Dramatic Literature, Criticism and Theory | Open Access Articles

Oskar Blumenthal And The Lessing Theater In Berlin, 1888-1904, William Grange

William Grange

OSKAR BLUMENTHAL (1852-1917) was Berlin’s most feared theatre critic in the early years of the new German Reich. He had the audacity of referring to Goethe as “an egghead” who had no understanding of what made plays effective for audiences, and in other critiques he ridiculed Kleist, Hebbel, and other “important” playwrights—prompting an adversary publicly to call him a “one-man lynch mob.” In the 1880s Blumenthal himself began writing plays, and he was so successful that many self-appointed cultural guardians accused him of damaging the German theatre beyond repair. His became the most frequently performed plays on any German stage …

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Ersatz Comedy In The Third Reich, William Grange

William Grange

JOSEPH GOEBBELS and ALFRED ROSENBERG identified Jewish playwrights, especially those who wrote comedy, as “agents of the threatening anti-Western invasion. . . . With the help of nigger Americanism, Jews from the East brought hither by the Mongolian sources of Bolshevism” had polluted an ethnically pure German theatre. Goebbels attacked plays by Franz Arnold (1878-1960), Rudolf Bernauer (1880-1953) Julius Berstl (1893-1975) Bruno Frank (1887-1945), Carl Zuckmayer (1898-1977) and others of deploying “hyper-modern, bolshevistic, mollusk-like and neurasthenic aesthetics” on German audiences. Purging the German theatre of comic plays by Jews and other creators of “abusive and undesirable literature,” Goebbels, Rosenberg, and …

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The Blondest Of The Blondes: National Socialist Paradigms For A New German Theatre, William Grange

William Grange

The National Socialists encountered little resistance in their campaign to demolish the German theatre and to reassemble it along revolutionary lines when they took over the reigns of political control in 1933. They had since 1925 promised to reform German cultural institutions upon assuming power, and high on their list of priorities was the wholesale extirpation of “bastardized mestizoism” in culture with the aid of a state bureaucracy. Their guide in that effort was a cultural theory resembling many other Nazi doctrines, because it was formulated to give the National Socialist German Workers' Party a patina of intellectual legitimacy. Adolf …

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Full-Text Articles in Dramatic Literature, Criticism and Theory

Oskar Blumenthal And The Lessing Theater In Berlin, 1888-1904, William Grange

William Grange

Ersatz Comedy In The Third Reich, William Grange

William Grange

The Blondest Of The Blondes: National Socialist Paradigms For A New German Theatre, William Grange

William Grange