Performing unification : history and nation in German theater after 1989 / Matt Cornish.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Cornish, Matt, author.

Contributor:

Michigan Publishing (University of Michigan), publisher.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Theater--Germany--History--20th century.

Theater.

German drama--20th century--History and criticism.

German drama.

Political plays, German--History and criticism.

Political plays, German.

Germany--In literature.

Germany.

Germany--History--Unification, 1990--Influence.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (252 pages) : illustrations, photographs

Place of Publication:

Ann Arbor : University of Michigan Press, [2017]

Summary:

Since the moment after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the most important German theater artists have created plays and productions about unification. Some have challenged how German history is written, while others opposed the very act of storytelling. Performing Unification examines how German directors, playwrights, and theater groups including Heiner Müller, Frank Castorf, and Rimini Protokoll have represented and misrepresented the past, confronting their nation's history and collective identity. While scholars and critics have scrutinized unification in cinema and literature, this is the first book to focus on theater and performance. Author Matt Cornish surveys German-language history plays from the Baroque period through Friedrich Schiller, Heinrich von Kleist, Brecht, and up to the documentary theater movement of the 1960s to show how German identity has always been contested, even well before Germany became a nation. Then turning to performances of unification after 1989, Cornish argues that theater, in its structures and its live gestures, on pages, stages, and streets, helps us to understand the past and its effect on us, our relationships with others in our communities, and our futures. Engaging with theater theory from Aristotle through Bertolt Brecht and Hans-Thies Lehmann's "postdramatic" theater, and also with theories of history from Hegel to Walter Benjamin and Hayden White, Performing Unification demonstrates that historiography and dramaturgy are intertwined.

Contents:

Prologue: Berlin, Alexanderplatz

History and nation in German drama before 1989

Unification as drama

Western playwrights and counternarratives of unification

Allegory and antiallegory in the Ost

Eastern directors and postdramatic historiography

Performing archives and museums in the Freie Szene

Epilogue: hybridized history : a society in transition.

Notes:

Issued as part of book collections on Project MUSE.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 227-238) and index.

Description based on information from the publisher.

ISBN:

9780472123070

0472123076

OCLC:

1002909621

Publisher Number:

10.3998/mpub.9406366