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Gerwin Strobl. The Swastika and the Stage: German Theatre and Society, 1933-1945. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Pp. xii + 341. $95.00.
This book begins with a provocative introduction: by presenting documented evidence, Strobl explains how the most exciting culture of the Weimar Republic (the culture with which contemporary readers are now most familiar) actually alienated huge sectors of the German population. He studies three educated individuals who were to become leading Nazis - Rainer Schlösser, Hans Severus Ziegler, and Baidur von Schirach- as examples of those who lost out in the cultural revolution of the period. Strobl penetrates the psychology of those who would later welcome the changes initiated in 1933. You did not have to be highly conservative to be shocked by the politics and aesthetics of avant-garde theater in the 1920s: the radical plays of Erich Mühsam and Ernst Toller, together with director Leopold Jeßner's assaults on the classics, politicized theater by attacking nationalism, and, in the process, cutting well-known texts, sacrificing the poetic recitation of verse drama, and sometimes providing inaudible spectacles. As a result, theater auditoria were often emptied.
Subsequent chapters describe what ensued after 1933. Chapter 2 studies "visions of a national rebirth" with a subtle analysis of Hanns Johst s Schlageter, a play designed to evoke "survivor guilt" (41) in its audiences, and a view of the genre of the Thingspiel (enormous open-air shows which plotted the resurrection of the country). The following chapter contains a detailed examination of Eberhard Wolfgang Möllers The Frankenburg Dice Game, which premiered at the Olympic Games in 1936, and examples of Nazi history plays which were promoted after the ban of much directly contemporary representation of the regime. Chapter 4 concentrates on the theatrical treatment of other nations, such as France, Poland, and Czechoslovakia, which had disputed regions in which Germans lived. Among the surprises here are the dramas advocating Franco-German reconciliation. In chapter 5 racism comes under scrutiny. Of particular interest are the Deutsche Afrika-Schau, a mixture of colonial exhibition and traveling circus which ran from 1936 to 1940, and the fact that some Nazi dramatists showed sympathy for non- Aryan peoples.
Strobl has written a valuable section on the Nazis' difficulties in curbing existing Christian theater and an account of...