Tragedy's Endurance: Performances of Greek Tragedies and Cultural Identity in Germany since 1800 by Erika Fischer-Lichte

Abstract

118 BOOKREVIEWS intermediality. David H. Wenkel, in Coins as Cultural Texts in the World of the New Testament (2016), likewise ruminates on the hermeneutic potential of intertextuality for the study of coins as “cultural texts” (10-11), but “reading” ancient coins entails far more than intertextuality alone can explain. I would like to propose the term “nomismality” to describe the unique intersection of image and text on coins, along with the associated terms intranomismality and internomismality to describe the complex relationships between imperial and provincial coinage,as well as between individual coin series. JOHN JACOBS MontclairKimberleyAcademy,jjacobs@mka.org * * * * * Tragedy's Endurance: Performances of Greek Tragedies and Cultural Identity in Germany since 1800. By ERIKA FISCHER-LICHTE. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2017. Pp. xix + 398. Hardcover, $115.00. ISBN 978-0-19965163 -4. Tragedy’s Endurance is not simply a welcome addition for the field of Classical Reception, but it is also a book which offers a new methodological paradigm to a thriving discipline. The book presents a new approach to theatre historiography by relating the performances of Greek tragedy to the formation of cultural identity in Germany (from Winkelmann’s idealist Philhellenism to contemporary deconstructionist approaches). Commencing from Goethe’s production of Euripides’ Ion (1802) in Weimar, which was guided by the principle of harmony between all the elements of the performance (music, picturesque sets and costumes), Fischer-Lichte calculates firmly the starting ideological point of her discussion. Consequently, beauty, harmony and Philhellenism epitomized the romantic idolization of Greek Antiquity, strengthening therebythe “institutionalization” of Bildung. Potsdam’s Antigone (1841) continued the cultural production of Greek tragedy performances as “unmissable sensation[s]” (45) at times when Philhellenism was linked with the emerging nationalism in Europe and Classics BOOKREVIEWS 119 were becoming the focus of the new university in Germany. The author rightly underlines that in this historical context a new Weltanschauung was born due to the prevalent phenomenon of historicism according to which a past epoch could be “understood on the basis of acknowledging its fundamental difference and foreignness” (50). Not surprisingly, the production of Antigone was the first in the German states strictly to follow the principles of historicism, particularly in the sense that the great and immortal qualities of the ancient texts were to be filteredandreturnedtorealitywithacontemporaryandalterableeffect(55). A new era began with Richard Wagner’s theorization of the Gesamtkunstwerk which “ultimately aim[ed] to realize a socio-political utopia” (74) for a people’s democratic assembly in theatre, developed in the first Bayreuth Festival of 1876. Using her favorite anthropological model of analysis (employed by Victor Turner), Fischer-Lichte interprets the Festival as a “liminal experience,” “characterized by the separation from everyday life” and causing thereby “the destabilization or affirmation of an individual’s identity but also towards the coming-into-being of acommunity” (83). At the beginning of the twentieth century Max Reinhardt inaugurated the era of the Director who must use the Classics in a way that complies with modern times. With his productions of Greek tragedies between 1903 and 1919, Reinhardt proved his awareness “of the tension between historicity and topicality” andhe developednewmethods and“modes that were stronglyrelated to contemporary life in the modern metropolis” (96). But what makes FischerLichte ’s analysis more significant is her theatrical sensitivity in concluding that Reinhardt employed theatrical “devices that directed the spectator’s attention to the performers’ bodies—to the individual bodies of the protagonists as well as to the masses of bodies in the case of the chorus and sometimes even to their own bodies” (96). Thus, a Nietzschean vision of an ecstatically “primitive” Greekness was chosen for Sophocles’ Electra (1903) not only to allude to ancient maenads, but to attract attention to the protagonist’s “phenomenal body” (100). Additionally, the “atmosphere” of “coming-into-being of a community exclusively through performance” (120) is an important remark that FischerLichte makes in discussing Reinhardt’s legendaryOresteia(1911–1912). A new step in the contemporary approach to staging Greek Tragedy was recognized in Leopold Jessner’s production of Oedipus (1929) that acknowledged ancient Greece as a model “albeit defined by everyone in their own way according to their artistic and political leanings and Weltanschauungen (141). 120 BOOKREVIEWS...