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Introduction: Theater and the Possibility of Enlightenment
KARL EMIL FRANZOS'S Der Pojaz (The Clown, 1905) tells the story of a supposedly toxic culture and the emancipatory potential of the theater. The novel is a failed Bildungsroman of sorts or, as Kata Gellen has described it, a failure-to-launch narrative. It may seem an odd starting point for a chapter concerned largely with the German Democratic Republic (GDR), but the novel and its reception tell us a great deal about the place of German culture, and particularly theater, in the German Jewish imagination in the late nineteenth century. Understanding this conceptualization and its evolution throughout the early twentieth century is key to understanding the place of Jewish theater in the East German imagination in the decades following the Holocaust. Looking at East German publications and performances with this particular intellectual and cultural history in mind, it becomes possible to understand the status of Eastern European Jewish culture in the GDR as inherently linked to the state-promoted image of the nation as the already realized besseres Deutschland and the shift away from theater as a means of enlightenment or self-improvement toward its function as a sign that this desired state has already, somehow, been achieved, or is at least well within reach. Crucially, this desired state of being is no longer a goal for Jewish culture but one that is to be reached through the instrumentalization of a particular vision of this culture, a vision that strategically excised the elements of Jewishness deemed antithetical to proletarian universalism and highlighted those that could be used to support East Germany's own selfmythologization as the only antifascist German state.
Der Pojaz describes Sender Glatteis and his journey out of, and back to, the shtetl as he struggles to become an actor on the German-language stage. Franzos sets up the German language and culture as the path to enlightenment and modernity—only to have his protagonist die in the place of his birth after pursuing this very path. It is not that Franzos's narrative undermines the possibility of enlightenment through German culture; the novel in fact depicts a real-world example of exactly the kind of success Sender is striving toward in the form of Bogumil Dawison, the most successful Jewish actor in nineteenth-century Europe.
Nexus is the official publication of the biennial German Jewish Studies Workshop, which was inaugurated at Duke University in 2009, and is now held at the University of Notre Dame. Together, Nexus and the Workshop constitute the first ongoing forum in North America for German Jewish Studies. Nexus publishes innovative research in German Jewish Studies, introducing new directions, analyzing the development and definition of the field, and considering its place vis-à-vis both German Studies and Jewish Studies. Additionally, it examines issues of pedagogy and programming at the undergraduate, graduate, and community levels. Nexus 3 features special forum sections on Heinrich Heine and Karl Kraus. Renowned Heine scholar Jeffrey Sammons offers a magisterial critical retrospective on this towering "German Jewish" author, followed by a response from Ritchie Robertson, while the dean of Kraus scholarship, Edward Timms, reflects on the challenges and rewards oftranslating German Jewish dialect into English. Paul Reitter provides a thoughtful response.
Contributors: Angela Botelho, Jay Geller, Abigail Gillman, Jeffrey A. Grossman, Leo Lensing, Georg Mein, Paul Reitter, Ritchie Robertson, Jeffrey L. Sammons, Egon Schwarz, Edward Timms, Liliane Weissberg, Emma Woelk.
William Collins Donahue is the John J. Cavanaugh Professor of the Humanities at the University of Notre Dame, where he chairs the Department of German and Russian. Martha B. Helfer is Professor of German and an affiliate member of the Department of Jewish Studies at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey.
Thomas Christoph Harlan's play Ich selbst und kein Engel premiered in West Berlin in 1958, but quickly made headlines in both halves of the divided city. The play, written by the son of the infamous filmmaker Veit Harlan and starring the Argentine riddish-speaking actress Cipe Lincovsky, played a central role in the Cold War struggle over the legacy of both the riddish literary tradition in post-Holocaust Germany and the German Volksstück tradition, especially in the East. This essay uses Harlan's play and the public reaction to its performances to tie political and aesthetic debates on the role of the folk in postwar theater to Cold War attempts by both German states to appropriate distinctly Jewish traditions as their own. Ultimately, the essay argues that a postwar fascination with riddish culture played a much larger role in East German political identity formation than has been previously acknowledged.
AS BOTH GERMAN STATES tried to set up a new theater culture in the years following the end of the Second World War, theater directors and dramaturges had to consider to what extent the German stage could continue to rely on pre-war traditions and to what extent new models needed to be developed. By the late 1950s, the two German states had made “two very different attempts to translate pre-war German theater to the contemporary situation.” While theater directors, writers, and dramaturges in the East were concerned primarily with a specific form of re-education that would help viewers develop class consciousness and a strong identification with a specifically Marxist form of antifascism, Western theater during the first decade and a half of the postwar period tended to stress an ahistorical “essential humanity in its spectators.” Nonetheless, both states laid claim to certain aspects of the German dramatic tradition and strategically disavowed others. Both stressed the fostering of a cultural legacy as a means of signifying the rebirth, on their own respective soil, of a “better Germany,” but also deemed certain aspects of the pre-war theater unsuitable for theirpurposes. Particularly contentious were those forms associated with the Volk.