Lecture Truth in Theatre

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Here is the text of my lecture on ‘Truth in Theatre’, given at the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts Munich. It is an abridged summary of my articles ‘Truth in Theatre – Parts 1-5’ on this website:

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5

Munich, 11 November 2025, Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts

Esteemed Gentlemen of the Academy!1

oh no, that is the wrong kind of address. I am not Rotpeter and I am not Kafka, I have no previous life as an ape which I could report of, I am just an ordinary specimen of the species criticus theatralis, a simple theatre critic who ventures to tackle a big question.

So: Ladies and gentlemen,

What is truth?

Even Pilate did not know the answer. I, too, had reason to ponder this question because I did not know enough. It was in 2002 at a public discussion at the Berlin Theatertreffen, where I represented the jury and had to justify the selection of Luc Perceval’s production of Jon Fosse’s drama ‘Dream in Autumn’ for the festival. The great and highly respected theatre figure Ivan Nagel stood up and uttered the damning sentence: ‘This juror has no idea what truth is.’ Because this verdict still bothers me (and I wasn’t completely clueless even back then), I am standing here today.

After this autobiographical introduction, I would like to give you a brief overview of what to expect:

In order to say something about truth in theatre, one must first clarify the concept of truth, then its application to art, and finally one must consider the special conditions of the art form of theatre. Theatre is a composite, hybrid art form, so I want to examine the question of truth at the various levels of theatrical art.

So, first of all:

  • The concept of truth in general
  • Truth in art (Here I will take a view slightly different  from Professor Vossenkuhl’s in the first lecture of this series.
  • The truth of the theatre text
  • The truth of the actor and actress
  • The truth of the audience,  – and finally:
  •  Two examples of theatre today

The concept of truth

Truth in theatre is different from ordinary truth. When used by theatre people, the concept of truth has a meaning completely different  from that in science. It has nothing to do with the theories of truth in contemporary philosophy – semantic or representative concepts of truth, evidencial, consensus or coherence theories of truth. [1] Modern scientific theory largely dispenses with the concept of truth anyway.

The concept of truth in theatre is something between philosophical theory and untrained everyday thinking. The ideas of truth held by theatre and acting theorists move in this transitional area, in which concepts of the highest level of abstraction descend from philosophical tradition into a specific sub-area of human activity – and encounter concepts that ascend from the concrete practice of artistic, present performance to a higher level of abstraction. [2]

The most common concept of truth is the one first formulated by Aristotle:

‘To say of something that is that it is not, or of something that is not that it is, is false; on the other hand, it is true to say of something that is that it is, and of something that is not that it is not.’[3]

In the Middle Ages, this became the formula: ‘Truth is the conformity thing and intellect.’[4] This correspondence theory of truth, also known as the adequacy theory of truth, limits the application of the concept of truth to propositional statements. From Aristotle to Thomas Aquinas and Ockham to Kant, there is agreement: Truth is propositional truth, correspondence between thought and thing. Art has nothing to do with this.

Plato, on the other hand, related the concept of truth to a higher reality: for him, ideas (forms) are true because they have a higher form of reality than empirical reality. Hegel (following Fichte) ties in with this ontological-gnoseological concept of truth when he devalues the concept of truth as correspondence  to mere ‘correctness’ – and defines truth, on the other hand, as ‘the agreement of a content with itself’. [5]

For Hegel, truth is only the spirit that has come to itself, the agreement of the spirit with itself. So for Hegel, only the whole is truth, not a statement, but the whole, self-developing understanding of reality.[6]

There are thus two different directions in the development of the concept of truth in philosophy. The concept of truth in theatre (and theatre theory) comes more from the Platonic-Hegelian tradition than from the Aristotelian-Thomistic-Kantian tradition.

Truth in art

In this process of the spirit coming into its own, art plays a decisive role for Hegel. Through the correspondence of the concept of a work of art with its concrete existence, through its combination of complete freedom of its parts and the necessity of their correspondence, a work of art (‘the beautiful’) has truth. For Hegel, art is an

‘unfolding of truth that reveals itself {…] in world history’.[7]

Here, art is given a function in a process whose goal is truth. However, art is only a preliminary stage of liberation, ‘not the highest liberation itself’.[8] In antiquity, art had played its role as ‘front man’, as the highest form of expression of the spirit, and but it has handed it over to revealed religion and finally to pure reflection, i.e. philosophy.

This emphatic concept of truth, that truth is the whole and cannot be attributed to a single sentence, becomes decisive for philosophical aesthetics and art theory in the 20th century – despite all of Nietzsche’s polemics against the concept of truth. Both Heidegger and Adorno see the task of art in this process of unfolding truth. Despite all their political and stylistic differences, despite all their different basic assumptions, the similarities between the two are striking – if one reduces them to the aspect of the relationship between art and truth and ignores what the two great thinkers respectively understand by truth.

For both, the work of art places the individual, the recipient of art, in relation to something supra-individual. The reception of a work of art is not only an individual experience, not only a process of arousal in the consciousness of the recipient, but the mediation of a connection to something supra-individual, which both Heidegger and Adorno call ‘truth’. [9]

For Heidegger as for Adorno, truth is not something static, something that exists. For both, truth is a becoming, an event, and the truth of art is then something that has become, something that has happened.

Because truth is not simply present in art, it is important to handle works of art in the right way in order to unfold the truth. Heidegger calls this unfolding of the truth of the work of art ‘preservation’. (The German word “Bewahrung” is a derivation of “wahr”, i.e. true. Therefore the word “Bewahrung” also alludes to the act of making true[10]), while Adorno calls it ‘philosophical reflection’ and ‘criticism’.[11]

From the point of view of theatre criticism – in search of instructions for dealing with works of theatre – this is where the decisive difference lies: according to Heidegger, the work of art should be ‘preserved’ in its reception; according to Adorno, it should be critically reflected upon.

Adorno writes on this in the early introduction to his ‘Aesthetic Theory’:

‘Works of art are only understood when their experience reaches the alternative of true and untrue or, as a preliminary stage, that of right and wrong. Criticism does not add itself externally to aesthetic experience, but is immanent in it.’ [12]

For Adorno, therefore, evaluation is part of understanding art. And for him, this evaluation is not ‘more or less well done,’ but ‘true or untrue.’

The French philosopher Alain Badiou has attempted to organise theories about the relationship between art and truth into three schemata:

  1. The didactic schema (e.g. Plato): Art cannot produce truth. It is only the deceptive appearance of truth. Truth exists only outside of art. Therefore, art must be regulated.
  2. The romantic schema (e.g. Hegel): Truth exists only in art (and in philosophy, but artistic truth is the completion of philosophical truth through embodiment).
  3. The classical schema (e.g. Aristotle): There is no truth in art, but that is not a bad thing. It has other tasks. [13]

For Badiou, Heidegger’s theory of art clearly belongs to the romantic scheme. This may also apply to Adorno’s theory, if one follows Badiou’s somewhat crude scheme. For Adorno, art is not truth, but it refers to it. Ultimately, for Adorno, philosophical reflection is only a means of delivering the truth content of the work of art.

If one finds this romantic scheme of the relationship between art and truth too nebulous and yet does not consider art to be merely deceptive appearance, only the classical scheme remains:

The task of art is not to proclaim the truth. But what then are its other tasks?

Truth in the theatre text

In order to examine more closely the capacity for truth of the art form of theatre, I will first examine whether truth can be attributed to the theatre text, the drama.

If we provisionally agree to understand truth in theatre only as the truth of the drama, i.e. of the theatre text, let us take the example of Jon Fosse’s drama ‘Dream in Autumn’, which was the subject of my discussion with Ivan Nagel at the time.

What can be said about the truth of this text?

a) The sentences of the drama

For example, the first sentence of Jon Fosse’s text:

‘MAN: No, is it you’[14]

No criterion of truth can be applied to this sentence: it is the beginning of a dialogue (between a man and a woman), it is spoken in a specific situation (a reunion at the cemetery), it is fictional (part of a text that constructs its own reality), it is a question. Or, as Gottlob Frege says: the sentences spoken by actors on stage are only images, with meaning but without significance and therefore without truth value[15].

Let’s try another sentence:

‘MOTHER: Nothing remains / everything drifts away / like clouds / A life is a cloudy sky / before it gets dark’[16]

This looks like a declarative sentence, but how can we judge whether it is true? It contains a metaphor and judges something as general as ‘a life’. Metaphors cannot be true. The truth of a theatre text is not to be found at this level either.

b) The drama as a whole

There are only a few such life-affirming sentences in Fosse’s work. Jon Fosse himself does not see the truth of his texts in individual sentences, but, in a very Hegelian way, in the whole:

Fosse: ‘Didn’t someone here say: Truth is always concrete? … I am concerned with the whole of a text, and the world in the text speaks of the whole and is therefore present in every part, in every detail of the text.’[17]

The truth of a drama, or its participation in truth, cannot therefore lie in individual sentences, but only in the drama as a whole. The drama as a whole speaks a non-discursive language (although it also consists of many discursive sentences). What this truth is, which the drama expresses or conveys, cannot therefore be formulated discursively. But nevertheless, it is supposed to exist, this transsubjective something, the truth of the work of art. For Adorno, criticism would therefore have to work out this truth.

c) Interpretations

So let us try to work out the truth. What would be true about ‘Dream in Autumn’? For example, the experience of time, how past and present mix in consciousness. In Fosse’s play, the time levels blend imperceptibly, forwards and backwards. Of course, in real life we can distinguish between the past and the present, but in our consciousness, current perceptions, memories and plans for the future blend together. It is these expanded temporal dimensions that give meaning and significance to our perceptions in the here and now.

Is that the truth of this play? If so, it has been worked out; it is the result of the reflections of a single recipient. At most, it is trans-subjective in that it imposes on others the expectation that they agree with this assessment.

The decisive factor, however, is that what is called ‘truth’ in Heideggerian-Adornian diction arises from a communicative act between the work of art and the recipient. Viewed soberly, this ‘truth’ is different in every mind – and thus loses its justification for supra-individual validity. If everyone has their own truth, it makes no sense to attribute truth to these different thoughts of different individuals. That these many thoughts are inspired by a single object, the work of art, or in the theatre by a shared experience, is the essence of art. Art is communication, not truth; that is the insight of hermeneutics. All that remains is the ‘game of truth’[18] between interpreter and artwork. Truth as a game has nothing to do with either the correspondence theory or the ontological concept of truth.

d) Sentences in reviews

If there were one or more ‘truths’ in ‘Dream in Autumn’, someone would have noticed them. In the reviews of the premiere at the Schaubühne Berlin and in those of the Munich Kammerspiele production invited to the Theatertreffen at the time, the word “truth” does not appear, nor does the adjective ‘true’ .

If one searches for truth-apt sentences in these reviews that go beyond describing what happens on stage and reproducing the audience’s feelings, one finds at most sentences such as that by Dirk Pilz (the co-founder of Nachtkritik, who died prematurely):

‘Life means preparing for death, love means practising saying goodbye.’[19]

Or this one from Christopher Schmidt (the Munich-based critic for the Süddeutsche Zeitung, who also died young):

‘Two things, death and love, knock you off your feet.’

These are weighty, pointedly formulated sentences that could be considered true. However, like many good sentences in theatre reviews, they deliberately remain suspended between the reproduction of opinions attributed to the theatre text or production and general statements by the critic. They are part of the game. Such statements do not claim universal validity; they are subjective attempts to mediate between the theatre text or the performance experienced and the audience, tentative generalisations that are aware of their unalterable subjectivity.

Truth as propositional truth is not applicable to texts of theatre literature. The application of the term ‘truth’ to a theatre text is therefore only possible if truth is something absolute, the idea, the whole, being, or similar.

In the 1950s, this emphatic concept of truth is also frequently found in theories of the arts, e.g. in Hans Sedlmayr’s theory of fine art[21] or Romano Guardini’s theory of literature[22].

At some point in the 1970s, however, the term ‘truth’ seems to have died out as a value-laden concept in art theory.

The truth of the actor and actress

No truth can be found in the theatre text. Adorno judged that no statement could be extracted from ‘Hamlet’. And Bertrand Russell concluded incisively that all propositions in ‘Hamlet’ are false because the person Hamlet never existed[23]. But the actor (or actress) who plays Hamlet exists. And he (or she) should be true.

Understood in this way, truth in theatre is not a piece of knowledge that can be experienced or formulated; it is a demand placed on actors. This use of the term ‘truth’ has a long tradition in acting theory.

One of the oldest formulations of this postulate of truth can be found in 1749 in the work of the French theatre theorist Pierre Rémond de Sainte-Albine: he believed that truth was the ‘confluence of all probabilities that can serve to deceive the audience.’

Similarly, Johann Jakob Engel, director of the Berlin National Theatre in 1786, believed that the ‘highest possible degree of truth’ created ‘the highest possible deception.’[25]

Here, truth has the function of deceiving. It soon became apparent that this paradox somehow overstretched the concept of truth.

Denis Diderot recognised this; for him, truth was the correspondence between the real actions of the actor or actress on stage and the playwright’s ideal conception, or the enhancement of this ideal conception. This was also a very narrow use of the concept of truth.[26]

In the 19th century, following Hegel, beauty in theatre was demanded in addition to truth:

For Heinrich Theodor Rötscher, a student of Hegel, beauty stands for ideality, truth for sensually perceptible reality. Without ideality, meaning the dramatic text created by the poet, the actor sinks to mere ‘natural truth’. Truth alone is therefore not enough here. In Rötscher’s idealistic theatre aesthetics, truth is no longer the concept used to describe the ultimate goal of acting.[27]

It was Konstantin Stanislavski who gave the concept of truth in theatre a more precise meaning. For him, truth is a characteristic of the actor’s inner feelings.

‘In theatre, it is not important whether Othello’s dagger is made of cardboard or metal, but that the actor’s inner feeling, which justifies Othello’s murder, is true, sincere and genuine. … This is the truth of feeling that we talk about in theatre. … There is no real art without such truth and belief!’[28]

So, if the guiding pair of concepts in the 18th century was truth and deception, and in the 19th century truth and beauty, for Stanislavski it becomes the connection between truth and belief.

What the actor’s truth achieves is no longer ‘deception’ but “belief”: ‘Truth creates belief.’[29] This ‘truth’ is something that the actor or actress creates, not something that he or she finds or names. The state required of the actor or actress by Stanislavski is twofold: it is both an experienced psycho-physical state and the reflection of this state: one ‘sincerely believes’ in this state. With Stanislavski’s psychotechnics, the actress or actor creates the ‘truth’ of inner processes in order to achieve an effect, the belief of the audience.

It was only later that Stanislavski’s German translators realised that the concept of ‘truth’ (Правда) was once again being overstretched. In the GDR, Stanislavski’s terminology was initially adhered to until the concept of truth became overused: Maxim Vallentin, long-time director of Berlin’s Maxim Gorki Theatre, even demanded three truths: ‘The truth of feeling, the truth of the stage and the social truth’[30]. Here, the concept of truth was transferred from the actor (‘feeling’) to the content of theatre productions (“stage”) to politics (‘society’).

In the Federal Republic of Germany, people were somewhat more cautious in their approach to truth. Hans-Günther von Klöden, director of the Hanover Drama School since 1950 (and once my acting teacher for a short time), felt a slight unease about Stanislavski’s concept of truth:

‘So what should we understand by “truth”? […] Perhaps we have been linguistically sloppy and meant “truthfulness”?’[31]

‘Truthfulness’ is also the term used by the translators of the later GDR edition of Stanislavski’s writings to translate the term Правда (Pravda).[32] Von Klöden is not satisfied with this solution either:

‘… because we are thrown back to the concept of truth, since truthfulness is nothing other than the virtue of always telling the truth.’ [33]

Consequently, he returns to the term ‘truth’: for him, the term truth now takes on the meaning of “genuineness” {“Echtheit”). ‘Genuineness of action arises from the “centre of gravity” of the human being.’ Acting is above all ‘the ability to express the truth clearly.’ Here, too, the actor’s truth is something complex: genuine action arising from the centre of gravity of the human being and its clarification.

In English-language textbooks, on the other hand, Stanislavski’s concept of truth seems to persist: ‘Truth’ is emblazoned in large letters on the cover of Susan Batson‘s acting textbook[34].

The German publisher has cautiously supplemented the triumphant title with a subtitle: ‘Truthfulness in Acting’ (“Wahrhaftigkeit im Schauspiel”).

Jens Roselt, professor of theatre studies at the University of Hildesheim, has traced in detail the zigzag path of acting theory between truth and deception, hot and cold actors, between the path from the outside to the inside or from the inside to the outside, and comes to the conclusion:

‘The dispute over the “genuineness” of emotions cannot be settled in theory.’[35]

Truth or authenticity as a term to describe the goal of an actor’s embodiment of a role has a long tradition. However, upon closer analysis of this use of the term, it dissolves and proves to be unsuitable.

The truth of the audience

The concept of truth has therefore almost disappeared from theatre theory discussions over the last 30 years. The term “truth” is missing from the Lexikon der Theatertheorie (Encyclopaedia of Theatre Theory).[36] The concept seems fundamentally suspect to the prevailing relativism.

So why has the term disappeared in this field? Because the Hegelian construction of truth as the whole of the unfolded world has evaporated, and even for Hegel’s Marxist heirs, truth was too nebulous a concept for the goal of art.

There was no crisis of truth; it disappeared silently.

But there was a noisy crisis of representation (in Munich, people will remember Matthias Lilienthal’s directorship at the Kammerspiele). Actually, the concepts of truth and representation belong to different areas: truth to propositional logic, representation to sign theory. The statements made by art are not true, but they represent something; they are supposed to have meaning. And this meaning should not be arbitrary, as in everyday language or in the forest of signs in the consumer world that surrounds us. Art should mean something essential in some way. This became questionable around 1900. The more one learned to understand the connection between sign and meaning, the more fragile the bridge between signifiant and signifié became, first in literature (Mallarmé’s poetry, Hofmannsthal’s Chandos Letter, Lukacs’ theory of the novel[37]. Whereby the terms representation, image, illusion, fiction and mimesis are often used interchangeably).

Theatre, initially as literary theatre, is part of this crisis of representation. Since Alfred Jarry and Antonin Artaud, at the latest, theatre has freed itself from literature. But the crisis of representation remains. Following on from Artaud, in the 1980s Jacques Derrida called for a form of representation in which the stage does not stand for another reality that is being portrayed, but in which the visible and the sensual present themselves[38].

This critique of representation conveyed by Derrida was very influential for the development of post-dramatic, re-theatricalised theatre. From the spatio-temporal identity of the aesthetic act and the act of reception, it was concluded that theatre should therefore ‘create its own, genuine situation in the co-presence of the audience.’[39] “Genuine” here means without the representation of another reality. This is the way out of the ‘representation trap.’

But if what takes place on stage is not a representation, neither of a literary text nor any other representation of something material or ideal outside the stage, then, according to this understanding, the stage lies when it claims to be a place other than the empty space of a theatre building, or when the actor claims to be perceived as someone he is not.

But if we cannot perceive the stage in two different ways, as reality and also as illusion, if we do not adopt the attitude of the spectator that Samuel Coleridge classically characterised as ‘willing suspension of disbelief’ [40] (i.e. the deliberate suppression of the disbelief that A cannot be equal to A’, that Sandra Hüller is not Hamlet), then all that remains is a trivial statement of identity: A equals A. This statement makes sense, but has no informative content. That Sandra Hüller is Sandra Hüller is correct, but it is nothing new.

Either one accepts representation, in which case A can be equal to  A’ (and Sandra Hüller can be Hamlet), or one does not accept representation in theatre, in which case A being equal to A’ is a deception or even a fraud. And deception is evil, so we want what is good, and we call that truth. The complicated emotional mechanics of actors’ real and displayed emotions are no longer of interest if there is no representation. We then want truth, and that is the identity of the actor or actress with themselves, the identity of the shared space of the auditorium and the stage, the identity of the moment experienced together. If one demands truth from theatre and rejects any form of representation, only performance theatre remains. And that, seen in this light, is the legacy of the old demand for truth in theatre.

Thus, the much-justified liberation of theatre from the demand for truth leads to a knee-jerk rejection of representation and a demand for identity, instead of analysing and developing the theatre-specific mode of representation. Only by understanding performance as an event between performer and recipient, independent of representation or non-representation, can one escape the gaze that seeks truth, identity or authenticity.

From the perspective of phenomenological philosophy, Jens Roselt, mentioned above, attempts to justify the performative turn in theatre studies less as a prophecy about the future of theatre and more as a necessary step from semiotic analysis of staging to analysis of performance. And his conclusion: theatre is an intermediate event, an event between the stage and the audience, regardless of whether one intends to represent something or not. From a phenomenological point of view, experience is a ‘dialogical intermediate event’ (“dialogisches Zwischengeschehen”). And the situation of a performance is one of experience:

Jens Roselt: “The stage and the audience thus enter into a dialogue with each other that does not have to be linguistic. Audience members are engaged by the performance, just as they themselves question it.‘[41]

Along with phenomenologist Bernhard Waldenfels, Roselt assumes a ’responsive difference‘ that characterises the relationship between stage and audience. Stage and audience behave like question and answer. But it is

’a response that reveals something the question did not anticipate. Such an answer no longer obeys the distinction between right and wrong.‘[42]

And certainly not the distinction between truth and falsehood.

The audience is ’a constitutive part of the performance.” The audience’s modes of perception and experience thus take on a productive dimension, even when a character is represented on stage by an actress or actor:

‘It is only in the performance that an appearance is constituted that cannot be reduced to either the individual person of the actor or a role specification, since the intentions of the audience are also meaningful here.’[43]

In her Hamburg Poetics Lecture 2023, actress Julia Riedler described this active role of the audience from an actress’s perspective:

‘The energy space created by the audience’s presence creates a communication that turns my thinking into a three-dimensional force and the theatre space into an immersive world. And so something that was once written, whether it is thousands of years old or only a few months old, becomes a present sculpture. Not because I say it particularly loudly, but because it is listened to particularly attentively.’[44]

When the productive contribution of the audience to a performance is recognised, all ghosts of truth and identity disappear.

Two current examples

If theatre cannot be the proclaimer of truth, what can it achieve in times of ubiquitous deception?

One possibility is journalistic theatre, as practised by the actor Calle Fuhr with the director Kay Voges and the journalist collective ‘Correctiv’. The best-known example of their collaboration was the project ‘Geheimplan gegen Deutschland ’ (Secret Plan against Germany) about the Potsdam meeting in 2024. Or Calle Fuhr’s solo evening ‘Aufstieg und Fall des René Benko’ (The rise and fall of René Benko) at the Vienna Volkstheater and now also at Schauspiel Köln.

Here, too, theatre is not the mouthpiece of truth, but it participates in a social process that revolves around the concept of truth. If we do not attempt to define the concept of truth philosophically, but instead consider the role that the concept of truth plays in our society, we see that what we consider to be truth comes about through our trust in certain scenes of truth and certain figures of truth. Donald Trump aptly names his social network, through which he spreads his resentments, outbursts and distortions of reality, ‘Truth social’. Sociologically speaking, truth is a social operator.

The research project ‘Praxeology of Truth’ at the University of Erfurt, headed by Prof. Bernhard Kleeberg [45], has a painting by Lucas Cranach as its logo on its website. It is entitled ‘Bocca della Verità’ [46]. This mouth of truth is actually a Roman manhole cover in the shape of a lion’s head, which, according to legend, will bite off the hand of anyone who puts it in the lion’s mouth while telling a lie. Lucas Cranach depicts such a scene of truth: a stone lion statue stands in a courthouse. A young woman accused of adultery puts her hand in the lion’s mouth while being watched by a judge and her husband. Behind her stands another figure in a jester’s costume, embracing the woman at the hips. The medieval story told by the picture is that the lover has disguised himself as a jester, and the woman can now truthfully say that no one has embraced her except her husband and this strange fool. So she tells the truth, which is actually a lie. Theatre is being performed here to give the appearance of truth. This is what truth practices look like.

Theatre has the disadvantage of slower reaction times compared to other competing truth assemblages (as heterogeneous structures of social and technical practices are called in sociological jargon). It is slower than electronic media, but still faster than the justice system, and has the advantages of concentrating the audience over a longer period of time and providing a communal experience.

Theatre projects such as those by Calle Fuhr and Kay Voges can be understood as a condensed form of theatre. They forego many other possibilities that theatre has to offer. But in doing so, theatre also gains a new possibility: theatre as part of social truth practices.

A second example and another possibility: Milo Raus’ project ‘Die Seherin’ (The Seer) with actress Ursina Lardi (at the Vienna Festival and the Schaubühne in Berlin).

Here, the relationship between truth and deception is brought to the forefront on four different levels. Ursina Lardi plays a photographer who specialises in war images and violence.

But what she says about her origins in a village in southern Switzerland fits so well with the actress’s real biography. Where is the boundary between the actress as a person and a fictional character? It becomes blurred.

While talking about her fascination with depictions of violence, Ursina Lardi cuts her left calf with a scalpel, and blood visibly runs down her leg. This detail is greatly enlarged and projected onto a screen above the stage. Is she really doing this, or is it just the work of the make-up artist? The theatre hammers this doubt into the audience. The line between truth and illusion is blurred.

Then Azad Hassan, an Iraqi man whose right hand was chopped off by IS in Mosul for alleged theft, appears on the video screen. The actress talks to him. Is it a real-time dialogue or a pre-produced video? The line is blurred.

Then a video is shown of the public mutilation of the Iraqi in Mosul during the reign of IS, which could be watched on the internet at that time. The Iraqi reports that worse than the pain was the enthusiasm of the spectators. Spectators, that includes us, the theatregoers. The truth of visible violence is a fascination that binds the non-acting spectators to the acting perpetrators of violence. The truth of a documentary image can also function as a visual stimulus. Guilty actor or innocent observer? The boundary is blurred.

The effect of documentary images is less information about reality than a response to our ‘desire for intensity’ (as Academy member Hito Steyerl puts it[47]). The doubt as to whether the video images we see are real or faked – whether Azad Hassan is really standing in Mosul when he speaks, whether Ursina Lardi is really hurting herself – and theatre demonstrates this doubt to us here – this doubt does not devalue the images, but makes them more powerful. Whether the images are true, whether they show us reality, is secondary; it is precisely the doubt about their truth that demonstrates the power of the images. [48]

Participation in our society’s discourse on truth is one of the possibilities of theatre; another possibility is the analysis of this discourse by telling stories that make our society’s truth-seeking processes tangible and transparent. Theatre shows us how what we consider to be truth comes about. Theatre can do this as a hybrid medium in which contemporary shared presence can be mixed with fiction, media reproduction and digital production. Precisely because theatre cannot be the mouthpiece of a higher truth of art, it can show the construction of truth and become a ‘school of complexity’.

The relationship between theatre and truth today is therefore very different from what Ivan Nagel assumed at the time and what I thought as a juror back then.

Thank you very much for your attention.

[1] Vgl. Thomas Grundmann, Philosophische Wahrheitstheorien. Stuttgart: Reclam, 2018. Oder: Bruno Puntel, Wahrheitstheorien in der neueren Philosophie. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1983

[2] Vgl. Arne Naess, „Truth“ as conceived by this who are not professional philosophers. Skrivter utgitt av det Norske Videnskaps-Akademi i Oslo. II. Hist.-Filos. Klasse. 1938. No. 4.

[3] τὸ μὲν γὰρ λέγειν τὸ ὄν μὴ εἶναι ἢ τὸ μὴ ὂν εἶναι ψεῦδος, τὸ δὲ τὸ ὂν εἶναι καὶ τὸ μὴ ὂν μὴ εἶναι ἀληθές.“ Metaphysik IV,7 1011b

[4] About the origin oif the formula „veritas est adaequatio rei et intellectus“:  Thomas Aquinas refers to Isaac Judaeus {Thomas von Aquin, Von der Wahrheit – De veritate. Quaestio I. Hamburg: Meiner, 1986, S.8}, there, the formula cannot be found. Guillaume d’Auvergne uses the formula, but it probably goes back to Avicenna.

[5] G.W.F. Hegel, Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften I. Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 1970 (WA Bd.8), S. 323, §172 Zusatz

[6] G.W.F. Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, Einleitung. (WA Bd. 3) Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 1970, S. 24

[7] G.W.F. Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik III. Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 1970 (WA Bd. 15), S.573

[8] G.W.F. Hegel, Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften. 1830. Hg, Friedhelm Nicolin u. Ottfried Pöggeler. Hamburg: Meiner, 1969. S. 445 § 562

[9] Martin Heidegger, „Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes“ in: Holzwege. Frankfurt/M: Klostermann, *6*1980, S.54 , Theodor W. Adorno, Ästhetische Theorie. (=Gesammelte Schriften Bd. 7). Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 1970, S. 421

[10] “Bewahrung” Heidegger a.a.O., S. 53

[11] Adorno a.a.O., S. 193f ↵

[12] Adorno a.a.O, S. 515f

[13] Alain Badiou, Kleines Handbuch der Inästhetik, Berlin: Turia + Kant, 2+2012 (zuerst frz. 1998), S.9-13

[14] Jon Fosse, Traum im Herbst und andere Stücke. Reinbek: Rowohlt, 2001 S. 91

[15] Gottlob Frege, „Über Sinn und Bedeutung“ (1892) in: G.F., Funktion, Begriff, Bedeutung. Fünf logische Studien. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, hg.v. Günther Patzig, 3. Aufl. 1969, S. 48f

[16] Jon Fosse, a.a.O. S.135

[17] Programmheft zu „Traum im Herbst“ Münchner Kammerspiele. Premiere 29. November 2001.

[18] Hans-Georg Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode. Grundzüge einer philosophischen Hermeneutik. Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1960, S.465

[19] Dirk Pilz „Verfall, Verlust und Niedergang. Elegisch: Wulf Twiehaus versetzt an der Schaubühne mit Jan Fosses Trauerspiel „Traum im Herbst“ sein Publikum in einen anhaltenden Zitterzustand“, die tageszeitung1.2.2001 ↵

[20] Christopher Schmidt, „Ist ein Cutter, der heißt Tod. Lachender Moribund: Lukas Perceval inszeniert Jon Fosses ‚Traum im Herbst‘ an den Münchner Kammerspielen“, Süddeutsche Zeitung, 1.12.2001

[21] Hans Sedlmayr, Kunst und Wahrheit. Zur Theorie und Methode der Kunstgeschichte. Mittenwald: Mäander, 1978 (zuerst in „Rowohlts deutscher Enzyklopädie“ 1958) S.171

[22] Romano Guardini, Rainer Maria Rilkes Deutung des Daseins. Eine Interpretation der Duineser Elegien. Ostfildern/Paderborn: Matthias Grünewald, Schöningh 5. Aufl. 2016 (zuerst 1953) S.19

[23] „The propositions in the play are false because there was no such man.“ Bertrand Russell, An Enquiry into Meaning and Truth, London: Allen and Unwin, 1962, S. 277

[24] Rémond de Sainte-Albine, Der Schauspieler. übers. Friedrich Justin Bertuch. Altenburg 1772, S.49

[25] zit. in: Jens Roselt (Hg.), Schauspieltheorien. Seelen mit Methode. Schauspieltheorien vom Barock – bis zum  postdramatischen Theater. Berlin: Alexander Verlag, 2005, S.154

[26] Denis Diderot, Paradox über den Schauspieler. übers. u. eingeführt von Felix Rellstab. Wädenswil: Verlag Stutz & Co, 1981, S.22

[27] Heinrich Theodor Rötscher, Die Kunst der dramatischen Darstellung in ihrem organischen Zusammenhang wissenschaftlich entwickelt. (Erster Band) Leipzig: Otto Wiegand, 2. Auflage 1864, S.19, 21

[28] Konstantin Sergejewitsch Stanislawskij, Das Geheimnis des schauspielerischen Erfolges.  übers. v. Alexandra Meyenburg. Zürich: Scientia AG, o.J (1940?). {zuerst Moskau 1938}. S.185

[29] ibid. S.225

[30] Maxim Vallentin, „Geleitwort“, in: Ottofritz Gaillard, Das deutsche Stanislawski-Buch. Lehrbuch der Schauspielkunst nach dem Stanislawski-System. Berlin: Aufbau-Verlag, 1947, S.11

[31] Hans Günther von Klöden, Grundlagen der Schauspielkunst II: Improvisation und Rollenstudium. Velber bei Hannover: Friedrich Verlag, 1967 (Reihe Theater heute 24) S.19.

[32] Stanisławski. Die Arbeit des Schauspielers an sich selbst. Tagebuch eines Schülers. Teil 1 Die Arbeit an sich selbst im schöpferischen Prozess des Erlebens. übers. v. Ingrid Tintzmann. Westberlin: das europäische Buch, 1981, z.B. S. 148ff, 181

[33] v. Klöden a.a.O., S. 20f.

[34] Susan Batson, Truth: Personas, Needs, and Flaws in the Art of Building Actors and Creating Characters.Webster/Stone, 2006 (deutsch: Truth. Wahrhaftigkeit im Schauspiel. Ein Lehrbuch. Berlin: Alexander Verlag, 2014)

[35] Jens Roselt (Hg.), Schauspieltheorien. Seelen mit Methode. Schauspieltheorien vom Barock – bis zum  postdramatischen Theater. Berlin: Alexander Verlag, 2005, Einführung S.47

[36] Erika Fischer-Lichte e.a. (Hg.), Metzler Lexikon Theatertheorie. Stuttgart: Metzler, 2. Aufl. 2011

[37] Georg Lukacs, Theorie des Romans. Ein geschichtsphilosophischer Versuch über die Formen der großen Epik. Berlin: Cassirer, 1920, S.12

[38] Jacques Derrida, „Das Theater der Grausamkeit und die Geschlossenheit der Repräsentation“ in: J.D., Die Schrift und die Differenz. übers. v. Rudolphe Gosché. Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 1976 (zuerst als Vortrag in Parma 1966)

[39] Florian Malzacher, Gesellschaftsspiele. Politisches Theater heute. Berlin: Alexander Verlag, 2020, S.36

[40] Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria (1817). Ch. XIV, ebook Project Gutenberg, 2004 p.347

[41] Jens Roselt, Phänomenologie des Theaters. Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink, 2008, S. 194f

[42] Roselt, S.179

[43] Roselt, S. 300

[44] Julia Fiedler, „Über das Umarmen der eigenen Mittelmäßigkeit“ Poetik des Spiels. Hamburger Poetikvorlesung 2023

[45] Vgl auch  Bernhard Kleeberg, Robert Suter, „»Doing truth« Bausteine einer Praxeologie der Wahrheit“, In: Zeitschrift für Kulturphilosophie. 8 (2014) H. 2, S. 211-226 ↵

[46] Eine genaue Analyse des älteren Bildes findet sich bei Sotheby’s anlässlich eines Verkaufs.

[47] Hito Steyerl, Die Farbe der Wahrheit. Dokumentarismen im Kunstfeld. Berlin-Wien: Turia+Kant, 2008, S. 36f

[48] Steyerl a.a.O. S. 11, 13 

[49] Kay Voges im Gespräch mit Ulla Egringhoff, KunstSalon Köln 12.10.2025

Essay on Political Theatre – Part 6

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After ‘Essay on Political Theatre – Part 5’ provisionally concluded that theatre productions specifically related to current politics were making a comeback after a phase in which theatre called itself political but explicitly turned away from current political content, it remains necessary to ask what the term “political” actually means in the expression ‘political theatre’.

Vollrath’s theory of the political

One could attempt to find an answer to this question using Ernst Vollrath’s theory of the political. Since the 1970s, Vollrath has followed Hannah Arendt’s1 theory in developing his own philosophical theory of politics2. Vollrath takes as his starting point the political difference between politics and the political initiated by Carl Schmitt3 and then, independently of Schmitt, by Ricoeur and Lefort 4.

For Vollrath, the political is a practice, i.e. a modality of experience (according to Michael Oakeshott). It is not a content-determined area, but an adverbial modality, i.e. a certain way of doing or experiencing something. Part of this modality is that the political requires decisions. Vollrath defines this type of decision as judgements according to Kant’s maxim of reflective judgement. Kant actually develops his theory of judgement based on aesthetic judgement5. Reflective judgement finds the general in a given particular (and certainly does not determine the particular from the general, as theoretical or determinative judgement does). For Kant, this process of judgement underlies aesthetic judgement. Aesthetic judgement, which for Kant consists of declaring something to be beautiful, is not a purely subjective judgement, but neither is it an objective judgement that would be universally valid. However, aesthetic judgement ‘urges’ (“ansinnen”) everyone to ‘agree’ with it. Kant calls this mediating relationship ‘subjective generality’. Vollrath now extends this definition to the political6. Subjective universality thus becomes interpersonal universality, because in political judgement all others are considered as persons. Political judgement follows the maxim of reflective judgement: ‘Think in the place of every other person’7.

“Reflective judgement can be used in its political quality to define a concept of the political. A judgement made on the basis of the principle expressed in its maxim – to think oneself in the place of each other in community and communication with people – and the operation of reflection following this maxim as a rule is designed in such a way that the basis for its validity is the potential agreement of all others. Those who judge in this way form an association by making their being-with-and-among-others the interpersonal universal practice of their association.”8

For Vollrath, this concept of the political is a yardstick that can be applied to all possible phenomena in order to measure their political quality. Because the political is an adverbial modality and not a distinct social sphere, anything can take on political quality as long as it meets this standard.

“Whether and in what way war or revolution or other phenomena are politically qualified and exist in political modality can very well be assessed on the basis of a concept of the political that does not encompass them as phenomena in terms of content, but rather assesses their qualification and modality politically, that is, it measures the extent to which these phenomena are politically determined or not.”9

Despite this function of the concept of the political as a yardstick for all possible social phenomena, for Vollrath the norm of the political is a specific type of constitution: the polity[10. For Vollrath, the political is not something that occurs in all human associations, but a specific type of socialisation invented by the ancient Greeks 11.

“The constitution of a multitude of people from their centre, determined according to the principle of judgement and its reflective operation, should be called polity in order to characterise its authentically political character. If an association allows the centre of its formation and existence to be determined by the practice that is qualified according to the maxim of reflective judgement, then it is a polity.” 12

Vollrath has a precise idea of what this polity looks like in concrete terms, which largely corresponds to the model of a representative, pluralistic, constitutional democracy accepted in Western societies:

“In concrete terms, polity refers to the constitutional form of a group of people that is determined by the five elements of mandate, responsibility, time limit, restriction and limitation. … Politie can be realised in a constitutional and legal community based on representation and the separation of powers.” 13

Ultimately, for Vollrath, this type of constitution is the criterion for whether any social phenomenon can be called political in the full sense of the word. Politics is the institution that arises from the operation of reflective judgement, and all social phenomena that are called political are measured against the yardstick of their orientation towards this type of socialisation, namely politics.

‘The concept of politics as that of the political is a normative concept insofar as it measures the political quality and modality of phenomena.’ 14

If the concept of the political is to be the yardstick for the political character of various social phenomena, what is the procedure for determining this political character, the polity, of social phenomena? Vollrath remains rather vague and gives no examples:

“The concepts of the political are therefore concepts of judgement, concepts that determine and comprehend the phenomenon of the political and political phenomena from their cultural context and in relation to it, i.e. together with it, which is at the same time historically shaped. Once again: how should insight into these connections and contexts be achieved in concrete terms? Through distinctive comparison, by comparing one phenomenon with other phenomena against a cultural background, so that they form a context.”15

How can Vollrath’s concept of the political be applied to theatre?

The political in theatre

Through comparison and contextualisation. One would assume.

But at what level should the comparison be made? The fact that theatres are financed by political institutions is not what is meant by the concept of political theatre. It is obvious that publicly financed theatre has close ties to state political institutions (city, state, federal government).16. However, this does not necessarily follow that upholding the freedom of art will result in the political character of the product of its activity.

