Es gibt kein Drama mehr.” This saying by Iwan Goll is, in one sense of the word, manifestly not true: there is no lack of plays in German after the onset of the Modern Movement; many on themes taken from history, and among these, works whose “modern” credentials are indisputable. One thinks of Dürrenmatt's treatment of the Anabaptist theocracy in Münster (Es steht geschrieben [1947], recast as Die Wiedertäufer in 1967). Goll's remark makes sense, however, if applied to the idea of drama as it had existed since Aristotle: a coherent action between defined characters, located in a known reality. If “character” and “reality” become unstable and subjective notions, drama in its classic form comes under threat. One can see the faultline developing between Ibsen and Chekhov. Historical drama is probably more at risk than most other kinds, since the “historical” quality is linked with the idea of objective factuality, but insofar as such twentieth-century plays are indisputably “modern” (as distinct from, say, Hochwälder's Das heilige Experiment) they are a-, if not unhistorical. The ambivalence, from the 1890s onward, of the concept “reality,” and its psychological internalisation, militate against the realisation of past actuality in the objective form essential to the “historical” effect. Elisabeth Brock-Sulzer says of Es steht geschrieben that it presents “nicht das Bild einer geschichtlichen Welt, sondern eine Welt eigenen Gesetzes.” Dürrenmatt himself, in laying the foundation for his idiosyncratic conception of “Komödie” in an appendix to Die Wiedertäufer, denies that dramatic reality is any longer possible.