Performing Unification: History and Nation in German Theater after 1989 by Matt Cornish (review)

Performing Unification examines the ways nation, historiography, and dramaturgy have been interwoven in German theater. In six chapters, a prologue, and an epilogue, theater historian Matt Cornish demonstrates how the Hegelian philosophy of history became tightly interwoven with Aristotelian concepts in German classical drama, particularly in Schiller's history plays. Although playwrights of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries became increasingly skeptical about progressivist and teleological concepts of history as a series of reversals (peripeteia) and moments of recognition (anagnorisis) leading toward freedom, Cornish argues, the fall of the Wall and subsequent unification of the two Germanys reinvigorated stories of national normalization told by politicians and conservative historians. Perhaps most memorably articulated by Francis Fukuyama, the rhetoric of a "peaceful revolution" conjured up the idea that the Hegelian dialectic of tragic historic turns and insights had finally come to a happy end. Against this idea, Cornish explores plays, productions, and performances that resisted the thesis of a comedic end of history. He shows that theater artists invented new, postdramatic forms inspired by non-Hegelian notions of history closer to Benjamin's philosophy of catastrophe, stasis, and living with ruins.

Cornish sets the stage with a chapter on history plays before 1989. It surveys playwrights' efforts to imagine, and challenge, German national identity through history plays from the Baroque period through Sturm und Drang and Weimar classicism to Kleist, Büchner, Brecht, and Weiss. Schiller's history plays provide the clearest examples of Hegelian historiography, by "laying out the principles governing the development of human society … teaching its spectators or readers how to reach freedom" and "imagining a future united nation for the new citizens [they] attempted to create" (27). But it also points to later dramatists' critiques of nationalism, focusing in particular on Brecht's strategy of historicization, as key to the anti-Aristotelian, epic dramaturgy that proved formative for the GDR and Western leftist playwrights discussed in subsequent chapters. The theater's critical distance to nationalism, Aristotelian dramaturgy, and Hegelian historiography in turn serves as foil for the discourse of unification as the "end of history" discussed in chapter 2.

The remaining four chapters examine how West and East German playwrights and directors responded to the newly hegemonic Hegelian narrative in distinct ways, and how a younger generation of theater and performance artists working in the Freie Szene (off-theater) further developed the postdramatic dramaturgies invented by East German directors for new contexts and settings. Cornish demonstrates that West German playwrights (Rolf Hochhuth, Klaus Pohl, and Elfriede Müller) resisted the comedic scripting of German history and national normalization by highlighting the tragic dimensions of unification. He shows that they offered sobering counternarratives, but framed their criticism in traditional dramatic terms, and hence kept faith in the historic dialectic and its eventual resolution. By contrast, East German directors Heiner Müller and Frank Castorf, in productions whose rehearsal process straddled the fall of the Berlin Wall, radically broke with the dramaturgy of the plays they were directing (Hamlet and Die Räuber, respectively), as well as with the sly use of allegory they had developed in response to ideological censorship during the GDR. In very fine readings of these two productions, Cornish traces the fracturing of epic dramaturgy; the turn against allegory and against the representation of cohesive historical worlds; the radicalization of distancing effects and refusal to mimetically represent characters or action; and the experimentation with elements of grotesque, satire, and physical comedy as hallmarks of what has come to be known as postdramatic theater. The formal features, historiographical premises, and political implications of postdramatic dramaturgy are the focus of the book's core chapter, which analyzes productions by Müller, Castorf, and Einar Schleef from the 1990s.

It is in these two chapters that Cornish makes his most original contribution to German theater studies and intellectual history: he historicizes the emergence of postdramatic theater, a term coined by German theater...