The Piscatorbühne Century

Politics and Aesthetics in the Modern Theater After 1927

Drew Lichtenberg

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000479751
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Theatre History & Criticism

This study of the Piscatorbühne season of 1927–1928 uncovers a vital, previously neglected current of radical experiment in modern theater, a ghost in the machine of contemporary performance practices.

A handful of theater seasons changed the course of 20th- and 21st-century theatre. But only the Piscatorbühne of 1927–1928 went bankrupt in less than a year. This exploration tells the story of that collapse, how it predicted the wider collapse of the late Weimar Republic, and how it relates to our own era of political polarization and economic instability. As a wider examination of Piscator's contributions to dramaturgical and aesthetic form, The Piscatorbühne Century makes a powerful and timely case for the renewed significance of the broader epic theater tradition. Drawing on a rich archive of interwar materials, Drew Lichtenberg reconstructs this germinal nexus of theory and praxis for the modern theatre.

This book will be of great interest to students and scholars in theatre, performance, art, and literature.

1 The founding and principles of the Piscatorbühne

DOI: 10.4324/9781003163916-2

The height of Weimar ambition

On March 30, 1927, Erwin Piscator and a group of allies rented a ballroom in the Herrenhaus, the former Prussian House of Lords on 3 Leipziger Strasse—an address long at the heart of Berlin’s cultural life.¹ A crowd estimated at 2,000 gathered to discuss what Cecil Davies, in his history of the Volksbühne, refers to as “The Piscator Affair.”² Controversy had arisen at the theater after the premiere, seven days earlier, of Ehm Welk’s Gewitter Über Gottland (Thunder over Gottland). As directed by Piscator, the production ignited a firestorm of debate, setting in motion a sequence of events leading to his dismissal from the Volksbühne and the subsequent founding of the Piscatorbühne. Paul Fechter, writing in the right-wing Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung on March 23, challenged Piscator to a duel on behalf of the wronged playwright.³ Luise Barnewitz, writing about the “Piscator-Scandal” in Der Tag four days later, accused him of propagating a “Bolshevik interpretation of history.”⁴ In response, the Volksbühne Board, citing “political neutrality,” removed Piscator’s references to the Volk (“the people”) and stripped out his trademark film montages, which had upstaged Welk’s medieval parable play with documentary images of Leninist Bolsheviks and Chiang Kai-shek’s revolutionary People’s Party. As Piscator writes in The Political Theater, his intention was to construct an unbroken timeline leading all the way up to the date of the performance itself, violently collapsing the realms of stage theatrical fiction and offstage political reality.⁵ The night after Piscator was forced to resign, actor Heinrich George made an impromptu onstage announcement, making clear that the company was performing the play in an altered state and under duress. An open letter, signed by 42 prominent literary, theatrical and intellectual figures, quickly circulated in support of Piscator.⁶

At the Herrenhaus, these signatories appeared in person, presenting a united cultural front. Arthur Holitscher, founder of the League for Proletarian Culture, who had written of the “Crisis of the Volksbühne” in Die Weltbühne, praised Piscator’s devotion to the class struggle.⁷ Actor Erwin Kalser offered the unanimous support of the Volksbühne’s acting ensemble. Leopold Jessner, powerful Intendant of the Prussian Staatstheater and subject of frequent right-wing attacks for his own social-democratic politics and Jewish heritage, expressed solidarity. Playwright Ernst Toller, perhaps the most high-profile leftist in the German theater, accused the Volksbühne of betraying its mission and called for a new theater that engaged the times in Piscatorian manner. Piscator himself spoke of the need for commitment in art as in politics.

A few days later, Alfred Mühr, an influential right-wing critic, warned darkly of Piscator’s “radical political movement” and his intention to “turn the worldview of the proletariat into a reality” through “the theater of modern times … of the proletariat, … of political and cultural demonstration. The theater according to the Russian model.”⁸ With Thunder over Gottland and the “Piscator Affair,” Piscator had moved to the center of contemporary debate, transcending the daily Weimar-era churn of theatrical reviews and petty aesthetic squabbles. His theater threatened to bridge the divided, fragmentary cultural life of the Republic. The Piscator Affair was a clarifying moment, revealing where respective segments of society actually stood. On one side stood the Board of the Volksbühne, in implicit lockstep with the most nationalistic and racist right-wing critics of the time, both parties insisting on the need for neutrality and timeless virtues in art. This was bitterly ironic, as the Volksbühne, whose name literally translates to the “People’s Stage,” had been founded in 1890 as part of a movement that Davies describes as a “marriage between political and artistic movements, socialism and naturalism.”⁹ On the other side, the ordinarily moderate, pacifistic, and social-democratic left found themselves as sudden, strange bedfellows with the communist, proletarian, and artistic avant-garde.

