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  • Religion in Contemporary German Drama: Botho Strauß, George Tabori, Werner Fritsch, and Lukas Bärfuss by Sinéad Crowe
  • Sun-Young Kim
Sinéad Crowe. Religion in Contemporary German Drama: Botho Strauß, George Tabori, Werner Fritsch, and Lukas Bärfuss. Studies in German Literature, Linguistics, and Culture. Rochester: Camden, 2013. 178 pp. US$75.00 (Hardcover). ISBN 978-1-57113-549-0.

In the book reviewed here, Sinéad Crowe seeks to provide the first comprehensive examination of Judaeo-Christian religious elements in contemporary German-language theatre and drama by focusing on works by representative avant-garde dramatists of the past thirty years. She examines how and why the authors listed in the title use religion in their dramas and thus sets out to both acknowledge religion as a noteworthy influence on contemporary avant-garde dramas and, more broadly, to understand how they reveal the changing perception of religion and spirituality in secular European countries. Crowe has taken on an ambitious task, and while her readings of individual works offer useful models for analysing religious elements in contemporary dramas, her book also reveals how difficult it is to find a common theoretical frame for general observations. Crowe conscientiously acknowledges these difficulties, which are most apparent in the theoretical and methodological chapters (the introduction as well as chapters 1 and 5). Despite minor organizational weaknesses and some theoretical vagueness, the strengths – including the careful, historically contextualized, and close examinations of selected dramas as distinct works – dominate, as discussed below. [End Page 247]

What inspired the book’s investigations were religiously themed plays in the early 2000s and the question whether religion had returned to the contemporary German stage, as posed in feuilletons, such as Die Welt and Süddeutsche Zeitung, and specialized journals, such as Jahrbuch für Internationale Germanistik, Die deutsche Bühne, and Literaturen. To launch the book’s analyses, Crowe counters the claims that the beginning of the twenty-first century witnessed an unprecedented interest in religion in German theatre. When we read on, the discussions of the theoretical framework and methodological approaches in the introduction and first chapter reveal a more specific enquiry that probes widespread explanations of religion and theatre’s connections: how accurate is the claim that religious rituals, by virtue of their performative and repeatable qualities, constitute the shared sources of religion and theatre? The brief investigation is informed by scholarship on ritual studies as well as sociological and anthropological comparisons between the function of rituals in religious institutions and the theatre. Fleshing out her initial question further, Crowe asks how categories of religious rituals, which are employed outside the usual setting of a church or synagogue, act as markers of transition and change in the selected avant-gardist plays. The author thus ultimately reveals a concern with religious elements’ purpose and their realization in dramas, that is, how and whether these elements are aimed at effectuating change and how and whether they raise awareness about specific problematic areas of contemporary society (e.g. dealing with the National Socialist past, the capitalist reality, the modern condition of loneliness in a supposedly godless society, etc.).

Another useful contextualizing move is found in the second chapter, which positions contemporary dramas within a meaningful historical framework. Crowe convincingly presents a genealogy of dramas with religious elements, beginning with late nineteenth-century expressionist works by August Strindberg, Georg Kaiser, and Ernst Toller; proceeding to those of classical avant-gardists of the twentieth century, Antonin Artaud, Jerzy Grotowski, and Samuel Beckett; and ending with the twenty-first-century plays of contemporary avant-gardists. Crowe’s synchronic grouping of these dramas as experimental and provocative plays and her diachronic treatment of each play present the use of religious themes in the primary texts as part of a European literary tradition instead of an isolated German-specific curiosity. Moreover, Crowe’s diachronic presentation highlights important shared attributes: she focuses on their conflicted utopian motivations of creating a secular sacrality through theatre, of bringing together thoughtful, socially conscious individuals, while also expressing doubt about such utopian possibilities. More important, this chapter demonstrates how religious elements have been used to express the paradoxical combination of disillusionment and divine authority per se...

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