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Reviewed by:
  • Jews and the Making of Modern German Theatre
  • Alan Lareau
Jews and the Making of Modern German Theatre. Edited by Jeanette R. Malkin and Freddie Rokem. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2010. 304 pages + 19 b/w illustrations. $49.95.

Building on a range of recent studies on the connection of Jews and modernity, most famously the 2000 exhibit at New York's Jewish Museum entitled Berlin Metropolis: Jews and the New Culture 1890–1918 and its ambitious catalogue, the volume at hand argues that the central role of the theater in the modernist revolt and modern Jewish identity has been underestimated, even overlooked. This collection of fourteen essays (counting the introduction and epilogue) has a two-fold purpose: to demonstrate the central role Jewish directors, actors, and artists played in the development of modern theater in Germany from naturalism through the Weimar Republic, but also to illustrate how theater and theatricality expressed the struggles of Jewish identity within modernity in Germany. The editors propose that the essays can be grouped into four blocks: first, four historical overviews (of which Peter Jelavich's contribution on imperial Berlin is a condensed revision of an essay that already appeared in the Berlin Metropolis volume), then two studies of critical perspectives (on the writings of Theodor Lessing and Arnold Zweig), two articles on genres (cabaret and expressionism), and four portraits of individual artists.

The collection draws on a traditional vision of theater as the elite stage of high art, but there is as well discussion of revue, cabaret, and the admittedly "anomalous" [End Page 676] (32) Herrenfeld theater, as well as a chapter on the Yiddish theater and its influence. The pivotal figures of this study are the directors Otto Brahm, Max Reinhardt, and Leopold Jessner, and the actors Alexander Granach and Rudolf Schildkraut. Women are all but absent; stars such as Elisabeth Bergner and Fritzi Massary earn only passing mention, and there is no discussion of the popular fare of boulevard theater, comedy, or operetta.

While the individual essays are engaging reading, the volume as a whole would have benefited from more editorial oversight and guidance. The somewhat arbitrary, hodgepodge feel of the collection betrays its genesis as the outcome of a conference and a subsequent workshop. A broad essay on Jewish theater critics and their role in the development of literary and theatrical modernity, for instance, would have been helpful background to the more focused studies of Theodor Lessing and Arnold Zweig's philosophies of theater. There is a disconcerting amount of overlap and outright repetition; while this is touted in the introduction as a strength that demonstrates the "ongoing dialogue" (5) among the authors, readers may instead find it irritating and careless.

In truth, the collection is more cultural and intellectual history than a study of performance art. One searches impatiently for the modern theater under discussion here. Anat Feinberg's study of the "unknown" Jessner proposes to reveal the influence of the director's life and experience as a Jew on his work, but his theatrical art does not come through in the essay. "The three Tells directed by Jessner in Germany tell us much about the man, not only the director," we read (241), but the resulting curiosity about what these productions were and what precisely they show remains unsatisfied, just as we do not learn what the director's "artistic compromises" (242) actually were. Steven E. Aschheim argues engagingly that theatricality can serve as a metaphor for the identity struggle of modern Jews, but when he then intends to transport his metaphor to actual theatrical performance, the essay runs thin. Throughout, production values such as staging, costuming, acting, lighting, and dramaturgy take a back seat to biography and historical context, appearing as incidentals rather than the heart of the argument. Hans-Peter Bayerdörfer's article on Jewish cabaret artists presents cabaret as a linguistic art of avant-garde poetic techniques and does not engage issues of performativity (using texts, moreover, that were in part not written for the cabaret, such as Walter Mehring's Kaufmann von Berlin); in her article on Expressionist theater, on the other hand, Jeanette Malkin does discuss the physicality...

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