Two Hundred Years of Political Theatre in Vienna

The intellectual and political climate of Vienna has long seemed hostile to political theatre, which was indeed forbidden for most of the nineteenth century. But Grillparzer's evocation of a public that perceived even the 1848 revolution as theatre exemplifies the centrality of theatre in cultural life, which has meant that even when politics was not its overt subject it has functioned as a showcase for political issues. Examples central to Viennese theatre tradition are cited to support the argument that historically this has indeed been one of the most important functions of theatre in Vienna, so qualifying in relation to the Burgtheater the kind of criticism developed in Eugen Klingenberg's recent polemical history. That in the Metternich period theatre reviews were the chief organ of public debate is exemplified by the reception of Nestroy and treatment of the emancipation of women. Later, implicitly political themes recur, as for instance in Hofmannsthal and Schnitzler. More recently, the controversy surrounding Claus Peymann's direction of the Burgtheater follows a long‐standing pattern whereby political issues, in this case centring on the identity of Austria, have been fought out at one remove in the theatrical culture of the city

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