Theatre in Nazi Germany

I was looking in the library the other day and I came across a shelf that had books all about theatre in Germany.  So, I pulled a few off of the shelf and started flipping through them, using the index to find all references to Shakespeare and specific Shakespearean plays.  Here is what I learned from two of those books:

From the book Theatre Under the Nazis, by John London (2000):
There was a section where they he summarized the number of legal productions of Shakespeare by play during the Nazi era.  The results are fascinating.  Now keep in mind these are productions across all of Germany, not individual performances.   Shakespeare was apparently extremely popular.


Twelfth Night -135
Taming of the Shrew - 101
Hamlet - 94
Midsummer Night's Dream - 76
Much Ado About Nothing - 57
Comedy of Errors - 48
As You Like It - 47

A Close Reading of King Lear

• Prof. Burton has mentioned in class a couple of times that he would like to see more close reading and textual analysis.  Here is my attempt with one of my favorite scenes from King Lear.  This is the end scene, one of the most tragic, but also most powerful, in my opinion.

• Enter Lear, with Cordelia [dead] in his arms, [Edgar, Captain, and others following].
• Lear. Howl, howl, howl, howl! O, you are men of stone.
  Had I your tongues and eyes, I'ld use them so
  That heaven's vault should crack. She's gone for ever!
  I know when one is dead, and when one lives.
  She's dead as earth. Lend me a looking glass.
  If that her breath will mist or stain the stone,
  Why, then she lives.

What is my point: In which I try to come up with a thesis

I have written a lot about Shakespeare and  Germany, and I have been focusing mostly on Hamlet, and how Hamlet has been treated in Germany.  This has been extremely fascinating for me, researching and discovering the depth of the scholarship, particularly in Germany on the subject of Shakespeare and Hamlet.

But where am I going with this?   I want to take a step back and look at what I already know, what research I have already done in order to see if I can come up with some sort of working thesis.

1. Deutschland ist Hamlet -- I posted about Freiligrath's famous poem along with a translation and interpretation.  There has been scholarship in Germany since the mid 1800s about Germany's relationship with Hamlet, including the debate whether Germany is Hamlet or not.

2. Shakespeare in Nazi Germany -- I have also found several books dealing with theatre and Shakespeare and how these plays were seen and produced in Germany under the Nazi regime of the 1930s and 40s.   There were some productions that were very pro-Nazi and anti-Semitic, especially a production of The Merchant of Venice, and some productions that were blatantly critical of the Nazis, like Fehling's Richard III or Gründgen's Hamlet.

3.  König Lear -- I have an edition of King Lear in English and German, and I have done some comparative analysis of the two languages, and I have at least one more post in draft status which looks at the footnotes of my German translation, which helps explain some things from the English text. I would like to do more close readings and analyses of King Lear using both of these texts.

So, what thesis should I be following?  What should I spend my time focusing a little more in depth on?  For this week, I will do one more post on each of these three points as I continue to develop a thesis, but for now, I think I am leaning more toward a study of Shakespeare in Nazi Germany.  I would like to do a Reader Response analysis and look at how Shakespeare can be interpreted in any way to prove whatever point the director or audience chooses.

German Theatre and Lear

I am certainly not the first, nor will I be the last, to admit that German theatre is strange.  I am a big fan of all things German and all things theatre, but German theatre??  Even I don't understand all of that.

As I was cruising YouTube looking for German versions of King Lear (I just did a search for "König Lear" and found 46 results), I found a few trailers for theatre productions done in various cities in Germany, like Köln, Cottbus, and Hamburg.

From these trailers we get a feel into the staging, costuming, and direction and I repeat : The Germans are Weird.

In two of these productions that I found, Lear was a woman, one had her with three sons, completely reversing the traditional gender roles. An interesting directorial choice, I wonder how that would change the meaning or effect of the play?

Two productions had an Oriental feel to them, with actors running around with wooden kendo swords. ???  Though I was impressed with the rotating, slanted stage that they had, that would certainly be fun to play around with!

Some thoughts to King Lear

As I read King Lear, one thought kept occurring to me:  Lear is a man full of contradictions. He doesn't know what he wants, but he wants it all the same.

An appropriate quote for a poster about King Lear.

1. At the beginning he says that he has a plan to divide his kingdom and give the largest part to the daughter that loves him most.  Yet, after Goneril has spoken he immediately assigns her her portion, without hearing from either of his other daughters.  The same thing happens after Regan speaks, he gives her her portion without hearing from Cordelia.  So it would seem that he already knew how he was going to divide the kingdom.  If he were really waiting to hear what his daughters thought, he would have heard them all, and then divided the kingdom.  As it is, Lear says he wants to give the largest portion to the daughter that loves him most, but it appears that he has already decided that it should be Cordelia.  Which is what makes her refusal to play his game all the more crushing for him.

King Lear / König Lear

Once again I am reading this play in both English and German, but this time it's a little easier.  I have a copy of this play that has the original English text on the left side of the page and a German translation (from Raimund Borgmeier, Barbara Puschmann-Nalenz, Bernd Santesson, and Dieter Wessels).  This makes it easier to go back and forth and see just how the German text compares to the English.

The first thing I noticed is that the German translation abandoned the poetic structure of the English text, not even attempting to have a meter or a rhyme.  This is most evident in Lear's opening speech, which looks organized and separated by lines on the left hand of my book, but is a big, long paragraph of text on the right.

The other thing I noticed is the many footnotes in my German text.  Most of these, especially in the opening scene with Gloucester and Kent, explain the wordplay and puns which do not translate well, as anybody who has tried to tell a joke in a foreign language knows.   One of my favorite German jokes makes absolutely no sense in English.

Zwei Jäger treffen sich im Wald.  Beide sind tot.

The joke here is in the double meaning of 'sich treffen' which can mean either to meet or to hit (as in with ammunition). Thus the joke is that two hunters meet or hit each other in the forest.  Both are dead.  As I said, it doesn't work well in English, but there you go.