In the Bridge Theatre's 2019 production of A German Life there is a moment where Maggie Smith, playing Brunhilde Pomsel (a former secretary to Joseph Goebbels), remembers attending Goebbels's ‘total war speech’ at the Berlin Sportpalast. Smith's Pomsel struggles to describe the sheer frenzy and mass hysteria that enveloped this event and wonders how this ‘small man’ managed to have such a huge effect on so many people. Smith manages to capture the mixture of awe, fear and disbelief that this moment held in Pomsel's memory even seventy years after its occurrence.

This infamous speech is, of course, only one example of the many mass spectacles produced in Nazi Germany, and Evelyn Annuß’s new study on the theatrical forms of such mass productions offers one possible answer to Pomsel's question of how these spectacles managed not just to capture the imagination of thousands but also to foster an individual's identification with the Volkskörper (body of the people). Annuß’s object of study is the Volksschule des Theaters, those populist mass spectacles created after 1933, which aimed to (further) indoctrinate audiences in fascist ideologies and create a collective need to be formed and led as one people (p. 2).

Annuß is keen to confront the theatres of National Socialism aesthetically as well as politically. Her study shows that it is incorrect to think of Nazi aesthetics as a complete break from what came before; rather, Nazi theatre-makers were apt at transforming the theatrical experiments of the theatrical avant-garde and optimizing them for their own propagandist purposes. Another central claim of the book is that what was commonly perceived as a fairly homogeneous Nazi aesthetic was instead influenced and altered by changes in leadership culture and war politics. While the primacy of the Volk is crucial to the rhetoric that accompanies the Nazis’ rise to power, their consolidation of power in the following years demanded a control of the Volk. This, Annuß argues, is visible in the changing aesthetic of the forms of mass spectacle, where strategies of emboldening a collective yield to modes of disciplining it.

Over the course of eight chapters, Annuß identifies a grand trajectory (which the very comprehensive study is careful to test and complicate) from the early atmospheric experiments of the theatrical avant-garde and the passion-play-inspired Thingspiele to the mass spectacles of the later NS period. While the focus in the Thingspiele lay in liturgical dramaturgies and a ‘collective experience in the here and now’ (‘Erlebnisgemeinschaft im Hier und Jetzt’, p. 441), the mass spectacles focused on an aesthetic of the ‘living ornament’ (‘lebendes Ornament’, p. 2), geared towards mass-medial reproducibility. Annuß parallels these developments with certain governing styles. The earlier Thingspiel choreographed collective choral and movement-based responses to the allegorical figuration of the ‘Führer’; whereas later mass theatres turn away from the cultic and towards entertainment formats, which put greater currency in the silent but visually all-encompassing mass ornament (p. 58).

A key contribution of Annuß’s study lies in her careful examination of how fascist mobilization of affect intersects with these modes of governmentality. Annuß reads the practices of mass theatre in conjunction with collective practices of affecting or being affected, where different aesthetic models offer different modes of subjectivation (p. 49). Here, she borrows from Deleuze and Guattari, to cast the participants and spectators of mass theatre as prototypes of the post-disciplinary subject (pp. 448–51), who are controlled into agreement rather than disciplined into obedience. In these mass spectacles, agreement is configured affectively and theatrically, which preconfigures the participants’ acquiescence to the crimes perpetuated with their help and in their name as the German Volk. Annuß’s reading of affective strategies as strategies of control allows her study to become a vehicle to understand mechanisms of populism today. She rightly points out the parallels with contemporary populist strategies, such as the affective employment of ‘alternative facts’ or the stylization of majorities as threated minorities. Recalling Annuß’s study when pondering Pomsel's description of Goebbels's Sportpalast speech then gives insight into how fascist aesthetics of the mass spectacle offered ways of immersing oneself in ‘the personified image of the Volk’ (‘personalisierte Bild der Volksgemeinschaft’, p. 444), which, depending on the context, simulated the affective experience of political victory, mobilized the narrative of German victimhood, or collectivized identification with the Führer's position.

Annuß is a great storyteller and manages to hold the various narrative strands of the books together well. The impressive quantity of her archival materials occasionally risks overwhelming the reader, but is necessary for the broad scope of Annuß’s argument. Especially Annuß’s intervention into affect studies and its implication for our understanding of contemporary populist movements offers an important impulse for the field of theatre and performance studies, making Volksschule des Theaters a critical contribution to a wider discussion beyond the German-speaking world.