¹ See Hall, Edith, Inventing the Barbarian: Greek Self-Definition through Tragedy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989)Google Scholar, 5 ff. Her evidence suggests that the pre-classic “barbarian” was determined linguistically: a “barbarian” was someone who did not speak Greek. Refinements came during the fifth century, when the barbarian became “the universal anti-Greek against whom Hellenic—especially Athenian—culture was defined.”

² In a statement published in the New York Times, 3 January 1921, 17, under the headline, “Wants Protest to France,” Republican Representative Britten of Illinois furthered the heated atmosphere when he commented, “I cannot believe that the civilized nations of the world will long countenance the retention of semi-civilized African troops in the Rhineland of Germany, when repeated protests, not only from the women of the world, but of high ranking British and French authorities, are outspoken against this procedure because of the brutalities that are daily being committed against old women as well as defenseless young women and girls.”

³ Allen, Henry T., The Rhineland Occupation (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1927), 324Google Scholar.

⁴ Hitler, Adolf, Mein Kampf, tr. Mannheim, Ralph (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1943), 325Google Scholar; cf. 624. Mein Kampf summarizes Hitler's goals and expressions up to 1924, and thereafter continued to express the majority viewpoint of the Party. Hitler most frequently mentions Blacks parenthetically, as the equivalent of “the primitive” or “the subhuman.”

⁵ Jahnn, Hans Henny, Medea (Frankfurt am Main: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1958)Google Scholar. Both the prose and later verse editions are available in Jahnn, , Dramen I, 1917–1929: Dramen, dramatische Versuche, Fragmente, ed. Bitz, Ulrich (Hamburg: Hoffmann und Campe, 1988)Google Scholar. The volume also contains “Zur Medea,” “Die Sagen um Medea und ihr Leben,” and “Medea.”

⁶ Respectively, “Die Sagen um Medea,” and “Medea,” in Dramen I, 939 and 956.

⁷ Rühle, Günther, Theater für die Republik, 1917–1933, im Spiegel der Kritik (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1967), 24–25Google Scholar.

⁸ The major difference between the prose and verse editions is format, the way the lines are displayed on the page. Subsequent references to the play will appear in the text; they refer to the verse Medea (Frankfurt am Main, 1959).

⁹ While Colchis was not in Africa, there is some evidence, based upon Herodotus, that there were Black Colchians, the descendants of an army sent by Egypt's Pharaoh Sesostris, ca. 2000 B.C. See McDonald, W. P., “The Blackness of Medea,” College Language Association Journal 19 (1975): 23, n. 5Google Scholar.

¹⁰ Jahnn, , “Brief zur Berliner Uraufführung der Medea,” in Das Theater des deutschen Regisseurs Jürgen Fehling, ed. Gorvin, Joana Maria, 2nd ed. (Berlin: Quadriga, 1987), 118–119Google Scholar.

¹¹ Medea observes that she was only following Creon's law: whoever leaves corpses to dogs and crows deserves to be dismembered (99). But Creon does not say this during the play, nor are any corpses left as carrion, so the reference must be to his Theban namesake in Sophocles' Antigone. Jahnn's cross-dramatic reference is a bit of privileged literary whimsy which offsets some of the severity of Black Expressionism. It is comparable to his world-weary Richard III at Bosworth Field announcing that he will refuse a horse even if offered (at the close of Die Krönung Richards III).

¹² Reviews by Paul Fechter, Alfred Kerr, and Emil Faktor are reprinted in Rühle, Theater für die Republik, 711–716. See also Hochdorf, Max, “Staatstheater. Medea von Hans Henny Jahnn,” Vorwärts (Berlin), evening ed., 5 May 1926: 2Google Scholar; and , F. S. [Franz Servaes?], “Staatstheater. Jahnns Medea,” Germania (Berlin), evening ed., 5 May 1926: 2Google Scholar.

¹³ This “primitivism” is suggested by a setting he sketched for the manuscript: a neopaleolithic, cave-like Corinthian hall—albeit classically symmetrical (reprinted with the prose Medea, in Jahnn, Dramen I,585). Fehling's designer, Rochus Gliese, apparently did not follow Jahnn's concept.

¹⁴ The verse Medea was produced in 1964 at Wiesbaden, directed by the young Hans-Günther Heyme; the prose version premiered in Cologne in 1988. The verse version reemerged, with Barbara Nüsse as Medea, in Düsseldorf in 1989: it would approach the 1926 premiere in notoriety. See Henning Rischbieter, “Versuch mit Jahnn. Medea in Wiesbaden” and “‘Die Götter sind nicht milde.’ Gespräch über Medea mit dem Regisseur Hans-Günther Heyme,” Theater heute, February 1965, 34–35; Franke, Eckhard, “Liebe heißer als der Tod. Köln startet mit der Uraufführung von Hans Henny Jahnns Ur-Medea,” Theater heute, November 1988, 25–26Google Scholar; and Schmidt, Jochen, “Sexualität und Opfer. Werner Schroeter inszeniert Hans Henny Jahnns Medea,” Theater heute, April 1989, 30Google Scholar.

