Review of the introduction to Peter W. Marx, Macht | Spiele. Politisches Theater seit 1919. Alexander Verlag Berlin 2020, 223 p.

With his new book “Macht | Spiele. Politisches Theater seit 1919.” Peter W. Marx shows how the various figures of thought (“Denkfiguren”) have developed, with which the changing relations between political power (“Macht”) and theatre (“Spiele”) since the end of the First World War have been considered, viewed and examined in German theatre performances. The relationship between theatre and power is reciprocal: power presents itself in public politics as on a theatre stage, and theatre presents power (and its self-staging) in fiction on the stage. Marx calls the “tension between the staging of power and politics and the theatrical-fictional reflections” ¹ the basic axis („Grundachse“) of his presentation. Concentrating his study on these figures of thought and on a selection of exemplary productions is the great advantage of this book over other books on the history of theatre. ². This concentrated way of presentation confirms Peter W. Marx’s understanding of theatre history as social history. And since it goes beyond the factual retelling of the past to depicting intellectual and political trends, it stimulates discussion.

In his “Introduction”, Marx presents the theoretical starting point for his investigations. Some comments:

The two bodies of the king

In order to understand the “forms of political communication” at the beginning of the 20th century, Marx relies on Ernst H. Kantorowicz’s historical analysis of the theory of the two bodies of the king ³. Marx finds in Kantorowicz the description of a “practice of the sensual doubling of the ruler body”. Kantorowicz actually shows this practice with many examples of pictures of rulers, coins, paintings, grave slabs, funeral processions ⁴. But the basis for these images is the argumentation of medieval legal experts, which Kantorowicz traces in many details. This theory, which played a role especially among the lawyers of Elizabethan England, is about the legal safeguarding of the continuity of the state. The imaginary doubling of the ruler’s body was a necessary stage in the development of awareness of what a state is, that an immortal state exists, and not just a mortal ruler.

The metaphor of the body for the abstract structure of the state, which consists of different institutions, legal concepts and people, has been used since the Romans ⁵. Kantorowicz shows how Christian theology made it possible to transfer this idea to the monarchs of Europe. Kantorowicz also shows that the continuation of this medieval theory in the Renaissance was limited primarily to England and emphasizes that this theory played no role in Germany. ⁶ The English historian Quentin Skinner regrets that Kantorowicz did not continue his investigations beyond the beginning of the 17th century, because then he would have he found the replacement of the theory of the two bodies with other justifications of statehood ⁷ But Marx transfers the theory of the two bodies of the ruler to the German Kaiser Wilhelm II. Accoding to Marx, he was concerned with the “generation of a virtual body politic“, with the ” media doubling of the imperial body ”⁸ . Marx therefore is interested in the visual representation of the ruler in the media. The “body politic” in the sense of the English theory of the state is, however, the entire state system, not just the visual presentation of a ruler by the media. Kantorowicz’s haunting picture of the two bodies is not suitable for analyzing the modern mechanisms of the representation of power. The medieval two-body-teaching cannot be equated with the modern distinction between the real bodies of the persons in government and their representation in the media. ⁹.

At the time of Wilhelm II, Germany was a rapidly developing nation with diverse, strong political currents, a highly developed bureaucratic apparatus, the modernity of which was only covered by the glittering feudal surface – a deeply hypocritical state structure ¹⁰, but not a medieval empire and not an absolutist monarchy. The theory that the state is a legal entity that “stands in and not above the law”, that is, a constitutional state in which the people are the last source of law and the monarch only an organ of this corporate body (“juristische Person”) had long been developed by Otto Gierke in German jurisprudence, but was not used in political reality. ¹¹.

Marx illustrates his view with the well-known cover picture of a magazine published in 1919, which shows President Ebert and Interior Minister Noske in swimming trunks, and sums up “The nudity of the natural body disqualifies the new body politic.” ¹² Marx comments on how the image of the bodies of the representatives of the state is used by their opponents in the public debate through the media. But the term body politic in the theory of the two bodies of the king was a legal metaphor for the “immortal” state as a whole.

