Performing Unification: History and Nation in German Theater after 1989 by Matt Cornish (review)

The title of Matt Cornish's study already signals an important position with its terminology. It is common practice to consider the great historical merging of the Federal Republic with the German Democratic Republic (GDR) in 1990 as the "reunification," following the original unification of Germany in 1871. The author, however, rightly insists that the more popular usage overlooks the fact that the unified Germany that emerged at the end of the 20th century differed greatly from the territories that came together 119 years earlier.

The interest in history, and more particularly historiography, runs through almost all of the study. Cornish opens with some methodological comments and signals his debt to Hayden White's Metahistory (1973) as a source for understanding the different dramaturgical strategies he assays in his chapters. Comedy, tragedy, and satire feature prominently in the analysis. According to White, comedy suggests a reconciliation of historical tensions, tragedy their unresolved persistence, while satire, in Cornish's interpretation, is reserved for framing postdramatic productions. It is the latter category that seems the most difficult to apply because satire suggests a surveyable world in which folly can be exposed. Yet Cornish manages to square this circle by understanding White's term as one with a "resistance to closure" (53). Cornish also makes an important contribution to our understanding of how history is still refracted through productions that appear to dismiss the category, such as Frank Castorf's Die Räuber. That is, he argues against the popular contention that Castorf's work is little more than a chaotic mélange of fragments. Instead he proposes that the treatment of performed material reflects a notion of crisis fundamental to Castorf's understanding of historical processes.

The emphasis on a text's or a production's historiographical dramaturgy is illuminating. The author considers the ways in which history has been conceptualized in a survey of significant history plays that precede the fall of the Berlin Wall before narrowing his focus in subsequent chapters. Here he shows how erstwhile West German playwrights understood the historical upheavals as tragedy; argues that East German directors found themselves both prisoners of history in the years immediately following unification and more liberated in their treatment of the recent past; and considers three productions from 2009 to 2011 that reflect on unification with more distance. The epilogue that concludes the study engages with the integration of Turkish theatre-makers as a meditation on more recent historico-demographic trends. The focus of the analysis is very Berlin-centric, something Cornish acknowledges in his prologue: he understands the city as a "synecdoche for the divided Germanys and the troubles of unification" (9). And while this may be true, the former GDR's theatres did spend much time and effort reflecting on their past. Word limits always constrict authors' ambitions, but a broader examination of the traumatized landscape of the 1990s would have been a welcome addition to the study.

For the most part, the analyses are solid and open new vistas through Cornish's historiographical emphasis. Of particular note is his discussion of postdramatic theatre in this context. He argues that meaning and social critique are both present in this theatrical form, but that the category of "disintegration" (124) is central to determining their status to audiences. That is, disintegration is not an arbitrary mode of producing fragments, but a key to understanding the relationships between them. His case studies on Castorf, Heiner Müller, and Einar Schleef carefully map different directorial strategies that seek to establish this position.

There are, however, some terminological questions that arise, sometimes due to a lack of appropriate introduction and definition. When, for example, the author maintains that Rolf Hochhuth's play Wessis in Weimar employs Brechtian historicization (113) and "relies on the classical dramaturgy of tragedy" (84), he seems to be applying categories that contradict each other. Elsewhere, the important term "postmigrant" merely...