The Swastika and the Stage: German Theatre and Society, 1933-1945 (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Swastika and the Stage: German Theatre and Society, 1933-1945 John London Gerwin Strobl . The Swastika and the Stage: German Theatre and Society, 1933-1945. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Pp. xii + 341. $95.00. This book begins with a provocative introduction: by presenting documented evidence, Strobl explains how the most exciting culture of the Weimar Republic (the culture with which contemporary readers are now most familiar) actually alienated huge sectors of the German population. He studies three educated individuals who were to become leading Nazis—Rainer Schlösser, Hans Severus Ziegler, and Baldur von Schirach—as examples of those who lost out in the cultural revolution of the period. Strobl penetrates the psychology of those who [End Page 524] would later welcome the changes initiated in 1933. You did not have to be highly conservative to be shocked by the politics and aesthetics of avant-garde theater in the 1920s: the radical plays of Erich Mühsam and Ernst Toller, together with director Leopold Jeßner's assaults on the classics, politicized theater by attacking nationalism, and, in the process, cutting well-known texts, sacrificing the poetic recitation of verse drama, and sometimes providing inaudible spectacles. As a result, theater auditoria were often emptied. Subsequent chapters describe what ensued after 1933. Chapter 2 studies "visions of a national rebirth" with a subtle analysis of Hanns Johst's Schlageter, a play designed to evoke "survivor guilt" (41) in its audiences, and a view of the genre of the Thingspiel (enormous open-air shows which plotted the resurrection of the country). The following chapter contains a detailed examination of Eberhard Wolfgang Möller's The Frankenburg Dice Game, which premiered at the Olympic Games in 1936, and examples of Nazi history plays which were promoted after the ban of much directly contemporary representation of the regime. Chapter 4 concentrates on the theatrical treatment of other nations, such as France, Poland, and Czechoslovakia, which had disputed regions in which Germans lived. Among the surprises here are the dramas advocating Franco-German reconciliation. In chapter 5 racism comes under scrutiny. Of particular interest are the Deutsche Afrika-Schau, a mixture of colonial exhibition and traveling circus which ran from 1936 to 1940, and the fact that some Nazi dramatists showed sympathy for non-Aryan peoples. Strobl has written a valuable section on the Nazis' difficulties in curbing existing Christian theater and an account of the Third Reich's dramatic propaganda against Catholicism (chapter 6). At times, audience hostility to such material succeeded in a Nazi retreat. Apart from an important aside on amateur theater, chapter 7 deals with the regulations affecting theater during Hitler's regime and is intended to demonstrate the chaos resulting from competing Nazi factions. Local Gauleiters sometimes banned plays officially promoted from Berlin. The last two chapters cover theater and propaganda (chapter 8) and the relationship of members of the profession with the Nazi hierarchy (chapter 9). Strobl sees many middle-class audiences as clinging to notions of entertainment divorced from politics, but also notes that "the more sophisticated Nazis regarded theatre as a safety valve" (190). In a coda, there are wonderful descriptions of the problems caused during the Second World War and the heroic efforts of performers to continue their work. The archival research in this book is unprecedented and reveals many fascinating vignettes hitherto unknown. There are copious details on plays submitted to the Propaganda Ministry for potential production. Among those in the Thingspiel genre, we are treated to some titles: Let There Be Light, The Crusade Against [End Page 525] Poverty, and The Scandal of Inflation (60). We learn of a twenty-year-old laborer who tried to write an allegorical play about the Führer; a fourteen-year-old girl who had penned a play in the hope of earning enough to buy Christmas presents for her family (for there would otherwise be nothing to unwrap); and a woman from the Sudetenland who apologized for sending a typed letter with her play (a drama to thank Hitler for the deliverance of her countrymen), because she had dislocated her right shoulder by waving at the man himself in a surging crowd the...