From body to state and back again

Peter W. Marx refers to Hans Belting’s reception of the theory of the two bodies of the king presented by Kantorowicz. ¹³ Belting rightly shows that every human body is itself an image even before it is reproduced in an image ¹⁴. Belting’s summary of Kantorowicz’s chapter on “Effigies” also shows the terminological confusion. An “Effigies ” was a doll that wore the insignia of power in place of the dead ruler at the funeral of the king and was carried in addition to the coffin at the funeral procession. This practice was used first in England with Edward II, then in the 16th and 17th centuries it was common in France. Belting writes that there were “two bodies which were separated in an official person, first the natural body that was mortal, and then the official body which was transferred from one living bearer to the next and thereby attained immortality”  ¹⁵. Kantorowicz explained in detail which different terms were in use for what Belting calls “official body”: “corpus mysticum”, “universitas”, “corona”, “body politic”. The term dignitas is used in connection with the effigies. ¹⁶ It is the “dignity of the office” (i.e. dignitas, “Amtswürde”) of the deceased king, which is transferred to the doll, the effigies, as Belting writes two sentences later. Kantorowicz himself resorts to the metaphor of “body politic” when he then writes “The two bodies united in the living body were visibly separated after his (the king’s) death.” ¹⁷ The increasingly diverse political community with its institutions was still tied to the person of the ruler. The abstract of the state had to be made visible in a human body, so “body” became the anthropomorphic term for this abstract community structure. Belting uses many historical and current examples to show the crisis of the body image and its reflection in art. The theory of the two bodies of the king, however, belongs to a long past phase in the history of the development of the concept of the state. The modern state is no longer embodied in one person. It only has representatives, elected people, whose body images in visual communication are subject to the general mechanisms of the image market.
In his chapter on female power figures in the theater (“Die Provokation des  Female Body Politic”) ¹⁸, Marx applies the term “body politic” to the external appearance of a person in power: it is about the hairstyles of Chancellors Schröder and Merkel. It is obvious that the representation of the body of politicians in the media of a democratic society plays a role in public debate. It is also obvious and regrettable that the depiction of the body of female politicians (and their self-portrayal) is exposed to the mechanisms of a patriarchal tradition. But politicians are not kings and politicians are not queens.

The career of a medieval theological concept, which was developed in the Renaissance by lawyers to distinguish between the ruler and the state, on the theatre is astonishing ¹⁹. The efforts of the lawyers to form clean legal terms from indistinct metaphors are traced back to their pictorial origin. This is an example of the crooked ways in which social communication has become visualized today.

Who answers Carl Schmitt?

Peter W. Marx contrasts Max Weber and Carl Schmitt as the two representatives of the political understanding of the state of the Weimar Republic. ²⁰ Peter Marx also finds this contrast in the Bonn Republic and cites the well-known Böckenförde dictum that the state is based on conditions that he cannot guarantee ²¹. Böckenförde really did the trick of giving a liberal interpretation of Carl Schmitt’s theory of the political and his state theory and translating it into a liberal decision-making practice as a judge of the German supreme court (Richter am Bundesverfassungsgericht). ²² The famous Böckenförde dictum was primarily intended as an appeal to Christians to regard the preservation of freedom by the state as their own task ²³. Böckenförde was also an social democratic politician (SPD). He was the rare case of a liberal Catholic constitutional judge who was also prepared to oppose the hierarchy of the Catholic church.

But Böckenförde’s dictum is less an “answer to Carl Schmitt” ²⁴ as it is a continuation of Carl Schmitt under the conditions of the Bonn Republic. Böckenförde saw himself as a disciple of Schmitt. Of course, he only referred to Schmitt’s work in the early Weimar Republic, not to his Nazi tracts in the early years of the Third Reich. With Böckenförde, Schmitt’s brusque rejection of any kind of pluralism turns into the cautious reference to “relative homogeneity” as a prerequisite for the state ²⁵. As an answer to Carl Schmitt, one can better understand Chantal Mouffe’s theory, which agrees with Schmitt in recognizing the need for homogeneity in a democracy (which she then calls “commonality” to distinguish herself from Schmitt). But for her, this homogeneity is the result of a process in a field of conflicting forces. ²⁶. This theory is also often used to justify an agonistic concept of current political theatre, which tries to intensify hidden social conflicts ²⁷.

