The Theatre of the Weimar Republic by John Willett (review)

Book Reviews CORRECTION The review of Carl Rollyson's Lillian Hellman: Her Legend and her Legacy. published in Modern Drama, 32, 3 (September 1989), 454 - 456, was incorrectly attrib~ted to Thomas P. Adler. The reviewer was Professor Jacob H. Adler ofPurdue University. The editors apologise to both Professors Adler for the confusion. JOHN WILLETT. The Theatre of the Weimar Republic. New York: Holmes and Meier 1988. Pp. 350, illustrated. $79·50 There may be a continuing sense of similarity to the present in the apocalyptic politics, economic crises, and technological challenges ofthe Weimar Republic. But what makes it relevant is the close involvement of artists in events of the time. The developments in Germany - from defeat in the first World War and failed revolution, through wild fluctuations of boom and bust, to the burning of the Reichstag - encapsulated many of the existential issues and sociological prOblems, which still preoccupy the present. The wide range of this gamut, in such extreme fonns and compressed into so short a span, both forced the Weimar intellectuals to confront them and clarified the essential questions. As a result their art and writings stand as reference points for defining the experience of modernity itself. At the same time, from the perspective of over half a century later, Weimar appears a comprehensibly coherent society where even ideological polarizations or fragmenting cultural conflicts reveal shared characteristics: if only extremism, turbulence and fervour. It offers a Zeitgeist with a uniquely identifiable, even exotically alien flavour, with flaunting decadence and materialistic excess co-existing alongside the emergence of the masses and puritanical idealists (of Right as well as Left - indeed, in several instances th,e opposing political positions were interchangeable). There is a homogeneity and romanticism about the modem appreciation that inhabitants of the period would hardly have recognized. Book Reviews 151 OUf image may not be their mirror. which makes the factual detail of this study by John Willett particularly appropriate. Still, as he remarks in his introduction, it is the emotional impression of perpetually impending crisis that gives the Weimar theatre its appeal: "The very urgency which which so often underlay its productions touches the nerve ends of those who once again know they are living in a precarious world." In an unstable social situation, the sense that even the slightest shift in public opinion can have a decisive effect was what lent this electricity to perfonnances - a voltage increased by the traditional Gennan view of the stage as a moral tribunal. It was this apparent potential that the first attracted Willett to the Weimartheatre that he has done so much to make accessible through his studies of such leading individuals as Brecht and Piscator. However, the subtext in Willett's focus here denies the assumption (shared, as he tellingly shows, not only by these subjects of his previous books and the expressionists, but also by the Nazi Propaganda Ministry under Goebbels, himself a minor playwright of the period) that art can change the world. Broadening the critica1lens to encompass the whole apparatus oftheatre demonstrates the degree to which, on the contrary, artistic expression was determined by external factors. This is not so much a work of dramatic criticism as an essay in the sociology of the stage. As such it offers a r, efreshingly different approach to largely familiar material. There are book-length studies available to the English-speaking reader of the institutions and movements such as the Volksbiihne or Expressionism, as well as the individual directors like Reinhardt, that are also central to Willett's discussion. But what has been sacrificed in depth is compensated by the overview. EVen so, the breadth of focus is paradoxically specialist. Sections on the most transient of light entertainment, conventional comedy and opera rub shoulders with agitprop, epic theatre and the experimental fringe; and while relatively more space is allowed to familiar figures thus implicitly endorsing standard evaluations - this tends to be outweighed by brief references to a multiplicity of actors, designers , impressarios and minor directors or largely unknown works. Thus the index for just over 200 pages of text approaches 1500 separate entries. Such a panorama certainly gives a convincing picture of the richness of the...