Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Nexus Forum
- Introduction to the Nexus Forum A Most Unwanted Man: Hans-Joachim Schoeps
- Jew, Prussian, German: The Adventuresome Story of Hans-Joachim Schoeps
- Hans-Joachim Schoeps: Contrarian Scholar
- The Meyerowitz Family from Königsberg: Contemporaries of Hans-Joachim Schoeps
- From the Margins: A Response to Schoeps on Schoeps
- A Conservative Christian Welcome: A Response to Julius Schoeps
- Facing His Nazi Past? A Response to Schoeps on Schoeps
- Setting the Record Straight Regarding The Protocols of the Elders of Zion: A Fool's Errand?
- A Discussion of the “German” Dimension of Reform Judaism in Select Congregations in Three American Southern States, 1860–1880
- Weimar on Broadway: Fritz Kortner and Dorothy Thompson's Refugee Play Another Sun
- If I forget thee, O Jerusalem: The Jewish Exilic Mind in Else Lasker-Schüler's IchundIch
- “Seit ein Gespräch wir sind und hören können von einander”: Martin Buber's Message to Postwar Germany
- Hungerkünstler: George Tabori Directs Kafka in Bremen (1977)
Hungerkünstler: George Tabori Directs Kafka in Bremen (1977)
from Nexus Forum
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 March 2018
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Nexus Forum
- Introduction to the Nexus Forum A Most Unwanted Man: Hans-Joachim Schoeps
- Jew, Prussian, German: The Adventuresome Story of Hans-Joachim Schoeps
- Hans-Joachim Schoeps: Contrarian Scholar
- The Meyerowitz Family from Königsberg: Contemporaries of Hans-Joachim Schoeps
- From the Margins: A Response to Schoeps on Schoeps
- A Conservative Christian Welcome: A Response to Julius Schoeps
- Facing His Nazi Past? A Response to Schoeps on Schoeps
- Setting the Record Straight Regarding The Protocols of the Elders of Zion: A Fool's Errand?
- A Discussion of the “German” Dimension of Reform Judaism in Select Congregations in Three American Southern States, 1860–1880
- Weimar on Broadway: Fritz Kortner and Dorothy Thompson's Refugee Play Another Sun
- If I forget thee, O Jerusalem: The Jewish Exilic Mind in Else Lasker-Schüler's IchundIch
- “Seit ein Gespräch wir sind und hören können von einander”: Martin Buber's Message to Postwar Germany
- Hungerkünstler: George Tabori Directs Kafka in Bremen (1977)
Summary
Based on the minutes of a meeting that took place in May 1977 between the Bremen Senator for Science and Arts Horst Werner Franke and the members of George Tabori's Theaterlabor, this article unfolds layers of significance in the director's adaptation of Franz Kafka's novella “Ein Hungerkünstler.” Specifically, I argue that the production— surrounded by controversy due to the actors’ decision to fast for forty days—represented an unanticipated extension of Kafka's story about the artist's predicament in society into the realm of Bremen politics, as it challenged traditional notions of theater and acting and referenced the hunger strikes of imprisoned German terrorists. While the issue of aesthetics was directly addressed in the meeting in a lengthy exchange about different notions of acting, the role of domestic terrorism remained an important subtext for the theater board's demand that the actors cease their voluntary food abstinence. No resolution of the conflict was reached. Rather, unwilling to give up the attempt to experience the hunger artist's ascetic quest, Tabori and his company prevailed in transferring the questions posed by Kafka's parable into the political reality of the day.
ON MAY 11, 1977, AN EXTRAORDINARY MEETING took place in the halls of the Theater Bremen. At the time, the Bremen stages were under the artistic direction of Peter Stoltzenberg, who had been working in the Hanse City since 1975. Stoltzenberg had taken over the post from Kurt Hübner, who had led the theater to international prominence during the previous decade by assembling a young cast of exceptionally talented actors, directors, and stage designers—among them Peter Stein, Bruno Ganz, Jutta Lampe, Edith Clever, Wilfried Minks, Erich Wonder, and Karl-Ernst Herrmann—who were eager to push the aesthetic envelope and garnered the theater a reputation as a dynamic and sometimes revolutionary institution. For a time, Theater Bremen was on par with the best contemporary theaters in Germany, close to the pulse of the era and constantly eyeing aesthetic innovation.1 Stoltzenberg intended to continue in this vein, and when he brought Hungarian-German-Jewish director George Tabori to Bremen in 1976, he did so in the hope that Tabori would stake out new ground artistically (fig. 1).
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- Information
- NexusEssays in German Jewish Studies, pp. 153 - 172Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2013