Theater über Theater. Parodie und Moderne 1870–1914 (review)

Nikola Roßbach's Theater über Theater opens with the discovery that the years 1890 to 1906 brought forth a boom of dramatic parodies that coincided with the heyday of humorous journals, professional humorists, and the earliest German-language cabarets. Taken together, these phenomena, she argues, were instrumental for the development of the nascent modern theater. The study is based on a collection of 600 printed and/or staged parodies, which she subjects to typological breakdown and statistical analysis. In order to elucidate strategies of theatrical innovation at the turn of the century, she divides the texts into three categories: parodies of traditional or "old" theater, parodies of naturalist drama, and parodies of manifold modernist styles (above all Maeterlinck), which she conflates under the term "symbolism." For each grouping, she has selected five plays as case studies for close readings. A supplemental listing of the 600 parodies the author has identified, along with their sources (often only as manuscripts in censors' archives or no longer extant), is followed by short biographies of the authors.

Any discussion of comedy runs the danger of killing it through analysis; some recent theories of parody barely acknowledge the central elements of humor and playfulness, and they can degenerate into self-important hymns to intertextuality. Roßbach foregrounds comic techniques such as substitution, omission, exaggeration, distortion (drawn largely from the work of Erwin Rotermund), but she, too, is more concerned with the critical potential than humorous effect. While she notes that an overwhelming majority of the parodies she has compiled are merely nonsense and jest with no literary or critical intents, these are disqualified in order to foreground parodies as self-reflective dialogues with modernist drama, a form of literary-theatrical criticism through practice.

The original theatrical performances that are lampooned and the stage productions of the parodies themselves come up somewhat short in this study. Roßbach acknowledges that many of these parodies were aimed not just at contemporary dramatists but also at the stagings and actors of the day; this topical recognition effect through gesture, costuming, impersonation and caricature of acting and production styles was certainly at the heart of these spoofs' success. While granting Roßbach's assertion that it is difficult if not downright impossible to reconstruct this dimension due to the lack of sources (even printed reviews give little sense of performative qualities, and Roßbach makes no use of what scant photographic sources may be available), it is ironic that a study of theatricality must in large part overlook that entire mode of expression and limit itself to the printed word. Indeed, the parodies underpinning this study were not all written for the stage; many appeared in humorous journals and books and are thus literary rather than theatrical texts (although a few were subsequently performed), but insofar as they reflect on the aims and means of the theater, they are by Roßbach's definition metatheatrical.

The book is a revised Habilitationsschrift, and it reads like a dissertation, hammering on its main concepts and arguments. The first quarter of the volume lays the groundwork in a Forschungsbericht regurgitating previous research and definitions of modernity, parody, performativity, and (meta-)theatricality. The analyses of the plays are often dry and fail to convey what made these pieces such a success in their day. Given that these texts are so rare, clearer orientation (especially plot summaries) would be helpful for readers. In the discussion of Hugo Busse's 1899 parody of Fuhrmann Henschel, for instance, one never discovers what the text is actually about, except that it has virtually nothing to do with the original and somehow features song and dance.

Roßbach's accomplishment lies in the correction of misconceptions and stereotypes in previous research on parody and theater. She is able to demonstrate that the literary-critical parody had not run dry by the late nineteenth century, as asserted by Alfred Liede (1966) and Erwin Rotermund (1996), who based their conclusions on a dearth of sources...