On personal identity

Analyses of the dwindling ability of people to understand themselves as a unitary, self-consistent person abound. Here are three examples:

Disaggregated personhood

First, David Runciman’s political diagnosis in the dispute with Derek Parfit¹:

„Derek Parfit has argued that our attachment to the illusion of a single identity over time is one of the things that stifles our moral and political imaginations.² We instinctively believe that we have more in common with the person we will be in twenty years’ time than with the person sitting next to us right now. Parfit thinks that is wrong: we are as disconnected from our future selves as if there were physical space between us. I am not the me I will be in future. The two of us are essentially separate people.
If only we could see that, we might start to reconfigure our moral priorities. First, we would be more solicitous of our neighbors and of people further away, given the time we currently spend worrying only about ourselves. Second, we would do more to guard against doing harm to people who don’t yet exist (for example, by squandering natural resources). It it is wrong to hurt the person sitting next to me, it is also wrong to hurt my or your future self. Disaggregated personhood should make us better and more responsible people than we are at present.
So far, there is little sign that information technology is having this effect. Parfit was writing in the mid-1980s, before the digital revolution had got going. His arguments assumed a backdrop of relative political stability: under conditions of calm philosophical reflection we should be able to see the things owe to each other and to our future selves. In other words: first we stabilize, then we take our identities apart, then we put our moral universe back together again. At the moment that process is being played out in reverse: first we take our identities apart, then we destabilize, then we see what if anything is left of the moral universe we built. Our personalities are getting fractured in little ways, piece by piece – health data over here, WhatsApp over there, Twitter chattering away in the background – with our anything to give us a shared perspective on what’s happening. This is not taking place in a philosophy seminar. It is lived human experience, which makes calm reflection almost impossible. For now, technology is fraying us more that it is liberating us.“

These “disaggregated selfs” will be second-rate victims of a technocratic elite. That is one of the dangers that will come after the demise of democracy, according to Runciman.

You are not a story

Yuval Noah Harari provides an even more fundamental criticism of the idea of a unified subject who can tell his or her own story to himself or herself³:

„In order to understand our selves, a crucial step is to acknowledge that the ‚self‘ is a fictional story that the intricate mechanisms of our mind constantly manufacturing, update and rewrite. There is a story-teller in my mind that explains who I am, where I am coming from, where I am heading to, and what is happening right now. Like the government spin doctors who explain the latest political upheavals, the inner narrator repeatedly gets things wrong but rarely, if ever, admits it. And just as the government builds up a national myth with flags, icons and parades, so my inner propaganda machine builds up a personal myth with prized memories and cherished traumata’s that often bear little resemblance to the truth. (…)

Hence if you really want to understand yourself, you should not identify with your Facebook account or the inner story of the self. Instead, you should observe the actual flow of body and mind. You will see thoughts, emotions and desires appear and disappear without much reason and without any command from you, just as different winds blow from this or that direction and mess up your hair. And just as you are not the winds, so also you are not the jumble of your thoughts, emotions and desires you experience, and you are certainly not the sanitised story you tell about them with hindsight. Your experience all of them, but you don’t control them, you don’t own them, and you are not them. People ask ‚Who am I‘ and expect to be told a story. The first thing you need to know about yourself, is that you are not a story.“

Harari also offers a provisional solution: meditation is the way to assure oneself of the working of one’s own mind, before the algorithms understand us better than we ourselves.

Robert Macfarlane offers a different solution: contact with the untamed nature⁴. However, this is more a yearning scenario than a practicable socio-psychological recipe:

Disembodiment and dematerialization

„We are, as a species, finding it increasingly hard to imagine that we are part of something which is larger than our own capacity. We have come to accept a heresy of aloofness, a humanist belief in human difference, and we suppress wherever possible the checks and balances on us – the reminders that the world is greater than us or that we are contained within it. In almost every front, we have begun a turning away from a felt relationship with the natural world.
The blinding of the stars is only one aspect of this retreat from the real. In so many ways, there has been a rising away from place, an abstraction of experience into different kinds of touchlessness. We experience, as no historical period has before, disembodiment and dematerialization. The almost infinite connectivity of the technological world, for all the benefits that it has brought, has exacted a toll in the coin of contact. We have in many ways forgotten what the world feels like. And so new maladies of the soul have emerged unhappinesses which are complicated products of the distance we have set between ourselves and the world. We have come increasingly to forget that our minds are shaped by the bodily experience of being in the world – its spaces, textures, sound, smells and habits – as well as by genetic traits we inherit and ideologies that we absorb. A constant and formidably defining exchange occurs between the physical world around us, and the cast of our inner world of imagination. The feel of a hot dry wind on the face, the smell of distant rain carried as a scent stream in the air, the touch of a birds sharp foot on one’s outstretched palm: such encounters shape our beings and our imaginations in ways which are beyond analysis, but also beyond doubt. There is something uncomplicatedly true in the sensation of laying hands upon sun-warmed rock, or watching a dense mutating flock of birds, or seeing snow fall irrefutably upon one’s upturned palm.“