Another way of understanding the Piscatorbühne inflection point is not as the result of a climactic battle over a single production but as the inevitable outgrowth of a previous decade of experimentation, practiced outside of the mainstream theatrical industry, away from the watchful eyes of the habit-forming daily press. Between 1918 and 1920, the director participated in the spontaneous, improvisatory performances in West Berlin art galleries known as “Dada Evenings.” That same year, he founded the low-budget Tribunal Theater in nearby Königsberg, a venture inflected by the recent flourishing of Expressionist drama and notable for its eclectic modernist repertory. In 1921, Piscator founded the explicitly Marxist–Leninist Proletarian Theater, performing in East Berlin workers’ halls, and in 1922 the Central-Theater in Berlin, which he described as a proletarian alternative to the Volksbühne. Each of these projects lasted for less than a year before being shut down by municipal authorities, and his next two projects, though groundbreaking, were similarly short-lived.¹⁰ In 1924, Piscator was commissioned by the German Communist Party (KPD) to create a theatrical “revue.” The result, titled the Roter Rummel Revue (Red Revel Revue), toured working-class Rummelplätze (amusement parks) in the run-up to the Reichstag elections of that year. In 1925, he created a “historical revue” for the KPD Parteitag (Party Congress) in Berlin titled Trotz Alledem! (Despite All!). Assembled entirely out of newspaper reports, newsreel clips, and film images, this foundational instance of documentary theater was performed only twice. Beginning, however, with his production of Alfons Paquet’s Fahnen (Flags) at the Volksbühne in 1924, Piscator began to transfer the experimental techniques developed at these smaller stages onto a larger canvas, taking advantage of the Volksbühne’s enormous stage with its technologically state-of-the-art revolve. As the “Piscator Affair” demonstrates, his work at the Volksbühne was always on a collision course with the conservative board. The Piscatorbühne, more than a mere offshoot of the Volksbühne, sought to fill the political and institutional mandate that the Volksbühne had seemingly abdicated. As Herbert Ihering wrote in his 1928 pamphlet, Die Volksbühnenverrat (“The Betrayal of the Volksbühne”), speaking for many on the German left, “The Piscatorbühne’s mission is the Volksbühne’s failure.”¹¹ Perhaps for this reason, the Volksbühne attempted to smooth over this schism by designating a Sonderabteilung (“Special Department”) of the theater’s young and working-class membership, offering them subscriptions to the Piscatorbühne at a lower price.

Piscator, 1893–1919: the roots of the Piscatorbühne

Piscator’s conception of the Piscatorbühne derived from multiple impulses: his heterodox Marxist–Leninist thinking, instinctively experimental theatrical sensibility, and vision of a new kind of theatrical institution. But it was also a product of deeply felt, lived experience. He was born in 1893 in Ulm, across the river Danube from the state of Bavaria, a direct descendant of Johannes Piscator, the 17th-century Protestant theologian known for his German-language “Piscator Bible.” (The name itself is a Latinization of the family name Fischer, a gloss on the biblical “fisher of men.”) Many later collaborators would liken Piscator’s forthright, didactic temperament to his family’s legacy of radical Protestantism. In a letter from the 1930s, George Grosz remembered him fondly as “the same old Piscator-Bible-Thumper” of the 1920s.¹² The Latvian revolutionary Asja Lacis, who worked with Piscator in the early 1930s, describes a man of intense charisma and “hypnotic power”: “Whomever he presented his cause, his perspective, his future plans to—no one could resist him.”¹³ Rolf Hochhuth, Piscator’s collaborator at the Freie Volksbühne in the 1960s, regarded him almost as a figure from another age, a final link back to the “sermon-on-the-mount type of socialism of the twenties.”¹⁴ Extant photographs from the 1920s show Piscator as a fashio...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• List of figures and tables
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 The founding and principles of the Piscatorbühne
• 2 Piscator in context
• 3 Piscatorbühne 1927–1928
• 4 Brecht and Piscator: dialectical affinities
• 5 The Piscator lines of the modern theater
• Index