Hamlet ist Deutsch: My Conclusions to Studying Hamlet in German

As I have studied Shakespeare in Germany over the last few months I have come to one conclusion that I would like to posit as a thesis for this research blog:

William Shakespeare's Hamlet has become and is now more German than English, because of the way that in which the German people have adopted and interpreted the play and incorporated it into their culture.

From the very beginning Hamlet has been a favorite play in Germany, there is a German translation that dates back to 1710, though there are accounts of the play being performed in Germany within five years of Shakespeare's death.

In the 1800's,Shakespeare, and Hamlet especially, were well loved and talked about by the great German thinkers and writers, like Goether, and Schiller.  In fact, now Shakespeare is considered their equal in German eyes, and they refer to the three great Klassiker Goethe, Schiller, and Shakespeare

In 1844, the German poet Ferdinand Freiligrath wrote a poem entitled Hamlet, where we wrote that Germany is Hamlet. I have translated this and done some interpretation, that indicates that Germany is Hamlet because, at least in the 1800's, it was full of great thinkers and philosophers, but few men of action.  At that time there was no German state, but several German kingdoms.  Freiligrath seems to mean with his poem that Germany should stop being so concerned with thinking and hesitating, like Hamlet was, and should start acting, or they would end up like Hamlet, stabbed and killed.

Sources and Links, and another step forward

Following the suggestion that Prof. Burton gave in class today, and modeling after Bryan's blog, I set up two pages:  one for the sources that I cite in my blog and one for other links and interesting websites I have found.  Hopefully this will help keep things a little more organized and a little more scholarly as I can show what I'm studying and where I'm finding my sources.  As my German professor keeps telling us "citing shows how smart you are, how many other sources you have read, how many other people are talking about the same subjects."

In looking through all of my old posts (I can't believe I've written 44 in two and a half months!), I was also reminded of several ideas that I had found and thought about, but forgotten.  In particular, one where I mention a German play called Der Bestrafte Brudermord (The Punished (or Revenged) Fratricide).  I would like to do more research into this, as it is an interesting subject.  I found an English translation online, with an introduction that talked about how this play seems to be based more off of a Thomas Kyd play than Shakespeare's Hamlet.  Others believe it may be the German translation of the original Hamlet story that both Kyd and Shakespeare based their plays on.

As I have been doing posts about Shakespeare and Germany and trying to find a thesis, I am torn between two ideas that keep recurring.

1. Shakespeare and the Nazis -- I want to continue my research into how Shakespeare was treated and performed under the Nazis, maybe comparing the plays produced in Nazi Germany with plays produced in England or America in the same time period.  What does the choice of plays say about Germany and German culture?

2. Germany and Hamlet -- Especially with this reintroduction to Der Bestrafte Brudermord (which I did find a copy of in German!) I would like to study Germany's history with the play and seek to understand why it is so popular in Germany more than elsewhere and more than other plays.  What is it about German history or culture that keeps this people interested in Hamlet?  And, going off of something Prof. Burton said in class today, are German productions of Hamlet more 'real', more 'authentic' than an English or American production, do Germans innately understand something about Hamlet that we do not?

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

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.

Hamlet in Nazi Germany

Today I had some free time so I went to the library and picked up a book that I mentioned earlier, The Nazi Appropriation of Shakespeare, by Rodney Symington, published in 2005.

I sat down and started reading it, but soon found myself flipping to the section that actually talked about the plays and how they were treated and dealt with, and to my surprise the very first play discussed in this book was Hamlet, specifically the Gründgens performance of 1936, that I also mentioned earlier.

Gustaf Gründgens as Hamlet 1936

What I found interesting was the description of the performance that Gründgens gave as Hamlet.  They cut lines and scenes that indicated Hamlet's reluctance to act.  The Shakespeare Jahrbuch, a publication of the German Shakespeare Society wrote in 1936 that Hamlet was not portrayed as "a weakling or nervous artistic personage, but as a brilliant young man whose world is overturned by incredible spiritual burdens" (qtd. in Symington).  A critic of the time, Richard Biedrzynski described Gründgen's Hamlet as, “more active, more single minded, more dangerous, more alert, more ready to strike” (qtd. in Symington).