Even though these analyses are very different from each other – dissipation by digital media, ignorance of the working of one’s own mind, loss of contact with body and nature – the mode of complaint about a lost stability of self-understanding is common. The presentation of stable fictitious or historical identities responds to this vague sense of loss. The more brutal the social system, the more hardened the identity of the resisters must be. Today, few want to resist, but many want to escape the general uneasiness of identity diffusion. Perhaps this can explain the boom of dramatised resistance novels on the German theatres.

The editors of the special issue “Drama, Theatre, and Philosophy” of the journal Anglia¹ call Hegel’s aesthetics a suitable starting point for their collection of essays. To this they quote Hegel’s formula of drama as the “the highest stage of poetry and of art generally” ². This formula is occasionally distorted and related to the theatre instead of drama ³. The editors of the special issue of Anglia, of course, quote correctly, and add Hegel’s suggestion that drama, “therefore demands a complete scenic production in order to give real life to the whole work of art.” ⁴.
However, they do not mention that Hegel demands the subordination of all elements of the scenic performance to the spoken word. Thus he writes about the art of acting:

“In principle, it consists in calling on the aid of gestures, action, declamation, music, dancing, and scenery, but in giving overwhelming preponderance to speech and its poetic expression. ” ⁵

Of „the art of the theatre more independently of poetry” ⁶ he has no good opinion. Either the actor makes himself independent of the poet, but only the “insignificant and in fact downright bad productions” ⁷ of German playwrights give him opportunity for that, or it is opera, „whose visible magnificence (always a sign, it is true, of the already growing decadence of genuine art) there corresponds, as the most appropriate subject-matter, what is utterly devoid of any intel­ligible connection“,⁸ or it is ballet, where „we threaten to see more and more disappearing from modern ballet what alone could lift it into the free realm of art. ⁹.
If one wanted to take Hegel as a starting point for a discussion of the relationship between philosophy and the theatre, one would also have to accept Hegel’s definition of the purpose of art:

“All art aims at the identity, produced by the spirit, in which eternal things, God, and absolute truth are revealed in real appearance and shape to our contemplation, to our hearts and minds.”¹⁰.

Theatre as a form of art is the revelation of truth to our hearts and minds for our contemplation, – that would be a Hegelian definition of the theatre. ¹¹

Suddenly everything is over again. On February 1, Carl Philip von Maldeghem announced by press release that he would not take up the directorship of the Schauspiel Köln, for which he had been chosen by the city administration ¹. What remains is the discrediting of the city administration of Cologne, in particular of its head of cultural affairs, Susanne Laugwitz-Aulbach, who had still defended the election of Maldeghem on 31. 1. with the argument that he stood “for a free and innovative concept of culture”. ². Maldeghem summarizes the way his plans were criticized in Cologne as follows: “A ‘theatre of participation’, which caters ‘without aesthetic and artistic scissors in mind to the widest possible audience’ does not seem to have been wanted in Cologne.” ³. The following commentary was essentially written before Maldeghem’s withdrawal.

The decision to establish Carl Philip von Maldeghem, previously artistic director of the Landestheater Salzburg, as future artistic director of Schauspiel Köln from the season 2021/22 on is not as surprising as most commentators think. It joins a series of decisions by the city administration to appoint directors from smaller theatres to Cologne, like Klaus Pierwoß (1985-1990 who came from Tübingen) and Marc Günther (2001-2006 who came from Bolzano). Pierwoß had an outstanding team of dramaturgs (including Joachim Lux, later to become head of Thalia Theater Hamburg), he managed to keep the audience stable, but he achieved little national attention. The employment of Frank Castorf for his first production in the West was an achievement only in retrospect. Although Marc Günther could come up with a bunch of interesting young directors, they all delivered their worst work in Cologne and disappeared again. And in directing his own productions, Günther failed catastrophically.

