an endless amount from this art, and a bit of a Japanese touch would certainly be as useful to our theatres as it has been for our painting. At any rate, here we find great models that should be studied and that require the highest absorption. (Quoted in Anon., Ost-Asien, 46 (1902), 450)1

Here, for the first time, a Japanese acting company is praised not only as being on a par with European theatre but even as a model for its future

1

For further reading on how the Kawakami troupe was received in London, Paris, and Berlin, cf. Fischer-Lichte (2014a: 116–27).

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development. Quite similarly, Suzuki’s Trojan Women opened up a new perspective on theatre and on acting in particular. Reinhardt’s Electra must be mentioned as the other reference point, since the impact of Shiraishi’s acting on the spectators in Frankfurt is reminiscent of the particular effect Eysoldt is said to have had on her audiences. Just as the Kawakami guest tour and Reinhardt’s Electra had marked the beginning of a new cultural understanding of self and other around 1900, Suzuki’s Trojan Women and Shiraishi’s acting at Theatre of the World in 1985 similarly led to the rethinking of this dynamic. Greek tragedy was no longer to be regarded as the sole property of Europe and the Western world. Accordingly, no longer could a special birthright or recognition be accorded to Western directors as the chosen group entitled to stage them. As Suzuki’s production demonstrated, theatres of all cultures could use Greek tragedies—along with all other plays—with outstanding and innovative results. However, this argument gave rise to a different problem. Since all cultures could now stage Greek tragedies without hesitation, some concluded that this was due to their universalism: Greek tragedies embodied universal truths and values, so that whoever put them on stage participated in their universalism, thus affirming the inherent superiority of Greek culture. Although such a claim is unfounded and has long since been refuted, it was still widespread among the German Bildungsbürger of the 1980s. It was reinforced by Suzuki’s belief that Greek tragedies speak to all people, ‘independent of nation, race, and gender’ (programme notes to Theater der Welt (1985), Frankfurt) and are to be understood as universal in this respect. He also attributed universality to the human body and, particularly, to certain movements—that is, stomping. It formed the backbone of Suzuki’s training method. Although it was derived from traditional Japanese theatre forms such as Noh and Kabuki, Suzuki regarded it as a universal method to restore to the human body its perceptive and expressive abilities, lost in the process of modernization—a method to be acquired by anybody irrespective of their cultural background. For, as he stated in his essay ‘Culture is the Body’ (1984), perhaps it is not the upper half but the lower half of our body through which the physical sensibility common to all races is most consciously expressed; to be more specific, the feet. The feet are the last remaining part of the human body which has kept, literally, in touch with the earth, the very supporting base of all human activities. (Quoted in Zarrilli 1995: 167)

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In any case, it was the acting based on this method that spellbound the German spectators as it had other European audiences when the Trojan Women was performed in Paris (1977) and London (1985). The French critic André Tunc called it ‘a tragedy of an exceptional force and beauty, a summit of theatre art of all times and places’ (André Tunc, La Croix, 2 June 1977). Michael Billington saw ‘Suzuki’s achievement’ in having ‘forged a style that unites past and present’, and came to the conclusion that the production was ‘true to the original’, and that this ‘after all is what Euripides’ play is all about’ (Michael Billington, Guardian, 11 April 1985). Here, the Japanese production was celebrated for what the acting achieved on the basis of criteria derived from text-centric forms of dramatic theatre. In Frankfurt, Josef Oehrlein praised the ‘evocative effect’ of the performance, which in his view was brought about by the ‘virtuosic coupling of ancient scenes with Japanese history’ through the continuous shifts between antiquity and the present, ‘between ancient Greek mythology and Buddhism’ (Josef Oehrlein, Frankfurt Allgemeine Zeitung, 10 October 1985). Two years later, when The Trojan Women was once again performed at Theatre of the World, this time held in Stuttgart, Werner SchulzeReimpell wrote: What is fascinating is the presence of the ensemble, the complete congruence of form and expression. Here, each action is precisely choreographed, each gesture rehearsed, each posture deliberate, nothing, it seems, is spontaneous. The entry of Jizo, the god of children, accompanied by electronic music is ceremonial . . . as he swings one leg with an outstretched knee in a semi-circle. Kayoko Shiraishi is . . . the focus of the performance. It is stupendous how the strictest formalization releases an ecstatic expressivity. Her language resembles music, continuously going through an entire sequence of notes, alternating between sonorous alto and high soprano: ur-mother and Niobe, principle of life and victim of all wars. (Werner Schulze-Reimpell, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 30 June 1987)

The strikingly new aesthetic of the performance, the perfect mastery of completely unknown techniques by the actors, particularly Kayoko Shiraishi, to deal with the problem of war in ancient and modern times was able to affect the spectators deeply and allow for an absolutely novel kind of liminal experience. In the following years, the festival Theatre of the World repeatedly included productions of Greek tragedies. As already mentioned, at the next festival in Stuttgart in 1987 Suzuki’s Trojan Women was presented

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in addition to his Bacchae, alongside Robert Wilson’s Alcestis and Peter Sellars’ Ajax. When the festival took place in Essen in 1991, Ariane Mnouchkine’s celebrated production of Les Atrides was shown. In 1996 in Dresden, Theatre of the World included Romeo Castellucci’s/Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio’s Oresteia as well as Johan Simons’s and Paul Koek’s/Theatergroep Hollandia’s Fenicische vrouwen (The Phoenician Women). The latters’ Bacchae was shown at the Festival of 2002, held in the Rhine–Ruhr region—that is, Cologne, Bonn, Düsseldorf, Duisburg, alongside Oskaras Koršunovas’s Oedipus the King from Vilnius. At the Berlin festival Spielzeit Europa (Season Europe) 2008–9 two productions of Medea were shown—one by Grzegorz Jarzyna and the other by Brett Bailey. The next season it presented Krzysztof Warlikowski’s (A)pollonia, which dealt with the problem of (self-)sacrifice by drawing on fragments from the Oresteia as well as from Euripides’ Iphigenia and Alcestis. This is merely a small selection of productions of Greek tragedies from abroad that have been invited to Germany since the 1980s, by considering just two major festivals. The productions of Greek tragedies from different countries presented at Theatre of the World and other festivals in Germany in my view proved to be successful with the German audiences because they displayed qualities congruous with what these audiences were looking for in Greek tragedies. The productions all realized a new aesthetic and tackled current philosophical, ethical, social, or political issues of great relevance. The expectation of the German spectators—mostly from the Bildungsbürgertum—to encounter a novel aesthetics and to be confronted with weighty problems was met and sustained at the highest level. And, since these productions hailed from different European and non-European cultures, they additionally seemed to widen the horizon of the German spectators by allowing them to experience the so far unimaginable, no matter whether they were spellbound or kept at a certain distance. In this sense, performances of Greek tragedies were once again able to contribute to their Bildung. Moreover, the festival framework played an important role. Although modern festivals, particularly theatre festivals, differ from traditional ones in decisive ways, they can still encompass some of the latter’s characteristic dimensions—that is, their liminal, transformative, conventional, and cathartic aspects (cf. Köpping 2002: 121-8). Festivals are

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constituted by a unique temporality. On the one hand, they are embedded in a daily routine that is repeated regularly; on the other, they enable a temporal transgression, because they create their own exceptional time frame that breaks with the everyday. Even if a theatre festival takes place within the perimeter of a city rather than necessitating a long journey to an isolated site—as is the case with Bayreuth—its usual duration of at least a couple of days, if not weeks, accomplishes this break. In fact, sometimes this break is achieved even within the extraordinary duration of a single performance, which transgresses the usual limits. Thus, the span of a festival constitutes an in-between, transitional time. It requires the participants temporarily to leave behind their daily lives, to which they return after the end of the festival, potentially in a changed state. For this liminal dimension is the precondition for its transformative dimension. To what extent existing identities are destabilized or strengthened and whether a respective transformation will extend beyond the festival cannot be predetermined or verified. Another paradox concerns the people’s activities during a festival. While their actions are subject to a precise set of rules, the essence of a festival ultimately lies in breaking with otherwise habitual rules. This opposition entails a conventional dimension, since specific interaction rituals are prescribed (cf. Goffman 1967). Transgression expressed as forms of excess, such as watching particular scenes of violence, invoke a cathartic dimension. While the conventional dimension of theatre festivals—as well as of any theatre performance—is obvious, the other three may be realized to different degrees. A liminal and transformative dimension might be particularly strong in international theatre festivals, when during the course of the performance a community between the spectators and actors from another culture may come into being. It might even be activated when the spectators consider themselves members of a community of connoisseurs, who claim to know how to appreciate the art and artists from another culture in a production of a Greek tragedy. This group of spectators will feel united in their self-understanding as cosmopolitans regarding their judgements on productions of Greek tragedies from diverse cultures. In any case, the triad of theatre festival, Greek tragedy, and artists from across the globe has proved to be extremely attractive in Germany, particularly in the new millennium—to such an extent that even the

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municipal theatres want to profit from it. In 2002—that is, the year when the festival Theatre of the World took place in the Rhine–Ruhr region— Anna Badora, Chief Director of the Düsseldorf Schauspielhaus, realized her own international festival of Greek tragedy. She recruited Theodoros Terzopoulos to stage The Bacchae once again (his 1986 production of the tragedy had caused a scandal in Delphi and made the director famous all over Europe and Latin America; cf. Fischer-Lichte 2014b: 116–34). She also invited Tadashi Suzuki with another production of Oedipus (he had directed the tragedy in 2000 for the International Spring Arts Festival in Shizuoka and the same year presented it at the Delphi Festival) and Valerij Fokin with Seven against Thebes, while Badora herself directed Antigone. All four productions were shown in a gigantic old industrial building in Düsseldorf, which the artist Jannis Kounellis had turned into a unique performance space enclosed by twenty-four pillars. Each production could complement this basic space with different centres and constellations. The project was called Mania Thebaia—since all the tragedies chosen take place in Thebes. It was also shown in Epidaurus the same year, which had been part of the plan from the very beginning. Despite the elaborate dramaturgical reflections, the unique performance space, and the high standards of the directors involved, the project ultimately flopped, revealing that the triad mentioned did not invariably lead to success but involved a high risk of failure should certain conditions not be met. Terzopoulos and Suzuki, for example, each had developed highly specialized training methods that required years, or at least several months, to master, and asking them to work with actors unfamiliar with these techniques turned out to be counterproductive for everyone involved. The Düsseldorf actors were unable to achieve a level that met the directors’ demands. This destroyed or at least blurred the particular quality characteristic of the productions of these directors. Perhaps the space also contributed to this failure. It set very specific conditions for the productions, which not all directors might have been willing to accommodate, particularly when the space impeded the realization of their ideas on how to stage ‘their’ tragedy (cf. the rather favourable review by Dana Rufolo-Hörhager, Theatre Journal, 55/1 (2003), 141–4). Much more successful were two other festivals held in Berlin, a city teeming with festivals, by the Deutsches Theater and the Volksbühne, respectively. Both festivals were devoted to Greek tragedies but without

