German Drama

In this impressively wide-ranging study of all drama written in German in the period 1945-1977, Christopher Innes' aims are to identify the concerns and perceptions of dramatists working in a specific and unique social context and period and to analyse the major theatrical forms they developed or adapted to express their experience, to trace the writers' literary antecedents, their 'tradition' and to explore the critical issues raised by each stylistic innovation. Professor Innes has organized his discussion around the main forms of theatre - epic, documentary, absurdist and more traditional forms. Redefining these conceptual labels as he progresses, he analyses, in a critical and informed way, the work on the page and the stage of all the major playwrights. This study, which is complemented by photographs of key productions and accompanied by translations for all quotations, will be of particular interest to teachers and students of drama and German, as well as to a wider theatre-going public.

If all the world's a stage, playwrights can theoretically be seen as in control of the world they create; this book asks to what extent women dramatists manage to use the space of the drama to reflect the world that they experience."--BOOK JACKET.

Focusing on eighteenth-century cultural productions, Wendy Sutherland examines how representations of race in philosophy, anthropology, aesthetics, drama, and court painting influenced the construction of a white bourgeois German self. Sutherland positions her work within the framework of the transatlantic slave trade, showing that slavery, colonialism, and the triangular trade between Europe, West Africa, and the Caribbean function as the global stage on which German bourgeois dramas by Friedrich Wilhelm Ziegler, Ernst Lorenz Rathlef, and Theodor Körner (and a novella by Heinrich von Kleist on which Körner's play was based) were performed against a backdrop of philosophical and anthropological influences. Plays had an important role in educating the rising bourgeois class in morality, Sutherland argues, with fathers and daughters offered as exemplary moral figures in contrast to the depraved aristocracy. At the same time, black female protagonists in nontraditional dramas represent the boundaries of physical beauty and marriage eligibility while also complicating ideas of moral beauty embodied in the concept of the beautiful soul. Her book offers convincing evidence that the eighteenth-century German stage grappled with the representation of blackness during the Age of Goethe, even though the German states were neither colonial powers nor direct participants in the slave trade.

Cited by Lukács as a principal source of literary modernism, Walter Benjamin’s study of the baroque stage-form called Trauerspiel (literally, “mourning play”) is the most complete document of his prismatic literary and philosophical practice. Engaging with sixteenth- and seventeenth-century German playwrights as well as the plays of Shakespeare and Calderón and the engravings of Dürer, Benjamin attempts to show how the historically charged forms of the Trauerspiel broke free of tragedy’s mythological timelessness. From its philosophical prologue, which offers a rare account of Benjamin’s early aesthetics, to its mind-wrenching meditation on allegory, The Origin of German Tragic Drama sparkles with early insights and the seeds of Benjamin’s later thought.

First published in 1950. This present work examines the political, economic and social condition of Germany on literature, particular drama, in the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-centuries. The author explores drama both in its passive and active relations with the life of the time and with the theatre, the medium without the aid of which the possibilities of the drama as an art form remain only half realised. This title will be of interest to students of literature, drama, and theatre studies.

The Second World War went beyond previous military conflicts. It was not only about specific geographical gains or economic goals, but also about the brutal and lasting reshaping of Europe as a whole. Theatre in Europe Under German Occupation explores the part that theatre played in the Nazi war effort. Using a case-study approach, it illustrates the crucial and heavily subsidised role of theatre as a cultural extension of the military machine, key to Nazi Germany’s total war doctrine. Covering theatres in Oslo, Riga, Lille, Lodz, Krakau, Warsaw, Prague, The Hague and Kiev, Anselm Heinrich looks at the history and context of their operation; the wider political, cultural and propagandistic implications in view of their function in wartime; and their legacies. Theatre in Europe Under German Occupation focuses for the first time on Nazi Germany’s attempts to control and shape the cultural sector in occupied territories, shedding new light on the importance of theatre for the regime’s military and political goals.