Stories from the Production Line

Five years after the breach in the Berlin Wall in 1989, the Democratic Republic (GDR) appears-under Western eyes at least--to be buried in the trash heap of history. To be sure, GDR culture, and especially theatre, received serious scholarly attention in some quarters in West Germany and the United States in the 1970s and 1980s and, as indicated by Theatre Journal's recent special issue, German Theatre after the F/Wall (March 1993), continues to provoke substantial critical comment. But this scholarly discourse has not diverted the flood of condemnation, contempt, or disdain from influential members of the West press and its American counterpart, who have recently dismissed GDR cultural production as a mere reflection of the Socialist Unity Party (SED) line. Even critics associated with the relatively liberal paper, Die Zeit, equated the GDR with Nazi Germany or argued that any writer who continued to publish in East Germany inevitably offered unlimited credit for a corrupt and repressive regime.' Others, led by Frank Schirrmacher of the relatively conservative Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, dismissed on principle any association of art and politics in West as well as East Germany as a bankrupt aesthetics of conviction (Gesinnungsiisthetik), encouraging their American counterparts, in the New York Times for example, to dismiss the idea of political art as at best a quaint anachronism.2

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• Notes on the German Theatre Crisis

  David Hughes, David Ashley Hughes•TDR/The Drama Review•2007

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