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involving directors whose work required particular training methods. The 2006 festival at the Deutsches Theater was entitled Anfänge (Beginnings), recalling the beginnings of European theatre in Greece 2,500 years previously as well as the first antiquity project at the Schaubühne and, in particular, the Exercises for Actors. It included Dimiter Gotscheff ’s production of The Persians (later invited to Epidaurus), Michael Thalheimer’s Oresteia, and Barbara Frey’s Medea, all of them highly successful with audiences and critics alike. They remained in the repertoire for a long time as single productions. On the occasion of a conference on Antike Tragödie heute (Ancient Tragedy Today), held at the Deutsches Theater in March 2007, the three productions were once again shown on three successive nights (cf. Fischer-Lichte and Dreyer 2007). When the Volksbühne building at Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz, a square in central Berlin, had to be renovated three years later, the theatre also launched a festival. Its entrance with the massive columns was used as the skene and the space in front of the theatre as the orchestra, which was surrounded by scaffolding mirroring the shape of an amphitheatre. This was called the agora, the public space where questions concerning all of society were addressed. Here, Prometheus, staged by Dimiter Gotscheff, Aristophanes’ The Birds, directed by Jérôme Savary, Frank Castorf ’s Medea, and Werner Schroeter’s Antigone // Electra were presented, complemented by discussions, lectures, and films. The festival was a huge hit. It brought together a range of spectators, some of whom habitually and eagerly visited productions of Greek tragedies; others had never read, let alone seen, one before; several generations of spectators were represented. As a whole, the festival was an exciting, crowd-pulling event. The three festivals of Greek tragedy held at German municipal theatres not only served to highlight the continuing relevance of Greek tragedy today. They also made a much more far-reaching claim regarding the role and function of theatre in contemporary German society. By establishing a strong link between Greek tragedy and festivals, they pointed back to the Great Dionysia. This was the most prestigious and, in terms of the self-understanding of the polis of Athens, the most important of the several festivals celebrated. It embodied and presented Athens’ self-image to the guest participants from other parts of Greece. By alluding to the Great Dionysia, the festivals of the municipal theatres emphasized the importance of theatre for the self-understanding of the citizens as well as for the self-image of German society to be presented at

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festivals to guests from abroad—that is, theatre as a place for the selfreflection and self-recognition of society. In this function no other institution can replace it. The relationship to the Great Dionysia was established not in order to revive ancient Greece in contemporary Germany but to reassert the central position held by theatre in German culture. At the international theatre festival Foreign Affairs held in Berlin in June 2015, a production premiered at the Festspielhaus that expressly referred to the Great Dionysia, albeit for very different reasons: the Belgian artist Jan Fabre’s 24-hour performance Mount Olympus—to Glorify the Cult of Tragedy. The very title is rather telling, ‘Mount Olympus’ being the residence of the Greek gods. Does this part of the title paint the production as an attempt to climb to its peak and join the gods? Or take their place? Or does it make sense only in conjunction with the second part? This is even more ambiguous. Which cult does it refer to? That of the Europeans venerating Greek tragedy? This can be read only ironically, for it would mean that the glorification of a ‘cult’ that epitomized a certain ideal, even ideology, of humanism and humanity is performed by foregrounding the sensuous body driven by instincts and desires. Or does it refer to the cult of Dionysus, as a part of which tragedies were performed? Is the Great Dionysia being glorified here? On the eve of the Great Dionysia, the statue of Dionysus Eleuthereus was carried out in a festive procession and brought to his temple in the holy precinct, after which the rumour spread that the god had appeared and the festival could commence. In Fabre’s production, it was Dionysus himself (Andrew Van Ostade) who inaugurated the festival. He appeared on stage pleading for the productive madness of orgiastic transgressions and for unrestrained devotion to the body, its instincts, drives, and desires. He opened on a Nietzschean note by establishing the themes of madness and the body that were not only enacted by the twenty-seven performers but explicitly reintroduced several times. Dionysus invited the performers to dance—‘I gave them just a little bit of madness’—and he closed the performance with the words ‘Truth is madness’. It was undoubtedly Dionysus’ festival that was being celebrated here. In fact, Dionysus’ dismemberment was repeated as the dismemberment of the body of Greek tragedies. Forty years earlier, Grüber’s Bacchae had performed a sparagmos of the tragedy’s textual ‘body’, so that each of its scattered pieces stood on its own as a fragment. This

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created a theatre of enigmatic images, which did not necessarily relate to the text or to each other. Rather, the fragments enabled and even encouraged the spectators to focus their attention on and indeed contemplate them as single images. This way, the Bacchae not only discredited the argument that tragedy’s endurance on the German stages was due to the Bildungsbürgers’ identification with Greek culture but also performed a sparagmos of their cultural identity (cf. Chapter 8, pp. 292–4). Mount Olympus provided quite another argument for tragedy’s endurance, as we shall see when going deeper into that production. Here, the sparagmos applied to the whole body of Greek tragedies. The performance consisted of fourteen scenes or fragments, each related to one tragedy of Aeschylus, Sophocles, or Euripides, and focusing on different heroines and heroes. The parts did not follow each other in a manner that allowed for coherent narration. Rather, the focus lay on each fragment itself. However, the fragments were conceived in such a way that the performance as a whole included most of the elements characteristic of Greek tragedy and, moreover, of satyr plays—monologues of the protagonists, bits and pieces of dialogue, choric songs, and dances, music, laments, even obscene and crude comic scenes. It was a very particular form of choric theatre. While most of the time the chorus as a whole, or at least a substantial part of it, filled the stage with its impressive presence, every now and then a performer stepped forward as a protagonist and delivered a monologue from one of the tragedies. The concretization of the elements already mentioned frequently alluded to certain styles and moments from the history of performances of Greek tragedies in modern times. Moreover, they cited aspects or moments from Fabre’s own body of work and its blending of performance and visual art elements, as well as 1960s performance art in general. The protagonists’ monologues were rewritten by Jeroen Olyslaegers and sounded contemporary. However, they were mostly delivered in a ‘high style’, no matter whether they were uttered in French, English, German, or Dutch, reminiscent, say, of ‘classical’ French or Goethean diction. This was particularly striking when Els Deceukelier—who has been working with Fabre since his early days—delivered one of Phaedra’s monologues like an aria, with the emotions building up to a climax. The performers were wrapped in white sheets—an ironic reference to the stereotypical image of ‘classical’ Greek costumes—or they wore bloody underpants. Often they were naked. Their nudity recalled not only Greek statues but,

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even more so, the history of nudity or semi-nudity in the performance history of Greek tragedies, ranging from Reinhardt’s torch-bearers to Schechner’s performers in Dionysus in 69 (cf. Fischer-Lichte 2014b: 27–47). The ecstatic dances also recalled Schechner’s production. The raw bloody flesh lavishly flung across the stage not only referenced the act of dismemberment but also alluded to the raw meat fed to the dogs in Grüber’s production of The Bacchae, and maybe also to the final scene of Warlikowski’s production of the same tragedy, when Cadmus emptied two buckets containing the remains of Pentheus’ dismembered body onto the table beside Agave (cf. Fischer-Lichte 2014b: 149). The entrails that the performers drew out of their bodies recalled the Living Theatre’s Antigone. Such allusions or citations underlined the fragmentary character of the fourteen parts, emphasizing the process of dismemberment not only of the body of Greek tragedies but also of its performance history. This also applied to the choice of music. Pieces by Handel, Mozart, Wagner, Strauss, Schubert, and Massenet were played alongside Theodorakis’s ‘Sirtaki’ and techno beats. The Dionysian dismemberment primarily applied to the body of the performers. It was not just the pieces of bloody flesh that filled the stage most of the time and were used as projectiles of sorts by the performers that constantly brought to mind the dismemberment of bodies. The way the performers treated their own bodies and drove them to their limits, transgressing many barriers and taboos, could also be received in this vein. Be it through ecstatic dancing, be it through endless rope-skipping, whereby the ropes were replaced by heavy iron chains, be it through roaring, shouting, yelling, moaning, whimpering, and whining, or through the attempt to make love to trees, the performers went on until they reached a state of total exhaustion. A strange juxtaposition of the two images of ancient Greece, so long dominant not only in Germany but in Europe in general, occurred here, literally embodied by the actors. Clearly, the ecstatic dancing and the rope-skipping with iron chains were reminiscent of Nietzsche and his ideas on the Dionysian body. However, the scene was preceded by a dance sequence utilizing ‘classical’ poses and gestures, and accompanied by classical music. Here, the dancers exposed the beauty of their bodies to the gaze of the spectators, calling to mind Greek statues. This impression was further reinforced by the short white dresses of the women that resembled Greek tunics. In fact, the dance presented a Winckelmannian Greece

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Illustration 10.1 Troubleyn/Jan Fabre: Mount Olympus; Pietro Quadrino strikes a classical, ‘Winckelmannian’ pose (the same that the unearthed Tiresias adopted in Grüber’s The Bacchae) while Lies Vandewege as a female priest decorates his phallus with laurel leaves as she sings Wagner’s ‘Mild und Leise’.