Probably the interest of the city administration, which after all was advised by the well-experienced Rolf Bolwin (former director of Deutscher Bühnenverein, the association of all German theatres), was less directed to the director than to the solid organizer and administrator Maldeghem. The examples of his predecessors in Cologne show that a non-directing theatre manager must be able to promote a creative and cooperative atmosphere in his house and to achieve this, he must pursue artistic goals himself. As a director, Maldeghem seems above all to have experience in entertainment theatre (Schauspielbühnen in Stuttgart, musical productions in Salzburg). This will be of little use to him in Cologne, where Schauspiel Köln has a more demanding audience.

Maybe Maldeghem would be in better hands in Bonn, where the city is trying to shrink its theatre so that they can – after the model of Salzburg – finance a sumptuous Beethoven festival. From Mozart to Beethoven, that would at least be a chronologically obvious development.

OB Reker’s justification of the election Maldeghem

What is amazing about the choice of Maldeghem above all is the reasoning of the city administration. Mayoress Reker justified her decision for Maldeghem by saying that “the theatre does not belong to politics, and certainly not to the city leaders, but to the people of Cologne.” ⁴. What kind of criterion for choosing a director is that? Does that mean there are directors who think theatre is owned by politicians? Or rather, are there directors who think the theatre is theirs? What idea of politics is this? What kind of understanding of local self-government? How could politics own something? Or how could a local institution belong to the city’s top politicians? Is not the Mayoress elected by the people of Cologne to act for them?

Negating the populist criticism of representative democracy only promotes its affirmation. The pattern of thinking that politicians own the state is also confirmed in its negation because no other pattern is offered. No one dares to say that the city’s theatre serves the good of all the citizens of the city, even if not everyone goes there. The “belonging”, the concept of property, is completely wrong for determining the relationship between citizen and state. One needs the concepts of representation and delegation of power to characterize this relationship.

A citizens’ stage for Cologne

One of Maldeghem’s few statements about his future plans for Schauspiel Köln is that he wants to set up a citizens’ stage. With such a stage Cologne would only catch up with a development which has evolved in many theatres since Volker Lösch’s staging of Hauptmann’s “Die Weber” in Dresden in 2001. Wilfried Schulz has also established such a citizens’ stage in the neighbouring city of Düsseldorf. Understandably, the theatres want to create audience loyalty with such an opportunity for everyone to play a role in professional theatre, because the Stadttheater is in a crisis of legitimacy and suffers from loss of viewership (which is masked only by overproduction, the increase of projects of the “Fifth Division”) [2nd see. Thomas Schmidt, Theater, Krise und Reform. Eine Kritik des deutschen Theatersystems. Wiesbaden: Springer VS, 2017, p. 40], but this format also fits in with the social development which leads to populism in politics.

In a society in which the theatre competes with a variety of entertainment and educational media, each of which develops its own marketing strategies, the theatre must also do marketing. Of course, the Stadtheater can use the appeal of playing a role on a professional stage (but then it should also go beyond a therapy for vitalizing pensioners). The fact that there is always an oversupply of actors in the theatre in the face of a lack of viewers is probably due to the deep anthropological roots of the need to play a role before others. Acting was never an understaffed profession. But the justification of these citizens’ stage projects often goes beyond satisfying this need, which originally was catered to by the many amateur theatre groups, and disparages the spectator. In the presentation of the citizens’ stage of Volkstheater Rostock e.g., it states: “The aim is to regard the citizens of a city not only as spectators, but to include them as co-designers and discussion partners at eye level in the artistic work.” The “not only” obviously carries a derogatory meaning, because the “co-designer” of the Bürgerbühne will be honoured as a partner at “eye level”. The spectator does not really look the actor in the eye. The spectator squints,  as is insinuated by this formulation, from a frog’s perspective to the stage as a submissive subject.

