Claus Peymann and the Performance Of Scandal

Abstract

Of the three major directors who dominated the German stage during the 1970s and 1980s and are still active today, Claus Peymann is probably the least well-known outside Germany, where his contemporaries Peter Zadek and especially Peter Stein have much more familiar names. This is true despite the fact that Peymann has been since 1995 the director of the Berliner Ensemble, surely the best known stage in Germany, and before that served for more than a decade at the head of the Vienna Burgtheater, another of Europe's leading theatres. Peymann's career has been one of the most turbulent in the modern German theatre, more marked by scandals and controversies, political and artistic, than the careers of any rival theatre leader in Europe. This essay provides and overview of this career, discussing Peymann's contributions and how he interacted with the social and artistic concerns of the German and Austrian stage during the past half century, from the engaged student theatre of the 1960s, though his involvement in the Baader-Meinhof affair in Stuttgart in the 1970s and his triumphs and scandals first in Bochum and then in Vienna in the 1980s and early 1990s, to his current position in the Berlin theatre scene as director of the Berliner Ensemble. The essay also discusses Peymann's importance in the development of such major modern German language playwrights as Peter Handke, Thomas Bernhard, and Peter Turrini.