coming to life—which turned into a Nietzschean image after a while (see Illustration 10.1). Last but not least, the time factor played a decisive role in this process. Performing for twenty-four hours with only a few intermissions of thirty minutes or an hour—called ‘dreamtimes’—and repeatedly and ruthlessly transgressing the boundaries of their own bodies posed a challenge to the performers’ endurance. Moreover, it transported the performers into a very particular state—a state best described by the metaphor of dismemberment, the most radical version of transformation, of loss of self and of identity. Reminiscent of Nietzsche’s statement on ‘the true Dionysiac suffering’—that is, the ‘dismemberment’ that ‘amounts to a transformation into air, water, earth and fire’ (Nietzsche 1993: 52)—it marks a state of radical in-betweenness that does not define where this transformation and process of dismemberment will lead—to a permanent state of liminality, for ever changing, or to the creation of something new. The production celebrated the return of Dionysus and his dismemberment. This set the conditions for the perception and experiences of the spectators. The basic conditions were provided by the twenty-four-hour

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framework. The performance began on Saturday, 27 June, at 4 p.m. and ended the next day at approximately the same time, or even a little later. Although it was a durational performance, it was neither immersive nor participatory in the usual sense of the terms. Rather, the performers acted—or slept—on stage. The spectators could spend their time in the auditorium, observing the actions of the performers with different degrees of attention ranging from being wide awake, drowsy, dreamy, or asleep. Or they could also temporarily leave the performance space and take a nap on one of the camp beds set up in the lounge on the first floor during or even outside of the ‘dreamtimes’. In the morning a number of spectators lined up for breakfast—a slice of roasted mutton that had been barbecued for a few hours in the garden near the entrance of the building. Even among those who used the ‘dreamtimes’ to take naps over the course of the twenty-four hours, more and more audience members slid into a state of exhaustion, a very particular liminal state between being awake and asleep. This in-between state was further increased by the spectators exposing themselves so enduringly to the excesses on stage, the waste of strength and energy of the performers, their ruthless maltreatment of their bodies, and by them immersing themselves completely in the particular fragment presented on stage without asking how it related to the others or how it foreshadowed what came next. This posed a challenge to the spectators’ endurance as well. Yet it was a state that most spectators clearly enjoyed tremendously, evidenced by their willingness to join in the rhythmic clapping and cheering after every scene. The applause at the end of the performance was frenetic—in fact, it began even before the end, so that Dionysus had difficulties delivering his final lines (see Illustration 10.2). The performers received long-standing ovations. During the final ten to twelve hours at the latest, it seemed as if they were increasingly losing control over themselves, slowly disintegrating while joyfully experiencing a loss of self—a Dionysian dismemberment.2 2 It is rather telling that none of the reviews makes an attempt to interpret the performance. The critics describe individual scenes or moments they found particularly impressive, or mocked certain others they regarded as kitschy—such as the grand finale. They limit their critiques to a discussion of this particular aesthetic, which was by no means completely novel but in the context of a durational performance unfolded an unusually strong potential for impacting on the spectators. They do not even try to relate this to current ethical, social, or political questions.

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Illustration 10.2 Troubleyn/Jan Fabre: Mount Olympus; Dionysus (Andrew Van Ostade) in the final scene in which sexuality, lust, madness, and catharsis come together and are displayed in an all-encompassing festival.

The performance functioned as a festival that celebrated the return of Dionysus to our contemporary world. Over the course of the long duration of the performance, everyone involved—performers and spectators alike, even if in different ways and to varying degrees—became detached from their everyday lives and were cleansed of the various selves and identities they displayed in it. Dionysus created the possibility of undergoing highly diverse transformations, none of which would result in a particular or prescribed new identity. He celebrated the state of in-betweenness—of dismemberment—as a conditio sine qua non for redefining one’s self once the festival was over, even if this would be a fluid, ever-changing identity. Here, of course, it was not the Bildungsbürgertum or their cultural identity that was being addressed. Rather, the focus shifted to the question of the possibility of adopting and transforming identities, thus providing another argument for tragedy’s endurance. The performance not only tested the performers’ and the spectators’ endurance. It can also be understood as an allegory of and a reflection on Greek tragedy’s endurance on the stage. Just as Dionysus

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was restored to wholeness after his dismemberment at the hands of the Titans, Greek tragedy, in spite of having been fragmented throughout its performance history, will again and again be embodied anew so that its bits and pieces are reassembled yet another time. This way, it will most likely continue to endure.

Bibliography I. Greek tragedies Aeschylus (1901). Griechische Tragödien, ii: Orestie, trans. Ulrich von WilamowitzMoellendorff. 2nd edn. Berlin: Weidmannsche Buchhandlung. Aeschylus (1922). The Oresteia of Aeschylus: Agamemnon, Choephori, Eumenides, trans. R. C. Trevelyan: London: The University Press of Liverpool, Hodder & Stoughton. Aeschylus (2013a). ‘Agamemnon’, trans. Richmond Lattimore, in Mark Griffith and Glenn W. Most (eds), Greek Tragedies, i: Aeschylus: Agamemnon, Prometheus Bound; Sophocles: Oedipus the King, Antigone; Euripides: Hippolytus. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 5–63, 307–8. Aeschylus (2013b). ‘Prometheus Bound’, trans. David Grene, in Mark Griffith and Glenn W. Most (eds), Greek Tragedies, i: Aeschylus: Agamemnon, Prometheus Bound; Sophocles: Oedipus the King, Antigone; Euripides: Hippolytus. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 65–112, 308–9. Brecht, Bertolt (2003). ‘The Antigone of Sophocles’, trans. David Constantine, in Tom Kuhn and David Constantine (eds), Bertolt Brecht: Plays, Poetry and Prose, viii: Collected Plays. London: Methuen, 1–51. Euripides (2008). Medea, trans. Robin Robertson. London: Vintage Books. Euripides (2016). Bacchae, trans. Robin Robertson. London: Vintage Classics. Hofmannsthal, Hugo von (1966). ‘Electra’, trans. with introduction by Alfred Schwarz, in Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Three Plays: Death and the Fool, Electra, The Tower. Waynebook No. 23; Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 67–140. Hölderlin, Friedrich (1994). ‘Ödipus der Tyrann’, in Jochen Schmidt (ed.), Sämtliche Werke und Briefe, ii: Hyperion, Empedokles, Aufsätze, Übersetzungen. Frankfurt/Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 787–848. Hölderlin, Friedrich (2001). Hölderlin’s Sophocles: Oedipus & Antigone, trans. David Constantine. Highgreen: Bloodaxe Books. Müller, Heiner (2004). ‘Sophokles/Ödipus, Tyrann’, in Frank Hörnigk (ed.), Werke, vii: Die Stücke 4: Bearbeitungen für Theater, Film und Rundfunk. Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 7–54. Sophocles (2014). The Theban Plays, ed. Peter J. Ahrensdorf and Thomas L. Pangle. Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press. Stein, Peter (1997). Die Orestie des Aischylos, ed. Bernd Seidensticker and trans. Peter Stein. Munich: C. H. Beck. Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, Ulrich von (1901) (ed.). Griechische Tragödien, ii: Orestie, trans. Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff. 2nd edn. Berlin: Weidmannsche Buchhandlung.

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Wünsche, Raimund (1995). ‘Antiken aus Griechenland—Botschafter der Freiheit’, in Reinhard Heydenreuter, Jan Murken, and Raimund Wünsche (eds), Die erträumte Nation: Griechenlands Wiedergeburt im 19. Jahrhundert. Munich: Biering & Brinkmann, 9–46. Young, Julian (2013). The Philosophy of Tragedy: From Plato to Žižek. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Zarrilli, Phillip B. (1995) (ed.). Acting (Re)Considered: Theories and Practices. New York: Routledge. III. Reviews and programme notes cited A note on the order of the reviews. Each production is followed by the programme notes, insofar as they exist and were cited by the author; these are followed by the reviews listed alphabetically by the reviewer’s last name; reviews without a specific author’s name are listed chronologically under Anon. Ludwig Tieck: Sophocles’ Antigone (New Palace, Potsdam, 28 October 1841) Anon. (1841). Berlinische Nachrichten von Staats- und gelehrten Sachen, 54 (30 October). Anon. (1841). Königlich privilegirte Berlinische Zeitung von Staats- und gelehrten Sachen (30 October). Anon. (1841). Königlich privilegirte Berlinische Zeitung von Staats- und gelehrten Sachen, 261 (8 November). Anon. (1842). Berlinische Nachrichten von Staats- und gelehrten Sachen, 87 (15 April). Wickenhagen, Friedrich Wilhelm (1845). ‘Antigone, Tragödie des Sophocles’, Both’s Bühnen-Repertoir des Auslandes: Frankreichs, Englands, Italiens, Spaniens, 13/103: 1889–905. Hans Oberländer: Sophocles’ Oedipus the King (Akademischer Verein für Kunst und Literatur, Berlin, 1900). Anon. (1900). Vossische Zeitung (1 March). Max Reinhardt: Sophocles’ Electra (Kleines Theater, Berlin, 30 October 1903) A.K. [probably Alfred Kerr] (1903). Vossische Zeitung (31 October). Anon. (1903). Berliner Morgenpost (1 November). Anon. (1903). Berliner Morgenzeitung (1 November). Anon. (1903). Freisinnige Zeitung (1 November). Anon. (n.d.). Unidentified review from the archive of the Theatre Museum Cologne.