The emancipated  spectators of Cologne

The justification of such concepts of participatory theatre often refers to Jacques Rancière’s essay “The Emancipated Spectator,” because emancipation of the spectator is described there as “the blurring of the boundary between those who act and those who watch” ⁵. It is overlooked that Rancière does not mean that the audience should become actors. He describes three tendencies of contemporary theatre: 1. the total work of art, 2. the hybridization of the means of art, both lead to “stupidity”. Rancière advocates 3. : the spectator as an “active interpreter”. He wants to equate the theatre stage with “telling a story, reading a book or looking at a picture”. “It takes viewers to play the role of active performers who work out their own translation to appropriate the ‘story’ and make it their own story.” ⁶. This is perhaps a justification of the theatre of Laurent Chétouane, but not of a civil stage ⁷.

During the artistic directories of Karin Beier and Stefan Bachmann, the audience of Schauspiel Köln had many opportunities to emancipate themselves in this sense. Hopefully, it will stay that way.

Peter W. Marx, Hamlets Reise nach Deutschland. Eine Kulturgeschichte. Berlin: Alexander Verlag, 2018, 435 S. ISBN 978-3-89581-490-7, 35,- €

Theatre as a transient art has a special relationship with memory. Theatre is not only the art form of the absolute present, of the simultaneity of performance and reception, it is also the art form of memory. Without memory no critical discourse of the theatre, without discourse no art. ¹. Even the casual chat after a visit to the theatre (“How did you like it?”) requires memory. And theatre criticism is also memory aid. German theatre studies, on the other hand, try rather to run ahead of current theatre practice than to chase the theatre of the past. Theatrical history seems to be something for pensioners. It is all the more astonishing that Peter W. Marx, a professor of theatre studies in Cologne, has come up with a large-scale, readable study of theatrical history: the history of German-language “Hamlet” productions ².

German nostrification of Hamlet

At the latest since the German translation of Shakespeare by the Romantics August Wilhelm Schlegel and Ludwig Tieck, Germany claims a special relationship to Shakespeare. That he was British is dismissed as an unfortunate coincidence. That he is an author of world fame, does not interest. Shakespeare is ours! In the 19th century, fantasies about Shakespeare’s “Germanic nature” are already in vogue ³. Even in the nationalist turmoil of the First World War, Germans hold fast to the “Nostrification“ of Shakespeare. ⁴. And Hamlet is the decisive figure because he represents a “call for self-identification” ⁵. “Hamlet” is a „play of yearning“ for the Germans ⁶.

Peter W. Marx undertakes an exploratory drilling into German history. With “Hamlet”, which has been present on the German stages since the travelling actor groups of the early 17th century, you can drive a core into the sediments of German mentalities. What does the soil sample show?

One sees how, in the early eighteenth century, the question of the hereafter, the metaphysical “remnant of need” [“Bedürfnisrest“] of the Enlightenment, was fixed on the appearance of the ghost of Hamlet’s father. A few decades later, this question will be answered quite differently: It is no longer about the ghost itself, but about the human being, the authenticity of the actor’s physical reaction to the ghost, the relationship between the inside and the outside of man. In the 19th century, the image of a heroically desperate Hamlet or the yearning for a princely hero prevails. Freiligrath’s mocking bêtise “Germany is Hamlet” suddenly is understood as praise of German heroism, and Hamlet becomes a figure representing the nation’s yearning for a young leader. After the contrasting politicization of the figure in the Weimar Republic (Jessner) and Nazi-Reich (Gründgens), Hamlet becomes the icon of timeless art (still Gründgens), and then come the postheroic Hamlets (Zadek, Heyme), settling the accounts with the generation of their Nazi-fathers. This process leads to Steemann’s Hamlet (Hannover 2001) ⁷, in which this 68-generation, who were keen on taking revenge on their fathers, are fathers in power themselves and their offspring do not stand any chance to oppose because of their parents’ overarching benevolent understanding. Up to the „To be or not to be“ reciting Youtubers, as examples of the games of the information society, which no longer need spectators, only participants.

Contextualization of „Hamlet“ productions

Marx always places the individual productions in a framework, politically and culturally. Time and again, historical figures flit through the picture: Lichtenberg, Goethe, Nietzsche, Wilhelm II, Göbbels. Again and again, scenes of historic events are briefly set up: the French revolution, World War I, the fall of the Berlin Wall – and torn down again in the next chapter. So the background appears, at least sketchily, to which the productions refer. Marx also casts sideways glances at the changing popularity of other Shakespeare plays: he explains why “Coriolanus” instead of “Hamlet” becomes interesting for the early GDR and “King Lear” for the late Bonn Republic.

