Writing about German theatre during the Nazi period inevitably raises political and ethical issues about the responsibility of artists and of art at large. Klaus Mann's famous Mephisto, with its barely disguised portrait of Gustaf Gründgens, set the tone for many reflections on theatre during the Third Reich, which made clear judgements that contrasted the emigrants with those who stayed and played for the Nazis. Gerwin Strobl follows a different path: his highly informative and provocative study avoids well-known protagonists and cases. Instead, the author has relied on combing, with admirable aptitude and accuracy, the files of several ministries and agencies, such as the Reichsdramaturgie, reconstructing not only the discourses but also the administrative structures that governed Nazi theatre politics. This allows Strobl to gain a multifaceted and much more conflicting picture of the position of theatre in a totalitarian system.
His premise is to re-examine the public attitude towards theatre from the Weimar Republic onwards. Following some of the major protagonists of Nazi theatre politics, such as Reichsdramaturg Rainer Schlösser or Carl von Schirach, father of Baldur von Schirach, the head of the Hitler Youth, Strobl traces the roots of Nazi art politics back to the interwar period. Both of the latter represented, according to Strobl, a small but well-educated conservative elite that felt badly treated and deprived of former privileges. The much-celebrated modernism of the Weimar years, as he goes on to demonstrate, not only alienated large parts of traditional audiences, but its rigorous gesture also excluded the former elites from participating in the public cultural discourse. As a consequence, large portions of both the former protagonists and the audience welcomed the reactionary Nazi measures as a way of healing such perceived shortcomings. Strobl thus constructs a much richer historical context, putting Nazi theatre politics in a perspective going back to the Kaiserreich.
Furthermore, Strobl makes clear that the Nazi measures in this field were not at all unequivocal. On the contrary, different concepts of art were engaged in a battle over political influence and public subsidies: The Thing movement relied on the tradition of mass theatre as it had emerged since the late nineteenth century, based on the idea of a nationalist revolution; regular theatres, on the other hand, tried to tie in with the dominant tradition of German repertory theatre and catered for the bourgeois notion of Bildung. Over time it became evident that the Nazis had a strong political claim on theatre as a way to mobilize the people, yet lacked artistic substance to sustain their claims. As early as 1934, they started to make compromises on all levels in order to avoid lowering artistic standards: where the political influence was too obvious, the audience simply stayed away. Strobl's illuminating study thus charts the German attitude towards as well as within theatre. He effectively discusses the attempts to instrumentalize and indoctrinate, finding examples for compliance as well as for an unexpected reservoir of strategies of resistance, developed by theatres and audiences. While some details would have called for further elaboration, the study's merit is that it never claimed to answer all questions, but primarily to open up new perspectives.