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dt. (1903). Vorwärts (1 November). Engel, Fritz (1903). Berliner Tageblatt (30 October). F.E. (1903). Berliner Tageblatt (31 October). Goldmann, Paul (n.d.). Unidentified review from the archive of the Theatre Museum Cologne. Hart, Julius (n.d.). Unidentified review from the archive of the Theatre Museum Cologne. H.E. (1903). Freisinnige Zeitung (3 November). J.L. (1903). ‘Vor den Coulissen’, Berliner Börsen-Courier (31 October). J.S. (1903). Hannoverscher Courier (1 November). Nordhausen, Richard (n.d.). Unidentified review from the archive of the Theatre Museum Cologne. P.S. (1903). Berliner Lokalanzeiger (31 October). W.T. (1903). Neue Hamburger Zeitung (1 November). Max Reinhardt: Sophocles’ Oedipus the King (Musikfesthalle Munich; Circus Schumann Berlin, 7 November 1910) Anon. (1910). Vossische Zeitung (8 November). E.v.B. (1910). Berliner Börsen-Courier (8 November). E.v.B. (1910). Neue Preussische Kreuz Zeitung Berlin (8 November). Engel, Fritz (1910). Berliner Tageblatt (8 November). Faktor, Emil (1919). Berliner Börsen-Courier, 558 (29 November). Falk, Norbert (1910). Berliner Zeitung am Mittag (8 November). Goldmann, Paul (1910). Neue Freie Presse (8 November). Jacobsohn, Siegfried (1910). Die Schaubühne (17 November). J.L. (1910). Berliner Börsen-Courier (8 November). Keller, Julius (1910). Berliner Lokal-Anzeiger (8 November). Max Reinhardt: Aeschylus’ The Oresteia (Musikfesthalle Munich 1911–12; Großes Schauspielhaus Berlin, 1911–12 and 28 November 1919) Düsel, Friedrich (1911). ‘Dramatische Rundschau’, Westermanns Monatshefte 55: 603–10. Engel, Fritz (1919). Berliner Tageblatt (29 November). Fechter, Paul (1919). Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung (29 November). Frenzel, Karl (1911). ‘Die Berliner Theater’, Deutsche Rundschau, 147: 401–72. Grossmann, Stefan (1919). ‘Review of the Oresteia’, Vossische Zeitung (29–30 December). Jacobsohn, Siegfried (1911). Vossische Zeitung (14 October). Klaar, Alfred (1911). Vossische Zeitung (4 October). Patry, Albert (1919). Berliner Tageblatt (14 December).

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Leopold Jessner: Sophocles’ Oedipus (Staatliches Schauspielhaus Berlin, 4 January 1929) Hollaender, Felix (1929). 8-Uhr-Abendblatt (5 January). Wiegler, Paul (1929). Berliner Zeitung am Mittag (5 January). Lothar Müthel: Kurt Heynicke’s Path to the Reich (Heiligenberg, June 1935) Braumüller, Wolf (1935). ‘Kurt Heynicke: “Der Weg ins Reich” ’, Deutsche Bühnenkorrespondenz, 58: 1–3.

Lothar Müthel: Aeschylus’ Oresteia (Staatliches Schauspielhaus at Gendarmenmarkt, Berlin, 3 August 1936) Programme notes to Lothar Müthel (1936), Aeschylus’ Oresteia, Staatliches Schauspielhaus at Gendarmenmarkt, Berlin, season 1935–6 (premiere on 3 August). Anon. (1936). Berliner Zeitung am Mittag (4 August). Anon. (1936). Berliner Börsenzeitung (5 August). Anon. (1936). Berliner Tageblatt (5 August). Anon. (1936). Der Mittag (5 August). Anon. (1936). Germania, Berlin (6 August). Anon. (1936). Münchner Neueste Nachrichten, 214 (6 August). Anon. (1936). National-Zeitung Essen (6 August). Anon. (1936). Westfälische Landeszeitung, Dortmund (6 August). Anon. (1936). Westfälische Zeitung (Bielefeld, 7 August). Anon. (1936). Schleswiger Nachrichten (Schleswig, 10 August). Anon. (1936). Münchner Zeitung (11 August). Anon. (1936). Die Tat (n.d.). Feldner, Kuno (1936). Deutsches Wollen (23 August). Hesse, Otto Ernst (1936). Berliner Zeitung, 187 (5 August). Märker, Friedrich (1936). Münchner Zeitung (11 August). Ruppel, Karl-Heinz (1936). Kölnische Zeitung, 396–7 (7 August). Karl Heinz Stroux: Sophocles’ Antigone (Staatstheater at Gendarmenmarkt Berlin, 3 September 1940) Programme notes to Karl Heinz Stroux (1940), Sophocles’ Antigone, Staatstheater at Gendarmenmarkt, Berlin, season 1940–1 (premiere on 3 September). Anon. (1940). ‘ “Antigone” im staatlichen Schauspielhaus’, Nachrichten aus dem deutschen Kulturleben (4 September).

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Anon. (1936). Berliner Tageblatt, 28 November. Biedrzynski, Richard (1940). ‘Im Schauspielhaus am Gendarmenmarkt: Die “Antigone” des Sophokles’, Völkischer Beobachter. Norddeutsche Ausgabe (6 September). Dargel, Felix A. (1940). ‘Sophokles im Staatlichen Schauspielhaus: Die Stunde der Götter: “Antigone” mit Marianne Hoppe und Walter Frank’, Nachtausgabe (4 September). Götke, Franz (1940). ‘ “Antigone” im Staatstheater: Die erste Neuinszenierung der Spielzeit’, Westen (4 September). Hamel, Fred (1940). ‘Wege der Schauspielmusik: Mark Lothars Antigone-Musik und das Melodium’, Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung (7 September). Hesse, Otto Ernst (1940). ‘Auftakt der neuen Spielzeit im Staatstheater: “Antigone” mit Marianne Hoppe am Gendarmenmarkt’, Berliner Zeitung am Mittag (4 September). Kersten, Paul (1940). ‘Kampf der Pflichten: “Antigone” als erste Premiere des Staatstheaters’, Berliner Lokalanzeiger (4 September). Kienzl, Florian (1940). ‘Das Staatstheater eröffnete die Spielzeit: “Antigone” in streng klassischer Form’, Das-12-Uhr-Blatt (5 September). Köppen, Franz (1940). ‘Staatsräson und Pietät: “Antigone” im Staatstheater’, Berliner Börsenzeitung (4 September). Korn, Karl (1940). ‘ “Sophokles” Antigone: Beginn der neuen Spielzeit im Staatstheater’, Das Reich (8 September). Weichardt, Carl (1940). ‘Ewiges Drama: “Antigone” im Staatlichen Schauspielhaus’, Berliner Morgenpost (4 September). Werner, Bruno E. (1940). ‘ “Antigone’ Eröffnung des Staatstheaters” ’, Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, 420 (4 September, ‘Wednesday Evening’). Gustav Rudolf Sellner: Sophocles’ Oedipus the King (Landestheater in der Orangerie Darmstadt, 18 September 1952; Athens, June 1966) Anon. (1952). Frankfurter Rundschau (22 September). Anon. (1966). Eleftheria, 17 June. Friedrich, Heinz (1952). Das ganze Deutschland (27 September). Geisenheiner, Max (1952). Darmstädter Tageblatt (20 September). Gotty, Werner Willy (1952). Abendpost (22 September). Hensel, Georg (1952). Darmstädter Echo (20 September). Heyd, Rosemarie (1952). Frankfurter Nachtausgaben (22 September). H.G. (1952) Rheinische Post (24 September). Hübner, Paul (1952). Die Neue Zeitung (23 September). Klinger, Kurt (1971–4). ‘Moderne Bühnenbilder für antike Dramen auf dem deutschen Theater’, Dioniso: Trimestrale di studi sul teatro Dramma Antico, 45: 395–418.

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Korn, Karl (1952). Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (23 September). Lambrou, Iro D. (1966). ‘A Teutonic Oedipus’, Eleftheria (22 June). Ruths, Heiner (1952). Rhein-Neckar-Zeitung (26 September). Gustav Rudolf Sellner: Sophocles’ The Women of Trachis (Darmstadt, 1959) Hensel, Georg (1959). Darmstädter Echo (14 December). Jenny, Urs (1969). Süddeutsche Zeitung (16 February). Erwin Piscator: Atrides Tetralogy (Theater am Kurfürstendamm—Haus der Freien Volksbühne Berlin, 7 October 1962) Programme notes to Erwin Piscator (1962), Hauptmann’s Atrides Tetralogy, Theater am Kurfürstendamm, Haus der Freien Volksbühne Berlin, season 1962–3, No. 1 (premiere on 7 October). Kaul, Walter (1962). ‘Stromlinie ohne Strom: Gerhart Hauptmanns AtridenTetralogie in Piscators Regie’, Der Kurier (8 October). Luft, Friedrich, Die Welt (8 October). Michaelis, Rolf (1962). ‘Der späte Hauptmann’, Theater heute, 11: 22–4. Pfeiffer, Herbert (1962). ‘Ein großes Drama der Menschheit’, Morgenpost (9 October). Benno Besson: Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrant (Deutsches Theater DT Staatstheater East Berlin (GDR), 31 January 1967) Programme notes to Benno Besson (1967), Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrant, Deutsches Theater DT Staatstheater in East Berlin (GDR), season 1966–7, No. 3 (premiere on 31 January). Anon. (1967). Neue Zürcher Zeitung (29 January). Bellmann, Günther (1967). ‘Mimik auf der Zunge’, Berliner Zeitung am Abend (3 February). Eichler, Rolf-Dieter (1967). ‘Ödipus Tyrann: Die Tragödie des Sophokles im Deutschen Theater’, Nationalzeitung (4 February). Middell, Eike (1967). ‘Ödipus Tyrann: Benno Besson und Heiner Müller stellen ein Theaterereignis vor’, Sächsisches Tageblatt Dresden (9 February). Müller, André (1967). ‘ “Ödipus Tyrann”: Eine großartige Inszenierung in Ostberlin’, Deutsche Volkszeitung Düsseldorf (31 March). Schneider, Heinz Ludwig (1967). ‘Ödipus “Schwellfuß” in Ostberlin: Besson inszeniert Sophokles’, Handelsblatt Düsseldorf (23 January). Schumacher, Ernst (1967). Berliner Zeitung (3 February). Ullrich, Helmut (1967). ‘Orakel und die Kraft des Verstandes’, Neue Zeit (East Berlin) (3 February).