Even on productions well-known in the history of theatre, such as Leopold Jessner’s Berlin “Hamlet” production of 1926 ⁸ Marx can shed new light by placing them in a wide social and intellectual context. Fritz Kortner’s blonde wig, which was mocked at in a theatre review as an „idiot’s roof” ⁹ caused such indignation in 1926 because it fitted into the scheme of the deceiving Jew. Marx quotes Oskar Panizza, Friedrich Nietzsche and Arnold Zweig in support of his view and refers to the insults of the Polish-Jewish Hamlet-actor Bogumil Dawison. The assimilated Jew was the worst Jew for the anti-Semites of the Weimar Republic because he was seen as a liar.

Derivations of the Hamlet cult

Not only the highlights are mentioned, but also almost forgotten versions like Felicitas von Vestvali’s female Hamlet (1913), a strangely modernized film version “The Rest is Silence” from 1959 or Heyme / Vostell’s Media-„Hamlet” in Cologne (1977). Epiphenomena of the Hamlet cult are also included, such as Gerhart Hauptmann’s annotated text edition (1928), published together with Edward Gordon Craig, Harald Schmidt’s talk show “Hamlet” (2001) or Katie Mitchell’s performance “Ophelia’s Room” (2015). While the purely text-oriented productions of the last decades (Grüber Berlin 1982 ¹⁰, Steckel Bochum, 1995 ¹¹, Gosch Düsseldorf 2001 ¹², Bachmann Cologne 2016 ¹³) are passed over.

Marx also opens up new sources, such as Heyme’s notes to his “Hamlet” in Cologne. Already 40 years ago, Heyme noted: “that historically fixed art or theatre work can only be experienced as filtered through the media. Everything else is a lie. Whereby this truth is, in consequence, a deadly and fatalistic one – completely un-utopian, and our yearning can of course only be aimed at […], THEATER AGAINST the media which are clinging to us and of which we consist in part.“ ¹⁴ There is nothing to add to that today.

Reshuffles

The difficulty of every historiographical enterprise lies in the contradiction between the individuality of the productions, which one has to do justice to, and the great zigzag line, for which one undertakes all the historical mining work. Marx is guided by Hans Blumenberg’s concept of “reshuffling” [„Umbesetzung“]. He wants to show how “different statements“ can be understood „as answers to identical questions” ¹⁵. Marx thinks that “Hamlet” can be understood as a “metaphor“, in the sense of Blumenberg. That provides a field for the “trial and error process” ¹⁶ and offers answers to an underlying question. For Marx, this question which provides continuity is that of the collective identity of Germans. “Hamlet” productions are not themselves the answers, but metaphors that provide the material for testing and discarding answers to this question.

Hamlet as a collective figure of thought

This embedding of the “Hamlet” productions into the “collective figures of thought“ of their time settles the claim of writing not only a history of theatre that mentions productions for the sake of completeness but a cultural history ¹⁷. Gründgens’ post-war productions are discussed against the background of Hannah Arendt’s criticism of the claim of a collective guilt of Germans and Mitscherlich’s analysis of post-war Germany as a fatherless society. Heiner Müller’s “Hamlet” of 1990 is placed in the context of the situation of the intellectual in the GDR and its dissolution.

Peter W. Marx’s narrative model is contextualist, his narrative attitude largely ironic, but in the end, it becomes a story of decay with a warning. The culmination of every analysis of cultural history is their final look at the present. In 2018 Peter W. Marx finds hidden references to the imagery and intellectual tradition of „Hamlet” in such diverse figures as Frank-Walter Steinmeier¹⁸, Christian Lindner¹⁹, Marc Jongen ²⁰, Simon Strauss²¹ and Philipp Ruch²²: he interprets these references as an “awareness of crisis in a society that is saturated in a wrong way“ ²³ as a dangerous self-empowerment to overcome the existing conditions in an “intoxicated desire to act” ²⁴

No knowledge can be gained without memory anyway. If theatre represents a supra-individual consciousness and the history of the theatre a collective memory, then the history of theatre can make us see things that we could not see before, not only in the theatre but in society as a whole.

This review is the extended version of a text that appeared in the December 2018 issue of “Theater heute”.