Volksschauspiele: Genese einer kulturgeschichtlichen Formation by Toni Bernhart

Abstract

Reviewed by: Volksschauspiele: Genese einer kulturgeschichtlichen Formation by Toni Bernhart Katherine Arens Toni Bernhart, Volksschauspiele: Genese einer kulturgeschichtlichen Formation. Deutsche Literatur Studien und Quellen 31. Edited by Beate Kellner and Claudia Stockinger. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2019. 399 pp. This volume originated in a 2017 Habilitationsschrift from Stuttgart (available in open access through de Gruyter's website), now expanded into a magisterial presentation of the Volksschauspiel, the Germanophone popular theater, as it has been created and studied in the scholarship, here offered by a scholar who is himself also a practicing playwright. The corpus of the Volksschauspiel includes popular theater of all genres, starting from the eighteenth century: the Viennese and southern Germanophone Volksstück, passion plays, the ritual plays of the Steiner Goetheanum, children's drama, and others. Toni Bernhart's Volksschauspiele focuses not only on these genres but also on how ideologies in aesthetics and literary studies have isolated them as somehow separate from serious art. The terms Volksschauspiel, Volksstück, and Volkstheater (9) are all in common use but need to be specified (as referring to theater history, the nineteenth-century Viennese stage, and a form of theater institution, respectively). Bernhart does so by reconstructing "die Genese der gattungstheoretischen Vorstellung des Volksschauspiels auf breiter Quellenbasis" (4)—what scholars have done to this corpus. The volume's first part (Part A, one of three) ties the terminology of Herder's idea of Volkspoesie, a discussion engaged by Gottfried August Bürger, Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz, and a handful of less familiar voices. The corpus of what then became "people's theater" comprised translations of Shakespeare's comedies, "Tyroler Bauernkomödien," religious and mystery plays, and even Dr. Faustus, Hans Sachs, and Nicolai's Herder and Bürger [End Page 77] parodies (16). That contemporaneous usage is confirmed by late eighteenth-century references from travel literature and other popular publications (Volksschauspiel even referred to cock fights). Bernhart finds two competing spheres of usage: "Volksschauspiel als (prä-)romantische Alternative zu gelehrter Literatur (Herder) und Volksschauspiel als didaktisches und kulturpatriotisches Institut mit oder ohne Betonung deutscher Spezifizität" (103). Part B takes up the academic study of the Volksschauspiel to critique the discipline's ideologies. The nineteenth century sought to "establish and professionalize" the then-new philology (207). Scholars took up the "Bauernspiel," "Bauernkomödie," "Bauerntheater," and more to collect and establish a canon of main authors and texts. Bernhart again adds citations from contemporaneous sources about how the texts were performed and then how scholars dealt with them (with biographical reference). A huge plus for today's researchers is Bernhart's list of important nineteenth-century collections (167), with notes about each editor's motivations and biases. Bernhart also draws on lexica, starting with Johann Christoph Adelung's dictionary, moving through the Aesthetisches Lexikon (1839) by Ignaz Jeitteles; the Allgemeines Theater-Lexikon (1842) by Robert Blum, Karl Herloßsohn, and Hermann Marggraff; and Johann Georg Krünitz's Ökonomisch-technologische Encyklopädie (1855). Each is carefully distinguished: Jeitteles focuses on Vienna, relying on August Wilhelm von Schlegel's poetics; Blum stresses how Volksschauspiel emerged as a derogatory term for "Zauberpossen, Spektakelstücke und Lokalsachen" aimed at local publics that created fertile soil for "Gemeinheit, Unsittlichkeit und Gesinnungslosigkeit" (147). Krünitz's Ökonomisch-technologische Encyklopädie devotes 336 pages to articles on "Volk," including "Volkstheater." Part C starts with twentieth-century scholars who wanted to institutionalize "Volksschauspielforschung etwa nach dem Vorbild des 1914 gegründeten Deutschen Volksliedarchivs in Freiburg im Breisgau" (213). At the start, Josef Nadler's Literaturgeschichte der deutschen Stämme und Landschaften (1912 und 1918) differentiated "bairisch" and "tirolisch" Volksschauspielen (later informing National Socialist ethnology, 214). Several gems stand out. Bernhart's explanation of how and why Hofmannsthal used Nadler clarifies differences in the Nazi ideologies (expanded in a further section on Nadler's "geistesgeschichtliche Rassenkunde," 243, and how it stressed "Germanness"). Section 11.3 amplifies the ties between Rudolf Steiner's Anthroposophy and National Socialism (233), with a particular emphasis on [End Page 78] Marie Steiner as a trained actress (239) and as an editor of the older texts being revised for pageants. Bernhart also reclaims an essay by Hans Moser, Das Volksschauspiel (1935), as an excellent...