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Wendt, Ernst (1967). ‘Sind Brecht-Schüler Formalisten? Am Beispiel von zwei Klassiker-Aufführungen: Benno Besson inszeniert “Ödipus Tyrann” in Ost-Berlin/Peter Palitzsch inszeniert den “Krieg der Rosen” in Stuttgart’, Theater heute, 3: 18–27. The Living Theatre Group: Brecht’s Antigone of Sophocles (Stadttheater Krefeld, 19 February 1967) Rischbieter, Henning (1967). ‘Gewalt gegen Gewalt. Das Living Theatre zeigt die “Antigone” des Sophokles in der Brechtschen Bearbeitung’, Theater heute, 4: 34–6. Vielhaber, Gerd (1967). ‘Die Hauptfigur: ein Leichnam’, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (4 March). Hansgünther Heyme: The Oedipus of Sophocles (Schauspiel Cologne, 12 September 1968) Anon. (1968). Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger (18 September). Canaris, Volker (1968). ‘Die Oberen und das Volk’, Theater heute, 10: 10–14. Müller, André (1968). ‘Gegen den Mythos vom Schicksal: Heymes “Ödipus”Inszenierung im Kölner Schauspielhaus’, Deutsche Volkszeitung Düsseldorf (11 October). Hans Neuenfels: Euripides’ Medea (Schauspiel Frankfurt, 27 September 1976) Programme notes to Hans Neuenfels (1976), Euripides’ Medea, Schauspiel Frankfurt, season 1976–7, No. 41 (premiere on 27 September). Beese, Henriette (1979). ‘Gewaltiges macht aber auch viel Mühe’, Theater heute, special issue: Theater 1979: 52–5. Glaser, Hermann (1977). ‘Ein kulturpolitisches Lehrstück: Überlegungen zum Neuenfels-Skandal in Frankfurt’, Theater heute, 1: 23–6. Karasek, Hellmuth (1976). ‘Medea als Feministin’, Der Spiegel, 48 (22 November), 201–2. Rischbieter, Henning (1976). ‘Was das Schauspiel Frankfurt (nicht) bewirkt: Überlegungen anhand von drei Aufführungen’, Theater heute, 12: 8–14. Rühle, Günther (1976). Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (no date). Zwerenz, Gerhard (1976). Konkret (November). Christoph Nel: Sophocles’ Antigone (Schauspiel Frankfurt, 4 November 1978) Programme notes to Christoph Nel (1978), Sophocles’ Antigone, Schauspiel Frankfurt, season 1978–9 (premiere on 4 November).

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Iden, Peter (1978). ‘An den Rändern der Nacht, Christoph Nels Frankfurter “Antigone” nach Sophokles/Hölderlin’, Frankfurter Rundschau (6 November). Rischbieter, Henning (1979). ‘Antike – fern im Kasten oder zum Anfassen? Über die “Antigone” des Sophokles in Frankfurt und den “Zyklop” des Euripides in Köln’, Theater heute 1: 32–41. Schödel, Helmut (1979). ‘Antigone, weit weg von Stammheim: Christoph Nel, Ernst Wendt und Niels-Peter Rudolph inszenieren Hölderlins Sophokles’, Die Zeit, 16 (13 April). Stadelmaier, Gerhard (1978). ‘Überlebensgroß Herr Jedermann: Wie Christoph Nel in Frankfurt die “Antigone” zu einem Gegenwartsstück machte’, Stuttgarter Zeitung (7 November). Claus Peymann: Brecht’s Antigone (The Schaubühne Berlin, 1965) Pfeiffer, Herbert (1965). ‘Zwischen Barbarei und Sitte: “Antigone” in der Schaubühne am Halleschen Ufer’, Berliner Morgenpost (30 September). Unger, Wilhelm (1965). ‘Zeitgeschehen in antiker Tragödie: “Brechts’ Antigone” bei den Berliner Festwochen’, Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger (6 October). The Schaubühne’s Antiquity Project (February 1974) Programme notes to the Schaubühne (1974), Antiquity Project, Peter Stein, Exercises for Actors, and Klaus Michael Grüber, The Bacchae, Schaubühne at Hallesches Ufer at the Philips Pavilion on the trade fair grounds in Berlin, season 1973–4, No. 9 (premiere on 6–7 February). Iden, Peter (1974). ‘Mit den Griechen an die Grenzen: Die Bakchen des Euripides als zweiter Abend des “Antiken Projektes” der Berliner Schaubühne’, Frankfurter Rundschau (11 February). Karasek, Hellmuth (1974). ‘Im griechischen Freistil’, Der Spiegel 8: 110–12. Peter Stein: Exercises for Actors (Schaubühne at Hallesches Ufer Berlin, 6 February 1974) Jäger, Gerd (1974). ‘Wie alles sich für mich verändert hat: Das Antikenprojekt der Berliner Schaubühne und die “Bakchen” des Euripides, von Grüber in Berlin, von Ronconi in Wien inszeniert’, Theater heute, 15/3: 12–21. Klaus Michael Grüber: Euripides’ The Bacchae (Schaubühne at Hallesches Ufer Berlin, 7 February 1974) Baumgart, Reinhard (1974). ‘An den Grenzen des Theaters: Das Antikenprojekt der Schaubühne’, Süddeutsche Zeitung, 49 (16–17 February). Feuilleton. Canaris, Volker (1974). ‘Zeit für Klassiker? Überlegungen aus Anlaß der beiden wichtigsten Theaterereignisse der Spielzeit 73/74: “Antikenprojekt” bei der

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Schaubühne, “König Lear” in Bochum’, Theater heute, special issue, Theater 1974: Chronik und Bilanz eines Bühnenjahres (Sonderheft der Zeitschrift Theater heute), 30–5. Rühle, Günther (1974). ‘Keine Liebe in Theben: “Antikeprojekt 2. Teil”/“Die Bakchen” des Euripides an der Berliner Schaubühne’, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (11 February). The Schaubühne’s Antiquity Project II (1980) Becker, Peter von (1997). ‘Die Sehnsucht nach dem Vollkommenen: Über Peter Stein, den Regisseur und sein Stück Theatergeschichte – zum sechzigsten Geburtstag’, Der Tagesspiegel 16 (1 October). Peter Stein: Aeschylus’ Oresteia (Schaubühne at Hallesches Ufer Berlin, 18 October 1980) Ben, Michael (1980). ‘Wie Faßbinder in Oberammergau: “Die Orestie” des Aischylos auf der Schaubühne—ein Börsenbericht’, Deutsche Volkszeitung (13 November). Egelkraut, Ortrun (1980). ‘Zurück zu den Ursprüngen unseres Theaters’, Spandauer Volksblatt (21 October). Hensel, Georg (1980). ‘Götter, Gräber und Geschworenes’, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (20 October). H.W.L. (1980). ‘Schwarze Welt weiß: Die Berliner Orestie’, Deutsche Gegenwart (27 November). Iden, Peter (1980a). ‘ “Sich hineinwühlen in diesen alten Krempel”: Wie die Berliner Schaubühne ihr Publikum auf die Orestie vorbereitet’, Frankfurter Rundschau (21 May). Iden, Peter (1980b). ‘Tun—Leiden—Lernen’, Frankfurter Rundschau (21 October). Ignée, Wolfgang (1980). ‘Ins Ehegrab mit Agamemnon’, Stuttgarter Zeitung (21 October). Karasek, Hellmuth (1980). ‘Sieg des Patriarchats’, Der Spiegel, 10 (20 October), 211–14. Michaelis, Rolf (1980). ‘Geburt des Rechtsstaats im Blutregen’, Die Zeit (24 October). Rischbieter, Henning (1981). ‘In welcher Weise ist Steins “Orestie” politisch? Überlegungen anhand einer Passage’, Theater heute, 1: 48–9. Einar Schleef: Die Mütter (Schauspiel Frankfurt, 23 February 1986) Henrichs, Benjamin (1986). ‘Stöhn heul kreisch blök krächz jaul stotter murmel: Ein Untergang: Einar Schleef inszeniert seine “Mütter” in Frankfurt’, Die Zeit (28 February).

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Iden, Peter (1986). ‘Chorisches Kunstgebrüll: “Die Mütter”—Einar Schleefs Griechenmontage gescheitert’, Frankfurter Rundschau (24 February). Skasa, Michael (1986). ‘Kinder, Mütter und ein Fahnenjunker: Das Frankfurter Schauspiel läßt die alten Griechen tanzen’, Süddeutsche Zeitung (24 February). Fritz Bennewitz: Brecht’s Antigone (Deutsches Theater Berlin, 9 October 1989) Anon. (1989). Bündner Zeitung (13 October). Lemke, Christine (1989–90). ‘Die Stadt ist voll von innerer Unlust’, Musik und Theater, 12 (December–January), 30–3. Einar Schleef: Reading from Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo (Akademietheater Vienna, March 2000) Iden, Peter (2000). Frankfurter Rundschau (31 May). Volker Lösch: Oresteia (Staatsschauspiel Dresden, 31 October 2003) Programme notes to Volker Lösch (2003), Aeschylus’ Oresteia, Staatsschauspiel Dresden, season 2003–4 (premiere on 31 October). Gorgas, Gabriele (2003). ‘Gewagt Gewonnen: Volker Lösch inszeniert “Die Orestie” und macht die Bühne zum Schlachten-Forum’, Sächsische Zeitung (3 November). Merck, Nikolaus (2003). ‘Doppelagent: Chor’, Theater der Zeit, 12: 38–9. Stephan, Erika (2003). ‘Die Hausbesetzung: Volker Lösch inszeniert die “Orestie” des Aischylos mit Dresdner Bürgern im Staatsschauspiel Dresden’, Theater heute, 12: 17–19. Claudia Bosse/theatercombinat: Aeschylus’ The Persians (Théâtre du Grütli Geneva, 2006; Vienna, 2006; Braunschweig, 2008) Programme notes to Claudia Bosse and theatercombinat (2006), Aeschylus’ The Persians, Théâtre du Grütli, season 2006–7 (accessed 23 June 2016). Behrens, Wolfgang (2008). ‘Masse und Wucht’, nachtkritik.de (7 June) (accessed 23 June 2016). Dössel, Christine (2008). ‘Im Meer des Schreiens’, Süddeutsche Zeitung (16 June). Otojirō Kawakami/Sada Yakko: Kabuki (Berlin, 1902) Anon. (1902). Die Neue Rundschau, 112. Anon. (1902). ‘Die Kawakami Truppe (Sada Yakko) in Berlin’, Ost-Asien, 46 (January), 449–50.

