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The German Genius

The German Genius

Titel: The German Genius Kostenlos Bücher Online Lesen
Autoren: Peter Watson
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Handke’s reservations about language link German theater to philosophy—Wittgenstein, for example—and find final form (thus far) in his play Die Stunde da wir nichts von einander wußten ( The Hour We Knew Nothing of Each Other ; 1992). The play is set in a town square in which, for one hour and forty-five minutes, two dozen actors playing close to 400 roles pass across the space, but nobody speaks. 46 The director Peter Stein has also been creating waves.
    Just as Dürrenmatt’s The Visit is the most-performed German play since World War II, so Kurt Jooss’s Der grüne Tisch ( The Green Table ) is the most-performed dance-drama, apparently “staged by more dance companies than any other work in the modern repertoire.” 47 Jooss died in 1979 and since then his pupil Pina Bausch (1940–2009) developed what she and others call Tanztheater . Building on the tradition of Rudolf Laban (1879–1958) in Munich, John Cranko (1927–73) in Stuttgart, and Mary Wigman (1883–1973) in Berlin, it is a mixture of narrative, expressionism, and sheer sensuality. 48 Her breakthrough came in 1971 with a commission from the Wuppertal Theater for Aktionen für Tänzer ( Actions for Dancers ), followed by a series of works that quickly became modern classics, the best being Café Müller , in which the chairs that virtually fill the stage are moved around at breakneck speed: only very fit, highly coordinated dancers could perform this piece without catastrophe.
    Which underlines the fact that, again as Patterson and Huxley point out, theater by and large represents “culture” rather than “entertainment” in Germany. There is no equivalent to “show-business” in the German language, and there is no equivalent of Broadway in German theater, though there are some theaters— Boulevardtheater —that specialize in comedies. In Germany theater audiences by and large expect a range of serious high-culture plays reflecting the European heritage. This requires subsidies that far outweigh those available elsewhere. The figures provided by Patterson and Huxley show that state and municipal subsidies to German theaters at the turn of the twenty-first century stood at roughly seven times the amount of public funding the United States provides for all the arts, while the Berlin Opera House alone receives almost as much as the British Arts Council spends on all the theaters it supports. German theaters tend to stand in their own grounds and the interiors are more elaborate and the productions more ambitious, as a result of which the role of the theater in the cultural life of Germany has been more important than it has elsewhere.
    In East Germany, in the 1980s, as with poetry, theater became a debating chamber for politics, albeit at one remove, via coded references, as mentioned in the previous section. 49 In fact, in the 1980s only the churches and the theaters provided a space for political debate.
    “T HE S ECOND F LOWERING OF G ERMAN F ILM”
     
    In film, as with the novel and poetry, the landscape of “rubble” was an early theme (Roberto Rossellini’s Germania anno zero , 1947) but this was not a genre that flourished. More successful was Wolfgang Staudte’s Die Mörder sind unter uns ( The Murderers Are Among Us ; 1946), in which a traumatized doctor tries to come to terms with the war and at the same time to bring his former commanding officer to justice.
    In East Germany filmmaking was controlled by the party, with DEFA (Deutsche Film-Aktiengesellschaft), maintaining a virtual monopoly over production (not so different from the UFA during the Nazi era). The early films often had capitalism in their sights, though other genres included the “anti-fascist film,” the doctrinal film, to promote the image of the ruling SED party (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands), with a lot of money also going into children’s films (likewise a form of indoctrination). The former UFA studios, in Potsdam-Babelsberg, were now used by DEFA; their most memorable anti-Nazi film was Sterne (Stars; 1959) in which an infantryman falls in love with a Jewish woman who is about to be sent to Auschwitz.
    Then there was the Gegenwartsfilm , which was a deliberate throwback to the “proletarian films” of the Weimar Republic. In such productions as Slatan Dudow’s Unser täglich Brot ( Our Daily Bread ; 1949), directors tried to show the real conditions existing in East Germany, but they were overtaken by events, in particular the

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