The phrase ‘doing  theatre politically’’, in which ‘politically’ is an adverb, refers to the production process of a theatre production. For example, Barbara Behrendt quotes director Joana Tischkau at a panel discussion at the Freie Volksbühne Berlin: ‘The debate is that it’s not so much about politics on stage, but about politics in the structural, in the working relationships, in how we treat each other.’ 17 Here, one could apply the standard of the maxim of reflective judgement. If the political in theatre is ‘how we treat each other,’ then the standard by which this is judged is ‘thinking in the place of every other person.’

But that is not what is meant when one replaces ‘making political theatre’ with ‘making theatre politically’. As Godard, who coined this phrase18, already made clear, this ‘political’ refers to the content or form of what is being presented, not to the production process. So that leaves the level of content or form. But how should its political quality be assessed? According to the intentions of the theatre makers? Then political theatre would be theatre with political intentions. In that case, it would not be possible to judge from the outside whether a theatre production can be called ‘political’ or not. An assessment of the political quality of theatre would have to take into account the entire event of a theatre performance, i.e. the stage and the audience and their relationship. Is there a way to assess the structure of a particular theatre production as “political” according to the definition of the term as defined by Vollrath? How could the maxim “think in the place of every other” be applied as a theatre structure?

Another hypothetical summary

Oliver Marchart defines the political as the dimension of the contingent foundation of societies, while for Ernst Vollrath it is an adverbial modality that applies to an activity when it corresponds to the maxim of ‘thinking in the place of every other’. Both theories agree on the definition of the basis of communitisation as contingent. Hume’s dictum “all government rests on opinion”19 is often quoted by Vollrath20. Vollrath considers the form of government he calls ‘politie’ to be the one that takes this contingency into account and is truly “political” in this sense. 21 Marchart calls this form of constitution democracy, also because it takes into account the ‘abysmal nature of the basis’ of socialisation22

Political theatre can therefore deal with this founding dimension of social association or with political issues that it measures against the standard of ‘thinking in the place of everyone else’. Not only in the place of one other person, which is what theatre that embodies characters always does and is a public training in empathy – also a prerequisite for ‘thinking in the place of every other person’ – but not political in the true sense of the word. Nuran Calis’ Cologne works with their structure of empathy exchange, e.g. ‘Die Lücke’ (The Gap) or ‘Mölln 92/22’, which apply to both sides, migrants and autochthons, can serve as examples. The criterion is therefore not objectifiable, but one that can only be applied in reception and is therefore applied differently by different recipients (=audiences).

‘It is important to develop a culture of the political’ 23

*

Finis

  1. Once again, on a personal note: Vollrath was in contact with Hannah Arendt from 1970 onwards and was her assistant at the New School for Social Research in New York from 1973 until Hannah Arendt’s death in 1976. In 2001, Vollrath and Daniel Cohn-Bendit received the Bremen Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought. G.P., the author of these lines, attended a seminar by Ernst Vollrath on Hannah Arendt’s essay ‘Das Urteilen’ in 1985. ↵
  2. Hannah Arendt’s theory of politics and her recourse to Kant’s analysis of aesthetic judgement has been frequently discussed, criticised or further developed in recent years. Ernst Vollrath’s continuation of this theory since the 1970s seems to have been forgotten. For example, Steffen Herrmann’s detailed discussion of Arendt’s concept of political judgement makes no reference whatsoever to Vollrath’s elaboration of this concept: Steffen Herrmann, ‘Demokratische Urteilskraft nach Arendt’, in: Zeitschrift für Praktische Philosophie Vol. 6, Issue 1, 2019, pp. 257–288 ↵
  3. Vollrath acknowledges Carl Schmitt’s pioneering theoretical achievement in developing an independent concept of the political, but criticises his one-sided definition of the political in terms of dissociation (friend-enemy relation) and contrasts it with Hannah Arendt’s definition of the political as association. ↵
  4. Vollrath does not take into account the later left-Heideggerian differentiations in Nancy, Badiou, Rancière, Laclau, etc. (cf. my contribution in Essay on Political Theatre Part 3). ↵
  5. Critique of Judgement § 40 ‘On taste as a kind of sensus communis’, Immanuel Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft. Schriften zur Ästhetik und Naturphilosophie. . Ed. Manfred Frank and Véronique Zanetti. Frankfurt/M: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 2009, pp. 638-642 ↵
  6. As Hannah Arendt did before him: cf. Ernst Vollrath, “Hannah Arendts ‘Kritik der politischen Urteilskraft'”’, in: Peter Kemper (ed.), Die Zukunft des Politischen. Ausblicke auf Hannah Arendt. Frankfurt/M: Fischer 1993, pp. 34–54 ↵
  7. Kant, Critique of Judgement § 40 . “This is done by comparing our judgement with the possible rather than the actual judgements of others, and by putting ourselves in the place of any other man, by abstracting from the limitations which contingently attach to our own judgement.” Similar formulations can be found in Kant’s ‘Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View’: ‘To think oneself (in communication with people) in the place of every other person.’ Kant, Werkausgabe Bd. XII. Ed. Wilhelm Weischedel. Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 1977 p. 549, BA 167 ↵
  8. Ernst Vollrath, Grundlegung einer philosophischen Theorie des Politischen. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1983, p. 300. All translations G.P. ↵
  9. Vollrath, Grundlegung, p.313 ↵
  10. ‘πολιτεία’ In Aristotle, this term refers to the middle ground between democracy and oligarchy: ‘ὄταν δὲ τὸ πλῆθος πρὸς τὸ κοινὸν πολιτεύηται συμφέρον, καλεῖται τὸ κοινὸν ὄνομα πασῶν τῶν πολιτειῶν, πολιτεῖα.’ (Arist. Pol. III 7, 1279a 37f ) “But when the masses govern the state with regard to the common good, then this is called ‘politeia’ by the common name of all constitutions” and IV, 8: “For the polity is, to put it simply, a mixture of oligarchy and democracy.” 1293b 33f  Aristoteles, Politik. Schriften zur Staatstheorie. Translated by Franz F. Schwarz. Stuttgart: Reclam 1989, pp. 169 and 219 ↵
  11. Vollrath repeatedly refers to Christian Meier, Die Entstehung des Politischen bei den Griechen. Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 1983 ↵
  12. Vollrath, Grundlegung, p. 303 ↵
  13. Vollrath, Grundlegung, p. 304 ↵
  14. Vollrath, Grundlegung, p. 310 ↵
  15. Vollrath, Was ist das Politische? Eine Theorie des Politischen und seiner Wahrnehmung. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2003, p.11 ↵
  16. See Ulrich Khuon in an interview about his interim directorship in Zurich 2024-25: ‘Freedom of art! That is also important. But I believe we must seek engagement with politics and partnership. Theatre, like kindergarten, school and universities, is an element of lifelong education. Politics must be invited to participate in a binding manner, without allowing itself to be dictated to.’ ↵
  17. in: Barbara Behrendt, “Diskussion im Berliner Festspielhaus. Muss Kunst wehtun?“ broadcast on rbb24 6.5.2023 ↵
  18. cf. my article in Essay on Political Theatre Part 3 ↵
  19. ‘It is therefore, on opinion only that government is founded’ , David Hume, Essays Moral, Political, and Literary. Ed. Eugene F. Miller. Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1987 p.32 ↵
  20. Cf.: Ernst Vollrath, “That All Governments Rest on Opinion” in: Social Research, Vol. 43, No. 1, (1976), pp. 46-61 ↵
  21. “Political means republican-representative; in this concept of the political, one has conceived the concept of the representative republic. The main elements of this concept, which together form a differentiated unity, are: secular commonality, even in the face of difference and dissent; decision-making procedures in accordance with the republican majority principle and the associated treatment of the dissenting minority without its destruction; control of compliance with these elements, which at the same time entails the possibility of replacement; separation of powers; and representation.” Vollrath, Was ist das Politische? p. 220 ↵
  22. “Democracy makes the failure of foundation its own basis. … The fundamental antinomy of democracy thus consists in the fact that democracy – or a policy of democratisation – is, on the one hand, a political project with claims to enforcement, but on the other hand, this project – due to the acceptance of democratic contingencies – threatens to unhinge itself, so to speak.” Machart, Die politische Differenz, p.331f ↵
  23. Vollrath, Grundlegung p.319 ↵

Essay on political theatre – Part 5

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In “Essay on Political Theatre – Part 4,” Hans-Thies Lehmann’s essay “How Political Is Postdramatic Theatre?” was analyzed.

Aftermath of Lehmann’s theory

The influence of Lehmann’s approach on theatre theory should not be underestimated. His formula that theatre is political precisely when it cannot be translated back into political discourse led to all kinds of theatre productions being classified as “political theatre.” In fact, all productions that exhibited the characteristics of post-dramatic theatre as analyzed by Lehmann were called political, from Rimini Protokoll 1 via Pollesch to Holzinger.2

An example:

“If Pollesch’s theatre can be called political, … then it is because of its playful questioning of what is considered normal reality.” 3.

With the same justification, one could call Pollesch’s work “philosophical.”

Or

“Making political theatre can also mean leaving it up to the audience to decide what they want to understand.” 4

In every form of theatre, it is up to the audience to decide what they want to understand. Exerting pressure on the audience to think in a certain way remains a pipe dream of overzealous theatre makers. Thoughts are free, even in theatre, and not just in political theatre.

Here, as there, there is no definable concept of “political.”

Politics and the political as asymmetrical opposites

However, reference is often made to the difference between politics and the political. The manifold attempts to establish this difference conceptually and to clarify the relationship between the two parts by Lacoue-Labarthe, Lefort, Badiou, Rancière and Nancy often shrink in theatre theory to a demarcation from ‘politics’. ‘The political’ is then everything in human coexistence that is not politics. Thomas Bedorf places this use of the dichotomy politics/political in the series of asymmetrical opposites such as Christian/pagan.5 The term ‘political’ is thus used to qualify theatre works that have no recognisable connection to “politics” as political. But why is this qualification necessary? Is ‘political’ simply a value-laden adjective like ‘interesting’?

Three microanalyses of theoretical statements

Hidden value judgements are typical of contemporary theatre studies. Here are three linguistic microanalyses:

‘The forms of explicitly political theatre that developed during the 20th century seem to have reached an end point.’6

A cautious (‘seem’), descriptive statement. But in the context of contemporary theatre studies, the assertion that a form of theatre has reached an ‘end point’ is a devaluation of that form. For this discipline seeks to theorise the new and thus point the way forward for practice. Such forms of explicitly political theatre are “often reduced to a legitimisation of the theatre business through obvious conflict themes,” writes Primavesi. Here, too, the description is cautious (‘often’). But the following participle “reduced” cannot refer to the frequency of the performances, but rather to their content, and conveys a devaluation of this content. In this context, the adjective “obvious” also takes on an aesthetically pejorative connotation. The “legitimisation of theatre operations” is also a pejorative motif in this context. Why should a theatre be criticised for wanting to legitimise its operations? It must legitimise its operations in the public eye, and it can do so with productions that take up “obvious conflict issues” or with productions that “disappoint or subvert the audience’s habitual perceptions”, as Primavesi describes and prefers in his essay. The “legitimation of theatre operations” is possible in many different ways. But it is necessary in any case.

Another example:

‘However, as this review of various positions on the question of political theatre has already shown, there can be no normative definition that determines once and for all what political theatre is or even should be. Nor is there “the political” that could serve as an absolute criterion of quality and prove the relevance of artistic practice. Who would decide what is political and what is not?’7

There is some confusion in these sentences by Primavesi.

1. A definition of what political theatre is is not normative, unless “political” is a normative term, a criterion of quality. Normative would only be a codification of what political theatre must be, i.e. a codification of instructions on what political theatre should look like.

2. A definition of what falls under the term ‘political theatre’ is necessary if one wants to clarify terms. And that is a task for philosophy. However, clarifying a term is not a prescription for practical behaviour.

3. Of course, there is no such thing as ‘the political’ that can function as an absolute (or even relative) criterion of quality. But every theory of political science or political philosophy attempts to determine what ‘the political’ is, what is meant by this term.

4. Even in the rejection of ‘the political’ as a criterion of quality for theatre, it becomes clear that Primavesi also considers it to be such. According to Primavesi, the reason why the political cannot be a criterion of quality is simply that it is impossible to determine what meets this criterion. If there were a generally accepted definition of what ‘the political’ is, we would have a criterion of quality for good theatre, and the relevance of artistic practice would be proven. Relevant theatre would then be political theatre.

Or

‘Making theatre politically does not mean that one does not want to take a political stance, but rather that one consciously refuses to take this moral position in order to address the functioning of politics. Moral political criticism, on the other hand, always falls short; it operates on the surface and remains trapped in the system of a conventional concept of politics.’ 8

Here, “taking a political stance” is equated (“this”) with “moral position”. The autonomy of politics and morality is thus ignored, yet a distinction is made between not taking “a political stance” and “consciously refusing to take this moral position” (=political stance).  The difference can therefore only lie in awareness. Political criticism, and thus political theatre that refers to ‘politics’ and does not merely ‘make  theatre politically’, is equated with moral criticism and devalued (‘too short … superficial … trapped’).

An open definition of political theatre

An older definition of political theatre from English-language theatre studies, on the other hand, is much more open and less normative than descriptive:

“Thinking of political theatre as a cultural practice that self-consciously operates at the level of interrogation, critique and intervention, unable to stand outside the very institutions and attitudes it seeks to change. Such a difference allows us to place under the rubric of political theatre a range of theatrical activity, from theatre as an act of political intervention taken on behalf of a designated population and having a specific political agenda; to theatre that offers itself as a public forum through plays with overtly political content; to theatre whose politics are covertly, or unwittingly, on display, inviting an actively critical stance from its audience.”9

At the same time, in their overview of the contributions to their anthology, the editors make it clear why it is so difficult to develop an open, descriptive concept of political theatre:

‘Critical activity is itself a situated act of political investment.’10

The  analysis of political theatre in theatre studies is rarely purely descriptive because the condition of partiality, which is inherent in any activity in the field of politics, spills over from the object to the analysis. The definition of what political theatre is is itself understood as a political act.

So what is the political?

A common distinction between politics and the political in theatre theory can be found in Jan Deck:

“Politics here means thinking in terms of government logic and problem-solving strategies, but also the practice of criticising state measures … And that means excluding certain views of social developments from political discourse per se. The political is that which eludes this definition and reduction to pragmatic self-restraint. It is the resistant, that which is not recognised as relevant by politics…. Contemporary approaches to the performing arts seem to be a place of the political in a way completely different to this understanding of politics.” 11

This understanding of the political as opposed to politics, as a political opposition that is not part of politics and therefore does not have to concern itself with ‘logics of government,’ ‘problem-solving strategies,’ and ‘state measures,’ and of theatre as a place of the political, not of politics, has shaped the idea of political theatre in Germany from around 2000 to the present day.

Oliver Marchart12 on the other hand, develops a different concept in his examination of the left-Heideggerian theorists of the political13. For Marchart, the political is the dimension of the founding of politics, the ‘institutionalisation of the community,’ which, according to his post-fundamentalist approach, is at the same time the recognition of the impossibility of a final justification of politics. For Marchart, the founding of politics is necessary, but always  necessarily contingent. Every political system must attempt to justify itself through reasons. At the same time, however, it is clear that these justifications are arbitrary, contingent, and that other justifications are always possible. Democracy is the form of politics that institutionalises this knowledge of the impossibility of a final foundation of politics. The connection between politics and the political is therefore one of foundation (in the form of necessary groundlessness on the one hand and the necessity of foundation on the other), not one of opposition.

‘No one has ever encountered “the political” in its pure form anywhere other than in the fractures and divisions of society, which are filled, expanded or closed by: politics.’14

A theatre of the political would therefore have to represent or examine how politics fills the ‘fractures and cracks of the social’ and in doing so discovers the possibilities for founding society.

An example:

The founding documents of a theatre of the political are, of course, Aeschylus’ ‘Oresteia’ and Sophocles’ ‘Antigone’15. What we can learn from this today in order to recognise the current political dilemmas by viewing them through the lens of the old model is demonstrated by Karin Beyer’s staging of Roland Schimmelpfennig’s five-part Thebes cycle ‘Anthropolis’ (Deutsches Schauspielhaus Hamburg 2023 16).

In ‘Iokaste’ (= Anthropolis IV), the chorus formulates the post-fundamentalist insight into the abysmal nature of all foundations of the community:

Chorus: “Justice and law are nothing but a construct, a house whose walls stand until someone tears them down, and then all that remains of justice and law is rubble.” 17

Jocasta then provides a foundation for politics in the tradition of Hannah Arendt:

Jocasta: “Equality is a law among humans, and this law applies to everyone, to all of humanity. You both have the same right. Equality and peace govern the world.” 18

And in ‘Antigone’ (= Anthropolis V), Creon formulates his concept of foundation closely based on the wording of Carl Schmitt’s definition of the political:

Creon: “Those who value their friends more than their own country are nothing but nothing… and an enemy can never become my friend or ally, for I know: We are all nothing without the city; without it, we are lost; there can be no future, no plans, no alliances, no friends without it; everything else is treason.” 19

In “Anthropolis”, the various possibilities for establishing the political are played out, demonstrating the necessity of this foundation and, at the same time, revealing the contingency of these various attempts. The diverse anachronisms that Schimmelpfennig has incorporated into the ancient mythological material ensure a connection to contemporary politics20.

What, then, is politics?

Marchart gives a minimal definition of politics. He lists six criteria that an action must fulfil if it is to be understood as politics:

  • Becoming a majority
  • Strategy
  • Organisation
  • Collectivity
  • Conflictuality
  • Partisanship

A political action must pursue the goal of becoming capable of gaining majority support, it must pursue a certain strategy, i.e. be compatible with a long-term concept that can become politically dominant (hegemony), have a minimum degree of organisation, be or become collective in some form, want to intervene in a conflict and therefore represent a certain point of view and thus be partisan, not neutral.

‘Politics is always shaped by restrictive conditions, including those of becoming a majority, strategy, organisation, collectivity, conflictuality and partiality.’ 21

No theatre production can fully meet these criteria, at least not one that is publicly funded, except perhaps the agitprop group of a political party, such as the “Rote Sprachrohr” (Red Megaphone) of the KPD in the Weimar Republic. 22. A municipal theatre (Stadttheater) is a publicly funded institution with a highly differentiated division of labour for the purpose of producing theatre art, but it is not a political organisation.

Nevertheless, there are varying degrees of approximation to these criteria of politics in contemporary theatre. Attempts to bring political groups such as the ‘Centre for Political Beauty’ (Zentrum für politische Schönheit, “2099” Theater Dortmund 2015) or ’”The Last Generation (“Die letzte Generation‘”, ’Recht auf Jugend” Schauspiel Bonn 2022, text: Lothar Kittstein, director: Volker Lösch) go the furthest in this direction. Here, the theatre places itself at the service of a political organisation, albeit only temporarily. Projects such as ‘Die Welt neu denken’ (Theatre Bonn 2021, based on the book of the same title by Maja Göpel, directed by Simon Solberg) and ‘Geld ist Klasse’ (FFT Düsseldorf 2024 with Volker Lösch and Marlene Engelhorn) meet these criteria even less, although they proclaim concrete instructions for action to the audience, because they are not directly (but possibly indirectly23) with a political organisation. Even further removed from these criteria are productions such as ‘Mölln 92/22’ (Schauspiel Köln 2022, concept and direction: David Nuran Calis) or ‘Aufstieg und Fall des René Benko’ (Volkstheater Wien 2024, concept and direction: Calle Fuhr), which do not proclaim any instructions for action but are nevertheless partisan.

Mass-politics – post-politics – anti-politics

The fact that so many examples of theatre productions that approach politics and explicitly address political issues can be found since 2020 is also due to a change in the relationship between society and politics. Theatres respond not only to theatre theory, but also to audience preferences. The “old” political theatre was not always wrong, it simply had a different audience. The “old” political theatre of the 1950s to 1970s (Sartre, Peter Weiss, Kipphardt, etc.) still fell within the phase of mass-politics, when politics still took place in institutionalised contexts (parties, organisations). Hans-Thies Lehmann’s definition of post-dramatic theatre as political in its departure from politics fell within the phase of post-politics between 1990 and 2010 24. The importance of organised political institutions declined, and political decisions were presented as having no alternative. Political engagement was less in demand.

‘Post-politics {…} was characterised by widespread depoliticisation: citizens withdrew into their private lives, wanted little to do with politics – and certainly not with regular political participation.’ 25

This turning away from the actual politics of the time is reflected in the theatre as a shift in the demands placed on politics:

‘When (government) politics becomes the mere administration of the existing order, it loses its function as a place of utopia.’ 26

This utopian function was now to be taken over by the theatre of the political.

Between 2010 and 2020, this relationship changed and new social movements with political aspirations emerged (Black Lives Matter, Yellow Vests, Last Generation, etc.). This marked the beginning of the phase of anti-politics, in contrast to the apolitical phase of post-politics.

‘Anti-politics was a politics against a politics that was not.’ 27

The examples of theatre projects mentioned above, which come as close as possible to politics, date from this phase. This shift is also reflected in theoretical reflections on the relationship between politics and theatre. Alexander Kerlin, then dramaturge at Schauspiel Dortmund under the artistic direction of Kay Voges, stated in 2019:

‘In view of the threat posed by anti-liberal, anti-democratic politics, many voices today are calling for a return to a completely different tradition in the performing arts: direct and unmediated political and activist action.’ 28

And Michael Wolf (editor of Nachtkritik) finds a solution for how political theatre can be effective: by taking a stand in local conflicts and anchoring itself in political debates at the local level 29.

“The ultimate goal of political theatre is not to make a few audience members think differently about an issue. Political theatre that wants to be taken seriously must leave the sidelines and take a position at the centre of the debate. […] How can a politically active theatre still have an impact? The answer is obvious: by relating its content to its region. It is important to limit the radius of one’s own themes. Stadtheater should remember that it is a local cultural institution.‘ 30

Here, then, is a proposed way in which theatre can meet the criteria of conflictuality and partisanship in politics.

Hypothetical summary

In the post-political phase after 1989, the distinction between politics and the political, which originated in French criticism of totalitarianism 31, was used in theatre theory to confer the quality of ‘political’ on theatre productions that deliberately avoided explicitly political content. In Germany, there is a long tradition of equating politics with the state 32. This tradition was still effective in this post-political phase. Distancing oneself from politics meant turning away from state action. However, the concept of ‘the political’ as the antonym of ‘politics’ offered the possibility of continuing to use the epithet “political” and thus continuing the justification of theatre from the years of the Weimar Republic and the ‘trent glorieuses’ 1945-75. The concept of ‘the political’ thus fulfilled a function similar to that in the German tradition of “culture” as the antithesis of politics understood as state action 33. However, when various political movements emerged (again) after 2010, both internationally and in Germany, which were political but not state-run, it became possible once more to apply the term ‘politics’ to a sphere that was not state-run. Theatres opened up to these political movements, and political content, albeit in a different form, was no longer taboo.

To be continued

  1. “The production that Rimini Protokoll created in 2006 from Karl Marx’s classic theory ‘Das Kapital, Band 1’ proved to be paradigm-forming {for new forms of political theatre}.” Christian Rakow, “Auf zweiter Stufe: Theater und politische Bildung – geht das überhaupt zusammen?” in: Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung (ed.), Moralische Anstalt 2.0. Über Theater und politische Bildung ↵
  2. “So what makes Holzinger Theater so special? {…} it is a density of theatrical means that function almost flawlessly and, in the flow of what can be seen, allow for moments of reflection, casual, clear, political in their own way.“ Georg Diez, ”Klarheit, Tiefe, Krassheit“ {review of Florentina Holzinger’s ”Sancta.” Die Zeit, June 1, 2024 ↵
  3. Patrick Primavesi, “Theater/Politik. Kontexte und Beziehungen” (Theatre/Politics. Contexts and Relationships). In: Jan Deck & Angelika Seeburg (eds.), Politisch Theater machen. Neue Artikulationsformen des Politischen in den darstellenden Künsten (Making Political Theatre. New Forms of Articulation of the Political in the Performing Arts). Bielefeld: Transkript, 2011, p. 65 ↵
  4. Jan Deck, „Politisch Theater machen – Eine Einleitung“ (“Making Political Theater—An Introduction”), in Jan Deck & Angelika Seeburg (eds.), Politisch Theater machen. Neue Artikulationsformen des Politischen in den darstellenden Künsten (Making Political Theatre: New Forms of Articulation of the Political in the Performing Arts). Bielefeld: Transkript, 2011, p. 17 ↵
  5. “It is only clear in each case what the political is not: namely, ‘mere’ politics. If this difference resembles the logic of asymmetrical opposites, as Reinhart Koselleck has examined in the history of concepts in the opposition between Greeks and barbarians, Christians and pagans, humans and subhumans, then the distinction between the political and politics threatens to become a hypostatisation of the political.” Thomas Bedorf, ‘Das Politische und die Politik. Konturen einer Differenz“ (The Political and Politics. Contours of a Difference). In: Thomas Bedorf and Kurt Röttgers (eds.): Das Politische und die Politik (The Political and Politics). Berlin: Suhrkamp. 2010, p. 33, cf. Reinhart Koselleck, »Zur historisch-politischen Semantik asymmetrischer Gegenbegriffe« (‘On the Historical-Political Semantics of Asymmetrical Opposites’). In: idem, Vergangene Zukunft. Zur Semantik geschichtlicher Zeiten, Frankfurt/M. 2nd ed. 1992, pp. 211-259. ↵
  6. Primavesi, op. cit., p. 44 ↵
  7. Primavesi, op. cit., p. 57 ↵
  8. Jan Deck, op. cit., p. 28 ↵
  9. Jeanne Colleran & Jenny S. Spencer (eds.), ’Introduction” to Staging Resistance Essays on Political Theatre. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1998 p.1 ↵
  10. ibid. p.3. The translation into German is problematic due to the different concepts of criticism and science. In this context, ‘critical activity’ refers to the detailed, theoretically underpinned analysis of a theatre performance, as this is the nature of most of the contributions to this anthology. ‘Theatre criticism’ (Theaterkritik) in the German sense, i.e. writing about theatre productions in the current media on a daily basis, is not meant here. In German terms, the contributions in this volume would fall under ‘theatre studies’ (Theaterwissenschaft) or ‘performance analysis’ (Aufführungsanalyse). In German terms, retranslated into English, the sentence means something like:  ‘Writing theatre studies or performance analyses is itself an activity embedded in a specific political situation with the aim of influencing politics.’ ↵
  11. Deck p. 25f ↵
  12. Marchart, Oliver, Die politische Differenz. Zum Denken des Politischen bei Nancy, Lefort, Badiou, Laclau und Agamben. Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2010 ↵
  13. Nancy, Lefort, Rancière, Badiou, Laclau, Mouffe ↵
  14. Marchart, p.328 ↵
  15. Sophocles’ Antigone repeatedly serves Hegel as an example of the opposing principles of state and morality. For various interpretations of this opposition, see Georg Steiner, Die Antigonen. Geschichte und Gegenwart eines Mythos. Munich: Hanser, 1988, first chapter, pp. 1-3, pp. 13-59), one can add: Hegel’s interpretation of Antigone can be seen as an example of a fundamentalist foundation of politics: the ‘tyrannical sacrilege’ (“tyrannischer Frevel”, Creon) and the ‘sacrilege of knowledge’ (“Frevel des Wissens”, Antigone) are suspended in the ‘absolute pure will of all which has the form of immediate being ’( im „absoluten reinen Willen aller, der die Form des unmittelbaren Seins hat“). For Hegel, the foundation of society arises from the confrontation and suspension (“Aufhebung”) of these two principles. Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes. Theorie Werkausgabe Vol. 3, Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1970, p. 320f ↵
  16. Simon Strauß in: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 17 July 2024 or Till Briegleb in: Süddeutsche Zeitung 12 November 2023 ↵
  17. Roland Schimmelpfennig, Anthropolis. Monster. City. Thebes. With an afterword by Sibylle Meier. Frankfurt (M: Fischer, 2023, p. 359 ↵
  18. ibid. p. 390 ↵
  19. ibid. p. 418 ↵
  20. e.g. in ‘Iokaste’ (=Anthropolis IV): the chorus describes the arrival of Eteocles in Thebes: “A single man on his way into the city, he is armed. Combat boots, an automatic rifle, combat suit, helmet.” Ibid. p. 385f ↵
  21. Marchart p. 342 ↵
  22. The “Rote Sprachrohr” was founded in 1926 under the direction of Maxim Vallentin as the ‘First agitprop group of the KJVD’, the youth organisation of the KPD. See Ludwig Hoffmann and Daniel Hoffmann-Ostwald (eds.), Deutsches Arbeitertheater 1918-1933. 2 vols. Munich: Rogner & Bernhard, 1973, introduction p. 37f ↵
  23. ‘Geld ist Klasse’ was co-financed by the Rosa-Luxemburg-Foundation, the party foundation of the ‘Left Party’ (“Die Linke”) ↵
  24. See also Colin Crouch’s concept of ‘post-democracy’ in: Colin Crouch, Postdemokratie. Berlin: Suhrkamp 2008 ↵
  25. Anton Jäger, Hyperpolitik. Extreme Politisierung ohne politische Folgen. Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2023, p.15 ↵
  26. Deck, op. cit. p. 13 ↵
  27. Anton Jäger, op. cit., p. 82 ↵
  28. Alexander Kerlin, ‘Beim Blick in den Abgrund’ (Looking into the Abyss), in: Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung (ed.), op. cit. p. 28 ↵
  29. The above-mentioned projects by Volker Lösch and Nuran David Calis can be seen as evidence of this thesis. ↵
  30. Michael Wolf, “Theater für den Heimbedarf: Wie Theater politisch wirksam werden kann” (Theatre for home use: How theatre can become politically effective), in: Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung (ed.), op. cit., pp. 44-45 ↵
  31. Following early work by Carl Schmitt and Hannah Arendt ↵
  32. Ernst Vollrath, ‘Zur Topologie der politischen Wahrnehmung in Deutschland I und II’ in: ibid. Was ist das Politische? Eine Theorie des Politischen und seiner Wahrnehmung. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2003, pp. 115-176 ↵
  33. ‘Leading representatives of German cultural self-awareness {have} separated culture and politics from each other, even setting them in opposition to each other.’ Vollrath, op. cit. p. 157 ↵

Essay on political theatre – Part 4

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In Part 3 of the ‘Essay on political theatre’, the development of the distinction between ‘the political’ and ‘politics’ from Herodotus to Lyotard was outlined. Now this development will be followed up to the theatre of the present day.1

f) Derrida

Lyotard’s parallelisation of representation in politics and representation in theatre is taken up by Jacques Derrida in a lecture from 1997 on the occasion of a theatre performance “Karl Marx, Théâtre inédit” in Nanterre. For him, the concept of representation is the intersection of politics and theatre. Derrida speaks of a disease of representation or an evil (“mal de répresentation”) that has infected both areas. His criticism of political representation is less sharp than Lyotard’s; he does not want to attack representative democracy as such, but only to remind the political representatives of their function. To do this, he demands of the theatre:

‘We must change the stage, change the time, change the order of time’ 2.

Without making a clear distinction between politics and the political, he calls for ‘allowing politics or the political to enter the structure of the theatre.’ 3 This can be achieved, ‘by interweaving several heterogeneous times in a single time that is divided and out of joint; by interweaving several orders of speech, modes of speaking that are simultaneously real, that is, realistic, and fictional, that is, lyrical and poetic.’ 4 Like Rancière, he also demands that theatre has the function of giving a voice to the unrepresented.

‘The art of disruption, of contratiempo (off-beat), is also an art of the political, an art of the theatrical, the art of giving the floor at the most inconvenient of times to those who, in the current course of events, have no right to raise their voice.”5

g) What used to be called political theatre

Jacques Derrida shares with Lyotard the rejection of

“what used to be called political theatre, which conveyed a message, sometimes a revolutionary content, without changing the form, time and space of the theatrical event”.6

This reproach against the old political theatre has been running through the discussion about politics in theatre since the 1990s, without the reproach being substantiated by examples. In the French context, one might assume that Sartre’s plays are meant, since they work with the traditional means of theatre: fictional plot and characters, empathy, arcs of suspense, concentrated narration with a condensed fictional time structure, clear separation of stage and auditorium (fourth wall).

Brecht is also considered part of the outdated, old political theatre. Lyotard rejects Brecht in his radical criticism of all symbolism in theatre and Rancière sees in Brecht, as in Artaud, one of the ‘theatre reformers’ who started from the false idea that ‘the theatre is a place of community in itself.’7 Both Brecht and Artaud set themselves the task of

‘to teach their audience the means to stop being spectators and to become actors in a collective practice.”8

Rancière, on the other hand, believes that ‘in a theatre […] there are only individuals who go their own way through the forest of things, actions and signs that they face.’ Only the equality of minds, only the same ability to play an unpredictable game of associations and dissociations, connects individuals.

‘Being a spectator is not the passive state that we have to transform into activity.”9.

Jens Roselt has used the phenomenological method to work out exactly what being a spectator in the theatre is like. It is a temporary, even selective community that in no way suspends the associative activity of the individual spectators. The spectator is actually not passive, he or she acts ‘in individual difference together’10. Although each spectator makes his or her own way through the forest of theatrical signs, the fact that all the others are also in this forest also characterises the theatrical situation of the audience. Commonality and difference – both are part of being an audience member.

An example:

In Karin Beier’s production of Roland Schimmelpfennig’s drama “Iokaste”11, the question of how the occidental culture of the political has developed from a ritual to a political culture is discussed on stage.12 The fact that a production like Karin Beier’s “Iokaste” deals with issues on stage that evoke associations in many minds to the current conflict between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza Strip is just one example of the combination of individual freedom and temporary collectivity in the theatre: the fact that about 1000 people are staring in the same direction while at the same time being free to concentrate on whatever detail, that such a temporary collective subject arises, which reacts to the same thing in its own individually different mixture of emotions, considerations and judgements.

Brecht was already aware of this. As is well known, Brecht wanted to teach the ‘art of watching’ ‘an art that must first be learned, trained, then constantly practised in the theatre’13. He was also aware of the inconsistency of audience reactions in political theatre:

‘When plays with political effects are performed, the ambivalence of our audience […] can be clearly seen.’

He explicitly rejects the attempt to strive for ‘a uniformly reacting audience’; only Aristotelian drama, based on empathy, could attempt this. He even saw the possibility of theatre motivating action outside of the theatre more in the Aristotelian than in his epic theatre.14 However, he was not a ‘teacher without teaching’, as Rancière wishes teachers to be.

h) After Brecht

For post-Brecht German productions of political theatre, the accusation that they want to teach the audience to no longer be an audience is hardly true. In the 1960s, the predominant form of theatre was documentary theatre, but it only ever addressed political issues after the fact: Kipphardt’s ‘In the Case of J. Oppenheimer’ (In der Sache J. Oppenheimer, 1964) and ‘Brother Eichmann’ (Bruder Eichmann, 1982), Peter Weiss’s ‘Inquiry’ (Die Ermittlung, 1965) and ‘Vietnam Discourse’ (Vietnam-Diskurs, 1968) or Heiner Müller’s ‘Germania – Death in Berlin’ (Germania Tod in Berlin, 1971) and ‘The Commission’ (Der Auftrag, 1979) took up past political events to shed light on contemporary debates. With the exception of Rolf Hochhuth’s ‘The Deputy’ (Der Stellvertreter, 1963), none of these plays was formally naive in the sense of Schillerian or Ibsenian dramaturgy. The clarity of the ‘message’ conveyed by the old political theatre according to Derrida varied, however: very clear in Peter Weiss’ “Vietnam Discourse”15 and in the original version of Kipphardt’s ‘Bruder Eichmann’, very unclear in Heiner Müller’s ‘Der Auftrag’. The authors and directors of the 60s and 70s were also aware of the mode of operation of their medium. Or as Rancière puts it: the unavoidable split between intention and effect.16 Even then, Peter Stein thought that

‘the actual effect of art on politics is zero.’ 17

These banal insights were already known at the time. Only Peter Stein and Wolfgang Schwiedrzik’s Munich production of the ‘Vietnam Discourse’ in 1968, with an integrated collection of money for the Vietcong (FNL), tried (unsuccessfully) to rebel against this basal structure of reception, but it also only expected a mobilising effect only in the audience that was already in agreement.18

i) Hans-Thies Lehman and the post-dramatic theatre

The most influential definition of what political theatre is for German theatre in the 21st century can be found in Hans-Thies Lehmann’s essay “Wie politisch ist das postdramatische Theater?”(How political is post-dramatic theatre?) from 2001. [Hans-Thies Lehmann, “Wie politisch ist das postdramatische Theater?”, in: H-Th.L., Das Politische Schreiben. Essays zu Theatertexten. Berlin: Theater der Zeit, 2002 {= Recherchen 12}; first published in: Theater der Zeit, October 2001]. As a lecturer at the Institute for Applied Theatre Studies in Gießen and as a professor at the University of Frankfurt/M, Hans-Thies Lehmann has had a decisive influence on the generation of directors and dramaturgs after 2000. His essay, like his magnum opus, ‘Das postdramatische Theater’19, is a profound analysis of contemporary theatre and, at the same time, an aesthetic programme, i.e. not just theatre theory, but a science that is to be applied. From today’s perspective, however, one must formulate some reservations about his definition of political theatre.

Lehmann first reformulates the title question of his essay to ‘How is theatre, for example post-dramatic theatre, political?’ His premise is therefore: theatre is political in a way that is particular to it. So there is no question of whether theatre is political or what kind of theatre is political. He later writes that theatre is structurally political, that the political is ‘inscribed’ in it. In doing so, he explicitly refrains from a more precise definition of the term ‘political’.20 In any case, the term ‘of the political’, which Lehmann always uses here, is not distinguished from ‘politics’.

As a theatre theorist, Lehmann does not want to give ‘instructions (programmes)’. But time and again, evaluations of theatre practice creep into his formulations. For example, when he warns against taking up political content in theatre because then there is a danger that it will ‘too obediently parrot’ what public discourse dictates. He is concerned with defending post-dramatic theatre (Fabre, Wilson, Pollesch, Lauwers) against the accusation that it lacks the political.

The political in theatre

Lehmann’s definition of the political in theatre is based on three formulas, the first of which has three sub-theses.

1. a) The political can only appear in theatre indirectly, in modo obliquo.

b) The political comes to bear in theatre when and only when it cannot be translated or retranslated into the logic, syntax and conceptuality of political discourse.

c) The political in theatre is to be thought of as an interruption of the political.

2. Political theatre is to be understood as a practice of exception. Only a theatre that shakes its own rules, that interrupts theatre as a show, enters into a genuine relationship with the political.

3. Political theatre takes the form of the shock of habit/disappointment of desire to find dramatised simulacra of political realities on stage. At the same time, this is a shock to the moralisation associated with the personalisation in politics and thus the avoidance of the moralistic trap.

