Theatre under the Nazis (review)

Reviews489 ship, internal contradictions, andattempt to do too much in a short space vitiate it. Nonspecialist readers interested in gender and politics in Athenian drama should consult David Wiles's Greeit Theatre Performance: An Introduction (2000). Its two chapters on "Politics" and "Gender" offer a discussion that is both more dependable and more stimulating—in forty pages. What really distinguishes Wiles's approach is not his scholarship (though it is certainly superior ) but his methodological self-consciousness. Zelenak thinks that when he dispels that "reverential mist" the truth about Athenian drama will be revealed; Wiles knows that "[hjistory can never be objective. As a way of establishing meaningful links between bits ofdata, we tell stories about the past, and those stories reflect how we see our world.... My sense of how things were in the past is informed by my sense of what theatre can do in the present, and my dreams ofwhat it might do" (2-3). Mary Kay Gamel Cowell College, University of California, Santa Cruz John London, ed. Theatre under the NazL·. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001. Pp. 356. $74.95 casebound; $35.00 paperbound. Theater machen (literally translated: "to make theater") is a German expression used to condemn children and adults who make a fuss or put on a show. The idiom is sometimes used in jest. The carefully researched and well-documented essays in Theatre under the Nazis are not written lighdy, though. The introduction by John London and the six essays that follow offer striking insights into the nightmare theater directed by that frustrated artist Adolf Hitler and produced by the many would-be dramatists urging on skillfully choreographed spectacles highlighted by musical processionals, torchlight parades, banner waving, dancing, and ritualistically triumphant speeches offered to eager audiences who were also part ofthe production. "The overlap between theatre and political life" was strikingly indistinguishable, London notes (30). Apparently, wide audiencesthrive through theater, andKraftdurch Freude (Strength tiirough Joy) was not only a heady slogan but a fact in a deadly drama that lasted between 1933 and 1945. Hider's theaterwas to be DasKunstwerkderZukunft(TheArtwork oftheFuture ) that would endure for more than a thousand years. In fact, the millennial dramaturnedout to beledialkitsch,while die actual tiieatrical productionswidiin die grand tiieater still continue to elicit wide-ranging reactions. As London indicates ,"Popular perceptions oftiieatre under the Nazis swing from one extreme to 490Comparative Drama anotiier. On die one hand, diere are diose who condemn everything official to do with the period. On the other, there is a general view that theatrical life under Hitler was largely untouched by the ugly violence ofNazi ideology" (1). For the first view, I can offer an example of "those who condemn everything " by translating a sweeping statement made byThomas Mann in his essay "Why I'm Not Returning to Germany" (1945): "It might be superstition, but, in my eyes, books printed from 1933 to 1945 in Germany are less than worthless....They all stink with blood and shame and should be destroyed" (Die Große Kontroverse [1963], 33). Apparently Mann was not thinking about his first two Joseph novels (Die Geschichten faakobs and Per funge foseph), published in Berlin in 1933 and 1934; and he had not considered many other creative and scholarly works published during the Third Reich—a fact that Wilhelm Hausenstein made plain to Mann in a celebrated open letter written on Christmas Eve 1945, a document nowhere noticed in London's book. While many of the essays in Theatre under the Nazis acknowledge the possibility and reality of creativity within the Reich, the book's obvious emphasis is on the many forms of Nazi repression, ranging from "bully tactics" during theatrical performances to droves ofcodes intended to regulate artistic expression. Control was the order of the era, but it was not consistent, as a quotation offered by Erik Levi in his essay "Opera in the Nazi Period" indicates : "The Third Reich's omnipresent system of artistic censorship has remained strangely elusive to the historian. Far from the stereotype ofthe coldly efficient, centralized, totalitarian model of control, it was a fluid and amorphous agglomeration of official proscriptions, unofficial pressures, and selfimposed constraints. Improvised amid the early power struggles of...