Abstract
When plays by British playwrights were banned in the Third Reich in September 1939, Shakespeare’s works were granted an exception. Reichsdramaturg Rainer Schlösser argued that Shakespeare in German translation was not an enemy author but a ‘German classic’.3 Although Schlösser’s statement might appear somewhat odd today, it did not originate from a radically new National Socialist take on Shakespeare. Rather, it relied on a long-established German tradition, eloquently epitomised by Gerhart Hauptmann’s famous lines from the previous war: ‘There is not a people, not even the English, that would have as much right to claim Shakespeare as the Germans. Shakespeare’s characters are part of our world; his soul became one with ours; and if it is in England that he was born and buried, Germany is the country where he truly lives.’4 In times of international conflict, this German, even Nordic, Shakespeare could thus be deployed as a token of German genius and cultural superiority.
The wonderful thing about nature and providence is that no conflict between the sexes can occur as long as each party performs the function prescribed for it by nature.
(Adolf Hitler)2
I thank Ros King, Paul Franssen, and Ruth von Ledebur for their immensely helpful comments on this paper.
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Notes
Cited in Claudia Koonz, Mothers in the Fatherland: Women, the Family, and Nazi Politics (New York: St. Martin’s, 1987), 91.
Alan E. Steinweis, Art, Ideology, and Economics in Nazi Germany ( Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1993 ), 163–4.
See also Werner Habicht, ‘Shakespeare and Theatre Politics in the Third Reich,’ The Play Out of Context: Transferring Plays from Culture to Culture, eds. Hanna Socolov and Peter Holland ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989 ), 110–20
Gerwin Strobl, ‘Shakespeare and the Nazis,’ History Today 47 (May 1997), 16–21.
Gerhart Hauptmann, ‘Deutschland und Shakespeare,’ Shakespeare Jahrbuch 51 (1915), xii. All translations are mine unless noted otherwise.
Henning Rischbieter, Thomas Eicher, and Barbara Panse, Theater im ‘Dritten Reich’: Theaterpolitik, Spielplanstruktur, NS-Dramatik ( Seelze-Velber: Kallmeyer, 2000 ), 302.
See also Thomas Eicher, Theater im ‘Dritten Reich’: Eine Spielplananalyse der deutschen Schauspieltheater 1929–1944 (Doctoral Dissertation, Institut für Theaterwissenschaft, Freie Universität Berlin, 1992 ), 45. For further statistical data for 1919–37, see
Wolfgang Stroedel, Shakespeare auf der deutschen Bühne: Vom Ende des Weltkriegs bis zur Gegenwart, Schriften der Deutschen Shakespeare-Gesellschaft, eds. Wolfgang Keller and Ernst Leopold Stahl, Vol. 2 (Weimar: Böhlaus, 1938 ), 88–92.
J. P. Wearing, The London Stage, 1930–1939: A Calendar of Plays and Players; and The London Stage, 1940–1949: A Calendar of Plays and Players (London: The Scarecrow Press, 1990 and 1991 ).
Paul Meißner, Shakespeare (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1940), 32. Although Meißner calls certain elements in the play ‘coarse theatre’, he fully embraces its ideological message: ‘But the wild raging, the coarse joking and the merry disguise may not dim our insight that behind this burlesque there also appears Shakespeare’s spiritual world’, represented primarily by‘fair Bianca’.
Eduard Eckhardt, Shakespeares Anschauungen über Religion und Sittlichkeit, Staat und Volk, Schriften der Deutschen Shakespeare-Gesellschaft, ed. Wolfgang Keller, Vol. 4 (Weimar: Böhlaus, 1940 ), 139.
Important book-length studies on the Kulturbund and its theatre in Berlin include: Herbert Freeden, Jüdisches Theater in Nazideutschland ( Tübingen: Mohr, 1964 ); Geschlossene Vorstellung: Der Jüdische Kulturbund in Deutschland 1933–1941, ed. Akademie der Künste (Berlin: Hentrich-Akademie der Künste, 1992);
Eike Geisel and Henryk M. Broder, Premiere und Pogrom: Der Jüdische Kulturbund 1933–41, Texte und Bilder ( Berlin: Siedler, 1992 ).
A couple of interesting studies on this same subject in English are: Alan E. Steinweis, Art, Ideology, and Economics in Nazi Germany: The Reich Chambers of Music, Theater, and The Visual Arts ( Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1993 );
Rebecca Rovit, ‘Collaboration or Survival, 1933–1938: Reassessing the Role of the Jüdischer Kulturbund,’ Theatre in the Third Reich, the Prewar Years: Essays on Theatre in Nazi Germany, ed. Glen W. Gadberry ( London: Greenwood, 1995 ), 141–56.
Wilhelm Hortmann (and Mike Hamburger), Shakespeare on the German Stage: The Twentieth Century ( Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998 ), 119.
Document printed in Fritz Wisten: Drei Leben f¨ur das Theater: Stuttgart 1919–1933, Jüdischer Kulturbund, Berlin 1945–1962 (Berlin: Hentrich-Akademie der Künste, 1990), 89; see also: Wolfgang Trautwein, ‘Erinnern und Bewahren: Der Jüdische Kulturbund in Archiv und Ausstellung,’ in Geschlossene Vorstellung: Der Jüdische Kulturbund in Deutschland 1933–1941, ed. Akademie der Künste ( Berlin: Hentrich-Akademie der Künste, 1992 ), 9–12.
This was already his third staging of this play: he produced it in 1933 at the Volksbühne (Theater am Horst-Wessel-Platz) and in 1939 at the Theater in der Josefstadt in Vienna. See Michael Dillman, Heinz Hilpert: Leben und Werk (Berlin: Hentrich-Akademie der Künste, 1990), 434, 440–1.
See Beate-Ursula Endriss, Shakespeare-Inszenierungen in Berlin 1933–1944 ( Doctoral Dissertation, Freie Universität Berlin, 1994 ), 150.
Hubert Maushagen, ‘Bezauberndes Lustspiel: Shakespeares “Widerspenstige” im Deutschen Theater,’ Die Reichshauptstadt 19 (1941), 6.
Ernst Leopold Stahl, Shakespeare und das deutsche Theater ( Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 1947 ), 708–9.
Werner Papsdorf with Ernst Leopold Stahl and Carl Nießen, ‘Theaterschau: Shakespeare auf der deutschen Bühne 1940/42,’ Shakespeare Jahrbuch, 78–9 (1943), 130–1.
Hans F. K. Günther, ‘Shakespeares Mädchen und Frauen: Ein Vortrag vor der Deutschen Shakespeare-Gesellschaft,’ Shakespeare Jahrbuch 73 (1937), 85–108.
See a brief but insightful analysis of this article in
Ruth Freifrau von Ledebur, Der Mythos vom deutschen Shakespeare. Die Deutsche Shakespeare-Gesellschaft zwischen Poltik und Wissenschaft 1918–1945 ( Köln: Böhlau, 2002 ), 201–4.
Hermann Muckermann, Der Sinn der Ehe. Biologisch, Ethisch, ( Bonn: Buchgemeinde, 1938 ), 10.
Claudia Koonz, Mothers in the Fatherland. Women, the Family, and Nazi Politics (New York: St. Martin’s, 1987), 5–6, and 387.
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Márkus, Z. (2008). Whose ‘Triumph’? The Taming of the Shrew in Berlin during World War II. In: King, R., Franssen, P.J.C.M. (eds) Shakespeare and War. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230228276_15
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