Lehmann’s thesis that the political in theatre is the interruption of the political obviously draws on Walter Benjamin’s use of the term ‘interruption’ in his characterisation of Brecht’s epic theatre. Benjamin sees the ‘interruption of sequences’ in Brecht as an essential means of alienation and thus for the spectator to discover in amazement the conditions in which he lives. 21 Lehmann expands this concept of interruption, however, from the interruption of processes to the ‘interruption of the regulatory’ in general and in politics. The interruption thus becomes an intended effect rather than an aesthetic device. The ‘solidified façade of legal relationships’ in which we live is to be broken open so that the agonistic, the conflict as the essence of politics, becomes clear again.22 It also becomes clear to what extent Lehmann in 2001 assumed a society based on superficial consensus in which conflicts are hidden. Meanwhile, in 2025, Western societies in Europe and America are on the road to increasing polarisation. The façade of consensus is crumbling, even legal relationships are becoming fluid because the opponents of the pluralistic-democratic system (Trump, Orban, Le Pen, Meloni, Kickl, Ben-Gvir) are attacking the legal institutions first. For Lehmann, however, these agonal forces of politics have no place and are not persons. Therefore, they ‘offer no content that would be political, no form to representation’. This is the old insight that Brecht had already formulated as:

‘Actual reality has slipped into the functional’.23

But if theatre wants to present these formless forces of the political (or of politics?), it cannot just present function graphs, it needs the detour via people, actors, performers or presenters. Lehmann seems to shy away from this detour and points to the possibility of retreating away from politics and towards one’s own rules, towards interrupting the ‘listening and viewing order’. The paradoxical formulation that the political aspect of theatre consists in keeping free of everything political is very much in line with Jacques Rancière’s:

‘Art that makes politics by abolishing itself as art is thus opposed by an art that is political on condition that it keeps itself pure of any political influence.”24

Rancière’s critique of art that abolishes itself for the sake of politics applies more to the actions of the ‘Centre for Political Beauty’ (Zentrum für politische Schönheit, ZfS) and similar artivist projects than to current attempts at political theatre. The political (and politics) also appear in the theatre directly, in modo recto. The political in the theatre can be translated into the terminology of politics. The political in theatre is not an interruption of the political, but (also, not always) an interference in politics.

Political tendency and artistic tendency

Walter Benjamin’s definition of the relationship between political tendency and literary tendency seems to provide a template for determining the relationship between theatre and the political:

‘The tendency of a piece of writing can only be politically correct if it is also correct in literary terms. This means that the politically correct tendency includes a literary tendency, […] this literary tendency can consist of a step forward or backward in literary technique.”25

Lehmann seems to want to reverse Benjamin’s formula: for him, progress in theatrical technique (‘overcoming the visual and auditory arrangement in favour of an exploration of the situational aspect’) is the condition for political theatre. For Benjamin, it was still clear which political tendency he meant. His lecture on the author as producer was delivered in 1934 in Paris at the ‘Institute for the Study of Fascism’. For Lehmann, on the other hand, there is no specific political tendency that political theatre should pursue, but only a ‘genuine reference to the political’, which, however, should consist precisely in a break with political content.

The auxiliary institute of theatre

‘Theatre cannot be an auxiliary institution of political education.’ 26

On the other hand, it is certain that theatre is being used as such in the present day: it is often the case that theatre intervenes in the realm of politics, and thus in the realm of power and strategy. The temporal dimension plays a role here. Theatre often takes up global topics of medium-term relevance and relates them to contemporary issues27 or locally in retrospect.28 The most internationally well-known play of this kind, which deals with political processes in retrospect, is ‘Enron’ by Lucy Prebble about the fraud of the American energy company.29 Or, more recently, Volker Lösch and Marlene Engelhorn’s show ‘Geld ist Klasse’ (Money is Class). Elfriede Jelinek’s almost daily text productions for the theatre, e.g. ‘Am Königsweg’ (On the Royal Road) 2017 on Donald Trump’s first election, most recently ‘Endsieg’ (Final Victory) on his re-election, and their staging by Falk Richter, are examples of how quickly the theatre can react and that a theatre that takes up current political content does not have to resort to the structures of traditional narrative-Aristotelian theatre.30

Investigative Theatre

Theatre not only addresses the conditions of the constitution of the polity, the political, but also, to an increasing extent, politics itself. Theatre critics can criticise such projects aesthetically, one can question their political effectiveness, but theatre theory would have to take note of the fact that such a thing exists and explain the condition of its possibility: the analogy of theatre and politics.31 Jean Peters of the journalists’ collective Correctiv explains the function of this investigative theatre with the decline of newspapers:

‘Theatre is one of many answers: here you can tell a story in peace and at the end we know: there are witnesses to the shared experience…. Theatre has the calmness of development and of picking up on things, of contextualisation and of meta-levels.’ ’It’s about creating a space in which society can develop. We want to awaken the desire to shape society. … That is my vision – and theatre can do that.”32

‘A space in which society can develop’ is a definition of the political, and this is the basis for a theatre project about a conference of far-right politicians who discussed the re-migration of emigrants: “Geheimplan gegen Deutschland” (Berliner Ensemble, Volkstheater Vienna 202 4).33 Here, then, the ‘political’, the conditions for the constitution of society, and ‘politics’, the decisions about society that are concentrated in the state and organised institutionally, are to be connected; the one is not without the other in the theatre, not separated as in Lehmann. Here, the political comes into play precisely because it can be translated into public discourse, which is called politics. At most, one could apply Derrida’s proviso clause: provided that the theatre “does not simply turn into a meeting place and continues to follow its theatrical destiny.”34 This journalistic theatre of revelations should certainly not be propagated as the future of theatre, but we should at least take note of its potential.

The moralistic trap

Lehman warns of the ‘moralistic trap’ that theatre could fall into by taking on political content, through the theatricalisation and personalisation of the political. This warning is in line with Rancière’s warning against the ‘ethical confusion’ that equates politics and art.35 For Rancière, art and politics are two areas that are in a permanent state of tension, but do not merge into one another. The possibility of political theatre does not mean a weakening of the autonomy of art36, although, as Janis El-Bira puts it, in the theatre “the post-autonomous has long since been rattling at the auditorium doors.”37  Art remains a separate area with its own valuations, rules and procedures, like politics and morality, even if one system can be judged by the standards of the other.

The ‘moralistic trap’ does not snap shut as soon as the theatre takes up political content because the political, like art, is an autonomous realm. Since the ‘Machiavellian moment’, politics has established itself as a separate realm alongside morality.38 But the autonomous realms of politics, art and morality are in a mutual state of tension.
For a pure ethics of reason, as advocated by Kant, there is no conflict between morality and politics, because politics must always be guided by morality, to which only what is possible is binding.39 But for actual morality, for the moral concepts in people’s minds, for what Hegel calls ‘morality’40, these conflicts between morality, politics and art arise constantly.

From today’s perspective, Hans-Thies Lehmann’s definition of the political in theatre, especially in post-dramatic theatre, seems to be a retreat from the ‘disgusting corruption of political discourse’41 to a ‘politics of perception’42, the effect of which remains questionable and the re-connection to the realm of the political is deliberately negated.

To be continued.

  1. This essay generally refers to German theatre and theory. Therefore, most references and quotations are originally in German. Quotations have been translated by myself, even if there are official English editions as in the case of well-known authors like Brecht, or Rancière. Titels are given in the original language (usually German), sometimes translated into English in addition, if it seems helpful. ↵
  2. Jacques Derrida, “Marx, das ist wer”. in: Zäsuren, November 2000, No. 1 Ökonomien der Differenz, ed. by Hans-Joachim Lenger, Jörg Sasse, Georg Christoph Tholen, pp. 58-70. Here p. 64. Transcript of a lecture in connection with the staging of the play ‘Karl Marx, théâtre inédit’, March 1997 Théâtre des Amandiers, Nanterre, Director: Jean-Pierre Vincent ↵
  3. ibid. p.65 ↵
  4. ibid. p.64 ↵
  5. p.69 ↵
  6. Derrida, ibid. p.64 ↵
  7. Rancière, “Der emanzipierte Zuschauer”, in: J.R., Der emanzipierte Zuschauer. Wien: Passagen, 2nd ed. 2015 (first  Paris 2008), p.26f ↵
  8. Rancière, ibid. p. 18 ↵
  9. Rancière, ibid. p. 27f ↵
  10. Roselt pp. 330-333, see also Essay on Political Theatre Part 2 on this website ↵
  11. Roland Schimmelpfennig ‘Iokaste’, directed by Karin Beier, Deutsches Schauspielhaus Hamburg ↵
  12. cf. Ernst Vollrath, Was ist das Politische? Eine Theorie des Politischen und seiner Wahrnehmung. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2003, pp. 23-27 ↵
  13. Bertolt Brecht, Große kommentierte Berliner und Frankfurter Ausgabe, Vol.22.1, Schriften 2, Part 1. ‘Politische Theorie der Verfremdung’ (1936/37), p.125 ↵
  14. Bertolt Brecht, Große kommentierte Berliner und Frankfurter Ausgabe, Vol.22.2, Schriften 2, Part 2,   p. 663 ↵
  15. “The ideal for an artist would, of course, be to describe the situation in which we live so vividly that people, when they read about it or experience it on stage, say on the way home: ”We have to change that. It can’t go on like this. We won’t put up with it any longer. As long as I haven’t managed that, I haven’t done my job as an artist.‘ Peter Weiss in conversation with A. Alvarez, in: Karlheinz Braun (ed.), Materialien zu Peter Weiss’ `Marat/Sade’. Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 5th edition 1975, p.99 Two years later, however, he also said: ‘Theatre itself cannot change society. That is impossible. The best effect I can hope for is that a play provides an opportunity for further reflection.’ Interview with Peter Weiss, in: Der Spiegel 12/1968 ↵
  16. ‘No art form can avoid the aesthetic split that separates effects from intentions.’ Rancière, ‘Die Paradoxa der politischen Kunst’, op. cit., p. 99 ↵
  17. Hans Bertram Bock, “Ohne Duselei. Gespräch mit Peter Stein, Wolfgang Schwiedrzik und Wolfgang Neuss”. Abendzeitung (Munich) 24 June 1968, quoted in: Dorothea Kraus, Theater Proteste. Zur Politisierung von Straße und Bühne in den 1960er Jahren. Frankfurt: Campus, 2007 p.145 ↵
  18. Dorothea Kraus also provides a detailed account of the controversies surrounding the performances of ‘Vietnam Discourse’ in Frankfurt, Munich and Berlin in 1968, op. cit. pp.142-153. ↵
  19. Hans-Thies Lehmann, Das postdramatische Theater. Frankfurt/M: Verlag der Autoren, 1999 ↵
  20. ‘The political should not be vaporised in the rarefied air of more precise distinctions’, ibid., p. 14. ↵
  21. ‘Was ist das epische Theater?’ in: Walter Benjamin, Der Autor als Produzent. Aufsätze zur Literatur. Stuttgart: Reclam 2012, p. 222, also ibid. “Der Autor als Produzent”, p. 245 ↵
  22. Here Lehmann also refers to Carl Schmitt. ↵
  23. Bertolt Brecht, ’Der Dreigroschenprozeß. Ein soziologisches Experiment“, in:  Große kommentierte Berliner und Frankfurter Ausgabe, vol. 21, Schiften 1, Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1992, p. 469. Also quoted in Walter Benjamin, ‘Eine kurze Geschichte der Photographie’ in: W.B., Angelus Novus. Ausgewählte Schriften, vol. 2. Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 1966, p.243 ↵
  24. Jacques Rancière, “Die Ästhetik als Politik” in: J.R., Das Unbehagen in der Ästhetik. Vienna: Passagen 3rd ed. 2016, p.47 (first published in French in Paris 2004) ↵
  25. Walter Benjamin, “The Author as Producer” ibid. pp.229, 231 ↵
  26. Lehmann, ibid., p.13 ↵
  27. Climate crisis: “Rethinking our world” (Unsere Welt neu denken) Schauspiel Bonn 2021, war in Ukraine: “The revolution starves its children” (Die Revolution lässt ihre Kinder verhungern’,   Schauspiel Köln 2022) ↵
  28. Bankruptcy during the construction of the World Congress Centre: Schauspiel Bonn 2017 ‘Bonnopoly’, Archive collapse: Schauspiel Köln 2010 “The Work/On the Bus/A Fall” ‘Das Werk/Im Bus/Ein Sturz’ ↵
  29. Nuremberg 2010 ↵
  30. Likewise Marcus Lobbe’s staging of Mike Daisey’s monologue ‘The Trump Card’ at Theater Dortmund 2017 ↵
  31. More examples: Calle Fuhr, ‘Aufstieg und Fall des Herrn René Benko’ (The rise and fall of Mr. René Benko, Volkstheater Vienna 2024) ↵
  32. Calle Fuhr and Jean Peters, ‘Zum Verstehen verfühen’, interview with Nachtkritik editors Elena Philipp and Esther Slevogt 6.8.204. ↵
  33. This action by the journalists’ collective Correctiv, which created a political fact with minimal aesthetic preparation, is likely to be a borderline case in the relationship between theatre and politics, however. ↵
  34. Jacques Derrida, ‘Marx, das ist wer’. in: Zäsuren, November 2 000, No. 1 Ökonomien der Differenz, ed. Hans-Joachim Lenger, Jörg Sasse, Georg Christoph Tholen, pp. 58-70 ↵
  35. Rancière, Ist Kunst widerständig? Berlin: Merve, 2004, p.34 ↵
  36. Cf. Volker Ullrich, Die Kunst nach dem Ende ihrer Autonomie. Berlin: Wagenbach, 2022. Especially Part I “Was hat die Idee autonomer Kunst geschwächt?” Ullrich is mainly concerned with the visual arts. ↵
  37. Janis El-Bira, Das ‘Art-Toy’ als Lebensbegleiter. Review of Volker Ulrich, Die Kunst nach dem Ende ihrer Autonomie. Nachtkritik.de ↵
  38. “It is only with Machiavelli that politics achieves a distinctive identity and autonomy.” The Machiavellian moment is the ontological moment “of the experience of contingency and groundlessness of the social.” Thus, politics cannot be based on morality. Oliver Marchart, Die politische Differenz. Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2010, pp.28 and 49, cf. Luhmann ↵
  39. ‘ultra posse nemo obligatur’, ‘true politics cannot take a step without first paying homage to morality.’ Immanuel Kant, ‘Zum ewigen Frieden. Ein philosophischer Entwurf’ in: I.K. Werkausgabe Bd.XI, hg. Wilhelm Weischedel. Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp,1968, S. 229 B71, S. 243 B97 ↵
  40. cf. G.W.F. Hegel, Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts, Werke Bd. 7. Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp 1970. §142, S.292. In Hegel’s appendix to §144, there is a nice poem:
    „Heilig, was die Geister bindet, wär es auch nur leicht wie die Binse den Kranz. Heiligstes, was innig gedacht ewig die Geister einig macht.“ (“Sacred is the bond that unites minds, though it be but light, as the slender rush makes the wreath. Most sacred what as individual thought, eternally unites the minds.”) Here, as often in his Aesthetics, Hegel refers to the exemplary conflict in Sophocles’ “Antigone” between the state (politics) and morality (custom) pp. 293f. ↵
  41. Lehmann, loc. cit., p. 18 ↵
  42. ibid. p. 19. If every change in our perception were political, sunglasses and earplugs would be political. ↵

Essay on political theatre – Part 3

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Politics or the Political

In the discussion about what political theatre is, the distinction between ‘politics’ and the ‘political’ plays an important role. What Fischer-Lichte calls ‘New Politics of the Aesthetic’1 is based on this distinction. The separation of ‘politics’ from ‘the political’ makes it possible for an influential current in contemporary theatre to distance itself from a ‘political theatre’ that takes up political topics or content, and yet still see itself as political. Therefore, the development of this distinction will be briefly presented here. 2

a) Herodotus and Aristotle

The nominalisation of the adjective ‘political’ goes back to antiquity, to the peculiarity of the Greek language of enabling such nominalisations through articles, and to the tendency of Greek philosophy to formulate abstract concepts in such a way 3 The noun τὸ πολιτικόν first appears in Herodotus.

“καίτοι εἰ τὸ πολιτικὸν ὑμῖν πᾶν ἐστι τοιοῦτ”  (“and if  your political is as you describe it”)4

The Persian ruler Xerxes is discussing the fighting strength of the Greeks with Demaratus, a former Spartan king who has defected to the Persians, and is planning a campaign against them. Here, the political is equated with the polity, the city-state of Sparta.

Aristotle also uses the adverbial version of ‘politikos’ (πολιτικῶς). Ernst Vollrath relies on a passage in Athenaion Politeia (The Athenian State),

‘Πεισίστρατος … διῴkει τὰ κοινὰ πολιτικῶς μᾶλλον ἤ τυραννικῶς ‘ (14.3) ‘Peisistratos ruled the common – that is, the polis – in a political rather than a tyrannical way.’5

to show that the political is a practice.6 It means an ‘adverbial modality’, not a specific content or area.7 This adverbial use of the concept of the political will become even more significant for theatre in the 21st century.

b) Carl Schmitt and Hannah Arendt

Later, the concepts of politics and the political were largely equated8, until Carl Schmitt’s 1932 essay ‘Der Begriff des Politischen`(The Concept of the Political) provided the impetus to define the category of the political more precisely. For him, however, the conceptual opposition was between the state and the ‘political’. His fanfare-like opening was the sentence:

„Der Begriff des Staates setzt den Begriff des Politischen voraus.“ (The concept of the state presupposes the concept of the political.)9.

‘Politics’ is identified with the state. 10. While the ‘political’ is understood as a general term for a certain quality of human coexistence:

‘{The political} does not denote a separate subject area, but only the degree of intensity of an association or dissociation of people.”11.’ Christian Meier, Die Entstehung des Politischen bei den Griechen. Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 2nd ed. 1989, p. 36]

Th the theoretical opponent of the later Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt was Hannah Arendt12. For her, politics is the free association of people:

“The meaning of politics is freedom”13,

Not, as with Carl Schmitt, ‘the distinction between friend and foe’14. But Hannah Arendt also does not give an independent definition of the political that could be contrasted with politics. She uses the concept of the political for ‘the political sphere’ or the ‘space of the political’15.

c) Paul Ricoeur

A definitional distinction between politics and the political can be found at around the same time in Paul Ricoeur 1957:

‘Le politique est organisation raisonnable, la politique est décision {…}. Le politique ne va pas sans la politique.’ (“The political is reasonable organisation, politics, on the other hand, is decision. {…} Of course, the political does not exist without politics.”)16

Ricoeur is actually concerned with the demarcation between politics and economics. Soviet troops marching into Hungary in 1957 was the reason for his criticism of Marxism, because it ignored the autonomy of the political sphere and thus made Stalin’s despotism possible.17 But to do that, he needed a concept of politics that did not mean the respective actions, but the area in which political actions take place, namely the ‘political’.18 But to do that, he needed a concept of politics that does not refer to the respective actions, but to the area in which political actions take place, namely the ‘political’, ‘la politique’.

d) Jean-Luc Godard

In the aftermath of May 1968 in Paris, this distinction between politics and the political was further developed because the demand for political effectiveness remained, but the experience of the failure of the rebellion also had to be processed. ‘Politics’ became the realm of established state powers, ‘the political’ the realm of art. The statements of film director Jean-Luc Godard are one stage in this development. His in his 1970 manifesto ‘Que faire?’, he invented the momentous distinction between ‘political’ as an adjective and ‘political’ as an adverb. It is no longer about the artistic product as political, but about the process of creating the work of art as understood politically.

1 We must make political films. 2 We must make films politically. 3 1 and 2 are antagonistic to each other and belong to two opposing conceptions of the world. {…}

10 To carry out 1 is to remain a being of the bourgeois class. 11 To carry out 2 is to take up a proletarian class position. {…}

21 To carry out 1 is to give a complete view of events in the name of truth in itself. 22 To carry out 2 is not to fabricate over-complete images of the world in the name of relative truth.19

Godard’s distinction between ‘making political films’ and ‘making films politically’ is repeatedly cited against a theatre that takes up current political issues. Godard’s text was written in 1970 and reflects the political discussions of the time.

In thesis and antithesis, the two concepts (making political films and making films politically) are juxtaposed. But when you read how Godard tried to explain what he meant by ‘making films politically’, it becomes clear how little use this is today. For him, making political films means ‘describing the wickedness of the world’. On the other hand, political filmmaking means ‘showing the people in struggle.’ So there is a difference in content, in the material depicted in the film. And when he concludes by calling for ‘reading the reports of Comrade Kiang Tsing,’ it becomes clear that this is not an authoritative text that could be referred to today. (He probably means Jiang Qing, Mao Zedong’s wife at the time, who has not published any reports. After Mao’s death, she was convicted as a member of the Gang of Four who had pushed the Cultural Revolution.)

There is only one pair of theses in this manifesto that points to the future: thesis 21, making political films ‘means giving a complete view of events in the name of truth itself.’ And thesis 22, making political films means ‘not creating over-complete images of the world in the name of relative truth.’ By calling for incomplete images and emphasising the relativity of truth, he is opposing the dogmatism of the left at the time and pointing the way for his further aesthetic development.

e) Jean-François Lyotard

A further step in the direction of a theatre that rejects ‘political theatre’ but still sees itself as political is Jean-Francois Lyotard’s essay ‘The Tooth, the Hand’ from 1972.20. In it, Lyotard attempts to refute the semiotic analysis of the theatre as a sign system by means of a complex argument. To do this, he goes back to Marx’s analysis of capitalism, in which the commodity relation is analysed as the interchangeability of everything with everything else. For Lyotard, this makes a meaningful sign relationship between representing signs and the represented signified impossible. Lyotard calls this a nihilism. He then turns against the agreement of the various elements of theatre, as demanded in the theory of Japanese Noh theatre. He wants ‘the independence, the simultaneity of sounds/noises, words, body figures, images.’21 He also criticises Brecht’s Marxist sign theory of theatre. He goes back to the surrealist painter Hans Bellmer, who, using the example of a hand cramped with toothache, questions the relationship between sign and signified. The hand does not signify pain. For the ‘movement of the libido’, both phenomena are equivalent, their relationship reversible. Lyotard pleads for an ‘energetic theatre’ in which there are no more sign relationships.

Lyotard’s essay is one of the first pieces of evidence that political representation in representative democracy is equated with the representation of the signified by and the signifying in theatre and is rejected in the same way. For him, categorically ‘no representation is justified.’ 22 In doing so, Lyotard equates political representation with ‘politics’, but his counter-concept is not yet that of the ‘political’ or ‘political theatre-making’, but rather that of ‘energetic theatre’, entirely in the sense of Antonin Artaud.

“9. Where the sign relationship and its gulf are abolished, the power relationship (the hierarchy) becomes the domination of the dramaturge + director + choreographer + set designer over the alleged signs and the alleged spectators impossible.
10. Alleged spectators, because the concept of such a person or function goes hand in hand with the predominance of representation in social life and especially with what the modern West calls politics.’”23

To be continued

  1. Erika Fischer-Lichte, {Lemma} „Politisches Theater“ in: Erika Fischer-Lichte e.a. (Hg.), *Metzler Lexikon Theatertheorie*. Stuttgart/Weimar: Metzler, 2nd ed. 2014, p.262. Translations of German quotations into English are my own G.P. ↵
  2. This presentation is inspired by the works of Marchart and Primavesi, but goes beyond these sources. ↵
  3. e.g. τὸ ἀγαθόν, the good in Aristotle. ↵
  4. Herodotus, Historien VII, 103 (1) ↵
  5. Ernst Vollrath, Grundlegung einer philosophischen Theorie des Politischen. Würzburg: Königshaus & Neumann, 1987, p. 54 ↵
  6. Vollrath takes Michael Oakeshotts concept of practice as his starting point. ↵
  7. Less relevant is a passage in Aristotle’s Politics, where the relationships within the household (economy) are explained: the man must rule over the woman and children, but in different ways, ‘γυναικός μὲν πολιτικῶς τέκνων δὲ βασιλικῶς’ (1259b1). Franz F. Schwarz translates ‘πολιτικῶς (politikoos)’ as ‘über die Frau nach Art eines Staatsmannes’ (Aristoteles, Politik. Schriften zur Staatstheorie. Stuttgart: Reclam, 1989, p. 101), Eugen Rolfes ‘über das Weib nach Art des Hauptes eines Freistaates’ (Aristoteles, Politik. Hamburg: Meiner, 4th ed. 1981, p.26) ↵
  8. Ernst Vollrath has traced the history of the concept in detail in his dictionary entry ‘Politisch, das Politische’. Ernst Vollrath, Lemma ‘Politisch, das Politische’, In: Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, ed. by Joachim Ritter & Karlfried Gründer. Vol. 7 P-Q, Basel: Schwabe, 1989 pp. 1072-1075 ↵
  9. Carl Schmitt, Der Begriff des Politischen. Text von 1932 mit einem Vorwort und drei Corollarien . Berlin: Duncker und Humblot, 9th ed. 2015 ↵
  10. In a detailed study, Ernst Vollrath has shown the extent to which the concept of the political in Germany has always been identified with the state. ‘German political perception is almost exclusively related to the state, so that the political is seen and shown in absorptive identification with the state.’ Ernst Vollrath, Was ist das Politische. Eine Theorie des Politischen und seiner Wahrnehmung. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2003, p.115 ↵
  11. „{Das Politische} bezeichnet kein eigenes Sachgebiet, sondern nur den Intensitätsgrad einer Assoziation oder Dissoziation von Menschen.“ Carl Schmitt l.c., p.36. Carl Schmitt’s definition of the political is the starting point for any discussion of the concept: critically, for example, in the work of Ernst Vollrath, who criticises  Schmitt’s definition of the political solely through dissociation, i.e. through the friend-foe relationship, and points  to Schmitt’s later justification of the Hitler’s ‘leader principle’  as the moment of association in the political as a consequence of his earlier definition of the political as category of dissociation.  Cf. Vollrath 1987 pp. 37f. Or approvingly in Christian Meier: ‘Carl Schmitt speaks very aptly of a field of relationships and tensions. What was previously concentrated in the substance of the state has, due to its decentralisation, increasingly been externalised among the diversity of forces and relations, and the concept of the political seeks to do justice to this situation [… ↵
  12. Ernst Vollrath was a participant in Hannah Arendt’s seminars at the New School for Social Research in New York. G.P. was only a student of Ernst Vollrath in a seminar in Cologne. ↵
  13. „Der Sinn von Politik ist Freiheit“ Hannah Arendt, Was ist Politik? Munich: Piper, 1993 p.28, in a fragment published only from the estate, written around 1958 ↵
  14. “die Unterscheidung von Freund und Feind” Carl Schmitt, op. cit., p.19 ↵
  15. Arendt, op. cit., p. 53. In her work, politics and the political can also be used synonymously, e.g. „… der Sinn von Politik, und zwar das Heil wie das Unheil des Politischen“ p. 42 ↵
  16. “Das Politische ist vernünftige Organisation, die Politik hingegen Entscheidung. {…} Das Politische freilich existiert nicht ohne Politik.“ Paul Ricœure, „Das politische Paradox“, in: P.R., Geschichte und Wahrheit. Trans. by Romain Leick. Munich: Li , 1974. First published in French as ‘Le paradoxe politique’, in: Esprit 25 (1957), pp. 721-745 ↵
  17. ‘Only a political philosophy that has recognised the specificity of the political – the specificity of its function and the specificity of its evil – is able to correctly pose the problem of political control.’ „Nur eine politische Philosophie, die die Spezifität des Politischen – die Spezifität seiner Funktion und die Spezifität seines Übels – erkannt hat, ist in der Lage, das Problem der politischen Kontrolle korrekt zu stellen.“ Ricoeur ibid. p.265 ↵
  18. Ricoeur, op. cit., p.265 ↵
  19. Jean-Luc Godard, “What is to be done?” afterimage No. 1 April 1970. German in: Jean-Luc Godard, „Was tun?“ in: Godard/Kritiker. Ausgewählte Kritiken und Aufsätze über Film (1950-1970*. Auswahl und Übersetzung von Frieda Grafe. München: Hanser, 1971 p.186-188 ↵
  20. Jean-Francois Lyotard, „Der Zahn, die Hand“, in: Essays zu einer affirmativen Ästhetik. Berlin: Merve, 1982, pp. 11-23 {first published in French as ‘Le Dent, la Paume’, 1972} ↵
  21. Lyotard, ibid. p. 21 ↵
  22. Lyotard, l.c. p.11 ↵
  23. „9. Wo man die Zeichenbeziehung und deren Kluft abschafft, wird die Machtbeziehung (die Hierarchie) die Herrschaft des Dramaturgen+Regisseurs+Choreographen +Bühnenbildners über die angeblichen Zeichen und die angeblichen Zuschauer unmöglich. 10. Angebliche Zuschauer, weil der Begriff einer solchen Person oder Funktion einhergeht mit der Vorherrschaft der Repräsentation im gesellschaftlichen Leben und besonders mit dem, was das moderne Abendland Politik nennt.“ Lyotard, op. cit. p.21 ↵

Essay on political theatre – part 2

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There are two ways of thinking about political theatre, two ways of beginning a sentence: I. ‘Theatre is political because…’ or II. ‘Theatre is political if…’. In the first part of this essay, the first beginning was completed and examined and the second beginning was examined in so far as its continuation is considered to be a descriptive statement.. But it is also often the beginning of a normative statement.  This second part of the essay is about the normative understanding of such conditions (‘if’) for designating theatre as political.

Often, this ‘if…’ seems to be heading towards a value judgement. The condition is actually a wish or a demand. Theatre ought to be political. It is characteristic of the discussion in theatre criticism and theatre studies that this ‘ought to’ is not explicitly formulated, but only insinuated.
How is this ‘ought to be’ justified?

II. ‘Theatre is political if…’

b) normative

aa) Hegelian

“But since art has the task of presenting the Idea to immediate perception in a sensuous shape and not in the form of thinking and pure spirituality as such, and, since this presenting has its value and dignity in the correspondence and unity of both sides, i.e. the Idea and its outward shape, it follows that the loftiness and excellence of art in attaining a reality adequate to its Concept will depend on the degree of inwardness and unity in which Idea and shape appear fused into one.”1

For Hegel, art has two sides: the abstract, i.e. thinking or idea, and the concrete, the form or ‘shape’. The criterion for evaluating art is then the ‘unity’ of these two sides in a work of art. Hegel also uses the term ‘inwardness’ (“Innigkeit”) for this correspondence between idea and shape to emphasise that this unity should not be an external juxtaposition, but an inner ‘unity’  that is the result of artistic work. The production of art should be a weaving together of idea and shape.

If the idea of theatre (or its concept or structure) is something political, then the ‘loftiness and excellence ’ (“Höhe und Vortrefflichkeit”) of theatrical  art depends on how far this idea is incorporated into the concrete form. This is roughly what a Hegelian conception of political theatre would look like, which at the same time offers a yardstick for evaluating concrete, individual theatre products. Of course, Hegel’s concept of theatre is not that of a political theatre and, of course, today’s representatives of the primacy of politics in theatre do not argue with Hegel. But the idea that artistic practice must bring to bear what is inherent in the concept or structure of theatre characterises the thinking of many theatre-makers. This often has a kind of super-Hegelian twist, in that this reduction of theatre to its basic structure is exhibited in a self-reflective way.

The idea that theatre is inherently political is rarely explicitly represented in theatre theory, but it forms the background for many statements by theatre-makers when they talk about political theatre. Necati Öziri2, for example, begins his talk about political theatre at the Römerberggespräche in Frankfurt/M. 2017):

‘I would have argued that there is no such thing as apolitical theatre, only theatre that is more or less explicitly political. I would have explained that theatre, by virtue of its form, is one of the most political of the arts.”3

Öziri cites this view that theatre is always somehow political only to distance himself from it. He then defines political theatre in terms of content or at least according to certain political goals: political theatre should be post-migrant, always question the downside of a narrative, have the task of protecting pluralism, demonstrating identities. Öziri says about the arguments for the fundamentally political character of theatre, ‘there is something to that’. But since he is looking for a justification for his own work in the theatre, he justifies political theatre (similar to Piscator) with the current political situation.

Milo Rau 4 takes a similar approach in his speech at the conference of the International Theatre Institute in Antwerp in 2024:

‘Theatre doesn’t ‘have to’ be political, it’s political anyway. Theatre has to be surreal, crazy, hallucinatory, unbearably contradictory. … Which is why the political theatre that I mean shows a clear edge precisely by going between all fronts and asking fundamental questions about our coexistence, our beliefs, and how we represent the world.’5

The fundamentally political character of theatre is assumed in order to then formulate the demands for a specific type of political theatre. The thesis that theatre is political per se serves here as an argumentative springboard for the transition from being to ought. Because theatre is political, it ought to be political in a certain way. In the mouths of theatre-makers who make political theatre, such arguments are attempts to justify their own artistic practice. And on the assumption that theatre is always political, they can then formulate certain political goals for the theatre that arise from the respective political situation.

bb) Moral (Jacques Rancière)

Jacques Rancière is probably the most influential philosopher for the theory and practice of theatre (especially in Germany), and at first glance he does not appear to be one of the theorists who make moral demands on political theatre. He firmly separates the realm of art from that of politics and calls the union of art and politics, the assertion that art is always political, ‘ethical confusion’. 6 But he distinguishes between ‘politics’ (la politique) and ‘police’ (la police).7 ‘Police’ is the organisation of power in a state, while ‘politics’ means the inclusion of the non-represented. For Rancière, then, politics is a normative term that contains an emancipatory concept of participation. 8

For Rancière, politics is not a subsystem of society or an attitude with which one can view the whole of society, but a process that ought to take place. That is why Oliver Marchart accuses him of an ethicalisation of politics and calls his conception of politics ‘emancipatory apriorism’.9 The tension between art and politics, which Rancière calls for us to maintain, is the tension between art and an ethical, normative concept of politics. Political art, that is, art in the unresolved field of tension between art and politics, is for Rancière an art in the field of tension between art and an ethical concept of politics.

Despite his distinction between the realms of politics and art, Rancière sees a close connection between politics and art. This arises not from artists setting political goals, but because art, like politics (in Rancière’s emancipatory understanding), is an experience of dissensus, of rupture.

‘If aesthetic experience concerns politics, it is because it is also defined as an experience of dissensus, in contrast to the mimetic or ethical adaptation of art products to social purposes.”10

For Rancière, art is therefore not political because it has political content or because it pursues political goals, but because it creates new forms of structuring sensual experience.11

‘The effect of a museum, a book or a theatre lies much more in the divisions of space and time and in the modes of sensual presentation that they establish than in the content of this or that work.”12

Rancière also opposes ‘critical art’ (e.g. Brecht) because the social conditions for its effectiveness are lacking in the present.13 He describes the present (the beginning of the 21st century) as an age of ‘consensus’. The ‘obviousness of the struggle against global capitalist domination’ has disappeared. His rejection of art that sees itself as political through its political content also arises from the experience of the ineffectiveness of such art forms:

‘One does not go from watching a play to understanding the world and from intellectual understanding to deciding to act.”14

His rejection of the previous ‘critical art’ is therefore both the result of his analysis of the way art works and an expression of resignation in the face of the political conditions of his present. Rancière rescues the political character of art, despite his rejection of an art that defines itself through political content, by assigning a political function to its structure.

‘Cinema, photography, video, installation and all performances of the body, the voice and sounds contribute to reshaping the framework of our perceptions and the dynamics of our affects. In doing so, they open up possible transitions to new forms of political subjectivisation…. A critical art is an art that knows that its political effect is achieved through aesthetic distance.”15

But this rescue is only possible through his normative concept of politics. An art that enables new forms of police subjectivisation would be a mockery of his concept. Ultimately, then, for Rancière, political theatre is only possible if it subordinates itself to this emancipatory conception of politics. And this is a moral or ethical concept of politics. Politics is good and police is evil, and art is good when it is political.

One example of the impact of Rancière’s theory is the German women’s artists’ collective Werkgruppe 2 (Julia Roesler, Insa Rudolph, Silke Merzhäuser), which produces theatre productions and films. They describe their work:

‘In artistic projects – especially in theatre and film works – Werkgruppe2 attempts to describe social reality from the perspective of people who belong to social minorities, the invisible, the excluded.’16

This corresponds exactly to Rancière’s demand on politics:

‘To deny a category, for example workers or women, the quality of political subjects, it has traditionally been sufficient to determine that they belong to a ‘domestic’ space, a space separate from public life, from which only whimpers or cries as expressions of suffering, hunger or anger can penetrate to the outside world, but not a speech that announces a common aisthesis. The politics of these categories has always consisted in redefining these spaces, in revealing the location of a community, even if it is only a simple dispute, in revealing and hearing each other as speaking beings that contribute to a common aisthesis.’17

For Rancière, politics is precisely this process by which the unrepresented gain visibility and a hearing. On its website, Werkgruppe2 cites Jacques Rancière’s statement as a motto for its work:

‘The real must be fictionalised before it can be thought.’18

This corresponds to their approach of first conducting interviews with members of groups that are not very present in public, and then editing, condensing and arranging these interview transcripts in a dramaturgical way, and then using these texts and professional actors to create a theatre production in which the real (the statements of the interviewees) becomes fiction (the theatre performance with actors).

This method originated in Great Britain and is called ‘verbatim theatre’ there.19 This method, which is indebted to Rancière’s political aesthetics, reached an ironic climax in their most recent production: ‘Hier spricht die Polizei’ (This is the police speaking). In this production, police officers, as a minority group neglected in public, have their say. It was produced with the help of the police union and co-produced by the Ruhrfestspiele, which is sponsored by the German Trade Union Confederation (DGB), and the Staatstheater Hannover, and shown in Recklinghausen in 2024. Here, the executive body of the state, the police, was represented in the theatre as a group of ‘those without shares’.20 Rancière’s opposition between politics and the police was ironically suspended here.

Rancière, too, does not provide a descriptive concept of political art and thus also of political theatre.

  1. G.W.F. Hegel, Aesthetics. Lectures on fine art. vol. 1. Transl. T.M. Knox. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 19 75 p. 72. „Indem nun aber die Kunst die Aufgabe hat, die Idee für die unmittelbare Anschauung in sinnlicher Gestalt und nicht in Form des Denkens und der reinen Geistigkeit überhaupt darzustellen und dieses Darstellen seinen Wert und Würdigkeit in dem Entsprechen und der Einheit beider Seiten der Idee und ihrer Gestalt hat, so wird die Höhe und Vortrefflichkeit der Kunst in der ihrem Begriff gemäßen Realität von dem Grade der Innigkeit und Einigkeit abhängen, zu welcher Idee und Gestalt ineinandergearbeitet erscheinen.“ G.W.F. Hegel, Werke in zwanzig Bänden. Bd. 13 Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik I. Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 1970 (=Theorie Werkausgabe), S. 103 ↵
  2. Necati Öziri  (*1988) is a German author of theatre plays and novels, and has been working as dramaturg at Maxim Gorki Theatre in Berlin ↵
  3. Necati Öziri, Römerberggespräche 2017  Here, and in the following quotations (with the exception of Hegel) all translations from German to English are by G.P. ↵
  4. Milo Rau (*1977) is a Swiss director and author. At present he is artistic director of NT Gent, Belgium and of Wiener Festwochen, Austria. ↵
  5. Milo Rau, speech at the International Theatre Institute conference, Antwerp 2024 ↵
  6. ‘The becoming-political of art thus becomes the ethical confusion in which art and politics mutually efface each other in the name of their union.’ Jacques Rancière, Ist Kunst widerständig?. Berlin: Merve, 2008 p.34 (in French: ‘Si l’art résiste à quelque chose?’ Lecture 2004) ↵
  7. ‘La politique s’oppose spécifiquement à la police.’ Jacques Rancière, Onze thèses sur la politique. Thesis 8. In English: “Politics is specifically opposed to the police.” Thesis 7, Ten Theses on Politics. London: open university press, 2009 p. 24 ↵
  8. “The essence of politics, then, is to disturb this arrangement by supplementing it with a part of the no-part identified with the community as a whole. Political litigiousness/struggle is that which brings politics into being by separating it from the police that is, in turn, always attempting its disappearance either by crudely denying it, or by subsuming that logic to its own. Politics is first and foremost an intervention upon the visible and the sayable.” Rancière, Ten Theses, p. 32 ‘ „L’essence de la politique est de perturber cet arrangement en le supplémentant d’une part des sans-part identifiée au tout même de la communauté. Le litige politique est celui qui fait exister la politique en la séparant de la police qui constamment la fait disparaître…. La politique est d’abord une intervention sur le visible et l’énonçable.“ Rancière, Onze thèses ↵
  9. Marchart on Rancière: ‘Politics is the politics of equality, therefore emancipatory – or it is not politics.’ Oliver Marchart, Die politische Differenz. Zum Denken des Politischen bei Nancy, Lefort, Badiou, Laclau und Agamben. Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2010, p. 183 ↵
  10. Rancière, Der emanzipierte Zuschauer. “Die Paradoxa der politischen Kunst”, p. 74. ’Art and politics are related to each other as forms of dissensus, as operations of reshaping the common experience of the sensible. There is an aesthetics of politics in the sense that acts of political subjectivisation redefine what is visible, what can be said, and which subjects are capable of this. There is a politics of aesthetics in the sense that new forms of circulating words, exhibiting the visible and generating affects define new abilities that break with the old configuration of the possible.” p.78 ↵
  11. ‘the effect of forms of structuring sensual experience in the field of politics’ p. 78 French: ‘l’effet, dans le champ politique, des formes de structuration de l’expérience sensible’. ↵
  12. p. 78 ↵
  13.  It is certainly unfair and at most permissible in a footnote to point out that both Alain Badiou and Jacques Rancière attempt in their theories to preserve the legacy of their political past in the years around May 1968 in Paris, also in view of the lack of success of their political actions. Badiou was one of the leading minds of the dogmatic-Maoist UCF-ML, Rancière was in the circle of the spontaneous-Maoist ‘Gauche Prolétarienne’. Both taught at the University of Vincennes (Paris VIII) from the 1970s onwards. Unlike Badiou, Rancière did not make loyalty to Maoism in 1968 the criterion of truth, but his understanding of ‘politics’ as an emancipatory process in contrast to ‘police’ as the power structure of the state is also the conceptually differentiated elaboration of his convictions of 1968. ↵
  14. p. 82 ↵
  15. p. 99 ↵
  16. https://www.werkgruppe2.de/ueber-uns/ ↵
  17. Rancière, Zehn Thesen zur Politik. Berlin: diaphanes, 2008, p. 35 ↵
  18. p.38. Jacques Rancière, The politics of aesthetics. The distribution of the sensible. (G. Rockhill transl.) Continuum, 2000/2006b ↵
  19. The video by the National Theatre London, Introduction to verbatim theatre, provides an introduction to the methods and history of verbatim theatre. ↵
  20. Ranciere, Zehn Thesen, p.32 ↵

Essay on political theatre – part 1

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There are two ways of thinking about political theatre, two sentence beginnings: I. ‘Theatre is political because …’ or II. ‘Theatre is political if …’.

