Soon after Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany on January 30, 1933, Nazi Brownshirts gathered outside the German National Theater in Weimar. With a great show of force, they removed a plaque commemorating the Weimar constitution, signed there in 1919; a photograph captures the event. Other changes took place inside the theater. The Intendant (the artistic and managing director) was dismissed, replaced by someone more acceptable to the new regime, just as his predecessor, Carl von Schirach, father of future Hitler Youth leader Baldur von Schirach, had been summarily sacked after the November Revolution fourteen years before. Von Schirach's experience was not unusual. Under the new democratic government, Germany's theaters were effectively purged of their Intendanten, leaving behind shattered careers and embittered opponents of the new republic. Gerwin Strobl's The Swastika and the Stage: German Theatre and Society, 1933–1945 begins by examining this process, which the Nazis then reversed after 1933. His excellent study is the first book-length account in English devoted to the German stage under Nazism.

Chapter one challenges the existent, rather hagiographic accounts of the Weimar stage (“the Glory That Was Weimar”), which tend to remain silent about the expulsion of theater professionals after 1918 (p. 17). Strobl examines the consequences of those dismissals, not only for the German theater world, but also for German society as a whole. He shows how deeply unpopular Weimar theater had actually been with German audiences, who, incidentally, voted with their feet and often stayed away, leaving many theaters on the brink of bankruptcy.

Before the Nazis “Nazified” the theaters, Social Democrats and their sympathizers had tried to “republicanize” them by firing the Intendanten and staging new plays alongside reinterpretations of the classics, such as Wilhelm Tell. These were seen as a “gleeful assault on conservative sensibilities,” which provided little “comfort” or “enchantment,” something Strobl concludes was much needed by audiences reeling from recent events (pp. 17, 27). Only the Nazis would be able to satisfy those unfulfilled desires through their “völkisch theatre reform” after 1933, the subject of chapter two. The Nazis' assault on the German stage, which, for many theater professionals and theatergoers truly represented a “bright new dawn,” included the inauguration of the Thingspiele (p. 4). These elaborate open-air spectacles attracted crowds in the hundreds. Yet Strobl is always careful not to overplay the Nazis' theatrical successes. In the following chapter, about the use and misuse of the past on the Nazi stage, we learn that the Thingspiel arenas cost too much, that audience members complained about amateur acting abilities, and that the problem of a suitable repertoire was never solved.

By 1936 the Thingspiel era was at an end. A transformation in Third Reich theater had occurred: out went “artistic innovation” and “proselytizing plays,” and in came “polished traditional theatre” (pp. 81, 72). Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels had already overseen a similar shift in radio programming and feature films after 1933. “The drum,” he stated in one speech not cited by Strobl, must be kept “in reserve”; otherwise, the public “no longer hears it.” Theater thus followed suit in muffling the drum; however, these rival conceptions of theater's role—propaganda platform or entertainment medium—continued to exist throughout the Third Reich, as chapter eight argues. And even without “an explicit propaganda message,” stage plays, just like radio dramas and romantic film comedies, could “serve a propaganda function” (p. 187) in the Third Reich. In both chapters, Strobl could have made the obvious parallels between theater and radio or film, if only to show that the regime's affinity for less explicit politicization at times was hardly unique to the stage.

Yet, clearly, on occasion, Nazi ideology found the spotlight. Chapter four charts how certain plays took up the theme of Germany's ethnic struggle with enemies to the east. Chapter six examines anti-Christian, and more specifically, anti-Catholic dramatic productions. Chapter five turns to the matter of race on stage, a vexed issue, since playwrights and Intendanten were kept guessing about what was desired and what would be verboten. All-out racism was unacceptable, but anti-Semitic plays were often criticized for not being anti-Semitic enough. This chapter also recounts the de-Jewification of the theater world, which, although “agonizingly slow” in Nazi eyes, meant that for ordinary theatergoers, “Jews had effectively vanished from sight by late 1935” (pp. 121, 126).

The vacillating, contradictory guidelines about appropriate dramatic content was in part a result of “the whole messy nightmare” of competing, overlapping individuals and institutions responsible for German theater under the Nazis, from Goebbels' Ministry of Propaganda on down (p. 154). Recreating that “nightmare,” chapter seven walks readers through the process of how a play actually came to be staged in the Third Reich. It is an innovative and highly effective way to illustrate how the mechanics of censorship and other means of theatrical repression functioned. Finally, chapter nine follows the story into the war years, when performances were interrupted by air-raid sirens and occupied peoples were refused admittance to their own theaters, as the Germans took them over during their march eastward.

The Swastika and the Stage is definitely pitched at readers who posses not only a good knowledge of Nazi Germany, but also some understanding of its cultural priorities, policies, and practices. Strobl rarely pauses in his riveting account for explanatory asides, which no doubt contributes to its readability. The book is also thoroughly researched, drawing upon the archival record, contemporary journals, and newspapers. We hear surprisingly little, however, from the actors and actresses who strode the Nazi stage. Their post-1945 exculpatory memoirs are undoubtedly problematic sources, but they might have fleshed out Strobl's story all the more, adding to the excerpts about them from Goebbels' diaries. Yet these are minor points. The Swastika and the Stage is a welcome addition to the ever-growing literature on Nazi culture.