Theater history: History of the German Theater: From Stalin to the Deutsche Bank

How can the abysses of reality be recognized in the midst of the imaginary counterworlds of art? A question of artistry – and at the German Theater in Berlin they perfected this right down to the explosive device under the state theater that they were supposed to be. Representational art never took place here that was not also a forum for the most subversive art practice. For a long time (not anymore today) it was considered good form for statesmen and their wives to be seen in the German Theater. Then spirit met power – friction and scandal were inevitable. It was always the authors, directors, actors and directors of this theater who belonged to the avant-garde of their time. That too is long gone now; today the Deutsches Theater is one of many. Here too, there is a lack of great individualists, from whom the theater thrives.

It is all the more interesting to turn to the history of this unusual house. In the 80s, the DT was a first-class educational institution for me, my actual university – and after attending the performances I went to the “Funnel” on Schiffbauerdamm, which was open almost all night long. An exclusive, exotic audience found its nightly stage here, as one would expect in the 1920s. Today the faceless tourist strip has long since absorbed this place.

At that time, directors at the DT such as Thomas Langhoff, Friedo Solter, Jürgen Gosch, Frank Castorf (who had his breakthrough here in Berlin) and Rolf Winkelgrund with his legendary Ernst Barlach productions, but above all Alexander Lang and Heiner Müller, brought the formal aggravation combined with unheard of thought experiments. The actors: highly individual and at the same time ensemble trained. The youthful Ulrich bother, of unheard of expressiveness, was able to play cold ecstasies like no other. He provided delightful proof that one could grow up in the GDR, which seemed provincial to us, and yet still find one’s own highly artificial tone that was unparalleled. Effort dominated the DT stage from the mid-80s. But also Inge Keller, Kurt Böwe, Christine Schorn, Eberhard Esche, Christian Grashof, Dieter Mann, Jutta Wachowiak and Gudrun Ritter – such ensemble quality only existed at the Deutsches Theater.

A good reason to dedicate a book to this history, as Esther Slevogt does with “On the Boards of the World – The Deutsche Theater Berlin”. An exciting journey through time that always puts this theater in the focus of the nodes of contemporary history, which is illuminating. Paris-born Slevogt, who heads the online theater portal nachtkritik.de and has already published a book about Wolfgang Langhoff that is worth reading, admits that she regularly went to the DT from West Berlin in the 1980s. She must have liked what she saw, because she approaches the history of the German theater with a pleasant sympathy for the actors of the different times, but prefers the objective tone of a theater chronicle. Enthusiasm or disappointment, as they arise from one’s own experience – especially with the western view of the eastern theater – tend to be ignored.

One can regret that, but the cool and critical distance also makes some things clearer, for example that the German Theater was always suspected in West Berlin precisely because of its high artistic quality, and even became a political enemy that could only be addressed with the martial rhetoric of the Cold War approached. Slevogt quotes nasty statements from the “front city” of West Berlin, a few years after the end of the war. Erik Reger wrote an editorial in the “Tagesspiegel” that West Berliners should allow the East theaters to become “desolate”: “Don’t mention the names of the artists who play there anymore, they are forgotten.” The condemnation of the East culminates in the sentence: “Avoid the plague “How to avoid the plague!” Ugly tones that characterized the Adenauer era.

But there have always been politicians who were allergic to art. This is one of the purposes of art. In the 1890s, when Otto Brahm was director, who also discovered the director Max Reinhardt, as we read in Slevogt, the first plays by Henrik Ibsen and Gerhart Hauptmann came onto the stage. When Hauptmann’s “The Webers” premiered in 1894, Wilhelm II angrily quit his imperial box because he had no intention of witnessing such “gutter art.”

The long line of directors who tried to protect the house against attempts at occupation from outside passes us by. From Max Reinhardt it goes to Heinz Hilpert, who tried to keep propaganda chief Goebbels at a distance during the Nazi era. After the war, the first person to come was Gustav von Wangenheim, who returned from Soviet emigration in 1945, but was only allowed to manage the house for one season. He was followed by Wolfgang Langhoff, Wolfgang Heinz, Gerhard Wolfram, Dieter Mann and Thomas Langhoff, who was abruptly replaced in 1999. His successor Bernd Wilms announced that, ten years late, the change would now also reach this theater. This seems infamous in a way that has been forgotten by history, because the “call for a demonstration” (the rally on November 4, 1989 on Alexanderplatz), the so-called turning point spirit, also came from the Deutsches Theater.

Art and politics, are they always unrelated? Obviously, because several attempts to bring “Faust” onto the stage failed. Walter Ulbricht had a very special relationship with this material: for him, the GDR was the fulfillment of the dying Faust’s dream of standing on free land with a free people. He overlooked the fact that it was Mephisto who gave Faust this dream. A dangerous mirage!

After Alexander Lang’s attempt at the negative dialectics of revolution in Büchner’s “Danton’s Death”, the most important production of the German Theater during the GDR era was probably Heiner Müller’s “Hamlet / Hamletmaschine”. Müller began rehearsals in the fall of 1989, and the extra-long production was performed in the spring of 1990, with Ulrich bother and Jörg Gudzuhn as a doubled Hamlet. Where is the crack that runs through time for Hamlet today?

With his production, Müller ultimately had to answer the question of who Fortinbras was, the victorious conqueror. We learn: At the beginning of the rehearsals it was Stalin, at the end it was Deutsche Bank.

Esther Slevogt: On the boards of the world – The German Theater Berlin. Ch. Links, 381 p., hardcover, €25.