I. ‘Theatre is political because …’

Then general conditions would have to be outlined which theatre as a whole fulfils in all possible variations and which justify the qualification as political.

II ‘Theatre is political if …’

a) descriptive

This sentence structure seems to introduce a description of a genre of theatre, a purely analytical statement that names the conditions under which a certain type of theatre can be described as political. There would then be a kind of theatre that is not political and one would have to name the difference between political and non-political theatre.

b) normative

Often, however, this ‘if …’ seems to be heading towards a value judgement. The condition is actually a wish or a demand. Theatre ought to be political. It is characteristic of the discussion in theatre criticism and theatre studies that this ought to is not explicitly formulated, but only insinuated.
How is this ought to justified?

aa) In Hegelian terms: it follows from the concept or basic structure of theatre that it is political, and only if it fulfils this concept it is theatre in the full sense. If not, is it somehow inferior? So, as with I., one would have to define the concept or basic structure of theatre more precisely. And explain how an ‘ought’ emerges from this ‘being’ of theatre.

bb) Or is the demand for a political theatre simply a moral demand like any other? Theatre should be political because it then promotes the interests of the greatest possible number of people? It would be more than just a demand that theatre meets the requirements of politics (‘politically correct’), but that it makes a morally valuable contribution to politics. The theatre would therefore not be autonomous, but subordinate to politics, which in turn would be subordinate to morality.

I.+II. Politics or the political

For both analyses, the question arises as to whether the quality ‘political’ refers to politics or to the political (in  English often polity). For in the philosophy of politics and also in the discussion of theatre theory, the distinction between ‘politics’ (la politique) and ‘the political’ (le politique) has become established. So does political theatre refer to the realm of politics or to the political or both? So what is the relationship between the noun ‘politics’, the attributive adjective ‘political’ and the substantivised adjective ‘the political’ in the case of theatre?

In her encyclopaedia article ‘Politisches Theater’1 Erika Fischer-Lichte distinguishes between four conceptual understandings:

1. structural politicality of theatre, 2. anthropological impact of theatre as political, 3. thematic politicality of theatre, 4. new politics of the aesthetic.

Conceptual understandings 1 and 2 are of the type ‘theatre is political because …’ (I.) and are aimed at theatre as a whole, at its structure (1) or its effect (2). 3. is a definition of a certain type of theatre, i.e. II a), but often also II b) bb). However, Fischer-Lichte’s term no. 4 is the most interesting because it has occupied the theatre studies debate in recent years.

In the following, the questions arising from I, II a) and b) as well as Fischer-Lichte’s No. 4 will be examined, in each case with reference to the philosophical or theatre studies literature and occasional references to current theatre practice.

I. ‘Theatre is political because …’

1 Alain Badiou

From Alain Badiou, the French philosopher who has always been politically active to this day and who was also present in the theatre as an author, one could expect an answer.2

For Badiou, there is a ‘formal analogy’ between theatre and politics (‘la politique’)3 He also calls this relationship of similarity ‘isomorphism theatre/politics’. It is not based on thematic congruence, but on structure. However, he also sees a distance between politics and theatre, which he calls ‘figurative’4. To show the analogous relationship between theatre and politics, he lists the elements of both areas:

‘So: place, text, director, actors, set, costumes, audience are the elements of theatre that can be deduced a priori. And organisations, textual speakers, thinkers, proper names, the state, different points of view and eventful masses are the mandatory ingredients of a political situation.’ 5

For Badiou, politics is nothing permanent, ‘politics takes place’ and so does the theatre: ‘The performance takes place.’6. For Badiou, theatre and politics (‘la politique’) have the complete precariousness of time in common. For Badiou, ‘substantial’ theatre, unlike cinema and commercial ‘theatre’, is a matter for the state and therefore requires subsidies.7.

‘Of all the arts, theatre is the one that most persistently leans towards politics (or presupposes it).’ 8

For Badiou, events produce truths, both in art (and thus in theatre) and in politics. For Badiou, truth is the process of fidelity to an event.9

This conception of politics10 can be criticised because it does not take into account the antagonistic element of politics11. But regardless of his political theory, it can also be said that even Badiou does not claim an identity between politics and theatre. For Badiou, the sentence ‘Theatre is political because …’ could not be continued in this way. It should read: ‘Theatre is similar to politics because …’.

With his definition of the relationship between theatre and politics as a relationship of proximity without identity, Badiou hits on a point that other theories of political theatre also consider.

Oliver Marchart, for example, also states

‘a certain similarity of theatrical and political action’, “a fundamental comparability of the boards that mean the world with the public space of politics.”12

Marchart examines two of the prime examples of political theatre, the occupation of the Theatre Odéon in Paris in 1968 and the re-enactment of the Russian October Revolution in 1920 in St. Petersburg by the director Nikolai Evrejnoff. However, Marchart uses these examples to show the fundamental unrepresentability of antagonism, which is the essence of politics. For him, there is therefore only a rough approximation, a ‘passage à l’acte’ to antagonism. For him, the genre of theatre that most closely corresponds to the antagonism of politics is melodrama (whereby he is referring to the French and British stage melodramas of the 18th and early 19th centuries, not the musical genre). However, because he can hardly recommend melodrama to contemporary theatre as a future-oriented model for political theatre, he leaves the conclusion for future theatre to the English theatre scholar Janelle Reinert:

“In casting my comments within the discourse of what might be called ‘democratic civics’, I am attempting to theorize a theatrical space patronized by a consensual community of citizen-spectators who come together at stagings of the social imaginary in order to consider and experience affirmation, contestation and reworking of various material and discursive practices pertinent to the constitution of a democratic society.” 13

For Marchart, political theatre seems to be possible without all theatre being political for him or theatre being part of the political or of politics. Only an approach to politics is possible.

It is therefore impossible to find a valid reason why all theatre is political per se. The sentence ‘Theatre is political because …’ remains unfinished.

2 Jens Roselt

A completely different philosophically based definition of the structure of theatre can be found in Jens Roselt’s habilitation thesis ‘Phänomenologie des Theaters’ 14. It does without any reference to politics. However, Roselt does examine the particular structure of the community that a theatre performance creates. He analyses the theatre situation between performer (actor/actress) and audience (spectators) as a we, without any reference to politics.

Unlike Badiou, he does not parallel audience (theatre) and ‘eventful masses’ (politics), but rather defines the specificity of theatre closely oriented to the manifestations of contemporary theatre. Its audience is constituted in the ‘interplay of seriality and dissidence’15. Seriality is the interdependence of a collective, but one that is purely external, without individual reciprocal influence. On the other hand, a theatre audience is not completely determined by this seriality; everyone can reclaim their individual freedom at any time (by heckling, booing, leaving the auditorium, etc.). As an audience, one acts ‘together in individual difference’16.

Following the phenomenologist Aron Gurwitsch, Roselt distinguishes between three dimensions of we-experiences: partnership (“Partnerschaft”), community (“Gemeinschaft”) and covenant (“Bund”). All three can characterise the situation of a theatre performance:17 the encounter in a role (partnership), the experience of affiliation (community), emotional fusion (covenant). However, Roselt cites the Living Theatre’s production ‘Paradise Now’ (which was shown in January 1970 at the Berlin Akademie der Künste) as an example of this seemingly antiquated terminology from the 1930s18. Roselt can thus analyse the effect of the avant-garde theatre of the 1960s ‘as a new form of social experience’ 19 without declaring it ‘political’, although the Living Theatre explicitly saw itself as a political theatre in the radicalised succession of Erwin Piscator20. Roselt thus shows through precise analysis that new experimental theatre forms that overcome the traditional ‘viewing and listening arrangement’ of the theatre and offer an ‘exploration of the situational aspect’21 of theatre, do indeed make new forms of social experience possible for the audience, but these do not have to be equated with a political experience.

Or in the words of Oliver Marchart:

‘Not every social practice is a political practice.’22.

II ‘Theatre is political when …’

a) descriptive

1 Erwin Piscator

Erwin Piscator coined the term ‘political theatre’ in the 1920s. He was referring to his own  theatre, the Piscator Theatre. The term therefore originated from the perspective of the theatre makers, not as an analytical term of theatre observation. Because by ‘political theatre’ Piscator meant his theatre, which he created as a director and theatre manager, ‘political’ was not a descriptive term for him either. For him, political theatre is therefore necessarily a ‘proletarian-political theatre.’23. For him, the necessity of this theatre was based on the present, in which he developed his theatre in the 1920s and 1930s.

‘A time in which the relationships between the general public, the reorganisation of all relationships are on the agenda, can only see man in his position in society, as a political being.”24

Conditions that make every expression of life a political one also require a political theatre.

For Piscator, there is also non-political theatre, but only if a ruling class wants to keep theatre out of the power struggles of a society. For Piscator, the sentence would therefore be: ‘Theatre is political when it is necessary.’

2 Siegfried Melchinger

This view that political theatre is a special subspecies of theatre, alongside entertainment theatre, commercial theatre, children’s theatre, etc., is rarely held today. A prominent example of this view in the 1960s and 1970s, when the concept of ‘political theatre’ came back into the discussion, is Siegfried Melchinger’s comprehensive ‘Geschichte des politischen Theaters’25.

Melchinger’s account of theatre history is of little use for today’s discussion because, despite his knowledge of Living Theatre and Bread and Puppet Theatre, it only refers to theatre texts, to plays, and only to those that were still being performed in 1970. For him, theatre is always an object of politics. But politics is also a subject of theatre (plays).

‘Politics is an important and at times urgent theme of the theatre. But it has never been the only one, and it will and can be as little so as in life.”26.

For Melchinger, not all theatre is political, but his definition of the difference between political and apolitical theatre remains imprecise:

‘Political theatre sets up situations, processes that are important for many, most, perhaps all. It shows possible forms of behaviour in these situations; it shows them critically and appeals to criticism. To the criticism of the audience. Only when political theatre succeeds in involving the audience in the situations and events does it create the public sphere that is its most distinctive feature.’ 27.

The criterion of publicity applies to all types of (contemporary) theatre, as long as they are not private events. This also means that theatre tries to be important ‘for everyone’ – which it can never achieve in full. The counter-image of apolitical theatre is only pejoratively labelled with common terms such as ‘sentimental emotion’, ‘strange identification’, ‘beautiful or uplifting illusion’28.

Melchinger’s initially descriptive concept of political theatre becomes more normative in the course of his presentation. Not only should political theatre be critical, it should not serve the ‘intentions of ruling systems’ 29, but there should always be political theatre. Despite the ineffectiveness of political theatre, which Melchinger states at the end of his passage, he demands:

‘Now that nothing has been achieved, the task remains: to intervene in the arrogance of politicians through political theatre.’ 30

Melchinger’s ‘History of political theatre’ is written from the perspective of a theatre critic, and any critic cannot refrain from making judgements.

Preliminary conclusion:

There does not seem to be a truly descriptive concept of ‘political theatre’. But why?

To be continued

  1. Erika Fischer-Lichte, {Lemma} ‘Politisches Theater’ in: Erika Fischer-Lichte e.a. (ed.), Metzler Lexikon Theatertheorie. Stuttgart/Weimar: Metzler 2nd ed. 2014, pp. 260-262 ↵
  2. Badiou was a leading member of the ‘Union des communistes de France marxiste-léniniste’ UCF-ML from 1969-1985. In 1974, he was the leader of the group ‘Foudre’ (Lightning Strike), which blew up film screenings by throwing paint bags at the screen, and which also disrupted Ariane Mnouchine’s performances because it considered her work with immigrants to be wrong. He is the author of a tetralogy of plays ‘Le Cycle Ahmed’, his dialogue ‘La Républic de Platon’ was performed at the Avignon Festival in 2015. Detailed references to Badiou’s plays and their reception can be found in note 6 of Bruno Bosteel’s foreword to the English edition of Rhapsodie pour le théâtre {Alain Badiou, Rhapsody for the theatre. Edited and introduced by Bruno Bosteels. London: Verso, 2013 p.X-Xi}. This volume also contains an English version of a text by Badiou on his ‘Ahmed’ tetralogy {ibid. p.139-159}. The original French version of this text, including the play text of ‘Ahmed le subtil’ on the occasion of the performance in Reims and Avignon in 1994, can be found at numilog.com. ↵
  3. Alain Badiou, Rhapsodie für das Theater.  Eine kurze philosophische Abhandlung. Vienna: Passagen Verlag, 2015. p.49 ↵
  4. ‘Isomorphism {of theatre} with politics (taking into account the figurative distance).’ ibid. p.36 ↵
  5. ibid. p.33 ↵
  6. ibid p.34 ↵
  7. ibid. pp. 38, 43 ↵
  8. Ibid, p. 49 ↵
  9.  Oliver Marchart, Die politische Differenz. Zum politischen Denken bei Nancy, Lefort, Badiou, Laclau und Agamben. Suhrkamp, 4th ed. 2019, p. 169 ↵
  10. An English version of his essay on justice ‘Philosophy and Politics’ from 1999 is available on the Internet ↵
  11. Marchart, p. 177: ‘Badiou is led to his ethical narrow-mindedness because he does not want to understand politics as a space of immanence of intertwined forces {…}, but wants to maintain a strict separation between the state and a politics of truth in his two-world doctrine.’ trsl. G.P. ↵
  12. Oliver Machart, “On the stage of the political. The Street, the Theatre and the Political Aesthetics of the Sublime” {2004} https://transversal.at/transversal/0605/marchart/de ↵
  13. Janelle Reinelt, ‘Notes for a Radical Democratic Theatre: Productive Crises and the Challenge of Indeterminacy’, in: Jeanne Colleran and Jenny S. Spencer (eds.), Staging Resistance. Essays on Political Theatre, Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press 1998, p. 286. cited in German translation in: Marchart 2004 ↵
  14. Jens Roselt, Phänomenologie des Theaters. Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2008 ↵
  15. Roselt p. 333 ↵
  16. Roselt p. 330-333 ↵
  17. Roselt p.345 ↵
  18. In my memory, it was a chaotic mess on stage that barely touched the audience, who were seated in two blocks on the two long sides of the stage in the middle. ↵
  19. Roselt p. 355 ↵
  20. Judith Melina: ‘Without question, the Living Theatre was always a political theatre. That was also always Piscator’s view.’ Erika Billetter, The Living Theatre. Paradise Now. Ein Bericht in Wort und Bild. Bern: Rütten + Loening, 1968, p.15f ↵
  21. Hans-Thies Lehmann, ‘Wie politisch ist postdramatisches Theater?’, In: H-Th.L., Das Politische Schreiben. Essays on theatre texts. Berlin: Theater der Zeit, 2002 {= Recherchen 12; first in: Theater der Zeit, October 2001}, p.35 ↵
  22. Oliver Marchart, book presentation Conflictual Aesthetics.University of Applied Arts Vienna ↵
  23. Erwin Piscator, Theater der Auseinandersetzung. Ausgewählte Schriften und Reden. Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 1977, p. 17. This formulation can be found in an article that Piscator published in the ‘Rote Fahne’, the party newspaper of the KPD, on 1 January 1928 ↵
  24. Piscator p.26 ↵
  25. Siegfried Melchinger, Geschichte des politischen Theaters. Velber: Friedrich Verlag, 1971, developed from a series of lectures at the Stuttgart University of Music and Performing Arts in 1970/71 ↵
  26. ibid. p.9. From today’s perspective, Melchinger’s addition is amusing: ’There is no doubt that the dismantling of constraints and taboos that we are experiencing in this area also has a political relevance. But nobody will be so silly as to relegate the fact itself, the division of the human race into two sexes that relate to and mate with each other, as such to the responsibility of the politician.” trsl. G.P. ↵
  27. ibid. p. 17 ↵
  28. ibid. p. 17 ↵
  29. ibid. p.18 ↵
  30. ibid. p.418 ↵

Analysis and judgement in music and theatre

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What are arguments good for?

Wolfgang Behrens, deputy director of the Wiesbaden State Theatre and former editor of Nachtkritik, addressed the function of arguments in theatre criticism in one of his always anecdotal but well thought-out columns 1.

He had two references: the musicologist Carl Dahlhaus and the author Rainald Goetz. Dahlhaus insists that although arguments are psychologically secondary, i.e. they are only developed retrospectively from a preceding emotional decision, they are nevertheless primary for the validity of a judgement. 2

Behrens, however, agrees with Rainald Goetz’s view:

“The function of arguments is not … to convince others of something. In reality, arguments serve to give oneself clarity about the rationality of one’s own intuitions.” [3 Rainald Goetz, Rave. Erzählung. Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2001, p. 217]

If aesthetic arguments only serve to reassure oneself of the rationality of one’s own opinion, why do we need rationality? Only for self-congratulation? As a gain in distinction, as adornment? As a selection advantage in the media public’s battle for survival? Then rationality loses its actual meaning: the harmonisation of thinking to solve common problems. The critique of rationality since Nietzsche and Foucault has always sardonically referred to the biological core of rationality. In view of the world situation, however, every ounce of rationality is valuable if we do not want to limit ourselves to the warlike self-assertion struggles of ethnic groups, empires or civilisations.

Carl Dahlhaus’ essay from 1970 refers to music and aesthetic judgements in musicology, but still provides stimulating reflections today that can be applied to theatre and its critical evaluation.

Analysis as the basis for judgement

The necessity of analysis as the basis for an aesthetic judgement arises from the absence of standards to which a judgement could be based. This has been the prerequisite for all art criticism since the end of the 18th century, when the writers of the Sturm und Drang movement turned against the poetics of rules and established the concept of genius. The standards for the judgement of a work of art are to be taken from the work of art itself 3. Therefore: no value judgement without analysing the individual work of art. And the argumentation that justifies the judgement arises from the analysis.

“The aesthetic judgement is therefore dependent on a factual judgement, which in turn includes an aesthetic decision – about the validity or lack of validity of the premises on which the analyses are based.” 4

(Even if it were only the “rationalisation” of a spontaneous emotional impression). This must therefore also apply to theatre criticism.

Kant and aesthetic judgement

Dahlhaus is wrong when the only thing that occurs to him about Kant’s analysis of the judgement of taste is that it should be disinterested. Contrasting the judgement of taste with the judgement of art is not Kant’s position. Kant makes a clear distinction between the judgement of the agreeable, which is purely subjective and interested in its object, and the judgement of the beautiful, which is subjective without having a practical or moral interest in its object, but contains the claim that general humanity agrees with it 5. Kant’s formulation is that the aesthetic judgement “appeals” for assent 6. And this appeal is an activity, a mental orientation towards some other person, is the reasoning that supports an aesthetic judgement.

“One solicits the approval of every other because one has a reason for doing so that is general.” 7

There is therefore an interest in the approval of others for an aesthetic judgement made by the art critic, hence the argument for the evaluation. A moral evaluation of works of art is of course also possible and also necessary, because the claim to validity of morality is universal.8 But then, according to Kant, the judgement is not a pure judgement of taste (aesthetic judgement) 9.  Dahlhaus himself attempts to find criteria for the inner-aesthetic judgement of works of art. And this makes his almost forgotten treatise interesting today, when the moral judgement of art threatens to overrun its aesthetic judgement.

Dahlhaus, Behrens and Goetz are right that no aesthetic judgement can be based solely on rational argumentation 10. Subjective affectation is the starting point for all aesthetic reasoning. But this argumentation “appeals” for consent and this consent is possible.

There are aesthetic arguments that can change subjective judgements. 11. But what do they consist of?

Dahlhaus offers some criteria for music that can be relevant for an aesthetic judgement. In good Hegelian fashion, he finds that every criterion dissolves into its opposite if you look closely enough.

Novelty as a criterion

Novelty is a criterion that also plays a decisive role in theatre. It is divided into three areas:

  1. breaking with tradition. But not every arbitrary break with the past is artistically valuable.
  2. topicality. The new must in some way strike a chord with the times. Dahlhaus uses an expression of Theodor W. Adorno:  “that which is historico-philosophically of the time” (“das, was geschichtsphilosophisch an der Zeit ist”).
  3. the effect of the new must potentially extend beyond the present.

If one considers the great style-defining directors of German theatre (after the great father Brecht), Sellner, Kortner, Zadek, Castorf, Schleef, then they fulfil all three aspects of novelty. However, the criterion of the future viability of the new does not justify epigonism (as could be observed with Castorf or Schleef), nor does it demand constant new breaks with tradition. A new aesthetic work of art, in the full sense of the word, enables a continuation of the aesthetic approach once gained in such a way that the criterion of topicality, the stimulation of the ever-changing nerve of the times, continues to be fulfilled. Just as in science (according to Kuhn) a new paradigm makes normal research possible, which yields further new insights. Dahlhaus’ sentence “No one is able to escape the omnipresence of the musical past.” 12 can be turned into its opposite for the theatre: “No one can escape the omnipresence of the current zeitgeist in the theatre.”

Relational richness and intrinsic complexity

Dahlhaus calls relational richness {Beziehungsreichung} a further criterion for aesthetic judgements. This refers to the richness of internal relationships between the individual elements of a work of art. For music, these are tone sequence, rhythm, harmony, form, etc. Applied to theatre, this would be language, movement, stage design, music, costumes, props, etc.

This definition of “relational richness” is closely related to what Andreas Reckwitz calls “intrinsic complexity”. He defines complexity in a way similar to Dahlhaus:

“There is a series of elements or nodes between which relations, linkages and interactions exist. If such an interconnected context exists, we speak of complexity, the nature of which can be described as density.” 13

For Reckwitz, this is the criterion for a “singularity”.  His sociological analysis is that this concept of singularity, starting with art, has expanded across all products of society. Reckwitz refers to Nelson Goodman, for whom “syntactic density, semantic density, and syntactic repleteness” 14 are symptoms of the aesthetic, i.e. of art. Reckwitz extends the scope of these criteria to all singularities. For both Goodman and Reckwitz, however, these are not judgemental criteria, but merely descriptive categories. For Reckwitz, however, the status of “singularity” is the condition for “valorisation processes”, i.e. evaluative judgements in society. 15. For Goodman, works of art “are not race-horses, and picking a winner is not the primary goal.” 16 Dahlhaus, on the other hand, is engaged in such a “valorisation process” to find out what the characteristics of a good race-horse are. And so it is with theatre criticism.

Analogy and adjustment

The wealth of relationships between these different elements is aesthetically relevant, i.e. a quality criterion, if the sub-elements are also “characteristically different”. “Differentiation and integration” seems to be the postulate, differentiation in the character of individual elements and their integration into a whole. This is actually the biological concept of an organism. However, Dahlhaus also shows here that this criterion dissolves on closer analysis and proves to be historically variable. The integration of the elements can either take place as a principle of analogy (Analogieprinzip)- all dimensions of the work of art are linked in equal density – or according to the principle of adjustment or compensation {Angleichungsprinzip), if one dimension of the work of art is particularly richly linked with relationships, but others are less developed for the sake of comprehensibility. Both possibilities must be taken into account in aesthetic judgement.

To cite examples from the theatre: Jürgen Kruse’s work at Schauspielhaus Bochum was an example of the analogy principle: the greatest possible wealth of relationships between all elements of the production, the principle of overabundance to the point of incomprehensibility. Frank-Patrick Steckel’s productions, on the other hand, practised the principle of balance: the greatest possible richness of relationships on two levels, text and image, reduction on another level, movement. Johan Simons’ productions also pay homage to the principle of balance rather than the principle of analogy. Johannes Schütz’s stage sets serve as an abstract but richly evocative background for the actors. One element is reduced in its complexity (which does not diminish its significance) in order to emphasise the complexity of another level. Olaf Altmann’s stage sets for productions by Stefan Bachmann in Cologne and Basel add the function of a productive obstacle for the actors to the abstract symbolic reference to the other levels of the production.

Rank and success

Dahlhaus argues in favour of the analogy principle as a quality criterion:

“The coincidence of both richly differentiated and analogously developed moments … {is} one of the criteria from which an attempt to substantiate and justify aesthetic judgements through factual judgements can proceed.”17

For him, the analogy principle is a criterion for the artistic rank of a musical work, the adjustment principle only one for its success. He allays the lack of success of complex musical works, which can perhaps only be understood by analysing the musical text, by pointing out that

“Music, unlike linguistic formations, can be effective without being understood.” 18.

This distinction between rank and success is difficult to transfer to the theatre if it does not want to fall into esoteric isolation like New Music. Hence perhaps the primacy of the principle of adjustment in the currently successful productions. At least if a partial element of theatre is some kind of “linguistic structure”, it is true for theatre that it cannot be effective without being understood.

But theatre that is effective without being understood also exists. And its significance is increasing. This is how theatre approaches music.

  1. https://www.nachtkritik.de/kolumnen-wolfgang-behrens/kolumne-als-ich-noch-ein-kritiker-war-ueber-die-funktion-von-argumenten ↵
  2. Carl Dahlhaus, “Analyse und Werturteil”, in: Musikpädagogik. Forschung und Lehre. Vol. 8. Mainz: B. Schott’s Söhne, 1970, p.11 ↵
  3. “The paradoxical concept of the individual norm – the postulate that a work is to be measured by nothing other than its own implicit standard.” Dahlhaus p.43 ↵
  4. „Das ästhetische Urteil ist also von einem Sachurteil abhängig, das seinerseits eine ästhetische Entscheidung – über die Triftigkeit oder Untriftigkeit der Voraussetzungen, von denen die Analysen getragen werden – einschließt.” Dahlhaus p. 47 ↵
  5. Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft. Analytik des Schönen. Werkausgabe Vol. X, §§ 4-7 “subjective generality” “subjective Allgemeinheit”, p.125, B 18 ↵
  6. “The judgement of taste does not postulate everyone’s assent …; it only appeals to everyone for this assent.” „Das Geschmacksurteil postuliert nicht jedermanns Einstimmung …; es sinnet nur jedermann diese Einstimmung an.“ Idid. §8, P.130, B 26 The German verb “ansinnen” is rare in modern German. It does not have the negative connotation that the noun „Ansinnen” has in modern German, but it means “jemanden um etw. ersuchen, bitten” It refers to a polite kind of appeal or request. ↵
  7. „Man wirbt um jedes anderen Beistimmung, weil man dazu einen Grund hat, der allgemein ist.“ Kant idid. §19 p. 156 B 64 ↵
  8. Kant considers art to be the symbol of morality: “The beautiful is the symbol of morality”, therefore the transition from sensual stimulus to moral interest is easily possible for him, but nevertheless the aesthetic judgement itself has no interest in the existence of the object being judged. Kant op. cit. §59 ↵
  9. Kant op. cit. §14 ↵
  10. Kant also sees it this way: “The feeling of the free play of the imaginative powers” or “the pleasure in the harmony of the cognitive faculties” characterise aesthetic judgement. ibid. § 9 “The feeling of the subject and no concept of an object” is its determining factor. ibid. §17, p. 149 ↵
  11. In my own experience there are both cases: both the case where reading other critiques makes it clear to me how wrong I was in my own judgement, and the case where I dismiss a divergent judgement as being caused by the critic’s prejudices ↵
  12. Dahlhaus p. 32 ↵
  13. Andreas Reckwitz, Die Gesellschaft der Singularitäten. Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2017, p.52. engl. The society of singularities. Hoboken, N.J.: Wiley & Sons, 2020 ↵
  14. Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art. Indianapolis: Hackett, 2nd ed. 1976, p.252 ↵
  15. See my article on this website “Theatre and theatre criticism in the society of singularities” and in it the excursus “Andreas Reckwitz and Nelson Goldmann on the criterion of ‘density'”. ↵
  16. Nelson Goodman, p.262 ↵
  17. „Das Zusammenstimmen von sowohl reich differenzierten als auch analog entwickelten Momenten … {ist} eines der Kriterien, von denen ein Versuch, ästhetische Urteile durch Sachurteile zu fundieren und zu rechtfertigen, ausgehen kann.“ Dahlhaus p. 62 ↵
  18. Dahlhaus p. 65 ↵

Truth in Theatre – Part 5 Two current examples

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On the occasion of my lecture on ‘Truth in Theatre’ at the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts, here is an addendum to my attempts at truth based on two current examples.

If theatre cannot be the herald of truth, what can it achieve in times of ubiquitous deception?

One possibility is journalistic theatre, as practised by the actor Calle Fuhr with the director Kay Voges and the journalist collective ‘Correctiv’. The best-known example of their collaboration was the project ‘Geheimplan gegen Deutschland’about the Potsdam Meeting 2024. Another example is Calle Fuhr’s solo evening ‘The Rise and Fall of René Benko’ at the Vienna Volkstheater and now also at the Schauspiel Köln.

Here, too, theatre is not the mouthpiece of truth, but it participates in a social process that revolves around the concept of truth. What we consider to be truth comes about by trusting certain scenes of truth and certain figures of truth. Donald Trump accordingly calls his social network, through which he spreads his resentments, outbursts and distortions of reality, ‘Truth social’. Sociologically speaking, truth is a social operator. 1

The research project ‘Praxeology of Truth’ at the University of Erfurt has a painting by Lucas Cranach as its logo on its website. It is entitled ‘Bocca della Verità’ 2 This mouth of truth is actually a Roman manhole cover in the shape of a lion’s head, and legend has it that anyone who puts their hand in the lion’s mouth and lies will lose their hand. Lucas Cranach depicts such a scene of truth: a stone lion statue stands in a courthouse. A young woman accused of adultery puts her hand in the lion’s mouth while being watched by a judge and her husband. Behind her stands another figure in a jester’s costume, embracing the woman at the hips. The medieval story told by the picture is that the lover has disguised himself as a fool, and the woman can now truthfully say, “No one has embraced me except my husband and this strange fool”. Thus she tells the truth, which is nevertheless a lie. Theatre is being performed here to give the appearance of truth. This is what truth practices look like.

Theatre has the disadvantage of slower reaction times compared to other competing truth assemblages (as heterogeneous structures of social and technical practices are called in sociological jargon). It is slower than electronic media, but still faster than the justice system, and has the advantages of concentrating the audience over a longer period of time and providing a communal experience.

Theatre projects such as those by Calle Fuhr and Kay Voges can also be understood as a reduced form of theatre. It dispenses with many other possibilities that theatre has, but gains a new one. Theatre as part of the truth practice of our society.

A second example and another possibility: Milo Rau’s project ‘Die Seherin’ (The Seer) with actress Ursina Ladi (at the Vienna Festival and the Schaubühne in Berlin).

Here, the relationship between truth and deception is brought to the centre of attention on four different levels. Ursina Lardi plays a photographer who specialises in war images and violence. But what she says about her origins in a village in southern Switzerland fits so well with the actress’s real biography. Where is the boundary between actress and fictional character? It becomes blurred.

While talking about her fascination with depictions of violence, Ursina Lardi cuts a wound in her left calf with a scalpel. This detail is greatly enlarged and projected onto a screen above the stage. Is she really doing this, or is it just a work of art by the make-up artist? The line is blurred.

Then Azad Hassan, an Iraqi man whose right hand was chopped off by IS in Mosul for alleged theft, appears on the video screen. The actress talks to him. Is it a real-time dialogue or a pre-produced video? The line is blurred.

Then a video is shown of the public mutilation of the Iraqi in Mosul during the reign of IS. The video was also available on the internet at the time. The Iraqi reports that worse than the pain was the enthusiasm of the spectators. Spectators, that includes us, the theatregoers. The truth of visible violence is a fascination that binds the non-acting spectators to the acting perpetrators of violence. The truth of a documentary image can also function as a visual stimulus3. Guilty actor or innocent observer? The boundary is blurred.

The effect of documentary images is less about providing information about reality than about responding to our desire for intensity. The doubt as to whether the video images we see are real or staged – whether Azad Hassan is really standing in Mosul when he speaks, whether Ursina Lardi is really hurting herself, and the theatre demonstrates this doubt to us here – this doubt does not devalue the images, but makes them more powerful. Whether the images are true, whether they show us reality, is secondary; it is precisely the doubt about their truth that demonstrates the power of the images.4

Here, theatre shows how what we consider to be truth comes about. Theatre is particularly well suited to this as a hybrid medium in which contemporary presence, fiction, media representation and digital production can be mixed.

Participation in our society’s discourse on truth is one possibility for theatre; analysis of this discourse, through the telling of stories that make our society’s truth-seeking processes tangible and transparent, is another. Precisely because theatre cannot be the mouthpiece of a higher truth of art, it can show the construction of truth and become a ‘school of complexity’5 .

The relationship between theatre and truth today is therefore very different from what Ivan Nagel assumed at the time and what I thought as a juror at the time.

See also the previous parts of ‘The Truth in Theatre’ Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4.

  1. See the research project ‘Praxeology of Truth’ at the University of Erfurt under the direction of Prof. Bernhard Kleeberg and his lecture at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in 2023: ‘The invocation of truth is both the cause and consequence of social disintegration, an expression and amplifier of the fragmentation of belief systems and a Schmittian polarisation of political debates.’ Kleeberg follows Michel Foucault’s understanding of truth: ‘Truth is to be understood as an ensemble of regulated procedures for the production, law, distribution, circulation and mode of operation of statements.’ Michel Foucault, “Wahrheit und Macht. Interview mit Michel Foucault von Alessandro Fontana und Pasquale Paquin“, in: M.F., Dispositive der Macht. Über Sexualität, Wissen und Wahrheit.  Berlin: Merve, 1978 (first published in Italian in 1977). p. 53. Foucault uses ‘ensemble’ in the same way as the term “assemblage” (French: ‘agencements,’ German: ‘Gefüge’), as first introduced into philosophy by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. They understand this to mean mixtures of technical and administrative practices. See also Bernhard Kleeberg, Robert Suter, „»Doing truth« Bausteine einer Praxeologie der Wahrheit“, In: Zeitschrift für Kulturphilosophie. 8 (2014) No. 2, pp. 211-226. ↵
  2. There are two versions of this theme by Lucas Cranach. The first painting from 1524 is definitely by Lucas Cranach the Elder himself. It shows the figures in full size, including the husband. The second, from around 1530, now in the Germanisches Nationalmuseum in Nuremberg, comes from Cranach’s workshop, but could also have been painted by a pupil or Lucas Cranach’s son Hans. It shows more figures in half-length portraits, but is less clear in its characterisation of the people involved. A detailed analysis of the older painting can be found at Sotheby’s on the occasion of a sale. ↵
  3. cf. Hito Steyerl, Die Farbe der Wahrheit. Dokumentarismen im Kunstfeld. Berlin-Vienna: Turia+Kant, 2008, p. 36f ↵
  4. “Doubting their claims to truth does not weaken documentary images, but rather strengthens them…. It is no longer about information that could be conveyed through clear and visible images. Rather, it is about that mixture of panic and excitement that arises from the mere feeling of being there.” Hito Steyerl, op.cit. p. 11, 13 ↵
  5. Kay Voges in conversation with Ulla Egringhoff, KunstSalon Cologne, 12 October 2025 ↵

Truth in Theatre – Part 4 Representation and Identity

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The concept of truth has almost disappeared from the discussion in theory of theatre during the last 30 years. In the relevant German handbook “Lexikon der Theatertheorie”, the lemma “truth” is missing1. Florian Malzacher still mentions “truth” in the list of terms used carelessly in the theatre bubble, such as “reality” or “politics” 2, but without evidence. The term seems fundamentally suspect to the prevailing relativism.

Jakob Hayner’s love of truth

Jakob Hayner makes an exception with his essay “Warum Theater. Krise und Erneuerung” 3. He is well aware of his isolated position:

“What is still considered ridiculous today, however, is above all if you expect and demand  a relationship to truth from art.” 4

But he holds fast to the emphatic concept of truth in the tradition of Hegel and Adorno. For him, as for Hegel, art has the function of making truth appear. But this truth is one about society:

“Without being able to give a definition of art that is fixed for every time, there is nevertheless a concept of it that is fed by its inner movement. In this movement, art reacts to society and articulates a truth about it from its own standards.” 5

For him, the very concept of truth is what connects politics and art:

“In the expression of truth about the untruth of society, the otherwise separate spheres of art and politics touch.” 6

“Truth” here, then, is a term for a utopian, undefined state of society to which both art and politics are supposed to be committed. Truth is for him an ethical-political postulate. That this postulate cannot be justified without speculative metaphysics is obvious. Hayner does not shy away from the outmoded reference to religion or communism.

“The questions of metaphysics are not settled, merely forgotten. Not to evade the problems once articulated in religion, but to seek to solve them oneself, is to be truly modern in a world without gods.” 7

The problems articulated in religion are, after all, theodicy, the justification of evil in the world, and the path to eschatological redemption from evil. Modern art, according to Hayner, should therefore be dedicated to these problems. On the other hand, in a grand sweep, he manages to tie together Foucault, Hegel, Rötscher and Marx for a determination of the goal of art:

“Art points the way to one’s own desire. This desire, in which truth and beauty meet, could be called political and utopian at the same time, in other words, communist.”8

The idea of communism is for Hayner (following a formulation of Walther Benjamin) “the idea of redemption as a secular event.” 9 For him, the fictionality of  theatre, the mere “appearance” of  reality, brought about by a few plywood boards as a stage set, by the actors’ doubling of themselves into real bodies and signified figures and the imagination of the spectators, by the assertion of another reality on stage, – the whole as-if is not an obstacle to the appearance of truth, but the condition for it:

“In theatre, the as-if is the condition of its capacity for truth. Through it, the subject can enter into relationship with an otherness already present in it, realise its own knowledge and desire.” 10

For Hayner, however, truth is not a question of content or material, but one of form. As supporting evidence for his view he relies on Bertolt Brecht:

“A return to Brecht would be the resumption of the attempt to articulate social criticism through  artistic form . {…} By translating political impulses into aesthetic innovations within theatrical form, he renewed the capacity for truth of appearance.” 11

Hayner  believes mimetic theatre, in which role, text and action serve to represent reality artistically, can  criticise social reality through the distance of artistic form, and he wants to defend it against  the attacks of the advocates of a “performative turn” of theatre studies.

