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Shakespeare in the Weimar Republic

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 July 2009

William Grange
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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

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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.

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