Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-2plfb Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-23T18:27:08.836Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Shakespeare in the Weimar Republic

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 July 2009

William Grange
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

The Weimar Republic occupies a period in German history that has long fascinated students of theatre and drama. It was a period of profound change in German social, political, and cultural experience, and rarely has the confluence of those experiences figured so influentially upon the performance of William Shakespeare's plays. In decades previous to Weimar, German Shakespeare productions manifested the awed reverence in which the playwright was held, since most German actors, directors, and designers regarded Shakespeare in the same light as they did Goethe and Schiller. In 1864, for example, Germany celebrated the three-hundredth anniversary of the playwright's birth with the founding of the Deutsche Shakespeare Gesellschaft and the proclamation that Shakespeare was not “a foreign poet, but one which England must share with us, due to his inborn Germanic nature.” In the Weimar Republic, however, the view of Shakespeare as playwright changed; it did so perhaps because everything else was changing in that volatile period, and also because Weimar culture encouraged innovation and experimentation. The republic itself, after all, was an experiment. If in retrospect the Weimar Republic's experimentation with democracy seems a failure, its success and achievement in painting, architecture, music, literature, and theatre cannot be denied. One overlooked area of particular achievement is the work of Weimar theatre artists who succeeded in their attempts to dismantle Shakespeare's status as a cultural icon.

Type
Articles
Information
Theatre Survey , Volume 28 , Issue 2 , November 1987 , pp. 89 - 100
Copyright
Copyright © American Society for Theatre Research 1987

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Notes

1 Koberstein, August, “Shakespeare in Deutschland,” Deutsches Shakespeare Jahrbuch 1 (1865), 7Google Scholar.

2 Reinhardt's first production of A Midsummer Night's Dream premiered in 1905 at the Neues Theater in Berlin; four subsequent productions of the play remained in the neo-Romantic style of the original. Reinhardt's first Shakespearean staging in the Weimar period, As You Like It, premiered February 27, 1919, at the Deutsches Theater, and it was similar in style and approach to the Midsummer Night's Dream extravaganzas; it was, according to Hugh Rorison in his notes to Piscator's, ErwinThe Political Theater (New York: Avon, 1978)Google Scholar, “wholly at odds with the times, and it turned out to be the lightest, most delicate, happiest thing he had ever done.” Reinhardt's other notable Shakespearean stagings in the period appeared at the Grosses Schauspielhaus; Hamlet opened there on January 17, 1920, and Julius Caesar followed on May 28, 1920. Both productions failed, due in part to acoustical problems in the Grosses Schauspielhaus and to the acknowledged unmanageability of that space's playing area.

3 Hauptmann, Gerhart, “Deutschland und Shakespeare,” Deutsches Shakespeare Jahrbuch 51 (1915), xiiGoogle Scholar.

4 Berger, Ludwig, Theatermenschen (Velber bei Hannover: Friedrich, 1962), p. 17Google Scholar.

5 Berger, Ludwig, “Der Schauspieler,” Das junge Deutschland 2 (1919), 262Google Scholar.

6 Jacobsohn, Siegfried, rev. of Cymbeline, Theater für die Republik, ed. Rühle, Günther (Frankfurt: S. Fischer, 1967), p. 166.Google Scholar

7 “My production style,” said Jessner, “has nothing in common with that anarchy which manifests itself as the expressionist style.” Theater in unserer Zeit, ed. Rühle, Günther (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1976), p. 58Google Scholar. Rühle describes Jessner's style as one characterized by “expressivity” rather than by “expressionism.”

8 Rühle, Theater in unserer Zeit, p. 69.

9 Jessner, Leopold, Schriften (Berlin: Henschel, 1979), p. 56Google Scholar.

10 Kortner, Fritz, Aller Tage Abend (Munich: Kindler, 1959), p. 352Google Scholar.

11 Patterson, Michael, The Revolution in the German Theatre, 1900–1933 (London: Routledge and Regan Paul, 1981), p. 114Google Scholar.

12 Friedrich, Otto, Before the Deluge (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), p. 140Google Scholar.

13 Sternaux, Ludwig, rev. of Macbeth, Theater für die Republik, p. 413Google Scholar.

14 The Dawes Plan was a reparation scheme devised by a commission headed by the American banker Charles G. Dawes (1865–1951). The commission presented a plan, subsequently adopted by the Weimar government, to stabilize the collection of the German war debt. It provided for the evacuation of the Ruhr area by French and Belgian forces and for new sources of tax income which could be applied to reparation payments. For his efforts, Dawes was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for 1925.

15 Wiegler, Paul, rev. of Coriolanus, Theater für die Republik, p. 619Google Scholar.

16 Jacobs, Monty, rev. of Coriolanus, Theater für die Republik, p. 622–623Google Scholar.

17 Jessner, Leopold, “Das Theater, ein Vortrag,” Die Szene 17 (1928), 70Google Scholar.

18 Hollaender, Felix, rev. of Hamlet, Theater für die Republik, p. 765Google Scholar.

19 Jacobs, Monty, rev. of Merchant of Venice, Theater für die Republik, p. 828Google Scholar.

20 Sternaux, Ludwig, rev. of Merchant of Venice, Theater füur die Republik, p. 829Google Scholar.

21 Rühle, Theater für die Republik, p. 940.

22 Ihering, Herbert, rev. of King John. Von Reinhardt bis Brecht (Berlin: Aufbau, 1959), p. 65Google Scholar.

23 Ihering, p. 66.

24 Kerr, Alfred, rev. of King John, Theater für die Republik, p.943Google Scholar.