“It is with some surprise that one can note how eagerly work is being done on the re-enchantment of theatre in the gesture of performative renewal, in order to rule out theatre as a place of truth.” 12

But in doing so, he is striving for a Hegelian, neo-metaphysical concept of the truth of art, which can only be filled speculatively, quasi-religiously. In contemporary theatre, he finds this claim only in René Pollesch and Fabian Hinrichs, in their Friedrichstraßen-Palast project: „Glauben an die Möglichkeit der völligen Erneuerung der Welt“ (“Believing in the Possibility of the Complete Renewal of the World”, Berlin 2019), but apparently also only in its title and in its conclusion, when Hinrichs floated off into the artificial starry sky13.

The crisis of representation

So why has truth disappeared from theatre-theoretical discourse? Because the Hegelian construction of the true as the whole of the unfolded world has evaporated and even for the Marxist heirs of Hegel, truth was too nebulous a concept for the goal of art.
There was no crisis of truth, it disappeared silently.

But there was a noisy crisis of representation. Actually, the concepts of truth and representation belong to different domains (at least in the Middle Ages with Thomas Aquinas): Truth to propositional logic, representation to sign theory. The statements of art are not true, but they represent something, they have a meaning. And this meaning is not something arbitrary, as in everyday language or in the forests of signs in the consumer world that surrounds us. Art should mean something essential in some way. This became questionable around 1900. The more one understands the connection between sign and signification, the more crumbling becomes the bridge between signifiant and signifié, first in literature (Mallarmé’s poetry, Hofmannsthal’s Chandos letter, Lukacs’ theory of the novel14. The terms representation, likeness, illusion, fiction and mimesis are often used indiscriminately). Theatre, initially as literary theatre, participates in this crisis of representation. Since Alfred Jarry and Antonin Artaud at the latest, however, theatre has freed itself from literature. But representation remains.

“Freed from the text and from the god-creator, staging would thus be given back its creative and instaurative freedom. Director and participants (who henceforth would no longer be actors or spectators) would no longer be tools and organs of representation. Does this mean that Artaud would have refused to give the theatre of cruelty the name of representation? No, provided one understood the difficult and ambiguous meaning of this term {…}. End of representation, yet original representation, end of interpretation, yet original interpretation, which no imperious language, no project of domination have occupied and flattened from the outset. Visible representation admittedly, in opposition to the language that is stolen from the gaze, {…} whose visibility, however, is not a spectacle organised by the lord’s language. Representation as self-presentation of the visible and even of the purely sensual.”15

This critique of representation mediated by Derrida was certainly very influential for the development of post-dramatic, re-theatricalised theatre. But in the verbiage of the propagandists of post-dramatic theatre, the crisis of representation became the abolition of representation, instead of asking, with Derrida-Artaud, for the “original representation” of theatre.

From the spatio-temporal identity of aesthetic act and act of reception16 it is hastily concluded that theatre should therefore “create its own, genuine situation in the copresence of the audience.” 17 “Real” here means: without representation of another reality. This is a way out of the “representation trap” 18.

If what takes place on stage is not a representation, neither that of a literary text nor any other representation of something material or ideal outside the stage, then the stage is lying when it claims to be a place other than the empty space of a theatre or when the actor claims to be perceived as someone he is not.

The concept of truth, if one starts from the classical Aristotelian version, is a two-digit relation: A (the idea) agrees with B (the thing). What this relation consists of, what distinguishes A from B, is the real epistemological question. A equals A, that would be identity. Identity is the term for equality with oneself. But the relation of actor and character is not such a relation, neither truth nor identity.

If one wants to treat acting like a propositional sentence, acting representation is something like a meaningful informative identity statement: A equals A’, actress A (Sandra Hüller) is character A’ (Hamlet), the object (actress) is identified by the spectator in two different ways, the sense is different, but the meaning is the same, as with Venus as morning and evening star in Frege 19.

But if we cannot perceive the stage in two different ways, as reality and also as appearance, if we do not adopt the spectatorial attitude that Samuel Coleridge classically characterised as the “willing suspension of disbelief”20, then all that remains is a trivial identity statement: A equals A, it makes sense but has no informative content. That Sandra Hüller is Sandra Hüller is true, but it is nothing new.21.

Either one accepts representation, then A can be equal to A’, or not, then “A is equal to A’ ” is a deception or even a fraud. And deception is evil, then we want truth.22 The complicated emotional mechanics of real and shown feelings of the actors are no longer of interest if not represented. We want the truth and that is the identity of the actor or actress with himself or herself, the identity of the shared space of auditorium and stage, the identity of the moment experienced together. You cannot escape from performance theatre that is hostile to representation and pretends to be avant-garde by imposing the goal of truth on theatre.

Thus, the liberation of theatre from the demand for truth, which has been justified many times, results in a short-circuit rejection of representation and the demand for identity instead of analysing and developing the theatre-specific mode of representation. In his discussion with Florian Malzacher, Wolfgang Engler has pointed out that there are two types of criticism of representation:

“One problematises the frame, the other breaks it, abuses people and de-theatricalises theatre.” 23

Florian Malzacher calls the use of “real” people on stage, like the experts at Rimini Protokoll, a way out of the “representation trap”. He acknowledges, however,  that the “authenticity of these people is also just a role” but calls this role “the role of their lives” 24. In contrast, Jens Roselt points out, using the example of the performance Sabenation (a project with ex-empolyees of the Belgian airline Sabena, Berlin, Hebbel Theater 2004), that real life has no privileged place,

“neither in the suburbs nor on stage. One cannot seek out reality, but it seeks us out or haunts us, everywhere, unexpectedly and uninvited. Reality cannot be prefabricated and exhibited. Rather: it happens.” 25

Putting experts or imperfect amateurs on stage instead of actors does not bring us closer to the truth.

“The conflation of the performer and his actual biography does not at all lead to a form of immediacy, {…} but to a distance.” The aesthetic framework in which these people are placed on stage always makes it clear “that it is not a question here of depicting or pretending true life in a more or less realistic sense.” 26

Only if one understands a performance as an event between player and recipient, independent of representation or non-representation, does one escape the gaze that seeks truth, identity or authenticity.

The performance: an in-between event

From the perspective of phenomenological philosophy, Jens Roselt attempts to justify the performative turn in theatre studies less as a prophecy about the future of theatre than as a necessary step from semiotic staging analysis to performance analysis. And his conclusion: theatre is an in-between event, an event between stage and audience, regardless of whether one thinks it represents something or not. From a phenomenological point of view, experience is a “dialogical in-between event”. And the situation of a performance is one of experience:

“Stage and audience thus enter into a dialogue with each other that does not have to take place linguistically. Spectators are engaged by the performance, just as they themselves question it.” 27

With the phenomenologist Bernhard Waldenfels, Roselt assumes a “responsive difference” that characterises the relationship between stage and spectator. Stage and spectator behave like question and answer. But there is

“an answer is conceivable that opens up something that the question did not anticipate. Such an answer no longer obeys the division into right and wrong.” 28

And certainly not to the division into truth and lies.

“Spectators {are} not merely asked to be vicarious agents of someone else’s intention in the performance.” 29

Roselt even criticises his teacher Fischer-Lichte for not taking this responsive difference into account with her notion of the feedback loop. 30 This also applies to a theatre of as-if, in which an actor or actress represents a character:

“The figure that occurs between actors and spectators is a third that is not exclusively owned by anyone.” [11 Roselt, p. 248.]

The spectators are a “constitutive part of the performance”. The modes of perception and experience of the spectators thus have a productive dimension, even in the representation of a character on stage by an actor or actress:

“Only in the performance [is] an appearance constituted, which can neither be reduced to the individual person of the actor nor to a role specification, since the intentions of the spectators are also meaningful here.” 31

When one acknowledges the productive activity of the spectators in a performance, all spectres of truth and identity disappear.

  1. Erika Fischer-Lichte e.a. (ed.), Metzler Lexikon Theatertheorie. Stuttgart: Metzler, 2nd ed. 2011 ↵
  2. Florian Malzacher, Gesellschaftsspiele. Politisches Theater heute. Berlin: Alexander Verlag, 2020, p.40 ↵
  3. Jakob Hayner, Warum Theater. Krise und Erneuerung. Berlin: Matthes und Seitz, 2020 ↵
  4. p. 62 ↵
  5. p. 13 ↵
  6. p. 79 ↵
  7. p. 152 ↵
  8. p. 150 ↵
  9. p.149f ↵
  10. p. 148 ↵
  11. p.77 and p. 126. ↵
  12. p. 127. Cf. also his detailed criticism of Fischer-Lichte’s aesthetics of the performative in the chapter “Wiederverzauberung oder Entzauberung der Welt” pp. 100-121 ↵
  13. Hayner’s comment on this: “The possibility of desiring an idea that transcends the world appears in the work of art.” cf. Christian Rakow’s critique ↵
  14. E.g. “The visionary reality of the world appropriate to us, art, has thus become independent: it is no longer a copy, for all models have sunk; it is a creating totality, for the natural unity of the metaphysical spheres is forever torn asunder.” Georg Lukacs, Theorie des Romans. Ein geschichtsphilosophischer Versuch über die Formen der großen Epik. Berlin: Cassirer, 1920, p.12 ↵
  15. Jacques Derrida, “Das Theater der Grausamkeit und die Geschlossenheit der Repräsentation”, in: J.D., Die Schrift und die Differenz. transl. v. Rudolphe Gosché. Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 1976 (first as a lecture in Parma 1966) ↵
  16. Malzacher wrongly quotes Hans-Thies Lehmann here. Lehmann names a basic condition of theatre, of dramatic as well as postdramatic or performative theatre, cf. Hans-Thies Lehmann, Postdramatisches Theater. Frankfurt/M: Verlag der Autoren, 1999, p.12 ↵
  17. Malzacher p.36. ↵
  18. ibid ↵
  19. Gottlob Frege, Funktion, Begriff, Bedeutung. Five logical studies. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1969, p. 41, cf. also Tugendhat/Wolf, Logisch-semantische Propädeutik, Stuttgart: Reclam, p.176 ↵
  20. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, *Biographia Literaria* (1817). Ch. XIV, ebook Project Gutenberg, 2004 p.347. cf. my review of Tom Sterns, Philosophy and theatre. An Introduction. Jakob Hayner puts it aptly in German: “One pretends to believe what one sees. Or to put it another way: one does not act as if one did not believe what is presented to one.” Hayner, p.124 ↵
  21. Tugendhat/Wolf, p. 183 ↵
  22. Hans-Thies Lehmann also works with the pair of opposites truth and deception: “If theatre is to offer truth, it must now reveal and exhibit itself as fiction and in its process of producing fictions, instead of deceiving about it.” Lehmann, p. 186. ↵
  23. Wolfgang Engler, Authentizität! Von Exzentrikern, Dealern und Spielverderbern. Berlin: Theater der Zeit, 2017, p. 136 ↵
  24. Malzacher, p. 32 ↵
  25. Jens Roselt, Phänomenologie des Theaters. Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink, 2008, p.280 ↵
  26. Roselt, p.281 ↵
  27. Roselt, p. 194f ↵
  28. Roselt, p.179 ↵
  29. Roselt, p.185 ↵
  30. Roselt p.195 ↵
  31. Roselt, p. 300 ↵

No theatre – Memory Books by Ex-Comrades

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This is a review of several memoirs and novels by former members of a German maoist-communist group called KPD-AO (later only KPD, i.e. Communist Party of Germany). This may be of little interest for non-German readers, but in Germany the Maoist movement in the 70ies was probably stronger than in other countries. The German inland secret service (Verfassungsschutz) estimated the followers of these several Maoist groups as 60.000. There are some of them who became prominent as politicians much later: Winfried Kretschmann (present Ministerpräsident of Baden-Württemberg, former member of KBW), Antje Vollmer (former vice-president of Bundestag, former fellow traveller of KPD-AO), Jürgen Trittin (former Federal Cabinet minister for the environment, former member of KB Nord), all of them made their careers as members of „Die Grünen“. So it may be of some interest how the former intellectual leaders of one of these groups evaluate their commitment in the 70ies in retrospect.

  1. Melting of the snow

In 2022 and 2023 Elisabeth Weber 1, Ruth Ursel Henning 2, Willi Jasper 3 and Antje Vollmer 4 died in quick succession. Thus the most prominent group of the KPD-AO, which existed from 1970-1980, has now almost completely disappeared 5, after Jürgen Horlemann6, Christian Semler7, and Peter Neitzke8 had died years earlier9. The generation that tried to draw the consequences from the social upheaval of the 68e revolt is dying out. What remains? At any rate, a few books of remembrance, also of limited durability.10.

 

“The snow of merciful oblivion now covers the landscape on which the Maoist “K-groups” set about revolutionising the proletariat in the 1970s. […] Finally, and at least, the functionaries of yesteryear hardly understand their motives and actions of that time any more.[…] The former leadership personnel are too embarrassed by the history of the K-groups.”11.

This is what Christian Semler wrote in 1998. Slowly this snow of oblivion is melting and underneath it strange remnants, rusty junk of thoughts of a summer of action, once so hot, are emerging.

Today, the mode of commemoration of the actors of that time is less a reckoning with the past than an attempt to understand themselves.12.

When asked by his son “why one could have had the idea of becoming a member of a Maoist party in the 1970s”, Helmuth Lethen wrote his report “Suche nach dem Handorakel” 13. Marianne Brentzel 14 confesses at a loss:

“I know of no satisfactory answer that justifies my own decision to join this organisation for almost ten years, and none for all those who subordinated themselves to it for years.”15.

But understanding is not justification. When I justify a past action, I apply my present moral standards to the past action. By our present standards, the “decision for this organisation” is not justifiable. But there is a need to understand oneself, i.e. to find reasons in the context of the time that led to these decisions. Christian Semler put this most clearly in 2001:

“Should one, especially as a public figure, publicly distance oneself from those elements of one’s own life that appear reprehensible to the contemporary gaze? Contrary to the view that our biography consists of nothing but disconnected new beginnings, we all strive for something like an ego identity in our life cycle. Therefore, it is quite nonsensical to simply renounce parts of one’s biography as a kind of purification ritual. We should explain how everything is connected, what continues to have an effect, what has been overcome. This requires not knee-jerk distancing, but self-distancing.”16

  1. Reasons

So why did Helmut Lethen, a literary scholar born in 1938, participate in the founding of a Maoist party in 1969/70?

In “Suche nach dem Handorakel. Ein Bericht” in 2012, he describes in detail his intellectual career in the 1960s17: Reading Adorno, Walter Benjamin and Mitscherlich. These were the intellectual prerequisites of the student movement before 1969.

Mitscherlich’s thesis of the “fatherlessness” of the post-war generation, whose fathers kept quiet about their activities in the Nazi dictatorship and the war, was banal but “struck a nerve at the time” 18. Lethen, however, remained sceptical. That the “unreliability of internal control” of his generation caused by the lack of authority of the father generation was the psychological reason for the student movement was implausible to him at the time. For Lethen of the 1960s, Mitscherlich was also one of the fathers.

The rejection of Critical Theory (Adorno, Horkheimer) came with the Bild-Zeitung campaign of the SDS. Critical Theory could easily be integrated into the existing society. The Bild newspaper makers could also use it as strategic advice.

So far Lethen explains the preconditions that applied to the whole breadth of the student movement. But why did it have to be this small circle of just under 20 West Berlin SDS members who wanted to found a democratic-centralist cadre party? At first, the balance of his attempt at self-explanation remains negative:

“What is not explained is why I joined the hand-picked crowd of party founders in 1970, in which I found clever minds of the student movement in West Berlin.”[16 Lethen, Handorakel p.21]

Then, in addition to saying goodbye to the crippling impracticality of Critical Theory, he gives another reason:

“Somehow the disenchantment with the paralysis of action and function of securing the present state of society of Critical Theory, which was supposed to legitimise entry into an ML party, concealed a more tangible reason from me. It lay in the fear of losing one’s composure in the environment of lifestyle experiments, in the maelstrom of the disintegrating movement, of drifting aimlessly, of being marginalised.” [17 Lethen, Handorakel, p.25]

“What saved us from collapse and running amok? Should the series of ML parties have been founded specifically for the purpose of preventing this course of events? Strange thought, these parties might have caught some as ‘sense machines’.” [17 Lethen, Handorakel, p. 27]

Lethen’s objective description of the function of the ML movement after 1970 corresponds to this subjective need for support and orientation:

“The disintegration of the student movement in 1969, 1970, 1971 released a quantum of unbound destructive energy that should not be underestimated. The achievement of the Marxist-Maoist apparatuses was to integrate the free-floating subversive energies into their above-ground system of movement.” [17 Lethen, Handorakel, p. 14]

Lethen’s thesis, repeated several times, is: the ML parties “objectively served to stabilise the Republic.” [17 Lethen, Handorakel, p. 13]

The political events and social developments that made possible something as improbable and nonsensical from today’s perspective as the founding of a Maoist-communist party by a handful of students and young academics, are described in Willi Jasper’s memoir book, “Der gläserne Sarg. Memories of 1968 and the German ‘Cultural Revolution'”:

  • – The shooting of demonstrator Benno Ohnesorg by a policeman on 2 June 1967,
  • – the assassination of Rudi Dutschke, the recognised spokesman of the student movement, on 11 April 1968,
  • – the student protests and strikes in Paris in May 1968,
  • – the invasion of Prague by Russian troops in August 1968.
  • – the Vietnam War with the failed Vietcong Tet-offensive in 1969
  • – the strikes at Fiat in Italy and the influence of the “Unione dei Communisti Italiani”,
  • – the non-union “wildcat” strikes in German factories in September 1969,
  • – the violent confrontation between students and police at the Tegelerweg demonstration in Berlin in November 1969.

This perhaps makes it easier to understand why then, at the working conference of the Berlin Red Press Correspondence on 6/7 December 1969, five former members of the dissolved SDS proposed the foundation of a Communist Party 19. Then, in February 1970, the Preliminary Platform of the Aufbauorganisation für die Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands (KPD-AO) stated:

“The timely building of a political organisation which was no longer student-oriented and which would have directed its main attention to the organisation of the proletariat would have been the corrective of delusions which haunt the minds of comrades to this day.” 20.

In retrospect, today this seems to have been more an attempt to replace many divergent delusions with a unified delusion.

The fact that the failure of this attempt was only admitted so late (earlier than with the competing K-groups, after all) was also due to the fact that it was initially successful. Alan Posener, then a student and later chief commentator for the newspaper “Die Welt”, describes the appeal of this group:

“That I joined the KPD/AO was more by chance. I had enrolled in German Studies in order to study something, and in the Rotzeg (Red Cell German of Studies) the representatives of the KPD/AO set the tone. Most of what they said I understood in outline at best, but I admired them as people: Dietrich Kreidt, Helmut Lethen and Rüdiger Safranski, for example, but also Lerke von Saalfeld, Beate von Werner and above all Elisabeth Weber. This was an impressive  concentration of intellectual potency. I think that most younger students at that time felt the same way: the decision for a political organisation was more a personal than an ideological decision. You decided who you wanted to belong to and then adopted the political line. This was then consolidated into actual conviction in the confrontation with the other sects.” 21

Helmut Lethen’s “strange thought” that the party may have functioned as a “sense machine” and picked up some who might have else been lost to terrorism, drugs or despondency is confirmed by Alan Posener:

“So I owe it to the KPD {…} that I got away from drugs and the feeling of existential nothingness. {…} And I owe it more to it than to any strength of character of my own that I was saved from the abyss into which others could fall.”

  1. Theatre nevertheless

“Never before, to my knowledge, had a German party been founded by such a preponderance of Germanists” wrote Peter Schneider about the KPD/AO 22. Helmut Lethen rightly remarks “that there were a disproportionate number of theatre scholars in our Politbüro.” 23

Helmut Lethen and Willi Jasper describe in detail the role played by the literary scholar Peter Szondi in the debates of the time. He was both the instigator of criticism of German studies, which was still under the influence of the former Nazi fellow travellers, and the victim of the student protests. Even the poet Paul Celan was drawn into the maelstrom of the 68 movements 24. The theatre was not left untouched either:

  • – Peter Stein’s production of Peter Weiss’ “Vietnamdiskurs” (Kammerspiele Munich 5 July 1968 with the collaboration of the later KPD-AO founders Wolfgang Schwiedrzik and Jürgen Horlemann) caused a scandal because money was collected for the Vietnamese guerrilla Vietcong after the performance.
  • – Peter Stein’s production of Brecht’s “Die Mutter” at the 8 October 1970 Berlin Schaubühne am Halleschen Ufer (again with the collaboration of Wolfgang Schwiedrzik) could be understood as a call to tackle the realisation of communism, “the simple thing that is so hard to do”.
  • – Wolfgang Schwiedrzik’s drama “Märzstürme 1921 (Leuna)” at the Schaubühne 7.3.1972 recalled the militant action of the KPD at the beginning of the Weimar Republic.

It was thus logical that the actions of the KPD-AO were “staged like revolutionary theatre.”25

  1. Losses and Gains

Working for the party was exhausting. Membership (also in the student association) required the recognition of the “primacy of politics”, i.e. the priority of political activity over all other expressions of life. Helmut Lethen describes the party as a “self-destructive funnel” that sucked up all energy without leaving any result. 26. This led to losses. The memoir books discussed here deal with these losses nonchalantly. Lethen left the party in 1976, Neitzke in 1975, Alan Posener in 1977. Willi Jasper, after all, had been working towards its dissolution since 1979. So they had remained independent and capable of acting. Willi Jasper only shrugs his shoulders when asked about his personal loss:

“When asked if it was a `lost time’, I explained {in 1980} that I could of course imagine having spent the last ten years more meaningfully.` But I could not answer at the time ‘through which constellation and at what point I would have had to direct my personal development in other directions.’ Of course, I felt a regret. {…} But I believed (and still believe) that the ‘guilt’ of the KPD-AO must be placed in an ‘overall balance’ of how much human and social existence as a whole has fallen by the wayside in the left movement since 1968.” [29 Jasper, p.33].

And Helmut Lethen’s damage was gastritis, which at least enabled him to turn away from the organisation. But the politically justified rejection of his applications for professorships in Bremen and Marburg still offended him.

“Of course, the party did destructive things, first and foremost internally: clever young trade unionists were torn from their biotopes and shipped from West Berlin to our dreamland and no-man’s land called the Ruhr. We ruined many comrades for life in their teaching profession, to which they were passionately attached. The party consumed inheritances and ended academic careers.” [30 Lethen, Handorakel,p. 18]

This unexciting negative balance sheet is clearly at odds with the shrill accounts of suffering published anonymously in 1977 by a group of dropouts27 and to the sneering remarks of outsiders 28.

However, the negative balance sheet is also contrasted with the attempt to save what can remain. Alan Posener, unsuspected of being an incorrigible because he left the party and worked for the flagship of the Springer newspapers, finds essentially two things he owes to the KPD: on the one hand, “technical-character things”: strict discipline, on the other ideological: “as a negative lesson, the deep abhorrence of communism and the deep horror of one’s own seductibility”, but also: “a left liberalism. Liberal, because I think I know how important freedom is; left-wing, because the real heroes are the people who don’t have it easy.” 29

Christian Semler also tries to record what remained of conclusive orientation, especially with regard to the not a few who remained politically active. First of all, in general for the student movement: “The left-wing students: “were, despite their often forced left-wing traditionalist character, motors of the democratic westernisation process”. 30 But then also specifically for the ex-comrades of his former party:

  1. brusque anti-utopianism (out of disappointment with utopia of the Cultural Revolution), association with East European democrats,
  2. left anti-totalitarianism, support from the East European opposition,
  3. three-world theory: legitimacy of national liberation movements also in the case of the disintegrating Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, positive valuation of the EU (second world)
  4. serving the people: “Volkstümlertum” “It allowed the ex-Maoists to measure their private professional existence against a general ethical standard.” Criticism of the anti-people development of technology (Green Movement).

However, as a shrewd dialectician, he also sees the downsides of these benefits: Anti-utopianism is at the same time the “refusal even to think the quite other of the capitalist mode of production”. Anti-totalitarianism leads to “moral superiority feelings” and the “pose of the chief prosecutor.” 31

  1. Novels

Not everyone feels important enough to publish their memoirs for future historians to read. Not everyone can process the affect of shame as productively as Helmut Lethen. Christian Semler attempted an honest stocktaking early on and several times as editor and commentator of the newspaper “taz”. Alan Posener can confine himself to a single question and thus avoid any “the red grandpa tells” attitude.

But there is another way to deal with embarrassing memories: fictionalisation. There are at least three novels by former members of the leadership of the KPD(no longer AO). Helmut Lethen skewered a fitting quote by Walter Benjamin for this:

“The birth chamber of the novel is the individual in his loneliness, who is no longer able to speak out in an exemplary manner about his most important affairs, is himself unadvised and cannot give advice. To write a novel is to carry the incommensurable to extremes in the representation of human life.” 32.

Alexander von Plato circumnavigates the cliff of perplexity most elegantly…. Memory is his theme, but not his own and not that of the years 1970-80.

Blurred. A Love in Germany 1989

For the historian Alexander von Plato 33 The years 1970-1980 are too short a wave for him to deal with it publicly. As an internationally renowned specialist in “oral history”, he is concerned with how the long waves of historical development play out in the short waves of a human life. The “longe durée”, the study of which the French historian Fernand Braudel made the task of historical science, i.e. the change in the coexistence of people that is imperceptible to individuals, has an effect on the life courses of individuals. The purpose of “oral history” is to record these developments, which develop in a time structure seemingly independent of the decisions of individuals and completely different from the individual life rhythm of birth, life and death, in their impact on the conscious experience of individuals.

Or as one of the characters, a film director, explains in von Plato’s novel “Verwischt. Eine Liebe in Deutschland 1989 (Blurred. A Love in Germany 1989):

“It is – I think – insanely difficult to link the long waves of history, which we can only learn, with the short ones we experience […] Perhaps only art can succeed in this.” 34

Another character, a historian, picks up on this:

“His thoughts about the long waves we can only learn and the short waves we experience struck at the heart of my work. To analyse these two waves together, that is the art that professionals in cultural and historical studies should master.” 35.

Von Plato tries to unite both: art (fiction) and historiography (truth); he has written a novel based on his life-history recollections of his interlocutors in the course of his work on German reunification. It is about the great period between 1944 and 2014 in Nazi Germany, the GDR and united Germany (The political developments in West-Germany in the 70ies are not mentioned at all).

This self-published novel, which has hardly been noticed by the media, actually has the makings of a popular book, it is something like a docufiction thriller. But interest in the German past is waning as interest in the present increases. Communist resistance to the Nazi dictatorship and the end of the GDR, that is of little interest in view of the Ukraine war. However, there is a clear warning from the perspective of a former GDR dissident from 2014:

“A united Germany under the umbrella of NATO, which kept Russia out of Europe and humiliated the Russians. We will pay dearly for that. {…} In doing so, we helped make Putin great.” 36

The plot centres on a West German historian, Marie, who wants to investigate the role of Jewish communist resistance fighters in the early GDR using the tools of “oral history”. She falls in love with Paul Z., one of her interlocutors, a 70-year-old member of the Central Committee of the SED. On the day the Wall is opened in 1989, he collapses after suffering a stroke. With all the devices of the detective novel – red herrings galore – the solution is withheld from the reader. After his arrest by the Gestapo, Paul revealed names of the domestic leadership of the KPD under torture, who were then executed. He always kept quiet about this in the GDR, but the Soviet secret service knew. A son of one of the victims of Paul’s “betrayal”, a successful film director, finally confronts him about it on that day of the GDR’s downfall. Which leads to Paul’s breakdown.

The narrator works with all the means of perspective narration. The first part consists of reports, notes, transcripts of conversations that a West German journalist receives from Marie and other people involved. Only in the short second part does it become clear that this material was the basis for a television film that this journalist made with the said film director. Marie now receives this material back and can use it to prove that the film director was justified in reproaching Paul for his weakness under Nazi torture, but that he had unjustly defamed him as a collaborator with the Soviet secret service. The honest enlightener was thus the liar.

Alexander von Plato knows the biographies of many GDR citizens intimately from his research work. And he knows the pitfalls of the “oral history” method.

“It is possible, after all, that one always picks something out of other stories and images that fits one’s own experiences or adventures.” 37

Even contemporary witnesses do not always tell the truth. But he has not written a roman à clef. The fictional characters are assembled from puzzle pieces of real biographies.

Red Flags Red Lips

Marianne Brentzel has taken a different path. She already wrote a novel in 2011, but an autobiographical one, a middle ground between a book of memories (Jasper) and complete fictionalisation (Neitzke).

Hannah Heister is the name of the heroine, born in 1943 (as Marianne Brentzel herself). Her life is told from the beginning of her studies in 1963 in Berlin at the Otto Suhr Institute (OSI) of the Free University until the dissolution of the party in 1980. It thus covers the development of the student movement from its beginning to the final end of its offshoots. The shooting of Benno Ohnesorg, the attack on Rudi Dutschke, all the important events are described in their effects. Hannah is initially a member of the Liberaler Studentenbund 38, then she switches to the Proletarian Left (PL/PI), a loosely organised group with syndicalist leanings that propagated that students should work in industrial factories. Hannah works as a factory worker at SEL and Gilette. But soon she is disappointed:

“She had had enough of a bunch of chaotic people who soon dispersed.” 39.

So the call to join the just-founded KPD-AO comes just in time.

“Probably the Chinese one was the right form of political struggle today. In no case would the comrades of the KPD get the crazy idea of instigating some kind of armed struggle.” 40.

The motives of rejecting the RAF’s armed struggle and the need for stability and orientation, which Helmut Lethen also mentions, also become clear here.

Now the novel becomes a party story, told from a very specific point of view. All the characters are recognisable, albeit under pseudonyms: the sinister comrade Elroh is Jürgen Horlemann, comrade Olaf (Peter Neitzke) tears up an image of Stalin and is expelled from the ZK. Katharina, the Great Ka, (Ruth Henning) competently dominates the regional leadership with flexible intransigence. The party leader Brotler (Christian Semler) only makes an appearance in passing. Hannah has a young son even before she joins the party and she becomes a functionary, moving from Berlin to Dortmund on behalf of the party. And what elevates the novel far beyond a party story is the shaping of this conflict between private family life and unconditional commitment to the political organisation.

This Hannah is a woman of fierce temperament, sharp tongue and considerable drive for action. Even after an unpleasant Christmas party at party headquarters, she keeps at it:

“I don’t want the chubby family routine to be my business.” 41

But she sees herself and her comrades as.

“puppets of self-imposed duties {…} not at all the universally developed personalities we once wanted to become. Rather like hamsters in a cog. The party is our world. We run and run and feel very important. But we don’t advance a metre.”

Thus she weeps over her life, but “didn’t know exactly why the next morning.” 42To her Parisian friend’s question, “What’s the point of it all?” she replies

“You know, it’s hard to explain, because besides inner conviction, it’s also living in a fixed social environment.” 43

And she does not let go, becoming a member of the Regional Leadership North Rhine-Westphalia, again with suppressed self-doubt:

“Why did she actually want this? Was it ambition that drove her? The desire for more recognition?! Certainly these ‘arch-bourgeois’ motives also played a role, as she had confessed to Lena in Paris, but added, above all she wanted to serve ‘the cause’ better.” 44

In this capacity she represents the complete subordination of all personal spheres to the primacy of politics, even in relation to others. She makes this clear to a comrade who refuses to move from Duisburg to Solingen and then allays her own doubts.

“He could have said no, she reassured herself. The party decides about my life, too. That’s the way it is when you join us. There’s no other way.” 45

After an abortion described in detail 46. She gets into second child without any problem. And yet the dichotomy remains:

“Family, Hannah often thought during this time, family is something crazy. A construction in spite of everything. You want it and yet you don’t want it.” 47

A trip to China with the party delegation at the invitation of the Chinese Communist Party provides the final disillusionment. The land of utopia is also only a contradictory reality. In the end, there is the redemptive self-dissolution of the party in the spring of 1980.

The silent hero in the background who makes it all possible is Hannah’s husband Rolf, that is Hugo Brentzel 48, the party’s long-time lawyer, who was not a member himself but defended numerous comrades in countless trials with which public prosecutors overtook party members. He is always there to look after the children when Hannah’s appointments take precedence, he is there to comfort Hannah in her nights of despair. These private scenes, which repeatedly interrupt the party coverage, are what give the account its character as a novel in the first place.

But the novel has a second element: texts entitled “Hilde’s Diary” are repeatedly inserted into the narrative of Hannah’s life. Only at the end does it become clear that Hannah’s friend Hilde has given her this diary. (A similar narrative manoeuvre to the handing over of material by the journalist Barbara to the historian Marie in Alexander von Plato’s novel). These texts recount in fragments Hilde’s search for her origins. She was born in the Ravensbrück concentration camp as the daughter of a concentration camp guard. In various stages of the narrative it becomes clear that this origin was both a reason for Hilde to join the communist party and that she wants to keep this reason to herself, not to make it available to the party as an argument. In return, she accepts being excluded from the party.

This parallel story to Hannah’s career, further deepens the theme of the conflict between privacy and political activity: the right motive leads to separation from the party, the wrong motive leads to advancement in the party.

Morelli disappears

The literary pinnacle of the memoir books by this group of authors is Peter Neitzke’s novel “Morelli verschwindet”. It is contemporary satire, a critique of memoir literature, a reckoning and reconciliation with the past – all rolled into one. A novel with bitterness and humour, of a superior reflectiveness that you will hardly find in any other novel. And a reading pleasure of the challenging, exciting kind.

The basic idea of the novel is anything but naïve: Gregor Hellman, a bar pianist, hires Frantz Morelli, an architect, as a ghostwriter to write Hellman’s autobiography with the help of his notes. Everything is twisted and mirrored here. Hellman enlightens Morelli:

‘Writers {…} pass off as fiction what is more or less composed of elements of their own biography. But using the usual tricks to obscure their own person. I’m interested in the reverse: How, when one’s own life is a fiction? How do you solve that literarily?'” 49

And Morelli understands his role for Hellman as “a kind of productive shadow, an investigative double, a questioning instance and a crafted cleavage product.” 50

But Morelli disappears, throws his mattress, complete with manuscripts, out of the window of his 5th floor flat into the river and departs, destination unknown. He writes nothing for Hellmann; he does not return the three thousand he received as a down payment. The novel now constantly switches perspectives between Hellmann and Morelli. Hellmann is looking for Morelli, thinks he is meeting him. This gives rise to a series of satirical vignettes of the present: a visit to the shopping paradise “Universum”, assisted by a digital shopping assistant, which ends with Marxist-trained terminology:

“‘Don’t worry. The producers of social wealth will refrain from revolutionising the relations of production.’ ‘And what do they do instead?’ ‘They find their field of activity in the sphere of circulation.'” 51

Or the lecture of a famous artist in art school:

“Speech acts pushed across the planet as market events. The business field is called performative approach or performative turn.” 52

And a visit to a converted industrial hall, one the “Chambers of Posthumous Fame” have been built in, small windowless cubicles for people who want to disappear. There are also “chambers for renegades of any {…} chambers for communists of once competing general lines.” 53.

Hellmann has meanwhile found fragments of an address book in Morelli’s abandoned flat, all just addresses of people beginning with K., a Latin teacher, a newspaper editor, an optician, his former landlady, a voice consultant, a piano teacher, a performer. He interviews them one after the other. He receives information about Morelli’s past, but none about his current whereabouts.

In the second part, however, it becomes clear where Morelli has disappeared to: Dubai, where he experiences the final phase of the construction boom there. But there he also meets a writer. This results in the “art talk” of the novel, in which the secrets of its making are released. The writer recommends Julio Cortazár’s method:

“irony, incessant self-criticism, incongruity, imagination in no one’s service. {…} You must write the anti-novel, without any closed order. You must make your readers accomplices. Give them something like a façade with doors and windows, nothing more. Behind it they will discover all kinds of contradictions {…} They will discover a world of ruins behind the façade with doors and windows. And rejoice.”

Morelli counters:

“Only with these tricks you don’t write a narrative today. The form can be conventional. It doesn’t have to, it can. So conventional that one is seduced to immerse oneself in your story. And stay with you for a while. You have to postpone breaks and incursions. {…} Above all, your story must be a story of your time, with every line. {…} The façade is the convention. Your ruins are not the ruins of the narrative form, only theorists are interested in that, but the ruins of your present. When I write, I report on ruins, on clouds of dust. Of the slurry of the world in which I live.” 54

That these are not just the self-referential pirouettes of an indecisive man of letters, but really the legacy of the real Peter Neitzke, becomes clear again and again. For example, one of Hellmann’s interlocutors says of Morelli:

“You may know that at some point he co-founded one of those left-wing political sects.” 55

And in one of Morelli’s notes inserted as “lost property” it states:

“Morelli, someone once told him, here we argue politically, not morally, morally was petty-bourgeois, putting one’s own miserable person in the centre, your name is not Morali, the party secretary once said, smiling maliciously, your bourgeois name is Morelli, morally is not argued here, it was not about morals, politically was to take one’s own person into the direction of the political, politically was to judge people according to where they stood, on the right or the wrong side. He suspected that this was fundamentally wrong, but risked no quarrel with the comrades.”56

Before leaving the desert of new building ruins in Dubai, Morelli quotes to himself in soliloquy the critique of the Trinitarian Formula of vulgar economics from Karl Marx’s third volume of “Das Kapital” 57 that the true realm of freedom can only flourish on the realm of necessity as a base.

“You sought your private realm of freedom here. Didn’t work out, as you can see. Doesn’t work anywhere as long as …” 58

Eventually Hellmann and Morelli do meet, on the Baltic beach, beat each other up and then play Bill Evans’ song “What are you doing the rest of your life?” four-handed on Morelli’s grand piano [Peter Neitzke’s grand piano]. Morelli continues to deny Hellmann’s biography:

“Why would he necessarily want to lay out his life, some story of depression? {…} An obituary, if someone had put it in the paper and I had discovered it (what else) by chance, would not surprise me.” 59

On 13.5.2015, shortly before the publication of this novel, Peter Neitzke died.

 

  • Peter Neitzke, Schwarze Wände. Roman. Textem Verlag 2008
  • Marianne Brentzle, Rote Fahnen Rote Lippen. Roman. Edition Ebersbach, 2011
  • Helmut Lethen, Suche nach dem Handorakel. Ein Bericht. Göttingen: Wallstein, 2012
  • Alan Posener, „Was ich der KPD verdanke (1-3)“. starke-meinungen.de, 25.6.2013
  • Christian Semler, Kein Kommunismus ist auch keine Lösung. Texte und Essays. Hg. v. Stefan Reinecke und Mathias Bröckers. Berlin: taz, 2.2013
  • Peter Neitzke, Morelli verschwindet. Roman. Lohmar: Hablitzl, 2015
  • Willi Jasper, Der gläserne Sarg. Erinnerungen an 1968 und die deutsche „Kulturrevolution“. Berlin: Matthes & Seitz, 2018
  • Alexander von Plato, Verwischt. Eine Liebe in Deutschland 1989. Berlin: neobooks, 2019
  • Helmuth Lethen, Denn für dieses Leben ist der Mensch nicht schlau genug. Berlin: Rowohlt, 2020
  • Marianne Brentzel, Rathaussturm. Vechta: Geest-Verlag, 2021

 

  • Andreas Kühn, Stalins Enkel, Maos Söhne. Die Lebenswelt der K-Gruppen in der Bundesrepublik der 70er Jahre. Frankfurt/M, New York, Campus 2004.
  • Benedikt Sepp, Das Prinzip Bewegung. Theorie, Praxis und Radikalisierung in der West-Berliner Linken 1961-1972. Göttingen: Wallstein, 2023
  • Klaus Birnstiel, „Gelehrtenexoterik. Einige akademisch-intellektuelle Erinnerungs- und Notizbücher.“ in: Merkur 67 (2013), S. 354-360.

