The German Genius

of mainly now-forgotten playwrights, often performing modern plays about peasant themes— and in peasant dialect. 41 Theater also underwent what was called a “ braun shift”—all aspects being politicized, taking their color from the brown shirts of the Storm Troopers. Both Hitler and Goebbels believed, or said they believed, that it was the theater in the Weimar period that had abused German culture the most.
    The first National Socialist premiere took place in 1927, in Cologne, with Hans Johnst’s Thomas Paine , about the nationalist American revolutionary, “forgotten by his country as he sits in a French Republican prison.” But by May 1933 the change that was to come was heralded. On the sixth of the month, as minister president of Prussia, Göring took personal control of state and city theaters and, two days later, Goebbels addressed a special meeting of producers at the Hotel Kaiserhof in Berlin on “the tasks of the German theater.” He insisted that “outmoded art forms” would be eliminated in favor of the new Volk art—political, patriotic, and “consistent with the philosophy of the ruling party.” 42 “German art of the next decade will be heroic; it will be like steel; it will be romantic, non-sentimental, factual; it will be national with great pathos and at once obligatory and binding, or it will be nothing.” On August 21, 1933, Goebbels announced the creation of the office of Reichsdramaturg to advise his ministry on the theater, under Dr. Rainer Schlosser, a former critic. By then the new administration had given some hope to the theater profession (provided it kept in line) by supporting twelve new theaters (on to a total of 248 across the country).
    The earliest chance the Nazis had to show off their taste was at the First National Socialist Theater Festival, held in Dresden from May 27 to June 3, 1934. The brainchild of the Propaganda Ministry (known then as the Promi), it was graced by Hitler himself, who decided to attend at the last minute. By this time, the theaters were more or less firmly under Goebbels’s control and he identified three Berlin houses in particular to be the showcase of his new policy, and new Intendants , or directors. These were Count Bernhard Solms for the Volksbühne (formerly associated with Piscator), Heinz Hilpert for the Deutsches Theater (Reinhardt), and Walter Brügmann for the Theater des Volkes (the former Grosses Schauspielhaus of Reinhardt). Ten days before the Dresden Festival, Goebbels announced the Unified Theater Law, which stipulated that all theaters—private and public—must abide by the Nazis’ racial and artistic aims, that theaters had only one obligation, to be “conscious of national responsibility” and that otherwise artistic freedom “will not be altered in any way.” 43 Theaters were to be licensed.
    One of the arguments Goebbels had with what he called the “modernist big-mouths” was that they often showed strife within Germany (Hauptmann’s The Weavers , for instance) and this would no longer be tolerated. The program of the Dresden Festival therefore included works by Kleist, Schiller, Ibsen/Eckart ( Peer Gynt ), Goethe, and Shakespeare. It was in effect a “safe” performance, not ramming propaganda down people’s throats too hard.
    The Berlin Grosses Schauspielhaus itself, as a building, was huge and had a varied history, being at one stage the home of a circus, at another the venue where Robert Koch’s international congress dealing with tuberculosis had been held in 1890, and at another where the workers congregated on hearing of the death of Lenin in 1924. 44 Its great days were inaugurated with the arrival of Max Reinhardt (see Chapter 28), in whose time the theater was equipped with a Kuppelhorizont (sky dome) for spectacular staging effects and a revolving floor. Financial difficulties forced Reinhardt to sell this theater even before Goebbels forced his hand with the others.
    The very size of the theater was attractive to the Nazis. This “sense of massiveness” was always important for them as they attempted, one way or another, to create what Hofmannsthal had identified as “ceremonies of the whole” back in turn-of-the-century Vienna (see Chapter 26). In the Grosses Schauspielhaus, productions were always grand, massive, achieving their effects by enormous choruses, hundreds of musicians, vast troops of dancers, real cocks crowing, and real dogs barking. The aim, says Yvonne Shaffer, was to