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Tadashi Suzuki: Euripides’ Trojan Women (Paris, 1977; London, 1985; Theatre of the World, Frankfurt, 1985) Programme notes to Theater der Welt (1985), Frankfurt (online: http://www.itigermany.de/fileadmin/user_upload/pdf_theater/Theater_der_Welt_1985_web. pdf> (accessed 23 June 2016). Billington, Michael (1985). Guardian (11 April). Oehrlein, Josef (1985). ‘Kassandra zwischen Troja und Tokio’, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (10 October), 28. Schulze-Reimpell, Werner (1987). ‘Das Leben geht weiter: Theater der Welt: “Die Troerinnen” des Euripides aus Japan’, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (30 June). Tunc, André (1977). La Croix (2 June). Anna Badora et al.: Mania Thebaia (Düsseldorf, 2002) Rufolo-Hörhager, Dana (2003). ‘Theban Cycle: Schauspielhaus, Düsseldorf: 27 June–30 June 2002’, Theatre Journal, 55/1: 141–4. IV. Online references ‘Article II A 3 (ii)’, The Berlin (Potsdam) Conference, 17 July–2 August 1945, (a) Protocol of the Proceedings, 1 August 1945 (accessed 21 June 2016). ‘Mitbestimmungstheater’, Wikipedia (last modified 21 May 2016). (accessed 21 June 2016). ‘Red Army Faction’, Wikipedia (modified 17 June 2016) (accessed 21 June 2016). V. Films Riefenstahl, Leni (1936a). Olympia Part I: Fest der Völker [Festival of the Nations] (DVD). Riefenstahl, Leni (1936b). Olympia Part II: Fest der Schönheit [Festival of Beauty] (DVD).

Index A note on the Index. As it was impossible for obvious reasons to list every single name and keyword mentioned in the book, the author has decided to limit the index only to those entries that are of key importance to the main arguments of the book. Adenauer, Konrad 203, 220 Adorno, Theodor W. 285 Aeschylus 77–8, 84, 89, 108, 110, 120, 129, 148, 155, 157–8, 160–1, 163–4, 205, 217, 247, 272, 274–5, 298–300, 302–6, 314, 337–8, 340, 342, 344–5, 359 aesthetics 4, 24, 36, 38, 51, 53, 72–3, 85–6, 145–6, 167, 193, 225, 256, 310, 314, 318, 324, 326, 333, 345, 362 aesthetic distance 26, 29, 37, 41, 52, 57, 67, 141, 177, 191, 196, 198, 201, 203 aesthetic education 23–6, 28, 35, 39, 41, 52, 62, 83, 133, 331 theatre aesthetics 5, 17, 19, 23, 26, 35–6, 41, 67–9, 71, 83–4, 90, 107, 132–6, 139–40, 188, 194–5, 197–8, 202–5, 207–9, 212–13, 215–21, 224, 227, 232, 234, 236–7, 241, 246–7, 254–5, 267, 294, 306, 313, 326, 348, 354 Aillaud, Gilles 280–1 d’Alembert, Jean-Baptiste Le Rond 342 Altertumswissenschaften 2–3, 28, 41, 48, 55 ambiguity 275–7, 284, 292, 301–2, 304–10, 312, 321, 345, 358 Apollo / Apollonian 28, 30–4, 86–7, 110, 129–30, 150, 159–61, 173–4, 280–1, 285, 295, 297–8, 302, 304, 309, 326 Appen, Karl von 315 Appia, Adolphe 81, 113 archetype 183, 207–9, 213, 216, 218–19, 236 Arendt, Hannah 246 Aristophanes 227, 247, 272, 328, 357 Arroyo, Eduardo 280–1 atmosphere 60–1, 78, 101, 112, 115–21, 135, 151–2, 173–4, 177, 191, 258, 280, 334–5

Baader, Andreas 247, 257–9, 266 Bach, Johann Sebastian 57 Badora, Anna 350, 356 Bahr, Hermann 96–8 Bakunin, Mikhail 70 Bassermann, Albert 134–5, 144 Bayreuth Festival 69, 76–7, 79, 81–2, 84–5, 88, 90, 93, 127, 132, 205, 214, 355 Beck, Julian 238–9 Behrens, Peter 94–5, 205 Benn, Gottfried 145 Bennewitz, Fritz 330 Berlau, Ruth 194–5 Berlin Ensemble 195, 228–9, 243, 249, 315, 330, 333 Berlin Festival Weeks / Berlin Festspiele 221, 226, 349 Bernal, Martin 2–3, 232 Bertuch, Carl 35–6 Besson, Benno 195, 227–9, 231–7, 243, 328, 349 Bildung 4, 9–10, 13, 16–17, 19, 28–9, 35–6, 38–41, 45, 47–9, 62–4, 66–7, 74, 82, 84, 92, 126, 134, 143–4, 193, 205, 226, 247–8, 254, 256, 295, 305, 311, 331, 354 Bildungsbürger / Bildungsbürgertum 1–2, 4–6, 7, 12, 45–6, 48–52, 62–3, 66–7, 69, 79, 82, 84, 86–90, 96, 99–100, 107, 111, 114, 125–6, 140, 145–7, 165–6, 170–1, 178–9, 190, 193, 197, 202, 204, 209, 216–17, 222, 225, 227, 236, 238, 246–7, 255–6, 267, 271, 293–4, 296, 311–14, 327, 345, 347, 349–50, 352, 354, 359, 363 Bloch, Ernst 126, 345 Blouet, Albert 149 Böckh, August 51–2, 54–5, 57, 59



INDEX

Böhme, Gernot 115–16 Böll, Heinrich 258 Bosse, Claudia 337, 342, 344 Böttiger, Karl August 30–1, 33, 36 Brandt, Willy 248, 269 Braumüller, Wolf 162 Brecht, Bertolt 132–3, 136, 138–40, 144, 187–8, 194–203, 208, 215, 224–6, 228–9, 238–41, 246, 249, 270, 279, 311, 314, 315, 330–1 Breker, Arno 180 Brennglas, see Adolf Glaßbrenner Burckhardt, Jacob 89 Burgtheater, Vienna 109, 168–9, 195, 222, 333 Burkert, Walter 272, 274–6 Butler, Eliza Marian 1–2 Caldéron de la Barca, Pedro 23, 27 Camus, Albert 216 Castellucci, Romeo 354 Castorf, Frank 334, 357 Chamberlain, Houston Stewart 164 Charcot, Jean-Martin 99–100 Chéreau, Patrice 79 chorus 17, 26, 29, 31, 56–60, 67, 69, 75–6, 83, 87, 96, 109–10, 113–14, 119–21, 124–5, 153, 157, 160–3, 170, 173, 196–200, 208–13, 216, 224–5, 228–31, 233–5, 240, 242–5, 250, 253, 261–6, 274–5, 281–3, 286, 289, 298, 300–2, 304, 308, 314, 315–23, 326–7, 332–5, 337–46, 348 choric theatre 154, 161–3, 313–15, 332–4, 336, 338, 345–6, 359 protest chorus 327, 329, 331–2, 337, 341 Circus Schumann / Großes Schauspielhaus 107–8, 111, 126–8, 132, 137, 153 Clever, Edith 270, 289, 297–8, 300 Cocteau, Jean 137 communism 132, 144, 153, 156, 189, 221, 238, 248, 270, 314, 323–4, 329, 331 community 61, 74–6, 81–3, 86–7, 90, 94–5, 102, 104, 106, 108, 119, 121, 123, 127–31, 133, 153, 161, 164, 170, 173, 226, 230, 232–4, 236–7, 275–6, 291, 303, 314, 317, 321–3, 325, 327, 333–6, 341, 348–9, 351, 355

aesthetic community 103, 120, 125, 131 theatrical community 120, 125–6, 131 Corneille, Pierre 23 Coubertin, Pierre de 150, 152 Craig, Edward Gordon 93, 112–13, 144, 221 Crelinger, Auguste 54, 59, 63 cult of beauty 8–9, 16 cultural crisis / Kulturkrise 92–3, 95, 107–8, 125, 130 cultural identity 1, 4–5, 38–9, 45–6, 48, 52, 70, 82, 84, 89–90, 107, 126, 147, 170, 179, 190, 193, 216–17, 225, 236, 238, 247, 256, 267, 271, 280, 293–4, 311–14, 345, 347, 349, 359, 363 Curtius, Ernst 89, 149–50, 155 Deceukelier, Els 359 democracy / democratization 49, 70, 79, 81, 89, 91, 114, 127, 129, 160, 183, 191, 203, 245, 247–8, 295, 305, 310, 331, 337–9, 341–2, 346 participatory democracy 313, 332, 338, 341, 345 Deutsch, Ernst 130, 144 Deutsches Theater, Berlin / Kammerspiele, Berlin 122, 127, 136, 144, 146, 185, 187, 195, 222, 227–9, 232, 327, 330, 350, 356–7 Devrient, Eduard 54–5, 59–60, 62 Diderot, Denis 20 Dingelstedt, Franz von 66 Dionysia / Dionysiac / Dionysian / Dionysus 55–6, 61, 69, 77, 84, 86–9, 93, 99–100, 107, 130, 155, 159–62, 172–3, 228, 272, 280–3, 285–6, 288–90, 296, 326, 347–8, 357–8, 360–3 Dionysus Theatre, Athens 55, 86, 155, 296 dismemberment 88–9, 274, 276, 287, 290, 293, 307, 320–1, 358, 360–4 Dodds, Eric 272 Donner, Johann Jakob Christian 55, 57–8 Droysen, Johann Gustav 55, 58, 60–2, 78, 83, 295, 348 Duncan, Isadora 93, 99 Durieux, Tilla 111, 124, 144

