Jews and the Making of Modern German Theatre

6. German and Jewish “Theatromania”: Theodor Lessing’s Theater-Seele between Goethe and Kafka

9 9 Does history repeat itself? If we look at the exceptional part played by Jewish authors, actors, managers, directors, and critics in the development of modern German theatre and the above-average proportion of Jews in the audiences , it is not an exaggeration to speak of a “Jewish theatromania” during the late nineteenth century and the first three decades of the twentieth century. The Jewish community obviously had a sense that something significant was to be gained from participation in the theatre experience. Precisely this kind of “theatromania” typified German cultural life during the eighteenth century , in the context of bourgeois class emancipation.1 A look at that period might thus enhance our understanding of the expectations that generated Jewish theatromania as well as an understanding of its illusion. During the eighteenth century theatre functioned as a site where the bourgeoisie could publicly and powerfully articulate its demand for social and personal “autonomy.” But theatre itself exposed the unresolved tension underlying the demand for autonomy: the indeterminate relationship between reason—which generates the idea of freedom—and empirical reality as the field of determination. This inherent contradiction stimulated both the social and the aesthetic imagination. Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister (1795/1796) is an example of this double attraction and the ambivalent promise that the theatre provides. The eponymous hero of this Bildungsroman finally realizes that in order to complete his “education,” his personal formation, he must search beyond the illusion of theatre. A hundred years later we find a new “turn to theatre” in the German-speaking countries; this time the fever was 6 b e r n h a r d g r e i n e r German and Jewish “Theatromania” Theodor Lessing’s Theater-Seele between Goethe and Kafka b e r n h a r d g r e i n e r 100 most particularly found among German-cultured Jews. This chapter examines the striking—almost obsessive—Jewish turn to theatre as a renewed “theatromania”: an appropriation, continuation, and reorganization of the expectations underlying the mania of the eighteenth-century bourgeois, but this time within the context of Jewish emancipation. Here the theatre once again becomes the place for powerfully and publicly articulating the demand for autonomy (now meaning Jewish equality), with its irresolvable contradiction . Theatre’s ambivalent appeal can perhaps explain its powerful attraction , inspiring innovation; and this in fact is the constitutive Jewish role in the development of modern German theatre. Interestingly, both groups of theatre enthusiasts share an original rejection of this medium. The term “theatromania” stems from a theatre-hostile article published in 1681 by a vicar named Anton Reiser entitled “Theatromania , oder Die Werke der Finsterniss in den öffentlichen Schauspielen, von den alten Kirchenlehrern und etlichen heidnischen Skribenten verdammt” (Theatromania, or the Works of Dark Forces in Public Plays, Condemned by the Ancient Church Patriarchs and Some Pagan Writers).2 Karl Philipp Moritz used the name of the article’s author as the hero of his famous theatre novel Anton Reiser (which appeared in four parts in Berlin between 1785 and 1790). This is a fictitious autobiography of Moritz’s educational development , a Bildungsweg in which all efforts to attain independent selfhood are focused—in vain—on a theatre career. Approximately a century later Karl Emil Franzos (1848–1904), a German Jewish author from Galicia, wrote an analogous theatre novel set in a Jewish milieu, entitled Der Pojaz (The Clown, 1905).3 As in Moritz’s novel, the hero tries to achieve selfhood through the theatre; he too fails, this time due to the intervention of Hasidic rabbis. Thus Der Pojaz can be read as a Jewish Anton Reiser. ••• The Jewish theatromania was of course noticed at the time, but it was seldom a subject of public discussion.4 The German Jewish poet and philosopher Theodor Lessing (1872–1933) was an exception. In the first decades of the twentieth century he made a name for himself as a Lebensphilosoph (life philosopher) and radical culture critic; he was also a harsh critic of Jewish society in Germany. In the 1920s Lessing turned to Zionism, which he understood as a return to an original Jewish way of life and as the only solution to the “Jewish problem.”5 Lessing’s radical critique of modern culture in all its manifestations (political imperialism, exploitation of nature, mass production , mass culture) won him many enemies, not least in Jewish circles, espe- g...