¹⁵ Grillparzer, , Medea, in his Dramatische Meisterwerke (Berlin: Deutsche Bibliothek, n.d.), 2:103–185Google Scholar. Der Gastfreund (one act), Die Argonauten (four acts), and Medea (five acts) make up the trilogy, which premiered on 26 and 27 March 1821 at the Vienna Burgtheater. The trilogy was normally presented on two evenings.

¹⁶ Jacobsohn, , “Medea,” Die Weltbühne, 25 May 1926, 819–820Google Scholar.

¹⁷ Straub's situation is suggested by reactions to her winning the Dumont prize, named for actress and producer Louise Dumont, who had died in 1932. At the start of 1933, Straub was the first recipient of a set of topaz which had been presented to Dumont by the Queen of Württemberg. The prize was to go to the German actress who best met the “humanitarian and artistic qualities of Dumont.” Straub was a logical choice. In the next issue of the Deutsche Bühnenkorrespondenz—the organ for Alfred Rosenberg's Militant League for German Culture and for the German Stage Union, a right-wing spectator organization—Straub was praised for her interpretations of “Aryan” roles, but condemned for her other artistic associations, including public readings of the letters of the hated Jewish Communist Rosa Luxemberg. The journal dismissed the prize as an “appropriate honor for the dead Jewess Dumont; the German-minded should take heed.” See Wulf, Joseph, Theater und Film im Dritten Reich; Eine Dokumentation (Gütersloh: S. Mohn, 1964), 253–254Google Scholar. In 1935, the Rosenberg organization also condemned Straub's romantic connections to Leo Reuß, who had played Jason: “Whether she was officially married to the Jew Leo Reuß or merely lived with him is immaterial for the examination of these facts”; Dresniak has concluded that these “assaults affected the career and private life of the actress.” See Drewniak, Boguslaw, Das Theater im NS-Staat: Szenarium deutscher Zeitgeschichte, 1933–1945 (Düsseldorf: Droste, 1983), 148Google Scholar.

¹⁸ Jameson, Anna, “Grillparzer's Sappho and Medea,” in her Studies, Stories, and Memoirs (Boston: Tichnor and Fields, 1859), 109–110Google Scholar.

¹⁹ For reviews, see Morgenroth, F., “Agnes Straub als Medea,” Neue Preuβische Zeitung (Berlin), 25 November 1933: 8Google Scholar; ck., “Gastspiel Agnes Straub. Theater in der Stresemannstraße: Medea” Germania (Berlin), 25 November 1933: 8Google Scholar; aru., “Berliner Schauspieler—Agnes Straub,” Neue Preuβische Zeitung (Berlin), 18 February 1934: 14Google Scholar; and , G.G., “Agnes Straub: Medea. Gastspiel im Alberttheater,” Dresdner Anzeiger, 2 June 1934: 2Google Scholar.

²⁰ Lbg. [von Lichberg, Heinz], “Die schwarze Medea der Straub: Grillparzers Tragödie im Berliner Theater in der Stresemannstraße,” Der völkische Beobachter (Berlin), 25 November 1933: 8Google Scholar.

²¹ This Medea was also covered with geometric tatoos, to reinforce the “otherness.” Some might argue that the Düsseldorf experiment did as much violence to Jahnn's conception of a Black Medea as Straub's Medea in blackface did to Grillparzer's notions of a White Medea. That would be to assume that the playwright is the sole or final arbiter of stage interpretation.

²² Or according to Thomas Postlewait, “The historian's task, then, is the reenactment of past thought in his or her own mind—with the understanding that the past is a different, if not undiscovered country.” See Postlewait, , “Historiography and the Theatrical Event: A Primer with Twelve Cruxes,” Theatre Journal 43 (1991): 73CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²³ The grotesque situation of 1933 is further complicated as we imagine a blackface Straub on the stage in Nazi Berlin. Her Jason—and according to Alfred Rosenberg, her lover—was Jewish actor Leo Reuß (1891–1946). Only weeks after Goebbels decreed that private German theatres would be nationalized to meet the artistic and racial demands which had already been imposed on state theatres (15 May 1934), Reuß slipped away to Austria. He left so quickly that Dresden newspapers continued to advertise him as Jason to Straub's Medea, even though the role had been taken by Wolfgang Büttner. Reuß ultimately came to America, where, as Lionel Royce, he made a career in Hollywood war films.

²⁴ “Die Sagen um Medea,” in Jahnn, Dramen I, 939. A version of this paper was presented at the 1991 Association for Theatre in Higher Education conference in Seattle, Washington.