INDEX

Durkheim, Emile 92 Dutschke, Rudi 241, 259 Eagleton, Terry 42 Ebert, Friedrich 128 Eckermann, Johann Peter 16–17, 23 Eichendorff, Joseph von 334 empathy 9, 16, 19–20, 26, 29, 36, 38, 41, 139, 164, 175, 177, 180, 198, 201, 235 energy 74, 83, 93–4, 112, 121–5, 292, 316, 322–3, 325–6, 338–9, 345, 362 enigmatic images 280, 282–3, 285, 289–91, 293, 359 Ensslin, Gudrun 247, 257–8, 266 Enzensberger, Hans Magnus 271 epic theatre 132, 139–41, 194–5, 201–2, 330 Eschenburg, Johann Joachim 11 estrangement effect / Verfremdungseffekt 197–8, 201, 203, 228 Euripides 13, 23, 27–8, 32, 41, 63, 78, 84, 225, 247, 251–2, 254–5, 269, 272, 281, 314, 349, 353, 354, 359 Eysoldt, Gertrud 97–102, 105–7, 286, 352 Fabre, Jan 358–9, 361, 363 Fassbinder, Rainer Werner 258 festival / festive 17, 61, 66, 69, 71, 75–9, 81–3, 93–5, 107–8, 118–19, 131–2, 134, 148, 150–1, 160, 163, 165, 184, 205, 218, 222, 224, 238, 296, 323, 328, 342, 347–51, 353–8, 363 Festival of Delphi 329, 349–50, 356 Festival of Epidaurus 312, 349–50, 356–7 Feuchtwanger, Lion 332 Flashar, Hellmut 4–5, 83, 109, 134, 147, 187, 328, 331 Fleißer, Marieluise 271 Fokin, Valerij 356 Foreign Affairs, Berlin 358 Foucault, Michel 292 Franz II 15 Frazer, James George 88, 104, 110 Frederick II (Frederick the Great) 7 Freud, Sigmund 100 Friedrich Wilhelm III 53 Friedrich Wilhelm IV 53, 65, 70 Fuchs, Georg 94–5, 99, 107, 118, 205



Ganz, Bruno 270, 274, 283 Genast, Eduard 22 Genelli, Hans Christian 55–6 Gennep, Arnold van 104, 272 George, Stefan 1, 141 German Democratic Republic (GDR) 5, 188, 194–6, 203, 225–8, 232–3, 236, 241, 248–9, 315, 327–9, 331–2, 338, 342 German reunification 331, 337 Gesamtkunstwerk 69–70, 73–5, 79, 83–5, 88, 90 Girard, René 272, 285, 320–1, 325 Glaser, Hermann 255–6 Glaßbrenner, Adolf 63–4 Gleim, Johann Wilhelm Ludwig 7, 35 Gluck, Christoph Willibald 71 Gobineau, Arthur de 164 Goebbels, Joseph 143–4, 148, 153, 166, 179, 181, 221 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 1, 7, 10–13, 15–17, 19–23, 25–41, 43, 45–7, 52, 57, 59, 67, 127–8, 146, 164, 198, 204–5, 271, 311, 331, 333, 359 Goldoni, Carlo 23 Göring, Hermann 148, 169 Gorky, Maxim 97, 270 Gotscheff, Dimiter 350, 357 Gozzi, Carlo 23, 27 great form 139–40, 195, 208, 215, 234 Grimm, brothers Jacob & Wilhelm 53 Gropius, Walter 94, 133 Grüber, Klaus Michael 269–70, 272, 279–81, 283, 288–9, 291, 293–4, 300, 307, 358, 360–1 Gründgens, Gustaf 146, 169, 187–8, 190–2, 215 guilt 153, 167, 177, 183, 188, 213, 215, 226, 246, 257, 320 collective guilt 187, 189–90, 193, 197, 202–4, 223 Hacks, Peter 227 Hall, Edith 5, 66 Hall, Stuart 9 Hamann, Richard 150 Hardenberg, Carl August von 46 Harrison, Jane Ellen 88–9 Hauptmann, Gerhart 128, 146, 222–3, 332



INDEX

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 42, 51, 53–4, 170, 177–8, 193 Heidegger, Martin 215 Heine, Heinrich 1 Herald, Heinz 127, 144 Herder, Johann Gottfried 35, 40–1 Herder, Karoline 35–6 Herodes Atticus Theatre, Athens 67, 205 Herrmann, Karl-Ernst 273, 276, 296 Hesse, Volker 334 Hessisches Staatstheater, Darmstadt 134, 205 Heyme, Hansgünther 224, 241–7, 272, 350 Himmler, Heinrich 146–8 historicism 45, 50–2, 55, 67–8, 81, 96, 296, 305, 311, 348 Hitler, Adolf 1–2, 143, 146, 151, 164, 166, 169–70, 178–81, 189, 196–7, 206, 216, 223 Hochhuth, Rolf 224, 333 Hofmannsthal, Hugo von 96–7, 100, 103, 105, 109, 111–12, 114, 132, 144 Hölderlin, Friedrich 1, 42, 134, 171, 186–7, 196–7, 232–3, 259, 262–3 Homer 87 Horkheimer, Max 285 Horvath, Ödön von 279 Hübner, Kurt 225, 270 Humboldt, Wilhelm von 4, 15, 21–2, 45–9, 164, 204 hysteria / hysteric 96, 99–100 Ibsen, Henrik 146, 221, 271 Ihering, Herbert 136–8, 140 image of ancient Greece 3, 5, 67–9, 84–5, 88–90, 101, 107, 122, 140, 155, 163, 179, 188, 202, 216, 218, 230, 232, 256, 327, 348, 359–60 inaccessibility of the past 292, 301, 307, 310, 327 individualism 92, 100, 108, 125, 314, 331 Jacobsohn, Siegfried 115, 117, 121–2, 124, 135 Jagemann, Caroline 30, 34 Jaspers, Karl 189 Jelinek, Elfriede 333–4 Jessner, Leopold 126, 134–41, 144–5, 147, 186, 194, 216, 311 Jones, William 164 Jung, Carl Gustav 207

Kammerspiele, Munich 133, 233, 270 Kawakami, Otojirō 351–2 Kerr, Alfred 98, 136, 141, 144 Kessler, Harry Count 112 Kiesinger, Kurt Georg 237 Klee, Paul 133 Kleines Theater, Berlin / Small Theatre, Berlin 97, 100, 107 Kleist, Heinrich von 146, 271 Klenze, Leo von 64–6 Kluge, Alexander 258 Koch, Heinrich 186, 207 König, Michael 270, 280–1 Kortner, Fritz 135–6, 138–40, 144, 270 Kott, Jan 272 Kotzebue, August von 40 Koun, Karolos 349–50 Lampe, Jutta 270, 297, 299, 302–3 Langhoff, Wolfgang 187 Le Corbusier 94 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim 7–9, 15, 20, 23, 185 liberation of the body 92, 124, 131, 238 liminal / liminality 61, 82, 105–6, 177–8, 217, 326, 353–5, 361–2 Lindtberg, Leopold 184 Living Theatre Group 195, 238–40, 360 Lösch, Volker 337–42 Lothar, Mark 159, 173 Louis XIV 7 Ludwig I 49, 64–6 Ludwig II 79, 81 Luft, Friedrich 184, 224, 269 Macintosh, Fiona 5, 66, 346 maenad 96, 99–100, 104, 286 Malina, Judith 221, 238–9 Marchand, Suzanne L. 3–4, 48–9, 141 Marcuse, Herbert 238 Marthaler, Christoph 334 Marx, Karl 72, 79, 230, 232, 234, 334 Masur, Kurt 330 Maximilian I 65 Meinhof, Ulrike 247, 257, 259, 266 Meins, Holger 257 Mendelsohn, Erich 294 Mendelssohn, Eleonore von 139 Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, Felix 54, 57–9, 63–4, 66–7, 83, 170–1, 236 Merkel, Garlieb 39–40

INDEX

Mertz, Franz 208–10, 224 Metternich, Clemens von 49–50, 65 Mhe, Margarethe 207 Miller, Arthur 221 Mnouchkine, Ariane 78, 347, 354 model book / model production 81, 194–5, 197–8, 201, 203, 270, 330 Moissi, Alexander 111, 129–30, 144 Molière 23 Möller, Eberhard Wolfgang 152–3, 167 Moritz, Karl Philipp 12 Mounet-Sully, Jean 109 movement 10–11, 46, 70, 82, 133–4, 181, 327, 332 anti-authoritarian movement 246, 256 Greek independence movement 49, 65, 126 Lebensreform movement 92–3, 96, 99 student movement 224, 237 terrorist movement 247, 257 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus 23, 360 Müller, Heiner 232–3, 333–4, 343 Müller, Traugott 156, 158, 172 Murray, Gilbert 122, 272, 348 Musikfesthalle, Munich 107–8 Mussolini, Benito 143, 179 Müthel, Lothar 139, 147–8, 155–65, 169, 171, 222 Myron 151 Napoleon (Bonaparte) 46, 49, 128, 143 Napoleon III 77 nationalism 3–4, 45–6, 49, 76–7, 84, 91, 126, 128, 141 National Socialism 131, 143, 145–6, 148–9, 156, 160–6, 170, 176, 178, 181, 196, 204, 206, 216, 237, 257 Neher, Caspar 187, 194–7, 199–202 Nel, Christoph 248–9, 259, 260–1, 264–6 Neuenfels, Hans 248–9, 251–2, 254–5, 305, 314 Neve, Rotraut de 259, 262–3, 266 New Palace, Potsdam (Neues Palais) / The Court Theatre, Potsdam 45, 55–6, 63 Nicolai, Friedrich 9 Nietzsche, Friedrich 1, 69–70, 76–7, 84–90, 93–5, 99–100, 102, 104, 155–6, 173, 218, 228, 232, 286, 319, 326–7, 333, 358, 360–1