  1. 16.5.1941-31.3.2022 ↵
  2. -17.12.2022 ↵
  3. 11.6.1945-3.2.2023 ↵
  4. 31.5.1943-15.3.2023 ↵
  5. Elisabeth Weber was the leading head of the Rotzeg (Red Cell of German Studies) at the Berlin Freie Universität in 1970 and then a member of the leadership of the KPD(formerly AO) until 1980. After 1980 she was a staff member of various members of the Bundestag of the “Greens” and decisively involved in the preparation of the merger of Bündnis 90 and “Die Grünen”. Obituary Böll Foundation, Obituary Havemann Society.

    Ruth Henning was also a member of the Central Comitee of the KPD(former AO). After 1980 she supported the Polish opposition, lived in Poland for a time and founded the German-Polish Society Brandenburg. Obituary Märkische Oderzeitung

    Willi Jasper was editor-in-chief of “Rote Fahne”, the party’s weekly newspaper, from 1976-1980. Since 1994 he was professor of Modern German Literary and Cultural History and Jewish Studies at the University of Potsdam. Interview Deutschlandfunk 2022

    Antje Vollmer, vice-president of the German Bundestag from 1994-2005, “did not join the party {KPD-AO}” and was only a member of the “League against Imperialism”, a subsidiary organisation of the KPD, but in any case had an influence on the party’s women’s policy line through her biography of Clara Zetkin published under a pseudonym (Karin Bauer) (Oberbaum Verlag, Berlin 1978) and an article on the women’s question in the “Rote Fahne”. Obituary taz

    The fact that these persons are mentioned here mainly in their functions in the years 1970-1980 does not mean that their later activities and positions should not be acknowledged. All those mentioned here made significant contributions to politics and culture in Germany after 1980, which cannot be mentioned here in detail. What are these 10 years against the 30 or 50 that followed! ↵

  6. 7.12.1941-24.5.1995 Obituary Southeast Asia Information ↵
  7. 13.12.1938-13.2.2013 taz Overview of Obituaries, Three taz Memoirs ↵
  8. 21. 8.1938-15.3.2015 obituary Bauwelt ↵
  9. Jürgen Horlemann, Christian Semler and Peter Neitzke were the founding triumvirate of the KPD-Aufbauorganisation, which emerged at the end of 1969 from the dissolution of the Berlin SDS (Socialdemokratic Students Association) and the RPK (Red Press Correpondence) conference. The KPD-AO was also derisively called the “Semler-Horlemann-Neitzke group” ↵
  10. A detailed account of the K-groups, also called ML-parties, including the KPD-AO, as a subject of historical research is: Andreas Kühn, Stalins Enkel, Maos Söhne. Die Lebenswelt der K-Gruppen in der Bundesrepublik der 70er Jahre. Frankfurt/M, New York, Campus 2004. The drawback of this work, written from a temporal and intellectual distance from the ML marxist-leninist) movement, is the author’s fascination with the repulsive features of his subject. He collects all the reprehensible or astonishing practices and views he could find (and rightly so, there are many). An effort to understand the motives of those acting at the time, except in the detached formulas of social psychology, is completely absent from his work. Moreover, he treats the three organisations KPD-AO, KPD/ML and KBW in context and thus does not do justice to the KPD(formerly AO), especially in the last two years of its existence. A discussion  of the political developments in Germany and the world of the 1970s is completely missing (cf. the review by Thomas Dannebaum ) ↵
  11. Semler, p.32, taz 1998 The abbreviated citations refer to the bibliography at the end ↵
  12. The writer of these lines was a member of the Rotzeg (Rote Zelle Germanistik) of the FU Berlin in 1970, then of the Communist Student Association (KSV) until 1978, a staff member of the magazines “Kämpfende Kunst”, “Kunst und Gesellschaft” and “Spuren” and cultural editor of the weekly newspaper “Rote Fahne” of the KPD(formerly AO) from 1978-1980. My task was to open the newspaper to the general public. So I mainly wrote reviews of current films and novels. My articles were successful in that they drew many indignant letters from readers. After all, there were much more competent assessors around the party than this little-read youngster. The phrase “was never a member of the party” has a disreputable tradition in Germany, but in this case it is unavoidable. I was a subaltern employee of the party headquarters in Dortmund and then in Cologne in various capacities without being a member of the party. When I was handed the application for membership in 1979 with the remark that I had only been forgotten, I had already pleaded with the “Rote Fahne” editorial staff for the dissolution of the party and did not return the form ↵
  13. Lethen, Handorakel, p. 11 ↵
  14. Former member of the North Rhine-Westphalia regional leadership of the KPD and member of the party delegation to China in 1979 ↵
  15. Brentzel, p.175 ↵
  16. Semler p. 80, taz 2001 ↵
  17. In his autobiography “Denn für dieses Leben ist der Mensch nicht schlau genug. Erinnerungen” (Memories), Lethen draws on his older “Bericht” for the phase from 1969 to 1980 and adds little new. ↵
  18. Lethen, Handorakel p. 72 ↵
  19. “Die erste Etappe des Aufbaus der Kommunistischen Partei des Proletariats” Thesenpapier von Semler, Horlemann, Neitzke, Hartung, Chr. Heinrich, Jasper. Presentation of the proceedings of the conference, in: Karl-Heinz Schubert, “Zur Geschichte der westberliner Basisgruppen”, from: Aufbruch zum Proletariat. Dokumente der Basisgruppen, introduced and selected by Karl-Heinz Schubert, West Berlin 1988 ↵
  20. Die Partei aufbauen. Plattformen, Grundsatzerklärungen. Berlin, 1971 ↵
  21. Alan Posener, Was ich der KPD verdanke 1-3. starke-meinungen.de ↵
  22. quoted in Jasper, p. 53 ↵
  23. Lethen, Handorakel p. 19. The first German edition of the writings of the stage designer and theatre reformer Edward Gordon Craig (1872-1966) was published in 1969 by the later KPD-AO founding members Elisabeth Weber and Dietrich Kreidt: Edward Gordon Craig, über die kunst des theaters. Berlin: Gerhart Verlag, 1969 ↵
  24. Jasper, pp.58-63 ↵
  25. Jasper, p.133 ↵
  26. “The apparatus was a self-destructive funnel that devoured movement energies in the self-running of repetitions internally, but had a stabilising effect externally in the confusing situation of the 1970s.” Lethen, Handorakel, p.18 ↵
  27. Wir warn die stärkste der Partein… Erfahrungsberichte aus der Weit der K-Gruppen, Berlin 1977 ↵
  28. Michael Rutschky, Erfahrungshunger. Ein Essay über die siebziger Jahre. Berlin: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1980 ↵
  29. Posener, Part 3 ↵
  30. Semler, p. 167 ↵
  31. Semler, pp. 34-36 ↵
  32. Walter Benjamin, Illuminationen p. 413, quoted in Lethen, Handorakel p.51f ↵
  33. (*1942).His dissertation Zur Einschätzung der Klassenkämpfe in der Weimarer Republik. KPD und Komintern, Sozialdemokratie und Trotzkismus. Oberbaumverlag, Berlin 1973 decisively shaped the historical understanding of the KPD-AO cadres. He was then head of the KJVD youth association of the KPD. ↵
  34. v. Plato, p. 302f ↵
  35. v. Plato, p. 304 ↵
  36. v. Plato, p.283f ↵
  37. v. Plato p. 312 ↵
  38. The Liberaler Studentenbund Deutschlands was actually the student association of the FDP, but had already broken away from the FDP in the 1960s and saw itself as part of the “socialist opposition.” ↵
  39. Brentzel, Red Flags p.102 ↵
  40. op. cit. p.103 ↵
  41. op. cit. p.141 ↵
  42. op. cit. p.142 ↵
  43. op. cit. p. 157. ↵
  44. op. cit. p. 160. ↵
  45. op. cit., p.209 ↵
  46. Which is not, as the blurb says, “dictated” by the Party, but also wanted by her. Her first reaction to finding out she is pregnant at the gynaecologist’s is “I don’t want that, no child and no heart sounds.” Later she repeats “I want it {the abortion} too” p.202 ↵
  47. op. cit. p.226. ↵
  48. ✝︎2017 ↵
  49. Neitzke, p.24 ↵
  50. op. cit. p. 57 ↵
  51. op. cit., p. 32 ↵
  52. Op. cit., p. 34 ↵
  53. op. cit., pp.45-47 ↵
  54. op. cit. p.118f ↵
  55. op. cit. p. 76. ↵
  56. op. cit. p.51. ↵
  57. Karl Marx, Das Kapital Vol. III. 48th Chapter, in: MEW Vol. 25, p. 828 ↵
  58. op. cit., p.125 ↵
  59. op. cit., p.139 ↵

Who needs theatre reviews?

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In the aftermath of the discussion about theatre criticism following the dog excrement attack on dance critic Wiebke Hüster, Thomas Rothschild asked about the justification of theatre criticism in a Nachtkritik commentary on an essay by Christine Wahl:

“What I miss is an explanation why actors, directors, choreographers have to endure what most professions are spared of. The fact that the arts have to face criticism is not a law of nature. It is a historically developed tradition that can be welcomed, but not necessarily.”

The following is a kind of attempt at justification of theatre criticism:

There is no criticism of rubbish collection and no applause for it. But the  fashion of ranking  is spreading everywhere, to coffee machines, software, doctors, novels, films and so on. Andreas Reckwitz has analysed this as a symptom of the society of singularities. The genre of the review is also spreading from literature into all areas. (There are teacher reviews in every high school newspaper.) But there are other reasons for theatre criticism, independent of the current change in communication structures through the internet.

For one thing, theatre criticism is art criticism. Art reception provokes aesthetic judgements. You don’t come out of an art exhibition without having found it good or bad or somehow. Aesthetic judgements (there’s no getting around Kant) are not universally valid judgements about facts, they only pretend to be universally valid, they only “sense approval”. They challenge contradiction and discussion.

On the other hand, theatre criticism is the criticism of a collectively experienced public event. One does not walk singly at one’s own pace in a space of art objects, but experiences the simultaneous presence of actors crammed in alongside other spectators. This increases the need for conversation compared to other art forms. Audiences occasionally decide on a possible theatre visit based on reviews, but they also compare their experience of a theatre visit with the evaluation by a professional critic. Making theatre performances discussable is also a rationale for theatre criticism. That is the service it provides for spectators.

It is understandable that theatre-makers, like all artists, dislike pejorative judgements about their works. Art wants affirmation. But the insight that art only has meaning when it enters into open social discourse should also be clear to every artist, even if he or she is not guided by it in the creative process. There must also be pejorative aesthetic judgements. If there were only approving judgements in public discourse, the discourse-initiating function of criticism would be limited. One can heed the old rule, slurs short, anthems long, but respect for artists should not be completely supplanted by the experiential component (i.e. the reviewer’s anger).

Incidentally, Rebekka Kricheldorf’s play„Homo empathicus“ provided an entertaining satire of the “positive society” back in 2014.

Excrement on critics – On choreographer Marco Goecke’s attack on dance critic Wiebke Hüster

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On 11 February 2023, Marco Goecke, the ballet director of the Hanover State Opera, physically assaulted Wiebke Hüster, the dance critic of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ), during the intermission of the premiere of the dance evening “Glaube, Liebe, Hoffnung”. In the course of an argument about Wiebke Hüster’s derogatory reviews of Goecke’s choreographies, Goecke pulled a bag of dog excrement from his dachshund Gustav out of his pocket and smeared the contents in Hüster’s face. The Hanover State Opera then suspended Goecke and banned him from the house.

Marco Goecke’s action was a performance. All the characteristics apply: in front of an audience, existential risk of the artist, crossing borders, de-fictionalisation of art. “She’s also been throwing shit at me for years,” says Marco Goecke. So it’s not only an action that seeks to repay like with like, but also the translation of a linguistic metaphor into physical action. And that, precisely, is Marco Goecke’s professional activity as a choreographer. So here someone has forgotten the difference between art and reality. And blurring this difference is one of the common strategies of contemporary art. It is a case of loss of reality. What is an effect in art is a crime in reality.

Theatre critic Tobi Müller pointed out in his commentary that the aggravation of the climate between theatre criticism and theatre art, or the aggravation of the theatre-makers’ traditional aversion to critics, also comes from the existential fears of both sides. Both sides have an increased need for public attention because the importance and regard of their activities in the public sphere is diminishing. Invective increases attention. Name-calling brings more clicks than compliments.

Karin Beier’s now frequently quoted bon mot about the “shit on the sleeve” is, in contrast, only a verbal gaffe with which she justifies why she does not read reviews. 1She is describing the effect of not only negative but also uninformed reviews. And therefor, theatre critics have to take a good look at themselves. The precarious financial position of theatre criticism also lowers its average standard. Today, there is neither the space (an available number of characters in a public medium) nor the thoroughness of description and analysis that theatre criticism by Rolf Michaelis or Hellmuth Karasek had (to stay with the Hamburg examples). Anyone who wants to write theatre criticism today cannot make a living from it. Anyone who wants to write theatre criticism today has to master the art of quick, concise, short writing. And that hardly makes you a serious interlocutor for theatre-makers.

Marco Goecke has put Karin Beier’s casual vulgarism into practice, as an act of revenge. Wiebke Hüster’s immediately preceding critique of Goecke’s dance evening “In the Dutch Mountains” in The Hague is an example of the common stylistic device of exaggeration: “While watching, one is alternately driven mad and killed by boredom. Every now and then there are two brilliant, coherent minutes. … It is an embarrassment and an impertinence, and the choreographer must be blamed for both all the more …”. (FAZ 11.2.2023)] But also a personal attack. With personal attacks on theatre-makers in reviews (“bloody” slurs) one must expect counter-reactions. But they have to remain verbal (the comment function at nachtkritik.de offers a forum for this). It is not true that Wiebke Hüster has tried to destroy Goecke journalistically for twenty years. For example, only recently she praised Goecke’s “magnificent realisation of Marguerite Duras’ novel The Lover” and combined this with an explicit advertisement for a visit to the theatre (FAZ 26.10.2022 and 01.03 2021). And in 2012, she praised Goecke’s Stuttgart choreography for “Dancer in the Dark” at length (FAZ 1.12.2012).

“Excrement on critics” is also the intensification of the principle of “mashed potatoes on art”. Symbolic communication is taking up more and more space in the public sphere. Those who have something to say say it through the flower (or through action). Demonstrations are becoming more and more similar to theatre performances (as the Federal Constitutional Court already stated in 1984 in its decision on the „Anachronistischer Zug“ ). Analogue communication, based on similarity, is more effective when it comes to affective effects than verbal communication. So Goecke has struck with the weapons at his disposal. Only he miscalculated the effect. The physical expression of his emotional state cannot count on the empathy of the audience as it does on stage. On the contrary, disgust hits him, pity the critic. Did no one really film the scene in the foyer of the Hanover theatre?

Addendum:

Three days after the incident, Marco Goecke has submitted a letter, which he understands as an apology. “I would like to apologise  sincerely {“ich möchte mich … aufrichtig entschuldigen”) to all those involved, first and foremost to Ms Hüster, for my action, which I absolutely do not condone. In hindsight, I clearly realise that this was a shameful act in the heat of the moment and an overreaction.”

The offender’s use of language “ich entschuldige mich” (literally “I forgive myself”, used as “I apologise”) in German is common today, but of course it should be “ich bitte um Entschuldigung” (literally “I ask to be forgiven”). Blame can only be forgiven by the one to whom evil has been done, not by the wrongdoer. Used in such a way, the phrase “Entschuldigung …” becomes a justification for effrontery. One is familiar with this when someone pushes his way forward in a queue with a muttered “excuse me”.

He also writes that it would be appropriate for all media to “reconsider a certain form of destructive, hurtful reporting that damages the entire cultural enterprise”. Cultural criticism must ask itself where it “crosses the line into insulting, denigrating works, bullying, attempting to create negative opinion and damaging business”. (SZ 14.02.23). So he justifies his attack again, shows no understanding for the fact that art only gains a social significance in the dispute of opinions.

If one wants to find “hurtful reporting” in Wiebke Hüster’s competent and balanced critique of „In the Dutch Mountains“, only the word “impudence” comes into question. This is a moral evaluation that is explicitly related to the person of the choreographer. It is not a verbal jury, not an insult, and moral judgements are permitted, even necessary, in public (politicians know a thing or two about this). Morality is also communication of respect, and that must be public. But it is a question of the critic’s self-control whether one allows oneself to be carried away by such outbursts against a person. In any case, one must (or wants to) expect reactions. However, not with dog excrement.

The clearest devaluation of Goecke by Hüster can be found, significantly, in her blog “Aufforderung zum Tanz” from 2012: “Marco Goecke, whose meaningless nullity dances are not needed by anyone”. This quote is in the context of a judgmental tour d’horizon through the German ballet scene, which does not leave a good hair on the German ballet dramaturgies, with the exception of Düsseldorf and Munich. The fact that this quote is found in an internet blog perhaps shows one of the causes of the aggravation of the tone between (some) critics and (some) theatre people. The internet is an emotion machine, the inhibition threshold for unbridled emotionality becomes lower compared to a newspaper printed on paper. Criteria for a good blog are, after all, speed of reaction, topicality, directness and subjectivity. With its comment code, nachtkritik.de is exemplary in containing such art-critical low blows.

  1. Here is the decisive section of the interview transcribed: “And there I think we don’t meet on a level that is really interesting to me. And then that in relation to what then unfortunately sticks. So really, to put it nicely in German, like shit on my sleeve, I think, no, I don’t do that.” ↵

Marginalia Eur. Alc. 800-803 – Anne Carson’s translation

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Heracles is a kind of comic figure in “Alkestis” by Euripides.1 To the servant mourning for Alcestis he proclaims his carpe diem philosophy: “Be merry, drink, remember, only the here and now is yours, the rest is chance!” (788-789 εὖφραινε σαυτόν, πῖνε, τὸν καθ᾽ ἡμέραν \ βίον λογίζου σόν, τὰ ἄλλα τῆς τύχης) 2. His pep talk culminates in the toast, “Let him who is mortal cherish mortal thoughts.” (ὄντας δὲ θνητοὺς θνητὰ καὶ φρονεῖν χρεών. 799).
In this context, it does come as a surprise to read in Anne Carson’s translation:

“‘We’ are all mortal you know. Think mortal./ Because my theory is, there’s no such thing as life, / it’s just catastrophe.” 3

The Bochum version, created by Susanne Winnacker and Mieke Koenen from Anne Carson’s English translation for Johan Simons’ production (2022 Athens Epidauros Festival and Schauspielhaus Bochum4), reads:

„Es ist doch so, dieses Leben gibt es gar nicht, es existiert nicht, alles ist nichts weiter, als eine einzige Katastrophe.“ 5

The original text of these verses reads:

“ὡς τοῖς γε σεμνοῖς καὶ συνωφρυωμένοις \ ἅπασιν ἐστιν, ὥς γ᾽ εμοὶ χρῆσθαι κριτῇ \ οὐ βίος ἀλητῶς ὁ βίος, ἀλλὰ συμφορά.” (Eur. Alc. 800-803).

Heracles thus turns against any killjoys or mourners (like the servant) who cannot enjoy life. σεμνοῖ are the venerable or, pejoratively, those putting on airs. συνωφρυωμένοι are those who contract the eyebrows (ὀφρύες). It is the eyebrow-knitting people who mourn their mortality in advance, for whom life is an evil coincidence.

The usual German translations of the last lines are:

„Denn den feierlichen Stirnrunzlern,/ allen, ist, soll ich darüber Richter sein, das Leben nicht eigentlich Leben, sondern schiere Plage.“ (Kurt Steinmann)

„Für all die ernsten Stirnrunzler bleibt / Das Leben – wenn du meinem Urteil traust – / Kein wahres Leben, nur ein Missgeschick“ (Ernst Buschor)

Common English translations are 6:

“As for those who are solemn and knit their brows together, their life, in my judgement, is no life worthy of the name but merely a disaster.” (David Kovacs)

“To all solemn and frowning men, life I say is not life, but a disaster.” (Richard Aldington)

How did Anne Carson and the editors of the Bochum version come to deviate so much from the original and ascribe to Heracles a conception of life that he had previously expressly rejected? What is the reason for this deviation in the otherwise modern, but always sensible translation?

The starting point is probably Heracles’ call to “think mortal”. In the context of his speech, it becomes clear that Heracles means to consider one’s own mortality, that is, to enjoy life while it lasts. But “to think mortal” for Carson seems to mean to think not of life but of death. This radical pessimism, however, does not fit the function of Heracles’ speech. (It would only justify Alcestis’ readiness to die.) The actor of Heracles in the Bochum performance (Pierre Bokma) can only save himself in irony: Life a catastrophe? – It’s all a joke!

Anne Carson’s translation results from simply omitting verse 800. Was it omitted on purpose? Was it an oversight? Was it the unusual word συνωφρυωμένοις? Was it to reinterpret the figure of Heracles from burlesque swashbuckler to cynic?

  1. A. Lesky „Rudimente der Komödienfigur“, F. Stoessl „burleske Gestalt“, zit. bei Kurt Steinmann, Nachwort zu Euripides, Alkestis. Griechisch-Deutsch. Stuttgart: Reclam, 1981, S. 134f ↵
  2. Steinmann, p.73 ↵
  3. Euripides, Grief Lessons. Four Plays. Translated by Anne Carson. New York: New York Review of Books, 2006, 682-684 p.288 ↵
  4. See Andreas Willink`s review on Nachtkritik ↵
  5. Alcestes {sic!} by Euripides. Version by Mieke Koenen and Susanne Winnacker. Translation from English (Ann {sic!} Carson) Susanne Winnnacker. Manuscript Schauspielhaus Bochum ↵
  6. Ted Hughes, whose personal fate became a public one through the death of his wife Sylvia Plath, deleted this humorous part in his adaptation of “Alcestis” and replaced it with a dialogue about the deeds of Heracles, culminating in Heracles` exclamation: “I see my wife. I see my dead wife. Who killed her?” ↵

Friendly Fire – Part 1

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Notes on interviews about the Berliner Theatertreffen

In July 2022, Berliner Festspiele, the state-funded organization responsible for a bunch of festivals taking place in Berlin every year,  announced that the new management of the Berliner Theatertreffen, which is one of these festivals, would consist of the team Olena Apchel, Marta Hewelt, Carolin Hochleichter und Joanna Nuckowska. The recently appointed artistic director of Berliner Festspiele, Matthias Pees , explained that this team is intended to “connect the Theatertreffen more closely with the Central and Eastern European region”.
A small flurry of public discussion followed, with many commentators expressing their lack of understanding or scepticism for this decision, e.g.  Christian Rakow. Then people looked back at an interview that Matthias Lilienthal and Amelie Deuflhard had already published on the Theatertreffen website in May. And finally, Matthias Pees himself gave two interviews, one on Nachtkritik.de, , the other in „Der Spiegel“, in which he explained his intentions.

In the following – as in Friendly Fire Part 2– some sentences from these three interviews are commented on because they are of general importance. The quotations are translated and   speakers are indicated by (ML) for Matthias Lilienthal, (AD) for Amelie Deuflhard, (Pees) for Matthias Pees.

German language

“The previous restriction of the Theatertreffen to German-speaking countries is no longer in keeping with the times.” (Pees)

That something is “no longer in keeping with the times” (“nicht zeitgemäß”) is the cheapest formula for those who want to abolish something and avoid giving reasons. Anything can be “no longer in keeping with the times”:  Café Mohrenkopf, an ice rink in summer, television, the privileges of the churches, compulsory vaccination, breast size descriptions in theatre reviews, SUV cars, hunting, animal testing, the Nutcracker ballet – whatever one happens to find annoying. Politicians like to use the phrase out of professional opportunism. “Times” is a rather vague term and opinions about what is “in keeping” with them differ widely. Even if a regulation, an institution, a procedure is no longer “in keeping with the times”, the question remains whether it is good if something is in keeping with the times. As we know, there are good times and bad times.

“The Theatertreffen as it refers to a ‘German-speaking territory’ also unconsciously perpetuates colonial structures.” (ML)

That Germany wants to colonise Austria is something not even the FPÖ dared to claim. And the German-Swiss, with reference to William Tell, will politely but firmly refuse to be called a subjugated colony of Germany. But probably one can also consider the “Council for German Orthography” a totalitarian attempt at colonisation. There was German colonisation of the Eastern Europe in the Middle Ages and German imperial colonisation in Africa and Asia in the 19th century. And there was the attempt to subjugate Eastern Europe in the Second World War. This must be borne in mind if one wants to create a Central European 1 theatre festival in Berlin. In doing so, there is indeed the danger of “unconsciously perpetuating colonial structures”. A Central European theatre festival with structures that would take on the representative claim of the Berlin Theatertreffen would probably have to take place in Krakow, not Berlin.

“Theatre culture has long since detached itself from the German language.” (ML)

It’s just a pity that the German theatre audience has not yet detached itself from the German language.

“In drama, the German language has turned out to be a great barrier”.(Pees).

Drama used to be called “spoken theatre”, in distinction from the “singing theatre” of opera. Those days are long gone. Through authors and directors like Edward Gordon Craig, Antonin Artaud, Jerzy Grotowiski, Tadeusz Kantor or Pina Bausch, the visual and physical components of drama have emancipated themselves from words. And the tendency of all the arts to blur or leap over boundaries between sections, genres or art forms, the tendency towards the “fraying of the arts” (“Verfransung der Künste”) 2 is unbroken.

But some kind of verbal component almost always remained in the play (with the exception of some extreme cases in Handke or Beckett). The fact that drama is essentially moored to a national language has always been a “barrier” against the internationalisation of drama. Unlike music, painting or ballet, free movement across borders was restricted for drama. But word-bound, literary drama always had a means of overcoming all barriers: translation. Thus Calderon, Molière, Shakespeare, Ibsen, Chekhov and Grombrowicz could dance on the barricade of the German language.

The problem only arose with the emancipation of the play from the word. When staging and no longer a theatrical text is the original work of art, the whole apparatus with actors, set, sound, including the spoken part, etc. must be hoisted over the barrier. A re-staging with a translated text would destroy the work of art. Theatre technology offered the means of surtitles. Opera was the first to use it. Text comprehensibility has always been an insoluble problem for opera singers anyway, so the practice of translating foreign-language opera texts into German was ended in Germany, operas are now performed in their original language and text projections are used. The fact that these can only imperfectly and in abbreviation reproduce the libretto text was acceptable in view of the gain of being able to hear the correspondence of melody and original language vocalisation.

That theatre then resorted to this means has three causes: the mobility of productions across language borders, the mobility of the audience (cultural tourism) and, to a lesser extent, the linguistic heterogeneity of the local audience. The linguistic loss through surtitling is disproportionately greater in drama than in opera. Nuances of meaning and linguistic beauties are lost. The spoken word is reduced to a dennotative framework, which must then be supplemented by the audience through perception of analogue communication (gestures, body language, facial expressions). In translated plays of the repertoire, curious retranslations also occur (for example, in a “King Lear” production, Shakespeare’s mocking metaphor of man as a “forked animal” appeared on the surtitle screen as a “two-legged animal” via the diversion of a German translation).

In German theatre, the language of the surtitles is either English or German, depending on the language spoken on stage. The assumption that everyone in the audience somehow understands English is likely to be refuted in a Central European audience and mostly excludes the first generation of migrants in Germany. But even among an average Western European theatre audience, English proficiency is likely to be limited. How much would a German audience understand of an original language production of a play by John Osborne or Simon Stephen (or even from a French one of a play by Bernard-Marie Koltès)? Do we want to make the presentation of language certificates compulsory at the theatre box office? Productions designed for the international festival circuit have found ways out: untranslated English, complete renunciation of spoken language, reduction of language to sentences presented in writing, or rare languages without translation as an exotic attraction3.

But without speaking the language of the actually present audience, drama can at best discuss, deepen or make perceptible general human problems. What is lost in the process can perhaps be shown by the example of Nuran Calis` project “Mölln 92/22” (Schauspiel Köln). It deals with a central conflict in German society: violence against migrants. The German language is indeed sometimes an obstacle here. The production depicts the real multilingualism of German society. But it is not transportable. Even if there are similar conflicts in other European countries, it would hardly be understandable in France or England or even Poland, not because it is too deeply rooted in traditional German culture, but because it is anchored in contemporary German culture and its current conflicts. Without spoken language, a theatre that wants to be political only achieves an emotional effect, but never the discursive level on which politics takes place. The structural analogy, the isomorphism of politics and theatre 4 is not possible without verbal language.

This is not to say that drama cannot or should not respond to the multilingualism of the world. Édouard Glissant sums up his experience as a speaker of the Creole of Martinique and French thus: “that I can no longer defend my language monolingually either. I have to defend it in the knowledge that it is not the only one in the world under threat.” For him, multilingualism is “the presence of all the languages of the world in the practice of one’s own.”5 To show the multilingualism of the world in the practice of German theatre is the paradoxical task. There have been many attempts in recent decades to make multilingual productions comprehensible to a German audience.6 Multiplying the surtitle screens (English, German, Polish, Turkish …) will not solve the task. German communal theatres will hardly be able to afford surtitle screens in the backs of the seats on which one can choose between different languages, as in the Vienna State Opera or the Metropolitan Opera in New York. A surtitle app for smartphones like “Burgtheater Promt” is cheaper, but leads to a forest of dimly lit mini-screens in the auditorium that disturbs everyone’s concentration.

There is a somewhat forgotten model for dealing with Europe’s multilingualism in German theatre: the Bonn Biennale “New Plays from Europe” (“Neue Stücke aus Europa”)7. From 1992 to 2004, this festival took place at Schauspiel Bonn during the directorship of Manfred Beilharz, supported with considerable federal funding. With a network of “godfathers” in many European countries, mostly playwrights, productions of new plays from these countries were selected and shipped to Bonn. There were no surtitles, but translators who sat in a booth during the performance and interpreted simultaneously, knowing the text of the play. The audience was given one (!) earplug free of charge and could listen to the translation. The second ear remained free for the original language. Thus, with a little more concentration, one could both hear and also understand Icelandic, Russian or Serbian. The cultural contexts of the plays remained foreign, of course, and could at best be relayed in panel discussions. But the incentive to learn about the cultural contexts remained. This model incurs considerable costs, but takes better account of the multilingualism of the world than English surtitles for everything or a battery of mini-screens for all languages.

Finally, if the German language has turned out to be a major barrier – barrier to whom or what? Matthias Pees says, for “all those who do not have a sufficient command of the German language”. Are they audience members or theatre-makers? Or does the Theatertreffen only count on an audience that is professionally connected to theatre anyway? German language as a barrier to attracting audiences to the Berlin Theatertreffen? Probably not. Barrier to selecting productions for the Theatertreffen in which German is not spoken? That is not the case. Meg Stuart’s “Alibi” was already invited in 2002 and Alain Platel’s „Wolf“ in 2003. And many other productions followed in which the German language did not play a role, also in this year’s selection of 10. Barrier to the import of productions produced internationally in other languages? Yes, certainly. Barrier to attracting non-German-speaking directors and actors? Only in part.

“The challenge of having to find a common language on many levels is being met in many German theatres today.” (Pees)

This is true. The list of directors at German theatres whose primary language is not German is long, from Laurent Chétouane to Oliver Frljić, Alvis Hermanis, Antonio Latella, Ewelina Marciniak, Toshiki Okada, Dušan Parizek to Kiril Serebrennikov. They work in the German city and state theatre system because they find comfortable working conditions and good fees there. And the potential for aesthetic innovationl of these foreign workers is enormous. German theatre has gained a lot from this openness. But the effort required for such productions is also enormous: translation problems everywhere, in writing the text, in the rehearsal process, in communicating it to the audience. Communication via Google translators is tedious, time-consuming and ineffective. In the Nachtkritik.de interview, Matthias Pees also has to admit that theatre is bound to a national culture and language: “It is true that artists from our neighbouring countries to the east are already present in this country – but often with works that are weaker than those they stage in their home countries, because they work with new, foreign ensembles in a foreign language.”

The association „drama-panorama“ is dedicated to these translation problems. Barbora Schnelle, for example, writes “When I translate political theatre from the Czech Republic, I have to think very carefully about where I want to go from and to and ask myself, for example: What does the German-speaking audience know about Czech oligarchic structures? Where do I have to convey what, where do I have to enlighten, where do I have to contextualise and where is it best to find domestic parallels?” This need for translation and contextualisation will increase if one wants to achieve a stronger connection of German theatre with Central European theatres.

A parallel model, as proposed by Matthias Pees in the Nachtkritik interview, in which there is a group of productions from Central Europe, also selected by a jury, in addition to the existing selection of productions from German-speaking countries, would necessarily lead to a reduction in the number of invited productions from German-speaking countries. Even if the funding for the doubled Theatertreffen were increased, a reduction in the number of performances would be unavoidable.

  1. On the term “Central Europe” cf. the works of Karl Schlögel, e.g. Karl Schlögel, Die Mitte liegt ostwärts. Europa im Übergang. Munich: Hanser, 2002 ↵
  2. “In recent development, the boundaries between the genres of art flow into each other or, more precisely, their lines of demarcation fray.” Theodor W. Adorno, “Die Kunst und die Künste”, in: Ders., Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 10.1, Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 1997, p. 432 ↵
  3. See my report on this year’s Ruhrfestspiele Recklinghausen in: Theater heute 7/2022 ↵
  4. cf. Alain Badiou, Rhapsodie für das Theater. Kurze philosophische  Abhandlung. Vienna: Passagen, 2015, pp. 36, 48 ↵
  5. Edouard Glissant, Kultur und Identität. Ansätze zu einer Poetik der Vielheit. Heidelberg: Wunderhorn: 2nd ed. 2013 ↵
  6. e.g. Karin Beiers production of Shakespeare’s “Summer Night Room” in 1995 at the Düsseldorfer Schauspielhaus, in which actors of different nationalities not only spoke their languages but also practised their national styles of performance. See my old review in the taz of 4.11.1995 ↵
  7. The last two directors of the Theatertreffen, Iris Laufenberg and Yvonne Büdenhölzer, acquired their first experience as festival organisers there. ↵

Friendly Fire – Part 2

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Notes on interviews about the Berliner Theatertreffen

In July 2022, Berliner Festspiele, the state-funded organization responsible for a bunch of festivals taking place in Berlin every year,  announced that the new management of the Berliner Theatertreffen would consist of the team Olena Apchel, Marta Hewelt, Carolin Hochleichter und Joanna Nuckowska. The recently appointed artistic director of Berliner Festspiele, Matthias Pees , explained that this team is intended to “connect the Theatertreffen more closely with the Central and Eastern European region”.
A small flurry of public discussion followed, with many commentators expressing their lack of understanding or scepticism for this decision, e.g.  Christian Rakow. Then people looked back at an interview that Matthias Lilienthal and Amelie Deuflhard had already published on the Theatertreffen website in May. And finally, Matthias Pees himself gave two interviews, one on Nachtkritik.de, , the other in „Der Spiegel“, in which he explained his intentions.

In the following – as in “Friendly Fire – Teil 1” – some sentences from these three interviews are commented on because they are of general importance. Here (ML) stands for Matthias Lilienthal, (AD) for Amelie Deuflhard, (Pees) for Matthias Pees.

Criticism of the existing jury procedure

“‘Best of’ is not a forward-looking principle.” (AD)

The rampant expansion of ranking lists also in the theatre sector speaks for the fact that “best of” is at least a current principle. Andreas Reckwitz explains why rankings (“quantitative techniques for representing particularities”) are necessary, especially in singularity markets (such as theatre)1. In the endless competition for attention of singular productions, visibility must be generated. Rankings serve this purpose. The time-honoured principle of “Theatertreffen” of selecting ten equally remarkable productions is more cautious in this respect. The jury has always resisted any ranking among the ten invited productions. This preserves to some extent the singularity, the incomparability, of the work of art. However, any selection based on the “best of” principle is under the constraint of having to define its selection area and actually cover it completely. Hence the restriction to the German-speaking area and the intensive travelling of the jurors.

“Medium-sized and smaller theatres are visited by the jury to a much greater extent than is then reflected in the final selection”. (Pees)

This is a basic problem of the Theatertreffen. But it also has its place in the system. One can think of the German, Swiss and Austrian municipal and state theatre system as an autopoietic system that is stable in itself and can regenerate itself. It is also capable of resonance, of reacting to its environment (other social subsystems, other theatre systems). Such a system needs elements for self-observation, self-imaging subsystems. The Theatertreffen has always been such a subsystem for self-observation of the German-speaking theatre system. The Deutsche Bühnenverein, the association of all German  theatres,  is a different one, with different guiding distinctions. The specific difference of the Theatertreffen subsystem is “aesthetically remarkable/not remarkable”. The individual theatres as subsystems of the larger theatre system interact with each other in many ways. Actors change, dramaturges discuss, artistic directors go on merry-go-rounds, authors receive prizes, and so on. But how does the overall system perceive itself? Without self-observation, no readjustment of interactions, no change of structures is possible.

The theatre system is also financially controlled. Theatres in large cities have larger budgets than those in small towns. This also creates a market for actors, directors, stage managers, production managers, etc. It is therefore not surprising that the aesthetic singularity market correlates with the financial market. The best directors move to where they earn the most or at least have the best working conditions. This correlation is never perfect. The Theatertreffen owes its existence to the fact that this correlation of art and money was blurred after 1945. The aesthetic centre of theatre culture in the Federal Republic moved between 1945 and 1989 from Darmstadt (Sellner, Hering) to Bremen (Hübner, Zadek) to Bochum (Zadek, Peymann) to Berlin (Stein, Grüber). There was a need for an artificial centre to reconcile perceptions. After 1989, with the inclusion of the former GDR and the development of Berlin into the actual capital, there was a natural centre, the correlation of art and money was perfected. But still, the system needs an element of introspection as a whole system. Without a province, there is no capital. The manifold interactions, the opportunities for advancement and internal differences of the subsystems are essential for the stability of the whole. Permanent self-observation is necessary for the permeability of the overall system. The significance of the Theatertreffen for small theatre towns lies not only in the invitations (which are rare), but in the permanence of observation.

Criticism of theatre critics

“Theatre critics are no more neutral or objective than we are.” (AD)
“As a dramaturge, I also still see myself as a kind of critic.” (Pees)

Of course theatre critics do not judge objectively. Christine Wahl formulates the credo of theatre critics: “But there is one conviction that unites us all: The eternally plural attracts us.”2 Aesthetic judgements are never objective. An aesthetic judgement only suggests approval to everyone3, i.e. it must argue in order to gain persuasive power. However, this subjective generality of the critic is different from that of the dramaturg. Internally, a dramaturge may be as sharp a critic of a production as a newspaper writer. But externally, towards the audience and the public, he has to be careful. He has an interest in a positive judgement. His or her contract renewal also depends on how far he or she succeeds in contributing to audience acquisition, to a positive public reaction or to the creative climate in the house.

