Theater has long served as a central site for political expression, whether as official representation, communal affirmation, subversive opposition, or combinations of all three. The Vormärz period (1830–1848) was no exception in this regard. German stages bristled with political energy, contesting cultural regulation with innuendos, double entendres, eye-winking gestures, and extemporized remarks. Most scholars of Vormärz censorship have unfortunately ignored theater politics, largely because its regulatory apparatus differed from those that monitored newsprint, journals, and books. Recognizing this deficit, Meike Wagner's Habilitationsschrift sets theater production in conversation not only with censorship and state control of public space, but also with the “media practices” that disseminated commentary on theater. The study consequently assigns the dramatic arts and theater journalism a leading role in shaping Germany's bourgeois public sphere.

With five substantial chapters bookended by a lively introduction and a trenchant conclusion, the study covers extensive theoretical and empirical terrain. The first three chapters review definitions of the public sphere, conjoin media studies with historical research, and, not least, survey theater's changing roles as a public institution for dynastic rule, for state bureaucracies, and for its various audiences. Alongside its official uses, theater also embraced an open-ended, democratizing function for a new civil society, as envisioned by leading authors such as Karl Gutzkow, Robert Prutz, and Richard Wagner. Indeed, the author's exposition of dramatic theory in the Vormärz illuminates the period's understudied contributions to modern theater.

Journalism plays the key role in Wagner's analysis, however. If dramatic performance provided room for sociopolitical commentary, theater journalism extended communicative channels for critical reflection. This entanglement of theatrical performance with reading publics produced mediality, a media-studies term referring to the second life of a performance in text and image. For Wagner, the diffuse and unruly autonomy of such discourse marked the onset of cultural and political modernity. The reviews, commentaries, essays, scandal columns, theater reportages, and official memoranda that scaffolded theatrical performance, Wagner argues, constituted an “intermediality” that unleashed polycentric cultural criticism: a “literary sansculottism” (154) that undermined the ability of court coteries, state officials, and theater directors to set the tone as tastemakers. The eighteenth century might be the starting point for such a discussion, but Wagner is nonetheless persuasive in showing how this brand of journalism reframed the Restoration's public sphere.

Wagner uses Berlin in the 1820s, Munich in the Vormärz, and Vienna in 1848 to explore how theater's media practice produced a synergy by which the combined result of plays, reviews, and reader reception was greater than the sum of their individual effects. Each city had its own story, but collectively, they narrate the growing pains that arose as producers, critics, and consumers renegotiated the relationship of theater to the public sphere. The satirist Moritz Gottlieb Saphir and the “newspaper wars” of the 1820s in Berlin clearly demonstrated journalism's growing importance as a generator and framer of public debate. Saphir's reviews linked theater criticism with broader social deliberation, and his irreverent tone became an idiom for a generation of political wags.

Wagner then uses Munich playhouses to examine theater's evolving status as a public institution. Amateur theater, as well as commercial enterprises, challenged reigning notions of official patronage and the state's role in defining the arts. Like Berlin, Bavaria was also unhappy with independent criticism. Karl Theodor von Küstner, who directed the Hoftheater, claimed the right to control the content of reviews—an assumption that clashed with the emerging information economy. The story's arc is completed with Wagner's textured portrait of Vienna in 1848, where the freedoms of press and assembly merged with an unfettered, politicized theater. Opera and theater reflected the themes and motifs of street politics. The two revolutionary years conflated drama and politics to such an extent that the union of aesthetics and the political wearied both playwrights and audiences. Such fatigue triggered calls in the 1850s to separate art from politics and, as Friedrich Hebbel put it, to reclaim theater as a “temple of art” (393).

This clipped account fails to capture Wagner's textured arguments about public space, publicity, audiences, and theater's role in shaping the social order. Theater's dual role as a contested site of performance and as a discursive space comes to full light, and the study situates theater and its media as prominent components of the public sphere. Scholars of theater will want to emulate this work's reach into politics and journalism, and historians will henceforth ignore theater and its forms of journalism at their peril.

Some critical observations are nevertheless in order. First, it is a pity that Wagner did not engage the “new censorship” scholarship of Michael Holquist, Judith Butler, R. C. Post, and others to consider the “productivity” of censorship, i.e., how cultural regulation unwittingly spawns novel forms of expression and knowledge. Vormärz culture offers an ideal laboratory for studying the consequences of silencing. Second, the work's emphasis on intermediality is welcome and important, but such cultural cross-pollination has a longer history. The reading revolution of the eighteenth century spawned a spate of middlebrow almanacs, calendars, booklets, yearbooks, and journals that linked theater and text. In many ways, the late Enlightenment was the engine that drove the Restoration's critical esprit and its reading habits. Finally, Wagner's claims about the centrality of theater journalism after 1830 are plausible, but the political landscape is not drawn sharply enough to make the case. Her account of Saphir's transformative role in the 1820s is persuasive, but the claim that theater journalism retained its central role for political criticism after the July Revolution requires a more convincing presentation. Other forms of oppositional print matter rapidly expanded in the 1830s and political discourse developed its own formal channels. The era's passion for political print arguably displaced an earlier fascination with the symbolic contests of theater.

Alive to the manifold dimensions of Öffentlichkeit, Wagner's study nevertheless stands as a significant contribution to scholarship about the public sphere: her research breaks new ground by illuminating how the circulation of information cut across a range of social fields and media practices in order to demonstrate, in turn, how theater and journalism contributed to the wider domain of social communication.