A theater and film specialist at the University of Vienna, to which Kriegsbühnen was originally submitted as a doctoral dissertation in 2009, Eva Krivanec was motivated to undertake her study as a corrective to the apparently widely held but erroneous impression that “the war produced no cultural life in the cities.” Her principal focus is on theater. In order to show just how vibrant and variegated it was during the period 1914–1918, she sets about exploring in massive detail all the manifestations of stage performance in four major capitals, Berlin and Vienna—representing the Central Powers—and Paris and Lisbon, representing the Allies. Classical stages, as well as such forms of urban popular entertainment as variety theaters, vaudevilles, operettas, revues, and cabarets, are considered in terms of their responses—political, social, and artistic—to the new realities of war.
The structure of Kriegsbühnen is organized along chronological and thematic lines. Within the time frame 1914–1918, Dr. Krivanec investigates such topics as the interrelationship between city, nation, and theater in the years immediately preceding the war and in the early months of the conflict; mobilization for war as a theatrical theme; vilification and belittlement of the enemy; the revival of national classics; the celebration of national history and national glory; the role of women and relations between the sexes during the war; the elaboration and ultimate disintegration of the myth of “national unity,” above all in Germany and Austria-Hungary; and war weariness and pacifism. The wide net cast by Dr. Krivanec also enables her to take in the issue of the influx into Germany and Austria in the early twentieth century of large numbers of East European refugees, especially Jews and Poles, and their impact on cultural life as exemplified by Polish theatrical companies and the emergence of a Jewish entertainment theater, in German as well as Yiddish, between 1910 and 1918.
The book covers a great deal of ground and has much to recommend it, its density notwithstanding. But there are certain imbalances. Some fairly minor texts or performance venues are dealt with in depth, whereas other more important phenomena receive scant attention. For example, the distinctly minor writer Franz Cornelius—whose prior claim to literary fame was a new edition of Des Freiherrn von Münchhausen höchst wunderbare Abenteuer—was the author of two Krümel plays (Krümel was a veteran of 1870), Der Kaiser rief and Krümel vor Paris. Meant to exemplify the wartime unity of Germans and Austrians, the little plays were apparently big hits when performed in Berlin's Residenz-Theater in 1914. Dr. Krivanec devotes almost two full pages of text to them, along with twenty-three lines of quoted dialogue (158–60). By comparison, in the major chapter “Mobilization for War on the Stages,” little space is devoted to the great controversy aroused by the performance of Festspiel in deutschen Reimen by the renowned dramatist (and winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1912), Gerhart Hauptmann. The glorified puppet show intended to deflate Prussian militarism above all and to promote a pacifistic agenda was mounted at the new Breslau Jahrhunderthalle in 1913 in conjunction with the centenary celebration of the defeat of Napoleon in the Befreiungskriege. The drama hardly fit the mood of the occasion and was greeted with dismay and scorn, so much so that the sponsor of the Jahrhunderthalle, Crown Prince Friedrich Wilhelm von Hohenzollern, demanded its removal from the repertoire. To be sure, the drama is discussed in Dr. Krivanec's book, but only in two small passages (97, 113), and with no consideration of the innovative formal properties of the work.
The question may also be fairly raised as to why Dr. Krivanec never offers a rationale for the inclusion of certain capital cities and the exclusion of others. Only on the last page of her book does she mention which capitals she chose to exclude:
The choice of Berlin, Vienna, Paris and Lisbon for my study led to the exclusion from this book of some other metropolises (even if limited to capital cities) requisite for a comprehensive European theater history of the years 1914 to 1918. The most important of these was London . . . But an important role in European theater history was also played by the great East European metropolises and capital cities of St. Petersburg, or Petrograd as the city was known after the Russification of its name following its entry into the war in 1914, and Istanbul, or Constantinople. . . . As the capital of Italy whose entry into the war in 1915 was viewed as the betrayal of an alliance by the Central Powers and signified an important and perhaps even decisive turning point for military operations in Europe, Rome would also be a promising area for research in this context.
Dr. Krivanec then mentions en passant the possible interest represented by such neutral capitals as Madrid, Bern, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Oslo, or Stockholm. Brussels, however, is omitted. Moreover, nothing is said about such far more significant capitals as Budapest and Bucharest, Belgrade, and Sofia. Dr. Krivanec was obviously unable to cover everything that one might have liked to see in her book. She was, after all, not writing a comprehensive history of European theater during World War I. So she may be forgiven her inattention to the Balkan capitals, Istanbul (with its late development of a modern Western-oriented theater), and certainly the neutral capitals. Limitations must also have been imposed by linguistic demands (as in the case of Budapest, Istanbul, and perhaps also St. Petersburg/Petrograd).
The inclusion of Paris, Berlin, and Vienna certainly makes sense, but the addition of Lisbon at the expense, say, of London and Rome, less so. Although Portugal tried to remain neutral despite its historical alliance with Britain, it found itself dragged into the war because of German attacks on Portuguese ships carrying goods to Britain and skirmishes between German and Portuguese troops in Angola. Theater in Lisbon before and during the war was patterned by and large after the Parisian and tended to be a provincial reflection of it. This certainly could not be said of London or Rome. Because the author obviously reads English well, one wonders why the vibrant London music hall was overlooked by design. As the two great capitals of the Triple Entente, and with dissimilar patterns of cultural evolution, London and Paris would have made for a better juxtaposition to Berlin and Vienna than Paris and Lisbon. The London music hall was at the height of its renown in World War I (as the careers of Ella Shields and Vesta Tilley, “Britain's best recruiting sergeant,” amply attest) and contributed importantly to the military recruitment campaign. And because Dr. Krivanec knows Portuguese well, the consideration of Italian developments would not have proven an unreasonable stretch. It is hard to imagine a study like this ignoring Ettore Petrolini's immensely popular Compagnia dei grandi spettacoli di varietà Petrolini or the anticipatory militarism of Marinetti and his fellow Futurists. The neglect of the Futurists and the breadth of their influence from one end of Europe to the other—above all in the chapter “City, Nation and War Around 1910”—is all the more striking in view of the fact that Dr. Krivanec discusses at length the Dadaists and Expressionists in Munich, Berlin, and Zurich.
Kriegsbühnen is certainly a valuable book for anyone interested in the theatrical life of four European capital cities during the war to end all wars. It covers a great deal of material, much of it already well documented (early twentieth-century German, Austrian, and French theater and cabaret life; Jewish theater; the Vienna coffeehouse), some of it less so (Lisbon stages). It may be understandable to wish for greater scope (and to bemoan the absence of an index, an absolute necessity for a publication of this type); but it is proper to commend Dr. Krivanec for what she has accomplished.
