Lost in Translation?

Ed. note: TDR invited Hans-Thies Lehmann and Karen Jürs-Munby to respond to Elinor Fuchs’s review of Jürs-Munby’s English translation of Lehmann’s book Postdramatic Theatre, published in TDR 52:2 (T198):178–83, 2008. Their responses and Fuchs’s reply follow.

Hans-Thies Lehmann responds

A strange thing happened to me on the way to America . . . and I do not mean the translation by Karen Jürs-Munby but the review by Elinor Fuchs published in this journal. Since Richard Schechner has asked me to write a response to this text, I take up the opportunity to correct some of the errors in the review concerning my book and its alleged intentions, and to add a personal note answering a rather personal overtone in the review. I will touch only briefly on the polemic concerning the English edition.

Polemics/Subsumptions

Even though at one point Postdramatic Theatre is qualified—through gritted teeth, so to speak—as an “important book” (182), the review as a whole is essentially a polemic. Of course there’s nothing wrong with polemics in principle. Yet, instead of a potentially fruitful exchange and debate about different conceptual approaches, I find a disappointing and, I must say, somewhat disquieting preoccupation on the part of my American colleague with questions of power, influence, priority, and position. I read here about “rival rubric” (180), a “war of subsumption,” the “coloniz[ing]” of “territories,” and questions such as “whose book is this?” (181). Goodness, what a tempest in an academic teacup! In the review’s conclusion, I find my book “elbowing its way into the forefront” (182). (I am trying in vain to picture this badly mannered behavior and cannot help thinking of Gary Larson’s wonderful snake rolled up in a cosy armchair while the phone is ringing on the table.) All this rhetoric is disturbing and reflects a style of thinking and discussion which I find at once too “academic,” in the bad sense of the word, and too invested in defending or attacking institutional or personal “positions”—be they real or imagined and invented. The review also manages to devote two entire pages to the issue of who first used the word “postdramatic.” (I will add a personal remark about this at the end, since the review here slips in a personal value judgement deeming me “ungrateful” [180] in this regard.)

Performance/Postdramatic Theatre

The book was written in and for a situation where the strong tradition of literary theatre, with dramatic narration as a norm, is still very much alive (in part this is due to the highly institutionalized framework of theatre practice in Germany in particular). The predominant intention was to open people’s minds and eyes to new and different ways of theatre practice. Performance art certainly plays a role in this context but not a prominent one in the critical discourse on theatre in Germany. However, a sharpened awareness of the “performative” aspects of theatre and culture in general has certainly foregrounded corresponding aspects of theatre that were more or less neglected in earlier times. Now, I explain in one section of the book that I cannot discuss performance art in the present context in any depth. My clear meaning is that I consider it a wide field and an extremely important issue meriting extensive consideration, and that I can only touch upon it briefly in the present context of my book. That I do so nevertheless is because the overlap between performance art and theatre is a reality and, as such, belongs to a study of postdramatic theatre, where the reader would rightly miss it if I passed over the subject completely. What does the reviewer do? First, she creates the wrong impression that I consider not the overlap but performance tout court as being simply part (“a subset”) of the discourse of postdramatic theatre (watch out, danger of subsumption!). Then she produces the next— I cannot but think deliberate—misreading: that I did not consider performance art as having “an objective standing in its own right”; that I...