Theater at the Iron Curtain

In its function as a Cold War partition, the Iron Curtain rarely recalls theater unless it is to allude to the vague sense of drama in the era's politics. To reconsider its relationship to the stage, this article uncovers a short-lived plan to turn the divide into a meaningful location of West German theater of the late 1950s and early 1960s—the period usually associated with creative stagnation. Along the spuriously explored Czechoslovak–West German border, I argue, the border was mobilized to infuse canonical works with new strategic significance and make a case for site-specific performance.