Oberländer, Hans 109 Offenbach, Jacques 302 Olympic Games 1, 132, 147, 148–53, 163–6 Orff, Carl 151 Orwell, George 9 Otto I 49–50, 65 Palitzsch, Peter 248–9 Parker, Louis Napoleon 82 Pasolini, Pier Paolo 239 people’s theatre 108, 125–8, 143–4 Peymann, Claus 195, 224, 238, 270 phenomenal body 100, 106, 123 Philhellenism 1–7, 9, 13, 15–17, 26, 28, 30, 34–5, 38, 40–1, 45–7, 50, 53–4, 62–8, 78, 84, 90, 126, 140, 146, 193, 216 philosophical theatre 43, 195, 201, 208, 311 Pinthus, Kurt 127 Piscator, Erwin 132, 134, 139–40, 144, 221–6, 238, 241, 246 Plautus 23 Poelzig, Hans 127, 137 political theatre 125–6, 132–4, 144, 196, 208, 221, 224, 237, 246, 255, 267, 270, 310, 314 Poppy-Dressler, Ricarda 242–3 Pound, Ezra 205, 218–20 Racine, Jean 23 Raspe, Jan-Carl 257–8, 266 Red Army Faction (RAF) 247, 257–9, 310 Reich, Wilhelm 238 Reichardt, Johann Friedrich 34 Reichsgründung 91 Reinhardt, Max 67, 69, 82, 91, 95–7, 105, 107–15, 117–22, 124–32, 136, 144, 146, 153, 159, 185, 215–16, 293, 312–14, 316, 347–8, 351–2, 360 revival of Greek theatre 34–5, 54–5, 60, 83, 92–3, 149, 165, 213, 215, 226, 237, 293, 307, 358 revolution 10, 24–5, 38, 40, 70–4, 145, 162, 187 cultural revolution of the 1960s 4, 238 French Revolution 2, 5, 19, 23, 41–2, 119, 331



INDEX

revolution (cont.) German Revolutions of 1848 and 1989 (GDR) 5, 53, 65–6, 70–1, 76–7, 327, 329, 331–2 Greek Revolution, see movement (Greek independence movement) revolutionary art 73, 114, 128 Russian Revolution 125, 313 rhythm 58, 61, 94–5, 115–16, 118–19, 137, 160, 173–4, 177, 211, 218, 228, 233, 238, 260, 275, 317, 319, 321–3, 325, 334, 338–9, 342, 345, 362 Riefenstahl, Leni 150–1 ritual 88–9, 103–4, 106, 108, 160, 208, 217, 272–4, 277, 293, 295–7, 299, 307, 318, 355 Rohde, Erwin 88–9, 99–100 Ronconi, Luca 272 Rondiris, Dimitrios 225–6, 347, 349 Rosenberg, Alfred 206 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 342 Royal Theatre, Berlin 58, 61–3, 134, 171 Rühle, Günther 253, 269, 279, 315, 324, 333 Sada Yakko 351 Saint-Saëns, Camille 80 Sartre, Jean-Paul 216, 328 Savary, Jérôme 357 Sawade, Jürgen 294 Schadewaldt, Wolfgang 77, 208–9, 216–18, 244, 291 Schaubühne am Halleschen Ufer, Berlin 195, 224, 267, 269–74, 278–9, 293–4, 305–6, 310, 357 Schaubühne at Lehniner Platz, Berlin 311 Schauspiel Frankfurt 156, 168, 255–6, 258, 259, 270, 315, 333, 350 Schechner, Richard 360 Scheidemann, Philipp 128 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph 30, 42, 53 Schiller, Friedrich 1, 15–16, 21, 23–9, 35, 39, 41–2, 47, 57, 72–3, 83, 93, 133–4, 141, 146–7, 152, 161, 185–6, 198, 241, 271, 328, 331 Schirach, Baldur von 148 Schitthelm, Jürgen 270 Schleef, Einar 313–16, 318–21, 323–7, 332–4, 337, 341

Schlegel, August Wilhelm 23, 27–9, 34, 36, 42 Schlegel, Caroline 29–30, 32–4 Schlegel, Friedrich 42 Schlemmer, Oskar 133 Schlenther, Paul 109, 115 Schlöndorff, Volker 258 Schlösser, Rainer 167, 177–8, 188 Schreyer, Lothar 133 Schröder, Friedrich Ludwig 10–11 Schroeter, Werner 357 Schroth, Christoph 328 Schumacher, Ernst 236 Schütze, Johann Friedrich 12, 39 sculpture, ancient Greek 16, 34, 41, 150, 155 Seghers, Anna 249 Sellars, Peter 354 Sellner, Gustav Rudolf 186, 188, 194, 203–10, 212–13, 215–20, 224, 236, 314, 349 Semper, Gottfried 70, 75, 79 Shakespeare, William 10–11, 23, 27, 141, 146, 247, 279 Shiraishi Kayoko 350, 352–3 Simmel, Georg 117 Simonischek, Peter 298, 302 Simons, Johan 354 Snell, Bruno 24, 186, 202 socialism / socialist 70, 226–7, 230, 236, 270–1, 314, 331–2 Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio 354 Sophocles 23, 41, 45, 52, 54, 84, 96–7, 105, 108, 113–14, 124, 139, 167–8, 174, 176, 178, 192, 194, 197, 199, 201, 205, 210, 212, 218, 225, 227, 231–2, 235, 239–43, 245, 247, 261–2, 264, 266, 275, 349, 359 Speer, Albert 146 Spielzeit Europa, Berlin 354 Staatliches Schauspielhaus at Gendarmenmarkt, Berlin / Staatstheater Berlin 143, 146, 148, 154–5, 168–70, 185 Staatstheater, Schwerin 168, 328 Stalin, Josef 156 Stanhope, Philip Lord 149 Stauffenberg, Claus von 181, 196–7 Steckel, Leonard 183 Stein, Charlotte von 15 Stein, Gertrude 333

INDEX

Stein, Karl Freiherr vom 46 Stein, Peter 269–73, 276, 278–9, 292, 294–307, 310–12, 314, 316, 319, 337, 339, 341, 348, 350 Stern, Ernst 112 Strauss, Richard 132, 360 Stravinsky, Igor 137, 280 Strehler, Giorgio 279 Strindberg, August 97 Stroux, Karl Heinz 168, 171, 174, 185, 187, 192, 215 Sturm, Dieter 270 Suzuki Tadashi 347, 350–3, 356 Tchaikovsky, Pyotr Ilyich 81 Teatro Olimpico, Vicenza 4, 57 Terence 23, 29 Terzopoulos, Theodoros 356 Thalheimer, Michael 357 theatercombinat 337, 342, 344 Theater der Welt / Theatre of the World 349–50, 352–4, 356 Theatergroep Hollandia 354 Theatertreffen, Berlin 221, 227, 249, 259, 333 Théâtre du Grütli, Geneva 342 Theatre of the Five Thousand 69, 107, 125, 127, 131–2, 144, 313, 348 Theatre of the Nations 349–50 theatromania 5–7, 9, 13, 15, 17, 41, 90 Thing play / Thingspiel 131, 143–4, 152–4, 161–3, 167, 206, 221, 313 Third Reich 2–3, 143, 147–8, 155–6, 161, 163, 168–9, 180, 188, 190, 193, 204, 222–3, 237, 248 Thomson, George 272, 276, 295 Tieck, Ludwig 53–4, 170–1 Toelken, Ernst Heinrich 55 Toller, Ernst 136 tragic 1, 9, 41, 53, 69, 86, 88, 90, 114, 137, 153, 161, 164, 167, 177–8, 188, 191, 193, 219, 226, 263, 266, 286, 314, 324–5, 327, 334, 345 philosophy of the tragic 42, 167, 177, 324–5, 327 tragic experience 313, 326–7 transgression 98, 101, 104, 326, 355, 358 Trissenaar, Elisabeth 250–4 Turner, Victor 105



Ulbricht, Walter 227 universal human 203, 209 Varnhagen von Ense, Karl August 65 Vilar, Jean 349 Vitruvius 56 Volksbühne 108, 132–3, 221 Freie Volksbühne Berlin 221–2, 224–5 Volksbühne at Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz, Berlin 221, 233, 315, 334, 356–7 Vollmoeller, Karl Gustav 109–11, 127 Voltaire 23 Wagner, Cosima 77, 81 Wagner, Richard 69–85, 87–8, 90, 93, 96, 102, 110, 127, 132, 181, 205, 217, 332, 360–1 Wagner, Wieland 216–17 war 26, 161, 196, 198, 320, 328, 353 cold war 5, 189, 327, 332 First World War 1914–18 85, 126, 128, 130–3, 136, 140, 149, 153, 161, 349 Franco-German War / FrancoPrussian War 1870–71 77, 91 Napoleonic Wars 1803–15 45–6, 126 Peasants’ War 1524–5 153 Second World War 1939–45 5, 147, 150, 166–9, 176, 178, 180–1, 183, 185–6, 188, 196, 202–8, 216, 221–3, 348–50 Thirty Years War 1618–48 334 Vietnam War 1954–75 237 Warlikowski, Krzysztof 354, 360 Weber, Carl Maria von 71 Wedekind, Frank 97 Wegener, Paul 111, 113, 124, 185 Weigel, Helene 194–5, 200–1 Weimar Court Theatre / Weimar Nationaltheater 17, 19, 27, 29, 32, 36–7, 39, 127, 143 Weiss, Peter 224, 270 Wendt, Ernst 205, 228, 231–2, 234–5 Widmer, Urs 334 Wieland, Christoph Martin 11, 36, 46 Wieler, Jossi 334 Wigman, Mary 152 Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, Ulrich von 89, 109, 155–6, 295 Wilde, Oscar 97, 333 Williams, Raymond 9



INDEX

Williams, Tennessee 221 Wilson, Robert 118, 333, 354 Wimmer, Maria 186–7 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim 1–2, 4, 7–8, 15, 30, 34, 42, 47, 67, 69, 84, 87, 89–90, 92, 95, 146, 149, 164, 204 Winckelmannian 69, 85, 218, 228, 232, 360–1 Wisten, Fritz 185 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 284, 291–2 Woerner, Roman 171

Wolf, Amalie 59 Wolf, Christa 328 Wolf, Friedrich August 4, 48, 51 Wolff, Pius Alexander 21 Wonder, Erich 260 Wotruba, Fritz 219–20 Wuttke, Martin 316 Yurev, Yuri 125 Zadek, Peter 333