After all, when several media judge a production, the subjectivity of the judgements becomes clear. The fact that there were critics who hid their subjectivity behind categorical praise and slurs, writing in the tone of the authoritative ex cathedra judgement, was due to the need for self-assertion of newspaper writers in a differentiated media landscape. But the grand critics have disappeared, partly because the media landscape has thinned out and almost no newspaper can afford a full-time theatre critic any more. On the contrary, since the 1970s, the emphasis on the subjectivity of the theatre experience has become a quality feature of theatre criticism (even if the “I” in the formulations is still frowned upon). The extent to which the critic succeeds in both linguistically conveying the subjective experience and argumentatively backing up his or her own emotional reaction is decisive for the effect of a theatre review on the reader. Till Briegleb has summed up this understanding of criticism: “A critic may hate, be moved, instruct, resign, become personal or cheer, as long as he brings his feelings into an understandable relation to the subject matter.” 4

“Critics writing against the decline of theatre criticism.” (ML)
“Theatre critics’ fear of loss of significance”. (Pees)

I can’t see any fear on the part of critics of losing their own significance. Those who write theatre criticism today know the marginal importance of their work. If there is a fear among critics, it is that of the theatre’s loss of significance. And there is just as much of this fear among theatre directors, actors and curators.

“Whether there are enough critics left at all, who still want to do it – or can afford it at all.” (Pees)

This question is justified. (Almost) no one can afford to make a living from theatre criticism. The fees are pitiful or non-existent. The clamour about the poor qualifications of theatre critics is age-old:

“Yes, theatre criticism is not infrequently the last refuge of a degenerate talent, of a mentally and morally disintegrated person who finds himself excluded from all other literary activities, which require the acquisition and mastery of a rich material.”

This was written by H.Th. Rötscher, himself a theatre critic, as early as 18645. Michael Billington, the theatre critic of the British “Guardian”, provided a friendlier self-description of the type person that becomes a theatre critic:

“Critics are born, not made: possibly because of some temperamental deficiency or innate shyness, many of us discover at an early age that we prefer to be among the watchers than the watched … We find our emotional energies released by appraising the work of others.”6

But the qualifications of today`s critics are high. Most of them have a degree in theatre studies as intellectual background. But no one stays in the business for long, unless they have sufficient other income. Some become dramaturges, a few get editorial posts in the mixed feuilleton, some become lecturers at universities, others switch to curating festivals. Theatre criticism has become a sideline or a transitional occupation 7.

“I doubt that journalism still is really as independent as it was or supposedly once was.” (Pees)
“A view of journalism that is out of date.” (AD)

Frugal rewards for theatre criticism naturally encourage susceptibility to subtle attempts of corrupting critics. Till Briegleb’s iron rule “A sincere critic does not fraternise with the theatre.”8 is being softened. This applies above all to local criticism. If newspaper editors are still interested in theatre coverage, they want preliminary reports, interviews, portraits. These require closer contact with the theatre. Local theatre critics tend to be mild in their assessment of the productions of their city’s theatre anyway9.

“In times of social media, one can communicate oneself through quite a few channels. This creates the possibility of criticism of criticism.” (AD)

Nachtkritik.de is the medium that has best succeeded in using these possibilities of interactive communication on the internet for theatre criticism.10 But the social internet media accelerate the fragmentation of the public sphere through the algorithms of attention steering working in the background. The public sphere is a field in which opinions compete for attention. The media have always been segmented, newspapers had a basic political slant. Nevertheless, they were open to the reading public. Anyone who read a conservative critique of a theatre performance in the “Welt” (or “Daily Telegraph”) could have their opinion confirmed by reading a more liberal critique in the “Frankfurter Rundschau” (or “Guardian”). Back then, it was a long time ago.  What the segmentation of the public through attention-grabbing and choice architecture on the internet does, can be seen in the political development of American democracy. However, it is short-sighted to conclude from the reduction of the importance of print media that theatre criticism is dying.

Christine Wahl sees the fatal tendency to understand the task of theatre criticism as an invitation to “join in a community of values” 11. Deuflhard and Lilienthal seem to orient themselves more towards the model of the market economy. Each producer advertises his product. The theatres can criticise themselves; after all, every dramaturge is also a critic, according to Matthias Pees. After all, every expert assessment for some theatre by the management consultancy Actori, which specialises in theatre consulting, has shown that the marketing department needs to be staffed more strongly, despite or precisely because of all the theatres’ efforts to save money. So marketing departments of theatres simulate journalism in their own interest.

However, one function of theatre criticism (in addition to providing guidance on possible performance attendance, reporting) is to draw theatre into the realm of public debate. A theatre performance is an event in the simultaneous physical presence of many. Making this event debatable is also a function of criticism. This includes some kind of judgement, positive or negative, that makes a debate for-and-against possible. This debate is not only the great public one, but also the private one between spectators of the same production and between actual and potential spectators. A theatre review is not only part of a public debate, but can also be the subject of a private debate. Such micro-discussions form the root network of a pluralistic democracy. Theatre criticism is not marketing. A theatre production is more than just a commodity to be sold. Theatre criticism is debate culture. And the aesthetic debate about the value of jointly experienced representations of human conditions is the pleasurable preliminary exercise for the debates about the political regulation of social relations.

Internationalisation

“Set an example for how we on this continent intend to live and communicate with our neighbours in the future in general.” (Pees)

That is the best intention of the whole enterprise of restructuring the Berlin Theatertreffen. But there does not yet seem to be a coherent concept for how it is to be realised.

  1. Andreas Reckwitz, Die Gesellschaft der Singularitäten. Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2017. p.175. See also my article “Theatre and Theatre Criticism in the Society of Singularities.” ↵
  2. Christine Wahl: Zum Stand der Theaterkritik. nachtkritik.de 4 May 2022 ↵
  3. “The judgement of taste itself does not postulate everyone’s approval {…}; it only suggests this approval to everyone.” Immanuel Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft. Analytik des Schönen, §8 ↵
  4. Till Briegleb, “Kritiker und Theater. 10 Thesen” in: Dramaturgie. Zeitschrift der Dramaturgischen Gesellschaft. Resümée des Symposions ‚Radikal Sozial‘. Berlin 2006 ↵
  5. Heinrich Theodor Röscher, Die Kunst der dramatischen Darstellung in ihrem organischen Zusammenhang wissenschaftlich entwickelt. First volume. Leipzig: Otto Wiegand, 2nd edition 1864, p.50 ↵
  6. Michael Billington, One Night Stands. A Critic`s View of modern British theatre. London: Nick Hern, 1993, p. IXf ↵
  7. I have always understood my appointment to the jury of the Theatertreffen in 2000 as the beginning of the decline of the profession of theatre critic. I was probably the first person in that position who did not earn his living as a journalist. ↵
  8. Rule No.1, Till Briegleb op. cit. ↵
  9. On the differences between regional and national theatre criticism, see: Vasco Bönisch, “Die Aufgaben der Theaterkritik”, in: V.B., Krise der Kritik? Was Theaterkritiker denken – und was ihre Leser erwarten. Berlin: Theater der Zeit, 2008, pp. 103-150 ↵
  10. See Christiane Wahl’s essay “Zum Zustand der Theaterkritik” nachtkritik.de 4 May 2022 ↵
  11. in: Zum Stand der Theaterkritik”  nachtkritik.de 4.5.2022 ↵

Truth in Theatre – Part 3 Acting

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1

So there is no truth to be found in the theatre text. Adorno said that you can’t squeeze a statement out of “Hamlet”. And Bertrand Russell concluded succinctly that all the propositions in “Hamlet” are false because the person Hamlet never existed2. But the actor (or actress) who plays Hamlet does exist.  And he (or she) is supposed to be true.

Truth in theatre is not knowledge that can be experienced or formulated, it is a demand on the performance of actors and actresses. This use of the term “truth” has a long tradition in the theory of acting.

Truth as deception

One of the oldest formulations of this ideal of the art of acting is found in 1749 by the French theatre theorist Sainte-Albine:

“Dramatic poems please us the more they resemble true stories, and the perfection we demand in their performances is actually what is called truth, in the language of the theatre. One understands by this word here the confluence of all probabilities which can serve to deceive the spectators.” 3.

Johann Jakob Engel, for a time director of the Berlin National Theatre, still adopted this view in 1785:

“When words, tone, movement, are in the most perfect agreement with each other, and all in the most perfect agreement with passion, situation and character; only then does the highest possible degree of truth arise, and through this truth the highest possible deception.” 4

Here, then, truth has the function of deceiving. The fact that this contradiction in terms somehow overstretches the concept of truth was soon to be noticed.

Denis Diderot was more cautious in his use of the term:

“Think for a moment about what being true means in the theatre. Does it mean showing things as they are in nature? Not at all. The true, in this case, would be nothing other than the ordinary. But what is the true on stage? It is the conformity of actions, of speech, of appearance, of voice, of movement and gesture to an ideal conceived by the poet and often exaggerated by the actor. This true is the miracle.” 5

Here, then, the true is the miracle – also a use of the concept of truth that needs a lot of explanation.

Truth and beauty

In contrast to his teacher Hegel, for whom the truth of art consists in the concordance of the external and the internal 6, for the theatre critic Heinrich Theodor Rötscher, truth in the performing arts is only one of the two sides that theatre must combine.

“In the art of acting, which is based on the sensualisation of drama, they {the opposites of the general and the individual} appear in the demand to let beauty as well as truth come to their rights in equal measure.”7

For him, beauty stands for ideality, truth for sensually perceptible reality. Without ideality, meaning the dramatic text created by the poet, the actor sinks down to mere “natural truth” 8. Truth alone is not enough. In Rötscher’s idealistic theatre aesthetics, then, truth is no longer the term used to designate the supreme goal of the art of acting.

Truth as belief

It is Stanislavski who gives the concept of truth in theatre a more precise meaning. For him, truth is a quality of the actor’s inner feeling.

“In the theatre it is not important that Othello’s dagger is made of cardboard or metal, but that the inner feeling of the actor himself, which justifies Othello’s murder, is true, sincere and genuine. … We talk about this truth of feeling in the theatre. Here is that scenic truth which is necessary for the actor at the moment of his creation. There is no real art without such truth and belief!” 9.

In Stanislavski’s work, the conceptual pair “truth-deception”, which could be  seen in Sainte-Albine and Engel, becomes the connection “truth-belief”. What the actor’s truth produces is no longer “deception” but “belief”:

“Truth produced belief.” 10.

This “truth” is something the actor or actress produces, not something he or she finds or names.

“Logic and consistency of the actor’s physical actions and sensations lead to truth. 11

Truth for Stanislavski is something internal:

“Truth on stage is what we sincerely believe both in our inner selves and in the souls of our partners.” 12.

This internal state is twofold: it is both a psycho-physical state experienced by the actress or actor and the reflection of this state: one “sincerely believes” in this state. With Stanislavski’s psycho-technique, the actor creates an inner process in order to achieve an effect (belief of the spectator). Because the actor or actress believes in his or her deliberately aroused emotion and feels it as his genuine emotion the audience believes this emotion to be the “truth”.

That the concept of “truth” (Правда) is once again overstretched here only became clear to Stanislawski’s German translators at a later stage. In the GDR, they initially followed Alexandra Meyenburg’s old translation. Ottofritz Gaillard (after 1945 director of the German Theatre Institute in Weimar and later of the acting department of the Theatre Academy in Leipzig) wrote in his handbook for training actors in 1947:

“The truth of the stage as a framework for the truth of sensation and, on the other hand, the truth of sensation as a prerequisite for the truth of the stage, that is the knowledge on which we continue to build.” 13.

His mentor Maxim Vallentin (1927-1932 director of the agitprop group Rotes Sprachrohr, artistic director of the Maxim Gorki Theatre 1952-1968) goes even further: the “stage of truth” unites

“three truths – the truth of feeling, the truth of the stage and the social truth” 14

Here the concept of truth is transferred from the actor (“sensation”) via the content of the theatre productions (“stage”) to politics: the construction of socialism in the GDR is the “social truth” that the theatre serves.

Truth as truthfulness

In West-Germany, people were a little more cautious when dealing with truth. Hans-Günther von Klöden, director of the Hanover Drama School since 1950, felt a slight unease about this Stanislavskian concept of truth:

“So what are we to understand by ‘truth’? […] Perhaps we have made a linguistic slip-up and ‘truthfulness’ is what is meant?” 15

“Truthfulness” (“Wahrhaftigkeit”) is also the term used by the translators of the later GDR edition of Stanisławski’s writings to translate Правда (Pravda).  16 Von Klöden is not satisfied with this way out either:

” … for we are nevertheless thrown back on the concept of truth, since truthfulness is nothing other than the virtue of always telling the truth.”17

Nevertheless, he returns to the concept of “truth”:

“Aristotle only speaks of the truth of propositions or more precisely of  ‘judgements’. But we think that a thing, a process or any other phenomenon can also be true ‘in itself’. And thus ‘truth’ takes on the meaning of ‘reality’, ‘authenticity’. Authenticity of action arises from the ‘centre of gravity’ of the human being. (…) We are not only concerned with playing inwardly, but from the inside out. According to this, art would be above all: the ability to speak the truth clearly.” 18

Here, too, the actor’s truth is something complex: genuine acting out of the person’s centre of gravity and its deliberate clarification.

In English-language textbooks, on the other hand, the Stanislavskian notion of truth seems to persist: “Truth” is the word emblazoned in large letters on the cover of Susan Batson’s acting textbook.

“Stanislavski understood that actors bring characters to life by using the truth of their own experience. The actor’s truth is the truth of honest sensation.” 19.

The German publisher has carefully added a subtitle to the triumphant title: “Wahrhaftigkeit im Schauspiel” (truthfulness in acting).

Truth as an individual relation

In his essay “On the Philosophy of the Actor” (“Zur Philosophie des Schauspielers”), Georg Simmel tries to save the concept of truth in the actor by redefining it. For him, truth is no longer the correspondence between statement and object, nothing universally objective, but a relation between an individual and an object:

“What we call truth about an object is something very diverse, depending on the being for which the truth is to apply (…) Thus for every being there is a truth about every given object that is different because of its individuality.”20

Truth is not a relation between subject and object that would be the same for all intelligent subjects but is different for each “species of being”. “Truth” for Simmel is only the “expression for the appropriate relation between subject and object”. Actors who are “different in their temperaments and talents” also belong to such different “types of being”. Thus, for every type of actor there is a “true” portrayal of a certain role (the example, as always, is Hamlet), but it is not the same for every type of actor and this truth is not always achieved. Thus the concept of truth dissolves and becomes an individual ideal of the relationship between actor and role. How this ideal is to be recognised remains open. The only indication of this ideal is that, if this ideal is not achieved, the viewer’s emotional reaction will be: this realization of this role in this performance  “does not satisfy us” (“befriedigt uns nicht”).

In his collection of texts, Jens Roselt has traced the zigzag path of acting theory between hot and cold actor, between playing from the outside in or from the inside out, in all its details and concludes:

“The dispute about the ‘genuineness’ of feelings cannot be settled in theory.” 21

Intermediate result 3

Truth as a term to denote the goal of acting, of the embodiment of a role, has a tradition that goes back a long way. However, on closer analysis of this use of the term, it dissolves and proves to be unsuitable.

  1. Please forgive me that I use of the generic masculine. The reason for this lies in the texts of acting theory reproduced here. Even in the 21st century, the masculine “the actor” is often used in them when speaking of acting in general. Where it is stylistically bearable, I have tried to make it clear that the statements also refer to actresses as well. ↵
  2. “The propositions in the play are false because there was no such man.” Bertrand Russell, An Enquiry into Meaning and Truth, London: Allen and Unwin, 1962, p. 277 ↵
  3. Engl. transl. G.P. „Dramatische Erdichtungen gefallen uns desto mehr, je ähnlicher sie wahrhaften Geschichten sind, und die Vollkommenheit, die wir in ihren Vorstellungen verlangen, ist eigentlich das was man in der Sprache des Theaters, Wahrheit nennet. Man versteht durch dieses Wort hier den Zusammenfluss aller Wahrscheinlichkeiten, welche dienen können, die Zuschauer zu täuschen.“ Rémond de Sainte-Albine, der Schauspieler. Übers. v. Friedrich Justin Bertuch. Altenburg 1772, p.49, original: “Les fictions Dramatiques nous plaisant d’autant plus, qu’elles sont plus semblables à des aventures réelles, la perfection que nous desirons le plus dans la Représentation est ce qu’au Théatre on nomme Vérité. On y entend par ce mot le concours des apparences, qui peuvent servir à tromper des Spectateurs.” Le comédien : ouvrage divisé en deux parties / par M. Remond de Sainte-Albine. Nouvelle édition augmentée & corrigée. Paris: Desaint & Saillant, 1749. p.107. https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=ucm.5323613769&view=1up&seq=137. Bertuch translates “apparences” as “probabilities (Wahrscheinlichkeiten)” while actually “appearances” is meant ↵
  4. Engl. transl. G.P. „Wenn Worte, Ton, Bewegung, auf das vollkommenste unter einander, und alle auf vollkommenste mit Leidenschaft, Situation und Charakter übereinstimmen; dann erst entsteht der höchste mögliche Grad der Wahrheit, und durch diese Wahrheit die höchste mögliche Täuschung.“ zit. in: Jens Roselt (Hg.), Schauspieltheorien. Seelen mit Methode. Schauspieltheorien vom Barock – bis zum  postdramatischen Theater. Berlin: Alexander Verlag, 2005, S.154 ↵
  5. „Denken Sie einen Augenblick darüber nach, was auf dem Theater Wahrsein bedeutet. Heisst das, die Dinge so zu zeigen, wie sie in der Natur sind? Keineswegs. Das Wahre in diesem Fall, wäre nichts anderes als das Gewöhnliche. Aber was ist denn das Wahre auf der Bühne? Es ist die Übereinstimmung der Handlungen, des Sprechens, der Erscheinung, der Stimme, der Bewegung und der Geste mit einer von dem Dichter ersonnenen Idealvorstellung, die vom Schauspieler oft noch übersteigert wird. Das ist das Wunder.“ Engl. transl. Ftom German G.P., Denis Diderot, Paradox über den Schauspieler. transl. u. eingeführt von Felix Rellstab. Wädenswil: Verlag Stutz & Co, 1981, p.22. Original: “Réfléchissez un moment sur ce qu’on appelle au théâtre être vrai. Est-ce y montrer les choses comme elles sont en nature? Aucunement. Le vrai en ce sens ne serait que le commun. Qu’est-ce donc que le vrai de la scène? C’est la conformité des actions, des discours, de la figure, de la voix, du mouvement, du geste, avec un modèle idéal imaginé par le poet, et souvent exagéré par le comédien. Voilà le merveilleux.” Denis Diderot, Paradoxe sur le comédien. Ouvrage posthume. Paris: Sautele, 1830. p. 21. https://books.google.be/books?id=gksHAAAAQAAJ&printsec=frontcover&hl=fr&source=gbs_v2_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false ↵
  6. G.W.F. Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik I. Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 1970 (= Theorie Werkausgabe Bd. 13), S.205 ↵
  7. Engl. transl. G.P. „In der Schauspielkunst, welche auf die Versinnlichung des Dramas ausgeht, treten sie {die Gegensätze des Allgemeinen und des Individuellen} zunächst in der Forderung auf, die Schönheit wie die Wahrheit gleichmäßig zu ihrem Rechte kommen zu lassen.“ Heinrich Theodor Rötscher, Die Kunst der dramatischen Darstellung in ihrem organischen Zusammenhang wissenschaftlich entwickelt. (First volume) Leipzig: Otto Wiegand, 2nd edition 1864, p.19 ↵
  8. “Naturwahrheit”, ibid. p.21 ↵
  9. Engl. transl. from German G.P. „Im Theater ist nicht wichtig, dass der Dolch des Othello aus Karton oder Metall ist, sondern, dass das innere Gefühl des Schauspielers selbst, das den Mord des Othello rechtfertigt, wahr, aufrichtig und echt ist. … Über diese Wahrheit des Gefühls sprechen wir im Theater. Hier ist jene szenische Wahrheit, die für den Schauspieler im Augenblick seines Schaffens nötig ist. Es gibt  keine echte Kunst ohne solche Wahrheit und Glaube!“ Konstantin Sergejewitsch Stanislawskij, Das Geheimnis des schauspielerischen Erfolges.  übers. v. Alexandra Meyenburg. Zürich: Scientia AG, o.J (1940?). {zuerst Moskau 1938}. S.185 ↵
  10. „Die Wahrheit erzeugte den Glauben.“ ibid. p.225 ↵
  11. Engl. transl. from German G.P „Logik und Folgerichtigkeit der physischen Handlungen und Empfindungen“ des Schauspielers führt zur Wahrheit. ibid. p. 225 ↵
  12. „Die Wahrheit auf der Bühne ist das, woran wir aufrichtig sowohl in unserem Innern glauben, als auch in den Seelen unserer Partner.“ Ibid. p. 185 ↵
  13. „Die Wahrheit der Bühne als Rahmen für die Wahrheit der Empfindung und andererseits die Wahrheit der Empfindung als Voraussetzung für die Wahrheit der Bühne, das ist die Erkenntnis, auf der wir weiterbauen.“ Ottofritz Gaillard, Das deutsche Stanislawski-Buch. Lehrbuch der Schauspielkunst nach dem Stanislawski-System. Berlin: Aufbau-Verlag, 1947, S.191 ↵
  14. Die Bühne der Wahrheit“ vereine „die drei Wahrheiten – die Wahrheit der Empfindung, die Wahrheit der Bühne und die gesellschaftliche Wahrheit“ ibid. Geleitwort S.11. ↵
  15. „Was also sollen wir unter ‚Wahrheit‘ verstehen? (…) Vielleicht ist uns eine sprachliche Schlamperei unterlaufen, und es ist ‚Wahrhaftigkeit‘ gemeint?“ Hans Günther von Klöden, Grundlagen der Schauspielkunst II: Improvisation und Rollenstudium. Velber bei Hannover: Friedrich Verlag, 1967 (Reihe Theater heute 24) p.19 ↵
  16. Stanisławski. Die Arbeit des Schauspielers an sich selbst. Tagebuch eines Schülers. Teil 1 Die Arbeit an sich selbst im schöpferischen Prozess des Erlebens. übers. v. Ingrid Tintzmann. Westberlin: das europäische Buch, 1981, z.B. S. 148ff, 181 ↵
  17. „ … denn wir werden doch wieder auf den Begriff der Wahrheit zurückgeworfen, da ja Wahrhaftigkeit nichts anderes ist als die Tugend, stets die Wahrheit zu sagen.“ A similar, but not entirely synonymous definition is found in Otto Friedrich Bollnow: “While truth (according to the traditional, but for the present context entirely sufficient definition) means the (objective) agreement of a statement with its object, truthfulness means its (subjective) agreement with the opinion of the speaker. (…) But truthfulness (or untruthfulness) turns inwards, i.e. it lives in man’s relation to himself. (…) Truthfulness, therefore, goes to the behaviour of the human being towards himself. It means the inner transparency and the free standing up for oneself.” Übers. G.P., „Während die Wahrheit (nach der überkommenen, aber für den gegenwärtigen Zusammenhang völlig ausreichenden Bestimmung) die (objektive) Übereinstimmung einer Aussage mit ihrem Gegenstand bedeutet, meint die Wahrhaftigkeit ihr (subjektive) Übereinstimmung mit der Meinung des Sprechers. (…) Die Wahrhaftigkeit aber (oder Unwahrhaftigkeit) wendet sich nach innen, d.h. sie lebt in der Beziehung des Menschen zu sich selbst. (…) Die Wahrhaftigkeit geht also auf das Verhalten des Menschen zu sich selbst. Sie bedeutet die innere Durchsichtigkeit und das freie Einstehen für sich selbst.“ Otto Friedrich Bollnow, Wesen und Wandel der Tugenden. Frankfurt/M: Ullstein, 1958, S.138f ↵
  18. “Bei Aristoteles ist nur von der Wahrheit einer Aussage, genauer eines ‚Urteils‘ die Rede. Wir aber meinen, daß auch eine Sache, ein Vorgang oder sonst irgendein Phänomen „in sich“ wahr sein kann. Und damit bekommt die ‚Wahrheit‘ die Bedeutung von ‚Wirklichkeit‘, ‚Echtheit‘. Echtheit des Handelns erwächst aus dem ‚Schwerpunkt‘ des Menschen. (…) Es geht uns nicht nur darum, innerlich, sondern von innen nach außen zu spielen. Kunst wäre hiernach vor allem: die Fähigkeit, die Wahrheit deutlich zu sagen.” v. Klöden, op. cit., p. 20f. ↵
  19. Susan Batson, Truth: Personas, Needs, and Flaws in the Art of Building Actors and Creating Characters. Webster/Stone, 2006 (German: Truth. Wahrhaftigkeit im Schauspiel. Ein Lehrbuch. Berlin: Alexander Verlag, 2014) ↵
  20. Georg Simmel, “Zur Philosophie des Schauspielers”, in: G.S., Das individuelle Gesetz. Philosophische Exkurse, ed. by Michael Landmann. Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 1987, p. 85f. The essay was first published posthumously from the estate in: Internationale Zeitung für die Philosophie der Kultur, vol. 9 (1920-1921), pp.339-362. It is not identical with the essay of the same title in: Der Morgen 2.Jg., No.51/52, 18 December 1908, pp.1685-1689 ↵
  21. „Der Streit um die ‚Echtheit‘ von Gefühlen kann in der Theorie nicht beigelegt werden.“ Jens Roselt (ed.), Schauspieltheorien. Seelen mit Methode. Schauspieltheorien vom Barock – bis zum  postdramatischen Theater. Berlin: Alexander Verlag, 2005, introduction p.47 ↵

Truth in Theatre – Part 2 Drama

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Neither Hegel nor Heidegger nor Adorno apply the concept of truth to theatre. They are concerned with art in general, and in Hegel’s case with drama in particular. The side of theatre that is not identical with the word, the visualisation of text in a theatre performance or the non-linguistic side of theatre, are not essential for its truth content. The work of art is the work of words.

Theatre text and theatre performance

Hegel completely devalues the non-linguistic side of theatre 1 and if a theatre performance succeeds, it is only because the theatre poet has created the right conditions for it in the text.2.
For Heidegger, even all art is ultimately poetry.3 As for Hegel, language has a superior role in art4. If Heidegger mentions theatre once in passing, then in a pejorative sense as a machine of experience, as a medium of showmanship5.
Adorno, on the other hand, describes himself as “half a theatre child.”6. But by “theatre” he always means either drama or opera. His “Notes on Literature” contain the influential essays on dramas by Goethe, Beckett, Brecht, Horvath, etc. In the lovingly ironic essay “Natural History of the Theatre”, which is more a collection of aperçus about the audience and the various premises of a theatre building, it is also only about the opera audience and opera houses.7 He thinks nothing of opera directors who try to save operas “through the mise en scene” or try to “modernise it somehow” 8. Thus, one can expect little enlightenment from Adorno on the relationship of theatre (not drama and not opera) to truth.

One of the few theatre practitioners who dealt with the concept of truth was the director Adolf Dresen 9. He emphasises that the truth of art is a new truth, thus, similar to Heidegger, Adorno and Badiou, he sees truth as something developing, emerging, not as something fixed that art must achieve10. For him, the truth of art is always a “new truth”, and – entirely in the Heideggerian idiom – a truth that reveals itself11. But he too only explains his understanding of the truth of “art” in general, not of the particular role of truth in theatre.

The truth of the theatre text

If one now tentatively agrees to understand truth on the theatre only as the truth of drama, i.e. the theatre text, – what can be said about it using the example of Jon Fosse’s drama “Dream in Autumn” addressed by Ivan Nagel?12

Let’s take the first sentence of Jon Fosse’s text:

“MAN: No is it you”13

No criterion of truth can be applied to this sentence: it is the beginning of a dialogue (between a man and a woman), it is spoken in a specific situation (reunion at the cemetery), it is fictional (part of a text that constructs its own reality), it is an interrogative sentence. Let’s try another sentence:

“MOTHER: Nothing stays / everything moves / like clouds / A life is a cloudy sky /before it gets dark.”14

This looks like a propositional sentence, but how are we to judge that it is true? It contains a metaphor and judges something as general as “a life”. Metaphors cannot be true. Nor is the truth of a theatre text to be sought at this level. There are only a few such life-like sentences in Fosse’s work. He also immediately devalues them with sentences like:

“MAN: We’re just talking /Actually all nonsense /What we say /Just talk/ Yes”15.

Fosse himself also sees the truth of his texts not in the individual sentences but, quite Hegelian, in the whole:

“Didn’t someone say here: Truth is always concrete? … I am concerned with the whole of a text, and the world in the text speaks of the whole and is therefore present in every part, in every detail of the text.”16

The truth of a drama, or its participation in truth, cannot therefore lie in individual propositions, but only in the drama as a whole. The drama as a whole speaks a non-discursive language (although it also consists of many discursive sentences). So what this truth is that the drama expresses or conveys cannot be discursively formulated. But nevertheless it is supposed to exist, this trans-subjective something, the truth of the work of art. For Adorno, then, critique would have to work out this truth, although it cannot be squeezed out of the drama as a statement (see Adorno’s remark about “Hamlet”17).

The example of “Dream in Autumn”

So what would be true about “Dream in Autumn”? The experience of time, for example, how past and present mix in consciousness. In Fosse’s play, the time levels mix imperceptibly, forwards and backwards. Of course, in real life we can distinguish past and present, but in our consciousness current perceptions, memories and plans for the future do mix. Only these expanded temporal dimensions give meaning and significance to our perceptions in the here and now. Would that be the truth of this play? If so, – it has been worked out, it is the result of the reflections of an individual recipient. It is trans-subjective at most as an imposition on others to agree with this truth (cf. Kant’s judgement of taste) 18. Of course, “Dream in Autumn” has a part in the “untruthfulness of the age”: the characters are not happy, their communication is unconsciously instrumental, the image of women that the three female characters portray is pitiful, even if at the end they march into the future as a surviving, seemingly reconciled trio.

What is crucial, however, is that what is called “truth” in Heideggersch-Adornitic diction emerges from a communicative act between artwork and recipient. Viewed soberly, this “truth” is different in every head – and thus loses the justification of a supra-individual validity. If everyone has their own truth, there is no point in ascribing truth to these different thoughts of different individuals. 19 That these many thoughts are stimulated by a single object, the work of art, or in theatre by a common experience, is the essence of art. Art is communication, not truth, that is the insight of hermeneutics20. Gadamer does take up the question of the truth of art, but then resolves it in the back and forth of the playful conversation between the work of art and the art recipient. The claim of “lifting {so-called} reality to its truth” through art 21 becomes in the end only the “truth of play” 22. This overstretches the concept of truth beyond its possible meanings.

If there were one or more “truths” in “Dream in Autumn”, they must surely have been noticed by someone. In the reviews of the world premiere at the Schaubühne Berlin and in those of the production of the Münchner Kammerspiele invited to the Theatertreffen, the word “truth” is not to be found, not even the adjective “true”. The judgements of the play, the theatre text as distinguished from its performance, are cautiously positive in the premiere, but negative in the Munich production. The relationship between the evaluation of the theatre text and the production is reversed. Günther Grack in the Tagesspiegel only notes at the premiere that Fosse’s play abstains from “any message pointing beyond it” 23. Eva Corino criticises “flight into false simplicity” 24, Barbara Villiger-Heilig complains on the occasion of the Munich performance that the text “cannot hide its weak points where it becomes philosophical” 25. Marietta Piekenbrock immediately hands out “the sour pickle for the weakest play of the season” 26. The production of the world premiere is benevolently depreciated (“schade” Dirk Pilz 27, “remarkably successful in extracting a maximum of atmospheric appeal and psychological tension from the diffuse web”, Günther Grack28), the Munich production unambiguously praised: “wonderful” (Dirk Pilz), “wonderful” (Rüdiger Schaper29), “great” (Simone Meier 30).
If you look for truth-apt sentences in these reviews that go beyond the description of what happens on stage and the reproduction of the audience’s feelings, the most you will find are sentences like the one by Dirk Pilz:

“To live is to prepare for death, to love is to practice saying goodbye.” 31

Or Christopher Schmidt’s:

“Two things, death and love, take you off your feet.” 32

However, as in many theatre reviews, these sentences deliberately remain in limbo between the reproduction of views attributed to the theatre text or production and general statements by the critic. They are part of the game. Such statements do not claim general validity, they are subjective attempts to mediate between the theatre text or the experienced performance and the spectator, are tentative generalisations that are aware of their unalterable subjectivity. 33.

Interim result 2

The application of the concept of “truth” to a theatre text is thus only possible if truth is something absolute, the idea, the whole, being or the like. Truth as propositional truth is not applicable to texts of theatre literature. Empirically, the use of the term “truth” as an evaluative concept of art reception seems to have died out sometime in the 1970s. Only the philosophical fossil Alain Badiou still uses it.

 

See also Truth in Theatre Part 3 Acting. Part 4 on Representation will (hopefully) follow soon.

  1. see my contribution “Hegel and the Theatre” https://theatermarginalien.com/en/2019/08/17/hegel-and-the-theatre/ ↵
  2. see my contribution “With Hegel in the Theatre” https://theatermarginalien.com/en/2021/05/10/with-hegel-in-the-theatre/ ↵
  3. “All art, as letting happen the arrival of the truth of being as such, is in essence poetry.” „Alle Kunst ist als Geschehenlassen der Ankunft der Wahrheit des Seienden als eines solchen im Wesen Dichtung.“ Martin Heidegger, Der Ursprung des Kunstwerks. Mit der „Einführung“ von Hans-Georg Gadamer und der ersten Fassung des Textes (1935) Frankfurt/M: Klostermann, 2012, p.59 ↵
  4. “Nevertheless, the linguistic work, poetry in the narrower sense, has a distinguished position in the whole of the arts.” “Gleichwohl hat das Sprachwerk, die Dichtung im engeren Sinne eine ausgezeichnete Stellung im Ganzen der Künste.“ Heidegger, Der Ursprung des Kunstwerks, op. cit. p.61 ↵
  5. “Everything to be represented should only act as foreground and surface, aiming at the impression, the effect, the wish to impress and stir up: ‘theatre’.” „Alles Darzustellende soll nur wirken als Vordergrund und Vorderfläche, abzielend auf den Eindruck, den Effekt, das Wirken- und Aufwühlenwollen: ‚Theater‘.“ Martin Heidegger, „Nietzsche I“ in: Gesamtausgabe Bd. 6,1. Frankfurt/M: Klostermann, 1996, S.85. Quoted by Marten Weise, „Heideggers Schweigen vom Theater“, in: Leon Gabriel, Nikolaus Müller-Schöll (Hg.) Das Denken der Bühne. Szenen zwischen Theater und Philosophie. Bielfeld: Transkript, 2019. Weise fictionalises a vision of theatre  that Heidegger should have written but did not ↵
  6. “After all, I consider myself half a theatre child.” “Ich betrachte mich ja selber als ein halbes Theaterkind.“ Theodor W. Adorno, „Theater, Oper, Bürgertum“ in: Egon Vietta (Hg.), Theater. Darmstädter Gespräch 1955. Darmstadt: Neue Darmstädter Verlagsanstalt, 1955, p.139 ↵
  7. Adorno, Musikalische Schriften I-III. Gesammelte Werke Vol. 16, pp.309-320. The individual texts first appeared in the “Blättern des Hessischen Landestheaters, Darmstadt” 1931-33. ↵
  8. Adorno, Darmstädter Gespräch 1955, op. cit. p.139 ↵
  9. Adolf Dresen (1935-2001) was a theatre director first in the GDR at the Deutsche Theater, then at the Burgtheater in Vienna, in Frankfurt am Main and later an opera director at various European theatres ↵
  10. “The truth of art is {…} the new truth, it depends on the real discovery of truth. When truth is discovered, it is in contradiction with the previous image of the world, with the previous truth, the old truth. The truth of art takes truth seriously as a historical category.” „Die Wahrheit der Kunst ist {…} die neue Wahrheit, es kommt ihr an auf die wirkliche Entdeckung der Wahrheit. Wenn die Wahrheit entdeckt wird, ist sie im Widerspruch mit dem bisherigen Bild der Welt, mit der bisherigen Wahrheit, der alten Wahrheit. Die Wahrheit der Kunst macht Ernst mit der Wahrheit als einer historischen Kategorie.“ Adolf Dresen, „Wahrheitsagen“, in: Siegfrieds Vergessen. Kultur zwischen Konsens und Konflikt. Berlin: Christoph Links Verlag, 1992 {auch in Sinn und Form 1992}, p.212 ↵
  11. “It is this crust of self-evidence that art breaks through. {…} Truth is a performance. It is the reality behind reality, the other reality not of the existing, the recognised, the established, but of the astonishing, the astounding, even the miraculous. {…} The truth of art is the new truth, but it is also the new truth. It is neither a flat imitation nor pure aestheticism, but cognition. It is neither the existing truth nor the ignored truth, but the truth that has been unknown until now, the truth that is revealing itself.” „Es ist diese Kruste der Selbstverständlichkeit, die die Kunst durchbricht. {…} Die Wahrheit ist eine Leistung. Sie ist die Wirklichkeit hinter der Wirklichkeit, die andere Wirklichkeit nicht des Bestehenden, Anerkannten, Festgestellten, sondern des Erstaunlichen, Verblüffenden, ja des Wunderbaren. {…} Die Wahrheit der Kunst ist die neue Wahrheit, aber sie ist eben auch die neue Wahrheit. Sie ist weder der platte Abklatsch noch der pure Ästhetizismus, sondern Erkennen. Sie ist weder die bestehende noch die ignorierte, sondern die bis eben unbekannte, die sich offenbarende Wahrheit.“ Adolf Dresen op. cit., p.222f. ↵
  12. An excellent, methodologically very conscious and detailed work on Jon Fosse’s “Dream in Autumn” is the thesis by Marion Titsch, Das Ungesagte im Gesagten. Dramaturgische Untersuchungen zu Jon Fosses Theatertexten Draum om hausten und Svevn sowie deren Inszenierungen von Luk Perceval und Michael Thalheimer. Diplomarbeit Universität Wien 2009. https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/11585761.pdf ↵
  13. „MANN: Nein bist du das“ Jon Fosse, Traum im Herbst und andere Stücke. Reinbek: Rowohlt, 2001 p. 91 ↵
  14. “MUTTER: Nichts bleibt / alles zieht / wie Wolken / Ein Leben ist ein Wolkenhimmel /bevor es dunkel wird“ p.135 ↵
  15. „MANN: Wir reden ja nur / Eigentlich alles Unsinn /was wir sagen /Nur Gerede/ Ja“ p.115 ↵
  16. „Sagte nicht jemand hier: Die Wahrheit ist immer konkret? … Es geht mir um das Ganze eines Textes, und die Welt im Text spricht vom Ganzen und ist daher in jedem Teil, in jedem Detail des Textes präsent.“ Programme booklet for “Traum im Herbst” Münchner Kammerspiele. Premiere 29 November 2001. The someone Fosse is referring to is probably Hegel, although the quote was subsequently attributed to Lenin and Brecht. “The true, the spirit, is concrete {…} Only the concrete is the real, which bears the differences.” „Das Wahre, der Geist, ist konkret {…} Nur das Konkrete ist das Wirkliche, welches die Unterschiede trägt.“ Hegel, WA vol. 18 Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie , p.45 u. 53 ↵
  17. “Keine Aussage wäre aus *Hamlet* herauszupressen; dessen Wahrheitsgehalt ist darum nicht geringer.“ Ästhetische Theorie, p. 193 ↵
  18. That was roughly the meaning of my awkward answer to Ivan Nagel, that I consider truth to be something objective, whereas the critical appraisal of a play depends on the justification of a subjective judgement ↵
  19. „If it’s open to the individual spectator to derive certain implications into one universal proposition or another, then we are no longer talking about a straightforward instance of learning from true propositions (implicitly) expressed in the play; instead we are talking about a kind of interaction between spectator and performance, in which the spectator develops or reflects upon her own view in relation to the play.“ Tom Stern, Philosophy and Theatre. An introduction. London: Routledge, 2014, p.54 ↵
  20. “For the dialectic of question and answer which we have exhibited makes the relation of understanding appear as an interrelation of the kind of a conversation. It is true that the text does not speak to us in the same way as a you. We, the understanders, must first make it talk to us. But it has been shown that such an understanding making it speak is not an arbitrary use of its own origin, but is itself related as a question to the answer expected in the text. {…} This is the truth of effect-historical consciousness.” „Denn die Dialektik von Frage und Antwort, die wir aufwiesen, lässt das Verhältnis des Verstehens als ein Wechselverhältnis von der Art eines Gesprächs erscheinen. Zwar redet der Text nicht so zu uns wie ein Du. Wir, die Verstehenden, müssen ihn von uns aus erst zum Reden bringen. Aber es hatte sich gezeigt, dass solche verstehendes Zum-Reden-Bringen kein beliebiger Einsatz aus eigenem Ursprung ist, sondern selber wieder als Frage auf die im Text gewärtigte Antwort bezogen ist. {…} Das ist die Wahrheit des wirkungsgeschichtlichen Bewusstseins.“ Hans-Georg Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode. Grundzüge einer philosophischen Hermeneutik. Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1960,, p.359 ↵
  21. “Aufhebung der {sogenannten} Wirklichkeit zu ihrer Wahrheit“ Gadamer op. cit., p. 108 ↵
  22. Gadamer op. cit., p. 465 ↵
  23. „jeder über es hinausweisenden Botschaft“ https://www.tagesspiegel.de/kultur/traum-im-herbst-liebe-auf-dem-totenacker/264256.html ↵
  24. „Flucht in die falsche Einfachheit“ in: “Fjord Idyll. Das Phänomen Jon Fosse” Berliner Zeitung 18.12.2001 ↵
  25. „da wo er philosophisch wird, seine Schwachstellen nicht verbergen“ in: “Leben vor dem Tod. München mit Traum im Herbst” Neue Zürcher Zeitung 1.12.2001 ↵
  26. “die saure Gurke für die schwächste Spielvorlage der Saison“ Marietta Piekenbrock, “Heilige Hedda! In München eilt Luk Perceval durch den ‘Traum im Herbst'” Frankfurter Rundschau 1.12.2001 ↵
  27. “Verfall, Verlust und Niedergang. Elegisch: Wulf Twiehaus versetzt an der Schaubühne mit Jan Fosse’s Trauerspiel ‘Traum im Herbst’ sein Publikum in einen anhaltenden Zitterzustand”, die tageszeitung 1. 2.2001 https://taz.de/Verfall-Verlust-und-Niedergang/!1145941/ ↵
  28. „bemerkenswert gelungen, aus dem diffusen Gespinst ein Maximum an atmosphärischen  ein Maximum an atmosphärischen Reizen und psychologischen Spannungen herauszuholen“ Der Tagesspiegel 17.10.2201 ↵
  29. “Das Wunder einer Stunde. Luk Perceval illuminiert Jon Fosses ‘Traum im Herbst’ an den  Münchner Kammerspielen” Der Tagesspiegel 1.12.2001 cf. Wolfgang Behrend’s wonderful Nachtkritik column “Wunderbar wegkürzen!” https://nachtkritik.de/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=19662:kolumne-als-ich-noch-ein-kritiker-war-wolfgang-behrens-ueberlegt-welche-formulierungen-er-fuer-die-theaterkritik-auf-den-index-setzen-wuerde&catid=1503&Itemid=100389 ↵
  30. “Mehr November war selten auf einer Bühne. Trauerarbeit in den Münchner Kammerspielen: ‘Traum im Herbst’ von Jon Fosse, inszeniert von Luk Perceval”, Tages-Anzeiger 1.12.2002 ↵
  31. „Leben heißt Vorbereitung auf den Tod, Lieben Einübung in den Abschied.“die Tageszeitung 1.2.2001 ↵
  32. „Zwei Dinge, Tod und Liebe, holen einen von den Beinen.“ Christopher Schmidt, “Ist ein Cutter, der heißt Tod. Lachender Moribund: luk Perceval inszeniert Jon Fosses ‘Traum im Herbst’ an den  Münchner Kammerspielen”, Süddeutsche Zeitung, 1.12.2001 ↵
  33. After twenty years, it is touching to read  these sentences about death by the two great theatre critics Dirk Pilz ✝︎2018 and Christopher Schmidt ✝︎2017 who died so too soon, one vacillates between shuddering and indignation at death or at life. ↵

Truth in Theatre – Part 1 Art

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The primal scene

It was in 2002, in the mirror tent of the Berlin Theatertreffen, where the audience discussions following the performances took place at the time:

“This juror has no idea what truth is”1

the universally revered Ivan Nagel exclaimed from the auditorium. It was the evening after the performance of Luk Perceval’s production of Jon Fosse’s then new play “Dream in Autumn.” The Munich Kammerspiele were guests at the Haus der Berliner Festspiele with Dagmar Manzel and Stephan Bissmeier. And it had been my turn to present the reasons for the jury’s selection of this production2.

