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

In his Performing Unification, Matt Cornish offers the first comprehensive analysis of the most significant plays and productions dealing with unification and the politics of history and memory in Berlin during and after the Wende. Performing Unification not only provides an analysis of productions never before studied in English but also places both past and current trends in the context of historiography and nationalism. Cornish begins by providing a theoretical exegesis: first focusing on the history of German drama's participation in both constructing and contesting the nation from the baroque up to 1989, then exploring the dramaturgical underpinnings of the contemporary unification myth and the politics of narrating the German past. This is followed by responses to unification and conceptions of German identity on contemporary Berlin stages: plays by West German dramatists, East German Regietheater, postdramatic theatre, the Freie Szene, and postmigrant theatre. Cornish shows how each resisted the dramaturgical conceits and official discourse of unification.

To ground his theory, Cornish traces the historiography-dramaturgy relationship back to Aristotle. He shows how the major elements of dramaturgy, as defined in Aristotle's Poetics, are also the key components of a nationalist historiography: anagnorisis (recognition), peripeteia (reversal or change), and pathos (suffering). Of this, Schiller's late eighteenth-century history plays are paradigmatic—oriented around Aristotelian recognitions and narratives of the past as pathos-filled struggles for freedom through nation. Cornish also shows how German historians and philosophers perform poetic acts in their narration of history. He incorporates Hayden White's Metahistory (1973) to demonstrate that, for philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, dramatic action and historical action share the same formal characteristics. Hegel appropriated the characteristics of Aristotelian tragedy in his philosophy of history, dramatizing the linear development of spirit through recognitions and reversals towards its aim in comic resolution. Cornish demonstrates how tragic plot devices and a Hegelian telos underwrite the official unification story, which concludes in the happy marriage between East and West.

The seeds of dissent emerge in the early nineteenth century when German dramatists start to reject Schillerian dramaturgy and its implied finalities. Ambiguity towards a nationalist past is already evident in plays such as Heinrich von Kleist's Die Hermannschlacht (1808). Moreover, as early as Georg Büchner, along with Gerhart Hauptmann, Bertolt Brecht, and Peter Weiss, modern German drama exposes disunities and social inequalities in order to redefine or refuse nationalism. These plays anticipate the separation of theatre and drama—or, in this case, theatre and teleological history. Building on Hans-Thies Lehmann's Postdramatic Theatre (2006), Cornish expands our understanding of postdramatic dramaturgies by accounting for East German directors' cynicism towards Hegelian historiography during and after the Wende.

The postunification dramas and productions studied in this book all subvert one-dimensional narratives of progress and versions of history that demonize the GDR (German Democratic Republic) as totalitarian and celebrate the FRG (Federal Republic of Germany) as its overcoming. In various ways, all contested the myth of German unification, crystallized in Chancellor Helmut Kohl's "blooming landscapes" speech. Cornish shows how West German dramatists directly incorporated the official myths and rhetorical devices of unification, only to refuse the comic reversal associated with the Wende and instead opt for pathos and tragedy. Botho Strauss's Schlusschor (1991), Klaus Pohl's Wartesaal Deutschland Stimmenreich (1995), Rolf Hochhuth's Wessies in Weimar (1993), and Elfriede Müller's Goldener Oktober (1991) all end in tragic disunity. Only Strauss stands out as a conservative outlier for endorsing the need for a mythic history and collective German memory, the absence of which results in the play's violent finale.

Heiner Müller and Frank Castorf—two East German Regietheater directors who were participating in, or rehearsing close to, the events of November 1989—resisted creating straightforward allegories in their iconic productions. According to Cornish, with Hamlet/Maschine and Räuber respectively, each relied on the role that his drama played...