The “historical experience” in drama, as I eventually found myself constrained to call it to avoid confusion with the established term “historical drama,” first appealed to me as a technical problem, which I discuss in detail in the introduction. However, while it remains an aesthetic question to be examined in an aesthetic context, it leads us also into areas in which significant intellectual, and above all, political themes arise. We find ourselves confronting issues of crucial importance to the understanding of the past and present, and the building of the future of Germany and Austria. Using the drama, rather than the historical novel, some of the greatest German writers set out to create for their audience a dramatic experience that, as in Shakespeare's Histories, is historical and at the same time political. Since historical and critical studies of German drama have tended to focus on the former, somewhat to the detriment of the latter, it seemed to me that I might be justified in attempting to redress the balance a little, not to overturn their judgements, but in the hope of adding an additional nuance to the picture.