“What is truth?” asked Pontius Pilate in a famous trial, and then rendered the most momentous miscarriage of justice in Western history. That bumbling juror on the podium was indeed somehow barking up the wrong tree, but he wasn’t quite as clueless as he seemed, even then. The tumult in the mirror tent and Franz Wille’s eloquent defense of my position prevented Ivan Nagel from explaining further what exactly he understood by truth. So what could Ivan Nagel have meant by truth in the theatre?

The concept of truth

Truth on the Theatre  is different from ordinary truth. The concept of truth, when used by theatre people, has a completely different meaning than in science. With the theories of truth in contemporary philosophy – semantic or representative concept of truth, evidential, consensual, or coherence theory of truth3 – it has nothing to do. In any case, modern philosophy of science gets along largely without the concept of truth.4 The concept of truth in theatre (and theatre theory) comes more from the Plato-Hegel-Heidegger-Adorno-Badiou line of tradition than from the Aristotle-Thomas Aquinas-Kant-Wittgenstein line.

There is no treatise on truth in Nagel’s writings; only once does he mention Alfred Kerr’s enthusiastic exclamation in the face of a guest performance of Stanislavsky’s production of Chekhov’s “Uncle Vanya” in 1906.

“It is the truth – the truth!” 5

It is obvious to assume that Ivan Nagel, as a student of Adorno, referred to his academic teacher’s concept of truth. But Adorno’s concept of truth must also be placed in the context of Hegel’s and Heidegger’s theories of truth in order to understand what the concept of truth can and cannot mean in its application to theater. This essay is not just a ridiculously vain effort to wipe an old slate clean, but also to shed some light on the current discussion of authenticity and representation in the theatre.

The truth of art

In order to be able to say something about truth in theatre, one must first clarify the concept of truth, then its application to art, and finally one must consider the special conditions of theatre as an art form. The following account is certainly simplified in layman’s terms and does not take into account the widely differing basic assumptions of the various philosophers, and remains on the surface of what is of interest to theatre theory, but is thereby perhaps understandable the general public.

The most common concept of truth is that first formulated by Aristotle:

“To say of something that is that it is not, or of something that is not that it is, is false; whereas to say of something that it is, and of something that is not, that it is not, is true.”6.

This correspondence concept of truth, or this adequation theory of truth, limits the application of the concept of truth to propositional sentences. From Aristotle to Thomas Aquinas and Ockham to Kant, there is agreement that truth is propositional truth, correspondence of thought and object. The circularity of this definition is noticed only in the 20th century and leads to various attempts to save (Tarski) or to replace (Habermas) this correspondence theory. Art has nothing to do with this business.

From Plato to Hegel

Plato, on the other hand, had related the concept to a higher reality: the ideas (forms) are true for him because they have a higher form of reality than empirical reality7. It is to this ontological-gnoseological concept of truth that Hegel links8 (following Fichte) when he devalues the correspondence concept of truth to mere “correctness” 9 and truth defined as “agreement of a content with itself.”10. For Hegel, truth is only the spirit that has come to itself, agreement of the absolute spirit with itself. So only the whole is the truth11, not a proposition, but the whole self-developing apprehension of reality.

In this process of the spirit’s coming to itself, art has a decisive role. Through the correspondence of the concept of a work of art with its concrete Dasein, through its combination of complete freedom of the parts and necessity of their correspondence, a work of art (“the beautiful”) has truth.

“For according to its essence, in the beautiful object both its concept, its purpose, and the soul of it, as well as its external determinateness, diversity, and reality, must appear as effected by itself and not by others, in that, as we saw, it has truth only as an intrinsic unity and as correspondence of determinate existence and genuine essence and concept. {…} Both must be present in the beautiful object: the necessity that its particular sides belong together which is set by its concept,  and the appearance of freedom of its particular parts as being produced for themselves and not only for the unity of the whole. {…} Through this freedom and infinity, which the concept of the beautiful bears in itself as well as the beautiful object and its subjective contemplation, the the area of the beautiful is wrested from the relativity of finite relations and elevated into the absolute realm of the idea and its truth.”12

Here, then, art receives a function in a process whose goal is truth, and only because it is part of this process can there be talk of the end of art in Hegel, namely when, in this process of self-development and self-understanding of the absolute spirit, art cedes its role as “front man” to pure reflection, i.e. philosophy.

From Heidegger to Adorno

This emphatic concept of truth, that truth is the whole and cannot be attributed to a single proposition, will – in spite of all Nietzsche’s polemics against the concept of truth13 – be crucial to philosophical aesthetics and art theory in the 20th century . Both Heidegger and Adorno see the task of art in this process of unfolding a truth. The similarities are striking despite all political, and stylistic contrasts, despite all different basic assumptions – if one reduces them to the aspect of the relation of art to truth – and ignores what the two great thinkers each understand by truth14.

The work of art relates the individuals, the recipients of art, to something super-individual. The reception of a work of art is not only an individual experience, not only a process of excitation in the consciousness of the recipients, but the mediation of a connection to something supra-individual, which both Heidegger and Adorno call “truth.”

Heidegger:

“…does not degrade the work into the role of an catalyst of excitement. The preservation of the work does not isolate people to their experiences, but engages them into affiliation of the truth happening in the work….” 15

Adorno:

“The truth of the work of art, however, cannot be imagined in any other way than that in the subjectively imagined An sich something trans-subjective becomes legible. Its mediation is the work.” 16

For Heidegger as for Adorno, truth is nothing static, nothing existing. For both, art is a becoming, a happening, and truth then a Gewordenes, something that has happened:

Heidegger:

“Art is the establishing of truth setting itself up in the form (Gestalt).{…} So art is the creating preservation of truth in the work. Then art is a becoming and happening of truth.” 17

Adorno:

“Art is interpretable only by its law of motion, not by invariants. It determines itself in relation to what it is not. {..} Axiomatic for a reoriented aesthetics is the insight, developed by the late Nietzsche against traditional philosophy, that what has evolved can also be true. The traditional view demolished by him would have to be turned upside down: Truth only exists  as something that has evolved (Gewordenes).” 18

Both Heidegger and Adorno emphasize the ambiguity, the paradox of art’s relation to truth:

Heidegger:

“To the essence of truth as the unconcealed belongs this denial in the manner of the twofold concealment.”
“The essence of truth is in itself the primordial dispute, in which that open middle is contended for, into which being enters and from which it withdraws into itself.” 19

Adorno:

“Art is true insofar as that which speaks from it and it itself is ambivalent, unreconciled, but this truth is granted to it when it synthesizes the split and thereby determines it only in its irreconcilability. Paradoxically, it has to testify to the unreconciled and at the same time tend to reconcile it; this is possible only to its non-discursive language.” 20

Because truth is not simply present in art, it depends on the right way of dealing with works of art in order to unfold truth. Heidegger calls this unfolding of the truth of the work of art “preservation”; for Adorno it is “philosophical reflection” and “critique.”

Heidegger:

“To follow this dislocation means: to transform the habitual references to the world and to the earth and henceforth to hold back all familiar doing and valuation, knowing and looking, in order to dwell in the truth happening in the work. […] To let the work be a work, we call the preservation of the work.” 21 Das Werk ein Werk sein lassen, nennen wir die Bewahrung des Werkes.“ Heidegger op. cit., p.53.]
“The very reality of the work, on the other hand, comes into play only where the work is preserved in the truth that occurs through it.” 22

Adorno:

“The truth content of the works of art is the objective resolution of the riddle of each individual work. By demanding the solution, it points to the truth content. This can only be gained through philosophical reflection. … No statement could be squeezed out of Hamlet; its truth content is therefore no less.” “Grasping the truth content postulates criticism. Nothing is apprehended whose truth or untruth is not apprehended, and that is the critical business.” 23

Here, from the point of view of theater criticism, in search of the instruction manual for dealing with the artworks of theater, lies the crucial difference: according to Heidegger, the artwork is to be “preserved” in its reception; according to Adorno, it is to be critically reflected upon.
In Adorno’s “Early Introduction” to his Ästhetische Theorie, there is a passage that perhaps captures what Ivan Nagel would have wanted to reproach the uninformed juror back then in 2002, had he been allowed to finish:

“Works of art are understood only where their experience reaches the alternative of true and untrue or, as its preliminary stage, that of right and wrong. Criticism is not external to aesthetic experience, but immanent to it. Understanding a work of art as a complexion of truth brings it into relation with its untruth, for there is none that does not participate in the untruth apart from it, that of the world age. Aesthetics, which does not move in the perspective of truth, slackens before its task; most often it is culinary. Because the moment of truth is essential to works of art, they participate in cognition and thus the legitimate relation to them (participates in cognition).” 24

Badiou’s scheme

Alain Badiou has attempted to organize theories about the relationship between art and truth into three schemes:

  1. The didactic schema (Plato): art cannot produce truth. It is only the deceptive appearance of truth. Truth exists only outside art. Therefore art must be regulated.
  2. the romantic scheme: truth exists only in art (and in philosophy, but art truth is the completion of philosophical truth by embodiment).
  3. the classical scheme (Aristotle): there is no truth in art, but that is not bad. It has other tasks.

Against this Badiou puts his own theory of truth25. There is no such thing as truth, only truths. Truth, for Badiou, is not a property of a judgment, but a process in reality through which something new emerges. There are four different truth processes: Science, Politics, Love (!) and Art. The truths of art are immanent to it, found only in it, and they are singular, existing nowhere else26. For Badiou, however, it is not the artworks themselves that are the truths, but:

“A work of art represents an inquiry into the truth that is actualized in the work of art as its locus, or whose finite fragment it is.” 27

For Badiou, artistic truth is also not the individual work, but an “artistic configuration” that goes back to a triggering event, an upheaval. By configuration, Badiou means something like an artistic paradigm, an epoch, or a dominant style. He cites as examples of modernism: “serialism, romantic prose, the age of poets, a break with pictorial representation.” 28

For Badiou, Heidegger’s theory of art clearly belongs to the Romantic schema. This should also be true for Adorno’s theory, if one wants to follow Badiou’s somewhat crude scheme. After all, for Adorno, philosophical reflection is only an aid to disentangling the truth content of the work of art.

Interim result 1

Preliminary result thus: Ivan Nagel had a Romantic-Adornite conception of truth and now wanted to demand of the critic that he justify the selection of the production as one of the most “remarkable” of the vintage with its “truth.”

  1. In the following annotations you will find English translations of the German original, which are my own, followed by the original quotation in German. ↵
  2. Franz Wille called it a scene of “Homeric power” and took it as the occasion for his season essay in the yearbook of “Theater heute”: Franz Wille, „Im Auge des blinden Flecks. Über das Theater der Repräsentationen und seine Matrix, über Schwierigkeiten mit der Wahrheit von Nietzsche bis Nagel und manche andere Perspektive.“ Theater heute Jahrbuch 2003, pp. 102-113 ↵
  3. For a clear, brief account of modern theories of truth, see Thomas Grundmann, Philosophische Wahrheitstheorien. Stuttgart: Reclam, 2018. Grundmann considers the clarification of the concept of truth to be an urgent political task. A more detailed, older account is L. Bruno Puntel, Wahrheitstheorien in der neueren Philosophie. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1983. The main basic texts can be found in Gunnar Skirbekk (ed.), Wahrheitstheorien. Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 1977. ↵
  4. Karl Popper does hold to the “idea of absolute truth,” but only as a limiting concept to refer to our infinite fallibility: “The idea of absolute truth is necessary so that we live incessantly in the consciousness of our fallibility.” Karl Popper, „Interview mit l’Express“ 1982, dt. in: Aufklärung und Kritik 2/1994, pp. 38ff ↵
  5. „Manchmal, {…} sagt man sich: nun ja, die einzelnen sind Darsteller, bescheidene Einzelwerte … aber das Ganze gefaßt, glaubt man, wie der Diable boiteux in abgedeckte Häuser zu blicken … Es ist die Wahrheit – die Wahrheit.“  English: “Sometimes, {…} one says to oneself: well, the individuals are performers, modest individual values … but the whole taken together, one thinks one is looking, like the Diable boiteux, into covered houses … It is the truth – the truth.” Alfred Kerr, “Ich sage, was zu sagen ist” Theaterkritiken 1893-1919 (Werke Bd. VII.1) ed. Günther Rühle. Frankfurt/M: S. Fischer 1998, p.267 ↵
  6. „τὸ μὲν γὰρ λέγειν τὸ ὄν μὴ εἶναι ἢ τὸ μὴ ὂν εἶναι ψεῦδος, τὸ δὲ τὸ ὂν εἶναι καὶ τὸ μὴ ὂν μὴ εἶναι ἀληθές” „Von etwas, was ist, zu sagen, dass es nicht ist oder von etwas, was nicht ist, dass es ist, ist falsch; hingegen ist wahr, von etwas zu sagen, dass es ist und von etwas, das nicht ist, zu sagen, dass es nicht ist.“ Metaphysics IV,7 1011b ↵
  7. Jan Szaif proves that even the late Plato formulated this correspondence concept of truth in his Sophistes: Jan Szaif, „Die Geschichte des Wahrheitsbegriffs in der klassischen Antike“ in: Markus Enders & Jan Szaif (Hg.), Die Geschichte des philosophischen Begriffs der Wahrheit. Berlin/New York: de Gruyter, 2006, p.16f ↵
  8. “Hegel’s doctrine of truth thus appears at first glance as a dynamized variant of Christian Platonism.” „Hegels Lehre von der Wahrheit erscheint somit auf den ersten Blick als dynamisierte Variante des christlichen Platonismus.“  Herbert Schnädelbach, Antrittsvorlesung 26. Mai 1993. https://edoc.hu-berlin.de/bitstream/handle/18452/2275/Schnaedelbach.pdf?sequence=1 ↵
  9. “Correctness and truth are very often regarded as synonymous in common life, and accordingly the truth of a content is often spoken of where mere correctness is concerned. Correctness only refers to the formal agreement of our conception with its content, whatever else this content may be. Truth, on the other hand, consists in the agreement of the object with itself, i.e., with its concept.” “Richtigkeit und Wahrheit werden im gemeinen Leben sehr häufig als gleichbedeutend betrachtet, und demgemäß wird oft von der Wahrheit eines Inhalts gesprochen, wo es sich um bloße Richtigkeit handelt. Diese betrifft überhaupt nur die formelle Übereinstimmung unserer Vorstellung mit ihrem Inhalt, wie dieser Inhalt auch sonst beschaffen sein mag. Dahingegen besteht die Wahrheit in der Übereinstimmung des Gegenstandes mit sich selbst, d.h. mit seinem Begriff.” G.W.F. Hegel, Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften I. Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 1970 (WA Bd.8), S. 323, §172 Zusatz ↵
  10. “In the philosophical sense, on the other hand, truth, expressed abstractly in general, means agreement of a content with itself. {…} Untrue then means as much as bad, in itself inappropriate. {…} the bad and untrue in general consists in the contradiction that takes place between the determination or the concept and the existence of an object.” „Im philosophischen Sinn dagegen heißt Wahrheit, überhaupt abstrakt ausgedrückt, Übereinstimmung eines Inhalts mit sich selbst. {…} Unwahr heißt dann soviel als schlecht, in sich selbst unangemessen. {…} das Schlechte und Unwahre überhaupt besteht in dem Widerspruch, der zwischen der Bestimmung oder dem Begriff und der Existenz eines Gegenstandes stattfindet.“ G.W.F. Hegel, WA Bd.8, S. 86 §24 Zusatz 2 . Rainer Schäfer sets out the reasons for this change in the definition of truth. They lie in the idealistic basic conception of Fichte, Schelling and Hegel. Cf. Rainer Schäfer, „Das holistisch-systemische Wahrheitskonzept im deutschen Idealismus (Fichte-Hegel)” In: Enders & Szaif (eds.) op. cit. S. 251 ↵
  11. “The true is the whole…. But the whole is only the being completing itself through its development.” „Das Wahre ist das Ganze.. Das Ganze aber ist nur das durch seine Entwicklung sich vollendende Wesen.“ G.W.F. Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, Einleitung. (WA Bd. 3) Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 1970, p. 24 ↵
  12. “Denn dem Wesen nach muss in dem schönen Objekt sowohl der Begriff, der Zweck und die Seele desselben wie seine äußere Bestimmtheit, Mannigfaltigkeit und Realität überhaupt aus sich selbst und nicht durch andere bewirkt erscheinen, indem es, wie wir sahen, nur als immanente Einheit und Übereinstimmung des bestimmten Daseins und echten Wesens und Begriffs Wahrheit hat. {…} Beides muss im schönen Objekte vorhanden sein: die durch den Begriff gesetzte Notwendigkeit im Zusammengehören der besonderen Seiten und der Schein ihrer Freiheit als für sich und nicht nur für die Einheit hervorgegangener Teile. {…} Durch diese Freiheit und Unendlichkeit, welche der Begriff des Schönen wie die schöne Objektivität und deren subjektive Betrachtung in sich trägt, ist das Gebiet des Schönen der Relativität endlicher Verhältnisse entrissen und in das absolute Reich der Idee und ihrer Wahrheit emporgetragen.“ G.W.F. Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik I. Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 1970 (WA Bd. 13), p.156f ↵
  13. The hackneyed quotation may not be missing here: “So what is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonymies, anthropomorphisms, in short a sum of human relations, which, poetically and rhetorically enhanced, have been transmitted, adorned, and which, after long use, seem to a people fixed, canonical, and binding: the truths are illusions of which one has forgotten that they are any, metaphors which have become worn out and sensually powerless.” „Was ist also Wahrheit? Ein bewegliches Heer von Metaphern, Metonymien, Anthropomorphismen, kurz eine Summe von menschlichen Relationen, die, poetisch und rhetorisch gesteigert, übertragen, geschmückt wurden und die nach langem Gebrauch einem Volke fest, kanonisch und verbindlich dünken: die Wahrheiten sind Illusionen, von denen man vergessen hat, dass sie welche sind, Metaphern, die abgenutzt und sinnlich kraftlos geworden sind.“ Friedrich Nietzsche, „Über Wahrheit und Lüge im außenmoralischen Sinne“, https://www.projekt-gutenberg.org/nietzsch/essays/wahrheit.html ↵
  14. Heidegger deals extensively and repeatedly with the concept of truth, e.g. in “Being and Time” §44: “The statement is true, means: it discovers the being in itself {…} Wahrsein (truth) of the statement must be understood as entdeckend-sein (discovering).” „Die Aussage ist wahr, bedeutet: sie entdeckt das Seiende an ihm selbst {…} Wahrsein (Wahrheit) der Aussage muss verstanden werden als entdeckend-sein.“ Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 15th ed. 1979, p.218. Here Heidegger tries to ground the traditional correspondence-theoretical concept of truth existentially ontologically in the structure of human existence: “Truth in the original sense is the the state of being discovered of human existence, to which the discovering of the inner-worldly being belongs.” “Wahrheit im ursprünglichen Sinne ist die Erschlossenheit des Daseins, zu der die Entdecktheit des innenweltlichen Seienden gehört.“op. cit. S.223.
    Adorno refuses to define truth for good reasons. Even in his lecture “Philosophical Terminology” (1962/63) the term “truth” does not appear as a terminus of philosophy to be explained, but it is nevertheless constantly used. After all, there is a definition of philosophy: “This is how I would define {…} philosophy: as the movement of the mind whose own intention is truth, without imagining to have this truth as an already finished thing in one of its own propositions or in any shape of immediacy.” „So würde ich {…} Philosophie definieren: als die Bewegung des Geistes, deren eigene Intention Wahrheit ist, ohne dass sie wähnte, nun in einem ihrer eigenen Sätze oder in irgendeiner Gestalt der Unmittelbarkeit dieses Wahrheit als ein bereits Fertiges zu haben.“ Theodor W. Adorno, Philosophische Terminologie I und II, Hg.v. Henri Lonitz. Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2016, p.114. And a concise determination of the relationship between art and philosophy: “If in art the truth or the objective or the absolute becomes entirely expression, then conversely in philosophy expression, at least according to its tendency, becomes truth.” P. 113. Adorno, of course, is not uncritical of Hegel: “Spirit, which is supposed to be totality, is a nonsense.” Geist, der Totalität sein soll, ist ein Nonsens.“ (Adorno, Negative Dialetik. Jargon der Eigentlichkeit. Gesammelte Schriften Bd. 6, Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 1984, p.199.) Adorno’s dialectic is the negative one, therefore, for him, “The whole is the untrue.” „Das Ganze ist das Unwahre.“ Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia. Reflexionen aus dem beschädigten Leben. Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 1980 (= Bibliothek Suhrkamp 236) Nr. 29, S. 57 The whole is the “spell, the negative” ( p.161): “The calamity lies in the conditions which condemn people to impotence and apathy and yet could be changed by them.” „Das Unheil liegt in den Verhältnissen, welche die Menschen zur Ohnmacht und Apathie verdammen und doch von ihnen zu ändern wären.“ (p.191). Against this only “determinate negation” (bestimmte Negation) helps ↵
  15. „…setzt das Werk nicht herab in die Rolle eines Erlebniserregers. Die Bewahrung des Werkes vereinzelt die Menschen nicht auf ihre Erlebnisse, sondern rückt sie ein in die Zugehörigkeit zu der im Werk geschehenden Wahrheit….“ Martin Heidegger, „Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes“ in: Holzwege. Frankfurt/M: Klostermann, 6th ed. 1980, p.54 ↵
  16.  „Die Wahrheit des Kunstwerks aber kann nicht anders vorgestellt werden, als dass in dem subjektiv imaginierten An sich ein Transsubjektives lesbar wird. Dessen Vermittlung ist das Werk.“ Theodor W. Adorno, Ästhetische Theorie. (=Gesammelte Schriften Bd. 7). Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 1970, p. 421 ↵
  17. „Kunst ist das Feststellen der sich einrichtenden Wahrheit in die Gestalt.{…} Also ist die Kunst: die schaffende Bewahrung der Wahrheit im Werk. Dann ist die Kunst ein Werden und Geschehen der Wahrheit.“ Heidegger op. cit. p. 57. ↵
  18. „Deutbar ist Kunst nur an ihrem Bewegungsgesetz, nicht durch Invarianten. Sie bestimmt sich im Verhältnis zu dem, was sie nicht ist. {…} Axiomatisch ist für eine umorientierte Ästhetik die vom späten Nietzsche gegen die traditionelle Philosophie entwickelte Erkenntnis, dass auch das Gewordene wahr sein kann. Die traditionelle, von ihm demolierte Ansicht wäre auf den Kopf zu stellen: Wahrheit ist einzig als Gewordenes.“ Adorno op. cit. p. 12. ↵
  19. „Zum Wesen der Wahrheit als der Unverborgenheit gehört dieses Verweigern in der Weise des zwiefachen Verbergens.“
    „Das Wesen der Wahrheit ist in sich selbst der Urstreit, in dem jene offenen Mitte erstritten wird, in die das Seiende hereinstellt und aus der es sich in sich selbst zurückzieht.“ Heidegger op. cit., p.40f ↵
  20. „Wahr ist Kunst, soweit das aus ihr Redende und sie selber zwiespältig, unversöhnt ist, aber diese Wahrheit wird ihr zuteil, wenn sie das Gespaltene synthetisiert und dadurch erst in seiner Unversöhnlichkeit bestimmt. Paradox hat sie das Unversöhnte zu bezeugen und gleichwohl tendenziell zu versöhnen; möglich ist das nur ihrer nicht-diskursiven Sprache.“  Adorno op. cit. p. 251. ↵
  21. „Dieser Verrückung folgen heißt: die gewohnten Bezüge zur Welt und zur Erde verwandeln und fortan mit allem geläufigen Tun und Schätzen, Kennen und Blicken ansichhalten, um in der im Werk geschehenden Wahrheit zu verweilen. [… ↵
  22. „Die eigenste Wirklichkeit des Werkes kommt dagegen nur da zum Tragen, wo das Werk in der durch es selbst geschehenden Wahrheit bewahrt wird.“ Heidegger op. cit., p.55 ↵
  23. „Der Wahrheitsgehalt der Kunstwerke ist die objektive Auflösung des Rätsels eines jeden einzelnen. Indem es die Lösung verlangt, verweist es auf den Wahrheitsgehalt. Der ist allein durch philosophische Reflexion zu gewinnen. … Keine Aussage wäre aus *Hamlet* herauszupressen; dessen Wahrheitsgehalt ist darum nicht geringer.“ „Den Wahrheitsgehalt begreifen postuliert Kritik. Nichts ist begriffen, dessen Wahrheit oder Unwahrheit nicht begriffen wäre, und das ist das kritische Geschäft.“ Adorno op. cit., p. 193f. ↵
  24. „Verstanden werden Kunstwerke erst, wo ihre Erfahrung die Alternative von wahr und unwahr erreicht oder, als deren Vorstufe, die von richtig und falsch. Kritik tritt nicht äußerlich zur ästhetischen Erfahrung hinzu, sondern ist ihr immanent. Ein Kunstwerk als Komplexion von Wahrheit begreifen, bringt es in Relation zu seiner Unwahrheit, denn keines ist, das nicht teilhätte an dem Unwahren außer ihm, dem des Weltalters. Ästhetik, die nicht in der Perspektive der Wahrheit sich bewegt, erschlafft vor ihrer Aufgabe; meist ist sie kulinarisch. Weil Kunstwerken das Moment von Wahrheit wesentlich ist, partizipieren sie an Erkenntnis und damit das legitime Verhältnis zu ihnen.“ Adorno op. cit. p. 515f. ↵
  25. See also Badiou’s lecture “Event and Truth” at the symposium “Event in Artistic and Political Practices” (26-28 March 2013) in Amsterdam; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IE97dwA8wrU (part 1; parts 2-4 also on YouTube ↵
  26. “What makes art unique among truth processes is that the subject of truth in it is taken from the sensuous.” “Was die Kunst unter den Wahrheitsprozessen einmalig macht, ist, dass das Subjekt der Wahrheit bei ihr dem Sinnlichen entnommen wird.” Alain Badiou, Dritter Entwurf eines Manifestes für den Affirmationismus. hg. und um ein Gespräch mit Alain Badiou erweitert von Frank Ruda und Jan Völker. a.d. Frz.v. Ronald Vouillié. Berlin: Merve, 2007, S. 26 ↵
  27. „Ein Kunstwerk stellt eine Untersuchung über die Wahrheit dar, die im Kunstwerk als ihr Ort aktualisiert ist oder deren endliches Fragment es ist.“ Alain Badiou, Kleines Handbuch der Inästhetik, Berlin: Turia + Kant, 2+2012 (first French 1998), p.25 ↵
  28. Badiou op. cit. p.29 ↵

With Hegel in the theatre – Hegel’s anti criticism of Raupach’s comedy “Die Bekehrten”

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Hegel was an avid theatre-goer and a connoisseur of dramatic literature. But in his aesthetics, drama is given a prominent position, not theatre. For Hegel, beautiful art is the “sensuous appearance of the idea.”1, but the sensuous appearance of the drama, the theatrical performance, is secondary for him. The drama is the “highest stage of poetry and of art in general.”2, but the art of acting is secondary and all elements of theatrical performance “gesture, action, declamation, music, dance and scenery” 3 are subordinate to speech. For Hegel, drama has the highest position in poetry because, as a dialogical art of words, it unites subjectivity and objectivity, and is thus closest to philosophy. 4. The performance of the drama, on the other hand, is only a necessary accessory5. Out of the staging trappings, movement, music, stage setting, the “poetic word” stands out as the “salient centre … in free domination”6.

Thus Hegel’s theory. This is not to say that Hegel was incapable of appreciating and enjoying a theatrical performance. There exists the curious document of a pages-long slating review by Hegel 7 – not of a theatre performance, but of a theatre criticism, published in 1826 in a journal called “Schnellpost”, edited by Hegel’s friend Moritz Gottlieb Saphir 8]. The subject of the criticised review was the premiere of the comedy “Die Bekehrten” by Ernst Raupach. Raupach is completely forgotten today, but was a much-played, highly decorated, highly paid playwright between 1825 and 18509.

In his comedy “Die Bekehrten”, a pair of lovers quarrel and separate. The lover’s uncle then marries the young woman as a sham to keep her in custody for his nephew and protect her from other suitors, fakes his death, obtains an annulment of his marriage and reunites the two formerly quarrelling lovers. The action of the play, however, begins with the pretend-married uncle, who has supposedly died, disguised as a monk, giving his former wife-in-custody advice and thus the opportunity to tell the back story.

This was too much of an improbable construction for the critic of the “Schnellpost”. The author of the review in “Schnellpost” accused Raupach of having rendered the plot implausible with coincidences that were too extra-essential (“außerwesentlich”) and an overscrewed task of violence (“überschraubte Gewaltsamkeit”). This outraged Hegel, especially since the audience had also reacted lukewarmly. Hegel, however, was enthusiastic. So he wrote a detailed exposition of the necessary role of chance in comedies. This is a salute to the drama, to Raupach’s text.

Berliner Schnellpost Titelseite


But at least in one sentence it becomes clear that Hegel’s fascination with this simple comedy had its reason in the performance.

For Hegel, the playwright has to fulfil the “main task” so that the actors can unfold and assert their capacity10. Hegel, as a connoisseur, brings a number of examples of this from performances he has seen and from actors and actresses whose “ability” he can judge 11.

Hegel first raves about the leading actress of “Alanghu”, another completely unsuccessful drama by Raupach12:

The play had “enabled the actress to unfold all sides of her talent, mind and spirit, and to bring before our souls the attractive painting of fiery, restless, active passion with naive, amiable youthfulness, the liveliest, most determined energy, fused with sensitive, witty gentleness and grace” (trsl. G.P.)13.

Auguste Stich

Hegel then describes how an actress, whom he had already admired as Juliet in Romeo and Juliet (it was Auguste Stich), plays the charming embarrassment („reizende Verlegenheit“) of a character called Klothilde in “Die Bekehrten” when she meets her lover Torquato again (Act II, Scene 5).

“Position and arms remain, the eye, which one is otherwise accustomed to see in lively movement, does not dare to look up at first, its muteness interrupts here and there a heaving of the breast that does not become a sigh, it dares a few furtive glances that fear to meet those of Torquato, but it presses upon him when his own eyes turn elsewhere. The poet is to be esteemed fortunate whose conception is executed by an artist who makes it superfluous for the narration of the content expressed by the language to indicate more than the features of the soulful eloquence of her gesture.” 14

Here, then, for Hegel, the silent play of the actress, the “eloquence of gesture”, makes language superfluous. Hegel knows what “appeals” and “attracts” in a theatre performance. It is not the word.

His aesthetic theory could not accommodate this independent function of theatre vis-à-vis drama; he had to acknowledge it in his theatre experience.

  1. „Das Schöne bestimmt sich dadurch als das sinnliche Scheinen der Idee.“ G.W.F.Hegel, Werke in zwanzig Bänden. Theorie Werkausgabe Bd. 13 Ästhetik I. Frankfurt/ M: Suhrkamp, 1970, p. 151 ↵
  2. „Das Drama muss, weil es seinem Inhalte wie seiner Form nach sich zur vollendeten Totalität ausbildet, als die höchste Stufe der Poesie und der Kunst überhaupt angesehen werden.“ Hegel, Bd. 15 Ästhetik III p. 474 ↵
  3. Ästhetik III, p. 510 ↵
  4. „Denn die Rede allein (ist) das der Exposition des Geistes würdige Element … die dramatische Poesie (ist) diejenige, welche die Objektivität des Epos mit dem subjektiven Prinzip der Lyrik in sich vereinigt.“ Ästhetik III, p. 474 ↵
  5. „fordert deshalb (…) die vollständige szenische Aufführung.“ ibid. ↵
  6. „hervorstechender Mittelpunkt … in freier Herrschaft“, Ästhetik III, p. 505 ↵
  7. G.W.F. Hegel “Über Die Bekehrten”. in: G.W.F.Hegel, Werke in zwanzig Bänden. Theorie Werkausgabe, Bd. 11 Berliner Schriften 1818-1831, pp.72-82 ↵
  8. in three instalments: Berliner Schnellpost, 18. Jan. 1826 Nr. 8, 21. Jan. 1826, Nr.9 https://digitale-sammlungen.ulb.uni-bonn.de/periodical/pageview/1723191, https://digitale-sammlungen.ulb.uni-bonn.de/periodical/pageview/1723193 und Beiwagen zur Berliner Schnellpost, 23. Jan. 1826, Nr. 4 https://digitale-sammlungen.ulb.uni-bonn.de/periodical/pageview/1723203 ↵
  9. cf: Artikel „Raupach, Ernst Benjamin Salomo“ von Max Bendiner in: Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie, ed. by Historischen Kommission bei der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Band 27 (1888), S. 430–445, Wikisource https://de.wikisource.org/w/index.php?title=ADB:Raupach,_Ernst_Benjamin_Salomo&oldid=- ↵
  10. „ihr Vermögen entfalten und geltend machen“, Bd. 11 Berliner Schriften, p. 73 ↵
  11. Eduard Devrient, from his own experience as an actor, also appreciates Raupach’s merit in the promotion of the art of acting: „(es ist) ganz bestimmt nachzuweisen, dass er die Talente {der Schauspielerinnen und Schauspieler} nicht nur benutzt und sich ihnen accomodirt, sondern durch seine Aufgaben ihre Entwicklung und Erweiterung entschieden gefördert hat.“ Eduard Devrient, Geschichte der deutschen Schauspielkunst. Neu-Ausgabe in zwei Volumes, Vol. II Berlin: Otto Elsner, 1905 {first 1848-1874} p. 281 ↵
  12. Devrient: “Seine dramatische Erzählung ‚Alanghu‘ wirkte nicht.“ p. 190 ↵
  13. Das Stück habe „die Schauspielerin in den Stand gesetzt, alle Seiten ihres Talents, Gemüts und Geistes zu entfalten und uns das anziehende Gemälde feuriger, unruhiger, tätiger Leidenschaftlichkeit mit naiver, liebenswürdiger Jugendlichkeit, der lebhaftesten, entschlossensten Energie, mit empfindungsvoller, geistreicher Sanftmut und Anmut verschmolzen, vor die Seele zu bringen“, Bd. 11, p.77 ↵
  14. „Stellung und Arme bleiben, das Auge, das man sonst in lebhafter Bewegung zu sehen gewohnt ist, wagt es zuerst nicht aufzusehen, seine Stummheit unterbricht hier und da ein nicht zum Seufzen werdendes Heben der Brust, es wagt einige verstohlene Blicke, die denen Torquatos zu begegnen fürchten, es drängt sich aber auf ihn, wenn die seinigen sich anderwärts hinwenden. Der Dichter ist für glücklich zu achten, dessen Konzeption von einer Künstlerin ausgeführt wird, die es für die Erzählung des Inhalts, der durch die Sprache ausgedrückt ist, überflüssig macht, mehr als die Züge der seelenvollen Beredsamkeit ihrer Gebärde anzugeben.“ Bd. 11. p. 79 ↵